All the news that’s fit to print, but has nowhere to go.
This important rule is a special case of an even more important rule:
Dirty Hexas Hedge: One of the old unwritten WASP rules of civilization maintenance we’ve lost is: when someone behaves insincerely for the sake of maintaining proper decorum, you respond by respecting the commitment to decorum rather than calling out the insincerity.
The general rule is to maintain good incentives and follow good decision theory. If someone is being helpful, ensure they are better off for having been helpful, even if they have previously been unhelpful and this gives you an opportunity. Reward actions you want to happen more often. Punish actions you want to happen less often. In particular beware situations where you punish clarity and reward implicitness.
Another important rule would be that contra Elon Musk here you shouldn’t ‘sue into oblivion’ or ‘ostracize from society’ anyone or any organization who advocated for something you disagree with, even if it plausibly led to a bad thing happening.
Even more importantly: When someone disagrees with you, you don’t use the law to silence them and you most definitely don’t choose violence. Argument gets counterargument. Never bullet, no arrest, no fine, always counterargument. I don’t care what they are advocating for, up to and including things that could plausibly lead to everyone dying. It does not matter. No violence. No killing people. No tolerance of those who think they can have a little violence or killing people who disagree with them, as a treat, or because someone on the other side did it. No. Stop it.
This seems like one of those times where one has to, once again, say this.
This seems like a lot of percents?
Benjamin Domenech: New death of the West stat: 42 percent of people in line to meet Buzz Lightyear at Disney theme parks last year were childless adults.
Source: author A.J. Wolfe on Puck’s The Town podcast.
PoliMath: When I went to Disney in 2019, my kids were in line to meet Sleeping Beauty and the guy in front of us was a 30ish single dude who gave her a bouquet of roses and weirdly fawned over her. I admired the actress for not displaying her disgust.
If that is who gets the most value out of meet and greets, okay then. It also presumably isn’t as bad as it sounds since it has been a long time since Buzz Lightyear has been so hot right now, I presume characters in recent movies have a different balance. The price sounds sufficiently high that they should add more copies of such characters for meet and greets until the lines are a lot shorter? How could that not raise profits long term?
A-100 Gecs (1m views): the pearl-clutching about no young white men being published in The New Yorker is so funny like men, writ large, are basically a sub-literate population in the US. men do not read literary fiction. if you have even a passing interaction with publishing you realize this.
Kelsey Piper:
Open disdain for people on the basis of their sex is bigoted and bad.
Men obviously did read and write literary fiction for most of the history of literary fiction; so, if that has changed, I wonder why it has changed! Perhaps something to do with the open disdain!
Like in general, I try not to waste too much of my time on “this hobby has too few Xs” or “this hobby has too few Ys,” since that can happen totally organically, and pearl-clutching rarely helps.
However, if the hobbyists are saying “our hobby has no men because they are a ‘subliterate population,’” then I suddenly form a strong suspicion about why their hobby has no men, and it’s not that people innocently have different interests sometimes.
John Murdoch gives us many great charts in the FT, but often we lack key context and detail, because as John explains he only has very limited space and 700 words and everything needs to be parsable by a general audience, so spending space on methodology or a full y-axis is very expensive. We appreciate your service, sir. It would still be great to have the Professional Epistemically Ideal Edition available somewhere, any chance we can do that?
Reading books for pleasure continues to decline by roughly 3% per year. Alternatives are improving, while books are not improving, indeed the best books to read are mostly old books. So what else would you expect? Until recently I would say people are still reading more because a lot of screen use is reading, but now we have the rise of inane short form video.
Madeleine Aggeler figures out very basic reasons why you might want to not be constantly lying, and that she would be better off if she stopped lying constantly and that you really can tell people when you don’t want to do something, yet she fails to figure out that not lying does not require radical honesty. You can, and often should, provide only the information needed.
The IQ tests we have are drawn from a compact pool of question types and so can, unsurprisingly, be trained for and gamed. If you want to raise the result of your IQ test this way, you can totally do that. Goodhart’s Law strikes again. That doesn’t mean IQ is not a real or useful thing, or that these tests are not useful measures. It only means that if you want to make the (usually low-IQ) move of pretending to be higher IQ than you are by gaming the test, you can do that. So you need to not give people strong incentive to game the tests.
I often hear discussion of ‘masking’ where autistics learn how to fake not being autistic and seem like normies, or similarly where sociopaths learn not to act like sociopaths (in the clinical sense, not the Rao Gervais Principle sense) and seem like normies, because they realize that works out better for them. I mention this because I notice I rarely hear mention of the fact that (AIUI) the normies are mostly doing the same exact thing, except that they more completely Become The Mask and don’t see it as a strange or unfair or bad thing to do this kind of ubiquitous mimicry, and instead do it instinctively?
Eugyppius: when you’re with girl, do not quietly remove bugs. call her attention to bugs first, then heroically remove them for her. they love this.
Lindy Man: This is also good advice for the workplace. Never fix anything quietly.
Sean Kelly: When I discover a bug and figure out the solution, I don’t fix it.
I have an accomplice report it and play up how bad it is in the stand up.
Then I sagely chime in, “I bet I can figure that one out.”
If the bug looks tough, the accomplice suggests the H-1B with the shortest queue.
Caroline: People will fix things quietly and then complain they’re underappreciated. Does anyone even know what you did? lol
Kyle Junlong: ah yes, “half the work is showing your work.”
honestly this is so powerful. i’m realizing how valuable communication and visibility is, not just in work but in relationships and life.
i used to think managing other people’s perception of me was stupid and frivolous, but now i realize how *ijudge other people is solely based on my perception (eg., the convenient information) i have of them. so of course it makes sense to present myself well, because i like those who do present themselves well to me.
Over time, if you don’t take credit for things, people notice that you silently fix or accomplish or improve things without taking credit or bothering anyone about it, and you get triple credit, for fixing things, for doing it seamlessly and for not needing or requesting credit. The problem is, you need a sufficiently sustained and observed set of interactions, and people sufficiently aware of the incentive dynamics here, so that you can move the whole thing up a meta level.
There is also the reverse. If you know someone who will always loudly take credit, you know that at most they are doing the things they loudly take credit for. If that.
I am generally skeptical that we should worried about inequality, as opposed to trying to make people better off. One danger that I am convinced by is that extreme inequality that is directly in your face can damage your mental health, if you see yourself in competition with everyone on the spectrum rather than being a satisficer or looking at your absolute level of wealth and power.
Good Alexander: I think the main reason you find a lot of very unhappy tech people even at the highest levels
– when you’re a typical employee everyone around you is making .5-2x what you are
– when you start breaking out wealth goes on log scale. ppl with 10-1000x your net worth become common
– this is native to network effects, scale associated with AI training, and other winner take all dynamics in tech
– all of VC is structured this way as well — (1 unicorn returns entire fund rest of investments are zero) which psychologically reinforces all or nothing thinking
– this makes competitive people miserable
– this leads them to do hallucinogens or other psychoactive substances in order to accept their place in the universe
– the conclusions drawn from these psychoactive substances are typically at direct odds with how they got to where they are
– and after getting one shotted they’re still ultimately in a hard wired competition with people worth 10-1000x more than them
– due to the structure of technology it becomes more or less impossible to break out of your ‘bracket’ without engaging in increasingly dark things
– you realize that time is running out — and become aware of synthetic biology (peptides, genetic alteration of children)
– you end up getting involved in police state investments, gooning investments, or crypto — and view it as non optional to take the gloves off bc everyone around you is doing the same thing
– you’re on a permanent hedonic treadmill and you can’t ever get off or go back to where you were before bc after doing all of the things you’ve done you can’t possibly ever relate to normal humans
– you get involved with politics or Catholicism or other Lindy cults to try and get off the treadmill
– of course it won’t work and you bring all the weird baggage directly into politics or religion and poison those wells too
the current configuration of economics/ wealth distribution is pretty solidly optimized to drive the wealthiest people in society batshit insane, which – to some extent – explains a lot of things you see around you
w this framework you can understand:
Thiel Antichrist obsession
Kanye getting into Hitler and launching a coin
Trump memeing himself into becoming President then running again to escape imprisonment
Elon generating Ani goon slop on the TL
A16z wilding out
Eliezer Yudkowsky: – supposed “AI safety” guys (outside MIRI) founding AI companies, some of whom got billions for betraying Good and Law.
I have felt a little pressure to feel insane about that, but it is small compared to all the other antisanity pressures I’ve resisted routinely.
David Manheim: This is definitely not wrong, even though it’s incomplete:
“the current configuration of economics/ wealth distribution is pretty solidly optimized to drive the wealthiest people in society batshit insane, which – to some extent – explains a lot of things you see around you”
Speaking from experience, it is quite the trip to be in regular contact and debates with various billionaires. It can definitely make one feel like a failure or like it’s time to make more money, even though I have enough money to not worry about money, especially when you think you definitely could have joined them by making different life choices, and there’s a chance I still could. Whereas, when in prior phases of life I was not in such contact, it was easy not to care about any of that.
It helps to remind myself periodically that if I had a billion dollars, I could make the world a better place, but except insofar as I prevented us all from dying my own life would, I anticipate, not actually be better as a result. At that level, there isn’t that much more utility to buy, whereas more money, more problems.
It’s not easy buying art.
cold: Bro you make $500k at OpenAI you can go to the art fair and buy a little $10,000 painting to hang up in your SF apartment’s living room
You tell them this and then they’ll be like “I’m sorry 🥺 do you think a $15,000 desert meditation retreat will fix me so I’m not like this anymore??”
Daniel: The lack of personal art purchasing in SF is insane. A $3000 oil on canvas can change your whole living room and they won’t do it.
I know people who earn much more than $500k at openai and their living rooms are making them depressed.
Paul Graham: The main reason rich people in SV don’t buy art is that it does actually take some expertise to do it well. And since the kind of people who get rich in SV hate to do things badly, and don’t have time to learn about art now, they do nothing.
diffTTT: Rich SV people need an expert to tell them what kind of art they like?
Paul Graham: In a way. They need to learn how not to be fooled by meretricious art, how to avoid the immense influence of hype and fashion, etc. Most people have to figure this out for themselves or from books, but a truly competent expert could help.
If it takes some expertise to buy art well, that is a real problem with buying art. The thing is, if you do not buy art well, you will lose most of the money you spent on art, and also you will look like a fool, and also the art will not make you feel better or much improve your living room.
That leaves four options.
The one these people and I have taken, which is to not buy art.
Buy cheap art that you don’t mind looking at. Safe, but still annoying to do, and then you have to look at it, does it actually make you feel better?
Spend a lot of time figuring out how to buy expensive art properly. Yeah, no. I understand that Paul Graham can be in renaissance man mode, but if you are coding at OpenAI at $500k+ per year the cost of this is very, very high, and also you probably don’t expect the skill to stay relevant for long.
Find someone you trust to do it for you? Not cheap, not all that easy or quick to do either, and you are still the one who has to look at the damn thing.
Besides, who is to say that a constant piece of artwork actually helps, especially if it doesn’t hold particular meaning to you? I mean, yeah, in theory yeah we should get some artwork here, I suppose, but no one wants to do the work involved, also it should definitely be cheap art. At one point I bought some Magic: The Gathering prints for this but we never got around to hanging them.
Also at one point I tried to buy the original art for Horn of Greed, which at the time would have cost like $3k. I say tried because my wife wouldn’t let me, but if anyone wants to buy me a gift at some point, that or another original Magic art I’d look back on fondly seems great.
If there is one thing to learn from rationality: Peter Wildeford is 100% right here.
Wikipedia (Wet Bias): Wet bias is the phenomenon whereby some weather forecasters report an overestimated and exaggerated probability of precipitation to increase the usefulness and actionability of their forecast.
The Weather Channel has been empirically shown, and has also admitted, to having a wet bias in the case of low probability of precipitation (for instance, a 5% probability may be reported as a 20% probability) but not at high probabilities of precipitation (so a 60% probability will be reported as a 60% probability).
Some local television stations have been shown as having significantly greater wet bias, often reporting a 100% probability of precipitation in cases where it rains only 70% of the time.
Colin Fraser: If you believe it will rain with probability P, and getting caught in the rain without an umbrella is X times worse than getting caught in the sun with an umbrella, then it’s optimal to predict rain whenever P ≥ 1/(1+X). So e.g. for X=2 you should predict rain at P ≥ 1/3.
Peter Wildeford: I think you should only predict rain according to the correct p(rain), but you can change your behavior around umbrella carrying at lower values of p(rain).
Colin Fraser is right if you effectively can only predict 0% or 100% rain, and the only purpose of predicting rain is that you take an umbrella if and only if you predict rain.
Peter Wildeford is right that you can say ‘it will rain 40% of the time, therefore I should take an umbrella, even though more than half the time I will look foolish.’
The weather reports are assuming that people have a typical bias, that people respect 40% chance or more, but not 30%. Thus, there is a huge jump (AIUI, and Claude confirms). If the Google weather app says 30%, treat that as at most 10%, but the app doesn’t want to get blamed so it hedges. Whereas if it says 40%? That’s pretty much 40%, act accordingly.
If you don’t know the way the conversion works, and you don’t have the typical biases, you’ll respond in crazy wrong fashion. The bias and nonlinearity become self-perpetuating.
The right rule in practice really is to take the umbrella at 40% and not at 30%, almost no matter what the cost-benefit tradeoff is for the umbrella, since it is obviously wise at 40% and obviously unwise at 10%.
The ‘predict 100% instead of 70%’ thing that other sources do is especially maddening. This means both that you can’t tell the difference between 70% and 100%, and that on the regular you notice things that were predicted as Can’t Happen actually happening. The weather forecaster is consigned to Bayes Hell and you can’t trust them at all.
As Bryan Caplan notes, this is frequently a better question than ‘if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?’ It is a very good question.
His rejections of various responses are less convincing, with many being highly oversimplifying and dismissive of many things people often care about deeply. He presents answers as if they were easy and obvious when they are neither of those things.
I endorse rejection of the objection ‘the world is so awful that you have to be stupid to be happy.’ I don’t endorse his reasoning for doing so. I do agree with him that the world is in a great spot right now (aside from existential risks), but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that it isn’t improving your life or anyone else’s to let your view of the world’s overall state make you indefinitely unhappy. If you think you ‘have’ to be stupid not to be perpetually unhappy for whatever external reason, you’re wrong.
I also agree with him that one good reason to not be happy is that you are prioritizing something else. He retorts that few people are extreme Effective Altruists, but this is not required. You don’t have to be some fanatic, to use his example, to miserably stay together for the kids. What you care about can be anything, including personal achievements other than happiness. Who says you have to care about happy? Indeed, I see a lot of people not prioritizing happiness enough, and I see a lot of other people prioritizing it far too much.
There’s also another answer, which is that some people have low happiness set points or chemical imbalances or other forms of mental problems that make it extremely difficult for them to be happy. That’s one of the ways in which one can have what Bryan calls ‘extraordinary bad luck’ that you can’t overcome, but there are other obvious ways as well.
From a public choice standpoint I suppose this was inevitable. However, this phases out at higher income levels, which means that none of the prominent people you are thinking of likely can benefit from this. As in, Republicans proudly embraced progressive taxation to partially offset regressive tariffs? So yes, I do accept tips, and very much appreciate them along with subscriptions, but alas after consulting with my tax lawyer (GPT-5 Pro) I have concluded that I cannot benefit from this policy.
I think I agree that in a purely aesthetic sense people did dress ‘better,’ but that is because people in the past put massive investment into this. They spent a huge percentage of their income on clothes, they spent a large percentage of their time and attention on understanding, creating and maintaining those clothes, and they were willing to suffer a lot of discomfort. And they faced huge social and status pressures to devote such efforts, with large punishments for not measuring up to norms.
Derek notes our reduced tolerance for discomfort and lack of effort, but skips over all the extra money and time and cognitive investments, seems to lack the ‘and this is good, actually’ that I would add. I think it’s pretty great that we have largely escaped from these obligations. The juice is not worth the squeeze.
Santi Ruiz interviews Dr. Rob Johnston on the intelligence community and how to get good intelligence and make good use of it. There’s lots of signs of a lot of deep competence and dedication, but clearly the part where they deliver the information and then people use it is not going great. Also not going great is getting ready for AI.
Texas becomes the seventh state to ban lab grown meat. Tim Carney becomes the latest person to be unable to understand there could be any reason other than cronyist protectionism to want this banned. Once again I reiterate that I don’t support these bans, but it seems disingenuous to prevent not to understand the reasons they are happening. James Miller offers a refresher of the explanation, if you need one, except that the demands wouldn’t stop with what Miller wants.
No, the Black Death was not good for the economy, things were improving steadily for centuries for other reasons. As opposed to every other pass famine or plague ever, where no one looks back and says ‘oh this was excellent for economic conditions.’
It is relatively easy to stay rich once already rich. It is not easy to get rich, or to be ‘good at’ being rich. It is also hard to be rich effectively, including in terms of turning that extra money into better lived experiences, and ‘use the money to change the world’ is even harder.
Roon: its amazing how little the post-economic people i know spend. many people are bad at being rich. you should teach them how to do it.
i think this is often why the children of the mega-rich are the ones who even get close to squandering their parents’ fortunes. when you get rich later into life you often don’t think with enough 0s in terms of personal consumption, donations, having a lavish household staff etc.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: In their defense, once you’ve already got your personal chef, volcano lair with trampoline, and a harem that covers all your kinks, there’s just not much else Earth offers for converting money to hedons.
Zvi Mowshowitz: It is remarkably difficult (and time consuming!) to spend large amounts of money in ways that actually make your life better, if you’re not into related status games.
I got into a number of arguments in the comments, including with people who thought a remarkably small amount of money was a ‘large amount.’ Certainly you can usefully spend substantially more than most people are able to spend and still see gains.
Reasonably quickly you hit a wall, and the Andy Warhol ‘everyone gets the same Diet Coke’ problem, and to do better you have to spend obscene amounts for not that much improvement. Are you actually going to be that much happier with a giant yacht or a private jet? What good is that private chef compared to Caviar or going to restaurants? Do you actually want to live farther away in some mansion? Does expensive art do anything for you cheap art doesn’t? And so on.
Even in the ways that would be good to spend more, you still need to know how to spend more and get value from what you paid, and how to do it without it taking up a ton of your time, attention or stress. Again, this is harder than it sounds.
We talk constantly about ‘losing to China’ whereas in China there are reasons to worry that China is losing, not to an outside force but rather in general, and this is on top of a fertility rate that is 1.1 or below and an already declining population:
Mike Bird: Useful chart from @andrewbatson here covering one of the most under-discussed and useful macro metrics around. China’s capital productivity has been in consistent, marked decline even as panic over Chinese industrial prowess has reached fever pitch
Indeed as of 2019-2023 China’s marginal product of capital (basically how much output you’re getting from another unit of capital) was only very slightly higher than that of the US, though the US is at the frontier of GDP per capita and China nowhere near.
Clearly both things can be true – that some of China’s leading industrial firms are incredibly impressive, world-leading, and that in the aggregate they’re not enough to offset the misallocation and inefficiency elsewhere.
He quotes that the manufacturing share of GDP in China, for all our worries about Chinese manufacturing, declined 2-3 percent between 2021 and 2025, with the sector now having narrower margins, lower profits and more losses.
All of this is more reason not to give them opportunity to invest more in AI, and also reason not to catastrophize.
Cate Hall thanks you for coming to her TED talk, ‘A Practical Guide To Taking Control of Your Life.’ Which is indeed the Cate Hall TED Talk you would expect, focusing on cultivating personal agency.
In my startup roundups I muse about why don’t startups offered TMM (too much money, here presumably also at too high a valuation) take the money and then set expectations accordingly? A commenter pointed out that Stripe did do a version of this, although it is not a perfect fit.
Motivation and overcoming fear are tricky. You can get people comfortable with public speaking with complements. You can also do it by having people starting with you come up and give intentionally terrible speeches while they get crumpled papers thrown at them, to show that nothing actually bad happens.
When people rate their happiness, are they rating on an absolute scale that reflects a real treadmill effect, or are people simply asking if they are happy compared to what they know?
It seems obviously possible to raise national happiness. One existence proof is that there are very clearly regimes, policies and circumstances that make people very unhappy, and you can do the opposite of those things, at least dodging them.
Also there are things that consistently raise happiness and that vary in frequency greatly over time, for example being married and having grandchildren.
Abstract: We revisit the famous Easterlin paradox by considering that life evaluation scales refer to a changing context, hence they are regularly reinterpreted.
We propose a simple model of rescaling based on both retrospective and current life evaluations, and apply it to unexploited archival data from the USA.
When correcting for rescaling, we find that the well-being of Americans has substantially increased, on par with GDP, health, education, and liberal democracy, from the 1950s to the early 2000s.
Using several datasets, we shed light on other happiness puzzles, including the apparent stability of life evaluations during COVID-19, why Ukrainians report similar levels of life satisfaction today as before the war, and the absence of parental happiness.
Tyler Cowen: To give some intuition, the authors provide evidence that people are more likely engaging in rescaling than being stuck on a hedonic treadmill. I think they are mostly right.
This makes tons of sense to me. You get revolutions of rising expectations. There are definitely positional effects and treadmill effects and baseline happiness set points and all that to deal with, but the Easterlin Paradox is a paradox for a reason and things other than income vary as well.
That doesn’t mean life is getting better or people are getting happier. It can also go the other way, and I am very open to the idea that happiness could be declining (or not) in the smartphone era with kids not allowed to breathe outside, and everything else that causes people to feel bad these days both for good and bad reasons. But yeah, from the 1950s to the 1990s things seem like they very clearly got better (you could also say from the 1500s to 1990s, with notably brief exceptions, or earlier, and I’d still agree).
Camp Social is part of a category of offerings where adults go to sleepaway camp with a focus on making friends, complete with bunk beds and color wars and in one case a claimed 75% return rate, although also with staying up until 1: 30 getting drunk. The camp counselors are concierges and facilitators. Cost is $884 for two nights and three days, which seems rather quick for what you want to accomplish?
I do buy that this is a good idea.
Radiation is dangerous, but it is a lot less dangerous than people make it out to be, and we treat this risk with orders of magnitude more paranoia than things like ordinary air pollution that are far more deadly.
Ben Southwood: The life expectancy of someone hit with 2,250 millisieverts of radiation in Hiroshima or Nagasaki was longer than the average Briton or American born in the same year. Today in Britain we spend billions controlling radiation levels more than 100,000 times smaller than this.
2,250 millisieverts is a lot of radiation, like getting 225 full-body CT scans in one go. I don’t think anyone would recommend it. But it shows how ridiculous it is that we spend so much time, effort, and money on radiation levels of 1msv or 0.1 msv per year.
Andrew Hammel reports that the Germans are finally on the verge of losing their War on Air Conditioning, as in allowing ordinary people to buy one, because normies actually experienced air conditioning and are not idiots. The standard ‘urban haute bourgeoisie’ are holding out on principle, because they think life is about atoning for our sins and because they associate things like air conditioning with wasteful Americans. As you would expect, the alternative ‘solutions’ to heat wind up being exponentially more expensive than using AC.
I do note that they have a point on this one:
Andrew Hammel: First of all, *every oneof these people has a story about visiting the USA and nearly freezing to death in an over air-conditioned store or office. Every. Damn. One. I can predict exactly when they will wheel out this traumatic tale, I just let it unfold naturally.
I mean, I have that too, to the point that it is a serious problem. This happens constantly in Florida. Even in New York’s hotter summer days, I have the problem that there is nothing I can wear outside while walking to the restaurant, that I also want to be wearing once I sit down at the restaurant. It is crazy how often Americans will use the AC to make places actively too cold. We could stand to turn it down a notch.
Or rather, ‘the’ good news, as Elizabeth Van Nostrand lays out how Church Planting works and finds it very similar to Silicon Valley startups.
A counterargument to last month’s claim about rapidly declining conscientiousness. Conscientiousness has declined far more modestly, the decline here is still seems meaningful but is very is not be a crisis. What John did to create the original graph turns out to have been pretty weird, which was show a decline in relative percentile terms that came out looking like a Really Big Deal.
Cartoons Hate Her!is on point that germs are very obviously real and cause disease but quite a lot of people’s specific worries about vectors for being exposed germs and the associated rituals are deeply silly if you stop to think about physics, especially compared to other things the same people disregard.
Indeed, we should be putting all the old PBS kids shows on YouTube, and everything else that it would be good for kids to be watching on the margin. The cost is low, the benefits are high. There are low quality versions of the shows of my extreme youth available (such as Letter People and Square One TV) but ancient-VHS quality is a dealbreaker for actually getting kids to watch.
What TV show had the worst ending? There are lots of great answers but the consensus is (in my opinion correctly) Game of Thrones at #1 and Lost at #2.
After that it gets more fractured, and the other frequent picks here I am in position to evaluate were mostly bad endings (HIMYM, Killing Eve, Enterprise, Battlestar Galactica) but not competitive for the top spot. Dexter came up a lot but I never watched. Supernatural came up a bunch, and I’m currently early in its final and 15th season and is it weird this makes me want to get to the end more not less? Better a truly awful end than a whimper?
To be the true worst ending, it has to not only be awful but take what could have been true greatness and actively ruin the previous experience. You need to be in the running for Tier 1 and then blow it so badly you have to think about whether it even stays in Tier 2 because they poisoned everything. That’s why Game of Thrones and Lost have to be so high.
Indeed those two are so bad that they substantially hurt our willingness to invest in similar other shows, especially Lost-likes, which is enforcing the good discipline of forcing for example Severance to assure us they have everything mapped out.
(Briefly on the others: While at the time I thought HIMYM’s ending was as bad as everyone thinks, on reflection it has grown on me and I think it is actually fine, maybe even correct. Killing Eve’s ending wasn’t good exactly, but I didn’t feel it ruined anything, it was more that all of season 4 was a substantial decline in quality. Battlestar Galactica was rage inducing but I understand why they did what they did and that mostly made it okay, again mostly the show started fantastic and was dropping off in quality generally. Enterprise ended bad, but again not historically bad, whereas the show wasn’t getting bad, and mostly the frustration was we weren’t done.
I heard the claim recently that Lost’s ending is aging well, as it suffered from the writers assuring us that they wouldn’t do the thing they did, whereas now looking back no one much cares. There’s that, but I still find it unsatisfying, they said they wouldn’t do it that way for a reason, and the worse offense was the total failure to tie up loose ends and answer questions.
Scott Sumner: The public prefers 1980-2015, as you say. The movie experts say the 1920s-1970s were the best.
This highlighted the ways in which our preferences strongly diverge.
Another big hint is that Sumner and the experts claim an extremely high correlation of director with quality of movie. Great directors are great, but so many other things matter too.
As an example, recently I watched Mulholland Drive for the first time, which Sumner says might be his favorite film. I appreciated many aspects of it, and ended up giving it 4/5 stars because it was in many senses ‘objectively’ excellent, but I did not actually enjoy the experience, and had to read an explainer afterwards from Film Colossus to make sense of a lot of it, and even after understanding it a lot of what it was trying to do and say left me cold, so I didn’t feel I could say I ‘liked’ it.
From what I can tell, the public is right and the ‘experts’ are wrong. Also I strongly suspect that We’re So Back after a pause of timidity and sequilitius and superheroes.
Scott Sumner: There are two films that should never, ever be watched on TV. One is 2001 and the other is Lawrence of Arabia. If you saw them on anything other than a very big movie theatre screen, then you’ve never actually seen them.
I haven’t seen 2001 regardless, but on Lawrence of Arabia I can’t argue, because I attempted to watch it on a TV, and this indeed did not result in me seeing Lawrence of Arabia, because after half an hour I was absolutely bored to tears and could not make myself continue. There was a scene in which they literally just stood there in the sand for about a minute with actual nothing happening and I get what they were trying to do with that but it was one thing after another and I couldn’t even, I was out.
What I am confused by is how it would have improved things to make the screen bigger, unless it would be so one would feel forced to continue watching?
Here are his 13 suggestions for films to watch, although I have no idea how one would watch Lawrence of Arabia given it has to be on a big screen?
Vertigo, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Touch of Evil, Some Like It Hot, Breathless, Jules and Jim, Last Year in Marienbad, High and Low, The End of Summer, 8 1/2, L’Avventura, The Music Room, Lawrence of Arabia.
I tried to watch High and Low, and got an hour in but increasingly had the same sense I got from The Seven Samurai, which is ‘this is in some objective senses a great movie and I get that but I have to force myself to keep watching it as outside of moment-to-moment it is not holding my interest’ except with more idiot plot – and yes I realize some of that is cultural differences and noticing them is the most interesting thing so far but I’m going to stick with idiot plot anyway. In addition to the idiot aspects, it really bothers me that ‘pay or pretend to pay the ransom’ is considered the obviously moral action. It isn’t, that is terrible decision theory. The moral action is to say no, yet there is not even a moment’s consideration of this question by anyone.
If the above paragraph is still there when you read this, it means I was unable to motivate myself to keep watching.
Jeff Yang explains some of the reasons Chinese movies tend to bomb in America, in particular the global hit Ne Zha 2. Big Chinese movies tend to be based on super complex Chinese traditional epic stories that Chinese audiences already know whereas Americans haven’t even seen Ne Zha 1. American stories have clear structure, understandable plots, payoffs for their events, central characters, and a moral vision that believes in progress or that things can be better. And they try to be comprehensible and to maintain a tonal theme and target market. Chinese movies, Yang reports, don’t do any of that. Effectively, they assume the audience already knows the story, which is the only way they could possibly follow it.
It’s as if Marvel movies were the big hits, and they didn’t try to be comprehensible to anyone who didn’t already know the characters and comics extensively? Certainly there are some advantages. It might be cool to see the ‘advanced’ directors cuts where it was assumed everyone had already either read the comics extensively or watched the normal version of the film?
As Jeff says, if they can make money in China, then sure, why not do all this stuff that the Chinese audiences like even if it alienates us Westerners. There are enough movies for everyone. It does still feel like we’re mostly right about this?
Like everyone else I think Hollywood movies are too formulaic and similar, and too constrained by various rules, and thus too predictable, but those rules exist for a reason. When older movies or foreign movies break those rules, or decide they are not in any kind of hurry whatsoever, it comes at a cost. I don’t think critics respect those costs enough.
I strongly agree with Alea here and I am one of the ones who want to stay away:
Alea: Novels with an empty mystery box should be explicitly tagged so I can avoid them. 110% of the joy of reading comes from uncovering all the deep lore and tying up every loose end. Some people get off on vague worlds and unfinished plots, and they should stay the fuck away.
I don’t especially want to go into deep lore in my spare time, but if you are going to convince me to read a novel then even more than with television you absolutely owe it to me to deliver the goods, in a way (with notably rare exceptions) that I actually understand when reading it.
As in: I know it’s a great book but if as is famously said, ‘you don’t read Ulysses, you reread Ulysses’ then you had me at ‘you don’t read Ulysses.’
And you definitely don’t read Game of Thrones until I see A Dream of Spring.
True facts about the whole ‘fleeing Earth’ style of story:
Ben Dreyfuss: The stupidest part of INTERSTELLAR is that the blight starts killing all the crops and after just a few decades they go “ah well, guess it won! Better leave earth. Hope we solve this magic gravity equation with the help of 5 dimensional beings and wormholes.”
“We can’t make okra anymore. Better go explore this all water planet where one hour is 7 years of time and this ice planet where water is alkaline and the air is full of ammonia.”
Pretty sure you can’t make okra there either, buddy.
Kelsey Piper: every single movie about people fleeing Earth involves displaying a mastery of technology which would obviously be more than sufficient to solve the problem they are fleeing Earth about
climate change is not going to make Earth less habitable than Mars so you can’t have people fleeing to Mars because of climate change, you just can’t.
‘there’s a supervolcano/asteroid induced ice age’ oh boy I have some news for you about Mars.
Daniel Eth: Just once I want a movie about people fleeing Earth to have the premise “there are trillions of people, and we have a per capita energy consumption of 100,000 kWh/yr, which is straining Earth’s ability to radiate the waste heat. We must now go to space to expand capacity”
Movie could have a real frontier vibe (space cowboys?) – “of course back in the old world (Earth), population and energy per capita are subject to bureaucratic regulations to prevent total ecosystem collapse; but in new worlds we can freely expand anew”
A recent different case of ‘I can’t help but notice this makes no sense’ was Weapons. The link goes to a review from Matthew Yglesias that I agree with, it does cool things with nonlinearity and the performances and cinematography are good except when you put it together in the second half the resulting actual plot, while consistent and straightforward, makes no sense.
Zvi Mowshowitz reviews Weapons while avoiding spoilers: When you’re in, writing or deciding to go to a horror movie, you make dumb decisions. It’s what you do.
The difference is to him this adds up to 3.5 stars, and to me it means 2.5 stars, once the holes and idiot balls became too glaring, I stopped being able to enjoy the film.
My other problem with Weapons was that the first two acts made me care about various characters and relationships that were rich and detailed and well-executed and acted, and then the third act didn’t care at all about those things, only about the main plot that did not make any sense. There might actually be a pretty great movie here in which the missing kids are a tragedy that never gets explained or solved because what matters is a different third act that focuses on how people react to it.
Erik Gibbs: The bill’s language defines a micro bet as any live proposition bet placed during an event that pertains specifically to the outcome of the next discrete play or action.
This restriction seems clearly good. I don’t know where the line should be drawn, but I am confident that ‘ball or strike’ bets are over the line.
It is a very light restriction – you can’t bet on a ball or strike or pass or run under this rule, but you can still bet on the outcome of an inning or drive. Bets on the next play have all the worst gambling attributes. They cost a lot individually, they resolve and compound super quickly, they are especially prone to addictive behavior.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 finishes at Tier 2. It does a lot of things very right and I am very happy to have played it, despite some obvious issues, including some serious balance problems in Act 3.
If someone suddenly buys up the contract on Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce getting engaged from 20% to 40%, and you’re selling into it, yeah, good chance they know. Also this means yes, someone knew and traded on the information in advance. Cool. Oh, and congratulations to both of them, of course.
I don’t understand why Wizards of the Coast continues to be so slow on the banhammer in situations like Cauldron. We saw repeatedly exactly the broken format pattern, such as here where Cauldron starts out at 30% and then goes to 56% after six rounds, then a much larger majority of the top 8s. This continued long past the point where there was reasonable hope it would be fixed by innovation.
Mason Iange: Doesn’t it make sense that in a rotating format like standard, wotc wants people to have confidence in buying product and building decks? Literally no one is going to play standard if the best decks just get banned every 2 month.
Saffron Olive: The way I see is it there are two paths: you design cards conservatively and don’t need to ban anything, or you design cards aggressively and need to ban cards fairly often. Wizards is trying to design cards aggressively and never ban anything, which I don’t think is actually possible.
Patrick Sullivan: What you’re saying is true/relevant, but there are other considerations; the current state of affairs would clearly not be tolerated absent the stuff you’re mentioning. That’s why I think they should allow themselves to be as agile as possible regardless of what they decide to do.
Brian Kowal: The opposite of how I feel about rotating formats. I want it dynamic. I’d rather they make a balanced format. With a rotating format I want to feel like I can innovate. If it is solved I quickly lose interest. There are many formats that never rotate to protect investment.
I think ‘mix it up every time it is solved’ is going too far given how quickly we now solve formats, but the solution has to not be ‘play this deck or else.’ Yes, banning the best deck every two months would make you reluctant to invest in Standard, but effectively banning all but the best deck for months on end, or having to face an endless stream of the same overpowered nonsense even if you’re willing to sacrifice win rate to go rogue, is even worse.
They came out with an explanation and update on the 9th. A big part of this is that they screwed up timing the ban windows, and have a crazy high bar for doing “emergency” bans versus bans on announcement days. They are mitigating this going forward by adding more windows next year, one every major set release.
That points out how crazy the situation was. You’re going to release a set, and then not have a ban opportunity until after releasing the next set? That’s crazy.
Based on past experiences, I believe Brian Kowal is correct that an extended period of a miserable format, with bans that everybody knows have to happen but are extensively delayed, creates a point of no return, where permanent damage to the format and the game begins to accumulate.
Brian Kowal: There should be room in the ban policy for emergency bans. Perception has hit the point of no return. A significant portion of players do not want to touch Standard now. Rotation should be when we are creating players for the next year and this rotation lasts until January 2027! (I’m 80% on this. Somebody let me know if I’m wrong) Players are quitting Standard again to look for other games and formats. New players are choosing not to invest in it.
When format perception hits this state everybody knows something is getting a ban. So a lot of die hard competitives are even taking a break rather than buying 4 copies of the two most expensive cards in Standard.
The best way to go imo is to just suck it up and ban Cauldron immediately. Again, we all know it is happening anyway. Not taking action over and over again and just letting everybody suffer months of a bad format makes WOTC look like they don’t care.
Jenny: WotC took HOW long to decide to do nothing and ruin another Spotlight Series and RCQ season? Using the Arena ladder meta to judge the health of the format is *insane*
Pactdoll Terror: My 2-slot RCQ this Saturday in NYC sold 8 spots. I usually do 50. Someone who built Vivi to grind RCQs would be annoyed that it got banned, but Standard is DEAD locally. Weeklies aren’t launching, RCQs struggle to make money. Holding bans is bad for everyone except Vivi players.
Instead they’re going to do a strange compromise, and move up their next announcement date from November 24 to November 10, which still leaves two full months of this.
We should never have more than a month ‘in limbo’ where things are miserable and we know what is coming. Even if you decide to keep playing you are in an impossible position.
They say ‘Standard has not yet reached its final form’ but they are grasping at straws.
They say the Arena ladder is looking less awful. The Arena ladder is not real life, not only because the play level is low but also there’s nothing forcing the players to play the best deck. I learned that the hard way during the Oko era.
I get Carmen’s argument here that we ran the experiment and when you don’t have ban windows, you get constant speculation about potential bans and a lot of uncertainty, And That’s Terrible. You can’t fully embrace The Unexpected Banning. There needs to be a substantially higher bar outside of a fixed set of days.
The current situation was still ludicrous. While insufficiently competitive play is not as lopsided, that’s largely about card access and players wanting to have fun and of course not wanting to do this into a future ban. This ban would not be ‘from under players in a surprise move’ even if no formal warning was given. The idea that ‘we won’t make a move based on competitive play, only on non-competitive play, you competitors don’t much matter’ is definitely giving me even less desire to come back.
Which of course I get. Magic is not made for me. I’m just deeply sad about it.
I see the argument this isn’t a pure ‘do it today or else’ situation but it is an emergency. If I was Wizards, the moment it was clear we probably had a problem I would have created a new announcement date much closer in the future than two months, with the clear statement that at that time they would choose whether to ban Vivi, Caldron, both or neither. And then done it by now.
Sam Black: The house games are more fun when we don’t play for draws. Similarly games in top 16 are more fun.
Ultimately, I don’t think any solution would satisfy me, since it is going to come down to pure politics and kingmaker decisions. One potential approach is to say that wins are 10, draws are 1, and we pair people accordingly, so taking the draw is not obviously good for you, it might be wiser to lose and get paired against others who aren’t playing for draws. In the 0-0-4 bracket I don’t like your winning chances, and you have to win at some point to make the cut.
The exception (he seems to assumes in the modern era this won’t ever happen, which seems wrong to me) is if you are in danger of not having a deck, because you lack either enough cards or a key component, such that taking a usually bad card actually does provide substantial improvement.
Some cards that look bad, and have bad win rates, are instead good in the sense that they have high upside, but are being used badly by people who use them without the upside case. Sam’s example is a card that defaults to being a bad Divination but enables never running out of cards, so you can build your entire strategy around this, but if you put in your deck as a bad Divination then it will be bad.
As of the start of September, there are still only 2,000 Waymos: 800 in the San Francisco Bay Area, 500 in Los Angeles, 400 in Phoenix, 100 in Austin and ‘dozens’ in Atlanta.
As a point of comparison, San Francisco has ~1,800 taxi medallions, and an estimated 45,000 registered rideshare drivers, with Claude estimating there are typically 5,000 available rideshares at any given time, peaking in prime hours around 10,000.
This continues the recent trend of noticing that holding back self-driving means tens of thousands of people a year will die that didn’t have to.
Ethan Mollick: It seems like there is not enough of a policy response to the fact that, with 57M miles of data, Waymo’s autonomous vehicles experience 85% less serious injuries & 79% less injuries overall than cars with human drivers.
Think of EV policy and do long-term support: subsidies for R&D to bring down costs, incentives for including self-driving features, regulatory changes to make it easier to deploy, building infrastructure for autonomous-only vehicles (eg HOV lanes), independent testing.
Takes time.
There are many problems with this approach, including that it causes fixation on the lives saved versus cost and similar calculations, and also you sound like you are coming for people’s ability to drive. Whereas if you sell this purely as ‘Waymos are awesome and convenient and efficient and improve life greatly and also happen to be actually safe on top it’ then I think that’s way better than ‘you are killing people by getting in the way of this.’
Alice From Queens: Self-driving cars are like the new weight loss drugs.
Their value is so large, so obvious, and so scalable, that we can confidently predict their triumph regardless of knee-jerk cultural resistance and their wildly exaggerated downsides.
Yes, I’ve been saying the same thing for years. Because it still needs saying!
I mean, they totally are killing people by getting in the way, but you don’t need that.
Mostly you need to make people believe that self-driving is real and is spectacular.
Matthew Yglesias: I keep meeting people who are skeptical self-driving cars will ever happen.
I tell them I took one to the airport in Phoenix several months ago, did a test ride in DC, they’re currently all over San Francisco, etc and it’s blank stares like I’m telling them about Santa.
My model of what is holding things back for Waymo in particular right now is that mainly we have a bottleneck in car manufacturing, and there’s plenty of room to deploy a lot more cars in a bunch of places happy to have them.
Longer term, we also have to overcome regulatory problems in various places, especially foolish blue cities like New York and Boston, but I find it hard to believe they can hold out once the exponential gets going and everyone knows what they are missing. Right now with only a few hundred thousand rides a week, it’s easy to shrug it off.
Thus I think PoliMath might be onto something here:
PoliMath: I suspect Waymo doesn’t *wantthere to be a policy response to this data b/c it will inevitably end with the left demanding we ban human drivers and there will be a huge backlash that damages Waymo’s business in a serious way.
Waymo is steadily winning, as in expanding its operations. The more it expands, the better its case, the more it will be seen as inevitable. Why pick a premature fight?
Roon: It is pretty telling that when you ride in a Waymo, you cannot give instructions to Gemini to play a song, change your destination, or drive differently. When one of the great gilded tech monopolies of the world does not yet have a cohesive AI picture, what hope has the broader economy?
Eliezer Yudkowsky: AI companies are often so catastrophically stupid that I worry that Gemini might in some way be connected to the actual car. Oh wait, you explicitly want to be able to request that the car drive differently?
I do not want Gemini to be controlling the vehicle or how it drives, but there are other things that would be nice features for integration, and there are other quality of life improvements one could make as well. For now, we keep it clean and simple.
I am deeply skeptical that the discounts are this large, and my AI sanity check confirmed the savings are real but relatively modest. Also consider what ‘comfortable retirement’ means in places that (for example) won’t let you buy an air conditioner. But yeah, if you only have modest savings it seems like a good thing to consider.
YouTube Premium is an ideal product. For $10 a month you get no ads, creators get paid, and the variety of content is phenomenal. Yes, you could use AdBlock to get around it in many cases, and many will do that, but this is what the internet is supposed to look like.
Maxim Lobovsky: Not only is YouTube Premium great, it’s one of the few major ad-supported businesses offering a paid alternative. Paid social media is one of the only plausible solutions to the algorithm-driven polarization/rage-baiting/lowest-common-denominator content death spiral.
The problem is that you can’t then subscribe individually to everything else, because that adds up fast. Give me a unified YouTube Premium style subscription, please.
Yes, the failure to shut down TikTok despite a law making it illegal that was upheld by the Supreme Court 9-0 is rather insane. Trump is flat out refusing to enforce the ban and extending the deadline indefinitely, you can speculate as to why.
Downvotes, in some form, are a vital part of any social platform that has upvotes, both to maintain civility and maintain good incentives. If you can easily express pleasure there needs to also be an easy way to express displeasure. Dan Luu gives one reason, which is that otherwise people will write nasty comments as a substitute. The other reason is that otherwise maximizing for toxoplasma of rage and extreme reactions to get engagement wins and crowds other actions out. If you are going to do rankings, the rankings on LessWrong and also Reddit mostly seem quite good, and those are the only places where somewhat algorithmic feeds seem to do well.
Emmett Shear: The belief that downvotes are “uncivil” was one of the most common delusions I have encountered while working in social media.
Oliver Habryka: Yep, one of the things I always considered most crucial to maintain with LW 2.0. When I was shopping around for forum software alternatives when we started building LW 2.0 this ruled out like 80% of the options on the market.
Cremieux reports he was suspended from Twitter for a day for saying that Tea app had been hacked, which was called ‘posting other people’s private information without their express authorization and permission,’ except he did not do this or link to anyone who did do it (he said ‘you can go download 59.3 GB of user selfies right now’), whereas people who do expose such info often get ignored. He went warpath, citing various laws he asserts Twitter is breaking around the world.
(The link in the screenshot below takes you back to the post itself.)
Lewis: meanwhile post doxxing [someone’s] address was never removed. 2.5M views. reported it and DM’d Nikita, never heard back on either.
Sin: My contribution [which is literally a map containing the location with a giant arrow pointing to it saying it is where this person lives].
I saw this over a week later. Still there.
Elon Musk made a lot of mistakes with Twitter, but also did make some very good changes. One of them is that likes are now private. This damages an outsider’s ability to read and evaluate interactions, but it takes away the threat of the gotcha when someone is caught liking (or even not liking!) the wrong tweet and the general worry about perception, freeing people up to use them in various ways including to acknowledge that you’ve seen something, and to offer private approval.
It’s very freeing. When likes were public, which also means it was public what you didn’t like, I decided the only solution to this was to essentially not use the like button. Which worked, but is a big degrading of usefulness of Twitter.
Redaction: It really is insane how simply Hiding Likes On Twitter meaningfully shifted the overton window of the American political landscape
Samo Burja: I underestimated the impact change at the time. I think I thought preference falsification was much less pervasive than it was.
Meanwhile, in other contexts, it is still very much a thing to talk about who has liked which Instagram posts. This is exactly as insufferable as it sounds.
Every time Nikita tries to make me feel better about Twitter I end up feeling worse.
Nikita Bier (Twitter): The first step to eliminating spam is eliminating the incentive.
So over the last week, I have gone deep down the rabbit hole of X spam:
I am now in 3 WhatsApp groups for financial scams. I have become their friends. I know about their families. I cannot blow my cover yet.
What is the goal exactly? How would befriending them help? We already all know exactly how to identify these scams and roughly how they work. Understanding more details will not help Nikita or anyone else do anything. You think you’re going to do enough real world takedowns and arrests that people are scared to do scams, or something? How about instead we do basic filtering work?
Or, when he posts this:
Or this:
Eli: Twitter should include 3 schizophrenic reply guys and 1 egirl with Premium +
Nikita Bier: We did the math and that’s what retains a user.
He kids, but kid enough times in enough ways with enough detail and you’re not fully kidding. It is very clear that Twitter is doing a lot of the Goodhart’s Law thing, where short term feedback metrics are being chased without much eye on the overall experience. Over time, this goes to quite bad places.
Also, yeah, this is not okay:
Mike Solana: I truly believe blocking is a right, and I would never go after someone for blocking me for any reason. but you should not then be able to unblock, comment on a post of mine, and immediately REBLOCK so I can’t respond. in this case, I deserve at least 24 hours to roast your ass.
There are any number of obviously acceptable solutions to this. I like the 24 hours, where if you do something that you couldn’t do while they are blocked, your reblock is delayed for a day.
Vas: If a simple coffee shop has a bot farm with 100s of phones to amplify their message, please consider what a foreign agency or adversarial operator is running on your favorite social media platform.
Especially today, please consider that the opinions you read, the calls to violence you hear, and the news you digest, are all an operation done to sow hatred in your mind and your soul.
I may never stop finding it funny the extent to which Trump will seek out the one thing we know definitively is going badly, then and choose that to lie and brag about.
Initial market reaction was muted, the dollar only declined 0.3% and gold only rose 0.6%, likely because it was one escalation among many and it might fail, but this is a direct full assault on central bank independence, and central bank independence is a really big deal.
Jonnelle Marte and Myles Miller (Bloomberg): While a president has never removed a Fed governor from office, one can do so for cause. Laws that describe “for cause” generally define the term as encompassing three possibilities: inefficiency; neglect of duty; and malfeasance, meaning wrongdoing, in office.
What was this ‘cause’?
Trump had earlier called for Cook’s resignation after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte alleged she lied on loan applications for two properties — one in Michigan and one in Georgia — claiming she would use each property as her primary residence to secure more favorable loan terms.
Trump said it was “inconceivable” that Cook was not aware of requirements in two separate mortgage applications taken out in the same year requiring her to maintain each property as her primary residence.
That’s it. There are no additional claims. Only the claim that she claimed one place would be a primary residence, and then claimed a different primary residence.
Pulte, in a statement posted to social media, thanked Trump for removing Cook. “If you commit mortgage fraud in America, we will come after you, no matter who you are,” he wrote.
What about if you are President of the United States and have recently had a nine figure judgment against your ‘Trump’ organization entered against you for lying on mortgage applications? Are we coming for you?
Aaron Fritschner: The mortgage fraud claim against Lisa Cook is false, per documents obtained by Reuters. Bill Pulte’s accusation, the sole pretext Trump used to fire her from the Fed, was that she claimed two homes as primary residence. These docs show she did not.
“The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence.”
“documentation reviewed by Reuters for the Atlanta home filed with a court in Georgia’s Fulton County, clearly says the stipulation exists “unless Lender otherwise agrees in writing.” The loan estimate, a document prepared by the credit union, states “Property Use: Vacation Home”
Lisa Cook also didn’t claim a tax credit for primary residence on the second home and declared it as a second home on official federal government documents when she was being considered for a role on the Fed. A real master criminal.
Also her mortgage rate was 3.5%, modestly higher than the going rate at the time.
If you are going to try and fire a Federal Reserve President for cause, something that has not happened (checks notes, by which I mean GPT-5) ever, thus endangering faith in Fed independence and the entire financial system, you might want to follow due process, or at least confirm that your accusation is true? As opposed to demonstrably false?
A lot of people are understandably highly outraged about this, as Adam Tooze partly covered right after the attempted firing. This comes on the heels of firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because Trump didn’t like the statistics.
Yes, all the various ‘honesty taxes’ our government imposes (also see this highlighted comment) are extremely pernicious and do a lot more damage than people realize. We teach people they have to lie in order to get food stamps, and they (just like LLMs!) learn to generalize this, everything impacts everything, our society is saying lying is okay and lying to the government is mandatory, you can’t isolate that. You don’t get a high trust society that way, although we are remarkably high trust in some ways despite this.
Most of the time, the correct answer is not to enforce the rules as written even if we could do so, instead the correct answer is to remove or heavily modify the rule. Our rules are tuned to the idea they won’t be enforced, so it is likely enforcing them would not go well. Then there are exceptions, such as primary residence mortgage fraud.
Aaron Bergman: I think ethics- and integrity-pilled people need to have a better theory of when it’s cool to lie to *institutions
The “lying to a human” vs “lying to institution” distinction is real and important btw, the bar for the latter is much lower
Oliver Habryka: Yeah, I agree with this. I think lying to institutions is frequently fine, often roughly proportional to how big they are, though there are also other important factors.
I don’t have a great answer to exactly when this all makes it okay to lie to corporations or governments and on forms. My guess is it is roughly ‘do not break the social contract.’ But if this is something where is no longer (or never was) a social contract, and no one would look at you funny if you were doing it in the open, then fine.
If you notice you are very clearly expected to lie (including by omission) or do a fake version of something, that the system is designed that way, then you have little choice, especially if you are also forced to deal with such institutions in order to get vital goods or services.
I try to keep a high threshold for criticism but it does seem like Trump ordered a bunch of people murdered (some might use the term ‘war crime’ but I prefer plain language and also there was no war involved, the ‘war on drugs’ is not a war) on the high seas with absolutely no legal basis for doing so? He ran the plot of Clear And Present Danger straight up in the open? You didn’t know there were drugs involved, and even if you did you can’t go around blowing up boats purely because there were drugs involved?
JD Vance: Killing cartel members who poison our fellow citizens is the highest and best use of our military.
Rand Paul: JD “I don’t give a shit” Vance says killing people he accuses of a crime is the “highest and best use of the military.”
Did he ever read To Kill a Mockingbird?
Did he ever wonder what might happen if the accused were immediately executed without trial or representation??
What a despicable and thoughtless sentiment it is to glorify killing someone without a trial.
I’m sincerely and deeply confused what makes this not straight up murder and have not seen any serious arguments for why it would be anything else, as opposed to ‘yes it is murder and I really like murder for us here, yay this murder.’ It also seems, to the extent such points are relevant in 2025, like a very clear ‘high crime and misdemeanor.’
Apple’s new iPhone 17 Pro Max seems like a substantial improvement over the iPhone 16 Pro Max. You get 50% more ram, at least twice as many camera pixels, better cooling, a substantially better battery, and a new faster chip with GPUs ‘designed for AI workloads.’ I’m going to stick with my Pixel 9 Fold, the only feature on iPhones that is compelling to me at all is avoiding anti-Android discrimination, hell of a business model, but those are nice upgrades.
Apple Vision Pro is making small inroads in specialized workplaces that can exploit spatial computing, including things like exploring potential new kitchens or training airline pilots. It is expensive, but if it is the best tool, it can still be worth it. The rest of us will be waiting until it is lighter, better, faster and cheaper.
When Meta tries to have internal clarity and do research on the dangers of its products, people leak that information to the press, details get taken out of context and they get hauled before Congress.
When Meta responds to this by avoiding clarity, and suppressing the research or ignoring the problem, they get blamed for that too.
I mean, yes, why not simply actually deal with your safety problems is a valid response, but the incentives here are pretty nasty.
The central accusation is that the company’s lawyers intervened to shape research into risks from virtual reality, but I mean it would be insane for Meta not to loop the lawyers in on that research. If we are going to make Meta blameworthy, including legally, for doing the research, then yes they are going to run the research by the lawyers. This is a failure of public policy and public choice.
That doesn’t make the actual problems any less terrible, but it sounds like they are very standard. Kids were bypassing age restrictions, and when interacting with others they would get propositioned. It seems like the accusation is literally ‘Meta let its users interact with each other, and sometimes those users said or did bad things.’
Experts have long warned that virtual reality can endanger children by potentially exposing them to direct, real-time contact with adult predators.
It is remarkable how consistently even the selected examples don’t involve VR features beyond allowing users to talk? I’m not saying you don’t need to have safeguards for this, but it all sounds very similar to the paranoia and statistical illiteracy where we don’t let children participate in physical spaces anymore.
I love this report of a major problem running the other way, to which, I mean, fair:
In a January 2022 post to a private internal message board, a Meta employee flagged the presence of children in “Horizon Worlds,” which was at the time supposed to be used only by adults 18 and over. The employee wrote that an analysis of app reviews indicated many were being driven off the app because of child users.
I’m not saying Meta handled any of this perfectly or even handled it well. But there’s no smoking gun here, and no indication that they aren’t taking reasonable steps.
Matthew served, and Nate served back, so now it’s on.
Nate Silver: Academic journals might be a lost cause but they’d probably be better if you had some non-academic practitioners serving as reviewers. Journalists have their problems too but they have much better bullshit detectors, for instance.
The most important research paper of the past 10 years is the Google transformer paper (“Attention Is All You Need”) and it was written by non-academics and published in an open-access journal.
You ran some cool regression analysis OK great. Make some nice graphics and put it on a Substack. Engaging headline, 1500-2500 well-written words. That’s literally 100x faster than trying to publish in a journal and it’s better peer review anyway.
Matthew Sitman: Very, very occasionally an exceptional generalist intellectual or particularly well-informed journalist might be able to see a problem with a paper that an academic close to the subject doesn’t, but this radically underestimates the uses of expertise/familiarity with a literature.
As someone who’s been an academic and now talks/writes about ideas for non-specialists, a difference is that academics, ideally, know what they don’t know, are aware of questions asked/answered previously, etc; if that can produce tunnel vision, well, they’re trying to dig deep.
Nate Silver: Well, I know a lot about statistical inference, have been doing it for 25 years, have faced a lot of public scrutiny, and in the fields where I also have a lot of domain knowledge, probably half of published papers have obvious fatal flaws that render them unfit for publication.
Maybe I’m a weird outlier, but the peer review process is obviously broken. Maybe it’s better in the fields I *don’tknow well. But I’d be surprised if that’s true.
Aella: People don’t understand how much of a joke the current state of peer review is. It’s extremely bad.
It’s bad enough that at one point I was suggesting to someone “why don’t you just deliberately insert mistakes so they can feel satisfied about finding those and don’t end up fucking with the rest of the paper”
St. Motweb: This is actually a strategy that many academics use.
SolDad: I unironically do this in my papers, sort of. Not inserting new stuff, but leaving fairly-obvious but not super important work undone as “low hanging fruit” for the reviewers to notice and ask for.
This suggests a wager.
Select a field. A neutral party (or an LLM with an agreed upon prompt) selects 10 recent papers that meet some criteria for being Proper Papers In Good Journals and that assert some statistical finding and thus could in theory be flawed.
If Nate Silver can find a fatal flaw in at least 2 of the 10 papers, as evaluated by an agreed neutral judge, then he wins. If not, he loses. This should cover both sides: Two is enough that the system is obviously fatally flawed, and Nate says he can average five.
This is not a statement that the first best solution to peer review involved outsiders like Nate Silver reviewing papers. That seems obviously wrong. It is a claim that the current solution is so utterly terrible that outsider review would be a big improvement.
Indeed, ‘put your ideas out on the internet and let people critique them’ is the actual essence of true peer review, and far superior in practice to the formal version in 2025.
This is the peer! This is the review! That is how all of this works! This is it working!
Rob Bensinger is latest to note that we could do way better on a wide array of problems if we could improve discourse norms, and this could be a high impact play. That doesn’t mean we know how to pull it off. As he notes, prediction markets have been somewhat helpful, but seem unlikely to be the full game changer we need. Also as he notes, this would be great to pull off but there’s an attractor that causes this to look more relatively doable than it is, which can trick people into focusing on it more than they should relative to other interventions.
Kelsey Piper provides her overview of the findings that Giving People Money on a monthly basis in America does not seem to improve most outcomes, including child outcomes. They’re not ‘blowing’ the money on vices, but people give back a lot of it by working less, and while they tell stories about how great things are, most of the statistics don’t improve.
She then points us to a conservative critique of her analysis by Charles Lehman. I agree with Charles that the criticism ‘maybe the gains don’t show up in the measurements’ is rather silly, unless you can point to a specific policy aim that isn’t being measured, and explain why you have hope for that one despite the others not showing up.
I also appreciated Charles saying that for American purposes, a study of a social intervention in Africa should be treated similarly to when biologists say something ‘works in vitro,’ as conditions are so radically different. The synthesis would be that ‘give people money’ is highly useful at improving various outcomes when those people have so little money that they risk starvation, but not that far beyond that, and existing interventions here already take us above the threshold.
We definitely need to reconcile our model of how this works with not only the null results in these studies, but also the other null results from many other programs.
One reason to be suspicious of ‘policy mostly can’t help’ is that if you propose ‘policy mostly can’t hurt’ or even ‘getting rid of existing policies and enforcement mostly can’t hurt’ then most people will disagree with you. So at minimum, you can help by not hurting, and you should find the extreme asymmetry suspicious.
I do have one policy objective that I am confident this does help with if it is reliable and sustained, which is fertility. I’m sticking by the estimate that for every ~$270k in value (which need not be cash) you transfer to parents, you get one additional birth. This is one area where anticipation of money, or rather anticipation of having the necessary resources of all types, definitely changes behavior.
Lennox: But when I looked at what the EAs were actually doing, and the methods they were using to evaluate charities, it quickly became clear that this was not going to work. One look at a GiveWell spreadsheet filled my heart with dread. They were creating insanely detailed cost effectiveness estimates of different interventions, using probabilistic models that tried to account for every possible empirical and philosophical assumption you could think of.
It would be great to analyse policies that fundamentally transform the economy at this level of detail, but there were a couple of problems. First, it’s impossible to create a useful model at that level of detail for transformative economic policies. Second, even if it were possible, there’s no way I could do it.
Fine. Lesson learned.
Except, of course, lesson not learned, because he didn’t then think ‘oh that is exactly why the socialist ideas I am advocating for won’t work.’ So he continues, and asks his sociological experts who love socialism. The same result happens again:
This was… disappointing to say the least. Here was a group of serious academics who had spent decades trying to make a rigorous case for socialism, and this is what they ended up concluding? That we don’t have the social technology to make it work, but maybe one day we will get there.
He then does the ‘finds smoking causes cancer, quits reading’ move, saying this means analytical Marxists had undermined themselves so maybe look at critical theory. Because, of course:
I’d assumed that if you want to solve a systemic problem like global poverty, you need to understand the root cause, and the root cause of poverty was, of course, capitalism.
…
However, understanding the root cause of something doesn’t automatically help you solve it.
The main mistake, of course, is that the root cause was not capitalism but instead the human condition. This had not yet entered Lennox’s hypothesis space. The other mistake was, yes, knowing the root cause of something does not always help solve it.
The evidence continued to mount.
Throughout undergrad, I would read sociological theorists and often find their arguments vague, opaque, and at times just poorly argued. Then I would read work by EAs and find it crystal clear, carefully argued, and generally well calibrated to the evidence.
…
The final nail in the coffin came while reading Scott Alexander’s essayMeditations on Moloch.
..
Looking back, I could have saved myself a lot of time. These fundamental problems with the project were probably obvious to many in the EA community and they would have told me the project was unlikely to be useful, if I’d had the courage to ask. But I avoided getting their feedback, partly because I figured they were ideologically blinded and would just dismiss anything critical of their movement.
That last line really is wonderful. Socialist refuses to get feedback from target audience because they are worried audience is ideologically blinded. Love it.
After that he is then able to do some self-reflection, also fun but less fun. Then in conclusion he comes around and notes that if you accept that the world is a swirling mess of misaligned incentives and coordination problems, then this completely undermines the Marxist political project.
That is indeed how the world works, so yes. Thank you. Well done, sir. Also, well done, sir, at the end:
Anyway, a couple of years after this happened I fell in love, and it was everything the poets and songwriters said it would be. So I guess the moral of the story is: if you find yourself tempted to construct elaborate ideological arguments in a vain attempt to make yourself feel smart and important, consider falling in love instead.
I got suckered into paying attention to multiple non-AI political stories this month: The shooting of the messenger, in violation of the most sacred principles, via firing the head of the USA’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Online Safety Bill in the UK.
As a reminder, feel no obligation whatsoever to engage with either of these.
There are tons of other things worth paying attention to that are not that.
I realize philanthropy has been handed quite a few sinking ships lately, but if you exclude AI there is one crisis I would prioritize above the rest, which is mRNA.
Albert Pinto: Holy moly trump killed Moderna in US!!
“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the beginning of a coordinated wind-down of its mRNA vaccine development activities….”
“The projects — 22 of them — are being led by some of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Moderna to prevent flu, COVID-19 and H5N1 infections.”
Jesse Jenkins: Project Warpspeed was probably the most consequential and unqualified success of Trump’s first term, and mRNA vaccines one of the most exciting medical advances of the 21st century. But this time, Trump 2.0’s anti-vax HHS Secretary (Kennedy) is cancelling all federal funding for 22 active mRNA development initiatives. There just aren’t enough facepalm gifs for all this stupidity.
Alc Stapp: mRNA technology is miraculous and has so much potential.
This is such a massive own goal.
Thorne: We’re fairly close to being able to very effectively treat cancer with mRNA, and this will be a huge setback
To be blunt: people you care about will die of cancer because of this decision
It’s deeply delusional to think that just because this announcement is about respiratory viruses, it won’t greatly impact mRNA vaccine tech as a whole.
mRNA companies get way less funding now and have strong signals that other mRNA vaccines might face regulatory hurdles.
Also, a lot of people are responding as if I’m saying such a tech cannot possibly be developed without public funding. No, I said it was a huge setback. And that means people who could’ve been cured will die waiting for it.
A huge portion of optimism about new medical technology, and even about the future in general discounting AI, is mRNA vaccine development. They’re trying to kill it.
Private investment can and must come in and over. The funding gap here is only $500 million. Certainly some combination of billionaires (and perhaps others) should step up and their make grants or invest as needed to fix it.
The cost-benefit ratio here is absolutely absurd. When we think of the futures that aren’t transformed by AI, mRNA is one of the technologies giving us the most hope. If those who heave the means do not pick up the slack here, flat out.
This comes on the heels of various forms of amazing news about mRNA, such as this:
Kepecs Labs: Huge cancer breakthrough! mRNA vaccine (similar to COVID vaccine tech) shows stunning results against pancreatic cancer! 75% of responsive patients STILL cancer-free at 3 yr, normally 80% recur. Could revolutionize treatment for one of deadliest cancers! Funded in part by @NIH
The thread is full of the kinds of graphs you see when a treatment works really well.
A. Do responders still have better outcome?
Left = 1.5 yr follow-up
Right = 3.2 yr follow-up
Yes! 👇🏽
16. TAKE HOME
In #PDAC, RNA NA vaccines make CD8 T cells of
– multiyear longevity
– substantial magnitude
– durable effector function
whose presence
– correlates with delayed recurrence at 3-yr follow-up
The worries are politics and game theory.
In terms of game theory, if we step in and save this situation, did we effectively let the government steal $500 million? Won’t they then have every reason to do it again and target the best programs? Won’t this willingness to fund (acasually) be the reason this got cut?
My answer here is no, because this cut was intended not to steal the money but to stop the research. The people who are cheering this have bought into their own paranoia or perverse incentives so much that they actually want mRNA dead. In such cases, it is relatively safe to step up, although it does carry some risk of giving people ideas.
In other situations, the dynamics are different. Either the motivation was indeed to save or steal money, getting others to pick up the slack. Or it was to use a wrecking ball to kill a wide variety of things, knowing the best ones would then gets saved. Then you have to look at these questions a lot more carefully.
The politics means both that the administration might then use other means to stop mRNA or at least not be helpful, or that this might mark one as an opponent of the administration.
I would not worry much about the administration not playing further ball. This is a long term fight, and also we have reports Trump himself is not thrilled about the cuts. It is also quite a lot harder to turn down the life-saving medicine when the time comes than it is to deny the initial funding. The pressure would be immense, and also there are places besides America to start deployment if you need to do that for a bit.
I also don’t worry too much about this alienating the Trump administration. You’re investing in America, Trump was reportedly not thrilled about the cuts, and he definitely isn’t a true believer on this like he is on tariffs. He knows that being against mRNA is about placating crazy people, so if it happens without him, that is fine. That assumes, of course, that you are worried about this dynamic in the first place. Some people very much aren’t.
This pattern is common. I think centralizing suffering is a critical mistake, so you can substitute various things for ‘utilitarianism’ and also various things for ‘suffering.’
Although also, yes, at reasonable prices, and while factoring in other things we also care about, we should reduce suffering.
This is also a central common pattern, and the difference that matters.
Henry Shevin: Many years ago, I went to two animal welfare events with very different types of philosophers.
The conclusion of the first was “we need to have another bigger conference next year, with animals present.”
The conclusion of the second was “we need to fund in-ovo chicken sexing.”
I would not go to either conference. But, if you did go to one such conference, you would want it to be that second one.
I will note that there is already lots of talk about making the new in-ovo chicken sexing technology mandatory, starting in Europe. There will always, always be a push to make such things mandatory.
Some more making fun of how awful Cate Metz is and how much he got everything wrong yet again:
Leila Clark: on the lighthaven drama, from a friend:
Roon: Public goods are often expensive gifts to yourself scaled up.
David Manheim: Yes – and this is a reason that wealth inequality often leads to public benefit.
The cheapest way for wealthy firms to have educated workers is public education, and the cheapest way for the rich to reduce climate risk is fixing emissions globally, etc.
This is also why I refer to the ‘chasm of personal utility.’
Once you hit fyou money, there is remarkably little that additional money buys on a personal level. Marginal returns drop dramatically. It takes quite a lot of additional money to get remarkably little benefit. The things people buy for themselves that actually get expensive, like boats and lavish private parties, really aren’t that great.
If you actually want your life to get better, the only way to do so becomes improving the world, since you and those you care about have to live in it. Hence, public goods.
As a toy example, as a gamer, I could basically buy whatever I want and not bat an eye, unless I wanted things like Vintage Magic decks, and even that has an upper bound. So at that point, if I want better gaming, what do I have to do? Commission games.
Elizabeth von Nostrand: Lots of people want my job. No one wants the part where I spent five years doing this job for free.
Ben Landau-Taylor: Most of my friends with weird jobs could say the same.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Word.
Nefarious Jobs will, for a remarkably small fee that usually is only four figures, go out and ruin someone’s life, in ways that they say are technically legal, with the ‘Total Annihilation’ package only costing $10k. In addition to the other obvious reasons it is terrible, one strong reason not to do this is that it can be done back to you.
Reminder, once again: When people tell you who they are, believe them. Kelsey Piper is latest to confirm that people who identify themselves as evil, or with Hitler or as a fascist or a Nazi, will universally prove to indeed suck immensely.
It appears to not be a strawman that some disability activists oppose treating disability via gene editing because this would mean there would be fewer disabled people, which would weaken their ability to exert political pressure.
Rebekah Westenra: Begging the average disabled person to understand that it’s not about you. You will never ever get access to this kind of tech. This will never be a cure for YOU. This is about eliminating disability from the upper class which will reduce support & resources directed towards YOU.
She is of course directly incorrect, developing cures for the rich is how you develop the technology, after which it leads to cures for everyone else, but even if she were somehow correct, consider what don’t even count as the implications, just the outright telling people if they are rich then it is good they are disabled, my lord.
