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The Unz Review •�An Alternative Media Selection$
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Megatsunami
•�September 19, 2021
•�400 Words •�73 Comments
There's not much point worrying much over geological existential risks. They come too infrequently too be a major risk, and those that do occur more often, are not big enough to matter in the big picture. Still, if there's one risk that is both potentially highly destructive and occurs at a relatively high rate, it... Read More
American Gas Burners, Russian Nuclear Starships
•�September 16, 2021
•�1,000 Words •�41 Comments
mal comments on a post from last year: Well, there’s nothing wrong with current Russian commercial space program such – they are launching OneWeb satellites now and there’s a Korean one thats supposed to go on Angara. SpaceX does have more launches but thats because they launch their own Starlink constellation and Russian Sphere is... Read More
Rejecting Sputnik to Own Putler
•�July 6, 2021
•�500 Words •�166 Comments
Yesterday the Levada Center released a new poll on vaccines that tends to confirm my contention that Russia's tawdry pace of vaccinations is not a result of supply constraints, but the banal fact that many Russians (including in older age groups) would simply rather catch Corona than get vaccinated. The first observation is that the... Read More
Dying from Corona in Russia Has Long Been "Optional"
•�June 10, 2021
•�900 Words •�258 Comments
I don't have the reputation of someone who stans for Russia's record on dealing with Corona. I was writing about how Russian official statistics were massively understating Corona mortality more than a year ago, before Western journalists generally noticed it, and followed that theme up in the subsequent months. Ironically, Russia's development of one of... Read More
IHME: 6.9 Million Deaths from Corona
•�May 7, 2021
•�400 Words •�145 Comments
This is Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's assessment of global excess mortality from COVID-19 from the beginning until May 3, 2021. (h/t Ron Unz) You can read about the methodology here. All in all, this sadly comports with the "millions" prediction I made in February 24, 2020. While at the end of last year... Read More
China Torpedoes Biosingularity Bid
•�April 5, 2021
•�700 Words •�222 Comments
From the indispensable BioHackInfo: China’s new Criminal Code, which came into effect four weeks ago on March 1st, has a new section dedicated to ‘illegal medical practices’, which makes it a punishable crime to create gene-edited babies, human clones and animal-human chimeras. The new section is an amendment to Article 336 of China’s Criminal Law,... Read More
Existential Risks
•�March 4, 2021
•�400 Words •�141 Comments
There are only three real ones. Malevolent superintelligence. Aliens. The simulation ends. And various permutations thereof. (I suppose biological lifeforms losing consciousness during mind uploading is another one, but it can be considered a subset of the first one). Nuclear war isn't an X risk. It wasn't one during the height of the Cold War.... Read More
State Capacity and Vaccinations
•�January 3, 2021
•�500 Words •�234 Comments
Why is Israel vaccinating its population so fast relative to everyone else? I am seeing some smol brain takes on this. Sure, Israel might be a "small" country, but so is Belgium. Or US states like Massachusetts. But in the US it is those famous dense metropolitan centers of the Dakotas, Wyoming, and Alaska that... Read More
The Year of Corona: Ten Megadeaths & the Crash of Western Supremacism
•�December 29, 2020
•�7,600 Words •�297 Comments
In this "summary" post on Corona 2020, I will cover some of the following. Recap what we know about Corona, what we have learned in the past year, and what policies should have been undertaken; The big picture of global excess mortality that is emerging for 2020; Discuss the vaccines, "vaccine geopolitics", and Corona's impact... Read More
Corona's Toll in the Ex-USSR
•�December 28, 2020
•�1,500 Words •�115 Comments
This post sums up the coronavirus epidemic in Russia in 2020. There will subsequently be a larger post surveying the world at large and prospects for its containment before the New Year. � The observation that Russia is massive understating its COVID-19 mortality rate was first noticed by bloggers around May, when they noticed that... Read More
