Having been driven from his original blog due to a doxxing threat from a New York Times reporter, Scott Alexander has resumed his public blogging, this time on Substack:
Welcome to Astral Codex Ten! Some of you are probably veterans of my old blog, Slate Star Codex. Others may be newbies wondering what this is all about.
I’m happy to finally be able to give a clear answer: this is a blog about ṛta.
Ṛta is a Sanskrit word, so ancient that it brushes up against the origin of Indo-European languages. It’s related to English “rationality” and “arithmetic”, but also “art” and “harmony”. And “right”, both in the senses of “natural rights” and “the right answer”. And “order”. And “arete” and “aristos” and all those other Greek words about morality. And “artificial”, as in eg artificial intelligence. More speculatively “reign” and related words about rulership, and “rich” and related words about money.
(also “arthropod”, but insects creep me out so I’ll be skipping this one)
The dictionary defines ṛta as “order”, “truth”, or “rule”, but I think of it as the intersection of all these concepts, a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest. What are the laws of thought? How do they reveal themselves, at every level, from the flow of electricity through the brain to the flow of money through the global economy? How can we cleave to them more closely, for our own good and the good of generations still to come?
In practice, articles (another ṛta relative!) here tend to focus on reasoning, science, psychiatry, medicine, ethics, genetics, AI, economics and politics. The political posts sometimes stray into choppy waters, and I have immense sympathy for people who are sick of that and prefer to pass.
As with most Substack blogs, it’s a subscriber-supported effort with limited public posts available to non-paying subscribers (like me).
