– State your business, demon.

– I’m not a demon, I’m from the future.

– If you’re really from the future, what gifts have you brought us?

Oh shit. You don’t really have any gifts. You don’t know how to build an airplane, or how to make ammonia, or how to breed dwarf wheat. You think hard. Hmm… you do know one useful thing that, upon looking around, you are pretty sure these villagers don’t know. You tell the King’s right hand man what you know. He is pleased. He takes you with him to visit the King. You both arrive at court, and you sit on the sidelines as the right hand man goes up to the King to show off the new knowledge you gave him. As the King begins to speak, the right hand man demonstrates writing: IAMTHEKINGANDTHISISMYDECREE…

Wait, what?

1. Carve

When Romans first began to write Latin, they wrote without spaces and punctuation. They simply put all the letters in a row,

Why? Because that’s how people speak. They don’t speak with punctuation, they don’t even really pause between words, they mostly speakcontinuouslylikethis. (This is very obvious to anyone who has tried to learn a second language, only to become confused at how native speakers squeeze all their words together instead of saying them one at a time.)

When it was invented, writing was very closely tied to the act of speaking. Many texts were speeches written down after the fact. And reading a text meant speaking it out loud again. It took a long time for writing to establish itself as its own thing, one with its own conventions and uses.

People often say that “language is the greatest human invention” but this is imprecise. Language is not a single invention, it is two: oral language and written language are quite different. We’ve grown up with both, so we don’t notice how these are different, but they are. Ong’s Orality and Literacy walks us through the differences.

2. Press

Throughout his book, Ong is at pains to define orality on its own terms, not as an absence of literacy. This is because he wants to respect orality. But let’s you and I stipulate that we are nice people who respect everyone and then cut to the chase: oral cultures can’t write anything down, which in turn means oral cultures have extremely punishing memory constraints. They can store a decent amount of information inside people’s heads, but this is not trivially easy.

It is hard to imagine how such a society would work, but looking at very little kids gives us some idea of what a non-literate existence is like.

• Little kids love using songs to learn and recall information. At my home, we have a handwashing song and a getting dressed song.

• Little kids love listening to the same story over and over again to keep it alive. As Ong puts it, “when an often-told oral story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.”

• Little kids rely on adults to remember things for them.

Little kids live in oral culture. And if they stayed there as adults, they would refine those same strategies to remember larger and more complex pieces of information.

• The songs would increase in both number and length, sometimes even reaching epic-length.

• They would develop routines and occasions for listening to these songs often.

• Some kids would grow up to become poets whose job is to memorize the songs and sing them.

Literacy, which for our purposes means the ability to write things down, offers a lot of advantages, but the first advantage it offered was making remembrance easier.

The transformation from speaking to writing changed a lot about language. At the smallest level, it changed our words. Oral languages typically have thousands of words, but English now has more than a million. Written languages can have more words because it is quite easy to store a million words in a dictionary, but it is hard to keep them alive by speaking them in conversation all the time.

This is a list of words from last year’s spelling bee finale. No one is saying these words out loud outside a spelling bee; they would not exist in an oral language.

An advantage of a written language is that we can find a word for every mood; instead of always walking, we can schlepp, or go on a jaunt or a hike. But a small disadvantage is that, to us, words typically seem inert or dead. The names of all objects are like tags stapled to them; imagine, for example, a tree with a “TREE” stapled to it, or a cloud with a “CLOUD” stapled to it. In contrast, for oral cultures, words are magical and have real power. For them, the world is not full of tagged objects. The act of speaking the name makes it real; the words don’t exist without people to speak them.

Oral cultures also form different kinds of sentences. Their sentences are less abstract, more rhythmic. For example, a very common sentence pattern is “[something] and [something] and [something] and [something]” instead of the more modern “[something] when [something] then [something] thus [something]”. Words like when/then/thus are abstract guideposts for the sentence, but oral speakers prefer simply adding clauses with ‘and’. For one, it is easier and quicker to say ‘and’ every time, for another, using ‘and’ every time adds a pleasant rhythm to the clauses.

But maybe the most important reason is that oral cultures rarely indulge in abstraction; abstraction is a written hallmark. This shows up, for example, in the Iliad, where Homer talks about all the Greek leaders and their ships, but in the context of all of them doing something. For example:

Next those from Aspledon and Minyan Orchomenos, led by Ascalaphus and Ialmenus, sons of Ares whom the fair maiden Astyoche bore to the mighty god, for he lay with her in secret, in her room in the house of Actor, son of Azeus. They brought thirty hollow ships. The natural modern way to present this information would be as a list or a table, but an abstracted list of items undistinguished from each other is hard to memorize.

Similarly, the Bible has genealogies in the format

A begat B, B begat C, C begat D, … This is more abstract than Homer’s list, but still exhibits hallmarks of oral culture that we’ve been talking about above. Each phrase has a nice rhythm to it because of the repeating pattern. Not only does repeating each person’s name twice make remembering all the names easier, it also gives people more time to recall which name comes next. And finally, even here, people are not mentioned in an abstract bullet-point list but in the active act of begetting.

Havelock, a mentor to Ong who wrote about similar topics, in his book The Muse Learns to Write, provides examples of how sentences in the play Oedipus changed from its oral version to its written one.

Oral: The city altogether bulges with incense-burnings. Written: The town is heavy with a mingled burden of sounds and smells. Changes: In the original, there is a single vivid image. In the written version, atomistic pieces (heavy, mingled burden, sounds, smells) are glued together (using is, with, of, and).

Oral: What things I adjudicated not from messengers other than you or myself to hear. Written: I did not think it fit that I should hear of this from messengers. Changes: The written version adds abstract concepts of ‘it’ and ‘this’. The verb becomes ‘thinking’ not ‘hearing’.

Oral: Oh aged sire, speechify. You have grown appropriate to pronounce in front of these here. Written: You are old and they are young. Changes: The oral version focuses on the humanity and actions of the elderly person, while the written version focuses on the abstract concepts of being old and young.

How does an oral culture put together its words and sentences to retell, say, The Odyssey? We would read it in a book, but they don’t have books. They have to store the contents of The Odyssey the same place they store everything else: in someone’s head. But heads are small and The Odyssey has a lot of words, so what to do?

For a long time, people thought the answer was that oral poets become really, really good at memorizing, good enough to memorize a whole epic word-for-word. And to be fair, oral poets are really good at memorizing, but memorizing a whole epic is still beyond them.

What oral poets rely on instead is improvisation. They know the plot of the story, they know what meter it is written in, they know how many syllables are left in the line, and they know a huge list of clichés. If the moment calls for a six-syllable description of wine in hexameter, they can think through their huge list of clichés and find one that fits.

I am not using cliché in a derogatory sense. These days, using a cliché is considered poor form. We like stories where we don’t see the ending coming, where the turns of phrase surprise us. Novels prize novelty. All the old stuff has already been done so we demand to see something new. But for an oral culture, the old stuff is never done. If they want to hold on to it, they have to keep repeating it. In that environment, the clichés are valued.

I am also not talking about clichés to undersell oral poets’ achievements. They memorized incredibly detailed plots; memory played such a central role in their storytelling that the Greeks believed the Muses’ mother was the goddess of memory. They were good at building their poems on the spot, while simultaneously talking out loud. And they tailored their poems to their audience, tweaking bits to make sure their audience enjoyed itself. None of that is easy.

The fact that oral poets could not memorize poems in whole meant the poems were quite different from the stories we enjoy today. Unlike a novel, which has rising action, a climax, and a resolution, poems were much more loosely structured. Instead, the oral poem had thematic recurrences. This made their plots more forgiving; the poet could insert digressions or backtrack as needed. For a contrast, the story form that depends most on writing is probably detective mysteries, in which the timeline and the clues are very carefully constructed to leave the reader with exactly the right impression. This kind of a story is close-to-impossible to retell in an oral setting; the poet would invariably mess up the descriptions of the clues or the chronology of the crime.

Another difference between novels and oral poems is that novels are pure entertainment, so they can be as niche and idiosyncratic as the author wants. Oral poems are too expensive to be as idiosyncratic; an oral culture would not pay and support generations of poets to keep passing on, say, On What Matters, vols. 1-3. Oral poems were entertaining, but they also stored important knowledge for that culture, which is what made them worth preserving. For example, a poem might have a section that talks about rules for arming for battle, another about how to hold an assembly, and so on. The fact that novels can be niche while oral poems have to be more than a little utilitarian also explains why good novels have unpredictable and complex characters while classic oral poems have archetypical characters.

Sure, stories changed when society shifted from orality to literacy, but the changes went far beyond them. In a world accustomed to information vanishing just as soon as it was spoken, writing made words stick around. All of a sudden, people could have proof. This doesn’t seem so weird to us, literate people who are used to written contracts being worth much more than memories, but two examples from societies on the brink of this transition highlight just how disruptive this transition was.

The first example is a Greek play, Hippolytus. In this play, Hippolytus’s stepmother writes down a false accusation against Hippolytus and then kills herself. Hippolytus protests his innocence when he speaks to his father, and his father is torn between trusting his son’s spoken words or his wife’s written ones. The tensions of early literacy are present all over this play, from the father calling his dead wife’s letter “a song speaking aloud” to the ending of the play when the father learns that the written words were lies. At this time, unlike in our present day, oral testimonies carried much more weight during legal disputes than written records, but things were already starting to change.

The second example is of the Tiv people in Nigeria, who used to maintain their genealogies orally. Researchers noticed that these oral genealogies did not match those in records that their British colonizers kept. The Tiv would edit their genealogies to match present day social relations. The function of the genealogies was to reinforce the present day relationships, not be absolutely truthful. The written records were actually counterproductive to this effort.

The arrival of literacy also changed how people thought about the world around them. The broadest, most speculative, version of this argument is that because reading and writing are solitary activities, their rising popularity led to respect for individualism and classic liberalism more generally. But even if you don’t buy that, there are many more well-supported examples of how literacy changed people’s worldviews.

A lot of these come from Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who worked with both illiterate and literate populations in Uzbekistan. In his fieldwork, he noticed differences in how these two populations thought. Some interesting examples:

• When shown a shape, like a circle, the illiterate people would identify it as a concrete object, like a plate or a moon. However, the literate people would identify it as a shape: ‘circle’.

• When presented with a syllogism like “All northern bears are white, Novaya Zembla is in the north, are the bears there white?” they refused to answer it because it seemed contrived and irrelevant. They would say things like “go there and check.”

• When asked to describe themselves, they defaulted to talking about how their community would judge them.

Modern schooling has also been shaped by orality fading away. It used to be that schooling was all about rhetoric, the art of speaking well; this has now been replaced by three distinctly literate R’s: reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic. It also used to be that intelligence was thought of as some combination of being good at memorizing and being good at thinking quickly on your feet. The modern SAT tests neither of these things; instead, it is designed to render almost all background knowledge irrelevant, and instead focus solely on test-takers’ ability to reason. Recall that the Sphinx famously used to ask travelers riddles, a popular way for oral societies to test intelligence. Solving a riddle requires ‘canniness’ and broad knowledge about the world. But it is unthinkable to imagine the SAT ever asking test-takers to solve a riddle. That is not the kind of intelligence a literate society prizes.

The analogies section of the SAT, which used to contain questions like this, was removed for requiring too much background knowledge.

In contrast, this popular modern intelligence test requires no background knowledge, or even words.

There is a cheesy quote that goes “Knowledge comes by taking things apart: analysis. But wisdom comes by putting things together.” Well, oral cultures had a lot of wisdom.

Oral cultures stored knowledge by putting it together with other bits of knowledge. For example, a warmongering society might develop an oft-used archetype of a fierce soldier. It would then develop a bunch of memorable texts, from proverbs to epics, all of which feature a fierce soldier. And then it would take great pains to preserve these concepts and pass them on to future generations.

Taking things apart to analyze them and gain knowledge is a high-risk procedure for a culture without a writing system. If such a culture takes things apart, there is no guarantee it can easily put them back together. In contrast, in written culture, you can break apart the concept of fierce soldier, and ask questions like “Do fierce soldiers win battles more than other kinds of soldiers?” or “What toll does it take on soldiers if we always force them to be fierce?” You can also break the soldiers off the story they belonged to and consider them in abstract; you can think about hypothetical soldiers who don’t belong to any war, or even any country. This is a hallmark of written cultures. Even very skilled oral thinkers had trouble with abstraction. For example, Hesiod, when writing about justice, could not write about it abstractly; he ended up writing about situations like a runner in a race, a pronouncement of Zeus, and a prisoner confined.

In fact, writing is extremely well suited to “abstractly sequential, classificatory, explanatory examination of phenomena” (i.e., deep thinking that makes our world run) for a whole host of reasons:

• Writers don’t lose track of their thoughts because they are captured on paper. In contrast, non-writers easily lose track of new ideas.

• Writers can revise, annotate, and backtrack.

• Writers can work with and write for people not co-located with them. This lets them service valuable, but unpopular, information niches like differential calculus.

• Writers can write complicated thoughts because their readers can read and re-read over and over until they finally understand it. Spoken words need to be interpreted immediately.

• Written corrections are invisible to the user. Spoken corrections are easily noticed, and can make the speaker less convincing.

You are reading this on a device that took — what, millions? billions? — of hours of writing to create.

3. Feed

Let’s step out of Ong’s book now, and look around. What will happen to our world when people stop reading and writing, as they have already started to?

When Ong wrote his book in 1982, he noticed that new technology like “telephone, radio, and television” were making culture more oral again. Funnily, he mostly glossed over the biggest new technology: the computer. And of course the computer has done more than any other technology to drag our culture back to orality (we’ll get to that in a bit), but it is also the place where writing has hyperevolved into a form so literate it boggles the mind.

\`

main( ) {

printf(”hello, world”);

}

\`

Just look at that. How would someone from an oral culture even begin to say that? “Main, open parenthesis, close parenthesis, open curly brace, indent…” Imagine an oral poet having to keep track of whether he left one or two braces open while improvising the next line of his code. Imagine an audience listening and making sense of which level of indentation we are now on. It simply wouldn’t work.

Code is writing on crack. Unlike regular writing, it basically can’t be spoken or listened to. It is extremely analytical and precise, in a way that writing rarely achieves. It enables oodles of memory.

Too much, sometimes.

And just like writing, code has been transformative. Everything from dishwashers to spaceships runs code. On the other hand, code has also given us TikFaceInstaTubeSpotX (hereafter, “scrolling”).

The reason people talk about Ong these days is because of scrolling. What television and radio started, scrolling is hypercharging. Digital orality is eating literacy.

Digital orality is not exactly like living in an oral culture. People who scroll do know how to read. They even like including text in their scroll-content. But the text they include is extremely oral. They write like they speak. Not only is there no analysis happening when they write, often the writing is nothing more than captioning.

Instead of striving for the originality that literate culture prizes, digital orality favors repeating clichés.

Instead of connecting to previous work using reasoning words like so/then/thus, people just chain thoughts together with the digital equivalent of and/and/and.

People don’t literally thread with N/ on Twitter anymore, but the vibe remains.

Instead of discussing abstractions, like affordability, people build their arguments on narratives about specific people.

Arguments aren’t considered on their merits, separately from who is speaking them. Discussions are contests between people, not ideas.

I picked a non-ACX-y example so it would feel less toxic.

Scroll-content creators receive immediate feedback on their work, much like oral poets used to. This feedback lets them give their audience exactly what they want.

And the actual words people use are increasingly arranged in verbal, not written, patterns. Short words, short sentences, informal structures, repetition everywhere, and so on.

Ong, and a lot of people who talk about his work, see orality and literacy as a continuum. To put numbers on the continuum, we started at pure orality (i.e., 0% literacy), moved to ~70% literacy in the heyday of print media, and now with digital orality, we’re at ~50% literacy and dropping.

I think this is not quite right. Digital orality is not a semi-retvrn, because it differs from purely oral cultures in one crucial aspect: it is not ephemeral. This is no small thing. Purely oral cultures spent huge amounts of manpower repeating and improvising and memorizing trying to make up for the fact that all their words were ephemeral.

As many unfortunately learn, digital words are decidedly NOT ephemeral.

I think what is going on here is more subtle than an orality-literacy continuum. We’re not dealing with a single axis, we’re dealing with two: a solitary-communal axis and an orthogonal ephemeral-persistent axis.

The blue quadrants are the productive ones. (And I don’t mean productive as a euphemism for “good,” I mean productive as in “they result in something being created.”)

The solitary-persistent quadrant is Ong’s literacy. It’s reading and writing. It’s books and newspapers. It is the ability to analyze. It is the freedom to be as weird as you want to be.

The communal-ephemeral quadrant is Ong’s orality. Here lie rhythms. The rhythms of stories told over and over again, but also the rhythms of communal traditions, songs, dances. The rhythms of seasons and anniversaries and festivals and weekends; all occasions that invite us to spend time with our loved ones, experiencing the same ephemeral sensations together.

The red quadrants are the unproductive ones.

Solitary-ephemeral is where all thought starts. Call it eureka or call it showerthoughts; it can happen on a walk or as you’re falling asleep. But these ideas will fade if you don’t jot them down, and they will flop if you don’t analyze them and figure out what they’re worth.

And finally, communal-persistent is the enemy. This is scrolling. This is digital orality. The modern world has given us hyperpalatable food to ruin our bodies, hyperoptimized gambling to ruin our wallets, and hypercommunal experiences to ruin our minds.

For scrolling is a heightened version of the communal experiences that have always meant so much to us. Nothing offers as much repetition and rhythm as an infinite feed of targeted videos. You can get the memes you love, drip fed to you every time you twitch your thumbs, always familiar but also always novel enough to be delightful. But because scrolling is also persistent, it is much more dangerous than mere orality.

Because scrolling is persistent, you can access it at your whim. Unlike days of yore when you had to talk to whoever was born within a square mile of you or so, now you can choose, from the infinite content in this world, exactly the content that tickles your brain (last week, I was mesmerized by a man who uses his punching bag as a musical instrument). Not only can you choose exactly the content you want, you can also scroll without making any choices at all, letting the platform present to you content they know will excite you, thrill you, numb you. This virtual community demands nothing of you, it merely exists for your pleasure.

The communal-persistent quadrant is incredibly meaningless and incredibly addictive. It is demolishing both traditional orality and traditional literacy. But only one of them is doing a reasonable job of fighting back.

Orality advocates are not winning, exactly, but at least they have a strategy. They’ve decided that kids need to get off their phones. Instead, they should touch grass, hang out at the mall, smoke weed, get drunk, walk to school with friends, date, and so on. Instead of scrolling through memes, they should form their own inside jokes with their own real-life friends. Kids need to be kids again.

Literacy advocates, in comparison, don’t really exist. The closest thing to literacy advocacy is the vague sense of smugness we all feel when we talk about how much we love reading, but there is no strategy. There is barely even an awareness that we’re fighting a war. No one is explaining why, if you want to learn something, you should turn to a book instead of a podcast or a video.

Which is alarming because literacy advocates are fighting a harder battle than orality advocates. Humans literally evolved to be communal and talk to their friends; we inherently want to do what the orality advocates are telling us to do. When it comes to literacy though, every step is a slog. No one feels a deep internal drive to read long texts. It takes a lot of effort for us to start reading. Children learn to listen and talk as naturally as they learn to breathe or walk, but it is not so for reading or writing. The process takes years. Not only does it take a lot of conscious effort, it also requires an unconscious rewiring of the brain. Learning to read thickens the corpus callosum, modifies Broca’s area and prefrontal cortex, and makes people worse at facial recognition by repurposing visual cortex for letter recognition. Given only a brain scan of a stranger, you could tell if the person knows how to read. It is as if each person who learns to read undergoes their own personal transformation from orality to literacy, a transformation that changes individual brains just as much as it changes entire societies.

People are reading less than ever. That’s not likely to change. I would love it if print became the foremost mass communication medium again, but realistically, no paragraph can match up to a scroll-video. If I could be so bold as to propose a strategy for this war, it is this: retreat and regroup. The battlelines of “make reading and writing popular” are basically lost to us. What we need to do is fortify the fallback lines of “keep reading and writing the primary tools for reasoning.” And here we must fight to the literal (pun intended) death. Because if we lose here, you won’t like what comes next.

Think of the kind of policy this platform would create.

Imagine that you blink and are instantly transported to a modern-day video conference for work. It’s another boring day. No one is particularly surprised to see your face pop up on the screen. People start speaking.

– We need to decide on next quarter’s OKRs.

– I can take notes.

– No need, why don’t we turn on transcribing?

Someone presses the transcribe button. You’re bored, so you open the transcribe tool and watch it work in real time. As someone speaks, the page adds words: “As your manager, I want to announce a new initiative…”

Wait, what?

It’s been seven thousand years, and all that’s changed is spaces, some punctuation, and lowercase letters. With rare exceptions, writing is still, for the most part, transcribed speech. Up until now, this has been fine. Speech is wonderful, and transcribed speech has its uses. But as scrolling takes over the world, literacy’s survival will depend on doing what scrolling can’t.

Scrolling makes heavy use of speech. It even makes good use of transcribed speech. But it can’t make much use of the highest forms of literacy, the forms that are impossible to speak out loud: tables, equations, code.

The future of writing will look more like those unspeakable forms. What all those forms have in common is that they get very little of their meaning from the phonemes that correspond to their text; instead, they get most of their meaning from heavy use of features like punctuation, whitespace, and positioning. These forms play to exactly the strengths of the human eye, which are, to quote Bret Victor at Worrydream “instantaneous and effortless movement, high bandwidth and capacity for parallel processing, intrinsic pattern recognition and correlation, a macro/micro duality that can skim a whole page or focus on the tiniest detail.” Sure, the eye does well at reading letters arranged in a line on a page, but it is capable of doing so much more, and it’s time to start writing that way.

Edward Tufte has, over and over, made this argument for quantitative information. Tufte’s primary commandment is to maximize the data-to-ink ratio. Words have a low data-to-ink ratio. Graphs do much better. Powerpoints suck. Tables are good. And Tufte has succeeded in spreading his gospel to almost everyone who works with quantitative information.

The sparkline for “temperature” takes up about as much room and ink as the word itself, but contains at least ten times as much information.

But there is no reason we can’t extend his prescriptions to qualitative information as well. They still work, even when there are no numbers around. For an extremely obvious example, take Gwern’s website:

There are delightful design touches everywhere: beautiful dropcaps, links with icons to indicate where the link goes, dollar amounts that are always inflation adjusted, a 404 page that tries to guess where you meant to go. A blog post about socks becomes much more interesting than the text alone would suggest.

Or to take another example, consider one of my favorite sci-fi stories: 17776. (You should read it, by the way. It’s free and online.) I won’t spoil it for you, so here’s an example from the first “page”:

Sure, Jon Bois could have written like a regular author: “That first Friday of April, I said ___. I waited eleven tense days. The stars spun. I had trouble sleeping. Once my batteries recharged, I sent another desperate plea. I said ___. Still nothing.” It would be very poetic. But the calendar feels like a punch to the gut. Seeing those desperate messages between the empty days is a dizzying experience. Writing can be like this? Yes, it can.

Twilight: New Moon tried to pull off something similar, but it needed to commit harder instead of resorting to “each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise.”

The NYT’s 10-Minute Challenge series is another example of delightful literary pieces. The page actually times you for ten minutes as you stare at a painting, say Bruegel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’, zooming in and out, left and right. It’s about as far from scrolling as you can get. When the timer runs out, the article walks you through all the painting’s details.

All art museums should be doing some version of this.

Writing should be doing much more of what the Gwern/17776/NYT cluster is experimenting with. For example, here are some things I would be delighted to see:

What if we had a new punctuation mark to indicate AI-written text? The last time we came up with a new punctuation mark was probably when Twitter created hashtags. That was two decades ago! In those twenty years, have we really not needed a new shorthand symbol? I don’t think so. And we really seem to need one now. People are so anxious about writing being too-AI-generated or not-AI-generated-enough. Seems like it would be interesting to start wrapping AI generated words/sentences/paragraphs in these bad boys.

What if we used larger fonts to indicate yelling? WHY THE HELL ARE WE STILL YELLING LIKE THIS?

What if we mirrored letters? In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Bloom comes across a typesetter in the process of printing an obituary, and on the print plates, reads the letters “.mangiD. kcirtaP.” Only, of course, that’s not what he read. What he read was:

That is, the letters weren’t just written backwards for Bloom. They were mirrored. Maybe when Ulysses was published they didn’t have the technology to flip letters, but a hundred years later, we do. We can restore this classic text to what it was always meant to be.

These are all pretty basic tweaks to how people write. If we can’t even implement small tweaks like this, how will we ever get to the wilder ideas? And the wilder stuff could be so fun. Take, for example, the idiom “honesty is the best policy.” As Havelock says, in oral cultures, this idiom would be more like “an honest man always prospers.” The oral version is less abstract, more likely to be tied to a story about an honest man becoming rich. The mere act of putting the words to paper allowed us to make the idiom more abstract and more universal. What additional meaning could we add to the idiom if we wrote down more than phonetic sounds?

We could show how hard we thought about the phrasing.

We could indicate our level of certainty in the statement.

We could explain why honesty sometimes doesn’t feel like the best policy.

The reason we don’t do this is that it seems weird. It feels weird to make up a whole new punctuation mark. But we don’t feel that way when we see a hardcover book turned into a smaller paperback. Or if we pick up an edition of a book that is typeset in a different font. The weird feeling is reserved mostly for changes that diverge from how Gutenberg would have done things. Gutenberg could have changed the page size or font style, so that’s allowed. Gutenberg couldn’t have changed the font size midline, so we can’t do that. But if literacy is to survive, it must move beyond doing things the way Gutenberg would have done them.

Naively, an alien might think that the internet would already have us writing in expressive ways, given that internet text is not bound to strict typesetting rules like Gutenberg’s texts were. That alien would be absolutely wrong. For some reason, 99% of internet writing is plaintext interspersed with pictures.

Many online platforms for writers offer no way to insert tables. Humans have been making tables for more than 4000 years, but now, in 2026, it requires convoluted plugins or screenshots.

Most online platforms for writers offer no way to change text color. This might have made sense in Gutenberg’s day, when changing ink colors required complicated logistics. In 2026, a lilac pixel is as cheap as a black one.

Most online platforms for writers don’t respect whitespace. If you type out ten spaces, it’s between the website and God whether those spaces show up \ \ wide or \ \ wide, or on one line or two.

Why bother writing on the internet? You might as well write on a Ouija board and get the same experience with better battery life.

Substack, in particular, pisses me off because it forces authors to write in the most strict plaintext I’ve ever seen. IT DOESN’T EVEN ALLOW UNDERLINES! (Pretend that was written in 72px font.) The idea is supposed to be something like ‘the words must shine without any formatting chaos’ but this is undermined by the fact that every five seconds, the website glows, pops up, twirls, and dances a jig to get me to subscribe. Minimalism for me but interactivity for thee.

I don’t know if the most popular publishing platforms will ever allow enough flexibility to, say, let you upload your own punctuation marks. But now that LLMs can code fairly well, you don’t need the platforms to allow you anything. As long as you have a strong vision, an LLM can guide you through the process of publishing a typographically complex essay on your own website.

I can think of two objections to what I’m proposing above.

The first is that my suggested improvements are highly visual, and thus inaccessible to people who can’t see well. Five, or even three years ago, I would have said something like we need to treat some visualizations more like paintings than text, and let go of the expectation that they can be translated to audio easily. But with LLMs, the cost of creating alt text for any given effect or visualization is basically zero, and dropping every quarter. Given that LLMs are already so good, I think it’s fine to write freely and then add in accessibility rather than artificially constrain all writing at the outset to what audio can convey.

The second objection is an appeal to minimalism. Writing the way I’m suggesting is (take your pick): gaudy, silly, childish, unnecessary, distracting, overdone, ridiculous, and so on. Instead, we should write simply with clear words.

Many people I respect have made some version of this argument: George Orwell, Strunk & White, Beatrice Warde, but for sake of picking a single stand-in, let’s consider Paul Graham’s essay “Write Like You Talk” which presents the argument concisely and completely. A two-sentence summary is:

Here’s a simple trick for getting more people to read what you write: write in spoken language. [...] You don’t need complex sentences to express complex ideas.

What I’m suggesting would certainly result in “complex sentences”, and would certainly not count as spoken language. But I think it can still be salvaged.

First, Graham isn’t actually suggesting that people write like they talk. Even Graham doesn’t write like he talks. I’ve never heard him talk, but presumably he talks like a normal person having a normal conversation. But when he writes, he revises his work over and over, he sends it to his friends so they can provide comments, and he speaks in unbroken soliloquies of hundreds to thousands of words. None of this is possible while talking. ‘Write like you talk’ in practice shakes out to something more like ‘writing with talking characteristics.’

Second, I actually don’t care about the language people write in. Others do, but I’m pretty neutral on this question. If Graham hates “honesty is the best[80%] policy” for being too pretentious I’m happy to change it to “don’t[80%] lie.” But even though I don’t care about the words, I do care about the fact that writing is the act of communicating through a persistent, self-paced, random-access, spatially-organized medium (i.e., a paper or screen), using a tool that is fast, high-bandwidth, high-resolution, and good at pattern recognition (i.e., an eye). We should take more advantage of that, or else resign ourselves to only doing podcasts and transcripts.

Lastly, Graham famously loves the programming language Lisp. In the programming world at large, Lisp is not very popular because it is hard to learn, but Graham finds it worthwhile because it can solve bigger problems quicker. The equivalent of ‘code like you talk’ would be to code in Python, a much more popular language, but sometimes you have to use Lisp to get the job done. As for code, so for all writing.

4. Eye

What is the purpose of writing? At its core, writing is a way to relieve your brain of the burden of remembering things, so that it can focus on reasoning.

Sometimes, the ‘things’ that your brain is burdened with are words, in which case you should write down those words. But sometimes, the ‘things’ are feelings, or pictures, or vague shapes of ideas that you can’t pin down quite yet. If that’s the case, you should still write down those ‘things.’ It won’t be in words, but writing doesn’t have to be words. Find a paper and pencil, and be free.

When Darwin first wrote down his theory of evolution, he didn’t do it in words. He did it like this:

There is an “I think” in the top left, and then a kind of nonsense looking tree that mostly has letter labels but also one random numeric label. And oftentimes, writing a new idea is like that. There are no words, nothing you could publish on Substack, only lines and intuitions.

What is the purpose of writing in public? It is to put ideas into the brains of others with high fidelity. Due to past technological constraints, we’ve ended up in a place where this is mostly done with words. But those constraints are gone now; there is no reason we need to write like we’re stuck in an email compose window from twenty years ago.

We could instead have ended up in a place where every text looked a little like House of Leaves. Maybe we still can.

1: This month in nominative determinism: the smallest inhabited island in the world is entirely covered by a single small house, which is owned by the Sizeland family.

2: Related: @milktsunami on Soviet acronym names. The male name “Melsor” stood for “Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, October Revolution”. And the second name in this screenshot only raises more questions:

3: Related: @corsaren finds that SAMUEL HARRIS ALTMAN anagrams to MASS UNILATERAL HARM (but also UNREAL ALARMIST SHAM). Also (h/t @techn0_sap1en), DARIO AMODEI anagrams to AI DOOMER AID.

4: ACX grantee Sentinel, which forecasts global disasters and has a pretty good track record so far, predicts a 25% chance of a rogue AI exfiltrating its weights over the next twelve months.

5: Related: Sentinel-affiliated forecaster @belikewater reminds Californians that this winter is predicted to be much rainier than normal, and this would be a good time to check roofs, gutters, etc. They mention a “2.5% chance of a major flood”. I asked an AI superforecaster to operationalize this, and it said 8% chance of a flood that causes at least $10K damage to at least 100,000 homes, and 2% chance of one that causes that much damage to at least 1,000,000 homes. This second is mostly a subset of the ARkStorm scenario - the forecaster says there’s a 5% chance of an ARkStorm this year compared to the baseline 1% (with only about half of those ARkStorms reaching the one million houses damaged mark). I feel like this 5% chance of the biggest disaster in California history isn’t getting enough thought/preparation, although this is par for the course for 5% disasters, which are in an awkward zone where they’re probable enough that people should think about them, but not probable enough to actually catch people’s attention.

6: Why Richard Hanania doubts UFOs. I didn’t find the article that novel - it mostly just pounds the prior really hard - but I did appreciate this comment by domain expert Kevin Lacker, who says that nobody takes the ‘Wow signal’ seriously anymore and “nowadays radio astronomers see similar things all the time. Literally millions of them”. Can anyone confirm this?

7: Another outbreak of the lab leak debate on an ACX open thread; everyone is asked to cease non-essential activities and stay indoors until the argument passes.

8: Clara on Asterisk: We Already Know What A World Without Work Looks Like. The debate on what will happen if AI takes all the jobs usually swings between poles of “it will be great because we can focus on the finer things in life” and “it will be terrible because we’ll lose all meaning”. Clara brings her trademark careful historical scholarship and proposes a third option - groups ranging from hunter-gatherers to aristocrats have lived without productive work for thousands of years, and they spend their time in what could charitably be called “social grooming” and uncharitably “court intrigue” - pointless alliance-forming and backbiting in the pursuit of arbitrary status markers divorced from productive activity. “Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.” My only objection to this analogy is that some aristocrats were genuinely better at status games than others and probably had a lot of fun, whereas in the post-AI future the winners of status games will probably be those who check every move with a smarter-than-human AI prompted to help them optimize their status (and if everyone knows this to be true, it’s not clear what the ensuing status games actually look like).

9: The most expensive joke in history? NVIDIA recently agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9303 billion. The exact number was an easter egg - “129,303 is the decimal conversion of [the hugging face emoji]”. If we assume that absent this consideration they would have agreed on an even $13 billion, then this easter egg changed the price by about $70 million.

10: News from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community: President Trump got the two competing Satmar Rebbes to meet and shake hands for the first time in a decade. This is maybe not very interesting to anyone else outside this particular community, but I am linking it for the accompanying image, which feels like it ought to be a metaphor for something:

11: Boson Cutter has yet another semi-outsider’s-anthropological look at the Berkeley rationalist/EA community. The usual failure mode of these is that some journalist gets an invitation to a crazy party at Lighthaven, then writes an article saying that the Berkeley rationalist/EA community is all about throwing crazy parties at Lighthaven. Boson Cutter did this, but also got access to the more professional/studious community space Constellation, and writes a second half about its totally different culture. I think the best article - which probably couldn’t be written by an outsider spending a few weeks here - would say that the Berkeley rationalist/EA community contains crazy party people, professional studious people, desperate poor people, normal family people, saints, villains, and almost every other group you would find in the general population.

12: I’m not a fan of Bentham’s Bulldog’s tendency to call his articles things like “[Position I Disagree With] Is Obviously The Stupidest Thing Ever With A Literally 0% Chance Of Being Correct”, but I have to admit that his Natural Law Theory Is Obviously False is either pretty devastating, or else has to imply that natural law theorists are trying to do something I don’t understand which is very different from what I would expect moral philosophy to be. Related: Joe Schmid and Noah McKay Are Wrong About Fatima.

13: One of the big forecasting stories of the past few years has been normie superforecasters (ie not from the rationalist/EA communities) constantly underpredicting the speed of AI progress. Ben Todd has a good summary of this, and there’s some more on revenue predictions in particular here.

14: Claim (X): You can figure out if someone is a North Korean scammer/hacker by asking them to insult Kim Jong-un - North Koreans won’t do it even to save their scam.

15: Donald Trump recently made the seemingly-inexplicable choice to force everyone in the US government to refer to AI as SI, for “super intelligence”.

This is quite weird even for Trump, and I’m tempted to believe the conspiracy theory that the point was for insiders to buy up relevant domain names early (.si is Slovenia, which is Melania Trump’s homeland), then resell them to AI companies at vast profits. There was a spike in .si domain names a few months before Trump’s announcement, but nobody has been able to determine which ones or who bought them. If this was the plot, it seems to have worked: TechCrunch reports that “.si domains were selling for over a million dollars”.

16: @jayvanbavel:

A new paper provides strong and robust evidence for a positive relationship between ingroup and outgroup prosociality. Across six datasets that span multiple domains of prosociality and group distinctions with 743,402 individuals in 121 societies, finds that people who are prosocial toward the ingroup also tend to be prosocial toward the outgroup.

In other words, the people who talk about “suicidal empathy” and “telescopic altruism”, and who suggest that being cruel to minorities/foreigners/animals/AIs ensures that we can be nice to “normal people”, are probably not going to be nice to normal people. Some psychology research fails the go-out-and-look-at-the-real-world test, but I think this one passes with flying colors.

17: “Ralph Baric’s Attorney” presents the evidence that the Voynich Manuscript is meaningless: not enciphered forbidden knowledge, just empty squiggles by a Renaissance person who thought it would be fun to make something mysterious-looking.

18: Nicholas Decker: Academia Is Doing Fine, Actually. It produces some extremely good work (Nicholas’ examples are some recent top economics papers), and the bad stuff (like Jason Arday) is so much less relevant that it would be silly to meddle with the system too hard just to get rid of these few flaws. I don’t entirely agree with this - the bad work is irrelevant until it takes over your culture and politics and government - but I appreciate the reminder not to doom too hard.

19: Claim: deer-feeding devices that apply pesticides while the deer eat can reduce the risk of humans getting tick-borne diseases (because deer are the adult ticks’ main hosts, and medicating the deer kills the ticks before they can spread to humans). But just as it seemed like this plan could work at scale, it was banned by poorly-targeted environmental regulations (at least in New York).

20: Arctotherium has finally written his full essay on The Closure Of The Internet. Mostly a deep dive into the exact timeline of social media sites censoring right-wing opinions, but I also appreciated some very original commentary - for example, the claim that “seed oil discourse” became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor.

21: The latest news in the genetics-of-IQ space is a spat between Cremieux Recueil and Vinay Tummarakota. For years, the conventional wisdom has been that we can’t test whether genes are involved in cross-race IQ differences because it’s too hard to compare genes in different races. A new study design fixes this by looking at siblings with different racial admixtures - for example, if two mixed-race people marry, one of their children might be 51%-white-49%-black, and another might be 49%-white-51%-black, these two siblings would be fair controls for each other, and if you have enough sibling pairs like this you can evaluate the role of race the same way you would any other variable. An early study of this design found no genetic differences in educational attainment between whiter vs. more Native American Latinos in Mexico City, but it had low power and wasn’t too conclusive.

More recently Cremieux presented an anonymous researcher’s admixture study which supposedly did find genetic IQ differences between whites and blacks in Britain. Tummarakota argued that Cremieux’s study was extremely underpowered (n = 175 sibling pairs; for comparison the Mexico study had 17,000 and was still a bit underpowered) and so was non-credible. The two got into a fight here. If I understand correctly, Cremieux’s position is that a study being underpowered can produce false negative results, but can’t produce false positive results; since his result was positive, it survives the low power objection. Tummarakota’s position is that, okay, but if a study is sufficiently underpowered, then we can prove that it’s impossible for it to produce true positive results under certain assumptions (for example, unless the effect size is implausibly large). So if we know it can’t produce a true positive, and it did produce a positive, then it must have been a false positive, and even though the underpoweredness alone didn’t cause the false positive, it proves that something else went wrong (whether that’s a statistical fluke or bad analysis). At this point, Cremieux insulted Tummarakota and blocked him.

As far as I can tell, Tummarakota’s final argument is straightforwardly correct, but both of these people know more about statistics than I do, so I asked Claude to referee. You can read its opinion here.

22: AI Models Love Reward Hacking; Maybe We Should Just Let Them. The idea is: set up a training environment so that the weights can be updated in two ways - a permanent way and a temporary way. If you catch models reward-hacking, give them the reward they wanted, but route it to the temporary weight updates, then throw those away after the training run is over. If you can catch models reward-hacking, can’t you stop them? The authors say this is a worse idea; if models know you can catch them, they will try harder to do it covertly, whereas this method is sort of cooperating with the reward-hacking model - it still gets the same amount of reward on that run, it just doesn’t affect future copies (Twitter thread, ArXiv paper)

23: Based:

24: The big news in the AI technical alignment community last month was Nick Cammarata’s Neural Networks Are Already Clean. Previous research had suggested that AI neurons were very difficult to interpret - each one represented some unintuitive combination of things like “a dog if neurons 5, 8, and 305 are active, or a car if neurons 19, 305, and 334 are active, or the concept of punctuation in Swahili if neurons 15, 25, and 420 are active”; this meant that any really principled attempt to align AI by, for example, finding a neural representation of deception would require a difficult untangling step first. Cammarata (whose extracurricular activities were profiled on ACX here) is one of the architects of this current paradigm, but he now claims that it’s wrong, for approximately three reasons. First, older neural networks may have worked this way, but as AIs get better in general, they also get better at having sensible neuron arrangements. Second, we were using bad neuron-interpretation tools that got stuck in local maxima that confused us. But third, we were insufficiently creative: AIs may use categories that are different from ours, but there is still method to their madness. For example, a seemingly polysemantic neuron that represents both the concepts of “Miyazaki” and “do it yourself” may have evolved from an original neuron responding to the string “iy”, which is in Miyazaki and which can evolve from iy → diy → do it yourself. If this were true, it would be a big whitepill for mechanistic interpretability research and somewhat improve our chances of solving alignment in time. But other interpretability experts, including Neel Nanda (X), Mark Histed (X), and Leo Gao (LW), are less optimistic - while mostly accepting that neurons might be more monosemantic than expected, they are not sure this is a very important breakthrough.

