https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-fatima-sun-miracle-much-more

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 children's home village of Fatima. At solar noon, the children made contact with the Virgin and said the great miracle was still on track. Then someone - accounts differ as to whether it was the children or a member of the crowd - pointed to the sky.

According to the ~150 eyewitness accounts that have come down to us, the clouds parted, and the pilgrims saw a strange pale sun (or sun-like object), painless to gaze upon. As they watched in wonder, it began to spin around and flash all the colors of the rainbow, drenching the trees and buildings and crowd with yellow, green, and purple light in sequence. Then it seemed to loom, or grow, or fall to earth - accounts differ, but everyone agrees there was mass panic, as the people expected to be crushed or burned or consumed. It lurched downward three times, as the crowd screamed in terror or confessed their sins - then returned to its usual place in the sky. The whole affair had lasted ten minutes.

Since then, the Sun Miracle of Fatima has gained a reputation as the final boss of paranormal experiences, the ultimate challenge for would-be skeptics and debunkers. It's not hard to see why. The witnesses included journalists, atheists, prominent scientists, and people who freely admitted that they had only attended in order to laugh at everyone else when nothing happened. There are far too many of them to dismiss, and their reports are surprisingly close to unanimous. People in nearby towns who knew nothing about the miracle claimed to have seen the same thing, seemingly ruling out mass hallucination. There are photographs - too low-tech to clearly visualize the sun, but clear enough to show a crowd pointing at the sky in astonishment. For one hundred eight years, believers and skeptics have written magazine articles, scientific papers, and at least a dozen books on the topic, mostly without progress.

Now its fame has reached Substack. Ethan Muse presents the case in favor, and Evan Harkness-Murphy the case against, with additional commentary from Dylan and Bentham's Bulldog. I don't think any of them have risen to the occasion. Ethan observes the formalities of good debate, but regurgitates such a neatly-packaged story that readers are liable to miss the thousand little threads that trail off the bottom and lead places that are, if anything, even stranger than the original miracle. Evan puts admirable effort into arguing that child-seers could confabulate visions, but by the time he gets to the sun miracle itself, he has only a few potshots about crowd psychology and "optical phenomena". Other skeptics are even worse, barely gesturing at Evan's piece before redirecting their attention to boasts about how they have totally demolished the credulous fundies, or laments about how cosmically unfair it is that they must take time out of their busy schedules to respond to such idiocy. The final boss of the paranormal deserves more respect!

We will at try to at least do better than the other Substackers. But as a stretch goal, I would like to actually advance this 108-year-long conversation.

[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]

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 too old to be broke. If pressure to fit in with my yuppie, family-and-career-having peers pushed me into corporate life, the depressing mundanity of Covid-era day-to-day pushed me out just as quickly.

On February 24th, 2022, Russia began its full scale invasion, and America learned what a "Ukraine" was. Having long used politics as a surrogate activity to distract myself from my life of chronic underachievement, I was already a little more familiar than most with the country's woes, and had followed the conflict from the time of the Euromaidan protests.

Years before I had read of the likes of Azov and its many foreign volunteers, and had even periodically fantasized about dropping everything and going to the Donetsk Airport. But no, that Wasn't The Type Of Thing Normal People Like Me Did, so instead I joined my own country's armed forces, sat around pushing papers, earned the dubious honor of washing out "ahead of schedule", and finally graduated college with a not very useful degree and a mediocre GPA.

With the invasion however, things changed. Before I had always vaguely felt that I would eventually end up doing something "cool", and had soothed myself with reassurances that I was still in the "early life" section of my future Wikipedia article and would bide my time before I made my play at greatness.

Now however, the unrealisticness of this conceit was thrown into uncomfortably sharp relief by a certain contrast I could not not ignore. Only three days after the start of the full scale invasion, Ukrainian foreign minister Dymytro Kuleba announced the creation of the "International Legion For The Territorial Defense Of Ukraine". Unlike in 2014, Ukraine was now specifically and officially soliciting foreigners with military experience to fight for them! I was at least technically in that category! I thought about my own time in the military. My ideas of going to war in Afghanistan had been quashed by the US withdrawal not long after I joined, and I had quickly found that military life involved more editing forms in Adobe Acrobat and less explosions than I had naively supposed.

But this was a real war, a deadly serious war, and a major, world defining event at that. In the early months of the invasion the international media talked about almost nothing else. I spent all day at my desk pretending to work while frantically refreshing OSINT live maps and breathlessly following news from the front. I remember the circulation of harrowing video clips. Kalashnikovs being distributed to civilians in Kyiv, the mayor of a small village publicly asking its inhabitants whether they should personally accede to Russian ultimatums, or risk having their property destroyed and lives forfeit- to resounding cries of "Glory to Ukraine". The Ukrainians' courage blew my mind. There were people who really had something to die for, and by extension something to live for.