Oh, and then the follow-up is, maybe curing your disability would be bad, yo, and if you disagree with this than you’re not really a disabled person so you have no right to talk, there are those who can make this up yet I remain not one of them.
Also begging people to understand the differences between various disorders and to think about what makes you YOU and if your disorder can be completely separated from that then maybe just shut the hell up for now.
Simon Fruit: One of my favorite employment phenomenons is this retarded idea that if you do your job very well but don’t participate in stupid, time-consuming, and useless ice breakers then you’re not a “team player” because you made Brenda feel bad that you didn’t care for her weekend.
Andrew Rettek: I got fired for this once.
Patrick B: Three phrases to remember: Oh wow crazy. That’s amazing. Oh no he didn’t.
This is effectively a large reason to seek out coworkers you like hanging out with, since you’re going to be forced to do that if you want to succeed.
I never had a problem with such work exercises, because the offices I did join for any length of time – Jane Street and Wizards of the Coast – selected for people I would have been happy hanging out with anyway.
I did however kind of get fired as a student at a Dojo for this. For a while I would go to class twice a week and had moved up one rank. I was informed by Sensei that as I kept going, they expected me to participate more in the community. I found the other students to be nice people, I didn’t at all mind training with them and making small talk, but burning evenings socializing? Oh, hell no. That was essentially that.
It seems in Cairo (and presumably many other places) Uber drivers flat out ignore the fare they accept and then you have to haggle. Like James here I absolutely cannot stand small stakes haggling. Transaction costs are very high and it makes sense that the Anglosphere has long had a big advantage everywhere it doesn’t haggle, but struggles on housing which is the one place we still do it and have to hire people to advise us on optimal haggling techniques.
Whisper networks are terrible, but what is the alternative? Ideally actual fact finding, but that is expensive. You cannot play that card so often, and indeed you need a whisper network or something similar to know when to invest in fact finding. Next up would be creating common knowledge and only saying things in the open, which also has obvious limitations. If nothing else, it means that if you can make the victim or witness not want to come forward, in one of any number of ways, you get away with it, and it is not obvious how to go from ‘whisper networks are bad’ to preventing one from spontaneously arising unless you have an effective alternative mechanism. Also, if you cannot say anything negative about anyone without telling them directly, that leads to heavily biased information and also various games where silence starts to be highly meaningful. I don’t see any good solutions?
Wes: Whisper networks are bad, for obvious reasons.
Xenia: unfortunately also good for obvious reasons.
Wes: Alas. The bad parts tend to eat the good parts.
Sparr: In my intentional community organizing efforts, I have tried and failed a few times to establish this rule/norm:
Say nothing negative about someone behind their back that you don’t say to their face, unless it should get them kicked out of the house.
Wes: Why does it fail?
Sparr: People refuse to honor/follow it. If I could find a core group of 3-5 people who would adopt this norm, new people could be acculturated. But I have never found that core group.
Recommended: Cate Hall tells us 50 things she thinks she knows. The list is as excellent as everyone says it is. Many of these are exceptionally valuable if you don’t know them or needed a reminder. A number of them are in my opinion false, actively unhelpful or both, but that keeps you on your toes and a list where all 50 were true and useful would not be as interesting. Like her I could probably write a post about most of these if I wanted to (especially the one I think are wrong).
Recommended: The Inkhaven Residencyat Lighthaven in Berkeley, happening November 2025. If you attend you will write 30 blog posts, one per day, or leave, with advice and mentorship from Scott Alexander, Scott Aaronson, Gwern and more. Cost to attend is $2,000, housing is available as low as $1,500 ($2,500 for a private one).
(I do not currently have a plan to make an appearance myself, I only have so many trips in me per year, but certainly there is some chance I will choose to do so.)
I am doing my best to avoid commenting on politics. As usual my lack of comment on other fronts should not be taken to mean I lack strong opinions on them. Yet sometimes, things reach a point where I cannot fail to point them out.
If you are looking to avoid such things, I have split out this section, so you can skip it.
This month, that applies to the following two sections as well.
Because this is the realm of things like this:
Tetraspace: Reading another thread of people replying to “this law should be changed” with “but it’s the law” and being thankful that democracy achieving good outcomes doesn’t rely on people understanding policy details.
Replacing the H-1B visa lottery with a system based on ‘seniority or salary’ predicted to raise the program’s economic value by 88%. I would worry that ‘seniority’ is too easy to fake, so I would go with salary as much as possible. It is also argued that this would prevent the driving down of wages for native workers. Even better would, of course, be to straight up auction off the visas themselves, or set a market clearing price (ideally with much higher supply, perhaps the level that maximizes revenue), which is the obvious solution.
🚨 BREAKING: A bill to ban politicians from trading stocks is getting pushback from the White House, per Axios.
The pushback seemed to be they did not like that it applied to the President and Vice President. I can’t imagine why. I only report the news.
The situation has reached the point where if I lived in the UK, I would feel it necessary to leave, because I would otherwise not feel safe doing my job.
Dominic Green: On the night of Wednesday, July 16, the Labour government’s Employment Rights Bill passed its second reading in the House of Lords.
If the bill goes into law in its current form—and there is not much to stop it now—Britons can be prosecuted for a remark that a worker in a public space overhears and finds insulting.
The law will apply to pubs, clubs, restaurants, soccer grounds, and all the other places where the country gathers and, all too frequently, ridicules one another.
Oh, and on the first day of the ‘Online Safety Act’ they were already on the verge of shutting down Wikipedia. Could there be any clearer sign things are extremely bad?
Evolve Politics: Wikipedia is currently in a legal battle with the UK government to try and stop the platform being censored in the UK – or even completely blocked – thanks to the Online Safety Act.
Under the new law, the UK media regulator Ofcom is poised to label Wikipedia as a “Category 1” platform.
This would impose the strictest content rules possible – such as:
– age verification for users
– identity verification for contributors
– censorship of ‘harmful’ topics.
Wikipedia has already stated they will not implement any of these rules, arguing they would be forced to censor crucial facts, and potentially expose their volunteer contributors to real-world harm – such as political harassment, or worse – purely for documenting the truth.
In addition, Wikipedia says that bad actors could easily abuse the new laws – by filing fake complaints or exploiting vague “harm” rules to force them into entirely removing articles that people – or the UK government/corporations – simply disagree with.
Wikipedia’s legal case was heard at the Royal Court of Justice on July 22-23, and a ruling is expected within a month or so. However, if their legal arguments are rejected and they refuse to implement Category 1 rules, the UK government could block access to Wikipedia entirely.
It is a great relief to confirm that Wikipedia is not going to give in here, especially on censorship of ‘harmful’ topics even for adult users. They have since lost their court case.
Chris Middleton lays out what the Online Safety Act does in general.
Chris Middleton: It creates a new “duty of care” on all online services to police user content. This means:
✅ Platforms must proactively detect and remove “illegal” and “harmful” content.
✅ Age verification to block under-18s from adult material.
✅ Private messaging apps must scan messages for banned content.
WhatsApp and Signal warn this poses an unprecedented threat to encryption and privacy.
Age checks and the death of anonymity:
Any site with adult content must now implement “highly effective” age verification. That means:
📸 Face scans
📅 Government IDs
💳 Credit card checks
This applies far beyond just porn to any user-generated platform. The law covers any site that allows users to share or interact. That includes forums, messaging apps, cloud services, open-source platforms, even Wikipedia.
Proton VPN: Just a few minutes after the Online Safety Act went into effect last night, Proton VPN signups originating in the UK surged by more than 1,400%.
Unlike previous surges, this one is sustained, and is significantly higher than when France lost access to adult content.
Wint (August 28, 2013): lets set some realistic goals here : jokes banned by 2016. sex banned by 2020. a cop in every household by 2025
What kind of things are being censored, in addition to Spotify, which is also threatening that it might have to delete your account?
Saruei: I can’t believe Spotify now requires age verification. Today it’s music, tomorrow it could be books, films, or even news articles. It’s the first step into a dystopian reality we’ve seen in movies, where access to culture is gated by surveillance and the illusion of security.
Calgie: Your Spotify account is getting deleted unless you do age verification.
Adam Wren: For everyone that was saying “it’s just to stop kids watching porn” very first day of the restrictions it’s been used to censor “violence” which in this case means police arresting people at protests, well done. The very first day. Not even a ‘slippery slope’ at this point, more of a wet cliff.
Benjamin Jones: If you have a standard X account in the UK – presumably the vast majority of British users – you cannot see any protest footage that contains any violence tonight. Because of the Online Safety Act. A relative in America sent me this screenshot of one blocked post.
Matvey: It’s frankly disgusting that the Online Safety Act is being hidden behind the pretence of ‘child protection’ when it’s already being used to hide political content from non-age-verified uses, and next year will be able to take IP from tech companies at no notice.
Draconian.
It was a bold move, Cotton, to go directly after Wikipedia and coverage of police and protests and testimony before Parliament on day one. They did not want there to be any illusions what their true target was.
Charles: I just got asked to submit ID to view a Reddit wine forum.
Immediately thought “I’ve got to get out of this country (the UK)” and bought a VPN subscription.
Now I’m digitally in the much more free nation of “checks notes” Belgium.
But the impulse to physically get out remains. This is not a place that feels hopeful or optimistic or like it’s going to change for the better soon.
The community note is incorrect. This very obviously was exactly what the act was for. I’m not a pure ‘the purpose of a system is what it does’ person, but yes very obviously the purpose of this system is to censor speech authorities dislike.
Cremieux: The Online Safety Act censored one of my posts on lactose intolerance. It censored another where I mentioned donkeys, and my friend can’t see one of my posts on Neanderthals processing fat. If you support the Online Safety Act, you are an imbecile.
Nigel Farage and the Reform Party would get rid of the Online Safety Act, or as the Labour Party calls it, ‘scrap vital protections for young people online, and recklessly open the floodgates to kids being exposed to extreme digital content,’ the same way they were so exposed before and are so exposed in other countries, and thus he is ‘not serious.’ They also say you are ‘on the side of the predators’ while, censoring official discussions about investigation of actualpredators.
Many such cases.
Crush Crime: Our post with a screenshot of a House of Commons amendment, setting terms of reference for an inquiry into the grooming gangs cover-up, has been censored by the Online Safety Act. The state must spend less time policing speech and more time catching rapists and thieves.
Here is that post:
Sam Dumitriu: “Nigel Farage would give teenagers access to material on drinking cider, owning hamsters, and speeches from Conservative Members of Parliament. He is simply not serious.”
Charles Haywood compares the situation to that in Eastern Europe in 1989, as in it has become clear that the government will not respond to the public’s views except by trying to censor the public, including censoring statements that the majority agrees with and statements about police conduct, political opinions and the coordination of protests, now including on social media, in pubs and in private chats.
The UK is seeking to pass a law enabling the issuance of ‘respect orders’ to prevent someone from engaging in ‘anti-social behavior’ that can ‘prohibit the respondent from doing anything described in the order’ or ‘require the respondent to do anything described in the order.’ The court can simply order you to do or not do actual anything? So I suppose they spell respect T-Y-R-A-N-N-Y.
Isaac King: “The text of my new bill, the End All Bad Things Act, is as follows:
I can do whatever I want.
This will allow me to make people stop doing bad things. Thus if you oppose this bill, you are in favor of bad things.”
R Street: The U.K.’s Office of Communications (Ofcom) explains in detail what each category of prohibited content includes—even “[c]ontent which realistically depicts serious violence against a fictional creature.”
Such a definition would not only prohibit minors from accessing historical and newsworthy content about wars—but many episodes of SpongeBob (if posted to social media), including but not limited to “No Weenies Allowed.”
Klint Izwudd: Isn’t it fucking amazing how worldwide all of these incredibly sophisticated censorship measures are literally appearing in the last week.
The direction of this move is ambiguous. If the previous regime was that everyone was treated as a minor until proven otherwise, and now you have a second way to get the regime to stop doing that, and how minors are treated does not change, then This Is Good, Actually. Alas, this likely goes hand in hand with worse treatment of minors. From this article, it sounds like this will effectively mean an expansion of restrictions.
Also note that the actual changes listed are (they use the word ‘including’):
Disabling personalized advertising
Turning on digital wellbeing tools
Adding safeguards to recommendations, including limiting repetitive views of some kinds of content
All of those seem like they could be straightforward upgrades? Can I choose to turn on those features?
What they of course fail to mention is that the main change is age restricting videos. I do notice that I have an alt Google account, I definitely did not provide Google my ID there, and when I use YouTube on it I have yet to run into age restrictions on videos.
A fun note is, if you were trying to ‘look like an adult,’ what would you do? You would among other things try to make your consumption as age inappropriate as possible?
Arthur B: If Meta and Google had the courage to entirely drop service for the UK, the government would fold in two weeks and repeal the OFA. The EU, Australia, etc would start to backtrack. Two weeks is all it takes, it could be done.
Wikipedia has the right idea. By all means sue, but make it clear that if push comes to shove you will simply cut the country off. Even if the governments held firm, fine, so be it, let everyone use a VPN.
The traditional way such stories end, when they don’t end in revolution, is this:
Devon: This is what current polling looks like when you don’t include LeftParty_Final. I’m sorry but anyone making the “you’re gonna split the vote and let Farage in” argument has their head in the sand and can be safely and derisively ignored.
In particular I would not have simultaneously severely censored the internet for 16-and-17 year olds and also given them the vote. That’s just me.
Alex Tabarrok: The British would never have tolerated this if it came from Brussels and EU bureaucrats.
Once regulation was seen as self-imposed, the floodgates opened.
Mr. Obvious: BREAKING: Zoomers cannot adjust their Nvidia graphics cards settings on their gaming PCs anymore because they aren’t 18 thanks to the Online Safety Act.
To be fair, if you can’t get a VPN working then you shouldn’t be using Nvidia apps.
Guess who is also downloading those apps, also billing the public for them?
Freddie New: Peter Kyle suggesting that using a VPN will put children at risk (a laughably luddite suggestion, as he probably uses one himself every time he works from home)… At the same time that Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds (famously confused as to whether he is or is not a lawyer) is billing his use of a VPN to YOU, the taxpayer.
Why doesn’t Jonathan Reynolds just verify his age instead?
Jeremy Kauffman: Most people won’t state this so bluntly, but if the choices are:
kids sometimes access pornography on the internet
a federal ID system to access the internet
Then #1 is the better choice.
Well, actually the #2 choice is you have a federal ID system and the kids access the porn anyway, but it was never about the porn. The porn is an excuse.
Misha: The dangers to children of potentially seeing porn are trivial compared to the benefits of being able to freely access the internet
Kelsey Piper: And the most overwrought hysterical “this is the first step towards requiring government ID before you read or talk online at all” predictions have been borne out in full so swiftly that I don’t see how you can possibly feel certain it won’t happen here.
like, I’m sorry! I too really hate how hard it is to give kids a healthy online experience! and I will oppose every effort to enshrine age verification in either the law or in company policy on any level for any reason.
Matthew Lesh: The Online Safety Act debate was a lonely place for free speech advocates. Anyone who dared to question the law was treated as a child-hating pariah. Yet as key provisions have come into force our warnings have proven eerily accurate.
Institute of Economic Affairs: There was shock that anyone might dare to question a law designed to ‘protect children.’
In a separate meeting with a senior Ofcom official responsible for implementing the law, I was politely assured that excessive implementation is never a problem with regulation, leaving me utterly dumbfounded.
If those implementing a law tell you ‘excessive implementation is never a problem with regulation’ and you let them continue implementing, you know what you will get.
There was a period where we were constantly told that those concerned about AI killing everyone would impose dystopian authoritarian nightmare surveillance states because we wanted to impose some restrictions on who could train or distribute future frontier AI models potentially smarter than humans.
Instead, things far worse for freedom than anyone was talking about are being imposed because otherwise ‘you are not serious about protecting children from predators’ or what not, and being used to suppress dissent and also settings on Nvidia cards on day one. Somehow most of the same voices are being a lot less loud about it.
They are even going after good old free speech Americans like 4Chan, whose response letter correctly said they would fight any and all attempts and calling upon the State Department to step up its game, but seemed altogether too polite. Let 4Chan be 4Chan, at least this one time.
Also, frankly, go ahead, go after 4Chan and see what happens. It’ll be fun.
Then they went after Twitter for censoring in the UK too much, because it made the UK government look bad.
Preston Byrne: I was asked to comment on a story today about this. Apparently Ofcom wants to punish X for “over-censoring” user content, making the UK government look bad. In their view, X violates the Online Safety Act by over-complying.
“If Ofcom goes after X, I hope Elon kicks their ass.”
Also, I’m not sure what Ofcom is smoking, but there is no rule in English law which requires a website to platform lawful speech.
Maybe the UK is taking an expansive view of Article 10, but that’s just more evidence that Article 10 is vague and crap and should be abolished.
Forever Scept: TRANSLATION: You were supposed to censor without them knowing.
Preston Byrne: Right. “You’re supposed to censor only what we want you to censor, and we aren’t going to tell you what we want you to censor until you get an enforcement notice for censoring incorrectly.” Yeah, no. Absolutely not.
Patrick McKenzie: This is a recipe for censorship by “Come on, you know what we want.” followed by zero point zero democratic accountability. “All independent decisions of firms made for commercial reasons; we have no orders.”
We have seen this movie before, depressingly frequently.
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL): The UK’s Online Safety Act undermines the right to free expression by imposing censorship on vague grounds. Suppression of criticism of illegal immigration or the criminal justice system is completely unacceptable in a free society.
These laws will also create immense pressure on American companies to kowtow to the censors. Foreign laws must not undermine the right to freedom of expression of Americans.
I am proud to have supplied the US government with all relevant documentation on this point.
Meanwhile over in the EU they mandate TVs to lock the brightness at 30%-50% for sustainability reasons, as in ‘eco mode,’ and you have to dig deep into settings to fix it. But that’s nothing compared to what is coming, you are to hold their beer or wine.
Marko Jukic: The EU intends to automatically scan every private message sent over a phone, including encrypted ones, for “child abuse material” by this October. No prizes for guessing what else they will scan for in a few more months or years. Final death of free speech and free internet.
Alas, we have chosen to shoot the messenger along with a bold post that says ‘we are shooting the messenger,’ as in we got revisions to a jobs report that Trump didn’t like so he fired the Commissioner of Labor Statistics and accused her of ‘faked job numbers.’
Jonah Goldberg: It’s like a pilot smashing the altimeter because he doesn’t like the altitude reading.
To the extent the people angrily responding to this are A) People and not bots B) Sincere and not partisan hacks or C) Not complete idiots:
Trump blamed the bad numbers on political bias. The same head of BLS delivered terrible numbers on the eve of the election (a fact Trump now lies about). She also delivered great numbers earlier under Trump. So the argument she was biased is just stupid.
Nick Timiraos: Trump to CNBC on the jobs numbers before the election: “The numbers were rigged.”
He’s getting his dates wrong. He’s saying the jobs numbers looked good before the election but were revised down after the election. The big downward revision in August, before the election.
Kernan to Trump: You’re undermining confidence in the numbers by firing the BLS commissioner.
Trump: “When they say nobody was involved, that it wasn’t political…. Give me a break.”
Trump: “It’s a highly political situation. It’s totally rigged.”
Kernan: Which number do you believe? The chances of a Fed rate cut are going *upbecause of these weak numbers.
A slight slowdown in labor “will get you what you want” on the Fed.
This of course compounds the undermining of confidence. It seems actively designed to undermine confidence in the numbers.
Here is the director of the NEC outright saying that the data ‘has to be something you can trust’ and by ‘you can trust’ he means a high number that makes people do the things we want them to do. As in, the job of the numbers is to lie.
I appreciate the candor about the intent, sir.
Kevin Hassett (Director of the National Economic Council): “The data can’t be propaganda. The data has to be something you can trust, because decision-makers throughout the economy trust that these are the data that they can build a factory because they believe, or cut interest rates because they believe. And if the data aren’t that good, then it’s a real problem for the US.”
Justin Wolfers: Minister for Propaganda says the data can’t be propaganda once his Ministry has had a chance to vet them and ensure they’re even true-er.
Matt Darling: The White House anti-BLS webpage is basically nonsense. They claim a “consistent pattern” of “overly optimistic numbers” in 2024, but neglect that 2024 had 6 upward revisions and 6 downward revisions.
Aaron Rupar: Kevin Hassett suggests the Bureau of Labor Statistics rigged the 2012 election for Barack Obama.
Arin Dube: It’s critical to push back against baseless claims about data revisions, like those by Kevin Hassett. These falsehoods smear the integrity of professionals such as @brent_moulton, who have spent their careers ensuring the public has access to reliable economic data.
Brent Moulton: In 2012, I was the associate director at the Bureau of Economic Analysis (*not BLS*) and was responsible for preparing the estimates of gross domestic product. Mr. Hassett gets several things wrong here.
First, I would like to assure you that in the 19 years I was responsible for the GDP estimates (from 1997 to 2016), the estimates were NEVER politically manipulated, nor did anyone ever ask me to adjust them for political reasons.
At BEA we made a concerted effort to openly explain to our data users the data sources for the GDP, what methodologies were used in the estimation, and be as transparent and “open source” as possible. We provided source data tables, methodologies, technical notes, etc.
I disagree with Hassett’s allegation that the advance GDP estimate for the 3rd quarter of 2012 was unexpectedly large. That first estimate said that GDP grew at a 2.0% rate – just about what it had been averaging for the prior two years.
A number of forecasters try to predict the GDP estimate, often using much of the same source data as used by BEA (albeit usually calculated in less detail). For example, the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNOW forecast (one of the better ones) was 1.8%, close to BEA’s 2.0% estimate.
[thread continues as you would expect]
Then, as the replacement, Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, which seems like a caricature of the worst possible nominee.
Brendan Pedersen: Trump makes the nomination of EJ Antoni to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics official after firing the last commissioner over job report revisions. Antoni is chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.
Brian Albrecht (Chief Economist, Law and Economics Center, lacking imagination): Worse than I could have imagined 24 hrs ago
Ben Berkowitz, Emily Peck (Axios): President Trump’s nominee to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, E.J. Antoni, suggested the possibility of suspending the bureau’s flagship monthly jobs report.
Christopher Rugaber (AP): Jason Furman, a top economist in the Obama administration, wrote on X: “I don’t think I have ever publicly criticized any Presidential nominee before. But E.J. Antoni is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner. He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant expertise.”
Dominic Pino: What Trump would like is a BLS that is biased in his favor. The latest proof of that is his nominee to be the next commissioner, E. J. Antoni.
Antoni is the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. He has been a relentless booster of Trump’s policies on social media. And he has demonstrated time and again that he does not understand economic statistics.
Greg Mankiw, a conservative economist and chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under George Bush who I’ve had on my RSS feed for a decade joined fellow former CEA chair Cecilia Rouse to warn that this firing will backfire and hurt the ability to analyze the state of the economy and develop the best policies, with the headline warning this will ‘come back to haunt’ Trump. You can smell the forced politeness.
It’s a relatively minor point relative to not shooting the messenger, but the defenses claiming the messager was terrible have just been so absurdly bad.
Chamath Palihapitiya (All-In Podcast): Non Farm Payrolls are total garbage so I asked Grok:
“Hey Grok, go look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics website for their non farm payrolls data. Tell me how many times their original forecasts have been revised since Jan 2020. And, of those revisions, how many times the data was revised up versus down. Categorize this during the Biden versus Trump presidencies.”
Bottom line is that BLS isn’t so much conspiratorial as it is inadequate in its approach. They are all over the place and add little directional signal. They constantly revise and in both directions.
The sampling techniques they use are brittle and don’t work for a large and dynamic economy like the US.
Trump was right to fire the head of BLS because she ran a critical aspect of the US economic machinery in an unpredictable, haphazard and sloppy way.
There needs to be a new, oracle-like data provider for this critical information.
Alex Tabarrok: Amazing. Expects to find bias. Finds none. Which is what you would expect if BLS is doing their job well.
Reverses course and claims BLS lack of bias means their forecasts have no “signal” and that is bad? Incoherent. Ends with gratuitous call for better methods.
Christopher Clarke: BLS preliminary estimates have actually increased their accuracy over time. There is always room for improvement and survey responses have decreased. Improved accuracy requires more resources, not less.
What BLS does is they provide an early estimate, because that is valuable even when it is noisy, and then a later estimate. This Is Good, Actually.
Tyler Cowen, who has had some very let’s say creative defenses of various administration decisions, flat out made it is very bad to behave this way, and that BLS is not biased except in favor of following established procedures, as in it is biased towards being above reproach about potential biases. Which is wise, and means if you want to account for other things you need to do that on top of their estimates.
On top of everything else, the whole thing happens to be backwards in two distinct ways.
As in, the first way is that downward revisions mean the numbers were initially overstated, which makes you ‘look good,’ and no one involved is buying the galaxy brain (but kind of correct) take that you want to ‘look bad’ to get a fed rate cut.
Ernie Tedeschi: The average revision to monthly payroll employment during the Biden Admin–from 1st estimate to final/latest–was -0.05%. For the 1st Trump Admin, it was -0.10% (same including the pandemic or not). These are both small revisions, but the “overstatement” was greater under Trump.
The second way this is backwards is that low numbers mean you can get the Fed to lower interest rates, which is what Trump wants, so he should welcome that.
Nick Timiraos: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested that the Fed should consider cutting interest rates by a half percentage point at its September meeting in light of recent labor-market data showing a slower pace of job growth
Bharat Ramamurti: The job numbers are all fake and Mr. Trump’s economy is actually BOOMING! But also the Fed should cut by 50 bps despite accelerating inflation because the job market is so bad.
It is easy to say to all of this ‘oh this is at this point entirely unsurprising’ or dismiss it as unimportant. I believe that would be a mistake. This type of action is a big deal, and falls into the list of things you absolutely never do. Do not shoot the messenger, violate a flag of truce or break guest right. Ever. If you do, The North Remembers.
As in, recently I finally got around to watching The Godfather, and then it was clear that everyone involved expected everyone in their culture to go around shooting messengers (and shooting people at peace talks) and that’s when I lost the ability to sympathize with the characters.
There exist true things that are forbidden to talk about.
There also exist a lot of false things that are forbidden to talk about.
Peter Boghossian: One deliverable from Peter Thiel’s talk: If it’s forbidden to be spoken about, it’s likely true.
Emmett Shear: We taboo all kinds of claims, and only some of them are true. For example, claiming the earth is flat will get you excluded from society, but that doesn’t make it true. If only finding truth was as easy as inverting taboos!
Zac Hill: I mean that’s just straightforwardly not the case right? Also who is doing the forbidding and why are people running around like simps preoccupied about what is and isn’t sanctioned? “Ahh the Arian Heresy is obviously 100% factually accurate.” Just seems like a red herring idk.
Daniel Eth: This is very obviously false to anyone who thinks about it for more than a couple seconds. There’s a related point that EVEN THOUGH most things that are “forbidden” to be spoken about are false, we should taboo less b/c SOME are true and important. But that ain’t this
Arthur B: There’s sadly a cohort of people who defend hyperbole or outright nonsense so long as the direction is correct because it makes the message punchier, as if the rhetorical end justified the means. But such discourse habits destroy the commons.
Paul Graham: It’s not true that if you can’t say something, there must be a kernel of truth in it. It’s trivially easy to think of counterexamples.
What’s the best model of being unable to ‘work your way up from the mailroom’?
Here is one attempt.
Byrne Hobart: One way to frame this is to ask what would have to happen to have a modern Sidney Weinberg-style career, which is mostly a list of what would have to not happen. He’d have to:
Not found a company where there’s a career track that starts at “unskilled worker earning subsistence wages” and somehow has a path to the top.
Another way to say that is is that you only get Sidney Weinberg stories when the market for talent is fairly inefficient.
…
But you can flip that around and give it a grim corollary: the measure of how efficiently talent is allocated in a society is how young you are when your dreams are crushed. A world where 99.9th percentile talent immediately gets snapped up by whichever employer can make the best use of that talent is one where 99.8th percentile people learn early on that they just don’t have what it takes.
…
There is still a path for dropouts with few legible skills to work their way up to the top of a Fortune 500 company: start at the top, and stick around until your company is on the Fortune 500.
I think this is mostly a case of romanticizing a path that was never great in the first place. It’s not that it is impossible to ‘work your way up’ in this fashion, if you actually are good enough that you would deserve it, it’s that if you could impress enough to actually pull it off working your way up then you have much better paths, with or without going through college. That’s also largely about the great news that we have much better skill and reputation transfer, so you’re not permanently at the mercy of the firm and your boss.
I also very much don’t think it means your dreams die quickly if you are ‘only’ 99th percentile or 99.8th percentile talent. A hypothetically perfect sort where relative talent is static would do that, but neither half of that is true. Nor do you get locked out of most ‘dreams’ worth having if you get somewhat off track. There are certainly some that do have strict tracks, but they are that way because they are oversubscribed and mostly generic dreams and even then you mostly have redraws if you care enough.
John Wentworth offers Generalized Hangriness: A Standard Rationalist Stance Towards Emotions. Being angry because you are hungry means your anger is ‘wrong’ in its explicit claims, but it contains the useful information that you are hungry. Thus, the correct stance towards experiencing an emotion is to ask what information it actually provides you. A strong emotion is trying to tell you something is important, but you have to figure out what is the proper something.
Elizabeth: For readers who need the opposite advice: I don’t think the things people get hangry about are random, just disproportionate. If you’re someone who suppresses negative emotions or is too conflict averse or lives in freeze response, notice what kind of things you get upset about while hangry- there’s a good chance they bother you under normal circumstances too, and you’re just not aware of it.
Similar to how standard advice is don’t grocery shop while hungry, but I wouldn’t buy enough otherwise.
You should probably eat before doing anything about hangry thoughts though.
Benquo: Unless you’ve observed that you tend to unendorsedly let things slide once you’re fed. In that case, better do something about the problem while you’re hangry.
I would generalize this even further than Ben Pace does here:
Ben Pace: This rhymes with how one treats feature recommendations from users. It is typically the case that a user advising you to make a change does indeed have a problem when using your product that they’re trying to solve, and you should figure out what that problem is, but their account of how to solve it (what ‘improvement’ to make) is usually worth throwing out the window.
Emotions also have practical effects beyond their information content, so you want to watch out for and optimize those as well. One aspect John does not get into is that you need not take your emotional responses as givens.
John Wentworth also notes that his empathy is rarely kind, that trying to imagine things from someone else’s perspective can easily lead to the exact opposite of empathy if you would then view their decisions, in particular their lack of effort or willingness to apply effort to fix things, with disgust. Several comments point out that this could be seen as a failure to model their actual cognitive state, but why should we presume that should lead to empathy? The general case version of this resonates with me quite a lot.
Santi Ruiz: The McKinsey study that claimed diverse workforces lead to bigger profits was always fake (they won’t share data, it doesn’t replicate for the S&P 500 or other settings, and it doesn’t make sense). But fake social psych research is a demand problem, not just a supply problem.
I disagree that the finding doesn’t make sense. Like many things in social psych, you can tell a plausible story of effects in either direction, or of no effect.
Patrick McKenzie: I think many people would be surprised at the difficulties billionaires have in converting money into smart people and/or their outputs.
Casey Handmer: It is so hard that for essentially anything non trivial it still has to be done personally.
The examples of this are too numerous to count. Musk’s companies could not have succeeded unless he was in the driver’s seat for much of the time. By contrast, Google X, Virgin rockets, Blue Origin all had the best people and tech that money could buy – but it wasn’t nearly enough.
I see this on an almost weekly basis now. Anything sufficiently interesting is not fungible in money. The supply is extremely inelastic.
You must have an army of stringently curated and boldly led mechanical engineers.
Paper offers a bizarre thesis, that algorithmic collusion between sellers on a platform like Amazon helps consumers because they collude to lower advertising costs and this outweighs the effect of colluding directly on price. I notice my skepticism because if within-platform ads raise less revenue the platform should reclaim those costs via higher commissions, which should raise prices by the same amount. I note that o3 thought that there wasn’t room for Amazon to do this, but that’s weird.
Did the UK’s dominance fail because of emigration away from the home islands? The argument here is that developed economies don’t diverge that much on GDP per capita, but I don’t think this means the UK keeps similar GDP per capita in the alternative world, especially if we’re not on the margin and talking about 200 million people living there. The OP admits those people staying home would be a loss of welfare but I also assume it would have made the UK a lot poorer and also that population would have balanced largely in other ways.
A much better and simpler story is that the UK home islands simply didn’t have enough land and natural resources, which is why there was so much emigration in the first place? Europe was never going to be able to sustain its economic advantages indefinitely.
And of course in recent times, the UK has been dying mostly of self-inflicted wounds, such as effectively banning the construction of housing, and now the saying of words.
An excellent point:
Byrne Hobart: An interesting corollary to this is that the more words it takes for someone to explain a concept to you, the greater the proportion of jobs you’ll dismiss as “bullshit jobs.” I’ve observed this, too!
Note that the jobs here could be described in three words just fine, all you have to do is lose a little detail, on the level that ‘I catch fish’ simplifies fisherman. He doesn’t catch all fish everywhere, after all.
Software sales analyst.
Improve automated capabilities.
Create blockchain recorders.
Only three words is largely about negative space. Observe these job descriptions I brainstormed quickly:
Also note that it’s ‘if you can’t do it, it’s bullshit’ not ‘if you can do it, it’s not bullshit.’
Why does the trick still mostly work? Because the fact that you have a bullshit job predicts not that you can’t describe it in three words, but that you will choose not to.
Polymarket is on its way back to (being fully legal in) America, baby!
Shayne Coplan: Polymarket has acquired QCEX, a CFTC-regulated exchange and clearinghouse, for $112 million.
This paves the way for us to welcome American traders again.
I’ve waited a long time to say this:
Polymarket is coming home 🇺🇸🦅
Owning a DCM and DCO will let us serve all American traders and brokerages.
This acquisition isn’t just about a license; it’s Polymarket’s homecoming, returning stronger and ready to serve American users once again.
The best part about this is that this comes on the heels of the BBB plausibly making professional sports betting essentially illegal in America, since you can only deduct 90% of losses while being taxed on 100% of gains. If that is applied to individual wagers, then no one has an edge big enough to overcome it, so gamblers would have to either give up the gambling or give up on paying their taxes.
But if you buy a sports futures contract under CFTC rules, then you get normal tax treatment, and you’re back in business.
This could all end up being a blessing in disguise. The current licenced sportsbooks in America offer highly non-competitive pricing, focus on pushing you towards predatory behaviors and products, and aggressively limit winners. Once Polymarket gets sufficient liquidity, trading there is remarkably cheap, and you are naturally pulled towards behaviors that have little cost even if you are betting at random.
However bad you think companies like FanDuel are, they’re worse.
Ryan Butler: FanDuel reports 16.3% sportsbook gross gaming revenue margin in June, the highest mark in company history
This is roughly triple Nevada sportsbooks’ historic hold percentage from before FanDuel launched its book in 2018.
There is no way to make 16.3% profit on wagers in general without being deeply, deeply predatory, even if all of your customers are suckers. Someone betting a normal NFL line fully at random only loses 5%.
Whenever there is a graph that blows your mind every time you see it, chances are good it turns out to need a correction. Despite that, the corrected graph (the one shown below) is still rather mind blowing.
The Rich: people have no idea what life was like before they were born
If a statistic or claim sounds absurd and wrong, you can check the sources. Often this reveals the whole thing was bogus. Thread has some examples, several of which I can confirm because I too checked the sources or otherwise know the story.
You can identify outlier people by noticing you cannot predict what they are going to say next. That is not always good, but it often is very good. Whereas most people rarely break out of predictable scripts. Which in many circumstances is also good.
Whereas yes, a large portion of children’s media has been for decades or more straight up eco propaganda and says the ultimate evil is humans wanting to build and do things, or even wanting to exist.
Roman Helmet Guy: “Remember that the Earth’s resources are limited. You do not need to have a big family, because all the world’s people are your brothers and sisters.” You live in the most propagandized society in history.
Joe Lonsdale: A top kids’ show for much of the ‘90s had Malthusian / anti-natalist, globalist nonsense alongside its eco proselytizing.
It’s not a coincidence; if you go into its main backer Ted Turner’s office, a huge painting has his head in the sky, nearby a US flag turned into a UN flag.
Charles Fain Lehman: As my older son moves on from picture books, it’s stunning to me how much children’s media is just non-stop eco propaganda. “Humans are bad for the earth, you should feel guilty about this” is the constant message.
It is getting a lot easier to avoid. There is so much to choose from, so you don’t get whatever is on broadcast TV forced upon you, and similarly you can filter the books, and also the broader marketplace seems to be pulling things back. It’s still rough out there.
Megan McArdle on the cancellation of Steven Colbert’s The Late Show as reflecting the loss of shared culture. She oddly ties this to the extra 99 minutes a day we don’t leave the house, which historically was how people ended up watching late night, but now we watch more tailored content. Which in general is an improvement.
I do think there have been some fantastic late shows that I was happy to watch, in particular Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight and previously Craig Ferguson’s Late Late Show, or early Daily Show and Colbert Report, but I found most late shows bad and essentially unwatchable. That includes Colbert’s Late Show run, and I’m actually really happy for him to get a new show or podcast instead where he can do more interesting things. Free Colbert, as it were.
The Panama Playlists, see what various people listen to. Remember that Spotify playlists are public by default.
A discount does not mean a ‘good deal.’ Vacation markets are super duper inefficient. But also these are going to mostly be forced sellers, without natural buyers, and buyers might have gotten discounts to begin with by booking in advance, so if you can figure out what is a good deal (use AI for this?) you can probably find pretty good bargains.
The best part is that you have to buy one of a small number of particular packages. You avoid choices, and as we all know Choices Are Bad. Instead of comparing this vacation to all possible choices, and sweating planning and decisions, you take what is available and you show up and that is it. If something isn’t a great fit for your preferences, you have an excuse to go outside your comfort zone and you don’t feel like you punted. It actually sounds nice.
Thiccy Thot calls this ‘the jackpot age,’ with people not valuing survival or optimizing for mean results like they should, and urges people not to chase jackpots. As an illustration he offers this game, which is effectively a St. Petersburg paradox variant. The EV on each flip is great but the more you flip the more likely it is that you lose.
Assuming I cannot hedge the flip and no tax implications? I do notice I am past the point where I would flip, the marginal value of money is declining too rapidly.
Should Magic: The Gathering emergency ban either Agatha’s Soul Cauldron (galaxy-level move) or Vivi Ornitier (safe and obvious play), or accept that all the good players in Standard will be playing the same deck until the next window?
There is a long history in Magic of players discussing the need for emergency bans, and then mostly not getting such bans, as Wizards has placed very high value in sticking to its announcement windows outside of true emergencies. They’ve shown time and again they’d rather let Standard wither and be terrible for months on end. Usually there is a lot of talk about letting the players find a solution, long after it is clear that there exists no solution.
I have long disagreed with this policy. I disagree with it even more today, as information is found and spreads faster and there is tons of statistical data. Drop the ban hammer. Do it now.
Chess.com has a team of 30 people that ban 100,000 accounts per month for cheating and unfair play, 40% of the accounts get banned within their first two weeks. The article presumes this means they are doing a good job catching cheaters, but even if you assume minimal false positives that is not obvious. If we were doing a better job catching cheaters presumably people would be doing it less?
Optimization for thee but not for me, I insist:
Jorbs: looked something up about a game and someone posted that you should resolve an issue a certain way unless “you enjoy making suboptimal decisions” and that is such a funny thing for a human who spends their time answering rules questions on forums for board games to write.
Clair Obscura Expedition 33 continues to go well as I move into Act 3, despite some frustrating design mistakes.
One that I’m rather annoyed by is that at some point (not a meaningful spoiler) there is a character you pick that the game is telling you that you need to have in your party or they won’t learn their skills, similar to for example a Blue Mage in Final Fantasy V. I find this really annoying because that’s not who I enjoy having in the party on an aesthetic level, but it feels bad missing out, and even worse not knowing if any given battle is a place you would miss out. Grr. I’ve mostly decided I don’t care.
Even if you ignore that issue, the way upgrades work, both with Color of Lumina and weapon upgrades, effectively locks you into a party. I chose Luna and Maelle because I find that fun and more central to the plot. I’m happy with my choices but sad that the game punishes experiment like this.
Another main complaint is that balance is often lacking. Decisions that should be interesting instead feel forced. There’s also a big ‘too awesome to use’ problem with certain resources, especially Color of Lumina.
My biggest complaint is that it is very easy to get turned around, or for it to be otherwise unclear how to move on to the next area. Several times I have been extremely frustrated and effectively stuck, including right now as I type this inside the monolith. I am fine with navigation as an interesting puzzle or decision, but this does not feel like that.
There are a bunch of things in Act 3 that are deeply confusing or rediculous, but all of them seem highly optional. If you want to go completionist that’s your call.
Worlds Beyond is doing amazingly well for Magic: The Gathering. Final Fantasy made them $200 million in one day, and doing far better than any previous set, so much so that they could not meet demand. I didn’t love the flavor details of many of the cards, clearly the market disagrees or cares little, and everyone says the limited format is great.
Even Lord of the Rings took six months to get to that point, and that set is still selling several years later. Spiderman is up next. They see Japan as a ‘potential gold mine’ for more material.
Perhaps this was always the endgame for Magic. We had decades of our own storylines and worlds, but once Magic went sufficiently big and mainstream and moved away from competition and two-player games towards Commander, being the meta-IP for all of fantasy (and perhaps beyond it) makes too much sense, and it will only feed on itself until and unless it wears the product out.
This also seems like a solution for running out of design space. There’s no shame in it after three decades. Magic has mostly fully mined the simple stuff that works, forcing complexity to drift higher and the mechanics that work are getting continuously recycled, even if they get new names. If you want to have higher complexity and repeat mechanics forever, top down is where it is at.
Boen seems largely correct here:
Boen: we used to joke about this, but gambling mechanisms, metagame progression, interaction extenders, timewasting filler etc has all become so commonplace that most people genuinely just think that that’s what videogames are now & get confused/angry when you say that stuff is bad.
“metagame progression” is specifically like call of duty where a leveling system strings players along with little upgrades to keep playing. many stop after reaching max lvl, which betrays the fact that the “real game” is unfortunately shallow and boring absent external incentive
Andre Treiber: I’m with you on a lot of these, but I actually really enjoy meta progression as a mechanic. I really enjoy roguelite experiences and unlocking new things and making old challenges grow trivial is a rewarding part of the gameplay.
Boen: Yeah there’s some subtlety here. I think that the type of thing people mean by “meta progression” in the context of roguelikes and stuff like that, is actually much more akin to regular game progression, not meta at all, which is of course a pillar of game design & not a problem.
Roguelite metagame progression can be very good. I especially like it when you are unlocking additional abilities over time while you are not close to winning the run, and when the amount of progression you make determines what you unlock and is part of strategic decision making.
What annoys me quite a bit are situations in which you are reliably winning runs, there are higher difficulties that would be interesting, and the game wastes a bunch of your time getting to them. The worst version of this is when you are winning your runs but also unlocking capabilities faster or almost as fast as the extra difficulty kicks in, so the game doesn’t get harder for a long time and you’re skilling up on top of that. The central example of this I remember is Roguebook.
The other stuff is really terrible. The thing is, you could simply not do these things? Unless you are getting them on microtransactions there is no real advantage to keeping a player playing Call of Duty for 100 hours instead of 50 hours, not having any fun. Many games are using these techniques without the microtransactions. Stop it.
Timothy Lee: Mejia considered it “very triggering” for Waymo to use the term “driver” to describe a technology rather than a person.
…
City Councilor Benjamin Weber found it “concerning to hear that the company was making a detailed map of our city streets without having a community process beforehand.” He added that “it’s important that we listen when we hear from the Teamsters and others who feel as though they’re blindsided by this.”
“I think it’s important that we pause—sometimes we rush—and make sure everyone’s voice is heard before anything happens that we can’t turn back from and that protections are in place for our workers,” said City Councilor Erin Murphy.
The next day, Murphy announced legislation requiring that a “human safety operator is physically present” in all autonomous vehicles—effectively a ban on driverless vehicles. Given the near-unanimous hostility Waymo faced at the hearing, I wouldn’t be surprised if Murphy’s proposal became law in Boston.
There is good news elsewhere:
On the other hand, legislators in Washington DC and New York State have introduced bills to open the door to driverless vehicles—though it’s not clear if these bills will become law. Legislators in New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia could also act on driverless vehicle technology in the next year or two.
Timothy Lee, who is an expert at following developments here, fears that blue states and cities might indeed ban self-driving cars, and we could get to a 2035 where red states had tons of autonomous vehicles and blue states and cities have none.
It is not impossible, and certainly some amount of delay is in general likely, but I think we are going to win this one rather easily over time. It is impossible not to notice how much Waymo has improved San Francisco and other cities, and how much more it will improve it when supply goes up and thus costs and wait times go down. The lifestyle impact is dramatic and I do not expect the public in blue cities to accept being left behind.
Alec Stapp: We should be much more explicit about the tradeoff here:
The Teamsters are demanding that we let thousands of people die in car crashes in order to protect their jobs.
Chris Freiman: When Teamsters try to block life-saving technology to protect their jobs.
Alec is not wrong about self-driving cars preventing deaths, yet I would prefer to not make that the main argument. Quite often the protectionist laws, including union rules and things that destroyed childhood in America, are imposed in the name of that same ‘otherwise people will die’ style of rhetoric. What we should focus on are the far more important and massive other transformative benefits.
The jobs that they are trying to ‘protect’ are worse than useless. We would be requiring that people be paid to sit in cars and drive them all day, mostly not enjoying doing this or otherwise benefiting, doing the task worse than the AI could, in order to justify a transfer of wealth to those people.
Adam Thierer, together with Mark Dalton, proposes Federal-level regulation on self-driving, allowing Level 4-5 automated driving systems (ADS) nationwide under a new safety framework under the extremely poorly named ‘America Drives’ act (since this involves America not driving, that is the entire point).
The parallels and contrast to the insane AI moratorium are obvious, with concerns about ‘patchworks of state and local laws’ and localities doing crazy things like requiring a human driver be present as per Boston above.
Here I am fully on board. We know what self-driving looks like and do not expect it to change in unexpected ways. We are creating a new federal standard and set of regulations that would work well. We have extremely strong evidence that expanding self-driving increases safety and saves lives. We also do not have to worry about existential or catastrophic risks, or that things could develop to a point where our mistakes could not be fixed once we notice them.
Whereas all these considerations go the other way with respect to AI.
Tesla AI: Invites to our Bay Area ride-hailing service are going out now
I’ve taken a break, but I’m hoping to make my comeback as per usual in September. Football! Football! Football! Football! Football! Football! Football! Football! Football!
NFL teams are trying out bizarre angled kickoff strategies now that a touchback puts the ball all the way at the 35 yard line. This sounds like it would have been great last year too, which highlights how often there are big gains lying around that no one bothers to try and exploit until they are forced into it, even in places like the NFL.
I suspect it works the other way around. More and more households are giving up cable. If you are want to watch F1 and are told you need a cable package you would not otherwise get, that is super expensive. Apple TV is a lot cheaper and you can flip it on and off as needed.
Where I have a bunch bigger concern is the interface. It is absurdly terrible. They don’t give you an easy way to find what you want. When they do, they ruin it. I went to watch a Mets game on Apple TV and the icon for the game in question literally spoiled the final score, prominently, on purpose. Well, so much for that, and I think that played a substantial part in me giving up on watching the Mets this season.
The better question is, shouldn’t they be making a deal with Netflix? F1 has grown so much lately because of Drive to Survive. The synergies there seem fantastic. Netflix is optimizing for engagement and working on selling ads, and has a larger viewing base, so they should be happy to double down and match the $120m-$150m per year bid.
On the one hand, I stand by the claim that most of the moral panics about social media were directionally accurate. Social media wrecked quite a lot of things.
I agree that some of the accusations in hindsight went too far, and we should be skeptical of claims of the form ‘social media broke America,’ the same way you should be skeptical that television ‘broke America,’ or even that America is broken at all. I still think it is clear there are quite a lot of downsides at the personal and societal levels.
On the other hand, we should not dismiss the upsides. It really is much easier to meet, keep up with, talk with and coordinate with your friends. Our access to information of all sorts is vastly better if you know how to filter it. I couldn’t do what I do in this form without Twitter. They took a lot from us, but we got a lot in return.
A lot of this comes down to whether what they took from us was good, actually. Do you actually want to socialize with the people who happen to be physically proximate? Do you actually want to invest the required time?
Tenobrus: everybody’s in the replies like “but i found all my communities and friends with social media!!” sure but the counterfactual isn’t u being isolated, it’s returning to the era where irl socializing was common and easy and ur best friend was some guy u met in a park.
Social media is largely what *causedall that to fail. it created the problem it’s now “solving” for you.
Tracing Woodgrains: I grew up in a strong community with many opportunities for in-person socializing with the normal, pleasant people around me.
As a result, I was desperately lonely until I found all the weird people like me online. my social life has been exceptionally good since
There’s something to be said for that sort of community. a lot to be said for it, really! I was glad to grow up in it and there’s a lot about it that I miss.
But it could never have been anywhere near as good as niche online communities for the sorts of socialization I like.
Not here to call anyone “NPCs” or anything. I just have niche interests and basically only those interests, and it turns out it’s much easier and more pleasant to find conversations with people who share those interests online than in-person
Since I moved in, I’ve had a chance to meet a handful of our neighbors in this building. They are, without exception, lovely people who would be good friends. And yet, I do not invest time in trying to hang out with them, because even though they are great and we are living in the same place we (with one exception of someone I know from elsewhere where I do want to make the time but it hasn’t worked out yet) have little in common.
I once met my (for about 10 years) best friend in the park. But that was because the park had a chess club.
I’m still very interested in connecting with other families with kids, to help my kids make friends. And sometimes there’s a great match. But mostly? I’m good. Yes, social media caused the old system to fail. Largely that’s because the old system wasn’t great, especially for unusual people. The thing is, it still beats the hell out of nothing, or not having any friends at all.
I continue to be on the ‘For You is bad tech never use it’ side.
David Manheim: Update: [Twitter’s For You feed] does provide additional interesting tweets, but I’ve decided that the cost (both engagement-maximizing bullshit rabbit holes and opportunity costs of what I’d be looking at in my other lists) is much too high.
Der B: Using “not interested in that post” for engagement maximizing bullshit solves this, in my experience.
David Manheim: I tried that for a month, alas. You can push against specific types, which works a bit, but the system keeps working to find some new type of discussions to hook you.
The algorithm is not your friend. Ultimately it is your enemy. Do not engage.
Only 7% of time on Instagram and 17% of time on Facebook involves consuming content from friends. They have become primarily few-to-many sharing businesses, with an emphasis on video. The question is, how much is that displacing consuming friend content versus supplementing it?
I don’t love the dynamic that following someone on Twitter or elsewhere does several things at once. In addition to you seeing their posts and interactions, it is social proof for the person you follow, and also informs others about you.
David Manheim: The impact of following someone on twitter is not only to show your their content, but also (critically) it functions as social proof about them to others who follow you.
In other contexts I’ve seen various dramas around who does or does not follow or unfollowed or blocked who on Instagram, and I presume there is fear of being caught following someone who was cancelled, it is this whole todo. Luckily in the Twitter worlds I know this gets ignored except for very high profile follows like Elon Musk.
There are many legitimate problems to have with OpenAI but Elon Musk instead has chosen to be in a glass house throwing stones towards a brick one.
Stop deboosting links on Twitter. Especially stop penalizing Substack, including any mention of the word ‘substack.’ Then maybe we can talk.
Elon Musk: Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action.
Meta AI has also briefly been #1 in the app store, so quality is also unnecessary.
Sam Altman: This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.
Lots has been said about this, here is one thing [that points out Elon Musk created a special system for showing you all his Tweets first.]
I hope someone will get counter-discovery on this, I and many others would love to know what’s been happening. But OpenAI will just stay focused on making great products.
Nikita Bier: Perhaps it is you who is manipulating your products to your benefit, by putting warnings on every link to a competitor?
Dve Hazarika: I agree with Nikita that apps should not manipulate behaviors to discourage linking to other sites.
jpa: they do this for every url sent in the chat text.
And of course:
xlr8harder: Fix the specifically targeted Substack links before you point any fingers.
You start to wonder how much of this is pure expression of dominance play that indicates loss of any connection to reality or the idea that words have meaning?
There is a sense in which, because Elon Musk helped create OpenAI, ‘I am your father’ is not a crazy statement to make. But then that’s… bad, right? Since Elon Musk is constantly saying Sam Altman and OpenAI are terrible? And this metaphor kind of makes Elon Musk into Darth Vader?
I agree this could be a growing worry, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves:
Sully Omar: Good chance the internet becomes *extremelyclosed in the next few years.
We already see it with x/openai/anthropic (and most social media companies) where they actively discourage other companies from sharing/using links etc to other platforms.
And it likely will get worse as the platform does not want external agents using their data
Why? Because a competitor could create a better ai agent, and the user would never touch that platform again, and that’s pretty bad for business
so instead of making a better product, it will either charge for the data (making it $$), or just make their apis significantly worse/ shut off external access directly
Either way sucks for consumers if we go down this path.
Then again, we are also seeing MCP connectors and AI by default will make integration and automation and getting around any and all of this easier. What OpenAI and Anthropic do to ‘discourage’ clicking on links is at most very light, and those links are links they are choosing to provide. I just did a GPT-5-Thinking query that provided links, and I clicked on the links, and it was fine.
It is a dangerous game to shut AI agents out of your website. Right now, the AI agents are not good enough, so I would shrug and go to your website manually. But a year from now, I am probably going to be using an AI agents to book flights and make basic purchases and so on. What happens if Orbitz shuts me out and Kayak doesn’t, or vice versa? The answer isn’t ‘oh then I will be forced to go to one manually.’
Even Amazon should worry about this. Currently my default is Amazon to buy things, but Amazon needs to outcompete all of AI search if they want to keep that position.
There are two distinct sources of restriction here. We have restriction of access, especially via API, to shut out AIs. And then we have restriction of exit, discouragement of links. The first could be forced upon many because the alternative lets you be eaten. I am very confident the second one is mostly a mistake, but a lot of people seem determined to repeat it.
To be fair to Musk and xAI, for all the problems I have with both how they handle Twitter and what they’ve done with Grok, Grok does seem to take the whole ‘speak truth’ thing rather seriously when it isn’t being directly fed a particular ‘truth.’
Aian McLaughlin (OpenAI): i think it’s under-discussed how grok really is a pretty good truth maximizer. kudos to the team. training smart models is hard
Simeon: Yes! Congrats xAI team for maintaining a fairly truth seeking chatbot! I’d be really excited if xAI managed to keep improving on their core mission. As the informational footprint of these rising sapients grows, we’ll increasingly need it.
It also is rather telling that Elon’s response to claims he mainpulates Twitter is to point out an example where it was not manipulated, as proof.
Here’s a funny question, do you need your bookstore to have cashiers in order for it not to simply be Amazon But We Made Everything Worse? I get the instinct but my answer is no, the thing you are being offered is the ability to browse the books and see how they’ve chosen to highlight them and lay things out, and perhaps sit and read. But I say this as someone who cannot remember the last time he’s set foot in a physical bookstore.
(Also at the link, there is appreciation for a bakery providing a free piano.)
Right after writing about Tea I was informed they had a second far more damaging data breach, again due to a very stupid bug, this time exposing DMs and other activity on the site, in ways trivial to trace back to real identities. Given that has happened, I would treat Tea the way you would information that someone could leak or subpoena, as in I wouldn’t type anything into Tea you wouldn’t want on the front page of The New York Times.
Then someone went out and made TeaOnHer, as in Tea for men to spill about women. It got to number 2 in the lifestyle app section behind Tea. And then, of course, and let me tell you I feel bad for zero of the people involved in this:
Shoshana Weissmann: FINALLY true gender equality for men and women! This is what we have fought for!!!
ICYMI someone made a Tea app for men and it has basically no security and everyone’s IDs and info is leaked.
Techcrunch walkedthrough the Tea for Him leak, where they managed to speedrun in 10 minutes by accessing the API they weren’t supposed to access and which allowed unauthenticated access to user data. Yep. Then it proved remarkably difficult to tell the app about the flaw. This particular gaping hole has since been fixed.
There is a fun debate between ‘no human would be so stupid as to, this must have been vibe coding’ and ‘no AI would be so stupid as to do this, it can’t be vibe coding.’
For those in the first camp, I refer them to the Sixth Law of Human Stupidity, which states that if you say ‘no one would be so stupid as to’ then you know someone is indeed so stupid as to.
Then again, we have this response saying that the MobileMe debacle was because the team told everyone it wasn’t ready and asked for permission to trim features and were told no, then when it fell over they all got yelled at and it was highly demotivating to say the least. Who is to say, also it is possible that this strategy was effective in general even if it failed in that case.
Don’t let the haters tell you different, this graph is awesome, and points out two important facts about the world.
First, that we need to build a lot more houses where people want to live.
Second, and this is important, if you want to buy a house you’ll probably have to work for more than a week to buy it.
Bernie Sanders: It is insane that in the richest country in the world, millions cannot afford a home and hundreds of thousands are homeless every night. We need major investments in affordable housing, not tax breaks for billionaires
Tracing Woods: the people I find trickiest to handle online are ones who are clearly not stupid and sometimes raise good points, but pair whatever they say with a lot of belligerent mockery. avoiding responding with substance feels like a dodge, responding tends to lead to trading unproductive barbs while thinking that surely if you explain it just a bit better they’ll get the point
easier when someone is obviously just nasty
there are four or five people who travel in the same spheres as me online who fit this category, and I tend to wind up having a bunch of increasingly frustrating exchanges before blocking and moving on. but it leaves a bad taste in my mouth every time
Paul Graham: Just block them. Life is too short. They never rise above moderately smart anyway.
Did you know 67% of all college students bet on sports? That’s a group that is majority female, so that statistic is wild. This is in the context of Ron Yorko developing a class in sports betting awareness from a neuroscience perspective for CMU freshman.
Cooking scales well, but for single people the economics are remarkably bad. Stop telling single people not to order delivery.
Claim that AirBnB and Vrbo are headed downhill, which directionally matches my experiences, although it’s obviously not as bad as this portrays things. Revealed preference is that there was a period when I defaulted to an AirBnB, and I have definitely switched back to renting hotel rooms in most situations.
Seb Krier: In case anyone is considering booking an @Airbnb_uk, make sure there are no flea/tick infestations in your room because you will only get a refund of 30% of the cost of the last night alone, and no compensation for replacing infested luggage, medication for bites etc. Absurd!
Update: after escalating further, got the trip refunded as a “one-time concession” (but no other compensation). 👍🏼
Peter Wildeford: AirBnB has absolutely no downside protection. AirCover is a lie. We had to move out because the building architect said that the roof was at risk of collapse. AirBnB refunded us just $300 out of $2900.
Covi: AirCover is totally deceptive. They make it sound like they have you covered, yet a host cancelled the day before check in and I called being like “so can you help me” and they’re like here’s a £20 voucher, best we can do.
Adam Strandberg: To summarize: a grad student took physiological measurements of 11 ordinary chess players (not grandmasters). They reported in a summary in a chess magazine that the maximum chest movement rate they measured in a 10 second period was almost three times that of an average measurement from a different study.
Robert Sapolsky then cited this thesis in his popular book, dropping the distinction between maximum and average to give a 3X breathing rate. He later took the 3X number and multiplied that by 2000 calories per day to get the number 6000, adding the “grandmaster” rhetorical flourish along the way.
He spread this fact through his own talks at Stanford and through interviews with journalists, who accurately repeated him. When questioned about the source of the number, he then claimed on multiple occasions that the number actually came from someone else, and that journalists had distorted his argument.
Suffice it to say this is unbecoming of such an esteemed professor.
Europe’s war against air conditioning continues to be truly absurd. It’s even more absurd considering how well it lines up with solar power. If the solar panels can’t produce the energy to run the air conditioning, then you didn’t need to turn it on. It also is the obvious response any time someone says ‘their lived experiences are better.’
This does seem like a good heuristic:
caesararum: “oh you want to criticize veterans? why didn’t you sign up”
i did, two combat tours
anyway, do you want to keep arguing or should I just chalk this up as a W and move on
Alex Godofsky: whenever someone gives me this sort of “oh? do YOU have experience [with whatever]?” challenge I know they’re a fraud because approximately 0% of people concede when it turns out you do.
There are cases where the person is actually asking nicely and they clearly are hoping you tell them yes, as in ‘have you done this procedure before?’ or ‘are you familiar with [X] method?’ That’s different.
When someone says this in a way that clearly implies that they think the answer is no and they are using that to dismiss you, then yeah, doesn’t matter, it will change nothing, and you should likely write them off whether or not you can answer yes.
I am doing my best to avoid commenting on politics. As usual my lack of comment on other fronts should not be taken to mean I lack strong opinions on them. Yet sometimes, things reach a point where I cannot fail to point them out.
If you are looking to avoid such things, I have split out this section, so you can skip it.
FDA has a new pilot program that can slash FDA’s drug review time from 10-12 months to 1-2 months, by evaluating things along the way during clinical trials, which was what they did during Operation Warp Speed. That would straight up accelerate the deployment of such drugs by most of a year. It would also greatly encourage future investment, not only is the process faster the drug companies know where they are at throughout and can adjust accordingly. The term ‘AI’ does not once appear in the report.
Which demands the obvious question, why the hell are we only doing this now?
As per Levels of Friction, yes, you should have anticipated the results we got when moving things into Tier 1 where they are legal and ubiquitous without limiting principles:
John Arnold: I think legislators expected 10% THC weed and straightforward sports betting of money lines and over/unders when they legalized both but were quickly met with 30%+ THC products and props, parlays, and in-game wagers, each an order of magnitude more dangerous.
Zac Hill: This is exactly what happened and is also why we need more game designers working in policy.
It doesn’t have to be game designers. Ordinary capitalists should be fully equipped to reason this out.
Click-to-cancel, which I agree with Sheel Mohnot was by far the best thing Lina Khan did at the FTC, has been stopped by a panel of three Republican judges so the industry could get ‘more time and process’ to explain why they opposed the rule. The story here about his failure to cancel a gym membership is rage inducing and completely standard.
Martin Skrelli (replying to Lina Khan): Get a job.
Sir, when she had a job you complained, how you complain again, please make up your goddamned mind. Also offer me a click so I can cancel.
It seems the UK government literally got an injunction forbidding the press from talking about what the government was doing with respect to Afghan migrants? Regardless of what you think of what was being done, forbidding the press from discussing it feels like a Declaration of Independence, time-to-start-over-with-a-new-government level of violation of basic principles of freedom?
Meanwhile, you know how the Jones Act was supposed to promote American shipbuilding?
Instead, the beneficiaries of the Jones Act, via owning existing Jones Act ships, have enlisted the government to actively sabotage American shipbuilding even further.
As in, and I quote: “Some Jones Act companies now expressing fear that building new ships could devalue their current fleets.”
I’d say ‘mask off moment,’ but it’s not. What mask?
John Konrad: BREAKING NEWS: Massive shipbuilding changes in DC. None of them good. @gCaptain has confirmed from a White House source that Trump has closed the shipbuilding office at the NSC.
Reuters reports that Ian Bennitt, the President’s Special Assistant for Shipbuilding at the White House, has been fired.
Favored candidates for Provost and Superintendent positions at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy have received denial notices.
At a recent USNI shipbuilding conference, it became clear: major shipbuilding primes are actively fighting plans to expand commercial shipbuilding.
Sources inside the Pentagon say Admirals and SES are digging in their heels on several key shipbuilding objectives.
Some Jones Act companies now expressing fear that building new ships could devalue their current fleets.
Congressional sources say progress on the SHIPS Act is stalling in committee. It’s also unlikely the new Commandant will be confirmed before the August break.
We’ve confirmed that the French billionaire who offered to invest $20B in U.S. shipping sent a letter to Trump saying he’s not getting the support he needs to move forward.
The U.S. Coast Guard is slashing cutter orders left and right.
…
I spoke with half a dozen senior sources in DC—every single one is frustrated.
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Zero follow-through on Trump’s State of the Union promise to open a dedicated White House shipbuilding office.
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It’s been 252 days since the election, and not a single new ship has been ordered.
The smartest maritime policy guy I know sent me this: “Spot on that JA carriers do not want any newbuilding on grounds it devalues their assets and that primes don’t want it either. @WeAreHII & Crowley are acting poorly. I see this dynamic as a center of gravity of the mess.”
That’s right. We literally got an offer to invest $20 billion in US shipbuilding, and the Trump administration said no, we won’t support that. No non-US-built ships can be used, and also no US ships can be built. Also tariffs on things like steel.
So, no ships, then. Except the handful that exist, which get to profit.
The corruption is staggering. It can always get worse.
Chris Lakin: If you make >$300k/yr why aren’t you announcing random $1,000 prizes every Saturday for whatever you want to see happen in the world?
$1k prize for best blog post on X, $1k or best art like Y, $1k for best _____. High agency mindset.
near: is $1k a large enough prize to make things happen in sf?
Chris Lakin: Many of the https://franciscosan.org have been less than this.
Don’t view the money as “paying for time” — $1k isn’t enough for that. View it as “showing seriousness that someone cares enough to invest limited resources”
Gallabytes: I tried this for 10k + a job offer but the prize was too hard & nobody won it.
The answer is (as always) transaction costs.
At one point, I coordinated with Paul Christiano to put out an AI Alignment Prize. On a per dollar basis, I am confident we generated and highlighted excellent work. However, we also had to put in a ton of time evaluating all the entries. A lot of other would-be prizes will have a similar problem, and once you announce a prize people can get very persnickety about details.
Also you have to use part of your social bandwidth to communicate the prize.
However, yes, you should be doing it more. And I should be doing it more.
One cool variant is to create a Manifold market on ‘will [X] happen?’ where the [X] is something you want to happen and that someone can go make happen. The absolute value of the prize is low but in my experience this is highly motivating, and for example got my hands on a Switch 2. There is tons of alpha in offering a symbolic but real prize that shows you care at all.
By comparison, on Caviar, I tested out a similar sized order, subtotal was $94, sales tax was over $8 and total charge was $109.03. I mean, you can be an idiot and press the Pay More button if you want, I suppose.
Explanation of why all airport restaurants get similar Yelp ratings, they’re all run by the same group of people. Except no, that still makes no sense, because the food still mostly tastes the same as it does on the outside. If you go to Shake Shack you still get a Shake Shack burger, you go to Dunkin Donuts you get their donuts, and so on. So yes, there is a bit of equalization in service, perhaps, but that doesn’t explain it? I know that I will almost always make the same choices at airport restaurants I would at a similar outside food court.
So I think this is still a mystery, that likely has more to do with how people rate restaurants when they are being charged a lot and are travelling? As in, you’re always happy to eat something at all, always frustrated by the price and options and conditions, so you end up around 2.5-3 star averages almost no matter what? I guess?
A ghost kitchen Xi’an Famous Foods is doing bonkers business in Alexandria. Xi’an Famous Foods is quite good, I recommend the Lamb Noodles like everyone else does, but you have to eat it right away (and also I made the mistake of looking, and it is a lot of calories, so I don’t do it often). This isn’t only me, they’ve been consistent about insisting on the eating right away part, which applies here way more than usual. I worry many customers aren’t getting the full experience.
Joe Weisenthal says all cities have good food now. Nate Silver calls out Boston as being somewhat lacking among the top metro areas as do many others, which he attributes to it being a college town, and many others question the premise.
My understanding can be summarized this way:
No matter where you go, average quality of food is way, way up.
No matter where you go, the best available food is way, way up.
No matter where you go, variety of available food or good food is way, way up.
The average place is still far behind the better places, almost everywhere.
You can eat fine basically everywhere there are people, at this point.
This is all true regardless of your price level.
The average and best available options still vary a lot from place to place.
This difference matters, and can matter a lot. NYC is awesome here.
Lonely: why don’t autistic people make behaving appropriately and predictably in social situations their special interest.
Hotistic: While you were studying the blade, autistic people were studying appropriate ways to laugh and when to laugh and why it’s ok to laugh just to not make normies uncomfortable.
Madeline Pendleton: In 4th grade I tried to teach myself “how to be human” by replicating the tv show Friends. I did a peer survey and asked my classmates who their favorite character was. Phoebe won, so I spent the entire summer studying her and entered 5th grade AS Phoebe.
For those wondering it worked pretty well, I definitely became more popular. If you’re struggling socially I can 10/10 recommend just becoming Phoebe Buffay from Friends for a while.
I did become very popular almost overnight so I’m going to say yes [it did work.]
Sasha: The best part about this is that if any character on Friends was autistic, it would 100% be Phoebe.
Madeline Pendleton: Oh my god.
Trash Panda: I’ve always struggled making friends so at one point in high school I decided to copy the personality of fictional characters I liked because if I liked them surely other people would like me if I acted like them, right?
The character I chose was fucking Deadpool 🤦🏻♀️🤣🤣
Perhaps the supposedly ‘normal’ humans should also be doing more systematic study of how to do you do, fellow humans? They seem to have skipped over some things.
Meghan Murphy: This is the saddest thing I’ve ever read.
Ok never mind this is the saddest thing I’ve ever read:
[Quotes Dark Hyacinth: Parties are boring. A bunch of people standing around drinking. What’s fun about that?]
The parties like this were taken from me at the time (in the 90s and early 00s) and I never experienced them, but I did understand they existed and I was sad about this.
Cate Hall comes out against the concept of willpower. I see this post as correctly attacking people who simply tell you to Use The Try Harder and think doing hard things through ‘sheer willpower’ is virtuous and those who don’t have it deserve to suffer or anything like that.
I strongly agree that the best way to get good results is to set things up to be easy, and that anyone who says any form of ‘you don’t need [X] you only need willpower’ is usually the asshole in a given situation. Engineering solutions are great.
I still think the post goes too far in treating willpower as a non-useful concept. Willpower is a highly useful handle for an important tool that one can and should cultivate and learn how to use wisely. You can also choose to call it something else, if you prefer.
