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Related to 22, I am increasingly obsessed with Peter Turchin's concept of elite overproduction (which you've written about) and find that it explains so much of modern politics, media, and academia, and doesn't bode well for the future.

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You linked to the list of games Buddha would not play on a previous Link post, back in April of 2016.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, it's still interesting.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/15/links-416-they-cant-link-our-dick/

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

The part of the FDA/Public health/Trump conspiracy theory that I just can’t get behind is that it proposes a counter factual where the FDA acts with enough haste to approve before the election.

Feels like a rare case of Cowen et. al. letting their vaguely anti-woke bias (I don’t say that pejoratively) overcome their extremely justified skepticism of the clowns at our public health agencies.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

>18: Does “Moore’s law of genome sequencing” still hold? If not, who we should blame? Here’s a Twitter discussion.

Yeah, even before reading the tweet, it's Illumina and their monopoly. We'll just have to wait until their patents start expiring in the mid-2020s.

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founding

22 percent is a LOT higher than the base rate for committing violent crimes.

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Maybe a dumb question, but re #11, why would Xi cause offense generally? I've always pronounced it "ksai", so I'm not sure if it is the pronunciation. Is it that it is spelled the same as the family name of the president of China? But I think Chinese pronounce the spelling "she". So maybe the Chinese government would not want to see that in print? If that's the case, is there a general ban on Chinese researchers associating that Greek letter with anything negative, or using it at all? Greek letters are all over all kinds of science, so that would be a big headache. Or maybe not just something so prominent. Or is it not about Xi Jingping, but the fact that it is a common family name in China, and it's more about national sensitivity than the president's ego? So many questions!

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10: I've bought an audiobook in the last month based on the quality of its negative reviews. In case you're interested, it was "Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing" by Jacob Goldstein and it's great, and I knew it would be great because the one-star reviews were all various flavors of argle bargle Murray Rothbard. The lesson being, you can learn a lot about something by listening to its enemies.

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Regarding #26, I'm not a Mormon or a Utah resident, but I think your graph is cherry-picking the timescale it looks at. Based on https://gardner.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/Fertility-FS-June2021.pdf?x71849 , the state-level Utah fertility rate was generally declining from at least 1960 (as early as they show) to 1994, recovered a tiny amount from 1994-2008, and then declined again (as your graph shows). So, I think it's fair to attribute this to a trend that's been in place since 1960. The more interesting question is what caused the 1994-2008 temporary minor recovery?

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(Banned)Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

On 14: Poverty is bad enough, the idea that you'd need some sort of esoteric quantitative description that maps onto neat 21st century bourgeois categories of badness in order to want to fight poverty is bizarre, and it doesn't do anything to resolve one way or the other the questions about the "best" way to fight poverty because that's a discussion about values, not statistics.

Postscript: Give a monkey a set of calipers and apparently he'll call himself the Übermensch.

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"Cheap solar, cheap wind, and cheap storage mean that we could see the first large sustained decrease in electricity costs in over half a century. People are finally starting to realize this, and are speculating about what could be done with cheap abundant electricity. ...The reality of cheap electricity — not 30 or 50 years in the future, but in the coming decade — is thus starting to sink in. This is really happening."

Uh-huh. Meanwhile, this email from the electricity supplier I'm currently signed up with:

"We have all been impacted by the significant increases in wholesale energy prices over the past year. At [redacted] we have made a commitment to our customers to work hard to keep prices as low as possible. As a small supplier we are unable to absorb the increasing prices of wholesale electricity or to hedge against them effectively, this means that as prices increase we have to pass those increases onto our customers. In order to protect our customers from significant price rises we’ve engaged with [redacted] to offer our customers a competitive green electricity deal".

Every electricity supplier in Ireland has whacked on price increases over the past year. Although wind generation seems promising, at the same time, unusual weather patterns can mean it fails: right now, it's very very windy so the generation is high, but back in June we got a period of settled, warm weather with little wind, so no generation.

https://www.farmersjournal.ie/ireland-s-wind-energy-generation-plummets-during-heatwave-636463

So I'm not expecting 100% renewables electricity and I'm very much 'wait and see' if we do get cheap electricity sometime within the next nine years.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

26. As a childless white nonmormon young professional who moved to salt lake city recently, myself and quite a few people like me are the problem.

I have also read a bit about mormon women having trouble finding mormon men to marry due to asymmetric apostasy but don't have any detailed sources.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

re: #26, it seems too small of a change to be the whole explanation, but the source now has a link to the fact that Utah counties have been becoming less LDS over time as well as people of other faiths move in. In the addendum, he says 'there is an almost 1-to-1 ordering between "percent LDS" and TFR.'

So that explains at least part of it, people from groups with lower average fertility rates moving into the area would certainly affect the overall rate.

The percent LDS certainly explains much of the difference between counties in Utah/Idaho.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

This isn’t exactly hacking, but deepfake audio has been allegedly used twice in plots to steal money by mimicking the voices of company executives.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos-voice-in-unusual-cybercrime-case-11567157402

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/14/huge-bank-fraud-uses-deep-fake-voice-tech-to-steal-millions/?sh=687a06d47559

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So, based on item 3 from link 1, Buddha wouldn’t play Squid Game:

“ Games of marking diagrams on the floor such that the player can only walk on certain places. This is described in the Vinaya Pitaka as "having drawn a circle with various lines on the ground, there they play avoiding the line to be avoided". ”

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

On #16:

Criteria for what constitutes a fair predictive algorithm are inherently subjective, but the best one, according to me, is counterfactual fairness, and it's really cool, so check it out.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06856

The fairness-through-unawareness criterion used by the predictive policing people is not sufficient to guarantee this better notion of fairness -- far from it, unfortunately. As applied to predictive policing, it seems like the closest we could reasonably get is "don't do predictive policing", followed by "do predictive policing but actively rebalance until average levels of police focus match across racial categories." This failure seems like a reasonable thing for a journalist to be mad about. But the least they could do is explain it with some nuance.

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Re: Number 9. I have read that the COVID vaccine inserts non-human DNA into your DNA, thus making you technically non-human, so therefore Jesus cannot save you.

You'd think that if He were able to turn water into wine and raise the dead, as well as being generally omnipotent and omniscient, that He would not let Himself or His works by stymied by a game of Cosmic Gotcha.

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There was a group of engineers at Google NYC who would basically play Counterstrike all day. There were also some who barely showed up for work at all (and weren't working from home either). I don't think that's typical, though. But xkcd.com/303 isn't completely off, there's plenty of down time surfing the web, wandering the building, and having swordfights on chairs. At least until Corporate Safety shuts that last down.

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"11. Why COVID variants skipped from Mu to Omicron: “In a statement, the WHO said it skipped Nu for clarity and Xi to avoid causing offense generally.” Rolling my eyes at “offense generally” and the idea of deliberately averting nominative determinism."

On the one hand, the last thing we need is to give the Nutbar-American Community more ammo by naming a virus "Xi".

On the other hand, skipping "Xi" just gives the Nutbar-American Community more ammo.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

19. 6ixBuzz acted in a way that meaningfully emboldened gang violence in Toronto that causally contributed to many deaths (mostly gang involved but innocents as well). I do appreciate that people were erroneously accusing you [Scott] of emboldening abstract bad things but I do think the cases are qualitatively different.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

The “public health establishment delayed the COVID vaccine” theory is false. The companies very clearly explain the reason for the delay in the article below (ignore the bad headline).

“Pfizer initially designed the trial to conduct interim analyses after 32, 62, 92, and 120 cases accrued... Fewer cases means less statistical power and therefore greater uncertainty about the vaccine's impact, so the efficacy goals to meet FDA's requirements were higher than 50% at interim analyses, ranging from 76.9% for 32 cases to 58.8% for 120.