Meanwhile, there I was, sipping coffee and getting fat. The creation of the legion felt like destiny was reaching its hand out to me. Was I really going to ignore it so I could handle support tickets for the rest of my life?

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-russo-ukrainian-war

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sources-say-bay-area-house-party

[previously in series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

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 curtfishing? 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 Yarvin isn't at the party?"

"Oh, everyone pools their money and hires someone to pretend to be Curtis. You can just do things. Today it's Ramchandra."

You follow his gaze, and there is Ramchandra, hair greased back, wearing a leather jacket, surrounded by a crowd of young women. "When I say I'm against furries," he's explaining, staccato, at 120 wpm, "I mean the sort of captured furries you get under the post-Warren-G-Harding liberal order, the ones getting the fat checks from the Armenians at Harvard and the Department of Energy. I love real furries, the kind you would have found in 1920s New Mexico eating crocodile steaks with Baron von Ungern-Sternberg! Some of my best friends are furries, as de Broglie-Bohm and my sainted mother used to say! Just watch out for the Kikuyu, that's my advice! Hahahahahaha!" Some of the women are taking notes. "But enough about me. When I was seventeen, I spent seven weeks in Bensonhurst - that's in the Rotten Apple, in case you can't tell your Nepalis from your Neapolitans. A dear uncle of mine, after whom I was named…"

"Ramchandra is pretty good," you admit. "Still, if it were me I would have gone with a white guy."

"It's fine," says Chris. "Curtis describes himself as a mischling, and none of the journos know what that means."

Ramchandra is still talking. "Of course, strawberries have only been strawberries since after the Kronstadt Rebellion. Before that, strawberries were just pears. You had to get them hand-painted red by Gypsies, if you can believe that. Gypsies! So if you hear someone from west of Pennsylvania Avenue mention 'strawberries', that's what we in the business call il significanto."

"I admit he has talent," you say. "But this curtfishing thing - surely at some point your date realizes that you're not actually a high-status yet problematic bad boy who can further her career just by existing, and then she ghosts you, right?"

"That's every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It's a strict Pareto improvement!"

After some thought, you agree this is a great strategy with no downsides, maybe the biggest innovation in dating since the invention of alcohol. Having failed to bring your own journo to the party, you look for one who seems unattached. You catch the eye of a blonde woman who introduces herself as Gabrielle, and you try to give her the least autistic "Hello" of which you are capable.

[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]

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 French countryside. Back in 1942, he'd advocated to President Roosevelt the merits of Oppenheimer's atomic bomb. Roosevelt and his congressional allies snuck hundreds of millions in covert funding to the OSRD's planned projects in Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. Writing directly and secretively to Bush, a one-line memo in June expressed Roosevelt's total confidence in his Director: "Do you have the money?"

Indeed he did. The warheads it bought would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in mere weeks. The Germans had already given up; Victory in the Pacific was nigh. So Bush was thinking ahead.

In The Atlantic, Bush returned to a pre-war obsession with communication and knowledge-exchange. His essay, "As We May Think," imagined a new metascientifical endeavor (emphasis mine):

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-project-xanadu-the-internet

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 talk about "liberalism" because in the US it sometimes means being left-wing, and so we use the related concept "democracy" as a stand-in. This is reasonable, and some accused-democracy-destroyers like Viktor Orban even accept it for themselves, calling their brand of government "illiberal democracy".

But I think there's an even stronger response that doesn't require admitting to a bait-and-switch: democracy isn't just about having an election. It's about having more than one election.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/defining-defending-democracy-contra

[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]

The Tupinambá people ate their enemies. This fact scared Hans Staden, 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 rituals. They were elaborate, public affairs; here's a description of them from Duffy and Metcalf's The Return of Hans Staden, an assessment of Staden's voyage and claims: (Ch. 2, pg. 51-52)

First a rope was placed around the neck of the captive so that he might not escape; at night the rope was tied to the hammock in which the captive slept. Straps that were not removed were placed above and below the knees. The captives were given women, who guarded them and also slept with them. These women were high-status daughters and sisters of chiefs; they were unmarried and sometimes gave birth to the child of a captive. Some of the captives might be held for a period of time until corn was planted and new large clay vessels—for drink and cooking flesh—were made. Guests were invited to the ceremony, and they often arrived eight to fifteen days in advance of it. A special small house was erected, with no walls but with a roof, in which the captives were placed with women and guards two or three days before the ceremony. In the other houses, feathers were prepared for a headdress or for body ornamentation, and inks were made for tattoos. Women and girls prepared fifty to one hundred vats of fermented manioc beer. Then, when all was ready, they painted the victim's face blue, mounted a headdress of wax covered with feathers on him, and wound a cotton cord around his waist. The guests began to drink in the afternoon and continued all through the night. At dawn, the one who was to do the killing came out with a long, painted wooden club and smashed the captive on the head, splitting it open. The attacker then withdrew for eight to fifteen days of abstinence while the others ate the cooked flesh of the captive and finished all of the drink made for the occasion.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-synaptic-plasticity

I.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's Machine Intelligence Research Institute is the original AI safety org. But the original isn't always the best - how is Mesopotamia doing these days? As money, brainpower, and prestige pour into the field, MIRI remains what it always was - a group of loosely-organized weird people, one of whom cannot be convinced to stop wearing a sparkly top hat in public. So when I was doing AI grantmaking last year, I asked them - why should I fund you instead of the guys with the army of bright-eyed Harvard grads, or the guys who just got Geoffrey Hinton as their celebrity spokesperson? What do you have that they don't?