Cate Hall asks ‘are you stuck in movie logic?’ in particular highlighting one form of Idiot Plot where the whole problem could be cleared up in five minutes if people would simply talk to each other and Say The Thing rather than repeatedly and conspicuously dancing around it and not Saying The Thing. As she says, there is a time and place for not Saying The Thing but on the margin you should say it.
Isaac King: I suppose I already knew this, but it’s striking how many of the people responding to this seem to legitimately not understand the difference between “did you lie” and “can anyone prove you lied”.
I’m against lying in general. If there’s no good way around it and I think the other party is expecting me to lie, then I’ll sometimes grudgingly do it, but I try to avoid it as much as feasible.
I too am strongly against lying but there are exceptions and this is one of them. Technical attestations with no legitimate purpose or ability to be enforced, and no person who is relying on them in any way to be accurate, don’t count.
What are protests actually for? Ben Landau-Taylor asserts that if you want your protest to exert any political pressure, this requires that you demonstrate the capacity for violence (ideally while carefully avoiding any actual violence). Otherwise, no the state won’t respect your demonstration of support, so the purpose of the protest is as a pep rally for the participants (and I would add a signal to others in other ways, which can then indirectly pressure the state in various ways), which can be worthwhile but should not be confused with political pressure.
I think this model goes too far but is essentially correct, with the caveat that you can also credibly threaten things other than violence, but you have to credibly threaten something.
I don’t keep up with the superhero genre, so I asked ChatGPT to find some examples of underconfidence:
After Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, he gains superhuman abilities—but at first, he doesn’t fully understand or control them.
Other characters with a similar arc include:
Clark Kent (Superman) in some origin stories (like Smallville), where he gradually learns to control his immense strength.
Eleven from Stranger Things, though not a traditional superhero, also fits the theme of discovering and misjudging her powers at first.
These are terrible examples.
Clark Kent does not have an underconfidence problem with his powers at any point that I can see. He has a lack of control problem, which is a very real issue. He does have regular person underconfidence problems as Clark Kent, but that’s different.
Peter Parker, in every example I have seen, is initially radically reckless and overconfident. He does things that risk getting him killed if he lacks Required Secondary Powers he has not yet verified.
Have appliances declined in durability? The answer is yes, but only modestly, this reflects consumer demand for more features and not caring much about durability, and also largely reflects government requirements for water and energy efficiency. Besides, prices have declined a lot, so it is fine.
Something to watch out for:
Danielle Fong: 💭if mansplaining is telling someone something they already know, chicksplaining is explaining a dilemma to someone, but she already knows what she wants to do
Yishan: I had this extremely agentic female friend in college and I figured out really quickly that whenever she asked me for advice on what to do, the best solution was to figure out what she already wanted to do, and then advise her to do that because mostly she just wanted validation/permission to do some slightly transgressive thing. Over time, it became “Yishan, you give the best advice! No one else understands, but you get it!” which I guess was technically true.
Dushyant: She won’t tell you what she prefers though
A fungus was discovered that can eat even hard to break down plastics, so you could plausibly throw it into a landfill and it would do the rest? It is rarely that simple and there are obvious things to check first, but yes we do get bailed out like this every so often. Also note that if you build superintelligence, things like this will tend to happen a lot more often in a variety of ways.
John Wentworth advises us to centrally seek wizard power, the ability and skills to do and create things yourself, rather than king power, which is dominance and bargaining power and directing others, mostly in ways that can only get you what money can buy and involves you marching in front of parades thinking you decide where the parade goes. This allowed him to reorient his own drives in this way.
John Wentworth: In response to the Wizard Power post, Garrett and David were like “Y’know, there’s this thing where rationalists get depression, but it doesn’t present like normal depression because they have the mental habits to e.g. notice that their emotions are not reality. It sounds like you have that.”
… and in hindsight I think they were totally correct.
Here I’m going to spell out what it felt/feels like from inside my head, my model of where it comes from, and some speculation about how this relates to more typical presentations of depression.
Core thing that’s going on: on a gut level, I systematically didn’t anticipate that things would be fun, or that things I did would work, etc. When my instinct-level plan-evaluator looked at my own plans, it expected poor results.
Some things which this is importantly different from:
Always feeling sad
Things which used to make me happy not making me happy
Not having energy to do anything
… but importantly, the core thing is easy to confuse with all three of those. For instance, my intuitive plan-evaluator predicted that things which used to make me happy would not make me happy (like e.g. dancing), but if I actually did the things they still made me happy. (And of course I noticed that pattern and accounted for it, which is how “rationalist depression” ends up different from normal depression; the model here is that most people would not notice their own emotional-level predictor being systematically wrong.) Little felt promising or motivating, but I could still consciously evaluate that a plan was a good idea regardless of what it felt like, and then do it, overriding my broken intuitive-level plan-evaluator.
That immediately suggests a model of what causes this sort of problem.
The obvious way a brain would end up in such a state is if a bunch of very salient plans all fail around the same time, especially if one didn’t anticipate the failures and doesn’t understand why they happened. Then a natural update for the brain to make is “huh, looks like the things I do just systematically don’t work, don’t make me happy, etc; let’s update predictions on that going forward”. And indeed, around the time this depression kicked in, David and I had a couple of significant research projects which basically failed for reasons we still don’t understand, and I went through a breakup of a long relationship (and then dove into the dating market, which is itself an excellent source of things not working and not knowing why), and my multi-year investments in training new researchers failed to pay off for reasons I still don’t fully understand. All of these things were highly salient, and I didn’t have anything comparably-salient going on which went well.
So I guess some takeaways are:
If a bunch of salient plans fail around the same time for reasons you don’t understand, your instinctive plan-evaluator may end up with a global negative bias.
If you notice that, maybe try an antidepressant. Bupropion has been helpful for me so far, though it’s definitely not the right tool for everyone (especially bad if you’re a relatively anxious person; I am the opposite of anxious).
Derek Thompson looks back at how poor we were in 1776. We are, by comparison, unfathomably rich. George Washington spent $15k/year in today’s dollars on candles to keep the lights on. Heat was so expensive Jefferson couldn’t write in winter because his ink would freeze.
Religious attendance by the young is way up in the UK, as in by a factor of four or more, and France’s Catholic Church did more baptisms this year (17k) then they have in 20 years, in what some call The Quiet Revival. American bible sales are up 22%. I have seen similar statistics in a few places. What I have yet to see is an explanation of why this is happening, but also I have never seen a satisfying explanation of past cycles of religious revival.
I strongly endorse this, although I doubt we’ll get it. AI parsing for topics is a bonus.
Gallabytes: I want to be able to mute (person & topic) not just person OR topic. some people are broadly interesting but also have some pet issue they post a lot about upon which they are cursed with stupidity.
Indeed. I can think of a number of accounts where I highly value their opinions on [X], usually things like games or AI highly relevant to my interest, and very much do not value their comments on [Y], often political but sometimes simply something boring.
it is fascinating how in the 21st century 90% of variance in personal success can be explained by “did you find the right online communities or not.”
this will be increasingly so, post more…
“oh wow, you were an integral participant of the most important technological revolution of all time? you must have 7 sigma IQ and birthplace luck”
“nope, I just posted on the right forum”
One did not simply post to classic LessWrong. It was so intimidating that I at the time was worried to post there, which I shouldn’t have been, but if you weren’t ready the response was super harsh, you would be effectively shown the door. There was tons of filtering. Even if you weren’t shown the door, you wouldn’t get to be a true part of the community, although you could still have for example gotten an early line on Bitcoin.
There were also strong attractors. If you were the type of person who could be there, there was a substantial chance you ended up there. It’s true that there is a ‘invisible graveyard’ of other LessWrong people that would have been right at home and never found it, but I don’t think it is that much larger than the actual group. Same with MIRI.
Going forward, for future groups, I expect the effects will be similar, so long as it remains humans who are shaping our future. Let’s hope that lasts.
I wonder about this situation, and what is really going on.
As in, a good portion of those who see Brah’s post are going to notice that Freiman’s post saying ‘constant 2022 dollars’ right there in large friendly letters. I do think the true situation is more complicated than the chart suggests, but yes people are getting richer by these measures.
Ryx Commar notes a problem, and correctly identifies it as a sorting problem, not an average quality issue:
Ryx: A phenomenon in internet discourse over the last 5 years is that the correlation between signals of textual quality (grammar, punctuation, social media likes, probability it shows up in my feed) and actual textual quality has completely broken down. And it’s driving me insane.
All the biggest idiots in the world now use grammar check and spell check on their phones. You also have LLMs spitting out garbage. The Twitter algorithm puts tons of slop in your feed now. You actually have to read and manually sort through so much more stupid content.
It’s not so much that people have gotten dumber, it’s that dumb people and dumb text now blend in more with smart people and smart text. So my brain actually engages with all this dumb text. This is one of the bigger reasons why the internet today feels more psychically damaging.
The solution is to rely instead on other markers. Stick almost entirely to curated following-or-listed-only feeds (did you know even YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok let you do this, if you dare go to all such places?), except where algorithms are very good.
Social media likes and views are still a very rich indicator, but you have to control for circumstances, starting with the account posting but also the subject and the way it is constructed. With enough skill you can still get benefit out of them but it’s tricky.
Apple made the stop button on the alarm small because if you don’t force people to wake up to find the button they oversleep 30% more, whereas an easy to find snooze button only buys you a few minutes.
That is how badly it performs in a non-adversarial situation. This is how your age verification works when everyone is scanning their actual faces with no attempt to fool the system. If you’re facing kids who want to fool the system? I mean just give up, even if you mysteriously ruled out the ‘hey other kid can you do the verification for me’ strategy. Sonnet thought you could probably just literally use a fake mustache.
A Patrick McKenzie tale of how to allow kids to make phone calls on their Amazon Fire tablets, which for them required multiple non-intuitive steps.
I thought I had a lot of open tabs. I counted 139 including all my tab groups, of which probably half are actually necessary. I was incorrect, this does not appear to be ‘a lot of open tabs.’
Also, really, Safari?
Ryan Briggs: I asked my wife why she was in private browsing mode on her phone and she explained that Safari only allows 500 tabs in regular mode so she had to switch. You think you know a person.
William Eden: Oh my god I just asked my wife and she sent me a screenshot with 500 open tabs wtf
I have 13 tabs open on my phone and it’s too many. Less than 20 total across ALL of my devices.
Charles Neill: You need to create tab groups. You need to download more browsers. You need to be tab-maxxing.
I too have grown increasingly skeptical that meta-analysis in its typical form does anything all that useful.
sane people: at least half of these studies must be doing something terribly wrong; they’re not all reporting inside the same reality
journal papers: our meta-analysis shows that objects hover in place.
Tracing Woods here makes a similar argument for education meta-studies in particular, that the different studies have dramatically different setups and criteria, and you need to look at the studies individually if you want to learn anything. I buy it.
River Tam: Who would win, a PhD in natural resource economics doing detailed historical analysis of published firewood prices and consumption volumes over 300 years or one autodidact’s “I doubt it?”
Emmett Shear: You’d be surprised.
Actually, calling out absurd numbers as absurd is The Way.
Michael Vassar: The autodidact in this case, 100%. But @ben_r_hoffman has already addressed the most glaring flaws in this particular paper, the asymmetric treatment of non-market labor between numerator and denominator.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Looks like it was just the very straightforward “firewood was informal economy, formal small by comparison, guy with an axe chops firewood for their house in more like 5-10% of annual labor”. This is the Way of having a sense of numbers and asking honest questions.
Tetraspace: Chopping firewood is 30% of GDP but the economy is 300% of GDP
Spending 10% of labor on firewood is still a lot. Firewood was a huge deal. But 10% is very different from 30%, and makes a lot more sense. If it was 30%, that would have it be approaching farming in terms of how much labor goes into it even directly for the farmers, and this simply does not intuitively make any sense.
In theory if any given necessity gets sufficiently difficult to obtain it can become an arbitrarily large cost. But that definitely was not the way to bet, and indeed we have an explanation for what was going on: They were valuing all firewood at market price (which is well above typical cost) and then comparing to GDP estimates that treat production very differently than that, and I think the problem goes at least one step deeper than Bernard identifies, they likely aren’t even including this type of measurement of firewood itself in the denominator, and also they are using urban firewood prices for what was mostly rural consumption.
Bernard Stanford: If you value all informal economy firewood production at market price, and then compare it to extant GDP estimates, you need to make sure ALL informal economic production is similarly valued, or you’ll massively overestimate firewood’s share of GDP. Seems to be what happened!
The approach seems to have a serious flaw in assuming that THIS sector of the informal economy was underestimated, but surely not any OTHER sector. Yudkowsky’s objection seems to be bang-on.
Halogen: Eliezer is just right here. The number is off by at least one half an order of magnitude, it has to be. This is how real science works, you put things together and think about things. It’s not about memorizing your favorite papers and having 100 econometrics tricks in your bag.
The question is then, why don’t we feel rich? The reason we don’t feel rich is that we are not permitted to live in between how we lived then and how we are supposed to live now.
And yet, we could do so much better. Which is all very good news.
Liz: people don’t internalize how desperately poor the world still is. Yes it’s gotten better, the world is unrecognizable compared to a generation or two ago. doesn’t change the fact that the world is deeply impoverished and operating at a tiny fraction of its potential.
The problem isn’t inequality it’s just raw productive capacity. It’s artificially constrained and even the most productive places on the planet are operating with hands behind their back.
Fully endorsed. I do not know of a single example of a too-large name on a badge.
Gwern: Conference/convention advice on nametags (this is aimed at ~5 different events):
The ideal nametag is a large double-sided placard on a lanyard, with a printed full name on both sides, in large font. No, larger than that. No—NO, THAT IS STILL NOT LARGE ENOUGH. KEEP GOING!
(No, that is still not large enough. But y’all aren’t ready for that conversation.)
If I can’t read it from across a large crowded room in <1s, then the nametag has failed.
Especially do not make it 1-sided! They always flip around and are unreadable for half the event.
(Also, do not add lots of art or logos or random text. No, attendees do not need to be reminded what event they are at. They can probably remember what they traveled halfway across the world for… Remember, the nametags are for them, not you or your designers.)
Oh no.
Netflix: Julia Garner and Anthony Boyle will portray Caroline Ellison and Sam Bankman-Fried in the new limited series The Altruists. Two hyper-smart young idealists try to remake the global financial system in the blink of an eye…only to seduce each other into stealing $8 billion.
enci: Can’t believe how much you fumbled this
We also would have accepted Jonah Hill, as per Atomic. This is not merely a technical historical accuracy thing, I think it’s actually important. Also, given this and the name The Altruists, and also the description I – I mean seriously, what, no, that’s not how any of this worked – I presume they have zero idea what they are doing.
How should we think about Warren Buffet’s $6 billion donation going entirely to other foundations, mostly to the Gates Foundation? This is definitely not first best, but he is getting quite old, so I don’t think asking him to manage the money himself is a reasonable ask, trying to force generic additional foundation into existence without his focused attention seems unlikely to work out, and at this scale there are few options available. Obviously I have some suggestions I think are much better places to put a good chunk of these funds, but I’m not mad at it.
NYT once again pulls the Kevin Bacon Game, as in ‘[X] is associated with [Y] which has a similar name to [A] which includes [Z] so obviously [X] is linked to [Y].’
Andy Masley: NYT piece today connecting Elon to longtermism and by extension EA. Nothing really new. I just don’t buy the basic implication that longtermism’s responsible for turning Elon crazy. If you’ve become unhinged, any big ideology is going to be a useful justification.
If Elon were actually being guided by longtermist ideas he would’ve tried to influence US AI and biosecurity and nuclear policy. He didn’t. He nuked USAID and some of the governments’ most effective and utilitarian programs for insane culture war reasons.
…
EA and longtermism are in the cultural water in tech spaces. You can use both to justify almost anything if you just engage with meme versions. If longtermism were more than an aesthetic fad for Elon I would’ve expected his behavior to be radically different.
Tetraspace: The problem with asking an actual EA what they think about Elon Musk would be that either they’d tone it down for the camera or it would be rude to elicit people saying that about a senior official.
Elon Musk is no longer a senior official. It would still be rather rude.
This is rapidly evolving into a generalized weapon against everything good.
As in:
Person [P] supports thing [X] that would be good in the long term.
Even worse, [P] is trying to figure out actions [Y] that accomplish [X]!
Effective Altruism!
Which means bad! Get it? It means bad! And so cringe.
We see this in its pure form with David Sacks, saying anyone opposed to anything he wants must be an EA in a mask, and that we have to ban states from passing laws about AI because all state laws about AI would of course be the result of a global conspiracy of evil EAs. But you can do the same thing about anything, anywhere.
In a French experiment, they report that imposing a maximum donation increased likelihood and quantity of giving, at least as effectively as a suggested donation, but what they actually did was paid 10 Euros for completing a questionnaire and then offered people the chance to donate either 0-10, 0-10 (with a suggestion of 6) or 0-6 Euros. And yes, in this case 0-6 did better, but this obviously doesn’t either describe what they claim it does or generalize. It does suggest the important principle that you want to appear reasonable.
There are two distinct problems here: That on the margin there are huge rewards to learning to work the system, and that the intrinsic motivations have perhaps changed.
David Perell: Ten years ago, when YouTubers got together, they talked about editing and storytelling and how to make better videos. Now they talk about how to game the algorithm by increasing click-through rates.
Just about sums up social media right now.
This is not a critique of YouTubers. It’s the rational thing to do. To put numbers on this, all things being equal, when I publish a video with a 3% click-through rate, it’ll get ~3,000 views while a video with a 6% click-through rate will get north of ~100,000 views.
There was a time when you could simply make great content and people would watch (and in certain pockets, that’s still true) but just about every mega-YouTuber has devoted ungodly amounts of time and attention to title / thumbnail strategy.
Pratyush: Jimmy Iovine said that the number one reason music isn’t as good anymore is musicians want to be famous, not great. And nowadays, you can get famous without being great.
A lot of modern culture slop is downstream of this change in behavioral drive.
My money is on the problem being mostly about the reward systems rather than the motivation. Yes, some people primarily want to be famous and successful, but that has always been true. What changed is that if you pursue excellence, the excellence that gets rewarded and that you can measure is largely about working the system, whereas making the underlying products ‘better’ matters too but it is a slower process that on the margin doesn’t pay off for a long cycle. Success is so reliant on virality.
That’s one reason I am so grateful for Substack. It is one of the few places where virality is great when it happens, but it matters remarkably little for long term success.
My main takeaway was, wow, there are a lot of movies and I have seen not many. My secondary takeaway was, well, this does explain a lot, I suppose.
My evaluation:
Have seen, excellent pick (definitely would have made my list): 14
Have seen, good pick (would be happy to have this on the list): 10
Have seen, questionable pick (I mean weird flex, not my pick): 8
Have seen, actively bad pick (no, seriously, no, don’t watch this): 2
Haven’t seen, probably good pick, but I because of reasons I never saw it: 11
Haven’t seen, can’t tell: 52
Haven’t seen, probably bad pick: 3
If we look only at the 34 that I’ve seen, that ratio isn’t that bad, but you have highly favorable selection working for you there.
Recent movie pickings have been slim. A lot of people liked Superman. I did not.
As a reverse experiment, I went through my Letterboxd diary list (as in, what have I watched since I started tracking, that was released in the 21st century.) The ones that 100% should be on the list are Anora, The Fall Guy and Looper. All three are missing, and I get that the other two are quirky opinions but I don’t think there’s any excuse for excluding Anora. The bubble for my list would be somewhere in the 4.5 range. Of my 4.5 star movies recorded, NONE of them made it either: Challengers, Poor Things, Megalopolis, Weird: The Weird Al Story, Deadpool and Wolverine, Predestination, You Hurt My Feelings and May/December. Some of that is that the list clearly has an anti-recency bias, there are literally zero movies from 2024 or 2025. Who knows.
I think a lot of the problem was that they only asked each person to vote for 10 movies rather than 100 movies. That introduces some odd distortions.
For better opinions, here are Scott Sumner’s latest movie reviews. There is also well-earned praise for Lighthaven and the events there. I have been seeing less movies lately in favor of watching more television shows, and because few movies this year have appealed to me. I do hope to turn that back around, especially now that (by the time you read this) Love Island USA is done for the year, but I also think going through phases of intense interests and jumping around is actually correct.
Romy: Back in the winter i was depressed and speculated that if i got a hobby it would fix me, so i signed up for a ceramics class. I now spend 10-20 hours per week doing ceramics and am not depressed. It turns out you can actually just assign yourself a special interest.
Spent 2 hours designing and building most of this pentagonal planter today even tho i was hungry and had a headache
stef: hell yeah we’re always looking for complicated solutions and the answer is literally just use your hands to make/build/fix stuff
I don’t know how much this generalizes or how much it depends on it having been a physical skill like ceramics, but yeah. Get into something.
In one of the weirdest arguments I’ve seen in a long time, Tyler Cowen says people read less and perhaps have lower literacy skills but the ‘most likely culprit for our current problems’ is the decline of network television and people’s willingness to obey Walter Cronkite and be duller and more conformist. I suppose the point is that reading was already gone and mostly we’re substituting out of TV and there are some cultural downsides to that?
But that has nothing to do with the question about reading, and also that’s a different set of problems? Surely, if English Majors Can’t Read, that isn’t caused by their failure to watch a bunch of NBC. My read on the post covering the reading debate here is that it’s a mirage, reading hasn’t actually declined that much, we’re now constantly interacting via text, it’s more that attention spans for long texts have declined and this isn’t obviously wrong, and the reason students 100 years ago sound so much better is that they are a highly selected group.
To the extent there really is an issue, I say the problem was caused by… network television, which shifted a ton of consumption away from reading to video. After that, the recent changes didn’t make things worse (I think?) but substituted something else for the network television.
Kevin Roose: Need a phrase like “vanity metric” but for numbers you can’t disclose because they reveal your dominance and create existential malaise in all who hear them.
Robin Hanson: Note the huge increase over time. As US adults now average ~21 hours a week at jobs, and ~14 at housework, adults now spend substantially more hours on both fiction and music than they do on either jobs or housework. So it seems fair to wonder: is this behavior adaptive?
The post doesn’t focus on music, and I would ignore it. There is no real sense in which we ‘spend’ three hours a day on music. o3-pro estimates 97% of our music consumption is passive, so active consumption may even have gone down. There’s no reason to presume this is or is not adaptive.
I consume far less because I find music reduces my productivity, but it brings me joy and I should probably consume more.
Fiction however is presumably being consumed as a primary activity. So this change, largely in response to vastly superior supply of both fiction and free time, is plausibly maladaptive. Certainly 24 sounds like a ton, although 14 seems a lot more sane to me.
One could decompose this change into leisure consumption over time, and the share of that consumption that is fiction or actively listening to music. It seems plausible that given the decision to consume so much leisure, it is not a mistake to consume this much fiction and music, or it is a much smaller mistake. So to the extent we worry about a cultural error here, the focus should be on our potentially maladaptive increase in total leisure.
A paper’s model of ‘inefficient bargaining’ puts a 2% lower bound on the chance a TV show is cancelled even if it would be efficient to continue, higher if there is asymmetric information. That’s the nature of any similar negotiation, if you’re not risking a 2% chance any given negotiation blows up you are not negotiating very hard.
I’ve talked about it before but I seriously can’t get over that the world works this way.
America: I’d love to cooperate but the incentives, you see, my hand is forced…
Japan: The sign says to cooperate ?? why wouldn’t I cooperate ??
Peter Wildeford: The current way we do the 5 star system just sucks
Ryan Moulton: Game theory forces this. Using the ends of the range maximizes your power over the average.
Toucan: In japan they don’t have game theory, which is why 95% of restaurants get a 3.5 or below (correct)
If all you ever do is throw the number in the average, and all you care about is the average, then yes, rating something 3/5 is silly. But you don’t directly benefit that much from the average, so all you have to do is have the ratings also do something else, especially if they help you track things or help algorithms or AIs make predictions, or you get a reward for a reasonable distribution, or people are reading your reviews directly, and so on. Movie ratings do survive with a reasonable distribution for similar reasons, even in America.
The problem is that if you try to force calibration in various ways, that opens up other ways to cheat the system, so this would work if and only if people weren’t adjusting.
It was Monster Train 2 month. We’re back, baby.
I centrally describe Monster Train 2 as More Monster Train. Had fun the first time? Have fun again, with a bunch of cool new features, figure out the new clans, and climb. As before, the goal of Monster Train is to do Something Utterly Ludicrous, or more precisely something that wins the run, which means knowing exactly what does and does not win runs. There are particular battles that are run killers if you don’t realize the danger.
Ultimately I decided that I had fun for enough hours I was happy I bought and played the game, but that I’d had this experience before, I could keep going and achieve more things but my experience had peaked and I was done after 14 hours. Which is fine.
I am now on Clair Obscur Expedition 33. I agree with everyone else that, some frustrations with navigation aside it has been a great experience so far. I do have notes, especially that certain choices are not well balanced.
I agree with dCrusius that retro games both classic and new are pretty awesome, and it is not only nostalgia, and there’s a reason my kids like them so much. Restrictions breed creativity and I love being able to actually fully grok everything. There are still great modern games too, of course.
There was a poker tournament where one player got a $1 million dollar extra payout if he won, which was much larger than all the other prizes. So the other finalist let him win. All Magic: The Gathering players and game theorists are unsurprised, but in poker this is a real problem, because poker depends on the ability of various players to do various insane prop bets and competitions and such that create weird incentives, and for the other players to not respond by coordinating to make the conditions happen, whether or not they then directly get (or negotiated for) a cut.
I do miss the original Railroad Tycoon.
David: 2000s tycoon games were deep strategy games that really forced you manage tradeoffs and balance budgets/spend/revenue 2020s tycoon games are almost all pay-to-win waiting/idle games.
Alan Cole: The fact that Railroad Tycoon 2, specifically, had a complete and coherent simulation of equity and debt finance for companies, M&A transactions, individuals who could short sell or purchase on margin, and similar, really makes me wonder about reverse Flynn effects.
Railroad Tycoon was great because it focused on actually interesting decisions, and simulated actually interesting things in ways that felt real and forced you to think and work with a variety of real concepts. Alas, yeah, these types of games seem to have gone very downhill, even though one could very easily make them great by making the retro version and then using modern tech to make it better. But no one does it.
A common risk and gaming pattern:
Noam Brown: AI researchers will literally negotiate $100 million comp packages by themselves but they won’t play poker for more than $50 buy-ins.
Meanwhile, I mentioned to a VC I lost 300 playing poker in Vegas and his response was “300 what?”
Steven Adler: How much did you lose in the high-roller Blood on the Clocktower game though.
The VC’s question seems highly valid, and there are at least two very distinct plausible answers, although one probably means he was flying a bit too high.
The thing about poker and gambling is that you only have to gamble enough to make you care. It can’t be $0, but if I can get excited by amounts of money that mean nothing to me, why not? The excitement is the point, I’m certainly not making my hourly. If I ever do get to play a major tournament, which is the only time I might plausibly play for stakes that actually matter to me at this point in real terms, it will be because of the competition and the title.
I do remember what it was like to be gambling actually important, life changing amounts of money on a daily basis. I never actually got to the point where I enjoyed that aspect, but I did it because that’s the only way to get the alpha.
To be clear, this is extremely funny, but also we should totally do this, because skill-based immigration rules as does wholesome family entertainment.
The challenges might need some work, though?
In a 36-page slide deck reviewed by the Journal, Worsoff’s team outlines a reality-style TV show where, in one-hour episodes, immigrants compete to prove they are the most American.
In one challenge set in San Francisco, for example, immigrants would compete in a gold rush competition where they are sent into a mine to retrieve the most gold.
In another episode, contestants would be divided into teams and placed on an auto assembly line in Detroit to reassemble the chassis of a model T.
An alternative pitch, of course, would be Green Card Marriage. Relationships on The Bachelor tend not to last, so let’s raise the stakes. If you don’t actually marry and make it two years we kick you back out of the country. Remember, you can’t be 4TWR when coming to America is always the right reason. So all bets are off.
A key question on self-driving cars is, are we going to use them to give children better freedom of movement, because now they can safely go anywhere without having to drive? Are we perhaps also going to let them walk around because the primary threat (other than police) was always cars and the self-driving cars are vastly safer for pedestrians? Or are we going to be totally crazy and not let them do any of it?
I also disagree that they will make traffic worse, because self-driving cars can coordinate traffic very well, even if humans would end up in a pointless jam that feeds on itself, and because the cars can coordinate their movements much better, also we could vastly improve parking issues. But yes, ultimately if we want to get optimal road use we need to charge to use the roads.
A cool thought experiment, 23 million autonomous vehicles could take care of all car rides, a 90%+ reduction in vehicles, by an o3 estimate. This seems right to me at least if you exclude isolated people’s vehicle needs.
For now, we’re a little short.
Joseph Carlson: Waymo plans to more than double it’s fleet from 1,500 to at least 3,000 by the end of next year [thanks to a new manufacturing facility in Arizona].
That’s one of those statistics that is both impressive and disappointing at the same time. It is great to double the size of the fleet, but why only double? Why not 10x, or 100x? I want my self-driving cars.
There is a new culturally important sport in town, which is Love Island USA. Make no mistake, this is a sport, and a rather excellent one. Season 7 was reportedly several times the size of the former peak of Season 6 by audience and size of online discussion, so chances are Season 8 is going to be huge next year. The best part is that there is still so much room for improvement in the format.
NIL Go is the new attempt to get a handle on payments to athletes in college sports, requiring all substantial payments to go through them so they can check the deal and approve it, with arbitration if you object. It seems likely this will fail and we’re simply going to face a full market for student athlete services, with extra steps, but at least they are trying once more.
An SMBC is very much not how any of this works, which was the joke, but the problem is that SMBC is too often actually describing how things do work, such that Eliezer felt compelled to point out all the ways this one was wrong, which only made the whole thing funnier.
Lydia Laurenson: Vibegala theme this year was “the hero’s journey” and I particularly loved the satirical guerrilla posters that Chelsea Sierra Voss made to discourage attendees from heeding the call of adventure 😹
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore: I was explaining to my Ukrainian colleague the phrase ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’. She told me the equivalent in Ukrainian is ‘The only free cheese is in the mousetrap’ – which is so much better
It’s always a nice break to see what else is going on out there.
Study finds sleep in male full-time workers falls as income rises, with one cause being other leisure activities substituting for sleep. It makes sense that sleep doesn’t cost money while other things often do, but the marginal cost of much leisure is very low. I don’t buy this as the cause. Perhaps reverse causation, those who need or prefer less sleep earn more money?
The productivity statistics continue to be awful, contra Alex Tabarrok part of this recent -3.88% Q1 print is presumably imports anticipating tariffs driving down measured GDP and thus productivity. The more I wonder what’s wrong with the productivity statistics the more I think they’re just a terrible measure of productivity?
A model of America’s electoral systemthat primary voters don’t know much about candidate positions, they know even less than general election voters about this, so they mostly depend on endorsements, which are often acquired by adopting crazy positions on the relevant questions for each endorsement, resulting in extreme candidates that the primary voters wouldn’t even want if they understood.
It’s not really news, is it?
Paul Graham: A conversation that’s happened 100 times.
Me: What do I have to wear to this thing?
Jessica: You can wear anything you want.
Me: Can I wear ?
Jessica: Come on, you can’t wear that.
Jessica Livingston (for real): I wish people (who don’t know us) could appreciate the low bar that I have when it comes to your attire. (E.g. you wore shorts to a wedding once.)
Alex Thompson says “If you don’t tell the truth, off the record no longer applies,” proceeding to share an off-the-record unequivocal denial of a fact that was later confirmed.
I think anything short of 100% (minus epsilon) confidence that someone indeed intentionally flat out lied to your face in order to fool you in a way that actively hurt you should be insufficient to break default off-the-record. If things did get to that level? If all of that applies, and you need to do it to fix the problem, then okay I get it.
However, you are welcome to make whatever deals you like, so if your off-the-record is conditional on statements being true, or in good faith, or what not, that’s fine so long as your counterparties are aware of this.
Scott Alexander asserts ‘If It’s Worth Your Time To Lie, It’s Worth My Time To Correct It’ and I want to strongly claim that no, this is usually not true for outright lies and it definitely usually isn’t true for misleading presentations of facts that one could nitpick, and often doing so only falls into various traps, although it’s not clear Scott ultimately disagrees with that objection, he walks this back a bunch at the end. I do agree with his caveat that the actual important principle is that, if someone does decide to offer the correction, you don’t get to say they’re ‘supporting’ a side by doing so, or call them ‘cringe’ or describe it as ‘well acktually’ or anything like that.
What is the actual solution? Recalibration. As in, you pick up on the patterns, and adjust accordingly based on which sources pull such tricks and which ones are various amounts of careful not to do so. And yes, this does involve some amount of pointing it out.
Scott follows this up with the contrast of “But” versus “Yes, But.” As in, if [A] points out [B] while arguing for [X] was wrong about something that was load bearing to their argument, [B] needs to acknowledge they were wrong (the ‘yes’) before pivoting to other arguments for [X].
Scott Alexander: Someone wrote a blog post where they argued a certain calculation showed that the chance of a technological singularity in our lifetime was only 0.33%. I retraced the argument and found that if you did the math correctly, it was actually about 30%. Here’s the comment they left on that post:
I always find these ‘definitely the world will look almost exactly the same’ claims to be hilarious, given how that wouldn’t be true even without a singularity and hasn’t been true historically for a long time, but that’s beside the point here.
Cool thought, but I wish it had started with “Okay, you’re right and I’m wrong about the math, but I think you really want time machines and…”
I mean, not actually a cool thought either way. These thoughts are absurdly and utterly wrong. I for one want to say that while various sci-fi things would be nice, life right now (at least for me) is righteously awesome with only two real problems: Existential risk and other tail risks for highly capable future artificial intelligences, and our failure so far to cure human aging, because I hate getting old and I hate dying even more. That’s it.
But the ‘yes’ first would at least help, especially if you want continued engagement.
It is of course fine to say ‘I believe this because of [ABCD…Z], and any one of those would be sufficient, so even if you are right that [A] is false that doesn’t matter.’ But you have to actually say that, and also if I tear through [ABCD] in order you should be suspicious that this might correlate with the rest of your list.
I am doing my best to avoid commenting on politics. As usual my lack of comment on other fronts should not be taken to mean I lack strong opinions on them. Yet sometimes, things reach a point where I cannot fail to point them out.
If you are looking to avoid such things, I have split out this section, so you can skip it.
The Federal Reserve is cutting its workforce by 10% to be a ‘responsible steward of public resources.’ This is not a place I would be skimping on head count. There are so many ways for a marginally better Fed to make us a lot more money than it costs.
A fun question, who has the better business climate, California or North Carolina? It depends what kind of business. If you’re trying to build a car or open a sandwich shop, your job is way easier in North Carolina. But for some purposes, in particular tech, California’s refusal to enforce non-competes plausibly trumps everything else.
I knew the UK was arresting people for online posts, including private text messages, including ones that were very obviously harmless. I didn’t realize it was 1,000 people a month. The UK has a little over 40 million adults, so your risk every year is about 3bps (0.03%), over 1% chance that at some point this happens to you personally. That’s completely insane.
Field notes on Trump’s executive orders on nuclear power. It all seems neutral or better, but it’s not clear how much of it is new and actually meaningful. My guess is this on its own doesn’t do that much, and is less important than retaining or expanding subsidies.
Renaissance Philanthropy: U.S. companies can hire international talent in research and engineering in a matter of weeks, not months. But most never hear how.
New guide from @ImmCouncil breaks it down: OPT, O-1, J-1, H-1B cap-exempt and more. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 or a startup, odds are you’ll discover options you didn’t know existed.
“Trump’s shipbuilding agenda is sinking.” The Navy is described as 20 years behind in its goals. We need to face facts, we don’t have meaningful shipbuilding, and perhaps we want to pay massive amounts to change that while using proper tactics like export discipline, but the Jones Act and similar laws haven’t ‘protected’ American shipbuilding, they’ve destroyed it, and they need to go.
Strip Mall Guy: Signatures are a weird, outdated, and frankly laughable way to prove somebody approved a document.
Patrick McKenzie: (n.b. This is extremely well-known among companies which have a business process where you sign things. Most of them use a signature to demonstrate solemnization rather than authorization or authentication.)
As I’ve mentioned previously, solemnization is a sociolegal tripwire to say “There are many situations in society and in business where you’re Just Talking and up until this exact moment we have been Just Talking *and after this pointWe Were Not Just Talking. Do you get it?”
People who are unsophisticated about this think that the signature is somehow preventing someone from retroactively changing the terms of the contract. People who are unsophisticated say thinks like “Oh use digital signatures to PROVE that that has not happened. Sounds great.”
That is simply not the risk that the process is concerned with.
In some cases solemnization declines to being vestigial. For example, signing credit card receipts: no one cares.
Your bank does not expect a waiter to do forensic handwriting analysis on your signature versus the one on the reverse of your card, rejecting thieves.
If someone steals your card and perfectly reproduces your signature, and you say “My card was stolen; I did not pay for that dinner”, your bank will say “Yeah sounds really likely and we have no exposure here, OK restaurant eats it. Can we get you off phone quickly please?”
If same thing happens in a real estate situation, “Yeah that was not really me in the room signing that”, their lawyer is going to have some Pointed Questions and eventually your lawyer is going to have some Carefully Worded Professional Advice.
But a thing that a real estate closing is really really really concerned with is that all parties, who may be operating across a range of sophistications, understand that there was a long negotiation that got us to this point And That Negotiation Hereby Concludes Successfully.
(The number of conversations which begin “Well I didn’t really sell it to you” is greater than zero but it is less than it would be in a counterfactual world where there wasn’t the pomp and circumstance of a real estate closing.)
You can, by the way, get much [farther] than one would naively expect if one is willing to simply put forged documents in front of one’s lawyers and judges in an increasingly unrealistic fashion for many years. The immune system might not catch you for a very long time.
Many people tried it before Craig Wright did and many will try it after, and many of them felt very clever during all the years where they were still paying for their own housing. Did some get away with it? Yeah. There is no law of this universe that says justice inevitable.
Twitter introduces Polymarket as an official prediction market partner. Even the mid version is pretty cool, and executed properly this could be amazing, an absolute game changer. For now this only looks like Polymarket incorporating Twitter. I love that for Polymarket but the real value is the other way around. We need to incorporate Polymarket into Twitter, at minimum letting Tweets embed markets, and ideally complete community notes with markets attached, spin a market out of any tweet, trade right on Twitter, and so on.
Removing political ads from Facebook and Instagram for six weeks before the 2020 American elections for a given user had no detectable effect on their political knowledge, polarization, election legitimacy, campaign contributions, candidate favorability or turnout. I basically buy it in this context. Very little changed in that six week period. It makes sense that in the end stages of a campaign, all the information flow here is already oversaturated. You’ve already seen the ads, and those ads are still flowing to everyone else you know and back to you, if you’re using Facebook and Instagram, and the rest of your world is also unchanged.
The most interesting aspect is that the most common type of ad was a fundraiser, they kept running them, and yet they didn’t have a noticeable impact on fundraising. This is strongly suggesting that the ads on the margin shift distribution, avenue or timing of contributions but don’t impact overall giving, at least once you get to this stage of the campaign. Alternatively, such fundraising had reached such over-the-top obnoxious levels that they were driving people away as much as they raised money. That could also explain there being no net impacts in other ways, that saturation especially of fundraising but also other ads served to piss voters off about as often as they helped.
Also I think this was a fantastic experiment and we should do More Like This, although perhaps Meta is not so excited to let them do it again for obvious reasons.
New Twitter bot plot twist, bots that reply to you then block the author, which gets the author deboosted, en masse, and the impact adds up. Neat trick, it’s new and the network of bots doing this is reported to be massive, in the thousands or more. Or perhaps the deboosting is incidental to the standard goal?
SHL0MS: sorry but this is incorrect. it is top of funnel for a WhatsApp group scam the deboosting may be a second order effect but that is not the purpose of the bots. they block the author to avoid being blocked and having their replies hidden.
This seems like a clear Skill Issue by Twitter. The algorithm should be able to figure this one out, also in this case they keep tagging the same account which gives the game away but there should already be strong statistical evidence that the activity isn’t real.
This suggests the ads are efficient, or even that more ads would be better, since they have marginal value to Facebook and the users don’t actually mind. Alternatively, it means people’s posts aren’t better than ads.
Tim Hwang: Statistically, there is some person out there who for completely random reasons has ended up on the better side of every A/B test and is unknowingly experiencing the most incredible internet you can imagine.
Noah Smith: TikTok is so insanely goddamn boring. Every time I watch a TikTok video, I think “man that’s meh”. Then I watch my friends consume it, and they’re just flipping past every video, even the ones they like. They don’t even finish 15-second videos. It’s pure channel-surfing.
Zac Hill: The best way to understand TikTok is by reading Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram. Wallace understood ~35 years ahead of his time how profoundly the phenomenon of attention capture would shape the way we construct society – and how our minds could be so easily instrumentalized.
Paul Graham: Bluesky’s usage graph. The pattern here is bad. Spikes when a bunch of new people show up, followed by declines when the new arrivals are disappointed.
Andreas Kling: The problem with Bluesky (and Mastodon as well) is they mostly have one kind of asshole. They operate unchallenged, leading to extreme asshole saturation.
Meanwhile, X has *allkinds of assholes working against each other, so they kinda cancel each other out.
sin-ack: eh, more than anything it’s the consequences of disagreement. on ex dot com you get some pushback, at worst you mutually block and you’re done. on bsky you get added to a global block list and get hidden from half the people. on mastodon you and everyone on your instance get completely defederated and effectively permanently removed from the conversation. impartiality doesn’t exist because it’s “community operated”.
This usage pattern doesn’t have to doom you. It makes sense that you’d get traffic largely driven by major events and moments where new users show up who might not be a fit so many leave, and that without them you’d be static or in decline, and this is compatible with long term growth. Nothing wrong with losing small most days and winning big on occasion if the wins are big enough. In this case however it looks pretty doomed, as it’s hard to think of additional similar events.
This depends on what you care about. If you’re only thinking of your own experience, there is not that much to do beyond blocking the bot, short of getting block lists.
If you’re trying to promote the general welfare and fight on Team Humans, you can do more. Adam Cochran suggests first find the account the bot is shilling (if any), mute and then block it, to inflict maximum algorithmic pain. Then block the commentator. That sounds like more work than I’d be willing to do, but I notice that if I had one a quick way to tell an AI to do it, I’d be down.
The correlations here make sense, but a lot of potential explanations are not causal even before one examines the research methodologies involved:
Jared Benge and Michael Scullin (via MR): The first generation who engaged with digital technologies has reached the age where risks of dementia emerge. Has technological exposure helped or harmed cognition in digital pioneers?
…Use of digital technologies was associated with reduced risk of cognitive impairment (OR = 0.42, 95% CI 0.35–0.52) and reduced time-dependent rates of cognitive decline (HR = 0.74, 95% CI 0.66–0.84). Effects remained significant when accounting for demographic, socioeconomic, health and cognitive reserve proxies.
Tyler Cowen: So maybe digital tech is not so bad for us after all? You do not have to believe the postulated relatively large effects, as the more likely conclusion is simply that, as in so many cases, treatment effect in the social sciences are small. That is from a recent paper by Jared F. Benge and Michael K. Scullin. Via the excellent Kevin Lewis.
It’s definitely great if the early versions of digital tech are associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline, although I would not presume this result carries over to long term exposure to modern smartphones and the associated typical use cases. And even if it does still apply, this is one of many aspects of digital technology, and it very much does not allow us to ‘think on the margin’ about this, as the most likely causal explanations involve enabling people to meet minimal thresholds of cognitive activity that serve to slow down cognitive decline.
As per this righteous rant thread from Conrad Bastable, it is very true that when you buy a new computer, by default it will come pre-loaded with a lot of crap, and Windows 11 will waste a bunch of resources, and that Macs come with a lot of objectively terrible software, and that it takes a remarkable amount of deliberate effort to fix all this even if you mostly know what you are doing, during which you are subjected to ads.
Conrad Bastable: Your [Mac] Start menu comes preloaded with Politics and Baseball media content. Nightmares beyond comprehension.
Framework: The strongest argument in favor of 2025 being the year of the Linux desktop. To the other operating systems, you are the product, not the customer.
This isn’t a big deal for a knowledgeable user. No, the startup button in Windows spiking the CPU isn’t a practical problem, and it is a one-time not that high cost to get a lot of the stupid bloat out of the system, and letting apps send you notifications is good, actually, given there’s an easy way to turn it off for each app the moment they try to abuse it. I have made peace with the setup process.
What I don’t fully understand is why all of this is true. It’s one of those ‘yes I get it but also I don’t, actually.’ It seems like an obviously easy selling point to say ‘this PC doesn’t come with any ads’ and similar. People would definitely pay a bit more for that. You’d get customer loyalty and word of mouth, as your product would perform better. An expensive purchase is exactly a place where you shouldn’t need to do ads. And yet, yes, they consistently do this anyway, even when it is obviously net destructive to long term profits. Why is my smart TV so terrible, even if it’s ultimately fine and way better than an old dumb one? Yes, I tried using an XBox or Playstation instead, ultimately I found it not better enough to bother.
But even if you hate all that, what are people going to do, use Linux? Seriously?
Mustafa Hanif: No operating is serious if it doesn’t support:
Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Excel, Capcut, StarCraft 2, Fortnite, Valorant
I mean, okay, one out of six with the right link, I bet it’s more if you knew where to look, and you’re going to suggest this to people who can’t debloat their Windows box? Every now and then someone pitches me on switching to Linux, and every time it seems like an endless nightmare to get up to speed and deal with compatibility and adoption issues, even if I didn’t care about games.
Aella: i started out on X determined not to block anyone. then i entered 2nd stage: blocking everyone who seemed even a little unkind. but now im progressing to 3rd stage: giving up on blocking ppl cause they’re too petty to warrant the effort of moving finger to block button.
As your account grows in reach, the value of blocking any one account that is interacting with you goes down, so you bother doing it less, and eventually have to rely on mass blocks, block lists and automated tools. That makes sense. I’m still in full block people mode, although ‘a little unkind’ is not enough to trigger it for me. It used to mostly be mute but it’s now block since that doesn’t stop you from seeing my posts either way.
Steve Hsu reports lots of optimism for both artifical wombs and gene editing of embryos, and that a meeting at Lighthaven convinced him they’re coming sooner than you would think. I don’t have the optimism he has about this as a hedge against existential risk given the timelines involved, but there is wide uncertainty about that, it’s very much a ‘free’ action in that regard, it’s all upside.
A reasonable perspective on both Rationality and also The Culture, except that with this perspective redemption is possible only through grace, and that kind of thinking has a long history of really messing people up if they don’t feel the grace enough:
EigenGender: I think that interacting with rationality community online before I interacted with them in person gave me the community wide equivalent of when someone puts their partner up on a pedestal at the start of the relationship and it ruins the relationship forever.
It is by any objective standard a great community but it broadcasts an even more beautiful sirens call into the Internet and then fails to live up to the standards it sets for itself. It’s also failed to fix all my life problems for some reason.
Rationality is like The Culture. It is the best thing that ever existed and also bears an incredible and irredeemable moral sin for not doing more with the opportunity that’s been handed to it.
[the above tweet is exaggerated for comedic respect wrt. Rationality but sincerely captures my feelings towards the culture]
There definitely is an important pattern that bright abstract thinkers do many things, including Effective Altruism, that seem often motivated by striving to be and think of oneself as Good rather than Bad, with more discussion at the thread. We have a culture telling people (especially men but also everyone) that they and key parts of themselves and our entire civilization (and often even humans period) are Bad – we de facto now have the Christian idea of original sin without the Christian standard path to redemption, oh no. The historically prototypical ‘good deeds’ and ways to make yourself Good are, to bright abstract thinkers, either obviously fake or transparently inefficient and silly, or at least not sufficient to do the trick.
You shouldn’t not use common sense, but the word ‘just’ is not okay here.
There was a recent exchange of posts between Tyler Cowen and Scott Alexander about USAID. I wrote an extended analysis of that exchange and learned by doing so, but am invoking Virtue of Silence and not posting it. I will simply note that everyone involved agrees that it is completely false to say that anything remotely like only 12% of USAID money ultimately went to helping recipients, and that anyone using that claim in a debate (such as Marco Rubio or JD Vance) is doing a no-good very bad thing.
Last year Florida banned lab-grown meat, and I went throughthree rounds of trying to explain why, even though I wouldn’t ban it, a reasonable person who wanted to continue eating regular meat might want such a ban, given how many people are itching to ban or ostracize or otherwise destroy all other meat consumption.
I am the first to admit I am not always perfect about adhering to the principle of ‘if you care about an issue you need to understand where all sides and especially the opposition are coming from’ but I do try and I think it is important to do so.
I am quoting people on this again because there was another round of this argument recently, and because it is a microcosm of a lot of other things going on in politics, even more so than when this came up last year, culminating in Matt Yglesias presenting this as a fully one sided issue and saying ‘Banning Lab Grown Meat Is Stupid.’
Its Not Real: RWers in red states are banning lab grown meat because it will be used as a a cudgel against them in the future. There is no faith that lab grown meat will be on an even playing field in the market. It will be used for Dekulakization if the opportunity presents itself.
They saw what happened or has been attempted against mineral extraction industries. This is secondary to economic efficiency, market viability, meat taste quality, or meat nutritional quality. Its tertiary to the replication crisis and being able to trust this new meat.
Its the perfect anti-Chud machine, “Look at our superior product. Higher quality in tastes and nutrients, environmentally friendly, and morally superior since no animals died.” Its a short jump from there to heaping new regulations on farmers to strangle them financially.
(Thread continues as you would expect.)
PoliMath: This is a really good thread of why people are disinclined to permit lab-grown meat It feels like a back door to banning real meat and people are really sick of being tricked and forced into accepting shitty things they don’t want.
Derek Thompson: It’s a typical conservative opinion—I’m afraid that the emergence of new things will mean I won’t be able to enjoy my old things—and you’re free to have it, but I’m surprised somebody who’s worked in tech doesn’t see the limitations of this argument in his own field.
“If we allow this new thing to develop, the state will eventually ban this old thing I like, so we have to smother the infant tech in the crib” is a very very anti-progress position to take, in any field. You’re basically endorsing incumbent bias as a first principle because of a make-believe fear that Democrats are on the verge of banning steak.
PoliMath: Let’s talk about this. “Show me the legislation” is a head-fake. We aren’t in the legislation phase of this project. But every lab meat company markets itself as the future of meat and calls for an end to natural meat. Every single one.
Biocraft: “Farmed animals live shorter and more brutal lives today than ever before. In the USA, 25 million of them are killed every single day. We say enough is enough”
Enough is enough, huh? Oh that’s probably just harmless rhetoric.
SciFi Foods: “The future is coming soon.” “We’ll all be able to enjoy our burgers without destroying the planet.”
Huh. And what will happen to those planet-destroying farms? Probably nothing, I guess.
Fork and Good: “a vision of scalable, sustainable, human and cost-effective future for meat” “change meat production forever”
Forever, huh? Not just bringing more options to the consumer, you want to change meat production forever?
Oh, that’s probably just marketing.
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that is what is so annoying to me about this. I’m not so much advocating a ban as saying “Can you understand why this bothers people?” and too many of the answers are “no, if this bothers you, you’re a dummy who is imagining things”
No they aren’t. They’re being told things.
Kat Rosenfeld: this thread is garnering a lot of argumentative replies to the effect of “well people shouldn’t feel that way”, making it a fascinating microcosm for the brokenness of political discourse overall.
“well people shouldn’t feel that way” okay cool, but they do, and will continue to until or unless you can affirmatively address their concerns.
Mike Solana: I am against the lab meat bans, and enthusiastic about experimentation here, but decimating global meat consumption is the explicit goal of many people excited about the space, and pretending that isn’t true is just dishonest
I think the conversation you probably want to be having is “factory farming is morally bad and unhealthy and we need an alternative,” but proponents haven’t had much luck with that argument, and especially not abroad, so here we are
Last thought, the average normie “muh steak” guy (me some days) isn’t stupid. He knows you’re being dishonest. And this breeds further distrust / animosity for the tech, and tech generally. For ppl who never learned from COVID: if you can’t be honest, please just say nothing.
Derek Thompson: I’m describing reality — you’re banning meat, Dems aren’t — and you’re describing a psychology: “We’re afraid and want protection.”
Fine! I get that. But I’m surprised to see you so clearly make the argument that you’d rather feel safe than be right.
Emma Camp: “We need to ban this thing to prevent other people from hypothetically, sometime in the far future, making it mandatory” is not a compelling argument.
Josh Zerkle: let’s talk this out over a pack of incandescent light bulbs.
Again, I don’t want to ban lab grown meat, because I am willing to stick to my guns that you don’t go around banning things, even if you don’t like where all of this is going. But I understand, including for those who don’t have any financial skin in the game. I disagree, but it isn’t dumb.
If you don’t understand why, think about it until you do.
It is flat out gaslighting to call this, as Derek Thompson does, ‘a make-believe fear’ or ‘psychological issue’ rather than a very real concern, or to deny that this is the stated intention of the entire lab grown meat industry and a large number of others as well, and it is gaslighting to deny the clear pattern of similar other bans and requirements that have made people’s lived experiences directly worse – whether or not you think those other bans and requirements were justified.
There is less than zero credibility for the claim that no one will be coming for your meat down the line, no one is even pretending that they’re not coming for it, at best they are pretending to pretend.
A claim I have heard is that 50% or more of self-identified ‘vegetarians’ ate meat in the past week. When you ask my followers both questions at once, they don’t agree and it is only 17%. But obviously asking both at once and asking my Twitter followers are both going to lower the percentage here.
Lots of other people replied as well, seems overall like great picks but there are so many so I haven’t rad most of them. If I had to pick one, I’d pick Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War.
Cate Hall warns against the ‘my emotions really mean it’ approach to commitment, because it doesn’t work. Your emotions will change. What you have to do is engineer things, especially using forcing functions, such that success is easier than failure. For her the most prominent of these was diving into her relationship and marrying quickly. The whole system requires real accountability and real consequences. It has to actually hurt if you don’t do it, but not hurt so much you’ll back out entirely. You also need to watch out before doing too much to cementing a life or lifestyle you don’t want.
Connor: I don’t think I’ve said this before, but I think this post might have changed my life? Everything about it. The feel vs make, the forcing function, the aspiration of who you want to become. As soon as I wanted a counter point, she made it and deconstructed it. I will make changes in my life due to this post. I say that maybe 1-2 times a year (funny enough they are always blog posts/essays found via Twitter). What simple but great writing. Full post in her 2nd tweet.
The method Cate Hall describes here is highly useful, but far from the only component, and by its very nature this strategy involves real risk of costs big enough to hurt and without corresponding upside. As Cate would no doubt agree, a bet (where you can win or lose) is better expected value than a Beeminder (where there is only downside, except for the motivation).
Ideally you want other commitment mechanisms that involve upside. My central move is, quite literally, to realize that when one commits one is betting not only one’s external reputation but also one’s inner reputation, one’s thinking of oneself as someone who keeps similar commitments and thus the power of similar commitments to bind your actions.
Being able to use commitments effectively is super valuable, so endangering that by breaking commitments is a big cost, which enforces the commitment on its own. And every time you hold strong, the power grows. And this dynamic forces you to calibrate, and only use commitments when you mean them.
If your children are set to inherent vast amounts of wealth, there are three schools of thought on how to handle this:
Never leave anyone you love more than [X million] dollars, make them earn it, either for their own good or to donate the rest to worthy causes.
Make them earn it now, then let them inherent it later, or do so if they earn it.
Give them a trust fund now, so their life is better and they acclimate to wealth.
I am with Sebastian and Mason that plan #2, forcing your kid to live like a ‘normal person’ and obsess over small amounts of money so they can be like everyone else or learn to ‘value the dollar’ or what not, is actually terrible training for being wealthy, for the same reason lottery winners mostly blow their winnings. Choose #1 or #3.
You do want them to ‘earn it’ and more importantly learn how to operate in the world, it’s totally fine to attach some fixed conditions to the unlock of parts of the trust fund, but you don’t do that by giving them Normal People Money Problems.
Sebastian Ballister: people are dunking on this [now deleted tweet], but I went to college with a bunch of people whose parents are running business worth 9-figures who have left their kids to their own devices to find jobs in tech or finance.
Their kids will all be in completely over their heads when they do inherit.
If you’re going to pass on extreme wealth, “trust fund kid” is actually the way to go. Properly managed, it’s not an endless bank account, it’s an asset portfolio with training wheels
If you want your kids to be “normal” then fine, don’t leave them a mountain of wealth
If you’re leaving them a mountain of wealth, help them learn how to treat it like a custodian of multigenerational resources rather than a lottery they win when dad dies.
I do think this is different from putting them in charge of your own business straight away. It makes sense to make them train via other work, but that doesn’t mean you want to squeeze them for money while they do that. You want to design an actual curriculum that makes sense and gets them the right experience, in the real world.
I see a big difference between ‘you have to hold down a real job’ versus ‘you have to focus on personal cash flow.’
Danger Casey: I have a good friend who’s family has serious generational wealth through a business his father started
Despite following the same degree path, his father told him to work elsewhere for 10 years then hired him as a director. Then made him work 10 years up to president before handing the business over
It gave him experience and perspective elsewhere, gave him time in the business to learn *andprove himself to existing staff, and now he’s running the show
Frankly, I think it was brilliant.
Emre: Elite business schools are full of these kids who worked a few years as normies, then go to elite MBA, before settling into family business.
It’s a good path, and probably better than being a 21 year old heir inside the business.
Wedding costs seem completely nuts to me. Also, buffet is better? But I love that the objection here to that people have to get up, not to the RSVP-ordering rule.
Allie (as seen last month): I’m not usually the type to get jealous over other people’s weddings
But I saw a girl on reels say she incentivized people to RSVP by making the order in which people RSVP their order to get up and get dinner and I am being driven to insanity by how genius that is
Allyson Taft: I saw that, too. It’s kind of gross, though, because who wants a wedding where people have to get up to get food?
Ourania: Literally just discussed this with husband. Imagine the cost difference of $20 per person vs $50 per person and your list is over 100 people!
Rota: “Having your guests get up to get their food is extremely rude” good lord help me.
Teen Boy Mom: I paid for my own wedding and we did a free seat buffet at a high end French restaurant. They still got filet, and they could sit wherever they wanted and it cost me less.
In general, yes, a good restaurant is better than a buffet. But a buffet will be better than most catering that you’ll get at a wedding or other similar venue.
The deal on the catering is universally awful compared to what you get, even without considering that many people do not want it, and often quality is extremely bad. And by going buffet you get the advantages of a buffet, everyone gets what they actually want, or at least don’t mind. So yes, this means you have to get up to get your food, but so totally worth it, and I don’t even see that as a disadvantage. You can use an excuse to flee the table sometimes.
A series of branching exchanges on the ways to draw distinctions between interactions that are ‘transactional’ versus ‘social.’
Flowrmeadow: I’m sorry but if you want to stay at my apartment for your NYC trip you need to buy me dinner or at least a $20 bottle of wine. Just something that shows you give a shit man. It’s surprising how no one does this
Alanna: it is so insane to me that people no longer understand the difference between ‘transactional’ and ‘social graces.’ Like, if a friend saves you hundreds in lodging fees, buy them dinner and wine. That’s basic etiquette.
And, if you cannot afford anything lavish and are staying out of desperation… just be honest: “thank you for taking me in when I’m in such a tough spot, I can’t wait to make it up to you.” And people will be understanding. Why are people becoming so bad at social conventions???
Aella: That’s a transaction! If you’re giving a gift but you’ll be hurt if they don’t give you something back, then it’s not a gift freely given!
I once gave a friend a very large financial gift and I only did it after I fully came to emotional terms with them doing absolutely nothing.
Ta-Nehisi Quotes: In ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ there’s a great scene where the protagonist is gifted expensive cologne by a colleague. Although impoverished, he makes a show of offering his friend a quarter in return. The friend magnanimously declines. The thought is what is important.
Rob Bensinger: I think all three of these are good things: “giving something without expecting anything in return”, “giving something while expecting a specific thing in return”, and “giving something with the expectation of this vaguely influencing a social ledger of back-and-forth favors”.
It’s good to keep these three things distinct, IMO, and it’s good to be clear about whether “non-transactional” is referring to “truly expecting nothing in return” option vs. the “vaguely influence the social ledger” option.
I would go a step beyond Rob here, there are a lot of related but distinct modes here, and asking for symbolic compensation does not make something transactional, even if that symbol costs some money. The point of buying dinner is not that it’s a fair price, it’s that it shows your appreciation. Indeed, this can serve to avoid having to write an entry, or a much larger entry, into that social ledger.
Then there’s the question of smaller things like dinner parties.
Alyssa Krejmas: So I host a lot of dinner parties. In SF, 85% of guests show up empty-handed. And if someone does bring something like wine & it’s not opened, they’ll often take it back home. I’ve seen this happen not just at my own parties, but others’ too. It’s so odd to me. That was never the etiquette in New England—and I really don’t think this should be a regional thing?
Zac Hill: This is the single thing that bothers my wife (Venezuelan) the most about many of my friends. She is like, this is categorically exclusion-worthy behavior. Like for her it is fart-in-an-elevator-tier anathema.
PoliMath: People in the US need to understand that our country is functionally more than a dozen different countries, each with their own cultures and patterns.
If something is common in New England and you aren’t in New England, take the role of cultural ambassador & inform your guests.
I consider it fine to show up empty handed, but better to ask if you can bring anything. We have one friend who explicitly bars anyone from bringing anything, because he wants to curate the whole experience. I think that’s great.
My family try to host Shabbat dinners on Friday evenings for friends (if I know you and you’d like to come some time, hit me up), and we explicitly say that we don’t expect you to bring anything, although you are welcome to do so, especially dessert, or wine if you want to be drinking but our crowd usually doesn’t drink. It is nice when people do this. But also I think at this level, a thank you works fine.
Ah, the joys of someone with authority demanding documentation to prove that you do not need documentation. And the dilemma of what to do in response, do you produce it (if you have it) or do you become the joker? Here the example is, woman who is 24 weeks pregnant being told to prove she isn’t 28 weeks pregnant, because if she was she would need a doctor’s note to fly.
A fun proposal is to reduce sweets consumption by having sweet food with probability 2/3rds, determined by random draw. My problem with this proposal is that, when something isn’t always available, it makes you much more likely to take that opportunity when it is available, you don’t want to miss out on your opportunity. Thus, you need a variant: If you get a yes, you keep that yes until you use it, so you get rewarded rather than punished if you skip your chance.
Atlanicesque: We have a system which selects for dishonesty, but in a peculiar way. We select for “sincere deceivers,” people who lie and otherwise act dishonestly for personal gain, yet are intellectually capable of rationalizing their behavior to themselves so completely they feel no shame.
Such people are uniformly horrible to deal with in any extended or involved fashion, so of course our society has decided to put them in charge of everything important.
Benjamin Hoffman: I think I disagree on some important details with that tweet; the people in leadership more typically have a mindset that normalizes types of opportunistic identity-performance, and invalidates the very idea that such performances could be held to the standard of honesty.
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A simple example is Kamala Harris’s famous “it was a debate,” which openly implied that criticisms articulated in debate against a then political opponent aren’t supposed to add up with what you say after you’ve teamed up with them and thinking otherwise is for naive suckers.
This is not really “rationalized,” since there’s no reason offered; it’s merely a description. If asked for a justification in a context where they feel compelled to offer one, people who act like this might say “it’s the way of the world” or “you have to be realistic.”
Less famous people in the professional-managerial class have to navigate an analogous custom in their employment situations by constructing a persona that claims to care about the job authentically and not transactionally.
This doesn’t exactly entail an active 24/7 performance of the professional persona the way Robert Jackall’s book Moral Mazes claims, but it does tend to involve consistent readiness to engage that facade, and inhibition of anything that would challenge it too much.
I don’t think this is fully cross-culturally invariant. My impression is that the Russians have something more internally honest going on, though obviously something else is very wrong with Russian culture, and I predominantly speak with emigrants, who are therefore exceptional.
E.g. I met a Russian-American woman who spoke casually in a private social setting about valuing leisure and not wanting to work more than necessary, but when asked what she did for work, frictionlessly code-switched to corporate-speak.
I think those people mostly don’t even see it as deception or lying anymore. It’s simply the move you make in that situation. And I can actually model that perspective pretty well, because it’s exactly how I feel when I’m playing poker or Diplomacy.
I see Jackall as describing the attractor, and ‘how high you bid’ in moving towards that attractor, which is mostly about signaling how high you will continue to bid later, is a large determinant of ‘success’ within context. Willingness to engage a facade is sufficient to do okay, but you’ll probably lose to those who never drop the facade, and especially those who become the mask.
The growing Chinese trend of paying a fake office so you can pretend to work. Isn’t this at its base level just renting coworking space? The prices seem highly reasonable. For 30-50 yuan ($4-$7) a day, or 400 yean you get a desk, Wi-Fi, coffee and lunch. For more money you can get fake reviews, or fake employees, or fake tasks, and so on. Fun.
The base reported use case is to do this while looking for work, but also you could use it to, you know, actually work? There’s nothing actually stopping you, you have Wi-Fi.
Eric Weinstein: The title of this @joerogan clip from #1945 is literally: “We might be faking a UFO situation.”
OBVIOUSLY.
As I have said before, “When we do something secret and cool, we generally pair it with something fake.” This is standard operating proceedure (e.g. Operation Overlord was D-Day/Operation Fortitude was a Faked Norway Invasion). This is what ‘Covert’ means. Covert means ‘Deniable’. Not secret, but *deniable*.
You see, the evidence that this was faked only shows how deep the conspiracy goes.
It’s tricky to get this right and avoid anyone being misled, because you’re combining a number of related strategies and concepts into the group that is contrasted with, essentially, ‘cheap talk,’ and this risks conflating multiple concepts. But I think ‘costly signal’ is still our best option here most but not all of the time, as a baseline term, because simplicity matters a lot.
Richard Ngo: “Costly signaling” is one of the most important concepts but has one of the worst names.
The best signals are expensive for others – but conditional on that, the cheaper they are for you the better!
We should rename them “costly-to-fake signals”.
Consider an antelope stotting while being chased by lions. This is extremely costly for unhealthy antelopes, because it makes them much more likely to be eaten. But the fastest antelopes might be so confident the lion will never catch them that it’s approximately free for them.
Or consider dating. If you have few options, playing hard to get is very costly: if your date loses interest you’ll be alone.
But if you have many romantic prospects it’s not a big deal if one loses interest.
So playing hard to get is a costly-to-fake (but not costly) signal!
I think “costly” originally meant “in terms of resources” not “in terms of utility”. So a billionaire spending 10k on a date is a monetarily-costly signal which shows that they have lower marginal utility of money than a poor person.
But cost in terms of utility is what actually matters in the general case, and so “costly (in resources)” signaling is just a special case of “costly (in utility) to fake” signaling.
I get why one would think that ‘costly in utility to fake’ is the core concept that matters, but a bunch of other differences seem important too.
Is the signal costly or destructive even if it is accurate? If it is costly, is this a fixed cost (pay the cost once in order to signal, get to signal cheaply thereafter) or is it marginal (pay the cost each time you want to send the signal)?
Is the signal effective because it means it was cheap to send (either on the margin or in general)? Or is the signal effective because it was expensive to send, and you are sending it anyway, thus proving you care in some sense?
Does the signal involve destroying a bunch of value? Or does it involve transferring value or generating it for others (or even for yourself)?
Is this a positional signal? Or is it an absolute signal?
This matters because the goal is to have signals that maximize bang-for-the-buck in all these senses. I worry that calling it ‘costly-to-fake’ while accurate would (in addition to being longer) centrally point people towards asking the wrong follow-up questions.
“Travel” doesn’t have to be fake. Tyler Cowen travels. Eigenrobot goes a little too far here, on many fronts. But most of us at best Travel™, which can involve seeing some cool sights but mostly is something one does to have done it, except when we are meeting up with particular people or attending an event, which is a valid third thing.
no one except lord myles has “adventures” when they travel
you are staying at a hotel, paying large sums of money to have a far worse experience than you could have in your own home and a far softer experience than you could have by spending a weekend in jail
“i love to Travel” why have you failed to establish your home as a place of serenity and joy, to the extent that you feel psychically uncomfortable there and strive to get away from your life whenever you can, viewing it as the highest good?
you are not well
“i Travel” you can go wherever you like in the world but you will never escape yourself
“i want to spend time with people different than myself!” no you dont. there are Different people in your city.
go hang out with the homeless or some seniors hmmmm? i guarantee these people are more different from you than are your age and class peers in europe
the only really good reason to travel recreationally is to see old friends and travel in this case is, in a real sense, like coming home after a long time spent away.
Paul Graham: I was going to explain why you’re mistaken, but then I realized that the places I like to visit would be less crowded if people believed this, and moreover the people who’d stay home would be exactly the ones I’d want to.
The Galts: Ah but I do so on a small boat. I have adventures when I travel … and never need to pack a suitcase.
Eigenrobot: Yeah that’s legit.
Again, are some real advantages to Travel™, especially if your home base is in a place without all the things, you shouldn’t quite do zero of it. But most Travel™ is, I think, is either a skill issue due to an inability to relax without it, or a parasocial or future memory and anticipation play.
Plus you have to plan it. Some people enjoy this, and they are space aliens.
Daniel Brottman: having to decide things in advance is crazy lol. “yeah i’m gonna want to get on a plane on the 22nd of august.” statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged. they have played us for absolute fools.
QC: had to think recently about whether i wanted to sign a yearlong lease in august – bro i do not know a single thing about what the world will look like by august of NEXT year.
Daniel Brottman: holy shit is august of 2026 even real, i heard it was just a myth.