In mid-October, the companies had yet to confirm 32 cases. But with the epidemic exploding at many of the trial's locations—which were mainly in the United States—they had second thoughts about FDA's request that their first interim analysis should have more to support an EUA request…

The math was simple: COVID-19 cases among participants were jumping from one or two per day to up to 10 or more. It became clear that the trial would accrue 62 cases shortly after hitting the 32 mark, and the higher number meant greater statistical power—and fewer debates about the meaning of the data. This 62 cutoff both lowered the efficacy bar the vaccine had to clear, and was also something of an insurance policy: If the vaccine triggered mediocre immune responses and it teetered around 50% efficacy in the trial, it could more easily have been deemed futile at 32 cases because of bad luck.

the companies' decision to seek the protocol change had nothing to do with politics… "This was our decision," Sahin says. When he read Trump's tweets, he shrugged. "This is just not true."

In late October, they informed the FDA of the protocol change. The FDA approved the protocol change in early November, which meant that the companies could start testing their samples. The results were announced on 9th November.

https://www.science.org/content/article/fact-check-no-evidence-supports-trump-s-claim-covid-19-vaccine-result-was-suppressed

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In re: 26--as an LDS Utahn, I'm not sure there is a better reason generally than a vague "rise of secularism." We (American Latter-day Saints) track the broader American culture in many/most things, just with a significant delay. Economic worries about supporting a family and buying a home almost certainly play a role, both in people getting married later and in having children.

Social changes related to hanging out in groups vs. "serious dating" are fairly often referenced by the leaders of the church as an area of concern in terms of age at marriage, which I would think tracks with fewer children, but I'm not sure how strong an effect this really has.

I understand that some young married couples have been reluctant to have children based on worries about the wickedness of the world (an interesting mirroring of the "environmental concerns-->no children or small family" thing you posted about a few months ago).

The reason in my immediate family is ill health--all five of me and my siblings intended to have families more or less of that size, but chronic fatigue syndrome intervened.

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RE: 23, the "Effective Altruism" movement announcing that they're going all-in on supporting... Ivy League/Caltech/Swarthmore students with extra mentorship/funding/organization on campus smells a bit like reflexive elitism. Is it really not worth anyone's time to mentor students at a non-California flagship state school or seek out people who might be world-changers at schools who aren't already connected to strong pipelines to the elite? Seems like yet another way to hoard opportunities among a select group rather than seeking out new talent [and yes, they do say they will look to expand later, though I'm sure it will be to populist institutions like Cornell and Williams] and doesn't sound particularly altruistic in practice.

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> Nate Silver, Tyler Cowen, and Garrett Jones come out in favor of “the public health establishment deliberately delayed the COVID vaccine by a month so it wouldn’t make Trump look good before Election Day”

Why would other countries play along with this? The UK for example only started injecting in December, well after the election.

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Dec 30, 2021·edited Dec 30, 2021

Re: 23, I agree with the thesis of the post but am not at all sure it will be possible to achieve. I was also active in Stanford EA in 2015 and I think a large amount of the effect really was just getting extraordinarily lucky in having a bunch of interested/interesting people around at the same time (many of whom never ended up directly involved in EA after graduation, to my knowledge, but were still an important component - five people does not make a sustainable campus organization). It's still worth putting effort in to attempting to make such a group coalesce, but it might simply not work if you don't get lucky with the people who happen to be around when you're trying.

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Are there any games Buddha would have approved of, or at least tolerated?

Hypothesis: The purpose of games is to distract people from both daily life and any risk of enlightenment while playing.

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2.) This reminds me of what Turkey is doing right now to deal with its own inflation. I can go into more detail but they're effectively creating financial instruments that compensate for inflation through a variety of methods I an get into. And then trying to move most normal people's accounts into those instruments. They're trying it not because the new minister knew no economics but because Erdogan has a weird ideas about economics that just happen to justify his policies. Though in this specific case his beliefs have some possibility of working. Basically, it creates pressure on the Turkish balance sheet (so the government is picking up the tab) in exchange for (theoretically) shoring up the currency's value by allowing the lira to create fake dollars/euros. This should, in principle, help restore some confidence and give the central bank (which has not been printing money) a chance to lower inflation. Effectively through wealth transfers to ordinary Turks. While this is an expensive policy that will probably put Turkey somewhat into debt it's probably worth doing that to fight high inflation.

The reason we can't do it here is that the US has been printing money and we don't have the same fiscal room with all the other spending that's been going on. But most importantly: Turkey's effectively printing Euros/Dollars through its fiscal instruments (because that's how the peg works). Brazil, iirc, did likewise, as did several American countries. But the US can't peg its currency to the dollar because it IS the dollar.

11.) I suspect it's a sign that Chinese censorship algorithms don't like homophones and someone delicately told the WHO that China would prefer their people didn't have a sneaky way to refer to Xi.

21.) There has been a lot of interesting movement in power lately. I look forward to seeing how it ends up. Though frankly, people get really politicized and polarized about power production such that I expect there will be significant barriers. I'm less qualified to comment on the rest. I also find it revealing that Fintech is not among the new technologies despite the fact we're objectively behind much of the rest of the world. Even on easily measurable things like the T3 standard.

22.) Why would this only happen in upper income countries? Plenty of poor countries strangle themselves with red tape and regulation too.

24.) I like to use the metaphor that engineers/architects/artisans are like musicians. If you give a skilled violinist a violin and sheet music and ask them to play the next day they'll come in and do a great job. If you give an unskilled violnist the same task they will produce much worse music. Yet they both spent the same time preparing the piece. If anything the skilled violinist probably spent less time. Likewise, an engineer's work product is much less a result of the specific task than their total accumulated work experience. The issue is that measuring artisanal output is often very difficult and nearly impossible outside of someone with the same skill. So corporate sets up arbitrary rules like 40 hours a week or time tracking which then get gamed. You can see the same dynamic in teaching music: the really great musicians do practice a lot but they move on from the grade school "three hours of homework" model pretty quickly once they're good/independent. (And to be fair, that kind of grinding is necessary to GET good.)

33.) I can confirm this is what YC's process is like. I think he might have a bit of hero worship going on. Don't get me wrong, they all came across as very smart and sharp. I think the maximal terms ("the smartest person I've ever met and I just met the smartest bankers in Africa") is a bit overblown. Though, to be clear, I'm not implying Sam Altman isn't highly intelligent. I agree it's cut short. There would have been pre-interviews and all that. They would have met other people. And investor stories are a favorite of mine.

34.) I have one of these. Though it's significantly less nice than that one. I also have a candle clock that tracks the time, day, and year. Though I don't actually run it that often.

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#24 - I've had coworkers who do roughly an hour of work a day. I think they thought they were getting away with it, but I noticed, and it drove me crazy.

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Re the Amazon article (#10) and allowing consumers to post negative reviews -- I just saw Miracle on 34th Street and the man who thinks he's Santa Claus starts telling Macy's customers about bargains at other stores. Customers are so impressed that Macy's sales go up, and all the competing department stores start doing the same thing. Learn from the classics!

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founding

It's been a thing since at least 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Space

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Re #14: I would argue that in modern societies, especially of the welfare-state variety, it is unlikely that poverty is a major cause of cognitive problems; it's more likely the reverse. Although a third factor could cause both. Re #15: What group are we comparing to? Are we comparing to people incarcerated for non-violent crimes, or killers who weren't incarcerated, or the general population? Re #27: Maybe we need a 3-D graph.

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Minor error: The Indian Jews converted to Judaism in the 1950s and 1970s. "19th century" is when they converted to Christianity.

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Dec 31, 2021·edited Dec 31, 2021

#1: No hopscotch, then? I'm out, Buddha. That's a red line for me.

#12: The original Florida man?

#22: Elon Musk was just waxing philosophic about this with Lex Fridman about how wars help sweep away red tape and bad rules, and since we don't really have many of those anymore (not great power conflicts, anyway), we're stuck with the rent-seeking incumbents. I didn't find this portion of the conversation particularly insightful--it wasn't anything you couldn't have read in, say, Reason Magazine over the last ten years--but how to achieve similar effects without the eight figure death tolls of two world wars is certainly a topic worth thinking about. The post-war German economic miracle was a real phenomenon.

#29: eh, was successfully crowd-funding new social media sites a legit problem in recent years? I don't care much for Facebook or Twitter, but "finally, we found a way to make Gab work!" or some other right-wing alternative site seems like...not our most pressing issue. My Crypto Bear card remains valid.

