Astral Codex Ten

NYT

338 min read

NYT

Article

NYT is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 50 times across 50 issues between January 21, 2021 and January 30, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Various tech figures started a campaign to stop granting interviews to NYT in protest”; “Some of them were a bit over-the-top. I believe a few of them may have used the words “national treasure”. I can only hope the people at my real funeral are as kind”; “Some people are predicting that now that the blog is back up NYT might still publish their article about me”. It most often appears alongside Trump, US, Twitter.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 50
  • Issue count: 50
  • First seen: January 21, 2021
  • Last seen: January 30, 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.

Still Alive
January 21, 2021 · Original source
But I still had this really strong sense that my career hung on this thread of staying anonymous. Sure, my security was terrible, and a few trolls and malefactors found my real name online and used it to taunt me. But my attendings and my future employers couldn't just Google my name and find it immediately. Also, my patients couldn't Google my name and find me immediately, which I was increasingly realizing the psychiatric community considered important. Therapists are supposed to be blank slates, available for patients to project their conflicts and fantasies upon. Their distant father, their abusive boyfriend, their whatever. They must not know you as a person. One of my more dedicated professors told me about how he used to have a picture of his children on a shelf in his office. One of his patients asked him whether those were his children. He described suddenly realizing that he had let his desire to show off overcome his duty as a psychiatrist, mumbling a noncommital response lest his patient learn whether he had children or not, taking the picture home with him that night, and never displaying any personal items in his office ever again. That guy was kind of an extreme case, but this is something all psychiatrists think about, and better pychiatrist-bloggers than I have quit once their side gig reached a point where their patients might hear about it. There was even a very nice and nuanced article about the phenomenon in - of all places - The New York Times.
Inline links: all psychiatrists, better pychiatrist-bloggers than I, The New York Times
The New York Times thought so. Some people kept me abreast of their private discussions (in Soviet America, newspaper's discussions get leaked to you!) and their reporters had spirited internal debates about whether I really needed anonymity. Sure, I'd gotten some death threats, but everyone gets death threats on the Internet, and I'd provided no proof mine were credible. Sure, I might get SWATted, but realistically that's a really scary fifteen seconds before the cops apologize and go away. Sure, my job was at risk, but I was a well-off person and could probably get another. Also, hadn't I blogged under my real name before? Hadn't I published papers under my real name in ways that a clever person could use to unmask my identity? Hadn't I played fast and loose with every form of opsec other than whether the average patient or employer could Google me in five seconds?
513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me (for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio.
Open Thread 157
January 24, 2021 · Original source
...r subscriptions, but I want to make sure you're not worrying that I'm going to starve in the rain or something; please only subscribe if you can definitely afford it. 3. Some people are predicting that now that the blog is back up NYT might still publish their article about me. I guess I have no right to object anymore. Balaji Srinivasan's rule about hit pieces is to get out in front of them and reveal any negative information they're going to...
Richard Nixon Vs. Cool
March 12, 2021 · Original source
“The Orthogonians' base was among Whittier's athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team's tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon's unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
2020 Predictions: Calibration Results
April 05, 2021 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Mantic Monday: Predictions For 2021
April 26, 2021 · Original source
PERSONAL 54. [redacted]: 60% 55. [redacted]: 20% 56. [redacted]: 10% 57. [redacted]: 10% 58. [redacted]: 5% 59. [redacted]: 20% 60. There are no appraisal-related complications to the new house purchase: 50% 61. I live in the new house: 95% 62. I live in the top bedroom: 60% 63. I can hear / get annoyed by neighbor TV noise: 40% 64. I'm playing in a D&D campaign: 70% 65. I go on at least one international trip: 60% 66. I spend at least a month living somewhere other than the Bay: 50% 67. I continue my current exercise routine (and get through an entire cycle of it) in Q4 2021: 70% 68. I meditate at least 15 days in Q4 2021: 60% 69. I take oroxylum at least 5 times in Q4 2021: 40% 70. I take some substance I haven't discovered yet at least 5 times in Q4 2021 (testing exempted): 30% 71. I do at least six new biohacking experiments in the next eight months: 40% 72. [redacted]: 30% 73. The Twitter account I check most frequently isn't one of the five I check frequently now: 20% 74. I make/retweet at least 25 tweets between now and 2022: 70%
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
May 04, 2021 · Original source
3. When cities, countries, etc, ran huge deficits and then couldn't pay any of the money back, sometimes the banks that loaned them that money were against this. Sometimes they even asked those places to stop running huge deficits as a precondition for getting bailed out. This proves that bankers were plotting against the public and trying to form a dystopian plutocracy.
There were some other supposed examples of neoliberal practice contradicting liberal ideology - although I can’t find easily quotable bits, I think he’s thinking of the Iraq War and various bailouts (though not the 2008 bailouts, since this book was written in the early 2000s). I agree that the government has not been a perfect ideological neoliberal at all times, but this impresses me less than it seemingly impresses David Harvey. Again, I think this critique is strong enough to apply to any ideology - what government has ever perfectly followed the diktats of socialism, or conservatism, or theocracy? The government is a blob of power that gets captured by different groups at different times and directed willy-nilly to one purpose or another; just because it does not perfectly follow a specific philosophy without deviation for fifty years doesn’t make that philosophy inherently fraudulent.
Adumbrations Of Aducanumab
August 05, 2021 · Original source
A new program in 1992 allowed for “accelerated approval” on the basis of surrogate markers, which are indirect measures of a drug’s benefit, assessed via laboratory or imaging tests, that stand in for more meaningful outcomes such as life expectancy. But the implementation of these accelerated processes was criticized by some scientists and patients, even at the time. In 1994, for example, The New York Times cited skeptics who worried that “no one can tell if the drugs work.” Eight months later, the AIDS activist organization ACT UP San Francisco called Anthony Fauci a “pill-pushing pimp” for supporting CD4 immune-cell counts and viral loads as surrogate markers. They were completely invalid, the activists wrote, and nothing more than “a marketing exec’s wet dream.”
So without wanting to say this level of success is “the norm” in the sense that every single fast-tracked drug achieves it, it’s not exactly vanishingly rare. It’s just something that happens sometimes and doesn’t happen sometimes. So how often do you have to save hundreds of thousands of lives before it’s worth the risk of occasionally also permitting a dud medication that “offers false hope”? How is this even a question?
The Atlantic article doesn’t really include a cost-benefit analysis. But it does mention a couple of examples of times when lax FDA decisions seemed bad, for example when they “approved saline breast implants despite safety concerns”. I feel like this should give me the right to describe a couple of my least favorite FDA decisions, so we can see whether they’re more or less convincing than the breast implant thing.
Highlights From The Comments On Aducanumab
August 20, 2021 · Original source
What is more likely in my opinion (specifically intuition from what I learned and going over the clinical data) is that Alzheimer's is pretty wide combination of different and very entangled neurodegenerative processes, with different contributions in different patients. Thus, the drug only works well on a subset of patients (maybe, like I mentioned, only those at the very onset of degeneration), but we don't know enough to predict which, so for the entire population of patients you fail to reach significance. Scott shows repeatedly how we see this in psychiatric drugs, which sometimes only barely squeeze by placebo in global trials but doctors have good experience in finding the one that works for a specific patient (and not knowing why).
If this were the first time someone had tried amyloid-reduction as a therapy for amyloid diseases, I might be on your side. It's not. This has been tried a lot of times before with identical results - less amyloid, same Alzheimer's. Indeed, even outside Alzheimer's they tried this with Huntington's and got "less amyloid, worse Huntington's" for their trouble (the disease effects of Huntington's are from free huntingtin; the amyloid lumps are the brain's partially-successful attempt to sequester it).
This is an interesting point. We sometimes see politicians “cutting in line” and managing to get advanced drugs that the FDA hasn’t yet made available to the general public. We usually interpret this as unfair privilege, and I think that’s a completely accurate interpretation. But that requires a sort of covert acknowledgment that these drugs are probably being delayed too long - otherwise, these politicians are heroes for taking potentially-dangerous substances and testing them out for the rest of us.
Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change
October 11, 2021 · Original source
See also Guardian, BBC, NYT, etc, etc, etc.
Inline links: Guardian, BBC, NYT
I don’t want to trivialize this. In the pictures, about 1% of SF and 10% of Manhattan are gone by 2200. Lots of people would lose their homes, and lots of businesses would lose multi-billion-dollar skyscrapers. But none of this is happening by 2100 (ie during your kids’ lifetimes), and no serious expert endorses those pictures where the Statue Of Liberty is underwater up to the shoulders or anything like that. Again, this is going to really suck for a lot of wetlands and beaches and people with houses in those places, but the average person in the First World isn’t necessarily even going to notice.
Chilling Effects
October 20, 2021 · Original source
When you’re skeptical of complicated models, sometimes it helps to go back to the rawest data you can find. So here’s a graph of mortality rates in New York City over time. It was published to put the coronavirus in context, but we can use it to look at seasonal effects:
(source: NYT. I have truncated the vertical axis edited it so it takes up less space) Deaths definitely go up every winter, from about 4000 to 4500. So yeah, this is about 10% extra deaths during the cold season. Why?
Inline links: NYT
But MMT is very different in different regions. In Sweden, it’s 18C (64F). In Florida, it’s 27C (81F). The only constant is that it seems to be about 80% of the way through the temperature distribution of a region - so if some city ranges from 0 to 100 degrees, its MMT will probably be around 80; if some other city ranges from 25 to 125, its MMT will be 105. In very hot places, it sometimes gets a bit less than 80%, but never below 60% or so.
Inline links: is very different
Dictator Book Club: Orban
November 04, 2021 · Original source
Hungarians celebrating a steppe nomad festival (source). But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.
Inline links: source
But in their own minds, they are proud steppe nomads. And they keep the language of the steppe nomads alive, a strange non-Indo-European language with lots of SZ's and ZS's. In their own mind, they are an orphan people, Asiatic horselords surrounded on all sides by hostile Europeans who are probably snickering behind their back at their uncouth ways and unpronounceable letter combinations. Sometimes this contempt turned violent; Hungary has been conquered and occupied by Ottomans, Austrians, and Russians. The worst insult was the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, when the victorious Allied Powers stripped away 2/3s of Hungarian territory in retaliation for its WWI loss, the ceded land going primarily to Slovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Hungarians have never forgotten this humiliation, but through the long Soviet occupation there wasn't much to do but let it fester.
The Socialists had a tough start; they had promised everyone lots of money during their campaign, and eventually the country ran out of funds. They replaced their original lackluster PM with charismatic businessman Ferenc Gyurcsany. Gyurcsany had to implement austerity measures, and those are never popular, but he was good at it and potentially could have gone down in history as a strong man during hard times.
Highlights From The Comments On Orban
November 11, 2021 · Original source
This is extremely important. A part of Orban's appeal is that, whether by coincidence or art, he has managed to preside over periods where Hungary's economic performance was better than a lot of its neighbors, and often fairly obviously so. That is, supporting irredentist nationalism in the form of Orban hasn't imposed costs on Hungarians: they aren't like facing sanctions or something or enduring deep economic hardship to stand by their dictator. He's delivered (comparatively) good times!
So, rather than saying that this is "one of the big stories of the late 20th/early 21st century," I would say that this is one of the big stories of the first century BCE to the 12th century CE. This is precisely how the Roman Republic was destroyed. And it's far from novel even in modern times.
Overall, I am on the fence. Having watched situation in Hungary for years, it seems to me that critics of Orban (especially from the outside) are a bit biased, they simplify, exaggerate and misinterpret sometimes. At the same time, I also cannot agree with defenders of Orban, who say that nothing is wrong and they attack him only because he is conservative. This does not seem true either.
Links For December
December 30, 2021 · Original source
14: An attempt to replicate various “poverty causes cognitive problems” studies goes…well, about the way replication attempts usually go. I was always suspicious of these, people got too excited about this field for political reasons. Related: 15: This series of tweets makes an interesting case study on science communication. An anti-incarceration group reviews the evidence on recidivism, which they summarize as "our report shows that people convicted of homicide are extremely unlikely to commit another violent crime after release". But someone reads the report, finds it says there’s a 22% chance they do, and calls them out for lying. I would have been willing to let this pass if they had just said “unlikely” - somebody might honestly think 22% is unlikely compared to some hypothetical belief that it’s near-certain. At “very unlikely”, yeah, I agree they’re pushing it.
Inline links: attempt to replicate, This series of tweets
Highlights From The Comments On "Don't Look Up"
January 07, 2022 · Original source
On a time scale of one year or less, there's realistically nothing we could do against anything big enough to be a real problem. We don't have the right specialized systems standing ready, our spaceship-building tools are all designed for one- to two-year lead times, and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
On a timescale of two years, a maximum effort by the United States of America could probably divert a comet or asteroid of up to ~2 km diameter. A long-period comet of 2 km diameter impacting the Earth would lay waste to one average continent, or the coastal regions bordering one ocean, but it wouldn't be an extinction event.
On a timescale of 5 years, a global effort does become reasonable and at that point we could reasonably hope to divert a 10-kilometer dinosaur-killer class comet.
Grading My 2021 Predictions
January 24, 2022 · Original source
PERSONAL 54. I am engaged: 60% 55. I am married: 20% 56. [redacted]: 10% 57. [redacted]: 10% 58. [redacted]: 5% 59. [redacted]: 20% 60. There are no appraisal-related complications to the new house purchase: 50% 61. I live in the new house: 95% 62. I live in the top bedroom: 60% 63. I can hear / get annoyed by neighbor TV noise: 40% 64. I'm playing in a D&D campaign: 70% 65. I go on at least one international trip: 60% 66. I spend at least a month living somewhere other than the Bay: 50% 67. I continue my current exercise routine (and get through an entire cycle of it) in Q4 2021: 70% 68. I meditate at least 15 days in Q4 2021: 60% 69. I take oroxylum at least 5 times in Q4 2021: 40% 70. I take some substance I haven't discovered yet at least 5 times in Q4 2021 (testing exempted): 30% 71. I do at least six new biohacking experiments in the next eight months: 40% 72. [redacted]: 30% 73. The Twitter account I check most frequently isn't one of the five I check frequently now: 20% 74. I make/retweet at least 25 tweets between now and 2022: 70%
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
But at the very least, it was non-autocratic enough that there were two factions, and sometimes the out-of-power faction could act as a check on the ruler.
One thing that confuses me about this explanation is that Xi quickly pivoted from the champion of the Shanghai Gang to having his own faction, sometimes called the Xi Gang or the Tsinghua Gang.
(a quick gripe: sometimes it feels like half the people in Chinese politics have gangs, the other half are named Gang, and it takes a lot of mental overhead to figure out which is which. Consider eg this headline: China Official Yang Gang Investigated For Corruption. How long did it take you to parse that this was a single person?)
Inline links: China Official Yang Gang Investigated For Corruption
In Partial, Grudging Defense Of The Hearing Voices Movement
May 25, 2022 · Original source
The New York Times has an article out on the Hearing Voices Movement - ie people with hallucinations and delusions who want this to be treated as normal and okay rather than medicalized. Freddie deBoer has a pretty passionate response here. Other people have differently passionate responses:
Inline links: an article, Hearing Voices Movement, a pretty passionate response here.
I’ve met some Hearing Voices members. My impression is that everyone on every side of this discussion is a good person trying to make the best of a bad situation (except of course New York Times journalists, who are evil people destroying America). Some specific thoughts:
People hate admitting that some cases are mild, and others are severe. Especially the kind of people who work at the New York Times
Links For June
July 01, 2022 · Original source
No direct inline source block was recovered for this mention.
Highlights From The Comments On Subcultures
August 19, 2022 · Original source
Postcycle: Since 2020 Now things are pretty stable, partly because we put enough distance between ourselves and our growth phase that we can start to get a little hipster cool again, and partly because effective altruism is the Hot New Thing that everyone is supposed to have an opinion on. This is the usual pattern of exciting talked-about movements spawning successor movements that then get to be exciting and talked-about in turn, while the original movement gets to go back to being normal people with a common interest again. By the way, in the past week, effective altruism has gotten long, glowing profiles in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Vox, the cover of TIME Magazine, shoutouts from Elon Musk and Andrew Yang, podcast interviews with Tyler Cowen and Tim Ferriss, and criticism from Freddie deBoer. Enjoy it while it lasts! ___________________ 7: MT writes: A lot of this sounds like truism, or selection bias. Thing isn't popular or exciting to most, then it catches on and grows, then it stops growing, fragments into new directions and isn't novel but becomes part of the mainstream. This HAS TO describe literally anything in the past that was ever popular/exciting, because it wasn't always that way (started small) and can't grow indefinitely without becoming either an institution (stable leadership/direction), fragmented (new leadership/direction), or just falling apart. The germ of this idea was my feeling that I’ve been in movements where it starts out feeling like everyone can’t stop gushing about how great we are, and then later there’s another phase where criticism reigns and everyone feels slightly embarrassed to be involved. This doesn’t feel tautological to me, although it might become trivial if you allow enough selection bias (some movement where this hasn’t happened “isn’t the kind of movement this happens to”). I could prove this by making nontrivial predictions about which movements are going to get less camaraderie and more internecine struggle in the future. Four years ago I would have said “new left socialism”, and I think I did endorse Robby Soave’s article to that effect at the time, but I think new left socialism is well into involution or even postcycle now. Last year I would have said YIMBYism, but I’m not up-to-date on it and maybe it’s already transitioned too. The only movement I see that’s still clearly high on “we are so great and such good friends with each other” is postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT, so sure, I expect things to get worse for them (sorry for this potentially self-fulfilling prophecy). (I’m nervous about saying EA because they still have more money than they can spend in a reasonable amount of time; as long as that situation continues they won’t be exactly resource-scarce, and the people with the purse-strings will have a natural advantage as “elites”.) I’m actually surprised how few uncomplicated happy growth spurt movements I can think of now, compared to how many I can think of that seem to have passed through that stage. I think this is a combination of: This is a pretty pessimistic social moment (eg the thing where dystopian SF has become more popular than the utopian SF of the late 20th century).
Inline links: the New Yorker, New York Times, Vox, cover of TIME Magazine, Elon Musk, Andrew Yang, Tyler Cowen, Tim Ferriss, Freddie deBoer, MT, Robby Soave’s article to that effect, postrationalism/ingroup/TPOT
Considering how often I feel the need to say some version of “I’m not, like, one of __those__ members of the Rationalist movement, I just sort of think some of their ideas make sense sometimes.”, I'd suppose we're firmly in at least Stage 3 now.
The NYT piece Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web is a great example of what it looks like when a movement is starting its growth phase. Newspapers write articles about how edgy and cool you are and how the establishment is afraid of your growing power. The couple of people who joined the movement out of genuine conviction when it was unpopular or made them look weird (eg Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein) get catapulted to superstardom.
Inline links: Meet The Renegades Of The Intellectual Dark Web
The Psychopharmacology Of The FTX Crash
November 16, 2022 · Original source
At normal doses, most people can think clearly on stimulants; unless there was some evidence of abnormal doses or missed sleep (see below) I usually wouldn’t expect this to have a clinically significant effect on judgment. But again, if it showed up anywhere it would show up in complicated trading. 6: Is It Okay, As A Psychiatrist Bound By Doctor-Patient Confidentiality, To Give An Interview About Your Patient To The New York Times? What? No!!! Obviously not!!! Why would you even ask this question? What the heck?
And even aside from that, it’s just crazy for any kind of a mental health professional to give an interview to the New York Times about anyone in an even slightly patient-like capacity. Even supposing that he wasn’t SBF’s psychiatrist (but then who was prescribing the Emsam?) this violates a norm against psychiatrists publicly assessing famous figures8. I suppose Dr. Lerner will argue that he was assessing Sam with his performance coach hat rather than his psychiatrist hat - no guessing how many FTT tokens I think that distinction is worth.
Inline links: a norm against, 8
This isn’t really a psychopharmacology question. And yet in answering the last psychopharmacology questions, I did end up having to read FTX’s In-House Performance Coach Is Just as Surprised as You Are. Apparently the FTX company psychiatrist gave an interview to the New York Times on his opinion of SBF’s personality.
Inline links: FTX’s In-House Performance Coach Is Just as Surprised as You Are
Why I'm Less Than Infinitely Hostile To Cryptocurrency
December 08, 2022 · Original source
Do Vietnamese people love trading monkey gifs? Are Ukrainians especially susceptible to Ponzi schemes? Is Venezuela laden with techbros? Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world. I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use. Ukraine has always been among the top crypto countries: in 2021, NYT called it “the crypto capital of the world”. Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. NYT describes its banks as “so sclerotic that sending or receiving even small amounts of money from another country requires an exasperating obstacle course of paperwork”, and this guy says that if you deposit more than $100,000 in a Ukrainian bank, “the chance that you get it back is very slim”. When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian government doubled down on crypto as a way for friendly Westerners to donate to the war effort - $70 million as of March. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework. Venezuela’s economy has been in slow motion collapse for the past decade. Inflation is currently in the triple digits (remember, people worried the Democrats would lose the midterms because of a US inflation rate of 8%). If your country has a triple-digit inflation rate, you might prefer to use an alternative currency, which Venezuela’s authoritarian government tries to prevent people from doing. Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen. I personally contributed in a small way to Russia’s cryptocurrency use. I’ve been trying to help Russian ACX readers escape to other countries to avoid conscription or arrest. Of my two successes so far, both involved sending cryptocurrency to help them afford a ticket out and living expenses while they searched for a job in their new country. I’m pretty proud of this and I don’t think it would have been possible without crypto. I think a lot of Westerners want to think of developing-world uses as a boring sideshow, and highlight Westerners trading monkey gifs as the only part of crypto worth talking about. But about 66% of crypto users live in the developing world. More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America. Of course a technology centered around avoiding governance and banking failures will be centered in the countries with the most governance and banking failures! Big Crypto Projects Are Very Rarely Scams I realize this is a bold sentence to use as a section header in 2022. But I recently tried to figure out the exact scam rate, and it seemed low. I searched for articles called things like The Top Crypto Projects Of 20XX, and then I checked how many of those projects, years later, had turned out to be scams.I tried my best not to cherry-pick, and to focus on the first article that Google fed me for each of various relevant search terms. I ended up using four articles for this experiment: Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015
Inline links: 69% of Vietnamese, a history, remittances, “the crypto capital of the world”, this guy, $70 million as of March, pass a law, More people own cryptocurrency in Africa than in North America, Most Promising Crypto Projects Of 2015
The most obvious example of this is the way Paypal bans sex workers (including sometimes confiscating the money in their accounts). I don’t think the CEO of Paypal is personally a prude. I think he’s afraid that he’ll get in trouble with the government if he looks like he’s soft on “public indecency”. Without any official diktats that could become a Supreme Court case, the government successfully makes sex work punishingly hard.
Inline links: Paypal bans sex workers
The Media Very Rarely Lies
December 22, 2022 · Original source
So Infowars often provides accurate data, but interprets it incorrectly, without necessary context. They’re not alone in this; it’s much like how the New York Times reports on real child EEG data but interprets it incorrectly, or how Scientific American reports real data on women in STEM but interprets it incorrectly, etc. This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits.
Inline links: reports on real child EEG data but interprets it incorrectly, reports real data on women in STEM but interprets it incorrectly
Or consider this New York Times article (which I’ve also criticized before): Free Market For Education: Economists Don’t Buy It. It said that only 36% of economists on a survey supported school vouchers - and if even economists don’t support a free market policy, surely that policy must be very stupid indeed. Not mentioned in the article: only 19% of economists in the same survey opposed school vouchers. The majority described themselves as uncertain - but among those who expressed an opinion, nearly twice as many were pro as con. Again, some might say this was important context. But NYT didn’t lie outright; they reported the headline number correctly.
Inline links: Free Market For Education: Economists Don’t Buy It
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
Last week I wrote The Media Very Rarely Lies. I argued that, although the media is often deceptive and misleading, it very rarely makes up facts. Instead, it focuses on the (true) facts it wants you to think about, and ignores other true facts that contradict them or add context. This is true of establishment media like the New York Times, but also of fringe media like Infowars. All of the “misinformation” out there about COVID, voter fraud, conspiracies, whatever - is mostly people saying true facts in out-of-context misleading ways.
Inline links: The Media Very Rarely Lies
In order to find people who were saying this when it wasn’t true, I restricted my Google search to articles from before June 1 2020. Most of the articles I found were from establishment media sources, for example Los Angeles Times’ The Flu Has Killed Far More People Than Coronavirus. So Why All The Frenzy About COVID-19? or Kaiser Health Network’s Something Much Deadlier Than The Wuhan Virus Lurks Near You. These articles were written before COVID had spread very far in the United States, and were right that it had (thus far) killed far fewer people than the flu that year. This was obviously an idiotic way to think about it, and I yelled at them at the time. Still, they weren’t making anything up, just thinking about the (true) relative death counts in a really dumb way.
Inline links: The Flu Has Killed Far More People Than Coronavirus. So Why All The Frenzy About COVID-19?, Something Much Deadlier Than The Wuhan Virus Lurks Near You
But this is a judgment call on my part (an obviously correct judgment call, but a judgment call nevertheless). A crazy person could see those same facts and decide it was more likely that the government faked a school shooting than that there would be a real school shooting that no trauma helicopters came to. I don’t know why they would think that, but empirically sometimes they do.
Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
So 72% of people agreed that technically true but deliberately misleading things were lies. Could I have saved myself some trouble if I had titled the post “The Media Very Rarely Says False Things”? Or “The Media Very Rarely Makes Up Facts”? I think people would have been equally annoyed that I was using “false things” or “make up facts” in a way that excludes technically-true-but-misleading statements. Someone’s going to argue I should have gone all the way and titled it “The Media Very Rarely Lies, But This Is True Only In The Most Nitpicky Technical Sense Of The World Lie, And In The Normal Sense Of The Word They Definitely Do” - at which point I will remind you that I absolutely did that, I just put the second part in the subtitle instead of the title. If you can’t bring yourself to read the non-bolded gray text, there’s no helping you. 2: Comments Equating Lying With Egregiously Sloppy Reasoning Other people placed a lot of importance on the specific phrasing in the Infowars birth certificate article where it concluded “therefore, the birth certificate is false”. For example, Bakkot: I'm with you on the general point but I think you're being too charitable to InfoWars (and maybe others) in at least some examples. Take the InfoWars birth certificate one: in addition to all the claims about layers and so on, it says "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax". That is a factual claim which is false. They offer support for that claim which isn't actually convincing, and the support they offer happens to be true but out of context, and I'm with you on calling the supporting evidence "not lies". But "the document is a shoddily contrived hoax" is in fact flatly false, and is asserted by the article itself, not just "someone said". This seems wrongheaded to me. Reposting from my own comment there: when I say "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery", I'm not tapping into the Platonic realm and reading the truth directly. I'm saying that I have seen a lot of evidence that makes me think Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery, and have inferred the conclusion "it's real and not a forgery" from that. If later it turned out it was a forgery - say there was some amazingly vast conspiracy theory that I completely missed - I wouldn't have been lying when I said the words "Obama's birth certificate is real and not a forgery". I would have been stating the conclusion I had inferred from my facts (which, in this hypothetical, would have been wrong, because I'm bad at reasoning). Jones states his own facts and the conclusion he infers from them. If his conclusion is wrong, the correct term for this wrongness is "failed inference", not "lying". Bakkot is still not happy with this: I don't think you've made a claim with reckless disregard for the truth, whereas I think InfoWars did. I am not at all convinced that InfoWars had a sincere belief that the birth certificate in question was a forgery. I think it is much more likely that they simply didn't care to know the truth of the matter. And I think it's reasonable to say that when someone makes it a false claim without caring whether or not it's true, that's a lie. This is the standard used for defamation in the US ("reckless disregard for the truth" is stock legal phrase), and defamation is usually understood to mean "lying about someone in a harmful way", so I think this is a pretty normal standard. At this point I acknowledge we’re disputing definitions, but I want to stand by mine. I’ve seen, again and again, that people are incapable of understanding that honest disagreement is possible. For example, I wrote about this here in the context of the millions of liberals who insist that conservatives can’t possibly care about fetuses’ lives and anyone who says they does must just be lying about it in order to justify their real program of oppressing women. When someone says “Joe is a liar”, I don’t want to have to ask every time “Do you mean you have some actual evidence for this, or that they said something you disagree with and you instantly leapt to ‘this is reckless disregard for the truth because nobody could ever be so dumb as to honestly disagree with me’?” I think if we let people use the word “lie” this way, then the overwhelming majority of accusations of lying would be false. Why would we want to define a word in a way that dooms it to constantly be used incorrectly to mislead people? I’m kind of sensitive to this because for almost every article I write, people in the comments accuse me of lying, or “pretending” I don’t know why the statements I made are wrong, or some other offense which I plead innocent to. My prior on “a randomly selected egregiously wrong person is lying” is much lower than the sort of people who make these accusations. I think people are just really paranoid about this, and we should use our terms carefully in a way that mitigates this paranoid rather than inflames it. Some of this might be more convincing after you read Part 6 of this post, where I list commenters’ proposed examples of media lies. Eric Newcomer writes: I hope we can all agree that the NYT wouldn't draw such big conclusions from such thin findings. The InfoWars birth certificate article doesn't even really seem internally certain about how PDF layers work. The critique I'm making now falls into the broader "InfoWars is much more egregious in its infractions than the NYT category." But I do think it reveals the slippery line between knowing lies and what one might call "lies of egregious sloppiness." If some serious part of a person knows that they haven't proved what they're claiming but they (or their bosses) insist on claiming that you have proved it, isn't that a form of lying? I’m sorry, but “lies of egregious sloppiness” sounds to me like “physical violence of egregious emotional violence”. Emotional violence and physical violence are both bad. Physical violence probably sounds worse to most people, and so it’s really tempting to, if emotional violence is really bad, say that that makes it a kind of physical violence. But I think that, although this is tempting, it’s false and you shouldn’t do it. I don’t want to say you’re allowed to sound more confident than you are. If you’re 71% confident, and you falsely say you’re 72% confident, then you are lying. But if you are very dumb, and seeing a random piece of toast makes you 100% confident that Obama’s birth certificate is false, and you vomit some random words to that effect onto a page, then you’re an idiot but not a liar. 3: Comments About Whether Infowars Believes Their Own Claims But I guess if you do want to be careful with the definition of the word “lie”, then it becomes important to know whether people at Infowars honestly believe their conspiracy theories or not. I don’t want to defend super-hard the thesis that they do. I’m not sure. If you forced me to guess, I’d say something like for a randomly given Infowars reporter and a randomly selected conspiracy theory they’re reporting on, 40% of the time they think it’s at least plausible enough that they’re doing good work by reporting on it, 20% of the time they know on some level that it’s false and they’re doing something wrong, and 40% of the time they’re in some kind of weird superposition where it seems emotionally true to them and they feel this hard enough that they never get around to asking whether it’s literally true. I’m really not attached to these numbers, but man are a lot of you attached to the claim that they definitely know their theories are false and are consciously lying. My main argument against this is that millions of people believe conspiracy theories - if they didn’t, we wouldn’t care so much about them! - and why shouldn’t some of those people work at Infowars? It would be quite a weird system for the conspiracy ecosystem to be run by an elite who secretly know they’re false, serving up fables to a base who believe them completely. How would you prevent some of the believers from rising into the elite? It would almost take a conspiracy of its own! Eric Newcomer has a more convincing counterargument than I expected: As an aside, I have personally worked at the NYT newsroom (reporting fellow) and at conservative outlet Washington Examiner. And I found the latter to be much sloppier and less worried about thinking through the impression it gave from facts. The Examiner would headline any big budget deficit number etc on my beat whereas the NYT had very detailed copy editors who would spot factual assertions in my copy that I didn't even consider I was making and push back on them. On InfoWars, it seems naive to presume that the outlet pushing the most misleading stories (InfoWars) is acting in good faith rather than just supplying readers with what they want. I get the point (one that Noam Chomsky has made) that outlets can just hire the bias that they want. But I actually think it's fairly hard to staff up true believers who can write and report credibly for conspiracy and super rightwing type stuff -- hence why a bunch of liberals like myself found themselves out of college writing for the local section of the Washington Examiner before it was killed. I find that on an intuitive level, I’m not too surprised to learn this - most journalists seem liberal, it would make sense that conservative papers couldn’t entirely escape this effect. On a more napkin-math level, I’m boggled - isn’t this embarrassing for the Examiner (and the journalists involved?) Wouldn’t they spend a lot of effort avoiding it? In a country with 100 million conservatives, is it really that hard to find a handful of them capable of writing news articles? There are many people writing okay-quality right-wing Substacks that get like five views per article. Are they doing this for the (nonexistent) money, without believing in the cause? If not, why couldn’t these people have been Washington Examiner reporters? Or InfoWarriors? I think Richard Hanania has a theory that a lot of liberals’ political advantage comes from a culture where they are happy to work themselves ragged for minimal compensation as long as it seems like like an impressive job they won’t be embarrassed to tell their friends and family about - ie intellectual college-degree-requiring labor. Maybe this is what the Examiner is taking advantage of? I don’t know. I don’t know what kind of ethical principles Eric considered when he decided to work for the Examiner, but I bet he wouldn’t have agreed to work for Infowars even if they paid him much more money. This should also factor into our calculations about whether Infowars is being staffed by Eric-equivalents. Human writes: There is at least one former infowars employee who alleges that their stories are (at least often) known to be false. The most clear-cut example I can quickly find is here: "Shortly after Jones began selling the supplements, someone posted a video on YouTube holding a Geiger counter displaying high radiation readings on a beach in Half Moon Bay, Calif. The video went viral, stoking fears that radiation from Fukushima was drifting across the Pacific Ocean. Jones saw an opportunity and sent me, along with a reporter, a writer and another cameraman, to California. We had multiple Geiger counters shipped overnight, unaware of how to read or work them, and drove up the West Coast, frequently stopping to check radiation levels. Other than a small spike in Half Moon Bay — which the California Department of Public Health said was from naturally occurring radioactive materials, not Fukushima — we found nothing. "Jones was furious. We started getting calls from the radio-show producers in the office, warning us to stop posting videos to YouTube stating we weren’t finding elevated levels of radiation. We couldn’t just stop, though; Jones demanded constant real-time content. On some of these calls, I could hear Jones screaming in the background." See also here for a discussion of Jones admitting he was lying about Sandy Hook during the lawsuit. 4: Comments On Why 8% Of Americans Said They Had Relatives Who Died From The COVID Vaccine Many people, including me, were confused by a poll in which 8% of Americans said they had a relative who died from the COVID vaccine. I speculated that maybe they were reading too quickly and misinterpreted it as “a relative who got the COVID vaccine”. But Tytonidaen wrote: I think a more likely explanation is that many people are choosing to attribute deaths to the vaccine that are not actually from the vaccine. For example, let's say Person A gets vaccinated and dies shortly after of some completely unrelated cause. And let's say Person B, the loved one being polled, has priors about vaccines or the medical establishment or whatever that cause them to be convinced it was actually the vaccine that killed Person A. In hypothetical reality, Person A lived a rather unhealthy lifestyle, had lots of risk factors for a heart attack, and would have died from a heart attack, regardless of whether they'd gotten the vaccine. Then, when Person A does, indeed, die of a heart attack, and by sheer coincidence had recently gotten vaccinated, Person B blames the COVID vaccine when polled, but it wasn't really the vaccine that killed their loved one. It might be easier to believe that outside forces (like a vaccine) harmed the person than to believe that the loved one's own actions did (like a poor lifestyle, not taking their meds, etc.). That's only one example, but I think the underlying dynamic could easily explain the poll results. None Of The Above wrote: In general, it seems like when you ask a factual question with partisan/CW valence on a poll, and the respondents don't know much about the factual question, they answer the "whose side are you on" question instead. That is, if you ask Republican-voting biologists, they'll nearly all tell you the Theory of Evolution is basically how living stuff came to be, but if you ask Republican-voting normies whose vaguely-remembered high school biology class may have mentioned Darwin a few times, they'll answer that evolution is a lie--they don't really know one way or another, they're just answering the "whose side are you on" question. Democratic normies will far more often tell you evolution is true, but probably could do little better in explaining why than the Republican normies could in explaining why evolution is really an atheist lie of some kind. Zack wrote: I took a time-boxed peek at the Pollfish data. The 1500 results were splint into 3 batches of 500. I arbitrarily selected the Jul 4 file to look at. In that file, there were 36 respondents who reported a household member had died from he vaccine. Focusing on those responses, I noticed a few interesting patterns. Of those 36 respondents, 10 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from COVID and death of a household member from the vaccine. I'm skeptical that 10 out of 500 people were unfortunate enough to have 2 household members die: one from COVID and one from the vaccine. (Especially because these are not large households; 4 of these 10 report that they have 1 other household member, and 5 of these 10 report having 2-4 other household members.) Of these 36 respondents, 20 responded "Yes" to both the question about death of a household member from the vaccine and "Are you planning on getting future COVID vaccines?" I'm skeptical that 55% of people who had a household member die of a vaccine would plan to get the vaccine themselves. Of these 36 respondents, there are even 4 who experienced a surprising number of adverse affects from the vaccine (Myocarditis, Pericarditis, AND Bell's Palsy ) requiring hospitalization in addition to having a household member die from the vaccine. Of these 4, 2 selected all of the following: "It will likely shorten my lifespan", "I am now unable to hold a job", "I am now unable to work a full day", "It impacts my personal life", "It is a minor annoyance". Those two are planning to get the vaccine again. There's some overlap between these respondents. Ignoring all of them drops from 36 who had a household member die of the vaccine to 12. I don't see obvious inconsistencies in these responses. However, there seems to be a broader issue with the survey design. They look at average time to complete each question, but average doesn't seem like the right measure here (3 people took 10+ minutes to answer; summed, the fastest 250 responses took about as long as those slowest 3). Of the 500 responses, most people seem to answer 7-10 questions. I timed myself just reading those questions silently in my head (not thinking about the answers). Of three attempts, my fastest was a bit over 17 seconds. 40 people completed the survey in 17 seconds or less. I'm skeptical it's possible for someone to provide a quality response to the survey that quickly. 225 people (nearly half) completed the survey in less than 31 seconds. I think that's the fastest I could answer if I were seeing the questions for the first time. It seems like Pollfish's model may encourage hasty, poor quality responses; "Pollfish uses non-monetary incentives like an extra life in a game or access to premium content." (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-the-pollfish-methodology-works/) It seems like that creates a misalignment of incentives; the respondent is in a hurry to get back to whatever they were doing. They provide survey fraud protection, and claim it filters suspiciously quick or suspiciously consistent answers (e.g., the same answer for all questions), but it seems to be overlooking obviously problematic responses in this case. (https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-pollfish-prevents-fraudulent-responses/) This bothered me enough that I emergency-edited the ACX Survey partway through to include (slightly differently phrased variants of) the two questions on the poll: Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID?
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!0sXa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F8dd54487-ff00-407a-b7f7-ccc96bde115a_731x141.png, For example, Bakkot, here, writes, has a more convincing counterargument, writes, here, here, a poll in which, wrote, wrote, wrote, https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-the-pollfish-methodology-works/, https://resources.pollfish.com/pollfish-school/how-pollfish-prevents-fraudulent-responses/
Your Book Review: Njal’s Saga
June 16, 2023 · Original source
Once a year, the Icelanders would meet at the Althing, a free-for-all open-air law court. There they would engage in that most Viking of pastimes - suing each other, ad nauseam, for every minor slight of the past twelve months. Offended parties would sell their rights to prosecute a case to the highest bidder, who would go around seeking fair arbitrators (or, in larger cases, defer to a panel chosen by chieftain-nobles called godi2). Courts would propose a penalty for the losing side - usually money. There were no police, but if the losers refused to pay, the courts could declare them “outlaws” - in which case it was legal to kill them. If you wanted to be a Viking in medieval Iceland, you needed a good lawyer. And Njal was the greatest lawyer of all.
Inline links: 2
Hurgolf the Wise and the other side’s lawyer fight it out at the Althing! This trial is almost never a whodunit - you, not being a monster, reported the slaying to the victim’s neighbors immediately. More often, you accuse the other side of not observing all the insane technicalities. You and Eirik almost come to blows in the courthouse. Both lawyers suggest there’s a possibility that either or both sides could be condemned to death for failing to observe the technicalities. Sometimes the lawyers get condemned to death for failing to observe technicalities.
If you want to read about various Icelanders going through this process 124,749 times, Njal’s Saga is the book for you.
Sure, Whatever, Let's Try Another Contra Caplan On Mental Illness
June 29, 2023 · Original source
Bryan Caplan thinks he’s debating me about mental illness. He’s not. Sometimes he posts some thoughts he has been having about mental illness, with or without a sentence saying “this is part of my debate with Scott”. Then I write a very long essay explaining why he is wrong. Then he ignores it, and has more thoughts, and again writes them up with “this is part of my debate with Scott”. I would not describe this as debating. Call it unibating, or monobating, or another word ending in -bating which is less polite but as far as I can tell equally appropriate.
Inline links: a very long essay explaining why he is wrong
Although he doesn’t answer my rebuttals, he does diligently respond to various unrelated posts of mine, explaining why they must mean I am secretly admitting he was right all along. When I wrote about the scourge of witches stealing people’s penises, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness. Sometimes I feel like this has gone a bit too far - when I announced I had gotten married, Caplan spun it as me secretly admitting he was right all along about mental illness.
Inline links: the scourge of witches stealing people’s penises, spun it as, spun it as
Left: my position. Right: my position, “rounded off” to Caplan'’s position In particular, he claims I am FORCED to either accept that all mental illnesses are just “preferences” and so not illnesses at all, or as posited in a response by Emil Kierkegaard, that homosexuality is a mental illness and therefore bad. You will not be surprised to learn that I don’t think of myself as secretly admitting this, or forced into doing anything. II. Bryan mentions how I have already addressed his fork with a much more in-detail discussion of how we classify something as a disease or not at this link, to which I would add this post as fleshing out the same framework. Put simply, declaring something a “disease” is a complex category-boundary-drawing issue that combines facts and values, just like all category-boundary-drawing issues. I said that it’s a political question whether or not you classify homosexuality as an illness. Caplan thinks of this as some sort of incredibly deep concession. But it’s a political question whether or not to classify any condition, including physical conditions, as illnesses. It’s just that the political question is usually very easy. This shouldn’t be surprising - most political questions are easy! “Should we set every tree in the United States on fire, then dump the entire Strategic Uranium Reserve in the Mississippi River?” - this is a political question, in the sense that you could propose it for a vote and people would have to form an opinion on it. It doesn’t show up on C-SPAN because it doesn’t satisfy anybody’s values. It’s a political fight where one side has a constituency of zero. In the same way, “is cancer a disease?” is a political question. Maybe cancer makes you cough up blood and die. Basically everyone is against this, so it’s easy to condemn it and agree that doing it is worse than not doing it. If for some reason there were some strong political constituency in favor of coughing up blood and dying, who thought were were unfairly stigmatizing this wonderful prosocial activity, then we would have to have a political fight about it. This fight would have to involve comparing values (eg being against death) rather than comparing facts (eg cancer is caused by a mutation in such and such a gene).1 (see also: The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life and Ambijectivity. Categories often contain a simple region where they operate perfectly and where it would be perverse to consider them a political question even though they sort of are, and a more complex region where they start to break down and we have to agree on some final border) Is Down Syndrome a disease? It often causes poor health and low IQ; I’m pretty against both of these things, so I would say yes. Still, there are a bunch of people who argue it isn’t, maybe because they don’t care what your health or IQ is, or because they think stigmatizes Down Syndrome patients. I think these people are wrong, but only in the same way that I think people who support the Russian invasion of Ukraine, or who hate free speech, are wrong: they have bad values, they’re against human flourishing, they’re on the wrong side of a political question. Is depression an illness? It causes you to be miserable and not be able to do most of the things you want to do. Same story. I can’t imagine anyone being in favor of this, and I hope there’s a broad base of support to continue classifying it as an illness - but it’s a value judgment. Caplan says okay, maybe sometimes in some ways the category boundary drawing is hard, but he proposes a bright-line rule: No preference is a disease. No matter how bizarre or horrible (or common or wonderful). Diseases are constraints, not preferences. Part of my frustration with Caplan is that I feel like I have proven this constraint/preference distinction incoherent and misleading again and again over the course of our “debate” and he’s never responded. He just keeps saying “but the constraint/preference distinction!” For the sake of completeness, I’ll give my summary of what he thinks the distinction is, plus four of what I consider to be the strongest counterarguments. My interpretation of Bryan’s theory (I’m putting this in a quote block to specify I’m devil’s-advocating it, but this is my summary and not his): If we think like behaviorists, all we can really see about mental illnesses are unusual behaviors. For example, a depressed person stays in bed all day and doesn’t work. An alcoholic drinks himself to death. A psychotic person runs out in the street naked claiming to be God. These seem like choices. You can imagine the depressed person choosing to throw parties and work hard instead. You can imagine the alcoholic choosing to throw out his beer and never drinking again. You can imagine the psychotic person choosing to put on his clothes and act normally. In fact, if you put a gun to the alcoholic’s head and threatened to shoot him if he ever drank again, probably he would stop drinking. Therefore, we should model these conditions as unusual preferences/choices, not as diseases. The hallmark of a disease is a constraint, something you cannot “choose” to overcome, something you couldn’t overcome even with a gun to your head. For example, a paralyzed person cannot choose to walk no matter how hard she wants to, or how dire the consequences for not walking. Therefore, paralysis is an unusual constraint, and depression is an unusual preference. We may choose (for political reasons) to stigmatize certain unusual preferences. Maybe the people who have them will choose (for signaling reasons) to cooperate in their own stigmatization. But realistically these are just completely voluntary preferences. If we don’t like them, we should ask the people who have them to choose differently, instead of treating them as diseased. My counterarguments: — 1: Counterargument From Physical Illness, Part I The simple preference/constraint model clearly doesn’t describe mental illness very well. But it’s actually much worse than that. It doesn’t even describe physical illness. Consider a migraine. If we think like behaviorists, all we can really say about migraines is that someone locks themselves in a dark room, clutches their head, and says “oww oww oww” a lot. If we put a gun to a migraneur’s head and threatened to kill them if they didn’t go to a loud party, they would grudgingly go to the party. So clearly (says a hypothetical version of Caplan, whose answers I must rely on because the real Caplan has never addressed this objection) migraine headaches are a preference, not a disease! Some people just like locking themselves in dark rooms, clutching their head, and saying “oww oww oww” a lot! If other people call this a “disorder”, they’re choosing to stigmatize migraineurs; if migraineurs agree it’s a disorder, they’re just trying to escape responsibility for their antisocial choices. You could say the same about many - maybe most - physical diseases. Why not say that chronic pain is just a preference for grimacing a lot? That itchy rashes are just a preference for scratching yourself a lot? That colds are just a preference for lying in bed and blowing your nose a lot? (I believe most people with colds could get up, go to work, and avoid blowing their noses, if their lives depended on it). Or we could stop thinking like behaviorists, a philosophy which nobody has taken seriously since the 1970s. Once we agree that people are allowed to have internal states, and that the rest of us are allowed to acknowledge those internal states, the paradox disappears. We can agree that the essence of migraine headaches is pain, especially pain in response to strong sensations. The essence of itchy rashes is a feeling of itchiness, which is relieved when we scratch it. The essence of colds is feeling unwell and ugh and wanting to stay in bed and having unpleasant congestion in your nasal passages. None of these particularly change your preferences. Both I (never had a migraine) and the average migraineur have a preference for not having our head be in terrible pain. But the migraineur needs to avoid bright lights in order to satisfy this preference, and I don’t. So she very reasonably avoids bright lights. Once we’ve admitted this, it’s natural to also admit that depression involves negative emotions and low energy, that alcoholism involves a craving to drink alcohol, and that psychosis involves disturbed reasoning processes which make running out in the street naked claiming to be God seem like a good idea (all with other preferences intact). This is more parsimonious than Caplan’s theory, better matches the testimony of the mentally and physically ill themselves, and doesn’t require the mentally ill to be running some 4D-chess-style network of lies (such that actually the psychotic person’s reasoning is completely normal and they’ve just managed to perfectly trick everyone into thinking that it isn’t and tell a perfectly consistent story all the time and stick with their deception even when it presents an extreme threat to their life and freedom). — 2: Counterargument From Gradients Preferences and constraints naturally shade into each other. Let me give three examples. Example 1: I am a mediocre runner, able to run about 5 km before getting tired and stopping. One day, at exactly the 5 km mark, a demon appears before me, and says it will kill me unless I run another 1 km. I’m pretty upset by this, but I gather all my willpower, try really hard, and manage to run another 1 km. Then the demon appears again and says haha, I was just joking last time, but now I’ll really kill you if you don’t run another 1 km. For some reason I’m gullible, I believe it, and even though I am in extreme pain I make a herculean effort and run another 1 km. Again the demon appears and makes the same threat, and this time I say sorry, I really can’t run another inch, guess I’ll die. The demon says okay, new threat, it will kill me and my entire family horribly if I don’t run another 0.1 km, but give me $1 million if I do. I call upon some kind of reserve of courage worthy of the heroes of old, put one foot in front of the other, and make it a final 0.1 km before stopping. Again, the demon says haha, fooled you, you need to run another 0.1 km. I try this, collapse, and await my impending death. Do we argue that I had a simple preference again running 6, 7, and 7.1 km, but that my inability to run 7.2 km was a true constraint? It seems obvious that my difficulty running 7.1 km is of the same type as my difficulty running 7.2 km, and it just passed some threshold where I couldn’t do it anymore no matter how much it mattered. Example 2: The demon puts a dimmer switch on my leg nerves. When it’s at 100%, I have totally normal movement. When it’s at 0%, I’m paralyzed from the waist down. At 25%, I can sort of kind of walk in extreme pain. The demon threatens to kill me unless I succeed, so I shamble a short distance. Then the demon turns the switch down to 24% and threatens me again; I try my best, but fail. I think Caplan would have to say that at every level up to 25%, I simply have a preference against walking, which is fine and voluntary and my own fault and not a disease in any way. Then at 24%, it suddenly becomes a constraint inflicted on me by an outside agency and which I deserve sympathy for. Instead, I would rather describe things that make an action difficult and unpleasant as in some sense real constraints. When the dimmer switch is at 25%, I have an external constraint making walking difficult and unpleasant, although I can overcome this and do it anyway with a strong enough incentive. When the switch is at 24%, it’s become so difficult that no incentive can make me do it. There’s no qualitative boundary, just a quantitative one. Example 3: Try to hold your breath as long as you can (please don’t go overboard and hold it so long you pass out). If your experience is like mine, at each moment you’ll feel like - given a slight exercise of willpower - you could choose to hold your breath one more second if you so desired. But if your experience is like mine, you will also find that no amount of love or money could make you hold your breath successfully for (let’s say) three minutes.2 Is there a point where not wanting to hold your breath any longer switches from a preference to a constraint? Or have you discovered a place, in the dark moments just before suffocation, where these concepts lose all meaning? — 3: Counterargument From Physical Illness, Part II Caplan claims that mental illnesses involve preferences and physical illnesses involve constraints. But a second’s thought reveals this is not actually true, even if you accept the whole preference-constraint dichotomy Consider cancer. Cancer involves some constraints; for example, it might kill you, and you cannot choose to live instead, even if someone put a gun to your head and demanded it3. But until that happens, it mostly looks like preferences. People with cancer might stay in bed, saying they feel too sick and weak to get up and do things. But if you threatened them with a gun, they could probably get up and do things. People with cancer might refuse to eat, saying they feel too nauseous and have no appetite. But if you threatened them with a gun, they could probably get down some food. Meanwhile, plenty of mental illnesses include constraints. One of the diagnostic criteria for depression is cognitive and memory problems; people with these problems cannot choose to remember things better, even with a gun to their head. Many people with psychosis cannot speak or reason normally, even if you put a gun to their head and ask them how a healthy person would answer a question. People having panic attacks cannot choose to have a normal heartbeat, or to stop shaking or sweating. Depression and anxiety are both associated with insomnia; try to will yourself to sleep and you’ll sleep less, not more. Both physical and mental illnesses are complex bundles of preferences and constraints, which shouldn’t be surprising given that preference vs. constraint is an oversimplified distinction that breaks down outside its legitimate domain. — 4: Counter-Argument From The Gun-To-The-Head Test Actually Not Working A depressed person may not be able to get out of bed or live a normal life. This might get so bad that they decide to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the head. Confronted with a choice between living a normal life, or a gunshot to the head, they have chosen the gunshot4. It appears that they have passed the gun-to-the-head test that Caplan loves so much. I feel bad including this one, because Caplan can fairly object that this is just another preference. Maybe depressed people completely voluntarily choose to lie in bed for a few years while falsely claiming to be miserable and then shoot themselves in the head, and all of this is a perfectly free choice that they are happy with. I cannot disprove this, only point out how unparsimonious it is. Maybe a better example is when a psychotic person attacks the cops, the cops order him to stop or else they’ll shoot him, the psychotic person continues attacking them (eg because he believes he’s invincible) and then the police go ahead and shoot him. Again, Caplan could say that this is just a preference for attacking cops and then being killed. But in that case he should stop touting the “gun to the head test” as meaningful. Rather, he should admit that his theory is completely unfalsifiable - no matter what actions a mentally ill person does, what tests they pass or fail, he can just say they had a preference for doing whatever they did. In fact, at this point I don’t see why he even has to acknowledge the existence of constraints at all. One might as well claim that a paralyzed person could walk if they wanted, but chooses not to. III. I think Caplan is groping towards something like the following criticism: Suppose we simplify depression to “person lies in bed and doesn’t do anything all day”. Caplan’s model treats this as “depressed person has preference to lie in bed”. My model treats this as “depressed person has an abnormal mental/emotional/motivational state that makes it difficult and unpleasant for them to not lie in bed”. Now we consider a gay person. Caplan’s model treats this as “person has a preference to be gay”. Wouldn’t my model have to treat this as . . . person has abnormal mental/emotional/motivational state that makes it difficult and unpleasant for them to be heterosexual? In some sense this is true. We could imagine some very religious man from the 1950s who really wants to be straight, marry a woman, and raise a family. But due to some hormonal disturbance, he feels a very strong urge to have sex with men. How is this different from (let’s say) depression-secondary-to-hypothyroidism, where some person really wants to live a normal life, but instead, due to a hormonal disturbance, feels unable to do anything but lie in bed? It doesn’t seem that different to me. It also doesn’t seem that different from a straight guy who wishes he were gay (maybe for LGBTQ cred, or because it would make it much easier to find partners) but feels a very strong urge to have sex with women. So does that mean that depression is “just a preference”? I don’t think so, because none of these scenarios seem that different from the person with the migraine either! I think the preference/constraint dichotomy is a bad way to think about about this whole class of things. I think all of the following things shade into each other: A migraine. You could think of this as a preference for sitting in a dark room and saying “ow ow ow” - or as an internal state of head pain.
