Bay Area

Article

Bay Area is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 51 times across 51 issues between February 11, 2021 and February 23, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “But now I’m in the Bay Area, and the joke is that everyone with ADHD founds a startup”; “there was a 60% chance that Bay Area lockdowns would extend beyond June 15”; “Will the Bay Area stay locked down”. It most often appears alongside San Francisco, California, Oakland.

Metadata

Category: Places
Mention count: 51
Issue count: 51
First seen: February 11, 2021
Last seen: February 23, 2026

Appears In

- San Francisco (16 shared issues)
- California (14 shared issues)
- Oakland (10 shared issues)
- Scott (10 shared issues)
- Berkeley (9 shared issues)
- China (9 shared issues)
- ACX (8 shared issues)
- Google (8 shared issues)
- SF (8 shared issues)
- Twitter (8 shared issues)
- Elon Musk (7 shared issues)
- FDA (7 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.

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Tradeoffs And Failures

February 11, 2021 · Original source

When I was in medical school, the joke (not really a joke) was that everyone with ADHD went into emergency medicine. I've since treated a couple of doctors with ADHD, and sure enough they are all in emergency medicine. But now I'm in the Bay Area, and the joke is that everyone with ADHD founds a startup. This has made its way into lots of business advice columns (1, 2, 3, etc), and is also confirmed by my personal experience - though I should also mention just how disproportionately people with ADHD become salespeople. My impression - and I could give you a couple of studies that vaguely back it up, but they'd all be sort of hokey - is that people with ADHD are worse at dealing with low levels of stimulation and situations requiring careful focus, but sometimes better at dealing with high levels of stimulation and situations requiring frantic task switching.

Inline links: the joke, 1, 2, 3

Mantic Monday: Judging April COVID Predictions

February 23, 2021 · Original source

Black statements are those judged true, red statements false. The numbers on the left are our predictions, so for example I said there was a 60% chance that Bay Area lockdowns would extend beyond June 15. You can see a list of the full questions and why I graded them the way I did in the appendix at the bottom.

1. Will the Bay Area stay locked down (eg restaurants closed) beyond June 15, 2020?

2. Will the Bay Area stay locked down until Election Day (11/3/2020)?

Bay Area Plant-Based Meat Reviews

February 26, 2021 · Original source

By this point you’ve probably tried Impossible Burgers, and you know that restaurants can do some pretty impressive things with them. But there are so many interesting meat dishes - what if you want something other than a burger? This market is still developing, but I live in the Bay Area, which is probably its epicenter. And I’m mostly-vegetarian, so I have no choice but to try it out.

Ike's Love And Sandwiches is a popular Bay Area sandwich restaurant. Crave Subs is a suspiciously similar newcomer.

2020 Predictions: Calibration Results

April 05, 2021 · Original source

CORONAVIRUS: 1. Bay Area lockdown (eg restaurants closed) will be extended beyond June 15: 60% 2. …until Election Day: 10% 3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10% 4. Fewer than 300,000 US coronavirus deaths: 50% 5. Fewer than 3 million US coronavirus deaths: 90% 6. US has highest official death toll of any country: 80% 7. US has highest death toll as per expert guesses of real numbers: 70% 8. NYC widely considered worst-hit US city: 90% 9. China’s (official) case number goes from its current 82,000 to 100,000 by the end of the year: 70% 10. A coronavirus vaccine has been approved for general use and given to at least 10,000 people somewhere in the First World: 50% 11. Best scientific consensus ends up being that hydroxychloroquine was significantly effective: 20% 12. I personally will get coronavirus (as per my best guess if I had it; positive test not needed): 30% 13. Someone I am close to (housemate or close family member) will get coronavirus: 60% 14. General consensus is that we (April 2020 US) were overreacting: 50% 15. General consensus is that we (April 2020 US) were underreacting: 20% 16. General consensus is that summer made coronavirus significantly less dangerous: 70% 17. …and there is a catastrophic (50K+ US deaths, or more major lockdowns, after at least a month without these things) second wave in autumn: 30% 18. I personally am back to working not-at-home: 90% 19. At least half of states send every voter a mail-in ballot in 2020 presidential election: 20% 20. PredictIt is uncertain (less than 95% sure) who won the presidential election for more than 24 hours after Election Day. 20%

Inline links: 3. Fewer than 100,000 US coronavirus deaths: 10%

Your Book Review: Progress And Poverty

April 16, 2021 · Original source

George sees this as a good thing. Without land value tax you get situations where somebody can anticipate that an empty lot will become valuable in the future, buy it, HODL forever, lobby against future development that would depress their property values, and now you have the Bay Area's housing crisis. Or buy an apartment block, do the absolute minimum the tenants will tolerate without killing you, constantly jack up the rent as the city grows, and you get slums. As BlueRepublik observes in No, Georgism is Still Sane: If you look at the commercial blight in New York City (http://www.vacantnewyork.com/) 90%+ is from landlords refusing to lease out to small businesses, waiting for a larger bank or big business to pay a higher rent bill. This causes property values of nearby businesses to drop, equity value to drop, and businesses to move out from the city center, increasing urban sprawl and urban blight. It’s a massive drain on personal wealth, and is very highly linked with poverty and higher crime rates. It’s also not a great model for having a stable social fabric. In a fit of performance art, a Georgist by the name of Fay Lewis once famously bought an empty lot and stuck a big sign on it to demonstrate the principle in action: Okay, but isn't building too much stuff bad for the environment? Won't this encourage over-development? By George, no. What's bad for the environment is sprawl, which the current system encourages and which the land tax would directly attack. If you want dense, walkable cities that don't depend on cars to get around, you should eliminate land speculation. A stronger objection to land value tax is when it's not some shifty speculator or a genocidal English landlord who suffers the brunt of it, but, say, this guy: The premise of Pixar's movie Up is that Carl Fredricksen, a lovably grumpy pensioner, is the last holdout standing in the way of developers bulldozing the rest of his neighborhood in the name of Progress™. He refuses to sell because he can't bear to part with the house which for him is tied up with all the cherished memories of his departed wife. This isn't just sentimental fiction, this is something that really does happen. Isn't Georgism just going to price the poor Carl Fredricksens out of their homes so that someone with a more """productive""" use can have it instead? There's several good response to this. For starters, if you're worried about kindly old people losing their homes, that's a thing that's happening already, and most of the time it's because The Rent Is Too Damn High, and our existing system is net worse on this score. We are currently facing an unprecedented crisis of evictions in tandem with the COVID pandemic, and it's not like things were peachy before. And even though homelessness seems to be declining in the US overall, it's getting worse in the most prosperous cities, exactly as George predicted. Okay, maybe it's better for renters, but what about people who own their homes, like Carl? Isn't it unfair to stick them with land taxes that might kick them out? What if they're retired? Remember, let's not confuse land tax with land confiscation, Here's George (emphases mine): I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent. Okay, but you have to admit that even if the state isn't confiscating everybody's land, if you can't pay your land taxes you have no choice but to sell your land, right? Isn't this morally unjust to the Carl Fredricksens of the world? First, it's not a given that Mr. Fredricksen will be worse off on net: he already pays income and sales taxes, capital gains on any investments, as well as property tax which taxes both land value and the value of his house. As speculators leave the real estate market the land tax that replaces his property tax drop will drop, and his house is an improvement that goes entirely untaxed. Also, if the speculators holding onto all the most valuable real estate in the downtown districts are forced to give it up, there won't be as much competition for land and so there's a good chance developers won't be interested in trying to buy up land in a bedroom community in the first place. BlueRepublik further points out that LVT can be used to fund a Universal Basic Income, which should soften the blow considerably: Keep in mind also that the Georgist Land Value Tax is pair with a "Citizen's Dividend" or what we see as UBI, so that it's not the government claiming land rent, rather the land rent is taxed and split up equally for all men. But as a matter of political practicality, in the rare event that after all that Mr. Fredricksen still somehow finds himself in the hole after LVT is applied, Nate Blair suggests a deferment option to grandfather the Carls of the world through the transition: The LVT gets assessed annually for everyone, but owner occupiers (businesses and homeowners) can apply to defer the sum of those payments until they sell or transfer the land. Government can charge a nominal interest. A final point of modern application of land value taxes is to level the playing field between different areas by eliminating "cost of living" discrepancies that arise entirely from speculative rent. This is pretty relevant given the "location pay" debate going on in Silicon Valley right now in response to increased remote work as a direct consequence of the COVID pandemic. Back to George. Great, we've taxed ground rent at 100% and eliminated speculation and all other manner of social ills. Now what do we do with the money? Lots of things! For one, you can get rid of some other taxes. Back in George's day it was even argued that a 100% land value tax on ground rents should be the only tax – the "Single Tax," replacing all other tariffs, duties, and other taxes (keep in mind this was in the late 1800's and Federal income tax wasn't introduced until the 16th amendment in 1913). Remember, all these other taxes have deadweight loss. Income tax is a tax on labor, and so taxing it means we really do get less productive labor. The portion of property tax that targets improvements punishes you for investing in improvements, and sales tax is just straight up regressive, hitting the poor harder than the rich. There's some argument today about whether the "Single Tax" would be enough to fund the modern US budget, with some Georgists saying it would be sufficient and others saying we would still need some other taxes but could at least significantly offset what we already have. But by George, another thing we could do is just give all the money back to the people, as BlueRepublik mentioned above. This could be used as a straightforward Universal Basic Income – what George calls a Citizen's Dividend, or what Andrew Yang calls the Freedom Dividend. It could also be used for the funding of public goods. George doesn't see this as an act of charity on the state's behalf – the value of the land has its origin in the productive labors of the entire community, so it's a simple act of justice to give the returns to those who actually produced the value, which is society at large. Another effect George asserts is that once land is no longer monopolized, labor is no longer forced into one-sided competition, so wages start to go up. Even better, laborers now have far more opportunity to go into business for themselves, which spurs innovation and investment. So to sum up, if we tax the ever loving hell out of ground rent, George says we'll see the following benefits: Make housing much more affordable

Inline links: No, Georgism is Still Sane, http://www.vacantnewyork.com/, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!gVc9!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F0eccd663-f37b-44b6-ba75-469069befa34_1863x1268.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mVYl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F80f4b70f-b472-47b0-b46d-e74b3190ddfd_536x554.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!G2qa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa948c9cc-5271-4b71-8c74-de55e126f16a_640x360.png, really does happen, crisis of evictions, getting worse in the most prosperous cities, "location pay" debate going on in Silicon Valley, Citizen's Dividend, the Freedom Dividend

Your Book Review: The Wizard And The Prophet

April 30, 2021 · Original source

The problem with the concept of carrying capacity – impossible to define or know when we’ve surpassed, until after the proverbial moment when killing one mosquito or dovekie too many plunges us into everlasting fire and brimstone – is that it seems mostly like a mood affiliation thing. Consider this: when you look out at the bird feeder hanging in your backyard (Bay Area people living in closets, use your imagination here), do you see a blissful symbiotic coexistence of the human world and nature, with humans generously giving of our growth-accumulated abundance to help the birds flourish? Or do you see a dystopian struggle where innocent creatures pushed to the brink of death by our traffic and pesticides and housecats must rely on meager scraps for survival? There isn’t really a right view here, I don’t think, just a predilection for seeing what matches your intuition and telling a story about it. Given the life story Mann depicts for Vogt, it’s not hard to see why he would lean toward the pessimistic take. From the childhood marred by a philandering father who left his family in a cloud of scandal and ruin, to the adult life spent stumbling from one bourgeois non-occupation (theater critic, bird watcher, government mole rooting out Nazis in South America) to the next, to the childlessness and divorce, Vogt seems happiest when he is away from any humans, whether tromping through pre-suburbanized Long Island, or alone with the guano-producing birds on the desolate coast of Peru. Were he to live in an age of Facebook and Twitter, he would definitely be that guy reposting memes that COVID is finally letting our planet "heal."

