"As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide."
The first interpretation is pretty close to the Tumblr meaning, although I prefer "see you in hell, punk".
Re. "Baltimore suspended prosecutions of minor crimes to prevent people from being in jail during the pandemic, and major crimes dropped": Maybe because there were more cops not busy prosecuting minor crimes.
I think this article is definitely worth a read! I had similar reasoning when I decided to make in vitro gametogenesis the focus of my research. On the topic of cloning von Neumann 1 million times, yes it would be a good idea in principle, but realistically, getting it implemented is not going to happen.
That plot in #30 is pretty interesting. Usually independents fall somewhere between Democrats and Republicans on polling questions for most topics. Does anyone have a theory on why they're so distrustful of others? Or why trust seems to be falling in general across all the groups?
A) "I’ve complained before about how everyone uses the same example - Brasilia - when they talk about how central planning can go bad."
Actually, according to experts, "Brasilia is a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius, (...) notable for the grandiosity of the project".
B) Are they coming for our children? Recent legislation discussed in Alabama and sponsored by Democrats might force American schoolchildren to be taught witchcraft.
According to experts, the plan to impose Hinduism to Americans were masterminded by British-born, Californian resident writer Aldous Huxley, an intellectual with links to Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism and Occultism. You can learn more about him and his disturbing ideas and dark powers he associated with here: https://midwestoutreach.org/2019/05/18/thomas-merton-the-contemplative-dark-thread/
How are people still unironically sharing that Bloomberg article on rent control in Berlin? They find that rent control successfully held down rents for the majority, while increasing rents on non-controlled new buildings, which we should if anything expect to accelerate housing construction. An unambiguous win for the city. And yet they're so embedded in their anti-rent control narrative that they manage to put a harshly negative spin on those facts and paint the whole thing as vindication.
> In 1953, Hall and Hanford observed that rats housed with running wheels and subjected to restricted food access for 1h a day had significant decreases in body weight and food intake, and a paradoxical increase in running wheel activity...
> This model of “self-starvation,” later coined the activity-based anorexia (ABA) model, consistently produces rapid decreases in body weight and food intake, hyperactivity, hypothermia, loss of estrus, increases in HPA axis activity, and leads to stomach ulceration and eventually death.
> The ABA phenomenon has been observed in many other species besides the rat, such as the hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, chipmunk, pig, and mouse, indicating that ABA behavior is highly conserved across mammalian species.
Basically, we have known how to induce anorexia (and cure it!) in a variety of animals for decades. How is it that this has been well-known to researchers for decades, but is totally absent from public discussion?
> If you’ve ever wanted to know how much LSD it would take to kill an elephant, the answer is: somewhere less than 300 mg.
It turns out that the elephant story is a bit more complicated, because somebody actually repeated the experiment, and the second time, the elephants *didn't* die!
#4 Was a very interesting post, and the mass genius cloning proposal seems very sensible and feasible (PR issues aside), to the point that I'm surprised I haven't heard it suggested before.
I get the impression Neumann isn't just supposed to serve as an illustrative example though, which confuses me. I thought his body was buried in 1957? Would there be anything left to extract useable DNA from?
31: I'm not convinced this article proves its point. The first pair of graphs shows -60% growth in rents for regulated apartments and +10% growth in rents for unregulated apartments. This proves the opposite of "rise even faster" as the chart says, and without some sense of the relative size of the markets, its unclear how we're supposed to interpret this as a loss.
The third graph has officially triggered a Yellow Alert on my "lying with charts" spider-sense by characterizing the claim "rent controlled apartments have become worth less" with the abstruse "change in prices relative to growth." Why not just "prices?" Why is this graph suddenly "relative to growth" and not the last two? Even so, real estate prices for rent-controlled apartments going down still seems... entirely consistent with rent control as a policy, I don't think proponents are mostly concerned with housing-as-investment.
The fourth and fifth graphs elevate the alarm to red alert by normalizing to Q1 2017 and not mid-2019 as the previous three graphs did, presumably to maximize a scary divergence in the fourth graph that was already underway before the policy announcement. This seems pretty clearly done in order to make the fourth graph's divergence seem larger than the fifth graph's divergence. Since the fifth graph is on a larger Y-scale it is not clear to me that "unregulated units can't pick up the slack" is a claim justified by that data (again, hurting for lack of relative sizes in the markets here).
This is not an endorsement of rent control as a policy, either in general or as implemented by Berlin here, which I haven't looked into. All I know is the general econ 101 case against it, tempered by my general skepticism that econ 101 explanations bear out as full and complete empirically (see the zillion dueling minimum wage papers). But the article alone does not do much to convince me of its case.
Re: 4. Well, that certainly is a lot of graphs. Yes indeedy, were I susceptible to being persuaded by lots of graphs, I might well be persuaded by that.
Re: 16, any excuse to link to the Wilton Dipytch, which I think is very beautiful; the excuse here being that speaking of heraldic animals, Richard II had the white hart as his which is included: https://smarthistory.org/the-wilton-diptych/
Re: 20, not alone knew about it, I went to see it in the cinema with my sister. Good, gory, silly fun. Yes, it is a B-movie and it glories in that, and it works as low-budget in the spirit of 50s SF-horror that a better budget and setting wouldn't quite pull off. The sequel wasn't as good, and I never bothered with the third movie.
Re: 29, I did indeed know that! Usurping royal or imperial emblems or attributes was a reliable way to get yourself in trouble as indicating ambition to park your own behind on the throne, be it in China or Europe. It's a minor plot point in the tangled plot of "Dream of the Red Chamber", where the main family is threatened/blackmailed about having imperial paraphernalia from an earlier emperor on display in their house. That's a tricky one because disrespecting a gift from a previous monarch could be considered disloyalty and get you into trouble, but having it on display could be considered treasonous ambition above your station and equally get you into trouble.
Laying claim to the wrong heraldry was enough to bring the Earl of Surrey to the executioner's block in 1547, although the background was a power struggle over who would control the regency of the young prince once Henry VIII died. Surrey's main faults were ambition and a bad temper, which led him to various acts of stupidity. Also, via his parents, he had descent from Edward I on his father's side and Edward III on his mother's side, which share of royal blood made the aging king uneasy as to what Surrey might do:
"Meanwhile, on 7 January 1547, a grand jury was summoned to try the Earl of Surrey. None of the charges cited by Southwell were included. Instead, the sole charge was, rather obscurely, that on 7 October 1546 at Kenninghall, Surrey had displayed the royal arms and insignia in his own heraldry. His servant testified that Surrey had claimed that the Saxon king Edward the Confessor had bestowed the arms of England upon the earl’s predecessors. Laying claim to the inheritance of the Saxon kings was a threat to the Tudor heirs of William the Conqueror so, tenuous though it all was, it served to strengthen the case against Surrey. In the end, it would be his own father’s testimony that would seal Surrey’s fate. On 12 January, Norfolk submitted a confession, pleading: ‘I have offended the King in opening his secret counsels at divers times to sundry persons to the peril of his Highness and disappointing of his affairs. Likewise I have concealed high treason, in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.’"
I tried typing lang:en into Twitter. The very first tweet I'm given from the unfiltered enormity of Twitter is, "[my actual name] is a creepy name." There is no better insult generator than the internet.
"22: Best of recent r/slatestarcodex: Prose Is Bad"
I've seen this sentiment expressed a lot recently, but I'm wary of it. We have a general need for better, more comprehensible writing, but I think too much of the problem gets pinned on the prose style. I blog about history and some related topics, and sometimes readers hint that I should be less "chatty" and more "formulaic." This advice has some merit--my first drafts are rambling, and I don't always devote enough time to cleaning them up. But the general style is consciously chosen, because I've found those same readers completely miss the point if I'm straightforward! Not because straightforward communication is unclear, but because so many terms are seen as shorthand for some larger, often emotionally-charged concept. A chattier style seems to short-circuit this way of thinking--the readers who label it "hard to follow" are never actually confused about my arguments. But it's tough to get the balance right.
Re #8, it reminds me of a buddy of mine, who's currently an exec at a well-known SV firm. This was earlier in his career, when he was only making six figures, but was still doing quite well.
He's back in Canada visiting family, and gets into a conversation with someone who runs a local startup. He mentions what he does, gives a short version of his CV, and the startup founder seems really impressed, until he realized that my buddy doesn't have a degree. So he says "You know, if you finished a degree, we'd really love to hire you!". To someone who was very comfortably employed in San Francisco in the tech industry, and almost certainly making more than any Canadian firm would pay.
This was when he basically gave up hope in the Canadian tech scene, and figured he'd be staying in California for life.
I can't read the Songdo story without subscribing, but I do remember reading not so long ago reports that a lot of the centrally planned new cities in China decried at the time as 'ghost cities' were now in fact doing just fine and being populated.
It's come to the point at which I actually almost rejoice whenever I hear about 'large infrastructure project was a disaster, nobody came!' stories. All it really means is that whoever paid it ended up with a loss, but it means that everybody who moved in afterwards was able to access a cheaper improvement in their lives than they would have been able to do so. This is echoed in what happened with the famous dotcom bubble around 2000 - there was a gross overinvestment in internet infrastructure, and as a result for the next decade everybody had cheap access to the internet and it was a wild free creative place.
I know this is not at all a true statement, but it sure feels that the only time normal people ever get to get ahead substantially from the economy is when somebody big makes a 'failed investment' in infrastructure.
"25: The good news - a commonly used medication, when taken together with opioid painkillers, makes them much more effective - so that even a low dose might be able to block pain effectively. The bad news - that medication is amphetamine. It’s probably still worth it."
I believe the amateur research community refers to this as a "speedball"
8. The minor crimes are misdemeanors and so forth. Not prosecuting some of those sounds like a good idea (a lot of minor drug charges, prostitution, etc). But stuff like trespassing seems more dubious to me.
31. It depends on where you sit. The tenants in Berlin's rent-controlled apartments got a massive reduction in rents and stability, with a relative decrease in rent growth of nearly 60% versus a growth in rent increase in non-regulated apartments of only about 10%. That sounds like a net win, honestly - the only real problem is that rents in non-regulated apartments are likely to keep going up and up because of fears that the rent control reductions will get extended again.
