Astral Codex Ten

Amazon

50 min read

Amazon

Article

Amazon is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between February 24, 2021 and March 03, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Buy Class on Amazon”; “we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon”; “Amazon’s payment acceptance team advertising a job opening”. It most often appears alongside Google, Twitter, California.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 27
  • Issue count: 27
  • First seen: February 24, 2021
  • Last seen: March 03, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
It’s impossible to tell when Fussell is serious vs. joking. The section on the physiognomy of different classes has to be a joke, right? But then how did he come up with the Virgin vs. Chad meme in 1983? Also, why does my brain keep telling me these are John McCain and Donald Trump? A friend urges me to think of these not as "rich/successful people" vs. "poor/unsuccessful people", but as three different ladders on which one can rise or fall. The most successful proles are lumber barons or pro athletes or reality TV stars. These people are much richer and more powerful than, say, a schoolteacher, but they’re still proles, and the schoolteacher is still middle class. Likewise, a very successful middle class person might become a professor or a Senator or Jeff Bezos, but this doesn't make them even a bit upper class.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FPhF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ff00be1-c3eb-4aaa-b9fd-5f24b57ec0c8_1079x554.png
3. The more convenient something is, the lower class. The more it obviously requires a staff of servants to maintain, the better. So bronze doorknobs are upper-class, because they will quickly get covered with unsightly fingerprints unless polished everyday. Mirrors are upper-class because they need lots of dusting. And folding chairs are lower-class not just because they're a cool modern invention made with technology, but because they imply you have so few rooms in your house that you might need to change one from being chaired to being unchaired in a hurry. Baseball caps - artificial, convenient, homegrown - are apparently the prole-est thing there is. More evidence for a Trump connection? 4. Foreign things are high class, especially British things. Paul Fussell is very insistent on this point; in his "What Class Is Your Living Room?" quiz, he offers you one point for everything you have referencing the United Kingdom. He was apparently employed as a class consultant for someone designing an upper-class neighborhood, and gave everything British names with apparently good results:
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1nSX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F757db94a-1c2a-4df4-a873-eb645d478d41_625x540.png
Baseball caps - artificial, convenient, homegrown - are apparently the prole-est thing there is. More evidence for a Trump connection? 4. Foreign things are high class, especially British things. Paul Fussell is very insistent on this point; in his "What Class Is Your Living Room?" quiz, he offers you one point for everything you have referencing the United Kingdom. He was apparently employed as a class consultant for someone designing an upper-class neighborhood, and gave everything British names with apparently good results:
Your Book Review: Addiction By Design
May 14, 2021 · Original source
Sometimes employees at Netflix think, ‘Oh my god, we’re competing with FX, HBO, or Amazon’ … [W]e actually compete with sleep.
Another reality distorting optimization is to increase the number of ways a gambler can win. In old-school slot machines, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on the main line: the three symbols in the middle of the screen. Now, there are more ways to win than Horatio dreams of in his philosophy. Photo credit: Australian Gambling Research Center Originally, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on line 1, shown in yellow on the top left. Contemporary machines allow you to win if you get winning symbols on any of these 50 (and sometimes more) lines! These are not intuitive, straightforward ways of winning. You cannot convince me that lines 28, 39, or 45 are reasonable. These are lines drawn by game designers who acted like they were getting paid by the line.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HPsX!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Facc01082-e88f-49c6-ae84-7cdc8ed7570a_475x286.jpeg, Australian Gambling Research Center
Photo credit: Australian Gambling Research Center Originally, the only way to win was to get winning symbols on line 1, shown in yellow on the top left. Contemporary machines allow you to win if you get winning symbols on any of these 50 (and sometimes more) lines! These are not intuitive, straightforward ways of winning. You cannot convince me that lines 28, 39, or 45 are reasonable. These are lines drawn by game designers who acted like they were getting paid by the line.
Inline links: Australian Gambling Research Center
Links For July
July 23, 2021 · Original source
2: Poll, seen here: surprisingly many Brits want a permanent lockdown regardless of COVID: If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning. [Edit/update from commenters: as with all polls, this changes a lot depending on how you frame the question]
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!z56T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff584e7a9-5f23-46e8-9b8d-2409c3228db3_600x315.png, this changes a lot
If any commenters here would describe themselves as in this group, I’m interested to hear your reasoning. [Edit/update from commenters: as with all polls, this changes a lot depending on how you frame the question]
Inline links: this changes a lot
8: This month in Chinese propaganda (courtesy of Xinhua News’ Twitter account) 9: Dominic Cummings, formerly a top adviser to the British government, now has a Substack (…Domstack?) where he talks about the UK coronavirus response and his many other opinions. The “Ask Me Anything” threads are a particular gem - it’s hard for me to think of other examples of people with experience of the top levels of power being so accessible and willing to talk about it with randos.
