Monthly

This is your monthly roundup. Let’s get right to it.

As a reminder that yes college students are often young and stupid and wrong about everything, remember the time they were behind a ban on paid public toilets? This is a central case of the kind of logic that often gets applied by college students.

HR and Title IX training seems like it’s going a lot of compelled speech in the form of ‘agree with us or you can’t complete your training and the training is required for your job,’ and also a lot of that compelled speech is outright lying because it’s confirmation of statements that are universally recognized to be insane?

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!”

Training by Vector Solutions.

I do realize Robin’s followers can be odd, but yeah, not this time, and this is 87-1.

They also forced people to affirm the ‘affirmative specific consent’ rule, which voters disapproved of by 11-1.

Hard to pronounce names constitute 10%-50% of ethnic penalties among economics PhD job candidates, says new AEJ piece.

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 paper via 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.

Men sexually objectified during interviews, by both men and women, did not suffer decreased performance, and did not report much harassment, whereas those watching videos expected decreased performance and greater feelings of harassment. Sample sizes were not so large, so one possibility is that the negative effects occur mostly in a small number of extreme negative reactions.

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.

Might want to come into the office. Paper says:

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.

Moral Thin-Slicing via MR, here’s the abstract:

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.

What conclusions make sense to draw from this graph of suicide rates, originally from Bowling Alone, combined with people now experiencing peak happiness after age 60, versus people previously peaking much younger?

Yes, the numbers are pretty scary.

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.

1. Connection with the natural world;

2. Connection with family, friends, neighbors, colleagues;

3. Connection with history and tradition;

4. Connection with the community via institutions and organizations (e.g., civic engagement);

5. Connection via charitable acts, and giving (material and emotional) support;

6. Connection with spiritual and other metaphysical or higher values—sources of meaning outside the materialist realm;

7. Connection with creative human expression in art;

8. 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.

You can’t knock ‘em, out, you can’t walk away, but you can sell them feet pics?

Lilly Allen (yes that one, TIL): Haven’t posted in a while but you can still check out the archive [shows some feet pics]

ColdEdge: Imagine being one of the biggest pop stars/musicians in Europe and then being reduced to this.

Lily Allen: imagine being and artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

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.

Older homes hid food preparation in the kitchen away from others, because it was so often servants doing it. Now that when we cook at home we cook for ourselves, the new kitchens are open, so the cook can interact with and entertain guests. I love it.

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.

Also, a fun periodic reminder.

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.

Bill Maher says McDonald’s food is not only delicious, if he had six months to live he would eat it everyday (and if he did that, that he’d then have six months to live).

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.

In other decision theory news, you just can’t rely on people these days.

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.

Essentially everyone approves of the well-implemented version of this, unless they were busy engaging in fakery. Betsey Stevenson convincingly argues that this is good for the economy. It’s important that such information be reliable.

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.

Prediction market fun for the whole family, as a side note treat.

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%.

Meanwhile, after the French whale won $50 million by commissioning private polls based on the neighbor method (you ask ‘who are your neighbors voting for?’), France’s gambling regulator is preparing to ban Polymarket. Can’t have the French working hard or earning big money.

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.

The story of Google’s internal prediction market efforts over the years.

Paper observes that the possibility of immigration leads to skilling up of those aspiring to immigrate, many of whom remain put. This can mitigate or in theory reverse the brain drain effect in the medium term.

Bookstore where anyone can rent a shelf to feature anything they like, and it’s a much better store because people chose things they loved and wanted to share, or things they made. I mean, if you want the best sellers or whatnot you can go on Amazon.

Some sanity.

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

why does this keep happening

It turns out Richard Feynman’s peak bench press was 160 pounds, at age 55 (!), which means both it’s never too late to lift and also there’s something worth doing where you can plausibly outdo Richard Feynman.

Also, remember:

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.

It does damage your reputation when you share fake news, and people understand this and are reluctant to share it, even when it matches one’s political beliefs.

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.

Ut oh:

Elon Musk (69 million views, nice): There will be consequences for those who pushed foreign interference hoaxes.

The Hammer of Justice is coming.

…but not in Europe.

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?

Analysis of Reddit finds that those who are toxic in political contexts are also toxic in non-political contexts, r=0.47. So far, thanks for the paper, so Department of Unnecessary Studies. Slightly less trivially, those who comment on political contexts at all are more toxic in general, and those who comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts are more toxic still.

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.

Tyler Cowen links to this same paper as ‘words to live by,’ highlighting a different segment entirely.

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.

If given the choice to lie about their performance to get a bigger share of group payoff in an experiment (from 2019), 39% lied when it didn’t hurt others, 37% lied when it didn’t hurt overall group payoff, and 25% lied even when it hurt total group payoff.

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.

1. If you know someone else is lying, you’re much more likely to lie.

2. 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.

They’re also looking for someone to oversee their catastrophic risk portfolio and be one of the three most senior people in the org, applications due December 1.

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.

Jake Zegil offers to hook you tech people up during an NYC visit.

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.

GPDR: Somehow worse than you think.

Four states reject ranked choice voting. It was close, three states had over 40% support and two had 45%.

Do government jobs count?

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.

No, this is not merely about problems with liability laws or price gouging. This is a man who said during the campaign that he would stop research on drug development and infectious diseases for eight years. He doesn’t just shut down nuclear power plants, he fights wars against childhood vaccinations. As in, he tells hikers he passes on the trail not to vaccinate their kids. He says ‘there is no vaccine that is safe and effective’ then denies he said it, then when the clip is played for him on CNN he says ‘none of the vaccines have ever been tested in a safety study.’

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.

And here’s a terrifying thought of how this might do even worse damage if allowed, where RFK bans or messes up a bunch of fundamental things, but Ozempic’s effects mean we get healthier short term anyway, and we draw exactly the wrong conclusions:

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.

Here’s another way some Very Serious People think about DOGE, government spending and federal bureaucrats:

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.

If you want to cut the department of education to save $ (4% of spending), note that the vast majority of federal education spending is student loans, which are estimated to recover costs via higher tax revenue within 11 years after disbursement.

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:

1. For the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ to stop doing large portions of their work, which they see as actively massively impeding and messing with everyone else.

2. 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.’

You want to know how much room there is for DOGE to make things less bad? EPA hands out $3 billion of our money to ports on the condition it not be used for automation. Exactly.

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:

1. 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.

2. 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?

3. 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?

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

The argument against GiveDirectly, by GiveDirectly:

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.’

But of course there are obvious exceptions.

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.

This was a good experiment to run and I’m glad they ran it. Unfortunately again, the framing they chose to go with, and the subsequent framing that many attempted to make of it, was highly bogus.

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.

The cube where everyone can only win with Ornithopter.

This might be the key to Commander and why I don’t enjoy it?

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.

Meanwhile, Standard is dead, long live a thing they now call Standard.

Matej Zatlkaj: This math is staggering!

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.

New FTC frontiers where I’ll allow it: Mandate this initial setting.

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.

Factorio perhaps even more productive a use of time than I realized?

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.”

Elon Musk is top 20 in Diablo 4 in the world, one of only two Americans? WTF?

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:

1. Other team gets the ball on the 20 yard line, 1st and 10.

2. 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.

Excellent news: Trump’s transition team plans federal rules enabling self-driving cars.

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.

The catch is:

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.

Timothy Lee: Weekly driverless Waymo trips:

May 2023: 10,000

May 2024: 50,000

August 2024: 100,000

October 2024: 150,000

Exponentials are a hell of a thing.

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.

The chart of who has authorized how much self driving via Timothy Lee:

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.

Karpathy is experimenting with this: Wake up and go directly to deep work, without checking messages, email or news.

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…

Megan McArdle reminds us the horrible food in the 50s was on many fronts not a skill issue, the tools and ingredients and options were largely unavailable, but man, even so, it seems so easy to do better than they actually did?

Good Sarah Constantin post on Thinking in 2D, with the dimensions in question being small/large and radical/moderate.

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).

If you must gossip, especially among women, best to phrase it with concern. You pay a lower social price for spreading the gossip, and they potentially look even worse.

An argument in favor of studying technical thinking. I tentatively agree.

ACX directs us to Steph’s discussion of rich kid memes. All of this feels so exhausting. I’m pretty sure that they’d all be better off not trying.

A cool way to measure dishonesty: How many people claim to have completed an impossible five minute task.

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.

Visakan Veerasamy provides a thread of classic 4Chan analysis posts.

Nate Silver wins the most recent hashtag war.

Good advice:

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.

Everyone involved in this interaction acted correctly.

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.”

This format of presentation is underrated, as is path dependence more generally.

SNL once again justifies its existence.

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.

I am fully aware this is not what it was supposed to mean in context, and don’t care.

The story of this blog:

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.

Thus this report, that says the Japanese somehow are using the good set of rules?

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.

This statement might sound strange but it seems pretty much true?

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.

I knew Stanford hated fun but wow, closing hiking trails when it’s 85 degrees outside?

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 seems very 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.

That is on top of the standard ‘regulators only have reason to say no’ issues.

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.

An argument that all the bad service you are getting is a sign of a better world. It’s cost disease. We are so rich that labor costs more money, and good service is labor intensive, so the bad service is a good sign. Remember when many households had servants? Now that’s good service, but you don’t want that world back.

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.

1. We are richer, so labor costs more, so we don’t want to burn it on service.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Paul Graham asks in a new essay, when should you do what you love?

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:

1. If you need a small amount of money, you can afford to do what you love.

2. If you need a large amount of money, you need to do what pays more.

3. 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.

A claim that studying philosophy is intellectually useful, but I think it’s a mistake?

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 predict future 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.

It seems people keep trying to make the For You page on Twitter happen?

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.

A new paper on ruining it for everyone, social media edition, is called ‘Inside the funhouse mirror factory: How social media distorts perceptions of norms.’ Or, as an author puts it, ‘social media is not reality,’ who knew?

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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

Maybe we can quickly make an app for that?

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?

Or maybe it’s even easier?

Jay Van Bavel: Unfollowing toxic social media influencers makes people less hostile!

The list includes accounts like CNN, so your definition of ‘hyperpartisan’ may vary, but it doesn’t seem crazy and it worked.

If you want to fix the social media platforms themselves to avoid the toxic patterns, you have to fix the incentives, and that means you will need law. Even if all the companies were to get together to agree not to use ‘rage maximizers’ or various forms of engagement farming, that would be antitrust. Without an agreement, they don’t have much choice. So, law, except first amendment and the other real concerns about using a law there.

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.

NPR reports on internal TikTok communications where they spoke candidly about the dangers for children on the app, exploiting a mistaken failure to redact that information from one of the lawsuits against 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.

Old man asks for help transferring his contacts, family realizes he has sorted his contacts alphabetically by friendship tier and not all of them are in the tier they would expect.

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.

Seriously, how hard is it to ensure this particular autocorrect doesn’t happen?

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 glasses that 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.

What is important in a hotel room?

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:

1. Moderately comfortable bed or better. Will pay for quality here.

2. Sufficient pillows and blankets.

3. Blackout curtains, no lights you cannot easily turn off. No noise.

4. Excellent wi-fi.

5. AC/heat that you can adjust reasonably.

6. Desk with good chair.

7. Access to good breakfast, either in hotel or within an easy walk.

8. Decent exercise room, which mostly means weights and a bench.

9. Outlets on all sides of the bed, and at desk, ideally actual ports and chargers.

10. Access to good free water, if tap is bad there then bottled is necessary.

11. TV with usable HDMI port, way to stream to it, easy access to streaming services.

12. Refrigerator with space to put things.

13. Views are a nice to have.

The UK to require all chickens be registered with the state, with criminal penalties.

City of Casselberry warns storm victims not to repair fences without proper permits.

The FAA shut down flights bringing hurricane aid into Western North Carolina, closing the air space, citing the need for full control. It’s possible this actually makes sense, but I am very skeptical.

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.

US Government mandates companies create interception portals so they can wiretap Americans when needed. Chinese hackers compromise the resulting systems. Whoops.

Timothy Lee notes that not only are injuries from Waymo crashes 70% less common per passenger mile than for human drivers, the human drivers are almost always at fault when the Waymo accidents do happen.

Joe Biden preparing a ban on Russian and Chinese self-driving car technology, fearing that the cars might suddenly do what the Russians or Chinese want them to do.

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.

This was the second month I entered Scott’s ratings and films into a spreadsheet. Something jumped out quite a bit. Then afterwards, I discovered Scott’s reviews have all been compiled already.

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.

Robin Hanson has an interesting post about various features.

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.

Sam Black emphasizes that this change is destabilizing, after several years of stable decisions, hurting players who invested deeply into their decks and cards. He doesn’t agree with the philosophy of the changes, but does note that the logic here could make sense from a certain casual perspective to help the format meet its design goals. And he thinks cEDH will suffer most, but urges everyone to implement and stick to whatever decisions the Rules Committee makes.

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.

Samstod notes the change is terrible at the product level, wiping out a lot of value, Kai Budde fires back that it’s about time someone wiped out that value.

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.

The RC then offered a document answering various questions and objections. Glenn Jones has some thoughts on the document.

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.

Here is Wizards official announcement of the takeover.

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.

Alas, this isn’t new. Zac Hill and Worth Wollpert got serious threats back in the day. I am fortunate that I never had to deal with anything like this.

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.

Brian Kowal takes the opposite position, thinks a points-based system would be cool for the minority who wants to do that. I worry this would obligate others too much, and wouldn’t be as fully optional as we’d hope.

This also should catch everyone’s eye:

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.

Paul Williams: Lina Khan DO NOT read this.

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?

Roon: Beli.

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:

1. Restaurant pages do not by default list their hours or menus or link Google Maps.

2. 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.

3. There’s no button for ‘this place doesn’t interest me, don’t list it anymore.’

4. There’s no link to ‘bring this up on delivery apps.’

5. There’s reservations, but no prediction of whether you can get a table without one.

6. 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).

7. 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.

I want to play it now.

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.

Strictly speaking I do not have that much ‘good news’ to report, but it’s all mostly fun stuff one way or another. Let’s go.

Is this you?

Patrick McKenzie: This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t:

No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.

There are many other questions you can ask about an organization but if their people pay for coffee you can immediately discount their realized impact on the world by > 90%.

This is not simply for the cultural impact of stupid decisions, though goodness as a Japanese salaryman I have stories to tell. Management, having priced coffee, seeking expenses to cut, put a price on disposable coffee cups, and made engineers diligently count those paper cups.

Just try to imagine how upside down the world is when you think one of the highest priority tasks for a software engineer this Monday is updating the disposable coffee cup consumption spreadsheet.

And no, Japanese megacorps are not the only place where these insanities persist. And there are many isomorphic ones.

Dominic Cummings: Cf No10 Cafe.

One of the secrets of my productivity, such as it is, is that I know many (but not all!) of the things to not track or treat as having a price. Can you imagine thinking it was a good idea to charge the people at No10 for coffee? Well, bad news.

Tyler Cowen asks, why do we no longer compose music like Bach? Or rather, why do we not care when someone does, as when Nikolaus Matthes (born 1981) produced high quality (if not as high quality as Bach’s best) Bach-style work. All reviews strongly positive, stronger than many older musicians who are still popular, yet little interest.

To me the answer is simple enough. There is quite a lot of Bach, and many contemporaries, and we have filtered what is available rather well and turned it into a common frame of reference. One could listen to that music all of one’s life, and there is still plenty of it. Why complicate matters now with modern mimicry, even if it is quite good? In popular music there are cultural reasons to need ‘new music’ periodically even if it is only variation on the old, yet we are increasingly converging on the classic canon instead except for particular ‘new music’ spaces. And I think we are right to do so.

The fabrication of the Venezuelan election wasn’t even trying. This matches my model. Yes, it is possible to generate plausible fake election data that would make fraud hard to prove, but those with the fraudulent election nature rarely do that. Often they actively want you to know. The point generalizes well beyond elections.

Indeed, it seems that in the wake of his new 0% approval rating, Maduro is going Full Stalin, with maximum security reeducation camps for political prisoners. Also the antisemitism, and I could go on. The playbook never changes.

I am guessing this happens a lot, including the He Admit It part.

Kelsey McR: ‼️ HVAC rep legit just said “We know our prices are competitive because we meet with all the other vendors in the area at least once a year to make sure we’re in alignment.” ‼️

This was their defense to my husband’s complaint on how they completely took advantage of my mother.

Some $h!t about to go down in Charlotte, NC if they don’t fix their mistake.

A whole different reason to beware when engaging in Air Conditioner Repair.

Disney tries to pull a literal ‘you signed up for a Disney+ free trial so you can’t sue us for killing your wife’ defense, saying that he agreed to arbitration in ‘all disputes with Disney.’ Others claim this is bad reporting and it’s due to buying tickets for Epcot, and I guess that is slightly better? Still, it’s a bold strategy.

I’ve been everywhere, man. Where am I gonna go?

Kevin Lacker: Peter Thiel on his struggle to leave California:

Seattle: worst weather in the country

Las Vegas: “not that big a fan”

Houston: just an oil town

Dallas: has an inferiority complex

Austin: government town

Miami: the vibe is that you don’t work

Nashville:

Americans spent 1 hour, 39 minutes more per day at home in 2022 than they did in 2003. Or are we sure this isn’t good news?

Abstract: Results show that from 2003 to 2022, average time spent at home among American adults has risen by one hour and 39 minutes in a typical day. Time at home has risen for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities. Preliminary analysis indicates that time at home is associated with lower levels of happiness and less meaning, suggesting the need for enhanced empirical attention to this major shift in the setting of American life.

Vivek: There’s no proof of causation here, but it is interesting that participants reported sleeping half an hour more and commuting half an hour less. And then they reported working at home 40 minutes more and away about the same less, and a smaller identical ~1:1 shift for leisure activity towards home.

As someone who spends most of their time at home? Home is amazing. Up to a point.

I do think I spend too much time at home and don’t go to enough things. It is because home got more awesome, not because away got worse, but it still happened. It’s too damn easy to not go outside.

Tyler Cowen warns that larger teams and difficulty in attributing credit and productivity often means greater credentialism. Without other ways to tell who is good, companies fall back upon legible signals like degrees or GitHub profiles. He predicts credentialism will become more important, not less. I agree with his problem statement, and disagree with his assessment of the impact of AI on this, for which see the post AI #78 (when available).

As with many things, when the capitalists declined to open a grocery store in a ‘food desert’ there was probably a reason. In this case the reason was ‘there aren’t that many people around and they mostly prefer to shop at a Dollar Store or a relatively far away WalMart or other store anyway because it is cheaper.’

I do see the argument. A grocery store in an area provides substantial consumer surplus over and above existing options. It is not crazy to think that such a store could be socially good even if it is not profitable. The problem is that these are poor communities. We might think what the inhabitants want is fresh produce and better availability of otherwise healthy food.

The residents disagree. Their revealed preference is that what they need are lower prices, the ability to buy in bulk and feed families for less, and independent stores have higher supplier costs. Which is another way of saying that consumers mostly prefer the big businesses and their lower prices. Yes, they like having easily available fresh lettuce and a store that is closer, but how much are they willing to pay for that? Not much, as it turns out.

What would happen if we broke up the big supermarket chains, including WalMart? Or if we invalidated their deals with suppliers and forced such suppliers to price match for other customers? There is certainly actively talk of going after Big Grocery. The problem is that where Big Grocery is using its market power is primarily not to raise prices on customers, but to lower prices charged by suppliers. If you destroy that, you do not lower prices and make consumers better off. You raise prices and make consumers worse off.

This could also offer perspective on all the talk about supposedly predatory evil capitalist grocery chains, and how they are supposedly engaging in ‘price gouging’ while their profit margins are 1.5% and often their retail prices are better than some wholesale prices.

In conclusion:

On the congestion pricing front, NYC comptroller Brad Lander has filed two new lawsuits to challenge Hochul’s shameful indefinite pause order. Attempts to replace the lost revenue remain stalled.

(Whereas Congressman Hakeem Jeffries betrays NYC, calls the pause in congestion pricing ‘reasonable.’ No.)

Track records of various people on Manifold. I no longer am mysteriously winning actual 100% of the time, but it is going well.

One big opportunity in the election prediction markets is the spread between electoral college and popular vote. Nate Silver thinks there is a 12% chance that Kalama Harris will win the popular vote but not the electoral college. Polymarket says this is 21%. It could of course happen, but 21% seems clearly too high.

Shameless plug, take two: My 501c3 Balsa Research is looking to fund two Jones Act studies, but only has the funds right now to do one of them. Help us do both instead. I think these are very worth doing, and if it works out we have a model we can scale.

My dear and deeply brilliant and talented friend Sarah Constantin is looking for work on ambitious science and tech projects on strategy, research, marketing and more. Here is her LinkedIn, an in-depth doc and her Caldenly. You should hire her. But also if you cause her to move out of NYC I will not forgive you, you bastard.

YC is doing a fall batch, deadline is August 27 so move fast. If you are considering doing this than you should do it.

If you think you’re applying ‘too early’ or without enough done yet:

Paul Graham: I was sent stats for the YC board meeting tomorrow. The second number is the fraction of companies with no revenue when YC funded them. High is good because it means we’re investing early. If this doesn’t convince you that you don’t have to wait to apply, I don’t know what will.

Adam Veroni: Can you apply with just an idea?

Paul Graham: Yes, many people do.

If I wasn’t already so deep into my writing and didn’t have a family, especially if I was younger, I would 100% be applying, and assume I was getting positive selection – if I was accepted it would be a big sign I should do it and a giant leg up doing it.

(I also would note that this is an example of how metrics, especially involving revenue, can get very weird with venture capital, if you can’t get impressive revenue there are reasons to consider postponing revenue until it can look impressive or you don’t have to get funding for a while.)

IFP is hiring an Assistant Editor for Santi Ruiz, and paying $3k for a successful referral.

Who has food the locals are actually excited to constantly eat?

Epic Maps: Europe’s great divide.

Maia: Revealed preferences for which countries have good cuisine.

The locals, they know. The interesting zone is the Balkans (not counting Greece), you essentially never see their cuisine in America so it’s hard to know if they’re right to stay local. Iceland is presumably more about supply than demand. Otherwise, the border seems to clearly be in the right place.

Tyler Cowen offers thoughts on Ranked Choice Voting, saying it reduces negative campaigning and calling it a ‘voting system for the self-satisfied.’ Yes, it has a moderating influence, but it also opens the door to real change and third parties or independent runs. Tyler has made several similar arguments recently, essentially saying that it is good to shake things up and let essentially arbitrary major party groups govern despite minority support and see what happens, if things are not by default going well, which he believes they are not. This is at most a highly second-best approach, especially given who I expect to most often be doing the shaking up. He doesn’t get too deep into the game theory here given the venue, so I will finish by noting that I do think that if you are going to do something complex, RCV is the way. It has theoretical game theory issues, but from what I can see the similar issues for other complex systems are far worse.

Blackberry invented push notifications exactly so you didn’t have to check your phone.

The goal is to hit the sweet spot. You want sufficient notifications that a lack of them means you can relax and ignore, without notifications that hijack your attention. On the instinctive margin you want less notifications.

Twitter to remove the like and comment counts from replies, and soon from the news feed as well.

I notice I am confused. This is a really stupid idea. The replies were 90% ‘don’t do this.’

Like counts have their downsides. I do like that ACX does not have likes. But in the context of Twitter it is necessary to have that context.

And taking out the reply counts is madness. Taking reply counts out of the newsfeed? That would be complete and utter insanity. You don’t know if there are replies unless you click through? What the hell?

The question to me is not ‘is this a good idea,’ it is ‘is this the kind of thing that does enough damage to endanger Twitter.’ In its full version, I think it very much might.

Emmett Shear: As a (very small) investor in SubStack maybe I should be rooting for this change. It’s the first idea I’ve seen that’s so bad that it could actually destroy Twitter. Incredible stuff. Reminds me of when Digg self-destructed and thrust Reddit into the lead.

Making a tool much shittier does mean it’s harder to do bad things with it, I suppose that’s true. I’ll make you a deal: if this happens you can stay and use the plastic kids cutlery, and I’ll go somewhere they let me have a real fork.

I hope they think better of this, and also hope Tweetdeck does not follow this change.

Also it would be great if Twitter stopped all-but-blocking Substack links.

We keep seeing results like this: 41% of people in this survey would enter a Utopia-level Experience Machine, 17% would do it purely if it was ‘better than real life’ and I am guessing this group is less inclined to do so than many others. This is the experience machine from the thought experiment ‘you would obviously never plus into the experience machine.’ Something is very wrong.

A bizarre claim that the Pixel Watch has a terrible UI, especially by not automatically showing notifications, and this was largely because Google didn’t force those building its products to switch away from iPhones and Apple Watches. Except that I asked Gemini and Claude and no, the Pixel Watch does notifications in the obviously correct way?

The culture issue is still there. You absolutely have to use your own products.

Emmett Shear: On the other hand, when I interned at Microsoft on Hotmail in 2004 everyone used Internet Explorer and Outlook. So when I tried to tell them about Gmail on Firefox and that they were in deep trouble, no one really reacted. They didn’t disagree but they didn’t really *getit.

PRoales: Yes this is why when in an all hands meeting Eric Schmitt was challenged about being photographed using an iPhone he shot back that everyone in Google should switch back and forth between iPhone and Android once a quarter

Switching back and forth is plausibly even better.

Periodically I see people reinvent the proposal of communication services (here text and email, often also phone and so on) where the sender pays money, usually with the option to waive the fee if the communication was legit and worthwhile.

Switches and physical buttons are better than touchscreens, navy finally realized in 2019. When will the rest of us catch up? Certainly there are times and places for touchscreens, but if a system includes a touch screen then on the margin there are never, ever enough buttons and switches.

An in depth case study on the enshittification of Google results, and how major media products and brands are one by one being mined in ‘bust out’ operations that burn their earned credibility for brief revenue via SEO glory. And that’s (mostly) without AI generating the content, which will doubtless accelerate this.

Why is this a hard problem to solve?

I get the argument that ‘if 99% of SEO spam is detected you still lose to the 1%.’

The problem with that argument is that these are brands.

Suppose Google has to deal with 10 million pages, all from different sources, 9.9 million of which are SEO spam optimized to defeat whatever algorithms Google was found to be using yesterday or last month or last year. They can iterate more and faster than you can. You have to use some algorithm on all of it, you have lots of restrictions on how that works, you move at the speed of a megacorp. Sounds hard.

I think there are solutions to that, at least until everyone adjusts again, given that Google has Gemini and can fine tune (or even outright pretrain) versions of it for exactly this purpose.

There are also a bunch of other things one could try. Google has not even tried integrating direct user feedback despite this being the One Known Answer for sorting quality, and Google having every advantage in filtering that data for users that are providing good information. I realize this is a super hard problem and a continuous arms race. But I flat out think if you put me in charge of Google Search and gave me a free hand and their current budget I would solve this.

Where I don’t understand at all are the major brands getting away, for extended periods, with their ‘busting out’ and selling out their quality, often dramatically.

If a large percentage of users know that (without loss of generality, going off the OP’s claim without verifying) Better Homes & Gardens is now SEO Optimized Homes & Gardens, and has increasingly been for years, don’t tell me it is hard for Google to notice.

The point of a major brand is that it has an ongoing linked reputation. It is not as if such moves are not naked eye obvious. If you have to, you can have a human annual review, at a random time, of all major websites above some traffic threshold, based on a random sample of recent Google Search directed activity. Then that modifier gets applied to all searches there for a year, up to and including essentially an Internet Death Penalty. Even if you went overboard on this, it likely costs only eight figures a year to maintain, nine at the most. A small price to pay in context.

Here is a new candidate for most not okay thing someone openly did in a study. So this is mostly offered for fun, but also because Oliver Traldi is importantly right here.

Oliver Traldi: However low your opinion of “studies”, it should probably be lower.

sucks: lmfao. the “dAtA jOuRnAliSt” who did this study didn’t believe the alcoholics either so he just doubled their numbers for no good reason. now people quoting it as if it’s fact. really amazing stuff. at least every other study besides this one is Real And Reliable!!

Forbes: The source for this figure is “Paying the Tab,” by Phillip J. Cook, which was published in 2007. If we look at the section where he arrives at this calculation, and go to the footnote, we find that he used data from 2001-2002 from NESARC, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which had a reprentative sample of 43,093 adults over the age of 18.

But following this footnote, we find that Cook corrected these data for under- reporting by multiplying the number of drinks each respondent claimed they had drunk by 1.97 in order to comport with the previous year’s sales data for alcohol in the US. Why? It turns out that alcohol sales in the US in 2000 were double what NESARC’s respondents—a nationally representative sample, remember-claimed to have drunk.

I mean… you can’t… just… do that. You know you can’t just do that, right?

One obvious reason is that the distribution looks like that because it is missing people who say they don’t drink and are lying. And in general there’s no reason to think drinks unreported scale linearly with drinks reported.

The other reason is that not all alcohol that gets sold gets consumed? You can’t simply assume that every time someone buys a drink or a bottle that it gets fully consumed. That very obviously is not what happens.

Government actually working, hopefully.

More Perfect Union:

BREAKING: Banks, credit card companies, and more will be required to let customers talk to a human by pressing a single button under a new Biden administration proposed rule.

The @CFPB rule is part of a campaign to crack down on customer service “doom loops.”

The @FCC is launching an inquiry into considering similar requirements for phone, broadband, and cable companies.

And @HHSGov and @USDOL are calling on health plan providers to make it easier to talk to a customer service agent, according to the White House.

Rachel Tobac: From a personal perspective: I love this.

From a hacking-over-the-phone perspective: I’m hoping these Banks, Credit Card companies etc update their ☎️ identity verification protocols or we’re going to see quicker hacking / account takeover when reaching a human is required quick.

Andrew Rettek: Does this apply to when I reach out to government services that have frozen my bank account? It took over a week to get a person on the phone who could do anything at all about the issue.

My cynical take is that this won’t apply to federal or state call centers that cause way more damage than any private company. I hope I’m wrong.

Imagine being so despairing that you think slowing down bank phone calls is necessary to introduce friction into identity theft. Still, yes, that is a real concern, especially if banks are actually stupid enough to continue to allow voice ID. Every time the bank apologizes for asking me security questions, I reply “no, this is good, I would be worried if you weren’t asking, thank you for checking.”

Is graft here in the good old USA different?

Ben Landau-Taylor: Every time I talk about graft in the U.S., someone says “Oh but graft here is different, they have to go through sinecures and patronage networks, no one just steals the money.” And no, that’s ridiculous cope, they can also just steal half a billion dollars. [links to a story about Medicaid fraud and provides text]

Certainly the PPP showed that we do fraud on a massive scale when given the opportunity, or at least allow it, same as everyone else.

Your periodic moment of appreciation for the First Amendment, and periodic reminder that this degree of free speech is a very specifically American thing.

British politician Miriam Cates: But the invention of social media has exponentially increased the speed at which protests can be triggered, organised and spread.

…

Yet online anonymous users can say whatever they like without repercussions. Freedom without responsibility is just anarchy.

…

We should not try to regulate what is said online. But what keeps society civilised offline is the accountability of being responsible for what you say. Online anonymity is destroying the values and virtues that underpin peaceful society – responsibility, dignity, empathy.

Richard Ngo: Absolutely disgusting behavior from British authorities, who are becoming more authoritarian on a daily basis.

I lived there for six years, and the decline since then has been deeply disappointing.

If Brits can’t retweet what’s going on then the rest of us will have to.

Joe Rogan: The fact that they’re comfortable with finding people who’ve said something that they disagree with and putting them in a f—king cage in England in 2024 is really wild.

Especially, they’re saying you can get arrested for retweeting something.

Or here’s a call for ‘militant democracy’ which means shutting down the opposition’s media entirely.

Or here’s the UK National Health Service data analytics blaming Twitter having private likes for the UK’s riots.

3,300 people in the UK were arrested in the same year for social media posts.

Or it seems even for posting in private?

Francois Valentin: In the UK you can get arrested and sentenced to prison for offensive jokes in a private whatsapp group.

I’m not an American free speech absolutist but such a vile overreach by the state could radicalise me.

As in, 20 weeks for offensive jokes in a WhatsApp chat group with friends. What?

Also, come and take it has never applied more:

In summary:

The EU also joined the fun, having the nerve to threaten Americans who might dare talk to each other online.

Mason: The EU is threatening X with legal action “in relation to” a planned interview between Elon and Trump, as it may “generate detrimental effects on civic discourse.”

Thierry Breton: With great audience comes greater responsibility #DSA

As there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in 🇪🇺 in connection with events with major audience around the world, I sent this letter to @elonmusk.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Thierry Breton

Member of the Commission

Brussels, 12 August 2024

Dear Mr Musk,

I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU.

I understand that you are currently doing a stress test of the platform. In this context, I am compelled to remind you of the due diligence obligations set out in the Digital Services Act (DSA), as outlined in my previous letter. As the individual entity ultimately controlling a platform with over 300 million users worldwide, of which one third in the EU, that has been designated as a Very Large Online Platform, you have the legal obligation to ensure X’s compliance with EU law and in particular the DSA in the EU.

This notably means ensuring, on one hand, that freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security. This is important against the background of recent examples of public unrest brought about by the amplification of content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.

It also implies i) informing EU judicial and administrative authorities without undue delay on the measures taken to address their orders against content considered illegal, according to national and/ or EU law, ii) taking timely, diligent, non-arbitrary and objective action upon receipt of notices by users considering certain content illegal, iii) informing users concerning the measures taken upon receipt of the relevant notice, and iv) publicly reporting about content moderation measures.

In this respect, I note that the DSA obligations apply without exceptions or discrimination to the moderation of the whole user community and content of X (including yourself as a user with over 190 million followers) which is accessible to EU users and should be fulfilled in line with the risk-based approach of the DSA, which requires greater due diligence in case of a foreseeable increase of the risk profile.

As you know, formal proceedings are already ongoing against X under the DSA, notably in areas linked to the dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation.

As the relevant content is accessible to EU users and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU. Therefore, we are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political – or societal – events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.

Let me clarify that any negative effect of illegal content on X in the EU, which could be attributed to the ineffectiveness of the way in which X applies the relevant provisions of the DSA, may be relevant in the context of the ongoing proceedings and of the overall assessment of X’s compliance with EU law. This is in line with what has already been done in the recent past, for example in relation to the repercussions and amplification of terrorist content or content that incites violence, hate and racism in the EU, such as in the context of the recent riots in the United Kingdom.

I therefore urge you to promptly ensure the effectiveness of your systems and to report measures taken to my team. My services and I will be extremely vigilant to any evidence that points to breaches of the DSA and will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect EU citizens from serious harm.

Yours sincerely,

Cc: Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X

Thierry Breton

Elon Musk: Bonjour!

Remember the absurdity that is Einstein, Descartes, Feynman and others saying ‘oh I am not especially talented or smart?’ Yeah. Not so much.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo: Once upon a time at [trading firm], I realized that most interns were terribly miscalculated about their own skill level because they only really thought about the other interns who are at their skill level or better.

This rhymes with @RichardMCNgo’s observation that highly-intelligent people are often bad at understanding what it’s like to not be highly-intelligent — I would posit, because their attention tends to slide off the cases around them where people are not!

Today’s mental lightning bolt, courtesy of Richard, is that the same process can happen on other qualities. He notes empathy, but I’d add: – conscientiousness – appearance – enthusiasm for bird-watching – artistic skill – wealth – EA-ness – blog readership.

I definitely underestimated (and at other times overestimated!) my talents and advantages, but I was never under the illusion that I had ‘no special talent.’ But I didn’t before think I was that special about recognizing I had talent, and still can’t actually relate to Einstein thinking he didn’t have any (beyond curiosity).

Richard Ngo is saying, this applies to a lot of other things beyond intelligence.

Richard Ngo: Highly intelligent people understand most things very well, but are often terrible at understanding what it’s like to be dumb. Similarly, highly empathetic people understand most experiences very well, but are often terrible at understanding what it’s like to be selfish or evil.

Anecdotally, people who are brilliant in most other ways can be terrible teachers – picture academics giving talks that only a handful of people can follow.

That last part I thought was common knowledge, which perhaps reinforces the point. Brilliant people can be brilliant teachers, or they can go over your head, and I have been known to draw from both columns.

Some theories on why people do not take advice. It’s a good list. My main emphasis would be that mostly people absolutely do take advice, especially the standard advice. So we’re left giving the advice that people already aren’t listening to, or we focus on the parts they don’t listen to, rightly or wrongly. If I had to guess, I would say people take advice roughly as often as they should?

More speculation on why Rome never had an Industrial Revolution, this time from Maxwell Tabarrok.

Music as intentional barrier to communication, to facilitate communcation?

TLevin: I’m confident enough in this take to write it as a PSA: playing music at medium-size-or-larger gatherings is a Chesterton’s Fence situation.

It serves the very important function of reducing average conversation size: the louder the music, the more groups naturally split into smaller groups, as people on the far end develop a (usually unconscious) common knowledge that it’s too much effort to keep participating in the big one and they can start a new conversation without being unduly disruptive.

If you’ve ever been at a party with no music where people gravitate towards a single (or handful of) group of 8+ people, you’ve experienced the failure mode that this solves: usually these conversations are then actually conversations of 2-3 people with 5-6 observers, which is usually unpleasant for the observers and does not facilitate close interactions that easily lead to getting to know people.

By making it hard to have bigger conversations, the music naturally produces smaller ones; you can modulate the volume to have the desired effect on a typical discussion size. Quiet music (e.g. at many dinner parties) makes it hard to have conversations bigger than ~4-5, which is already a big improvement. Medium-volume music (think many bars) facilitates easy conversations of 2-3. The extreme end of this is dance clubs, where very loud music (not coincidentally!) makes it impossible to maintain conversations bigger than 2.

I suspect that high-decoupler hosts are just not in the habit of thinking “it’s a party, therefore I should put music on,” or even actively think “music makes it harder to talk and hear each other, and after all isn’t that the point of a party?” But it’s a very well-established cultural practice to play music at large gatherings, so, per Chesterton’s Fence, you need to understand what function it plays. The function it plays is to stop the party-destroying phenomenon of big group conversations.

My experience is usually that a conversation with 2-3 people and 5-6 observers is fine, even 20 observers can be fine (that’s a panel!), but only if those 5-6 observers know they are observers. When there are 5+ people trying to actively participate, that is usually a disaster.

There are of course other conversations where you do not want observers, and you benefit from intimacy or privacy. And yes there can be that situation where it would be higher value to split the conversation, but people do not feel social permission or see a good way to do so.

So I can see an argument that some amount of this can be useful. But also, no.

In general, we should be wary of this sort of ‘make things worse in order to make things better.’ You are making all conversations of all sizes worse in order to override people’s decisions.

You should be very suspicious of this, especially given that you have to do actual damage in order to have much impact.

I can see ‘light dinner music’ levels in some settings, especially actual dinner parties, where you really want the groups to stay small. Also the music itself can be nice.

I would still confidently say that by default, the music ends up far too loud for everyone, and a nightmare for people like me that don’t have the best hearing.

For example, I’d offer this slight modification: Dance clubs make it impossible to maintain conversations bigger than 1. The sound is by default, to me, physically painful at all times, potentially injuriously so. You have to yell to the person right next to you to do even the most basic things. Yes, the argument is that you let your body do the talking. Perhaps getting rid of people like me is part of the point. But yikes.

Does typical bar music ‘facilitate easy conversations of 2-3 people?’ Perhaps, but mostly I see it make even those conversations harder. It’s impossible to make an N-person conversation actively hard, without making an (N-2) conversation worse.

It’s so easy to go so loud it’s hard to talk. One of my otherwise favorite restaurants, Tortaria, plays music loud enough that I don’t take people there for conversations.

Eliezer Yudkowsky asks a question I often wonder about: Why do people so often choose to learn via video rather than over text?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: I don’t understand people who learn better from video than text. Why would your own thoughts about absorbing material always run at the same rate, and that rate is the lecturer’s voice?

Do they never stop and think? Do they never need to?

Huh, maybe this is a skill issue and I need to learn the UI? (Quotes Great Big Dot saying “I find it a lot more annoying if it’s not YouTube, because on YouTube I have keyboard shortcuts for pausing, rewinding, fastforwarding, speeding up, and slowing down.”)

I should clarify for the benefit of yung’uns: My words are meant literally enough that when I say “I don’t understand” I actually mean that I am epistemically confused and curious not that I morally disapprove of the act of preferring video.

I really had not expected, before today, that video-likers would consider frequent ongoing speed-manipulation to be part of their standard process! Today I learned!

To me there are two big advantages to voice or video over text.

1. You can listen to voice in situations where reading won’t work well. The central examples are you are walking down the street, or in a vehicle, or working out. Or you want to do it as more of a relaxation thing.

2. Audio and especially video is higher bandwidth than the transcript. You get to see people interact and move, you get to hear the details of their voices. If all you do is read the words, you are potentially missing a lot. Sometimes that matters. Or it is important to have good fluid visual aids.

I vastly prefer reading in most cases. I especially hate that videos are impossible to search and scan properly, or to know if you have the right one. Super frustrating. When people send me videos, I have a very high bar to watching, whereas it’s easy to check out text and quickly tell if it has value.

But also I recognize that my hearing and audio processing is if anything below average, whereas my ability to process written words is very good (although vastly slower than others like Tyler Cowen).

Scott Aaronson’s daily reading list is to reading what I am to writing. I am honored that he spends 12 hours a week on my blog, one does not have many of those bullets. He also reads WaPO and NYT, ACX, Not Even Wrong (although this one rarely updates anymore), Quanta, Quillette, The Free Press, Mosaic, Tablet, Commentary, several Twitter accounts (Graham, Yudkowsky, Deutsch), many Facebook updates and comments that he says in total often take hours a day, ~50 arXiv abstracts per day plus books.

He has noticed that this is approaching eight hours a day, seven days a week. And that this means often the day ends and Scott hasn’t created anything, and often without him even feeling ‘more informed.’

So the obvious first thing to say is: He’s going to have to make some cuts.

Let’s start with the newspapers.

I subscribe to Bloomberg, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, so I can access links as needed, and likely I ‘should’ bite the bullet and add a few more to that list even though it feels very bad to subscribe to things you mostly don’t read or even check (e.g. NYT, The Atlantic, FT…)

How many newspapers do I ‘read’ on a daily basis? Zero. I will occasionally scan one, or check for news on a particular event or on AI generally. What I do not find useful is the thing my family used to do in the mornings, which is to ‘read the newspaper.’