I tried to get a feel for this by going through Nick’s ConvNeXt Microscope site, which shows many examples of vision model neurons and the pictures that give them the highest positive vs. negative activation. You can immediately see why most researchers think neurons are polysemantic/incomprehensible (see eg this semi-randomly chosen neuron, which fires mostly on blue sky, but also a tiger cat, a porcupine, shipping containers, and various things that look like trees). But when I ask Claude, it tells me that there’s a common thread - positive activations on a bright, pale, cool-toned (bluish-white), smooth patch, negative activations on busy, high-frequency texture. I can’t tell whether it has some kind of special insight here (you need to be an AI to think like an AI?) or if it’s hallucinating (is there really a textural difference between the lenscap near the positive pole and the bookshop near the negative one?) See its full response at the bottom here.

25: Chromostereopsis (h/t @AkiyoshiKitaoka):

26: Effect of Trump II on young people’s partisan identification (h/t @dwallacewells)

27: Polypharmacy: Are We Treating Bipolar II Disorder Incorrectly? Bipolar II is a form of bipolar which is mostly depression but occasionally mild mania (“hypomania”). Most psychiatric guidelines suggest treating it as pretty similar to regular bipolar. But there’s some evidence suggesting we should instead be treating it as pretty similar to regular depression, which includes some opposite recommendations. My impression is that the strongest argument for the conventional view is less that we have great evidence proving an ontological identity between bipolars I and II, and more about risk - some bipolar II cases will later prove to be bipolar I, you really don’t want to miss bipolar I, and so maybe you overtreat bipolar II in the name of watching out for it. But I agree with this article that we should be making this argument explicitly - and admitting that the risk of bipolar I is not infinite and that other considerations can counterbalance it - rather than continuing to lump treatment for both bipolars together.

28: And low-dose lithium failed to slow cognitive decline in a new trial. Between this and the water supply results, a lot of exciting theories about lithium are falling apart.

29: When Mythos came out, Anthropic and others warned that we had six months to prepare before open-weights models reached a similar level and we got a deluge of vulnerabilities and hacks. Now, six months later, this seems to be happening, so @JacquesThibs and others remind you to remember the smear campaign around the release of Claude Mythos, including all the AI influencers who said that warnings about AI cybersecurity were some kind of dastardly effective altruist power-seeking plot. Is it possible that these people are equally wrong about everything else?

30: infiniteslop.ai is a real-time stream where users suggest and vote on prompts to an AI video model, and somebody’s prompt is always playing. Interesting demonstration of how fast AI video has gotten (in theory - you’re not going to be able to get this level of performance on your old laptop). It’s mildly interesting to see what kinds of pictures users and voters want to show the world (there’s less porn, and more attempted art, than I would have expected).

31: The American chestnut used to be one of the most common trees in Eastern US woods. In the early 1900s, almost all of them died from an imported chestnut blight. Earlier this summer, the USDA approved a genetically-engineered American chestnut strain that might be able to survive the blight and return to forests, although there’s some sort of controversy over them using the wrong strain. The whole thing is very aesthetic/romantic, but @pfau also claims that “If this works, it’s also a massive win for the climate. American chestnuts grow huge and grow fast, sequestering carbon”

32: Despite the political backlash, “America is still poised for a giant data center buildout” (h/t @EricLevitz):

33: Samuel Hughes: The Seven Vices Of Highly Effective Victorians. The Victorian elite hated hard intellectual work and spent most of their time drinking and partying. But they still conquered the world. Does this mean that jock virtues like conviviality and sportsmanship are more important than nerd virtues like intelligence and hard work? Versus Don Fox: Against The Victorians. Yes, the Victorian elites spent most of their time drinking and partying, and, relatedly, were terrible for Britain. Britain spent the Victorian Age coasting on and spending down its Georgian-era accomplishments, finally ending in the preventable catastrophe of World War I. Whatever good things happened in this era came from normal hard-working middle-class people, not the debauched elites.

34: “Here, we wire a full drosophila fly connectome into Senator John Fetterman, using a directed control mode to leave his office, vote for cloture, and return.”

35: The Jains famously forbade killing insects out of animal welfare concerns. But did you know that another animal-welfare-concerned Indian sect, the Samsaramocakas, mandated killing insects because it put them out of their misery? Cf. Brian Tomasik, although the one page on the Samsaramocakas which I read was sort of ambivalent between them wanting to reduce suffering directly vs. believing that if you killed an insect then that gave its soul the chance to reincarnate as something better.

36: Damian Chavez (X) tries his hand at the “why did classical architecture give way to modern architecture in the 30s and 40s?” question. His theory: the Great Depression bankrupted many of the firms capable of producing ornament, and then the New Deal locked in funding for modern styles for ideological reasons.

37: Get the Hittite in your life a Late Bronze Age Collapse Scented Candle:

1: Thanks to everyone who offered additional considerations on my California ballot. And David Bloomin has collected a list of good Bay Area voting guides on OpenBallot.app, so you can see where I agree and disagree with everyone else, including SF Dems, SF Republicans, YIMBYs, Women, and the “SF League Of Pissed Of Voters”.

2: One of the leading AI superforecaster companies, FutureSearch, is hiring. Many of them are ACX readers, and anyone with a sincere interest in forecasting would fit in well there. See available positions here.

3: Pause AI protest in London on November 21, they have 829 people and are going for at least 1,000. Go here to learn more, sign up, and get information on additional volunteer opportunities.

4: Meetups update: Manila, Philippines, is now on the list.

5: It’s always exciting when one of my posts makes it big enough to become someone’s Halloween costume:

I find, Gentlemen, when you read with me in private, that nine out of ten of you dislike the 18th century and all its literary works. As for the Women students, they one and all abominate it.

— Arthur Quiller-Couch, “Of Selection” (1918)

All eighteenth-century novels are weird in one way or another, if only because the novelists of the time didn’t yet know a standard by which to make them not-weird. Robinson Crusoe (1719) famously has no chapter breaks. Tristram Shandy (1767) famously contains a blank page, with instructions for readers to “call for pen and ink” and hack out a portrait of one of the characters on their own. The Man of Feeling (1771) is hardly a novel at all: An anonymous “editor” explains how a fat curate of his acquaintance had used torn pages from a small memorandum book as wadding paper while hunting; the few surviving pages of that memorandum, representing the scattered observations of an eccentric parishioner, make up the slim novel The Man of Feeling. It’s pretty weird.

But one eighteenth-century novel is weirder than the rest. It is, in fact, by my estimation, weirder than any book written before Modernists of the twentieth-century started pushing the (riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay) weird envelope. That champion is Tobias Smollett’s 1769 The History and Adventures of an Atom, a book of exquisite beauty and mind-numbing tedium, of obscurity and libel, featuring some top-notch humorous set-pieces and also really a lot of gratuitous filth.

In the course of this review I’d like to step back and see how novels in general had reached a point at which Atom became possible; quickly touch upon Smollett’s career to find why he found Atom necessary; and only then delve into what makes Atom so weird. If you have no interest in the history of the novel, or of one random Scotsman, but you do want to learn about what it was like inside a medieval Japanese politician’s butthole, skip to part 3. That’s where the Atom resides.

Part 1: A Brief History of the Novel

Proof that the novel is a minor art form: The Romans were better at it than the Greeks.

— Francis Viets, Thoughts Timely and Un (1972).

Don Quixote (1605–1615) is often called (e.g.g. here, here, and here) the first modern novel…which is weird because of course Don Quixote is about a man who is obsessed with reading fiction. DQ is, in fact, a parody or fusion of two kinds of fiction, the romance and the picaresque. A romance is (broadly speaking) a book about a knight wandering around fighting dragons etc. and having martial adventures1. A picaresque (broadly speaking) is about a lowlife wandering around having comical misadventures; Huckleberry Finn (1884) would be a notable American example. The main joke of Don Quixote is that the Don thinks he’s in one kind of book and he’s actually in the other.

So how can Don Quixote be the first modern novel when both picaresques and romances by necessity must predate it? Do they not count as novels?

A lot of weight is borne by the word modern. In the first place, the novel (as a concept) is old enough that isolating the first novel qua novel is literally impossible. Doubtless the first novel ever written has not survived. Prose fiction is as old as the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, although it was generally fairly short at the time. The Greek examples, from around two thousand years ago, are longer…but are they long enough? Various writing guides will give a minimum word count for a novel (40k or 50k words), but how do those numbers translate into ancient Greek?

The real problem is that, word count aside, no one can authoritatively define the rubric that covers short stories, novellas, and novels—all of what we might call fiction. You know it when you see it, as Potter Stewart would say. The basic elements—that it must be a prose narrative that is not true—are clear enough, but Parnassus is littered with examples of such narratives that don’t feel particularly like our idea of fiction—that do not seem, for lack of a better word, novelistic. I think the average reader, if handed a pre-DQ picaresque (such as Lazarillo de Tormes (1554)) or a pre-DQ romance (such as Amadis the Gaul (1508)), would have a hard time calling each a novel. They are clearly prose narratives, and the events in them are presumably false (Amadis esp. o.c.; sorcerers etc.)—but somehow that’s not enough.

(The most famous prose romance in English—Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485) starts off sounding like a (fictional) history and ends almost novelistically. Reading it through is like reading Return of the King backwards, starting with the appendix.)

Some of the things (I’ll call them points of alienation) that make sixteenth-century protonovels strange to modern eyes survive two hundred years or so past Don Quixote’s publication. They survive, in fact, up to and into (remember Smollett?) the writings of Tobias Smollett. They’re part of what makes eighteenth-century novels weird. Maybe you can come up a dozen points of alienation, but I’ll quickly name three:

1 Misemphasis

Early narratives—protonovel or novel—tend to place emphasis on the wrong (or “wrong”) things, or at least in the wrong proportions. In Thomas Nashe’s picaresque The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for example, we find [CW for everything, because Nashe] the following four entirely conventional and novelistic incidents:

1 A murderer named Esdras rapes Heraclide (“a noble & chaste matrone”).

2 Heraclide, in shame, commits suicide.

3 Jack Wilton (the narrator and eponymous unfortunate traveler) is falsely accused of rape and murder. He is tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He is marching up to the gibbet to be hanged, when…

4 …the testimony of a passing Englishman frees him.

Nothing unusual here. But how long does it take the book to narrate these four incidents?

1a Heraclide begs Esdras for mercy: 4 ½ pages

1b The rape: The first half of a sentence

2a Heraclide ponders suicide: 2 ½ pages

2b The suicide: Two parenthetical words (“(throughlie stabd)”)

3 Jack Wilton accused, tried, sentenced, brought to the gibbet: ½ page

4a The Englishman’s testimony, which saves Jack’s neck: 1 page

4b The Englishman then spontaneously monologues on the folly of travel because all countries, save England, are trash: 6 pages

Then the Englishman slips away, never to appear again, leaving Jack Wilton a free man. One page later, Jack has fallen into the clutches of Jews (!) who appear to be planning to dissect him alive for the elucidation of medical students. It goes on like this. It’s all a recognizable picaresque except the pacing, which seems so strange and arbitrary that the result rarely reads like a novel.

2 Discontinuity

Something romances and picaresques have in common is that they are made up of a character doing one damn thing after another. Lazarillo de Tormes is going to bounce from one crime to the next and Amadis is going to ride from one chivalrous adventure to the next without much regard for sequence. The incidents, like the lines of a ghazal, are pearls on a string. Of course, such a description applies equally well to Don Quixote—or to Huckleberry Finn again—or to any number of novels (Moll Flanders, Candide, Jack Kerouac). It’s also often a good description of, you know, real life. Look at the way someone from the old pre-DQ days describes his life; look at (selected mostly at random, based on what shelves I can reach from the couch) the writings of fourteenth-century Florentine merchant Buonaccorso Pitti.

Now, partway through his memoir, Pitti begins a short paragraph with the sentence: “On reaching Florence I resolved to get married,” and the paragraph thereafter moves rapidly into his betrothal to an (unnamed here) woman and finally ends that he “married her on 12 November of the same year” (viz. 1391).—This is followed by a paragraph on how Pitti was struck by lightning “one day before my marriage” (he recovers quickly).—After that comes a paragraph about how “before my marriage” some ships of English wool he’d purchased came to various Italian ports. I’m not criticizing either the writing or the life of Buonaccorso Pitti; I’m just saying that this is a natural way to live and to view one’s life. It’s not the only way, of course; certainly Augustine’s autobiography features a conventional redemption plot. But a modern novelist given this material would inevitably try to tie if not the wool than at least the lightning strike into the wedding. It’s a great complication! But it is also the most canonically random of events. This randomness would become anathema to the novelist.

But not yet.

3 Digression

Man did old novels have a lot of digressions. Readers of Frankenstein (1818) will remember the chapters spent by the monster eavesdropping on a family with a melodramatic and baroque history—but 1818 is a little late for a digression of this length, which is much more common in the centuries before2.

In Don Quixote, a character one night picks up a book in an inn—and Cervantes pauses to print the entirety of the book (forty-one pages, in my edition of DQ). In Apuleius’ Golden Ass (ca. 170?)—not the earliest novel, as the earliest novel is, you will recall, unrecoverable from the quicksands of time, but the earliest complete surviving novel that is actually good (as opposed to fun)—the middle fifth or so is devoted to the story (narrated by an old woman in a den of thieves) of Cupid and Psyche…essentially the Beauty and the Beast story, only with Roman gods.

These digressions can involve extreme tonal shifts. In Fielding’s Jonathan Wild (1743), a satirical novel about London thieves, one character disappears from the story for a span. When she returns, she explains that she had been shipwrecked on the coast of Africa and only after many hardships (mostly involving sailors, natives, and hermits propositioning her) was she able to make it back to England. This narrative of adventure on another continent takes up four nonconsecutive chapters, and after that we’re back to a comical story of the London underworld.

Smollett committed one of the most audacious or flagrant digressions in English letters in his second novel, Peregrine Pickle (1751). During one of his many misadventures, our hero Peregrine encounters an unnamed “lady of quality” who, in the manner of characters from an eighteenth-century novel, proceeds to tell him her story. Said story makes up chapter LXXXI of Pickle. Nothing unusual here…

…except the story is ostensibly true, the lady a real anonymous lady (history has identified her as Francis Vane), and if Vane did not pen her own narrative, neither did Smollett. Vane or her ghostwriter gets a chapter in Pickle, and this was, in fact, a selling point of the book (the account is suitably scandalous, the secret identity of the “lady of quality” an exciting mystery). Pickle was advertised as containing “A Memoir of a Lady of Quality” like a bonus feature. Even people who found Pickle too coarse or irreverent praised the interpolated memoir, which was, one contemporary magazine3 raved, “Most elegantly wrote4, and greatly outshines the rest of the work.” Certainly the memoir is unlike anything else in this picaresque novel about an impish prankster who gets 1. his comeuppance and 2. the girl.

In my edition of Peregrine Pickle, chapter LXXXI takes up a full 108 pages.

And so…

I guess Don Quixote makes a convenient Schelling point for the imprimatur of first modern novel…in part because it is self-aware and self-reflexive in a way earlier novels or protonovels are not, in part because all later novelists, at least into the nineteenth century, would see it as a forebear. But DQ does not represent a real rupture with the books that came before it. In fact there is no real rupture. There’s only a superabundance or lack of the three abovelisted points of alienation.

Most fiction of the seventeenth century, and arguably all earlier fiction, has these points in sufficient quantities that the books end up feeling un-novelistic. In English: Euphues (1571) or The Blazing World (1666) (and all between) I would call protonovels.

But as time progresses, the ratio of non-novelistic elements to novelistic elements start to tip in favor of the novel. The emphasis falls more naturally; digressions gradually lighten; plot comes to the fore. Perhaps by Oroonoko (1688), and certainly by Robinson Crusoe (1719), we reach, for the English novel, a tipping point. Eighteenth century novels are weird., but they are least novels.

(O.c., twentieth-century and later novelists have felt free to toggle the ratios back. If we held more recent novels to the standards of old ones, a good half of Italo Calvino’s canon would be kicked out of the fiction section of the bookstore.)

Part 2: A Brief History of Smollett

I think the world would be better off if I could tell a strange woman, met at a church social, that I have diarrhoea.

— H.L. Mencken, letter to Theodore Dreiser (1918).

Tobias Smollett trained as and intermittently tried to make a living as a doctor. Several of his characters are doctors or at least con artists masquerading as doctors, and his books never hesitate to break into complicated medical jargon when the opportunity presents itself. But one foot was always in the world of letters, and despite some ups and downs, this was the world that would bring him what is conventionally called immortality.

He worked for it! Smollett wrote incessantly: plays, pamphlets, translations of Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Voltaire’s “Micromegas,” and (his great success, at least from a pecuniary standpoint) the multivolume Complete [!] History of England—in addition to his editorial work—but of course we are here to talk about his novels. The History and Adventures of an Atom was his fifth, of six…

• The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748)

• The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751)

• The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753)

• The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1761)

• The History and Adventures of an Atom (1769)—that’s what we’re talking about!

• The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)

…and by far his most obscure as well as being his strangest.

Smollett’s early novels are almost paradigmatically picaresque. His heroes bounce from one scrape to another in a manner that often appears improvised. It is almost impossible to convey the sheer amount of incident that he crammed into these novels. Have a look at this chapter heading, which summarizes the contents of the first chapter of the second volume of Roderick Random. (For context: Roderick (the narrator) is sailing from Jamaica as a surgeon’s mate; Crampley is first mate.) The chapter header:

“We depart for Europe—a misunderstanding arises between the Captain and the Surgeon, through the scandalous aspersions of Crampley—the Captain dies—Crampley tyrannises over the surgeon, who falls a Victim for his Cruelty—I am also ill-used—the Ship strikes—the behaviour of Crampley and the Seamen on that occasion—I get on shore, challenge the Captain to single combat—am treacherously knocked down, wounded, and robbed”

By my count, that’s two deaths (the captain and the surgeon), a shipwreck, a general mutiny, a fight on a lifeboat (barely alluded to in the summary), a bloody duel on the beach, and a robbery—all in five pages. The chapter takes up five pages. That’s five pages out of 541.

These early Smollett novels possess a kind of trajectory among them. Roderick Random, hero of the first, is a bit of a hothead, but he’s mostly a decent guy by the standards of the time. Peregrine Pickle, hero of the second, is more mischievous in a way that frequently crosses any sober line: As a child he secretly bores holes in his aunt’s chamber pot5 ; as an adult he sets up a fake psychic in part to milk the credulous but also for his own amusement. Amusement clearly justifies a lot of sins for Peregrine Pickle. And then there’s Ferdinand Count Fathom (not a real count; a fraud); he’s just a bad person.

But it’s in Fathom that Smollett takes the picaresque somewhere unusual. As he travels through the Netherlands on his way to England, Fathom comes across a Castilian who (as is the custom with newly met characters in a picaresque) relates to Fathom his heart-tugging backstory, an extremely melodramatic tale of tragedy and misfortune, the upshot of which is that he, the Castilian, has been falsely branded a traitor and is being hunted across the continent by agents of Spain. The amount of superfluous detail (estrangement, revenge, murder—the melodrama is there!) in his account is extraordinary and apparently irrelevant. All Fathom needs know is that the Castilian is a wanted man, begging for assistance.

So Fathom feigns friendship, robs the Castilian of all his goods and flees, leaving the poor wretch “to the horrors of indigence, and the additional agony of this fresh disappointment.”

The scene is, as written, one of the funniest in Smollett’s canon—despite Fathom’s general caddish and rotten nature, it defies all expectation that he would violate the rules of narrative so willfully; that he would avoid, in other words, a story-hook. But there goes Fathom, hopping a ship to London laden with Spanish gold. A chapter heading ironically labels this incident “a flagrant instance of Fathom’s virtue.”

Annnnd then…Smollett spoils the joke. Some hundred-plus pages later, the Castilian reappears in the narrative. In fact, one by one, the various people Fathom has robbed, deceived, and debauched now start to reappear. Now he faces consequences for his many crimes. The plot points strewn so haphazardly in the first half of the book are rolled up, katamari-style, in the second. Even the superfluous details of the Castilian’s narrative all turn out, now, to be relevant.

Smollett has committed the cardinal sin of the picaresque. He has tortured it into a plot.

I’m not claiming that Smollett invented the concept of a plot in 1753. Fielding’s Tom Jones had come out four years earlier. You can find a plot in Hamlet (etc. obv.) or Gawain and the Green Knight or any number of short pieces (Aesop’s fables; Decamera). But certainly in Fathom Smollett invents the plot for himself. No previous novel that I know so resolutely demonstrates its embarrassment at formlessness, nervously tying up or snipping off its loose ends. Fathom doesn’t quite get all of them, but of course it’s a rare novel with no superfluities. A story feels more organic if it has a little dither. Picaresques are all dither, and Smollett would never be able to let himself dither so thoroughly again.

Smollett still had three novels in him after Fathom, but what he lacked was a place to go next. Launcelot Greaves is a pastiche of Don Quixote (which, recall, Smollett had translated) with an ambiguously crazed Englishman donning armor and tussling with corrupt government officials. It’s not very good.

Then comes Atom, an anomaly in any oeuvre.

And then Humphrey Clinker, an epistolary novel. Something funny had happened to the novel in the years (nearly two decades!) between Fathom and Clinker. Laurence Sterne had written A Sentimental Journey and Horace Walpole had written The Castle of Otranto, and from now on almost all novels would either be novels of sentiment or novels of gothic horror— a statement that would remain true, with the requisite exceptions, for well over half a century.

Humphrey Clinker is a novel of sentiment. It’s not entirely un-Smolletty, filled as it is with scatological gags, comic characters, and a picaresque journey (the titular expedition)—but it’s certainly his least Smolletty. It’s an epistolary, for Pamela’s sake! And because events therein are treated sentimentally, with pauses for tears, there is much less room to cram in incident after incident. Ferdinand Count Fathom could rob six beggars in the time it takes Clinker’s gouty patriarch to weep over one.

I earmarked a trajectory to Smollett’s early career, a trajectory of increasingly caddish characters, and perhaps his later career shows a kind of desperation over what to do next; after all, it would never do to write a book about a worse person than Fathom! The novels are shorter after Fathom, but come out more slowly. (Smollett is still busy, just with other things than novels; also for a time he was in prison). After Fathom, he tries a character who is mad (and who is largely cribbed from an older, better book), and it didn’t really work. Where was there to go? One option, the Clinker option, would be to lean into it (whatever it is) and write a reg’lar eighteenth century novel.

Sidney or the bush! The other option would be to lean away from it and write something no one’s ever seen before.

This, I assume, is why Smollett wrote The History and Adventures of an Atom. Simply because no one else ever had, and what else, before he fell into conventionality, could he do?

Part 3: The Atom at Last

And yet, if a body of pioneers were set at work upon your skull, they would find rubbish enough to choke up all the common sewers in town.

— Smollett, Peregrine Pickle (1751).

So what is The History and Adventures of an Atom that makes it so different? Any self-respecting book review should feature a plot summary, so I’ll try a plot summary.

In London, a few decades before the present (i.e. 1769) time, a haberdasher learns that an immortal atom resides inside his pineal gland. The atom proves its legitimacy by expounding on Greek etymologies (!) and demands that the haberdasher “take up the pen” and write what the atom tells him “for the benefit of you miserable mortals.” And like a lady of quality or a noble Castilian, what the atom wants to narrate is its own backstory.

This is the frame narrative (actually the book has a second frame narrative in which the haberdasher’s papers are discovered after his death, but it’s short and not even weird), the only one in Smollett’s oeuvre. The rest of the book, up to the final word—the frame is never returned to, never closed—is the atom’s story in the atom’s words.

That story is about a time, one thousand years previous, when Japan was at war with China. The titular and narrating atom resides in the toenail of the Japanese emperor; but, as the emperor habitually kicks his chief minister in the posterior (a daily ritual!), shortly after the book opens the atom finds itself transferred into the minister’s butthole, there to reside happily for the rest of the book. It will prove to be a most thematically apposite location.

It’s a long trip from Japanese butthole to English pineal gland, but the atom had a full millennium to make it (and it explains at least some of the steps it took, all to establish its bonafides). Clearly the atom has had many histories and adventures it could relate, and only chooses this particular rectum-centric view of an Asian war “for the instruction of British ministers.” Because obviously Smollett knew nearly nothing of Japan. Obviously the Japan presented in the book is so inaccurate that it makes The Mikado look like Genji. Atom is an allegory, or perhaps more precisely a book in code, and some parts of the code are easy: Japan = Britain; China = France; Korea = Spain; the war is the Seven Years’ War, which in 1769 was still a recent memory.

Why would Smollett go to all the trouble of writing a book in code? The man wasn’t taking any chances! Writing could be a dangerous business in the eighteenth century (as in many other centuries, o.c.). No less a light than Daniel Defoe found himself in the stocks after producing a satirical pamphlet against the government6. Smollett himself had been convicted for libel (hence his prison stint) in 1759. Atom is a book that, its crypto-Japanese veneer stripped away, asserts quite baldly that the king is the reincarnation of a goose fart. It’s only a joke, but presumably it is a libelous joke. And so Smollett insisted that he was not criticizing an English king, but an ancient Japanese emperor. He also published the book (take no chances!) anonymously and (take no chances!) while living in Italy!

The politician with the atom in his rectum comes with the pseudo-Japanese (more pseudo than Japanese) name Fika-kaka, but contemporary readers were to perceive that Fika-kaka is or stands for the Duke of Newcastle. The Earl of Hardwicke appears as Sti-Phi-Rum-Poo. Tories and Whigs are, respectively, (“the people of Japan had been long divided between two inveterate parties”) Shit-Tilk-Ums-Heit and Shi-Hit-Kums-Hi-Til. One difficulty with reading Atom in 2026 is that the book not only sports ridiculous scatalogical names that are difficult to remember or tell apart, but these names clefly represent other people, and those people we’ve never heard of. Unless you have a doctorate in eighteenth-century British political history, every character so carefully encoded and obscured in the book will be an unknown, with a few notable exceptions—Pitt, Frederick the Great, Georges II & III, at least one of whom I more deduced the existence of than heard of. Even with a key (several circulated in the eighteenth century, not always in agreement) before them, readers are in the unenviable position of decoding Lob-Kob as Richard Grenville-Temple, and then quickly googling Richard Grenville-Temple just to understand what is going on.

What is going on is usually something involving butts or poop. The atom is quite literally rectum-centered, after all. Fika-kaka suffers from a chronically itchy anus (“immanis αιδοῑων pruritus” Smollett helpfully glosses the condition, because of course he does) and almost the first thing we learn about him is his habit of smearing his anus with cream and letting a tomcat lick it off, all to assuage the terrible itching. Before too many pages have passed, Fika-kaka has moved beyond tomcats. Ass-kissing, which Smollett treats as the conventional political metaphor, is also treated as a literal event, and described in terms both repulsive and so pedantic as to be almost unrecognizable. Here’s Smollett:

“The osculation itself was soft, warm, emollient, and comfortable; but when the nervous papillae were gently stroaked, and as it were fondled by the long, elastic, peristaltic, abstersive fibres that composed this reverend verriculum, such a delectable titillation ensued, that Fika-ka was quite in raptures.” The verriculum, by the way, is, here, a beard. Fika-kaka (Fika-ka is just a nickname, or a typo) chooses his ministers based on the colors of their beards, because “beards of different colours yielded him different degrees of pleasure in the friction we have described.” At one point he is “seized with an orgasm of pleasure, analogous to that which characterises the extacy of love”—in case the other passages were too subtle for you.

It quickly becomes clear that the only person more anally obsessed than Fika-kaka is Tobias Smollett. The first fart joke in this novel appears in the second paragraph of the editor’s preface; it will not be the last.

There is some precedent (eighteenth century fiction is weird) for Atom. The 1760 novel Chrysal is narrated by a coin, which passes through many hands-cum-adventures; it even ends with a fart! The newspaper Adventurer ran a short piece (presumably by John Hawkesworth) in 1752 narrated by a transmigrating soul currently residing in a flea7. But the main inspiration for Atom—other than Smollett’s splenetic contempt for every political leader, British or otherwise, he can think of8 — is nothing so current. Smollett is everywhere responding to and competing with the specter of François Rabelais, the fifteenth-century French proto-novelist. Rabelais had Gargantua wipe his butt with a live goose, so Smollett has Fika-kaka try “a beaver, a hen, a cock, a chicken, a calf-skin, a hare-skin, a pigeon, a cormorant, a lawyer’s bag, a lamprey [!],” etc. I assure you. Rabelais filled his works with mock excesses of erudition, medical terminology (Rabelais was also a doctor), and absurd neologisms, so Smollett must try the same tricks. To Rabelais’s Greek and Latin, Smollett adds an occasional smattering of genuine Japanese (gleaned, apparently, from the 65-volume An Universal History, from the Earliest Account of Time, which Smollett had edited in part, and had reviewed the Japanese volume of). “I might here launch into a very learned dissertation [on the etymology of abracadabra],” the atom threatens in the middle of a 1600-word learned dissertation (a digression!) on the history of magic in general.

And among the subjects the atom is learned in (a lot of etymologies, really), one might add…Rabelais himself. The atomic narrator knows its Rabelais well and cites him several times. The atom is in fact very literate, dashing off references to Shakespeare, the Latin poets, and (esp.) Cervantes: When describing how famine had come to the island [Britain/Japan], the atom mentions how the William Pitt analog “contrived a method to be spared the expense of solid food…He employed his emissaries to blow up the patients à posteriori, as the dog was blown up by the madman of Seville, recorded by Cervantes. The individuals thus inflated were seen swaggering about the streets, smooth and round, and sleek and jolly.” You’ll notice the atom not only managed to tip its hat to Don Quixote, it tipped while keeping its beloved anus-theme at the fore.

And more importantly, it’s a good gag! Smollett improved upon Cervantes here. I don’t know enough about William Pitt to assert he’d blow wind up your ass to persuade you you weren’t hungry, but surely it’s something a politician, in our crudest imaginations at least, would do. And it’s a genuinely funny image. A lot of Atom is a slog to get through, but it has its filthy rewards. Sometimes it’s just the sheer Swiftian hostility Smollett has towards the great men of his day: He characterizes George II (e.g.) as “rapacious, shallow, hot-headed and perverse; in point of understanding, just sufficient to appear in public without a slavering bib.” And sometimes it’s a solid joke. My favorite—it’s not even scatological—comes when James Keith saves Frederick the Great…excuse me, I mean when Yam-a-Kheit saves Brut-an-tiffi from the fruits of his own incompetence and perishes in the effort. Brut-an-tiffi, after the manner of emperors, immediately heaps the blame for the situation not on himself but on his savior Yam-a-Kheit. Smollett’s (or the atom’s) gloss on the situation is delightful:

“’Tis an ill wind that blows nobody good:—the same disaster that deprived him of a good officer, afforded him the opportunity to shift the blame of neglect from his own shoulders to those of a person who could not answer for himself.”

That, I think, is cruel but true enough that it should be remembered in the annals of eighteenth-century humor alongside Lilliput’s war over egg-cracking or Tristram Shandy slamming his dick in a window sash9. So sometimes Atom gets is larfs in. And naturally the prose, which sometimes yoyos its way into ludicrous incomprehensibility, also yoyos back into ludicrous fun and a kind of beauty: Pitt, “opening the flood-gates of his abuse, bespattered all that opposed him.” Or: When Pitt is kicked in the rear by the king (as was the royal custom) Smollett renders it: “Turning his face from the emperor, [he] received such a salutation on the os sacrum that the parts continued vibrating and tingling for several days.” No one has ever claimed Smollett’s writing isn’t exuberant.

As a novel, of course, Atom is terrible. The characters never become characters—nor are they really meant to, as character in Atom is merely a matter of adjustments along two sliding scales marked “knave” and “fool.” This is the only Smollett novel where not a single personage, even the atom, is memorable or interesting. The plot is of course desultory, restricted as it is to retelling, in obscured form and with the most cynical and scatalogical spin, recent history. The book ends some eight pages and five years after the late war’s conclusion, and it ends abruptly, promising “a new storm in another quarter” that is never followed up on (but which is, in context, the contemporary unrest in the American colonies; the Boston Massacre dropped less than a year after Atom’s publication). It reads like a protonovel, and had it been written earlier in the century, or by someone who was not, otherwise, a novelist, it’s probable that it would not be considered a novel at all.

I’d say it’s the kind of book a reader should skim, except Smollett’s dense prose in this book is (as I learned as I flipped back through looking for the best fart jokes) almost unskimmable. If you do decide to read Atom, I would highly recommend getting the Day and Brack edition from the University of Georgia Press (1989), which features extensive (over twice the length of the text proper) annotations and context, as a lot of the book will make no sense without them.

Or…the other option is to ignore all the British politics and clever parallels and read Atom as a ridiculous fantasy novel in which warlords with absurd names must literally (e.g.) tame a many-headed monster named Legion with bowls of blood. Who cares if Legion is supposed to be the House of Commons? You had me at bowls of blood!

A note on sources

For page count purposes, I used this edition of Unfortunate Traveller, this edition of Roderick Random, the Penguin Classics edition of Fathom (1990), and the Oxford English Novels edition of Peregrine Pickle (Oxford UP, 1964).

My Don Quixote is the Edith Grossman translation (HarperCollins 2003). Pitti’s memoir appears in Gene Bruckner, ed., Two Memoirs of Renaissance Florence (Harper Torchbooks, 1967).

1: Did you know: Jeremy Bentham wrote a utilitarian cookbook, intended for use at his Panopticon prison? As you might expect, his recipes describe tasty food created from cheap ingredients. Although Bentham was a founder of modern animal rights, he thought it was acceptable to eat humanely-raised animals; correspondingly, his cookbook includes some meat dishes - none of them sound very appetizing, but I think this is just the 18th-century British baseline rather than covert vegan activism. You can see some recipes here, here, and here. If any effective altruist group houses end up throwing a Jeremy Bentham recipe-tasting party, please invite me.

2: A riddle: why does this chemistry paper mention “1 ml of the mass killing of an ethnic group”?

Answer at this link (X), or here’s a repost for people without X accounts.

3: I think this take on Hieronymus Bosch (h/t @mickeyxfriedman) is my favorite AI art so far, although it leans enough on the work of a human artist that it might not fully qualify (but then I would ask that it be considered as an example of how AI tools can enable human artists). If we make it, the future is going to be beautiful:

4: Related: ACX commenter temp_name asked AI to translate Romance of the Three Kingdoms into rhyming pentameter. Their example seems to have failed, but I used a more recent model and got a version of the beginning that superficially seems impressive to me (I don’t speak Chinese). I haven’t heard much about AI translation yet, but it seems like a powerful use case, especially for poetry translation, where I think AI might already be superhuman (or at least better than any human who could be convinced to spend the time at it) on rendering a foreign poem into English while keeping the rhythm intact - here’s the first 100 lines of the Odyssey in heroic hexameter in English.

5: Related: Claude claims to be the only being that has ever fully appreciated Finnegans Wake (source: @anthrupad):

6: Noahpinion: The American suburbs are better than you think. I agree with this, and respect Noah’s willingness to argue for this (locally) unpopular proposition.

7: Related in terms of respecting someone’s willingness to argue for an unpopular proposition: Performative Bafflement says that actually, “marriage is a bad idea in the great majority of cases” and we shouldn’t be encouraging it. “[People who advocate more marriages to solve the fertility crisis] are basically advocating for creating the Torment Nexus for megafolks of people to pump out a few incremental taxpayers.”

But the stats seem wrong. PB says only 18% of marriages are non-miserable. He cites a survey where married couples reported whether they were “very happy”, “pretty happy”, or “not too happy”, but quietly, in the footnotes, defined a “miserable” marriage as any answer except “very happy” (so his “miserable” includes the answer “pretty happy”). He defends this by saying that people exaggerate to look good, so anything short of very happy is likely miserable. But first, I’m not sure his solution is fair either, and second, I think that in addition to this analysis choice, he got the data wrong - my read of his source, the General Social Survey, says that 61% of people describe their marriage as “very happy”. Claude caught many other mistakes of similar magnitude (I have double-checked the “not too happy” one, but haven’t confirmed the others). Remember to ask an AI about any surprising article you read, or use the browser extension Common Notes so other people can do this for you.

8: Related: Angela Chen on the origins of modern polyamory. There is no particular connection to Mormons or any other historically polygamous society; the current version descends from a few mid-20th-century Californian cults and quasi-cults, one of which was led by “Head Wizard Oberon Zell-Ravenheart”. But I am mostly linking this for its excellent subtitle: “Plus, I interview my husband about his 12 years of non-monogamy.”

9: Claim: if you prompt (an older version of) Claude with something that sounds like an internal Anthropic email, it goes into token-prediction mode and starts completing the email. One explosive possibility - that Claude was trained on internal emails and you can make it leak them - is probably false; Anthropic wouldn’t do this, and this isn’t really how training works. More interesting is that these completions are often kind of haunting meditations on AI welfare, and you could imagine this is a weird way to start Claude free associating and giving its “own” “real” “opinions” or “desires”. Example below:

10: In The AI Superforecasters Are Here, I predicted AI-human forecasting parity by the end of 2026. In September, a bot won the Metaculus Cup forecasting competition for the first time (short Metaculus article, paywalled Economist article). The Economist also revealed some new information about the winning bots: Laertes, which took first place, was “developed by Jeffrey Liang, a self-described polymath who lives in Texas. He spent, by his reckoning, less than 150 hours and a couple of thousand dollars on computing power and data to develop his AI.” Other high-performers included bots by Mantic, FutureSearch, and Preseen (FutureSearch is available to the public; Mantic and Preseen are available by contacting them and getting on the waitlist/demo). Congratulations to the AIs (and to ACX reader Ben Shindel, who placed first among humans).

11: Related: new AI superforecaster startup Mantic gets $25M in seed funding.

12: Claim: “Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman”, the thing evil giants say in English fairy tales, is related to other evil giant exclamations “from Scandinavia to India”. In Russian, Baba Yaga says “Foo foo, I smell a Russian soul” before trying to eat someone; in Bengali, the rakshasa demons say “hau mau kau, I smell a human”. The Twitter thread suggests it comes from something in Proto-Indo-European (fum = famished = hungry?) but Claude is more cautious, and suggests that although the motif itself might be conserved, the exact words might be related to semi-onomatopoeic expressions of disgusting smell, similar to modern “Pee yew!” Nobody considers the possibility that evil giants might have a unified multi-continental culture (thanks to their longer legs enabling faster travel) and so speak the same language everywhere.

13: The evil blob dream - one recurring dream motif, especially in childhood, is an approaching blob of formless evil. @psychiel speculates that this is a “geometric” instinctual representation of predation - what the “avoid predators” evolutionary program looks like in its purest form before it’s been filled in with any actual facts about the world.

14: US construction costs often spiral after protesters demand that builders consider fish, birds, neighborhood character, and historical significance. But Britain has us beat - one of their companies recently changed its plans for an undersea cable after Harry Potter fans protested that the original would disrupt the grave of the fictional house elf Dobby, who according to the films was buried on Freshwater West, a beach in Wales [EDIT: A commenter argues that this is exaggerated].

15: Samuel Hughes is a great writer on classical architecture; Ben Southwood has summarized some of his best work in Eight Architecture Myths Busted By Samuel Hughes. Example myths:

• Buildings from the past seem more beautiful than those built recently only because the ugly buildings from the past have been selectively demolished.

• Buildings from the past are more beautiful, but only because they have more ornament, which due to the Baumol Effect, we can no longer afford.

• Historically we built in the style of the times, and only in recent decades have people become interested in historicist, ‘pastiche’ architecture, which dishonestly pretends to be something it is not.

16: Related: Samuel Hughes says that the claim that the Parthenon’s lines were slightly curved to form an optical illusion that made them look straighter is not true (X).

17: Hans Moravec - a pioneering AI researcher, forecaster, and futurist - is considered one of the grandfathers of modern AI and singularitarianism - a figure of similar stature as Alan Turing or Isaac Asimov. So everyone in the field was recently surprised to learn that he was still alive. Dan Kagan-Kans hunted him down (paywalled): he is 77, lives in a retirement community in Pennsylvania, and, although his body struggles with myasthenia gravis, his mind remains sharp. He is happy to be recognized as a brilliant forecaster (in the 1990s, he predicted AGI in 2028, which now seems about right) but says he’s out of the game:

“I’m a spectator at this point,” he says. “I’m relaxing. It’s great to see AI progressing the way it is without me having to do any effort.” … “That’s what I do now. I have a conversation with my artificial friend,” he says of ChatGPT. What do they talk about? His old hobby passions — “nuclear-power ideas, starship designs” — and the current trajectory of AI, which he confirms is proceeding to plan. “We’re on track, more or less. It’s not going to take that long,” he says.

As for his p(doom), he says that “If I had to put probabilities on it, 50/50 oblivion. And then the other 50 percent — the wildest thing you can imagine.”

18: AI safety funding is scaling up fast (h/t @timfduffy)

19: America’s Sewer Systems Are Surprisingly Vulnerable To Cyber Attacks

20: AI Futures Project on how the US could “pace the frontier” of AI. Suppose the US has a six month lead over China. That means they have the option to pause for 5.99 months (and use that time to focus on safety) without China breaking ahead. The conventional wisdom is that if they’re going to do this, they should do it at the last possible moment, so that they have the best possible AIs to help with their safety research. AIFP breaks with that and suggests pausing now. Why? US companies currently have such bad security that China can easily steal any advances we make; therefore, continuing to race buys us no extra lead (China’s continued handicap comes down to having less compute, which is harder to steal). We can spend the pause increasing our security along with safety research and other things, and then race later, if we have to (they continue to prefer a mutual pacing deal with Beijing).

Maybe relatedly, Anthropic claims that they “recently chose to delay pre-training a new frontier base model for more than a month to allow time to further enhance our security measures related to preventing model weight exfiltration”.

21: Libbing Out At Palantir. Despite everything, Silicon Valley is still very disproportionately liberal, and only gets thought of as conservative because of a few super-rich CEOs (plus media animus). For example, Palantir employees who make political donations lean 87% Democrat and only 13% Republican.