The Black Clinics of Kolkata
•�December 11, 2020
•�200 Words •�17 Comments
There's a lot of interesting data in the recent PEW poll on public attitudes to gene editing research, though it's really just the increasing intelligence part (4th column) that's of civilizational significance. Gene editing for IQ is still a philosophical discussion at this stage, despite very fast progress in the relevant fields. So these numbers... Read More
Testing Sputnik V
•�September 20, 2020
•�100 Words •�73 Comments
Today I have been granted the GREAT OPPORTUNITY and PRIVILEGE of serving Russia and President PUTIN as guinea pig for Gam-COVID-Vac, that is, the SPUTNIK V vaccine. Accounting for Phase I-II participants, I calculated I'm the 503rd person in the world (officially) testing it, out of perhaps hundreds of millions to come. Assuming, that is,... Read More
Magic Laogai Soil Theory
•�September 15, 2020
•�200 Words •�72 Comments
Alesina, Alberto F., Marlon Seror, David Y. Yang, Yang You, and Weihong Zeng. 2020. “Persistence through Revolutions.” Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research. The descendants of former Chinese landlords and rich peasants earn 16% more than average - despite them being barred from inheriting land or other asse
Venusian Lifeforms
•�September 14, 2020
•�700 Words •�123 Comments
Greaves, Jane S., Anita M. S. Richards, William Bains, Paul B. Rimmer, Hideo Sagawa, David L. Clements, Sara Seager, et al. 2020. “Phosphine Gas in the Cloud Decks of Venus.” Nature Astronomy, September. In reality, as Nick Bostrom
Sputnik V Seems to Work
•�September 6, 2020
•�300 Words •�177 Comments
At any rate, the paper in question was published in The Lancet, which isn't exactly the most obscure medical journal. Logunov, Denis Y., Inna V. Dolzhikova, Olga V. Zubkova, Amir I. Tukhvatullin, Dmitry V. Shcheblyakov, Alina S. Dzharullaeva, Daria M. Grousova, et al. 2020. “Safety and Immunogenicity of an rAd26 and rAd5 Vector-Based Heterologous Prime-Boost... Read More
Gpt-3
•�July 28, 2020
•�700 Words •�13 Comments
I haven't been following the topic closely. My own impression with playing around with it is that it just the most sophisticated chatbot to date, though that should already make it economically competitive in areas such as customer support. There is still clearly no deep "semantic" understanding (extract from AI Dungeon, which now runs on... Read More
Glimmers of Tropical Hyperborea
•�June 21, 2020
•�100 Words •�46 Comments
This is apparently the hottest temperature ever registered in the Arctic (100F ~= 38 Celsius). There's a good chance that 2020, an already very powerful year, will also become the hottest year on record (PredictIt now puts it at 50/50). And it's not even getting boosted by an El Nino, with very low levels of... Read More
#ShutDownSTEM
•�June 10, 2020
•�46 Comments
I unironically support #ShutDownSTEM, technological dominance is a dangerous thing in the hands of woke millenarian regimes, at this point it'd sooner be safer even with explicit theocracies like Iran.
Efficacy of Masks, Confirmed
•�June 10, 2020
•�200 Words •�15 Comments
Huge meta-study (n=172) concludes chance of transmission falls from 17.4% to 3.1% when wearing face masks: Physical distancing was also very important. Eye protection, less so. Chu, Derek K., Elie A. Akl, Stephanie Duda, Karla Solo, Sally Yaacoub, Holger J. Schünemann, and COVID-19 Systematic Urgent Review Group Effort (SURGE) study authors. 2020. “Physical Distancing, Face... Read More
Coronaskeptic Performance: Sweden, Brazil, Belarus
•�May 26, 2020
•�1,200 Words •�150 Comments
At the outset, I want to set out what this post is NOT about: It is not, per se, either an endorsement or a refutation of "coronapilling" or "coronaskepticism." (Though yes, obviously, I am personally closer to the former position). It is not a judgment on how we should manage the tradeoff between lives and... Read More
Corona-Chan Doesn't Like Fresh Air & Sunlight
•�May 23, 2020
•�400 Words •�27 Comments
This is actually fine. It seems like almost all, or all, of the major "superspreader" events have occurred indoors. E.g., in South Korea, the first and second waves were launched through a cult's churches and gay bars, respectively. A month ago, a Chinese study reported that in 318 analyzed outbreaks in China, just two out... Read More
Corona Scorecard: Is AK Bad, Wrong, and a COVID Fascist?