Inline links: Twitter account, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!a2iq!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7f1619b-35b8-47e0-9122-5cf84bec47ee_587x592.png, now has a Substack
Eight Hundred Slightly Poisoned Word Games
August 09, 2021 · Original source
The game was WordTwist, which you can find here (warning: potentially addictive). You get a 5x5 square of letters and you have to find as many words as possible (of four letters or more) within three minutes. You can move up, down, right, left, or diagonal, and get more points for harder words. A typical board looks like this: Did you spot “lace”? What about “intrapsychically”? I played this game about 5-10x/day over three months. During this time, the carbon dioxide monitor in my room recorded levels between 445 ppm (with all windows open and the fan on) and 3208 ppm (with all windows closed and several people crammed into the room for several hours). I discounted a stray reading of 285 as an outlier, since this is climatologically impossible (I’m not claiming my monitor is perfectly calibrated, just that it clearly shows higher levels when my room is less well ventilated). CO2 445 is basically the same as outdoors; 3208 is considered extremely poor air quality, likely to cause headaches, nausea, and other minor ailments. The Berkeley study looked at levels between 600 and 2500, so my range was comparable to theirs.
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!M6mg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1902078a-2b4f-4f8d-8b6c-7a8122700660_298x299.png
Did you spot “lace”? What about “intrapsychically”? I played this game about 5-10x/day over three months. During this time, the carbon dioxide monitor in my room recorded levels between 445 ppm (with all windows open and the fan on) and 3208 ppm (with all windows closed and several people crammed into the room for several hours). I discounted a stray reading of 285 as an outlier, since this is climatologically impossible (I’m not claiming my monitor is perfectly calibrated, just that it clearly shows higher levels when my room is less well ventilated). CO2 445 is basically the same as outdoors; 3208 is considered extremely poor air quality, likely to cause headaches, nausea, and other minor ailments. The Berkeley study looked at levels between 600 and 2500, so my range was comparable to theirs.
I was excited to read the Less Wrong post Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition by KPier, who does something similar with chess instead of a word game; they haven’t checked carbon dioxide levels yet, but I’d be excited for them to try. I’m also interested in hearing from anyone else who often repeats some objectively-scoreable cognitive task, to see how they do. A CO2 monitor costs about $100 on Amazon, but if money is the only reason you’re not going to do some really good experiment, please let me know and I’ll buy it for you.
Inline links: Chess and cheap ways to check day to day variance in cognition, costs about $100 on Amazon
The Unbearable Semiheaviness Of Being
September 09, 2021 · Original source
This probably doesn't have enough medical benefits to have been worth my time to research or yours to read. I still find it fascinating. I keep being amazed at how many dimensions things can vary along. You think you know what kind of things medicine has to investigate - how different chemicals interact, the effects of food and smoking and sleep and so on - and unless some weird Hungarians remind you, you would never in a million years remember that there are multiple different isotopes of water and this seems to have some effect on living cells. You would never think to check whether attempts to mine the Martian icecaps for drinkable water will result in dangerous water that could sicken the unfortunate astronauts who drink it (answer: it might! Martian water has five times more deuterium than Earthly water and seems to kill shrimp). You would never think that you could buy something called "deuterium depleted water" on Amazon, or that it would be completely safe to drink. But here we are!
Inline links: and seems to kill shrimp
Book Review: Modi - A Political Biography
September 14, 2021 · Original source
So I thought I'd make Modi the next entry in the ACX Dictator Book Club (previously: Erdogan). The Internet recommended Andy Marino's Modi: A Political Biography, and it seemed the least overtly hagiographical of the options Amazon gave me:
Inline links: Erdogan, Modi: A Political Biography
So I thought I'd make Modi the next entry in the ACX Dictator Book Club (previously: Erdogan). The Internet recommended Andy Marino's Modi: A Political Biography, and it seemed the least overtly hagiographical of the options Amazon gave me: Alas, M:APB is absolutely a hagiography. The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have "open-ended conversations" about "every aspect of his life". The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that "Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense - and probably the most vituperative - campaign of vilification." Marino promises to replace this campaign with "a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair - but also unsparingly critical of [Modi's] foibles" - which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness - and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing "foibles". I'm not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Inline links: Erdogan, Modi: A Political Biography, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Oxu6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa265ba38-351b-466a-acda-d0b72c8c6c1f_1193x576.png
Alas, M:APB is absolutely a hagiography. The author begins by writing about how Modi let him ride with him in his private helicopter and gave him unprecedented access to have "open-ended conversations" about "every aspect of his life". The cover promises an objective evaluation, but on page 2, the author notes that "Objectivity does not mean flying in the face of incontrovertible evidence”, adding that “Modi has been the subject of the longest, most intense - and probably the most vituperative - campaign of vilification." Marino promises to replace this campaign with "a narrative that is balanced, objective, and fair - but also unsparingly critical of [Modi's] foibles" - which is an interesting construction, given how it contrasts criticism with fairness - and also pre-emptively declares the flaws he will be criticizing "foibles". I'm not sure we ever get around to the criticism anyway, so it doesn't really matter.