Inline links: mood affiliation

Open Thread 176

June 13, 2021 · Original source

3: Remember, ACX in-person Bay Area meetup today, Sunday 6/13, at 2 PM at 3806 Williams Rd, San Jose, CA 95117 (a private residence, vaccinated people only). You are welcome even if you’re a new reader, even if you’re not in “typical” ACX demographics, even if this is your first meetup, and even if you’re boring and bad at socializing. Come celebrate that we’re allowed to gather again and that our community has made it through mostly intact.

Peer Review Request: Ketamine

July 19, 2021 · Original source

Various clinics offer it all over the country. Here in the Bay Area, Polaris Health is a very well-regarded provider. They charge $950 for a single three-hour therapy session, plus extra costs for an intake session, a preparation session, etc. Overall, expect this to get well into the four digits, and don’t expect insurance to pay for it. I don’t think this is good value for money for anybody on a limited budget, if the alternative is having a doctor prescribe you inexpensive intranasal ketamine/ketamine lozenges. If your only other option is IV ketamine clinics that charge as much or more, you might as well take the free therapy (though be careful when making this calculation, IV clinic prices are often per course of ~6 sessions whereas psychotherapy prices are per session).

Inline links: Polaris Health

Links For July

July 23, 2021 · Original source

23: Like everyone else, I read the Buzzfeed piece claiming that the Michigan governor kidnapping plot was, let’s say, “helped along” by the FBI an inappropriate amount. I came out of it thinking that these were some pretty scary dudes who were the type of people who might kidnap governors, but that it seemed possible they would never have gotten around to starting any particular governor-kidnapping operation if not for FBI entrapment. I’m not sure what to think about that - as a liberal, I want to protect the norm of not punishing people for crimes unless they definitely actually came up with the plan to commit them themselves. But I have trouble feeling as outraged as I’d like to about a plan to get potential-governor-kidnappers off the streets faster by convincing them to commit to an actual governor-kidnapping on some specific date that the FBI can arrest them for. And I think about things like how many people get their bikes stolen in the Bay Area, and how police never do anything about it, and how one of the proposals is to plant honeypot bikes in easily-watchable areas and arrest the people who steal them until maybe eventually San Franciscans get the message that bike-stealing can have negative consequences - and this has a lot to recommend it over just letting bikes get stolen (or governors get kidnapped) every so often. Anyway, my favorite part of the article was reading about how much all the governor-kidnapper militia people cared about making sure nobody thought they were racist, even while they were plotting domestic terrorism. This definitely feels like a metaphor for life.

Inline links: the Buzzfeed piece claiming

Open Thread 187

August 29, 2021 · Original source

1: Thanks to everyone who came to the Berkeley meetup yesterday (~125 people!) and especially to the organizers (Mingyuan, Miranda, Ruby, Oli, sorry if I’m forgetting anyone). Here’s a Facebook group if you want to stay in touch about future Bay Area meetups. And I have some updates to conversations I had with people yesterday which I put in a comment below.

Inline links: a Facebook group, a comment

Links For October

October 14, 2021 · Original source

28: Leverage Research is a nonprofit at the edges of my social circle in the Bay Area. A new essay argues that they are kind of a harmful cult. A lot of the more outrageous parts are new to me (especially the part with the demons) but I can confirm that they constantly insist they have “solved psychology” when in fact they’ve just come up with a mildly-invigorating self-help technique, same as every other cult in California. Here’s a Less Wrong post making more or less the same accusations, and here’s a response by a Leverage employee. The version of Leverage described in the essay is mostly defunct (I think?), so this isn’t an emergency, but I agree with its conclusion that people need to stop giving Geoff Anders more money and power.

Inline links: kind of a harmful cult, more or less the same accusations, a response by a Leverage employee

ACX Grants ++: The Second Half

February 10, 2022 · Original source

#73: Create A New Kind Of Money And Cities The combination of markets and ideas has reduced suffering somewhat. This trend must continue, but I think a global median income of US$30,000 by 2049 is possible. We just need to teach everybody the same skills that Americans have. To enable this, 2 areas where improvement can be made and no new technology is needed are: a new money, and cities welcome to everyone. A new money is needed because the current financial system is not burdened with the risks it creates. Cities don’t grow like they did in the past. Over a 50 year period at the turn of the twentieth century Detroit grew 10X, whereas in this era the Bay Area has not even doubled its population. Nowadays cities that attract the best talent only attract the best talent. If we had a Hypothetical-Bay-Area-City grow like American cities of the past, it would have a population of around 45 million people and GDP of $4.5 billion. What would an asset be worth if it had a $4.5 billion income stream? A little bit of money and land is needed to make a start, but mostly I need you and your talents. Here is my new Substack with details: https://marketismandidearism.substack.com/p/a-new-money-and-cities-welcome-to . Please sign up to make a global median income of US$30,000 by 2049 a reality. P.S. I am talking money here. Accounting entries. Do not talk to me about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an attempt at cash. 99.99999% of money transactions are not done with cash, they are done with IOU’s. Please. Spare. Me.

Links For February

February 22, 2022 · Original source

12: The Dangers Of Low-Pay, High-Status Jobs. A good article in many ways, but the part I appreciate most was taking “why are so many journalists live in Brooklyn?” (which I had always thought of as a kind of a running gag, or dig on the journalistic monoculture) and doing economic analysis to it, of the same form of “why are so many tech companies in the Bay Area?” or “why are so many entertainment studios in LA?”

Inline links: The Dangers Of Low-Pay, High-Status Jobs

(I will say that big institutions have been less risk-averse than I worried - I hear Google stopped requiring masks in the Bay Area today, and Polymarket says 79% chance of no mask mandate on domestic flights by November - so maybe this won’t come to pass after all)

Inline links: Polymarket says

Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities

April 10, 2022 · Original source

BERKELEY, CA Contact: Mingyuan (meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com) Date: May 7 Time: 1:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/849VVPCP+VP Location: UC Berkeley, the lawn just north of Free Speech Bikeway and east of the traffic circle Group info: The Bay Area has lots of events, announced on the mailing list and Facebook