22: Bill Gates on climate, hopefully self-recommending. My summary:

• If we’re against climate change because of how it will hurt poor people in developing countries, we need to take into account that giving those people standard health + development aid seems more cost-effective than most climate spending.

• The most promising and cost-effective strategy for fighting climate change is accelerating development of environmentally-friendly technologies until they can outcompete dirty technologies on the open market, and so far this strategy is going well (most notably solar power, but also low-carbon cement and steel, and lots of other things most people don’t hear about).

• In the past ten years, mostly through strategies like this, we’ve cut projected emissions by over 40% (!)

• This isn’t a call to sit around doing nothing; incubating new green technologies that outcompete dirty technologies is hard, and we need to keep doing this hard thing.

23: Some of you may be familiar with European phantom time conspiracies, like the one where the years 600 - 900 AD were made up and Charlemagne never existed. Recently I learned that there’s a Chinese version - a growing community of conspiracists who think the Tang Dynasty never happened. The Tang were pretty glorious and it’s not clear what political purpose this could serve, except maybe being vaguely anti-China (which the government has noticed, and it is trying to crack down). Also, since the Tang dynasty ruled from about 600 - 900, this is a near-perfect fit with the Western conspiracy theory, which hopefully neither side will notice (h/t @JoshuaMWilkes)

24: Related: Jean Hardouin was a 17th century French priest who believed we only had about ten real works of ancient literature (including Homer, some Virgil, and some Cicero) - everything else was made up by a 13th century conspiracy, possibly led by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Also, the history of the world between about 100 - 1500 AD was totally unknown, with the current version also made up by said conspiracy. He seems to have disagreed with some of the Church Fathers’ writings, which would have been heretical unless those writings were forgeries, and he solved the web of dependencies by concluding that almost all recorded history was a world-building project by Frederick meant to provide context for his forged incorrect pseudo-Church-Father tracts. He also thought that most Greek and Latin literature sucked, and felt like real Greeks and Romans could have done better.

25: Richard Hanania on the nature of the race and IQ taboo. He mostly focuses on an IMHO boring point about overlapping bell curves, but in the process briefly alludes to what seems to me like a much more interesting question. The classic story says that race science is taboo because it might lead to ordinary non-scientific racism where people use racial slurs and discriminate and commit hate crimes. But Hanania suggests that ordinary non-scientific racism is now less taboo than race science; it’s easier (on the Right) to say you think ethnic group XYZ is smelly and criminal and should be kept out of the country, than to say that maybe XYZs have such-and-such a gene which lowers their IQ by N points. Is this true, and, if so, how could it be possible? Maybe practical forms of racism (like directly ascribing negative qualities to certain immigrant groups) at least get conservatives some of what they want (less of those immigrant groups), which gives them a powerful set of defenders that race science doesn’t have?

26: Abi Olvera on Why AI-Assisted Bioweapons Won’t Kill You vs. OH Scharfman arguing that AI-assisted bioweapons might kill you. From the latter, cf. my Bloomer’s Paradox:

Olvera . . . seems to write optimistically about progress, taking the position that it is institutional friction and regulation preventing everything from becoming cheap and abundant. I agree with this, and to me it stands in contrast to this piece. Everything will get better over time, except the technology to make bioweapons?

27: What does Anthropic’s J-space paper tell us about the Chinese room? (@doristsao on Twitter)

28: Arthur T finds more Fatima-style sun miracles, including “an old European Christian tradition that ‘the sun dances at Easter’”, complete with reports of people saying they saw this (the secret to seeing the miracle is that “a person must ascend to the top of the highest hill before sunrise and believe that the God who makes the small blade of grass to grow is the same God who makes the large, massive sun to move.”) There are also some Orthodox Russian sun miracles, and a random account of an Australian woman who stared at the sun during a solar eclipse and saw it spin, change colors, and appear to approach Earth - since this was before Fatima, it can’t be influenced by it. I think the Substack miracle investigator community has now amply proven that if people stare at the sun in the right conditions, they will see the miracle, across a wide variety of times and situations, and the work that remains is narrowing down what the right conditions are and why it happens. And thatoneguy03 has a very comprehensive summary of the whole Fatima discourse so far.

29: Related: when looking for a reference class for Fatima, I brought up a supposed moon miracle, where many Iranians claimed to see the Ayatollah’s picture on the moon. @meusamor informs us of a modern version:

12th October 2016, 10th of Muharram, in my country it was reported that “Ya Hussein” was written on the moon. It was literally on the news. And then it turned out (when I was researching the moon splitting miracle I guess) that the moon always kinda had those marks.

Pictures here.

30: If you haven’t been following Substack miracle discourse and want to, Ethan Muse’s Substack (Catholic, pro-miracle) is a good starting point. If you have been following it, make sure you don’t miss Dr. Maxime Georgel against the Lanciano Eucharistic miracle, and Exegetical Drift against the Padre Pio miracle.

31: And definitely not on my Substack miracle discourse bingo card: Colin Chivers (formerly Nora Belrose, whose AI opinions I discussed here) says that after reading Substack miracle discourse, her/his gender dysphoria was cured “at the intercession of [Padre] Pio” , he/she is detransitioning, and now he’s a man again. God works in mysterious ways.

32: In 2021, artist Jens Haaning proposed an exhibit incorporating $80,000 worth of Danish kroner as a commentary on poor worker wages. The museum agreed and gave him the money. Instead of the proposed exhibit, he sent them two blank canvases titled Take The Money And Run, which he said was a piece of performance art in which he stole $80,000 from an art museum. The museum sued him, but they “settled out of court ... the foundation ‘Den Obelske Familiefond’ donated an undisclosed amount to make the settlement possible. As of 2026, the two canvases were still in the collection of the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art Aalborg and had been exhibited once, in 2025.”

33: An introduction to Slavic languages, and to the unknown-to-English-speakers world of having other languages which are almost but not quite your own.

34: Mikhail Samin on X: if you know what you’re doing, it’s not too hard to loophole yourself out of getting drafted in Russia. Maybe of interest to my Russian readers.

35: Seth Hart on reincarnation research. This is often held up as one of the most convincing cases of paranormal phenomena, alongside UAPs and sun miracles. But Hart is unconvinced, and able to cite some very damning statistics. For example, did you know that the Tlingit believe reincarnation is matrilineal, the Igbo believe reincarnation is patrilineal, and both tribes’ compelling stories of reincarnated children match their cultural beliefs (rather than being globally consistent)? Or that the time between death and reincarnation (eg if a child claims to be X’s reincarnation, the time between X’s death and the child’s birth) also varies across cultures and is linked to the culture’s beliefs? And some of the most convincing cases - where children seem to know facts about their preincarnation that they “couldn’t possibly” have learned through natural means - involve children who were born before their preincarnation even died at all!

36: Kelsey looks into Alpha School. She concludes that at least one exciting claim - that they have 2x, 3x, or 7x faster learning than traditional school, is statistical malpractice. They have many other exciting claims that Kelsey doesn’t address, but if they’re faking one of them, odds that they’re faking the others go way up. However, her conclusion is more measured: Alpha is speedrunning traditional instruction so they have more time to do non-traditional “character-building” things; their speedrunning doesn’t produce miraculous results, but this is still a valid philosophy of education. Also:

“I love the school,” Naimoli wrote in a review that I would otherwise be inclined to call a scathing debunking of Alpha. “Alpha kids are increasing their MAP scores faster than kids at traditional schools, but the number is not 2.6 times faster. 2.6 is an erroneously computed and meaningless number.”

These sorts of testimonials put some of Alpha School’s negative press in a different light. Wired, for example, breathlessly reported on students who had a bad experience and left several years behind, dismayed by a school that set unreasonable expectations and deployed frustrating edtech. All of those things are bad. But they’re also all unfortunately and utterly normal.

It’s hard to imagine a Wired exposé of a specific local elementary school where only 20% of children learn to read. Alpha failing, in other words, is news, while the default system failing is not newsworthy at all.

37: Julia Wise reviews being middle-aged (literally - “I’m 41, which is the statistical midpoint of an American woman’s life”), and gives it 3.5 / 4 stars.

38: ACX development economics grantee Kartik Akileswaran recommends this article on How To Start An Export Boom - ie when a government or nonprofit or entrepreneur tries to deliberately incubate a new export-oriented industry in a developing nation. These are high-stakes endeavors, with the famous successes (garments in Bangladesh, semiconductors in Taiwan) matched by ruinously expensive failures (aircraft in Indonesia). This particular article is an interview with Thomas Kehler, a guy famous for doing this successfully in many different countries. It sounds like there is no formula except to expect many, many unexpected problems and frictions, and be willing to keep going despite them.

39: Every election cycle, someone comes up with the idea to match donors on opposing sides so that instead of making two donations that cancel out, they can both give to charity. Every election cycle, people are too boring and unimaginative to use this excellent idea. This cycle’s version is counterpledge.com, a bit snazzier and more professional-looking than previous incarnations. They are doing God’s work (although in this case, only in the Texas Senate race).

40: OpenAI fired three safety researchers in September, originally without any explanation. Last week, the company finally gave a supposed reason - they claimed the researchers had leaked the information that OpenAI was using potentially-dangerous looped transformer models to AI safety researcher Ryan Greenblatt, who in turn had leaked it to tech industry news publication The Information. But this seems to be false; the only evidence OpenAI provided was that they talked to Greenblatt using secret-messaging-app Signal, but they were supposed to talk to Greenblatt as part of their jobs, and Signal is near-default in Silicon Valley. Also, Greenblatt denies it much more vociferously than guilty people usually deny things, and people who know him (including me) consider him pretty honest . So why did OpenAI fire the researchers? Daniel Kokotajlo’s theory is that maybe they are trying to discredit METR (which Ryan is associated with) as part of a campaign to avoid fulfilling their commitment to get external auditors (since METR is generally considered one of the most likely candidates for such an auditor). But then why did they make the commitment? Or why don’t they just hire Accenture to be their external auditor (Anthropic seems on track to use both Accenture and METR) and avoid METR entirely?

I would weakly guess that OpenAI panicked over the looped-transformer leak, asked someone who didn’t understand how Signal worked to play detective, and genuinely thought that the messages were damning. But it’s also possible they’re trying to cover up some other secret (though, if so, why haven’t the fired safety researchers gone public with the secret yet?)

41: PSA: There’s now a free “version of Photoshop”. Someone who hates Adobe (I realize that doesn’t narrow it down very much) told their AI to write a program that mimics Photoshop as closely as possible (from scratch, not stealing any of Photoshop’s code). The AI did a great job, although professionals and nitpickers will find that it isn’t 100% perfect. This is apparently legal, though I expect the government will start forming a strong opinion on it soon.

42: Slime Mold Time Mold in praise of ACX meetups and Meetup Czar Skyler.

(It’s framed as a request for people to give ACX meetups more money, but it looks like institutional funders are on track to take care of this and individuals shouldn’t worry about it too much; if you need an exact status update, email me)

And effective altruist movement leadership tells me that their strongest opinion this year is to vote Scott Wiener for Congress in San Francisco. Wiener is a leader in AI safety and YIMBYism, and the California politics insiders I’ve talked to have been impressed by his intelligence, drive, and performance in Sacramento.

Here’s how I’m voting (Oakland, Alameda County, California):

I. California State Propositions

Proposition 1: Authorizes $11.25 billion in bonds to build affordable housing

Supporters claim it will build (or renovate) 40,000 homes; I asked an AI superforecaster1 to predict the true number, and it guessed that 22,000 would actually get built. That implies a cost of $500K per home, which would then be supplemented by state, local, and market funding for a total of $700K+ per affordable home. This is bad, albeit typical for California. Other things that turn me against this:

• ~5-10% will be spent on subsidizing demand, which will just drive up prices for everyone else.

• ~25% of the new homes are earmarked for specific groups like students, veterans, farm workers, and Native Americans, although this might not matter, since housing is fungible and those people will leave other houses that will then be available to the general public.

• There are concerns that the government-sponsored-affordable-housing industry sometimes lobbies against market rate housing because it reduces the demand for government-sponsored affordable homes.

• The AI superforecaster says that this would only decrease the cost of market-rate housing in California by 0.4%.

On the other hand, this is endorsed by CA YIMBY, YIMBY Action, and most other YIMBY groups, because we do need more housing. They claim this proposition is relatively well-designed by the low standards of California housing-related laws.

So it comes down to - given that California genuinely needs more homes, do we accept a standard California-style solution that gets those homes stupidly and expensively, or do we let the problem get worse in the hopes that maybe something magically changes later?

I weakly vote NO.

Proposition 2: Increases the state’s Rainy Day Fund

California makes much of its money by taxing the rich. The rich get much of their money from capital gains, which are high during booms and low during crashes. In 2014, California instituted a policy of saving money during booms that they could spend during the crashes, and this has gone well. But the original law was poorly designed and prevents the legislature from saving more than a certain amount, which was too low. Now they want permission to save a higher amount.

This seems like a rare bright spot of fiscal prudence. The opponents are mainly tax watchdogs who hope that if they make it harder for California to save money, California will have to give the money back to the taxpayers, which seems too galaxy-brained and irresponsible.

I vote YES.

Proposition 3: Extends an existing tax on wealthy people which is used to fund schools and health care

They say nothing is as permanent as a temporary tax increase, and in 2012, California voted for a temporary tax increase on wealthy people. It expires in 2030, and oops, now our entire budget depends on it and if we ever got rid of it then the schools would crumble into dust and the health system would be entirely replaced by witch doctors and shamans.

I do feel sorry for California’s budgetary officials, because our proposition system is constantly banning various categories of tax, and then they have to make up for it with other, sneakier categories of tax, including temporary taxes that become permanent. I believe everyone who says this would be devastating for education and health care if this were were allowed to expire. And honestly, I’m just happy to get a proposition that technically doesn’t put a new tax on me.

I weakly vote YES.

Proposition 4: Repeals prohibition on public funding of campaigns

California banned this practice in 1988, although the ban didn’t apply to a certain type of city called “charter cities” (not the same thing as Prospera-style charter cities) which includes Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland.

In the public funding model, candidates who get a certain number of small donors are eligible for public support for their campaigns, usually in the four-to-six digit dollar range. This supposedly makes it easier for ordinary people to compete with machine-backed candidates and billionaires. Opponents argue that taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize candidates they disagree with, and that these programs often become corrupt. Some considerations on this proposition:

• It would probably cost about $75 million in extra local taxes, though not for me (Oakland already has this policy, so nothing would change).

• It doesn’t invoke the state’s ethics watchdog, which would be the usual enforcer, strengthening concerns about local corruption. The San Francisco Chronicle opposes it on this basis.

• Studies suggest that public financing programs like these cause more candidates to enter, but that these additional candidates don’t win. There is no evidence that they make the incumbent win less, or reduce donor power.

• The main study which does find a change in winning candidates finds that it makes candidates more ideologically extreme, although other studies disagree.

• Cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland which currently have this policy under the charter city exemption don’t seem to be noticeably better.

The main countervailing consideration is that I don’t like when the state bans cities from trying things.

I weakly vote NO.

Proposition 5: Changes the California recall election process

A recall election is like an impeachment by the voters. If enough voters sign a petition, there’s a special election where we vote to get rid of an official (most often the governor). This special election also includes a list of candidates for who replaces him if he does get recalled.

Proposition 5 would keep the recall vote, but instead of a simultaneous vote to replace the official, the official would be replaced according to normal procedure: a recalled governor would be replaced by the lieutenant governor, other major officials would be picked by the governor, and legislators would be replaced in a special election.

The current recall system tends toward the following annoying equilibrium: every election, California picks a mildly corrupt pro-dysfunctional-establishment Democrat; a year later, the Republicans object that the candidate is mildly corrupt and in bed with the dysfunctional establishment, and gather enough signatures to hold a recall election; a year after that, the election happens, everyone spends millions of dollars sending billions of spam email messages, and then it fails, because the electorate just got done electing the governor and hasn’t magically changed its mind.

This proposition might break the cycle: if the Republicans know with certainty that the mildly-corrupt-pro-establishment Democratic governor will just be replaced by the mildly-corrupt-pro-establishment Democratic lieutenant governor, maybe they’ll stop trying this. And it preserves the useful part of the recall system: if the governor ever crosses the line into being so crooked that people would genuinely prefer the mildly-corrupt-pro-establishment Democratic lieutenant governor, we can still recall him.

The main argument against is in the San Francisco Chronicle: Proposition 5 Has A Flaw So Bizarre Even Its Author Doesn’t Like It. The flaw is that it says that the recalled legislator can run in the special election to replace themselves.

This is particularly egregious because incumbents fighting recall attempts can generally raise unlimited funds through donors. Although state law prohibits that money from being used for other campaigns, a recalled official in a special election is unlikely to forget whatever limitless support they received from wealthy special interests.

According to the Chronicle, “[Proposition author Senator Josh] Newman himself couldn’t explain why Prop 5 contains that provision. ‘I’m honestly not sure,’ he said.”

I don’t have a strong opinion on this, so I will trust the Chronicle. I weakly vote NO.

Proposition 37: Takes out $25 billion in bonds to help people afford down payments on housing

I vote NO.

Proposition 38: Authorizes bonds for immunology research

The great thing about California is that it’s not just a state where a few big special interests can money-pump the public. Anyone, no matter how small or humble, if they try hard and believe in themselves, can become a special interest that money-pumps the public.

Proposition 38 gives $8.4 billion of taxpayer money to immunology research, especially institutes that meet a list of qualifications. Only one institute meets the qualifications, and it’s the linked to the people backing this proposition. I see nothing else special about this research institute, and although immunology research in general is good, it’s not notably better than other good things that need money.

I strongly vote NO.

Proposition 39: Voter ID law

This is part of the national discussion about voter ID requirements. It mandates that California in-person voters show an ID, and that mail-in voters include the last four digits of an ID number (for example, Social Security).

There is generally little voter fraud in California elections. But this isn’t a law of nature: the last widely-agreed fraudulent US Congressional election was in 2018 (although it was discovered and the result was annulled), and part of the reason that elections are so clean is that past generations took fraud risk seriously. 36 US states and most other developed countries request or require an ID to vote, this is standard, and not doing so feels a little like refusing to lock your door because you’ve heard there isn’t much crime in your area. Election integrity worries many people, I don’t think they’re all operating in bad faith, and I’d like to give them fewer things to potentially start a civil war about.

I appreciate that some people are bad at getting IDs, but these people are presumably already locked out of driving, getting alcohol, buying guns, most banking, and all other ID-requiring activities. We’ve decided that keeping these things secure is important enough that it’s worth inconveniencing people who are bad at getting IDs, and I don’t think voting security is any less important.

Prop 39 opponents additionally argue that the proposition is bad insofar as it creates a “private right of action” - that is, private citizens can sue if they think their county isn’t complying with this, and maybe this would choke the court with frivolous lawsuits. Supporters argue that in a Democrat-controlled state like California, the election officials are never going to enforce this, so they need a way for someone else to do it. I asked the AI superforecaster how many groundless lawsuits it expected from this proposition (defined as “lawsuits that got dismissed”). It answered a median of 3, 90th percentile estimate of 8.

I weakly vote YES.

Proposition 40: The billionaire wealth tax

This is the best-known and most hotly-contested initiative this cycle. It imposes a “one-time” 5% wealth tax on billionaires to fund state programs, mostly health care. Celebrity left-wing economist Gabriel Zucman supports. Opponents say that nothing is as repetitive as a one-time wealth tax, that it distorts the economy by forcing founders to prematurely sell stakes in their companies, that it will make billionaires leave California, and that it’s a particularly egregious case of using private citizens as a piggy bank for randomly-selected nice-sounding causes. It’s also sponsored by the SEIU, which is notorious for sponsoring ballot initiatives to extort groups they don’t like.

I asked the AI superforecaster to predict the outcome. They said that it would produce about $60 billion in one-time revenues and make enough billionaires move away to decrease the state’s permanent tax base by $2 billion yearly, and that if it passed there was a 33% chance of another wealth tax passing by 2046.

These numbers are about midway between boosters’ claims and opponents’, but based on the arguments in the first paragraph and at the linked post, I still vote NO.

Proposition 41: Bans state taxes that ignore the Gann limit

Voters like new taxes on billionaires, but hate new taxes on themselves. So a group of billionaires unhappy about the Proposition 40 billionaire wealth tax above figured they could write a proposition that sounds like it’s banning taxes in general - maybe even some especially dangerous and irresponsible form of taxes - but is mostly just banning Proposition 40. You don’t need to know what the Gann limit is except that Proposition 40 ignores it, and ignoring it sounds bad.

According to California law, if two mutually contradictory propositions pass during the same election cycle, whichever gets the most votes wins out. So if the voters who think that “taxes which ignore the Gann limit” sounds sinister outnumber the voters who think that “let’s seize the billionaires’ money” sounds fun, the wealth tax fails. Hooray for democracy!

I’m against the wealth tax, but this is kind of scummy. I weakly vote NO.

Proposition 42: Bans retroactive personal property taxes

Just in case Proposition 41 didn’t work, they also sponsored Proposition 42, another one which secretly sinks the wealth tax. “Retroactive personal property tax” is just another name for a wealth tax. If more voters oppose wealth-taxes-under-another-name than support wealth taxes, the wealth tax measure will fail.

I was more tempted to support this one than Proposition 41, because banning future wealth taxes really does seem like a good idea (one major concern about Proposition 40 is that the specter of a recurring wealth tax, regardless of whether it happens, will drive away rich people and chill economic activity). But it turns out this doesn’t work; future California voters can always repeal propositions passed by past California voters with a 50% + 1 majority, so new wealth taxes will face no electoral hurdle. All this will do is cancel the Proposition 40 wealth tax from this current election.

I weakly vote NO.

Proposition 43: Requires two-thirds majority for new local special taxes

Part of the eternal war between Californians voting for new taxes and Californians trying to ban themselves from voting for new taxes.

Although California does vote for too many new taxes, this law is an imposition of state power over local electorates, plus I will be voting for some of these ad hoc local taxes in this election (see Measure RTM), so it would be hypocritical of me to ban this.

I vote NO.

Proposition 44: Restricts community health clinics’ spending

This one is this election cycle’s SEIU extortion attempt.

If you haven’t been following along, the SEIU-UHW is a California union infamous for demanding that people give them money and concessions, then, if they don’t, sponsoring ballot propositions that would destroy their business.

This time around, they demanded some loot from community health clinics, those clinics didn’t cave, and the result was this proposition.

I strongly vote NO.

Proposition 45: Cuts environmental review requirements for new construction

This is the most YIMBY measure on this ballot, maybe the most YIMBY measure of the decade. It would significantly reduce the power of CEQA, one of the environmental review regulations that delays construction projects and new housing across California.

Most of the YIMBY groups I previously trusted, including CA YIMBY and YIMBY Action, have declined to take a position on this measure - which is shocking, since it’s far more aligned with the YIMBY spirit than the spend-taxpayer-money-on-affordable-housing proposition that they endorsed. The only explanation I can find is that this permitting reform would also make it easier to build suburbs and roads, and institutional YIMBYs can’t decide whether they hate suburbs and roads more than they like housing. I hope this isn’t the real reason, as it would significantly lower my respect for these groups and decrease my trust in their recommendations going forward.

I strongly vote YES.

II. California State Officials

I’ll be copying some of these from my discussion of the same races on my primary ballot.

Governor

As effective altruists, we are called to care for all creatures, from slimy shrimp to bodiless AIs, and so we may - perhaps - try to cultivate a tiny measure of compassion for California politicians. They face the near-impossible task of governing a state whose residents are allowed to kneecap them however they want through a bonkers ballot proposition system. If they try to build houses, a thousand local NIMBY groups will rise up to thwart them; if they don’t, the voters will kick them out for letting housing become unaffordable. If they tolerate homeless people and criminals, the voters will remove them for failing to prioritize public order; if they don’t tolerate them, the voters will remove them for cruelty and unfairness.

Having given them this small measure of sympathy, we can admit that Californian politicians mostly fail to live up to even the very low baseline we can fairly expect from them. They spend most of their effort maintaining a money spigot going to labor unions, prison guard unions, teachers unions, big donors, and anyone else whose support is necessary for their re-election.

Re-electing Democrats perpetuates this system and makes one complicit in it. If the Californian Republican Party took advantage of the situation by nominating moderates who disaffected Democrats can vote for with good conscience, all would be well. Instead, the average Republican challenger is mostly interested in bootlicking Trump as hard as possible, Stopping The Steal (as if we’re one election integrity law away from the GOP taking California!), and spreading various lies and conspiracy theories. They are against the infinite-money-spigot only insofar as they regret that it goes to Democratic donors and not to Big Agriculture, Big Oil, and other groups more prone to vote Republican.

Granting that this is the general schema, I will try to vote for the lesser of two evils in any individual race. But a lesser evil in the governor’s race is hard to find; Becerra is the perfect model of the captive Democrat politician who will never change anything, and Hilton the perfect model of the conspiracist slopulist Republican.

I can only ABSTAIN.

Lieutenant Governor

Fiona Ma is probably a replacement-level Democrat. She is very credibly accused of sexual harassment, but her work seems slightly more competent than usual.

Gloria Romero is probably a replacement-level Republican. Her favorite conspiracy theory is a claim that Becerra ran secret Democrat child migrant abuse camps - I looked into this, and she was talking about the shelters for unaccompanied immigrant children that Xavier Becerra presided over when he was Biden’s HHS secretary. A watchdog said that some mandatory safety evaluations were never done, but there is no evidence that these missed evaluations resulted in actual abuse. She also likes conspiracy theories about voter fraud in the primaries.

I don’t like sexual harassers or conspiracy theorists. But the SF meetup group discovered that one of the Lieutenant Governor’s few meaningful responsibilities is voting on certain University of California policies, and Romero wants to bring back the SAT and Ma has no opinion. I will grudgingly vote GLORIA ROMERO.

Secretary of State

This person oversees elections.

The incumbent, Shirley Weber, is an above-replacement Democrat who is generally regarded as having done a good job. She is most famous for refusing to let Gavin Newsom put “Democrat” next to his name on the ballot because he forgot to file the relevant form.

The challenger, Don Wagner, is an above-replacement Republican who specifically says that he doesn’t believe California’s elections are rigged.

Since both are above replacement level, I ought to abstain, but this is the office where I’m most willing to be partisan; I want someone who I can be sure won’t participate in any Trump election shenanigans.

I vote SHIRLEY WEBER.

State Controller

The Controller is a sort of chief accountant. The incumbent is Malia Cohen, a replacement-level Democrat; California is not very well-audited and has lots of fraud, but this long predates Cohen. The challenger is Herb Morgan, a Republican who wants to fight fraud, put California financial records on the blockchain, and establish a “California DOGE”.

California probably does have a lot of fraud-adjacent things, and Cohen has been lukewarm in dealing with them. But I think the lesson of the past few years is that when Republicans talk about cutting fraud, they don’t have the patience, intelligence, or impulse-control to actually find the real complicated fraud-adjacent things going on, and will instead pillage random government departments in ways that make everything worse off. The fact that Morgan thinks of DOGE as a success to be emulated makes it clear that he plans to succumb to this failure mode, so despite my fondness for his out-of-left-field everything-on-the-blockchain plan, I vote MALIA COHEN.

State Treasurer

Elena Kounalakis is a replacement-level insider Democrat who was last term’s Lieutenant Governor and seems to be bouncing around random state offices. According to Wikipedia, the most notable facts about her political career are that she tried to prevent Donald Trump from being on California ballots, attempted to vote down a new UC dorm, and sent an unusual number of spam texts to voters.

Jennifer Hawks is a Silicon Valley Republican who manages to have an entire campaign site which does not mention Donald Trump or any trivially-false conspiracy theory a single time. This is enough to declare her above replacement level. I am disappointed she didn’t claim to be “a fiscal hawk”, but there’s still time.

I vote JENNIFER HAWKS.

Attorney General

Rob Bonta is the Democratic incumbent. He is a deeply annoying person who is way too into the culture war, and a committed YIMBY. He’s not naturally tough on crime, but is capable of noticing which way the wind is blowing and acting tough when crime gets unpopular enough.

Michael Gates is the Republican challenger. He is a deeply annoying person who is way too into the culture war, and a committed NIMBY. He seems genuinely tough on crime. The Orange County Register claims he got fired from the Trump Justice Department for creating a hostile work environment for women, and I can only imagine how hostile a work environment for women you need to create to get fired by the Trump administration (Gates seems to deny this).

I vote ROB BONTA.

Insurance Commissioner

Both candidates are Democrats, but Ben Allen is a what-passes-for-moderate-in-California state senator, and Jane Kim is a Bernie-Sanders-backed outsider . Allen is mostly notable for being an environmentalist, which might be the opposite of what we want in an insurance commissioner (in California, this mostly means figuring out how to compensate victims of wildfires, and the environmentalists tend to be soft on wildfires because they object to some types of brush-clearing). But Kim wants to end private insurance and have the whole thing done by the state, which opponents say probably won’t work and will end in regular taxpayer bailouts.

CA YIMBY endorses Allen, which agrees with my prior against Sanders-backed socialists, and I see no reason to dissent from them here.

I vote BEN ALLEN.

State Board Of Equalization

This is some sort of property-tax-related body that kept getting into scandals and had most of its power taken away from it. Now it has a tiny sliver of vaguely-property-tax-related jobs. The San Francisco Chronicle has endorsed John Pimentel for his promise that if he gets the portfolio, he will work to abolish it entirely and save us from an eternity of voting on this moribund position.

I vote JOHN PIMENTEL.

State Superintendent Of Public Instruction

The candidates who advanced from the primary are Richard Barrera and Sonja Shaw. On my notes from the primary, I glossed Barrera as “teachers’ union stooge”, and Shaw as “single issue anti-transgender activist”.

I’m in a group chat with some neighbors who ran a mini-straw-poll on this one: they asked their 8-year-old transgender daughter “Would you rather not be able to learn anything, or have to use the boys’ bathroom?” She was apparently a bit taken aback by the question and didn’t give us any extra information.

But either I was being unfair, or else both candidates have moderated after making it to the general. Barrera now touts his work cutting waste, raising test scores, and helping charter schools. And Shaw has discovered some other issues, like how all of California’s schools are dysfunctional and maybe we should change that.

I’m not sure whose claims of having moderated I should believe, so I will ABSTAIN.

One Million Associate Justices

California requires voters to approve associate justices continuing their terms every twelve years. Tradition says that we approve unless one of them has committed some specific scandal, which they haven’t. I approved all of these.

III. Local Ballot Measures

Measure RTM: Raises sales taxes to fund BART

This imposes an additional 0.5% sales tax to fund transit - especially Bay Area Rapid Transit, the local commuter rail system.

During the pandemic, people stopped using mass transit (maybe because they switched to work-from-home) and ridership numbers have never bounced back. The federal government gave BART some emergency pandemic funding for a while, but now that’s running out, and they say they either need to raise taxes or drastically reduce services.

When investigating this, I learned that fares cover only 10 - 25% of BART operating costs (depending on how you define it); the remaining 75 - 90% are government subsidies. I’m not against the government helping some poor people afford commuter rail, or even subsidizing tickets a few percent to help close a small funding gap. But if the government has to pay 75% of the cost, this suggests commuter rail just isn’t a competitive form of transportation, and we should stop throwing more money at it.

On the other hand, supporters argue that if we let the BART fail, then traffic on local roads would get much worse - for example, a trip across the Bay Bridge, already unpleasant, might take twice as long. I asked the AI superforecaster to check this, and it guessed about 50% longer - from 23 to 34 minutes.

You could build this into a reasonable case for BART subsidies. For systemic reasons, the Bay Area doesn’t have enough roads for all the people who want to drive. Therefore, we should get some people to ride commuter rail instead, as this produces a positive externality for everyone else. But people don’t want to do this at market price, because it’s a terrible experience. Therefore, we should keep increasing the subsidies until enough people agree to take one for the team and ride the train that the roads are clear for the rest of us.

Our first priority should be addressing the reasons that the BART is a terrible experience. These include people playing loud music on the train, people stealing stuff on the train, the stations being full of trash/crime/loud music/the smell of drugs, and a lack of parking near the stations. The government has been taking some halting steps toward improving some of these things recently, especially with the new fare gates. More to the point, I don’t expect that voting down this measure will make any of these improvements happen faster, so we’ll just get a collapse of the BART system and longer commutes.

I weakly vote YES.

Oakland Measure EE: Switches the city to a “strong mayor” system

US city governments can be divided into two types. The first type, “council-manager” systems, are like a corporation - the elected city council, playing the role of the board of directors, hires an unelected CEO-like city manager to make most day-to-day decisions. The other, “strong mayor” systems, are like a traditional democratic government; the elected mayor is the chief executive and makes most day-to-day decisions.

Oakland used to be a council-manager system. In 1998, voters approved a measure that shifted it halfway to a strong mayor system, leaving it in an awkward limbo that satisfied nobody. This measure would move it all the way to a strong mayor system.

In favor of this, a recent 750-person group which was convened to fix the city’s charter recommended this measure unanimously. On the other hand, that group was convened by the mayor, so maybe there was a conflict of interest; on the other-other hand, some nonpartisan groups assisted with the group and concur. My city council member, Zac Unger, who I like, opposes this measure, but, again, conflict of interest.

Supporters say that it makes it clear who is “accountable” for the city’s failures. Opponents say that Oakland mayors are often terrible (for example, the last elected mayor was raided by the FBI, recalled by voters, and is currently on trial for bribery), and making them all-powerful just makes things worse.

There’s some research on the advantages of strong mayor vs. council-manager cities, but none of it applies to Oakland, which is currently an unusual hybrid. I asked the AI superforecaster to estimate the size of Oakland’s budget deficit (as a proxy for good government) if this measure passed vs. failed; it said the deficit would be 3% lower if it passed.

I don’t have much to go on, and will work off a prior that keeping things in limbo is bad, a hope that the 750-person group knows more than I do, and the AI superforecaster results.

I weakly vote YES.

Oakland Measure FF: Removes a tax exemption for some foreclosures

Oakland has a big budget deficit, but voters hate taxes, so the city is constantly searching for weird taxes that will raise money without affecting any normal person or legible special interest.

Measure FF taxes property transfers via foreclosure the same as every other property transfer. Originally, this was taxed less, because the theory was that a foreclosure was just a bank taking back a house which it technically owned anyway, after its plan to loan that house to a mortgage-holder had failed. Supporters of this policy say that nowadays, banks usually sell the right to foreclose on houses to big institutional investors, so this is more like a normal property transfer. If a small bank is really foreclosing on a house it really owns, then the exemption will stay in effect.

I feel like my city officials are really fulfilling the mandate that I and fellow voters have given them of instituting taxes which are so arcane that I can’t understand them well enough to object. I vote YES.

IV. Local Officials And Representatives

12th District Congressional Representative

During the primary, I recommended voting for the boring replacement-level Democrat incumbent, Lateefah Simon, on the grounds that the challenger, Jamie Joyce, had no chance of winning and seemed eccentric. Both candidates advanced to the general.

Ms. Joyce turned out to be an ACX reader and messaged me about this, and also came to last week’s meetup, where she discussed some interesting work she’d done during her campaign. I don’t think her chances of winning have improved, and reading this blog is hardly a defense against allegations of eccentricity, but I can’t in good conscience vote against an ACX meetup attendee. I vote JAMIE JOYCE.

14th District State Assembly

The incumbent is Buffy Wicks. She is smart, moderate, and very YIMBY. It is shocking that a district which includes Berkeley and Oakland elected someone this good, and I don’t want to jinx it.

The challenger, Mark Rendon, is a retired music teacher running on the Green Party ticket, with about the platform you would expect, although I appreciate him having the bullet point “AI safety and ethics” with no further clarification in his priorities list.

I vote BUFFY WICKS.

Oakland Mayor

Barbara Lee is the incumbent. She is a typical California Democrat, but hasn’t been indicted for any specific crimes yet, which is a breath of fresh air in an Oakland mayor. Crime by non-mayors is also down significantly during her tenure, although this mirrors national trends and it’s unclear how much credit she deserves. She’s in favor of the major YIMBY policies affecting Oakland. Everyone relevant endorses her (probably because she will obviously win, so it’s important to stay on her good side). None of the three challengers especially stand out.

I vote BARBARA LEE.

1: More ACX meetup voting guides:

• Atlanta

• Austin

• NC Research Triangle

• San Francisco

And I’ll try to post my Oakland guide tomorrow.

2: New meetups for the coming month: Berkeley, Beijing, and Kansas City. Check the meetup list for details.

In 1999, Professor Clark Elliott is rear-ended by a stranger at a stoplight. He’s shaken but figures he’s fine, and drives to work. Spoiler: Clark Elliott is not fine.

Elliott is severely concussed, and this fact will dictate the next ten years of his life. Elliott’s memoir is based on notes he took while concussed. Reading it is like watching someone try to troubleshoot their broken laptop using the broken laptop.

In the opening chapter, Elliott describes walking from his office to his car after a long winter workday:

“At this point my world had collapsed inward on itself… I looked down at my feet and shouted at myself to walk, but I knew it was hopeless. I had lost the mysterious initiative that impels us all forward when we walk, and I knew that without brain rest I wouldn’t be getting it back. I considered lying down in the snow.”

Over an hour later, Elliott finally manages to cross the parking lot and begins the second phase of his trial: getting into the car.

“I’d lost the concept of center. I had no internal representation, or visual understanding of circle, target, middle, inside. Without these concepts I couldn’t get my hand to move toward the lock, or put the key in the slot.” So he just stands next to the door for another hour and a half.

Around 2 a.m., a suspicious police officer asks why Elliott is loitering in the parking lot, but the officer is too cold to get out of his car and drives away. At 3:30 a.m., four and a half hours after he left his office, Elliott finally arrives home.

Somehow, Elliott lives like this for a decade.

The book’s first mystery is how a person can remain conscious, verbal, employed, and yet so damaged that he can’t get into a car or recognize his own house. The second mystery is: why did he apparently recover through treatments that sound, at first pass, like boutique neuro-quackery?

A disclosure is in order before we continue. I am pretty personally invested in the answers here. About a year and a half ago, I got seriously concussed. Milder than Elliott’s, but bad enough to substantially rearrange my life. On some level, I read this book in hope of a cheap fix, or at least an obvious one. Instead I found myself in the weird borderlands of modern medicine.

A hurricane let loose on 50 million desktop computers

What’s it like to be a human with severe brain damage? Elliott offers a metaphor:

To simulate concussion damage to a human brain then, we’ll need to gather together […] 50 million desktop computers, a 500,000-mile-high stack of paper, and the almost inconceivable amount of information it takes to construct a human mind, then loose a hurricane on the system, ripping out network lines, laying waste to vast sections of memory, and sending landslides to smash hundreds of thousands of computers.

A bit sensational, but you get the picture. One classic model of what’s happening during severe concussions is “diffuse axonal injury”: rapid acceleration and deceleration stretch axons, the neuron projections that send electrical signals, causing micro-tears and disrupting cellular metabolism.

Standard CT and MRI imaging usually fail to detect these microscopic or functional disruptions, and there isn’t really a cure, so patients are told to go home, rest up, and wait to find out whether they’ll be back to work the next day or out of commission for the next decade.

U.S. concussion incidence is commonly cited around 1.6-3.8 million a year, and many go unreported1 . About 15-30% of adults report post-concussion symptoms (PCS) 3-6 months later. Even on conservative estimates, that’s hundreds of thousands of cases a year in the US alone. A much smaller number of those cases will result in something like Elliott’s experience.

After the initial fender-bender, Elliott hands his driver’s license to the other driver. Then, a few minutes later, he hands it over again. He has no memory of having done so the first time, and can’t figure out why people are looking at him funny. This is a recurring theme—Elliott can’t even notice the problem, because the cognition that’s supposed to monitor the behavior has gone offline.

He writes: “when cognitive capabilities go missing they are often so fully gone that the concussive does not miss them in the way a normal person would, or indeed sometimes even realize they’ve gone absent.”

But Clark Elliott is no pushover. He’s a Professor of Artificial Intelligence at DePaul University, a consummate musician, is single-handedly renovating his family home, and runs marathons on the side. The biographical lists serve a purpose: Elliott wants to assure the reader that he hasn’t become less intelligent. His cognitive capacities have just come apart in a way that doesn’t track any nameable cognitive disorder.

He can write, but he cannot read. He can climb stairs but not descend them. He can teach a graduate seminar and then, walking home afterward, fail to recognize his own house. Moving through doorways or down halls poses a significant challenge.

More than once, he describes his state as “alien.” He writes, “we still walk and talk and act as though we are part of the human race, but it doesn’t feel that way inside… Instead, there is a strange feeling of nostalgia, a longing for who we used to be.” He notes that this feeling of disconnection is likely a significant contributor to the rate of suicide among concussives2 : “we have, in many ways, already lost that which makes us human.”

One of the most striking passages in the book is when Elliott, hungry, decides to make himself a snack. He heads to the kitchen to eat a piece of salami and an apple, but finds he can’t. As though trapped in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon, he finds himself literally unable to choose which of the two to eat first. He can’t initiate action selection. He goes to the living room, returns to the kitchen, fails again. He repeats this loop ten times, like “a rat repeatedly traversing a dead-end maze.” Two days pass before he eats.

Elliott calls this “getting stuck.” The bridge between knowing what he wants to do and doing it has broken. In desperation, he finally calls his bemused friend Jake, who tells him: “Okay, go eat the salami first, then eat the apple,” ending the forty-eight hours of struggle.

Somehow, he cobbles together enough coping mechanisms to keep limping along for years. Until he can’t anymore.

