2026-10-05 09:40:19
People often have a sense that all the low-hanging scientific fruit has been picked, or that all the fruit that’s left can only be picked by huge teams with lots of funding. But in fact, there are still lots of projects that are just the right scale for Indie Science.
Good ideas too — the big labs miss them because they seem low-prestige, because a null result would be embarrassing, or because they’re not a funding priority. Yet the subjects considered “prestigious” are always changing, as are funding priorities. And for the curious, null results can be perfectly interesting. (Science, after all, is all about alternative explanations.) These blind spots are an opportunity.
So there are plenty of projects for people who want to answer questions and solve problems. Here are three of them:
Creatine is a compound synthesized from three amino acids. Popular among gym bros for letting them push harder and build muscle faster, there are anecdotal reports that supplementing creatine has a grab bag of other positive effects. This is fairly plausible — creatine is used to recycle adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of your cells, so it could be involved in almost anything.
Creatine is cheap, safe, stable, and effective. Given the huge number of plausible but untested anecdotes, studies could be run on topics like 1) whether taking creatine in the evening vs. morning really disrupts sleep onset, reduces total sleep time, or worsens sleep quality, as is suggested by anecdote and rat data but so far never been confirmed in humans, 2) cognitive benefits of creatine in vegans and vegetarians, a result that is probably real but has not yet been formally confirmed, and 3) studying the 20–30% of people who are creatine non-responders, first building a predictive model to identify likely non-responders upfront, and then testing whether higher doses or different forms can convert them into responders. But the research question to start with is almost certainly female reproductive health / menstrual symptoms.
In many anecdotes and case studies, women report that taking creatine can reduce their painful menstrual symptoms (e.g. cramps, mood swings, bloating, fatigue) and give them more regular cycles (see e.g. page 6 of Issue 1 of THE LOOP). There are epidemiological associations from the NHANES dietary data that support these anecdotes. But so far, there are no studies. Many women have menstrual symptoms they would like to reduce; if creatine helps, people should hear about it.
Running some studies would be easy. It would be affordable. It would take only a few months per study, and would require relatively small sample sizes. (In general, we expect women’s health to be full of low-hanging fruit.) Also, creatine suppliers should maybe fund this because the results could open up entirely new market segments for their product. Creatine monohydrate powder is the most studied form by a large margin, the cheapest, and the most bioavailable per gram, so that’s the form to use.
You can imagine forms of this study at different scales.
Pilot study. Recruit 30-40 women with moderate-to-severe menstrual symptoms, give them all creatine, and have them track symptoms for 2-3 cycles as baseline and 2-3 cycles during supplementation. In the best case, you have results in 8 months. This is cheap and fast, but it has real limitations: there’s no control group, so you can’t rule out placebo or regression to the mean, and the results, while suggestive, wouldn’t be considered conclusive by a skeptic. This is more of a proof-of-concept that might justify future research, but it is unlikely to be compelling by itself unless the effect size is really large. Still, better than anecdote.
Full crossover RCT. Recruit 50-60 women (expecting ~35 to complete), randomly assign half to start on creatine, then swap after 2-3 cycles, with a washout period (no pun intended) in between. Each woman serves as her own control, which makes the result much cleaner and reduces the sample size required. This design would be much more compelling, and the timeline is still only 10-12 months to completion, with preliminary data available earlier.
Full study plus. Same design as above, but even stronger: a larger sample, possibly a study arm with a higher dose or different timing to answer one of those questions. You could get a little more nuanced, e.g. expand recruitment to capture more diverse symptom profiles.
If you observe the expected effects, this could become the first study of a longer research program. Once you know there are real effects, you immediately start wondering things like: What’s the optimal dose? The optimal timing? What symptoms does it help with the most? Does it help some populations more than others, etc. For example, a luteal-specific loading protocol might outperform flat daily dosing, since the luteal phase is when endogenous creatine synthesis is most disrupted by shifts in hormones. It would be a more specific finding than just “creatine helps PMS”. But nobody has tested this.
Potassium is an essential nutrient that is necessary for the normal functioning of all cells. To be healthy, a person needs a few thousand milligrams of potassium per day. So it’s quite strange that you can usually only get potassium supplements in doses of 99 mg or less, a tiny fraction of the required daily amount.
When we examined this more closely (search for “Theory Viability” on that page), we found that this limitation probably comes from a misinterpretation of a small number of studies of Hydrosaluric-K (“enteric-coated hydrochlorothiazide with potassium chloride”) from the 1960s. These specific pills may have been dangerous, but only because of their unusual coating, not because of the amount of potassium they contained. People get much more than 99 mg of potassium from their diets every day, and potassium pills containing more than 99 mg are often prescribed in clinical contexts without any concern.