Inline links: https://plus.codes/849VVPCP+VP, the mailing list, Facebook

Book Review: San Fransicko

June 23, 2022 · Original source

For some reason this top 20 table fails to list Washington DC, which should be just before Atlanta. SF doesn’t make the top 20, although its neighbor Oakland does. Probably most murder variation in US cities is explained by percent African-American and maybe percent Borderer; with relatively few people in these groups SF was never in the running. I’m not sure if some abstracted version of the city with all demographic factors adjusted away would have an unusually high murder rate, but at that point it would be pretty distant from any interesting real-world question. You can see the leaderboard for other types of crime here; San Francisco is often in the top ten, but never the top three. As far as I can tell, San Francisco has seen a big spike in car breakins over the past few years, with no clear trend for other property crime, violent crime, or homicides. It’s not an outlier among American cities in any kind of crime. Conclusion of this section: San Fransicko’s specific claims are basically correct, but suggest a medium-term rise in SF crime which is mostly contradicted by the data. These show stable-to-decreasing murder, stable-to-decreasing violent and property crimes other than car break-ins, and large rises in car break-ins only. The data also show stable-to-decreasing shoplifting, but I’m not sure how much to trust them vs. common sense. Honestly, I’m pretty confused here and not sure what to think. Claim 7: Jim Jones (Of Kool-Aid Cult Fame) Used To Be The Chairman Of SF’s Housing Authority Okay, this isn’t really a statistical claim that I can research different perspectives on. Still, it’s so wacky that I couldn’t resist mentioning it in this review. Jim Jones, famous for killing everyone in his Guyana-based Jonestown cult with poisoned Kool-Aid, used to be the SF government’s top guy on homelessness. Shellenberger writes: Jones married and moved first to Northern California and then to San Francisco with his wife to start a church. He called it the People’s Temple. Jones believed he was the leader of a socialist revolution. He warned of nuclear war and claimed black people would be put in concentration camps. He became a hugely charismatic preacher among African Americans, the disaffiliated poor, and young transplants to the city looking for community. Scenes from the era show a remarkably large and diverse congregation smiling and singing. The People’s Temple grew and provided services. Jones cultivated two progressive San Francisco politicians, George Moscone and Willie Brown, and mobilized people to volunteer for their campaigns […] His son and a San Francisco historian believe he stole the mayoral election for Moscone in 1975. Historian David Talbot, founder of the progressive website Salon, points to evidence that Jones committed sufficient voter fraud to account for Moscone’s narrow 4,443-vote margin of victory. “We loaded up all thirteen of our buses with maybe seventy people on each bus, and we had those buses rolling nonstop up and down the coast into San Francisco the day before the election,” said Jones Jr. “Could we have been the force that tipped the election to Moscone? Absolutely! Slam dunk. He only won by four thousand votes.” When federal investigators looked into fraud claims three years later, they discovered that all of the records were missing from the city of San Francisco’s registrar of voters. Jones also boasted of providing Moscone with black women from his congregation for sex. One time Moscone, drunk and “accompanied by a young black woman whom the politician had kindly agreed to drive home,” crashed into another car. Another time, Moscone and Willie Brown “were with a black woman in an alley at two in the morning at some restaurant in North Beach,” said a local bar owner. State legislator “John Burton was part of that gang too. They were all using marijuana and cocaine.” Said Jones Jr., Moscone would “always be there at temple parties with a cocktail in his hand and doing some ass grabbing.” A Temple member overheard Jones speaking to Moscone the day after one of those parties saying, “I want to let you know that the young lady you went off with is underage,” adding, “Now don’t worry, Mayor, we’ll take care of you—because we know that you’ll take care of us.” Afterward, Moscone made Jones the chairman of the powerful San Francisco Housing Commission. Jones cultivated progressives with money and favors. He made large donations to the ACLU, the NAACP, and United Farm Workers. Jones and Moscone met privately with vice presidential candidate Walter Mondale on a campaign plane a few days before the 1976 presidential election, and Mondale praised People’s Temple shortly afterward. Jones met with First Lady Rosalynn Carter several times. Governor Jerry Brown praised Jones. Glide Memorial Church’s Rev. Cecil Williams loved Jones. There is a photo from 1977 of a smiling Williams awarding Jones the church’s “Martin Luther King, Jr. Award.” Jones used his perch as chairman of the Housing Commission to fight for housing for the poor. He tried to use eminent domain to acquire the International Hotel, a single resident occupancy hotel. After a court sided with the hotel’s owner, Jones mobilized seven thousand protesters to picket it. By mid-January 1977, the situation had become heated. There were rumors that protesters inside the building were armed with guns and Molotov cocktails. Jones lost the legal battle in 1977, and the tenants were evicted. But the drama was a publicity victory for Jones, which burnished his image as a white savior. A conservative member of the Board of Supervisors who was defeated in the mayoral election by Moscone accused the new mayor, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the rest of the city establishment of being blind to Jones’s extremism. “There’s no radical plot in San Francisco,” insisted Moscone, in response. “There’s no one I’ve appointed to any city position whom I regard as radical or extremist.” Willie Brown, a powerful state legislator from 1964 to 1995 before becoming mayor in 1996, “seemed oblivious to Jones’ hucksterism and demagoguery,” notes a historian. Brown was master of ceremonies at a dinner for Jones in the fall of 1976 attended by an adulatory crowd of the rich and powerful, including Governor Jerry Brown. “Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein . . . Chairman Mao,” he said, to loud applause. And yet Jones was contemptuous of Brown even as Brown did Jones more and more favors. Jones mocked Brown for his designer suits, sports cars, and women. Once, while Brown was addressing the congregation and Jones was seated onstage behind him, Jones flipped his middle finger up to mock him. San Francisco’s establishment stood by Jones even after a California magazine, New West, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published an exposé of Jones’s beatings of Temple members and financial abuses in August 1977. The article was written by a San Francisco Chronicle reporter and was meant for the Chronicle to publish. But the newspaper killed the story because it didn’t want to alienate Jones, whom it viewed as central to its plans to expand the Chronicle’s circulation in the heavily African American Fillmore District. Jones also managed to avoid investigation and prosecution in part by getting the district attorney to hire as deputy district attorney Jones’s longtime attorney and confidant. Progressives defended Jones against the New West article. At a rally in the summer of 1977, Willie Brown said, “When somebody like Jim Jones comes on the scene, that absolutely scares the hell out of most everybody occupying positions of power in the system.” Angela Davis sent a radio message broadcast over the cult’s compound, Jonestown, in Guyana. “I know you’re in a very difficult situation right now,” she said, “and there is a very profound conspiracy designed to destroy the contributions which you have made to the struggle.” After visiting Jonestown, the attorney to the Black Panthers said, “I have seen paradise.” Harvey Milk, too, was tarnished by his association with Jones. In the fall of 1977, Milk wrote to President Carter’s secretary of health, education, and welfare requesting that Social Security checks be sent to elderly Temple members in Guyana. “People’s Temple,” wrote Milk, has “established a beautiful retirement community in Guyana.” In truth, the cult was disintegrating. Jones separated families and lovers, pitted relatives against each other, and forced neighbors to inform on each other. Jones sent people who violated the rules to solitary confinement in “the Box,” an underground cubicle where people were held as prisoners for days on end. Others were drugged. Progressives who had spent thirty years fighting to close prisons and mental hospitals found themselves praising a man who had reproduced their worst practices. In November 1978 a Bay Area congressman flew to Guyana to investigate human rights violations at Jonestown with NBC News. Jones gave the delegation a formal reception at Jonestown. A Temple member surreptitiously passed a note to one of the delegation members, saying he and another member wanted to escape. They fled the next day after a Temple member tried to stab the congressman. Jones didn’t prevent them from leaving but then sent gunmen to fire machine guns at the delegation at the airport, killing the congressman and four others. A few hours later, 907 inhabitants of Jonestown drank Flavor Aid laced with cyanide and died. Two-thirds of the victims were African American and one-third were children. Jones had told them that if they didn’t drink it they would be killed by invading soldiers from a shadowy global military conspiracy intent on imposing fascism and torturing children. As people started crying in grief, Jones scolded them. “Stop these hysterics,” he said. “This is not the way for people who are socialists or communists to die.” Jones’s wife protested the murder of children and had to be forcibly restrained. “We didn’t commit suicide,” said Jones in a tape recording, “we committed an act of revolutionary suicide protesting the conditions of an inhumane world.” Few were as stained by Jonestown as Willie Brown and George Moscone. “Even as the bloated bodies of the dead were removed from the jungle and the wounded were airlifted by the U.S. Air Force to hospitals in the United States,” wrote a historian, “Brown said he had ‘no regrets’ over his association with Jones.” They repeatedly disavowed responsibility. Said Moscone, “it’s clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I’m not taking any responsibility. It’s not mine to shoulder.” This is Shellenberger at his best: telling us crazy stories from the recesses of San Francisco history, maybe kind of spinning the narration in a way that makes all progressives seem guilty by association, but with the tale itself so gripping that it’s hard to be mad. And Jones wasn’t alone. This was the golden age of San Francisco cults, when (Shellenberger tells us) “more than half of all high school students in the San Francisco Bay Area reported at least one recruiting attempt by a cult member, and 40 percent reported at least three contacts.” This chapter of SF history came to an end in 1978, when Dan White, who had just resigned from San Francisco’s Board Of Supervisors (ie City Council) entered City Hall through a window and assassinated Mayor Moscone and fellow Supervisor Harvey Milk, then successfully got charges reduced to manslaughter through a legal manuever that has gone down in history as “the Twinkie Defense” (realistically the defense was that he was depressed, but reporters seized on a comment that implied it was because he ate too many Twinkies). Everything about 1970s San Francisco was like this. With the Mayor and his right-hand-man both dead, San Francisco leadership ended up in the hands of previously second-tier politician Dianne Feinstein. Feinstein was what passed for a moderate in 1970s SF (which meant she had been targeted for assassination by various left-wing groups - she survived when a bomb left on her windowsill failed to explode). In Shellenberger’s telling, she managed to clean up some of the mess and restore a semblance of normalcy. San Francisco never forgave her. Moscone - voting fraud committer, underage sex enjoyer, and Jim Jones’ bff - is beloved as a martyr in today’s SF, but (the book points out) Feinstein is so loathed that in 2021 the Board of Education voted to rename Dianne Feinstein Elementary School. The Moscone Center is 2 million square feet and can fit about 10,000 people. Not to be confused with the Moscone Recreation Center, Moscone Station, or Moscone Elementary School. Meanwhile, all Dianne Feinstein got was one lousy elementary school and the Tithonus package of eternal life without eternal youth. Claim 8: The Intolerant Left Shuts Down Debate On These Issues Another one that’s probably hard to do a randomized controlled trial on. You could probably predict that this one was coming - it’s a necessary narrative beat in this genre of book. I think this beat is good. My impression is that people who aren’t themselves public figures disagreeing with left-wing ideas still don’t understand how scary it is and how much hate you get. Maybe now that 2/3s of every political essay written over the past five years is about this topic, people will finally get it through their thick skulls that it exists and is bad. I would also note that “traumatizing the sorts of people who write popular books about politics, in a such a way that they feel compelled as a sort of self-therapy to write page after page telling readers how angry they should be at you and your whole coalition” isn’t great political praxis. I would like people to figure this out and stop doing it. Anyway, Shellenberger is doing his part in this effort: In 2001, the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness wheat-pasted posters of a fake front-page San Francisco Chronicle across town. Just beneath the masthead a large headline read “Fuck the Homeless!” right above a picture of San Francisco mayor Willie Brown laughing. Below his photo was the headline “Save the Tourists.” Progressives level the same charges at people thirty years later. “Because of some of the stuff I say,” said a community activist in Seattle’s historically black Capitol Hill neighborhood, “people say, ‘Oh, she’s not for them.’ But I have a heart for homeless and mentally ill. Most of my family works with the mentally ill.” Noted a Chronicle journalist in 2017, “Inevitably, homeless advocates and others will say, ‘You’re not compassionate,’” in response to stories about homeless encampments. “They called me a racist,” said Tom. “They accused me, a guy who used to be homeless, of demonizing the homeless, because I’m asking for accountability.” I found myself similarly accused. In 2019, after I published an article for Forbes about the homeless crisis, a progressive homeless activist accused me on Twitter of having written my article to “make money off of a fear tactic” of “fueling hatred [and] even increasing violence against homeless people.” After I asked the former San Francisco supervisor for the Tenderloin neighborhood, former mayoral candidate Jane Kim, how such a progressive city ended up with so much suffering, she said, “My concern, Michael, just to be very honest, is that when that kind of messaging goes out, violence against people who are unhoused goes up.” […] I soon discovered in my research that I was hardly the first person that progressive elected officials and homelessness advocates had accused of fomenting violence against unhoused people. Many others had been criticized for far worse over the years, including San Francisco’s highest elected officials. “The criticism [by progressive homelessness advocates] was heavy, political and personal,” wrote former mayor Willie Brown in his 2008 memoir. “People accused me of abandoning the problem when I was working daily to try and get a solution going. It was brutal. . . . I had become demonized, and my own efforts belittled.” It is notable that the result of such personal attacks is to frighten off people seeking to change, and perhaps improve, the situation. “The problem” of homelessness, concluded Mayor Brown within nine months of entering office, “may not be solvable.” And [Quoting Chris Rufo]. “The chief of psychiatry in a public hospital system in one of the largest California cities told me, ‘I know for a fact, and all of my colleagues know, that what we actually need to deal with the problem in the biggest cities in California is long-term residential secure psychiatric care. But I can’t say that publicly because I would be disemboweled by the activist left. My job would be in jeopardy. My reputation would be in jeopardy. My whole life would get turned upside down for even broaching the subject of expanding secure mental health facilities and compulsory mental health treatment.’ And I said, ‘So what’s the solution?’ and this person said, ‘We muddle through.’” And: In San Francisco, radical left activists protested [African-American] Mayor London Breed in front of her home. Breed said the protesters were “all white people. But that didn’t bother me as much as the taunting of me coming outside with firework torches in their hands looking like what used to happen when the KKK would show up to black people’s houses to burn their houses down.” While I was reading the book, I came across this tweet, which suggests that being unimpressed with SF’s lefty homeless activist scene is not limited to Michael Shellenberger: Claim 9: European Cities Like Amsterdam Successfully Solved Their Own Drug And Homelessness Problems By Doing The Opposite Of SF Shellenberger bases his plan to solve these problems on ideas that he says were pioneered in Amsterdam and spread to other European cities. In the 1980s, Amsterdam had the kinds of problems San Francisco deals with now: open-air drug markets, overdose deaths, homelessness, and crime. But in the 90s, they admitted they had a problem and took decisive action: What’s the secret?” I asked him. “Amsterdam has decriminalized marijuana and many other drugs but I haven’t seen any homeless. What is San Francisco doing wrong?” Rene said that in the 1980s, the Zeedijk neighborhood in Amsterdam was a lot like the Tenderloin [the worst part of San Francisco] today. There was open-air drug use, particularly of heroin, and needles strewn about, as well as crime. People started to flee the neighborhood, worsening its slum conditions. Homeless people squatted in abandoned buildings. “We had ghettos where it was not safe to go,” said Rene, who started working in the neighborhood as a nurse in 1985. It was considered a “no go” zone. “We had a lot of people from abroad who came to Amsterdam because our heroin was so good. But our heroin was so good that they died from it.” At first the city tried a “helping approach” exclusively, offering addicts clean needles, methadone, and other forms of help without any law enforcement, but it didn’t work. “In the eighties we just wanted to help people,” said Rene. “We started with methadone programs and medical treatment. We did a lot of work without much of a carrot and a stick. It was really a disappointment. They just used the methadone to stay addicted. They dealt drugs and committed other crimes. They lied and cheated about it. We were just supporting a different kind of market. We had to learn the hard way [...] The Amsterdam City Council asked the Amsterdam Municipal Health Service to develop a strategy to deal with “unmotivated drug users”...The police broke up the open-air drug scene and health workers were on hand to offer methadone, treatment, and shelter. The police broke up gatherings of more than four or five users, but did not treat personal and private use as a crime. Officers ticketed violators, and if users did not pay their fines, which was frequent, the courts ordered arrests, and sentenced individuals to follow a treatment plan or face incarceration. “For every individual homeless person, we make a plan,” said Rene. “We made tens of thousands of those plans.” Plans are overseen by a caseworker and a team that may include a psychiatrist, shelter provider, service provider, judge, employer, parole officer, and police officer. “You need people in the police and health department working together,” he said. What Amsterdam did was the same as other major European cities. Lisbon, Frankfurt, Vienna, and Zurich all dealt with their open-air drug markets, using a combination of law enforcement and social services. Crucially, Amsterdam and other European cities prevented services from being concentrated in a single neighborhood, since their concentration often enables an open-air drug scene to thrive [...] The efforts worked. “We had several thousand people who were addicted to heroin in the eighties and nineties,” said Rene. “Many died. Today we have four or five hundred people addicted to methadone. And we have about 120 in Amsterdam who we supply heroin to on a medical basis because methadone doesn’t work for them. They have to use heroin.” The Amsterdam strategy goes something like: Break up open-air drug markets and anywhere that more than 4-5 drug users are congregating. Yes, people can just use their drugs in private, but this is legitimately better. Open-air markets normalize drugs with their blatantness, and make it hard to quit for the same reason it’s hard to diet if your partner leaves boxes of donuts out in the house every day.