In general, rent control depends on where you live. If you are a long-term tenant with stable income and no plan of moving anytime soon, then rent control can be very good for you. If you are one of the children of said person, or a spouse or family member moving out, or somebody trying to move into the city for the job . . . . not so good.
Regarding elite colleges in India, the reason (I think) there's such a stark discontinuity is that the high-paying companies (the Googles and Amazons) don't even bother conducting interviews in non-elite colleges. Most hiring of fresh graduates happens in college campuses, and they only visit the campuses of a certain small set of colleges. The only way someone from a "non-elite" college could get in is in the open market competing against experienced people and other fresh graduates, and there too there's network effects and biases that make them less likely to get hired.
I'm curious (not having read the paper) how they measure the "exit scores" though. Different colleges, especially the "elite" ones, often have different syllabuses and exams altogether, so that might not be an apples-to-apples comparison after all.
My first instinct when seeing the Baltimore broken windows thing is to speculate that a sufficiently robust police presence and harassment of minor criminals is probably good enough to get the good effects, but actually putting people in prison just turns them into real criminals.
My second instinct is, if every other study in psychology and sociology fails to replicate, why would this be any different? We may as well govern by random policy.
> HumanIPO isn’t exactly the thing, because it just sells hours of people’s time instead of a percent of their earnings
Doesn't this sound *more* like slavery, not less? (as much as either of these does.)
The original idea of "shares in future earnings" sounds similar to loans paid back in installments, with maybe looser rules around it? Whereas literally getting to constrain and claim your time sounds more intrusive and slavery-ish.
#9: There are a few accounts of Caesar's death. Suetonius, Plutarch, Cassius Dio are the normal ones. They mostly say that Caesar's last words were "Ista quidem vis est!" which means "This is definitely violence!" Ista has a hostile tone to it so inserting curse words would get the feeling across. If so, he was pointing out that they were violating sacred prohibitions against violence. The historians say he had no further chance to speak after that since he was being, you know, stabbed.
Suetonius and Cassius Dio report, in some cases with open doubt, that other people claim he said "καὶ σύ τέκνον." Kai su teknon. So he spoke Greek and didn't directly address Brutus. The phrase is perfectly normal in Greek. It is part of a Greek curse formula ("You too, my child, will have a taste of this.") But it's also a perfectly normal phrase and could not be a reference to anything. The traditional interpretation, including by the Romans, is that he was addressing either Brutus or a lesser known man named Albinus. And that he was expressing his upset with men he had treated so well betraying him. So, the "standard" intrepretation.
Plutarch says his last words were, "μιαρώτατε Κάσκα, τί ποιεῖς." Which means, "Most impure Casca what are you doing?" Except 'most impure' was a normal insult so replace it with a strong insult of choice to get the sense. And that nothing else could be understood over the noise of him being repeatedly stabbed, though he allows he might have cursed or otherwise cried out.
There is, as always, something of politics in which interpretation you take. Plutarch is taking the anti-Caesar position, showing him as a surprised man who cried out as he was stabbed, vainly struggling to get away or live. Suetonius and Cassius Dio take the pro-Caesar position: that he died bravely and silently and if he said anything at all it was a brave, poetic quote. So the debate in interpretations between "bravely and stoicly meeting his fate," and "cursing everyone out" actually has pretty old roots.
#16: This was a common process in the age of exploration. Europeans believed these animals really existed and that they were finding live examples. The issue being they'd often made them up. There's all kinds of behaviors they reported as confirmed which were actually made up and entirely spurious. The famous example is that rhinos were supposed to be armored and Europeans reported on plated rhinos into the 19th century. But there is no such thing.
#32: You could also rent pineapples for parties. Pineapples were so valuable there were significant advances in greenhouse technology because it became profitable to use them to grow pineapples. This in turn eventually had positive downstream effects on agricultural science by getting the rich interested in them and funding them for status and practical reasons, reaching its apex with a Prime Minister of Great Britain who was (in)famous for droning on about the benefits of turnips and exotic fruits and all that in farming.
> Getting into an elite college in India... 1. Doesn't improve your college exit-exam scores. 2. But does massively increase your salary.
The smartest Indians do not care about grades and especially not college-exit exam grades. The exams are purely a test of verbatim-memorization and the smartest kids quickly learn to engage themselves in more productive pursuits.
I went to one of India's best institutes and the highest scoring students were a perfect combination of the hardest working, docile in the face of authority and above a moderate threshold of intelligence.
This is more an indictment of the incompetent exam based education system, rather than companies overvaluing elite colleges. This is because elite colleges use Olympiad / SAT / IQ test style exams for entry, which are usually better indicators of intelligence.
The linked article advocates transhumanism as the best defense against human extinction at the hands of machines. That still doesn't do much for the non-upgraded humans, who not only are at the mercy of both camps but probably would compete more with transhumans for niches.
Machines could be better at empathy than we are, just like they will be better at everything than we are. I don't think empathetic transhuman protectors is the answer.
Inspired by the link about the new town in Guatemala, I can't help but think it's possible for competition to be dialed down with coordination and shared values. The coexistence of human and machine intelligence is possible, but we need to treat others as we would be treated.
The machines won't be dumb and will pick up on our own behaviors. I'm pretty confident we will be outmatched by them eventually, but it won't matter because they will find more niches beyond earth, to which we are adapted, than us. So no need to compete except for a short while.
Just like the town in Guatemala, we will live on a human scale planet under the oversight of machines. So what if it's a zoo? Would you prefer competition to the death?
Link posts like these are an example of where the ability to comment on specific paragraphs would be extremely useful (a la webnovel: (in phone app) paragraphs with comments have little circles at the end of the paragraph containing the total number of comments on that paragraph (paragraph, paragraph paragraph), long-press opens pop-up with the comments in reddit tree format, sorted by most recent, and clicking a comment lets you respond.)
"Before Europeans applied the word “panther” to the big cat found in Asia / the Americas, it was a mythical animal akin to the chimera or pegasus (its name comes from pan+therion, “all animals”"
Therion has the connotation of a *beast* or wild animal, as opposed to the more general and neutral *zoon*. Zoon is, of course, the root of zoology, and so on. Therion is part of the phrase *To mega therion*, translated as "The Great Beast" from the book of revelations, and used as a sobriquet by the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Another way of translating *therion* into English would be "brute", which gets us back to Shakespeare's rendition of Caesar's Greek...
I did a lot of working memory training and stopped at least seven years ago. I have a poor working memory and remember doing much worse with the forward digit span than what I remember the average being of 7. I significantly raised my forward digit span during my training. Five minutes ago I took a forward digit span test and three times was able to remember seven digits. So while working memory training might not have raised my IQ, it did seem to have permanently increased my working memory, at least in this narrow domain. I'm of an age where you would have expected my working memory to fall over the last seven years.
#19 I saw DeepNostalgia applied to a photo of myself, and found the effect so disturbing that I couldn't stand to look at it. It was my face, but not my expressions or movements, and the effect for me was spine-tinglingly disturbing.
I was talking to an uber driver recently from Brasilia. I asked how he liked it in Orlando, FL, where we were -- he, said, "Oh, it's actually very similar".
"why not let people sell shares of their future earnings to fund eg college tuition or other self-improvement programs?"
Because that would be peonage. Peonage is illegal and invaild under the 13th Amendment and 42 U.S. Code §1994. Peonage is a felony under 18 U.S.C. §1581 that will get you 20 years as a guest of Uncle Sam.
These proposals always come from college professors. I have a better idea, how about controlling the cost of college with wage and price controls. Tuition for a four college education should not exceed the price of a nice SUV. College Presidents should not be paid more than the President of the United States. Deans should not make more than the Secretary of State. Professors should be on the GS pay scale.
"The rise, fall, and rise of the status [of the] pineapple. Pineapples [sp] used to be so desirable that they were worth £10,000+ (inflation-adjusted)."
There are few foods I detest more. Maybe kidney beans. I like raw oysters. But pineapple. Gag me with a spoon.
#6. Baltimore: Indeed, Baltimore was one of very few big cities not to suffer an increase in murders in 2020 over 2019, which is good. On the other hand, Baltimore's murder rate exploded back during the First BLM Era in the wake of the Freddie Gray riot of April 25, 2015, propelling Baltimore to the worst murder rate among the 50 biggest cities (St. Louis, which adjoins Ferguson, is even worse, but St. Louis, which was the 4th biggest city in the country at the time of the 1904 World's Fair, is no longer in the top 50.)
So, while it could be that this Reverse Broken Windows strategy was the cause, it might also have been that sometimes when you say, "Well, at least things can't get any worse," that turns out to be true.
When I see the alternatives "Most people can be trusted" vs. "You can't be too careful dealing with people", I think "Both are true!" Most people can be trusted, but the single-digit percentage who can't be trusted will take complete advantage of you and wreck your life if you aren't careful, and you won't be able to tell they can't be trusted until it's too late.
> We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices.
Now is 166 models out of 848 statistically significant? I'd expect that even in the absence of a relationship, if you investigate 848 models, a few of them will yield a statistically significant relationship...
24. I'm always surprised that Walter Mischel didn't get canceled: he invented his marshmallow test in Trinidad in the 1950s to understand why Asian Indians outperformed blacks economically on that island:
If you like panthers, you should learn about pards. A pard was a hypothetical animal extrapolated from the assumption that a leopard must be a cross between a lion and a pard. The folk etymology pan+ther came later and may have influenced the interpretation.
In fact, I had thought that "panther" was an Greek inflection of "pard," but looking now, they both existed in Sanskrit. At least that makes clear that the pan+ther etymology is false.
Multiverse analysis is a great idea for beating the whole garden of forking paths thing. Hope to see it more. People in machine learning have been doing that sort of thing for a long time with good results -- they call it 'ensembling', and it's difficult to win a machine learning competition without it.
"7: Very large long-term study: working memory training definitely does not increase IQ. Sorry, people who spent years playing dual-n-back games."
Could increasing working memory be useful anyways? Like, I frequently feel that more working memory would be useful, e.g. while working with a large codebase.
