Astral Codex Ten

Philadelphia

61 min read

Philadelphia

Article

Philadelphia is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 27 times across 27 issues between February 24, 2021 and April 01, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Philadelphia”; “PHILADELPHIA, PA ( RSVP )”; ""exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia"". It most often appears alongside San Francisco, Berkeley, Boston.

Metadata

  • Category: Places
  • Mention count: 27
  • Issue count: 27
  • First seen: February 24, 2021
  • Last seen: April 01, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

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

Book Review: Fussell On Class
February 24, 2021 · Original source
Where then may a member of the top classes live in this country? New York first of all, of course. Chicago. San Francisco. Philadelphia. Baltimore. Boston. Perhaps Cleveland. And deep in the countryside of Connecticut, New York State, Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. That's about it. It’s not considered good form to live in New Jersey, except in Bernardsville and perhaps Princeton, but any place in New Jersey beats Sunnyvale, Cypress, and Compton, California; Canton, Ohio; Reno, Nevada; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Columbus, Georgia, and similar army towns.
Meetups Everywhere 2021: Times And Places
August 23, 2021 · Original source
PHILADELPHIA, PA (RSVP) Contact: Majuscule, dmcbriggs[at]gmail[dot]com, wfenza[at]gmail[com] Google group Time: 7:00 PM, Thursday, September 30 Location: 210 Ardmore Avenue, Ardmore PA. We’ll be meeting on the spacious covered front porch. Coordinates: https://w3w.co/heap.tracks.fantastic Notes: We've been doing meetups since 2018, join our Google Group for updates and announcements. RSVP encouraged but not required.
Inline links: RSVP, Google group, https://w3w.co/heap.tracks.fantastic
On Hreha On Behavioral Economics
August 30, 2021 · Original source
Somewhere in this process, they did an experiment where they gave participants a quarter minted in Denver and asked them if they wanted to exchange it for a quarter minted in Philadelphia. 60% of people very reasonably didn’t care, but another 35% had grown attached to their Denver quarter, with only 5% actively seeking the novelty of Philadelphia. Psychology is weird. I understand why some people would summarize this paper as “loss aversion doesn’t exist”. But it’s very different from “power posing doesn’t exist” or “stereotype threat doesn’t exist”, where it was found that the effect people were trying to study just didn’t happen, and all the studies saying it did were because of p-hacking or publication bias or something. People are very often averse to losses. This paper just argues that this isn’t caused by a specific “loss aversion” force. It’s caused by other forces which are not exactly loss aversion. We could compare it to centrifugal force in physics: real, but not fundamental. Also, you can’t use this paper to argue that “behavioral economics is dead”. At best, the paper proves that loss aversion is better explained by other behavioral economic concepts. But you can’t get rid of behavioral econ entirely! The stuff you have to explain is still there! It’s just a question of which parts of behavioral econ you use to explain it. Complicating this even further is Mrkva et al, Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated (h/t Alex Imas, who has a great Twitter thread about this). This is an even newer paper, 2019, which argues that Gal and Rucker are wrong, and loss aversion does have an independent existence as a real force. There are many things to like about this paper. Previous criticisms of loss aversion argue that most experiments are performed on undergrads, who are so poor that even small amounts of money might have unusual emotional meaning. Mrkva collects a sample of thousands of millionaires (!) and demonstrates that they show loss aversion for sums of money as small as $20. On the other hand, I’m not sure they’re quite as careful as G&R at ruling out every other possible bias (although I don’t have a great understanding of where the borders between biases are and I can’t say this for sure). The main point I want to make is that all the scientists in this debate seem smart, thoughtful, and impressive. This isn’t like social priming experiments where one person says a crazy thing, nobody ever replicates it at scale, and as soon as someone tries the whole thing collapses. These have been replicated hundreds of times, with the remaining arguments being complicated semantic and philosophical ones about how to distinguish one theory from a very slightly different theory. If that takes replicating your result on a sample of thousands of millionaires, people will gather a sample of thousands of millionaires and get busy on the replication. Just overall really impressive work. I don’t feel qualified to take a side in the G&R vs. Mkrva debate, but both teams make me really happy that there are smart and careful people considering these questions. And this is just a drop in the bucket. Alex Imas also links Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, which says: Though substantial evidence supports prospect theory, many presumed canonical theories have drawn scrutiny for recent replication failures. In response, we directly test the original methods in a multinational study (n = 4,098 participants, 19 countries, 13 languages), adjusting only for current and local currencies while requiring all participants to respond to all items. The results replicated for 94% of items, with some attenuation. Twelve of 13 theoretical contrasts replicated, with 100% replication in some countries. Heterogeneity between countries and intra-individual variation highlight meaningful avenues for future theorizing and applications. We conclude that the empirical foundations for prospect theory replicate beyond any reasonable thresholds. Beyond any reasonable thresholds! IV. Do Nudges Work? or, How Small Is Small? Continuing through the Hreha article: For a number of years, I've been beating the anti-nudge drum. Since 2011, I've been running behavioral experiments in the wild, and have always been struck by how weak nudges tend to be. In my experience, nudges usually fail to have *any* recognizable impact at all. This is supported by a paper that was recently published by a couple of researchers from UC Berkeley. They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials run by two "nudge units" here in the United States. I want you to guess how large of an impact these nudges had on average... 30%? 20%? 10%? 5%? 3%? 1.5%? 1%? 0%? If you said 1.5%, you'd be right (the actual number is 1.4%, but if I had written that out you would have chosen it because of its specificity). According to the academic papers these nudges were based upon, these nudges should have had an average impact of 8.7%. But, as you probably understand by now, behavioral economics is not a particularly trustworthy field. I actually emailed the authors of this paper, and they thought the ~1% effect size of these interventions was something to be applauded—especially if the intervention was cheap & easy. Unfortunately, no intervention is truly cheap or easy. Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. Uber infamously had a team of behavioral economists working on its product, trying to “nudge” people in the right direction. Relatedly, Uber makes $10 billion in yearly revenue. If they can “nudge” people to spend 1% more, that’s $100 million. That’s not much relative to revenue, but it’s a lot in absolute terms. In particular, it pays the salary of a lot of behavioral economists. If you can hire 10 behavioral economists for $100,000 a year and make $100 million, that’s $99 million in profit. Or what if you’re a government agency, trying to nudge people to do prosocial things? There are about 90 million eligible Americans who haven’t gotten their COVID vaccine, and although some of them are hard-core conspiracy theorists, others are just lazy or nervous or feel safe already. (source) Whoever decided on that grocery gift card scheme was nudging, whether or not they have an economics degree - and apparently they were pretty good at it. If some sort of behavioral econ campaign can convince 1.5% of those 90 million Americans to get their vaccines, that’s 1.4 million more vaccinations and, under reasonable assumptions, maybe a few thousand lives saved. Hreha says that: Every single intervention requires, at the very minimum, administrative overhead. If you're going to do something, you need someone (or some system) to implement and keep track of it. If an intervention is only going to get you a 1% improvement, it's probably not even worth it. This depends on scale! 