A theory of the popularity of anime.
Much like there have been ten thousand reskins of Harry Potter I’ve been waiting for more central examples of English-language cultural products to take that story archetype and just run with it. There is clearly a demand.
Well then Rejoice! The entire genre of Progression Fantasy is what you desire, and you need only browse the Best Of RoyalRoad to see lots of english-language stories that scratch that particular itch. In fact, I find these english stories immensely superior to anything in anime or manga.
A particularly good example is the recently-finished 12 book series Cradle, whose books ranked at #1 on fantasy Audible for the past few years.
I checked up the first few cases from that list of different things that cops find suspicious, and in 100% of them it seems that the person the cops were suspicious about were in fact transporting large quantities of illegal drugs.
What this looks like to me is less "cops will use any excuse to stop anyone they feel like" and more "some cops are actually quite good at spotting the many and varied signs that someone might be a drug dealer, and the particular things they happen to describe having noticed vary a lot", and there doesn't seem anything terribly bad about that.
There are a bunch of ways in which the situation could in fact be bad. For instance, maybe the people being stopped by the cops all just happen to be black because the cops are super-racist -- no!, I hear you cry, cops in America being racist? say it ain't so! -- or something like that. But then the problem isn't "cops have a wide variety of things they find suspicious", it's "cops disproportionately turn their drug-dealer-finding skills on a particular group of people they're biased against", and the fact that they find a large and "inconsistent" set of kinds of evidence has nothing much to do with it.
(I'm not sure whether Zvi is in fact making the same point as me. Is "this strategy" meant to be "the strategy being employed by the cops" or "the strategy being employed by the person complaining about the cops"?)
None of your Twitter links are working for me, even in incognito mode. They just give a generic "Something went wrong. Try reloading." error message.
If you are not logged into Twitter you can no longer use links. I am doing my best not to rely on them going forward but this was already written.
As always, plenty of non-AI things are happening, most of which do not justify their own posts. This is where all of those go. Skimming for things relevant to your interests is encouraged.
Before I begin, a Point of Order: I plan to have a post later regarding the rate limitation and disruption on Twitter, which disrupts many features of Tweetdeck and means that if you aren’t logged in Twitter links no longer work. Adjustments will need to be made if the situation is not fixed very soon, despite my having no fear of ever hitting the 10k rate limit itself. It is not practical to go back and fix links or other decisions on already written material but I am adjusting the process going forward.
Bad News
RIP 538. Nate Silver leaving was always going to be a hard blow to recover from, as the models are the heart and soul of the entire model. It also depends on a deep commitment, visible to all, to fair play and avoiding putting a finger on the scale or using the scale as leverage. Alas:
No. I have listened to many a Model Talk, with in-depth discussion of how to (among many other considerations) construct a polling aggregation systems that best resists partisan manipulation, despite the need to ‘play defense’ where the pollsters respond to your policies. Using logic like this is incompatible with such an effort.
Cocaine Bear, meet Government Warrantless Survey of Private Property Bear.
It is an important fact about banks that both they will pitch beyond atrocious products at you constantly, and also that no overloaded number of indicators, however explicit, that you know better, will get them to stop. Until McKenzie, I do begrudge the bank and the salesperson here, actively pitching a 2% CD right now is stealing. Worse, it’s wasting your time. The amount of idiocy I had to push through to get a Chase Bank representative to tell me their real interest rate offer was… not small.
Claim that a third of software job applicants, and over 5% of actual job holders, can’t write fizzbuzz, which implies they can’t do anything else either, and then the claim that many people literally never produce any productive output yet stay employed indefinitely. Which is good news if you are competing against such businesses. It is ambiguous news if you are trying to get hired. It means you have a big edge on those people in this area, also means that area is less important than you thought.
We have a list of jobs for which workers are in short supply, called Schedule A, to streamline immigration. It hasn’t been updated since 1991. Might want to do that.