#33: This left me wanting more, too, but not in the "George Costanza always leaving on a high note" sense, but rather in the "you yada yada-ed sex?" sense, where they skipped over the best part.

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#26, former Mormon here - it's not entirely "rise of secularism" but it rhymes.

For the past 15 years people have been leaving Mormonism in *droves*. It used to be that almost no one left, and it was incredibly taboo to even talk about.

When I tried to leave in 2008 I knew 1 person in my entire life who'd ever left, and she was 25 years older than me. When I successfully left in 2012, I probably knew a handful of people who'd exited. Today, _everyone in Mormonism_ knows someone who has left. It's still a big deal to leave, but it's much less taboo.

In trying to prevent even more people from leaving, the church has become more "big tent". Some of the defining features of the Mormon lifestyle (big families, church literally every Sunday in person, women only as homemakers) have been deemphasized, to the point where "Buffet Mormonism" is now part of the nomenclature, where you're not judged as harshly if you subscribe to certain beliefs/rules but not others.

What that all means is fewer people view "have lots of kids" as a necessary and fundamental part to "being a good Mormon".

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Re the Mormon babies or lack thereof. The study uses a location sample of Utah County, UT and Bonneville County, Idaho, as a proxy for “all Mormons.” This is a flaw for a few reasons. Utah County is a sub/exurb of Salt Lake City. Bonneville County is Idaho Falls, the nearest major city to Idaho National Lab. I argue Utah Cty is subject to middle/upper middle class downward population pressure making those Mormons anomalous. Also Bonneville county is population small but has larger than average population of lab employees, also subject to the class/education population pressure. And it’s a city even w/o the lab, hence another layer of same pressure.

The conclusion may reflect reality, I don’t know, but not for the reasons given. I’m not Mormon but I lived in/near Bonneville county for a while. Something that stood out at the time was age at marriage and childbirth was lower than the west coast (anecdotal).

Getting a good sample of Mormons spanning US/world geography, urban/rural range and income range would give a better picture.

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To #26 as a former Mormon, formerly Utah county resident I think I can speak to this. First younger Mormons are having fewer children for the same reason everyone else is having fewer children - they're expensive. We're just highly motivated to have them for theological/cultural reasons. Anedotally I've watched the culturally ideal family (ie the one pushed in talks, considered normative etc) drop from 5-6 (my moms generation) to 3-5 (my generation), to 2-3 (the current generation). Simply put Mormons are subject to the same pressures as everyone we're just stubborn enough to delay the effects.

You're also equating Utah County and Utah with Mormonism which is less true than it used to be 20 years ago. Lots of non-mormon childless people moving in especially to the Salt Lake Area. Utah County is of course still a Mormon bastion but even that's less true than it used to be.

Finally the last 10-15 years have seen a pretty unpresidented swing away from orthodox belief. The Church failed to publish membership growth numbers for Utah for the first time ever this past year. Anecdotally the number of people leaving the Church has increased particularly over the pandemic, and exMormon support spaces are exploding.

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Out of curiosity, why can't you link to Money Stuff on Bloomberg?

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“ I would have been willing to let this pass if they had just said “unlikely” - somebody might honestly think 22% is unlikely compared to some hypothetical belief that it’s near-certain.”

Surely it should be compared to the likelihood of the average person killing someone. Less than 0.1% I imagine.

At any rate, we jail murderers for the crime they’ve already committed rather than worrying what they may do in the future. If some otherwise meek mannered husband kills his wife in a crime of passion, and all psychological profiles, indicate he will never kill again we jail him anyway.

That’s retributive justice for you, not to be confused with revenge which is a personal thing; it’s the state dispassionately deciding this crime is worse than that crime and applying different punishments. Long may it continue.

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“ but the will of God is really easy to thwart,”

Hey, nobody’s perfect.

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20 is very encouraging! If most of the important info is not in digital text, and most of the digital text is unimportant, I never have to read my backlog of AI/safety papers to contribute to the field!

(This is somewhat sarcastic, but... am I wrong tho?)

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#7 somehow feels reminiscent of this Icelandic study:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jan/16/natural-selection-making-education-genes-rarer-says-icelandic-study

As for guppies, so for yuppies?

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Dec 31, 2021·edited Dec 31, 2021

> although this is weirdly short and leaves me wanting more

lsusr (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/lsusr) writings on LessWrong are usually like that, but there's a lot of them. He's a damn good writer/thinker, highly recommended.

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#28 Having complained about mainstream media misuse of “no evidence” in the past, specifically that it seemed biased against right-wing political statements, I should credit NYT: in their obituary of Harry Reid, they noted that he famously claimed “without evidence” that Mitt Romney cheated on his taxes.

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"[Claim of the first successful deepfakes based hacking.] Looking through comments elsewhere, I think [this claim falls apart](...)" - actually those two links are about two different hacks (with the first not including any kind of detail beyond hearsay, so not verifiable). It sounds somewhat implausible that two different people would make up the same deepfake story. (There was indeed a wave of extortion-based attacks against semi-famous instagrammers at the time, see e.g. https://www.vice.com/en/article/93bw9z/bitcoin-scam-hostage-videos-instagram , but it wouldn't be strange for the attackers to use multiple methods.)

In any case, wouldn't be the first time deepfakes are used in a crime, see e.g. https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/ahmedabad/deepfakes-replace-women-on-sextortion-calls/articleshow/86020397.cms

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Those eigenrobot tweets are pretty much just content-free shitposting and as such it's not helpful to promote them as an example of how to talk about statistics and bias on the internet, IMO. They also miss the real point of story, which IMO is that the Markup was able to access a predpol company's dataset due to sysadmin incompetence, and did some handwavey analysis (they compared predictions to actual arrest and showed that it overpredicts in black areas and underpredicts in white ones, but admitted that it doesn't really prove anything since the police tried to deter crimes from happening based on those predictions, and the mismatch between predictions and reality could simply mean they were successful at it) to whip up interest in the story and push their point that this kind of data should be available for public scrutiny and not only when someone misconfigures a firewall.

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Funny you follow up the story about Amazon allowing customer reviews being fundamental to their success with a story about not offending Xi: Amazon wouldn't allow negative reviews of a book of President Xi Jinping’s speeches and writings on its Chinese website. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/amazon-partnered-with-china-propaganda-arm-win-beijings-favor-document-shows-2021-12-17/

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Dec 31, 2021·edited Dec 31, 2021

2) I’ve been waiting for a decade for someone to explain how this story is made up / not the real reason for the end of (Réal) inflation. It just sounds way too good to be true. Surely if there’s an angle that deflates the hype, someone in the ACX comments would know it. Anyone?

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There might be something *in general* to the notion of having a social media site that rewards first movers. But "In Praise of Ponzis" makes me angry, because the glorious outcome of the cooperation he wants to build is just "if we all cooperate, we can trick Youtube's recommendation system".

Tricking Youtube's recommendation system does not generate social good, because you're just replacing one (possibly more authentic) winner with your own artificially generated winner.

Also, Youtube can just patch the hole in their recommendation system, if they haven't already.

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Re 7: If you too strongly select for intelligence (or any other trait) you will do so at the expense of other beneficial traits and overall fitness. This is because the strong pressures on intelligence will cause you to select for genes which (for example) increase IQ by 0.5 points but decrease overall fitness 0.5% (numbers made up). What you want is a weak pressure on intelligence sustained, over a long period of time, in the presence of pressure on other traits you value. This causes genes which increase intelligence but don't decrease overall fitness (or decrease it only very small amounts) to be positively selected for, while genes which increase intelligence but decrease overall fitness are rejected. Time is important as it allows new mutations to enter the gene pool and be tested by these pressures.

In the fish example, if the only factor being selected for is intelligence, then you will select for negative, neutral and positive overall genes that increase intelligence. However, negative changes (changes that increase intelligence but decrease overall fitness) will be the lowest hanging fruit because they will be barely hanging on in the gene pool and thus have the strongest potential to grow in number. This dynamic also would incorporate the homozygous/heterozygous dynamic you talk about in your 2016 article.

What you want is a situation where all selection forces for the traits you desire are in a reasonable balance. So perhaps health, symmetry and intelligence are being selected for simultaneously, and any new mutation which helps one but harms the others too much is removed.

WRT Ashkenazi Jews; in normal populations, the reproductive returns from higher IQ were probably not strong enough to overwhelm the negative effects of being more sickly or having more sickly family members. However in Ashkenazi Jewish society, for a time, the benefits of increased intelligence outweighed the reproductive harm of having more sickly family members. This would have improved the selection for positive and neutral intelligence boosting mutations, but also negative ones - which would be proportionally boosted more until a new equilibrium was reached. I'm unsure if it would be easier to develop mutations which boost IQ but harm other aspects fitness versus mutations which boost IQ and help other aspects of fitness, but initially you're going to be tapping into the harm pool.

In your 2016 article you talk about how IQ genetically correlates with many good things. Apologies if you ultimately concluded this, but (severity of) mutational load makes the most sense. 99% of impactful mutations are shit. They're still going to get passed along for a while if they aren't too major. Some people (by chance) are going to inherit more of the shittiest ones and these are most likely to just harm many things (like 10% corroding every part in a car made of a certain type of metal). For example, if you have a mutation that makes your mitochondria 10% less efficient, that will possible reduce your height, health, intelligence and cardiovascular fitness. If you're unlucky enough to have a greater proportion of your shitty mutations be the shittiest ones, then they are probably going to drag everything down.

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That Ponzi scheme article (#29) is rather bad. For one thing it confuses Ponzi schemes with things that aren't. The essence of a Ponzi scheme is that the system is funded by new entrants; when you give tokens to everyone who watches your video, in the hope of recouping on ad fees, that's not a Ponzi scheme, that's just you paying people to watch ads. If that worked out economically, advertisers would just cut out the middle-man and pay people directly.

And for actual Ponzi schemes, the article conveniently ignores the reason they are forbidden in many contexts, which is that most investors will lose their money - the system doesn't produce any value, just redistributes it from late entrants to early ones. You can play the lottery of entering at what you think is an early point, and on the system level you can fundraise off of people's propensity for gambling, but it doesn't seem like a revolutionary improvement over traditional fundraising. And anything on top of a blockchain needs to be a revolutionary improvement to work, because it needs to compensate all the intrinsic disadvantages of being on top of a blockchain.

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26. I wrote a short thread on this, still some loose ends to tie up tho.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ageofinfovores/status/1473811731419779072

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Yeah, re:technology, I remember in like 2014 people were confidently predicting fully self-driving cars by like 2018. Now self-driving cars are not even on Noah's list. People are probably overly optimistic.

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As a Mormon, and a current student at BYU-Idaho (see data for no.26), I feel like many of the other takes here in the comments are broadly correct. LDS members are not immune to broader cultural trends/pressures, though they are mitigated for a time by our community's relative insularity (like most frictional religious minorities). To the extent that lower fertility rates are a cultural issue, more than enough time has passed since the broad slowdown occured for the majority of demographic groups for cultural ideas to have permeated Mormon norms. To the extent that this effect is a product of mothers entering the workforce, etc., that has definitely happened within the Church, even though it again has lagged the same phenomenon in broader society. (I asked a few family members about what they thought the reason for this decline in the fertility rate could be and they all mentioned cost of housing, how expensive it is to rear a kid, etc. AKA the kinds of takes you would equally expect from a non-Mormon sample. A couple of them also mentioned that a large proportion of LDS friends in their age groups wanted to have kids but were unable to due to actual fertility issues.)

Mind you, this particular take seems a bit haphazard and I would quibble slightly with the methodology; I don't think that BYU-Idaho -- located in Rexburg, Madison County -- holds enormous relevance for Bonneville County. The latter is larger, and centered around Idaho Falls, which has grown tremendously in the last couple of decades and is located within a different micropolitan statistical area than Rexburg, i.e. may be a poor proxy.

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Re 2: Brazilian here, can attest that Planet Money episode was an good summary of Plano Real. I was eleven, so just old enough to remember visiting a newstand to buy comic books and checking a table posted on the side that told me how much each issue would cost that month. Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, and all the rest started going for "A23". One URV went from CR$647.50 to CR$2750.00 over four months and then it felt like inflation stopped.

It's still probably Brazil's greatest success story. It has become the sort of thing everyone is in favor of, like mom and apple pie and hating the NYT for doxxing bloggers, but both 2022 frontrunners were against it in 1994.

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On #6, discussed many of these with my girlfriend. The one on polygenetic screening for gender took me for a spin, until I realized it was literally China’s one-child policy, then it became quite clear why it’s a form of eugenics you shouldn’t support. I don’t think the sex ratio of society is a “slider” that we can be trusted to muck around with, at least not yet.

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6) Quasi-Mormon here, but not in Utah. I haven’t noticed anything at all. There are 3 families with 6+ kids that go to church with me, and everyone has kids or is planning on it. Maybe it’s a trend in Utah and that’s overwhelming the small progress down south?

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#26: As a Latter Day Saint who spent a decade living in Utah, I definitely don’t think it was secularism or any other cultural explanations. The explanation that I find most plausible is the high cost of child care (including the opportunity cost of having a stay at home mother). It’s increasingly difficult to sustain a family on a single income and that difficulty increases with each additional child.

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I’m aware of three politically-related delays in the mRNA clinical trials. Please note that safety, diversity, and efficacy are somewhat separate issues.

– Safety: The decision to require two months of safety data, pushing Pfizer’s first date for an application back to 11/17/2020. The campaign for this was clearly motivated in part by Democratic concerns to deny Trump his October Surprise on the vaccine front, but … safety is important. So I’m not as worked up over this as some libertarian economists are. I can't say off the top of my head what the right amount of time to collect safety information was.

– Diversity: The Trump Administration’s decision in late summer to require Moderna to delay its clinical trial by a month to recruit a more racially diverse set of volunteers to test the safety and efficacy of the vaccine on different races. I’m sympathetic toward this delay: as I may have mentioned once or twice over the years, human biodiversity can be important in a variety of settings. Ironically, however, as far as we can tell so far, HBD doesn’t matter much for vaccines: racial equality more or less reigns in terms of response to mRNA vaccines. So the one month slowdown of Moderna by the Trump Administration in the name of diversity cost Trump his October Surprise, delaying Moderna’s announcement of its high efficacy until 11/16/2020.

– Efficacy: Finally, the vastly underpublicized decision by Pfizer to shut down lab processing of clinical trial samples from late October until 11/4/2020, the day after the election. Pfizer wound up blowing through even the third checkpoint when they let their lab get back to work the day after the election. This lab shutdown strikes me as the most egregious of the three politics-related interventions. The first two called for More Data but the third led to Less Data during a critical week at the beginning of 2020’s Winter Surge.

Without the lab shutdown, my best guess is that Pfizer would have announced the very high efficacy of its vaccine on Monday, 11/2/2020, the day before the election. Trump would then have spent the last 24 hours of the campaign trumpeting the success of his vaccine strategy.

Would that have switched enough voters in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada to cause a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College and cast the decision to the House of Representatives with one vote for each delegation, probably favoring Trump? If that looked like it would happen, would there have been a violent and/or corrupt intervention to deny Trump a second term?

Who knows?

On the other hand, I don’t think Pfizer’s lab shutdown delayed the rollout of the vaccine by much more than one week and maybe just a few days.

The government decision had already been made due to the Democrats’ anti-VAXX fear, uncertainty and doubt campaign in the fall to require, in effect, until November 17, 2020 for enough safety data to be available to begin government processing of the application. However, announcement of efficacy on 11/2 rather than 11/9 would have given states and localities an extra week to focus on the big challenge of the vaccine rollout, which most botched until about the second half of January.

So I could imagine the vaccine rollout running a few days ahead without the Pfizer lab shutdown. The number of lives lost due to the lab shutdown sounds to me like in the hundreds but probably not in the thousands.

But who knows? Perhaps if Pfizer hadn’t shut down its lab processing, Democrats would have been the anti-vaxxers in 2021?

The alternative potential timelines rapidly spin in multiple directions. A timeline in which the mainstream media spent 11/2/20 and 11/3/20 screaming in rage about how the Pfizer vaccine was a dangerous conspiracy to re-elect Trump would have been ... different.

I suspect that when Pfizer CEO Bourlas is alone with his conscience, he says to himself that, sleazy as it sounds, his ordering the lab shutdown until after the election, wound up saving lives on net.

He may be right.

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W.r.t. Vetocracy vs. Bulldozers, it's interesting that Vitalik, given that he lives here, doesn't bring up Swiss political system, which is heavily consensus oriented (vetocracy) but then there's always a referendum hanging above any decision, which, if the consensus decision was not good enough, would bulldoze over it (referenda results are written to constitution and thus take precedence over everything else).

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Per the link at the end of #27, could someone please explain Quadratic Voting to me as though I’m an idiot? How could it possibly be more equitable if billionaires can conceivably buy more votes?

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Dec 31, 2021·edited Dec 31, 2021

> the fact is they made a deliberate decision to make the process take an extra month, and that some four-to-five-digit number of people died because of this decision.

I love how you can just casually drop that your side killed 50,000 people just so that Trump's approval ratings would fall, but somehow you still think they're the good guys

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Haha how many "brilliant AI journal extraction ideas" did you get?

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I think we should bring those incense clocks back.

Ferbreeze already makes an air freshener that cycles through 3 different smells so you don't get used to them and I see no reason why you couldn't expand that to 12 aromas that change on the hour. The plug-in fresheners just use a 2.4W resistor next to the wick which gets warm and promotes evaporation of the volatiles. This plus a half-watt noctua fan is well within what a USB 3 or USB-C can supply.

I'll have to find out what 3d printer filaments are compatible with air freshener juice because I've seen the solvents from them degrading plastic before.

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So here I am again, to correct a mistake on vitamin D.

The study did not "find no effect". The exact quote is:

"61 (10.46%) individuals in the treated group died, compared to 386 (25.81%) in the non-treated group [odds ratio (OR): 0.597; 95% CI: 0.318-1.121; p=0.109] ... 45 (12.19%) individuals in the treated group were admitted to ICU, compared to 129 (26.27%) in the non-treated group (OR: 0.326; 95%CI: 0.149-0.712; p=0.005)."

So they found a very strong result in preventing ICU admissions. Mortality also had a reduction but it did not reach statistical significance. The correct probabilistic interpretation of that result is of course not "prevents ICU but not death", but rather "prevents ICU and will likely show significance on death as more trials are done".

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"Related: AI Safety Needs Great Engineers."

* Who happen to live in Bay Area.

So annoying. There's always lots of talk about shortage of software engineers in general - but apparently no one cares about... not even trivial inconvenience - huge ones. Maayybe there would be less of a "shortage" if there was a) a legible process to getting a job which b) wouldn't constrain candidate population to a single location on Earth.

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re: 19, even the article says their names were already out there publicly, in other articles and interviews, and they are often recognized on the street. if we lower the meaning of dox to mean "identified online but by someone we didnt want to" then sure, they were doxed"

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I wish these comments were sorted by link number. Not sure if there's a platform that would support that. I guess Scott could post each link as a comment on a reddit post.

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One line in Noah's article on techno-optimism is particularly striking to me:

"Drones are the most obvious application; small battery-powered quadcopters may change the face of warfare and offer all kinds of delivery services."

Killing people will be much easier but so will be getting a late night MacDonald delivery.

Seems worth it.

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#6 Melissa Etheridge had a son using sperm donated by David Crosby, a musically talented man with a long history of addiction.

The son went on to die at 21 of a drug overdose. Eugenics? Too real world tragic for me to play at a thought experiment.

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With regard to brazil and the URV how did they avoid the problem that once you price everything in inflation adjusted units you totally eliminate the ability of the central bank to affect the economy by increasing inflation or increasing interest rates. I mean it doesn't render central banks totally powerless but, one of the biggest economic dangers is that the stickiness of wages (wages tend to stay at the same level even during a downturn) can create a depression. Central banks generally respond to this in part by inflating the currency which has the effect of reducing the real value of the debts and the real value of wages but if everything is denominated in inflation adjusted units they lose that ability.

Ok, ok, this is way simplifying and if the country had a good credit rating it could still borrow and spend but surely creditors would also demand inflation adjusted units severely limiting the government's ability to engage in these kinds of interventions.

I don't think all contracts in Brazil today are made in inflation adjusted units so how did they extricate themselves from this problem?

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Regarding the network heterogeneity hypothesis I'm tempted to say: well duh but does it really matter. Any number of people, including myself, have been remarking that this must, in some sense, be at play to explain the fact that the virus doesn't behave like the simple exponential models.

While I'm frustrated at the fact that it seems like all our digital gizmos mean that there should be the ability to do much more accurate population models in our epidemiological simulations I'm unconvinced it would really do much to affect how we've dealt with the pandemic. No one is really responsibly inferring substantial evidence from masks or other interventions from these hugely noisy data sets and if the total population can be thought of as a bunch of sub-populations with different reproduction rates (and occasional crossover) it's not clear to me that the standard model isn't still a pretty good guide to appropriate interventions as long as one doesn't take it too seriously (e.g. expect to be able to suppress hard for a quick win).

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Re #21: These kinds of articles are easy to write if you don’t work in technology. There are a lot of things that look exciting that sort of work in a lab. There are a lot of things that demonstrably work but that would require significant changes in society and human behavior.

Turning something from “works in a lab” to “works in each of the 80 million iPhones I build every quarter for 3-4 years when dropped on cement every month or two” is a non-trivial problem. Many (most) technologies cannot move past this hurdle. Battery technologies in particular are extremely difficult to turn from the lab to the real world.

Autonomous cars are really exciting to people. But at least for the foreseeable future, they require very regular and structured environments to operate reliably and safely. You can do this in some places (e.g., airports, college campuses, maybe some sections of the freeway). But you can’t simply rebuild every road in America to be safe for autonomous cars. And why would you want to? There would be tremendous costs and no real benefit. So, yeah, we basically have the technology but putting it into the real world may never make any sense.

The worst example of this is nuclear energy. We literally have the means to end global warming, which I’m told by Netflix is metaphorically the same as ignoring an asteroid that’s about to smash into the earth. Nuclear has killed far fewer people (like, order of magnitude) than any other means of generating electricity (I suspect more people have fallen off of roofs installing solar panels than have been killed by nuclear). It’s been stymied from innovation by absurd regulation and unhinged people. So we literally know how to do something that will avoid the thing that people believe is an extinction event. And they still won’t get behind the technology.

This isn’t to say that we should be down on the future. We should be pushing for improved technology to improve our lives so much more than we are today. But it is to say that there are a lot of reasons you can’t just see something that’s interesting in some paper and think it will change the world. Or, rather, that the “changing the world” part is a lot more of the challenge than the figuring out the “science” part.

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Re #1. I don't get the point of avoiding games 1 through 15. Avoiding 16 thought, sounds like a very good advice. Happy new year to all.

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Nothing unique to explain with Mormons. They follow the same trends as the general population, just at a higher level. Fertility rates in a lot of developed countries, including US, have been collapsing in the past 10-15 years. In 2007, US fertility rate was 2.12. By this spring, CDC estimated it was just 1.64. Haven't done much research into matter, but seen a decent number of demographers suggest that it is a consequence of the modern electronic age both generally and for Mormons in particular.

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20 "The Oxford Chemistry and Biology postdocs I met during bus rides to the science park (from my time at Oxford Nanopore) earned £35k at AstraZeneca 3. That's half of what someone slightly competent earns after four months of youtubing Javascript tutorials 🤷‍♂️."

That's nonsense if coders were getting paid that much we would never be able to hire anyone. Should we mistrust the rest of the article similarly?

