Monthly

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.

AI developments have picked up the pace. That does not mean that everything else stopped to get out of the way. The world continues.

Do I have the power?

Emmett Shear speaking truth: Wielding power is of course potentially dangerous and it should be done with due care, but there is no virtue in refusing the call.

There is also an art to avoiding power, and some key places to exercise it. Be keenly aware of when having power in a given context would ruin everything.

Eliezer Yudkowsky reverses course, admits aliens are among us and we have proof.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: To understand the user interfaces on microwave ovens, you need to understand that microwave UI designers are aliens. As in, literal nonhuman aliens who infiltrated Earth, who believe that humans desperately want to hear piercingly loud beeps whenever they press a button.

One junior engineer who hadn’t been taken over and was still actually human, suggested placing a visible on-off switch for turning the sound off — for example, in case your spouse or children were sleeping, and you didn’t want to wake them up. That junior engineer was immediately laughed off the team by senior aliens who were very sure that humans wanted to hear loud screaming beeps every time they pressed buttons. And furthermore sure that, even if anyone didn’t want their microwave emitting piercingly loud beeps at 4am, they would be perfectly happy to look up a complicated set of directions for how to turn the sound on or off, rather than needing a visible on-off switch. And even if any humans had trouble remembering that, they’d be much rarer than humans who couldn’t figure out how to set the timer for popcorn without a clearly labeled “Popcorn” button, which does a different random thing in every brand of microwave oven. There’s only so much real estate in a microwave control panel; it’s much more important to have an inscrutable button that says “Potato”, than a physical switch that turns the sound off (and which stays in the same position after power cycles, and which can be inspected to see if the sound is currently off or on).

This is the same species of aliens that thinks humans want piercing blue lights to shine from any household appliance that might go in somebody’s bedroom at night, like a humidifier. They are genuinely aghast at the thought that anyone might want an on-off switch for the helpful blue light on their humidifier. Everyone likes piercing blue LEDs in their bedroom! When they learned that some people were covering up the lights with black tape, they didn’t understand how anybody could accidentally do such a horrible thing — besides humans being generally stupid, of course. They put the next generation of humidifier night-lights underneath translucent plastic set into the power control — to make sure nobody could cover up the helpful light with tape, without that also making it impossible to turn the humidifier on or off.

Nobody knows why they insist on hollowing out and inhabiting human appliance designers in particular.

Mark Heyer: A nice rant Eliezer, one that I would subscribe to, having been in the information design business. However, I have an interesting counter-example of how to fix the problem.

In the 90s I worked at a rocketship internet startup in SV, providing services and products nationwide. As the internet people were replaced with suits, my boss, a tough ex-Marine, called me into his office and asked what my future was with the company. I channeled Steve Jobs and told him that I wanted to look at everything we did as a company and make it right for the users. He pounded his fist on the desk and said “Make it happen!”

After that I was called into every design and process meeting to certify that what they were doing was right for the users. The Ah-so moment was finding that the engineers and designers knew that those blue lights knew that they sucked – but were ruled by the real aliens, the suits above, who didn’t know or care about customers. I empowered them to make the right decisions and it turned out that everyone in the company supported my mission.

So it can be fixed. All it takes is a leader to establish the mandate. And to point out that happy customers buy more of their products.

United Airlines gives up on the Boeing Max 10 after sufficiently long delays, accepts some Max 9s and starts looking to Airbus. Boeing looking more and more like a zombie company, an Odd Lots episode recently drove the point home as well. They look entirely captured by consultant types who have no intention of ever building anything, and by the time they decide to try no one left will know how.

I saw a claim that Russia can deanonymize Telegram accounts but the link has since been deleted by its source.

Russian documents show high willingness to use tactical nuclear weapons in various circumstances. The obvious thing to point out is the possibility that they are lying. Whether or not you intend to use nuclear weapons in various situations, if you were Russia, wouldn’t you want everyone else to think that you were going to do so?

Red Sea continues to be de facto blockaded, America unwilling or unable to do anything about it.

Honest Broker Ted Gloria sees us moving not only from Art to Entertainment, but then to Distraction and finally Addiction, a total victory for ‘dopamine culture,’ which is crowding out traditional slower activities. As usual with such critiques, not all the details resonate, but the overall message hits the mark.

The illustrations here are excellent:

I think it is very good advice to essentially never be on the true, de facto right side of this graph for most items. You want to be on the left as often as you can, and spend most of the rest of the time in the center.

I suspect part of the issue is the conflation of old and traditional with slow, and new and modern with fast. There is a correlation, but it is incomplete.

Were newspapers slow culture? In some sense yes, you sat down and focused on them, they were part of a morning ritual. But also they were kind of clickbait in print form quite a lot of the time. I would say that reading books, or in-depth blogs, constitutes much more of the long-term-better slow form of journalism here.

I would say something similar about communication. Handwritten letters are slow, but that is a bug rather than a feature. Good slow communication is talking in person, or through longform or carefully writing. Which certainly can include email. Voice communication is quick in some senses, but is doing the thing that counts, I think. This is also the place where quick short bursts sometimes make sense, and you want a mix throughout.

On video, I see film alone as the slow thing, TV as the fast thing, and other much shorter things as the dopamine thing. Similarly, shouldn’t music’s left be live music? Or more likely there are four levels, not every graph fits every concept. For images, there’s view on phone versus view on a computer or TV screen. Details matter.

For sports, gambling very much depends on what exactly you are doing. If you are playing fantasy sports and counting stats, or betting on the next play, yeah, that’s dopamine. Whereas classic slower gambling is often if anything slower and more participatory than merely watching, rather than less.

In any case, yes, we all constantly hear the calls for slower modes, slower living, unplugging periodically and all that. And we all know those calls are largely right. Then most of us keep ignoring them.

Dan Luu on how scale is effectively the enemy, rather than the friend, of good customer service and ability to fight scams and other spam. I buy his model here. Smaller sites and services can and do invest in bespoke service and in things that don’t scale such as one dedicated employee reading everything or tracking down the bad guys. Whereas at scale, these companies do not invest the same way, and what they do is forced to focus on legibility and consistency and following rules.

As their scale also scales the rewards to attacks and as their responses get worse, the attacks become more frequent. That leads to more false positives, and a skepticism that any given case could be one of them. In practice, claims like Zuckerberg’s that only the biggest companies like Meta can invest the resources to do good content moderation are clearly false, because scale reliably makes content moderation worse.

In case you were wondering what New York is doing to replace its nuclear power, well, it is going better than it did in Germany, at least we are using natural gas:

Oh. Right. That.

Josh Barro: Politicians love to complain about airline fees. But they also wrote a tax code that applies a 7.5% excise tax to airfares but not to fees, encouraging airlines to charge fees instead of fares.

We could reverse this. Let’s instead charge airlines 25% on all fees and 2.5% on the fares themselves. Then there will be proper tension between ‘get listed first and look cheaper than you are’ versus ‘save money on taxes.’

FTC attempts to block merger of Kroger and Albertsons’s in part because of antitrust concerns regarding ‘union grocery labor.’ I mean, wow.

EPA bans asbestos. Good. Wait, what? They hadn’t banned it before? I got Gemini to agree that this was crazy zero-shot, which is not a label it likes putting on things.

It sure seems like a commissioner of the EEOC is explicitly saying that race and sex can’t be any kind of factor in hiring, and that lots of corporate DEI initiatives are very much violating Title VII?

DHH: How does corporate DEI in America proceed after getting such a clear notice that using race or sex as a “motivating factor” in hiring decisions is plainly illegal?

And given this, you’d think that Corporate America just opened itself up to the mother of all discrimination suits on the basis of its 2021 hiring drive. Will be fascinating to see how this plays out in the class-action lawsuits that’ll surely follow.

If that is true, it sure seems like there are a lot of Title VII violations going on? For example, here’s the recent story about air traffic controller hiring being filtered through a ‘biographical test,’ although the practice is no longer ongoing since it has been banned more generally. Were sufficiently obfuscated proxies used that the government’s actions are plausibly legal here, regardless of the obvious admitted motivations, although the lawsuit here is real and ongoing? In practice I have to assume that Lucas is wrong in practice and such laws will almost never be applied to actions like those Cuban suggests. And indeed I cannot think of a single case where a civil action was successful in such a case, despite many clear examples of such actions?

Also the government’s actions in the FAA case seem at first glance to have been rather corrupt as hell. Give out a ‘biographical test’ that eliminates 90% or more of candidates on the basis of questions highly unrelated to prospective job performance, and have favored groups get explicit instructions on what answers to give on the test to lie their way past it?

Washington State Supreme Court rules the bar exam no longer a requirement to practice law, cites impact on ‘marginalized groups.’ I am all for ending or easing occupational licensing, but the courts imposing the change on this basis seems kind of insane. Either the alternative process can verify someone can safety practice law or you rightfully decide this should be the client’s problem in a free market, in which case you should do it anyway, or it doesn’t and you think it shouldn’t, so you shouldn’t make the change.

I worry that there are essentially no rating systems or other ways to verify you have found a decent lawyer (presumably because lawyers work to prevent this in various ways), and so the first question new prospective clients will ask is ‘did you pass the bar?’ because it is at least a legible question. So lawyers will effectively have to pass the bar anyway to get private clients, and those who can’t end up as public defenders and prosecutors. That doesn’t sound great.

San Francisco spends $34 million on custom payroll system, which inevitably does not work, and they are ‘ready to start over.’

Patrick McKenzie: Have they considered giving up and starting over with another workforce given a much simpler compensation structure? Because writing a computer program whose true requirements are intentionally designed to be impossible to write down is extremely non-trivial.

I once again propose that we dramatically raise base pay for various government workers such as police, in exchange for getting rid of the various insane rules and loopholes they use to get far more pay than we allocate, while keeping average total pay similar. We would recruit far better, both in quality and quantity, by doing so, and elicit much better behaviors with far lower deadweight loss. Are we this obsessed with a low headline number?

That thread includes this graphic, which likely requires periodic reminders:

Government working depends partly on @Ringwiss, a Twitter account that has mastered parliamentary procedure and history, and will answer your questions with lightning speed. It is run by a 20-year-old economics student named Kacper Surdy.

You really can be the best if you actually read the materials and do your work.

Of course, no one pays for this, and keeping it free is vital if it is going to deliver its value. So flagging this now. Once he graduates, EAs or others need to give him a full time job doing this as a public resource.

Prospera forces you to choose whose laws you are subject to, and you must choose from the OECD countries. The good news is you can mix and match, which means there are often things like medical procedures that can be done in Prospera that cannot be done anywhere else. There still seems like so much you are unable to do, that it would be great if someone were able to do it.

Utah doing the whole age verification requirement thing over again, despite the problems of ‘no way to actually do it’ and also ‘blatantly unconstitutional.’ Sigh. As usual, the arguments against seem to be overreaching, but also the bill is really terrible.

Free speech under attack in Canada, Ireland and the UK. Here too, although the first amendment helps a lot. We should be so thankful we have it.

Details available elsewhere but the Chips Act is failing to produce chips due to all the requirements it imposes on anyone seeking to produce chips.

What would happen if we banned the same cookie pop-ups that the EU makes mandatory?

Abe Murray: I hate regulation but …. hear me out on this one. The US *mustmake it illegal to show those stupid cookie popups all over the web. We can’t allow the EU to export its stupid paternalistic pollution to us here in the land of freedom.

How much has this cost us in lost time and attention as a society? The milliseconds must add up to weeks of lost productivity across millions of people.

Plus there are the 2nd order effects of teaching a generation of humans that stupid ineffective regulations are an ok thing and should be quietly accepted. That is a massive negative cost.

Casy Handmer: I would become a single issue voter on this issue. It is unacceptable that we allow the Internet to be polluted by insanely indifferently stupidly ineffective “regulatory” regimes beyond our borders. Normalize the expectation that regulators are accountable to their users!

It’s terrible, everyone knows it’s terrible, and it will never ever be fixed.

I would not go single-issue or anything but I would be strongly in favor. On this issue, Europe is obviously in the wrong and I have never heard an actual human argue otherwise. Sometimes all sides of other debates can come together.

Apple being forced to dismantle many of the safeguards of the iPhone ecosystem under orders of the EU via the DMA. Everyone is trying to force them to make all sorts of changes. They are no longer allowed to verify that apps work before letting them into the store. They are being asked if they are going to do ‘forced scrolling’ to allow competitors to be seen, order of apps shown to be shuffled, while copycat apps attempt to fool users. Apple is being forced to do things via implied threats of what happens if they don’t ‘comply’ on their own.

I am no fan of the iPhone and avoid the Apple ecosystem, but this is very much destroying the core value Apple is offering.

I continue to not look forward to when I finish reading the EU AI Act, which I am eventually going to have to do.

An ode to the excellent AppleTV+ show Slow Horses. I have Slow Horses solidly in Tier 2, definitely Worth It.

Suits was the most streamed show of 2023, perhaps not despite but because of it being epically medium. Regular old many-22-episode-season shows keep catching fire years later. They keep bringing people comfort. Shows like The Office and Friends are worth nine figures per contract, then unavailable at any price. Yet the streaming services do not understand, and do not seek to imitate. Instead, they produce shorter seasons, and ask the question ‘how many people got this far into the show?’ and when that drops they cancel, long before they can get to 100 let alone 200 episodes.

I think this is a serious mistake. I do understand that when you are hiring an all-star cast to do something explicitly prestige-level, you are doing a different thing. That’s fine. But yes, we really do love the thing that Suits is trying to do. There is a reason that what I watch when on the elliptical is Law & Order, and if I sustain that long enough to run out I’ll likely turn next to SVU. We need that reliability, that comfort, that volume, and it pays off. Not always, but sometimes.

Everyone seems to reliably underestimate the value in increasing the quantity. I hate that our best people stop producing television so they can try to do movies. You’re giving me so much less content! Come back.

On a related note, I am over the moon that I finally have a new late night show I can watch a recording of the next day. For many years I absolutely loved Craig Ferguson, alas he hated the job and quit. I very much enjoyed Chris Hardwick doing At Midnight, also great relaxed no-stakes comfort television that makes you think without demanding that you do so, but he quit too to do the rather stupid The Wall.

And I’ve loved Taylor Tomlinson’s stand-up for a while now, including going to her Have it All tour, which was top notch.

So you can imagine my ‘no way, you’re kidding’ smile when I saw that the old Craig Ferguson slot was going to Taylor Tomlinson to do a show called After Midnight. Perfection.

And it has delivered on its promise. Forty minutes of comedians improvising jokes and riffing off each other every night, such a great format. I presume it will only get better. This is The Way.

Interesting and also great fun, from a public defender: My Clients, The Liars. Lying to your lawyer will not help your cause, yet most guilty defendants, especially those caught dead to rights and not for the first time, do it constantly. Another note is that the author effectively says it is mostly very easy to tell which clients are innocent, because those clients dump information on him in the hopes any will be useful, whereas guilty clients come up with excuses not to pursue evidence for their story.

Also from the same source, one might want to learn the eleven magic words: “Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?”

Perhaps there is. It seems every felon in California can now challenge their conviction retroactively on grounds of systemic bias. That bias can be proved through group comparisons, where criminal history is excluded as a consideration. This seems likely to grow into a giant disaster as long as it goes unfixed.

Arresting eleven person bike ring cut local bike thefts by 90%. As Patrick McKenzie notes, much of crime is a business that scales, and the state is bad at understanding this. He uses the example of credit card fraud, and notes that the crime business is remarkably similar to any other.

It’s not as if we don’t often know who the criminals are:

NYPD News: Last year, 38 individuals accounted for assaulting 60 @NYCTSubway employees. Those 38 individuals have been arrested 1,126 times combined.

NYPD Chief of Transit: If anyone is curious what your NYPD cops are doing … well … they’re doing their jobs! They’ve arrested these 38 individuals a combined total of 1,126 times! The better question is why are they forced to arrest these people so many times & where are the consequences for their repeated illegal actions? Know this, the NYPD does NOT determine and/or impose consequences. That is the responsibility of the other stakeholders in the criminal justice system (lawmakers, judges, prosecutors). NY’ers deserve better.

Colby Cash: Carceral conditions for all in the absence of incarceration for criminals: part 3,157 in a continuing series

Morgan McKay: Security Checkpoint to check bags at Grand Central set up just a short time ago – NYPD asks this woman if they can check her bag – as you can see it was a quick search Officers tell me that the checkpoint spots will vary – right now checking about every 4th person walking by.

What happens if New Yorkers do not want their bags checked by the national Guard?

“Then go home,” @GovKathyHochul says on @fox5ny “You’re not taking the subway.”

I am not saying all 1,126 arrests were justified, but surely something has gone horribly wrong with the punishments here. There is a clip of mayor Adams talking about subway crime. He repeatedly talks about ‘feeling safe,’ never talking about being safe. I do get that feeling safe is important, people who feel unsafe are unhappy and might not ride the subway, but our focus surely must be on actually being safe.

Eric Adams (NYC Mayor): Nothing encourages the feeling of safety more than having a uniformed officer present from the bag checks when you first come into the system to watching them walk through the subway cars to the platforms.

So the Governor sends the national guard in to check bags at Grand Central. Which is completely insane. The purported solution has exactly nothing to do with the cause.

That is not even a way to feel safe, if you are anything like me. If anything, this is a way to make me feel actively unsafe and a reason to avoid taking the subway. I will never feel fully safe around inspection points and men with guns, for obvious reasons.

Even if some might somehow feel more safe from this (why?) there is absolutely zero actual safety reason to do this, it in no way stops crime, even in theory anyone who actually did want to do crime with things in a bag could walk to the next stop and anyway this is crazy. We could use more people in uniform to make things more safe if we wanted to, but that would involve them being asked to do police work.

Case of assault and being held for ransom at SFSU suspended as all charges are ‘alleged’ and ‘unfounded,’ despite what appears to be audio, video and eyewitnesses.

California’s new $20 minimum wage rule specifically exempts grandfathered in restaurants that serve bread (as in prior to September 2023), as in Panera in particular, run by a longtime Newsom donor after extensive lobbying. Panera now has a full regulatory moat and cost edge against any and all competition. It is listed in this section. Note which section this is in.

Here is a rather crazy statistic:

Cremieux: Incredible stat: the 1% of male adoptees with biological parents who had three+ convictions were responsible for 30% of the sample’s convictions. Crime is very concentrated.

These are all adaptees. There are still possible non-genetic factors, but this is also rather a large effect from a pool of people already in bad shape. This suggests that targeted interventions could be highly cost-effective. It also suggests that rational people would check such information and update on it, even if the government cannot and often makes such actions technically illegal.

Ricki Heicklen writes in Asterisk about Michael Lewis and Going Infinite. She notices that Michael Lewis, while getting the overall vibes of the situation at FTX mostly correct, seems completely uninterested in how and why people make mistakes, most importantly himself and his own mistakes. How did he not realize anything was amiss, and why was he so uninterested in that question? Why did he constantly take the word of someone doing all the fraud and crime, and those around him doing likewise? She absolutely hammers him. The contrast to my own (fully compatible with hers) take is interesting throughout. I was more interested in what happened to FTX and SBF than what happened to Lewis, but also asked how Lewis could not realize even after the fact about all the crime.

Fascinating: An assisted suicide pod that passed an independent legal review showing it complies with Swiss law. At the push of a button, the pod would fill with nitrogen gas, rapidly lowering oxygen levels and killing the user.

Holden: Why is it the assisted suicide people can easily device a contraption to kill a human being unmolested while capital punishment is in a constant struggle for ways that aren’t denounced as cruel and illegal?

Mo Sabet: They did this for capital punishment. It went poorly.

I mean, yes, if you mess it up. Also the person did not want to die. There is that.

Very good profile of Dwarkesh Patel, who is rapidly becoming the clear GOAT of podcasters to not miss, ahead of previous title holder Tyler Cowen. Both take similar approaches, doing extensive research and asking incisive, deeply specific questions, without wasting time on things you already know. Episodes demand your full attention, often justifying pausing to contemplate and take notes, or converse with an LLM.

So it is odd to see people comparing him to a very different Lex Fridman.

Shreeda Segan: Today, Patel is quickly becoming known as ‘the new Lex Fridman’ and even ‘Lex Fridman but better.’ Here, again, he credits his success to prep. On Lex Fridman and other competitors, Patel says “Sometimes it doesn’t feel like they’re trying. In other fields, if something is your full-time job, there’s an expectation for you to spend a lot of effort on it.

The idea of popular podcasters just walking into a studio after just a single day of prep… It’s like this is your full-time job, man. Why don’t you spend a week or two instead?”

What is the Lex Fridman approach?

Lex Fridman is there to ensure no listener gets left behind, and otherwise to let the subject talk at length. He is not there to challenge the guest or to dig deep into the technical details. When that approach works, as it did with the con artist Matt Cox, it can be great. In areas I know well, it tends to be a lot of ‘get on with it’ without striking much new ground. Those are diametrically opposite approaches. There is a time and a place for both. Mostly I want to go deep.

The biggest takeaways from Patel’s story are that there are big returns to being Crazy Prepared, that you can optimize the hell out of things without worrying about hitting the Pareto frontier because there are always basic things others aren’t doing, and also big returns for asking people for help and what you want. He took a big swing, put in an extraordinary effort to take advantage, and it worked.

Also related:

Luis Garicano: Axiom for young people:

No one (journalists, academics, managers, politicians, consultants etc.) ever, does their homework.

If you do the homework , you win: e.g. if you show up to a meeting having read the paper to the end, you will often be the only one who did.

Dwarkesh Patel is another example of a kid who (as he explains) got big because he (by his own account) was the only one who was willing to spend two weeks preparing his interviews. Here is a fabulous example [his interview with Demis].

Kevin Erdmann: Reminds me of this quote from “Teller”, which I think applies to success in general,

“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”

Virginia state legislator kills, at least for now, the new stadium deal that would have cost the public over a billion dollars. Our government failing in such brazen fashion by continuously bribing sports teams owned by billionaires in zero sum games continues to illustrate how they operate more generally.

Educational requirements are gradually disappearing from job postings. Declines are small, and the tight labor market is doubtless a lot of it. It still seems like progress.

Economics journals are demanding that papers include reproducibility of the results. The threads here are people finding this process outrageously expensive. It turns out that if you do not plan ahead with reproducibility in mind, it is going to be really annoying to fix that later. If you do plan ahead for it, it is presumably not so bad?

You know what makes people feel better? Dancing. Effect size listed here is ludicrous. Also other exercise helps as well, but dancing is an Ozempic-level cheat code. That is, if you believe the study in question, which I initially said ‘I do directionally although I am skeptical on full effect size’:

Except, of course, when you are ‘skeptical on full effect size’ that is not a great sign, and, well…

Cremieux Recueil: This study should be retracted, both for issues the authors can address and issues with the underlying data. The study suffers from some noticeable, obvious miscoding of effect sizes. For example, the authors reported an effect size of -11.22 Hedge’s g. That’s MUCH larger than the difference in people’s preference for chocolate over feces-flavored ice cream.

Attempting to replicate the authors’ effect sizes with their provided data, it’s simply not possible. Most effect sizes are not even within 1 Hedge’s g of what they reported, and 1 g is a huge effect.

I asked the authors what happened. They replied by uploading some new code. Their new code showed that they did not estimate the effects they verbally described estimating. In fact, they didn’t estimate treatment effects, they estimated change scores.

Even if this wasn’t the case, there is extremely low power and there’s a good deal of publication bias.

The power was so poor that, among studies classified as having a low risk of selective reporting (doubtful given other mistakes), the mean effect was estimated at 0, with CIs from almost -1 to 1.

It goes on. I am including it because this got a lot of play, and one does not want to silently delete in such situations.

Time management is not as hard as many pretend, but it is also not this easy.

Emmett Shear: You have 168 hours per week.

For most, sleep takes 56 of those.

A full time job is anyone 40.

Food, grooming, exercise add another 18 if you’re reasonably efficient.

Misc obligatory bullshit paperwork like taxes or errands, another 7.

This leaves you with 47 hours!

47 hours to dispose of as you see fit. You can get so much done in 47 hours! And that’s without counting overlapping eg. food with socialization.

The limit is not time. It is energy, gumption, courage. Those are real barriers! But they are not time.

I know a few exceptional people who truly run out of time, they are going every minute and there are no gaps. The rest of us are killing time on Twitter, watching Netflix, indulging in whatever activity feels that it doesn’t demand too much of us.

If you think your problem is not enough hours, and you’re talking about it on Twitter…believe me your problem isn’t hours.

I think this is important to notice because if you try to solve an energy or courage problem with a time solution, you won’t succeed in getting any more done.

This is like one of those ‘help me my family is dying’ math problems. So let’s think step by step.

Let’s start with sleep. Most people want about eight hours of sleep a night. 7*8 = 56.

However, if your plan is to start the sleep process at 11pm and set an alarm for 7am, you are not going to get eight hours of sleep. There are a few lucky people who can fall asleep instantly without first getting too tired, and then reliably sleep through the night, and then wake up on a dime ready to go. But they are few.

Realistically, if you want eight hours of sleep, you need to allocate nine hours for this process. So that’s 63 hours, and we are down to 40 to spare.

What about a full-time job? Well, once again, 40 is the core baseline activity (and many people short on time work more). It is not the time it actually costs you. Even if you are not asked to work overtime or stay late, there is commute time. According to the U.S. Census, the average commute was 27.6 minutes each way in 2019. Yes, this is a choice, you can prioritize working from home or a short commute, but we cannot pretend this is free.

Let’s be generous and say you can do this in three hours a week. That leaves 37.

Is 18 hours a reasonable budget for exercise, grooming and food? A solid exercise program likely takes something like 5. Grooming including clothes is going to be several more. Food is something you can rush quite a lot if you want to exist on cereal, Mealsquares and Soylent and live without joy. Less extremely you can eat at your desk. So yes, I do think 18 is a realistic goal here for some, in the sense that we all make choices. But if you do that, it likely means you are not using this time as a psychic recharge or source of joy. You aren’t scoring your victory points.

Another 7 hours for mandatory bullshit sounds nice. It is realistic if you keep things simple, or you are rich enough to hire a lot of help. In between, I am doubtful.

Then there is everything not included here. Health problems and being sick will cost you a lot of time periodically, more so as you get older, even if things are mostly fine. Family emergencies are what they are. You can call having children ‘a choice’ but if your plan for living does not involve them it has no future, and this very much is not killing time on Twitter or Netflix. You get called into court, for jury duty or otherwise.

A big one is that this plan does not charge you for transitions. The idea of ‘going every minute and there are no gaps’ is not so easy to pull off even if your brain could handle it. Lots of things get scheduled. Then you need to confidently be ready when they start, block off time, not start next thing until it finishes, and so on. How many hours does it cost to schedule a one-hour meeting? It varies, but ‘one’ is incorrect.

The little things add up.

And yes: You also have to stay sane, and have sources of joy, and have sources of energy, and have some time to process. You can say ‘time is not the issue here’ and ‘your real issue is energy or courage or gumption or money’ but time is one of the costs of maintaining such resources, so there is non-zero fungibility going on here. One does not (with notably rare exceptions) simply have maximum gumption and courage and energy all the time, and this does not mean that you aren’t running out of time.

And you need to maintain various other relationships in your life, various social considerations and so on. And you need to be doing a bunch of information intake and exploration and playing around without strict particular goals you are maximizing. These things are not as optional as you might think.

Also you need slack, on all these levels. If you are allocating every minute of the day, every day, that is generally not something I would advise.

You certainly can spend periods of your life laser focused on one goal. I had a period where I did that. I woke up, I did work, I paused to grab two quick meals. When work involved keeping an eye on things, I would also often watch TV, which helped keep me sane. Modulo the minimum requirements on other fronts, that was pretty much it, for several years. I do not think that means that you can say to those refusing to do similarly that ‘time is not your problem.’

I am now someone who gets a lot done, in the sense that a lot of people tell me ‘I have no idea how you get all of that done.’ Simultaneously, I look at my time spent, and I notice I could be doing so much more, in theory, if I used all the hours in the day more efficiently.

What is the right way to think about that?

I do not know.

Tyler Cowen asks, how is a $600 a night hotel room better? Location, location, location of course. Although in most cases there is a place very close that is far cheaper. I have paid ~$300/night total largely for location though, especially for key tournaments.

The rest is less convincing, unless you need a great view that badly to have ‘performed vacation.’ Yes, the WiFi is more reliable in expectation, and the beds are on average modestly better, but you don’t need to go this high for that, that is about avoiding the extreme low end, and reviews are a thing to help you. And as Tyler notes, they will attempt to make the $600 hotel effectively an $800 (or more) hotel in various ways. The rest is simply not so valuable, unless of course you are so rich you do not care.

I think of this as ‘the $600 hotel is 1.1x better than the $300 hotel, but if you are a billionaire or expensing or signaling, or you want to form memories of the finest experience to save your marriage or what not, or this is a super high leverage moment in your life otherwise, you will choose it anyway.’

Claims about experts:

Paul Graham: One way you can tell real experts is that they hedge less. They’ll tell you what’s *notthe case. People with merely moderate expertise can’t say that, because they’re not sure.

Of course, people who know next to nothing about a subject also speak decisively about it. There’s a sort of midwit peak of hedging. So this test only works to distinguish experts at the high end.

I would instead say that true experts hedge in the right places. They are unafraid to, as Paul notes, say what is clearly not the case. You can often telling the difference even as a non-expert.

It seems there is potentially a way to, in theory, disable all the nuclear bombs on earth remotely and without countermeasure. All you need is a 1000 TeV machine requiring an accelerator circumference of 1000km with the magnets of ~10 Tesla and power of 50 GW which exceeds that of Great Britain. Attempting to actually do this seems highly destabilizing, and of course if it can do this, what else can do it do, and what happens if your calculations were not correct?

One reason to note this is that we are constantly thinking about the future and about AI as if there won’t be more large surprises waiting for us in physics. This suggests that there might be such surprises. This particular trick looks like it is not so practical at least for now, but what will be next?

We tend to watch movies more when they reinforce our mythos and values, says paper. Stories of entrepreneurs do better in entrepreneurial societies (and presumably reinforce that trend), same for gender roles and everything else. Well, yes.

Matthew Yglesias asks if polygraphs are real or fake, gets mixed response. They are clearly real in the sense that the machines exist and that they often cause people to confess or otherwise be more truthful than they would be otherwise or choose their actions for fear of being tested later. They also clearly correlate with truth, and raise the cost of deception.

However they are fake in the sense that they are easy to fool if you put effort into it and know how to do so, some people naturally are able to best them, and the error rate is substantial even in ideal circumstances.