1% of a small number isn’t worth it! 1% of a big number is very worth it, especially if that big number is a number of lives! A few caveats. First, a small number only matters if it’s real. It’s very easy to get spurious small effects, so much so that any time you see a small effect you should wonder if it’s real. I’m ready to be forgiving here because behavioral economics is so well-replicated and common-sensically true, but I wouldn’t blame anyone who steers clear. Second, Hreha says: To be honest, you can probably use your creativity to brainstorm an idea that will get you a 3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics "science" required. Which leads me to the final point I'd like to make: rules and generalizations are overrated. The reason that fields like behavioral economics are so seductive is because they promise people easy, cookie-cutter solutions to complicated problems. Figuring out how to increase sales of your product is hard. You need to figure out which variables are responsible for the lackluster interest. Is the price the issue? Is the product too hard to use? Is the design tacky? Is the sales organization incompetent? Is the refund/return policy lacking? etc. Exploring these questions can take months (or years) of hard work, and there's no guarantee that you'll succeed. If, however, a behavioral economist tells you that there are nudges that will increase your sales by 10%, 20%, or 30% without much effort on your part... Whoa. That's pretty cool. It's salvation. Thus, it's no surprise that governments and companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on behavioral "nudge" units. Unfortunately, as we've seen, these nudges are woefully ineffective. Specific problems require specific solutions. They don't require boilerplate solutions based on general principles that someone discovered by studying a bunch of 19 year old college students. However, the social sciences have done a good job of convincing people that general principles are better solutions for problems than creative, situation-specific solutions. In my experience, creative solutions that are tailor-made for the situation at hand *always* perform better than generic solutions based on one study or another. Hreha is a professional in this field, so presumably he’s right. Still, compare to medicine. A thoughtful doctor who tailors treatment to a particular patient sounds better (and is better) than one who says “Depression? Take this one all-purpose depression treatment which is the first thing I saw when I typed ‘depression’ into UpToDate”. But you still need medical journals. Having some idea of general-purpose laws is what gives the people making creative solutions something to build upon. (also, at some point your customers might want to check your creative solution to see whether it actually gives a “3-4% minimum gain, no behavioral economics required”, and that would be at least vaguely study-shaped.) Third, everyone who said nudging had vast effects is still bad and wrong. Many of them were bad and wrong and making fortunes consulting for companies about how to implement the policies they were claiming were super-powerful. This is suspicious and we should lower our opinion of them accordingly. In a previous discussion of growth mindset, I wrote: Imagine I claimed our next-door neighbor was a billionaire oil sheik who kept thousands of boxes of gold and diamonds hidden in his basement. Later we meet the neighbor, and he is the manager of a small bookstore and has a salary 10% above the US average... Should we describe this as “we have confirmed the Wealthy Neighbor Hypothesis, though the effect size was smaller than expected”? Or as “I made up a completely crazy story, and in unrelated news there was an irrelevant deviation from literally-zero in the same space”? All the people talking about oil sheiks deserve to get asked some really uncomfortable questions. And a lot of these will be the most famous researchers - the Dan Arielys of the world - because of course the people who successfully hyped their results a lot are the ones the public knows about. Still, the neighbor seems like a neat guy, and maybe he’ll give you a job at his bookstore. V. Conclusion: Musings On The Identifiable Victim Effect I actually skipped the very beginning of Hreha’s article. I want to come back to it now. It begins: The last few years have been particularly bad for behavioral economics. A number of frequently cited findings have failed to replicate. Here are a couple of high profile examples: The Identifiable Victim Effect (featured in the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014)
Inline links: Loss Aversion Has Moderators, But Reports Of Its Death Are Greatly Exaggerated, Alex Imas, Replicating patterns of prospect theory for decision under risk, They looked at the results of 126 randomized controlled trials, others, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!1gY_!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fbucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5b127d7c-045a-4266-b515-a0e9201ce651_571x382.png, a previous discussion of growth mindset, the workbooks I wrote with Dan Ariely and Kristen Berman in 2014
Does Georgism Work? Part 2: Can Landlords Pass Land Value Tax on to Tenants?
December 10, 2021 · Original source
Here's a simple visualization of how an LVT paired with a Citizen's Dividend compares to conventional property taxes. It's just an illustration meant to make a rhetorical point, but now I'm curious to see a real-world version of this superimposed over, say, Houston or Philadelphia or New York City, and based on actual data.
Open Thread 217
March 27, 2022 · Original source
Metaculus currently has him at 40% to win the primary and 29% to win the general. I’m closer to 60/45. Although he’s getting support from some big funders, campaign finance privileges small-to-medium-sized donations from ordinary people. If you want to support him, you can see a list of possible options here - including donations. You can donate max $2900 for the primary, plus another $2900 for the general that will be refunded if he doesn’t make it. If you do donate, it would be extra helpful if the money came in before a key reporting deadline March 31. 3: Every year in autumn I hold a big Meetups Everywhere event, and every time people tell me I should do it more often than once a year. So this time we’ll hold a mini-Meetups-Everywhere this April. It won’t be any different from your usual meetup schedule except that it’ll be the Schelling time for everyone who only wants to come once every few months to come. If you’re a meetups organizer (or want to become one), please fill in this form with the date of a meetup April 11th or later. Next Sunday I’ll put the results on the Open Thread for people to see. 4: Speaking of meetups, the rationalist/EA establishment is trying to promote local meetups. If you’re a local ACX/LW meetups organizer, you’re potentially invited to attend an all-expenses paid retreat in California in July with our meetups czar Mingyuan. Please read more here, then fill in this form to get on her radar. 5: And speaking of Mingyuan, she is going to inspect - sorry, enjoy the hospitality of - the East Coast meetup groups. She’ll be in DC: 4/11–4/13 Baltimore: 4/14 Philadelphia: 4/15–4/16 NYC: 4/17–4/21 Yale: 4/22–4/23 Northampton: 4/24–4/25 Boston: 4/26–5/1. The local groups have already taken care of having meetups at the right time, but she’s looking for people who could host her and drive her between cities . Email meetupsmingyuan@gmail.com if you can help. 6: Last week I tried to figure out the needs of community members in Russia and Ukraine. There are some great resources on the thread, but issues that still need solving: Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work
Inline links: here, donations., fill in this form, here, this form, on the thread, Seven Ukrainian refugees looking for remote work
Spring Meetups In Seventy Cities
April 10, 2022 · Original source
PHILADELPHIA, PA Contact: Wes and Diana (wfenza@gmail.com) Date: April 15 Time: 6:00 PM Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR3M+9J Location: Uptown Beer Garden, 1500 JFK Boulevard
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR3M+9J
Highlights From The Comments On The 2020 Homicide Spike
July 08, 2022 · Original source
3. Many large cities and states are now making it very clear that they literally do not want police to do proactive police work. Philadelphia, for example, banned police from doing traffic stops. Baltimore's prosecutor said she won't prosecute any cases for drug possession. Boudin refused to use evidence San Francisco police gathered during "pretextual" traffic stops. When political leaders tell officers that they should stop doing police work, police stop doing it.
Open Thread 242
September 18, 2022 · Original source
7: Sorry about the weather today for the Bay Area meetups! We are still planning to hold the Berkeley meetup at the Rose Garden Inn starting at 1, and SF started at 11 and has announced their rain plan here. Next week will be meetups in Amman on the 20th, Philadelphia on the 22nd, Paris on the 23rd, Zurich + Edinburgh + Pittsburgh + Copenhagen on the 24, and London + Perth + Waterloo on the 25th - see details here.