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While I agree with this, as well as the video featured,

"Glad to see the “we should try to stop global warming for altruistic reasons, but it’s not going to destroy humanity or kill your family” perspective picking up more traction,"

I was disappointed that she then refers to "subsistence farmers and people in the third world" as if we'll still have "subsistence farmers and people in the third world" 80 years from now.

Once the Startup Cities/Charter Cities movement gets going, I don't expect there to be any subsistence farmers nor will there be any "third world" after a few decades. The very existence of mass poverty is due to bad law and governance. Most of the world's population is still stuck in regimes that make it unnecessarily difficult to create entrepreneurial value.

Rather than cite the literature on economic freedom, it might be helpful to give a concrete example. Last year Africa had its best year ever for venture capital,

"The continent’s startups raised over $4 billion this year and minted five unicorns."

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/30/african-tech-took-center-stage-in-2021/

Much of this was in Nigeria. What was the Nigerian government response?

"The Nigerian government is waging war on its technology industry. Within the last 12 months, President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration – through different ministries and regulatory bodies – has enacted a series of bans and operational restrictions in the country’s vibrant tech ecosystem.

Most recently, the Central Bank froze the accounts of four fintech platforms this August, claiming they were operating without a license and trading unethically sourced foreign currencies. The same month, the Nigerian Information and Technology Development Agency (NITDA) proposed introducing tax levies and licensing fees for tech companies as well as prison sentences for those who default on these payments. . . .

As economist Tunde Leye puts it: “The main thing we must understand [is] that the Nigerian elite have a consensus from the North to the East to [the] West to the Delta, that the formation of wealth independent of the political patronage system is a threat that must be exterminated.”

https://africanarguments.org/2021/10/nigerias-war-on-tech/

So called "developing nations" often have similar dynamics; Nobel laureate Douglass North, along with Wallis and Weingast, famously called this "the natural state,"

http://www.fnf.org.ph/downloadables/Douglass%20North%20Article.pdf

Because it is the natural condition in most societies for the oligarchs to prevent entrepreneurial capitalists from creating prosperity.

The more jurisdictions we can create where people are as free to create entrepreneurial value as they are in Singapore, Denmark, or New Zealand, the faster mass poverty will become a historical footnote. As Muhammad Yunus notes, at some point poverty will be only seen in museums, a peculiar feature of ancient human history. Children in 2100 will regard mass poverty as unfamiliar as children today regard a telephone booth or a slide rule, something that happened sometime before they were born. Their grandparents will talk about how hard life was in the old days, and thus provide "poverty within memory" for the grandchildren of today's global poor.

To shift more specifically to the climate debate: Especially when people talk about stopping fossil fuel use in Africa, these judgments should be based on empirical analyses on the relative benefits of varying rates of economic growth, on the one hand, vs. various climate impacts, on the other. There are undoubtedly scenarios in which it is more beneficial for Africans to continue to have access to affordable, reliable energy (usually fossil fuels) than to contribute marginally to lower temperatures 80 years from now. I've never seen a rigorous empirical analysis comparing such scenarios, but I wish those activists and NGOs working to end fossil fuel consumption in Africa would first undertake such scenario planning so they had an empirically informed understanding of the real human tradeoffs involved.

The "existential risk" of a population at an average GDP per capita of $80K each is very different from the "existential risk" of a population at $2K each. Climate impacts for populations at $2k would indeed be devastating. At $80K each, not so much. In 60 years, Singapore went from less than $500 to roughly $60K,

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/SGP/singapore/gdp-per-capita

Personally, I see getting average GDP per capita up to the $80K range to be the highest moral priority. As Fred Turner notes, the goal is to "Make Everybody Rich,"

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24562532

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Re: 15, when you look at the paper, it looks like they are talking about low rates of recidivism as compared to *other types of convicts who get released*, rather than compared to the general public.

IE,Someone released for murder is less likely to commit a violent crime than a random criminal convicted of a nonviolent offense. This is relevant if you are talking about relative sentencing guidelines between different types of convicts, and for pointing out false dichotomies between violent and non-violent offenders. In this sense the report is saying something useful, but of more niche applicability.

The tweet doesn't convey this nuance, and seems like an attempt to lie for that reason. But that shouldn't be held against the report itself.

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Re: 16 are we supposed to be impressed by eignenrobot here? He seems to be doing a really terrible job of the standard replyguy thing: make fun of each individual sentence out of context, never acknowledge that the criticisms of sentence 1 gets explained in sentence 5, when you do get to sentence 5 which disproves all your previous sneers, just sneer at it without making an argument and then move on as if it never happened.

Basically: yes, the fundamental issue is what your frame of reference for bias is. The algorithm is not biased relative to crime reporting and arrest rates, the journalist is claiming that crime reporting and arrest rates are themselves biased and provides several references to believe this, this is the heart of the question and eigenrobot just completely fails to address it or come to grips with it in any meaningful way.

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Re: 21 I'd 'get excited about' a technology that has a 10% chance of revolutionizing something I care about in the next 10 years, so I don't think 'get excited about this list of things' and 'only 10% of them are likely to happen' are in much conflict.

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Re: 24 - adding my datum, same for me, couple hours of real work a week in a very high-paid job and never caught up to me.

Of course, there were some weeks with legitimately 50+ hours of real work, including weeks-long travel to factories and things, so I think a peak capacity model would probably explain a lot of why jobs are structured this way. You can't just hire 50 programmers for 2 weeks when you hit crunch, they need to already be onboarded and part of the corporate mechanism to be effective.

But it would be nice if they were only required to be in the office 20 hours a week on the weeks they only have 5 hours of work, with an understanding that they'll show up for the 50+ weeks.

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Stating the obvious: Scott needs a sidegig substack called "Wait, what?"

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During my 3 hour flight home after xmas, I had 5 ideas that seem to me like good ideas, but maybe only 2-3 of them are actually good. This seems like a good thread for going off on disparate tangents, so here they are:

Idea 1: Biological carbon capture

Producing biomass is very cheap (90 tons +/- 30% CO2 per year per $4000 acre of farmland with minimal work using Paulownia trees or bamboo, 90% confidence). Preventing the biomass carbon from getting back into the atmosphere eventually is the hard part. This is a refinement of my prior ideas.

Step 1: Grow biomass

Step 2: Pulverize it

Step 3: Mix with water and alkaline clay (literally dirt cheap, 99% confidence)

Step 4: Anaerobically produce methane from this slurry via either microbes or synthetic enzymes. (related study: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S072320208680011X)

Step 5: Almost all the resultant CO2 is trapped in solution as carbonate/bicarbonate ions due to alkalinity (99% confidence). The outgassing will be nearly pure methane (higher purity than fossil gas, 75% confidence)

Step 6: The remnant may be marketable as topsoil because you've reduced its pH and added lots of humus to the clay. (30% confidence... actually after reading this I updated to 50%: https://forum.gardenersworld.com/discussion/1020379/i-have-alkaline-clay-soil(

Idea 2: Lyft and Uber should do just-in-time matching of drivers with passengers by physically bumping phones together with NFC. Then Ubers could pick up the same efficient way taxis pick up at the Las Vegas airport, and save everybody 10 minutes of waiting for some specific driver to come on-demand to a place that everyone already knew years in advance would have lots of passengers waiting.

Idea 3: Doing explicit Bayesian calculations in your head when you lack a good social intuition (using intuition as a synonym for what Daniel Kahneman calls "System 1"). Prior that a random girl is into me: 1:100. She starts fiddling with her hair the instant I look at her, multiply by 4:1. She offers me some gum unsolicited, multiply by 4:1. She keeps leaning over me to take pictures out the plane window, multiply by 8:1. She's with a guy but there are no PDAs, might just be a brother or platonic friend. Multiply by 1:2. She bumps my foot with hers in a way that was obviously intentional. Multiply by 4:1. Correct my numbers if they're wrong. I multiply it all out and get 64:25 Due to feminism/metoo I need pretty high confidence before making any moves (What % would be appropriate)? I should probably be reciprocating with a similar series of ambiguous gestures like she did, to gradually ratchet up our probability estimates about the other being into us, but I didn't really say or do anything. I would really appreciate a list of numbers I can use for these calculations.

Idea 4: Integrating a solar panel with a battery, a converter, and an outlet, and trying to get the entire package down below $200 like OLPC. To electrify off-the-grid places. Tesla's battery costs are around $150/kwh now, and excluding heating/cooling/cooking, 1kwh could be adequate for one household for one night. 300 watts of panel capacity could charge that in one day and have plenty left over for daytime use. Current cost of 300 watts of panel capacity is <$100. If you can get broadcast TV or internet access to remote parts of the third world (30" LCD TV = 60 watts) their ignorance will decrease, their welfare will improve, and their fertility will go down. Reducing fertility in the third world can reduce problems of hunger, longer term carbon emissions, dysgenics, and political instability.

Idea 5: I noticed there is such a thing as a "social justice quilt academy". I really don't know how to model this phenomenon of social justice people entering every hobby and making it about social justice instead of what it was originally about, except by analogy to old-timey religions that took every opportunity to proselytize. If SJW views of the causes of group performance gaps were correct, then there would be a massive utility payoff to proselytizing as much as possible. Likewise global warming. The ideas that spread will tend to be the ideas that can convince people there is a huge utility payoff for proselytizing as much as possible. The payoff need not be real. It only needs to be as convincing as religious ideas of afterlife, which is a very low bar.

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Does anyone know what the recidivism rates are for fraud?

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On that number 24, man I've felt horribly guilty for being that guy in my career. I don't know how to feel about the idea that maybe it's fairly common.

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Re Mormon birthdates: According to https://religionnews.com/2019/06/15/the-incredible-shrinking-mormon-american-family/, Mormon leaders used to be extremely opposed to birth control, and they gradually stopped talking about it in 1980-1990's. Is it possible it took about a decade or two for their influence on the population to fade?

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26. I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (We prefer to be called by the full name of the church rather than "Mormons", but I'll give you a pass this time.) I have 7 children and my wife is expecting our 8th in May, and we feel strongly about this. We love having a big family though it is countercultural in this day and age. Other commenters have pointed out that Utah is growing and the percentage of Church members is dropping, suggesting that the data doesn't actually reflect birthrates among members of the Church specifically. However, I don't think that fits the data. An outsized percent of the growth state-wide has been in Utah County, so this theory would predict that birthrates in Utah County would be falling faster than in other Utah counties - but that is not the case, at least for the counties with data shown at the link. Instead, birthrates in all of the available Utah counties are falling at a similar rate. It certainly is true that societal trends that impact everyone impact members of my church too, and pull the birthrate numbers down. But I think that trends in church teachings (softening the "multiply and replenish the earth" rhetoric) are also accelerating the trend toward lower birthrate. These changes in teaching approach are likely in response to, and out of sensitivity to, increasing numbers of unmarried and childless church members. But the softened rhetoric of course also amplifies the cycle. You can dig up old quotes from the Prophets in the 1950s and 1960s that are very straightforward about the need for and benefits of having children. Those old quotes now seem like they came from a different world. For decades now we didn't hear very much about this doctrine at all. Just in the last year or so some of the Apostles have felt a need to speak up (probably in response to the tanking birthrates we are now discussing), but that is still tentative and a marked change in approach. Even on Mothers Day at the local level, the speakers in our ward spend less time thanking mothers than they spend making sure everyone knows that those who don't have children are also ok - which is true, of course, but illustrates the point. To step back a little, and of course I am biased, but I can think of no other action that increases the overall utility of the world than bringing children into it in the first place. Existence, even in the third world, is a utility net-positive. Existing in the world vs not existing is a giant step change in utility, obviously. In our society we underestimate the value of potential existence, which almost never gets factored into our policy math. Any policy that lowers birthrates (e.g. car seat regs, or anything that hurts prosperity, or makes it harder for single-income families) has a huge unaccounted-for negative impact in overall utility via potential lives not realized as the birthrates fall as an unintended (and un-thought-about) consequence. Should be an opening for EA, but I doubt it would mood affiliate.

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Re 2.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilian_real says the Real, which replaced the URV, was worth exactly one U.S. dollar at the time it was introduced, so it seems the URV was tied to the dollar before it was converted to the Real.

The article on NRP is certainly interesting, and it explains the trick behind the URV well, but omitting the USD binding seems to give the impression that the trick's basis was purely psychological. However, binding one's currency to a stable foreign currency seems to be a pretty basic economic trick - which, of course, has a psychological side too, because the reason the inflation does not come back after it is not anymore tied to the dollar, seems to be the expectation of the people using the currency.

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Jan 3, 2022·edited Jan 3, 2022

#30: The interviewee has an MA in political science and is a policy analyst in an organisation with a track record of minimising environmmental and social damage from resource exploitation). She does not have a track record in energy, climate, environmental, or social science.

My prior belief is that it will be full of BS, strawman opponents, misinterpretations and innumeracy.

... And my post is that the interview is full of strawmen by caricature ("children are little carbon emitting machines"), strawmanning by extremising ("stop reproducing"), and misrepresentations (a focus on birth rate, when the problem lies almost entirely with the 250 million highest-income people, who already have below-replacement birth rates; massive overclaiming, and innumeracy and ignorance of scaling timetables when it comes to technological matters), and distractions from the issue (e.g. talking about medical progress in the mid-20th century).

There are also outright falsehoods being brought out: the idea that we need technological breakthroughs to "solve" climate change (and therefore need more people to have those ideas). We have all the needed technology now. Ideas, from now on, have negative value. Climate change *is* solved...in theory. All that's left is the politics.

She *is* right that our collective non-climate-affecting depradations are pretty bad too, and those chickens will also come home to roost this century. That doesn't help her argument.

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> But here’s a story about someone selecting guppies for intelligence (successfully) and finding that they had smaller guts and lower fertility.

Aren't humans descended from animals that had larger guts (due to less meat in their diet, and not cooking it)? Also, while no-one knows how fertile extinct hominins were, the probability for pregnancy per copulation is probably lower from humans than most mammals.

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"Glad to see the “we should try to stop global warming for altruistic reasons, but it’s not going to destroy humanity or kill your family” perspective picking up more traction"

For the longest time, this was the *default* position among progressives and environmentalists. In Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," the big threat posed by climate change was an increase in the amount and severity of flooding, hurricanes, and other natural disasters due to the melting of the polar ice caps. In Kim Stanley Robinson's book "New York 2140" - which was praised by environmental activists as being a starkly realistic vision of the devastation that climate change may cause - Manhattan is partly submerged and has become a poor and squalid place due to flooding and infrastructure damage, with Denver (a landlocked, high-altitude mountain city) taking its place as the economic capital of the nation. These are certainly grim predictions that present a rather bleak future, but they don't come anywhere close to the claim that humans will literally go extinct or suffer an apocalyptic catastrophe that kills billions and destroys modern civilization entirely.

But somehow, over just the past few years, the idea of climate change as an *existential threat* to humanity has become a mainstream idea among online progressives and leftists. I still don't think it's the majority opinion among left-leaning folks, but it's definitely a popular one. A recent poll I saw in a progressive Facebook group was about evenly split between "climate change is an existential threat that could cause human extinction" and "climate change is really bad, but it's not an extinction risk."

Of course, the extinction narrative has virtually no support from actual climate scientists. Only a vanishingly small minority of climatologists actually believe it will cause the literal extinction of humanity, and they tend to be viewed as crackpots by the rest of the scientific community, just like the denialists on the other end of the spectrum. Roger Hallam's claim that "climate change will kill 6 billion people by 2100" was extensively debunked by scientists, and the fringe theory of a "runaway greenhouse effect" that would turn Earth into an uninhabitable wasteland was dismissed by the IPCC as a literal impossibility. Yet that hasn't kept the extinction narrative from gaining traction among the activist crowd since the mid-2010s. Any ideas why this might be the case?