The IRS tax filing software that everyone except TurboTax loves, and that they got the Trump administration to attempt to kill, has instead gone open source, with its creators leaving government to continue working on it. Something tells me plenty of people will be happy to fund this. So maybe this was a win after all. I am sad that my taxes involve too many quirky details to use anything like this.
This is very much The Big Game, so these numbers are not as impressive as they look. But it’s still respectable, and most importantly the pricing is good and it is fully legal. I consider products like DraftKings and FanDuel effectively abominations at this point, but if you don’t want to use overseas books this seems fine:
Cate Hall also points out that while you may be high agency in some ways, that does not mean you are automatically high agency in other ways. In many ways you likey are not actually trying. In particular, you’re likely stuck on whatever level of resourcefulness you had when you first encountered a given problem, which I’d raise to you likely being stuck with the particular strategies you found. You don’t step back and treat problems in other spheres the way you do in your areas of focus, even if you are exerting a lot of effort it is often not well-aimed or considered.
David Parrell: One way to sense if somebody’s telling the truth is that there’s a freshness to their words, whereas people who are lying speak in platitudes and tell you what they think they’re supposed to tell you.
This is also a way to investigate your own thinking. We can so easily fool ourselves without realizing it. But when our words feel recycled and repackaged, it’s a sign that we’re deceived, or at the very least, not being entirely honest with ourselves.
Yes And: A good therapist can smell this in seconds.
This is true if and only if the cheerfulness doesn’t interfere with something load bearing, which can be true in unexpected ways sometimes, hence missing mood:
Tetraspace: I don’t really believe in missing moods but I do believe in the nearby concept of stop celebrating the costs.
If something is worth doing it’s worth being cheerful about (you don’t have to be cheerful, but it’s worth cheer). But a lot of things that are worth doing hurt people, and the people being hurt are costs, not benefits, and the cause of the cheer is the benefits, not the costs.
There are two levels to missing moods.
The first level, where everyone here is in violent agreement, is not to celebrate the need to pay costs, and not to confuse costs with benefits.
The second level, which can play back into confusions on the first level, is that you need the missing moods because that is how humans track such things, and how we generate reward signals to fine-tune our brains. You should generate such signals deliberately and ensure that they train your brain in ways that you prefer.
Jane Street was excellent about this. They emphasized the situations in which you ‘should be sad’ about something, versus happy, exactly enough to remind your brain that something was a negative and it we should evaluate and update accordingly. This is part of deliberate practice at all levels, in all things. You need to pay that experiential price, to some extent, to get the results.
Whereas there are other situations in which doing something cheerfully is the action that is load bearing. It is always a little bit load bearing in that you would prefer to be cheerful rather than not, and those around you usually also prefer this. Some actions only work if you are cheerful while doing them or otherwise have the right attitude, or at least they work far better. Those are almost always either worth doing cheerfully, or not worth doing at all.
The trick then is that this conflicts with a well-calibrated brain that systematizes deliberate practice. You need to be able to shut off those functions, in whole or in part, for the moment, while retaining them for other purposes. That’s tricky to do, and a tricky balance to get right even once you have the power to do it.
If you’re a young woman at a prestigious university there are those who will pay top dollar, tends of thousands, for your eggs. One comment says they offered $200k. Thanks, people warning about this ‘predatory advertising’ of (for some, it’s an offer, you can turn it down!) the ultimate win-win-win trade. There’s a real health cost, but in every other way I say you’re doing a very obviously good thing, and if you disagree you can just pass on this.
Tetraspace: If only I could be so exploited!
Kelsey Piper: I also got these ads and looked into the process! It didn’t happen to work out but I’m glad I was offered the opportunity. Graduate students aren’t children; the serious moral considerations occurred to me and I thought about them; and I value helping people start families.
The absurd culture of infantalization and helplessness of grown adults where we are appalled at the idea of a 22 year old graduate student making a serious, major life choice sickens me. 22 year olds can marry! They can have children! They make many decisions of serious import.
Part of living in our world is that there will be a great many opportunities to make decisions that really matter and that you feel unequipped for. Make them, or don’t, but the world spins on – that’s adulthood, and it’s grotesque to complain it was expected of you.
A graduate student at Yale is also offered the opportunity to make absurd sums of money working in various industries of at least dubious ethical standing. Should we go ‘poor Yale babies, how could they resist the predatory management consulting offers’? No! They should grow up.
If you went to Yale, you have lying before you manifest opportunities to affect the world for good and for ill, to create life and to design new weaponry, to be an egg donor or a crypto sports betting founder. You’re not a helpless baby being preyed on.
It is your obligation- and I’m not saying it’s an easy obligation, just that bioethicists cannot shield you from it- to figure out what you believe is right and pursue it, and refuse temptations to do wrong. The world can’t provide this, won’t provide this, and frankly shouldn’t.
He starts off citing the standard evidence like movies being dominated by sequels and music being dominated by older songs and the top Broadway shows being revivals and old brands (e.g. DC and Marvel) dominating comics. He also cites the standard counterexample that TV has very clearly experienced a golden age – I strongly agree and observe that with notably rare exceptions older shows now appear remarkably bad even when you get to skip commercials.
I’d also defend Broadway and music consumption mostly being old. Why shouldn’t they be? A time-honored Broadway play is proven to be good, it makes sense to do a lot of exploitation along with the exploration, and we do find new big hits like The Book of Mormon and Hamilton. In music it is even more obviously correct to do mostly exploitation, or exploration of the past where selection has done its job over time, in at-home experiences. In addition, when you play the classics, you get the benefits of a rich tradition, that adds to the experience and builds a common culture and language. I say that’s good, actually. Is it ‘cultural stagnation’ when we read old books? Or is that what leads to culture?
And also there are completely new, rapidly evolving forms of culture, that flat out didn’t exist before, as he notes Katherine Dee arguing. A lot of it is slop, but that’s always been true everywhere, and they are largely what you make of them. Even in a 90%+ (or even 99%+!) slop world, search and filters can work wonders.
Noah considers response to technology, and also has a theory of possibility exhaustion, that the low-hanging fruit has been picked. There are only so many worthy chords, so many good plots. He thinks this is a lot of why movies now are so repetitive, the space of movies is too small.
Noah and I basically agree on what’s going on in another way. Movie people used to largely make movies for each other. The sequels were (I think) always what audiences actually wanted, and the creatives basically refused to deliver and now they’ve stopped refusing. But there’s still plenty of room for the avant-garde and making a ‘good’ ‘original’ movie.
Also, we’re seeing a lot of cultural change start to happen because of AI, which will only accelerate. I’m definitely not worried about ‘cultural stagnation’ going forward.
Tyler Cowen responds that he is inclined to blame what stagnation we do see on lack of audience taste today. I would reframe most of that complaint as saying that before we used to get to overrule or dictate audience taste far more than we do now, with a side of modern audiences having very little patience, which I mostly think they are right about.
Are the music recommendation engines the problem, or is this an unreasonable ask? I think the answer is both, we are trying to solve the wrong problems using the wrong methods using a wrong model of the world and all our mistakes are fail to cancel out.
David Perell: It’s strange, but I almost never discover my favorite music on Spotify. The songs I fall in love with are always the ones I hear when I’m out. The ones friends show me. The ones I hear at coffee shops. Or a night out. I would’ve expected personalized algorithms to constantly show me songs I fall in love with, but that hasn’t happened.
Erik Hoffman: That’s why recommendations will always suck if they do not include data such as time of year, weather, season of life etc into the algorithms
Matthew Kobach: This isn’t because the algorithms are bad per se, it’s because context matters. Spotify can play the right song, but if it’s the wrong time or context, you’ll never love it.
Your favorite songs are inextricably tied to emotion, even if you’ve long forgotten the original emotion.
Brett Iredale: Been saying this for years. Spotify is obsessed with giving you more of what you’ve already listened to – not focused on new things you might like. I will jump ship the second there is a new product with a better recommendation algo.
Allen Walton: Was at Starbucks 2 years ago. Empty, raining outside, just espresso sounds. Song came on I’d never heard before.
“Cats and dogs are coming down… 14th street is gonna drown.”
It got my attention and I enjoyed the whole song, so IIooked up the band (Nada Surf). Ended up loving their music and now I’m a huge fan. Saw them live a couple months ago, was excellent.
If the algos worked, I would have been enjoying them the last 20 years!
The songs you love, though, usually have something different than what you like.
They’re often songs, as you say, in a moment. With an experience. They fill something in you at that moment and Spotify or any Algo, so far, doesn’t know that moment.
AI tied to your everyday life, and body metrics, will get there.
An algorithm like Spotify is simply not trying to find unique music you will love. That’s not what it is being optimized to do. It is trying to go ‘here is Some Music, you could listen to that’ such that you go ‘okay, that is indeed Some Music, I could listen to that.’ This is not a terrible thing to do, but it is not where most value lies.
Simply put, the algorithms are not yet that good. They are good enough to say ‘here is Some Music’ or ‘here is Some Music that closely matches your existing choices of music’ but not at making interesting leaps.
Most value lies in big successes: You find a song, album or artist (or even entire genre) you then love. By its nature, searches for this on the margin are going to have a low hit rate.
The priming is very important, as is the feeling of curation and scarcity. You really benefit from association and serendipity. I will often find good stuff from a TV show, or a game, or a movie, or yes a song I heard in some circumstance. Of course, if a song really is good enough, you can make that happen afterwards, but to be a song you love it has to mean something.
The algorithms not only can’t set the context, they don’t understand the context, as Hoffman points out. This one is going to be a tough nut to crack.
The collective music world is actually scary good at finding the best stuff once you adjust for context. I am currently doing a ‘grand tour’ of every artist for whom my music library contains at least one song and wow, the popularity rankings within each artist are scary accurate. They can miss something great via not noticing, but even that is rarer than you think. There are places the public makes bad picks or had its chance and missed, but it’s always surprising, and usually even when I disagree I understand why. In most cases I realize that yes, I am in general wrong, this song is great for me (or lousy for me) but not in general.
The algorithm moves last, after you’ve tried everything else. This subjects it to adverse selection.
There’s a lot of room to do better for power users, but Spotify has to work with users who, like users everywhere, are mostly maximally lazy and who don’t want to invest. I’m actually not so sure there’s much room to improve there, although I use Amazon Music rather than Spotify so I haven’t put it to the test.
Benjamin Hoffman: The big movies of 1999 were expressions of desperation at the false bourgeois we’d constructed to replace the real one – Office Space, Fight Club, American Beauty, and The Matrix, which spookily resembled the Columbine High School massacre.
The Matrix also specifically and correctly predicted that we’d try to replay the ‘90s over and over to keep the simulation going instead of getting on with our lives. The best Office Space could recommend was becoming a laborer.
It makes more sense to think of the ‘90s as the last decade in which a relatively sheltered person might not realize that society was systematically breaking its implied commitments to people who worked hard & played by the rules.
I notice that those are the ones that I loved and remember and seem important, but only 2 of those 4 are in the top 10 grossing movies of the year.
The listed category also would include Magnolia, and arguably also in a way the highest grossing movies of the year if you take them properly seriously, which were Star Wars Episode I about the fall of a republic that had lost its virtue in peacetime and how we ultimately turn to the dark side, The Sixth Sense about (spoiler but come on) and Toy Story 2 about being trapped by a collector and preserved in a box. Then #4 is The Matrix, and #5 is Tarzan, which glamorizes being outside of society, and #7 is Notting Hill which is basically about rejecting modernity for an old bookshop. Huh.
I still think of 1999 as a high water mark in movies. Those were good times.
(As a control I randomly chose 2005 and didn’t see the same pattern, also most of the top films were now some sort of remake. Then I went to 2012 and we’re in a wasteland of franchises that have nothing to say.)
Joe Barton: “I continue to think that a mega subscription is The Way for human viewing. Rather than pay per view, which feels bad, you pay for viewing in general, then the views are incremented, and the money is distributed based on who was viewed.”
I’ve been a YouTube Red/Premium subscriber since basically day one. I know you go on and on about how Google can’t market their way out of a used kleenex dropped in the street on a rainy day – This is Yet Another Example of that principle.
YouTube Premium is the mega subscription model you’re describing, and it already works brilliantly – Google just can’t market it to save their lives.
Nobody and I mean NOBODY (except The Spiffing Brit in one throwaway line in one video¹) realizes that YouTube splits Premium subscription revenue 55/45 with creators, just like ad revenue. But here’s the kicker: it fundamentally changes the entire ecosystem. Instead of viewers being the product sold to advertisers, we become the customers. Creators get paid MORE per Premium view than ad views, without worrying about “advertiser-friendly” content guidelines. I never get that “feels bad” moment of deciding if a video is worth X cents – I just watch what interests me, guilt-free.
The model removes ALL the friction: no ads, no ad-blocker wars, creators get stable income, and viewers can support creators without thinking about it. YouTube Premium is proof that the mega subscription model works. The only failure is that after nearly a decade, Google still hasn’t figured out how to explain this to people. They’ve positioned it as “YouTube without ads” when it’s actually “become a patron of every creator you watch, automatically.”
¹ Explained briefly from 1: 24 to 2: 40 in “YouTube Premium Is Broken.” by The Spiffing Brit, 14 August 2021. “Most creators see basically no revenue from Premium each month.”
I too am a YouTube Premium subscriber, and no I did not realize that my viewing was subsidizing creators more than I would have without the subscription. I only knew not having ads was worth a lot. And yes, YouTube has quite a lot in it, but no it is not the Mega-Subscription even for video. Too many others aren’t playing ball.
ESPN finally launches a streaming service. Ben Thompson correctly says ‘finally’ but also notes that everyone is worse off now that sports along with everything else can only be watched intentionally through a weird mix of streaming services. The problem with ESPN as a streaming service is that it won’t actually give you what you want. If you offered me the Sports Streaming Service (SSS), and it had All The Sports, I’d be down for paying a decently large amount. Give me a clean way to subscribe even just to the teams I want, and maybe that works until the playoffs. But if I’m going to be in I want to be in. ESPN alone doesn’t get me in and I don’t want to spend the time figuring out where everything is. So it’s still going to be YouTubeTV for football season and that’s it, I suppose.
Alas, there’s been no time for me to game this month. I hope to get back to it soon.
I am on the fence about getting back to Blue Price. I do think it’s pretty great in many ways, but not sure it’s my speed and I worry about being puzzle-locked or waiting for a lucky day?
Next up: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which everyone loves but I haven’t played yet past the first campfire, and Monster Train 2 which is a ticket I can cash at any time.
And of course Slay the Spire 2, once it arrives.
So instead we have to live vicariously through Magic: The Gathering news.
The same way that the Dungeons & Dragons set ‘got’ D&D, the Final Fantasy set mostly doesn’t ‘get’ Final Fantasy, or its particular concepts and characters. There are some clear hits for me, especially Cecil, Dark Knight. But there’s also a ton of ‘look at what they did to my boy.’ Or my girl, Aerith, the vibes are almost reversed. You think that’s Tifa? You think that’s what happens when Kefka transforms? Cloud triggers equipment twice rather than being able to lift his sword at all? The Crystal’s Chosen happens on turn seven? What is even going on with Sin?
I could go on.
Mechanically the set feels schitzo. Which is kind of fine in principle, since Final Fantasy is kind of schitzo and I love it to pieces (in order especially 6, 4 and 7, but I’ve also played through and endorse 12, 1, 10, 8, 3 and 2) you’re doing the entire franchise, but then the resonance mostly feels backwards. We object because we care.
(I don’t know why I bounced off 9, whereas 5 felt like an uber grind and my first attempt got into a nightmare spot in the endgame, must have been doing it wrong. X-2’s opening was insane in the best way but it kind of petered out. I endorse that 13 and 15 weren’t doing the thing anymore, sad, and haven’t tried 16. The MMORPGs don’t count, I tried 14 for a few hours and it felt highly mid.)
I don’t follow Magic right now so I have no direct data on if Prowess is too good in Standard, but Sam Black seems clearly right that if you hold a bunch of major Arena tournaments and no one can beat the best deck there, then that means the best deck is too good, what else were you even hoping for? Arena regular play, including at high Mythic, systematically is both much easier than big tournaments for other reasons and also includes a lot more people experimenting or trying to beat the best deck, and less people playing the best deck.
With distance from the game, I think Magic in general has been way way too reluctant to drop ban hammers. Yes, it’s annoying to strike down people’s cards and decks, but it’s far worse for your game to suck for a while, and for everyone to feel forced to fall in line. In the Arena era, things go faster, no one is holding big secrets back for long, and you find out fast if you have a problem.
Sam Pardee: Playing on Arena before the RC I played against a ton of MD High Noons and Authority of the Consuls. The notion that players aren’t trying and “immediately crying for changes” is laughable to me.
…
I think one of my opponents had a MD white enchantment but mostly I played 9 mirrors so not really. People all had plans for the matchup and were certainly trying their best to win, the plans were just not any good.
Sam Black: I entirely agree with Sam. To say players are “conditioned” to ask for bans rather than tried to beat the best deck makes no sense—what more could possibly done to do the opposite of that than offer tournaments with meaningful prizes and rarely ban cards?
Commander keeps eating Magic, Sam Black is going to stop doing Drafting Archetypes to focus on cEDH. It makes sense for him to focus on what he enjoys, but this confirms to me that the Magic I loved is essentially dead, and unless and until my kids get interested in playing I need to fully move on.
Waymo gets regulators to approve roughly a doubling of the area they can operate in around San Francisco, from the gray to now the orange, although for now they are limited by the number of cars so they are expanding gradually.
East Bay when? Alas, it seems they are still not allowed on highways so it wouldn’t link up, which means it wouldn’t make sense to expand there.
Sam Rodriques: Today: Wow Waymo is so good at driving it’s crazy that we ever thought it was a good idea for humans to drive.
Tomorrow: Wow AI is so good at reviewing papers, it’s crazy that we ever thought it was a good idea to have other humans review our papers.
Waymos remain severely undersupplied even in the service area of San Francisco.
Nathan Lambert: In my recent trip, the waymo market in SF has converged to ~2-3x the wait time and ~2-3x the cost of uber because that’s how much more people are willing to pay for Waymo.
Arvind Narayanan points out via Matthew Yglesias that we lose a lot of the upside of self-driving cars if we don’t adjust our parking rules, because we’d miss out on much more efficient use of space. And yes, we should try to get that value too, but mostly we just need to actually allow the self-driving cars and that’s where most of the value lies? Arvind then generalizes this to diffusion begin the bottleneck to progress rather than innovation. To me this is a great example of why that is obviously false, the main barrier to self-driving cars was expected to be regulatory but it has decisively proven to mostly be the ability of the AI to drive the car.
If all the AI can do is drive the car, we will quickly replace the taxis and the cars with versions that self-drive (or at least versions capable of it), and then of course we will fix the parking rules.
Bryne Hobart: A good time to remember that vandalizing Waymos demonstrates the incredible trust we all have in big tech companies: Waymo is studded with cameras and are owned by a parent company with access to your email and detailed knowledge of your porn consumption habits.
Timothy Lee: First fully driverless ride on public roads:
Google/waymo: 2015
Amazon/zoox: 2020
GM/Cruise: 2022
Aurora: 2025
Tesla: 2025
After Waymo’s first driverless ride it took Waymo another five years to launch a fully driverless commercial service. Presumably it won’t take Tesla that long but they have a lot of catching up to do.
Robert Graham: What are the technical details of Tesla’s achievement. I ask because their existing FSD can’t drive very far without requiring interventions to prevent damage to the vehicle.
I’m assuming that like Waymo, they’ve secretly created maps of the area.
Timothy Lee: Yeah the evidence that they are ready to scale rapidly is very thin afaik.
This brings up something we often deal with in AI. Fast following is substantially easier. In some sense, Tesla is 10 years behind Waymo by this metric. In others, it’s less, because Tesla should be able to get through those 10 years faster given what Waymo already did. So how ‘far behind’ are they is a question that depends on which sense you care about, and whether you care about Tesla’s ability to take a lead.
I don’t see it as gendered, but so much this, although I do have Cursor working fine.
Aella: Never ever trust men when they say setting up an environment is easy
I’ve been burned so bad I have trauma. Any time a guy says “omg u should try x” I start preemptively crying
Pascal Guay (top comment): Just use @cursor_ai agent chat and prompt it to make this or that environment. It’ll launch all the command lines for you; just need to accept everything and you’ll be done in no time.
Aella: THIS WAS SPARKED BY ME BEING UNABLE TO SET UP CURSOR.
Ronny Fernandez (comment #2): have you tried cursor? it’s really easy.
Piq: Who tf would ever say that regardless of gender? It’s literally the hardest part of coding.
My experience is that setting things up involves a series of exacting magical incantations, which are essentially impossible to derive on your own. Sometimes you follow the instructions and everything goes great but if you get things even slightly wrong it becomes hell to figure out how to recover. The same thing goes for many other aspects of programming.
AI helps with this, but not as much as you might think if you get outside the realms where vibe coding just works for you. Then, once you are set up, within the realm of the parts of the UI you understand things are relatively much easier, but there is very much temptation to keep using the features you understand.
People who play standard economic games, like Dictator, Ultimatum, Trust, Public Goods or Prisoner’s Dilemma, frequently don’t understand the rules. For Trust 70% misunderstood, for Dictator 22%, and incentivized comprehension checks didn’t help. Those who misunderstood typically acted more prosocial.
In many ways this makes the games more realistic, not less. People frequently don’t understand the implications of their actions, or the rules of the (literal or figurative) game they are playing. You have to account for this, and often this is what keeps the game in a much better (or sometimes worse) equilibrium, as is the tendency of many players to play ‘irrationally’ or based on vibes. Dictator is a great example. In a real-world one-shot dictator game situation it’s often wise to do a 50-50 split, and saying ‘but the game theory says’ will not change that.
Jorbs: i have this ludicrous thing where if i see someone cheating at something and lying about it, i start to believe that they aren’t an honest person and that i should be suspicious of other things they say and do.
this is only semi tongue-in-cheek. the number of times in my life someone has directly told me about how they cheat and lie about something, with the expectation that that will not affect how i view them otherwise, is like, much much higher than i would expect it to be.
It happens to me too, as if I don’t know how to update on Bayesian evidence or something. I don’t even need them to be lying about it. The cheating is enough.
There are partial mitigations, where they explain why something is a distinct ‘cheating allowed’ magisteria. But only partial ones. It still counts.
This is definitely a special case of ‘how you do anything is how you do everything,’ and also ‘when people tell you who they are, believe them.’
Spaced Out Matt: This person appears to be an active participant in the “Effective Altruist” movement—and a good reminder that hyper-rational political movements often end up funding lifesaving work on critical health issues
Alexander Berger: Really glad that @open_phil was able to step in on short notice (<24h) to make sure Sarah Fortune's work on TB vaccines can continue.
“Much to the relief of a Harvard University researcher, a California-based philanthropic group is getting into the monkey business.
Dana Gerber: Open Philanthropy, a grant advisor and funder, told the Globe on Friday that it authorized a $500,000 grant to allow researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine to complete an ongoing tuberculosis vaccine study that was abruptly cut off from its NIH funding earlier this week, imperiling the lives of its rhesus macaque test subjects.
Am I the only one who thought of this?
In all seriousness, this is great, exactly what you want to happen – stepping in quickly in suddenly high leverage opportunities.
Simeon: The media negativity bias is truly deranged.
Managing to frame a $200B pledge to philanthropy negatively is an all-time prowess.
Gates is doing what other charitable foundations and givers fail to do, which is to actually spend the damn money to help people and then say their work is done, within a reasonable time frame. Most foundations instead attempt to remain in existence indefinitely by refusing to spend the money.
John Arnold: This is a great decision by Gates that will maximize his impact. All organizations become less effective over time, particularly foundations that have no outside accountability. New institutions will be better positioned to deal with the problems of future generations.
I would allocate funds to different targets, but this someone actually trying.
The Secular Solstice (aka Rationalist Solstice) is by far the best such ritual, it isn’t cringe but even if you think it is, if you reject things that work because they’re cringe you’re ngmi.
Guive Assadi: Steven Pinker: I’ve been part of some not so successful attempts to come up with secular humanist substitutes for religion.
Interviewer: What is the worst one you’ve been involved in?
Steven Pinker: Probably the rationalist solstice in Berkeley, which included hymns to the benefits of global supply chains. I mean, I actually completely endorse the lyrics of the song, but there’s something a bit cringe about the performance.
Rob Bensinger: Who wants to gather some more quotes like this and make an incredible video advertisement for the rat solstice
But people should do the cringe thing if they truly enjoy it. Cringe would ideally remain permanently fashionable.
Nathan: Pinker himself is perhaps answering why secular humanism hasn’t created a replacement for Christianity. It cares too much what it looks like.
The song he’s referring to is Landsailor. It is no Uplift, but it is excellent, now more than ever. Stop complaining about what you think others will think is cringe and start producing harmony and tears. Cringe is that which you believe is cringe. Stop giving power to the wrong paradox spirits.
Indeed, the central problem with this ritual is that it doesn’t go far enough. We don’t only need Bright Side of Life and Here Comes the Sun (yes you should have a few of these and if you wanted to add You Learn or Closer to Fine or something, yes, we have options), but mostly on the margin we need Mel’s Song, and Still Alive, and Little Echo. People keep trying to make it more accessible and less weird.
I do notice this is a sudden demand to not build software not that can be misused to help violate the US Constitution.
You know what other software can and will be used this way?
Most importantly frontier LLMs, but also most everything else. Hmm.
And if nothing else, as always, I appreciate the candor in the reply. Act accordingly. And beware the Streisand Effect.
Drop Site: ICE Signs $30 Million Contract With Palantir to Build ‘ImmigrationOS’
ICE has awarded Palantir Technologies a $30 million contract to develop a new software platform to expand its surveillance and enforcement operations, building on Palantir’s decade-long collaboration with ICE.
Key features and functions:
➤ ImmigrationOS will give ICE “real-time visibility” into visa overstays, self-deportation cases, and individuals flagged for removal, including foreign students flagged for removal for protesting.
➤ ImmigrationOS will integrate data from multiple government database systems, helping ICE track immigration violators and coordinate with agencies like Customs and Border Protection.
➤ The platform is designed to streamline the entire immigration enforcement process—from identification to removal—aiming to reduce time, labor, and resource costs.
Paul Graham: It’s a very exciting time in tech right now. If you’re a first-rate programmer, there are a huge number of other places you can go work rather than at the company building the infrastructure of the police state.
Incidentally, I’ll be happy to delete this if Palantir publicly commits never to build things that help the government violate the US constitution. And in particular never to build things that help the government violate anyone’s (whether citizens or not) First Amendment rights.
Ted Mabrey (start of a very long post): I am looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post. Please don’t delete it Paul. We work here in direct response to this world view and do not seek its blessing.
Paul Graham: As I said, I’ll be happy to delete it if you commit publicly on behalf of Palantir not to build things that help the government violate the US constitution. Will you do that, Ted?
Ted Mabrey: First, I really don’t want you to delete this and am happy for it to be on the record.
Second, the reason I’m not engaging in the question is because it’s so obviously in bad faith akin to the “will you promise to stop beating your wife” court room parlor trick. Let’s make the dynamics crystal clear. Just by engaging on that question it establishes a presumption of some kind of guilt in the present or future for us or the government. If I answer, you establish that we need to justify something we have done, which we do not, or accept as a given that we will be asked to break the law, which we have not.
…
or y’all…we have made this promise so many ways from Sunday but I’ll write out a few of them here for them.
…
Paul Graham: When you say “we have made this promise,” what does the phrase “this promise” refer to? Because despite the huge number of words in your answers, I can’t help noticing that the word “constitution” does not occur once.
Ted? What does “this promise” refer to?
…
I gave Ted Mabrey two days to respond, but I think we now have to conclude that he has run away. After pages of heroic-sounding doublespeak, the well has suddenly run dry. I was open to being proven wrong about Palantir, but unfortunately it’s looking like I was right.
Ted tried to make it seem like the issue is a complex one. Actually it’s 9 words. Will Palantir help the government violate people’s constitutional rights? And I’m so willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that I’d have taken Ted’s word for if it he said no. But he didn’t.
Continuing reminder: It is totally reasonable to skip this section. I am doing my best to avoid commenting on politics, and as usual my lack of comment on other fronts should not be taken to mean I lack strong opinions on them. The politics-related topics I still mention are here because they are relevant to this blog’s established particular interests, in particular AI, abundance including housing, energy and trade, economics or health and medicine.
In case it needs to be explained why trying to forcibly bring down drug prices via requiring Most Favored Nation status on those prices would be an epic disaster that hurts everyone and helps no one if we were so foolish as to implement it for real, Jason Abaluck is here to help, do note this thread as well so there is a case where there could be some benefit by preventing other governments from forcing prices down.
Then there’s the other terrible option, which is if it worked in lowering the prices or Trump found some other way to impose such price controls, going into what Tyler Cowen calls full supervillain mode. o3 estimates this would reduce global investment in drug innovation by between 33% and 50%. That seems low to me, and is also treating the move as a one-time price shock rather than a change in overall regime.
I would expect that the imposition of price controls here would actually greatly reduce investment in R&D and innovation essentially everywhere, because everyone would worry that their future profits would also be confiscated. Indeed, I would already be less inclined to such investments now, purely based on the stated intention to do this.
In all seriousness, if I understood the paperwork and other time sink requirements, I would not have created Balsa Research, and if the paperwork requirements mostly went away I would have founded quite a few other businesses along the way.
Katherine Boyle: We don’t talk enough about how many forms you have to fill out when raising kids. Constant forms, releases, checklists, signatures. There’s a reason why litigious societies have fewer children. People just get tired of filling out the forms.
Mike Solana: the company version of this is also insane fwiw. one of the hardest things about running pirate wires has just been keeping track of the paper work — letters every week, from every corner of the country, demanding something new and stupid. insanely time consuming.
people hear me talk shit about bureaucracy and hear something ‘secretly reactionary coded’ or something and it’s just like no, my practical experience with regulation is it prevents probably 90 to 95% of everything amazing in this world that someone might have tried.
treek: this is why lots of people don’t bother with business extreme blackpill ngl
Mike Solana: yes I genuinely believe this. years ago I was gonna build an app called operator that helped you build businesses. I tried to start with food trucks in LA. hundreds of steps, many of them ambiguous. just very clearly a system designed to prevent new businesses from existing.
A good summary of many of the reasons our government doesn’t work.
Alec Stapp: This is the best one-paragraph explanation for what’s gone wrong with our institutions:
I could never give that good a paragraph-length explanation, because I would have split that into three paragraphs, but I am on board with the content.
At core, the problem is a ratcheting up of laws and regulatory barriers against doing things, as our legal structures focus on harms and avoiding lawsuits but ignore the ‘invisible graveyard’ of utility lost.
The abundance agenda says actually this is terrible, we should mostly do the opposite. In some places it can win at least small victories, but the ratchet continues, and at this point a lot of our civilization essentially cannot function.
Once again, cutting FDA staff without changing the underlying regulations doesn’t get rid of the stupid regulations, it only makes everything take longer and get worse.
Jared Hopkins (Wall Street Journal): “Biotech companies developing drugs for hard-to-treat diseases and other ailments are being forced to push back clinical trials and drug testing in the wake of mass layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration.”
…
“When you cut the administrative staff and you still have these product deadlines, you’re creating an unwinnable situation,” he said. The worst thing for companies isn’t getting guidance when needed and following all the steps for approval, only to “prepare a $100 million application and get denied because of something that could’ve been communicated or resolved before the trial was under way,” Scheineson said.
Paul Graham: I heard this directly from someone who works for a biotech startup. Layoffs at the FDA have slowed the development of new drugs.
The recent proposals around restricting shipping even further caused so much panic (and Balsa to pivot) for a good reason. If enacted in their original forms, they would have been depression-level catastrophic. Luckily, we pulled back from the brink, and are now only proposing ordinary terrible additional restrictions, not ‘kill the world economy’ level restrictions.
Also note that for all the talk about the dangers of Chinese ships, the regulations were set to apply to all non-American ships, Jones Act style, with some amount of absolute requirement to use American ships.
That’s a completely different rule. If the rule only applies to Chinese ships in particular but not to ships built in Japan, South Korea or Europe, I don’t love it, but by 2025 standards it would be ‘fine.’
Ryan Peterson: Good to see the administration listened to feedback on their proposed rule on Chinese ships. The final rule published today is a lot more reasonable.
John Konrad: Nothing in my 18 years since founding Captain has caused more panic than @USTradeRep’s recent proposal to charge companies that own Chinese ships $1 million per port call in the US.
USTR held hearings on the fees and today issued major modifications.
The biggest problem was the original port fees proposed by Trump late February was there were ship size and type agnostic.
All Chinese built ships would be charged $1.5 million per port and $1 million for any ship owned by a company that operates chinese built ships.
This was ok for a very large containership with 17,000 boxes that could absorb the fee. But it would have been devastating for a bulker that only carries low value cement.
The new proposal differentiates between ship size and types of cargo.
Specific fees are $50 per net to with the following caveats that go into effect in 6 months.
•Fees on vessel owners & operators of China based on net cargo tonnage, increasing incrementally over the following years;
•Fees on operators of Chinese-built ships based on net tonnage or containers, increasing incrementally over the following years; and
•To incentivize U.S.-built car carrier vessels, fees on foreign-built car carrier vessels based on their capacity.
The second phase actions will not take place for 3 years and is specifically for LNG ships:
•To incentivize U.S.-built liquified natural gas (LNG) vessels, limited restrictions on transporting LNG via foreign vessels. Restrictions will increase incrementally over 22 years.
… [more details of things we shouldn’t be doing, but probably aren’t catastrophic]
Another major complaint of the original proposal was that ships would be charged the fee each time they enter a US Port. This meant a ship discharging at multiple ports i one voyage would suffer millions in fees and likely cause them to visit fewer small ports.
That cargo would have to be put on trucks, clogging already overburdened highways
The new proposal charges the fee per voyage or string of U.S. port calls.
The proposal also excludes Jones Act ships and short sea shipping options (small ships and barges that move between ports)
In short this new proposal is a lot more adaptable and reasonable but still put heavy disincentives on owners that build ships in China.
They also dropped fleet composition penalties, and the rule has at least some phase-in of the fees, along with dropping the per-port-of-call fee. Overall I see the new proposal as terrible but likely not the same kind of crisis-level situation we had before.
Then there’s the crazy ‘phase 2’ that requires the LNG sector in particular to use a portion US-built vessels. Which is hard, since only one such vessel exists and is 31 years old with an established route, and building new such ships to the extent it can be done is prohibitively expensive. The good news is this would start in 2028 and phase in over 22 (!) years, which is an actually reasonable time frame for trying to do this. There’s still a good chance this would simply kill America’s ability to export LNG, hurting our economy and worsening the climate. Again, if you want to use non-Chinese-built ships, that is something we can work around.
Ryan Peterson asks how to fix the fact that without the Jones Act he fears America would build zero ships, as opposed to currently building almost zero ships. Scott Lincicome suggests starting here, but it mostly doesn’t address the question. The bottom line is that American shipyards are not competitive, and are up against highly subsidized competition. If we feel the need for American shipyards to build our ships, we are going to have to subsidize that a lot plus impose export discipline.
Or we can choose to not to spend enough to actually fix this, or simply accept that comparative advantage is a thing and it’s fine to get our ships from places like Japan, and redirect our shipyards to doing repairs on the newly vastly greater number of passing ships and on building Navy ships to ensure what is left is supported.
Someone clearly is neither culturally rationalist nor culturally Jewish.
Robin Hanson (I don’t agree): “Rituals” are habits and patterns of behavior where we are aware of not fully understanding why we should do them the way we do. A mark of modernity was the aspiration to end ritual by either understanding them or not doing them.
We of course still do lots of behavior patterns that we do not fully understand. Awareness of this fact varies though.
Yes we don’t understand this modern habit fully, making it a ritual.
Ritual is not about not understanding, at most it is about not needing to understand at first in order to start, and about preserving something important without having to as robustly preserve understanding of the reasons.
Ritual is about Doing the Thing because it is The Thing You Do. That in no way precludes you understanding why you are doing it.
Indeed, one of the most important Jewish rituals is always asking ‘why do we do this thing, ritual or otherwise?’ This is most explicit in the Seder, where we ask the four questions and we answer them, but in a general sense if you don’t know why you’re doing a Jewish thing and don’t ask why, you are doing it wrong.
This is good. The rationalists follow the same principle. The difference is that rather than carrying over many rituals and traditions for thousands of years, we mostly design them anew for the modern world.
But you can’t do that properly, or choose the right rituals for you, and you certainly can’t wisely choose to stop doing rituals you’re already doing, unless you understand what they are for. Which is a failure mode that is happening a lot, often justified by the invocation of a now-sacred moral principle that must stand above all, even if the all includes key load bearing parts of civilization.
Introducing the all-new Doubling-Back Aversion, the concept that we are reluctant to go backwards, on top of the distinct Sunk Cost Fallacy. I can see it, but I am suspicious, especially of their example of having flown SFO→LAX intending to go then to JFK, and then being more willing to go LAX→DEN→JFK than LAX→SFO→JFK even if the time saved is the same, because you started in SFO. I mean, I can see why it’s frustrating a little, but I suspect the bigger effect here is just that DEN is clearly ‘on the way’ to JFK, and SFO isn’t, and there’s a clear bias against ‘going backwards.’ They do try to cover this, such as here:
But I still don’t see a strong case here for this being a distinct new bias, as opposed to being the sum of existing known issues.
The case by Dr. Todd Kashdan for seeking out ‘48% opposites’ as friends and romantic partners. You want people who think different, he says, so sparks can fly and new ideas can form and fun can be had, not some boring static bubble of sameness. But then he also says to seek ‘slightly different’ people who will make you sweat, which seems very different to me. As in, you want 10%-20% opposites, maybe 30%, but not 48%, probably on the higher end for friends and lower end for romantic partners, and if you’re a man dating women or vice versa that 10%-20% is almost certainly covered regardless.
There are, in theory, exceptions. I do remember once back in the day finding a 99% match on OKCupid (those were the days!), a woman who said she only rarely and slowly ever responded to anyone but whose profile was like a bizarro world female version of me. In my opening email I told her as much, asking her to respond the way she’d respond to herself. I’ll always wonder what that would have been like if we’d ever met in person – would it have been ‘too good’ a match? She did eventually write back months later as per a notification I got, but by then I was with my wife, so I didn’t reply.
Patrick McKenzie is one of many to confirm that there are lots of things about the world that are not so hard to find out or become an expert in, but where no one has chosen to do the relevant work. If there is a particular policy area or other topic where you put your focus, it’s often very practical to become the World’s Leading Expert and even be the person who gets consulted, and for there to be big wins available to be found, simply because no one else is seriously trying or looking. Getting people’s attention? That part is harder.
Kelsey Piper: This is related to one of the most important realizations of my adult life, which is that there is just so much in the modern world that no one is doing; reasonably often if you can’t find the answer to a question it just hasn’t been answered.
If you are smart, competent, a fast learner and willing to really throw yourself into something, you can answer a question to which our civilization does not have an answer with weeks to months of work. You can become an expert in months to years.
There is not an efficient market in ideas; it’s not even close. There are tons and tons of important lines of thought and work that no one is exploring, places where it’d be valuable to have an expert and there simply isn’t one.
Patrick McKenzie: Also one of the most important and terrifying lessons of my adult life.
Mine too.
Michael Nielsen: This is both true *andcan be hard to recognize. A friend once observed that an organization had been important for his formative growth, but it was important to move away, because it was filled with people who didn’t realize how derivative their work was; they thought they were pushing frontiers, but weren’t
One benefit of a good PhD supervisor is that they’ll teach you a lot about how to figure out when you’re on that frontier
And yes, by default you get to improve some small corner of the world, but that’s already pretty good, and occasionally you strike gold.
Zy (QTing Kelsey Piper): There’s so much diminishing returns to this stuff it’s not even funny. 400 years ago you could do this and discover Neptune or cellular life
Today you can do it and figure out a condition wherein SSRIs cause 3% less weight gain or an antenna with 5% better fidelity or something
Marko Jukic: Guy 400 years ago: “There’s so much diminishing returns to this stuff it’s not even funny. 400 years ago you could do this and discover Occam’s Razor or the Golden Rule. Today the best you can do is prove that actually 4% more angels can dance on the head of a pin.”
Autumn: 7 years ago a fairly small team in san francisco figured out how to make machines think.
Alternatively, even if there are diminishing returns, so what? Even the diminished returns, even excluding the long tail of big successes, are still very, very good.
Apologies with longer words are perceived as more genuine. I think this perception is correct. The choice to bother using longer words is a costly signal, which is the point of apologizing in the first place. Even if you’re ‘faking it’ it still kind of counts.
Endorsed:
Cate Hall: Amazing how big the quality of life improvements are downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.”
It’s not just shifting work up in time — it’s saving you all the mental friction b/w now & when you do it. Total psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time.
Sam Martin: conversely, “I’ll deal with this later” is like swiping a high-interest cognitive load credit card (said the man whose CLCC is constantly maxed out)
Thus there is a huge distinction between ‘things you can deal with later without having to otherwise think about it’ and other things. If you can organize things such that you’ll be able to deal with something later in a way that lets you not otherwise think about it, that’s much better. Whereas if that’s not possible, my lord, do it now.
If you can reasonably do it now, do it now anyway. Time saved in the future is typically worth more than time now, because this gives you slack. When you need time, sometimes you suddenly really desperately need time.
I did not wager because I try not to do that anymore and because it’s specifically a mortal sin to bet on a Papal election and I actually respect the hell out of that, but I also thought that the frontrunners almost had to be rich given the history of Conclaves and how diverse the Cardinals are, and the odds seemed to be favoring Italians too much. I wouldn’t have picked out Prevost without doing the research.
The past sucked in so many ways. The quality of news and info was one of them.
Roon: If you read old analytical news articles, im talking even just 30 years old, most don’t even stand to muster against the best thread you read on twitter on any given day. The actual longform analysis pieces in most newspapers are also much better.
we’ve done a great amount of gain of function research on Content.
Roon then tries to walk it back a bit, but I disagree with the walking back. The attention to detail is better now, too. Or rather, we used to pay more attention to detail, but we still get the details much more right today, because it’s just way way easier to check details. It used to be they’d get them wrong and no one would know.
Here’s a much bigger and more well known way the past sucked.
Hunter Ash: People who are desperate to retvrn to the past can’t understand how nightmarish the past was. When you tell them, they don’t believe it.
Tyler Cowen asks how very smart people meet each other. Dare I say ‘at Lighthaven’? My actual answer is that you meet very smart people by going to and participating in the things and spaces smart people are drawn to or that select for smart people. That can include a job, and frequently does.
Also, you meet them by noticing particular very smart people and then reaching out to them, they’re mostly happy to hear from you if you bring interestingness.
Will Bachman: I’m the host of a podcast, The 92 Report, which has the goal of interviewing every member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1992. Published 130 episodes so far. (~1,500 left to go)
Based on this sample, most friendships start through some extracurricular activity, which provides the opportunity to work together over a sustained period, longer than one course. Also people care about it more than any particular class.
At the Harvard Crimson for example on a typical day in 1990 you’d find in the building Susan B Glasser (New Yorker), Josh Gerstein (Politico), Michael Grunwald (Time, Politico), Julian E Barnes, Ira Stoll, Sewell Chan, Jonathan Cohn, and a dozen other individuals whose bylines are now well known.
Many current non-profit leaders met through their work at Philips Brooks House.
Many top TV writers met at the Harvard Lampoon.
Many Hollywood names met through theatre productions.
Strong lifelong friendships formed in singing groups.
Asking Harvard graduates how they met people is quite the biased sample. ‘Go to Harvard’ is indeed one of the best ways to meet smart or destined-to-be-successful people. That’s the best reason to go to Harvard. Of course they met each other in Harvard-related activities a lot. But this is not an actionable plan, although you can and should attempt to do lesser versions of this. Go where the smart people are, do the things they are doing, and also straight up introduce yourself.
Here’s a cool idea, the key is to ignore the statement when it’s wrong:
Bryan Johnson: when this happens, my team and I now say “plank” and the person speaking immediately stops. Everyone is now much happier.
Gretchen Lynn: This is funny, because every time a person with ADHD interrupts/responds too quickly to me because they think they already understood my sentence, they end up being wrong about what I was saying or missing important context. I see this meme all the time like it’s a superpower, but…be aware you may be driving the people in your life insane 😂
Gretchen is obviously mistaken. Whether or not one has ADHD, very often it is very clear where a sentence (or paragraph, or entire speech) is going well before it is finished. Similarly, often there are scenes in movies or shows where you can safety skip large chunks of them, confident you missed nothing.
That can be a Skill Issue, but often it is not. It is often important that the full version of a statement, scene or piece of writing exists – some people might need it, you’re not putting that work on the other person, and also it’s saying you have thought this through and have brought the necessary receipts. But that doesn’t mean, in this case, you actually have to bother with it.
Then there are situations where there is an ‘obvious’ version of the statement, but that’s not actually what someone was going for.
So when you say ‘plank’ here, you’re saying is ‘there is an obvious-to-me version of where you are going with this, I get it, if that’s what you are saying you can stop, and if it’s more than that you can skip ahead.’
But, if that’s wrong, or you’re unsure it’s right? Carry on, or give me the diff, or give me to quick version. And this in turn conveys the information that you think the ‘plank’ call was premature.
Allie: I’m not usually the type to get jealous over other people’s weddings
But I saw a girl on reels say she incentivized people to RSVP by making the order in which people RSVP their order to get up and get dinner and I am being driven to insanity by how genius that is.
No walking it back, this is The Way.
Why do posts with links get limited on Twitter?
Predatory myopic optimization for ‘user-seconds on site,’ Musk explains.
Elon Musk: To be clear, there is no explicit rule limiting the reach of links in posts. The algorithm tries (not always successfully) to maximize user-seconds on X, so a link that causes people to cut short their time here will naturally get less exposure.
xlr8harder: i’m old enough to remember when he used to use the word “unregretted” before “user-seconds”
yes, people, i know unregretted is subjective and hard to measure. the point is it was aspirational and provided some countervailing force against the inexorable tug toward pure engagement optimization.
“whelp. turns out it was hard!” is not a good reason to abandon it.
caden: MLE who used to work on the X algo told me Elon was far more explicit in maximizing user-seconds than previous management The much-maligned hall monitors pre-Elon cared more about the “unregretted” caveat.
Danielle Fong: deleting “unregretted” in “unregretted user seconds” rhymes with deleting “don’t” in “don’t be evil.”
I am also old enough to remember that. Oh well. It’s hard to measure ‘unregretted.’
Even unregretted, of course, would still not understand what is at stake here. You want to provide value to the user, and this is what gets them to want to use your service, to come back, and builds up a vibrant internet with Twitter at its center. Deprioritizing links is a hostile act, quite similarly destructive to a massive tariff, destroying the ability to trade.
It is sad that major corporations consistently prove unable to understand this.
Stuart Thompson (NYT): The New York Times found three users on X who feuded with Mr. Musk in December only to see their reach on the social platform practically vanish overnight.
…
Mr. Musk has offered several clues to what happened, writing on X amid the feud that if powerful accounts blocked or muted others, their reach would be sharply limited. (Mr. Musk is the most popular user on X with more than 219 million followers, so his actions to block or mute users could hold significant sway.)
At other times It Gets Better, this is Laura Loomer, who explicitly lost her monetization over this and then got it back at the end of the fued:
There’s also a third user listed, Owen Shroyer, who did not recover.
One could say that all three of these are far-right influencers, and this seems unlikely to be a coincidence. It’s still not okay to put one’s thumb on the scale like this, even if it doesn’t carry over to others, but it does change the context and practical implications a lot. He who lives by also dies by, and all that.
As a general rule, even though technically there Aint No Rule it is not okay and a breach of decorum to ‘bring the receipts’ from text conversations even without an explicit privacy agreement. And most importantly, remember that if you do it to them then it’s open season for them to also do it to you.
Matt Taibbi remains very clearly shadowbanned up through April 2025. If you go to his Twitter page and look at the views on each post, they are flattened out the way Substack view counts are, and are largely uncorrelated with other engagement measures, which indicates they are coming from the Following tab and not from the algorithmic feed. No social media algorithm works this way.
A potential counterargument is that Musk feuds rather often, there are a lot of other claims of similar impacts, and NYT only found these three definitive examples. But three times by default should be considered enemy action, and the examples are rather stark.
The question is, in what other ways is Musk messing with the algorithm?
Here’s a post that Elon Musk retweeted, that seems to have gotten far more views than the algorithm could plausibly have given it on its own, even with that retweet.
Geoffrey Hinton: I like OpenAI’s mission of ‘ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity”, and I’d like to stop them from completely gutting it. I’ve signed on to a new letter to @AGRobBonta & @DE_DOJ asking them to halt the restructuring.
AGI is the most important and potentially dangerous technology of our time. OpenAI was right that this technology merits strong structures and incentives to ensure it is developed safely, and is wrong now in attempting to change these structures and incentives. We’re urging the AGs to protect the public and stop this.
.
Hasan Can: I was serious when I said Elon Musk will keep messing with OpenAI as long as he holds power in USA. Geoffrey’s [first] tweet hit a full 31 million views. Getting that level of view with just 6k likes isn’t typically possible; I think Elon himself pushed that post.
Putting together everything that has happened, what should we now make of Elon Musk’s decision to fire 80% of Twitter employees without replacement?
Shin Megami Boson: the notion of a “fake email job” is structurally the same as a belief in communism. the communist looks at a system far more complex than he can understand and decides the parts he doesn’t understand must have no real purpose & are instead due to human moral failing of some kind.
Marko Jukic: Would you have told that to Elon Musk before he fired 80% of the people working at Twitter with no negative effect?
Do you think Twitter is the only institution in our society where 80% of people could be fired? What do you think those people are doing besides shuffling emails?
Alexander Doria: Yes, this. He mostly removed salespeople and marketing teams that were the core commercial activity of old Twitter.
Marko Jukic (who somehow doesn’t follow Gwern): You are completely delusional if you think this and so is Gwern, though I can’t see his reply.
Gwern: Yes, and I would have been right. Twitter revenue and users crashed into the floor, and after years of his benevolent guidance, they weren’t even breakeven before the debt interest – and he just bailed out Twitter using Xai, eating a loss of something like $30b to hide it all.
Alexander Doria: If I remember correctly, main ad campaigns stopped primarily as their usual commercial contact was not there anymore. And Musk strategy on this front was totally unclear and unable to reassure.
Marko Jukic: Right, please ignore the goons celebrating their victory and waving around a list of scalps and future targets. Pay no mind to that. This was all just a simple brain fart, where Elon Musk just *forgothow to accept payments for ads, and advertisers forgot how to make them! Duh!
Quite an explanation. “My single best example of how 80% of employees can be cut is Twitter.” “Twitter was one of the biggest disasters ever.” “Ah yes, well, of course, all those goons and scalps. Naturally it failed. What, are you dense? Anyway, 80% of employees are useless.”
There’s no question Twitter has, on a technical and functional level, held up far better than median expectations, although it sure seems like having more productive employees to work on things like the bot problems and Twitter search being a disaster would have been a great idea. And a lot of what Musk did, for good and bad, was because he said so not because of a lack of personnel – if you put me in charge of Twitter I would be able to improve it a lot even if I wasn’t allowed to add headcount.
There’s also no question that Twitter’s revenue collapsed, and that xAI ultimately more or less bailed it out. One can argue that the advertisers left for reasons other than the failures of the marketing department (as in, failing to have a marketing department) and certainly there were other factors but I find it rather suspicious to think that gutting the marketing department without replacement didn’t hurt the marketing efforts quite a bit. I mean, if your boss is out there alienating all the advertisers whose job do you think it is to convince them to stop that and come back? Yes, it’s possible the old employees were terrible, but then hire new ones.
In some sense wow, in another sense there are no surprises here and all these TikTok documents are really saying is they have a highly addictive product via the TikTok algorithm, and it comes with all the downsides of social media platforms, and they’re not that excited to do much about those downsides.
On the other hand, these quotes are doozers. Some people were very much not following the ‘don’t write down what you don’t want printed in the New York Times.’
Neil ‘O Brien: WOW: @JonHaidt got info from inside TikTok [via Attorney Generals] admitting how they target kids: “The product in itself has baked into it compulsive use… younger users… are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self-regulate effectively”
Jon Haidt and Zack Rausch: We organize the evidence into five clusters of harms:
Addictive, compulsive, and problematic use
Depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and suicide
Porn, violence, and drugs
Sextortion, CSAM, and sexual exploitation
TikTok knows about underage use and takes little action
…
As one internal report put it:
“Compulsive usage correlates with a slew of negative mental health effects like loss of analytical skills, memory formation, contextual thinking, conversational depth, empathy, and increased anxiety,” in addition to “interfer[ing] with essential personal responsibilities like sufficient sleep, work/school responsibilities, and connecting with loved ones.”
Although these harms are known, the company often chooses not to act. For example, one TikTok employee explained,
“[w]hen we make changes, we make sure core metrics aren’t affected.” This is because “[l]eaders don’t buy into problems” with unhealthy and compulsive usage, and work to address it is “not a priority for any other team.”2
…
“The reason kids watch TikTok is because the algo[rithm] is really good. . . . But I think we need to be cognizant of what it might mean for other opportunities. And when I say other opportunities, I literally mean sleep, and eating, and moving around the room, and looking at somebody in the eyes.”
…
“Tiktok is particularly popular with younger users who are particularly sensitive to reinforcement in the form of social reward and have minimal ability to self-regulate effectively.”
…
As Defendants have explained, TikTok’s success “can largely be attributed to strong . . . personalization and automation, which limits user agency” and a “product experience utiliz[ing] many coercive design tactics,” including “numerous features”—like “[i]nfinite scroll, auto-play, constant notifications,” and “the ‘slot machine’ effect”—that “can be considered manipulative.”
Again, nothing there that we didn’t already know.
Similarly, for harm #2, this sounds exactly like various experiments done with YouTube, and also I don’t really know what you were expecting:
In one experiment, Defendants’ employees created test accounts and observed their descent into negative filter bubbles. One employee wrote, “After following several ‘painhub’ and ‘sadnotes’ accounts, it took me 20 mins to drop into ‘negative’ filter bubble. The intensive density of negative content makes me lower down mood and increase my sadness feelings though I am in a high spirit in my recent life.” Another employee observed, “there are a lot of videos mentioning suicide,” including one asking, “If you could kill yourself without hurting anybody would you?”
The evidence on harms #3 and #4 seemed unremarkable and less bad than I expected.
And it is such a government thing to quote things like this, for #5:
TikTok knows this is particularly true for children, admitting internally: (1) “Minors are more curious and prone to ignore warnings” and (2) “Without meaningful age verification methods, minors would typically just lie about their age.”
…
To start, TikTok has no real age verification system for users. Until 2019, Defendants did not even ask TikTok users for their age when they registered for accounts. When asked why they did not do so, despite the obvious fact that “a lot of the users, especially top users, are under 13,” founder Zhu explained that, “those kids will anyway say they are over 13.”
…
Over the years, other of Defendants’ employees have voiced their frustration that “we don’t want to [make changes] to the For You feed because it’s going to decrease engagement,” even if “it could actually help people with screen time management.”
The post ends with a reminder of the study where students on average would ask $59 for TikTok and $47 for Instagram in exchange for deleting their accounts, but less than zero if everyone did it at once.
Once again, let’s run this experiment. Offer $100 to every student at some college or high school, in exchange for deleting their accounts. See what happens.
Tyler Cowen links to another study on suspending social media use, which was done in 2020 and came out in April 2025 – seriously, academia, that’s an eternity, we gotta do something about this, just tweet the results out or something. In any case, what they found was that if users were convinced to deactivate Facebook for six weeks before the election, they report an 0.06 standard deviation improvement in happiness, depression and anxiety, and it was 0.041 SDs for Instagram.
Obviously that is a small enough effect to mostly ignore. But once again, we are not comparing to the ‘control condition’ of no social media. We are comparing to the control condition of everyone else being on social media without you, and you previously having invested in social media and now abandoning it, while expecting to come back and being worried about what you aren’t seeing, and also being free to transfer to other platforms.
Again, note the above study – you’d have to pay people to get off TikTok and Instagram, but if you could get everyone else off as well, they’d pay you.
Tyler Cowen: What is wrong with the simple model that Facebook and Instagram allow you to achieve some very practical objectives, such as staying in touch with friends or expressing your opinions, at the cost of only a very modest annoyance (which to be clear existed in earlier modes of communication as well)?
What is wrong with this model is that using Facebook and Instagram also imposes costs on others for not using them, which is leading to a bad equilibrium for many. And also that these are predatory systems engineered to addict users, so contra Zuckerberg’s arguments to Thompson and Patel in recent interviews we should not assume that the users ‘know best’ and are using internet services only when they are better off for it.
Tom Meadowcroft: I regard social media as similar to alcohol. 1. It is not something that we’ve evolved to deal with in quantity. 2. It is mildly harmful for most people. 3. It is deeply harmful for a significant minority for whom it is addictive. 4. Many people enjoy it because it seems to ease social engagement. 5. It triggers receptors in our brains that make us desire it. 6. There are better ways to get those pleasure spikes, but they are harder and rarer IRL. 7. If we were all better people, we wouldn’t need or desire either, but we are who we are.
I use alcohol regularly and social media rarely.
I think social media has a stronger case than alcohol. It does provide real and important benefits when used wisely in a way that you can’t easily substitute for otherwise, whereas I’m not convinced alcohol does this. However, our current versions of social media are not great for most people.
So if the sign of impact for temporary deactivation is positive at all, that’s a sign that things are rather not good, although magnitude remains hard to measure. I would agree that (unlike in the case of likely future highly capable AIs) we do not ‘see a compelling case for apocalyptic interpretations’ as Tyler puts it, but that shouldn’t be the bar for realizing you have a problem and doing something about it.
Court rules against Apple, says it wilfully defied the court’s previous injunction and has to stop charging commissions on purchases outside its software marketplace and open up the App Store to third-party payment options.
Stripe charges 2.9% versus Apple’s 15%-30%. Apple will doubtless keep fighting every way it can, but the end of the line is now likely to come at some point.
Market reaction was remarkably muted, on the order of a few percent, to what is a central threat to Apple’s entire business model, unless you think this was already mostly priced in or gets reversed often on appeal.
Recent court documents seem to confirm the claim that Google actively wanted their search results to be worse so they could serve more ads? This is so obviously insane a thing to do. Yes, short term it might benefit you if it happens you can get away with it, but come on.
A funny thing that happens these days is running into holiday episodes from an old TV show, rather than suddenly having all the Halloween, Thanksgiving or Christmas episodes happening at the right times. There’s no good fix for this given continuity issues, but maybe AI could fix that soon?
Gallabytes’s stroll down memory lane there reminds me that the actual biggest changes in TV programs are that you previously had to go with whatever happened to be on or that you’d taped – which was a huge pain and disaster and people structured their day around it, this was a huge deal – and that even ignoring that the old shows really did suck. Man, with notably rare exceptions they sucked, on every level, until at least the late 90s. You can defend old movies but you cannot in good faith defend most older television.
Fun fact:
Samuel Hammond: Over half the NYT’s subscriber time on site is now just for the games.
That’s about half a billion in subscriber revenue driven by a crossword and a handful of basic puzzle games.
It is a stunning fact, but I don’t think that’s quite what this means. Time spent on site is very different from value extracted. The ability to read news when it matters is a ton more valuable per minute than the games, even if you spend more time on the games. It’s not obvious what is driving subscriptions.
Further praise for Thunderbolts*, which I rated 4.5/5 stars and for now is my top movie of 2025 (although that probably won’t hold, in 2024 it would have been ~4th), from the perspective of someone treating it purely as a Marvel movie in a fallen era.
Zac Hill: Okay Thunderbolts is in the Paddington 2 tier of “movies that have no business being nearly as good as they somehow are”. Like this feels like the first definitive take on whatever weird era we find ourselves inhabiting now. Also the first great Marvel film in years.
What more is there to want: overt grappling with oblivion-inducing despair stemming from how to construct meaning in a world devoid of load-bearing institutions? Violent Night references? Selina Meyer? Florence Pugh having tons of fun???
Okay I can’t/wont shut up about this movie (Thunderbolts). For every reason New Cap America sucked and was both bad and forgettable, this movie was great – in a way that precisely mirrors the turning of the previous era into this strange new world in which we’re swimming.
Even the credits sequence is just like the graveyarding of every institution whose legitimacy has been hemorrhaged, executed with a subtlety and craftsmanship that is invigorating. But WITHOUT accepting, and giving into, cynicism!
Indeed, it is hard for words to describe the amount of joy I got from the credits sequence, that announced very clearly We Hear You, We Get It, and We Are So Back.
Gwern offers a guide to finding good podcast content, as opposed to the podcast that will get the most clicks. You either need to find Alpha from undiscovered voices, or Beta from getting a known voice ‘out of their book’ and producing new content rather than repeating talking points and canned statements. As a host you want to seek out guests where you can extract either Alpha or Beta, and and as listener or reader look for podcasts where you can do the same.
Alpha is relative to your previous discoveries. As NBC used to say, if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you. If you haven’t ever heard (Gwern’s example) Mark Zuckerberg talk, his Lex Fridman interview will have Alpha to you despite Lex’s ‘sit back, lob softballs and let them talk’ strategy which lacks Beta.
Another way of putting that is, you only need to hear about any given person’s book (whether or not it involves a literal book, which it often does) once every cycle of talking points. You can get that one time from basically any podcast, and it’s fine. But you then wouldn’t want to do that again.
Gwern lists Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella as tough nuts to crack, and indeed the interviews Dwarkesh did with them showed this, with Nadella being especially ‘well-coached,’ and someone too PR-savvy like MrBeast as a bad guest who won’t let you do anything interesting and might torpedo the whole thing.
My pick for toughest nut to crack is Tyler Cowen. No one has a larger, more expansive book, and most people interviewing him never seem to get him to start thinking. Plus, because he’s Tyler Cowen, he’s the one person Tyler Cowen won’t do the research for.
There are of course also other reasons to listen to or host podcasts.
Surge pricing comes to Waymo. You can no longer raise supply, but you can still ration supply and limit demand, so it is still the correct move. But how will people react? There is a lot of pearl clutching about how this hurts the poor or ‘creates losers,’ but may I suggest that if you can’t take the new prices you can call an Uber or Lyft without them being integrated into the same app? Or you can wait.
Waymo’s injury rate reductions imply that fully self-driving cars would reduce road deaths by 34,800 annually. It’s probably more than that, because most of the remaining crashes by Waymos are caused by human drivers.
They’re remaking the Legend of Heroes games, a classic Japanese RPG series a la Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, starting with Trials In The Sky in September. Oh to have this kind of time.
Proposal for a grand collaboration to prove you cannot beat Super Mario Bros. in less than 17685 frames, the best human time remains 17703. This would be an example of proving things about real world systems, and we’ve already put a ton of effort into optimizing this. Peter is about 50% that there is indeed no way to do better than 17685.
If you know, you know:
Emmett Shear: This is pure genius and would be incredible for teaching about a certain kind of danger. Please please someone do this.
RedJ: i think sama is working on it?
Emmett Shear: LOL wrong game I don’t want them in the game of life.
College sports are allocating talent efficiently. You didn’t come here to play school.
“Among the top eight quarterbacks in the Class of 2023, Texas’ Arch Manning is now the only one who hasn’t transferred from the school he signed with out of high school.” –@TheAthletic
I do think it is terrible. Every trade and every transfer makes sports more confusing and less enjoyable. The stories are worse. It harder to root for players and teams. It makes it harder to work as a team or to invest in the future of players, both as athletes and as students. And it enshrines the top teams to always be the top teams. In the long run, I find it deeply corrosive.
I find it confusing that there is this much transferring going on. There are large costs to transferring for the player. You have an established campus life and friends. You have connections to the team and the coach and have established goodwill. There are increasing returns to staying in one place. So you would think that there would be strong incentives to stay put and work out a deal that benefits everyone.
The flip side is that there are a lot of teams out there, so the one you sign with is unlikely to be the best fit going forward, especially if you outperform expectations, which changes your value and also your priorities and needs.
I love college football, but they absolutely need to get the transferring under control. It’s gone way too far. My guess is the best way forward is to allow true professional contracts with teams that replace the current NIL system, which would allow for win-win deals that involve commitment or at least backloading compensation, and various other incentives to limit transfers.
I am not saying the NBA fixes the draft lottery, but… no wait I am saying the NBA fixes the draft lottery, given Dallas getting the first pick this year combined with previous incidents. I don’t know this for certain, but at this point, come on.
As Seth Burn puts it, there are ways to get provably random outcomes. The NBA keeps not using those methods. This keeps resulting in outcomes that are unlikely and suspiciously look like fixes. Three times is enemy action. This is more than three.
On the other hand, I do like that tanking for the first pick is being actively punished, even if it’s being done via blatant cheating. At some point everyone knows the league is choosing the outcome, so it isn’t cheating, and I’m kind of fine with ‘if we think you tanked without our permission you don’t get the first pick.’
In Monthly Roundup #28 I made clear I intend to leave the Trump administration out of my monthly roundups, for both better and worse, outside of my focus areas. Again, this does not mean I don’t have a lot to say or that those questions don’t matter. It means you should not rely on me as your only source of news and I pick my battles.
I am going to stick to my guns. Trade and trading very much inside my focus areas, but for economics roundups, and in extreme cases AI roundups. Besides, you don’t need me to tell you that tariffs not only impose immense economic costs but also fail to achieve their primary policy aims and foster political dysfunction along the way. That question should already be answered by my t-shift. I do have a word about things related to a potential expansion (I can’t believe I’m typing this!) of the Jones Act. And I’ll deal with certain crime-related things when I do my first crime roundup.
23andMe is going into bankruptcy. It would seem a wise precaution to download and then delete your data if it’s there, which takes a few days to do, in case the data falls into the wrong hands or is lost forever.
A claim that banning smoking in bars increases alcohol consumption by ~5% without decreasing smoking. I presume the increased alcohol consumption is because the bar became a much better experience without all the smoking? It seems bizarre that this wouldn’t decrease smoking, especially over the long term.
Beware communities that encourage irresponsible risk taking and dismiss those who do not endanger themselves. It can be good if targeted well: There are places, like founding startups and putting yourself out there for romance, where people take far too little risk and it is often good to encourage people to take more. But this very much doesn’t apply to, for example, talk about financial investments.
I even hear people complaining about ‘the algorithm’ without doing the obvious and switching to chronological feeds and lists. That’s on you.
As far as I know this is the size-adjusted record, yes, and well earned.
Kelsey Piper suggests Twitter’s conversational meta favors long tweets because they attract thoughtful people, plus you get the bonus of QTs saying tldr. That hasn’t been my experience, but I also try to have those conversations elsewhere.
A great question, why is there such huge variance in self-checkout system quality? We have essentially solved self-checkout technology yet half of stores have multiple employees whose job is to fix errors because their terrible software doesn’t work. So yeah, diffusion can be hard.
Ryan Peterson: While everyone in business is busy losing their minds about tariffs, @zipline just quietly launched a logistics revolution in Dallas, TX. You can now get anything at a Walmart delivered to your front door by drone, with a flight time under 2 minutes for most orders.
@DanielLurie We gotta legalize drone delivery in San Francisco.
If you live in Dallas download the app here and starting buying stuff from Walmart before the prices go up!
The full agenda he spells out as the baseline minimum seems like an obviously massive overkill level of security for almost anyone. What is Andrej’s hourly rate? Some of this is worthwhile, but as Patrick McKenzie reminds us, the optimal rate of fraud is not zero.
Alice Maz: the good part of the signal leak is it implies a bunch of people with ts/sci access don’t know anything we don’t that would make them distrust signal.
My current model is that Signal is the best low-effort secure communication method, but not on its own good enough that you should assume that using Signal on a normal phone is an actually secure communication method against someone who cares.
Signulll: one of the most common mistakes in product thinking is the belief that you can reintroduce artificial scarcity to improve something that has already been made abundant—especially by the internet (& the internet makes almost everything feel abundant). after people have experienced the infinite, you can’t shove them into a box & expect them to enjoy it. the brain doesn’t forget oxygen.
this shows up in products that add fake constraints: one post a day, one profile at a time, one action per hour. the assumption is that limiting access will restore value or mystery. it doesn’t. once the user has tasted abundance, constraint doesn’t feel elegant or intentional—it feels broken. worse, it feels patronizing.
artificial scarcity almost never works unless it’s intrinsic to the product. you either have to make abundance feel valuable (curated, contextual, high signal), or find a new mechanic entirely. nostalgia for constraint is not strategy. it’s just denial of the current physics of the medium.
this is an extension to this. i see this type of thinking all the time, particularly when people who are frustrated at the current dynamics of any given network (e.g. a dating app etc.)
Nogard: Agree and great point. Modern dating apps unleashed an irrational level of abundance and optionality—so much that it bled into the physical world, warping its constraints. You can’t trick anyone with artificial scarcity; they’ve already tasted the forbidden fruit. It’s like trying to enjoy tap water after a decade of chugging Monster Energy.
Games, especially free mobile games, are chocked full of artificial scarcity. For the most successful games, everything is limited or on a timer. People find this highly addictive. They eat it up. And often they also pay quite a lot to get around those restrictions, that’s often the entire business model. So there’s a big existence proof.
What games try to do is justify the artificial scarcity. When this is done well it works great. So the question now becomes, can you make the artificial scarcity fun and interesting? Can you make it addictive, even? A maximization problem of sorts? Or tie it into your ‘game mechanics’?
I think you absolutely can do all that in many cases, including in dating apps.
First of all, limited actions really do restore value to that action. The frictions and value this introduces can do many useful things. The ideal friction in many cases is money, the amounts can be quite small and refundable and still work. But in cases where you cannot use money, and there are many good reasons to not want to do that, using an artificially scarce currency seems great?
If I was dating, I would rather be on a dating app where I can only match once a day and those I match with know this, than one in which I don’t have that restriction.
Kelsey Piper discusses the administrative nightmare that is trying to use your home to do essentially anything in America. There is no reason for this. If people could easily run microschools and tea shops out of their homes America would be a much better place.