•�May 22, 2020
•�1,200 Words •�62 Comments
Am I a so-called "COVID merchant" peddling fear and BS, as several conspiracy-minded people from both the Left and the Right have alleged? Or have most of my predictions, such as they were, actually (and unfortunately) panned out? As such, I think it would be useful to have a "tallying up" reference sheet that I... Read More
Coronafacts: IFR ≈ 1%, Spread Low
•�May 21, 2020
•�1,000 Words •�268 Comments
As data has crept in over the past few months, it has become incontrovertibly clear what we already kind of knew since the Princess Diamond days - that IFR is ~1%. Consequently, unless Corona mortality "hotspots" were a figment of our collective imaginations, the percentage of people who have been infected with the novel coronavirus... Read More
National IQ in 2019
•�May 17, 2020
•�700 Words •�137 Comments
Map of QNW+SAS+GEO (IQ tests, international standardized test, and geographic imputation) national IQ on the basis of David Becker's National IQ dataset v1.3.3. David Becker has done yeoman work validating Richard Lynn's datasets to produce the world's most comprehensive national IQ database (James Thompson has written about this at UR). Sole purpose of this post... Read More
Nature Index 2020
•�May 16, 2020
•�400 Words •�77 Comments
UPDATE - Emil Kirkegaard has kindly graphed all these trends at his RPubs blog. Has been released. Here is the updated "state of the noosphere" (percentage of global high-quality scientific research produced by country, as proxied by the Nature Index FC). Country 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 pc12/19 1 USA 37.15% 36.49%... Read More
Lightpill: Containing Corona with Far-Ultraviolet Light?
•�April 24, 2020
•�800 Words •�140 Comments
So, "powerful" as Trump's latest ideas on coronavirus treatment are, there is a surprising nugget of wisdom to the following: Back in March 18, rationalist thinkers Roko Mijic (yes, he of the Basilisk) and Alexey Turchin explored the idea of using "ubiquitous far-ultraviolet light" to "control the spread of COVID-19 and other pandemics" at LessWrong.... Read More
The BCG Vaccine
•�April 15, 2020
•�200 Words •�68 Comments
Just like the theory that everybody has already been infected so IFR must be really low, and/or not too dissimilar theory that there had already been a wide round of coronavirus infections as early as Dec/Jan, I think this is most likely just another "cope" (wishful thinking). Bloomberg: Nations with Mandatory TB Vaccines Show Fewer... Read More
Smoking Protecc!?
•�April 15, 2020
•�100 Words •�27 Comments
Conventional wisdom was that smoking would be a major risk factor for dying from the new coronavirus. But so far data from China and now the US shows the opposite (h/t Wael): Obviously, this is not a valid reason to light up. But this would be good news for countries where smoking rates are high.
Science Production
•�April 12, 2020
•�600 Words •�232 Comments
Long-time readers will know that I am a fan of The Nature Index for tracking global scientometrics. Unlike raw numbers of articles published, it automatically adjusts for quality, since only submissions to elite journals are counted. In my previous longread on the subject, I presented a per capita map of the Nature Index FC (fractional... Read More
The Cost of Herd Immunity
•�April 4, 2020
•�300 Words •�213 Comments
We now have the first hard data from regions that achieved "herd immunity" the hard way - that is, by having Corona burn through most of the population. 70% of blood donors from Castiglione d'Adda, in the 50,000 population region of Lodi, the epicenter of Italy's outbreak, tested positive for SARS-2 antibodies. There's just one... Read More
Corona-Chan Didn't Care Until I Put on the Mask
•�April 2, 2020
•�1,400 Words •�250 Comments
For most of the past two months, Russian disinformation agents respectable Western Establishment voices such as the Surgeon-General of the US, the CDC, and the MSM (e.g. CNN, Vox) have churned out propaganda that masks are ineffective against containing the spread of the coronavirus. In perhaps the most "powerful" take, Forbes even claimed that they... Read More
Reference: COVID-19 Survival Guide
•�April 2, 2020
•�1,700 Words •�37 Comments
This is a reference list of recommendations for avoiding the warm and welcoming if overly suffocating embrace of Corona-chan. Disclaimer: NOT MEDICAL ADVICE! *** Note that I compiled a list of resources for tracking the pandemic. If your country/region is conscientious about testing, and there are no cases in your city/region, there's no need to... Read More
Reference: COVID-19 Resources
•�April 2, 2020
•�400 Words •�3 Comments
This post is a reference list of COVID-19 resources to optimize your monitoring. See also: COVID-19 Survival Guide Corona-chan Didn't Care Until I Put on The Mask *** WorldoMeter Coronavirus has timely updates on new cases and deaths, as well as historical data for countries with major epidemics. Wikipedia: 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic Articles on regional/national... Read More
Corona Deaths In Italy 5x Higher Than Official Numbers?