It is indeed odd that polygraphs are illegal, except where they are mandatory. Matt Yglesias calls it a ‘fake solution’ in border security. It also makes a weird kind of sense. In some situations, we care about protecting people’s rights and dignity, and about avoiding false positives. In others, we really do not. So if you are someone we have disdain for, or in a position where we care sufficiently more about false negatives than false positives, or both, then polygraph. It is not a full solution, and in practice it might or might not be net positive, but I can see plausible situations where it would be. It is not like our non-polygraph detection systems are foolproof, so this is another case of the machine being held to different standards than humans.

Imagine if we had a machine about as reliable as eyewitness testimony. What happens?

Two classic mistakes, one of which I am highly sympathetic to:

Paul Graham: It’s a bad sign when a site forces you play a video to learn what they offer. They won’t let you jump around a text explanation. You’re going to hear the words they want you to hear, in the order they want, at the speed they want. How can anything made by such people be good?

Rick: My least favorite is “schedule a time to come to our webinar”, it’s at least an order of magnitude worse than having a video I can watch now and skip around in.

I hate when people do this. Text Über Alles. Forcing users to watch a video indicates and forces upon them a certain mindset. Yet the evidence it provides on overall lack of quality is not so strong. This has become the ‘standard’ thing to do, what people reveal they want. People like Paul and myself are mostly not the target.

Rick’s extension, however, seems highly reliable. If they make you take a webinar at a given time, chances of value production greatly decline.

Patrick McKenzie confirms that yes, if in The Atlantic they are claiming specifically about The New York Times that a new hire was chided about saying Chick-fil-A was their favorite sandwich, then yes this happened, it has confirmation and was probably confirmed by The Times itself. I notice I was confused when people said ‘this didn’t happen’ because why wouldn’t that happen?

ACLU is trying to destroy the Biden NLRB, potentially invalidating all its decisions, over arbitration in a single firing with essentially no stakes, reports Matt Bruenig among others. The only explanation I can think of here is that the ACLU has been sufficiently ideologically captured by those who did the firing that they were forced to go all-in where it makes no sense. In theory the ACLU could be on a true rule-of-law kick for freedom of contract and the improper firing of a government official, but yeah, that doesn’t make any sense.

As Josh Barro says, the details of the firing sound absurd, but he reports it checks out.

I love the structure of the description, wonderful use of the rule-of-three.

ACLU: [Ms. Oh was] terminated for violation of her obligation to maintain a workplace free of harassment, including in her engaging in repeated hurtful and inciteful conduct for colleagues that impugns their reputation and her demonstration of a pattern of hostility toward people of color, particularly black men, and her significant insubordination.

Matt Bruenig: What exactly did Ms. Oh, an Asian woman, do that is being characterized like this?

1. After the national political director, a manager that Ms. Oh and her colleagues had submitted complaints against, left the organization, Ms. Oh joked in a meeting announcing the departure that “the beatings will continue until morale improves.” The ACLU DEI officer said this comment was racist because the former national political director is a black man.

2. Ms. Oh said in a phone meeting that she was “afraid to raise certain issues” with her direct supervisor. This was also described as racist because that supervisor is a black man.

3. Ms. Oh claimed that another manager “lied to her when she identified the members of management who had ultimate responsibility over whether to proceed with a particular campaign.” This was also racist because that manager is a black woman.

Sounds like it is time to solve for the equilibrium.

Matt Bruenig later put out another column, pointing out that the ACLU’s arguments here are a direct attack on free speech, and that seems obviously right. Free speech used to be what the old real ACLU was all about, so this is strong evidence that we are very much dealing with the new fake ACLU.

Why do East Asian firms value drinking so highly? The answer given is that by lowering inhibitions it leads to social bonding, which promotes social harmony, which they highly value. It also it allows candid communication, bypassing the inability to speak and deference to authority that is otherwise ubiquitous. You need copious amounts of alcohol to defeat the final boss of the SNAFU principle.

Mostly though I saw this as an excuse to ask better questions. The section on different communication norms has some great stuff, yes we know most of it but I like when such things are well-modeled and spelled out.

Interesting that USA is dramatically low-context in relative terms, but is near the middle in confrontation and negative feedback. Mostly those two correlate rather strongly, and egalitarian-hierarchical looks like the same graph as well:

So this means that America has this One Weird Trick where it is willing to aggressively communicate directly, without being otherwise confrontational and hostile. When I go even to other places in America that have this less than here in New York, it drives me insane. I bet that this trait does quite a lot of work for us.

This then becomes so important that in many places only men who can and are willing to drink heavily and do associated activities like strip clubs can get ahead, women cannot do it because it is unsafe and if something goes wrong they will get the blame, and men who don’t want to play along also get left out.

How do you solve this? Even if you can create a new organization that does not do these activities, and you then get to hire lots of great sober and female talent, you still need to solve the communication problem, or find a way to survive not doing so. You would have to make dramatic cultural changes that complement this move.

We are about to ask whether we could. We also must stop to ask whether we should.

Cate Hall: Scott has graduated from scissor statements to scissor grants.

Scott Alexander [as an ACX Grants award]: Marcin Kowrygo, $50,000, for the Far Out Initiative. Recently a woman in Scotland was found to be incapable of experiencing any physical or psychological suffering². Scientists sequenced her genome and found a rare mutation affecting the FAAH-OUT pseudogene, which regulates levels of pain-related neurotransmitters. Marcin and his team are working on pharmacologic and genetic interventions that can imitate her condition. If they succeed, they hope to promote them as painkillers, splice them into farm animals to produce cruelty-free meat, or just give them to everyone all the time and end all suffering in the world forever. They are extremely serious about this.

near: Possibly the best use of $50,000 I’ve seen in my life.

Alice Earendel: Finally, we can create the drug ‘soma,’ from the hit sci-fi novel ‘don’t create the drug soma.’

(Fr, pigs that don’t feel pain, and so can’t be dissuaded by it from eating their tormenters, are the start of a sci-fi horror short story.)

Daniel Eth: Weirdly, my aggressively-pro-this thing tweet which I expected to generate tons of pushback instead largely led to agreement

Daniel Eth (quoted Tweet): Hot take, but ~this should probably be like the second biggest EA cause area, after X-risk. The fact that things like this are approximately totally neglected by EA makes me think worse of the non-X-risk parts of EA.

I notice my instincts are on the ‘maybe this is not a great idea’ side of the spectrum here. Suffering is a mainly measure, rather than the target metric. Eliminating the measure in general seems like a deeply terrible idea.

Emmett Shear: People who want to end all experience of negative reinforcement either (a) believe you negative reinforcement is not needed for an effective system to maintain homeostasis, or (b) believe you should avoid experiencing some real things happening in your mind.

I think both (a) and (b) are clearly somewhere between “false” and “wrong” and that existence of negative reinforcement is important for system function and it is good to experience what is there.

I do not trust myself to be able to handle this power if offered it, let alone trusting others or society as a whole.

Are there ways we could ‘use this power for good’? In theory, yes, absolutely.

In practice, if we discovered we could, I do not think people would properly stop to think whether we should, and notice I expect this to go quite poorly. This seems like a way to get tons of the things suffering helps you notice are bad, with no way to stop them. This is the ultimate Chesterton’s Fence situation, and the ultimate EA failure mode.

I notice that if you say ‘oh but the animals were genetically modified to not suffer, so everything we are doing is fine’ that my brain responds with a terrified Little “No.” Either what you are doing was fine before, or you did not hereby make it fine. Same thing goes for people.

Again, there are tactical ways to use this to score huge actual net wins. I have zero faith in our ability to do that, any more than we limited cocaine use to dentists.

So I don’t know what to do about this. It seems crazy not to investigate. On the margin, it seems like it must be good. But then I solve for the equilibrium, or what it would do if unleashed fully, and I see huge upside potential but expect it to by default go very badly and see no way to coordinate for a better outcome.

No, the parallel is not lost on me.

Scott Alexander also lays out his other grants here. Overall I am happy with his selections. Definitely some I would not have picked, but some potentially very good picks, and a solid willingness to go outside the box or narrow cause areas relative to what I have seen in past grants, so good show. Balsa got passed over, but such rounds are about positive selection, not negative selection, and we did get actual Georgism.

Robin Hanson says academia has virtues it would be good to see more of elsewhere, but lacks other important virtues from outside academia. He does not see why one could not get the best of both worlds. I think there is some room to combine the best, but not as much as one would hope.

I also question the virtues.

1. Robin says academics invite ‘strong criticism.’ I would instead say that they disregard criticism that does not follow their formal rules or respect their notions of expertise and status, while elevating very particular types of criticism that do follow those protocols, and considering it blameworthy to be vulnerable to such criticism. This does not, in practice, seem to me to be so good for seeking important truth.

2. Robin says they prioritize original insight. I would say they place an emphasis on things being technically new, over what is important to notice or talk about, in a way that does not cause focus on what matters. Some amount of this is good but the obsession with formal credit and being first seems counterproductive at the margin.

3. Robin says they use precise language and announce core claims up front. I do think this is something others need to do more, but also academics use nitpicking on precision to dismiss those who do not play their games, ignoring what people have to say via technical excuses. And the obsession with precision prevents academics from talking in plain language, making them very difficult for others to understand and painful to read, all while making the process of writing and communicating take far longer. This blog is an attempt to do a synthesis, where one is precise in ways that matter without going (too far) overboard.

I notice that these criticisms tie the bad to the good. If you are obsessed with new ideas and precise language and the ability to cite the record, you are going to neglect the most important topics more, because they won’t fit those priorities. Similarly, this focus on language exactness and formal criticisms leads to attempts to use language for prestige.

Bill proposes spending $5 billion on prosecuting those who share online child sexual abuse material (CSAM, can we ever call anything by its name anymore?). This is a good cause, and I strongly agree that prosecute the offenders is the correct way to do this, as opposed to violating civil liberties. However it seems like massive overkill. Do we need to spend this much here? What would we get for it?

Meanwhile Zuckerberg got quite the grilling from various Senators over related issues. The hearing starts with Graham saying ‘you have blood on your hands’ and ‘you have a product that is killing people’ and getting applause. The product in question is an app for sharing photos and videos.

The clip directly linked, which is the one that showed up in my feed as ‘Zuckerberg should be fired for this,’ shows Ted Cruz blaming Zuckerberg for two things.

1. For knowing something he did not have admit to knowing. The idea is that Instagram knew that certain searches might contain CSAM, and put up a warning, offering to help the person get resources or to see results anyway. But as Zuckerberg points out, the whole idea is to trigger this if the results had even a tiny chance of such CSAM, rather than only either blocking or not blocking. So of course he gets roasted for it. Clearly, he should not have offered this message, instead having searches be either blocked or not blocked, no middle ground?

2. For not knowing something he had no reason to know. Meanwhile, Cruz was furious Zuckerberg did not know ‘how many times this message was displayed’ and then demanded that he find out and tell Cruz within five days, as Zuckerberg protested quite reasonably that this was not information he was confident was being tracked. Other than grandstanding what use is that number?

Then the next Tweet is about Hawley hammering Zuckerberg for daring to commission his own study on potential harms, which he claims means they ‘internally know full well’ how terrible Instagram is, and conflating Zuckerberg’s statement that overall the evidence does not provide a demonstrable link between social media (X) and harm to teenagers (Y) with a claim that there is definitely no link between X and Y. Also did you know that if Zuckerberg gets sent an email, he knows its contents?

We have an existence proof that you can make me sympathize with Zuckerberg.

If you were Zuckerberg, you would want to know as little as possible, as well.

I do think Zuckerberg is wrong, and being at best disingenuous, about the weight of the evidence. Haidt lays out a bunch of it here, I understand and buy many of the causal mechanisms and I have not seen the case against made in remotely convincing fashion. However it is strongly in Zuckerberg’s interest not to gather the evidence, and rathe than minimize that problem, we are maximizing it.

I am also with Sam Black that Haidt’s invocation of Pascal’s Wager here is a gigantic red flag, an attempt to sidestep the need to prove the case. It is not a good argument here any more than it is with AI. Social media has massive benefits, and an attempt to restrict it would have massive costs, the same as AI, and here the risks are not even existential. Even in AI where the stakes are everyone dying and the loss of all value in the universe, ‘you cannot fully rule this out’ is a bad argument, that the unworried claim is being made in order to discredit the worried. The calls to action are because the risk in AI is high, not because the risk is not strictly zero.

It is easy to see why this is not the case, and yet.

Miles Brundage: I think at least once a week about how Jeff Bezos could trivially increase the quantity/quality of journalism and improve public discourse by making The Washington Post free and bumping up the budget a bit, and doesn’t do so.

(Don’t know if up to date numbers are available on either front but the annual budget of WaPo is ~500M; Bezos has ~200B)

Daniel Eth: Any other mega-billionaire could too by working out a deal with Bezos/WashPo. Blaming Bezos but not the others is just the Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics.

Rich people often do things like this. Many media companies are run at a loss, often a high loss, as passion projects or de facto charities. I consider this highly effective altruism. This blog is among those who benefit from such a system, allowing all content to be fully free. Running the Washington Post without subscription revenue and with a bigger budget would be an extreme case, but would doubtless be very good bang for the buck. In a better world, various people would step up and take up a collection.

It should still be noted that Bezos is still doing everyone a solid with the Washington Post. He is not (as far as we can tell) interfering with the content, and he is running it far less ruthlessly as a business than would most replacements.

Dominic Cummings offers more snippets, almost entirely bad news, I disagree with some points but far more accurate than one might think.

A claim by Daniel Treisman in Asterisk that Democracy typically emerges ‘by mistake’ rather than as the inevitable result of a systematic process. This seems to me to be thinking about the problem wrong. Democracy is an inevitable aspiration, and a Shilling point that all can agree upon when there is unhappiness with the current regime or people otherwise want a greater voice. These exist at all development levels, and are enhanced as Democracy becomes more common and its legitimacy enhanced relative to other regimes, and also gains strength with economic development. There are also strong motivations by groups and leaders to try and defend or implement autocratic government as well.

So what determines what succeeds? Treisman’s case is that this is usually what he calls ‘accident,’ that the majority of the time the autocrats that lose power ‘make mistakes.’ This is measured against what he judges, in hindsight, to have been optimal policy for retaining power. Unnecessary concessions, especially ones that fuel greater concessions, are common in this view, as are cracking down in ways that only make things worse.

But already, one sees the problem. And a large part of the problem with autocracy is that such systems are going to not have great insight into the situation and make a lot of mistakes in this sense, see the SNAFU principle. Yes, of course the proximate causes of failure will often be particular mistakes, in the sense that perfect play had a better shot, but that will always be true. How often have Democracies or democratic revolutionary attempts fallen or failed ‘due to mistakes’?

Certainly, if one were to tell the stories of 2016 and 2020 (and no doubt 2024) in America, in terms of those who advocated for and against democracy in various ways or at least believed they were doing so and could counterfactually have been doing so, they are full of huge mistakes on all sides. A lot of those mistakes seem very non-inevitable, very particular and human. As they usually are. When was the last time there were major messy events anywhere, and there were no important mistakes made by this standard?

So I don’t see it the way Daniel sees it, but also I think he is doing good pushback to the extent anyone is thinking of results as inevitable in this sense. But at the same time, looking at the map, the results look highly non-random in terms of who ended up in which camps. Mostly, in the end, it is not an accident, and national character and circumstance functions as fate, if we aren’t considering alternative endings to a few key events (e.g. the American and French Revolutions, World Wars and Cold War).

Also, as was recently pointed out online, all these democracies are highly imperfect, with numerous veto points and special exceptions and other tricks to let the system function in practice.

Scott Alexander in a newly unlocked post discusses the philosophy of fantasy, and in particular speculates that the everything is built around the possibility for someone seemingly ordinary to go save the world and suddenly have lots of agency and power. The only way that anyone can become the hero is if the hero roll is assigned mostly randomly, you are secretly the son of the king or something. Or of course if there is some Origin Story situation where they get ‘superpowers’ they now have to master via a personal journey, Scott does not mention we have invented a second variant with a bunch of different conventions.

Then, because (as Scott coined) Someone Has To And No One Else Will, or as Marvel’s Uncle Ben puts it With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility, they actually go out there and Do Something to perhaps Save the World. Which hopefully makes people realize they also have power, or could have it, and could go out and Do Something themselves, whether or not Saving the World could be involved.

There’s definitely something to that. I also think the other explanations he cites, that no one is creative and everyone enjoys consistent tropes, matter as well.

I also think a lot of it is about being allowed to not let the laws of physical reality get in the way of a good story. If you set your story in a realistic world, people dislike it when something physically impossible or otherwise nonsensical happens, oops.

If you set your story in a mostly realistic world, then decide to disregard the rules when it is inconvenient for the plot or someone’s emotional journey or a really cool moment, people will not like that.

If you set your story in an entirely unrealistic world with all new different stuff, people will get confused, and they will see you have too many degrees of freedom, and it will all seem arbitrary.

Meanwhile, these others have gone ahead and created these conventions that readers understand and that will mostly allow you to pull your shenanigans as needed, and where the reader expects some twists where you pull random rabbits out of hats.

Following the specifics of existing conventions or stories gives you permission to do arbitrary stuff without it having to otherwise be the best stuff. That lets you make or use more interesting choices, rather than being forced to go generic. It also means that you do not have to ‘justify’ your decisions, things do not need to tie together, you do not need to give everything logically away.

In particular, when you are doing it right, this lets you show a potential Chekhov’s Gun without being obligated to fire it, because you could be doing worldbuilding. There is not the same strict ‘every moment must be in here for a reason’ that I often cannot get out of my brain.

This all of course gets turned on its head and ruined once the formula becomes too generic. This is part of what happened to Marvel. Being in the MCU went from ‘lets you do cool different things’ to the opposite, where everything was on rails with slightly different physical laws. No good.

I am continuously dismayed by the ‘everyone is always selling something’ worldview.

Especially when the people espousing it are using it as an argument to sell something.

Right Angle Sports: The anti-tout sentiment is more out of control than ever, and it usually comes from the biggest attention seekers on this platform. Remember that EVERYONE is selling something. They may not want money for picks at this moment, but they want views, likes, reposts, and to build their brands for influence and other money making opportunities.

Seth Burn: Chart is undefeated.

Chart indeed remains undefeated.

Every NFL team season in a Simpsons clip. 10/10, no notes.

Walker Harrison is one of many analyzing the new playoff overtime rules. He finds that it is very slightly better (50.3% winning chance) to receive if everyone acts rationally. This is close enough that idiosyncratic considerations would dominate. I continue to presume that it is right to take the ball, that it is not as close as such calculations indicate, and people are overthinking this. The exception is if you think the opponent will make larger mistakes if you kick, whereas taking the ball might ‘force them’ into playing correctly.

College football considering a 14-team playoff where the SEC and Big 10 champions get byes and no one else does, as opposed to current new 12-team playoff where the top 4 conference champions get byes. Somehow other conferences are upset. I get the argument that being SEC or Big 10 champion is much harder and means more, and also they have more leverage, but also he who lives by the superconference dies by the superconference, and this is too many teams. I would stick with 12, or at most expand to 13, one bye for the Big 12 and ACC combined seems reasonable. The other talk is of guaranteed slots for conferences, and I say none of that, if you don’t have two worthy teams why should you get a second slot?

Is a similar reckoning coming for NCAA basketball and march madness? Here’s a headline: SEC’s Sankey doesn’t envision P5-only NCAA Tournament, but ‘things continue to change.’

“You have to give credit to teams like Saint Peter’s a couple years ago, Florida Atlantic’s run,” SEC commissioner Greg Sankey said. “There are great stories and we certainly want to respect those great stories, but things continue to change.”

It is very clear what he is thinking. It is very clear why he is thinking it.

Matt Brown: NEW EXTRA POINTS: I understand the arguments for expanding the NCAA Tournament, and even agree with many of them. But altering automatic bids shouldn’t be part of a “dialogue.” It should be a core principle worth defending.

Seth Burn: 100% agree. The SEC cannot be allowed to come after the autobids. It was bad enough when expansion allowed them to dilute the autobids via play-in games.

I have no objection to 72 teams, so long as all 16 play-in games are at-large teams. Let the bubble sort itself out in Dayton.

I agree as well. Automatic qualifiers for all conference winners into the round of 64, or GTFO, and the dream is dead. If you want to add additional play-in games for those on the bubble right now? Sure, why not, that’s good TV.

Television networks that lack WNBA contracts consider paying Iowa star Caitlin Clark to stay in school for another year to continue being NCAA ratings gold. It did not happen this time, but why not in the future? If she gets to allocate a bunch of wealth, she should be taking bids and capture a good portion of that. If she is worth more in college than in the pros, and it sounds like she was, then we should keep her in college, but of course pay her accordingly.

Regulated American sportsbooks offer in-game potentially highly correlated parlays, they make mistakes with the math, then when the parlays hit they often try to void the ticket and either not pay at all or renegotiate the odds, citing ‘obvious errors.’

In case it needs saying, this is extremely unacceptable behavior, completely out of line. Yes you can void for an obvious error, but the time to do that is before the game begins, and when we say obvious it better be obvious. Your correlation calculator being out of whack? That’s not it.

New Jersey scores points by having none of it. Although it seems they are what one might call overzealous?

Rebuck said he saw Europe’s lax standard for palps and decided to impose much stiffer criteria in New Jersey. Soon after his state legalized sports betting, in 2018, an operator mistakenly listed the Kentucky men’s basketball team as a double-digit underdog instead of a heavy favorite.

After investigating, New Jersey ordered the operator to pay up because Kentucky’s overmatched opponent still had a theoretical chance of winning. On another occasion, an operator was allowed to void bets on a field goal in a football game being longer than two yards because a field goal must be longer than 10 yards and is almost always at least 18.

A flipped large favorite is the canonical valid example of an obvious error that a book is permitted to void. The standard of ‘you cannot void a bet that could possibly lose’ is not a reasonable one. If the game is already over and then you try to void it, it is admittedly tricky, since it means you are ‘taking a free shot’ at the customer, and the magnitude required goes up a lot.

If the game hadn’t started yet or much progressed since the wager, then not letting them void the ticket is absurd. That’s what I would emphasize here. If the game hasn’t started and market odds haven’t moved a ton, I’m sympathetic. If you sit on it in case the house wins anyway? Not so much. If you only realize after the game? Well, tough.

These parlays were indeed big mistakes. The customer here estimates they had a 1% chance of winning and were being paid 200:1 (+20000). That’s over a 100% return in expectation, and you can do this in a lot distinct games, so it will add up fast and is a huge mistake. It is not however an obvious one.

Even in other states that don’t protect the player so much, the customer for a voided parlay has various tools to fight back and get paid. My model is that customers who can perform class and work the system, who have a decent case and are willing to fight, generally win their fights in such situations.

North Carolina governor Roy Cooper cuts an ad for sports betting? This seems pretty not okay?

Haralabos Voulgaris: How many years till Sports Gambling addiction becomes a massive problem in the USA. The number of college aged (and younger) kids obsessed with gambling is way too high, and nearly every platform and league are promoting the *fout of gambling to their fans.

And Yes I get the irony, I was always a mass proponent of legalized gambling in the USA but not this version where its this much in your face. Its too much and it shows no signs of abating.

TBD: Universities are pimping out their students for 30 dollar referral fees. It should be a scandal.

I feel similarly. Sports betting is great in moderation, when used wisely, or when played as a game of skill. It can enhance the game rather than take away from it. I love that ESPN will now tell me the odds. It is a great antidote to dumb punditry. Discussion can enhance your understanding, and also train your mind on things like probability and focusing on what matters.

It can also ruin lives, and focus on it can warp and crowd out everything else, both for an individual or for sports in general. Making it available, in expensive form, on everyone’s phone, with constant advertising, is a serious problem. Having everyone with any platform, reach or authority sell out to push this onto young people (and others) is highly toxic.

In some ways it feels like this peaked a year or two ago, but the problem has not gone away.

I think the right model is largely that of cigarettes, and many others are coming around to this as well.

bomani: this is a terrible medium to discuss gambling because it’s unserious place fueled by unserious people. but a serious reckoning is coming and i fear we’ll all be too compromised to properly address it. but it’s guaranteed to happen.

Kyle Boddy: Being a former professional gambler across a lot of domains naturally makes most think that I like the legalization push we’ve seen.

But mostly, I don’t.

Spend years of your life in casinos and you may agree.

People should be free to gamble, no question about it. But I doubt I’ll ever get over it being intertwined with sports broadcasts and league announcements. It’s weird, unsettling, and vaguely predatory.

Just look at how much states are making off addicts and desperate people betting insane parlays. Honestly, that’s the only thing I have a very hard time accepting: The glorification of 20-30% holds on parlays that are beyond ridiculous.

Marketing the inevitable statistical outlier wins of the 12-leg garbage parlay or teaser should likely be made illegal. Possibly the bet itself should be banned, but I’d not go that far yet.

Seth Burn: I agree with a lot of this. My thought is that banning advertising, the same as we did with cigarettes, might be the best we can do.

Advertising and ways of ‘pushing the product’ generally need to get restricted, so you cannot link it to any given brand or offering. It should be taxed. It should ideally come with some modest social stigma. But we of course must accept that it is something people are going to do and that telling people probabilities is legal. We may also want some restrictions on gambling on phones to avoid people falling into bad patterns.

The phone thing is a big deal. Ryann Hassett notes that America used to think that gambling needed to be physically difficult to reach in order to protect us, and now we all have it on our phones and no one seems to be objecting all that much, while we still retain our restrictions on physical gambling locations.

I believe the distinction between sports betting (and I would add poker) on one hand, and other gambling on the other, is a lot of this. People instinctively understand that easy access to slot machines in particular is deeply dangerous and destructive, any kind of luck-based video machine with immediate feedback loops. Whereas things that are tied to events and other people and skill-based decisions are still dangerous, but different, less scary and with more upside.

A few states have legalized virtual slots on phones. I believe they will regret this, and the damage will snowball with time. We can never fully prevent gambling, but we want to not make it easy.

Worst and most shameful of all, of course, is the lottery.

Amazing Maps: Average yearly spending on lottery tickets by state

There is no adjustment for income, so this is even worse for West Virginia and South Dakota than it looks. West Virginia has a median income of $26,187, so that’s over 2% of income. Nevada, of course, has its own issues.

I won’t spoil this, but it is awesome, and wow I cannot believe this was allowed to happen. There is a third trick that I thought was going to be involved to make all this work, but turns out it wasn’t, the other competitors made the errors on their own.

I won’t spoil this either, it is table tennis.

A fun thing: Infinite Craft. Combine two things, get new thing.

People ask me occasionally for my list of tier 1 games, those one Must Play. Alas, I do not have a complete list assembled. I can, however, say that Persona 3 (I played the FES version) is definitely on that list, although it had some clear issues with repetitiveness in its dungeons.

There is now a remake, Persona 3 Reload, which brings it up to ‘Persona 5 standards.’ You don’t get to tell everyone they Must Play more than one such 75-hour odyssey, so I only get to pick one. This is the one.

Persona 3 Reload has a core story and message people need to really understand. It was important even before concerns about AI, it works without it, but now the game is very clearly also about AI, our reaction to AI and existential risk from AI more than almost any other story is about AI, and that has almost nothing to do with Aigis (the game’s actual AI).

Of course I am a huge Shin Megami Tensei fan, so adjust for that in terms of the gameplay. Of the others I have played, I would then likely put Devil Survivor, Persona 5 and SMT IV, in Tier 2, and I’d have Devil Survivor 2, Persona 4, SMT III and SMT IV: Apocalypse in Tier 3.

Persona 5 has the edge in terms of the game play, as it has demon negotiations, custom designed dungeons and monthly opposition that ties into characters, better tension on how to spend your time, better quality of the individual social link stories, and other signs that it learned from the previous two iterations. But the story in Persona 3 wins hands down, and that is more important than all that other stuff.

Persona 4 and Persona 5 are both attempts to get that same message across, retelling the core story using different characters and metaphors. Persona 4 is the lesser work that I am still very happy I played, Persona 5 would be Tier 1 if I didn’t instead choose Persona 3.

I am not going to have this opportunity, but playing 3 over again made me want to make Persona 6. The central plot is obvious, you make everything straight up text.

SMT V was in progress, I had finally gotten around to resuming it, and then suddenly they announce SMT V: Revenge is coming in a few months as a superior edition, so I switched to Persona 3 Reload for now.

You can play the games in any order, except for SMT IV before SMT IV: Apocalypse. The mainline games are more hardcore and grindy, so take that into account.

To be clear, if you do not enjoy the core gameplay of grinding in these games, you mostly will not like them. But I think Persona 3 is pretty great. Memento Mori.

I finished Octopath Traveler 2, and can put it solidly into Tier 2. If you like what this game is doing it is a great time. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’d have two notes. Mechanically, I ended up with a highly effective strategy that worked on essentially everything, allowing me to do enough damage in one go to bypass the scary final phases of most bosses. It felt like the game made this too easy on several levels, and I wonder to what extent other strategies that I missed are close to as good.

In terms of story, it worked great and the whole thing was fair and many things came together nicely, except that there were some things that felt underexplored or like loose ends. It also illustrated some unique things that games can do with story that wouldn’t work in a passive medium. A television adaptation of this wouldn’t capture it at all. You could use the basic plots and still have something but it would be totally different.

I played a full run of Griftlands after two false starts where I learned some of the game’s mechanics and quickly reset. There isn’t nothing there, but it gets tedious, it encourages play patterns that are not great, the cards did not seem so flexible, and the game felt like it gives choices that are not interesting rather than ones that are. I am pretty sure this is Tier 5 (We Don’t Talk about Bruno), might scrape into Tier 4 if I give it more of a chance but doesn’t seem worth doing that, so I probably won’t. Also wow all the achievements are brutal, the easiest one only went to 4.4% of players and all of them felt like ‘you are doing this very much on purpose.’

I played a bunch of Balarto. The game is definitely fun to play, does a bunch of interesting things, and packs lots into a tiny little package. It’s a roguelike. You have a poker deck, play hands, score increasing number of points, try to improve fast enough to win, and so on.

Issues are that it forces you to play a lot of games to unlock the interesting challenges, that large parts of runs at lower difficulty levels (which you’ll do a lot of) are ‘you have already won, unless you hit a particular whammy’ or other times you quickly die because whoops, game has gigantic levels of variance, and also there are clearly correct things to do.

I won’t spoil what they are, but it seems to me like the game is very clearly pointing you in one of two directions. There is one clearly easiest strategy for low difficulty, and another clearly best strategy for higher difficulty. Extensive rebalancing will be needed if the game wants to attempt to take itself to the next level. At this point, there are some achievements and unlocks I could go hunting for, but trying to high roll into winning at the highest difficulty doesn’t seem all that exciting. But yeah, play it, it’s fun, I’d say Tier 2.

