Foomax

One Tool, Eight Locks

September 2026 · LessOnline

A synthesis of themes 3–10 — epistemics, law, fiction, culture, medicine, physics, status, markets. Part 3 of a series drawn from 37.6 million words across 34 rationalist blogs.

In August 2007, the physicist Steve Hsu posted a spreadsheet tracing subprime-mortgage bonds through European banks — a year before Lehman fell. He held no credential in finance. He just kept the numbers and believed them.

That is the whole movement in one gesture. The corpus’s founding theme isn’t a subject; it’s a repair manual for belief, assembled by Robin Hanson in 2006’s Reasonable Disagreement: if two honest people share the facts, their disagreement is itself data, and someone owes an update. Everything else in this stratum of the corpus — the eight themes ranked third through tenth, roughly 7,500 articles between them — is that manual, pointed at a different lock.

David Friedman points it at the courts. Why is Tort Law like Accounting? (2006) is two sentences of pure epistemics in a lawyer’s coat: both fields round every probability to zero or one — 60% liability becomes a million-dollar debt, 40% becomes nothing — “because both depend on low quality decision-making mechanisms.” He has written 327 such posts.

Hanson points the same instrument at himself, in near-total monopoly: 697 of 701 posts in the status theme — 99.4% — on why we perform status rather than merely seek it, from Why Pretend? in 2010 to Status Leadership in 2023. That is epistemics turned on deception rather than error, and it is the most concentrated theme in the taxonomy after monetary policy.

Yudkowsky dramatises the manual as 122 chapters of Harry Potter, and Alicorn’s Luminosity adds 436 articles more; between them they are the largest single word-count contributors to any theme in the corpus, and fiction runs to 4.77 million words. The point is never entertainment — narrative is an argument-testing device. The same apparatus even grades books: ACX’s annual anonymous book-review contest applies the evidence-and-update machinery to literary judgment.

Hsu works two of the locks himself, at different rigour: 60% of the physics theme is his alone — interviews, papers, academic-adjacent posts — and, with Overcoming Bias and TheMoneyIllusion, he anchors the markets theme his 2007 subprime call came from. And Hanson tested the manual against real medicine for thirteen years, review by review, and got his randomised trial in the end — part 2 of this series tells that story in full.

Add it up and the pattern inverts part 1. AI is the theme twenty blogs share; these eight are the themes one writer at a time carried into a domain and kept. Status is 99.4% one blog. Physics is 60% one author. Law is Friedman, 327 posts deep. In this stratum the rule is concentration, not convergence: each theme lives in whichever writer carried the habit into that domain first.

Eight themes, one habit, never turned back off.

Corpus and method as in parts 1 and 2: every post by the authors on the LessOnline guest lists — 34 blogs, 21,403 articles, 37.6 million words — sorted into 23 themes by topic model.

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