Inline links: here, here
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2023
April 10, 2023 · Original source
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Wes Contact Info: wfenza[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Thursday, April 27th, 06:30 PM Location: Philadelphia Ethical Society. 1906 Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia, PA 19103 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ Event Link: https://discord.gg/W5rsVbdJUM?event=1090645327809363979 Notes: Free Dim Sum!
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ, https://discord.gg/W5rsVbdJUM?event=1090645327809363979
I’ll provisionally be attending the Berkeley meetup on May 6th. Skyler will provisionally be attending Manhattan, DC, Boston, Philadelphia, and Berkeley.
The Question Of Separatism
May 19, 2023 · Original source
This wasn’t of any interest to London or other European cities. The Bostonians weren’t nearly as good or efficient at making metal tools as Londonians were. So Boston couldn’t export the metal tools back to Europe — but it could use them internally, and also export them to other American cities that were about as poor as Boston was, or poorer. Internally, this meant the spark of a manufacturing economy in Boston, as easily obtained metal parts made it easier for other Bostonians to replace other imports from European cities, and eventually develop a symbiotic network of industries. It also meant that the revenue from fish and timber could be used to import new things, including new innovations from European cities (which would later become opportunities for more import replacement). And because there were customers for Boston-made metal goods in New York and Philadelphia, and eventually Cincinnati and Chicago and Pittsburgh as these cities came into existence, it meant additional revenue for Boston that it could reinvest into developing its production further. For Jacobs, virtually all city development can be seen through the lens of import replacement (which, to be clear, has approximately nothing to do with policies of import substitution industrialization; import replacement is not a policy, but a naturally arising free market phenomenon). Her book contains many other examples than Boston, such as Venice, which started off in the early Middle Ages as a small town that sold salt to Constantinople, but then diversified its production to become one of the wealthiest cities of its time; or Taipei and Kaohsiung, two cities in Taiwan that kickstarted their development not long before the 1980s, by forcing expropriated landlords to invest into local import-replacing businesses. One is reminded of Scott’s review of How Asia Works. Import replacement, then, is what makes cities economically powerful. And this power is so great that it causes ripples in distant places. In fact it is the main reason that anything happens at all in non-city areas. Jacobs gives the example of Bardou, a small village in southern France. Bardou looks like this: To the extent that Bardou ever had an economic life, that life was almost entirely driven by distant cities. In ancient times, the area was populated because of iron mines nearby. The mines were exploited to serve the needs of people in the distant cities of Lugdunum (Lyon), Nemausus (Nîmes), or even Rome. As Jacobs notes, we could say that the mines served “the Roman Empire,” but that would be another example of using the abstraction of sovereign countries when we should instead be specific. It was Lugdunum, Nemausus and Rome that wanted the iron — not some random rural area of the empire, and certainly not the part of the empire in which Bardou was located. Eventually the mines and the region were abandoned. More than 1,000 years later, peasants moved into the area and built the modern village. For centuries they lived a wretchedly poor life of subsistence farming. No cities exerted any influence on it, and indeed nothing happened. Then, in the 19th century, the people of Bardou learned that they could improve their situation by moving to distant cities such as Paris, and most of them did. Again, the force wasn’t being exerted by “France”; Bardou was already part of France. The force was specifically being exerted by Paris and other cities with jobs for poor peasants. By the 1960s, only one old man was left. That’s when two foreign visitors, a German and an American, happened upon the village, decided to buy most of it, revitalized it, and turned it into a tourist spot (and even, for a brief time, into a set for a movie company). Today Bardou is a popular place for travelers — who are mostly city people, and spend money that was mostly earned in cities. The Bardou story contains examples of several of the forces that import-replacing cities radiate, according to Jacobs. These forces are central to her thinking. There are five of them: Markets. Cities house a lot of people who need a lot of goods and services, and are therefore strong markets to sell goods and services to. This was the force that acted on the Bardou area when it was a Roman mining region, and again today when it functions as a tourist spot for city vacationers.
Inline links: import substitution industrialization, Scott’s review of, Bardou, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!RfMs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fc119b085-f7b3-4e09-a586-9f4fc4c2ea21_1200x1600.png
Meetups Everywhere 2023: Times & Places
August 25, 2023 · Original source
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Wes Contact Info: rationalphilly[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Tuesday, September 26th, 7:00 PM Location: Ethical Society of Philadelphia, 1906 Rittenhouse Square Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ Group Link: Email - https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia; Google Calendar - https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=cmF0aW9uYWxwaGlsbHlAZ21haWwuY29t; Meetup - https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-rationalists/; Discord - https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB; Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly Notable Guests: Wes, one of the hosts of the Mindkiller podcast Notes: Free dim sum! There will be vegetarian and non-vegetarian selections. We have a social meetup once a month.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ, https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia, https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=cmF0aW9uYWxwaGlsbHlAZ21haWwuY29t, https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-rationalists/, https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Hardball Questions For The Next Debate
November 07, 2023 · Original source
DESANTIS: Again, nobody told me about that rule, and I think the Iowa vote part might be un-Con . . . un- . . . could be contrary to that big piece of paper by the people in the building in Philadelphia.
Spring Meetups Everywhere 2024
March 30, 2024 · Original source
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Siddhesh Contact Info: ranade[dot]siddhesh[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, April 6th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee Roasters on 6th and Market (100 S Independence Mall W #110) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: Email - https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia; Google Calendar - https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=cmF0aW9uYWxwaGlsbHlAZ21haWwuY29t; Meetup - https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-rationalists/; Discord - https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB; Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M, https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia, https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=cmF0aW9uYWxwaGlsbHlAZ21haWwuY29t, https://www.meetup.com/philadelphia-rationalists/, https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
My 2024 Presidential Debate
June 27, 2024 · Original source
Biden: “Foreigner” is the wrong word to use here. I believe that during the theophany at Philadelphia, the souls of all future Americans were present, and agreed to the Constitution along with the delegates. But some of these souls were erroneously born into foreign bodies, and as part of the Messianic process we must gather them back into America.
Meetups Everywhere 2024: Times & Places
August 29, 2024 · Original source
Contact: Phil Contact Info: acxharrisburg[at]gmail[dot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 03:00 PM Location: Zeroday Brewing Company Taproom 925 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA 17102 We will likely be in the side-room to the right as you enter, look for the ACX MEETUP sign on the table Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G57487+R73 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA, USA Contact: Siddhesh Contact Info: ranade[dot]siddhesh[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe at 100 S Independence Mall W #110, Philadelphia, PA 19106 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G57487+R73, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD, https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M, https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Contact: Siddhesh Contact Info: ranade[dot]siddhesh[a t]gmail[d ot]com Time: Saturday, October 05th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe at 100 S Independence Mall W #110, Philadelphia, PA 19106 Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M, https://discord.gg/46zb6hRVGB, https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalphilly
Open Thread 349
September 30, 2024 · Original source
2: Late addition to Meetups Everywhere: Moscow on October 6, see link for more. Other meetups coming up this week include Philadelphia, Austin, Istanbul, Canberra, Budapest, and Warsaw. 3: If you haven’t already, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest - voting closes Sunday, October 6. 4: And if you’re an ACX veteran, you might remember the winner of the very first book review contest - Lars Doucet’s review of Progress And Poverty, the book on Georgism. Since then, Lars has gone on to start a Georgism-inspired land valuation company, Valuebase, which has gotten investment from Sam Altman, Nat Friedman, and others. Now they’re recruiting paid interns, including: Technical interns: Ideal candidates have experience in programming, data science, machine learning, or AI, and are eager to work on real-world problems that scale across millions of properties.