Jorbs offers his review:

Jorbs: jorbs balatro review: B+

pros:

mega buffoon pack

joseph j joker

numbers go up

cons:

bad ui/ux and balance for high difficulty play

delayed variable response animations get boring and empty pretty fast

Seems spot on. As one response said, has potential to be A+ (my Tier 1) with more work. The UI could get options to speed various things up, and various things could be better balanced, including what is being rewarded.

I am probably mostly done with the game, but in the sense that I am done with Slay the Spire, it seems like a fun thing to do on occasion and there are still new numbers to make go up.

Jorbs also has this thread about how to communicate what a hand will score.

Jorbs: balatro hand score discourse is so fascinating to me. I don’t think i’ve ever seen any other discourse where so many people /who would personally enjoy a thing/ argue against it because /they think someone else wouldn’t/.

There are so many “we can’t clearly communicate that information to people because they won’t respond to it how we want” arguments that get made in the world and my thought forever and ever will always be “maybe do it anyway so they get used to having clear information?”

An example. The idea that something could be displayed purposefully and helpfully to a player is just never mentioned. Is there really no way to make the circled region more useful here in a way that makes the game more fun?

Text Jorbs quotes: I can absolutely see where you and your feelings are coming from, but I think what you’re missing is that you’re very much in the minority with what you find fun. Most people aren’t finding any fun in trying to find the play that wins 47% of the time instead of the play that wins 43% of the time. And the reason for that is exactly your first point: you’ll never know if the play you made was the mathematically optimal one (and by that I mean exactly what you mean, the play that wins the run with the highest probability), you’ll only ever know the outcome.

At a certain point, you cannot make sure your decision is better than a certain other decision. And that’s fair, the game is complex. No matter how much you think about it, you’re going to make a decision that is not a 100% informed one, and that’s why it’s not nice to want even more and more and more information out of the UI. If you are the type of person that’s interested in the mathematics of it, you’ll be able to figure out the easier things (just like you did in the video). If you aren’t though, what would be your reaction to seeing all these percentages in the UI? To me, it feels like most people would be turned off by that and say that the game is not for them. (I know this because I have seen games where I went ‘oh man, this is really complicated’ in the first 10 minutes of the demo and never looked back at them, and I consider myself to be similar to you in interests.) To most people, the decision not to include any of that stuff is most probably the right decision.

That said, if the game did go in that direction and tried to appeal to you more, it could do that by locking all that stuff behind something that already proved you aren’t fazed by any of that difficulty, for example, winning a run on gold stake or something.

I think this is bonkers. When I lose a run of Balatro because I did not realize how much a hand would score, or I have to choose whether to spend a bunch of time calculating what the play is, that is infuriating.

I do realize there is a UI puzzle to solve here, especially when there are random things involved (e.g. the misprint joker), and I would stick to the minimum a hand can score. I might also lock the calculation behind a higher stake where you actually need it.

And I do think there is a real worry that people will feel forced to try every possible hand to see what it might score, which is not fun.

So perhaps a compromise?

One thing I can see is, simply, saying whether a hand is definitely going to defeat the blind, warning the player if they are about to play a final hand that will definitely lose (e.g. you get a message like the ‘hand will not score’ that says ‘hand will lose.’) and also perhaps an indication of whether you are playing the highest expected value hand possible.

Also you could require players unlock the indicators and only get them on higher stake levels, so new players get the slot machine feeling and then serious players get to focus on what is interesting.

Very Fyed: I think it’s supposed to invoke slot machine vibes in that your score is a surprise. The tally plus the flames if you hit a hand that wins the round would be detracted from if you knew the score ahead of time. This feels like a deliberate choice but could maybe be a toggle?

Jorbs: that is 100% what it’s supposed to be, however, you cannot multiply 60 x 12 in order to immediately know what a slot machine is going to give you, so the execution of the idea is very poor.

Natures: Is this about the game not showing how much a given hand scores in total?

I played Balatro for the first time last night and this was the #1 thing that was turning me off of it. I’m fine doing some amount of math, but I immediately felt like this was hugely cumbersome

Jorbs: yes, the dev says it’s part of the design philosophy and a bunch of people very vocally say that they wouldn’t enjoy the game as much if it worked that way (n.b. without ever having tried playing the game with it working that way).

Steam Families is a new feature that lets you share your entire game library with up to five other people in your immediate family, and offering sensible parental control options, including the kid asking for purchases and you decide whether to approve. The only restriction is you can only play the same game at once if you have enough copies. This seems amazingly great, tons of value. Even better would be letting you decide exactly which games to grant children access to.

You can swap families or members with a one year delay, if your life changes.

I won a different way, but this works too, and his prize was way better.

NewCommand: Everyone else was making AIs but only the OP was playing poker.

And yes, I remember, it was glorious to watch this in real time, if you know you know:

Mobile game ads show things entirely unrepresentative of game play. Why? Presumably it works, and no one punishes them for it. People don’t uninstall based on being misled. Mobile games exist in a LTV of customer versus CPI winner take all world, anything successful at that can scale, so if there is any edge you have to take it, and that’s all you ever see.

Why you should care about competitive Magic: The Gathering, if you play Magic. It is a thrilling spectator sport, for those who put the energy into understanding the cards and enough of the context, especially when viewed with friends, packed with great storylines. It is aspirational, it is a testing ground and sanity check and forcing step to keep things balanced, it provide a place to learn, it ensures the art has an end other than itself to tie it together.

Alas, ‘puts the energy in’ no longer includes me, largely because of the gap in Pro Tours, but now it has gone on too long and I am too busy, and the cards all got too much text and are too centered on Commander, so I am unlikely to soon turn back unless my kids get interested.

The one place I disagree with Reid Duke is that I do think the focus on Commander hurts competitive Magic. It messes up the player funnel and card acquisition process, with much of everyone’s collection not legal in tournaments, and it makes designs increasingly focus on casual and multiplayer play, while fighting for mindshare. I am totally thrilled that many get joy out of Commander, but things are out of hand. I continue to think Commander was at its best without intentional designs towards it, as a player driven found format. Making cards for it on purpose? No thanks.

Magic: The Gathering changes the rules around suspend, gives the player full choice on whether to play the spell. They admit this makes the resulting gameplay worse, that being forced to cast a spell you did not want to what a positive and made life more interesting. The excuses given for why it was necessary anyway don’t fly. I would have been fine with the simple compromise rule that if there is any additional cost you must pay to play the spell, or playing the spell generates some sort of strange infinite loop, then paying that cost is optional. Instead, no fun.

Channel Fireball makes all its articles free to read. Lots of good stuff here, so now is a great time to check it out if any of it is relevant to your interests.

Patrick McKenzie finishes Factorio: Space Exploration after 748 hours. This is one of those ‘maybe I need to play this, and maybe I need to absolutely never play this’ situations. So far I’ve gone with not playing.

Tyler Cowen dislikes Fischer Random Chess. He seems to be looking at it as a spectator sport, where he notices that positions are impossible to readily understand with a perpetual ‘fog of war’ effect, you often watch young guns fight it out rather than stars, and it all feels wrong and disconnected from chess history. I think these are good objections, and that some of it also applies to the players.

But I also think that the opening preparation problem, which Tyler correctly calls ‘insanely out of control,’ is underrated in difficulty here. Going to faster time controls seems like at best a partial solution, although I support that change in general. I also would expect that random initial moves would only mutate the problem. Yes, you would not go 25+ moves deep anymore, but now players would feel pressure to study every possibility, rather than being able to choose their favorite lines. A big advantage of chess is that you can pick what types of games you want to play, and also if you want you can choose areas where relatively little opening work is done or needed.

In case you did not realize: No, chess grandmasters do not burn 6000 calories a day.

The art of Nile’s Bat Heist, where you play with Bats and everything they steal until you win a game. Sounds like tons of fun.

Kevin Fisher notices that game companies produce games that are reflections of the characters of the founders. Makes sense to me, for small shops.

Did you know misleading statistics are allowed if they point in the right direction?

NBC News: Under 2% of console video games include LGBTQ characters or storylines, despite the fact that 17% of gamers identify as queer, according to a new GLAAD survey.

Alex Godofsky: A problem with this measure is that a much smaller fraction of games feature *straightcharacters or storylines than there are straight players, too. Many (most?) games feature zero characters or storylines of an identifiable sexuality.

Keller Scholl: It’s much worse than that: the GLAAD survey only counts it if it’s tagged as such on Steam (or other stores). Dragon Age Inquisition, to pick a famous one, isn’t tagged because it’s not LGBTQ-focused, or even romance-focused, even though there are romanceable gay characters.

Yep. When I think of the games I have played that offer multiple romance options, they usually (although not always) have an LGBTQ option among them, including the Dragon Age and Mass Effect games which I very much enjoyed.

Whereas most games, and most games I play, wisely have nothing to do with sexuality at all, and would be clearly worse for it if they did.

If one wants to imagine Luigi gay, neither I nor any evidence is going to stop you.

This section is here to signify that there was a section I wrote about recent happenings, that I decided brought more heat than light.

In the most in-character thing ever, Larry David beats up Elmo on live television when Elmo kept going on and on about mental health. Who among us, I ask. No jury would convict. Well, expect perhaps Wil Wheaton. He was enraged.

Seth Myers says Elmo is ‘one might say loved by all.’ Well, as a parent who has seen Sesame Street through two generations, that one would be incorrect. The clip gives David’s side of the story and must be seen. And yes, he would do it again.

I don’t know if Larry David thought it would be funny. I do know that character is fate.

Another month. More things. Much roundup.

Jesse Smith writes in Asterisk that our HVAC workforce is both deeply incompetent and deeply corrupt. This certainly matches my own experience. Calculations are almost always flubbed when they are done at all, outright fraudulent paperwork is standard, no one has the necessary skills.

It certainly seems like the Biden Administration is doing its best to hurt Elon Musk? Claim here is that they cancelled a Starlink contract without justification, in order to award the contract to someone else for more than three times the price. This was on Twitter, but none of the replies seemed to offer a plausible justification.

Claim that Twitter traffic is increasingly fake, and secondary claim that this is because Musk fired those responsible for preventing it. Even if it is true that Twitter traffic is 75% fake, that does not mean that your experience will be 75% bots, or even 7.5% bots. Mine is more like 0.75%. As usual, the bots are mostly making zero attempt to not look like bots, and would be trivial to find and ban if people cared.

Nate Silver is correct that ‘misinformation experts’ are collectively making a mistake when they themselves spread highly partisan misinformation, and also that the game theory makes it impossible for them to collectively stop.

The word ‘genocide’ risks being watered down to the point where we will not have a word for what it used to mean, and this will make it much harder to maintain the taboo of Never Again.

Avatar: The Last Airbender’s live action Netflix version decides that some of the scenes in the original ‘are iffy’ and it needs to soften a cartoon show made for eight year olds, to exclude a character arc where a boy grows up and learns not to be sexist, because the character started off too sexist. Not that I was ever watching anyway. As one commenter notes, if that is an issue, in news related to the previous item, wait until you hear about the Fire Nation.

An essay correctly identifying some (but far from all) of the problems with modern (post-2017) Star Trek, and how things have shifted from Starfleet being fundamentally good and its officers as professionals committed to behaving as such and living up to its ideals, to Starfleet being more often than not the enemy institution to be critiqued and opposed morally and practically, although its rivals are still worse, and everyone standing up for personal morality and vibes rather than caring about principles, professionalism, discipline or truth.

Picard I see as doing this ‘on purpose’ as subject, while still embodying the ideals of old Star Trek and thus still being actual Star Trek, Picard falls back upon moral authority because this is a scenario in which he lacks chain of command, whereas Discovery is simply a distinct entity (also its imagined future pretty much ruins everything) and thus I do not treat it as canon.

(Strange New Worlds a lot of people I know think is great, but both I and my wife stuck with it for that reason and found it unwatchable and bad on pure quality grounds, the issues pointed at here didn’t seem to be the problem.)

More on the lying, cheating bathroom scales that have been imbued with memory. A vision of one form of nightmare awaiting us in a future full of things that have ‘intelligence.’ Good news is the replacement scale I bought lacks this ‘feature.’

Claim that the remote work is devastating to talent development in software engineers. As someone who has worked from home most of their various careers I am skeptical. Yes, I see the value of in-person contact for tech, but it would be so easy to also make the opposite case.

Another case against smartphones, this one that they obviate and eliminate the opportunities and finitudes in which those virtues are cultivated. And yes, ‘your pocket calculator’ and everyone else’s can radically alter dynamics to derail many who would otherwise be likely to accomplish great things. It is amazing that those terrified of the slightest regulation as the death of innovation will often deny that any other obstacle in someone worthy’s path could ever stop them. You can’t have it both ways.

To what extent is our continuing to cook our own food a regulatory issue? To what extent is it us not actually being all that rich?

I do not think it is lack of wealth. Cooking for yourself is not even obviously more efficient, since you give up mass production. The places that most economize on food, such as schools and armies and collectivist groups, very much do not have anyone cooking for themselves. Cooking for yourself can be a luxury. You get food exactly how you want it, when you want it, fresh and not (do not underestimate fresh and hot) and you get to do something many people enjoy and find rewarding. This does break at the extremes, but that is a long way from where we are, and the very fact we are rich makes the labor required expensive. Being richer won’t save you from cost disease.

So how much does the regulatory issue matter? What would happen if we did not charge extra taxes when food production was outsourced, as opposed to the current method where groceries are immune from taxation and also your labor preparing them is not taxed? What if we also allowed things like small-batch sales from whoever wanted to cook something that day, and enabled that marketplace to properly clear? How much would we then rely on others more?

My guess is there would be substantial movement but less than you might anticipate. There are real natural advantages to cooking for yourself and your family. People rightfully take joy in cooking, and it has its benefits.

One might even say that there is a strange curve, where one starts out so poor one cannot cook, gets rich enough to cook, then gets rich enough to not cook, then rich enough to start cooking again, then perhaps rich enough to have a personal chef.

$250 an hour empty nest coaches for parents who can’t handle it? I mean, sure, I guess, shrinks cost what they cost. I love my kids but do not anticipate having this problem. Oh no, suddenly I have lots of space and money and time.

Extensive guides are being offered to the puzzle that is Disney World, where the stress, planning, time and money costs seem to be spiraling out of control. I have no doubt there is much genuine magic to be had underneath it all, but none of this seems like something any sane person would subject themselves to on purpose, unless you placed very high story value on it. I suppose this was inevitable. People are bidding against each other for the Disney World experience using various currencies, there are a lot of Americans and only one park, so only those who get unusually high value from it will find it worth the price. Seems like there is a lot of winner’s curse going on, also toxic dynamics involving the expectations of children, where the existence of the park is for most people a net negative whether or not they go.

Here is one good use case, showing giant reams of sheet music while playing piano.

Chris Velazco tries it out for the Washington Post. He concludes it has its uses, but that ultimately no you do not need it. The spacial computing as work plan continues to not look good at current margins versus using a desktop with multiple monitors.

Mark Zuckerberg strikes back, flat out calls Quest the better product even ignoring the price differential. Apple’s screen resolution is better, he says, but they had to make tons of compromises to get it, and for most purposes the Quest is better, because it is open and there is software for it and it supports more use cases and input devices.

Demos for the Quest were not available locally, but I tried one on and the difference in resolution was obvious right away.

Liron Shapira joins those returning their Vision Pro, as he was looking for productivity, and the mirroring DPI wasn’t good enough. He did find it promising otherwise as a relaxing work environment, and notes that ignoring his family can also be fun. I applaud him for running the experiment. He does note it might work for those who are already at lower resolutions due to poor vision.

Meanwhile reports are it will be at least 18 months before the second version is available.

Time is valuable and optionality is great. So it still simultaneously seems crazy to buy one, and also crazy to not buy one. I am leaning towards passing, but still not sure.

The problem in science.

helicopterosaur: In a randomized controlled experiment, even if the difference you’re measuring is not there, you can still get a statistically significant result if you roll a natural 20.

Ronny Fernandez: Of course, part of what’s sad here is that scientists tend to think of this as rolling a natural 20 rather than as rolling a natural 1.

Another problem in science is that prestigious journals are now sufficiently gated that publishing in them actively interferes with scientific work.

Ethan Mollick: Evidence that academic publishing is now doing the exact opposite of what it did before the internet. It is now a massive gatekeeper to knowledge, rather than a way of distributing it. Publishing in an expensive journal can lower, rather than raise, citation counts.

Florian Ederer: Market power hinders the dissemination of knowledge.

+1% increase in journal price -0.83% article’s citations and -1.07% citing author count with much larger effect for citations from lower-ranked institutions.

Immediate boost to citations when an article becomes free on JSTOR.

Most economics papers and other academic work is useless, everyone involved knows this, outside of the top quartile it is essentially a grift where nothing would survive critical review. Tyler Cowen retweeted and I too have come around to thinking this is basically correct.

Also here we see that the statistical results of economics papers are so frequently selected, and so excessive in their results as compared to their statistical power, that a majority of them are at best misleading.

A large majority of empirical evidence reported in leading economics journals is potentially misleading. Results reported to be statistically significant are about as likely to be misleading as not (falsely positive) and statistically nonsignificant results are much more likely to be misleading (falsely negative). We also compare observational to experimental research and find that the quality of experimental economic evidence is notably higher.

I have done my best to be skeptical, both of each result and of academia in general.

It seems I need to up my game.

Technically bad news, the growth rate of EV sales has slowed? Everyone remember how exponentials work?

Those are growth rates, so the complaint is that we aren’t selling enough more than we were before in relative terms. Oh, no.

Lithium prices are declining once again.

Billionaires commit a lot of crime and fraud. That is how I would summarize the key findings of Ben West in Rates of Criminality Amongst Giving Pledge Signatories, where roughly 200 non-EA billionaires pledged to give most of their money away, and we find 25% have been accused of financial misconduct, 10% or so have been convicted of financial misconduct, 4% have spent some time in prison and 41% have at least one misconduct allegation against them.

It is of course possible that signing a pledge saying you will give all your money away correlates highly with willingness to do crime and be deceptive, for various reasons, along with the obvious reasons to suspect the opposite. My guess is this is representative.

My presumption is also that the rate of actually doing the crime vastly exceeds the rate of doing the time. Most crimes of almost all types are not punished, most perpetrators not caught let alone convicted. White collar crimes of billionaires seem unlikely to be an exception. You could say that they bring greater scrutiny and have more enemies. They also have much better tools to avoid consequences.

Why? My model says that the acts required to become a billionaire make you willing to engage in such conduct if you weren’t already, and those winning to engage in such conduct are much less likely to become billionaires. Also the world has a lot of fraud and crime in it. I still think it is important to draw the distinction between ‘ordinary decent fraud’ versus aggressive fraud versus outright fraud, and how much we expect of each one. As the post notes, our intuitions for such situations are often poor.

The discussion section is disappointingly mostly about how much to expect there to be scandals from those giving to charity, rather than learning important facts about the world.

I continue to have the point of view that if someone wants to donate their money to a good cause, that money should be used for the good cause.

I don’t get this either, and consider it evidence against the broader EMH that companies generally do reasonable things:

Gordo: there is no way it is good marketing practice for a company to email you 9 times within 2 days of purchasing a product how on earth are we justifying these actions.

There is no question in my mind that many companies massively over-email you when you buy their products. I presume this is a simple case of each email having clear benefits where sometimes people respond and buy something or give you traffic, and they impose costs on users that those users then punish you for gradually over time. In general, if something has this form, where you burn goodwill for benefits now, I expect massive overuse.

Political charitable donations and apolitical charitable donations are functional substitutes, increasing donations to the Red Cross in the wake of a natural disaster and increasing political donations in the wake of campaign adds come partly at each others’ expense. It seems odd to think that it would be otherwise. Do people forget that giving to politics is giving to charity? If you are familiar with Effective Altruism, you understand the core insight that a lot of charitable donations have zero or negative net impact, so there’s nothing weird here.

Rules for cults from Ben Landau-Taylor’s mother. If the group members are in contact with their families and people who don’t share the group’s ideology, and old members are welcome at parties, then proceed, you will be fine. If not, then no, do not proceed, you will likely not be fine.

I strongly agree with Sarah Constantin that the old school Patron model of ‘rich person decides to fund this and funds it’ model is highly underrated, including that it is very much working for me. There are major obvious flaws, you cannot fully systematize it and would not want to. But I love it because it lets everyone involved focus on what matters and actually do the valuable thing. You can create something far more valuable, or do much better scientific work, if you do not need to constantly be checking your incentives and dealing with various forms of fundraising or revenue.

Spencer Greenberg notes that most often people end up getting less done than they expect, and it is very not close.

Spencer Greenberg: The results of this poll are wild. Given that this is about daily activity, why don’t people’s anticipations adjust for how much they can get done??? I have this same problem, so I’m also wondering this about myself.

Anna Salamon: I made my predictions more pessimistic until accurate. This made my output worse (couldn’t not take predictions as targets). Eventually decoupled predictions from targets by practicing in taxing, success-unlikely games until I could fully try while ~20% likely to succeed.

Warlock: Cool! What games?

Anna Salamon: Mostly: 20 questions (modified to be harder by picking random, difficult words), and difficult rounds of the “clicker game” (a game where group picks an action while I’m out of room, then “clicks” when person comes closer to it). Also consciously practiced porting to life tasks.

In practice my observation is that ‘what one expects to accomplish’ ends up being the same as ‘what one plans on accomplishing’ or even ‘what one aims to accomplish, if things go well.’ Then the median might end up being that you accomplish what you expected, but often you will fail, whereas it will be rarer for you to accomplish substantially more than that. Indeed, if you accomplish it all, you likely stop.

My solution, I think in practice, to this is to recognize that this is what I am doing by default, and notice that I should not conflate these two things, and to be fine with often ending the day disappointed. Indeed, I frequently end the day disappointed, asking why it was not more productive. Yet still, the productivity does happen.

Cate Hall offers an excellent post that is nominally about how to cultivate agency.

It is about that. It is also more general. It is about how to accomplish things in general. How to be effective.

The central theme is what I call Finkel’s Law: Focus Only on What Matters.

Most people think agency is largely about grinding through tons of hours. It isn’t. It is about buckling down and doing the real work that determines outcomes.

Cate Hall: These days I set boundaries that would have made me ashamed at earlier points in my life: I’m offline at 6 p.m. almost every night, and rigorously observe a Sunday Sabbath where nothing with the flavor of effort is tolerated. These will seem like small things to some people, but like a mortal sin to others in the communities I run in.

My rule is never to take instructions on how hard I should work from someone who hasn’t burned out before. Very few people take this seriously enough.

I do not follow as strictly, I prefer to be more flexible with time and often not writing feels less relaxing than writing, but I am very much with Cate on setting limits.

Her other specific advice, all of which I endorse:

1. Court Rejection. Practice making unreasonable asks. Aim high.

2. Seek Real Feedback, especially anonymous feedback.

3. Increase Your Surface Area For Luck. Talk to as many people as possible, see what happens, even when you’re not sure why or if the person is worthwhile.

4. Assume Everything is Learnable. Not only skills, also many attributes. You have to be willing to do the boring work, but it can pretty much all be done.

5. Learn to Love the Moat of Low Status, when you are acquiring new skills and you need to mess around trying but still suck at the skill.

This is all the service of Focus Only on What Matters. Look for the big edges, the things that make a big difference. That does not mean you get to neglect the fundamentals. Everyone needs to be blocking and tackling. That matters too. Then you need to also put the focus on other things that matter.

Here is her example:

Cate Hall: Two friends and I maniacally studied reads together, and we all had out-of-distribution results. But when we’d tell other pros what we were doing, the response from most was “nuh-uh, that’s not a thing.” They weren’t willing to consider the possibility that reads were valuable, maybe because they didn’t want to feel obligated to study them.

All of my agency hacks are kind of like this, in my opinion — big, glaring edges that people might rather ignore.

I think pros have largely come around since then on the value of live reads. You can still try to ignore that to avoid ‘getting leveled’ in such games, trying to rely on reads makes you exploitable, but the competitors on the amazing Game of Gold made it clear that live reads are a huge deal even among pros.

Certainly in Magic: The Gathering reads have always been huge. I would constantly fret that someone who paid enough attention could notice various things, and try to make it harder on them. I also made a lot of effort to get good at reading people in various ways, and to develop a talking game that helped me get good reads and also to get opponents to relax, while hiding information that mattered.

An even better parallel might be Fact or Fiction splits. When you play Fact or Fiction, the opponent must divide five cards into two piles, and then you choose one to keep. When the card came out, it was clearly going to get played a lot. My testing partner Seth and I realized that good divisions would be very high leverage, and we spent a lot of time going deep analyzing various splits and situations. That work directly let me steal at least one win by tricking the opponent into taking the wrong pile, getting me into the final day.

I do not do anything like enough of the things Cate is talking about here.

1. I don’t make big asks often. When I do, I scarily often get them.

2. I don’t sufficiently actively seek out feedback, and don’t provide a way to give it anonymously, although I do prefer to get it non-anonymously.

3. I don’t sufficiently actively seek out meetings with others, despite high returns.

4. I don’t devote much time to intentional skill development.

5. I don’t like sucking at things. I do like the feeling of rapid improvement and the expectation of getting better. But I don’t appreciate it enough.

People do not appreciate true opportunity.

In the standard setup, you would retain knowledge of previous loops, your memories, experiences and skills, but everything else resets, including your physical state, no matter what.

To answer the question completely, one must ask what are the starting conditions and other rules.

If you are starting from a sufficiently terrible position with no good options, such as locked in a prison or in the middle of nowhere, you might need to spend substantial time fixing that each loop if you want to do much. It might even be impossible with perfect play.

Keeping your sanity is going to be a crucial problem if you are locked in a room or something. If you can handle that, there is a lot out there to think about, and I still think it’s a clear yes, but I do realize reasonable people could disagree. That is, however, a highly extreme case.

If you are starting from a normal position, with your usual resources, and you live in a city or even a town, you can do a hell of a lot in an hour even on the first or second loop.

Once you know the landscape, you can do quite a lot. And that’s locally. If you also have a phone or a computer? You can access all the world’s knowledge.

Consider this loop: A fully secured room, you can’t get out and no one can come in, one hour, but you have a desktop computer with internet access.

With that loop, you can watch every movie and show, read every book, study every intellectual discipline and non-physical skill, speak to a large percentage of the world’s people.

I don’t know how long I would choose to stay in that loop, but only centuries seems clearly like a massive punt. If you gave me a perfect (or good enough) memory that my knowledge and skills didn’t atrophy, I’d want a very, very long time. On the other hand, if you gave me a highly imperfect memory where I forget things, it’s very possible there is no upper bound, because I’d forget things faster than I could enjoy them, so the loop is permanently positive.

If you’re talking about loops of over a week in a normal situation, the whole thing is madness. Now you can go anywhere, do almost anything, learn almost anything to help you do it. I’d want to come out of the loop with the code for an aligned AGI.

There is also all the hedonic value. Every loop you get to eat anything you want and not face the consequences, along with every other available experience. Even if you have deep ethical qualms there are so many options, and in so many ways there is plenty of time to do the research.

Also note that if you get the last run of the loop on your way out, as is traditional, and it is not very short, then you also get almost unlimited funds, because you are the ultimate insider trader holding a full Sports Almanac, and you can do trial runs on that, and should. If you have a day out in the open and don’t leave with at least billions that’s on you.

So while Arthur initially meant to demonstrate that beyond some time frame it is a blessing, and I mostly agree with that, I think that time frame is very short.

NBER working paper claims that scientific advancement is much less a public good than we think, that the best and most useful science is done in private industry, and therefore that government funding of academic science is plausibly an active negative.

Patrick McKenzie takes his shot at explaining that the USA is on the verge of effectively forcing many companies that hire engineers to have tax rates over 100% due to forced amortization over five or even fifteen years, that many engineers are going to have to be fired if this isn’t fixed, no one wants that outcome, yet it remains unfixed.

You assume that no one wants public toilets to cost $1.7 million and not even be finished, that this must be incompetence. Do not be so confident.

Alec Stapp: “Under city law, for example, installing the Noe Valley toilet — even the free one — requires that the Recreation and Parks Department coordinate with or seek approval from San Francisco Public Works, the Planning Department, the Department of Building Inspection, the Arts Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Mayor’s Office on Disability, and Pacific Gas and Electric.”

Paul Graham: The people currently running San Francisco are not merely politically extreme. They’re also just plain incompetent. $1.7 million to build one public toilet isn’t a liberal vs conservative thing. Nobody wants that.

Patrick McKenzie: Do you know the Spider-Man panel with “But I don’t want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs.” ?

I have had some meetings with people who passionately believe in values systems that I would not have predicted would be ones someone could expouse except as a bit.

And while I wouldn’t predict someone would say “Oh toilets must cost $1.5 million that’s just science” in a meeting I would also not have predicted “Saving lives is a bad thing actually if doing so has bad distributional effects and so I will oppose it on the margin.”

Patrick is not speaking metaphorically. He is talking about vaccine distribution. Similarly, I do not think anyone actively wants to spend the extra money. However, I do think key people believe that cost is essentially irrelevant compared to being responsible and inclusive and equitable and so on, and think the status quo is righteous.

Can the government mandate a pause? Maybe not for foundation models, but for long term projects to facilitate LNG exporting that would improve the climate and our economy while helping our allies, but that sound like something they might dislike, the Biden Administration says yes.

New Jersey bans plastic bags, alternative bags people then use instead have 500% bigger carbon footprint, as the ‘reusable’ bags people use instead, in addition to being a royal pain in the ass, are a lot worse as used in practice, since the average number of uses is about two and a half.

Sar Haribhakti: “This ought to be the motto of the climate lobby: We don’t help the environment, but we feel good about it anyway.”

I worry the actual motto is ‘We actively hurt the environment, but we make people visibly suffer and hurt the economy while doing so, and that makes it all worthwhile.’

I am all for doing things that actually help the environment and actually fight climate change, provided the cost-benefit analysis is reasonable. There have been some very good programs. Increasingly, alas, the dominant mode has been otherwise.

Airfares are halved (!?) when three competitors fly a route versus a monopoly provider, and more competition drops fares further. My guess is this is overstated quite a bit due to selection effects, as the profitable routes are the ones where other airlines push to provide that competition, but I have little doubt the effect size is large. We could substantially reduce airfares while improving quality and quantity by allowing foreign airlines to compete. The arguments against doing so are Obvious Nonsense.

Government actually working, California bans ‘drip pricing,’ forces advertising of goods and services to quote final price up front. This is a clear collective action problem where it makes sense to intervene, since customers are sadly fooled by such nonsense.

Good news, I guess, San Francisco has managed to lower its $1.7 million per public toilet budget down to $725k.

Seattle implements a mandatory $5 fee on delivery apps to compensate drivers to ‘cove their living wage.’ It has now (as of the article linked) been two weeks. Sales fall by almost half, drivers are suffering.

Corie Whalen: WHO COULD HAVE PREDICTED THIS?