Good News, Everyone
Worth repeating: Across the Spiderverse is the best new movie I’ve seen in years. If you have not yet done so, see it now, ask no questions. Unless you never saw Into the Spiderverse, in which case see that first and same advice applies.
Excellent new long Paul Graham essay on How to Do Great Work. In so many ways no one else could have written it this way. I do not agree with everything and do not forget to consider reversing all advice you hear, and yes this is too long, yet this is an excellent essay and you should read it. I hope he invests the time to make it shorter. Plausibly deserves a full response post at some point.
Chinese friend of Paul Graham estimates 90% of highly educated 25-year-old Chinese citizens would come to USA if handed a green card. If we made this our policy, we would cripple China and supercharge America. If you think we have to ‘beat China’ in any sense, or are worried about Chinese AI, or arguing that we can’t slow down on AI because we must beat China, and are not screaming for this immigration policy from the rooftops, your position is not coherent.
Excellent writing advice from Larry McEnerney (2 min + 9 min). Write to understand. Your writing must be valuable to the reader. Recommended for a watch.
Joe Weisenthal says trainers are observing use patterns shifting (locally in NYC) to reflect a return to the office.
The statistics reflect this. New York City office occupancy breaks 50% of pre-pandemic levels for first time.
There is a clear pattern here. If it holds we should get to at least 60% later this year, and be mostly back to old levels before the decade is out.
Claim that of the four self-driving car accidents cited by San Francisco officials, one wasn’t an accident and the other three involved the self-driving car being rear ended, which by default means it wasn’t at fault, and no determinations of fault were made. None had major injuries. I’d assume it would be easy to find out who was responsible? Don’t these cars have cameras actual everywhere?
Michael Ashcroft makes the case for holding down a job. About half of it seems like ‘if you get an unusually good job’ style arguments. The other half is that not having to think and only do a narrow thing you are told within fixed bounds can be freeing and provide a narrative where you are fitting in and responsible and making progress and not blameworthy and such. Which is in fact a big deal. Eyes open, though.
Lionel Messi signs with Inter Miami over Riyadh, passing up a billion dollar payday, presumably because he has plenty of cash and gets to live in Miami and grow his brand in America. Also he’s getting true skin the game upside potential for the whole of MLS, this could be the heir to the Michael Jordan shoe contract (if you haven’t seen the movie Air about that, it is excellent).
While I Cannot Condone This
It really is strange and wonderful that we can’t trust the airline to get the bag (or, lately, you) to your destination, but we completely trust the other passengers not to steal our bag, such that when our bag isn’t there we don’t even consider the possibility someone stole it despite zero precautions being taken.
My name is Inigo Montoya. I am representing my own interests. Prepare to vote.
Claim that The Simpsons is good again. I am skeptical that one can go home again.
New York City bans discrimination based on height and weight. Knicks are on it.
Paul Graham declares peak woke.
Claim by Brian Manookian that if you challenge the chain of title validity of your student loans using the proper legal magic invocations, there is a very good chance that your loan gets wiped out. Huge if true. The causal theory offered is: Almost no one ever does this, so the companies involved stopped bothering to properly handle the paperwork. No one involved is a lawyer, none of this is legal advice and so on. Note that this type of affordance gets very interesting as AIs lower the cost of both noticing and exploiting the opportunity.
Poland simplifies visa procedures for citizens of many countries, including Ukraine, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Vietnam and Nigeria. The right wing ‘law and justice’ party intends to accept over 400,000 such visas per year, including simplifying the ‘benefit’ procedure to allow them to work. This would be more immigrants than any other country even in absolute terms, who would then get to move throughout the EU.
There is particular talk that demand is high in typically ‘male’ industries like construction, welding and transport. This indicates that Poland is not using this opportunity to choose those with high human capital, instead looking for cheap labor, and trying to use guest workers, likely without intending on offering a path to citizenship. That tends to change over time.
This is remarkably close to open borders for Poland, which then has open borders with most of Europe. Poland gets the short term economic benefits of new workers, while offloading many of the longer term concerns from taking on so many immigrants so quickly as they diffuse throughout the continent. This has always seemed like a deep flaw in the EU system for those who want to limit immigration. If you think the public favors too little immigration and too much democracy, it is a feature.