This isn’t the only unusual thing about the recommended dose of potassium. For a long time, the recommended daily value for adults (technically, the “Adequate Intake”) was 4,700 mg of potassium per day. But in 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine changed the recommended / adequate intake to 2,600 mg/day for women and 3,400 mg/day for men.
They say that the change is “due, in part, to the expansion of the DRI model in which consideration of chronic disease risk reduction was separate from consideration of adequacy,” but we can’t help but wonder if they changed it because it was embarrassing that less than 5% of the population was getting the recommended amount. In every CDC NHANES dataset from 1999 to 2018, median potassium intake hovers around 2,400 mg/day, and mean intake around 2,600 mg/day. And in this report from 2004, the National Academy of Medicine found that “most American women … consume no more than half of the recommended amount of potassium, and men’s intake is only moderately higher.”
Here’s our point: there are recommended dietary allowances, adequate intake values, estimated average requirements, tolerable upper intake levels, and various limits or warnings, for all kinds of nutrients. Government agencies are happy to provide these numbers. But the history of each number is often obscure, and some of these recommendations are unjustified or entirely mistaken, based on limited data or misinterpretations of studies that by now are several decades old.
We propose a series of in-depth literature reviews, to be written in plain language and released publicly, documenting the history of each of these recommendations and offering analysis as to whether each recommendation is justified. While nutrition is complicated, the foundations can be made simple, or can at least be mapped out clearly. We can enumerate the most important pieces one by one and lay out the available information for each. We could start with an extension of the analysis for potassium RDA and tolerable upper limit, and continue from there.
There are a finite number of amino acids — only 22 α-amino acids make up all proteins, and we can compile the research on each. How much does a person need of each to have a baseline of health? How much variation is there in how much of each amino acid each person needs? How much of each is too much? Can you take 10 mg of glycine per day, or is that dangerous? If we can’t provide definitive answers to these questions, we can at least outline what is known.
There are a finite number of dietary minerals, some subset of the 118 elements. Some of these, like sodium and mercury, have known good and bad nutritional properties. Some of them (like carbon) are not considered minerals per se because they are CHON. Other minerals, like chromium, are in a gray area where it’s still not clear if they are essential micronutrients or not.
For all of these minerals, we can for starters:
Let’s take a specific case as an example: it’s recommended that people get at least 150 mcg of iodine per day. This certainly seems like it is enough to keep you from developing goiter, and that target may be the source of this specific number — we think health agencies may have chosen 150 mcg because that was the minimum needed to keep Swiss people from getting this disease.
But we wonder if the optimal level of iodine for general health (actually thriving, not just the minimum amount to keep you from getting goiter) might be much higher, and suspect the tolerable limit for iodine might be even higher still. These are questions that you might be able to answer with a detailed analysis of the literature. And if a detailed review doesn’t answer this question, then we’ll have discovered an important gap in the literature.
There are lots of stories where an American goes on vacation for a few weeks, to Europe or Asia, and loses a significant amount of weight without any special effort. Sometimes it’s not weight, it’s something else, like their acne breakouts or digestive issues suddenly disappear.
There are also some stories that are exactly the opposite: someone from Europe or Asia goes on vacation to America for a few weeks, and gains a significant amount of weight without any obvious changes to their diet or lifestyle.
These anecdotes are interesting, at times even compelling. But so far there hasn’t been any systematic study. If people really do rapidly gain and lose weight when they briefly visit other countries, or if other health issues really switch off and on, that would be good to know and easy to document. We should run some studies and find out.
We imagine two different kinds of designs: one for smaller incremental effects like weight change, and another for large binary results like digestive issues.
Incremental outcomes. The incremental effects studies can be relatively simple. One design is: Send obese people from the United States to Vietnam (or some other lean country) for a few weeks, and see if they lose weight. Or: Send lean people from Vietnam (or some other lean country) to the United States for a few weeks, and see if they gain weight.
Obesity is a good choice for these incremental methods because weight is easy to measure, and there are already plenty of anecdotes claiming that people have gained/lost weight this way. You could use this same method to study any other health issue, but there’s less initial support for the hypothesis and most other outcomes will be harder to measure.
Binary outcomes. Studies on large binary issues will demand more complex methods, but they tend to require fewer participants. A small number of people, sometimes even just a single participant, can produce compelling results.
Here’s an example. Find a small number of people with gluten, wheat, or dairy intolerance who report that their intolerance went away when they spent a few weeks in Europe. Recruit them to your study. First, confirm that they have this dietary sensitivity in the US, and find a way to measure it. Have them consume some gluten / wheat / dairy in the US so you can observe and confirm their symptoms.
Then, send these people to Europe for a few weeks, and confirm that they don’t have this same issue in Europe. If so, congratulations, you have an interesting finding.