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Per #26, I'm an active Mormon who lived in Utah for 17 years (10 of them in Utah County). I don't think the birthrate decline has much to do with secularism or a reduced percentage of Mormons in the state. It's much more simple than that: Utah is booming!! Utah County especially is growing like mad. What was once a collection of small towns throughout the Provo-SLC-Ogden corridor is not an unbroken sea of increasingly dense suburbs. Lehi is becoming a tech hub of its own (Silicon Slopes!). Utah feels more and more like California every year.

The result of this is that Utah is much less isolated than it used to be. There are far more people with far more connections to the outside world, and it has given the state a more metropolitan feel. The state is still dominated by Mormons. In Utah County especially, you can still assume that everyone you see at the grocery store either is or used to be an active Mormon. But with a more metropolitan culture, people just aren't having as many kids. My dad was one of eight kids, I was one of eight kids, but my wife and I only have three. That's a common story. There's a lot more to life now that there are things to do.

The older generations still feel very strongly that women should stay home with their kids (my wife and I get this talk from both our parents), but more and more women are working now. Managing a huge family is very difficult to do when you also have a job. Religious changes are mostly a red herring. It's just simple affluence.

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022

#6 Pleasantly surprised that lots of people are supporting some obvious utility gains, and not getting derailed by the worst argument in the world (P1: nazi death camps killed people partly for eugenics. P2: nazi death camps were super evil. P3: eugenics means any organized attempt to improve the gene pool P4: therefore any organized attempt to improve the gene pool is super evil. To see how ridiculous this is, compare: P1: nazis invaded eastern europe partly for agriculture P2: the nazi invasion of eastern europe was super evil. P3: agriculture means any organized attempt to improve the food supply. P4: therefore any organized attempt to improve the food supply is super evil.)

#7 the article says they were selecting for bigger brains *relative* to body size. That implies they weren't just selecting for bigger brains -- they were selecting for bigger brains and smaller rest-of-body. In that context the result of smaller guts is less surprising and I should update much less towards intelligence genes being tradeoffs.

#8 seems very plausible but in its current form it's too vague to constrain anticipation. The south Korean government had everyone's cell phone GPS data in real time for test and trace purposes. They could use that data to characterize population structure and get better at modeling interventions. Models definitely don't need any more free variables that researchers can tweak to arrive at whatever conclusion they already wanted to arrive at.

#9 is probably a joke (90% confidence that the author doesn't actually believe that). But there's no parody disclaimer in the profile. It's probably unvirtuous to make an ambiguously-parodic twitter account that tweets straw men which people might mistake for the genuine article and update towards negative karma for various tribes that never espoused that straw man. (generalizing from fictional evidence, ethnic tension)

#12 Bowles' life story makes me want to take the Bran pill so I can observe history in first person. That'd be better than all the other pills (https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/02/and-i-show-you-how-deep-the-rabbit-hole-goes/) except Orange.

#15 The subset of murderers who ever get released is a very nonrandom sample of murderers, plus they've been in jail so long that they've aged out of their peak violent crime years. So low-ish recidivism of murderers doesn't say much about what the recidivism rates would be in the context of some radical anti-incarceration reform, and it's probably a mistake to use the former to argue for the latter.

#16 The NVCS shows that racial disparities in arrest rates correspond to disparities in actually-committing-crime, not police bias, so assuming neighborhood disproportionality = bias is not just an unwarranted assumption, it's actively undermined by the available evidence. Black and Latino neighborhoods also have a younger average age, and youth commit several times more crime than old folks. (having a not-yet-fully-developed brain is a bit like having a low IQ and correlates with many of the same things: impulsivity, aggression, criminality, low productivity)

#21 My most pessimistic take on this analogizes big tech to land speculators who got in early, and are now just collecting rent on their natural monopoly. But worse than actual land speculators, because they use all that money to hire the smartest people to figure out how to make people click on ads 1% more instead of actually innovating. So there's a brain drain from everything else into figuring out how to make people click ads 1% more. Related Neal Stephenson speech which is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM "I saw the best minds of my generation writing spam filters"

Noah blaming energy costs for the stagnation seems dubious. Total US energy spending is only 5.7% of GDP (https://css.umich.edu/factsheets/us-energy-system-factsheet). US total government spending (federal+state+local) was 45% of GDP in 2021. A new government program that wastes an extra 6% of GDP could have a bigger impact than doubling energy prices. It's plausible that affirmative action or uncertainties about inflation or regulations could make the economy 5% less efficient too. But Noah singles out energy as the scapegoat for declining innovation in the physical realm, without considering any of the other possible causes.

Sanity check: If energy is really going to become a lot cheaper over the coming decade, CME oil futures for 2033 should be a lot cheaper than oil prices today, because people will substitute other energy sources for oil. But actually, the futures prices decline from $75/barrel to $60/barrel by 2025 (which is basically just reversion to the mean) and then approximately stay there until 2033. There's no longer term trend towards vastly cheaper energy visible in this futures curve. (CME also has futures for electricity prices, which show a similar pattern of quick reversion to the mean followed by stasis, but they're a lot less liquid than oil futures so I don't trust the accuracy of the quotes as much. Zero volume on a typical day. https://www.cmegroup.com/markets/energy/electricity/pjm-western-hub-peak-calendar-month-real-time-lmp.quotes.html)

Brain computer interfaces are still slow and lossy. They're inevitably lossy, because external electrodes can't perfectly read the state of the neurons. They'll probably not in my lifetime be as fast and accurate as a mouse, but they might enable something more compact which is useful for non-paraplegics (e.g., google glass style computers)

The vision implant is super cool but it sounds like it still has a very long way to go to get to Geordi on Star Trek TNG. They basically upgraded a blind person to a person who can just barely see large shapes.

The fine print about the pig-to-human kidney transplant was that it only ran for a couple of days, and it was external to the body. (h/t NSQ or freakonomics podcasts) They're still nowhere close to what people usually mean by the words "organ transplant".

This Comment Is Too Damn Long so I'm going to write a separate one if I have any thoughts on 22-34

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022

#22 Nomad capitalists have observed that as soon as a country gets developed enough for its passports to have visa-free access to the US, it usually stops having a very favorable tax and regulatory regime. The intersection of countries with visa free access to the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Waiver_Program) and tax havens (https://howmuch.net/articles/world-map-of-personal-income-tax-havens) is empty except for Poland, which has low-ish but not impressively low taxes.

#23 When I worked for a startup in LA, I worked a lot harder than my usual laziness. I put in about 35 hours of high quality effort every week. (because I actually liked the job, I had a substantial equity stake, my boss was great at motivating me, and I was overcompensating after getting fired from a previous job for extreme laziness and insubordination) A year after I quit that job my boss told me that he had to get 3 people to do what I used to do. There are huge differences in productivity between programmers, so it's not surprising that some programmer can get away with working 5-10 hours a week.

#27 the bulldozer-vetocratic axis is really cool.

#33 Sam Altman was in my accelerated math and science classes for three years in middle school. I went over to his house once to make a 1m parabolic reflector out of mylar in 8th grade. He didn't seem like the smartest in the class, but he was very polite, scrupulous, and hard working. I had no idea he was gay until I read about it on Wikipedia decades later. He did seem annoyed that I was talking about girls while I was at his house. Those were the days when I was widely bullied for being gay, and wasn't actually gay, but people might have thought so. And a couple years later I got a 9.6 on hotornot, so maybe he was into me and I was oblivious as usual.

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The reality is that even if they had approved the vaccine sooner, it would not have saved many, if any lives. They started ramping production even before they got approval, and we were short for many months on vaccines. We would have at best saved a tiny number of lives - and probably not that.

Moreover, they were concerned about rushing through a vaccine that either didn't work or which caused damage to people, as it would increase vaccine hesitancy - which, as we know, has killed far more people than any delay would have.

So the argument that it killed lots of people is false.

This seems to be a common cognitive glitch amongst a certain brand of libertarian - you constantly and consistently disregard this stuff.

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I just realized that link posts would make very good twitter threads - how do you feel about making them or me making them?

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founding

To be fair to the people at Toronto Life, if you wore a bejeweled SSC pendant around your neck and had a STAFF, the NYT would NOT have been acting inappropriately.

It's literally their jobs, and they have corporations involved. This ain't the same thing.

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