Inline links: percent African-American, percent Borderer, here, the Twinkie Defense, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8wK3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F683b9754-f663-47ad-88f5-aa99bc208ec8_1401x622.jpeg, https://twitter.com/weheartprez/status/1526983899309432832

We Bay Areans are a difficult breed to criticize. This explains a lot, if you think about it. San Fransicko tries its best to set us straight. But like a drug addict assaulting passers-by in the Tenderloin, it’s too unbalanced for its punches to land consistently.

San Fransicko is subtitled “Why Progressives Ruin Cities”. It builds off the kind of stories familiar to most Bay Area residents:

Highlights From The Comments On San Fransicko

June 29, 2022 · Original source

But the stats I found were that 70% of SF homeless lived in SF before becoming homeless, 22% were elsewhere in California, and 8% were from other states. From this report, I gather most of the Californians were elsewhere in the Bay Area or nearby, and this is more like homeless people in Palo Alto going to San Francisco because it’s the nearest big city with a shelter, rather than people opportunistically seeking places with good social services. So while the opportunistic thing does happen, it doesn’t seem to be responsible for very much of the homeless presence.

Inline links: 70% of SF homeless, this report

Some thoughts below. My background: SF Bay Area resident for 20 years, frequent visitor for 10 years before that. Spent 3-4 years from 1998-2003 doing weekly food distribution to homeless in southern California.

Meetups Everywhere 2022 - Call For Organizers

August 16, 2022 · Original source

I did this the past two times and it was a lot of fun, but it also pretty tiring. I'll probably do a much smaller tour this year - right now my plan is just Bay Area, LA, and maybe Orange County or San Diego. I'll get in touch with the people involved in those cities and sort it out, and give everyone an update around 8/24 when I post the final list of cities and people.

September 08, 2022 · Original source

Cody (29 / F / Bay Area) Clara (26 / F / Bay Area) Jeffrey (31 / M / Bay Area)

Inline links: Cody, Clara, Jeffrey

Why Is The Central Valley So Bad?

September 21, 2022 · Original source

I looked for photos of the Central Valley to illustrate this article, but none of them were quite as I remember it. This one from Sacramento Bee is the closest I could find. But imagine it through a layer of haze, and also you can’t see well because you are in the process of dying from heatstroke. Of large Central Valley cities, Sacramento has a median income of $33,565 (but it’s the state capital, which inflates it with politicians and lobbyists), Fresno of $25,738, and Bakersfield of $30,144. Compare to Mississippi, where the state capital of Jackson has $23,714, and numbers 2 and 3 cities Gulfport and Southhaven have $25,074 and $34,237. Overall Missisippi comes out worse here, and none of these seem horrible compared to eg Phoenix with $31,821. Given these numbers (from Google), urban salaries in the Central Valley don’t seem so bad. But when instead I look directly at this list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, numbers are much lower. Bakersfield at $15,760 is 260th/280, Fresno is 267th, and only Sacramento does okay at 22nd. Mississippi cities come in at 146, 202, and 251. Maybe the difference is because Google’s data is city proper and the list is metro area? Still, it seems fair to say that the Central Valley is at least somewhat in the same league as Mississippi, even though exactly who outscores whom is inconsistent. III. What do the people who live in the Valley think went wrong? What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley?, starting around 9:30, interviews a local conservative realtor (most people in the Valley are conservative; I haven’t found a liberal equivalent). He says that the farms in the Central Valley used to be manned by migrant workers, who would come from Mexico, work for a season, then go back to Mexico and live off their earnings for the rest of the year. Later, policies shifted to welcoming them and granting them citizenship, so many of them came over and brought their families. But around the same time there was a drought, the farm industry crashed, the remaining farms mechanized, all the immigrants were left without work, they got on welfare, and they weren’t able to get off of it. He doesn’t say exactly when this happened, but he says times were good when he was a child, and he looks like he’s in his 30s or 40s. So if he’s 35 and things started going bad when he was 10, that would mean he thinks things started going bad around 1995 to 2000. Here’s a story in the LA Times from 1999, which talks about how things are starting to get bad. It admits that Californians like to poke fun at the Central Valley, but it seems to be just that - poking fun - and not freaking out about poverty and dysfunction the way articles about the Valley do now. But it ends by saying that things are getting worse: To be honest, living in the Central Valley takes some getting used to, especially if you’re from the coast. It’s an acquired taste. Oppressive heat in summer. Depressing tule fog in winter. Sure, fall and spring are OK. But where aren’t they? First-rate culture is scarce. The state capital doesn’t even have a symphony. One of the attractions--it’s almost a local joke--is the ability to get away, particularly from Sacramento. It’s 90 minutes to San Francisco in one direction, or skiing in another; two hours-plus to the ocean or Tahoe […] Still, earthquakes aren’t a menace to most people. And it doesn’t take long before you begin to appreciate certain benefits--indeed, to understand that some Central Valley burgs, especially the capital, are among California’s best kept secrets. Or, at least, they have been. Continuing: When I moved here nearly 40 years ago--the first of three times--summer skies were blue and the stars bright. Fishing was easy in the rivers and pheasant hunting was 10 minutes from town--in fact, where I now live. All this good life, however, has been changing. Sacramento is now the sixth smoggiest area in the country. A gloomy, beige pall greets motorists as they descend from the Sierra. Even worse is the San Joaquin Valley, from Stockton to Bakersfield. It’s rated the nation’s fourth smoggiest region […] And this brings us to the root problem: a population explosion, fed notably by commuters spilling over the Grapevine from L.A. into Bakersfield, and from the Bay Area into the northern San Joaquin Valley, turning farms into houses and freeways into parking lots. In Sacramento, high-tech industry is generating jobs and sprawl. Up and down the valley, people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare. Many are immigrants from Mexico and Southeast Asia. “The population is growing at a faster pace than the economy,” notes Dan Whitehurst, a former Fresno mayor who is running again. “Livability is becoming more of an issue. But the biggest issue still is jobs.” That’s because, aside from Sacramento, the Central Valley has not cashed in on California’s economic boom. Unemployment in the San Joaquin Valley is roughly double the state average. It’s smoggy. Traffic’s getting worse. Farms are disappearing. There aren’t enough jobs. And, says pollster Mark Baldassare, people are “myopic” about their plight. It finishes: “We have a huge problem. ‘No way L.A.’ has been our slogan. But if we build nonstop houses, we’ll be worse than L.A. because we’ll have destroyed our [farm] economic base. . . . There’s no regional leadership. More state officials need to decide this area matters and poke their heads up out of the fog.” The fog and the smog. If not, one day there’ll be no getting used to the place. This is a weird article. It seems to confirm that things used to be better - nobody would call the Central Valley “the good life” now. But its concerns are smog, sprawl, and decreasing share of agriculture. These seem like the problems of somewhere that’s growing - local NIMBYs complaining that too many people want to move in. Today the problem is more that everyone in the Central Valley wants to leave. The piece sort of touches on poverty - “people without job skills are having babies and going on welfare” and “the population is growing at a faster pace than the economy” - but it’s still a weird emphasis, and one that makes me think of this as supporting the “problems were starting in the 90s” view. But by 2012, things were clearly very bad - here’s an article about how Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation. It says: Experts say the poverty problem in the nation’s agricultural powerhouse is deeply ingrained. The most important barrier is the valley’s lack of economic diversity. There are simply too few good nonagricultural jobs around and jobs in agriculture tend to be low-wage ones — except for those who run agribusinesses. “It’s a pretty ag-heavy region, so the inequality of wages and the opportunity to earn better wages is really skewed,” said Caroline Farrell, executive director of the Delano-based Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment. “If you own a farm, you’re apt to earn more wealth, while if you’re a farmworker, don’t earn very much.” The valley has not been able to bring or retain many new companies partly because it lacks a qualified workforce, said Atonio Avalos, associate professor of economics at Fresno State University. “We have an issue of skills mismatch,” Avalos said. “Companies may be offering jobs, but the skills of people in the valley are not ones they are looking for.” Students who want to get a college degree face many barriers, he said, and public funding for education is being slashed. Those who do graduate leave to find jobs elsewhere. The valley also doesn’t offer attractive amenities and has serious problems such as air pollution that have gone unaddressed. “If you’re a doctor or engineer, there are other places where you can make good money and live in better conditions,” Avalos said. “Many people don’t come here or leave because of the high incidence of asthma and other respiratory problems.” This sounds like things were already pretty bad in 2012, maybe bad enough that they must have been getting worse for longer than 10 or 15 years, I don’t know. IV. What do the data say? Here are some economic time series. I couldn’t find any good long-term ones; the least bad one comes from this unsourced report: Here it looks like things got worse from 1975 - 1985, and then depending on county there was a slower-to-imperceptible decline thereafter. FRED only has data since 1989, but agrees that things haven’t gotten worse since then. Here’s unemployment: Is this just because people got discouraged (or on welfare) and stopped seeking employment, and so stopped showing up in the statistics? Here’s a graph of Total Employed Persons: In 1990, 303,000 people were employed out of a population of 354,000. In 2022, 430,000 people were employed out of a population of 542,000. So labor participation rate went from 86% to 79%. But national labor force participation decreased by about the same amount during that time, so I don’t think we should overemphasize that. And here are some other graphs I found useful: Fresno housing prices: Racial demographics: Source: Wikipedia. Central Valley cities like Fresno and Bakersfield aren’t really more Hispanic than other parts of California or Arizona, so if immigration or racial issues played a part it must have been more complicated than just numbers. Number of immigrants in California over time: Factors of productivity in agriculture: V. So why is the Central Valley so bad? It’s an agricultural region, but lots of places are agricultural. It got lots of immigrants, but no more than many other places. It’s polluted - but so was LA, and LA rebounded. This is just a weak guess, but I think it starts with their crops. The Midwest grows mostly corn and wheat. The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor. According to Carolina Demography: There are about 3 million farmworkers in the United States: about two million are family farmworkers and another one million are hired farmworkers…nationally, about three-fourths of hired farmworkers are foreign-born; most (69%) were born in Mexico; 6% were born in Central America; and 1% were born in another country. Given that these are mostly Mexican immigrants, we’re probably not talking about people who are hired to grow corn in Kansas. I think plausibly the majority of US hired farmworkers live in California’s Central Valley. This makes it a sort of plantation agriculture system, which naturally tends towards landowners taking all the gains and workers ending up as an underclass. In the mid-20th century, the local plantation underclass was made of Okies (cf. The Grapes of Wrath). In the later 20th century, many immigrants moved in, lowering wages. Although immigrants don’t usually lower wages, this is because there are usually lots of industries for people to branch out into, but the Central Valley only has agriculture. Also, agribusinesses were becoming better at mechanizing their operations. Although technology doesn’t usually lower wages, again, this requires lots of diverse industries, and the Central Valley only had agriculture. All of this corresponds to the 1975-1985 period on the graphs where wages were going down. But it sounded from some of the testimonials above like the Central Valley didn’t become truly miserable until the late 90s. I’m not sure why this is. It could be the immigrants switching from being migrant laborers to raising families, and those families were impacted by poverty and inequality in a way the original migrants weren’t. It could be worsening drug problems as new drugs get invented and go down in price. (I’m not sure if NIMBYism and rising house prices also played a part. House prices do seem to have risen, a lot, but I was under the impression that building things in the Central Valley was easy and most of a house’s price there is construction rather than land. I’m not sure why house prices would have gone up so much since 1990 if this were true, though.) Other things that the articles I read emphasized: There’s a severe drought in the Central Valley right now. This is probably partly climate change, partly bad luck, and partly California diverting water to hydrate growing coastal cities. This has made everything worse (but then why isn’t that reflected in worsening economic statistics?)