Seizure Salad: I’ve been following this in the Seattle subreddit. Someone ordered an $18 bowl of clam chowder and with taxes and fees (before gratuity) the total was $41.

K5: “It was three items of, you know, Thai takeout food for $122, without the delivery tip,” recalled Pettit.

She continued, “I ordered like a $12 sandwich. But then the $12 grew to $32.”

At these prices, delivery is not quite banned, but it is damn close, and instead of using such apps often I would use the apps essentially never. Of course, who is to say that was not the intention.

New York City took the opposite approach of banning outsized fees, and as a result I use delivery substantially more than under the previous regime.

IRS does not expect that many to use its direct filing option, although still enough to make it worthwhile. The system still fails to offer taxpayers the information the IRS already knows. Why shouldn’t it pre-fill the information, saving everyone time and effort and minimizing error? Seems to be more rent seeking from the tax preparers, also I suppose you could say that ‘tipping their hand’ could tell taxpayers what they could try to ‘get away with,’ someone ought to do a study, it should statistically be very easy to tell if there is an impact here. They also note that California tried pre-filled tax forms 20 years ago, but it was a failure as 80% of taxpayers did not use it. To which I say, what? That means 20% did use it. Sounds great to me.

You can have a substantial effect by calling your Congressman about a particular piece of legislation, and it only takes a few minutes. What happens with AI?

A law has been introduced in California that would impose several rules on social media platforms.

All the rules apply only to defaults. Users are free to change the settings, but as they note the defaults are powerful. Most people do not bother to change them. Here are the proposals:

1. The default feed must be chronological, not algorithmic.

2. The default notification settings must mute between midnight at 6am.

3. The default settings must cap usage at one hour per day.

4. The default settings must hide like counts.

The first two seem like clear wins. Chronological feeds are healthier. This is also a great way to target TikTok without doing something insane like the Restrict Act, making users do some work to get hit with the secret sauce.

The one hour usage cap is an odd one. I would expect the user to often remove this the first time they hit it, but perhaps many would instead take the hint as being helpful. It also would strongly help parents, as they would have a much stronger case for leaving such a restriction in place. Of course I say this as someone who has Twitter open all day every day, and is actively on it for more than an hour often.

I see what they are trying to do by hiding like counts, but I think this is a losing battle. Like and view counts are important context and provide key feedback. Yes, Scott Alexander can pull off removing them entirely, but he is the exception that proves the rule.

You do not want to push too far with such proposals. A lot of what you are counting on is that people never change their default settings.

If you push the user too far, they will essentially be forced into digging into the settings. Once they do that, they will also be far more likely to change other settings. So if you want to set good defaults, you want a set of defaults people can live with.

In general, the government mostly should not be sticking its nose in such business, especially when it is California trying to set rules for the whole world. I happen to like many of these changes, but that will often not be the case. So I would not be so sad if this particular bill passes, but in general we’d be better off leaving things alone.

California also has a new law that bans ‘drip pricing’ where the advertised price does not include all mandatory charges and fees. That one seems plainly good. The market failure being fixed here is clear. It has been such a relief that ticket sales to events use all-in pricing now.

In Soviet Oakland, when your small business is broken into, City bills You.

A crowd in San Francisco surrounded and vandalized the a fully autonomous Waymo vehicle, throwing a firework inside that lit the car on fire. Tyler Cowen says ‘In some alternate univsere, a small drone would emerge from the burning vehicle and strike them all down.’ I am happy we instead live in the opposite universe, where the vehicle lets the crowd do this, but also we have full camera footage and I very much hope that the police apprehend and punish everyone involved.

Zac Hill notes the strange economics of semi-organized theft:

Zac Hill: Things I tried and failed to get at my local @Walgreens just now due to (what I assume to be) the retail theft epidemic:

-> Deodorant

-> Toilet Paper

-> Toothpaste

Things apparently left untouched by this terrible blight/scourge:

-> A *staggeringvariety of “dual vibrating massagers”

Later, he follows up:

Zac Hill: I was talking with someone on Twitter who was insisting to me that the wild shit I personally saw at my local Walgreens didn’t happen. It now appears we’ve figured out the root cause!

Peter Hermann: A shocking twist in a series of Walgreens robberies in Chinatown: ‘An inside actor [was] helping to orchestrate the entire robbery conspiracy.’

Thief rips out all the phones on the ground floor of an Apple store one by one, then walks out casually past a police car and drives away. A response says Apple responds by bricking all the phones and even any phone that later uses their component parts, so people buy used phones that are bricked on Facebook marketplace, as if that makes this acceptable. The cost to Apple must be very large, that loss is fully a deadweight loss, and people buying the phones get scammed and have no useful phone. So arguably this makes the situation even worse.

Once again, I am left to wonder how the store is still there at all? How does our civilization not collapse, if there is zero risk of enforcement of laws against theft?

Our civilization also needs to figure out that it is not a victimless crime to steal a car.

Occupational licensing regimes greatly contribute to recidivism. At minimum, we could do more to mitigate the damage here, but much better not to throw up the barriers in the first place. A reform proposal is linked here.

Wayne Hall: There are many cases where people are released from prison without the nessassary documents to work. It can take 90 days to get these in order and to not be a burden. It seem it would be an easy win to ensure they are ready to work on release with a copy of their social security card and a state issued id.

Anna Salamon on the concept of ‘Believing In’ something or someone, considering that as something worth counting on, acting as if, investing in, championing and such, as distinct from believing a fact about the world or the probability of an outcome. I believe there is much wisdom here. Also see the concept of Steam.

Neal Stephenson to release Polostan on October 15, which sounds very Stephenson, potentially the start of an early 20th century version of the Baroque Cycle. I notice haven’t read his last few novels, despite enjoying his earlier ones a lot. I wonder if I am making a mistake.

Dan Wang’s 2023 letter. Almost odd to see thoughtful musing about the future that mentions offhand but essentially ignores both AI and fertility collapse as key elements. It is hard not to be pessimistic about China after reading. How can a country so profoundly unfree compete on AI or anything else? Its people seem, based on this, to have rejected the idea of having a future.

Dan also makes the claim that in Asia you can get spectacular food prepared for you everywhere dirt cheap, it is around each corner, whereas in America you can only get excellent food at a premium, and he feels compelled to cook. I am skeptical that things are so good elsewhere, but also the premium here is not so high. Even when it is not cheap, great food is still remarkably cheap, so long as you do not ‘go nuts.’ I do agree with Dan that New York City has gotten more expensive across the board over the last several years and service reliability is a little bit worse. I see this as the market correcting itself. An important point when living here is that you are buying location at a premium because it is worth a lot to have access to all the things, so skimping on other things to save relatively little (including on food quality) likely does not make sense.

Adaobi publishes a sneaky post called ‘How to do things if you’re not that smart and don’t have any talent,’ which is actually telling you how to accomplish things no matter who you are. As in, a lot of what determines success of a person or project has very little to do with talent or intelligence, it is grit and moving fast and hard work and doing the boring stuff and improving things when you see an opportunity and not being afraid of mild social awkwardness and asking stupid questions and cold emailing and learning unnamed skills and showing up at hard times and figuring out the first step and finishing what you start and so on.

Andrew Biggs makes the case for eliminating the tax preference for retirement accounts. This mostly benefits the rich, does not obviously increase net savings values, causes lots of hoops to be jumped through, and we can use the money to shore up social security instead, or I would add to cut income tax rates. This would be obviously great on the pure economics, assuming it did not retroactively confiscate existing savings and only applied going forward. But as Matthew Yglesias says, political nonstarter, so much so that not even I support doing it.

Sleep matters a lot.

Nate Silver: Just for me personally it feels like with math tasks there’s a ~10% performance boost from being well-rested but with verbal tasks like writing it’s maybe literally 100%.

As several commenters suggested, it is largely about deep versus shallow, focus versus autopilot, at least for me. There are certain types of thinking that require being fully on, where lack of sleep makes me largely or entirely useless. Then there are other things that can mostly run on autopilot. What I can’t do without sleep is in some (but not all!) ways very similar to what I can’t do when dealing with kids. Much of the writing process is now in the autopilot phase, especially scanning firehoses and picking out sources. Then there are effort posts, or effort sections, where you have to be on.

Often, when a policy is overwhelmingly good, one must sell it based on a quantification of a tiny portion of its benefits. That is still often good enough.

Parth Ahya: Properly accounted for, lifting the green card limit for STEM master’s and PhD graduates would reduce the federal budget deficit by $129 billion over 10 years and $634 billion over 20 years. Great work by @heidilwilliams_, Doug Elmendorf, @BudgetModel and others.

Daniel Eth: This feels like people who talk about how anti-aging tech would reduce Medicare costs. Like, yeah, probably true, but this is such small potatoes compared to the other benefits – why are we even talking about this?

In both cases this is less crazy than it sounds, because it turns a talking point against you of increased costs into a talking point in your favor. Being able to demonstrate direct profitability is very strong evidence that such a policy is a great idea. If bringing in more STEM graduates would hurt the budget, that would be a sign it was not a great idea, whereas it helping is evidence it is indeed a great idea.

Your CEO needs to be out there communicating how great the company is. Many do not do this well, or even at all. I consider this a version of the Leaders of Men issue. There are only so many good CEOs out there. You need to hire to get the important stuff right, so if this kind of communicating is not a top priority it will often suffer.

Greg Brockman (President OpenAI): better work often comes from those striving for excellence than from those who have already achieved it.

Greg undoubtedly has achieved excellence and is also continuing to strive for it. That is the common pattern. If someone has excellence, the chances are very good they are striving for more of it. That is the best of both worlds, and the same inner drives are usually causing both. If you have to choose one or the other, it depends on your task which one is more important.

Emmett Shear asks a month ago, what are the best techniques against procrastination?

Malcolm Ocean: “chill out in a chair or on a couch, with no phone or anything to read/do/etc, until you feel like getting up and doing the thing or you get clear that you’d rather do something else”

Aaron Slodov: the yc group method is unmatched tbh, frequent check ins, progress reports, press them on metrics, etc etc mega accountability.

Visakan Veerasamy: ask em questions. whatcha (not) doin? why u wanna/gotta do it? whats hard or unpleasant about it? what r u worried about? can you make tiny progress on it, what would that look like? etc etc

kaiwan: 1) Mirroring (doing our separate things separately but in a shared space like a cafe or video call) 2) Doing the first step for them or with them

Suhail: Ask them for $1000 and you’ll pay it back in 2w or keep it depending on whether they did the task.

I find the right solutions depend on the person. For me, one key is to get rid of distractions. Another is to set it up so that your procrastination is productive, if you are procrastinating about X with Y and about Y with X then that’s the dream. I also like to gate things, as in ‘I am not doing Z until I finish this.’ Also I’ve learned to hate it when I’m procrastinating, so it feels better to do the thing.

But also I still procrastinate a lot.

Universal Music Group pulls its music from TikTok, saying TikTok only accounted for 1% of total revenue. Josh Constine says TikTok has them over a barrel, they should give away their music essentially ‘for the exposure’:

Josh Constine: Sounds boring, but actually a big deal. Top record label Univeral Music is ceasing to license music to TikTok and says the app bullied it in negotiations…

…But music popularity is dictated by TikTok, whose trends were behind 13 or the top 18 songs last year.

So either all videos using Universal artist songs muted, which sucks for users and musicians, it convinces other labels to fight alongside it for a better deal, or it caves.

Honestly, each label needs TikTok more than it needs them, given it’s become the primary music discovery mechanism. And I’d argue the tickets, merch, and streaming royalties it drives more than make up for the licensing costs.

Citation needed. Yes, hit songs will end up in TikTok videos, and songs from TikTok videos will end up as hit songs. That does not provide causation.

As usual, basically everyone will always tell every creator that on the margin that participation will be good for them long term, think of the exposure and reputational benefits, so they should work for free or almost free. And technically they are right, but also of course screw that, fyou, pay me.

Universal says that the new deal they were offered was actively worse than the old one.

Variety: With respect to the issue of artist and songwriter compensation, TikTok “proposed paying our artists and songwriters at a rate that is a fraction of the rate that similarly situated major social platforms pay,” according to UMG’s letter.

…

Regarding the issue of artificial intelligence, TikTok “is allowing the platform to be flooded with AI-generated recordings — as well as developing tools to enable, promote and encourage AI music creation on the platform itself — and then demanding a contractual right which would allow this content to massively dilute the royalty pool for human artists, in a move that is nothing short of sponsoring artist replacement by AI,” UMG said.

In addition, according to Universal Music, TikTok “makes little effort to deal with the vast amounts of content on its platform that infringe our artists’ music and it has offered no meaningful solutions to the rising tide of content adjacency issues, let alone the tidal wave of hate speech, bigotry, bullying and harassment on the platform.”

I am not one to believe the claims of a music label or of a social network. Here my gut strongly tells me Universal is mostly telling the truth, that TikTok is indeed doing all these things, and that they are right to pull the content.

I agree with Daniel Eth here, the news is not that Americans are inconsistent about which tactics are acceptable and favor the causes they find just, it is that Americans mostly do not do this, and are remarkably consistent and honorable here.

YouGov America: Americans’ views of protest tactics such as picketing or blocking traffic aren’t fixed: Acceptance of tactics depends on support of the cause that protesters are advocating

I would love to see a breakdown of how much of this is a gradual shift in everyone’s views, versus a few people who radically shift their views. For handing out fliers, for example, consider two possible worlds:

1. Most people have a mostly consistent view, but 12% are fundamentally against free speech, so they think that a flier saying ‘apple pie is good’ is always acceptable because apple pie is good, and one saying ‘apple pie is bad’ is never acceptable because apple pie is good.

2. Many people are slightly less approving of the other perspective.

As usual this is doubtless a mix, my guess is a more of #1 is going on, there is a fixed pool of ~10% of people who essentially think the other side is always wrong.

We also get some issue opinions, free speech nominally remains super popular.

The obvious question is, if you do not actively oppose free speech, then how can you say that your opponents handing out fliers is never acceptable? Yet that second group is substantially bigger.

I would also add that these responses show highly good sense overall.

We have, essentially, two categories of things.

In the first we have handing out flyers, marching long distances, boycotting products and picketing. These are all at core clear forms of free expression, rather than attempts to inflict damage and make the lives of others worse, so long as one is not using violence to stop someone who attempts to cross a picket line.

Americans find all these broadly acceptable, with at most 28% opposition (with 65%+ actively in favor) even for opponents. I agree, all of these are always acceptable.

Then there is the second group: Disrupting public events, defacing property, blocking traffic and rioting. These are all centrally about causing harm and inflicting damage. Give us what we want, or else we will make your lives worse. Disrupting events is the least unacceptable because it at least plausibly targets the particular thing you are objecting to. Defacing property and blocking traffic are lashing out at random, forms of collective punishment, and rioting is that but violent.

Americans find all these broadly unacceptable, with at most 25% approving even for favored causes, and at least 66% opposed, and the latter three correctly considered substantially worse than that.

So this is the exact right order from most acceptable to least acceptable, and the majority broadly is right in each case.

I am curious about the 4% of people are who think that rioting is always acceptable, and how they think that works. Presumably they simply want to watch the world burn.

If you are considering protesting, this provides clear guidance. You should go ahead and hand out fliers, go on marches, boycott and picket. Have your rallies, do active expression.

You should not, however, disrupt events, deface property, block traffic or riot. This mainly serves to piss people off. If I learn that you are blocking traffic in order to demand the government change its actions, or even worse that overseas governments or corporations magically change their actions, then you are not going to win hearts and minds.

Emmett Shear reads Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, notes the vast overconfidence throughout and that many claims seem false, wonders what all the fuss is about. Turns out the answer is that he correctly noticed the early macro assertions on urban design and land use were Obvious Nonsense. I noticed that too, but thing improve, and Shear notices he got trapped in a cynical perspective. What confuses me is that he still made it through the full thousand pages. One day, architecture sequence of posts. One day.

We made it weird at the planet reunion (1 min video).

Too many working papers.

Good question.

Sarah Constantin: I do notice a lot of people whose story is “I got sick of the shallow hedonists who just wanna hang out” and I’m always like “hey…I would LOVE to hang out…where are these people? can I meet them?”

The problem is that when we ‘just want to hang out’ we want to do that with people who aren’t so shallow that all they want to do is hang out. That gets boring. Then we end up not having people with which to just hang out. Whoops.

Anton: to a medieval peasant this would be exactly backwards makes you think

The Golden Sir (2019): Me sowing: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!

Me reaping: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.

Yep. That’s right.

Insanity. Pure insanity.

Vivek Ramaswamy: On Day 1, *instantlyfire 50% of federal bureaucrats. Here’s how: if your SSN ends in an odd number, you’re fired. That downsizes government by half. Absolutely *nothingwill break as a result. It doesn’t violate civil service rules because mass layoffs are exempt. SHUT IT DOWN.

Matt Darling: Vivek, don’t announce the randomization assignment a year before treatment!

McSweeney’s nails it: Son, you will not binge-watch LOST – you’ll watch one episode a week and be frustrated like mom and I did.

In addition to being funny this take is correct. Binging anything actively good or interesting is a mistake. Sure, if you want to binge a cooking show or procedural go right ahead. Law & Order marathons exist for a reason. But with shows that are actively good you want to pace yourself. You get diminishing marginal returns, and then the show is gone.

Once a week is still a little extreme, even for me. And we get to test this out even today, with shows like Loki, where a full week is long enough I forget details.

I would suggest the following rules, keep in mind these are upper limits not requirements:

Unlimited Binge: Procedurals, sports.

Two episodes per day: Pulpy stuff, semi-procedural genre shows, 4+ seasons minimum.

One episode per day: Everything else that has no social aspect.

One episode per week: Only do this if you are actively discussing it with others.

Exception: You can always watch 2 episodes in a night, or an episode of twice-normal length, if doing so finishes a season.

For a second we got this right, then we failed again, but remember the good times.

Scott Lincicome: Quality matters.

I Lim: Overpaid.

Scott Lincicome: Chilli’s is fine, actually.

Mike Chase: I went to Chili’s and the waiter instantly blew his elbow out and said he’d come back in like 12-16 months.

Scott Lincicome: and yet they STILL won Restaurant of the Year. Amazing.

Mike Chase: Well duh. Max Scherzer was also drunk at this Chilis.

Scott Lincicome: Sounds like an awesome Chili’s.

Autodesk Hate Account: there is this chinese place we like to get takeout from and incredibly it is called “wok! you want”. when you call them they answer the phone with “wok you want?” and i would always reply “wok you got?” but they never laugh.

Kane: my childhood chinese takeout was called “Wok 22” but every time they shut down for health/fire/tax reasons it would reopen under a new name and I just checked and they’re on “Wok 28”

Reference books on the retirement shelf. And the autocorrect problem.

Probably costs more in New York, but also would work even better.

Brooks Otterlake: I looked into it and it would only cost $20 or $30 to rent a stall at a farmers market and put out a bunch of empty crates and if someone makes eye contact you smile sheepishly and say “Forgot to farm”

Elle Cordova presents fonts hanging out.

I memba.

Walter Hickey: hey remember all the parts of Oppenheimer where a heroic innovator is completely unprepared for the brutal implications their life’s work? and years later must reconcile with the devastating wreckage left after they unintentionally created a materially worse world? no reason.

Matthew Belloni: Big news: JON MF STEWART is returning to host The Daily Show on Mondays through the election, with a deal to EP all nights and possibly stay through 2025. A big test of his appeal in a media landscape that’s changed A LOT since 2015, but for me this news is:

A little late now, well a lot late now, but yes, obviously, although it doesn’t quite work as well as this:

Jewr move.

Remarkably good decisions (11 second clip).

There’s always lots of stuff going on. The backlog of other roundups keeps growing rather than shrinking. I have also decided to hold back a few things to turn them into their own posts instead.

I wonder if it is meaningful that most of the bad news is about technology?

I don’t even know if this is news, but Rutgers finds TikTok amplifies and suppresses content based on whether it aligns with the CCP.

It would be great if we could find a way to ban or stop using TikTok that did not involve something crazy like the Restrict Act. I still think the Restrict Act is worse than nothing, if those are our only choices.

If the CCP limited its interference to explicitly internal Chinese topics, I would understand, but they do not: WSJ investigates the TikTok rabbit hole, in particular with respect to Gaza pro-Hamas content.

Noah Smith: At this point, whether America can bring itself to ban TikTok will determine whether it’s an actual country, or just a country-shaped sandbox for totalitarian states to play in

An analysis of Chinese censorship of American movies. Under their analysis, without such bans we would have 68% of the Chinese market instead of our current 28%. They emphasize factors like occult content, which has an effect but a remarkably small one, only raising an otherwise 50% to be banned movie to a 67% chance to be banned. An R rating similarly takes the odds to 70%, likely largely as a proxy for various things that get you the R rating.

I love buttons that do things. The thing I loved most about early iPhones was that they had a button. A nice, big, physical button, that bailed you out of pretty much anything. Things were simple. Alas.

Matt Palmer: Observation from younger brother: “Whenever I have to adjust the settings on my iPhone I have to Google how to do so, this seems like a red flag.”

Patrick McKenzie: No lie, I had to ask my wife how to turn my iPhone off, now that I have one that doesn’t have a physical home button.

“Isn’t it basically same as it is on an iPhone with a home button?” The thing which stopped was that you need to long press two things but Siri triggers immediately when on button(s) down and I would immediately release them thinking “No I didn’t want Siri.”

And almost every interaction with Settings or any part of the Apple ecosystem is brokered by a Google search leading to Apple dot com or a content farm explaining in four steps which buttons I need to hit. These don’t seem learnable or predictable in most cases.

A decade ago when I started using Macs seriously (quite late in my career for that relative to most geeks’ expectations) I was routinely surprised and delighted by how much the iOS experience on phone/iPad had prepared me for.

These days iPhone doesn’t prepare me for iPhone.

Can anyone explain why various meeting and calendar apps continuously fail to understand what time zone they are in? I’ve dealt with this a lot as well.

Patrick McKenzie: Why Google’s Calendly won’t crush Calendly’s Calendly in one image. Necessary context: I live in Chicago and am accessing this from a phone which knows it is currently 10: 15 AM to schedule an appointment with someone in San Francisco.

Patrick McKenzie: Here are two things Google PMs would say: “The default time zone set in your Google Calendar account is JST. I know a user could have two time zones there, but org politics will not allow me to override the default one.” and “This affects almost no users. Only millions.”

Meanwhile the businesses which actually care about calendaring for power users of calendaring know that many of their favorite users have two, three, or more home time zones and always getting this exactly right is important.

Do they? I am not convinced they do. I am also very convinced that it is utterly insane for a calendar app not to default to the time zone in its current location. It should also be loud about any conflicts, when it sees you moving around or in an unusual location.

Takeovers of phone numbers, especially important phone numbers, are getting worse. The system as it currently exists essentially lets any telecom worker give anyone your phone, and many of them are easy to either dupe or bribe. Meanwhile, everyone increasingly uses phones as account recovery and security, which you have to actively guard against to stop them from doing, and some of them will outright insist.

Twitter Safety: We can confirm that the account @SECGov was compromised and we have completed a preliminary investigation. Based on our investigation, the compromise was not due to any breach of X’s systems, but rather due to an unidentified individual obtaining control over a phone number associated with the @SECGov account through a third party. We can also confirm that the account did not have two-factor authentication enabled at the time the account was compromised. We encourage all users to enable this extra layer of security. More information and tips on how to keep your account secure can be found in our Help Center

SwiftOnSecurity: The attacker uses other channels to enumerate and guess the phone number attached to an account and then checks against the telco they have control over.

The insider only briefly temporarily forwards the victim number to a 3rd party then switches it back to normal once they’re in. This is how they stay quiet since most victims will not have leverage or telemetry to understand how they got hacked. It was their cell phone provider.

Make it so account recovery systems require multiple factors and remove telephony-based recovery for VIP accounts entirely. Go check your systems now. Go try to access all your stuff like you forgot your password.

At a minimum, it is insane at this point to allow verification of anything valuable via only a phone, you need to at least also require another source.

We increasingly care too much about comfort versus other things. But that’s peaked?

From November 2022 (!), 1 in 4 hiring managers said (he admit it!) they’re less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants.

When asked why they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants, the top reasons include Jews have too much power and control (38%), claim to be the ‘chosen people’ (38%), and have too much wealth (35%).

…

Seventeen percent of hiring managers say they have been told to not hire Jewish applicants by company leadership. This is true of more hiring managers in education (30%), entertainment (28%), and business (26%).

And that’s with it improving!

Nine percent of hiring managers say they have a less favorable attitude toward Jews now than 5 years ago, while 31% say they think more favorably of Jews; 60% say their attitude is unchanged.

So yeah, antisemitism was already quite alive and well, all the standard tropes. If anything, that’s still historically pretty good. We have been dealing with this for several millennia. In every generation they try to kill us. We all know Hamas aim at another holocaust. Some people were surprised at who joined the ‘they’ this time, that’s all. I wasn’t.

Sarah Constantin on various reasons she sometimes feels she can’t say various things.

US high skill immigration policy has figured out it can use the O-1A visa for extraordinary ability and also the STEM EB-2 for advanced STEM degrees.

Alec Stapp: Major win for the US on high-skilled immigration policy: “USCIS data show that the number of O-1A visas awarded in the first year of the revised guidance jumped by almost 30% The number of STEM EB-2 visas after a ‘national interest’ waiver shot up by 55%”

If you have an advanced STEM degree and want to put it to work, or have any valuable extraordinary ability, it seems rather insane to not let you come to America and become a citizen. I strongly support doing as much of this as possible.

The rest of the world standardized, but the USA and Canada have their own exclusive standard for elevators, excluding us from global parts markets.

State Farm stops writing new home insurance policies in California due to legal inability to raise prices and massive resulting losses. If you could be stuck selling insurance at or close to current prices indefinitely while facing adverse selection over customers, I don’t see how you can sell insurance priced in a reasonable way.

Federal highway officials hate us, tell local and state officials they must stop using humor and pop culture references on their road safety signs because they might ‘distract.’ That’s the point. You get people to pay attention. Also you brighten up their day. I sincerely despise people who issue rules like this. How do we fight back?

The Farm Bill is mostly subsidized crop insurance. Taxpayers cover 62% of premiums. Which is profitable enough for the farmers that it forces farmers to make decisions that are legible to the insurance, often preventing them from being flexible and adapting to weather conditions or doing proper crop rotations.

This is of course an utterly insane way to do some combination of lowering food prices (which we then try to raise with other programs, and lower again with yet others) and transferring wealth to farmers. It should be up to them how much and what type of insurance to buy. If we want to bribe farmers because we think that’s in our interest to do so or we want to be corrupt, let’s write some checks (or at least give out tax credits) and bribe farmers.

At least it’s not as bad as the part where we also pay people not to plant crops.

Agreed with retiring congressman Patrick McHenry, we need to pay Congress more. I think it was Robin Hanson who I saw say that either you pay them or someone else will pay them, you get to pick which one.

As was inevitable, meet the new Speaker, same as the old Speaker, cutting the same spending deal because of the same conditions, and the same people getting mad about it. Question is what they dare do about it at this point.

California Fatburger manager trims hours, eliminates vacation days and raises menu prices in anticipation of $20/hour fast food minimum wage. That seems like a best case scenario, unless the goal is to make fast food uncompetitive.

UK moves to exclude family members from coming in on student visas. The usual suspects pointed out how this is going to discourage students from coming. Nathan Young points out that this is one of those ‘ruining it for everyone’ situations.

The chart clearly shows that this was rapidly transforming into a backdoor immigration mechanism. If the situation is what it was in 2015, something like ‘5% of students take someone along because they need to,’ then you want to allow that. If the ratio starts exceeding 100%, then the policy is being gamed so much it is clearly unsustainable. If you want to allow more immigration, great, but you still do not want to give active preference to those who twist their lives to game the system.

UK’s lawyers advised the government that it was unable to legally discriminate against companies on the basis of their past performance.

Nathan Young: This is disastrous. The UK Government can’t discriminate based on performance. What on earth are we even doing?

Vegard Beyer: Aren’t the rules governing the UK Government’s discrimination between contractors based on past performance… within the sphere of influence of the UK Government…?

Nathan Young: I wouldn’t want to discriminate on past performance so I’m sure they’ll fix it this year.

UK decides what is important to crack down upon.

Emmett Shear: We’re shutting you down. Your pizzas have consistently come in 1/2” too wide, and we have caught you five times distributing excess pepperonis.

Biggest surprise is that this is a UK pizza photo where the pizza looks edible.

Well, that and any productive activity whatsoever, like renewable energy.

In the past five years, the number of applications to connect to the electricity grid — many of them for solar energy generation and storage — has increased tenfold, with waits of up to 15 years. The underinvestment is restricting the flow of cheap energy from Scottish wind farms to population centers in England and adding to the delays for those with high power needs, like laboratories and factories. Laws that give local planning authorities considerable power are blamed for Britain’s shortage of housing and blocking the construction of pylons needed to carry electricity from offshore wind farms. Residents’ objections to noisy construction and changes to the landscapes have been a stumbling block.

One way the British government turned off investors was by changing planning measures in 2015, and tightening them further in 2018, so that a single objection could upend a planning application — effectively banning onshore wind in England. John Fairlie was a consultant in the wind industry at the time.

Mr. Fairlie is currently a managing director at AWGroup, a land development and renewable energy company that recently got an onshore wind turbine up and running in Bedfordshire, in the east of England, that will generate enough electricity to power 2,500 homes. Because of planning restrictions and grid connection delays, the project took seven years to complete.

It is amazing, and a statement about the expected returns to investment, that such projects still continue at all. Imagine what the UK could accomplish if people were allowed to build houses and generate energy, even if nothing else changed.

Ah, standard plugs.

European Parliment: From 28 December 2024 all mobile phones, tablets and cameras sold in the EU will be equipped with a standard USB Type-C charging port, making it easier for you and better for the environment.

How do they think that works exactly? In twelve months I get rid of all my existing devices? I note all the concerns about ‘what if they had done this five years ago with micro-USB’ and if a new better tech comes along in the future, and yeah, sure, but I’m still inclined to say Worth It at this point.

Also:

The map is full of little joys, like Cyprus being in purple.

It is insane that we are not doing our job of protecting international trade. A bunch of rebels shoot a few missiles, and we can’t stop them? We take weeks to even start responding?

There is a list of things you absolutely do not tolerate as leader of the free world. Disrupting international trade routes is near the top of that list. That’s the job.

Don’t tell me we can’t handle it. Point, counterpoint:

Almutawakkil: I advise Americans and British people to familiarize themselves with some points about the Yemeni fighters ( Houthis) before rushing into anything.

– They don’t follow your movies and TV shows at all.

– They are not bothered by your media or social media distractions.