Twitter allows me to do this, while having confidence that if something is important it will still come to my attention. I do not think Facebook can substitute for Twitter here, so if concerned with current events one would otherwise still need to scan and partially read one newspaper.

I do think you can very safely cut this down to one newspaper. If you want two, it’s to have both a blue paper and a red paper. You don’t need both WaPO and NYT.

So I would absolutely lose one or the other, and also be more selective on articles.

If you are literally Tyler Cowen and can read at 10x speed, sure, read five papers. The rest of us mortals, not so much.

Next up are what one might call the magazines. This seems like a reasonably sized list of choices here, in terms of places to look for good material. But surely one would not be so foolish as to read most of their offerings? I have The Free Press on my RSS feed, but well over half the time I see a post headline, maybe read one paragraph or do a few seconds of skimming, and move along, most of what they offer is not relevant to my interests. That will be less true for Scott’s interests, but still a lot of it is doubtless irrelevant or duplicative.

As an experiment, I’m going to go to Quanta, a name I didn’t recognize. Okay, it’s a science magazine. A decent chunk of these posts sound potentially interesting to either of us, but how many of them seem vital enough if one is overloaded? I say none, unless I recognized a good author or otherwise got a recommendation.

I decided to keep going with Quillette, which I remember can host good posts sometimes, but again when I checked I didn’t see anything important or compelling. It is odd what they choose to focus on. I went back as far as June 2, when they had a post on AI existential risk that if I’d seen it at the time I would have been compelled to read and cover, but I can already tell it’s bad. I tried the least uninteresting other teaser (about the X trilogy, since I’ve seen two of them) and it was a snoozefest. So I would definitely use the ‘you need a reason’ rule here.

As I do on every magazine-style website. If it’s worthwhile, you’ll find out. At most, check once a month and see what catches your eye, with a short hook.

Then there’s Facebook. One of the decisions I am most happy with is that I am not on Facebook – although many others could say the same about Twitter. Given I’m writing this, I checked it again, and wow the feed was stupider than I thought. If this is taking hours of reading, that’s got to be a big mistake. If it’s a place to chat with friends, sure, I could see that working and being worthwhile. This sure sounds like something else, given it is taking hours. At minimum, I’d start very very aggressively unfollowing all but a core of actual good friends and a few high hit-rate other accounts.

People often ask how I am so productive. One of the keys is that I am ruthless about filtering information and choosing what to consume in what amount of detail. And I’m still nowhere near ruthless enough.

It is indeed frustrating when people deny one’s own lived experiences.

Brittany Wilson: One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you personally remember pretty well.

Memetic Sisyphus: I worked retail when Obama care became law and before I could work OT as much as I wanted but when it passed it meant my hours got restricted to 34 a week so they didn’t have to give me full benefits. So I didn’t get healthcare and my paychecks were smaller.

Aelita (QTing MS): No, you stopped getting overtime because the economy was in a recession and unemployment spiked to 11 percent, your employer just lied to you.

MS: Yeah this is exactly what the OP was talking about.

The replies are mostly full of other people telling stories about what happened to their jobs, or ability to find jobs, or to their insurance. Almost none of it is good.

My own experience is that Obamacare made it extremely expensive to not have a legible full-time job with a large employer. The marketplace is outrageously expensive, and what you get in exchange is not good insurance. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with employers trying to dodge insurance mandates so I can’t speak to that, but it seems like what people responding to incentives would do.

Do not assume people understand why they do what they do, such as Praying for Rain.

It turns out you pray for rain in order to convince people you caused it to rain.

We study the climate as a determinant of religious belief. People believe in the divine when religious authorities (the “church”) can credibly intervene in nature on their behalf. We present a model in which nature sets the pattern of rainfall over time and the church chooses when optimally to pray in order to persuade people that it has caused the rain. We present evidence from prayers for rain in Murcia, Spain that the church follows such an optimal policy and that its prayers therefore predict rainfall.

In our model, praying for rain can only persuade people to believe if the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time, so that the probability of rainfall is highest when people most want rain.

We test this prediction in an original data set of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain. We find that prayer for rain is more likely among ethnic groups dependent on intensive agriculture for subsistence and that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 53% more likely to pray for rain, consistent with our model. We interpret these findings as evidence for the instrumentality of religious belief.

None of this implies that anyone involved understands why the prayers correlate with rain. Instead, everyone involved is making the mistake of confusing correlation with causation. The main thesis suggested is ‘the instrumentality of religious belief’ which seems like one of those ‘why did we need a study for this’ conclusions when this broadly construed. Yes, people choose to believe and be more religious when they think there is something in it for them, the evidence for this is overwhelming. Also overwhelming is the evidence that when people around you are religious, that makes you and future generations more similarly religious.

Still, it’s pretty cool to notice the pattern that in many places prayers for rain happen most when rain is most likely. What else follows this pattern? Many medical remedies are similar, happening when people would naturally get better. Calling timeout or anything else will ‘break up’ a scoring run, since such runs are mostly random. More generally, if there is any kind of mean reversion effect, anything that responds to poor outcomes will correlate with improvement in results.

A fun reminder that the wisdom of crowds technique works best when people do not compare notes. Otherwise people (correctly) mostly discount their private information in the wake of all their public information, which prevents proper accounting for the private info. Robin Hanson suggests the implication would be to ban people who do research from participating in markets, while observing this move would be obviously dumb. I would notice the distinguish the difference between markets, where you express opinion largely directionally, versus wisdom of crowds, where you care a lot about magnitude. For markets giving people more information is fine, you don’t mind if people move towards the market price.

Lyman Stone is back to remind us that the cell phone-based data on church attendance makes no sense and is obvious measurement error.

I loved this especially, because… I mean…

Lyman Stone: and I commend the author for following up the 2023 version with a n~5k sample asking people religion + cell phone behaviors.

he found almost a third of Jews don’t take their phones to church…

… and that’s almost a third of Jews who take online surveys!

As a Jew you are very much not supposed to take your phone to church.

I mean, if you did for some reason go to a church then go ahead, presumably you are visiting a friend or viewing the architecture.

But if you are attending weekly services, which would be at a synagogue, then it would be Shabbat. You are not supposed to operate electronic equipment on Shabbat, or according to many even turn on a light. It is very hard to even carry a cell phone without accidentally doing that. For the Orthodox, it is clearly forbidden, as it is the carrying of a non-essential item. So, yeah.

Even if it were not required anyway, it would seem obvious to me that one should do one’s best not take one’s phone into religious services, for overdetermined reasons.

There is a bunch of other cool stuff in the thread.

Devin Pope then responded to Lyman here, including this chart, which suggests that this method works more generally. Devin admits the task is super hard and notes everyone mentions the Orthodox Jew measuring problem, but suggests this is the best we can do.

So, have you talked to a user?

I laugh, but I have created multiple companies and in no case did I do remotely enough user talking.

Devon: “Allegations of market failures often reflect ‘imagination failures’ by analysts rather than a genuine incentive problem”

“Lighthouses were long used by economists as a textbook example of the free-rider problem—until Coase discovered that many lighthouses were supported by fees charged by nearby ports”

Michael Nielsen: That’s not so much an imagination failure as a basic-lack-of-contact-with-reality failure…

Patrick McKenzie: “Have you actually talked to a user?” is a question which I wish tech could export to e.g. economists researching impact of financial innovation on particular populations of interest.

Dave Guarino: I get many policy people coming to me per month and to all of them I say “oh you should help one person with the process and see what you learn.”

The take up rate is about 10%.

(Epistemic blinders abetted by social norms are blinding!)

Devon: A recent highlight was when a guy who’d never spent time in a high-inflation country sent me an email about this post saying “that’s not right, theory predicts X so Y can’t be true even though you’re seeing right in front of your eyes” 🤣

Dave Guarino: Now that’s some “it’s simple – assume a can opener” energy right there.

Dave Kasten: Corollary: you can rapidly become the person in your office with the argument-winning anecdotes on a subset of issues with <1 week of labor.

(I now wonder if this is the actual causal arrow for why CEOs care about anecdotes so much — it was an early career cheat code for them?)

Mr. Smith: This is one of the secrets of McKinsey; I show up and do that week of work and then I’m the most credible guy until I leave

Anecdotes are a sign that you know the particulars of time and place and have some idea what you’re talking about.

Most people don’t. It sets you apart.

Patrick McKenzie: An internship project worth doing at any age: go out into the world, learn one relevant thing, write it down, then bring it back to us (who are equally capable of going out into the world and writing things down *but will not do this*).

I have literally suggested this to interns over the years, but it was also my default marching order for my executive assistant: if you don’t know what to do, to learn one interesting thing and write it down.

The ceiling for this being useful is crazily high.

And while one could perform years of academic effort to do a study with controls etc etc given how low the fruit hangs you can probably have an artifact worth reading for the price of a single coffee conversation or five user interviews or similar.

There are very many companies at which “conduct five user interviews” is a Deliverable and there is a Process requiring Multi-Stakeholder Coordination and *bah humbugyou have email you have Zoom this can be done any afternoon you decide to do it.

So help me if I have one more conversation with someone whose objection is “But how would I find a user of [a product which has as many users as Macbooks].”

“Have you considered walking into a Starbucks and briefly visually inspecting surroundings?”

“What no that’s crazy.”

Patrick McKenzie’s podcast with Dwarkesh Patel about VaccinateCA and how that group had to be the ones to tell people where to get vaccinated was… suppressed on YouTube out of ‘misinformation’ concerns with a banner telling the user to go to the CDC for more information. Good news is by the time I went to YouTube to verify there at least was no banner, but I can’t tell if it is still surpressed.

“What are my options,” asks the Dangerous Professional. Full thread is recommended.

Patrick McKenzie: Now returning to why I have learned to ask about options here: if you have someone who is either in a rush or very low sophistication, and you *guessat a resolution path, you might have them engage that resolution path even if that is a much worse option.

Patrick McKenzie explains CloudStrike.

Interview with art dealer Larry Gagosian turned into maxims. Great format, would be cool to build a GPT for this, would be a good example except we don’t have the source interview handy.

Thread on ‘busting out.’ Maxing out use of your credit before you default (in any sense of both words) on it is a great trick, except you can only do it once. The good news is we have gotten a lot better at noticing this happening in real time. I had experience with a variation of it myself, the transformation of recreational gamblers into ‘beards’ that place bets for professionals, including the parallel action in actual financial OTC markets.

Patrick discusses the question of who his audience is.

One way to think about Starlink and Elon Musk.

On joining the ‘winning team.’ I consider pressure to join the winning team to be, in various forms and on various levels, one of the most pernicious forces out there. Indeed, Patrick identifies one of them, that the ‘winning team’ cares about things other than winning, and will punish you for caring about other things. But also often the winning team very much does not care about other things. Often it cares exactly about being the winning team, and supporting those who support the winning team, and will punish any signs of caring about anything else at all.

This is very different from the question of ‘do you want to be right, or do you want to win?’ Which has different answers at different times. People forget that the best way to win, either locally or generally, and especially in the ways that matter most, is often to care a lot (but not entirely!) about being right.

Patrick McKenzie on deposit pricing, as in banks not paying a fair price for deposits and in exchange providing lots of other costly stuff for free because you can’t charge directly for that other stuff. And especially this:

Patrick McKenzie: Speaking of which: a professional skill of bankers of the well-off is knowing who you should give the “We’ll knock a percentage point off your new mortgage if you have $1 million in deposits!” pitch to, who you should give the pitch to while winking, and who you never pitch.

Then there’s Wells Fargo. Where the banker will give that pitch (for 50bps not a full 1%), allow you to include other assets like stocks, and then when you flat out ask ‘are you expecting me to keep those assets with you after we close?’ will tell you he does not in any way expect you to keep those assets there after the close.

Spencer Greenberg tests whether astrology works using a cool methodology. He shows lots of astrologers about twelve people. For each he provided detailed biographical information, and asked the astrologers to pick their true full astrological chart from five choices. The astrologers predicted they could do it, afterwards they predicted they had done it. As you would expect, they hadn’t done it, with a success rate under 21% versus a pure chance rate of 20%, and none of them getting more than five charts correct.

Indeed, they failed even to agree on the same wrong answers. Even the most experienced astrologers only agreed with each other 28% of the time.

Shea Levy said this was still a ‘win for astrology’ because it indulges and legitimizes Obvious Nonsense despite showing that it is indeed nonsense. Spenser points out that 20% of Americans say they believe in astrology, and also I don’t see this as ‘legitimizing’ anything.

Even I have encountered enough believers that having more convincing responses is highly useful.

Sarah Constantin: Disagree.

We live in an Eternal September world. There are people who don’t know astrology doesn’t work.

Every now and then somebody has to explicitly argue against an “obviously” dumb idea, or debunk an “obvious” superstition. It renews the credibility of science/inquiry.

There’s an argument for not bringing more attention to bad ideas because you’re “giving them a platform”…but astrology is already hugely popular.

Spencer has a gift for doing lots and lots of social-science stuff that I’d find too dull to do myself, including this study. But there’s nothing intellectually wrong with it! I’m glad somebody’s doing the debunking thing with high standards.

Indeed, I would find doing this study extremely boring. Kudos to Spenser for doing it.

A group of MR links led to a group of links that led to this list of Obvious Travel Advice. It seems like very good Obvious Travel Advice, and I endorse almost all points.

My biggest disagreement is actually jet lag. It can absolutely be beaten (by most people, anyway), if you want to make that a priority and are willing to devote a day to doing that. I did a lot of things right when I won Pro Tour Tokyo, but one of them was flying in a day early in order to spend it on fixing jet lag – I basically rented a hotel room, listened to music, relaxed and did nothing else except go to sleep at the right time. If you have to ‘be on’ badly enough you should totally do that.

With the warning that jetlag when you return tends to be worse, as you’ve tapped out certain resources, and I still don’t know how to properly handle that when going to places like Japan, so ‘do something important right after coming back’ is mostly a bad idea if you couldn’t have done it on the destination’s schedule. Notice that often you very much can.

The list also highlights three things.

1. A lot of the value of travel is essentially this old Chelm story, you experience things that are worse to make you appreciate how good you have it. Yet I agree with the author here that this does not last long enough to justify such trips repeatedly. Get vaccinated once but ‘booster shots’ are not worth the side effects.

2. Travel is all about mindset and actual value and who you are with. A lot of travel is about ‘performing a vacation’ or a trip, also some people enjoy the anticipation and preparation work. Whereas for me, I’ve learned that basically the only good reason to travel far is to see particular people – it’s who you are with, and that’s something I can have a good attitude about. But otherwise, why not have the Vacation Nature at home or close to home? This is especially true in a place like New York City, there’s so much available close to home that you’ve ignored.

3. Most vacation or ‘for fun’ travel is not, as it is actually done, worthwhile, unless it is a proper Quest. Tyler Cowen seems to know how to get a lot out of travel but you are not going to do what he would do even if you follow the Obvious Advice.

You know, in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Erik Brynjolfsson: Athletes from four California universities won 89 Olympic medals. (The United States won 126 total).

Athletes from Stanford University alone won more medals than all but seven countries in the world.

Olympic success is a choice. You have to want it.

Caitlin Clark started off slow in the WNBA due to the learning curve, but she adapted, and now her numbers are rather insane. She did not make the Olympic team and its probable gold medal because the team was selected a while ago and one could not be confident it would go this way, which is bad for the sport, but that’s how these things go and it’s good not to warp selections for marketing even if in this case it would have worked out.

Are you ready for some football?

The top of this list is very good. Some rather awesome matchups.

However, if falls off quickly. On average there is only about one exciting non-conference game per week. Also some strange rankings here.

And as a Wisconsin fan, I must ask: We wanted Bama? Why would we want Bama?

Aside from ‘playing great games is really cool,’ which it is. With the end of the 4-team playoff era, hopefully we can see more great games. If you have any chance to actually be national champion, a game like this is highly unlikely to actually keep you out under the new system.

The obvious question is, can they reliably tell who is cheating, or not? If they can, then the 1% that cheats will get caught by automated checks, and we should not have a big issue. If they cannot tell, how do they know how many people are cheating? It is easy to catch someone who suddenly plays like Stockfish.

It seems next to impossible to catch a cheater who does something sufficiently subtle, especially if the cheat is ‘in the negative’ and all it is doing is avoiding some portion of your mistakes, and you do not make the mistake of using it only with high leverage.

As usual, I presume what is actually protecting us is that cheaters never stop. It takes a lot to be good enough at chess to play at an elite level even if you use subtle cheats. Once you start using subtle cheats, it is not long before you get greedier with them.

All growth in MMO gaming revenue after 2004 comes from increasing spending by whales. A large portion of the gaming world is completely dominated by whale revenue, who QCU describes here as ‘the bored children of tycoons in the developing world.’ The rest of the players either play for free or they spend amounts too small to matter, the point of all the masses being there is to provide the social context for the whales to enjoy spending their money, plus the opportunity to try to convert a tiny portion of them into whales. That’s it. The extended thread goes into various dynamics involved.

The simple rule in response to this is, of course: If the game allows any form of pay to win or other whale play, then it is not for you. It will make your life miserable in order to motivate whale purchases, use timed actions and delayed variable rewards, it is a Skinner box, get out. Spend your gaming time in places where there is a hard upper limit on what can meaningfully be spent (cosmetics excluded) sufficient for the game to be optimized for the average player and not for the whale. Ideally stick to games where there is a fixed one-time or subscription fee and nothing else.

Collectable card games are a weird case where the good ones (like Magic: the Gathering) are good enough that they can survive quite a bit of heavy spending and justify their costs, but notice the difference between paper Magic, where you can reasonably spend your way out and recoup through trade, and Magic Arena, where the price for getting out of the grinding entirely is prohibitive. You might opt into Arena anyway, Magic is that good, but it the need to minimize costs will warp your actions a lot.

Extend this to other non-game activities, as well. The club where people spend money on tables and drinks and women as eye candy to show they spend money? Don’t go there unless your business networking demands it.

From 2023: Reid Duke tells you everything you need to know about Vintage Cube.

There were more discussions this month about collusion and related issues in Magic. One note by Sam Black is that the ability of players to cooperate on prize splits, on draws and to otherwise help each other was indeed very helpful in forming a positive community. It was one more incentive for everyone to stay on good terms, and when you had a chance to help someone out it reliably won you a friend. And I definitely don’t think we need draconian penalties for people who say the incantations wrong, especially regarding prize splits.

I understand the argument that scooping or even splits can be damaging to tournament integrity. I even hear the arguments against intentional draws. But I disagree and find such arguments mostly misplaced. I especially hear Gerry Thompson’s point that it would be better if we didn’t have vastly asymmetric rewards for winning particular matches. And that the solution is to fix the incentive design.

Proposed solutions within a tournament include expanding use of the rule of ‘first players to X wins automatically make top 8’ which seems great. You could go further, if you wanted to get a bit messy, in engineering the last 1-2 rounds into an explicit bracket, where opponents had identical incentives the way they do in the top 8.

This month’s game activity included continued play of Hades, where I’m rapidly approaching diminishing returns but for now it’s still fun, and Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance, where I’ve been postponing going for the win to try and figure out how to get to the hidden ending but one of the quests isn’t appearing right and it requires a bunch of grinding. I have enough stashed items that if I wanted to give up on being level 99 and just win on one of the other paths, I could probably do that rather quickly.

I do notice I’m disappointed in the choices I’m offered at the end, given the story, and that they don’t seem to contrast as interestingly as past games in the series.

I tried out Vault of the Void. It has some cool different mechanics than most Slay the Spire variants – you can hold onto cards but only draw up to 5, you carry energy over with a hard cap, you can discard cards for more energy, you build a deck of 20 out of your collection each battle rather than looking for card removes. The game doesn’t support a third full act, so it doesn’t have one, bravo on that.

Alas, it has severe problems. The balance is off. Each character (so far anyway) seems like it has a powerful thing you’re supposed to do that scales, but it’s always fiddly and feels like piling incremental advantages on top of each other.

Most of all, a huge portion of the challenge is in the last fight against the Void, and a lot of this is that it slowly adds a bunch of curses to your deck and otherwise scales. So in a genre where your top priority is always card draw and card selection, they’re screaming at you to do more of that.

My last run I found a card that lets you remove a curse from your deck in-battle, and it’s in a class about deck manipulation and making things cost zero, so I basically recursed that card over and over and I got bored enough I accidentally took one damage (out of 95) and I’m sad about that.

I do like the idea of ‘souls are a currency, and also they reduce the HP of the final boss which is an attrition war so try not to spend them’ but the execution needs work. Another issue is that the other boss battles simply are not scary enough, also your route planning too often forces your hand on a simple ‘which path lets me go to more stuff’ theory.

Also I’m officially sick of all these unlocks and making us play tons of runs to see what games offer.

Once Upon a Galaxy, still in early development, is potentially the lightweight successor to Storybook Brawl. I’ve given a try, and it can be fun. I do miss the complexity of Storybook Brawl, but others might appreciate something lighter. Storybook Brawl had really quite a lot going on. And while I miss (for now) playing against other people directly, being able to proceed at your own pace and never wait or feel time pressure is nice.

His day will come.

This takes the cake.

Deferrence, presumably?

So much this.

That kid has a bright future.

Paul Graham: At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults.

Mandrel: Such a bad idea to incentivize kids to do startups instead of enjoying life, and leaning as much as possible at school, something PG advices Stanford student to do 10 years ago.

Paul Graham: He’s not actually starting any of those companies.

It is monthly roundup time.

I invite readers who want to hang out and get lunch in NYC later this week to come on Thursday at Bhatti Indian Grill (27th and Lexington) at noon.

I plan to cover the UBI study in its own post soon.

I cover Nate Silver’s evisceration of the 538 presidential election model, because we cover probabilistic modeling and prediction markets here, but excluding any AI discussions I will continue to do my best to stay out of the actual politics.

Jeff Bezos’ rocket company Blue Origin files comment suggesting SpaceX Starship launches be capped due to ‘impact on local environment.’ This is a rather shameful thing for them to be doing, and not for the first time.

Alexey Guzey reverses course, realizes at 26 that he was a naive idiot at 20 and finds everything he wrote cringe and everything he did incompetent and Obama was too young. Except, no? None of that? Young Alexey did indeed, as he notes, successfully fund a bunch of science and inspire good thoughts and he stands by most of his work. Alas, now he is insufficiently confident to keep doing it and is in his words ‘terrified of old people.’ I think Alexey’s success came exactly because he saw people acting stupid and crazy and systems not working and did not then think ‘oh these old people must have their reasons,’ he instead said that’s stupid and crazy. Or he didn’t even notice that things were so stupid and crazy and tried to just… do stuff.

When I look back on the things I did when I was young and foolish and did not know any better, yeah, some huge mistakes, but also tons that would never have worked if I had known better.

Also, frankly, Alexey is failing to understand (as he is still only 26) how much cognitive and physical decline hits you, and how early. Your experience and wisdom and increased efficiency is fighting your decreasing clock speed and endurance and physical strength and an increasing set of problems. I could not, back then, have done what I am doing now. But I also could not, now, do what I did then, even if I lacked my current responsibilities. For example, by the end of the first day of a Magic tournament I am now completely wiped.

Google short urls are going to stop working. Patrick McKenzie suggests prediction markets on whether various Google services will survive. I’d do it if I was less lazy.

This is moot in some ways now that Biden has dropped out, but being wrong on the internet is always relevant when it impacts our epistemics and future models.

Nate Silver, who now writes Silver Bulletin and runs what used to be the old actually good 538 model, eviscerates the new 538 election model. The ‘new 538’ model had Biden projected to do better in Wisconsin and Ohio than either the fundamentals or his polls, which makes zero sense. It places very little weight on polls, which makes no sense. It has moved towards Biden recently, which makes even less sense. Texas is their third most likely tipping point state, it happens 9.8% of the time, wait what?

At best, Kelsey Piper’s description here is accurate.

Kelsey Piper: Nate Silver is slightly too polite to say it but my takeaway from his thoughtful post is that the 538 model is not usefully distinguishable from a rock with “incumbents win reelection more often than not” painted on it.

Gil: worse, I think Elliott’s modelling approach is probably something like max_(dem_chance) [incumbency advantage, polls, various other approaches].

Elliott’s model in 2020 was more bullish on Biden’s chances than Nate and in that case Trump was the incumbent and down in the polls.

Nate Silver (on Twitter): Sure, the Titanic might seem like it’s capsizing, but what you don’t understand is that the White Star Line has an extremely good track record according to our fundamentals model.

At worst, the model is bugged or incoherent, or a finger is on the scale. And given the debate over Biden stepping aside, this could have altered the outcome of the election. It still might have, if it delayed Biden’s resignation, although once you get anywhere near this far ‘the Sunday after the RNC’ is actually kind of genius timing.

I have done a lot of modeling in my day. What Nate is doing here is what my culture used to refer to as ‘calling bullshit.’ I would work on a model and put together a spreadsheet. I’d hand it off to my partner, who would enter various numbers into the input boxes, and look at the outputs. Then we’d get on the phone and he’d call bullshit: He’d point out a comparison or output somewhere that did not make sense, that could not be right. Usually he’d be right, and we’d iterate until he could not do that anymore. Then we might, mind you I said might, have a good model.

Another thing you could have done was to look at the market, or now the market history, since ‘things may have changed by the time you read this’ indeed.

Thus, no, I do not need to read through complex Bayesian explanations on various modeling assumptions to know that the 538 forecast here is bonkers. If it produces bonkers outputs, then it bonkers. If the topline number seemed bonkers, but all the internals made sense and the movements over time made sense and one could be walked through how that produces the final answer, that would be one thing.

But no, these outputs are simply flat out bonkers. The model does not much care about the things that matter most, it does not respond reasonably, it has outputs in places that were so pro-Biden as to look like bugs. Ignore such Obvious Nonsense.

It is also important because when they change Biden, to Harris or otherwise, there is a good chance they will still make similar mistakes.

As noted above, I will continue to cover modeling and prediction markets, and tracking how the candidates relate to AI, and continue doing my best to avoid otherwise covering the election. You’ll get enough of that without me.

My current view of the market is that Harris is modestly cheap (undervalued) at current prices, but Trump is still the favorite, and we will learn a lot soon when we actually have polling under ‘it’s happening’ conditions.

Shame.

The beatings will continue until we have congestion pricing or a new governor.

We actually do want a 24-hour coffee shop and bookstore (with or without a cat, and 18-hour get you 95% of the value), or the other nice things mentioned in the Josh Ellis thread here. We say we do, and in some ways we act like we do. We still don’t get the things, because our willingness to pay directly says otherwise.

There are many similar things that genuinely seem to make our lives way better, that warm our hearts by their mere existence and optionality. That people actively want to provide, if they could. Yet they are hard to find, because they cannot pay the rent.

You can have your quaint bookstore, on one condition, which is paying a lot more, directly, for some combination of a membership, the books and the coffee.

Instead, we are willing to pay quite a lot more for the house three blocks from the bookstore, because we recognize its value. But if the bookstore charged us half that money directly, we would refuse to pay. It ruins the thing. So the owners of land get rich and the bookstore gets driven out.

I have to remind myself of this constantly. I pay a lot in fixed costs to live in a place I love, including the extra taxes. Then I constantly have the urge to be stingy about actually paying for many of the things that make me want to live here. It is really hard not to do this.

Magic players drive this point home. You plan for a month, pay hundreds for cards, pay hundreds for the plane ticket and hundreds more for the hotel, work to qualify and train, in a real sense this is what you live for… and then complain about the outrageous $100 entry fee or convention fee.

This is so much of why we cannot have nice things. It is not that we do not have a willingness to pay in the form of having less money. It is that we think those things ‘should cost’ a smaller amount, so when they cost more, it ruins the thing. It is at core the same issue as not wanting to buy overpriced wires at the airport.

The CrowdStrike incident was covered on its own. These are other issues.

Least surprising headlines department: Identity-verifier used by Big Tech amid mandates has made personal data easily accessible to hackers.

AU10TIX told 404 Media that the incident was old and credentials were rescinded—but 404 Media found that the credentials still worked as of this month. After relaying that information, AU10TIX “then said it was decommissioning the relevant system, more than a year after the credentials were first exposed on Telegram.”

If you require age verification to safeguard privacy, this will predictably have a high risk of backfiring.

Nearly all AT&T customer records were breached in 2022. The breach has now been leaked to an American hacker in Turkey. This includes every interaction those customers made, and all the phone numbers involved. Recall that in March 2024 data from 73 million AT&T accounts leaked to the dark web. So yes, we need to lock down the frontier AI labs yesterday.

Beware the laptop trap.

Samo Burja: When I first saw the laptop practice in San Francisco I assumed people worked with laptops in cafes because their houses were crowded with too many roommates to save on rent and offices to save on startup runway.

I had no idea people in LA and NYC did this too.

Unless you’re in San Francisco I don’t think your laptop work is adding to GDP. Use cafes to meet friends.

Marko Jukic: European cafes are 100% right to ban “coworking” i.e. staring silently at my electronic device screen for hours on end while pretending to work and taking up space in a public place intended for relaxation and socializing.

Don’t let Americans turn the cafe bar into an office!

The picture on the right above depicts a hellish anti-social prison-like atmosphere. In a cafe, I want to hear music, conversation, laughter, and the football game.

It’s a CAFE, not a library, not an office, not a university lecture hall. Leave your laptop at home.

Americans will complain endlessly how America lacks “third spaces” and enjoyable public life but then like the idea of turning European cafes into sterile workspaces where professional laptop-typers sit in silent rows avoiding eye contact pretending to do important work.

Levelsio: The difference between European and American cafes is so stark

In Europe many don’t allow laptops anymore

In America they usually do and people are working on something cool!

I am with the French here. The cafe is there to be a cafe. If you want to work, you can go to the office, and seriously don’t do it on a laptop, you fool. I do not care if you are in San Francisco.

Marko Jukic claims that what distinguishes others from ‘normies’ is mainly not that normies are insufficiently intelligent, but not normies have astounding and incurable cowardice, especially intellectual cowardice but also risk taking in life in general.

Marko Jukic: Spending time with our young elites at university, in Silicon Valley, etc. I never got the impression that intelligence was lacking. Far from it. What was lacking was everything else necessary to use that intelligence for noble and useful ends. In a way this is much worse.

Actually practicing personal loyalty, principled self-sacrifice, or critical thinking in a way that isn’t camera-ready is not just uncommon or frowned-upon but will get you treated like a deranged, dangerous serial killer by average cowards. It’s actually that bad these days.

To return to the original point, thinking your own thoughts is barely a drop in the bucket of courage. But most don’t even have that drop. Important to keep that in mind when you model society, social technology, reforms, and “the public” or “the normies” or whatever.

We are certainly ‘teaching cowardice’ in many forms as a central culture increasingly over time. It is a major problem. It is also an opportunity. I do not buy the part where having courage gets you attacked. It is not celebrated as much as it used to be, this is true. And there are places where people will indeed turn on you for it, either if you make the wrong move or in general. However, that is a great sign that you want to be in different places.

Note that even in places where rare forms courage are actively celebrated, such as in the startup community, there are other ways in which being the ‘wrong kind of’ courageous and not ‘getting with the program’ will get this same reaction of someone not to be allies with. The principle is almost never properly generalized.

To answer Roon’s request here: No.

Mark Carnegie: If you don’t think this is a crisis i don’t know what to say to you.

Roon: cmon man now adjust the graph with the amount of time people spend texting or in their GCs.

Suhail: Yeah, we’re more connected, not less connected.

No. We really, really aren’t more connected. No, time spent texting or especially in ‘group chats’ is not a substitute to time spent with friends. Indeed, the very fact that people sometimes think it is a substitute is more evidence of the problem. Is it something at all? Yes. It is not remotely the same thing.

Tyler Cowen asks, what is the greatest outright mistake by smart, intelligent people, in contrast to disagreements.

His choice is (drum roll): attempting to forcibly lower prescription drug prices. Here’s the post in full.

Tyler Cowen: I am not referring to disagreements, I mean outright mistakes held by smart, intelligent people.  Let me turn over the microphone to Ariel Pakes, who may someday win a Nobel Prize:

Our calculations indicate that currently proposed U.S. policies to reduce pharmaceutical prices, though particularly beneficial for low-income and elderly populations, could dramatically reduce firms’ investment in highly welfare-improving R&D. The U.S. subsidizes the worldwide pharmaceutical market. One reason is U.S. prices are higher than elsewhere.

Tyler Cowen: That is from his new NBER working paper.  That is supply-side progressivism at work, but shorn of the anti-corporate mood affiliation.

I do not believe we should cancel those who want to regulate down prices on pharmaceuticals, even though likely they will kill millions over time, at least to the extent they succeed.  (Supply is elastic!)  But if we can like them, tolerate them, indeed welcome them into the intellectual community, we should be nice to others as well.  Because the faults of the others probably are less bad than those who wish to regulate down the prices of U.S. pharmaceuticals.

Please note you can favor larger government subsidies for drug R&D, and still not want to see those prices lowered.

He has amusingly gone on to compare those making this mistake to ‘supervillains.’

A lot of people thought this was all rather absurd. The greatest mistake is failure to choose to vastly systematically overpay for something while everyone else gets it dirt cheap, because otherwise future investment would be reduced?

I think this points to what may actually be the gravest genuine mistake, which is:

Causal Decision Theory!

As in, you base your decision on what has the best consequences, rather than choosing (as best you can) the decision algorithm with the best consequences after considering every decision (past, present and future, yours and otherwise) that correlates with your decision now.

Alternatively, you could view it as the desire to force prices to appear fair, the instinct against gouging, which is also involved and likely a top 10 pick.

The debate over pharma prices indeed a great example of how this messes people up.

Everyone else except America is defecting, refusing to pay their fair share to justify the public good of Pharma R&D. One response is that this sucks, but America needs to step up all the more. Another is that if people can defect without punishment knowing others will pick up the slack then they keep doing so, indeed if you had not indicated this to them you would not be in this position now.

On top of that, you are paying off R&D that already happened in order to hold out the promise of reward for R&D in the future (and to some extent to create necessary cash flow). Locally, you are better off doing what everyone else does, and forcibly lowering prices rather than artificially raising them like we do. But if corporations expect that in the future, they will cut R&D.

So everyone is threatening us, and we are paying, so they keep threatening and we keep paying, but also this gives us strong pharma R&D.

You could say on top of the burden being unfairly distributed this is a really dumb way to support pharma R&D, and we should instead do a first best solution like buying out patents. I would agree. Tyler would I presume say, doesn’t matter, because we won’t possibly do this first best solution big enough to work, it is not politically feasible. And I admit he’d probably be right about that.

Another aspect is, suppose a corporation puts you in a position where you can improve welfare, or prevent welfare loss, but to do so you have to pay the corporation a lot of money, although less than the welfare improvement. And they engineered that, knowing that you would pay up. Should you pay? Importantly wrong question framing, the right question is what should your policy be on whether to pay. The policy should be you should pay to the extent that this means the corporations go out to seek large welfare improvements, balanced against how much they seek to engineer private gains including by holding back much of the welfare benefits.

A lot of situations come down to divide-the-pie, various forms of the dictator game – there is $100, Alice decides how to divide it, Bob accepts the division or everyone gets nothing. At what point does Bob accept an unfair division? If Bob demands an unfair (or fair!) division, and Alice believes Bob, at what point does Alice refuse? And so on.

Another way of putting a lot of this is: You can think of yourself or a given action, often, as effectively ‘moving last,’ where you know what everyone will do conditional on your action. That does not mean you must or should do whatever gives you the best payoff going forward, because it is very easy to exploit those with such a policy.

What does that imply about the motivating example? I think the answer is a lot less obvious or clean than Tyler thinks it is, even if you buy (as I mostly buy) the high value of future marginal pharma R&D.

Next up we have another reason you need functional decision theory.

Agenda setting is powerful when you model everyone else as using naïve Causal Decision Theory. If you get to propose a series of changes to be voted upon, you can in theory with enough steps get anything you want.

We model legislative decision-making with an agenda setter who can propose policies sequentially, tailoring each proposal to the status quo that prevails after prior votes. Voters are sophisticated and the agenda setter cannot commit to future proposals.

Nevertheless, the agenda setter obtains her favorite outcome in every equilibrium regardless of the initial default policy. Central to our results is a new condition on preferences, manipulability, that holds in rich policy spaces, including spatial settings and distribution problems. Our findings therefore establish that, despite the sophistication of voters and the absence of commitment power, the agenda setter is effectively a dictator.

Those voters do not sound terribly sophisticated. Rather, those voters sound profoundly unsophisticated.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can’t get fooled again.

An actually sophisticated voter would say that the agenda setter, if allowed to pass anything that is a marginal improvement for 51% of voters, effectively becomes a dictator. The proof is easy, you don’t need a paper – you could for example repeatedly propose to transfer $1 from 49% to the 51%, while always being part of the 51%, repeat until you have almost all the money, use that money periodically to buy other preferences.

The thing is, a sophisticated voter would recognize what you were up to rather quickly. They would say ‘oh, this is a trick, I know that this benefits me on its face but I know where this leads.’ And a majority of them would start always voting no.

This is not merely a theoretical or ideal response. This is a case where economists and casual decision theorists and politicians look at regular people and call them ‘irrational’ for noticing such things and reacting accordingly. What’s the matter with Kansas?

This, from the agenda setter’s perspective, is the matter with Kansas. If you set the agenda to something that looks superficially good, but you having control of the agenda is bad, then I should vote down your agenda on principle, as you haven’t given me any other affordances.

That is not to say that the agenda setter is not powerful. Being the agenda setter is a big game. You do still have to maintain the public trust.

Roon weeps for the old Twitter. He blames the optimizations for engagement for ruining the kinds of communities and interactions that made Twitter great, reporting now his feed is filled with slop and he rarely discovers anything good, whereas good new discoveries used to be common.

I continue to be confused by all the people not strictly using the Following tab plus lists (or Tweetdeck), and letting the For You feed matter to them. Why do you do this thing? Also out of curiosity I checked my For You feed, and it’s almost all the same people I follow or have on my lists, except it includes some replies from them to others, and a small amount of very-high-view-count generic content. There’s no reason to use that feature, but it’s not a hellscape.

Roon: The beauty of twitter was the simcluster, where 90% of the tweets in my feed came from one of the many organic self-organizing communities i was part of. now it’s maybe 20%. I used to daily discover intelligent schizomaniacs, now they are diffuse among the slop.

Near: Human values are actually fully inconsistent with virality-maximizing algorithms ‘but revealed preferences!’ as a take fully misunderstands coordination problems any society can be burnt to the ground with basic game theory and the right algorithm. We should strive for better.

I see Twitter as having net declined a modest amount for my purposes, but it still mostly seems fine if you are careful with how you use it.

I do think that Roon and Near are right that, if this were a sane civilization, Twitter would not be trying so hard to maximize engagement. It would be run as a public good and a public trust, or an investment in the long term. A place to encourage what makes it valuable, with the trust that this would be what matters over time. If it made less (or lost more) money that way, well, Elon Musk could afford it, and the reputational win would be worth the price.

If you want to improve your Twitter game, I found this from Nabeelqu to be good. Here is how I do things there. Here is Michael Nielson’s advice.

Your periodic reminder.

Brian Potter lays out the history of fusion, and the case for and against it being viable.

Scientists want to take more risks, and think science funding should generally take more risks. We need more ambitious projects. This paper points out a flaw in our funding mechanisms. The NIH, NSF and their counterparts make funding decisions by averaging peer review scores, whereas scientists say they would prefer to fund projects with more dissensus. This favors safe projects and makes it difficult to fund novel ideas. This is great news because it is relatively easy to fix by changing the aggregation function to put much less weight on negative reviews. Rule scientific ideas, like thinkers, in, not out.

Does the Nobel Prize sabotage future work?

Abstract: To characterize the impact of major research awards on recipients’ subsequent work, we studied Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Physics and MacArthur Fellows working in scientific fields.

Using a case-crossover design, we compared scientists’ citations, publications and citations-per-publication from work published in a 3-year pre-award period to their work published in a 3-year post-award period. Nobel Laureates and MacArthur Fellows received fewer citations for post- than for pre-award work. This was driven mostly by Nobel Laureates. Median decrease was 80.5 citations among Nobel Laureates (p = 0.004) and 2 among MacArthur Fellows (p = 0.857). Mid-career (42–57 years) and senior (greater than 57 years) researchers tended to earn fewer citations for post-award work.

Early career researchers (less than 42 years, typically MacArthur Fellows) tended to earn more, but the difference was non-significant. MacArthur Fellows (p = 0.001) but not Nobel Laureates (p = 0.180) had significantly more post-award publications. Both populations had significantly fewer post-award citations per paper (p = 0.043 for Nobel Laureates, 0.005 for MacArthur Fellows, and 0.0004 for combined population). If major research awards indeed fail to increase (and even decrease) recipients’ impact, one may need to reassess the purposes, criteria, and impacts of awards to improve the scientific enterprise.

Steve Sailer (in the MR comments): I had dinner with Physics Laureate Robert Wilson, who had with Arno Penzias discovered the origin of the universe, a few months after Wilson won the Nobel in 1978. He was very gracious and polite as he was feted by his alma mater, Rice U., but deep down inside he probably wished he could have been back at his observatory tinkering with his radio telescope rather than doing all this kind of unproductive socializing you have to do after winning the Nobel.

Crusader (MR comments): Who ever said that major awards are supposed to increase the recipient’s future impact regardless of its merit?

Are Olympic gold medals supposed to increase the performance of athletes afterwards? Is a research award not just a status game carrot meant to incentivize the “first success” as well as a signal to others to review the related research?

Quite so. If you get a Nobel Prize then suddenly you have a ton of social obligations. The point of the prize is to give people something to aspire to win, not to enable those who win one to then do superior work, also scientists who win are typically already sufficiently old that their productivity will have peaked.

It seems odd to think about a Nobel Prize as being primarily about enabling future work. Even to suggest it is a huge indictment of our academic system – if you are up for a Nobel Prize, why didn’t you already have whatever resources and research agenda you most wanted?

Should scientific misconduct be criminalized? The slippery slope dangers are obvious. Yet it seems a violation of justice and also incentives that Sylvain Lense, whose deception wildly distorted Alzheimer’s research, killing many and wasting epic amounts of time and money, remains at large. Can we simply charge with fraud? If not, why the hell not?

Linch: Gender issues aside, it’s utterly bizarre to me that plagiarism is considered vastly worse among academics than faking data. It’s indicative pretty straightforwardly of rot imo, since it means the field as a whole cares more about credit attribution than about truth.