Inline links: Meetups Everywhere, vote for the winner of this year’s book review contest, Lars Doucet’s review of, Valuebase
Ballots Everywhere: Call For Organizers, Times, & Dates
September 30, 2024 · Original source
Philadelphia
Ballots Everywhere: Times And Places
October 04, 2024 · Original source
PHILADELPHIA - Saturday, October 5, 11:00 AM - La Colombe, 100 S Independence Mall W #110, Philadelphia, PA - Contact rationalphilly[at]gmail[dot]com
ACX Local Voting Guides
October 22, 2024 · Original source
AUSTIN: Guide here BOSTON: Guide here CHICAGO: Guide here LOS ANGELES: Guide here NEW YORK CITY: Guide here OAKLAND/BERKELEY: Guide here PHILADELPHIA: Guide here SAN FRANCISCO: Guide here SEATTLE: Guide here
Inline links: Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here, Guide here
PHILADELPHIA: Guide here. Finally, a swing state! Philadelphia Rationality endorses Harris for President. But they pick Republican candidate Dave McCormick for Senate after his Democratic opponent, incumbent Bob Casey, earned their ire for various ill-thought-out progressive legislation like anti-price-gouging laws; McCormick also seems like a rare Republican capable of standing up to Trump. Just because you’re a swing state doesn’t mean your vote always counts; Philadelphia itself is so heavily Democratic that the group says “voting for [its Congressional representatives] should be seen more as a form of self-expression than a process to choose a candidate, so we recommend voting for whichever party makes you feel best”.
Inline links: Guide here
Mantic Monday: Judgment Day
November 05, 2024 · Original source
Yet in the end, everything is so perfectly balanced that the sum total of these luminaries refuse to say which side of even we’re on. The nation balances on a knife’s edge. Eli Lilly stock moons. A red sun hangs over Philadelphia, where American democracy began and may yet end. A man walks into a diner just before closing time. He looks like a good tipper. The waitress was hoping to leave early and go vote. She decides against. Seven trumpets sound; seven seals are opened; there is silence in Heaven for the space of about half an hour. As George RR Martin put it, “God flips a coin and the world holds its breath.” Tomorrow - if we are so lucky - there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of public life. The winner’s campaign operatives will be praised as world-historic geniuses, the loser’s mocked forever as utter nincompoops. Thousands of lifelong public servants who backed Mr. 49% will be tossed from DC like used toilet paper and replaced with thousands of hacks who backed Mr. 51%. Funding streams will go dry. Whole lands will turn to economic deserts. Fortunes will be destroyed. A few people will make good on their exile and suicide threats. Most won’t. The Union will either survive or not. If it survives, we’ll do it all over again four years later. A red sun sets over DC. The marble monuments are stained crimson; the statues of Lincoln and Jefferson and the rest look like they writhe in hellfire. The people seclude themselves in their houses. A city where even the Christians are atheist kneels in prayer. On some level, they know - we know - it was never just about choosing a leader. It was all for this - the same urge that drove the games of the Colosseum and sacrifices of Tenochtitlan. The need for a single moment of unconditioned reality. For one evening, the people of the richest and most secure nation in history, fat off the spoils of six continents, will know the same fear as the starving Catalhuyuk farmer, staring at the sky, wondering if the rains will come. For one evening, everyone - rich or poor, religious or secular, Democrat or Republican - will join in the prayer of the poet: “Judge of the Nations, spare us yet Lest we forget - lest we forget!” Don’t Blame Me, I Voted For Kodos Metaculus uses experimental “conditional forecasts” to determine the consequences of a Trump/Harris victory. How it works (example): you set up two forecasts: If Trump wins, will China invade Taiwan?
Inline links: the prayer of the poet, experimental “conditional forecasts”, example
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity
November 12, 2024 · Original source
The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, by Jean-Leon Gerome (maybe slight nominative determinism?) Stark is writing in the 1990s, and martyrology c. 1995 does not exactly cover itself in glory. At the time of writing, the most popular theory among scholars (claims Stark) was that the martyrs were masochists. He considers this dumb and offensive theory a natural consequence of historians being reluctant to accept anything that sounds too miraculous or amazing, and there being few other hard-headed rational explanations of the martyrs’ behavior (for some reason, the obvious one - that they believed in God and Heaven - impresses neither Stark’s foils nor himself). He sets out to build an alternative theory: the martyrs were rationally seeking the approval of their community. Martyrdom not only occurred in public, often before a large audience, but it was often the culmination of a long period of preparation during which those faced with martyrdom were the object of intense, face-to-face adulation. Consider the case of Ignatius of Antioch … Ignatius was condemned to death as a Christian. But instead of being executed in Antioch, he was sent off to Rome in the custody of ten Roman soldiers. Thus began a long, leisurely journey during which local Christians came out to meet him all along the route, which passed through many of the more important sites of early Christianity in Asia Minor on its way to the West. At each stop Ignatius was allowed to preach to and meet with those who gathered, none of whom was in any apparent danger although their Christian identity was obvious. Moreover, his guards allowed Ignatius to write letters to many Christian congregations in cities bypassed along the way, such as Ephesus and Philadelphia … As William Schoedel remarked, “It is no doubt as a conquering hero that Ignatius thinks of himself as he looks back on part of his journey and says that the churches who received him dealt with him not as a ‘transient traveller,’ noting that ‘even churches that do not lie on my way according to the flesh went before me city by city.’” What Ignatius feared was not death in the arena, but that well-meaning Christians might gain him a pardon…He expected to be remembered through the ages, and compares himself to martyrs gone before him, including Paul, “in whose footsteps I wish to be found when I come to meet God.” It soon was clear to all Christians that extraordinary fame and honor attached to martyrdom. Nothing illustrates this better than the description of the martyrdom of Polycarp, contained in a letter sent by the church in Smyrna to the church in Philomelium. Polycarp was the bishop of Smyrna who was burned alive in about 156. After the execution his bones were retrieved by some of his followers - an act witnessed by Roman officials, who took no action against them. The letter spoke of “his sacred flesh” and described his bones as “being of more value than precious stones and more esteemed than gold.” The letter-writer reported that the Christians in Smyrna would gather at the burial place of Polycarp’s bones every year “to celebrate with great gladness and joy the birthday of his martyrdom.” The letter concluded, “The blessed Polycarp ... to whom be glory, honour, majesty, and a throne eternal, from generation to generation. Amen.” It also included the instruction: “On receiving this, send on the letter to the more distant brethren that they may glorify the Lord who makes choice of his own servants.” In fact, today we actually know the names of nearly all of the Christian martyrs because their contemporaries took pains that they should be remembered for their very great holiness. I don’t know, I’m not putting too much effort into writing up this section, because it doesn’t feel like as much of a mystery as some of the others. Maybe all of this was weird in 1996. But since then, we’ve seen plenty of suicide bombers willing to die for their faith. I accept that the Christian martyrs were more impressive - a slow death in the Colosseum takes more grit than the quick detonation of an explosive vest, and dying for peace is more impressive than dying in war - but it hardly seems like as much of a leap. Honestly, Stark’s “social approval” theory seems only slightly less objectifying than the masochism theory. Some people just have a tendency towards self-sacrifice. I know many effective altruists who, for example, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research. If someone told them a way that they could help the neediest people in the world by feeding themselves to lions, the lions would no doubt eat well. Because They Survived The Plagues However bad you imagine daily life in ancient Rome, it was worse. Historians estimate that ancient Rome had a population density of 300 people per acre. That’s almost ten times denser than modern New York City, two thousand years before anyone invented the skyscraper3. How did they do it? By cramming people together in unbearable filth and misery: Most people lived in tiny cubicles in multistoried tenements…”there was only one private house for every 26 blocks of apartments”. Within these tenements, the crowding was extreme - the