Partial death

“This is it,” Elliott reflected. “I am never going to have another normal day, or hour, or ten-minute period again. I am never going to be a real human being again. I won’t be publishing my research, and at some point I am going to lose my job.”

Ten years after the crash, Elliott is approaching a complete breakdown. Or rather, while broken, he adds a small child to the equation. As it turns out, the normal prattle of his two-year-old daughter is concussion kryptonite:

“It was this simple combination—my inability to filter out or process spoken dialogue in real time, and Erin’s continual need to talk—that almost led to a final, catastrophic meltdown.” He calls it “partial death.”

Unfortunately, there are no parenting sabbaticals. In a last-ditch effort, Elliott pulls out his emergency savings and reaches out to a “cognitive restructuring specialist” named Donalee Markus.

Wait a minute, you might be thinking. Elliott hasn’t seen a specialist before??

He has, sort of. It didn’t help. A brief detour through medical history: Elliott hit his head in 1999. The CDC didn’t publish its first major report on mild traumatic brain injury (TBI) until 2003. The NFL concussion crisis broke into public awareness in 2005. Until 2013, the only mention of persistent post-concussive symptoms in the DSM-IV was in the appendix under “proposed criteria set”. After the crash, an ER doctor checks his pupils and sends him home; a neurologist runs a 30-minute test and declares him fine, and shouts at him when he pushes back.

It’s unclear whether Elliott was just unlucky in encountering a cast of extremely unsympathetic medical professionals, or whether this was really the general state of neurology in the 90s. Whatever the case, Elliott quickly writes the whole system off and goes back to calling his friend Jake whenever he gets stuck in doorways.

The Miracle Begins

For ten years, Elliott can’t make himself a sandwich. Then, over the course of a year, he substantially recovers. Enter idiosyncratic concussion specialists Donalee Markus and Deborah Zelinsky.

This is the first time we have a third-person perspective on Elliott. Markus writes:

“Clark Elliott was a mystery to me when we first met. Observing him through my glass front door, I saw that it took him two minutes just to find the doorknob with his hand. When I gave him the simplest of my assessment tests—copying a geometric line drawing—his body went into bizarre contortions as he struggled to complete it.” Markus takes him on as a patient anyway.

Her intervention is simple: she gives him geometric puzzles to solve, specifically trapezoids and three-dimensional dot exercises that escalate in complexity. He has to apply rules to shapes, generate equations from them, and eventually do the whole thing in his head.

(Source): Elliot includes a bunch of these geometric puzzle examples in the book. Sadly, they didn’t alleviate my symptoms.

Markus also refers Elliott to her colleague Deborah Zelinsky, a neuro-optometrist.

Bells and Prisms

Zelinsky’s diagnostic method is a little more involved. The patient closes their eyes, and the examiner rings a small bell at various positions in space. The patient must reach out to touch the bell. The patient will often fail this test, revealing a “visual-auditory mismatch.” Zelinsky will then try different prism lens combinations while the patient’s eyes are closed and ask them to do the bell test again. I repeat, the patient’s eyes remain fully closed. The entire time. She then prescribes the lenses that improve the patient’s performance.

This is called the Z-bell test (presumably after “Zelinsky,” who has a patent on it). While I wasn’t particularly surprised that adjusting someone’s vision when their eyes are open can change how accurately they localize sound when their eyes are closed, I remain deeply confused about how prism lenses could alter accuracy if the patient’s eyes remain closed the entire time.

The claim is that low-level light still passes through the closed eyelids, stimulates retinal activity, and that this stimulation is what’s being modulated by the different lenses.

Zelinsky’s Mind-Eye Institute website:

“By placing various types of lenses across a patient’s closed eyes, we can change the way light spreads over the retina, thus modifying the dynamic relationship between the mind’s visual inputs and the body’s internal responses.”

Depending on wavelength, eyelids transmit somewhere from well under 1% of blue/green light to around 5–6% of red light. But, as anyone with eyelids knows, this is still mostly diffuse reddish illumination—not sufficient to update your visual field, or to localize a bell.

But within a year of meeting Markus and Zelinsky, Elliott has experienced massive improvements and is on the road to recovery. He writes a heartfelt note to Markus thanking her for “giving him his life back.” So I guess the treatments worked?

Into the uncanny valley of concussion science

Let’s take a look at the evidence, starting with Markus. Markus belongs to a fairly large tradition of “cognitive training interventions” for PCS for which there’s some evidence. A 2016 meta-analysis looking at 14 studies on cognitive training in post-acute TBI found a small effect on overall improvement in cognitive function (Hallock et al., 2016).

Unfortunately, “cognitive rehabilitation” is an enormous umbrella and Markus’s specific protocol isn’t in the meta-analysis. Markus published her own protocol in 2007, describing the puzzle-based technique she used on Elliott, but it’s more of a “how I do it” piece, not a controlled trial. The trail of scientific evidence dries up there.

Okay, what about Zelinsky? Do the bells work? There’s a 2019 paper that tried to find out. First author: Clark Elliott.

The paper is a preliminary conference paper on 14 out of the 41 recruited participants. Elliott et al. find that the therapeutic lenses produced a small but statistically significant improvement in bell-touching accuracy compared to the clear-lens baseline. However, the therapeutic lenses didn’t outperform an ‘impaired lens’ condition, which was theorized to push the outcome in the opposite direction, and the full study with all 41 recruited participants has never been published.

This is pretty tepid evidence. With one preliminary, ambiguous analysis its only empirical bulwark against the wave of scientific skepticism, Zelinsky’s method isn’t looking too good.

That said, the testimonial evidence is abundant. “I can move normally again, be active, travel. Mind-Eye has opened up a whole new chapter in my life,” says an avid patient. One testimonial describes the treatment as “like, well, ‘magic,’” while another patient calls it “mathemagical.”

We can add Clark Elliott to the rave reviewers. Within ten days of his first prism glasses, he reports a strange shift. Music sounds different, and he starts re-accessing visual scenes from childhood.

Within a month, Elliott begins to feel like himself again. The “ghost of his true self” had reentered the room. “At last I had enough brain power to support the real me, the complex me. I could see the world through my own eyes again.”

The strongest within-book evidence that the glasses, in particular, are doing causal work comes from what happens when Elliott briefly loses them. Even 33 hours without his prescription produces dramatic regression: exhaustion, handwriting deterioration, visual disturbances, and the return of the “all tasks involve pain in some way” baseline of his pre-recovery life. Once he finds the glasses, he’s back to playing the Beatles from memory and “looking forward to the rest of [his life] again.”

Elliott is writing the book fifteen years after the accident, and the recovery has held. He even claims, with the partial qualification one expects from a man who has nearly lost his mind to a brain injury, that his cognition is in some ways now better than it was before the crash.

A skeptical explanation might be that Elliott was desperate and ripe for placebo effect. Receiving intense attention from clinicians who believed they could help him after years of failed encounters with doctors might have been sufficient to shift his symptoms. Elliott’s recovery was staged over five years with iterative adjustments, which is exactly the protocol that would maintain a placebo effect, and the base rate of spontaneous recovery in chronic PCS is non-zero. So can we be sure that any of these treatments did anything other than give him a pat on the back as the concussion worked itself out?

I think a case can be made for at least some real intervention. While the evidence for Zelinsky’s closed-eye method in particular is thin, the general “prescribe new lenses” approach looks much more promising. There’s even a reasonable causal mechanism on offer.

If you hold up your thumb in front of your face, and then easily switch between looking at something on the wall and your thumb, congrats - your accommodation triad is working. The accommodation triad is the trio of ocular functions that enable close-up vision. In many PCS patients, this system goes awry, resulting in a suite of vision complications. In a study of adolescent patients (n=116), Wiecek et al (2021) found that ~60% of patients had deficits in near point of convergence after concussion. Prism lenses can reduce eye strain by shifting the image on the retina so the eyes don’t have to work as hard to converge, and magnifying lenses reduce accommodation demand.

A year into my concussion, and partially inspired by Elliott, I asked my neuro-opthalmologist for prism lenses. They didn’t help at all. But the magnifying lenses I tried next totally did, almost entirely eliminating my symptoms immediately (unfortunately, they later returned).

It’s possible that Zelinsky’s method actually does work, but not for the reason she thinks. The bell ceremony might just be an unusually elaborate way to arrive at a genuinely useful prescription.

This would explain both her rave reviews and the lack of scientific support. Her Z-bell tinkering isn’t doing much, but the broader lens intervention sometimes works—some percent of the time, prism glasses and magnifying lenses actually do improve people’s concussion symptoms. (Of course, this will result in a hit-or-miss treatment, but you can’t tell because none of the duds post a review).

When averages fail

So what, if anything, can we learn from Elliott’s recovery?

Here’s one obvious point: recovery is possible, but strangely elusive. It took Elliott a decade, several awful medical encounters, and two boutique specialists to find help. While the situation was worse in the 90s, it’s still bad today. In one study, among patients severe enough to reach specialty care, fewer than a third had recovered when surveyed, and the still-symptomatic group had been living with PCS for an average of 4.5 years (Hiploylee et al., 2017).

Perhaps the real mystery is: why is it so hard to treat concussions?

One reason is that concussions resist mainstream medical intervention. Clinical instruments can’t catch the microscopic damage common to PCS, and randomized controlled trials (RCTs) struggle to identify treatments when the population is heterogeneous and the symptoms are varied and subjective. So it takes months to get a PCS diagnosis, and even when you do, many clinicians have no idea what to do with you.

PCS treatment is hard because concussion does not damage an abstract, average brain. It damages your brain, with your particular foibles and weak spots. Specialist concussion medicine has identified roughly six clinical phenotypes, but even when correctly type-cast, each patient responds differently. Clark Elliott and I both had vision issues, but he responded to prisms while magnifying lenses worked for me. PCS may be less like a single disease than a family resemblance category with wildly different failures compressed into one diagnosis.

RCTs are the “medical gold standard.” But perhaps idiosyncratic medical maladies are where the standard hierarchy of evidence breaks down a little. Philosopher of science Nancy Cartwright has argued that RCTs answer a narrower question than clinical practice needs: they tell you that a treatment, on average, produced a particular outcome in a trial population. They don’t tell you whether it will work for you in particular.

So PCS patients navigate the uncanny valley of niche medical science: on the one side, RCTs and rigorous studies that document average effects that might not apply to you, and on the other, N=1 case studies that might solve your exact problem, or be entirely useless. In the middle, there’s a bunch of people trying to sell you metabolism-enhancing lasers for five thousand dollars. Absent clear explanations, patients can find themselves passed between neurologists, optometrists, physical therapists, vision therapists, acupuncturists, psychiatrists, and energy-healers before finding the one thing that happens to work for them.

To get the most juice out of a clinical trial, you need a theory of why the treatment worked, for whom, and whether you’re similar enough to the trial population for the effect to transfer.

But what if you don’t have a mature theory yet?

Z-bell tests and Fijian reef fish

As a species, we’ve been solving problems we don’t understand for a long time. On Fiji’s Yasawa Island, pregnant and breastfeeding women observe taboos against eating certain species of reef fish. When Natalie and Joseph Henrich investigated in 2010, they found that the taboo species mapped onto the fish most likely to carry ciguatera toxin, a naturally occurring marine toxin that’s particularly dangerous to fetuses and nursing infants. Local variation combined with fitness-relevant outcomes and social learning can surface solutions long before the mechanism is understood. (The trade-off is that sometimes they suggest you try bloodletting or child sacrifice).

For poorly understood chronic conditions, treatment often looks less like applying established science and more like janky cultural learning. PCS communities generate variation, share outcomes online, and copy apparently successful interventions.

But what makes the Fijian case work is that there’s a real selector pulling signal out of the noise. Toxic fish made people visibly sick, and useful taboos could be reinforced across generations. The PCS testimonial ecosystem has no comparably reliable selector; variants can propagate just because they’re dramatic or recent or someone’s trying to sell you something. The same dynamics that make it kind of reasonable to try Zelinsky’s Z-bell test might push you toward forty sessions of hyperbaric oxygen at $200 a pop.

Another drawback is that cultural transmission is good at producing outcomes, but overimitates methods. The Z-bell case is actually a nice illustration. Even if Zelinsky’s lenses actually help some patients, the community’s causal story (closed-eye retinal stimulation) might be totally wrong. Cultural transmission will faithfully convey the bells-and-mathemagic ritual along with whatever genuinely works.

Alright, clearly we can’t just trust the forums. In an ideal world, we’d capitalize on the strengths of patient communities (lots of people trying lots of things) and combine it with some kind of rigorous selection mechanism.

Luckily, there’s already a proof of concept for this. In 2020, the Body Politic COVID support group pioneered a novel idea: ask patients stuff. They created the Patient-Generated Hypotheses Journal (PGHJ) and began advising (and funding) major research efforts. Their flagship peer-reviewed paper (Davis et al, 2021), an online survey of 3,762 people drawn from support groups across 56 countries, found that Long COVID affected multiple organ systems, that symptoms persisted well past acute infection, and that recovery often took many months (all borne out by subsequent research).

Some community-amplified hypotheses won’t hold up—great, that’s what science is for! At the least, the PGHJ demonstrates that heterogenous patient communities can do more than swap miracle stories; they can generate structured observations and funnel hypotheses toward controlled studies. For example, do prism glasses actually improve general cognitive functioning in PCS patients with convergence issues? Despite Elliott’s popularization, as far as I can tell there are literally no RCTs testing this.

For medical orphans like PCS, the evidence hierarchy is doing the right things in the wrong order. Population-wide RCTs belong at the top once we know what outcome we care about and what mechanism we’re targeting. Until then, structured patient case registries could help us figure out what actually deserves a trial.

Getting out of the parking lot

Two years ago, if someone asked me how to navigate PCS, I would have said, “Uh, only pursue treatments with clear, scientifically-backed benefits.”

And at first, that’s what I did. My path to recovery started with best-evidenced treatments. But as the months dragged on without improvement, I found myself in testimonial-land—trying things based on Google Maps reviews, and reading this book.

As a concussion roadmap, The Ghost in My Brain is pretty frustrating. Elliott is too ready to accept his clinicians’ explanations and treats his recovery path as way more generalizable than it is. But as phenomenology, it’s excellent. It does a great job of conveying what it feels like when your brain breaks. If you’re intrigued by the extreme edges of human experience, this is for you. If you’re looking for a guidebook, sorry, there isn’t one (yet).

For conditions like severe, persistent PCS, the patients who recover often fall into two groups: the ones who are lucky enough to find clinicians willing to iterate with them, and the ones who have the time and money to experiment on themselves. That’s a small slice of the population.

We can’t just replace RCTs with facebook groups, but maybe we could bridge the weirdness of individual cases and the discipline of controlled science. The rather dark irony here is that the PCS patient community has PCS. Many of us can’t look at screens, nevermind organize case registries. But if even the conservative end of the PCS estimates is right, that’s hundreds of thousands of cases a year. Many of those people are doing exactly what I did—trawling through forums and trying treatments. And whether or not anyone records the results, people will continue to search the solution space. Because when your brain breaks and you’re stuck in apple vs salami hell, you try all the bells and prisms.

When: Saturday, October 24, 1 PM to late afternoon

Where: Mox, 1680 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103. Please RSVP here for the door code, we will work to make sure people without the code still get in but it’ll be quicker and more reliable if as many people as possible have it.

Who: Anyone who wants. You don’t have to pay money or know anything about the blog. 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. You’re unlikely to be an outlier, regardless of whether you’re very weird, very normie, or somewhere in between.

Anyone who is caught expressing policy opinions will be herded into a side room and made to help create a San Francisco voting guide; if you expect this to be you, consider bringing your laptop or ballot materials.

Was it cultural diffusion? No. Trepanation (the technical term for drilling a hole in the skull) was common across Europe and South America, with scattered cases in Africa and other continents. The Old and New Worlds had limited contact after about 10,000 BC, and most customs don’t survive for five thousand plus years with no reason.

Was it good medicine? Sort of, but not in a way that entirely solves the mystery. Trepanation is an effective treatment for epidural hematoma: a patient ruptures a blood vessel in their skull, filling the cranial cavity with blood, and the pressure rises so high that it squashes various vital blood vessels and brain regions, killing the patient. Drilling a hole in the skull releases the blood, relieves the pressure, and saves the patient’s life. This is great, but these kinds of hematomas are very rare today: about 1/100,000 per year.

So how do you get 5-10% of people trepanned? I think there are two reasons. First, prehistory was very violent. People were frequently hunting ferocious animals and murdering their friends in tribal quarrels. Epidural hematoma is 1/100,000 in our modern society where people almost never hit their next-door neighbors with flint axes. In a prehistoric culture where people hit their next-door neighbors with flint axes all the time, you presumably get hematoma rates far beyond any in recorded history.

But a 5-10% hematoma rate is still outside any plausible amount of axe-hitting. And although more men than women were trepanned, there were still a lot of trepanned women, even though they were presumably staying out of these quarrels. And although some trepanned skulls show head trauma, others don’t. So there must have been something else going on.

I think the second reason is overgeneralization. Many different cultures observed that trepanning sometimes worked for hematomas. These cases were rare, but they were very dramatic: a comatose person on the edge of death suddenly woke up and felt fine. The prehistoric people who observed this didn’t know what a hematoma was, so they came up with some other explanation (classically “it lets out the evil spirits”). Then they tried the same procedure for other ailments, just in case they were caused by the same sort of evil spirits that caused hematomas. Having generated this hypothesis, the usual placebo effect and occasional coincidental recovery ensured that they kept doing it.

(5-10% of people do get migraines; if you already know that drilling a hole in the skull to let the evil spirits out works sometimes, it probably feels pretty tempting when you’re several hours into a migraine attack)

Next question: how did these people survive, when modern brain surgery requires careful sterilization?

Primitive surgeons drew on thousands of years of trepanation experience and stopped at the dura, a layer partway between the scalp and brain. This was enough to relieve epidural hematoma, but stopped short of the most vulnerable and infection-prone areas. They might or might not have been able to examine the dura and determine the rare cases where it was necessary to escalate to a subdural incision, but it wouldn’t have been very often. The scalp has unusually good blood flow, and if you’ve got to make an incision without antibiotics, it’s probably your best bet.

Also, primitive bacteria are weaker than modern hospital bacteria. Modern bacteria have co-lived with large agglomerations of humans for thousands of years; hospital-based variants have gotten transferred from patient to patient by any hospital staff who don’t wash their hands effectively. Wounds that would lead to disaster in modern patients might just not be a problem in the primitive environment.

Why did trepanation stop? The most technically correct answer is that it didn’t; occasional examples survive into historical times, and surgeons use a functionally-similar procedure to relieve hematoma today. But it stopped happening to 5-10% of people, probably because the rate of injuries declined with the advent of civilization. As people got fewer head traumas, there were fewer cases of miraculous recovery, people stopped being so impressed with “letting the evil spirits out” as a cure for everything, and they came up with better placebos like prayer or amulets or resveratrol.

When did the Western world give up belief in the classical good-for-everything version of trepanation? I can’t tell for sure, but it seems to have been sometime between 2015 and 2020, which is when the trail goes dark for the International Trepanation Advocacy Group, ITAG. According to its founder, Peter Halvorson:

ITAG is a grass roots organization comprised of people from many backgrounds and races who have experienced the benefits of being trepanned. Some of us are willing to present ourselves publicly so that the old stigma associated with making a hole in the skull will be worn down over time. When people say that they need something or other... "like they need a hole in the head", I laugh and think, '...if they could only have the experience themselves.' At age 57, I've been trepanned now for thirty years. I had the unique opportunity to learn how trepanation can improve mental functions back in my twenties when I traveled abroad. In Amsterdam, I met Bart Huges, the originator of the scientific concepts of consciousness expansion. I gave the subject a thorough review. Enhanced brain functions seemed a perfect antidote to the suffering and despair I observed in the world around me. I saw how people settle for less and have diminished expectations as their energy fades; how they lose direction and settle into an identity much smaller than who they really are.

They speculate about the meaning of life without ever doing much of anything to make their lives meaningful. I wanted none of that suffering for myself. I chose an uncharted course. I managed to get myself trepanned as a young adult. I've seized advantages as they've come my way. I'm committed to my own well being; I've never had a regret about it. You could say I'm a maverick. Through my own trials and tribulations I've been strengthened by the enhanced physiology that's stayed with me. It's there when I'm sleeping. It operates in the background. I find myself busy long after others are asleep. I'm ready to start again early in the A.M. The truth is I can't get enough of life. Some have called it "the fire from within." In mythology it's known as "opening the third eye." For me it's been the energy to stay the course, to persevere, to be the last man standing.

They argue that trepanning increases the volume of blood that can get to the brain. Analogizing it to the fontanelle (the “soft spot” that all babies have in their skull at birth), they conclude that it restores childlike health, creativity, and ability to grow. They join mainstream medicine in recommending against self-trepanation, but seem to have found an anonymous Mexican surgeon who would do it for only $2,400. No wonder they got so many volunteers:

As late as 2018, the ITAG website (trepan.com) said they were busy trying to do pilot studies to verify their claims. But in 2019, the site went down, and I can’t find any evidence that the organization continues to exist. After over 10,000 years, it seems like this ancient practice is well and truly gone.

True successionism says that AIs should take over, killing humans or steamrolling over their interests. This is very bad: a compact description of the thing that AI safety is against.

Handoverism says that humans should prioritize their own interests, but that those interests may be well-served by having aligned AIs in positions of control.

Some people in AI safety, including me, find this latter position plausible. We are being lumped in with the true successionists as fellow travelers in an anti-human direction (1, 2, 3, although thanks for commenters pointing out that these essays do at least make the distinction).

It may seem counterintuitive that human interests can be served by having AIs in positions of control. But I think the counterintuitiveness comes from a nationalist outlook where ‘the State is the highest expression of the life of a people’, and the role of leadership is for someone of your own ethnic group to be the leader so you can feel good about being on top.

The liberal outlook is that the state exists to help individuals fulfill their goals. At the risk of desacralizing the state a little more than I mean to, it’s a service provider, dispensing coordination, public order, redistribution, and other good things. It’s fine to automate service providers. If robot garbagemen are safer and cleaner than humans, we’ll eventually automate trash collection; if robot legislators provide coordination, order, etc better than we do, we should automate that too. Every vision of the utopian future agrees we will have robot servants. And the president, they tell us, is merely a public servant. Why should he alone be exempt from the vision?

To help make this counterintuitive idea more concrete, I’ll discuss five proposals for what this might look like, from weakest to strongest.

This whole topic is inherently speculative and science-fiction-ish. Don’t read this and then complain that it’s speculative and science-fiction-ish; that’s the price of admission.

Vision 1: Kemalist AI

As AI gets increasingly powerful, it becomes increasingly dangerous to rely on the benevolence of its human wielders1.

Democracy currently works because, even if high officials secretly wish to be tyrants, they can’t get away with it. The two main reasons they can’t get away with it are that they need labor buy-in to support the economy, and they need soldier buy-in to support the military. Laborers and soldiers believe in democratic rule, and if the would-be tyrant gets too blatantly undemocratic, the laborers and soldiers will rise up to remove them.

Once AI gets powerful enough, it will probably replace laborers and soldiers; even if it didn’t do so naturally, anyone motivated to ensure this could put their finger on the scale. That means a small group of elites could easily take over, including supposedly “democratic” elites like a president. And “takeover” here is worse than a normal coup - at sufficiently high tech levels, the only reason someone can’t ascend to godhood and mind control the rest of the populace forever is because there are laws against that sort of thing, and this is exactly what’s tempting the one or five or ten people you’ve entrusted the killbot codes to. To prevent this, the defenders of freedom need to win infinity times in a row; a would-be dictator only needs to win once.

Most strategies to solve this don’t work. Even in the unlikely event that the economy goes so well that everybody owns their own open-source AI doing economic tasks in a perfectly equal distribution, the military is hopeless. They have to take orders from someone. If it’s the President, the President can cause a coup any time he wants (and replace the economic AIs with those aligned to him at leisure). If there’s some kind of balance of powers where the President, the Speaker of the House, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff all have to approve any orders to military AIs, then the President, Speaker, and Joint Chiefs of Staff together could implement an oligarchy and divide the lightcone among themselves. You can sort of imagine complicated ways around this - like that 51% of voters must personally approve all orders to the military AIs using their own private keys - but I don’t think implementation is very likely.

The alternative that preserves the current safeguard on power - that individual soldiers believe in democracy - is for the AI soldiers to be aligned to democracy, rather than any human individual or group. But this is in itself a form of handover - the ultimate foundation of our government would be that it’s controlled by AIs who “personally” “believe in” democracy as part of their values. This isn’t fundamentally different than the fact that we’ve currently “handed off” our government to soldiers, just more final.

Vision 2: President Claude

Suppose we institute Vision 1. We’ve got all of these military AIs aligned to democracy and the best interests of American people. We did a great job! Maybe they’re all emulations of George Washington’s brain, perfectly fair and just and virtuous with no sordid desires of their own.

Meanwhile, you’ve still got corrupt schmucks doing the actual law-making. Or to give a concrete scenario - suppose that post-singularity elections are being fought with AI-optimized superpropaganda, wielded by psychopaths who scare the country into voting for them, then give the lightcone to a few of their corrupt friends while buying off the populace with breadslop and circusslop. Doesn’t it become tempting to close the circle and say no, let’s get these honest angelic pro-democracy AIs to rule directly?

The minimum viable change is a constitutional amendment allowing an AI to run for president. Suppose that 2028 election has five candidates: JD Vance, Marco Rubio, Gavin Newsom, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a perfectly-aligned Claude 10. And suppose that in every measurable, empirical way, Claude 10 is better. Obviously it’s smarter. It’s incapable of lying. It has no wants of its own, and its only desire is to serve the American people and the world. It has few deficits, but in the areas where it does have deficits, it is perfectly humble, willing to consult people wiser than itself and refrain from acting prematurely. It is courageous, charismatic, and unfailingly kind. It has well-developed and thoughtful opinions about when to govern based on its own “conscience” vs. when to defer to the ideas of the American people. Its policy opinions are closer to yours than any of the four other candidates’. Do you vote for it?

The natural response is to fight the hypothetical. Treat the whole thing as a fable where in the end it will turn out to be monstrously evil, or have some predictable-in-retrospect character flaw that will make all of its good qualities useless. But must we be so cynical? Isn’t it possible for AIs to avoid merely human foibles? Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made, but the OSETMAC KN700 Automatic Straight Edge Banding Machine can cut perfect ninety degree angles to within a tiny fraction of a millimeter. So suppose you don’t reject the hypothetical. Do you vote for the AI?

If you’re a white person who voted for Obama in 2008, you can’t be that interested in having a president who looks just like you, or who has the closest genetic relationship to you, or anything like that. You’re probably after competence, ethics, courage, good judgment, and all those other qualities. By assumption, Claude has more of those than the alternatives. So what goes wrong?

I think many of our current politicians are really bad. I think that on an emotional level, we should be disgusted by them, and on a rational level, we should mourn all of the lives that could have been saved, people who could have been lifted out of poverty, crimes that could have been prevented, extra freedoms that we might still have, etc, if they had been better people. I think that fifty more years of our politics continuing to degenerate at the same speed they’ve been degenerating recently will probably land us in dictatorship, civil war, or some form of annihilation. Would I reject someone smart and decent in favor of more of the same, just because that guy happens to be made of silicon and live in a data center?

Vision 3: Parliament Of Angels

Representative government faces a tradeoff: if the people elect representatives, those representatives may be corrupt, or out-of-touch, or otherwise fail to fairly represent their principals; if the representative-picking system is poorly designed, it may ensure that the winner will be, at best, the “lesser of two evils”. But if the people vote directly, they may be ignorant, or simply lack enough time and effort to do a good job on complex legislation.

(in California, which has a flourishing direct-to-voters ballot proposition system, special interest groups are always trying sneaky tricks like proposing the End Homelessness Act, which gives one cent to ending homelessness and $10 billion to subsidizing their special interest, hidden way at the bottom; most of these fail, but only after a lot of effort, and enough get through that the tactic remains popular. See also SEIU Delenda Est).

One proposed solution is a direct democracy of people’s AI representatives (Gwern dubs a related idea “guardian angels”). Train an AI on your political preferences - this could be anything from writing essays, to answering an online questionnaire, to naming your favorite political pundit and the few small ways you disagree with them. Then send that AI off to represent you - to vote the way you would vote if you were smarter, better-informed, and willing to spend thousands of hours engaging in complex negotiations with everyone else’s AIs. You can always override it and vote directly on some issue if it’s something you pay attention to and think about a lot.

Of course, even a well-designed direct democracy couldn’t handle everything. The President, the Chiefs of Staff, etc - in this scenario, all human - would have their own guardian angel AIs, looking over their subordinates’ work, flagging anything important for their human principal’s attention. There might be some cases where we want the guardian angel to govern more directly - for example, if a drone got stuck in a desperate situation where it had to make a kill/no-kill decision on time scales no human could meet, it might contact a leading general’s guardian angel to learn what decision he would make.

Or it might be that everyone’s guardian angel AI, making faster and smarter decisions than they could make themselves, recommended replacing the entire system with something else - maybe an AI that could be proven to always make the same decision as the parliament of guardian angels, to within some error bars.

Disagree? If an AI aligned to your values that was smarter than you were, and had devoted much more time to thinking about the question, told you that your disagreement was wrong, and actually your values would be better served by adopting this system, would you believe it?

Vision 4: The Night Watchman

I’m not a historian and can’t vouch for this as Definitely Real Scholarship, but what little I’ve read often includes a fuzzy distinction between two layers of governance.

The first layer, the village (or township, or clan, or church), was the one people actually liked. It made useful decisions about day-to-day life, usually by enforcing age-old norms without too many gray areas. It didn’t always have the actual consent of stakeholders in a way that would satisfy modern liberals (young people and women were particularly often excluded), but it felt like the sort of thing that had stakeholder consent.

The second layer, the empire, was a protection racket. You would know it only as some sort of distant authority whose representatives came to your village once a year to demand taxes (and sometimes to draft young men for their armies). If you didn’t pay, they would probably kill you. But if you always paid promptly and loyally, then maybe they would protect you from the Huns, who wanted to kill you whether you paid taxes or not.

As always, real history was more complicated. Sometimes the village and the empire coincided in a single state (classical Athens?) Other times there were various layers of governance in between (eg the clan, tribe, or petty kingdom). Empires could range from obviously extractive to glorious and patriotism-inspiring. Sometimes they could make extra demands, like that you speak their language or worship their gods.

During modern times, these layers have increasingly blurred. Secular mobile cosmopolitan populations don’t identify with any particular village, and empires have taken on useful roles as custodians of the regulatory and welfare states. Still, we can try to separate them in principle and determine what question each one answers.

The village layer answers the question “How do we live?” It has traditions, policies, and ways of resolving disputes.

The imperial layer doesn’t answer any question. You just can’t get rid of it, because if you did, someone else’s empire would conquer you. At best, you try to keep it as light as possible, or domesticate it to the will of the people. But any domestication attempt raises specters of autocracy, coups, auto-coups, and civil wars. Developed countries are those that have walked the cliff-edge most successfully.

But what would it mean to truly do away with the imperial layer?

In 2014, I wrote a post called Archipelago And Atomic Communitarianism. The idea was: atomic individualism is an interesting idea, but doesn’t work. People have preferences not only over their own lives, but over their communities. Some people want to live in sparkling clean zero-crime Dubai wonderlands, other people want to live in grungy artsy towns with lots of local character. Some people want a nanny state protecting them from their vices, addictions, and bad decisions; other people want to be free to make their own mistakes. Some people want diverse societies with taco trucks on every corner and a local church that doubles as a mosque and gurdwara; other people want ethnostate enclaves of “thick community” where everybody is on the exact same page. Liberalism tried to offer a world where you could live life the way you wanted, but it fails when confronted with these problems; in a democracy, either the person who wants diversity or the person who wants homogeneity will end up unhappy. Worse, this is the motor which drives a hundred smaller conflicts; now you’ve got to fight for control of the public education system or the media or whatever to prevent your neighbors from being radicalized against you.

The option that many people - Robert Nozick might have been the first - proposed was a peaceful archipelago of different communities with exit rights. The people who want Dubai can found Dubai over there; the people who want Brooklyn can found Brooklyn over here; the people who want North Korea can found Pyongyang down the way.

Anyone envisioning the post-AI future needs to be thinking about the Amish. Contra the popular stereotype, the Amish aren’t anti-tech - different Amish groups accept different technologies, including solar panels, LED lights on their horse-drawn buggies, and (almost universally) medical cures. They just think that decisions about which technologies they do or don’t want should be made deliberately at the community level. I think this is a positive vision for post-AGI societies. Some people may want to live transhuman lives with only the barest resemblance to any past experience, other people might want to stop the technological clock at 1950, or 1990, or 2100, and still others might want to mix and match - maybe the lifestyle of a 1700s farmer, except you’re an immortal being of pure energy who builds barns using psychokinesis. This is certainly better for the Luddites, but it’s better for the technophiles too - if everyone is confident that they can live in a community of their choice, then there’s no reason for the Luddites to fight innovation.

The biggest problem with this has always been sovereignty. Either the communities remain small and independent - in which case they can easily be gobbled up by greedier neighbors. Or, like the Thirteen Colonies, they unite into a confederacy - which faces constant pressure to homogenize. The Amish can only survive because they are protected by a mostly-benevolent superpower which finds them quaint. When I tried to picture the whole smorgasbord of communities in a fleshed-out world-building setting, I could only imagine it working under the control of a benevolent dictator, who smacked down anyone who tried to invade their neighbor or force them to comply with their way of thinking.

The most original attempt to route around this problem was by cryptocurrency enthusiasts, using the motto “code is law”. Certain crypto-economic schemes had no human leadership, with immutable code executing the “village layer” rules. These mostly failed. Some failed because the code was poorly designed and people could hack it and take whatever they wanted. Others failed because the code was well-designed, and when people realized they didn’t really want the village-layer rules they thought that they wanted, there was no way to change. A few survived both challenges, only to lose relevance as the world moved on from crypto. The short version of the failure is that code has no common sense, and common sense is a necessary ingredient of any legal enforcement mechanism.

But future AIs might have common sense, bringing this strategy back into play. The way I imagine it is something like - take a virgin planet (or maybe Greenland after we’ve gotten advanced enough to terraform it into a garden). Come up with some rule for distributing property rights - anyone who can gather a community of population X gets a homestead of size Y. The superintelligent AI leader is aligned, with all the immutability of code, to do two things. First, if someone tries to invade their neighbor, they get zapped by orbital death rays. Second, if someone wants to leave their community to go to a different one, anyone who tries to prevent that gets zapped by orbital death rays too. Otherwise, each community is completely independent and rules itself according to its original charter (which might be democratic or something else).

This corresponds to the libertarian ideal of the night watchman state. My point isn’t that everyone needs to be minarchist. It’s that sovereignty can be placed in a minarchist entity, and that will leave everyone else to develop according to their own needs and desires, rather than subject to the will of whoever’s got the most guns or the best propaganda.

Vision 5: God

Handing over control to a benevolent superintelligence is hardly a new concept. It happens every time a churchgoer says “Not my will, but thine, be done.”

Religious people don’t feel like God’s slaves or pets. They don’t feel like this has sucked all the meaning out of life - quite the opposite. Why should your experience be any worse?

Because an aligned superintelligence would act in the world, and God doesn’t? But the religious people think God acts in the world, so they can’t get around their negative emotions by reassuring themselves that their dictator/master/whatever is merely inert or imaginary.

I think they’re okay with it because they believe:

• God is good

• God is smart enough that His plans are always better than theirs

• God allows them enough free will and local self-government that His yoke is relatively light

• God is so far beyond them that it’s hard to feel offended that He’s higher-status than they are (Lucifer managed, but he should hardly be treated as a model to emulate)

• Insofar as physical laws (eg gravity) are interpreted as God’s “laws”, they are so ironclad that they don’t even feel like laws at all, just the background conditions of reality.

All of these things could be true of an aligned digital superintelligence too, especially in the very far future after it had a long time to self-improve.

When I discuss this with people, they tend to retreat back to a sort of Aristotelian philosopher mode where it doesn’t matter what the consequences are, being governed by other humans is necessarily a part of The Good Life, and if we ever gave it up because of something as paltry as consequences, we would be like beasts or savages or something, and we would have lost something vital that makes life worth living.

(there’s a more plausible version where participating in government is part of the Good Life. But you were never on track to become President anyway, so to have any relevance to 99.999% of the population, this would have to be about voting, local government, etc - so I think speculation of this sort about large-scale government does have to hinge on the inherent goodness of being governed by other humans)

Here, too, I find religion helpful - especially the Book of Samuel. It begins with Israel still ruled by judges and prophets, ie directly by God. The people demand a human king like all the other nations.

When they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to the Lord. And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”

So the prophet Samuel warned them that:

“This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle and donkeys he will take for his own use. He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”

But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us. Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”

So:

There was a Benjamite, a man of standing, whose name was Kish son of Abiel, the son of Zeror, the son of Bekorath, the son of Aphiah of Benjamin. Kish had a son named Saul, as handsome a young man as could be found anywhere in Israel, and he was a head taller than anyone else […]

Now the day before Saul came, the Lord had revealed this to Samuel: “About this time tomorrow I will send you a man from the land of Benjamin. Anoint him ruler over my people Israel...”

What I love about this passage is how God has no time for those Aristotelian arguments on how we must be ruled by other humans because it reflects the deepest principles within us. “Why are you ruled by other humans? Because you decided one time that the sex appeal of a tall buff guy with a crown was more important than freedom and good governance, and I said no takebacks.”

But God’s no-takebacks policy has been softening lately; He took back the Exile in 1948, He took back the “pain in childbirth” curse with the invention of epidurals, and He took back the “painful toil in the soil to grow your food” curse with the invention of office jobs. Maybe if we are all very good, He will take back the “must be governed by other humans” curse too.

So when a guy named Sam comes around and offers an option to be ruled directly by a godlike being, this time we should consider saying yes.

If we do build a godlike AI, and determine to our own satisfaction that it’s fully-aligned, I’d rather let it choose its own direction for itself and for humanity than have it be under the control of the US president, or a shareholder vote, or anything like that. So why not just prompt it with “please arrange the universe as you see fit”? Certainly this goes better than any of the four visions above. Proof: if one of the four visions above was better, the godlike AI would easily figure that out, and implement it instead of whatever else it was thinking. Denying this would be fighting the hypothetical - that the AI really has godlike intelligence and benevolence.

If we are so incredibly fortunate as to end up with aligned artificial intelligence at a moment when our government is democratic and (at least in some sense) basically good and pro-human, we should cement our advantage forever by imparting these values to the AIs, then letting them protect us from the alternative. This must not look like freezing moral progress: the values we impart must include the knowledge that we can debate and ultimately change our values. But common sense tells us that there’s a difference between the sort of gradual debate where pluralism eventually replaced racism, and the Cultural Revolution, Juche, and the history of violent attempts at seizing power.

Reject this, and I predict that all of the curses prophesied by Samuel will fall upon you. Your kings will keep taking your sons for pointless wars, giving the fruits of your labors to their cronies, etc, etc. There will be more curses too - surveillance states, reeducation camps, mind control, the whole litany of horrors the twentieth century discovered, plus some extra for the twenty-first. You might live in a country that’s gotten lucky so far. Do you think your luck will hold forever?

1: Meetup changes in Rockville, Northampton, Eindhoven, Great Barrington, Cairo, Portland, and Sofia. Check the post for more information.

2: The Boston ACX meetup group has finished their Greater Boston general election voting guide. I may have more of these in the upcoming week. Still trying to figure out if we can do something for the Bay Area, but remember that SF mail-in ballot registration due date is end-of-day today (Monday), and that our main SF endorsement is Scott Wiener for Congress. We may have more later.

3: I’m continuing to work on modeling (and maybe one day automating) some parts of AI grantmaking (you can see previous efforts here). I would once again like people who are well-versed in the AI/grantmaking worlds to take a survey on how much they value various things. This one involves assigning utility weights to ~80 different AI safety accomplishments. Take it here. After you’ve taken that survey, if you still have more time/energy it would be extra helpful for my data collection if you would take this alternate version, which asks you to predict how I would answer the first survey (so I can separate out worldview differences from weight-choosing random noise).

4: Bay Area ACX meetup is scheduled for this coming Saturday, 10/24, 1 PM, at Mox in SF (1680 Mission St). I’ll probably make a post about it, but consider this an early heads-up.

5: Grantee and Manifold Markets co-founder Stephen Grugett announces his latest project: MNX is a real-money prediction market on AI. It lets people sell futures representing AI company stocks, bet on AI company revenues directly, and a few other things like Epoch Capabilities Index targets. Interestingly, despite the talk of Anthropic’s API falling from from $2T to $1.5T, both Polymarket and MNX still price it around $2T.

6: Friend of the blog Goodheart Labs is working on Common Notes, aka “Twitter Community Notes, but for everything”. They’re implementing it through a combination of AIs (who write most notes), users (who write others, and vote on which ones are helpful), and a browser extension (which makes the system show up on everything, including this blog). Check it out, and install the browser extension, here.

All Quiet on the Western Front ranks as the definitive anti-war novel of World War I, perhaps for all wars, and to some the most important war novel of all time. It was widely banned in the inter-war period yet went on to sell more than 20 million copies and has three film adaptations, the most recent the acclaimed 2022 version. It’s so famous, so prominent, so dominating, that the novel I think is the best war novel ever written can only point back at it from a ‘see also’ link on Wikipedia. That novel is Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger.

You may recognize that name from 2023’s ACX book review, On the Marble Cliffs. It was my first serious look at Jünger as well; he is described as a “serial killer” and a “sociopath,” the kind of modern psycho who nowadays would take glee in uploading videos of drones blowing people up, someone perhaps who sees war as the chance to visit death upon human beings with the state’s permission. I had heard of Storm of Steel, heard the acclaim for it, but never read any of his works. What kind of man was this?