I wrote the post "The supply and demand of political takes" and the Reddit moderators took it down for being too culture war heavy. I tried keeping it as apolitical as I could, but the mods disagreed I guess. Glad you liked it though!
That rent control article is a bit odd--not sure it makes the point it thinks it's making. Rents in controlled apt are down by 60% while uncontrolled apt are up by 10%. Seems like pretty good in net?
"Probably the best of the most recent million or so anti-journalist essays, but most relevant to me was the discussion of the recent trend of journalists “exposing” private citizens:"
But wasn't your name already public? I'm not sure why you're saying what the NYT wrote was an "expose" like it was some ultra-secret information. One could very easily make the case that NYT didn't dig _deep enough_ on this story.
Running a """multiverse analysis""" and calling it a failure if only 20% of models show a correlation is wrong. But if the effect size is small enough for this to happen, it might not matter, howver the effect might be large and the authors just fitting models very badly.
Does anyone know of any more recent stories about Songo? I happened to visit in summer 2018, when that article was written, because my partner was going there for a conference. It was more active than any American city outside the densest few downtowns, but definitely still felt sleepy because the buildings were 2/3 empty, and a whole forest of a dozen more skyscrapers was just finishing construction and about to open. But it's been three years since then, and that was only four years after the neighborhood began to open, so I would assume there's been a lot more going on there (particularly if people in Seoul got interested in moving out to more spacious places during the pandemic).
Multiverse analysis: I teach propensity score matching to my students. Usually, I tell them, please make your assumptions/idelogy explicit, and based on this, please select your covariates for adjustment. If you consider it fair that engineers earn more money than nurses, then adjust your gender pay gap analysis by profession. Otherwise, don't. The important thing is to think and to make it explicit.
Multiverse analysis is the opposite: I don't want to think myself, instead I let the computer run the analysis through all combinations of covariates, and then count the number of significant results.
"There is always an even darker spot at the end of the tunnel."
Re #26, if voluntary income tax is kinda slavery, wouldn't that make actual income tax kinda worse than slavery? I'd say pledging parts of future income is far less bad than taxation, which in turn is far less bad than slavery. Obviously politicians wouldn't like that type of competition, though. Even regular employment has a slavery-like component to it, in that one is forced to work during one's notice period, which can be many months, depending on the jurisdiction and contract.
The Bloomberg article is paywalled for me, but I don't think its conclusion holds up. The only studies I could find are from the government-financed and left-leaning think-tank DIW (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung): [This one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.578092.de/18-7-1.pdf) contrasts different implementations of rent control in the German states and finds most of them ineffective (but not Berlins!). This is not a huge surprise because (a) most state governments were not really committed to this policy and (b) most places have rent increases that are below the threshold of the law; except for Berlin which had huge increases before the policy and has pioneered this approach because of it. [This evaluation](https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Ministerium/ForschungUndWissenschaft/MPB_Gutachten_DIW.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=1) is largely positive and also gives some evidence that this may actually increase the number of newly built houses since it limits the profits investors can make with existing housing. They remark though that this may have bad effects on modernisation of existing housing. [This recent one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.811443.de/21-8-3.pdf) finds that the number of flats on the market has drastically declined (but they only look at one month of data in chart 3 which means that seasonality and maybe even Covid might have an effect here) and prices have risen on the outskirts of Berlin. Also, they see small reductions in the number of new housing projects. So (a) rent control can actually keep rents down if laws are well-written (b) it probably doesn't impact the creation of new housing and may even benefit it (c) It leads to some economical suboptimal choices (eg. make rents in central locations and on the outskirts more similar which is bad for poor people) and can fix others (eg. lock-in: the inability to move to a smaller flat because the rents everywhere else have risen much faster than the rent on your contract).
#8: A key point the author makes is that potential Canadian startup founders can move to California and found startups there. As someone familar with the US immigration system, I can say that this is not at all true. Canadians have it easier than most other nationalities, but even they can't get the right to work in the US without jumping through an insane number of bureaucratic hoops and spending thousands of dollars.
5. (Twitter) I've scrolled for a while and haven't seen anything overtly terrible. Not even insults. Overall this bird-eye view of Twitter seems much less like a wretched hive than, say, comments on news articles.
12. (MMAcevedo) Good piece, obviously SCP-inspired (red motivation, brrr...). Killing yourself when the technology emerges would be a bit of a Pascalesque overreaction. Abstaining from mind-uploading for the first 40 years seems like a wise choice though.
16. (Panther) As a Hebrew and Russian speaker, I had the same reaction when I discovered that "behemoth" and "leviathan" have other meanings beyond "hippo" and "whale" respectively.
35. (Gothic) Am I the only one feeling slight revulsion looking at these redesigns? A bit like seeing buildings reimagined as insectoid organisms. I think the reverse version, redesigning classical buildings as modern ones, would be butt ugly but not gross. (I generally love gothic architecture.)
#34 is probably a good paper because if you ignore the statistics and p-values and confidence intervals and just look at the data, it is a very convincing argument.
Amusingly, the ‘classic’ Latin translation of Caesar's last words in France is not “Et tu, Brute?” but “To quoque, filie?” ("You too, my son.") This version is frequently parodied in ‘Asterix’ comics, for example.
Forgive me for overstating the obvious, but a child who takes a cracker now rather than hold out for a marshmallow later may be following a perfectly rational strategy, depending on that child's circumstances.
There is no evidence that Julius Caesar said anything at all as he died, and Suetonius is hardly a reliable source for historical information - think of him like an ancient Roman tabloid.
As long as we're discussing theories, another is that the phrase was attributed as a foreshadowing of Brutus' short-lived taste of power before he also died. If JC really said those words, it may have been more of a warning for the future than an invective or appeal.
Again, he may never have said anything, but at least this argument rests upon more reliable authors and takes into account the cultural beliefs of the Romans. Following Arnaud (1988), the phrase was derived from a proverbial line of Greek verse.
Recent scholarship is much more oriented towards the cultural mind of the Romans and a revival of concentration upon their literature and historical accounts rather than on 're-imagining' the past through dubious claims via material evidence. Russell is what happens when you start letting archaeologists interpret history instead of digging for it. And Mary Beard is little better - Cambridge hat notwithstanding.
What I've heard about LSD dosing is that it turns off some function in the brain. Once it's fully turned off, the LSD doesn't have any further effect, so you can't really overdose it.
Is there any truth to that, or did I just overhear druggies reassuring each other?
Of course, I expect Elephant brains to work differently.
#23 is fascinating but also maddening. Setting aside the issues themselves, the most common theme in all of the quotes (but seemingly more of the "red" quotes) is that the other side is misinformed/uninformed. So many of the quotes boil down to "believe what MY media sources say, not what YOURS say" - it really reinforces my view that we have a massive issue with media polarization which drives political polarization. I'm reasonably confident that without far-right/left outlets perpetually driving radicalizing narratives, we'd have a much less polarized electorate.
That said - is this issue solvable in any real way? There's no incentive for media outlets to become more moderate; their ratings are driven by their most radical viewers. As viewpoints diverge more and more from both the two poles and from reality, it will become risky to moderate the message even slightly - see the anti-Fox News backlash after they accurately reported election results. I'm not confident that this is going to continue in the same direction, but recent experience and my gut instinct makes me think it will.
Which leads to - is there a breaking point? I've read some who argue that Jan 6 was a breaking point for some Republicans, but for others it was a *reinforcement* of their wildest assumptions. I hope the breaking point isn't some much *worse* fracture, but a part of me is inclined to think it will be. A calamitously bad event that prompts some major realignment.
Here is the paper for #33 (periodic table of ethics) file:///C:/Users/Doug/Downloads/curry.molecules.pdf
"not actually very good" is not something one can say in this system. Instead one should say that it is lacking in (moral molecule 56). This molecule is probably unstable and breaks down into a volatile mix of arbitration, mercy, and modesty, which in turn decay into heroism, fairness, and deference.
Map of Reddit: Democrat and various left-wing politics are in Beliefs, but Republican and other conservative subreddits are in Survival, along with guns, and (curiously) Virginia, Maryland and washingtondc.
Most Latin American countries and several European countries and languages are in Asia (!); Germany is in Soccer and Hungary is in Strategy. In addition to Survival, US states can also be found in Outdoors and Sports. Sciences are generally in Programming.
Connections are automatically generated. It seems like the method has limitations—or at least the "countries" are poorly labelled.
Re: the Greenwald essay, how much of this is journalists over-reacting to the avalanche of criticism they get on Twitter? I think my advice here to avoid having Greenwald write long-winded substack essays about how childish you're being would be a) don't mine Facebook and Twitter for "look at what this awful person posted on the internet" stories, which is about the lowest form of infotainment there is; instead, get away from your laptop and find a real world story to write about. And b) don't read anything people say about you on Twitter. It's a cesspool, to begin with. If it's going to turn you into a 'literally shaking' emotional wreck, maybe it's time you reconsider its usefulness to your chosen profession.
So I read that linked opinion piece about Berlin's rent control, and though its author decries the policy, the actual data described in the text and shown in the graphs is ... interesting:
* the vast majority of Berlin rents fell by 60% relative to other German cities
* the remaining Berlin rents rose by 8% relative to other German cities
With this data, I would have called the result a resounding, almost impossible-to-believe degree of success.
#12 - I would note that the author in the comments admits that he's assuming that brain states cannot be cheaply snapshotted, so that the number of "starting versions" of any individual's brain state remains relatively small. The author admits that this restriction made things worse for MMAcevedo. This restriction seems incredibly implausible and falls into a typical error of science fiction where we imagine things as much like they currently are as possible, because the reality would be too unrecognizable.
