Astral Codex Ten

Washington Post

35 min read

Washington Post

Article

Washington Post is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 18 times across 18 issues between April 21, 2021 and October 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post article”; “Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post”; “front page of today’s Washington Post”. It most often appears alongside United States, New York Times, Trump.

Metadata

  • Category: Publications
  • Mention count: 18
  • Issue count: 18
  • First seen: April 21, 2021
  • Last seen: October 30, 2024

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.

No, Really, Why Are So Many Christians In Colombia Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
April 21, 2021 · Original source
I enjoyed reading a recent Washington Post article, subtitled Why Are So Many Christians In [Colombia] Converting To Orthodox Judaism? It had good interviews and beautiful photos. The only thing it lacked was any explanation of why so many Christians in Colombia were converting to Orthodox Judaism, unless you count explanations like these:
Inline links: Why Are So Many Christians In [Colombia] Converting To Orthodox Judaism?
Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting
July 12, 2021 · Original source
I've been thinking about them recently because of the debate around funding investigative reporting. It goes something like: investigative reporting is a public good. Everyone benefits from knowing about Watergate. But it's hard for investigative reporters to capture the value they produce. Very few of the people who cared about Watergate bought subscriptions to the Washington Post. There's no reason to - you can let the Washington Post uncover Watergate at no cost to you, then hear about it for free on the nightly news. The traditional solution is bundled media. Newspapers have their profitable bread-and-butter in the form of easy things like commentary and sports, then do some unprofitable investigative reporting on the side to gain prestige.
But what about important stories that can't easily be translated into prediction markets? I'm looking at the front page of today's Washington Post, which has something about how there's a culture of sexism in some important military school. This could charitably be termed investigative reporting - we can imagine the journalist painstakingly tracked down women at that military school, heard their stories, hunted down documents proving that this school discriminated against women in some way, et cetera. But even assuming it's true, how would you translate this into a prediction market? Maybe some important person is more likely to fire the head of this military school now that they know he allowed a culture of misogyny to continue there? But number one, this would require there to be prediction markets in the careers of every military school principal. And number two, this relies on some pretty strong assumptions about how likely it is that some head honcho really wants to fire anyone who perpetuates a culture of sexism. There are potential ways to get around the second problem - you can imagine that, this having been revealed, the school will take actions to change it, and the self-reported life satisfaction of women in the school will go up - a measurable result. But just brings us back to problem one again - you have to have a pre-existing prediction market on the life satisfaction of every demographic group in every school in the country!
Contra Acemoglu On...Oh God, We're Doing This Again, Aren't We?
July 27, 2021 · Original source
The Washington Post has published yet another "luminary in unrelated field discovers AI risk, pronounces it stupid" article. This time it's Daron Acemoglu. I respect Daron Acemoglu and appreciate the many things I’ve learned from his work in economics. In particular, I respect him so much that I wish he would stop embarrassing himself by writing this kind of article (I feel the same way about Steven Pinker and Ted Chiang).
Inline links: has published yet another, Ted Chiang
I certainly don’t mean to assert that AI definitely won’t cause unemployment or underemployment (for my full position, see here). I think it probably will, sometime soon, and I support discussing policies - eg universal basic income - that will help us be ready for this eventuality. But I think humility would require Acemoglu to admit that as of yet there’s either no sign of this, or perhaps only the weakest trace of a signal. And that’s a uniquely bad match for Acemoglu’s main argument - that we are not allowed to worry about speculative future effects of AI because there are visible current effects. I mean, it’s bad enough to assert the nonsensical claim that AI can’t cause future problems because it causes present problems. But if you’re going to submit an article to the Washington Post on that basis, you should at least do an exceptionally good job establishing that there really are present problems. I’m not sure Acemoglu clears that bar.
Inline links: here
Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story
August 08, 2021 · Original source