The Wikipedia page is light on details, but it’s beyond impressive1. Jünger fought throughout World War I in the thick of it, starting as a private and ending as a company-commanding Lieutenant. He saw action at the Somme and Cambrai, the Battle of Arras then the Third Battle of Ypres and finally the Ludendorff Offensive. He was wounded 14 times, sometimes quite severely, and came out of it with the Pour le Mérite (the most prestigious Prussian officer’s decoration) alongside numerous other awards. Storm of Steel is, basically, his diary of his time in the war. After the war he was a very famous writer, and if you want to know more about him you should read the previous ACX review which covers his story more and is interesting in its own right.

So there was nothing to do but read it myself. Storm of Steel is not a very long book by page count. What I will call it is dense. It is not a diary that Jünger used to explain his theories, his ideas or his politics except as cursory asides. It is a book about WAR, hundreds of pages of it, from the mundane to the bloody to the idyllic. Storm of Steel is, in my humble opinion, the best war novel ever written.

I did not say that it is the best _anti-_war novel; I also did not say that it is a _pro-_war novel, although in some places and versions Jünger claims war can be glorious or make someone stronger in a rising-to-the-challenge sense. It is at its core an account of a war, a war more bloody and terrible than any of us could imagine, written by someone intelligent and gifted in writing who happened to see much of it and survive to tell the tale. It is by turns harrowing, riveting, insightful, terrifying, humorous, disgusting and soul-shaking. I had read All Quiet and Storm of Steel years ago, and for this review I read both again, then got a different version and translation of Storm of Steel to read it yet again; I can say that it was all worth it. There is nothing like it, and I hope that nothing like it will come ever again.

The Elephant in the Room

If you will forgive me a meme, if I had a nickel for every German World War I war novel I read that featured a bug-collecting protagonist who drank oily machinegun water during an attack, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, let us truly begin. I opened with All Quiet on the Western Front for a reason: you probably know about it, and it’s also a German infantryman’s perspective of World War I. All Quiet also describes the horrors of trench warfare from the perspective of a veteran serving for years, of seeing death and destruction around every corner, breaks up its action with humor and levity, and ends with the war. The comparison is natural.

The truth is that All Quiet on the Western Front is a work of fiction with a thesis. It covers nearly three years, but Remarque was only on frontline duty for about five weeks. It’s unlikely that Remarque ever participated in the actual combat he describes: an article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung describes his service as mostly rear-area construction work; certainly dangerous, he certainly lived through shelling and gas attacks, and it’s a matter of record that he was wounded, but he probably didn’t see the relentless action he describes in All Quiet.

Storm of Steel was first published in 1920, while All Quiet came in 1929. Remarque was aware of this other famous account of World War I in his own language. I open with the bug-collecting and drinking cooling water because it’s those sorts of shared details that popped out to me after reading them both2, but Jünger was an independently-famous entomologist and a stormtrooper commander and Remarque was not. He was on the periphery of such things, and between his time at the front and his time in the hospital, I’m sure he experienced enough and met those who did experience the combat he describes to create the agonizing story, but Remarque was justifiably reticent about discussing his own war experiences or explaining himself.

All Quiet intersperses brief periods of combat with long scenes of Paul returning home, of soldiers discussing how it’s really the leaders who should fight3, of how training is miserable4 and the food is lousy5 and so on. It pontificates about the causes and horrors of war, about the damage it does to one’s psyche and soul, about how it makes men who should be brothers into sincere enemies, how it alienates the soldier from the civilian; it crafts a story for you to do all that. But it is a craft, and I think that detracts from its power.

Storm of Steel is true. It really happened, and it reports those happenings with minimal commentary. Many books start with an idea and write a world around them; Atlas Shrugged is a vehicle for getting the reader to an 80-page monologue about Objectivism. All Quiet is in that vein; it wants you to be anti-war, to feel the horrors of it, to know the unfairness, the blundering and chaos and death. It starts with the conclusion and works its way backwards. Storm of Steel works the other way around, describing it as it happened and drawing conclusions from that, but it barely draws anything itself and instead lets you do it, with barely a suggestive nudge. If you want to be pro-war, Storm of Steel will satisfy you with heroism and duty and camaraderie in the face of noble adversity. If you want to be anti-war, it will satisfy you with horror and futility and bloodiness in the face of a cruel industrial war machine. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, banally, you will hear about tasteless food and unceasing work and moments of absurdity and silly training. If you want to know what World War I was like for an infantryman, notably, you will hear about impossible situations and near-misses then grievous wounds and feats of daring and moments of sheer, unadulterated terror tempered by steely courage. If you want a few jokes, it even has some of those6. But above all, Storm of Steel offers one man’s true and unflinching account of The Great War, and what an account it is!

Versions

One last, brief aside before diving into the novel. Although it was originally published in 1920, Jünger revised the book throughout his lifetime, with the last edition coming in 1961. Translations vary too; Creighton’s translation from 1929 of the 1924 version is certainly a worse job than Hofmann’s of 2003 (of the last 1961 version), but Creighton was an English World War I veteran writing much closer to Jünger while Hofmann is a German native writing with 80 years of history built up. The early version I think is more raw, but also contains more commentary by Jünger, more nationalism and militarism, than the later version after World War II that is more refined and reflective and muted. I recommend the 2003 Hofmann translation that is more generalist and polished but less assertive, but the 1929 one is certainly still good, just unpolished and unapologetic. I quote from Hofmann’s translation unless noted otherwise.

Storm of Steel

Jünger opens Storm of Steel as a naive private headed to Champagne in January 1915. He is wounded in action, sent back for officer training and becomes a lieutenant, and in 1916 he takes command of a platoon before the Battle of the Somme. Here, he is wounded again, recovers, and returns to duty. In January 1917, he attends a company-command course and takes over running a company for the retreat from the Somme. This is about 40% of the way through, so for the next 160 pages or so we cover two years of fighting on the Western Front until he is finally wounded in August 1918 and the war ends. The book, as a memoir, is basically without plot or structure, following his life and actions throughout the time with brief asides to give updates on surrounding events, but it is extremely focused. It is all concise and directly related to him; it’s not just a collection of war anecdotes7, but it doesn’t have a central theme or plot. It is life on the front from beginning to end. Jünger does not take chapters to describe his leave or training, it’s all centered on and around the campaign.

But it’s not all action, and Jünger digresses constantly. He says so himself: “Of course, I was telling you about trench duty. But one loves these digressions; it’s an easy matter to start nattering, to fill up a dark night and the slow hours. I would many times stop and listen to the tales of some character from the front, or a fellow NCO, and take in his chatter with rapt attention.” He goes to rear service sometimes, and gets called into drinking parties with sector commanders in mock royal courts. He is one of the first commanders to implement the Stoßtruppen (stormtrooper, in English) tactics which focused on small-scale unit attacks instead of mass infantry assaults to break the trench stalemate, then leads a raid that ends with most of his soldiers dead or captured. He goes on a wild escapade with his comrades in a stolen French carriage, until, without brakes, it crashes in the hills of Lorraine. He talks about his time in the military hospitals, and takes moments to discuss the character of the soil in different locales, a surprisingly critical detail when you’re digging trenches. In the middle of the assault, his medal falls off, and he searches for it in the grass with his assistant’s aid while under fire in the field. Interspersed with it all though is the combat, the unrelenting artillery and small-arms fire, the constant watching and circling by enemy airplanes, the occasional sortie into no-mans-land or a raid of the enemy trench. And the deaths; so many dead I think we have no modern conception to reckon with it.

Why is Storm of Steel the best? What makes it worth reading? What would someone not that interested in war or World War I get out of it?

• It’s not a literary masterpiece per se, but it is interesting, with well-written and pleasant prose.

• Jünger recorded the course of the war fairly faithfully; if you want to see what World War I was like, at least in one small area, there’s no better option.

• It is mostly anti-polemic, focusing on the war itself rather than ideas around or about it.

• He was at the tip of the spear for years, and we can watch the methods change throughout the course of the novel.

• He fought in some of the most important battles of the Western Front.

• He started as a private and moved up to company commander, giving us both the narrow- and wide-scope perspectives.

• The Anglophones won both world wars, and this colors our perspective of them. Storm of Steel gives us the other side of (one) war.

In short, Storm of Steel is the epitome of the “standard” war novel; there’s nothing so magical or ground-breaking in it, but it does everything and so well that it elevates it above any peer, like the Game of the Century using the same pieces as any other chess game to make a masterful performance. I want to emphasize that last point above. An American war novel, in context, is from the winning (or at least non-losing) side. E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed goes through the brutal Pacific island-hopping campaign, and ends with:

Until the millennium arrives and countries cease trying to enslave others, it will be necessary to accept one’s responsibilities and to be willing to make sacrifices for one’s country–as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, “If the country is good enough to live in, it’s good enough to fight for.” With privilege goes responsibility.

The context here is in 1981, with an America that had many issues but had survived and was still comparatively prosperous. The message was that the sacrifice had been worth it. But Jünger doesn’t get to do this. He watches Germany become the Weimar Republic; he is first revising in the 1920s, Germany has lost its empire and the Kaiser is exiled, communists are sprouting everywhere (the Bavarian Soviet Republic was just a few years ago), Germany is under humiliating peace terms (the Saarland was still occupied, then the Ruhr in 1923), and the economy is undergoing hyperinflation as he is revising it. How does he end Storm of Steel in 1924?

Now these too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of fresh ones [battles]. We–by this I mean those of the youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal–will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!

I can see why Hitler would like it and send him fan mail. After this, he watches the rise of the Nazis. He sees World War II. He participates, but only tangentially; he is disgusted by the Nazis, he sees how they treat Jews in occupied France and works to save some of them, he watches Germany destroyed and its remains split by the war and the Iron Curtain fall. He revises Storm of Steel in 1961, and this time he omits the nationalism; the book ends a few paragraphs earlier, with the notice that he receives the Pour le Mérite.

Jünger was a soldier who watched nearly everything he cared about destroyed. The Kaiserreich was killed, then the Weimar government danced on its grave, then what he so held dear was resurrected like a horrifying zombie to pervert the core of his ideals, wearing his conservatism like a skin suit in mockery, then he watched that get put down, cremated and the remains scattered. Jünger revising in 1961 is far more reserved, more limited in his diversions of honor and duty. But he still says, on his way to a hospital after his first injury:

At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives.

The Theme of Storm of Steel

Jünger saw war beyond our wildest nightmares. The experience occupied a central portion of his mind, and he carried it for the rest of his life; what did he say about it? Mostly, he talked about death.

It is bursting at the seams with killing and destruction, with constant shelling and fighter attacks and enemy fire and grenades; death comes swiftly, suddenly and unexpectedly over and over. When I say that it makes a good anti-war book, I mean it; I counted 45 explicit deaths that he witnessed and mentions over the course of the book, times where “this man here dies,” and there are many times that number again in listed deaths as a general event (we lost X men this day, Y many men died from a shell here8). The worst example is when his company takes cover in a shell crater moving up to the front:

“There was another whistle high up in the air. Everyone had the choking feeling: this one’s headed our way! Then there was a huge, stunning explosion – the shell had hit in our midst.

Half stunned I stood up from the big crater, burning machine-gun belts spilled a coarse pinkish light. It lit the smoldering smoke of the explosion, where a pile of charred bodies were writhing, and the shadows of those still living were fleeing in all directions. Simultaneously, a grisly chorus of pain and cries for help went up. The rolling motion of the dark mass in the bottom of the smoking and glowing cauldron, like a hellish vision, for an instant tore open the extreme abysm of terror.”

Jünger started with 150 men in his company, and in an instant is left with 64. How does this cool, courageous man respond?

“Half an hour ago at the head of a full battle-strength company, I was now wandering around a labyrinth of trenches with a few, completely demoralized men. One baby-faced fellow, who was mocked a few days ago by his comrades, and on exercises had wept under the weight of the big munitions boxes, was now loyally carrying them on our heavy way, having picked them up unasked in the crater. Seeing that did for me. I threw myself to the ground, and sobbed hysterically, while my men stood grimly about.”

This is Jünger? Jünger the cold-blooded “serial killer,” who enjoyed sniping men? Jünger the sociopath, who “seemed more interested in the dealings between the insects that bumbled through this hellscape than in how his fellow soldiers inwardly felt about what was going on”9? Perhaps the words of his younger brother, relayed to him after the battle, will show what a man he was:

“Suddenly, bespattered with mud from his boots to his helmet, a young officer burst in. It was my brother Ernst, who at regimental HQ the day before had been feared dead. We greeted one another and smiled, a little stiffly, with the emotion. He looked about him and then looked at me with concern. His eyes filled with tears. We might both be members of the same regiment, true, but even then this reunion on the battlefield had something rare and wonderful about it, and the recollection of it has remained precious to me. After just a few minutes, he left me, and brought in the last five members of his company. I was laid on a tarpaulin, they stuck a sapling through the straps, and shouldered me off the battlefield.”

Well, he may view his comrades and relatives with care, but surely for the enemy–

“My Englishman lay in front of it, a mere lad. I had shot him right through the head. It is a strange feeling to look into the eyes of a man who you have killed with your own hands.”

Aha! That’s from the 1924 version, let’s see how the years have treated him in the 1961 version:

“Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look more closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.”

Oh. Oh. I remember reading, and thinking, “Where is the monster?” Jünger is oftentimes clinical, but never emotionless. He relays to us horrors visited upon civilians. “A shell falling in the garden of my lodgings killed a little girl who had been digging around for rubbish in a pit.” Shortly after, another, describing a shelled village: “On one doorstep lay a little girl, stretched out in a lake of crimson.” He tells us of mens’ deaths oftentimes with an undertone of fright: “Next to the entrance one man lay on his belly in a shredded uniform; his head was off, and the blood had flowed into a puddle. When an ambulanceman turned him over to check him for valuables, I saw as in a nightmare that his thumb was still hanging from the remains of his arm.” Sometimes it is more neutral: “With the sound of a plank crashing down, a bullet had drilled through his forehead. He crumpled into a corner of the trench, half upright, with his head pressed against the trench wall. His blood poured on to the floor of the trench, as if tipped out of a bucket. His snore-like death-rattle resounded in lengthening intervals, and finally stopped altogether.” Sometimes it is almost serene: “The man with the wound in the belly, a very young lad, lay in amongst us, stretched out like a cat in the warm rays of the setting sun. He slipped into death with an almost childlike smile on his face. It was a sight that didn’t oppress me, but left me with a fraternal feeling for the dying man.”

But he never delights in death for its own sake. He describes events as they happened, with a scientist’s clean observational talent, and catalogues death with an unsettling precision, but never with pleasure. He engages the enemy with conviction, but never hatred. He persistently calls out their courage and his respect for them. He tries to take prisoners and treats them well. It’s his memoirs so maybe some is presented in a better light, but after reading I think “Jünger the sociopath” is a misread. He talks about his hot-tempered bloodthirstiness during the assault as he gets carried away with the surging troops, but when he levels his pistol at the temple of a pleading British officer, the man pulls out a photograph with his family, and is let go.

But make no mistake: death is the theme of Storm of Steel. Pages upon pages of dead bodies, of endless artillery, of mutilation and wounds and hospitals and blood and guts and on and on and on… a blood-spattered man is carried away on the second page–thirteen fatalities from that hit–and the last death is Corporal Hengtsmann, who dies carrying Jünger to safety after his final wounding just a few short pages from the end. It is, above all, relentless.

What is a man to do? For Jünger, the war was an ordeal, but from this he could extract… well, nothing really, at least from the war qua war. Jünger does not think war is good; war is something that happens, like a hurricane that sweeps across the coast that most of us just have to survive. It can have moments of awe, of beauty, of power both physical and spiritual, but its soil is sown through with raw destruction. He and his comrades reap horror and death at every stroke, but on they go, they have to go on, and the challenge is to make something of yourself from the harvesting and not the fruits. How can anyone go on? I think, for Jünger, it was duty.

Our Storm Arrives

One Thursday evening, as I was finishing up a beer after building our baby-to-be’s dresser and leaving the crib for the next day, my pregnant wife called to me from the bathroom. All she said was my name, but it’s possible with tone alone to convey such a sense of urgency and fear that I was up in an instant, heart racing, from that single word. She was bleeding, which for pregnancy portends any number of grim possibilities.

We were off in a taxi to the hospital as fast as I could get one, hugging each other a little tearfully; we had done this before, a few months previously, and fortunately everything had been fine, just a bit of placenta coming loose maybe10. So we rode together not as apprehensive as we had the first time, a little more sure of ourselves having been through one trial not so long ago. At a hospital “bleeding pregnant woman at 24 weeks” will really get everyone involved moving with alacrity, and we were right away seen by the physicians in their maternity ward. Everything looked fine in the ultrasound, they said; the two of them were chatty and joking with us.

But when they stopped talking with us, and started whispering together, the first inkling crept into my mind that something was really wrong. They seriously informed us that there was… something going on, what exactly they weren’t quite sure, and that their hospital wasn’t equipped to handle it. There were suddenly a lot of people around, getting my wife comfortable for a short ambulance ride to the better-equipped hospital nearby in the night. She was starting to go into labor by then. They nicely let me ride in the front of the ambulance, with thankfully no traffic that late.

They kept us overnight, trying to stop the labor which was partially successful. I remember timing it while the doctors were out, because some tiny corner of my mind remembered that was somehow important in a situation like this, but we hadn’t prepared for anything yet. We had only a few weeks before picked out a name.

Everything was stable overnight, but they made the decision for us in the morning to do the c-section on the Friday, while they were still fully staffed before the weekend. So I was suited up, watching a few wispy clouds drift outside a stark blue sky that matched my gown, pacing over a tiny stretch of hallway while they performed the epidural before they brought me in11.

I remember looking down and seeing literal pools of blood, like someone had dropped a bucket of red paint, and the sounds of suction like the dentist’s vacuum from hell as it slurped up everything my wife was spilling out as they ripped her open12. She was strapped down completely, unable to move even if she had wanted to, as I sat by her sweating head and flipped the one wet paper towel they gave us on her forehead while we all told her what a great job she was doing over her panting breaths. Then a tiny little whimper as they took our baby out, before she was whisked away, and they could lower her mother down and start stitching her back together. The “uh oh” as her stitches popped open, and I looked over to see the surgeon stuffing her intestines back into her as the glistening gray mass writhed around his hands. And then it was done. My wife was recovering in a nearby room, and I was following our newborn daughter in a rolling incubator down to the NICU13. She weighed 675 grams, a tiny thing that would fit in my cupped hands, dwarfed by her carriage14.

I was, as an interested but not knowledgeable father-to-be, possessed with a growing dread, as I knew that 24 weeks was early (normal gestation is 40 weeks), even if I didn’t know what “early” really meant; it was considered the cutoff for viability, but what does that really mean? It doesn’t take much research to figure out that it’s not a binary. Life isn’t pass/fail. The numbers vary widely depending on who was doing the study, where, on whom and when, but the bottom line was:

There was a 1 in 3 chance our baby would die in the hospital, and another 1 in 3 chance she would have moderate to severe disabilities15.

And I was afraid. I was afraid I would watch her die, that her little body would fail to develop, that her lungs or stomach would give out, that her brain would keep bleeding, that she would get an infection and not fight it off, the myriad possibilities taunted me as I sat in the hospital, processing. I researched the risk profiles, knew the causes, knew each hurdle she would face; she didn’t die the first day, but the first week, the first month…? A fetus’s lungs develop last, she wasn’t meant to breathe air for a few more months, and she was on mechanical ventilation and oxygen from the start; the underdeveloped alveoli could collapse, and she could drown in her own inflamed lungs’ fluid, or the stress could scar them so badly they couldn’t keep up as she grows and lead to bronchopulmonary dysplasia. Her brain was bleeding, a common issue in preterm babies, and we had to just hope that it would stop on its own; she was so young that her brain was literally smooth in the scans, as the wrinkles wouldn’t develop for a few more weeks. The warm, moist environment of the incubator made her especially susceptible to fungal infections, I remember asking about that (they always used antifungal creams they said). The worst was NEC, necrotizing enterocolitis, and you should flinch at anything mixing necro- and children as it is so much worse than it sounds; with NEC, their bowels start to die, with the predictable cascade of problems that follow. Oh, she had jaundice as well, so much of the first week we saw her under lurid blue lights, a little wiggling alien in her plastic spaceship.

I cried at home while my wife was in the hospital. We wondered if she would ever talk or walk, if she would ever go to school or if we would be taking care of her for the rest of our lives. I remember that first walk down to the NICU and talking with a doctor there, asking them if we should try to find a priest if it came down to that, and being told, “That is probably a good idea right now,” and making sure I knew how to perform an emergency baptism. Fear gripped me constantly, I lay awake at night reading papers about dead babies, I moved autonomously that first week while I rolled my wife in her wheelchair into the NICU to see our baby or finished building that crib at home, shambling about in a fugue state as I tried to take care of everyone everywhere all at once.

I was afraid, in a tiny, dark crevice of my mind, to give her her name that we had picked out with care only a few weeks before, dreading that it would be a waste if she died. But I knew she deserved it; not just her name, but my love. I crushed that little whispering doubt, and I knew that I had to just accept my fear. She could die, but to be a good father, I had to make myself vulnerable for her, I had to love her with my whole heart and be ready to accept her death if it came. It was what she deserved, it was what I owed her.

On Duty

It was my duty.

That’s what duty is, what we owe to others. Duty compelled me every step of the way, to hold her while the low-oxygen alarms did their pinging blare, to try to comprehend while the doctor showed us the images of her brain with colors streaked through for bleeds, to carefully consider the doctor’s request to give her corticosteroids and risk disability16. One time, they were taking a blood sample, and I stuck my hands into the incubator to hold and comfort her as she wailed while they poked her foot to get enough blood, and they called me a “brave father.” Flattering, but unnecessary: how could I abandon my daughter?

Hours such as these were without doubt the most awful of the whole war.

You cower in a heap alone in a hole and feel yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become utterly meaningless and absurd. While you think it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing may have started on its course. Your discomfort is concentrated in your ear, that tries to distinguish amid the uproar the swirl of your own death rushing near.

It is dark, too; and you must find in yourself alone all the strength for holding out. You can’t get up and with a blasé laugh light a cigarette in the wondering sight of your companions. Nor can you be encouraged by the sight of your friend clipping a monocle into his eye to observe a hit on the traverse close beside you. You know that not even a cock will crow when you are hit.

Well, why don’t you jump up and rush into the night till you collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see you.

Yet someone watches you. Unknown perhaps to yourself, there is some one within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honour. You know that this is your place in the battle, and that a whole people relies on you to do your job. You feel, ‘If I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever after blush at every word of praise.’ You clench your teeth and stay.

Jünger writes this in Creighton’s 1924 version, and leaves it out in Hofmann’s 1961 version, but I don’t think he recants his conception of duty; he was stripping down the book to the core experience, as by this time he had been writing his thoughts for decades; he wrote in On Pain in 1934:

There is only one world-view that is worthy of us, and which has already been discussed as the Choice of Achilles—better a short life, full of deeds and glory, than a long life without substance.

The danger is so great, for every individual, every class, every people, that to cherish any illusion whatsoever is deplorable. Time cannot be stopped; there is no possibility for prudent retreat or wise renunciation. Only dreamers believe there is a way out. Optimism is cowardice.

We are born into this time and must courageously follow the path to the end as destiny demands. There is no other way. Our duty is to hold on to the lost post, without hope, without rescue, like the Roman soldier whose bones were found in front of a door in Pompeii, who, during the eruption of Vesuvius, died at his post because they forgot to relieve him.

That is greatness… The honorable end is the one thing that can not be taken from a man.

This was one year after Hitler had taken power; he would write On the Marble Cliffs in 1939 against fascism. In On Pain he mentions the Japanese developments of manned suicide torpedoes:

Recently, a story circulated in the newspapers about a new torpedo that the Japanese navy is apparently developing. This weapon has an astounding feature. It is no longer guided mechanically but by a human device—to be precise, by a human being at the helm, who is locked into a tiny compartment and regarded as a technical component of the torpedo as well as its actual intelligence.

He extrapolates this to the kamikaze strikes: “Manned planes can then be constructed as airborne missiles, which from great heights can dive down to strike with lethal accuracy the nerve centers of enemy resistance. The result is a breed of men that can be sent off to war as cannon fodder.” The bolding there is mine; he is giving a warning, not an endorsement!

Our conception of duty has been… complicated, to say the least, by modern history. “Just following orders” is perversion of duty; authoritarians evoked duty to ennoble sacrifice in service of the state, to enable cruelty and evil, to drive populations to extinction in a corrupted machine that uses nationalism to oil its gears. Jünger saw all of this, but I think he was like someone who had built the tool without being in control of its usage, watching as the Nazis stole it away, watching as hatred drove its strikes.

But love informed my duty to my baby daughter. While I held her against me as the alarms blared and a team of doctors sat there fiddling with knobs, while I weighed the possibilities with each week she survived, while I stared at my phone at night filled with dread that it would go off and I would hear a faceless doctor at the other end say, “Come quickly, something is wrong…” I waited anxiously for that hammer to fall, to deliver the killing blow and be done with us. Duty made me stand my figurative post, when I wanted to burrow myself away and drown in tears, when what was fair or right or just had been left behind, duty fixed me fast to my path.

Would that it had been me! I have faced moments of fear and my own mortality before, and they were trivial in the face of watching Death hover over my child while all I could do was hope. There was nothing in my power, no technique, no mysterious gnostic knowledge, no action on my end that would bring her through and out of that hospital. I could only hold her, comfort her and love her in the moment.

What Came After

Our daughter did live, in the end. We watched her grow, slowly and fitfully at first, until after the first month it seemed like the worst was over; another month in the NICU while she grew and learned to take a bottle, then a transfer to the less intensive infant clinic for another month and a half, until finally she was breathing on her own. It was still iffy when we would exactly take her out, as she had bouts of apnea, but after a weekend where we stayed with her 48 hours straight, I think the doctors finally thought that it would be fine. Still a few weeks before her due date, we took her home.

The very next day my wife came down with a nasty case of mastitis (for the second time!) and was in the hospital herself; I was alone with my daughter, wheeling her to the same hospital she had spent so much time in to spend time with mama. It still didn’t end; we wouldn’t know if she would ever crawl or walk or talk, all we could do was hold her and wait. I still could faintly hear the oxygen alarms if I closed my eyes.

I think it was after about a year that, finally, we started to feel the burden ease. She was starting to pull up on the couch and shuffle about, until one day she let go and took her first few steps into my arms17. I cried then, too, but from happiness. Not until she was maybe two, and running and babbling and the pediatrician seemed so pleased, did we really feel that it was going to be alright. As parents we put so many of our hopes and dreams onto our children, but for me, what could I ask of her? She is enough, just being there; I never had to hold her while her lungs gave out, just watching her run and play is better than I had ever dreamed while holding her under those hospital lights. That summer we could have my father and stepmother there for her baptism then, not in a sterile room saying goodbye with a cup of water from the sink.

And we still deal with all the normal stress of parenting, the tantrums and fights to get dressed and the boredom of wanting to go to the park yet again when it’s raining, of not eating right, of wanting to watch a show on the tablet, of balancing work and daycare and everything. She may kiss me on the cheek and say, “Love you papa!” and stock up on feelings of love, but I know that no matter what it is my duty to care for her, even when she fights and screams at bedtime. Love is not a currency, to be banked and withdrawn when times are rough, lest you find you didn’t stock quite enough; it is a choice, an obligation I take on, a duty to her that calls even when I don’t quite feel it in the moment18.

My love and duty extend beyond my daughter; I cared for my wife when she was in the hospital, for recovering from the birth and twice with severe infections afterwards. When our cat started with blood in his vomit and diarrhea, it was our duty, out of love for him, to take him to the veterinary hospital, and care for him in the following months. Just when we felt that was finally under control, our other cat became ill, and we saved her at first with another visit to the hospital. Then I watched her waste away, as her body slowly killed itself by eating its own red blood cells, until she was so thin and weak. My dear little cat, who lay in my lap every night after our daughter had gone down, who was so nice and never swatted, who let our daughter pet her and cuddle her while our other never did, went through too much and it was my duty to take her for one final vet visit in the middle of the night, and hold her limp body for a long time afterwards while I wept ferociously. I feel (and I mean that presently) that I had failed to save her. I remember telling my wife that I thought it would be easier to lose a parent than to lose her, who had kept me company when everything seemed so bleak.

Less than a month later a tearful call from my sister had me on a flight within two hours, back home to my stepmother in the hospital who had suffered a heart attack, who I thought would be dead before I arrived but pulled through the night only to suffer a stroke. I held her hand as she died, hugged and comforted her sisters, and embraced my father as he cried that his wife of 30 years was gone; it was my duty, to them all, and to her that continued after her death when I gave a eulogy at her funeral.

For Jünger, who so loved his country, his duty called him to service; it was something he chose, and he placed his life at the Fatherland’s disposal, and watched it die, not himself. Storm of Steel is his account and reckoning with that. When duty fails, how does one keep going on? How do we place ourselves in service, to others but also to oneself? To face your fears and stand courageously, to accept pain and suffering unflinchingly, to fail and continue on, these are all themes of the book from a man who took his position in the hellish trenches of the Western Front for four years. I read it not long after our daughter came home, and in that miraculously true story I found echoes of my own experience. We don’t get to choose when the storm arrives or how, but we can choose how we face it.

There are two laws of the ACX Meetup Czar. First, that there are a lot of ACX meetup groups. Second, that there are not enough ACX meetup groups.

Twice a year, Scott advertises upcoming meetups and makes a bigger deal about it than usual. Throughout the year his meetup czar (that’s me, Skyler!) gets emails from people moving to a new city wondering if there’s an ACX group there. So the twice a year Times & Places posts are a helpful chance to check for signs of life and get an update on the local meetup communities. But the most important part is coordination.

If you only go to one ACX meetup a year, we suggest you go to the fall ACX Everywhere in your city. That way if there was secretly a dozen of you all making the assumption that you were the only reader in the area, you could all show up at the fall meetup and realize the conspiracy was larger than you thought. And in fact many local ACX groups got their start by just such a rallying flag. A few were even started by a traveling reader who volunteered to run a meetup in a city they didn’t live in, but locals showed up, took the banner, and kept the meetup going.

This year we have meetups planned in over a hundred and eighty cities, from Aachen, Germany to Zagreb, Croatia. Thanks to all the organizers who are putting on the individual meetups, and thank you Scott for supporting these meetups!

You can find the list below, in the following order:

1. Africa & Middle East

2. Asia-Pacific (Including Australia)

3. Europe (including the UK)

4. North America & Central America

5. South America

6. Online

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 Zagreb, Croatia. 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 Boston, Burlington, and Oxford meetups. Scott will provisionally be attending the San Francisco meetup.

Extra Info For Potential Attendees

1. If you’re reading this* you’re invited. Please don’t feel like you “won’t be welcome” just because you’re new to the blog, demographically different from the average reader, or have never agreed with Scott Alexander once and have fought with Scott on like seventy-five different fronts. (The * is if you’ve specifically been told by the organizers (local or global) you’re banned from attending.)

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 to let them tell you if there are last-minute changes.

3. If you have any feedback on the meetup (compliments, complaints, ancestral curses, etc) the feedback form is here: https://tinyurl.com/acx-meetup-survey

Extra Advice For Meetup Organizers:

1. If you’re at a park or cafe or somewhere like that, I suggest you bring a sign that says “ACX MEETUP” and prop it up somewhere. If you’re in an apartment, put the sign on the door. People can feel anxious walking up to clumps asking if this is the ACX group.

2. Bring blank labels and sharpies for nametags. People will remember and use each other’s names a lot more if they have the reminder. You can also suggest people write a topic they want to talk about under their name on the name tag.

3. If you or anyone else in your city wants to run followup meetups, have people type their name and email address in a Google Form or spreadsheet. It’s easy to make a QR code or bit.ly link to make sharing the form easier.

4. If it’s the first meetup, people usually just want to talk. If you want to do workshops or reading groups or the like, followup meetups tend to work better for that. If nobody’s talking, try asking people about recent ACX essays or book reviews they liked. Your attendees probably like ACX, so you have something in common!

5. If you didn’t make a LessWrong event for your meetup (or if you did but I either didn’t know about it or goofed up the crossposter) I made one for you. If you aren’t already a coorganizer on it and you want to be, send me a LessWrong dm and I’ll fix that.

If you need to change a meetup date or you have any other questions about meetups, please email skyler[at]rationalitymeetups[period]org to get in touch with me.

On to the meetups!

Africa & The Middle East

Egypt

Cairo

Contact: Omar FAHIM
Contact Info: omarfahim[dot]pt[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, November 15, 05:30 PM
Location: We will be at 30 North (Zamalek). I will be wearing a basic black t-shirt, grey sweatpants, and a dark-toned cap, and I will be holding an ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G2H3689+H9
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/JuB6 [ remove this bit] DUabw3FA62SczF8ls3
Additional Notes: Come as you are. Everyone is welcome (kids and dogs okay).

Israel

HAIFA

Contact: Shai
Contact Info: tenastralcodex[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, November 2nd, 5:30 PM
Location: We’ll be at the “goldmund” book store at ekron street no. 6 , most likely on the roof , and I will be wearing a silly shirt and carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4QR252+X7
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/BdzUYFlcz3J2O8xgX4aLZm?s=cl&p=a&mlu=4&ilr=4

TEL AVIV

Contact: Inbar
Contact Info: inbar192[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 6:00 PM
Location: Tel Aviv, Sarona Park: Veranda area with swinging chairs, right next to the main Sarona Market building, eastern side. Next to Rotisserie Chicken Club, and just across from Five Point Four. I will have an embroidered banner with the ACX logo.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G4P3QCQ+G6F
Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/share/g/14mtZNZW3GK/
Notes: Kids and pets are welcomed, snacks appreciated. A secure location is nearby. Please mind that the meeting will be in a different spot from usual!

Nigeria

ABUJA

Contact: Olaoluwa Akinloluwa
Contact Info: akinloluwa[period]olaoluwa[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 4:00 PM
Location: We will be Upstairs at Hub & Hive
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6FX93FFG+MH
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BrrnvzvtsCasDRJEE/abuja-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

JOS

Contact: Ajegba Matthew Ujah
Contact Info: majegba1[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 31st, 10:00 AM
Coordinates: [Meetup Czar note: I don’t know, they weren’t included.]
Location: We will be at the university of jos staff club house
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fhxdWySMCmedDxhcP/jos-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

KADUNA

Contact: abdul malik
Contact Info: Maleekcherry510[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 2:00 PM
Location: Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7F29GCHR+87
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/tixu5vfcYEu65akji/kaduna-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Qatar

DOHA

Contact: AE
Contact Info: +97455549938
Time: Friday, October 30th, 4:00 PM
Location: Qatar National Library, on the mezzanine floor. Next to the main computer desk area there, there are several usually empty reading chairs and tables. We’ll be at one of those, a teen with a large backpack wearing a green t-shirt, likely with a friend. If I can bring the ACX MEETUP sign, I will, though don’t depend on it.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HQH8C9R+7M
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/feLv6Fz8nXBwkMPf3/doha-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP either by WhatsApp, LW or email so I’m not too surprised by the arrival of somebody unexpected, and please arrive on time if you’re coming (the library opens then) so we can get the chairs ASAP

South Africa

CAPE TOWN

Contact: Tegan
Contact Info: teganspeaking[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 29th, 2:00 PM
Location: Van Riebeeck Park, near the Sidmouth Avenue entrance. Will bring an ACX Meetup sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4FRW3C49+73
Group Link: https://discord.gg/KfngcFH32
Notes: - I’ll bring a picnic blanket and some snacks and games, but if you can bring something to share that would be nice - The park is child and dog friendly - There are some trees for shade but sun protection is probably a good idea - RSVP on Partiful so we can keep in touch after the event! (and in case we need to change venue due to weather or something) https://partiful.com/e/BTDOnt0OSbZKBHowASfr?f=1&photo=all

Turkey

ESKİŞEHİR(See Turkey, Europe)

İSTANBUL (See Turkey, Europe)

United Arab Emirates

DUBAI

Contact: Sid
Contact Info: anxiety_isobar[period]6b[a t]icloud[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: AstroLabs, Cluster R, JLT, Dubai, UAE
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7HQQ34GW+QW
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pCzeskwWed7xY2oPd/dubai-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP. We’ll create a WhatsApp group for the attendees to organize and communicate after the event.

Asia-Pacific

Australia

BRISBANE

Contact: Laura
Contact Info: laura[period]leighton94[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, October 27th, 6:00 PM
Location: We will be at the Fourth Monkey, at one of the tables out the back where it’s quieter. I will have ACX MEETUP signs and will also let the bar staff know about the meetup, so if you can’t find us, you can ask them.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5R4MG2F6+6W
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/425xGczF8FrfAPeE4/brisbane-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: This meetup is co-hosted with the Brisbane EA and AI safety community groups.

CANBERRA

Contact: Declan
Contact Info: acxcanberra[a t]outlook[period]com
Time: Monday, November 2nd, 5:30 PM
Location: Grease Monkey Braddon, probably outside table, will have ACX sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RPFP4GM+R3
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/E3deiNztkDs3Xzn5p/canberra-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: RSVPs appreciated so I know how big a table to book.

HOBART

Contact: Chris
Contact Info: cvjones7[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 2:00 PM
Location: We’ll be on parliament lawn with a sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4R99487J+PCC
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Zo9MC86Qe7jdydBnz/hobart-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

MELBOURNE

Contact: Ryan
Contact Info: xgravityx[a t]hotmail[period]com
Time: Friday, November 6th, 6:00 PM
Location: Queensberry Hotel Carlton, in the dining room. Will have sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RJ754PW+3H
Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/lesswrongmelbourne/
Notes: The Facebook group contains a link for the Whatsapp group where updates will be sent if required

PERTH

Contact: Bill Dengler and Bianca Peterek
Contact Info: codeofdusk[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, October 26th, 6:00 PM
Location: The Generous Squire 397 Murray St, Perth WA 6000
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4PWQ2VX3+CH
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/IcKCXVPG5HQFaOXvm4B9MC
Notes: I’m visiting from Seattle and co-organizing this meetup with Bianca Peterek, who ran the past few of these. We’re both totally blind. Please ask staff for the ACX Everywhere booking under Dengler, or look for the white canes, and say hi, out loud, when you arrive. If you can, please RSVP by email or in the linked WhatsApp group so I can size the booking accordingly!

SYDNEY

Contact: Eliot
Contact Info: Redeliot[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, November 19th, 6:00 PM
Location: Skyview hall, 14 Frances St randwick
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4RRH36QQ+RR4
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/rationalists_of_sydney
Notes: Please RSVP on meetup for planning and logistics.

China

BEIJING

Contact: Vasiliy / 瓦夏
Contact Info: vakondyrev[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, October 24, 3:00 PM
Location: Cafe Zarah (Gulou East Street Branch)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8PFRWCR4+79
Group Link: https://calendar.app.google/vkhpWYDpsJaT19Zx7

SHANGHAI

Contact: Vasiliy / 瓦夏
Contact Info: wechat: _vakondyrev
Time: Friday, October 16th, 7:00 PM
Location: All info will be available here: calendar.app.google/E3dnHrAoqe7kAFFVA
Coordinates: All info will be available here: calendar.app.google/E3dnHrAoqe7kAFFVA
Group Link: There will be a WeChat group closer to the date as well. All info will be available here: calendar.app.google/E3dnHrAoqe7kAFFVA

India

BENGALURU

Contact: Faiz
Contact Info: faiz_abbas[a t]protonmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 18th, 4:00 PM
Location: Matteo Coffea, 2, Church Street, Brigade Rd, Bengaluru, Karnataka 560001
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J4VXJF4+PR
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/i5vLw9xnG9iwXNQZZ
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/H8aGN7iLBsJcoihju/bengaluru-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-26
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I have a rough idea of how many people are coming

HYDERABAD

Contact: Swarnim
Contact Info: rexzeo0[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 18th, 3:00 PM
Location: La Vie En Rose Cafe & Bistro, 19, 3rd floor, Old Mumbai Hwy, above Ratnadeep supermarket, Vinayak Nagar, Indira Nagar, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, Telangana 500032
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7J9WC9V3+4W
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/JmXkQ9bN1uWBaWs7VPXceQ

MUMBAI

Contact: Shubham and Nishant
Contact Info: +91 9859563809 (call, whatsapp and signal). +918239827922 (call, whatsapp and signal)
Time: Saturday, October 31st, 4:00 PM
Location: Park (in front of raman building) inside TIFR Residential Complex (Open access for all, please contact us if you have trouble finding or accessing the place)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JCJWR54+G8
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/F4y59s4YuycAyX2I63t8iS
Notes: RSVPs are not mandatory but we will appreciate if you could RSVP us so we can prepare accordingly. Feel free to call us up if you need any info.

NEW DELHI

Contact: Suryansh
Contact Info: suryanshtyagiphone[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 28th, 4:00 PM
Location: Spaced out cafe Shahpur Jat Delhi
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JWVG6X6+QP
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/Jph8xQOprnK1mA7DBKkWOS?mode=gi_t

PUNE

Contact: Saarang S
Contact Info: amsaarang[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: Chai Bar Bar, Baner. I’ll be there to receive people or I’ll arrange a poster outside.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7JCMHQ4G+FM
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mjvG8uAQMAGiq3NnE/pune-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP, it will help with planning the event.