Claim that TSA employees are actively happy about the attacks on their union, because the union was preventing the purging of bad actors. I wouldn’t have predicted this, but it shouldn’t be discounted as a possibility. Many comments confirmed that this has recently improved the TSA experience quite a bit. Yes, we shouldn’t need the service they provide, but we’ve decided that we do so better to do a decent job of it.
Jesse Singal: hopefully just the start of RFK Jr making good proposals for hilarious reasons
“We should promote whole grains, because the Illuminati has a stranglehold on processed carbs”
“Everyone should get 30 mins of exercise a day to stay a few steps ahead of your own shadow-daemon”
A word of warning, in case you think the tariffs were not great, that we might be about to not only not repeal the Jones Act but to do things that are vastly worse:
Ryan Peterson: On April 17th the U.S. Trade Representative’s office is expected to impose fees of up to $1.5M per port call for ships made in China and for $500k to $1M if the ocean carrier owns a single ship made in China or even has one on order from a Chinese shipyard.
Ocean carriers have announced that to reduce the fees they will skip the smaller ports like Seattle, Oakland, Boston, Mobile, Baltimore, New Orleans, etc. Some carriers have said they’ll just move the capacity serving the U.S. to other trade lanes altogether.
This would be horrible for jobs in and around those ports, and really bad for companies, both importers and exporters, using those ports. Huge extra costs will be incurred as trucks and trains run hundreds of extra miles to the main ports on each cost.
Similarly the major ports (LA, Long Beach, Houston, and New York) will be unable to keep up with the flood of extra volumes and are likely to become congested, similar to what we saw during Covid.
The craziest part of the original proposal is a requirement that within 7 years 15% of U.S. exports must travel on a ship that’s made in America and crewed by Americans.
There are only 23 of American made and crewed container ships in the world today, and they all service domestic ocean freight (Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, etc). They’re all tiny compared to today’s mega ships, and they’re not even sailing to overseas ports.
The U.S. did not produce any container ships in 2024. And the number we produce in any given year rounds to zero. The reason is that American made container ships of 3,000 TEUs cost the same price as the modern container ships from China of 24,000 TEUs.
Colin Grabow: The last time a US shipyard built Suezmax tankers (2004-2006) the price was $210 million each. Now we’re apparently at $500 million with a 6x delta versus the foreign price.
The Jones Act is caught in a vicious circle. Costs spiral, leading to lowered demand for new ships, which drives costs even higher. There’s very little appetite for ships at these prices. The law is self-destructing.
The full proposal to require US ships would drastically reduce American exports (and even more drastically reduce American imports). As in, we’d have to go without most of them, for many years. There’s no way to quickly ramp up our shipyards sufficiently for this task, even if price was not a factor. The port of call fees are a profoundly terrible idea, but the ship origin requirements are riot-in-the-streets-level terrible.
The rhetoric is largely about Chinese-built vessels being terrible or a security risk. Even if one buys that, what one could do, both here and for the original Jones Act, is simply to restrict the specific thing you don’t like: Chinese-built, Chinese-flagged or Chinese-owned ships. Or even require the ships come from our allies. It wouldn’t be a free action, but we could substitute into Japanese, South Korean or European ships. Whereas if you demand American ships? They don’t exist. And having 100 years of such restrictions domestically has only ensured that.
I’ve written before that this might happen when protection creates a domestic monopoly, but I’m not so convinced by my own explanation.
The answer is that when you create a domestic monopoly or oligopoly without export discipline, you allow domestic industry to not compete on the international market, and instead they find it more profitable to service only the domestic protected market. We can’t compete on the international market even if we want to, because others offer large subsidizes and are already more efficient in various ways, so no one wants our ships and we can’t use that to improve or scale.
Unfortunately, the domestic market is not large enough to generate robust competition that creates reasonably priced ships, which decreases demand and causes shipbuilders to get less competitive still, pushing prices even higher, until the point where domestic ships are so expensive that more than a handful of Jones Act ships aren’t profitable. So at the end of the death spiral, we don’t make them anymore.
If you decide we need a domestic shipbuilding industry, there is a known playbook in these spots, which is to offer large subsidies and also enforce export discipline, as for example South Korea did during its development. No one seems to want to do that.
A discussion about many things, but the later more interesting part is about dealing with cognitive decline. In particular, a sadly common pattern is that you have someone who used to be unusually intelligent and capable. Then, for a variety of reasons including getting older and a toxic information and reward environment, and because having to ‘act dumb’ in various ways actually makes you dumb over time, and often probably drug use, they lose a step, and then they lose another step.
Now they are still well above average for intelligence and capability, but their self-image and habits and strategies are designed for their old selves. So they take on too much, in the wrong ways, and lose the thread.
Megan McArdle reminds us that Levels of Friction are required elements of many of civilization’s core systems, and without sufficient frictions, those systems break.
Dilan Esper: i think people don’t realize the extent to which easier and cheaper travel, the Internet, and fake asylum applications have wrecked the international asylum system carefully built after the Holocaust. Poland is a particularly sobering indicator of this.
Megan McArdle: We underestimate how many policies are only feasible because various frictions prevent abuse. When the frictions are lubricated, the policies collapse.
Alex Tabarrok asks, if we were confident Covid-19 was a lab leak, what then? His first conclusion is we should expect more pandemics going forward. That’s not obvious to me, because it means less natural pandemics and higher risk of lab-originated pandemics. It is within our power to prevent lab-originated pandemics but not natural pandemics, and indeed Alex’s core suggestions are about ensuring that we at least do our research under sufficiently safe conditions – I’d prefer that we not do it at all. Note that Alex would be right about expectations if we already had confidence in the rate of natural pandemics, but I think we largely don’t know and it may be changing.
The kind of study one instinctively assumes won’t replicate says that those who believe in the malleability specifically of beauty will therefore take more risk, as in if you give people articles showing this then they’ll take more risk, but malleability of intelligence doesn’t have the same impact. The theory is that this is mediated through optimism?
Matt Lakeman asks, quite literally from a real example: How Much Would You Need to be Paid to Live on a Deserted Island for 1.5 Years and Do Nothing but Kill Seals? Plus another year in transit to boot. He estimated $2-4 million, and the real workers were clearly paid far less. But that’s the thing about such jobs – you don’t have to pay anything like what the median person would need to take the job. Someone will do it for a lot less than that, and I’m guessing the median young person would come in well under $2 million already.
Paul Graham: If Princeton students think the “vibe shift” is real, it is, because if it has reached them, it has reached pretty much everyone.
I don’t buy that this means it has reached everyone. The Ivies and Twitter are both places where the future is more highly distributed, that respond more to vibe shifts. It would make perfect sense for such places to feel a vibe shift, while students at (let’s say) Ohio State or other residents of Columbus felt relatively little change.
Are Monte Carlo algorithms hacks to be avoided? They are hacks, and randomization is dangerous, this is true. But sometimes, they’re the only way to get an estimate given the amount of complexity. There is also an underused variation, which I call the Probability Map. This is where you can simplify the set of relevant considerations sufficiently that you can track the probability of every possible intermediate state. To work this usually requires not caring about path dependence, but this simplification is more accurate more often than you would think.
A Time to Keep: “Make bedrooms small, and shared spaces big.” – CA
If you want a family to be together, don’t isolate them in giant bedrooms. Draw them toward the hearth, the table, the common room.
I keep my bedroom large, but that is because I work and exercise there. The isolation effect is intentional in those spots. In general, you want the bedroom to be the minimum size to accomplish its specific goals, and to spend the rest of your space on the common areas.
We definitely need a word for this. Claude suggested ‘attention saturation’ or ‘bid overflow’ but they’re two words and also not quite right.
Nick Cammarata: I’m surprised we don’t have a word for the shift when the bids for your time goes above your supply for time vs before, it feels like a pretty fundamental life shift where it changes your default mode of operation.
like if you get 200 bids for your time a week vs 2 the set of things you need to do to thrive are pretty different, different risks and ways to play your hand, need to defend energy in new ways
it ofc depends on your psychology too, you might be built to handle X amount of bids per week, it’s less about the absolute amount of bids and more the ratio of bids to what you can easily handle.
I’ve gone through this a number of times. I have a system where I determine how to allocate time, and how to respond to bids for time, both from people and from things. Then suddenly you realize your system doesn’t work, quickly, there’s no time. There needs to be a substantial shift and a lot of things get reconsidered.
I kind of want to call this a ‘repricing,’ or for full a Time Repricing Event? As with other things, you have menu costs, so you only want to reprice in general when things are sufficiently out of whack.
My experience matches Kelsey Piper’s here.
Kelsey Piper: every single time I have witnessed people decide to compromise on character and overlook major red flags because ‘hey, he’s good at winning’, they have regretted it very dearly and in very short order
cutting corners, lying, and cheating will get you ahead in the short run, and sometimes even in the long run, but tying your own fortunes to someone who behaves this way will go very badly for you.
if you sell your soul to the devil you’ll pay more than you intended to, and buy less.
Pursuing all-in soulless strategies can ‘work,’ although of course what does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and all that. The person doing the lying and cheating will sometimes win out, in terms of ‘success.’ If you are also centrally in the lying and cheating business, it can sometimes work out for you too, in those same terms.
However. If you are not that, and you hitch your wagon to someone who is that in order to ‘win’? Disaster, almost without exception. It won’t work, not on any level.
I know that sounds like the kind of thing we all want to be true when it isn’t. So yes, you are right to be suspicious of such claims. The thing is, I think it really is true.
Paul Graham’s latest essay is What To Do. His answer, in addition to ‘help people’ and ‘take care of the world’ is ‘make good new things.’ Agreed.
Paul Graham: So there’s my guess at a set of principles to live by: take care of people and the world, and make good new things. Different people will do these to varying degrees. There will presumably be lots who focus entirely on taking care of people. There will be a few who focus mostly on making new things.
But even if you’re one of those, you should at least make sure that the new things you make don’t net harm people or the world. And if you go a step further and try to make things that help them, you may find you’re ahead on the trade. You’ll be more constrained in what you can make, but you’ll make it with more energy.
On the other hand, if you make something amazing, you’ll often be helping people or the world even if you didn’t mean to. Newton was driven by curiosity and ambition, not by any practical effect his work might have, and yet the practical effect of his work has been enormous. And this seems the rule rather than the exception. So if you think you can make something amazing, you should probably just go ahead and do it.
I’m not even sure it’s on you to make sure that you don’t do net harm. I’ll settle for ensuring you’re not going catastrophic harm, or at minimum that you’re not creating existential risks, say by creating things smarter and more capable than humans without knowing how to retain control over the resulting future. Oh, right, that.
Dean Ball writes about his intellectual background and process. It’s a completely different process from mine, focusing on absorbing lots of background knowledge and understanding intellectual figures through reading, especially books. It reminded me of Tyler Cowen’s approach. One thing we all have in common is we intentionally play to our strengths. If I tried to do what they do, it wouldn’t work.
Alessandro: I believed the quote in Caplan’s tweet [that rich kids mostly succeed because of genetics], and then I ended up ~doubling my lifetime expected earnings because of a lucky personal connection.
It would be unBayesian of me not to update my prior!
Properly optimizing for the actions that maximize chances of making the most valuable connections is difficult, but highly valuable. Blogging definitely helps.
Federal complaint alleges that construction equipment rental firms have engaged for 15 years in a widespread cartel to limit capacity and drive up construction costs. I file this under Good News because we know how expensive it is to build and this could mean there is an easy way to make that number go down.
Patrick Collison: In which domains are elite practitioners celebrating the kids being better than ever before? Would love to read about a few instances. (Not just where there’s one particular genius, such as Ashwin Sah’s recent success, but where “the kids” as some kind of aggregate appear to be improving.)
The first category, which had a lot of responses, was that ‘the kids’ are better in particular bounded domains with largely fixed rules. My model agrees with this. If it’s a bounded domain with clear rules where one can be better by following standard practices and working harder, the kids are alright, and better than ever.
Tyler Cowen: The kids are clearly better in chess.
Ulkar: definitely in classical music. the sheer number of outstanding young musicians is probably higher than ever before in history
Patrick McKenzie: Japanese language acquisition for non-heritage speakers. (I non-ironically think it’s primarily YouTube’s doing.)
Eric Gilliam: In American wrestling, high schoolers are getting *waybetter. This year at Olympic trials, a few ~16-year-olds took out some NCAA champs. And those guys still lose some hs matches! Guesses why include more kids getting elite coaching early and internet instructionals.
The second category was founders, and Dwarkesh Patel said ‘big picture thinkers.’ Paul Graham was the most obvious one to say it but there were also others.
Paul Graham: Young startup founders seem better than ever, though I realize this is a bold claim to make to you.
Patrick Collison: Who’s the best founder under 28? I’m deliberately choosing an arbitrary age to exclude Alex Wang, who is extremely impressive, but I feel like years past usually had a super young (<28) clear industry leader. (Zuckerberg, Dell, Jobs, Gates, Andreessen, etc.)
My hypothesis there is that we have systematized VC-backed YC-style founders. The rules are a lot easier to discover and follow, the track record there makes it a career path one can essentially plan on in a way that it wasn’t before, and the people who gate progress with money are there to reward those who internalize and follow those principles.
This makes Dwarkesh the only one I saw whose answer didn’t fit into the model that ‘kids these days’ are excellent at rule learning and following and working hard on that basis, but this has left little room for much else. I don’t know how this would lead to there being more or better big picture thinkers. Also I’m not at all convinced Dwarkesh is right about this, I suspect it’s that the current crop is easy for him to pick up upon and we forget about many from older crops.
it is okay, though usually not ideal, to not enjoy things
There are some things i will look down on someone for enjoying but most of the time i do that i think it’s a failing in my part.
Anna Magpie: Counterpoint: Enjoying things that are bad for you often results in them displacing things that are good for you but slightly less enjoyable (for example I am currently on Twitter instead of reading a novel)
Aprii: in an ideal world this is solved by enjoying novels more.
The cases where you want to not like things is where liking them would cause you to make bad choices, which are more expensive than the value you would get, and you are unable to adjust for this effect because of bias or because it gives you a bad world model.
The canonical example of the first case is heroin. The common pattern, which also applies to novels versus Twitter, tends to be hyperbolic discounting. You want to like things that have long term benefits relatively more, and this often rises to the point where it would be better to like other things less. Another risk is that you end up doing too little exploring and too much exploiting.
The second case is where the value is in choosing, so liking everything can muddle your ability to choose. It doesn’t have to, if you can differentiate between what you like and what you predict others will like. But that can be tricky.
I find it mind boggling to think such ads are efficient. They are beyond obnoxious, and there are many customers who would act similarly to Leah:
Leah Libresco Sargeant: I have kids and a @Roku TV
If they autoplay video ads on boot up, we will absolutely ditch it and find a new tv. I’m not using any device or service with the potential to autoplay violent tv or movie ads the second you hit the power button.
Even without that concern, such obnoxiousness in your face is unacceptable. My current LG TVs do have some ads on the home screen, but they’re always silent, they never stop you from navigation, and even then I hate them so much. If they forced me to interact with the ad in order to proceed? Yep, TV straight in the trash, or down to goodwill. If the ads are so bad people don’t want your TV for $0, how much are the ads worth to you, exacctly?
We also need to have a word about certain highly obnoxious autoplay and ad settings inside TV apps. As in, every time I go to Paramount+, I am careful to actively mute the television first, or I know I am going to regret it. Then you have to be sure to skip other ads. Why would you make opening your own app this stressful? Yet this seems to be how much I will endure to keep watching Taylor Tomlinson.
And then there’s Prime Video, which will have multi-minute blocks of unskippable obnoxiousness during movies, and doesn’t even use caution with who gets to do that:
Sarah Constantin: I’ve been unpleasantly surprised to see the ads on @PrimeVideo include what I’d normally think of as “vice” or “trashy” products.
Sketchy weight loss supplements, shady-looking finance apps marketed in a gambling-esque “surprise free money” way, etc.
I would have assumed that somebody buying ads on what is now the equivalent of a major television network would have a certain amount of “taste” such that they wouldn’t be willing to advertise exploitative products to a super-broad audience.
Differing opinions about Severance. I am on the side of masterpiece, I think Blow’s objection here is wrong and expect it to stick the landing and be my 8th Tier 1 show.
I’ve also been watching The White Lotus for the first time, which is also excellent and I expect to put it in Tier 2.
I still have a few Beli invites if anyone wants one. Beli lets you rank restaurants via Elo, tracks your preferences and gives you predictive ratings. I am a little worried they still haven’t integrated Beli with web or any good export mechanism so I can’t easily feed everything into an LLM or save it elsewhere, but I’ve found it to be useful for research and search and also for note taking.
Looks Mapping, a service that tells you how hot the people reviewing a restaurant on Google Maps tend to be. There was not an obvious correlation here with which restaurants are worth going to.
Waymo gets green light to start “mapping” San Francisco airport in hopes of ultimately using its driverless cars to pick up and drop off passengers at SFO. Mapping process will train fleet where to go and will be done with human safety drivers behind the wheel.
After mapping, cars will then need to go on test drives at SFO without a driver. An official decision on ultimately granting SFO access to Waymo’s driverless cars still hasn’t been made.
This mapping process could take weeks or even months and allows for two cars to be at the airport at a time. No passengers can be inside — just the safety driver. If Waymo gets approved to pick up & drop off passengers, there’s still no timeline on when that could begin.
Paula: as someone who either walks or takes a waymo, these announcements are like when you unlock a new area in an open-world game.
Waymo: We’re pleased to share that the CA DMV gave Waymo approval to operate fully autonomously in expanded South Bay areas, including almost all of San Jose!
While the public won’t have access at this time, we’re working closely with local officials, emergency responders, and communities to safely expand driving operations.
I say this utterly seriously: Whoever runs for mayor on the ‘bring Waymo to NYC whatever it takes’ platform gets my vote, even if it’s Andrew Cuomo, I don’t care. Single issue voter.
Timothy Lee: I hope they lower the minimum age over time. There’s no reason a 12 year old shouldn’t be able to ride in a Waymo alone.
Parents (especially of girls) might feel more comfortable if there is no driver. Also in the long run Waymos will hopefully be much cheaper than a conventional taxi.
I suppose you need some age requirement but I also presume it should be, like, 6.
As he periodically does, Timothy Lee also checks Waymo’s few crashes. There were 38 between July 2024 and February 2025. Not only are Waymos crashing and injuring people far less often than human drivers, with about 90 percent fewer insurance claims, when there is an incident it is almost always unambiguously a human driver’s fault. The question even more than before is not whether to allow Waymos everywhere all the time, it is whether humans should be driving at all.
Timothy Lee: A large majority of serious Waymo crashes are “Waymo scrupulously following the law, lunatic human driver breaks the law and crashes into the Waymo.”
Waymo still has one big problem. It obeys traffic laws and drives ‘too safely,’ which means that the drive that takes 41 minutes in an Uber or Lyft can take 57 in a Waymo. This example might also be geofencing, but the problem is real. There probably isn’t anything we can do about it while we are holding self-driving cars to insanely higher safety standards than human drivers.
In the social media age, the red card rule applies to attention, if you’re innovative everything works the first time. Thus, we have tech workers leaving notes in Waymos, looking to hire software engineers or find hot dates. That’s a great idea, but the reason it scaled was social media, and that presumably won’t work again, not unless your notes are increasingly bespoke. If I was Waymo, my policy would be to allow this and even have a protocol, but restrict it to handwritten notes.
Famed King of Kong (which is a great movie) villain and by all accounts notorious video game cheater Billy Mitchell won a defamation lawsuit against YouTuber Karl Jobst in Australia. It turns out that if you incorporate a specific false claim into an attack narrative and general crusade, you can get sued for it even if you did begrudgingly take that particular fact back at some point.
In a Magic match, is it okay to not kill your opponent in order to take time off the clock, if you’re sure it would work and there’s no in-game advantage to waiting?
Discussions ensue. I see a big difference between being illegal versus unethical. As I understand the rules, this is technically legal.
The argument for it being fine is that you are never forced to play your cards, and they are welcome to concede at any time, although they have no way of knowing that they can safely concede.
But you are making a play, that is otherwise to your disadvantage, in order to bleed the clock. I think that’s basically never okay. And when I see people broadly thinking it is okay, it makes me much less interested in playing. It’s a miserable experience.
After reflection and debate, my position is that:
It is always honorable to make a play to make the game finish faster.
You are under no obligation to sacrifice even a tiny amount of win percentage in the game or match to make the game finish faster, if you don’t want to do that.
You are dishonorable scum if you play in order to make the game finish slower, in a way you would not behave if this was a fully untimed round.
That is different from what is punishable cheating. Which is fine.
Also making me much less interested is the lack of a banned list. As I understand it, cheating is rather rampant, as you would expect without a banned list.
Will Manidis: the yankees hired a single smart guy to think about baseball bats for a year and he fundamentally changed the game forever
the efficient market hypothesis is an total lie. the most important problems in the world go unsolved because no one spends the time to think about them
“I’m sure someone has thought about this before and found out it’s impossible”
no they haven’t, no one has spent the time. most “hard work” is spent on stamp collecting, neat little procedural iterations on things that we already know are possible. just spend the time thinking
Chinese TikTok claims to spill the tea on a bunch of ‘luxury’ brands producing their products in China, then slapping ‘Made in Italy’ style tags on them. I mean, everyone who is surprised raise your hand, that’s what I thought, but also why would the Chinese want to be talking about it if it was true? I get it feels good in the moment but you want brands to be able to count on your discretion.
Lindsay Eagar (this was #12): I brought my four-year-old to meet my boyfriend at the aquarium. She said, “I love you and want you to be my dad.”
I nearly died, but he said, “How about I pretend to be your dad for today?” and then they held hands the whole day.
We got married, he adopted her, he’s her dad.
Visakan Veerasamy: great example of someone receiving a large ask and appropriately right-sizing it into something smaller (and eventually delivering on the large ask too, but that one day was perfect even and especially if he couldn’t follow through for whatever reason)
simply existing as a person like this is a public service to everyone around you. people learn to get better at asking for help + helping others when everyone can correct/transmute/scale requests appropriately. this then allows the rate-of-help to increase, which is wealth
if you look up any unusually successful scene, IME you’ll always find some behind-the-scene manager who was the de-facto mayor who’s like this, that everyone goes to for counsel, to resolve disputes, etc. people like this keep scenes and communities together longer than normal
More Perfect Union: DoorDash and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments or deferred options aligned with payday schedules.
Axial Wanderer: We are selling pad thai in installments to willing buyers at the current fair market price
OldWorld Marc: But John, if we do that, no one will ever finance his kung pao chicken through us ever again!!
Maselaw: They can slow you down. But they can’t stop you. It’s your burrito to sell.
0xtopfloor: “Here’s Margot Robbie in a bubble bath to explain”
I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups – I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas. That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’ and not ‘there are not things worth mentioning.’
I also had forgotten this was originally from Napoleon rather than Bill Watterson.
Dylan O’Sullivan: Napoleon once said that the surprising thing was not that every man has his price, but how low it is, and I can’t help but see that everywhere now.
You destroyed and betrayed yourself for a handful of clicks.
Jasmeet: Dostoevsky wrote, “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
That seems especially appropriate lately, for mostly non-AI reasons.
Disney shuts down 538, Nate Silver offers a few words. You can get all their data off of GitHub. It is a shame that 538 could not be sustained, and I am sad for those who lost their jobs, but as Nate Silver notes their business model was unsustainable inside Disney. Hopefully Silver Bulletin and others can carry the torch in the future.
Restaurant productivity technically rose 15% during the pandemic and sustained that gain, but it turns out it is entirely attributable to the rise of takeout and delivery. That’s not a rise in productivity, that’s delivering a different product that is easier to produce and also in general worse. If anything this change is bad.
Zeynep Tufekci, who has been on top of this from the beginning, reminds us of the massive efforts to mislead us about the fact that Covid-19 could have come from a lab. We don’t know whether Covid-19 came from a lab, but we do know it very much could have, that there was a massive coordinated operation to suppress this fact, and most importantly that this means that we are continuing to do lab research that is likely to cause future pandemics.
Aditya Agarwal models a person’s ambition as something you can unlock and unleash, but not fundamentally change. I think I mostly agree with a soft version of this. There are plenty of people who are ambitious but haven’t been given or felt opportunity, or you can remove something blocking them, but if an adult is at core not so ambitious you should assume you can’t fix that.
Travel advice from The Technium, mostly endorsed by Tyler Cowen. Definitely some good tips in there, even for those who have little desire for the kind of experience this is striving to achieve. The core recommendation is as a baseline to take trips with about 10 days of intense travel, with 12 non-travel days total, and you start with the most challenging content first.
One pattern to notice is the need to focus on absolute marginal cost of things like renting a driver or paying for entry to a museum and what not, rather than looking at relative cost or comparing to what might seem expensive or fair. Only the absolute costs matter.
I continue to not have the desire to do this style of travel that he calls E&E, for engagement and experience, but it does appeal more than the traditional R&R style, for rest and recreation. I can do R&R at home, in many ways far better than I can travelling, at almost no marginal cost. But then, I can do my version of E&E at home too, and often do, although not as often as I should.
A perspective on what does and does not cost you precious Weirdness Points. The particular claim is that being vegan while respecting others preferences costs very little, whereas telling others what to eat costs a lot of points. I agree in relative terms, although I disagree in absolute terms. The general pattern of ‘telling others to do [weird thing] costs vastly more than doing it yourself’ definitely applies, but the [weird thing] can still be expensive.
The Dead Planet Theory, the generalization that most of life is showing up, if showing up includes attempting to Do the Thing at all. As in, yes You Can Just Do Things, and the reason you can is that you almost certainly won’t, which means little competition.
Ashwin Sharma: Basically, Joseph Campbell taught me to ritualize almost everything I considered mundane. Like my morning coffee, my afternoon walk, and my bedtime reading. I learned over time that this is because ritualizing ordinary moments makes them sacred. And when something becomes sacred, when you give it meaning, it gives meaning back to you.
Chris Cordry: Ritualizing everyday actions also means you bring more attention to them. When we give attention to something on a deep level, we can experience it as sacred independent of cognitive meaning-making.
I wrote Bring Back the Sabbath, so I’ve long been a supporter of this, and I agree. The more rituals you can make work for you, the longer you can sustain them, the better. There are of course costs, but consider this a claim that the Ritual Effect matters more than you think it does.
Your periodic reminder that some important people need lately:
Lars Doucet: The counterpart to “move fast and break things” is “don’t be in such a hurry that you waste time.”
This is commonly misunderstood as saying, “please don’t go fast.” It means the opposite! It means, “optimizing for the *feelingof going fast will *MAKE YOU SLOWER*”
The “move fast and break things” vibes, as fun as it is, does pack in a certain tolerance for carelessness and “we’ll figure it out later.”
Sometimes being careful and figuring it out before you leave the house makes you arrive at the destination faster!
The most obvious application in software land is technical debt. You do want rapid prototypes and you do want to avoid premature optimization and over engineering.
But also nothing slows you down like an easily avoided big ball of mud.
Really you just need to very good at asking yourself “am I chasing a goal or am I chasing a vibe?” There are a lot of things that FEEL like going fast that aren’t actually going fast, just being in a hurry, which is a totally different thing.
There’s a similar phenomenon with various cargo-cult symptoms surrounding work culture. It’s very easy to signal that you are very busy, but that’s not the same thing as working hard, which in turn is not the same thing as getting stuff done efficiently and effectively.
I didn’t like The Great Gatsby (the book) either when I was forced to read it, not great at all, do not recommend. I don’t put it in ‘least favorite book’ territory like Tracing Woods does, but I respect that take. My least favorite book, by this criteria, would probably be One Hundred Years of Solitude. Absolutely dreadful. It’s actually amazing how consistently awful were the fiction books schools forced me to read.
Who believes in astrology? Astrology is the Platonic ideal of Obvious Nonsense, so you can use belief in it as a way to measure various group differences. Intelligence is the biggest predictor of non-belief listed in the abstract, followed by education, which makes sense. Religiosity and spirituality are null effects. That speaks poorly of religiosity, since all the major religions are in agreement that astrology is bunk. Whereas it speaks well of spirituality, because it seems like it should be positively correlated to astrology, especially given that right-wing individuals believe in astrology less.
The most interesting one is no impact of ‘scientific trust’ on astrological belief. You would think that belief in science, whether it was real science or Science™, would mean you trusted the scientists who tell you astrology is Obvious Nonsense. This isn’t the case, suggesting that a lot of ‘trust in science’ is actually ‘trust’ in general.
Ryan Peterson: My friend’s startup uses facial recognition to identify employees entering the office and then plays the walk-out theme song of their choice as if they were a WWE superstar.
Would this even be legal in Germany? No wonder Europe is falling behind.
Washington Post will be writing in its op-eds every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. They’ll cover other topics too, but the arguments against personal liberties and free markets will be left to others.
As a very strong supporter of both personal liberties and free markets, I love this.
In response to this, there were a bunch of people on the left who got Big Mad and accused Bezos of some sort of betrayal of democracy. To which I say, thank you for letting us know who you are and what you think of free markets and personal liberties. Whereas I saw some on the right, who have not exactly been the biggest free market fans recently, and have a spotty record on personal liberties, cheering this on, so maybe negative polarization can work in our favor for once?
Walks are great. The best walks are aimful walks, where you have an ultimate destination in mind from which you will gain value, but ideally you can proceed there and back at a leisurely pace and wander while doing so. However your amount of physical activity is not fixed, so you can and should also go on aimless walks, which both help you stay active and can help you think better about various things, either alone or with a companion or two.
LessOnline 2will take place at Lighthaven, from May 30 to June 1. I plan on being there. LessOnline 1 was pretty awesome and I’m excited to run it back. Last time I ran a makeshift ‘show the Zvi process’ workshop, haven’t decided what if anything I’ll run this time. Early bid pricing lasts until end of March.
If you are a charity whose goals are compatible with Jaan’s priorities, or especially if you are a good fit for the freedom or fairness tracks, I highly recommend that you apply. The cost is low and the upside is high. And who know, perhaps you will even appear in a future version of The Big Nonprofits Post if I happen to be one of the recommenders for your round.
Calling local Magic gamers: The NYC Invitational Series is coming, starting with the NYC Pauper Open on May 25 at the Upper West Side Hex, building towards an end-of-year invitational. Local game stores are invited to reach out to get in on the fun.
While we’re on that subject, of course, my official trading experience was at Jane Street Capital, which is always hiring. It didn’t work out for me but they’re great people and if you’re going to do that kind of work it’s a pretty great place.
Suzy Weiss argues that comedians should not be hot. I strongly disagree. This is a confusion of the wonderful fact that comedians are allowed to not be hot – which is great – with saying that hotness, or more precisely actually looking good by being not only hot but also well-dressed, shouldn’t be allowed. A central example here (that Suzy uses) is Tina Fey, who is definitely hot, and was hot even when she was playing the intentionally not hot Liz Lemon. Suzy Weiss argues that being ugly, here, is an asset.
To me, that’s exactly the proof that the thesis doesn’t hold water. There’s nothing wrong with hot. The idea that people who are hot, or otherwise advantaged, don’t have problems to use for material, is Obvious Nonsense. What you don’t want is for the hot to crowd out the not hot.
Consider music. In music, the product is fully audio, and yet being hot is increasingly a huge advantage that crowds out the not hot. It’s really tough to be an ugly (or even Hollywood homely) rock star, especially as a woman. That means we’ve missed out on tons of great musicians, and the exceptions that make it anyway prove the rule (but for obvious reasons there will be no examples here).
Alec Stapp: Funny how most people legit believe this.
Philly Gov: Yeah that’s crazy but it also happens to be right specifically in regards to me.
Alec Stapp: Same.
That comes from this paper, but the paper says the peak is around 23.5 years old, whereas the graph here is much earlier.
I am a strange case, in that I didn’t listen to essentially any non-kids non-classical music until college, and I did only a small amount of ‘listening to what is coming out right now.’ So not a representative case, but I very much prefer older music than that, in general. But I do notice that I have a strong preference for the particular relatively new songs I did listen to about that time, including the ones that get reinvented every so often. So there’s that.
I do notice that when I sample new music from recent decades I usually hate it, to the point where I essentially have given up on playlists of hot new music. They are consistently very bad. New (to me!) older music that stood the test of time tends to work better, down to ~1965 or so, which is well before I was born.
My actual music theory is that in micro terms the public has no false positives once songs are at least a few years old. Marketing can make fetch happen for a month or two, but it fades. Your hits that last are your hits for a reason. One hit wonder songs are always bangers and almost always yes it was their best song when I investigate. Artists that break out, break out for a reason (although it can involve looks or dance moves or hard work and so on). The public does offer false negatives – there are gems they don’t appreciate – but that’s largely due to lack of exposure and opportunity.
The public’s macro preferences are of course up for debate. Their genre preferences are wrong, but they are entitled to their opinions on that.
Will Severance stick the landing? Jeff Maurer is skeptical. I agree the prior is to be skeptical, but the vibes tell me to be optimistic this time around. I very much get the sense that they know where things are going and what story they are telling. I’m also at the point where I’m mostly willing to endorse the show even if they only half stick the landing.
Pretty good but growth rate seems to be slowing a bit.
Sunder Pichai: Exciting new @Waymo milestone: Waymo One is now serving 200k+ paid trips each week across LA, Phoenix and SF – that’s 20x growth in less than two years! Up next: Austin, Atlanta and Miami.
New York is alas likely to take a while due to regulatory concerns. But it’s a real shame to see the latest +50k take a full four months. We need to be on an exponential here, people! This now looks kind of linear and I am not here for that, very literally.
It’s so weird that this new area does not yet connect to the existing San Francisco coverage zone, but actual usage patterns are often not what you would think they are.
Kevin Kwok: Waymo is executing a textbook pincer movement against SFO.
Give me Waymo in East Bay and to SFO and I’ll be a lot more tempted to visit.
Well, you can’t have Waymos yet in New York, so can I interest you in armed guards?
Nikita Bier: Over the last few months, I’ve been advising @bookprotectors: a new app for ordering an on-demand security detail. Or more simply: Uber with guns.
Today, they’re debuting in Los Angeles and NYC at No. 3 on the App Store.
If you have a hot date this weekend, pick her up in a Protector.
5 hour minimum booking. All ex-military or ex-law enforcement.
Because our world is bonkers crazy, their top weapon are orange triangles? As in, if a truck stops, within 10 minutes you have to put out orange triangles. But a driverless truck has no way to do that, and so far Aurora has been unable to get a waiver, because they can’t show an alternative that would be at least as safe – never mind that obviously the self-driving trucks will overall be vastly safer. So now they’re in court.
If they don’t get an exception, Aurora won’t have to have a person in every truck. It does mean they have a Snow-Crash-pizza-delivery-style 10-minute countdown to ‘rescue’ any given truck that runs into trouble. So there needs to be someone 10 minutes or less away from every truck at all times. That means you need a lot of trucks to justify the humans who are constantly on call to leap into action with orange triangles.
Evidence on the Hot Hand in Jeopardy. I think the study underestimates the extent to which being hot and each correct answer inform skill differences, and also how much small differences in skill or being hot should impact wagering size. Remember that contestants have very high uncertainty about their skills in terms of knowledge and also ability to execute, and that they can actively improve their skills over the course of the game, and that confidence actually matters.
Also people think extremely poorly about this question. I asked o1-pro and got an answer that was a mix of stating obvious considerations plus complete nonsense. The impact here is only $100-$500 more per wager. That’s not as much as one might think, and the experienced players who don’t vary their wagers probably are mostly just using an established heuristic. Partly this is to keep their focus on other things.
It’s not even clear if being a stronger player should in general make you wager more – if you need variance you should probably risk everything even if you’re under 50%, if you’re sufficiently confident might as well risk it all to win more and more money, it’s in a weird in-between situation (or when you don’t like your chances in this particular category), or especially where you’re in a close 3-way race where polarizing your score is a bad idea until you can break 70%+, where you want to do anything else.
If I was going on Jeopardy for real, I would likely have AI build me a game simulator, because I have actual no idea what the right strategy is here, and it’s important.
This is part of a longstanding tradition where economists analyze people’s decisions, only take into account half the considerations involved, and declare actions irrational.
Sports have an analytics problem, in that teams and players are Solving For the Equilibrium, and that is often resulting in less appealing games. What to do?
As always, don’t hate the player, change the game. The rules have to adjust. The tricky part is that it can be extremely difficult to preserve the things that make the game great, especially while also preserving the game’s traditions and continuity.
MLB largely solved its ‘games take forever’ problem, but has a pitchers being pulled too early problem rapidly getting even worse, and a severe strikeout problem.
The pitchers being pulled issue can be solved via rules change, in particular the double hook, which helps in other ways too.
Strikeouts are trickier, but the solution there is also likely to try and limit pitching changes, combined perhaps with moving the mound back, perhaps in exchange you pull back the fences so home runs are harder and more balls end up in play. I would experiment with aggressive solutions here, even things like ‘make the ball a little bigger,’ or ‘formalize that the strike zone shrinks when you have two strikes and expands when you have three balls.’
The NBA has a 3-point shot problem. An occasional three pointer is fine, but things are very out of hand. The math on 3-point shots is too good, and the weird part is how long it took everyone to notice.
Or at least I think it’s out of hand. Many agree. Others like the current game.
The obvious place to start if you want to change things back, other than ‘move the three point line back,’ is to only award two shots rather than three if you are fouled on a three point shot except in the last two minutes of the game. Another more radical idea is to strengthen two point shots, by treating shooting fouls like a 2-point goaltending if the ball hits the rim, note you can adjust what counts as a foul to taste.
The NFL’s major shift is teams go for it more on fourth down, but that’s good. They warn that there are shifts towards pass-heavy games, but that’s the kind of change that you can fix with rules tweaks, as the NFL has lots of ‘fiddly bits’ in its rules, especially regarding penalties, that are already constantly adjusted.
I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation.
Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people, excellent advice from Kaj Sotara. This matches my experience as well, if your instincts say there’s something off, chances are very high that you are right. Doesn’t mean don’t be polite or anything, but be wary even if you can’t identify exactly where it’s coming from. In my experience, it’s scary how often such vibes prove correct in the end. If you identify the reason why and you don’t endorse it (e.g. prejudice) of course that’s different.
The art of the French dinner party: It seems you must have an opinion on everything, no matter the topic, and argue for it. Only a boring guest would have no opinion. Heaven forbid you are curious and want to explore with an open mind. This explains a lot.
You love to see it? Apple Blasts EU Laws After First Porn App Comes to iPhones, via state-mandated third-party software marketplace AltStore PAL, falsely claiming that Apple meaningfully approved it, which they very obviously didn’t. I do not believe Apple should be banning porn, but the EU has zero business mandating that they allow porn. Apple is offering a curated ecosystem for a reason, it’s their call.
TikTok as intermittent reinforcement, a slot machine for children. This model seems right to me, and explains why something can be so addictive despite the vast majority of content shown being utter junk in the eyes of the user it is shown to (based on my experience watching people use TikTok on trains).
Aella: i’ve heard ppl who lost a lot of weight talk about some angry cynicism when people start treating them better, even ppl they’ve known for a long time. I’m having a bit of that now that twitter seems to like me. i’ve been consistently myself this entire time, what’s happening.
literally last weekend i had multiple ppl come up to me at a party and go ‘oh are you aella? i see you on twitter cause everyone hates you’.
if the thing that causes ppl to like me is that i just publicly was patient and knowledgeable with a doofus then this feels kind of shallow and fickle and bad incentives for me. Like what, i win the tribal allegiance game by doing very easy, low-brow things? oh no
it just seems exceedingly clear that public opinion is based on kinda trivial, salient, emotional stuff and not actual work. I’ve been putting out consistent good-faith attempts to do science and been patient with people who were mean to me for YEARS but nobody cared until now
I’m suspicious about how good it feels for people to like me. I’m suspicious about my own motivations now. I’m suspicious that i feel *moremotivated? I’m wondering how much of my past fatigue has been just the difficulty of keeping going in a world where you’re widely hated
i’m kinda angry that it seems like I’m responsive to the opinion of the masses, and also that the thing that shifts the masses is so trivial.
The moment itself might seem trivial, but a lot goes into that moment happening. It’s about consistently being the type of person who gets and executes on opportunities like that, puts themselves in spots where good things can happen, or vice versa. The system is not as dumb as it might seem, especially in terms of the sign of the reaction. There are also various ways to go more viral, that encourage very bad habits and patterns, and that you need to fight against using.
In terms of the weight loss thing, as someone who has made that transition, this… simply never bothered me? It seemed like an entirely expected and reasonable thing for people to do? But also I got a lot less of it, because I had friends largely from the Magic: the Gathering community at the time, whose reactions changed an order of magnitude less than most others do, and I’d previously never attempted to date anyway so there was nothing to contrast to there.
Scott Alexander tries to make the argument that if you care about the grooming gangs in England, then you care about people you don’t know who are far away, and so ‘gotcha’ and now you have to either admit your preferences make no sense or else be an effective altruist who goes around helping people you don’t know who are far away.
I believe that this was a highly counterproductive argument. Scott was so busy saying this was a contradiction that he never asked why people could be outraged and say things like ‘maybe we should invade the UK’ even in jest, in response to this particular outrageous situation, but not care about (his example) preventing third world domestic abuse. And he all but asserts that his philosophy is right and theirs is wrong, and they would agree with him if they Did Philosophy to It and ‘realized they were a good person.’
Whereas I think there is are several perfectly coherent and reasonable positions that explains why one might care a lot about this particular scandal, without caring about the causes Scott implores people to embrace.
And what do these people constantly yell at us, if we have ears to hear?
That they, their preferences and causes get no respect. That they are constantly being gaslit and lied to and no one cares, that they are told they are bad people, told they are racists, told other people should get preference over them because they are ‘privileged’, told that other people should get what they think is rightfully theirs. They are sick and tired of exactly this kind of treatment, only this is if anything worse.
I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t respond with a very clear ‘fyou.’
Indeed, this seems like an excellent way to make those people hate Effective Altruism.
Have I fallen into a similar trap in the past, to varying degrees, at various times, on other issues? Oh, absolutely. And that was stupid, and counterproductive, and also wrong, no matter what I think of the opposing positions involved. I am sorry about that and strive to not do it, or at least do as little of it as possible.
Scott Alexander seems like he’s been on tilt lately dealing with all the people coming out and saying ‘effective altruism is bad’ or ‘altruism is bad’ or ‘helping other people is bad’ and then those people respond yes, they actually think you should let a child drown in the river in front of you, stop being such a cuck.
Scott Alexander: I went on a walk and saw a child drowning in the river. I was going to jump in and save him, when someone reminded me that I should care about family members more than strangers. So I continued on my way and let him drown.
Marc Andreessen (QTing OP):
Carl of Claws: Lots of people drown pointlessly trying to help others who are drowning. He couldn’t have picked a worse example.
Scott Alexander: Hi Marc. I know the heatmap meme, but I think the study it comes from is saying something really interestingly different from the meme version. [goes on from there, for really a long time, in great detail]
Also Scott Alexander: [Another very long Twitter post about exactly what moral obligations he does and doesn’t believe in, in which he is Being Scott Alexander.]
I (uncharitably, but I think accurately) interpret Marc Andreessen as saying either or both of:
You shouldn’t save a child drowning in a river, because that means you don’t care enough about yourself and your family (or others closer to you).
America should spend no dollars on even existing super efficient lifesaving foreign aid like PEPFAR, even though the price is absurdly low and it pays for itself many times over in goodwill alone.
I’ve always hated the ‘drowning child in a river’ argument, because it was trying to equate that scenario with giving away all your money and not caring about your family more than other people. That’s a magician’s trick, hopefully people can see why.
But I never thought I’d see the response be ‘actually, that argument is wrong because you shouldn’t save the child.’
Roon: if you read between the lines it’s implied the foreigners are actually of negative value, worried about their population size, etc
Kaledic Riot: Made a very similar meme after some similar discourse a while ago.
This is, in general, an equal opportunity motte-and-bailey situation. There are also those who occupy the equal and opposite bailey, and assert that you do not have special obligations to those close to you, there is no distinction. Those people can be quite assertive and obnoxious about this. Now we deal with the new version instead.
If you run a charity and you want to raise money, but I repeat myself, you need to convince people their contribution is making a tangible marginal difference. This is most extreme in Effective Altruist circles, where the thought is fully explicit, but it’s also true everywhere else. The goal must be at risk, the project must be in danger, and the best goal at risk of all, by far, is for you to be on the verge of shutting down.
Ben Landau-Taylor: Lightcone’s monthslong fundraiser meeting its $2m goal in the last 6 hours is the clearest illustration I’ve seen yet of the “by default, people give money to nonprofits if and only if the alternative is that the nonprofit will literally die” thesis.
And yes, it’s not coincidence, it’s explicitly because of multiple people calibrating their donations to make sure Lightcone reaches the “don’t die” threshold.
The silver lining is, “Our nonprofit is running out of money and will die without a big donation push” is less scary than it sounds, probably you’ll run around frantically and experience a ton of stress, then successfully raise barely enough to keep going.
The most common way out is selling prestige—naming buildings, listing donors in the program, plaques on the wall or on benches, etc.
Samo Burja: This is completely true. A little over one year ago @palladiummag nearly shut down. When I stepped in to save it I thought I should just quietly work very hard and have positive messaging only.
That worked OK, but I was wrong to not appeal to donors [donation link here].
…
I made the mistake of focusing on optimistic messaging because of my experience as a business exec
There you’re never losing even when you are.
Totally different motivations from people buying a product vs. people donating to a cause or project.
Patrick McKenzie: There are different parts of the curve. A lot of donations are to non-profits whose brand doth exceed their deployment ability, and who will basically drown in money given reasonable execution on the usual playbook. In other parts of curve: unceasing precarity.
Ben Landau-Taylor: My favorite case of that was when the Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (March of Dimes) was founded to fund polio treatments, raised like 10x more money than they could spend on treatment, went “idk I guess let’s fund research too”, and a couple decades later had a cure.
Oliver Habryka: It is really extremely frustrating.
It creates really weird brinksmanship dynamics where to successfully fundraise you have to decide how much you are willing to explode the organization if you don’t fundraise enough to make it worth running it.
I really wish people would give projects money proportional to how much good they think they do.
I have been surprised by how many people in grantmaking do not understand the considerations here. It caused me to update on bad faith and people being actively adversarial/CDT-ish for a while, but then I realized that people really haven’t thought about the consequences of this.
I endorse essentially all of this. I do think there are some circles that have people more explicitly and intentionally ‘playing chicken’ or other adversarial CDT-agent games with each other.
The times I was at SFF, I tried my best to mostly not do this, and instead mostly do what Oliver suggests – allocate the money where I thought organizations were doing the best work and not only funding on pain of death, although ‘you already have enough’ as to be a factor at some point.
If you’re not wondering what was up with that shootout with the border patrol in Vermont or a landlord in Vallejo, as reported in places like this, skip this section.
If you are wondering, probably skip it anyway.
If you didn’t do that, well, here are some links with information.
Here is a thread where a vegan responds to these events by saying most people commit murder, calls those who disagree ‘speciesist’ and asks how they can ‘be so concerned about murder now?’ And being glad that the murder victim is dead, and several others essentially back this up, illustrating that the philosophical positions involved justify murder. And Tracing Woods explains that he does not feel especially confident in the amount of moral prohibition against murder involved in those who generate or defend such statements.
Some reporters reached out to me to discuss this because I am on the board of CFAR. So I’m going to take this opportunity to tell everyone that I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of the events in question whatsoever.
Yes, it is on net a very good development is that you became able to say ‘that’s not very nice’ and be taken seriously, even if some people weaponized this previous ‘vibe shift’ in rather absurd ways. The bad news is that part of the latest ‘vibe shift’ is people trying to assert once again that ‘vibe makes right’ and you have to do what vibes say, except this time in the opposite direction. I’m probably going to say this again, but regardless: Fthat s.
Sarah Constantin: In the 2010s it began to seem more feasible to say “that’s not very nice” and be taken seriously.
I didn’t like every cultural trend of that era, but this one was positive.
In my experience this began to reverse around 2018/2019: a few years before everyone else noticed what we now call the “vibe shift.”
More people deciding “softness” was inadequate or unsatisfactory or dated.
Now, once again, we have to frame things from a position of strength. We have to game out what would make us look like losers or winners.
I’ve gone back and forth on how much to adapt to “playing the new game” vs refusing to succumb.
Zac Hill: I agree that this was a huge positive development. The people who dislike it because it ‘fails to signal strength’ or whatever are revealing their brazen insecurity, which is just a loud signal to the actually-strong people about who is exploitable.
Mostly I’m sick of people trying to use ‘vibe shifts’ to attack me with paradox spirits.
Misha: I’ve asked this before but what are all the bitcoin millionaires doing with their gainz? It seems like distributing lottery payouts to a bunch of weird nerds should result in more wacky ambitious megaprojects and stuff but afaict it hasn’t
Ben Landau-Taylor: Bitcoin wealth is the ultimate proof that talent is far more of a bottleneck than money. Even among people who do something interesting with crypto money, it’s all people like Buterin and Tallinn who were building cool projects *beforetheir windfall from magic internet money.
Misha: Also heir wealth is huge in this world.
Roko: I disagree, lack of money is a severe shit show.
Roko is correct as well, but the point stands. If you’re given a pile of money, and you are most people, you might live comfortably and enjoy nice things and raise a family. But if you lack talent and ambition, then no one will remember your name and you won’t change things. You will not do much of anything with the opportunity.
Which has opportunity cost, but is also pretty much fine, it’s just a missed opportunity to do better? If you come into a billion dollars via crypto, and you invest in the stock market and enjoy life, that’s not the worst way to invest it and move around real resources.
More people like Vitalik Buterin and Jaan Tallinn would be better, of course, but you don’t want to force it if it isn’t there, or the money will effectively get wasted or stolen.
If you want to do better, and you should, you will need to seek more agency.
Warning: Requires sufficient agency to bootstrap. But if you’ve got even a little…
Nick Cammarata: I hate how well asking myself ‘If I had 10x the agency I have what would I’ works.
Paul Graham: This may be the most inspiring sentence I’ve ever read. Which is interesting because it’s not phrased in the way things meant to be inspiring usually are.
Nick Cammarata: oh wow thanks paul. I accidentally learned it from sam at openai who presumably partially learned it from you. he’d just assume I have 10x the agency I do, and I’m like okay well he’s wrong but if he were right what would I do, and every time I tried that my agency went up.
Amjad Masad: What’s agency in this context? Is it like discipline and ambition?
Nick Cammarata: it was mostly creativity for me. Like instead of “I have a fear of X” being treated as a constant it’s how do you plan to work on that, what have you tried, and a strong belief it’s fixable. It involves discipline and ambition too, but in my case that wasn’t the bottleneck.
Sam Altman: Why not 100x?
Zvi Mowshowitz: Unneeded, it’s implied. Obviously a 10x more agentic person would ask themselves about a person 10x more agentic than they are, and then…
File this one under More Dakka. The trick works, because:
Figuring out what the high agency person would do requires a lot less agency than being that person or actually doing it.
Once you know what it is you would do, and you have a procedure that implies you need to do it, that greatly reduces the agency required to do it.
That’s not the only trick to having more agency. But it’s a big help.
I probably shouldn’t have written this section at all, but here we are.
A theory from Benjamin Hoffman on various Trump executive order fiascos: That the administrative class feels compelled to do perverse interpretations of the (usually very poorly drafted) EOs. It also seems plausible that they felt the credible threat of being fired if they failed to interpret the EOs perversely or maximally expansively, leading to things like NIH scientists being unable to purchase supplies for studiesand thepausing of PEPFAR, which looked like it was going to get unpaused but then it wasn’t, and people are dying and children are being infected with AIDS and even if you don’t care about that (you monster) we’re burning insane amounts of goodwill here and with USAID overall, and getting very little in return.
There is an endless stream of what sure look like ‘Control + F’ mistakes, where they fire people or cancel projects for containing a particular word or phrase, when in context the decision makes no sense. If they were to, let’s say, feed the relevant text into Grok 3, presumably it would have known better?
They talk about the need for more power and say it’s time to build then shut down solar and wind projects on government land.
Scott Alexander uses way too many words to support his obviously correct title that ‘Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative.’ I would assume at current margins you should presume money saved by the government goes unspent, slowing increase in the debt. Which isn’t the best use of funds, but isn’t the worst either, especially if AI isn’t transformational soon.
Remember that time JD Vance complained about Canada and the flow of drugs into this country and said he was ‘sick of being taken advantage of’? No, I do not think this and related tactics are, as Tyler Cowen put it, a strategy to shift our culture to be better by being more assertive and sending the right message, and I don’t think it is in the slightest way defensible in either case. Anyone who did try to defend them was being bad, and they should feel bad.
Meanwhile, I have to listen to Odd Lots podcasts where they’re worried DOGE will break our government’s payment systems, and watch various people proclaim they are going to ignore court orders or imply that they should, or that any judge who defies them should be removed from their post. Dilan Esper says no chance they can actually ignore court orders, Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin is more worried, others seem to be all over the map on this. Trump says he will obey court orders, which is evidence but doesn’t confidently mean he actually will. They’re speedrunning the faround section, straight to finding out.
I very much do not like where any of this is going.
There’s at least some good news:
Election Wizard: NEW: President Trump has issued an executive order that eliminates government requirements for low-pressure showerheads and low-flow toilets.
Dylan Matthews: My favorite part of the list of frozen programs OMB sent with their memo is that they just included every single tax expenditure.
Guys, we won, tax expenditures are officially spending now, everyone agrees.
Nobody:
OMB: There shall be NO MORE EXCLUSION FOR IMPUTED RENT
Well I didn’t say anything before, I’ve been busy, but now that you mention it…
Trump (and others in his administration, including Musk) are doing a lot of things. Most of them I won’t be covering. It’s not my department and it doesn’t fit my OODA loops and I don’t have the bandwidth. It probably would have been better to not mention any of this at all, really.
Again, that doesn’t mean the other things happening are not important, or not awful, or even that they are less important or less awful (or that everything else is awful). Even with the stuff I did mention here, I’m only scratching the surface.
Again, as the Daily Show used to put it, do not rely on us as your only source of news.
A fun ongoing New York City story is that yellow taxis have long gotten insurance from a boutique insurance company with very low rates. The problem is that the low rates aren’t enough to pay the insurance claims, so the insurer is insolvent. When NYC said actually you need to buy insurance from a company that is solvent, drivers panicked, and the city said fine, you can all keep buying ‘insurance’ below cost, from the company that can’t pay claims. Which presumably means the taxpayer is going to end up on the hook for the difference.
UK tells Apple it has to create a backdoorin all its encryption on all customers, around the world, for use by the UK at any time, and it isn’t allowed to tell anyone. The UK seems to think that merely not offering encryption in the UK is insufficient – Apple must still put a global backdoor into all encryption so the UK can use it. Apple has said they will refuse. Google didn’t say whether it had received a similar order, but denied that they had put in any backdoor.
Polling Canada: “Canada should quickly work to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers”
All:
Agree: 95%
Disagree: 5%
Agree Among (X) 2021 Voters:
BQ: 99%
LPC: 98%
NDP: 97%
CPC: 95%
Angus Reid / Feb 3, 2025 / n=1811 / Online
It’s so absurd. The Prime Minister wants them gone too. Of course, these trade barriers don’t actually make any more or less sense than trade barriers between the USA and Canada, but here it’s that much harder be confused about it.
There is a general tendency, closely related to people’s failure to understand Levels of Friction, to assume that all things must be either Allowed or Not Allowed. The instinct tells us that not only All Slopes are Slippery and that people eventually can Solve For the Equilibrium, which are approximately true, but that you will always very quickly end up at the bottom of them, which is usually false.
Mike Solana: Either the preemptive pardons are struck down, or we have just begun a new tradition in which every president, upon leaving office, preemptively pardons himself, his family, and everyone he has ever worked with. This creates a new class of Americans officially immune from the law.
That is certainly one way it could go, but it probably won’t. There’s lots of unprincipled situations like this where such behavior does not escalate. Civilization would not survive if every time someone successfully violated a norm or got away with something, the norm or law involved de facto went away.
Also, in this particular case, Biden paid a steep price to his reputation. History, assuming we are around to tell it, will remember him in large part for the way he chose to leave, and this will for a while be a headwind for Democrats at the ballot box, and state law still exists.
Similarly, there’s no reason that a certain amount of ignoring court orders has to mean that all court orders are meaningless, or various other ‘end of democracy’ scenarios. It can escalate very quickly, and may yet do so. Or it might not.
The broader point is more important, though, which is that an exception weakens a rule but in no way must break it. It can lead to that, but often it doesn’t, without any ‘good reason’ why.
Emmett Shear: This is a good thread on noticing what is happening when people’s reasons do not seem internally consistent, and how to handle the situation.
Maeбичка (detail edited for readability): It took me a long time to realize that people simply make up false reasons and justifications for things that may or may not be true, entirely independent of those reasons.
I hate this but also have begun to understand why people (probably including me?) do it, and I am learning how to navigate it.
First, I want to note something crucial: the people giving false reasons, whether they are intelligent or not, often do not even realize the reasons are false. They are not “lying.” Half the time, or perhaps even more, the reasons are there to convince themselves just as much as other people.
A second crucial thing: “False” does not mean untrue. It could even be a valid logical reason for the thing. But it is not the instinctive reason you believe in or want the thing. It is divorced from your needs and reality. So here is what false reason-giving looks like:
>I cannot do A, because B.
>Oh, good news, B is not true! So you should be able to do A, right?
>Well… but also C and D. And also B is true because E and [blah blah blah].
It took me a long time, both with clever and unintelligent versions of this, to realize this person simply does not want to do A, period.
The unintelligent version of false reasons, where their logic does not make sense, is quite obvious, and it is how I discovered the phenomenon in the first place (recently!).
But false reason-giving can be very subtle.
In the sophisticated version, the words are logical!
but the emotions might not match, or seem disproportionate. If you are sensitive, you will notice something is off, or their words are not grounded.
This is extremely common. I would perhaps even claim 90% of modern communication is this type of nonsense.
People do not mean what they say, and do not say what they mean. Instead, they say whatever is strategically optimized to achieve the outcomes they want.
And of course they would! This is a reasonable strategy in a world where boundaries are disrespected and people are alienated from their desires!
If “I do not want to do A” is not respected on its own (by others or your own inner critic), of course you are going to come up with whatever reasons you can think of to justify it to other people or to yourself!
By alienated from desires I mean:
People especially do not respect the boundaries/desires of children—who then become uncertain of their own boundaries/desires, and then grow up having to justify them not only to others but also to themselves.
This is how someone would come to habitually give reasons they do not realize are divorced from their own truth.
Rationalists have noticed this tendency too, but they usually come to the wrong conclusion: “If there is no clear reason not to do A, then as a rational person, I should be fine with A.”
No! If you do not want to do A, that is important to account for, even if you do not know the reason.
Speaking of rationalists, a key thing about false reason-giving is that intelligent people are not immune. They are simply good enough to fool each other. Both unintelligent and intelligent people do it, but the latter may never be detected.
Likely entire civilizations have been built on the false reasons of intelligent people.
As an autist-adjacent, it’s hard for me not to get caught up in the logic games when talking to ppl putting up an obfuscating fog of fake logic.
I chase around people’s Bs and Cs and Ds, without taking a step back to realize…oh. All they want is for me to accept their A.
I love a tight rationale and can play ball that way, but I also have a deep respect for the secret emotional currents and needs that actually impel people. So it’s frustrating to me when people think they need to come up with bad fake bullshit logic to convince me!
An example of this btw is “I can’t come to your party bc I have to grocery shop” instead of “I find it weird you invited me but not my husband so I don’t wanna come.” Our culture all but requires people to bullshit one another this way
I REALLY appreciate it when people play it straight and put on the table how they actually feel!
I trust and respect it MORE if you say “I don’t have a reason, I just want to/it just feels right to me”!
I am still learning to step back from my annoyance that ppl feel the need to do this, and recognize why they are this way:
1) there are pushy boundary disrespecters (ESP if ur a kid) who wont leave u alone or respect your preferences unless u put up a big defensive bullshit wall
(“you HAVE to go kiss Aunt Susie, she gave you a present” => “I am Bad if I don’t do things including physical favors for ppl who give me things” => “if I say I have a cold, I can Not kiss her and still be Good”)
2) The dominant cosmology of our whole modern world IS Reasons and Logic, undergirded by the church Systems and Bureaucracy. So of COURSE people feel they need to provide Reasons and Logic when challenged.
Yep, fake reasons are all over the place, including reasons we give to ourselves. They can be ‘good’ fake reasons, or even true partial reasons, that could plausibly have been the real reason or that even are real reasons but not full or sufficient explanations and thus not true objections and not cruxes. Or they can be ‘bad’ fake reasons, that are Obvious Nonsense or are straight up lies. Or anything in between.
Here are the most important notes that come to mind on what to do about this:
If you do not want to do [A], and cannot come up with a legible reason not to do [A], then that is indeed a rather strong reason to consider doing [A], but I agree it is not conclusive. You should look for illegible reasons, the real reasons you don’t want to do [A], and see if there’s something important there. Once you know why you have the desire not to do [A], then you can decide to ignore it if the reason is dumb.
If someone says [B], [C], [D] in turn, the conclusion is not always that they want [~A] period. It means that there is some unknown [X] that is the actual reason. Sometimes [X] could be overcome. Sometimes it couldn’t.
Sometimes they don’t know what [X] is and you have to figure it out.
Sometimes they do know what [X] is, but for social reasons they can’t tell you.
Sometimes they want you to figure it out but not tell them, and they will sometimes be dropping rather aggressive hints to tell you this. This can involve things you can’t say out loud, secret information, and so on.
Sometimes they want you to figure it out and maybe tell them, but they can’t tell you first, whereas if you go first it makes it okay.
Sometimes they want to essentially tell you ‘because of reasons’ and do not want you to figure it out.
Sometimes they simply can’t even and don’t have the time to explain, or even to figure out what they’re thinking in the first place. Can be highly valid.
They may also be trying to fool you, or they might not.
We’d indeed all be better off if we just said the real reason more often, people are way too afraid to do this.
“I don’t want to do that” is, in my book, a highly valid reason.
You can (literally!) say “I don’t want to do that because of reasons” to indicate that you do indeed have legible-to-you reasons to not do this, but that you are choosing not to share them for whatever reason.
You can also (literally!) say “I just don’t want to do that,” or “I’m not feeling that” or if you’re among true friends “I don’t want to do that not because of reasons.”
It’s important to tell kids real reasons whenever possible, and when it’s not possible to give them minimally fake reasons, even if that means being vague AF.
There are certain classes of reasons that are almost always fake. For example, when a VC says they won’t fund you, or a company does not hire you, unless they point to an actual obvious dealbreaker you should assume the reason is fake.
There were recently some rather epic fires in Los Angeles.
Many aspects of those fires don’t fall under this blog’s perview.
Others do.
So while these may not be the most important aspect of the fires, that’s also why the wise man does not rely on us as your only source of news.
One fun aspect of these fires is that State Farm specifically declined to renew fire insurance coverage in exactly the most impacted areas, because the insurance company thought there was too much fire risk and they weren’t allowed to raise prices.
That is some killer risk management, by a mutual insurance company that doesn’t have shareholders. For which of course various people are mad at State Farm rather than suddenly being very curious about the other areas where State Farm wasn’t interested in renewing coverage.
Unusual Whales: BREAKING: State Farm, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled hundreds of homeowners’ policies last summer in Pacific Palisades—the same area which is now being ravaged by a devastating wildfire, per Newsweek.
Jakeup: translation: the state of California got 6 month’s advance warning from the best risk-assessment professionals that the risk of fire in this specific area is too high and proceeded to do nothing at all with this information
insurers want you to know this one weird trick to keeping people insured without raising premiums: mitigate the actual fucking risk
Kelsey Piper: Okay so the Eaton fire and Palisades fires were in areas where State Farm declined to review fire coverage. …what are the other areas in California where State Farm declined to renew fire coverage?
By far the most realistic part of ancient Greek myths is the part where the prophets tell them exactly what’s going to happen, and they get really angry at them and ignore them, and then it comes true, and they get even madder and ignore them harder.
Ezra Klein: This seems like a good question to ask. If insurers are good at doing anything it’s modeling risk so they don’t lose too much money. We should take those models seriously.
Patrick McKenzie: You’ll notice that in society we have many competing classes of prophets. The ones who actually have to be right about the future are despised, while the ones who are never scored on that continue being invited to the nicest parties.
Not at the nicest parties: insurance underwriters, prediction market users, conversion optimization specialists.
At the nicest parties: politicians, journalists, and people who publish in fields where replication is a thing you ask only of your enemies.
“Really we seem to like science and scientists. Isn’t the plucky hero in a movie likely to be a scientist? Didn’t Einstein attend lots of parties?”
Power likes science to precisely the extent that science supports power. When it doesn’t, science is replaced with Science (TM).
It is a good thing that I actively prefer not to be at the nicest parties. Please don’t make me go to those parties.
Here’s why State Farm had to stop writing policies, because it turns out ‘because prices were capped and the expected value of the policies was negative’ isn’t quite a full explanation.
Or rather, that was the short version, here’s the long one.
Ian Gutterman: I see a lot of people reacting to State Farm’s decision to stop writing new home insurance in California.
But there seems to be a lot of confusion about their motives.
The last thing State Farm wants to do is give up business.
Here’s why State Farm felt they had to act.
State Farm is a mutual insurer which means it’s owned by its policyholders.
Mutuals do not prioritize profit. They make much lower returns than public insurers.
What do mutuals care about?
Maximizing customer count.
Keeping their agents happy.
Turning off new business upsets both groups. It creates a lot of problems.
Agents make more $ off new clients than renewals. They are angry at State Farm.
Market share is how corporate keeps score. Sacrificing it is bad for morale.
So why would they do it?
Because it would be financially reckless to keep growing given the CA regulatory problems.
CA is a very difficult place for insurers. It limits price increases to <7%/year and makes it difficult to drop customers who require more than that.
These restrictions are tolerable most of the time.
But in high inflation environments these limits quickly become unbearable.
If claims inflation grows 10%/yr, a 6.9% price cap means results get worse each year so a new customer will lose SF more and more money every year.
This is why State Farm had to walk away. It is not a flex or game of chicken. It’s a capitulation.
If they are already 25% below the needed price, then even 3 years of flat costs won’t let rates catch up.How did things get so bad? Higher construction costs (materials and labor shortages) and climate change (e.g. wildfires) in recent years made claims worse than expected.
At the same time, the Insurance Commissioner stopped approving any rate increases.
Why weren’t normal rate increases approved? 2022 was an election year and the Insurance Commissioner is elected in CA.
It’s easier to get re-elected campaigning on no price increases! Who would have imagined there would be future consequences?
Meanwhile State Farm recently reported first quarter results and they were likely the worst in company history. They paid out $1.30 on every $1 of insurance they sold nationwide!
That’s why you’re not seeing as many insurance commercials.
John Arnold: CA politicians wanted to keep the cost of homeownership from rising so they limited property insurance rate increases, driving private insurers out of the market and homeowners to the state’s insurer of last resort, which itself was not allowed to charge actuarially sound rates.
This sounds like State Farm got pushed well past what would be my breaking point. It was willing to write losing (minus expected value, or -EV) policies for a while, but when you’re already underwater and they say no rate increases at all? Okay. Bye.
And yes, if you have a state ‘insurer of last resort’ that moves in and charges artificially low rates in exactly the places private insurance won’t touch, I hope that you know what will happen after that, rather than this being me having some news. As in this 2024 post calling this a ‘ticking time bomb.’ Boom.
So what does the state plan to do about the fires? Why, of course.
Eytan Wallace: BREAKING: California Insurance Commissioner @RicardoLara4CA has issued a mandatory one-year moratorium that will prohibit insurance companies from enacting non-renewals and cancellations of coverage for home owners within the perimeters or adjoining ZIP Codes of the Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles County regardless of whether they suffered a loss. The moratorium will expire on Jan. 7, 2026.
The CA Dept. of Insurance may issue a supplemental bulletin if additional ZIP Codes are determined to be within or adjacent to a fire perimeter subject to this declared state of emergency for Los Angeles and Ventura counties.
Miles Jennings: In my 20’s, I ridiculed friends for liking Atlas Shrugged – any political philosophy can be justified if you use ridiculous characterizations of government actors with absurd approaches to problem solving.
In my 40’s, I’m going to spend a lot of time apologizing.
What will happen now after the fires?
Biden decided to send everyone involved a one-time $770 payment. We’re sorry we burned down your village? Yishan says this reflect the government being unable to provide basic relief supplies and imagining private entities doing it, but that seems fine? As long as you don’t then ‘ban price gouging.’
People will try to rebuild their homes.
I say try, not because they won’t have the money, or because we don’t know how to do that. I say try because there will be a shortage of Officially Approved Labor to rebuild with especially with crackdowns on immigration, and because building houses is not something taken kindly to in Los Angeles.
I also say try because:
Gavin Newsom (Governor of California): NEW: Just issued an Executive Order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.
We are also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.
Oh, price gouging protections. So much for supply.
Samuel Hammond: “Extend protections against price gouging on building materials, storage services, construction, and other essential goods and services to January 7, 2026, in Los Angeles County.”
i.e. create an artificial shortage
Well, at least we get rid of some of the extra stupid rules, that part will help. In other cases, of course, they’re still effectively blocking almost all home construction with that same ‘bureaucratic red tape’ that he seemingly can suspend at any time.
Eli Dourado: Putting aside the urge to dunk on Newsom, I do think this is a great precedent.
Any time we want to do anything with any urgency, whether it is rebuilding from fires or building a border wall, we waive a bunch of laws and regulations.
Well hang on, those laws and regulations must not actually be that important, right? And they slow everything down? So can get rid of them and replace them with rules that don’t slow things down?
Many people are asking these questions, love to see it.
Kelsey Piper: Wait a second, could he suspend all CEQA and permit requirements by executive order at any time (after declaring emergency)? I’m not totally sure the governor should have that power but if he does – set the state free, Governor!