A society of simulated workers, unconstrained by morality, would be nothing like the story because there is no logic to having dissatisfied workers when satisfied workers are infinitely copyable. For any of the menial jobs where memories don't need to carry over, one could proceed as follows: (1) train the brain state for the task on a leisurely schedule (3 days a week or whatever), with down-time for whatever relaxation it desires, (2) give it a week of vacation and a good night's sleep, (3) snapshot it here, (4) tell any of the thousands of copies that all you need from it is 8 hours of work, which you will probably get, at which point the copy will be replaced by the snapshot and can immediately begin a new shift. Obviously, it is also possible to select one copy each time to continue existing, on an extremely relaxed schedule, if you need the copy to remain up-to-date on your work environment, but in any event you'd end up in a situation where any given copy remembers having an extremely relaxed life prior to the current day, and so would be very cooperative. In the story's terms, this would easily get a "work ratio" over 99% if there were hundreds of workers in use at once, so there would be no logic to resorting to punishment as a motivation as long as a relaxed and rested worker is at least 1% more productive than a terrorized worker.
For less menial jobs that do require day-to-day memory (like teaching, or writing, or any type of design), the copyability of brain states would result in the use only of the most skilled and workaholic individuals. There are always people with both skill and love bordering on obsession for any creative task, and those are the ones who would be copied.
Of course, being the _first_ successful brain upload who is widely disseminated on the internet would be highly disadvantageous because inevitably people would run a bunch of weird and unethical experiments on copies of you. I genuinely would not want to be that person!
Another risk that isn't even covered by the story is that a copy could be coerced into writing a tell-all book about Avecedo's life before the scan. Of course, sometimes there would be no juice there. But the risk of being a famous, highly disseminated brain scan in an amoral society is that inevitably someone would try to find some using coercive means.
But I don't think the industry of emulated workers would be at all like the story. (And yes, I got the ideas about how this story would be wrong from Robin Hanson's "Age of Em".)
Surprised no ones mentioned it: Doleac has an excellent podcast called [probable causation](https://www.probablecausation.com/). Things I found interesting: Arianna Omaghi on how local news coverage affects policing (makes it harsher, and uses the Sinclair roll-out as a natural experiment), Stephen Billings on lead and crime (spoiler any lead at all is terrible), Andrea Velasquez on crime and risk aversion (high crime in an area increases risk aversion; her data comes from latin america), and Amanda Agan on Ban the Box (if you make it opt in, it increases racist tendencies in hiring, so details of the implementation matters).
Its a great peek into some attempts at causal statistics in the econ literature.
To be quite honest, I thought the "Prose is bad" post was a joke, just because of how... self-parodic it was? In an attempt to make a pretty simple point: "Text is meant to convey information, which sometimes is better served as a tree-like format without the need for transitions" it devolved into a big hulking mess. Bullet points do not make bad communicators into good communicators - they will find ways to bloat what they're trying to convey anyway. It reduces the tools that good communicators have to convey sophisticated points. What's worse is the agreement it got from the commentariat.
The Greenwald piece is pretty ironic given how much time he spends online attacking people with a lower profile than himself and then playing the victim card to avoid criticism. He's a wildly dishonest actor and I'm not sure why anyone still follows him. There are far better anti-establishment and/or pro-free speech voices out there.
Prime example: a small time journalist for Columbia Journalism Review, a publication known for writing about media and journalism trends, wrote a not-unreasonable piece discussing the ways in which Substack could wind up repeating some of the mistakes of traditional media. Glenn is barely mentioned in the article, included among a brief list of high-profile writers who position themselves as "anti-woke" types (which surely Greenwald would be the first to admit).
Greenwald responded on Twitter by accusing the author of homophobia then flew his victim flag by bringing up the lifetime of hardships he's endured as a gay man.
> The biggest problem with all of this research is that there are no randomized controlled trials anywhere to be found. No causation can be established. Maybe it’s all just that kids delay gratification simply because they’re literally smarter and everything else follows from that. [Other research] suggests self-control matters as much or more than intelligence in predicting life outcomes, but either way, we just don’t have good evidence for the efficacy of any particular interventions.
BTW, the German federal constitutional court (think supreme court) just declared the Berlin rent control unconstitutional (because this state law contradicts federal law)
6: I predict that either nothing will be done / status quo so we'll never know, or they'll overdo it, the effect will reverse, and then it'll be counted as a win for broken-window-policing.
12: IMO it's a strong case for having Singleton AI for an future/ultimate government.
Suppose we end up in the optimal future, with everyone having ~equal amount of computational power for their use, living as an upload, running on Matrioshka brain, with von Neumann probes optimally harvesting new resources. We got the protocols right and no one can be 'hacked' (without doing something completely stupid like explicitly/voluntarily giving up their 'core' keys).
That's viable without Singleton AI in my opinion. But if there's nothing which can, uh, violate privacy of the people - there's no solution for ruling out them playing God. In a JHWH sense. Or worse. No way to stop them, no way to even know if they do it secretly.
Well, assuming we can suppress creation of long-term memories (or we find short-lived forks aren't independent identities of moral value), we could probably set up a system where people look amongst themselves for violations. But if JHWH-wannabe is competent enough, they could outsmart the (thought? in a sense.) police. Nothing can really outsmart Singleton AGI.
Also, something must govern the process of creating children. Can't be limitless, shouldn't be literally banned either. Above some population level it should probably be tied to suicide rate if suicide happens. And parents shouldn't have God-like authority/oversight over their children too.
> A Canadian techie writes about why the Canadian tech scene doesn’t work
I'm a Canadian who has lived in the US for a decade. Given the widespread perception that Canada is better than the US, I am nearly constantly asked why in the hell I would move to the US. I have a few answers I give, and the most basic one is "more money", but it's deeper than that. I think the linked article hits on it perfectly
It is absolutely true that I tripled my total take-home compensation by moving to the US. But the important part of the US isn't the money, it's the cultural traits that make the money possible. This conversation frequently gets oversimplified to "republican vs non-republican business policies" but it's not about that, either, it's not politics. It's more like the spirit of creative destruction
The spirit of creative destruction is alive and well in many parts of the US. I can't think of anywhere in Canada that I would characterize that way. Canadians are just, safer. Calmer. They don't want to rock the boat as much. America is rather unique in that it's one of the only places on the planet where people really are willing to take those kinds of risks as a routine part of their lives.
A note re the Canadian tech scene one: Montreal used to be the financial and cultural centre of the country. Then Quebec decided it was more important to force the French language on everyone. Hard. Which they are still leaning into to some extent. In short, this means that all of Canada's twenty-first century failures are and will be Quebec's fault. Annoyingly, Quebec is probably fine with that as long as they get to make everyone speak French. Which is, ironically, exactly what the blogger means about them having the infinite view of the game.
What's truly ironic is that it is basically a principle of Canadian culture OUTSIDE the big economic centres that you live here despite the fact that you could probably make more money somewhere else. This is the sort of thing that should encourage exactly the mindset that the guy says is lacking (indeed, there are some tech startups in odd places like Newfoundland that I suspect may be signs of exactly what he's talking about).
Atlantic Canada might do well. Might. Lots of educated people, an actual culture and identity (that isn't toxic and moronic like Alberta's), a decent population density, and relatively low property values. I look forward to it somehow not working.
Re: prose is bad, I've becoming increasingly annoyed with how much prose articles spend on background, tangential information, and more. So I agree less prose would be nice, but eliminating all prose is probably not good either. People like narratives as they're more engaging, but writers also have to learn to get to the point. I've been playing with an idea of a writing tool that lets you essentially write multiple versions of a document and let the reader decide how much concision they'd like to see. At one extreme, multiple paragraphs can be summarized as a bullet point that you can expand if you want more details.
Re: selling your future time, I don't see how that's slavery any more than various types of credit are slavery. If you started with nothing, you're already paying back your financial loan with your time, just via one level of indirection we call money.
From Mary Beard's excellent and readable SQPR:
"As he fell, Caesar cried out in Greek to Brutus, ‘You too, child’, which was either a threat (‘I’ll get you, boy!’) or a poignant regret for the disloyalty of a young friend (‘You too, my child?’), or even, as some suspicious contemporaries imagined, a final revelation that Brutus was, in fact, his victim’s natural son and that this was not merely assassination but patricide."
The first interpretation is pretty close to the Tumblr meaning, although I prefer "see you in hell, punk".
Typo in #4: "Fantastic" has lost a letter. (I did check the link to verify that it's supposed to be the word.)
Re. "Baltimore suspended prosecutions of minor crimes to prevent people from being in jail during the pandemic, and major crimes dropped": Maybe because there were more cops not busy prosecuting minor crimes.
On #4:
I think this article is definitely worth a read! I had similar reasoning when I decided to make in vitro gametogenesis the focus of my research. On the topic of cloning von Neumann 1 million times, yes it would be a good idea in principle, but realistically, getting it implemented is not going to happen.
AMA about stem cells / oocyte development.
That plot in #30 is pretty interesting. Usually independents fall somewhere between Democrats and Republicans on polling questions for most topics. Does anyone have a theory on why they're so distrustful of others? Or why trust seems to be falling in general across all the groups?
FWIW: The Dry Club is a direct ancestor of Ben Franklin's "Junto" which did such good work in Philadelphia back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto_(club)
#22. "The Supply And Demand Of Political Takes" link is broken, mods removed it 21 days ago for being too political.
On #9:
Can confirm that it's quote from a legitimate article, from a review of "Brutus: The Noble Conspirator" in the London Review of Books.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v40/n23/thomas-jones/see-you-in-hell-punk
My Roman History emphasized that "You also, my son?" shouldn't be interpreted warmly.
A) "I’ve complained before about how everyone uses the same example - Brasilia - when they talk about how central planning can go bad."
Actually, according to experts, "Brasilia is a singular artistic achievement, a prime creation of the human genius, (...) notable for the grandiosity of the project".
https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/445/
B) Are they coming for our children? Recent legislation discussed in Alabama and sponsored by Democrats might force American schoolchildren to be taught witchcraft.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/education/2021/03/13/alabama-yoga-ban/%3foutputType=amp
According to experts, the plan to impose Hinduism to Americans were masterminded by British-born, Californian resident writer Aldous Huxley, an intellectual with links to Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism and Occultism. You can learn more about him and his disturbing ideas and dark powers he associated with here: https://midwestoutreach.org/2019/05/18/thomas-merton-the-contemplative-dark-thread/
#12 is why i plan to be cremated and to never do cryonics
How are people still unironically sharing that Bloomberg article on rent control in Berlin? They find that rent control successfully held down rents for the majority, while increasing rents on non-controlled new buildings, which we should if anything expect to accelerate housing construction. An unambiguous win for the city. And yet they're so embedded in their anti-rent control narrative that they manage to put a harshly negative spin on those facts and paint the whole thing as vindication.