– Psychological warfare is utterly useless against them.

– They are natural-born fighters, really, no kidding.

– Their life goal since childhood has been to fight America.

– The last will and testament passed down from their ancestors is to liberate Palestine.

– At the very least, they have 4 to 5 wars of military experience in various terrains.

– They have all written and recorded their life wills in both audio and video formats.

– The martyrdom of one of them is a tremendous source of pride for their children, family, village, province, and country.

– Their poets passionately glorify war more than any love, flirtation, or romance poetry.

– They all obey their leader, Abdul-Malik Badr al-Din al-Houthi, with absolute obedience.

– Their only fear is the punishment and wrath of Allah if they fail to support the people of Palestine and backtrack on their support.

– They love death as much as you love life, if not more.

In any confrontation they engage in… I won’t explain these words… you will come to know, understand, and feel them more when facing them.

Frank Fleming: I advise foreign countries to familiarize themselves with some points about United States citizens (Americans) before rushing into anything.

– They enjoy multiple streaming services.

– Each day they get worked up and outraged by something on social media that would be impossible to explain to you.

– Psychological warfare works really well on them but only for a few seconds before they get distracted by something else.

– They probably have no idea where your country is and maybe have never even heard of it.

– Their life goal since childhood is to be a popular influencer.

– The last will and testament passed down from their ancestors is to prefect their BBQ recipe.

– At the very least, they can walk up two flights of stairs before being winded. – They have 401ks, but probably not enough in them.

– Getting a post to go viral is an extensive source of pride among their community.

– Their poets passionately glorify getting superpowers and fighting supervillains.

– They only elect the dumbest idiots as leaders and never listen to them.

– Their only fear is their phone running out of power when they’re away from home.

– The only reason their enemies are still around is it feels unChristian to completely obliterate them.

In any confrontation they engage in… I won’t explain these words… you will come to know, understand, and feel lucky if your entire effort to fight against them merits you to even be a future question on Jeopardy!.

History is littered with tribes who studied nothing but war wiped about effeminate guys in white wigs. If you want to defeat America, learn to code or something.

There was a time, for thousands of years, when ‘we do nothing but fight for generations’ was the way to go to win wars. When the dudes on horseback periodically sacked the cities and became the new ruling class. When it was said, as in the end of Herodotus, let us live somewhere hard so we might win wars.

Now, not so much. I may not be ‘appreciating the complexities’ but if I am Biden I get on the phone, explain that either shipping is going to resume or there are not going to be any more rebels, as an example to the next ten generations, and I mean what I am saying.

We did not go that far. We did eventually start using force.

Bret Devereaux: There is a sort of performative naivete for the folks acting shocked, shocked! that it turns out that disrupting more than 10% of all global trade does, in fact, lead to a kinetic military response. Of course it did.

And just a reminder for the folks who think this is about Israel – the Houthis have been firing on ships indiscriminately. If they were just attacking ships bound to or from Israel, I doubt we’d see the same level of response.

You do not get to pirate ships chartered by Japanese companies to move from Turkey to India because you are mad about Israel. You don’t get to try to seize Danish ships moving from Singapore to Egypt because you are mad about Israel.

Or, well, you can, but then this happens.

I continue to be surprised and dismayed that we have not done more. The situation is completely unacceptable. Anyone who has an issue with using force to stop pirates, or thinks that the actions of unrelated nations could possibly excuse it whatever you think of those actions, can go to Davey Jones’s Locker.

It does seem that on the 22nd we did another set of airstrikes. This still does not seem to appreciate the stakes:

Jim Bianco: ~70% of all shipping is conducted on a long-term contract. A cargo ship is essentially a shuttle between ports. If they have to go around Africa, that adds 20+ days to the route.

So, if a ship can make six runs yearly, the extra distance means it can only do four or five runs yearly under current conditions.

To make up for this shortfall of runs, excess shipping capacity is contracted on the “spot” market. This chart shows worldwide “spot” rates are up 85% in the last two weeks, the largest two-week jump (bottom panel) since Drewey started its index in 2011.

Shippers are aggressively grabbing excess shipping capacity and will pay up big to do it.

The objective of the military action against the Houthis is to allow unarmed commercial ships to sail the Red Sea with affordable “war insurance” rates. These rates are up 300% to 500%.

I FEAR we are weeks or months away from commercial shipping returning to normal in the Red Sea. Until then, supply chains remain snarled, and the inflation pressure on goods is very real.

Meanwhile, the propaganda wars got weird. Why are we having propaganda wars where one side are literal pirates? How is this a call people are in doubt about?

Daniel Eth: Describe the last 500 years of great power conflict in a tweet:

Kane: the funniest part of the red sea houthi pirate conflict is that the pirates keep posting super macho propaganda videos only to be annihilated while the captain of the carrier doing the annihilating is just tweeting about cute dogs and stuff

Chowdah Hill: This captain only loves me for the snax. I was hoping for a more productive working relationship, perhaps a few team ups or something. Instead… just snax.

There are those here who are cheering on the rebels for trying to disrupt shipping. These people are enemies of civilization and of humanity. Treat them accordingly.

Periodic reminder: The rate of rape in prison is almost 5% per year, the majority of sexual abuse reports were of rapes by staff rather than other prisoners. It is pretty stunning that we all continue to accept this as part of our justice system.

If someone is indeed saying this (the video won’t load), many things have gone very wrong.

EndWokeness: Canadian police warn residents not to post photos of thugs stealing packages.

“You cannot post the images… we have a presumption of innocence & posting that could be a violation of private life” -Comms Officer Lt. Benoit Richard

If the police are unwilling to do their jobs and arrest people who steal, as often the police are unwilling to bother to do, the least they can do is not actively get in the way. You have a presumption of innocence in court, and only in court. Even if that was not true, a presumption of innocence does not mean no one can accuse you, and no one can post evidence. That is completely absurd. As is any ‘expectation of privacy’ while stealing a package off someone else’s private property.

Poor people commit more crimes. Alex Tabarrok asks, why? He points to a Swedish study by Cesarini et al, studying lottery winners there. Winning the Swedish lottery does not substantially decrease crime despite it paying out over time and looking a lot like a permanent income shock. This continues the pattern of lottery winners proving largely unable to use their money to get better life outcomes. I do not think it translates zero to other questions, but lottery winnings being very clearly luck and happening all at once I do think makes them categorically different.

The cost of crime is high, even when it does not happen to you.

Audrey (of San Francisco): I used to take dance classes at a studio on Market st 3-5 times a week. I was perplexed by people who would pay $25 for a 50min yoga class when a 90min ballet or jazz class with live music cost $9. I would usually jog there and walk back, but then the area got more sketchy so I started to call Ubers there (which made the yoga classes comparable in price).

Then the area got SO scary I basically go 0-1x a week (to just one ballet class during weekend day time since the instructor is dear to me). Meanwhile the building put metal over their glass doors and now has at least two people to guard the door and manager elevator.

I can’t imagine how hard this is for the dance studio to need to spend more money for building security and have fewer dancers come. I am also begrudgingly taking more yoga classes that are boring and expensive because I can walk there and back without having to dodge needles and people on some horrible drug shrieking and violently flailing around.

Nix: I think I know this dance studio… stopped going for same reason. The side street was so rough especially as it got dark (like people screaming etc)

I pay a huge portion of my discretionary income so my family can live in New York City. If crime was the way it was when I was growing up, my willingness to pay that would go way, way down. Luckily, things are much better.

Illinois eliminates cash bail. It seems the plan is to not charge bail, hope everyone shows up anyway and that it will all work out?

George Washington University law professor Kate Weisburd said in other states that have implemented bail reforms, like California and Texas, the use of ankle monitors has gone up while jail populations decreased. She said an increased reliance on monitoring isn’t “moving the ball forward when it comes to pretrial justice.”

“I think what makes the [Illinois law] so powerful is that judges are required to release people who are deemed not to be a safety risk and not likely to flee,” Weisburd said. “So that means that most people released under this new law don’t need to have an electronic monitor, because they’re not a safety risk, and they’re not a flight risk.”

I notice I am confused. How is going from ‘put you in jail’ to ‘have you wear an ankle bracelet’ not ‘moving the ball forward?’ That seems like moving the ball forward to me. Wearing an ankle bracelet is at least an order of magnitude less bad than being held in jail? I would say at least two? And for many people, far better than paying the bond to post bail even if they could? I mean, you could pay me to wear an ankle bracelet and it would not even be that expensive.

As always, people confuse ‘not available’ with ‘not available at this price’:

Garrison said even if they had more money, there aren’t attorneys available to hire. Macoupin County is part of Illinois’4th Judicial District. It includes 41 counties in central Illinois. This year, only 55 new lawyers were sworn in in the 4th District, fewer than 1¹⁄₂ attorneys per county.

There are tons of lawyers, by all accounts, who are in need of work. AI will likely streamline much legal work further, expanding that pool. Do these people want to go to Macoupin Country to work with criminal defendants? No, mostly they do not want to do that. Also, if you raise your price, some of them will do it anyway.

RCTs on interventions in criminal justice almost always show no benefit. The obvious follow-up is, suppose we did anti-interventions, would we expect to see no harm?

What happened when judges were given algorithmic risk assessments on defendants, while still having discretion to make final decisions on sentencing?

Megan Stevenson (paper author): We find that the judges DO use the risk assessment tools, but mostly only during the first couple of years after adoption. After that, they seem to stop consulting them.

But even in high-use periods, they overrode the recommendations associated with the risk assessment frequently!

Although the risk assessment was implemented solely for the purpose of diverting people from prison, it had no effect on incarceration rates.

There are some curious expectations at play here. Megan seems surprised that judges frequently ‘overrode’ the recommendations, despite the recommendations being based on only a subset of the factors judges care about and considering only some of the evidence, and also judges being humans who think they know better.

Megan also seems surprised overall sentences stayed the same. Whereas of course judges are not going to think risk assessments should alter how tough they are on crime. Good job judges making the proper calibration adjustments. Yes, if you say some people are low risk hoping those people go to jail less, the ones it says are high risk will then be put in jail more.

Megan Stevenson: Below, we compare the *actualimpact of risk assessment in the hands of humans to the *simulatedimpact of sentencing by risk assessment alone (no discretion). [shows graph with no impact on average length of sentence]

Deviation from the recommendations of the algorithm is systematic: longer sentences for Black defendants and shorter sentences for young defendants.

Risk assessment had not impact on racial disparities, likely because judges already sentenced in a racially disparate manner. It led to harsher punishment for young defendants — but human discretion mitigated the full negative impacts on young people!

I read this as: Judges care about things your risk assessment does not. They think younger people, and women, deserve consideration, for reasons that are not about risk.

Not sure what the story is here regarding unemployed? If I had to guess, the judges noticed (consciously and systematically, or otherwise) that the risk assessments made unemployed people very high risk, and did not think that was equitable or something they should get punished for so much, so they scaled it back.

What about black defendants? Certainly there is some amount of racism involved. There is also the possibility that the risk assessments deliberately ignored or controlled for various factors to correct for racial disparities or ensure equities, and the judges learned to correct for this or simply observed the facts and overruled.

Stevenson is framing this as ‘we had a risk score, and they overruled it.’ I am confident the judges instead were thinking ‘ah, good, a risk score, we can try using this as one of our considerations.’

If you thought this could convince a system to stop being racist, or stop putting people in prison so often, I would wonder why one would expect that to stick?

Instead, the risk scores worked in doing the thing one would hope, which is moving incarceration from those with low risk scores to those with high risk scores.

In sum, risk assessment use in the hands of humans led to a reshuffling of prison beds — no net decline, but a shift towards incarcerating those with higher risk scores and releasing those with lower scores.

And yet, this didn’t work?

Theoretically, this should have led to lower recidivism rates, since the highest risk people were locked up. This did not happen. We can reject even small declines in recidivism.

So what is going on there?

Why not? Maybe the tool had less novel information than expected. Maybe judge’s used it in the “wrong” way, over-riding it when they shouldn’t.

The tool meant more emphasis on the factors considered by the tool, excepting those undone intentionally by the judges, and less emphasis on other factors. Yet this did not help.

I find the ‘over-riding it when they shouldn’t’ hypothesis unconvincing. The model predicts that things should have improved given these choices. Things did not improve. Judges would have to be doing far worse than random, in terms of recidivism, in deciding when to overrule.

But “wrong” is subjective. If the only goal is preventing crime via incapacitation, teenagers should get the longest sentences. Young people are by FAR at the highest statistical risk of crime.

But there are lots of goals at sentencing. And many people — Virginia judges included — don’t love the idea of harsh punishment for teenagers.

…

In Virginia, discretion mitigated some of the adverse effects of risk assessment (harsh sentences for the young) at the expense of its benefits (reduced incarceration/recidivism).

Quite so. This is certainly a reason to expect judge final decisions to score worse than the algorithm on risk alone. But it would still predict that, given you saw a shift in who got sentenced from low risk to high risk, an improvement in results.

So the algorithm has some explaining to do. Why were judges unable to improve the production possibilities frontier?

Why did the judges ultimately decide the scores were not useful? Notice that they were correct about this.

To be useful, a risk score has to tell the judge something they do not already know. So we’d need to look at what makes up the scores. What is the new information?

Adam Grant suggests: “I’m giving you these comments because I have very high expectations for you, and I’m confident you can reach them. I’m trying to coach you. I’m trying to help you.” Then you give them the feedback. Love it.

Wind turbines are friendlier to birds than oil and gas drilling, purely in terms of directly damaging wildlife. And of course they are four (yes, 4) orders of magnitude less deadly than cats. A sane civilization would have a blanket ‘no you do not get to say what about the birds’ rule in place, certainly not if the particular bird is not endangered.

Claim that solar power and energy storage will eat all other power sources and reach total dominance. Certainly if you continue on an exponential for long enough that is what will happen. Predicting total dominance is a much better prediction than the continuous official predictions of linear increase every year.

Cost per hour for various digital media. Essentially all TV and video subscriptions are bargains for the average user, as is Twitter. The only issue is that this makes us unwilling to pay for the movies and shows we actually want if they’re not included, I am learning to stop doing that but it is tough. Games he treats strangely, with $60/game and also assuming very long play times. Games are reliably a bargain if you like them, the trick is finding the right games for you. That’s true for basically everything here. The real cost is always your time.

The Puritans would one-box in Newcomb’s Problem. So what if the decision on whether you are Elect has already been made and what you do now can’t change that? Have a good enough decision theory to do your best anyway. Generalize this!

Suhail notes a curious effect.

Suhail: One thing I’ve noticed that drastically reduces my screen time is not allowing my phone to be in the same room as I sleep. Unsurprisingly it’s the first thing I’ll reach for and I’ll clock in 30-45 min. What’s been surprising is how much less I’ll reach for it throughout the day.

The other benefit is it protects my mind. It’s subtle but if I read a tweet, news article, etc I’ll start thinking about it. If I wake up to my own thoughts, I find those thoughts far more satisfying to begin the day. Maybe it’s a personal thing or a project I was working on.

Everyone gives the ‘don’t have your phone there’ advice and almost no one follows it. I do believe I have gotten pretty good at not actually using the phone while it is there without a good reason, but there is a clear effect where doing that still requires effort. The part that is interesting is that he reports this also helping throughout the day.

Note that ‘out of the room’ need not be literal. Technically my computer and work area are within the bedroom. Leaving the phone there would be distant enough for me.

Emmett Shear threads on agency and how to cultivate or teach it. A key suggestion is ‘write down the dumbest plan that could possibly work’ to avoid having to find a plan that will work, and still verifying that your efforts could, somehow, end up working. Other good questions include ‘what’s the stupidest easiest one thing you could do to make even a little progress?’ ‘What if it was possible? What might be a good first step?’ and ‘It sounds like you’re sure you won’t succeed, what’s going on with that?’

He says agency is a complex skill. In some ways it is. In other ways it is simple. Or, it is functionally complex, but conceptually simple.

Modern elevators have overlapping failsafes. If the cable snaps, then most of the brakes would have to fail, and even then compression of air and the springs at the bottom should mostly prevent injury from a freefall.

JOMO, the Washington Post says, is the Joy of Missing Out, and you should cultivate it more. I was ready for a historically bad take. Then I got a good one, which is that ‘missing out’ on social media in particular is good, go live your life. You want to fear missing out on real activities, especially in person. You want the joy of not looking at your phone.

Bernie Sanders again quoting the claim “63% of Americans do not have $500 in the bank to pay for an emergency healthcare bill.” The good news is that this is obviously false. Median household net worth is $192k including $8k in checking.

Rampant corruption in Chinese military procurement led to purge of army, Bloomberg says, with missiles filled with water instead of fuel.

NPR reporter fired for ‘offensive’ stand-up jokes, was forcibly rehired because arbiter decided jokes were funny.

This seems true, and I have occasionally done this:

Paul Graham: A lot of essay writing is not so much telling people new things as helping them to reach conclusions they were already 90% of the way to themselves. It’s easy for an uncharitable reader to dismiss such essays as obvious.

That’s 90% true. And yet false; that last 10% is hard.

Nate Silver is optimistic about the new Las Vegas A’s.

I strongly agree with Tyler Cowen and his reasons that we want to keep sports teams playing within city centers. You want to encourage people to make trips to the city center. You want to enable people to combine trips to multiple locations. You want to allow easy transitions in and out of the stadium. You do not want to be locked into only the team’s offerings.

Location, location, location. All of this is vastly more important than a nominally nicer venue. I love Citi Field. It is an amazing ballpark. I would still happily prefer a lousy ballpark that was closer and within the heart of the city. And I would happily take the old lousy Shea Stadium over a Citi Field (or even the platonic ideal of a stadium) if the new place was not on a Subway line, or on a much less accessible subway line.

NBA in-season tournament is a big hit, everyone loves it. I agree that this is a great development and we need to see more things like this. If they never flop, we are not running enough experiments. What sports needs are storylines, stakes and motivation. With the expanded playoffs in every sport, if you don’t do anything to fix it, the regular season loses meaning. The NBA should also flat out reduce how many games they play, but there are understandable reasons they don’t.

NFL players go bankrupt at a constant rate regardless of how much money they earned over how many years. That is super weird to me. The amount of money really should matter, yet somehow it doesn’t? It is really hard to be that bad with money.

ESPN used fake names to get unearned Emmys for many of its stars, including those on College Gameday. It seems like what they actually did was get them Emmy-shaped physical statues which they never earned? Which is hilarious, also who cares. There is a very clear record of who did and did not earn one. An unearned trophy is nothing.

Ben Krauss calls for reform of sports betting, saying that the combination of mobile betting, aggressive notifications and other advertising tricks is increasingly causing big problems. It is a difficult balance to strike, but I agree things need to change. I actively like that College GameDay discusses point spreads and has someone making a few picks. I do not think it is fine that people are getting lots of in-game push notifications. Charles Barkley should not be able to, on television, offer ‘guaranteed parlays.’ Letting people bet on their phones is clearly dangerous at best. The balance is tricky.

One place the industry continuously offends me, that does not offend Ben Krauss as a purely casual gambler, is the prices. With the epic growth in gambling volumes, and the ability to bet in person with low transaction costs, we need to see a lot more competition on price. Alas, regulatory and advertising costs, and the cost of deposits and withdraws, are standing in the way. It is still insane and kind of criminal that ESPN is showing us truly obnoxious baseball lines that go -120/+100 or worse as if that is an acceptable thing to do.

As Seth Burn put it, math is not this hard.

Kirk Herbstreit: “I think the 12-team playoff is going to create a lot of buzz,” Herbstreit said on College GameDay. “How many games will that be, seven total?

“I think you eliminate the bowls,” Herbstreit added. “Nobody wants to play in them, don’t play the bowls. Just have the 12 teams—we’ll get excited about those—and if you want to add maybe five or six bowls outside of that, then do five or six. But we’re getting to a point where it’s ridiculous.

Kirk is actually pretty great both on GameDay and as one of the best full-spectrum play-by-play announcers. I agree that there are far too many bowls. You should only get a bowl if you accomplish something, which does not mean going 6-6. I think it would be fine to say you need either 8 wins, a conference title game or the top 25?

Tony Hawk one year made four million dollars off the Tony Hawk Pro Skater games.

Magic: The Gathering bans some cards. Channel Fireball’s LSV reacts. It is odd to read about such developments while this removed from the game.

Magic: The Gathering Arena introduces Timeless, their version of Vintage complete with original versions of all tabletop cards and an actual three-cards-only restricted list of Channel, Demonic Tutor and Tibalt’s Trickery.

Brilliant, passionate and scarily accurate thread from Cedric Phillips about what drives Magic players to attend tournaments. Decklists, feature matches, deck techs, chance to make your name, narratives and excitement, aspirational experiences, staying at top of the circuit. Not the prize money. Amazing points. Also someone hire this man please? He is very good at this sort of thing. Alas, I have nothing relevant for him to do.

I am not as down as he is on the importance of prize money, you need to give them that kind of hope too, especially if you want to let people turn fully pro. You also need enough to drive the proper attention and prestige, so they feel real. But what matters to people most is attention and prestige. Ben Seck confirms. Brian Kowal confirms. Sam Black confirms, was was never focused on asking for more money, but as he noted he made his money off content creation. LSV confirms that switching from aspirational to esports and entertainment was deadly, players need to think that could be them.

I continue to think Magic would get a huge ROI from a true return to form of the Pro Tour including very large prize pools. But to make it work, all the prestige stuff has to get knocked out of the park too.

Selling slots on a Magic Pro testing team for $300 is either way too much or way too little. The amount of labor and value here is intense. You’ll spend a lot of time with at least one dedicated pro. So either this is a sacred value that must be $0, or it is worth way more. I lean towards the latter. There was basically never a point at which I would have let someone I didn’t otherwise want onto my team this cheap, and I’d happily pay $300 for someone else to be handling all the logistics.

Crypto trader withdraws $25 million worth of ETH by spending it all on Magic: the Gathering cards that got handed to him in person. Patrick McKenzie is both offended as a geek and respects the genius of the move, where you buy an object you can move physically, using payments that look like product purchases, that then trades like a gold bar, without screaming ‘I am a gold bar.’

Advice to anyone building a new rogue deckbuilder is to not make it easy to assemble tiny decks, or to do something to seriously punish anyone who does it.

Jorbs reascends the Spire from scratch, going 80-3 on ascending over about 80 hours, with 3 additional losses in act 4 for 70-6 (since the first three runs weren’t allowed access to Act 4). One of the losses outside of act four (A17 Watcher) sounds clearly avoidable if not goofing around, the other two sound like whammies. He notes biggest difficulty spike was losing third potion slot, other notables are Ascender’s Bane, gold hits and worse events. He didn’t much notice stronger enemies, whereas I do notice, he notes that is likely a reflection of how he builds. He also notes he had fun playing janky decks that don’t work on A20. As he noticed right in his first run, the problem with such runs is that you spend a lot of time going through motions of runs you’ve already won, which is also the issue with many daily climbs.

Interview with Jonathan Rodgers, co-founder of Grinding Gear Games, about Path of Exile 2. He says that loot can only have value if it might have value to someone else, hence you must enable trade. I thought Diablo 3’s auction house proved the opposite, that if you allow trade then loot only has value that it holds in the marketplace, which means loot mostly has no value. The variance disappears, you can always trade for items that get the job done. Whereas if you are looting for yourself (e.g. Solo Self-Find, or at most a small group) and there is no fungibility, loot becomes more interesting.

I strongly agree with him to stop with the +2% modifiers, +20% or GTFO, you want to make sure everything each item does counts and you can feel it. I also agree on the power and necessity of the reset button, to strongly encourage everyone to start over.

I’m very much looking forward to Path of Exile 2. Path of Exile is far and away the best Action RPG of all time, and the only one I’d put in my Tier 1 of Must Play (I’d have considered putting Diablo 2 there, if Path of Exile didn’t exist, but it does.)

Exodus sounds like it’s going to have some cool things to do with time dilation.

Emmett Shear reminds us that if you are playing Street Fighter [2 Turbo, presumably] then the solution to the so-called ‘cheese’ moves that seem overpowered is not to ban them, it is to use them until someone shows you or figures out the counter, then everything is fine.

This works exactly because the game is well-designed, with good counters to every such move. If that was not true, this would fail. It also relies on having enough data to find the counter-moves, and enough practice to learn them, to get to the new equilibrium. It does genuinely ruin a different experience some people want. Keep those things in mind while generalizing.

China announces planned restrictions on video game monetization. They intend to ban daily log-in rewards, bonuses for first-time spenders, incentives for repeat 5spenders, not having a spending cap, offering loot boxes to minors, not letting items be purchased directly, and the auctioning off of game assets. Also unspent currency must be refunded at purchase price if a game shuts down.

Bravo. Mostly. I notice that there is a problem with Magic: The Gathering and other tradable or collectable card games. It would be nice to find a way to exempt sufficiently ‘real’ games. I presume Magic: The Gathering Arena and Modo can survive this in China, but it will be tricky. Emergents, had it survived, would have had to either leave China or radically change its economic system.

That is still a price I would be willing to pay. Gacha (I will always call this Gotcha in my head) and gambling games, and dopamine-based tricks like daily logins, are the bad money that drives out good due to how mobile customer acquisition works. Despite all the obvious reasons to be opposed, I think this is sufficiently good for human flourishing that I am fine with it.

Mahokenshi was a fun little game. I did a relaxed pace, no-information full-achievement run in about 15 hours. Think rogue deckbuilder, with a very small deck, on a hex grid with goodies and enemies, usually against a clock. I rank it Tier 3, worthwhile for fans of the genre, with two caveats. The first is that the game is not difficult. The other is that there is a huge lack of balance between the four characters or Samurai houses. One is very obviously busted, especially going for many challenges where you need to go fast. Then again, if you want the game to be more challenging, one way to do that is to say you have to rotate between the houses you can play, and then you can’t use the broken house (you’ll know which it is) once all four houses are unlocked.

Cobalt Core is a fun little roguelike deckbuilder in small doses, and it has its charm, but ultimately I can only put it at Tier 4. There is not enough variety in cards, strategies or enemies, you often know you’ve won a run before the first boss, there are severe balance issues and the game doesn’t encourage you to do challenging things, with the highest level being more ‘you randomly die easily’ than anything else and the game not gating anything behind playing on it. And it asks you to play way more games to unlock things than is reasonable. With some more work this could be Tier 3, but in its current state, diehards only. But did I have some fun? Sure.

I played a bunch of Backpack Hero. I wanted to like this game a lot, but ultimately can only classify it as Tier 4, for diehards only. I had fun with the core concepts. Alas, the balance was all off. It took quite a long time before I was in any danger of dying. When I occasionally did, it felt like carelessness, until I moved to secondary characters that had it much harder, were far more fiddly, and that I enjoyed less. You had to do a lot of runs before things unlocked properly. The powerful things are stupidly powerful, many options seem highly under-developed. The first two heroes are straightforward and fun at their core, the next two felt fiddly and not fun.

Octopath Traveler II is my current game, so I don’t yet know if they stick the landing (I’m wrapping up the first few of the individual stories now with the main party around level 51), although other reviews hint that it does. The first game didn’t lay sufficient groundwork for the real ending, whereas I am pretty sure I know more or less where the second one is going. Did you like Octopath Traveler? This is more of it, seems to be improved around many margins. There are a few places where one could reasonably say ‘are we really doing this again?’ and yes you are doing it again but that is mostly fine. It is impressive how the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The flipping between stories makes them work. You do have to be in for a long journey. My guess is this is on pace to be Tier 3 but fighting for Tier 2.

Waymo crash data shows only three injuries in seven million miles, all minor, much lower rates than you expect with human drivers. They only generate 25% as many insurance claims as human drivers and generated zero injury claims. This does not tell us much yet about fatal crashes since those are one every 100 million miles, and tail risk could be different if there are weird failure modes, so the question is whether there are rare weird failure modes.

Not enough links? Astral Codex Ten’s monthly links are here, only a few are things I’ve linked to here or otherwise.

Americans do not read many books. Even listened to counts here.

It makes sense to me that not many people read exactly one book in a year. Once you’ve read one, about half the time you’ll read more than six, and half of that time you’ll read more than fifteen.

A fun study found via MR of how long chocolates last in hospitals. This is one case where it should have reversed its final statement and said ‘further study is not needed.’

I had a whole Christopher Alexander sequence planned before AI happened. There’s so much good stuff there, I am still glad I read A Pattern Language.

Made in Cosmos: Christopher Alexander is so wild. 80% of his ideas about home design make me go “wow, how come I never thought about it before?”, and then he’ll randomly come up with something like putting guest alcoves in your master bedroom so that you can all have big sleepovers together.

Charlie Page: Are you saying that’s not a phenomenal idea? Master bedrooms are too big anyway.

Made in Cosmos: lol our entire apartment is probably the size of an average American master bedroom. I dream of a time we’ll have a bed that can be approached from both sides.

A Pattern Language is very clear that not every pattern fits into every house. You choose the patterns that have the most value to you, that fit your space and your life. Also yes, alcoves in the master bedroom are an awesome idea if you have a lot on which you can build a non-standard structure, and therefore can choose to add alcoves. Remarkably efficient use of space to generate optionality. As Cosmos notes, not applicable for everyone, but also it would be a very good way to get extra beds into a tiny footprint if that was your puzzle.

Is this the year?

Paul Graham: Prediction: Wokeness will recede significantly in 2024. There were always more people against it than there seemed, but many were afraid to say so. Now that it’s safer to criticize it, more will.

Manifold traders say 39%, which is pretty good for a substantial move in one direction.

I mostly tried this for a few years. In my job it didn’t take.

Paul Graham: I don’t think journalists or universities grasp how much their reputation has suffered, and that it’s due to their own intellectual dishonesty. A generation ago newspapers and universities were esteemed institutions. Now you see open contempt for them.

A journalist seeing Suhail’s tweet would presumably think “nutjobs are always saying things like that.” But Suhail is not a clueless extremist. Exactly the opposite. And yet is there any journalist in the world who can even see, let alone admit, that there’s a problem?

I mean, not quite the opposite. I’ve seen his views on AI. He does, from what I can tell, support building smarter than human intelligence as quickly as possible and letting it proliferate and thinks that would be good for us. He quoted his company’s written testimony to the House of Lords with pride, in which they commit outright fraud regarding the ‘integrity’ of their investment portfolio’s AI products, claiming we now understand such AI models. But definitely not a nutjob.

Amjad Masad (CEO Replit): Agreed, but what’s the alternative to find ground truth? I hoped Twitter/X + Community Notes + Free Speech + Transparency would be it. But it’s neither free nor transparent, and notes are easily gamed.

Paul Graham: One way is to follow people whose judgement you trust.

Andrej Dabrowski: It doesn’t scale though.