Book Review: The Scout Mindset
September 29, 2021 · Original source
Galef says not necessarily. Did you know that Jeff Bezos said outright he started off with a 30% chance Amazon would succeed, even going so far as to tell investors “I think there’s a 70% chance you’re going to lose all your money”? Or that Elon Musk said the odds of SpaceX working were “less than 10%”? Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin said he’s “never had 100% confidence in cryptocurrency as a sector…I’m consistent in my uncertainty”. And since the book came out, I stumbled on this profile of billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, which says he believed his chances of success “were only 20% to 25%”.
Inline links: this profile
Not sure how sure you are? The book contains a fun probability calibration exercise. I won’t violate its copyright, but you can find a very similar automated test here My results on the quiz above. See if you can get closer to the line than I did! But you probably already knew all of this. One of the genuinely new ideas in Scout Mindset is its endorsement of various counterfactual “tests”. The idea is, imagine yourself considering a similar question, under circumstances that would bias you the opposite direction. If you stick with your opinion, it’s probably honest; if you’d change your opinion in the counterfactual, you probably had it because of bias.
Inline links: here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!844A!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F527cc487-fa09-45a2-a36f-7aacefeb1a3b_991x812.png
My results on the quiz above. See if you can get closer to the line than I did! But you probably already knew all of this. One of the genuinely new ideas in Scout Mindset is its endorsement of various counterfactual “tests”. The idea is, imagine yourself considering a similar question, under circumstances that would bias you the opposite direction. If you stick with your opinion, it’s probably honest; if you’d change your opinion in the counterfactual, you probably had it because of bias.
Every Bay Area House Party
May 04, 2022 · Original source
“Like - have you heard of the Temple of Artemis? One of the Seven Wonders of the World. Burned down not by a Christian or a Muslim, but by a random Greek guy who wanted his name to be remembered by history, and figured that burning the most beautiful building in the world would ensure it. The Greeks responded by banning anyone from mentioning or recording his name, but the historian Theopompus wrote it down anyway, and it’s survived to the current day. No, I won’t tell it to you. Anyway, I was going to lead a consortium with the censors at Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, all the big name sites. We were finally going to complete the ancient Greeks’ work. We were going to memory-hole this guy’s name from the Internet. Even the people at Amazon were going to be on board - they would stop selling editions of the Theopompus book that gives his name. And then, finally, the burning of the Artemision would be properly avenged. We were this close! And then some dumb billionaire waltzes in and says ‘muh free speech’ and ruins everything!”
Peer Review: Nightmares
June 16, 2022 · Original source
But in terms of treating nightmare specifically, here’s the headline image of Randomized controlled trials of psychological and pharmacological treatments for nightmares: A meta-analysis: Edited for readability The numbers in the blue box are effect size, ie how good the treatment is. Higher numbers are better, 0 means it doesn’t work at all, and negative means it makes things worse.
Inline links: Randomized controlled trials of psychological and pharmacological treatments for nightmares: A meta-analysis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!v179!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F31616dea-a9d9-442c-af1d-4b1cd069615d_534x383.png
Edited for readability The numbers in the blue box are effect size, ie how good the treatment is. Higher numbers are better, 0 means it doesn’t work at all, and negative means it makes things worse.
Stephen LaBerge’s Exploring The World Of Lucid Dreaming (Amazon link, free copy with unclear legal status) is a good introduction to lucid dreaming in general, but it’s long and detailed and a lot of work. I don’t know of anything simpler aimed at nightmares in particular. Some people will find lucid dreaming interesting enough that they’ll be willing to put in the many months of work it will take to make it work well; people looking for a specific fix for this specific problem will probably find other methods simpler.
Inline links: Amazon link, free copy with unclear legal status
Impact Markets: The Annoying Details
July 15, 2022 · Original source
Jeff Bezos founded Amazon, sold off some of his equity for seed funding, and kept some other equity for himself. As Amazon grew, the equity appreciated in value, making him very rich.
Billionaires, Surplus, And Replaceability
August 31, 2022 · Original source
Suppose Amazon creates $1 trillion in extra value for the world, it gets split 50-50 with consumers, Amazon makes $500 billion, that gets split 50-50 with labor and other stockholders, and Jeff Bezos ends up with $250 billion. The standard argument would say that this is fair compensation for the $1 trillion Amazon provided to the world.
But suppose that we go back in time and prevent Jeff Bezos from ever being born. Does this mean Amazon wouldn’t exist today? Probably not by that name. But does it mean that we wouldn’t be buying things online today? That we would have to walk to the brick-and-mortar store every time we wanted a book? Does it mean that Internet retail would be split across a hundred different storefronts, none of which had a good selection or was easy to use?
Suppose that if Jeff Bezos had never existed, someone would have founded pseudo-Amazon two years later. That means Bezos gets credit for Amazon being two years more advanced than it otherwise would have been. That’s actually still worth quite a lot of surplus value - maybe still enough to make him a billionaire many times over! But probably not enough for him to have $200 billion or however much he has right now.
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
4: Nostalgebraist talks about his experience home-brewing an image generation AI that can handle text in images; he’s a very good explainer and I learned more about image models from his post than from other much more official sources. And here’s what happens when his AI is asked to “make a list of all 50 states”: 5: Related: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report. “I think my fundamental objection to the report is that it doesn’t seem aware of what argument it’s making, or even than it is making an argument.”