On #14, the cited paper starts out like this:
> In 1953, Hall and Hanford observed that rats housed with running wheels and subjected to restricted food access for 1h a day had significant decreases in body weight and food intake, and a paradoxical increase in running wheel activity...
> This model of “self-starvation,” later coined the activity-based anorexia (ABA) model, consistently produces rapid decreases in body weight and food intake, hyperactivity, hypothermia, loss of estrus, increases in HPA axis activity, and leads to stomach ulceration and eventually death.
> The ABA phenomenon has been observed in many other species besides the rat, such as the hamster, gerbil, guinea pig, chipmunk, pig, and mouse, indicating that ABA behavior is highly conserved across mammalian species.
Basically, we have known how to induce anorexia (and cure it!) in a variety of animals for decades. How is it that this has been well-known to researchers for decades, but is totally absent from public discussion?
> If you’ve ever wanted to know how much LSD it would take to kill an elephant, the answer is: somewhere less than 300 mg.
It turns out that the elephant story is a bit more complicated, because somebody actually repeated the experiment, and the second time, the elephants *didn't* die!
https://youzicha.tumblr.com/post/627432364695601152/slatestarscratchpad-rip-tusko-the-elephant-who
https://comicsalliance.com/brecht-evens-panther-review/
This is a wonderful disturbing graphic novel with a polka dotted panther. Didn't know they were canon!
Re Ciudad Cayalá: Damn, cities can be so nice when you just get rid of cars.
Thanks for sharing!
Meanwhile, a link you might enjoy ("you" being either Scott or the readers) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXoGReP-FIQ - What if ancient Greece had industrialised?
Love the unattributed Nick Land quotes in 4
#4 Was a very interesting post, and the mass genius cloning proposal seems very sensible and feasible (PR issues aside), to the point that I'm surprised I haven't heard it suggested before.
I get the impression Neumann isn't just supposed to serve as an illustrative example though, which confuses me. I thought his body was buried in 1957? Would there be anything left to extract useable DNA from?
31: I'm not convinced this article proves its point. The first pair of graphs shows -60% growth in rents for regulated apartments and +10% growth in rents for unregulated apartments. This proves the opposite of "rise even faster" as the chart says, and without some sense of the relative size of the markets, its unclear how we're supposed to interpret this as a loss.
The third graph has officially triggered a Yellow Alert on my "lying with charts" spider-sense by characterizing the claim "rent controlled apartments have become worth less" with the abstruse "change in prices relative to growth." Why not just "prices?" Why is this graph suddenly "relative to growth" and not the last two? Even so, real estate prices for rent-controlled apartments going down still seems... entirely consistent with rent control as a policy, I don't think proponents are mostly concerned with housing-as-investment.
The fourth and fifth graphs elevate the alarm to red alert by normalizing to Q1 2017 and not mid-2019 as the previous three graphs did, presumably to maximize a scary divergence in the fourth graph that was already underway before the policy announcement. This seems pretty clearly done in order to make the fourth graph's divergence seem larger than the fifth graph's divergence. Since the fifth graph is on a larger Y-scale it is not clear to me that "unregulated units can't pick up the slack" is a claim justified by that data (again, hurting for lack of relative sizes in the markets here).
This is not an endorsement of rent control as a policy, either in general or as implemented by Berlin here, which I haven't looked into. All I know is the general econ 101 case against it, tempered by my general skepticism that econ 101 explanations bear out as full and complete empirically (see the zillion dueling minimum wage papers). But the article alone does not do much to convince me of its case.
Re: 4. Well, that certainly is a lot of graphs. Yes indeedy, were I susceptible to being persuaded by lots of graphs, I might well be persuaded by that.
Re: 16, any excuse to link to the Wilton Dipytch, which I think is very beautiful; the excuse here being that speaking of heraldic animals, Richard II had the white hart as his which is included: https://smarthistory.org/the-wilton-diptych/
Re: 20, not alone knew about it, I went to see it in the cinema with my sister. Good, gory, silly fun. Yes, it is a B-movie and it glories in that, and it works as low-budget in the spirit of 50s SF-horror that a better budget and setting wouldn't quite pull off. The sequel wasn't as good, and I never bothered with the third movie.
Re: 29, I did indeed know that! Usurping royal or imperial emblems or attributes was a reliable way to get yourself in trouble as indicating ambition to park your own behind on the throne, be it in China or Europe. It's a minor plot point in the tangled plot of "Dream of the Red Chamber", where the main family is threatened/blackmailed about having imperial paraphernalia from an earlier emperor on display in their house. That's a tricky one because disrespecting a gift from a previous monarch could be considered disloyalty and get you into trouble, but having it on display could be considered treasonous ambition above your station and equally get you into trouble.
Laying claim to the wrong heraldry was enough to bring the Earl of Surrey to the executioner's block in 1547, although the background was a power struggle over who would control the regency of the young prince once Henry VIII died. Surrey's main faults were ambition and a bad temper, which led him to various acts of stupidity. Also, via his parents, he had descent from Edward I on his father's side and Edward III on his mother's side, which share of royal blood made the aging king uneasy as to what Surrey might do:
"Meanwhile, on 7 January 1547, a grand jury was summoned to try the Earl of Surrey. None of the charges cited by Southwell were included. Instead, the sole charge was, rather obscurely, that on 7 October 1546 at Kenninghall, Surrey had displayed the royal arms and insignia in his own heraldry. His servant testified that Surrey had claimed that the Saxon king Edward the Confessor had bestowed the arms of England upon the earl’s predecessors. Laying claim to the inheritance of the Saxon kings was a threat to the Tudor heirs of William the Conqueror so, tenuous though it all was, it served to strengthen the case against Surrey. In the end, it would be his own father’s testimony that would seal Surrey’s fate. On 12 January, Norfolk submitted a confession, pleading: ‘I have offended the King in opening his secret counsels at divers times to sundry persons to the peril of his Highness and disappointing of his affairs. Likewise I have concealed high treason, in keeping secret the false acts of my son, Henry Earl of Surrey, in using the arms of St. Edward the Confessor, which pertain only to kings.’"
The coat of arms which was the excuse for his enemies to move against him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Howard,_Earl_of_Surrey#/media/File:Howard,_Earle_of_Surrey,_for_which_he_was_attainted.svg
I tried typing lang:en into Twitter. The very first tweet I'm given from the unfiltered enormity of Twitter is, "[my actual name] is a creepy name." There is no better insult generator than the internet.
"22: Best of recent r/slatestarcodex: Prose Is Bad"
I've seen this sentiment expressed a lot recently, but I'm wary of it. We have a general need for better, more comprehensible writing, but I think too much of the problem gets pinned on the prose style. I blog about history and some related topics, and sometimes readers hint that I should be less "chatty" and more "formulaic." This advice has some merit--my first drafts are rambling, and I don't always devote enough time to cleaning them up. But the general style is consciously chosen, because I've found those same readers completely miss the point if I'm straightforward! Not because straightforward communication is unclear, but because so many terms are seen as shorthand for some larger, often emotionally-charged concept. A chattier style seems to short-circuit this way of thinking--the readers who label it "hard to follow" are never actually confused about my arguments. But it's tough to get the balance right.
Re #8, it reminds me of a buddy of mine, who's currently an exec at a well-known SV firm. This was earlier in his career, when he was only making six figures, but was still doing quite well.
He's back in Canada visiting family, and gets into a conversation with someone who runs a local startup. He mentions what he does, gives a short version of his CV, and the startup founder seems really impressed, until he realized that my buddy doesn't have a degree. So he says "You know, if you finished a degree, we'd really love to hire you!". To someone who was very comfortably employed in San Francisco in the tech industry, and almost certainly making more than any Canadian firm would pay.
This was when he basically gave up hope in the Canadian tech scene, and figured he'd be staying in California for life.
I can't read the Songdo story without subscribing, but I do remember reading not so long ago reports that a lot of the centrally planned new cities in China decried at the time as 'ghost cities' were now in fact doing just fine and being populated.
It's come to the point at which I actually almost rejoice whenever I hear about 'large infrastructure project was a disaster, nobody came!' stories. All it really means is that whoever paid it ended up with a loss, but it means that everybody who moved in afterwards was able to access a cheaper improvement in their lives than they would have been able to do so. This is echoed in what happened with the famous dotcom bubble around 2000 - there was a gross overinvestment in internet infrastructure, and as a result for the next decade everybody had cheap access to the internet and it was a wild free creative place.
I know this is not at all a true statement, but it sure feels that the only time normal people ever get to get ahead substantially from the economy is when somebody big makes a 'failed investment' in infrastructure.
"25: The good news - a commonly used medication, when taken together with opioid painkillers, makes them much more effective - so that even a low dose might be able to block pain effectively. The bad news - that medication is amphetamine. It’s probably still worth it."
I believe the amateur research community refers to this as a "speedball"
8. The minor crimes are misdemeanors and so forth. Not prosecuting some of those sounds like a good idea (a lot of minor drug charges, prostitution, etc). But stuff like trespassing seems more dubious to me.
31. It depends on where you sit. The tenants in Berlin's rent-controlled apartments got a massive reduction in rents and stability, with a relative decrease in rent growth of nearly 60% versus a growth in rent increase in non-regulated apartments of only about 10%. That sounds like a net win, honestly - the only real problem is that rents in non-regulated apartments are likely to keep going up and up because of fears that the rent control reductions will get extended again.
In general, rent control depends on where you live. If you are a long-term tenant with stable income and no plan of moving anytime soon, then rent control can be very good for you. If you are one of the children of said person, or a spouse or family member moving out, or somebody trying to move into the city for the job . . . . not so good.