MIRI answered: moral clarity.

Most people in AI safety (including me) are uncertain and confused and looking for least-bad incremental solutions. We think AI will probably be an exciting and transformative technology, but there's some chance, 5 or 15 or 30 percent, that it might turn against humanity in a catastrophic way. Or, if it doesn't, that there will be something less catastrophic but still bad - maybe humanity gradually fading into the background, the same way kings and nobles faded into the background during the modern era. This is scary, but AI is coming whether we like it or not, and probably there are also potential risks from delaying too hard. We're not sure exactly what to do, but for now we want to build a firm foundation for reacting to any future threat. That means keeping AI companies honest and transparent, helping responsible companies like Anthropic stay in the race, and investing in understanding AI goal structures and the ways that AIs interpret our commands. Then at some point in the future, we'll be close enough to the actually-scary AI that we can understand the threat model more clearly, get more popular buy-in, and decide what to do next.

MIRI thinks this is pathetic - like trying to protect against an asteroid impact by wearing a hard hat. They're kind of cagey about their own probability of AI wiping out humanity, but it seems to be somewhere around 95 - 99%. They think plausibly-achievable gains in company responsibility, regulation quality, and AI scholarship are orders of magnitude too weak to seriously address the problem, and they don't expect enough of a "warning shot" that they feel comfortable kicking the can down the road until everything becomes clear and action is easy. They suggest banning all AI capabilities research immediately, to be restarted only in some distant future when the situation looks more promising.

Both sides honestly believe their position and don't want to modulate their message for PR reasons. But both sides, coincidentally, think that their message is better PR. The incrementalists think a moderate, cautious approach keeps bridges open with academia, industry, government, and other actors that prefer normal clean-shaven interlocutors who don't emit spittle whenever they talk. MIRI thinks that the public is sick of focus-group-tested mealy-mouthed bullshit, but might be ready to rise up against AI if someone presented the case in a clear and unambivalent way.

Now Yudkowsky and his co-author, MIRI president Nate Soares, have reached new heights of unambivalence with their new book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (release date September 16, currently available for preorder).

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-if-anyone-builds-it-everyone

[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.]

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-september-2025

[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]

If you've been following this blog for long, you probably know at least a bit about pharmaceutical research. You might know a bit about the sort of subtle measures pharmaceutical companies take to influence doctors' prescribing habits, or how it takes billions of dollars on average to bring a new medication to market, or something about the perverse incentives which determine the FDA's standards for accepting or rejecting a new drug. You might have some idea what kinds of hoops a company has to jump through to conduct actual research which meets legal guidelines for patient safety and autonomy.

You may be less familiar though, with how the sausage is actually made. How do pharmaceutical companies actually go through the process of testing a drug on human participants?

I'm going to be focusing here on a research subject's view of what are known as Phase I clinical trials, the stage in which prospective drugs are tested for safety and tolerability. This is where researchers aim to answer questions like "Does this drug have any dangerous side effects?" "Through what pathways is it removed from a patient's body?" and "Can we actually give people enough of this drug that it's useful for anything?" This comes before the stage where researchers test how good a drug is at actually treating any sort of disease, when patients who're suffering from the target ailments are given the option receive it as an experimental treatment. In Phase I clinical trials, the participants are healthy volunteers who're participating in research for money. There are almost no cases in which volunteer participation is driven by motivations other than money, because the attitudes between research participants and clinicians overwhelmingly tend to be characterized by mutual guarded distrust. This distrust is baked into the process, both on a cultural level among the participants, and by the clinics' own incentives.

All of what follows is drawn from my own experiences, and experiences that other participants in clinical pharmaceutical research have shared with me, because for reasons which should become clear over the course of this review, research which systematically explores the behaviors and motives of clinical research participants is generally not feasible to conduct.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-participation-in-phase

"You made him lower than the angels for a short time..."

God: …and the math results we're seeing are nothing short of incredible. This Terry Tao guy -

Iblis: Let me stop you right there. I agree humans can, in controlled situations, provide correct answers to math problems. I deny that they truly understand math. I had a conversation with one of the humans recently, which I'll bring up here for the viewers … give me one moment …

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/what-is-man-that-thou-art-mindful