From here the next question becomes, does this difference come from something about the food in Europe, or some other difference about the environment? Well, you can find out more.
As one possibility, have these people stay in Europe, but ship them American food, exactly what they ate at home, and have them eat the American food while staying in Europe. Does their issue return? If so, then the problem is something in the American food. If not, it suggests that the problem is something else about the American environment, something missing in Europe.
Or, have these people stay in America, but ship them European food, exactly what they ate in Europe, and have them eat the European food while staying in America. Does their issue go away? If so, then the problem is something in American food, something they don’t consume when they eat food shipped from Europe. If not, it suggests that the problem is something else about the American environment, that can’t be fixed by eating carefully imported European foods.
If you can confirm this pattern, you can go deeper. For example, imagine you have an American who thought he had a gluten problem. But when you feed him bread made from flour you ship over from Europe, he has no problem at all. Obviously it can’t be the gluten, because European flour contains gluten just like the US does.
So find out more, you can consider each ingredient and additive in American flour, but not in your European flour, and add them back in one at a time. When you add an ingredient that brings back his “gluten problem”, you’ve found the real cause. If it’s not one of the ingredients, then you test the two flours for contaminants, and you add the contaminants from the American flour to the European flour one by one, again until you discover the true problem.
2026-09-30 23:25:56
The superior japanese sunscreen that the FDA doesn’t allow for no reason (per Aaron Bergman)
explore the entire US with 1-meter 3D LiDAR data
H.G. Wells makes predictions from 1903 about the “house of the future”:
Within, plumbing, new means of lighting, new means of communication between one part of a building and another, lifts and the like have revolutionized all the conditions of convenient arrangement ; while without, a building which had formerly to be beautiful only when lit from above in sunlight and moonlight, is now in nine cases out of ten urban, and must be viewed from much nearer at hand than were the old buildings, and most often by strong artificial light from below.
You Are Now A Normal Rat – JazDog (Composer’s View)
Animated Maps — cova says, “i dug up 200 map animations dating back to 1927, free to weave into your work”
Researchers used electric stoves to treat asthma. It worked. And reporting:
Insane new research. Scientists gave asthma patients free electric stoves to replace their gas stoves, then checked to see if symptoms improved. Not only did symptoms improve, ditching gas was *better than medicine.*
A sensitive period for texting
“I have crawled through depths of hell to bring you, for the foreseeable years, one of the more important foundational pieces of UI engineering (if not in implementation then certainly at least in concept): Fast, accurate and comprehensive userland text measurement algorithm in pure TypeScript, usable for laying out entire web pages without CSS, bypassing DOM measurements and reflow”
[T]he so-called “Big Five” personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism—seem, to many smart people, to be useful and explanatory. I have never found them to be useful or explanatory. But they are psychology’s standard answer to the question of what a person is like, and since there are more psych majors than English majors, social scientists have gotten to decide how to talk about personality for the last 90 years.
Potatoes indicated for IBS??? Someone should do a study! Not us though (h/t nEquals001)
Kala Paint — “If you are looking a way out of Adobe hellscape, my friend ollylawson has been making his own painting program Kala, it’s insanely optimized, blazing fast, has most of the features you need from other big software + new and inventive stuff, no-subscriptions, it’s great.”
2026-09-25 01:32:13
When we talk about the paradigm for psychology described in The Mind in the Wheel, we often use the word cybernetic.
Cybernetics refers to the study of negative feedback loops and control systems, things that function like thermostats to keep values at certain levels or a signal on one side of some threshold — keeping your vehicles at certain speeds, your blood sugar within a certain range, and your reactor temperature below critical levels.
But this paradigm is not just cybernetic. It’s also dynamic.
Dynamics refers to the study of drives and motivations, analysis of something in terms of the internal forces that cause it to do the things it does. This term is no longer popular, but it has a long history in cognitive science. Ulric Neisser gives this definition:
Dynamic psychology, which begins with motives rather than with sensory input, is a case in point. Instead of asking how a man’s actions and experiences result from what he saw, remembered, or believed, the dynamic psychologist asks how they follow from the subject’s goals, needs, or instincts.
Calling the paradigm “cybernetic” is entirely accurate, because negative feedback and control really are core ideas that we apply to everything in the system. And it ties these ideas to previous cybernetic theories like William Powers and his Perceptual Control Theory and the OG cybernetics of Norbert Wiener.
But going around emphasizing the cybernetics without mentioning the dynamics risks putting the cart before the horse. Arguably, The Mind in the Wheel is more dynamic than cybernetic. (Or at least we should be clear on how each label applies.)
Dynamics is the perspective, which is why it’s arguably the more foundational of the two. In this paradigm, we orient with the observation that there are multiple different motivations — that being hungry is not the same as being tired — and start by trying to understand the mind in terms of motives and inner forces. In a word, the drives.