tenants rarely had more than one room in which “entire families were herded together”. Thus, as Stambaugh tells us, privacy was “a hard thing to find”. Not only were people terribly crowded within these buildings, the streets were so narrow that if people leaned out their window they could chat with someone living across the street without having to raise their voices… To make matters worse, Greco-Roman tenements lacked both furnaces and fireplaces. Cooking was done over wood or charcoal braziers, which were also the only source of heat; since tenements lacked chimneys, the rooms were always smoky in winter. Because windows could be “closed” only by “hanging cloths or skins blown by rain”, the tenements were sufficiently drafty to prevent frequent asphyxiation. But the drafts increased the danger of rapidly spreading fires, and “dread of fire was an obsession among rich and poor alike.” Packer4 (1967) doubted that people could actually spend much time in quarters so cramped and squalid. Thus he concluded that the typical residents of Greco-Roman cities spent their lives mainly in public places and that the average “domicile must have served only as a place to sleep and store possessions.” These tenements had no plumbing. Waste was eliminated by pouring it onto the street, often to the detriment of people walking underneath. Water was brought home from public wells; if you were out, you either walked back to the well or made do. The total public baths capacity of Rome was about 30,000; the total population of Rome was about a million; in practice, the upper classes used the “public” baths and the average citizen had never bathed in their life. Soap had been invented a century or two earlier but was limited to a small pool of early adopters. The cities buzzed with flies, mosquitos, and other insects. It would be eighteen hundred years before anyone invented germ theory. Tenements were six stories high and frequently collapsed, killing everyone inside. Fires consumed the city on a regular basis, giving rise to colorful legends like Nero fiddling while Rome burnt. Police were limited, and it was understood that you would be robbed immediately if you set foot outside at nighttime. This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in most American cities. How did people survive? Mostly they didn’t. Cities were destroyed regularly - multiple times within a single human lifetime! - then rebuilt and replenished with rural population. Stark focuses on Antioch, a Syrian city which was a center of early Christianity. During “six hundred years of intermittent Roman rule”, he finds: It was conquered 11 times
Inline links: The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, deliberately let themselves be infected with malaria to help speed vaccine research, 3, 4, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!WKib!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F398aa36d-4d66-44e5-b035-fa3a20e457da_1858x1696.png
Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know
November 27, 2024 · Original source
People take various policy implications from this (maybe “life sentences” should end at 65, since incapacitation is unlikely to help much after that). But here we’re interested in its potential to confound studies. A 20 year old who gets 5 years in prison is released at 25 - still young! - but a 20 year old who gets 10 years in prison is released at 30 - too old to be leaping on rooftops and running from cops. The National Sentencing Commission understands this problem, and matches the experimental and control groups by age at release. But this introduces a new bias - now they’re different ages when they start committing crimes. Might a person who starts crime at 15 be a more disturbed and committed criminal than one who starts at 20? Seems plausible. I think this might be responsible for a lot of the seemingly positive effect of sentences > 5 years. There are dozens of other studies on this topic, all hotly debated, so even in this part I’m only going to list a few highlights. Still, these are: Green and Winik (2010). They use random judge assignment, ie look at criminals with similar crimes who got lenient/strict judges and so shorter/longer sentences. They find that the total difference in rearrests is indistinguishable from zero. But the length of time in which they were measuring rearrests includes the time the offenders were in jail, so this is saying that incapacitation plus aftereffects was zero (plus or minus a margin of error), meaning that aftereffects must be detrimental and large enough to cancel out the benefits of incapacitation, just as Roodman claims. But this study looked at minor crimes where sentences were measured in months, so I think this matches our previous suspicion that aftereffects might be detrimental in short sentences but neutral-to-beneficial in longer ones. Roach and Schanzenbach (2015) More random judge assignment, this time in Seattle. They find that each month of longer sentence decreases future reoffending by one percentage point. Most of these sentences are short, so this contradicts our working theory that lengthening short sentences increases crime but lengthening long ones decreases it. Neither Berger nor Roodman really want to take this study too seriously; Berger objects that it’s an unusual study population (everyone entered a guilty plea), and Roodman objects that the judge selection might not have been truly random. Rhodes (2018) is a matching study - it artificially tries to create groups of prisoners who are as similar as possible except that one group got longer sentences. Its big advantage is that it has some people serving moderately long sentences (a few years), getting us out of the few-month range investigated by some of the other studies. It finds a mild beneficial effect of longer sentences: This study provides no evidence that an offender’s criminal trajectory is negatively affected – that is, that criminal behavior is accelerated – by the length of an offender’s prison term. If anything, longer prison terms modestly reduce rates of recidivism beyond what is attributable to incapacitation. This “treatment effect” of a longer period of incarceration is small. The three-year base rate of 20% recidivism is reduced to 18.7% when prison length of stay increases by an average of 5.4 months. We are inclined to characterize this as a benign, close to neutral effect on recidivism. What Do Our Experts Think? As mentioned above, these are only a few of the very many studies on this topic, and I’ve only given the briefest summary of each. Due to the complexity of this literature, I’m relying more than usual on the opinion of the expert reviewers. Berger (pro-longer-sentences) says: Considering the rigorous research published since the Nagin et al. (2009) review, the literature regarding length of stay on recidivism is still somewhat inconsistent, with many studies claiming no recidivism effects and some showing that increased prison length reduces recidivism slightly. However, just like the rest of the research examined thus far, the study methodologies vary in terms of their limitations, which could explain some of the mixed results [...] At present, there is no substantial evidence that a criminogenic effect exists in the aggregate. Thus, it remains unclear whether criminogenic effects exist, and if so, under what circumstances...Among the substantial number of published studies with varying methodologies, not one has found a large aggregate-level criminogenic effect. Roodman (pro-shorter-sentences) says: The preponderance of the evidence says that incarceration in the US increases crime post-release, and enough over the long run to offset incapacitation. A quartet of judge randomization studies (Green and Winik in Washington, DC; Loeffler in Chicago; Nagin and Snodgrass in Pennsylvania; Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang in Philadelphia and Miami) put the net of incapacitation and incarceration aftereffects at about zero. In parallel, Chen and Shapiro find that harsher prison conditions—making for incarceration that is harsher in quality rather than quantity—also increases recidivism. Gaes and Camp concur, though less convincingly because in their study harsher incarceration quality went hand in hand with lower incarceration quantity. Mueller-Smith sides with all these studies and goes farther, finding modest incapacitation and powerful, harmful aftereffects in Houston; but modest hints of randomization failure accompany those results. Some studies dissent from the majority view that incarceration is criminogenic. Roach and Schanzenbach find beneficial aftereffects in Seattle—a result that is also subject to some doubt about the quality of randomization. Bhuller et al. make a more compelling case that incarceration reduces crime after—in Norway. Berecochea and Jaman, one of the few truly randomized studies in this literature, also looks more likely right than wrong, and is also somewhat distant in its setting, early-1970s California. And there are the two Georgia studies, which upon reanalysis no longer point to beneficial aftereffects, but still do not demonstrate harmful ones either. Aftereffects must vary by place, time, and person. But the first-order generalization that best fits the credible evidence is that at the margin in the US today, aftereffects offset in the long run what incapacitation