Highlights From The Comments On Boomers
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[original post: ] Before getting started: First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims: Boomers had it much easier than later generations. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract. Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could...
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You Have Only X Years To Escape Permanent Moon Ownership
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
If you’re not familiar with “X years to escape the permanent underclass”, see , or the , , and articles that inspired it. The “permanent underclass” meme isn’t being spread by poor people - who are already part of the underclass, and generally not worrying too much about its permanence. It’s preying on neurotic well-off people in Silicon Valley, who fret about how they’re just bourgeois well-off rather than future oligarch well-off, and that only the true oligarchs will have a good time after the Singularity. Between the vast ocean of total annihilation and the vast continent...
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Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
[Original post: ] Table of Contents 1: When was the vibecession? 2: Is the vibecession just sublimating cultural complaints? 3: Discourse downstream of the Mike Green $140K poverty line post 4: What about other countries? 5: Comments on rent/housing 6: Comments on inflation 7: Comments on vibes 8: Other good comments 9: The parable of Calvin’s grandparents 10: Updates / conclusions
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ACX/Metaculus Prediction Contest 2026
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
is live on Metaculus. They write: This year’s contest draws directly from that community, with all questions suggested by ACX readers. Both experienced forecasters and newcomers are invited to participate, making predictions across U.S. politics, AI, international affairs, and culture. To participate, submit your predictions by January 17th at 11:59 PM PT. At that time, we will take a snapshot of all standing forecasts, which will determine the contest rankings and the allocation of the $10,000 prize pool. While you are encouraged to continue updating your predictions throughout the...
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Against Against Boomers
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
Hating Boomers is the new cool thing. Amazon offerings include , the two apparently unrelated books and , and . “You don’t hate Boomers enough” Richard Hanania, who has tried hating every group once, has decided that hating Boomers . Some people might say we just experienced a historic upwelling of identity politics, that it was pretty terrible for everyone involved, and that perhaps we need a new us-vs-them conflict like we need a punch to the face. This, the Boomer-haters will tell you, would be a mistaken generalization. This time, we have finally discovered a form of identity...
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The Pledge
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
This holiday season, you’ll see many charity fundraisers. I’ve already mentioned three, and I have another lined up for next week’s open thread. Many great organizations ask me to signal-boost them, I’m happy to comply, and I’m delighted when any of you donate. Still, I used to hate this sort of thing. I’d be reading a blog I liked, then - wham, “please donate to save the starving children”. Now I either have to donate to starving children, or feel bad that I didn’t. And if I do donate, how much? Obviously no amount would fully reflect the seriousness of the problem. When I...
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Links For December 2025
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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Vibecession: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
The term “vibecession” most strictly refers to a period 2023 - 2024 when economic indicators were up, but consumer sentiment (“vibes”) was down. But on a broader level, the whole past decade has been a vibecession. Young people complain they’ve been permanently locked out of opportunity. They will never become homeowners, never be able to support a family, only keep treading water at precarious gig jobs forever. They got a 5.9 GPA and couldn’t get into college; they applied to 2,051 companies in the past week without so much as a politely-phrased rejection. Sometime in the 1990s,...
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The Good News Is That One Side Has Definitively Won The Missing Heritability Debate
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
…the bad news is that they can’t agree which one. I explained the debate more , but the short version is: twin studies find that most traits are at least 50% genetic, sometimes much more. But molecular studies - that is, attempts to find the precise genes responsible - usually only found enough genes for the traits to be ~10-20% genetic. The remaining 35% was dubbed “missing heritability”. Nurturists argued that the twin studies must be wrong; hereditarians argued that missing effect must be in hard-to-find genes. The latter seemed plausible because typical genetic studies only...
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Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
Astral Codex Ten Podcast
If we worry too much about AI safety, will this make us “lose the race with China”? (here “AI safety” means long-term concerns about alignment and hostile superintelligence, as opposed to “AI ethics” concerns like bias or intellectual property.) Everything has tradeoffs, regulation vs. progress is a common dichotomy, and the more important you think AI will be, the more important it is that the free world get it first. If you believe in superintelligence, the technological singularity, etc, then you think AI is maximally important, and this issue ought to be high on your mind. But...
info_outline[original post: Against Against Boomers]
Before getting started:
First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:
- Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
- The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
- Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.
Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions - I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support - rather than letting them switch among them as convenient - then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.
Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.
Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.
I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.
Anyway, here are your comments.
Table Of Contents:
1: Top comments I especially want to highlight
2: Comments about housing policy
3: ...about culture
4: ...about social security technicalities
5: What are we even doing here?
6: Other comments
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-boomers