Paper asks how people decide who is correct when groups of scientists disagree. Here is the abstract.

Uncertainty that arises from disputes among scientists seems to foster public skepticism or noncompliance. Communication of potential cues to the relative performance of contending scientists might affect judgments of which position is likely more valid. We used actual scientific disputes—the nature of dark matter, sea level rise under climate change, and benefits and risks of marijuana—to assess Americans’ responses (n = 3150). Seven cues—replication, information quality, the majority position, degree source, experience, reference group support, and employer—were presented three cues at a time in a planned-missingness design. The most influential cues were majority vote, replication, information quality, and experience. Several potential moderators—topical engagement, prior attitudes, knowledge of science, and attitudes toward science—lacked even small effects on choice, but cues had the strongest effects for dark matter and weakest effects for marijuana, and general mistrust of scientists moderately attenuated top cues’ effects. Risk communicators can take these influential cues into account in understanding how laypeople respond to scientific disputes, and improving communication about such disputes.

The first sentence carries the odd implicit assumption that there is a ‘correct’ answer people should accept, the absence of which is skepticism or noncompliance. Then there’s describing various forms of Bayesian evidence as ‘cues,’ as opposed to considering the hypothesis that people might be considering the hypothesis. The role of risk manager seems to assume they already know what others are supposed to believe during scientific disputes. How do we use the right messaging to ensure the official scientists get believed over the unofficial ones?

Here are the results, all seven factors mattered.

Majority vote, replication and information quality and experience (where experience is defined as time doing this particular type of research), the most influential ‘cues,’ seem like excellent evidence to be using, with majority vote and replication correctly being used as the most important.

The other three are reference group support, degree source and employer. These seem clearly less good, although worth a non-zero amount. No, we should not rely too heavily on arguments from authority, and in particular not on arguments for association with authority.

Mistrust of science only decreased impact sizes by about 27%.

Score one for the public all around.

One thing I love about the paper is in 2.4.7 they lay out their predictions for which factors will be most important and how impacts are expected to work. Kudos.

Here are the detailed descriptions of the questions and cues.

Cues have the strongest effect on dark matter, a case where regular people have little to go on and know it and where everyone has reason to be objective. Marijuana leaves room for the most practical considerations, so any cues are competing with other evidence and it makes sense they have less impact.

Via Robin Hanson, across six studies, communicators who take an absolute honesty stance (‘it is never okay to lie’) and then lie anyway are punished less than those who take a flexible honesty stance that reflects the same actual behavior.

The straightforward explanation is that it is better for people to endorse the correct moral principles and to strive to live up to them and fail, rather than not endorse them at all. This helps enforce the norm or at least weakens it less, on several levels, and predicts better adherence and an effort to do so. With the same observed honesty level, one predicts more honesty both in the past and the future from someone who at least doesn’t actively endorse lying.

One can also say this is dependent on the lab setting and lack of repeated interaction. In that model, in addition to the dynamics above, hypocrisy has short term benefits and long term costs. If you admit to being a liar, you pay a very large one-time cost, then pay a much smaller cost for your lies beyond that, perhaps almost zero. If you say you always tell the truth, then you pay a future cost for each lie, which only adds up over the course of a long period.

Certainly Trump is the avatar of the opposite strategy, of admitting you lie all the time and then lying all the time and paying very little marginal cost per lie.

In Bayesian terms, we estimate how often someone has lied to us and will lie in the future, and will punish them proportional to this, but also proportionally more if you take a particularly strong anti-lie stance. And also we reward or punish you for your estimated effort to not lie and to enforce and encourage good norms, by both means.

In both cases, if you are providing only a few additional bits of evidence on your true base rate, hypocrisy is the way to go. If discount rates are low and you’re going to be exposed fully either way, then meta-honesty might be the best policy.

One can also ask if honesty is an exception here, and perhaps the pattern is different on other virtues. If you are exposed as a liar, and thus exposed as a liar about whether you are a liar, how additionally mad can I really get there? How much does ‘hypocrite’ add to ‘liar,’ which arguably is strictly stronger as an accusation?

German marginal tax rates are a disaster and the poverty trap is gigantic.

The grey lines are Euros per month. Orange is effective take home pay. You essentially earn nothing by going from $25,800/year to $77,400/year, what the hell? With the median income right in the middle of that around €45k.

It is not as extreme as it sounds, because the benefits you get are not fully fungible. To get them you need to be renting, and to get max value it needs to be in a relatively expensive city, whereas the actual cash benefit is only 500 euros a month, which isn’t much. But still, yikes. This has to be a recipe for massive voluntary unemployment and black market work. To the extent that it isn’t, it is the German character being bizarrely unable to solve for this particular equilibrium.

jmkd: The wikipedia article (in German) below suggests that ~15% of the German economy is in “undeclared work.” Admittedly using numbers from different time periods, that would be equivalent to roughly 1/4 of the population working minimum wage.

yo: It’s a household-level view for a family of four. Roughly, if this family has no income, it is eligible for Bürgergeld, €24k/y. Plus a rent subsidy worth about the same €24k/y in the big cities, plus health insurance worth around €15k/y for that family. So yes, average families can get roughly €70k net welfare. Note that a family of four with €70k income would not pay much in taxes. But it would pay around 20% of this pretax income in social charges (mostly pension contributions and health insurance)

Oye cariño, ¿quieres comprar algunos créditos porno? Spain unveils the Digital Wallet Beta, an app for internet platforms to check before letting you watch porn. The EU is giving all porn sites until 2027 to stop you from watching porn, forcing kids (by that point) to download AI porn generators instead. Or have their AI assistant purchase some of those porn credits from ‘enthusiasts.’

Gian Volpicelli (Politico): Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits. 

While the tool has been criticized for its complexity, the government says the credit-based model is more privacy-friendly, ensuring that users’ online activities are not easily traceable.

While I oppose this on principle, I do approve of this for the kids all things being equal. You should have to work a bit for your porn especially when you are young. I also like the VPN encouragement. The parts where various website geoblock and adults get inconvenienced and identification information is inevitably stolen again as it was this past month? Those parts I do not like as much.

Should the UK use proportional representation? Tyler Cowen says no, because the UK needs bold action so it is good to give one party a decisive mandate even if they got only a third of the vote and essentially won because game theory and a relatively united left. See what they can do, you can always vote them out again. He does not much care about the voters not actually wanting Labour to rule any more than they did before. The point of democracy, in his view, is as a check in case government gets too out of line (and presumably a source of legitimacy), rather than ensuring ‘fairness.’

The danger is an unfair system can damage those other goals too, and this seems like a lot of power to hand to those who get the upper hand in the game theory. Essentially everyone is locked in these ‘unite or die’ dilemmas constantly, as we are in America, except now there is an expectation that people might not unite. So I presume you need some form of runoff, approval or ranked choice voting. They are far from perfect, but so much less distortionary than actual first past the post rules when they fail to collapse into a two party system.

The FTC tried to ban almost all noncompetes, including retroactively. It is not terribly surprising that the courts objected. Judge Ada Brown issued a temporary block, finding that the FTC likely lacked the authority to make the rule, which seems like a very obviously correct observation to me.

Thom Lambert: Now that @FTC’s noncompete ban has been preliminarily enjoined (unsurprisingly), let’s think about some things the agency could do on noncompetes that are actually within its authority. It could, of course, bring challenges against unjustified noncompetes.

hat would create some helpful precedent *andallow the agency to amass expertise in identifying noncompetes that are unwarranted. (The agency implausibly claims that all but a very few noncompetes lack justification, but it has almost no experience with noncompete cases.)

It could also promulgate enforcement guidelines. If the guidelines really take account of the pros and cons of noncompetes (yes, there are pros) and fairly set forth how to separate the wheat from the chaff, they’ll have huge influence in the courts and on private parties.

These moves are admittedly not as splashy as a sweeping economy-wide ban, but they’re more likely to minimize error cost, and they’re within the agency’s authority. In the end, achievement matters more than activity.

This is the new reality even more than it was before.

1. If you bring individual action against particular cases you can build up case law and examples.

2. If you try to write a maximally broad rule, the courts are going to see to it you have a bad time.

There was a lot of talk about the overturning of Chevron, but there was another case that could also potentially be a big deal in making government work even less well. This is Ohio v. EPA, which is saying that if you ignore any issue raised in the public comments, then that can torpedo an entire project.

Robinson Meyer: Last week, the Court may have imposed a new and *extremelyhigh-scrutiny standard on how federal agencies respond to public comments. That will slow the EPA’s ability to write new rules, but it would also make NEPA even more arduous.

…

The EPA did respond to the comments at the center of the Ohio case, but Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing for the majority, decided the agency did not address a few specific concerns properly.

So the new procedure will be, presumably, to raise every objection possible, throw everything you can at the wall, then unless the government responds to each concern raised in each of the now thousands (or more) comments, you can challenge the entire action. And similarly, you can do the same thing with NEPA, making taking any action that much harder. Perhaps essentially impossible.

French elections produce unexpected seemingly disproportional results.

It is not as bad as it looks. NFP and Macron essentially (as I understand it) operated as one block, with whoever was behind dropping out in each local election, so effectively this is more like a party with 49.1% of the vote getting 325 seats to RN’s 37.4% and 142.

Claude estimates that if a similar result happened in America, the house would break down about 265-170, but our system is highly gerrymandered and the parties are geographically isolated. I don’t think 325-142 is that extreme here.

If you combined RN+LR+’Other Right’ then you would get 46% of the vote and only 208 seats with a 3.1% gap, which seems extreme. LR and Other Right did well in converting votes to seats in the second round, so they were likely not being dramatically unstrategic.

Similarly to the English results, one must ask to what extent we want strategic voting and negotiating between parties to determine who gets to rule.

New York City sets minimum food delivery wage to $19.56, which in turn means intense competition for work preference during busy hours. It also means fees on every order, which many no doubt are responding to by not tipping. I strongly suspect most of this mostly cancels out and the services are still totally worth it.

New York City gets trash cans. You thought the day would never come. So did I. Before unveiling them, New York did a $4 million McKinsey study ‘to see if trash cans work’ and that is not the first best solution but it sure is second best.

Enguerrand VII de Coucy: Oh my god New York City paid McKinsey $4,000,000 to do a study on if trash cans work.

rateek Joshi: Maybe the point was that the NYC govt wanted to tell its citizens “If you don’t start putting trash in trash bins, we’ll give more money to McKinsey.”

Enguerrand VII de Coucy: Honestly that’s a potent threat

Swann Marcus: In fairness, the end result of this McKinsey study was that New York started using trashcans. Most American cities would have spent $4 million on a trashcan study and then inexplicably never gotten trashcans.

Aaron Bergman: I am going to stake out my position as a trash can study defender. It probably makes sense to carefully study the effects of even a boring and intuitive policy change that affects ~10⁷ people

Mike Blume: It’s fun to rag on NYC for their incompetence in this area, but “where will the bins go” is an understudied problem on many American streets

Getting the details right here is very important. There are some cases where governments vastly overpay for stupid things, and I don’t think this is one of them.

In defense of the lost art of the filler episode. I strongly agree here. Not all shows should be 22 episodes a year, but many should be. It makes the highs mean more, and I love spending the extra time and taking things gradually.

What do we make of this list and also the rating type breakdown?

The recency bias is strong. There are way too many 2010s shows here. I do think that there was a quality upgrade around the 90s but still.

The drama bias is also strong. Comedies are great and deserve more respect.

It’s hard to get a good read on the relative rating systems. It does seem like too much weight was put on the votes.

How many of these have I seen enough to judge?

There are a bunch of edge cases but I would say 20.

Correctly or Reasonably Rated: The Wire (my #1), Breaking Bad (my #3 drama), The Office, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Mr. Robot (I have it lower but I can’t argue), Severance (so far, it’s still early), Seinfeld (you somewhat had to be there), Freaks and Geeks (if you don’t hold brevity against it).

Underrated: The Americans (my #2 drama), Deadwood

Decent Pick But Overrated: Chernobyl (miniseries don’t count, others are missing if they do, and even if you discount that it’s good but not this good), Game of Thrones (great times and should make the list but you can’t put it at #2 after the last few seasons, come on), Stranger Things (Worth It but #8?!), Battlestar Galactica (this is a bit generous), The Shield (I can maybe see it), Lost (oh what could have been).

Bad Pick: Friends (better than its rep in my circles but not a best-of), House (it’s fine but not special), True Detective (one very good season but then unwatchable and no time is not a flat circle), Black Mirror (not half as clever as it thinks, despite some great episodes), The Mandalorian (I stuck with it long enough to know it isn’t top 50 level great and wasn’t working for me, although it isn’t actively bad or anything).

Most Importantly Missing (that I know of and would defend as objective, starting with the best three comedies then no order): Community, The Good Place, Coupling (UK) (if that counts), Watchmen (if we are allowing Chernobyl this is the best miniseries I know), Ally McBeal, Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (no, seriously, a recent rewatch confirms), Gilmore Girls, Roseanne, Star Trek: DS9 (I see the counterarguments but they’re wrong), How I Met Your Mother.

I wonder if you should count Law & Order. You kind of should, and kind of shouldn’t.

The other ~30 here I haven’t given enough of a chance to definitively judge. Many I hadn’t even heard about.

Does anyone have a better list?

Of the ones I didn’t mention, I’m open to the case being made. For The Sopranos and Better Call Saul, I watched a few episodes and realized they were objectively very good but thought ‘I do not want to watch this.’ Or in particular, the show is great but I do not want to watch these people. A bunch of others here seem similar?

I can overcome that, but it is hard. Breaking Bad is not something I wanted to watch, in many important senses, but it was too good not to, and Walter White breaks bad but does not have that ‘I can’t even with this guy.’

Scott Sumner has his films of 2024 Q2. He put Challengers at only 2.6/4, whereas I have Challengers at 4.5/5, which provides insight into what he cares about. From the description he was clearly on tilt that day. Also I strongly suspect he simply does not get the characters involved, and finding them unlikeable did not seek to get them. It is the first time I’ve seen his rating and said not ‘you rated this differently than I would because we measure different things’ but rather ‘no, you are wrong.’

My movie log and reviews continue to be at Letterboxd. I’ve moved more towards movies over television and haven’t started a new TV series in months.

The official EA song should be: Okay, full disclosure. We’re not that great. But nevertheless, you suck.

Economeager: As you know i do not identify with EAs as a culture despite my great support for givewell, open phil, etc. However when I meet someone who gives misguided and ineffective charity for purely emotional reasons I do have like a palpatine kermit moment with myself.

Never mind I saw the EA guys getting hyped to think about how “the economy” will work “after AGI” and hate everyone equally again.

Andy Masley: I was on the fence about getting more involved in EA a few years ago and then in my old job was exposed to a charity where people read stories over Zoom to dogs.

When given $10,000 to spend however they wanted, people spent the majority of it on pro-social things that benefited others, and almost 17% went to charities outright. This seems like a missed opportunity to provide more details about what types of things the money was spent on, we can study multiple things at once. Public posting of spending choices on Twitter had little impact on distribution of purchases.

I didn’t get a chance to pre-register my expectations here, nor do I have a good sense of exactly what counts as ‘pro social’ versus not. The idea that people, when given a windfall, spread it around somewhat generously, seems obvious. Windfalls are considered by most people as distinct from non-windfall decisions, the money is ‘not yours’ or not part of your typical planning, and is often largely wasted or bestowed generously, in a way that ‘core’ income is not. It is an opportunity to affirm your bonds to the community and good character and not present a target, and the money fails to ‘feel real.’ I do find it strange that public info did not at all impact decisions, which makes me suspect that such decisions were treated as effectively equally public either way in practice.

Johns Hopkins Medical School goes tuition-free for medical students due to massive grant, also expands aid for future nurses and public health pioneers. Nikhil Krishnan speculates that more places will end up doing this, and correctly notices this is not actually good.

The choke point is residency slots. It would not be my first pick for charity dollars, but I think that ‘give money to endow additional residency slots at hospitals that agree to play ball’ would be a highly understandable choice. Whereas ‘make future doctors that will mostly earn a lot of money have less student debt’ does not make sense. Yes, you can potentially improve applicant quality a bit, but not much. Whatever your goal, unless it is ‘glory to this particular program,’ you can do it better.

You can use 1Password to populate environmental variables in CLI scripts, so you can keep your API keys in your password manager, also there is a fly.io plugin.

Arnold Ventures is hiring for its infrastructure team.

How to write for Works in Progress.

Pick your neighborhood carefully, not only your city.

Phil: So, the first thing I think of is that you’re going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city. And so thinking about all the things that New York City or next city has, is to me a lot less important than thinking about the things within the five blocks where you live. Most neighborhoods in your city you might never step foot in, they might as well be in the other side of the country. But the things in your immediate vicinity are the things that are going to dominate your life. So picking and influencing your neighborhood is really important. And the two big ways you can influence your neighborhood are one, determining who lives in your neighborhood by moving people there, something I am very biased on because I work on it. And two, improving your neighborhood.

As a New Yorker, I definitely will walk more than five blocks more than 5% of the time. For example, my favorite most frequented restaurant is 7 blocks away. The point very much still stands. My friend Seth uses the rule of thumb that value is proportional to the inverse square of travel time, which again goes too far but is directionally right.

Concert goers who consumed more alcohol were less likely to choose pro-social options in experimental economic games. Does not seem to distinguish between cooperators being more sober, versus sobriety leading to cooperation. Both seem plausible. One more reason not to drink.

Little effect is found of siblings on attitudes towards inequality. This study says more about what current academic pressures and biases than it says about anything else.

Paper says that despite the narrative of democratic backsliding, objective measures such as electoral competitiveness, executive constraints and media freedom show no such evidence of (net) backsliding.

Those with higher IQ scores shoot firearms more accurately. I did not expect that. The real intelligence is never needing to shoot and never getting shot. I bet those correlate too.

Your enemies probably have more enemies than you do. Unfortunately, on the same principle, you probably have fewer friends than your friends.

Shoutout to my former teammate and coworker Kai Budde, the German Juggernaut who never loses on Sundays. He’s an all around amazing guys and best teammates you will know. I mention this because unfortunately Kai has terminal cancer. They have renamed the Player of the Year trophy in Kai’s honor.

He at least got a chance to play the PT recently in Amsterdam, with all the associated great times.

Then it was a Sunday, so of course Kai Budde won the PTQ.

Even with my qualification slots, I’m well past the point I can take this kind of time off to properly prepare, and even if I could I can’t put up the stamina for a three day fight, or even a two day fight. But man I miss the good times.

Moxfield lets you do this:

Lupe: I used to be in on the bling until we hit a weird critical capacity of too much. I’m now slowly putting a filter of “first printing” on all of the cards in my main Cube. Magic cards are kind of like hieroglyphs, so as a designer, I want to maximize tabletop legibility.

Brian Kowal: This is The Way.

Magical Hacker: I didn’t know you could do this until I saw this post, & now I need to share what I picked: f:c game:paper lang:en -e:plst (frame: 2015 -is:borderless (is:booster or st:commander) -is:textless -is:ub -is:etched or -is:reprint or e:phpr) (-e:sld or e:sld -is:reprint) prefer:newest

I cannot emphasize enough how much I agree with Lupe. Some amount of bling is cool. At this point we have way, way too much bling. There are too many cards, and also too many versions of each card, too many of which are not legible if you do not already know them on sight. I do want to stay in touch with the game, but it seems impossible.

The value of Chess squares, as measured by locations of pawns, bishops and knights. A fun exercise that I do not expect to offer players much insight. Pawn structure seems strangely neglected in their analysis.

John Carmack points out that a key reason the XBox (and I would add the PlayStation) never caught on as entertainment centers is that their controllers require non-trivial power to operate, so they go to sleep after periods of inaction and require frequent charging. If we could solve that problem, I would happily use the PlayStation as a media center, the interface is otherwise quite good.

Surely we can get a solution for this? Why can’t we have a remote that functions both ways, perhaps with a toggle to switch between them? Maybe add some additional buttons designed to work better as part of a normal remote?

Matthew Yglesias makes a case that high-pressure youth sports is bad for America. Sports played casually with your friends are great. Instead, we feel pressure to do these expensive, time consuming, high pressure formalized activities that are not fun, or we worry we will be left behind. That cuts out a lot of kids, is highly taxing on parents and damages communities. And yes, I agree that this trend is terrible for all these reasons. Kids should mostly be playing casually, having fun, not trying to make peak performance happen.

Where we differ is Yglesias thinks this comes from fear of being left behind. There is some of that but I am guessing the main driver is fear of letting kids play unsupervised or do anything unstructured. The reason we choose formal sports over the sandlot is that the sandlot gets you a call to child services. Or, even if it doesn’t, you worry that it would.

Hockey got one thing very right.

Scott Simon: In prep for, tonight, watching my first hockey game in… a decade?… I just learned that challenges in the NHL come with real stakes—if you’re wrong, your team is assessed a penalty. Now *thatis a challenge system. (Still, robot refs now.)

My first choice is no challenges. Barring that, make them expensive.

Tyler Cowen links to a paper by Christian Deutscher, Lena Neuberg, and Stefan Thiem on Shadow Effects of Tennis Superstars. They find that when the next round in a second-tier tournament would be against one of the top four superstars, other players in the top 20 over the period 2004-2019 would advance substantially less often than you would otherwise expect.

The more the superstars go away, the more the other top competitors smell blood and double down, effect size is 8.3 percentage points which is pretty large. Part of that might come from the opposite effect as well, if I was not a top player I might very much want the honor of playing against Federer or Nadal. Mostly I am presuming this effect is real. Tennis is a tough sport and you can’t play your full-on A-game every time especially if slightly hurt. You have to pick your battles.

Analysis of the new NFL kickoff rules, similar to the XFL rules. I realize the injury rate on kickoffs was too high, and seeing how this plays out should be fun, but these new rules seem crazy complicated and ham fisted. At some point we need to ask whether we need a kickoff at all? What if we simply started with something like a 4th and 15 and let it be a punt, or you could go for it if you wanted?

College football seems ready to determine home teams in the new playoff based on factors like ‘hotel room availability,’ ‘ticket sales’ and weather? Wtf? Oh no indeed.

Mitchell Wesson: Schools can absolutely control the quality and quantity of nearby hotel rooms.

Weather, obviously not but it doesn’t seem reasonable to ignore it either. Wouldn’t be fair to fans or teams if a game has to be delayed when that could otherwise have been avoided.

If someone gets to host, there needs to be only one consideration in who hosts a playoff game. That is which team earned a higher seed (however you determine that) and deserves home field advantage. That is it. If the committee actually ever gives home field to the other team, even once, for any other reason (other than weather so extreme you outright couldn’t play the game), the whole system is rendered completely illegitimate. Period.

Waymo now open to everyone in San Francisco.

Sholto Douglas: Three telling anecdotes

> I felt safer cycling next to a Waymo than a human the other day (the first time I’ve had more ‘trust’ in an AI than a human)

> the default verb/primary app has changed from Uber to Waymo amongst my friends

> when you ride one, try to beat it at picking up on noticing people before they appear in the map, you ~won’t

They’re amazing. Can’t wait for them to scale globally.

Matt Yglesias asks what we even mean by Neoliberalism, why everyone uses it as a boogeyman, and whether we actually tried it. Conclusions correctly seem to be ‘the intention was actually letting people do things but it gets used to describe anything permitting or doing something one doesn’t like,’ ‘because people want to propose bad policies telling people what to do without facing consequences’ and ‘no.’

Certainly all claims that the era of big government was ever over, or that we suddenly stopped telling people what they were allowed to do, or that we pursued anything that was at all related to ‘growth at all costs’ is absurd, although we made some progress on at least not having (fewer, although still far too many) price controls.

Nick proposes that for less than $1 million a year you could easily have the coolest and highest status cafe in San Francisco, attracting immense talent, have a cultural touchstone with lots of leverage, creating tons of real estate and actual value, other neat stuff like that. It seems many engineers pus super high value on the right cafe vibe, on the level of ‘buy a house nearby.’ I don’t get it, but I don’t have to. Nick proposes finding a rich patron or a company that wants it nearby. That could work.

In general, this is part of the pattern where nice places to be add tons of value, but people are unwilling to pay for them. You can provide $50/visit in value, but if you charge $10/table or $10/coffee, people decide that kills the vibe.

Which do you value more as a potential superhero: Mind control, flight, teleportation or super strength? On the survey the answer was teleportation.

The correct response, of course, is to have so many questions. Details matter.

Teleportation is a very extreme case of Required Secondary Powers. How do you ensure you do not teleport into a wall or the air or space? How do you deal with displacement? How often can you do it? Where can you go and not go? And so on.

There are versions of teleportation I’ve seen (including in some versions of AD&D) where I would not pay much for them, because you are so likely to get yourself killed you would only do it in a true emergency. Then there are others that are absurdly valuable.

Flight is the lightweight version of the same problem. If you take it to mean the intuitive ‘thing that Superman or Wonder Woman can do in movies’ then yeah, pretty great assuming people don’t respond by trying to put you in a lab, and I’d pay a lot.

Super strength is a nice to have at ‘normal’ levels. At extreme levels it gets a lot more interesting as you start violating the laws of physics or enabling new engineering projects, especially if you have various secondary powers.

Mind control is on an entirely different level. Sometimes it is a relatively weak power, sometimes it enables easy world domination. There you have to ask, as one of your first questions, does anyone else get mind control powers too? This is like the question of AI, with similarly nonsensical scenarios being the default. If the people with true mind control powers used them properly there would usually be no movie. If others get ‘for real’ versions of mind control, and you take super strength or flight, do you even matter? If so, what is your plan? And so on.

What activities do people enjoy or not enjoy?

Rob Wiblin [list edited for what I found interesting]:

1. ‘Computer games’ are among the most enjoyable activities, probably deserve more respect. It clearly beats ‘watching TV’. ‘Games at home’ sounds cheap and accessible and scores high — I guess that’s mostly card or board games.

2. Highly social activities are more work and money to set up but still come in highest of all: ‘restaurant / pub’, ‘go to sport’, and ‘theatre / concert’. ‘Parties’ comes in behind those.

3. ‘Play with child’ was among the most enjoyable of any activity. Many folks who choose not to have kids probably underrate that pleasure. Pulling in the other direction ‘Childcare’ falls in the middle of the pack, though it’s more popular by a mile than school, housework, or paid work. No surprise some people opt out of the workforce to raise a family!

4. ‘Homework’ came dead last, much less popular than even ‘School’. Counts in favour of reducing it where it’s not generating some big academic benefit.

5. ‘Email and internet’ — the activity that eats ever more of our days — is right in the middle. Conventional wisdom is you want to substitute it for true leisure and the numbers here clearly back that up.

6. There’s some preference for active over passive leisure — TV, reading, doing nothing and radio are all mediocre by the standards of recreation. I’m surprised reading and watching TV are right next to one another (I would have expected reading to score higher).

7. People sure hate looking for a job.

8. I’ve seen some debate about how much people like or dislike their jobs. Work and school are definitely much less enjoyable than activities where people are more likely to be freely determining for themselves what they’re doing. But they still manage a 4.7 out of 7. It could be much worse (and in the past probably was). Commuting is unpopular but not at the very bottom like I’d heard.

Gaming and sports for the win. Going to the game is second only to concerts, and I strongly agree most of us are not going to enough of either. Weird that going to the movies is not here, I’d be curious how high it goes. And yes, playing board games at home is overpowered as a fun activity if you can make it happen.

Homework being this bad is not a surprise, but it needs emphasis. If everyone understood that it was less fun than looking for a job or doing the laundry, perhaps they would begin to understand.

Reading I am guessing scores relatively low because people feel obligated to read. Whereas those who choose to read for relaxation on average like it a lot more.

Why Do Companies Go Woke? Middle managers, so a result of moral maze dynamics, which includes a lack of any tether to or caring about physical reality. Makes sense.

The absurdity of the claims in Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo notes that ‘hold right mouse button and then gesture’ is a technique he and others often use playing the game Dota because it is highly efficient, yet only when Parity suggested it did it occur to him to use it for normal text editing. My initial reaction was skepticism but it’s growing on me, and I’m excited to try it once someone implements it especially if you can customize the options.

Making dumb mistakes is fine. Systems predictably making particular dumb mistakes is also fine. Even bias can be fine.

This was a serious miss, but it is like AI – if you only look for where the output is dumb, you will miss the point.

Keep trying, and you’ll figure it out eventually.

(For those who don’t know, this was about prediction markets on the Democratic presidential nomination.)

Looks like we made it. Yes, the non-AI world still exists.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul has gone rogue and betrayed New York City, also humanity, declaring a halt to congestion pricing a month before it was to go into effect. Her explanation was that she spoke to workers at three Manhattan diners who were worried people would be unable to drive to them from New Jersey. Which, as Cathy Reilly points out, is rather insulting to New Jersey, and also completely absurd. Who in the world was going to go into Manhattan for a diner?

She says this won’t interfere with Subway work. Work on the 2nd Avenue Subway line has already been halted. And that’s not all.

You’re damn right. We are going to blame Hochul. Every. Damn. Time.

So Elizabeth Kim investigated. One never talked politics at all. One is directly across from Grand Central, is not a diner, and actively wants congestion pricing. The third did in fact object. That’s it. The good news is Hochul’s attempt to prevent this seems likely to be illegal, so maybe it won’t stop us.

The good news is this was so dumb that she might get primaried, but we will have to wait until 2026.

This terrible thinking is not an isolated incident.

Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY): The next few days it’s going to be hotter than hell across New York — so we’re making admission and parking free at all our State Parks, pools, and beaches tomorrow and Thursday!

Take your families to beat the heat, and enjoy it on us ☀️🌊

Matthew Yglesias: When faced with high demand for an excludable, rivalrous good with inelastic supply, I would make the price higher rather than lower and use the revenue for something useful.

Trump endorsed high skill immigration explicitly on the All-In podcast. He even said, only half prompted, that anyone who graduates from even a junior college should get a green card to stay in the country. It is amazing how clearly he speaks here. There is little question that Trump ‘gets it.’

Yet Trump’s track record is of course very different. Remember Trump’s H-1B Visa suspension in 2020?

So I wrote I was not optimistic about Trump following through, and indeed he has already ‘walked this back.’ Notice Fox News saying this was somehow a promise about ‘migrants.’

We should still obviously take this all up immediately in a bill and see who votes for it.

High skill immigration is overwhelmingly popular across the board, but political gamesmanship has meant we don’t have it. Shame on everyone. Fix it.

No, I don’t care that this isn’t being tied to other things you also like. FIX IT.

There is of course a potential problem with the equilibrium.

Austen Allred: I love the idea of letting more skilled labor into the United States (and making it easier to stay), I just want to make sure we realize “everyone who gets a degree gets a green card” would be mostly driven by diploma mills.

Mark Krikorian (Center for Immigration Studies, Executive Director): If someone earns a Ph.D. at a university in a hard science, I personally will drive to their house and give them a green card. The issue is any foreign college graduate, even from a bogus two-year master’s program or gender studies [major], would get a green card.

Trump explicitly included even junior colleges. Which would absolutely mean this gets dominated in terms of number of students by diploma mills, especially once that opportunity is established.

You know what? I say that’s fine, if that is what it takes. The top people matter a lot, and if you get a bunch of other young people who clear even a moderate bar, that is going to be good too. It’s not even clear raising standards would be better.

We could do something that better addresses everyone’s concerns by being narrower, and I would be happy to start there if that is what it takes. But of course Trump did not walk this back to ‘we need to limit this to real degrees from real schools in real things’ or anything like that. He went back to his anti-immigration rhetoric, full stop, as if this never happened.

Salad Size Me, eating only Sweetgreen for two weeks, goes as you would expect. The shorter duration (versus the original Super Size Me) was initially based on cost considerations, but being able to stop after two weeks was priceless.

Any time you think people know things they have no practical need to know, remember that only 1% of college students know that Hannibal was from Carthage.

Isaac King: This seems like a common failure mode in knowledge-based hobbies. People pour a ton of effort into learning the details of their field, giving it personal importance to them, and they incorrectly generalize this to a belief that their obscure trivia is of general importance.

I’m never sure whether I’m doing this. When I encounter someone who doesn’t understand some basic-seeming-to-me math or science concept, is that actually a real problem, or just me ascribing undue import to something that happens to interest me?

Women, the young and the left leaning in academia are more censorious than their counterparts, and more likely to discourage various forms of research. Cory Clark reports about 10 ‘taboo claims.’

So of course Robin Hanson offered polls on these so-called taboo topics. The ‘controversial’ positions got overwhelming support. The tenth question, whether demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance got affirmed 54%-17%, and the rest were a lot less close than that. Three were roughly 90%-1%. I realize Hanson has unusual followers, but the ‘taboo questions’ academics want to discuss? People largely agree on the answers, and the academics have decided saying that answer out loud is not permitted.

Cocoa prices are dangerously high and might take years to come down. Worth it.

Disney started giving its rides long official names rather than using casual nicknames people would actually use, forcing influencers to use the real names. Which means you know they’re paid and they sound like a duffis.

You can buy vapes on which you can play Pac Man. Our watching out for the children principle is, shall we say, inconsistent.

Stadium tours doing poorly, many of them being cancelled. The upside profits are huge, and touring a ton is a very non-free action, so perhaps this is the equilibrium. If you are not failing at a large fraction of your stadium tours, you are not attempting enough stadium tours. My experience however is that you get rapidly decreasing marginal utility from going to bigger events. When I went to Radio City Music Hall to see Taylor Tomlinson’s Have it All tour, I had a solid seat and a great time, but I had to force me eyes to look at the physical Taylor rather than the giant screens of her. I’d pay substantially more to go to the smaller Beacon Theater, although I’m sure it would still add up to a lot less.

Prediction markets are unpopular. Sure, lots of people in my circles love them and want there to be more of them, but activity is limited even when you get them, and usually focused on stuff not that interesting. The basic thesis here from Nick Whitaker is that without subsidies no one wants to trade, so you need subsidy in the form of either cash, natural hedgers or suckers at the table, and usually you have none of them, nor do you appeal to investors trying to make a buck, and being slow to resolve is a huge issue.

This is all broadly compatible with my perspective from a while back. I strongly agree that you need subsidy if you want to get good action. Alas, people are mostly unwilling to pay. I think we basically need to ‘suck it up’ and be willing to pay for information, both to subsidize traders and encourage reliable wording and resolution.

As I’ve tried to use Manifold, my biggest frustration has been resolution criteria. Why do we see the same few markets over and over? It is not because those are the only interesting questions. It is because those are the questions we can quantify. If you cannot quantify, you get endless tsoris, and can’t play for real amounts. By default unclear markets turn into betting on how the judge is going to see the problem, and that is not something I care about.

I’m definitely planning on being less accommodating with nitpicks on market resolutions, especially hypothetical ones, going forward, because time is short and the stakes not so high. Yes, that means you are predicting in part how I will rule. Tough. I don’t trade on my own markets to avoid conflict of interest issues.

Modern buildings are ugly. We made that decision. We woke up, time and again, and we chose ugly. I do not understand how anyone fell for this, but a lot of people did. The cost argument does not check out. I know people actually prefer nice things in practice.

I would offer two other explanations not listed there.

1. Vetocracy and permitting and regulatory requirements including zoning. If you have to struggle to get permission for every detail of what you try to build, and anyone can say no, are you going to risk delays or refusals in order to create something not ugly? Do you want fights over details? Or will you go with the ugly thing that you know is standard and where no one will complain too loudly?

2. Externalities. When you create something beautiful, the whole world wins. When it is ugly, the whole world suffers. You do get the brunt of both, but a small fraction of the overall effect. It is only somewhat priced in. It makes sense that you would not invest sufficiently in it. This used to be made up for by people caring about that sort of thing inherently and it granting more status.

For public buildings externalities are sort of priced in, but not fully, and you have even more of a vetocracy and designed by committee issue, on top of the ‘yes someone pulled a con on us and convinced Very Serious People ugly was good somehow’ the article discusses. For private ones, you have both issues.

In potentially a big practical deal, the courts have now ruled that CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act, their version of NEPA) should no longer be construed to give the ‘fullest possible protection,’ a formula that means no one ever does almost anything, and instead treat it as one would an ordinary law. Maybe we can build some things now.

Government actually working: If only the system worked like this more often, in response to a call to extend our insane child car seat requirements to airplanes:

Kelsey Piper: Fun fact, the FAA reviews this periodically and always concludes that, by raising the cost of flying and making more people drive, it would likely increase child deaths.

This is my literal favorite fact about any regulatory body and I cannot shut up about it because so many regulations are written with willful obliviousness to the harms done by making things more expensive and annoying.

Imagine if we went back and analyzed all our existing rules around airplanes, and everything else, around similar principles.

Biden tariffs on China seem quite bad, thanks to Governor Polis for being willing to say it plainly. Taxes on input goods like the 25% on steel and aluminum are madness.

Activists successfully lobby Belgian government to give prostitutes ‘proper labor contracts’ that give them all the protections, rights and procedures you get in the European labor market. Then people realize what those rules imply, and ‘when you refuse to do assigned tasks ten times in six months we call in a government mediator’ suddenly sounds like what it is when you those tasks are often sex acts. If you are going to mandate contracts and salaries and benefits and refusal rights and make it hard to fire workers, that has consequences, and not all of them are the higher prices.

Another brief analysis on the government anti-trust case against Apple.

Ben Krauss at Slow Boring proposes higher education for police officers, both a dedicated university and programs at universities, complaining that our police officers get less hours of training. Oh no, the default reaction should go, more occupational licensing and credentialism and wasteful gatekeeping and signaling, even if as he suggests we don’t increase requirements outright. I very much did not buy the case that this solves any of our real problems.

California rules on wages and fees continue to take their toll on restaurants. The costs add up. I do not however have sympathy for those complaining they will have to bake the fees into menu prices. That seems great. Yes, there will be initial sticker shock, but this puts everyone on a level playing field. In general, the game of ‘everyone is forced to hide the true price’ is a great place for intervention. Ben Phelps has similar thoughts in this Twitter thread.

Why did it take 10 years to open a Trader Joe’s in Hayes Valley? For years they wouldn’t let anyone open a ‘chain grocery store’ anywhere pink on this map:

So they passed particular laws to ‘allow’ a grocery store in an area with no grocery stores. The first time, they couldn’t open until a condo was completed (because shrug) and that took so long the store backed out. Then in 2019 they tried for a Trader Joe’s, but the developer was caught bribing officials to let the development go faster, so it had to wait until they were bought out.

The obvious question is why anyone thinks banning ‘chain’ grocery stores was a sane idea in the first place?

I considered putting this one in Crime and Punishment.

Shirt, raising questions it answers.

European Union has declared itself opposed to encrypted chats, and is trying to pass laws to that effect. Signal has promised they would leave Europe rather than comply. Matthew Green says they are extremely close to proposing such a law. It might have already passed by the time you read this.

Symbolic importance: UK hotels engage in weekly fire alarm tests that everyone treats as not real and they look at you funny if you don’t realize. Never sound an alarm with the intention of people not responding, even or especially as a test.

A big advantage and also big danger of becoming rich and powerful is people get afraid to tell you no. In some contexts, that is great, you get what you want and you can motivate people to do things. When flying in bad weather, not so much.

Kelsey Piper: There are several famous plane crashes that killed presidents where foul play was strongly expected and the ultimate explanation was crew inexperience and a terror of telling the President that what he wanted them to do was ill advised. This is one, this is another.

There are also some billionaire plane crashes with a similar dynamic. Pilots who should have said “no, I am not qualified to safely do that”, who would have said that to an ordinary client.

Money and power can buy a lot of things but they seem actively counterproductive sometimes for purchasing “someone who will tell you that the thing you want is actually a bad idea and they won’t do it”.

This is part of why such people sometimes find it highly refreshing and useful when they find someone willing to tell them no. The problem in the case of planes is that planes are far too safe. So you want the pilot to be bolder than normal. But not too bold.

Macron calls snap elections in France, despite clear danger Le Pen and the far right could win, on theory that the threat of Le Pen and the far right winning means he will win. It probably works, the problem is it sometimes doesn’t. This is a central problem with democracy. Everyone wants to run against the existentially disastrous (in the eyes of their voters) candidate, so they can win, right up until eventually the the disaster happens. Generalize this, including to AI.

Biden Administration to ban medical debt from credit reports. If it cannot go on your credit report, why would anyone pay a medical bill that was not big enough to justify going to court, or at least one they did not feel was fair, especially as social norms around this shift? If that’s true, asks Robin Hanson, who would issue this ‘medical debt,’ and offer services without payment or insurance in advance? Mostly I think all of that is fine. Instead of fake super inflated bills no one consented to, we’d get up front known pricing, and people could take on other debt to pay for it as needed. It’s still illegal to not provide sufficiently urgent care either way.

The alternative is to continue with billing like this, where an ER visit costs $2215 for ‘the visit,’ $1200 for a nurse’s swab of a 3 year old’s throat for a covid/strep test, $740 for two minutes with the doc, then the ‘cash pay’ is $685. End this scam.

Flo Crivello reports from time at Uber eight years ago (so things may have changed) that for finding shortest routes, Apple Maps was best, followed by Google Maps, and Waze was far behind both. Waze perhaps makes people feel smarter and in the know, but it is too clever by half and did not (at least then) actually translate into faster routes.

Why did Google never implement a ‘nicest route’ button? Because people might use it to select nicer routes, thus choose to give foot traffic to richer areas. So they decided to hide this information from their customers to avoid this.

If it had ended here it would have been purely for the popcorn: A conversation between Yann LeCun and Elon Musk, part one.

Then… well…

People will actually tell Elon Musk he has never done Science and will die bitter and forgotten because he did not publish, or did not publish in the proper scientific journals.

After a highly justified roasting all around, Yann quickly retreated back to the Motte, which is far more reasonable.

Yann LeCun: So much misunderstanding of this comment!

Here is a list of things I am *NOTsaying:

– you need a PhD to do Science. You don’t. A PhD teaches you to do research, but you can learn that on your own (though it’s much easier with a mentor).

– you need to get papers accepted by a journal or conference to publish: you don’t. You can just post it in http://ArXiv.org. Many influential papers never went through the formal peer review process, or went through it after they became influential.

– engineering is not science: it can be, depending on your methodology. I’m a scientist *andan engineer. These activities are complementary and need each other.

– science requires formal papers: it doesn’t. A clear explanation on a website and a piece of code on a public repo will do.

What I *AMsaying is that science progresses through the collision of ideas, verification, analysis, reproduction, and improvements.

If you don’t publish your research *in some wayyour research will likely have no impact.

