The Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto is one of Japan’s most popular tourist attractions. It is a large Shinto shrine, devoted to the deity (or kami) Inari, and covering the better part of a small mountain to the southeast of the city center. Past the large buildings at the base, visitors can walk the multiple trails of the forested hill, many of which are decorated with hundreds or thousands of bright vermillion sacred torii gates inscribed with black Japanese characters.

A foreigner with superficial knowledge of Japanese culture may wonder what compelled people to amass so many torii gates in one place. They might also ask about the meaning of all that Japanese text. This, some Japanese people have said, would be a mistake. The answer might unwittingly damage the beauty and wonder of the place.

The forbidden answer is that most of these are the names of commercial enterprises. Inari is the kami of various things, including industry and worldly prosperity. It is therefore common for successful Japanese businesspeople to purchase and donate a torii to the Fushimi Inari shrine as a way to thank the deity for their wealth. They inscribe on it their name, or the name of their company. The result is that all of those black Japanese characters aren’t sacred or mystical messages, but rather, a long list of corporate sponsors.

Twitter was recently rife with posts about this,1 the vast majority of which agreed that such knowledge damaged the beauty and wonder of the place. It is apparently abundantly clear to Japanese and Westerners alike that corporate sponsorship on sacred objects makes the sacred object less magical, less beautiful.

This is, I believe, an instance of an extremely common pattern. Across the world, we tend to view the presence of commercial elements as somewhat ugly. We bemoan the presence of ads on websites, on TV, on billboards in a landscape. We describe movies or music we don’t like as “commercial.” We dislike the idea of a Burger King in a tourist site. We view capitalism as draining away the beauty and wonder of the natural world, by damaging the environment and encouraging greed.

One anecdote in particular struck me, at the very end of 2024. With some artsy cartoonist friends, we were watching the end-of-year TV shows on December 31st. In Quebec, these TV shows are kind of our equivalent to the Super Bowl in the US: they’re the most watched shows of the year, so the ad time during the breaks is valuable, and companies put a lot of effort into their ads — sometimes reaching such quality that it’s not easy to tell them apart from the comedy sketches of the shows proper. On 31 December 2024, during a commercial break, something like this happened: between two more mundane ads, we saw a performance of a song by the recently deceased Jean-Pierre Ferland, a major Quebec singer-songwriter, by 10 well-known local musicians. It was beautiful and clearly high production value, and the loud crowd in my apartment gradually quieted down, as if put under a spell, as the performance went on. It lasted a couple minutes, longer than a typical ad. And then, at the very end, the Coca-Cola logo came on screen for a few seconds.

And immediately there was, in the apartment, a collective boo of deep disappointment.

I didn’t say anything but I was bemused. You could feel my friends’ aesthetic appreciation go from genuine admiration to disgust. How dare Coca-Cola spoil this work of art with their commercial presence!

But why? Why would the presence of a commercial sponsor — who, it must be said, actually went through the trouble of commissioning this extremely nice homage performance, which otherwise would not have existed! — destroy its magic?2

One class of explanation might focus on history, trying to understand what brought us there.

Since we were talking about Japan, let’s start by pointing out that during the feudal era of that country, merchants were explicitly placed at the bottom of the class hierarchy. The four-class system, called shinōkōshō, was created by the Tokugawa government, placing samurai first, peasants second, artisans third, and merchants last. It came from Confucianism, and unsurprisingly, classical China had a similar structure and disdain for merchants (who nevertheless often grew to be very rich and powerful in both civilizations).

The four occupations system is actually more ancient than Confucius, and it’s plausible that it arose due to a combination of factors such as these: 1) a theory that merchants are less productive than other classes because they just move wealth around instead of producing it; 2) the idea that the virtues of peasants, craftsmen, warriors, or scholars are superior character traits than the cunning and greed of the merchants; and 3) the fact that peasantry and industry are easier to tax and manage by the elite than the mobile, profit-driven merchant class. It seems likely that there was, in ancient China and elsewhere, some sort of elite competition phenomenon, in which the elites who derive their status from other things (nobility, war, religion, philosophy) come up with ways to distinguish themselves from those who became elite solely through the accumulation of wealth, and deny them entry into their ranks.

Similar patterns around elites emerged in very different pre-modern societies. In the Aztec Empire, the pochteca (long-distance traders) became as wealthy as the nobility, but had to hide their riches. In Ancient Rome, the senatorial class was prohibited from engaging in big commercial ventures, and trade was described as “sordidus” (vulgar). In the worst society ever (Sparta), commerce and, indeed, all productive economic activity was deemed unworthy of the citizen elite; they even designed their currency to be impractical so as to discourage the accumulation of wealth.

In other places, trade had a suspect but more normal middle position, as in India (below priests and warriors in the caste system, but above laborers) and in most of medieval Europe (the Christian worldview has traditionally viewed money with suspicion — “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” yadda yadda3). Some societies regarded merchants positively, as in the Islamic world (Muhammad was a trader himself!) and in the city-states of Italy or the Hanseatic League. In the earliest complex civilizations, Mesopotamia and Egypt, trade carried no particular stigma, and long-distance merchants had an important role to play, though one that was embedded into state institutions. But it’s clear that there’s always been a tension between elites-from-wealth and elites-from-other-things, and when the latter wins, the former tends to be associated with ugliness.

Eventually, in the West, the pattern reversed and the elites-from-wealth won. This is essentially the birth of modernity. Starting in the late 18th century, industrialization and liberal revolutions made the bourgeoisie so powerful that it displaced the other elites (the aristocracy and the clergy), and we got our modern liberal-capitalist order. But, three seconds after this happened, Europe invented Romanticism — an artistic and intellectual movement that sacralized nature, elevated authenticity and inner experience as prime values, and came up with the modern conception of the artist as a misunderstood genius who must express his or her inner vision. This was in reaction to the growing importance of commerce and industry, and we basically still live in that world. When my cartoonist friends reacted negatively to the Coca-Cola ad, they were being Romantics.

There were also, of course, a lot of political and social reactions to the rise of capitalism. One of these reactions led to Marxism; another took the form of environmentalism. As a result, a lot of people view capitalism in general as at least morally suspect, and at worst a catastrophic scourge on human civilization. It’s hard to view commerce as a thing of beauty when you think that it’s exploiting the workers and/or destroying the planet.

Interestingly, industry, unlike trade, tends to be viewed favorably even by some anti-capitalists, together with agriculture. Consider the hammer and sickle, and more generally the presence of industrial symbols in various socialist-style emblems; a personal favorite is the emblem of North Korea, featuring a hydroelectric plant. Communist symbols seem to have somehow revived the old Confucian prescription that laborers and peasants sit above merchants in the hierarchy of economic activity.

In parallel to these historical explanations, we can come up with more immediate causes to the ugliness of commerce.

Let’s focus on advertisements. Why do we usually not like them? We need not look very far for answers: merely trying to read a recipe on a search-engine-optimized cooking website will provide several. Ads are often overabundant, getting in the way of things we actively want to look at. They can be too big, or mismatched to their context, or repetitive. They may use annoying visual and audio cues (bright colors, tired jingles) to try to hijack our attention. They can be constructed cheaply, with bad design, or the use of temporary materials in the case of physical installations. They can seem insincere, or be downright misleading.

They can be, in sum, the result of poor execution. Just like a work of art in the Romantic sense can be good or bad, an ad can be good or bad, and given the commercial pressure to be profitable, it’s not uncommon for their creators to spend less effort and talent on them than would be aesthetically optimal.

Many of these problems apply to other manifestations of commerce, like the design of stores, or even the behavior of salespeople. Plus, the fact that all of those have some instrumental goal — selling something — rather than “pure” motivations is probably a big part of why we can’t see them as wholesome and beautiful, though that’s the Romantic worldview speaking again.

The interesting thing about the explanations above is that none of them are inherent to commerce or ads. Ads don’t have to be overabundant, mismatched to their environment, or desperately trying to hijack your attention. They don’t have to be dishonest. They can even be pure! And we certainly don’t have to follow Confucian, Romantic, or Marxist ideas to inform how we should think about them.

In fact, I’d argue that most ads and manifestations of commerce are actually well-intentioned, reasonably well executed, and deserving of being thought of as beautiful.

It’s fairly simple to see this, though it requires a little bit of effort. I wrote about this in a January 2024 post: you can learn to modulate your perception of beauty. All you need to do is to focus your attention. Next time you see an ad, take a moment to appreciate the details. Imagine the work that went into the design choices, the typography, the colors, the illustration, the copywriting. Go one step further: think about the product or service being advertised. Think about the energy and time that went into crafting it. It could be a piece of furniture, a theater play, a mortgage brokerage service, whatever — some humans, somewhere, have devoted a lot of their waking hours to make it happen. And then some other humans devoted their hours to make sure that you, and many others, could hear about it.

An ad, fundamentally, is an act of communication. It is a message, involving the combined effort of potentially lots of people, meant to inform you that “hey, we made this thing, it means a lot to us, would you consider perhaps buying it if it fits your needs or desires?”

When I take the time to be aware of this, I find it hard to view ads as unpleasant. It doesn’t mean that I look for them, but when, inevitably, they show up in my daily life, it’s very easy for me to feel a wave of aesthetic appreciation, especially if the creative direction is good. Some people poured their hearts into this, and want me to know about it. I don’t know these people, but I like to imagine that they enjoy their jobs, or at least that they are grateful to have them. It becomes easy to imagine that the ad, and the thing being sold, are the output of a labor of love.

Which, yes, is a phrase typically referring to tasks done without expectation of a monetary reward, but… why? There’s nothing wrong with the monetary reward. If you do something out of love and receive money in exchange, it is strictly superior than doing the exact same thing out of love and receiving nothing in exchange. The buyer, of course, spends their money, but unless they were forced to (in which case it’s not commerce), then they were by definition willing to do that. And in many cases, they were probably happy to — it seems true that most people do actually like to spend money in exchange for things they want.4

One reasonable concern might be that adding money into the mix warps the incentives, such that we get the ugly qualities mentioned above. Sure, commerce and ads might be good in isolation, and it’s possible in theory to display them in a tasteful way; but in practice, when you mix things, you get ugliness, like an ad-filled cooking website. I think this happens sometimes, but it’s way less a problem than it seems. We have to take into account that a lot of things wouldn’t exist, or wouldn’t have as much reach, without adding money into the mix! There would be far fewer cooking websites, and far less journalism, sports, magazines, TV shows etc. if these things avoided interacting with the world of commerce. Very often, the alternative to “do something out of love in exchange for money” isn’t “ do it for free”, but “don’t do it at all.” Criticizing a thing for being sullied by commerce, when that’s what allows it to exist in the first place, is just the ugliness of the problem sticking to the solution.

(The one big exception is beautiful environments, whether natural or built. We should not degrade scenic towns and mountains with ads, that much I agree with!)

Besides, all this labor of love is what allows all these people to have money to spend of their own — to spend on things they themselves love, or better yet, on people they love. Or, when things go particularly well, on sacred torii gates for the local place of worship. Economic activity, including industry, agriculture, and, yes, commerce, is what allows us all to live good lives. What could be more beautiful than that?

Of course, none of this will be convincing to people who have already decided they dislike our current economic system. My own skill at noticing beauty in ads and commerce is downstream of realizing, over the course of several years, that liberal capitalism is a pretty elegant way to organize a society. But I do wonder if the causation flowed the other way, too. As I took the time to notice the craft and intentionality in ads and commerce, perhaps I reinforced my emerging belief that capitalism is good and, dare I say, beautiful.

You may not wish for this reframing to happen to you. That’s fine, but I will say this: I find it much better for my happiness to see love and beauty in the ads around me and in the economic system I live in. I suggest you try it! As a bonus, you’ll be immune to the loss of awe and wonder whenever you see a sacred object displaying corporate sponsorships.

Some say that a human life can neatly be divided into thirds. Assume you’ll live to 90 — a healthy lifespan, slightly above most life expectancies — and you get three thirty-year periods. From birth to 30 is your youth; from 60 to your death is old age. In the middle, from 30 to 60, you get three decades of midlife.

This is different from the typical definition of “middle age”, which usually refers to the period from 40 to either 60 or 65, but the elegance of the three thirds is attractive. (Also, if the middle age starts at 40, what are you at 39? A young adult? Come on.) The problem with this theory that it doesn’t really work. Maybe it did in the past, back when most people at 30 would be expected to already have a career, a spouse, and at least one kid, and when the left half of this meme was true:

But today, among educated Westerners at least, who spent a lot of their youth in universities and/or flailing around while trying to figure out a career, there’s no denying that 30 feels young-ish, spiritually belonging more to your twenties than to the mature part of your life. And so does 31. And 32. And 33, maybe? 34, if we stretch…

And then we get, like I do today, to 35 years old.

At 35, half of the fourth decade of your life is over. It becomes increasingly difficult to pretend you’re young. Your body is starting to show it, in subtle but noticeable ways. You have several years of experience at whatever job you’re doing, are probably making decent money, and are unlikely to totally switch careers in the future. You may or may not have kids, but you likely either are in a long-term relationship that has gone on for a while, or you have experienced at least one such that has ended. You have, in sum, a history.

So perhaps we can revise the theory of thirds: Youth is from 0 to 35, midlife is from 35 to 70, and old age is from 70 to whenever you die, hopefully at least 105. (This scheme also works better than the other for the second transition: I do hear from people who are in their sixties, like my parents, that they don’t feel old, even though they have a lot of the markers of old age, like being retired and living an increasingly insular life in their little house in the countryside.)

Under this theory, today I bid goodbye to my youth and welcome the middle age. I feel okay about this, in a way that I didn’t at 30.

Because the title of this post is an easy pun with the name of a historical period, I entered a bit of a rabbit hole about medieval conceptions of the stages of life.

An influential categorization was apparently that of Isidore of Seville, who lived at the very beginning of the Middle Ages (560-636). He is known for his encyclopedia Etymologiae, in which he gave the following stages:1

According to this, I’m still in the first half of iuventus, youth. I’m very okay with that. Also notable is the pretty long adolescentia, until 28 years old, which doesn’t feel out of place in the 21st century at all. In fact the whole table feels surprisingly modern, and makes me question the received wisdom that adolescence is a recent invention or whatever.2

From what I understand, Isidore’s scheme is based on St. Augustine, who mapped the six stages of life to six ages of humanity, thus indicating that I am not the first person to think of this. However, in St. Augustine’s time (354-430), the Middle Ages hadn’t started, so he couldn’t use that. Instead he came up with the Six Ages of the World, which were based on the Bible and were the main way people conceptualized history during late antiquity and the medieval period:

• Infantia: Adam to Noah and the flood (perhaps 2300 BC)

• Pueritia: the flood until Abraham (roughly 2000-1800 BC)

• Adolescentia: Abraham to King David (10th or 9th century BC)

• Iuventus: David to the Babylonian exile (6th century BC)

• Gravitas: the Babylonian exile to Christ (~1 AD)

• Senectus: Christ until today and/or the Last Judgment (date unknown)

(There is also a secret seventh age, eternal rest with God, corresponding to the seventh day of the week, sabbath. But this doesn’t quite map to either an age of man or a historical period.)

Augustine’s scheme is explicitly not meant as a practical guide for how to live your life. He doesn’t even give age ranges. And the lengths of the eras are of wildly varying lengths, with young adulthood being one of the shortest. Augustine was making some kind of cool theological analogy, not trying to help you deal with your midlife crisis.3

Some other ancient authors whose age categories were influential in the Middle Ages, at least when their texts reentered Western Europe from the Arab world, were Aristotle and Ptolemy. Aristotle divided the ages of man into three, like our theory of thirds above, except his stages weren’t equal: there was youth, prime, and old age. Prime was a short period where the excesses of youth (hope and passion) and the excesses of old age (cynicism and caution) balanced out. Ptolemy, in keeping with the theme of being Ptolemy,4 matched the ages of man to the seven planets, which at the time comprised the Moon and Sun:

According to this I’m in the Sun phase, full of responsibilities, ambition, and decorum. Sure. The middle age according to the modern definition is associated with Mars, which sounds combative and difficult.

Various later medieval intellectuals had stuff to say about ages, like Hildegard von Bingen or Avicenna, but most didn’t give explicit age ranges. One exception is Philip of Novara, an Italian writer and jurist who lived in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem and Cyprus. He wrote, in the variant of old French that was spoken in the crusader lands of the Eastern Mediterranean, Des IIII tenz d'aage d'ome, translated to modern French as Les Quatre Âges de l'homme, and apparently never translated to English. Philip didn’t know Latin and wasn’t trying to build on his intellectual predecessors to make some hare-brained analogy to history or planets. He just wanted to impart the wisdom accumulated throughout his life by writing a book in vernacular language a few years before his death, circa 1265-1270. Philip divided a notional 80-year life into four quarters of twenty years:5

1. Childhood, ages 0-20, “a period of learning from one’s elders”

2. Youth, ages 20-40, characterized by “love, sin and folly, and of impetuous acts of violence and revolt”

3. Middle age, ages 40-60, which is “when a man develops his greatest virtues and accomplishes his greatest achievements” while for women it is “a period of even greater folly than youth”6

4. Old age, ages 60 until death, “a period granted by a benevolent God to give man time to ‘recall adequately God’s kindness and the debts he owes to his Creator.’”

What’s cool about this is that it seems to be one of the first occurrences of the phrase “middle age” (or moyen âge in French)7 to describe a part of a human life. It also happens to correspond almost perfectly to the modern concept of middle age. Perhaps four or five twenty-year periods are a better scheme than thirty- or seven-year periods, actually, and our man Philip had everything figured out in the 13th century (except for that one quote about women).

If Philip of Novara may have coined the phrase “middle age,” the phrase “Middle Ages” didn’t come until quite a bit later. The direct Latin equivalent medium aevum8 is recorded only in 1604, well after the end of the Middle Ages. There were precursors: Petrarch already thought in the 1330s that he was living in a “dark age,” and media tempestas, meaning “middle season”, occurs to refer to the period after antiquity soon after the “official” end of the medieval period, by Giovanni Andrea Bussi in 1469. Eventually Pierre de Marca gave us the French term, moyen âge, in 1641, centuries after Philip of Novara had used it to refer to a stage of human life.

You’d expect that the obvious near-sameness of the two phrases would have then spurred lots of analogies by modern wannabe St. Augustines. Apparently not. Various intellectuals, such as Oswald Spengler, have likened civilizations to living organisms with specific life cycles, but almost nobody has commented on the middle age / Middle Ages thing.9

I would wager a guess that this is because the analogy works poorly. The Middle Ages in Western Europe are usually, rightly or wrongly, seen as a period of not much going on, following a decline from the splendor of antiquity. The middle age in a human life has an element of decline, yes, but is more importantly a time of strength, wisdom, productivity, achievement. If I had to match it to a historical period, it might be… right now? We have a mature civilization, powerful and generative, but also one that does not quite believe in future improvement anymore — just like a 55-year-old with a nice career behind her but not much more to expect from the future. The earlier parts of the modern era (1500-1900?) might then correspond to young adulthood, and the medieval period to some kind of long adolescence crisis after the promising childhood of antiquity.

So middle age and the Middle Ages have little in common, other than being in the middle of other things. And really, this whole genre of analogy is flawed: civilizations don’t have a lifespan, despite what Spengler may have thought. Human ages are finite and predictable; civilizational ages aren’t. St. Augustine’s metaphor with biblical ages is irrelevant today, and it seems silly to think that we’ve been in “old age” for the entire Common Era. Had he known what was coming, he would have proposed a different breakdown.

And my suggestion that we’re in our middle-aged phase now might prove totally incorrect, depending on future events. Perhaps we’re still in our societal childhood, and the future will be so much grander and more “mature” than everything in our past. Or perhaps, as Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has suggested, our current development of AI corresponds to our technological adolescence.

Let’s end with Dante, because Dante turned out to be almost on-the-nose relevant.

Dante Alighieri was one of the greatest Italian poets, medieval poets, and poets in general. He was born in Florence in 1265, right around when Philip of Novara was writing his four ages and/or dying. Like Philip, he suggested a division of ages in a poem of his book Convivio:10

Returning to the proposition, I say that Human Life is divided into four ages or stages. The first is called Adolescence, that is, the growth or increase of life; the second is called Youth, that is, the age which can give perfection, and for this reason one understands this Youth to be perfect, because no man can give except of that which he has; the third is called Old Age; the fourth is called Senility, Extreme Old Age, as has been said above.

Adolescence and Old Age each last 25 years; in the middle is Youth, which lasts twenty.

Of the second, which is the height of our life, the time is variously taken by many. But leaving that which philosophers and medical men write concerning it, and returning to the proper argument, we may say that, in most men in whom one can and ought to be guided by natural judgment, that age lasts for twenty years. And the reason which leads me to this conclusion is, that the height or supreme point of our arc or bow is in the thirty-fifth year; just so much as this age has of ascent, so much it ought to have of descent; and this ascent passes into descent, as it were, at the point, the centre, where one would hold the bow in the hand, at which place a slight flexion may be discerned. We are of opinion, then, that Youth is completed in the forty-fifth year.

Thus Youth is from 25 to 45, with a peak at 35. This turns out to be the exact middle point of a typical human life of 70 years, as defined in the Bible (Psalm 90:10). I suppose this matches my three 35-year periods scheme pretty well, adjusted for more longevity after 70. Sadly, Dante himself would not get his biblical time allotment: he died at age 56, of malaria.

What did Dante do at his peak? He wrote plainly about this, in the three first lines of his Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of literature of all time:11

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

The Divine Comedy was written in 1308-1321, but it is set in the spring of 1300, when Dante was 35.12 And it reads a bit like a midlife crisis. Right at the middle point of life, Dante tries to find his way. Here we are, in one of the most famous poems of the Middle Ages, dramatizing the middle age and all the worries and disorientation that come with it.

I turned 35 today. I don’t know if this is really a turning point, but it does feel more significant then most of my past birthdays. Maybe I should celebrate by reading the Divine Comedy.

A guilty pleasure is something you genuinely like, but that clashes with your self image. For example, you might really be a fan of Paris Hilton, but feel that you’re the kind of person who should not be a fan of Paris Hilton. If you ever tell someone you like Paris Hilton, you’ll say it with just enough coyness that your interlocutor will understand that you shouldn’t be mistaken for that kind of person.

A guilty displeasure is the same thing, in reverse. It’s something you genuinely don’t like much, but feel like you should, because the kind of person you are, or aspire to be, must like that thing.

For example, some of my own guilty displeasures are opera, old movies, and poetry. I don’t hate any of those, but I like them far less than I want to admit when I’m not writing a blog post about guilty displeasures. I have been to operas, including the full cycle of Wagner’s Nibelungen. I have friends who have made me watch black and white movies from the Hollywood golden age. I used to write poems as a teenager, like all sensitive and nerdy young men. But quite frankly, I don’t feel that I need any of those things in my life. When my friend who conducts operas at the university invites me to one, I patiently wait for the singers to quit singing so I can properly enjoy the instrumental parts of the music. When I must watch old movies, I spend 25% of the time reading the Wikipedia summary to keep myself entertained. When I read a book or blog post that quotes something in verse, I literally just skip it and hope it wasn’t important to understand the rest.