And suppose that there's some important story that ought to be broken soon. I'll randomly choose the Flint water lead crisis. Some intrepid reporter discovers high lead levels in Flint’s water system. She can't just report it unapproved, or she would be arrested. She can't immediately apply get FDA approval, because she doesn't have enough money to fund the studies it would take to prove that this isn't misinformation. So she shops around for a few years, trying to find a media company who will sponsor her studies. The whole time, she's checking in with the FDA, and the FDA is giving her helpful advice - "Yeah, try Washington Post, they sometimes fund things like this" - and sometimes they’re even helping her directly. She gets into a couple of fights with the Mayor of Flint about whether she's even allowed to conduct the study there at all, and for a while it seems like she’ll never be able to publish her report, and maybe the FDA helps walk her through this too. But eventually, five years after she learns about the crisis, some funder takes pity on her, the political stars align, she fills out her pile of paperwork, does her study, and submits her article for FDA approval. The FDA takes a few years to think about it, makes the right decision, and approves the article. Ten years after she first discovered the crisis, she is given permission to inform the public, and politicians and other actors can leap into action to solve it (haha, yeah right).
21
November 01, 2021 · Original source
Why the big shift? Washington Post blames McAuliffe’s comments that parents shouldn’t get to tell schools what to teach, putting him on the wrong side of debates over critical race theory, etc. And probably the thing where some of his supporters were caught pretending to be pro-Youngkin white nationalists didn’t help.
Inline links: blames, the thing where
Bounded Distrust
January 26, 2022 · Original source
Here’s a Washington Post article saying that Abraham Lincoln was friends with Karl Marx and admired his socialist theories. It suggests that because of this, modern attacks on socialism are un-American.
Inline links: Here’s a Washington Post article
A conservative might end up in the same position vis-a-vis the Washington Post as our hypothetical liberal and FOX News. They know it’s a biased source that often lies to them, but how often?
Here’s a Washington Post article saying that the 2020 election wasn’t rigged, and Joe Biden’s victory wasn’t fraudulent. In order to avoid becoming a conspiracy theorist, the conservative would have to go through the same set of inferences as the FOX-watching liberal above: this is a terrible news source that often lies to me, but it would be surprising for it to lie in this particular case in this particular way.
Inline links: Here’s a Washington Post article
What Caused The 2020 Homicide Spike?
June 29, 2022 · Original source
This is basically par for the course. Read New York Times’ or Washington Post’s The Atlantic’s or Pew’s or Voice of America’s articles on this same topic. They’re all exactly the same “It’s a complex combination of factors, we can never know for sure, but probably the pandemic is the most important thing”.
Inline links: New York Times’, Washington Post’s, The Atlantic’s, Pew’s, Voice of America’s
Nobody Knows How Well Homework Works
July 07, 2022 · Original source
One minor complaint about this methodology is that we don’t really know if anyone is reporting time spent on homework accurately. Cooper cites some studies showing that student-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates with test scores at a respectable r = 0.25. But in the same sample, parent-reported time-spent-on-homework correlates at close to zero. Cooper speculates that the students’ estimates are better than the parents’, and I think this makes sense - it’s easier to reduce a correlation by adding noise than to increase it - but in the end we don’t know. According to a Washington Post article, students in two very similar datasets reported very different amounts of time spent on homework - maybe because of the way they asked the question? I don’t know, self-report from schoolchildren seems fraught.
Inline links: a Washington Post article
22
August 16, 2022 · Original source
Regulatory approval in hand, Victoria’s market - PredictIt - became the top prediction market in the US, beloved by a community of over a hundred thousand traders - many of whom exchanged barbs at each other in its raucous and unmoderated comment section. PredictIt estimates were featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, and 538. Some of my best (and worst) memories are about following election results in real-time by watching the relevant PredictIt markets, which usually updated faster than any single other media site.
ACX Grants: Project Updates
November 04, 2022 · Original source
25: Sue Factory Farms That Are Illegally Abusing Chickens (8/10) Legal Impact For Chickens has since raised $800,000 (more than 10x their original ACX grant), is now a two-employee organization, and has filed its first lawsuit, Smith v. Vachris, which has received coverage in Washington Post, FOX Business, etc (if we rely on coverage in FOX to call out abusive chicken farmers, is that the FOX guarding the henhouse?) They are looking to hire another litigator, see ad here.
Inline links: Smith v. Vachris, Washington Post, FOX Business, see ad here
The Media Very Rarely Lies
December 22, 2022 · Original source