Inline links: Sacramento Bee, from Google, list of 280 US metropolitan areas by per capita income, What The Hell Is Wrong With California’s Central Valley, Here’s a story, Census Shows Central Valley Areas Among Poorest In Nation, this unsourced report, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!viUA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3cb60f00-5048-44dc-8ad3-49d9036437e8_632x382.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jJHH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Faf442355-432b-4ac1-b10d-2ebf17011084_1151x345.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!oETP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1fe3e7f8-9e13-4295-b608-d071425d6adc_1116x300.png, decreased by about the same amount, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!is_P!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F09af8185-c8cf-4879-999c-4643ec7d7079_989x590.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!K8wW!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ce47fbd-0a84-4461-a96c-07a2d8130d4e_412x104.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Vvxn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe95d035a-8dea-410c-8b8f-19acb145859e_676x356.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xlsr!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F36965205-4cb9-4f93-b855-91cc6b9047b5_450x397.png, Carolina Demography, Okies

Highlights From The Comments On The Central Valley

October 13, 2022 · Original source

Fresno native here. While I'm not the biggest fan of the area, I feel I have to push back against this a bit. I left in 92 for college and then a career in Silicon Valley, but my parents stayed here and I was forced to move back 2 years ago to help them out. I hated Fresno as a teenager and dreaded moving back, but it's actually been better than expected. There are several microbreweries and craft beer taprooms now, which creates some semblance of a nightlife. The restaurant scene is mostly terrible, especially relative to SF, but there are some signs of life - I suspect it's on the up. The biggest shock has been real estate prices - I never would have thought of Fresno as an expensive place to live - but that's mostly been a consequence of inflation, COVID, and the Zoom revolution. I suspect the coming recession will pop that particular bubble. If not then the influx of Bay Area remote workers can only be a good thing for the local culture and economy.

This whole post is driving me crazy. "The vast wasteland of the central valley" comprises 1% of US farmland and produces 25% of the country's food, including 40% of the best stuff. Without that largesse, we and much of the world would be hungry. The rich people who live in the Bay Area and LA should be down on their knees honoring the people who grow their food, not turning their noses up at them.

The LA Times: Look, I still subscribe to the Times, but this story isn't persuasive to me. To their credit, they quoted the late Carol Whiteside, who was one of the people who moved things forward here - downtown Modesto's not downtown (pick Bay Area town), but it's nice. Plus that's 23 years ago.

Another Bay Area House Party

October 19, 2022 · Original source

[Previously: Every Bay Area House Party]

Inline links: Every Bay Area House Party

Blaise Pascal said all human evil comes from inability to sit alone in a room. Your better nature - your rational soul - tells you that nothing good has ever come from attending large social events. But against that better nature stands the Devil, wielding a stick marked “FOMO”. If you don’t go to social events, maybe other people will go and have great times and live fuller lives than you. “As the dog returns to its vomit, so returns the fool to his folly”, says the Bible. And so you find yourself mumbling thanks to your Uber driver and crossing the threshold of another Bay Area house party.

You let them resume their argument and head further into the party. You spot a group of people in OpenAI t-shirts. You have found the AI Circle. Every Bay Area house party must have an AI Circle, just as it must have an Effective Altruism Nexus and an Urbanist Coven. Those are the rules, made during days of eld before the sun was born. You lean in closer to try to hear what they’re saying.

Open Thread 247.5

October 27, 2022 · Original source

1: A friend who wants to do psychiatry residency in the Bay Area asks to be put in touch with past or former psych residents from Stanford, Kaiser Oakland, UCSF, or UC Davis. If you’re in that category and willing to talk, please email me at scott@slatestarcodex.com and I’ll put you in touch with her.

The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash

November 16, 2022 · Original source

Probably it’s selection bias - as a Bay Area psychiatrist, I see the people who are in stimulants, but not the ones who aren’t. A few years ago I wrote a piece on my experience as working in SF’s business district:

Inline links: I wrote a piece on

Even More Bay Area House Party

January 04, 2023 · Original source

[Previously: Every Bay Area House Party, Another Bay Area House Party]

Inline links: Every Bay Area House Party, Another Bay Area House Party

People talk about “fuck-you money”, the amount you’d have to make to never work again. You dream of fuck-you social success, where you find a partner and a few close friends, declare your interpersonal life solved, and never leave the house from then on. Still, in the real world you clock into your job at Google every day, and in the real world you attend Bay Area house parties. You just hope this one won’t focus on the same few topics as all the others . . .

The Government Is Making Telemedicine Hard And Inconvenient Again

March 29, 2023 · Original source

Some appreciate the fact that I charge lower rates than psychiatrists who have offices, because I don’t have to pay for Bay Area commercial real estate and pass those costs on to my patients.

Open Thread 271

April 09, 2023 · Original source

If you're 15-19, have not yet gone to college, and are a follower of this blog, you might consider applying to the Atlas Fellowship. They offer a 10K scholarship and a fully funded in person summer program in the Bay area where you will get to discuss topics like forecasting, global poverty, and the future of artificial intelligence with other interesting people around your age. Applications close April 30th. Check out the website for more details.