These are very different statements. No, the first statement did not say ‘all you have to do is put it up on ArXiv.org.’ I love this illustration of the classic two step, the flip between science and Science™. The difference between ‘you have to tell people about your discovery or they won’t know about it’ and ‘if your statement hasn’t gone through proper peer review in the official channels then I can act as if it isn’t real.’

I would be thrilled if we could all agree on that second thing. Science is where you figure things out about the world. When the guy in the shirt says he will do science to his cookie, he speaks truth.

If you then want to add to the light of science, then you also have to tell other people your findings.

That’s it. No gatekeeping.

Or as Xkcd famously put it:

Say what you want about Elon Musk, but admit the man ships and he experiments.

Similarly, here’s that quote from Katalin Kariko’s book, Breaking Through. She still got mRNA vaccines to happen despite being driven out of her position for trying, and this thread from St. Rev Dr. Sev explains that weirdoes like her who think science should be about doing actual science are not to be tolerated going forward by those who only know Science™.

Goro Shimura: The thing that bugs me about a lot of the replies to this is the number of people (mostly American) looking at what is clearly meant to be a description of rank obsequiousness mixed with self-promotion and saying “but of course these are just basic social skills”

St. Rev Dr. Rev: A whole bunch of Leading Scientists with Professional Headshots on Twitter Dot Com are extremely buttmad about this quote. Genius is a dime a dozen, they are saying. Science is about project management and filling out form!

Well, Science is about that now, anyway.

I reflexively blocked the ratfucker who said the thing about genius so I can’t find it now, but check out this other ratfucker. If genius can make a difference in your field, it’s immature!

Kariko revolutionized her field in the teeth of people like this, and they will never forgive her, and they will fucking destroy the next Kariko they get their hands on.

An unspoken conspiracy of mediocrity. The purpose of Science is to turn grant money into papers, nothing more. Actual progress threatens to disrupt a lab’s business model. Can’t have that.

The greater part of modern science (by staffing levels, at least) is worthless bunk.

…

But when everyone’s a fucking high-agreeability pod person, you don’t filter the trash once it’s clear that it’s trash. That would be unmutual, it would interfere with the flow of grant money. So the intellectual trash piles up. That’s good leadership and community service.

I grew up reading about how Science was done in the mid-20th century. My mom worked in a cancer research lab herself. Disagreeable weirdos have always been critical to scientific work. Purging them because they make the conformists uncomfortable is a fairly new development.

St. Rev. Dr. Rev.: So this thread Took Off, as they say, and a lot of people dug it but some people got really nasty, like, ‘oh you think you’re BETTER than other people, like you don’t need to FIT IN, like you should get money for free’

I think Katalin Kariko is better than other people.

More fun ‘things are not science’ here.

If you think Science™ makes good funding decisions on the merits, well:

Julian Togelius: This Dutch study finds that finds that panelists make the same allocations of research fundings even if they don’t get to read the actual proposals, just abstracts and CVs. This result *shouldhave a large impact on science funding policy. (h/t Thore Husfeldt)

Abstract: Do grant proposal texts matter for funding decisions? A field experiment

Scientists and funding agencies invest considerable resources in writing and evaluating grant proposals. But do grant proposal texts noticeably change panel decisions in single blind review? We report on a field experiment conducted by The Dutch Research Coun- cil (NWO) in collaboration with the authors in an early-career competition for awards of 800,000 euros of research funding.

A random half of panelists were shown a CV and only a one-paragraph summary of the proposed research, while the other half were shown a CV and a full proposal. We find that withholding proposal texts from panelists did not detectibly impact their proposal rankings. This result suggests that the resources devoted to writing and evaluating grant proposals may not have their intended effect of facilitating the selection of the most promising science.

Julia Togelius: Far too much time and effort goes into writing and reviewing grants. The grant funding system also distorts priorities, rewarding faculty for spending their time writing grants instead of doing research. It’s the worst part of academia.

I think we should simply do what it implicitly suggests: replace grant proposals with submitting abstracts (maybe half a page or so) and CVs. Plus some regularization to ensure a more even spread of grant money. Better for everyone.

“But what about the new investigator that has no track record but a brilliant idea?”

1. Specific grant schemes for new PIs, as already exists

2. Research is a social endeavor, you learn it and get a track record by collaborating with others

3. Brilliant ideas are a dime and dozen

In other words, Science™ does not care about the details of your research, and this good, actually, we should stop wasting time with that and allocate money based on your social status.

Thus is proposed by Ruxandra Teslo this law, after explaining that failed corporatists are forcing the weird nerds out of academia: Any system that is not explicitly pro-Weird Nerd will turn anti-Weird Nerd pretty quickly. Most would-be Karikos, including the ones who are not somewhat crazy, are driven out.

Another sign of how things are going, yes the study data is posted online.

Ben Landau-Taylor: In 2023 Ian Hussey tried requesting data from dozens of academics who promised “data available upon request”, and found they were LESS likely to share data (17%) than authors who did not make any promises (26%).

Over and over again, when we check the parts of today’s academic process which can be inspected, it turns out that there’s nobody home. The parts which are harder to inspect? Well, I’m sure those are fine.

The rationalist term is ‘front running steel man, for German Claude suggests Replikationsmangeleinsichtsanerkennung (‘acknowledgement of the insight despite lack of replication’):

Tess: There should be a German word that means “I see where you’re going with this, and while I agree with the point you will eventually get to, the scientific study you are about to cite doesn’t replicate.”

Paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas estimates 150%-300% returns to government nondefense R&D over the postwar period on business sector productivity growth. They say this implies underfunding of nondefense R&D, but that is not right. One should assume decreasing marginal returns, so this is entirely compatible with the level of spending being too high. I also would not assume conditions are unchanged and spending remains similarly effective.

What are the load-bearing posts of our time? Only one way to find out. Recommended thread if you haven’t yet. I am sad you can’t easily find all the quote tweets.

TikTok gives different people completely different comment feeds on the same video. Woman gets comments supporting female video creator, man gets comments supporting the creator’s boyfriend instead. Evil genius.

fabian: the final stage of web2 social media is that everyone is heaven banned

maybe not enough demand yet to enable more controls, but maybe just too crude tooling?

let folks tap more seamlessly into different simclusters, view feed as-redneck/feminist/techbro/nigerian-communist

TaraBull: TıkTok is dividing people by curating entirely different comments to us.

Do you look at comments to gain perspective on social media?

Was this purely the ‘people you follow or engage with show up first’ principle being strong enough if you spend too much time on the platform? I very much doubt it.

Ragged man stands up, says this anything beyond that should be against the rules. Everyone gets different feeds, but aside from actively connected specific accounts we should mandate everyone gets the same comments sections, unless you are being intentionally heaven banned.

You can still gain perspective from the comments on videos even so, but you need to be properly calibrated, and understand you are seeing a customized reaction. How that compares to your expectations is less information, but still information.

You want more evidence TikTok is an enemy of America?

It hates us so much it banned anyone who helped promote Ozempic, without warning, under the ‘Integrity and Authenticity’ policy, in particular the ‘might be helping Americans be better off’ clause.

“We want TikTok to be a place that encourages self-esteem and does not promote negative social comparisons,” TikTok says in a preface to the rules.

That’s right, yes, not letting people say a healthy weight is good is an actual CCP op.

And yet, the algorithm knows all:

Stephanie Boyle: I’ve seen all of these creators on my fyp. I usually see them complaining about being banned which I often find mildly amusing. If they were banned or shadow banned, I wouldn’t see them I would think!

The market only has a 33% chance that TikTok will actually get banned, despite ByteDance having revealed it won’t be allowed to divest (I bet nominal yes purely for tracking purposes and don’t have a strong opinion).

Liz Miele got flagged on YouTube for hate speech on her latest special Murder Sheets because she playfully calls her own cats the C-word, despite their policies not even listing the word, with no way to fix it, cratering her ad revenue. I was at the taping of this special, and calling that hate speech is completely absurd. This feels like an AI Solves This problem, and also a Human With a Brain Solves This problem? Yes, perhaps for people with 8 subscribers and 31 views you cannot afford to check when someone appeals, but this is very much not that. The good news is that enough people heard about this that one of them found someone who could hear her appeal, and they fixed the problem. Yay.

Did you know that if prominent people give you retweets, you get more views and likes? Yeah, least surprising economics experimental finding ever, and that’s saying something. What is more interesting is that getting the prominent economist retweets of job market papers actively did boost flyouts and job offers, women receiving 0.9 more job offers. Which is a lot of job offers given you only ultimately need one and the average for controls is 1.5.

Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham: The average control individual in this sample is an individual who has 11 tenure track and 16 total interviews, 5 and 3 flyouts, and 3 and 1.5 offers. Notably, being URG doesn’t predict (significantly ) on any of these outcomes for the control.

Why does it work? Here is one guess.

Paul Novosad: An explanation could be that the candidate search is EXTREMELY random.

We get 1000 applications at Dartmouth, and our administration requires that the same 3-4 people review every single one.

It’s an overwhelming task. It’s inevitable that people make quick decisions — as happens in college admissions and all other kinds of job hunts too.

Any kind of positive signal at that first stage could increase your odds of moving forward substantially.

Never mind social media, is the internet bad for you? The study says mostly the internet is good for people, actually (ragged man stands up at meeting), although in some data sets women ages 15-24 in particular are worse off. I am not in the Patrick McKenzie camp where the internet is by a mile our greatest invention, but yes, the internet is pretty awesome and I am very happy to have it. Also I agree with the commenters that any such study is hopelessly confounded.

New York passes law making it illegal for social media websites to provide ‘an addictive feed’ without ID verification. It is called, of course, ‘SAFE for kids act.’ Also parents will be able to pause notifications for their kids from 12am to 6am (okay, I guess), and ban selling data from users under 18. Doesn’t seem great, plausibly unconstitutional, and it is always weird when people say ‘you cannot collect our data’ and then require age verification.

Nate Silver: The [Twitter] For You algorithm is pretty good at picking up on your revealed preferences so if you’re complaining about it, you’re kinda telling on yourself.

It measures your interactions, so you are telling on how you choose to interact. We are forced to be disciplined in how we react, lest the AI gives us what we on reflection do not want. We now have to exercise this kind of strategic thinking with every online interaction. It is exhausting.

Twitter porn bots. Hard to catch?

Michael Nielsen: Can someone at Twitter anonymously explain to a reporter why the pornbots are being allowed to proliferate? (I presume it’s because Elon thinks it’s funny?)

Paul Graham: Apparently they’re hard to catch. I know this seems implausible.

I roll to disbelieve. I could believe that porn bots that are trying maximally hard to not be caught are hard to catch. I flat out refuse to believe that the actual in practice bots on Twitter are hard to catch. The bots are so unimaginative that I’ve gotten the exact same message about a sister looking to date 10+ times, the same exact crypto messages. The porn bots 90%+ share several very clear characteristics.

I have an alternative theory. Now hear me out. Twitter is choosing to have bots that are trivial to identify. If they crack down, then the bots get sneakier, and actual humans have to spend time on them rather than recognizing in 200 milliseconds that it is a bot. Better, they have decided, to do a phony war that doesn’t actually cause much stress or lost time. It’s crazy, but not as crazy as it sounds.

Could it be as dumb as?

Tyler Young: Some of them are sophisticated. Some are very much not. My bet is that Twitter has no interest in solving the problem because the bots boost their engagement metrics.

I cannot rule it out. I mean, you’d think it can’t be this stupid, but it can. At some point, making the insurance fund an actual random number is less harmful than making people miserable in order to create a more credible fake number.

Patrick McKenzie sees them as a visibe test of non-state capacity, similar to cleanliness at McDonalds.

Twitter made likes private. Note that even if there are no flaws, it is two-way private. The person whose Tweet you liked knows it was you, which is vital to Twitter functioning.

Paul Graham: Instant 10% increase in likes. Large numbers of people must have different opinions than they dare express, to move the total number of likes by that much.

The problem is that people have literally gotten into big trouble or been attacked out of context for merely liking the wrong Twitter post. Whereas the upside of liking a post is very small, and also people might look at your list of likes to find good content.

Stuart Buck: One downside of Twitter making “Likes” private is that one of the most interesting ways to find new ideas/tweets was to go to the “likes” of someone you admire, and see what they had been reading lately.

I occasionally enjoyed seeing the “likes” of John Arnold, Patrick Collison, and others. Lots of overlap with the stuff that I read, but it would regularly turn up interesting ideas/people that I hadn’t seen.

So it makes sense to now be modestly less selective, also it could easily be a temporary bump from the new policy (‘I can like everything I want now, mwahahaha’).

Michael Keenan: Like everyone else, I’d rather they make this optional per Like. A side benefit would be that we could see a tweet’s public:private Like ratio, which would measure taboo strength. We’d see what taboo topics are ready for an information cascade.

Complexity is bad and choices are bad, and a ‘private like’ carries a weird implication. Not being public with your likes could be seen as a kind of ‘evidence of guilt,’ even, or you could be blamed for being public or private. I am not excited to split the baby here, but it does solve some issues.

Violet Blue: So now scammers and bots can artificially inflate post popularity and no one can verify if likes are from any real accounts. A gift to influence ops.

Shoshana Weissmann: This is a REALLY good point. This is another huge use of checking likes.

There was once a company opposing R Street’s work. All the likes were bots and weirdly the like count fluctuated throughout the day. Now we won’t know.

Yep. Public record of likes lets you understand context. What type of engagement is happening here? Who is liking this and who is not? It is rarely the best use of one’s time, but occasionally it was valuable, as would have been tasking an AI with this.

Beff Jezos notes likes often said ‘I understood this post’ and regrets that this is gone, or flagged things for their followers, and the new world will only reward those who cater to the center of mass rather than the tail of intellect (virtue of silence goes here). The first use should mostly still be intact, since the author still knows. I do think Jezos has a point here, but that this does not shift the balance of power all that much. Already Twitter favored the middle quite a lot.

That could be part of the motivation as well. If your likes are public, an AI can use that as data in a way humans could not do at scale.

Scott Alexander on the Far Out Initiative, a quest to abolish suffering by altering neurotypes rather than the usual proposed method of omnicide. The claim is that Jo Cameron is incapable of any form of suffering, and she’s otherwise mostly fine, only a few minor accidents, she still seems to do things and care about things, it’s great. So let’s do that for everyone and ow who put that stupid fence there?

I always view focus on suffering in general, especially when viewed as The Bad, as at great risk of asking the wrong question. Suffering is highly correlated with things sucking, and provides valuable information that things likely indeed suck and in exactly which locations and ways they suck. This is highly useful, both as information and motivation.

That does not mean we currently have the correct level of suffering in response to things sucking, or that a lot of our suffering is not mismatched. Nor does it mean that the suffering does not make things suck a lot more than they need to.

That is a roundabout way of saying the right amount of suffering is probably a lot lower than the human norm under current conditions, let alone those who report constant suffering, but the right amount is not zero. I do not sufficiently buy the ‘you can vary how happy you are instead’ counterargument. Negative reinforcement should not purely be the lack of positive reinforcement. A knob to lower this setting would be immensely valuable, but yeah, I worry a ton about what people would do with it.

Here is a question that is not so correlated with that, entire history of the question:

Stefan Schubert: Most people are not unhappy. [then he shows this graph]

Danielle Fong: It’s fascinating how un-impacted this data series is by basically anything.

Matthew Yglesias: It’s fascinating how un-impacted this data series is by basically anything.

How do I know? Because ‘lol nothing matters,’ to this extent, is not a plausible hypothesis.

Are you telling me 2008 did actual nothing? That 2020 did actual nothing? Phones?

Yeah, no.

My explanation is that this question is being answered in relative terms. You aren’t equally happy during a pandemic or financial crisis, but that is not the question being asked. How your personal life is going is a question that mostly rules that stuff out and is judged compared to other people around you, and we are mostly risk averse and willing to accept somewhat below average performance, so we consistently bat around 80%.

Here’s what Stefan was responding to:

Tim Denning: Most people are unhappy.

So, I’ve spent 20 hours watching Bill Murray interviews over 3 months.

What did he find? Organizing for space:

1. Forget trying to be famous, try to be rich first.

2. The more relaxed you are the better you are.

3. Be weird as hell, crash random events and parties.

4. Tell everyone you are retired.

5. Most mental health advice is too serious.

6. It’s hard to be an artist. It’s hard to be anything. It’s hard to be.

7. The automatic things you do are basically those things that keep you from doing the better things you need to do.

8. Whatever you do, always give 100%. Unless you’re donating blood. Giving a sis underrated, the competition is weak, most people never try.

9. Melancholy is kind of sweet sometimes.

10. It’s not that attractive to have a plan. Focus on being resourceful, not clever.

11. It just doesn’t matter! People worry about dumb stuff. Go do epic stuff.

12. You can tell how boring a person is by the lack of fear in their eyes when someone is flipping through photos on their phone.

13. Just beat my record for most consecutive days without dying.

14. People say I’m difficult. Sometimes that’s a badge of honor.

Strongly agree: #1, #2, #5, #6, #9, #13.

Directionally agree, good advice, but not strictly consistently true: #3, #7, #8, #11, #14.

Not buying it: #4. Never retire. Maybe tell people different, sometimes?

Actively disagree: #10, #12. You need a better plan, and it is boring to take photos rather than live, although I am considering changing that somewhat because of AI search and using the photos as a kind of memory bank.

Given the non-obviousness level here, that’s a very good hit rate.

Jerry Seinfeld’s commencement address at Duke was very good. So was his appearance on Honestly. It is fascinating how much more interesting I find Seinfeld when he is not on stage, compared to how he did when I saw him at the Beacon Theater.

Ruxandra’s post claiming that autists (rationalists being the chosen example) and the Internet will defeat the monoculture. I do not see us bringing down the monoculture (at least not via non-AI methods). The monoculture need not much care that there are a handful of people off in the distance doing its own thing, and indeed it will come for such groups in time, and it has. If all the major tools and attention is monoculture, and there are a bunch of small splinter factions that occasionally get to add some concepts to the monoculture, that is better than not having the factions but mostly still monoculture.

Polymarket raises $70 million including from Vitalik Buterin and Founders Fund. As is noted in the announcement, Polymarket is often now cited as a news source, since it is the largest prediction market on major events even without American participation.

Note that they are crazy low on Biden, having him at 34% (!) as of this writing, with Trump at 56%. Whereas Manifold has Trump 52% versus Biden 46%. Adding to 98% is slightly too high, but adding to 90% is clearly too low. In general Polymarket is biased towards Republicans. The obvious play is to take the gift directly as they (at the time) had Biden dropping out at 24% (!?!) versus Manifold’s single digit levels. Yes there is some chance you lose and nothing is ever investment (or gambling) advice but hot damn. Remember always that such changes persist, so you are probably stuck holding until election day. Or, perhaps, somewhat after it.

Review of a new book on basics of Bayes, looks promising.

A look from Dylan Matthews inside the INR, a federal intelligence agency that uses a small group of dedicated domain experts (as opposed to places like the CIA where everyone rotates every few years) and got Vietnam, Iraq’s lack of a nuclear program and the early stages of the Ukraine war right. Which would have been a lot more useful if anyone had listened. Of course, they are far from perfect.

Dylan Matthews: For their part, INR veterans tend to be less triumphalist, preferring to say they were merely “less wrong” than other agencies. They agreed with other agencies that Iraq still had biological and chemical weapons, and they got that wrong.

The article is full of INR wins, and notes some INR losses. It is ‘contrarian’ because it does not bow to government consensus and is proud of dissent. Alas, they are being shrunk, and they are paid poorly. It is going to be tough. And their methods depend on far too much confidential information for us civilians to tap their expertise.

News you can use: A map of the public bathrooms in New York City.

The bees are fully back.

Topher Stoll: This is the hilarious tragedy that plagues all of human endeavor. If we rally to fix a problem in time, idiots will come out of the woodwork to say that there was never a problem to begin with. See also: Y2K, the Ozone Layer, global food supplies, “peak” oil, Acid Rain.

One day, god willing, some incurious doofus will be able to say with a straight face-

“Pssh, climate change was NEVER a danger! All our energy is renewable, the geo-engineering is going great, and we’ve restored 90% of habitats around the world.”

That’s the dream.

Yep. Always the dream. Ideally we’d be measured before and appreciative after. Alas, it almost never works that way.

Tyler Cowen recommends reading about a specific business you know a lot about already, or if that fails about the business of a sports team or musical group that resonates with you, as opposed to books in the ‘business section.’ As he says, the part about not reading ‘business’ books is the easy insight. The hard part is what is good. Here I worry that there are too many important differences between superstar competitions and other practices, and thus if you are not careful you would learn many wrong lessons. But I do agree that looking into areas you know is great here.

Tyler Cowen book recommendations: Olivier Roy’s new book The Crisis of Culture: Identity Politics and the Empire of Norms was a very strong one. He also suggests In This Economy: How Money & Markets Really Work by Kyla Scanlon.

Also he says in Cape Town you reverse the usual rules and eat at restaurants with beautiful women facing the waterfront, because everything is cheap and you want to be part of the class of people with money. Order the seafood.

He does not mention this, but the right next question is, how does this generalize?

A Twitter thread guide to hosting gatherings. This model says: Look for people who are interesting and are interested in others, never invite people because you feel obligated. Curation of people is key. You only need 14 square feet of active party space per person. Create talking spaces where people face each other, ideally limited to 4-5 people. Warm bulbs for light, make a playlist, mostly don’t sweat it.

Some related good advice on community spaces:

Tetraspace West: I think my hard won community management advice is:

1. Laissez-faire and free speech is for strangers; your walled garden is tiny and low-stakes, be ruthless.

2. Not *technicallybreaking the rules is breaking the rules.

Your discord server can maybe have an #appeals channel, if you know what you’re doing; if you start creating something that looks like a legal system, you’re copying intuitions from systems much larger and more alienated and less designed than yours.

A justice system is based on the principle that punishing innocent people is very bad, and decisions must be objective. In many situations, those should not be priorities.

Also good social advice:

Elizabeth van Nostrand: I’ve know of several people who violate social rules a lot and tell people there have been no consequences. They are wrong about this.

It might be true that it’s a good trade off for them, but I also know of opportunities they otherwise would have been offered but weren’t because they were considered too hard to work with.

…

Long ago I read a blog post about a clerk at a porn rental store (so, really long ago) about a karma system he + coworkers implemented. They had a fair amount of leeway around late fees, and if you were rude to them or another customer it would never be used in your favor again.

Like a note went in your Permanent Record at the porn rental store that you were mean and they should be mean back.

The justice feels delicious here but no one was being made a better person by that so mixed feelings. See page 52 of this PDF.

Examples of rules broken: arrive within an hour of when you said you would most of the time, don’t yell at people or call them names, don’t constantly ask for favors from near-strangers and if you do at least be really nice about it.

Oh and my favorite “starting projects other people depend on you can’t complete, forcing others to rescue you.”

Also sometimes they people lie. I’ve heard people forced out of multiple spaces that were deeply important to them, tell others they’d never faced consequences for being too X.

Paul Crowley: This is a great caution. You often won’t know about the invites or kinder treatment you didn’t get because someone noticed you violated a rule. They often won’t tell you. Also, rule-violators lie about this stuff.

I have known more than one example where a whole circle of people have known that someone is a liar, but no-one tells them to their face, and they very likely think they’re getting away with it.

Quinn Que: An easy example of this is being blocked by people you’ve never interacted with on social.

Paul Crowley: I block like this a lot!

Five models of how to live near friends, from Cabin:

I strongly endorse the Apartment Cluster. I have some small experience with this, having had one friend living our building. It was awesome. It is hard to overstate the extent to which not having to go outside meant we had more interactions. Same floor would have been another big jump. Trivial inconveniences matter.

The best part is that this is easy to do. In any big building there will be openings over time, and presumably you chose the place for a reason. Alas, our problem is that those we know always wanted to live in cheaper locations than we did, so we couldn’t make it work.

Yes, you could do this in reverse via ‘meet your neighbors,’ but these days it is difficult, and it turns out most people are not on the same wavelength. The people in the next apartment are lovely, but we have so little in common. It is hard to make that work these days.

Minihood is the classic version, potentially even easier, and the one that was pulled off in Berkeley. Again, exact proximity matters a lot. You want easy walkability.

The duplex dream is a step up from both, if you can pull it off. ADU is a stretch.

Micro-village is often the dream. I have seen much talk of it over the years, but no one ever seems to get that close to pulling it off. Coordination is hard. From what I can tell, this will only happen if a small subset is willing to take the risk and do the work, and then offer to let others follow. You will also need easy access to civilization.

I am late to the party on this one due to other concerns, but still seems worth weighing in. By all means skip if you consider this old and busted.

The FTC have decided they are the fairness department. They decide what is fair. If they decide your agreement is not fair, that agreement is null and void. If you don’t like it, tough, because life it not… well, you know.

In this case, the thing that they have decided is not fair are noncompetes.

Dave Michaels (WSJ, April 23): The Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday banned employers from using noncompete contracts to prevent most workers from joining rival firms, achieving a policy goal that is popular with labor but faces an imminent court challenge from business groups.

…

The rule prohibits companies from enforcing existing noncompete agreements on anyone other than senior executives. It also bans employers from imposing new noncompete contracts on senior executives in the future.

…

Noncompete clauses violate a 110-year-old law that prohibits unfair methods of competition, the FTC says.

…

Outlawing noncompetes is hugely popular with many workers, and the FTC estimates that its rule would boost their earnings by $400 billion or more over 10 years. Cosmetologists, who earn about $35,000 a year according to federal data, say noncompete agreements are a drag on their earnings.

The move, approved 3-2 by Democrats on party lines, is roughly 50% to be upheld after all appeals.

Pacific Legal is suing on the highly reasonable grounds that this is none of the FTC’s business and these agreements can be good for both parties by enabling training.

Austin Campbell is one of many celebrating this decision, calling it an earth-shakingly massive win for free markets and capitalism to deny this freedom of contract to deny one future freedom of contract. In practice, he argues, noncompetes are highly abusive and workers are put in horrible situations.

Like many, he argues that this isn’t a free contract because many don’t know what they are agreeing to. It doesn’t have to be that way. A noncompete is a fairly straightforward thing. I once signed one that the employer refused to waive or even to let me buy out of or negotiate about, and that I decided to honor, and it sucked, but I did not have a lawyer and I was not for a second confused on what I was signing.

Did I check if it was enforceable in my state at the time? No, because a contract is a contract is a contract, I knew what I agreed to, and I was not about to break my word even if I wasn’t legally bound to it.

The flip side is studies show workers don’t understand and do not bargain with the noncompete in mind. Which seems crazy to me, but also shouldn’t obviously matter if employers are competing for workers? Then there are workers who aren’t aware they even signed. That I agree should not be allowed, you should have to be very clear that this is a noncompete and on what it applies to.

Here is Luke Herrine sharing a bunch of examples of workers who got screwed by noncompetes.

Others complain of an equilibrium where most employers insist on noncompetes, putting workers in a terrible position. The next question is, why doesn’t one employer compete by offering lower wages and not requiring a noncompete, if that is better for workers?

1. One possibility is that we are up against the minimum wage. If that happens, then yes, employers will have to compensate with other terms, and banning these agreements is a lot like raising the minimum wage further, and likely the superior choice. It certainly seems like there should be some wage floor on new noncompetes to avoid this, substantially above the minimum wage.

2. Another possibility is that the employees, whether or not they know what the agreement says, are wrong about what the agreement is worth to them. Like in many other places, they focus on the headline number and other short term factors, and don’t properly factor in the noncompete. Alternatively, they are liquidity constrained so they have to make tradeoffs.

3. A third possibility is that you don’t want the employees who are more inclined to refuse to sign noncompete, because they are the ones who will leave and compete with you, so the equilibrium is everyone has to sign even though that’s not net good. That would be a story where intervention makes sense.

4. Another story like that is if competition and dynamism are largely public goods. So the employee and the employer can make a deal that leaves both better off, but it makes everyone else worse off, so you want to tax or ban it. Possible.

Betsey Stevenson is on the ‘victory for the economy’ side.

Tyler Cowen refers back to his post from January 2023, where he argues noncompetes can be welfare enhancing. His argument is straightforward. If you can go to a competitor tomorrow, I am forced to silo my trade secrets and other information, and I will invest less in your skills. At the low end, noncompetes seem net negative, but we shouldn’t be too restrictive.

Alex Tabarrok agrees with Tyler on the merits that the proposed ban is too broad, and also questions the FTC’s authority. As he points out, the FTC’s claim that banning noncompetes will raise wages ignores that this is part of the worker compensation basket. By default, we should expect wages to go down short term. My response would be the FTC is abrogating existing contracts, which effectively raises the wages and bargaining power of the impacted workers, which means the short term impact could indeed send wages higher. Alex buys the externality story, though, so he is willing to give the change a try.

Another story I buy is that noncompete agreements can be observed and enforced whereas NDAs make this a lot harder, so often noncompete agreements are substitutes for NDAs.

Arthur Breitman: On the FTC… in a few serious industries non competes aren’t about depriving the competition of talent or even employee retention, they are largely a stopgap to make NDAs de facto more enforceable. Of course we’ll hear the contorted explanations from a cohort of Silicon Valley “libertarians” that it’s a great policy, because that’s part of the local lore, but it ain’t. There are industries where trade secrets are far more valuable than the broad Internet tech sector, and the alternative to trade secrets are patents.

Your periodic reminder to file under ‘and then they voted.’

Aaron Blake: The NYT/Siena poll shows 37% of Trump voters say Trump is most responsible for the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

24% … say *Bidenis most responsible.

‘If it happened on your watch it is your fault’ is a popular heuristic. This makes it very difficult to make good policy decisions.

Scott Sumner on aging and looking back on the past, recommended.

The mirror of Jerry Seinfeld’s graduation speech is Chiefs placekicker Harrison Butker’s graduation speech, that of a traditional Catholic saying what many traditional Catholics actually believe to a college dedicated to traditional Catholicism, no matter what you think about that. People with different worldviews got mad at him.

Cable! Get Netflix (with ads), Peacock (with ads) and AppleTV+ for $15 a month, if you already have Xfinity TV or internet. I hate that this is with forced ads. Ads are the bad equilibrium. People should work a bit more, then pay the extra money, everyone is better off. Alas, when packages form, the ads seem unavoidable, because if people want discounts everyone assumes you must want the discount more than you want to avoid the ads.

Give me the version that packages and integrates all the media services so I don’t have to rotate and app shift, with zero ads, at a modest discount to the combined price (let’s say $200/month for Netflix, AppleTV+, Hulu, YouTube and YouTubeTV with the sports channels back and ad autoskip, Paramount+, Peacock and Max, ideally throw in various side subscriptions), and I will be all ‘Where do I sign.’

I have active reasons I want each of those. Instead, right now, I’m ‘supposed to’ be rotating between them, and they’re (largely correctly) counting on laziness to stop me, so I only partially bother, and I’m missing several of them.

The SMBC theory that you should maximize the vector sum of your life and your work, which is why so many great artists, scientists and philosophers are ‘huge dickwads with tortured lives,’ they get little value out of life so they focused in on work and achieved greatness. This reminds us that for those with the talent the Great Work has highly increasing marginal returns. We would be better off if there were more people who went fully all-in on the Great Work. They should be rewarded and supported more, and (up to a point, but a high one) forgiven their personal trespasses.

Uber does pass on tips to drivers, but its interface implies heavily that it doesn’t so Bill Ackman’s Uber driver thought they were being stolen. This is a bizarre own goal, why would you do this? They also taking a huge chunk of the actual fare. Claude says typical is about a 25% fee. That is in some sense outrageous, but it still exceeds the consumer surplus from being able to use an app and it isn’t remotely close.

Aella reminds us of a great rationality technique in such situations. When you see a claim or headline, ask what the world would look like if the claim was true.

As I’ve said before, the repugnant conclusion is based on a fallacy in its core argument, but another distinct problem with the repugnant conclusion in practice is that it leaves you little margin for error.

Amanda Askell: Being averse to the repugnant conclusion makes sense. Unless you’re omniscient, a googolplex lives at +1 utility is indistinguishable from a googolplex lives at -1 utility. Better to have fewer clearly positive lives to reduce the risk of accidentally bringing about a hellscape.

This is a good principle in general. One wants to have a bias towards action and living and being, to balance out most people making the opposite mistake, due to the value of experience, story, skill and exploration and such.

Ultimately most of the value comes from things that are very clearly valuable. If you cut out all the marginal stuff that isn’t required to match some need, you are making only a small mistake.

Nick reports a third of women he is close to dream of opening beautiful bookstores with cafes, and Tokyo says doing things like that is awesome, so how can we make this easier? My presumption is they dream of doing this and also somehow being able to make a living and raise a family. Alas, the economics of bookstore cafes are not good, even if you solve for zoning and rent costs and get rid of a bunch of dumb regulations. And also what they want is to have the bookstore and cafe be there and to hang out in it all day, rather than do the actual background work of running it. The alternative plan is ‘these people would do the fun parts for free,’ which Nick proposes, but do they have that ability?

I’m sorry I must report that the principle here is right, but of course there are obvious exceptions, although mostly to the first clause.

Paul Graham: If it starts “I’m sorry I” it’s a genuine apology, and if it starts “I’m sorry you” it isn’t.

New movie ‘The Apprentice’ chronicles part of the rise of Donald Trump, well before his political adventures. Dan Snyder, former owner and abuser of the Washington Football Team, joined the Canadian, Irish and Danish government and others to help finance it because he thought it would be flattering, then turned around and fought its release (intended for this year ahead of the election) when it turned out to be attempting an accurate portrayal.

Sources familiar with the back and forth say Snyder took issue with multiple aspects of the film and weighed in on what should be changed.

…

Despite its title, “The Apprentice” doesn’t chronicle Trump’s years as the star of the hit NBC reality show that catapulted him into the Oval Office. The logline provided to press calls the film “a story about the origins of a system … featuring larger-than-life characters and set in a world of power and ambition.” It adds, “The film delves into a profound exploration of the ascent of an American dynasty. It meticulously charts the genesis of a ‘zero-sum’ culture, one that accentuates the dichotomy between winners and losers, the dynamics between the mighty and the vulnerable, and the intricate psychology of persona.” 

…

Trump has not yet weighed in on “The Apprentice.” (He did not respond to a request for comment from Variety.) One insider says, “it would be like a gift.”

I would have a prediction market on whether Trump will weigh in, except what would be the point, when has Trump not weighed in?

Trump is certainly all about the zero-sum culture and winners versus losers.

Which level are you playing on?

Yosarian Two: Chesterton’s meta-fence: if you’re walking in the forest and you see a bunch of people removing a fence, you can’t invoke Chesterton’s Fence until you know why they’re removing the fence.

Matt Neary: Chesterton’s fence still applies at object level. You should inquire why they’re removing it and confirm that they are aware of its original purpose.

Yosarian Two: Inquiring is never a bad idea, but it’s worth keeping in mind that the fence, the guy building fences, the people removing fences, the process by which people decide to remove fences, etc, are all existing systems that exist for a reason. It might or might not be a good one.

Pasha Kamyshev: You can always go one level of meta more: If you see people invoking “Chesterton’s Fence,” don’t un-invoke it, until you understand why they invoked it.

Lyn: what if you see Chesterton removing his own fence?

Yosarian Two: Then you have to ask him both why the fence was there in the first place and why he’s removing it. Unless there’s a cultural fence against bothering Chesterton on his own property about his own fence which there probably is.

nihilism disrespecter: reverse of chesterton’s fence also true: don’t try to RETURN to something your ancestors abandoned until you understand why they abandoned it.

Do not in general assume people know what they are doing or why they are doing it, unless they are doing something local and practical. The question is, which act is removing a fence and which one is not?

I do not think we can let this one go.

Anya Martin: I know it’s dunking on a dead horse but… if the fundamental issue is that people are too poor to have a nutritionally balanced diet, & a product is invented that makes a nutritionally balanced diet affordable & accessible, then that literally does address the fundamental issue.

Seth Burn: I think there has to be no limit of the dunking here. At this point Greenpeace is being actively evil, and that should be recognized as such.

Maia: Anti GMO types will be like “Oh, you support alleviating poverty? That pales in comparison to my preferred strategy, eliminating poverty” and then not eliminate poverty

Niels Hoven: Oh, you invented a cheap nutritious food to alleviate global hunger?

Sorry, that doesn’t address the fundamental issue: that even in 2024, people still have to eat and drink to stay alive.

We had the fun claim going around from The Guardian that ‘12 percent of the population of Phoenix, Arizona will die of extreme heat in the 2030s.’ I would respond explaining why this is Obvious Nonsense, but as I noted on Twitter I have been informed by some effective altruists that dead horses may experience qualia.

And we have Just Stop Oil spray-painting Stonehenge (yes literal Stonehenge) orange a day before summer solstice. Which turns out to be not only a huge desecration but also actively criminal and also a threat to an endangered species. But hey. Capitalism.

They kept doubling down on this being a good idea, on the theory that the way to get what you want is to do the worst possible thing until people give up?

Clearly, then, what they should actually do is found an AGI company. Your objection is that would be capitalism, but don’t worry, you can do it as a non-profit and raise money in the spirit of a donation.

Jason Crawford gets the point for being the first to actually say the line ‘Never doubt that technology can eliminate poverty; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’

Others come out and say it. As always, I appreciate the candor.

Not the Bee: “Planet of the Apes” actors [Freya Allan and Owen Teague] say they are “Team Ape” because humans are bad for the environment and start wars: “I dislike humans a lot.”

Elon Musk: The true battle is:

Extinctionists who want a holocaust for all of humanity.

— Versus —

Expansionists who want to reach the stars and Understand the Universe.

It is extremely frustrating when people are very clear they are on team human extinction, and others do not respond accordingly.

It is even more frustrating when people confuse team human extinction with team humans reach the stars. Indeed, often they flip them. And then I and others have to hear all this talk about how we are on team human extinction, exactly for saying we can’t help but notice that it would be better if humans did not go extinct and current actions are likely to lead to that.

The moral economy of the Shire. Good read.

Last month I covered Florida banning lab grown meat.

I explained that I did not support a ban on lab grown meat. But I understood why others might support it, which is that if lab grown meat becomes viewed by a certain crowd as an acceptable substitute there will be an attempt to ban other meat.

And I explained that many people quite reasonably expect this to happen, and possibly succeed, well before this lab grown meat can match quality, quantity or product variety and detail preferences at a given price point. They expect this because we have many prior examples of exactly this happening.

As in:

Also because lab grown meat advocates are explicitly saying they want to ban meat.

‘Your claim that people understandably want to ban lab grown meat because we are coming for your meat is your worst take even though you do not support such a ban,’ many commenters said, while also saying that they are coming for your meat.

That’s all. Again, I’m not saying we should ban lab grown meat. I’m saying we shouldn’t ban it, but also you should understand why people might choose to do that.

Senate resolution calls for a moratorium on all federally funded gain of function research given the increased safety concerns.

Also we are doing even worse than that?

Aidan O’Gara: Orders for 1918 Spanish Flu were sent to 38 DNA synthesis labs; 36 completed the order.

Many of these labs had protocols for screening out hazardous orders, but simple methods circumvented the safeguards.

Need better techniques and wider adoption for DNA synthesis screening.

There are arguments it probably would not be a big deal if this particular strain got out right now, but ‘not making copies of the 1918 Spanish Flu without a damn good reason’ seems rather far up on the very basic tests of our protocols? We can’t even keep a basic blacklist here?

At LessOnline I was introduced to the game Lonestar. I am placing it in Tier 3. I went 20-4, never using an initial reroll and winning with 16 different pilots. Game is fun and has unique elements, also game is weird and game is not difficult even at highest difficulty. Also, can we please not make unlocks this slow? There are still a bunch of items that haven’t ‘unlocked’ yet.

My current game is Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance. It is still early, but this is a clear improvement over vanilla SMT:V and the best entry point to the mainline series although SMT:III is still great if you are ready for true old school. For newcomers biggest tip is be very careful where you spend your Glory, a highly limited resource.

A little late for the event itself at this point, but Nate Silver offers 21 tips for acing the World Series of Poker, most of which generalize. Alas, I have accepted that I am too old to play the World Series for value. I could study GTO and get good easily enough, but I can’t sustain for long enough through the fatigue.

Nate Silver reminds us to not be a nit, an overly tight player in poker or life that is too risk averse. Opposite is degen, usually used as praise by the other degens. My experience was that almost all successful sports gamblers were also degens. If you didn’t love risk you weren’t gonna make it. You make mistakes and take dumb risks as a degen but if you give action you get action and you can make it work.

In most of life, similarly, most people are effectively nits who are far too risk averse, or hopeless degens, very few in the middle. For many purposes better to be a (modest) degen so long as you’re learning, at least you have a chance, most of the value is in the extreme upsides, the disaster is rarely so bad these days and it will be a fun ride.

He also notes that using phones at the table is one thing, but somehow you are de facto allowed to text your buddy a spot during a poker hand at WSOP events? I could not agree more with Nate Silver here.

Nate Silver: Dude in the Mystery Millions today pulled out his phone in the middle of a hand and took like 40 seconds texting his buddy the spot. (He opened, one caller, I shoved on button, action was back on him.)

I don’t want phones to be banned at the tables. But if were a tourney director I’d set a rule that anything other than incidental use of your phone once you’ve looked at your cards = your hand is dead. And something like that = DQ.

I agree with Matt Sperling that the Arena tournaments being on demand play instead of rounds is a huge life upgrade. Waiting for rounds and having to be on a fixed schedule are very expensive. It is weird they still have a narrow window to join day 2, they could simply not do that.

Price of Magic Arena is going up, they are charging 40k gold or 8k gems for the enemy fetchlands playset, versus the old standard of 25k gold, so about $40. You pretty much have to either pay this or burn the wildcards, if you want to play the formats in question. But compared to most things in Magic that’s actually pretty reasonable?

Video of Daniello Carmine 100% definitely being a filthy cheater, It is naked eye obvious, I like to think I’d have caught it for sure in real time. No ban. What a joke.

Whereas here is Stanley’s story of how he got knocked out of contention at an RC, followed by a full DQ and being expelled from the hall. He let his opponent look at her top card so she could scoop early if it wasn’t a land, someone called a judge about it, both of them get a match loss which effectively knocks them out of contention for ‘improperly determining a winner.’ Then there was aggressive behavior that led to a DQ and the expulsion.

