300 Comments
Comment deleted
Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

If you believe Peter Zeihan (whose book you reviewed a while back), Putin's current wars of expansion make most sense as an effort to address sn-risk.

Expand full comment

you read Douglas Coupland all over again.

Expand full comment
founding

Enjoyed this a lot.

Expand full comment

Most days, I fear I was born in the wrong city. But there are few, blessed, days, when Scott reminds me that things could be worse.

Expand full comment

You're describing people who don't know who they are. Kids who haven't grown up. Some of them probably never will.

Expand full comment

You were there too?

Expand full comment

Gotta say, the sn-risk thing seems pretty on-brand to me!

So how do you handle the new Avar hordes?

Expand full comment

I didn’t realize Tyler Cowen had achieved this level of status.

Expand full comment

Pretty good house party. No one trying to get you to sell Amway. I call it a win.

Expand full comment

I, for one, would love to go to a party where everyone had a Scott Alexander-style thought experiment ministory to introduce themselves with. I guess this is why people pay Bay Area rents.

(Reminds me - looking forward to the Boston ACX meetup next week!)

Expand full comment

I reread this whole thing and I'm still not sure I understand the meaning of "alpha" in this sociolect.

Expand full comment

Can someone cooler than me explain what "alpha" is in this context?

Expand full comment

Man, I've never lived in SF but I've spent collectively probably over a year there (between weeks and months spent in small doses). I've lived in Boston and NYC. This seems more like a college than an industry party. Maybe I'm just lame and didn't get invited to the really weird ones?

My version would involve a bar or lounge or tech offices, no or soft music, and a lot of people drinking while playing board games or ping pong and hashing out arcane technical details of this or that. I once had a long, long discussion about video compression in a downtown Boston lounge for example. It seems like the difference is people are shooting money from their ears while in my world you needed a solid plan to get to utility. Not necessarily profitability, but widespread adoption. If you just had an idea you'd get politely given advice rather than just kind of unmitigated approval.

Is it just that the East Coast is more businesslike and less into weird rat-culture stuff like AI risk? Maybe I just gravitate towards other engineers and we're a subculture?

Expand full comment

Seems like not nearly enough drugs to be a proper party

Expand full comment

Very well done.

But typo: It's spelled "Khamenei" – not "Thiel".

Expand full comment

“But Tyler Cowen hates parties!” 😂https://youtu.be/wPJo15XpvrE

Expand full comment

This was probably my favorite post this year. Enjoyed it a lot. Thanks for writing it, Scott.

Expand full comment

I've never seen the show Silicon Valley, but if anyone here vouches that it's even half as funny and relatable as this post, I'll watch every episode.

Expand full comment

“A woman in a blue dress was saying something about how she was trying to build a secular scientific interpretation of Buddhism.”

No, no! It was a gold dress!

Expand full comment

>If you think about it, all problems are caused by lack of awareness.

#Kony2012

Expand full comment

Man I miss bay area house parties. You skipped the part where the refreshments table has mealsquares though

Expand full comment

So when is the next brooklyn meetup? Some approximation of this sounds like a lot of fun.

Expand full comment

"You tell them what times and days of the week you’re available. Then if they have a need, they text you a day or two beforehand and tell you where to go. You get to eat other people’s free food, drink their free alcohol, and meet a lot of cool people. Sometimes you meet the same Partyr standby guests a few times in a row and make friends with them. Sometimes they even pay you a stipend. I got to say, it’s a pretty great deal."

having been an astroturfed guest like this at more than a few parties, it is indeed a pretty great deal

Expand full comment

So that's how humanity is going to die... when party music fooms.

Expand full comment

This is the first I’ve read from you and I absolutely loved it!

Expand full comment

This kind of post is Scott Alexander in peak form. Idol Worship, The Gods Only Have Power, and of course the canon on the old blog are clearly the best you have to offer. Sn-risk almost took me out of my chair

Expand full comment

This post is clearly inaccurate. No Twitter exec has ever studied Classical History.

Expand full comment

I was at a wedding reception once where there were quite a few google people. None of them talked like that, but I suppose it was because they hadn't quit google yet.

Scott, I think you could write a couple of hilarious skits for SNL.

Expand full comment

Is axolotl kosher? Can I mix it with dairy?

Expand full comment

too many unnecessary details; complete lack of tempo; peter thiel should have appear earlier in the passage; taylor swift shall be replaced by either a vegan blonde model slash programmer e.g. karlie kloss or one of the kardashians; periodic interludes of scenic descriptions of evening sea waves and warmly yellow street lights that contrasts with the never-grow-up theil foundation startups

Expand full comment
founding

Brilliant.

I’ve been mulling over the ‘reincarnation without the woo’ thing for decades and think it does actually make sense.

It starts with: why do you have a first person experience from the creature that is reading these words? Why are you not having a first person experience from the body of Elon Musk (maybe you are, hi Elon!) or a particular sparrow in the New Forest?

And then, when your body dies, does that mean no more first person experiences again for ‘you’? Or, will some other creature create a first person experience for ‘you’ again (for whatever reason this current creature is creating your current first person experience?)

There is no need for a ‘woo’ part ie no memories are retained, no ‘new game+’, no element of karma (although I love the version of that in this story). Just the concept that first person experiences may not end with death of this current creature.

If this is correct - and we perhaps we should act in a way that assumes it is - what would be the implications?

Many creatures have minimal agency over their experiences. Humans are different, not just with more agency of themselves but of others - at a minimal level of their family and pets and immediate connections, but wider too esp in more developed countries and moving up the influence and power in society.

If you were a cow, you would look at humans and saying ‘if I was one of those I could impact this shitty situation’. Well congratulations, you are! How do you, as a first world human, use that power to mean that if you do have a first person experience from another creature, that future experience is…not utterly horrific?

That idea if embraced ties all living things together. Selfishness disappears - you might literally be in anyones (or anything’s) shoes in the future, so do anything you can to not deliver horrible experiences to anything. It’s to your own benefit!

Expand full comment

Fuck yes! That was awesome, Scott!

Expand full comment

Irony aside, this is why I live in New York

Expand full comment
May 4, 2022·edited May 4, 2022

Like 80% of Bay Area house parties are actually nothing like this. That's more of a SF/Berkeley, transplant, grad. education type of party that rationalist types would be invited to, and which many of the same types of people in Boston, Austin, and Seattle would be familiar with.

In general Bay Area house parties are similar to what you'd find elsewhere across the US. A lot of people blitzed on 8 servings of alcohol surrounding beer pong, deafening trap music, tons of weed passed around, occasionally mushrooms and cocaine, and waking up to shenanigans on Instagram, and definitely not a whole lot of intelligent conversation. More like singing a long and people just reconvening happily, hugging, and shooting the shit. I love it, but could definitely use more rat-type parties too.

Expand full comment

very funny

Expand full comment

Rolled a 20 on this one... great fun!

Expand full comment

Not quite the Turtledove restaurant, but Topolobampo in Chicago (the fanciest of Rick Bayless's Mexican restaurants) did a "1491" menu some years back with a similar idea.

I was underwhelmed. Like the dinosaur killer asteroid, I'm glad not to have experienced the Columbian Exchange directly, but the results are clearly to my benefit.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160324221332/https://www.chicagotribune.com/dining/recipes/ct-topolobampo-review-20140227-20140227-column.html

Expand full comment

You missed the main Aztec comfort food: Chihuahua!

Expand full comment

Are the tense changes errors, or is Scott doing something too clever for me?

Expand full comment

This sort of makes me happy to be a guy in rural Washington who quietly does wood working in his garage while thinking about things. At least I don’t have to be confronted with the existential horror that I’m the same as everyone else in a visceral manner.

Expand full comment

I have never in my life been to a Bay Area house party, but this is exactly what every Bay Area house party is like.

Expand full comment

Can anyone fully unpack the meanings of “having alpha” and “freeze peach” for me?

Expand full comment

Some people in these comments are taking this story, and the word "every" in the title, way too literally. *Obviously* most people in the Bay Area are the same as everywhere else. *Obviously* you would meet hardly anyone like the people described in this story if you came here, unless you actively tried really hard to do so. *Obviously* Scott's social circle is a weird little corner of a corner of a society, as every individual person's social circle is. Mine is a different corner of a corner so it's different. This is all so obvious I feel bad writing it, but I'm getting the sense it's somehow not apparent to everyone.

Expand full comment

😂😅 Love it! Do you have a novel length techno, satire, sci-fi book? If not why not?

😉

Expand full comment

unrealistic: who would talk to that many people at one party

Expand full comment

I can't tell whether I would love or hate living in these social circles.

Expand full comment

If Subnormality dropped the pictures entirely

Expand full comment

Laughed out loud several times, well done!

Expand full comment

Really enjoyed the part about Zen and enlightment.

I semi-seriously endorse the idea that whole enlightment thing is just an elaborate prank and becoming enlightened is figuring this out, laughting at yourself and then not spoiling the joke for others, while possibly continuing all the medival monk stuff for your own amusement.

Expand full comment

that was some party….

Expand full comment

This is the funniest thing you've written in a while.

Expand full comment

I don’t know what position Hunter Biden is running for, but I’m sure there’s more than a week before this election

Expand full comment

No, I can't believe axolotl.

Expand full comment

A serious and humorless take on secularized 'reincarnation' - it's more or less a combination of any of these three ideas: heredity(you carry your ancestors in your blood), the notion of eternal return given either determinism or an infinite number of iterations and convergent thought on universal topics. It doesn't have to mean living past your death, especially given the focus on deemphasizing the notion of the self as illusory. But hey, discovering some arcane truth about say the distribution of prime numbers is tantamount to channeling every mind that thought about the same. Just in a poetic, not literal fashion.

Expand full comment

Obnoxious music aside this sounds better than most parties I get invited to.

Expand full comment

I'm weirdly reminded of one of those Jane Austen drawing room scenes among the early 1800s aristocracy, with everyone[1] speaking competitively about who came into ten thousand a year and which horse the Prince of Wales favors at Ascot this year.

----------

[1] Except Darcy and Anne Elliot of course.

Expand full comment

As I recall, one of the unwritten rules of parties in San Francisco was: if the party isn’t being organized by a startup, don’t talk about your startup. On the other hand, apart from the use of the word “alpha”, this does match a lot of my recollections about parties organized by startups.

Expand full comment

Possible subtitle for this post: The Hidden Costs of Agglomeration Effects.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

Expand full comment

> I’m studying sn-risks.”

> “I can’t remember, which ones are sn-risks?”

> “Steppe nomads. Horse archers. The Eurasian hordes.”

I feel attacked.

Expand full comment
May 4, 2022·edited May 4, 2022

Taking a slightly different tack on secular reincarnation: "You" is the mental pattern not the physical body, that's why when someone gets uploaded to the Matrix we don't start talking as though it's a different person. "You" is also fuzzy, people's patterns change over time but "you" describes both yesterday's and today's pattern. When you die you don't *automatically* reincarnate, but given an enormously large universe, eventually there will come another embodied pattern close enough that it also counts as you.

From there we get to karma by considering selection effects. If you were an especially violent pattern, the next place you pop up in the universe is likely to be the sort of place that produces a lot of violence, and you're going to be stuck there until you die at which point maybe you've changed enough that your next match lands you somewhere else.

Expand full comment

If the Mongols are coming back, invest in The Hu.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4xZUr0BEfE&ab_channel=TheHU

Expand full comment

We already had the "overdue" barbarian invasion. It was called 9/11 and it came out of Afghanistan. Then we went and beat up the barbarians badly enough that they're going to wait a while before trying that crap again, even though they technically "won".

Related: One of the justifications for tte Vietnam War was the "domino theory" that if we let South Vietnam fall to Communism, then there would be similar uprisings/invasions in other Asian countries and they would fall as well. There's a more recent hypothesis that the fact that South Vietnam did eventually fall and no other "dominoes" fell doesn't actually discredit the theory; the fact that the US fought as long and as hard as it did before giving up was enough to keep Communists elsewhere from trying.

Expand full comment

I'm probably going to get scolded for this opinion; but I suspect the type of person who is on the so-called "Trust and Safety Council" at Twitter probably thinks the destruction of the monuments and works of Western Civilization is a commendable act.

Expand full comment

This is the moment when I went from thinking "wow, there have been some great ACX posts recently" to "wow, ACX really is entering a new era of enhanced quality, perhaps enough to rival the SSC glory days of whenever that was"

Expand full comment

Darn it, worrying about steppe nomads was going to be *my* thing.

Expand full comment
May 4, 2022·edited May 4, 2022

There should be a party guest working on disruptive access to abortion, dropping packets of the 5 pills from airplanes, or selling them in pet stores "for aquarium fish use only", or something like Vine-Glo.

Or would that be too useful for the world?

Expand full comment

The scientific reincarnation thing is quite similar to the premise of Permutation City by Greg Egan. Not my favorite book ever but if that kind of stuff intrigues you check it out.

Expand full comment

Great Post Scott, Excellent Satire.

BTW: your repeated references to Peter Theil funding everything are now more important and more real than you let on.

Last night J.D. Vance, best known as the author of "Hillbilly Elegy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Elegy, won the primary election to be the Republican candidate in the State of Ohio for the U.S. Senate.

The national media is playing the story as a Trump endorsement story. And, to be sure, Trump's endorsement did seem to boost Vance into the lead. Vance won with about 32% of the vote in a 7 candidate race. #2 & #3 we about 23%.

But it really is a Peter Theil story. Theil groomed and promoted Vance's candidacy and invested $15 million in it.

Ohio is a red state now. Trump won it by 8% in 2020. Republican Governor Mike DeWine is very popular. Vance is very likely to be a US Senator come next January. And, Peter Theil will have funded him.

Expand full comment

Love these short stories. Can never tell if they're apocryphal or mere exaggerations.

I have avoided the bay area due to the stereotype of Big-tech nerd on koolaid mono-culture. But, if the parties are anything like this, it sounds interesting. Can anyone in Bay Area / SF give me an idea of whether such spots quirky exist and where one could find them ?

Expand full comment
May 4, 2022·edited May 4, 2022

I wanna get paid to be a retard at a sweet VC party

Expand full comment
founding

"Exactly! With modern technology, the next time could be so much worse! Usually the steppe nomads are limited to a small fringe around the steppe where they can still graze their horses..."

I think Sara is a bit behind the times. The steppe nomads have embraced modern technology and taken a step up from both horses and archery: https://i.redd.it/idkemq67bqj71.jpg

Expand full comment

Read Arslan, by M.J. Engh. A great novel about the sn risk from 1987.

Expand full comment

"God is so powerful that He doesn’t even need to exist in order to save us.”

OMG, I think I might believe this! Thx.

Expand full comment

Anybody say " Namu Amida Butsu" ten times just in case?

Expand full comment

this is so fucking good and also so fucking accurate. I'm so blessed that somebody was able to write about my sf experience

Expand full comment

Apropos of nothing, I created a couple fake twitter accounts pretending to be cardinal points on the political compass and started doing one reply a day to a large account (On company time, of course.).

Communism got banned first, after I threatened to Carthago a brand's lawn; Anarchist and anarchocap got banned around the same time for threating statements. Nationalist just kept going till I got bored; I couldn't bring myself to add a 'White' to the front and go full racist and I was less enthusiastic about it. It turns out, auth-right is just kinda boring unless you are willing to COMMMIT; and if you don't break any rules you can say pretty much whatever you want, even if it's outrageously offensive.

Expand full comment

Tip: scribble “music too loud” on a piece of paper or just type it on your phone; this battle can be won.

Expand full comment

Holy mother of god, this all sounds awful

Expand full comment
May 5, 2022·edited May 5, 2022

If I had to live surround by these people I'd just go ahead and commit quantum suicide and hope I reincarnated into a society that hadn't lost its friggin mind. Societies like this are only possible because of a genuine lack of want and need. Human beings worried about day to day survival do not have time for this crap. So apparently the closer you are to barely surviving, the more you actually live in reality.

Expand full comment

Very nice David Foster Wallace vibe

Expand full comment

Превосходно!