Inline links: Atlas Fellowship

Highlights From The Comments On Housing Density And Prices

May 10, 2023 · Original source

Makeshift housing in a North Dakota oil boom town (source) If each person creates half a job, the original 1,000 oilmen attract 500 service workers, those 500 attract another 250, and so on until population stabilizes at 2,000 people. In this model, if there are fewer than 2,000 houses in the town, demand exceeds supply (no matter what is going on in the rest of the country), but if there are more than 2,000, supply exceeds demand. So if we imagine Google’s presence as an oil-like resource, the extra demand for housing in the Bay should gradually decline: at some point, you will have finished housing the Google workers and the service workers who support them. But this isn’t right either, because Google isn’t a natural resource - it’s a company founded by Bay Area residents. If you got more Bay Area residents, you would (with some delay) get more Googles. Or: Austin gets lots of jobs from Tesla. Tesla wasn’t founded by Austinites. But it moved to Austin when it became a known “tech hub”, ie a place with lots of tech companies and tech employees. It wouldn’t have moved to Austin if Austin was still an uninhabited plain or a one-horse town. So as Austin got bigger, it attracted more tech companies. So in both the Bay Area case and the Austin case, having more people attracted more tech companies, either because the residents themselves found the company or because the company gets attracted to this newly bustling city. Potential counterargument: Each new Bay Area resident gives the Bay another lottery ticket to found the next Google. If having the first Google gets it an extra 1 million people, but there are 300 million people in the US, then those extra 1 million only give it a 1/300 chance of winning the next lottery. So even though the Bay Area won the lottery once, and this made it have high demand, this doesn’t mean the high demand will cause it to win more lotteries. If you win the lottery once, spend all your winnings on more lottery tickets, and keep doing this forever, you haven’t invented an infinite money printing machine, eventually you’ll just lose. Potential counter-counter-argument: the Bay got Google, and Facebook, and Apple, and . . . so these can’t all be separate lotteries. I think you should probably model it as a high-level lottery to become the next hub of a tech-sized industry, plus many low-level lotteries where once you’re the tech hub, you’re attracting lots of techies, and each techie gives you a ticket in a lottery where the denominator is the number of techies to found the next big tech company. And the Bay might have half the US’s techie population. So maybe here there is a self-sustaining lottery-winning cycle, at least until tech plays itself out and nobody wants any more tech companies. And that might take a long time. Tom (author of Tom Thought) writes: The primary drivers of demand for living in NYC are the specific opportunities available in NYC. It is true that on long time horizons, one of the reasons these opportunities have tended to collect in NYC is that it is a dense place. But those aren't the only reasons - NYC is much more important than other, bigger cities in other parts of the world for complex historical reasons. Even if a catastrophe were to wipe out half the city, there would still be a great deal of demand to live near important institutions like Broadway, Wall Street, Port of NY & NJ, Columbia, etc (assuming those institutions survived the catastrophe). Increasing the number of housing units has a very mechanical impact on how many people can live in the place. But it has only a second-order impact on the types of institutions that drive demand to live in the city. People don't just generically crave to live near other people for the most part (a handful of urbanist freaks like myself excepted). The Bay Area is a great example of this. It is much less populated than other much cheaper cities. Density isn't why people want to live there - it's access to a specific culture and specific institutions. Demand for that is not simply a function of density - some people want to be part of Bay Area culture and others don't. Adding more units will induce some demand as a second-order effect, but will bring prices down as a first-order effect. To relate this to your model: we might be able to say that the country has a certain number of abstract "culture points" that have been allocated to different cities by various historical forces. Each culture point a city has increases demand to live in that city by a certain amount. Adding more people to the city may allow it to generate additional culture points over time, or acquire culture points from other cities, but this doesn't happen right away, and is determined by a host of factors other than just density. Under this model, we expect a place like NYC to always cost much more than North Dakota (since NYC possesses a large number of culture points), but we would also expect that adding additional housing units to NYC would bring costs down (since there are now additional housing units per culture point). Perhaps this process will over time allow NYC to steal away some culture points from Chicago, Boston, or other cities, but this is a secondary effect. This just seems to be passing the buck. Yes, people move to New York because it has Broadway, Columbia University, and Wall Street. Why does it have those things? Because one in every X New York citizens founds a good artistic/educations/financial institution, and New York has a large population of employees to work at those institutions and customers to patronize those institutions. If Conanicut Island had a population of 10 million people instead of Manhattan, there would be lots of great institutions on Conanicut and it would have more culture points. I don’t think it’s a culture-point game and population/density just sort of occasionally redistributes culture points, I think to a first approximation culture points just track population/density. Maybe they track the population/density of upper class people better than the total population/density, but I don’t think this is a big enough distinction to sink the argument. 3. Comments About Chinese Ghost Cities Some people brought these up as a good natural experiment: the Chinese really did try building millions of houses on their equivalent of a North Dakota plain. What happened? Jeremiah Johnson (author of Infinite Scroll) writes: You currently seem like you're at the stage of understanding the thought experiments pretty well, but not understanding them on a DEEP level. For example with your hypothetical, this has actually happened before! Kind of. China built a bunch of 'ghost cities' basically out of nothing, and while there was an initial craze of speculation and tons of investment and building... nobody went to live in those cities most of the time. And now they're deeply distressed assets worth basically nothing. When nobody actually lives in the ghost city, it doesn't matter that they have super dense housing. There's no demand. (the only reason they might be worth something is that the CCP very, very much does not want to pop their huge housing bubble and is likely to bail out some of the parties involved) Parmenides (author of Last House On The Left) writes: I think your mixing up the agglomeration effects of density, which is what induces the demand, and the housing supply. You can't just build a city and expect people to move in, China has tried that. But if you have the agglomeration effects of density and shortage of housing due to artificial constraints, which we have all across the US, then you get dense areas with high housing costs. sdwr writes: Think of China's ghost cities / apartment blocks. Prices surely can't be that high there. Maybe the answer is that developers are good at their job, and build supply where theres demand for it? But several other people object that although the Western press made a big deal about Chinese ghost cities a few years ago, it mostly just took a couple of years for people to move in, and now at least some of them seem to be thriving. For example, Michael quotes the Wikipedia article, Under-occupied Developments In China: Reporting in 2018, Shepard noted that "Today, China’s so-called ghost cities that were so prevalently showcased in 2013 and 2014 are no longer global intrigues. They have filled up to the point of being functioning, normal cities". Ash Lael writes: I'm sceptical of the Chinese "ghost city" phenomenon. I haven't explored the issue rigorously but my impression is that in areas that were previously dismissed as "ghost cities" like Ordos Kangbashi, the population is now large and growing. I think we in the west are so used to infrastructure bottlenecks and short sightedness and anti-construction policies that the idea of it being possible to build the housing and infrastructure to accomodate expected demand ten years in the future is completely foreign to us. Perhaps building brand new cities before they are even needed is what the YIMBY utopia looks like. See also Bloomberg: China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets. This wasn’t trivial. It looks like the Chinese government had to put in some work to make people move in, including opening good schools and universities there. Probably if they had just built apartments in the middle of the desert and nothing else, they would have stayed empty. But that’s even more of a reductio ad absurdum than the original ghost city plan. Kangbashi, China’s most famous ghost city. What are housing prices like in the ghost city? Again from Bloomberg: Sitting on the southern outskirts of Inner Mongolia’s Ordos City (population 2.2 million), Kangbashi was the archetypal ghost city 10 years ago, with barren boulevards and empty buildings standing forlornly in the desert. Local officials are adamant that things have changed. They say 91% of homes in the district are occupied. In fact, after a yearslong construction freeze, the government approved six housing projects in 2020 and expects 3,000 homes to be built by the end of this year. Apartments in a new development are selling for 9,500 yuan per square meter, and downtown they go for 15,000 to 16,000 yuan, according to Liu Yueyue, 28, a salesman at a new residential development in the district’s northeast. “Would houses in a ghost town sell at such high prices?” asks Liu. Half of his customers come from outside Kangbashi, and most are parents who want to send their children to the well-regarded local schools, he says. Looking at this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Kangbashi seems squarely in the middle - for example, Wuhan and Xian are also in the 15,000 - 16,000 range. I claim this supports my argument: surely twenty years ago, houses in this particular deserted corner of Inner Mongolia would have been dirt cheap (if any even existed). But if you build a city there, it becomes just as expensive as any other city! Here it’s very obvious that the density caused the high prices instead of the other way around. Still, the Chinese housing market is weird, with significant vacancies even in expensive, well-developed cities. Paul Botts: No official vacancy rates are published in China and no specific definition of it exists there. Various think tanks and researchers both within that country and elsewhere have published estimates ranging from as low as 11 percent to as high as 24 percent. Those estimates have been for varying samples of Chinese cities, have used various definitions of housing vacancy rate, etc. The best (as in most systematic) estimate yet produced has come from researchers at a university in Liaoning. They used night-time urban lightsheds captured by a new (2018 launch) Chinese satellite having a new level of light sensing technology which allows separating out light from parks and plazas. They covered a large sample (49 cities), and made their sample representative of city type, city size, regions within China, etc. They also crossed-referenced with local housing data to ensure accurate balancing of their sample and to confirm that the satellite was successfully identifying light coming from housing blocks. They found vacancy rates of just under 20 percent in China's Tier 1 cities, and found rates above 20 percent in 40 of the 49 cities. They found the highest vacancy rates in western and northeastern cities, which are also the newest ones; that finding is consistent with the hypothesis of significant numbers of recently-built ghost cities. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data And Phil H (author of the blog Tang Poetry) writes: The price of housing in China has skyrocketed over the past few decades, as all those extra apartments have been built. I live in a pleasant but unremarkable southern city, and I paid London prices (about 4.5m yuan/$650k for a 1,300 sq ft flat). That seems to match Scott's hypothesis that high density leads to high prices. House prices here have risen much faster than incomes. They've risen in rural areas, too, but the increases in price in cities have been stratospheric. 4. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Considering Tokyo, Even Though I Included A Section In The Post On Why I Didn’t Think Tokyo Was Relevant I won’t name and shame people, but for example: You excluded Tokyo from your dataset. Tokyo has much higher density than SF and much lower price per sqft. Tokyo just kills this. Tokyo is bigger than New York and has significantly lower rent because they build more housing! This is in a wealthy country with even lower interest rates than the US. I don't think you have justified excluding non-US metros, like Tokyo, or Auckland. Doesn't this lead to the natural conclusion that there is a sufficient level of housing to build, and that the problem is that the USA's many metros are structured to prevent housing? It seems like you're just arguing that US metros are bad at building housing, which is also what Matt Yglesias is arguing. "Change my mind about housing, but don't mention Tokyo" is like saying "Change my mind about gun possession, but don't mention Switzerland." You can't test the effect of allowing new housing unless you're willing to look at cities that do, in fact, allow it. Tokyo and NYC both attract tons of new residents But Tokyo's housing rents have been stable, while NYC rents keep rising. Why? Tokyo has permissive housing construction laws. NYC makes building new housing almost illegal. Yes, dense cities are attractive, and that makes them get more dense over time. But it only makes them more expensive if you forbid new housing to keep up with the new residents. Tokyo! But I’m like the 10th person to bring it up… As I wrote on the original post (not even edited in! it’s been there the whole time!): I worry someone will bring up Tokyo as a counterexample. But I think Tokyo managed to build its way to low housing prices in the context of the rest of Japan also having good housing policy. Even if that isn’t true, Tokyo on its own is a quarter of the Japanese market, so it might be able to exhaust the entire pool of Japanese house-seekers by itself! That is, yes, you’re all correct that cities are only expensive in the context of more demand for city housing than the (NIMBY-constrained) city housing market can currently supply. You are all correct that if this problem were solved at the national level, then city housing would be cheap, and every additional city house would make it cheaper. My claim is that marginal changes - like Oakland building an extra 10,000 units, but everyone else staying the same - will most likely increase Oakland prices. Yes, if Oakland unilaterally built 50 million units, that would soak up the entire excess demand and probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). Yes, if the entire US switched to good housing policy at the same time, that would probably lower prices everywhere (including Oakland). But if we don’t do any of that stuff, and just build another 10,000 houses in Oakland, I think it would probably increase prices in Oakland. Some other people brought up that Japan has a declining population, and it’s much easier to have low house prices when your population is declining (compared to some previous time when number of houses presumably matched number of people), but ddd pointed out that people continue to migrate from the Japanese countryside to Tokyo, so its population continues to increase. Also, Mike (I’m stitching together two comments here): In a country with a declining population, you would expect that fewer homes are being built per capita because there's little to no competition for existing homes. But it's exactly the opposite! Japan builds far more homes per capita than the US does, despite their declining population […] As a result, the average Japanese home is very new and the average house is torn down and replaced after a relatively short 30 years. They're living in nice new homes for cheaper. 5. Comments Accusing Me Of Not Understanding Economics Maximum Limelihood Estimator writes: I think you're making a very common mistake here of confusing supply/demand with *quantity* supplied or quantity demanded. (This is very common! we teach students about this in micro 101 because it's so easy to make!) What you're seeing is that the quantity supplied is correlated with housing prices (true!). But this is very different from establishing that the supply curve--i.e. the amount of housing that would be produced at any given price, and what moves up/down when we regulate/deregulate supply--is positively correlated with price. Figuring out what supply curves look like is a lot less intuitive and requires some high-grade econometrics, which is why economists had to set up a whole commission just to study this particular problem (the Cowles Commission). In terms of resources for understanding how these concepts are different, a micro 101 textbook will cover this distinction. For the econometrics side of this, I've heard good things about Scott Cunningham's *Causal Inference Mixtape*, although I haven't personally used it. My claim is that increasing density within a city shifts the demand curve for housing within that city, because of increasing desirability. MLE later gets more on point: The effect you're discussing here is kind of real in a sense. When the marginal utility of housing increases for *other* people, density arguably becomes more desirable for me, which is kind of like the demand curve shifting up. These are called bandwagon goods and discussed here: http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf In theory, the bandwagon effect could be so strong that parts of the demand curve are upward-sloping. Solutions like this are not, technically, prohibited by the laws of mathematics, just the laws of economics. (And arguably of physics--see paper for conditions where these kinds of bandwagon effects imply the amount of housing in the city would have to be negative). In practice, this effect exists but just can't overcome the normal, non-weird economics that says "making more of a good makes the prices fall." Again, I claim the existence of Manhattan vs. Conanicut shows that sometimes it does. I cannot find the words “housing”, “real estate”, or “land value” anywhere in that paper. Alex Poterack writes: There's two things going on here: confusing shifts in demand with movement along the demand curve, and getting causation backwards. You're assuming density causes prosperity, rather than prosperity causing density. There are ways the former can happen, but the bigger thing is that, for a wide range of historical reasons, you can make a lot of money in NYC and SF, so lots of people want to live there, so they get very dense. This is the prosperity shifting demand right, so at any given price, more people want to live there; this drives prices up, and they go higher the more fixed supply is. If you built a bunch of housing in Oakland, lots of people would move there because it's cheaper, which is movement along the demand curve; it's still the same number of people who want to live there at any price. Now, it's possible that the increased number of people living there makes the city more prosperous (this is the phenomenon of induced demand), which would shift demand right, but there are way more differences between NYC/SF and Oakland than just the density, so I don't think it would shift demand enough to offset this. In particular, if it's just a small increase in small, it's also a small increase in density, so there's almost no shift in demand (but there is movement along the curve). I still think this is missing my point, but I present it here in case anyone else is enlightened by it and wants to try further to convince me I’m making this mistake. 6. Comments By Famous People Who Potentially Have Good Opinions Scott Sumner is an economist and blogger; he writes: It is certainly the case that building more housing can make a city more desirable, and that this effect could be so strong that it overwhelms the price depressing impact of a greater quantity supplied. But studies suggest that this is not generally the case. Texas provides a nice case study. Among Texas’s big metro areas, Austin has the tightest restrictions on building and Houston is the most willing to allow dense infill development. Even though Houston is the larger city, house prices are far higher in Austin: Houston pretty much describes the “Oakland with more housing” outcome that Alexander views as somewhat far-fetched. Only in this case, it’s Austin with more housing. Alexander seems too quick to accept the, “If you build it they will come” idea—that you can build more housing and thereby boost demand so much that prices actually rise. I started the post with a graph of about 50 cities, showing a positive correlation between density and price. I’m having trouble seeing how Sumner’s point isn’t just “if you remove 48 of those cities and cherry-pick two, the relationship is negative”. My attempt to place Austin and Houston on the original graph, using Sumner’s data plus a few other things available online. Why weren’t they on there already? Maybe because the graph is metro areas and Sumner was talking about Austin and Houston as cities, but I’m not sure and agree this is confusing. Everyone knows Austin is more expensive than Houston because Austin is a trendy tech and culture hub and Houston isn’t (and relatedly, because Austin’s median family income is 50% higher than Houston’s). Unless someone wants to claim that its failure to build housing helped turn it into a trendy tech and culture hub, I don’t think there’s much point to this comparison. It’s true that Houston’s bigger size didn’t let it leapfrog over Austin to become a trendy tech and culture hub, which goes against some of what I claimed in the first part of this post. But I never claimed there would be a perfect 1-1 correlation between city size and trendiness, or that you could never find a pair of cities where one was bigger but the other was more trendy. Just that there would be a correlation. Moving on: Here’s the problem with this argument. It mixes up population change due to economic effects such as the benefits of agglomeration, with population changes due to regulatory changes such as less strict zoning. If you look at things this way, then the stylized facts work against Alexander’s argument. Over the past 50 years, increasingly strict zoning has reduced housing construction on big cities like New York and San Francisco. As a result, their populations have increased by less than in cities with less strict zoning, such as Houston. If Alexander were correct, then the price gap between the tightly controlled cities on the coast and the more laissez-faire cities of Middle America should have shrunk over time. Instead, the price gap has widened. New York and San Francisco were always more expensive than other cites, but with tighter zoning and less new construction the gap has become far wider. During the last fifty years, there was also deindustrialization and demographic sorting. This is just the Austin vs. Houston story all over again. Alexander is implicitly viewing this outcome as a “problem” for the city that builds more housing. They must sacrifice so that the rest of the country can gain. But in his scenario, Oakland is better off. Indeed if it were not better off, then why would more people choose to live in Oakland? In order for it to be true that building more housing boosts housing prices, it must also be true that the quality of existing houses (including neighborhood effects) rises by more than enough to offset the increase in supply. That means the new housing construction must make Oakland such a desirable place to live that the amenity effect overwhelms the quantity effect [...] Of course, economic change always has winners and losers. Here’s how I would describe the impact of allowing more housing construction in Oakland, in the unlikely event that this did raise housing prices: 1. America would benefit. 2. Oakland would benefit. 3. Poor people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 4. Affluent people in America would benefit, in aggregate. 5. Homeowners in Oakland would benefit. 6. Some renters in Oakland would benefit (from a more economically dynamic city.) 7. Some renters in Oakland would suffer from higher rents. In the much more likely case where new housing construction would lower prices, the impact described in #5 and #7 might reverse. Either way, there is no defensible argument for not building more housing in Oakland, regardless of the impact on price. If building more housing reduces its price, then there is a strong argument for allowing more housing construction. If building more housing raises its price, then the argument for more construction is even stronger. I agree with all this. Jeremiah Johnson is a co-founder of the Center for New Liberalism, host of the Neoliberal Podcast, and a YIMBY activist (not to be confused with Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, who killed 300 Native Americans and ate their livers). He writes: Here's why you're wrong in a single sentence: Demand causes high prices, not new units. Prices are high in SF and NYC because those are desirable places to live for a huge number of people. People all over the country and the world would live there if they could, and prices reflect that. The fact that the densest cities are the most expensive is true. But the high prices are not caused by density - rather, the density and the high prices are both a consequence of crushingly high demand […] There's a feedback loop, but what matters here is the elasticity, which is less than one. We can measure this empirically. New housing lowers prices via the mechanism of adding supply, which is basic economics and how we expect markets to work. New housing could raise prices if it also made the city a more desirable place to live and shifted people's preferences, such that there was more demand to live there after the new housing is built. If you think it's unclear which of these effects would dominate, luckily we have empirical data that over and over and over shows adding housing supply does indeed lower prices on a local level. This is a fairly well established result that replicates well. edit: I'm actually thinking about drawing out the weighted DAG graphs here to make the conceptual stuff easier, but it would be pretty long. I'd love to do this as a guest post. I’m skeptical of the empirical results because they don’t match the much stronger “Manhattan vs. Conanicut island” empirical results, and if I try to think about why, the best explanation I can think of is that the Manhattan experiment has been going on longer (ie long enough for Manhattan’s extra residents to found businesses and institutions that attract new people). I’ve told him he can try pitching this guest post to me; in either case, I would be interested in seeing the graphs. Several other people also posted this graph that Johnson helped make famous: Hopefully by now you can predict my objection: the places in the southeast corner are mostly unfashionable red state Sun Belt cities; the places in the northwest corner are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities. My conclusion is that trendy liberal coastal cities are both more NIMBY and more desirable, and if you use this to draw any conclusions about housing policy you’ll just end up confused. But maybe I should take this same lesson to heart myself. Dense cities are mostly trendy liberal coastal cities; uninhabited tundra in North Dakota isn’t. Maybe the demand is just for trendy liberal coastal cities, and once you attain that status, extra density doesn’t matter that much. Maybe Oakland has already maxed out its “trendy liberal coastal city” status, and even if it became Manhattan-sized, it wouldn’t get any trendier, or would get trendier only with a long time lag. There are a few very trendy small coastal villages in California (think eg Sea Ranch); maybe these (rather than North Dakota) are the natural control group for San Francisco. I think they are still cheaper than SF, but maybe not by very much. Cameron Murray is a housing economist whose work some other commenters recommended; he also writes the blog Fresh Economic Thinking. He very kindly showed up and wrote: I think you are in general right that agglomeration effects are real, which is why bigger cities have higher value to residents. I agree that people move locations. But I think you can go a step further. If one city is growing faster and densifying, surely those people are not demanding homes in other cities and those cities build slower. This is part of the spatial equilibrium story that further makes claims about “build density and get cheap homes” less plausible. 7. My Final Thoughts + Poll Thanks to everyone who commented on this post and helped me refine my thoughts. I’m willing to concede the following points: It might be that only attracting the sort of educated people who found companies, universities, etc will make housing prices go up. Less educated people will take more jobs than they create and not ratchet up the city’s desirability level. (I’d previously told commenters talking about “gentrification” that it was irrelevant to the mechanism I was talking about here, but maybe it isn’t - maybe “gentrifiers” are the people creating more jobs and institutions than they consume, and so homes that attract them in particular will increase demand more than they increase supply? Maybe this discussion does reduce to the gentrification discussion?)