does in the short run. Nagin (neutral, tie-breaker) says: Compared with noncustodial sanctions, incarceration appears to have a null or mildly criminogenic effect on future criminal behavior. This conclusion is not sufficiently firm to guide policy generally, though it casts doubt on claims that imprisonment has strong specific deterrent effects. What conclusions do we draw from these studies of the dose-response relationship between time served and reoffending? The one experimental study is suggestive of a preventive effect, but that effect may be attributable to incapacitation. Two of the matching studies point weakly to a criminogenic type dose-response relationship, but both are extremely dated. The Loughran et al. (2008) study suggests a possible criminogenic effect of placement but finds no linkage between time served and reoffending. We draw no conclusions from the results of the regression studies. Not only are results extremely varied, but more importantly all of the studies suffer from a fundamental analytical flaw. This flaw relates to the potential sensitivity of regression- based studies to specification errors in the model of the relationship of age and offending rate. In other words: Berger and Nagin think evidence is weak and it’s kind of a wash and maybe there are slight criminogenic effects; Roodman thinks there are strong criminogenic effects that (on the current margin) are sizeable enough to approximately cancel out the benefit from incapacitation. So What’s Up With Roodman? At the risk of repeating myself: this is the question upon which this whole essay hinges. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of deterrence are real but small. Everyone agrees that the beneficial effects of incapacitation are real and large. Everyone except Roodman agrees that aftereffects range from slightly beneficial to slightly detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration significantly decreasing crime. Only Roodman says that aftereffects are large and detrimental, for a net effect of incarceration having no effect on crime. So where does Roodman disagree with everyone else? My impression is that the main difference is that Roodman gives more weight to certain judge selection studies. These find that being randomly assigned to a lenient vs. strict judge (and therefore on average getting a short vs. long sentence) doesn’t change rearrest rates after X years from the time the sentence started. This X year period includes both the time spent serving the sentence, and the time after release when aftereffects might materialize - ie they include both incapacitation and aftereffects. Since these studies fail to find any net effect, and incapacitation effects must be beneficial and large, Roodman concludes that aftereffects must be detrimental and large. Then he reanalyzes several of the other studies that other people use to demonstrate no or beneficial aftereffects, and finds them less convincing after reanalysis. So who is right? Roodman gets his strongest evidence from studies of short sentences vs. shorter sentences (eg going from 0 to 1 years, or 1 to. 2 years). These are naturally where we would expect the fewest benefits from incapacitation. But they’re also where we would common-sensically expect the worst aftereffects. Someone going from zero prison to one year in prison has had their life, career, and relationships profoundly changed, in a way that someone going from ten years in prison to eleven years hasn’t. This is consistent with the National Sentencing Commission study above. They found that aftereffects trended worse the shorter the sentences got, but didn’t investigate any sentences shorter than 2-3 years. If the trend continues, sentences shorter than that could have aftereffects > incapacitation. So maybe Roodman is right about shorter sentences, and everyone else is right about longer sentences. Going from a month to a year in prison is so disruptive and criminogenic that it risks canceling the benefits of eleven extra months of incapacitation. But going from ten years to eleven years mostly just gives you the incapacitation. Marginal Revolution This highlights a problem with all of these studies: we can only talk about particular margins. Imagine a country which currently incarcerates zero people, trying to decide whether to move up to a policy of incarcerating one person. If you only incarcerate one person, it will be the baddest dude in the whole country. That guy really needs to be behind bars! And we’re not worried about turning him into a hardened criminal, because he’s already maximally bad. Here it’s obvious that benefits outweigh costs. Now imagine a country which incarcerates 50% of its population, trying to decide whether to move up to 50% + 1. At this point, you’re imprisoning someone who went a few miles over the speed limit. You gain no benefits from incapacitation (he wasn’t going to commit any crimes anyway), but you stand to lose a lot from aftereffects (he’s probably a totally normal law-abiding citizen, so there’s a very high risk of ruining his life and turning him into a more hardened criminal). Here it’s obvious that costs outweigh benefits. So the question isn’t “do the costs of prison outweigh benefits?”, but rather “at what point between incarcerating 0% and 50% of people does the cost of imprisoning one more person start outweighing the benefits?”, or even “at the current US incarceration rate of 0.75%, does the cost of imprisoning one more person outweigh the benefits?” In some sense, this is what we’ve been investigating the whole time - all of these studies are being conducted at the current margin. But this hides big differences between them. We’ve already seen that European studies get stronger results than American studies. That’s because European countries have incarceration rates of ~0.05%, compared to America’s ~0.75%. In theory, Europeans countries’ incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime. But I notice that the European countries we’re talking about here all have high recent new immigrant populations, and in Europe these groups commit more crimes per person than natives. So it’s possible that Europe is still adjusting to being a high-crime continent, whereas America has already adjusted by raising incarceration rates. So one possible conclusion is that the benefits of incarceration strongly outweigh costs in Europe. I think this is clearly true by American values - we seem to care more about preventing crime, and be less horrified by imprisonment, than the average European. But there are many different margins even within America. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is >1%; Massachusetts is <0.25%. Some of the variance reflects the criminality of each state’s population, but other variance reflects the values of each state’s voters and policy-makers. We haven’t been keeping great track of which state each of our studies comes from, but plausibly the marginal prisoner in Massachusetts is a badder dude than the marginal prisoner in Louisiana, and releasing him is more likely to have costs > benefits. Margins also differ across eras. US incarceration ranged from 0.2% in 1970 to 0.95% in 2007 to about 0.75% today. Our studies cover this entire time period. This is probably why Levitt found stronger incapacitation effects (studying the 1970s) than Owens or Lofstrom+Raphael (studying the 2000s). Finally, there are the margins across sentences we discussed earlier. Going from zero years in prison to one year is a bigger deal than going from ten to eleven. When we examine our original question - does extending the average prisoner’s sentence for one year substantially decrease crime, we find that there’s no single answer - it depends where we are on all of these margins. Roodman’s skeptical position is most plausible for shorter sentences in high-incarceration areas, and Berger’s pro-prison position is most plausible for longer sentences in low-incarceration areas. So Why Do People Keep Saying That Prison Doesn’t Decrease Crime? We began with the observation that criminologists tend to deny that prison decreases crime. We now know why Roodman thinks this: he idiosyncratically believes that aftereffects equal (and so cancel out) incapacitation. But nobody else has even gotten this far. So what’s everyone else’s position? The Vera Institute is an anti-incarceration think tank. They have a policy paper titled The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime. It says: There is a very weak relationship between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates. Although studies differ somewhat, most of the literature shows that between 1980 and 2000, each 10 percent increase in incarceration rates was associated with just a 2 to 4 percent lower crime rate. This is just taking the (real, positive) effect of incarceration on crime, and calling it “very weak”. Research shows that each additional increase in incarceration rates will be associated with a smaller and smaller reduction in crime rates. We saw above that this is true, but I find it annoying to mention here in this kind of advocacy context - it’s also true of everything else in the world! When the Vera Institute publishes anti-mass-incarceration white papers, the 500th white paper will be less influential than the first. If I claimed that “research showed” this, and so they should stop publishing anti-mass-incarceration