A theory of the popularity of anime.
Yes, I am absolutely saying that quite a lot of objections to things are exactly this. Usually they make it slightly less obvious.
Trump arrested for retaining classified documents under the espionage act. Nixon reads the indictment, detail after detail is essentially ‘It doesn’t look good.’ Former Trump-appointed Attorney General Bill Barr says ‘if even half of it is true he’s toast, it’s a detailed indictment and it’s very, very damning.’ Jane Rosenzweig explains that the indictment is highly readable exactly because of good writing decisions, with the explicit goal of readability and the telling of a page turning story. All coverage I have read confirms that, as a matter of law, they have Trump dead to rights here.
Like everyone else I still expect Trump to somehow not be held to account, but from what I can tell a normal person would be super duper toast here.
I share Patrick McKenzie’s ambivalence here. Is it good news that the internet can often run laps around official investigators? Or is it bad news that the internet can often run laps around official investigators? Highly related to whether this is a ‘me question’ or a ‘you question.’
The other thread is quite the rundown. I definitely haven’t checked the claims, but here’s the first third or so minus its images:
[thread continues, also it contains images of various documents]
What would happen if you fed all the public information on such matters into a computer system and set it up to do this type of analysis, ideally using refined LLM tools, in the style of Person of Interest? You would learn quite a lot of ‘Hayekian details’ that way, and uncover quite a lot, no need to add in universal illegal wiretaps. Our secrets largely survive via security through obscurity, which is why someone who is willing to spend the time can figure out things like this. What happens when they don’t need to spend the time? What happens if you combine this with governmental information assets and powers?
Useful Vibes Only
Consumption should not be conspicuous. The same applies to its absence.
[links to this Lincoln Quark post called ‘Why Altruists Can’t Have Nice Things’ where Lincoln essentially endorses providing clearly worthwhile stuff but not luxurious perks or things that otherwise send the wrong type of message, and to consider charging for things including food at events.]
The distinct tax advantages of providing employees with experiential goods should not be dismissed, especially in high-tax areas like New York and San Francisco. Nor should one dismiss the value of making someone’s life nicer or easier. People really do appreciate it, and the time saved is more valuable on the margin than it appears. Free is powerful. Offering people free food in particular has very strong returns in positive vibes and ability to not distract. I am all for using markets and prices to allocate scarce resources, sometimes it’s even worth a major tax hit to use them, but sometimes the optimal price most definitely is $0.
Can you go too far with upgrades and massages and retreats? I mean, yes, of course.
I still strongly endorse that if you want someone to work hard at an important task, you want to pay them an amount such that they’re not constantly worried about money (not profligate, but they can act in reasonable ways they are used to without worrying about it). And you definitely don’t want to be underpaying people, or not providing useful services, to ensure people are ‘on mission’ or to send a signal. Whenever you do things for signaling reasons, be suspicious.
People at nonprofits are, as far as I can tell and in my experience, constantly put under a kind of siege where they are expected to get none of the surplus they generate – they should always get the minimum they need to deliver the goods, nothing more, or else it is, as Daniel puts it, ‘a grift.’
In my experience, paying less (in total compensation, including perks) than someone’s happy price and dramatically less than their opportunity cost, asking people to make the maximum amount of sacrifices they possibly can, is a fools errand. Absolutely act responsibly. Don’t throw money around, don’t do crazy perks, especially don’t do perks that cost more than the person values them plus what they add to productivity. Also don’t guilt trip the exact people out to do the most good, or most others either.
Outback Steakhouse dominating Brazil with over 150 spots all packed. Article makes clear that the chain has much better both absolute and relative style in Brazil, and that the contrast in food styles is doing a lot of work. It had better, because the food quality very much does not justify the price level. Whereas Fogo de Chao is spreading here in America, and it’s awesome.