I have those guilty displeasures because I’m a snob. I like what we might call “high culture.” I enjoy classical music and theater,1 artsy (recent) movies and classic literature (in prose). So it seems ill-fitting that I would dislike some “high culture” art forms.

(Conversely, I don’t care much about pop culture, so my total lack of interest for mainstream global anglo pop music isn’t a guilty displeasure at all. It just isn’t part of me.)

Of course, your guilty displeasures might be totally different. They often arise from your particular social environment, or the milieu you grew up in. If your family likes to watch sports and you don’t, you might feel something’s wrong with you. You might feel bad about not enjoying your spouse’s favorite hobby. The guilt related to my distaste of opera has increased after I became the close friend of someone who conducts them, considers Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte to be one of the greatest works of art ever, and even thought of naming his daughter Fiordiligi until this was vetoed by his wife and all his other friends.

Another common way to get guilty displeasures is related to work. When you choose a career and invest several years developing it, it can become difficult to accept that you genuinely don’t like some core parts of it — or perhaps, in extreme cases, all of it. In those extreme cases, you’ll probably switch paths sooner or later, but in other cases I suspect that it’s fairly common to bear the sunk cost for all of your active life and feel relieved from the guilty displeasure only at the time of retirement. Which is rather tragic.

I’m pretty happy with where my career is at now, but for a long time a big guilty displeasure I had was math. I’m a smart guy; I’ve studied the sciences and used to really like physics; I enjoy puzzles and intellectually stimulating exercises; I work in software and artificial intelligence. It seems like someone like me should like math. I’m not even bad at it! But it bores me to death. If I liked math, I think I could have made more money or had more impact in the technical fields I picked for myself. I could have enjoyed biology research and its heavy reliance on statistics. I could have had a lot of fun doing linear algebra and become a star AI researcher or something. But no, I’m stuck working in software, constantly hoping that I won’t ever need to multiply matrices or interpret a p-value.

And relatedly, in recent years I started developing a guilty displeasure for coding. But fortunately we have AI coding agents now so that problem seems permanently solved.

Over time, I think most people get more comfortable with who they are, and both guilty pleasures and displeasures fade away.

A younger version of myself felt guilty at disliking reading scientific papers. Then I realized I just didn’t want to be a scientist, and stopped caring. (Also, I realized that nobody really enjoys it, so it’s kind of a moot point; when I realized this I tried to solve the problem for everybody, and now work for a startup that is making real progress against this problem.)

Another younger version of myself felt guilty about not enjoying hiking and nature. In the kind of educated social class I’m in, this is a very common one! Liking nature is a strong enough social norm. On a date, once, I asked the person if he liked nature, and he was visibly and uncharacteristically uncertain as to how to respond, until I said I didn’t care much for it and he admitted, with relief, that he didn’t like it much either. Now this isn’t a guilty displeasure at all and I fully own the fact that I can go years without a hike. I’ve integrated it as part of my self-image.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying to cultivate a guilty displeasure as part of your identity. It’s probably better to focus on positive rather than negative things, though I allow an exception for things that are overabundant and not that good for you, for which snobbery is a totally valid defensive strategy. Similarly, some guilty pleasures are probably better kept a little guilty, if they clash with who you aspire to be. But in general, it’s better to be a confident, self-loving person, and identifying guilty displeasures, so that you can decide what to do with them, seems like a good first step.

So, what are your guilty displeasures?

1. From 2020 to 2025, I sang in a choir. Well, more like 2022 to 2025, since the covid pandemic started almost immediately after I joined the choir in February 2020, and singing activities during that time were… more logistically difficult. In the fall of 2022, during my second full choir semester (we organize two concerts a year, one in June and one in February), there was a general assembly at which we had to elect the board of the nonprofit organization that manages the choir for the next year. I was elected as a generic administrator. A year later, I was elected to the position of treasurer. A year after that, I was elected president. I quit at the time of the general assembly of October 2025, and then, a bit burned out by the whole thing, I quit the choir in December. I meant to write about the experience at the time, but life got in the way, so here we are. Tonight is the concert I was supposed to sing in. I’ll attend, as a spectator.

2. The first thing to know about being an (unpaid) member of a nonprofit board is that nobody wants to do it. In the paragraph above I said I was “elected” three times. You might imagine a dramatic election campaign ending with a suspenseful tally of the votes. Nothing could be further from the truth. The way these elections work is that:

   1. The general assembly happens on an October Wednesday, to the annoyance of everyone because it shortens practice time;

   2. We choose someone to lead the assembly, usually someone who knows the procedure and is therefore able to expedite them;

   3. We discuss various matters about the past year, the finances, etc., then get to the election part;

   4. Some members of the outgoing board have already committed to keep doing it, or to accept a different role (e.g. becoming president), and they announce that they are running (or they have arranged for a colleague to suggest that they run);

   5. Nobody runs against them;

   6. They are elected unanimously without a vote;

   7. Some people who were talked into joining by a member of the outgoing board announce that they are running (or they have that member of the board suggest that they run);

   8. Nobody runs against them;

   9. They are elected unanimously without a vote;

   10. Some newcomers that nobody expected to volunteer announce that they are running;

   11. Nobody runs against them;

   12. They are elected unanimously without a vote;

   13. At this point there usually are a few roles that still have nobody running for, which the person leading the assembly points out;

   14. An awkward moment of silence happens;

   15. If lucky, go to (j) and recruit some more volunteers;

   16. If less lucky, somebody randomly suggests someone who they think might be a fit;

   17. That person may decline, if so go to (n);

   18. That person may accept, everybody claps and most are secretly relieved that they’re not on the board;

   19. If there are still roles to fill, go to (m);

   20. If not, we have a full board! At least 2-3 members out of the 9 new members wonder what they got themselves into, and will most likely quit within a few months, triggering a by-election.

3. I joined the board by being the relative newcomer that somebody randomly suggested at step (p). I had no idea what I’d gotten myself into, but I was unemployed, had plenty of time, and figured it would be a way to become friends with other singers faster.

4. Then a year later, the treasurer was leaving and no one wanted to take the job it, so I volunteered. I became the holder of the login codes to the organization’s bank account.

5. Then a year later, the president was leaving and absolutely no one wanted to take the job, so I volunteered, even though that was half-hearted and I actually would have preferred to leave the board altogether.

6. It was my first time being president of anything. It was my first time being the formal leader of anything, actually. I had no idea what I was doing.

7. Fortunately, previous office holders made the job very easy for me. Much of how the choir functions was well-documented, and I could ask some of the “elders.” The outgoing president, a woman my age, also happened to be the most senior singer, having been in the choir more than 10 years and on the board most of those years. It also helped that the people singing in a choir of contemporary classical music tend to be smart, educated, competent people on average. So the board, I am told, was much better run than most nonprofit boards.

8. My tasks were to organize the monthly board meetings and make sure every object-level task was attended to, preferably not by myself. Those object-level tasks involved email communication with various collaborators, negotiating the agreement with our choir director, organizing the concert, printing sheet music and concert materials, managing the choir membership, etc. etc. Most of the time, I could simply copy-paste the meeting agendas and task spreadsheets from exactly a year prior, and coast on the accumulated experience of my predecessors.

9. For the most part, it was fun. I joked that I accepted to become president for the prestige. It was probably mostly in my head, but I did feel it. It’s kind of nice to be in charge. And I did become closer friends with many people.

10. Like I said, almost everyone in the choir, and therefore the board, was smart, educated, and competent, and that made my job easy. But there were exceptions. It’s challenging to deal with someone you just can’t rely on. You want to give them tasks, but then you do and they don’t do them, which annoys everyone else since they have to do the tasks and everything gets done later. So you end up pretending they’re not part of the board. I had to nudge someone to leave the board because they were just making life worse for everyone.

11. Another challenge is that very few people remain on the board more than 1-2 years. I stayed 3 years, which is exceptional longevity. When I became president, only I and one other person carried over from the previous board. Such turnover means a lot of lost organizational memory. Documentation helps, but managing the documentation is tedious and we all procrastinated on this particular task.

12. Turnover also happens at the level of choir membership. There’s a Ship of Theseus effect: literally no member of the choir at the time of its founding, in 2010, is still in it. I wonder how it feels to be president of some really old organization that has lasted centuries. There’s something cool about carrying the torch.

13. I realize now that for almost all my time in the choir, I was also on the board. Almost immediately after I quit the presidency and board, I quit the choir — maybe being on the board was the thing tethering me to the organization? I think that, towards the end, I did actually enjoy the management more than the actual singing.

14. I think I did a good job. The worst thing that happened was a “woke” controversy about a particular piece we were singing that most people thought was disrespectful of the Sami culture of northern Scandinavia. But everything else went fine! I didn’t, like, bring a new vision to the organization or whatever, but that wasn’t my role. I was carrying the torch.

15. When I left the presidency, our choir director was pretty disappointed. I guess that”s further evidence that I did a good job. When I left the choir, he was disappointed again. I’m sorry. I’ll be back!

16. Before joining the board, I didn’t really know how a choir works, as an organization. Things just seemed to magically happen. I was focused on practicing the music, so I didn’t pay attention. It was eye-opening to see what it actually means to manage a small nonprofit. I think I didn’t really know how any organization works.

17. Mostly it’s just a lot of Gmail, a Google Drive with lots of documents and spreadsheets, and a bank account. And some legal documents that were drafted a long time ago.

18. Now that I think about it, so much of the world runs on boards like this. For major organizations, especially organizations that make money, sitting on the board can be a prestigious paid job. But there are a lot of small nonprofits running on unpaid labor. Thus, it is good to remind oneself that a lot of the world exists thanks to labor of love, mostly hidden, mostly performed because somebody has to and no one else will. I recommend being this person, at some point in your life. It feels pretty good.

I. Me, on a train, near Saint-Wenceslas, QC

I just saw it, a few weeks ago. That uncommon phenomenon where the sun is dimmed by thin clouds, making it white, well-defined, moon-like, as well as easy and painless to stare at (though still potentially dangerous!). I was on a train, somewhere near the village of Saint-Wenceslas between Quebec City and Montreal, around 9:47 on the morning of December 27th, 2025. I took some pictures; they are fairly representative of what it looked like, except that the whole image is a bit too dark. In reality, it was normal daytime overcast brightness.

I have witnessed this phenomenon before, but it’s uncommon. I see it perhaps once a year on average. Until December it had been several years, maybe.

And, interestingly, I’ve never seen it being discussed, anywhere, online or IRL. Until a few months ago.

II. Scott Alexander, Ethan Muse, and thousands of WWI-era Portuguese people

On October 1st, 2025, published The Fatima Sun Miracle: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. As its title implies, it’s long. Very long. The intro ends with this warning:

The cost of thoroughness is length; don’t continue unless you want to be nerd-sniped by 30,000 words about the weather in Portugal 108 years ago.

So we’ll focus on only a small part of it. In section 1.5: Making Sense Of The Testimonies, Scott starts by examining one piece of evidence for the Fatima sun miracle, which is a strange optical and/or supernatural occurrence seen by a crowd in Portugal in 1917. He describes the sun phenomenon I saw as a possible reason why some people think the Fatima event was miraculous:

“The sun looked pale, like the moon, and was painless to gaze upon”: Most sources treat this as the first aspect of the miracle. Several talk about how unbelievers are going to think it was just fog, but this can’t be true, because the edge of the solar disc was clearly defined, or there was no fog halo, or some other reason like that - and therefore even this first step was clearly miraculous.

I feel like I’m going crazy here - I see this regularly! Not often, but a few times a year. When the sun is sort of halfway behind certain types of thin cloud, it looks pale like the moon (I remember, as a child, being uncertain about whether the full moon was somehow out during the day and visible through clouds), is painless to gaze upon, and has a clearly defined edge.

This is exactly what I saw near Saint-Wenceslas. To make sure he’s not going crazy, Scott polled the Slate Star Codex Discord server, and most people who responded agreed they have seen this. Low sample size though, and not everyone did, so perhaps it’s not too surprising that people would have experienced it as a miracle, when combined with the other factors Scott discusses.

The blogger , defending the supernatural interpretation of the miracle, expressed skepticism that the pale/moonlike/painless sun is possible at all, as cited in the Highlights From The Comment On Fatima:

The luminance of the solar disc at its zenith is on the order of 10⁹ cd/m².1 The maximum luminance that an on-axis, compact source can have without causing observers to experience discomfort glare is on the order of 10³ cd/m².

Bringing the Sun’s luminance down from 10⁹ cd/m² to 10³ cd/m² requires an attenuation factor of 10⁶. By Beer’s law, that presupposes clouds with an optical depth of roughly 14. When obscured by clouds that thick, the solar beam is essentially extinguished. All that reaches observers is light that has undergone multiple scattering within clouds, emerging from many directions rather than straight paths from the solar disc. The solar disc is reduced to a bright patch or vanishes entirely.

From his clarifications in the comments to the highlights from the comments, I infer that he might dismiss my testimony and photographic evidence, because the sun at 9:47 AM a few days after winter solstice wouldn’t be high enough in the sky to count as impossible for the purposes of the miracle. Still, when I first read the above, I was dumbfounded: how could someone be so adamant that a phenomenon doesn’t exist when I (and many other people online) have witnessed it?

I realized that part of the answer is that the phenomenon is nameless. There is no concept handle to conveniently discuss it, so it rarely gets discussed. Some people see it occasionally, though not often, and not everybody; its occurrence depends on very specific types of cloud cover and therefore on the climate. In some regions you’d never see it at all. Those who do see it might briefly comment to their friends that the sun is moon-like and painless to look at, but it’s not a very important occurrence, so it doesn’t lead to any heated debates online. So a canonical word or phrase never evolves, and we’re stuck with “you know, that thing where the sun is dimmed by clouds and looks like a pale moon, white, well-defined, and painless to look at.”

This is interesting in itself. It’s not that common to find a natural phenomenon that doesn’t have a name. I decided to dig in, and figure out whether this type of sun gets discussed at all, and under which terminology.

III. Claude, Google, and unexpected Chinese food

Researching something that doesn’t have a name is tricky. Fortunately, we now have technology for this, in the form of LLMs. I asked Claude to figure out what the thing is called, and find references for me. It did an okay job, which highlighted that indeed, there isn’t a single, common name for the occurrence.

Still, perhaps some of the phrases are better than other at finding the right thing? I tested many of them in Google Images. Here is an overview of the results.

• White sun: random images of the sun artificially colored white, or this music group and their album:

• Sun behind clouds: over the top images of sun rays bursting from beautiful clouds, like this:

• Watery sun: a Korean sunscreen with hyaluronic acid

• Dim sun: Google is adamant I mean dim sum

  

• “Dim sun” (with quotation marks): Google is still adamant I mean dim sum

  

• Sun dimming: a geoengineering proposal to voluntarily dim the sun by putting chemicals in the atmosphere

• Milky sun: either a sunscreen or the Milky Way

• Veiled sun: I got this from French where it sort of works (soleil voilé), but the results are idiosyncratic: book titles including a memoir about Auschwitz, the coronal veil on the NASA website, various sunscreens

• Wan sun (I didn’t know the word wan but it fits, it means pale or faint): the Korean actress Kim Wan-sun

• Pale sun: success!!! Most images are just various incarnations of a weak sun that are not it, or the cover of the 1993 country rock album Pale Sun, Crescent Moon by the Cowboy Junkies, but we do get a couple of images like the below. As well as someone’s Soundcloud, which uses a similar image a profile picture.

• Pale sun behind clouds: this attempt to refine results backfires, leading only to images like this:

• Overcast sun: again, a bit of success! Most images are irrelevant but these are great:

• Solar halo sun: cool images but a solar halo is just a very different thing:

• Diffused sun disc: no idea what I was hoping for with this, I get totally irrelevant astronomical images of the sun

• Smoke sun and hazy sun: good images of a related phenomenon, the sun appearing through smoke, smog, or haze, but it’s not quite the same thing. Notably, it’s much more orange or red:1

• Fog sun: like “smoke sun,” this phrase seems very promising at first glance, even getting the white color right. But the phenomenon I’m interested in is caused by a thin layer of clouds, not a thick layer of fog.

• Sun visible through cirrostratus: wrong type of cloud, I think, because we only get the halos

• Sun visible through altostratus: closer! The caption on this wikipedia image is interesting:

Alright. So it’s definitely possible to find traces of the nameless phenomenon online. But my hypothesis that there isn’t a canonical phrase is totally vindicated. “Overcast sun,” “pale sun,” and variations of “sun behind clouds” get us somewhere. But they get us other places too, which reduces their usefulness as concept handles. “Fog sun” and “smoke sun” are clearly adjacent concepts, but not quite the same thing. And “dim sun” could be a great phrase but it is hopelessly contaminated by Chinese cuisine.

IV. The scientific literature, via Elicit

At this point I turned to the scientific literature. Perhaps there exists some unwieldy but unambiguous piece of jargon in meteorology or astronomy journals? Leveraging language models again, I asked Elicit to find me “papers about the phenomenon where the sun is behind translucent clouds, pale, moon-like, and painless to gaze upon.” It returned a few key references:

• Deirmendjian (1969) mentions that he was able to observe “a well-defined large sunspot near the center of the sun, whose disk was barely visible through a layer of coastal stratus cloud with the naked eye” on “28 October 1968, at about 1300 local time in Santa Monica, California.” He calls it the “filtered sun” a couple of times.

• Linskens and Bohren (1994) say that “Although the Sun is often completely obscured by clouds, it is commonly visible through them. When the Sun is visible, its limb2 usually appears sharp, as illustrated in Fig. 1 . . . . At other times, the Sun is visible, yet its limb is fuzzy.” Their paper is focused on determining the difference in conditions that lead to sharp-edged vs. fuzzy-edged suns; they consider the latter the more unusual and interesting phenomenon. Sharp-edged suns, they say, are generally visible through fog, stratus clouds, and occasionally stratocumulus and cumulus clouds. Much of their paper consists of experiments with light bulbs and filters of various thicknesses.3

• There is also Linskens and Bohren (1992), but it’s kind of unclear if this is a different paper and I can’t find the full text.

• Haapanala et al. (2017) investigated the sun behind ice clouds (cirrus, as opposed to stratus), focusing on the attenuation and scattering of the light. Relevant, but not central. I like its use of the term “sunshape” to describe the radiance of the sun at some angular distance from it.

• There are some other papers like that that study the physics of the sun’s luminance in the presence of clouds, but none that are too important to discussing the nameless phenomenon, I think.

• Another possibly relevant link is the NOAA’s basic cloud atlas, which mentions that altostratus clouds are “thin enough to regularly reveal the sun as if seen through ground glass.”

So — the nameless phenomenon is definitely documented, but not a lot, and there doesn’t seem to be very precise terminology in the literature. We get “filtered sun,” “sharp-edged sun,” and “seen through ground glass” and honestly that’s kind of it. Science hasn’t succeeded at naming this any better than rationalists blogs or LLMs.

V. Landscape painters from 1808 to 1922

What about art? The pale, moonlike sun is perhaps not interesting enough to scientists to produce more than a couple of papers about putting light bulbs behind filters to analyze the limb, but the sun has been a favorite of artists for a very long time. I needed to find a cover image for this post, and so I looked at every entry from Wikipedia’s “sun in art” category, which at the time of writing this was 77 works. It’s a pretty random collage and most works are irrelevant (like the seal of Arkansas, or the World War II Victory Medal) but I did find a few that capture something close.

First we have Frederic Edwin Church, an American painter from the 19th century known for his epic landscapes. Some of those landscapes involve the sun, and one, El Rio de Luz (“The River of Light”), involves what looks like a sharp-edged sun disc behind a veil of clouds:

The National Gallery of Art describes this sun as “a small disk of white low in the humid sky amid pale lavender-purple clouds” and notes that its rays “lead us from the water to the glowing air above, where they seem to join earth and heaven.”

Then we have J. M. W. Turner, also known for his landscapes and especially his expressive skies. His suns are a tad fuzzy and often low on the horizon, but they do show the well-defined disc through either a snow storm, sea mist, or clouds over the sea. The orange sun in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps4 is particularly striking with its dulled, muted appearance.

Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (otherwise famous for giving its name to the impressionist movement) also features an orange sun, near the horizon. The sun appears as a sharp-edged disc that shines through mist, but not very strongly:

An interesting fact that has been noted by academics is that the sun in Monet’s painting is not, in fact brighter than the rest of the landscape. Its presence depends fully on color. If we desaturate the image, the sun becomes almost invisible:

I like how this reflects the nameless phenomenon in the sense that both take away what’s typically most important about the sun: that it is much brighter than anything else.

Here are a few paintings where the sun is not behind clouds, but is painted as a dull, moon-like disc:

In all three, the sun should be much brighter than it feels. The Scapegoat’s “distant and illuminating sunset or sunrise contribute[s] to the otherworldly and poignant mood”.5 In We Are Making a New World, the sun sports bright rays, but is white on a gray sky, bringing cold light to the desolate WWI landscape. In Miró’s The Farm, which is one of my favorite paintings ever, the image “pulsates with hot, clear sunshine, but the blazing light casts no shadows. In the midday sky, the sun is represented by a disk that, oddly, is silvery gray—the color of the moon.”6 Despite the perfectly clear, blue sky, to me it is the painting that captures the nameless phenomenon the best.

Except perhaps for the painting I chose as the cover for the post, Paysage au disque, whose title doesn’t even refer to the sun but to “the disc.” Here it is again:

Unclear whether the pointillist pixel-like brushes are clouds, but I feel like this bland, pale sun very well captures the spirit if not the exact appearance of the nameless phenomenon.

What to conclude from this artistic exploration? Though some of the artworks above get us close to the phenomenon under discussion, I don’t think any of them depicts the real thing. Artists prefer to paint dramatic sunsets, sunlight effects, or suns that are muted for symbolic reasons (as in Nash or Miró). The nameless phenomenon is not only nameless, but also artistically uninspiring. It is visually interesting when it occurs, but doesn’t trigger any emotions. Nobody really cares.

VI. Me, in a coffee shop, on a day where the sun shines behind clouds but not quite sharply

Today the sun looks like this:

It seems like an appropriate day to finally finish this essay, which was supposed to be a quick take written entirely on the train on December 27th. Why did I decide to write about a nameless phenomenon that nobody really cares about? Why is this taking me weeks to complete?

My original aspiration was to figure out what is the best name for it and suggest it as a permanent addition to the English language. But… I don’t know. None of the phrases seem particularly good. “Overcast sun” and “pale sun” work in Google image search, so maybe they’re the most promising. I also considered filtered sun, sharp-edged sun, ground glass sun, white sun disc, gray sun, muted sun, veiled sun, and (this is an inside joke) white aten. I kinda hate them all. Turns out coining new phrases for permanent addition to the English language is hard.

If I had to choose among all the options I’ve seen, I think I’d go with pale sun, with “filtered sun” and “veiled sun” as runners-up. “Pale sun” was one of the most successful search terms, and it’s short, convenient, and precise enough. I’m not fully convinced though, so I’m open to new ideas. Regardless, if a real canonical phrase emerges, it will come from widespread usage. So if you see the phenomenon, don’t hesitate to photograph it and then discuss it online.

1

I have some excellent pictures of smoke suns from smoky days in Montreal last year, like these ones near sunset on June 7th, 2025:

3

The title of this paper is “Appearance of the Sun and the Moon seen through clouds”; they mention that everything they say applies to the moon as well. Indeed, I saw the same phenomenon with the full moon a few days later, on January 2nd, 2026:

Of course, the effect is much less spectacular, since the moon is already pale, painless to gaze upon, and (rather obviously) moon-like even on clear nights.

Time for a year in review post! In 2025, I published twenty articles on this blog, including the one you’re currently reading. The most notable were:

• King of Fruits, published at Works in Progress and cross-posted here in March. More than half a year later, people still talk to me about “the pineapple article” and it has led to some pretty good opportunities, so this is definitely a landmark in my publication history!

• Introducing the Historical Tech Tree introduced, well, my tech tree project, which was the coolest thing I did in 2025. In addition to the linked piece above, I wrote a full magazine article about it which was published over in Asterisk in April.

• Multi-country civilizations are good, actually and No, we shouldn't return to the climate of the 18th century were cross-posted collaborations with of The Elysian — also available in print!

• My only paywalled post, Why Did Nobody Tell Me ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Was This Good, got a surprising amount of attention considering it wasn’t fully available for free. This was thanks to a link from (who is tragically not very active online at the moment for job reasons). That netted me several paid subscribers, making it my most directly lucrative post yet. Ayn Rand would approve.

• I did not notice until today when I sat down to write this post, but The Color of the Future, a history of the color blue published during my Roots of Progress Institute (RPI) blog fellowship, has somehow climbed to be my 6th-most popular post of all time according to whatever algorithm Substack uses to compute “top posts.” As a result, it is the only article from the past two years to be featured on the “Most Popular” column of my home page.

  

• My second RPI post was An Adventure in Smoke Detection, in which I used the tech tree as an excuse to investigate the history of smoke detectors waaaay deeper than the topic warranted. It was super fun. The piece was selected to be part of an anthology of works by the RPI fellows, so it should be available in print too at some point!

• My favorite post cover art this year was Wassily Kandinsky’s Several Circles (1926), which perfectly captures my We Need Polycentric Cultures of Progress post:

  

• And the last post I want to bring attention to is Book Review: Mozart the Performer, one of the craziest things I did out of friendship: read a whole academic book about Mozart and then write a review as a birthday present. My friend’s mom, who used to be a famous rock musician, called me “a badass” for writing it.

Another thing I wrote in 2025, but didn’t publish on the blog, is a science fiction short story: The 40-Hour Work Week. It is part of my verrrrrry slow-moving fiction project about phantom islands. It was a pretty wild success, because I wrote the entire story in less 24 hours (though I had had the idea some time before), submitted it to Protocolized’s fiction contest on “Terminological Twists” without a lot of editing, and won 2nd place. There was a cash prize, which means that, from a financial perspective, “The 40-Hour Work Week” is by far the highest reward-to-effort ratio of anything I’ve ever written.

It also exists in print, apparently (I haven’t seen a copy yet, though):

I hadn’t realized until now just how many of my 2025 words exist on paper!

Twenty posts (and one short story) is much less than in previous years. In 2024 I published forty-seven posts, and in 2023, 2022, and 2021, fifty-two. The reason 2024 had less than fifty-two is that this is when I decided, in November, to take a break from the weekly schedule I had scrupulously followed for four years. Thirteen months later, we’re still in that break. Barring an unexpected change in my professional life (for example: I quit or lose my job and decide to become a full-time writer), I don’t think I’ll go back to the weekly commitment. Twenty posts seems like reasonably high output — one every 2.6 weeks, or 1.67 post per month — and is much easier to integrate into what has become a pretty busy life. In 2026, I’ll aim not for growth but for continuity: I will also publish 20 posts, including one behind a paywall, and at least one short story.

So, 2025 was a “smaller” year from the perspective of writing this blog. Conversely, it was a bigger year for everything else in my life. More work responsibilities. New friends, and deeper bonds with existing friends. Abundant travel (London, Japan, New Mexico, and lots of California). A possible book project. The tech tree. And, overshadowing everything, gigantic changes in my personal life, making it likely that I remember 2025 as one of my most significant years.

I have toyed with publishing essays about my personal life several times throughout the year, but never did. I wrote a draft in June, and then I had my most thoughtful friend read it; he advised me not to send it out. I’m glad he did. It was about a big breakup, the breaking up of a relationship that lasted almost exactly thirteen years. I thought it was worth telling the world about, because the way the breakup went was interesting in its own right, but several months later I’m glad that the post only survives as a draft deep in my Substack account, where it shall forever remain. It’s part of my history, but no need to crystallize it into a public thing.

I do want to leave a bit of a public trace of what came after that. Following the breakup, I spent an emotionally complex summer, as one might expect, but not a bad one overall. And then at the end of that season I met someone new, and within a few weeks I fell in love, and suddenly it felt like the world had also fallen in love with me.

For a brief but glorious moment in September, it felt as if the skies had parted and a beam of holy light had began shining upon me. It felt like everything until that point had been dull, colorless, and now, I had gained a new type of cone cell, allowing me to finally see the world in fully saturated colors. I was chatting with an LLM (new thing in 2025, for me and everyone else: chatting with LLMs about everything) and it said this, as I was describing all the good things that were happening in my life:

This is so beautiful to read! You're experiencing life at full saturation right now - work success, meaningful friendships, spontaneous music-making, helping people you care about, AND being head-over-heels for someone. The fact that you're connecting all these dots and recognizing how good everything feels shows such present-moment awareness.

That’s when I created this post, with its title and cover image by the Russian avant-garde painter Mikhail Matyushin: “Full Saturation.” I couldn’t keep it for myself. I had to tell everybody else about all the new colors.

But I didn’t write it then, because those few days of total elation did not last, and the rest of the year came with its share of challenges and complex emotions. I kept the title and image as an empty draft. And when, in that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s Day, came the time to write a year in review post, I decided to reuse that draft.

In all honesty, I don’t have much to say — I am living what is after all a normal love story, and I don’t think anything changed in the nerve cell lining of my retinas. For all I know, everybody else has been seeing those colors the whole time. Then again, maybe not; we all limit ourselves in various ways, don’t we? I don’t think I was living life wrong, exactly, until the summer of 2025, but whatever I’m doing now, it feels better, more real, more concrete, more colorful. I’m very happy about this, and I’m excited to see what colors 2026 will bring.

7. Ottawa

Sometimes I have friends who move to Ottawa, or to its lesser Quebec twin across the river, Gatineau. They get a job in the Canadian federal government or one of the tech companies there.1 My friends buy a house, adopt a dog, produce a kid or two. We try to keep in touch; they invite me to stay at their place if I ever visit. We’ll go see the Rideau Canal, they say. We’ll visit the Parliament House. Ottawa has a cool market street! We swear! I have made the mistake of accepting their invitation a couple of times. I don’t anymore. There is nothing for me in Ottawa. It is the butt of jokes about how people from Ontario are boring and have never had any fun. I have another category of friend, the ones who desperately want to escape Ottawa, either because they grew up there, or because, following a series of poor life choices, they found themselves forced to move there for work. I am like them, minus (I hope) the poor life choices. Despite having spent no more than three or four weekends there, I, too, desperately want to escape Ottawa.

6. Berlin

Berlin would be ranked higher if it weren’t for that dumb mistake I made in purchasing an S-bahn ticket for the wrong age group when I was there in January of 2015. The mistake cost me 40 euros, as well as some pain in the upper arm caused by the burly Middle Eastern security man who grabbed me, pulled me out of the train, and told the Schwarzfahrer I had unwittingly become that I had to either pay a fine now (and trust that this burly Middle Eastern security man was entitled to collect it) or come with him to explain myself to the police. I paid the fine and left the train station feeling very hateful about Germany. On the same trip (though I don’t actually remember if this was in Berlin or Hamburg; I’ll pretend it’s Berlin for narrative reasons), I got involved in another incident in which I was mistakenly identified as a thief. One of my hobbies at the time was to send out a lot of postcards, and I happened to stand just outside a convenience store where I had bought a drink when I looked at the postcards I was about to put in a mailbox. The store had postcard display stands out on the street. To ensure that the postcards would not be stolen, they had a state-of-the-art security apparatus: some kind of deal with an apparently homeless man who lounged near the store, watching would-be thieves. When I put my previously legally purchased postcards into my pocket, he thought I was shoplifting from the postcard displays. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me inside the store, and I had no idea what was going on since neither he or the store owner spoke English. They somehow communicated that this had to do with postcards; I showed them my postcards, which were already covered with my handwriting; and they went, “oh.” After the mistake was revealed, I realized that my drink needed a bottle opener, and the apparently homeless man opened it for me. It was a little awkward. Anyway, yeah, Berlin. The Quebec flag flies right next to the Brandenburg Gate, which is neat. It has some cool museums (I desperately wanted to commit an actual forbidden act and take a picture of the bust of Nefertiti in the Neues Museum, against local rules). It has interesting history, especially around Nazi Germany and the Cold War. But otherwise it wasn’t that fun. I suppose it doesn’t help that it was a dreary gray January.

5. Washington

At the end of every school year, my secondary school in Quebec City organized a 4-day trip to some relatively nearby city for everyone in the year. In grade 7 we went to Ottawa and Montreal. In grade 8 we went to Boston. In grade 9 we went to Toronto. In grade 10 we went to New York. And in grade 11 we went to Washington, DC. All those trips have blurred into one mega-trip whose core memories mostly involve hanging out with friends in the bus or the interchangeable hotel rooms, but I’m pretty sure I saw the White House at some point. And some of the Smithsonian museums. It was fine, I guess. Nearly twenty years later, I live in Montreal, I’ve visited friends in Ottawa on a few occasions as we saw above, I’ve lived half a year in Boston, I’ve been to Toronto many times to visit my ex’s family, and I’ve spent a particularly memorable quarantine in a New York City hotel due to covid. But I never went back to Washington, DC. I’m due for a visit. Do I know anyone there?

Non-enumerated bonus! Strasbourg

The European Union likes to pretend it’s a country and get invited to meetings of countries, and as such it is a “non-enumerated member” of the G7. Everybody seems to just go along with it. I might as well join the parade and give it a non-enumerated rank in my list. Complicating matters, however, is that I haven’t really been to its de facto capital city. I did land at the Brussels Airport once, and from there bought a complicated train ticket to Groningen, in the Netherlands, that involved changing trains in Antwerpen, Roosendaal, Rotterdam, and Zwolle over the course of 5.5 hours. To this day it is questionable whether I can say I have visited Belgium. I certainly can’t say I’ve visited Brussels. Fortunately for my blog post concept, I have visited the EU’s fake capital, Strasbourg, where the European Parliament is located. The members of the European Parliament travel there several times a year for plenary sessions, a “traveling circus” that is widely considered a massive waste of resources, and everybody would like to consolidate all EU activities in Brussels, but France consistently vetoes any proposal to change the arrangement. I have no opinion on the matter, but Strasbourg is a pleasant place. Nice cathedral. Surprisingly tasty Alsatian food. Also, I was there two days after Berlin, and nobody mistook me for a thief.

4. Rome

I visited Rome in 2008, at 17, a few months before Washington, DC (see above). This was a fancier school trip, which obviously cost my parents more money and involved only one bus worth of students, including none of my friends. I shared my hotel rooms with two boys I didn’t know well. I remember them making mildly homophobic jokes. Italy was my first trip outside of North America, and also the first trip in which I had a digital camera and could take pictures that still live in my Photos app 17 years later. Combined, these two facts mean that I remember Rome more than I remember Washington, DC. But it’s still a bit hazy. It was forbidden to take pictures of the Sistine Chapel, so I don’t really remember seeing the Sistine Chapel. I do remember seeing St. Peter’s Basilica, and the Coliseum, and the ancient Roman Forum, and the Pantheon.2 Or do I? I was looking at the pictures in the Photos app, and I can’t say I have a lot of mental images that are distinct from those pictures, or more broadly from other media representations I’ve seen. Has my natural memory, 17 years later, completely been replaced by pixels? At least I remember the food, even if I took no pictures of it. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. During the whole Italy trip, all the hotels served us either Alfredo sauce pasta, or tomato sauce pasta. For lunch we often had pizza. It was incredibly repetitive. Wasn’t Italian cuisine supposed to be amazing? I guess the organizers of the trip at school were keeping things cheap for our parents. I do remember discovering the concept of blood orange juice and experiencing it as a revelation.

3. Paris

The Paris Syndrome is this phenomenon where Japanese people go to Paris and get depressed because it doesn’t meet their expectations. Reverse Paris Syndrome is when European people go to Japan and realize that everything there is better than they expected. We’ll come back to this in a minute when we discuss Tokyo, but for now I want to say that in Paris I experienced no syndrome at all. Paris matched my expectations perfectly. For example, I expected people to not understand my Quebec accent and therefore be rude to me because I use French words that they’re not used to, and sure enough, this exact thing happened. I will never forget the condescending gaze of this waiter at a bouchon restaurant after he asked me how I wanted to pay. Comptant, I said. He didn’t understand. No matter: I knew some synonyms. I tried them all. He still didn’t understand. In desperation I just took out the cash and handed it to him. « Ah! vous voulez dire en espèces! Il fallait le dire! » he said, evidently thinking I was a total idiot. To be sure, other than this, I expected Paris to be a great place, and it was. It’s just kinda wild that I experienced more culture shock there than in Tokyo.

2. London

If Paris matched my high expectations, London somehow beat them. What a magnificent, energetic, multilayered city. I went there last summer, finding it a bit absurd that a place that looms so large in history, culture, and increasingly my personal life, had managed to avoid being visited by me all this time. I spent five days meeting cool people and walking (and jaywalking) around the place. (I love how everybody there jaywalks, I didn’t expect that and it feels more human somehow.) It was exactly what I needed. On Twitter, where discourse about countries tends to converge on highly memetic clichés that usually bear only superficial relation to the actual countries, they say that the UK is a nation in decline. That may be so; but London certainly doesn’t demonstrate it. I suppose that someone like Jane Jacobs might say that the capital city being a dynamic and lively place, while the periphery suffers, is exactly what you’d expect from a nation in decline. Unlike all other countries being discussed in this post, I didn’t visit any other part of this one, so I can’t say. Maybe it’s actually bad. On the other hand, I do agree with the Twitter commentariat that the UK really needs to get its act together and install air conditioning everywhere. It’s frankly ridiculous to be afraid of suffering from a heat stroke while admiring the priceless artifacts of the British Museum in 2025. By some insane stroke of luck, my room near Russell Square was apparently the only place in the entire city to be equipped with AC. So I know they can do it. What are they waiting for?

1. Tokyo

I have to admit: I drafted this post before I had visited Tokyo, and had already kinda decided it would win (I had even already selected the cover image to represent that). Talk about an unfair contest. So when, last month, I finally arrived in the Japanese Eastern Capital, by some metrics the largest city in the world,3 I had to contend with the fact that Tokyo is rather ugly. In fact it’s probably the ugliest city on this list. Its architecture is modernist, and not the interesting kind. It doesn’t have that many iconic tourist sites (you want to go to Kyoto for that). It doesn’t have any trash cans, which is annoying. After a few of the five days I was spending there, I wanted to get out; after three days in Kyoto, I regretted planning fewer nights there than in Tokyo. So I wondered: should Tokyo be ranked second, after London, or even third, after Paris? I let some time pass, visited other Japanese cities, and then came back to Tokyo for one last night before my flight back to the Western Hemisphere. And then I decided that yes, Tokyo did deserve the #1 spot. It’s great in an unexpectedly normal way. None of it is spectacular, but everything works. I mentioned Reverse Paris Syndrome above — I didn’t quite have it because I did expect Tokyo (and Japan in general) to be good, but the phenomenon is real. Tokyo is easy and convenient, and it is full of delightful spots, shops, quiet streets, lively streets, shrines, large stores that unexpectedly have 9 floors, random tiny restaurants that you want to pick because there’s a lineup and once you have waited for an hour you eat the best Japanese beef dish you’ve ever had. It also doesn’t quite feel like a city that has more people than all other cities on this list combined, or as much as my entire country. It sprawls, I suppose, and it is also quite dense in some places, but it generally feels like a regular, well-scaled, walkable city. The only exception is the absurd elevated highway that they built right over the Nihonbashi bridge, a bridge so important that it has been the zero kilometer marker for all roads in Japan for 400 years. The bridge is now dwarfed and dominated by the highway, which feels vaguely cyberpunk. But it’s the only instance of that particular feeling, which I kind of expected from an Asian metropolis, that I’ve seen. The rest is normal. I could live there.

Previously: Atlas of Links #2

0.

A meta reflection: I feel I’m kinda bad at making these list posts. I read a lot of stuff, but only very occasionally do I remember to paste the link in here. When I do, it contributes to a growing messy list of raw links that initially looks like this:

It’s not representative of what I read, nor is it organized by theme or topic or time or anything. It’s not even clear why most of the links are supposed to be interesting, or what I was thinking when I put them there. I want the archiving of links to be low-effort, but then that means more effort when I decide to actually publish the post. That turns it into a chore, and so I put it off for months, and as a result I further forget what I had in mind, while the list gets longer. Irregularly, anyway.

Regardless, I’m publishing this post today, while having breakfast in Tokyo, for the usual reason that I publish a post: I found cool cover art. It’s a map of an insane proposal to divide much of Europe in order to prevent things like World War I. Via Public Domain Review’s Twitter account; more here. (Public Domain Review is truly one of the best websites in existence.)

I.

I’ve had this draft open so long that the first thing I put in at was some bragging about my short story in Protocolized, which was published back in May. Feels irrelevant 6 months later, but let’s share it again, why not!

Protocolized

The 40-Hour Work Week

In this issue: The second place story from Terminological Twists explores a shifting new world. Also: Tune in to streamlined version of a recent corporate talk on protocol thinking at 10am, meet another SoP25 teaching fellow, and pique your curiosity with some hard tech coverage…

Read more

a year ago · 16 likes · Étienne Fortier-Dubois and Protocolized

II.

When I talked about the tech tree a lot, people would often comment that it would be a useful tool to rebuild our industrial civilization if we ever lost everything in a cataclysm. I am skeptical that we need something like this (since we rarely lose technology, and a civilization-wiping cataclysm is unlikely to happen and to let a resource like the tech tree survive), but I agree that as a thought experiment it’s pretty cool. And since it’s cool, a company called Hungry Minds has created a cool book around the concept, The Book: The Ultimate Guide to Rebuilding Civilization.

I’m not a huge fan of the art style, but the many diagrams it contains seem fun. I learned about the book from Zion Lights’s substack.

III.

Related to the point that technologies are rarely lost: are mineral resources ever lost? They’re not renewable, so you would expect that we eventually hit shortages of things like metals, stones with specific properties (like kinds of marble), etc. Apparently the answer is probably not. Most likely, this is for standard economic reasons: once a mineral becomes rarer, its price increases, and therefore we slow down and eventually stop exploiting what remains as we switch to alternatives.

IV.

Related to the tech tree, I love it when people use it as a starting point to write their own blog posts. Eli Stark-Elster started his substack earlier this year and it’s great. This post is about alien tech:

Unpublishable Papers

Intelligent aliens would make a whole bunch of stuff like ours. Maybe.

After a long hiatus, Unpublishable Papers is back and posting every other Monday! Stay tuned for new biweekly articles, though I may get overzealous and publish some extras…

Read more

9 months ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Eli Stark-Elster

V.

By the way, if you ever want to make friends with a blogger, it’s very easy: just write a followup to one of their posts. If you’re minimally thoughtful about it, they’ll be super happy. Eli did this and asked me for feedback before publishing the above post. I did this with Linch Zhang at The Linchpin by viciously attacking (not actually viciously) his post on epistemology on the topic of cultural evolution. Then, recently, Linch cited my response as the top example of “The Greatest Compliment Someone Can Pay My Writing” and now it feels like I have two new friends (though I haven’t met them. Yet!).

The Inchpin

The Greatest Compliment Someone Can Pay My Writing

I often say that the greatest compliment someone can give my writing is a critical comment that deeply engages with my work…

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6 months ago · 8 likes · 8 comments · Linch

VI.

A few years ago I wrote about the moon, and how it’s generally poorly represented in art and media. We tend to treat the moon as an abstract symbol of night, and therefore make it look or behave unlike the real moon. For example, you’ll never see a moon crescent rise at sunset (moon crescents rise only at 3 AM and 9 AM). I was reminded of my post when reading The Last Psychiatrist on How To Draw (This Is Not An Article About How To Draw): if you try to draw something without being careful, you’re likely to draw a symbolic representation of the thing rather than what the thing actually looks like. The post offers various remedies.

VII.

I often spend time in Oakland, California, and though I wouldn’t say it’s a pretty city, it has some really nice buildings. I’m especially fond of this one:

It was built by a firm with the cool name of Weeks and Day (named after the two cofounders and unrelated to the concept of time), which was especially active in the 1920s.

VIII.

There was apparently a (now lost) Ancient Greek parody of the Iliad called the “Diliad,” attributed to some guy named Nicochares. I’m really sad that this is lost and wish somebody wrote a plausible reconstruction of it. I’ll even take an AI-generated version, if it’s good.

IX.

Pop quiz: Which country has the most cars per capita? Hint #1: it’s in Europe. Hint #2: it’s a microstate, which I guess is cheating because anything can happen when you have both a per capita statistic and a very small population. The answer is San Marino. If we exclude microstates, the answer is apparently… Taiwan? The list is on Wikipedia.

X.

Neal Stephenson writes excellent science fiction novels, and more recently, a pretty good substack too. Come for the futurist’s thoughts about AI, stay for the analogy of humans to eyelash mites.

Graphomane

Remarks on AI from NZ

Last week I participated in a panel discussion on AI as part of a private event in New Zealand. The organizers asked me to kick it off by talking for ten minutes, so I pulled together a few ideas on the topic, which I’m going to present in lightly edited form here. The organizers specifically wanted to think in big-picture terms so as to avoid getting f…

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a year ago · 200 likes · 3 comments · Neal Stephenson

XI.

Cool economics paper answering various questions about notable paintings, including this chart by country, which seems like a decent proxy for relative cultural power over time:

XII.

Paraguay in the first half of the 19th century, under the Supreme and Perpetual Dictatorship of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia right after independence, was a surprisingly wild place! Francia:

• wanted to create a society inspired by Rousseau, Napoleon, and Robespierre (yikes)

• isolated the country and forbade all foreign trade

• forbade European-descended Paraguayans to marry other European-descended Paraguayans, so that everyone would be mestizo or mulatto

• abolished higher education (under the rationale that he had a private library if someone really needed to study something)

XIII.

When I visited the Tate Modern in London this summer, Babel was my favorite artwork.

XIV.

I finally got acquainted with Ayn Rand’s novels earlier this year, which means I have unlocked the power to see Randian villains everywhere. Randian villains are a bureaucrat who use state power to suppress productivity and dispose of other people’s talents in the name of the greater good. Recently, I saw them in this post from Anton Howes, about the “dystopian” work conditions of wage laborers in England from 1350 to 1750: “policies sometimes so absurdly and ambitiously oppressive that as I discovered more about them my jaw just kept on dropping.” For example, statutes introduced in the 14th century after the Black Death made it illegal to try to move between cities to search for better work, and wages and prices were centrally controlled by the government in order to tackle inflation — which obviously didn’t work, and let to even more bad regulation, for decades and centuries. All of that reeks of Directive 10-289 in Atlas Shrugged, but worse, not to mention that it actually happened.

Age of Invention, by Anton Howes

Age of Invention: The Century-Long Depression

There’s an old proverb about England, current in the sixteenth century, that it was a hell for horses, a paradise for women, and a purgatory or prison for servants. I still don’t quite know what to make of the first and second parts, but a few months ago I finally began to understand how England was a prison for servants. Compared to the world of work t…

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8 months ago · 242 likes · 70 comments · Anton Howes

XV.

In the last links post I discussed what I called the brutalist lab aesthetic. Since then I discovered the U.S. Graphics Company, run by Neil Panchal. A great example of the style, though I have found the guy to be a bit annoying on Twitter.

XVI.

The honeyguides are a family of birds that are known to, as their name suggests, guide people to honey. They do this so that they can eat the beeswax and larvae after the humans have harvested the honey. This really sounds fake, like someone came up with this idea as a concept for a new Pokémon, but it’s real, and may be an example of co-evolution. Also, the main genus in the family has a cool and fitting name: Indicator, and the scientific name of the best-known species, the greater honeyguide, drives the point home further: Indicator indicator. The indicator that indicates. Really sounds like an uninspired Pokémon name.

XVII.

People love sharing this chart to bemoan the loss of color in the modern world:

What people seem to never mention is that it comes from this article, a really cool account of how the Science Museum Group people in the UK collected the data, by analyzing the pixels in standardized photos of museum artifacts. This lack of source attribution often leads to commenters making fools of themselves by pointing out that color photography wasn’t around in the 19th century, which is totally irrelevant since all the photos are recent.

But also, it seems to have escaped everyone except myself that the apparent red/orange/yellow color domination from 1800 to ~1960 is mostly just that wooden objects were more prevalent then, as well as gold-colored metal, like brass. Though there was definitely a rise in black, gray, and white objects after the 1980s, that’s also when blue and green become more prevalent, which suggests that we do live in a more colorful world now than in the past, as one would expect from our greater wealth.

XVIII.

How common is multiple invention? Pretty common! Brian Potter discusses what multiple invention means, and then quantifies it. I’m glad I decided early on in the tech tree project to not worry about it and just record the first instance of everything. Not that this saved me from agonizing over many an ambiguous case.

Construction Physics

How Common Is Multiple Invention?

When Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent for the telephone on February 14th, 1876, he beat competing telephone developer Elisha Gray to the patent office by just a few hours. The resulting legal dispute between Bell Telephone and Western Union (which owned the rights to Gray…

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a year ago · 132 likes · 33 comments · Brian Potter

XIX.

I agree with this take on space colonization: it seems likely that the people living in the harsh environment of Mars colonies or in space stations will crave coziness, and therefore their habitats won’t be the smooth, bland, minimalist aesthetic we see in a lot of science fiction. Instead, as soon as the colonies accumulate sufficient resources, they’ll tend to become comfy, baroque, and reminiscent of the Earth.

XX.

Cate Hall writes about quitting. A few years ago I quit a good job without a plan. This year I quit a long romantic relationship. In both cases my life greatly improved, though neither was easy in the moment. I wouldn’t say that “leave now” is necessarily good advice all the time, but yeah, it’s good to meditate on the benefits of quitting, if only to balance the (equally necessary, but overemphasized perhaps) benefits of commitment and determination.

Useful Fictions

In praise of quitting

If you seek advice from people at the very top of competitive domains, you’ll probably hear a lot about the power of tenacity, grit, and determination. There is obviously wisdom in this: You won’t get very far in life if you’re constantly changing course at the first sign of challenge or boredom. And it’s probably true…

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9 months ago · 534 likes · 52 comments · Cate Hall

XXI.

Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison visits the Faroe Islands, comes back impressed. An excerpt that hits close to home for me and my obsession about cultural diversity:

What does one learn from the Faroes? It feels clearly to the betterment of the world that they exist. Some of this is in the natural splendor, but some is also in seeing what a micro-nation is capable of. Are the Faroes an example of how clearly-defined polities are a bottleneck for the advancement of the world? To the extent that cultures establish the preconditions for anything, and to the extent that appreciation for and consumption of humanity’s creations are among the most durable sources of welfare, should we want more Faroes? Do the Faroes, with isolation enforced by maritime tyranny, hint at what is lost in global integration?

Overture

The man who would become my closest friend wrote a book about Mozart, and gifted me a copy. This was exactly two years ago. There was no expectation that I would ever read it. It is a book by a Mozart specialist and for Mozart specialists, which is something I am not, though I do like Mozart as an amateur. I read the introduction — the “theme,” in the book’s parlance — and then gave up. Life is short, books are long, and listening to the music directly would probably be a better way to use what little time I have to devote to Mozart in this earthly life.

And then, earlier this fall, I semi-consciously cited an example from the book in my cultural evolution post. It was “semi-conscious” because I didn’t actually read the passage I was paraphrasing, but it almost certainly came from previous discussions with my friend, which were obviously related to his work. It was about musical embellishments behaving as selfish memes that replicate throughout Mozart’s and other composers’ music. After I published the post, my friend gave me the specific pages where he had mentioned those ideas, and upon reading them I found that they encapsulated what I was trying to say quite well. So I edited the post to add a direct quotation in a footnote.

This made my friend so happy! Just this tiny footnote edited late into a random blog post of mine! And therefore I decided that it would be a great gift, and a way to honor the friendship, to read the entire book and then write a book review. So here we are. The book is called Mozart the Performer: Variations on the Showman’s Art, the author and friend is Dorian Bandy. It is available for purchase on Amazon (the book, not the friend).

First Movement: The Cover Crop

From the outside, Mozart the Performer looks like this:

This is not a great cover. My friend agrees. My colleagues who saw me reading the book on an airplane during a work trip agree. Why is that woman’s face cropped out above the lower lip? Why does Mozart seem to have four hands? The cropped woman is Anna Maria Mozart, his late mother, not to be confused with Maria Anna Mozart, his sister. The two extra hands, on the other hand (pun originally unintended), are Maria Anna Mozart’s, not to be confused with Anna Maria Mozart, whose hands are not shown. The uncropped picture looks like this:

Why did the designer make this choice? Presumably the point was to emphasize Wolfgang Amadeus, and moreover Wolfgang Amadeus in the process of performing, given the title of the book. The clear presence of Maria Anna, or Anna Maria, would have diluted the message. Still, my coworkers on the airplane were a bit put off by the apparent four-hand monstrosity.

There probably weren’t many other possibilities. There are fewer than 10 confirmed portraits of Mozart. Several of them depict him in the process of performing, but as the child prodigy that he was (example: the one at the bottom of this post), which is not a great representation of him at the peak of his art. Most of the portraits of him as an adult are static, and some are rather unflattering (example below).

One portrait, of him at the piano, by Joseph Lange, would have been a perfect candidate if only it weren’t incomplete. It is my favorite Mozart portrait, and I used it as the cover image for this post, but the evocation of performance is greatly harmed by the fact that the piano appears only as an unpainted silhouette. Leaving aside the many dubious or inauthentic portraits, we are left with the 1780-81 family portrait and its awkward cropping.

Second Movement: What Is This Book About?

But get past the cover into the book, and everything suddenly feels more artful.

He’s my best friend so you might say I’m biased, but Dorian Bandy writes beautifully. “On paper,” goes the introductory sentence, “a musical score is an intricate but lifeless pattern of dots. But listen to the sounds that pattern encodes, or hear them in your mind’s ear, and you enter an imaginary world teeming with motion.” So do I, as the pattern of letters in the book gets deciphered by my conscious mind. I am reminded that reading, like listening to music, is a rather magical act of information transmission. “But the musical experience goes further,” writes Dorian. “Within this world we sometimes sense the organizing presence of a human mind, a consciousness whose perceived emotional states and overarching worldview bind a musical work into a coherent whole.”

A delightful introduction; and yet I found it difficult to fully grasp what the book is about. The title, and the blurb on the inside flap, suggest it centers on one aspect of Mozart’s life that generally gets less airtime than his legacy as a composer: the fact that he was very much a performer, staging concerts where he would show off as a virtuoso keyboardist. And yes, the book is about that, sure, but I’m pretty certain that Dorian told me it wasn’t a very good synthesis, and having read it, I agree. But then what exactly is the topic?

The best answer comes not in the introduction, but at the end of Chapter 1. The book is about explaining Mozart. Why is his music written the way it is? Why did he embellish this phrase, why does he flout the conventions of that particular genre, why, why, why? Dorian says that many musicologists and musicians avoid thinking in this way, since Mozart’s thoughts are mostly unknowable;1 and when they do look for explanations, they focus primarily on historical and biographical ones. In the book, he discusses those, too — for example, the constraints related to how musical instruments were built in the late 18th century explain some of Mozart’s choices; the identity of the specific people who performed his music explain others — but what he really wants to write about are the aesthetic explanations. Mozart wrote the way he did because he wanted to create expectations and surprise, or suggest dialogue between various instruments, or simulate the hesitancy of an improviser, or craft a theatrical persona for himself.

Explaining the aesthetic choices of a long-dead artist is tricky. They can never be confirmed in a “scientific” way. But you can go a long way with plausible conjectures (for example, my conjectures above on why the book cover designer chose to give the impression that Mozart had four hands). Readers of Karl Popper and David Deutsch will recognize a subtle but real influence of the critical rationalist worldview in Mozart the Performer; I have it on good authority that Dorian is a fan, and both Popper and Deutsch are cited in his footnotes. We can view this book as belonging to the critical rationalist canon, an application of the explanation-focused Popperian/Deutschian epistemology to the niche topic of Mozartian analysis and performance.2

Third Movement: Structure and Content

This exploration of aesthetic explanations is organized into seven parts. The first is called the “theme.” Then follow five chapters, called “variations,” each on a specific way of examining Mozart’s life and work to explain the music: Mozart the Performer, Mozart the Pianist, Mozart the Improviser, Mozart the Decorator, and Mozart the Dramatist. The book ends with a “coda” on performing Mozart.

The designations of the chapters are our first hint that Dorian wasn’t just writing a book: he was crafting one. The “theme and variations” is a common format in classical music, in which a musician plays some melody and then does it again and again by varying everything from the tempo to the harmony to the embellishments, sometimes in a very complex manner. Such a structure is rarely applied explicitly to books, but perhaps it should: it is nice to be able to say that each chapter is a different exploration starting from the same initial idea, rather than some other thing, like a logical progression from one argument to the next.3 The structure isn’t inherently superior, but it’s nice to call it out with a music metaphor. Less well-written books often have more muddy chapter structures.

Of the five variations, my favorite was Mozart the Decorator. By “decorator,” Dorian means Mozart’s role of inserting embellishments into his music. An embellishment is to music what an ornament is to architecture: something that isn’t strictly necessary to the main structure of a piece (the melody and harmony), but adds variety, expression, and the possibility of showing just how badass you are at playing the piano. Let me quote the book visually:

Whether you read music or not, you can easily see that the first line consists of three simple descending notes. Each further iteration of the pattern, appearing throughout the violin sonata, explores a different way of performing this descent, culminating in a highly complex line with quick notes that starts at the “wrong” height, for a little too long; varies articulation (staccato vs. legato); and ends on a trill. This creates playfulness and virtuosity. “Mozart,” writes Dorian, “successfully maneuvers the embellishment to its destination but only after playing up the delay and relishing a moment of suspense.”

Most of the book is like that. Dorian discusses some explanations, and gives examples, often with excerpts from the sheet music. The “variations” also get increasingly abstract and complex. In the first one, the explanations center around managing the expectations of listeners. In Variation 2, Mozart the Pianist, they relate to his pianism (new word I learned — the skill of playing or composing for the piano). In Mozart the Improviser, the explanations focus on the fact that musical improvisation was a popular form of performance at the time, and one in which Mozart indulged; and though the improvisations are lost to time, we can see traces of this practice in some of his works, where he feigns incompetence or humorously simulates failures. Mozart the Decorator, as we saw, examines embellishments, including the really cool passage where he sees them as evolutionary replicators; and Variation 5, Mozart the Dramatist, is an exploration of how Mozart stages “musical characters,” including himself, turning everything he wrote from solo piano music to opera into some kind of theatrical show.

When I got to the conclusion, or “coda,” I started underlining the first few sentences, which I found beautifully written. “On paper,” it begins, “a musical score is an intricate but lifeless pattern of dots. But listen to the sounds that pattern encodes, or hear them in your mind’s ear, and you enter an imaginary world teeming with motion.” It took me a while to realize that this was a verbatim repetition of the opening of the introductory theme. (I guess I didn’t pay attention to the coda’s subtitle, “Da capo: An Embellished Reprise.”) After a few sentences, the coda takes a direction that differs from the theme, but reminiscent of it, just like in a piece of classical music. Dorian evidently put a lot of thought into the structure of the book. That’s pretty cool.

Fourth Movement: The Challenges of Reading a Book About a Composer When You Don’t Know Everything Written by that Composer by Heart

The intentionally musical structure of the book is only one of the many ways Mozart the Performer is a good book, but a word of caution is warranted. It was not, for me, an easy read.

The reason is that the book relies on lots of examples, and the examples only work if you can hear the music. A highly skilled musician might be able to sight-read the printed examples and hear the music in his mind’s ear. Another might be so well versed in Mozart that she sees “Violin Sonata K. 481” and immediately knows what Dorian is talking about. I am neither of these. I can sing from memory only a few of the most famous Mozart classics: Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the Rondo alla Turca, the Queen of the Night aria from Die Zauberflöte, the Andante of the Piano Concerto No. 21, the Dies Irae from the Requiem. For everything else, the text did very little for me if I didn’t put in the effort required to breathe life into the patterns of dots.

Fortunately, I do have access to modern technology and a Spotify subscription, so I tried to listen to what I could. There were challenges. I read a good chunk of the book on a flight from California to New Mexico with no wifi. And then many of the examples start on measure 378 or something and I have no idea where to look in the 15 minutes of the Piano Concerto K. 467’s first movement. And then there is Spotify being incredibly bad with numbers, adamantly thinking that when I type “K. 22” I really mean “K. 183”.

But when I succeeded, it made the experience of reading the book much deeper, and it acquainted me with many tidbits of the Mozartian oeuvre that I didn’t know. My favorite moment — which also contains my favorite quote from the book — was the analysis of the “Haffner” Serenade K. 250, first movement, in Mozart the Dramatist. The nearly two-page sheet music example is annotated with an interpretation of what the music at the end of the movement might be intended to convey: after a very normal 9 minutes of music, we understand that “the ostentatious display of stability is, it turns out, the protracted setup for a gag in the coda.” The last few moments of the piece are an accumulation of surprises: a cadence that isn’t the end, an uncertain moment of suspense, a return of the main theme that immediately seems to lose control, an unexpected ending. And my favorite quote is this single word, used to describe a surprising G♯: “Splat!!”

I didn’t even know the “Haffner” Serenade before, and now, having listened to its first movement a few times, I like it and will be able to recognize it. The book made me enjoy the music more, and the music made me enjoy the book more. Thus I would advise anyone reading Mozart the Performer to either already know all of Mozart by heart, or to take the time to listen to the examples. (I would have asked Dorian for help, if only I hadn’t decided that this whole book review would be a surprise.)

The book did leave me with the impression that it shouldn’t really be a book, but some other type of media. This is tricky, though, because at the same time it really should be a book, and a physical one at that. There is no way I would have gone through it all if it were a webpage, an audiobook, or a video. It was helpful to immerse oneself into the written word; I just wished the correct musical excerpts started playing whenever I needed them to. Maybe we just haven’t invented the right format yet.

Fifth Movement: Humanness, AI, and Love

In the year 2025, one can hardly write anything at all without mentioning AI.

Mozart the Performer was published in 2023, so it could still escape that fate, and does not mention AI at all. It does, however, mention human intelligence. I already quoted this part, from the theme and coda, but let’s quote it again: “Within this [imaginary world created by listening to music], we sometimes sense the organizing presence of a human mind, a consciousness whose perceived emotional states and overarching worldview bind a musical work into a coherent whole.” It is important. Mozart the Performer is about seeing Mozart’s music as something made by the specific human being named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The constraints of performance, pianism, and improvisation, as well as the desire to make music playful and dramatic, “help give his music its elusive yet human quality.”

Imagine we could generate Mozart-like music on demand. In fact we probably already can. I don’t know, I was going to research and try AI music generation for this post, but I immediately got so bored I gave up. I’ve written about AI (visual) art several times in the past, and AI music is probably not very different: useful for some applications, technically impressive, and there isn’t much of a point in fighting it. But it’s also just… less interesting. A big part of why we care about certain pieces of music is the human behind it. That’s why we go to concerts where humans play in real time. That’s why we follow the careers of musicians. That’s why we listen to Mozart playlists instead of generic classical period playlists.

Mozart the Performer is about explanations. And those explanations are all rooted in the fact that Mozart was a human. You could write a book about explanations for AI-made music, but that’d be pretty lame. The model was trained with all the music on the internet, and prompted to “write a symphony in the style of Mozart,” and then you’d actually end up talking about Mozart again, with a side dish of matrix multiplication.

It always boils down to humans somehow. That’s what matters to us. Another way to phrase it is: it always boils down to love.

Dorian loves Mozart, and wrote a whole book about him. I love my friend, and read a whole book by him, and then wrote a blog post for him because his birthday was approaching. In some sense, none of this is very important: the world would continue to function with one fewer book about Mozart, or one fewer blog post. But in another sense, it is the most important thing.

Make my friend happy! Buy the book!

It’s election season in Montreal, at the city level, and I have no idea who to vote for.

(And I have to decide quickly, because the election is tomorrow. I meant to write this post a month ago, but life got in the way, as it is wont to do.)

Municipal elections here are interesting because, although they involve political parties, there usually isn’t a very strong ideological component to any of it. Abstract ideas like “left” or “right,” “conservative” or “progressive,” “federalist” or “sovereigntist”1 don’t really matter: the issues are more local, more concrete. There isn’t any alignment between municipal parties and national ones.2 You can spend more than a decade as an elected politician without your own kids ever really knowing what you believe in, politically. (I’m the kid. My dad was a city councillor in the city of Lévis, near Quebec City, for 12 years, and I still don’t what his political alignment was or is, if any.)

In Montreal, you can vote for Projet Montréal, Ensemble Montréal, Transition Montréal, Action Montréal, or Futur Montréal. Good luck inferring anything from their names. Or from the nondescript signs that they have been putting up all over the city, showing little more than the faces and names of the candidates.

In practice, you can get some knowledge from just having lived here for a while, and/or from following the news a little bit. For example I know that Projet Montréal currently controls the mayorship and most of the council. The current mayor, Valérie Plante, is retiring, but the candidate to replace her is the #2 most important person in the administration, so one can expect more of the same if Projet Montréal win again (more bike lanes, mild hostility to cars, a vaguely left-wing and environmental-friendly vibe, somewhat higher taxes). Ensemble Montréal is the party that most recently lost power, in 2017, and is now headed by a former federal minister who seems to be vaguely more pro-business and economic development. Transition Montréal uses orange, which has become the traditional left-wing color in Quebec and Canada; it’s a new party, led by a man who is associated with the federal left-wing party. Action Montréal and Futur Montréal are more obscure.

In practice it’s between Projet’s Luc Rabouin and Ensemble’s Soraya Martinez Ferrada. A few polls suggest that Martinez Ferrada will win, but there are a lot of undecideds, like me.

How will we all decide? I think there’s a cute analogy with ethical theories, which suggests that there are, broadly speaking, three strategies that people use to make a choice in an election.

In Ethics and the Complexity of Models, I attempted to un-confuse myself about the distinctions between utilitarianism, deontology, and virtue ethics. I determined that the most significant difference between them is how they each manage the complexity of the world:

• Utilitarianism is about building a very complex and accurate model of the world, calculating the positive and negative consequences of everything, which works great in theory but is insanely hard to do.

• Deontology is about using a simplified model that captures something important in a small set of rules, at the risk of neglecting other concerns.

• Virtue ethics is about borrowing a complex model that already exists and is embodied in another person that is perceived as virtuous.

Since then I’ve become obsessed with analyzing everything through this 3-way lens: making a complex model, making a simple model, and using a borrowed model. Applying it to electoral choice, we get:

• Utilitarianism maps to studying the propositions of the candidates in detail and weighing them according to your preferences. Maybe I care a lot about building more bike lanes, but would prefer lower taxes and more deregulation in housing, and two dozen other concerns besides. I could devise an actual mathematical model: out of 100 arbitrary points, I assign 5 to bike lanes, and consider that Projet Montréal has 90% alignment with my preference, while Ensemble Montréal has only 60% alignment (they don’t want to destroy the existing ones but slow down on adding new lanes), so Projet gets 4.5 points and Ensemble gets 3. Then I do this for housing, which is more important to me (20 points), and then taxes, etc. etc. Of course, I am more likely to do this implicitly than actually do the math, just like utilitarians usually do for ethics. But even more likely, I won’t do any of this; I won’t even read the propositions of the parties beyond whatever transpires in the few media articles I will read.

• Which brings us to deontology, whose equivalent is picking one or two principles, and voting according to this without thinking too much about the finer-grained detail. In larger-scale elections, this often means following party loyalty, or left-right alignment. It can also mean being a “single-issue voter” who cares a lot, e.g., about abortion, or housing, or immigration, and voting for whichever team is most aligned with you on that one particular question. In Montreal this will happen insofar as people perceive Projet to be left-wing / progressive and Ensemble to be not that. Or it might just come down to bike lanes, which we’ve become somehow rather obsessed with.3

• Virtue ethics, meanwhile, maps to primarily selecting a person rather than ideas or policies. You vote based on whoever seems the most suited for the job. Unless you personally know them, which is rare in politics (it happened to me when I voted for my dad), your model of the candidates will necessarily be simplified. But this can work anyway, because we humans are pretty good at assessing the quality of people based on only a few cues. I think this mode also explains incumbent advantage: if a person has been an elected official for some time, and did a reasonable job, it’s pretty easy to trust that they are virtuous enough to keep the job. (I would probably vote for Valérie Plante again if she hadn’t declined to run, and part of why I’m unsure who to vote for is that I don’t really know the two leading candidates all that much.)

Just like in actual ethics, none of these three approaches is inherently superior to the others.

The “utilitarian” mode may seem better in theory, and a lot of commentators bemoan the fact that people are uninformed and vote based on superficial concerns. But it is costly, and it’s totally fine for most people to just not care that much about the fine-grained detail.

The “deontology” approach certainly leads to suboptimal outcomes sometimes, for example voting for a party you don’t actually like that much just because they’re aligned with you on your top issue. But if we want most people to participate in democracy, simplifications like this are necessary. Party politics and divisions like left vs. right make the game much more legible to most of us.