white papers, they would look at me like I’d gone insane. Get a life. The weak association between higher incarceration rates and lower crime rates applies almost entirely to property crime. Research consistently shows that higher incarceration rates are not associated with lower violent crime rates. This is sort of true. Research finds a stronger effect of incarceration on property crimes than violent crimes, although Levitt does find a violent crime effect of minus one violent crime per incarceration-year. Partly this is because violent crimes are rarer than property crimes, and so studies are underpowered to find them. And partly it’s because most studies are done on mass releases of prisoners, where (for example) the state has to release 25% of the prison population to decrease overcrowding, but they get to choose which 25% - and states are smart enough not to release the murderers and psychos. Still, if Vera Institute’s preferred decarceration policy is also smart, then it won’t release the murderers and psychos either, and this point will stand. So my interpretation of Vera Institute is that they’re making some good points about ways that incarceration isn’t an infinitely powerful cure-all, but that it’s deceptive to summarize them as “incarceration doesn’t decrease crime”. What about other groups? Prison Policy Institute has a list of “crime myths”. Myth #7 is that “Harsh punishments deter crime, making us safer”. They write: Many people mistakenly believe that long sentences, paired with austere and even brutal prison conditions, will have a deterrent effect on crime. But research has consistently found that harsher sentences do not serve as effective “examples” that would prevent new people from committing serious crimes. In 2016, the National Institute of Justice summarized the research on deterrence, finding that prison sentences, and especially long sentences, do little to deter future crime Here they’re using “deterrence” in the strict sense (that is, in a way that doesn’t count incapacitation), noting that it’s small, and rounding off “small” to “zero”. I’ve looked at some other sites and think tanks that claim to have arguments against the “myth” that prison prevents crime, and they’re all using these same two tricks. Either they ignore incapacitation and focus only on deterrence + aftereffects. Or they imagine some hypothetical prison super-fan who believes that incapacitation is infinitely effective, prove that it’s less effective than this, declare victory over this fake opponent, and then summarize their win as “prison has no effect”. What Are The Costs Vs. Benefits Of Prison? So a more honest version of the claim that “prison has no effect on crime” might be “the effect of prison on crime is weak”. How weak is it? We already saw one way to answer this: it probably prevents on average 7 crimes/year (6 property + 1 violent), minus some amount, especially for short sentences, if you believe in criminogenic aftereffects. For the shortest sentences at the highest-incarceration margins, it’s possible for the effect to be zero or less. Another way to answer is with elasticities. If we increase in incarceration rate 10%, how much crime do we prevent at the current margins? Levitt estimates 3%, Cohen finds 0.5-7%, and Dhodnt finds -2% (ie prison increases crime) but this is an outlier. Spelman writes: Our best estimate of elasticity is “in the neighborhood of [3% drop in crime per 10% increase in incarceration]” but “[a]ny figure between [2% and 4%] can be defended, and we should not be too surprised to find that the result is anywhere between [1% and 5%]” This broadly agrees with our numbers from Sweden, California, and El Salvador above. Small increases in incarceration cause small decreases in crime. Large increases in incarceration cause large decreases in crime. If you doubled the incarceration rate, locking up an extra million people, then crime would decrease ~30% at current US margins (maybe less, because you’re shifting the margin and getting diminishing returns). Would more prison be good or bad? We’d need to do a cost-benefit analysis. Surprisingly, Roodman does the best work here: after making his claim that costs and benefits mostly cancel out, he admits that most people won’t believe him, and tries to estimate the effect size in the “devil’s advocate” case where everyone else is right and he is wrong. He starts with our previous finding that incapacitation prevents ~7 crimes a year, and returns to the incapacitation studies to see what types of crime are most affected. Then he adjusts for the low level of aftereffects that everyone else believes in. I’ve redone his results for clarity. This table shows the total number of each type of crime prevented by keeping the marginal prisoner in jail for one extra year: Why does prison prevent negative robberies? Roodman is subtracting the small aftereffects found by other researchers, and the data for rare crimes is noisy, so probably this is just an artifact. I round this to zero for the full analysis. If we’re trying to calculate the costs vs. benefits of imprisonment, we need to put a cost on all these crimes. This is hard to quantify - a robber may steal $100 worth of goods, but valuing his crime at $100 in costs ignores the disutility of (eg) living in fear Roodman uses two methods: first, he values a crime at the average damages that courts award to victims, including emotional damages. Second, he values it at what people will pay - how much money would you accept to get assaulted one extra time in your life? These estimates still exclude some intangible costs, like the cost of living in a crime-ridden community, but it’s the best we can do for now. Here are his answers (I’ve taken the geometric mean of the two methods): So one extra year of incarcerating the marginal criminal saves society $44,000 in crimes prevented. Now we add in the opposite side of the ledger: the costs of incarceration: According to Roodman, the average prisoner costs the state $31,000 per year. He got his data from 2008, and it’s since ballooned to about $60,000, but we’ll keep his number so that everything is from the same time period. (also, as always, California is more expensive - here it’s $120,000) Roodman also adds in the costs to the prisoner. He uses some surveys to value the disutility of the suffering caused by a year in prison at $50,000; additionally, the prisoner loses about $16,000 in earning potential. The end result: if you don’t count the costs to the prisoner themselves, and you don’t use the more modern number, and you’re not in an expensive state like California, then the marginal incarceration-year saves society about $13,000. If you do count those things, or you’re in an expensive state, the costs far outweigh the benefits. Realistically, most people won’t care about analyses like this. They’ll be more interested in the unquantifiable costs and benefits, including: The “benefit” of feeling like justice has been done and an evil deed has been avenged.
Inline links: Green and Winik (2010), Roach and Schanzenbach (2015), Rhodes (2018), incarceration rates are lower because they have less crime, The Vera Institute, The Incarceration Myth: More Incarceration Will Not Decrease Crime, a list of “crime myths”, Cohen, Dhodnt, Spelman, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!FI6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6865dbc9-fe86-4467-ab7b-829c1425a81b_189x133.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!X8oH!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F13ddcc41-7e70-4a3c-bd25-c046f2bf811d_404x177.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ltt7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7484d67f-e24d-4511-ac8f-f7b20efed758_458x273.png
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2025: Times & Places
March 25, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Phil Contact Info: acxharrisburg[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, April 19th, 02:00 PM Location: Zeroday Brewing Company Taproom, 925 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA 17102. Table with ACX MEETUP sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G57487+R77 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD PHILADELPHIA Contact: Wes Fenza Contact Info: wfenza[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 24th, 06:30 PM Location: Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. Upstairs in the Weston Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ Group Link: https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB; https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia Notes: Kids welcome. We'll provide an assortment of dim sum.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G57487+R77, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD, https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ, https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia
Contact: Wes Fenza Contact Info: wfenza[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Thursday, April 24th, 06:30 PM Location: Ethical Society, 1906 Rittenhouse Square. Upstairs in the Weston Room Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ Group Link: https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB; https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia Notes: Kids welcome. We'll provide an assortment of dim sum.