Expand full comment

Does the Taliban's victory in Afghanistan count as an example of SN-risk? Everyone keeps bringing up Russia and Ukraine, but it seems like the Taliban is a better match for modern Steppe Nomads. Afghanistan seems like one of the few remaining places on Earth where the Steppe Nomad strategy for fighting off larger, better equipped, and more organized forces could still work.

In keeping with Dogiv and Watchman's comments below, maybe the real winning strategy for the British/Soviets/Americans in Afghanistan would've been to build more railroads.

Expand full comment

This was my favorite newsletter (maybe the wrong term?) in a while.

Expand full comment

Three things:

1) This post was a lot of fun.

b) Is the thing about the pilot whales' relative unintelligence true?

III) I would absolutely eat at that restaurant.

Expand full comment

Very surreal but the point is not missed. People have gone bat shit.

Expand full comment

Maybe somebody can actually bootstrap a party with Elon Musk (or whichever big celebrity they want) attending, by telling all the other famous potential guests that Musk will be there, and then telling Musk that all those other people will be there.

Expand full comment

The Zen Buddhist reincarnation idea in here sounds incredibly similar to what they suggest in Space Dandy to be 'warp travel' aka FTL travel.

Expand full comment

stupidity compounds pretty fast. If you buy $100 of stupid coin today you would have 10,000 in 10 yrs

Expand full comment

As a finance guy I love that "alpha" has made its way into Silicon Valley vernacular. I wonder how that happened? Maybe via the quants?

Expand full comment

We do live in a society.

Expand full comment

These people are coo coo. Is this real or satire? And people make fun of followers of Christ and of the Bible for believing it (yes, some Christian beliefs don't make sense, but often it's because of a misinterpretation of the text).

Expand full comment

German-japanese fusion is great, but an hour later you want to conquer the world.

Expand full comment

God, this sounds amazing. Wish I could attend one. Major FOMO I'm feeling now.

Expand full comment

Partyr actually seems like a good idea

Expand full comment

What’s worked historically re steppe nomad risks, offered by the great novelist Jin Yong 金庸:

“I wrote about how powerful Chinese martial arts are in my wuxia novels, but actually it’s a bit exaggerated. Chinese people are not so great at fighting wars. When we fight wars with foreigners, we lose more often than we win. But we have stamina! If we don’t win this round, that’s okay, we’ll fight you long-term. Eventually, the foreign country falls apart from civil war. For instance the Huns were very fearsome, so we couldn’t win against them. Han Dynasty Emperor Gaozu was besieged by the Huns near Datong in Shanxi, and could not escape. His advisors offered a stratagem, to go to the Empress of the Huns and say: there are many beautiful Han ladies, and if you capture the Han Emperor, defeat the Han people, and get a whole bunch of beautiful Han women as spoils of war, it’s going to go badly for you -O Empress of the Huns! The Empress of the Huns fell for this stratagem, and pulled back the army. The Huns later split into Northern Huns and Southern Huns. The Southern Huns surrendered to the Han Empire, while the Northern Huns went westward, some of them reaching England, and they destroyed the entire Western Roman Empire. What was interesting was, half of the Huns were resisted by and surrendered to China, while the other half defeated all of Europe.”

— from https://feikayser.substack.com/p/chinese-ladies-for-decisive-military?s=w

Expand full comment

I moved to the old money neighborhood in town, known for and named after its trees. Slowly, new money invaders have bought plots in said neighborhood and clear-cut them of almost all foliage. I am inherently distrustful and disdainful of those who don't feel safest and most at peace in a wooded, forest-like environment, so I can only assume these are the descendants of steppe nomads. They speak our language and look like us, but their gene-deep disdain for trees can only mean one thing—the invasion has already begun.

Expand full comment

Reminiscent of Point Counter Point.

Expand full comment

I started to get a real Disco Elysium vibe when the music defended itself

"INCREMENTAL PROGRESS"

Expand full comment

I enjoy these sorts of websites because they help us to get fantastic bargains. I also prefer online stores because they sell apparel like this Saints Row Johnny Gat Leather Jacket https://www.hitjacket.com/product/saints-row-johnny-gat-leather-jacket/ at reasonable prices.

Expand full comment