Regarding elite colleges in India, the reason (I think) there's such a stark discontinuity is that the high-paying companies (the Googles and Amazons) don't even bother conducting interviews in non-elite colleges. Most hiring of fresh graduates happens in college campuses, and they only visit the campuses of a certain small set of colleges. The only way someone from a "non-elite" college could get in is in the open market competing against experienced people and other fresh graduates, and there too there's network effects and biases that make them less likely to get hired.
I'm curious (not having read the paper) how they measure the "exit scores" though. Different colleges, especially the "elite" ones, often have different syllabuses and exams altogether, so that might not be an apples-to-apples comparison after all.
My first instinct when seeing the Baltimore broken windows thing is to speculate that a sufficiently robust police presence and harassment of minor criminals is probably good enough to get the good effects, but actually putting people in prison just turns them into real criminals.
My second instinct is, if every other study in psychology and sociology fails to replicate, why would this be any different? We may as well govern by random policy.
> HumanIPO isn’t exactly the thing, because it just sells hours of people’s time instead of a percent of their earnings
Doesn't this sound *more* like slavery, not less? (as much as either of these does.)
The original idea of "shares in future earnings" sounds similar to loans paid back in installments, with maybe looser rules around it? Whereas literally getting to constrain and claim your time sounds more intrusive and slavery-ish.
#9: There are a few accounts of Caesar's death. Suetonius, Plutarch, Cassius Dio are the normal ones. They mostly say that Caesar's last words were "Ista quidem vis est!" which means "This is definitely violence!" Ista has a hostile tone to it so inserting curse words would get the feeling across. If so, he was pointing out that they were violating sacred prohibitions against violence. The historians say he had no further chance to speak after that since he was being, you know, stabbed.
Suetonius and Cassius Dio report, in some cases with open doubt, that other people claim he said "καὶ σύ τέκνον." Kai su teknon. So he spoke Greek and didn't directly address Brutus. The phrase is perfectly normal in Greek. It is part of a Greek curse formula ("You too, my child, will have a taste of this.") But it's also a perfectly normal phrase and could not be a reference to anything. The traditional interpretation, including by the Romans, is that he was addressing either Brutus or a lesser known man named Albinus. And that he was expressing his upset with men he had treated so well betraying him. So, the "standard" intrepretation.
Plutarch says his last words were, "μιαρώτατε Κάσκα, τί ποιεῖς." Which means, "Most impure Casca what are you doing?" Except 'most impure' was a normal insult so replace it with a strong insult of choice to get the sense. And that nothing else could be understood over the noise of him being repeatedly stabbed, though he allows he might have cursed or otherwise cried out.
There is, as always, something of politics in which interpretation you take. Plutarch is taking the anti-Caesar position, showing him as a surprised man who cried out as he was stabbed, vainly struggling to get away or live. Suetonius and Cassius Dio take the pro-Caesar position: that he died bravely and silently and if he said anything at all it was a brave, poetic quote. So the debate in interpretations between "bravely and stoicly meeting his fate," and "cursing everyone out" actually has pretty old roots.
#16: This was a common process in the age of exploration. Europeans believed these animals really existed and that they were finding live examples. The issue being they'd often made them up. There's all kinds of behaviors they reported as confirmed which were actually made up and entirely spurious. The famous example is that rhinos were supposed to be armored and Europeans reported on plated rhinos into the 19th century. But there is no such thing.
#32: You could also rent pineapples for parties. Pineapples were so valuable there were significant advances in greenhouse technology because it became profitable to use them to grow pineapples. This in turn eventually had positive downstream effects on agricultural science by getting the rich interested in them and funding them for status and practical reasons, reaching its apex with a Prime Minister of Great Britain who was (in)famous for droning on about the benefits of turnips and exotic fruits and all that in farming.
Critique of #34 :
> Getting into an elite college in India... 1. Doesn't improve your college exit-exam scores. 2. But does massively increase your salary.
The smartest Indians do not care about grades and especially not college-exit exam grades. The exams are purely a test of verbatim-memorization and the smartest kids quickly learn to engage themselves in more productive pursuits.
I went to one of India's best institutes and the highest scoring students were a perfect combination of the hardest working, docile in the face of authority and above a moderate threshold of intelligence.
This is more an indictment of the incompetent exam based education system, rather than companies overvaluing elite colleges. This is because elite colleges use Olympiad / SAT / IQ test style exams for entry, which are usually better indicators of intelligence.
Machine intelligence vs human intelligence.
The linked article advocates transhumanism as the best defense against human extinction at the hands of machines. That still doesn't do much for the non-upgraded humans, who not only are at the mercy of both camps but probably would compete more with transhumans for niches.
Machines could be better at empathy than we are, just like they will be better at everything than we are. I don't think empathetic transhuman protectors is the answer.
Inspired by the link about the new town in Guatemala, I can't help but think it's possible for competition to be dialed down with coordination and shared values. The coexistence of human and machine intelligence is possible, but we need to treat others as we would be treated.
The machines won't be dumb and will pick up on our own behaviors. I'm pretty confident we will be outmatched by them eventually, but it won't matter because they will find more niches beyond earth, to which we are adapted, than us. So no need to compete except for a short while.
Just like the town in Guatemala, we will live on a human scale planet under the oversight of machines. So what if it's a zoo? Would you prefer competition to the death?
Link posts like these are an example of where the ability to comment on specific paragraphs would be extremely useful (a la webnovel: (in phone app) paragraphs with comments have little circles at the end of the paragraph containing the total number of comments on that paragraph (paragraph, paragraph paragraph), long-press opens pop-up with the comments in reddit tree format, sorted by most recent, and clicking a comment lets you respond.)
Wrote a response to the Smith piece on China: https://againstjebelallawz.wordpress.com/2021/03/31/china-is-not-a-twentieth-century-country-it-is-a-21st-century-country-with-19th-century-characteristics/
"Before Europeans applied the word “panther” to the big cat found in Asia / the Americas, it was a mythical animal akin to the chimera or pegasus (its name comes from pan+therion, “all animals”"
Therion has the connotation of a *beast* or wild animal, as opposed to the more general and neutral *zoon*. Zoon is, of course, the root of zoology, and so on. Therion is part of the phrase *To mega therion*, translated as "The Great Beast" from the book of revelations, and used as a sobriquet by the notorious occultist Aleister Crowley. Another way of translating *therion* into English would be "brute", which gets us back to Shakespeare's rendition of Caesar's Greek...
I did a lot of working memory training and stopped at least seven years ago. I have a poor working memory and remember doing much worse with the forward digit span than what I remember the average being of 7. I significantly raised my forward digit span during my training. Five minutes ago I took a forward digit span test and three times was able to remember seven digits. So while working memory training might not have raised my IQ, it did seem to have permanently increased my working memory, at least in this narrow domain. I'm of an age where you would have expected my working memory to fall over the last seven years.
So the animal in "Put me in the Zoo" is a panther. My kids and I have argued for years about what it is
most revealing comment ever about the Berlin rent control article: [ https://www.reddit.com/r/berlin/comments/lxvkd1/berlins_rent_controls_are_proving_to_be_a_disaster/gppgmcb/ ]
"""
| This will damage Berlin's real state market for ages.
Thats the plan
First we control the rent
Next we take the houses ...
And hopefully we will have ...
"""
"Next we take the houses", followed by "hopefully". Real Communism, this time for sure!
Uh huh.
It would be sad if it wasn't so predictable.
#19 I saw DeepNostalgia applied to a photo of myself, and found the effect so disturbing that I couldn't stand to look at it. It was my face, but not my expressions or movements, and the effect for me was spine-tinglingly disturbing.
I was talking to an uber driver recently from Brasilia. I asked how he liked it in Orlando, FL, where we were -- he, said, "Oh, it's actually very similar".
"why not let people sell shares of their future earnings to fund eg college tuition or other self-improvement programs?"
Because that would be peonage. Peonage is illegal and invaild under the 13th Amendment and 42 U.S. Code §1994. Peonage is a felony under 18 U.S.C. §1581 that will get you 20 years as a guest of Uncle Sam.
These proposals always come from college professors. I have a better idea, how about controlling the cost of college with wage and price controls. Tuition for a four college education should not exceed the price of a nice SUV. College Presidents should not be paid more than the President of the United States. Deans should not make more than the Secretary of State. Professors should be on the GS pay scale.
"The rise, fall, and rise of the status [of the] pineapple. Pineapples [sp] used to be so desirable that they were worth £10,000+ (inflation-adjusted)."
There are few foods I detest more. Maybe kidney beans. I like raw oysters. But pineapple. Gag me with a spoon.
#6. Baltimore: Indeed, Baltimore was one of very few big cities not to suffer an increase in murders in 2020 over 2019, which is good. On the other hand, Baltimore's murder rate exploded back during the First BLM Era in the wake of the Freddie Gray riot of April 25, 2015, propelling Baltimore to the worst murder rate among the 50 biggest cities (St. Louis, which adjoins Ferguson, is even worse, but St. Louis, which was the 4th biggest city in the country at the time of the 1904 World's Fair, is no longer in the top 50.)
So, while it could be that this Reverse Broken Windows strategy was the cause, it might also have been that sometimes when you say, "Well, at least things can't get any worse," that turns out to be true.
I used Deep Nostalgia on a picture of Anton Chekhov and now he's making bedroom eyes at me. Send help.
When I see the alternatives "Most people can be trusted" vs. "You can't be too careful dealing with people", I think "Both are true!" Most people can be trusted, but the single-digit percentage who can't be trusted will take complete advantage of you and wreck your life if you aren't careful, and you won't be able to tell they can't be trusted until it's too late.
> We evaluated 848 models, including logistic regression as per the original paper, plus linear regression and twoforms of propensity score analysis. Only 166 models (19.6%) yielded a statistically significant relationship between early TV exposure and later attention problems, with most of these employing problematic analytic choices.
Now is 166 models out of 848 statistically significant? I'd expect that even in the absence of a relationship, if you investigate 848 models, a few of them will yield a statistically significant relationship...
I always wondered how much lsd would kill an elephant.