Government Not Working
FTC situation is not great, complete with a lot of threatening emails from certain commissioners if other commissioners don’t vote the right way. They are also going after Amazon for enrolling people in prime and not making it easy enough for them to quit, claiming millions have been unwittingly enrolled. With complaints like this:
Stratechery devotes a whole post to pointing out how good a deal prime is and how it is a customer friendly business model that benefits from scale, and then walking through the details of these so-called ‘dark patterns’ and showing definitively that Amazon’s actions here are all perfectly reasonable. The deck isn’t completely unstacked, but it never is, I really don’t know what anyone was expecting.
I actually do think it would be good to take action to deal with abuse of free trials and automatic renewals across the board. In particular, automatic renewals for extended periods, in the absence of active use of the subscription, should require periodic explicit consent. I’d also be down for universal enforcement of ‘two clicks to cancel.’ Until then, this is the worst kind of selective enforcement, for one of the best deals in the world. There are much, much worse cases out there getting away with it, as Ben points out. New York Times, anyone? Or your local gym?
Call-to-cancel is the toxic thing that must be wiped from the planet. If your website is a little obnoxious about its six clicks? Seriously, stop complaining now.
(The post then goes on to discuss a new Texas anti-porn law that applies if your platform is ‘more than one third’ porn, and asks how a social network could know if this was true, complaining it is not well defined. And I guess so, but wouldn’t you know? I feel like you would know.)
Niskanen Center publishes one of the most depressing documents I’ve seen in a while, about how Culture Eats Policy when it comes to government hiring and tech procedures. Trying to hire someone is a nightmare, you submit a request and then HR judges who can cut and paste and give themselves master rankings in everything and maybe eventually you’ll get someone through the ‘cert’ process after multiple six month cycles that can even in theory do the job at all – such as a job for web designer where zero applicants are web designers. Senseless requirements in contracts that no one ever intended, such as routing messages through an ESB loop that when it works properly does nothing, as every stage of authority solidifies requirements more and more and no one has any way to point out they make actual sense, with costs sometimes running into the billions for no reason at all.
Congress yells about such things, then everyone goes back to being terrified of justifying every step of the process in pure process terms, again regardless of whether anything involved made any sense. And so on.
Ben Hoffman suggests creating common knowledge that such systems treat costs (the requirements) as benefits, rather than the benefit being that you build the thing and it does what it was meant to do. Then perhaps we can offer solutions. That seems better than the Niskanen Center’s exhortation of ‘have less process requirements.’ Yes, have less process requirements, but how? A process requirement to minimize process requirements?
What won’t work is tinkering along the edges of the problem. The core structure is fatally broken.
What we need is a plan that works in practice, not one that works in theory, that gets everyone involved away from all of these checklists and required practices, while not opening the door to corruption, corner cutting and the whole host of principal-agent problems. The government system is designed around only paying for, requiring getting what you can technically measure. Can we redesign the system to do the thing the rest of the world does, and pay for and reward practical results? Keep in mind incentives will need to be fixed up and down the line.
Biden Administration provides aid to ports, on the explicit condition that the funds not be used for automation. Yeah, AI might run into some problems.
Periodic reminder that our immigration system is completely bonkers, including letting a single officer arbitrarily deny entry to a fully funded PhD headed to Johns Hopkins because they didn’t like their stupid face.
Reasons not to take advice from professors: World is changing rapidly so their experiences don’t apply, survivorship bias, conflict of interest.
Someone is the change they want to see in the world.
Thread from Sandeep Parikh about his experience working with Robin Williams, great stuff. The power of engaging for real with those around you no matter what, and also that you know more than you realize you know.
Caviar really is the best delivery service and it isn’t close.
It’s true. Doordash itself is consistently a disaster. Caviar is highly reliable. Their time estimates are bizarrely terrible, but if you ignore them and use common sense, you’re golden.
Agency can be taught to humans.