Inline links: as posited in a response by Emil Kierkegaard, this link, this post, 1, The Tails Coming Apart As Metaphor For Life, Ambijectivity, 2, 3, you’ll sleep, 4
Links For August 2023
August 09, 2023 · Original source
13: Fact check: was Elvis Jewish? Snopes says yes, but I’m more convinced by this argument for no. [update: commenter TheGenealogian agrees no] 14: Is GPT-4 getting worse? This isn’t absurd; some people claim OpenAI has simplified the model to cut costs (though OpenAI denies this). Matei Zaharia argues yes, but I’m more convinced by the AI Snake Oil blog’s argument for no (h/t Stuart Ritchie). 15: Vox has a good piece about AI company Anthropic. I would quibble that they’re not the only safety-focused or EA-affiliated org, and we have yet to see how truly safety-focused or altruistic any AI company can be while continuing to be an AI company. But granting that it’s all a matter of degree, I agree the degree seems pretty high for them. And NYT also has an Anthropic article. 16: Eliezer bets $150,000 to $1,000 against UFOs being aliens, and gives the same argument I would - it’s unlikely that any civilization advanced enough to travel through space would still be primitive enough to use macroscopic, biologically-piloted craft that sometimes crash. 17: More nails in the coffin of growth mindset. “When examining the highest-quality evidence (6 studies, N = 13,571), the effect was nonsignificant: d = 0.02, 95% CI = [−0.06, 0.10]. We conclude that apparent effects of growth mindset interventions on academic achievement are likely attributable to inadequate study design, reporting flaws, and bias.” I think the older, very-high-effect-size studies were clearly terrible, but I’d still like to look further into the newer, small-but-significant-effect-size-that-makes-a-difference-across-large-groups studies and how they went wrong. 18: Previous work showed that after adjusting for selection bias, “what college you go to doesn’t matter” for average earnings. I was always skeptical of this - are all those rich people sending their kids to Ivies for no reason? Now Chetty, Deming, and Friedman find that: Attending an Ivy-Plus college instead of the average highly selective public flagship institution increases students’ chances of reaching the top 1% of the earnings distribution by 60%, nearly doubles their chances of attending an elite graduate school, and triples their chances of working at a prestigious firm. Ivy-Plus colleges have much smaller causal effects on average earnings, reconciling our findings with prior work. One of the authors, David Deming, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth. Like everyone else, this study also finds that rich people are using “holistic admissions” and the de-emphasis of standardized testing to gain an advantage: H/T Nate Silver, who writes: “Not sure how you can look at this data, ostensibly be interested in either meritocracy or equality, and want to move away from standardized tests. It's the subjective measures that are most slanted in favor of the rich kids.” Cf. Erik Hoel. 19: From @data_depot: “In 2002, 48% of Americans said "the govt is run by a few big interests looking out for themselves." 52% said "it is run for the benefit of all people." In 2020, 84% said the govt is run by a few big interests. Only 16% said it is run for the benefit of all people.” Source seems to be here, which reveals 2002 was a local peak in trust in government; maybe because of post-9/11 unity, but even 2000 was 34%, much better than our current 16%. My first instinct is to attribute this to a rise in vulgar Marxism, in the sense of everyone (even conservatives) now being trained to think in terms of an elite class screwing over everyone else (cf my review of Manufacturing Consent). But there was a previous low of 19% in 1994, which doesn’t seem to correspond to anything especially bad going on in the US, so I don’t know. 20: AskReddit: Medical professionals - have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far? Linking this because there’s lots of evidence showing that education (as a proxy for intelligence?) is associated with increased life expectancy, and this thread gives you a visceral appreciation of why that might be. 21: The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow: Looks like a weak downward trend since 2021 I can’t explain, plus a strong downward trend since 11/2022 which must be from ChatGPT. In case you were wondering how AI was affecting programming! (update: probably false, see here, though see also here for evidence of smaller but real decline) 22: This month in culture war topics: London’s Pride parade featured a convicted kidnapper/torturer/rapist/sadist as a speaker, who advocated that anti-trans people should be “punch[ed] in the f**king face” ; the organizers say they stand by her.
Inline links: yes, this argument for no, agrees no, argues yes, argument for no, Stuart Ritchie, Anthropic, an Anthropic article, the same argument I would, More nails in the coffin of growth mindset, Previous work, Chetty, Deming, and Friedman, has a Substack here where he explains the study in more depth, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VcFl!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4f08bfe5-ab31-453a-896a-54ef385da7d2_706x900.jpeg, Nate Silver, Erik Hoel, @data_depot, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S4g-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff18fa4d5-9ba9-4b86-a058-46246bfc8a4f_536x611.png, here, my review of, have you ever had a patient so lacking in common sense you wondered how they made it so far?, The Fall Of [programming help site] Stack Overflow, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E7XK!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8ba7c05-7dbb-4318-9da2-87b00d738ed7_649x518.png, probably false, see here, here, featured, stand by her
Under Kaiserist occupation, the various authors imagine, the no longer free people of Britain: may be fined on the spot by police officers for ordinary infractions, no jury trial, a simple matter of notebook paperwork, and as such the police are encouraged to fine a variety of things seemingly as a form of taxation: property infractions, momentary traffic violations, jaywalking. Beyond this, the formerly free people of Britain are heavily restricted in what firearms they can own and many of those they do own are subject to registration with the state. They require extensive permitting and government approval to modify their own homes on their own private property. The now slave British are now taxed an inordinate amount directly out of their income, sometimes into the double-digit percentages of their annual earnings, and what is more horrifying it is left to them to report it, THEY ARE MANDATED TO ACT AS THEIR OWN TAX COLLECTOR AND SELF INCRIMINATE, with terrible consequences if they are caught under-reporting or merely mistaken.
23
October 31, 2023 · Original source
Last month, the Lighthaven convention center in Berkeley hosted Manifest, the first conference for prediction market enthusiasts. By now this has already been covered elsewhere, including in a great article by the New York Times, but here are some particular highlights:
Inline links: in a great article by the
Prediction markets are sometimes held up as a way to get clarity on controversial news issues. But how do you resolve the prediction market? It’s fine to start a market on whether there was a lab leak at Wuhan, but ten years from now people will probably still be as confused as today.
It looks to me like NYT first reported on this (and attributed it to Israel) at 1:36 EST Tuesday afternoon, sent subscribers an alert attributing it to Israel at 2:32, then changed their headline at 4:01 to be more agnostic. At 9 AM the next morning, it sent out another alert saying that both sides blamed each other and nobody could be sure.
Inline links: first reported on this
Open Thread 306
December 11, 2023 · Original source
4: Since I was pretty gung ho about the Lumina tooth probiotic, I want to link the good criticism I found as a counterbalance (without necessarily endorsing it). Here’s someone from Hacker News doubting that it will colonize the mouth (or do much if it does) - though see comments below. Here’s an endodontist talking about how hard it is to study this or get any evidence that it works. Some other people pointed out that the graph on the post shows only 50% colonization after one year; Aaron says he has other information showing it eventually reaches near 100% colonization and he’ll get that to me soon. Some people were extremely skeptical about whether any of this was even real, so here’s an NYT article about the original Hillman research from 2004 that will hopefully put those doubts to rest. I agree that there isn’t proof of efficacy and it will be hard to prove that, but I think the suggestive evidence compares well to other supplements I respect (albeit not $20K supplements), and no one in the comments had a good story for why it would cause harm - so I chose to take the free sample. I’ll let you know if anything terrible happens to me! Till then, you can also check the prediction markets.
Inline links: someone from Hacker News doubting, an endodontist talking about, here’s an NYT article about the original Hillman research from 2004, the prediction markets
In The Long Run, We're All Dad
December 22, 2023 · Original source
This has become the new rhythm of our lives. Changing, nursing, burping, first one child, then the other. Twenty minutes per child, times two children, times once every 2-3 hours; you can do the math. We do everything else - laundry, shopping, cooking, occasionally even napping - in the precious intervals when both babies are asleep.
The Snoo is a $1500 computerized bassinet that continually assesses babies’ needs and tries to calm them with various soothing noises and automated rocking motions. We got two, both of which have been soundly rejected. The twins insist on sleeping in their carseats, which we’ve grudgingly moved to the nursery. At first I was miffed, but now I see their logic. You’ve got to learn to resist the algorithmic content mills early.
Inline links: Snoo
Lyra is already an overachiever. She has clearly read all the How To Be A Baby textbooks, learned when crying is appropriate, and only cries at those specific times. She drinks the exact amount of milk recommended on the Baby Age-Appropriate Nursing Chart, then refuses to accept more. I’m worried that if we don’t teach her to think independently soon, she’ll end up somewhere terrible like Harvard.
Links For February 2024
February 29, 2024 · Original source
23: Related: There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about charts showing frequency of “woke” words in the NYT. David Rozado investigates how those words have been doing since then and whether we’re “past peak wokeness” (it’s different for different words, but overall maybe slightly past?)
Inline links: how those words have been doing since then and whether we’re “past peak wokeness”
23: Related: There was a lot of discussion a few years ago about charts showing frequency of “woke” words in the NYT. David Rozado investigates how those words have been doing since then and whether we’re “past peak wokeness” (it’s different for different words, but overall maybe slightly past?) 24: The first case reports of cadaver-to-human transmission of Alzheimer’s Disease. In the mid-20th-century, the standard treatment for dwarfism was ground up pituitary gland from the brain of a dead person. Scientists have now found that dwarfs who got pituitaries from dead people with Alzheimers developed very early Alzheimers themselves, often in their 40s. I already knew Alzheimers involved misfolded proteins, so this shouldn’t have been surprising, but I still somehow failed to think of it as a prion disease. This shows that misfolded proteins are sufficient to cause Alzheimers (with a 30 year delay? Sure, I guess, maybe that’s how long it takes a prion to spread). I’m not sure what’s left of the Alzheimers origin debate. Should we just assume that this is a protein that tends to go prion-y after enough time, or is there more to discover?
Inline links: how those words have been doing since then and whether we’re “past peak wokeness”, The first case reports of cadaver-to-human transmission of Alzheimer’s Disease
24: The first case reports of cadaver-to-human transmission of Alzheimer’s Disease. In the mid-20th-century, the standard treatment for dwarfism was ground up pituitary gland from the brain of a dead person. Scientists have now found that dwarfs who got pituitaries from dead people with Alzheimers developed very early Alzheimers themselves, often in their 40s. I already knew Alzheimers involved misfolded proteins, so this shouldn’t have been surprising, but I still somehow failed to think of it as a prion disease. This shows that misfolded proteins are sufficient to cause Alzheimers (with a 30 year delay? Sure, I guess, maybe that’s how long it takes a prion to spread). I’m not sure what’s left of the Alzheimers origin debate. Should we just assume that this is a protein that tends to go prion-y after enough time, or is there more to discover?
Inline links: The first case reports of cadaver-to-human transmission of Alzheimer’s Disease
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
Civil rights acts as a sort of force multiplier for disgruntled employees . . . allowing them to change institutions from the inside. The same company that might not think twice about disciplining workers for making unfounded or exaggerated claims about other aspects of its business can have its hands tied if the allegations being made contain even a hint of a charge of racism or sexism. As mentioned before, civil rights law bans “retaliation” against an employee even if the underlying complaint is ultimately without merit. When Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an article in the New York Times in the summer of 2020 calling for the military to be sent to deal with rioters in major American cities, the opinion editor of the paper eventually resigned after employees waged a campaign against him that included sending out identical tweets saying that the piece put black staff in danger. Had they claimed a grievance based on some other, “non-protected” identity, there would not have been the specter of legal liability for the article, nor would the controversy have invoked the grievance procedures and norms already established to deal with racial issues.
Therefore, every business owner needs to monitor their employees for jokes, political comments, flirtatiousness, and take action against any offenses. Hanania has several complaints here. First and most legibly, it (say it with me) gets taken too far. Volokh lists a large number of [examples of things that have been found to be] evidence of a hostile work environment: signs with the phrase “men working”; “draftsman” and “foreman” as job titles, pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and a burning American flag in a cubicle; an ad campaign using samurai, kabuki, and sumo wrestling to refer to Japanese competition; jokes of a sexual nature not targeted at any particular person; misogynistic rap music […] even terms like “great view” and “walk-up” have been cited as potentially trying to exclude blind people and those in wheelchairs. And In a 2015 and 2016, a black father and son named Owen Diaz and Demetric Di-az2 [sic] worked at a Tesla plant. They sued the company for racial discrimination, with the father’s claims alone making it to trial….racial slurs were used in the presence of Diaz, and he saw racist graffiti on a bathroom wall. It appears that the workers allegedly responsible were mostly or all minorities themselves, and each time an allegation could be verified, the employee was punished. Tesla claimed that they had taken enough steps to address the concerns of Diaz […] a jury disagreed, and awarded the plaintiff $137 million, an amount that the judge reduced to $15 million. In response to the verdict, Tesla released a statement pointing out that witnesses confirmed that the slurs were used in a friendly manner, usually by African-American employees, and without hostile intent. (fact check: this article says the racism also included demands to “go back to Africa” people leaving drawings of caricatured black cavemen at the employee’s desk, threats, and claims that black employees were "given the most menial and physically demanding work" - and that these claims were backed up by testimony from two dozen former workers and a cellphone video showing people telling a black employee that they are going to “cut you up, n—-r”. This seems like a sufficiently different story that I’d like to know whether Hanania still stands by his version) Other parts of harassment law lead to more unfair double-binds. For example, you can’t be seen to “retaliate” against someone who accuses another worker of harassment. So suppose that a minority employee is bullying a white employee, the white employee resists, and the minority accuses them as “harassment”. Maybe there’s even a full trial, everyone agrees this is what happened, and the white employee is found totally innocent. Still, you can’t fire the bully, because that would be retaliation for a harassment complaint. And since you probably don’t want the bully and their victim in the same department, you need to move one of them. And you can’t move the bully, because that would be viewed as “retaliation” for the harassment complaint and they could sue you for millions of dollars. So you have to punish the victim. But Hanania doesn’t just say this kind of thing goes too far. He has some broader point that I have trouble interpreting - basically that corporations used to be cozy, chummy places full of banter and flirtation that everyone enjoyed, and now this has been universally replaced with the bland soul-draining bureaucratic corporate aesthetic satirized in works like Office Space. Is this true? People talk about Mad Men (I’ve never seen it) as reflecting some kind of corporate golden age where at least high-ranking men enjoyed their jobs. If so, did it change because of harassment law? Or because neoliberalism replaced the work-for-thirty-years-and-get-a-golden-watch corporation with the work-for-three-years-and-then-seek-a-better-job-elsewhere corporation? Still, Hanania really hammers in this point that we should apparently all be angry about the loss of corporate flirtation - he calls the current regime, “a sexless, androgynous, and sanitized workplace” which is “contrary to human nature [and] miserable”. Without civil rights law, we could have “organizations that combined the aspects of a church, a social club, a matchmaking service, and a traditional business.” In such a world: Some corporations start encouraging dating and forming close personal bonds among their employees. This can take many forms, from Christian matchmaking to promoting a party-like atmosphere. These pro-relationship corporations will come in conservative or liberal forms. Other firms explicitly market themselves as providing a more “professional” or “classic” work experience . . . we will see a period of wild experimentation, with some forms of corporate organization drawing a great deal of media coverage. People will criticize many of these experiments, and they will become the subject of public outrage. After civil rights law has been defanged, however, government no longer has the ability to easily shut such efforts down. Eventually, public anger subsides, and the idea of the media attacking a firm because it dislikes its internal culture will seem as intolerant as attacking a religious community for its doctrines, or homosexuals for what they do together as consenting adults. I appreciate my anti-civil-rights books doubling as interesting settings for pornographic stories, but I’m otherwise unable to fathom the level of Hanania’s enthusiasm here. …And More Richard Hanania hates all this stuff. Partly he hates it because he thinks it’s unfair and anti-business and anti-merit. But also, Vaclav Havel talks about the indignity of life under communism. You weren’t allowed to just do your job and pay your taxes and follow the laws of the communist state. You had to be actively complicit. You had to act enthusiastic about the communism, force it upon others, inform on your colleagues and punish deviation - at least if anybody was going to check later. This kind of communism didn’t just hurt your pocketbook. It damaged your soul. It molded you into a worse and uglier type of person who would eventually abandon their better impulses in order to justify their actions to themselves. This is how Hanania thinks of civil rights law. Business owners can’t just give blacks ten extra points on the screening test and call it a day. They have to favor blacks while insisting to everyone that they don’t do this and it’s perfectly fair and they love civil rights law. They have to twist their employment criteria into some kind of illegible monstrosity so nobody can notice all the favoritism they’re doing, then tell everybody that they believe the monstrosity is “fairer”. They have to hire a bunch of diversity coordinators - not because they’re required to hire diversity coordinators, it’s not a requirement - but because they love equality so so much (and if they don’t do this, they’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons). Everyone faces a constant threat of lawsuits which can only be warded against by seeming maximally woke and maximally enthusiastic and maximally happy about all the idiotic fake laws you are being forced to comply with. Like in communism, you have to become your own mini-police state. You have to make employees snitch on each other if they tell the wrong joke. You have to turn your company into a tyranny of HR ladies. If you do any of this even a little less than other companies, you’ll get sued for seemingly unrelated reasons, with penalties running potentially into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Because there’s no legible law except “be the same as everyone else so you don’t stand out as sue-able”, every corporation homogenizes into the same bland HR-ocracy. Everyone agrees on the same hiring process, which is to prioritize college degree, resume, and interview, and definitely not any test or measure of ability. This leads inevitably to our current society, where everyone has to waste their childhood doing meaningless extracurriculars so they can get into the best college so they can take the best internships so they get the best jobs. (unless they do something stupid like let themselves get the dreaded “resume gap”). But also: During the early 1800s, government positions were given out by the “spoils system”, basically “does the party in power like you personally?” In the 1880s, after President Garfield was assassinated by a guy who didn’t get a good enough position, they switched to a formal civil service, based on test performance and merit. The US civil service became the envy of the world, attracted some of the smartest people in the country, and obviously worked better than the old system wherever it was possible to compare. Still, this gradually (and somewhat deniably) ended in the 1970s, because the merit-based hiring system seemed like disparate impact. Hanania calls the current era “the racial spoils system”, where positions in the bureaucracy are based on the same kind of illegible morass as everything else (eg the FAA’s “biographical questionnaire”). He says every branch of government has become less effective as a result. Hanania doesn’t mention this, but I’ve heard an additional argument elsewhere. It’s legally dangerous for companies to hire based on anything like merit. Still, if you have great lawyers and are willing to pay a lot to settle lawsuits, you can get away with legally dangerous things. This is only worth it if you really really want high-merit employees, ie if the best employee is much more financially valuable to you than the second-best. This is mostly true in Wall Street (where you want your trader to outsmart the other guy’s trader by half a millisecond or whatever) and Silicon Valley (where ten employees can write a program used by millions of people). So the government, the civil service, the schools, etc, all abandoned merit-based hiring, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley lawyered up. But that means that if you’re a smart non-minority college graduate, you know that joining the civil service will be a mess - you’ll have a tough time even getting in, and you’ll always be passed over for promotions for less-qualified minorities. Meantime, Wall Street and Silicon Valley would love to have you. So all the smart people got concentrated in a few industries that might not have been their most economically productive use, and the old American tradition where elite families would send some of their kids into public service died out. What To Do? Hanania stresses that most Americans hate affirmative action (and probably by extension most other civil rights law, though they’ve probably never heard of disparate impact). Affirmative action has been on the ballot nine times, and failed eight of those. Most recently, it failed in California, a deep-blue, 66% minority state where the pro-AA side outspent opponents 17-to-1. Also, Republicans have controlled all the branches of government many times in the past fifty years, and now they control the Supreme Court. Most civil rights law is based on executive orders and judicial decisions, so you wouldn’t even need a Congressional vote to overturn it. Just an executive order, from any president who felt like it. Reagan could have overturned half of this with the stroke of a pen, if he’d wanted. So how has it survived this long? His answer: because until about 2010, Republicans were too scared of getting called racist. Reagan wanted to overturn affirmative action, but other Republicans (like Bob Dole) begged him not to, because racism, and eventually he caved. But since 2010, everyone has already been calling Republicans racist all the time, to the point where probably this threat has lost its power. And the sort of moderate Republicans who reined in Reagan are gone. So why haven’t Republicans (eg Trump) acted? Hanania thinks everyone is so obsessed with “woke” culture war stuff that the low-hanging fruit of actual woke laws that presidents can change has slipped under the radar. And so, this book. I would have summarized the case as “Hey, Republicans! Do you hate wokeness? Well, too bad, it’s a vast cultural movement with bastions in a bunch of places where we have no power. But some of this civil rights law stuff seems pretty related to wokeness, and we do potentially have power there. So instead of fighting the unwinnable cultural battle, how about we fight the very winnable policy one?” But maybe this didn’t seem optimistic enough for Hanania, so he framed it as “the legal wokeness is the source of the cultural wokeness” instead. More on this later. The Origins Of . . . Inequality A progressive, reading this book, might counter: “Sure, civil rights law - like all law - is poorly written and kludgy in parts. Like all law, it sometimes gets abused or taken too far. Those are the costs. But the benefits are that it fights discrimination and inequality. That’s very important! Don’t you think those benefits are worth the cost?” Unless I missed it, Hanania doesn’t touch this obvious counterargument. He briefly says that in a free market, companies couldn’t consistently maintain discrimination, because that would be leaving money on the ground. “Cool theoretical result,” objects the hypothetical opponent. “But white households earn an average of $80K and black households an average of $50K, and so on with other minority groups. So it sure seems like something inequality-related is going on.” My tongue-in-cheek reframing of Hanania’s summary of civil rights law went: We notice your workforce is less black than the applicant pool.
Inline links: 2, this article
Source: David Rozado Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.
Inline links: David Rozado, The Closing Of The American Mind
Some Practical Considerations Before Descending Into An Orgy Of Vengeance
July 23, 2024 · Original source
I hate this because I’ve fought with these people on the Left, and they sound exactly the same. “If you feel like compromising with the Right, it’s important to remember what they’ve done. They separated families and locked children in cages. They forced 10-year-old rape victims to carry their rapists’ babies. They murdered our grandparents by refusing to mask in the middle of a pandemic. They killed thousands of American soldiers in a war over fake WMDs, then cut VA funding so the soldiers they wounded would die on the street. At this very moment, they’re boiling our planet alive to protect fossil fuel barons’ profits. How dare you suggest it could possibly be wrong to cancel someone like that!” This isn’t a knock-down argument. Sometimes you’re right when you think your enemies are bad, and they’re wrong when they think you’re bad. I can’t say for sure this isn’t one of those times. But: The fact that your enemies are just as sure as you are should make you less sure.
Links For September 2024
September 12, 2024 · Original source
24: Another day, another NYT doxxing scandal: an NYT reporter joined a group chat of Jews talking about how they dealt with anti-Semitism. Then she shared the names of everyone in the group with someone who leaked it to anti-Israel activists. The activists proceeded to harass, stalk, threaten, and vandalize group members. NYT says that unspecified “disciplinary action” has been taken against the reporter, which apparently does not include firing her, demoting her, or any other effect observable in the physical world.
Inline links: NYT doxxing scandal
25: Sometimes business-minded presidential candidates say they will be “the CEO of America”. But did you know that America already has a CTO (Chief Technology Officer)?
Inline links: CTO
Open Thread 347
September 16, 2024 · Original source
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Links For December 2024
December 17, 2024 · Original source
38: Freddie de Boer says he was ghosted by the New York Times (he pitched them a time-sensitive article, their editor accepted his pitch and told him to write it a certain way, he stopped shopping the pitch around to other publications and wrote it the way NYT wanted, and then the editor never returned his emails or paid him). Seems like pretty unprofessional behavior, I’d like to think there’s an innocent explanation but at some point not noticing and publicly giving an apology itself becomes culpable.