Once we accept the existence of the drives, that leads to a natural question: how do the drives work, what principles do they operate on? Cybernetics is one possible answer to that question. In our opinion, the most reasonable answer, maybe the only reasonable answer. The drives are homeostatic systems that work on negative-feedback principles from control theory. What else would they possibly be?
The problem is not seeing that they’re root and flower. If psychology is cybernetic, then it has to be dynamic. Control systems are systems of goals and motivation! And if it’s dynamic, then probably it’s cybernetic. Homeostasis just makes sense! Previous traditions have tried both cybernetics and dynamics — maybe the reason they never went anywhere is that no one tried them both at once.
Cybernetics and dynamics aren’t competitive – they’re complimentary. But dynamics is more fundamental.
Cybernetics sounds more flashy, but dynamics is more core. As a result, most of the early questions are about dynamics rather than cybernetics.
Psychology hasn’t found the drives; most schools of psychology don’t even have a list. It’s not that they think it’s boring; it’s totally outside their awareness. So zeroing in on the drives might seem a little strange.
But seeing dynamics as foundational explains why you need them first. Dynamics suggests that people have specific needs, different drives and motivations. Since people have different drives, you can make a list of what they are.
This is a serious departure from most cognitive science. Nobody acts like the drives are enumerable, like there’s a finite list of things you need. But you obviously can, there obviously are. The list of possible human motivations is either exactly one motivation, a finite number of motivations, or an infinite number. It can’t be an infinite number. No one accepts that there’s just one motivation — everyone realizes that there’s a sex drive distinct from the other things you want. So there must be a finite number of motivations, just like there’s a finite number of elements, and that means you can make a list.
Once you have even a partial list, you can ask things like: are these all the same kinds of drive? Is there just one kind of motivation? Are the sex drive and the salt drive basically identical drives that happen to point to different targets? Or are there different kinds of drives?
Do these drives split along some axis that we would find intuitive or familiar? Like, it would seem somewhat natural if all the physical drives (thirst, hunger, warmth) were one kind of drive, and all the social drives (status, belonging) were another. Or do they split in some way we find bizarre? It’s always been this way in the past: Elm trees are more closely related to strawberries and stinging nettles than they are to Maple trees. Maybe the salt drive and the sex drive are perfectly alike, while the drive to breathe is like the drive for status. We just don’t know.
(Slight digression: Why is it provocative that human psychology is dynamic? It seems more than a little taboo. Perhaps it’s that many of the drives themselves are taboo, and we don’t mean sex. Everyone admits a sex drive, it’s impossible to explain human behavior without it. It’s much more awkward to admit a status drive, or a touch drive. Perhaps it’s the fault of failed dynamic approaches like Freud’s. Perhaps it’s a squeamishness around admitting that we’re embodied. We’re not supposed to have deep, grasping desires, especially physical ones. Or maybe we’re uncomfortable with how dynamics is a mechanical rather than alchemical way of looking at human psychology. Why are people so comfortable blithely attributing their behavior to dopamine and cortisol? Who knows.)
We think that ultimately, the way to understand the drives will be cybernetic. The rules that explain the drives will be the rules of negative feedback, and the concepts will be the concepts of control systems, technical concepts of gain and error terms and set points. But those rules can’t be explored until we have the drives well in hand, so the first questions will be about drives.
So many people have tried and failed to understand the social world in behaviorist terms like reinforcement; or cognitive terms like appraisal. Look how much more fruitful it is to approach everyday questions as questions about dynamics (emphasis added):
In order to quit, one must realize that what is really being interrogated is not necessarily the thing itself (and yes this includes Phone Capitalism) but the behavior and what we get out of it. What do we want from Phone World? Is it companionship? Prestige? Reassurance seeking? Attention? Entertainment? What do we get from doomscrolling? Why even call it that? Can we not use grown-up words like self-soothing, numbing, rumination, avoidance, paranoia, insecurity, anxiety, despondency, resentment, despair, anger etc. to describe our behaviors and the feelings behind them? If we can name these things, these actions, these needs, only then can we actually take the necessary steps to put the phone down and seek either help for ourselves or satisfaction of these needs in less maladaptive ways, because that’s the thing: ultimately, phone use is not an existential battle between the human mind and nefarious powerless-making material and mechanical forces — it is a behavior.
2026-08-31 06:59:20
Shakespeare immortalized particular bear. (Reader discretion for disturbing “descriptions of horses with apes tied to their backs set upon by dogs.”)