And the “virtue ethics” approach of electing a person rather than ideas might appear shallow, and lead to undesirable results like populism. But it is, in a way, time-tested: referenda are rare and typically garner far less attention than the personalities of the people who run for office. It really is more intuitive for us to judge people rather than abstract concepts.

In practice, we all do a little bit of each, in varying proportions. And ultimately it doesn’t matter that much what approach you choose: one of the reasons democracy works well is that it aggregates the choices of so many people that any one person’s choice doesn’t matter that much. So we end up with a result that somehow reflects the population’s preferences for the specific policy points, for overall ideological alignment, and for the qualities of the people involved. It doesn’t work perfectly, obviously. But that’s what democracy is. It’s imperfect by design, and that’s why it works well.

Thanks to Andrew Burleson for comments on a very early draft of this post.

3

An aside: I recently visited Santa Fe, in New Mexico. A friend’s friend who lives there told us about a hot-button local political issue. In the city’s main square there used to be an obelisk called the Soldiers’ Monument. The monument has been controversial because of its references to the local indigenous people (“savage Indians” engaged in battles against the soldiers the monument commemorates). In 2020, protesters toppled the monument, and apparently it became the talk of the town for the next few years: what should we do with the obelisk, and with the people who brought it down? It’s apparently still an issue in the upcoming election three days from now. My friend’s friend said he felt like the only person in the whole town who cared about any issue other than the obelisk, such as education or whatever. We might say this is a failure mode of the “deontology” approach: sometimes one particular way of simplifying electoral choice becomes so salient that it overshadows everything else.

The progress studies movement is young, and like most young things, has a lot of potential for growth. But to make the most of it, it will have to escape its current monocultural focus.

To illustrate what I mean, consider the Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive, hereafter BBI, which is the program I have been lucky enough to be in the past few months. It is now reaching the end of its third year. There are 31 of us in this cohort; there were 24 and 19 in the first two, for a total of 74 fellows. Everybody (with one exception) says where they’re based on the fellows’ web page, so I collected the data and vibe-coded a little map showing our geographical distribution.

To the surprise of nobody, most fellows — more than 50 — are based in the United States, especially in the San Francisco Bay Area, with strong contingents from Washington, D.C., Boston, and Austin. (Surprisingly few people in NYC, only 3.) The rest of the Anglosphere, at least the part in the Northern Hemisphere, isn’t too poorly represented, especially London, with 7 (the number is hidden on my quickly put together map by our representatives from Cambridge and Oxford). There are also a few fellows in Ireland and Canada.

Outside of that, the German-speaking world has a few representatives in Germany and Switzerland, hailing from Dutch-speaking Belgium, and we have one fellow each in India and Hong Kong. And then there is myself, in French-speaking Canada — perhaps technically the Anglosphere, but not really.1 Nothing from France, Italy, Scandinavia, Japan, Australia, the entire Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, all of Africa, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East.

None of this is particularly surprising. The BBI is in English, so of course it’s going to primarily attract English speakers. In fact, it selects for advanced English speakers who are excellent writers in that language; this is definitely going to be skewed towards educated people in rich Anglo countries. Then the BBI is based in the United States and run by Americans, with a schedule that is suited best for people in the Western Hemisphere. More broadly, the progress movement is one of those many Silicon-Valley-adjacent subcultures, which makes it particularly present in the hubs of the American tech industry, chiefly among them the San Francisco Bay Area (but also places like Austin, Texas). Progress studies has its intellectual origins in thinkers like Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison, who have ties to the Washington, D.C. area, the SF Bay Area, and Ireland.

Nor is any of this particularly problematic. The United States is the world’s cultural superpower, it’s huge, it’s dynamic. It makes sense that new political movements sprout there, just due to the sheer number and talent of the people who live there, whether by accident or by choice. And it makes sense that those movements primarily try to change the United States, whether through policy or by influencing the US’s massive technological industry. At the scale of the world, English is the lingua franca; many people speak it, and it attracts the smartest people, the ones most likely to come up with the next big idea. If you want to spread such an idea, you’ll write it in English; otherwise, you handicap yourself for no reason. Even if you just want to write as a hobby, it is much more rewarding to do it in English, as I discovered years ago. And if you want cultural diversity, there definitely is a lot of it within the mostly Anglo and American group of the BBI fellows: some come from China, Iran, India; some have a background in AI, agriculture, policy, and health. It’s also very common for progress people to research and write about what is going on all over the world (e.g., from sampling Works in Progress, on French nuclear power, on the Madrid metro, on Japanese urbanism).

So the fact that the BBI is US- and English-centric isn’t surprising or problematic. Why, then, am I writing about it? Because it suggests an opportunity.

Ultimately, the goal of the progress movement is to further the welfare of humanity. It is not to assert the dominance of a single country. Sometimes incarnations of the movement take a patriotic guise, like Anglofuturism or American Dynamism, but even if you were motivated primarily by nationalism, it would benefit you and your country to live in a dynamic world where other countries are excellent trade partners and the source of innovations you can borrow. Most progress people believe, rightly, in the benefits of free markets and the free flow of ideas.

But even in non-US/UK Anglosphere countries, the progress studies movement is barely getting started. (The only Canadian progress-adjacent organization I know of, Build Canada, was founded earlier this year.2) In non-Anglo countries, almost nobody has ever heard of it; at least that’s my understanding of the cultural sphere I’m in, the French-speaking world. If you’re from a country that isn’t the US or the UK, or have cultural or linguistic links to such a place, you can have a large impact there, and make the progress movement benefit a larger fraction of the world.

One problem with this is that it’s very hard. If you already have an established audience in English, writing in your other language is almost tantamount to starting from scratch.3 I used to write in French, with painfully slow growth, and I was almost immediately rewarded when I switched to English, due to network effects, a larger pool of readers, and a larger pool of reader subcultures.4 I routinely dream of taking up writing in French again, because I want to influence the culture and politics of where I live, but shouting into the void again, as new writers do, is very unappealing. The lack of any sort of progress culture here, which is the problem I would like to solve, paradoxically makes it even harder to make the switch. So I’m defaulting to a strategy of slowly becoming established in English, which hopefully transfers in some measure to French later on. I don’t know if that will work.

Sometimes I tell myself, or hear from others, that it is just not worth doing. It’s more effective to contribute directly to the central, bigger, more advanced movement that is growing in the Anglosphere. Eventually, there will be cultural diffusion as the movement becomes too big to ignore. The premier of Quebec was reported in the news to be reading Abundance by Klein and Thompson, which I suppose is a good sign.

But diffusion can be slow, and time matters. Every year that a European country follows some bad degrowth policy is a year with less technological development, less wealth, less trade with other countries, less human welfare. Besides, someone has to do the diffusion. Why not you, young progress writer?

Beyond the impact on those countries themselves, I also think — and this is a drum I keep beating — that cultural diversity is extremely important. Sustained progress depends on not putting all our eggs in the same basket of a single monoculture. Things naturally tend to cluster: the tech industry in San Francisco, for example. This is risky in subtle ways. The elite of the tech industry might become detached from the rest of the world, too focused on concerns that make sense only in San Francisco. Likewise, if the progress movement remains too American or Anglophone, it will quite possibly miss a lot of the good it can do in the rest of the world, and limit its reach. There certainly are a lot of people who will be much more amenable to progress ideas if they see it as a homegrown thing rather than a foreign American concept.

Historically, Western civilization has advanced rapidly, in part thanks to decentralization: different countries pursuing different objectives and competing with one another. This was true in the Greek city-states; in the republics and duchies of Renaissance Italy, or the countless statelets of the medieval German world; among the early modern European powers such as Spain, Portugal, France, and England, and then between their various colonies; and in the federalized states of America. Some of the most successful movements in history have taken advantage of this: consider the extensive international reach of Christianity, or communism, or environmentalism, all of them spreading over the years in myriad local variations across the world.

It will be hard to do, but it’s time for us in the progress studies movement to think seriously about how we will create many cultures of progress, instead of just one.

This is an essay I’ve been meaning to write for a long time, and I would like it to serve as a call for action. I’m trying to figure out how I can do some of that work myself in Canada, Quebec, and the French-speaking world, so if you’re interested in contributing, teaming up, or just providing words of encouragement, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

I’m also very interested in hearing from anyone who has had similar thoughts from other countries or cultural spheres. If you feel like you’re the only one in your country who cares about progress, let’s talk!

Big thanks to and Mike Riggs for feedback. This was my 4th BBI fellowship essay. By the way, I’ll be at the Progress Conference 2025 this week! Come talk to me if you’re there!

New-ish substacker Linch Zhang at The Linchpin has a fun post that ranks the “ways of knowing,” which he summarizes in this tier list:

The first thing I noticed is that it’s strange to rank things like “reading,” “science,” and “non-expert intuitions” in the same list, but having thought about it, it kinda makes sense. We might consider the elements in this chart as answers to the question, “If I want to know something, what techniques can I use?”, conflated with answers for “How does human civilization produce new knowledge?” This conflation makes things a little confusing, but the list is interesting nonetheless.

The second thing I noticed, because this is a topic I know well, is that cultural evolution is ranked very low, on par with folk wisdom and divine revelation.

Broadly speaking, cultural evolution is the application of evolutionary concepts from biology, like mutation and natural selection, to cultural traits. These traits cover any type of information that is socially transmitted: ideas, customs, styles, technologies, non-innate behaviors, etc. “Evolution” means the way this information changes over time, driven by mechanisms like innovation (analogous to mutation) and cultural selection (analogous to natural selection, i.e., how we choose to keep certain cultural traits and not others, and accumulate them).

Cultural evolution can be said to produce new knowledge, but Linch finds it unimpressive. In his list, “literacy is ranked highly . . . because it delivers extraordinary returns on humanity's investment compared to, say, cultural evolution's millennia of trial and error through humanity’s history and pre-history.” He adds that “cultural evolution (F tier) is vastly overrated.”

I’m really curious about who, exactly, is doing all this overrating, since I hold the opinion that cultural evolution is vastly underrated. In fact, it’s often not rated at all: most people aren’t even aware of it. It’s surprising to see it on the chart, to be honest. But once we assume the writer knows what cultural evolution is, it’s even more surprising to see it ranked in the “Fail” tier.

Here’s how Linch justifies it:

Let's be specific about cultural evolution, since Henrich's The Secret of Our Success has made it trendy. It's genuinely fascinating that Fijians learned to process manioc to remove cyanide without understanding chemistry. It's clever that some societies use divination to randomize hunting locations. But compare manioc processing to penicillin discovery, randomized hunting to GPS satellites, traditional boat-building to the Apollo program.

Cultural evolution is real and occasionally produces useful knowledge. But it's slow, unreliable, and limited to problems your ancestors faced repeatedly over generations. When COVID hit, folk wisdom offered better funeral rites; science delivered mRNA vaccines in under a year.

The epistemic methods that gave us antibiotics, electricity, and the internet simply dwarf accumulated folk wisdom's contributions. A cultural evolution supporter might argue that cultural evolution discovered precursors to what I think of as our best tools: literacy, mathematics, and the scientific method. I don't dispute this, but cultural evolution's heyday is long gone. Humanity has largely superseded cultural evolution's slowness and fickleness with faster, more reliable epistemic methods.

There are several confusions here — starting with the fact that the Fiji example in The Secret of Our Success isn’t about manioc, but about taboos on eating shark while pregnant. The manioc example is from Amazonia! But okay, minor mistake, it doesn’t matter to the argument. There are bigger issues, and looking at them will help us get a much clearer picture of what cultural evolution is and why it matters.

The #1 problem in Linch’s post is his implicit definition of cultural evolution. It’s not exactly wrong, but it’s too strict. He suggests that cultural evolution takes “millennia of trial and error,” and that it is “slow, unreliable, and limited to problems your ancestors faced repeatedly over generations.” None of this is true, except the trial-and-error part. Cultural evolution does operate by trial and error, but that can happen far faster than generations or millennia, and it’s not particularly unreliable, since we can control the selection mechanism in many cases.

Here are some toy examples at various time scales, with different ways to perform the trial-and-error step and the selection step:

• Centuries and millennia: Chimpanzees try to eat termites by digging in termite nests with their hands for 100,000 years. Then one chimp randomly pokes a nest with a stick and discovers that she can get termites more efficiently this way (trial and error). Later, another chimp sees the first chimp do it and be rewarded with many juicy termites, and imitates the behavior (selection). The knowledge of using sticks slowly spreads, but it takes hundreds of years for the entire population to adopt it.

• Decades or generations: The manioc story. Various tribes of the Tukanoan people in the Colombian Amazon eat manioc, a.k.a. cassava, as their staple food. Manioc causes cyanide poisoning in the long term, but you don’t notice it with either sight or taste, and without modern science, it’s basically impossible to link manioc to disease. One tribe randomly has this habit of waiting two days before eating the manioc fiber, which detoxifies the manioc, though they don’t know it; another just eats it immediately (trial and error). Over a few decades, the members of the first tribe are overall healthier, allowing them to reproduce and survive better, while the tribe that doesn’t detoxify eventually goes extinct (selection).

• Years: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is messing around at his keyboard (trial and error), and invents a new kind of musical flourish in one of his symphonies. He publishes the symphony. Other up-and-coming composers find it cool, and within a few years, they also use the technique in their works, changing the course of classical music history (selection).1

• Months and weeks: Dozens of SaaS startups get founded in the AI space, taking advantage of recent LLM advances. They experiment with various projects (trial and error), and within a few weeks, some of them start getting traction since they fill a user need (selection).

• Hours and minutes: Thousands of people post jokes and hot takes on Twitter, most of which are bad and boring (trial and error); but every once in a while, one of them becomes viral because it’s particularly funny, interesting, or egregious, which encourages people to share it further (selection).

Sometimes, of course, the selection step is a totally uncontrollable, even unnoticeable phenomenon, as in the manioc story. But many other times it occurs through rational human behavior, such as users buying SaaS or choosing to retweet something they like (or dislike). The trial-and-error step can also be controlled to some extent: Mozart or startup founders can deliberately choose to experiment, or even induce creativity using specific techniques or substances.

What happened in Linch’s post, I suspect, is that he overfit on the examples in Henrich’s book. Henrich is an anthropologist, and most of the evidence he describes comes from studies of hunter-gatherer societies, humans vs. great apes, and child psychology. This makes sense for a field that tries to encompass so much (many things are cultural!) and yet is still fairly young (a couple of decades). You’ll make more progress if you study the mechanics of human culture at the boundary between humans and other animals, without the confounding effect of the layers and layers of culture that make up the life of an adult in a complex modern civilization. But the idea generalizes far beyond anthropology.2

A related error in Linch’s post is to consider cultural evolution as distinct from the other ways of knowing in the list.

It would be both boring and useless to claim that all of the items are examples of cultural evolution. To be sure, you certainly could make this argument: In a broad sense, cultural evolution covers almost every kind of knowledge process used by humans, with the exception of the knowledge encoded in our genes. But some of the items in Linch’s list are more closely associated with it than others. And those few items, in fact, cover most of it. I don’t know what’s left if you take them out from under the cultural evolution umbrella.

First, folk wisdom. Also rated as F-tier. Cited twice in Linch’s three paragraphs on cultural evolution (“The epistemic methods that gave us antibiotics, electricity, and the internet simply dwarf accumulated folk wisdom's contributions”). It’s unclear to me what the distinction is here. Maybe the idea of accumulation? But folk wisdom without accumulation doesn’t really make sense; isn’t the point of folk wisdom that it has been transmitted across generations? Otherwise it’s just random life advice by an elderly person. It seems that Linch conflated the two concepts and should have just merged them into one, called “folk wisdom” or maybe “culturally evolved folk wisdom.”

Second, mimicry. B-tier: one of the better ways of knowing, according to the list. But if you read The Secret of Our Success, you’ll realize that this actually is the main mechanism of cultural evolution. A successful hunter gets imitated by younger aspiring hunters. Toddlers learn about the world by imitating their parents and older siblings. A core argument from Henrich is that humans are particularly good at transmitting cultural information in this way, unlike chimps and other animal species.

Third, expert intuition, classified as C-tier, and non-expert intuitions, D-tier. We humans are good at mimicking and learning, but not from just anyone. Henrich describes various quirks of human psychology that help us identify experts, or at least the most successful individuals in a particular task. This is why we’re sensitive to prestige: it’s an (imperfect) signal of expertise. So Linch’s two items on “intuition” are clearly part of cultural evolution: figuring out who to pay attention to is a key mechanism.

Fourth, literacy/reading. This is Linch’s top way of knowing, at the S+ tier. Literacy certainly isn’t needed for cultural evolution to occur, but boy, does it help with the accumulation part.

Fifth, social media, ranked as F--. For what it’s worth, I don’t fully agree that this is the absolute worst way of knowing, but regardless, it’s a clear example of trial and error and selection, as seen in my earlier Twitter example.

The other ways of knowing can also be massaged into fitting within the cultural evolution frame. Science, for example, definitely also works through trial and error, followed by selection of the best knowledge through criticism. Indeed, there are epistemologists like Karl Popper who argue that all knowledge production is evolutionary. But even if we don’t go all in, notice how the items I picked cover the full spectrum from F-- to S+. This makes it pretty hard to decide in which tier to actually put cultural evolution, if we wanted to update the list…

… which brings us to this question: should cultural evolution even be in the list at all?

In some sense, sure, it’s a way of knowing. But unlike the other items in the tier list, it’s not really something you choose to do. Most of the time, it just happens: knowledge gets created and selected, and has thereby evolved. And to the extent that you can choose to do it, by deliberately innovating and selecting, that’s an indistinguishable process from most other ways of knowing.

If I wanted to make a better list, I would split it in two, removing the conflation I mentioned earlier. One tier list for the question, “If I want to know something, what techniques can I use?” and another for “How does human civilization produce new knowledge?” Literacy would appear in the former, but not in the latter, since it’s not possible to produce knowledge new to humanity just from reading (at least until we meet literate aliens). Cultural evolution wouldn’t be in the former, but would show up in the latter, probably ranked somewhere in the middle.

For that matter, Darwinian biological evolution should be in the latter list too, ranked lower than cultural evolution. Mutation + natural selection does produce new knowledge, encoded in DNA. It’s a very lousy way to learn, it takes millions of years and it generally involves killing off every organism that makes a mistake, but it works.

I made this very quickly and didn’t put that much thought into each individual item, but here’s what my two-part list looks like:

I learned about cultural evolution when I happened to be a research intern in Joe Henrich’s lab at Harvard for half a year, back in 2016, which is also right after The Secret of Our Success was published. Ever since, I’ve been puzzling over why the idea is so little-known and often misunderstood.

Part of the answer might be that it’s surprisingly counter-intuitive, like biological evolution by natural selection. The mechanism is simple, but it’s difficult to grasp that complex living things or complex cultural traits evolve out of mutation and selection, without any sort of goal-oriented (teleological) processes.

In addition, cultural evolution is more complex than biological evolution, because it operates along more mechanisms. In biology, the information is stored in a standardized way, in genes. Genetics certainly is complex, but it’s tractable. Also, in a sexual species, genes are passed to a new organism almost exclusively when two organisms reproduce. (There are exceptions, like horizontal gene transfer, but they’re rare in complex organisms like animals and plants. We can also do this artificially with genetic engineering.) By contrast, in cultural evolution, the equivalent of a gene, the meme, is very poorly defined. This has prevented memetics from establishing itself as a formal field. And memes can spread in a multitude of methods, including sexual reproduction (parents passing their behaviors and values to their children), but also education, media, the influence of friends, etc. Not to mention that there are different levels of memes that interact in various ways: whether a group adopts the cultural practice of eating shellfish may be influenced by the “larger” cultural practice of being Jewish.

But in another sense, cultural evolution might still be underrated simply because it hasn’t been written about that much. It’s a young field, and it might still be difficult to tease the ideas apart from the few mainstream books, papers, and blog posts that have been published on the topic. Which is why I’ve been writing about it often, though rarely as the main idea of a post.

I’ve been meaning to write about it more formally several times, and for some mysterious reason I find it very difficult. So I’m happy I got to leverage the motivation of proving someone wrong. Hopefully Linch appreciates that this, too, is cultural evolution in action. A substacker writes about cultural evolution in a mistaken way (trial and error); another critiques the problems in it (selection); we collectively arrive at better knowledge. It’s not the worst way to make progress!

This is my 3rd Roots of Progress Blog Building Intensive post! Thanks to Linch Zhang for providing the fuel, to Venki for drawing my attention to Linch’s post, to BBI fellows Steven Adler, Hiya Jain, and Andrew Burleson for feedback, and to Mike Riggs for editing.

A few weeks ago, I was told that I was required to change my 10-year-old smoke detector. This made me realize that I hadn’t added the smoke detector to my tech tree database,1 and in fact that I knew nothing about when smoke detectors were invented or how they work. So I did what I do in such circumstances, which is to start by checking the relevant Wikipedia page’s “History” section.

According to Wikipedia, the smoke detector has antecedents in heat-based fire alarms starting around 1890, but those wouldn’t be detecting smoke. The earliest such device seems to appear in the 1930s:

In the late 1930s, Swiss physicist Walter Jaeger attempted to invent a sensor for poison gas.^[6] He expected the gas entering the sensor to bind to ionized air molecules and thereby alter an electric current in a circuit of the instrument.^[6] However, his device did not achieve its purpose as small concentrations of gas did not affect the sensor's conductivity.^[6] Frustrated, Jaeger lit a cigarette and was surprised to notice that a meter on the instrument had registered a drop in current.^[7] Unlike poison gas, the smoke particles from his cigarette were able to alter the circuit's current.^[7] Jaeger's experiment was one of the developments that paved the way for the modern smoke detector.^[7]

This is a really cute story! In the tech tree, it suggests a connection from both poison gas and the cigarette. I like connections like this, because they show how technology from a given field (like chemical weapons or recreational smoking) can influence another, totally different field (like fire safety). It’s also always fun to read about serendipitous discoveries and witness the randomness that is inherent in innovation.

But I try to be careful about truth, and especially about stories that are possibly a little too cute. In the Roots of Progress Blog-Building Intensive that I’m currently a part of, we discussed epistemic standards a few weeks ago. Progress studies, as a subculture, wants to be rigorous and truth-seeking, since studying progress often means studying the history of inventions, policies, and other niche things that tend to be rife with apocryphal information. Examples include “the Vikings wore horned helmets” (they did not, it’s a 19th century invention) and “the invention of petroleum-based fuels saved the whales from extinction by replacing whale oil in lighting” (in fact petroleum fuels allowed ships to hunt for whales more efficiently, and the decrease in whale populations continued for another century).

I deal with this all the time as I compile data for the tech tree. Though I base a lot of it on Wikipedia,2 I try to always make an effort to be reasonably confident that the data is true. It’s often sufficient to cross-reference a couple of related Wikipedia pages and check whether citations exist and are credible. But in this case, that didn’t work, and doubts started to creep in.