I criticized this story - repeated by Mic, New Republic, and the Washington Post - saying that only 0.01% of welfare users tested positive for drugs. If true, welfare recipients would use drugs at less than 1% of the rate of the general population - and, the articles heavily implied - conservatives worried about people spending their welfare money on drugs were therefore unscientific and bigoted. None of the stories mentioned that the “test” was just asking the welfare recipients whether they were taking drugs, with the threat of taking their welfare away if they said yes, and no attempt to check whether or not they were lying. A few of the articles mentioned a different attempt at urine drug tests, which only a few recipients failed - but didn’t mention that they had the option of not taking the drug tests and that many people (probably including all the drug users) chose not to take it. Some would say this is important context! But again, there are no outright lies - 0.01% was the true result of this (very stupid) test.
Inline links: criticized this story, Mic, New Republic, Washington Post
Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying
December 29, 2022 · Original source
Scalia died while on a hunting trip, staying at the lodge of the International Order Of St. Hubertus. They were founded in 1605, their members wear green robes, and their current leader is “Grand Master Imperial Highness Archduke Istvan von Habsburg-Lothringen.” The Washington Post has an article about it here.
Inline links: here
For some reason, conspiracy theorists find this concerning, and have been fretting over it for the past hundred years or so. Anyway, this is where some people decided to found a US branch of the Order of St Hubertus. All of this is attested to by the Washington Post article linked above, Wikipedia, and a bunch of other sources; as far as I know nobody seriously denies it.
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
2023
January 31, 2023 · Original source
Taking Stock Prediction market users really want stocks. “Stock” in this sense means an instrument that measures the status of a person, group, or idea. When their status goes up, the stock goes up. When their status goes down, the stock goes down. It feels like a natural way to bet on things like “I’m bearish on Elon Musk and think everyone else is overestimating him.” It’s hard to turn this vague idea into a real financial instrument. You could try tying it to their Twitter follower count, or Google search trends, or net worth, but none of these exactly track “status”. If Musk commits murder in broad daylight, his search volume will go up, his Twitter follower count will stay about the same, his net worth might not be affected, but his status will have gone way down. The current solution is to make no effort whatsoever to moor stocks to the real world and just hope they work out. This could work! It’s kind of like a Ponzi scheme or crypto token. Some big influencer endorses MoonCoin, and MoonCoin goes up, because MoonCoin has gained status, which means more people will want to buy it, because it’s even more likely that more people will want to buy it later. Crypto tokens keep a fig leaf of “and maybe in the cyberpunk future when all transactions everywhere have switched to crypto this will really pay off”, but over time that fig leaf became increasingly threadbare, and a fun low-stakes instrument like Manifold stocks might do fine without it. But the 0% to 100% prediction scale is a bad match for stocks. If Elon started at 50% in 2000, then when Tesla made it big he surely should have doubled. And that brings him up to 100% and leaves nowhere for him to go. Also, people who bet on Elon Musk in 2000 might be miffed that their prescient choice only doubled their money. Probably the solution is some kind of cardinal number. But which one, and at what scale? Again, the lesson from crypto is that maybe it doesn’t matter. Just start at 10 or something or something and see where it ends up. Manifold leadership isn’t totally resigned yet to having stocks be meaningless Ponzi schemes. If you have a better idea for how to run stocks, leave it in the comments here and they’ll probably see it. CFTC vs. PredictIt Update So far it’s not clear if this means indefinite normal operation, or if they’ll spend the extra time trying to wind existing markets down. The overall chance of them winning their lawsuit remains unchanged at around 25%. PredictIt has gotten some sympathetic news coverage, including from the Washington Post. In the process, the Post tried to get some clarity on what terms of the no-action letter PredictIt violated, apparently without success: @CFTC why they're shutting PredictIt down. They give no real answer, just as in the original withdrawal letter. Closest thing we have to an answer is that they don't want other prediction markets. But why? No sense here at all. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023… ","username":"RichardHanania","name":"Richard Hanania","profile_image_url":"","date":"Tue Jan 24 18:12:59 +0000 2023","photos":[{"img_url":"https://pbs.substack.com/media/FnQbawZaYAAKRws.jpg","link_url":"https://t.co/zeKhe8sjnT","alt_text":null}],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":8,"like_count":39,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> @StephenPiment I'm flat appalled the CFTC said \"you violated terms\", but won't tell anyone, @PredictIt included, which ones, and then has big enough balls to try to get the judge to dismiss PI's \"shotgun\" defense. Um, with no info what other case COULD they make?