Inline links: image generation AI, here’s what happens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jEvV!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4ac60ca9-5fb4-40c1-82ba-c3ab5c3d8073_509x494.png, Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report
5: Related: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report. “I think my fundamental objection to the report is that it doesn’t seem aware of what argument it’s making, or even than it is making an argument.”
Inline links: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report
8: Alex Tabarrok and Indian giant statues: 9: Last year Resident Contrarian wrote a widely-read post on his experience being poor. This helped him start a writing career, a few other things went well for him, and now he’s written a followup about his experience not being poor anymore, with a focus on whether/when/how consumption grows to fill the space available (eg people making $500K a year who still feel like they’re forced to live paycheck to paycheck).
Inline links: Alex Tabarrok and Indian giant statues, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DPef!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd154b0c9-063e-4311-97f9-a091e7e91095_479x851.png, his experience being poor, his experience not being poor anymore
Highlights From The Comments On Billionaire Replaceability
September 22, 2022 · Original source
Maybe taking Amazon off the table clarifies things a bit. How about digital distribution of Video Games? This seems like a thing that wasn't invented by anyone in particular, and Steam wasn't "first", they were just the first to establish a tight market niche.
But I also want to make an economic response: I’m not sure “what rewards need to be offered to incentivize people?” is the right question. Suppose Jeff Bezos just really loved founding businesses, and couldn’t imagine working for anyone else, and he would found and run Amazon for $10/day, just enough to live in a tent in one of his warehouses and eat cold beans. Does that mean society would optimally pay him that amount? Maybe this isn’t true because in some kind of hypothetical perfect society, all money would be distributed evenly, so nobody should get less than GDP/population, but sometimes we need to give people more, and we’re just trying to figure out how much more, when?
I’m claiming that a sort of Platonic perfect liberalism that taxed externalities and implemented a Georgist LVT and all those things would also have some institution in place to make sure that Amazon could make profits off of its own good decisions and hard work, but not collect rent off the concept of being a retail giant. I don’t know what that institution would be, in much the same way I probably couldn’t personally have invented Georgism and LVTs, but I think it would exist. In the absence of that institution, I have a vague feeling that probably Amazon makes too much money, and that taking away some of their money is a kind of ugly hack but not totally absurd.
How Trustworthy Are Supplements?
October 05, 2022 · Original source
If you knew the half of the shit that goes on in the background of this industry, you'd be disgusted. My lab director went to the AOAC conference last week. Scientists from most of the analytical labs in the US were there, and many of the quality directors from the bigger brands. My lab director was just openly calling products out that we tested and had failed, and everyone was looking at him like he was breaking decorum. There is an unspoken rule in this industry that you don't call out other brands for quality issues, because you know you have some of your own. It's insane! Everyone knows all the products fail. Everyone knows almost nobody is doing things right. However, the status quo makes too many people too much money to change. He was going back and forth with the lab director from NOW Foods, and they have been doing similar things to us. They have been buying products on Amazon and testing them in their lab. Surprise surprise, tons are failing. However, they can't get Amazon to do anything about it. The unwritten rule there is that they don't want to hear about quality issues. They want to put their fingers in their ears and go la la la la laaaaaa. Truly! You can test this yourself. Write Amazon support asking how to report fake reviews, and they will give you a place to report them. Then ask where you can reports fake or impure product, and they will literally stop talking to you. We have tried. We'd love to just send Amazon our testing results of their top products failing lab testing, but they shut any discussion of it down. There's not much money in admitting you have been selling products that don't meet labels claims, and it is so widespread that fixing it would upend the entire industry, so covering their eyes and ears is their choice. In fact, we have been warned that if we make too many waves, we might be punished instead. They might just shoot the messenger because that is easier.
Who Predicted 2022?
January 24, 2023 · Original source
In a very technical sense, the single person who predicted 2022 most accurately was a 20-something data scientist at Amazon’s forecasting division.
I know this because last January, along with amateur statisticians Sam Marks and Eric Neyman, I solicited predictions from 508 people. This wasn’t a very creative or free-form exercise - contest participants assigned percentage chances to 71 yes-or-no questions, like “Will Russia invade Ukraine?” or “Will the Dow end the year above 35000?” The whole thing was a bit hokey and constrained - Nassim Taleb wouldn’t be amused - but it had the great advantage of allowing objective scoring. Sample questions. Our goal wasn’t just to identify good predictors. It was to replicate previous findings about the nature of prediction. Are some people really “superforecasters” who do better than everyone else? Is there a “wisdom of crowds”? Does the Efficient Markets Hypothesis mean that prediction markets should beat individuals? Armed with 508 people’s predictions, can we do math to them until we know more about the future (probabilistically, of course) than any ordinary mortal?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!JKph!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F953914da-0dda-4c0d-a555-67cadbaaf24a_659x521.png
Sample questions. Our goal wasn’t just to identify good predictors. It was to replicate previous findings about the nature of prediction. Are some people really “superforecasters” who do better than everyone else? Is there a “wisdom of crowds”? Does the Efficient Markets Hypothesis mean that prediction markets should beat individuals? Armed with 508 people’s predictions, can we do math to them until we know more about the future (probabilistically, of course) than any ordinary mortal?
