Scott Alexander shares excerpts from Josiah Royce's 1886 history of 1850s San Francisco, showing that many supposedly modern urban problems—housing prices, crime, family breakdown, NIMBYism, boom-bust cycles—existed in frontier California. Longer summary

Scott Alexander presents a series of excerpts from Josiah Royce's 1886 book about San Francisco in the 1850s, covering topics including absurdly high housing prices, overworked businessmen, scarce respectable women, weak family ties, rampant crime, financial fraud, the coexistence of vice and charity, NIMBYism, boom-bust economic cycles, and ethical tolerance of vice. The excerpts reveal that many problems associated with modern San Francisco—and modern cities generally—were already present in the frontier city over 150 years ago. Scott provides minimal commentary, letting the historical parallels speak for themselves. Shorter summary

A person repeatedly wakes up in a Matrix-like pod, being told different versions of reality about the concept of 'family' in a series of nested scenarios, ultimately revealed to be an alien experiment. Longer summary

This fictional story describes a series of nested simulations or scenarios where the protagonist repeatedly wakes up in a Matrix-like pod. Each time, they are told a different version of reality regarding the concept of 'family'. The story explores themes of conformity, belief systems, and the malleability of memory and perception. It ends with a twist revealing that the entire experiment was conducted by aliens seeking to understand optimal social arrangements, particularly regarding the concept of family. Shorter summary