I disagree, Andrej. I think it scales fine. If everyone has a pool of people they trust, but is doing the work to adjust that pool to get it right, that absolutely scales. In my model, everyone has a ‘level’ (from 1-4 or so) of sense making production, and your goal is to follow people one level above you and those at your level, make sense of the worthy ones, and then make sense to those at or below your level in return.

Journalists used to be accepted into this as All-Level sources, without much question, in a way that rewarded reliability and allowed everyone to understand. Now they’ve lost the necessary faith in that institution. You need higher-level people you trust to be able to use Bounded Distrust on the outputs. Thank you for putting some of that trust in me, keep an eye and ensure I stay worthy of it.

Andrew Gelman reweighs himself on his bathroom scale 46 times to compute the standard error. I mention this partly because it is inherently cool, and partly to tell the story that you cannot do this on my bathroom scale. If you do, you will get an answer of zero. It will come back the same every time.

Is that because the scale is super accurate, or at worst off by a fixed amount? Oh, no. Nothing like that.

It is because someone decided that the scale should have memory. If it gives you 161.3, then it has decided that everything from about 160.9 to 161.7 is going to count as 161.3 for a while. You can even see it, sometimes, bouncing towards the ‘real’ number, then at the last moment it reverts to its baseline. So if you (for example) were to pick up something weighing 0.2 pounds before weighting yourself, then weigh yourself again without it, you’d get an answer 0.2 pounds higher than otherwise.

I am fascinated by who thought this was a desired behavior. Writing this inspired me to get a second scale, for now keeping both around because it is fascinating.

You want to complain? I want to complain about all your complaining. Or do I?

Owen Cyclops: There’s a culture divide you can go your whole life without pinpointing: groups where complaining is negative, and groups where complaining is a normal positive method of socializing. they cant understand each other. larger than a language gap. probably best if they never interact.

Emmet Shear: Games People Play names a bunch of these games, like “Wooden Leg” and “Ain’t It Awful.”

Lilibeth: I’ve found that the ones who don’t tend to thrive in the cultures of the ones who do. Mainly because they don’t know how good they have it, and so the ones who don’t can lap up all the good things. And thrive.

Ben Linzel: Those groups are called men and women and civilization is built around pairing them.

Emily: Been thinking about this all day with shame about my whole family’s complaining culture. So far I have not complained today and I’m going to try actively not to anymore. This tweet bodied me with embarrassment.

I would divide complainers into two key subcategories. One we could call the commiserators (or simply the complainers, or if you want to treat them with proper disdain rather than be even-handed, the whiners), the other the critiquers or the optimizers. The first group wants your social attention on the complaints they are making, the second group wants to fix the problem.

Then you can also divide the non-complainers. You have those who do not complain because they are in Guess Culture, and you have those who don’t complain because they choose to instead not expect their complaints to be heard, at least at this time. They don’t expect you to figure it out or tell you implicitly, they don’t ‘drop hints,’ they suck it up, do what needs to be done and keep things positive. The first group wants your attention on their complaints they aren’t making, the second group does not.

I love the culture where it is standard to critique and complain about everything in a good natured way. Magic: The Gathering culture is like that. When I was gambling it was like that. Rationalist culture is often like that.

Over time, I have also grown to appreciate the need, often, to prioritize a nice time and keeping things positive. You still need to strike a balance in a way that often doesn’t happen, where when it is sufficiently important you speak up. But yes, there is something pretty great about there being times and places to sit back and enjoy, and not be optimizing or complaining and not getting nerd sniped by everything.

There is also a time and place to enjoy a good rant, and loudly complain about how awful things are even if you don’t have a larger goal in mind. In small well-timed doses this is great. When people make it a habit or can’t stop or take it too seriously? Not so much.

There are also times when one must stop complaining because the social punishment would be too large, and find ways to indicate your information and preferences when you can. I hate this. The ‘upper classes’ seem to largely operate this way in most times and places, playing these comedies of manners, and I think this alone is bad enough that you mostly shouldn’t envy them. Their lives seem rather worse than mine.

I mean, I love it, too perfect, so even thought you’ve all seen it by now:

Gary Gensler (January 9): The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.

The ETFs were ultimately approved.

Vitalik Buterin offers financial advice, much of which many in crypto need to hear:

Vitalik Buterin: [not diversifying] is awful advice. Some actual financial advice:

Diversification is good.

Save. Get to the point where you have enough to cover multiple years of expenses. Financial safety is freedom.

Be boring with most of your portfolio.

Don’t use >2x leverage. Just don’t.

Nothing I ever say is investing advice, but I agree, especially about the leverage. I would add a general principle that one should not worry much about the details of things like diversification or ‘balancing.’ The point, once you have enough savings that it maters, is not to die on any one hill even if that hill is Nvidia. Or if that hill is cryptocurrency. I do not care how bullish you are, there is no reason to risk ruin.

We were promised a recession. Tyler Cowen reminds us of this, asks why we were promised one that then never arrived. As he notes, the correct response is to notice the confusion, not to sweep it under the rug or pretend you made a better prediction. Scott Sumner notes that this seems to be due to aggregate demand stubbornly refusing to fall. I did not predict a recession, but only because I did not make a prediction at all. No points.

My hypothesis is a little out there, and of course Cowen’s Third Law that all propositions about real interest rates being wrong applies, but my hypothesis is that this is not unrelated to AI.

Everyone keeps saying that expectations for AI should raise real interest rates. Well, what if they did raise real interest rates? Not a ton yet, but some. The mechanism is for now only a little bit productivity and consumption effects, although we do have a few areas like coding. It is mostly investment and the anticipation of future investment and opportunity and growth, leading to consumption smoothing and also greater willingness to borrow and such, and people who place bets on future rates impacting rates now. Real monetary policy is not a number like 5%, it is where the rate sits compared to its ‘natural’ setting, so it meant monetary policy was looser than it looked.

Congressman Sean Casten has a thread that explains some issues with banking regulations and the ‘inflation reduction act.’

The way the IRA works is that it declares some forms of investment related to climate ‘good’ so you get tax credits for them. Can you feel the inflation reduction? So that’s great, says Sean, because it means for every dollar in tax credits given out, you generate several dollars in investment activity. We pay $2, industry puts up $10 and we get $10 of windmill if and when it passes environmental reviews and isn’t stopped by the Jones Act.

Sometimes there will actually be a profitable windmill where they put up the same $10 they would have anyway and pocket the $2, but hey, that’s life, and they might do it bigger and faster. Not an obviously crazy strategy.

The problem is that the payment is in the form of tax credits rather than in the form of money. That means that if you are making money, you get paid money in the form of owing less money. But if you are not making money, and presumably need the money all the more, you get nothing. That’s by design. They could have written checks instead and didn’t.

Why didn’t we? Because a certain Senator threw a hissy fit over how it looked:

Sean Casten: Postscript because a few people have said that we fixed that with refundability / direct pay. The House version did that – but a certain Senator substantially limited its availability in exchange for his vote. Here’s to tax code (and Senate) inefficiency!

The good news is that banks can get you out of this. The bank invests in the project. As payment, instead of taking money, they take the tax credits, which are money to the bank because the bank owes taxes. So by rerouting banking capital to these projects, we allow the money we gave as tax credits to turn back into money, so everyone involved can feel like they kind of didn’t spend it, and it is only moderately convoluted.

But there is a problem. To do this, the bank must invest capital. We worry when banks invest capital, bank runs and solvency and all that, so we impose capital requirements on the banks before they can reroute our money that isn’t money back into money.

And the Basel III draft rules for how this works say that energy investments are four times ‘riskier’ than housing investments. They do this because there is greater risk in energy projects, much of it due to all the environmental and other regulations that could sink the project. And we are forcing the bank to take on that risk in order to facilitate the tax credit transfer, so it needs to account for that.

Oh no, Sean warns us. If we account for this risk by measuring it accurately, this will cripple the ability of banks to provide the capital, so we won’t be able to reconvert the tax credits. All because of this ‘oversight.’

None of this is an oversight. It is the result of negotiations and deliberate decisions. It would all be deeply funny if the stakes were lower.

Crypto has this issue where people keep getting their crypto stolen.

Crypto also has the problem where crypto people treat this as a marketing issue.

Approve infinity strikes again.

Do you think the user who just lost $4.4million will stay in crypto? Won’t he just sell everything and hate crypto after? It is so irresponsible to build on ERC-20 token standard, but with the current EVM, all token standards will fall to the same problems.

I say the responsibility here is not to the reputation and adaptation of crypto. It is to your users, whose money you want to not be stolen.

Nothing I say is ever investment advice, but we may have spotted Patrick McKenzie giving actual investment advice, and it is the best advice:

Patrick McKenzie: Almost all investment advice is written for people who cannot action the strategy “Choose to earn more.” My investment advice for most geeks begins with “Choose to earn more” and underlining that a lot, because NPV of your career and any optimization of that >>> your $ capital.

Read “cannot easily move the needle drastically” for “cannot choose to earn more” in above. A schoolteacher doesn’t have a static income but they don’t have nearly the dynamism of options available to the people this advice is for.

Thread occasioned by someone who asked for advice given particulars of personal situation which they felt rhymed with my life story.

In the my life story version, best investment in 2010 wasn’t Chipotle even though that was great. Best investment was quitting $40k salaryman job.

I strongly believe this as well, and have acted accordingly. Do something reasonable with your savings, there are various low-fee broad based ETFs available as a baseline option, and then focus on what matters. This holds until you have an extraordinarily large amount of savings relative to potential future earnings.

He also notes that a lot of people who believe that they need to worry about someone draining their bank account, and for the bank to refuse to fix the problem, whereas this is exceedingly rare. It is indeed weird that it is rare, and that we write our account numbers on every check and anyone with the account number can initiate arbitrary transfers out of the account. Somehow we do that, and we have a system on top of it that almost entirely prevents this from going wrong. It still baffles. And yeah, I’m still going to try to avoid putting my account number on various computer servers.

Pat Reginer: When I was in college someone stole my checkbook and used it to clear out my bank account. And then the bank… just gave me my money back. This has informed my intuitions about crypto.

A bold strategy, Cotton, let’s see if it works out:

Patrick McKenzie: The charmingly American healthcare experience of receiving a bill for $89 from a medical office you don’t recognize in a state you don’t live in for a service which sounds plausible but not actually remembered and wondering: scam, data entry error, or actual real bill?

So then you call them and of course that doesn’t work because why would a phone number on an invoice saying “If you have billing questions please call us.” actually result in reaching a human who can answer billing questions.

In Japan that would move the probability far, far towards “scam” but my general feeling is that it moves the probability precisely zero in America.

Anton: I stopped paying any bills that came by mail over a year ago and it’s had zero consequences. Any mail that isn’t obviously personal (hand written, addressed to me, from someone I know) immediately goes in the trash, i don’t even think about it.

“they’ll send it to collections, they’ll hit your credit score” – urban legend, never happened. “important! retain for your records!” – in the shredder with you, then the trash

I have explained to the mail carrier that they’re just creating waste but she refuses to listen to reason.

Anyone can send anyone else a bill for any amount, for any reason or no reason at all. If you don’t pay, they can keep sending the bill and potentially involve collections, again with or without any real reason to bill you for that amount. It is a strange system, or complete lack of a system.

In practical terms, Anton seems largely right. When you see a paper bill, if you do not think it is legitimate, and you ignore it, mostly all that happens is they keep sending you paper copies of the bill. There are exceptions if the size gets bigger, but mostly as far as I can tell they end up writing it off. Often they are ‘making the bill up’ in the sense that you did not agree to pay that amount, and sometimes it is entirely fake, and other times they also billed your insurance and paying the bill would be deeply stupid.

Meanwhile, every legitimate service I use that is not medical, to my knowledge, will bill me only electronically. Makes you think.

Tyler Cowen warns that with fertility on the decline, this could be the last chance for many countries to get rich. If they wait until their populations are in decline, they will face too many headwinds. The obvious response is that AI will change all that, whereas he only mentions AI as making it harder for low-wage economies to offer basic services such as call centers, which seems like such a minor part of the changes coming.

What frustrates me whenever I see such talk is that Tyler emphasizes that the causes of the trend, which he cites as reliable birth control and freedom for women, will not and should not be reversed. But then he does not call for other options or speak of potential interventions, instead he presumes this problem will go unsolved. There is a hell of a missing mood when you warn of countries failing to get rich, when what you are actually warning about is a dramatic and rapid fall in their populations.

Scott Sumner movie reviews for 2023 Q4. Such different worlds we live in. I’ve seen two movies here, Matchstick Men and The Sting. He given Matchstick Men a slightly higher rating, which is bold, but I suspect he is correct. I notice I am much more inspired to watch recent picks, and expect to enjoy similarly rated ones more.

For my own movie reviews, I have decided to try storing them at Letterboxd, with 10 movies so far. I am not claiming to be objective or correct in the way Sumner is. I am going to punish you if the movie is too slow developing, or is not pleasant to watch, although great is still great.

How I’m thinking about the scale:

5/5 is ‘drop what you are doing, see this and I will answer no questions’ and the only movie of 2023 that clearly qualifies is Across the Spiderverse, I think Barbie is my #2 and on the edge between 4.5 and 5.

My ‘Must See’ threshold is if something gets 4.5/5 stars, ideally this is also ‘see this and I will answer no questions’ but you don’t need to drop what you’re doing.

I think it is typically a good decision to see anything 3.5/5 or 4/5 as well. 3/5 is either inessential but fun, or has value but also downsides, and could go either way. A 2.5/5 means this is a subpar product but in the right mood or with a reason, and no better options, sure why not. A 2/5 means serious issues but there’s something there and it isn’t automatically a mistake. Below that, there isn’t, what are you doing, stop.

I notice that there are kind of two tracks, the ‘this is trying to be entertainment’ track and a ‘this is trying to be art or otherwise do something’ track. It is not the comedy/drama divide, although that is related. It is also related to Hollywood/independent, but again not the same and I can think of exceptions.

Of the 10 I saw recently, there were three excellent films that each got 4.5/5, and I can recommend them to any adult reading this: May/December, You Hurt My Feelings and Poor Things. I also gave 4/5 to Godzilla Minus One. I was relatively low on Anatomy of a Fall at 3.5, although I appreciated seeing a very different system in operation, and I was an outlier in the negative direction on Saltburn, which got the only 2.

I have not actually forgotten that the rest of the world exists. As usual, this is everything that wasn’t worth an entire post and is not being saved for any of the roundup post categories.

(Roundup post categories are currently AI, Medical and Health, Housing and Traffic, Dating, Childhood and Education, Fertility, Startups, and potentially NEPA and Clean Energy.)

Rebels from Yemen were firing on ships in the Red Sea, a problem dating back thousands of years. Here’s where we were on December 17, with the US government finally dropping the hammer.

Hidden fees exist, even when everyone knows they’re there, because they work. StubHub experimented, the hiding meant people spent 21% more money. Companies simply can’t pass that up. Government intervention could be justified. However, I also notice that Ticketmaster is now using ‘all-in’ pricing for many shows with zero hidden fees, despite this problem.

Pollution is a huge deal (paper, video from MRU).

Alec Stapp: Cars spew pollution while waiting at toll booths. Paper uses E-ZPass replacement of toll booths to identify impact of vehicle emissions on public health. Key result: E-ZPass reduced prematurity and low birth weight among mothers within 2km of a toll plaza by 10.8% and 11.8%.

GPT-4 estimated this could have cut vehicle emissions by 10%-30%, so the implied relationship is ludicrously large, even though my quick investigation into the paper said that the estimates above are somewhat overstated.

Optimal chat size can be anywhere from 2 to 8 people who ever actually talk. Ten is already too many.

Emmett Shear: The group chat with 100 incredibly impressive and interesting members is far less valuable than the one with 10.

Ideal in-person chat sizes are more like 2 to at most 5.

The good news in both cases is that if you only lurk, in many ways you do not count.

Simple language is indeed better.

Samo Burja: I’ve come to appreciate simple language more and more. Careful and consistent use of common words and simple sentences can be just as technically precise.

Ben Landau-Taylor: I’m reading two papers by the same author, one at the start of his career and one after he’d been in the field for two decades. It’s remarkable how academic experience makes his prose *worse*. At first his language is clear and straightforward, later it’s needlessly complex.

IRS changed Section 174, under the ‘Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,’ such that R&D expenses can only be expensed over 5 years, or overseas over 15 years. All software development counts as R&D for this. If you are big and profitable, you do less R&D but you survive. If you are VC-backed and losing tons of money, you don’t owe anything anyway and do not care. If you are a bootstrapping tech company, or otherwise trying to get by, this is death, at a minimum you have to lay off a bunch of staff whose cost you can no longer meaningfully expense.

This is complete insanity. It is obviously bad policy to discourage R&D in this way but I did not fully realize the magnitude of the error. If we do not fix it quickly, it will do massive damage. I don’t care whether it makes sense in theory in terms of value, in practice companies are getting tax bills exceeding 100% of their income.

IRS did also notch a recent win. They’re cutting college aid application process from over 100 questions down to 18 with auto populated IRS information.

Ashley Schapitl: Thank the IRS for the new 10-minute college aid application process! “The new FAFSA pulls from information the government already has through the IRS to automatically input family income details.”

Yes, Matt Bruenig is coming out in favor of all paychecks going directly to the government, which then gives you your cut after. Just think of the efficiency gains. This does not seem like a good idea to me.

Department of amazing news but you’re only telling me this now?

Alec Stapp: Good news of the day: DOE is proposing a new rule to give solar, energy storage, and transmission line upgrades a categorical exclusion from environmental review. Simple administrative fix that will speed up permitting for clean energy.

This is only a proposed rule. There is still time for us to continue not building anything and boiling the planet. But yes. It turns out we had the ability to do this the entire time. This will, if implemented, dramatically advance our ability to do such projects.

The weirdest part is this is still only partial. It does not include non-battery energy storage, carbon capture, direct air capture, wind, geothermal or hydrogen. Once you realize you can do this, why stop at solar, transmission and batteries?

If we can give all clean energy projects this massive advantage, then we have a real shot at getting the grid off fossil fuels.

Did you know that if you are doing work for the federal government, you are expressly forbidden from doing user research unless you go through a 6 month approval process first? This is of course exactly the opposite of how anyone capable of building anything ever builds anything. Everything government does ends up like this. Massive disruption and let-people-do-things energy is needed, instead everyone is mostly forced to focus on meeting a long list of technical requirements.

We should continuously be thankful that Americans enjoy basic rights like ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘if the courts say something is illegal the government has to stop doing it.’ Because places like the UK do not grant their citizens such rights. Prim Minister Sunak is trying to deport anyone who arrives illegally on a boat and leave them in Rwanda. The courts have said this is illegal, you have to put them somewhere they are safe, and his response is:

UK Prime Minister: We are a reasonable country, but our patience has now run out. Our Parliament is sovereign, and it should be able to make decisions that cannot be undone in our courts.

This is both a cautionary tale, in that it is rare and precious that we enjoy such protections, and also a non-cautionary tale, in that the UK would still be a fine place to live, at least if they built houses in which one could live there.

Matt Yglesias theorizes that work from home is a dysfunctional equilibrium that makes people miserable, but an empty office is worse so you can get stuck. There will be cases where this is true, but also ‘you need to be in the office for signaling and office politics’ or flat out ‘they wouldn’t let you work from home’ meant a lot of people were miserable the other way.

He illustrates one way that Choices are Bad:

Matthew Yglesias: When I was in college, for one class we were assigned a case study of a company that shifted to a flexible work schedule that gave everyone way more opportunity to take time off when needed to participate in kids’ events, family responsibilities, etc.

Everybody hated it because the flexibility meant in practice that a huge share of your non-work time was taken up by family responsibilities.

They’d lose the freedom of there just randomly sometimes being neither work nor any family shit and you could just do whatever.

But they were stuck in a virtue signaling trap. Nobody could actually *saythat they preferred going back to a more rigid schedule that forced them to miss some school plays and kid softball games and family dinners.

That seems like a different situation. Also I don’t really buy it? I can see the problem but seems so hard for that to dominate.

Study finds most college students would actively prefer a world without Instagram and TikTok, but don’t feel they can stay away if everyone else is using them.

Jonathan Haidt: New study shows that TikTok and Insta trap young people, who feel they MUST use the platforms because… everyone else does. But if offered the chance to PAY to have everyone in their college delete the apps, most on TikTok, and half on Insta, would pay.

Also: most students say they’d PREFER to live in a world with no TikTok or Insta. Even most active users of Insta say that. Social media is not a normal consumer product. The negative spillover effects are enormous, not just on non-users, but on active users as well, the authors conclude. The business models of Meta and TikTok require trapping young users in this way. The presence of major external costs imposed on others–especially children–is the textbook example of why societies impose regulations, and why class action lawsuits exist.

See the summary, and the full working paper, here.

Andrew Critch: This survey shows how platforms are like arms dealers: turning us against each other and selling us weapons to attack each other in self-defense. They literally manufacture a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Now imagine all the ways superintelligent AI could turn us against each other.

From paper:

• Users would need to be paid $59 to deactivate TikTok and $47 to deactivate Instagram if others in their network were to continue using their accounts.

• Users would be willing to pay $28 and $10 to have others, including themselves, deactivate TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Accounting for consumption spillovers to non-users reveals that 64% of active TikTok users and 48% of active Instagram users experience negative welfare from the products’ existence. Participants who do not have accounts would be willing to pay $67 and $39 to have others deactivate their TikTok and Instagram accounts, respectively.

• Taken together, these results imply the existence of a “social media trap” for a large share of consumers, whose utility from the platforms is negative but would have been even more negative if they didn’t use social media.

Our price cheap. New cause area. Only $106 per college student to get them all off of TikTok and Instagram at the margin, flipping to a negative amount if enough others took the bribe? The average college student pays $104,108 over four years to attend college. I’d much rather charge them an even $104k and have them agree not to use TikTok and Instagram. Everybody wins.

Nikki Haley called for mandatory identify verification on social media, saying the alterative is a ‘national security threat.’ She was rightfully roasted for this and was forced to walk it back. I will note that I was never especially worried she would be able to implement this, even if there was a legal way to do it. We have not even been able to ban TikTok, and oh boy is TikTok doing its best to explain why we need to ban it.

Also note that the bottom graphic says she first discussed this during a segment on antisemitism. If you think that either forcing people to identify themselves to talk, or otherwise censoring ideas, is a good way to fight antisemitism, you do not understand how any of this works, least of all antisemitism.

Claim that X Premium+ gives a rather large boost to Twitter engagement. I have not noticed an obvious difference between Premium+ and regular Premium, other than access to Grok.

It is highly understandable, given how unreasonable many attacks upon EA have recently been, for its advocates to get a little carried away in its defense. It is vital to not do that, and instead use this opportunity to get the house in order. This includes things like better respect for stakeholders and norms, it means not using supposed fungibility of lives and money to justify almost anything. And it especially means proper condemnation of lying and fraud.

Either lives and money are centrally fungible or they are not. Either you are on board with not committing fraud no matter what on a pretty basic level, or you’re doing math. Consider this from Scott Alexander, the necessity and precision of which boggles in various ways:

Scott Alexander: In my defense of EA, I said of its failures (primarily SBF) that “I’m not sure they cancel out the effect of saving one life, let alone 200,000.” A friend convinced me that this was an unfair exaggeration. There are purported exchange rates between money and lives, destroying billions in value is pretty bad by all of them, and there are knock-on effects on social trust from fraud that suggest its negative effects should be valued even higher. I regret this sentence, no longer stand by it, and have added it to my Mistakes page.

I feel like the important mistake here has not been properly recognized yet?

The link goes to the EPA statistics on mortality, where a life is valued at $10 million. Meanwhile, Scott Alexander is using estimates of EA lives saved based on dollars spent on interventions times EA’s own estimated cost per life saved for the intervention. Which is, to say the least, quite a lot lower.

Effectiveness for me but not for thee. You almost need to justify why you wouldn’t commit fraud, here using secondary knock-on effects but they are unquantified and thus easy to largely disregard if you follow such a philosophy too closely.

This is then combined with an implied denial of action-inaction distinction. Which is good utilitarian logic and we very much go overboard the other way as a civilization, but this type of scenario is exactly why that distinction is often necessary in practice rather than confused or stupid.

More to the point, you can’t both make the case that everyone agrees you definitely shouldn’t ever commit fraud, and also make arguments like this that the fraud basically wasn’t inherently that big a deal. It was a big deal.

Even if and while you are determined to only look at specific quantifiable knock-on effects, advocates of EA must appreciate how stupendously bad SBF was for exactly what they most care about. The whole OpenAI incident had many causes, but an important one was a desire by Altman and others in management to distance from EA, caused largely by the direct aftermath of SBF and FTX. They are far from the only ones looking to create such distance.

In other EA criticism: Long thread from Eli Tyre critiquing EA as too focused on quantifying first order effects, in a way that works on the margin but does not scale. Can you improve the world a lot without deeply understanding it? On the margin, yes, relative to your efforts, there are various tricks to free ride on the information of others. Or you can deeply understand the local situation, and help locally. Or find unique opportunities that are overdetermined, where you don’t need deep understanding to know the right play. Helping at scale without deeply understanding what you are doing? No. Won’t work.

McKenzie Scott gives away $2.1 billion to 360 different charities. Focus is clearly to help Americans with things like health, poverty, hunger, community centers, child aid, legal aid and so on. Very conventional portfolio ‘this is a charity that helps the less fortunate by providing stuff,’ with broad diversification.

I love that she is so low key about all this, not making it all about her. Mad respect.

Matthew Yglesias: If you tell people you are trying to do the most good, inevitably people will end up disagreeing with some of your choices and getting mad.

If you do what Scott does and just throw money around semi-randomly with no particular reason given then people love it.

This is a ubiquitous issue. Taking default actions and avoiding agency and meaningful decisions means you are not blamed for things, rather than getting you blamed for not even trying to maximize. Trying to maximize gets you the opposite. This is a problem.

I am sad that she is missing the opportunity to do better. But that is supererogatory. What she is doing is still great. The origin of the mistake is, in large part, where people are mad at and blaming people for attempted maximization. And also where others are not laying the necessary groundwork for efficient passive investment.

In a world in which other people were doing the work of finding good charities and donating primarily to them, and responded to her actions by stepping up their work on that, Scott’s behavior as essentially a passive investor would work out well. Not everyone needs to be on the research team. Not everyone needs to be an active investor for market prices to work out.

The problem is that if the dumb money is outvoting the smart money in the nonprofit sector. If the grifters and emotional manipulators and storytellers and those with prestige and connections and reputations end up with the money. If the market is fundamentally failing, then putting in more passive money is going to encourage further bad behaviors and distortions. And that is indeed my model.

This compounds over time, if Scott’s decisions predictably reward funds raised. That will amplifies returns to raising funds. Doing this kind of passive investment once and only once is basically fine even in a pretty bad situation. Do it every year at this size, where people can plan for it, could become a real problem.

I love how it has proven essentially impossible to, even with essentially unlimited power, rig a vote in a non-obvious way. I am not saying it never happens deniably, and you may not like it, but this is what peaked rigged election somehow always seems to actually look like.

Kenny: This is the funniest way to start a war. Have a “should we invade?” Referendum and then rig the vote for yes. 10/10 no notes

That’s right. Exactly 95/5, exactly 10.5 million yes votes, exactly the same vote totals on both questions. It is a power move, rather than laziness or a mistake, making it clear to everyone what you did rather than having people ‘accuse you’ of anything. Which makes sense.

Police in San Francisco can get paid over $400k total compensation via overtime.

I have no problem with paying the market clearing price for talent. San Francisco’s tech community certainly understands this lesson. If no one wants to be a police officer, especially one who works lots of overtime, then the price should be high. Very few of you would take the job even at $500k. I certainly wouldn’t.

What we actually have here is different. We have a failure of marketing.

If you are going to pay this much, that’s fine, do what you have to do, but then structure it to induce supply and then you shout it from the rooftops.

Instead we get:

Give me one minute television adds during 49ers games that explain the full compensation package. You’ll get your new recruits.

Even better, structure it so base is stronger but system is harder to game and overtime pays less, I am confident there is a way to make everyone but a few extreme examples better off.

Police in San Francisco seem increasingly to have zero ability to enforce the law. This could have something to do with their recruiting problems.

Garry Tan (CEO Y-Combinator): I just got forwarded the craziest email from SF Parking Enforcement

A vehicle used in narcotics trafficking with over $2600 worth of tickets has been parked for weeks across from the Marina Safeway.

A citizen asked to get it removed and this was the response.

Parking tickets are more of a suggestion, then. As are the laws against narcotics trafficking. I continue to be impressed at how slowly things are escalating.

Then again, they might reasonably wonder why they would bother.

Kane: Judges released ~90% [284 of 316] of the most egregious suspects in San Francisco, and basically none of them re-appeared for their court date. Incredible.

Kron 4 News: There are 535 suspected San Francisco drug dealers with open bench warrants who failed to show up in court to face narcotics sales charges, the DA’s Office said. Judges had granted their freedom from custody pending trial.

And then there’s this. Quite the headline from the San Francisco Standard.

San Francisco Homeless Man Camped Outside a School With ‘Free Fentanyl’ Sign Is Convicted Pedophile

The story backs this up, hard.

Joseph Adam Moore, 46, is camped opposite the Stella Maris Academy K-8 Catholic school on Geary Boulevard at Ninth Avenue. Convictions in Santa Cruz in the mid-’90s that are listed on the state’s registry of sex offenders say he was found guilty of forcible unlawful sex in 1997 and committed lewd acts with a child under 14 in 1996.

“We don’t want anything of that nature anywhere near our schools, but we want to be able to work with law enforcement to establish the guidelines,” he said. “The school works with law enforcement and city officials to manage unhoused individuals who are perhaps too close to the students. It’s a frequent thing.”

Marlow said the school would be looking into Moore’s claims that he is selling drugs near the school. He said that police had come to the location multiple times. 

…

San Francisco Superior Court documents show Moore has been arrested five times in the city since 2007 for allegedly failing to re-register his address as a sex offender every 30 days. 

I would think that picture would be sufficient to have the police deal with the situation, even if this wasn’t across from the school, a convicted sex offender and recurring over months. I would however be wrong about that, at least in San Francisco.

We need bold new ideas. Instead, we are told to beware the hot dogs, or anyone that might dare try and do business?

London Breed (Mayor of San Francisco): We want food vendors to be permitted so we can ensure the food being sold on our streets is safe and healthy. @SF_DPH will continue to enforce our food safety laws. They’ll also continue educating unpermitted vendors on how to get into compliance with the support from the City.

Paul Graham: Could you maybe start classing fentanyl as food, so that you’ll also be able to crack down on unlicensed street vendors of that?

near: cant believe this website is only $8.

Whatever it takes.