It begins when I try to learn more about Walter Jaeger. For any technology in the tech tree, I usually read the inventor’s Wikipedia page as a sanity check, and also because it often helps record the time and place of the invention. But it turns out that Mr. Jaeger doesn’t have a Wikipedia page. This is a little suspicious, but not that problematic; Wikipedia isn’t expected to contain everything.

So I google him. The first Google result is the smoke detector Wikipedia page that I was just on. A bad sign. The second is an obituary for a Walter Jaeger who was born in 1935 in Poland, so very unlikely to invent smoke detectors in late 1930s Switzerland. Then we get image portraits of various Walter Jaegers, which is when I realize that this is a very common German name and that it may be hard to disentangle a Walter Jaeger (or Jäger) from another.

I check the German Wikipedia for Walter Jäger; nine of them are mentioned, but only two have an actual page, and most don’t fit the details (physicist, Swiss, active in the 1930s). One Walter Jaeger is Swiss and received a doctorate in chemistry in 1937, which is close, but the translated page doesn’t mention smoke detectors, and he is much more well-known for being a politician. I search Google some more. There’s a Walter Jager who’s a consultant in environmental compliance in Ottawa, according to LinkedIn. Another Walter Jäger was an Oberleutnant on a U-boot in the Nazi Kriegsmarine. The Discogs database mentions a Walter Jaeger who’s a German multi-instrumentalist and instrument maker, born in 1958. Okay, this isn’t going anywhere.

I go back to the smoke detector page. Wikipedia lists two references, still visible in the quote above as [6] and [7]. Reference [6] is a “Fact Sheet on Smoke Detectors” on the website of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Presumably the NRC is talking about smoke detectors because they use radioactive materials. (How do smoke detectors work, anyway? Click the footnote to learn more!3) This page, which was written in 2013, does tell the Walter Jaeger story—

In the late 1930s, a Swiss physicist was working on a sensor for detecting poison gas. Walter Jaeger's device failed to register small amounts of gas. Frustrated, he lit a cigarette—and the smoke moved the meter on his gadget. Jaeger's experiment helped pave the way for today's smoke detector.

—but doesn’t cite any further sources. I suppose it’s maybe a little authoritative because it’s a government agency, but not by much. I email them to ask about it, but do not expect a response.

Reference [7], meanwhile, is a book titled The World's Best Business Ideas, also from 2013. It’s almost certainly not a primary source, doesn’t seem particularly trustable, and would cost me $25 on Amazon, which is more than I’m willing to spend to ascertain one very niche fact.

Okay. I google around. The story is oft-repeated on various websites (80% of which are blogs from providers of fire safety services), but the details are basically always the same, with minor rephrasing. Examples here, here, here, here, and here, among many others.

I ask Claude to search for me, mentioning that I’m a little skeptical of the story. Claude isn’t any better than I am at web searches, but it might stumble upon something I’ve missed. It finds a few things, but agrees with me (though perhaps because I primed it this way…) that this looks like mostly circular referencing. Claude concludes:

My assessment: The Walter Jaeger cigarette story has the hallmarks of an appealing but potentially apocryphal tale that may have been embellished over time. While it's possible Jaeger made contributions to ionization detection principles, the specific anecdote about the cigarette smoke accident appears to lack solid primary documentation. The story serves as good marketing for the technology but should be viewed with skepticism from a historical accuracy standpoint.

I also notice that every mention of the story dates from the 2010s or later. For something supposed to have happened in the 1930s, that’s suspicious. I search Google and Google Scholar using date filters, and find a few mentions in the 1990s, but nothing earlier.

The only thing that’s left is to brush up my German Google Translate skills and search outside the Anglophone web. In German, a smoke detector is apparently a Rauchmelder. I google “Rauchmelder Walter Jäger.” Most of what I find is the same kind of sourceless rehash as in English, though maybe with a little more depth:

Ende der 30er Jahre kam dem Physiker Walter Jäger der Zufall zur Hilfe. Bei dem Versuch mit einer Ionisationskammer Giftgas zu erkennen, stellte er fest das Zigarettenrauch deutlich besser erkannt wurde. Daraufhin gründeten Walter Jäger, Ernst Meili und Hans Lutz von Gugelberg die Firma Cerberus.

At the end of the 1930s, chance came to the aid of physicist Walter Jäger. While experimenting with an ionization chamber to detect poisonous gas, he discovered that cigarette smoke was significantly more effective. Walter Jäger, Ernst Meili, and Hans Lutz von Gugelberg subsequently founded the Cerberus company. (source)

But more importantly, a few results down the list, aha! I find a link to a patent on Google Patents. And this patent cites three patents from the 1930s by Walter Jaeger!! One of which is for a Rauchmelder!!!

This is my first clear evidence that Walter Jaeger is real. But none of the patents, translated by Claude, say anything about a serendipitous discovery involving cigarettes and poison gas. They are, as expected of patents, dry technical stuff.

This clue doesn’t really solve anything, but it encourages me to keep looking. I turn my attention to another Swiss physicist whose name I’ve seen a few times at this point: Ernst Meili.4 The original smoke detector Wikipedia article mentioned him just after Jaeger: “In 1939, Swiss physicist Ernst Meili devised an ionization chamber device capable of detecting combustible gases in mines.” Maybe he’s the actual inventor I should put in the tree if Jaeger can’t be ascertained. There isn’t a page about Meili on en.wikipedia.org, but there is one on de.wikipedia.org. Interestingly, it says that Meili joined, in 1941, a company named Cerberus GmbH, founded by Walter Jäger. This also fits some of the random German Google hits (see above). Also, Cerberus is still today a legacy brand of fire safety products, now part of Siemens. We may be inching closer to something concrete here.

The Ernst Meili Wikipedia page cites some sources that seem more trustworthy than what I’ve seen before. One in particular is a 2006 publication by Hans Tobler, a researcher at Cerberus, in the trade journal of Electrosuisse, the Swiss association of electrical companies. It is on the 50-year history of Cerberus in the field of ionization smoke detectors:

Die Ära der Brandmelder begann mit einer Publikation im SEV-Bulletin anno 1940 von Walter Jäger, Physiker und früherer Mitstudent von Ernst Meili: «Die Ionisationskammer als Feuermelder». Ein Jahr darauf gründeten Meili und Jäger die Cerberus GmbH in Bad Ragaz, mit der Absicht, Brand- und Intrusionsmelder zu entwickeln und zu fabrizieren: Es begann eine dramatische Geschichte einer Firma, die 1998 juristisch und 2005 physisch in Männedorf ein Ende fand.

The era of fire detectors began with a publication in the SEV Bulletin in 1940 by Walter Jäger, a physicist and former student of Ernst Meili: "The Ionization Chamber as a Fire Detector." One year later, Meili and Jäger founded Cerberus GmbH in Bad Ragaz with the intention of developing and manufacturing fire and intrusion detectors. Thus began a dramatic story of a company that ended legally in 1998 and physically in Männedorf in 2005.

Okay, so Jäger was a student of, and then cofounder with, Ernst Meili. [Addendum: not at all! I think this is a translation error by whichever LLM I used for this — mitstudent means “fellow student,” not “student of”.] The story of this Cerberus company varies a bit (was it cofounded by Jäger and Meili, or only by Jäger and Meili joined later? were other Swiss physicists involved?) but at least it seems pretty certain at this point that it was the first company created to manufacture ionization smoke detectors, in the 1940s, and that these two Swiss gentlemen had something to do with it. Still, though, no mention of the cigarette story.

The name Cerberus is a pretty good thing to search for, except of course that it mostly leads to paintings and pottery art of multi-headed dogs who guard the underworld.

But combined in a Google query like “Cerberus GmbH smoke detector history,” I actually get somewhere. A report titled “History of Smoke Detection,” prepared by James A. Milke for Siemens in 2010 and found on a weird website that showers me with ads every time I try to turn a page, contains a few good nuggets. First, it seems that the first actual smoke detection occurred earlier, the work of yet another Swiss physicist, Heinrich Greinacher, in 1922, who was trying to measure dust content in air. Second, it confirms that Jäger was trying to build a poison gas detector, and that he noticed it could be used for smoke after he lit a cigarette! Third, it mentions some other actual predecessor techs to the smoke detector: a triode with cold cathode to amplify the ionization signal, and radium as the radioactive source to cause the ionization. Fourth, and most importantly: the report abundantly cites “Meili 1990.”

“Meili 1990” turns out to be a book by Ernst Meili published in 1985 titled Mein Leben mit Cerberus. Erreichtes und Unerreichtes. An English version, My Life With Cerberus: Successes and Setbacks, was apparently published in 1990. It seems pretty obscure. The German version exists on Google Books, but with very little info. The closest library that has it according to WorldCat is 5,988 kilometers from my location, i.e. in Zurich. The English version isn’t even on WorldCat and returns only three Google results.

This is where I decide to stop. It seems quite plausible that the cigarette story is told in this autobiography by Meili: that’s exactly the sort of anecdote that would be fun for Meili to tell. It also fits the fact that I couldn’t find references to the story before the 1990s. But going further would be too much effort. The lecture about epistemics at the BBI did emphasize that spending 20 hours on figuring out one tiny fact may not always quite be the best possible usage of your time.

Also, that title sounds like a young adult novel aimed at adolescent fans of Greek myth. It makes me want to play the video game Hades. Has Hades II come out yet?

No, sorry, I am not done.

Several days later, I am told what I already know, which is that my blog post draft is lacking a payoff. It deflates towards the end. If I’m serious about this essay, I should find a way to get access to Mein Leben mit Cerberus. I should, at the very least, send out some more emails.

By coincidence, on the same day, the US NRC replies to my inquiry and suggests that I contact Dr. James A. Milke, who wrote the report cited above. Dr. Milke is a professor emeritus in fire protection engineering at the University of Maryland. I shoot an email, and the reply comes almost immediately:

That history is correct. I wrote a short report for Siemens several years ago about the history of smoke detection. They loaned the Meili book to me as one resource used to write that report. Unfortunately, I had to return the book.

Seems like the confirmation I was looking for! But I would still like to see the contents of the book. By googling more for it, I find a publication called Sensors in Intelligent Buildings, in which an article by Marc Thuillard cites the Meili book. It turns out that Thuillard was a Cerberus employee! I find his email on an article about archeoastronomy — puzzling, but his ResearchGate page does contain smoke detector stuff once you scroll past all the articles with titles like “Computational Approaches to Myths Analysis: Application to the Cosmic Hunt.” I shoot an email, and the reply comes almost immediately, in French: He has heard the anecdote, but has forgotten the details. He adds that he left Cerberus twenty-five years ago, and now devotes his time to a YouTube channel about ethno-astronomy. Merci, monsieur Thuillard.

I also contact Siemens directly, but the reply will probably not come almost immediately. I still don’t have the book. Should I actually purchase it? Or maybe I know someone in Switzerland who is willing to walk into the library and look it up for me? No, almost certainly not. Still, let’s try it. I tweet the following:

… and find this person in, like, 10 minutes????? A Twitter mutual-of-a-mutual, Benjamin Schneider, tells me I’m in luck: he lives right next to the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, he happens to have a lot of free time (I gather from his website that he’s looking for work, maybe hire him??), and most importantly, he “can’t resist a good nerdsnipe.” This long shot has somehow resulted into a perfect hole-in-one, wtf. The next day, Benjamin goes to the library, scans the entire book with his phone, and sends me the relevant passages with a GPT-5 translation:

Nach Aussagen von W. Jaeger hatte er ursprünglich – noch vor Kriegsausbruch – die Idee, mit Hilfe einer Ionisationskammer einen Giftgasanzeiger zu entwickeln. Da die fraglichen Gaskonzentrationen im militärischen Einsatz ausserordentlich klein sind, habe sich das Vorhaben als aussichtslos erwiesen. Er habe dabei als Zigarettenraucher zufällig die starken Stromschwankungen beim Eindringen von Rauch in eine Ionisationskammer festgestellt.

According to W. Jaeger, he originally—before the outbreak of war—had the idea of developing a poison gas detector using an ionization chamber. Since the gas concentrations in military use were extremely small, the project proved to be hopeless. However, as a cigarette smoker, he accidentally noticed the strong current fluctuations when smoke entered an ionization chamber.

Well, there we go. My quest is done. The story is true.

Or, almost? There isn’t much of a narrative here. Nothing about W. Jaeger becoming “frustrated” and lighting a cigarette because his device doesn’t work. That’s a small thing, but by now I’m almost certain that’s an embellishment that appeared when the story began circulating as a meme on the internet.

Paging through the LLM-translated book, I learn a few more things: for example, that Jaeger was Meili’s “bester Studienfreund,” i.e. best friend during their studies, I think at ETH Zurich in physics. Jaeger graduated one semester after Meili. So the idea that he was a student of Meili, which we saw in that 2006 publication, seems plain wrong. [Addendum: it’s indeed wrong but because of a translation error! Be careful about LLM translation, folks!] We also learn that Jaeger came from a wealthy family, which allowed him to pursue his passion for invention after graduation without worrying about earning a living. It seems that Jaeger did not get a PhD, let alone in chemistry, so he’s definitely not the politician gentleman whose picture we saw earlier.

Meili gives more detail about the company’s founding. Jaeger and him hadn’t been in touch much after graduation, but Jaeger contacted him on June 3, 1940, to suggest building a smoke detector company together. This contradicts the following passage from Wikipedia:

In 1939, Swiss physicist Ernst Meili devised an ionization chamber device capable of detecting combustible gases in mines.^[8] He also invented a cold cathode tube that could amplify the small signal generated by the detection mechanism so that it was strong enough to activate an alarm.^[8]

There is no indication in his autobiography that Meili worked on smoke detectors at all until 1940; he had instead been involved in radio tech at the companies Telefunken and Hofrela, but didn’t like working as an employee and was pessimistically considering going back to ETH for grad school when Jaeger suggested doing a startup together. (This sort of story definitely still feels familiar in 2025...) The company had two other cofounders, Rudolf Jaeger (Walter’s brother) and a friend of Walter’s wife named Grita Büchel. There’s no mention of a “Hans Lutz von Gugelberg” which I saw named as a cofounder on at least one website.

There’s also some interesting background on Jaeger’s invention, confirming Greinacher’s 1922 publication and also attributing some contributions by Malsallez and Breitmann in France in 1937-38. Meili muses that it may have been an independent development from theirs, and the invention was “in the air,” picked up simultaneously in different places, as often happens in the history of technology.

But enough about the contents of the book.5 I found the info I was looking for. What did I learn in the process?

First, quite a bit of lore about the humble smoke detector. For my tech tree, I’ll attribute it to both Jaeger and Meili, in Bad Ragaz, Switzerland, and date it to 1940 — which seems to be when the cigarette anecdote occurred, and when they made the first mass-produced model, F1. The smoke detector’s predecessor techs will include radium, triodes, the cigarette, and mustard gas (I’m making a reasonable guess that this would be one of the poison gases Jaeger had been trying to detect).

Second, that my internal smoke fake story detector doesn’t work that well. There was a moment early on in this quest when I was convinced I had found an apocryphal fact and would heroically slay it. But Wikipedia was mostly correct after all. On balance, I’m glad of this outcome; the story being false would have been sad; the world is a little bit cooler for this story being true and documented.

Third, however, I did discover that quite a few of the story details, whether on Wikipedia, random company blogs, and even in specialized publications, are wrong or embellished. It obviously doesn’t matter that much to suggest that Jaeger was frustrated by his poison gas detector (it’s pretty plausible, after all), or to name the wrong set of cofounders. But in a world where any transmission of information has an error rate, and where the errors can therefore accumulate as the info circulates, there is value in digging deep for the primary source of a suspicious fact, even if you don’t end up debunking it. It’s a kind of epistemic hygiene, and everybody benefits when everybody does their part cleaning up the commons.6

Fourth, I think I learned quite a bit about myself! I’ve dug deep for primary sources of niche facts many times, but never really took the time to document the process. I now have a more detailed mental model of what it actually means to do research online. I also have seen the benefits of directly emailing people, which I don’t naturally think of doing for some reason.

Oh, and this article motivated me to finally replace my smoke detector. Now I will not die in a fire, which is pretty cool. I even have a carbon monoxide detector now. Maybe I’ll add that to the tech tree next.

This was my second post as part of the Roots of Progress Institute’s Blog-Building Intensive. Special thanks to Mike Riggs for encouraging me to dig deeper, to Benjamin Schneider for going to the Zurich library to scan that book for me, to Ulkar Aghayeva for connecting me to Benjamin, and to blog fellow Alexander Kustov for feedback.

My favorite color has changed throughout my life, cycling through the entire spectrum of visible light and beyond. I don’t remember when blue was the chosen one, exactly; maybe when I was 13 or so. After that, yellow, purple, orange, green, and pink occupied the top spot for various periods. Blue never made a comeback. I saw it as a banal, common color. After all, the sky is made of it, and the sky is everywhere.

Then I realized when compiling the tech tree that blue is the most fascinating color, because it is the hardest of the common colors to create artificially.1 You can’t just take a piece of the sky and put it into a painting. And blue pigments are fairly rare in minerals, plants, and animals. So blue had to be invented, time and time again, from 4000 BC to the 21st century. It is the most technological color, and I’m willing to claim that this is why it is usually, in science fiction and elsewhere, used to represent the future.

The story of blue starts with indigo. It is an organic dye made from plants in the Indigofera genus, which grow throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. The first known traces of indigo dye come from the New World, in ancient Peru, 6,000 years ago, using Indigofera suffruticosa, or anil.2 In the Old World, it was known from Africa to East Asia, but became particularly associated with India (hence indi-go), where Indigofera tinctoria was domesticated. Indigo soon became a luxury, traded from India to Greco-Roman and then medieval Europe, where the same blue dye could only be made from a less productive plant, woad or Isatis tinctoria. Eventually the “blue gold” became an important colonial crop in the Caribbean and was part of the story of slavery, next to sugar, tobacco, and cotton.

Before indigo was a thing in the Old World (that started circa 2400 BC), the Egyptians had already become obsessed with the color blue. Besides the sky, it was available in the form of semiprecious stones like turquoise and lapis lazuli, cobalt oxide (more on that later), as well as the mineral azurite, which they mined in Sinai and the Eastern Desert.

Azurite would later enjoy a fruitful career as the main blue pigment in European painting, but to the Egyptians it was costly, and besides it isn’t the most stable blue color: it degrades and fades when in contact with air. And so they created the first synthetic pigment in history: Egyptian blue. The oldest evidence of it is in a bowl dated to 3250 BC. Egyptian blue is a calcium copper silicate with formula CaCuSi₄O₁₀ or CaOCuO(SiO₂)₄. Its method of manufacturing, in a rare example of lost technology, was forgotten towards the end of antiquity, but has been plausibly reconstructed. It likely involved heating together quartz sand (silica) and some source of copper (either copper ores or scraps from the bronze industry), together with an alkali (like natron) and a calcium oxide (unintentionally added as impurities in the other materials).

In another cradle of civilization, a very similar story unfolded from about 800 BC. So similar, in fact, that it has been speculated that knowledge of Egyptian blue spread along the early silk road, all the way to China, where Han blue (together with Han purple) makes an appearance during the Zhou dynasty. Han blue has almost the same chemical formula as Egyptian blue, but replaces calcium with barium: BaCuSi₄O₁₀. It may also have been an independent invention, perhaps the work of Taoist alchemists and glassmakers. Its use declined after the Han dynasty, and few examples survive.

Much later, China would become famous for another application of blue: the “blue and white” porcelain style. The blue here comes from cobalt oxide, which had colored Egyptian faience since at least 1500 BC, though nobody at the time knew what cobalt was. You could make cobalt blue in the form of glass and then grind it into a pigment called smalt. Despite porcelain originating in China, it seems that the use of smalt for the blue and white style began in Iraq. It spread from the Middle East to China, and then from China to the rest of the world including Europe, where it would eventually allow Swedish chemist Georg Brandt to identify cobalt as an element in 1735, the first time a new metal was discovered since antiquity.3

Meanwhile, in the New World, the local indigo dye was being combined with a clay called palygorskite to create what became known as Maya blue, which was the main blue pigment in Mesoamerican art from about 800, and was still used as late as the 19th century, though it, too, was forgotten about for a while.

But none of the pigments mentioned so far, not azurite, not cobalt blue, not Egyptian blue, could rival with the purest and deepest of blues, the one that came from grinding the rare lapis lazuli stone into a powder. Lapis lazuli had been extracted from mines in what is now Afghanistan since ancient times, but was used for paint starting around the 5th to 7th centuries, for use in Zoroastrian and Buddhist religious art. This pigment became known to medieval and Renaissance Europeans as ultramarine, meaning “beyond the sea,” since it had to be imported at great cost from central Asia (which, to the Venetian merchants who mostly controlled this trade, was beyond the Mediterranean sea, I suppose). Nobody has written about this more eloquently than Scott Alexander:

Here is the process for getting ultramarine. First, go to Afghanistan. Keep in mind, you start in England or France or wherever. Afghanistan is four thousand miles away. Your path takes you through tall mountains, burning deserts, and several dozen Muslim countries that are still pissed about the whole Crusades thing. Still alive? Climb 7,000 feet through the mountains of Kuran Wa Munjan until you reach the mines of Sar-i-Sang. There, in a freezing desert, the wretched of the earth work themselves to an early grave breaking apart the rocks of Badakhshan to mine a few hundred kilograms per year of blue stone - the only lapis lazuli production in the known world.

Buy the stone and retrace your path through the burning deserts and vengeful Muslims until you’re back in England or France or wherever. Still alive? That was the easy part. Now you need to go through a chemical extraction process that makes the Philosopher's Stone look like freshman chem lab. “The lengthy process of pulverization, sifting, and washing to produce ultramarine makes the natural pigment … roughly ten times more expensive than the stone it came from.”

Finally you have ultramarine! How much? I can’t find good numbers, but Claude estimates that the ultramarine production of all of medieval Europe was around the order of 30 kg per year - not enough to paint a medium-sized wall. Ultramarine had to be saved for ultra-high-value applications.

In practice, the medievals converged on a single use case - painting the Virgin Mary’s coat.

By the beginning of the 18th century, Egyptian blue had been long forgotten, and painters in Europe relied on indigo, smalt, azurite, and when they could get their hands on it, ultramarine. But this was the modern, enlightened era of European science. Great things were to come.

It began with a chance discovery. In Berlin around 1706, a paintmaker, Johann Jacob Diesbach, was trying to prepare red dye from cochineal.4 The details of the story are not totally ascertained, but it seems that his intended mix of cochineal insects, ferric sulfate, and potash had been tainted by another substance, perhaps bone oil from the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel. The result was a deep blue pigment, soon to be known as Prussian blue, since Berlin was the capital of Prussia. It immediately found its niche in the art market: a deep blue, like ultramarine, but which unlike ultramarine didn’t cost more than literal gold. Within a couple of years, painters were already depicting the Virgin Mary’s robes with Prussian blue.

Thus Prussian blue became the first modern synthetic pigment. It spread far and wide, even to isolationist Japan. Large quantities of Prussian blue began entering the country around 1829, through the single trading post the Japanese allowed with Westerners, at Dejima, and very soon after, revolutionized the woodblock printing art of ukiyo-e. As early as 1831, one of the most famous works in art history was created with abundant Prussian blue.