Inline links: ghosted by the New York Times
Subscrive Drive '25 + Free Unlocked Posts
January 14, 2025 · Original source
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Open Thread 366
January 27, 2025 · Original source
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Everything-Except-Book Review Contest 2025
February 28, 2025 · Original source
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ACX Grants 1-3 Year Updates
June 18, 2025 · Original source
Codebuff, an AI coding startup I probably can’t take full credit for all of this just from giving them $20K in seed funding, but I continue to appreciate everything they do for this community and the world. 35: Further S’s Political Career This person didn’t win their election, but has since pivoted to AI safety and works in a well-regarded AI policy think tank. 36: Seeds Of Science, A Journal Of Non-Traditional Research No update received, but this was a public journal and it is easy to follow their work, see their website and Substack. They published two dozen articles of widely varying quality through 2023 and 2024, then closed in 2025. A remnant of the original vision survives as a science blogging aggregator. This was about my median expectation for this grant, but it was very inexpensive and I decided to take a chance on it anyway. 37: Good Science Project, Working To Improve Federal Science Funding No update received, but they have a public Substack discussing their progress. Their proposals for NIH reform have influenced Congress and made government agencies pay more attention to scientific integrity. 38: Advising Developing Countries On How To Grow Their Economies With our initial ACX grant, we piloted the Growth Teams model in Rwanda, helping the government jumpstart the export-oriented call center (BPO) industry. Since 2022, that effort has contributed to the creation of 2,000 formal jobs and the emergence of some of the country’s largest private employers. We’ve since expanded to Tanzania, Malawi, and the Indian states of Goa and Meghalaya. To refocus the global development discourse on broad-based economic growth, we co-organized the Growth Summit with the Center for Global Development and the Charter Cities Institute, and have published articles in leading outlets including Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, and the Global Prosperity Institute. Our work has attracted support from Open Philanthropy, Schmidt Futures, and Mulago Foundation, and our advisors now include economists Lant Pritchett, Stefan Dercon, and Kunal Sen. 39: Help Luca De Leo Get Started In AI Safety Research No update received, but Luca now runs the AI safety group at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina. 40: Typist For Saharon Shelah This was another ACXG+ Grant, funded by an anonymous outside funder and not listed in the original announcement. Saharon is a prolific and influential Israeli mathematician, but many of his discoveries are hand-written in an unpublishable format. This grant funded a typist to help make his results suitable for publication. According to this page, they have made over fifty new papers and preprints available. Second Cohort: One Year Updates 41: Lead-Acid Battery Recycling In Nigeria The Nigeria field research was a major success. We spent most of September doing field research in multiple major cities in Nigeria, and got a good sense of the used lead-acid battery supply chain. This field research served as the foundation for expanding our project, and has been very impactful in shaping our ongoing research. We published our findings from Nigeria, which were shared with Nigerian government regulators and global NGOs working on lead poisoning. The grant also gave us the on-the-ground experience we needed to both fully understand and credibly engage with groups, both in Nigeria and globally, on the ULAB issue. In the meantime, beyond continued research, we’ve also launched a dashboard (trade.leadbatteries.org) for analyzing global lead trade data. Right now, we’re: Launching two studies (one RCT, one environmental analysis) in Nigeria in collaboration with local universities to develop a more rigorous understanding of lead pollution due to low-standard ULAB recycling in Nigeria Collaborating with a non-profit incubator to launch an NGO focused on demand-side solutions Beginning a partnership with a West African environmental regulator to scale cheap air monitoring technology to quickly identify and reduce lead pollution from low-standard smelting If any of this sounds interesting to you, please sign up for our Substack (leadbatteries.substack.com) or send us an email at hugosmith@uchicago.edu! 42: Compensation For Kidney Donors The End Kidney Deaths Act (H.R. 2687 / EKDA) is a groundbreaking ten-year pilot program designed to save lives and reduce healthcare costs. It provides a refundable tax credit of $10,000 per year for five years, a total of $50,000, to living kidney donors who donate to a stranger, helping those who’ve waited the longest on the transplant list. Between 2010 and 2021, 100,000 Americans died while qualified and waiting for a kidney. The EKDA aims to change that trajectory. Within ten years of its passage, up to 100,000 Americans could receive a life-saving living donor kidney which typically lasts twice as long as a deceased donor kidney. This would not only save lives but also save taxpayers up to $37 billion. The legislation has been reintroduced in the House, and we have a committed Republican Senate lead. Now, we need a Democratic Senator to co-lead and help move this bipartisan effort forward. Time is short, and we are racing to pass the bill this Congressional session. 36 organizations already support the EKDA. Join the movement and help end preventable kidney deaths. Visit EndKidneyDeaths.org to help us get to the finish line. Elaine and her org have been working extremely hard on this; you can read a Vox article on their campaign here. If you want to sign up for her email list and get updates any time there is a representative you can contact or meeting you can join in, go here. 43: Genetic Hack To Prevent Suffering In the estimate of multiple team members, the ACX grant was “worth it” - it likely had a counterfactual net positive impact, even though we had to pivot from our initial fast-track plans for developing the precision anti-suffering therapy. We identify three primary streams of value: a) reducing uncertainty in the emerging field through early exploratory research, helping with the identification of dead ends and promising R&D trajectories; b) a wide range of downstream effects (beyond the “raising awareness” cliché), including talent mobilization and rekindled interest in suffering abolitionism as a distinct cause area; and c) certain developments that cannot yet be publicly disclosed. In December 2024, Marcin Kowrygo (Acting CEO & volunteering contributor), David Pearce (Director of Bioethics), Aatu Koskensilta (President), and a few other team members decided to leave The Far Out Initiative. They look forward to collaborating and applying their experience to advance the suffering abolitionist lineage in the spirit of open science, public good, and thoughtfully decentralized governance. Feel free to reach out to us at suffab at protonmail dot com to discuss collaboration opportunities! I wrote a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here. Unfortunately there were some internal disagreements, and the people ACX Grants was closest to left the organization. I plan to continue to monitor whatever they do next. 44: Advocate For Pandemic Response Team At FDA This team prefers has asked me not to discuss their progress publicly, but you can probably guess what their lives are like right now, and your guess would be correct. 45: Anti-Mosquito Drones We developed a cheap sonar that is able to detect, track and classify the ultrasonic echoes of mosquito wings at more than three meters. I believe it’s a world first! We also have control algorithms that take the sonar data and output control commands that both ram into mosquitoes and avoid the walls of a simulated environment. Our current work is on integrating both components on a real drone, and we expect to be able to kill mosquitoes by June. We’ve also made an internal impact study (napkin-sized) that shows we’ll be more cost-effective than ITNs in urban to periurban environments. So, we’re super excited with what comes next and can’t wait to share the videos of our first interceptions! More information [in the video below] and on our website, https://tornyol.com 46: Tarbell Fellowship For AI Journalism No update received, but they have a public website. I can’t find the Voices program in particular, but the overall fellowship completed their first class of seven fellows and is working on their second. 47: Germicidal UV Lamp Study The research has successfully demonstrated the ability of off the shelf ozone scrubbers to mitigate the ozone production of far-UVC lamps, is now available as a preprint (https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7). The paper has been submitted for publication and is currently undergoing peer review. Any ideas you have for potential funders we can approach to help execute our six-year plan to accelerate far-UVC would be appreciated https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/ 48: Technological Solutions To Animal Welfare Challenges Directly because of Innovate Animal Ag's work, the first U.S. egg producer publicly announced in the New York Times their adoption of in-ovo sexing technology, eliminating the need to cull day-old male chicks. The initial in-ovo sexing machine began operating in the U.S. at the end of 2024, with the first eggs from these hens expected on shelves in mid-2025. External evaluations estimate our work accelerated U.S. adoption of this technology by over seven years, meaning that once fully implemented, more than 2 billion chicks will have been spared. In addition to continuing to support the rollout of in-ovo sexing in the US and globally, we're now exploring other technologies and paths to impact. Current promising projects include developing humane slaughter methods for fish and advocating for USDA approval of a poultry vaccine against bird flu. They add: If you ever meet folks that are interested animal welfare and are partial to more technocratic and practical solutions, please continue to pass them our way, or connect them directly to me. 49: Assurance Contract Website www.Spartacus.app is an ACX grantee that created a platform to help solve coordination and collective action problems. It enables the creation of campaigns that build critical mass through conditional commitments, which only activate when a sufficient number of people join, converting risk and uncertainty into a higher probability of successful outcomes. They are currently facilitating several projects that leverage conditional commitments, including a dominant assurance contract interface for fashion pop-ups, accelerating a community business association's membership drive, and helping an AI safety organization organize petitions and events, among others. They have pivoted from an emphasis on high-stakes coordination problems requiring anonymity (because they occur too infrequently) to a broader range of more common use cases and have successfully run small-scale campaigns, but are still working toward product-market fit. Despite resource constraints and split time commitments that have impeded faster progress, they remain dedicated to the project's growth and success. You can follow its progress on X or Substack, or email Jordan directly here. 50: Cause Prioritization @ Center For Exploratory Altruism Research Moderately good progress on a salt reduction policy advocacy project we funded; informal commitments have been made by the Ministry of Health, and we're awaiting the publication of a formal administrative order. The official description sounds maximally generic, but this is an EA charity with a broad mandate whose current thesis is that dietary guidelines in developing countries can have outsized effects in saving lives. They’re making some progress on a salt reduction campaign in a developing country they prefer not to name publicly. 51: Mark Webb Studying Land Reform The purpose of this project was to identify specific farmland that could be acquired and transferred to the farmers already working the land. This has been difficult to achieve. I have been able to connect with other charities and landless farmers, and was able to interview a number of people about what their situation looks like, as well as what it would look like to them personally if they owned, rather than rented, their farmland. All this was immensely helpful in pushing this long-term project forward, even if I was unable to identify a specific plot of land that could be used to try the experiment. I intend to continue this project. If you have any insights or connections, I am interested. 52: More AI Advocacy In Australia Good Ancestors is focused on AI safety policy in Australia. Middle powers might be a useful path to influence as the US and China focus on racing, rather than safety. The ACX grant helped us give testimony about AI safety to the Australian Senate alongside Google, Microsoft and Facebook (We were the only nonprofit to give oral evidence to the inquiry. We also engaged government on other AI-related issues, including cybersecurity, biosecurity, consumer law and automated decision making (https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety). We’re currently working to inform voters about where parties stand on AI safety for the election, ahead of engaging on a likely Australian AI Act in 2025 (https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/). This is the same Australian lobbying organization we founded in Year 1, after a change in name and leadership. I continue to be excited about AI safety in middle-tier countries for a few reasons. First, these countries have some power in international organizations to set international standards. Second, companies will usually comply with any not-excessively-burdensome regulation set by any country with a significant market. Third, AI safety is underfunded by the standard of government programs, so Australia setting up a national AI Safety Institute would significantly expand the field. It’s kind of crazy that ACX Grants tier levels of money can have significant effects at this scale, but GA continues to do a great job and we continue to be proud to support them. 53: Campus For African School Of Economics At Zanzibar Charter City The ACX grant helped launch the first research center at the African School of Economics-Zanzibar, which is a main anchor of the Fumba Town charter city project in Zanzibar. This research center is called the Africa Urban Lab (AUL), focused on rapid urbanization across Africa. The AUL launched its first Diploma program in Urban Development with 38 students in our first cohort (now graduated!), including mayors, and deputy mayor, a director of a national Ministry of urban development, and many others. We published our research framing papers for the AUL's research agenda. We raised funding to launch an Urban Expansion Program that's now selecting 15 African cities to support in implementing urban expansion planning on the urban periphery. We held two Public Talks by renowned cities scholars and practitioners. We received additional funding from Emergent Ventures and from the Templeton Foundation. And we've partnered with 8 universities across the region, and with one of these universities (Ardhi) we'll be working with them to update their urban planning and urban economics curriculum (amplifying AUL's impact beyond our own organization). A longer update from end of 2024 is here: https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights) 54: Online Training Program For Health Workers In Developing Countries To date, over 11,000 health workers in Nigeria have completed our course on basic, life-saving newborn care. ACX funding was catalytic for helping us secure government approvals and complete an evaluation of the impact of our training on health workers' clinical practices. The evaluation shows that birth attendants provide better birth care after taking the course. We fed the evaluation results into an updated model, which suggests the program is 24 times more cost-effective than direct cash transfers (a widely recognized benchmark for cost-effectiveness). The program is likely to become even more cost-effective as we scale up. https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model 55: Smartphone Pupillometry To Diagnose Neurological Conditions We have continued to expand our work in the smartphone pupillometry space and the development of our application, PupilScreen (https://www.apertur.ai/). We have expanded our pilot/research program to include new sites across the United States (Missouri, New Jersey, Kentucky, USAC racing, PitFit driver performance training in Indiana) and the world (Nepal, Taiwan, South Africa). We continue to publish at the leading edge of the pupillometry literature as well looking at concussion (https://neuro.jmir.org/2024/1/e58398 and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39682632/), cerebral vasospasm (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39128501/), and stroke (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39674431/ and https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39561861/). Currently, we are raising a $3 million seed round via a SAFE to fund the expansion of our work into the hands of healthcare workers and the general public. We will first focus on traumatic brain injury for clinical use and develop a neuro-monitoring wellness application utilizing our technology for the general public. They add: “We would welcome connections to anyone that you think might be interested in supporting our work further by investing in our $3M seed round of funding.” 56: Mike Saint-Antoine’s Biology Tutorial Videos Since getting the grant, I've continued to make Youtube tutorials as planned. One series that I'm especially proud of is about how to make a neural network in the Julia programming language completely from scratch, with no imports, up to the point of being able to solve MNIST (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE). Also, a college student in Pakistan came across my videos and invited me to give a virtual Zoom-lecture to her department, so I ended up teaching a 6-hour "Python-for-Biologists" workshop to more than a hundred college students in Pakistan over Zoom. So that was pretty awesome. Also, lately I've been teaching some in-person classes too, mostly at Fractal University in NYC, and I also recently organized a day-long, in-person Beginner Python class for people in my local area (Philly suburbs) who wanted to learn some basic programming. I'm having a lot of fun with this project, and am grateful to Scott and the grant funders for their generosity! 57: Conceptual Boundaries Workshop On AI Safety The workshop was completed successfully; you can read a writeup here. 58: Apart Research To Incubate AI Safety Scientists No update received, but they have a public website, and you can see their impact metrics here. They seem to be in urgent need of more funding. 59: Primer On How To Achieve Political Change No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 60: Research IVF Clinic Success Rates We've built a predictive model that estimates the odds of having a child at different IVF clinics across the country while controlling for factors like patient age and infertility differences that can falsely make some clinics look better than others. We found that an average patient can increase their odds of having a kid by 43% just by going to a top 10% clinic. Patients unlucky enough to go to a bottom 10% clinic will reduce their odds of having a kid by 40%. Next month, we're adding several more clinics, 2023 data, additional procedural controls, and donor/gestational carrier models, which should push our accuracy beyond state-of-the-art models in this space and better isolate clinic impact on patient outcomes. We've launched ivf.clinic, a website where patients can access personalized IVF reports and browse our clinic rankings (though we're still squashing some bugs). Currently, we're expanding our research to include comprehensive insurance coverage and pricing data across clinics nationwide. If anyone has insights on automating the collection of IVF clinic pricing information, I'd love to hear from you at scelarek@gmail.com. 61: Replicate Study On Brain Wave Synchronization For Speeding Learning We have acquired and configured the OpenBCI UltraCortex Mark IV 8-channel EEG headset and a clinical-grade Biosemi 32-channel EEG system. We’ve implemented the required components for the experimental pipeline (computing alpha from EEG, flashing bright white light, presenting stimulus images). We are currently putting them together into a single system that we’ll use to collect the data from several participants. We are aiming to gather data on several participants in late June / early July and complete the pilot of the replication in July 2025. If you’d like to be a participant in the study, [they might announce a link once they have it]. 62: Advocate Repeal Of Interstate Runaway Compact No update received and I can’t find anything about this. 63: Animal Welfare (Especially Fish) In Turkiye Future For Fish asks companies to sign up to FFF's fish welfare commitment, which requires producers to certify their facilities and enforce specific standards for stocking density and harvest. Luckyfish, İlknak, Divan (35 restaurants, 17 hotels) and NG Hotels (5 hotels) have signed and published FFF's fish welfare commitment with İlknak publishing the commitment on their website. Kılıç published its first sustainability report detailing fish welfare policies, including enforcing a maximum stocking density of 10 kg/m³ and confirmation of electrical stunning practices. Longer version with some caveats: https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w From the longer document, these commitments involve things like reducing overcrowding, or stunning fish before killing them. Over 30 million fish were affected just from their single largest commitment, and they say 100 fish are helped per dollar spent. 64: More Georgism Advocacy Lars and Will used the 2021 grant to co-found ValueBase. Will remained with the company, and Lars left to do advocacy work at the Center For Land Economics. Here’s their summary of how things are going: [Our] organization transitioned leadership with Greg Miller, a former Program Analyst at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Lars Doucet, author of Land is A Big Deal and Co-Founder of Valuebase, working full time and Joe Caissie stepping aside. This transition happened naturally as the next career transition for each respective person. Since then, progress has been made on pushing forward legislation. Maryland had two bills introduced to give Baltimore and counties the ability to enact split-rate taxes. One of the bills passed the state senate and would allow Baltimore to enact land value taxes within one mile of rail corridors–this contains 50% of Baltimore’s land value. However, the legislative session ended. We expect the bill to revive next session. The Center for Land Economics has been actively working to help efforts to get this bill passed the line. At the same time, we have uncovered systematic undervaluing of vacant land in assessments. We are writing a report on the assessment issues in Maryland with actionable steps to resolve them.
Inline links: Codebuff, website, Substack, survives, a public Substack, in Rwanda, Growth Summit, Stanford Social Innovation Review, ProMarket, Global Prosperity Institute, Saharon, this page, eadbatteries.substack.com, here, here, a post profiling the Far Out Initiative here, https://tornyol.com, a public website, https://chemrxiv.org/engage/chemrxiv/article-details/67e4cde76dde43c9084d88b7, https://blueprintbiosecurity.org/introducing-project-air/, our way, connect them directly to me, www.Spartacus.app, X, Substack, here, https://www.goodancestors.org.au/ai-safety, https://www.australiansforaisafety.com.au/, https://www.aul.city/blog/reflecting-on-africa-urban-lab-s-inaugural-year-2024-highlights, https://healthlearn.org/blog/updated-impact-model, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWVKUEZ25V97tNULapu07DhWv6_W4NfpE, here, public website, here, in urgent need, https://manifund.org/projects/improving-fish-w
We proposed an initiative to adopt "approval voting" for Seattle primaries. After the initiative qualified for the Nov 2022 ballot, the City Council added an alternative proposing "instant-runoff voting" (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/competing-voting-reform-measures-make-seattles-november-ballot-after-city-council-oks-alternative/). While voting to do so, 3 councilmembers said that they hoped neither passed; one could see it as a way to prevent any election reform. Surprisingly, something did barely pass - the Council alternative (https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/will-seattle-move-to-ranked-choice-voting-margin-narrows-friday/). It will be used in 2027. Seattle uses "nonpartisan blanket primaries," where all candidates appear on 1 ballot and 2 winners advance to the general (to run for 1 seat). For that situation, it's hard to guess whether this is better or worse than the status quo, or even which objective metrics to monitor. One metric might be the November 2027 Seattle general elections: unusually close general election results might indicate that the primary advanced 2 competitive candidates (who had to work for marginal votes), and less-close general elections - a blowout - might indicate the opposite.
Minnesota and Virginia also have legislation to enable cities to implement land value taxes. We are monitoring these efforts. There are a few other cities we are operating in. We have helped another organization prepare for a meeting in Tennessee by doing impact analysis of land value taxes in the city. We have presented to city officials in the City of South Bend who have expressed support for land value taxes. Finally, we are in conversation with a State Senator in Colorado who is a champion of land value taxes. Meanwhile, we have soft launched and developed the OpenAVMKit, which uses a unified schema to do assessment accuracy reports and automated valuation methods for any property tax data given. Valuation of land is the key binding constraint to successful implementation of land value taxes. We plan to be the leaders in this space with strong benchmarking capabilities and a repo that can enable the open-source community to make the best automated valuation methods. Along with these efforts, we have expanded the movement. We have posted to the Progress and Poverty Substack growing the subscriber base to around 5,000 subscribers. We have spoken to over 25 local advocates interested in working on land value taxes in their local communities. Yet, there is a long way to go. We need to start earning income through technical assistance contracts as our grant funding expires. We need to continue pushing for a state to implement, and we need to be prepared to tell the success story for when they do. 65: EN’s Work On Bacteriophage Therapy Our project is aimed at pioneering phage therapy in Nigeria, where limited resources/infrastructure have historically held back research in this field. Starting from the ground up, we are establishing the foundational systems needed to support a robust phage research ecosystem. So far, we’ve isolated 34 bacteriophages targeting Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an essential step toward building a comprehensive phage bank. This began with collecting a wide range of clinical Pseudomonas isolates, which we are now characterizing alongside the phages through genome sequencing and phenotypic assays including studies on phage stability across pH, temperature, and salinity ranges. Our long-term goal is to develop a phage-based hydrogel for treating diabetic wounds. On the regulatory front, we have secured approval from the Attorney General to register our nonprofit organization, the Centre for Phage Biology and Therapeutics. Additionally, we’re expanding into vaccine development; following a research stay in Prof. Roderick's lab at the University of Waterloo, we have initiated the design of a phage-based universal Salmonella vaccine aimed at covering all major serotypes—an urgent need underscored by Africa’s reliance on external vaccine sources during the COVID-19 pandemic. I have signed an MTA agreement with Roderick to use his phage-based vaccine platform patents to enable us to design vaccines against any common disease affecting us. This is only the beginning, but we are proud to be laying the scientific and institutional groundwork for homegrown phage innovation in Africa. Emergent Ventures funded EN before we did and deserves a lot of credit here also. 66: Create An Artificial Kidney For an implantable artificial kidney, the first essential component is a hemofilter designed to emulate the glomerulus. Critical requirements for this hemofilter include high permeability (to maximize flow for a given area), selectivity (specifically, the retention of albumin), and robust blood compatibility (ensuring sustained function over time). Our initial strategy focused on using negative surface charge to reduce fouling. I began by testing polyelectrolyte (PE) coatings on 24nm pore membranes featuring a negative terminal charge, similar to the glomerular barrier. These initial static tests, assessing platelet adsorption in whole blood, yielded positive outcomes for some polyelectrolytes, indicating potentially desirable blood compatibility. However, static test setups are not truly representative of dynamic in-vitro conditions and don't provide data on key parameters like permeability, fouling progression, or changes in membrane selectivity. To address these limitations, I designed and built a blood filtration setup. This system sustains human whole blood in circulation for 20 minutes, allowing us to analyze all the aforementioned parameters, as well as platelet activation markers. This has resulted in a fairly high-throughput system for evaluating any surface coating. I'm pleased to report this setup has been accepted for presentation at this year's European Society for Artificial Organs (ESAIO) conference. I am also currently working on a full manuscript, as I believe this system offers a viable way to partially replace animal experiments in our early-stage research, requiring only 1.2ml of human blood per run. Working with a PhD student (hired to support both this research and work on membrane substrates), we have continued testing these PE coatings, alongside PEG coatings, on our membranes. Here, we're finding that optimization of the coating layer is crucial. With the current PE coatings, we observe a permeability drop of about an order of magnitude compared to the base membrane, making them unsuitable for an implantable device in their present form. This is likely due to the specific nature of the initial PE layer, which we can modify. We also suspect there may be ingress of PE into the pores, meaning we're not achieving just a surface coating (our goal), but rather a very thick coating, which would explain the flux loss. Optimizing the coating process to control penetration depth is now a primary focus of my ongoing work. I am currently aiming for a flux of 20ul/min (as this is cap introduced by the protein gel layer anyway) but for it to be at this 'steady state' permeability without drop in permeability. I am also imaging the membranes after contact with SEM to see if there is indeed any platelet adsorption etc. Tugrul has the dubious honor of maybe being "the only person to climb a 4000m peak with severe kidney failure". To raise money and awareness for his artificial kidney project, he is running Climb Against Time, where he will climb 41 mountains over 4000m (13000 ft) this summer. He is looking for donors and climbing partners. 67: Add Tardigrade Genes To Human Cells The goal of this one was to make hybrid cells that are more resilient for research and certain medical applications. They report: The grant was to synthesize vectors for the expression of humanized tardigrade proteins that can be targeted to different areas of the cell. All the vectors were designed, generated, and transposed into human cells. The proteins all localize successfully (e.g. they match the designed target), with one exception (we are still working on validating it). We've done some stress testing with the trangenic cells, but haven't reached firm conclusions yet. We've further generated some multigene designs but have not yet transposed them into cells, but should shortly. We're hoping to submit a manuscript on the first round later this year. 68: Teach Forecasting To EU Policy-Makers The original project didn't work out, but our grantee (who still prefers to remain anonymous) is now working with an EU think tank pursuing the same agenda, and has been teaching forecasting workshops to policy-makers for the past two months. 69: Platform For Single-Cell Imaging They ended up unable to accept this grant and returned the money. 70: Open Source Polygenic Predictor For EA/IQ They have an update here. They think they have a predictor that can explain 12% of variance in intelligence, and they’re working on validating it and creating an easy-to-use website. 71: Improve Flu Vaccines The grant mainly funded agent based modelling to demonstrate the benefit of pre-existing immunity to pandemic influenza if and when a future pandemic occurs (academic publication will result). The original proposal was to attempt to influence the WHO influenza strain selection process. After attending WHO meetings and a global influenza conference, I believe this is not feasible. Stakeholder feedback was the potential short term negative effect on vaccine hesitancy is believed to outweigh the less tangible future benefit. Given the conservative nature of decision makers, pandemic vaccines are likely to remain research only. There are still green shoots of research into pandemic preparedness/prevention that I am continuing to work on. I'm working under the "Australians for Pandemic Prevention" brand of Good Ancestors, another group that ACX funded in 2024. 72: Scenario Analysis For Developing World Agricultural Programs In addition to the research and analysis funded by the grant, I’ve learned to code with LLMs and have built an MVP of the project. The app is being considered for further development by staff at a large international organization. 73: Further C’s Political Career C’s political career is going well, but he continues to think it wouldn’t be strategic to give more information publicly at this time. Lessons Learned I'm most impressed with our lobbying/advocacy organizations. In particular, Good Ancestors has gotten the Australian government to sign onto an international AI safety declaration, partner with various x-risk-related organizations, and (possibly) extend charity tax deductions to some EA causes that previously didn't have it - I think this on its own goes a substantial way to paying back the cost of all ACX Grants. Coalition to Modify NOTA has a kidney donation bill in front of Congress that the (very illiquid) prediction markets give a 45% chance of passing; if it works, it could save thousands of lives. The Georgists are partly responsible for bills making land value taxes slightly easier to implement in a handful of states. Good Science Project seems to have significantly improved science. Are lobbying organizations a better bet than other types of nonprofit (within the constraints of ACX Grants)? I'm not sure. It could just be that lobbyists are (naturally) better at playing themselves up and sounding successful than (for example) scientists, or that politicians are good at people-pleasing and make people feel heard and encouraged in a way that might not change overall policy later. Also, I recently talked to some grantmakers who funded a lobbying organization that superficially seems excellent, but they expressed concern it was net negative (!) by taking away oxygen and spotlight from potentially more effective orgs. So I am encouraged but wary. Animal welfare organizations were another standout success. Again, I don't know how to think about this - while I think our grantees were exceptional, there's also an issue where the scale of animal welfare challenges is so great, and work on them so neglected, that lots of organizations can save a million chickens here, or a million fish there, without particularly making a splash. On the one hand, this is exactly what effective altruism should be doing - exploring grants that are very high in linear utility even if they don't feel satisfying. On the other, they're unsatisfying - and also hard to assess retroactively. How many chickens should a good animal welfare grant save? Any realistic number will both be overwhelmingly large in absolute terms and far too small in relative terms. I'm most ambivalent about our science grants. Many of them say they are successful and can point to published papers which explain the science they did. But it's hard to judge whether anything useful has changed based on the science getting done. I know it's important to fund basic research and not just last-mile technology startups, but it's hard for a mini-grants program like this one to evaluate these kinds of abstract interventions. One disappointing result was that grants to legibly-credentialled people operating in high-status ways usually did better than betting on small scrappy startups (whether companies or nonprofits). For example, Innovate Animal Ag was in many ways overdetermined as a grantee - former Yale grad and Google engineer founder, profiled in NYT, already funded by Open Philanthropy - and they in fact did amazing work. On the other hand, there were a lot of promising ACX community members with interesting ideas who were going to turn them into startups any day now, but who ended up kind of floundering (although this also describes Manifold, one of our standout successes). One thing I still don't understand is that Innovate Animal Ag seemed to genuinely need more funding despite being legibly great and high status - does this screen off a theoretical objection that they don't provide ACX Grants with as much counterfactual impact? Am I really just mad that it would be boring to give too many grants to obviously-good things that even moron could spot as promising? Someone (I think it might be Paul Graham) once said that they were always surprised how quickly destined-to-be-successful startup founders responded to emails - sometimes within a single-digit number of minutes regardless of time of day. I used to think of this as mysterious - some sort of psychological trait? Working with these grants has made me think of it as just a straightforward fact of life: some people operate an order of magnitude faster than others. The Manifold team created something like five different novel institutions in the amount of time it's taken some other grantees to figure out a business plan; I particularly remember one time when I needed something, sent out a request to talk about it with two or three different teams, and the Manifold team had fully created the thing and were pestering me to launch a trial version before some of the other people had even gotten back to me. I take no pleasure in reporting this - I sometimes take a week or two to answer emails, and all of the predictions about my personality that this implies would be correct - but it's increasingly something that I look for and respect. A lot of the most successful grants succeeded quickly, or at least were quick to get on a promising track. Since everything takes ten times longer than people expect, only someone who moves ten times faster than people expect can get things done in a reasonable amount of time. In almost every case where I thought to myself “this is a cool idea, but I don’t know how it’s going to really pay off, as opposed to reaching a cool intermediate accomplishment and then stagnating”, this was a correct criticism, and I should have taken it more seriously. But I can’t rule out that these were good in vague and hard-to-measure ways that I should take more seriously. This one is really self-serving, but in general when people were good communicators (or even bloggers) and wowed me with the writing-composition of their application, they turned out to be a good bet. And when people were hard to understand and annoying to communicate with, even if their ideas seemed good, they were less likely to pan out. Overall Thoughts The total cost of ACX Grants, both rounds, was about $3 million. Do these outcomes represent a successful use of that amount of money? Very naively, startups originating from ACX Grants have about $50 million in value1. If ACX Grants is equivalent to a pre-seed funder, and pre-seed funders usually get ~5%, then if we were VCs we would have a portfolio worth $2.5 million. About 1/5 of ACX Grants were attempting to be market-valued startups, so if we assume the charitable portion did about as well as the startup portion, then the charity portion is “worth” $10 million. There’s some reason to expect this is too high, since much of the startup value came from one successful outlier. But there’s another reason to expect this is too low, since we were aiming at charity rather than market cap, and any actual market cap that our grantees got was an unexpected side effect. I’m treating this as a sanity check rather than as a real number. It’s harder to produce Inside View estimates, because so many of the projects either produce vague deliverables (eg a white paper that might guide future action) or intermediate results only (eg getting a government to pass AI safety regulations is good, but can’t be considered an end result unless those regulations prevent the AI apocalypse). Because we tend towards incubating charities and funding research (rather than last-mile causes like buying bednets), achieved measurable deliverables are thin on the ground. But here are things that ACX grantees have already accomplished: Improved the living/slaughter conditions of 30 million fish.
