Astral Codex Ten has a paid subscription option. Once a year, I try to convince you to take it. You pay $10 (or $2.50 if you’re a student or you can’t afford the regular price) per month, and get:

• Extra articles (usually 1-2 per month)

• A Hidden Open Thread every week

• Access to the occasional Ask Me Anythings I do with subscribers

• Early access to some draft posts

• The warm glow of supporting the blog.

The history of ACX paid subscriptions looks like this:

There was a strong burst of support when I started the blog and it got covered in NYT. Subscriptions gradually increased over the first year, since some new people were joining and no old people were leaving.

After one year, the original burst of support started leaving or auto-canceling or having their credit cards expire, and this was enough to more than counteract all new subscriptions. ACX has been losing subscribers year-on-year from 2022 until present, although over the past few months it seems to have been leveling out.

I’m financially well-off and don’t immediately need your money to survive. But last month I ran into Razib Khan, he asked me how much my paid subscriptions had gone up over the past year, and I had to sheepishly admit they had slightly decreased. I’m not saying you should subscribe just so I can win conversations with Razib. I’m trying to stress that anyone with any financial insecurity whatsoever shouldn’t feel pressured to fund me - but, simultaneously, that it would make me happy to do better than breakeven and financially comfortable people can fund me if they want.

If you subscribe, you’ll get access to subscriber-only posts. Last year, those were:

1. Your Name Was Changed At Ellis Island, short fiction based on the claim that nobody’s name was really changed at Ellis Island.

2. Links At Length: Democratic Socialists’ Budget Crisis. Haha, socialists bad with money, but can we learn anything more interesting from this?

3. Contra The Atlantic On Polyamory, in which I disagree with an ocean about nonmonogamous love

4. Explicit Honesty. Is there a sweet spot between life-ruining “radical honesty” and the normal thing where nobody knows what’s a “white lie”?

5. Contra Hoel On Nerd Culture. When and why did “nerd movies” (eg Star Wars, Marvel) become so dominant?

6. The Mistakes Are All Waiting To Be Made. Reflections on parenthood, 0 - 6 months edition.

7. Subscriber Bonus Debate Questions. Some extra questions from my mock presidential debate.

8. How Do We Rate The Importance Of Historical Figures? Seemingly unresolvable philosophical/methodological problems with those lists that purport to say that Napoleon was the 13th most important historical figure (or whatever).

9. Mostleastremarkablegate And The Nature Of Online Harassment. A pundit who rose to fame by saying things like “the orange fuckface wants his tiny hands up your uterus", the people who hate him, the people who hate those people, and so on forever.

10. Game Theory Of Michigan Muslims. If Muslims hate Biden for being too pro-Israel, but Trump is even more pro-Israel, should they vote Trump instead of Biden to prove that Biden needs them?

11. The Innocent And The Beautiful Have No Enemy But Time. Reflections on parenthood, 6 - 12 month edition.

12. Can You Hate Everyone In Rome? How should we interpret claims like “You can’t hate people for voting Trump, that would mean hating 50% of the population!”

To whet your appetite, I’m unlocking two old subscriber-only posts: Henrietta Lacks Seems Like A Nice Person, But Not A Scientific Hero and Book Review: Cyropaedia. Everyone should now be able to read these.

A common folktale involves a deal with the Devil - some shmuck gets everything he ever wanted, and the only catch is that he must leave one copper coin outside on New Years’ every year. Of course, one year he’s so busy enjoying his infinite luxury that he forgets, so the Devil takes his soul. The modern version of this is “if you subscribe once, you can read everything in the archives, but if you forget to unsubscribe afterwards, you’ll pay money every month forever”. I like my chances with this, so go ahead and try it if you want - in addition to the twelve posts above, you’ll get twelve from 2023, another twelve from 2022, and so on for a total of 54 new ACX posts. And all you have to do is remember to unsubscribe later. Muahahaha.

You can subscribe here:

If you need the student / financial hardship discount, and for some reason it doesn’t show up at the button above, you can get it here.