My thoughts here? The DQ is necessary once the aggressive behavior happens, no matter the cause. There’s no real choice there. However, as LSV says, the match loss ruling that led to all this was. while technically correct, deeply stupid in context. Could we give judges enough discretion to avoid that and have it be fine? We could. In this case we didn’t.

I do think at minimum judges should absolutely step in before an unintentional violation if they notice it about to happen. On Reddit another player tells the story of a judge watching him shuffle while one of his cards is on the floor, then giving him a game loss for an improper deck the moment he presents. What does that judge think that rule is for? What does that judge think is the point of a tournament? Yikes.

Ondrej Strasky once again attempts to quit Magic.

A great attitude:

Jake Chapman: One of my favorite slices of time is the hour or two after playing a strategy game for the first time and losing.

It’s an opportunity to ideate around a new system and come up with new, more effective strategies for future fame sessions. A new world of challenge and possibility.

Yeah, this is often pretty great. There are strategy games where the first game is stamped ‘You Lose.’ There are others where it is not. I find it good to go in knowing the difference. Agricola is a great game, but you have to learn it, and I was happy that my group essentially treated my blind first game’s 4th place out of 5 as a win. When I tried to play my first game of Advanced Third Reich or Napoleonic Wars, it was understood, the goal is to learn, that’s it. Whereas in other games you can pull it off, such as my first round WBC win as a fully naive player in Baltimore & Ohio (aside from having played 2038), although round 2 would have been a blowout if I hadn’t had a scheduling conflict and skipped it.

Praise for The Stanley Parable. Agreed we want More Like This.

Continued thoughts on the longstanding policy that Steam accounts cannot be transferred in a will, which seems crazy. So a hundred years from now, setting AI aside, would my grandchildren be logging into Steam as the long dead me to play my games?

Emmett Shear: I don’t think it should be legal to sell digital goods with language like “buy” and “own” and not let you transfer them. Spotify and Netflix aren’t selling you anything, that’s fine. But if you sell me an album or a movie, it should be mine. Doctrine of first sale and all that.

It is tricky, and this is potentially part of The Big Rule Adjustment. First sale works when there is friction around transfer, but when there is no friction then a single copy gets used lots of times. In that case, sales plummet, price to own increases, and effectively everyone is forced to rent rather than own. If you can sell your digital copy of a movie to a stranger, and you can do that automatically at market price with effectively no transaction costs, you will never ‘own’ a movie for more than the time it takes to watch one.

Fun way to gamble, buy the unknown content of unclaimed packages.

Kevin Corcoran uses the standard color guide to loot rarity as an example of spontaneous order. I believe the ‘who decided that’ was Blizzard with World of Warcraft and everyone else followed suit.

Bounties are fun. Here’s a cool one but it will not be easy:

Jmo: if anyone can create a game as good as slay the spire with web3 and blockchain directly integrated you got a 10m check from me today.

There are too problems.

1. Slay the Spire is plausibly the best game since Magic: The Gathering (1993).

2. Integrating Web3 and blockchain would make most games worse.

If you invented Magic: The Gathering for the first time today, then this integration would make sense, and you could plausibly get the 10 million. That’s the level of difficulty here. Still, worth a shot? Good luck.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo makes the case for Figgie as a vast improvement over poker and other games for learning epistemics or in helping train traders. You can learn faster, you can skill up together much faster, feedback is strong, you’re more active more often, and the skills learned are more directly helpful. I love Figgie when played in person. I did think the app needed work when I checked it out.

During international conflicts, those in opposing nations play chess less often, when they do engage they play safer openings and are more likely to persist and not resign. File under results that seem obvious once you say them. On the safer openings, there is a constant exploration/exploitation (or fun/winning) tradeoff in chess, makes sense that this would tilt it.

Quantic Foundry’s Nick Yee claims gamers have become less interested in strategic thinking in planning. He links this to short attention spans. Jorbs mentions Balatro, which is clearly a strategy game but avoids catering to those who want to play it as if it were what it is.

Mr. Beast gives us two people a hundred days in a room, with a $500k prize if they both make it, but they can spend money to make the stay less painful. I both see why Mr. Beast is popular, and also rapidly started skipping. Did I predict the end? Oh yes.

U.S. Customs seizes 345 counterfeit championship rings representing 18 different sports teams, which would have been worth $1.38 million if real (and, presumably, if they didn’t increase the supply).

I love this as an illustration of how easy it is to think something is meaningful.

Patrick McKenzie rides in his first self-driving car, finds it magical.

Waymo test cars spotted in Washington D.C.

Timothy Lee continues to point out that the Waymo ‘crashes’ include ‘another car made contact with a parked Waymo while travelling at 1 mph,’ while our information on the real progress of Tesla self-driving remains poor. Claims on Tesla are all over the place. Timothy is far more impressed by Waymo, which he says is playing chess while Tesla plays checkers. He thinks Tesla is several years behind.

He also notes that there actually aren’t any federal restrictions on self-driving cars, and many states are basically free-for-alls. You can still sue them, and this is exactly the case where that is close to a first best solution, perhaps even too restrictive.

One place he is skeptical is Waymo choosing a Chinese car company, Zeekr, for their next-generation vehicle. Waymo responded that vehicles are delivered with no telematics or other way to send info back to the manufacturer. This feels like a large misstep to me. You both have to worry about an actual issue now or in the future, and also how it looks. Self-driving cars need public and government support to be allowed to operate and have a huge perception problem. Why give people a reason?

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is on the other side, saying Tesla is far ahead and every since car, someday we will have to have autonomous capability.

One issue with self-driving cars is they are part of The Big Rule Adjustment. If you need to specify your exact principles on which lives to value, you get weird results. This study looks at how people see these questions, especially whether to kill pedestrians versus passengers when there are no other choices. People wanted to sacrifice passengers first 78% of the time by default, and only 20% were utilitarian. The pedestrians being blameworthy only moderated this disparity.

My answer depends mostly on which decision algorithm leads to greater adaptation of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars will be sufficiently safer that both the passengers and the pedestrians will be safer no matter the choice here. So which effect is bigger, people being unwilling to use self-driving if it wouldn’t value the passengers, or people not allowing self-driving if it didn’t value pedestrians? If you are going to be a proper utilitarian about this, use functional decision theory and get it right.

Even if your car is not self-driving, they might well be keeping second-to-second records of every time you drive above 85 mph, slam on the breaks or accelerate rapidly, which is being used to price your insurance. There is a comment that ‘no one who realizes what they’re doing would consent.’ I am confident many would object, but I think many would consent, or would take a small discount to do so. With proper privacy controls (ha!) this seems like it would actually be great, you get de facto taxed for the social cost of your driving habits.

Did the company do the thing it is required to do? Not properly, no. What to do?

Pools that for decades have attracted young people who greatly overperform remain mostly ignored. Why aren’t law firms recruiting from college debate teams? DM Patrick McKenzie when you beat Factorio. If you see someone who will obviously found a company and likely succeed, tell them now that you will be investing.

When you need a ton of info for government reports fast, as one sometimes does, what do you do? If you are Binance, is it a good idea to offer $3 for those who do their KYC? Why would you choose to do that? The obvious answer is that it buys more than $3 in goodwill gained and badwill avoided, plus the cost of tracking down anyone who doesn’t do it gets annoying quickly.

On the art of bespoke real time translation. No, the AI can’t do that quite yet.

You can bootstrap meetings by asking for conditional commitments. Entire conferences, too. Or companies. Skill at the cold start problem is a choice.

Guys what is wrong with ACATS? A Bits About Money post about how we transfer stocks between financial institutions. Fun if it sounds fun, skip if it doesn’t. Practical bottom line for those not into the details is that if someone defrauds the system, they will make you whole, so don’t sweat it too much.

I strongly endorse this in every way except it is not investment advice:

Patrick McKenzie: Find ways to bet against the Efficient Institution Hypothesis.

(“That is a large, well-resourced collection of smart people and THEREFORE evidence that they have made a mistake or missed an opportunity is likely a figment of your imagination.”)

Ironically most people who believe the EIH believe it with a caveat “except mine, you won’t believe what dumb %]*}^] we do on the regular. But the other orgs, THAT is where competency rules the roost.”

Note that reversing this advice and assuming that all large orgs are incompetent all the time is a) not a path to wisdom and b) manifestly ignores how much of the world undeniably *works.*

The art of throwing around a few Shibboleths so people stop talking down to you.

Checking for employee mouse movements is not your first best option, but it could locate people who are doing actual nothing, and perhaps have been for a decade. How much you are willing to insult and piss off your real employees to do that is an open question.

Reel Updates: WERNER HERZOG says “you can witness sheer hell, as close as it gets” by watching Greta Gerwig’s BARBIE.

Jason Grote: Everyone’s getting mad about this but I’m not joking when I say this doesn’t mean he disliked it.

Blast from the past: Things Unexpectedly Named After People.

Elle Cordova in ‘If the RX side effects list rhymed.’

Old man yells at old man for yelling opinions (in 5/10 funny fashion) at large audience without proper systemic change plan. No, this kind of bit is not likely to get it done on its own, but it helps assuming you think what is being advocated is helping.

You have to commit to the bit.

The perfect collaboration doesn’t exist.

John Goodman: This continues to be my best known and least cited piece of research.

We received 4 referee reports when we submitted this article to Economic Inquiry:

R1: There’s more theory you can cite.

R2: There’s more data you can cite.

R3: This isn’t funny.

R4: The paper would be improved by adding a fifth Goodman.

ely: Thinking about the greatest paper in economics.

Joshua Gans: R4 was correct.

Josh Goodman: Unfortunately, we couldn’t find a fifth. The closest we came was @agoodmanbacon, and adding him wouldn’t quite have been kosher.

Jaime Arellano-Bover: R4 had a point. Would’ve been a 25% increase in the contribution, according to my calculations.

John Goodman: But at what point does “A Few Goodmen” become “Many Goodmen”?

Keith Humphreys: Apparently a good man isn’t hard to find

Know them as people, or live in blissful ignorance.

Brian David-Marshall: Life hack: Never join any online neighbors groups. You are better off not knowing and just assuming the best of everyone.

In case you were confused before, we can help? Sort of?

ComicXBook: BREAKING: James Gunn confirms that episodes 1-4 and episode 7 from minute 26: 08 of ‘Peacemaker’ is canon to the DCU, while the events of the other remaining episodes are not. Season 2 will be canon from episode 3 but will happen before the events of ‘Superman’.

David Hines: oh so it’s like before Crisis on Infinite Earths.

I would love if everything in DC had a little icon on the screen that changed color based on the degree to which the scene was canon, cause sure, why not. And then they could stealth edit it in both directions sometimes and drive fans completely nuts.

The case of Kate Middleton.

Emery Robin: spent my lunch break today coming up with ways that the Kate Middleton story would turn out if it were being investigated by various fictional detectives

A thread of (claimed human right to below real cost) DoorDash takes.

And I suppose this would be the kicker:

Paul Williams: Just walked to McDonald’s, ordered food, and literally ate it there. It was hot and fresh and cheap, unlike delivery. Why aren’t more people doing this? Kind of a food hack.

Honestly had no idea fries were supposed to taste like this. Warm and crispy? wtf? It’s good though.

Nicole: “I am a white man who had no issue walking, who happened to lived walking distance from a McDonald’s, who had the time to walk, and I’m unconcerned about covid so I ate inside the restaurant. I cannot comprehend an experience outside of mine.”’

Matthew Yglesias: This is I guess the answer to my question yesterday about whether Zoomers know you can go to the restaurant and eat there.

FWIW, plenty of non-white folks at the 14th & U McDonald’s every time I visit.

Or maybe it’s this?

New Liberals: “1 in 6 people can’t eat leftovers” is genuinely the funniest thing I think someone has ever said

I find the whole thing funny, and also I order delivery all the time, and also nothing is stopping anyone from doing that. But also I don’t see what differentiates this discussion from so many other seemingly crazy claims that are taken seriously, or even written into law and paid for by tax dollars. So what do I know?

The new most satisfying community note.

Dissproportionately

Writing 250 words an hour?

Unless, of course, you are dealing with a real editor. In which case, oh no.

Also, here’s a link to Meals on Wheels, if you want to help get meals to people who need them, which seems like the long-known correct solution to at least a large portion of the problem. I do get it does not work for everyone.

Remember, set the price where if they actually say yes, you’re happy.

File under: It’s happening.

Iain Brassington: Oh, god: it’s happened. A No-True-Scotsman argument that genuinely hinges on whether someone is a true Scotsman.

What’s happening… at board meetings? Carl Icahn warned us.

Important safety tip:

I saw this on After Midnight, then Marginal Revolution linked to it, so: Everyone in Japan will be called Sato by 2531 unless marriage law changed, says professor.

This, you see, is because the government is forcing couples to share a surname.

Justin McCurry (Guardian, in understatement of the post): Yoshida conceded that his projections were based on several assumptions…

I presume all of you already know why this is not going to happen, even if ‘nothing changes.’ And so does Yoshida.

In case this is wrong: Right now, Sato is being chosen for the surname more than half the time, because it is a good name. If Sato became a much larger share of the population, people would notice this and want different names. So couples with one Sato would choose the other name more often, and eventually Sato-sans would start changing their names en masse.

Love it.

Trung Phan: This is art.

I’m including this about half for the visual, about half so I can rewatch this link.

And finally…

Those who do not know their history, or those who very much do?

As I note in the third section, I will be attending LessOnline at month’s end at Lighthaven in Berkeley. If that is your kind of event, then consider going, and buy your ticket today before prices go up.

This month’s edition was an opportunity to finish off some things that got left out of previous editions or where events have left many of the issues behind, including the question of TikTok.

All of this has happened before. And all of this shall happen again.

Alex Tabarrok: I regret to inform you that the CDC is at it again.

Marc Johnson: We developed an assay for testing for H5N1 from wastewater over a year ago. (I wasn’t expecting it in milk, but I figured it was going to poke up somewhere.)

However, I was just on a call with the CDC and they are advising us NOT to use it.

I need a drink.

They say it will only add to the confusion because we won’t know where it is coming from. I’m part of a team. I don’t get to make those decisions myself.

Ben Hardisty: The usual institute, or did they have a good reason? 😳

Marc Johnson: They say it would only add to the confusion since we don’t know precisely where it is coming from. But then they said 2 minutes later that they aren’t sure this isn’t just regular influenza appearing late. We can answer that, so why don’t we??? I don’t get it.

Alex: Are your team members considering bucking the CDC advice or has the decision been made to acquiesce? I understand them not wanting panic but man if that’s not self serving advice I don’t know what is.

Marc Johnson: The CDC will come around.

ZzippyCorgi11: Marc, can private entities ask you to test wastewater around their locations? Is the CDC effectively shutting down any and all testing of wastewater for H5N1?

Marc Johnson: No, if people want to send me wastewater I can test them with other funding. I just can’t test the samples I get from state surveillance.

JH: This is ridiculous. Do it anyway!

Marc Johnson: It’s not my call. I got burned once for finding Polio somewhere I wasn’t supposed to find it. It fizzled, fortunately.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo: It’s a societal mistake that we’re not always monitoring for outbreaks of the dozen greatest threats, given how cheap wastewater testing can get.

Active intervention by the CDC to stop new testing for a new strain of influenza circulating in mammals on farms is unconscionable.

I strongly agree with Ross here. Of all the lessons to not have learned from Covid, this seems like the dumbest one to not have learned. How hard is ‘tests help you identify what is going on even when they are imperfect, so use them’?

I am not so worried, yet, that something too terrible is that likely to happen. But we are doing our best to change that.

We have a pattern of failing to prepare for such easily foreseeable disasters. Another potential example I saw today would be the high-voltage transformers, where we do not make them, we not have backups available and if we lost the ones we have our grid plausibly collapses. The worry in the thread is primarily storms but also what about sabotage?

I am proud to live in an information environment where 100% of the people, no matter their other differences, understand that ‘ban all prediction markets on elections’ is a deeply evil and counterproductive act of epistemic sabotage.

And yet that is exactly what the CFTC is planning to do, with about a 60% chance they will manage to make this stick.

Maxim Lott: This afternoon, the government bureaucrats at the CFTC announced that they plan to ban all election betting (aka “prediction markets on elections”, aka “event contracts”) in the United States. They will also ban trading on events in general — for example, on who will win an Oscar.

The decision was 3-2, with the Democrats voting to do this to protect the ‘sanctity of elections’ against ‘threats to election integrity,’ and worrying that this would force the CFTC to become an ‘election cop’ determining the rightful outcomes. They claim to do this under the provision banning ‘gaming.’

All of that is Obvious Nonsense.

1. Prediction markets actively protect election integrity.

2. Prediction markets actively protect election sanctity.

3. No one is forcing the CFTC to ‘play cop’ other than the CFTC.

4. This is not gaming.

In case you wondered if they had shame: The ban on ‘event betting’ includes bans on prediction markets in sports, while leaving FanDuel and DraftKings in place.

The good news is that this ultimately matters less than people think. Overseas prediction markets will not be shutting down. We will still have BetFair and Polymarket no matter what happens, even if we lose PredictIt and Kalshi. I do not know what would happen to Manifold Markets, they are trying a unique legal strategy.

This will hurt accuracy, but we would still get most (80%-90%?) of the epistemic benefits, especially on major events. To the extent that this is motivated by Democrats who want to make dumb decisions saying ‘never tell me the odds,’ it won’t work.

At the end of the month (May 31 – June 2) I will be attending LessOnline, at Lighthaven in Berkeley, California.

The lineup is pretty exciting to me. In addition to myself, it includes Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Patrick McKenzie, Agnes Callard, Kevin Simler, Cremieux Recueil, Aella, Sarah Constantin, Katja Grace and many more.

Prices will go up at the end of the day, so act fast.

Here is their description of LessOnline, which I expect to be accurate:

LessOnline is a festival celebrating truth-seeking, optimization, and blogging. It’s an opportunity to meet people you’ve only ever known by their LessWrong username or Substack handle.

The goal is to bring together a “mostly-online subculture of people trying to work together to figure out how to distinguish truth from falsehood using insights from probability theory, cognitive science, and AI.”

A week after that is Manifest, so a bunch of people plan to stay for a ‘summer camp’ during the interim. Alas, I cannot be away that long in one stretch, so I had to choose one or the other and will be missing Manifest this year. I get to stick around on Monday, but then I head back.

People at these events are often (but not always) remarkably approachable, myself included, even if you don’t know us. If this sounds like fun I’d encourage you to come.

The Europeans are not poor. They are vastly rich compared to almost everyone in history and also everyone today. But yes, vastly less rich than they could be.

Matthew Yglesias: Every European country has various laws on the books that are just like “productivity is illegal now” and then people wonder why they are poor.

[Points to examples that French supermarkets can no longer offer discounts of more than 34% on various personal and household products, and German supermarket chain Tegut being forced to close on Sundays even though it requires no workers to stay open.]

Generalize this.

Rob Henderson: 35% of American elites (people with postgraduate degrees, earn $150K+ per year, and live in large cities) say they would rather cheat than lose an election compared with only 7% of ordinary voters.

Robin Hanson: Successful people are selected for a willingness to break rules when they can get away with it undetected.

In long form, he gives us The Business of Wallets.

Patrick McKenzie explains the incentives behind stupid compliance requirements, which are exactly what you would expect.

Patrick McKenzie also explains, without at the time knowing the details of what happened, Google falling on its sword to take all the blame for the outage of UniSuper services on May 7. The incident was so bad that people were in danger of being fired for buying Google. No one gets fired for buying Google, and this must be common knowledge, so marketing got the statement it needed no matter the objections elsewhere.

Then we learned a little more about what did happen. UniSuper is a company managing about $125 billion. Google Cloud deleted their entire account for no apparent reason. And they also deleted Unisuper’s backup account in another region, due to ‘unprecedented misconfiguration.’ But look at this detail, it ‘ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription.’ That then caused deletion of the account without warning. The good news is that there was another backup with a distinct provider, and this allowed them to restore everything.

Michael Nielsen rightfully wonders, maybe doing stuff in-house is good after all?

Here he explains that airlines are one of many large organizations whose rules are often things that many employees have the power to waive, so you should ask them to do so when it would be a reasonable thing to do. The central example here is asking for an earlier flight while at the airport on travel day, and for the airline to waive the change fee. Ja3k says this has a 40% success rate.

I used to have a very high success rate when I was travelling for Magic, to the point where I expected this to work unless the flight was full. Then it stopped working. Then Covid got all the change fees waived for a while, so it worked again, but now people report it is once again getting harder. As Patrick notes, a key strategy is making it clear you are not ‘travelling on business’ and cannot stick your employer with the bill.

He also notes the immense economic value of transforming face-to-face meetings at outside locations into zoom meetings, especially for parents and for ‘I have to say I met you’ styles of meetings.

How much is playing Factorio (which I haven’t done) like starting a company? Yes, it is a lot of work that could have been directed towards producing real world value. But I am confident that a lot of what makes Factorio such a great game is never having to talk to customers, investors, human resources or the legal department, plus as Patrick says the ability to quit and resume at will.

Greenpeace commits a crime against humanity. No, seriously, and this is not counting their efforts to stop nuclear power and otherwise cripple in the climate. They contain multitudes, and are blocking the adaptation of Golden Rice. J’accuse.

When people tell you who they are, believe them.

Mark Lynas (Spectator UK): First, a word of warning. If you donate money to Greenpeace, you might think you’re helping save the whales or the rainforests. But in reality, you may be complicit in a crime against humanity. Last week, Greenpeace Southeast Asia and several other NGOs managed to stop the cultivation and use of vitamin A-enhanced rice in the Philippines, after the country’s court of appeal ruled in their favour.

In doing so, Greenpeace have blocked a multi-year, international, publicly-funded effort to save the lives and the eyesight of millions of children in some of the world’s poorest countries.

German vandals assault a Tesla factory producing electric vehicles, saying they are ‘bad for the environment’ in various ways. Having successfully killed Germany’s nuclear plants, they need a new way to try to bolster fossil fuel use, boil the planet and also make people otherwise poorer, I suppose. I wonder who could be behind this.

For those who haven’t seen it, potential new Canadian law reminds us why we have our first, second and in a surprise appearance seventh amendments.

Mert: This new Canadian law is the craziest thing I have ever seen in the west

According to this, they can:

– accuse, fine, and jail you for PAST speech (before the law went live)

– put you on house arrest AND take away all communication rights if they even suspect you MIGHT say something they don’t like (I.e you haven’t done literally anything).

– anyone can accuse you and it’s on a committee of bureaucrats called the Digital Safety Commission to solely determine truth .

If you are an immigrant or young person thinking of coming to Canada — I strongly recommend reconsidering.

Toby Young (The Spectator): To those worrywarts who are anxious about the risk that this new law might be weaponized by woke activists, the government has said that ‘detestation’ and ‘vilification’ are not the same as ‘disdain’ or ‘dislike’, which would still be permitted (thank you, Mr Trudeau), or speech that ‘discredits, humiliates, hurts or offends.’

Although, that won’t protect you from another clause in the bill – and this is where it trips over into as yet unimagined dystopian territory. If the courts believe you are likely to commit a ‘hate crime’ or disseminate ‘hate propaganda’ (not defined), you can be placed under house arrest and your ability to communicate with others restricted. That is, a court can force you to wear an ankle bracelet, prevent you from using any of your communication devices and then instruct you not to leave the house.

Even the practical implications boggle.

If you are arrested by the precogs, you cannot use communication devices and you cannot leave the house. How can you work? How are you going to acquire food?

The craziest part is this is retroactive. So they can go after you, now, as a criminal, for speech that at the time was not only not illegal but considered broadly acceptable.

All that matters is that someone now decided it is retroactively hate speech.

Freedom seems a lot more endangered in Canada than the United States. I would not be comfortable writing a blog like this, or even speaking my mind, in Canada.

Canada also is looking to impose a $25k penalty and double its ‘exit fee’ for citizens who leave the country, to ‘curb the emigration crisis.’

It warms my heart that I have not seen a single post, not one, that defended what Canada is attempting to do here. But that also means I have not seen anyone claim that these characterizations of the proposed new law are inaccurate.

After Uri Berliner published his story in The Free Press last month about how NPR has lost its way, NPR suspended him for it, as per their own report.

David Folkenflik (NPR): In presenting Berliner’s suspension Thursday afternoon, the organization told the editor he had failed to secure its approval for outside work for other news outlets, as is required of NPR journalists. It called the letter a “final warning,” saying Berliner would be fired if he violated NPR’s policy again.

…

On Friday, CEO Maher stood up for the network’s mission and the journalism, taking issue with Berliner’s critique, though never mentioning him by name. Among her chief issues, she said Berliner’s essay offered “a criticism of our people on the basis of who we are.”

Yes. Berliner criticized who you are. Because he criticized who you chose to be.

Which is most definitely not a spy.

What else is there to criticize?

The New York Times reports that the person she replaced as CEO was formally accused of racism and investigated by an outside firm because he asked employees to be ‘mindful of civility.’

Rural Capital: I remember on All Things Considered they did a story about how calls for civility had roots in racism. I guess the employees took that to heart!

Uri Berliner then resigned.

There has been ongoing discussion about the new NPR CEO Katherine Maher.

Lex Fridman: NPR CEO needs to step down.

Get political bias out of NPR.

We need great, balanced journalism now more than ever.

Marc Andreessen: Respectfully disagree. These leaders are exact matches for the institutions they run. Replacing them does nothing, the replacement will be the same or more so. These institutions are locked in, they’re not going to change, they’re going to just get more like they are now.

There certainly are a bunch of Tweets and also video clips of the new CEO Maher saying some things I do not want the CEO of NPR to say or believe.

What I kept noticing was that, when there was a timestamp on any of it, it was consistently between 2019 and 2021.

The second thing I noticed was that there was no one defending her or her statements. That could simply be that such folks finally realized this time that there is no need to defend her. NPR can do whatever it wants to do. Let people complain.

Or it could be that everyone wants to memory hole such statements as much as possible.

Daniel Friedman: I’ve been following the drama around NPR CEO Katherine Maher, and, while lots of conservatives are dunking on her tweets and statements, I don’t see a lot of liberals circling the wagons around her. But a lot of them were just like her between 2017 and 2020.

If Maher is forced to step down over her “in this house” tweet history, a lot of other people who advanced their careers a few years ago by being performatively woke could also be in trouble. I guess their plan is to just delete their old tweets and try to keep their heads down.

These people went completely fucking insane. They destroyed the lives and businesses of a lot of people who didn’t deserve it. And now they’re going to try to pretend that none of it ever happened.

Katherine Maher espoused exactly the opinions that were expected of her to be promoted as a white female nonprofit executive in the 2010s. She is not an unusual figure. There are people like her in c-suite positions in every company right now.

Marc Andreessen: She is the precise median of the leadership teams of Big Tech.

Daniel’s model seems highly plausible to me. In the period from 2017-2021, the dynamics in many places rewarded saying things that are, objectively speaking, nuts.

The world today and also history are full of people who saw people around them getting ahead by saying (and often doing) nuts or terrible things or being punished for not saying or doing those nuts or terrible things. Often those who notice this then protect and advance themselves by also saying or doing those nuts or terrible things, perpetuating and compounding the problem.

This seems like a clear case where if someone wants to go back to acting sanely and pretend that all of this never happened, because that would be totally nuts, then we should be happy to accept that peace offering. Are they up for their side of that deal?

Timothy Lee attempts to diagnose what is wrong with tech journalism. His diagnosis is that readers lack background, the industry is struggling, nuanced and positive stories don’t sell when covering established big companies, and the readers are getting what they want.

I buy all that. If you want nuanced journalism about technology, you need to find niche publications, and annoyingly you will often have to pay, it is the only business model that makes sense.

But also the New York Times has an explicit narrative and agenda to attack the technology industry, and many other mainstream outlets are also very much Out to Get You on that front to varying degrees.

James Meigs writes in City Journal about Scientific American’s transformation from a science publication to what is now primarily a social justice publication with a secondary focus on science, alongside similar trends at several rival publications.

Who said Apple Vision Pro wouldn’t have a price drop? Ebay of course tells another story, where it looks to be available at $2500 or less.

Now that a bill requiring divestiture has passed, I got to cut out a lot of my notes here as no long relevant. But not all of them. What is left to notice?

The obvious place to start is that ByteDance is reaffirming that they will shut down rather than divest.

Why yes, it is weird that a business worth billions would consider shutting down rather than selling its product to willing buyers at the current fair market price.

Whatever could be going on?

Reuters: BREAKING: Reuters reports that TikTok’s owner ByteDance would prefer to ‘shut down’ its app in the US rather than sell it if all legal options are exhausted

Eigenrobot: Why would you say this?

It’s odd that a profit maximizing firm would actually pursue this strategy.

The obvious explanation is “lol TikTok is an op” which seems plausible sure. But if so why would they say this and come off looking like an op.

Is there another explanation?

Indif4ent: yeah op is really looking likely. if they divest, whoever takes over is likely to take a hard look at the code. at minimum, id expect to find some backdoors for the CCP.

Hopeful Abandon: there’s not actually much to sell — they can’t give up the recommendation algo without government approval, which is unlikely. stripping it of all the internals that are export-controlled and trying to auction off the husk is possibly more costly than just ending service.

From PoliMath:

TikTok is not purely an op. TikTok is a legitimate highly predatory business, and also TikTok is an op.

Why are they threatening to shut TikTok down in response rather than sell, even now that the law is passed? Many possible reasons suggest themselves. Here are some.

1. Public pressure. Rile up voters and hope that the decision gets reversed.

2. Help Trump. Trump opposed the TikTok ban, so get supporters angry at Biden.

3. Negotiating tactic. You need to bid higher if ByteDance is willing to burn it all.

4. Damning evidence. Suggested above. If you can’t show the books you can’t sell.

5. CCP veto. If the CCP tells you that you are not selling, guess what?

6. Algorithm. It could be necessary and something they can’t afford to give out.

7. Decision theory. In order to fight the sale they needed to be people who would rather burn the place to the ground. This is the consequence.

8. Vindictiveness. Fyou. That’s why.

There is obvious overlap, many considerations touch on several of these at once.

It is often assumed that people will ‘be rational,’ and go along with your plan after you screw them over because it is obviously in their best interest to do so. Well, even if you are right about what is best for them, humans do not work that way. Because that way does not work.

Alternatively, ‘they’ could reveal the answer, and make it easy. It’s #5.

Michael Sobolik: 😳 @TikTokPolicy literally says it cannot comply with the divestment requirement because “the Chinese government has made clear that it would not permit a divestment” of ByteDance’s algorithm.

They’re literally making the national security case for the U.S. government.

Okay, then. We have established what you are. Now we’re talking price. Or not.

Meanwhile, China continues to argue, on this issue as it does on so many others, that there should be rules for thee but not for me.

The other clear argument is that China has made it clear some of the ways it intends to use this power.

Zac Hill: This is what I don’t understand about the “Tik Tok is fine, actually” position: we know and can see exactly how China puts its finger on the scales, and why.

Noah Smith: Apparently the Chinese government is encouraging an explosion of antisemitism on Chinese domestic social media. It’s obvious they’re trying the same thing here in the U.S.

JS Tribune: Racist cartoons, Hitler memes, swastikas, and quotes from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are now ubiquitous in comments sections. In an ironic twist, Hu Xijin, former editor-in-chief of the CCP mouthpiece Global Times, cautioned his followers on Weibo, “Some of us should not be influenced by public opinion dominated by Jews and Americans.” Two weeks later, Hu claimed that “there is no such thing as antisemitism in China,” adding Holocaust inversions comparing Israel to modern-day Nazis.

…

Portraying a symbiotic relationship between America and the Jewish people is a recurring theme in the propaganda campaign.

It is hard to pretend that TikTok is not involved in this. And when the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Hitler memes are ubiquitous, it is very clear what is going on.

The other problem is that when you pass a law now, that would ban TikTok next year, but that might be reversed if Trump wins the election, what do you think TikTok does?

Tara Palmeri: Since November, according to two TikTok officials, there’s been twice as much pro-Trump content as pro-Biden content on the platform—specifically, 1.29 million positive Trump videos or images, with 9.1 billion views, compared to 651,000 positive Biden posts, with 6.15 billion views, they told me. According to an internal TikTok analysis, from January 2023 into May 2024, videos tagged #Trump2024 have generated 472.8 million likes and 6.5 billion views, compared with 50.9 million likes and 558 million views for videos tagged #Biden2024. This may not be the most precise survey of the landscape, but that’s still a nearly 10 to 1 ratio of Trump likes to Biden likes, and 12 to 1 in views.  

This does not require Trump to have been bought. The result is the same. It is amazing how poor the planning was on this.

Who are the contenders to buy, if ByteDance is ultimately bluffing? Manifold is here for you. Note that this is all conditional on TikTok being actually bought, and there are lots of other names on the list that don’t count under ‘Other.’

With Manifold’s new loan rules and this being a conditional market that likely does not pay, the primary conclusion here is that Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon are live, but that you should be ready to be surprised.

I am bullish on Amazon here, and bullish on Alphabet at only 2%. They both have very deep pockets. The tie-ins to Amazon shopping seem great, also you have Amazon music. Microsoft and Alphabet would both also surely love to have it, and might plausibly be allowed to buy.

Meanwhile, anyone remember back in 2020 when Grindr was sold by its Chinese owner after the US expressed security concerns? I remember hearing that and thinking, ‘yes, well, obviously, you do not want a foreign adversary knowing who is secretly on a gay dating app’ and wondering how no one had previously realized this. Was that also a threat to free speech? We really shouldn’t need to pass a bill for TikTok either, but I suppose here we are.

I touched on this in the older post, but here are others picking up on the important concept that many TikTok users would actively prefer if everyone were to quit, so much so that the average cost for this outcome among students was less than zero. Students would pay to have TikTok vanish.

Robert Wiblin: The consumer surplus of banning TikTok:

David Zweig: A remarkable study. Most young people would prefer for themselves and their peers to not be on social media. In fact, they hate it so much that they’d be willing to pay to make this happen. But they are stuck on TikTok and Insta because everyone is on it.

From Article: A recent study led by the University of Chicago economist Leonardo Bursztyn captured the dynamics of the social-media trap precisely. The researchers recruited more than 1,000 college students and asked them how much they’d need to be paid to deactivate their accounts on either Instagram or Tik Tok for four weeks. That’s a standard economist’s question to try to compute the net value of a product to society.

On average, students said they’d need to be paid roughly $50 ($59 for TikTok, $47 for Instagram) to deactivate whichever platform they were asked about.

Then the experimenters told the students that they were going to try to get most of the others in their school to deactivate that same platform, offering to pay them to do so as well, and asked, Now how much would you have to be paid to deactivate, if most others did so? The answer, on average, was less than zero. In each case, most students were willing to pay to have that happen.

The collective action problem is real. And that is the views from the students themselves.

From the perspective of the parents? Good fing luck.

Reason: “You, as a parent, can tell your child not to be on TikTok,” says Reason Editor in Chief @kmanguward on The Reason Roundtable podcast, but “we should not try to beat the Chinese by being more like the Chinese.”

Matthew Yglesias: I think this is a pretty naive view of the collective action issues involved in parenting. Nobody wants their kid to be the first one in school to get a smartphone but it’s hard to ask your kid to be the only one who doesn’t have one.

At a minimum, you are spending a large number of points with your child, on a continuous basis, and make your relationship more adversarial. One must pick one’s battles. And even if they go along with it and we ignore that issue, your child will then be substantially worse off than if TikTok did not exist. Their peers will be using it, they will be left out and pressured and mocked. It is not good.

Am I going to let my kids have TikTok any time soon? Oh, hell to the no. But I know how much worse my life is going to be, and theirs, if they decided they did want it.

Also, in case TikTok wants to claim it has not been sharing data, a TikTok scientist says they were absolutely sharing data.

Alexandra Sternlicht: SCOOP: A TikTok data scientist says he was assigned a Seattle-based manager on paper, while actually reporting to a Beijing-based ByteDance executive, who ordered him to regularly email U.S. data in spreadsheets to ByteDance workers in China during 2022.

This occurred after TikTok launched Project Texas to Separate U.S. user data from ByteDance.

Shoshana Weissmann: okay but i respect that this was done in spreadsheets.

Now here’s an idea.

Luke Hosey: Ten thousand Twitter accounts just sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in cold terror-sweat.

keshav: instagram will now recommend original content when it detects duplicates

Bravo. All social media platforms should do this for content that is produced from a recommendation algorithm rather than those you follow. AI can help check for duplicative content, in case people think they can make a minor tweak.

As Rob notes here, people like to complain about Twitter but have you seen Facebook?

Rob Bensinger: All the dramatic claims have been about Twitter, but I feel like Facebook has already quietly become basically-not-a-functional-website. It is no longer a place with core functionality like ‘in a discussion, there’s a way for each person to get notified when the other responds’.

Why did we used to have television that was often remarkably high brow? Theory here is that people didn’t know how good stupid content would do, the available technology was less friendly to stupid rapid fire content, and the presence of only so many networks kept out competition from stupid alternatives and allowed cooperation to keep things from getting too stupid.

Yes, there has been a big change towards stupid. But there has, I believe, been an even bigger change against slow. And I am on the This Is Good, Actually team on that one. Older television and movies are remarkably slow. Sometimes this allows them to use slow burns, set scenes and accomplish important things. Sure. But most of the time, it is not a good tradeoff. Things are better now. Yes, in some ways we are now too impatient, and a lot of that is the phones, but the improvement is mostly real.

Disney and Warner Bros. will team up for a new streaming bundle containing Hulu, Disney+ and Max. Good. Marginal cost is close to zero, there is no reason people should need to choose and rotate between packages. I am so done with the unbundling and ready for the rebundling. Viewing data lets them still compete for division of the revenue.

Zeng Yuli reports that ‘loveable losers’ took over China’s screens. These ‘economic men’ are called ‘wonangfei,’ askin to ‘timid loser,’ they put their woman first and have a certain sex appeal and a willingness to sacrifice under tough working conditions. So, not losers, then? Those are winners. It used to be that this was what winning looked like. Then we created a worldwide culture with bizarrely unrealistic expectations and warped priorities, where devoted long-suffering family man who gets the job done was looked upon negatively. The worry is that the Chinese are reversing this due to a form of despair, but actually yeah, this is usually what winning feels like. Finally some Truth in Television.

I put my movie reviews on Letterboxd. I have been logging all movies I see including the bad ones, but mostly (one exception so far) not going back. This shows me starkly what happens when I use various selection methods.

This month had two excellent movies: Challengers and especially The Fall Guy.

One movie I am actively avoiding is Civil War. Not since Don’t Look Up have I wanted this much to not see a movie. Is it (minor spoilers) about how war is about nothing except pointless suffering, destruction and death, and things can fall apart without a reason? Is it about how a nation under too much strain from immigration cannot hold together or maintain its democratic norms? Is it a Spanish Civil War style scenario, or purely that only those two states could credibly form a force to threaten a President? Or is it as the director says about how fascism is bad actually and journalism is our lifeblood? Is the scenario well thought out or complete nonsense?

I do not know. I found the discussions interesting, and I appreciated Ex Machina, but ultimately realized my life would not be better having seen Civil War, and likely the world is not better for having made it, even if it turns out to be in the Scott Sumner sense a Good Movie. Perhaps I finally learned my lesson with The Zone of Interest.

From early this year, here’s a fascinating chart of how various sources are viewed.

John Burn-Murdoch: It always blows my mind how much wider the partisan trust gap is for US media compared to the UK 🤯

Most British media is trusted (or distrusted) about equally by supporters of both major parties. That’s true of virtually no US media org.

Deeply corrosive for US society.

This seems like an excellent time to play overrated versus underrated.

Bloomberg is my pick for the most underrated. I have them at or near the top of my list. They do not always get it right, but I feel I can relax when reading there in a way I can’t in most other places, and also they tend to be better at focusing on things that matter. They are not cheap, but I am happy that I subscribe. Whereas with my other subscriptions, I feel kind of obligated as part of the job. The Economist is substantially higher, so this can’t be a pure subscribers-only effect.

Bloomberg is also strong evidence that the baseline Republican mistrust of media has remarkably little to do with the content in a given media platform. Yes, they trust explicitly red sources (Fox News, Newsmax, even Breitbart) and also they have a special distrust for sources that are being actively hostile to them, especially CNN and MSNBC but also the broadcast networks, NYT and WaPo.

The broadcast networks remaining high trust for Democrats is likely a legacy effect. In terms of their value as news sources they are overrated here for sure. As a matter of trust, however, I do find that CBS, NBC and ABC are all still relatively careful and worthy of trust. I don’t know if PBS is still trustworthy, because I can’t remember the last time I used or even saw it as news source, it never comes up. The BBC is properly rated near the top.

Forbes is doing an especially good job, it seems, earning trust across the aisle. I am not happy about certain recent choices of theirs, I think they are overrated here, but on that front they are doing something right.

C-SPAN seems clearly underrated in terms of trust. They are not terribly useful, but I certainly feel like I can trust them?

The Atlantic seems underrated. It is not a hard news source, but for what it is I find it to be relatively more trustworthy than this.

You have to adjust for partisanship, but I do find both Fox News and CNN to be overall underrated here. Washington Post seems overrated on trust, they push the envelope on bounded distrust reasonably often and also can be rather clueless.

The AP is definitely overrated, based on having been caught in quite a few whoppers over the last year or so, some of them clearly intentional.

Politico has established recently with its AI coverage that it cannot be trusted, I presume it is overrated in general.

InfoWars seems highly overrated, even as the lowest rated. I presume the lack of distrust, especially among Democrats, is largely not knowing who they are.

The New York Times seems properly rated here overall. It does worse in tech. It is very much not living up to its status, or especially what it used to claim to be, but it still often breaks important or useful information and plays by rules better than the lower half of the list.

Paul Graham offers a very good note:

Paul Graham: One thing people selling expensive things often don’t grasp is that the people who can afford them are often too busy to deal with the work involved in buying them. So if you’re selling expensive consumer goods, make them really easy to buy.

Some responses point out there are luxury brands that actively make buying difficult, which Graham notes is quite rare. This is a special case where the value is largely in the exclusivity, so they sacrifice volume and lose most potential marginal sales to maintain that.

The missile defense systems we built? They work. One should update the general world model accordingly, the government was capable of building such a thing for real. This is relevant both for missile defense and for other capabilities.

Tyler Cowen clarifies that he prefers current airport security entirely because of the deterrence and prevention effects on terrorism. I think this is his worst take, especially for someone who thinks travel and tourism are so important. We have run natural experiments, and also I can think about physical reality and we know the failure rates. Most of the procedures have almost zero deterrent or prevention effect, while being very expensive in time lost and in travel prevented.