At least some bears — perhaps the fiercest, longest-enduring ones — were given names: “George Stone,” “Ned Whiting,” and the most famous, “Sackerson.” … Sackerson actually gets his own place in Shakespeare’s plays, having been written into Merry Wives of Windsor. Slender says “I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain” (Act I Scene 1)
Where does taste come from? Why do some people love licorice while other people hate it? Why do people like what they like in general? One case study on these questions: (why do) i hate chocolate
The story of a weird spasming disorder, codified thanks to Reddit. An intrepid doctor tries an experimental procedure (involving botox!) on one patient who presented with loud gurgling noises, chest and abdominal pain/distention, excessive flatulence, and inability to belch. This cures the patient, who documents it on Reddit, and causes a flood of people with the same symptoms asking for the same procedure. This turns into a de facto clinical trial of over 50 people, and the issue (and cure) become well-documented. Inability to Belch and Associated Symptoms Due to Retrograde Cricopharyngeus Dysfunction: Diagnosis and Treatment (h/t Alex P.)
In November 2015, we encountered a desperate patient who described the severe, daily constellation of symptoms listed in Table 1. He had seen numerous doctors and undergone many tests, yet without a diagnosis or any relief. … All of the patient’s symptoms disappeared after cricopharyngeus muscle (CPM) injection of botulinum toxin (BT). Without the knowledge of the authors, that initial patient posted his experience to the Internet (Reddit). Additional patients self-presented when their Internet searches stumbled upon Reddit. After diagnosing and successfully treating these additional patients, the author searched the literature and found 3 case reports describing elements of this disorder, but using other terminology.
Can humans learn a new sense? Mikhail Samin says yes! “I made an app that uses headphones to make the user hear a sound that comes from the direction of north. … You quickly learn to anticipate the direction the sound will come from. As the feeling of the direction in which north is gets stronger, you can decrease the frequency of the sounds. And you acquire a sense of the direction of north that persists even when the app is off!” Currently available for iOS and Android at contact.ms/compass/
“Edward Bellamy once imagined that music on demand would be ‘the limit of human felicity.’ A modern apartment is full of things that once drew the same kind of awe.” For those who seem to think that technology hasn’t given us anything. — Ordinary Abundance
In June, we shared Talia’s Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets. ExFatLoss saw that link and stepped up to the plate: My answers to “Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets”
2026-08-28 00:36:52
Unless you’re stuck in an airport like Tom Hanks in that movie, you’re a citizen of somewhere. So pointing out that someone is a citizen is kind of a non-starter. Yes, they are also made of molecules, they are a mammal, what of it?
But for some reason, we keep finding ourselves in conversations where people pull out the term “citizen science”. What is that adjective doing there, Timmy? What is it doing?
In most cases, adjectives are looped in on a noun to add some information. A car may be red, but we call it a red car when we want to distinguish it from other cars. A red car is not green, blue, white, etc. What information does “citizen” add, what other scientists are we distinguishing them from? If “blue” is a non-red car, what is a non-citizen scientist?
We’re tired of having conversations about “citizen science”. First of all, “citizen science” is incoherent. Pointing out that science was done by “a citizen” is like pointing out that it was done by someone with a nose; except more vapid than that, since some scientists don’t have noses, while almost all scientists have citizenship. Tenured professors at Princeton and Oxford are citizens; so are research professionals at Pfizer and ThermoFisher. So why point out that a particular project involved citizens?
Because the term is so incoherent, the only reason to use it is to be condescending. The implication is that the citizens involved are not scientists, and that “citizen science” is a process of the general public (after all, almost everyone qualifies as a citizen, so this is the lowest possible bar) helping “real” scientists with their work.
This is not even a very subtle condescension — when people go on to define citizen science, they usually say it outright. Wikipedia describes “citizen science” as “research conducted with the participation of the general public”, and other definitions are even more blunt: “the practice of public participation and collaboration in scientific research, where everyday people help professional scientists gather, analyze, or report data.”
But we already have a term for people who do research: we call them scientists, and William Whewell didn’t coin the term “scientist” to describe local mom Mary Somerville in his anonymous 1834 review of her On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences for us to abuse it with vapid adjectives like “citizen”. Mary Somerville was a translator, experimentalist, astronomer, and mathematician. She was also a citizen of Great Britain, but you would never think to call her a “citizen scientist”, it would be an insult to a great woman. She was a scientist.
If we insist on making a distinction, we should be clear about it. How about professional science vs. amateur science?
While “amateur” has become a bit of an insult, it originally referred to someone who loved what they did. It comes from French amateur, via Latin amātor (“lover”), from amāre (“to love”). An amateur is someone who’s in it for the love of the game — in contrast to a professional, who does it for pay.
Historically, most scientists were amateurs, in the sense that they were not paid to do science. They mostly had day jobs or were independently wealthy. Charles Darwin? Independently wealthy. Gregor Mendel? Day job. Robert Boyle? Fabulously wealthy. Albert Einstein? Famously, day job as a patent clerk. Caroline Herschel was granted an annual salary of £50 by King George III for her work as her brother William’s assistant, but this was the exception, rather than the rule.