Turing Test
March 27, 2023 · Original source
WATER: My name is Alan Serzynski. I’m a 39 year old engineer at an Amazon data center in Bellingham, Washington.
Highlights From The Comments On IRBs
April 17, 2023 · Original source
I don't work in academics, but I have a positive impression of IRBs from my time as an Amazon MTurk worker. It is very common for researchers to try to defraud such workers in various ways to cut costs (most commonly they fail to understand or care that a rejected hit threatens your ability to continue working and is not only about the few cents paid for it, so rejections should not be arbitrary or used as a way to get a refund). It's widely reported to be effective to contact a requester's governing IRB to resolve disputes if you can't come to an agreement directly, or that even mentioning you know how to contact their IRB often leads to a resolution […]
A rejected hit is when the requester claims you didn't do the given task correctly and declines to pay you. Requesters can filter workers for eligibility by accepted hit rate, so if you go below 98% it's really bad, you want to do everything you can to avoid rejected hits, for example there are third party tools to help warn you about requesters with rejection rates that are too high. Naturally Amazon itself has no interest in mediating fairly or at all. […]
A 'rejected HIT' is a task that the requestor declines to pay the worker for. This can be for any reason, legit or not. Amazon does not mediate at all. Disputes about rejected hits can also only be made for a month.
Contra Kriss On Nerds And Hipsters
April 19, 2023 · Original source
Also, speaking of collectors, are there any, any more? When I was a child, the stamp collector and coin collector were stock cultural figures. Now I realize I haven’t thought about them in years. Where did they go? My theory is: hipsterism and nerdism are both forms of trying to invest your identity in a cultural product. If there’s no competition, you become a hipster; if there’s high competition, you become a nerd.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cmEH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7a0418a-649b-42e3-a1ad-dc6eba2556b3_1108x444.png
My theory is: hipsterism and nerdism are both forms of trying to invest your identity in a cultural product. If there’s no competition, you become a hipster; if there’s high competition, you become a nerd.
Also, what was up with stamp and coin collectors? This seems like a different phenomenon: surely nobody wanted to identify with the US Postal Service. I have a better hypothesis for why this pastime has died out: collectors enjoyed the thrill of hunting for a rare piece, but Amazon and eBay have made it trivial to exchange money for whatever coins/stamps you want. I’m not sure this works; when I was young in the 90s, there was a store in my hometown that sold rare coins; even then I could have gone to the store and walked out with a pretty good collection. But maybe the fact that I would need multiple books to know which coins were “rare”, and that the store could have been out of one or two valuable pieces, was enough cover to make it still seem interesting and impressive. Now there’s no sense that you have to really care about stamps or coins to have a great stamp/coin collection: you just need a higher budget than whoever else typed “stamps and coins” into the eBay search function.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
The first book is Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life, first published in 1984. I found it, as it happens, in a city, more specifically in one of those public bookshelves where people give books away. A lucky find: my copy is somehow signed by Jane Jacobs herself. A friend said that although this book is read less often than The Death and Life etc., it actually contains the real gems from Jane Jacobs’s thought. So I was quite excited to read it, by which I mean that I kept the book on my bookshelf for more than a year before finally digging into it. Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!7hkj!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F86adfacf-c8d6-4ede-ae88-2a737911e0ed_292x500.png
Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty.
Mere days after I finished reading it, thinking it was indeed one of the best essays I’d ever read, I checked the same public bookshelf again. And lo! There was a second Jane Jacobs book: The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. This book is Jacobs’s least read. It was published in 1980, right after the first referendum where Quebecers voted to remain a part of Canada. It is based on lectures that Jacobs (who was an American but had moved to Canada in 1968) gave in Toronto right before the referendum. It’s not hard to guess why the book didn’t have a huge (read: any) impact. First, most people outside Quebec or Canada don’t have any reason to care. Second, the essay — which was written in English — argues in favor of the secession of Quebec, which virtually no one among the English-speaking population of Canada agreed with. The natural reaction from Canada’s intelligentsia was to ignore the book altogether. Meanwhile, few people in Quebec itself read it, since the referendum was over; it wasn’t even translated into French until decades later. As a result, The Question of Separatism sits awkwardly in Jane Jacobs’s bibliography, as if it were “a mistake in an otherwise brilliant career,” like I read somewhere. In a 2005 interview, one year before her death, Jacobs said that no journalist ever asked her about it. But the book was not a mistake. I don’t claim any special insight here: Jane Jacobs herself said so in that same interview. She said that she would have written the same book in 2005, “because that’s the way it is in the world, and it still holds.” Besides, The Question of Separatism is in fact not that much about the specifics of Quebec’s political situation, but rather about interesting generalities: what size means for countries and organizations, and why the fate of nations depends primarily on what happens in their cities. Taken together with Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which Jacobs wrote a few years later to expand on those ideas, we get a coherent and deeply interesting philosophy of economics: one that favors the local scale, cities and small countries, antifragility long before Nassim Taleb coined