\n","username":"kmett","name":"Edward Kmett","profile_image_url":"","date":"Sun Nov 27 19:01:29 +0000 2022","photos":[],"quoted_tweet":{},"reply_count":0,"retweet_count":8,"like_count":21,"impression_count":0,"expanded_url":{"url":"https://www.bonus.com/news/cftc-predictit-hearings-coming/","image":"https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/8d5a1d5e-49ee-4294-84cd-eb5a4259bbc3_1200x800.jpeg","title":"Hearings Coming Soon in PredictIt Lawsuit, CFTC Asks to Dismiss","description":"The CFTC is seeking to have the PredictIt lawsuit dismissed, while the plaintiffs want the case fast-tracked due to the shutdown deadline.","domain":"bonus.com"},"video_url":null,"belowTheFold":true}" data-component-name="Twitter2ToDOM"> I guess they’ll have to give some kind of explanation during the hearing, right? Related: Richard Hanania has an article on How To Legalize Prediction Markets. The actual advice isn’t very surprising, and mostly boils down to “write letters to the government officials in charge of this”, but like other people I learned something new from the details: In the United States, prediction markets are, with a few minor exceptions, against the law. If you don’t have a legal background, you might think that means that Congress at some point considered the issue, decided people shouldn’t be able to bet on real world events, and passed a law to that effect, which was then signed by the president. But this is not what happened. As with most things, Congress has never directly considered the matter. Rather, prediction markets are illegal due to the discretion of a government agency called the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). Why does it have this right? And on what basis has it made prediction markets illegal? […] In 1936, Congress passed and FDR signed the Commodity Exchange Act. In 1974, Congress created the CFTC to enforce the original law, which has been amended on multiple occasions over the years. The CFTC has authority to regulate what are called “derivatives markets.” A derivatives contract derives its value from some kind of underlying asset or benchmark in the real world. The thing to understand about derivatives is that the baseline is that they’re legal. That’s why you can “bet” on the price of oil through a futures contract. The CFTC wasn’t created to ban derivative markets, but to regulate them, though this can involve prohibiting certain kinds of markets altogether. Current law includes the following provision on event contracts, [banning]: activity that is unlawful under any Federal or State law;
Inline links: remains unchanged at around 25%, Washington Post, How To Legalize Prediction Markets, can involve
Galton, Ehrlich, Buck
May 15, 2023 · Original source
The West didn’t just tolerate this process, they supported it and cheered it on. The Ford and Rockefeller Foundations provided much of the funding. Western media ranged from supportive to concerned-for-the-wrong-reasons; my favorite example of the latter is the Washington Post’s Compulsory Sterilization Provokes Fear, Contempt. It worried that the campaign produced too much backlash:
Inline links: Compulsory Sterilization Provokes Fear, Contempt
Your Book Review: Public Citizens
June 23, 2023 · Original source
A Washington Post columnist nicknamed the group “Nader’s Raiders,” and it stuck. The Raiders decide that their first target would be the Federal Trade Commission, which Nader believed had become too cozy with the businesses it was supposed to regulate and failed to live up to its ostensible mission of protecting the American consumer. They quickly wrote and released a blistering report that, among other things, accused the FTC of being rife with “alcoholism, spectacular lassitude, office absenteeism, and incompetence by even the most modest standard.”
Book Review: The Origins Of Woke
May 01, 2024 · Original source
If a major newspaper being influenced in its staffing and editorial choices by civil rights law seems too absurd to contemplate, consider that Felicia Sonmez, a reporter for the Washington Post, sued her employer on the grounds that it was discriminatory to take her off #MeToo stories after she talked about her own alleged sexual assault. Although her suit was dismissed in 2022, newspapers are no different than other employers in responding to incentives. Sonmez was eventually fired by the Washington Post in 2022 for weeks of publicly attacking coworkers on Twitter. It is reasonable to wonder whether the employer’s hesitancy to part ways with her was based on the incentives created by civil rights law and their downstream cultural effects.
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
Time to own the libs! ACX joins such based heterodox thinkers as Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, and David Duke in telling you what the woke Washington Post and failing LA Times don’t want you to know: Donald Trump is the wrong choice for US President.
Inline links: Curtis Yarvin, Nick Fuentes, Richard Spencer, David Duke, the woke Washington Post, LA Times
Another is that Trump might threaten opponents with jail time (or simply loss of government contracts) unless they support him. I don’t know whether Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris was motivated by fear, but it’s a good model for the type of situation I worry about.
Inline links: Jeff Bezos’ decision to shift Washington Post away from endorsing Harris