Because they are paid to do science, and often paid, implicitly or explicitly, to get certain kinds of results, pros have the most incentive to manipulate their data, the most incentive to outright lie. Professional research is always at least a little suspect. Amateurs didn’t give us the replication crisis. Pros did.
That said, we do support scientists getting paid for their work. We think amateur scientists are real scientists, as real or sometimes more real than the professionals, but we don’t think that all scientists should remain amateurs. It’s natural for the very talented to go pro, we want that.
So if “amateur” rubs you the wrong way, maybe academic science vs. indie science.
We love the term “indie science”, and not just because of the implied street cred. If indie music is “a broad style of music characterized by creative freedom, low budgets, and a do-it-yourself approach to music creation”, that’s a phenomenal target to aim at for science.
The only thing that captures our ideal ethos better is the slogan, “Tony Stark did this in a cave with a box of scraps”. Galileo, Newton, and Einstein revolutionized physics, and the biggest line item on their budgets was for thought experiments. Big telescopes are great, but science doesn’t benefit from having a particle accelerator fetish. We like Paramore, but we also like mewithoutYou.
(While we’re on music genre metaphors, is it too much to ask for punk rock science? Blunt and confrontational, fun and liveliness, designed to outrage and shock the mainstream? Honestly, that might be a return to tradition. In The Scientific Virtues, we named Rebellion as one of the seven virtues, because thumbing your nose at common sense and conventional wisdom is not optional.)
Indies are independent. Independence of thought, judgment, and outcome. The opposite of “indie music” is “selling out to the man”. You cannot serve both God and Elsevier.
Calling things “citizen science” has a chilling effect on broad and general participation in the scientific enterprise, which is the common heritage of humanity. Discouraging that is contemptible — which is why we hate to hear it!
If you have noticed something strange or wonderful or mysterious in the world around you and you want to understand it better, you should go for it. Discoveries made by people without PhDs, or people without jobs for that matter, are still discoveries. Anyone with a good idea should do it — even if they happen to have citizenship.
2026-08-22 07:02:12
Astral Codex Ten (and its predecessor Slate Star Codex) is a wildly popular blog by psychiatrist Scott Alexander about “a sort of hidden node at the center of art and harmony and rationality and the rest”. Scott’s writing has been described by The New Yorker as “delightfully weird” and his arguments “often counterintuitive and brilliant”. The blog has about 125,000 subscribers on Substack and is currently the #3 bestseller in the category “Science”. Beyond this, it’s been a hugely influential example to the blogosphere — it’s one of the blogs that made us want to start blogging ourselves.
One thing that distinguishes ACX from other blogs is its exceptionally strong community: an unparalleled comments section, a thriving series of book review (and other) contests, and of course, ACX Meetups, where readers of the blog can hang out in person and pass around their tungsten cubes, so that everyone can say in turn, “wow, it’s heavier than I expected”.
This last pillar of the community is run by the ACX Meetups Czar. Given the scale of the meetups — thousands of people, in over 180 cities, on every continent save Antarctica — this is more than a minor operation. Beyond the stated duties of organizing ACX meetups, the Meetups Czar also helps LessWrong and effective altruism meetup groups in an unofficial capacity. There’s a team in place to organize EA groups and meetups, but no team dedicated to LessWrong meetups, so the ACX Meetups Czar often picks up the slack. In practice, the Meetups Czar supports rationality meetups of many stripes, not just meetups explicitly connected to ACX.
The first ACX Meetups Czar, Mingyuan, was supported by grants until she passed the torch to the current Meetups Czar, Skyler AKA “Screwtape”.
Skyler has also historically been funded through individual grants. In 2023 he was supported by a one-year grant from the Long-Term Future Fund, in 2024 he was supported by another one-year grant from the Long-Term Future Fund, and in 2025 the EA Infrastructure Fund gave him a 3/4-year grant, covering ACX Meetups from January to September.
We were surprised to hear that the ACX Meetups Czar, and by extension ACX Meetups as a whole, has gotten no funding at all in 2026. We asked Skyler about the effect this has had on his ability to do ACX Meetups Czar work, and the phrase he used was that it has been “degraded, in the computer hardware sense.”
Because of the lack of funding, Czar Support for ACX meetups in 2026 has been cut to a minimum viable level. (Distinct from local volunteer activities. Like, ACX Philadelphia’s meetups continue because the local organizer is doing it for fun, it’s just smaller / growing slower because there’s no food reimbursement / venue assistance.) This means no advice for new organizers, complaint management involving only slightly more than copy-paste responses, and reimbursements that happen on a 2-month lag rather than within a week.