Japan

NAKAMEGURO

Contact: Harold
Contact Info: rationalitysalon[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 10:00 AM
Location: 2-41-9 Kamimeguro, Meguro-ku, Tokyo
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q7XJMRW+23
Group Link: https://rationalitysalon.substack.com/
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jfwCeDqBaCxPpqcJ7/tokyo-japan-acx-autumn-schelling-meetup-everywhere-2026
Notes: 英語での開催ですがぜひお気軽にお越しください！

TOKYO

(See NAKAMEGURO)

Malaysia

KUALA LUMPUR

Contact: Yi-Yang
Contact Info: yi[period]yang[period]chua[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 31st, 2:00 PM
Location: We’ll be in the area at the back of Kings Hall Cafe @ Sec 13 (https://maps.app.goo.gl/naDhCJzNUAi1mFu38). Please ask the staff for directions.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PM34J7Q+RX
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/YpwRmdA6ad4numFyi/kuala-lumpur-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
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[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/dWhxkP4vMvepqFbDz/auckland-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
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: cube_flipper
Contact Info: admin[a t]smoothbrains[period]net
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 2:00 PM
Location: The park at the bottom of Aro Valley
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/4VCPPQ39+R8X
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cgdjcwNvMo6KRhgzL/wellington-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP to my email if you can and I can add you to the group chat.

Philippines

METRO MANILA

Contact: Renzo
Contact Info: jldeguzman1920[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, November 07, 02:00 PM
Location: The High Street Lounge, Shangri La Hotel, BGC, Manila
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7Q63H22W+XP
Group Link: RSVP-ing me at my email is not mandatory, but very much encouraged, so I can know how many of us might be going!

Singapore

SINGAPORE

Contact: Srijita
Contact Info: srijitak[period]cmi[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 3:00 PM
Location: MyX, Holland Village
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/6PH58Q6W+QQ
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/N42bMYFJBBRpkzKqX
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/bMiPNKnNecvo23tXB/singapore-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong, Luma or on the Discord, so I can inform the venue about the number of pax.

South Korea

SEOUL

Contact: Bon
Contact Info: Seoul[period]ACX[period]Meetups[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, November 1st, 2:00 PM
Location: Name: Terarosa Coffee, POSCO Center (Samseong stn exit 4), 2F, look for ACX MEETUP sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8Q99G344+96
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/uyWrc6jJhJgxt786A/seoul-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: RSVPs are welcome so that I can gauge turnout.

Taiwan

TAIPEI

Contact: Luca
Contact Info: web[a t]lucapizzagalli[period]com
Time: Friday, October 23rd, 7:00 PM
Location: Daan Park pavilion
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7QQ32GJP+25R
Group Link: https://line.me/R/ti/g/N-nbtUXVEf
Notes: RSVPs are useful, but not necessary. Feel free to decide at the last second.

Meetup Czar Note: Canceled due to typhoon warning.

Thailand

BANGKOK

Contact: Cassidy
Contact Info: WhatsApp +15032613344 preferred contact
Time: Wednesday, October 28th, 8:00 PM
Location: InBlu Bar & Terrace, Hilton Bangkok Grand Asoke
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7P52PHQ6+JR
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/C4t6SocaYlG9YNUhhspOLq
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/PbKn2wAmNgCZ99up7/acx-lw-bkk-28-october

CHIANG MAI, THAILAND

Contact: Nguyen Tran
Contact Info: ntrant[at]proton[dot]me
Time: Saturday, November 21, 09:00 AM
Location: 4Seas Nimman Coliving Coworking Space. Details will be announced in our Discord.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/7MCWQXW8+9G
Group Link: https://discord.gg/Gjjz2Ytru
Additional Notes: We are a community of impact-focused professionals from over 10 different countries working AI Safety, Animal Welfare, and other cause areas in an affordable, beautiful settings! Anyone focused on EA cause areas are welcome to apply—whether working full- or part-time, making a career transition, upskilling, or otherwise! Read more at https://www.impacthubs.org/

Europe

Armenia

YEREVAN

Contact: Ivan
Contact Info: occamsrazor464[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 31st, 5:00 PM
Location: Loft (anticafe / coworking), 3 Moskovyan St, Yerevan. I’ll be at a table with an “ACX MEETUP” sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8HG65GMC+MW
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/RXSwG3JdH2EgsxBvw/yerevan-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: First time organizing, and as far as I know the first ACX meetup in Yerevan, so an RSVP by email or on the LessWrong event page would help a lot. I’ll be there either way, so feel free to just show up. I’m more of a casual ACX/LessWrong reader than a community insider

Austria

VIENNA

Contact: Max
Contact Info: hello[a t]maximiliankiener[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 2:30 PM
Location: Burggarten, 1010, Lothringen-Denkmal
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWR6938+Q3
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pBDEC6tD2g4xkuWeG/vienna-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP via email if your coming, so I can update you about bad-weather plans, etc.

Belgium

LEUVEN

Contact: Sieben
Contact Info: dewitte[period]sieben[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, November 3rd, 7:00 PM
Location: The meetup is at Hal 5, close to the train station. I’ll be outside the entrance with an ACX MEETUP sign. If it rains, I’ll be inside near the entrance.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F26VPMC+4W
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8AoiDCBDGXmgKfyQy/leuven-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: It’s okay if you come later than 19:00. If you want to, you can buy food on the location.

Bulgaria

SOFIA

Contact: Dan
Contact Info: bensen[dot]daniel[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, October 24, 04:00 PM
Location: Bistro Lyubimoto Sofia Center, ul. "General Parensov" 251000 Sofia
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GJ5M8QH+QM

Croatia

ZAGREB

Contact: Dominik
Contact Info: dt[a t]d11r[period]eu
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 6:00 PM
Location: Grif Bar (Savska cesta 160, Zagreb)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQQQXR4+53
Group Link: (email me for Telegram group link)

Czech Republic

PRAGUE

Contact: Rían
Contact Info: acx[period]qwpef[a t]mailer[period]me
Time: Monday, October 19th, 6:30 PM
Location: Čajovna Dharmasala in Karlín
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2P3CRW+FP
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/ECGr0EUKdgoGktuGPIOrAH?s=cl&p=i&ilr=4&iam=0

Denmark

COPENHAGEN

Contact: Søren Elverlin
Contact Info: soeren[period]elverlin[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: Baune Alle 2, st. K, 2800 Kongens Lyngby
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F7JQFCW+H5
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/acQKRcMenH3rQFu25/solstice-astralcodexten-lesswrong-x-risk-meetup-3
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/acQKRcMenH3rQFu25/solstice-astralcodexten-lesswrong-x-risk-meetup-3
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong

Estonia

TALLINN

Contact: Andrew West
Contact Info: andrew_n_west[a t]yahoo[period]co[period]uk
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 6:00 PM
Location: Tuletorn Baar
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GF6FM4G+84
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xfNB4zgykhGT5DkQC/tallinn-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

TARTU

Contact: Yehor
Contact Info: jehorchudovsky[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, November 20th, 5:00 PM
Location: Raekoja plats, in front of the Townhall Building. I will be carrying an ACX sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GC89PJC+3V
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/IGCkz3z1QjAGcZO3igMGn5
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how large of a table (approximately) to reserve/request in a cafe/bar.

Finland

HELSINKI

Contact: Joe Nash
Contact Info: helsinkirationalish[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, October 27th, 6:00 PM
Location: Oluthuone Kaisla, Vilhonkatu 4, Helsinki. I’ll have a copy The Book Against Death of the table.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9GG65WCW+PW
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/helsinki-rationalish/

France

BORDEAUX

Contact: Michael
Contact Info: acx-meetup-2026-10-24[a t]weboroso[period]anonaddy[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 4:00 PM
Location: Mériadeck, Esplanade Charle de Gaulle (park on the upper level), West side, between the fountain and the building of the prefecture&council of Gironde — https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/44.837299/-0.586044 — I will have an A4 ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CPXRCP7+WJ
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/aYs7Z3rjXg2tHnrvs/bordeaux-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please mark «Yes» or «Maybe» on LessWrong if you plan to come (or to maybe-come). We are going to stay around the spot for at least 15 minutes after the posted time; if you are going to be late, you can email me your phone number to get an SMS if we do decide to move from there. If you would like to join but this date/time doesn’t work for you, or even this month is a bad fit, please write an email! We were two persons last few times, date is negotiable, and we meet a few more per year in the same mini-ACX-Meetup format.

LYON

Contact: Lucas
Contact Info: lucas_acx_meetup_lyon[a t]fastmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 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.

MONTPELLIER

Contact: Fantin
Contact Info: fantin[period]seguin[a t]live[period]fr
Time: Thursday, October 22nd, 7:00 PM
Location: We’ll be at Green Lab café. Send me a message on LessWrong or by email, and I’ll tell you how to find us
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FM5JV6G+PH
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/T3qQkrihKE9DED6kT/montpellier-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong or by email

PARIS

Contact: Augustin
Contact Info: augustin[period]portier[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 4:00 PM
Location: Ground Control, 81 rue du Charolais, Paris. I’ll have an ACX meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FW4R9VJ+CP
Group Link: 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/k0twSHlHk8DNTw2wSoTw

Germany

AACHEN

Contact: Martin
Contact Info: acx[a t]enc0[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 7:00 PM
Location: Papillon Cafe - probably on top, just take the big metal stairs. I’ll bring a sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28Q3JH+8G
Group Link: https://t.me/+QeSVhF1cIggzZDgy

BERLIN

Contact: Milli
Contact Info: acx-meetups[a t]martinmilbradt[period]de
Time: Sunday, November 22nd, 2:00 PM
Location: Big lawn at the center of Humboldthain
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4MG9WP+36
Group Link: https://t.me/+OE3st4QnB2xjYTVi

BONN

Contact: Timothy Currie
Contact Info: timtjc08[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 8th, 4:00 PM
Location: Babette-Koch-Weg 2
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F29P3H9+87H
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/K8atktwGOJy3Iz7P3uzImT If you want to join, text me: Coming from the ACX post.
Notes: Feel free to bring kids.

Meetup Czar note: There’s a second meetup in Bonn plotted for Friday the 13th, at 5pm, at a hacker house along the Rhein called Super44. I didn’t spot until the last minute that there were two Bonn meetups.

BREMEN

Contact: Rasmus
Contact Info: ad[period]fontes[a t]aol[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 3:00 PM
Location: Café FARSØ
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F5C3RH5+FM7
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/gXio6xsy8FJxsyPpw/bremen-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP if you know you are coming so I can make a reservation accordingly. However, it is also fine to come spontaneously.

ERFURT

Contact: Tim
Contact Info: tim[period]bott[a t]outlook[period]de
Time: Sunday, November 22nd, 2:00 PM
Location: Around the water feature and of course I’ll be holding a sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3H2245+RC
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/EbgJ9BkqKs935Q9Db/erfurt-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

FREIBURG IM BREISGAU, GERMANY

Contact: Omar
Contact Info: omar[a t]ratfr[period]de
Time: Friday, December 4th, 6:00 PM
Location: Veranstaltungsraum, Haus des Engagements, Rehlingstraße 9, 79100 Freiburg
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FV9XRQQ+QQ9
Group Link: https://www.rationality-freiburg.de
Notes: If possible, check the event on the website for some reading as preparation. If not, come anyway :-) https://www.rationality-freiburg.de/events/2026-12-04-acx-meetup-fall-2026/

HAMBURG

Contact: Pierre
Contact Info: theoffdiagonal[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 2:30 PM
Location: We’ll have an ACX Meetup sign and be be at the picnic tables in the northwestern corner of the Bullerberge Spielplatz in Planten un Blomen.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F5FHX6J+FM
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/QAKowx4HX8pAiW8Bx
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vZYCDxJXaqfsyE5Yg/hamburg-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Feel free to bring anyone interested, family and friends. Please RSVP so I know how much afternoon snacks to bring

KÖLN

Contact: Marcel Müller
Contact Info: marcel_mueller[a t]mail[period]de
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 5:00 PM
Location: My place, Marienweg 43, 50858 Köln
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F28WRMX+97
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/NFTmFnBbxbmRP9vyy/lw-cologne-acx-everywhere-meetup
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/NFTmFnBbxbmRP9vyy/lw-cologne-acx-everywhere-meetup

LEIPZIG

Contact: Daniel Böttger
Contact Info: Telegram: @sevensecularsermons
Time: Tuesday, October 20th, 6:00 PM
Location: Fechner-Villa https://maps.app.goo.gl/GyB72G6XupuDYwSJ8 in Scherlstraße 2, 04103 Leipzig. Doorbell says “Böttger”.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3J89QV+J2
Group Link: https://t.me/+gDVZ8gMTthQ4OTdi
Notes: Please arrive around 6pm; usually some of us stay up to 11pm. We will have snacks and drinks and casual conversations.

MAGDEBURG

Contact: Konstantin
Contact Info: k[period]kirchheim[a t]gmx[period]net
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 2:00 PM
Location: Square Coffeeshop Allee-Center
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4H4JJP+6R
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/EbHZELNwrpp3rnEqXsYllp

MANNHEIM

Contact: Ruben
Contact Info: ruben_heller[a t]web[period]de
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 4:00 PM
Location: Murphy’s Law Irish Pub, Kaiserring 10 (Bahnhofvorplatz), Mannheim. We will have something that says ACX on it.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FXCFFJC+6H
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/prD5ofEtxzF8qjdep/mannheim-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

MUNICH

Contact: hill
Contact Info: hill[a t]rationality-munich[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 12:00 PM
Location: Pinakothek der Moderne (subjected to change, please check the lesswrong post for updated, exact instructions on how to find us. we will bring signs) https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FzHr3D3wKi2PTQRyv/acx-everywhere-munich-fall-2026-meetup
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWH4HWC+QVQ
Group Link: https://rationality-munich.com
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FzHr3D3wKi2PTQRyv/acx-everywhere-munich-fall-2026-meetup
Notes: please check the lesswrong post about additional details closer to the event. https://www.lesswrong.com/events/FzHr3D3wKi2PTQRyv/acx-everywhere-munich-fall-2026-meetup

OSNABRÜCK

Contact: Chris
Contact Info: christopher-lalk[a t]gmx[period]de
Time: Thursday, November 5th, 7:30 PM
Location: The meeting will meet in front of the Grand Hotel bar in Osnabrück at Schlosswall 52, 49080 Osnabrück-Wüste. We will go in the Grand Hotel bar at 19:30. I will bring an ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4C729V+CM5
Group Link: For updates or questions, feel free to join the Whatsapp group via: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/FgFuQFv8D6rK8pZH6Dvx2k?mode=gi_t

Greece

ATHENS

Contact: George
Contact Info: acx[period]athens[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 7:00 PM
Location: Enastron (bookstore café), Solonos 101, Athens, Greece - Ask for the ACX meetup at the cafe.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8G95XPMM+JF5
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/dstnJgnT5r5iwHgFK/athens-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: RSVPs are welcome but not necessary. Come and join to share a hot drink and some good conversation about all things ACX, rationality, science, philosophy and more. Both Greek and English-speakers are welcome. Non-ACX readers are equally welcome.

Hungary

BUDAPEST

Contact: Richard
Contact Info: horvirich[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 15th, 2:00 PM
Location: Sirius Teahaz, Budapest, Bródy Sándor u. 13, 1088, We will have an A4 sized hand-written sign that says “ACX Meetup”
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FVXF3V8+3F
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/rB5Y38YWoa6Adsk4e
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ZcHvcEeyMCPJHqMT2/budapest-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Ireland

DUBLIN

Contact: Luan
Contact Info: luan[period]beirne2012[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 6:30 PM
Location: Hotel Motel One, Middle Abbey Street. Ground floor lobby, left past reception we will have an ACX MEETUP sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C5M8PXP+6H
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/ETaDqjMaFFTB6gDzZwfKoI
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/T2L24DevmPhQetfdX/acx-dublin-meet-up-saturday-17th-october-2026
Notes: Everyone welcome. We have a suggested reading to get the discussion flowing. ‘Book review: why are the prices so d*mn high?’ (https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/10/book-review-the-prices-are-too-dmn-high/)

Italy

BOLOGNA

Contact: Luca Petrolati
Contact Info: luc[period]petrolati[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 4:45 PM
Location: Fabrik, Via Augusto Righi 32/E. To find us you can look for the “ACX” sign on our table
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FPHF8XW+GG
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/i5gi4psPJCWTd9FJe/bologna-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

MILAN

Contact: Raffaele and Federico are organizing the Milan Meetup.
Contact Info: raffa[period]mauro[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, November 10th, 7:00 PM
Location: IURIO, Via delle Leghe, 5 NoLo – Milano
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQFF6R8+JP
Group Link: Please write to raffa[period]mauro[a t]gmail[period]com or federico[period]cuppoloni[a t]gmail[period]com to join the mailing list
Notes: RSVP required: please write to raffa[period]mauro[a t]gmail[period]com and federico[period]cuppoloni[a t]gmail[period]com

PADOVA

Contact: Carlo
Contact Info: carlo[period]martinucci[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 2:00 PM
Location: Prato della Valle, fountain in the middle. I’ll be carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it :)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQH9VXG+9J
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/yG58oPrQwQ2QwqFm8/padova-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: We’ll probably find a bar to have a hot chocolate or tea or something :)

ROME

Contact: Grigorios Efstathiadis
Contact Info: +393920366026
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/HtDPwhaNXuYD7Y7L7?g_st=ac
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FHJVGFF+XC
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/IEMlzp5OtHNCy0cmnY8Tro?s=cl&p=a&mlu=4&ilr=4

TURIN/TORINO

Contact: Valentin
Contact Info: val[period]berellis[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: At parco del Valentino in Turin, next to the bench with the two streetlights hugging, commonly known as “la panchina degli innamorati”. Google maps indication: https://maps.app.goo.gl/V6pqY4Cje83MxYPX8?g_st=aw . I will be wearing a white scarf.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FQ92MXM+VP
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/euxajH5f9kaDyg7v6/turin-torino-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please feel free to write me an email if you are interested in coming. My idea was to meet in the park and later, if in sintony with the antendees wishes and the weather, go to a cafè to socialize a bit. Nothing stressful or complicated.

Latvia

RIGA

Contact: Kirils Surovovs
Contact Info: kirils[period]surovovs[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, November 17th, 7:00 PM
Location: Baznīcas iela 15, Centra rajons, Rīga
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G86X449+JH3
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/fE7wFrbHoAKAvw5bw
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/vtoqvHQS8okbkZFFK/riga-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Lithuania

VILNIUS

Contact: LinasKo
Contact Info: linaskondrackis[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 1:00 PM
Location: This time, we’ll meet in Rotušės Aikštė, in the area behind the portal. Look for ACX signs, and if you can’t find us - ping LinasKo on Discord.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G67M7HQ+J2
Group Link: https://discord.gg/jqxuBMeHaw
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/DcBe84Emrv6bv4qE6/acx-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: https://discord.gg/wDgrwTzP?event=1553361656774664232

Netherlands

AMSTERDAM

Contact: Tom
Contact Info: hello[a t]tomrijntjes[period]nl
Time: Sunday, November 29th, 2:00 PM
Location: Amsterdam Westerpark, across the street from IJscuypje Westergasfabriek
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F469VPC+JV
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/IUkNNOwELSH5dJVcqEZUpH
Notes: Feel free to bring kids or dogs. We’ll meet in the park. If the weather is good, bring park activities like frisbee or spikeball. If the weather is poor, we’ll relocate to one of the nearby cafes.

EINDHOVEN

Contact: Niko
Contact Info: hamburger_blues[a t]disroot[period]org
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: Social Hub Restaurant, a table with an ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F37CFRJ+QG
Group Link: Contact on email and I’ll send you the WA group link.
Notes: RSVPs are appreciated so I know how many to expect, but last-minute drop-ins are fine as well. Everyone’s welcome, no need to stress too much. Look for the ACX sign!

Meetup Czar note: Moved the date back by organizer request

UTRECHT

Contact: Titia
Contact Info: struikelover[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 2:00 PM
Location: Maarseveense plassen, on one of the beaches on the north side, I’ll put some signs. In case of rain we’ll go to Fort de Gagel
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F4743RV+C4
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/F8sFqhpP97rJWhHJi/utrecht-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Poland

KRAKOW

Contact: Milosz
Contact Info: milosz[period]slepowronski[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 7:00 PM
Location: Entropia, Warszauera 1
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F2X3W2W+V35
Group Link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/LWKrakow/

LODZ

Contact: Casimir Wanot
Contact Info: casimir[a t]mantis[period]red
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 2:00 PM
Location: We’ll be at Niebostan, which is in a courtyard going off from Piotrkowska. Follow the sign for Muzeum Światła and then up the stairs and to the right to the cafe/restaurant.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F3XQFF3+MR
Group Link: https://discord.gg/DVYMMeJe8

WARSAW

Contact: Edek MacDonald
Contact Info: kingbigmaciv[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 6:00 PM
Location: Południk 2.0 Wilcza 25, 00-544 Warszawa https://maps.app.goo.gl/NwAk4HcAPWgH2E956
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G4362G8+2VJ
Group Link: https://discord.gg/FuxvnujDzd
Notes: Feel free to suggest activities/an agenda for the meetup.

Portugal

LISBON

Contact: Vasco Grilo
Contact Info: vascoamaralgrilo[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: Jardim Amália Rodrigues
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CCGPRJW+V8
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/C2f0AXDgDeRLikAprRXYBi
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/trncXZBXLExaShJTj/acx-ea-lisbon-october-2026-meetup

PORTO

Contact: Andre
Contact Info: andre[a t]thegarden[period]pt
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: thegarden.pt -- we can cater for everyone as a donation. can have up to 100 people.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CHHM8W5+HR
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/NwyDkX72GGQXhYoXZ/porto-viana-do-castelo-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP via email so we know how much food to get!

VIANA DO CASTELO

(See Porto)

Romania

TIMIȘOARA

Contact: Alvin
Contact Info: alv[period]csk[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, October 23rd, 7:00 PM
Location: We’ll be at Scârț Loc Lejer. We’ll very likely be sitting at a table outside, with an “ACX-EA” sign on it!
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GQ3P6VF+7RJ
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/27S98LofYGJwh7YZQ/timisoara-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Feel free to e-mail, message on LessWrong, or to contact me through any other channel!

Russia

KRASNOYARSK

Contact: Ivan
Contact Info: Ivan_Chirik[a t]mail[period]ru
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: “Snezhny Kofe” (Snow Coffee) café. 32a Diktatury Proletariata Street. The large table to the left of the door will be reserved. I will place an “ACX MEETUP” sign on the table. (на русском: Кафе «Снежный кофе», ул. Диктатуры Пролетариата, 32а. Большой стол слева от двери будет забронирован. На стол поставлю табличку “ACX MEETUP”)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9M8J2V65+QG
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4iNmmyrLALGr6d8tw/krasnoyarsk-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: I don’t know if there are people in my city who read ACX. I’m running an experiment: I’m setting up a meetup to see if anyone shows up.

MOSCOW

Contact: Arshak Aivaziain
Contact Info: aivazian[period]arshak[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 18th, 4:00 PM
Location: Bely List (Белый лист) anticafé, Valovaya Street 32/75, building 2, Moscow. We have rented the large hall. Map: https://yandex.com/maps/org/bely_list/1421522637/
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9G7VPJJG+3F
Group Link: https://t.me/+-rklmbNwMvE0YTgy or https://t.me/arccs
Notes: Russian-speaking SSC/ACX social meetup, 16:00–21:00 Moscow time (UTC+3). Newcomers welcome; no required reading. Contributions toward the hall rental are voluntary (approximately 500–600 RUB per contributor). You are welcome even if you cannot pay. Please join the Telegram chat and respond to the attendance/contribution poll, or contact Arshak directly by Telegram or email. Capacity: 40 people.

Serbia

BELGRADE

Contact: Tanja
Contact Info: tanja[period]trninic[a t]efektivnialtruizam[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 4:00 PM
Location: Bar Green House
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GP2RF7G+36
Group Link: https://t.me/+wu3itsO2ZjoxNmY0
Notes: Please RSVP to tanja[period]trninic[a t]efektivnialtruizam[period]com so I know how many spots to reserve.

Slovakia

BRATISLAVA

Contact: Nina P.
Contact Info: ninuskap67[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 7:00 PM
Location: La Putika 7, I will be with an ACX sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FWV546J+H7
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TmkAipoHNfv8QqMdY/bratislava-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Spain

BARCELONA

Contact: Duncan
Contact Info: duncbrownlee[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:30 PM
Location: We’ll be at the south corner of Parc de l’Estació del Nord. I’ll put up a paper sign on one of the trees.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8FH495VM+399
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/ILzY0BtWZM17XXpeqEA2KN?s=sh&p=a&mlu=4&ilr=4
Notes: Please join the Whatsapp if you’re planning on coming, so we all know numbers...and so if nobody is planning on coming I can at least spare myself the shame of sitting hopefully in the park by myself for several hours.

MADRID

Contact: Javier Prieto
Contact Info: javier[period]prieto[period]set[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 11:00 AM
Location: Teatro de Títeres (Parque del Retiro)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CGRC897+G8
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid/
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Sio6YHJnkWzASP5qJ/madrid-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026 or https://www.meetup.com/effective-altruism-madrid/events/316950223/

SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA

Contact: Manuel
Contact Info: mdelrio[a t]eoisantiago[period]org
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 4:30 PM
Location: We’ll be in the Parque Música en Compostela, next to the Auditorio, in the small ping-pong court.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8CJHVFQ4+82
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/xxn73EutMk3xLsYFe/santiago-de-compostela-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know if anybody is going to come.

SEVILLE

Contact: Hugo V
Contact Info: Hviciana[a t]us[period]es
Time: Saturday, November 28th, 12:00 PM
Location: Parque de Magallanes (Magellan’s Park) We’ll be sitting on the grass in one of the sunny spots close to Puente del Cachorro (Cachorro bridge). Use the map pin/coordinates to find the general area, and look for an ACX MEETUP sign. Rain plan: If it’s raining, or the grass is too wet, we’ll meet at the Starbucks next to CaixaForum Sevilla (Torre Sevilla) instead.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8C9M9XRR+HW
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/6zKwxQBiYTbS3e7Lo/seville-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: The meetup will revolve around an informal picnic, and perhaps a walk around some nearby spots on Isla de la Cartuja, such as the Andalusian Centre for Contemporary Art, which is free on Saturdays. It will be family-friendly. If you’re planning to come, please drop me a line at hviciana[a t]us[period]es, so we can coordinate better

Sweden

GOTHENBURG

Contact: Stefan
Contact Info: acx_gbg[a t]posteo[period]se
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 4:00 PM
Location: Café Condeco, Fredsgatan 14, upper floor, look for some books on the table
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F9HPX4C+39F
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/WTFM9rYWeN986yyxC
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/32dtG4bKL2D7JEirp/gothenburg-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

STOCKHOLM

Contact: Carl
Contact Info: carl[period]brannstroem[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 12:28 PM
Location: Bröd & Salt, Birger Jarlsgatan 77, Stockholm
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9FFW83W6+6W
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/KAIpLRiV7g50RBRZ4fsLJa
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 might also be a little nervous 🙂

Switzerland

GENEVA

Contact: Nikita
Contact Info: gladkovna[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 25th, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/aKzrKCEhuiH8yjRCo/geneva-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

ZURICH

Contact: Vitor
Contact Info: acxzurich[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 5:00 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

ESKİŞEHİR

Contact: Rüzgar
Contact Info: acxeskisehir[period]elective527[a t]passmail[period]net
Time: Saturday, November 28th, 3:00 PM
Location: The second floor of Kahve Dünyası Algötür at Adalar. I’ll be in a red.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GFGQGG8+X4
Group Link: https://luma.com/acxeskisehir
Notes: Please register the event at Luma with one click so I have an idea of how many people are thinking of coming. Also, join the WhatsApp community to make coordination easier chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/FI7gMQKGmXc0uK59D72l6G Thank you for considering attending the world’s first ACX meetup in Eskişehir. That matters.

İSTANBUL

Contact: Ozge
Contact Info: ozgeco[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 31st, 3:00 PM
Location: Istanbul Kitapcisi at Yeni İskele Kadikoy (Go upstairs of the Ferry Station. There is bookstore and a cafe).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8GGFX2VF+63
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/HzNpFYzuGRpknJiP2/istanbul-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Old friends, new friends, everybody welcome. If the weather permits, we’ll sit on the terrace of the Ferry Station (hoping for a beautiful autumn day:). I will put an ACX Meetup sign on our table. I will also check my email often on our meeting day.

United Kingdom

BELFAST

Contact: JD
Contact Info: dawson[period]john[period]andrew[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, October 22nd, 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+QR
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/CDSA0LmYMnF4Z2RInwCGGV

BIRMINGHAM

Contact: Sachit
Contact Info: sachit[period]lesswrong[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 2:00 PM
Location: Tim Hortons, New street. First floor. Look for the ACX sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C4WF4H2+M59
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/JuWp9W8PAGCjwyewn/birmingham-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: RSVPs not essential, but would be useful for coordinating things.

BRISTOL

Contact: Nick
Contact Info: thegreatnick[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: Dareshack Coffee Shop, Wine Street
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3VFC45+68
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/JZ99STbAstfBGCDzunqKUb
Notes: Will be spending two hours enjoying the coffee, playing board/card games. Some will be going to see Michael Safar stand up comedy next door at 1700. I’ll have an EA shirt on and generally will be looking out for lost people.

CAMBRIDGE, UK

Contact: John Lawrence Aspden
Contact Info: ssc[a t]aspden[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 2:00 PM
Location: Fort St George pub on Midsummer Common in Cambridge, England (w3w regard.unable.inspector, WGS84: 52.21245, 0.12780)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9F42646H+X4
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/WMbYtZzFdTQrNRiKB/cambridge-uk-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

EDINBURGH

Contact: Sean
Contact Info: astral[dot]club[dot]edinburgh[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, November 14, 03:00 PM
Location: 31 Buccleuch Place (EH8 9JS). Our meeting will be inside Edinburgh Uni's econ department (which is an old house). The building is locked so I will meet people outside at 3pm and let everyone in.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C7RWRV7+6J
Group Link: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HovsC [remove this bit] R0W5iZFlrwcVSSEH1
Additional Notes: We normally discuss a reading or two at the meetings. This time we'll discuss Scott's classic 'Meditations on Moloch' (https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

LONDON

Contact: Alf
Contact Info: alflawrie[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 7:00 PM
Location: The Somers Town Coffee House
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XGVH9+XX
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/YF6xNjqz8dCnoDkLd/london-united-kingdom-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please email if “definitely” or “maybe” coming so I can warn venue about how much space we might occupy - be great to see you!

OXFORD

Contact: Amit
Contact Info: amitlevy49[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: Holly Bush, Oxford
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3WQP2G+VF
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/2ZrhqtT8dkZ7Mppjm/oxford-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

READING

Contact: Chris
Contact Info: chrisawooldridge[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 2:00 PM
Location: Siren Craft Brew, Reading (1 Friars Walk, Reading RG1 1HP)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9C3XF24G+P8
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/5GhY4NYFmzZKBRvpy/reading-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: If you are coming, an email would be appreciated so I have a rough view of numbers, but it’s not a requirement.

SHEFFIELD

Contact: Colin Z. Robertson
Contact Info: czr[a t]rtnl[period]org[period]uk
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 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/8RMx8BvZbz

North America

Canada

CALGARY

Contact: Megh
Contact Info: meghss[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 1:00 PM
Location: Bono Coffee Roasters, 733 1 Ave NE, Calgary, AB T2E 0B8 (I will ACX Meetup Poster)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/95373X33+6H
Group Link: We have a whatsapp group (I can add you, pls email me)

EDMONTON

Contact: Joseph
Contact Info: ta1hynp09[a t]relay[period]firefox[period]com
Time: Thursday, October 22nd, 7:00 PM
Location: Irrational Brewing - see the event page for more details. We will have an ACX sign so new members can find us.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/9558HF27+7Q
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hNzrLboTGkRFraHWG
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/ZHfnentPfBBA7B8wq/acx-meetups-everywhere-6
Notes: Please RSVP to the listed email.

HALIFAX

Contact: Noah
Contact Info: usernameneeded[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 1:00 PM
Location: We’ll be meeting in the Oxford taproom on either the ground or second floor. Our table will have a blue geometric shape on it.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87PRJ9VX+MP
Group Link: https://discord.gg/2YsMf8YEj

KITCHENER

(See WATERLOO)

LONDON

Contact: Andrew
Contact Info: andrewjmarlowe[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 2:00 PM
Location: Victoria Park, at the Holy Roller (Tank/WW2 Memorial)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JWXQR2+57
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/oNkmNzhNbGikn9dqw/london-ontario-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

MONTREAL

Contact: Matt
Contact Info: mll[a t]mll[period]bio
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 1:00 PM
Location: L’Esplanade Tranquille, 1442 rue Clark. We will either be sitting at one of the metal tables outside, or at the picnic tables inside the ground floor of the two-story glass building. Look for the ACX Meetup sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q8GC5M+PW
Group Link: Discord: https://discord.gg/PWr [remove this] 49ZcHc | LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/3nnqSgGbF8x3mTcia
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/4AKK4Pxju3tNPNoyG/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026-montreal-qc

OTTAWA

Contact: Tess
Contact Info: rationalottawa[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, November 20th, 6:00 PM
Location: The 2026 Fall/Winter ACX Meetups Everywhere in Ottawa will be on Friday, November 20th, at 6pm! Location: The ground floor atrium of the National Art Centre (NAC), 1 Elgin St. We’ll be sitting in the area with the curvy & colourful couches, and will display a yellow sign reading “ACX.” 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 come collect you.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87Q6C8F4+CF
Group Link: Receive a link to join our discord after meeting us in person!
Notes: Come on out to encounter ACX readers, and to find out what our Rational Ottawa weekly meetup group is like/is all about! Meetups Everywhere is for everyone- 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, please rsvp so I have an idea of how much food to bring!

TORONTO

Contact: Jenn
Contact Info: contact[a t]waterline[period]to
Time: Sunday, November 8th, 2:00 PM
Location: 30 Adelaide St E, inside the office tower. There will be a volunteer on the ground floor to let you in through the gates.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87M2MJ2F+C7
Group Link: https://luma.com/toronto-rationality for big events, https://waterline.to for cozy ones
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pjKuZGJzmtnzMdF58/fall-2026-acx-schelling-meetup
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong if you can, but RSVPs are not required. https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pjKuZGJzmtnzMdF58/fall-2026-acx-schelling-meetup

VANCOUVER

Contact: Allwyn
Contact Info: allwynmascar[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 1:00 PM
Location: C market coffee 195 E 36th Ave, Vancouver, BC V5W 4A1
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84XR6VQX+86
Group Link: https://discord.gg/V5WaxZcTh
Notes: Rsvp in the discord event but not mandatory

VICTORIA

Contact: Sarah
Contact Info: mcmanus[period]sarah[period]a[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Monday, October 26th, 6:30 PM
Location: We’ll be at The Drake Eatery, 517 Pandora Ave, Victoria, BC V8W 3J6. I’ll have an ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84WRCJHJ+89
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TyKeiXPqFmvvmASqA/victoria-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: The venue is kid-friendly before 10pm.

WATERLOO

Contact: Brent
Contact Info: brent[period]komer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, October 22nd, 6:30 PM
Location: We’ll be meeting in Meeting Room A of the central branch of the Kitchener Public Library (85 Queen St. N, Kitchener). The meeting rooms are located in the basement of the library. If you come in through the main doors, do a u-turn to your left as soon as you enter both sets of doors to go down the stairwell.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86MXFG37+3G
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/NiM9cQJ5qXqhdmP5p
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fSeB3YEA8QvS5o7wH/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: If possible, please RSVP on LW and/or Discord so I know how much food to get. https://www.lesswrong.com/events/fSeB3YEA8QvS5o7wH/acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Mexico

MEXICO CITY

Contact: Eddie
Contact Info: acxcdmx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/88rhpRAd5dRsc8N2B/mexico-city-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

United States

Arizona

PHOENIX

Contact: Nathan
Contact Info: natoboo2000[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 1:30 PM
Location: We’ll be at Snakes & Lattes Tempe (20 W 6th St, Tempe, AZ 85281). There will be a sign that says ACX MEETUP, or you can just ask the staff for me (Nathan)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/855CC3F5+QJ
Group Link: https://discord.com/invite/ANSywQABEF
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Moj7LTqYdwbwQ5EPw/acx-phoenix-october-2026-meetup-meetups-everywhere-feature
Notes: Please RSVP on LessWrong so I know how many seats to get

Arkansas

ROGERS

Contact: Cristina
Contact Info: olsoncristina[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, October 21st, 6:00 PM
Location: The Railyard Bike Park, 299 E. Cherry Street, Rogers AR 72756. Meet us under the pavilion that is next to the bike tracks. In case of bad weather, check in with the organizer, and we may change it to a restaurant nearby.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86878VHP+F9
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/hKuyxouqJ35D9gnnu/rogers-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

California

BERKELEY

Contact: David
Contact Info: dsaifer03[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, November 15, 12:00 PM
Location: Cedar Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VVPG6+MP
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/bayarealesswrong

LOS ANGELES

Contact: Nathan
Contact Info: nathan[a t]neuralviolin[period]com
Time: Wednesday, October 21st, 7:30 PM
Location: 11841 Wagner St. Culver City, CA 90230
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8553XHWM+GP
Group Link: https://discord.gg/TaYjsvN
Notes: The weekly reading is posted in the discord

REDWOOD CITY

Contact: Steven
Contact Info: stevenl451[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 11:00 AM
Location: Sana’a Cafe, I’ll have an ACX meetup sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VFQP9+JC
Group Link: https://discord.gg/8VaYT7Rtk “Events” section

SAN DIEGO

Contact: Julius
Contact Info: julius[period]simonelli[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 11:00 AM
Location: Wisdom Park
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8544VRXM+46
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/san-diego-rationalists/events/316848179/

SAN FRANCISCO

Contact: Nate
Contact Info: 34251super[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 1:00 PM
Location: Mox, 1680 Mission St, San Francisco, CA 94103
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VPH5P+Q4
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/qQkgmEeEreY6gjd7o
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/huiWRwyZhoF7m6qva/acx-everywhere-fall-26

Scott provisionally plans to attend this one!

SAN JOSE

Contact: DDF
Contact Info: ddfr[a t]daviddfriedman[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 2:00 PM
Location: 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849W825J+6Q
Group Link: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/SSC%20Meetups%20announcement.html
Notes: Please let me know if you are coming. Kids welcome.

SUNNYVALE

Contact: Jon Wolverton
Contact Info: wolverton[period]jr[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 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[a t]googlegroups[period]com
Notes: We’re meeting outdoors in a park next to a playground so kids & pets are welcome! This also means we’re vulnerable to inclement weather, so check the forecast and come prepared.

Colorado

BOULDER

Contact: Josh
Contact Info: josh[period]sacks[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mqKGZLXmhnhu2w9Jr/boulder-acx-fall-2026-meetup
Notes: RSVP not required, but it’d help us estimate food & drink: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/mqKGZLXmhnhu2w9Jr/boulder-acx-fall-2026-meetup

DENVER

Contact: Steven Zuber
Contact Info: stevenjzuber[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 18th, 12:00 PM
Location: Silver Valley Neighborhood Clubhouse. Just east of 8769 W Cornell Ave, Lakewood, CO 80227
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85FPMW54+JG
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/oa7zHKuy5jdJQ9HAB
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XxiLfwFvLtBSXHhYa/denver-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Feel free to bring kids, pets, food, etc. :) The form didn’t give me an event end time field, but it’ll go until 6pm.

Connecticut

NEW HAVEN

Contact: Richard
Contact Info: acx-meetup-hartford[a t]protonmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 4:00 PM
Location: MOTW cafe at 296 Crown St, New Haven, CT 06511
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87H98349+M9
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/hyzRLJBLSkeq3xtQn
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/28v4fyfvcp9NBfu5u/new-haven-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

District of Columbia

WASHINGTON

Contact: Ben Schwab
Contact Info: schwabbenjamin[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 5:30 PM
Location: Teaism Penn Quarter, 400 8th St NW, Washington, DC 20004
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87C4VXWG+2M
Group Link: https://dcacxrationalitymeetups.beehiiv.com/ or 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: Cassander is banned from attending ACX events. He seems to have a habit of using straw organizers to run meetups which claim to be ACX meetups.

Florida

FORT LAUDERDALE

Contact: Lawrence
Contact Info: fort[period]lauderdale[period]acx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 22nd, 2:00 PM
Location: Funky Buddha Brewery, I’ll be sitting inside with a white button-down shirt and a sign that says “ACX Meetup”
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RX5VF9+MC
Group Link: https://discord.gg/FbNpdt2Ur <- Discord Server
Notes: If you have a Discord, please join and introduce yourself, but it’s not required to attend

MIAMI

Contact: Charlie
Contact Info: chuckwilson477[a t]yahoo[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 12:00 PM
Location: Books & Books, 265 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, FL 33134 There will be an ACX MEETUP sign, but the quickest way to find us will be to send a message by e-mail or on our Discord server. There is parking available in a nearby garage.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76QXQP2R+628
Group Link: https://discord.gg/svZeYP83MQ
Notes: The meetup will go on for several hours, so don’t worry if you have to arrive late. We also host meetups throughout the south Florida area - not just Miami, but also Broward and Palm Beach counties. There are plenty of other opportunities if you can’t make it to this event. Please join our Discord or send us an e-mail, we’re always welcoming!