Declare a cost of living emergency or a wildfire vulnerability emergency or whatever and make it legal to build any density with streamlined permits in every urban low-risk area! Be remembered as the governor who saved California with a one page EO!!
Would it hold up in court? Maybe not, but you have to try.
And because, if your home is no longer ‘conforming to applicable zoning’ you will need to fix that and then go through the entire permit process over again:
This is of course a great opportunity to upzone that area and build more. Not that they have any intention of taking advantage of that.
Gavin Newsom: This [claim that they are working with developers to change zoning in burn areas to allow pass apartments] is not true.
Alex Tabarrok: Of course it is not true because upzoning would be a smart thing to do. The increased wealth would help to pay for rebuilding.
I did a fact check of Scott Adams claims here, and so many of them were false or unsupported I deleted the analysis – no, it doesn’t cost more to build a new house than it is worth, especially when you have to work so hard to get permission to build it. But yes, we should expect a labor shortage, and for permitting to delay things by 2+ years when you can’t rebuild exactly the same house within code and get a waiver, and 5+ years in at least 10% of cases. And the property tax resets could get ugly due to previous abuse of Proposition 13, although I won’t shed a tear there.
StewMama: Only 25% of the houses burned in Malibu in 2018 Woolsey fire have been rebuilt [as of 2023].
Elon Musk speculates that this ‘might finally spell doom for the Coastal Commission,’ haha no that is not how any of this works, this is California.
If you’d rather sell your home for what the market will bear right now?
Governor Newsom: Today, I signed an executive order prohibiting greedy land developers from ripping off LA wildfire victims with unsolicited, undervalued offers to buy their destroyed property.
Make no mistake — this is a prosecutable crime.
Aella: This is really jaw dropping stupidity.
Ronny Fernandez: I am genuinely interested in breaking this law. If you or anybody you know would be interested in selling me any parcel that burned down in LA for $500, please let me know.
Emmett Shear: This order is insanity. The LA fires and our governments response has radicalized me against our current government in CA in a whole new way.
Kendric Tonn: “Below market value” seems like such a weird guideline when regarding land in neighborhoods the character of which has been permanently altered located in political environments about which new information and circumstances have recently arisen.
I mean, I get two or three calls every day from subcontinental call centers from people, I suspect, mostly hoping I’m senile or desperate enough to sell below market value, and I want them all drone struck, I get it.
But IDK man, you gotta find that market value somewhere, and I kind of suspect there’s a whole lot of finding out that has to happen in some of these places.
Bitzuist: It’s a scene from atlas shrugged. Gov officials virtue signaling but not actually helping anyone.
Emmett Shear: Ayn Rand is, tragically, wrong about her heroes but totally on point about her villains.
Dale Cloudman: Atlas Shrugged was not hyperbole.
CA: made it illegal to raise fire insurance rates. Insurers pulled out. CA offers their own but it is mismanaged and can’t cover the risk.
After a huge fire (caused by ca making it illegal to properly manage their forests), they made it illegal for insurers to pull out, insurers have to renew policies at old (unprofitable) rates for a year
Now with your home burnt down and no money to rebuild it, CA has made it illegal to sell your land for a price they deem is too low. Incredible.
I believe that technically, what you can’t do is make an offer that is too low. You can accept whatever offer you want? So the market can still function, it’s just weird.
And indeed, I think it would be fine to say that you need to first get an IoI (indicator of interest) from the potential seller fully unprompted, to avoid what Kendric describes above. It’s somewhat tricky to get it right, but seems doable.
Forester Mike: I have done CEQA reviews for forest management projects in CA. They are completely insane.
One time we had a simple fuels reduction project that we started review for in 2022. Goal was to begin logging in summer 2023. Permit rejections and re-reviews led us to need to cut the project area in IN HALF. Last i checked in mid-2024 not a single acre had been worked.
It should be mind numbingly obvious that wildfire mitigation projects should be immune from CEQA and NEPA review. But forget it, kid. It’s California.
Chris Elmendorf: Kudos to @dillonliam for covering the unintended but entirely foreseeable consequences of CA’s anti-price-gouging law for L.A. fire victims.
Liam Dillon:
Property owners are making fewer properties available for rent because of a state law barring new listings from charging more than $10,000 a month during the state of emergency, real estate agents and brokers say.
The price cap is below what L.A.’s pre-wildfire market would bear in many expensive neighborhoods where wealthy displaced residents may be willing to relocate.
The circumstances may be adding to the squeeze wildfire victims are facing while searching for replacement housing.
Josh Barro: Simply banning rental listings in LA for over $10,000 a month is an insane policy. There are a lot of rich people whose houses burned down for whom that would be a normal rental price, even before price effects from a shortage.
Jeff: A mortgage at today’s rates for the median valued home in Pacific Palisades would run at almost exactly double that cap, or just over $20k, assuming 20% down payment and 7% interest rates.
Well, yes, obviously. There will be a non-zero number of places that are slightly above $10k, that will now rent for $10k plus bribes or similar. But then there are lots of places that were already well over $10k, which will sit idle during the emergency, which in turn drives up the prices of everything else during that time, and means a lot of people are forced out entirely. Oh well. Who could have seen that coming?
Finally, here’s the ultimate Gavin Newsom Tweet, except for its lack of restrictions on prices.
Gavin Newsom: I remember the guy who called me Newscum in 7th grade. I can handle that. This isn’t about me. It’s about the people we represent — and the aid they deserve.
Andrew Critch: Respectfully, Governor Newsom, if you say “I/me” four times in a tweet, you are not helping your case that “this” isn’t about you. I’m sure you are working very hard right now to protect Californians, but want to share that your messaging about yourself is not landing well.
(This message is about me, and how your message landed, with me.)
Eric Wall: Human morality peaked in the late 1980s as represented by Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
All the evolutions of morality since then, on all topics from inclusivity to tolerance, gender, right-leaning/left-leaning have been degradations since that perfection.
There are obvious issues with Picardian morality, for example it thinks it’s good that we age and die, it has big scope sensitivity issues and it doesn’t know how to handle realistic AGI or various other utility monsters or other inconvenient scenarios (obvious examples: The Borg, if you don’t have Q or plot armor on your side, but it’s a very broad category, and if they’d successfully figured out how to mass produce Data all philosophical and practical hell would have broken loose). One could say it doesn’t work out of distribution, and it also isn’t that competitive in a future universe where the Federation keeps getting almost wiped out, which doesn’t seem great. But yeah, pretty great.
Paul Graham: When you have good friends over for dinner, you can just eat what and where you normally do. You don’t have to shave or change your clothes or cook different food, or eat in the dining room.
The more laborious way we entertain people we don’t know as well is not for their sake. It’s because we worry they’d be shocked if they saw how we actually live. But only 1% of them would be; 99% of them live the same way, when no one’s looking.
Maybe the reason you have to be formal when entertaining strangers is that you know they assume any such dinner is much more formal than everyday life. So if you just gave them everyday life, they’d assume in actual everyday life you ate dinner out of a trough.
That’s exactly right. You present a better face partly because it’s nice, partly because people adjust expectations for the fact that you are likely putting on a better face.
The worst part about this is it leads to far too few gatherings. If you were to have friends over and act otherwise almost totally normally, that would be a clear win. But you think ‘if I did that I’d have to do all this work and clean up and so on.’ So you don’t invite them, and everyone loses.
Let’s say it is true. If that’s the price of eating unhealthy, I expect most people would say screw it, that’s really not very much time. If people thought like this, I bet they’d eat a lot more fast food burgers, not less. The reason that’s a mistake isn’t that people care that much about the 20 minutes. It’s that they also spend what time they still have in worse shape and feeling worse. That’s the pitch that will far more often work.
On regret, I’ve found my instincts on ‘will I inherently regret not doing this’ are spot on and most people’s seem to be as well:
David Holz: We tend to regret the things we don’t do *muchmore than the things we actually end up doing – so you should always lean towards doing slightly more “regrettable things.”
That’s distinct from predicting a good result or knowing what we will regret if we actually do it, which we are far less good at doing. But we’re very good at knowing when we’re in a ‘if I don’t try I’ll regret it’ situation, especially in scenarios where if you don’t do it, you never know how it would have gone.
I do think you should give this a lot of weight when you get a strong ‘I will regret [X] or ~[X] but not the other one’ instinct, especially if you’ve trained your predictions of this on results.
A similar lesson is to put substantial weight on ‘story value.’
The classic form of this mistake is to avoid taking a risk, but to actually then feel worse than if you’d taken the risk and failed. The fully classic version, of course, is asking someone out or saying yes to someone else, or applying for a job, where even if you get rejected it’s better than always wondering. And you never know.
Old popular Neel Nanda post on making close friends. It’s full of obvious things like actually talking to people about things you both find exciting, filtering quickly, asking what you want, following up and so on, that are obvious when you say them but that you definitely weren’t doing, or weren’t doing enough (see More Dakka). Consciously having Friendship Building Questions in your queue is the most non-obvious thing here, and seems wise, but am I going to actually do it?
Bayesian Asian: I was confused how to ‘rest’ in a way that seems distinct from vegetating (TV, games, scrolling) or working (art, code).
I grilled my friends about how they rest, and came up with a tentative list of different *typesof exhaustion, which need separate solutions.
Procrastination-guilt => work
Choice exhaustion => TV marathon, social event, flow state (gaming, coding, or art)
Loneliness => socialize, LLMs, metta meditation
Physically tense/inert => exercise, bath
Thoughts racing => TV, scroll, concentration meditation
(2 miiight be the same as 5?)
usually my problem is 1, so I feel more rested the more I work
one Classically Restful Activity that usually feels anti-restful for me is going on a walk. it works when my issue is 4, but usually 4 is far behind 1 and 5, which walking exacerbates
I didn’t list reading anywhere above because it’s too intellectually and emotionally varied
challenging but worthwhile material addresses guilt-of-not-doing, and maybe thoughts-racing. Reading certain authors addresses loneliness-tired. Absorbing books address choice-exhaustion
I’m usually ‘tired’ because I’m fighting myself all the time over my todo list. so I’ve always associated ‘rest’ with ‘flow state’. it feels good, and when I exit it, the “you never do anything” guilt-buzz is gone. yay! rested!
…but I’m 4 or 5 tired, which idk how to deal with
because I just HAD a restful 5 hour coding or painting session. what do you mean you need more, different rest
(I mean, in practice I scroll social media uncontrollably for an hour. so my routine works. but I didn’t have an underlying model of what problem this was solving)
after work I’m out of energy (I’m going to mess up the painting/code if I try to do more) but I’m still keyed up and my thoughts are racing, so I need to turn off my brain and make something else be in control of my mental narration for a while
The principle seems strongly correct. You don’t need generic ‘rest’ or ‘to relax’ or ‘a vacation.’ You need to address whatever your particular issue is, however you in particular address it. I don’t match up with every solution proposed here, but most of them make sense.
Also, there’s a type #6, which is actual physical exhaustion? Where the solution is, as you would expect physical rest.
And I think type #7 also exists, a mental exhaustion where you’re just out of thoughts. Your thoughts aren’t racing, the issue isn’t choices, it’s just you’re out of compute. For me #4 solutions or a walk work reasonably here, but so does TV or a movie.
Walking in particular works well for me in many cases. It can help with #4, but I actually really like it for #2 or #5 or #7 too, you pick some music (or a podcast if you have a relaxing one available in context) and you go. And if it’s choice exhaustion or being out of thoughts, I have a standard ‘The Hits’ list of 400+ songs and I just randomly spin to some position in it.
I have other random notes, but I’ll wrap up there.
The ‘five-star controversy for the three-star film’ that is Emilia Perez. The real problem with Emilia Perez is that it simply is not very good, as audiences agreed. They made an awards show darling of it anyway for obvious cultural reasons, but now even those cultural reasons have turned against it, it’s on the ‘wrong side of history.’ The best part is remembering that we used to have to care about such things, and now we get to sit back and laugh at them, and hopefully have a better film win the Oscars.
My other observation for the month is that I clearly don’t rewatch movies often enough versus seeing new ones – when I do revisit the average experience is miles better. Thus there’s more 5-star ratings on my Letterboxd than the bell curve would suggest, but it’s all selection effects. That has diminishing returns, but I’m nowhere near them. Consider whether you are making the same mistake.
Good news, we also have at least a test flight of a supersonic jet!
The press was absurdly uninterested in the flying of a supersonic jet. NYT and WaPo both reportedly told Boom to come back when they were actually flying passengers. This seems like rather bigger news than that?
Paul Graham: What most people don’t realize about Boom is that if they ship an airliner at all, every airline that flies internationally will have to buy it or be converted against their will into a discount airline, flying tourists subsonically.
Ticket prices will be about the same as current business class prices on international flights. How can this be? Because the flights are so much shorter that you don’t need lay-flat beds. You can use the seat pitch of domestic first class.
If business class travelers have a choice of a 10 hour subsonic flight from Seattle to Tokyo or a 5 hour supersonic one at the same price, they’re all going to take the 5 hour one. Which means all the business class travelers switch to supersonic.
Patrick McKenzie: Also think that many business travelers would switch loyalty programs over it, which is a threat out of proportion to the number of transoceanic flights. It might be the only product innovation in decades that has threatened that.
That same price, from the business flyer’s perspective, is of course $0. And in a world where many people charge hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour for their time, if you can cut 5 hours off a flight, ‘the sky’s the limit’ is a reasonable description of the ticket prices you can charge for business flights booked on short notice.
Supersonic travel would also highlight the need to lighten airport security and on-ground transit times, as the flight itself would be a much smaller portion of time spent.
Michelle Fang: I know a Waymo hate to see this one coming.
And here’s a report on Waymo in Phoenix, with many starting to use it as their go-to taxi service, with the biggest barrier that Waymos obey the law and thus are modestly slower than Ubers. And the most killer app of all is perhaps that society will let children take a Waymo alone?
Ryan Johnson: Parents now comfortable sending their kids to school and elsewhere. This is a major vibe shift. Early on, women solo riders were the loudest champions. But parents are overtaking that. Effusive praise e.g. “I have my freedom back!”
This is huge. Many parents have to effectively structure their entire non-work lives around providing transportation to children, because our society has gone completely bonkers and if you let children do on their own what they used to do all the time, the cops might get called. This fixes some of that.
In the medium-term this will be highly pro-natalist, especially if the threshold age becomes relatively young.
My understanding is that the current limiting factor on Waymo is purely their ability to manufacture the cars. Right now all of this is coming from only about 700 cars. Alas, they seem uninterested in providing details to allow us to chart their growth.
The ACC is considering engaging in hardcore shenanigans with its title game to try and secure more spots in the College Football Playoff. Possibilities include having the regular season winner skip the game since they’d probably be in anyway, to try and secure a second slot. That would be an overtly hostile act and also ruin the actual conference season and championship, and I would presume the committee and also everyone else would do its best to retaliate.
Their other suggestion, however, is to have a semifinal the week before the championship game. That isn’t only not shenanigans, that’s awesome, and we should be all for it. Conference semifinals seem great, especially now that fully deserving teams who lost in the semis could be in the playoff anyway.
It’s weird to see a football player get a tattoo of Matthew 23: 12 (Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted) and then point to it after a touchdown on national television. What are you trying to say?
The Mets seem to have won the hot stove league, as they resign Pete Alonso to a two-year, $54 million deal. We were always talking price, and we successfully held out for the right one. OMG, LFGM. Nixon says we’re still one bat and two relievers short.
Tyler Cowen instead treats this as evidence the economics of basketball have changed, noting that Doncic was causing trouble and not fun to be around, and the whole point of choosing to own an NBA team is that it is fun. There is something to that, but you know what else isn’t fun? When the entire fanbase predictably turns against you, the owner.
Seth Burn has a different proposal. Texas isn’t playing ball with the Mavericks. Perhaps this was a bribe to the Lakers and the NBA so they would greenlight a move to Las Vegas? Thus the word coming down to focus all talk on the Lakers. Seth also notes that this makes Luka ineligible for a Supermax contract, which costs him $116 million dollars, which goes right into cap space. As Seth says, given that incentive, you’d think every otherwise supermax-eligible player would get traded – if everyone knows that’s why you’re doing it, you should be able to put together a win-win deal. However, this very obviously wasn’t that, and ownership signed off for some reason.
Ondrej Strasky concludes from Artifact’s failure that if you can’t teach the game in five minutes, you’re doomed. [Edit: I don’t think this is the primary reason Artifact failed, and I think Brandon in the comments, who was the lead on the game, is much closer to what actually happened, which was that there were insufficient Outer Loops.]
I asked about DoTA and LoL, and was told that people consider the ‘click random buttons’ version to be ‘learned the game’ so it’s fine, and the other argument was path dependence, if you have existing buy-in you can push through it. Whereas I didn’t feel like the five minute explanation let me have fun or meaningfully play.
I think there’s certainly a big weight on ‘you’re having fun within five minutes’ but clearly it’s not strictly necessary, given Magic: The Gathering, and also many single player games. Anyone remember Final Fantasy X? Great game once you get into it but you literally don’t make a decision for the first 40 minutes. Many such cases. But I suppose during those 40 minutes you aren’t overwhelmed or confused either. Maybe that’s the actual lesson, that you can’t have people confronting the complexity for more than five minutes in a way they notice? And people who don’t want it can just durdle in the dark for a while and maybe restart later.
My journey with Path of Exile 2 is that it’s been some relaxing ‘more Path of Exile’ but that it has also been frustrating. The boss fights are not easy, and they often take a long time, and several feel like DPS checks. And the grinds in areas are very large, even relatively early. So overall, it’s… fine, I guess.
I also agree that the threshold win conditions tend to take the fun out of the endgame. You’re building a civilization, and then you steadily pivot into sacrificing everything in pursuit of some specific goal, everything else doesn’t matter. Or you’re going about your business and suddenly ‘oh Babylon got X culture points, game’s over, you lose.’
While this is looking to be in some senses highly realistic as we speedrun in real life towards the real scientific victory condition of AGI (well probably everyone-loses condition, given how we’re going about it) and most board games have the same issue, I’d like to minimize this and keep everything mattering as long as possible, and also avoid invisible-to-you events you don’t interact with like ‘Babylon got X culture points’ effectively being like someone else built ASI and converted you with nanobots.
The vote said yes, with a 10% gap in value for approval. This likely highlights an issue with Futarchy: It’s using Evidential Decision Theory (EDT). The 10% gap is mostly because the DAO that approves this is the superior DAO.
It’s inauguration day, so perhaps hilarity is about to ensue. I will do my best to ignore most forms of such hilarity, as per usual. We shall see.
My intention is to move to a 5-posts-per-week schedule, with more shorter posts in the 2k-5k word range that highlight particular subtopic areas or particular events that would have gone into broader roundups.
This means that the Monthly Roundups will likely be shorter.
If you’re considering reading Agnes Callard’s new book, Open Socrates, I am reading it now and can report it is likely to get the On the Edge treatment and its own week, but of course it is too soon to know.
I may be doing some streams of myself working, via Twitch, primarily so that a volunteer can look for ways to build me useful tools or inform me of ways to improve my workflow. You are also of course welcome to watch, either live or the recordings, to see how the process works, but I make zero promises of any form of interaction with the audience here. I also might stream Slay the Spire 2 when the time comes, once I have access and they permit this.
Older software engineers often report that once they lose their current job, they can’t get new jobs and that this is because of rampant agism, others report this is not true, and it’s you in particular that sucks, or you’re seeing selection effects because most of the good ones get forced into management or start their own companies. It’s certainly not universal, but my sense is that many underestimate the downside risk of this outcome.
Derya Unutmaz, M.D.: I accept this, and in fact, I counteroffer a $10,000 bet that by 2045 we will surpass a life expectancy of 95, with an increase of more than a year each year thereafter. I intend to collect it, so don’t die!
Gary Marcus: I hereby accept
@deryaTR_’s $10,000 bet on human life expectancy 20 years hence.
Winnings go to charity, and I hope desperately that I lose!
The bet is resolved once 2045 data are available. (I will not hold him to the “thereafter” part. But I hope he is correct on that part, too.)
Best part of this bet is everyone is rooting for Derya. This is largely but not entirely a bet on AI capabilities. If we get an intelligence explosion relatively soon, then either life expectancy will go way down but Gary won’t be around to collect, or if things go well I do expect to be able to get life expectancy rising rapidly. If AI stalls out, then it gets a lot harder for Derya to win, but it isn’t impossible.
There’s always the rub of whether, when you lose, you actually pay…
Sam Harris accuses Elon Musk of having bet him a $1 million in charitable donation at 1000:1 odds (against a $1k bottle of tequila) that there would not be 35k Covid cases in America, and then refusing to pay and turning against him when Harris tried to collect. Both halves are rather terrible if true, and it is a strange accusation to make if it is false.
There are also rather well-supported accusations that Elon Musk’s supposed Path of Exile 2 characters are, at best, being played primarily by someone else. He doesn’t seem to even understand many basics of how the game works, and the amount of time obviously required to get the characters in question is obviously impossible given his time constraints. Honestly this was pretty embarrassing, and it tells you a lot about a person if they decide to do this, including the fact that it was 100% to be caught.
Does Musk pull off some impressive feats of gaming? It seems like he does.
Grimes: Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.
However, when you pull a stunt like this, you call all that into question, and you dishonor the game, all of gaming and also yourself.
On some level, one must wonder if this was intentional.
Tyler Cowen challenges whether there can be ‘an intermediate position on immigration.’ This is another form of Dial Theory, where one says that all one can say is Yay [X] or Boo [X], so saying something nuanced only matters insofar as it says Yay or Boo. That what matters is the vibe, not the content.
Tyler Cowen: Increasingly, I have the fear that “general sympathies toward foreigners” is doing much of the load of the work here. This is one reason, but not the only one, why I am uncomfortable with a lot of the rhetoric against less skilled immigrants. It may also be the path toward a tougher immigration policy more generally.
I hope I am wrong about this. Right now the stakes are very high.
I have never written the post Against Dial Arguments, or perhaps Against Against Nuance. Or perhaps Stop Prioritizing the Vibes? This seems like a clear example. Tyler has had several posts on related issues, where he frames discussions as purely being on the basis of what would be convincing to the public in the immediate term, rather than any attempt to actually use asymmetric weapons or argue for actually optimal understanding or policy.
I also am much less cynical here. I believe that this distinction (between legal or skill immigration, versus illegal or unskilled) not only can be drawn, but that drawing it is the way to win hearts and minds on the issue.
So much of how I disagree with Tyler Cowen in general is perhaps embodied by his response to the death of Jimmy Carter. Essentially Tyler said that Carter had great accomplishments that stand the test of time, but the vibes were off, so he much preferred Ford, Clinton or Reagan – and without a ‘I know this is foolish of me but’ attached to that statement.
If Carter killed it on foreign policy and peace, and killed it on being moral and standing up for what is right, and killed it on monetary policy and deregulation as a Democrat when we desperately needed both, and you realize this, then I don’t care if the vibes are off. That’s amazing. You better recognize.
I pledge not to ever vote for anyone who claimed in public that the ERA was a legal part of our constitution. This is a dealbreaker, full stop. Please remind me, if this ever becomes relevant. Note that this includes one of my senators, Gillibrand, and also Duckworth. A similar reaction goes for organizations that bought into this, which they claim includes the American Bar Association.
I also note I don’t understand why the Archivist of the United States matters here. Kudos to her for pointing out that A is A, the bar sure is low these days, but her role is ceremonial. If she declared that somehow it had been ratified, wouldn’t SCOTUS simply inform everyone that it wasn’t? How is this not ultimately their call?
DOGE picks a fight over the Christmas tree funding package, and loses hard. It’s not only that they didn’t get most of what they wanted. It’s that they picked the wrong fight on multiple levels, targeting the traditional superficially flashy ‘wasteful spending’ instead of places that matter, in a spot where they needed congressional approval. They need to wise up, fast.
Our government will sometimes take your child away for months or longer because of a positive drug test reported by a hospital… for the same drugs that hospital gave you. And there are several cases where, after the authorities in question were made aware of what happened, Child Services not only did not profusely apologize, they didn’t let the matter drop.
His post is rather scathing. The fact that it tries not to be only makes it worse.
Peter Eisenman: What I’m suggesting is that if we make people so comfortable in these nice little structures of yours, that we might lull them into thinking that everything’s all right, Jack, which it isn’t. And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right.
I say the proper role of architecture is to make things as all right and good as possible.
Are the other similar academic determiners of truth and worth any better?
Let’s consider economics.
Scott Alexander: I used to wonder why so many econ-bloggers I liked were at GMU. GMU only is only the 74th best economics department in the country, but more than half of the econbloggers I like are affiliated with it in some way (Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Garett Jones, Robin Hanson, Bryan Caplan, Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, Mark Koyama, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone!).
…
When I asked academics about this, they didn’t find it mysterious at all. The average high-ranked economics department doesn’t care that you have a popular blog. They might even count it against you. Only your reputation within the priesthood matters.
This is my experience too.
What’s weird is that Tyler Cowen is responsible for the majority of the time I encounter in practice the pure form of the argument that ‘blogs don’t count, only properly peer reviewed and published papers do, so your argument is invalid. I am not only allowed to but almost obligated to ignore it until you change that. Good luck.’
Whereas this exact principle is used to exclude essentially all the economists I respect most from the core economic discourse – and most of them are listed above, in one place, at ‘the 74th best economics department in the country.’
I have no problem with various people playing intricate ingroup status games. But when that makes my buildings ugly and economics largely Obvious Nonsense, and so on throughout the various disciplines with notably rare exceptions, and those with power are accepting their status claims, and they’re doing it all effectively at public expense, I’m not a fan.
Scott Alexander tries to say that hard boundaries with the public are not only useful, but even necessary.
Scott Alexander: This hard boundary – this contempt for two-way traffic with the public – might seem harsh to outsiders. But it’s an adaptive artifact produced by cultural evolution as it tries to breed priesthoods that can perform their epistemic function.
The outside world is so much bigger than the priesthoods, so much richer, so full of delicious deposits of status waiting to be consumed – that any weaker border would soon be overrun, with all priesthood members trying to garner status with the public directly.
Only the priesthoods that inculcated the most powerful contempt for the public survived to have good discussions and output trustworthy recommendations.
Several othersections are so unconvincing as to sound absurd. Yes, there is messiness in not doing everything according to only the sacred laws of communication and trade, but come on with these excuses.
It also seems suspect, but it seems to be pointing towards some part of the story.
Scott Alexander: I think the priesthoods are still good at their core functions. Doctors are good at figuring out which medicines work. Journalists are good at learning which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today and interviewing the participants about what fighting wars in the Middle East is like. Architects are good at designing buildings that don’t collapse.
But now this truth must coexist with an opposite truth: the priesthoods are no longer trustworthy on anything adjacent to politics.
This is the standard, which is rather grim and… well, it’s close.
Yes, I can probably count on architects to design builds that don’t collapse. That’s a case where they are forced to match physical reality. We’d find out real quick if they stopped doing that one. But I can’t count on them to, beyond this basic requirement, design good buildings I want to exist.
I am not convinced I can count on journalists to tell me which Middle Eastern countries are having wars today. There has often been quite a lot of them pretending that countries that are effectively fighting wars (e.g. through proxies) are not fighting wars today. If I want to know who is and is not fighting wars today, my best way of doing that is not to trust journalists too much on that question.
Doctors are not good at figuring out what medicines work. I know this because I had a company based largely on trying to figure out which medicines work in a given context, and because I know doctors and I know people who encounter doctors. Doctors are much better than random, or a random member of the public, at this, to be sure. Mostly they learn a set of heuristics, which they apply, and that’s not too bad in most situations and for many practical purposes you can largely trust them, but don’t kid yourself.
Maybe we should accept this. Maybe we should say: to hell with the priesthoods!
I think this would be a mistake.
My thesis in this essay is that the priesthoods are neither a rent-seeking clique nor an epiphenomenon of the distribution of knowledgeable people.
In what universe are these not rent-seeking cliques?
They are not only rent-seeking cliques. The stationary bandits have to provide some value to defend their turf, after all. But to use doctors as a main example and pretend they are not very literally a rent-seeking clique – whatever else they also are – is rather deeply confusing.
Scott Alexander complains that the priesthoods are captured by left-wing politics and often rather brazenly doing politics, which I agree is an important issue here, then he posts this chart.
But then he says something weird.
The meme is supposed to be a criticism of the priesthoods. But I genuinely miss the step where you had to find a priest who made something up, rather than making it up yourself directly.
Priesthoods make things up differently from normal people. Even when they’re corrupt, they still have a reputation to maintain. I’ve written about this before at Bounded Distrust and The Media Very Rarely Lies.
I mostly disagree. If you’re going to play the ‘I made it up’ game, make it up. I get the advantage of the making things up having some amount of restraint on it. That can be helpful on occasion.
At this point, the ‘jealously guard their own reputation’ function is ineffective enough as a group that I don’t see the point. Individuals also guard their own reputations, often far better, whereas the priesthoods have burned their reputations down. They’ve both collectively decided that they are going to effectively assert that which is not as a group plan in many cases, politically and otherwise, and also members are increasingly happy to go rogue.
So priesthoods’ standards fall slowly; a substantial fraction of doctors need to have been corrupted before any doctor feels comfortable acting in a corrupt way.
The part where individual doctors adjust slowly is a feature. But our perceptions shifting similarly slowly is a rather serious bug.
You know what priesthood Scott Alexander doesn’t discuss? Actual priests.
In particular, he doesn’t discuss Rabbis. In my culture, the priesthood argues with each other and with you, endlessly, about everything. The public is not only allowed but encouraged to participate in this. And if you want to be a Rabbi, mostly you don’t need some official central authority’s permission, or to adhere to their rules. There’s a bunch of training and all that, but ultimately you need the congregation to decide that you’re their Rabbi. That’s it.
He also doesn’t go back and revisit the original question he starts with, of the Rationalist priesthood, in the Rationalist community. Do we exclude ‘the public’? Yes, in the sense that if the average person tried to participate, we’d downvote and ignore them. But we’d do so not because they didn’t have credentials. We’d do it because we don’t respect your arguments and way of thinking. We’d notice you do not know The Way, and treat you accordingly until that changes. But that’s the whole point.
You can just do things. Except the priesthoods mostly are indeed rent-seeking cliques, and have sought legal protections against you just doing things, so you can’t. And in other cases, they’re conspiring to make it not respectable, and invalid, to do things without joining the clique. Then instructing everyone in the clique not to do things.
Which reliably renders those areas dead or stagnant, at best. Don’t let them do it.
An estimate of average vehicle values shows that there has not been a substantive adjustment in the average value of private cars, suggesting there has not been a substantial crowding-out-of-the-poor effect.
This one I know instantly, it’s University around 11th Street. From what I remember, it’s usually reasonably quiet, there’s no real reason to be on it with a car due to how it interacts with Union Square. Japonica is very good, the Naya is relatively new, that used to be Saigon Market on the left which was solid but closed a few years ago. Tortaria used to be a top place for me but they changed their sandwiches and now I never go there, although I still like the tacos.
The levels of decline in traffic in such pictures presumably involved a lot of selection. Even so, they’re pretty weird.
Some restaurants are offering $9 discounts to drivers tooffset the congestion price. This is smart, because some diners will value this far and above $9, they’ll be more likely to choose your restaurant out of tons of options, they’re spend more freely, and it may even increase the tip by $9 or more out of appreciation. Those from outside the zone are on average poorer and are worse at knowing which places are good (including because they try less often) so this is also smart price discrimination.
Note that some of the discounts are simply traditional special deals with an excuse – Sushi by Bou has a discount code, Shake Shack has a code for a deal that costs $9, Clinton Hill is discounting everyone, that’s 3 of the 6 offers. Also note the expiration dates on the deals, and that by percentage about 0% of restaurants are doing this.
Tyler Cowen’s larger point was also interesting.
Tyler Cowen: I am not suggesting that will be the typical equilibrium, as it should demand on elasticities of demand and supply, and also the time horizon over which you consider adjustment.
But do note that if you are a NIMBY vs. YIMBY type, you ought to conclude that a lot of the congestion tax will fall on landlords, ultimately, and not drivers.
The New York Times reports that restaurant owners are nervous, as some who do shipping pass the fees on to restaurants, and some of their workers are supposedly driving in every day although the math says almost none of them did before.
Julia Moskin: Jake Dell, an owner of Katz’s Deli, estimated that one-fifth of his employees drive to work, usually because they live in parts of Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx that are underserved by public transit.
Drive into work is different from drive fully into Manhattan for work. Katz’s is right by a subway stop (2 avenue on the F) and within reasonable reach of multiple other lines, and where the hell are you parking if you drive in all the way?
Once again here, we get more strange math:
Julia Moskin: Many of his guests drive in from the suburbs, he said, and pay about $20 in tolls and $50 for parking even before congestion pricing. Mr. Mehta said that they are both cost- and safety-conscious, and that forcing them to chose between spending more for an evening out or braving public transit will keep them out of Manhattan altogether.
So that’s $70 for tolls and parking, or $79 for tolls, parking and the congestion price, purely to come eat a meal that likely costs ~$200, rather than eat locally or take mass transit. Are you telling me they’d much rather pay the $70 and have the extra traffic at the bridges and tunnels and will travel in far less? That does not actually make any sense.
Similarly, the same article complains about a minimum wage hike from $16 to $16.50, and notes that someone was having trouble getting dishwashers at $29 an hour. I’m no fan of the minimum wage but if it doesn’t remotely bind, who cares?
What I presume matters most is the congestion tax on trucks (which is more than $9) that deliver the supplies. That will make the trucks more efficient, but it is also a charge that will need to be passed on in some form, to some combination of landlords via lower rent in the long run, and to customers.
Those customers are the residents of Manhattan, who essentially everyone agrees are made better off by all this. Note that trucks delivering to grocery stores face the same charges, so the marginal cost of dining out likely won’t change, and the percentage charge might even go down. Which means that the long run amount of dining out plausibly goes up.
To the extent that the tax incidence falls ultimately on landlords, that makes congestion pricing even better. Note that previously, Tyler Cowen framed congestion pricing as good for Manhattan residents and bad for visitors. One could ask ‘which is it’ and it could be different for residential versus commercial.
Normally one would worry that a tax on landlords and buildings would reduce the supply of buildings. But in the case of New York City for most commercial and retail space, the supply is fixed – there are only so many places to put it, and they are going to be full no matter what. For residential, by Cowen’s model and also my own, rents and sale prices should go up rather than down, as improved experience outweighs the cost, and this would hold true even if we correctly priced trips within the zone at $9 (and even if we also priced taxi rides accordingly as well).
Both children and adults do not view social resources like love and trust as zero-sum, or at least they view them as ‘less zero-sum than material resources like stickers.’ Well, I certainly would hope so, these are very clearly not zero-sum things in most contexts. In other contexts, there are obvious competitive elements. In my experience both adults and children seem reasonably good and knowing the difference most of the time?
Their explanation is weird:
Abstract (Kevin Wei and Fan Yang): Perceived renewability of resources predicted lower levels of zero-sum beliefs, and both social and material resources were perceived as less zero-sum when presented as renewable compared with nonrenewable. These finds shed light on the nature and origins of zero-sum beliefs, highlighting renewability as a key mechanism and a potential intervention for reducing competition and promoting cooperation.
I mean, I guess, in some senses, for sufficiently strong renewability, especially if we are accessing the resource at different times. But this feels so off, some sort of buzzword or applause light trying to fit its square peg into a round hole.
The key element, I am guessing is, going out on a limb… actually not being zero-sum? Which sometimes has causal factors or correlates that can look like ‘renewability.’
Zara Dar: People may not know this, but I publish the same STEM videos on both YouTube and Pornhub. While YourTube generally generates more views, the ad revenue per 1 million views on Pornhub is nearly three times higher.
There ‘aint no rule’ that PornHub videos need to be porn, and the reviews are mostly very positive and much more informative than YouTube’s since you get percentages. Unfortunately, there are now a bunch more states where this won’t work, thanks to PornHub pulling out in the face of new ID laws.
Of course, there’s always the danger of audience capture.
Zara Dar: After my last video went viral announcing I had dropped out of my PhD to pursue OnlyFans and teaching STEM on YouTube full-time, I made over $40k on OnlyFans-more than my previous annual stipend as a graduate student. While most of us don’t pursue graduate studies for the money, it’s terrifying how underpaid and undervalued researchers are in academia.
Elon Musk: Algorithm tweak coming soon to promote more informational/entertaining content. We will publish the changes to @XEng.
Our goal is to maximize unregretted user-seconds. Too much negativity is being pushed that technically grows user time, but not unregretted user time.
We’re also working on easy ways for you to adjust the content feed dynamically, so you can have what you want at any given moment.
Paul Graham: Can you please stop penalizing links so much? They’re some of the most informative and entertaining content here.
One of the most valuable things you can do for people is to tell them about something interesting they didn’t know about. Links are often the best way to do that.
I strongly support Paul Graham and everyone else continuing to hound Elon Musk about the links unless and until Musk reverses course on that.
I also want to note that ‘unregretted user-seconds’ is a terrible goal.
Your Twitter thread should either be a few very long posts, one giant post, or a true thread where the posts are limited to 280 characters. Otherwise you’re making people click on each Tweet to expand it. Especially bad is when each one is slightly over the limit. Yes, Twitter should obviously display in a way that fixes this, but it doesn’t.
Everything about the way the TikTok so-called ‘ban’ that was never a ban ultimately played out screams that we were correct to attempt to ban TikTok, and that we will regret that due to corruption we failed to do so. TikTok demonstrated, in so many ways, that it is toxic, and that it is an instrument of foreign propaganda willing to gaslight us in broad daylight about anything and everything, all the time – including by doing so about the so-called ban.
One of their favorites is to push claims about how great China is and how awful America is, especially economically and also in terms of freedoms or ethics, that are mostly flat out factually absurd. She says ‘what do you mean in other countries they don’t have to spend 20% of their paycheck on groceries?’ and ‘in other countries everyone can own homes’ and ‘what do you mean people in China work one job and they don’t even work 40 hours’ in tears.
It means they are lying to you. Also that your consumption basket is completely absurdly rich compared to theirs and if you had to consume theirs for a month you would want to throw yourself out of a window.
Roon: the thing about America is that its clearly always functioning at like 10% of its power level due to the costs of freedom and yet manages to win anyway due to the incredible benefits of freedom
Richard Ngo: This also applies to people. A significant number of the most brilliant people I know avoid self-coercion to an extent that sometimes appears dysfunctional or even self-destructive. But it allows them to produce wonders.
This effect seems particularly concentrated amongst Thiel fellows (e.g. @nickcammarata, @LauraDeming). @Aella_Girl and @repligate are also examples.
I myself am halfway there but still want (for better or worse) to be more rigid than most of the people I’m thinking of.
Scott Stevenson: Are you sure they avoid self-coercion? They may be very disciplined and embrace illegibility. These look similar but they’re different. You can be disciplined and highly illegible.
Note that America could function at like 20% instead of 10% without sacrificing any of its freedoms, indeed by allowing more freedoms, and thus win more, but yeah.
My case is weird. I do things through willpower all the time, and I don’t really have long periods of ‘being off’ or anything like that, but ultimately everything is because I want to do it, at least on the ‘I want to use the willpower here’ level. I’m fortunate to have been able to structure around that. And still, I feel like I waste so much time.
Richard Ngo: Hypothesis: for many people one of the main blockers to the radical non-coercion I describe below is their pride in their ability to endure pain.
When self-discipline is a big part of your identity, even “having fun” often involves seeking out new types of adversity to overcome.
Clearly the ability to overcome adversity can be extremely valuable (and developing more goal discipline is one of my main aspirations for the year).
But when you have a really big hammer you’re really proud of, everything looks like a nail, even the parts of yourself in pain.
This thread was sparked by me trying some laps in a pool and wondering “why on earth does anyone do endurance exercise when they could play sports instead for all the same health benefits and 10x the fun?”
I’d also draw a big distinction between pain and adversity. They are not the same.
Robin Hanson: “What we have now is a perverse, frictionless vision for art, where a song stays on repeat not because it’s our new favorite but because it’s just pleasant enough to ignore. The most meaningful songs of my life, though, aren’t always ones I can listen to over & over. They’re there when I need them.”
And how exactly can any music system tell that the marginal value of a particular listen is unusually high? If the only signal it gets is whether you listen, all it can tell is that that marginal value is above your other options.
[Twitter] has similar issues.
If all you know are how many times a song has played, then yes, all you can do is use the Spotify formula of rewarding the number of times songs are played.
I am an extreme version of this. The vast majority of my music streaming hours are rain sounds, literal white noise I use to help me sleep. I don’t want all my streaming dollars going to that.
The answer is to offer other forms of feedback.
One can start with the tools that already exist by default. How are users selecting songs? Should we treat all those plays equally?
Here are some basic ideas along those lines.
We could weigh songs a user likes (the plus icon) or has added it to their music collection more, perhaps much more, than songs where the user doesn’t do that.
We could rate manually selected plays, where the user uses a playlist they created or selects a particular song or album themselves, more than songs autoselected or off of system generated playlists.
We could downweight songs played in long sessions without user interaction, especially if those songs are being looped.
We could reward songs more if the user then seeks out the artist, or otherwise shows related interests.
We could draw distinctions between song types in various ways.
You can also ask the user to tell you what they value?
Suppose there was a button you could click that said ‘support this artist.’ Each user can select any set of artists they want to support each month, and some of their allocation of payments gets divided among whichever artists they select. I expect this would be super popular, and help reward real value creation. Or you could get one reward token per day, week or month when you listen. Or maybe it appears at random while you’re listening, and you have to notice and click it for it to count.
The downside of course is that there would be various schemes to mine that revenue, perhaps offering to split it with the user, and people starting fake accounts to get the revenue from themselves and their friends, and so on. You would need safeguards. It would need to be fully anonymous. Perhaps you could only get support revenue at some proportion to some calculation based on your unique streams.
That’s the five-minute-brainstorming-session version. We can do a lot better.
If we actually want to do better.
What should we think about claims regarding ‘Operation Chokepoint 2.0’?
I see no reason not to believe the things in that post.
So, as I understand it:
Did crypto and people involved in it get debanked rather broadly? Yes.
Did the government encourage this, including some Democratic officials using various forms of leverage to cause more cracking down? Yes.
Did they intentionally kill Libra using their leverage? Yes.
Did the individuals in crypto often try to use personal accounts as business accounts, leading to the part where the individuals got debanked too? Hell yeah.
Has the SEC largely enforced the obviously-true-under-the-actual-law-as-written fact that almost all crypto tokens and certainly all the offerings are securities, while not giving crypto any way to comply whatsoever that is compatible with their technology and business models? Well, yeah, to a large extent that did happen.
Are crypto people trying to use this moment, in its various aspects, and the label ‘Operation Chokepoint 2.0,’ to try and force banks to allow them to operate with essentially no supervision, allowed to essentially do all the financial crime, as Patrick McKenzie claims? And, also as Patrick McKenzie lays out at the end, do they want to force the SEC to allow them to issue arbitrary tokens they can market to ordinary Americans via every form imaginable to both make every moment of our lives filled with horrid spam and also try to extract trillions of dollars, largely from unsuspecting rubes? I mean, that does sound like what they would try and do.
Are banks ‘part of the government’ as Marc Andreessen claims? Do we ‘not have a free market’ in banking? Well, yes and no, banks certainly have a lot of rules to follow and when the regulators say jump they have to ask how high, but centrally no, that’s not how this works in the way he’s trying to imply, stop it. I’m sure Patrick McKenzie would write a lot of words on that prompt explaining in excruciating detail exactly how yes and how no, that he still felt was highly incomplete.
The question this leaves us with is, how far beyond crypto that did this go? Marc Andreessen claims that they also debanked “tech startups and political enemies.” But this is a highly unreliable source, very prone to hyperbole and exaggeration – he could in both cases essentially again just mean crypto.
The one other case I know about of a ‘political enemy’ being debanked plausibly for being a political enemy is the case of Gab (which definitely happened regardless of what they did or didn’t do to provoke it), but what else do we have? How systematic was this? Are there any known cases where it was, as he implied, the government going after AI startups because they are (non-crypto) AI startups?
And if there are such other cases, does it go beyond a few overzealous or partisan people in some compliance departments acting on Current Thing on their own, of which one can doubtless find some examples if you look hard enough, as Patrick McKenzie lays out?
Especially, did partisan officials engage in a campaign to debank political enemies? Marc Andreessen claimed yes in front of 100 million people.
Patrick McKenzie points out that if that was true, the world would look very different. That these claims seem to be almost entirely spurious.
I am actually asking, in case there is stronger evidence that Marc Andreessen was not, to use another of Patrick’s terms, bullshitting as per his usual. There are some very bold claims being thrown around far too casually, that are very Huge If True.
I do think we should have a full accounting of exactly what happened, and that this is important. I do worry that the ‘full accounting’ we will actually get will be written by certain rather unreliable agenda-laden narrators. For details, again, Patrick’s account seems like the best we have right now.
Dennis Porter’s account seems likely correct too, as I understand this, government applies soft power to imply that if you bank people in certain industries (centrally crypto here at least sometimes, but there’s a bunch of others saying ‘first time?’) you’ll get investigated, so the banks don’t want the trouble.
What I don’t understand is the label ‘tech founders’ as people who are being debanked, independent of issues with crypto. Yes, Silicon Valley Bank went under, but to the extent that was intentional it was quite clearly about crypto. I don’t see any such pattern substantiated in any concrete way, and when I asked o1, GPT-4o and Claude they didn’t find one either. Patrick McKenzie seems unaware of one, except insofar as a16z portfolio companies tended to engage in actual financial shenanigans and get debanked for them sometimes, which frankly seems like the kind of thing he would invest in. As far as I can tell, this was basically bullshitting.
I’d also use this opportunity to agree strongly with Brian Armstrong here that Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations are nowhere near passing a cost-benefit analysis. They do indeed have impose massive costs and make many things so much more annoying as to make people give up pro-social activities outright, I suspect his ~$213 billion global annual cost estimate here is actually rather low. One of those costs is, indeed, a lot of the debanking going on.
The primary intended effect, of course, is exactly in the deterrence of activity and cost of compliance. You only intercept 0.2% of criminal proceeds, but if that makes all sorts of crime more expensive and inconvenient (e.g. you Better Call Saul and he takes 15% up front and also you spend a bunch of time dealing with a car wash). So in an important sense you’ve lowered criminal returns and logistical ability quite a lot.
This in turn should greatly reduce crime. We impose all sorts of regulations on pro-social and legal activity, if criminals could use the banking system with impunity the balance might get totally out of control. We could easily be preventing a ton of counterfactual money laundering activity. Or it could be not that impactful versus a much lighter touch version, and we should be 80-20ing (or even 90-10ing) this.
I’m very confident we’re spending at least double (in terms of money and inconvenience) what we should be spending on this, as opposed to our underinvestment in many other forms of crime prevention, and probably a lot more than that. The banking system puts up way too many barriers in places that have very low probabilities of stopping either errors or crimes, when it could simply track activity instead. And yes, if we keep all this up and things are too annoying, we drive people to alternative systems.
I wonder how or how much this is related to it becoming easier over time to get various documentation from banks, as various frictions go away perhaps they find other places to appear because they were load bearing.
Conrad Bastable has thoughts here about the question of ‘do you destroy debanking and other government abuses or do you use them on your enemies now that you have power?’ My note here is that he puts Marc Andreessen on the ‘destroy the ring’ side of the debate, whereas I see him as very much saying to use the ring. Perhaps not to the extent Vance wants to use ‘raw administrative power’ to bully everyone and everyone, but quite a lot.
Men love quests. Give them quests. Then say thank you rather than sorry.
Nadia: You can literally just email a museum and ask them to connect you to exhibit creators and geek about their art with them – what a beautiful and open world??!
Ryn: Yes! I work in heritage and run an exhibition programme and this is true. Art and culture can have a huge influence on people’s lives, but we never know unless you tell us. It absolutely makes my day when I get those types of emails.
Thomas Delvasto: It’s pretty dope. Most creators and professors love that shit too.
Yatharth: every time i’ve done this they’ve usually been dying to talk to me 😭
i assumed they would be too busy or uninterested
Speaking from experience: Creators are by default yelling into the void, and even at a surprisingly high level hearing they’re appreciated is kind of amazing, it’s great to interact with fans, and also the data on exactly what hit home helps too.
There is a limit to how much of this one wants, but almost no one ever does this, so you probably don’t hit that limit until you’re someone rather high level.
In general, you can reach out to people, and they remarkably often do respond. When I don’t get a response at all, it’s typically a very high level person who is very obviously overwhelmed with requests.
Paul Graham: Prediction: This is a secular [as in not cyclical] trend. The pendulum will never swing back.
Steve McGuire: Seems likely.
“Employers don’t hire as many MBA grads during the school year, a tactic that was common two years ago. Now, they recruit smaller numbers closer to graduation—and afterward. “
“Amazon, Google and Microsoft have reduced MBA recruiting, as have consulting firms.”
“Going to Harvard is not going to be a differentiator. You have to have the skills.” —Harvard Business Schools’s Career and Professional Development Director
Jinjoo Lee: What might it take for the shine to return to natural diamonds? Miners like De Beers are hoping that the widening price gap for the lab-grown variety will naturally lead consumers to consider them a completely different category, not a substitute.
For those who don’t know, if your flight seems oddly expensive, such as in this example $564 LAX-STL, I don’t recommend it, but you can (if you dare) try and do much better by booking a flight with a layover at your true destination, such as LAX-STL-ATL, and not using the second leg of the flight. By default this does mean you can’t check bags, but with a long enough layover there’s a claim you can cancel the second leg after the first one and get your bags back. The catch is that technically this violates the terms of service and they can sue you for the fare and void your miles and in theory ban you also cancel your return ticket (so if you do this, you presumably want to do it with two one-way tickets) and so on.
Patrick Collison on reading ten historical novels in 2024. He recommends Middlemarch, Bleak House, Karenina and Life of Fate. It is telling that he includes a passage to show what a great wordsmith Dickens was… and I couldn’t make myself finish it, I was so bored. That’s not to say it was bad wordsmithing, I can’t even say, but there was something there I was supposed to care about, and I just didn’t.
Visakan Veerasamy: I’ve personally helped several hundred people with their problems at this point and one of the most widespread issues was they were previously thinking of focus or attention span as something fungible, like a commodity, when it always turns out to be more like love and caring.
He links to Jay Alto giving recommendations on how to improve on this: Sleep, bianural beats right before work, warm-up, 90-minute work sessions, warm-down, supplementation of (Omega 3s, Creatine, Alpha-GPC and L-tyrosine), meditation and an afternoon ‘non-sleep deep rest). This all most definitely falls under ‘do what works for you,’ a lot of this I can confirm wouldn’t help me, but I have no doubt it works for some people.
Tip rates at restaurants slightly declined and are now around 19.4% from a high of 19.8%. The whole system is fundamentally broken, since tips correlate with money spent and whether the person adheres to social norms, and vary almost none with actual service, plus people are abusing the system by asking for tips anywhere and everywhere, which makes some people pay up everywhere and others throw up their hands and pay nowhere. But I don’t know how we get out of this trap, and restaurants that go tipless learn that due to customer perception of prices they can’t sustain it.
Robin Hanson: Nothing makes food taste better than not eating for many days before. Yet how often do supposed “foodies” use this time-tested trick to achieve max food pleasure?
My explanation: they are more interested in signaling taste than in acquiring pleasure.
No doubt that is part of it, and people often want the symbolic experience of having eaten the good thing more than eating the thing they would actually enjoy, or especially that they would enjoy in the moment.
But also fasts are rather expensive for most people, and it’s not obvious the gains are worthwhile, and people are bad at planning ahead and discipline.
I do indeed often fast for 24-36 hours, occasionally 48, before a big or special meal, or purely because I can only eat so often. But I have the practice, and it truly does not bother me. My wife is an example of someone who absolutely cannot do that.
I do agree strongly with his opt-repeated call Towards More Direct Signals. Or signals are often indirect, and costly. Would it not be better for them to be direct, and not costly, but still credible? Alas, we do not want to admit what we are doing to others or even ourselves, and punish overt signaling and demands for it, so this is difficult.
He points to the Nordics allowing the public to access tax records, as a way to force everyone to credibly and freely signal wealth, and suggests we could do mandatory IQ tests and paternity tests and such as well. This makes sense in theory. If we inflict a price on people who signal too cheaply, requiring cheap signals can be a win for everyone, or at least everyone who wasn’t successfully fooling us, and faking the signal.
The biggest problem is that our desires, even hidden ones, are not so simple. Do we want to signal our wealth? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. In the never-stop-Robin-Hansoning, we have this from the comments.
Daves Not Here: High income numbers make you a target for burglary, kidnapping, or home invasion. At that point, you might want to signal that you consume a lot of private security services.
Robin Hanson: I’m happy to have that stat included in your public stat profile.
No, that’s even worse! The issue is not that you want to signal that you consume the services. The issue is that you actually need the services, and actually effective security is super expensive not only in money but in lifestyle. If you have billions in crypto – which to be very clear I do not – there are situations in which you want that known, and others in which you really, really don’t.
Similarly, often you want to ‘live as a normal person’ without wealth coloring everything. If you make a friend, or date someone, and they know you’re rich, how do you know they aren’t after your money? That’s a key reason why ‘who you knew before you made it’ is such a big deal, and why the wise ultra-wealthy person often doesn’t tell their dates the full extent of their situation. For a fictional example, see Crazy Rich Asians.
There are also issues of fairness norms, and the ‘evil eye.’ A key failure mode is when people are too aware of when others have additional wealth or income, and can thus create social obligation to friends, family or community to spend that, imposing very high effective marginal tax rates, often approaching 100%. If people then expect you to keep producing at that level, it can be even worse than that.
Or you could simply face a lot of price discrimination, and a lot of solicitation for gifts, spending and investment, along with attempts to scam, defraud or rob you, have the specter of money over every interaction, and generally feel adversarial all the time.
Thus there are common real situations where additional wealth or income that people know about is much less valuable or even an albatross, and everyone works hard to hide their wealth, or even intentionally avoids acquiring it in the first place. If you cannot hide your wealth, the envy and fairness instincts run deep, and people might well punish you in various ways for the signal even if you didn’t intentionally send it. These mechanisms keeps many cultures mired in poverty.
I’d also note that my experiences in the nonprofit world show a large amount of a version of this problem. Donors often only want to help based on their marginal impact, and want to ensure you ‘need the money,’ so everything gets twisted to ensure that without marginal donations a lot of value would be lost. And That’s Terrible.
Another problem is Goodhart’s Law. People are going to respond to incentives. If certain signals are required, then people will warp their behaviors around those signals, to get the results they want, in ways that could themselves be massively costly.
I final problem is that some amount of strategic ambiguity is important to social interactions. In a typical group you would know who is highest and who is lowest in status, but there is often deliberate effort to avoid creating too much clarity about status within the middle of the group to maintain group cohesion and let everyone tell themselves different stories – see The Gervais Principle. And when things get quantified, including changes in status from actions, then that’s a lot like attaching money to those transactions, another reason many things want to be ambiguous, and also of course often you want to measure signaling skill itself in various ways, and so on.
So you often want to be able to signal ambiguously, and with different levels of clarity, to different people, about things like wealth but also things like intelligence. And you want to have some control over methods of that.
The correct Hansonian response to these caveats is to ask when and where these trends go in one direction versus the other, and why we should expect such objections to dominate. And to point out that we should expect to have way too little mandated clarity versus what is optimal, for the reasons Hanson originally gives, even if the results of marginal clarity are mixed and decreasing. These are very strong objections.
I endorse the principle here from Kelsey Piper that if someone is rhetorically endorsing mass murder or other horrible things, one should assume the people involved do indeed endorse or at least are willing to be gleefully indifferent to mass murder, far more than you might thin,, no matter how much they or others explain they are using ‘dramatic license’ or saying it ‘to make a valid point,’ and this applies in all directions.
Kelsey Piper: Some people have really invested their identities in “having any standards of decency at all is leftist” and I don’t think this is going to go as well as they believe it will.
If a leftist said that we should guillotine all the rich, deport all the MAGA supporters, and take the vote away from men, would you go “hey, it’s dramatic license, calm down”? I think that everybody should be held to the standard of not calling for atrocities.
J.D. Haltigan: I would simply pass it off as standard leftist fare.
Andrew Rettek: People being tolerant of those sorts of statements and dismissing my unease with them back in 2018-2019 is a big factor in why I stopped participating in a lot of discord channels.
Kelsey Piper: I made the mistake of assuming some leftist rhetoric was dramatic license not meant literally and then learned that no, those people sincerely supported Hamas and shooting CEOs. I have learned from that mistake.
I think that for the most part, people jokingly declare that their political agenda is mass murder usually actually favor mass murder, or are at least gleefully indifferent to it.
Virtue is good, vice is bad, society isn’t a race to the bottom and the people who are racing to the bottom won’t like what they find there.
No Refuge in Audacity. Also, if someone says that endorsing very horrible proposals is ‘standard [X]-ist fare’ a la Haltigan here, and you find yourself thinking they are right about that, then you should draw the obvious correct conclusions about standard forms of [X] and act accordingly.
The other problem is, if you start out saying such things ironically or as hyperbole, especially if people around you are doing the same, you all start believing it. That’s how human brains work.
Ben Landau-Taylor: It is psychologically impossible to hold any position ironically for longer than 12 hours. If you start saying something as a joke, then you will come to believe it sincerely very, very soon.
Science Banana: true but it has good and bad uses IMO. Irony is a frame that lets us try out a lot of behaviors and then kick out the frame if we like them.
Ben Landau-Taylor: Yeah this is why the “Skill issue” and the “Yet. Growth mindset” people actually end up getting better at stuff and living with more thumos.
The title of the excellent post by Sarah Constantin is ‘What Goes Without Saying,’ because in the right circles the points here do go without saying. But in most places, they very much do not, which is why she is saying them, and why I’m repeating them here. Full post is recommended, but the central points are:
My biggest disagreement is that Auren says the food does not matter. That’s Obvious Nonsense. The food matters a lot. Great food makes the night, both directly and indirectly. Great food gives people something to enjoy and appreciate and bond over, and will be something people remember, and even if the conversation is boring, you still had great food. Everyone’s in a good mood.
Even more than that, if the food is bad, you feel obligated to eat it anyway to be polite and because it’s there, so it’s often far worse than no food at all. If you structure the food so one can inconspicuously not eat, then food matters much less, as your downside is capped.
If you don’t have good food, you can still rescue the night with great conversation – I would happily have a great dinner conversation minus the dinner.
Of course, you can have a great night of discussion over pizza. Nothing wrong with that. That’s a different type of party, and it has different rules.
All the terrible dinners Auren warns about, and oh boy are they terrible? They all have terrible food. Imagine going to that nightmare charity dinner and auction, except the food is not catering, it is exactly what you’d get at your favorite high end restaurant. So sure, you have to sit through some drivel, but the meal is amazing. So much better. The rubber chicken is integral to the horribleness of that charity auction dinner.
I agree speakers are bad, and that you want people on roughly the ‘same level’ regarding what you plan to discuss, in the sense that everyone should want to meet and talk to everyone else. It’s fine to have someone ‘hold court’ or explain things or what not, too, but everyone has to want that.
I agree that planned conversation can be better than unplanned, but I think unplanned is fine too, and I especially push back against the idea that without a plan a dinner party will suck. If you bring together great people, over good food, it will almost never suck. Relax. It’s all upside from there.
Especially important: Do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Don’t think that if you do a bad job, you will have made people worse off.
The full easy mode is ‘let’s all go to a restaurant and have dinner together’ and there is 100% nothing wrong with choosing to play in easy mode.
I strongly agree that you want one conversation, and you want to keep things small, and you need good acoustics. I don’t think it’s as fatal as he does to have 2+ conversations, so long as each one can hear itself within the conversations, especially since I think 12 is already too many people in one conversation. I think you want to be in the 4-8 person range, hosts included.
Thus yes, the best place is your place, because it’s small.
I also mostly oppose fixed end times, except for a ‘this is when it becomes actually too late for us.’ The night will go on as long as it wants to, and I don’t want to pressure people either to stay or to go.
This step change feels like it changes the nature of the product. It’s a big deal.
An issue with Waymo is that they cannot easily adjust supply to fit demand. They have a fixed supply of cars. Waymo does use surge pricing anyway, since demand side needs to be adjusted, but they don’t apply enough of it to balance wait times.
If you ever consider gambling, here is a sign for future tapping:
Note on sports betting: This assumes random betting on a -110 line. You can do much worse if you use parlays or props, or you can actively win if you’re good enough, and quick line shopping helps a lot (probably takes you from -5% to about -2%).
The issue is tracking the longest turn. Perhaps an AI like Project Astra could do this?
For computer versions of many games, this is easy to implement, and potentially very cool. Alas, it doesn’t guard against someone taking infinite time, and also doesn’t help if someone already has accepted that they’re getting the penalty this game. So it’s not the right complete design, you need something that scales alongside this.
A strong argument that Hasbro should massively increase spending on the Magic Pro Tour going forward. This suggests a 150% prize pool jump. I would go a lot further. Why not a 2,000% jump to $1 million per event, which would still less than double overall costs because of logistical expenses? Magic is a bigger and more popular game than back in the day, and this is still a drop in the bucket. Don’t let the failure of the MPL prevent us from doing the very obvious. Not that many at Wizards don’t know that, but the bosses at Hasbro need to understand.
Netflix mandates that content in its ‘casual viewing’ category continuously have characters explain what is happening. Good. Technically this is ‘horrible writing’ and makes the content worse, but the purpose of this content isn’t to be good in that sense. ‘Show, don’t tell’ is for people who want to focus and pay attention, and overrated anyway. I don’t put shows on in the background, but many others do, and the cost of telling in addition to showing usually is often very low.
This then gets them out of the way so Netflix can also offer Really Good and even Insanely Great content, such as recent verified examples Nobody Wants This and The Diplomat. You can’t watch more than a small fraction of what’s out there, so differentiation is good, actually.
There is a problem, not unique to Netflix, where there are shows that have real merit, but which are presented as casual viewing, and thus waste a lot of time or even involve massive intentional self-spoilers.
The bad-on-purpose genius of Hot Frosty, according to Kat Rosenfield. I love all this on a conceptual level, but not on a ‘I would choose to see this movie’ level.
The Diplomat is also excellent, now through two seasons, a third is coming.
Severance had an excellent season 1 but I haven’t gotten to season 2 yet. No spoilers.
TV show rating updates: Umbrella Academy moves from Tier 2 → Tier 3 as it only finished okay. Slow Horses goes in Tier 2. Killing Eve goes in Tier 4. In a special split case, Supernatural (Seasons 6-15) goes in Tier 4, but Supernatural (Seasons 1-5) remains in Tier 2, if I had to fuse them I’d split the difference. Similarly, The Simpsons used to be purely Tier 3, will now be Tier 2 (Seasons 1-10) and Tier 5 (Seasons 11+) as a superior approximation. The Bachelor moves from Tier 5 → Tier 3, The Bachelorette at least from Tier 5 → Tier 4, in a pure ‘no I didn’t get it and I was wrong.’
Also I am considering renaming the tiers from 1-5 to S/A/B/C/F as per custom.
The new record for ‘men slept with in 12 hours’ is now 1,057, for some necessarily (given math) loose definition of what counts. My actual objection is that we need clear standards on exactly what counts here. Depending on the answer, this is either a ‘how did you pull that off’ or ‘come on you can at least double that.’
The college football playoff is a rousing success, except that the actual game outcomes could not from my perspective have gone worse. Aside from swiftly dispatching the ACC teams I rooted for did not win a single game. Notre Dame vs. Ohio State with OSU a heavy favorite is the actual worst possible final matchup in all of college football – Ohio State is objectively Them and Notre Dame is my best friend’s Them. Well, as they say, wait till next year.
Why should I invest in even my local team if they have to constantly rotate players, and having a shot this year often means gaming the salary cap and thus being bad in adjacent years?
As a fan, I want to root for the same core players over time, and either have ‘hope and faith’ each year or a story about how we’re rebuilding towards something that isn’t a 1-year flash in the pan.
There’s also the problem of taxes, which Tyler oddly does not mention. If I play in New York or Los Angeles, I have to pay much higher tax rates. But the salary cap and max contract are the same. I probably like living in those places, and I probably like the media and marketing and star making opportunities, but this is really rough for exactly the teams you ‘want’ to be good. From the league’s financial perspective, you don’t want Oklahoma City playing Milwaukee in the finals. Imagine a world in which the salary cap and max contract were post tax.
Parity can be cool too, but we also don’t have that. There are fully three teams who have won 75% of their games as of Christmas Eve and four teams averaging at least a +9.5 point differential. And that’s presumably with those teams largely coasting to stay healthy for the playoffs – if the Cavaliers wanted to be undefeated, my guess is they would be.
I would also continue to blame the incentives. The season has too many games, and they matter too little, and the risk of injury thus dominates too much thinking. Sure, the finals of the midseason tournament is worth $300k per player and they’re going to care about that, but it should matter for the fans. Imagine if the midseason tournament came with a Golden Home Game. At any point during the playoffs, one time, you could say ‘we’re playing this one at home.’
Alternatively, this could all be a blip. The NBA had a great season, now it’s having a less great season. These things happen.
Paper claims that top tennis players use inefficient mixed strategies on where to target their serves, and most Pros would win substantially more if they solved for the equilibrium. Partly they’re pointing out that Pros are not perfect at the calculation, which is obviously true. What I think they’re missing, which is common in sports, is that not all points and games are created equal, and that opponents adjust to what you do in ways that don’t snap exactly back when the leverage shows up. So often players and teams will do non-optimal things now to impact future opponent actions, allowing them to be above equilibrium later.
Except for steroid use. Here I find Nate’s attitude unacceptable and baffling. We are talking about players whose careers were, fundamentally, a bunch of filthy cheating, and in a way that substantially contributed to their success. If that’s you, am never, ever rewarding that behavior with my vote, period, and if you disagree I will think less of you. I felt the same way about the Magic Hall of Fame, and voted accordingly.
The interesting steroid case as I understand what happened is Barry Bonds, in that we believe that he first had a Hall of Fame level career, and then he started using steroids, and then he had one of the best sets of results of all time. To me the question is, can we vote him in purely for the first half, or do we need to not do so because of the second half. But a discount rate of far less than 100%? I can’t agree to that. The same would apply to Clemens, A-Rod or anyone else.
The only clear mistake Nikita is making here is underestimating AI.
Nikita Bier: Over the next four years, the only thing that will have a greater economic impact than AI will be the financialization of everything, the effective legalization of gambling, and the elimination of all securities laws.
Grimes: I’m not a communist – I’m probably a capitalist but I think the incentives in capitalism are bad, and the dollar shud be backed by something more meaningful – like trees. I know that’s insane and likely impossible but I’m an artist so my job is to say things like this.
It’s an especially funny example to those who know their Douglas Adams. Which, given that Grimes had a child with Elon Musk, presumably includes her.
Ever since then, things in the world of AI have been utterly insane.
Google and OpenAI released endless new products, including Google Flash 2.0 and o1.
Redwood Research and Anthropic put out the most important alignment paper of the year, on the heels of Apollo’s report on o1.
Then OpenAI announced o3. Like the rest of the media, this blog currently is horrendously lacking in o3 content. Unlike the rest of the media, it is not because I don’t realize that This Changes Everything. It is because I had so much in the queue, and am taking the time to figure out what to think about it.
That queue includes all the other, non-AI things that happened this past month.
Your periodic reminder that if you say you’ll make a ton of money and then pursue your dreams, or then advance the causes you care about, the vast majority of the time this does not actually happen. Not never, but, well, hardly ever.
An important note from Michael Vassar: People rarely see themselves or their group as ‘bad’ or ‘evil,’ but often they do view themselves as ‘winners’ rather than ‘good.’ Which is a very different morality, and you can guess what label I’d use for such folks.
Sam Knowlton: Recycling is a psyop to convince people that plastic can be used abundantly and sustainably without consequences.
Of all the recyclable #5 plasticware waste generated in the US only 1% is recycled.
As a clean (with respect to the things this blog cares about) example of the kind of accusations being thrown around by a certain type of person, that very much rhyme with certain accusations in other areas including AI, in case I want to point one later: I saw this example where Mario Nawfal got 15m+ views for saying ‘Biden paid Reuters $300m for targeting Elon’s companies’ based on Mike Benz (who also got 15m+ views and got Elon Musk to reply with a 100% sign and called this ‘lawfare’) stating the facts that:
The government gave Reuters $300 million in total government contracts, mostly for various data analytics services to Thomson Reuters Government Contracts, a distinct subsidiary of Reuters.
Reuters did investigations of Musk that were unkind, for which they won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting.
No claim as to how #1 and #2 are related.
Therefore conspiracy and government funded attacks on Elon Musk!
No, seriously, here is the full argument, with the entire comments section cheering on how awful and illegal all this was:
Mario Newfal: The Biden administration gave $300 million in government contracts to Reuters while 11 federal agencies investigated Elon’s businesses—Tesla, SpaceX, and X.
During this time, Reuters received millions from these agencies and won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting on “misconduct at Elon’s companies.”
This means taxpayer dollars funded media attacks on Elon! It’s a coordinated effort to undermine one of America’s most innovative leaders.
Elon keeps building; they keep scheming.
It’s all one big government operation and conspiracy, man. Except not only don’t these posts have any evidence or causal story whatsoever here, not even a fig leaf of one, these contracts are not even larger under Biden than you would have expected from what they got under Trump. If you do a search on the very database he links to and extend it back another 4 years to include the first Trump administration, and sort by contract size, you get this:
As in, 7 of the 9 biggest contracts to Reuters in the past 8 years began under the Trump administration and the long tail looks similar. On so many levels there is absolutely nothing here. When I ask who seems more likely to put their finger on the scale of unrelated government contracts on the basis of news coverage, I think we all know the answer.
Career advice from Richard Ngo, aim to become the best at some broadly-leverageable thing, which can include being the best at the intersection of A, B and C.