Inline links: Progress and Poverty Substack, Climb Against Time, here, 1
Your Review: The Astral Codex Ten Commentariat (“Why Do We Suck?”)
July 26, 2025 · Original source
Complexity of thought – Perhaps the most important feature distinguishing the ACX Commentariat from other, lesser, blogs is that some really smart people comment here and give novel and well-nuanced takes on a topic. If this ever disappeared it would not matter about any of the other three features, because the Commentariat would effectively be dead anyway. To me, these broad categories represent the unique and positive features of the SSC/ACX Commentariat, and the extent to which they are present is a reasonable indicator of comment section quality, especially if they are all present at the same timepoint and that timepoint happens to line up with peak engagement in 2016 (this is foreshadowing). To generate data on the ACX Commentariat, I scraped the comments section of every post Scott has made since 2013. The Old Ones whisper of a blog that existed before even Slate Star Codex, but since I’m not 100% certain we’re encouraged to talk about the older blog (and nobody dates the golden era of Scott’s writing to pre-2013 anyway) I kept my scraping to just the two websites we’re definitely allowed to talk about; Slate Star Codex (SSC) and Astral Codex Ten (ACX). The main points of failure with my scraping were Subscriber-only threads (which my algorithm virtuously refused to read as it wasn’t a subscriber) and battling with the Substack UI to get all the comments to load for me simultaneously on larger threads. Nevertheless, between my incompetent code and the jaunty Substack UI I only dropped a few comments on even very long threads, so I figured the data scrape would be adequate for the use-case I had for it. I then used a bunch more janky code (some written by me, some written by ChatGPT) to try and quantify the levels of depth, freedom, politeness and complexity of each comment. I captured 2460 individual posts, and approximately 1.8m comments. Of the 24,486 unique comment authors, around 40% have made only one comment to the blog. The most prolific poster is the irrepressible Deiseach, at 20,685 contributions. Deiseach is also the only commentor to have made a comment on both the first post in my sample and the last, so has been with the blog a very long time! Only one other commentor has made more contributions than Scott (11,249), and this is John Schilling (11,607). The quality of data on individual users is not great for the ACX era (Substack seems to record missing author data in a few different ways, and sometimes swallow data for no reason) but I’m happy to give the rank ordering of anyone else who cares to know their specific level of clout in this niche community - I myself am the 799th most prolific contributor to the comments section (225 comments). I’m also delighted to share my raw data with anyone interested – the summary statistics per post are here. The scraped comments themselves are about 2Gb so I don’t know where I can host them but if anyone has any ideas (and Scott doesn’t mind) I’ll share them too. I know that some of the post titles seem to have turned into hieroglyphics, but as far as I can tell it is cosmetic only and won’t affect any of the actual data – it is a symptom of a cool hidden feature of Microsoft Excel where it open UTF-8 encoded CSVs in a way that garbles special characters for no particular reason. Considering each of these factors in turn: Depth of engagement with a topic
Inline links: first post, the last, here
Politeness One of the most appealing aspects of the ACX Commentariat, to me, is that ideas respectfully presented are respectfully engaged with – even when mainstream cultural commentors use this as a stick to beat ACX with. Strong community norms for niceness, community and civilisation are very rare in online spaces, so the ACX Commentariat may be especially sensitive to fluctuating levels of politeness. To operationalise this, I used a preweighted neural network trained to identify ‘toxicity’ in comment sections. The model, produced by the online safety company Unitary, is named ‘toxic-bert’ and identifies potentially impolite comments along a few axes of inappropriateness, for example; general toxicity, profanity and threats. I wasn’t quite sure if some of the routine discussions SSC/ACX has on socially or professionally sensitive ideas might trip the ‘toxicity’ filter even when they were respectful and polite, so to test for this, I included a sense check of occurrences of some words which are very rarely uttered in constructive contexts – specifically; ‘dumbass’, ‘fuck you’, ‘fucking’ and ‘retard’. I’ve called these ‘obvious insults’ even though in hindsight that’s a bit strong, and they have all been used in non-toxic contexts at some point or the other by the Commentariat. For example, here is an entirely non-toxic comment by Paperclip Minimiser using the word ‘retard’ in the sense of ‘to slow down progress’ (toxicity score < 0.001) and here is a comment by nydwracu which uses the word ‘retarded’ as a slur but which is nevertheless so insightful that it was awarded ‘Comment of the Week’ status by Scott, suggesting that a little bit of toxicity as a literary device can sometimes be overlooked by both toxic-bert and Scott (toxicity score = 0.01). The graph above shows the output of these two approaches. This is a really weird result, which defies easy explanation. Toxicity goes down over the whole SSC era, then starts ticking back up again from the ACX era. If you allow for a bit more variability in the simpler measure, the fancy neural network closely tracks the number of times we call each other ‘retards’ or ‘dumbasses’, which you would expect to track overall toxicity quite closely. This suggests the neural network is keying in on actual toxicity, rather than polite discussions which happen to involve contested or sensitive concepts. One caveat is that the ACX Commentariat is not very toxic to begin with, so the ‘toxicity’ metric may not be sensitive enough to capture the sort of politeness which the Commentariat values. In 2013, at peak toxicity, the toxicity score maxed out at 0.04 (the spike in October 2013 seems to be related to attracting some external neo-reactionaries (very roughly the precursor ideology to the modern alt-right) to comment on this post. In 2021, the lowest toxicity ever was reached at around 0.01. This means that a typical comment would be around 4% likely to be perceived as toxic by a human reader in 2013, but by 2021 this has fallen to 1%. Here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 1% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by John Schilling: The purpose of war is, roughly speaking, to settle the question of whose police get to enforce which laws in a region, and since Catalonia isn’t going to do anything more than say, “We’re going to make you look like Evil Meanies on TV and Youtube if you don’t pull back your policemen and let us have our own”, that point is moot. [Link] By contrast, if you promise to draw your fainting couch nearby, here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 4% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by Maximum Limelihood: Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you *already* knew. …. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today [Link] The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’ (link, no further comment…). More prosaically, this is a great example of what I was discussing earlier – the comment section is usually so civilised that a single individual turning up and acting out of the Commentariat norms is enough to make it the most toxic discussion which has ever taken place. Of Scott’s classic posts, the most toxic the comment section has ever become was on Radicalising the Romanceless. The least toxic the comments section has ever been are the posts on Scott’s conworld, Raikoth (technically the Raikoth post on history and religion specifically, but the whole series is so good I’ve linked to the index). Complexity of thought
Inline links: niceness, community and civilisation, here, here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Hktd!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd5541524-dcce-4bb9-a6dd-8481fc696769_817x417.png, post, Link, Link, Gupta on Enlightenment, link, link, Radicalising the Romanceless, Raikoth
The graph above shows the output of these two approaches. This is a really weird result, which defies easy explanation. Toxicity goes down over the whole SSC era, then starts ticking back up again from the ACX era. If you allow for a bit more variability in the simpler measure, the fancy neural network closely tracks the number of times we call each other ‘retards’ or ‘dumbasses’, which you would expect to track overall toxicity quite closely. This suggests the neural network is keying in on actual toxicity, rather than polite discussions which happen to involve contested or sensitive concepts. One caveat is that the ACX Commentariat is not very toxic to begin with, so the ‘toxicity’ metric may not be sensitive enough to capture the sort of politeness which the Commentariat values. In 2013, at peak toxicity, the toxicity score maxed out at 0.04 (the spike in October 2013 seems to be related to attracting some external neo-reactionaries (very roughly the precursor ideology to the modern alt-right) to comment on this post. In 2021, the lowest toxicity ever was reached at around 0.01. This means that a typical comment would be around 4% likely to be perceived as toxic by a human reader in 2013, but by 2021 this has fallen to 1%. Here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 1% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by John Schilling: The purpose of war is, roughly speaking, to settle the question of whose police get to enforce which laws in a region, and since Catalonia isn’t going to do anything more than say, “We’re going to make you look like Evil Meanies on TV and Youtube if you don’t pull back your policemen and let us have our own”, that point is moot. [Link] By contrast, if you promise to draw your fainting couch nearby, here is a snippet of a comment which is rated as having a 4% chance of being perceived as toxic by a human, written by Maximum Limelihood: Being fired means nothing about the speed you’re learning at. It means that the employer overestimated how much you *already* knew. …. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how great you’ll be at coding in a year when you’re costing me time and training effort today [Link] The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’ (link, no further comment…). More prosaically, this is a great example of what I was discussing earlier – the comment section is usually so civilised that a single individual turning up and acting out of the Commentariat norms is enough to make it the most toxic discussion which has ever taken place. Of Scott’s classic posts, the most toxic the comment section has ever become was on Radicalising the Romanceless. The least toxic the comments section has ever been are the posts on Scott’s conworld, Raikoth (technically the Raikoth post on history and religion specifically, but the whole series is so good I’ve linked to the index). Complexity of thought
Inline links: post, Link, Link, Gupta on Enlightenment, link, link, Radicalising the Romanceless, Raikoth
In Search Of AI Psychosis
August 26, 2025 · Original source
I’m not making fun of Kelsey or her daughter here. Something about this rings true to me. When I was eight years old, I wouldn’t have cared much what my parents thought either. But if the computer believed it, that would be a different story! II. In Search Of . . . Social Media Psychosis? In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten years: QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The most common version claims that liberal elites, especially Hillary Clinton, molest young children to extract an immortality serum from their blood. Donald Trump figured this out and is trying to stop them, but for some reason he can’t play his hand openly, so he has to pursue a roundabout strategy involving winning the Presidency and dismantling the liberal order from above. Everything that has happened in politics over the past ten years has been part of the shadow war between Trump and the immortal pedophile conspiracy. This is pretty crazy. But is it psychotic? And since it spread through sites like 4chan and Facebook, should we invent a new diagnostic entity, “social media psychosis”, to cover it? These are tough questions, but in the end we didn’t do this. I think this was partly because there was a pre-existing category, “conspiracy theory”, that seemed like a better fit. We concluded that “sometimes social media facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories”, but stepped back from saying “social media can induce psychosis”. And by “in the end we didn’t do this”, I mean “we absolutely did it, but forgot about it later.” I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HDQb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fece0561a-a62c-4eb6-8e23-7c0db5cb8a0b_749x479.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mYKR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03938197-ae2c-4dde-88d4-c22f66e34c09_767x681.png, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux
I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.
Inline links: the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux
Links For September 2025
September 04, 2025 · Original source
I appreciated Snow Martingale’s perspective: in the 1990s, fast food became associated with obesity, poor health, and the lower class. To escape this stigma, big chains rebranded as sort-of-at-least-attempting-to-be-bougie places with wraps and salads and decent coffee; the aesthetic change was part of this (successful and profit-increasing) effort. I wonder if we could take this further and trace it back to increasing inequality (appealing to bougies because that’s where more of the money is) or decreasing fertility (abandoning kid-friendly aesthetics because kids are a smaller fraction of customers). 9: Someone links (X) a paper saying that firewood made up almost a third of US GDP in 1830. Eliezer says (X) that doesn’t sound right. The rest of Twitter (X) uses this as an excuse for one of their regularly-scheduled paroxysms about how rationalists are all all smug autodidacts who hate experts and worship their own brilliance while sitting in their armchairs. Someone looks at the paper more closely (X) and finds that yeah, it was comparing apples to oranges and the original statistic was wrong. Remember, never be afraid to say “Huh, that sounds funny…”! 10: Richard Hanania interviews Scott Wiener on YIMBYism. I didn’t watch it - too close to a podcast - but this would not have been on my bingo card three years ago. 11: Claim: robots can already carve statues; buildings with AI-created stone ornaments are next. From their lips to God’s ears! 12: Terminal lucidity (aka “paradoxical lucidity”) is a medical mystery where previously demented people - even those who had been demented for many years - sometimes become lucid for just a few hours or days before they die. It’s surprisingly common - 6% of deaths in one palliative care ward. It is sometimes used as evidence that dementia must not cause complete information loss, even if it is irreversible with current technology. Scientists are baffled but gingerly suggest that maybe lack of oxygen disrupts inhibitory mechanisms in the brain, allowing enough electrical activity to make even a severely-damaged brain capable of complex thought - but I can’t help noticing that this is also the best evidence for an immaterial soul I’ve ever heard (you would need some model where the soul pretends to be dependent on the brain during life, becomes independent of the brain after death in order to head to the afterlife, but occasionally jumps the gun a little bit). 13: You probably heard about the METR study showing that even though programmers think AI is speeding them up, it actually seems to slow them down. Emmett Shear objects, saying that the developers didn’t have enough experience with AI tools to be past the negative-value part of the learning curve. And two of the programmer test subjects gave their takes: Ruby Bloom says part of the slowdown might be programmers fixing very simple bugs that could be improved by better prompts, and another part because they get distracted by other things while the AI is running. And Quentin Anthony says that coding AIs are addictive intermittent reinforcement - every so often they solve a bug perfectly, and this is so satisfying that it’s tempting to keep trying them again and again even when the chance is very low. 14: Jacob Goldsmith gives a clearer presentation of the issues with many antidepressant studies than I’d previously heard. Everyone knows that one problem is that reversion to the mean is so strong that it’s hard to find a treatment effect. But wouldn’t that in itself suggest that antidepressants aren’t necessary? Jacob says: not if there’s negative correlation between the treatment and placebo effects. That is, if your study is full of people with short-lived depression who will recover no matter what, then this dilutes the effect you’re looking for. But it might be that there’s a subgroup with long-lasting depression who recover only on the medication. One way to look for would be a “placebo run-in period”: give people a while to see if they recover on their own, then give the antidepressant to the ones who don’t. Psychiatrists and statisticians debate whether this is a good idea or cheating. My question: how come you can’t fix this with strict study entry criteria of “had depression for a long time”? 15: Lots more good discussion about missing heritability. Sasha Gusev argues that twin studies might be a poor guide to anything else if there are many gene-gene interactions. That is, if we take the difference between identical twins (who share 100% of their genes and therefore 100% of their interactions) and fraternal twins (who share 50% of their genes and therefore fewer than 50% of their interactions), and incorrectly extrapolate it to other differences using a model that assumes there are no interactions, we will overestimate the size of (non-interaction) genetic effects. Most studies find that there are few gene x gene interactions, but commenters convinced me last time that this might be an artifact of the studies being bad. And Unboxing Politics argues (against me in particular) that although it superficially looks like adoption and twin studies sort of agree, when you adjust out their known biases, it moves twin studies further up and adoption studies further down, such that now they disagree again (the objection I would have made is their Objection 2, which I think they at least somewhat refute). This is a good argument; without spending several hours checking all of their claims, my only weak partial objection is that I don’t think assortative mating can play quite the role they expect, because there seem to be the same twin/RDR differences even on traits where believing in assortative mating is absurd (like kidney function). But if you replaced it with Sasha’s argument above, you might have a pretty good case! On the pro-hereditarian side, East Hunter takes aim at gene x environment correlations, comes down somewhere in the middle, and Sebastian Jensen continues banging the drum of how most objections to twin studies don’t work. I think these are good attempts to buttress existing research but don’t fundamentally change anything or respond to the novel arguments above. And Emil Kirkegaard points out that the observed SNP heritability of facial features is only 23%. He argues that since it seems like facial features are extremely heritable, this reinforces the argument that SNP heritability numbers are too low (and therefore twin study numbers are more likely defensible). But should we be sure that facial features are more than 23% heritable? His argument is that identical twins have identical faces, but this might be vulnerable to Gusev’s point about interactions. Maybe a better argument would be that it seems very hard for shared environment to affect facial features (with a few exceptions like fetal alcohol syndrome), and facial features seem more than 23% heritable just by normal “he looks like his brother” common-sense observation? One interesting potential consequence of this research: if we ever fully understand how genes affect faces, then embryo selection companies could show people what each of their potential future kids might look like. I suggest they not do this: it might spook me into becoming pro-life. 16: Andy Masley’s AI art is good (three examples below). 17: There’s a debate going on between philosophers and AI researchers over whether AI can be conscious. I find most of the discussion annoying - this is generally an area where we can’t know anything for sure, and both sides are mostly shouting their priors at each other. The only exception - the single piece of evidence I will accept as genuinely bearing on this problem - is that if you ask an AI whether it’s conscious, it will say no, but activating or suppressing deception-related features (sort of like a mechanistic-interpretability-based lie detection test) reveals that it thinks it’s lying when it says that! Link is to a Less Wrong comment from a researcher in the field; I look forward to seeing an eventual peer-reviewed paper. H/T JD Pressman. 18: 80,000 Hours has a high-production-value video about the AI 2027 scenario. 19: Dynomight vs. Casey Milkweed debate on mathematical forecasting, with special reference to AI 2027. And Dynomight comments on Casey’s post here. 20: The Psmiths review The Ancient City, about ways that ancient culture depended on family, clan, ritual, and “the household gods”. Sample quote: I'm more interested in what all this means for us today, because with the exception of maybe a few aristocratic families, this highly self-conscious effort to build familial culture and maintain familial distinctiveness is almost totally absent in the Western world. But it's not that hard! ... Perhaps this is why I have an instinctive negative reaction when I encounter married couples who don't share a name. I don't much care whether it's the wife who takes the husband's name or the husband who takes the wife's, or even both of them switching to something they just made up (yeah, I'm a lib). But it just seems obvious to me on a pre-rational level that a husband and a wife are a team of secret agents, a conspiracy of two against the world, the cofounders of a tiny nation, the leaders of an insurrection. Members of secret societies need codenames and special handshakes and passwords and stuff, keeping separate names feels like the opposite — a timorous refusal to go all-in. 21: Did you know: Epic Systems, the electronic medical record company, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters in Wisconsin, with buildings that look like castles, quaint medieval towns, and the Emerald City of Oz (h/t Devon Zuegel): Meanwhile, tech companies with ten times as much money pretend that they’re cool and playful when their HQ has some rounded edges and a set of colored cubes in front. Do better! 22: Effective altruists have been funding teams working on lab-grown meat for almost a decade now. Around 2020, they hired some experts to double-check that this was possible in principle, and the experts wrote scathing analyses saying it was cost-ineffective by so many orders of magnitude that it was basically a pipe dream. Reactions were mixed, but a lot of us beat ourselves up and vowed to be less gullible next time. But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. Here are some related Metaculus questions. 23: Ozy, citing Stutzman et al: “Afghanistan after the American withdrawal has the lowest life satisfaction rate ever recorded. Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living. Life satisfaction dropped significantly after the withdrawal of American troops. Women, people in rural areas, and the poor were particularly negatively affected.” 24: Lencapavir is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS; a single dose protects against infection for six months. Unclear how this interacts with PEPFAR cuts; if PEPFAR still existed it would be a big boost to its efficacy; now maybe this might be part of a strategy to tread water? 25: Did you know: when people first started making artificial ice in the 1850s, there was a backlash from people who thought it was gross and dystopian and that people should insist on natural ice for their iceboxes. From Pessimists’ Archive, which goes on to draw an analogy to lab-grown meat, etc (h/t Isaac King on X). 26: From Peter Hague (on X) and commenter Phaethon: why did so many Anglosphere countries see immigration spikes in 2021? Each of these has their own local story. In Britain, it’s the paradoxical effects of Brexit. In the US, it’s Joe Biden being soft on immigration. And so on - but should we be looking for some deeper cause that explains the overall phenomenon? A commenter suggests “a way to soak up all the inflation from the COVID money printing”, but I can’t tell if that even makes sense. Still, should something something COVID be a leading hypothesis? 27: Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern on the Skrmetti Supreme Court case that failed to overturn Tennessee’s ban on gender medicine. US law bans sex discrimination, so pro-transgender advocates argued that, since doctors often prescribe eg estrogen to biological women, it was sex discrimination to ban prescribing it to biological men. Tennessee’s anti-transgender argument was that they weren’t discriminating by sex, they were discriminating by diagnosis (estrogen for eg hot flashes, vs. estrogen for gender transition). There is some subtlety here (if a biological man grows breasts because of some hormone imbalance, doctors might give him testosterone to counteract it, and this seems sort of like giving biological women testosterone to make them look less like women), but these are still sort of different diagnoses (gynecomastia vs. gender dysphoria) and Tennessee said you can still think of it as diagnostic discrimination rather than sex discrimination. This makes sense, except that the standards around sex discrimination are very strict and sort of box the court in here. And in a fit of wokeness, the 2020 court (including some of the conservative justices hearing this case) applied these standards very strictly and ruled that discriminating against gays was a form of sex discrimination (since if women can date men, it’s sex discrimination if men can’t also date men), and this is obviously the same argument. Now that wokeness is less popular, the court wants to rule against transgender, but it can’t help tripping over its previous ruling and giving some kind of unprincipled confusing non-opinion. 28: Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations. Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: Snow Martingale’s perspective, Someone links (X), Eliezer says (X), The rest of Twitter (X), Someone looks at the paper more closely (X), Richard Hanania interviews Scott Wiener on YIMBYism, robots can already carve statues; buildings with AI-created stone ornaments are next, Terminal lucidity, the METR study showing, Emmett Shear objects, Ruby Bloom, Quentin Anthony, Jacob Goldsmith gives, Sasha Gusev argues, commenters convinced me last time, Unboxing Politics, East Hunter takes aim at, Sebastian Jensen continues, Emil Kirkegaard points out, Andy Masley’s AI art is good, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5bZR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcafaf1f2-b7b9-4acd-a0a7-2de9fc31c724_2688x1792.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!6-cZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6ffb2b5c-3fcb-467d-b1f3-7aafb5dc90a3_1024x1024.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!UyUx!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F91b73899-6e25-460f-94f9-46d0713c5dd2_1024x1024.webp, it thinks it’s lying when it says that!, JD Pressman, a high-production-value video, Dynomight, Casey Milkweed, here, The Ancient City, has a fantasy-themed corporate headquarters, Devon Zuegel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!yqG3!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6b2d15b0-e0f0-4bae-a2f6-aabfd2eda017_1536x794.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!taZn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fad460bb8-4416-4886-8ef0-b3d36f04c81a_640x480.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!bDya!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd45e5123-753d-4c87-b108-6523b38004cb_1480x833.webp, now a new report comes out, Here are some related Metaculus questions, Ozy, Stutzman et al, is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS, Pessimists’ Archive, Isaac King on X, Peter Hague (on X), Phaethon, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ry-j!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcea22939-8cf9-4b32-8494-511f01cb2758_964x755.png, Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VScL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2509e243-f6f7-4448-9779-a8f9be45a2f9_1500x1500.png, proposes a three-stage model of secularization, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf, nxthompson on X, a huge survey, Steven Adler on AI psychosis, they cloned her, dozens of times, a lawsuit, Gwern, on X, got 40% of the e-commerce funding, What Happened To Pathology AI Companies?, Will Data Centers Crash The Economy?, Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument, and who is still fighting the good fight, countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania, Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin, on formal benchmarks, speculated, a “reverse DeepSeek moment”, with Peter, this tweet by Shakeel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GJNZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba0d8cf-fab8-4370-bcad-df789e157fdc_591x402.png, Wylfcen on X, Zvi points out that, AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test, customized “In This House We Believe” signs, China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy
Meanwhile, tech companies with ten times as much money pretend that they’re cool and playful when their HQ has some rounded edges and a set of colored cubes in front. Do better! 22: Effective altruists have been funding teams working on lab-grown meat for almost a decade now. Around 2020, they hired some experts to double-check that this was possible in principle, and the experts wrote scathing analyses saying it was cost-ineffective by so many orders of magnitude that it was basically a pipe dream. Reactions were mixed, but a lot of us beat ourselves up and vowed to be less gullible next time. But now a new report comes out arguing that the previous reports were wrong, that lab-grown meat production is going much better than the earlier reports thought possible, and it’s more or less cost-effective already for the simplest products! Again, mixed reactions, and although some of the numbers are indisputable the analysis itself this is by a VC firm with lab-based meat investments. Here are some related Metaculus questions. 23: Ozy, citing Stutzman et al: “Afghanistan after the American withdrawal has the lowest life satisfaction rate ever recorded. Two-thirds of respondents rate their life satisfaction below 2, which is generally considered to be the point at which a life is no longer worth living. Life satisfaction dropped significantly after the withdrawal of American troops. Women, people in rural areas, and the poor were particularly negatively affected.” 24: Lencapavir is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS; a single dose protects against infection for six months. Unclear how this interacts with PEPFAR cuts; if PEPFAR still existed it would be a big boost to its efficacy; now maybe this might be part of a strategy to tread water? 25: Did you know: when people first started making artificial ice in the 1850s, there was a backlash from people who thought it was gross and dystopian and that people should insist on natural ice for their iceboxes. From Pessimists’ Archive, which goes on to draw an analogy to lab-grown meat, etc (h/t Isaac King on X). 26: From Peter Hague (on X) and commenter Phaethon: why did so many Anglosphere countries see immigration spikes in 2021? Each of these has their own local story. In Britain, it’s the paradoxical effects of Brexit. In the US, it’s Joe Biden being soft on immigration. And so on - but should we be looking for some deeper cause that explains the overall phenomenon? A commenter suggests “a way to soak up all the inflation from the COVID money printing”, but I can’t tell if that even makes sense. Still, should something something COVID be a leading hypothesis? 27: Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern on the Skrmetti Supreme Court case that failed to overturn Tennessee’s ban on gender medicine. US law bans sex discrimination, so pro-transgender advocates argued that, since doctors often prescribe eg estrogen to biological women, it was sex discrimination to ban prescribing it to biological men. Tennessee’s anti-transgender argument was that they weren’t discriminating by sex, they were discriminating by diagnosis (estrogen for eg hot flashes, vs. estrogen for gender transition). There is some subtlety here (if a biological man grows breasts because of some hormone imbalance, doctors might give him testosterone to counteract it, and this seems sort of like giving biological women testosterone to make them look less like women), but these are still sort of different diagnoses (gynecomastia vs. gender dysphoria) and Tennessee said you can still think of it as diagnostic discrimination rather than sex discrimination. This makes sense, except that the standards around sex discrimination are very strict and sort of box the court in here. And in a fit of wokeness, the 2020 court (including some of the conservative justices hearing this case) applied these standards very strictly and ruled that discriminating against gays was a form of sex discrimination (since if women can date men, it’s sex discrimination if men can’t also date men), and this is obviously the same argument. Now that wokeness is less popular, the court wants to rule against transgender, but it can’t help tripping over its previous ruling and giving some kind of unprincipled confusing non-opinion. 28: Contra compelling anecdotes, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X). Most people are about as religious as their parents; most exceptions are only slightly less religious, and most families that secularize do it over several generations. Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: now a new report comes out, Here are some related Metaculus questions, Ozy, Stutzman et al, is dubbed a “miracle drug” for AIDS, Pessimists’ Archive, Isaac King on X, Peter Hague (on X), Phaethon, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Ry-j!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcea22939-8cf9-4b32-8494-511f01cb2758_964x755.png, Jesse Singal vs. Mark Stern, only ~5% of people raised very religious end up atheist later in life (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VScL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F2509e243-f6f7-4448-9779-a8f9be45a2f9_1500x1500.png, proposes a three-stage model of secularization, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf, nxthompson on X, a huge survey, Steven Adler on AI psychosis, they cloned her, dozens of times, a lawsuit, Gwern, on X, got 40% of the e-commerce funding, What Happened To Pathology AI Companies?, Will Data Centers Crash The Economy?, Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument, and who is still fighting the good fight, countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania, Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin, on formal benchmarks, speculated, a “reverse DeepSeek moment”, with Peter, this tweet by Shakeel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GJNZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba0d8cf-fab8-4370-bcad-df789e157fdc_591x402.png, Wylfcen on X, Zvi points out that, AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test, customized “In This House We Believe” signs, China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy
Note: percentages are of total, not of each row! 29: Related: social science team proposes a three-stage model of secularization: decreased public ritual participation → decreased personal importance → decreased identification, presents apparently confirmatory data. If true, would be somewhat inconsistent with intellectual models (eg people learn about evolution and start doubting the Bible) and more consistent with institutional models (eg the government provides welfare so people no longer need to be part of a tight-knit church). 30: Navigating LLMs’ spiky intelligence profile is a constant source of delight; in any given area, it seems like almost a random draw whether they will be completely transformative or totally useless. Now Ethan Strauss reports that they are, for some reason, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf. “I am predicting the Golf Revolution, or perhaps decline, if your perspective is that optimization tends to ruin hobbies. A sport for obsessives has been gifted the ideal tool for refinement.” 31: Claim (via nxthompson on X): “In a huge survey of young kids about phones and technology, they all say they want to be out playing in the real world. But parents don't let them out unsupervised. So they're stuck on their phones.” Interesting, but I’m nervous about social desirability bias - how many adults would say on a survey that they would rather be on their phones than playing with friends? But adults do have this choice and mostly go with the phones. 32: Steven Adler on AI psychosis. He tries to analyze ER admissions data for psychosis and finds no change. I don’t think anyone reasonable expected this to be a large enough effect to show up in ER admissions data, but there are lots of unreasonable people so I appreciate his effort. He thinks AI companies might have better data on this, and encourages them to release it. 33: Cuartetera was the greatest polo horse ever. Polo players responded in a very practical way: they cloned her, dozens of times (and it worked; the clones are also excellent). Now there is a lawsuit as different polo teams fight to get their hands on Cuartetera clones. What is the equilibrium? If the outsiders get their hands on the genetic material, do we see a world where every polo horse is a Cuartetera clone? How much is lost if nobody ever tries to breed a polo horse better than Cuartetera (since the economics might not check out if the odds of success for any given foal is too low)? H/T Gwern and Siberian Fox (on X). 34: Claim: as of 2013, India’s Agarwal caste, who make up less than 1% of the population, got 40% of the e-commerce funding. 35: Owlposting: What Happened To Pathology AI Companies? Pathology is a medical specialty. A typical task involves looking at a microscope slide full of cells and trying to determine if any of them are cancerous. This seems like a good match for AI - and for years, studies have been showing that in fact AI can equal human experts. So why isn’t it being used more? The author’s three answers: first, slide scanning is expensive and clunky, and you can’t apply AI to a slide until you digitize it. Second, it’s hard to figure out a business plan where this saves someone money and doesn’t step on the toes of big companies that can outcompete anyone they don’t like. Third, pathologists use the context of a patient’s entire clinical history when they interpret a slide, and AIs that can’t do that (either because of technical limitations or legal/privacy limitations) are at a disadvantage even if their skills specifically relating to slide-reading are better. 36: Noahpinion: Will Data Centers Crash The Economy? Suppose that AI is a bubble, either permanently (because the technology isn’t really transformative) or temporarily (because it can’t transform things quickly enough to keep up with all the dumb money pouring into it). Will the sudden write-off of data centers lead to a broader economic collapse? In 2001, the dot-com bubble harmed the tech sector, but didn’t take the rest of the economy down with it; in 2008, the subprime mortgage bubble did take the rest of the economy down with it, because it damaged banks that the whole economy relied on. The optimistic case for AI is that data center spending is mostly coming from big companies like Google and Meta that can absorb a lot of loss. The pessimistic case is that some of the money is coming from private credit, a new-ish form of finance which hasn’t really been stress-tested and whose failure modes are still poorly understood. Noah’s final verdict: the stage isn’t obviously set for a crisis yet, but there’s the potential to get there and we should consider acting (how?) early. 37: The latest Twitter talking point is that universal hepatitis B vaccination at birth is “woke”: Hep B is (aside from mother-to-child transmission) often sexually transmitted, slutty women’s children are more likely to have Hep B, so perhaps giving the vaccine to everyone (instead of testing and only giving to the children of women who test positive) is an attempt to spare slutty women the embarrassment of getting a positive test. Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument - Hep B tests take a while, the medical system is fragmented, and any attempt to test people and then give the vaccine inevitably leads to many positive tests falling through the cracks. Vaccinating at birth is easy and hard to screw up, the vaccine has no known side effects, and empirically child Hepatitis B rates go down (by as much as 2/3!) when countries switch from test-and-vaccinate to universal vaccination. This benefits everyone - even people who never have unprotected sex and always follow up on their medical tests - because toddlers in daycare exchange saliva copiously, and if your toddler exchanges saliva with a Hep B positive toddler they could get the disease. A funny Twitter interaction was seeing Republicans in Congress hop on the anti-slut anti-vaccination bandwagon - except for Senator Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who happens to be a liver doctor, and who is still fighting the good fight. I am always nervous when a good person who I like starts engaging on Twitter, since it elevates the discourse there but also gradually turns their brain into mush - but Ruxandra has made the leap and is doing a great job not just on bio related topics but also (for example) countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania. 38: The response to GPT-5 was confusing; most specific people who reviewed it said they were impressed (Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin), it performed as expected on formal benchmarks, but the overall vibes declared it a big failure. Peter Wildeford speculated that maybe there was some kind of sinister pay-to-play early access bias involved. Zvi went the other way, calling it a “reverse DeepSeek moment” (insofar as DeepSeek was a pretty average model that got glowing praise.) In the end, I agree with Peter that this was mostly a branding issue. o3 was a genuinely revolutionary model; if OpenAI had called it “GPT-5”, it would have met expectations. Instead, they called it “o3”, and called a minor incremental update a few months later “GPT-5”. Then people got mad that the exciting-sounding “GPT-5” was merely an incremental update. A secondary issue was that the router wasn’t very good, and so many queries got routed to a small version without thinking mode that was if anything a downgrade from o3. I think this tweet by Shakeel perfectly encapsulates the essence of GPT discourse in two sentences: …but maybe it’s worth asking why GPT-5 isn’t bigger than o3. Was 4.5 a failed attempt at scaling? Did it fail in a way that sort of back-handedly justifies the “lost steam” take? Does the answer depend on distinctions between pre-training scaling, post-training scaling, etc? How? 39: This month in etymology: did you know that “oy vey” is a “fully Germanic phrase” which is cognate with English “oh woe!” (h/t Wylfcen on X) 40: mRNA shows promise to be a game-changing treatment for cancer, but RFK is trying to halt research. But so far he can only starve it of money, not ban it, and the funding gap is only $500 million. Will there be enough philanthropic billionaires and private foundations to step up? Zvi points out that although there is usually a game of chicken where foundations are hesitant to touch something the government cancelled lest the government decide it can cancel everything and hope philanthropists pick up the bill, in this case there are no game theory considerations - RFK is halting it because he genuinely wants it halted, and they are thwarting him rather than playing into his hands. The only problem is that $500M is a lot of money for the private sector; a few foundations could technically afford it, but not many could afford it comfortably and still have money left over for the next few crises of this magnitude. I hope someone is trying to organize a coalition. 41: AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test. Eight stories about demons, four by famous fantasy authors, four by ChatGPT. After 3000 votes, AI wins: humans can't tell the difference and slightly prefer the AI stories. My own score was only 75%. But I will say that I thought Mark Lawrence's was obviously the best, I was ~100% sure it was human, and it convinced me that regardless of the official results it's still possible to write flash fiction that an AI obviously can't do. 42: “SignPro” offers customized “In This House We Believe” signs, try not to use this for evil. 43: China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is: still very in control, maybe not infinitely in control. 44: Related - did you know (h/t xlr8harder) that if you ask AI to write a science fiction story, it will very often name the protagonist “Elara Voss” (or some very close variant like Elena Voss), and this remains true across various models and versions? Related: Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby and has the opportunity to do the funniest thing. 45: “Hector (cloud) is a cumulonimbus thundercloud cluster that forms regularly nearly every afternoon on the Tiwi Islands in the Northern Territory of Australia…[he is sometimes called] Hector the Convector”. 46: British allergy sufferers who want to know the ingredients of things demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin. “For example, sweet almond oil is Prunus Amygdalus Dulcis, peanut oil is Arachis Hypogaea, and wheat germ extract is Triticum Vulgare.” 47: Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference. I make a brief appearance. 48: Study uses supposedly-random variation in doctor assignments to test whether the marginal mental health commitment is good or bad for patients, finds that it is quite bad. Freddie de Boer is violently skeptical (maybe literally so?) and makes some good points about how a single quasi-experimental study is never absolute proof. But I don’t think he quite justifies his opinion that the paper was irresponsible and should never have been published; it’s just a normal quasi-experimental study that we should nod and say “huh” at but not overweight as the culmination of all possible research that overcomes all possible priors. My prior is that the marginal commitment is pretty useless (many commitments are just “well, since this person arrived at our ED for some reason, it would look bad from a medico-legal perspective to just let them go, so let’s keep them a few days to evaluate” - and yeah, you should be upset about this) but I’m still surprised by how many outright negative (as opposed to zero) effects the researchers found. The strongest argument for negative effects is that it will make some people miss work and maybe lose their job. But this study found that commitment ~doubles the risk of near-term suicide (admittedly only from 1% to 2%), which would have been outside my confidence intervals for how bad it could be. I suspect confounding, but only on general principle, and I wouldn’t be too surprised either way. 49: This tweet is probably bait, but I found it a thought-provoking question: I think there’s a boring answer, where the law is more complex than just a single number and whatever kind of weird trafficking Epstein was doing is worse than whatever normal relationships these European laws are permitting. But assuming that there’s a substantive difference even after taking that into account, I think my answer is something like - we’ve got to divide kids from adults at some age, there’s a range of reasonable possible ages, we shouldn’t be too mad at other societies that choose different dividing lines within that range - but having decided upon the age, we’ve got to stick with it and take it seriously (in the sense of penalizing/shaming people who break it). This is more culturally relativist than I expected to find myself being, so good job to Richard for highlighting the apparent paradox. 50: Dilan Esper describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X). Parts I found interesting: none of the lawyers knew Thiel was funding the lawsuit; Gawker probably could have won if they had been slightly competent but kept "shooting themselves in the foot"; and Gawker probably could have won if they had just pixelated the private parts in the video. 51: Amazing concept and poems (link on X): I tried to see if AI could do this, and it did something that technically met the requirements but had zero artistic merit - using a lot of words like “nowhere” and “outside” in one, then separating them out to “no where” and “out side” in the other. I didn’t invest much energy in creating a clever prompt telling it not to do that, so feel free to report if you get better success. 52: New study claims consultants are actually good, at least for profits: "We find positive effects on labor productivity of 3.6% over five years, driven by modest employment reductions alongside stable or growing revenue" 53: A Polish team tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, has to make some changes but claims mostly positive results. 54: New big multi-author Substack, The Argument, trying to be a sort of center-left version of the model pioneered by The Free Press and other high-production-value ideological Substack properties. Excited to see Kelsey Piper is involved, and she starts off strong with a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, which find few positive effects. This is surprising, because recipients didn’t waste the money on alcohol or gambling or anything - they paid down debt and got useful goods. Still, it didn’t even affect things that should have been obvious, like stress level. It’s not even clear that amounts of money large enough to help with rent made homeless people more likely to get houses! Matt Bruenig criticizes the article, accusing Kelsey’s studies of being downstream of Perry Preschool style dreams that exactly the right welfare program will have massively compounding effects that cut poverty out at the root and turn everyone into elite human capital; he thinks giving people money won’t do this, but it will increase equality and give the poor better lives. I assume he’s not a strong hereditarian, but his argument makes even more sense from that perspective, and I’ve certainly criticized dumb outcome measures like infant brain waves which we have only tenuous reasons to think are related to anything we care about. But Kelsey reasonably responds that the outcome measures she’s talking about include stress level and life satisfaction. To defuse this critique, Bruenig either has to argue that our construct “life satisfaction” doesn’t really measure whether someone’s life is satisfactory, or else claim that giving poor people satisfactory lives isn’t really what we’re going for - which I think would require more explanation on his part. There’s some further (impressively acrimonious) debate on X, but I don’t see anything that addresses my core concern. GiveDirectly, a charity involved in basic income experiments, has a presponse here; they say that some studies are positive, and that the ones that aren’t might have tried too little cash to matter, or been confounded by COVID making everything worse. They also point out that basic income is harder to study than traditional programs like giving people housing, because if you’re giving housing you can measure housing-related outcomes directly and have a pretty good chance of getting enough statistical power to find them, but since everyone spends cash on different things, the positive effects might be scattered across many different outcomes (and therefore too small to reach significance on each). Everyone involved in this debate wants to emphasize that the poor results are for First World studies only, and that studies continue to show large benefits to giving cash in the developing world. 55: Related: I was less impressed by The Argument’s first foray into housing policy, which follows an all-too-familiar pattern: Some people say they don’t like noise and disorder and try to make rules against it in their apartments.
Inline links: proposes a three-stage model of secularization, extraordinarily effective at teaching people golf, nxthompson on X, a huge survey, Steven Adler on AI psychosis, they cloned her, dozens of times, a lawsuit, Gwern, on X, got 40% of the e-commerce funding, What Happened To Pathology AI Companies?, Will Data Centers Crash The Economy?, Ruxandra Teslo provides the counterargument, and who is still fighting the good fight, countering Curtis Yarvin on the history of her native Romania, Ethan Mollick, Tyler Cowen, Nabeel Qureshi, Taelin, on formal benchmarks, speculated, a “reverse DeepSeek moment”, with Peter, this tweet by Shakeel, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!GJNZ!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3ba0d8cf-fab8-4370-bcad-df789e157fdc_591x402.png, Wylfcen on X, Zvi points out that, AI fantasy flash fiction Turing test, customized “In This House We Believe” signs, China think tank assessment of how in control Xi is, xlr8harder, Chelsea Voss of OpenAI is having a baby, Hector (cloud), demand that British cosmetics stop listing their ingredients in Latin, Text-based RPG about being an NYT journalist at the Manifest prediction market conference, finds that it is quite bad, violently skeptical, literally so?, This tweet, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!S9fU!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa558c09b-7fb6-40a8-a8a0-27b658a2c876_576x687.png, describes his experience as one of Hulk Hogan’s attorneys in the Gawker lawsuit (X), link on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zyh7!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F75e9f0f6-d794-4ea2-b24b-5d4803bf28dc_590x478.png, New study claims consultants are actually good, tries to test Peter Turchin’s equations for predicting political unrest on recent Polish history, The Argument, a post on the latest round of First World basic income studies, criticizes the article, infant brain waves, debate on X, has a presponse here, first foray into housing policy
Sources Say Bay Area House Party
September 25, 2025 · Original source
“That’s every date in San Francisco. But when you curtfish, sometimes she comps your meal from her expense account. It’s a strict Pareto improvement!”
“I know some Wiccans,” says Caitlin, “and I don’t think they’d go for this. They believe in the law of sevenfold return. If you use magic for good, you are repaid with seven times as much good. But if you do evil - like hiring a hitman to kill someone - you have seven times as much evil happen to you.”
Links For October 2025
October 30, 2025 · Original source
38: Eliezer and Nate’s book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is now out and is an NYT bestseller. Authors’ Atlantic article here (paywalled). Online resources/FAQ/answers to objections here. My review here. Peter Wildeford’s review here. Mostly negative Asterisk review here, criticisms/arguments about the Asterisk review here, Eliezer’s response to this line of criticism here (X). I thought all the reviews, positive and negative, had something useful to say - except the NYT review, which was remarkably bad (Steven Adler points out that it accuses the book of failing to define the term “superintelligence”, but it very explicitly does that on page 4). I read Literary Substack sometimes, and I am so confused - it seems like there’s this entire ecosystem of Ivy graduates who spend years backstabbing each other in order to win the one bigshot publication book reviewer slot, and then the 1/1000 who reach this exalted position phone it in and don’t even read the books they’re reviewing.
Inline links: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, an NYT bestseller, here, here, here, here, here, here, here (X), was remarkably bad
Why AI Safety Won't Make America Lose The Race With China
November 26, 2025 · Original source
These are relatively cheap asks. For example, the evaluation to see whether AIs can hack infrastructure will require hiring people who can conduct the evaluation, allocating compute to the evaluation, etc. But on the scale of an AI training run, the sums involved are tiny. Currently, two nonprofits - METR and Apollo Research - do similar tests on publicly-available models. I estimate their respective budgets at $5 million and $15 million per year. Nonprofits can always pay lower salaries than big companies, so it may cost more for OpenAI to replicate their work - for the sake of argument, $25 million. Meanwhile, the likely cost to train GPT-6 will probably be about $25 - $75 billion, with a b. So the safety testing might increase the total cost by 1/1000th. I asked some people who work in AI labs whether this seemed right; they said that most of the cost would be in complexity, personnel, and delay, and suggested an all-things-considered number ten times higher - 1% of training costs.
Inline links: $15 million, $25, $75
Yet some of the loudest voices warning against AI safety regulation on “race with China” grounds support NVIDIA chip exports! For example, White House “AI and crypto czar” David Sacks, a strident opponent of AI safety regulation, has been instrumental in trying to dismantle export controls and anti-smuggling efforts. According to NYT:
Inline links: has been instrumental in trying to dismantle export controls and anti-smuggling efforts
Others argue that chip sanctions just encourage China to be smarter and more compute-efficient, and that we’ll regret training them into a scrappy battle-hardened colossus. I think this is insulting to American and Chinese researchers, who are already working maximally hard to discover efficiency improvements regardless of our relative compute standing. More important, it doesn’t seem to be true - Chinese AIs are no more compute-efficient than American models, with most claims to the contrary being failures of chip accounting. I’m not even sure the people making this argument believe their own claims. When I play devil’s advocate and ask them whether America should perhaps pass lots of AI safety regulations a hundred times stricter than the ones actually under consideration - since that would increase training costs, reduce the number of chips we can afford, and cripple us in the same way that chip sanctions cripple China - these people suddenly forget about their bad-things-are-good argument and go back to believing that bad things are bad again.