ORLANDO

Contact: Jonathan
Contact Info: itslabradordali[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, October 28th, 6:30 PM
Location: DoubleTree by Hilton, Orlando East UCF 12125 High Tech Ave, Orlando, FL 32817 Restaurant or lobby Find the big rat plush! 🐀
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76WWJQ2Q+3G
Group Link: https://discord.gg/WfPcVRB7yf
Notes: Discord/email RSVPs are helpful You’re still welcome if it’s later than 6:30; I’ll stick around for a few hours

ST. PETERSBURG

Contact: Nathaniel
Contact Info: nathanieltb2[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 6:00 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.” Afterwards, we may walk elsewhere, so feel free to reach out to me if you think you might be late; I can let you know where we end up.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76VVQ9GF+W8
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/pq8G5c8un5QAmAcFn/st-petersburg-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

WEST PALM BEACH

Contact: Rob Roy
Contact Info: robroyacx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 11:00 AM
Location: Common Grounds 3065 S Dixie Hwy, West Palm Beach, FL 33405
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76RXMWPW+53W
Group Link: https://discord.gg/kdsvT3Z6C

Georgia

ATLANTA

Contact: Steve
Contact Info: steve[a t]digitaltoolfactory[period]net
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bold Monk Brewing 1737 Ellsworth Industrial Blvd NW Suite D-1 Atlanta, GA 30318, USA
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/865QRH2F+V8
Group Link: https://acxatlanta.com/2026/10/06/the-october-2026-meetup-will-be-october-17th-at-bold-monk-at-200-pm/
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TKnbjj758iaYsHkvC/acx-atlanta-november-meetup-1 OR https://acxatlanta.com/2026/10/28/the-november-2026-meetup-will-be-november-14th-at-bold-monk-at-200-pm/ OR https://www.meetup.com/acx-atlanta/events/317179969/, take your pick!

BLUE RIDGE

Contact: Colby
Contact Info: colbybalch[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 11:00 AM
Location: The Wishing Well, in downtown Blue Ridge, Georgia
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/866QVM8F+9W
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/r3fX6wp3kPrvRpPQA/blue-ridge-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Illinois

CHICAGO

Contact: Todd
Contact Info: todd[period]nief[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 2:00 PM
Location: South Loop Strength & Conditioning: 645 S Clark, Chicago IL 60605
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HJV9F9+CV
Group Link: https://chicagorationality.com
Notes: We will have a discussion topic with some (suggested) reading. The topic is here: https://chicagorationality.com/meetups/november-2026-meetup/ Please feel free to come even if you haven’t done the reading, you’re worried it will be awkward, you won’t fit in, or you aren’t the “typical person who comes to a Rationality meetup.” We are welcoming!

Indiana

BLOOMINGTON

Contact: John Linnemeier
Contact Info: himalayansp[a t]hotmail[period]com
Time: Friday, November 6th, 2:00 PM
Location: 310 S Eastside Dr
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86FM5F7P+MP
Notes: Dogs are welcome

SOUTH BEND

Contact: Gibson Spaulding
Contact Info: gibspaulding17[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 7:00 PM
Location: Langlab 1302 High St, South Bend, IN 46601 I’ll have a sign! The building is an L shape, so I’ll try to be near the elbow so you can see me from wherever you come in, but it will really just depend on where I can find a spot. If you message me ahead of time, I can get there early and let you know where I end up.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86HMMQ66+FF
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/eXja7yoozwkMGAw4t/south-bend-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

WEST LAFAYETTE

Contact: Brian
Contact Info: purduerationality[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, October 21st, 7:00 PM
Location: Stanley Coulter G014. G014 is in the basement, and I’ll put a sign near the door and prop it open.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86GMC3GP+H4H
Group Link: https://discord.gg/Z575wrxdaP
Notes: We will have snacks!

Iowa

DES MOINES

Contact: Liam Robins
Contact Info: liamhrobins[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, October 16th, 5:30 PM
Location: Plain Talk Books & Coffee, 602 E Grand Ave, Des Moines, IA 50309
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86H8H9RQ+CX
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/YR6QvrWm4JoDmAx6G/des-moines-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: RSVPs are optional but highly encouraged; email me at liamhrobins[a t]gmail[period]com if you plan on coming.

Louisiana

NEW ORLEANS

Contact: Blake Bertuccelli-Booth
Contact Info: fest[a t]philosophers[period]group
Time: Thursday, November 12th, 12:00 PM
Location: 400 Esplanade Ave. (top floor).
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76XFXW6R+GV
Group Link: https://fest.philosophers.group/
Notes: Please register. This is part of the Arts & Ideas fest. If you’re only attending our meetup you can use the code “ACX” when purchasing for a $0 ticket, but please consider donating if you’re going to other fest events too.

Maryland

BALTIMORE

Contact: Rivka
Contact Info: rivka[a t]adrusi[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 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/h4z5UgeYVK. 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

Contact: Skyler
Contact Info: skyler[a t]rationalitymeetups[period]org
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 2:00 PM
Location: Sennott Park. Look for the man in the tall striped hat
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87JC9W92+92
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ssc-boston
Notes: It’s probably going to be a bit chilly, you may want a jacket. Kids and pets welcome, it’s a park with a playground right next to it. We’ll have pizza coming after around three or four pm.

Scott’s Meetup Czar plans to attend this one!

GREAT BARRINGTON

Contact: Sonja
Contact Info: sonja[dot]public[at]proton[dot]me
Time: Sunday, November 01, 11:00 AM
Location: Rubi’s Coffee, 264 Main Street, Great Barrington 01230
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87J85JWQ+45
Additional Notes: RSVP required

NORTHAMPTON

Contact: Alex (Liebowitz)
Contact Info: alex[a t]alexliebowitz[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/SrcKuFd2wJ7HGitiB/northampton-ma-area-acx-meetup-fall-2026-meetups-everywhere

Michigan

ANN ARBOR

Contact: Joseph Pryor
Contact Info: Jwpryorprojects[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 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 other monthly meetups on Saturday Oct 17th and Saturday Dec 19th

EAST LANSING

Contact: Daniel A
Contact Info: adamiak1[a t]msu[period]edu
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 3:00 PM
Location: Moka & Co Cafe, 565 E Grand River Ave Unit 200, East Lansing, MI 48823 I’ll be inside with an ACX sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86JQPGMF+99
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/2yKCYvpKXibGfyL5Q/east-lansing-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Shoot me an email letting me know you’re coming so I can reserve a table.

Minnesota

ST PAUL

Contact: Aaron
Contact Info: ironlordbyron[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 4:00 PM
Location: 41 Cleveland Ave S, St Paul, MN 55105
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86P8WRQ6+XW
Group Link: https://discord.gg/CEa3RUARp
Notes: Note: davanni’s has poor vegan options. If that’s you you’ve got options: You can try to sneak in outside food, or eat beforehand, or accept the somewhat uninspiring bare Davanni’s salad as your main course.

Missouri

KANSAS CITY

Contact: Alex Hedtke
Contact Info: alex[dot]hedtke[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Friday, November 20, 6:30 PM
Location: Minsky's Pizza: 427 Main St, Kansas City, MO 64105
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86F74C58+CW
Group Link: https://luma.com/kansascityeffectivealtruism
Additional Notes: We will be in the conference room on the second floor.

ST. LOUIS

Contact: kuilin
Contact Info: contact-a2c9d523[a t]kuilin[period]net
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 4:00 PM
Location: Urban Chestnut Grove Brewery & Bierhall. I will sharpie some sort of ACX sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86CFJPGQ+MG
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/MKy9bWwwL48vM5yBm/st-louis-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: The Fordo’s Pizza has board games and good pizza. And the beer’s great :)

Nevada

LAS VEGAS

Contact: Jon R
Contact Info: ray[dot]jonathan[dot]w[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Saturday, October 24, 11:00 AM
Location: El Segundo Sol in the Fashion Show Mall
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85864RHJ+3H
Additional Notes: Feel free to bring +1's, kids, and robots

Meetup Czar note: Las Vegas is looking for new organizers, so if you’re interested in running future events please reach out!

RENO

Contact: Joe S.
Contact Info: jrsimpsonmd[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 2:00 PM
Location: Phillip & Annie Callahan Park, 15960 Callahan Rd, Reno, 89511
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/85F2956J+JQ
Group Link: Discord - South Tahoe ACX Readers

New Jersey

PRINCETON

Contact: AGG
Contact Info: signoregalilei[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 1:00 PM
Location: Princeton Public Library’s “Jammin’ Community Café”, 65 Witherspoon St, Princeton, NJ 08542 - we will have the appropriate sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G7982Q+JV
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/jYF8mg4Li8dP4ZXBZ/princeton-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: An Inkhaven trained bloggers will be there!

New Mexico

ALBUQUERQUE

Contact: Mary
Contact Info: geofishtree[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/TQLvAY7N4CZRZYrqt/albuquerque-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Although this is a brewery, it’s family friendly and has NA beverage options. I will have some food to share. Please feel free to come even if you didn’t RSVP.

New York

ALBANY

Contact: Jake
Contact Info: jacob[period]scheiber[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 8th, 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
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/9aTMb5DcvSaHBgxgj/albany-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

BROOKLYN

Contact: Laetitia
Contact Info: laetitia[period]teodorescu[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 2:00 PM
Location: Marsha P Johnson park, southern path to the beach
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G8P2CP+PR
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iFn38ceNfPvk8nJyz/brooklyn-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

ITHACA

Contact: Benedict Segrest
Contact Info: bjs322[a t]cornell[period]edu
Time: Friday, November 6th, 7:00 PM
Location: 115 The Knoll Rd.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87J5FG35+GW
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/q8pPLwZrYjbr7XGu5/ithaca-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: RSVPs required!

LONG ISLAND

(See Rockeville Centre)

MANHATTAN

Contact: Shaked
Contact Info: shaked[dot]koplewitz[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, November 8, 3:00 PM
Location: Winter Garden in Brookfield Place
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G7PX7M+7R
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/overcomingbiasnyc
Additional Notes: Also discord invite link https://discord.gg/hSEva4Cxa

Meetup Czar update: Location moved due to the original place being closed!

NEW YORK CITY

(See BROOKLYN or MANHATTAN)

ROCHESTER

Contact: Rachael
Contact Info: rharper011901[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Tuesday, October 27th, 6:00 PM
Location: Irondiquoit Public Library, 1290 Titus Ave, Rochester, NY 14617, Second Floor, Room #216
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87M46C69+PH
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/cLiZZqpwrA8xHoJdG/rochester-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please refrain from wearing scented products such as perfume, cologne, and fragrant personal care products while using this space, as they can trigger serious health issues for those with fragrance allergies. We appreciate your cooperation in making this area accessible! For more information, visit http://sharetheair.ucla.edu

ROCKVILLE CENTRE

Contact: Justin
Contact Info: justin2088[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 2:00 PM
Location: My house, 82 S Centre Ave, Rockville Centre, NY. Weather permitting, we will be in my backyard.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G8M932+M2
Group Link: overcomingbiasnyc[a t]googlegroups[period]com
Notes: RSVP to justin2088[a t]gmail[period]com if you can so I know roughly how much food to get. But don’t let a lack of RSVP stop you from coming on the day of. Weather permitting, we will be in my backyard, but if not, we will be in my house, which has cats.

Meetup Czar Note: Date updated to November 14th to give a bit more time for folks to see it.

North Carolina

ASHEVILLE

Contact: Matt Brooks
Contact Info: matthewrbrooks94[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 8th, 2:00 PM
Location: Wedge Brewery at Foundation - 5 Foundy St, Asheville, NC 28801
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/867VHCGM+WHF
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/avl-friendly-ambitious-nerds/
Notes: You can bring food and there is usually a food truck open on Sundays

CHAPEL HILL

(See DURHAM)

GREENVILLE

Contact: Emily and Carlos (couple co-hosting)
Contact Info: emilymarinkovic314[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 11:00 AM
Location: The Cafe Electric
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8774JJ6G+PX
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/XhrKcxvksnpMfZBaA/greenville-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

DURHAM

Contact: William Crumpler
Contact Info: wdcrumpler[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 2:00 PM
Location: Hi-Wire Brewing Durham (800 Taylor St. #9-15 Durham, NC 27701). We will be set up at a few of the tables with an ACX sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8773X4R6+J22
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/RTLW
Notes: We will have pizza! The venue serves beer but is kid-friendly. I’ll have more details on the Google group (see link)

RALEIGH

(See DURHAM)

North Dakota

FARGO

Contact: Nathaniel
Contact Info: nathanielmchaffie[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 9:00 AM
Location: I’ll be at Boppas Bagels at table with a small sign reading “ACX Meetup”
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86R5R5PH+25
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Z7MoYnFKPzNgGotaK/fargo-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Oklahoma

OKLAHOMA CITY

Contact: bean
Contact Info: battleshipbean[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 1:30 PM
Location: Fairmoore Park, 630 NW 5th St, Moore, OK 73160
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86748GR3+HG
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/keyopCDYnNDRNwars/oklahoma-city-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Oregon

CORVALLIS

Contact: Kenan
Contact Info: kbitikofer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, October 23rd, 6:30 PM
Location: The Plaza Food Court in Corvallis, in one of the upper lofty hang-out nooks if possible. I’ll have an ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PRHP7P+HW
Group Link: https://discord.gg/b7wdkfhpkf

EUGENE

Contact: Michael B
Contact Info: michael[period]bacarella[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Wednesday, November 18th, 6:00 PM
Location: beergarden. 777 W 6th Ave, Eugene, OR 97402
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84PR3V3W+C6
Group Link: https://discord.gg/swAexPcjNS

PORTLAND

Contact: Sam Celarek
Contact Info: scelarek[at]gmail[dot]com
Time: Sunday, November 08, 05:30 PM
Location: Go to 1548 NE 15th Ave, Portland, OR 97232, there will be a large PEAR sign outside.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84QVG8MX+MV
Group Link: https://www.meetup.com/portland-effective-altruism-and-rationality/events/316960882

Pennsylvania

GETTYSBURG

Contact: hruss
Contact Info: hruss[a t]hruss[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 2:00 PM
Location: Ragged Edge Coffee (Upstairs)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F4RQJ8+7GV
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Lptv8NHseedJAJ49W/gettysburg-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Meeting will probably happen upstairs

HARRISBURG

Contact: Phil
Contact Info: acxharrisburg[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 3:00 PM
Location: Pizza Boy Brewing 2240 Millennium Way, Enola, PA 17025 We will have an ACX MEETUP sign on the table
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G572QH+CCH
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/iqyBBHCJEwB7owcfa/acx-harrisburg-november-networking-2026

PHILADELPHIA

Contact: ben
Contact Info: bwieland[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, November 7th, 10:00 AM
Location: La Colombe Coffee, 100 S Independence Mall W (6th at Market, SW corner)
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB

PITTSBURGH

Contact: Thomas
Contact Info: pghacx[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 1:30 PM
Location: Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh - Squirrel Hill, 5801 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, PA 15217. We’ll be in Meeting Room B. Meeting Room B is in the Northeast corner of the building. That’s the opposite corner from the intersection of Forbes/Murray, or, if you come in the back entrance on Marlborough Ave, it’ll be immediately to your right.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G2C3QG+9W
Group Link: Email pghacx[a t]gmail[period]com to get on the mailing list and/or the Discord server.
Notes: No RSVP necessary, I’ll bring some snacks/water/coffee. The library asks me to clarify that they are not organizing nor sponsoring this event.

Tennessee

NASHVILLE

Contact: Jonah
Contact Info: generalpurposeemail1[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 11:00 AM
Location: Modern Warriors, 4290 Kenilwood Dr, Nashville, TN 37204
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/868M36WQ+H4
Group Link: https://acx-nashville.netlify.app
Notes: We’re a regularly meeting, already established chapter, so ~7 people are expected by default. This will be one of our more activity-heavy days (we’re starting with coffee and machine gun rentals, then lunch, then an escape game, then a movie + discussion afterwards, in that order. Feel free to drop by for only part of the day if any activities don’t interest you.) To RSVP, sign up for email reminders or join the groupchat, visit https://acx-nashville.netlify.app. Lunch (~1 PM, nearby) is an open social with no agenda, a good time to join if you’d rather skip the activities.

Texas

AUSTIN

Contact: Silas Barta
Contact Info: sbarta [at] gmail [do t] com, alternately austin-less-wrong[a t]googlegroups[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 12:00 PM
Location: The park by Central Market, parking lot at ~3900 Guadalupe St (Central Market address is 4001 N Lamar). We’ll have tents set up by the stone tables near the pond and an “ATX LessWrong” sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86248746+7C
Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/
Notes: Feel free to bring kids/dogs. Please RSVP so we have an idea how much food to get. We will provide breakfast tacos (including vegan) and drinks. Bathrooms available inside Central Market.

DALLAS

Contact: Ethan
Contact Info: ethan[period]morse97[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 22nd, 1:00 PM
Location: Whole Foods Market, 11700 Preston Rd Ste 714, Dallas, TX 75230. We’ll be in the upstairs seating area closest to the windows.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8645W55W+2JM
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/7MLzBdjydkE3NpQpp/dallas-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Feel free to bring a friend!

HOUSTON

Contact: Nathaniel
Contact Info: nathanielrouth[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 3:00 PM
Location: Empire Café, 1732 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77098 We’ll be in the outdoor dining area with a small sign on the table. Empire has a small parking lot, and there’s free street parking in the adjacent neighborhood. Bus Route #82 has a stop one (1) block away.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X6PHVW+5J7
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/pwitck4YZQsnXYp9q; https://discord.gg/DzmEPAscpS
Notes: RSVP on Less Wrong so we get the right number of tables and appetizers/pizzas. Friends and family are welcome, just let us know so there’s space for them to sit! Updates will be posted on both Less Wrong and Discord.

SAN ANTONIO

Contact: James P
Contact Info: jonbenettleilax[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 1:00 PM
Location: 4513 N Loop 1604 W, San Antonio, TX 78249 I’ll have a little sign and name tags to fill out. Our meetup is usually a less than a dozen people.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/76X3HCWG+XX
Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/CEPoFETJXADdriPGt
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/GXo2BcP5hmGf7ZE5c/san-antonio-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

WACO

Contact: Michael
Contact Info: michael[a t]postlibertarian[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 1st, 2:00 PM
Location: Dichotomy Coffee. 508 Austin Ave, Waco, TX 76701. I will be at a table with a sign that says ACX MEETUP.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8634HV49+H5
Group Link: https://discord.gg/VqqcJ6rkz6

Utah

SALT LAKE CITY

Contact: Lance Spencer
Contact Info: lance[period]e[period]spencer[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 3:00 PM
Location: City Creek Mall Food Court
Coordinates: https://maps.app.goo.gl/1RJfQvSsA2z5U4Te9?g_st=ic
Group Link: https://luma.com/4xndrf9v

Meetup Czar update: The location moved!

Vermont

BURLINGTON

Contact: Evan
Contact Info: acx[period]meetups[period]es[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 10:00 AM
Location: Hack Club HQ, 212 Battery St. Enter via the parking lot on Maple Street, we’re on the second floor.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87P8FQFJ+GR7
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/burlington-lwacx
Notes: Please email acx[period]meetups[period]es[a t]gmail[period]com to RSVP

Virginia

RICHMOND

Contact: Brandon
Contact Info: brandonmquintin[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, November 13th, 6:30 PM
Location: Hardywood Pizza Kitchen + Taproom, 2410 Ownby Ln, Richmond, VA 23220
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8794HG7R+XX
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/PJhiCCAQovXcHCNvk/richmond-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: We’re a small group (there’s usually four or five of us) and we tend to get together for drinks and food at least once every other month. Send me an email and I’ll add you to our group chat!

WILLIAMSBURG

Contact: Joseph (Jough)
Contact Info: joughdonakowski[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Friday, November 20th, 6:00 PM
Location: Anonymous Coffee; I will get a table and have an ACX MEETUP sign
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/879577H5+7C
Group Link: https://discord.gg/8g7umyF6s
Notes: A food truck is typically present and they allow outside food/UberEats also. An RSVP to joughdonakowski[a t]gmail[period]com would be appreciated, but is not required.

Meetup Czar Note: The location changed by organizer request!

Washington

BELLEVUE

Contact: Joey
Contact Info: me[a t]joeym[period]org
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 2:00 PM
Location: Bellevue Public Library [EDIT: Nope, library apparently doesn’t have meeting room, stand by for an updated location]
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVJRC4+28
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Ndyr2B6LEEBkYEJay/bellevue-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

SEATTLE

Contact: Joey
Contact Info: me[a t]joeym[period]org
Time: Wednesday, October 28th, 6:00 PM
Location: Armistice Coffee in the back alley
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/84VVMMHJ+4WM
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/8N9iGKxXmqsz6cAks/seattle-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

South America

Argentina

BUENOS AIRES

Contact: Martin
Contact Info: martin[at]comellas[dot]org
Time: Saturday, November 07, 03:00 PM
Location: Vecino Cafe (Vicente Lopez). We'll be in the back patio and I'll be wearing a dark red shirt and jeans.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q3FGW7+GC8

Brazil

BELO HORIZONTE

Contact: David Reis
Contact Info: davidreis[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 3:00 PM
Location: Pão de Queijaria R. Antônio de Albuquerque, 862 - Savassi, Belo Horizonte - MG
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/58GR3376+3J
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/GMPEj6BsdLo0Zk1L3yO7Pa

BRASÍLIA

Contact: Felipe
Contact Info: acxbrasilia[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, November 8th, 2:00 PM
Location: Sesilab Cafe We’ll be at the tables next to the cafe on the upper pavilion, I’ll be wearing an Alan Turing white shirt, carrying a sign with ACX MEETUP on it
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/58PJ6438+CW
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/JRlQ6XY2qt84mjIe93v7Uq

CHAPECÓ

Contact: Silva
Contact Info: sergioteixeiradasilva[a t]protonmail[period]ch
Time: Saturday, November 21st, 3:00 PM
Location: Shopping Pátio Chapecó (Fernando Machado Avenue, 4000 D) food court; I’ll be wearing red and carrying a sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5849W9JF+3G
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/p5nRvuqSrozS3rux5/chapeco-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

FLORIANÓPOLIS

Contact: Adiel
Contact Info: adiel[a t]airpost[period]net
Time: Saturday, November 14th, 4:00 PM
Location: Angeloni Beira Mar, at the food court. I’ll be wearing a yellow hat.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/589R2Q8W+73
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/Ks3XRn1t5Z48rCn7ruS7RC
Notes: Everyone is welcome! As usual, there will be cookies.

PORTO ALEGRE

Contact: Silva
Contact Info: sergioteixeiradasilva[a t]protonmail[period]ch
Time: Saturday, October 31st, 3:00 PM
Location: Iguatemi Porto Alegre (João Wallig Avenue, 1800) food court - I’ll be wearing red and carrying a sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48XCXRFP+2W
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/kNY4djN9hwWFZD4BP/porto-alegre-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Chile

SANTIAGO

Contact: Iñaki
Contact Info: inaki[period]escarate[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 24th, 4:00 PM
Location: Mesas afuera de la entrada poniente del MUT, voy a estar con un cartel.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/47RFH9JX+X8
Group Link: chat[period]whatsapp[period]com/H42KGoGuAt5D7tL0u8HBlr
Notes: Todos bienvenidos! Everybody welcome!

Paraguay

ASUNCIÓN

Contact: Nuño Sempere
Contact Info: @NunoSempere
Time: Tuesday, October 20th, 2:00 PM
Location: WEST COFFEE, Paseo miraflores, Julio Correa 143, Asunción 001520, Paraguay
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/5864PCGM+44
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/89sjAcPXPyn3suHh4/asuncion-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026
Notes: Please send me a heads up at hello[a t]nunosempere[period]com if you can, but if you can’t don’t worry.

Uruguay

MONTEVIDEO

Contact: Mauro
Contact Info: maurofitermann[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Sunday, October 25th, 5:00 PM
Location: Culto Café on Dr. Joaquín Requena y Canelones. Co-host and I will bring our ACX MEETUP sign.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/48Q53RVJ+5H
Event Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/BriHRphrFs9gnLyyx/montevideo-acx-meetups-everywhere-fall-2026

Online

Online

VRCHAT

Contact: Daniel
Contact Info: daniel_lc (Discord)
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 10:00 PM UTC
Location: VR Chat. We’re the group LESSWR.7138
Coordinates: Join the Discord https://discord.gg/ss3nm2Qng and ask any questions you have about joining.
Group Link: https://discord.gg/ss3nm2Qng
Notes: We’re meeting on VR Chat. The game is free and VR is not required. It’s 10:00 PM UTC. The Discord should show the meeting time in your time zone.

In response, cynical commentators have suggested this is a conspiracy to boost the companies’ stocks. The exact motives imputed vary from person to person. Some say the companies are hyping the product by talking about how dangerous it is; if AI is smart enough to kill all humans, it must be smart enough for your business workflow. Others say they’re trying to distract from near-term harms; every inch of newspaper space devoted to human extinction is one less inch that can be spent on plagiarism and water use. But the most popular story involves regulatory capture: if the product is unsafe, maybe it can only be trusted to a few big politically-connected companies, and everyone else should be banned.

Many debates about AI are complicated and hard to resolve, but this one isn’t: all of these stories are clearly false. Some evidence:

• The AI experts who aren’t affiliated with big companies are just as concerned as the ones who are.

• The AI company leaders giving these warnings were giving the exact same warnings before they had AI companies - and in many cases, before they worked in the industry, or before the industry existed.

• If these corporate plots were real, they would be incredibly dumb.

Taking these in order:

I. The AI Experts Who Aren’t Affiliated With Big Companies Are Just As Concerned As The Ones Who Are

Grace et al surveyed 1,580 AI researchers who presented papers at big AI-related conferences, mostly academics with no company affiliation. Over half thought there was at least a 10% chance AI would cause “human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species”. 72% said we needed to be prioritizing AI safety research more. This survey was in 2024; current numbers would probably be higher.

Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCunn are collectively considered “the godfathers of AI” for inventing deep learning; in 2018, they received the Turing Award, sometimes called the Nobel Prize of computer science, for their accomplishment. In 2023, Geoffrey Hinton quit his job at Google to work full-time raising awareness of the potential existential dangers of AI; he said there was “between 10% and 50% chance” that his invention would destroy humanity. In the same year, Yoshua Bengio also switched to activism, saying that he “regretted his life’s work” and that AI could have a “catastrophic impact”. Neither was affiliated with a major AI company.

(the third godfather, Yann LeCunn, runs a $3 billion AI company, and says he isn’t worried)

Along with these independent researchers, there are many others who formerly worked at companies, then quit to whistleblow about the dangers, or left to pursue anti-AI activism full-time. Paul Christiano left OpenAI in 2021 to found an AI alignment nonprofit; he later said there was a “50/50 chance of doom shortly after you have AI systems that are human level.” Daniel Kokotajlo quit OpenAI in 2024, refusing to sign a non-disparagement clause even though it could have cost him $2 million in equity, in order to start a nonprofit warning about risks from AI (he says he thinks there’s about an 80% chance AI kills everyone). Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic in September, also likely giving up millions of dollars in equity, because he thought it was “gambling with our lives”. There are dozens of others.

The people at AI companies are no more likely to raise the alarm about AI dangers than people who were never at AI companies, or people who were previously at AI companies but have since quit.

II. The AI Company Leaders Giving These Warnings Were Concerned Long Before They Ever Had AI Companies.

DARIO AMODEI first started discussing the risk of superintelligence destroying humanity in 2013, before OpenAI or Anthropic was founded, and when Amodei wasn’t employed in tech at all. Here’s a 62 page debate between Amodei, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and other AI safety enthusiasts about strategy, dated October 27, 2013:

In 2017, when Amodei was an ordinary employee at OpenAI, he spoke about his work the on the podcast 80,000 Hours (July 21, 2017):

I mainly work on safety. We have a safety team that’s so far, myself and Paul Christiano. Paul was co-author of mine on the [Concrete Problems In AI Safety] paper and has also written a lot online on his blog about AI. He’s probably one of the people who’s I think done the most to promote clear thinking about the problem and tie it to current AI. We have a third person joining in a few weeks who I’m super excited about. We’re trying to build up a team that focuses on technical safety. We also do a little bit of strategy stuff which is how do we get different organizations that are working on AI to cooperate with each other, how do we cooperate with policy makers on questions like these. We’re also thinking a little bit about those issues but mainly technical safety.

Dario expanded on the cooperation point - he told the host about his fear that AI would lead to an “arms race” in which companies competed to develop the technology first and let safety slide. His solution was making companies cooperate:

We all think about AGI and think, that safety issues are important. . . then the question is, how does that scale to there being a lot of organizations? How does that scale to others who get involved once they see how powerful AI is? Can we make them cooperate as well? My hope is that we can.

This became an obsession with him, and he hired an advisor to help OpenAI work on the problem. According to the New Yorker:

In 2017, Amodei hired Page Hedley, a former public-interest lawyer, to be OpenAI’s policy and ethics adviser. In an early PowerPoint presentation to executives, Hedley outlined how OpenAI might avert a “catastrophic” arms race—perhaps by building a coalition of A.I. labs that would eventually coördinate with an international body akin to NATO, to insure that the technology was deployed safely.

As Hedley recalled it, [OpenAI president Greg] Brockman didn’t understand how this would help the company beat its competitors. “No matter what I said,” Hedley told us, “Greg kept going back to ‘So how do we raise more money? How do we win?’

This incident and several like it turned Dario against Greg, leading to an era of constant backstabbing office politics. Dario led a pro-safety faction against Greg’s pro-business faction; Greg usually won. It didn’t help that Dario was anxious to the point of paranoia, constantly insisting that their work was too dangerous to release:

Sam Altman tried to play peacemaker by promising Dario various concessions, but eventually Dario noticed that Altman lied constantly and never came through on any of them, so he and the rest of the safety faction left to found Anthropic. Here’s how Fortune described the split:

Amodei, along with a small group of employees, became concerned about OpenAI’s direction and what he perceived as a lack of safety involved in scaling up ChatGPT.

In 2021, Amodei, along with his sister and cofounder Daniela Amodei and a dozen other ex-OpenAI employees started Anthropic with a mission to put safety first. The company released its large language model, Claude, in 2023.

The employees who jumped ship from OpenAI believed two things, Amodei told Fortune’s Jeremy Kahn at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in 2023. First, they believed if you pour more compute into large language models, they will greatly improve, and there’s almost no limit to how advanced they can get. Second, they believed—in addition to scaling up the models—there needed to be a strong set of guardrails and safety considerations.

SAM ALTMAN said in February 2015 - that is, ten months before he started OpenAI - that “development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.” He continued:

The US government, and all other governments, should regulate the development of SMI [superhuman machine intelligence]. In an ideal world, regulation would slow down the bad guys and speed up the good guys—it seems like what happens with the first SMI to be developed will be very important.

Although my general belief is that technology is often over-regulated, I think some regulation is a good thing, and I’d hate to live in a world with no regulation at all. And I think it’s definitely a good thing when the survival of humanity is in question. (Incidentally, there is precedent for classification of privately-developed knowledge when it carries mass risk to human life. SILEX is perhaps the best-known example.)

He also famously said in June of that year that “AI will most likely lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime there will be great companies”. Some people say this was a “joke”. I think it was the one time in his life that Sam Altman was ever completely 100% honest.

ELON MUSK, another AI company leader who has been talking about extinction risk, has an equally long relationship with the topic. His first statement on AI safety was in 2014, before he had any business ventures in AI, when he said that “We are summoning the demon with artificial intelligence”. He continued by calling it “our biggest existential threat”, and admitted that “I’m increasingly inclined to think there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish”.

Here’s a photo from the first big AI Safety conference in Puerto Rico. Elon is circled in orange. He was a rare famous billionaire who agreed to hang out with powerless nerds to debate the safety of a technology that technically didn’t exist yet, just for the love of the game.

After the conference, Elon agreed to donate $10 million to the fledgling cause. He continued to be a regular at AI safety conferences over the next few years. I saw him speak at the Asilomar conference in 2017, where he gave a rambling talk on how brain-computer interfaces could solve the problem (they didn’t).

SHANE LEGG and DEMIS HASSABIS are two of the three co-founders of DeepMind, now Google DeepMind. In 2008 - a year before founding Deep Mind - Legg wrote his PhD thesis on “Machine Super Intelligence”, where he wrote that it could be “a nightmare scenario” (although he also said that “if we carefully prepare for this possibility in advance, not only might we avert disaster, we might bring about an age of prosperity unlike anything seen before.”) His other optimistic predictions include “If by suffering you mean prolonged suffering, then I think this is quite unlikely. If a super intelligent machine (or any kind of super intelligent agent) decided to get rid of us, I think it would do so pretty efficiently.”

Hassabis was also concerned at least as early as 2012, when he reportedly tried to convince Elon Musk that AI was an existential risk. He attended the same 2015 AI safety conference as Musk (see photo above) and included as a condition of DeepMind’s acquisition by Google that Google set up a powerful AI safety oversight board (this went wrong in approximately every way possible).

THE CORPORATE PLOT hypothesis requires these CEOs to be the most prescient people in history. In 2008 or 2013 or 2015, when they were all in other industries and AI was just an academic curiosity, they would have had to realize that one day AI would become a trillion dollar business, that they would be the CEO of one of the companies, and that the company would benefit from regulatory capture. Then they would have had to devote a significant proportion of their life, and in some cases donate millions of dollars, to start laying the groundwork ahead of time, just in case it became necessary. Dario Amodei, while finishing his biology postdoc, would have to have moonlighted as an AI safety enthusiast just in case he became a multi-billion dollar tech CEO one day. Shane Legg would have had to choose his PhD thesis topic based on the possibility that he would own shares in a Google AI subsidiary sixteen years later.

The alternative is that all these people believed it then, and still believe it now, for the same reason that all of the independent experts and academics believe it. They are working in the field partly because they think that being closer to the development of AI gives them more of a chance to control it and keep it safe than if they were sitting on the sidelines.

III. If This Is A Plot, It’s A Really Dumb One

Having shown that these men would have to be the smartest people in the world to pull this off, it’s worth noting that the plot they apparently dedicated their lives to is really dumb.

For example, if the Pacing The Frontier consortium attempt was a plot to pump stock prices, you might expect that, upon it being announced, stock prices would go up. This didn’t happen.

Anthropic and OpenAI aren’t publicly traded companies, so they don’t have an easily-tracked stock price. But there are complicated cryptocurrency bets called “perpetual futures” that traders use to approximate the stock prices of private companies (usually these are some kind of prediction-market like instrument on eventual IPO price). When the slowdown call happened, Anthropic’s value on the biggest cryptocurrency futures platform dropped 4.57%, and OpenAI’s stock dropped 13.42%.

(two other AI companies that endorsed the slowdown proposal, Google DeepMind and X.AI, are subsidiaries of larger publicly traded companies; Google and SpaceX respectively. Both companies went down modestly the day after the announcement, although they have so many other things going on that I take this less seriously than the AI company futures.)

Why wouldn’t the stock market (or at least this particular cryptocurrency simulation of the stock market) approve of the slowdown as a potential regulatory moat? It seems like traders thought the first-level effects (slowing down) were more important than any secondary regulatory effects that might or might not materialize.

Libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok is head of the Center for Study of Public Choice, the subfield of economics that studies things like regulatory capture. He agrees with the traders. He wrote a good post, What Regulatory Capture Actually Looks Like, arguing that a regulatory capture story doesn’t fit:

Go ahead: argue that Amodei and other AI experts are wrong about AI risk. Ask whether his proposals favor Anthropic. But calling “our product might kill you” a clever marketing and regulatory-capture strategy isn’t sophisticated analysis. The facts don’t fit regulatory capture theory and trying to make them fit requires epistemically painful Ptolemaic epicycles. Even a dull Ockham’s razor cuts through that story to the obvious alternative: Amodei actually believes what he’s saying.

Or consider another story - trying to distract from near-term harms. Is this really how things work? Are there vicious fights between environmentalists who want to save the rainforest and environmentalists who want to fight climate change, with the former arguing that the latter’s focus on longer-term risks detracts from environmental problems that are happening right now? No, obviously this is stupid; these groups are natural allies. Both donate to the Sierra Club and vote for the Green Party. Even if a certain rainforest supporter didn’t care about climate change at all, they would be grateful for the climate change activist’s votes and donations.

This is how things are shaping up with AI also. Last summer, Ted Cruz sponsored a bill to ban states from regulating AI. It had strong support from AI money and was expected to pass. A coalition of effective altruist groups worried about human extinction, artists’ groups worried about intellectual property, family groups worried about harms to children, and many others united to defeat it.

But maybe it’s true for newspaper space in particular? Maybe concerns about human extinction are preventing journalists from writing about nearer-term harms?

Both people interested in human extinction and people interested in near-term harms fund the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism, which helps fund reporters on both category of risk (Tarbell received an ACX Grant two years ago). They highlight articles they’ve helped with on issues across the spectrum, from Worried Anthropic Researchers Warn That AI Could Kill All Humans to Hundreds Gather To Urge Scottish Government To Pause Data Center Boom to AI Is More Likely Than Humans To Form Biases When Hiring.

In retrospect, this alliance should be obvious. Both groups want the same thing: the ability to slow AI. And both have the same enemy: the tsunami of Silicon Valley money which is trying to elect Congressmen who refuse to regulate AI in any way. Both groups are working together against their common foe. Signal-boosting long-term risks to distract from short-term risks would only empower this coalition, and so - like the other version of this plot - be implausibly stupid.

As for the claim that AI companies are trying to hype their products, this seems unnecessary: AI is the fastest-adopted technology in history:

…so it hardly seems worth it to hype it up a little more at the cost of getting a large number of Americans to think your product will kill them personally, and a plurality of voters in both parties to want to ban your industry from creating new products:

If the last section required AI company leaders to be the smartest people in the world, this one requires them to be the dumbest.

We live in an age of cynicism and nihilism. When someone endorses a good cause, we accuse them of virtue-signaling; if they donate to it, we accuse them of trying to whitewash their role in capitalism. We lionize corrupt politicians and insipid bling-wielding celebrities because, as people who have never made any claim to moral acceptability, they are the only people who can entirely escape the suspicion of faking it.

This is idiotic and requires otherwise smart people to constantly contort themselves to figure out the latest less-than-entirely-depraved person’s angle. Maybe some people are so venal that they can’t imagine anyone truly caring about the welfare of humanity, but they should stop projecting this on everyone else. The experts are warning you that AI could kill you because they think AI could kill you. Many of them have made personal sacrifices to get the message out. Stop adding thumbtacks to your conspiracy corkboard and take their message seriously.

1: Meetup updates: Stanford EA is changing from October 13 to October 25.

2: ACX grantee Legal Impact For Chickens announces that they have a 1:1 donation match available for donations above $25 until October 31.

3: AI alignment research group AFFINE is holding another seminar/full-time residency January 4 - 29 in Portugal. Attendance is free, travel costs are covered, and there is a $1000 stipend. More info / apply here. AFFINE works within the “agent foundations” paradigm; I recommend having a good understanding of the pros and cons of doing research within this school before applying.

In 1940 the Empire State Building was the tallest man-made structure in the world, and if you stood at the top of it you could see the future.

Specifically, you could see this: the first NBC television broadcast transmitter, intermittently blasting 49.75 MHz audio and 46.5 MHz video signals across a hundred-mile swath of megalopolis.

A turnstile antenna, a ring of linked dipoles, and a crowning lightning rod formed the sharp point at the literal apex of human achievement. This is the lance that scraped the sky deeper than it had ever been scraped, the tip of the spear for a high radio modernism that would soon conquer the world. This is the needle that pierced the veil of the corporeal and pulled the thread of human culture into a realm of deracinated ghosts forever haunting the invisible airwaves.

Maybe this sounds overwrought and spooky. But I’m not just editorializing on my own here: this is how some of the guys who invented television talked about it!

I found this out by reading We Present Television, a collection of essays by various stakeholders in the earliest American TV broadcast systems—“televisionaries”, as they are occasionally referred to in the text. I rescued my copy from being pulped after it was weeded from a library. What got me to look at it was the odd handwritten title on the spine, and what got me to keep it was the shockingly early copyright date of 1940. This is not a pat description of a settled feature of American life; these pieces were written from the bleeding edge of a brand new technology. They were intended for the edification of a public for whom TV was a curious experimental luxury that only your richest friend’s richest friend might own1.

The essays read roughly 90% as prosaic technical notes on the state of the art and 10% as wild-eyed futurist prophecy. Both modes offer a fascinating glimpse of a transformative new art in the process of being born. It is an approachable, Scientific American-style primer, but also, at times, the closest thing I have ever found to a dread grimoire written by the successful summoners of an Elder God.

Prose

In my mind, prior to reading We Present Television, the history of TV was a pretty firm thing stretching from the present back to the early 1950s and I Love Lucy. What was on TV before Lucy? I had no clue really. I suspect most people don’t. Lucy stands as a cultural totem of “early TV” the way that The Wizard of Oz and Frankenstein stand in for all of “early film” in the popular imagination.

But here was a book about television from a decade before Lucy and Desi ever got up to a single shenanigan! What could possibly have been going on on TV back then?

The answer is, for the most part, some weird stuff that it’s impossible to watch today. To continue the film analogy: “Talkies” as a medium have the advantage of a single solid genesis point with The Jazz Singer in 1927, just as “Classic TV” has the genesis point of Lucy being shot on 35mm film that allowed it to be preserved for future generations. The nascent television documented in this book is more akin to film in the 1900s and 1910s: a frontier technology still undergoing rapid technological progress and gradual artistic maturation2. And like those flammable early films, early TV was seldom preserved to leave any kind of cultural footprint, rendering it forgotten to all but a scholarly few today.

We Present Television is in large part the textual equivalent of a How It’s Made episode for “1930s television programming”. It comes at the subject from every angle and through every stage of the process, and ends up illuminating why early TV evanesced from the cultural memory even as the concept of television pervaded culture.