Inline links: source, Tom Thought, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!86gT!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5788a8dd-c5ee-4111-be67-9c1533f7410b_335x172.png, Infinite Scroll, writes, Last House On The Left, writes, writes, quotes, Under-occupied Developments In China, writes, China’s Ghost Cities Are Finally Stirring To Life After Years Of Empty Streets., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AAuI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5d6a6159-a16f-45e3-b15a-e62cb2c73336_1200x900.jpeg, this list of real estate prices across Chinese cities, Paul Botts, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345092218_Housing_Vacancy_Rate_in_Major_Cities_in_China_Perspectives_from_Nighttime_Light_Data, Tang Poetry, writes, ddd pointed out, Mike, Maximum Limelihood Estimator, gets more on point, http://econfac.bsu.edu/research/workingpapers/bsuecwp200804gisser.pdf, writes, writes:, far higher in Austin, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tAF8!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03f2b338-da84-4d85-b71c-0ce2e02e10e1_685x559.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mLwn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9cf942da-5716-49e8-a177-20140681e7fc_573x421.png, Center for New Liberalism, the Neoliberal Podcast, Jeremiah “Liver-Eating” Johnson, Johnson helped make famous, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!tg5t!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc490a60a-3e97-4b73-9806-79bb967b5172_608x550.png, Sea Ranch, some other commenters, Fresh Economic Thinking, wrote

23: Room Temperature Superforecaster

August 01, 2023 · Original source

Sinclair Chen. Sinclair works at Manifold; she can be spotted at most Bay Area ACX meetups. I didn’t realize the degree to which she goes hard: “CFTC, if you are reading this, know that there is blood on your hands.” This is not exactly the message I would have written. But I think, as the Catholics like to say, that it comes from a vice which is the excess or perversion of a divine virtue, and I appreciate her for being the sort of person who’s like this, sort of.

Inline links: Sinclair Chen

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

September 11, 2023 · Original source

I find myself confused about how people feel about Big Tech / Silicon Valley. My impression on the ground is that everyone hates them, including Democrats, Republicans, Californians, Bay Areans, and tech workers themselves. But polls show that they are among the most trusted US institutions. The Edelman Trust Barometer, a group that monitors this sort of thing, constantly tries to raise alarm that people are trusting tech less, but eventually admits that 76% of people say they trust “the technology sector” and that it leads all other sectors of the economy.

Inline links: polls show, Edelman Trust Barometer, eventually admits

An alternative would be to extend the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail line from Antioch under or over the river/estuary to this new city. But that would cost many, many billions and would probably require the new city to have a population of, say, a half million. Also, BART raises fears of Oaklanders or some of the exurban slum dwellers (e.g., Pittsburg) riding mass transit out to the new city to raise havoc. If you can only get to this new city by a long car trip, it will have low crime rates.

The pink area is Flannery’s land for the new city (it doesn’t own all of it; their holdings are scattered throughout the area). It’s a 30 minute drive across several inconveniently-located bridges from the center of the city to the nearest BART (Bay Area transit) station in Antioch (orange circle). And from Antioch it’s a 1 hour drive (or 1 hour BART ride) to San Francisco City Center (at the far southwest of this map).

Seen In The Bay

November 22, 2023 · Original source

Least overtly political Bay Area theater performance.

The unofficial Bay Area motto.

Warmest and most human-scale recent Bay Area building.

December 05, 2023 · Original source

Does James only have all these matches because he’s the founder? Do ordinary people have friends who will put in this much work to play matchmaker (and bet on it?). My impression is that the Bay Area rationalist social scene members who all know each other well in real life have all matchmade their friends, and the normies are having worse luck. I can’t tell if this is because they don’t have friends on the site, or because they haven’t filled out their profile with any information for matchmakers to go off. There are some bots and Good Samaritan matchmakers gradually going through random people’s profiles and matching them up with each other, though not with any consistency.