•�March 28, 2020
•�500 Words •�84 Comments
According to an analysis by Luca Dellanna in Italy, a huge number of Italian deaths have been going unregistered. Comparing death rates in Corona-afflicted towns in North Italy this March with the statistics from March during previous years, he estimates that the differential could be as high as a factor of 5. If this can... Read More
Corona CFR Creeps Up to 2% in South Korea
•�March 28, 2020
•�300 Words •�26 Comments
The novel coronavirus is a long disease. That's one of the things that makes it so problematic. Apart from having being at least 10x as lethal as the standard flu, and people having no herd immunity against it (so potentially up to 5x as many infectees as during a typical flu season), the average hospital... Read More
Hotspots of the Imagination
•�March 26, 2020
•�100 Words •�73 Comments
There is a study going round arguing that most people are already infected with the new coronavirus, and that the CFR is thus very, very low. The implication is that "hotspots" (e.g. Wuhan, Lombardy, NYC) were figments of our collective imagination. Or, perhaps more plausibly, it's just a cope.
Skier Patrol
•�March 25, 2020
•�400 Words •�12 Comments
Steve Sailer has been banging the drums on how skiers seem to be extremely overrepresented amongst the ranks of early COVID-19 victims: Why Skiers Instead of Golfers? Once Again, the Skier Menace Rich Skiers Step Up to Say: Let's Get the Data Black Ski Group Hit Hard by Virus Commenting on the rise in Moscow's... Read More
Corona & the Cost of Doing Nothing
Permanent 2.5 Year Drop in US Life Expectancy - It's Just Like the Flu, Brah!
•�March 12, 2020
•�2,800 Words •�477 Comments
There is a three in a million chance that a Boeing 737 MAX won't arrive at its destination in one piece. At the end of the day, this isn't that big of a deal - as late as the 1980s, this was the average for the commercial airline industry, and risks were twice as high... Read More
Cucked By Corona?
•�March 6, 2020
•�400 Words •�87 Comments
So even after Corona is done genociding the boomers, we might still have a lingering problem. Here's one English language paper about this: Fan, Caibin, Kai Li, Yanhong Ding, Wei Lu Lu, and Jianqing Wang. 2020. “ACE2 Expression in Kidney and Testis May Cause Kidney and Testis Damage After 2019-nCoV Infection.” Urology. medRxiv. In December... Read More
Corona Will Kill Millions & Crater the World Economy
•�February 24, 2020
•�1,300 Words •�764 Comments
Hyperbolic much? At this point, the burden of proof surely now has to be on the optimists, who've been alternately barraging us with "iTs JuSt LiKe ThE fLu", and/or "it's not going to kill non-East Asians anyway" (not that CNN's Sanjay Gupta will admit it). But with epidemics, it's usually a case of go big... Read More
Warmest January in Moscow
•�February 3, 2020
•�200 Words •�167 Comments
This January has been Moscow's warmest by a significant margin since records began, clocking in at stunning +0.1C; in all likelihood, it is the first time it has slipped above zero since at least the Medieval Warm Period. The previous maximum was -1.6C just a bit more than a decade ago, in 2007. Saint-Petersburg likewise... Read More
Corona FAQ
•�January 29, 2020
•�1,100 Words •�198 Comments
Estimates of r0 are converging to ~3.0: It looks like Corona is becoming a full-fledged pandemic in geographic terms, with multiple cases of human to human transmission confirmed in Germany yesterday. This has also been observed in Japan and Taiwan. If that happened there, then surely it must have happened in other countries with close... Read More
Chinese Response to Corona Nothing to Write Home About
•�January 29, 2020
•�300 Words •�50 Comments
On the surface, quarantining the population of Spain looks impressive and decisive. But it conceals that there were many decisions that are unlikely to happen in advanced country democracies: (1) The lax regulations or biosafety standards that resulted in this zoonosis event in the first place. (2) The Wuhan local government keeping the whole thing... Read More
Corona Bioerror: Is Steven Pinker About to Get Pwned?