the term, and avoiding grandstanding theories that always fail to take into account the real complexity of the world. I. A Fake Mystery Cities and the Wealth of Nations opens on an economic mystery. “For a little while in the middle of this century,” writes Jacobs, “it seemed that the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics had yielded up something we all want: instructions for getting or keeping prosperity.” This was the 1940s to 1960s, and economists thought they had it all figured out. It was the golden age of high modernism and scientific technocracy. Everywhere from China to the Soviet Union to the United States and Britain and the nascent European Economic Community, leaders were coming up with elaborate plans, rooted in macroeconomic theories, that were supposed to guarantee future wealth and avoid economic crises. The theories had been developed by many thinkers over the previous two hundred years: Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes. Jacobs explains how they each had their own ideas of how the economy worked, disagreeing over things like whether supply or demand was the main driving mechanism, but they all agreed on a fundamental fact: inflation and unemployment have an inverse relationship to each other, like a seesaw. High inflation comes with low unemployment; high unemployment comes with low inflation, or even deflation when prices drop. The Great Depression, a time of deflation, had provided proof of the seesaw. Big government projects, as prescribed by Keynesians, were a way for states to reduce unemployment and bring the seesaw back in a balanced state. Economists developed fancy models, based on historical data, to predict the behavior of the economy. The Phillips curve in particular became popular. It was the golden age of technocracy; it was the triumph of high modernism. From now on wealth was assured, because we weren’t blind anymore: we had the curves. And yet — by the 1970s and 1980s, when Jane Jacobs was writing, the theories all stopped working. There was high inflation and high unemployment. People called it stagflation. Keynesian advisers in various governments were devastated: either their ideas were wrong, or they were applying them wrong. Economists such as Milton Friedman, from a rival school of economists called the monetarists or the Chicago school, came to the rescue — but their remedy, Jacobs believes, only made things worse. Whatever governments did to increase employment made inflation worse; whatever they did to attenuate inflation killed employment. The seesaw from the theories was working in application, even though it didn’t explain reality anymore. Stagflation was not supposed to exist, so stagflation could not be fought. At this point we’re near the end of Chapter 1, the densest part of the book. Jacobs has artfully guided us along economic history and laid out the mystery for us. What’s going on? we wonder. How are we supposed to deal with the two-headed monster of stagflation, if all economists are stumped? Then Jacobs, in a masterstroke, flips the whole thing over. I was impressed enough that I would have inserted a spoiler alert here, if it didn’t feel so silly putting a spoiler alert in an essay on economics. Stagflation is not a strange monster from legend. It is, Jacobs says, just the normal state of everything. Backward economies are in fact constantly in a state of stagflation. The prices in a poor country like Portugal or India (her two examples) feel low for an American or Canadian, but they’re high for most Portuguese or Indian people. At the same time, Portugal and India provide too few jobs to their residents. Inflation and unemployment are both perennially high, and none of that feels surprising whatsoever. Stagflation, in short, is just good ol’ poverty. All these fancy economists, from Cantillon in 1700s France to Keynes and Friedman in the 20th century Anglosphere, were thinking and writing about unusual places: rich countries that were undergoing fast economic development. They were making the classic mistake of treating poverty as a mystery and wealth as a given, when in fact poverty is the normal order of things and wealth, when it does occur, is what warrants an explanation. The result is that we don’t really know how to fix the economy of poor countries, nor do we know how to deal with decline in rich countries, whether we call it stagflation or something else. Jacobs derives from this a pretty damning view of macroeconomics. It is to her a science that has failed again and again, each time engulfing the equivalent of billions of dollars in wasted wealth. “We must,” she writes at the close of Chapter 1, “find more realistic and fruitful lines of observation and thought than we have tried to use so far. It is bootless to choose among existing schools of thought. We are on our own.” Fortunately, she has some ideas. II. Nations and the Wealth of Cities The original sin of macroeconomics, Jacobs believe, is to treat sovereign countries, or nations, as the main unit of economic analysis. This error, she claims, goes back to mercantilism, one of the first formal economic policies. Oversimplified, mercantilism states that wealth is synonymous with the amount of gold and silver in a nation’s treasury. This makes nations the main unit of economic analysis by definition. It’s a tautology — and one that was somehow embedded so deep in economic thinking that even the non-mercantilist Adam Smith would eventually choose, for his masterpiece of economic theory, the title An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Today, even though mercantilism has long been obsolete, we perpetuate the same tautology whenever we talk of the Gross Domestic Product or look at the very nice charts from Our World in Data, which for the most part allow only one level of resolution: sovereign countries. Of course, nations are an economically important concept because of that one property: they are sovereign, and therefore they write laws and implement policies that affect the economy. These policies can be productively compared. But that’s about it — for everything else, nations aren’t the right way to think about wealth. One reason is simply that they’re very different from one another: “it affronts common sense,” Jacobs writes, “to think of units as disparate as, say, Singapore and the United States, or Ecuador and the Soviet Union, or the Netherlands and Canada, as economic common denominators.” I would add that countries are arbitrary and changing: when the Soviet Union was replaced by 15 sovereign countries, the economic reality didn’t suddenly reshape itself to match the new borders. Lastly, nations contain, under the hood, many sub-economies that are also highly different from one another. None of that is secret or forbidden knowledge. Everyone has always been aware that New York City, or Milan, are economically very different from rural Mississippi or Sicily. But I find that it’s far easier to think in terms of “the United States” or “Italy,” especially when you’re not from there. Nations are an abstraction of real-life complexity, and are accordingly very tempting to use. Also, they’re often the entities that collect statistics, which is another difficult-to-resist temptation for anyone who likes quantitative data. Cities as Radiators of Economic Forces If nations aren’t the best unit to analyze the economy, what is? This is a Jane Jacobs book, so the answer is obviously going to be cities. Jacobs doesn’t actually give a clear argument why. Maybe that was in her previous book, The Economy of Cities. So far as I can see, her reasoning is, ironically, a bit tautological: “all developing economic life depends on city economies; it depends on them by definition because, wherever economic life is developing, the very process itself creates cities and has probably always done so.” But so far as I can see, this reasoning is correct. Cities concentrate people, and therefore economic life, and therefore economic power. The driving force for all this is a phenomenon that, from what I gather, was discovered by Jacobs when she wrote The Economy of Cities: import replacement. Consider, say, Boston back when it was a tiny settlement, not yet a city, in colonial times. At first, Boston didn’t produce much, especially not much that would be of interest to its main trading partner, London. It exported some natural resources: timber, fish. Whatever else the Bostonians needed, they needed to import it from other cities, again mostly London. (Remember to think of imports and exports in terms of cities, not nations.) For instance, at first, all metal tools in Boston came from European cities, and were paid for by the revenue from selling the timber and fish. Then, one day, some Bostonians decided to build an ironworks and make metal tools themselves. (Pictured: a reconstruction of the Saugus Iron Works, established 1646.) This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BjyZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe0bfbafa-7e10-4d83-abe4-34251c126728_332x499.png, Phillips curve, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!9wEn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F850ce64a-4367-4a7a-a9ec-e8eb1af3ed08_399x292.png, Our World in Data, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zS15!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d533e64-f407-4b05-aea5-5b5a9dbdc7bc_1600x1130.png, import replacement, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5j2T!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7f2675d9-ce56-4ac5-9b78-a16720269dea_1600x1159.png, import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
Your Book Review: Why Machines Will Never Rule the World
June 03, 2023 · Original source
The authors thoroughly and commendably engage with a breadth of literature in physics, biology, linguistics, philosophy of mind, AI, and more, including up-to-the-moment deep learning research, and they collect many of the existing arguments against artificial general intelligence, notably Toby Walsh’s “The Singularity May Never Be Near” and Erik J. Larson’s The Myth of Artificial Intelligence.
Inline links: The Singularity May Never Be Near, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence
Arguments about computability aren’t new, and have fallen out of favor with many AI researchers. Landgrebe and Smith’s contention that the brain isn’t a Turing machine is reminiscent of Hubert Dreyfus’ What Computers Can’t Do and Roger Penrose’s Shadows of the Mind, both of which the authors discuss.
Inline links: What Computers Can’t Do, Shadows of the Mind
Why Machines Will Never Rule the World is 301 pages before you hit the appendices. You can buy the paperback from the publisher or on Amazon for $48.95, almost exactly the price of a Warhammer starter set or 800 grams of Dutch baby formula.
Inline links: publisher, Amazon
Links For September 2023
September 28, 2023 · Original source
5: One of the largest planes ever seriously proposed was the Lockheed CL-1201 flying aircraft carrier, with a wingspan of 1120 feet: 6: I somehow forgot to mention this until now, but Rational Animations has made a video of my old poem “The Goddess Of Everything Else”:
Inline links: the Lockheed CL-1201 flying aircraft carrier, Rational Animations, “The Goddess Of Everything Else”
7: “Adversarial examples” are a weird AI phenomenon where imperceptible changes to certain images can make AIs get them bizarrely wrong. For example, you can take a picture of a house, add a tiny amount of invisible noise representing “giraffe”, end up with a picture that still looks exactly like a house, but an AI will identify it as a giraffe. Now a new paper claims these sort of work on humans?! That is, given the following two pictures: …and asked to choose which one looks “more cat-like”, people will choose the one with the adversarial example perturbation for “cat” slightly more often than the other. Or if you perturb one train picture to be “cat” and another to be “house”, people will be able to recognize better than chance that one of them seems more cat-like and the other more house-like. I have to admit I can’t see this, but some commenters say they can (maybe it’s my monitor)?
Inline links: a new paper claims these sort of work on humans?!
8: Related: AI art has gone from copying humans to inventing entirely new styles. Like images with hidden-yet-obvious spirals: Or images with hidden-yet-obvious text:
Inline links: images, images
Unsong Available In Paperback
May 31, 2024 · Original source
The online version isn’t going anywhere, but lots of people asked for a hard copy. I tried to get the book formally published, but various things went wrong and I procrastinated. Commenter Pycea finally saved me from myself and helped get it published on Amazon (thank you!) You can now buy the book here, for $19.99.
Inline links: You can now buy the book here, for $19.99
Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
October 24, 2024 · Original source
Progress (as measured by things like total factor productivity) was fast for much of the early 20th century, then slowed around 1970. Nobody knows why; theories include shifting social attitudes, over-regulation, or simply exhausting the potential in a few big inventions like electricity and mass production. This slowing was a great historical tragedy: if progress had continued at pre-1970 rates, we would be twice as rich today. We call the ensuing period the Great Stagnation. There was plenty of innovation in computers (“the world of bits”), but real physical goods (“the world of atoms”) stayed disappointingly similar. Our great-grandparents grew up in a world of horse-drawn carriages and lived to see the moon landing. We grew up in a world of cars and jumbo jets, and live in it still. But Tyler Cowen has declared the Great Stagnation provisionally maybe starting to be over. This is a bold pronouncement; official statistics are as dull as ever, and Progress is a field where going off vibes leads you astray. Still, advances in AI, solar, space, and biotech seemed impressive enough that he thought it represented a phase change.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!c9Ed!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4d1fb269-8513-41ee-9ddb-98baae9f8bef_320x231.jpeg, provisionally maybe starting to be over
But Tyler Cowen has declared the Great Stagnation provisionally maybe starting to be over. This is a bold pronouncement; official statistics are as dull as ever, and Progress is a field where going off vibes leads you astray. Still, advances in AI, solar, space, and biotech seemed impressive enough that he thought it represented a phase change.
Inline links: provisionally maybe starting to be over
Everyone agreed that we should have 100x as much energy per person (or 100x lower energy cost), that we should simultaneously lower emissions to zero, and that we could do it in a few decades. The only disagreement was how to get there, with clashes between advocates of solar and nuclear. This year, the pro-solar faction seemed to have the upper hand because of trends like this: Between 2010 and 2019, the nuclear/solar cost comparison fell from $96 / $378 to $155 vs. $68 (yes, nuclear got more expensive). As a result:
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gCmZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa2c4119d-6a5e-45de-bf21-8d0454aac7f5_1200x1200.jpeg
OpenAI Nonprofit Buyout: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
March 13, 2025 · Original source
Manifold asks whether they might end up funding AI safety efforts: This sort of makes sense - surely this is the most direct way to interpret a mandate of using charity dollars to “make sure AI benefits humanity”. And an obvious commitment to pursuing their mission exactly as described would look good to regulators. But it also might not be as popular with the normies as “health care, education, and science” - and doing popular things would look good to regulators too. If this is on their mind, Altman hasn’t mentioned it.
What Do Prediction Markets Say? This is the biggest Manifold market on the topic. The big drop at the end is when the judge ruled Musk’s case had merit.
Inline links: This
This is the biggest Manifold market on the topic. The big drop at the end is when the judge ruled Musk’s case had merit. This Metaculus question looks like the Manifold market, but without the big drop at the end. Are the Manifolders overreacting, or are the Metaculans asleep at the wheel?
Inline links: This, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!TQOx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf64ecf7-5216-453a-b2ab-fd8717718343_760x453.png, This
Book Review: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
May 15, 2025 · Original source
Bryan Caplan’s Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids is like the Bible. You already know what it says. You’ve already decided whether you believe or not. Do you really have to read it all the way through?
Inline links: Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids
After many trials, tribulations, false starts, grabs, shrieks, and attacks of opportunity . . . . . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!DpbH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba286a6d-ee79-414b-ae68-2c58282564b6_452x369.png
. . . I finally made it to the part on how fun and easy this all was.
Open Thread 415
January 05, 2026 · Original source
Some people have argued that you have to find a way to join an AI company, because AI company employees will form the new ruling class, with everyone else as serfs. I disagree. The main thing an AI company employee has that you don’t is AI company stock. But you can buy stock in Google, you may soon be able to buy stock in OpenAI and Anthropic, and even if not, you can get indirect exposure to these companies via stock in Amazon and Microsoft. I don’t recommend putting all your money in these stocks. But there’s no fundamental difference between a Google employee having 75% of their money in Google stock because they didn’t cash out their equity vs. you having 75% of your money in Google stock because you’re crazy and fail at diversification. So either put 75% of your money in Google stock or don’t (I recommend don’t), and don’t worry about how you need to join an AI company or be left out of the future oligarchy.
Mantic Monday: Groundhog Day
March 03, 2026 · Original source
Upon the “supply chain risk” designation, predicted value at IPO fell from about $550 billion to $475 billion - then, after a day or two, went back up to $550 billion. No effect!
The chance of Anthropic getting a $500 billion+ valuation in 2026 fell from 90% to 76%, before rebounding to 83%.
Partly it’s because Anthropic seems likely to win on appeal. Hegseth has said the government will keep using Anthropic for the next six months (undermining his case that they’re a national security risk) and has signed a substantially similar contract with OpenAI (undermining his case that their contract terms were unworkable). The prediction markets think the courts will be sympathetic: But even in the 28% of timelines where the designation sticks, things don’t seem so bad. Secretary of War Hegseth originally tweeted that:
Inline links: tweeted