Seriously, as I said on Twitter, I love economists, never stop economisting:
Tyler Cowen: A bigger change is that average walking speed rose by 15%. So the pace of American life has accelerated, at least in public spaces in the Northeast. Most economists would predict such a result, since the growth in wages has increased the opportunity cost of just walking around. Better to have a quick stroll and get back to your work desk.
I am tempted to reply with something wonky about marginal incentive effects not obviously pointing in that direction, or how the opportunity cost is mostly about substitution effects on leisure time instead, but mostly I just want to bask in it.
The biggest change in behavior was that lingering fell dramatically. The amount of time spent just hanging out dropped by about half across the measured locations.
…
The internet and mobile phones are likely driving this change in behavior.
I think faster walking, when you are alone, is mostly great. It doesn’t only get you where you are going faster, it’s better exercise. A slow walk alone can be nice but on average it’s mostly a skill issue. If you’re with someone else, then yeah, walk slow, have a chat.
As for outright lingering, yeah, I think this one is opportunity costs from better leisure options, the same as most everything else. Why would I linger at Boston’s Downtown Crossing, or another public square, and let serendipity happen, given the other options I have?
Adam Thierer: In recent years, we’ve repeatedly been fed a bed of lies about supposedly unassailable “digital monopolies” when, in reality, competition is always developing in unexpected ways.
These days my head is spinning trying to figure out which social media platforms (X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Threads, Mastodon, etc) I should be focused on. I’m trying to touch all these bases myself while also keeping up with all the other traditional platforms and outlets out there. It is completely overwhelming.
I suppose it’s only a matter of time before the pro-regulation crowd switches their argument and petitions government to end all this “ruinous competition” through interconnection / interop mandates. But, before that happens, let’s be clear that this splintering of social media is happening without any sort of unnatural external pressure from govt authorities. Once again, organic social and market forces worked their magic. The only problem is it works so well! Now we just have too many damn choices.
Now, excuse me while I go post this same rant on 5 other “digital monopolies.” 😂
BlueSky at that time was still less than 10% the size of Twitter. There are obvious parallels to what happened with Mastodon, which quickly fizzled out.
Yet this time feels different. With Mastodon, it felt like performative anger. People were announcing their moves like they were morally superior. Not this time. This time, the people moving are talking about it practically. They are serious.
The pattern is that the most progressive members of Twitter, and those who move in related circles, are mostly the ones splitting off into BlueSky. They claim Twitter is all MAGA now, I can confirm many times over that many they believe this, but it is all about how you use the site. I don’t encounter any of that, because I don’t interact with the relevant content.
From all reports, BlueSky is ‘like old Twitter’ in some ways, especially in the sense that Old Twitter was D+42, and in that it was largely a left wing echo chamber. Which in turn meant that other spaces did not have those people, and leaned further right, while the left wing echo chamber acted as an exclusionary rather than inclusionary force. Also, yes, more people looking to understand things or win at politics should be reading Tracing Woods, who I have met and is delightful.
My current view of BlueSky is that those who leave Twitter for BlueSky are usually improving both social networks. Everyone wins from them being distinct. Bubbles are not always a bad thing.
Community Notes is a miracle of the modern age. Is it over?
Richard Hanania: “Readers added context: mask off moment.”
This is the end of the old Community Notes. Now it’s about editorializing. These things always start off targeting the least sympathetic before expanding. Shame.
I strongly say no, and believe this is an important principle. I often see people dismiss norms when they see even one clear instance of ‘getting away with it’ or non-enforcement, or the start of a potential slippery slope, as if these things must be absolute and stand up to rigid definitions, or they’re worthless, doomed or both. And that simply is not so. Lots of rules, including most laws and norms, constantly face this sort of pushing and pushback, and are muddling through, often for a very long time.
Should Community Notes call this a ‘mask off moment’? No, but Community Notes is just people, and occasionally they’re going to do that sort of thing in this kind of spot. To illustrate, after Hanania drew attention to this, the note was voted off this post.
DOGE is looking for regulations to target. How do you tell them about this? It seems that you literally DM them on Twitter. That is literally what I have my ops person at Balsa doing for the next few weeks, gathering together properly formatted pitches to DOGE, starting with repealing the Jones Act and Dredge Act of course.
Jennifer Pahlka put out this widely praised post about how hard DOGE will have it when up against all the legal barriers, and how people like Musk willing to brazenly do things people say are illegal might be our best hope in spite of it, not someone like her who has studied the issues but would be too timid to act. Sounds like she should advise?
More than that, what this is saying is, the law has tied all this up in knots. So what we need, ultimately, is not DOGE. DOGE is potentially helpful but not good enough. What we need is new law, to get rid of old law. I realize this would be very difficult, but the first step is having it shovel ready. Is anyone actually writing the ‘make it so the government can do reasonable things without avalanches of lawsuits’ bill? The one that would actually work? At some point we might get an opening.
How many jobs will they cut? Market at time of writing this says 76k, but with a long tail and a 13% chance of over 1 million which means the mean is substantially higher.
For those who don’t know, from the above link: If you want to get hired for a government job, you need to literally cut and paste the exact language in the job description into your resume, then in your self-assessment fill out ‘master’ for everything, or you’re ngmi. So, I suppose you’ll want to do that.
Donald Trump: Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America, will receive fully
expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!
Also, if you can do this at all, why not expedite all the permits? Rather than make the billionaires and mega corporations the only ones who can build anything, forcing everyone to partner with one of them?
Matt Parlmer: This is not going to make America more competitive.
Donald Trump: Just finished a meeting with the International Longshoremen’s Association and its President, Harold Daggett, and Executive VP, Dennis Daggett. There has been a lot of discussion having to do with “automation” on United States docks. I’ve studied automation, and know just about everything there is to know about it. The amount of money saved is nowhere near the distress, hurt, and harm it causes for American Workers, in this case, our Longshoremen.
Foreign companies have made a fortune in the U.S. by giving them access to our markets. They shouldn’t be looking for every last penny knowing how many families are hurt. They’ve got record profits, and I’d rather these foreign companies spend it on the great men and women on our docks, than machinery, which is expensive, and which will constantly have to be replaced. In the end, there’s no gain for them, and I hope that they will understand how important an issue this is for me.
For the great privilege of accessing our markets, these foreign companies should hire our incredible American Workers, instead of laying them off, and sending those profits back to foreign countries. It is time to put AMERICA FIRST!
Is it worse if he knows this is not how any of this works, or if he thinks this actually is how any of this works?
I predict that Trump’s statement opposing port automation was a substantial misstep. There is a certain crowd that really wants to be optimistic about making things work again, and this is a very clear negative signal to them.
Bending the knee to the dockworkers shows weakness, and has extremely bad vibes.
Homeland Security modernizes H-1B program effective January 17, 2025, from the summary the big changes are expanded eligibility for founders with controlling interest in the petition, and nonprofits and research entities being exempt from the cap. That last one is a huge deal.
Agus: One implication of this rule is that it should allow a broader set of nonprofits in EA/AI safety to leverage cap-exempt status for H-1Bs, allowing research to be a “fundamental activity” (among many) rather than the org’s primary activity.
Joe Weisenthal: Riding in an Uber after a Waymo feels like going from an iPhone to a flip phone.
Whether Waymo can scale like the iPhone did. Obviously a totally separate question. But just as an experience, the difference is stark.
Having ridden in Waymos myself now, I do not want to go back.
And yes, they are everywhere in San Francisco, my eyes confirm this:
liz: prolly about 15-20% of all the cars i see on regular basis in sf are waymos now. rest of the country doesnt recognize how real this is.
Tyler Cowen points to a new working paper from Kevin Lang, that notices that under reasonable assumptions, it would take a t-score of 5.48 to reject the null hypothesis in an economics paper with 95% confidence, with 65% of narrowly rejected hypotheses and 41% of all rejected hypotheses remaining true. Notice that this is the optimistic conclusion that assumes everyone’s methodology is good and no fraud or large mistakes are involved, so it is much worse than this.
Scott Aaronson responds to Google Willow’s advances in quantum computing. Basically, yes it’s a cool advance, but don’t get overexcited yet.
In case it needs to be said: You find a way to rebuild Notre Dame. It is in the 99th percentile of things people spend money on to rebuild Notre Dame. If your ethics and world impact modules suggest that the world should not rebuild Notre Dame, or that marginal ordinary ‘effective’ charity spending would be better than rebuilding Notre Dame, please go and fix your modules accordingly. Thank you.
(~1% of total population, ~3% of grad school finishers.)
If you go to ‘has heard of EA at all’ it’s 12%, but they mostly know nothing more.
Of the 1% who actually know what EA means, their attitudes are generally positive.
Sentiment is far more positive among those who don’t know what EA is, if an advocate tells them what EA is, but the issues with that measurement are obvious.
This is a good touching of grass for what regular people have even heard about:
This lack of knowing anything about EA caused EAs generally to greatly underestimate the reputational damage they took from FTX and SBF. As Oliver points out, this is a general point – most of the time most people don’t think about you at all, and most people haven’t heard of and don’t care about most things. So if you do a general population survey mostly all you detect are the vague vibes, but that is very different from what they would find if suddenly they did care, or what the people interacting with you will care about.
The AI situation is similar. Americans hate AI, don’t want AI, and support regulation of AI. The vibes are terrible. That doesn’t mean they actively care much yet, and it isn’t inherently that predictive of what their opinions will be once they do care.
I suppose I am modestly disappointed by Noah Smith there, whereas I no longer know how to be disappointed by the hysterics of Marc Andreessen, such as those he is replying to here.
Ryan Peterson: Fast shipping can have 5x the sales impact of a super bowl ad.
This is another reason to highly value Jones Act repeal. If we speed up transit within the United States, that can have a big impact on reshoring production.
A thread of polls that asks what it would take before you would let your trusted friends convince you to go to a doctor for what they say is a manic episode, despite you not seeing why any of your new behaviors should be concerning.
And when the doctor says you need meds and everyone around you agrees, a large majority won’t take the meds, although a majority of married people would if those warning them included their spouse. But as Paul says, that’s what being crazy will often look like when you’re crazy.
The cops additionally arresting you for a seemingly insane reason got a 60% majority to take the meds, but a lot of people still wouldn’t do it.
It seems rather obvious that people are wrong here. Your close friends all saying you need to see a doctor is rather strong evidence. The doctor then telling you they’re right and you need meds is very strong evidence you need meds. Yes, this means you can in theory be ‘hacked from the outside’ but that is supremely less likely than already being hacked from the inside (and if you’re delusional about all your friends telling you that you need meds, then you definitely need meds!).
The keys here are that almost no one agrees with you, and you don’t know why.
I don’t generally let it bother me much if a majority thinks I’m crazy or wrong.
I do let it bother me when it is essentially everyone, and I don’t have a damn good model of why they’re think I’m crazy or wrong. I probably am.
However, if I have a good model of exactly why they all think I’m crazy, then it might be time for ‘they all thought that I was crazy, but I’ll show them!’
Nate Silver makes his case against eliminating daylight savings time, saying it will cost daylight, and we should save the daylight instead. I say no, we should kill daylight savings time. If schools and companies and businesses then want to adjust their start times, then go ahead. There’s nothing stopping you. In particular I think Nate is being rather unfair in his assessment of the cost of the clock adjustments. Indeed, he proves too much – if clock adjustments are almost free, why not have more adjustments?
What makes a good Royal Navy Officer? Motivation. Motivation matters more for performance evaluations and advancement to leadership than general intelligence or personality traits. Does this mean intelligence is not so important? Perhaps for this particular job it is so, especially in peacetime and until a high level is reached, more than that I would say it is a liability.
The question is indeed who wants to be a Royal Navy officer? Who wants to work hard at that for many years? Being intelligent is a highly double edged sword. If you are the Royal Navy, the highly motivated might not be the best talent, but they are the best talent you can hope to retain.
As always, some people need to hear this, some need to hear the opposite.
Daystar Eld: Your wants and preferences are not invalidated by smarter or more “rational” people’s preferences. What feels good or bad to someone is not a monocausal result of how smart or stupid they are.
The post is about one form of the Valley of Bad Rationality, where (as a summary of the post’s key points here) you think that you shouldn’t do ‘irrational’ things like eat ice cream (it’s a superstimulus!) or want to share housework (they earn more than you, their time is more valuable!), or feel hurt, or have different preferences than that of your community, and so on. And you definitely shouldn’t let someone bully you with logic into giving up your desires or preferences, even if they aren’t legible. Not everything you think and do and want and insist upon needs to pass a strict logical test all the time.
Beware requiring everything to be legible or logical, especially on every level at once.
You can absolutely take that principle too far. This here I think is simply wrong:
Daystar Eld: If someone else tells you that something you’re doing or thinking is irrational, they need to first demonstrate that they understand your goals, and second demonstrate that they have information you don’t, which may inform predictions of why your actions will fail to achieve those goals.
I need to understand your instrumental goals in context, and every little bit helps, but I absolutely do not need to understand your overall goals except insofar as they are relevant to the actions in question.
I also need some epistemic advantage – which often is actually ‘I understand what your goals are better than you do’ or yes sometimes ‘I am more skilled or smarter’ – but that need not take the form of information. If I have the same information you do, and we are both focused on the same goal, then yes one of us can plausibly be much better at figuring out what to do from there. That doesn’t mean you have to trust it.
So of course I was delighted that Bret Deveraux not only fully agreed with me (he was kinder on the action scenes than I was, I wasn’t impressed, we agree that Denzel Washington was by far the best part), he also decided to waste a lot of time with two longposts dedicated to nitpicking the film. I knew the film had historical accuracy issues, and I knew I didn’t know the half of it, but even accounting for not knowing the half of it… I definitely did not know the half of it. Wow. They Just Didn’t Care.
I hope to have a 2024 year-in-movies spectacular post, if I find the time. For now, I’ll say I still think The Fall Guy is my favorite movie of 2024, followed by Megalopolis, but I’m realistic and unless something blows me away from the end-of-year releases at the awards shows I will be rooting for Anora.
Tyler Cowen says India has the best food, with $5 meals there often better than Michelin star restaurants in Paris. I too am not a big fan of the Michelin stars. I do buy his case that ‘when everyone is a food critic’ standards rise, and I think the rise of online reviews is a lot of why food has been rapidly improving (and it has!). And I buy that India punches ‘far above its weight’ here and relative to its prices.
But I think the full claim mostly says something very particular about Tyler’s preferences (although I have never been to India so anything is possible). I think this also links in to Scott Alexander and the discussion on taste – Tyler is largely identifying a particular type of taste that he loves, that is highly present in India.
He also mentions that reservations are not a problem, ‘unlike in London or New York.’
Whereas my experience in New York is that reservations are only required at a handful of places, as long as you are not going at peak times on Friday or Saturday night, or to peak brunch, or trying for one of a handful of the hottest places, half of which will still let you sit at the bar if you show up early. My solution is simply that the few places that are hard to get into don’t exist unless someone else gets me a reservation.
Patrick McKenzie: I do not know what product manager at Google Docs decided that every time I see my own name I would prefer to be reminded by a fly-in card of who I am, what my schedule is like, that I am currently outside of my business hours, and options to email/etc myself, but I urgently want that individual to edit a transcript sometime while on deadline.
That “Was this helpful?” reminds me of Camellia from Wrath of the Righteous, whose catch phrase is “I am helpful, am I not?” and who is lawful good by comparison to the slow-moving interruptive doesn’t-actually-disable-it feedback form which pops if you thumbs down the card.
Had to serially select my name to perform editing of the transcript.
Patrick McKenzie points out that with notably rare exceptions essentially everyone prefers the chargeback system ot the legal system, where the chargeback system is extremely punishing to anyone who gets chargebacks, which means that customers can explicitly break off their agreements and avoid cancellation fees and such if they ever feel like it, and only a few businesses (like many gyms) will find it worthwhile to fight back.
Thread with notes on identity theft, in response to another thread about the pervasiveness of identity theft among poor people with extreme problems, with it being extremely difficult and costly to clean up the mess even once you know about it.
There are those who do not understand why Patrick cares so much about subtexts and being a Dangerous Professional, and those who don’t understand that some people need to be informed about this. Yes, the two should meet, it would be fun and also educational.
On the music of Sid Meier’s Civilization. I feel this. Songo di Volare is on in the background right now, I’m not crying, you’re crying. What I think this undersells is the amount to which great games (and movies and shows) make the associated music great. Yes, there is correlation – if you’re doing great work in one area you do great work in another, and this music is great – but a lot of why we see it as great is that we associate it with the games and the rise of Civilization. Baba Yetu is otherwise not special, but it is Grammy-level because it is part of the game.
Magic’s latest banned and restricted announcement unbans Mox Opal, Faithless Looting, Green Sun’s Zenith and Splinter Twin in Modern while banning The One Ring, Amped Raptor and Jegantha, the Wellspring.
Here are two takes I am inclined to agree with, although my knowledge is rusty now.
Sam Black: The bans are very clear steps in the right direction that, as usual these days, almost certainly didn’t go far enough, but that’s because there is real value in taking things slow (I think I’d like ban updates to be a little more frequent so they could be slow but less slow).
Legacy is probably a Nadu ban away from playable, but I might play another legacy tournament now, where I didn’t even consider playing legacy at EW (despite being there) before. I’m actually happier about the bauble ban than the frog ban.
I wanted big unbans in Modern and I’m very happy they went that way. Also, it’s possible Mox Opal is the strongest card in Modern again, but I have no problem with its unban and it does make me curious to try Modern again.
The hate for Lantern is extremely strong, but at least there’s payoff for trying to make it work again, so I could see myself messing around with Modern Amulet at some point, however.
I’m noticing that I’m less likely to try Modern because I’m not excited about the opportunities to play paper Modern, which is interesting since it used to be the most played paper format. This might just be a bubble I’ve fallen into since I wasn’t interested, or it might be a result of Modern having been bad enough to fall off for awhile, like Standard did in the past, but I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s Modern curious after this update, and I hope event organizers respond by offering some nice Modern events soon.
Brian Kibler: Understandably lots of ban list chatter this morning. Just a reminder that the design philosophy of direct-to-Modern sets like Modern Horizons necessitates pushing the envelope of the most powerful cards in the history of the game and broken cards are absolutely inevitable.
The genie is out of the bottle, and the sets make tons of money, so they’re not going away. Modern is no longer a non-rotating format. It’s a format that effectively rotates whenever the next Horizons set comes out and creeps the power level of the entire game because it has to.
I completely understand the business case for Modern Horizons, but I think from a game design and balance perspective, they are *literallythe worst thing that has ever happened to paper Magic because of the constant upward pressure they put on power level.
Path of Exile 2 is in early access. I’ve barely had time to try it. So far, I like a lot of the choices, but it’s too early to tell. It is very hard early on compared to other similar games, especially for the wrong characters. We’re talking a several-minute fight (at least for my character) with potential one shot kills less than an hour into a Diablo-like, at level 4. And it is very visually dark.
Ultimately it comes down to whether baseball contracts will keep getting bigger, since the money is mostly far in the future. I would be sad about this signing if the Mets were effectively on a fixed budget set now, but Steve Cohen is one of a kind and if anything I bet this means he wants to spend more to ensure the money didn’t go to waste, and I expect salaries to rise over time.
So I’m happy about it.
Similarly, I expect Pete Alonso to be at least somewhat overpriced, but I’d be all for signing him as long as the price is only moderately unreasonable, because I don’t expect the Mets to then take that money away from the rest of their budget.
Also, for both cases, I think having star players in very long term contracts is great for fans and for the game. I want to root for my same guys for a decade, as much as possible. Alonso has to be much more valuable as a Met than anywhere else, but if we do it I want it to be a full-career contract. And again, that ultimately would look like a bargain if salaries keep rising, even if it looks high now.
I am extremely excited for the College Football Playoff. I was worried that it would harm the regular season, I was spectacularly wrong it made it infinitely better, and now we get the playoff.
I disagree, unless we are expanding to a full 16 teams, which we should probably do. The byes make conference championships matter. It makes them worth fighting for and caring about, effectively playoff games no matter what.
This also answers the question ‘why would you show up to your conference championship game?’ that everyone was so worried risked ruining conference championship games.
The answer is, ‘because a slot in the quarterfinals is a lot better than a slot in the first round.’ You would of course want to play for a first-round bye (and sometimes an automatic playoff slot that you wouldn’t otherwise have!) even at the risk of occasionally slipping out of the field.
Consider the SMU situation, the only team that was in danger of slipping out. If they beat Clemson, one of the weakest four teams in the field, they would have had a first round bye, so they’d have gotten to skip a much harder other game. So even they are mostly better off playing, and for no other team in contention was it even a question.
My expectation was that they wouldn’t much be punishing teams that lost conference championship games in any case, unless they were exposed as total frauds. That has been the pattern in the past, even when there weren’t stakes.
The last time a team under the existing system would have lost a slot due to a championship game was Oregon in 2021 after a blowout loss to Utah. Before that it was TCU in 2017, when they started on the bubble at #11 and took a blowout loss to Oklahoma. Both seem like very reasonable cuts.
So even if the committee isn’t consciously intervening here (until this year these decisions meant almost nothing) we are looking at about one drop out every four years, and most of them won’t be controversial.
I also thought that letting the #5 seed (aka the highest rated non-champion) have a presumptive easy quarterfinal was also great design.
The future, however, is clearly in having more true home games. Everyone wants true home playoff games. So yes everyone wants a bye, but the ‘gains from trade’ are clear.
I do think this was a weird season, in that Alabama missed the playoff and could plausibly have won it all. Normally, there won’t be a bubble team like that. And if we expand to 16 teams, as we likely will and should, then the issue goes away – any team with even 3 losses that could plausibly win, should then make it.
My solution would be to expand to 16, and the top four conference champions are locked into first round home games. None of the four can be seeded lower than 8. Ideally I’d also allow the top seeds to draft their opponents, but we probably can’t have everything.
In terms of how we determine the rankings, this year made it clear we don’t put enough weight on strength of schedule and record, and especially on Nick Saban’s question: Who did you beat? I understand that you don’t set your conference schedule, and you don’t know who is going to be good, but let’s be real. The non-SEC mind really cannot comprehend an SEC schedule. But ultimately, if we go to 16 (and even now with 12) and you don’t get in, that’s still completely on you.
I certainly don’t agree that the playoff is a failure. Yes, the first four games were blowouts, but that’s still playoff football, and it was mostly not because of poor design. It turns out the home teams were very good, and the road teams weren’t. That won’t always be true. We should have had Alabama over SMU, true, but you can’t not include Clemson, Tennessee or Indiana.
Ezra Klein: Online gambling is going to be a fascinating dividing line between the NatCon coalition that sees itself as restoring virtue and the Barstool Conservative side. The evidence is overwhelming that a lot of people are getting hurt, and not just here.
In general you don’t want to put a cap on interest rates, and it is good to give people access to even very expensive credit, but at 400%+ credit card rates I have to wonder. Steps being pondered, like banning advertising that claims gambling is ‘an investment,’ or not allowing funding directly via credit cards, seem likely to be wise.
I have been convinced that both Claude and I were wrong, and that the Ohio thing is not actually about the well known villains that are the Ohio State Buckeyes. But I’m still going to head cannon and pretend that we were right anyway.
Robin Hanson: Scenario: 2 women talking. X, married to woman, announces is pregnant. Y asks how they got pregnant, was it friend, donor, or IVF? 3rd person overhears, wonders if they should immediately intervene in convo to tell Y they are discriminating. Should they?
Context: This is example given in my workplace harassment/discrimination training, & one can’t move on unless one agrees that 3rd person should intervene.
My training says “Those questions are a little invasive!”
Qi Ge and Stephen Wu: The results are primarily driven by candidates with weaker résumés, suggesting that cognitive biases may contribute to the penalty of having a difficult-to-pronounce name.
Given this was not a controlled experiment, I’d ask if choosing an unpronounceable name is correlated to other parental characteristics that matter here.
The good news is you can solve for this – you can change your name.
A papervia MR says that across seven studies ‘attractiveness discrimination’ goes undetected because people lack the ability to do so, not because they think it is fine, and warn that interventions to increase salience of the issue would likely decrease detection of gender and race discrimination.
My read is that the people saying they disapprove of this type of discrimination are mostly lying, or at least answering in a far philosophical mode that they do not endorse in actually-making-decisions mode. When we make more and more justifications for decision making unacceptable, we mostly introduce illegibility into the decision making process and prevent the keeping of records.
People want to spend time around and interact with others they find attractive, and they correctly expect others to want to do the same. It is both more pleasant in the moment, and also, hey, you never know. They are going to find a way.
Looks are heritable, so how much does lookism increase inequality? Looking only at earnings does not measure the main impacts, but it is a start.
Abstract:
Since the mapping of the human genome in 2004, biologists have demonstrated genetic links to the expression of several income-enhancing physical traits. To illustrate how heredity produces intergenerational economic effects, this study uses one trait, beauty, to infer the extent to which parents’ physical characteristics transmit inequality across generations.
Analyses of a large-scale longitudinal dataset in the U.S., and a much smaller dataset of Chinese parents and children, show that a one standard-deviation increase in parents’ looks is associated with a 0.4 standard-deviation increase in their child’s looks.
A large data set of U.S. siblings shows a correlation of their beauty consistent with the same expression of their genetic similarity, as does a small sample of billionaire siblings. Coupling these estimates with parameter estimates from the literatures describing the impact of beauty on earnings and the intergenerational elasticity of income suggests that one standard-deviation difference in parents’ looks generates a 0.06 standard-deviation difference in their adult child’s earnings, which amounts to additional annual earnings in the U.S. of about $2300.
I am surprised all these effects are so small. Clearly missing $2300 a year is nothing. Most people would, I presume, happily pay $2300 for 0.4 standard deviations of improved looks even if it did not impact their earnings directly.
Lookism is also highly persistent. In two studies, this paper found that educating judges to not bias on looks had no practical impact on the advantages of ‘looking trustworthy’ during sentencing. Then they tried having judges form their decision without looking, but with the opportunity to revise later, and found that this actually increased the bias, as judges would often modify their decisions upon seeing the defendant. People seem to very strongly endorse lookism in practice, no matter what they say in theory.
My guess however is that this result is mostly correct, there is little net impact on performance and men mostly don’t care, sometimes actively don’t mind, and are often oblivious to such matters, whereas those watching on video were primed to look for it, and once you are in that mindset and asked about it of course people will say they expect a performance hit.
As additional data, I will say that to the extent that I have ever been sexually objectified, it has never to my knowledge had a negative impact on my life experience or my performance, in any sense.
Employees who work from home (WFH) are less likely to be considered for promotion, salary increase & training than on-site workers. The pay & promotion penalties for WFH are particularly true for men (both fathers & non-fathers) & childless women, but not mothers. We also find that employees operating in teams with a higher prevalence of WFH do not experience negative career effects when working from home.
If others are meeting in person, they will conspire against you, and see you as less valuable. It will not go well for you. I found this out the hard way. That does not mean it is not worth working from home, I would do it again, but understand the price.
Study claims that white flight from Asian immigration is a thing in California public schools among the wealthy. MR commentator raises doubts on validity, OLS gives a different result, the measures aren’t robust or justified, also points out that since one does not simply build housing a lot of this is pure replacement effects.
If you argue as the paper does that whites and Asians are both responding to increases in school quality to explain why the naive OLS impact measure looks negative, while Asians directly impact both school quality and style by being present, you beg the question. There are several reasons the effect here might be real, especially the stacking of the college admissions deck geographically in the name of diversity, where whites should fear that being in an Asian school district means their kids will be at a disadvantage, and also a clash of desired school styles, or of course simple racism is a thing, but those considerations also apply to non-white non-Asians.
Based on the extensive documented objections I am going to put this on NIMBY, and presume that the reason whites are leaving is mostly the fixed number of available houses.
Given limits on time and attention, people increasingly make moral evaluations in a few seconds or less, yet it is unknown whether such snap judgments are accurate or not. On one hand, the literature suggests that people form fast moral impressions once they already know what has transpired (i.e., who did what to whom, and whether there was harm involved), but how long does it take for them to extract and integrate these ‘moral atoms’ from a visual scene in the first place to decide who is morally wrong?
Using controlled stimuli, we find that people are capable of ‘moral thin-slicing’: they reliably identify moral transgressions from visual scenes presented in the blink of an eye (< 100 ms).
Across four studies, we show that this remarkable ability arises because observers independently and rapidly extract the atoms of moral judgment — event roles (who acted on whom) and harm level (harmful or unharmful). In sum, despite the rapid rate at which people view provocative moral transgressions online, as when consuming viral videos on social media or negative news about companies’ actions toward customers, their snap moral judgments about visual events can be surprisingly accurate.
I interpret this result as strong evidence that when people talk about ‘morality’ they mostly mean something quite superficial, the superficial surface appearance of morality. If the mere superficial surface appearance of morality – which is all one can possibly hope to measure in milliseconds – is then described as ‘accurate’ then that is all that later judgments are measuring.
The first example given in the paper is a doctor forcibly removed from a United flight. People judged his removal from his seat ‘immoral,’ despite the agreed upon legal system not entitling him to a seat. So the fact that he had physically sat down, combined with him being a good person, made it moral for him to appropriate the seat and ‘immoral’ to remove him. Why is this a ‘moral transgression’? Because we say it is, which is because of what it looks like in those 100 ms. Whereas if the doctor had given off a different vibe, as picked up in those 100 ms, then removing him would have been fine.
Thus, I say all the claims about ‘moral judgments are complex’ here are bullshit. Yes, if you wanted your moral judgments to be consistent, to provide good incentives, to measure what the actual best decision was for the good of all, or any neat stuff like that, moral decisions are often complex and can be infinitely complex. If you want to give an AI system a moral code that does what we want, that’s incredibly complex. If you study moral philosophy, that never ends.
All that would require being willing to look at people’s actual moral judgments, in many cases, and quite correctly say you are all wrong.
One option, which is how Ted Gioia reads this, is it is generational, a new malaise impacting the young. That can at most explain the half that’s getting worse. The other half is things getting better over time. The theory of (negative) change here is atomization and lack of connection, but people tend to lose connections on net as they get older rather than gain them?
The timing also really does not line up with ‘blame social media.’ Social media might make it harder to make connections, or it might make it easier, but the problem and the entire above graph predate smartphones and all social media. I do continue to think we should ban smartphones in schools (to the extent we don’t instead ban the schools) but the problem goes deeper.
Here are Ted’s core suggestions:
Here are my eight pillars of connection—and none of them require Wi-Fi access.
If you want a happy life, you nurture them. If you let them all topple, you’re at grave risk.
Connection with the natural world;
Connection with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues;
Connection with history and tradition;
Connection with the community via institutions and organizations (e.g., civic engagement);
Connection via charitable acts, and giving (material and emotional) support;
Connection with spiritual and other metaphysical or higher values—sources of meaning outside the materialist realm;
Connection with creative human expression in art;
Connection via all those other things a computer can’t provide (love, forgiveness, fidelity, trust, empathy, kindness, etc.).
We have an existence proof, in the form of all of human history before 2010, that human connection does not require a screen at all, let alone wi-fi. That doesn’t mean you can or should throw out all that the new technologies have to offer, either in these fields or elsewhere. Both there’s a lot more to life than connection, and you can use your phone to connect if you use it wisely. It’s weird to say ‘do the things a computer can’t provide’ as if the computer not providing them makes them better. Seriously, how did we ever communicate and coordinate or find out things before? I vaguely remember and it was super annoying.
In terms of what connections are most important, that’s going to vary from person to person. Think about what would actually work best for you, and note that #2 seems to tower above the rest, especially if you include the missing element of having children.
Lily Allen charges $10 a month on OnlyFans, of which she keeps $8 after the 20% site cut, or $8k/month. So this is weird, because every calculator says that she should expect in the range of $34k/month in streaming income – but I do not think she would be lying about this.
Cartoons Hate Her reports that the problem with ‘it takes a village’ and having community is that we don’t actually want all the obligations or to interact with the people who happen to be physically near us. We don’t want it enough to be the kind of reliable and generous that makes this happen. Sounds right.
Stephanie Murray reports that the village thing can still be done, and in particular has pulled off a ‘baby swapping’ system that periodically pools child care so parents can have time for themselves. Great idea. The catch is that you have to give up your say in what happens during that time, in terms of your kids getting exposed to high fructose corn syrup, or screen time, or anything similar. The other catch is that you need a walkable neighborhood, which most people don’t have.
Owen Cyclops similarly notes that your village can only help if they know what you need from them and what roles you should have, and we’ve made everything contingent and special and negotiable, which makes that much harder. Yes, everyone always wanted the ‘perfect village’ but you used to take what you can get, and now you don’t. That seems closer to the issue, that we now have the optionality to reject or accept every individual interaction and relation each time, and aren’t willing to settle for the rather expensive-in-time-and-boredom thing that was having a village of whoever was around and accepting social obligations you didn’t like.
Also, seriously, grilling is awesome and the number one thing I miss living in NYC.
VB Knives: The “grill” did not exist in mainstream American culture until the later 20th century. Neither of my grandfathers ever “grilled.” I am not sure they would have known what the word even meant, in reference to cooking. BBQ existed but strictly as an exotic Southern practice.
Grilling really only makes sense in a world where one has a nice backyard but no servants to prepare a meal for one’s guests. So one moves the cooking outside where one can socialize and prepare food at the same time.
It also avoids heating up the house, which is always a significant point in favor of outdoor cooking, especially in warm climates.
[chart shows BBQ rising over time, with a big jump in 1900-20 and the big jump being steadily over 1965-2000 or so.]
Barbeque has three big advantages. The first is that it turns the meal into an event, which is of course also the disadvantage that it takes extra effort, but it’s good to have special things. The second is that, let’s face it, barbeque makes things better. It is a superior technology that moves everything on it up a tier even if you don’t get the timing right. If you do a good job throughout, it punches way above its weight, and was reliably the best thing available during the pandemic, we did it weekly.
The third is that it got male coded, allowing men to embrace doing it who would otherwise realize and hate that they are cooking, but actually cooking is great. That’s also a big plus.
Matthew Griesser: It is funny that most places in the U.S. mandate that every residence have access to its own private, unlicensed kitchen for cooking, yet we deem it totally unsafe for preparing food to sell to others.
Clearly, someone only remembers half of Super Size Me. Yes, some people really like McDonalds and other fast food, and most people have some fast food they like a lot. But no, it’s not the actual best, and nothing holds up as maximally delicious every day for more than a week. If I had three months to live, and wasn’t simply in ‘quickly there is no time’ mode, I would eat a wide variety of things, try to hit all the highlights at least one more time.
Scott Alexander asks why the early Christian strategy of essentially Cooperate-Bot won out over the classic mystery cult strategy of Tit-for-Tat. Historically I don’t know. The strategy here was extreme, not only helping those who could not reciprocate, but those that were actively killing and persecuting the Christians. He has a number of theories for why this worked, and one could add several more related items to it.
You can also see his full review of The Rise of Christianity more generally. That review makes it clear that Christianity had a lot of important unique advantages and opportunities. The existing network of millions of Jews was an advantage its competition did not have, giving them extensive traditions and many structures of beliefs that many people badly needed but that aren’t natural fits for mystery religions.
The Jews themselves could not take advantage of this, because not only do not proselytize they make it actively hard to convert, but the Christians could. One must be careful drawing conclusions from phenomena that seem in hindsight overdetermined. The Christians could have succeeded in spite of the Cooperate-Bot aspect, rather than because of it, as essentially the only players in the game.
One should also note that once they got sufficient numbers, the Christians then not only recruited the less pious and less generous, who were never going to go Full Altruist. They fully pivoted, and started gathering armies and persecuting non-believers for quite a while.
This is consistent with the Cooperate-Bot strategy succeeding early via advertising, heroic appeal and recruitment, and people being good and wanting to join and cooperate with the program and message, and this working well with the innovations regarding afterlife promises that were a huge competitive advantage, but too many such cooperate-bots not being a stable equilibrium.
As in, if you have 1% of the population being cooperate-bot, then if you defect against them you don’t win much, and you would show yourself to be the villain to those paying attention. But if you’re up against 75% cooperate-bot, or 99%, then obviously you defect, and also they were later facing stronger memetic competition, including from Islam. Too much unconditional kindness running around and the defectors and freeloaders win, so you can’t allow that. Thus, the Spanish Inquisition.
Scott then goes on to ask, what is the right strategy today, especially for groups like rationalists or effective altruists, or individuals? I think you have to draw a distinction between those who can’t pay you back, and those who are actively in bad faith and defecting. The part where you help out those who ask up to a point when you can, even without any expectation of specific compensation? That’s mostly great. As is giving everyone epistemic fairness. That’s different from tolerating the bad faith.
You also have to check how much you and yours are correlated with other decisions, and to what extent you are creating bad incentives for others. You mostly want to avoid that.
And again, you need to take care of you and yours first. Help, but do not help beyond your sustainable means. Fully implementing ‘take all you have and give it to the poor’ is at best a kind of Ponzi scheme, because you destroy your means of production. That’s probably another part of the explanation. You can be over-the-top generous and have it work, if and only if this inspires growth of that pattern, but this requires sustained exponential growth. Eventually, most people are now either a Christian, a freeloader or both, and most of you need to get back to work.
Liberal democracy has a lot of the same dynamics. While things are growing rapidly in various senses, you have a lot of slack in the system and it pays to be generous. But a lot of strategies that are appealing and good for people in the short term can’t be sustained in the long term because they aren’t an equilibrium, and the problems with them compound over time.
Romy: You’ve made a pact with a friend that if they commit suicide, you will kill their cat (to disincentivize their suicide). imagine the friend has committed suicide, would you follow through and kill the cat? (result: 83% let the cat live)
Worm Girl: Only if I had at least one other suicidal friend I’d made the same pact with.
We lose a lot through our ubiquitous use of Causal Decision Theory and thus our inability, as a society and individually, to make credible commitments like this. But also if you put me in a situation where I’m told I’ve made a promise I would never have made, should I say I would follow through on that? In which both (1) if I got into that situation for real I would totally do it and (2) because of this I wouldn’t get into the situation? I’m not sure. All I know is, if I say I’m killing the cat, I’m killing the cat.
The FTC is one step closer to instituting a ‘click-to-cancel’ rule. Most everyone agrees this rule would be great if implemented. The problem is that a lot of people are counting their chickens. The FTC’s authority to do this is not so clear. It’s going to be a while before this has any teeth or we find out if it sticks, and it might instead further damage the FTC’s authority (for worse and for better).
FTC also finalizes its rules banning fake online reviews and testimonials, including buying positive reviews, having insiders review without disclosing they are insiders, or paying for fake followers.
The problem is, similar to the click-to-cancel rule, does this accomplish that? How will it get enforced? Can it be enforced, without putting undo frictions on the ability of people to post reviews? Will there be jurisdictional issues?
Then there are the other FTC actions, especially those attacking individual companies, which tend to be… let’s say less good.
Byrne Hobart: Every complaint in this thread is the classic Internet argument trick of going “X? By X you most assuredly mean Y, which is a blatant lie, because the truth is of course X.”
Lina Khan (Chair of FTC):
1. Firms that lure workers with false earnings claims are breaking the law. @FTC has taken action against @Lyft for deceiving drivers about how much they could expect to earn on its platform. We’ve ordered Lyft to stop this conduct & pay $2.1 million.
Oh no, what did Lyft do?
In 2021, Lyft faced a shortage of drivers. It responded with a marketing campaign that routinely inflated how much drivers could expect to earn through its platform—sometimes by as much as 30%. These false claims led to increased sign-ups, with more drivers joining Lyft.
Most drivers would not earn the amounts Lyft advertised. For example, Lyft told potential drivers they could make up to $33/hour in Atlanta and up to $31/hour in Miami. In reality, these figures reflected earnings of the top one fifth of drivers.
FTC: Lyft failed to disclose that these amounts did not represent the income an average driver could expect to earn, but instead were based on the earnings of the top one-fifth of drivers. The complaint notes that these figures overinflated the actual earnings achieved by most drivers by as much as 30%.
What the actual fuck? This is completely insane. That’s what “up to” means. It does not mean “what you should expect.” 20% seems totally fair.
I mean, if you want to ban the phrase “up to” and force only advertising of median earnings, as per the consent decree here, then… I have no idea how that survives first amendment scrutiny but in practical terms I guess fine?
Have they never seen a sale where items are “up to 90% off?” If that only applied to 20% of store items, are they going to sue the store?
Lina Khan: Lyft also enticed drivers by promoting “earnings guarantees,” which supposedly guaranteed that drivers would be paid a certain amount if they completed a specific number of rides in a certain time—like an offer of $975 for completing 45 rides in a weekend.
In reality Lyft would only pay drivers the difference between what they actually earned and Lyft’s advertised guaranteed amount. Drivers were clearly deceived, with tens of thousands reporting that Lyft’s claims had misled them.
Seriously, what the actual fuck? Yes, that is what an earnings guarantee is. It means you get at least $975 if you compete 45 rides. So Lyft paid the drivers a minimum of $975 for 45 rides. If it was a bonus they’d have called it a “bonus.”
Richard Hanania: I hope this helps you understand that the modern antitrust movement is little more than a vehicle for anti-market sentiments.
FTC also scores this win: Right to repair may soon enable the fixing of McDonalds ice cream machines. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, this still has various steps to go before it actually happens. It’s funny how much that one case got focused on over the rest of what right to repair means. The real value is going to be in things like farm equipment, medical equipment, cars and household appliances and consumer electronics especially iPhones.
Also, sure, McDonalds ice cream machines. If you actively want a McFlurry, you should be able to get one.
Scott Alexander reports from the Progress Studies conference. Everywhere but AI, I quibble on details but it’s all great stuff. On AI, ‘supports acceleration out of a general obligation to progress but feels weird and bad about it’ seems like a good description, on many levels. It’s not a good reason. But yes, otherwise, great stuff.
Stats: A wallet moved $3,000,000 to Polymarket today and put it all immediately on “YES” for Trump. His only issue: he cleared the whole order book and bought $274,300 worth of shares at 99.7%.
On the debates as to whether the logic involved and the result should be considered a big ‘win for prediction markets,’ remember conservation of expected evidence. Suppose Harris had won. Would that have been a ‘big loss for prediction markets’ and the logic used by the whale? There’s no obviously right answer, but consistency is necessary.
Banana Con Panna: Make peace with death bc it’s inevitable: ✅
Death makes life more meaningful: ⛔️, skill issue, generate meaning harder lol
Monk: my views regarding anything transhumanism related are quite libertarian and tolerant
If YOUR death gives your life meaning, godspeed; I respect it and far be it from me forcing anyone to stay alive.
If MY death gives your life meaning, then we’re at war.
Noah Smith reports he used to be an economist who endorsed a bunch of highly economically destructive propositions in the name of progressivism in the 2010s when everyone else on the left was doing it, and now years later the vibes have shifted so he can notice that some of them are deeply economically destructive? Yet he still frames this as the issues being ‘stuck,’ as if more progressive always equals good, and that therefore he ‘feels adrift.’
Have you tried this? More importantly, have you tried skipping the first two steps?
Aerto: >reach out to junior level swe
nothing
> reach out to senior swe
nothing
> reach out to CTO
replies, gives resume advice, and puts me in contact with person running the internship team
Shaggy: The optimal amount of people not liking you is not zero. I only realized this for the first time just now and it fixed everything.
This is importantly true in non-trivial ways, you really do want to be fine with some people not liking you and not expend too much effort to prevent this. But also remember to reverse any advice you hear, some people need the opposite message.
Chinese hire real women to walk on treadmills in place of mannequins, to give an illustration of how the clothes look as you walk. Yet another job the robots will take from us soon? For now, a chance to get paid and also get some light exercise. I have wide uncertainly how often they get hit on.
Via MR, cognitive behavioral therapy had dramatic positive effects on Ghana’s rural poor after 1-3 months, ‘show strong impacts on mental and perceived physical health, cognitive and socioeconomic skills, and economic self-perceptions.’ It’s pretty weird that mental health is objective here while physical health is ‘perceived.’ It is also worth noting that none of the measures listed above represents a clear objective measure from the outside. I do think it is likely such interventions are good on the margin, I am highly skeptical of any claims to large effect sizes.
The problem in a nutshell (no link is intentional)? (Yes, he then shares the clip.)
In Defense of ‘Surveillance Capitalism,’ arguing that big tech tracking your actions online is good, actually. I agree on targeted advertisements, and in general I do not think the surveillance is the problem in any of this.
Ann Selzer, after one very wrong poll, ends her election polling. Sad. We need pollsters willing to be wrong. Not only do we lose the pollster most willing to be wrong, who was thus often the most right and definitely offered the most value added, who is going to pick up that legacy now?
Tim Cook finally learns that people name their group chats. The rest of his WSJ profile was less fun, and I didn’t come away thinking I’d learned much beyond that the Vision Pro is something he cares about more than I expected. He calls it an ‘early adapter’ device at this point, so fair enough. I do see myself getting a lot of use out of some AR/VR device in a few years, but it will be a few years, and that’s not about price.
In a fun post via ACX that I’d read first if you’re curious, Naomi Kanakia spins the hypothetical that if you use all the ‘is social media bad?’ tests and instead apply them to reading books, you would get a book called The Literary Delusion, that argues that books are actually quite bad for you, far worse than social media, with high-brow books being worst of all. It’s a fun exercise, but ultimately I think it’s clearly wrong.
Australia prepares to set social media minimum age to 16, without specifying an enforcement mechanism, presumably due to there being no non-awful enforcement mechanisms. At best it’s a pain and a gigantic honeypot, and actual enforcement like ‘scan your face to sign in’ is crazytown. I don’t agree with Tyler Cowen that this kills anonymous posting, you can have verification, although I assume with AI we are already headed in that direction, to at most pseudonymous posting which verification can allow.
It seems fine to have ‘illegal but not strictly enforced’ as a category? As in, there’s a whole range of vice items that have age minimums attached, and everyone knows you can get around the limits if you care enough, but it’s a trivial inconvenience and means you can’t be as public and open about using it, and this is sometimes good where both ‘fully allowed’ and ‘actually not allowed’ would both be worse.
Indeed, consider the central case of this, which is alcohol. I definitely do not want any 15 year old to be able to walk into a convenience store and buy a 6-pack of beer. I also definitely do not want to make it actually impossible for anyone under 21 or even under 18 to ever consume a beer. I don’t know if our current level of difficulty is right, presumably it isn’t, but it’s more plausibly right than either extreme.
As in, we need to not be so dismissive of soft paternalism, as a compromise.
Michael Arouet: One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart. Europe used to be innovative and drove new technologies. Why is Europe so badly lagging behind the US now? What happened?
Yes, Europe is in red here, it’s just so tiny it’s almost impossible to see.
Tyler Cowen points to a new working paper from Kevin Lang, that notices that under reasonable assumptions, it would take a t-score of 5.48 to reject the null hypothesis in an economics paper with 95% confidence, with 65% of narrowly rejected hypotheses and 41% of all rejected hypotheses remaining true. Notice that this is the optimistic conclusion that assumes everyone’s methodology is good and no fraud or large mistakes are involved, so it is much worse than this.
When asked to estimate caloric intake, study participants who were allowed to form their own opinions before seeing others’ estimates did worse, because they put too much weight on their own opinions. This seems transparently right in the case in question, where the average participant has no reason to think their estimate is any more accurate than anyone else’s, so if you don’t care about the epistemic commons you should take a straight average.
Outside of a laboratory, it is rare that you can be this confident that you can trust other opinions as much as your own, so people have learned not to do that. Also, someone who fully did that would likely not learn as well. And if everyone takes the average, then the average gets worse, and so on.
Another paper that is very closely related reports that in most studies where there is social information available, people undervalue that information. One should be wary before incorporating such social information, and read the paper. There we find that they assume the conclusion, that if you rely on others opinions less than your own then that is considered underusing social information. You are not to treat your own information any differently from the information of others. In scenario type after scenario type, participants not following this rule are sneered at.
Certainly there is some error here due to anchoring and worry about looking foolish and such, which collectively drives down willingness to incorporate outside info properly in such circumstances. In context, yes, people are collectively messing up.
But as a generalized principle, the suggested rule of full indifference between information sources is utterly insane. Even in these idolized cases, there are plausible points of failure for the information of others that don’t apply to your own. Even if you can’t put your finger on one, few of the unknown unknowns favor the information of others. Even in a lab, experiments often involve confederates, lies or tricks, and people’s decision algorithms are designed for the tricker and trappier real world. They need to be robust against potential social attack. The discussion section considers this, as well as other explanations. This includes the important point that you need to worry that others got their information socially. If no one puts any additional weight on their own information, then information cascades are inevitable and devastating.
The authors cite examples of ‘failure to use social information’ that include vaccine hesitancy and climate change skepticism, which clearly shows another side of social information, where the authors think it is obvious which social information to trust and which way it should point, and I am confident that those that reach the other conclusions disagree on such points. Nor would we have been able to get the majority opinions flipped, if people were only relying on social information in such cases.
Giving poor people money improved their cognition, but the paper found a 3-4 times smaller size impact than previous papers predicted, with the effect fading over time, and found it not uniformly distributed between cognitive functions. The motivation is helping people escape the poverty trap, which seems better measured by whether they manage to remain out of poverty?
Did you know that if someone goes viral on the internet, they will then post a lot more content? I did, now I also have a job market paper from Karthik Srinivasan to prove it. Here is Reddit where production goes up 373% for a month:
And here is TikTok, where posting goes up 279% in the next month:
So far the interesting finding is that people are scope insensitive. Going super duper viral did not cause a different reaction than ordinary viral.
Then the author loaded up a bunch of ChatGPT-powered bots into Reddit, to give people fake comments.
Cremieux: By posting bot comments under posts, Karthik managed to increase people’s odds of posting again (but not their post upvotes), but only when they were given a little attention (3 comments). Giving people a lot of attention (6) didn’t increase post count or quality-weighted count.
Importantly, there was no evidence these findings were driven by individual differences in posting likelihood. There was was no difference in the effect of comments by whether people were active (>50 prior posts) or relatively inactive.
…
Accordingly, it seems relatively simple to drive people haywire: just give them a bunch of attention and suddenly they’ll be consumed by the drive to post! This could be the source of *a lotof lost productivity.
Attention is valuable. It also indicates you are providing value. It makes perfect sense that people respond to strong evidence of attention by posting more.
Karthik Srinivasan: I propose a model of a social media platform which manages a two-sided market composed of content producers and consumers. The key trade-off is that consumers dislike low-quality content, but including low-quality content provides attention to producers, which boosts the supply of high-quality content in equilibrium.
If the attention labor supply curve is sufficiently concave, then the platform includes some low-quality content, though a social planner would include even more.
This description seems to assume that the quantity of high-quality content is the variable one wants to maximize. This seems wrong. You want to maximize the practical availability of well-matched high-quality content, which requires both the content and the ability to find it.
The ability to produce and get attention or other value from low quality content induces content creation in general, so it has non-zero value. Setting too high a quality bar prevents development of skills and discourages participation.
Yet mostly I think a social planner would enforce a high quality bar. Effective average quality matters quite a lot, net of any curation available. When I use social media, I have a very low tolerance for a source that includes low-quality content. Sources that rarely produce but with good hit rates are invaluable.
I see a similar phenomenon with other content sources. Where high quality content of a particular type is sufficiently scarce, I am willing to engage in search and endure some low quality. But increasingly what I want are curated sources that are reliably high quality. Apple TV has impressed me on this front. There is not that much core content, but its hit rate has been remarkably high. Netflix by contrast has more good content but also floods you with a ton of filler, so exploring at random is much worse.
Saying ‘um’ and other ‘disfluency’ might help listener information retention? I can see it. In at least some contexts, such words are a sign that speaker thinks getting next thing right is important or difficult, or that they are deliberately pausing for effect or to give listener time to consider what will come next. There are other implications as well, depending on the context.
There are times when I will even write such words, which has the advantage that it is clearly on purpose. Still has to be balanced against the downside of how it sounds and how people update on you.
The most fun part? When conditioned on knowing how many other people lied, people lied more in every case. Even when they knew no one else was lying, lying jumped to ~40%-60%, and ~70%-80% if anyone else lied (multiple other liars didn’t much matter).
Thus we have two important effects.
If you know someone else is lying, you’re much more likely to lie.
And if you think about or know whether others are lying, you’re also more likely to lie, even if what you know is they’re not lying.
It makes sense that increasing the salience of lying, and making someone think harder about the incentives – there’s no actual downside here other than considerations of virtue ethics – could have a big effect.
Also note the decision theoretic implications of making your decision last while knowing who else lied, as this dramatically alters the correlations between your lying and their lying.
Italians over time sorted themselves geographically by honesty, which is both weird and damn cool, and also makes a lot of sense. There are multiple equilibria, so let everyone find the one that suits them. We need to use this more in logic puzzles. In one Italian villa everyone tells the truth, in the other…
Open Philanthropy strikes again, is looking to hire someone to oversee at least $30 million in spending on accelerating economic growth in developing countries. Listing here, deadline is November 24. The track record of OP’s attempted economic interventions is not so great, especially their active attempt to get the Federal Reserve to emphasize unemployment over inflation at the worst possible time for that – and I worry about the kind of thinking that led to that attempt. But that’s also why you might want to get the job, to ensure that things go better this time.
Steve Hsu says to DM him on Twitter if you are a scientist, technologist or academic with USA citizenship and ‘strong credentials’ looking for a role in the Trump administration enforcing ‘competitiveness and meritocratic values.’ As I say with the AI labs, part of your task would be to decide whether the cause is just.
I can confirm that government bureaucracy is insane to deal with even for the unusually competent and responsible, so if anything it’s stunning that more people don’t get into deeper trouble over issues navigating it. The number of hours I have spent trying to sort out IRS issues in particular is off the charts, everyone is trying to help and on the same side, there are no disputes, it’s just that the entire system is a giant shitshow. Then we ask people who don’t have things together to handle that sort of thing to get what they need, too. Everyone totally hates it, it eats tons of valuable time, and the problems are so so fixable. Neglected cause area.
Kat Snyder: GDP fell short again last quarter. Government jobs don’t count. Wages have not kept up with inflation.
Jordan Weissmann: When people say things like ‘government jobs don’t count,’ I’m always curious whether they think teaching, police work, firefighting, and trash pickup are real work.
It’s not that government jobs aren’t real work and therefore don’t count.
It’s that marginal government jobs don’t represent market demand for labor and are reasonably viewed as unlikely to be net productive, given they are likely to represent additional bureaucracy rather than adding classroom teachers, police on the street, firefighters or trash collectors. The government choosing to hire more people is not a good sign. That doesn’t have to malign any of the real and important work being done.
What about DOGE? Tyler Cowen thinks this effort could do some good, yet somehow leads with imploring us to not regulate AI, then discusses crypto. Essentially it seems like he is despairing of fixing what is already broken, and warning DOGE to pick winnable battles with big payoffs? But in the long term there is no alternative to fixing the core issues, short of revolution and starting over.
The emphasis Cowen places on YIMBY and on deregulating medical trials seems good, but this seems like ‘find the ways to get high marginal value without having to fight too hard or fix the underlying issues.’ Which is a fine goal if you can’t win those fights, but when will we get a better opportunity?
Alas, it does not seem like ‘make it easier to develop new drugs’ is on the agenda. If anything quite the opposite, with the appointment of RFK Jr for HHS and resulting dramatic drop in pharma stocks, although I would not assume that he makes it through – which makes the implied drop if he does make it through that much larger.
The hope is that this pick was transactional, a deal made (with whatever degree of explicitness) in exchange for RFK Jr’s endorsement. If that’s true, then rejecting the nomination could make the problem go away. Even if he got through, he could have little support for most of the highly destructive things he might try to do.
Then on top of that he doubtless plans to do this via prohibitions and barriers, rather than cutting barriers and aligning incentives and freeing the market to give us what we need. As in, for example, somehow legally require Coca-Cola to use sugar, rather than end the subsidies to corn syrup that cause it not to use sugar in the first place. Then that for everything else.
Josh: My new favorite thing is telling my wife, “Better buy that before RFK Jr. bans it,” pointing at things while we shop.
My best explanation for the core problem with RFK is that his purity moral foundation is completely dominating his thinking. And it gets triggered by a wide variety of things, many of which are obvious false positives, mostly for superficial reasons. So yes, he does correctly warn us on occasion about real issues, but he can’t differentiate between actual dangers versus vaccines and nuclear power. The damage is immense.
Anatoly Karlin: The ownage hasn’t even begun. Consider what will happen to obesity rates in the US over the next four years, and who stands to take the credit for it and have his ideas validated by association.
John Pressman: “RFK Jr. takes credit for the work done by Ozempic” is thoroughly absolutely dystopian and also going to happen if he’s nominated thanks I hate it.
Jason Abaluck: The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year. Federal government spending was $6.1 trillion. You cannot meaningfully shrink the federal government by firing “unelected bureaucrats.”
What is money spent on? Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are 45%. Defense and debt payments are 28%. The VA, education and transportation are 15%. SNAP, UI, child nutrition, and the earned income tax credit are 7.5%. The remainder is stuff like military pensions.
What this means is that if you want to save money, you need to be talking about *how to provide important benefits more efficiently.How can we provide similar quality healthcare at lower cost? NOT, “we are going to get rid of a bunch of stuff no one wants in the first place.”
The all-in cost of an employee directly is 50% above salary. Something like 40% of employees are contractors, so probably then double that cost again. But the issue with the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ is mostly not paying them anyway. Musk might object on principle, and because he knows every little bit helps and also sets a culture and example, but that’s not central.
Most people who want them all fired would be totally fine paying the extra salaries indefinitely. What they want is one of two things:
For the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ to stop doing large portions of their work, which they see as actively massively impeding and messing with everyone else.
For the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ to to their jobs properly. Actual Government Efficiency, where your permits get evaluated within a week and drugs actually get approved quickly at reasonable cost and your tax letters don’t take months for each exchange and hours on the phone, and so on.
Neither request need be about the employees themselves doing anything wrong. If an employee spends half their time on irrelevant paperwork, what can they do? If their job is fundamentally to avoid blame for things happening, of course they’ll stop things from happening. And so on.
The two central requests are related. And no, they are not code for ‘cut medicare and social security.’
One danger is that we end up latching on to what sounds dumb rather than what actually is dumb. There’s always ‘look at this dumb animal study lol that is such nonsense’ but that stuff occasionally hits big and is generally totally worth it.
On the concept that student loans pay for themselves, this is exactly the kind of ‘there is nothing one could possibly do to improve this, this is clearly necessary and great’ thinking that makes people want to burn it all to the ground.
Quite obviously, yes, there is a vastly more efficient, simpler, obvious alternative.
Here’s the link’s abstract:
Growing reliance on student loans and repayment difficulties have raised concerns of a student debt crisis in the United States, but little is known about the effects of student borrowing on human capital and long run financial well being.
We use variation induced by recent expansions in federal loan limits combined with administrative datasets to identify the effects of increased access to student loans on credit constrained students’ educational attainment, earnings, debt, and loan repayment. Increased student loan availability raises student debt and improves degree completion, later life earnings, and student loan repayment while having no effect on homeownership or other types of debt.
My quick takes here:
The student loan analysis only applies to marginal limit increases for dependent undergraduate students already enrolled in college and already borrowing – half is for graduate students, which is where most of the massive debt loads come from and is plausibly a lot less efficient.
It’s odd not to study the marginal students who go to college because of the bigger loans – do they actually benefit or do they struggle and drop out a lot?
The analysis in the paper explicitly (big points to the paper for pointing this out!) does not account for schools adjusting tuition costs in response. Why should we believe student loans on average lower tuition costs in the long term?
Nor does it identify which students benefit (it is plausible that loans to STEM students pay for themselves and others don’t, etc) or whether this is largely or entirely a signaling or sheepskin effect for these particular students.
The loan structure is very damaging to students in various other ways, often burdening them with debt and forcing life choices upon them that they don’t want, including likely delaying fertility, another key input to government revenue.
Oh, and they seem (according to Claude) to use a 0% discount rate to evaluate whether the loans pay for themselves. That’s a pretty big no-no when evaluating a loan program! Almost any investment looks great at 0% discount rates.
Is it plausible that educational investments like this pay for themselves despite all those caveats and there isn’t that much ‘fat to trim’ here?
I mean, it’s possible. But I find it highly unlikely.
What is the alternative?
If we think going to college should be subsidized more, we should do that directly.
GiveDirectly: Wasteful, paternalistic handout vs. http://GiveDirectly.org🎃
Look. I get it. And all this is largely a quibble. Most of the time I am totally on board with ‘if you want to help people who don’t have enough real resources, give those people cash and let them decide what helps them most.’
If you are literally GiveDirectly, I want to be confident you understand what they are.
Halloween is an obvious exception. The point of Halloween is that the candy is not fungible with money. The parents could of course buy epic amounts of the child’s favorite candy. The child could use their money to buy that candy, if allowed.
But the whole point is that this is wisely not done, and not allowed. Candy is a special treat, that you get once a year, but that you must earn in this special way. Which gives everyone an excuse to go through a fun ritual, make memories, spark joy, meet the neighbors, face fears, get used to asking for things, and so on. Good times.
It’s like saying ‘why don’t people get a job to earn money and then use the money to buy beads, instead of going to Marti Gras,’ except that we actively want to ensure you don’t constantly have access to beads because that’s unhealthy.
I mean, I’m not mad if someone gives my child a quarter or dollar instead of candy, if that’s what they want to do. But they’re missing the point. We’re not here for the hourly rate.
Another relevant-to-GiveWell reason is that you can purchase candy efficiently only in very large quantities, even when you involve variety packs, and the bigger it is the bigger the discount. Letting people in need benefit from your bulk discount, or from access to skills and markets and so on that they don’t otherwise have the ability to access, can be a big deal, especially for something everyone ultimately does need.
So yes, if you want to help poor people, GiveDirectly is a high bar and tough to beat. But handing out dollars on Halloween makes as much sense as walking around giving homeless beggars Peanut Butter Cups.
What happened when recently homeless Canadian citizens, without drug abuse, alcohol abuse or mental health issues, were given $7,500 with no strings attached? The researchers predicted better executive function and fluid intelligence and affect and satisfaction with life, none of which proved statistically significant and enough of which went the other way that it looks like noise.
They did however get one very strong result that makes perfect sense, which was fewer days homeless, presumably given they had money for a security deposit and rent, and thus fewer days in the homeless shelter, which on net saved the government slightly more money than the cost of the transfers. Shelters cost ~$93 a night in Vancouver, so helping someone pay rent is the smart play if you can do it.
Unfortunately, it is clear from Table 3 that this effect was declining over time. As they note, results were driven by impacts during the first three months, before the money ran out.
No, this is not literal free money. You cannot simply do this. There were a number of additional logistical costs beyond the cash transfers. The program relied upon screening out those with various problems, in ways that would be expensive and politically very difficult to implement in practice.
If this was a systemic play, predatory behaviors would have to be dealt with. And people would respond to the new incentives. We cannot look at this as a one-shot problem. If you implemented this at scale everything would change.
Most troubling is that the effects were concentrated in the first three months, rather than letting people get permanently back on their feet. A one time payment to those down on their luck is scary as hell to suggest doing too systematically, and needs a bigger margin of error than we see here, but is potentially feasible if it works. Subsidizing them indefinitely is not an option due to the incentive problems and feedback loops it creates.
Rebell Lily: The less I respect commander as a format, the more I enjoy it.
Somehow we’re expected to craft these perfect 100 card decks for a nebulous play scale, to find perfect games out in the wild with total strangers.
I think all this over engineering has made commander more than what it is: a beer and pretzels board game where the outcome actually doesn’t matter.
Sleeve up 102 cards, nobody is checking. Jam that silver border card that reads like it works but it actually kind of doesn’t but people don’t really care.
The more I focus on chasing what’s fun and exciting, and just expect there will be a lot of chaos and mistakes on the way the more I enjoy commander, and I think you might too.
Or just play standard it’s great.
That’s not the play experience I am looking to have, at least not often. And in particular, it’s not an experience that sounds like it justifies the amount of investment required (in all senses) to get the relevant decks to exist. That appeals to me a lot more than trying to do 4-player cEDH – I’d rather either play Standard or play Diplomacy.
The old Standard I knew and loved had about ~1300 unique cards in it. The new Standard will have over 5000 unique cards, larger than what we used to call Extended.
That’s too many cards.
There is nothing wrong with a format with 5000 cards, but it isn’t Standard, and it doesn’t serve the purpose of Standard, which is to provide a compact entry point without too high a power level, with room to explore the mechanics and strategies that aren’t quite good enough, and a high probability each new card is useful and each set will shake things up.
It’s also too many cards per year. Releasing Standard-legal sets every two months is overwhelming and madness. There’s no reasonable way to draft enough to keep up with that on Arena, no chance to get comfortable, and it’s an obscene quantity of physical cards. It’s too much.
That’s in addition to the worry that we’re getting so many Universes Beyond sets. I accept the benefits of doing Universes Beyond, but this is approaching half of all cards being from IPs other than Magic: the Gathering. The identity risks being lost, especially if many of the world choices are rather far from Magic’s core identity. When we do Lord of the Rings or D&D’s Forgotten Realms, it feels at home, but careful how often you call in Spiderman.
I attempted a low key return to Magic for Foundations, hoping to introduce my kids to the game. I did appreciate that card complexity was down. The pre-release went okay, but reminded me how much ‘hurry up and wait’ there is at events. The big problem for limited is that the good cards are much, much stronger than the not as good cards – this has been a problem for a while but seemed extreme here.
I tried two (traditional) drafts on Arena, and I found both that the elite cards dominated and that the number of interesting games was low, I spent a lot of time going through motions that weren’t interesting but still required attention, and I am not fully giving up but I am pretty unexcited to continue.
Giving people in Japan a gaming system improved their mental well-being and life satisfaction in the near term. That is good news, but doesn’t answer the question we care about. What is the long term impact on life outcomes, including well-being and satisfaction? The worry is not that games aren’t fun. The worry is that playing video games is a dead end that does not build social or human capital. So I’d want to see a follow-up study in ten years.
Jorbs: yo i am #sponsored to play the star vaders demo tonight and the game launched at 50% master volume instead of 100% and i think that might already make it game of the year? This tweet was not part of the sponsorship I just wanted to say how happy I was about the volume defaults.
That is 100% of the information I have about Star Vaders.
I agree, many games are addictive because they offer a sense of progression where so few other things in life do that in a reasonable or satisfying way. If you want people to dig anything, offer a sense of progression. Engineer in state of nature never plays Factorio on computer, because they’re too busy playing Factorio in real life. Deprived of that chance, he plays on his computer, but also it’s a really good implementation by all reports and the reason I haven’t played is I don’t want to blink and have it be a week later.
James Stuber: VC the other day told me, “We’ve lost several really good founders to Factorio. They came back and just wanted to work in manufacturing, not SAAS.”
This is not an easy thing to do, and it’s definitely not a remotely fast thing to do. You have to put in the work. However many companies Elon Musk is running, there could have been at least one more, and maybe two, but he decided to play Diablo 4 instead. Can we switch him over to Factorio?
I have rarely rolled to disbelieve harder on a study, before looking at any details, than I did on the claim there is no home field advantage in Chess. If you read the history of the world chess championship, you see obsession with not only locations but minute details. The players act very much like these details matter a lot. My experience playing games says the details matter quite a lot, and travel is a huge handicap. Seems crazy to think otherwise.
I found the solution when I looked at the data set. It is of Israeli games. That means they were all played within Israel, and it isn’t that big a country. When you are playing a ‘road game’ there, you’ll still be able to sleep in your own bed – even in the worst case you can get between any two cities in 3.5 hours or so according to Bing. It also seems unlikely the venues would be hostile.
I do agree that you don’t have the same level of ‘literal home field’ dynamic you have in American sports, where the LA Clippers and LA Lakers share the same arena yet whoever is officially the home team still has substantial home field advantage. I still say that playing where you are at home and comfortable and can get great sleep and so on is a big game.
Paper claims that psychological stress hurts performance in high-stakes competitive settings because those with higher heart rates scored lower in an Olympic archery competition. This seems like a great example of correlation not indicating causation (twice) and people claiming they have proven way too much. Even if one proved this applied to archery I would still doubt that it would generalize, it seems like a maximally friendly case for where low heart rate might be helpful.
I enjoyed this piece by Suzy Weiss on the excellent and therefore poorly named Nobody Wants This, as a friendly reminder of how people focus on different things and live in such different media worlds on top of in different cultures. There’s so little overlap in what Suzy notices, what the people she is referencing as complaining noticed, and what I noticed.
I am late to the party on Killing Eve, and will confirm it is very good, but not elite.
I am very much enjoying my AMC A-List membership, as it encourages me to go to the movies more ($0 marginal cost!) and makes the experience better too ($0 marginal cost!), while being a good deal. I went through Letterboxd and rank ordered the 24 movies I’ve seen so far from 2024, and the correlation of my experience and evaluation with ‘saw in theater’ was off the charts, including all 7 that I put at 4 stars or higher (I saw 15 of the 24 in a theater). That of course involves heavy selection, but it’s clearly a lot more than that.
If you haven’t seen Anora, it is the third movie this year I would put in the ‘if you generally like seeing movies then see it, see it now, ask no questions’ category (unless, in the least spoilery warning of all time, you really don’t want to see something highly sexually explicit), along with The Fall Guy and Megalopolis.
Contra Nate Silver here, I continue to hate the new NFL kickoff rule. I realize the old rule led to injuries, but the new rule looks and is deeply stupid, it’s inelegant and makes no sense and has remarkably little variance, and mostly they kick it into the endzone anyway.
We don’t have to do kickoffs. It’s fine. They’re not worth the injury risk? Let it go.
Let’s let the team that scored choose either:
Other team gets the ball on the 20 yard line, 1st and 10.
You get the ball on your own 20 yard line, 4th and ~15, balance to taste.