Here we go again: California is the latest jurisdiction to move far enough with a proposed ‘link tax’ on news that Google has removed links to California news websites for a small percentage of users, as a ‘test.’ If California thinks they are bluffing, I am confident that they are not. California called it intimidation and outrageous that Google would respond to an increase in price by decreasing quantity purchased.

Here is another analysis on California’s $20 minimum wage for fast food workers, by Richard McKenzie of EconLib. It explains why this will lower, rather than raise, wages for those not subject to the minimum, as lower employment at covered locations enlarges the labor supply. And that this 25% jump all at once is very different from most minimum wage increases, which are typically smaller and phased in over time, which explains their relatively small impacts on employment.

The weird part is the later sections, where Richard points out that workers who keep their jobs and hours likely lost a lot of value in benefits, and when he notes that many restaurants were already paying over $16 an hour in California, some more than $20. This would suggest that the increase should indeed have a small impact on employment, if paying $20/hour was already a superior option for some restaurants, or real compensation does not need to increase much to meet the new law.

It would be a good idea to make Manifold markets or Metaculus questions about the impact of the law, but I was unable to come up with resolution criteria that were clean enough to justify the time investment I was willing to make. Anyone want to step up?

In news of a minimum wage hike escalating quickly even beyond my expectations, Seattle attempts to reverse course on delivery driver compensation four months after the new laws took effect, to try and get companies to reverse their new fees. I really do not know what they were expecting, look at the prices we are talking about:

Her proposal, pieced together over weeks of negotiations with the companies and an industry-backed drivers’ group, Drive Forward, would cut the hourly rate to roughly 33 cents per minute and 35 cents per mile, below the IRS’s per-mile reimbursement rate for vehicle wear and tear of 67 cents. In place of the $5 per trip minimum, companies would calculate hourly pay on a weekly basis, topping up drivers who earned less than $19.97 for each hour worked. The bill would also make it so drivers would not be paid for trips canceled by the customer.

…

Andi Honer, who’s been delivering for six years, says no. When the law took effect in January, she saw her earnings drop in half. Though she was making more per trip, she was getting fewer orders and smaller tips.

Since then, her earnings have rebounded slightly, but are still below what she made the year before.  

“Before, I was making $3 on an order, and now I’m making $8 on an order, but after 40 hours of work I’m making half the amount I was making before,” she said.

Tips, in particular, have disappeared: They once accounted for more than half of her earnings, but now customers are plowing that money into service charges.

So that’s a minimum wage of $20 an hour after cutting the rules back. Before that was a minimum of $5 per delivery and an average of $8, so guess what deliveries are going to cost more than? And guess what that does to demand and willingness to tip?

The government’s demand for records knows no bounds.

Austen Allred: It’s interesting that document retention has evolved from, “OK don’t destroy all your documents now” to, “We demand to have record of every conversation anybody has from here on out.”

“But Austen document retention has always made it so that everything is captured in perpetuity.”

No, 30 years ago 99% would be be voice conversations and phone calls.

Accidentally having “documentation” of everything that ever happens is a new/accidental phenomenon.

Contrast this with Sam Altman’s recent speculations about potentially needing 5th Amendment protections for your AI assistant that will know everything about you. That is not how government typically responds to new records being kept.

Japan doubles its intake of skilled workers to 160k/year, versus our H-1B limit of 85k. It remains completely bonkers that we cap the number of H-1B visas at all.

As expected, Florida also bans lab-grown meat.

A lot of people genuinely do not understand how anyone could support such a ban, unless they were in the pocket of Big Meat.

I do not support it. But allow me to once again attempt to explain.

As I mentioned last time, this is in large part happening because, no matter what anyone says now, these types of worse alternatives seen by some as morally superior will always, always then be used as justifications to attempt to socially shame, destroy and ultimately ban the original product.

This will happen even if the new offering is more expensive, lower quality than even the cheapest versions of the old product, and at best a poor substitute for even those cheaper versions, or in this case that a switch could be greatly damaging to your health as well in a wide variety of ways.

This will happen even when the ban will predictably backfire on its own merits.

Indeed, this was the comment I got last month when I pointed all this out:

Zvi Mowshowitz: In this case, it is obvious, many are not bothering to hide their intentions. Many of the people I know who are vegans absolutely want to come for your meat, and even your dairy. They are building alternatives in order to do this. They bide their time only because they do not have the power to pull it off, but they will absolutely impose first expensive mandates and then outright bans if permitted to do so, and would do so even with no good alternatives.

They certainly would do so if they could point to ‘meat alternatives,’ even if we all knew they were expensive and not the same. They would gaslight you about that, as other movements continuously gaslight us about other cultural trends via the full four-step clown makeup. And they think they are morally right or even obligated to do this.

Is it still perverse to ban lab-grown meat? Very much so, and I would not be banning it. That is not how I roll.

Derek Heady: Read through the [above] quote, replacing “vegan” with “abolitionist” and “meat” with “slave,” and you’ll be seeing the issue from the p.o.v. of animal ethicists. My guess is that history will not be kind to arguments of this sort.

Thank you, Derek. I appreciate the honesty and removal of the mask.

I continue to oppose this ban. But if you cannot see why some people react with ‘oh then we definitely need to ban lab grown meat before it is too late’ then that is on you. If you keep saying ‘eat what you want, but leave me alone’ and do not understand why so many do not believe you or take that argument seriously?

This is why. For many of you it is very much a ‘oh look, if it isn’t the consequences of my own actions’ or ‘me reaping’ situation.

For those who are instead principled libertarians who genuinely wouldn’t turn this around on a moment’s notice, well, I am sorry that others have ruined this and so many other principled stands.

Also, I think this Tweet below might explain more than half the objections and warnings around California’s proposed SB 1047 and why they so often don’t correspond to anything written in the bill?

Instead of saying ‘I do not like this on its merits and suggest we not do it,’ they instead say: I don’t care that [lab grown meat, putting safety requirements on state of the art non-derivative AI models above 10^26 flops] has exactly zero to do with almost every [startup, AI company]. What matters is: The vibes are off. You don’t like what we like. You gestured disapprovingly in our philosophy’s general direction, and might at some point pass other rules against other things. This cannot be tolerated. So that’s that. It’s all over, nothing else matters, we’re done here, we’re totes going to abandon the whole place in droves.

Or remember when a bunch of VCs signed an extremely milquetoast content-free statement to the effect of ‘it would be better if AI companies tried to do things safety’ and for a week we got lots of founders saying ‘looks like we have a list of VCs we never will take a meeting with again! Cancelled!’ Yeah, okay. You do that.

I think that if you did that, you would miss your nose. But it’s your face.

Homicide rates rose during the pandemic. Now they are falling again.

Dan Frosch (WSJ): Nationwide, homicides dropped around 20% in 133 cities from the beginning of the year through the end of March compared with the same period in 2023, according to crime-data analyst Jeff Asher, who tabulated statistics from police departments across the country.

…

If the trend continues, the U.S. could be on pace for a year like 2014, which saw the lowest homicide rate since the 1960s.

The CCJ report says that homicide was 18% higher in 2023 than 2019, so this would be more than a full reversal.

Florida charges you $50 per day to stay in their prisons, and has extended this to time not served, charging a woman $127,000 for her 7 year sentence despite only serving ten months. This is unsurprisingly wrecking havoc with her life and many others.

Needless to say this is insane. If you want to fine people and confiscate their existing assets, fine, but debt here is deeply destructive. Saddling ex-convicts with this is not how you get good outcomes. Then again, who says Florida wants good outcomes? One person suggested this was a response to felons being given the vote, with the debt designed to deny them that vote until they pay, which they often cannot do.

Fox News covers the squatter issue how you would expect, with a great shoutout to the need to build more housing. As Mark Miller points out here, adverse possession letting you claim ownership of an abandoned property after 5-7 years makes sense, and most squatting has zero to do with that and is simply theft, fraud and extortion. When that happens it should be dealt with accordingly. I want jail time.

Meanwhile things like this in Oakland will keep happening, where it seems squatters terrorized the neighborhood for five years, constantly chopping stolen cars, no one felt they could do anything about it, and the fifth time they set a fire it finally burned down several houses. I am boggled how we reached a point where doing normal business or building anything is illegal, but living completely illegally and destructively is protected.

The Toussaint Cartier necklace, valued at over $150 million and worn at the recent Met Gala by Daphne Kluger, was reportedly stolen. Love it. I am strongly against theft but if you tempt fate this precisely then that is on you.

El Salvador continues to be a fascinating experiment and Rorschach test. So here is the latest exchange, focusing in on how strong is the evidence from a gang tattoo.

Law & Liberty: The American right should be ashamed of their admiration of @nayibbukele, writes @plynch1966.

The fact that he has ended El Salvador’s violent crime epidemic does not justify his betrayal of liberal ideals and principles.

[The last section of the post is entitled ‘Not a Solution to Anything,’ in which it admits that this was indeed a solution to vital things, and without suggesting a viable alternative.]

Shylock Holmes: El Salvador is a legal philosophy hypothetical come to life.

“Okay, but what if all the guilty people… tattooed their faces. And literally nobody else did. And there’s like 100,000 of them. Would you still really need trials for all of them?”

“Yes, because, um, er…”

The commitment to due process as a kind of romantic attachment and end in itself, rather than as an engineering hack for somewhat Bayesian justice, is quite jarring. Especially given that this had been tried, for decades, and the result was a homicide rate north of 100 per 100k.

Another useful intuition is “if you don’t immediately understand what ‘a homicide rate above 100 per 100k’ means in practical terms, nor know that this is what El Salvador had, perhaps you aren’t a serious authority on the country.

“But this sets a terrible precedent for other cases”.

Okay, but imagine there’s no evidence of any desire to apply this standard to anyone other than obvious gangbangers.

“But it’s a slippery slope.”

So is a homicide rate of 100 per 100k.

Seriously, @plynch1966, what do you expect the wrongful imprisonment rate to be if you were to lock up everyone with an MS-13 face tattoo? Would you say, 10^-5? 10^-6? Either ES or the US, the answer is the same.

It is hard to overstate how relevant this is to the question.

I want to see the movie where the protagonist goes to sleep, then wakes up with an MS-13 face tattoo and has to go on the run from the police and also both gangs.

I also would assume that the false positive rate for current offenders is higher than 10^-5, likely at least 10^-2 (1%), even if everyone with such a tattoo got it on purpose. Presumably some people quit the gangs. And it would be quite bad to tell gang members that you will lock them up even if they decide to be too legit and thus quit.

It still does seem like the tattoo is super strong Bayesian evidence of gang activity. It is certainly much stronger Bayesian evidence than ‘was found guilty of murder in America’ or what I would require to convict a defendant ‘beyond a reasonable doubt.’

Given the circumstances El Salvador was facing, I do not see a reasonable argument that it was wrong, during the acute crisis period, to make arrests based on this evidence alone.

That does not make the concerns about strongman activity illegitimate. Arresting criminals does not require changing the constitution to give more executive power or getting the courts to let you have consecutive terms that were previously illegal. It is very easy to see this lack of due process being extended to political enemies and for democracy to be endangered. It is difficult to do this kind of policy in an isolated and careful way that preserves everyone’s rights otherwise even when that is the goal.

And that very clearly was not the goal. The goals seem to be a mix of popularity, power, profit and prosperity. If you do not want the people to take that deal, you need to give them an alternative. Those issuing dire warnings have not done so.

A study found that paying off people’s medical debt does not help them much.

Patrick McKenzie: “We pay off the debt and then credit score improves” is not a good theory of change, because paying off delinquent debts just doesn’t improve credit score, point blank.

Once someone is in a state of being overwhelmed by debt, the medical trade lines on a credit report are a social fiction. (Even more than medical bills generally.)

Donors may have been one of few actors who believed that fiction had strong impact on material world.

This seems like an obvious flaw in the system, if it is true in general? If it does not improve your credit score to pay off a delinquent debt, then you have even more reason not to pay. Obviously it should not get you a full credit score refund, but a partial one seems appropriate. On the other hand, if you are drowning in debt, it makes sense that it changes very little.

I think this is spot on:

Patrick McKenzie: 1/6 of U.S. economy is medical spending, and medical spending is observable on credit reports in a way which food spending is not. If you get to the point where you’re defaulting, via any mechanism, you will default on both medical and food-based expenditures if you have them.

And then scholars suggest you were brought to this circumstance by the medical debt, but not the food debt, because scholars can’t see food debt.

Anyhow, in the case where medical issues are proximate cause of downward financial spiral, whackamoling the bills doesn’t redress.

In terms of interpreting the study’s results, however, we have this big caveat.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: “We tried forgiving $169M in debt [that was already in arrears and deemed uncollectible, bought for pennies on the dollar] and found little effect” is the econ equivalent of IN MICE. Please lead with that part next time.

I’m not objecting to the research, people, I am objecting to its initial representation online and in media headlines.

The debt was cheap for a reason. It was bought for pennies, and mostly written off, the damage otherwise already done.

Still, yes, this could have been a situation in which that debt did damage vastly in excess of its economic value. A collection agency buys the debt for pennies, then harasses the debtors, threatens them, potentially goes after them legally if opportunity arises. What is still left is all but worthless. Yet the debtor cannot purchase their own debt anywhere close to market price, for obvious reasons.

So gains from trade would have made sense. It would have made sense if it was good value to settle those debts at market price.

Alas, we now know that this was not the case. Or, alternatively, we know that the debt collectors were not doing that much additional damage.

What could be tried next?

If I had the budget for it, I would attempt to repeat the experiment, except that instead of buying the debt from collectors, you try buying it instead of the initial debt collector, at a competitive price for that point in time.

Then you divide into various experimental groups. Perhaps something like:

1. For a control group, you have the debt serviced normally, or you never buy it in the first place but track the debtors. This hopefully is a close to free action.

2. For the first experimental group, you have the debt serviced normally, except without any further negative reports to the credit agencies. So they still try to get paid, and still harass the debtor, but they don’t make their credit any worse than it already is.

3. For the second experimental group, you service the debt nicely. You not only don’t ding their credit, you also don’t harass coworkers or family members, you don’t call constantly at all hours, you don’t make idle threats and you’re not abusive. You accept reasonable settlement offers and set up payment plans. But you do remind them of the debt, and if they can clearly pay you attempt to collect.

4. For the third experimental group, you forgive the debt.

Or something like that. Doubtless the IRB will invoke the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, and blame you for helping but not doing more, so you do the best you can there or you don’t ask permission since there is no law against doing any of this. Then you see the results, and where intervention provides marginal help.

Jeff Lawson buys The Onion, demands $1 or it will disappear forever.

Ben Collins: NEWS: My friends and I now own and run The Onion. I’ll be the CEO.

We’re keeping the entire staff, bringing back The Onion News Network, and share the wealth with staff.

Basically, we’re going to let them do whatever they want. Get excited.

It is too early to know if this will work out well. I used to get a lot out of The Onion, but then slowly stopped checking it. Revealed preference. Occasionally they still nail something, and I am eager to see what happens with ‘do whatever you want.’

Consider the context of Twitter, and also other places like The Washington Post.

Paul Graham: It’s weird how consistently people who attack Twitter point out that ad revenue has decreased. They don’t seem the sort of people who care about companies’ revenues, and now they’re suddenly amateur stock analysts. I suppose it’s because usage hasn’t decreased.

Ravi Parikh: Buying & running a media company at a loss to better adhere to your personal values, rather than purely profit-maximizing, seems like a reasonable thing for a rich person to do.

Indeed, ‘purchase and operate at a loss a media company or other company you want to exist’ is a highly standard thing to do.

It can be a very high impact strategy.

Media production has cultural impact vastly in excess of what can be captured in revenues. Attempts to capture more revenue cripple the reach and quality of the product, both compromising integrity and artistic choices and also saturating customers with ads and stopping them from consuming zero marginal cost products.

Buying Twitter or The Onion or The Washington Post, if you can afford to do so and can run one of them wisely, is a fantastic bargain. So is supporting individuals. This blog runs on the patron model as well. And this extends beyond media to many other businesses.

This is also one of the few socially acceptable, and thus likely to actually happen, ways to deploy that level of capital at scale for anything other than profit maximization.

Matt Yglesias implores us to ask how to solve problems, not why they happened.

But even though I enjoy this sort of thing, it’s also pretty plainly irrelevant to the question at hand, which is “what, if anything, can we or should we do about absenteeism right now?”

Well, maybe. There are times when all we care about is the how and it is unrelated to the why. But most of the time:

1. The why is a key component of figuring out the how.

2. The why is a key component of figuring out how to stop it happening again.

3. The why is necessary for both perception of and actual justice or fairness.

4. Asking why is necessary in general, or people notice you not asking.

5. Learning about the world is an important secondary goal.

Or: Knowing why a problem happened is usually a key part of solving it.

Yglesias’s example is school absenteeism.

1. If you don’t know why children aren’t coming, you might not get them to.

2. If you don’t know why children stopped coming, they might stop again.

3. It is terrible for various reasons not to settle accounts for our Covid decisions.

4. If people think they can get away with such decisions again, they will try again.

5. These seem like things worth knowing for anyone trying to model the world.

I think I’ve heard it before, but there is a theory that agriculture happened in so many places at similar times because the Earth’s climate got more seasonal so people had to shift into more reliable and consistent food supplies.

New theory says only if you know where to shop.

Noah Smith: Bad news: If you’re happy with $80k, higher income will tend to make you even happier, but if you’re still miserable at $80k, further increases in income won’t do much.

Abstract: We discovered in a joint reanalysis of the experience sampling data that the flattening pattern exists but is restricted to the least happy 20% of the population, and that complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship between happiness and income.

…

Main Paper: Approximately 15 to 20% of people frequently experience negative affect, and the relationship between happiness and income is different in that group and in the happier majority. The suffering of the unhappy group diminishes as income increases up to 100k but very little beyond that.

The story or assumption that these are the same people at each income level seems suspect. Suppose 20% of the population is chronically unhappy due to mental issues. Would they tend to distribute normally over the income distribution? Presumably not. A lot of them would have this interfere with their work. Which then raises the worry that income is selection. The flip side would be if some people are satisficing on income, and others are working very hard because they know how bad it would be for them to make less money, both of which are doubtless the case. People are responding to their situations.

A day in the life of a Walmart manager (WSJ). The job is all about sweating the small stuff, day in and day out.

Nate Silver will be doing his election forecasts in 2024.

A fun thread on statistics, and what it means to get a given p-value with samples of different sizes.

We are so spoiled with so much free music we recoil at the idea of paying $10 a month for full unlimited access to all of music. I worry that now no one appreciates it, and thus the utility we get from music is actually way down. I keep getting reminded I radically under-consume music, largely because there are so many podcasts. It needs to be something I focus on, when I put music on while working I don’t appreciate it and it distracts me.

You need talent, but Taylor Swift shows us the value of also being prolific, having a formula and schedule and relentlessly shipping, argues Katherine Boyle. She correctly points out Taylor is vastly more prolific than any other famous musical artist. Which is true, but that also means that everyone else who made it did so without shipping anywhere near as much as she did.

I think whether to always be shipping depends largely on the patterns of selection and consumption, and how you get evaluated.

In the before times, you would buy or sample an album. Then based on its quality, you might keep going. And every time you got stung by low-quality offerings, that hurt. In the physical media era, reliable quality was a huge deal.

In the download and especially streaming eras, as long as you are fine with people mostly streaming singles, not so much? If Taylor Swift puts out 28 new songs and 3 of them are bangers, and others can inform me which 3 are bangers. That’s almost as good as going 3 for 3. It’s potentially better if I want to sample a long tail. I can configure my own playlist. There is still the exploration cost issue at the limit, but you have a lot more slack there.

As a writer I think of this the same way. How do I want people finding, evaluating and consuming my content?

If people follow links and see what is viral or recommended, or people like to pick and choose by subject matter, then it is ship ship ship.

If it is people randomly sampling, or deciding whether to be in or out overall based on average quality, especially if they say ‘oh that is too much,’ then flooding the zone is unwise.

Here are some claims that the great people really are that great, you should get exposed to them and be in awe, and those who haven’t seen it pretend such people do not exist, whereas instead you should strive to be worthy of their time. I think this is in some ways very true and in other ways totally false.

Roon: Twitter often accuses me of hero worship on here when I say that someone is a singular individual or uniquely capable. This is a consequence of not living at the edge of history and observing exactly how outlier the outliers are.

Anton: unless you’ve experienced it, you probably don’t know how great ‘great’ can be. one of the best things that you can do is get exposed to really great people, doing really great work, as early in your life as possible.

…

you cannot absorb this from books or television documentaries. You need the object lesson. all media occupies the same part of your brain as fiction – you need the life lesson.

By seeing with your own eyes what is possible you can better understand what you are really capable of. you become a better judge of yourself for having a better yardstick to measure by.

It is true in the sense that yes, there are people who are vastly more effective than most. It is a joy and inspiration to behold. I have definitely experienced it on several occasions. Peter Thiel was a rather blatant example. Jon Finkel in Magic: the Gathering is another. There have been many others, some of which I mention here periodically and some of which I don’t.

It is false in the sense that part of it is being sharp in a certain kind of special way, having certain mental capabilities and a willingness to push them and power through hard things, but at core they’re all still just (smart) regular people doing regular things except they have some sort of ambition. It does not take miracles to work miracles. They have many of the usual flaws and biases and weaknesses. A lot of what makes a great person is purely stepping up and doing the thing, while focusing on figuring out how best to do it, day in and day out.

There are minimum requirements, but great people are primarily made, not born.

That is a lot of why you need to see it. If you see it, at first you are in awe, then you realize you could do that same thing, and you might get the same results.

Kickstarter for the direct sequel to Star Control 2, from its creators. Was already well past its goal, but there are stretch goals and also: Shut up and take my money. Between this and Slay the Spire 2, a lot of future gaming hours are happily spoken for.

I played the Tier 2 game Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. Warning that I am generally high on vampire survivors-likes, but this has some very cool innovations that made it genuinely different. It is still in early access, I’ll come back to it as it improves.

I played through Tier 3 game Unicorn Overlord. It is a tactical RPG of sorts, with no strict grid, and where you battle in units of 3-5 characters each, according to tactical rules you code in beforehand. It is a fun game, with a lot of different things to play with and optimize, and the story and characters are fine. I especially appreciate the preview of how battles will go, and the ability to respond accordingly.

The core problem is that, as one poster put it, the game is ‘not going to be busting anyone’s balls.’ If you are paying attention at all, and trying to get stronger at all, you will win. If you find yourself underpowered, there are repeatable battles you can quickly grind to fix that, especially to let your secondary teams catch up on levels.

Similarly, the game offers all these one-use items you can find and buy. You get a lot of them automatically. They are useful. But the stores do not restock, and you don’t ever have to use them, so they end up Too Awesome To Use until the last few battles, where the end is in sight and munching stamina and healing items becomes a ‘sure, why not?’ proposition.

So you end up with a game that has a lot of complexity in it, which you can engage with to the extent you like, but the game doesn’t pressure you to do that much, or punish you for not doing so. It is so much easier to simply overpower everything.

I played on the fourth difficulty level out of five. I died a few times when I was moving fast and didn’t realize I had to protect my command post, but you can always restart any stage, so no worries. My guess is that max difficulty would have been more annoying, but still not a real challenge so much as requiring (more) grinding.

I gave a shot to Dragon’s Dogma 2 after Playstation Network spontaneously bought it for me without asking. I would have complained about that, but it had good reviews modulo some DLC issues that seemed easy to ignore, so I figured sure, why not faround.

I found out.

Dragon’s Dogma 2 is obsessed with its ‘pawns,’ the other three members of your party, two of which you constantly swap in and out.

Then it gives you only one save slot you cannot involve for long periods plus an autosave that triggers when battles start, and makes the pawns not smart enough to not get knocked off ledges, where if you pursue them you can get autosaved into a location where you definitely die, and if you don’t you lose them. And it sends you on deeply generic quests, and the battles are largely a blur since you have little control over the other party members. So it felt like it sucked, and was actually full Tier 5 (We Don’t Talk About Bruno)? But others seem to like it, so I presume I am missing something. Should I give this another shot?

I am now taking up Disgaea 7, which means (because D2) that I am doing this thing for the 8th time. It is very early, but I worry that this is too many times going back to the well. I also worry that they are not iterating over the right things and the flaws are amplifying, although there are clear improvements from Disgaea 6.

In particular, the game should make you care about various things and try to maximize in lots of directions at once, while ensuring all of them matter and giving you interesting choices. Instead, it kind of doesn’t.

Early on, instead of rewarding keeping things balanced or making it reasonable to level up via the story stages and fighting close battles, there is more of a mad dash to the item world, even more than in past editions. The game does not want you to ‘play fair’ in a way that keeps things interesting, and story progression seems like what you do to unlock various game features. Yes, obviously power leveling will be faster, but things do not need to be this stark.

Then later on, from what I have read, similar problems emerge, where you are not making choices on emphasis or picking strategies so much as checking off boxes.

The game also just gives you tons of stuff that does not matter. Why this giant barrage of quests and scrolls? We need some addition by subtraction.

The big change is the switch from the bonus gauge, where you were rewarded for gigantic combos where you sometimes cared very deeply about a particular level, to having five chests you can earn with different missions, but the chests are mysteries.

I like the idea, since filling the bonus gauge can be fun but ultimately got boring. The problem is that the missions they picked give you are even more encouragement to go curb stomp, as they consistently reward ‘no one died’ and ‘won quickly.’ So you are encouraged to not make things interesting or close. It also devalues the cool stuff that did reward you on the bonus gauge, such as setting up Geo blocks.

Also, the chests being random (outside the item world) or always levels (inside it) means there is no tension. You never see that legendary or emblem or big EXP bonus or what not and think ‘I have got to get me one of these.’ If you miss, meh. Then in the item world, the bonuses are all item levels, and not very many, which is even more meh.

I’d love to be a designer on Disgaea 8. We need to make a lot of cuts, to focus on a few things and make them really matter but give you meaningful choices which of them to emphasize, and find ways to not as brazenly reward charging head first into power leveling your top character. No one said it was going to be easy.

One place I would consider starting is to make stats on equipment multiplicative rather than additive. As in, your attack is your equipment’s ATK multiplied by your character ATK, not the sum.

If you are new to the series, I continue to suggest starting with Disgaea 1: Afternoon of Darkness. It has a purity and simplicity that makes up for a lot.

Then in mid-June, Shin Megami Tensei V: Revenge comes out, so that is where my gaming time will go for a few months after that.

I am definitely opening the floor to ‘what should I be playing right now,’ both in rogue deckbuilders and otherwise. I do want to get away from RPGs.

Update to the Philosophy of Commander document for Magic’s most popular format.

I understand why this document contains the principles it contains. I also am sure those who created it understand why this does not make me want to play Commander.

Brian Kowal’s followers prefer two-year Standard format over three. I strongly agree. Three years is far too many cards and too little rotation.

Reid Duke on Standard’s best decks. My reading of this having not seen the cards was a lot of ‘huh?’ with intermittent ‘oh’ and also periodic exclamations of ‘WHAT?’

Here is an example of why I keep saying ‘WHAT.’

PVDDR: I think this is my favorite MTG art since Esika’s Chariot (and the card seems kinda broken too)

The economics of magical item crafting in D&D make no sense, failing to stand up to even a minute of scrutiny. This is mostly not a direct problem unless a third level Wizard starts creating lots of trivial Magic items, everyone can still have their fun, but it indicates the level of economic and market understanding running around.

A reminder that this is The Way.

Kevin O’Connor: The top playoff seeds should be rewarded with the ability to choose their 1st round opponent.

Intentional losing to drop a spot for a matchup isn’t as exciting as teams competing to win for homecourt AND their choice of an opponent.

It should matter the Knicks just beat the Bulls while the Bucks lost and the Cavs had no interest in winning to get the 2nd seed. Instead many Knicks fans are disappointed they will end up with the Heat or Sixers from the play-in.

This makes no sense. It doesn’t have to be this way. Winning should be all that matters.

The NBA used to allow G League teams to choose their playoff opponent. Clearly, there’s interest.

Nate Duncan: I would love it, but GMs and coaches on the competition committee will never vote for having to make another decision (picking your opponent) that could possibly get them fired if it goes wrong.

Nate Silver: Have season ticket holders vote.

Should you be allowed to bet on yourself?

Say Cheese: Ryan Garcia cashed out a $12M winning ticket from a gambling company this morning, after he bet $2M on himself to win last night. “He was a huge underdog because Vegas thought he was going crazy”

Tautologer: I like this honestly, and I think if we’re going to allow sports gambling (ehhh…) this should be allowed more broadly. eg NFL players should be allowed to bet moneyline on their own team to win (and nothing else obviously). betting on yourself is pretty based.

In boxing, as in life, strong yes. Indeed, in any individual sport including tennis or golf I think it is fine to bet on yourself to win the game (and no other wagers of any kind).

In team sports, the answer should often be no. Pete Rose is banned from baseball for a reason. Betting on the team to win is the least bad wager and is indeed based, but can still be distortionary. It places pressure on you to win today, at the expense of tomorrow and the health and development of the other players. Such tradeoffs are common.

Then again, contracts often create similar incentives, including for many things that are not winning the game. We allow that to happen. This mostly seems not worse than that, especially if the bet is by a player not a coach? The coach should still definitely not be allowed to wager on individual games.

Hero Max Scherzer proposes relegation for umpires as a substitute for outright robot umpires, the bottom 10% as ranked by the machines get relegated to the minors each year. I heartily endorse this service or product. The human element is good for the game up to a point, but also Angel Hernandez exists.

The price of youth baseball keeps going up. Leagues that cost money and involve travel and tryouts and attempts to play well are on the rise. Little league and other open-to-all baseball is on the decline. Those who want a cheaper game, or one that is easier to play casually, are presumably playing basketball or soccer instead.

That seems fine for the kids. All the worry about declines in youth physical activity here do not consider substitution effects, or that baseball is a relatively poor source of physical activity when played at the free level. Standing in right field and sitting on the bench with an occasional strikeout is a good excuse to go outside, but not accomplishing much else. Baseball that is official with uniforms and teams but not taking it super serious, like little league, is in a weird spot.

For the sport of baseball, it would be good to get more kids playing. So yes, I would like to see more low-cost opportunities. Otherwise, I don’t get the worrying.

Matt Yglesias declares self-driving to now be underhyped. This kind of technology is mostly useless until it is suddenly transformational, and we are rapidly approaching the threshold.

Waymo is a real thing available now, and is steadily expanding its reach and scale, and are on the verge of having useful geographic footprints.

I strongly agree. The self-driving business model depends on reaching critical mass of scale and geographic coverage. In San Francisco, you can already cover the central area, and they are planning to extend this south as far as Sunnyvale, which would include the airport. The East Bay is still missing, which will make this less exciting for my standard trips into town, but this is already a big game.

As with all such schemas, once you establish base then expansions become more attractive, and things escalate quickly.

Self-driving trucks will be a distinct huge deal. Things are taking their sweet time, and there are still legal hurdles, but at this point self-driving is severely underhyped.

California of course now is seeing efforts to ban this before it can take off. No idea how serious that threat is, but if you can please help head it off.

This checks out, if you add a ‘more than usual.’

Austen Allred: A random thing someone told me once that I now think about constantly:

If you feel like you hate everyone, eat.

If you feel like everyone hates you, sleep.

If you feel like you hate yourself, shower.

If you feel like everyone hates everyone, go outside.

Claim that applying to focus groups can be a good source of extra cash. They pay well per hour, although you have to spend time applying. They seem like fun. I’ve watched a few when I was investigating politics, and I’ve done one taste test interview. The best part is you get to influence things to be more like what you prefer, and have your voice heard. Seems great.

Airlines will be required to give automatic refunds on flights much more aggressively, in particular for ‘Departure or arrival time that moves by more than three hours domestically or six hours for international flights.’ Three hours is not a lot of time. Ideally, this would be even stronger, where you would both get the refund and also keep the flight. Yes, that would raise fares to compensate, but it would also provide the right incentives.

These labels are highly non-exclusive.

As always, a lot to get to. This is everything that wasn’t in any of the other categories.

You might have to find a way to actually enjoy the work.

Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): Sustained great work often demands enjoying the process for its own sake rather than only feeling joy in the end result. Time is mostly spent between results, and hard to keep pushing yourself to get to the next level if you’re not having fun while doing so.

Yeah. This matches my experience in all senses. If you don’t find a way to enjoy the work, your work is not going to be great.

This is the time. This is the place.

Guiness Pig: In a discussion at work today:

“If you email someone to ask for something and they send you an email trail showing you that they’ve already sent it multiple times, that’s a form of shaming, don’t do that.”

Others nodding in agreement while I try and keep my mouth shut.

JFC…

Goddess of Inflammable Things: I had someone go over my head to complain that I was taking too long to do something. I showed my boss the email where they had sent me the info I needed THAT morning along with the repeated requests for over a month. I got accused by the accuser of “throwing them under the bus”.

You know what these people need more of in their lives?

Jon Stewart was told by Apple, back when he had a show on AppleTV+, that he was not allowed to interview FTC Chair Lina Khan.

This is a Twitter argument over whether a recent lawsuit is claiming Juul intentionally evaded age restrictions to buy millions in advertising on websites like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and ‘games2girls.com’ that are designed for young children, or whether they bought those ads as the result of ‘programmatic media buyers’ like AdSense ‘at market price,’ which would… somehow make this acceptable? What? The full legal complaint is here. I find it implausible that this activity was accidental, and Claude agreed when given the text of the lawsuit.

I strongly agree with Andrew Sullivan, in most situations playing music in public that others can hear is really bad and we should fine people who do it until they stop. They make very good headphones, if you want to listen to music then buy them. I am willing to make exceptions for groups of people listening together, but on your own? Seriously, what the hell.

Democrats somewhat souring on all of electric cars, perhaps to spite Elon Musk?

The amount of own-goaling by Democrats around Elon Musk is pretty incredible.

New York Post tries to make ‘resenteeism’ happen, as a new name for people who hate their job staying to collect a paycheck because they can’t find a better option, but doing a crappy job. It’s not going to happen.

Alice Evans points out that academics think little of sending out, in the latest cse, thousands of randomly generated fictitious resumes, wasting quite a lot of people’s time and introducing a bunch of noise into application processes. I would kind of be fine with that if IRBs let you run ordinary obviously responsible experiments in other ways as well, as opposed to that being completely insane in the other direction. If we have profound ethical concerns about handing volunteers a survey, then this is very clearly way worse.

Germany still will not let stores be open on Sunday to enforce rest. Which got even more absurd now that there are fully automated supermarkets, which are also forced to close. I do think this is right. Remember that on the Sabbath, one not only cannot work. One cannot spend money. Having no place to buy food is a feature, not a bug, forcing everyone to plan ahead, this is not merely about guarding against unfair advantage. Either go big, or leave home. I also notice how forcing everyone to close on Sunday is rather unfriendly to Jews in particular, who must close and not shop on Saturday and now have to deal with this two days in a row.

I call upon all those who claim to care deeply about our civil rights, about the separation of powers, government overreach and authoritarianism and tyranny, and who warn against the government having broad surveillance powers. Take your concerns seriously. Hold yourselves to at least the standard shown by Eliezer Yudkowsky (who many of you claim cares not for such concerns).

Help spread the word that the government is in the process of reauthorizing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, with new language that is even broader than before.

This passed the house this week but has not as of this writing passed the Senate.

The House voting included a proposed amendment requiring warrants to search Americans’ communications data failed by one vote, 212-212. And an effort similar to the current one failed in December 2023.

So one cannot say ‘my voice could not have mattered.’

I urge the Senate not to pass this bill, and have contacted both of my senators.

Alas, this iteration of the matter only came to my attention this morning.

Elizabeth Goitein: I’m sad—and frankly baffled—to report that the House voted today to reward the government’s widespread abuses of Section 702 by massively expanding the government’s powers to conduct warrantless surveillance.

…

Check out this list of how members voted.

That’s bad enough. But the House also voted for the amendment many of us have been calling “Patriot Act 2.0.” This will force ordinary American businesses that provide wifi to their customers to give the NSA access to their wifi equipment to conduct 702 surveillance

I’m not kidding. The bill actually does that. If you have any doubts, read this post by a FISA Court amicus, who took the unusual step of going public to voice his concerns. Too bad members of the House didn’t listen.

Next time you pull out your phone and start sending messages in a laundromat… or a barber shop… or in the office building where you work… just know that the NSA might very well have access to those communications.

And that’s not all. The House also passed an amendment authorizing completely suspcionless searches for the communications of non-U.S. persons seeking permission to travel to the U.S., even if the multiple vetting mechanisms already in place reveal no cause for concern.

…

There are more bad things in this bill—a needless expansion of the definition of “foreign intelligence,” provisions that weaken the role of amici in FISA Court proceedings, special treatment for members of Congress—but it would take too many tweets to cover them all.

There is certainly a ‘if you are constantly harping on the need to not regulate AI lest we lose our freedoms, but do not say a word about such other far more blatant unconstitutional violations of our freedoms over far smaller risks, then we should presume that your motivations lie elsewhere.’

But my primary purpose here really is, please, if you can, help stop this bill. Which is why it is here in the monthly, rather than in an AI post.

Take the following (full) quoted statement both seriously and literally.

Ryan Moulton: “Agency is immoral because you might have an effect on the world. The only moral entity is a potted plant.”

This is not exactly what a lot of people believe, but it’s close enough that it would compress a lot of arguments to highlight only the differences from this.

Keller Scholl: There’s also a very slight variant that runs “an effect on the world that is not absolutely subject to the will of the majority”.

Ryan Moulton: Yes, I think that is one of the common variants. Also of the form “with a preemptive consensus of all the relevant stakeholders.”

Also see my post Asymmetric Justice, or The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics, both highly recommended if you have not encountered them before.

Andrew Rettek: Some people see this, decide that you can’t be a potted plant, then decide that since you can’t possibly get enough consent you don’t need ANY consent to do Good Things ™.

This is presumably in response to the recent NYT op-ed from Peter Coy, attempting to argue that everyone at all impacted must not only agree but must also fully understand, despite almost no one ever actually understanding much of anything.

Nikhil Krishnan reports on his extensive attempts to solve the loneliness problem.

Nikhil Krishnan: spent like all of my 20s obsessed with trying to fix the loneliness problem – hosted tons of events, tried starting a company around it, etc.

Main two takeaways

1) The fact that you can stay home and basically self-medicate with content in a way that feels not-quite-bored is the biggest barrier.

Meeting new people consistently is naturally somewhat uncomfortable no matter how structured/well designed an event is. Being presented with an option of staying home and chilling vs. going out to meet new people, most people will pick the former and that’s pretty hard to fight.

2) Solving loneliness is largely reliant on altruists.

-altruists who take the time to plan events and get their friends together

-altruists that reach out to bring you into a plan being formed even if you’re not super close

-altruists that bug you to go out even when you don’t really want to I don’t think a company will solve this problem tbh, financial incentives inherently make this entire thing feel inorganic IMO. I’m not totally sure what will..

Altruists is a weird term these days. The point is, someone has to take the initiative, and make things happen, and most people won’t do it, or will do it very rarely.

In the long term, you are better off putting in the work to make things happen, but today it sounds like work even if someone else did take the initiative to set things up, and the payoffs that justify it lie in the future.

How much can AI solve this? I think it can do a lot to help people coordinate and arrange for things people want. There are a lot of annoyances and barriers and (only sometimes trivial) inconveniences and (only sometimes mild) social awkwardness involved, and a lot of that can get reduced.

But (most of) you do still have to ultimately agree to get out of the house.

This Reddit post has a bunch of people explaining why creating community is hard, and why people mostly do not want the community that would actually exist, and the paths to getting it are tricky at best. In addition to no one wanting to take initiative, a point that was emphasized is that whoever does take initiative to do a larger gathering has to spend a lot of time and money on preparing, and if you ask for compensation then participation falls off a cliff.

I want to emphasize that this mostly is not true. People think you need to do all this work to prepare, especially for the food. And certainly it is nice when you do, but none of that is mandatory. There is nothing wrong with ordering pizza and having cake, both of which scale well, and supplementing with easy snacks. Or for smaller scales, you can order other things, or find things you can cook at scale. Do not let perfect become the enemy of the good.

After being correctly admonished on AI #59, I will be confining non-AI practical opportunities to monthly roundups unless they have extreme time sensitivity.

This month, we have the Institute for Progress hiring a Chief of Staff and also several other roles.

Also I alert you to the Bridgewater x Metaculus forecasting contest, with $25,000 in prizes, April 16 to May 21. The bigger prize, of course, is that you impress Bridgewater. They might not say this is a job interview, but it is also definitely a job interview. So if you want that job, you should enter.

Pennsylvania governor makes state agencies refund fees if they don’t process permits quickly, backlog gets reduced by 41%. Generalize this.

Often the government is only responding to the people, for example here is Dominik Peters seeing someone complain (quite obviously correctly) that the Paris metro should stop halting every time a bag is abandoned, and Reddit voters saying no. Yes, there is the possibility that this behavior is the only thing stopping people from trying to bomb Paris metro trains, but also no, there isn’t, it makes no physical sense?

A sixth member of the House (out of 435) resigns outright without switching to a new political office. Another 45 members are retiring.

Ken Buck (R-Colorado): This place just keeps going downhill, and I don’t need to spend my time here.

US immigration, regarding an EB-1 visa application, refers to Y-Combinator as ‘a technology bootcamp’ with ‘no evidence of outstanding achievements.’

Kirill Avery: USCIS, regarding my EB-1 US visa application, referred to Y Combinator as “a technology bootcamp” with “no evidence of outstanding achievements.”

update: a lot of people who claim i need a better lawyer are recommending me *MYlawyer now.

update #2: my lawyer claims he has successfully done green cards for [Stripe founders] @patrickc and @collision

Sasha Chapin: During my application for an O1, they threw out a similar RFE, wherein my lawyer was asked to prove that Buzzfeed was a significant media source

After the Steele dossier

This is just vexatiousness for the sake of it, nakedly.

Yes, I have also noticed this.

Nabeel Qureshi: One of the weirdest things I learned about government is that when their own processes are extremely slow or unworkable, instead of changing those processes, they just make *newprocesses to be used in the special cases when you actually want to get something done.

Patrick McKenzie: This is true and feels Kafkaesque when you are told “Oh why didn’t you use the process we keep available for non-doomed applicants” by advisors or policymakers.