Other drugs sold in San Francisco (and presumably many other places) are increasingly laced with Fentanyl. As Garry Tan point out, this is very much on purpose, and officials are complacent. What to do about it? On a practical level, it is worth paying a premium to carefully source your recreational drugs, and get them from sources that are reliable and have no incentive to contaminate. I’m mostly in the ‘drugs (and alcohol) are bad’ camp even without this concern, but if you go a different way definitely get the good stuff.

Or are they finally turning the corner, completely unrelated to Xi’s visit?

Brooke Jenkins (District Attorney of San Francisco): We have now turned the corner on the culture in San Francisco with respect to retail theft. I have made it clear that we will prosecute those who commit theft in our City. No longer can we view retail theft as a low level crime. No longer can we view it as less serious.

She talks tough, even brags about getting a guilty verdict in a theft case. Let us see if she can keep it up.

Meanwhile, the whole city cleaned up its act just in time for Xi’s arrival, As is suggested in the video, how about we do it this way all year round?

Newsome shows refreshing honesty and says yes, we are only cleaning up the city because the fancy leaders are coming into town (0: 17 video).

Or perhaps it is all very Potemkin village, and they are only cleaning up their act in exactly the ways and places that impact the summit?

Misha Guervich: People keep saying this but it’s just not even close to true that they “managed to clean up the city” Just walk around downtown and you’ll see at best a tiny fraction is kind of cleaned up.

It seems like the courts can tell prisons how they have to treat prisoners, the prisoner can literally bring a copy of the court’s decision with him, and then the prison workers can choose to ignore that and then are immune to being sued ? Which means, effectively, you have no rights, and courts have no power over prisons.

Raffi Melkonian: A devoted Rastafarian wanted to keep his locks while imprisoned, and TOOK a copy of the Fifth Circuit’s opinion saying he could with him to intake. The guards threw it away and forcibly shaved him. However, he loses his case for damages under circuit precedent.

Here is the opinion, which explains in greater detail why under CA5 precedent the inmate loses.

Wayne Burkett has a Twitter thread pointing out that we very much send those who break the rules the message that as long as they don’t want to be respectable they can get away with ignoring the rules. Right up until they can’t. You can misbehave in school quite a lot without much happening to you. Authority figures will look right at you while you steal on camera and mostly do nothing. You might get arrested 20 times with no major ill effects, again so long as you give zero anythings. And then, suddenly, wham, without any clear differential from your own perspective, years in prison.

As Wayne notes, everyone says that certainty and consistency of punishment is what keeps would-be criminals and rulebreakers in line. If you want to rehabilitate or deter, you need consistent proportional punishments, not improbable oversized ones. We do the opposite, in part out of compassion, mostly because it is cheaper and easier. There is no cheap or easy way to do the proportional punishment thing. It is expensive to catch those involved. We lack the knobs to punish them afterwards, once they don’t care much about things like credit ratings or not spending a night in jail. We essentially can’t fine them, we don’t want to take away economic opportunities or deny them benefits, we don’t want to beat them, we don’t know how to meaningfully shame them, we don’t want to jail them long enough to matter. What are our options? I can think of a number of additional ones that might work, but most people are going to like them even less, usually due to something about ‘ethics.’

Armed gangs are stealing huge quantities of high value goods from shipping containers when they pass through New Mexico. The theft of transport cargo seems to be getting worse, and the plot is thickening.

Bill Schieder (VP of Global Physical Security, Flexport): In mid-2021 a ‘red zone’ was established around the ports of Los Angeles/Long Beach. Encompassing a vast swath of the Inland Empire, cargo trucks are no longer permitted to stop (not including drayage trucks) within this zone, which also includes heightened security measures around cargo facilities. It didn’t take long for the criminals to learn of this and set up shop around the edges of that zone, which for trains means along the tracks of southeastern Arizona and into New Mexico.

…

Our team has investigated roughly 100 cases globally thus far in 2023. These are not all rail theft, mind you, however, we would estimate that ~30% are. In those 100 cases, we’ve been able to help retrieve close to $1 million worth of stolen goods for our customers.

Those shipping cargo are advised on how to improve their physical security. This would be a bigger problem if America wasn’t so woefully short on trains.

Shrinkage, or theft from stores, is 1.5% of inventory for stores with ‘traditional’ checkout. It jumps to nearly 4% for self-checkout. So from the store’s perspective, it saves 2.5% by having a human check you out.

The math is clear. If the clerk is indeed continuously serving customers, the direct shrinkage costs saved exceed, on their own, the cost of the employee. Then you have to add the costs of self-checkout, including employee assistance, cost of the new setup and also the damage to the customer experience and customer preferences. It seems like a no brainer to mostly not use self-checkout. So why is it so popular? Is this simply a miscalculation?

Among the somehow standard Very Online response that no one should ever take action against those who break the law in various petty ways and make our lives miserable, there are two things to consider. Here’s one of them.

Misha Gurevich: I think something that leads to a lot of flawed reasoning about crime is nice people imagining what it would take to get them to commit that crime, which, because they’re nice, is desperation or emergencies.

Nice upper middle class people do not instinctually consider shoplifting bulk baby food to resell it on the street for personal profit. If you try to make things better for desperate poor moms by not punishing shoplifting you actually make it worse because the professional shoplifters can move in.

You need a way to not punish (too harshly or reliably) the shoplifting mom in need, without enabling roving gangs. If someone is engaged in organized behavior, is doing crime as a job or as a means of making a living, and lesser punishment didn’t work and we don’t want to consider the alternatives we don’t want to consider, we should all be able to agree that they need to go to jail.

The other issue is simple impact. If the conduct is too damaging, causing too much reduced quality of life or too much damage, then it has to stop. Again, if warnings and lesser punishments don’t work, then we have little choice. Or again, things escalate.

The International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has filed for bankruptcy. Despite having a monopoly on West Coast shipping they have used to earn what Alex Tabarrok links to as an average of $200k in salary and $100k in benefits, it seems they tried to coerce a port operator into bullying the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers into transferring two of their jobs to the dockworkers union, the port operator didn’t do it, the union shut down the entire port, and the port operator sued and got $19 million. All over a dispute over who would have union jurisdiction over two jobs. And they still signed a new contract that includes an agreement not to automate the ports for six years.

I do not much begrudge the workers their pay or their jobs. Highly affordable. It is the lost capacity that matters. Failing to automate our ports is an ongoing catastrophe for America. And mkt42 claims things are so bad from various slowdowns that Portland is effectively no longer a port. There’s so much profit to be made, you would think a deal could be struck to divide it.

Ouch: Washington DC only tests 7% of DNA samples from crime scenes and the labs involved have to apply for re-accreditation?

Washington D.C. gives residents tracking tags for their soon-to-be stolen vehicles?

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser: Today, we announced a pilot program to provide DC residents with free digital tracking tags for their vehicles. We’ll continue to use all the tools we have, and add new tools, to keep our city safe.

It is odd that someone could say ‘if you would shoot someone who tried to steal your dog, then you value your dog’s life more than a human’s life.’ It is important to note the general case of this fallacy – if you are unwilling to inflict more harm, or endure a higher cost, in response to hostile action, then yeah, it being ‘your’ anything is pretty much a suggestion. Consider that this generalizes kind of a lot.

One of SBF’s lawyers says he may be the worst witness he’s ever seen. That part is unsurprising. The strange part is the lawyer actually thinks Sam is innocent, that he never formed the requisite intent. But he couldn’t convince Sam to use that defense.

Trump promises to pay off the entire $35 trillion debt within his second term. Glad we are finally going to take care of that. What do you mean, completely impossible?

George Mack on how to spot high agency people.

1. Weird teenage hobbies.

2. Leaves you energized.

3. You’d call them to get you out of a foreign prison.

4. Can never guess their opinions.

5. Immigrant mentality.

6. Send you niche content.

7. Mean to your face but nice behind your back.

Paul Graham approves, asks to what extent it could be used as a recipe.

A thread of handy graphics to have on hand for explanations. I have a Google Doc that I save such things to when I remember to do so, for easy reference later.

How did people become more hard working? The top answer was, essentially, to stop listening to advice that does not work for you. Ask what actually works on your brain, not what would work for others. In this case, avoid anything suggesting work is aversive or requires incentives, and be as comfortable as possible. He realized for him taking breaks was actively harmful. In your case, perhaps something very different. Work from home gives the opportunity to try very different setups.

David Friedberg announces CEO role at Ohalo, a company dedicated to reimagining agriculture via gene editing. One should of course not trust the big hype talk here, but you still love to see it.

CEO of Cruise resigns. Seems appropriate in wake of everything. I worry that the honorable people resign in such spots, and the dishonorable scum don’t.

Meaning is important. Seek where someone has to, and no one else will?

Peter Thiel: Meaning is found in doing things that are important, that otherwise wouldn’t get done. Aim to work on things which without you, wouldn’t / couldn’t get done by anyone else. [Link has 30 second video]

Paul Graham: This is an important point. A lot of the most successful people, not just in startups but in many fields, do what they do because there’s something they want to exist, or some mystery they want solved, and no one else is working on it.

There’s a triple reason this is such a powerful filter. These people are highly motivated because they want the thing themselves, they understand both the problem and (when applicable) the market better than outsiders, and the problem is usually a good match for their abilities.

And the fact that there’s no one else working on the problem means that they’ll have few competitors. Which means they’ll have more time to work on their solution, and whatever they come up with will be all the more valuable for being unique.

There is wisdom here. Is there also a claim that those not doing startups or other ambitious projects lack meaning?

No. Or, at least, there should not be. The thing that you find important, that no one else would do, need not be world changing. It can be an artistic vision. It can be providing for your family or helping out your friends or community. Even if you spend your day as a cog in the machine that does not itself have meaning, what you do with the proceeds can still be your great work.

And while knowing no one else would step up without you certainly helps on this front, I think that ‘someone else would have likely done this instead’ need take the meaning away. Someone else doing it does not mean it would have been done properly, with the necessary care, the way it needs to be done.

Scott Alexander attempts book review of Girard’s I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning.

About 80% of people don’t much care if you recline your airline seat, but 20% care quite a lot.

Not quite the graphs I would have expected (source)? As always, do not confuse causation with correlation.

I disagree strongly with many of the claims in this post where Benjamin Hoffman explains why he is no longer anti-Trump. I would describe Hoffman’s stance as continuing to expect Trump to intend great harm, but no longer being able to meaningfully differentiate Trump from the salient alternatives and standard practices in this regard. Reading the post was insightful, even though Hoffman’s reasoning is idiosyncratic in key places, as he is honestly reporting what his stance feels like from the inside. Understanding what such stances feel like and where they come from and what they imply is important. You can and should imagine what the more common version of this sounds and feels like. Then, if you desire to convince, ask what arguments would be potentially convincing. Note that the arguments most frequently made will reliably fall flat or backfire.

Some interesting facts in this thread and paper about academic scientific research, but difficult to find anything actionable.

Proposal to use ‘highest median’ to determine winner on a multi-way ballot, as evidenced by an IRV of 2024 encouraging Democrats to falsify their preferences to get rid of Biden in an early round, to get a better final matchup against Trump. Which is also, of course, centrally what what our current primary system does, a smart primary voter is strategic.

Highest median however has its own problems, potentially far worse ones. The party that unites around its top choice has a huge advantage over those that do not. Irrelevant additional alternatives can be hugely important. There are even some cases where deception and bluffing becomes important, although at the Presidential level such strategies obviously would not work.

I continue to see essentially no actually good solutions, only least bad options.

Why is this true in practice? I think the ‘there is a primary and there is a general election’ or ‘who I want versus who would win’ problem has no good solutions. We think there should be a way to not have voters trade off between candidate electability and candidate preference, that they should instead be able to rank their true preferences and an algorithm gets you the right answer. But as Arrow tells us there is no ‘right answer.’

Thus ranked choice voting, with an early round to cut the field to manageable size, continues to me to seem like the clear least bad option. There are weird cases where it gets an answer we would consider wrong or it rewards strategic behavior, but from what I can tell every alternative is far worse. RCV can be tricky to resolve in practice, although I have no idea why, in the age of computers, this need take non-trivial time. It still maintains a clear legitimacy, in a way that further complexity would threaten.

Movies in Bold are recommended. Movies in Italics are anti-recommended. Movies in neither are in the middle.

Another echo of the standard ‘superhero movies and adaptations and streaming killed Hollywood and now movies suck’ argument went around recently. I am not as high as Tyler Cowen on 2023’s movies, and do not see as many as I would like, but it was clearly a good year for the movies and I generally think things are fine.

We have more lousy stuff than before, and our sorting mechanisms are moving towards streaming service algorithms and away from critics and other measures of value, so it is easy to end up watching worse movies. Where you would previously rent what you wanted, now you watch whatever is prominent on Netflix and company. But if you wanted to watch the best, you could.

I need to improve my algorithm for seeing movies. I saw 16 in total that were released this year, which should have been more like 30-50, and several of my selections were clear mistakes at the time. Tyler’s list of favorites contains many movies (at least 4) I clearly should have made time to see, yet that I have not yet seen.

It also has two movies I thought were actively bad and that made my life worse, although neither inclusion on the list shocks me. The Creator is truly atrocious and anvilicious anti-human reversed-morality Vietnam War parallel of which the less said the better.

The other, Dream Scenario, is a more complicated case. Actors including Nicolas Cage are excellent throughout. It is clearly original and trying to explore ideas. But it was deeply unpleasant and sad to watch, and I felt it did not deliver on its premise. Ultimately I do not have anything to take away from it, and instead of a refreshing break I came out sadder. I can sort of see what it was trying to say? But also no?

I affirm: Across the Spiderverse (Clear #1), John Wick 4 and Bottoms are excellent.

Interestingly missing from Tyler’s list are both Oppenheimer and Barbie, and also Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning despite its impact on Biden making it potentially the best movie of all time (and even without that, it was fun).

Here is everything else I ended up seeing that I can recall:

1. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumaina was not as bad as people said but aside from Jonathan Majors it was pretty bad and I haven’t seen a Marvel movie since.

2. The Super Mario Bros. Movie’s 46 on Metacritic isn’t objectively wrong, exactly, but the movie does its job, my kids love it and I’m glad I saw it once.

3. No Hard Feelings exactly meets your expectations.

4. Cocaine Bear lives its best life. As Tyler said about Napoleon, it isn’t exactly a ‘good’ movie, but I was never bored or tempted to walk out.

5. Ghosted was a great example of how laziness gets us to watch movies we know are not worth watching, it’s lousy, but not a 34-level bomb. Too bad.

6. Heart of Stone was not only disappointing as an action movie, it did not even pass my only real plot goal of ‘not being about AI.’ Whoops.

7. Hypnotic was neither good nor fun and I really should have known better.

8. Dumb Money was not good exactly but it was fun as hell.

Public perception of inflation more reflects past inflation rather than present and expected future inflation (source).

The other problem is that most Americans continue to say prices are increasing a lot, likely because they are measuring over a longer time scale than economists would like.

Presumably that means that people will feel ‘inflation is high’ until a substantial period where inflation is low in the lived experience of people, not only low on charts.

Meanwhile, people do not think their personal household income is doing so well.

This is noteworthy because mostly people say ‘the economy sucks but my family is doing all right.’ Here people think their family is making no progress.

Inflation really sucks for people, and people hate it even more than it sucks.

Also, real earnings might be back on trend, but they are still down since Biden took office, and between mortgage rates and other fluctuations they do not feel back on track.

How are both these numbers so low?

Michael Yeh: “One toxic employee wipes out the gains for more than two superstars. In fact, a superstar, defined as the top 1% of workers in terms of productivity, adds about $5,000 per year to the company’s profit, while a toxic worker costs about $12,000 per year.”

The recommendation to check for civility is fine, that does seem important, but a top 1% worker is only $5k better when the average salary is $60k plus benefits? They are less than 10% better than average? You would rather have 11 average workers than 10 top 1% workers? No way in hell. I realize not everything is programming where the top employee is going to be 10x or 100x, but this seems so absurd.

Certainly my experiences as an employer scream this is all quite nuts. A superstar top-1% employee, even in a seemingly low-leverage job, is a big deal. A truly toxic worker is also a big deal. Your talent is worth so much more than this.

Tyler Cowen argues that even the pre-tax income share of the top 1% has only risen 2.6% since the 1960s, and after-tax there has been essentially no change.

Tyler Cowen: Auten and Splinter have a methodological explanation for why their results differ. The share of true income missing in tax data has increased over time, and they attempt to adjust for that discrepancy, as well as for how income is sheltered in corporations has changed. Auten and Splinter also include cash and in-kind transfers for the lower income groups, to better measure their true incomes.

Splinter has explored this theme of underreported income in detail in previous work, directly comparing his results to those of Piketty, Saez and Zucman. It appears that Auten and Splinter really do have more complete numbers.

It seems everyone involved in such debates is highly motivated. They all want it to be one way, or the want it to be the other way. This is because such statistics are being used by one side to justify interventions and vibes, so the other side feels compelled to fight back, even though ultimately they do not care. My guess from what evidence I have seen is that Cowen, Auten and Splinter are mostly right here on the facts, that the measures showing rising inequality are mostly a function of failing to properly account for various taxes and transfers.

I would also add that such unequal shares matter less as we get richer, or at least that they should. If you have enough, that is what matters, not whether someone else has more. A lot more people have more than they used to. The real problem is why this is not translating into people’s felt and lived experience, and affordances to have children.

The Bond Villain compliance strategy. About Binance by Patrick McKenzie.

Things on the AI front have been rather hectic. That does not mean other things stopped happening. Quite the opposite. So here we are again.

PSA: Crumbl Cookies, while delicious, have rather a lot of calories, 720 in the basic cookie. Yes, they display this as 180, by deciding serving size is a quarter of a cookie. This display strategy is pretty outrageous and should not be legal, we need to do something about unrealistic serving sizes – at minimum, require that the serving size be displayed in same size font as the calorie count.

It really is weird that we don’t think about Russia, and especially the USSR, more in terms of the universal alcoholism.

Reminder that there really is an architecture conspiracy to make life worse. Peter Eisnman straight out says: “Anxiety and alienation is the modern condition. The point of architecture is to constantly remind you of it. I feel anxious. I want buildings to make you anxious!” There is also, in response to being asked if perhaps it would be better for there to be less anxiety not more: “And so the role of art or architecture might be just to remind people that everything wasn’t all right. And I’m not convinced, by the way, that it is all right.”

My wife is exploring anime recently. It has its charms, but the rate of ‘this thing multiple friends recommended is actually pretty boring’ is remarkably high. New generations have other concerns.

Avary: growing up is realizing a lot of the anime you watched and loved as a kid is actually problematic af so you’re stuck between exposing yourself with defending it or hating on it with everyone else…

Tom Kitten: Zoomers basically exist in a technological panopticon of continual anxiety about conforming to the latest updates in moral standards & moral panics, but they’re told the alternative is Nazism so many just try to adopt a “haha isn’t it weird” attitude about it.

Can I suggest a third way? You don’t have to say anything. If you love an anime and others are calling it problematic, you don’t have to defend it and you don’t have to condemn it. You can enjoy your anime in peace. I get that there’s a lot more of the ‘silence is violence’ and compelled speech thing going on, but I will need a lot more evidence of real consequences of silence before I stop pushing it as a strategy in such spots.

‘As a bioethicist, I support requiring students to take ethics.’ Ethics professors continue to show why they are no more ethical than the general population. We badly need ethics, but almost nothing labeled with the term ‘ethics’ contains ethics. Recent events have made this far clearer.

Republicans continue to prioritize not letting the IRS build a free digital tax filing system. I have other priorities, but important to note pure unadulterated evil. Even an ethicists get this one right.

Tipping indeed completely out of control, potential AI edition?

Flo Crivello: TK tried to warn us but you wouldn’t listen.

Molson: I was just asked to tip a hotel booking website.

Lighthaven, a campus in Berkeley, California, is now available for bookings for team retreats, conferences, parties and lodgings. Parties are $25-$75 per person, other uses are $100-$250 per day per person. I have been to two events here, and the space worked exceptionally well as a highly human-friendly, relaxing and beautiful place, with solid catering, good snacks and other resources, and lots of breakout areas. Future events being held here definitely raises my chance of attending, versus other locations in The Bay.

All is once again right with the world, Patrick McKenzie now gets his insurance from Warren Buffet. Because of course he does. Fun thread.

Magnolia Bakery to make weed edibles, but for now only for dispensaries in other states: Illinois, Nevada and Massachusetts.

iCarly revival is cancelled on a cliffhanger, and we will never find out about her mom. Seems somehow highly appropriate? Not that I’ve ever watched. Some cliffhangers are good endings.

Vitalik Buterin reports success in the creation of Zuzalu, a two-month-long intentional community of 200 people formed out of a resort during its off season. Give people a gorgeous and affordable setting, with likeminded people excited by a core group of projects, with people who want to be there and have no other commitments, and it can go great. I encourage more such experiments to happen with more ambition, but no I do not see this as heralding a Network State or other such nonsense.

You don’t have to worry about trying not to offend philosopher Agnes Callard. Oh, you’ll offend her, but not in the usual ways, so there is no avoiding it, and she doesn’t mind. So don’t worry about it. Also, I am guessing that she would get offended by you holding back to try and not offend her, rather than speaking or seeking truth.

Electric car growth is not slowing.

The tragedy is our continued focus on the symbolically superior pure electrics over the what could instead be a much larger number of hybrid vehicles.

It’s true, figuring out how to fund good science is complicated. Choose your fighter.

Stuart Buck: It is a testament to how little we know about metascience that two of the most prominent suggestions are:

1) Fund the person without regard for what the project is;

2) Fund the project without regard for who the person is (that is, anonymize grant applications).

Daniel Eth: Also we see both:

• complaints that scientists perform the actual work before applying for the grant and then use the grant money for their next project

• suggestions that we move from grants to prizes

I agree that we would get better results funding the person and letting them choose the project. I have zero faith in our process to choose valuable projects, instead predicting that the process will choose reliable projects over valuable ones. I also don’t love our ability to choose the best scientists, but I think we are capable of making at least some good decisions there, and if we offer those scientists freedom then many of them would choose valuable projects.

A hybrid approach might be good as well. If you make your mark we let you do what you want, if you don’t then you need to make a great proposal, but you can’t use your reputation for that at all and there are not many slots available, so it needs to be ambitious and awesome, you can’t play it safe. Or at least, that would be the idea.

Wait, non-creative types don’t use every moment as an opportunity to learn and train and figure things out (includes 2 minute clip)? Not all work looks like work, and it is not only the comedian that is (as Seinfeld explains elsewhere) mining actual everything that happens to them for material.

It is the torture that many of the rest of us embrace as well. Why wouldn’t I scan a new restaurant menu for font designs or think about the sound acoustics, isn’t that cool? That does not mean one cannot relax. Relaxing is imperative. But when people’s relaxing involves getting zero useful training data, it confuses me. I love me a relaxing bath, but I’m usually going to be listening to a podcast.

For the true value of working, most of you are slacking off, big time.

I cannot condone anything Meta does but yes, this is a good point:

Arc: I want the Zuck smart camera glasses to succeed mainly because the aesthetic of a bunch of people holding their phones up at events, especially concerts, is horrible, just looks like no one is there for the thing itself (though they may be, they’re distracted!)

Meta also seems to have had people who wanted to take various steps to protect mental health and make their products less addictive, including disabling some filters, and Mark Zuckerberg ultimately said no, citing lack of causal data on the harm, whereas the demand was clear as day. Reports involve noting things like the products providing dopamine hits and satisfying novelty seeking.

This all sounds quite bad, with talk of ‘worse than tobacco.’ But let us remember, also, the story of the man who read smoking was bad for him. So he quit reading.

I fear that if we punish Meta for having reports on harm and considering harm reduction interventions, the main effect will be that they and others censor and render illegible all discussions of harm and harm reduction.

Meta has much to answer for, but let us beware of hitting them on their internal processes until we know what incentives that would create.

Government actually working! IRS makes 83(b) election electronic signatures permanently valid, hopefully avoiding future time bombs exploding on founders when their stock vests. Still insane that the law works this way, but in practice should claim a lot fewer victims.

Even better, IRS launches free online tax filing service for 2024 season. For the pilot program, you need to be in one of 13 states (Arizona, California, Massachusetts, New York or the ones without a state income tax, so either obnoxious-tax city or no-tax city) and have a relatively simple tax return. Let’s fing go.

No10 is listening to my conversations, and I am here for it.

BBC: Smoking age in England should rise by one year, every year, so that eventually no-one can buy them, Rishi Sunak says.

The idea was put forward by a government-commissioned review in 2022.

Makes sense to me. If you are already addicted, and you can’t buy legally, you’ll have to buy illegally. Whereas if you choose to start knowing you will never be able to legally buy, that is a choice. Alternatively, we keep cigarettes legal, and the barrier to sell anything else is you show it is safer and less addictive than a cigarette.

Imagine this as well.

Joe Biden: Today, I’m proud to announce that we are taking our most comprehensive action ever to eliminate junk fees.

The Federal Trade Commission is proposing a new rule that would ban hidden fees across the economy and require companies to show consumers the all-in pricing upfront. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is also banning banks and credit unions from charging fees for basic services like checking your account balance.

These actions are going to save Americans tens of billions of dollars.

Danielle Fong: Do this for medicine and the consumer surplus will be in the trillions.

In a world where consumers increasingly see product offerings sorted by headline price, and with related human biases and adjustments of expectations, there is continuous pressure to utilize hidden ‘junk’ fees. Everyone is better off if all the prices are displayed in full up front.

As Danielle notes, the real value is in places like medicine. The junk fees there are even more outrageous, the true prices more hidden and out of our control.

How much should we worry that business will pass on costs to consumers in other ways here? That depends on execution details but my prior is not much. Yes, most of the costs get passed on in the base price, but that is the point. That is good. A lot of the surplus here is reduced cognitive load on the customer, a lot is in better customer choices. We are not actually trying to lower effective prices as such, although I expect a little of that on net.

Give SSI beneficiaries $3,200 stimulus checks, notice they have a bank balance over $2,000, attempt to claw back years of benefits that this balance proves they shouldn’t have gotten, stop the checks while the victims appeal? Yep.

FAA offers us new MOSAIC rulemaking for light-sport aircraft. Eli Dourado reports that the new rules are actually pretty great, giving much greater experimental flexibility on numerous fronts and plausibly hitting the safety sweet spot. You’ll get more passenger seats, higher speeds, more takeoff weight and more.

Eli says this could be transformative, allowing us to to maybe even get our flying cars some day.

Buy American rules are far worse than they look. Not only do you need to source everything from American suppliers (who are in turn sourcing from American suppliers and so on) but also everyone involved needs complex chain of custody systems in order to prove the Americanness of all the objects involved. Often entire projects incur massive delays. If one is determined to shoot oneself in the foot, one can do a lot less damage by using a mix of tariffs and subsidies.

The saga of SpaceX continues.

DabIsBad: >FWS was worried about a rocket hitting a shark No way. Absolutely zero fucking way. Are you kidding me?

>FWS was worried about the infinitesimally low chance of the rocket hitting a shark

>FWS asks SpaceX to calculate the risk of a shark hitting it

>SpaceX asks for data to calculate this

>FWS refuses to give data because it might somehow spread to shark fin hunters

>SpaceX asks if they could get another department of the FWS to do the calculation since they have the data

>FWS says they don’t trust the other department of the FWS

>Took them a bunch of time to resolve this shit

>Another agency asked about chance of rocket hitting a whale

This we have a tight lid on. Training AI models that could kill everyone, not so much. Can we please concentrate our anti-regulatory fire where it is so richly deserved?

Ro Khanna (team blue) says to Matt Gaetz (officially team red, mostly team schmuck), let’s have the house vote on the things like term limits and bans on member stock trading that the public 80% supports but that members for obvious reasons do not want, speculates that an actual vote might shame some into voting for it. Certainly it creates a prisoner’s (legistlato’s?) dilemma, where no one wants to vote against but also no one wants it to pass. Except most of the American people, but who cares about them? Forget it Matt, this is Congress.

Even better would be to go back to letting individual members introduce bills and then the House votes on them. We have computers, this need not disrupt regular business, perhaps if something passes that way you then do a traditional vote for real.

Scott Sumner’s film ratings for Q3. He is always exactly correct in his ratings, on the dimensions he is evaluating. If you want to see the highest Quality films, the objectively best films, he is here to tell you what they are.

Yes, Barbie is a 3.3 on his scale, and MI: Dead Reckoning is a 3.0 (out of 4) – I’d have said 2.8 or 2.9 for MI before learning it impacted Biden, and 3.4 or 3.5 for Barbie, but then I remember Scott is never wrong.

However, as always, one must remember that the dimension Scott is measuring is merely one dimension, which is also composed of its own subdivisions. There are many other dimensions to measure as well, that mostly are of no concern to Scott, but which I care about quite a bit. Is this something I actually want to watch, and would enjoy? Which is highly correlated with Scott’s ratings… once you control for certain factors. And which much more favors relatively recent films.

It is on my project list to do my own film rankings some day. They would look very different. Also at some point when things are quieter, to watch at least all of Scott’s 4.0s and 3.9s.

Note that this search cleanly brings up all his reviews.

I also completely endorse Scott’s horror at the ‘4DX’ theater, and would continue to happily pay a lot to never be in one again.

Dumb Money review: Kind of dumb. Also money. Would invest again. If Scott Sumner saw it he would probably give it at most a 2.5, but again, not why I saw it. Enjoy life.

Saw old movie The Adjustment Bureau, which was okay. Most unrealistic thing was that New York Senate elections were treated as competitive. Was enough about AI to not stand up to scrutiny in any way. Predicted Scott review that would be fair in its own way: Uninventive, seen it all before, philosophically incoherent, 2.2.

Wanted a short-ass dumb action movie one night and watched Avarice on Paramount+, which has no plot, no characters, no acting, no action and no movie. The gimmick is ‘she is an archer and has a bow’ I guess but if you replace it with ‘she carries a gun’ actual nothing changes. Actual 0.0.

Mostly I need to find time to watch more movies, and to always check reviews first and choose my targets more deliberately.

Warner Brothers attempts to bury a third movie, Coyote vs. Acme, as a tax write-off, despite a great concept, a finished product and good audience testing. This was not a ‘this is so bad we must pretend this never happened’ situation, whereas they said Batgirl was unreleasable and my imagination can suffice for a project entitled Scoob! Holiday Haunt. After creatives cancelled a lot of meetings with Warner Brothers, understandably concerned this might happen to their projects as well, WB agreed to let Coyote vs. Acme be shopped around instead. It sounds like fun.

Twitter’s algorithm is severely punishing external links, and on top of that they’ve stopped displaying the headline text of the links. As Nate Silver points out, this might sound like a good short term idea, but it’s a terrible long term plan, and no this is not a purely Elon Musk style of mistake.