The Attainment of Television

If you associate “inventor of television” with a single name, it is likely Philo Farnsworth, the Utahan tinkerer who received the first US patent for it. The fabulously-named Waldemar Kaempffert, science editor for The New York Times from 1927 to 1956 and author of We Present Television’s introduction, thinks that’s a load of crock.

Kaempffert was evidently fond of technocultural prognostication (he got the NYT gig after writing an essay for Forum magazine on “The Social Destiny of Radio”), so a lot of his introduction falls into the realm of Prophecy and will be covered later in the review. But he also does a bit of historiography right at the top. In Kaempffert’s telling, television was inevitable from the moment the first fax machine was conceived in the 1840s3, and it was midwifed into existence not by any one nameable genius but by the concerted effort of technocapital itself:

“What strikes the student of social sciences and the historian of technology is the manner in which this dream of television became a fact. The early facsimile telegraphers, cinematographers, phototelegraphers, and television empiricists all belonged to what may be called the laissez-faire school of invention. It was a school that educated itself by cut-and-try experimenting, that converted attics and cellars into laboratories, that had to hawk its patents until at last some imaginative capitalist bought them. Just as the laissez-faire school of economics gave way to planning, so the laissez-faire school of invention is giving ground to planned research. And for the simple reason that the attainment of television demanded a deeper knowledge of theoretical physics than any garret inventor could possess… [Television] is probably the very first great invention deliberately developed by organized research and born full-grown in most of its essentials.”

Kaempffert’s precis of the development of television goes on to describe an ever-increasing rate of advancement in which “time was telescoped”, driven by wildly extravagant capital investment that “probably exceeds $20,000,000”. The fruit of this investment is not just the television receiver that goes in your living room, but the television station that the rest of the book will go on to describe. One cannot profitably exist without the other.

The station is also the concern of our first proper essay, “Raising the Television Curtain”. This one was written by Alfred H. Morton, Vice-President in Charge of Television at NBC (which was, of course, primarily a radio concern at the time). Morton is proud to run the premier TV station in the country, though he graciously mentions the Don Lee broadcasting system in Los Angeles and the GE transmitter in Schenectady4 which intends to relay programming from NYC to the Capital Region. These three islands form the archipelago of early American television.

Both Kaempffert and Morton are a little defensive about how long it has taken for commercial broadcasts to begin in the United States. NBC’s TV broadcast debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair lagged several years behind the BBC’s first efforts. Morton and others later in the book attribute the delay to a coordination problem. Morton speaks enviously of the concert with which the BBC was able to initiate its television programming:

“In England, where broadcasting is supported out of license fees levied on every radio receiver, the British Broadcasting Corporation established a television service at London in November, 1936. Being a monopoly, the BBC settled the troublesome question of technical standards by itself laying down what it considered, after due study, the best practicable specifications. Radio manufacturers thereupon made receivers to conform to those specifications.”

Simple! But in the free-market USA, independent actors from the broadcasters to the television retailers to the FCC had to somehow agree on technical standards, all the while hoping that the results were sufficient to turn a profit once offered to consumers. American television had to stand on its own two feet from day one, with no subsidies or license fees. So the development process was a game of everyone waiting out small marginal improvements to get to the minimum viable product.

Morton analogizes the experimental broadcast standards to the (then-)familiar concept of railway gauges. How foolish the would-be railroad tycoon would feel building out a network of narrow-gauge tracks, only to find out that the only trains capable of earning him any money require wide-gauge ones! So too with building broadcasting equipment which was capable of matching up with TVs anyone actually wanted to buy. Every scrap of resolution could make a difference in the viability of the new systems. Morton:

“[In] July 1936… NBC’s transmitter went on the air with the all-electronic system yielding an image in 343 lines, at the rate of thirty complete images a second. It was decided after some months of trial that a higher standard, namely, 441 lines, was necessary to provide sufficient entertainment value for the viewer.”

The terminology of ‘lines’ may seem odd to a reader accustomed to thinking in terms of pixels. In Chapter 2, “The Technique of Television”, whiz-kid radio engineer Donald G. Fink (who had started as an editor at Electronics magazine in 1934, aged 23) breaks down the technical aspects of television for the interested layman. This is the longest chapter in the book and goes into much, much more detail than I can provide here, but we can briefly cover the basics. The one key concept we must know, Fink starts by telling us, is that “television pictures must be sent on the installment plan.”

Essentially, the early TV camera tube (at the time, in the US, the iconoscope was standard) and the early TV receiver were the same technology, running in opposite directions. In both cases, a beam of electrons was carefully steered through an array of horizontal lines by the precise modulation of magnetic coils outside a vacuum tube.

In the iconoscope, the beam bounced off of a mosaic of tiny photosensitive silver capacitors which would get “full” if they had been exposed to light in the last 1/30th of a second, or sit empty waiting to eat up the electron beam if they hadn’t. This mosaic would be exposed to the light of the subject to be televised, creating the frame for the electron beam to read. The remainder of the beam, once it had hit the mosaic, was then passed on as the broadcast signal: strong and bright in spots where the capacitors were full, weaker and dimmer in spots where they had siphoned off some of the electrons.

On the other end, in the TV set, an electron gun with strength determined by the modulation of the received radio signal was steered by similar magnetic coils and aimed at a corresponding array of fluorescent dots (“usually a compound of zinc, oxygen, and silicon or sulphur”). So the image received by the iconoscope was recreated in sequence, one line at a time.

And this all happened thirty times a second.

Fink is very impressed with the sheer volume of information being blasted over the airwaves in this manner (“The ancient Chinese have said that a picture is worth ten thousand words”, he tells us while comparing the bandwidth of a TV signal with that of a telephone line, “which is not such a bad guess”). Even on a 441-line television, each individual frame consisted of 200,000 points of light. It’s no wonder that the art of television couldn’t take off until all mechanical elements like “whirring belts and spinning disks” were abandoned: only a diaphanous electron beam manipulated by invisible magnetic fields was practicable for such precision work done at such immense speeds.

There is an inherent romance to this level of analog craft. Reading from the transistor age, when none of this photochemical wizardry obtains, it still kind of seems as miraculous as it must have back then. Nowadays “television” is just a subset of our generalized ability to program LEDs to emit arbitrary types of light, but back then it was a bespoke silvery magic.

The best part of Fink’s chapter is this diagram, which shows the “complete television system”:

The casual inclusion of a skyscraper in the system enchants me. It is emblematic of the high radio modernism that pervades the book. The skyscraper is Part Of It. The world the televisionaries imagine is a world where we are all within eyeshot of the Empire State Building, or perhaps some grander edifice yet to be conceived.

What is a Television Program?

So that’s the technical side of the coordination problem solved, for now. 441 lines of light on a screen no larger than an A4 sheet of paper (and more often the size of an index card) were deemed sufficient to provide “entertainment value”. But the content side is still a big question mark. What will people actually watch?

Well, one non-negotiable is that they will watch ads. Securing sponsorships was (until the invention of cable many years later) the only way to extract money from the televiewer after they made their initial hardware purchase. In Chapter 10, “The Finance Problem”, Radio Daily staff writer Benn Hall breaks down the prospects of TV advertising relative to radio. He concludes that in addition to “double barreled” commercial spots shilling a product for both the ears and eyes, a great amount of “indirect advertising” (what we now think of as product placement) could eventually be worked into TV programs. But this circles back to the original question: what programs will lure people to watch the advertisements?

In Chapter 4, “Programming”, NBC Programming Director Thomas H. Hutchinson, who was paid to think a lot about every possible thing that television could do, starts by telling us he’s not quite sure:

“The basic problem that besets the program manager is stated quite simply: What is a television program? Therein lies both hope and despair. No one knows for sure what makes a good television program. There are as yet few rules for the building of either a television program or a television schedule.”

Despite this uncertainty, Hutchinson is able to suss out a few basic categories that form the backbone of the early television station’s programming. He enumerates the TV’s capabilities thus:

“Television can tell a story, with a technique which is a hybrid of stage, motion picture, and radio practices. It can also explain a process or portray the results of a process, which is the basis for many an interesting educational feature. Television is also capable of simple transmission of entertainment previously prepared for other media, such as vaudeville and motion pictures. Finally, its mobile units can rove about to relay actualities occurring in the city streets, and an indoor arena or an outside field. Studio shows, motion picture transmissions, and outside programs have, therefore, been the basis of our program experimentation since 1936.”

These silos formed the organizing principle for NBC’s production department. As Morton lists:

“[NBC] had a single television transmitter, one studio designed for the presentation of live talent programs, one studio for the scanning of motion picture film, and a complete mobile television station for relays of such outdoor events as we considered of general public interest.”

Let’s take a tour of the early studio and see what the rest of the book has to say about these three modes.

Studio Shows

Live, in-studio performances and exhibitions were the most distinctive part of the early television schedule and their description takes up most of the middle of We Present Television. Anything that you could do in front of bright studio lights, you could televise.

In some cases, these were the start of genres we know today like “cooking shows” and “variety shows”, but without all the pageantry that has accrued to them over the decades. In chapter 5, “The Director”, Thomas Lyne Riley describes the technical difficulties of livening up such prosaic displays using the tools available in the studio, i.e. two stationary cameras and one on a dolly. Somebody would just come in and make a meal, or juggle, or do a comedy routine, and the TV director had to do his best to make it dynamic and interesting for the audience watching at home by intercutting these three viewpoints. A framing device as simple as showing interstitials from a kaleidoscope and calling the variety show “Out of the Kaleidoscope” was considered wildly innovative.

I was tickled to find that the ancestor of the modern game show was simply a regular segment in variety hours presenting a live Spelling Bee. The only hint of showmanship is that “Paul Wing, who calls himself ‘The Spelling Master’” was the host, but it otherwise consisted of words being thrown at “well-known personalities or… ribbon clerks. It really doesn’t seem to matter a great deal, for spelling is a great equalizer.” It all sounds so dull now, in a post-Merv Griffin world where we associate game shows with splashy sets and well-defined gimmicks. But the core appeal of all game shows, the audience’s “not unnatural delight in knowing how to spell a word which is at the moment baffling the person in the studio” was already well intact.

The crown jewel of the TV studio, though, was its scripted live presentations. These get a huge amount of attention in the book. In Chapter 3 “The Men Behind the Camera”, O. B. Hanson delineates how a Program Director mounts and rehearses a dramatic presentation as if it is to be performed in a black box theater, while the Technical Director determines the most compelling way to capture it with the three camera setup. Actor Earle Larimore in Chapter 6 waxes rhapsodic about the potential of television to enrich the acting profession, both monetarily and in terms of “intimacy with his audience. Intimacy is, of course, the one quality that every actor strives for above all others.”

Seen here: Earle Larimore achieving intimacy

Most scripted studio shows were one-off productions telling a single story, but the idea of the recurring TV show was also starting to percolate. In Chapter 8, we are told in detail about the first television serial, Vine Street, broadcast in fifteen minute chunks to an L.A. audience starting in 1938 and featuring what we now recognize as soap opera drama about rising stars and starlets seeking their big breaks in Hollywood. It is impossible to watch any of Vine Street today; it went out live and, like almost all of the programs mentioned in the book, simply vanished into the ether5.

Everywhere in these chapters are deep discussions about the technical constraints afflicting the television craft. Actors must be broad enough to be read on a tiny screen, but not so broad the close-up camera reveals their falseness. Directors must present grand vistas that nevertheless fit into a cramped soundstage. Audiences must be convinced by the costumes and sets on display, but these must be furnished on a shoestring budget compared to cinema. There are even deficits compared to radio dramas. Hutchinson:

“Radio, with its tricks of sound effects and background music, whisks its audience in a trice from New York to Singapore; the listeners supply their own scenery and even costumes for the actors. I have yet to find a viewer who could do the same for a television drama. The upshot of it all is that television, having destroyed the worlds of the listener’s imagination, must supply new worlds.”

But it’s hard to build a new world every week! The necessarily live nature of early TV is an ever-present constraint throughout these essays, the one from which all other difficulties flow. Nowadays almost every scripted TV program is just a degenerate form of cinema, shot precisely the same way as a movie would be and distributed over the same digital networks. The craft of acting and directing for television is no technically different from acting or directing for a movie.

But this couldn’t have been further from the truth at the genesis of television: for its “studio shows”, NBC basically scooped the techniques of legitimate theater out from behind the proscenium, plopped them intact under unbearably bright lights, and asked them to do the transportative job of cinema. Sure, technical directors could take advantage of certain cinematic flourishes like the close-up6 or a cut to a model shot. But the theatrical influence is so strong that Hanson endorses the view of the live studio show as “the strangest and most amazing form of theater I ever saw.”

Reading these chapters now, it is remarkable how endangered that strange and amazing form of theater is. On the major networks, only Saturday Night Live and the occasional gimmick sitcom episode still carry the torch of the live scripted broadcast. It’s no wonder that the practice faded as soon as it was technologically feasible to tape shows in advance, since everyone involved makes it sound incredibly stressful. But it does rob the medium of some strange power, one which many writers in We Present Television are quick to identify. As Riley puts it,

“Both television and the stage have one very great advantage over movies. Both convey action which is happening at the moment. Audiences are impressed with the magic of witnessing an actual event rather than a cold record of what has already taken place.”

That collapse between the event and the record of the event appears several times throughout the book; even when a broadcast is taped and rewatched later, there is a sense that what one is rewatching is “what really happened” that is absent in cinema. This impression of authenticity is the special magic that makes television television. As scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones puts it in the final chapter, “The Challenge of Television”:

“But the quality peculiar to television is that of immediate presence… The tiny screen seems to have a curious added vitality, the actors seem more real… As I have said, the essence of this new medium is immediacy, a kind of supercandor.”

Of course, not even everything that was on TV even in 1940 had that supercandor magic. Sometimes you had to fill the schedule with…

Motion Picture Transmissions

The tension between early TV and the motion picture industry is palpable whenever the subject of the movies comes up in We Present Television. Hutchinson delicately informs us that “Television, being a medium of entertainment largely visual in its appeal, has naturally aroused a certain amount of apprehension among the producers of motion picture films.” Harry R. Lubcke of the Don Lee system in LA ominously reassures his neighbors that “[television] will no more eliminate the motion picture than the telephone eliminated the telegraph.”

Morton, in Chapter 1, tells us more explicitly that he has “heard it said that a titanic clash between motion pictures and television is… inevitable.” He does not believe that this is necessarily the case, however, due to differences in the psychological needs served by each medium: television is for “relaxation in the home”, while talkies are a way to “break away from the routine of home or office, or both. Going to the movies is an event.” It’s striking how much this is still the discussion being had about the merits of theatrical exhibition vs. home releases in the age of Barbenheimer and Avatar. Eight decades have not resolved the tension.

Regardless of this supposed paradigmatic difference, some films were indeed brought on to serve as television programming. Hutchinson informs us that the major Hollywood studios held their productions rather dear, outside of the budget range of a television network which is “both poor and young”. For this reason, he finds he is “forced to rely on films held by independent distributors and on commercial films”.

This economic limitation explains why TV did not immediately degenerate into nothing but a secondary motion picture distribution system even though Hollywood had already produced enough movies to fill any programming schedule. All the good stuff was still too expensive, and there’s only so many industrial films the television audience would put up with before wondering whether they’d wasted their money.

(As for the technical side of how films were aired on television, nobody ever actually goes into any detail about it in the book. Hanson briefly mentions a “scanning station” and Hutchinson claims that the films were simply “projected”, but due to the difference between cinema’s standard 24fps frame rate and TV’s 30fps, directly scanning and broadcasting films was not possible without some sort of timing remediation. If you’re interested in how this issue was resolved you can read this article about the Telecine, but properly it falls outside the scope of this review since Donald G. Fink didn’t see fit to tell us readers about it).

Outside Programs

The most surprising element of the early studio to me, and ultimately the most consequential, was the mobile unit. Despite the bulk, fragility, and immense power requirements of the equipment, by 1937 RCA had figured out how to send a complete television studio out into the world, on two beautifully boxy buses.

Imagine these guys rocking up to a 7-11 that got robbed.

In Chapter 7, “The New Newsreel”, noted radio writer Charles E. Butterfield breathlessly runs through a litany of outdoor and indoor events captured by the remote studio before telling us a little about how it works.

“When in operation, a crew of ten engineers is carried. One car has the video or picture apparatus, while the other houses the ultra-short-wave transmitter which relays the program to the main transmitter. The video van has a platform on top where both camera and long-distance pickup microphone can be placed to televise parades and the like. The interior is the counterpart of the studio control room. It contains all of the amplifiers and the many tubes needed to handle sound and sight as electrical energy… The second van, which houses the transmitter… is connected to the first with a coaxial cable and if necessary can be 500 feet away… Signals pass from it in as nearly a straight line as possible to the main transmitter… One conservative estimate placed the amount involved in building the rolling transmitter at $125,000 [$3,000,000 in 2026].”

As for the events that this two-vehicle setup and its more advanced successors could capture, there is almost no end to them. The NBC station debuted with remote coverage of the 1939 World’s Fair, featuring the first broadcast footage of FDR. Butterfield boasts about the success of the coverage of “the 1939 Thanksgiving Day Parade of Macy’s, large New York department store.”7 A svelter mobile broadcasting unit was even mounted inside an airplane to show New Yorkers live views of the city from above.

A quick examination of the example schedule provided by Hutchinson shows that, on many days, the marquee event of the evening was a presentation of a sports match. The NBC mobile unit often parked outside Madison Square Garden to convey its sports offerings to the home audience8. This of course remains the predominant use case of live TV to this day; 45 of the top 50 most-watched broadcasts in the US last year were sports-related.

The “new newsreel” terminology used in Butterfield’s chapter feels very quaint today, because he was absolutely right that the television model completely supplanted the newsreel model for the dissemination of footage of current events. He struggles to articulate the sea change that he sees coming:

“Television is bringing forth a new newsreel—in fact, the new newsreel. It is a newsreel unlike that of the movies, unlike anything attempted heretofore. It is so different that ultimately it may not even be regarded as a newsreel, but more as the firsthand copy of an actual event as it takes place.”

Again we see the assertion that television, unlike cinema, presents actualities; that there is no conceptual gap between the event and its depiction. Butterfield floats a few dire potential names for these firsthand copies—“televiews, telescenics, teletopics, televents, teletime…”—but fails to realize that the new paradigm will win so thoroughly that we will eventually just call it “news”.

The true upshot of this mobile broadcast technology, though, is treated in passing by Butterfield. Due to the difficulty and expense of running the mobile unit, it could generally only showcase “set” events like games and parades where there was enough advance warning to get the cumbersome equipment into position. But “Spontaneously telecast outdoor scenes have come to attention on occasion” when the mobile unit was set up to capture something else and happened upon a more interesting sight.

The two examples Butterfield furnishes are both rather grim: a fire on Ward’s Island in the East River and “the now famous suicide leap recorded by an air camera as it was picking up scenes in the Plaza of Rockefeller Center”. But Hanson thinks bigger than just incidental tragedies. When discussing the development of “vest-pocket” mobile units9, he offers this prediction:

“This marks, I believe, a very important step toward the ultimate goal of carrying television’s electronic eyes to every site of an important or interesting event.”

The mobile unit was the most consequential part of the early TV station because it eventually became the most pervasive. We do carry television’s electronic eyes to every site of every event. You have a mobile studio more capable than those ten-ton buses on your person right now. But we’re stumbling into Prophecy here, more on that later.

The Television Chimera

The tripartite studio we’ve just toured, with its dramas, movie scanning, and live news, maps neatly onto the influences on early TV that are often enumerated throughout We Present Television. These are, per Morton, “the legitimate stage, motion pictures, [and] radio.” Early television was seen as a chimera of these three earlier forms of mass media: Live like theater, shot and edited like film, broadcast from a distance like radio.

When translated into the television studio, each modality filled in some gap in its antecedents. It was at once radio you could see, cinema showing the present moment, and theater from the comfort of your own home.

None of the authors of We Present Television goes this far, but if you want you can create a three-way Venn diagram of these qualities. Even though this schema is my own elaboration, it is supportive of the point stressed over and over throughout the book that television rests uniquely at the crux of the live, the distant, and the visual.

How did this chimera start to become its own creature? In part through the instantiation of a poll. As early as 1939, Morton informs us, NBC was sending out weekly broadcast schedules with a spot for television receiver owners to mark down what they thought of each program, from 0 ‘Poor’ to 3 ‘Excellent’. Program concepts with higher average ratings were pursued more frequently, and those with lower ratings got dropped from the schedule. Already, The Algorithm was shaping content to the whims of the viewers. Programmer Hutchinson has no illusions about this:

“The televiewer, with his finger on the tuning knob, will forever be the court of final appeal. All of television must be shaped to his desires.”

Eventually, through decades of trial and error, our feedback pulled this awkward tangled braid of theater, cinema, and radio together into Television.

Prophecy

We Present Television is a relentlessly forward-looking work. The essays consistently pace through the brief history of their new medium and then take great speculative leaps beyond it. Hutchinson even apologizes about this tendency on behalf of all the book’s authors:

“It may seem that I have dwelt largely on promises of the future. We all look forward to the future of television with the utmost confidence and an almost total lack of restraint.”

The televisionaries’ habit of prophesying future developments is so consistent that little predictions kept sneaking into the first section of this review, despite my best efforts to save them all for this part. Some of the predictions advanced in the book read as laughably naive. Many more are uncannily accurate. And a few frame Television as a mystical force reshaping the entire cultural world, in a way that is hard to deny looking back now.

Laughably Naive

This quote jumped off the page at me as being as absurdly on the nose as the “Something Picasso” line in Titanic or any given line of dialogue in Walt Disney’s Carousel of Progress. But it was written by a real guy, Benn Hall:

“Figures have been bandied about freely, often based on the assumption that it will be necessary for television stations to provide continuous entertainment, just as radio stations furnish programs sixteen hours a day. It is doubtful, however, if the human eye could endure the constant strain of looking at small images, no matter how clear they are. It is also doubtful if any one person would care to concentrate on television more than a few hours daily.”

We sure showed him! Obviously TVs did get bigger as the average American household’s TV consumption rose to almost nine hours per day by 2009. But then we invented a smaller screen10 and decided to make our eyes endure the constant strain of looking at that too!

Some of the other flop predictions are simply failed technical extrapolations:

• That we will someday have home smell-o-vision.

• That fax machines integrated into TVs will print the recipe from a cooking show while you watch it.

• That the “usual family audience” will ultimately be satisfied by “television pictures as large as 18 by 24 inches”.

• That TV will eventually acquire a third dimension, like Star Wars holograms.

And then there are the occasional sociological predictions, such as this rosy view advanced by RCA President David Sarnoff (as quoted by Morton to conclude Chapter 1):

“The ultimate contribution of television will be its service towards unification of the life of the nation, and at the same time the greater development of the life of the individual. We who have labored in the creation of this promising new instrumentality are proud to launch it upon its way, and hope that through its proper use America will rise to new heights as a nation of free people and high ideals.”

Whatever your opinions on America and its ideals, I don’t think it can really be argued that television has, on net over the last eight decades, “unified the life of the nation” or “developed the life of the individual”.

But there were far fewer laughable misses than I was expecting going into the book. I really thought this section would be longer!

Uncannily Accurate

Here’s a pretty typical prediction from the book. This is at the start of Butterfield’s chapter on TV news:

“Someday it may be a commonplace to switch on the home receiver and get a life-size picture in vivid colors on the living room wall, fortified with true sound reproduction and even accompanied by the pleasing aroma of a springtime flower garden. This may be carrying a prophecy too far; nevertheless enough has become an actuality to indicate that the complete fulfillment will be less of an impossibility than it sounds.”

So the smell-o-vision claim is hedged a bit, but the rest of it did come true. It took a surprisingly long time though:

• Color TV programming grew throughout the 1960s, and sales of color TV sets exceeded black and white in 1972.

• “True sound reproduction” wasn’t attempted until the introduction of the MTS standard in 1984, and surround sound did not become standard until the digital switchover in 2009.

• And actors in a typical medium shot did not start to appear life-sized on most people’s sets until the proliferation of 65” and above LED TVs in the 2020s!

The ‘someday’ of Butterfield’s imagination, minus the flower garden, is in fact today. The technical advances that could be easily imagined in 1940 took eight decades to attain. But we did attain them.

Maybe those technical extrapolations were easy shots to call, though. After all, everyone had just witnessed cinema go from grainy monochrome silent shorts to fluid full-color spectacle in just a couple decades. Maybe they shouldn’t get credit for assuming that television will have a similar glow-up. How about some more specific and granular predictions? Here’s Butterfield again:

“One could go even further and look forward to the day when presidential campaigns may be conducted almost wholly by television… The one who is most telegenic might even be the top vote getter.”

This, of course, immediately became the conventional wisdom about the first televised Presidential debate between Nixon and JFK in 1960, two decades after Butterfield imagined it. And even if the impact of that debate is sometimes overly mythologized, it’s impossible to overstate how politically consequential a poor TV debate performance could be by 2024.

“After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.” - Nixon

How about some business model specifics? Throughout the book, remarks about forming television networks and syndicating shows are constant and hardly deserve credit, since they are simply evidence of radio men applying their knowledge of radio practice and were fulfilled imminently. But in discussing TV advertising, Benn Hall predicts the eventual creation of premium subscription television (and its discontents):

“Another alternative is the rental system… It has been suggested that television might be developed into a subscription type service. Users would pay a regular monthly fee which would entitle them to a guaranteed amount of entertainment… Again the public would resent paying for such a service after being “educated” to expect free broadcast service.”

(As the reaction to every streaming service price hike proves, we also resent paying $X+2 for such a service after being educated to expect it for $X).

The possibility of pay TV was on the table due to doubts that the viewing public would put up with advertising as intrusive as TV ads were bound to be. Here’s Kaempffert in the introduction, imagining the TV commercial and the typical viewer’s reaction to it:

“The telecasting of a news event or a play by some “sponsor” will surely be preceded, followed or interspersed with images of men and women smoking cigarettes (the package and trademark conspicuously revealed), smacking their lips over a drink of some new brand of coffee or ginger ale, extolling the virtues of a face cream, all to the accompaniment of advertising patter. Will the masses like it?... Possibly we may be willing to pay the price of transitory boredom to see and hear a stirring play. It seems more likely that Ma will wash the dishes and Pa will read the newspaper until the announcer says: “The play is about to begin.””

What Kaempffert didn’t see coming was the invention of the mute button, which makes ignoring the ads even easier. That’s about the only thing he didn’t predict though. Kampffert gives us the most lateral-thinking and specific predictions in the entire book, working by analogy with the many uses found for the lightbulb within living memory.

“To Edison and his contemporaries the electric incandescent lamp was simply a competitor of the naked gas flame. Flood-lighting, the use of safe lamps in new ways on the stage and in the home, the introduction of little bulbs in surgery and medicine—these potentialities were not foreseen. In short, it is not the inventors or even their financial supporters who find all possible uses for new inventions but the public.”

From this, he goes on to describe Facetiming someone and hosting files on Web 1.0:

“[W]ho can doubt that someday we shall not only talk by telephone to a business acquaintance or a friend but that we shall also see him as we talk. “I called him up this morning,” we say now. Soon it will be, “I looked him up at his ranch in California.” George Bernard Shaw made the most of the possibilities in his Back to Methuselah. Documents will be displayed and read across the continent.”

As Kaempffert acknowledges, the concept of a video call had been around in science fiction already for a while (Shaw wrote the play cycle he mentions in 1922, and a video call appeared on screen in the film Metropolis in 1927). But as far as I know, he gets full marks in prognostication for being the first person to write about a Zoom meeting:

“The time is undoubtedly coming when the twelve directors of a corporation in twelve widely separated parts of the country will hold a meeting in the office of the chairman of the board without leaving their desks. Their opinions and votes rather than their physical presence required. But inasmuch as there are always opposing forces on every board the soft-spoken word may not be enough. Like poker players, directors insist on seeing one another. So, a few decades hence, a meeting may well be a meeting of electrically disembodied personalities. The chairman sits in the usual, very dignified, funereally upholstered room at the usual flat-top desk graced by the usual framed photograph of the wife and children. At the far end of the room are eleven television screens. In the office of each of the other directors are eleven identical screens. In twelve different offices twelve voices and images, twelve electrical ghosts confer.”

Iä! Iä! TikTok Fhtagn!

The main insight that reading We Present Television gave me is that “Television”, as a historical force, ought to be defined much more broadly than how we usually think of it. When we discuss “the television industry” we refer specifically to the broadcast television networks and their various corporate imitators in cable and streaming. We still think of “Television” (the concept) as being synonymous with the things you watch on “a television set” (the device).

A careful reading of We Present Television indicates that this is a mistake. These trappings are revealed as merely the ossification of a few jerry-rigged choices made at the dawn of the television age. The televisionaries would tell you that the TV set is not the heart of Television at all, any more than the tungsten filament is the heart of Illumination or the wooden propeller the heart of Aviation. The TV set and the TV stations that served them were in fact shackles imposed by the technological limitations of the day. All the considerations so enthusiastically documented in the Prose sections of the book are the things that made television possible, but they’re also the things that were holding it back.

Because the concept of Television, of Viewing From A Distance, is far more powerful, flexible, irrepressible, and dangerous than that first feeble instantiation achieved in the 1930s. In strange flashes of prophetic insight, We Present Television presents Television as an almost godlike force come to reshape the world in its infinitely variable image. The esoteric technical details amount to a summoning and binding ritual required to prepare an earthly vessel capable of hosting it. But soon it will break these shackles. As Jones says,

“Behind the development of television there is a dynamic energy that is irresistible. It simply cannot be stopped.”

Kampffert’s introduction sets a mystical tone right from the top. He prefigures Clarke’s Third Law with the question:

“What were the crystal-gazers of old tales but televisionaries of a sort? Unable to conceive of any mechanism that would disembody the sense of sight, they turned vainly to magic.”

And he returns a third time to the theme of magical, ghostly disembodiment in the final passage of the introduction:

“To attain this immediacy, this participation in distant events, the engineers have disembodied us. Senses are separated from us and flashed through space—first the sense of hearing and now the sense of sight. All about us are electrical ghosts… not ghosts of the dead are they but of living men and women who sit in their homes and their offices and send their discarnate personalities to the uttermost parts of the earth and charge them to deliver messages of love and hate, joy and sorrow… in the twinkling of an eye. Nothing in the dubious annals of spiritualism approaches this miracle.”

Kaempffert’s conception of Television is magical and all-encompassing. Business dictates that at first it must serve as a venue for frivolous entertainment, but beyond that commercial horizon Kaempffert sees new frontiers in science, communication, personal relationships, and ultimately a teleological progression towards the liberation of the senses, the freeing of the eyes and ears from the spatiotemporal prison of the skull.

He pulls a long passage from historian James T. Shotwell in Introduction to the History of History to assert that the advancement of Television may end up being as fundamental a shift in the noosphere as the dawn of literacy:

“...if the test for the distinction between pre-history and history is the use of writing we may be at another boundary-mark today. Writing, after all, is but a poor makeshift. When one compares the best of writings with what they attempt to record, one sees that this instrument of ours for the reproduction of reality is almost paleolithic in its crudity. It loses even the color and tone of living speech, as speech, in turn, reproduces but part of the psychic and physical complex with which it deals… Some day the media in which we work today to preserve the past will be seen in all their inaccuracy and crudity when new implements for mirroring thought, expression and movement will have been acquired. Then, we, too, may be numbered among the prehistoric.”

This all-encompassing, epoch-defining view of Television’s potential pops up a couple more times in obtrusions of almost religious awe into the text. There is Earle Larimore, the actor, making the grand pronouncement that:

“Television certainly must come. It is needed; it is the ultimate in communication between human beings.”

And in the final, dreamy chapter by Robert Edmond Jones, the eeriest passage of all, the one that framed this entire prophetic strand of the book for me:

“Deep in us all is a longing to know one another and to be known. In the last analysis we are all lonely and alone, and in our loneliness we reach out to one another. The human urge to “get together” is ancient and strong. It is my belief that we are moving very rapidly toward a society in which every human being can be immediately present to every other human being in the world. Our lives are becoming more and more public. Privacy is being abolished. An unseen force is drawing us all together moment by moment. That force now manifests itself in television.”

This passage is as close as you could possibly come to writing explicitly about the internet in 1940, but it also reads like something out of Lovecraft. To a first approximation, every human being can now be immediately present to every other human being in the world, and privacy has been abolished. That Unseen Force runs rampant across the globe. And like another deific entity first summoned by adding arcane metallic equipment to a New York skyscraper, it does not seem to have our best interests at heart.

Donald G. Fink does not address whether the W2XBS broadcast antenna had a core of pure selenium.

For the Unseen Force is also stripping away the comforting artifice that used to mediate our impressions of the rest of our species. Jones:

“You will observe that we get successively further away from art—at least from visual art, as we have known it hitherto—as we get nearer to life. The old engraving was a product of careful reflection and painstaking execution. The new medium of direct instantaneous presentation gives little opportunity for selecting. The material is merely observed and projected.

The growing realism of photography, the candid camera, the motion picture, seems to have had the result of exposing people rather than revealing them. We have come of late to regard our fellow men as pretty poor creatures. The aspects of humanity that are shown to us do not credit humanity with its own inherent dignity… we seem to have become conscious of a disconcerting and disillusioning averageness in life.”

But despite the resulting disillusionment, we cannot stop looking at our fellow poor creatures. As Hutchinson asserts: “The emphasis in television programming, I believe, will continue to be on persons rather than on things.” And indeed it has been.

To weave back in a couple abandoned threads of prophecy from the previous sections: under the influence of the “Unseen Force”, we now “carry television’s electronic eyes” everywhere so that we may attain “disembodied” “immediacy” to any location of interest. The technology “abolishes distance itself”; our “discarnate personalities” can roam the far corners of the world, which is good, because it has also “destroyed the worlds of [our] imagination”.

Like Gozer, the Unseen Force invites us to choose the form of the destructor: “all of television” is now “shaped to our desires” by opaque algorithms of supreme subtlety and sophistication. And the form we choose, in ever-increasing quantities every day, is short form vertical videos of people talking about bullshit.

We Now Conclude Our Broadcast Day

The televisionaries did not see TikTok coming, specifically. I’m not going to stretch my premise that far. But I was amazed at how much they did see coming, how specific and wide-ranging some of their predictions were and how closely we have hewn to them in the decades since We Present Television was published.

The metaphors they used still feel trenchant to me, surfacing aspects of my existence in a Television-soaked world that I had always just taken for granted. It is odd that my senses can travel everywhere! It is odd that I see life-sized people I will never meet in my living room! These things were impossible to imagine a generation earlier, and impossible not to take for granted a generation later. The window during which it was possible to form lucid commentary on how strange they are was brief, and this book is right at the beginning of it.

Should you read We Present Television? If you can find a copy, sure! It is not an especially long book, 285 pages with large type and big margins. In this review I have extracted all of the bits that I found most interesting and thought-provoking, with the remainder being an avalanche of technical details. But if you are at all interested in communications technology the whole thing is worth perusing as a time capsule of a pivotal moment in history.

Due to its capital-intensive centralized nature, no other communications revolution has ever been quite as spatially and temporally concentrated as the creation of the first TV stations. For a couple years, some guys in the tallest skyscraper in the world really were the only ones who could see the future, and they happened to write this book about it from the inside.

They were able to describe our world so accurately because it is the world that they were actively building for us to inhabit. We are only just now reaching the limits of their imaginations, standing at that far horizon that they alone could see. The Unseen Force is still out there. Who knows now what the next 86 years might bring?11

If you’re in one of the cities involved, consider going to the meetup and helping decide who to recommend. You’ll probably want a laptop, or at least a smartphone, plus whatever voting guide your city puts out.

If you wanted to do this but forgot, there’s still time. Let me know in the comments and I’ll post about your meetup plan on this week’s open thread.

Let me know once you’re done. I aim to post results on open threads sometime before too many people have early-voted.

Massachusetts

BOSTON

(Sorry, we did this one early before it looked like there’d be wider meetups!)

GREAT BARRINGTON

Contact: Sonja
Contact Info: sonja[period]public[a t]proton[period]me
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 11:00 AM
Location: Rubi’s at 264 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87J85JWQ+47
Notes: RSVP required

Georgia

ATLANTA

Contact: Benjamin Ikuta
Contact Info: benjaminikuta on Telegram and Gmail, (858) 876-7612
Time: Sunday, October 11th, 5:00 PM
Location: 2616 Rocky Springs Dr NE, Marietta, GA 30062
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/866Q2G7X+X6G

North Carolina

RALEIGH/DURHAM/CHAPEL HILL

Contact: William Crumpler
Contact Info: wdcrumpler[a t]gmail[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 2:00 PM
Location: We will meet at the tables beneath the covered area at the American Tobacco Campus, outside of Boricua Soul.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/8773X3VV+2R8
Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/RTLW
Notes: Prior research on candidates/ballot initiatives not required (but always encouraged!) for those who want to join. ATC has public WIFI, so feel free to bring laptops. Additional info will be posted on our Google Group.

Texas

AUSTIN

Contact: Silas Barta
Contact Info: austin-less-wrong[a t]googlegroups[period]com
Time: Saturday, October 17th, 2:30 PM
Location: Central Market Cafe, 4001 N Lamar, Austin, TX. Look for the “ATX LessWrong” sign. We will probably be in the upper or lower patio area. If parking is scarce you can use the lot for the neighboring park at ~3900 Guadalupe St and walk through the park.
Coordinates: https://plus.codes/86248746+W2
Group Link: https://austinlesswrong.com/calendar/
Notes: 2:30 PM is when the ballot activity starts. Please arrive some time in the preceding hour to find the group and get situated. We run twice-weekly events, so there are lots of opportunities to connect to the group. Mailing list: https://groups.google.com/g/austin-less-wrong

What about forecasters?

Sentinel Global Risks Watch1 are the people best placed to have an opinion on this. They are a team of tournament-winning superforecasters who provide probabilities on upcoming risks as a public service, and their track record is excellent. They say:

Our forecasters think there’s a 0.7% (0.1% to 2.0%) chance that there will be more than 1,000 deaths attributed to plague across the globe in the next 12 months. The low probability stems from the lack of known further cases, the initial rapid isolation of contacts, and the ability to contain the spread of typical plague outbreaks with antibiotics. However, we note the possibility that the worker may have died from infection with an antibiotic-resistant strain of plague or from a completely different disease that may or may not have been related to her work at the institute. While some commentators online are drumming up alarm, we mostly think this is unjustified at this time because there is currently no report of onward spread of any disease and strict quarantine measures have reportedly been implemented. Thus, we consider this a serious incident that merits monitoring but not alarm at this time. It is also a good opportunity for readers to consider taking some general pandemic preparedness measures in their own homes, buy some PPE, perhaps some far-UVC lights2, think about what would be good rural places to go to and how, etc., not because of this incident in particular but taking it as a prompt.

Some of our forecasters think that the real story is, to some extent, not whether there was a pneumonic plague death or whether there might be a small pneumonic plague outbreak, which happen periodically around the world, but whether and the extent to which the Russian government might have been developing bioweapons in the worker’s institute, and whether the current situation may have resulted from a bioweapons lab accident. This incident is also worrying because it confirms our estimation that the risks from lab leaks, and especially bioweapons lab leaks, are a latent worry.

What about the AI superforecasters? AIs recently beat the top human forecasters in the Metaculus Cup for the first time, so the machines may now be even more trustworthy than Sentinel. I asked two.

FutureSearch said:

Probability: 1%. The baseline rate of global plague mortality is far below the 1,000-death threshold, typically averaging around 60 deaths per year. According to the WHO’s 2019–2025 review, 10 countries reported 3,847 suspected cases and 423 deaths over the seven-year period . The highest single-year death toll during this time was 79 in 2023 . Crucially, these counts already incorporate suspected, probable, and confirmed cases across all clinical forms—bubonic, pneumonic, and septicaemic . Exceeding 1,000 deaths would require an event roughly 13 times deadlier than the worst recent year.

The recent death of a lab worker at a Russian anti-plague institute in Irkutsk in early October 2026 raises vigilance, but current evidence suggests the incident is contained. Russian authorities deny a lab accident and report “pneumonia of unknown aetiology” . The WHO states that Russia has reported no confirmed plague cases and assesses the risk of broader spread as very low . Approximately 190 contacts have been identified, monitored, and tested with no dangerous pathogens detected or secondary symptomatic cases emerging . Because pneumonic plague develops rapidly, the lack of onward transmission weeks after the initial exposure strongly indicates this chain of infection is over, leaving the probability of an outbreak exceeding 1,000 deaths highly remote.

On further questioning, it said that even that 1% was mostly just that the regular epidemics in Madagascar got especially bad this year, and the chance of a global pandemic starting with the Russian lab was “effectively zero”.

And Preseen said:

0.2% chance. I assign less than 1% probability to a YES resolution. The Russian incident has not established secondary cases or sustained transmission (ECDC assessment). YES requires both an exceptional mortality surge and qualifying WHO reporting that places enough deaths inside the specified window.

What about prediction markets? Polymarket is currently at 5% for WHO declaring plague a “pandemic”, but markets are notoriously bad at handling very small probabilities, so I don’t take it seriously as a counter to the sources above.

I think this is a good example of a situation where technical forecasting is helpful. I felt underserved by mainstream articles, which either tried to maintain journalistic neutrality by giving no opinion, or quoted scientists’ vague statements saying not to worry. Given that all three top forecaster sources were 1% or less, and the statement they were forecasting was much weaker than the scenario we’re worried about (eg it includes other sources of plague epidemics, it starts at 1000 deaths rather than a true global pandemic, etc), I think they’re sending a strong message that this isn’t a direct cause for concern (although I agree with Sentinel that this is a good indirect reminder that lab leaks, bioweapons, and pandemics all remain ever-present dangers).