Game of Thrones sound suddenly went from world-class to awful, Lauren McKenzie claims, because AT&T forced HBO shows to use AT&T’s sound tech. I file this under good news because that means there’s a very easy way to fix it. Could also be filed under the efficient market hypothesis is false.
My general rule at this point is that I will use subtitles on all television shows except comedies, since jokes don’t land without their details and timing. It’s too important not to be confused. For movies sound quality and details can be good enough that, given I’m giving my full attention, I’ll go without.
Government Working
UK government plans ‘controlled spontaneity’ in response to terrorist attacks, to focus public reaction on sympathy for victims rathe than outrage at terrorists, and to prevent giving the terrorists exactly what they want. Clearly framed as terrible in the post. This seems very good?
Senator Sinema finally gets one right, holds up major bill unless it reduces the absurd 1500 hour training requirement for pilots. The response talk of ‘blood on your hands’ is completely unhinged. If anything, this should be reversed. If you make it harder to fly and force people to drive instead, you are the one with blood on your hands. Also the rhetoric comes from Senator Duckworth, whose army pilot training was 180 hours.
I loved this comment on r/flying on the topic. Refreshing levels of quiet part out loud.
Deeply Suspicious
If you think that’s suspicious, you can add that to a very long list of officially suspicious things.
I would have so much more respect for this strategy if they put the contradictory conditions together rather than scattering them. What’s suspicious is anything a cop didn’t expect or that looked weird, or the cop is racist, that’s it, full stop. I mean, isn’t that the job? To be suspicious?
Why was more than $200 billion in Covid economic aid funds stolen, as reported by a watchdog? Justin Amash points out this was completely predictable. Patrick McKenzie explains that in general we have the capacity to either get money out the door fast or not get a bunch of it stolen, and in this case we made a choice to get it out the door.
In Medical and Health News
Air quality is a really big deal.
That point was driven home rather forcefully this past month, as New York City’s sky briefly turned orange and spent several days being not blue, linked thread has both good details and good advice from Zeynep Tufekci, including instructions on making your own air filter in a pinch. My oldest child reporting being more dizzy than he’d ever felt, upon waking up. My youngest was coughing.
I rushed to finish the Thursday morning AI update, because I was having trouble thinking straight while working on my desktop. When I then moved next to the air filter and we turned on the air conditioning for help, my brain returned. The next day, on Friday, things were mostly back to normal, but my head was still noticeably not right.
The new plan is to permanently run three air filters, one in each room. I expect a hard-to-notice but quite real cognitive improvement, on top of health benefits. That came up on 6/30, as the AQI broke 150 again, and the filters are working as designed.
All of which is to say, yes, air quality really is a really big deal, as per Alex Tabarrok’s redux and this Matt Yglesias write-up.
This is highly underserved cause area around the world. Huge gains are available.
Lilly’s new drug Retatrutide also a really big deal assuming anything like its current results are sustained (direct link requires login).
Perhaps results will fragment, if different drugs solve different issues, especially with different side effect profiles. It is also entirely plausible that varying the dose is mostly the best strategy. Too early to tell.
These drugs are, as I understand it, not especially fun. They are still a lot less not fun than trying and failing over and over to lose weight via diet and exercise, often less not fun than succeeding ‘the hard way,’ and a lot less fun for many than giving up entirely.
Also, being fully serious, how much to buy out the patents here and offer this free to whoever wants it? Can we for once not have a massive deadweight loss triangle, and instead have massive weight loss? I bet the government turns a profit after health care spending cost reductions and productivity gains.
NHS situation in the UK continues to deteriorate.
Prompt engineering works on humans. Our doctors are willing to largely spill the beans on the right decisions if given the right prompts, because no one is much paying them not to do that. Like with LMMs, we are only teaching doctors to hide this info in a shallow way.
There is high willingness to pay $100+/month for effective weight loss drugs. If anything the mystery is why willingness is still modest, not why willingness is high. I personally do not want drugs lie Wegovy, because they do not help with my particular issues. If they did, I’d be all over it. At $100/month you could plausibly come out ahead from reduced food costs alone.
