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family

Essays tagged “family”. Follow an idea across the archive.

Essays on family

2 essays

Sep 10, 2026ACX

Royce On San Francisco

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.

16 min read 2,398 words

Jun 3, 2014SSC

Asches to Asches

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.

18 min read 2,790 words

Asch conformity experiment belief systems conformity