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6WRXG+FQ, https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia
Meetups Everywhere 2025: Times and Places
August 29, 2025 · Original source
Contact: Phil Contact Info: acxharrisburg[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 3:00 PM Location: Zeroday Taproom, 925 N 3rd St, Harrisburg, PA 17102 Look for the table with an "ACX MEETUP" sign Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G57487+R7G Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD PHILADELPHIA Contact: Ben Contact Info: bwieland[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee, 100 S Independence Mall W (6th at Market, SW corner) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G57487+R7G, https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J
Contact: Ben Contact Info: bwieland[a t]gmail[period]com Time: Saturday, September 20th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee, 100 S Independence Mall W (6th at Market, SW corner) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+4J
Open Thread 399
September 15, 2025 · Original source
1: Meetups this week include Ann Arbor, Bangkok, Brussels, Cape Town, Charlotte, Frankfurt, Kyiv, Lisbon, Madrid, Paris, Portland, Philadelphia, San Jose, Santa Cruz, Sydney, Waterloo, and others; see the meetup post for more information. And Prague and St. Louis have been added to the list for October.
Inline links: the meetup post
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
Eric Hill, a 15-year-old hacker and indicted felon, who “had been dismissed by the judge with admiration.” In Swarthmore, Nelson hoped his decades-old dream of Xanadu would finally materialize. 5. Developing Xanadu Ted Nelson had built Project Xanadu into, for lack of better terminology, a cult.8 He writes: We all were deeply concerned about the Bad Guys, who we saw as a combination of IBM and the government. (The others were all Libertarians, I still called myself a Cynical Socialist.) The Bad Guys would spy on people, withhold and block information, and give us inferior hypertext. We had to Do It Right, to help prevent this. This meant using the standard business defenses—especially non-disclosure agreements (I made all of them sign) and secret proprietary algorithms. The Xanadians had a messiah—Ted Nelson—a gospel—Computer Lib—a persecution complex, a fearful dystopia—“inferior hypertext”—a hopeful utopia—Xanadu—and utter secrecy. Just six dudes in a rented house near Philly, building the internet, hiding from the Feds, signing NDAs, and saving the world. Nelson spent a summer explaining the project to his team in its entirety. By the end, Gregory, Miller, and Greene were the only ones left. They told Nelson, “We’ll do it,” and moved to another suburb, where they finally began to work on an implementation of Xanadu. The three quickly figured out a new system that would allow users to reference and link to specific parts of a file—they called these links tumblers, and made them work with transfinite numbers. Suddenly, transclusions were really possible. But after only a few early successes, the team’s progress stalled completely. Greene and Miller were young and left for jobs elsewhere, and so Gregory was left working on Xanadu alone. Nelson, meanwhile, ran a magazine called Creative Computing for a while, then tried again to build his JOT word processor—this time for the Apple II—then spent a year in San Antonio pitching a watered-down version of Xanadu (rebranded as “Vortext”) to a tech company called Datapoint. Datapoint wasn’t buying, but kept Nelson on in some sort of fake, primitive email job anyway. Gregory kept working on Xanadu in Philadelphia, slowly running out of money. Ted Nelson held an “Ecstasy party” in San Antonio: “A number of us floated down the river on inner tubes. It was quite lovely.” In 1987, like he did every year, Roger Gregory went to The Hackers Conference in Saratoga to show off the latest unimpressive version of Xanadu. There, he met a man named John Walker—founder of the wildly successful Autodesk—and pitched the project to him. Incredibly, Walker was interested, and after tense negotiations with Nelson, agreed to fund Xanadu in earnest. Beginning in 1988, Autodesk poured millions of dollars into the project, and a programming team led by Gregory finally started to make real progress. Walker said of Xanadu: “In 1980, it was the shared goal of a small group of brilliant technologists. By 1989, it will be a product. And by 1995, it will begin to change the world.” Sweeping rhetoric—clear deadlines. The team came nowhere close to meeting them. Infighting broke out between two factions—while Gregory simply wanted to patch together his old C code, insisting his product “was within six months of shipping,” the whiz-kid Mark Miller came back from his new job at Xerox PARC, alongside a half-dozen of his closest friends, and insisted on a perfectionistic rewrite in a more flexible language, Smalltalk. The PARC faction began to drive Gregory up the wall. According to Nelson, it got to the point that he “was throwing things and acting crazy.” So Nelson called John Walker, the two “summoned Roger to meet [them] at John’s house at Muir Beach, and Walker told Roger he was no longer in charge.” Miller took over and began the rewrite in Smalltalk. Walker’s deadline came and went, and the team delivered nothing. Xanadu’s offices descended into chaos—Miller anointed two PARC programmers to be “co-architects,” and the three of them increasingly left the rest of the team out of the loop. For four years, Miller dawdled about, adding features, giving them clever names (files were “berts,” after Bertrand Russell, and so, for symmetry’s sake, royalty-generating transclusions became “ernies”), and never building them.9 Meanwhile, Ted Nelson was living on a houseboat, attending sex retreats and Keristan orgies, and giving talks in Singapore. He recorded a new soundtrack for his student film, the one from 1959. In 1992, Autodesk’s stock cratered, and they divested entirely from Xanadu. Miller lamented that his program was just six months from completion. Ted Nelson started a film studio to make a movie with Doug Engelbart, then left for Japan to get a PhD. Xanadu’s code was open-sourced in the late 90s. 6. The World Wide Web In March 1989, a British computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee, working at CERN, wrote a proposal for a system unifying hypertext and the internet. It was ignored. In 1990, Berners-Lee resubmitted his proposal, it was accepted, and he began to work on the World Wide Web. The WWW had a number of advantages over Xanadu: It was much simpler—Ted Nelson wrote of it disparagingly: “Where were annotation and marginal notes? Where was version management? Where was rights management? Where were multi-ended links? Where were third-party links? Where were transclusions? This ‘World Wide Web’ was just a lame text format and a lot of connected directories.” As it turns out, it’s much easier to build a lame text format and a lot of connected directories!
Inline links: 8, 9, Keristan
Meetups Everywhere Spring 2026: Times & Places
April 01, 2026 · Original source
Contact: Phil Contact Info: acxharrisburg[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 3:00 PM Location: The Millworks 340 Verbeke St, Harrisburg, PA 17102 We will hang out in the lobby for the first 5 minutes or so, look for the ACX MEETUP sign or ask at the hostess stand to find our table if you show up later. Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87G574C7+728 Group Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD PHILADELPHIA Contact: ben Contact Info: bwieland[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee 100 S Independence Mall W #110 (6th at Market, SW corner) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87G574C7+728, https://www.lesswrong.com/groups/PXrLoKgiAyXEG2hLD, https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M
Contact: ben Contact Info: bwieland[@]gmail[.]com Time: Saturday, April 18th, 11:00 AM Location: La Colombe Coffee 100 S Independence Mall W #110 (6th at Market, SW corner) Coordinates: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M Group Link: https://groups.google.com/g/ACXPhiladelphia https://discord.gg/46z [remove this bit] b6hRVGB
Inline links: https://plus.codes/87F6XR2X+6M