UK did get three very important things right during Covid: Approving the vaccine fast, first doses first and the Recovery trial. All three saved many lives. Similarly, the USA did one thing very right, Operation Warp Speed. What does that say about the post title, state capacity? That in theory there is some. In most practice, not much. What other high impact options could we have used state capacity for that we didn’t?
Talk back and forth about Lab Leak probabilities. In addition to analyzing the evidence value of the new info, Tyler Cowen claims that the lab leak world is a worse world. I see why one would think so, but is this true? If Covid-19 came from the wild, then that suggests we may have little hope of preventing another such virus from developing, although we can and very much should develop vaccines and other responses in advance.
If Covid-19 escaped from a lab, then that gives us another affordance. We can avoid doing gain of function research, tighten up lab security, and reduce the chance of another pandemic quite a bit.
Or, alternatively, if we take the risks as givens, we can use the cause to implement better safety in labs, stifle gain of function research, and also rally anti-pandemic measures as it is now a man-made threat from a geopolitical rival rather than a natural cause, justifying very high ROI investments in vaccines and other responses. And the CCP losing face is certainly not obviously bad.
I do see downsides as well, especially involving political tensions rising. The sign here is not obvious.
What percentage of colleagues you would trust depends on both the distribution and also the alternative. It seems psychiatric standards of care are not so good.
A plausible model of therapy is that the good version of it is great, while the median version of it is terrible, and we have no good tools as prospective patients for identifying the good version.
When it’s not therapy, the bar can be a lot lower. If you need an SSRI and a benzo, then all you need is someone not too crazy to run the sanity checks. That still rules out maybe half the profession, but the other half is fine. Whereas if you want something more complicated, you’ll have to search, presumably with a highly itchy trigger finger on switching providers.
For Science!
Alex Tabarrok correctly points out that it is insanity to ask you to do proper formatting for a given journal prior to submission, rather than after acceptance. It’s a huge waste of time. The only explanations are an ego trip, or more sensibly as a costly signal to filter applications. The cost seems too high for the costly signal plan to make sense, you could instead charge a modest fee.
There is not enough funding of long term science, because it does not generate short term wins for funders. This is an echo of scientists not doing long term research work, especially if it might not pan out, because they have too-short feedback cycles to attend to, despite such long term risky projects being key to science progress. This still seems like massive underinvestment even with the AI situation. I don’t know what to do about this at a structural level.
Whereby a rather large problem with our system of diffusing science knowledge is highlighted by Justice Jackson’s recent SCOTUS opinion, thankfully not in a load-bearing way.
The exact quote from the brief is: “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”
A fun game, by the way, is to ask Bing to fact check this claim, and have it say it’s true, while also explaining in detail why the claim is false.
A modest proposal by Stuart Buck: You can put your name on lots of papers without doing the work if you want to do that, but if there is fraud in those papers, you can’t then are held responsible, no saying ‘I didn’t do it.’ Real skin in the game. I approve.
The NIH to not allow AI to be used for peer review, because it is a ‘breach of confidentiality.’
Tyler Cowen was alerted to this by Raghuveer Parthasarathy, who points out that the policy makes no sense as stated whatsoever, and certainly can’t reflect any actual confidentiality concerns as written.
Tyler Cowen confirms this is Obvious Nonsense and asks: dare we expect just a we bit better from our scientific authorities?
I mean, no? Why should we? Remember Covid, also everything else? These are our scientific authorities. They are who we thought they were. Do not let them off the hook. Don’t pretend they are better than this. They are not.
That does not mean we have a better alternative. It does not mean it would not be strategically unwise to participate. The system still, in some ways and some places, tends towards truth over a sufficiently long time horizon. Eyes open, though.
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
The most epic deck photo of all time competition. Current entry:
Last year’s entry from Ryan Grodzinski:
Whereas this was merely a normal one from championship semifinalist fpawluszmtg, still warms my heart.