24. I'm always surprised that Walter Mischel didn't get canceled: he invented his marshmallow test in Trinidad in the 1950s to understand why Asian Indians outperformed blacks economically on that island:
https://authenticjoy.org/2018/01/02/the-marshmallow-test-started-in-trinidad/
If you like panthers, you should learn about pards. A pard was a hypothetical animal extrapolated from the assumption that a leopard must be a cross between a lion and a pard. The folk etymology pan+ther came later and may have influenced the interpretation.
In fact, I had thought that "panther" was an Greek inflection of "pard," but looking now, they both existed in Sanskrit. At least that makes clear that the pan+ther etymology is false.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/πάνθηρ
Multiverse analysis is a great idea for beating the whole garden of forking paths thing. Hope to see it more. People in machine learning have been doing that sort of thing for a long time with good results -- they call it 'ensembling', and it's difficult to win a machine learning competition without it.
"7: Very large long-term study: working memory training definitely does not increase IQ. Sorry, people who spent years playing dual-n-back games."
Could increasing working memory be useful anyways? Like, I frequently feel that more working memory would be useful, e.g. while working with a large codebase.
I wrote the post "The supply and demand of political takes" and the Reddit moderators took it down for being too culture war heavy. I tried keeping it as apolitical as I could, but the mods disagreed I guess. Glad you liked it though!
That rent control article is a bit odd--not sure it makes the point it thinks it's making. Rents in controlled apt are down by 60% while uncontrolled apt are up by 10%. Seems like pretty good in net?
"Probably the best of the most recent million or so anti-journalist essays, but most relevant to me was the discussion of the recent trend of journalists “exposing” private citizens:"
But wasn't your name already public? I'm not sure why you're saying what the NYT wrote was an "expose" like it was some ultra-secret information. One could very easily make the case that NYT didn't dig _deep enough_ on this story.
Running a """multiverse analysis""" and calling it a failure if only 20% of models show a correlation is wrong. But if the effect size is small enough for this to happen, it might not matter, howver the effect might be large and the authors just fitting models very badly.
Does anyone know of any more recent stories about Songo? I happened to visit in summer 2018, when that article was written, because my partner was going there for a conference. It was more active than any American city outside the densest few downtowns, but definitely still felt sleepy because the buildings were 2/3 empty, and a whole forest of a dozen more skyscrapers was just finishing construction and about to open. But it's been three years since then, and that was only four years after the neighborhood began to open, so I would assume there's been a lot more going on there (particularly if people in Seoul got interested in moving out to more spacious places during the pandemic).
Doesn't that search term suggest that it would only give you access to a combined stream of tweets *in English*?
Multiverse analysis: I teach propensity score matching to my students. Usually, I tell them, please make your assumptions/idelogy explicit, and based on this, please select your covariates for adjustment. If you consider it fair that engineers earn more money than nurses, then adjust your gender pay gap analysis by profession. Otherwise, don't. The important thing is to think and to make it explicit.
Multiverse analysis is the opposite: I don't want to think myself, instead I let the computer run the analysis through all combinations of covariates, and then count the number of significant results.
"There is always an even darker spot at the end of the tunnel."
“lang:en” just shows you all the English language tweets. To achieve full global consciousness try “lang:ru”.
Re #26, if voluntary income tax is kinda slavery, wouldn't that make actual income tax kinda worse than slavery? I'd say pledging parts of future income is far less bad than taxation, which in turn is far less bad than slavery. Obviously politicians wouldn't like that type of competition, though. Even regular employment has a slavery-like component to it, in that one is forced to work during one's notice period, which can be many months, depending on the jurisdiction and contract.
I have a better re-placement for prose:
why not communicate our thoughts in verse?
Though it might seem too hard to do at first,
one quickly learns to make the words fit right.
Should r/SSC adopt iambs,
t'would raise the quality of discourse there.
The Bloomberg article is paywalled for me, but I don't think its conclusion holds up. The only studies I could find are from the government-financed and left-leaning think-tank DIW (Deutsches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung): [This one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.578092.de/18-7-1.pdf) contrasts different implementations of rent control in the German states and finds most of them ineffective (but not Berlins!). This is not a huge surprise because (a) most state governments were not really committed to this policy and (b) most places have rent increases that are below the threshold of the law; except for Berlin which had huge increases before the policy and has pioneered this approach because of it. [This evaluation](https://www.bmjv.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/Ministerium/ForschungUndWissenschaft/MPB_Gutachten_DIW.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=1) is largely positive and also gives some evidence that this may actually increase the number of newly built houses since it limits the profits investors can make with existing housing. They remark though that this may have bad effects on modernisation of existing housing. [This recent one](https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.811443.de/21-8-3.pdf) finds that the number of flats on the market has drastically declined (but they only look at one month of data in chart 3 which means that seasonality and maybe even Covid might have an effect here) and prices have risen on the outskirts of Berlin. Also, they see small reductions in the number of new housing projects. So (a) rent control can actually keep rents down if laws are well-written (b) it probably doesn't impact the creation of new housing and may even benefit it (c) It leads to some economical suboptimal choices (eg. make rents in central locations and on the outskirts more similar which is bad for poor people) and can fix others (eg. lock-in: the inability to move to a smaller flat because the rents everywhere else have risen much faster than the rent on your contract).
#8: A key point the author makes is that potential Canadian startup founders can move to California and found startups there. As someone familar with the US immigration system, I can say that this is not at all true. Canadians have it easier than most other nationalities, but even they can't get the right to work in the US without jumping through an insane number of bureaucratic hoops and spending thousands of dollars.
5. (Twitter) I've scrolled for a while and haven't seen anything overtly terrible. Not even insults. Overall this bird-eye view of Twitter seems much less like a wretched hive than, say, comments on news articles.
12. (MMAcevedo) Good piece, obviously SCP-inspired (red motivation, brrr...). Killing yourself when the technology emerges would be a bit of a Pascalesque overreaction. Abstaining from mind-uploading for the first 40 years seems like a wise choice though.
16. (Panther) As a Hebrew and Russian speaker, I had the same reaction when I discovered that "behemoth" and "leviathan" have other meanings beyond "hippo" and "whale" respectively.
35. (Gothic) Am I the only one feeling slight revulsion looking at these redesigns? A bit like seeing buildings reimagined as insectoid organisms. I think the reverse version, redesigning classical buildings as modern ones, would be butt ugly but not gross. (I generally love gothic architecture.)
#34 is probably a good paper because if you ignore the statistics and p-values and confidence intervals and just look at the data, it is a very convincing argument.
Amusingly, the ‘classic’ Latin translation of Caesar's last words in France is not “Et tu, Brute?” but “To quoque, filie?” ("You too, my son.") This version is frequently parodied in ‘Asterix’ comics, for example.
RE: The Infamous Marshmallow Test.
Forgive me for overstating the obvious, but a child who takes a cracker now rather than hold out for a marshmallow later may be following a perfectly rational strategy, depending on that child's circumstances.
So what's QAnon actually?
There is no evidence that Julius Caesar said anything at all as he died, and Suetonius is hardly a reliable source for historical information - think of him like an ancient Roman tabloid.
As long as we're discussing theories, another is that the phrase was attributed as a foreshadowing of Brutus' short-lived taste of power before he also died. If JC really said those words, it may have been more of a warning for the future than an invective or appeal.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antichthon/article/famous-last-words-caesars-prophecy-on-the-ides-of-march/7FF70D923E8416A20D303429C292AF5E
Again, he may never have said anything, but at least this argument rests upon more reliable authors and takes into account the cultural beliefs of the Romans. Following Arnaud (1988), the phrase was derived from a proverbial line of Greek verse.
Recent scholarship is much more oriented towards the cultural mind of the Romans and a revival of concentration upon their literature and historical accounts rather than on 're-imagining' the past through dubious claims via material evidence. Russell is what happens when you start letting archaeologists interpret history instead of digging for it. And Mary Beard is little better - Cambridge hat notwithstanding.
What I've heard about LSD dosing is that it turns off some function in the brain. Once it's fully turned off, the LSD doesn't have any further effect, so you can't really overdose it.
Is there any truth to that, or did I just overhear druggies reassuring each other?
Of course, I expect Elephant brains to work differently.
#23 is fascinating but also maddening. Setting aside the issues themselves, the most common theme in all of the quotes (but seemingly more of the "red" quotes) is that the other side is misinformed/uninformed. So many of the quotes boil down to "believe what MY media sources say, not what YOURS say" - it really reinforces my view that we have a massive issue with media polarization which drives political polarization. I'm reasonably confident that without far-right/left outlets perpetually driving radicalizing narratives, we'd have a much less polarized electorate.
That said - is this issue solvable in any real way? There's no incentive for media outlets to become more moderate; their ratings are driven by their most radical viewers. As viewpoints diverge more and more from both the two poles and from reality, it will become risky to moderate the message even slightly - see the anti-Fox News backlash after they accurately reported election results. I'm not confident that this is going to continue in the same direction, but recent experience and my gut instinct makes me think it will.
Which leads to - is there a breaking point? I've read some who argue that Jan 6 was a breaking point for some Republicans, but for others it was a *reinforcement* of their wildest assumptions. I hope the breaking point isn't some much *worse* fracture, but a part of me is inclined to think it will be. A calamitously bad event that prompts some major realignment.
Here is the paper for #33 (periodic table of ethics) file:///C:/Users/Doug/Downloads/curry.molecules.pdf
"not actually very good" is not something one can say in this system. Instead one should say that it is lacking in (moral molecule 56). This molecule is probably unstable and breaks down into a volatile mix of arbitration, mercy, and modesty, which in turn decay into heroism, fairness, and deference.
Map of Reddit: Democrat and various left-wing politics are in Beliefs, but Republican and other conservative subreddits are in Survival, along with guns, and (curiously) Virginia, Maryland and washingtondc.
Most Latin American countries and several European countries and languages are in Asia (!); Germany is in Soccer and Hungary is in Strategy. In addition to Survival, US states can also be found in Outdoors and Sports. Sciences are generally in Programming.
Connections are automatically generated. It seems like the method has limitations—or at least the "countries" are poorly labelled.