OTOH, I could probably name three examples from tech without thinking that hard.

Tech companies generally have parallel paths through the recruiting process for favored candidates, partially because the stupid arbitrary hoop jumping offends them and the company knows it. Partially.

M&A exists in part to do things PM is not allowed to do, at higher cost.

“Escalations” exist for almost any sort of bureaucratic process, where it can get bumped above heads of owning team for a moment and then typically sent down with an all-but directive of how to resolve from folks on high.

Up to a point this process makes sense. You have a standard open protocol for X. That protocol is hardened to ensure it cannot be easily gamed or spammed, and that it does not waste too many of your various resources, and that its decisions can be systematically defended and so on. These are nice properties. They do not come cheap, in terms of the user experience, or ability to handle edge cases and avoid false negatives, or often ability to get things done at all.

Then you can and should have an alternative process for when that trade-off does not make sense, but which is gated in ways that protect you from overuse. And that all makes sense. Up to a point. The difference is that in government the default plan is often allowed to become essentially unworkable at all, and there is no process that notices and fixes this. Whereas in tech or other business there are usually checks on things if they threaten to reach that point.

Ice cream shop owner cannot figure out if new California law is going to require paying employees $20 an hour or not. Intent does not win in spots like this. Also why should I get higher mandatory pay at McDonald’s than an ice cream shop, and why should a labor group get to pick that pay level? The whole law never made any sense.

One never knows how seriously to take proposed laws that would be completely insane, but one making the rounds this month was California’s AB 2751.

State Assemblymember Matt Haney, who represents San Francisco, has introduced AB 2751, which introduces a so-called “right to disconnect” by ignoring calls, emails and texts sent after agreed-upon working hours. 

It is amazing how people say, with a straight face, that ‘bar adults from making an agreement to not do X’ is a ‘right to X.’

Employers and employees will tend to agree to do this if this is worth doing, and not if it doesn’t. You can pay me more, or you can leave me in peace when I am not on the clock, your call. I have definitely selected both ends of that tradeoff at different times.

Mike Solana: California, in its ongoing effort to destroy itself, is once again trying to ban startups.

Eric Carlson: My first thoughts were whoever drafted this has:

A. Spent a lot of time in college

B. Worked for a non profit

C. Worked in government for a long time

D. Never worked for the private sector

To my surprise, Matt Haney lit up my whole bingo card.

His accomplishments include going to college, going back to college, going back again, working for a non profit, going into government, and still being in government.

On the other hand, this is an interesting enforcement mechanism:

Enforcement of the law would be done via the state Department of Labor, which could levy fines starting at $100 per incident for employers with a bad habit of requiring after-work communications. 

Haney said that he decided after discussions with the labor committee to take a flexible approach to the legislation, in contrast to the more punitive stance taken by some countries.

It actually seems pretty reasonable to say that the cost of getting an employee’s attention outside work hours, in a non-emergency, is $100. You can wait until the next work day, or you can pay the $100.

Also, ‘agreed-upon working hours’ does not have to be 9-to-5. It would also seem reasonable to say that if you specify particular work hours and are paying by the hour, then it costs an extra hundred to reach you outside those hours in a non-emergency. For a startup, one could simply not agree to such hours in the first place?

A younger version of me would say ‘they would never be so insane as to pass and enforce this in the places it is insane’ but no, I am no longer so naive.

Every navy shipbuilding program is years delayed. Does that mean none of them are?

This was reported as ‘breaking’ and ‘jaw-dropping.’ We got statements like this quoting it:

Sean Davis (CEO of The Federalist): Every aspect of American life—the very things that made this country the richest and most powerful in history—is in rapid decline, and none of the political leaders in power today in either party seem to care.

…

We are rapidly approaching the point where the decline becomes irreversible. And the most evil and tragic aspect of the entire situation is that it never had to be this way.

But actually, this all seems… totally fine, right? All the contracts are taking 1-3 years longer than was scheduled. That is a highly survivable and reasonable and also predictable delay. So what if we are making out optimistic projections?

In wartime these delays would be unacceptable. In peacetime, I don’t see why I care.

It turns out it is illegal to pay someone cash not to run for office, in this case a $500k offer that a candidate for Imperial County supervisor turned down. So instead you offer them a no-show job that is incompatible with the office due to a conflict of interest? It is not like this kind of bribe is hard to execute another way. Unless you are trying to pay Donald Trump $5 billion, in which case it is going to be trickier. As they wonder at the end, it is curious who thinks her not running was worth a lot more than $500,000 to them, and why.

This is still one of those situations where there are ways around a restriction, and it would be better if we found a way to actually stop the behavior entirely, but better to throw up inconveniences and say the thing is not allowed, than to pretend the whole thing is okay.

We continue to have a completely insane approach to high-skilled immigration.

Neal Parikh: Friends of mine were basically kicked out. They’re senior people in London, Tehran, etc now. So pointless. Literally what is the point of letting someone from Iran or wherever get a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford then kicking them out? It’s ridiculous. It would make way more sense to force them to stay. But you don’t even have to do that because they want to stay!

Alec Stapp: The presidents of other countries are actively recruiting global talent while the United States is kicking out people with STEM PhDs 🤦

If you thought Ayn Rand was strawmanning, here is a socialist professor explaining how to get a PS5 under socialism.

In related news, Paris to deny air conditioning to Olympic athletes in August to ‘combat climate change.’

New York mayor Eric Adams really is going to try to put his new-fangled ‘metal detectors’ into the subway system. This angers me with the fire of a thousand suns. It does actual zero to address any real problems.

Richard Hanania: Eric Adams says the new moonshot is putting metal detectors in the subway.

Imagine telling an American in 1969 who just watched the moon landing that 55 years later we would use “moonshot” to mean security theater for the sake of mentally ill bums instead of colonizing Mars.

Brad Pearce: I loved the exchange that was something like “90% of thefts in New York are committed by 350 people”

“Yeah well how many people do you want to arrest to stop it!”

“Uhhh, lets start with 350.”

New Yorkers, I am counting on you to respond as the situation calls for. It is one thing that Eric Adams is corrupt. This is very much going too far.

In other NYC crime news, go to hell real life, I’ll punch you in the face?

Tyler McCall: Some common threads popping up on these videos of women being punched in New York City:

1) Sounds like he says something like “sorry” or “excuse me” just before attacking

2) Appears to be targeting women on phones

3) All the women I saw were in this general area of Manhattan

Sharing partly because I live close to that area and that’s weird and upsetting and some people would want to know, partly because it is part of the recurring ‘have you tried either getting treatment for or punishing the people you keep constantly arresting.’ And partly because this had 1.8 million views so of course this happened.

The story of a crazy financial fraud, told Patrick McKenzie style. He is reacting in real time as he reads the story and it is glorious.

Governor DeSantis, no longer any form of hopeful, is determined to now be tough on crime, in the form of shoplifting and ‘porch piracy.’ He promises hell to pay.

TODAY: Governor DeSantis signed a bill to crack down on retail theft & porch piracy in Florida🎯👇

“If you order something and they leave it at your front door, when you come home from work or you bring your kids over from school, that package is gonna be there. And if it’s not — someone’s gonna have hell to pay for stealing it.”

Shoshana Weissmann: A thief in DC tried to steal my friends’ new mattress and gave up in 2 blocks bc it was too heavy. I just want them to commit

Ed Carson: Criminals just don’t “go to the mattresses” with the same conviction as in the past. No work ethic.

Shoshana Weissmann: IN MY DAY WE CARRIED STOLE MATTRESSES BOTH WAYS UP HILL TO SCHOOL IN THE SNOW.

My model is that what we need is catching them more often, and actually punishing thieves with jail time at all. We don’t need to ratchet it up so much as not do the not catch and if somehow catch then release strategy from New York and California.

How much tolerance should we have? Yet another study shows that we would be better off with less alcohol, here in the form of ‘Zero Tolerance’ laws that reduce youth binge drinking, finding dramatic effects on later life outcomes.

This paper provides the first long-run assessment of adolescent alcohol control policies on later-life health and labor market outcomes. Our analysis exploits cross-state variation in the rollout of “Zero Tolerance” (ZT) Laws, which set strict alcohol limits for drivers under age 21 and led to sharp reductions in youth binge drinking. We adopt a difference-in-differences approach that combines information on state and year of birth to identify individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence and tracks the evolving impacts into middle age.

We find that ZT Laws led to significant improvements in later-life health. Individuals exposed to the laws during adolescence were substantially less likely to suffer from cognitive and physical limitations in their 40s. The health effects are mirrored by improved labor market outcomes. These patterns cannot be attributed to changes in educational attainment or marriage. Instead, we find that affected cohorts were significantly less likely to drink heavily by middle age, suggesting an important role for adolescent initiation and habit-formation in affecting long-term substance use.

As usual, this does not prove that no drinking is superior to ‘responsible’ drinking. Also it does not prove that, if others around you drink, you don’t pay a high social tax for drinking less or not drinking at all. It does show that reducing drinking generally is good overall on the margin.

I continue to strongly think that the right amount of alcohol is zero. Drug prohibition won’t work for alcohol even more than it won’t work for other drugs, but alcohol is very clearly a terrible choice of drug even relative to its also terrible salient rivals.

Hackers crack millions of hotel room keycards. That is not good, but also did anyone think their hotel keycard meant their room was secure? I have assumed forever that if someone wants into your hotel room, there are ways available. But difficulty matters. I notice all the television programs where various people illustrate that at least until recently, standard physical locks on doors were trivially easy to get open through either lockpicking or brute force if someone cared. They still mostly work.

Court figures out that Craig Wright is not Satoshi and has perjured himself and offered forged documents. Patrick McKenzie suggests the next step is the destruction of his enterprises. I would prefer if the next step was fraud and perjury trials and prison? It seems like a serious failing of our society that someone can attempt a heist this big, get caught, and we don’t then think maybe throw the guy in jail?

Scott Sumner notes that we are seeing more overdose deaths in cocaine, not only in opioids. Thus, decriminalizing cocaine is not a reasonable response to Fentanyl. That is doubly true since the cocaine is often cut with Fentanyl. If you want to avoid that, you would need full legalization, so you had quality controls.

I never fully adjust to the idea that people have widely considered alcohol central to life, ubiquitous, the ancestor of civilization itself, at core of all social function, as Homer Simpson calls it ‘the cause of and solution to all life’s problems.’ People, in some times and places most people, do not know what to do with themselves other than drink and don’t consider themselves alcoholics.

Collin Rutherford (post has 1.2 million views): Do you know what a “bottle night” is?

Probably not, because my gf and I invented it during a 2023 blizzard in Buffalo, NY.

We lock our phones away, turn the TV off…

Each grab a bottle of wine, and talk.

That’s it, we simply talk and enjoy each other’s presence.

We live together, but it’s easy to miss out on “quality time”.

What do you think?

Do you have other methods for enjoying quality time with your partner?

O.J. Simpson never paid the civil judgment against him, while his Florida home and $400k a year in pensions were considered ‘protected.’ I do not understand this. I think debtor’s prison would in general be too harsh for those who did not kill anyone, but surely there is a middle ground where we do not let you keep your home and $400k a year?

Tenant law for those who are not actually legal tenants is completely insane.

At a minimum, it should only apply to tenants who were allowed to live there in the first place? You shouldn’t be able to move in, change the locks and then claim any sort of ‘rights’?

The latest concrete example of this madness is an owner being arrested in her own home when squatters called the police. Instead, obviously, the police should be arresting the squatters, at a minimum evicting them.

New York Post has an article about forums where squatters teach each other techniques by which to steal people’s houses, saying it is bad enough some people are afraid to take extended vacations.

Why is this hard? How can anyone possibly think squatting should get legal backing when the owner shows up 31 days after you try to steal their property, and you should have to provide utilities while they live rent free without permission on your property? Or that you should even, in some cases, let them take ownership?

If you illegally occupy someone else’s property and refuse to leave, and force that person to go to court or call the police, and it turns out you had no lease or agreement of any kind? That should be criminal, ideally a felony, and you should go to jail.

The idea that society has an interest in not letting real property stay idle and neglected, in some form, makes sense. Implementing it via ‘so let people steal it if you turn your back’ is insanity. Taxes on unoccupied land or houses (or all land or houses) are the obviously correct remedy here.

This is distinct from the question of how hard it should be to evict an actual tenant. If you signed a lease, it makes sense to force the landlord to take you to court, for you to be given some amount of time, and you should obviously not face any criminal penalties for making them do that. Here we can talk price.

Also I am confused why squatters rights are not a taking under the 5th amendment and thus blatantly unconstitutional?

Stories about El Salvador continue to be split between a media narrative of ‘it is so horrible how they are doing this crackdown on crime’ whereas every report I see from those with any relation to or stake in the country is ‘thank goodness we cracked down on all that crime.’

John Fetterman is strongly in this camp.

Senator John Fetterman (D-PA): Squatters have no rights. How can you even pretend that this is anything other than you’re just breaking the law?

It’s wild, that if you go away on a long trip, for 30 days, and someone breaks into your home and suddenly they have rights. This is crazy. Like if somebody stole your car, and then they held it for 30 days, then somehow you now have some rights?

Well said.

Sadanand Dhume: My Uber driver today was from El Salvador. He went back last year for a visit for the first time in 15 years. He could not stop raving about @nayibbukele. He said Bukele’s crackdown on crime has transformed the country. People feel secure for the first time. “They don’t have money, but they feel safe.”

My driver used a Mexican slang word, “chingon,” to describe Bukele. “He is the king of kings,” he said. “He’s a blessing for El Salvador.”

Crime that gets out of hand ruins everything. Making people feel safe transforms everything. Ordinary grounded people reliably, and I think quite correctly, are willing to put up with quite a lot, essentially whatever it takes, to get crime under control. Yes, the cure can be worse than the disease, if it causes descent into authoritarianism.

So what happened, and is likely to happen? From Matt Lakeman, an extensive history of El Salvador’s gangs, from their origins in Los Angeles to the later crackdown. At their peak they were two de facto governments, MS-13 and B-18, costing the economy $4 billion annually or 15% of GDP, despite only successfully extracting tens of millions. Much of what they successfully extracted was then spent for the purpose of fighting against and murdering each other for decades, with the origin of the conflict lost to history. The majority of the gang murders were still of civilians.

The majority of the total murders were still not by gang members and the murder rate did not peak when the gangs did, but these gangs killed a lot of people. Lakeman speculates that it was the very poverty and weakness of the gangs that made them so focused on their version of ‘honor,’ that I would prefer to call street cred or respect or fear (our generally seeing ‘honor’ as only the bad thing people can confuse for it is a very bad sign for our civilization, the actual real thing we used to and sometimes still call honor is good and vital), and thus so violent and dangerous.

There was a previous attempt at at least the appearance of a crackdown on gangs by the right-wing government in 2003. It turns out it is not hard to spot and arrest gang members when they have prominent tattoos announcing who they are. But the effort was not sustained, largely due to the judiciary not playing along. They tried again in 2006 without much success. Then the left-wing government tried to negotiate a three-way truce with both major gangs, which worked for a bit but then inevitably broke down while costing deary in government legitimacy.

Meanwhile, the criminal justice system seemed fully compromised, with only 1 in 20 prosecutions ending in conviction due to gang threats, but also we have the story that all major gang leaders always ended up in prison, which is weird, and the murder rate declined a lot in the 2010s. Over the 1992-2019 period, El Salvador had five presidents, the last four of whom got convicted of corruption without any compensating competence.

Then we get to current dictator Bukele Ortez. He rose to power, the story here goes, by repeatedly spending public funds on flashy tangible cool public goods to make people happy and build a reputation, and ran as a ‘truth-telling outsider’ with decidedly vague plans on all fronts. The best explanation Matt could find was that Bukele was a great campaigner, and I would add he was up against two deeply unpopular, incompetent and corrupt parties, how lucky, that never happens.

Then when the legislature didn’t cooperate, he tried a full ‘because of the implication’ by marching soldiers into the legislative chamber and saying it was in the hands of God and such, which I would fully count as an auto-coup. It didn’t work, but the people approved the breach of norms in the name of reform, so he knew the coast was clear. Yes, international critics and politicians complained, but so what? He won the next election decisively, and if you win one election in a democracy on the platform of ending liberal democracy, that’s usually it. He quickly replaced the courts. There is then an aside about the whole bitcoin thing.

The gangs then went on a murder spree to show him who was boss, and instead he suspended habeus corpus and showed them, tripling the size of the prison population to 1.7% of the country. While the murder rate wasn’t obviously falling faster than the counterfactual before that, now it clearly did unless the stats are fully faked (Matt thinks they are at least mostly real), from 18.17 in 2021 to 2.4 in 2023.

It is noteworthy that he had this supposed complex seven-step TCP plan (that may have laid key groundwork), then mostly threw that out the window in favor of a likely improvised plan of maximum police and arrests and no rights of any kind when things got real, and the maximum police plan worked. The gangs didn’t see it coming, they couldn’t handle the scope, the public was behind it so the effort stuck, and that was that. A clear case of More Dakka, it worked, everyone knew it and everyone loves him for it.

To do this, they have massively overloaded the prisons. But this might be a feature, not a bug, from their perspective. In El Salvador, as in the United States, the gangs ruled the old prisons, they were a source of strength for gangs rather than deterrence and removal. The new deeply horrible and overcrowded violations of the Geneva Conventions? That hits different.

The twin catches, of course, are that this all costs money El Salvador never had, and is a horrible violation of democratic norms, rule of law and human rights. A lot of innocent people got arrested and likely will languish for years in horrible conditions. Even the guilty are getting treated not great and denied due process.

Was it worth it? The man on the street says yes, as we saw earlier. The foreign commentators say no.

Have democracy and civil rights been dramatically violated? Oh yes, no one denies that. But you know what else prevents you from having a functional democracy, or from being able to enjoy civil rights? Criminal gangs that are effectively another government or faction fighting for control and that directly destroy 15% of GDP alongside a murder rate of one person in a thousand each year. I do not think the people who support Bukele are being swindled or fooled, and I do not think they are making a stupid mistake. I think no alternatives were presented, and if you are going to be governed by a gang no matter what and you have these three choices, then the official police gang sounds like the very clear first pick.

Letting ten guilty men go free to not convict one innocent man, even when you know the ten guilty men might kill again?

That is not a luxury nations can always afford.

Not that we hold ourselves to that principle all that well either.

Here is a ProPublica article that made the rounds this past month about prosecutors who call ‘experts’ to analyze 911 calls and declare that the word choice or tone means they are liars and therefore guilty of various crimes including murder.

The whole thing is quite obviously junk science. Totally bunk. That does not mean one can put zero Bayesian weight on the details of a 911 call in evaluating credibility and what may have happened. Surely there is information there. But this is often presented as a very different level of evidence than it could possibly be.

I do note that there seems to be an overstatement early, where is ays Russ Faria had spent three and a half years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, after he appealed, had his conviction thrown out, was retried without the bunk evidence and was acquitted. That is not how the system works. Russ Faria is legally not guilty, exactly because we do not know if he committed the murder. He was ‘wrongfully convicted’ in the sense that there was insufficient evidence, but not in the sense that we know he did not do it.

Similar, later in the article, they discuss the case of Riley Spitler. The article states that Riley is innocent and that he shot his older brother accidentally. But the article provides no evidence that establishes Riley’s innocence. Again, I can believe Riley was convicted based on bogus evidence, but that does not mean he did not do it. It means we do not know. If we had other proof he was innocent, the bogus evidence would presumably not have worked.

This is the mirror image of the Faria case then being prepared for a book promoting the very junk science that got thrown out.

Here is an example of how this works:

Well, yes. On the margin this is (weak) Bayesian evidence in some direction, probably towards him being more likely to be guilty. But this is something else.

The whole thing is made up, essentially out of whole cloth. Harpster, the man who created all this and charges handsomely for providing training in it, doesn’t have any obvious credentials. All replication attempts have failed, although I do not know that they even deserve the name ‘replication’ as it is not obvious he ever had statistical evidence to begin with.

Outside of law enforcement circles, Harpster is elusive. He tries to keep his methods secret and doesn’t let outsiders sit in on his classes or look at his data. “The more civilians who know about it,” he told me once, “the more who will try to get away with murder.”

It gets worse. He looked at 100 phone calls for patterns. He did a ‘study’ that the FBI sent around before it was peer reviewed. Every detail screams p-hacking, except without bothering with actual p-values. This was used at trials. Then in 2020 someone finally did a study, and found it all to be obvious nonsense that often had the sign of the impact wrong, and another study found the same in missing child cases.

They claim all this is highly convincing to juries:

“Juries love it, it’s easy for them to understand,” Harpster once explained to a prosecutor, “unlike DNA which puts them to sleep.”

I wonder what makes this convincing to a jury. If you told me that I should convict someone of murder or anything else based on this type of flim-flam, I cannot imagine going along with that. Not because I have a keen eye for scientific rigor, but because the whole thing is obvious nonsense. It defies common sense. Yet I suppose people think like this all the time in matters great and small, that people ‘sound wrong’ or that something doesn’t add up, and thus they must be guilty?

Then there is this, I get that we need to work via precedent but come on, shouldn’t that have to come at least at the appellate level to bind?

Junk science can catch fire in the legal system once so-called experts are allowed to take the stand in a single trial. Prosecutors and judges in future cases cite the previous appearance as precedent. But 911 call analysis was vexing because it didn’t look like Harpster had ever actually testified.

…

[Hapster] claims that 1 in 3 people who call 911 to report a death are actually murderers.

…

His methods have now surfaced in at least 26 states, where many students embrace him like an oracle.

..

“If this were to get out,” Salerno said, “I feel like no one would ever call 911 again.”

Yeah. You don’t say?

And it’s not only 911 science.

Kelsey Piper: I was haunted by this ProPublica story about how nonsensical analysis of 911 calls is used to convict people of killing their kids. I mentioned it to a friend with more knowledge of criminal justice. “Oh,” she said casually, “all of forensics is like that”

This was @clarabcollier, who then told me dozens of more depressing examples. It seems like each specific junk science gets eventually refuted but the general process that produced them all continues at full speed.

Will MaCaskill went on the Sam Harris podcast to discuss SBF and effective altruism. If Reddit is any indication, listeners did not take kindly to the story he offered.

Here are the top five base comments in order, the third edited for length:

ballysham: Listening to these two running pr for sam bankman fried is infuriating. He should have coffezilla on.

robej78: I expect excuse making from the parents of a spoiled brat, don’t have sympathy for it but I understand it.

This was an embarrassing listen though, sounded desperate and delusional, very similar to trump defenders.

deco19: The absolute ignorance on the various interviews SBF did in the time after being exposed where SBF literally put all his reasoning and views on the table. And we hear this hand-wringing response deliberating why he did this for months on end according to McCaskill.

Novogobo: Sam draws a ethical distinction between merely stealing from customers vs making bets with their money without their consent or knowledge with the intention of paying them back if you win and pocketing the gain. He just lamented that Coleman was surrounded by people on the view who were ethically deranged. THAT’S JUST STEALING WITH EXTRA STEPS!

He laments that sbf was punished too harshly, but that’s exactly the sort of behavior that has to be discouraged in the financial industry.

It’s like defending rapists who eat pussy. “Oh well it’s obvious that he intended for her to enjoy it.”

picturethisyall: McCaskill completely ignored or missed the countless pump n dumps and other fraudulent activities SBF was engaged in from Day 1. NYTimes gift article with some details.

It… doesn’t get kinder after that. Here’s the one that Sam Atis highlighted that drew my attention to the podcast.

stellar678: I’ve listened to the podcast occasionally for several years now but I’ve never sought out this subreddit before. Today though – wow, I had to make sure I wasn’t the only one whose jaw was on the floor listening to the verbal gymnastics these two went through to create moral space for SBF and the others who committed fraud at FTX.

Honestly it makes me uneasy about all the other podcast episodes where I feel more credulous about the topics and positions discussed.

Edit to say: The FTX fallout definitely tainted my feelings about Effective Altruism, but MaCaskill’s performance here made it a lot worse rather than improving things.

This caused me to listen as well. I cannot argue with the above reactions. It was a dreadful podcast both in terms of how it sounded, and in terms of what it was. This was clearly not a best attempt to understand what happened, this was an attempt to distance from, bury and excuse it. Will has clearly not reckoned with (or is pretending not to have reckoned with) the degree of fraud and theft that was baked into Alameda and FTX from the beginning. They both are not willing to face up to what centrally happened, and are essentially presenting SBF’s story that unwise bets were placed without permission by people who were in over their heads with good intentions. No.

The other failure is what they do not discuss at all. There is no talk about what others including Will (who I agree would not have wanted SBF to do what he did but who I think directly caused SBF to do it in ways that were systematically predictable, as I discuss in my review of Going Infinite) did to cause these events. Or what caused the community to generally support those efforts, or what caused the broader community not to realize that something was wrong despite many people realizing something was wrong and saying so. The right questions have mostly not been asked.

There has still been no systematic fact-finding investigation among Effective Altruists into how they acted with respect to SBF and FTX, in the wake of the collapse of FTX. In particular, there was no systematic look into why, despite lots of very clear fire alarms that SBF and FTX were fishy and shady as all hell and up to no good, word of that never got to where it needed to go. Why didn’t it, and why don’t we know why it didn’t?

This is distinct from the question of what was up with SBF and FTX themselves, where I do think we have reasonably good answers.

Someone involved in the response gave their take to Rob Bensinger. The explanation is a rather standard set of excuses for not wanting to make all this known and legible, for legal and other reasons, or for why making this known and legible would be hard and everyone was busy.

This Includes the claim that a lot of top EA leaders ‘think we know what happened.’ Well, if they know, then they should tell us, because I do not know. I mean, I can guess, but they are not going to like my guess. There is the claim that none of this is about protecting EA’s reputation, you can decide whether that claim is credible.

In better altruism news, new cause area? In Bangladesh, they got people with poor vision new pairs of glasses, so that glasses wearing was 88.3% in the treatment group versus 7.8% in the control group (~80% difference) and this resulted after eight months in $47.1/month income versus $35.3/month, a 33% difference (so 40% treatment impact) and also enough to pay for the glasses. That is huge, and makes sense, and is presumably a pure win.

Generous $1 billion gift from Dr. Ruth Gottesman allows a Bronx Medical School, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, to go tuition-free. She even had to be talked into letting her name be known. Thank you. To all those who centrally reacted negatively on the basis that the money could have been more efficiently given away or some other cause deserved it more? You are doing it wrong. Present the opportunity, honor the mensch.

Also seems like a good time to do a periodic reminder that we do not offer enough residency slots. Lots of qualified people want to be doctors on the margin, cannot become doctors because there is a cap on residency slots, and therefore we do not have enough doctors and healthcare is expensive and rushed and much worse than it could be. A gift that was used to enable that process, or that expanded the number of slots available, would plausibly be a very good use of funds.

Alas, this was not that, and will not solve any bottlenecks.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Actually, more tragic than that. The donation is clearly intended to give more people access to healthcare by creating more doctors. But the actual bottleneck is on residencies, centrally controlled and choked. So this well-intended altruism will only benefit a few med students.

So basically, at worst, be this way for different donation choices:

Here is some good advice for billionaires:

Marko Jukic: The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.

Billionaires are poor.

Having more money doesn’t make you wealthier or more powerful.

Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas.

Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an influencer.

My advice to billionaires:

Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book.

Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.

If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end.

If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.

The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn’t take a genius of political economy to see this coming.

The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.

One should of course also invest to make more money. Especially one must keep in mind what incentives one creates in others. But the whole point of having that kind of money is to be able to spend it, and to spend it to make things happen that would not otherwise happen, that you want.

Funding people to do cool things that don’t have obvious revenue mechanisms, being a modern day patron, whether or not it fits anyone’s pattern of charity, should be near the top of your list. Find the cool things you want, and make them happen. Some of them should be purely ‘I want this to exist’ with no greater aims at all.

I have indeed found billionaires to be remarkably powerless to get the changes they want to see in the world, due to various social constraints, the fear of how incentives would get distorted and the inability to know how to deploy their money effectively, among other reasons. So much more could be accomplished.

Not that you should give me billions of dollars to find out if I can back that up, but I would be happy to give it my best shot.

Xomedia does a deep dive into new email deliverability requirements adapted by Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail. The biggest effective change is a requirement for a one-click visible unsubscribe button, which takes effect for Gmail on June 1. Seems great.

“A bulk sender is any email sender that sends close to 5,000 messages or more to personal Gmail accounts within a 24-hour period. Messages sent from the same primary domain count toward the 5,000 limit.”

…

April 2024: Google will start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant email traffic, and will gradually increase the rejection rate. For example, if 75% of a sender‘s traffic meets requirements, Google will start rejecting a percentage of the remaining 25% of traffic that isn’t compliant.

June 1, 2024: Bulk senders must implement a clearly visible one-click unsubscribe in the body of the email message for all commercial and promotional messages.

…

Engagement: Avoid misleading subject lines, excessive personalization, or promotional content that triggers spam filters. Focus on providing relevant and valuable information when considering email content.

• Keep your email spam rate is less than 0.3%.

• Don’t impersonate email ‘From:’ headers.

• [bunch of other stuff]

Terraform Industries claims they can use electricity and air to create carbon neutral natural gas. This in theory allows solar power to be stored and transported.

First, our innovative electrolyzer converts cheap solar power into hydrogen with current production costs at less than $2.50 per kg of H2.

…

Second, the proprietary direct air capture (DAC) system concentrates CO2 in the atmosphere today for less than $250 per ton.

…

Finally, our in-house multistage Sabatier chemical reactor ingests hydrogen and CO2, producing pipeline grade natural gas, which is >97% methane (CH4).

Normally Google products slowly get worse so we note Chana noticing that Google Docs have improved their comment search and interaction handling, although I have noticed that comment-heavy documents now make it very difficult to navigate properly, and they should work on that. She also notes the unsubscribe button next to the email address when you open a mass-sent email, which is appreciated.

If I ever did go on Hills I’d Die On, and was getting properly into the spirit of it, this is a top candidate for that hill.

Sriram Krishnan: This is worthy of a debate.

Gaut is Doing Nothing: The most productive setup is 9 here. Change my mind.

Sriram Krishnan: 9. but my current setup is actually two separate machines next to each other with two keyboards so not represented here.

The correct answer is 8, except for a few places like trading where it is 6. You need a real keyboard and mouse, you real space to put the various things, and some things need big monitors. Lack of screen space kills productivity.

People very much disagree about this.

The ensuing debate did convince me that there is more room for flexibility for different people to benefit from different setups.

Where I stand extra firm are two things:

1. It is worth investing in the right setup. So the 25% of people who agree with my preference but don’t have the setup? Fix it, especially if on a laptop now.

2. Laptop only is a huge mistake, as people mostly agreed.

I can see doing 2, 3 or 4 with truly epic monitor size, although if you have the budget and space they seem strictly worse. For 2 in particular, even if it is an epic monitor you want the ability to full screen and still have other space.

When I try working on a laptop, my productivity drops on the order of 50%. It is shockingly terrible, so much so that beyond checking email I no longer even try.

This section accidentally got left out of March, but figured I’d still include it. At this point, the overall verdict is clearly in that the Apple Vision Pro is not ready for prime time, and we should all at least wait a generation. I still wonder.

Kuo says Apple Vision Pro major upgrades unlikely until 2027, with focus on reducing costs rather than improving user experience. That makes ‘buy it now’ a lot more attractive if you want to be in on this. I do plan to buy one, but I want to do so in a window where I will get to fly with it during the two-week return window, since that will be the biggest test, although I do have several other use cases in mind.

The first actual upgrade is here, we have ‘spatial personas.’ It is definitely a little creepy, but you probably get used to it. Still a long way to go.

Garry Tan says Apple Vision Pro really is about productivity. I remain skeptical.

Alexandr Wang (CEO Scale AI): waited until a long business trip to try it out—

the Apple Vision Pro on a plane / while traveling is ridiculously good—

especially for working basically a gigantic monitor anywhere you go (plane, hotel, everywhere) double your productivity everywhere you go.

Not having a big monitor is really bad for your productivity. I’d also need a MacBook, mouse and some keyboard, but it does not take that many days of this to pay for itself even at a high price point.

Will Eden offers his notes;

Will Eden: Notes on the Apple Vision Pro

-eyes look weird but does make it feel like they’re more “present”

-it is quite heavy :-/

-passthrough is grainy, display is sharp

-definitely works as a BIG screen

-hand gestures are slightly finicky

Overall I don’t want one or think I’d use it… …on the flip side, the Quest 3 felt more comfortable and close to equivalent. Slight drawback is I could see the edges in my peripheral vision

I still don’t think I’d use it for anything other than gaming, maaaybe solo movies/TV if comfortable enough.

It’ll certainly improve, though the price point is brutal and probably only comes partially down – the question is whether it has a use case that justifies that price, especially when the Quest 3 is just $500.

Lazar Radic looks at the antitrust case against Apple and sees an increasing disconnection of antitrust action from common sense and reality. Edited for length.

It certainly seems like the core case being made is quite the overreach.

Lazar Radic: The DOJ complaint against Apple filed yesterday has led me to think, once again, about the increasing chasm that exists between antitrust theory and basic common sense & logic. I think this dissonance is getting worse and worse, to the point of mutual exclusion.

…

What worries me aren’t a couple of contrived cases brought by unhinged regulators at either side of the Atlantic, but that this marks a much broader move towards a centrally-administered economy where choices are made by anointed regulators, rather than by consumers.

…

Take this case. A lot of it doesn’t make sense to me not only as an antitrust, but as a layperson. For starters, why would the iPhone even have to be compatible with third-party products or ensure that their functionality is up to any standard – let alone the *highest*?

If I opened a chain or restaurants that became the most popular in the world and everybody only wanted to eat there, would I then have a duty to sell competitors’ food and drinks so as to not “exclude” them? Would I have to serve the DOJ’s favorite dishes?

And, to be clear, I am aware that the DOJ is saying that Apple is maintaining its iPhone market position thanks to anticompetitive practices but, quite frankly, discounting the possibility that users simply PREFER the iPhone in this day & age is ludicrous to me.

…

But in the real world, there exists no legal obligation to be productive or to use one’s resources efficiently. People aren’t punished for being idle. Yet a private company *harmsus when it doesn’t design its products the way public authorities thinks is BEST?

…

Would X be better if the length of all tweets was uncapped? Would McDonald’s be better if it also sold BK’s most popular products – like the Whopper? Would the Playstation be better if it also had Xbox, Nintendo and PC games? I don’t know, maybe. Does it matter?

The magic of antitrust, of course, is that if one can somehow connect these theoretical shortcomings to market power — no matter how tenuously — all of a sudden, one has a blockbuster case against an evil monopolist & is on the right side of history.

I am not a fan of the iPhone, the Apple ecosystem or Apple’s aggressive exclusivity on its devices. But you know what I do in response? I decline to buy their products. I have an Android phone, a Windows computer and for now no headset or watch. There is no issue. Apple is not a monopolist.

It seems crazy to say that Apple is succeeding due to the anticompetitive practice of not allowing people into the Apple store. If this is causing them to succeed more, it is not anticompetitive, it is highly competitive. If this is causing them to succeed less, then they are paying the price.

However, that does not mean that Apple is not abusing its monopoly position to collect rents or leverage its way into other businesses in violation of antitrust law. That is entirely compatible with Apple’s core ecosystem can be superior because it builds better products, and also they can be abusing that position. And that can be largely distinct from the top complaints made by a government that has little clue about the actual situation.

Indeed, that is my understanding of the situation.

Ben Thompson breaks down many reasons others are rather upset with Apple.

Apple wants a huge cut of everything any app maker makes, including on the web, and is willing to use its leverage to get it, forcing Epic and others to sue.

Ben Thompson (June 2020): I have now heard from multiple developers, both big and small, that over the last few months Apple has been refusing to update their app unless their SaaS service adds in-app purchase. If this has happened to you please email me blog @ my site domain. 100% off the record.

Multiple emails, several of which will only communicate via Signal. I’m of course happy to do that, but also think it is striking just how scary it is to even talk about the App Store.

We have now moved into the “genuinely sad” part of this saga where I am learning about apps that have been in the store for years serving the most niche of audiences being held up for what, a few hundred dollars a month?

Ben Thompson (2024): That same month Apple announced App Tracking Transparency, a thinly veiled attempt to displace Facebook’s role in customer acquisition for apps; some of the App Tracking Transparency changes had defensible privacy justifications (albeit overstated), but it was hard to not notice that Apple wasn’t holding itself to the same rules, very much to its own benefit.

…

The 11th count that Epic prevailed on required Apple to allow developers to steer users to a website to make a purchase; while its implementation was delayed while both parties filed appeals, the lawsuit reached the end of the road last week when the Supreme Court denied certiorari. That meant that Apple had to allow steering, and the company did so in the most restrictive way possible: developers had to use an Apple-granted entitlement to put a link on one screen of their app, and pay Apple 27% of any conversions that happened on the developer’s website within 7 days of clicking said link.

Many developers were outraged, but the company’s tactics were exactly what I expected…Apple has shown, again and again and again, that it is only going to give up App Store revenue kicking-and-screaming; indeed, the company has actually gone the other way, particularly with its crackdown over the last few years on apps that only sold subscriptions on the web (and didn’t include an in-app purchase as well). This is who Apple is, at least when it comes to the App Store.

This is not the kind of behavior you engage in if you do not want to get sued for antitrust violations. It also is not, as Ben notes, pertinent to the case actually brought.

Apple does seem to have taken things too far with carmakers as well?

Gergely Orosz: So THIS is why GM said it will no longer support Apple CarPlay from 2026?! And build their own Android experience. Because they don’t want Apple to take over all the car’s screens as Apple demands it does so.

“Apple has told automakers that the next generation of Apple CarPlay will take over all of the screens, sensors, and gauges in a car, forcing users to experience driving as an iPhone-centric experience if they want to use any of the features provided by CarPlay. Here too, Apple leverages its iPhone user base to exert more power over its trading partners, including American carmakers, in future innovation.”

A friend in the car industry said that the next version of Car Play *supposedlywanted access to all sensory data. Their company worries Apple collects this otherwise private data to build their own car – then put them out of business. And how CarPlay is this “Trojan horse.”

Even assuming Apple has no intention of building a car, taking over the entire car to let users integrate their cell phone is kind of crazy. It seems like exactly the kind of leveraging of a monopoly that antitrust is designed to prevent, and also you want to transform the entire interface for using a car? Makes me want to ensure my car has as any physical knobs on it as possible. Then again, I also want my television to have them.

Instead, what is the DOJ case about?

1. Apple suppresses ‘Super Apps’ meaning apps with mini-apps within them. As Ben points out, this would break the rule that you install things through Apple.

2. Apple suppresses ‘Cloud Streaming Game Apps,’ requiring each game to be its own app. Ben finds this argument strong, and notes Apple is compromising on it, so long as you can buy the service in-app.

3. Apple forces Androids to use green bubbles in iMessage by not building an Android client for it, basically? I agree with Ben, this claim is the dumbest one.

4. Apple doesn’t fully integrate third-party watches and open up all its tech to outsiders.

5. Apple is not allowing third-party digital wallets. Which DOJ bizarrely claims will create prohibitive phone switching costs.

I can see the case for #1, #2 and #5 if I squint. I find Apple’s behavior to make perfect sense in these cases, and see all of this as weaksauce, but can see why it might be objectionable and requiring adjustments on the margin. I find #3 and #4 profoundly stupid.

Ben thinks that the primary motivation for the lawsuit is the App Store and its 30% tax and the enforcement thereof, especially its anti-steering-to-websites stance. And that as a result, they face a technically unrelated lawsuit that threatens Apple’s core value propositions, because DOJ does not understand how any of this works. I am inclined to agree.

Ben thinks this is a mistake. But Apple makes so much money from this, in an equilibrium that could prove fragile if disrupted, that I can see it being worth all the costs and risks they are running. Nothing lasts forever.

Too… many… bills!

Jess Miers: CA lawmakers bristle at opposition to their bills unless you’ve met with every involved office + consultant. Yet, they continuously flood the zone with harmful bills.

The “kiss the ring” protocol enables CA lawmakers to steamroll over our rights without considering pushback.

If you’re spending more time as a policymaker imagining clever schemes to sneak your bills into law instead of working w/experts and constituents to craft something better, you’re bad at your job and should probably find something else to do that doesn’t waste taxpayer dollars.🤷🏻‍♀️

We’re tracking ~100 unconstitutional / harmful bills in the CA Leg rn. If we had to meet with every staffer involved w/each bill *beforeregistering our opposition, we’d miss numerous bills solely due to impossible deadline constraints.

To CA, that’s a feature, not a bug.

I asked her how to tell which bills might actually pass and that we might want to pay attention to, since most bills introduced reliably go nowhere. I hear a lot of crying of wolf from the usual suspects about unconstitutional and terrible bills. Most of the time the bills do indeed seem unconstitutional and terrible, even though the AI bill objections and close reading of other tech bills often give me Gell-Mann Amnesia.

But we do not have time for every bad bill. So again, watchdogs doing the Lord’s work, please help us know when we should actually care.

Accusation that Facebook did a man-in-the-middle attack using their VPN service to steal data from other apps?

Instagram seems to be doing well.

Tanay Jaipuria: Instagram revenue was just disclosed for the first time in court filings.

2018: $11.3B

2019: $17.9B

2020: $22.0B

2021: $32.4B

It makes more in ad revenue than YouTube (and likely at much higher gross margins!)

It is crazy to think things like this are exploding in size in the background, in ways I never notice at all. Instagram has never appealed to me, and to the extent I see use cases it seems net harmful.

Twitter use is down more than 20% in the USA since November 2022 and 15% worldwide, far more than its major rivals. Those rivals are sites like Facebook and Instagram, and very much not clones like Threads or BlueSky, which are getting very little traction.

For now Twitter is still the place that matters, but that won’t last forever if this trend continues.

Brandon Bradford: Spend at least 25% of your online time off of Twitter, and you’ll realize that the outrage here has a tinier and tinier influence by the day. Super users are more involved but everyone else is logging in less often.

Noah Smith: This is true. This platform is designed to concentrate power users and have us talk to each other, so we power users don’t always feel it when the broader user base shrinks. But it is shrinking.

Julie Fredrickson: Agreed. The only platform that still has people with real power paying attention to power users is Twitter. None of the media platforms have managed to break away from their inherent worldview concentration (NYP vs NYT) so we have no replacement for the thinking man yet.

It’s my general belief that the extremists misjudge who has power here, and in trying to listen to all perspectives, we only entrench the horseshoe theory people.