Sam Black wins a major premodern tournament, his second back-to-back, this time with a deck built from theory, no prior games played. Man remains a legend. So many details here are so Sam Black. Why not play all the best cards?
I have never played a game of Premodern, but it is impossible not to appreciate what is happening here. It is also amazing to see the declaration that no, creatures are nothing to worry about, I will begrudgingly board in two cards I guess but don’t waste precious space.
I do think this should be sufficient to show that the engine of Enlightened Tutor, Mox Diamond, Land Tax and Scroll Rack cannot survive. It was fun for a while, it is going to rapidly get less fun over time. I’m sorry to have missed it, but ensuring I miss this is 100% the necessary move.
Get in gamer, we’re going to MagicCon Las Vegas for the 2,000 person, $100,000 prize pool limited open. I mean, no, I’m probably not because I would have to learn the set, but this is still awesome and I’m actually tempted.
Quite the Twitch. They came out with these guidelines, before quickly backtracking the face of a widespread creator revolt.
It is very difficult to get things right on the first try. It’s not this hard. If you want to make it clear you don’t allow third party ad networks, you can say up front ‘this is a clarification of our existing policy that we don’t allow third party ad networks, if this is functionally doing other things that are a problem please let us know and we will fix it.’ If you want to actually put on much harsher restrictions and then you quickly realize you’d face a revolt, so you pretend that all you were doing was clarifying your existing position… that’s also a thing one can do.
Yes, Twitch will probably mostly be fine, but they sustained serious damage from failing to get this right on the first try. There are constantly examples of people who very much have the clear ability and the strong incentive to get something right on the first try, yet they fail. Then in hindsight the right way seems obvious.
Also, this introduced to me the Frog of Shame, whose conditions were very much met, and a concept I definitely endorse.
Twitch also has an alignment problem regarding its metrics. Streamers do not benefit from having lots of performance metrics forcibly shoved into their face.
When I do stream, I go further and don’t look at the interface at all. That is not why jorbs is a successful streamer and I am not, it does however make my experience much better. I do want to know how many viewers I have so I know what drives people away, and when one of them subscribes or pays, because I want to thank them – sub hype and all that – but otherwise leave me alone.
Chance Kornuth speaks truth in call for ban on poker player Martin Kabrhel, former Magic professional Tom Martell helps explain. Was Martin Kabrhel cheating at the WSOP? We don’t know. I was convinced by a Doug Polk video that it is unlikely he cheated. Except via what we do know, which is that he was intentionally making everyone else think he was cheating.
Which is cheating. This creates a distraction that generates an unfair advantage, also makes the experience of playing miserable for everyone involved, as did his other antics.
As a former professional Magic player from back in the days cheating was a big deal, I can strongly attest that it is a huge advantage if your opponent is spending a substantial portion of their effort ensuring you don’t cheat. If you intentionally abuse that, claiming or implying you are cheating, that itself is cheating. It deserves a ban. I wish we had that rule back in the day.
College football FBS teams often use larger personnel on offense in short yardage situations. The few teams that sometimes do this outside of short yardage situations don’t benefit from doing it in short yardage situations, but they also aren’t harmed by it. Other teams do actively worse and would be better off running their normal offense every time. Or at least, that’s what the basic stats say. I would want to check to ensure the samples represent similar situations, since more difficult plays and especially goal-line stands potentially involve more big packages.
I am not typically one for cage matches. I will always be one for dumb money.
This seems like an excellent data point for exactly how much of a hell of a drug is partisanship. Also helps explain why the odds are as close as they are. If the match does happen, Zuckerberg isn’t 100% to win, but it could not be more obvious he is the right side. I shudder to think what Kelly would tell me to bet if I end up still laying less than 3:1.
As expected, I spent my month of gaming on Final Fantasy 5, where I’m near the end of world two, and primarily on Diablo 4. I do regret moving in on Diablo 4 so quickly, as the first quality of life improvements are a massive upgrade, something like 80% more experience in the core endgame loop while reducing required travel time. That’s hardcore punishment for not waiting.