•�January 27, 2020
•�1,700 Words •�78 Comments
Martin Rees is a British astronomer and existential risks philosopher with a decidedly gloomy outlook, predicting that humanity only has a 50/50 chance of surviving the 21st century. Steven Pinker hardly needs an introduction, but in short, he is an evangelist of the idea that the world is getting better - richer, nicer, safer -... Read More
Can't Quarantine the Corona-Chan
•�January 24, 2020
•�1,100 Words •�417 Comments
This Wuhan coronavirus (Corona) is very contagious: The WHO gives an estimate of r0 = 1.4 to 2.5 (this means that control measures must prevent 29%-60% of transmissions to stop the epidemic from growing further). There are 41 deaths / 1,287 confirmed cases as of right now (i.e. 3% mortality like 2 days ago). Hopefully,... Read More
Corona Virus
•�January 22, 2020
•�100 Words •�77 Comments
500+ confirmed cases and closing on 20 deaths as of today. It seems to be highly virulent, much more so than SARS, which took 4 months to spread out of China vs. a couple of weeks with the Wuhan coronavirus. It's already in the US, and, from today, in Russia. Live updates here. The nice... Read More
AI Flesh Search Engine
•�January 18, 2020
•�600 Words •�42 Comments
The Chinese describe the concerted campaigns to identify and shame various malefactors as a "human flesh search engine." In China itself, it has been used to identify corruptioneers, sadists, or merely people who have been too outspoken about their dislike for China. In the West, it seems that this role is largely played by the... Read More
What Do Intelligence Experts Think?
•�November 18, 2019
•�1,500 Words •�58 Comments
Rindermann, Heiner, David Becker, and Thomas R. Coyle. 2020. “Survey of Expert Opinion on Intelligence: Intelligence Research, Experts’ Background, Controversial Issues, and the Media.” Intelligence 78 (January): 101406. Experts (N max = 102 answering) on intelligence completed a survey about IQ research, controversies, and the media. The survey was conducted in 2013 and 2014 using... Read More
doomed-earth
The Katechon Hypothesis
That Which Withholds Eschaton: The Katechon Hypothesis for Resolving the Fermi Paradox
•�October 20, 2019
•�14,900 Words •�381 Comments
I have been mulling over the ideas in this article since early 2016, when they crystallized in more or less their current form. I am not quite sure whether these ideas are rather important, or the ravings of a lunatic. But I am certainly glad to be able to finally unload them from the confines... Read More
Noah Carl & Woodley on Persecution of IQ Researchers
•�October 19, 2019
•�1,400 Words •�56 Comments
"Intelligence researcher" doesn't exactly have a reputation as a safe, uncontroversial profession. There are perhaps 200 people in the world who do that full-time. Despite this small population, we seem to get a story - often multiple stories - of them getting denounced, defamed, deplatformed, threatened, and even physically attacked every single year. Thanks to... Read More
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Anatoly Karlin
About Anatoly Karlin

I am a blogger, thinker, and businessman in the SF Bay Area. I’m originally from Russia, spent many years in Britain, and studied at U.C. Berkeley.

One of my tenets is that ideologies tend to suck. As such, I hesitate about attaching labels to myself. That said, if it’s really necessary, I suppose “liberal-conservative neoreactionary” would be close enough.

Though I consider myself part of the Orthodox Church, my philosophy and spiritual views are more influenced by digital physics, Gnosticism, and Russian cosmism than anything specifically Judeo-Christian.