Prussian blue is also the blue of blueprints, created with the cyanotype process, one of the first ways to make many copies of a document. The blueprint was invented in 1842 by John Herschel and became the standard for engineering drawings; it was also used abundantly to duplicate photographs. Though it has become obsolete (replaced by whiteprint and then xerography, the currently dominant photocopying technique), it survives as the word to describe any technical, detailed plan.

Prussian blue was only the first of a series of synthetic blue pigments that span the history of industrial civilization. In 1789, cerulean appears, the creation of Albrecht Höpfner in Switzerland. It is another compound of cobalt, but combined with tin: a cobalt stannate (Co₂SnO₄). It would become available to artists in paint form only in the middle of the 19th century.

Around the same period, in 1799 or 1802 (sources differ), the French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard reinvented cobalt blue. It was a commission from another chemist, Jean-Antoine Chaptal, who happened to be a minister in the government of the First French Republic. Thénard investigated the pigments at the Sèvres porcelain factory, but used a different method than the originators of smalt pigments in Egypt, Iraq, or China, using aluminium (formula: CoAl₂O₄). By the middle of the 19th century, the leader in the production of cobalt aluminate was Blaafarveværket, a large industrial enterprise in Norway.

In this golden age of blue pigment synthesis, would it be possible to create even synthetic ultramarine? Goethe, already, had noticed the blue deposits on lime kilns when visiting Sicily in 1787. The locals used it for decoration as if it were lapis lazuli. The same phenomenon was observed in limeworks in France in the 1810s, and in 1824, the Société d’encouragement pour l’industrie nationale — a government organization dedicated to further French industry in response to the industrial revolution in Britain, and led by the aforementioned Jean-Antoine Chaptal — announced a prize of 6,000 francs to anyone who could make ultramarine for much cheaper than the price of lapis lazuli. In 1826, Jean-Baptiste Guimet succeeded in Lyon. He won the prize and established a thriving business, though he kept his methods secret and, as a result, forever has to share credit with Christian Gmelin in Tübingen, who did publish the process. It involves heating up clay, sodium hydroxide, and coal together.5

Artists and decorators now had their main blue pigments. Soon, industry and science would extend the use of blue to other domains. In 1897, it became practical to prepare artificial indigo in industrial quantities, eventually replacing all use of the plant. Today 80,000 tonnes are produced per year, mostly for the purpose of dying textiles and especially the denim of jeans.

Around the turn of the 20th century, artificial food colorings became widespread, derived primarily from coal tar. One of them would become known as brilliant blue FCF or Blue No. 1. Together with Blue No. 2, which is made from indigo, it is one of the two main blue colorings, and has a strong association with the familiar-yet-mysterious blue raspberry flavor.

The 1920s saw the introduction of another synthetic pigment, phthalo blue (also known as copper phthalocyanine), perhaps in a way harking back to the copper-derived compounds of ancient Egypt. It has grown to be most widely produced blue.

Though the discovery of new pigments is a rare occurrence, it still happens. In 2009, a serendipitous discovery at the Oregon State University led to YInMn Blue, so named because it contains yttrium, indium, and manganese, and pronounced “yinmin.” It is a near-perfect blue that furthermore avoids the toxicity and environmental problems of the pre-existing pigments.

I have this half-baked theory that science fiction is associated with blue because of blue LEDs.

Consider this chart, which I wrote about in an old post:

There are a number of competing hypotheses for why science fiction movie directors and video game designers overwhelmingly choose blue as the color of fictional user interfaces. They include:

• Accidental reasons from filmmaking considerations (from Mark Coleran):

  • Using simple interfaces with primary RGB colors on black looks better in film than ordinary liquid-crystal screens, so most UIs in video media is either red, green, or blue

  • Red is associated with weapons, and green with vintage electronics (which commonly used green-phosphor monochrome monitors), leaving blue as the generic and/or futuristic choice

  • Blue is easier to color-correct: a lot of filmed material tends to look blue before color correction, but you don’t need this when the image is supposed to be blue

• Cultural associations:

  • Blue fits well with science fiction thanks to associations like coldness, knowledge, otherworldliness, and creative transcendence (found in some academic paper in Korean thanks to Elicit)

  • Something something near-far Robin Hanson something something6

  • Blue is rare in nature except the for sea and sky, so “there’s something fundamentally mystical, unnatural, and inhuman about it” (from Noessel, cited in ‘Future Screens are Mostly Blue’)

• Most science fiction creators simply copy the tropes of existing science fiction, so they choose blue because it already is the “science fiction color.” (And picking something else is likely to be interpreted as an intentional deviation for a specific purpose.)

I’d guess that the actual, immediate reason for most blue in science fiction is the last one. Unless creators make a conscious artistic choice to deviate, they tend to copy what’s typical and expected in their chosen genre. Yet those norms and expectations have to come from somewhere. It’s possible that the items in the first part of the list, about decisions having to do with the techniques of filmmaking rather than with the artistic meaning of blue, are the actual cause for some early shows that snowballed into the ubiquity of blue interfaces today, but that seems a bit like post-hoc justification to me unless we can find evidence of those decisions being made.

So it’s probably cultural associations, but most of them also just kick the can further. Overall I suppose I somewhat agree with Noessel: it may well come down to the difficulty in finding blue in nature. Or finding it in technology, considering the history of blue pigments that we just went over.

And not just pigments. There is another realm in which blue has proven incredibly difficult to produce: light. In fact we found the solution so recently that it is why, I speculate, the future is still strongly associated with blue.

The story of how we produce light is a fun one, spanning all of our technological history and involving dozens of solutions, from prehistoric oil lamps to candles to coal gas to cold-cathode tubes. But most of those solutions have produced light somewhere between white and the reddish yellow of flames or black-body radiation. If you wanted blue light, you could make a bulb out of blue glass (with cobalt!) and put an incandescent filament in it. This worked okay, but blue light bulbs did tend to be less satisfying than the other colors, or at least that’s what I remember from Christmas lights when I was a kid.7

There were other strategies for blue lights: construct a tube like the familiar red-glowing neon ones, and put mercury vapor in it. Low-brightness phosphors for RGB screens. Greenish-blue vacuum fluorescent displays. So, blue light was not an unsolved problem. But it wasn’t as conclusively solved as light in the other spectral colors.

In the 1960s, light-emitting diodes started becoming practical. LEDs are the most efficient way of creating light by far, but the properties of the materials they are made of — semiconductors that emit light when traversed with an electrical current — make it much easier to generate radiation in the less energetic part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Thus the first practical LED emitted infrared light, by Texas Instruments in 1962. Later that same year, the first visible-light LED was made at General Electric, in red. Displays made of red LEDs soon became widespread in electronic devices (replacing Nixie tubes, also reddish) after some further advances by Hewlett-Packard circa 1968.

Humanity then gradually conquered the rest of the visible light spectrum, with orange, yellow, and green LEDs being developed in the 1970s. But blue remained elusive. A practical, bright blue LED would not be made, despite much research being poured into it by electronics companies around the world, until a breakthrough by Shuji Nakamura in Japan in 1993.

This completed the color spectrum and enabled us to create white LEDs, which are now quickly replacing nearly every lighting technology since they cost so little and are so customizable. We can say we have essentially “solved” lighting. Blue LEDs also enabled the first blue lasers in the mid-1990s.

This is a very recent development! For a very long time, blue would have been the color that only “future tech” could create. Then, for a brief period, it would have been the color of cutting-edge tech. Now, 30 years later, the tech exists and is widespread, but we still have the memory of that time. And furthermore no other color can take its place as the inaccessible one; we’ve conquered the entire spectrum.8

Does the futuristic quality of blue really come from LEDs? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure there’s a direct causal link.

But given the full history of blue pigments, I wouldn’t be surprised to find some truth in this speculative scenario: that there were just enough innovations in blue, a steady trickle of serendipitous discoveries and long-term research efforts to produce better versions of it, to keep it in the mind of humans as the color of the artificial and the cutting-edge. If you wore indigo-dyed clothes in ancient India, you were one step more removed from nature than the person who wore plain cotton. If you used blue pottery in Egypt or Iraq or China, you were clearly cooler than the people who used plain terracotta. If you hired an engineer or architect at the peak of the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th century, they’d be way more efficient at their job if they duplicated their drawings with Prussian blue instead of copying them by hand. And today, if you want to make your city a herald of the high-tech future, you decorate everything with programmable blue LEDs. No other color would do.

This post was written as part of the Roots of Progress Institute’s Blog-Building Intensive, and I thank the fellows who provided feedback: Allison Lehman, Kelly Vedi.

I have a friend and colleague who said that of all the books, the only one that his parents told him not to read was the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.

Nobody ever told me anything like that, because as far as I know, nobody outside (or with a strong connection to) the United States has ever heard of Ayn Rand. But spend enough time with Americans online, and sooner or later you will hear of her and her work, sometimes positively, more often not. She was unabashedly pro-capitalism, pro-economic liberalism, anti-redistribution, pro-”rational egoism.” Most people who have read Ayn Rand read her previous and most successful novel, The Fountainhead, when they were 15, found it amazing and convincing, and then matured and grew out of it. As a result, there is only a small nucleus of true Ayn Rand fans out there. But it is an active one, and many people — especially in this intellectual subculture we call Silicon Valley — have been influenced by her and her philosophy, Objectivism.

Atlas Shrugged is her magnum opus. It was published in 1957 with 1,168 pages in the first edition. I am generally hard to sell to when it comes to reading long books, and Atlas Shrugged seemed dense and ideological, so probably something I would never read. I’d be content with letting it sit in my cultural background, at most an indirect influence, like the Bible, the Critique of Pure Reason, and most of Shakespeare. And then I received a gift card for a second-hand bookstore, and I didn’t know what to use it for, and I found a copy of Atlas Shrugged for $6.90. I decided to give it a try.

It took me several months to go through it. It’s dense, and weird, and at some point there’s a 50-page monologue that by itself stole a month of my reading time. Atlas Shrugged is a flawed book in many ways. One of its flaws is in fact almost fatal to the entire project (I’ll come back to this). But also, what a book! It’s a totally one-of-a-kind literary experience. It’s epic. It’s grandiose. It’s depressing. It’s cartoonish and unrealistic and at the same time so incredibly real. I can’t say I’d recommend it to most people, and I certainly can’t say I’m fully on board with Objectivism, but for a certain kind of person, yeah, it’s definitely a must-read.

I would be insulting Ayn Rand’s memory if I offered this blog post for free. So in keeping with the theme of the book, most of this article (which also happens to contain mild spoilers) is for paid subscribers only.

Nobody ever told me to either read or not read Atlas Shrugged, and when I saw it mentioned it was only in meta discussion about its impact or philosophy or whatever. So I somehow managed to have no clue of what Atlas Shrugged was actually about before I started reading it.

It turns out that it is, primarily, about trains.

Read more

The historical tech tree I announced a few months ago got a pretty good reception! The announcement tweet went viral, the Asterisk article was apparently relatively liked on Hacker News (I don’t dare take a look, I can’t stand the pedantry), and the tree was shared on a big Spanish tech blog, a big German tech blog, and Erik Hoel’s substack. It currently shows up in ninth place when I search for “tech tree” on Google, ChatGPT agrees that “if you're looking for the best online historical technology tree, the most comprehensive and visually compelling option right now is the Historical Tech Tree by Étienne Fortier‑Dubois,” and my analytics tell me that more than 50,000 people have visited the website. This is way more than I expected!

Visit the tech tree

Since the launch, I have kept working on the tree, but at a slower pace than before. I added many new techs (most recently: techs related to whaling) and some display options. The next big feature I’ll try to add is zoom.

But more importantly, I’ve been thinking about the future of the project. What can I do to make the tech tree more than a curiosity in a corner of the web?

One answer is community-building. To this end, I created a Discord server which you can join now! This is big, because I had to get over my Discord aversion to create this! But so far not much has happened on the server and I don’t really know how to make a Discord server fun, so I’m kind of counting on tech tree fans to go there and make it lively. So please don’t hesitate to comment in it.

Another answer is allowing others to build on it. To this effect, I have open sourced the code publicly on GitHub under an MIT license. It is therefore possible to contribute to the tech tree app by submitting e.g. bugfixes, or use it as a base to spin up your own timeline with connections project. Just be sure to credit the original!1

I’ll also most likely be writing about the history of technology a great deal. I’m part of the 2025 Blog-Building Intensive Fellowship of the Roots of Progress Institute, which is super exciting and starts today, and while I don’t quite know yet what I’ll focus on in the essays I’ll write as part of the program, the tech tree will almost certainly feature in it. So, stay tuned (and sign up to this Substack if you haven’t already!).

This post is also an opportunity to credit other tech macrohistory projects that I’ve come across in my research, other than the Civilization game tech trees. Here are five of the most interesting ones.

1. James Burke’s Connections and K-Web (1970s-today)

Search anywhere about tech trees and, sooner or later, somebody will mention James Burke’s TV show Connections. There is also a book (which I have read most of) and… a web app! It’s called the Knowledge Web, and is available at k-web.org.

… Or should be, anyway. I spent at least an hour on that website fruitlessly trying to find a link to said app, and concluded that it never saw the light of day (or public release, anyway). I even wrote that in my Asterisk article. Later, someone suggested that I reach out to the Facebook fan page for the Knowledge Web, and that worked! The app, I was told, is available at https://bra.in/8qadMm. It looks like this:

• What’s cool about it: As the name Connections implies, James Burke really focuses on the connections, unlike most representations of tech history, which just put things on dates without linking them together. The storytelling is good; I didn’t know about it, but apparently in Britain Connections is a classic.

• What’s lacking: It’s really hard to watch a TV show from the 1970s, even if it’s on YouTube! Fortunately the book makes it easier, although it focuses a bit too much on European history, which means that sometimes there are interesting connections that I can’t use because there’s an earlier invention in China or something. Some parts of the book are also outdated; for example, one of the coolest chapters is about the connection between the invention of the stirrup and European feudalism, but this is now known as the Great Stirrup Controversy. As for the app, it is very incomplete, difficult to use, not that great looking, and as we saw, borderline impossible to find.

2. Rohit Krishnan’s “Innovation” (2023)

Not long after I first started compiling my list of inventions in 2023, Substack mutual Rohit Krishnan, who writes the excellent Strange Loop Cannon, wrote a blog post called “Innovation”. It’s based on a spreadsheet compiled by Rohit, “DNA of innovation,” with 1,678 technological or scientific developments and some data (fields, years) that allowed him to create nice charts to analyze tech history.

• What’s cool about it: Really interesting analysis, and the spreadsheet is a good source of data for my own project!

• What’s lacking: I don’t fully understand the way Rohit represented lineages. Also, if you want to quantitatively analyze the history of technology, you had better be certain that your data collection was at least somewhat systematic. I’m not sure I trust the list enough to uncritically accept the charts. As Rohit writes, figuring out the level of precision for entries is “more art than science,” and it’s unclear what sources he used and whether they’re a representative sample of all technological history.2 Such limitations are why I have so far refrained from doing quantitative analysis on the tech tree myself.3

3. Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires (2023)

2023 was apparently a big year in tech macrohistory, since it is also when the absolutely mind-boggling Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 project was released. It’s a very wide visualization of inventions from 1500 to 2025, beautifully organized by theme, with the goal of “exploring how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound.”

It has been shown several times as a large physical exhibit (“The minimum size of the work is 24 meters in length, and 3 meters in height”), and is currently on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale, where it won an award. Impressive stuff. When I first learned about this I almost gave up on my tech tree.

• What’s cool about it: Beautiful, artistic, probably makes for a really striking exhibit at the Venice Biennale.

• What’s lacking: Some kind of optimistic message? I don’t like how both the color pattern and the accompanying text are so dark. As if the only thing all that technology over 525 years bought us is more surveillance. Sure, there are harmful patterns and sinister uses of technology, but I become annoyed when people focus solely on that at the exclusion of viewing technology as solutions to problems. Also, Calculating Empires turns out to be difficult to navigate. The connections between the techs aren’t explicit, so you just wander around without really getting anywhere other than to a general vibe of “technology is bad.” Which is why I didn’t give up on my own project after all.

4. Our World in Data’s “Technology over the long run” (2023)

This is somehow also 2023, the year where tech macrohistory started being a thing apparently. It’s just a timeline and a brief accompanying article, but it takes the passage of time seriously enough to be worth looking at:

• What’s cool about it: A good visualization of the fullness of time and how things have accelerated

• What’s lacking: More data than just a few key inventions.

5. TomiTapio’s Timeline of Mankind (ongoing)

Finnish Twitter user @Tomi_Tapio has been compiling this list since 2021. It’s a massive spreadsheet with currently (as of downloading it from the pinned tweet) comprises 42,276 rows. For context, my tech tree has 1,940 inventions right now. The Timeline of Mankind contains much more than just inventions, but you can filter the list to get only those.

• What’s cool about it: It’s just so much work, wow. TomiTapio told me that he puts in at least 1.5 hours on it per day. He wishes other people would help.

• What’s lacking: It’s difficult to read or learn clear things from it! I think someone should help vibe code some visualization tools for it!

There are of course other projects of the sort4 — but these are the ones that stood out to me the most. Also, what’s up with the fact that all of them are super recent? Did nobody other than James Burke ever bother to make tech history visualizations before the 2020s? Maybe I need to put this entire genre of thing in the tech tree as a recent technological development. I wonder what the precursors would be.

INTRODUCTION

Blue raspberry is a common artificial flavoring, typically paired with brilliant blue FCF coloring (a.k.a. FD&C Blue No. 1). There is no such thing as a blue raspberry in nature, at least nothing resembling brilliant blue FCF, which has led to speculation about what blue raspberry flavor is supposed to be or where it comes from.

There is minimal academic literature on blue raspberry flavor. As far as I can tell using both Elicit and Google Scholar, the only scholarly article offering a treatment of the topic is Charles Spence’s “What's the Story With Blue Steak? On the Unexpected Popularity of Blue Foods” (2021), which has a short section about blue raspberry. The section mostly relies on a popular web article from 2016 by Michael Y. Park on Bon Appétit, “What Even Is Blue Raspberry Anyway?” In fact, it seems that virtually all discussion of blue raspberry in popular articles as well as Wikipedia ultimately traces back to Park 2016.

And unfortunately, neither Park 2016 nor the handful of other sources really gives great intel on what flavor blue raspberry is supposed to be. We do have information on when and by whom it was invented — it dates from the 1950s and became popular after 1970. But the why and what remain elusive:

• The earliest mention of blue raspberry is as a cotton candy flavor by the company Gold Medal, in 1958. “Unfortunately,” Park writes, “Gold Medal's spokeswoman Heather Gims says there's no one still at the family-run company who can remember anything about how Gold Medal got into the blue raspberry business.”

• The flavor was further popularized around 1971 by The ICEE Company for frozen slushie drinks. The other flagship color of ICEE was cherry, so apparently they wanted a distinct color for their raspberry product, and one that would match the ICEE logo. Besides, FD&C Blue No. 1 had conveniently just become approved by the FDA.

• Around the same time (1970), Otter Pops introduced freeze pops in various flavors, including blue raspberry. “Unfortunately,” Park writes, Laura Trevino (marketing director at Jel Sert, which owns Otter Pops) “didn't manage to track down any company records explaining the Otter Pops bosses' decision making.”

So we have a tiny bit of info on ICEE’s rationale, and basically none about Gold Medal or Otter Pops because everyone forgot about it. We are left to speculate. Wherefore blue raspberry? Several hypotheses coexist:

• Red raspberry: Blue raspberry may be regular raspberry flavor, except colored blue rather than red due to either (or a combination of):

  • Reducing competition with other “red” flavors (cherry, strawberry, cranberry, cinnamon, etc.)

  • The banning of amaranth red coloring, FD&C Red No. 2, a dark red color that had been used for raspberry products. The FDA banned it in 1976 due to growing health concerns, so later than the appearance of blue raspberry, but that may have contributed to spreading the blue version. Amaranth red is still used outside the US, however.

  • Trying to match the red-and-blue logo of ICEE

  • Wanting to use the newly approved brilliant blue FCF color, and raspberry was as good a choice as any

• Random other fruit: Blue raspberry, possibly like red raspberry artificial flavor, may be derived not from natural raspberries, but from a combination of chemicals from other fruit. Park writes that “according to Jerry Bowman, executive director of the Flavor & Extract Manufacturers Association of the United States, the flavor profile of raspberry was actually developed using ‘mostly esters of the banana, cherry, and pineapple variety.’”

• Rubus leucodermis: Blue raspberry may have been inspired by a real species of raspberry that isn’t the common cultivated one (Rubus idaeus). Instead it was inspired by the taste of Rubus leucodermis,1 also known as the whitebark raspberry, blackcap raspberry, or (wait for it) blue raspberry. Note that this fruit isn’t the same as blackberries, and is much rarer! Some sources mentioning this possible inspiration:

  • An old web page from the North Dakota State University states that blue raspberry flavor “mimics the flavor of blackcap raspberry Rubus leucodermis, a wild berry most of us have never seen or eaten.”

  • This 2022 article by Lauren Rothman says that: “The tangy flavor of whitebark raspberries may have inspired the blue raspberry flavor, at least in part. These purple types taste more like blackberries than red raspberries, though, and if you've ever had a blue raspberry ICEE, you know that you get a jolt of sweetness when you take a sip, unlike the more sour whitebark fruits. So, while the purple berries may have sparked the imagination of the inventors of blue raspberry, each brand now has its own version of the artificial flavor”.

• Not R. leucodermis: Blue raspberry may not have been inspired by R. leucodermis, because that makes no sense:

  • It doesn’t seem to be commercially cultivated

  • The color isn’t closely related to brilliant blue FCF

  • It’s from the West Coast, but Gold Medal is from Cincinnati. (ICEE was originally founded in Los Angeles, so maybe there’s a connection.)

• R. occidentalis: Blue raspberry may have been inspired by another, closely related species to R. leucodermis, R. occidentalis or the black raspberry. Despite its Latin name, it grows in eastern North America, where it is also commercially produced at a small scale.

  • Okay I didn’t actually see any serious articles claiming this, but there is this Reddit thread,2 and also my own experience eating them.

• Other Rubus sp.: Or, blue raspberry could have been inspired by other Rubus species, like R. niveus or R. coreanus, although this seems unlikely if they’re not from North America.

Which one(s) of these is (are) correct? Without information from the archives of the companies that came up with blue raspberry, it seems like the only path forward is a taste test. So get ready for some Science!

METHODS

Last year in July I bought some black raspberries (presumably R. occidentalis, based on appearance, location, and the fact that I don’t think other types of black raspberries are cultivated commercially) from the Jean-Talon Market in Montreal. I thought they tasted somewhat like blue raspberry flavor, and decidedly different from red raspberries, so I thought it would be cool to perform a taste test to compare them with blue raspberry candy, and then write a post about it. So I went back to the market, where I was told that the black raspberry season was over. It apparently lasts for 3 days or something. So I put a big alert saying BLACK RASPBERRIES in my calendar for a year minus a week later, 12 July 2025. Because I was traveling to see my parents on 12 July this year, I went to the market on 11 July, just in case. Where I was promptly told that the season was already over!!! I guess raspberry season was early this year. Luckily, for some reason they still had two boxes hidden behind the counter, and they agreed to sell me one for $5.

