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Highlights From The Comments On The Lab Leak Debate

Release Date: 04/26/2024

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

I. In my 2019 post , I asked: why is there so little money in politics? During the 2018 election, Americans - candidates, parties, PACs, and small donors like you - spent a combined $5 billion pushing their preferred candidates. Although that sounds like a lot of money, Americans spent $12 billion on almonds that same year. Why the imbalance? The oil industry has strong political opinions, and they make $500 billion per year. Do they really think electing oil-friendly politicians isn’t worth 2% of revenue? We debated how this could be. Some of the discussion proved prescient - I asked if...

Non-Book Review Contest 2025 Winners

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Thanks to everyone who entered or voted in the Non-Book Review Contest. The winners are: 1st: , by William Friedman. William is a history enthusiast and author who lives in California, where he spends his time reading, writing, GMing, playing video games and telling people excitedly about all the horrific stuff he learned in his latest history book. His fiction blog is (which is currently serializing his first novel, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant) and his nonfiction blog is . 2nd: , by Edward Nevraumont. Edward also wrote one of last year’s finalists (). Now that he’s no longer...

ACX Grants Results 2025

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Thanks to everyone who participated in ACX Grants, whether as an applicant, an evaluator, or a funder. We received 654 applications this year, and were able to fund 42. To the other 612: sorry! Many of you had great ideas that we couldn’t fund for contingent reasons - sometimes because we couldn’t evaluate them at the level of depth it would have taken to feel comfortable supporting them, or because we had complicated conflicts of interest, or just because we didn’t have enough money. Some of you had ideas that were good but not a match for our particular grantmaking philosophy....

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

The following three things can’t all be true simultaneously: Many Americans are fascists Fascists are an acceptable target for political violence Political violence in America is morally unacceptable (at the current time) I thought about this while following between Democratic hopeful Gavin Newsom and Trump advisor Stephen Miller. Newsom called Miller fascist; Miller accused this of being a call to violence which placed “a target” on him. Miller is hardly sympathetic here - , and later suggested Newsom for his speech (if only there were a word to describe the sort of person who...

The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

0: Here Comes The Sun In 1917, three Portuguese children reported a vision of the Virgin Mary. She promised to return to them on the 13th of each month. On the sixth month - October 13th - she would perform a great miracle. Rumors spread, and on the 13th of each month, crowds gathered to watch the children speak to an apparition that only they could see. Increasingly many of these pilgrims started reporting minor visions or miracles themselves. Anticipation for the great October miracle consumed the region, then the country. On October 13, a crowd of about 70,000 people descended on the...

Your Review: The Russo-Ukrainian War

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] You Can Just Do Things In the winter of 2022 I was unhappily working at a dull but decently compensated IT job, which I had come upon at last after four years of phoning it in at college and abandoning my brief stint as an MMA Fighter/Porn Store Security Guard due to feeling like I was getting...

Sources Say Bay Area House Party

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[previously in series: , , , , , , ] Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women. “I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?” “No - have you heard of ? It’s the new male dating trend. You say in your Bumble profile that you’re a member of the Dissident Right who often attends parties with Curtis Yarvin. Then female journos ask you out in the hopes that you’ll bring them along and they can turn it into an article.” “What happens when they realize Curtis...

Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] 1. The Internet That Would Be In July 1945, Vannevar Bush was riding high. As Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, he’d won World War II. His proximity fuse intercepted hundreds of V-1s and destroyed thousands of tanks, carving a path for Allied forces through the...

Defining Defending Democracy: Contra The Election Winner Argument

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Someone argues that Donald Trump threatens democracy, maybe because he’s asserting authority against the judiciary or the media or the NGOs. Someone else counterargues that it hardly seems undemocratic for someone to favor someone who won an election (the President) over other people who did not (the judiciary, the media). If anything, it seems undemocratic to allow the unelected people to continue to obstruct and harass elected leaders. The most common response is to say that fine, democracy is about who wins votes, but we also like liberalism, liberalism is under threat, it’s too hard to...

Your Review: The Synaptic Plasticity and Memory Hypothesis

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[This is one of the finalists in the 2025 review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked] I. THE TASTE OF VICTORY The Tupinambá people ate their enemies. This fact scared , a German explorer who was captured by Tupinambá warriors in 1554, when they caught him by surprise during a hunting expedition. As their prisoner for nearly a year, Staden observed a number of their cannibalism...

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Original post here. Table of contents below. I want to especially highlight three things.

First, Saar wrote a response to my post (and to zoonosis arguments in general). I’ve put a summary and some my responses at 1.11, but you can read the full post on the Rootclaim blog.

Second, I kind of made fun of Peter for giving some very extreme odds, and I mentioned they were sort of trolling, but he’s convinced me they were 100% trolling. Many people held these poorly-done calculations against Peter, so I want to make it clear that’s my fault for mis-presenting it. See 3.1 for more details.

Third, in my original post, I failed to mention that Peter also has a blog, including a post summing up his COVID origins argument.

Thanks to some people who want to remain anonymous for helping me with this post. Any remaining errors are my own.

1: Comments Arguing Against Zoonosis
— 1.1: Is COVID different from other zoonoses?
— 1.2: Were the raccoon-dogs wild-caught?
— 1.3: 92 early cases
— 1.4: COVID in Brazilian wastewater
— 1.5 Biorealism’s 16 arguments
— 1.6: DrJayChou’s 7 arguments
— 1.7: How much should coverup worry us?
— 1.8: Have Worobey and Pekar been debunked?
— 1.9: Was there ascertainment bias in early cases
— 1.10: Connor Reed / Gwern on cats
— 1.11: Rootclaim’s response to my post

2: Comments Arguing Against Lab Leak
— 2.1: Is the pandemic starting near WIV reverse correlation?

3: Other Points That Came Up
— 3.1: Apology to Peter re: extreme odds
— 3.2: Tobias Schneider on Rootclaim’s Syria Analysis
— 3.3: Closing thoughts on Rootclaim

4: Summary And Updates

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-the-5d7

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