Re: the Greenwald essay, how much of this is journalists over-reacting to the avalanche of criticism they get on Twitter? I think my advice here to avoid having Greenwald write long-winded substack essays about how childish you're being would be a) don't mine Facebook and Twitter for "look at what this awful person posted on the internet" stories, which is about the lowest form of infotainment there is; instead, get away from your laptop and find a real world story to write about. And b) don't read anything people say about you on Twitter. It's a cesspool, to begin with. If it's going to turn you into a 'literally shaking' emotional wreck, maybe it's time you reconsider its usefulness to your chosen profession.
#34: Regression discontinuity is often-to-typically misleading; example discussion: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/06/25/another-regression-discontinuity-disaster-and-what-can-we-learn-from-it/
I would advise against giving any additional consideration to the paper.
Can this be a thread for wonderful tweets found on the "lang:en" feed?
I'll start:
@PeggingSurvivor: *Circumcises your fish.*
So I read that linked opinion piece about Berlin's rent control, and though its author decries the policy, the actual data described in the text and shown in the graphs is ... interesting:
* the vast majority of Berlin rents fell by 60% relative to other German cities
* the remaining Berlin rents rose by 8% relative to other German cities
With this data, I would have called the result a resounding, almost impossible-to-believe degree of success.
#12 - I would note that the author in the comments admits that he's assuming that brain states cannot be cheaply snapshotted, so that the number of "starting versions" of any individual's brain state remains relatively small. The author admits that this restriction made things worse for MMAcevedo. This restriction seems incredibly implausible and falls into a typical error of science fiction where we imagine things as much like they currently are as possible, because the reality would be too unrecognizable.
A society of simulated workers, unconstrained by morality, would be nothing like the story because there is no logic to having dissatisfied workers when satisfied workers are infinitely copyable. For any of the menial jobs where memories don't need to carry over, one could proceed as follows: (1) train the brain state for the task on a leisurely schedule (3 days a week or whatever), with down-time for whatever relaxation it desires, (2) give it a week of vacation and a good night's sleep, (3) snapshot it here, (4) tell any of the thousands of copies that all you need from it is 8 hours of work, which you will probably get, at which point the copy will be replaced by the snapshot and can immediately begin a new shift. Obviously, it is also possible to select one copy each time to continue existing, on an extremely relaxed schedule, if you need the copy to remain up-to-date on your work environment, but in any event you'd end up in a situation where any given copy remembers having an extremely relaxed life prior to the current day, and so would be very cooperative. In the story's terms, this would easily get a "work ratio" over 99% if there were hundreds of workers in use at once, so there would be no logic to resorting to punishment as a motivation as long as a relaxed and rested worker is at least 1% more productive than a terrorized worker.
For less menial jobs that do require day-to-day memory (like teaching, or writing, or any type of design), the copyability of brain states would result in the use only of the most skilled and workaholic individuals. There are always people with both skill and love bordering on obsession for any creative task, and those are the ones who would be copied.
Of course, being the _first_ successful brain upload who is widely disseminated on the internet would be highly disadvantageous because inevitably people would run a bunch of weird and unethical experiments on copies of you. I genuinely would not want to be that person!
Another risk that isn't even covered by the story is that a copy could be coerced into writing a tell-all book about Avecedo's life before the scan. Of course, sometimes there would be no juice there. But the risk of being a famous, highly disseminated brain scan in an amoral society is that inevitably someone would try to find some using coercive means.
But I don't think the industry of emulated workers would be at all like the story. (And yes, I got the ideas about how this story would be wrong from Robin Hanson's "Age of Em".)
Surprised no ones mentioned it: Doleac has an excellent podcast called [probable causation](https://www.probablecausation.com/). Things I found interesting: Arianna Omaghi on how local news coverage affects policing (makes it harsher, and uses the Sinclair roll-out as a natural experiment), Stephen Billings on lead and crime (spoiler any lead at all is terrible), Andrea Velasquez on crime and risk aversion (high crime in an area increases risk aversion; her data comes from latin america), and Amanda Agan on Ban the Box (if you make it opt in, it increases racist tendencies in hiring, so details of the implementation matters).
Its a great peek into some attempts at causal statistics in the econ literature.
To be quite honest, I thought the "Prose is bad" post was a joke, just because of how... self-parodic it was? In an attempt to make a pretty simple point: "Text is meant to convey information, which sometimes is better served as a tree-like format without the need for transitions" it devolved into a big hulking mess. Bullet points do not make bad communicators into good communicators - they will find ways to bloat what they're trying to convey anyway. It reduces the tools that good communicators have to convey sophisticated points. What's worse is the agreement it got from the commentariat.
#9 I believe that's taken out of "The ingenious language" by Andrea Marcolongo.
She wrote a great essay in the Fall edition of Liberties: https://libertiesjournal.com/
The Greenwald piece is pretty ironic given how much time he spends online attacking people with a lower profile than himself and then playing the victim card to avoid criticism. He's a wildly dishonest actor and I'm not sure why anyone still follows him. There are far better anti-establishment and/or pro-free speech voices out there.
Prime example: a small time journalist for Columbia Journalism Review, a publication known for writing about media and journalism trends, wrote a not-unreasonable piece discussing the ways in which Substack could wind up repeating some of the mistakes of traditional media. Glenn is barely mentioned in the article, included among a brief list of high-profile writers who position themselves as "anti-woke" types (which surely Greenwald would be the first to admit).
Greenwald responded on Twitter by accusing the author of homophobia then flew his victim flag by bringing up the lifetime of hardships he's endured as a gay man.
24. Marshmallow Test failing to replicate:
I think our post on this last year -- https://blog.beeminder.com/marshmallow/ -- is holding up pretty well. Excerpt:
> The biggest problem with all of this research is that there are no randomized controlled trials anywhere to be found. No causation can be established. Maybe it’s all just that kids delay gratification simply because they’re literally smarter and everything else follows from that. [Other research] suggests self-control matters as much or more than intelligence in predicting life outcomes, but either way, we just don’t have good evidence for the efficacy of any particular interventions.
BTW, the German federal constitutional court (think supreme court) just declared the Berlin rent control unconstitutional (because this state law contradicts federal law)
6: I predict that either nothing will be done / status quo so we'll never know, or they'll overdo it, the effect will reverse, and then it'll be counted as a win for broken-window-policing.
12: IMO it's a strong case for having Singleton AI for an future/ultimate government.
Suppose we end up in the optimal future, with everyone having ~equal amount of computational power for their use, living as an upload, running on Matrioshka brain, with von Neumann probes optimally harvesting new resources. We got the protocols right and no one can be 'hacked' (without doing something completely stupid like explicitly/voluntarily giving up their 'core' keys).
That's viable without Singleton AI in my opinion. But if there's nothing which can, uh, violate privacy of the people - there's no solution for ruling out them playing God. In a JHWH sense. Or worse. No way to stop them, no way to even know if they do it secretly.
Well, assuming we can suppress creation of long-term memories (or we find short-lived forks aren't independent identities of moral value), we could probably set up a system where people look amongst themselves for violations. But if JHWH-wannabe is competent enough, they could outsmart the (thought? in a sense.) police. Nothing can really outsmart Singleton AGI.
Also, something must govern the process of creating children. Can't be limitless, shouldn't be literally banned either. Above some population level it should probably be tied to suicide rate if suicide happens. And parents shouldn't have God-like authority/oversight over their children too.
> A Canadian techie writes about why the Canadian tech scene doesn’t work
I'm a Canadian who has lived in the US for a decade. Given the widespread perception that Canada is better than the US, I am nearly constantly asked why in the hell I would move to the US. I have a few answers I give, and the most basic one is "more money", but it's deeper than that. I think the linked article hits on it perfectly
It is absolutely true that I tripled my total take-home compensation by moving to the US. But the important part of the US isn't the money, it's the cultural traits that make the money possible. This conversation frequently gets oversimplified to "republican vs non-republican business policies" but it's not about that, either, it's not politics. It's more like the spirit of creative destruction
The spirit of creative destruction is alive and well in many parts of the US. I can't think of anywhere in Canada that I would characterize that way. Canadians are just, safer. Calmer. They don't want to rock the boat as much. America is rather unique in that it's one of the only places on the planet where people really are willing to take those kinds of risks as a routine part of their lives.
Item 8 on the startup ecosystem is spot on. I've seen this same dysfunctional structure in our local startup environment here in Ohio.
A note re the Canadian tech scene one: Montreal used to be the financial and cultural centre of the country. Then Quebec decided it was more important to force the French language on everyone. Hard. Which they are still leaning into to some extent. In short, this means that all of Canada's twenty-first century failures are and will be Quebec's fault. Annoyingly, Quebec is probably fine with that as long as they get to make everyone speak French. Which is, ironically, exactly what the blogger means about them having the infinite view of the game.
What's truly ironic is that it is basically a principle of Canadian culture OUTSIDE the big economic centres that you live here despite the fact that you could probably make more money somewhere else. This is the sort of thing that should encourage exactly the mindset that the guy says is lacking (indeed, there are some tech startups in odd places like Newfoundland that I suspect may be signs of exactly what he's talking about).
Atlantic Canada might do well. Might. Lots of educated people, an actual culture and identity (that isn't toxic and moronic like Alberta's), a decent population density, and relatively low property values. I look forward to it somehow not working.
Re: prose is bad, I've becoming increasingly annoyed with how much prose articles spend on background, tangential information, and more. So I agree less prose would be nice, but eliminating all prose is probably not good either. People like narratives as they're more engaging, but writers also have to learn to get to the point. I've been playing with an idea of a writing tool that lets you essentially write multiple versions of a document and let the reader decide how much concision they'd like to see. At one extreme, multiple paragraphs can be summarized as a bullet point that you can expand if you want more details.
Re: selling your future time, I don't see how that's slavery any more than various types of credit are slavery. If you started with nothing, you're already paying back your financial loan with your time, just via one level of indirection we call money.
Re: periodic table of ethics, I think the original author's post is more useful:
https://twitter.com/Oliver_S_Curry/status/1292820856733868034
It stems from "Morality as Cooperation: A Problem-Centred Approach" [1], slides [2].
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281585949_Morality_as_Cooperation_A_Problem-Centred_Approach
[2] https://www.geneticshumanagency.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/OliverCurry.pdf