It’s a real shame to see this beloved operation under so much strain, and at further risk of degrading. ACX Meetups generate a huge amount of value for the greater community, and the Meetups Czar should have the support they need to work on meetups full-time, at a more than minimum viable level.
This means paying the Meetups Czar a reasonable salary, because anyone who would make a good Meetups Czar would easily be able to find high-paying work elsewhere (you can thank Baumol for that). The Czar position is too much work for a volunteer, and requires too many full-time weeks for someone to juggle it part-time. It also means enough funding to hire an accountant, host some custom software, and reimburse college ACX meetup groups for $20 of pizza.
But the ROI on ACX meetups is exceptional, so investing in the Czar and the groups is more than worth it. Let’s not “for want of a pizza, the lightcone was lost” ourselves.
ACX meetups are great for a lot of reasons. But if we’re talking about ROI, the return lands squarely in two laps.
The first is effective altruism. Scott has been blogging about EA for easily more than a decade. In fact, he may have been writing about these ideas since before the term “effective altruism” was even coined.
The second is AI safety. Again, Scott has been blogging about this for a long time. If you’re worried about AI destroying the world, Scott’s blog and the community around it are an important part of the effort to keep this from happening.
It’s a little hard to distinguish the impact of ACX meetups from ACX more broadly, but any impact that the ACX community has had can at least partially be attributed to meetups.
Our main source for ACX data is the 2025 ACX public survey, which had 5,593 respondents. For context, 24.8% of ACX survey respondents have attended at least one meetup, and 4.4% attend meetups regularly. For EA-specific questions, we can use the EA survey 2024, with 2,078 respondents.
The Centre For Effective Altruism takes their local and university EA groups seriously, which is a smart decision, because these groups have great ROI. Every university student who enjoys their EA group, hears EA arguments, and makes EA friends, is more likely to support things like AI safety or animal welfare in the future. When EA survey 2024 asked where people first heard of effective altruism, 8.4% of them picked “Local or university EA group”.
ACX is tied with these groups — the same survey found that another 8.4% of people said they first heard about effective altruism from Astral Codex Ten. Given that another 12.7% heard about EA from “book, article, or blog post”, this may be a slight undercounting, as ACX accounts for nine out of every seven blog posts on the internet. (Another 7.0% found EA through LessWrong.)
When people were asked what factors were important for becoming involved in EA (people were asked to select all that apply, and could select more than one factor), ACX was selected by 25.4%, while explicit efforts, like EA Global, were selected by only 15.0%. Again, “article or blog” was selected by 12.8%, so this may undercount the impact of ACX itself — and “personal contact with EAs” was in second place at 45.0%, so it may undercount the impact of ACX meetups.
There’s also the direct impact — in the 2025 ACX Survey, 51.4% of ACX respondents said they donated more (or more effectively) to charity as a result of reading ACX, the most common life effect listed. Another 20.5% said they ate less meat or otherwise changed their meat consumption patterns.
Another 6.5% said they signed the Giving What We Can pledge as a result of ACX. The ACX survey happens to ask about income level, so we can make a guess at what this means in dollar terms. The respondents who say they were convinced to sign the pledge report making about $26 million a year combined. (Picture a bunch of mid-to-late-career software engineers in California.) At a pledge of 10% of income, that’s around $2.6 million donated per year to effective causes as a result of ACX. And that’s only counting the people who mentioned it on the survey.
Also, 21 people reported donating kidneys because of the ACX kidney donation post.
On the one hand, Scott’s writing obviously gets more credit for all these good works than the Meetups Czar does. On the other, if ACX were an outreach program for EA, it would be one of the most effective outreach programs they have. EA groups could reasonably hand ACX $300,000 every year and come out well ahead, and the place to put those funds would almost certainly be outreach and the community, which means meetups. Ideas seem a lot less wacky / outside the Overton window when you get to chat about them with friendly people at a meetup.
(As a comparison, each EA Global costs about two million dollars, and CEA runs about three of them a year. ACX Meetups have been run on less than two hundred thousand dollars a year worldwide.)
Yesterday, Scott put out a post calling for more college EA organizers and drawing a direct parallel between them and ACX meetup groups. Meetups Czar Skyler is even mentioned in the post as one of the people helping with this effort. Scott says,
Many colleges have effective altruist meetup groups or clubs. They range from fun social gatherings of like-minded individuals, to serious organizations working hard to build a better world; most are both at once. They have to replenish their ranks each fall as seniors leave and new freshmen enter.
This year, they’re trying especially hard. The AGI clock is ticking, and the movement wants to build up capacity as quickly as it can. At the same time, it’s flush with new resources as newly-minted AI millionaires and billionaires donate their fortunes. Its big bottleneck is now finding the talented, value-aligned, motivated people who can convert that money into good outcomes.