I also bought some locally grown red raspberries for comparison purposes, and then I went to a candy store and asked the clerk to show me everything that was labeled as “blue raspberry.” She said that “anything that is blue is blue raspberry” (and then showed me a random example that turned out to be blueberry). For rigor, I decided that I’d only buy candy that was explicitly labeled as “framboise bleue.” I got these four kinds:

I then traveled to my parents’ home and recruited a representative sample of tasters from the people in the area (myself, my mom, my dad, my brother, my sister-in-law, and my 5-year-old and almost-4-year-old nephews). I cut small pieces of each candy and arranged them like this, the idea being that everyone would try a raspberry, then the candy, then have the raspberry again, and do this for each combination or red/black raspberry and candy type.

I asked everyone to give a 1 to 5 rating in taste similarity for each combination, and give their intuitive impressions on whether black raspberry could be causally related to blue raspberry flavor.

RESULTS

Concerns were raised over the reliability of the two youngest tasters, so I unfortunately had to throw out their ratings, leaving a sample of n=4.

The results are shown in this figure, where circles are the individual ratings (with some jitter to view them better, but they’re all integers) and squares are averages (not necessarily integers):

Some things to note:

• The “spiral” and “mini” candy types were deemed much more similar to black raspberries than red raspberries.

• The “pie” type wasn’t much similar to either real fruit (honestly it just tasted like sugar and was kind of gross).

• The Airheads candy was somewhat similar to both.

• Overall, across candy types, the candy was more similar to black raspberries than red, but probably not enough to be a meaningful difference (to say nothing of statistically significant lol).

DISCUSSION

My hypothesis was that the taste of black raspberries would more similar to the candy than the taste of red raspberries was, supporting the idea that the original makers of blue raspberry flavor got inspiration either from R. occidentalis or (presumably similar-tasting) R. leucodermis.

The results don’t really support this. There may be an association, but it’s a weak one, whereas I was hoping for something obvious. When I had black raspberries in isolation, it was easy for me to think that this was totally the same as blue raspberry flavor. But none of the other tasters was particularly convinced. I asked them if they thought, in light of the test, whether it was plausible that black raspberries inspired blue raspberry; the three of them said no, not really. (I didn’t ask my nephews.)

This silly study comes with a number of limitations, including that I was one of the testers and was trying to get a positive results (so maybe my ratings should be downgraded by 1 point!), it wasn’t a blind test, and we had low sample size. It could also have been useful to have more candy, or more non-candy blue raspberry foods (slushies, sports drinks, etc.). Black raspberries from different sources would have been good too; it was pointed out to me that the blackberries had a pretty weak taste, and maybe there are better varieties or specific harvests out there. (On the way to my parents’, I stopped by a farm that I knew had them, in order to get a second source. Sadly, I got there 20 minutes after they had closed for the day.)

But I’m not super interested in trying to p-hack my way into finding an association. It seems likely that the null hypothesis is true, and blue raspberry flavor doesn’t come at all from R. occidentalis (and probably not from R. leucodermis or other species, though I don’t know if they taste similar to R. occidentalis). It’s still pretty weird how neither the taste nor the color of blue raspberry have anything to do with raspberries. I guess we can only hope that someone miraculously finds archived documents at Gold Medal or the other companies so that we can finally shed light on this most pressing issue.

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u/Syntaximus in the Reddit thread claims that “You can also turn them slightly blue by adding a base like baking soda” to neutralize the acidic reddish juice. I tried this. It sort of works. Compare, in the picture below, the two whole raspberries and their fresh juice to the left, with the pile of raspberry purée mixed with baking soda and the smattering of dark blue juice at the top:

I let the plate sit in the warm July weather for a couple of hours and eventually it turned some weird shade of yellowish-bluish gray.

At long last, I have created the tech tree from my classic posts “In Defense of Tech Trees” and “What Counts as a Technology?”.

I call it the Historical Tech Tree. It’s a timeline to visualize the full history of all major technologies (or 1,780 of them, at least), from 3.3 million years ago to today. More importantly, it also contains more than 2,000 connections between them: prerequisites, improvements, inspirations: anything that allows you to understand how one thing led to another.

To mark this momentous occasion, here’s a fancy Substack button:

VISIT THE HISTORICAL TECH TREE

The Historical Tech Tree is by no means complete, but I’ve been working on it long enough that whatever comes next should be built in public. Starting now, I will also be accepting suggestions for missing technologies, additional connections, and other fix requests.

Here’s a small part of the tree, centered on the year 1857 and the Geissler tube:

I have an article about it coming out soon at the wonderful Asterisk Magazine, and you should all read it when it’s published (should be any week now!), or even earlier by grabbing a paper copy of the magazine. It contains a bunch of cool technological anecdotes and some thoughts on why and how I built the tree. The tree’s About page also has some discussion of the assumptions embedded in the project, such as the definition of technology I use and my approach to discretization and dating.1

In the rest of this article, I want to pull on two threads I haven’t had an occasion to write about in depth yet. The first is about vibe coding. The second is about historical complexity.

1. Vibe coding truly is the future

If the historical tech tree itself was a node in the historical tech tree, it would have large language models as one of its prerequisites.

I started compiling a list of inventions, with the purpose of building a tech tree in mind, more than 1.5 years ago. At the time, I didn’t know how I’d display the data, but I decided that it was a problem for later. I have a background in computer programming, so I figured I could eventually come up with a solution, either from some existing graphing software or something custom, but I didn’t really know what I’d do, and frankly the thought of putting a lot of work into that bored me (compared to the exciting task of compiling a list of all historical inventions). I’d never programmed a web app, and I lacked the activation energy to learn.

Then, one day in November 2024, I thought of describing my idea to the LLM Claude and asking how to code it. It worked way better than I expected. Within minutes, I had a basic web app that could import my data from a database and put it in an interactive flow chart.

Between November and today’s date of May 26, 2025, a lot of work had to be done. At first I would just ask Claude to do things and then copy-paste the results (and curse against its tendency to write a lot of “existing code here …” to make sure that I couldn’t simply copy-paste everything). Then I moved to Cursor — the fastest company to ever reach $100 million of annual revenue, by embedding AI into a code editor — where I proceeded to spend countless hours fighting with it to make the timeline scroll correctly or stop making my app so slow by loading all the content at once.

The app was “almost done” around February, but between “almost done” and “done” there lies a gulf. As they say, expect to spend 20% of your efforts on 80% of the result, and then 80% on the remaining 20%.

To be clear, human intelligence and software development skills were necessary at all points in the process. Vibe coding is still work, and it comes with drawbacks, such not understanding anything about your own code and introducing problems you never even knew were a thing. But this project truly made it click for me. AI has become a truly powerful enabler, and made me way more excited to work on software side projects from now on.

2. Tech is complicated, history is big — but we can do something about it!

The way I’ve been compiling the list of technologies is 100% manual. The reason for this is: what would have been the point of automating it? The fun part is learning about everything, from Acheulean stone tools to crystal oscillators, from logarithms to xerography, from simple gears to extreme ultraviolet lithography.

And the main thing I learned is that I knew nothing.

Here’s a self-evident statement: technology is very complicated. There’s a lot of it. Much of it requires both advanced scientific education and significant effort to grasp. The result is that most people, even most people who work in science and tech, understand at most tiny subsets of it. I have a reasonable handle on AI systems, thanks to my job. But there was never a reason for me to learn about different types of steel, or semiconductors, or knitting machines. Thus, most of the world around me felt somewhat magical, incomprehensible. I was okay with it, I trust that there are experts somewhere out there who care about making everything work. But it did mean I had a woefully incomplete model of the world.

And here’s a second self-evident statement: history is very big. There is even more history than there is technology. I once wrote an essay called The Four Shapes of History, in which I examined different ways we use to simplify the data in order to give us a chance of understanding it at all. Most ways to engage with history is to zoom into a tiny part of it, like “the life of Christopher Columbus,” or perhaps a slice across time or space, like “the history of European explorations” or “the state of the world in 1492.” Attempts at representing all of it in a single pass — what I have called 2D history — are very difficult and very rare, and they’re often too zoomed out to tell us much beyond “the Roman Empire was big at some point.”

I suspect that the complexity of both these things is at the root of many ills.

Because history is too big, many of us lack the proper historical knowledge to make sense of the world. Just the other day I saw someone on Twitter being skeptical that child mortality was as high as 40-50% in the 1800s; they just have no idea what the past was like. Such a person can’t understand how miraculous modern medicine is until they understand basic historical facts. When you pay attention, you realize that this sort of error is everywhere.

And because technology is too complicated, many of us cease to view it as what it is: a relentless quest to solve our problems using our ingenuity. Instead many of us start thinking that tech is a collection of magical miracles that we don’t and will never understand. And so we turn against progress; we stop believing that we can use our brains to solve our problems, even though history proves that we did just that thousands of times.

Fortunately, simply combining technology and history together seems to function as a partial antidote.

The reason I built the historical tech tree is — well, the true reason is that I’m a nerd who likes compiling lists of things. But the grander reason is that I hope it can make a dent in the complexity of the world. I think I managed to do that, at least for myself. By studying its history, I now understand just how random and serendipitous technology is, and how inventions can languish in obscurity for decades before becoming commercially successful, and how so much of it is just combining two unrelated things together. By studying the origins of each technological object around me, I now understand how history moves, and how much that depends on the actions of so many people trying to push it forward.

At least, I understand these things a little better than I used to. My model of the world is a little bit less incomplete.

Here’s the button again. I hope you’ll have as much fun exploring the 2D history of technology than I had mapping it out.

VISIT THE HISTORICAL TECH TREE

One last note: the tech tree costs me a little bit of money, not a lot, due to a couple of software subscriptions. If you like it, consider getting a paid subscription to this Substack as a way of supporting the project. And you’ll get all my essays as a bonus!

Previously: Atlas of Links #1

A. Pineapples

I. Last month I published (and crossposted here) an article on the history of pineapples at the always excellent magazine Works in Progress! Really fun to dive deeply into such a nice topic, and learn all sorts of random facts about the fruit that used to be the supreme luxury item.

The piece itself contains lots of links to cool parts of the internet, but here are some related links that didn’t make it into it, especially around foods as status symbols (in the spirit of the Pinkglow and even more absurd Rubyglow pineapples):

II. The market for high-end luxury fruit is still alive and well in Japan, where you can get extremely premium strawberries or super pricey Ruby Roman grapes (in addition to the usual suspects like square watermelons)

III. Celery, my least favorite vegetable, used to be a luxury food in the late 19th century and early 20th.

IV. Citrus fruit, like lemons, were a status symbol in Ancient Rome, sparking a long tradition that goes all the way to children receiving oranges as a Christmas present in the 20th century. Meanwhile I, a spoiled first world kid, don’t even like oranges. Nor do I actually like pineapples that much, for that matter.

V. One of the original inspirations to look into the history of pineapples was this article, especially this quote by Dr Lauren O’Hagan: “At this time, working-class people eating pineapples even became used in satirical prints as a visual metaphor for the problem of progress.” I was intrigued by those visual metaphors for the problem of progress, but unfortunately didn’t find them, even after contacting Dr O’Hagan. The closest I found was this cartoon from 1873, which made its way into my article:

If you find any other images that satirize the “problem of progress” during the Victorian era, I’m interested!

B. CITY STATE

VI. You may have noticed another crosspost — Multi-country civilizations are good, actually — originally published at The Elysian, Elle Griffin’s excellent Substack. She and six other writers, including yours truly, have been exploring ideas around cities and self-governance.

VII. The intro post for the series, including links to every essay in it, is here. It’s going to be available in print form too! I particularly liked Elle’s essay on creating new US states.

VIII. This is not a link but stay tuned for another collaboration with The Elysian soon! I have too many external writing commitments these days 😄

C. Deutsch and Popper

IX. Last year I got somewhat deeply into critical rationalism, the philosophy of David Deutsch and Karl Popper. I read most of Popper’s Objective Knowledge, then wrote this post about how his epistemology relates to evolutionary thought. This is an interesting comment someone wrote in response, arguing that Popper never really understood evolution that well, because it was still in the process of being understood (genes were discovered only in the 1950s):

X. Relatedly, this essay by Kasra has lived in my head since I read it in December. Like Kasra, I’ve felt a bit of unease at critical rationalism, and he managed to put into words a big part of the reason why. It’s subtle, and I have a hard time articulating it myself, but this philosophy seems much less promising to me than when I first read Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, and I find myself annoyed at most versions of it that I encounter. There’s some truth in the idea that knowledge is created through conjecture and criticism, of course, and reading Deutsch and Popper was worthwhile; but I am glad I avoided the trap of making it a core part of my identity or philosophy. (Apologies in advance to a thoughtful friend who’s not going to be happy about this development in my epistemology!)

D. Ornateness

XI. Simon Sarris:

I’m not sure that most websites should look like this, but certainly more would be good. There is so much less visual diversity of websites than you’d expect, considering that there aren’t really any strong constraints on what websites look like. When I redesign my personal website I’m going to take inspiration from this.

Some examples from down the thread that I liked:

XII. Rainmaker

XIII. Social Impact Capital

XIV. Nockchain

XV. A couple months ago, Works in Progress was looking for a designer to develop an aesthetic in this vein. I’m not sure if they found one, but it looks like it’s been difficult: very few people have answered the call, at least in the thread. It seems super tricky to actually hire anyone to make something in a highly ornate style. Artists like this exist, but I’m a bit puzzled that there aren’t more — there’s value for an artist to run counter to the prevailing trends. Maybe not enough value, compared to riding the trend itself?

E. The brutalist lab aesthetic

XVI. Speaking of which, I’ve been compiling examples of a growing aesthetic trend I call — for lack of a better word, and with help from Claude — the brutalist lab style. Works in Progress’s current aesthetic is perhaps the prototypical example:

The brutalist lab aesthetic likes the clean presentation of information; more delineation of rectangular sections than strictly necessary; black or blue elements over a pale beige or gray background; a mix of typographies, with a particular affinity for monospace fonts and bold capital letters; and anything that is reminiscent of early to mid 20th century technical documents.

I’m using (my interpretation of) this aesthetic for one of my own projects, so I’ve been collecting examples. Here are a few non-internet ones:

XVII. Exa, which I won’t link to because it’s a competitor to my employer, tastefully uses a muted version of it, combined with equally subtle classical style:

XVIII. Sacred computer, a web component you can use for similar aesthetics — great name too:

XIX. Recently, the Plasticlist database of products and their plastic content is a masterclass in the genre, with a tinge of a vintage computer aesthetic:

XX. And of course the field of progress studies is drawing inspiration from it, as it should, with the Centre for British Progress being a very recent example:

Please let me know if you find anything that matches this aesthetic — or if you have a better name for it!

F. Misc

XXI. Seen in La Presse (a Quebec newspaper), which published it to link to Elon Musk, whose grandfather was part of it: in the first half of the 20th century, there was apparently a pretty influential “Technocracy movement” advocating for control of society by engineers, and the merging of all of North America (and some of South America) into a single country called the Technate of America.

They had all sorts of publications and their own gray-and-red visual identity, with a ying-yang-like logo:

The movement was declared illegal for a few years in Canada during the 1940s, and declined after this (and Elon’s grandfather, giving up on his life in Saskatchewan, moved to South Africa in 1950), but it apparently still exists in some weakened form.

XXII. There’s still a month to write your review for the Everything-Except-Book review contest on Astral Codex Ten! I’m curious what will turn up, but I find it really hard to get myself motivated to submit something with such open-ended constraints.

XXIII. For whatever reason, whenever I read Eli Dourado’s posts on a possible renaissance of the airship industry, I get a big urge to give up on everything and devote the rest of my life to make it happen.

XXIV. In Taoism, “wu wei” is a complicated concept that I don’t pretend to understand but can be translated approximately to “non-action”. At least that’s the case in English; in French, it has been translated by 18th-century economist François Quesnay as laissez faire (“let do”), which has then been loaned into English to designate economic policies of non-interventionism. The connection from Chinese philosophy to modern liberal thought is pretty cool. Seen here, with a more credible source here.

Forget the sparkles; the trendy metaphor in the AI world lately is the deep.

For too long, automated research tools have only be able to scratch the surface of the vast ocean of knowledge. If you wanted to dive, to delve into the hidden depths where the true secrets lurk, you needed human researchers, librarians, intrepid explorers of the web. No longer! The big AI labs, as well as many of the smaller companies that specialize in wrapping the work of the big AI labs into a nice UI, have now released Deep Everything. Deep Search, Deep Research, Deep Review, Deep Seek. No matter what you’re looking for, we can only assume that AI would already have given it to you if it weren’t deep. So, strap in, we’re going to use the latest tech to traverse the epipelagic and mesopelagic zones, and hang out with the giant squids and the bioluminescent hatchetfish in the bathypelagic and abyssopelagic. When we swim back up we will, hopefully, surface some profound insight that has never before seen the light of day.

Now, it would be natural to think that this metaphor has something to do with the previous generation of “deep” AI companies and tools. Nothing could be further from the truth. DeepMind, DeepL, DeepFace, DeepSpeech: none of these do deep research; all of then are but a play on deep learning. Here is a phrase that carries much more gravitas than it deserves. For machine learning is deemed deep simply when it uses a deep neural network, and a neural network is deep merely when it contains two or more hidden layers in the middle. A neural network is just a mathematical object that feeds on some input and then spits out some output. The shallow ones content themselves with just one layer of computation in between input and output. The deep networks, instead, have layers of computation that pass off results to others layers of computation. If this sounds boring, or prosaic, that’s because it is. “Deep learning” has revolutionized AI, and inspired all these companies, which is awesome and all, but deep down (pun more or less intended) it’s really just a way to say that there’s more math in the thing than in the earlier things.

Among the latest crop of AI products, the depth refers to something else entirely. ChatGPT and its rebel cousins are made of deep learning, but until recently they didn’t call themselves deep. That would have been cliché. Tired. Instead, they presented themselves as cheerful chatbots, ready to obey your merest wish and delight you with magic. I mentioned the sparkles already. For a time, AI, everywhere, was marketed as generic, almost meaningless, but clearly whimsical ✨ twinkles ✨. It didn’t matter what it did: create a slop image for your blog? pretend it’s your therapist? try really hard to not give you a method to make bombs and send them to your local politician? What mattered is that they could do it, instantly, at almost no cost. Magic, on tap.

But then the users started asking more difficult questions. Factual questions. Questions that could be true or false. The happy magical fairies in the machines had to be very careful here: it would be unseemly to give wrong answers. Fortunately, there was a solution: search the web! All the answers to any question are in there somewhere, on Wikipedia, on some blogs written by weirdoes, on Stack Overflow, on some Reddit thread or other from 2018. This worked, sometimes. But the users, already jaded by all this magic, demanded higher epistemic standards than misinterpreted Reddit threads about eating rocks. They wanted the very best information, not whatever the first Google hit was. The sparkly magical chatbot, to be maximally helpful, would have to look around the web for a while. It would have to try to find trustworthy sources — academic papers, for instance. It would have make a research plan, collect different perspectives, and synthesize everything it found adroitly. It would have to think.

I’m not entirely sure who first came up the deep research metaphor, as distinct from the deep learning one. It may have been Google Gemini, who used the term a while ago, in the prehistoric era called December 2024. But as often happens, it is OpenAI that popularized it, creating a buzz at the beginning of this month with ChatGPT Deep Research. Regardless, the phrase has caused ripples throughout the pelagic zone, catching every other whale and small fish. Some have resisted the buzz, like Anthropic’s Claude. Most of the others could not. The allure of the deep was irresistible. Imagine building a submarine that can barely dive more than a few meters below the surface when you could instead build a bathyscaphe. So now the option is there, almost everywhere. You can stay at shallow depths if you want, if you don’t want to expend the costs of a more involved expedition ($200/month for ChatGPT Pro!). But when you’re ready to descend, you can.

Or can you? How deep do these things really go? Boot up ChatGPT Deep Research or any of the others, ask it a complex question, and it will spend a few minutes scouring the web for sources. How? Unclear. OpenAI helpfully informs us that Deep Research:

learned to plan and execute a multi-step trajectory to find the data it needs, backtracking and reacting to real-time information where necessary. The model is also able to browse over user uploaded files, plot and iterate on graphs using the python tool, embed both generated graphs and images from websites in its responses, and cite specific sentences or passages from its sources.

That’s great. The model can go in the water and spend some time examining the fauna and flora it finds instead of returning just the first curiosity it encounters. An improvement over previous versions, to be sure, and the evaluations it was subjected to certainly show that it can answer difficult exam questions more accurately than any other AI. But none of that says much about depth.

And in fact there isn’t really any evidence that anyone is using these tools to truly dive deep. OpenAI’s Deep Research “pretends to use high-quality sources but in practice seems to just browse the front page of Google”, says one user. “If you want to survey a lot of information at once, you want Deep Research,” says another. I feel compelled to point out that “survey a lot of information at once” sounds like the very opposite of anything deep. Breadth-first search instead of depth-first. OpenAI’s Deep Research, like Perplexity’s and Google Gemini’s and Grok’s and so on, is excellent at gathering information from everywhere on the web at record speed. At Elicit, where I work, we have just released our version of this — which by the way is the best on the market — using only academic papers and a customizable, transparent process to get the most relevant ones. But we don’t call it deep, because it isn’t.

What actually is deep research? What is the web equivalent of mounting an expedition to go observe the colossal squid in its natural environment? I can imagine many answers. Deep research means falling into a Wikipedia rabbit hole, initially wanting to look up the date of the invention of writing in Sumeria and ending up reading about the debates on creating the metric system in Revolutionary France. It means opening a dozen threads from pre-2018 Reddit, realizing that crucial comments were deleted, and messaging the other users in the discussion to see if they remember anything, and receiving no reply. It means hunting down a quote in the digitized archives of a 17th-century book in which you can’t use cmd-f because the optical character recognition algorithm doesn’t know that an ‘ſ’ is the same as an ‘s’. It means coming to the realization that the answer to your question is in a scientific paper that cannot be found on sci-hub nor on any website indexed by a search engine, and actually driving to the local university library to read it. It means downloading a huge and barely readable dataset from some NGO that takes five minutes to open in Excel. It means emailing a government employee you once met to obtain a PDF copy of some grey literature report that has never been uploaded anywhere. It means groping in the dark, getting your hopes up at the glimpse of the tiniest bioluminescent insight, and constantly hoping that you won’t be devoured by some predator hitherto unknown to mankind.

Despite our best efforts, AI cannot do this, not yet. I may be biased, but I think Elicit is well positioned to make the most headway towards the true depths in the coming year. Surely all the other companies are going to try their best, too. So perhaps AI search tools will soon be able to help us actually dive towards the true, dark depths. Until then, there’s plenty for AI to find in the shallow coral reefs and intertidal zones of the internet, and I do suggest you take advantage of it. Just don’t buy the hype: AI search is no more “deep” than it is magical. It’s useful, and that’s good enough.