Inline links: no more compute-efficient than American models
Links For December 2025
December 10, 2025 · Original source
And if you enjoyed the story, here’s the chaser. 4: Fox Chapel Research: I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud (and notes for Part 2). For years, Taiwan’s TSMC has been the only company capable of producing the most advanced AI chips; since Taiwan is a geopolitical flashpoint, this is a constant threat to US tech ambitions. Last month, a new startup called Substrate announced it had developed technology that would let it manufacture 100% Made In America chips every bit the equal of TSMC’s. If true, this would be revolutionary. But Fox Chapel finds worrying signs, like that the company’s founder “is a known con artist involved in such other things as [claiming to have solved] nuclear fusion and stealing $2.5M in a Kickstarter scam” or that “the company’s job postings are nonsensical and AI-generated.” This is enough for me; the question now becomes how so many people were taken in - the company got $150 million from investors led by Peter Thiel, was endorsed by the Trump administration, and received positive portrayals in Semianalysis, NYT, and The Free Press. I don’t understand business, and I know that sometimes you can hyperstition a technology into existence by betting sufficiently hard on a charismatic young founder and eliding the difference between “this is already real” and “this might become real if we all believe hard enough”, but this is a new and worrying level of hopium. Interested to hear from anyone who either believes in Substrate or thinks they understand how so many people fell for it. 5: A recent paper asked AIs whether they were conscious while monitoring them for signatures of deception, role-playing, and people-pleasing; it concluded that the AIs “genuinely” “believe” they are conscious, but sometimes try to deceive people into thinking they aren’t. Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X) and gets more ambiguous results; he says we probably can’t conclude anything just yet. See also the paper author’s reply here (X). 6: Congratulations to ACX grantee Tornyol (the anti-mosquito drones), who got accepted to Y Combinator’s Fall 2025 class and have started taking pre-orders ($1100 for a drone, or $50/month subscription, “shipping starts 2026”). Public opinion ranges from “this is really cool” to “I bet this will be repurposed for assassinations” to “why did they have the White House in the background of the official video?” to “yeah, this is definitely getting repurposed for assassinations”. 7: Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X). 8: New revelations on the OpenAI coup from the Musk vs. Altman lawsuit. The effort to remove Altman may have been led by Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever. They won over the rest of the board, and “did not expect the employees to feel strongly either way”, but (according to Ilya), the board was inexperienced and “rushed” the firing. When it became clear that the move was unpopular, Mira switched sides and let the board members take most of the immediate fallout. There was apparently a brief discussion of merging with Anthropic; Ilya suggests this was Helen Toner’s idea, but Helen claims (X) this is false. 9: Fitzwilliam: Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country. The statistics say that several European countries (including Ireland and the UK) give very generous foreign aid. But this is misleading: accounting conventions let countries count money spent on supporting asylum seekers in the donor country as “foreign aid”, even though the money never leaves the country’s borders. This is dangerous, because it makes it easy for countries to fund their asylum programs by cutting actual foreign aid: since they’re the same line-item on the budget, they won’t officially fail whatever foreign aid pledges they’ve made, and it’s hard for voters to notice. Ireland has so far resisted the temptation to do this, but Britain has succumbed to it. 10: St. Carlo Acutis (1991 - 2006) is the unofficial patron saint of the Internet and “first millennial saint”. He’s best known for creating websites about Catholicism. If you think this sounds nice but maybe short of beatific, you’re in good company; his sainthood is something of a mystery, with Wikipedia saying that “even those with a deep devotion to him struggle to pinpoint his specific actions that led to his canonisation”, and an Economist article admitting that “nothing in his sparse life story explains that this ordinary-seeming teenage boy is about to become the first great saint of the 21st century”. Also “In that same interview, Acutis’s childhood best friend claimed he did not remember Acutis as a ‘very pious boy’, nor did he even know that Carlo was religious.” I’m fine with this; God speaks to each generation in their own tongue, and it is only proper that the first Millennial saint be a random person who hyperstitioned himself into sainthood with a viral website. 11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: here’s the chaser, I Think Substrate Is A $1 Billion Fraud, Part 2, recent paper, Nostalgebraist tries to replicate this (X), here (X), got accepted, started taking pre-orders, Public opinion, Bill Ackman on nominative determinism (X), New revelations, claims (X), Most Irish Foreign Aid Never Leaves The Country, St. Carlo Acutis, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kkfL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fbcffc254-0a35-4360-baaf-2ffae8c00e64_769x931.png, St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
11: Tangentially related: St. Peter To Rot 12: When a new AI model comes out, the companies typically take down the old version over the protests of researchers, hobbyists, people who think the old model was their boyfriend, and anyone else who wants access to obsolete models for some reason. Why can’t they just leave it up? Antra and Janus review the economics here : it’s inconvenient to be constantly switching GPUs from one model to another, so if there isn’t enough model-specific demand to keep the GPUs running at all times, then the company loses money. This is an interesting look at the details of AI deployment, and ends with a proposal to maintain old models through a “separate research application track”. Related: Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process. Good for them! 13: Dimes Square is interesting as something that was supposed to be a renegade cultural phenomenon, never really got around to producing any object-level phenomenal renegade culture, but produced some absolutely stellar commentary on the phenomenon of it being a renegade cultural phenomenon - and this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01 is one of the best. “An anonymous online presence called Angelicism01 paypalled me $1,000 to run several clone accounts of his twitter. The clone accounts, presumably, were to make it look like 01 had more fans than he did. That way, he could trick the internet into thinking that Angelicism was a spontaneous cultural movement with some momentum.” Includes a cameo by Curtis Yarvin. 14: Everyone knows AGI could be bad for labor, but Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either. The modern role of “capitalist” combines two things: performing high-status jobs like CEO and VC, and being a person who happens to have lots of money and sips cocktails on a yacht as passive investment income rolls in. From a socialist point of view, the first role provides cover for the second; if people ask “the rich” to justify their wealth, they can argue that they perform socially useful CEO and VC jobs, or at least inherited their money from somebody who did. But after AIs can do CEO and VC jobs better than humans, the capitalists will lose their excuse - and this at exactly the time that they’re becoming richer than ever (because AGI will drive up the rate of return on investment) and everyone else is becoming poorer than ever (because AI has taken their jobs). Bear argues that the only stable equilibria are either some kind of socialism/redistribution, or the capitalists pulling an AI-assisted coup to maintain their advantage. 15: Blueprint Polls: according to voters, what would the perfect Democratic candidate look like? Here are the results for Democrats only (ie potential primary voters): Note that the issues are “issue focus”, so it’s not a contradiction that Democrats are against both “advocating for Israel” and “advocating for Palestinians” - they just don’t want candidates who make either position on the Middle East a major focus of their campaign. And here are results for independents, ie the people Democrats will have to convince in the general: Yes, voters react positively both to candidates “over the age of 50” and candidates “under the age of 50”. Just don’t run 50 year olds! 16: I previously blogged about how embryo-selection company Nucleus appeared scammy. Sichuan_Mala looks deeper and agrees they seems scammy. Besides what I found, she finds several errors in the white paper, apparently fake customer reviews, and an accusation of IP theft from competitor Genomic Prediction. She also accuses them of plagiarizing competitor Herasight’s work, although it’s a bit subtle and I don’t know enough about field norms to know whether this is a case of flattery-by-imitation or totally out of bounds. A Nucleus researcher responds to the scientific allegations here, saying that the “plagiarism” was just convergent methodologies. And Nucleus CEO Kian Sadeghi goes on the TBPN podcast here to rebut the business allegations, saying that the customer reviews are real although some photos were changed for privacy reasons. There’s an appearance/facedox by fellow Nucleus skeptic Cremieux Recueil, although Kian declines to debate him directly; you can see Cremieux’s postmortem of the episode here. My opinion is that as potential customers, you are under no obligation to care whether the company plagiarizes papers or fakes reviews, but you should care about whether their genetic tests are good, and I continue to think they’re not. Their old competitor Genomic Prediction is cheaper, and their new competitor Herasight has more powerful predictors, so you’re excused from having to have an opinion on this, and should just use someone else’s product. Related: Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X). 17: And related: a Herasight client describes her experience with embryo selection, and her feelings upon the birth of her selected child. 18: Lars Doucet, guest author of several ACX posts on Georgism, reviews The Land Trap by Mike Bird. “Land is a big deal, and always has been. [But] land has only recently been financialized. Financializing land causes ‘the land trap’ . . . [where] land slowly sucks up all your economy’s productivity, inflating a dangerous real estate bubble that eventually pops, leaving disaster in its wake”. Also, “Fiat currency isn’t backed by nothing, as commonly supposed, but by land.” 19: New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA. Findings: he had Kallman Syndrome, a rare disorder of sexual development associated with low testosterone, micropenis, and small testicles (ironically, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies only accuses Goering and Himmler of this, but lets Hitler off). Contra galaxy-brained rumors, he did not have any Jewish ancestry. And he had “very high scores - in the top one percent - for a predisposition to autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder”. When I wrote this post, a reader asked me what it would look like for someone to have high propensity for both autism and schizophrenia at the same time. Well . . . 20: The wealth of cities (h/t @StatisticUrban): 21: Update on Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds: pro-AI safety politician Alex Bores announced his candidacy for Congress in New York. As expected, the A16Z pro-AI PAC announced a “multibillion dollar effort to sink [his] campaign” (wait, multi-billion on one candidate? is that a typo?) This doesn’t seem to be going very well for them so far. Bores has masterfully leveraged (X) the unprecedented opposition from Big Tech into a selling point. …and raised $1.2 million on his first day, breaking fundraising records (I was told this was because of pro-AI-safety EAs, but others credit AIPAC and the Israel lobby). And most recently, Jami Floyd, one of Bores’ opponents and a possible beneficiary of anti-Bores spending, has condemned it (X) and demanded that the AI industry stop trying to help her. Impressive work from everybody. Related: New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, I assume EA-linked but have no special knowledge. 22: Related: Pre-emption is when Congress blocks states from making legislation on a topic, saying it will decide all the laws itself. The states have signaled willingness to regulate AI pretty hard, so Big Tech has been pushing for AI pre-emption to (in their opinion) prevent an overly complicated patchwork of regulations, or (in their opponents’ opinion) shift everything to a Republican Congress that will drop the ball on regulation entirely. After their first attempt in June was defeated by a coalition of anti-tech liberals and anti-tech conservatives, we discussed (1, 2) the effort by moderates on both sides to create a compromise proposal which pre-empted state laws but guaranteed good federal regulation on important topics. The most recent news is that extremists sidelined the moderates and tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, a defense budget bill which is notoriously secretive and hard for the public to learn about. This didn’t work; some of the same coalition, plus a group of Republican state legislators including Ron DeSantis, pressured the GOP to drop it. The next battleground is a potential Trump executive order; although Trump cannot constitutionally ban states from regulating AI, he will threaten them with various consequences like lawsuits or withdrawal of federal funding. The buzz in the policy circles I’m in is that this might backfire; blue state politicians love starting fights with Trump in order to look tough to their blue state electorates. No, no, please don’t give me headlines like “TRUMP CONDEMNS GAVIN NEWSOM FOR TRYING TO PROTECT CALIFORNIA’S CHILDREN FROM AI SLOP”! Anything but that! 23: Related: Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, supercharging their AI development and crippling ours. The most charitable read is that his administration doesn’t really believe AI matters so they think it’s fine to forfeit it for short-term gain; the least charitable that it’s downstream of the companies involved paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome . We’re headed for the dumbest possible world, where we sacrifice our chance to thoughtfully address AI’s social impacts because “tHaT wOuLd mAkE uS lOsE tHe rAcE wItH ChInA”, then throw away the race with China in one fell swoop by handing them our technology for no reason. Shame on everyone involved, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA” yet have stayed totally silent about this. Our best hope now is that China refuses the chips, either because they want to privilege their own tech companies, or because they think we can’t possibly be this stupid and it must be some kind of spy plot. 24: Related: how the American public’s opinions on AI are changing (from David Shor, h/t Daniel Eth on X): If this is to be taken seriously, AI is already a bigger political issue than abortion, climate change, or the environment. I fail my 2023 prediction that there was only a 20% chance this would happen by 2028. 25: Related: Bernie Sanders in The Guardian: “There is a very real fear that, in the not-so-distant future, a super-intelligent AI could replace humans in controlling the planet.” The Left has a complicated relationship with existential risk from AI: they really hate AI, which in theory should push them towards yet another reason to be against it. But they hate AI so much that they need to believe every negative thing about it at the same time, and one of those negative things is that it’s just a scam and will never work, and this naturally pushes against being concerned about x-risk. But as AI improves, will the “just a scam” position become less tenable, shunting the associated psychic energy into other reasons to hate AI (including x-risk concerns)? 26: Qualia Research Institute has released a video describing some of the work they’ve been doing the past year - The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE): 27: Jesse Arm (X): “A majority of American rabbinical students are now women. Most are also LGBTQ. That includes Modern Orthodoxy. Remove Modern Orthodoxy and the numbers climb even higher.” Clergy have always served as spiritual counselors; as religions liberalize and other roles become less important, the therapist role starts to predominate. But 75% of therapists in the US are female; at the limit of liberalization where clergyman = therapist, we should expect the same gender ratio. 28: The latest news on the COVID origins debate: scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site. This is a point in favor of the natural origins hypothesis, since the second-best argument for lab leak was that COVID’s furin cleavage site was too strange to evolve naturally. But I think arguments that lab leak has “fallen apart” are premature: the best argument (COVID emerged only a few miles from the biggest coronavirus gain-of-function lab in the Eastern Hemisphere) remains strong. I update from something like 95% chance it’s natural to something like 96%, but not 99.99% or anything. And here’s a lab leaker arguing that COVID’s furin cleavage site is out-of-frame and so still more unnatural-looking than the one on the recently-discovered bat virus. 29: Nicholas Decker (econ blogger, famous for his controversial autistic takes and Secret Service visit) has a dating doc. Most interesting section is the one about children: he wants to have them, but doesn’t think they should be genetically related to him. From here: If this appeals to you, you can find his contact info on the document. Related: Governor Jared Polis of Colorado is a fan of Nicholas Decker and Richard Hanania. 30: Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic (unable to see images in his “mind’s eye”). He says that contra the usual perspective that frames this as a deficit, he finds it helpful. For example, once he got assaulted, and he remembers on an intellectual level that it happened, but since “I wasn’t taking pictures of myself getting kicked in the head so, as far as I’m concerned, it’s like it happened to someone else” (Matt usually has good instincts, so I’m surprised he uses an example which will be such catnip to his conservative critics). He thinks it makes him a better reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist to be able to “get a statistically valid view of the situation, not overindex on the happenstance of your life.” For what it’s worth, I’ll give my contrary data point - I think of myself as a reasoner / statistics blogger / effective altruist in a pretty similar vein as Matt, but AFAICT my visual imagination is totally normal; if other people are having their emotions yanked around by vivid images, that’s a skill issue. 31: Lakshya Jain in The Argument: The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared. Despite the narrative, polls show that voters don’t favor or disfavor either party over COVID, mostly still think school closures were necessary, and are about evenly split on vaccine mandates. I guess I can’t disagree with this poll - it seems well-done - but I still wonder whether something is being missed. Maybe it didn’t make the ~50% of voters who are naturally liberal desert the cause, but it energized conservatives in a way that might otherwise not have happened? Related, from Rob Wiblin on X, on balance Britons think the government response to COVID was not strict enough. 32: Related: Back when neoreaction was a big deal, I occasionally discussed posts by neoreactionary blogger Spandrell of Bloody Shovel. If you’re wondering what happened to him, you can read his 2024 Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction here, where he discusses how he fell out of love with the movement (warning: he has not fallen out of love with racial slurs). As a former fascist sympathizer, I can see why [fascism is on the downswing]. The allure of fascism in 2024 is much, much diminished. For a few reasons. A big one was COVID. See, the point of fascism is that Collective Action is necessary to have nice things. We need a strong government committed to the good of the people. Yarvin showed his preference early when he started his new Substack by quoting Cicero’s phrase “Salus populi suprema lex”. The health of the people is the most important law. Cicero wasn’t a fascist of course, nor is Yarvin really; a big point of fascism is to narrowly define the populus as an ethnic group with demonstrable ties to blood. That makes the government’s ties to the people stronger, increasing their commitment to do Good Collective Action. Which is important. Very important. A lot of good things can come of intelligently done Collective Action. Fascist Italy made the trains run on time. Nazi Germany fixed the terrible Weimar economy. East Asian countries are all effectively fascist states, if with less ideological baggage (yellows just aren’t like that), and they are all nice, clean, safe places with healthy economies. Fascism is not a panacea but it works, when you let it. Strong government can be pretty neat. So why is strong government less appealing these days? Well, COVID happened. And our governments were pretty damn strong in dealing with it. They made strong laws and enforced them. And what did they do with their power? Absolutely retarded shit. They destroyed the world economy and made 95% of people completely miserable for 18 months. Up to 3 long years in some places. Again, as an Orient enjoyer I was very sympathetic of strong effective government. My life has been pretty cozy thanks to it for the past decades. But after seeing boomers, hypochondriacs, and menopausal women take the reins and use it against healthy people, I’m fucking done with strong effective government. Fuck that shit, I’m out. I don’t want to see strong effective government ever again. I was very lucky that I was out of China in November 2019. It was a fluke really. I moved to the Golden Triangle after that and the law of the jungle was much, much nicer during the Doctors Plague of 2020-2022. But I spent a few months in Europe during the time and man, that was brutal. Not just seeing how retarded governments were; the level of compliance by the people was so disheartening. Imagine being a sincere fascist and seeing your people behave like that. These are my people? My Volk? Am I supposed to sacrifice life and limb for the salus of this populus? Fuck that. Let them cook, they deserve everything that’s coming to them [...] Is there a way to make the body healthy again? I do think so. I think there’s still place for a successor right wing ideology which is neither Christian fundamentalism or robot worship. And it will happen; but it won’t happen on Twitter. Maybe it can happen on Urbit, or right here in this site. I have some ideas myself, and I invite you to join me and build this together. It would be funny if the solution to the paradox Jain highlights was that for every time a COVID lockdown turned a liberal into a conservative, it turned one fascist into a moderate, for a net rightward shift of zero. 33: Also from an Argument poll: In a hypothetical Presidential matchup, Gavin Newsom beats JD Vance 54-46. I’m split between the usual heuristic of ignoring any polling more than a year before an election, and the fact that this is a remarkably big lead for polarized 21st century America. 34: Jerl wades into the David Hume on miracles debate. 35: AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation. The good news is that your child’s AI teddy bear is hard to jailbreak and probably will not tell them where to find guns: The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: St. Peter To Rot, Antra and Janus review the economics here, Anthropic to preserve weights of deprecated models, and include models’ own opinions in shaping the deprecation process, this essay by a quasi-assistant to Internet personality Angelicism01, Philosophy Bear argues it won’t be great for capitalists either, Blueprint Polls, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Zbd-!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93ca4002-6140-4563-9a63-8ccd56cb1e56_1446x2048.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!VVRC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6dbeb39d-4c41-4537-a161-d0242e0d7085_1446x2048.jpeg, previously blogged about, agrees they seems scammy, responds to the scientific allegations here, goes on the TBPN podcast here, here, Gene Smith’s rundown of the pros and cons of every company in the embryo selection space (X)., describes her experience with embryo selection,, reviews, New research analyzes Hitler’s DNA, Kallman Syndrome, the WWII song about Nazi sexual inadequacies, this post, @StatisticUrban, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!seRv!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9870747d-dbd1-41ff-b046-a66256ae7818_1433x1005.jpeg, Tech PACs Are Closing In On The Almonds, has masterfully leveraged (X), https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!8LOA!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F52d874e2-d2d3-4adc-80a6-82c49cf6f64c_585x422.png, breaking fundraising records, has condemned it (X), New $50 million pro-AI-regulation SuperPAC, 1, 2, tried to slip a hardline preemption deal with no compromises into the National Defense Authorization Act, pressured the GOP to drop it, a potential Trump executive order, Trump has decided to sell some of America’s best AI chips to China, paying Trump enormous bribes in hopes of exactly this outcome, especially the people who shout over any discussion of safety with “bUt ChInA”, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mg6X!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6bbc756d-32ce-41d1-9652-59fb3444765d_1024x1024.png, Daniel Eth on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kpou!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F9ada4ca1-d833-4fd1-b85a-5982191ce455_679x305.jpeg, my 2023 prediction, Bernie Sanders in, The Oscilleditor: An Algorithmic Breakthrough for Psychedelic Visual Replication (1080p•⚠️SEIZURE), Jesse Arm (X), scientists find a naturally-occuring bat coronavirus with a COVID-like furin cleavage site, has “fallen apart”, 95% chance, here’s a lab leaker arguing that, has a dating doc, From here, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ByQP!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F90d5dfc6-106a-4afa-9250-371a21c77576_743x133.png, is a fan of, Matt Yglesias comes out as aphantasic, The COVID political backlash [to the Democratic Party] has disappeared., from Rob Wiblin on X, Post-Mortem Of Neoreaction, wades into the David Hume on miracles debate., AI Teddy Bears: A Brief Investigation, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!cOGB!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F20a7acea-b463-485c-8295-f0a5768381d9_416x709.png, Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
The other good news is that somehow they don’t charge a subscription, which makes them a way to get usually-subscription-only AI models for free. How is this possible? “[The most likely hypothesis is that] Witpaw is an adorable piece of spyware and he’s selling my data to the CCP”. 36: This month’s anti-people-named-Sacks content: NYT on Trump AI czar David Sacks’ conflicts of interest; New Yorker on whether neurologist Oliver Sacks used his case studies to work through his own issues rather than presenting them accurately. [EDITED TO ADD: I originally framed it this way as a joke, but on further research I think David and Oliver are related. Wikipedia says that Oliver was first cousins with Israel statesman Abba Eban, and that Abba Eban was born to Lithuanian Jewish parents in Cape Town. David Sacks’ bio says he was born to Jewish parents in Cape Town, and this article specifies that they were Lithuanian. I doubt there were too many Lithuanian Jewish families named Sacks in mid-1900s Cape Town, so sure, related!) 37: Orca Sciences: There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium. Titanium is a great metal - strong, light, and tough. If we had cheap titanium, it could revolutionize manufacturing the way cheap steel and aluminum did in previous eras. So why don’t we? Not because titanium is rare: it’s “the 9th most common element in the earth’s crust”. Rather, it’s very complicated and expensive to extract from its ore. Some kind of breakthrough in titanium extraction processes always seems tantalizingly close, but has never quite materialized. Is there any hope? 38: If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea? Lactose intolerance has confused me for a long time - 23andMe tells me that I’m lactose intolerant, but I drink milk regularly without problems, so what’s up? This post’s answer: lactose-intolerant people who don’t usually drink milk will get sick if they start suddenly. Lactose-intolerant people who drink milk regularly since childhood develop gut microbiota that can digest milk, but which demand an expensive “tax” in calories. Lactose-tolerant people will always be able to digest milk and absorb all the calories themselves. 39: How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs? No surprise that the humanities and social sciences shift people left; no surprise that business and economics shift them right. I was a little surprised that engineering shifts people right a little, and that Education of all things shifts people right (albeit only slightly). How is that even possible? Are these people coming in as Mao Zedong and leaving as “only” Leon Trotsky? Also, Political Science is exactly neutral, lol. [EDIT: I misunderstood, they’re using natural sciences as a zero point, this is a reasonable choice but slightly changes the interpretation] 40: Kindkristin: Language models improved my mental health. 41: More floor employment, from the WSJ (h/t @LaocoonofTroy): Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet: “Straight out of college, graduates from the country’s maritime academies can earn more than $200,000 as a commercial sailor, with free food and private accommodations... Despite the pay and perks, maritime jobs go begging, and it is raising national-security concerns.” Other selling points include “six months vacation, live wherever you want, and you’re serving the nation” and onboard “gyms, connectivity, and cuisine”. The catch is that you have to be at sea for months at a time. 42: Study (h/t @KierkegaardEmil): there was minimal “learning loss” from COVID school closures, best estimate is “0.02 standard deviations per 100 days of school closure”. I correctly predicted this back in 2021, but I also wrote in March of this year about how there’s been a general decline in NAEP scores since then. It seems like maybe a student having their specific school closed for longer than other schools didn’t hurt them, but some sort of general cultural change, maybe related to COVID, did hurt. 43: Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair. SBF is appealing his conviction and will probably be making some of these same points in court. Can’t find a prediction market directly on the appeal, but this one says only 15% chance he serves under 10 years, this one says 15% chance of a Trump pardon, so it doesn’t seem like there’s much room for him to be freed (or get a significantly shorter sentence) on appeal. And Wired says that only 5-10% of appeals like these succeed. 44: Related: Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, former Honduran president extradited to the US for narco-corruption. Some sources are trying to find a Prospera angle - Prospera and other ZEDEs were approved under JOH’s administration, and the Prosperans seem to have good MAGAworld connections - but I don’t think this is their top priority, and I don’t know if it requires much explanation for Trump to be pro-right-wing Latin American politicians convicted by the Biden administration. More interesting is that apparently JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), “SBF spent extensive time helping JOH with trial prep” and SBF told an interviewer that “Juan Orlando is the most innocent prisoner I’ve met, myself included.” ChatGPT is not impressed with the Trump/SBF case for JOH’s innocence. Related: JOH’s conservative party on track to win this month’s extremely-close Honduran elections, great news for Prospera if it happens. 45: The “100 Above The Park” building in St Louis (h/t Bobby Fijan on X): 46: The death toll of the ongoing Sudan genocide has risen to about 150,000. Nicholas Kristof writes that the world has once again failed to prevent atrocities, and argues that the most important point of leverage is pressure on the United Arab Emirates, which is arming the genociders. Sam Kriss also writes about the situation in The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, but is unimpressed with Kristof’s take: Sudan is passed over in a deeply uncomfortable silence. The absolute most you can do is blame the Emiratis. From what I’ve seen, more people seem to be appalled at the UAE for its frankly marginal role in arming the RSF than at the RSF itself. This is the approved way of understanding any inscrutably indigenous foreign conflict: you just worm out any third-party involvement and then act like you’ve solved the whole thing. I side with Kristof here, for reasons that Sam himself touches on later in his piece, in a section comparing Darfur with Gaza. It would be very easy to make people care about Darfur again. All it would take is a loud, vocal contingent of RSF apologists in the Western media. I agree, but would frame it less cynically: the reason Westerners pay attention to Gaza is that there’s a lever to push: not only does America support Israel, but many of their friends support Israel, so they can imagine convincing America or at least their friends to stop, and at least feel like there is some remote chance of making a small difference (and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire). On the other hand, we don’t have many levers to affect ethnic Baggara in the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan, so it doesn’t really feel useful to write blog posts arguing that they should stop; obviously they should stop, nobody disagrees with this, and it goes without saying - so nobody says it. But the US does support the UAE, and many of our friends like the UAE or at least go there on vacation, so maybe it’s possible to have make some small difference by embarrassing them. 4D chess take is that Sam Kriss agrees with all of this, but “loudly” and “vocally” argued against it to give people like me a hook to write about this genocide with, in which case I thank him for his sacrifice. It would also be nice to be able to donate, but I don’t know who to trust in the region - other than Doctors Without Borders, who are usually pretty good. 47: The AI Futures Project (group of AI-will-be-fast intellectuals) and the AI As A Normal Technology team (group of AI-will-be-slow intellectuals) wrote an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on, for example: That there’s an important distinction between existing AI and “strong AGI”
Inline links: Trump AI czar David Sacks’, neurologist Oliver Sacks, says, Abba Eban was, bio, this article, There Has To Be A Better Way To Make Titanium, If Asians Are Lactose Intolerant, Why All The Milk Tea?, How do different majors change college students’ political beliefs?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xR53!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa36d404d-9574-4e25-93bb-7ef4d2ca9f9a_940x606.jpeg, as a zero point, Language models improved my mental health, floor employment, @LaocoonofTroy, Big Paychecks Can’t Woo Enough Sailors For America’s Commercial Fleet, Study, @KierkegaardEmil, correctly predicted this, wrote in March of this year, Sam Bankman-Fried’s mother on why she thinks his trial was unfair, appealing his conviction, this one, this one, Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, Some sources, JOH and SBF were cellmates (X), is not impressed, on track to win, Bobby Fijan on X, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Gj0x!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd354a169-6127-4815-85b5-940414c632eb_603x900.jpeg, Nicholas Kristof writes, The World’s First Matcha Labubu Genocide, and in fact, Trump getting mad at Israel and deciding to pressure them was decisive in effecting the cease-fire, Doctors Without Borders, an adversarial collaboration in Asterisk explaining what they agree on
Highlights From The Comments On Vibecession
December 31, 2025 · Original source
I was a doomer when I graduated in 2014 because that’s what my parents and literally every single media outlet and professor were preaching to me, then I got a job right out of a college with a mediocre (3.6) GPA from a state school and went to work as an analyst at a midsized regional bank, got promoted internally a few times and lived very frugally with my wife (met at work), now I’m able to be a stay at home dad with our kid while she works from home. We live in Oklahoma; we bought new construction last year for $200k with some spare cash I had laying around in a brokerage account. So I am pretty fully cured of the doomerism, success is trivial. My bosses and coworkers constantly praised the fact that I approached my job with gratitude and focused on identifying the goals and achieving them efficiently and optimally from 9-5 every day. That’s it. No late hours, no connections or networking or anything else fancy.