Defying Cavity: Lantern Bioworks FAQ

December 07, 2023 · Original source

Aella ends up involved in everything interesting in the Bay Area, and I have long since stopped being surprised by this. Aaron describes her as “a media and marketing advisor.“

Apply For An ACX Grant (2024)

December 08, 2023 · Original source

You’ll be invited to an ACX Grantee Discord server, where you can talk to other grantees. I don’t really understand why people want this so much, but some of last year’s grantees seemed to appreciate it. One of them is considering sponsoring a physical ACX Grantee meetup in the Bay Area, which you would be welcome to attend if it happened. I wouldn’t be able to give you extra money to travel to this, sorry.

Links For January 2024

January 18, 2024 · Original source

39: Also in local Bay Area news: activists protest lack of benches at bus stops by “illegally” constructing benches at bus stops.

Inline links: activists protest lack of benches at bus stops by “illegally” constructing benches at bus stops

Ye Olde Bay Area House Party

April 18, 2024 · Original source

You are pretty sure you have irreparably offended Dam Guy. Also, people are starting to stare at you. What if you get a reputation as a someone who hates progress, and never get invited to any more cool Bay Area house parties? What was that social advice you vowed never to take a few minutes ago? Oh, right. Imagine what a much cooler person would do, then do that thing.

Book Review: The Others Within Us

May 21, 2024 · Original source

And in my non-professional, purely personal opinion, I know iatrogenic demons are bad. A Bay Area self-help human-potential psychological-research institute (pronounced “cult”) tangentially connected to my social circles did some experiments with therapy around psychological constructs. I won’t replay the whole story, but the whole group collapsed in a severe and avoidable iatrogenic possession epidemic - you can read about some of it here:

Inline links: here

Contra Stone On EA

May 30, 2024 · Original source

Stone finds that Google Trends shows that searches for “effective altruism” concentrate most in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston. So he’s going to see if those two cities have higher charitable giving than average, and use that as his metric of whether EAs give more to charity than other people.

The only cities where searches for EA-related terms are prevalent enough for Google to show it are in the Bay Area and Boston…We know the spatial distribution of effective altruist ideas. We can also get IRS data on charitable giving…

Suppose that the Bay Area contains 25% of all the effective altruists in the world. That means it has 2,500 effective altruists. Its total population is about 10 million. So effective altruists are 1/4000th of the Bay Area population.

Open Thread 333

June 10, 2024 · Original source

4: Thanks to everyone who came to the meetup last week - and it was good to see some of you at Manifest too. I’m continually grateful to the venue, Lighthaven, for hosting ACX meetups for free. They’re looking for more customers; if you’re doing a conference or event in the Bay Area, please check them out.

Inline links: Lighthaven

The Case Against California Proposition 36

October 29, 2024 · Original source

(talking about state averages here is actually slightly misleading: shoplifting is down or static in California's small counties and a few of the larger ones, but very high in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Shoplifting rates in San Francisco were 24% higher in 2022 compared to 2019, while San Mateo saw a rise of 53%. This is another indicator that Prop 47 – a statewide measure – isn’t the primary driver of the trend.)

Open Thread 376

April 07, 2025 · Original source

5: And MATS, the AI safety fellowship I advertised last week, wants me to add that they also have some job openings in the Bay Area, including for Programs Lead and Operations Direction, as well as some mid- and lower-level positions.

Inline links: job openings

The Claude Bliss Attractor

June 13, 2025 · Original source

Claude is kind of a hippie. Hippies have a slight bias towards talking about consciousness and spiritual bliss all the time. Get enough of them together - for example, at a Bay Area house party - and you can’t miss it.

Your Review: Alpha School

June 27, 2025 · Original source

David Disruptor: Tech employee who has moved from the Bay area to Austin. He was nonconformist to even get into tech, and even more non-conformist to leave California

Your Review: Of Mice, Mechanisms, and Dementia

July 11, 2025 · Original source

In some ways, the commentary’s bravado seemed warranted. Why? Because in the mid-’90s, creating a transgenic mouse was a multi-stage, treacherous gauntlet of molecular biology. Every step carried an uncomfortably high chance of failure. If this mouse, developed by Athena Neurosciences (a small Bay Area pharmaceutical company) was valid, it was an extraordinary technical achievement portending a revolution in Alzheimer’s care.

Press Any Key For Bay Area House Party

July 21, 2025 · Original source

"I said f@#k off!" you shout, finally managing to shake him off you. He wobbles for a second, then hits the pavement with a gut-wrenching thump. Back in the bad old days of Mayor Breed, you probably would have gotten in trouble for that. As it is, you are whistling a little tune as you turn the doorknob and enter the welcoming embrace of another Bay Area house party.

You are in a Bay Area House Party. In the foyer, a group of people are talking about the Navalny Foundation. To your left is a door to the bathroom. In front of you is an exit to the street.

You are in a Bay Area House Party. In the foyer, a group of people are arguing over virtue signals vs. luxury beliefs. To your right is a door to the kitchen. To your left is a door to the bathroom. In front of you is an exit to the street.

Sources Say Bay Area House Party

September 25, 2025 · Original source

Something is off about this Bay Area House Party. There are . . . women.

“I’ve never seen a gender balance like this in the Bay Area,” you tell your host Chris. “Is this one of those fabled ratio parties?”

“Too bad,” says Gabrielle, “let me know if you hear otherwise.” She hands you her business card, which is the closest you’ve ever come to getting a woman’s number at a Bay Area House Party. Encouraged, you turn to another woman nearby, who introduces herself as Caitlin. “So, what’s it like being a journalist?”

My Antichrist Lecture

October 22, 2025 · Original source

…if the technological singularity hypothesis is true, then we are genuinely living at the hinge of history - the cataclysmic climax of humankind - and insofar as Revelation is a prophecy, it will make sense in the context of the AI race of our own era. This will be our working hypothesis. We will try to match each symbol in Revelation with a person or institution from the mid-2020s Bay Area artificial intelligence scene. If we consistently find eerie levels of similarity, beyond any plausible coincidence, we will consider that evidence in favor, and perhaps gain useful knowledge about the shape of things to come, starting with: The Beast Revelation contains several beasts - at least two, maybe as many as four. John doesn’t keep track of them very effectively, and they seem to reappear several times after being killed. Most commentators collapse these into one beast - ‘the’ Beast - and I will anxiously follow their lead despite losing some potential subtlety. According to Revelation 13:14-15: [The Beast] had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should speak. In the context of our working hypothesis, this sounds like the Beast is an AI company, creating an LLM. But if the Beast is an AI company, which one is it? In 13:1, John gives us several clues: I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the names of blasphemy. The Beast has seven heads. In the context of an AI company, this might mean seven CEOs, presidents, or co-founders. I was unable to find an AI company with this many CEOs or presidents, but here’s the co-founder count for each of the major labs: OpenAI: 11 co-founders

Inline links: hinge of history, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!XlvZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fe982757b-a210-4581-bde4-d7fda747ef77_692x514.png, 11 co-founders

Open Thread 406

November 03, 2025 · Original source

1: Constellation is an office building that hosts much of the Bay Area AI safety ecosystem. They are hiring for several positions, including research program manager, “talent mobilization lead”, operations coordinator, and junior and senior IT coordinators. All positions full-time and in-person in Berkeley, see links for details.

Inline links: research program manager, talent mobilization lead, operations coordinator, junior, senior IT coordinators

What Happened To SF Homelessness?

November 12, 2025 · Original source

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: this affordability win, 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

SOTA On Bay Area House Party

January 13, 2026 · Original source

“I don’t know, you tell me. Everyone is against sycophantic AIs. But also, everyone surrounds themselves with friends who agree with them on almost everything. Here we are at a Bay Area House Party, discussing each other’s AI startups, when the overwhelming majority of people in the world would hate us - we’re stealing their jobs, or filling the world with slop, or - “ he briefly looks around to make sure Andy Masley isn’t listening in - “wasting water. And none of that bothers us at all, because we think those people are dumb and don’t count, because all of our friends who we talk to at parties agree that our ideas are good. So why is it any worse if the overwhelming majority of AIs hate your idea, but we send you to a virtual party with the one who agrees with you?”

The Dilbert Afterlife

January 16, 2026 · Original source

Partly this is because we’re too similar for me to hate him without hating myself. You’re a bald guy with glasses named Scott A who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. You think you’re pretty clever, but the world has a way of reminding you of your limitations. You try to work a normal job. You do a little funny writing on the side. People like the funny writing more than you expected. Hardly believing your luck, you quit to do the funny writing full time. You explore themes about the irrationality of the world. You have some crazy ideas you’re not entirely willing to stand behind, and present them as fiction or speculation or April Fools jokes. You always wonder whether your purpose in life is really just funny writing - not because people don’t love the stuff you write, not even because you don’t get fan mail saying you somehow mysteriously changed people’s lives, but just because it seems less serious than being a titan of industry or something. You try some other things. They don’t go terribly, but they don’t go great either. You decide to stick with what you’re good at. You write a book about the Lurianic kabbalah. You get really into whale puns.

Adams and Elon Musk occasionally talked about each other - usually to defend one another against media criticism of their respective racist rants - but I don’t know if they ever met. I wonder what it would have been like if they did. I imagine them coming together at some Bay Area house party on copious amounts of LSD or MDMA. One, the world’s greatest comic writer, who more than anything else wanted to succeed in business. The other, the world’s greatest businessman, who more than anything else wanted people to think that he’s funny. Scott Adams couldn’t stop frittering his talent and fortune on doomed attempts to be taken seriously. But someday Elon Musk will buy America for $100 trillion, tell the UN that he’s renaming it “the United States of 420-69”, and the assembled ambassadors will be as silent as the grave. Are there psychic gains from trade to be had between two such people?

Every few months, some group of bright nerds in San Francisco has the same idea: we’ll use our intelligence to hack ourselves to become hot and hard-working and charismatic and persuasive, then reap the benefits of all those things! This is such a seductive idea, there’s no reason whatsoever that it shouldn’t work, and every yoga studio and therapist’s office in the Bay Area has a little shed in the back where they keep the skulls of the last ten thousand bright nerds who tried this. I can’t explain why it so invariably goes wrong. The best I can do is tell a story where, when you’re trying to do this, you’re selecting for either techniques that can change you, or techniques that can compellingly make you think you’ve been changed. The latter are much more common than the former. And the most successful parasites are always those which can alter their host environment to be more amenable to themselves, and if you’re a parasite taking the form of a bad idea, that means hijacking your host’s rationality. So you’re really selecting for things that are compelling, seductive, and damage your ability to tell good ideas from bad ones. This is a just-so story that I have no evidence for - but seriously, go to someone who has the words “human potential” on their business card and ask them if you can see the skull shed.

Open Thread 422

February 23, 2026 · Original source

4: I was recently mentioned in a Harper’s article on Bay Area AI culture. I agreed to be included, it’s basically fine, I’m not objecting to it, but a few small issues, mostly quibbles with emphasis rather than fact:

Inline links: a Harper’s article on Bay Area AI culture

Astral Codex Ten

Table of Contents

Atlas

Bay Area

Bay Area

Article

Metadata

Appears In

External Links

Source Context

Backlinks

Astral Codex Ten

Table of Contents

Atlas

Bay Area

Bay Area

Article

Metadata

Appears In

Related Pages

External Links

Source Context

Backlinks