These issues are obviously topical, they matter right now, and if you’re going to be investing in this movement, meetups are a good place to put your money.
According to the 2025 survey, 7.3% of ACX readers work on Computer (AI), as distinct from Computers (Practical: IT, programming, etc.) and Computers (other academic, computer science).
We also see that 9.7% of respondents said they have changed or are seriously considering changing careers to work in AI safety. Given the denominator of 125,000 subscribers, perhaps 12,000 people have changed or seriously considered changing careers to AI safety due to ACX.
Speaking of denominators: Just how big is the AI safety community as a whole? One 2025 analysis suggests around 650 people working on AI safety full-time across about 70 organizations. Another estimate from 2023 came up with a total of around 350.
Even if we very conservatively assume that only the people who mentioned changing careers in the survey actually made the change (275), ACX would still have contributed almost half of all full-time AI safety employees to the field. If that seems implausible, we invite you to visit your local AI safety organization and ask how many people read ACX or have ever gone to an ACX meetup. Again, if you care about AI safety, the ROI seems high.
The value of meetups isn’t just in people who hear about interesting ideas, decide to donate to effective causes, give a stranger their kidney, and so on. It’s also in the discovery of unknown talent. “Straight trees are found in remote forests,” wrote Zhuge Kongming, “Upright people come from the humble masses.” ACX Meetups are one of the ways to find them.
For starters, ACX meetups attendees are often drawn into the greater community.
Joe Rogero went to East Coast Rationalist Megameetup for years, then started going to ACX meetups in Philadelphia, then switched his career to working on AI safety comms for MIRI.
Alice Blair attended rationality meetups in Boston while a student at MIT, then left MIT to move back to Berkeley and work for an AI Safety organization writing their newsletter.
Drake Thomas attended the East Coast Rationalist Megameetup, went on to work for Anthropic, and recently donated $100,000 to an Alaskan gubernatorial campaign in support of the candidate’s call for a moratorium on data center development.
The process may be even more accelerated for local organizers. They’re plugged in more than attendees are, and every week they’re proving that they can run events, handle logistics, manage a small team, the works. Skyler lost three Montreal meetups organizers in a row to Berkeley, two of them within two months.
Vishal Prasad ran Los Angeles Rationality for years, then left to move to San Francisco where he is about to run Inkhaven 3.
Priyansha Bajoria ran ACX Mumbai, then moved to the UK to work for the Charity Entrepreneurship program at AIM.
Jenn Chen ran Waterloo Rationality, sending many attendees to Berkeley; she still runs meetups, and also runs the Balsa Research effort to overturn the Jones Act.
Lucie Philippon regularly attended LessWrong community weekends, then became an organizer of AI safety group houses in Paris (and also ran ACX Paris), and now works at Lightcone Infrastructure, where she helps run Lighthaven.
Lots of people now working in effective altruism, AI safety, and similar areas got their start as an attendee or organizer for ACX meetups. If organizations want to keep drawing from this spring of talent, then it’s important to keep the spring flowing.
The ACX Meetups Czar position could be funded through a grant, as it’s been funded in the past. Given the downstream effects on EA and AI safety, natural funders might include:
But we’re worried that a grant is actually a bad fit. The ACX Meetups Czar has been supported on grants in the past, but this has been a source of constant trouble.
You could say that things “worked” in 2023 and 2024. But the fact that the grants pipeline stopped working properly in 2025 and hasn’t funded the position at all in 2026 is exactly the issue. If you want people making plans that might take more than 12 months to pay off, you need to give them confidence that they will be able to keep operating for at least that long. “Centuries” might be pushing it, but is it too much to ask that our plans be measured in 3-year increments?
If a grant is somehow the only option, the grant should at least be large enough that ACX meetups can operate for 3-5 years. Otherwise you lose a portion of every year to pointless overhead. If a grant only covers the Meetups Czar for a single year, then a serious fraction of that funding will go towards the Czar’s time spent applying for next year’s grant. Doesn’t seem good. There’s no hypothetical party that wants exactly one year of this: anyone who wants ACX Meetups to happen wants them to keep happening indefinitely.
Another option would be for the Meetups Czar to be supported as a full-time employee of an adjacent organization, likely something with a scope that includes AI Safety or EA. Plausible fits might be the Centre For Effective Altruism or Lightcone Infrastructure. Putting the Meetups Czar under an organizational umbrella means that Skyler won’t have to rent his own servers or hire his own accountant, and won’t have to worry about applying for grants for core functions at all. CEA already has a headcount of several dozen people. Why not take on the Meetups Czar?
Exact details don’t matter to us — the different organizations and funds should discuss and figure it out among themselves. Maybe they can even split the expense between them. But if ACX Meetups are to continue, the Czar should have the support they need.