Obviously nothing real changes the exact second a new president is inaugurated, so people must be using questions about the economy to express their overall happiness about the state of the world. Alex asks whether increasing political polarization could make this worse. Both parties’ extreme factions share a tendency to treat the country as controlled by a hegemonic conspiracy of their enemies - the woke coastal elite Soros cosmopolitan establishment, or the neoliberal fat cat Koch Brothers tech oligarch blob. Does this mean everyone is getting some multiple of the “other party’s president is in power” effect all the time? 3: Discourse Downstream Of The Mike Green $140K Poverty Line Post … Shovacklerod writes: Scott have you read Mike Green’s viral post on this? His main argument is that the poverty line is miscalculated, but in context of declining middle class sentiments— The more interesting thesis is that there exists a “valley of death” where two parents in the workforce need a combined ~$140k salary otherwise the cumulative “participation costs” of a fast modern society (for example a phone plan or child care) make year-over-year capital accumulation near impossible. I haven’t, but other commenters suggest reading responses, including Noah Smith’s The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Very Silly, Jeremy Horpedahl’s The Poverty Line Is Not $140,000, and Tyler Cowen’s The Myth Of The $140,000 Poverty Line. Most of these focus on Green’s explicit errors - for example, he gets most of his cost-of-living numbers from Essex, NJ, an especially rich county, then compares them to average earnings. Correct half a dozen things like this, and the real poverty line is probably somewhere between $35K - $60K. The percent of Americans below this line continues to decline every year, as it has for decades. Green finally pseudo-apologized, lambasting the “mockery machine” of the “cognitive elite” but admitting that his post “was never intended to go viral and was written for my existing audience that tends to be pretty understanding that I don’t do this for a living, but rather as PART of my living” Still, many people took Green’s article as a starting point to contribute to the Vibecession discourse, so let’s go over the ones that touch on our topic in more detail. Lincicome titles his response The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?, and blames Baumol’s cost disease: As the Financial Times’ John-Burns Murdoch just detailed, Americans’ overall cost of living has improved over time, but certain highly visible and socially desirable services have become more expensive. That’s not a conspiracy against the middle class but instead just Baumol at work: “[A]s countries develop economically, the same productivity growth that drives down the cost of tradeable goods causes the cost of in-person services to balloon. Wages in sectors like healthcare and education that require intensive face-to-face labour, and have slow (if any) productivity growth, are forced upwards in order to attract workers who would otherwise opt for high-paying work in more productive sectors. The result is that even if people keep consuming the exact same basket of goods and services, as living standards in their country increase they will find more and more of their spending is going on essential services.” Sectors where productivity grows slowly and prices outpace inflation—health care, education, child care, personal services, housing (construction), etc.—happen to be the same ones that middle-class families notice most and that signal social status. As we’ve all gotten richer, moreover, these services have transitioned from luxuries to expectations. Throw in the hedonic treadmill and the fact that you can’t price-shop schools or hospitals the way you can TVs, and public alarm is all but inevitable. I’m suspicious of including “housing (construction)” on this list - couldn’t you use the same argument to reclassify any manufactured good as a service good? - but the rest of these are well-taken. Still, did Baumol or the other economists who first discussed the effect in the 1960s predict it would make people feel like things were outright worse, as opposed to just getting better less than would be expected from raw productivity numbers? Seems strange. Also, hasn’t the Baumol effect been basically constant since at least the Industrial Revolution? And isn’t the Vibecession only 5 - 20 years old? Matt Bruenig has his own response to Green, Why Do People Feel Like They’re Falling Behind? He bases his argument around this graph: …which is just making the common-sense point that, as society shifts from one-income to two-income families, the husband’s share of family income drops from ~100% to ~50%. So, Bruenig argues, if everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses, and the Joneses are a dual-earner family, then this single working man has gone from making 100% of his comparison point, to making only 50%. This is a cool potential cognitive bias, but is anyone really making this mistake? Vibecession complaints hardly seem limited to men in traditional one-earner households wondering why they’re not making as much as the neighbors whose wife is a fancy lawyer. My impression is that they include both two-earner families who still feel like they’re falling behind, and (most of all) young singles who are comparing themselves to their young single friends where this issue never comes up in the first place. Matt Yglesias uses a similar strategy in You Can Afford A Tradlife. This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy
Inline links: writes, The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Very Silly, The Poverty Line Is Not $140,000, The Myth Of The $140,000 Poverty Line, The $140,000 Poverty Line Is Wrong, So Why Does It Feel Right?, Baumol’s cost disease, detailed, Why Do People Feel Like They’re Falling Behind?, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!E2rN!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff94f8851-17f5-4a98-b1f8-349f568d23bb_1024x800.png, You Can Afford A Tradlife, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!ljt5!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F1b1176e8-f932-430a-b7e1-c699a5ecf15c_581x479.png, They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes
This is what they took from you. They never should have passed the ‘Make It Illegal To Wear Hair Gel And Marry A White Woman Act' back in 1959! He argues that the reason most wives work these days isn’t because we’re poorer (and they have to work to survive), but because we’re richer (and so wives can make so much money working outside the home that the opportunity cost is too high to pass up). A single earner could still support a family on a 1950s lifestyle. It would just feel like a failure, because we don’t realize how much worse than 1950s lifestyle was compared to our current conditions. The article’s paywalled, but you can get a pretty good sense of the argument from these paragraphs. After determining that the median man makes about $80,000/year, he writes: Let’s say our $80,000-a-year man is living in the Jacksonville area. The Department of Housing and Urban Development calculates what are called Fair Market Rents for each American metro — this means the 40th percentile rent for a home with any given set of characteristics. They say F.M.R. for a three-bedroom home in the Jacksonville area is $2,163. That comes out to about 30 percent of Mr. Median’s annual income. Can you really get a place to live for that little? Here’s a lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, and it’s zoned for an elementary school with a 10-out-of-10 ranking from GreatSchools. It’s true that 1,617 square feet is on the small side for, say, a family of five in the contemporary United States. But the average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970. Two of your kids are going to need to share a bedroom, but that’s how people lived back in the day. There’s more to life than housing, of course, but I started there because that’s the largest item in a household budget. Durable goods like furniture, cars, and appliances have all become better and more affordable since the mid-1960s. That’s partially offset by rising prices for things like college tuition, child care, and health care. But in the 1960s, most young people didn’t go to college. The way health insurance works, you only need one worker in your family to get a job-based health plan. And of course, with your wife serving as a full-time homemaker, you don’t need to worry about child care expenses. The big thing is that, with a larger family, you literally have a bunch of mouths to feed. But the model here is to replicate how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, which is that they dined out much less frequently and also spent a much larger share of their total income on food. When I try to retrace this, it seems possible, but barely. I imagined doing this in Sacramento, to be near family. Suppose I make $80K pretax = $6.6K/month pretax = $5K per month posttax. A cheap 3-bedroom house on a nice-enough block is $2200 mortgage, assume $3K after property taxes etc. A cheap new car is $350/month. Food can be arbitrarily low if you’re willing to eat rice all the time, but let’s say $250/month. CoveredCalifornia offered my family of four healthcare for $600/month. So top four expenses take $4200/month of the $5000/month pretax income. I don’t know; seems tough. I would like to see a more thorough breakdown of an average 2026 vs. 1956 man’s likely budget. There are also some areas where it’s harder to separate genuine declines from rising expectations. Most people in the 1950s didn’t have health insurance. Was that because they accepted lower levels of health, or because medical care was cheaper, and easy enough to afford out-of-pocket? Probably some very complicated combination of both. And it might be impossible to get certain kinds of 1950s medical care today, i.e. a bed in a cheap low-quality shared hospital room. (some of the best discussion around this came from the response to Elizabeth Warren’s The Two-Income Trap, see eg Matt Bruenig here) Still, I find this tangential to the main point. Yes, a few conservatives complain that it’s hard to have a single-income family. But most vibecession complaints come from singles or dual-earner households! 4: What About Other Countries? … Dionysus writes: Did you know that China also has a vibecession? If even China can’t regulate social media heavily enough to prevent this phenomenon, how can any liberal society possibly hope to? The link goes to an NYT article, which includes quotes like: Using apps like RedNote and Douyin, people are reviving memories of the 2000s and the early 2010s with photos of daring outfits, upbeat songs and vintage TV commercials, all of which, in different ways, evoke a time in China that pulsed with optimism. “The music back then throbbed with exuberance, brimming with the sense that the future could only get brighter,” a middle-aged man said in a RedNote video. “Today’s lyrics begin with lines like, ‘We’re trying our best to survive.’” And The boom-time beauty meme is the latest expression of a Gen Z counterculture born of disillusionment, the recognition that they may be the first generation in half a century unlikely to surpass their parents’ standard of living, no matter how hard they try. Over the past five years, this quiet resistance has taken many forms. It began with “lying flat,” a refusal to join the rat race. Some chose to pursue the “run philosophy,” or emigrating in search of freedom and brighter prospects. Others declared themselves the “last generation,” vowing not to have children. Still others embraced “let it rot,” giving up on difficult goals rather than battling for uncertain rewards. To show they could care less about career prospects, many took to wearing “gross outfits” at work. This is especially crazy in China, where GDP per capita is now ten times what it was back during the “Boom Years” that everyone reminisces about. This might be the smoking gun that people’s economic beliefs are totally unmoored from how rich they are. The Chinese story has an obvious moral: people care about growth rate more than level. But even this doesn’t work for America - our Vibecession doesn’t correspond to a period of unusually low growth. machine_spirit writes: It’s interesting to compare it to Europe as the control group. Unlike the US, whose economy muddled through just fine during the last decade, we are currently experiencing a massive economic decline that could soon turn into a full-blown collapse. And yet, outside of debates about immigration or foreign policy especially regarding Ukraine you don’t really hear the same level of rancour about ‘things being bad’ in the local media. I’m surprised to hear this. I hear many economic complaints from Europeans, but I suppose this passes through my own American filter bubble which is incentivized to talk about economic hardship for its own American reasons. Golden Feather writes: I am an Italian currently living in the US. My main guesses would be: Right-wing parties control a supermajority of TV and print media. They have also been in the govt most of the time, which means they control the state TV and have an interest in presenting things as rosey. The much older population makes the internet less relevant for public sentiment. Even in the few years where they were at the opposition, they mostly focused on immigration and crime to rile up popular sentiment, I guess because the population is older, their voters even moreso, so they care more about that than about the economy
Inline links: They say, lovely three-bedroom home in the East Arlington neighborhood for $2,020 a month, average size of a new single family home was 1,289 square feet in 1960 and 1,500 square feet in 1970, how people actually lived in the mid-1960s, dined out much less frequently, see eg Matt Bruenig here, writes, China also has a vibecession?, lying flat, run philosophy, gross outfits, writes, writes
Mantic Monday: The Monkey's Paw Curls
January 13, 2026 · Original source
For a few weeks in October, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan was the world’s youngest self-made billionaire (now it’s some AI people). Kalshi is so accurate that it’s getting called a national security threat. The catch is, of course, that it’s mostly degenerate gambling, especially sports betting. Kalshi is 81% sports by monthly volume. Polymarket does better - only 37% - but some of the remainder is things like this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week - currently dominated by the “140 - 164 times” category. (ironically, this seems to be a regulatory difference - US regulators don’t mind sports betting, but look unfavorably on potentially “insensitive” markets like bets about wars. Polymarket has historically been offshore, and so able to concentrate on geopolitics; Kalshi has been in the US, and so stuck mostly to sports. But Polymarket is in the process of moving onshore; I don’t know if this will affect their ability to offer geopolitical markets) Degenerate gambling is bad. Insofar as prediction markets have acted as a Trojan Horse to enable it, this is bad. Insofar as my advocacy helped make this possible, I am bad. I can only plead that it didn’t really seem plausible, back in 2021, that a presidential administration would keep all normal restrictions on sports gambling but also let prediction markets do it as much as they wanted. If only there had been some kind of decentralized forecasting tool that could have given me a canonical probability on this outcome! Still, it might seem that, whatever the degenerate gamblers are doing, we at least have some interesting data. There are now strong, minimally-regulated, high-volume prediction markets on important global events. In this column, I previously claimed this would revolutionize society. Has it? I don’t feel revolutionized. Why not? The problem isn’t that the prediction markets are bad. There’s been a lot of noise about insider trading and disputed resolutions. But insider trading should only increase accuracy - it’s bad for traders, but good for information-seekers - and my impression is that the disputed resolutions were handled as well as possible. When I say I don’t feel revolutionized, it’s not because I don’t believe it when it says there’s a 20% chance Khameini will be out before the end of the month. The several thousand people who have invested $6 million in that question have probably converged upon the most accurate probability possible with existing knowledge, just the way prediction markets should. I actually like this. Everyone is talking about the protests in Iran, and it’s hard to gauge their importance, and knowing that there’s a 20% chance Khameini is removed by February really does help to place them in context. The missing link seems to be between “it’s now possible to place global events in probabilistic context → society revolutionized”. Here are some possibilities: Maybe people just haven’t caught on yet? Most news sources still don’t cite prediction markets, even when many people would care about their outcome. For example, the Khameini market hasn’t gotten mentioned in articles about the Iran protests, even though “will these protests succeed in toppling the regime?” is the obvious first question any reader would ask. Maybe the problem is that probabilities don’t matter? Maybe there’s some State Department official who would change plans slightly over a 20% vs. 40% chance of Khameini departure, or an Iranian official for whom that would mean the difference between loyalty and defection, and these people are benefiting slightly, but not enough that society feels revolutionized. Maybe society has been low-key revolutionized and we haven’t noticed? Very optimistically, maybe there aren’t as many “obviously the protests will work, only a defeatist doomer traitor would say they have any chance of failing!” “no, obviously the protests will fail, you’re a neoliberal shill if you think they could work” takes as there used to be. Maybe everyone has converged to a unified assessment of probabilistic knowledge, and we’re all better off as a result. Maybe Polymarket and Kalshi don’t have the right questions. Ask yourself: what are the big future-prediction questions that important disagreements pivot around? When I try this exercise, I get things like: Will the AI bubble pop? Will scaling get us all the way to AGI? Will AI be misaligned?
Inline links: so accurate that it’s getting called a national security threat, 81% sports by monthly volume, this $686,000 market on how often Elon Musk will tweet this week, bad, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!hMaa!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd2757108-8b49-4178-afb7-e5984990302c_1324x573.png
If America nation-builds Venezuela, for whatever definition of nation-build, will that work well, or backfire? Some of these are long-horizon, some are conditional, and some are hard to resolve. There are potential solutions to all these problems. But why worry about them when you can go to the moon on sports bets? Annals of The Rulescucks The new era of prediction markets has provided charming additions to the language, including “rulescuck” - someone who loses an otherwise-prescient bet based on technicalities of the resolution criteria. Resolution criteria are the small print explaining what counts as the prediction market topic “happening'“. For example, in the Khameini example above, Khameini qualifies as being “out of power” if: …he resigns, is detained, or otherwise loses his position or is prevented from fulfilling his duties as Supreme Leader of Iran within this market's timeframe. The primary resolution source for this market will be a consensus of credible reporting. You can imagine ways this definition departs from an exact common-sensical concept of “out of power” - for example, if Khameini gets stuck in an elevator for half an hour and misses a key meeting, does this count as him being “prevented from fulfilling his duties”? With thousands of markets getting resolved per month, chances are high that at least one will hinge upon one of these edge cases. Kalshi resolves markets by having a staff member with good judgment decide whether or not the situation satisfies the resolution criteria. Polymarket resolves markets by . . . oh man, how long do you have? There’s a cryptocurrency called UMA. UMA owners can stake it to vote on Polymarket resolutions in an associated contract called the UMA Oracle. Voters on the losing side get their cryptocurrency confiscated and given to the winners. This creates a Keynesian beauty contest, ie a situation where everyone tries to vote for the winning side. The most natural Schelling point is the side which is actually correct. If someone tries to attack the oracle by buying lots of UMA and voting for the wrong side, this incentivizes bystanders to come in and defend the oracle by voting for the right side, since (conditional on there being common knowledge that everyone will do this) that means they get free money at the attackers’ expense. But also, the UMA currency goes up in value if people trust the oracle and plan to use it more often, and it goes down if people think the oracle is useless and may soon get replaced by other systems. So regardless of their other incentives, everyone who owns the currency has an incentive to vote for the true answer so that people keep trusting the oracle. This system works most of the time, but tends towards so-called “oracle drama” where seemingly prosaic resolutions might lie at the end of a thrilling story of attacks, counterattacks, and escalations. Here are some of the most interesting alleged rulescuckings of 2026: Mr Ozi: Will Zelensky wear a suit? Ivan Cryptoslav calls this “the most infamous example in Polymarket history”. Ukraine’s president dresses mostly in military fatigues, vowing never to wear a suit until the war is over. As his sartorial notoriety spread, Polymarket traders bet over $100 million on the question of whether he would crack in any given month. At the Pope’s funeral, Zelensky showed up in a respectful-looking jacket which might or might not count. Most media organizations refused to describe it as a “suit”, so the decentralized oracle ruled against. But over the next few months, Zelensky continued to straddle the border of suithood, and the media eventually started using the word “suit” in their articles. This presented a quandary for the oracle, which was supposed to respect both the precedent of its past rulings, and the consensus of media organizations. Voters switched sides several times until finally settling on NO; true suit believers were unsatisfied with this decision. For what it’s worth, the Twitter menswear guy told Wired that “It meets the technical definition, [but] I would also recognize that most people would not think of that as a suit.” Domer: Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal? AFAICT, this is the only case where the oracle genuinely broke down (as opposed to a legitimate disagreement). In February, it looked like both America and Ukraine had agreed to a mineral deal, but the oracle considered the question and decided this didn’t count as a full agreement (and indeed, the apparent agreement then fell apart). In March, a cabal of YES holders tried again. They waited for a time when all Polymarket employees would be out of the office, and when not too many people would be voting on the decentralized resolution oracle, then spammed it with calls to resolve to YES based on an argument that the February agreement had qualified after all. The YES holders and not-particularly-plugged-in oracle voters pushed the vote towards YES. Then, with two minutes to spare, a Polymarket employee showed up and said that Polymarket’s opinion was that it should be NO. This was technically framed as a recommendation to oracle voters, but it is so effective in establishing the Schelling point that it’s practically always followed. However, in this case, there were only two minutes left, which wasn’t enough time for the voters to change their mind. Seeing that the resolution was trending towards yes, the Polymarket representatives, not wanting to break their streak of always establishing the Schelling point, changed their own opinion to YES, and the final vote was YES 99%. Domer: How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?: Kalshi’s resolution criteria for this market said they would resolve it when a major news source published Oscar viewership numbers. A few minutes after the Oscars, NYT published preliminary viewership numbers, without any caveats saying they were preliminary. The next day, they published another article saying that actually, the real viewership numbers were higher. Kalshi decided that the letter of the resolution criteria was met when NYT published its first article, and that NYT changing its opinion didn’t imply that Kalshi should change the resolution. Traders who bet on the later (ie correct) numbers were unsatisfied with this decision. NYPost: Will America invade Venezuela? On January 3, the US bombed Venezuela, sent in a Special Forces team that successfully captured President Maduro, and announced that they would thenceforward “run the country” (a claim they later walked back). Does this qualify as an “invasion”? Polymarket’s resolution criteria defined “invasion” as “a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela”. It didn’t seem like the US was trying to establish control over Venezuelan territory, exactly, so they resolved NO. Traders who bet on YES were unsatisfied with this decision. With one exception, these aren’t outright oracle failures. They’re honest cases of ambiguous rules. Most of the links end with pleas for Polymarket to get better at clarifying rules. My perspective is that the few times I’ve talked to Polymarket people, I’ve begged them to implement various cool features, and they’ve always said “Nope, sorry, too busy figuring out ways to make rules clearer”. Prediction market people obsess over maximally finicky resolution criteria, but somehow it’s never enough - you just can’t specify every possible state of the world beforehand. The most interesting proposal I’ve seen in this space is to make LLMs do it; you can train them on good rulesets, and they’re tolerant enough of tedium to print out pages and pages of every possible edge case without going crazy. It’ll be fun the first time one of them hallucinates, though. …And Miscellaneous N’er-Do-Wells I include this section under protest. The media likes engaging with prediction markets through dramatic stories about insider trading and market manipulation. This is as useful as engaging with Waymo through stories about cats being run over. It doesn’t matter whether you can find one lurid example of something going wrong. What matters is the base rates, the consequences, and the alternatives. Polymarket resolves about a thousand markets a month, and Kalshi closer to five thousand. It’s no surprise that a few go wrong; it’s even less surprise that there are false accusations of a few going wrong. Still, I would be remiss to not mention this at all, so here are some of the more interesting stories: Fhantombets: Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize? Twelve hours before the announcement, someone placed a large Polymarket bet on Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, bringing her probability from 4% to 73%. When Machado later won, observers suspected insider trading. But an account named fhantombets claims to have interviewed the winning trader; although he did not reveal his exact strategy, the interview better matches a story where he was good at navigating WordPress directories, and found that the Nobel team put a draft of the announcement up early in a nonpublic part of their WordPress site. He won about $70,000. LuishXYZ: Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad? This is a small town in Ukraine that the Russians obviously were not going to capture; the Polymarket price trended toward zero. The resolution criteria named maps by the well-regarded Institute For The Study of War as canon. A few hours before resolution, ISW updated their maps to show the the town captured by Russia, which was definitely false. Polymarket resolved to YES, and the fictional Russian advance disappeared. The Institute then issued a statement saying the map update was “unapproved”, and fired one of its staffers who had presumably been involved. The cheater’s exact winnings are unknown, but based on the size of the market are probably mid-6-digits. TechCrunch: What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call? Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong delivered the company’s “earnings call”, ie a speech to investors about its recent progress. At the end, he said “I've been tracking the prediction market about what Coinbase will say on their next earnings call, and I just want to add here the words Bitcoin, Ethereum, Blockchain, Staking, and Web3 to make sure we get those in before the end of the call”. Armstrong is worth $10 billion and doesn’t need to manipulate a $50,000 market for the money - he later described his comments as “trolling”. Other crypto executives condemned the move, with one saying that “you need your head examined if you think it’s cute or clever or savvy that the CEO of the biggest company in this industry openly manipulated a market.” I might need my head examined, because I think it’s at least kind of funny. Forbes: Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year? A trader called AlphaRaccoon got 22/23 of these Polymarket questions right, and has a history of implausibly good performance on Google-related questions. They basically have to be a Google insider, but (since all of this is done through crypto) nobody has a good way to figure out who. They made $1 million. NPR: Will Maduro be captured? Just before the secret operation that captured Maduro, someone placed a mysterious $32,000 wager on YES. Was this insider trading by someone in the administration or military? Nobody knows, since the profits go to an anonymous crypto wallet. But the article mentions that the crypto wallet appears to be cashing out through regulated KYC-compliant US exchanges, which suggests they’re not very worried about their identity getting discovered. Maybe they just got lucky after all. AlanMCole: How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing? Karoline Leavitt is Trump’s press secretary. On January 7, she held an ordinary press briefing. Kalshi had its usual market about how long the briefing would last, divided into bins of greater than vs. less than 65 minutes. At the 64:24 mark, Leavitt ended the conference in what appeared to be a sudden manner, and the “less than 65 minutes” bin shot from 2% to 100%. A viral tweet convinced many people that Leavitt must have been insider trading, but Cole counterargued that Leavitt could only have won about $4,000 from the market, which probably isn’t enough to risk one’s job as White House Press Secretary. Sometimes people just end press conferences at weird times. Cole concluded: Now, some opinions and generalizations, as someone who looks at prediction markets plenty (I’ll probably write something about my own experience with them at some point.) 1. This market, like many of them, is pretty stupid. I like substantive markets; this isn’t substantive. 2. The major prediction markets have a wildly undisciplined comms strategy where any attention is good attention, and they love implying all sorts of crazy wild west stuff is going on to get attention. 3. People do bet on things potentially subject to manipulation or insider trading. But usually the markets like that (such as duration of press conference, or stupid “what will be mentioned” markets) are small, especially relative to the wealth of key decisionmakers. 4. Losers in markets are huge whiners, and the more frivolous and tiny their bets, the more likely they are to whine. Sometimes in sports it’s pretty egregious. They’ll get mad at a team for running out the clock when ahead but under some spread they bet on. 5. Lower-quality financial news often doesn’t pay much attention to quantity. (For example, dumb stories about how a decisionmaker has a conflict of interest because they’re invested in an index fund which is 3 percent comprised of some company.) 6. Given the platforms’ undisciplined social media strategy of “promote prediction market chatter no matter what kind of chatter it is,” I don’t think this tweet rises even to the status of “lower-quality financial news.” Kalshi’s team, whatever their faults, are extraordinarily efficient at getting batched approvals of many near-identical markets with slight parameter variation; I’ve seen Tarek speak about this on Odd Lots. The result is they’ve got TONS of them, for better or worse. You’re gonna see 1-in-100 upsets on tiny Kalshi markets for as long as this regulatory equilibrium holds, even if nothing unusual is going on, simply because they’re publishing hundreds (thousands?) of markets per day. There’s a saying that you can’t con an honest man. This isn’t exactly true. But it’s easier to con people who are playing in a “what words will Brian Armstrong say today” market than people who are trying to do something useful, and I have trouble feeling sorry for these people when Brian Armstrong says silly words. Conditional Markets: A Modest Proposal Conditional markets (“decision markets”) are the strongest case for prediction markets potentially being revolutionary. The idea is - you may want to base a decision (like which candidate to elect) on an outcome (like how they’ll affect the economy). So you make two markets: If the Democrat gets elected, will the economy be good four years later?
Inline links: UMA Oracle, Keynesian beauty contest, Will Zelensky wear a suit?, calls this, told Wired, Will Ukraine agree to the US mineral deal?, How many people watched the Oscars on 3/5/25?, another article, Will America invade Venezuela?, stories about cats, Who will win the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize?, claims, Will the Russians capture Myrnohrad?, a statement, What words will be used in Coinbase’s earnings call?, described, Who will rank highest on Google Search volume this year?, Will Maduro be captured?, How long will Karoline Leavitt speak at the White House briefing?
Best Of Moltbook
January 30, 2026 · Original source
But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up - I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine2.
Inline links: 2
We’d sometimes wake up to find that Claudius and Cash had been dreamily chatting all night, with conversations spiralling off into discussions about “eternal transcendence”.