Here is an amazing clip I saw watching College Gameday this weekend. This is The Way. It also is starting to be an excellent opportunity. According to this explanation, you can hand the kick to someone else, and the first 300 people to show up get a raffle ticket, and getting there at 3am was good enough this time to get into the raffle. And even if you end up with the standard payout next week, we’re talking at least $125,000. You might well get a lot more. So being the one who can actually make the kick starts to look really good, and also the hourly on being in the raffle is looking good as well.
So many people are processing this as ‘giveaway to Elon Musk’ or ‘dystopian nightmare’ rather than an enabling of the future. It is highly plausible that Elon Musk was the driving force behind this in order to benefit Tesla, but so what? What matters is the self-driving cars and especially self-driving taxis, and not burdening them with irrelevant requirements. If people want such cars to have steering wheels and gas petals and manual overrides, the market will give those things to them. If not, not.
Self-driving cars are wonderful, and they are especially wonderful for the blind and others who cannot drive. In other contexts leftists would embrace this, or accuse those opposing such an accomodation of terrible things. Here, where instead of an accomodation it’s purely an improvement, opponents choose to ignore this aspect as inconvenient.
Matt Bell reports after 130 hours in Waymos. It’s a huge upgrade, as time in the car becomes time spent in a mobile mini-office. It’s not zero commute time, but it’s effectively far less expensive lost time, and everything is super predictable, and it’s much safer. Overall he makes it all sound wonderful. I can’t wait.
Paul Crowley: We rely on random violent nutcases to deter certain kinds of antisocial behaviour.
Matt Bell: People are gradually figuring out that Waymos are incredibly docile and careful, and are taking advantage of it. I once had someone sit on my Waymo for a few minutes to prevent it from moving. Waymos are programmed to be very cautious and careful drivers. They are completely unable to deal with someone sitting on the car’s hood. This means that any person on the street can indefinitely stall a Waymo. This act in and of itself was a minor annoyance, but I think it’s a sign of a new behavioral dynamic that will become a lot more prevalent with time.
Paul Crowley’s point is important and highly general – I’ve talked about it before but it’s worth reiterating periodically, both for the car issue and the general case.
Our norms and equilibria absolutely rely on a foundation of human unpredictability, and the low possibility of a completely unhinged response or dramatically oversized reaction, and our inability to reliably predict what causes that. You don’t know. Indeed, it is the meta-level unpredictability, the ‘I don’t know what might happen or how likely it is but I sense I’m not supposed to Go There’ that does so much of the work.
Those who act confident and Just Do Things anyway, or have figured out where the lines actually are and are willing to risk getting some negative uncomfortable but ultimately harmless feedback, and take on some minimal tail risk, can often accomplish and get away with a ton (also see: dating). A lot of this is that many interactions are effectively chicken, or stochastic chicken, so if people think you won’t back down or don’t want to risk it, and aren’t trying to be game theory optimal or uphold social norms or reputations, the local maxima is to not risk conflict.
The problem is, we don’t want and won’t tolerate the AI or self-driving car having that tiny chance of going bonkers.
For now this is a drop in the bucket. Based on very quick Fermi estimations, American make approximately 3-4 billion car trips her week, of which taxis and rideshares are probably about 100-200 million. So there are still a lot of doublings left to go before this starts to be a big deal, but at this rate it won’t take that long? If we doubled every three months from here on out, we get to ~5 million weekly trips by end of 2025, then half the taxi industry by end of 2026, and so on. I can’t wait.
David Watson: What about the federal limit on the number of vehicles without steering wheels?
Timothy Lee: These level 4 and 5 vehicles might need to have steering wheels that passengers aren’t allowed to use.
Bill Kramer: We mark the states in this map that have explicitly enacted laws, EOs, or regs allowing the testing or operation of AVs (with or w/o a safety driver, thus SEA levels). The grey states haven’t explicitly said either way.
Daniel Eth: Man, this is really good advice, but also really hard to follow.
Simon Townsend: I think the important part is don’t check anything. You don’t need to go straight to work. You can exercise, meditate, journal first. But yes, hard to follow.
I’m a special case, because most of my work involves responding to things in real time as they come, and getting into the flow of what’s happening is the right state to be loading. When I’m instead working on deep work, or looking to relax, and don’t need to respond to the outside world, then yes, not checking things at all is a strong play.
I’d also note the reverse any advice you hear angle. There is huge value in responding quickly when contacted, and becoming known as someone who responds quickly, or in responding to many other events quickly. And if you’re distracted by the possibility that there might be something waiting for you, that can be just as distracting to your state. So the radio silence strategy isn’t free and needs to be used only when it makes sense.
This is actually a great mundane use of AI once it gets good enough: A filer that breaks through and alerts you when it actually matters, but that mostly leaves you alone. But it needs to be good enough that you can emotionally trust it.
John Wentworth notes that conversation guides portray conversations as a game (one might say a net token prediction task?!), where 2+ people take turns free-associating off whatever was recently said. His objection is that free association isn’t that interesting beyond being an icebreaker, although he sees why others do like it.
The skill in such a game is largely in understanding the free association space, knowing how people likely react and thinking enough steps ahead to choose moves that steer the person where you want to go, either into topics you find interesting, information you want from them, or getting them to a particular position, and so on. If you’re playing without goals, of course it’s boring…
In the culture and politics section, she notes the conflict between ‘radicals widen the overton window’ and ‘radicals turn people against you.’ My model is that almost all activists do both, with the downsides including both ‘constrain or trick you into actually asking for or endorsing the crazy’ and ‘people associating your cause with the crazy either way.’ The difference is the good activism in good spots provide a good tradeoff, and the bad activism in bad spots provides a bad one. The catch is you usually don’t have much sway over which kind you get.
I’d also highlight these meta thoughts:
Sarah Constantin: Working at a more “meta” spot in the ecosystem is a good move if you, personally, are good at meta, not because it’s “greater” generically in the same way that better success/results/performance is “greater”.
Higher levels of meta become accessible with greater age and experience, which can to some extent link meta with “seniority”. But, let’s say, an eighty-year-old concert violinist is 0% meta — he just plays the violin, that’s as object-level as it gets — and that has no negative implications about his wisdom, maturity, or skill.
Also, there’s such a thing as ecosystems that have too much “meta” work going on relative to the object level, but that shouldn’t be oversimplified down to “meta isn’t real work”. I’ve seen examples where you absolutely can’t make progress in a field beyond a very primitive level without a meta institution to provide funding, set context, seed culture, encourage entrants, etc.
When you are thinking at the meta or portfolio level you are “taking as object” what, at the object level, is someone’s whole full-time job and personal mission, and treating it like a card in your hand, and you have like twenty cards at once that you shuffle and move about and see what they can get you in aggregate. It’s a dizzying little perspective shift to go “down” to the object level (let’s say, my blog) and then “up” to a meta level (let’s say, what it’s like to be running a fellowship that supports many blogs) and then “up” some more (the fellowship is only one “thing” in an ecosystem of related things of similar scale).
Those are dramatic differences, and there’s a very clear pattern. It’s interestingly different from the lost wallet reporting rate, which involves other dynamics too.
And we have this, the percentage of scientific papers containing obvious fraud.
Paper says that the primary reason people make weird choices in weird situations is that those situations are complex and weird, and lead to computational errors. Biases of risk aversion or time preference mostly go away when you correct for this. Very interesting idea.
One can also unify these two things. In clear situations, people don’t have these biased or weird preferences, because they can be confident they are making the right decisions. In weird and complex situations, they are afraid of messing up or being cheated, so they pick the safe play and the one that pays off in ways they can touch. I can definitely note this kind of shift in myself and also have seen it in others – the moment the situation becomes clear and one feels comfortable, suddenly everything changes.
The exception is if ‘hey’ is indeed all the context they need to prioritize and reply.
Patrick McKenzie: Unironically yes, and if I can give a refinement to the endorsement, produce. a companion artifact designed to be linked to directly in Communication Norms documents distributed to new employees/managers.
Josh White: The Sandy Grossman story came up today. Surprised how few had heard it.
Sandy accepts a job at Wharton. During his introduction, the provost says, “I’m delighted to introduce Sandy to you all. We are thrilled he has joined our faculty.”
To which Grossman replies “Delighted? Thrilled? I was hoping you were indifferent.”
Will Kinney: We shall measure stellar brightness logarithmically, and it will be called the “magnitude.”
– Sir, will that logarithm be base 10, or based on Napier’s constant?
Neither. It shall be of the base of the fifth root of one hundred.
– and brighter stars will have larger magnitude?
No, it shall be the opposite.
And we shall classify stellar temperature by letters of the alphabet.
– In alphabetical order, sir?
No, it shall be O B A F GK M.
– But why, sir?
No one knows.
And stars will come in two types, depending on their age, and they shall be called Type I and Type II.
– With Type II being younger stars, descended from Type I, sir?
No, Type II shall be older stars.
We shall measure large distances by a new unit, the parsec.
– Will it be an integer multiple of light years sir?
No, it shall be in astronomical units the number of arc seconds in a radian.
– But how much is that in light years, sir?
It is 3.26.
– What is an “astronomical unit,” sir?
No one knows.
And luminosity shall be measured in units of solar luminosity, except when it’s not, in which case it will be measured in “absolute magnitude”, which shall be the apparent magnitude at a fixed distance in parsecs.
– Will that be one parsec, sir?
No, ten.
In this new land, we shall designate stars in decreasing order of brightness, and increasing magnitude, also by assigning letters.
– In alphabetical order this time, sir?
Yes, of course.
– In the Latin alphabet, sir?
No, it shall be Greek.
As free men, we shall measure fluxes in magnitudes, except in radio, where we shall measure fluxes in Janskys.
– Sir, how do you convert between Janskys and magnitudes?
Nobody knows.
In this new land of freedom l, we shall divide the sky into latitudes and longitudes, like the Earth, except they shall be called ‘declination” and “right ascension”
– And will they be measured in degrees, sir like the Earth?
Only the declination.
– Sir, what units shall right ascension be?
Hours.
Supernovae shall also be of two types, I and II.
– The same types as stars, Sir?
No, totally different.
And they shall have subtypes, denoted by letters.
-Alphabetical, sir?
Only Type I. Type II will be subdivided into B and L.
– This is so confusing, Sir.
And all shall be core collapse supernovae, except Type Ia, which is something completely different.
It’s monthly roundup time again, and it’s happily election-free.
Propaganda works, ancient empires edition. This includes the Roman Republic being less popular than the Roman Empire and people approving of Sparta, whereas Persia and Carthage get left behind. They’re no FDA.
Polling USA: Net Favorable Opinion Of:
Ancient Athens: +44%
Roman Empire: +30%
Ancient Sparta: +23%
Roman Republican: +26%
Carthage: +13%
Holy Roman Empire: +7%
Persian Empire: +1%
Visigoths: -7%
Huns: -29%
YouGov / June 6, 2024 / n=2205
What do we do about all 5-star ratings collapsing the way Peter describes here?
Peter Wildeford: TBH I am pretty annoyed that when I rate stuff the options are:
“5 stars – everything was good enough I guess”
“4 stars – there was a serious problem”
“1-3 stars – I almost died”
I can’t express things going well!
I’d prefer something like:
5 stars – this went above/beyond, top 10%
4 stars – this met my expectations
3 stars – this was below my expectations but not terrible
2 stars – there was a serious problem
1 star – I almost died
Kitten: The rating economy for things like Airbnb, Uber etc. made a huge mistake when they used the five-star scale. You’ve got boomers all over the country who think that four stars means something was really good, when in fact it means there was something very wrong with the experience.
Driver got lost for 20 minutes and almost rear ended someone, four stars
Boomer reviewing their Airbnb:
This is one of the nicest places I have ever stayed, the decor could use a little updating, four stars.
A lot of people saying the boomers are right but not one of you mfers would even consider booking an Airbnb with a 3.5 rating because you know as well as I do that means there’s something really wrong with it.
Nobe: On Etsy you lose your “star seller” rating if it dips below 4.8. A couple of times I’ve gotten 4 stars and I’ve been beside myself wondering what I did wrong even when the comment is like “I love it, I’ll cherish it forever”
Moshe Yudkowsky: The first time I took an Uber, and rated a driver 3 (average), Uber wanted to know what was wrong. They corrupted their own metric.
Kate Kinard: I’m at an airbnb right now and this magnet is on the fridge as a reminder
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️= many issues to fix!
The problem is actually worse than this. Different people have different scales. A majority of people use the system where 4-stars means major issues, and many systems demand you maintain e.g. a 4.8. All you get are extreme negative selection.
Then there are others who think the default is 3 stars, 4 is good and 5 is exceptional.
Which is the better system, but not if everyone else is handing out 5s like candy, which means your rating is a function of who is rating you more than whether you did a good job. Your ‘negative selection’ is 50% someone who doesn’t know the rules.
This leads to perverse ‘worse is better’ situations, where you want products that draw in the audience that will use the lower scale, or you want something that will sometimes offend people and trigger 1s, such as being ‘too authentic’ or not focusing enough on service.
Mrs. C: I love the fact that in Japan you need to avoid 5 star things and look for 3-4 star places because Japanese people tend to use a 5 point scale sanely and it’s only foreigners giving 5 stars to everything, so a 5 star rating means “only foreigners go here”
Eliezer Yudkowsky: How the devil did Japan end up using 5-point scales sanely? I have a whole careful unpublished analysis of everything that goes wrong with 5-point rating systems; it hadn’t occurred to me that any other country would end up using them sanely!
What makes this even weirder is Japan is a place where people are taught never to tell someone no. One can imagine them being one of places deepest in the 5-star-only trap. Instead, this seems almost like an escape valve, maybe? You don’t face the social pressure, there isn’t a clear ‘no’ involved, and suddenly you get to go nuts. Neat.
One place that escapes this trap even here are movie ratings. Everyone understands that a movie rating of 4/5 means the movie was very good, perhaps excellent. We get that the best movies are much better than a merely good movie, and this difference matters, you want active positive selection. It also helps that you are not passing judgment on a particular person or local business, and there is no social exchange where you feel under pressure to maximize the rating metric.
This helps explain why Rotten Tomatoes is so much worse than Metacritic and basically can only be used as negative selection – RT uses a combination of binaries, which is the wrong question to ask, whereas Metacritic translates each review into a number. It also hints at part of why old Netflix predictions were excellent, as they were based on a 5-star scale, versus today’s thumbs-based ratings, which then are combined with pushing their content and predicting what you’ll watch rather than what you’ll like how much.
Liz: The fact that it’s cheaper to cook your own food is disturbing to me. like frequently even after accounting for your time. like cooking scales with number of people like crazy. there’s no reason for this to be the case. I don’t get it.
In the liztopia restaurants are high efficiency industrial organizations and making your own food is akin to having a hobby for gardening.
I literally opened a soylent right after posting this. i’m committed to the bit.
Gwern: The best explanation I’ve seen remains regulation and fixed costs: essentially, paternalistic goldplating of everything destroys all the advantages of eating out. Just consider how extremely illegal it would be to run a restaurant the way you run your kitchen. Or outlawing SRO.
Doing your own cooking has many nice benefits. You might enjoy cooking. You get to customize the food exactly how and when you like it, choose your ingredients, and enjoy it at home, and so on. The differential gives poorer people the opportunity to save money. I might go so far as to say that we might be better off for the fact that cooking at home is cheaper.
It’s still a statement about regulatory costs and requirements, essentially, that it is often also cheaper. In a sane world, cooking at home would be a luxury. Also in a sane world, we would have true industrialized at least the cheap cooking at this point. Low end robot chefs now.
Variety covers studio efforts to counter ‘Toxic Fandom,’ where superfans get very angry and engage in a variety of hateful posts, often make threats and sometimes engage in review bombing. It seems this is supposedly due to ‘superfans,’ the most dedicated, who think something is going to destroy their precious memories forever. The latest strategy is to hire those exact superfans, so you know when you’re about to walk into this, and perhaps you can change course to avoid this.
The reactions covered in the past mostly share a common theme, which is that they are rather obviously pure racism or homophobia, or otherwise called various forms of ‘woke garbage.’ This is very distinct from what they site as the original review bomb on Star Wars Episode IX, which I presume had nothing to do with either of these causes, and was due to the movie indeed betraying and destroying our childhoods by being bad.
The idea of bringing in superfans so you understand which past elements are iconic and important, versus which things you can change, makes sense. I actually think that’s a great idea, superfans can tell you are destroying the soul of the franchise, breaking a Shibboleth, or if your ideas flat out suck. That doesn’t mean you should or need to listen or care when they’re being racists.
Nathan Young offers Advice for Journalists, expressing horror at what seem to be the standard journalistic norms of quoting anything anyone says in private, out of context, without asking permission, with often misleading headlines, often without seeking to preserve meaning or even get the direct quote right, or to be at all numerate or aware of reasonable context for a fact and whether it is actually newsworthy. His conclusion is thus:
Nathan Young: Currently I deal with journalists like a cross between hostile witnesses and demonic lawyers. I read articles expecting to be misled or for facts to be withheld. And I talk to lawyers only after invoking complex magics (the phrases I’ve mentioned) to stop them taking my information and spreading it without my permission. I would like to pretend I’m being hyperbolic, but I’m really not. I trust little news at first blush and approach conversations with even journalists I like with more care than most activities.
I will reiterate. I take more care talking to journalists than almost any other profession and have been stressed out or hurt by them more often than almost any group. Despite this many people think I am unreasonably careless or naïve. It is hard to stress how bad the reputation of journalists is amongst tech/rationalist people.
Is this the reputation you want?
Most people I know would express less harsh versions of the same essential position – when he says that the general reputation is this bad, he’s not kidding. Among those who have a history interacting with journalists, it tends to be even worse.
The problem is largely the standard tragedy of the commons – why should one journalist sacrifice their story to avoid giving journalists in general a bad name? There was a time when there were effective forms of such norm enforcement. That time has long past, and personal reputations are insufficiently strong incentives here.
As my task has trended more towards a form of journalism, while I’ve gotten off light because it’s a special case and people I interact with do know I’m different, I’ve gotten a taste of the suspicion people have towards the profession.
So I’d like to take this time here to reassure everyone that I abide by a different code than the one Nathan Young describes in his post. I don’t think the word ‘journalist’ changes any of my moral or social obligations here. I don’t think that ‘the public has a right to know’ means I get to violate the confidence or preferences of those around me. Nor do I think that ‘technically we did not say off the record’ or ‘no takesies backsies’ means I am free to share private communications with anyone, or to publish them.
If there is something I am told in private, and I suspect you would have wanted to say it off the record, and we didn’t specify on the record, I will actively check. If you ask me to keep something a secret, I will. If you retroactively want to take something you said off the record, you can do that. I won’t publish something from a private communication unless I feel it was understood that I might do that, if unclear I will ask, and I will use standard common sense norms that respect privacy when considering what I say in other private conversations, and so on. I will also glamorize as necessary to avoid implicitly revealing whether I have hidden information I wouldn’t be able to share, and so on, as best I can, although nobody’s perfect at that.
It certainly seems as if Elon Musk is facing additional interference in regulatory requirements for launching his rockets, as a result of people disliking his political activities and decisions regarding Starlink. That seemsvery not okay, as in:
Alex Nieves (Politico): California officials cite Elon Musk’s politics in rejecting SpaceX launches.
Elon Musk’s tweets about the presidential election and spreading falsehoods about Hurricane Helene are endangering his ability to launch rockets off California’s central coast.
The California Coastal Commission on Thursday rejected the Air Force’s plan to give SpaceX permission to launch up to 50 rockets a year from Vandenberg Air Force Base in Santa Barbara County.
“Elon Musk is hopping about the country, spewing and tweeting political falsehoods and attacking FEMA while claiming his desire to help the hurricane victims with free Starlink access to the internet,” Commissioner Gretchen Newsom said at the meeting in San Diego.
…
“I really appreciate the work of the Space Force,” said Commission Chair Caryl Hart. “But here we’re dealing with a company, the head of which has aggressively injected himself into the presidential race and he’s managed a company in a way that was just described by Commissioner Newsom that I find to be very disturbing.”
There is also discussion about them being ‘disrespected’ by the Space Force. There are some legitimate issues involved as well, but this seems like a confession of regulators punishing Elon Musk for his political speech and actions?
I mean, I guess I appreciate that He Admit It.
Palmer Lucky: California citing Elon’s personal political activity in denying permission for rocket launches is obviously illegal, but the crazier thing IMO is how they cite his refusal to activate Starlink in Russian territory at the request of Ukraine. Doing so would have been a crime!
I do not think those involved have any idea the amount of damage such actions do, either to our prosperity – SpaceX is important in a very simple and direct way, at least in worlds where AI doesn’t render it moot – and even more than that the damage to our politics and government. If you give people this kind of clear example, do not act surprised when they turn around and do similar things to you, or consider your entire enterprise illegitimate.
Roon: In a good world faa would have an orientation where they get credit for and take pride in the starship launch.
Ross Rheingans-Yoo: In a good world every regulator would get credit for letting the successes through – balanced by equal blame for harmful failures – & those two incentives would be substantially stronger than the push to become an omniregulator using their perch to push a kitchen sink of things.
In other Elon Musk news: Starlink proved extremely useful in the wake of recent storms, with other internet access out indefinitely. It was also used by many first responders. Seems quite reasonable for many to have a Starlink terminal onhand purely as a backup.
The obvious counterargument is that when you go to places that are poor, you usually get terrible service. At one point I would periodically visit the Caribbean for work, and the worst thing about it was that the service everywhere was outrageously terrible, as in your meal at a restaurant typically takes an extra hour or two. I couldn’t take it. European service is often also very slow, and rural service tends to be relatively slow. Whereas in places in America where people cost the most to employ, like New York City, the service is usually quite good.
There’s several forces at work here.
We are richer, so labor costs more, so we don’t want to burn it on service.
We are richer in some places, so we value our time and thus good service more, and are willing to pay a bit more to get it.
We are richer in some places, in part because we have a culture that values good service and general hard work and not wasting time, so service is much better than in places with different values – at least by our own standards.
We are richer in part due to ‘algorithmic improvements,’ and greater productivity, and knowing how to offer things like good service more efficiently. So it is then correct to buy more and better service, and people know what to offer.
In particular: Servants provided excellent service in some ways, but were super inefficient. Mostly they ended up standing or sitting around not doing much, because you mostly needed them in high leverage spots for short periods. But we didn’t have a way to hire people to do things for you only when you needed them. Now we do. So you get to have most of the same luxury and service, for a fraction of the employment.
I think I actually get excellent service compared to the past, for a huge variety of things, and for many of the places I don’t it is because technology and the internet are taking away the need for such service. When I go to places more like the past, I don’t think the service is better – I reliably think the service is worse. I expect the actual past is the same, the people around you were cheaper to hire but relatively useless. Yes, you got ‘white glove service’ but why do I want people wearing white gloves?
Like Rob Bensinger here, I am a fan of Matt Yglesias and his campaign of ‘the thing you said it not literally true and I’m going to keep pointing that out.’ The question is when it is and isn’t worth taking the space and time to point out who is Wrong on the Internet, especially when doing politics.
Large study finds ability to concentrate is actually increasing in adults? This seems like a moment to defy the data, or at least disregard it in practice, there’s no way this can be real, right? It certainly does not match my lived experience of myself or others. Many said the graphs and data involved looked like noise. But that too would be great news, as ‘things are about the same’ would greatly exceed expectations.
Perhaps the right way to think about attention spans is that we have low intention tolerance, high willingness to context switch and ubiquitous distractions. It takes a lot more to hold our attention than it used to. Do not waste our time, the youth will not tolerate this. That is compatible with hyperfocusing on something sufficiently engaging, especially once buy-in has been achieved, even for very extended periods (see: This entire blog!), but you have to earn it.
He starts with the obvious question. Does what you love offer good chances of success? Does it pay the bills? If what you love is (his examples) finding good trades or running a software company, of course you pursue what you love. If it’s playing football, it’s going to be rough.
He notes a kind of midwit-meme curve as one key factor:
If you need a small amount of money, you can afford to do what you love.
If you need a large amount of money, you need to do what pays more.
If you need an epic amount of money, you will want to found a startup and will need unique insight, so you have to gamble on what you love.
The third consideration is, what do you actually want to do? He advises trying to figure this out right now, not to wait until after college (or for any other reason). The sooner you start the better, so investigate now if you are uncertain. A key trick is, look at the people doing what you might do, and ask if you want to turn into one of them.
If you can’t resolve the uncertainty, he says, try to give yourself options, where you can more easily switch tracks later.
This seems like one of the Obvious True and Useful Paul Graham Essays. These seem to be the correct considerations, in general, when deciding what to work on, if your central goal is some combination of ‘make money’ and ‘have a good life experience making it.’
The most obvious thing missing is the question of Doing Good. If you value having positive impact on the world, that brings in additional considerations.
Michael Prinzing: Philosophers say that studying philosophy makes people more rigorous, careful thinkers. But is that that true?
In a large dataset (N = 122,352 students) @daft_bookworm and I find evidence that it is!
In freshman year, Phil majors are more inclined than other students to support their views with logical arguments, consider alternative views, evaluate the quality of evidence, etc. But, Phil majors *alsoshow more growth in these tendencies than students in other majors.
This suggests that philosophy attracts people who are already rigorous, careful thinkers, but also trains people to be better thinkers.
Stefan Schubert: Seems worth noticing that they’re self-report measures and that the differences are small (one measure)/non-existent (the other)
Michael Prinzing: That’s right! Particularly in the comparison with an aggregate of all non-philosophy majors, the results are not terribly boosterish. But, in the comparison with more fine-grained groups of majors, it’s striking how much philosophy stands out.
barbarous: How come we find mathematics & computer science in the bottom of these? Wouldn’t we expect them to have higher baseline and higher improvement in rigor?
My actual guess is that the math and computer science people hold themselves to higher epistemic standards, that or the test is measuring the wrong thing.
Except this is their graph? The difference in growth is indeed very small, with only one line that isn’t going up like the others.
If anything, it’s Education that is the big winner on the top graph, taking a low base and making up ground. And given it’s self reports, there’s nothing like an undergraduate philosophy major to think they are practicing better thinking habits.
I mean, we can eyeball that, and the slopes are mostly the same across most of the majors?
Facial ticks predictfuture police cadet promotions at every stage, AUC score of 0.7. Importantly, with deliberate practice one can alter such facial ticks. Would changing the ticks actually change perceptions, even when interacting repeatedly in high stakes situations as police do? The article is gated, but based on what they do tell us I find it unlikely. Yes, the ticks are the best information available in this test and are predictive, but that does not mean they are the driving force. But it does seem worth it to fix any such ticks if you can?
Paul Graham: Renaming Twitter X doesn’t seem to have damaged it. But it doesn’t seem to have helped it either. So it was a waste of time and a domain name.
I disagree. You know it’s a stupid renaming when everyone does their best to keep using the old name anyway. I can’t think of anyone in real life that thinks ‘X’ isn’t a deeply stupid name, and I know many that got less inclined to use the product. So I think renaming Twitter to X absolutely damaged it and drove people away and pissed them off. The question is one of magnitude – I don’t think this did enough damage to be a crisis, but it did enough to hurt, in addition to being a distraction and cost.
Twitter ends use of bold and other formatting in the main timeline, because an increasing number of accounts whoring themselves out for engagement were increasingly using more and more bold and italics. Kudos to Elon Musk for responding to an exponential at the right time. Soon it was going to be everywhere, because it was working, and those of us who find it awful weren’t punishing it enough to matter to the numbers. There’s a time and place for selective and sparing use of such formatting, but this has now been officially Ruined For Everyone.
Emmett Shear: Anyone else’s For You start filling up with extreme slop nonsense, often political? “Not interested” x20 fixes it for a day but then it’s back again. It’s getting bad enough to make me stop using Twitter…frustrating because the good content is still good, the app just hides it.
TracingWoods: it’s cyclical for me but the past couple of weeks have been fine. feels like a specific switch flips occasionally, and no amount of “not interested” stops it. it should rotate back into sanity for you soon enough.
I checked for journalist purposes, and my For You page looks… exactly like my Following feed, plus some similar things that I’m not technically following and aren’t in lists especially when paired with interactions with those who I do follow, except the For You stuff is scrambled so you can’t rely on it. So good job me, I suppose? It still doesn’t do anything useful for me.
Online discussions are dominated by a surprisingly small, extremely vocal, and non-representative minority. Research on social media has found that, while only 3% of active accounts are toxic, they produce 33% of all content. Furthermore, 74% of all online conflicts are started in just 1% of communities, and 0.1% of users shared 80% of fake news. Not only does this extreme minority stir discontent, spread misinformation, and spark outrage online, they also bias the meta-perceptions of most users who passively “lurk” online.
The strategy absolutely works. In AI debates on Twitter, that 3% toxic minority works hard to give the impression that their position is what everyone thinks, promote polarization and so on. From what I can tell politics has it that much worse.
Indeed, 97% of political posts from Twitter/X come from just 10% of the most active users on social media.
That’s a weird case, because most Twitter users are mostly or entirely lurkers, so 10% of accounts plausibly includes most posts period.
The motivation for all this is obvious, across sides and topics. If you have a moderate opinion, why would it post about that, especially with all that polarized hostility? There are plenty of places I have moderate views, and then I don’t talk about them on social media (or here, mostly) because why would I need to do that?
One of the big shifts in AI is the rise of more efficient Ruining It For Everyone. Where previously the bad actors were rate limited and had substantial marginal costs, those limitations fall away, as do various norms keeping people behaving decently. Systems that could take a certain amount of such stress will stop working, and we’ll need to make everything more robust against bad actors.
The great news is that if it’s a tiny group ruining it for everyone, you can block them.
Yishan: “0.1% of users share 80% of fake news”
After that document leak about how Russia authors its fake news, I’ve been able to more easily spot disinfo accounts and just block them from my feed.
I only needed to do this for a couple weeks and my TL quality improved markedly. There’s still plenty of opinion from right and left, but way less of the “shit-stirring hysteria” variety.
If you are wondering what leak it was, itʻs the one described in this thread.
Youʻll see that the main thrust is to exploit: “They are afraid of losing the American way of life and the ‘American dream.’ It is these sentiments that should be exploited,”
In the quoted screenshot, the key element is at the bottom: – use a minimum of fake news and a maximum of realistic information – continuously repeat that this is what is really happening, but the official media will never tell you or show it to you.
The recent port strike and Hurricane Helene were great for this because whenever thereʻs a big event, the disinfo accounts appear to hyper-focus on exploiting it, so a lot of their posts get a lot of circulation, and you can start to spot them.
The pattern you look for is:
The post often talks about how youʻre not being told the truth, or itʻs been hidden from you. Theyʻre very obvious with it. A more subtle way is that they end with a question asking if there is something sinister going on.
the second thing is that it does cite a bunch of real/realistic (or already well-known facts) and then connects it to some new claim, often one you haven’t heard any other substantiation for. This could be real, but it’s the cluster of this plus the other points.
The third is that the author doesn’t seem to be a real person. Now, this is tough, because there are plenty of real anon accounts. but it’s a sort of thing you can tell from a combination of the username (one that seems weird or has a lot of numbers, or doesn’t fit the persona presented), the picture isn’t a real person, the persona is a little too “bright”, or the character implied by the bio doesn’t seem like the kind of person who’d suddenly care a lot about this issue. This one requires a bit of intuition.
None of these things is by itself conclusive (and I might have blocked some false positives), but once you start knowing what to spot, there’s a certain kind of post and when you look at the account, it has certain characteristics that stick out.
It just doesn’t look like your normal extreme right-wing or extreme left-wing real person. People like that tend to make more throwaway (“I hate this! Can’t believe Harris/Elon/Trump is so awful!”) posts, not carefully-styled media-delicious posts, if that makes sense.
I mostly prefer to toss out anyone who spends their social media expressing political opinions, except for an intentional politics list (that I should update some time soon, it’s getting pretty old).
What Yishan is doing sounds like it would be effective at scale if sustained, but you’d have to put in the work. And it’s a shame that he has to do it all himself. Ideally an AI could help you do that (someone build this!) but at minimum you’d want a group of people who can share such blocks, so if someone hits critical mass then by default they get blocked throughout. You could provide insurance in various forms – e.g. if you’ve interacted with them yourself or they’re at least a 2nd-level follow, then you can exempt those accounts, and so on. Sky’s the limit, we have lots of options
Tenobrus: i have a lotta mutuals who i would love to follow but be able to mute some semantic subset of their posts. like give me this guy but without the dumb politics, or that girl but without the thirst traps, or that tech bro but without the e/acc.
This seems super doable, on the ‘I am tempted to build an MVP myself’ level. I asked o1-preview, and it called it ambitious but agreed it could be done, and even for a relatively not great programmer suggested maybe 30-50 hours to an MVP. Who’s in?
My best proposal continues to be a law mandating that large social media platforms offer access to alternative interfaces and forms of content filtering and selection. Let people choose friendly options if they want that.
Otherwise, of course you are going to get things like TikTok.
As TikTok’s 170 million U.S. users can attest, the platform’s hyper-personalized algorithm can be so engaging it becomes difficult to close the app. TikTok determined the precise amount of viewing it takes for someone to form a habit: 260 videos. After that, according to state investigators, a user “is likely to become addicted to the platform.”
In the previously redacted portion of the suit, Kentucky authorities say: “While this may seem substantial, TikTok videos can be as short as 8 seconds and are played for viewers in rapid-fire succession, automatically,” the investigators wrote. “Thus, in under 35 minutes, an average user is likely to become addicted to the platform.”
They also note that the tool that limits time usage, which defaulted to a rather large 60 minutes a day, had almost no impact on usage in tests (108.5 min/day → 107).
One document shows one TikTok project manager saying, “Our goal is not to reduce the time spent.”
Well, yes, obviously. In general it’s good to get confirmation on obvious things, like that TikTok was demoting relatively unattractive people in its feeds, I mean come on. And yes, if 95% (!) of smartphone users under 17 are on TikTok, usually for extended periods, that will exclude other opportunities for them.
And yes, the algorithm will trap you into some terrible stuff, that’s what works.
During one internal safety presentation in 2020, employees warned the app “can serve potentially harmful content expeditiously.” TikTok conducted internal experiments with test accounts to see how quickly they descend into negative filter bubbles.
“After following several ‘painhub’ and ‘sadnotes’ accounts, it took me 20 mins to drop into ‘negative’ filter bubble,” one employee wrote. “The intensive density of negative content makes me lower down mood and increase my sadness feelings though I am in a high spirit in my recent life.”
Another employee said, “there are a lot of videos mentioning suicide,” including one asking, “If you could kill yourself without hurting anybody would you?”
In particular it seems moderation missed self-harm and eating disorders, but also:
TikTok acknowledges internally that it has substantial “leakage” rates of violating content that’s not removed. Those leakage rates include: 35.71% of “Normalization of Pedophilia;” 33.33% of “Minor Sexual Solicitation;” 39.13% of “Minor Physical Abuse;” 30.36% of “leading minors off platform;” 50% of “Glorification of Minor Sexual Assault;” and “100% of “Fetishizing Minors.”
None of this is new or surprising. I affirm that I believe we should, indeed, require that TikTok ownership be transferred, knowing that is probably a de facto ban.
The obvious question is, in the age of multimodal AI, can we dramatically improve on at least this part of the problem? TikTok might be happy to serve up an endless string of anorexia videos, but I do not think they want to be encouraging sexual predators. In addition to being really awful, it is also very bad for business. I would predict that it would take less than a week to get a fine-tune of Llama 3.2, based on feeding it previously flagged and reviewed videos as the fine-tune data, that would do much better than these rates at identifying violating TikTok videos. You could check every video, or at least every video that would otherwise get non-trivial play counts.
Lu In Alaska: Stop what you’re doing and read the following:
All the kids and in-laws and grands have met up for breakfast at my geriatric dad’s house. My sisters are here. Their boys are here. We are eating breakfast. My dad asks for help transferring his contacts into his new phone.
Friends. We discovered together that my dad has his contacts in a tier list of his feelings not alphabetically. We are absolutely *beside ourselvesreviewing his tiers off as a whole family. Crying. Gasping. Wheezing. His ex-wife who is visiting today is C tier but his first wife’s sister is B tier THE DRAMA.
So like my name is in as ALu. His brother-in-law is BJim. He is rating us. I am DYING. Someone find CAnn she’s going to be pissed. Let’s sit back and watch.
The kids made A tier what a relief. Should be A+Lu
I love this, and also this seems kind of smart (also hilarious) given how many contacts one inevitably gathers? I have 8 contacts that are not me and that begin with Z, and 7 that begin with Y. You get a ‘favorites’ page, but you only get one. You can use labels, but the interface for them is awkward.
Cookingwong: The fact that my phone autocorrects “yeah np” to “yeah no” has caused 3 divorces, 2 gang wars, 11 failed hostage negotiations, and $54 billion loss in GDP.
‘Np’ is a standard thing to say, yet phones often think it is a typo and autocorrect it to its exact opposite. Can someone please ensure that ‘np’ gets added to the list of things that do not get corrected?
Apple is working on smart glassesthat would make use of Vision Pro’s technology, aiming for a 2027 launch, along with potential camera-equipped AirPods. Apple essentially forces you to pick a side, either in or out, so when the Vision Pro came out I was considering whether to switch entirely to their products, and concluded that the device wasn’t ready. But some version of it or of smart glasses will be awesome when someone finally pulls them off properly, the question is when and who.
There is the theory that the tech industry is still in California because not enforcing non-competes is more important than everything else combined. I don’t doubt it helps but also companies can simply not require such agreements at this point? I think mostly it’s about path dependence, network effects and lock-in at this point.
Auren Hoffman: things all hotel rooms should have (but don’t): MUCH more light. room key from phone. SUPER fast wifi. tons of free bottled water. outlets every few feet. what else?
Sheel Mohnot: blackout curtains
a single button to turn off every light in the room
check in via kiosk
Andres Sandberg: A desk, a hairdryer.
Humberto: 1. Complete blackout 2. 0 noise/ shutdown everything including the fucking refrigerator hidden inside a cabinet but still audible 3. Enough space for a regular sized human to do some push ups 4. Laundry bags (can be paper) 5. I was going to say an AirPlay compatible tv but clearly optional this one.
Ian Schafer: Mag/Qi phone charging stand.
Emily Mason: USB and USB_C fast charging ports sockets (and a few cords at the desk).
The answers are obvious if you ask around, and most of them are cheap to implement.
My list at this point of what I care about that can plausibly be missing is something like this, roughly in order:
Moderately comfortable bed or better. Will pay for quality here.
Sufficient pillows and blankets.
Blackout curtains, no lights you cannot easily turn off. No noise.
Excellent wi-fi.
AC/heat that you can adjust reasonably.
Desk with good chair.
Access to good breakfast, either in hotel or within an easy walk.
Decent exercise room, which mostly means weights and a bench.
Outlets on all sides of the bed, and at desk, ideally actual ports and chargers.
Access to good free water, if tap is bad there then bottled is necessary.
TV with usable HDMI port, way to stream to it, easy access to streaming services.
California decides to ‘ban sell-by dates’ by which they mean they’re going to require you to split that into two distinct numbers or else:
Merlyn Miller (Food and Wine): he changes will take effect starting on July 1, 2026, and impact all manufacturers, processors, and retailers of food for human consumption. To adhere with the requisite language outlined, any food products with a date label — with the exception of infant formula, eggs, beer, and malt beverages — must state “Best if Used By” to indicate peak quality, and “Use By” to designate food safety. By reducing food waste, the legislation (Assembly Bill No. 660) may ultimately save consumers money and combat climate change too.
It’s so California to say you are ‘banning X’ and instead require a second X.
The concern seems to be that some people would think they needed to throw food out if it was past its expiration date, leading to ‘food waste.’ But wasn’t that exactly what the label was for and what it meant? So won’t this mean you’ll simply have to add a second earlier date for ‘peak quality,’ and some people will then throw out anything past that date too? Also, isn’t ‘peak quality’ almost always ‘the day or even minute we made this?’
Who is going to buy things that are past ‘peak quality’ but not expired? Are stores going to have to start discounting such items?
Therefore I predict this new law net increases both confusion and food waste.
I have now finished the TV series UnREAL. The news is good, and there are now seven shows in my tier 1. My guess is this is my new #5 show of all time. Here’s the minimally spoilerific pitch: They’re producing The Bachelor, and also each other, by any means necessary, and they’re all horrible people.
I got curious enough afterwards to actually watch The Bachelor, which turns out to be an excellent new show to put on during workouts and is better for having watched UnREAL first, but very much will not be joining the top tiers. Is biggest issue is that it’s largely the same every season so I’ll probably tire of it soon. But full strategic analysis is likely on the way, because if I’m watching anyway then there’s a lot to learn.
A teaser note: Everlasting, the version on UnREAL, is clearly superior to The Bachelor. There are some really good ideas there, and also the producers on The Bachelor are way too lazy. Go out there and actually produce more, and make better editing decisions.
I can also report that Nobody Wants This is indeed poorly named. You’ll want this.
I continue to enter my movie reviews at Letterboxd, but also want to do some additional discussion here this month.
We start with the Scott Sumner movie reviews for Q3, along with additional thoughts from him, especially about appreciating films where ‘nothing is happening.’ This is closely linked to his strong dislike of Hollywood movies, where something is always happening, even if that something is nothing. The audience insists upon it.
Last quarter his lowest rated new film, a 2.6, was Challengers. He said he knew he’d made a mistake before the previews even finished and definitely after a few minutes. Scott values different things than I do but this was the first time I’ve said ‘no Scott Sumner, your rating is objectively wrong here.’
This quarter his lowest rating, a truly dismal 1.5, was for John Wick, with it being his turn to say ‘nothing happens’ and wondering if it was supposed to be a parody, which it very much isn’t.
There’s a strange kind of mirror here? Scott loves cinematography, and long purposeful silences, painting pictures, and great acting. I’m all for all of that, when it’s done well, although with less tolerance for how much time you can take – if you’re going to do a lot of meandering you need to be really good.
So when I finally this month watched The Godfather without falling asleep while trying (cause if I like Megalopolis, I really have no excuse) I see how it is in Scott’s system an amazingly great film. I definitely appreciated it on that level. But I also did notice why I’d previously bounced off, and also at least two major plot holes where plot-central decisions make no sense, and I noticed I very much disliked what the movie was trying to whisper to us. In the end, yeah I gave it a 4.0, but it felt like work, or cultural research, and I notice I feel like I ‘should’ watch Part II but I don’t actually want to do it.
Then on the flip side there’s not only the simple joys of the Hollywood picture, there’s the ability to extract what is actually interesting and the questions being asked, behind all that, if one pays attention.
In the case of John Wick, I wrote a post about the first 3 John Wick movies, following up with my review of John Wick 4 here, and I’d be curious what Scott thinks of that explanation. That John Wick exists in a special universe, with a unique economy and set of norms and laws, and you perhaps come for the violence but you stay for the world building. Also, I would add, how people react to the concept of the unstoppable force – the idea that in-universe people know that Wick is probably going to take down those 100 people, if he sets his mind to it, so what do you do?
Scott’s write-up indicates he didn’t see any of that.
Similarly, the recent movie getting the lowest rating this quarter from Scott was Megalopolis, at 3.0 out of his 4, the minimum to be worth watching, whereas I have it at 4.5 out of 5. Scott’s 3 is still a lot higher than the public, and Scott says he didn’t understand the plot and was largely dismissive of the results, but he admired the ambition and thought it was worth seeing for that. Whereas to me, yes a lot of it is ‘on the nose’ and the thing is a mess but if Scott Sumner says he didn’t get what the central conflict was about beyond vague senses then how can it be ‘too on the nose’?
I seriously worry that we live in a society where people somehow find Megalopolis uninteresting, and don’t see the ideas in front of their face or approve of or care for those ideas even if they did. And I worry such a society is filled, as the film notes, with people who no longer believe in it and in the future, and thus will inevitably fall – a New Rome, indeed. In some sense, the reaction to the film, people rejecting the message, makes the message that much more clear.
Discussion question: Should you date or invest in anyone who disliked Megalopolis?
I then went and checked out the compilation of Scott’s scores. The world of movies is so large. I haven’t seen any of his 4.0s. From his 3.9s, the only one I saw and remember was Harakiri, which was because I was testing the top of the Letterboxd ratings (with mixed results for that strategy overall), and for my taste I only got to 4.5 and couldn’t quite get to 5, by his scale he is clearly correct. From his 3.8s I’m confident I’ve seen Traffic, The Empire Strikes Back, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men and The Lord of the Rings. Certainly those are some great picks.
There are some clear things Scott tends to prefer more than I do, so there are some clear adjustments I can make: The more ‘commercial,’ recent, American, short, fast or ‘fun’ the more I should adjust upwards, and vice versa, plus my genre, topic and actor preferences. In a sense you want to know ‘Scott rating above replacement for certain known things’ rather than Scott’s raw rating, and indeed that is the right way to evaluate most movie ratings if you are an advanced player.
At minimum, I’m clearly underusing the obvious ‘see Scott’s highly ranked picks with some filtering for what you’d expect to like.’
As opposed to movie critics in general, who seem completely lost and confused – I’ve seen two other movies since and no one seems to have any idea what either of them was even about.
The Substance (trailer-level spoilers) is another misunderstood movie from this month that makes one worry for our civilization. Everyone, I presume including those who made the film, is missing the central point. Yes, on an obvious level (and oh do they bring out the anvils) this is about beauty standards and female aging and body horror and all that. But actually it’s not centrally about that at all. It’s about maximizing quality of life under game theory and decision theory, an iterated prisoner’s dilemma and passing of the torch between versions of yourself across time and generations.
This is all text, the ‘better version of yourself’ actress is literally named Qualley (her character is called Sue, which also counts if you think about it), and the one so desperately running out of time that she divides herself into two is named Demi Moore, and they both do an amazing job while matching up perfectly, so this is probably the greatest Kabbalistic casting job of all time.
Our society seems to treat the breakdown and failure of this, the failure to hear even as you are told in no uncertain terms over and over ‘THERE IS ONLY ONE YOU,’ as inevitable. We are one, and cannot fathom it.
Our society is failing this on a massive scale, from the falling fertility rate to the power being clung to by those who long ago needed to hand things off, and in reverse by those who do not understand what foundations their survival relies upon.
Now consider the same scenario as the movie, except without requiring stabilization – the switch is 100% voluntary each time. Can we pass this test? What if the two sides are far less the ‘same person’ as they are here, say the ‘better younger’ one is an AI?
I ask because if we are to survive, we will have to solve vastly harder versions of such problems. We will need to solve them with ourselves, with each other, and with AIs. Things currently do not look so good on these fronts.
Joker: Folie à Deux is another movie that is not about what people think, at all. People think it’s bad, and especially that its ending is bad, and their reasons for thinking this are very bad. I’m not saying it’s a great film, but both Joker movies are a lot better than I thought they were before the last five minutes of this one. I am sad that it was less effective because I was importantly spoiled, so if you decide to be in don’t ask any questions.
I also love this old story, Howard Hughes had insomnia and liked to watch late movies, so he bought a television station to ensure it would play movies late at night, and would occasionally call them up to order them to switch to a different one. Station cost him $34 million in today’s dollars, so totally Worth It.
Katherine Dee, also known as Default Friend, makes the case that the death or stasis of culture has been greatly exaggerated. She starts by noting that fashion, movies, television and music are indeed in decay. For fashion I’m actively happy about that. For music I agree but am mostly fine with it, since we have such great archives available. For movies and television, I see the argument, and there’s a certain ‘lack of slack’ given to modern productions, but I think the decline narratives are mostly wrong.
The real cast Katherine is making is that the new culture is elsewhere, on social media, especially the idea of the entire avatar of a performer as a work of art, to be experienced in real time and in dialogue with the audience (perhaps, I’d note, similarly to sports?).
I buy that there is something there and that it has cultural elements. Certainly we are exploring new forms on YouTube and TikTok. Some of it even has merit, as she notes the good TikTok tends to often be sketch comedy TikTok. I notice that still doesn’t make me much less sad and also I am not that tempted to have a TikTok account. I find quite a lot of the value comes from touchstones and reference points and being able to filter and distill things over time. If everything is ephemeral, or only in the moment, then fades, that doesn’t work for me, and over time presumably culture breaks down.
I notice I’m thinking about the distinction between sports, which are to be experienced mostly in real time, with this new kind of social media performance. The difference is that sports gives us a fixed set of reference points and meaningful events, that everyone can share, especially locally, and also then a shared history we can remember and debate. I don’t think the new forms do a good job of that, in addition to the usual other reasons sports are awesome.
We all have many kinds of features. I collected 16 of them, and over the last day did four sets of polls to rank them according to four criteria:
Liked – what features of you do you most want to be liked for?
Pick – what features of them do you most use to pick associates?
Future – what features most cause future folks to be like them?
Improve – what features do you most want to improve in yourself?
Here are priorities (relative to 100 max) from 5984 poll responses:
As I find some of the Liked,Pick choices hard to believe, I see those as more showing our ideals re such features weights. F weights seem more believable to me.
Liked and Pick are strongly (0.85) correlated, but both are uncorrelated (-0.02,-0.08) with Future. Improve is correlated with all three (L:0.48, P:0.35, F:0.56), suggesting we choose what to improve as a combo of what influences future and what we want to be liked for now. (Best fit of Improve as linear combo of others is I = 1.12*L-0.94*P+0.33*F.)
Can anyone help me understand these patterns?
In some ways, the survey design choices Hanson made are even more interesting than the results, but I’ll focus on looking at the results.
The first thing to note is that people in the ‘Pick’ column were largely lying.
If you think you don’t pick your associates largely on the basis of health, stamina, looks, power, wealth, fame, achievements, connections or taste, I am here to inform you that you are probably fooling yourself on that.
There are a lot of things I value in associates, and I absolutely value intelligence and insight too, but I’m not going to pretend I don’t also care about the stuff listed above as well. I also note that there’s a difference between what I care about when initially picking associates or potential associates, versus what causes me to want to keep people around over the long term.
This column overall seems to more be answering the question ‘what features do you want to use as much as possible to pick your associates?’ I buy that we collectively want to use these low rated features less, or think of ourselves as using them less. But quite obviously we do use them, especially when choosing our associates initially.
Similarly, ‘liked’ is not what you are liked for, or what you are striving to acquire in order to be liked. It is what you would prefer that others like you for. Here, I am actually surprised Intelligence ranks so high, even though the pool of respondents it is Hanson’s Twitter. People also want to improve their intelligence in this survey, which implies this is about something more than inherent ability.
The ‘future’ column is weird because most people mostly aren’t trying to cause future folks in general to be more like themselves. They’re also thinking about it in a weird way. Why are ‘health’ and ‘cooperative’ ranked so highly here? What is this measuring?
Matt Mullenweg publishes his charitable contributions going back to 2011, as part of an ongoing battle with private equity firm Silver Lake. This could be a good norm to encourage, conspicuous giving rather than conspicuous consumption is great even when it’s done in stupid ways (e.g. to boast at charity galas for cute puppies with rare diseases) and you can improve on that.
What makes a science Nobel Laureate? Paul Novosad crunches the numbers. About half come from the ‘top 5%’ by income, but many do come from very non-elite backgrounds. The most common profession for fathers is business owner rather than professor, but that’s because a lot of people own businesses, whereas the ratio on professors is off the charts nuts, whereas growing up on a farm means you are mostly toast:
What is odd about Paul’s framing of the results is the idea that talent is evenly distributed. That is Obvious Nonsense. We are talking about the most elite of elite talent. If you have that talent, your parents likely were highly talented too, and likely inclined to similar professions. Yes, of course exposure to the right culture and ideas and opportunities and pushes in the right directions matter tons too, and yes most of the talent out on the farm or in the third world will be lost to top science, but we were not starting out on a level playing field here.
A lot of that 990:1 likelihood ratio for professors, and 160:1 for natural scientists, is a talent differential.
Whereas money alone seems to not help much. Business owners have only about a disappointing 2.5:1 likelihood ratio, versus elementary and secondary school teachers who are much poorer but come in around 8:1.
The cultural fit and exposure to science and excitement about science, together with talent for the field, are where it is at here.
If I were designing a civilization-level response to this, I would not be so worried about ‘equality’ in super high scientific achievement. There’s tons of talent out there, versus not that much opportunity. Instead, I would mostly focus on the opposite, the places where we have proven talent can enjoy oversized success, and I would try to improve that success. I care about the discoveries, not who makes them, so let’s ‘go where the money is’ and work with the children of scientists and professors, ensuring they get their shot, while also providing avenues for exceptional talent from elsewhere. Play to win.
I played through the main story of Gordian Quest, which I declare to be Tier 4 (Playable) but you probably shouldn’t. Sadly, in what Steam records as 18 hours, not once was there any serious danger anyone in the party would die, and when I finished the game I ‘still had all these’ with a lot of substantial upgrades being held back. Yes, you can move to higher difficulties, but the other problem is that the plot was as boring and generic as they come. Some going through the motions was fun, but I definitely was waiting for it to be over by the end.
Also the game kind of makes you sit around at the end of battles while you full heal and recharge your action meters, you either make this harder to do or you make it impossible. And it’s very easy to click the wrong thing in the skill grid and really hurt yourself permanently, although you had so much margin for error it didn’t matter.
Summary: There’s something here, and I think that a good game could be built using this engine, but alas this isn’t it. Not worth your time.
I finished my playthrough of the Canon of Creation from Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance (SMT V). I can confirm that it is very good and a major upgrade over the base SMT V, although I do worry that the full ‘save anywhere’ implementation is too forgiving and thus cuts down too much on the tension level.
There are two other issues. The first is a huge difficulty spike at the end right before the final set of battles, which means that the correct play is indeed a version of ‘save everything that will still be useful later, and spend it on a big splurge to build a top level party for the last few battles.’ And, well, sure, par for the course, but I wish we found a way to not make this always correct.
The other issue is that I am not thrilled with your ending options, for reasons that are logically highly related to people not thinking well about AI alignment and how to choose a good future in real life. There are obvious reasons the options each seem doomed, so your total freedom is illusory. The ‘secret fourth’ option is the one I wanted, and I was willing to fight extra for it, but one of the required quests seemed bugged and wouldn’t start (I generally avoid spoilers and guides, but if I’m spending 100+ hours on one of these games I want to know what triggers the endings). Still, the options are always interesting to consider in SMT games.
A weird note is that the items I got for the preorder radically change how you approach the early part of the game, because they give you a free minor heal and minor Almighty attack all, which don’t cost SP. That makes it easy to go for a Magic-based build without worrying about Macca early.
The question now is, do I go for Canon of Vengeance and/or the other endings, and if so do I do it keeping my levels or reset. Not sure yet. I presume it’s worth doing Vengeance once.
Metaphor: ReFantazio looks like the next excellent Atlus Persona-style game, although I plan on waiting for price drops to play it since I’m not done with SMT V and haven’t gotten to Episode Aiges yet and my queue is large and also I expect to get into Slay the Spire 2 within a few months.
Magic’s Commander format bans Nadu, Winged Wisdom, which seems necessary and everyone saw coming and where the arguments are highly overdetermined, but then it also bans Dockside Extortionist, Jeweled Lotus and Mana Crypt. The argument they make is that with so many good midrange snowball cards it is too easy for the player with fast mana to take over and overwhelm the table, and they don’t want this to happen too often so Sol Ring is fine because it is special but there can’t be too many different ways to get there.
Many were unhappy with the decision to ban these fast mana format staples.
Brian Kibler calls Crypt and Lotus Rule 0 issues, you can talk to your group about whether to allow such fast mana, but can understand Dockside and is like most of us happy for Nadu to bite the dust.
Zac Hill points out that if you ban some of the mana acceleration, this could decrease or increase the amount of snowball runaway games, depending on what it does to the variance of which players get how fast a start. Reid Duke points out that something can be cool when it happens rarely enough but miserable when (as in Golden Goose in Oko) it happens too often.
Kai Budde: Hardly the problem of the CRC. that’s wotc printing crazy good chase mythics to milk players. and then that starts the powercreep as they have to top these to sell the next cards etc. can make the same argument for modern-nadu. people spent money, keep it legal. no, thanks.
lotus/crypt/dockside are format breaking. argueing anything else after 30 years of these cards being too powerful in every format is just ridiculous. now why sol ring and maybe some others survived is an entirely different question, i’m with @bmkibler there.
Jaxon: I have yet to hear of a deck that wouldn’t be better for including Dockside, Crypt, and Lotus. That’s textbook ban-worthy.
So far, so normal. All very reasonable debates. There’s a constant tension between ‘don’t destroy card market value or upset the players and their current choices’ and ‘do what is long term healthy for the format.’ I have no idea if banning Lotus and Crypt was net good or not, but it’s certainly a defensible position.
Alas, things then turned rather ugly.
Commander Rules Committee: As a result of the threats last week against RC members, it has become impossible for us to continue operating as an independent entity. Given that, we have asked WotC to assume responsibility for Commander and they will be making decisions and announcements going forward.
We are sad about the end of this era, and hopeful for the future; WotC has given strong assurances they do not want to change the vision of the format. Committee members have been invited to contribute as individual advisors to the new management framework.
The RC would like to express our gratitude to all the CAG members who have contributed their wisdom and perspective over the years. Finally, we want to thank all the players who have made this game so successful. We look forward to interacting as members of the community.
Please, be excellent to each other.
LSV: It seemed pretty clear to me that having people outside the building controlling the banlist for WotC’s most popular format was untenable, but it’s pretty grim how this all went down. The bottom 10% of any large group is often horrible, and this is a perfect example.
Gavin Verhey: The RC and CAG are incredible people, devoted to a format we love. They’ve set a great example. Though we at Wizards are now managing Commander, we will be working with community members, like the RC, on future decisions. It’s critical to us Commander remains community-focused.
This was inevitable in some form. Wizards had essentially ‘taken over’ Commander already, in the sense that they design cards now primarily with Commander in mind. Yes, the RC had the power to ban individual cards. But the original vision of Commander, that it should take what happened to be around and let us do fun things with those cards and letting weirdness flags fly and unexpected things happen, except banning what happened to be obnoxious? That vision was already mostly dead. The RC couldn’t exactly go around banning everything designed ‘for Commander.’ Eventually, Wizards was going to fully take control, one way or another, for better and for worse.
It’s still pretty terrible the way it went down. The Magic community should not have to deal with death threats when making card banning decisions. Nor should those decisions be at least somewhat rewarded, with the targets then giving up their positions. But what choice was there?
Contra LSV, I do feel shame for what happened, despite having absolutely no connection to any of the particular events and having basically not played for years. It is a stain upon the entire community. If someone brings dishonor on your house, ‘I had nothing to do with it’ obviously matters but it does not get you fully off the hook. It was your house.
Moving forward, what should be done with Commander?
If I was Wizards, I would be sure not to move too quickly. One needs to take the time to get it right, and also to not make it look like they’ve been lying in wait for the RC to get the message and finally hand things off, or feel like these threats are being rewarded.
But what about the proposal being floated, at least in principle?
WotC: Here’s the idea: There are four power brackets, and every Commander deck can be placed in one of those brackets by examining the cards and combinations in your deck and comparing them to lists we’ll need community help to create. You can imagine bracket one is the baseline of an average preconstructed deck or below and bracket four is high power. For the lower tiers, we may lean on a mixture of cards and a description of how the deck functions, and the higher tiers are likely defined by more explicit lists of cards.
For example, you could imagine bracket one has cards that easily can go in any deck, like Swords to Plowshares, Grave Titan, and Cultivate, whereas bracket four would have cards like Vampiric Tutor, Armageddon, and Grim Monolith, cards that make games too much more consistent, lopsided, or fast than the average deck can engage with.
In this system, your deck would be defined by its highest-bracket card or cards. This makes it clear what cards go where and what kinds of cards you can expect people to be playing. For example, if Ancient Tomb is a bracket-four card, your deck would generally be considered a four. But if it’s part of a Tomb-themed deck, the conversation may be “My deck is a four with Ancient Tomb but a two without it. Is that okay with everyone?”
This is at least kind of splitting Commander into four formats as a formalized Rule 0.
It is also a weird set of examples, and a strange format, where a card like Armageddon can be in the highest tier alongside the fast mana and tutors. I’d be curious to see what some 2s and 3s are supposed to be. And we’ll need to figure out what to do about cards like Sol Ring and other automatic-include cards especially mana sources.
I do worry a bit that this could cause a rush to buy ‘worse’ cards that get lower tier values, and that could result in a situation where it costs more to build a deck at a lower tier and those without the resources have to have awkward conversations.
On reflection I do like that this is a threshold tier system, rather than a points system. A points system (where each card has a point total, and your deck can only combine to X points, usually ~10) is cool and interesting, but complicated, hard to measure over 100 card singleton decks and not compatible with the idea of multiple thresholds. You can mostly only pick one number and go with it.
We will also be evaluating the current banned card list alongside both the Commander Rules Committee and the community. We will not ban additional cards as part of this evaluation. While discussion of the banned list started this, immediate changes to the list are not our priority.
I would be extremely reluctant to unban specifically Crypt or Lotus. I don’t have a strong opinion on whether those bans were net good, but once they happen the calculus shifts dramatically, and you absolutely do not want to reward what happened by giving those issuing death threats what they wanted.
That said, there are a bunch of other banned cards in Commander that can almost certainly be safely unbanned, and there is value in minimizing what is on the list. Then, if a year or two from now we decide that more fast mana would be healthy for the format again, or would be healthy inside tier 4 or what not, we can revisit those two in particular.
What should be the conventions around the clock in MTGO? Matt Costa calls out another player for making plays with the sole intention of trying to run out Matt’s clock. Most reactions were that the clock is part of the game, and playing for a clock win is fine. To me, the question is, where should the line be? Hopefully we can all agree that it is on you to finish the match on time, your opponent is under no obligation to help you out. But also it is not okay to take game actions whose only goal is to get the opponent to waste time, and certainly not okay to abuse the system to force you to make more meaningless clicks. Costa here makes clear he would draw the line far more aggressively than I would, to me anything that is trying to actually help win the game is fine.
In other news, gaming overall was way up for young men as of 2022:
Paul Graham: The amount of time young men spent gaming was not exactly low in 2019. Usually when you see dramatic growth it’s from a low starting point, but this is dramatic growth from a high starting point.
That’s actually quite a lot. I don’t get to play two hours of games a day. This going up for 2022 from 2021 suggests this is not merely a temporary pandemic effect.
For those who did not realize, game matching algorithms often no longer optimize ‘fair’ matchups, and instead follow patterns designed to preserve engagement (example patent here). I’ve had this become obvious in some cases where it greatly changed the incentives, and when that happened it killed the whole experience. So to all you designers out there, be careful with this.
I love this proposal and would watch a lot more baseball if they did it: MLB considering requiring starting pitchers to go at least 6 innings, unless they either are injured enough to go on the injured reserve, throw 100 pitches or give up 4 earned runs. This would force pitchers to rely on command over power, which explains some of why pitchers are so often injured now.
I would go farther. Let’s implement the ‘double hook’ or ‘double switch DH,’ which they are indeed considering. In that version, when you pull your starter, you lose the DH, period. So starting pitchers never bat, but relievers might need to do so. I think this is a neat compromise that is clean, easy to explain, provides good incentives and also makes the game a lot more interesting.
I’ll also note that the betting odds on the Mets have been absurdly disrespectful for a while now, no matter how this miracle run ends. I get that all your models say we shouldn’t be that good, but how many months of winning does it take? Of course baseball is sufficiently random that we will never know who was right on this.
Meanwhile the various fuckery with sports recordings in TV apps really gets you. They know you feel the need to see everything, so they make you buy various different apps to get it, but also they fail to make deals when they need to (e.g. YouTube TV losing SNY) and then that forced me onto Hulu, whose app sucks and also cut off the end of multiple key games.
I wish I could confidently say Hulu’s app has failed me for the last time. Its rate of ‘reset to beginning of recording when you ask to resume, for no reason’ is something like 40%. It can’t remember your place watching episodes of a show if you’re watching reruns in order, that’s too hard for it. If a copy of a program aired recently its ads could become partly unskippable. The organization of content is insane.
All of that I was working past, until the above mentioned cutoffs of game endings, including the game the Mets clinched their wildcard birth, and then the finishes of multiple top college football games. Unfortunately, there are zero other options for getting SNY, which shows the Mets games, but now we’re in the playoffs so it’s back to Youtube TV, which has other problems but they’re mostly less awful, together with like six other apps.
Can we please have a monopoly in TV streaming? Some of us are just trying to watch the game out here, why does my TV have 26 apps.
James Harvey: I don’t see what’s so confusing about this. I pay for MLB and I pay for ESPN, so if I want to watch an MLB game on ESPN I naturally go to the YouTube TV app.
There’s starting to be the inkling of ‘you choose the primary app and then you add to it with subscriptions for other apps content’ but this cannot come fast enough, and right now it seems to come with advertisements or other limitations – imposing ads on us in this day and age, when we’re paying and not in exchange for a clear discount, is psycho behavior, I don’t get it.
The idea that in April 2025 I might have to give Hulu its money again is so cringe. Please, YouTube, work this out, paying an extra subscription HBO-style would be fine, or we can have SNY offer a standalone app.
In this case an entrepreneur, asking the right question. We’ve done this before but I find it worthwhile to revisit periodically. I organized responses by central answer.
Paul Graham: Is there a reliable source of restaurant ratings, like Zagat’s used to be?
Alex Reichenbach: I’d highly recommend Beli, especially if you end up in New York. They use head to head ELO scoring that prevents rating inflation.
Silvia Tower: Beli App! That way you follow people you know and see how they rate restaurants. No stars, it’s a forced ranking system. Their algorithm will also make personalized recommendations.
StripMallGuy: Really rely on Yelp. I find that if a restaurant is three stars or less, it’s just not going to be good and 4 1/2 stars means very high chance will be great. We use it a lot for our underwriting of strip malls during purchases, and it’s been really helpful.
Nikita Bier: The one tip for Yelp I have that is tangentially related: if an establishment has >4 stars and their profile says “unclaimed,” it means 6 stars.
Babak Hosseini: Google Maps. But don’t read the 5-star ratings.
1. Select a restaurant above 4.6 avg rating
2. Then navigate to the 1-star ratings
If most people complain about stuff you don’t care, you most likely have a pretty good match.
Grant: Google Maps 4.9 and above is a no. Usually means bad food with over friendly owner or strong arming reviews. 4.6 – 4.8: best restaurants 4.4 – 4.5: good restaurants 4.3: ok 4.2 and below: avoid.
Peter Farbor: Google Maps, 500+ reviews, 4.4+
How to check if the restaurant didn’t gamify reviews?
1. There should be a very small number of 1-3⭐️ reviews
2. There should be at least 10-20% of 4⭐️ reviews
Eleanor Berger: Google Maps, actually. I don’t think anything else seriously competes with it.
Trevor Blackwell: Michelin 1-starred restaurants are usually good for a fancy dinner. 2 and 3-starred are good if you’re dedicating an entire evening to the meal. I don’t know where to find good casual restaurants.
Kimbal Musk: Use OpenTable for reviews by regulars. Use Google for reviews by tourists. Both perspectives are solid for guidance.
Hank: Eater is my go-to now for restaurant reviews in cities.
Ron Williams: Eater’s “essential” lists for each city is pretty reliable and varied by cost. So google Eater essential San Francisco for example.
Jonathan Arthur: Use the EconEats app or whatever they call it in ChatGPT if you are looking for good but not fancy.
Dan Barker: ‘The fork’ is good in continental europe. Uk/US = google maps, and treat 4.0 (or lower) as 0/10 and 5.0 as 10/10.
Ruslan R. Fazlyev: Foursquare: too small for most marketers to care about, but has loyal community. Any place above 8.0 is great. 8.7 and more is exceptional. Also is truly international and works well in Peru or Albania or wherever.
The new answer here is Beli Eats. I saw this on 10/8. I am now trying it out.
I’m sad they force you to use a phone app, but that’s 2024 for you.
My preliminary report is that Beli has a lot of potential, but it feels like an Alpha. There are a bunch of obvious mistakes that need fixing, such as:
Restaurant pages do not by default list their hours or menus or link Google Maps.
Recommendations sometimes default to ‘the best anywhere in the world’ which is almost never what you want, and seems to not discount for distance except for a cutoff somewhere above a mile away, as opposed to applying a distance penalty.
There’s no button for ‘this place doesn’t interest me, don’t list it anymore.’
There’s no link to ‘bring this up on delivery apps.’
There’s reservations, but no prediction of whether you can get a table without one.
You an exclude cuisines (e.g. Chinese) if you don’t like them but not use other filters (e.g. ‘No cocktail bars’ which I’d totally do if I could).
There’s no options to tell the algorithm about elements you like or dislike in a way that feeds into the recommendations.
Also I seem to have gotten my ‘invite’ from some random super user I’ve never heard of, and it seems to think I care what she is particular thinks, which is weird.
The actual recommendations so far have not been impressive, but also haven’t done anything too crazy.
So overall, potentially worth using, but making me itch to build something better.
If you want an invite, I’ve got four now, so if you live in NYC (so our info will overlap) and vibe with how I think about restaurants and want one, drop me a line (ideally a Twitter DM with your email, if you don’t want to put it in a comment).
Google Maps remains my default, because it gives you key info – ability to see distribution of photos so you know what the go to orders are and how they look, easy link to menu and hours, review details to understand the rating, and a rating that’s pretty accurate versus competition at least in NYC. If your Maps Fu is good enough, it’s excellent at evaluation, but mediocre at discovery.
Yelp numbers seem manipulated, bought or random here. OpenTable ratings didn’t seem to correlate to what I care about very well, but I haven’t used detailed review checking, maybe I should try that.
Also, if anyone at DoorDash or Caviar is reading this, something is very wrong with my account, it keeps refusing to accept all my credit cards. I could still pay via PayPal, but that is annoying and invalidates DashPass. I’ve been on many very frustrating chats with customer service reps who failed to fix the issue, and have tried all the obvious things and then some. Please help.
Scream Four: Once, consulting for a friend’s police procedural RPG, she needed names for five stats. I said they should all be body parts that complete the sentence “the kid’s got ___ but he’s a loose cannon” and got Heart, Guts, Brains, Muscle, and Nerve and I’ll never be that good again.