Twitter has several mechanisms of action. Outrage or piling on was always the most famous one, but was always one of many. The impact of such outrage mobs is clearly way down. That is a good thing. The impact of having actually reasonable conversations also seems to be down, but it is down much less.

How much does YouTube pay creators? Here’s a concrete example (link to her YT). Her videos are largely about covering the aftermath of FTX.

So for 10,000 hours of watch time she got $400, or 4 cents per hour, alternatively 0.4 cents per view. That seems like a very difficult way to make a living.

What about her numbers on Twitter? She has 116k followers, but she punches way above that. Her view counts are often in the high six figures, and she posts frequently including the same videos. So I do not think this reflects that different a payment scheme, it reflects that she has much better reach on Twitter. Twitter also seems like a very difficult way to make a living.

Uri Berliner, 25 year veteran of NPR and classic NPR style person, says NPR lost its way after Trump won the 2016 election, then doubled down after 2020. Eyes Lasho here offers some highlights.

St. Rev Dr. Rev: As a former NPR listener, it’s interesting to read someone on the inside talk about what the hell happened to it. The real meat doesn’t come until halfway through the article, though. Short version: it was malice from the top, not stupidity.

Assuming the story is remotely accurate, major thanks to Uri Berliner for writing this. This was very much not a free action, and it took guts.

I believe it is, because the story matches my observations as a former listener. As Ross Douthat says, if you have listened to NPR in the past five years, you know, and the massive audience tilt to the far-left is unsurprising.

My family listened to NPR all the time growing up, and I continued to rely on them as a main news source for a long time. ‘Listen to the news’ meant NPR.

The first phase, that started in 2017, was annoying but tolerable. Yes, NPR was clearly taking a side on some of the standard side-taking stories, like Trump and Russia or Biden and the laptop or Covid origins, the examples used here.

But that did not in practice interfere much with the news, and was easy to correct for. I think leading with that kind of ‘red meat for the base’ misses what matters.

The second phase, that seemed to explode in intensity in 2020, was different. It was one thing for NPR to take a relatively left-wing perspective on the events it was covering, or even to lean somewhat more into that. That is mostly fine. I know how to correct for that perspective. But in 2020, two things changed.

The perspective completed its shift from moderate nerdy left-wing ‘traditional NPR’ perspective to a much farther left perspective.

And also they let that perspective entirely drive what they considered news, or what they considered worth covering in any non-news way as well. Every single story, every single episode of every show, even shows that were not political or news in any way, would tie into the same set of things.

I still listen to Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, but in practice I have otherwise entirely abandoned NPR. My wife will still put it on when she wants to listen to news because radio news is to my knowledge a wasteland with nothing better, and the running joke is if I walk in the story is going to somehow be intersectional every single time.

Could they turn this around? I think absolutely, there is still a lot of great talent and lots of goodwill and organizational capacity. All need not be lost.

They recently gave the new CEO position to Katherine Maher. While I see why some are rushing to conclusions based on what she posted in 2020, I checked her Wikipedia page and her Twitter feed for the last few years, and if you don’t look back at 2020 it seems like the timeline of a reasonable person. So we shall see.

While some complain it is too violent and bloody, Netflix’s adaptation of The Three Body Problem is understating the depths of the Cultural Revolution.

I have also been told it also flinches away from the harsh game theoretic worldview of the books later on, which would be a shame. The books seem unfilmable in other ways, but if you are not going to attempt to do the thing, then why bother?

Thus, I have not watched so far, although I probably will eventually. You can also read my old extensive book review of the series here.

Liz Miele’s new comedy special Murder Sheets is out. I was there for the taping and had a great time. Someone get her a Netflix special.

Scott Sumner’s 2024 Q1 movie reviews. As usual, he is always right, yet I will not see these movies.

Margot Robbie to produce the only movie based on the board game Monopoly.

Culture matters, and television shows can have real cultural impacts. The classic example cited is 16 & Pregnant, which reduced teen births 4.3% in its first 18 months after airing, and Haus Cole cites Come With Me as inspiring a nine-fold increase (too 840k) in enrollment in adult literacy courses.

Random Lurker: Perhaps 36 & Can’t Get Pregnant could be a winner in our baby bust times. Show couples in their thirties and forties going through fertility struggles with realistic numbers on how many succeed and discussing how they got to this place.

One does not want to mandate the cultural content of media, but we should presumably still keep it in mind, especially when recommending things or letting our children watch them, or deciding what to reward with our dollars.

Coin flips are 51% to land on the side they start on, and appear to be exactly 50% when starting on a random side for all coins tested. I agree with the commenter that the method here, which involves catching the coin in midair, is not good form.

Michael Flores on agency in Magic.

Reid Duke on basics of protecting yourself against cheaters in Magic.

Paulo Vitor Damo da Rose reminds us, in Magic, never give your opponents a choice. If they gave you a choice but didn’t have to, be deeply suspicious. As he notes, at sufficiently low levels of play this stops applying. But if the players are good, yes. Same thing is true of other types of opponent, playing other games.

How to flip a Chaos Orb like a boss.

Should you play the ‘best deck’ or the one you know best? Paulo goes over some of the factors. You care about what you will win with, not what is best in the abstract, and you only have so much time which also might be split if there are multiple formats. So know thyself, and often it is best to lock in early on something you can master, as long as it is still competitive. If broken deck is broken, so be it. Otherwise, knowing how to sideboard well and play at the top level is worth a lot. Such costs are higher and margins are bigger for more complex decks, lower for easier ones, adjust accordingly. And of course, if you have goals for the event beyond winning it, don’t forget those. Try to play a variety of decks.

For limited, Paulo likes to remain open and take what comes, but notices some people like to focus on a couple of strategies. I was very much a focused drafter. If you are a true draft master, up against other strong players who know the format well, with unlimited time to prepare, you usually want to be open to anything. In today’s higher stakes tournaments, however, time is at a premium for everyone, and you don’t have the time to get familiar with all strategies, your time is trading off with constructed, and your opponents will be predictably biased. It isn’t like an old school full-limited tournament with lots of practice time.

So yes, you want to be flexible, and you want to get as much skill as possible everywhere and know the basics of all strategies. But I say you should mostly know what you want as your A plan and your B plan, and bias yourself pretty strongly. I’ve definitely been burned by this, either because I had a weird or uncooperative seat or I’ve guessed wrong. But also I’ve been highly rewarded for it many other times. Remember that variance is your friend.

Paulo covers a lot, but I think there are a few key considerations he did not mention.

The first key thing is that there is more to Magic than winning or prizes. What will you enjoy playing and practicing? What do you want to remember yourself having played? What story do you want to experience and tell? What history do you want to make?

Sometimes this matters a lot. I am remarkably happy that I won a Grand Prix with TurboLand, a deck I love and that I’d worked on for years. I’d take that win over two Grand Prix wins with stock decks. Plus, if you enjoy the process and have strong motivation throughout, you will have better practice, and play better too.

Don’t let anyone tell you that stuff does not matter.

The second key thing is that your goal is to win the tournament, or at minimum to reach the thresholds for prize money and qualification.

Thus, if you are choosing the deck you will be playing in the elimination rounds and down the stretch when the stakes are highest, you need to pick a deck that could be capable, in your hands, of winning those rounds.

If you cannot win against the best players, playing the best decks that will emerge from the field, your ability to crush weaker opponents matters little. So you have to ask what decks will emerge, and what they look like when played by the best.

You will have model uncertainty over the metagame, and over which decks are good, and how good you are, in addition to your luck in the games. You want to ask, if things break your way, will you then be able to take advantage?

If you are considering playing the best deck, the popular deck, will you be able to win the mirror match against top opposition all that often? Or will you be at a critical disadvantage there? Can you learn how to be at least okay here, despite everyone else trying to do this as well? Which of your plans, in what matchups, still work when everyone makes all the right moves?

The nightmare is you get into a bunch of grindy games with lots of complex decisions strung together, in places you do not understand, against opponents a cut or two above anything you had available to practice against. Suddenly you could be an extremely large underdog in what should be close to a 50/50 matchup.

When in doubt, on the margin, when what you care about is winning, I think going in with a deck you know inside and out, and can play like a champion, is underrated.

Following up from last month’s map about the lottery, here is lottery sales versus income by zip code.

Justin Wolfers: “In the poorest 1% of zip codes that have lottery retailers, the average American adult spends around $600 a year, or nearly 5% of their income, on tickets. That compares with just $150, or 0.15%, for those in the richest 1% of zip codes.”

A full 5% of income on lottery tickets for an entire zip code is pretty crazy.

I played the Tier 3 game Luck Be a Landlord, the game that helped inspire Balatro. You can see why right away, from the art style to the score progression requirement to the mix of small randomness that mostly evens out and the big randomness that there are a few key things you need to find. The settings let you crank up the speed a lot, which I appreciated, I hope Balatro fully offers that soon. The core game is that you have a slot machine, you add symbols after each spin, and you need progressively higher returns to survive. There’s definitely fun here. I liked that it had unique flavor, although I, shall we say, do not share the game’s view of morality.

The core weakness is lack of balance. The biggest issue is lack of support for a diversity of strategies. The cool mechanic for variety is that you have to take something from early picks to fill out your slots, and the idea is then you will have reason to build on them. The problem is that too many of the strategies available are not sufficiently supported even with an early entry, do not scale properly, take up too many inventory slots or all three. All the mechanics are linear, it is a slot machine after all, if you want to win on higher difficulty levels you need to go all-in on something.

In some early games, I got wins with several cool themes that then proved insufficiently supported at higher difficulty levels. I’d keep trying to make them happen, mostly they wouldn’t, sometimes I’d bail and sometimes it would kill me, until I learned to stop trying even when I got key help early.

So the percentage play is to almost always go for [dominant strategy] and hope you find support, and using other things to stay alive in the meantime without taking up too many slots. Often you have to say ‘whelp, I suppose I need X, hope it shows up soon.’ Balatro is all about finding the good jokers, and Luck Be a Landlord is all about finding key broken symbols and items and that you get the commons you need to make your play work.

Thus, I am sad about the more interesting potential game this could have been, and perhaps still could be if you made a mod for it to make different approaches viable.

The other big flaw is that the difficulty is in the wrong places. The first few games are solid. Then you learn how to scale, and the second half of most runs becomes trivial, you pass some point and you know you’ve won. Slowly, the game introduces difficulty at the end of the game, where you get put to a final test.

That test starts out ludicrously easy. It slowly gets harder, but even so I never actually lost to it, and it never felt at all close. Sure, I died plenty in the first 25%-50% of runs because I didn’t get my thing going. But once I had enough to survive the third quarter, the rest was always fine – you have 12 thresholds followed by the test, and I am pretty sure that all 20 times I passed threshold nine I won the run.

I do not think this is because I focused too much on scaling, because you need to scale enough to get through thresholds six to nine. It was that once you did that, you won.

Nate Silver proposes an MLB realignment plan, and it is very good. My only objection is that Participation Trophy Divisions of four teams remain stupid, as is a 12 team playoff, no matter how much leagues like such things, so I’d strongly prefer the version with 4 divisions of 8 teams each and as small a playoff as people would accept. But if we are stuck with 12 playoff teams, then yeah, Nate’s plan seems right. As a Mets fan, it will be weird to lose the Braves as a rival, but also it is weird to have them as a rival in the first place.

Owner of the Oakland Athletics, whose history of refusing to spend money knows few bounds, uprooted the team for next season to a minor league stadium in Sacramento rather than sign a new lease in Oakland, ahead of an anticipated move to Las Vegas and a new subsidized stadium. And now the Las Vegas voters look poised to reject the stadium deal.

I do see an argument that the current stadium needed an upgrade. I do not know why taxpayers should pay for that, especially given the way this team has been managed.

Do you want to watch baseball? They are not making this easy.

Sultan of Clout: OTD: The Chicago White Sox game was BLACKED OUT AT The White Sox Game.

DTreftz: At the royals Sox game tonight, the game also was blacked out lol.

Meanwhile, I had to move from YouTubeTV, which no longer offers SNY and thus the Mets, to Hulu, pay $80 a month, and navigate through a rather terrible new set of menus to see a team that is not exactly justifying my efforts.

Joe Nocera at The Free Press joins the chorus saying gambling is ruining sports, citing several scandals involving players. I do not think that is a strong argument. Ben Krauss at Slow Boring addresses the same problems, and (I think correctly) dismisses the gambling by players to focus on fans. Yes, we will occasionally see players get into trouble, but these incidents are a far cry from the Black Sox. History shows us via soccer that the national character determines how bad this gets, and America should be fine, especially for team sports. Tennis has had scandals that seemed much worse, and yet it doesn’t much impact the fan experience.

Also remember that for example Shohei Otani, to the extent he or his translator gambled, did so in illegal fashion, not through the newly legalized sportsbooks, and that both of them are culturally not American.

To Ben, the biggest issue is that betting is too accessible and proximate. He proposes we go back to the brick and mortar principle. If you want to gamble on sports, you should have to at least go to a liscenced bar or restaurant, introducing friction, making it more social and creating a ritual. It shouldn’t be automatic.

I can definitely get behind this idea. A lot of people cannot handle the constant availability, at home no one is there to help them or notice a problem. And I see no reason we should want the profits to be flowing to online apps instead of helping support local businesses.

A minimal version of this is to ban the apps. You can have a website, and people can navigate there, that works fine, but we are not going to give you an icon on the home screen to click on.

I also am down for saying that the advertising and promotion is out of control. It is tricky to draw the line, because I think that talking about games in the context of the odds is good and fun and informative, but we would benefit if there was a line and Barkley wasn’t talking about ‘can’t miss parlays’ constantly and nothing was ‘sponsored by FanDuel.’

Then he loses me.

Ben Krauss: While gambling winnings are currently subject to taxes ranging from 10% to 37%, and sportsbooks pay a small federal excise tax of 0.25%, gamblers don’t face a noticeable tax that is directly levied on their actual wager. That means there is a real opportunity to try to reduce gambling activity through federal, and entirely constitutional, tax policy.

That’s Reform #2: A federal tax on every bet that progressively increases as gamblers reach higher levels of wagering in a calendar year.

Notice how different are those two numbers. A tax on net gambling winnings is survivable even if it is large, so long as you wager in steady fashion. Most gamblers who wager more than a handful of times will net lose and owe nothing. Mostly the professional gamblers pay what is essentially income tax, same as everywhere else, and 10%-37% on net winnings is going to be a very small percentage of the total amount bet – if you can sustain winning 8% in sports, you are a legend. And it takes a big toll on those who hit a big parlay at long odds, but I notice I can live with that.

Whereas the 0.25% excise tax is a big deal, because it is assessed on every wager. This and advertising and promotional and money transfer costs are a lot of why there is fierce competition for your sports betting dollar, yet the odds you are offered remain consistently terrible. Ben now wants to make those odds infinitely worse.

Here’s an idea of how the sports betting brackets could look:

If you charge me 1% extra to wager, you can survive that. But no one can survive a charge of 5% unless they are doing something exotic like mispriced in-game correlated parlays.

A ‘normal’ wager is now at effective 6:5 (-120) rather than 11: 10 (-110), and at that point you can basically go home. Any reasonable person would give up on anything but exotics.

At 20%, you would have to be completely insane to wager at all. This is a ban. No one (well, almost no one, and no one sane) is going to ‘struggle through it’ and pay 20%.

Also, it is all a case of ‘get your buddies to place your wagers,’ also ‘get your buddies to book your wagers so they do not count’ and ‘well at this point I might as well only bet on these gigantic parlays’ and ‘make every wager count, so place a small number of very large wagers instead of more small ones.’ Which seems like a recipe for less fun and much bigger trouble.

What is his explanation?

Why a progressive structure? As mobile sports gambling has boomed, gambling frequency has seen a corresponding rise. And according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, gamblers who bet more than once a week are five times more likely to report addictive gambling behavior.

Even if I take this at face value, that does not mean that 50 vs. 100 bets a week results in a big difference in behavior patterns. It is comparing the people who choose to rarely bet to those who frequently bet. It is mostly not going to be causal, and it is not about crossing that threshold.

As always, no matter what you think of sports betting, it is a bastion of responsibility and health compared to the slot machines or the state lottery.

Caitlin Clark, biggest women’s NCAA basketball star in history, claims she always wanted to assumed she’d play for Connecticut. Except they never recruited her, and there are claims she didn’t actually want it.

Jared Diamond (WSJ): [UConn coach] Auriemma was even more pointed about Clark’s degree of interest in his team.

“If Caitlin really wanted to come to UConn, she would have called me and said, ‘Coach, I really want to come to UConn,’” Auriemma said. 

So, yes. If you really want a job, let them know you really want the job.

Or anything else.

On the whole mess with Ohtani and the illegal bookmaker:

Conor Sen: Between the NFL, MLB, and NBA that’s ~2,900 players on active rosters, largely men under the age of 30. I mean, what are the odds you get even mid-90’s % of compliance with league gambling policies.

In this case, it looks like it was indeed the translator. Ohtani was a victim, from whom his translator Ippei Mizuhara tole millions of dollars.

One side note is that Ippei Mizuhara is epically bad at gambling.

Front Office Sports: Ippei Mizuhara’s account placed about 19,000 wagers between Dec. 2021-Jan. 2024, according to the complaint.

Average wager: About $12,800

Largest wager: About $160,000

Smallest wager: About $10

Total losing bets: $182.9 million

Net losses: $40.7 million

In November 2022, according to records, Ippei Mizuhara texted his bookie: “I’m terrible at this sport betting thing huh? Lol”

…

The bulk of Ippei’s transfers—more than $15 million—took place in 2022 and 2023. Forensic evidence directly ties Mizuhara to the transfers.

Nate Silver: This works out to a -17% ROI. That is hard to do. (Just betting at random on pointspeads at -110 = -4% ROI).

Hareeb al-Saq: It’s easy to do with parlays, but he wagered about 243M, 183M were losers, so to net -41M, the other 60M only paid off 142M (~+235). Maybe lots of favorite-on-the-ML parlays involved? Degens do seem to love those FWIW.

As Andrew McCauley points out, a -17% ROI on straight wagers is sufficiently bad that one could pull a full Costanza. If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right, you could bet the opposite and win big, even if Ippei was rather unlucky.

The mind boggles. It doesn’t seem like this could be for real.

Derek Thompson: Reading this tweet over and over again and not having any ability to comprehend it. It’s like reading about the number of grains of sand on a beach or something. Ohtani’s translator secretly placed 19,000 bets and lost $40 million of his boss’ money before anybody figured out.

Hopper: Dodgers pay Ohtani through a US bank without a Japanese translation interface. He was totally reliant on Ippei, who had access to everything.

And yet, it looks like it is real.

Richard Nixon: The IRS has Mizuhara dead to rights, including falsely representing himself as Ohtani on the phone to the bank, and changing the account contacts to go to his own phone. He is a degenerate gambler and a thief. Ohtani is innocent, and many of you owe him an apology.

Richard Ito: Everyone commenting and asking all these questions and still not believing it just haven’t read the complaint. All parties involved look dumb but only one person looks like a criminal.

Woke Mitt Romney (Parody Account): There is a much greater than zero percent chance that Ohtani’s interpreter is taking the fall for him. It wouldn’t be the most ridiculous or surprising thing to ever happen.

Richard Nixon: I understand this but if you read the complaint, you see it doesn’t hold up. Ohtani comes out looking like an inattentive kid at best, a fool at worst. To cover this up properly would take calculation he doesn’t appear to have, and even if he did it would come out.

Pamunkey: Frankly, the kid is not obsessed with money. This explains the inattentiveness.

Richard Nixon: Again on Ohtani. This is correct. He’s young and all he knows is he has enough money to never think about anything but baseball again. Which is how he wants it. It’s like Ichiro, who was never one for houses and cars and so forth. Baseball.

Consider Ohtani’s deal with the Dodgers, where he postponed most of his compensation for a long time, without seeming to get reasonable compensation in terms of net present value. There are tax advantages, but that was plausibly a much bigger giveaway of money, and also is someone who wants to focus on baseball. You don’t get to be Ohtani by thinking about money.

Was it supremely dumb to trust a single person so much they could steal this much money? Yes, absolutely. But I totally believe that this could have happened here.

A question of the month:

Narwhalbaconguy: An average man gets stuck in a time loop, and the only way to escape is to beat Garry Kasparov at chess. How long until he gets out?

Average man has never played chess, but he knows all of the rules. Each time he loses, the loop resets and Garry will not remember any of the previous games, but average man will.

Cheating is utterly impossible and average man has no access to outside information. He will not age or die, not go insane, and will play as many times as needed to win.

How many times does he need to play to win and escape the time loop?

Garry Kasparov: This is what my matches with Karpov felt like.

Sydney: This started a civil war in my chess chat between the cynics and the believers.

When I think about this, here are three key questions:

1. Does the average man always play white? Or do they alternate? Or do they use a randomization method that he can likely manipulate (e.g. Garry will always choose your left hand, or put the pawn in his right, or you can choose a line where this happens, etc).

2. How fixed and deterministic is Garry Kasparov’s behavior? Is he going to always play the same moves in response to the same moves? The same moves in response to the same moves, words and mannerisms? Are you capable of exactly duplicating the previous line, and are you capable of duplicating and exploring alternative lines in this sense?

3. How good is your memory? How fast do you forget the details of previous loops?

And also there are of course fun other questions, like:

4. Once it is clear you have lost, before you resign and reset, can you ask Kasparov about what happened, what you did wrong, what he might have done and so on?

5. Is Kasparov allowed to let you win? Could you try to drive him insane through what you learned in previous loops? Will he engage with you at all?

The instinctive version of this challenge is that you:

1. Can choose white or black.

2. Garry Kasparov’s moves respond only to your moves, and are deterministic.

3. You have perfect memory of all previous loops.

4. You can’t ask questions or engage.

5. Nothing you say to him changes anything.

So yes, you can try to learn how to play chess well, or you can try to find a trick.

The obvious thing to do is to let Kasparov play against himself. Game one you play black, he plays 1. e4. Then game two you play white and play 1. e4, he plays c5. And so on. So each game you get one extra move.

Grandmaster games are drawn about 60% of the time now, but Kasparov loves complicated attacking chess, is old school and won’t know he is up against himself. So even if you do not know what you are doing, I am guessing this is closer to 50% draws. The average chess game is about 80 half-moves. About 50% of the time, the game is won by either white or black, you play that side, you win. You probably don’t get any ‘free’ moves from your knowledge of chess because Kasparov will resign first after seeing you play a great game for that long.

So that means a mean of about 160 loops to get out.

Garrett Peterson makes the same argument, although he misses that the game can draw.

If Kasparov’s moves are quantum randomized, or responding to your uncontrollable micromovements, and you have to actually play him, then you are in a lot of trouble. You are not going to be able to learn to play chess well with any speed. On average reaching IM takes people several years of intense practice. My guess is that once you are an IM or so, you will have the ability to steal a game at random, especially knowing Kasparov’s style so well by now.

But you don’t get space to do analysis, you don’t get book knowledge except through the games, you don’t get a tutor. So this won’t go that fast. My guess now is you likely need on the order of 10,000 games even if you have the talent, although I also notice the time controls matter. The faster the games, the more loops you will need, although you get a small boost at the end from blitz variance. The average man does not have the talent, and also lacks the memory to brute force, and again does not have the best resources. I think they top out rather early.

I think it is reasonable to say that the actually average man essentially never gets out if he has to do this ‘the hard way’ by winning a real game via playing well, and none of the tricks will work. Luckily the rules say you do not go insane, but also you stop getting better at some point?

But also maybe every so often Kasparov will hang his queen and you only have to be an average player to then win the game? I mean, it does happen. But my guess is this level of mistake takes a very very long time.

This estimate is similar to mine, then, since the 10k assumes talent:

Ublala Pung: probably 12000 hours to reach high tier chess enthusiast elo (~2000) at which point he should have a 0.03% chance (an expected 3000 games or 6000 hours) of defeating Kasparov based on ELO but ELO probably overestimates his chances so let’s double it and say it takes 24000 hours.

What about the trash talk strategy?

Alex Lawsen: Are you allowed to trash talk in chess? With unlimited retries I feel like I have a way better chance of shattering someone’s confidence in their grip on reality than finding a winning move sequence in a reasonable time.

This requires more or less driving Garry completely insane, if that even works. Anything short of that won’t get you that far, sure he will be down 200 or maybe 400 Elo points and you are still super dead. And you wasted all that time looking for trash talk.

Anyway, it is fun to think about. As the question is intended, where you have to win for real, the questions are ‘how good do I need to be to exploit his worst games’ and then how long does it take to get there and wait for one. And my instinct right now is that the 24k hours is an underestimate, perhaps by a lot, because even getting to 2000 is hard. If you get stuck around 1700, which seems plausible, you almost need a literal queen hang to have any chance.

Or: The efficient market hypothesis is false.

Joe Weisenthal: Honestly surprised that these prices aren’t up even more. Just a 14% increase in Dallas for something this rare?

Blake Millard: Might we see a hospitality and tourism boom in the Fed’s Beige Book à la Taylor Swift Eras Tour ??!?

A total solar eclipse will be visible across North America today, an event that won’t take place in the U.S. again until 2044.

The path of totality cuts across the country allowing 30M+ people from Texas to Maine to see the sun, moon, and Earth in perfect alignment.

Indianapolis is preparing for 500K visitors – more than 7x the attendance of the Super Bowl it hosted in 2012. Niagara Falls expects to host up to 1M people for the eclipse. It typically gets 14M visitors…throughout the entire year.

Trung Phan: Interesting stats for Solar Eclipse and rentals:

• Eclipse path in US is 180km wide

• 92,000 Airbnb and VRBO rentals in strip

• 92% of occupancy tonight (vs. 30% in normal April weekend)

• Avg. booking is $269 (only 10% above last week)

• Cumulative bump in sales is $44m

• Majority of short-term rental customers booked 2 months in advance so they locked in a good price (chain hotel/motel prices were up 50% to 100% for this weekend)

Airline prices, I can report, are substantially more elevated. They are used to adjusting for extraordinary events. Hotel rooms mostly not so much.

Delegation is crucial. So is making clear how much authority is being delegated. I have definitely not been good about this in the past, failing to create enough clarity.

• Level 1: Do as I say. This means to do exactly what I have asked you to do. Don’t deviate from my instructions. I have already researched the options and determined what I want you to do.

• Level 2: Research and report. This means to research the topic, gather information, and report what you discover. We will discuss it, and then I will make the decision and tell you what I want you to do.

• Level 3: Research and recommend. This means to research the topic, outline the options, and bring your best recommendation. Give me the pros and cons of each option, then tell me what you think we should do. If I agree with your decision, I will authorize you to move forward.

• Level 4: Decide and inform. This means to make a decision and then tell me what you did. I trust you to do the research, make the best decision you can, and then keep me in the loop. I don’t want to be surprised by someone else.

• Level 5: Act independently. This means to make whatever decision you think is best. No need to report back. I trust you completely. I know you will follow through. You have my full support.

The problem is that my mentee thought he was delegating at Level 2. The person on his team assumed he had given him Level 4. The whole problem could have been avoided by clarifying the expectations on the front end.

Even this scale is not enough clarity, in particular within Level 1. There is a Level 0 ‘Do exactly as I say’ that is barely delegating, where you actually outline exactly what to do. The person is a machine executing a function call. For some people and some tasks that is 100% the play. Then there is the same thing, but at full Level 1, ‘do as I say if sane to do so,’ but with the ability to use common sense along the way and adjust things, and know when you need to check back in. This is, indeed, probably the biggest distinction to make.

The ultimate good news is, of course, that overall the news is good, things get better.

The actual news we hear, of course, is instead consistently bad. This makes people unappreciative and unhappy. Matt Yglesias once again at the gated link attempts to explain this.

Bret Devereaux: I think as a historian I essentially have to broadly agree with this take. Ask almost any historian, ‘when in the past would you like to have lived?’ and you’ll get back, “how close to now can I go? Like, last week?”

As a military historian, well, war is way down. Way down.

…

The difference in living standards between today and even the relatively recent past is often quite big (and today is better); the gap between living standards today and the deep past is absolutely massive. Bit by bit, our world is getting better.

We are vastly wealthy, beyond the past’s comprehension, in many material goods, and enjoy many amazing benefits. We should still note that not everything is always getting better, and the drop in fertility points to some rather big problems, and of course there are many reasons things could in the future become worse. But yeah, if you would choose to have lived (normally as a randomly selected person, not time traveller style) well into the past, that seems like an exceedingly bad choice.

A dozen ways to get More Dakka.

Following up last time about how no one ever does their homework, so if you do it you win, world champion homework doer Dwarkesh Patel puts it this way.

Dwarkesh Patel: Unbelievably valuable to be young and have “nothing better to do”.

CEOs of major companies pay 100s of millions in opportunity cost to take time off and read up on important trends in the world (AI, solar deployment, geopolitics, etc).

What they wouldn’t give to have “nothing better to do” than spend weeks reading up on whatever subjects they find interesting and important.

Or: Freedom’s just another word for low opportunity costs.

Is there, as Cowen’s First Law says, ‘something wrong with everything’?

Consider the example here of a logically true argument. The thing wrong with ‘All dogs are animals. This is a dog. Hence, it’s an animal’ is that it is not new or useful. Yes, it is correct, but pobody’s nerfect, you know?

There will always be a downside, at least if you compare to every possible counterfactual. And as my father would often say, if someone tells you they ‘can’t complain’ then is a statement about them rather than about the situation.

One highly useful version of this principle is ‘never do a trade until you know why you have the opportunity to do it,’ or as some traders say, ‘I am not doing this trade until you tell me how you are fing me.’

Claim that the beauty premium can be explained away by the correlation with intelligence plus publication bias, with the exception of sex work where I could not have (if necessary) said ‘I defy the data’ fast enough. I am pretty sure I defy the data anyway. This does not make sense. Are you telling me that if two otherwise identical people apply for a job, or are up for a promotion or raise, and one of them has a large advantage in looks, they are not at an advantage here? How would that not translate to other success? Would you follow this advice if you were looking for a job? The question answers itself, although we can always talk price and magnitude.

Post attempts to compile The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject. I notice I lack motivation to use this modality, and think it would be a poor fit for how I learn, and that it is relatively less tempting now than it would have been two years ago before LLMs got good. The problem is that you don’t direct where it goes and can’t interact, so they’re not so likely to be teaching you the thing you don’t know and are ready to learn. But many people benefit?

Your periodic reminder: Blue collar jobs working on the physical world are in high demand and look to remain so indefinitely. If you spend a few years developing skills you will be a hot commodity, and the pay is remarkably good. Of course the reason for this is that most people do not want those jobs, but they seem to me to be better than most of what people are doing instead. Yes, I would much rather have my current job or follow my other interests, but the trades still seem way better than corporate drone.

The hardest part of talent evaluation is often narrowing the search.

Katherine Boyle: Yesterday, someone asked me to elaborate on talent picking and why “narrowing the subset” matters. It’s easier to pick the best talent from a subset of 10 versus 100 or 1000. You’d think seeing 1000 candidates would mean you have a greater chance of finding a unicorn genius but it takes longer and gives more choice and opportunities for error in judgment. Scale is one strategy to see the best, but it’s not the only strategy.

The hardest part about a narrow subset is ensuring you attract “the best” 50 candidates while repelling 450 candidates.

This is obvious in theory and hard to execute as a strategy. But the best talent pickers have figured out to repel the mediocre.

Sarah Cone: I once found the best executive assistant in the world by placing a Craigslist ad that had a set of 6 instructions in it. (e.g. “to apply, put Executive Assistant in the subject line, attach a resume, and so on.) Then I built an email filter to filter only those emails that followed the instructions exactly. Exactly one email passed this filter. This assistant has been working for me now for 15 years.

I am blessed that whatever I am doing seems to act as this sort of filter. Of those who contact me, the rate of being talented or interesting is very high.

We have the technology. We still have to use it.

Samo Burja: Europe doesn’t need to build any solar capacity in the Sahara and its complicated political situation, Spain has vast sparsely populated regions with high solar irradiation. Spain could sell enough electricity to power a continent if it chose to.

You want to put solar on some quaint little roofs. I want to put solar on SPAIN. We are not the same.

Forcing people to have lousy showers does not even save water. Not that this will stop those who care about people suffering and not using markets rather than about access to water. Who are unfortunately usually the people in charge.

Emmett Shear: Trying to solve water supply/demand issues through showers is silly, just charge market price for water and be done with it (residential water is not the problem and already pays, it’s industrial and agricultural). That said…this is a very interesting finding.

Ian Walker (thread has more): I know you’re wondering so here are the basic numbers. The average shower was 6.7 minutes, median was 5.7 and 50% fell between 3.3 and 8.8 minutes. In other words, the length of showers is quite variable. We excluded any showers over one hour, but believe me, they happened.

…

And this is where we saw the big win-win: there’s a clear negative relationship between water pressure and consumption. More powerful showers used less water overall. A LOVELY TINGLY SHOWER MIGHT BE *BETTERFOR THE ENVIRONMENT THAN A WEAK DRIBBLE. I know, right?

(Note that all our graphs use a logarithmic y-axis, so the real differences are a LOT bigger than they might appear visually. 3 on the graph = 20 litres, 4 = 55 litres and 5 = 148 litres. And yes, that was an exponential curve on a logarithmic axis – crumbs)

Ian Walker: This graph probably tells us something important behaviourally. It suggests that people turn the shower off when they have achieved a desired sensation, not just when they have completed a certain set of actions. This is a potentially important new insight.

But that’s not all! The Aguardio devices that measured the showers have timers on them that start automatically when the water flows. We covered up the display in half the showers, so we could see whether having the timer made a difference…

And here’s what we saw. It looks like a big advantage of the timers is that they stop showers from gradually creeping longer and longer as the weeks go by. We wonder if people ‘anchor’ on whatever is the length of their first shower, and stick to this when there’s a timer.

Putting the two effects together, we saw average water consumption shift from nearly 61 litres/shower (low pressure, no timer) to under 17 litres/shower (high pressure, timer). Remember, this is hot water, so potentially massive carbon savings.

My presumption is that of course no action will be taken to utilize these findings, because no one in charge cares about saving water if no one would be suffering.

A lesson in proper self-promotion, similar to spending time at airports.

Rob Henderson: Looking at newsletter unsubs. This is what you want. You want a few people who get so fed up with your promotion campaign that they silently or preferably openly say “I wish you would shut the fuck up about your book already.” Far better than “I didn’t know you had a book out.”

If you have ten thousand subscribers and zero of them complain about your self-promotion for your book, you are not pushing hard enough. It should presumably not be a lot of them.

Those who spend time in a wider variety of social interactions reported being happier. The implication is you want a diversified portfolio of social interactions. Family and friends and children are complementary goods with diminishing marginal returns. However as is noted we do not know this is causation. It can also be the case that happier people get and seek out diverse opportunities for interaction. My guess is this is a mixture of both.

I certainly echo the finding, and would generalize it to other forms of leisure or sanity as well. The more different options one has, the more diversity, the better things go.

The life story of Swift on Security. It is personal, reflective and hits hard. Patrick McKenzie reflects that such stories have a lot of showing up and a handful of key moments where small interventions can make a huge difference.

Kentucky had a bill to allow self-driving cars, teamsters convince governor to veto it. I am not going to RTFB but I am going to go ahead and say shame on Andy Beshear. Never has job protectionism been more pure, rarely is it more destructive. Notice that the talk about the bill is all ‘this was written by big tech’ without any substantive complaints about anything wrong with the bill.

Here they are celebrating their successful highly inefficient rent extraction.

Alex Tabarrok: Kentucky votes to keep drunk drivers on the road.

Byrne Hobart: I have worked for decades as a calligrapher and bicycle messenger, and it pains me to see the Teamsters sell out by using computers to transmit messages for free—callously destroying my middle-class livelihood in the process.

If you think Byrne Hobart is being unfair here, I actually do not think he is.

I don’t do the kind of speculation Paul does here, but I’m not calling him wrong:

Paul Graham: You can tell from a lot of these people’s facial expressions that they know they did something wrong.

This guy looks like he’s thinking “Dude, we’re not supposed to be *photographeddoing this. This kind of deal is supposed to happen behind the scenes, like with Airbnb in New York.”

I honestly don’t think they feel righteous. I bet their model of the world is that everything is a rigged game, and they won this round.

Creative genius, or even creative competence, means obsessing over tiny things that most people will never notice and would not consciously care about if they did.

Danny Drinks Wine: “Kubrick worked like 6 months trying to find a way to photograph somebody by candlelight, not artificial light. And nobody really gives a sh!t whether it is by candlelight or not. What are the jokes? What is the story? I did not like ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975)” — Billy Wilder

If you are not willing to work six months on photographing by candlelight, you are not going to make it great, even if you do end up making it. It does not give you success, but not doing it assures failure or at best mediocrity. That attention to detail is necessary in all things, even if most of those details ultimately do not matter. You cannot know which elements of it people in general or a particular person will pick up, but they do notice.

Ultimately, of course, you still have to deliver the goods on the big stuff, or none of this matters. From the clip I saw or Barry Lyndon, yes I was fascinated by the lighting, no most days I would not then want to see it.

A lot of ‘great’ things are not, in practice, so great. But no not great things are, in practice, so great either.

Don’t just stand there. Realize why you aren’t doing something (original).

Emmett Shear: The jump between the second panel and the third holds the entire secret. The correct question is asked (why am I not?), and then artfully avoided by an associative switch to self judgement. There is some reason you’re not doing them, and but it’s hiding.

If you could but stay with the question you’ve already asked for even thirty seconds, much might become clear. This is the Chinese finger trap of Trying. You are Trying to act, and thus not acting. You are Trying to be more productive, and thus not producing.

The reason for the immediate jump to self judgement in panel three is that it feels like Trying To Do Better. Noticing the actual reason does not involve anger or hate towards yourself and is unsatisfying, you don’t get that delicious moment of knowing for sure you’re a fuckup.

Rather than capitalization, the traditional rationalist description of this is ‘trying to try,’ which I then sometimes extend to additional such steps.As in, You are trying to try to act, and thus not acting. Or, sometimes, you are trying to try to try to act, you are not even plausibly trying to try to act, let alone trying to act. It is important to choose the accurate number of levels.

It can sometimes be useful to go to panel three as motivation, but in the service of jumping back to panel two.

Both LLMs I asked pointed to ‘flexitarianism,’ a term I don’t remember hearing before and that sounds like everyone involved is faking it, where people try to reduce meat consumption. Also meat consumption is not substantially down. My explanation is that this is a new food fad, and where much new food science is being done, and also a lot of people like opening trendy restaurants that then die in a few months or years.

For now, it is simply an unfortunate tax on the restaurants available. There are plenty of fine vegan things I enjoy, but if your offering is emphasizing it is vegan rather than happening to be vegan, then it is doomed, and I want no part in it. I cannot think of an exception.

This came up in the context of Tyler Cowen speculating on the recent bans on ‘lab-grown meat,’ which Tyler ascribes to concerns that if such products are allowed that eventually people will come for your meat and the rest of your lifestyle as well. I do not think such concerns are paranoia.

We have a lot of examples.

Sam Bowman: I think conservatives’ concern is that lab grown meat will get “good enough” to justify a ban on real meat, but still won’t be as good. This has happened many times – eg, with fluorescent bulbs, heat pumps, EVs, artificial sweeteners, eco hoovers.

Claims that ‘we are not coming for your X’ when creating morally-superior-from-some-angle alternative Y are simply not credible. Creating Y, in practice, inevitably means calls to tax, restrict and often ultimately ban X, even if customers still want X.

In this case, it is obvious, many are not bothering to hide their intentions. Many of the people I know who are vegans absolutely want to come for your meat, and even your dairy. They are building alternatives in order to do this. They bide their time only because they do not have the power to pull it off, but they will absolutely impose first expensive mandates and then outright bans if permitted to do so, and would do so even with no good alternatives.

They certainly would do so if they could point to ‘meat alternatives,’ even if we all knew they were expensive and not the same. They would gaslight you about that, as other movements continuously gaslight us about other cultural trends via the full four-step clown makeup. And they think they are morally right or even obligated to do this.

Is it still perverse to ban lab-grown meat? Very much so, and I would not be banning it. That is not how I roll.

But I notice that when people announce progress on it, it does not make me happy that this happened.

Study finds equal impact for matrilinear versus patrilinear influence on outcomes in England over several hundred years. Genetic influence predicts similar impact, other factors pull in both directions, which I find varying degrees of convincing as plausible candidates. Given how things worked back then, with names and titles and class being of such high import, I take this as discounting the importance of those factors.

Periodically one should ask: What is best in life?

Mike Hoffmann goes super-viral with some TikToks of yairbranchiyahu asking elderly people the standard lookback questions, and choosing 8 that give the standard answers: That money only matters insofar as you have enough, what matters is love and family and health, if they could have a conversation with their younger self they would spout platitudes and gratitude rather than tell them to buy Bitcoins.

Mike Hoffmann: Notice how they all say what’s most important/they regret not prioritizing is: • Health • Family time • Experiences • Relationships • Enjoying each day & they realized money & working hard is not important…

Thankfully, I’ve realized this at 34. Which is why I retired from my 9-5 at 30 & now spend my time: • With my daughters & wife • Prioritizing health • Traveling

My biggest fear is having regrets at 70-100 years old. I’m living my life now so that won’t be a problem.

Jon Stokes: This is a great thread. Every one of these old people said they wished they had spent more time fighting with the outgroup on the internet. It was the most commonly expressed sentiment. “If I could just go back & do it over again, I’d punish my enemies with MORE brutal tweets.”

Gfodor: I’ve heard it’s become more and more common for someone’s last words to include the word “bangers”

Yes, all the answers are the same, but that is because they were selected to highlight this, and also there are huge biases causing people to look back and say these things, including that at the end you likely know how much money you needed and that you would get enough of it, which you did not know at the time. And of course none of these people are thinking in terms of using money to help others, or were looking to have a Great Work of some kind.

If what you fear is looking back with regret, certainly that regret is a bad thing, but it being your main fear feels like asking the wrong question. You spend most of your life living your life. What you experience on the journey matters.

Of course, I am not disagreeing that in general people undervalue love and children and family and meaning. Yes, invest more in those. But I wouldn’t go overboard. I would be very unsurprised if Mike Hoffmann ends up regretting not ‘spending more time at the office.’

But also if you are creating viral threads and asking people to subscribe for more insights? Then your wife is presumably keenly aware that you not actually retired.