Philippe Lemoine: It’s clear at this point that Twitter’s algorithm is now severely penalizing external links, which as Nate explains kind of makes sense in a short-sighted way from their point of view, but as a pretty niche writer relying on Twitter to disseminate his work it massively sucks.

Nate Silver: Yeah and I do think it’s short-sighted. It’s basically replicating the mistakes of Facebook’s News Feed. I’ve always liked Twitter >> Facebook because it isn’t a walled garden and contains my well-curated list of links/sources. (Or even For You, which actually works OK for me.)

It’s sort of a Tyranny of Algorithms thing because it’s easy to know what maxes out time on site in the short term (i.e. forcing you to stay there) but very hard to know in the long term.

Daniel Eth predicted sites will start putting the headline into the graphic. Paul Graham predicts it will be obnoxious.

Meanwhile Simon Willison offers a practical solution to auto-generate social media display cards.

Paul Graham: If Twitter doesn’t revert to the old way of displaying links, sites will start putting text onto the images. And they won’t just put a little text at the bottom, the way it used to be. Your feed will resemble a series of billboards.

The sites will optimize for clicks, so whatever is the most linkbaitish way to put text on images, that’s what we’ll get.

Up until now, I have found Twitter has retained most of its prior usefulness, so long as you use a chronological feed and lists.

I have found the lack of titles on links only mildly annoying. The severe punishment of links does not directly impact my feed. But together they mean less people are posting links, which has been a non-trivial downgrade.

An illustration: Referrals from Facebook and Twitter to top news sites have cratered.

Odd choice to not have the y-axis start at zero here, this decline is dramatic.

Axios blames this on lack of positive selection, that tech companies no longer try to ‘elevate quality information.’ There is doubtless some of that, there is also the factor that these news organizations keep trying to forcibly extract payments, and that links to outside are being intentionally throttled across the board, partly to avoid those payments, partly to keep social media users from leaving the website.

I would support a rule saying that major social media sites cannot throddle posts with outside links, but if they are also going to try and extract payment, not so much.

Also every ‘major news’ site is now behind a paywall. I can read links to the two were I have subscriptions, not to the others. Without a unified subscription option, most people will be unable to follow most links. If I can’t easily share WSJ or NYT links, the value of a subscription goes down a lot, which feeds the cycle. Even I chose one mainstream source to stay grounded on that (WaPo). I also find Bloomberg valuable enough to pay for. Most people don’t even go that far.

Tyler Cowen claims that it is good Elon Musk bought Twitter. Here is his reasoning:

I have disagreed with most of his design decisions, do not like the name change or rebrand, and I have been disappointed by many of his tweets and points of view, often disagreeing vehemently. That said, allowing the videos to be seen on Twitter is the right decision, and it is a very, very important decision.

So I end up glad that he bought Twitter. I also very much like the general feed and also the “Community Notes” features.

I am not sure how widely acknowledged this will be, but someone should say it, and I am happy to be the one. In general, more attention needs to be paid to “getting one big thing right.”

I strongly agree with the underlying principle of ‘getting one big thing right.’ Often this will indeed prove more important than ten or a hundred little things you get wrong, and the reverse would have been true as well.

The question is, what is the particular big thing one must get right? That is itself the big thing one must get right. I do not see the videos as so important one way or another. Freedom of speech in general is a plausible candidate for the big thing, and the past month has reminded us of its importance. Community notes is very good, it could perhaps be the big thing. Or they could together be the next big thing, with notes allowing much more free speech.

An example of a big thing one could get wrong, that might be going wrong, is to give too many interactive advantages to paid users, especially across multiple tiers. Asking for $8 a month is one thing, but I would be very careful with the new additional tiers.

On the bright side Bloomberg’s Aisha Counts says Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino is claiming Twitter is cash flow positive excluding debt service and expects to be cash flow positive including debt service by 2024.

Nate Silver makes the case that a run by RFK Jr would more likely favor Biden than Trump. This seems right to me, with wide uncertainty bars. Kennedy does not hold positions compatible with the Democrats, and Libertarian runs typically hurt Republicans for obvious reasons.

Free speech is super important. I highly value free speech, and deeply thankful for the first amendment every time I see what happens in countries without one.

Presumably in response to some people not taking kindly to Paul Graham saying things one can totally say, he responded by posting this image, note the date on the older conversation:

Allow me to demonstrate what level we are on by saying this and noticing I do not expect any negative consequences whatsoever for saying it, because come on:

Zvi Mowshowitz hereby says: There are things in our society which are true that you cannot say.

Thus, by this scale, we are at Level 1. Which, by the definition of the scale, is the minimum level that has ever existed in any society, so it is not some huge indictment or big whoop. I do agree that the set of such things is larger now than it was in 2003, but less than in 2020, and again, I feel completely comfortable saying that, and would even if I lacked any power.

I would also not confuse level 1 here with the actual situation, which is that when there is an issue where lots of people are accusing each other of supporting genocide, saying pretty much anything is going to get one side, the other or both mad at you to some extent, that does not mean we can’t say things.

Also, my lord, reversed stupidity is not intelligence, the scale is not the territory, etc:

Rina Artstain: You’re at level -1, where you’re distorting “the truth” to look cool for level 4ers.

Paul Graham: Since higher = worse, level -1, whatever it was, would be good.

The ideal censorship level is zero, the same way the ideal Simulacra level is 1.

(Since everything is also about AI now, note the danger of an AI concluding things like ‘whatever seems like it would metaphorically be the -1 level must be good.’)

If you are surprised that new findings say the Eaterlin Paradox was bogus and money does indeed increase happiness indefinitely on a log scale, I am curious why.

Yes, obviously. No need to read the paper, yet an important paper to ensure exists.

Working Paper: We find that consumer surplus is the primary component of social impact (dwarfing profits, worker surplus, and externalities), suggesting that consumer impacts deserve more attention from impact investors. Existing ESG and social impact ratings are essentially unrelated to our economically grounded measures.

Increasing the minimum wage 10% increases low-end local rents 2.5%-4.5%.

Patrick McKenzie talked anti money laundering law back in February 2023, recommended for those interested if you haven’t seen it.

His new related piece, also recommended, is Seeing Like a Bank. The core idea is that banks could in theory solve your problems using bespoke professionals who can track information and understand the underling dynamics and use reason, but those people cost a hundred times as much the way doctors and lawyers do, and most bank issues very much do not require or justify such action and involve That Guy calling in time and again, so instead you get a three-tier calling system gating everything. But, if you know the right shibboleths, you can get the professional involved on your behalf and make things actually work. Banks also could in theory have software that worked well and kept good track of everything, but mostly they don’t and it will be a while before they do.

Historians do not know their economics, and thus do not know their history. Economists say the Great Depression was a story of aggregate demand contraction, monetary contraction, protectionism and failed Federal Reserve policy. History textbooks talk about income inequality, under-consumption and a stock market crash. Of course, the economists are also making big mistakes here, especially their failure to emphasize the gold standard and various contractionary policies implemented throughout, as always I recommend Scott Sumner’s The Midas Paradox.

No, it’s not free under $5, but if you want justifications for spending money you don’t have, ‘girl math’ and ‘boy math’ are now here for you. Why rationalize away your money all by yourself when you can have professionals help you do it, for free? Given your hourly, that means you’re making money. Which you can now spend. That’s math.

With a little software work, Mercury has routed around the requirement that every payment to a new person effectively requires a new W-9, because all the info in the W-9 is already known.

Paper claims the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 substantially increased corporate investment, those with mean tax change increased domestic investment 20%, with equilibrium long-run effect of 6% greater domestic capital and 9% greater total capital, while net tax revenue declines less than 2% of baseline corporate revenue due to feedback effects. As Tyler Cowen notes, this will not settle the matter, very few will be convinced. In my model, those who want higher corporate taxes would not change their position even if they were indeed convinced, they care about some mix of fairness and equality and perception of fairness and equality, so efficiency and positive-sum arguments will land on deaf ears.

Is it this simple?

Alec Stapp: The massive divergence between consumer sentiment and economic reality is mind-boggling.

Joe Weisenthal asks: Inflation has been coming down, and the unemployment rate is low. Yet measures of consumer sentiment are still in the tank. Curious if anyone has any thoughts or theories? Would love to hear some takes.

Joe Light: A lot of the things I buy, outside of food and transit, are things I haven’t had to shop for in years, and each time I run into them, it’s like the inflation happened right at that moment

Matt Stroller: The CPI doesn’t include interest charges, aka cars and houses.

Tren Griffin: That people will focus on the *rate of changein core inflation rather than how much they pay for real world goods and services now, is a triumph of hope over experience. What did I pay for potatoes or laundry soap five years ago? How much higher is my grocery payment now?

Threadass: My rent went up 50% in one year, my utilities are about 30% more expensive, groceries and household goods are expensive, and avg interest rates on mortgages have doubled. I know many friends and (now former) colleagues who have been laid off in the past 6 months or so.

George (other thread): The economy can be summed up by an experience I had at a recent family reunion. Everyone was complaining about how shit the economy was and how expensive everything was

I pointed out that for the first time ever, every adult present had a good paying job they liked. Three people present had just been bragging about doubling their salaries. 2 people had just gotten back from their first ever Europe trips.

The raises and the jobs were things they felt they had earned. The prices going up were the government’s fault.

Kind of yeah. Things are no longer rapidly getting more expensive. Things are still much more expensive than they used to be, and interest rates rising means rent, mortgages and car payments are way up. It’s kind of a big deal. And for whatever reason, the government is responsible for the price level, and isn’t responsible for your raise or new job.

The results of the UAW strike illustrate the real effective rise in wages and the cost of living, with the minimum raise being 25%. Yes, there was some catchup there, but also they quote someone jumping from $20/hour to $35/hour. In my experience hiring people, I have also had to pay a lot more than I did a few years ago, far more than the official inflation rate.

Relatedly, Tyler Cowen notes income stability in America has been rising for decades. Yet workers do not seem less nervous. I posit this is partly because workers are more risk averse, partly both are caused by us otherwise giving people less margin for error, giving people less affordance to survive being down on your luck and still keep your life on track. Having a volatile income is not that scary if you think you will still get a family in the end. I do agree with Tyler that if you are not too risk averse, there are great rewards at start-ups and for other forms of risk taking here.

I also would presume that people notice the specter of future changes from AI.

Danielle Fong: ambient grift fields surround pools of persuadable capital (crypto, nonprofits, esg) and to first order, work to kick out alternative legitimate investments for that capital in time this parasitic behavior starves the host; not always killing it, but limiting growth, liveness.

Andrew Rettek: Yep. At equilibrium, this grift brings those pools of capital down to the average rate of return. Some things die there or die getting there.

Danielle Fong: having witnessed this happen three times, the decay time constant varies with the smart money (eg ~1 week for lottery winners, ~months to years for crypto wealth, ~1 decade for top tier big tech, generational for legendary investors)

Andrew Rettek: This is the EMH at work, and it will win eventually. It can only be slowed by some other force at least as strong. Agency is best.

Danielle Fong: everything I have ever witnessed, you always have major nonequilibrium. it’s practically never that case that every company or technology that could exist, should — especially because the frontier of the possible, important, or labor/resource competitive is always changing.

At equilibrium I would say that such effects do not merely bring pools of capital down to the average rate of return. It goes far lower than that, the equilibrium is that a vulnerable pool of money will be entirely extracted. Something about a fool and his money.

Banks increasingly give people the option to pay to access money from a check right away. Patrick McKenzie notes that notes that banks used to instead turn to their risk department, and also that you could ask for a waiver and someone in the bank was authorized to credit your account today.

Letting people pay to get the money now seems an odd combination of price discrimination against the poor that does not seem great, and adverse selection against the bank that seems far worse. The whole point of placing a hold on the money is to guard against cases where the check is fishy and the customer does not have the money when the check bounces. When do you think people will pay to cash it now? When they suspect the check will not clear and they intend to use the money right away. The market for this service does not seem like it should clear?

529 savings plans are technically owned by the account owner, not the beneficiary, because otherwise colleges would impose an effective tax rate of 95% by reducing aid awarded. Kids should essentially never save for college with their own money for the same reason, unless the plan is to actually pay the whole thing, because you will not make college any cheaper. It still boggles my mind that we allow colleges to demand to know your assets and then perform ~100% asset confiscation.

Thread by Chris Conlon on the FTC’s case against Amazon. The core case is that Amazon causes prices to be too high, which is perhaps the most absurd allegation I have heard in a long time. Conlon says the FTC does perhaps have a case on the part where charging a lower price elsewhere leads to a demotion in Amazon’s rankings, although as he notes what would be the remedy there? Also how exactly is the consumer harmed by that?

Ben Thompson covers the FTC complaint, says this is the key paragraph.

This case is about the illegal course of exclusionary conduct Amazon deploys to block competition, stunt rivals’ growth, and cement its dominance. The elements of this strategy are mutually reinforcing. Amazon uses a set of anti-discounting tactics to prevent rivals from growing by offering lower prices, and it uses coercive tactics involving its order fulfillment service to prevent rivals from gaining the scale they need to meaningfully compete. Amazon deploys this interconnected strategy to block off every major avenue of competition — including price, product selection, quality, and innovation — in the relevant markets for online superstores and online marketplace services.

Amazon’s coercive tactics to thwart competition lie within the Amazon website. You are totally free to offer products elsewhere. Amazon’s ‘anti-discounting’ is, as noted below, that they will price match. The rest of the complaint is found to be even less compelling, and the FTC framing every ordinary business offering such as Amazon Prime, bundling or (gasp) store-branded goods as inherently suspicious does it no favors.

Thread on the details of that FTC complaint against Amazon. What are the actual objections?

Douglas Farrar: Amazon pursues a pay-to-play scheme forcing sellers to buy ads. Worse, many of these ads are junk ads that aren’t relevant to what users search for. Jeff Bezos and co. call these Junk Ads “defects,” and sellers pay big bucks for them.

These ads do two things. First, they make the customer experience much worse, which is why you might search for “water bottles” and end up with offers to buy “buck urine”

They know this harms consumers, but they don’t care because maximizing advertising profit at all costs “has effectively become ‘law’ even if it has many flaws” according to a senior Amazon executive

The second thing all of Amazon’s ads do is raise prices for consumers. Sellers are forking over big money in a pay-to-play scheme. That cost goes directly to you according to Amazon’ own executives.

Forcing ad buys seems worse than a straightforward fee. Amazon gets the revenue either way, and it ‘pays for’ the ad buys by having the customer experience get worse. As described, this is a perverse process that Amazon has every reason to fix. Corporations make these kinds of errors all the time, no idea why it requires an FTC action other than a political hit job. There’s some strange underlying assumption that Amazon shouldn’t have control over or profit from its own website.

Amazon’s own economists even pointed out that by flooding search results with paid ads, Amazon steers shoppers towards higher-priced products and makes comparison shopping harder on the platform.

By the way, you as you can see above Amazon is still trying to keep some of the material in the complaint out of the public eye…

Amazon is really excited about how much money these ads are earning them by the way. In their Q3 report last week they said that revenue from ads grew 25%, which is faster than AWS.

Amazon being excited by this is bad news for Amazon if the ads are like this. Ads you have to buy are a zero sum game at best, again is this about disguising how much it cots to list on Amazon?

Amazon harmed price competition in other ways too. Former Amazon exec Jeff Wilke came up with the idea for an algorithm to avoid a “perfectly competitive market” where Amazon’s rivals lower their prices!

The concept is that Amazon will match any price drops by rivals, but not move to lower prices first. A price match. You’re calling out a price match. Ben Thompson notes that Amazon will also punish the seller (via lower prominence on the website) if they offer a higher price for an identical product at Amazon and a lower one elsewhere. So Amazon is demanding that prices on its website not be too high, at the cost of not featuring the related product if it isn’t listed at a competitive price, and that’s bad because it leads to high prices. Got it.

Those foolish enough to compete with Amazon by lowering prices met the full force of Amazon’s monopoly power. Take Jet dot com, which tried to compete by lowering seller fees.

Amazon also harms competition and extracts monopoly rents from sellers by requiring them to use Fulfilled By Amazon to have Prime eligibility. They once launched a program called Seller Fulfilled Prime which was a huge hit.

Amazon shut SFP down because they said deliveries weren’t on time. But new info today shows sellers using SFP met the delivery requirement set up by Amazon more than 95% of the time.

Yeah, 95% is… not actually that great, especially if the 5% is non-trivially late, and if there is not proper accountability and repair when something goes wrong. Also, your 95% on time is not my 95% on time.

Eric Boehm: Just read the line in the FTC’s own lawsuit, as helpfully screenshotted by Farrar: “Sellers enrolled in SFP met their promised ‘delivery estimate’ requirement set by Amazon more than 95% of the time in 2018.”

…

How many of those sellers were actually meeting the standards for Prime-level shipping? According to Amazon spokesman Tim Doyle, it was about 16 percent.

Were there also other motivations? Amazon’s rule is, as Ben Thompson points out, that if you pay Amazon for guaranteed delivery services, that it provides those services.

This freaked Amazon out. One Amazon exec said splitting Prime eligibility from FBA was an “oh crap” moment. Another one said a growing third-party logistics marketplace “keeps me up at night.”

There is plenty more I didn’t cover. And you can view all the newly unredacted material at the link below, thanks to the heroic work by the FTC attorneys working on this huge case.

None of that matters if Amazon’s shipping standards were rarely met.

The case rests, as Thompson notes, on the accusation that Amazon is a monopoly. Amazon does not seem like a monopoly to me, except that it has a monopoly on selling via Amazon. Which I would hope does not count?

Freddie DeBoer asks how the NBA can survive its current era of player empowerment. If star players keep demanding trades to the same handful of teams in attractive locations – such as Miami, New York and Los Angeles – and their teams feel forced to then do so for what amounts to pennies on the dollar, how do the teams in less fun places ever win?

Rules enforcing parity in pay and limiting hiring of superstars help mitigate the damage somewhat, but they also lock in the result. If we each get to pay the same fixed pool of money, but superstars are the best deals to begin with and can choose to take pay cuts in order to play in places they prefer and with better teams, solve for the equilibrium. Even if everyone plays it straight without loopholes, it only ends one way.

This is compounded by the NBA being highly skill-intensive with best-of-seven series that lack large sources of variance, with results being dominated by the superstars.

I see two plausible ways this goes. Option one is to embrace it, or at least accept it. The Indiana Pacers of the world will be second-division teams that occasionally threaten to break through. Perhaps that is fine. The Lakers and Heat generate more excitement anyway. Like in college football, each team can have its own baselines and goals. People come to the NBA to see star personalities playing exceptional ball, to enjoy that the players are off the hook. So release that hook.

Alternatively, we could go back to a world in which the players largely don’t control their fate or where they play. Except no, we can’t and we won’t. So option one then.

Which I really do think is fine. Then again, the NBA rarely holds my interest.

The MLB strike zone is in theory a function of player height and stance. In practice, with human umpires, any attempt to abuse this for technical loopholes would run afoul of the ‘who are you kidding’ clause, and the umpire would call strikes anyway. With robot umpires, there is no such clause. They are now testing, in the minor leagues, an automatic system that measures from knees to a baseball above the belt. For now, in the minors, that should work, because no one cares about winning and the goal is to make it to The Show, if you game the robot umpire it won’t do you any good. So the system might work fine.

However, if you move that system to The Show, the munchkins will be out in force, and you won’t like the results. Another illustration that the rule that a computer must follow to the letter often needs to be very different from the human rule. This is on top of the fact that umpires widen or narrow the strike zone based on the count to favor whoever is behind on it, and also that they favor the home team a bit and veterans and stars a bit, and sometimes the team trailing, all of which they are very much not supposed to do but very much do anyway.

I would be in favor of actively codifying all those quirky preferences, as long as they are symmetrical. Home teams winning more than half the the is good for the game if played fairly, as are the other adjustments. But the fans would not stand for it.

Remember the principle of Leaders of Men, to focus on what matters most.

Don Van Natta Jr. (ESPN): If you need two timeouts to put 12 men on the field for a FG try that hands your opponent a second chance to beat you, you should be fired.

Such incompetence is indeed a hint that perhaps some firing-worthy things are happening. On the margin it can cost you games. But we need periodic reminders that you pick your coach mostly on whether they can draft or recruit, sculpt, script and motivate a team. The things that fans rightfully yell about as dumb or incompetent? The fans are right, but ask how much they matter.

Zac Hill gives his perspective on what is wrong with Magic: The Gathering’s Standard format. He sees Standard as about board presence and doing powerful individual things players like to do, giving a ‘standard’ play experience. Variety is good, but the ‘good stuff’ midrange style strategies need to remain the heart of the format. When the dominant play patterns depart too much from this, and the best decks you see all the time are all about walls of text and detailed interactions or they fog until they take infinite turns or their curves only go up to three, the heart is gone.

I think there’s something to be said for that, although I do not take it as far as he does. I would instead place a lot more responsibility on the ‘too many words’ problem. Cards now are too complex, are too fiddly and noisy, and there are too many cards released. Players cannot keep up or keep track, driving them into evergreen formats that change more slowly or where universal awareness is not expected. Cards often not ever being in Standard at all compounds this problem.

Having Standard rotations every three years instead of two seems if anything anti-helpful. Yes, your core concept can last longer, but you also need to keep 50% more things in your head at once, and there is less room for new concepts to breathe. As Sam Black notes, a lot of Standard is letting new cards shine. You want it small.

Sam Black goes farther, saying that Standard no longer makes sense. When Magic was designed around Standard, especially when it included mechanically unified blocks, Standard was great. Now that many cards are never in Standard, and the releases offering the best value include many non-Standard-legal cards, what are we even doing? There is no grassroots support for Standard, no reason for there to be any, and tournament support alone won’t cut it.

Sam’s suggestion is to sunset Standard without replacement, as Magic is trying to do too many different things, and Standard is no longer key to the business model. I do not think, long term, that this works. I think Standard is serving several purposes other formats don’t. It lets new cards shine, allows play at a more modest power level, offers a compact set of cards players can hope to fully learn or have access to as a gateway to being competitive. More than that, it is constantly changing.

Commander, Modern, Pioneer and all the rest are mostly static. Sure there are changes, but also there mostly are not. It is cool to visit those worlds on occasion, but Magic requires a place players can innovate, 1-on-1 with 20 life, without being up against years or decades of refinement.

That does not strictly have to be Standard. I have always loved Block Constructed, although to have that you would need to have blocks, and Wizards says people don’t like blocks. So mostly we are talking rotation speed, also known as talking price, and figuring out how to navigate the desire to aggressively power creep with some new releases, to create something sustainable.

I admit I do not know how to do that. I fear that Magic has in important ways peaked, having picked its low-hanging fruit of low-complexity cards and simple concepts, and now picking the fruit of connection with other franchises. That the future is a game built around Commander, which means a whole sort of general mish mash of stuff that people do for fun but that holds little interest for me outside of perhaps occasional limited play or something like Premodern.

Magic: The Gathering unifies its two types of boosters into new play boosters, designed for draft and also sometimes with multiple rares.

Saffron Olive: Big news on booster packs. Both draft boosters *andset boosters are going away with Murders of Karlov Manor in a few months to be replaced by play boosters (which are essentially set boosters, but made to be draftable).

Overall this seems like a good change. Makes thing simpler – having draft, set and collector boosters seems excessive – plus the idea of drafting something akin to set boosters is interesting thanks to multiple rares and wildcard slots.

The biggest drawback is that it will make limited more expensive, at least in paper, since play boosters will sell for set booster prices and there will no longer be a cheaper “draft booster” option.

Seth Burn: Obviously this will mean different things to different players. As someone who buys draft booster boxes specifically to draft, or play team sealed (remember that), this change is absolutely miserable.

Drafts are not cheap. This will make them less cheap. Or perhaps it will make them slightly more cheap? A draft will cost more money, but before draft boosters gave you worse value than set boosters, so if you get full value from the cards you could come out ahead. If all you care about is drafting, not as good.

Magic has gone from three rarities, to four rarities, to having relatively more copies of its higher rarities. Which seems like going around in a circle. The rarer cards will be less bomb-like, which seems good. All of that with some price raises along the way, but one has to keep up with inflation somehow I suppose.

I am still out. I experimented briefly with Wilds of Eldraine limited, but the online experience failed to hold my interest, the logistics of playing in person are not great for me, and the continuous investment cost of keeping up is way too high. So perhaps a draft or two right around release when reading the cards as I go is still fine, some occasional light Premodern, and that’s probably about it.

It is simultaneously amazing the ways people talk about and frame questions about the dangers of self-driving cars, and also amazing that it is all not so much worse.

In this case, I mean, wow.

SAN FRANCISCO — A pedestrian crossing a busy intersection was struck by a regular car Monday night and hurled beneath a Cruise autonomous vehicle where she was trapped for several minutes until firefighters freed her, according to emergency responders and a video of the crash viewed by The Washington Post.

Nothing in the article suggested what the driverless car could have done, even in theory, to be safer, other than not being on the road in the first place.

Except, actually there was something. It seems that after the woman flew under the car, the driverless car dragged her along a bit in a way it shouldn’t have, causing more damage. This is not itself shocking or worrying to me, because ‘another accident flies a person under the car’ is exactly the kind of not-in-the-training-set situation that you’re not going to handle so well the first time.

Except, actually there was a bigger problem, you idiots.

Cruise’s initial tweets the day after the crash didn’t mention its vehicle dragging the woman as it pulled over. Indeed, the DMV says that when it met with Cruise the day after the incident, the company only showed footage from the initial crash, leaving out the part where the victim got dragged under the vehicle as it pulled over.

That got Cruise suspended in California, and then Cruise voluntarily suspended their other operations. Intentionally misleading officials about accidents is rather not okay. This is an existential threat to Cruise. If they actually did what they are accused of doing, they brought it on themselves, and have single-handedly pushed back development of self-driving cars for years.

I say if because California has a history of pulling tricks around this issue. I would not rule out, based on what I know, that Cruise did cooperate and they are twisting this all around somehow. Otherwise, yeah, this is something a company should fry for.

Cruise also has this little other issue.

Dan Elton: On Cruise’s driverless cars: “Those vehicles were supported by a vast operations staff, with 1.5 workers per vehicle. The workers intervened to assist the company’s vehicles every 2.5 to five miles” Huh, is that true? (I don’t believe anything I read in the @NYTimes these days).

Timothy Lee: People (rodney Brooke’s on bluesky and Gary Marcus) are describing the the 2.5 to 5 mile figure as “stunning” but I am not that surprised. You encounter a lot of stuff in 5 miles of driving in San Francisco.

That doesn’t mean cruise cars would have made a mistake once every 5 miles without help. It means that once every 5 miles there was a situation where the car wasn’t 100 percent sure what to do.

I bet in most of those cases it had the right idea with 99 percent confidence. But that’s not good enough when lives are potentially on the line. We shouldn’t fault companies for being careful.

With that said these details should not be secret. Waymo and cruise should tell the public a lot more about what is going behind the scenes.

Dan Elton: Wow. Cruise’s cars are being remotely operated 2-4% of the time? Am I reading this correctly? I feel like we’ve been lied to.

Cruise CEO (on Reddit): Cruise CEO here. Some relevant context follows.

Cruise AVs are being remotely assisted (RA) 2-4% of the time on average, in complex urban environments. This is low enough already that there isn’t a huge cost benefit to optimizing much further, especially given how useful it is to have humans review things in certain situations.

The stat quoted by NYT is how frequently the AVS initiate an RA session. Of those, many are resolved by the AV itself before the human even looks at things, since we often have the AV initiate proactively and before it is certain it will need help. Many sessions are quick confirmation requests (it is ok to proceed?) that are resolved in seconds. There are some that take longer and involve guiding the AV through tricky situations. Again, in aggregate this is 2-4% of time in driverless mode.

In terms of staffing, we are intentionally over staffed given our small fleet size in order to handle localized bursts of RA demand. With a larger fleet we expect to handle bursts with a smaller ratio of RA operators to AVs. Lastly, I believe the staffing numbers quoted by NYT include several other functions involved in operating fleets of AVS beyond remote assistance (people who clean, charge, maintain, etc.) which are also something that improve significantly with scale and over time.

Gary Marcus: How I am feeling, too. Lied to.

This is how it always starts. You have to bootstrap to get data, given how crazy the public is about every little thing that goes wrong. How else would you do it?

Except, why are they still doing this? Why does the CEO think this situation is long term stable? In some sense this is 97% less human driving, but this is very much not 97% of the way there nor does it provide 97% of the value. In the beginning, This Is Fine. Given how long they were on the road? Very much not fine.

Waymo vehicles at a minimum generated fewer insurance claims and generally have a strong safety record. Seems robust, even taking into account that Waymo has no reason to ever file an insurance claim, or to not pay money before letting anyone else write one. What is happening behind the scenes at Waymo? I don’t doubt some amount of support, but I presume they are much farther along in reducing the need.

Mr Beast provided clean water for up to 500,000 Africans. Some people were (checks notes) unhappy about this. He will keep doing such things. Anyone upset about this should notice the skulls on their uniforms. Doing good that earns you back the costs is the most effective of altruisms.

But yes, such people do exist.

Annamarie Forcino: “oh poor me, I’m getting canceled because I’m so nice ” when in reality any criticism comes from the fact that people shouldn’t have to rely on a rich youtuber to get access to clean water.

Sydney Humanism Group: I understand that it can be frustrating to feel misunderstood or unfairly judged. However, it’s important to remember that being nice doesn’t exempt anyone from accountability.

Chris Freiman:

I will take a bold stance that it is good to help people even if those people should not have to rely on you.

I will also note that I am confident this bold stance is very popular.

Effective altruism too is rather popular among those who have heard of it. Which it had better be, if your whole plan is to dedicate everything to helping others as much as possible given fixed resources.

I’d certainly hope that the definition would be popular, to those who don’t know about the movement. And indeed, seems to go pretty well, and better with those who are familiar with the concept?

Stefan Schubert: YouGov finds that most Americans who have heard of effective altruism approve of it. Unclear how much to infer from it, though.

22% say they’re familiar with effective altruism; fairly strongly related to education level.

Next time an EA thinks they need to hide their affiliations, notice that this about as good as approval numbers ever get.

Scott Alexander writes up the experiment with impact markets. Judges found that the projects collectively were not worth what investors paid for them. Of 18 invested projects, 17 had negative ROI until Austin and Scott decided to overpay for two more, leaving 15 with negative returns.

The remaining one project got a 25x return, but that was because it was sold for $300 total, and it was pure community building at the University of Maryland future. Which I am assured is technically a Big 10 school. But for recruitment to be valuable, there needs to be something else effective going on.

Effective Altruism’s major organizations are largely under a single legal umbrella, which is inhibiting risk taking and information sharing quite a bit. This seems quite bad and I do not see sufficient corresponding upside.