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Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Release Date: 08/22/2024

Your Book Review: Nine Lives show art Your Book Review: Nine Lives

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Finalist #13 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book 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] Cats have nine lives but they don’t get involved in jungle wars in the Philippines Aimen Dean (pseudonym) compares himself to the proverbial cat: he has nine lives, surviving every impossible situation and starting new lives under strange new...

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Links For September 2024 show art Links For September 2024

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]  

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Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism show art Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Freddie deBoer He argues we shouldn’t expect a singularity, apocalypse, or any other crazy event in our lifetimes. Discussing celebrity transhumanist Yuval Harari, he writes: What I want to say to people like Yuval Harari is this. The modern human species is about 250,000 years old, give or take 50,000 years depending on who you ask. Let’s hope that it keeps going for awhile - we’ll be conservative and say 50,000 more years of human life. So let’s just throw out 300,000 years as the span of human existence, even though it could easily be 500,000 or a million or more. Harari's...

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Your Book Review: The Pale King show art Your Book Review: The Pale King

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book 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] For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes, sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with...

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Highlights From The Comments On Highlights From The Comments On "Sorry You Feel That Way"

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

[Original post .] Aeon : The main complaint about this expression is that it’s “not a real apology,” and that’s true, it isn’t. The error is in thinking it is therefore a fake apology. But it isn’t, because “I’m sorry” is not a statement of contrition, it’s a statement of sorrow. Somehow everyone has gotten confused into thinking an apology is the only correct use for that phrase despite the plain meaning of the words. This is the comment that best expresses what I wished I’d said at the beginning.  

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Interview Day At Thiel Capital show art Interview Day At Thiel Capital

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

You look up from your massive mahogany desk. “Tom, right? Thank you for coming…hmm…I see you’re applying for the role of Vice-President Of Sinister Plots. Your resume looks very impressive - I didn’t even know any of the masterminds behind the Kennedy assassination were still alive.” “That’s what we want you to think,” says Tom. “Of course. Then just one question for you. What’s something you believe, that very few people agree with you on?” “I think we’re in a simulation.” “Hm, yes, that was very shocking and heterodox back in 2012. But here at Thiel Capital...

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Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe show art Your Book Review: The History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Finalist #11 in the Book Review Contest [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book 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 Supernatural is Dead April, 1861 was a cruel month. The American Civil War had just started, and across the Atlantic, high in a remote valley in the western Alps, in the old market town of Morzines, another war was raging, this one pitting...

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In Defense Of In Defense Of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way"

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended" . They say it’s a fake apology that only gets used to dismiss others’ concerns. Well, I’m sorry they feel that way. People sometimes get sad or offended by appropriate/correct/reasonable actions: Maybe one of your family members makes an unreasonable demand (“Please lend me lots of money to subsidize my drug addiction”), you say no, and they say they feel like you don’t love them. Maybe you speak out against a genocidal aggressive war. Someone complains that their family member died fighting in that war. They accuse you of...

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Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition) show art Your Book Review: The Complete Rhyming Dictionary and Poet's Craft Book (1936 Edition)

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Finalist #10 in the Book Review Contest  [This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book 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. Suppose you were a newcomer to English literature, and having heard of this artistic device called ‘poetry’, wondered what it was all about and where it came from.  You might start by looking up some examples of poetry from each...

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The Compounding Loophole show art The Compounding Loophole

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

Now that we’ve gone over , let’s get back to the economics. , we asked - how will the economy handle a $12,000/year drug that everyone wants? Now we have an answer: the compounding loophole.  

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I. Bentham’s Bulldog

Blogger “Bentham’s Bulldog” recently wrote Shut Up About Slave Morality.

Nietzsche’s concept of “slave morality” (he writes) is just a dysphemism for the usual morality where you’re not bad and cruel. Right-wing edgelords use “rejection of slave morality” as a justification for badness and cruelty:

When people object to slave morality, they are just objecting to morality. They are objecting to the notion that you should care about others and doing the right thing, even when doing so doesn’t materially benefit you. Now, one can consistently object to those things, but it doesn’t make them any sort of Nostradamus. It makes them morally deficient, and also generally philosophically confused.

The tedious whinging about slave morality is just a way to pass off not caring about morality or taking moral arguments seriously as some sort of sophisticated and cynical myth-busting. But it’s not that in the slightest. No one is duped by slave morality, no one buys into it because of some sort of deep-seated ignorance. Those who follow it do so because of a combination of social pressure and a genuine desire to help out others. That is, in fact, not in any way weak but a noble impulse from which all good actions spring.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean