Supreme Court

Article

Supreme Court is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 43 times across 43 issues between March 15, 2021 and November 12, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court”; ""if the Democrats manage to pack the Supreme Court at some point""; “if the Democrats manage to pack the Supreme Court”. It most often appears alongside Trump, California, China.

Metadata

Category: Organizations
Mention count: 43
Issue count: 43
First seen: March 15, 2021
Last seen: November 12, 2025

Appears In

- Trump (19 shared issues)
- California (16 shared issues)
- China (15 shared issues)
- US (15 shared issues)
- United States (14 shared issues)
- San Francisco (12 shared issues)
- FDA (11 shared issues)
- COVID (10 shared issues)
- America (9 shared issues)
- Congress (9 shared issues)
- Germany (9 shared issues)
- India (9 shared issues)

External Links

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.

Mantic Monday: Mantic Matt Y

March 15, 2021 · Original source

1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent 8. Lakers win the NBA championship 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US 13. Substack will still be around 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary 20. No federal tax increases are enacted 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members

1. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win the Georgia Senate races (60%) 2. The same party wins both Senate races in Georgia (95%) 3. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating higher than his disapproval rating (70%) [83%] 4. Joe Biden ends the year with his approval rating above 50% (60%) [60%] 5. US GDP growth in 2021 is the fastest of any year of the 21st century (80%) [84%] 6. The year-end unemployment rate is below 5 percent (80%) 7. The year-end unemployment rate is above 4 percent (80%) 8. Lakers win the NBA championship (25%) [25%] 9. Joe Biden ends the year as president (95%) [96%] 10. Nancy Pelosi sets a definitive retirement schedule (60%) 11. A vacancy arises on the Supreme Court (70%) [50%] 12. The EU ends the year with more confirmed Covid-19 deaths than the US (60%) [80%] 13. Substack will still be around (95%) 14. People will still be writing takes asking if Substack is really sustainable (80%) 15. Apple releases new iMacs powered by Apple silicon (90%) [84%] 16. Apple does not release a new Mac Pro powered by Apple silicon (70%) [53%] 17. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 2 percent (70%) 18. Monthly year-on-year core CPI growth does not go above 3 percent (90%) 19. Lloyd Austin not confirmed as Defense Secretary (60%) 20. No federal tax increases are enacted (95%) 21. Biden administration unilaterally relieves some but not all student debt (80%) 22. United States rejoins JCPOA and Iran resumes compliance (80%) 23. Israel and Saudi Arabia establish official diplomatic relations (70%) [38%] 24. US and China reach agreement to lift Trump-era tariffs (70%) 25. Slow Boring will exceed 10,000 paid members (70%) [75%]

And also, as great as this list is, it seems kind of...artificial. It's only tangentially related to what happens when Matt does his job as a pundit and influences the rest of us. When I look at his Substack, the first post to strike my interest is Wealth Isn't What Matters (ironically, behind a paywall) - saying that on-paper wealth statistics aren't a great way to judge who is or isn't needy or taxable. This is a great point (you'll have to trust me, because of the paywall), but it's not obvious to me that Matt's ability to predict whether there will be a vacancy on the Supreme Court this year correlates very well with whether he can teach us about the flaws in on-paper wealth statistics.

Inline links: Wealth Isn't What Matters

Book Review: The New Sultan

March 18, 2021 · Original source

This has made me a lot less optimistic about the kind of dictator-prevention strategy where everyone has lots of guns and then if a dictator comes to power you rush out into the streets shouting FREEEEEDOM!, William-Wallace-style, shooting everything in sight. If there's a military coup or something, this might work. But if every day your institutions are just a tiny bit less legitimate than the day before, when do you rush out into the street? One of the most important steps on the way to Erdogan's total control was his court-packing, accomplished under the guise of EU-bid modernization. But if the Democrats manage to pack the Supreme Court at some point, are the people with guns going to rush out into the street shouting FREEEEEDOM? No - realistically even the people who really hate the Democrats and think they're bad and wrong are going to stop short of armed revolution, because that alone isn't quite Stalin-level obvious evil. Erdogan demonstrates that you can become a dictator through a few dozen things like that chained together, without any obvious single point where everyone wakes up and notices. There is no fire alarm for dictatorship.

Inline links: There is no fire alarm for dictatorship

Prospectus On Próspera

April 14, 2021 · Original source

In 2009, Honduras' leftist-ish President Manuel Zelaya proposed a referendum to change the Constitution, which his opponents interpreted as a plot to remove term limits and rule indefinitely. The Supreme Court ruled against him, Zelaya ordered the military to assist in holding the referendum anyway, and the military held a coup instead. They appointed the next person in the line of succession the interim president, then held tense elections which were partially boycotted by Zelaya supporters and of debated legitimacy. Conservative candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa won and became president. Lobo's chief of staff Octavio Sanchez stumbled upon the TED talk where Romer discussed charter cities and invited him to Honduras for negotiations.

In the midst of all this, the Honduran Supreme Court struck down the charter city law 4-1 because they thought it threatened Honduras' sovereignty.

This became part of a broader conflict in Honduran politics, which came to a head after the Supreme Court struck down a major police reform bill. Congress fired the four anti-government Supreme Court justices and replaced them with pro-government ones; opinions on the constitutionality of the move range from unclear to extremely skeptical. There was a big crisis for a while, various factions accused various other factions of plotting coups, but the government made it through. Three years later, they tried again with a ZEDE law, this one slightly amended to make it clear that the areas were still ultimately under Honduran sovereignty. The new packed-with-government-supporters Supreme Court pronounced it okay, and the law passed with the support of 78% (!) of Congress. They dismissed the old CAMP members and replaced them with people apparently inoffensive enough that nobody’s reported on who they are (I think one of them might be this guy).

Inline links: struck down a major police reform bill, unclear, extremely skeptical, this guy

Links For June

June 23, 2021 · Original source

41: The tendency for Supreme Court Justices to move left over time is known as the Greenhouse Effect, after former New York Times legal correspondent Linda Greenhouse.

Inline links: Greenhouse Effect

November 01, 2021 · Original source

Vitalik didn’t end with “and we should also replace all lower courts with prediction markets about what the Supreme Court would think”, but I’m not sure why not.

December 06, 2021 · Original source

These are still preliminary; this person argues that the Nationalists might pick up a few more seats as more conservative rural areas get counted. Liberty and Refoundation (the socialists) will probably enter into a coalition with the Savior Party and have 65/128 seats for a bare majority. They need 86 votes for a 2/3 majority, which in theory they can get if the Liberal Party agrees. The Liberal Party seems centrist and hard to pin down, but this article includes the following great quote: “The Liberal Party opposes the ZEDEs because, above all, they undercut our national sovereignty, and because we don’t want them to become hideouts for extraditable criminals,” said [Liberal Party leader Yani] Rosenthal, who served a three-year prison sentence in the United States for money laundering and participating in a criminal scheme with the Los Cachiros cartel. Rosenthal kind of goes back and forth elsewhere, but in the end I think he’ll vote with the socialists on this. Still, there’s some speculation that his party might not vote as a bloc, and even a few defectors would be enough to prevent a supermajority. In theory, even if the socialists win two consecutive votes, they have to give the projects ten years to wind down. Ten years is forever in politics, and probably before then the capitalists will get back into power and say never mind, everyone can keep doing what they’re doing. The socialists are aware of this and say that their supplementary strategy is to have everything about the ZEDE law declared unconstitutional. This should be a hard sell, because ZEDEs are a constitutional amendment, plus the current Supreme Court explicitly ruled a few years ago that they were constitutional. But apparently the Honduran Supreme Court can declare constitutional amendments unconstitutional if it really wants. And the new government will get to appoint a new Supreme Court in two years, and although the exact process is complicated, they may be able to get people who agree with them on this. Also, incoming president Castro is married to Manuel Zelaya, a former president who tried to pull an Andrew Jackson after the Supreme Court ordered him to stop holding an illegal referendum to change term limits in his favor. He ordered the military to hold the referendum anyway, and was only ousted after the military couped him instead. So this is not exactly a family known for their deep respect for the exact wordings of laws or court rulings (not that anyone in Honduras has really excelled on that front). See further speculation eg here and here. And here’s Mark Lutter from Charter Cities Institute on the elections and the future. Conchagua Volcano, El Salvador Meanwhile, insane El Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele says he is ordering the construction of a coin-shaped city dedicated to Bitcoin at the base of a stratovolcano: "Residential areas, commercial areas, services, museums, entertainment, bars, restaurants, airport, port, rail - everything devoted to Bitcoin," the 40-year-old said. And: The president, who appeared on stage wearing a baseball cap backwards, said that no income taxes would be levied in the city, only value added tax (VAT). He said that half of the revenue gained from this would be used to "to build up the city", while the rest would be used to keep the streets "neat and clean" […] Mr Bukele did not provide dates for construction or completion of the city, but said he estimated that much of the public infrastructure would cost around 300,000 Bitcoins. It’s tempting to dismiss this plan as crazy. First, this photo: Second, Bitcoin miners don’t want a city the shape of a Bitcoin with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo. They want cheap electricity. Bukele has promised that there will be cheap geothermal power from the volcano, which sounds good, but this article says El Salvador’s existing geothermal energy costs about 12 cents/kilowatt-hour, much higher than the 4 cents/megawatt-hour miners can get in the current cheapest areas. Maybe El Salvador could do a really good job upgrading their energy infrastructure, but at some point you’re subsidizing this rather than using it as a cash cow. And third, this isn’t even the stupidest plan to build a cryptocurrency-themed city in the Third World. That arguably goes to Akon City, a thing where a pop singer named Akon was going to build a cryptocurrency city in Senegal. Now, without any construction having started, they’re planning to build a second one in Uganda! All competing for the same handful of crypto companies! But I looked into Bukele to see if he was a moron with a habit of coming up with terrible ideas. It seems like no. He rose from nothing to become El Salvador’s first outside-the-traditional-party-system president, and has an approval rating of around 90%. And apparently he’s presided over a historic drop in the homicide rate of this previously murder-capital-of-the-world country. Although I’m betting that one day he’ll make a great Dictator Book Club entry, I’m prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt on “doesn’t do stupid things for no reason” What’s the non-stupid explanation for this? Maybe it’s supposed to be a signal. You can give up 5% of the way through, but even trying to build a Bitcoin-shaped city at least shows very conclusively that you’ve got a crypto-friendly regulatory climate, so many easily-spooked crypto companies will flock to you. This makes sense in the context of big crypto companies moving to the Caribbean for regulatory reasons, eg FTX moving to the Bahamas and Binance moving to the Cayman Islands. But if I understand correctly, both of these companies make on the order of $1 billion a year. If El Salvador can tax them at 5% (dubious, since a big part of promising a friendly regulatory climate is low taxes), that’s still only $100 million if they can capture both of them. Which they can’t, because these companies seem happy where they are. And I don’t think there are a lot of similarly-sized crypto companies looking for Central American homes that I don’t know about. And even though El Salvador is pretty poor, it’s not so poor that $100 million is worth embarrassing themselves over. So I’m stumped. EDIT: See this comment. Praxis, aka Bluebook Cities, the Internet Speaking of stumped, who are these people? Right now, they’re a web page with a lot of buzz promising the City Of The Future, in very poetic language: Praxis is a grassroots movement of modern pioneers building a new city. We are technologists and artists, builders and dreamers. We are building a place where we can develop to our fullest potentials, physically, culturally, and spiritually. Bitcoin was developed as a financial technology with political goals identical to those of the Founding Fathers: liberation. The ultimate end of crypto is the possibility of a future for humanity unshackled from the institutions that seek to limit our growth. Our ultimate goal is to bring about a more vital future for humanity, and we will use technology to achieve this righteous end. Our civilization is unwell. We eat food that kills us, we’ve lost sight of beauty, and we neglect our spiritual lives. The world is deranged and decayed, and this frightens people. We don’t look up from our screens; we seek to live within them. Crypto is a fundamentally political technology -- escape to the metaverse is a betrayal of the principles on which it was founded. We are descended from the people who built Rome and Athens, who dared to split atoms and voyage to the Moon. We can build new worlds not just of bits, but of atoms. But where is this city? What will its policies be? As we leave old lands, our values are our compass. Like wolves, tribes of pioneers are muscular by necessity. For voyaging tribes to settle, they must perform murmurations: intricate coordination with little communication, at scale. This is only possible with a strong sense of asabiyya (group feeling derived from deeply-held shared values). Our values inform the destiny we desire, and for which we struggle. Asabiyya is forged in this struggle. With asabiyya, pioneers can earn the divine mandate to build a city. Cities are the fount of human ingenuity. In cities, people enjoy their fullest potential by contributing their resources under the auspices of civilization. Who even are you? What experience do you have with city-building? Civilizations rise and fall. All around us, we see civilizational decay. The people are not vital: physically, culturally, spiritually. We live in an era of obesity, remakes, and pollution. We are losing the divine mandate, and in an era of absolute weapons, what’s at stake is everything. But perhaps there’s some glory in death by a light brighter than a thousand suns. A worse fate may await humanity: atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste, minds occupied by the petty amusements of a corporate metaverse. There, nothing is at stake; there are no frontiers to explore; no growth is possible. Nothing to live for, and nothing to die for. As we walk between these twin fates, the light of our civilization dims. But beyond the horizon, we see a new light emerging. Like the sun at dawn, it cannot be stopped. Vitality itself is the foundational value of this new civilizational form, and we have the technology to enact our moral imperative as never before. You’re not answering my…okay, fine, whatever, forget it. As far as I can tell, Praxis is two 25-year-olds with no previous experience, armed with about $10 million in Peter Thiel’s money. Peter Thiel is a smart person known for having good business sense, but he’s also known to have a weakness for young people who dream big and sound like purveyors of esoteric secrets. I wonder if the simplest explanation is just that this is one of the cases where his weakness got the better of his sense, and now these two random people have $10 million earmarked for building a city, and no idea what to do. [CORRECTION: some people involved in Praxis have reached out to tell me that it was $4 million instead of $10 million, and that it was Thiel-backed Pronomos and not Thiel himself. I’ll be getting in touch with them to learn if there are other issues or things I should correct here] But that’s not how they put it! The way they put it is - all previous charter city founders have started by approaching governments and pitching their ideas. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem: governments don’t want to give land to a purely hypothetical city that might not pan out, and the city can’t pan out until governments give it land. Praxis’ plan is to build the community first, then go to a government saying “Here’s 50,000 people who have agreed to join our city, and lots of businesses and organizations that are excited about it. Please give us land for our guaranteed-success, concretely-existing project.” Now this is a different chicken-and-egg problem: why join a community of people with no land and no plans? Praxis writes: What if we try to draw people to new cities not on an economic basis, but rather on a spiritual one? Which city (or country) founding projects have succeeded that have drawn people on a predominantly non-economic, but rather spiritual basis? Among others, Israel and America. Both groups were oppressed, and sought the freedom to live by their values. Both felt the intangible pull of the frontier. Both had a keen historical instinct. This is how cities with spiritual significance are founded. The correct approach to city building in this new world is demand-first (or as Balaji Srinivasan calls it, Cloud City first). We build the citizenry before the city. First, we create communities of true believers, organized around shared values, online. People move to cities for people, and it follows that if you collect a group of people who all want to live together, they’ll all move together if at a moment in time everyone else does, too. Today, we have new tools. The emergence of Web3 enables us to supercharge communities with self-ownership, governance, and determination. Once you build a community of people ready to move to a new city together, you can self-finance the entire project. With something real to offer nations, conversations with governments become productive (e.g. Gigafactory). That’s how you make the risk dominoes fall. The problem is, Israel worked because it had Judaism. Judaism is a very specific belief. Prospera is specifically libertarian, Telosa is specifically Georgist, and even the Bitcoin-shaped volcano city knows what it’s about. What is Praxis? The use of “atrophied bodies submerged in gel, fed synthetic bug paste” as a warning reads very slightly right-wing to me - there’s a right-wing meme about how the media keeps trying to get people to eat bugs, and how this is the shape our future dystopia will take. But whether I’m right or wrong, the fact that it’s hard to tell is a problem. The only other clues we’re getting are their Discord, which seems to be focused around getting a currency called PRAX for completing tasks. Once you get enough, you can become a Member, which seems to be where the real excitement starts. (source) I’m not even being sarcastic - I expect being a member to be quite fun. I say this because when I was a teenager I was part of a bunch of country simulation projects, some of which got past the inherent nerdiness of being a country simulation project exactly the same way Praxis is doing it - by saying that we were going to become a real country someday, as soon as we were big enough to convince people. These were usually fun and interesting and educational, and I made lots of great like-minded teenage and twenty-something friends. But none of them ever came close to becoming a real country, and I’m not sure it was merely for lack of millions of dollars. I hope I’m wrong and they manage to forge new lands through struggle to uplift the human spirit or whatever. Elsewhere In Model Cities Vitalik Buterin on the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies. He recommends they “start with self-contained experiments, and take things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible”, which is a weird way of saying “what we crypto leaders really want is a city at the base of a volcano, shaped like a giant Bitcoin”.

Inline links: this person, this article, some speculation, here, on the elections and the future, says, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!SuHh!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a12676-81c4-49a8-bb20-815d1c3f660b_763x509.jpeg, with a central plaza in the shape of a Bitcoin logo, this article, Akon City, a second one, Bukele, a historic drop in the homicide rate, Dictator Book Club, moving to the Bahamas, moving to the Cayman Islands, this comment, promising the City Of The Future, far as I can tell, the media keeps trying, their Discord, tasks, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2TK6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F020ebe08-e968-45cd-ba39-a91cdc6e5892_473x533.png, source, a bunch of country simulation projects, the intersection between local government and blockchain technologies

Predictions For 2022

February 01, 2022 · Original source

VOX PREDICTIONS 1. Democrats will lose their majorities in the House and Senate (95%): SELL TO 90% 2. Inflation in the US will average under three percent (80%): HOLD 3. Unemployment in the US will fall below four percent by November (80%): SELL to 60% if they mean in November, otherwise hold 4. Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade (65%): SELL to 60% 5. Stephen Breyer will retire from the Supreme Court (55%): N/A 6. Emmanuel Macron will be reelected president of France (65%): HOLD 7. Jair Bolsonaro will be reelected president of Brazil (55%): SELL to 50% 8. Bongbong Marcos will be elected president of the Philippines (55%): BUY to 60% 9. Rebels will not capture Addis Ababa (55%): N/A 10. China will not reopen its borders in the first half of 2022 (80%): BUY to 90% 11. Chinese GDP will continue to grow for the first 3/4 of the year (95%): SELL to 90% 12. 20% of US kids between 0.5 and 5 years old will get at least one COVID vaccine by year's end (65%): HOLD 13. WHO will designate another Variant Of Concern by year's end (75%): HOLD 14. 12 billion COVID shots will be given out globally by 11/2022 (80%): HOLD 15. At least one country will have less than 10% of people vaccinated with two shots by 11/2022 (70%): BUY to 95% 16. A psychedelic drug will be decriminalized/legalized in at least one more US state (75%): HOLD 17. AI will discover a new drug promising enough for clinical trials (85%): HOLD 18. US govt will not renew the ban on funding gain-of-function research (60%): HOLD 19. The Biden administration will set the social cost of carbon at $100/ton or more (70%): HOLD 20. 2022 will be warmer than 2021 (80%): HOLD 21. Kenneth Branagh's Belfast will win Best Picture (55%): SELL to 30% 22. Norway will win the most medals at the 2022 Winter Olympics (60%): HOLD

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half

February 10, 2022 · Original source

#92: Do Gay Rights In India Reduce Discrimination? I’m looking for funding for research that will test whether the expansion of the legal rights of gay people in India reduces discrimination by coordinating a shift in the social norms surrounding anti-gay behaviour. Using the Supreme Court ruling in 2018 that decriminalised homosexuality across India, I will use an RCT to measure the effect of exposing individuals who are not already aware of this law to the information that homosexuality is legal. I will measure how this information impacts participants’ anti-gay behaviours and sentiment. Being told about the law is likely to act as a signal to people that being homophobic is no longer socially acceptable. Even if the information doesn’t change their private attitudes, they may therefore be more likely to act kindly towards gay people when their actions are visible to others. Relatedly, they may be more prone to positive communication about gay people, e.g., they may share less anti-gay news stories on social media. This reduction in anti-gay narratives could in turn help the longer-term process of positive social change. If you’re interested in this project, please email me at dmbwebb@gmail.com!

Information Markets, Decision Markets, Attention Markets, Action Markets

March 28, 2022 · Original source

I once joked that instead of lower courts, we should have prediction markets on what the Supreme Court would think of a given case. Same idea, higher stakes.

Links For April

April 14, 2022 · Original source

29: Marcus v. Search Warrant was a 1961 court case where a magazine seller, unable to sue the police who confiscated his magazines, hit on a novel legal strategy: sue the search warrant. He made it to the Supreme Court and won. Related: US vs. Tyrannosaurus.

Inline links: Marcus v. Search Warrant, US vs. Tyrannosaurus

May 10, 2022 · Original source

Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?: (new) → 19% Aborcasting IE predicting the results of the recent Supreme Court link. Quick summary: markets already expected that the Court would overturn Roe v. Wade (~70% soon), but this moved them closer to 95% immediately. Democrats’ chances in the mid-terms went up 3-5% on the news. Markets are extremely skeptical of claims that this will lead to bans on gay marriage or interracial marriage, or that the Democrats will respond with (successful) court-packing. A single very small and unreliable market says the leak probably came from the left, not the right. Going through at greater length one-by-one: First: how much did the leak change predictions about the case itself? PredictIt had a market going, which said that even before the leak there was only a 15% chance the Court would make Mississippi allow abortions; after the leak, that dropped to 4%. A Metaculus question on Roe v. Wade overturned by 2028 went from 70% to 95%: A question on court packing hasn’t moved at all, suggesting Metaculus doesn’t think this response is in the Democratic playbook. A question on Obergefell v. Hodges, with good participation both before and after the leak, shows no change in probability - it stays consistently around 18-20%. Here’s PredictIt on Republicans’ chances of taking the Senate in November: The red line marks the Supreme Court leak. After a month of near-stability, Democrats’ chances went from 22% to 29%, before stabilizing around 26%. Markets on the Senate and on other sites like Polymarket tell a similar story. This is as far as we can go without using Manifold. Manifold questions have much less volume than PredictIt or Metaculus, and I have much less confidence in them, but for the record, here are a few: Disclaimer: I moved that one a bit myself, it was around 77% and I thought that was too high. Despite the fearmongering, this one looks about right to me. Disclaimer that Manifold probably can’t handle probabilities this small correctly and there’s no reason to think 0.2% is more realistic than 2%. It’s not 10% though. I couldn’t find some markets I wanted, so I’ve created them on Manifold for you to bet on: Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

Inline links: Will Russia formally declare war on Ukraine before August?, a market going, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!LriF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe4dbaa6f-7f4b-465a-bbf3-844e8ee84a41_487x357.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!BN85!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F786526b8-4963-4425-9815-d84e13ef5dd7_767x447.png, question on court packing, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!NiHN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fec90ad32-4f0d-4092-b284-550bba522a4b_773x455.png, Obergefell v. Hodges, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!KuhF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faa78df5a-89b2-40a2-aa2f-d11120876cdd_769x466.png, PredictIt, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!x1aF!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2c12404d-769c-4c3b-b863-ca7084ede93c_675x467.png, Polymarket, https://manifold.markets/fortenforge/did-the-dobbs-v-jackson-leak-come-f, https://manifold.markets/BrianAhuja/will-interracial-marriage-be-banned, Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

The red line marks the Supreme Court leak. After a month of near-stability, Democrats’ chances went from 22% to 29%, before stabilizing around 26%. Markets on the Senate and on other sites like Polymarket tell a similar story. This is as far as we can go without using Manifold. Manifold questions have much less volume than PredictIt or Metaculus, and I have much less confidence in them, but for the record, here are a few: Disclaimer: I moved that one a bit myself, it was around 77% and I thought that was too high. Despite the fearmongering, this one looks about right to me. Disclaimer that Manifold probably can’t handle probabilities this small correctly and there’s no reason to think 0.2% is more realistic than 2%. It’s not 10% though. I couldn’t find some markets I wanted, so I’ve created them on Manifold for you to bet on: Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

Inline links: Polymarket, https://manifold.markets/fortenforge/did-the-dobbs-v-jackson-leak-come-f, https://manifold.markets/BrianAhuja/will-interracial-marriage-be-banned, Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

Inline links: Will the Supreme Court leaker’s identity be known by 2023?

California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z

May 24, 2022 · Original source

#Progressive #antiwar #AntiNazi #Democratic (socially #Libertarian!) / #LOVEparty! #Abolitionist pro-#democracy #candidate for #president! (I've been working last 3 years on filing Supreme Court case , just filed 6/24/19, but have to refile in next few days!, to make #Hillary Clinton president, b/c #SheWon, but LOST case on Oct. 15, 2019, w/ J. Roberts NOT voting b/c I was suing him f/ swearing in trump, originally suing to block him from swearing in trump b/c he lost to Hillary Clinton by 3m votes, so not who we elected f/ president, so should have sworn in Hillary!!!)!

Your Book Review: The Dawn Of Everything

June 10, 2022 · Original source

For what are the hallmarks of civilization? I’d venture to say: immunity to gossip. Are not our paragons of civilization figures like Supreme Court justices or tenured professors, or protected classes with impunity to speak and present new ideas, like journalists or scientists?

Your Book Review: Public Choice Theory And The Illusion Of Grand Strategy

June 24, 2022 · Original source

Reinforcing the Supreme Court ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States by prosecuting any individual who publicises classified material, including top military officials and journalists who routinely leak classified material but are never prosecuted (unlike whistleblowers like Edward Snowden)

Links For October

October 12, 2022 · Original source

21: The Supreme Court will probably strike down affirmative action next term, but academics are already planning to replace it with a system of ranking applicants on diversity statements, how many racial-equity-related classes they took as an high schooler, and how many racial-equity-related extracurriculars they did. I can’t tell whether the goal here is to increase admission of minorities (under the assumption that they will either naturally do better at these things, or that the assessment can be weighted in their favor), to increase admissions of racial activists regardless of their own race, or both. [EDIT: A commenter suggests real decision-makers are not taking these kinds of proposals seriously]

Inline links: academics are already planning, A commenter suggests

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley

October 13, 2022 · Original source

The change [from pro-farm to anti-farm policy in California] is due to a Supreme Court decision. It used to be that Calif. Senators were elected on a scheme that gave each county a representation proportional to its land area. The Supreme Court decided that this was invalid…so now they're elected based on population. And most of the population lives in cities.

My California Ballot 2022

November 04, 2022 · Original source

Rob Bonta is a partisan Democrat who seems to really like publicity stunts for Democratic causes. When Texas set a bounty for reporting illegal abortions, Bonta had California set a bounty for reporting illegal guns to troll Texas (he seems to think it is immoral and unconstitutional, but wants the Supreme Court to “call his bluff”). He has gone to all 58 counties of California telling them to fight hate crimes more, and constantly comes up with newer and showier ways of demonstrating how much he hates guns. More substantially, he has been a powerful advocate for increased housing and has successfully sued cities that oppose denser zoning.

Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency

December 08, 2022 · Original source

The most obvious example of this is the way Paypal bans sex workers (including sometimes confiscating the money in their accounts). I don’t think the CEO of Paypal is personally a prude. I think he’s afraid that he’ll get in trouble with the government if he looks like he’s soft on “public indecency”. Without any official diktats that could become a Supreme Court case, the government successfully makes sex work punishingly hard.

Inline links: Paypal bans sex workers

Highlights From The Comments On Bobos In Paradise

December 09, 2022 · Original source

I could go either way on this. There’s a pretty strong movement for the Ivies to discriminate less against Asians now, even though that would change the makeup of the ruling class. But I hadn’t though of it that way until reading this book, and given that the movement might succeed, it doesn’t seem like the current ruling class is resisting it that hard (though admittedly, Republican Supreme Court justices are a noncentral example!)

Starting around 1970, people who hadn't gone to any Ivy League or equivalent school (eg MIT) suddenly were blocked from reaching positions of power, wealth, or prestige--in politics, law, finance, business, education, and science. I did a survey around 2010 of people who had Nobels in physics, and found that of those who attended college before 1970, most had either not attended an ivy, or attended an ivy or equivalent (in physics) on a full-tuition merit scholarship. After 1970, that number dropped to... a very small number, impossible to establish because I couldn't know whether non-white-male students had received a full-tuition scholarship, but possibly zero. By the 1980s (IIRC), the number of Supreme Court justices who hadn't attended an Ivy had dropped from "most of them" to zero or one. After 1990, the same could be said of elected US Presidents, and the number of new American industrialist billionaires who hadn't attended an ivy or equivalent had dropped from "most of them" to a few, owing to big-time venture capitalists establishing a strong preference for funding only ivy-league grads.

Which Political Victories Cause Backlash?

January 19, 2023 · Original source

After a major conservative victory (the Supreme Court overturning Roe), Americans’ opinions shifted heavily in a pro-choice direction after a long period of stalemate. The change seems to be of about equal magnitude regardless of political affiliation:

The problem is, I can’t really find this effect for recent Democratic victories. For example, in 2015 the Supreme Court ruled (in Obergefell) that gay marriage was legal. On a thermostatic picture, one might have expected the public to turn against gay marriage. Here’s the data (source):

Inline links: source

Links For February 2023

February 09, 2023 · Original source

In theory this also paves the way for human meat, though regulators might have other ideas. 2: Eight years ago I wrote an article about how the government should stop restricting doctors’ ability to prescribe suboxone, a useful medicine for opioid abuse. Last month, the government finally stopped the restrictions. Good for them! 3: Carl Sagan married three times. His first wife was legendary biologist Lynn Margulis, who discovered mitochondrial endosymbiosis, then went off the deep end and became an AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther. His second wife drew the Pioneer plaque. His third wife was one of the women who designed the Voyager golden record. 4: Claim: Chinese sources seem to back this up (and related BBC), but I’m skeptical: is this really the best way to satisfy a “must fight with medieval weapons” constraint? Why not crossbows? 5: Did you know: Alex Berenson, who runs the most popular anti-vaccine Substack, has had an unusual career: he used to be an investigative reporter for the New York Times, and also wrote a series of bestselling spy novels. 6: Less Wrong: I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format. Apparently there’s a thing where Zoomers are supposedly more likely to learn a text if you overlay it on on a fast-paced video game, example here. 7: By this point we’ve probably all heard stories about people who win the lottery and then end up bankrupt and miserable after X months or years. I had always assumed this was limited to very poor people with no understanding of money. This forum post argues it’s not, and tells the story of a man who started out with $15 million and still ruined his life after winning $170 million more in the lottery. 8: Did you know: Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II was a 5th century Jewish leader who took advantage of the chaos caused by weird Zoroastrian communists to secede and turn the city of Al-Mada’in, Iraq into an independent Jewish state for seven years. 9: Why doesn’t the Supreme Court have vice-justices? 10: Steve Sailer (warning: unz.com, far-right site, some firewalls will flag or block it): why aren’t there more gay English soccer players? Thousands of current or recent English pro soccer players, the media is really interested in finding a gay one so they can run a “Historic First” article, and apparently they can’t. There are rumors that players are afraid to come out because of homophobia, but there are at least 2,000 retired soccer players and only one of them has come out as gay. “I’m increasingly sympathetic to [the] theory that whatever psychosocial traits make men highly interested in team sports make them highly heterosexual too”. Is this true of other countries and other sports? 11: Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests. Iran thought it was facing an overpopulation crisis in the 80s and tried some reforms to lower family size. The reforms worked overwhelmingly well, causing “the most dramatic transition ever recorded in demographic history”, from 6.5 to 2.5 children per woman in thirty years. Iran now has “lower maternal mortality than the US”, and an education system where “women in university outnumber males”. This kind of demography isn’t usually compatible with patriarchal religious institutions, and the Ayatollahs are aware of this; in a rare admission of error, Khameini said that “Government officials were wrong on this matter, and I, too, had a part. . . . May God and history forgive us.” Now they’re trying to increase average family size and put the genie back in the bottle; Hungary can tell them about the limits of that strategy. 12: What it looks like to be on shrooms: I haven’t used shrooms myself so cannot confirm or deny, but this is oddly compelling, and makes some things I’ve read about neuroscience of vision make more sense. I wonder if you could get HPPD from watching videos like this for too long. 13: Study: federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective. Cancer research produces so many valuable treatments that it saves one DALY per $326 spent. For comparison, health systems usually consider an intervention good value-for-money if it saves at least one DALY per $50,000. By combing the Earth far and wide, effective altruists have tentatively found one or two opportunities in the poorest parts of Africa to save lives at $100/DALY, but these are extremely rare exceptions and I wouldn’t have expected anything in the US to be within an order of magnitude of that. Either this finding is fake, or we should all be donating to federal cancer research instead of whatever else we’re doing. 14: Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in The Office. This one is pretty good, also name-drops Bobos In Paradise. I’m still surprised this is such a common thing. 15: Marginal Revolution: FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices. Study looks at what happens when the FDA reclassifies medical devices from a highly-regulated to a less-highly-regulated category; in general, those devices get better, cheaper, and there are somewhere between similar and fewer deaths/injuries related to those devices. Why would safety increase? The author suggests that regulation is a defense against lawsuits (“Your Honor, the FDA agreed to approve our device, so it can’t have been bad!”), and removing that defense makes companies more lawsuit-conscious and careful; Alex Tabarrok suggests a bigger effect may be allowing more innovation towards safer versions. 16: Ozy writes about Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams (ie the other member of the Inklings) 17: Did you know: the Congressman who founded the House Committee On Un-American Activities was, in fact, a paid Soviet spy (tweet, Wiki article). This actually makes sense; he originally started HUAC to root out fascists, and it only got turned against communists later on. “There has been a push to rename the street [currently named after the Soviet spy], but as of 2018 it has been unsuccessful.” 18: Idle Words: Why Not Mars? Surprisingly strong argument for why sending humans to Mars is harder than people think, of minimal scientific value, and likely to contaminate all future searches for microbial life and ruin our chance to study the topic. Concludes that we should abandon the allure of human space travel and just send probes everywhere. This makes short-term sense, but I wonder what this author’s vision of the future is - do we just stay on Earth forever? If not, don’t we have to start trying to do the hard thing at some point? (I don’t care about this because I assume AI will will flip the gameboard one way or another, but Ceglowski is a noted singularity skeptic and should probably have opinions about long-term things). 19: Metacelsus and Razib on epigenetics. Stop using it to claim there’s “intergenerational trauma”! 20: Tafl games are a family of European games, played in areas as diverse as Iceland, Ireland, Britain, and Denmark, probably sharing descent from a now-lost board game of ancient Rome. One of them, Hnetafl, was the chief board game of the Vikings and is affectionately called “Viking chess”. The one we actually know the rules for is the Saami version, Tablut, which survived long enough for Linnaeus (the taxonomy guy!) to write down the rules. 21: Shot: Chaser: (source) 22: Related: the very center of GPT’s embedding space contains a few unusual tokens including the string “SolidGoldMagikarp”. GPT displays anomalous behavior if these tokens are inserted in a query; for example, it treats “SolidGoldMagikarp” as the word “distribute”. ChatGPT is pretty advanced and fails semi-gracefully here; GPT-2’s reaction to these tokens is more disturbing: (source: Less Wrong) Further investigation determined that many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity. The most likely explanation, according to the discoverers, is that these names were in GPT’s tokenization data, but not its training data (maybe they were especially common in the tokenization data because they made thousands of posts with numbers in them, but didn’t make it into the training data because their posts had no content?) - that leaves them existing without content, and GPT tries to round them off to some other “nearby” token (by incomprehensible AI standards of nearbyness). Congrats to the SERI-MATS AI alignment researchers who found all of this; maybe this makes it 0.0001% less likely that the AI which controls the nuclear arsenal in twenty years will have equally inexplicable behavior. 23: More language model news: LLM that understands and can explain images

Inline links: I wrote an article about how, finally stopped the restrictions, married three times, Lynn Margulis, drew the, Chinese, and related BBC, Alex Berenson, I Converted Book 1 Of The Less Wrong Sequences Into A Zoomer-Readable Format, example here, This forum post argues it’s not, Exiliarch Mar-Zutra II, weird Zoroastrian communists, vice-justices, why aren’t there more gay English soccer players?, Adam Tooze on the demographic background to Iran’s protests, federal cancer funding is extraordinarily effective, Yet another person building a vast theory of human interaction off of the characters in, FDA Deregulation Increases Safety And Innovation And Reduces Prices, Interesting People Of History: Charles Williams, tweet, Wiki article, Why Not Mars?, Metacelsus, Razib, Tafl games, Tablut, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EhT-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F39755d06-3101-44d5-bb50-0a6b99155fae_807x776.png, source, contains a few unusual tokens, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!rkvW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdeb0cd39-6942-44c0-85ef-0fac91b362e3_536x147.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!QIzo!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fba1d0783-5826-48a3-9ead-1e803042e96d_622x631.png, Less Wrong, many of these tokens are the screen names of a group of Redditors who attempted to count to infinity, SERI-MATS, LLM that understands and can explain images

Galton, Ehrlich, Buck

May 15, 2023 · Original source

Adraste: Ah yes, mental disabilities. Carrie Buck was the plaintiff in Buck v. Bell, the case where the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that involuntary sterilization was fully constitutional. She was sterilized for a mental disability. . . after making the honor roll at her school! Probably a family member raped her, and the family was trying to save their reputation and prevent any further inconvenient pregnancies. Then they sterilized her sister, on the grounds that she was related to Carrie and so probably had the same genes. Nobody knows how many of the hundred-thousand-odd forced sterilizations in the US were like this. Probably a lot. Again, not that it would have been any better if they were all real disability cases - just that the sheer incompetence and callousness of the people charged with making these life-ruining decisions is impossible to overestimate.

Coria: Absolutely not. I’m only recommending the existence of governments, which has been standard practice since Gilgamesh. Many things are rights violations - for example, seizing someone’s property. But when a legitimate government does so in the public interest after due consideration, we accept it as part of living in a society. It was a rights violation to quarantine an entire population in their homes during the early days of the coronavirus. But the legitimate government decided to do it in order to protect the public interest, so it’s not morally equivalent to kidnapping or whatever we would call it if a random person did it. And some states still castrate pedophiles as a punishment - one which naturally includes sterilization - and I have no particular problem with that. So it seems I must believe governments may sometimes involuntarily sterilize citizens when it is in the public interest. Did you know the Supreme Court’s ruling on Buck said that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes?”

Highlights From The Comments On The Academic Job Market

June 06, 2023 · Original source

Tenure is the "weird path dependence due to historical circumstances" thing. Probably no one would set up the system the way it is today if one were starting from scratch. Tenure worked somewhat okay when lifespans were shorter and mandatory retirement hadn't been struck down the Supreme Court (one old article: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/15/us/new-law-against-age-bias-on-campus-clogs-academic-pipeline-critics-say.html).

Inline links: https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/15/us/new-law-against-age-bias-on-campus-clogs-academic-pipeline-critics-say.html

Basically, the bargain here is just that if surplus academics are willing to compromise SOME of their self-regarding and comically left-wing "ideals," move to some underserved working-class community, and actually make themselves useful, while abstaining from the corrupt academic system somewhat in potentially controversial ways, right-wing taxpayers should and reasonably will open their wallets and hand out genuinely life-changing compensation. It would require legal cover because the academic bums have written their special privileges into the legal system itself in deep ways, but that's why you have a legislature. You can literally just change the law to fix things. Conservatives control the Supreme Court and it would be pretty perverse and surprising if they actually sabotaged a program like this by enforcing special rights for academic dweebs who want nonsense guild rules enforced as a matter of first-rank constitutional principle.

Links For July 2023

July 06, 2023 · Original source

The CSS General Price 17: Several people have said nice things about the Rose Garden Inn, a rationalist events space where we hold Berkeley ACX meetups. Mingyuan, who helped decorate it, now has a Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide with what she’s learned about light color temperature, chairs, rugs, and more. 18: Elo Everything is simple: it gives you two random people/objects/concepts, for example “soap” and “Nelson Mandela”, and you pick which one you prefer. Then they have a leaderboard with everything’s Elo (a way of ranking things based on victory in binary contests). The current #1 entity is oxygen; the bottom (#2260) entity is the KKK. 19: Erik Hoel tries to deflate UFO rumors. Although most of the post is the standard “here’s a time someone thought they saw a UFO but it had a reasonable explanation”, the highlight is the dissection of the credulous 2017 NYT article on UFOs, which based on his story sounds totally inexcusable (yes, the government funded a lot of money into UFO research, but only in the sense that Nevada Senator Harry Reid threw lots of money and government-sponsored prestige at random crazy people in his state, because he was either gullible or corrupt). Nothing here directly addresses the current spate of UFO rumors, but the silliness of the previous batch is indirect evidence of a sort. One thing he didn’t highlight: the Robert Bigelow who owned Skinwalker Ranch is the same guy who founded Bigelow Aerospace, an exciting-sounding private spaceflight company about which I suddenly have many more doubts. 20: Related: the most practical demand I’ve heard from people who take the current UFO rumors seriously is that AARO (the government’s new UFO investigation group) should get Title 50 authority (the right to demand classified information from intelligence services). Read their campaign (maybe sort of supported by some members of Congress) here. Suspicious detail: the colonel saying UFOs are real is named “Karl Nell”. 21: This month in social justice: New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists; “diverse” patients can jump ahead in the queue compared to other patients who may have waited longer or be sicker. The government says this just “corrects” institutional biases which exist at other stages; I don’t know the New Zealand situation but have found previous claims of this sort flimsy. Here are various articles talking about how anyone who is against this system lacks context on how it won’t work that way, plus also it already works this way so nothing will change, plus it will revolutionize health equity so you’d have to be a monster to object, plus it will make no difference so anyone who protests is just manufacturing fake outrage. I can’t find the algorithm they say they’re using anywhere; here is a FOIA-equivalent request for it which hasn’t been answered yet. This file seems related and suggests Maori should get the highest priority and Asians the lowest priority, but I’m not sure they’re exactly following the science here. I think of this in the context of the US COVID vaccine prioritization effort; not only did it cause hundreds or thousands of unnecessary deaths by giving vaccines to young healthy low-risk members of favored groups before old sick high-risk members of disfavored ones, it also caused scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups because of implementation details. We should be fighting for less of this, not more. 22: Related: affirmative action Supreme Court ruling links roundup: Will the ruling really change admissions policies, or will universities find a way around it? Humphrey on DSL works in the field and says he thinks it will produce real change.

Inline links: General Price, Rationalist Interior Decorating Guide, Elo Everything, leaderboard, tries to deflate UFO rumors, Bigelow Aerospace, maybe sort of supported by, here, is named, New Zealand health system implements affirmative action for surgery wait lists, various, articles, here, This file, scarce vaccine doses to be wasted rather than spent on members of disfavored groups, says he thinks it will produce real change

Dictator Book Club: Putin

August 03, 2023 · Original source

So could it happen here? Probably not. The closest US equivalents are the FBI and CIA. Right now they seem more aligned with the Democratic side of the aisle, so Trump or some future Trump would have a hard time winning their total loyalty. As for the Democrats, I think it’s against their ideological DNA to do Mafia-style killings. I’m not being some misty-eyed optimist here. I absolutely believe there are factions among the Democrats who would love to restrict free speech, pack the Supreme Court, divert Congressional powers to the executive branch, and lots of other creepy authoritarian things. But I just can’t take seriously the idea of Joe Biden / Kamala Harris / Chuck Schumer ordering goons to rough someone up3.

Inline links: 3

Links For August 2023

August 09, 2023 · Original source

25: Elsewhere in bad policy: after California voted for higher standards for animal welfare in factory farms, the agricultural industry has proposed the EATS Act, banning states from setting standards for what agricultural products they will allow. This seems like a clear attack on states’ rights to me. Still, its supporters cast it as promoting states’ rights, since if eg California bans unethically-factory-farmed meat then Iowa doesn’t have the right to unethically-factory-farm its meat if it wants to sell to California. This is a stupid argument, like saying that it “promotes individual rights” to force dieters to eat high-calorie meals, because their decision not to do so impinges on the rights of chefs to make their meals high-calorie if they would like to sell to dieters. If you’re making a federal power grab, at least admit you’re making a federal power grab! I hope this will either fail or get struck down by the Supreme Court. A post on the Effective Altruist forum urges you to write your representative.

Inline links: the EATS Act, its supporters, A post on the Effective Altruist forum

My Presidential Platform

September 05, 2023 · Original source

Also, everyone including Republicans supports free government-sponsored health care when it’s through the Veterans Affairs system, so we can just make all these people eligible for VA care and solve the healthcare crisis. Appoint Governor Jim Justice To The Supreme Court Jim Justice is the current governor of West Virginia. If he were on the Supreme Court, people would have to address him as Justice Justice. I believe that we as a nation can and should make this happen.

Inline links: Jim Justice

Jim Justice is the current governor of West Virginia. If he were on the Supreme Court, people would have to address him as Justice Justice. I believe that we as a nation can and should make this happen.

Inline links: Jim Justice

Highlights From The Comments On Last Week's Model Cities Post

September 11, 2023 · Original source

The government’s other option is to have the Supreme Court declare ZEDEs unconstitutional. This would be a bold strategy, since they were passed through constitutional amendment and it seems like the constitution should be constitutional by definition. But the new government has “packed” the Supreme Court with its allies (to be fair, so did the last government) and might be able to pull this off. But so far they haven’t tried this, and Prospera thinks even if they succeeded it would ban new ZEDEs but not affect existing ones.

Links For January 2024

January 18, 2024 · Original source

37: TracingWoodgrains: The Republican Party Is Doomed. Not electorally; it can still win elections as much as ever. But so many educated elites have abandoned it that it won’t be able to govern effectively (especially in the modern world where you need to cross your bureaucratic Ts or your policy will be overturned by the Supreme Court). All of this is a pretty common take (albeit well-presented). But I was intrigued by a conclusion hinted at in the article and developed more in comments sections, which is that Republicans will be dragged kicking and screaming towards something like small-government libertarianism, by the brute fact that government power will always work against them no matter how many elections they win. That is, Republicans will never be able to teach conservative principles (or even stop the teaching of woke principles) in the education system, because even if a future President Trump appoints a conservative Secretary of Education, all the teachers’ unions / principals / education degree-granting institutions will be left-wing. But Republicans might be able to create a robust charter school / home school / private school system that circumvents the power of all these groups and gives it back to parents. And ~50% of parents are conservative, which is a better deal than they’d get anywhere else. I dunno, could work.

Inline links: The Republican Party Is Doomed

Links For February 2024

February 29, 2024 · Original source

12: Did you know: by a 52-48 margin, black people approve of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to ban affirmative action at universities. Big age gap; older black people are mostly against, younger mostly for. But there’s some reason to think that many of them didn’t entirely understand the ruling and thought it banned pro-white racism or something; a majority of young black adults think the decision will make it easier for blacks to attend university.

Inline links: black people approve of the Supreme Court’s recent decision

Book Review Contest Rules 2024

March 02, 2024 · Original source

In past years, most reviews have been nonfiction on technical topics. To keep things interesting, I’m going to try some affirmative action this time (sorry, Supreme Court). ~25% of finalist slots will be reserved for books from nontraditional categories - fiction, poetry, and books from before 1900 are the ones I can think of right now, but feel free to try other nontraditional books.

May 13, 2024 · Original source

Nate Silver, Josh Barro, and others have been banging this drum recently: the most important thing Democrats can do this year is get Sonia Sotomayor to retire. Sotomayor is an older liberal-leaning Supreme Court justice. She might get sick or die in the next four years, and if Republicans win the 2024 election, then they get to choose her replacement and the Court shifts even further right. If she retired today, Biden and the Democratic Senate would choose her replacement and the Court wouldn’t shift. She doesn’t want to resign, but Silver (remembering the similar case of RBG) thinks Democrats should pressure her as best they can. The markets have been shifting between 20% and 40%, but don’t seem to expect this to happen.

Inline links: Nate Silver, Josh Barro

The Supreme Court recently said there were so many presidential immunity issues that it’s going to take forever to start trying the federal case, which is why that one is at 20%.

Your Book Review: Dominion

June 28, 2024 · Original source

That said, there are flowers of hope that spring through the cracks. There was the passage of Prop 12 in California, where voters opted to give more space to farmed animals. The appeals went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the law was upheld. Scully spends the last part of the book imploring us to change the laws so that more animals are protected, so I’m sure he smiled at that one.

Inline links: passage of Prop 12 in California

Highlights From The Comments On Mentally Ill Homeless People

July 18, 2024 · Original source

People think that “asylums” solve this because you just have to prove that someone is mentally ill. But this is also hard (will police be walking around administering the PANSS to everyone they see in a tent?) and under the existing systems you have to prove some additional point about danger. Even with the recent Supreme Court Grant’s Pass decision, there are a hundred finicky laws and precedents determining who you can and can’t arrest and for how long. I would like to see whether your plan involves pretending these don’t exist, or a concerted campaign to bring each one to the Supreme Court and overturn them, or what.

See my review of Revolt Of The Public. As I tried to say in the first part of the post, this is reasonable and sympathetic. But if people keep not listening to your demands, then learning more about the specifics might help you understand why. There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?” I don’t know if the anti-gun people are doing anything wrong here exactly, I just know they’re going to be constantly confused and disappointed, and that anyone else who tries the same strategy will get the same results. Realistically, my excuse for writing the post was that I read this and this article by Freddie deBoer which assume that there is some clearly-defined thing called “involuntary treatment” and that the kindest option for the mentally ill and everyone else is to lift some kind of law preventing us from delivering it. Even if it’s permissible for the average person to just say “less homeless crime, please”, I feel like at the point where you’re a public intellectual leading the public discussion, you have some responsibility to start talking specifics. 2. Specific Comments And Responses Shako (blog) writes: I agree with your point in the post. I’ll add though that a policy that is adjacent to this is be “cruel and draconian” to the subset of homeless who commit anti-social crimes. If we removed the subset of criminals from west coast homelessness the problem would be still visible but far far less concerning to those of us who live among it. This is where I land too, but I think it’s very hard. If a homeless person stabs someone, then I think most places (I don’t know if this includes SF), they get prosecuted under general anti-stabbing laws, which the police mostly have enough resources to investigate. If someone just gets in people’s face a lot and screams and litters, then what? Most of the time, police won’t be around to see this. Most of the time, the victim won’t go through the trouble of pressing charges. If they did, it would be he said, she said. Even if the government puts in the effort to actually try the case, screaming at people and littering is probably a couple-month sentence at most. Eledex tells a related story in Part 3 here. A group of homeless people took up residence in an empty lot next to his house, harassed him, set things on fire, etc. This is much worse than the average homeless person just bothering tourists, but when he called the police, they never followed up. I assume if they had tried, the homeless people’s public defender could have said something like “are you sure these homeless people are the same ones who set fire to your stuff?”, Eledex would have said “they’re the homeless people camping on the lot where it happened, but I don’t, like, recognize them or anything”, the public defender would have said “well how do you know those people didn’t leave and some new homeless people came on to the lot?” and everyone would admit they couldn’t prove that. So the normal criminal system might not be set up to deal with these kinds of issues, which I think is why there’s so much demand for some extreme law that criminalizes the entire concept of being this sort of person. But I do worry that if police don’t have the resources to deal with normal crimes, then whoever is charged with enforcing the new extreme law won’t have enough resources to do it well either - and that any society capable of enforcing the new extreme law would also be capable of solving this through normal policing. Humphrey Appleby writes: Can we look at what other places do? What is eg Salt Lake City’s solution? (Possibly, export the homeless to SF). What about Zurich? Singapore? Edinburgh? The US in general and SF in particular seems to have this problem unusually bad, so one could reasonably look elsewhere for ideas. I talk a little more about this at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko, but I think most places' solutions are a combination of: 1. Cheaper housing so that more people can afford homes 2. Cheaper housing so that the government has an easier time giving free homes to people who can't afford their own 3. Homeless shelters 4. Frequent bad weather, forcing the homeless to use the homeless shelters at least sometime, which gets their foot in the door 5. Laws requiring the homeless to use the homeless shelters, which I am much less against when the homeless shelters exist. Doktor Zum writes: At one point, there were something like 600,000 Americans in long-term psychiatric institutions, and that was in a less populous America. Start by locking up 600K and then lock up more. Ah, but where do you put them? The 50 states are dotted with the creepy and picturesque ruins of all the old mental asylums--you can't put them there! It's true that the current government (states, local and federal) are totally incapable of building and running a vast network of psychiatric hospitals, but don't we want government to do things like build nuclear power plants and also lots of housing? If I'm making an argument for cheaper housing and you say "government can't/won't ever allow more building," am I supposed to say that you have won the argument? Unless we want to embrace full anarcho-capitalism, we have to believe that it is possible to have a government that can do things that it did in the 1950s like (a) apprehend and detain the severely mentally ill, (b) back and create lots of nuclear power plants, and (c) build abundant housing and infrastructure. People say “we had giant institutions once, so we can do it again”. This is basically true, but with some missed subtlety. The 600,000 people in the old institutions included: Demented old people (eg Alzheimers)

Inline links: my review of Revolt Of The Public, this, this, blog, here, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-san-fransicko

Finally and probably most important to your point: the Supreme Court did recently rule that you can technically criminalize homelessness, but actually prosecuting the "crime" of homelessness might be onerous in the future, since there would be numerous active defenses, everything from "there were no shelters available" to the truly preposterous "oh gosh, this was a big misunderstanding, I was walking back to my house and then a dude came out of nowhere and beat me and threw me in a ditch and that's why i'm in this ditch at 3AM". Trouble is that even if your defense is truly preposterous, you get a trial...

Notes From The Progress Studies Conference

October 24, 2024 · Original source

I got to attend a session on SB 1047, the recently-vetoed California AI regulation bill. The most interesting thing I learned was that California’s position as home to all big American AI companies was irrelevant - the bill could have equally well been in New York or Texas. Any state can try to regulate any industry, and the industry has to comply or leave the state; it’s almost never worth the economic loss to abandon big states, so legislation in any big state has nationwide effects. Everyone agrees this is awkward, but the Supreme Court recently confirmed that it was true in a ruling on Prop 12, California’s law demanding better conditions for factory-farmed pigs. California doesn’t have a lot of factory-farmed pigs, so this law primarily demanded that other states give their pigs better conditions if they wanted to sell pork in California (which they all do). The Supreme Court said this was fine, and presumably would make the same decision if New York or Texas tried to regulate AI. The federal government tends to think of these situations as an invitation to step in (though it hasn’t with Prop 12), and if too many states make too many confusing regulations then Congress will probably pass a law to sort things out. But for now, it’s a free-for-all.

Inline links: Prop 12

The Case Against California Proposition 36

October 29, 2024 · Original source

In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California prisons were so overcrowded that their conditions violated the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. That year, the state assembly passed a package of reforms called "realignment," which shifted supervision of low-level offenders from the state to the counties. Then, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 47, which reduced some felony crimes to misdemeanors – theft of goods valued at under $950 and simple drug possession – and made people in prison for those crimes eligible for resentencing. Together, realignment and Prop 47 brought down California’s prison and jail population by 55,000.

Links For November 2024

November 01, 2024 · Original source

13: Gwern on the chip embargo: It is pretty damning. We're told the chip embargo has failed, and smugglers have been running rampant for years, and China is about to jump light years beyond the West and enslave us with AXiI (if you will) . . . And then an expert casually remarks that all of China put together, smuggling chips since 2022, has fewer H100s than Elon Musk orders for his datacenter while playing Elden Ring. And even with that huge bottleneck and 1.4 billion people, there's so little demand for them that they cost less per hour than in the West, where AI is redhot and we can't get enough H100s in datacenters. (And where the serious AI people are now discussing how to put that many into a single datacenter for a single run before the next scaleup with B200s obsoletes those...) 14: A company called Cosm has raised $250 million to build “immersive sports experiences”, ie giant buildings sort of like a cross between a stadium and a movie theater where people can get together and watch high-quality televised sports games in a “realistic” setting; they already have facilities in Dallas and Los Angeles. 15: Cremieux: The Ottoman Origins Of Modernity. The “Ottoman” bit is a distractor; the Ottomans fought the Catholics long enough for the Protestants to get a foothold, and then the Protestants established modernity. A useful pushback against the pushback that the Catholic Church never persecuted scientists or held back progress. I’m most interested in this post in the context of Cremieux saying he wrote it in two hours. Even I can’t work that fast! 16: The Green Party, a US third party, tried to put their candidate Jill Stein on the ballot in November. The Nevada election office sent them the wrong forms and gave them false advice about the process. The Greens filed the wrong forms, the Democrats sued, and the Supreme Court disqualified Stein, calling the election office’s incorrect advice an “unfortunate mistake”. I’m disappointed in this outcome - partly for the obvious reasons, but also because the incorrect forms they submitted technically should have added a state referendum to the ballot containing only the text “Jill Stein”. If they’re going to disqualify her candidacy, then I think they should at least hold the state referendum! 17: Nostalgebraist: Google has a new tool out that will create an AI podcast for any text; you hand it the text (could be a blog post, article, or work of fiction), and the tool generates a podcast of two AI hosts discussing it. You can find podcast discussions of Nostalgebraist’s fiction (Northern Caves and Almost Nowhere) at the link, but the acknowledged peak of the genre is Podcast Hosts Discover They’re AI, Not Human, And Spiral Into Existential Meltdown. 18: Also Nostalgebraist: The Case For Chain Of Thought Unfaithfulness Is Overstated. New AIs like o1 give “chain of thought”, ie display what they’re thinking after each step. This seems like a promising avenue to solve alignment - just see whether they’re thinking “and now I will plot against humans”. Unfortunately it’s not so easy; the chain of thought isn’t always accurate (you can sometimes catch the AI “hiding” thoughts it doesn’t want its human overseers to know, like when it’s using a racial stereotype). This article argues that these examples aren’t as exciting as they sound, and chain-of-thought accurately reflects reasoning for most tasks. 19: Australian government considers making doxxing a crime punishable by up to seven years in jail. 20: Getting your brain cryogenically frozen after your death is now free. 21: Cube Flipper: Hypercomputation without bothering the cactus people. The visual system must solve difficult math problems when translating the 2D visual field into a 3D world. Can we harness this innate mathematical ability to do arbitrary work? Cognitive scientist Mark Changizi developed a series of visual circuits (eg XOR gates) based on Necker cubes, probably easier seen than described: After surveying the field, Cube Flipper proposes a more advanced visual computer based on taking DMT and viewing certain types of tiles with slight deviations: …and makes the extreme claim that something like this might demonstrate hypercomputation, ie the visual system has semi-magic computational properties beyond those permitted by normal physical laws. I am skeptical but appreciate the survey of visual computing (as well as the callback to one of my older posts). 22: Material implication in Mormonism: In the book Doctrines and Covenants, Joseph Smith reports that God told him that if he lived to be 85, he would see the Second Coming (which would place it in 1890 - 1891). Mormon apologists note that Joseph Smith did not live to be 85, so no conclusion can be drawn. 23: More old-timey psychiatric ads (this one is from 1952, source: @justin_garson): This was before they invented what we would call antidepressants today; Dexedrine is an amphetamine related to Adderall. 24: Congratulations to Open Philanthropy, the biggest effective altruist foundation… …whose grantee David Baker recently won a Nobel Prize for his research on synthetic proteins. Potential applications include new drugs, vaccines, and materials. 25: Rich Kid Memes And The Online Culture Of The One Percent. Rich people who want to signal group membership to other rich people online can’t boast about how rich they are; that would be gauche. Instead, they’ve settled on the solution of making fun of rich people in hyperspecific language that proves familiarity with the culture. 26: Tap Water Sommelier: Vladimir Putin has two sons, ages 5 and 9. They are kept in luxurious but total isolation from the outside world and raised by flunkies who are too scared to punish/restrain them in any way. Also some discussion of an unexpected historical analogue. 27: Experiment from Colombia: replacing experienced teachers with less-experience but higher-scoring-on-tests teachers significantly decreased student performance. Got to admit I was expecting the opposite of this, I’d seen US data saying that experience didn’t matter and teacher intelligence did. Looking over this more, I find lots of studies on both sides and will go back to agnosticism on this question until someone I trust investigates further. 28: Large scale-formal Intellectual Turing Test finds that people can imitate partisans effectively; ie nobody on either side can tell the difference between a Democrat arguing for Democrat values vs. a Republican-pretending-to-be-a-Democrat arguing for Democrat values (and vice versa). This study used a 100 word essay on why you supported your party (you can see if you can do better here), but past attempts with different structures (religion, vegetarianism, polyamory) have shown broadly the same results. The researchers try to put this in the context of various studies showing that people do misunderstand their opponents (eg think they’re more extreme, underestimate the level of common ground), but it seems like intellectual Turing Tests aren’t a good way to measure or tease out this misunderstanding. 29: Congratulations to Substacker WoolyAI for doing the impossible and providing a genuinely novel and interesting (to me) take on pickup artistry: 30: Did you know: if you Google “cool websites”, our subreddit (r/slatestarcodex) is the first result. 31: Moshe Koppel, who works at the intersection of computer science and Talmud, is writing a series of posts (presumably) based off of my Every Bay Area House Party, titled Jerusalem Area House Party (it’s multiple part, you have to go to the main Substack page to find the others). I won’t necessarily link everyone who riffs off one of my posts - but honestly I probably will if you also have a Wikipedia page that describes you as working on computational Talmudology. 32: David Roman says it’s a myth that Arabic scholars rescued and preserved the works of the great classical authors. 33: Medications often decrease “secondary endpoints” (eg stroke, heart attack), but the holy grail of pharma studies is proving that a certain drug decreases all-cause mortality. This is much harder (not all heart attacks kill people, and people die from lots of other things), but is the strongest possible endorsement for the drug (without it, you might worry that it only prevented non-fatal heart attacks, or that it killed as many people through side effects as it saves through heart attack prevention). Even great medications that we’re confident in can’t always clear this bar. But a new JAMA article adds another member to this select club: Adderall decreases all-cause mortality in ADHD, probably because it prevents drug addiction, car accidents, and impulsive actions. 34: Before the Gulf War got in the way, Saddam Hussein was building some crazy mosques: 35: Italy bans surrogacy - quite strictly, too, Italians aren’t even allowed to go abroad and do it. I am so sorry for all the Italians who will never get to be mothers and fathers because their government hates progress. You might hope that, whatever the other disadvantages of anti-immigrant parties, at least they’re incentivized to let natives have children, but looks like they can’t even get that one right. Starting to wonder whether the trains even run on time. 36: Elsewhere in “Italy sucks” news - did you know Italy’s tax code effectively bans startups? Companies are taxed before making any money, based on how many assets they have. If they have lots of assets but aren’t making money (eg because they’re still doing research / in stealth) then tax officials get confused and hostile and run increasingly punitive audits. Related: size of the European tech sector. It’s the red line on this chart; if you can’t see a red line at your screen resolution, then you’ve learned something important about the the EU tech sector. 37: Seen on @cremieuxrecuel’s twitter (preliminary, needs replication): Jews may have gone from 65-29 Democrat/Republican in 2020 to 58-40 this election. 38: Extelligence has a post responding to my critique of the cultural Christianity argument (among, uh, many other things), but I don’t really think it connects. I’m not telling atheists they can’t go to church/synagogue if it makes them feel happy and fulfilled - I’ve done this myself sometimes. My post was meant to argue against the claim that, for pragmatic reasons, atheists should support the Christianization of society as a defense against Islam or postmodernism or some other philosophical enemy. 39: Related: Extelligence is finally going for their Trust Assembly project/idea/startup for online consensus-based truth-seeking (I think something like a cross between Community Notes and Wikipedia, but as a browser extension, and for everything). He’s looking for potential developers/testers/users. 40: Jiankui He is the Chinese geneticist who made history with the first germline gene editing in humans (resulting in three babies supposedly immune to AIDS, although nobody has tested this). China sentenced him to three years in prison for unauthorized experimentation, but now he’s out of jail, has an English-language Twitter account, has a new lab, wants to work on Alzheimers, and seems pretty based (although not infinitely based): 41: Anthropic has a new version of their AI Claude which can use your computer. You give it permission, put it on a virtual desktop, and ask it to do things for you (eg “please find and download a picture of a cat” or “please research these ten things and put them in a text file”.) It moves your cursor, browses the Internet, and creates and saves files. People keep saying they’ll care about AI “when it operates autonomously” or “when it becomes an agent”. But this is a trivial barrier, and one which Computer Use Claude has arguably already passed. So far this feature is limited to developers (though anyone with computer knowledge can sign up for it) but I expect it to be the near future of consumer AI, to get better quickly, and to shade gradually into the “autonomous” “agentic” AI that you all think will require a paradigm shift. 42: Claim (from the IDF): Hamas faked polls showing that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack; the real numbers are 31% in favor, 64% against. 43: Otto von Bismarck wanted to trick France into declaring war on Germany. In order to provoke the French, he sent the Ems Dispatch, a statement describing recent diplomatic events in a way that sounded maximally offensive. The French were so offended that “crowds” in Paris demanded war, and the Franco-Prussian War was declared soon afterwards. The part of this that I find most interesting is the text of the dispatch itself, which read: After the news of the renunciation of the Prince von Hohenzollern had been communicated to the Imperial French government by the Royal Spanish government, the French Ambassador in Ems made a further demand on His Majesty the King that he should authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King undertook for all time never again to give his assent should the Hohenzollerns once more take up their candidature. His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the Ambassador again and had the latter informed by the Adjutant of the day that His Majesty had no further communication to make to the Ambassador. I’m fascinated by the idea that only 150 years ago, it was obvious that if someone sent you this statement, you had to declare war or abandon all honor. If I read it carefully, I can sort of parse out that it sounds like the Prussians are unhappy, but that’s the most emotion I gather from it. Anyway, the Franco-Prussian War led to World War I which led to World War II - so if you don’t like 50 million people dying and the total devastation of Europe, blame this statement about ambassadors. 44: The first use of artificial insemination in humans: The first recorded case of artificial insemination by donor didn’t occur until 1884, when Dr. William Pancoast decided to treat a couple’s infertility by secretly inseminating the woman with sperm obtained from a medical student. The insemination happened while the patient was under anesthesia and Dr. Pancoast did not tell her what had occurred. She gave birth to a baby boy nine months later, but it was several years before the doctor finally confessed to her husband what he had done. Neither man ever informed the mother. It was 25 years later the result of this case was published. Dr. Pancoast was roundly condemned for his actions, but it did open the door for consensual sperm donor insemination. 45: ClearerThinking administers several personality tests to the same people to learn more about their comparative accuracy. I am most interested in their finding that tests with “factors” (eg the Big Five, where you rate people on a numeric scale) are inherently more accurate than those with “types” (eg Myers-Briggs, where you assign someone a specific category) and that, adjusting for this, Big Five is no more predictive than the Enneagram: 46: In 2022, I wrote Whither Tartaria, where I asked why ornate classical styles switched to more austere modernist styles around 1900 - 1950 in a variety of different arts (painting, architecture, literature, poetry, etc). I proposed seven theories, but was unsure which if any were true. Since then, Samuel Hughes of Works In Progress has been investigating. In May, he wrote a well-researched article showing that it wasn’t just increasing cost, because ornate classical architecture now costs less than ever. Now in a new article he demolishes a different theory - it’s not just decreasing cost (and subsequent lack of ability to signal wealth) - because costs didn’t decrease in several other arts, and the change was led by artists with rich people as reluctant followers. He concludes: Modernism may well be a status game of some kind; it may well signal taste more than it signals wealth; and this latter feature may be one of the things that distinguishes it from older artistic styles. But the mechanism by which this change came about must be different to the one Alexander describes. 47: Sort of kind of related - When Hamilton Lost Its Snob Appeal. The musical Hamilton was briefly an artistic/cultural phenomenon, but tastemakers eventually switched to making fun of it. Why? Rob Henderson says it happened after ticket prices came down and the common people could enjoy it. I disagree: everyone I knew who was into Hamilton got into it from the free online soundtrack long before they’d seen the show; I think this is more likely the usual fad cycle where anybody who’s too into yesterday’s fad is behind the curve and therefore uncool. 48: Related: Why are people such jerks to public intellectuals? And more. I agree this is a great mystery. 49: Some prominent Substack psychiatrists doing a video Q&A, submit your questions here. 50: Naomi Kanakia: The Literacy Delusion had a number of explanations for why reading books seemed to be so much worse for human beings (in terms of emotional wellness and productivity) than other forms of narrative entertainment, but its main theory was the integration hypothesis. That the stream of words in a book trained the human brain into a habit of self-consciousness, that reading books forced human beings to think of themselves as a stream of text, processed through time, making a coherent argument of some sort. And that this overall flattening effect forced readers to ignore aspects of their personality or their situation that were not otherwise in line with the overarching story they'd created about themselves. Basically, reading books causes repression and neurosis. The Literacy Delusion argued that, yes, human beings are storytelling machines, but that a stream of written text is a particular kind of story—a story that is particularly flat, particularly devoid of conflicting or harmonizing information—and that this flatness creates a peculiar effect on the human brain. 51: Last month, I linked Sasha Gusev’s No, Intelligence Is Not Like Height and asked people who disagreed to share their arguments; they sure did. First, several people pointed me to a new preprint, Family-GWAS Reveals Effects Of Environment And Mating On Genetic Associations, which finds that one of the main papers Gusev cited to make his case, Howe 2022, made a mistake - imputing sibling genotypes using a process designed for non-sibling genotypes - and that once that mistake is corrected, the finding disappears and intelligence and height appear similar. Second, Joseph Bronski has a more specific post where he responds to Gusev’s points one by one. He accuses Gusev of “[making] up his own chart to remove the error bars [from the originals], to obscure the fact that the study found no evidence for this in IQ”, and says that the cases where he didn’t do that are just “population stratification and range restriction”. Third, Noah Carl at Aporia, instead of writing a direct response like Bronski, argues that the usual method of attacking twin studies is obsolete; not only have the most-debated assumptions behind twin studies been thoroughly validated, but there are now other lines of evidence besides twin studies which confirm high IQ heritability. Fourth, Leonardo Parro (not framed as a response to Gusev) goes into more depth about one of those ways, a “pedigree-based analysis” demonstrating heritability of 54 - 69%, ie no “missing heritability” compared to twin studies. He summarizes this as the effect of “rare variants” compared to the usual SNPs - ie if you only look at the most common genes that are easiest to find, you get “missing heritability” compared to twin studies, but if you widen your search to rare genes that are hard to find, you don’t. 52: Extremely related: Heliospect is a startup promising polygenic selection for IQ and other traits; they were trying to stay in stealth mode but The Guardian spied on them and nonconsensually revealed their existence. The discussion on the r/ssc subreddit centered on their claim that (given enough embryos to choose from) they could increase a baby’s expected IQ by 6 points (I’ve also heard 7.5). Sasha Gusev had previously argued that current technology maxed out at 3.5 and future technology would max out at 6, so a claim of 6 - 7.5 is pretty extreme; Gwern, who wrote the pioneering analysis of this technology, was also skeptical. But Heliospect says they’ve got better predictors than academia that use the rare variants everyone else misses; after talking to the company, Gwern retracted his objections and says he finds their claim “pretty plausible”. Local ACX commenter geneticist Gene Smith also redid some calculations, changed his mind, and says “probably pretty realistic”. I find this interesting not just because of the polygenic selection angle, but because if Heliospect is right then their predictor is able to predict more genetic IQ than the “missing heritability” people believe exists, and it should be able to put this argument to bed once and for all. 53: This month in censorship: X/Twitter banned journalist Ken Klippenstein for sharing the Trump campaign’s dossier on JD Vance. Twitter’s side of the story is that the dossier was probably originally stolen by Iranian agents and they don’t want to support that kind of thing by letting people signal-boost the illicitly obtained goods; you can read Klippenstein’s side here. He appears to be unbanned now.

February 03, 2025 · Original source

The Honduras Supreme Court has declared charter cities, including Prospera, unconstitutional.

Inline links: has declared charter cities

The background: in the mid-2010s, the ruling conservative party wanted charter cities. They had already packed the Supreme Court for other reasons, so they had their captive court declare charter cities to be constitutional.

In 2022, the socialists took power from the conservatives and got the chance to fill the Supreme Court with their supporters, though this time it was routine and not fairly describable as “packing”. In September, this new Supreme Court said whoops, actually charter cities aren’t constitutional at all. They added that this decision applied retroactively, ie even existing charter cities that had been approved under the old government were, ex post facto, illegal.

Links For April 2025

April 22, 2025 · Original source

The Supreme Court has long maintained that immigrants have a right due process, including such bleeding-heart liberals as Antonin Scalia.

Inline links: has long maintained

34: Related: the Trump administration seems to be refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order to bring back a specific deported immigrant. This is obviously terrifying, but superforecaster Peter Wildeford says it is not technically a constitutional crisis yet (X) because there are still some formalities the courts need to go to before they have officially “ordered” Trump to bring back the immigrant, and he won’t have officially “defied” the order until the formalities are complete. This doesn’t make me too much calmer but I guess is good to keep in mind. Related: Nicholas Decker asks when a violation of the Constitution becomes the sort of wolf-at-the-door dictatorship that we are supposed to violently rise up to prevent; people are mad at him but I think you have to either admit that some level of tyranny reaches this level or else just lie down and die. My proposed solution (drawing, of course, on medieval Iceland) is that the Supreme Court should be able to directly enforce its decisions by declaring violators to be “outlaws”; not only do outlaws lose the protection of the law, but anyone who uses force to defend of an outlaw becomes an outlaw themselves. See here for discussion of the pluses and minuses of such a system.

Inline links: refusing to comply with a 9-0 Supreme Court order, it is not technically a constitutional crisis yet, that we are supposed to violently rise up to prevent, here

Highlights From The Comments On Liberalism And Communities

August 12, 2025 · Original source

Mostly, in the US, as long as everyone involved consents, you can get away with breaking these kinds of laws. But if you become A Problem, or if somebody complains about you, your situation can become quite tenuous. The Amish have had to go all the way to the Supreme Court as recently as 2021 (to avoid installing septic tanks for their graywater).

Fascism Can't Mean Both A Specific Ideology And A Legitimate Target

October 10, 2025 · Original source

I used to think that my bright line was contempt of the Supreme Court - when a leader echoes Andrew Jackson’s boast that “[the Court] has made its decision, now let them enforce it”. But the Trump administration briefly seemed to consider defying a Supreme Court order in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. In the end, they didn’t actually defy the order. And they were being subtle: less Jacksonian swagger, more special pleading about reasons why they thought the ruling didn’t mean what we thought it meant. But if they had actually defied the order - while still doing their best to maintain plausible deniability - would I have resorted to violence, or even felt in an abstract way that “it was time” for violence? I can’t imagine this would have felt convincing at the time.

Links For October 2025

October 30, 2025 · Original source

49: Ruxandra Teslo (X): “Why doesn’t the FDA just release regulatory filings? Why do we need a fund that owns them? The answer: trade secret law. A 2019 Supreme Court ruling in a trade secret case made FDA transparency even harder and a perplexing 2024 lawsuit against FDA highlights this.”

Inline links: Ruxandra Teslo (X)

What Happened To SF Homelessness?

November 12, 2025 · Original source

After a big spike during the worst part of COVID, tents plateaued until mid-2023, then steadily declined. This timeline doesn’t match the two factors most people credit with the decline - the Grant’s Pass v. Johnson case where the Supreme Court made it easier to clear encampments, and Daniel Lurie taking over as mayor. What does it match? It might match a legal ruling the city got in September 2023. At the time, it was federally illegal to clear away homeless encampments without offering the homeless people an alternative, eg a shelter bed. San Francisco is chronically short on shelter beds, but cleverly kept a small number of beds in reserve on the exact day of cleanup operations to offer the affected individuals (many of whom would decline anyway). In 2022, a homeless advocacy group sued, saying this was a loophole that made a mockery of the requirement, and the city needed to generally have shelter beds available before it could clear encampments; the judge issued an injunction preventing the city from clearing encampments while the case was going on. In September 2023, another judge disagreed, and restored the city’s right to use this strategy. Then, in the 2024 Grant’s Pass decision, the Supreme Court struck down the entire federal law at issue, making it legal to remove encampments whether or not there were available shelter beds. Encampment numbers fell further. CalMatters presents the cynical view of post-Grant anti-homeless enforcement. The usual problem with enforcing laws against the homeless is that no plausible punishment can make their lives worse: you can’t fine people without money, or suspend the drivers licenses of people without cars. All you can do is imprison them - but there are too many, it’s too expensive, and the legal justifications are too weak to keep them in for long. The post-Grant environment provides two new levers of control. First, if the homeless have a tent, police can take their tent. Second, if the homeless have other possessions (shopping carts, big bags of stuff, etc), the police can jail them for a day or two, and by the time they get back, someone will have stolen them. Both levers incentivize the homeless to lie low and avoid trafficked areas, to avoid contact with the police. And both remove bulky signs of homelessness that might otherwise block paths, present an eyesore to passers-by, or otherwise kill the vibes of a neighborhood. Did these measures convince the homeless to shape up and accept social services? Or did they simply make their lives worse by taking their last vestigial shelter, removing their ability to keep possessions for more than a few weeks, and driving them to a miserable nomadic existence? The qualitative interviews in the CalMatters article suggest mostly the latter, although they do include one success story. Another argument for the latter is that there isn’t some vast surfeit of empty shelter beds and subsidized housing for these people to go to. And as we’ll see in the next section, overall homelessness does not seem to have declined as much as the decline in tents. So I think it mostly made the lives of the homeless worse, although there may have been positive effects for a small subset. This isn’t a fatal criticism; the aesthetic and safety improvements are real. But I think it speaks against the argument, common during the height of the crisis, that there was no tradeoff and actually enforcement was the truly compassionate option. Separately, A Small Decrease In Actual Homelessness There is weak evidence that overall homelessness has declined in California over the past year. It’s hard to measure homelessness, because homeless people are hard to find and survey. The gold standard measure is a “point in time count”, where the state chooses one particular day, gathers lots of volunteers, and sees how many homeless people they can find that day. Some counties do this once a year. Others, including San Francisco, do it once every two years. The results of this year’s count (which didn’t include San Francisco) are: So overall, unsheltered homeless in the areas covered by this year’s count decreased 9%. This looks small, but represents a more impressive victory when compared to previous years (when the homeless population usually went up) and to the US as a whole (where homelessness generally increased during this time). From an earlier dataset: Governor Newsom takes the world’s most depressing victory lap (source). Why? Most sources credit improved funding or better local programs. But there was no major change in California homelessness funding during this time. HHAP and Project Homekey, Gavin Newsom’s two flagship homelessness initiatives, have been around for years without major changes in scale. A 2024 ballot measure (Proposition 1) raised billions of dollars for homelessness relief, but this is being spent on facilities that are still under construction. On the opposite side, there is widespread concern about next year, when Trump budget cuts will decrease operations funding. But for now, the budget remains at a plateau, neither significantly up nor down, unable to explain the turnaround. Might the clearing of tent encampments have encouraged the homeless to use shelters? Maybe, but sheltered homelessness only increased by a quarter of the amount that unsheltered homelessness declined, and most of that probably came from the construction of new shelters - it’s not like there were loads of unused beds for the tent denizens to take. So this can’t be very much of the effect. I think there are most likely two main causes. First, the clearing of tent encampments, and other enforcement, encouraged homeless people to hide. Hidden homeless people are harder to count than homeless people living in conspicuous tents. Therefore, the count is lower. Second, rents fell in most big California cities. Although unsheltered homeless usually can’t afford apartments at any rent, low rents still make it easier for friends and family members to house them. What brilliant policy victories caused this affordability win? Interestingly, the report suggests that the primary driver behind the falling rental prices in California is not an increase in housing supply, but rather a decrease in demand. In recent years, the Bay Area and Los Angeles have witnessed substantial population outflows and job losses, which have not yet been fully recovered. Moreover, California recorded the highest unemployment rate among all states in April 2024. Ah well, nevertheless. We don’t have this year’s numbers from San Francisco. But assuming it followed the state trend of -9%, this is probably too low for anyone to notice. If you’ve personally felt like there are fewer homeless people around, it’s probably because of the encampment cleanups and the subsequent tendency for them to lie low. Mayor Lurie’s Policies Probably Aren’t Primarily Responsible The strongest evidence for this is the same graph as before: The second strongest evidence is that approximately the same pattern has happened in every affected California city during this period, supporting the hypothesis that this is downstream of Grant’s Pass and other larger trends. But also, Lurie’s homelessness policy just isn’t that impressive. He ran on a platform of creating 1,500 extra shelter beds, which would have put a significant dent in the problem. But after creating 100 - 200, he admitted this was too hard and gave up. Otherwise, it sounds the same as every mayor’s Plan To End Homelessness - reorganize local services, fund street response teams, coordinate and streamline blah blah blah. Even the name - Breaking The Cycle - gives me deja vu. Didn’t Gavin Newsom call his homelessness plan that? No? Mayor Breed? Jerry Brown? Daenerys Targaryen? Mayor Lurie’s other big homelessness-related policy was getting tough on fentanyl - clearing up the open-air markets, cutting “harm reduction” programs that give free drug paraphernalia to users. To his credit, there are many fewer open-air drug markets now. As for drug-related deaths: …preliminary results look discouraging. Why? Some experts argue that the clearing of open-air markets shifts the dealer-addict relationship from an iterated game to a one-shot: since law enforcement prevents anyone from staying in the same place too long, addicts move from dealer to dealer, encouraging dealers to try exploitative strategies rather than cultivating repeat customers. Those exploitative strategies include toxic or spiked merchandise, hence the increased overdoses. Others argue that the harm reduction programs successfully reduced harm, and stopping them had the predictable effect. But it looks to me like things get worse slightly before Mayor Lurie took office, and that in any case the new regime is a return to form after an anomalous trough. This article argues that none of this has anything to do with local policy; some foreign countries successfully cracked down on fentanyl in 2024, raising prices and creating a shortage. Then in 2025 the traffickers recovered, and supply came back. Everyone Accuses Everyone Else Of Shipping Them Homeless People Look too closely into discussions of why homelessness is up or down in some particular city, and you’ll find dark murmurs about how they’re shipping problem individuals away, or getting duped by other cities doing the same to them. The Berkelians say SF has sent its homeless to Berkeley. The Oaklanders say no, to Oakland. The Sacramentans say Sacramento. And don’t forget the ones sent to other states! Meanwhile, former SF mayor Gavin Newsom has claimed that the majority of its own homeless people come from Texas (this is obviously false). Some of these claims make sense. San Francisco has three programs that bus its homeless people out of the city. Previously, they would only do this if social workers could prove the person had a family member willing to support them in the new city. More recently, they lowered this standard to “some connection” to the destination. But I don’t think this caused a large drop in SF homelessness, for three reasons. First, we have no evidence that any such drop in homeless numbers occurred - just a decrease in tent encampments and visible dysfunction. Second, the new lower-standards busing program only got about 100 people a year - pretty small compared to the scale of the problem. Third, the data above show general homelessness declines across California. If SF were exporting its homeless, you would expect other counties’ numbers to increase. Instead, it seems more likely that SF’s numbers are going down (if they are going down) for the same reason as everyone else’s. We’ll have more information next year, when Alameda County releases homelessness numbers. Alameda, which contains Oakland and Berkeley, is a natural export destination for San Francisco. So What Happened To Homelessness? This is a maximally boring story. There’s a natural tradeoff where governments can enforce laws against the homeless in ways that make them less visible and annoying, at the cost of making their lives harder, eg it can take away their tents. In the past, they didn’t do this, out of a combination of tender-heartedness and legal restrictions. After the homeless became extremely visible and annoying, voters felt less tender-hearted, and the courts lifted the legal restrictions. So cities took the tradeoff. This is the big effect that everyone noticed. At the same time, there were some small effects from increased funding, falling rents, drug market clearing, and busing programs. Realistically nobody would have noticed any of these; the big effect is from encampment clearing. Have we learned anything? I don’t think we learned the sort of thing we hoped we might learn, the lever we could push to solve everything with no downsides. But: I had previously thought there weren’t really any levers that could improve the problem at all, short of mass incarceration. I hadn’t considered that taking people’s tents and possessions would have such a strong aesthetic effect that most people would consider the problem solved from an annoyance/visibility perspective. I think my failure was some combination of 1: not realizing how much people hated tent encampments in particular, as opposed to (for example) weird people wandering the street in rags talking to themselves 2: not realizing how many options the homeless have for “lying low” when they really don’t want to be found (and therefore how elastic visible homelessness is with respect to legal crackdowns).

Inline links: and restored the city’s right to use this strategy, presents the cynical view of post-, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kCNg!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6fda1b28-6220-4c80-820b-6700bcb67a56_794x893.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jF-b!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F04c94ed0-966c-4a7a-9488-24324bdb2a47_864x1080.webp, source, Proposition 1, are harder to count, rents fell in most big California cities., still make it easier, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3SWT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F752f0794-bac0-4a44-8997-3fc897a231a6_805x462.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Mtf6!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdffe0a3b-7471-41d7-8998-1ea4631b663b_2027x2578.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!IP1D!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3dcf3fdb-3af0-4c26-b2c9-0525d4ab4800_807x615.png, the same, admitted this was too hard and gave up, Breaking The Cycle, Daenerys Targaryen, getting tough on fentanyl, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!g3SD!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1aaeff3b-8331-4d22-9ef2-e9c45edb7f60_767x495.png, preliminary results look discouraging, Some experts argue, to Berkeley, to Oakland, to other states, this is obviously false, has three programs

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