Asterisk Mag 10: Origins

By Clara Collier @ 2025-07-07T18:03 (+8)

This is a linkpost to https://asteriskmag.com/issues/10

Note: This post was link-posted from the Asterisk by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post. Summaries were auto-generated using GPT-4o, and any mistakes are our own.

Is evidence real? The second best-attended funeral of the 19th century. Car deaths. Colon cancer. California has a commitment problem. When is it right to indoctrinate children? The undiscovere’d country. AI can’t beat us at rock, paper, scissors. Modernity was invented by German bureaucrats in 1737. A really, truly excessive amount of math.

Asterisk is a quarterly journal of clear writing and clear thinking about things that matter (and, occasionally, things we just think are interesting). In this issue:

• Reed Schwartz traces how land value taxation, once a progressive remedy for inequality, has been repeatedly reinterpreted by libertarians and tech elites as a tool for market efficiency and frontier revival.
• Andre Popovitch describes how Google rebuilt its Android calculator using advanced mathematical frameworks to ensure exact answers even in edge cases, offering a rare example of constructive mathematics being deployed at global scale for improved computational precision.
• Louis Evans explores how cancer, research, and life itself exemplify self-propagating systems—blurring distinctions between dysfunction, design, and purpose in a universe of recursive processes.
• The Editors reflect on how origin stories, from technologies to institutions to ideologies, are often nonlinear, contested, and deeply interconnected — challenging the notion of singular beginnings and highlighting the complexity behind societal progress.
• Agustina Paglayan argues that modern education systems were historically designed to instill obedience and political control, not foster critical thinking or equitable learning, and that these origins still shape education today in ways that constrain student autonomy and societal progress.
• Robert Rosenbaum outlines how Project Resource Optimization (PRO) rapidly evaluated and redirected private funding to the most cost-effective, life-saving programs cut by USAID, offering a triaged, evidence-based response to preserve impact under severe resource constraints.
• Ajeya Cotra and Arvind Narayanan debate whether real-world constraints will slow AI progress, and explore how transfer learning, transparency, and safety tradeoffs shape the path and risks of advanced systems.
• Aurelia Song and Charlie Dever trace the evolution of cryonics from idealistic origins to rigorous modern techniques, arguing that true impact depends on preserving brain information within strict biological and legal constraints.
• Ryan Briggs argues that much of social science research is too error-prone, underpowered, and biased toward publishable results to reliably inform policy, but practical reforms could make it a more trustworthy tool for evidence-based decision-making.
• Rob Davidoff argues that California’s high-speed rail project has made significant, underrecognized progress and faces less a failure of capability than a failure of political commitment to sustained funding and execution.
• Clara Collier traces how 19th-century German universities transformed from outdated teaching institutions into global models for research by combining Romantic ideals of pure knowledge with bureaucratic incentives for professional advancement.
• Étienne Fortier-Dubois argues that mapping technologies as an interconnected timeline reveals how innovation is cumulative, contingent, and often nonlinear—highlighting overlooked links that shape our world and informing more grounded expectations for future progress.
• Abi Olvera argues that the U.S. could dramatically reduce traffic deaths by adopting evidence-based road design reforms, showing how current fatality rates reflect policy choices rather than unavoidable outcomes.

Huge thanks to everyone who helped bring Asterisk to life — we hope reading it brings you as much joy as making it did.