Mostly my summary of the game is, this is More Diablo. If you want More Diablo, this game is for you. It offers much better character customization and interesting decision making than Diablo 3, and it is extremely well polished to keep you playing and doing things that feel satisfying if you find Diablo games satisfying. The plot is fine, about what you would expect at this point. The side quest writing is solid.
The big issue is that Diablo 4 does not much innovate, or offer that much variety of things to do. You also get remarkably few upgrades to gear, because a few key features are more important than everything else, so you often get stuck with equipment for a very, very long time. This can cause the auto-leveling to be quite punishing if you are unusually weak for your level, although this issue goes away once you approach the endgame.
The endgame content loops are for now pretty basic. The nightmare dungeons are the World Atlas and maps from Path of Exile, except without anything to motivate or tie them together. The Helltide and World Tree game loops are undifferentiated pointers to more of the usual stuff. I mean, it’s fine, you kill things, you get loot. In general the game needs to do a better job of tying its good rewards to its more fun gameplay loops, and finding more good gameplay loops.
The level of bugs and glitches is fine for normal mode game play. If you go hardcore, expect them to kill your character at some point. There are at least two times that I was killed in ways that were completely unavoidable bugs, which I verified online.
Definitely go straight to World 2 when you start. I recommend playing the game in ‘no spoilers’ mode, in terms of figuring out character abilities and other mechanics for yourself, the game is highly forgiving on letting you undo mistakes and run experiments. Once you complete the main quest and enter the endgame, if you decide to continue, you’ll want to look up where to find the Alters of Lilith, but the game is more fun if you avoid doing that until the end.
As with all such games, one can think of it as two distinct experiences. Leveling up and going through the plot is cool. Playing the endgame, which will constitute most hours put into such games in the end, is less obviously cool or interesting. Know when to quit, also I will soon need to take my own advice.
No Content For You
A lot of what you see these days is not for you.
Often that is because the business models is focused on a few heavy spenders or otherwise important customers called whales. Most of the value and profits come from whales. Everyone else, even if technically profitable and where most of the consumer surplus is generated, is an annoyance. If you are never going to be a whale, you mostly don’t matter.
We are now much better at these types of focused optimizations, and much worse at resisting the temptation to do them.
By default, the revenue model determines who things are for, with the caveat that those who don’t raise revenue can also serve other purposes such as marketing and community. The experience you get is deeply intertwined with the ultimate revenue model. Beware when that revenue model is predatory, even if the target of this predation is clearly not you, because they will punish your experience as a result.
In a similar vein, oh no.
Let me try to articulate. Standard Beware Goodhart’s Law situation only more so.
A little of this in a contained way is good. Too much of it, or using it on an ongoing basis, results in generic over-optimized dreck.
For a fiction book to be good let alone great, it has to be unique, it has to follow its vision, and it has to challenge you and be willing to lose you, in order to bring its vision to life. It must also remain unpredictable and surprise you, you need the feeling anything can happen if it could happen in the fictional scenario. And often there is a subtle magic to the details of a book and its world, or even a hidden meaning, that risks being lost. Finally, there is a kind of improvisational wonder, or historical artifact, or knowing of the mind of another, aspect to the whole process. Oh, and there is the pressure to censor, or simply to tinker.
As a result, we have a very strong sacredness taboo on books. Once it is published, it does not get revised. We can then bond over this sacred text, compare our notes, cherish it forever. And we have seen examples of people who modify books of others, including posthumously, in ways that would have the author rolling in their grave and which destroy much of what makes the book special.
At one point, in one of his books, Nabokov says ‘at this point, dear reader, you are ready to throw this book out the window.’ Which my father reports was exactly what he was thinking at the time. That is an amazing moment.
All of that will get ground into dust if there is pressure at the micro level to optimize for how many people keep reading. It would be the nightmare version of Han Shot First.
It also confuses costs and benefits. Reading a book is a cost – a good reader knows to stop reading.
You still need an editor (cough George RR Martin cough) who will fight you on everything from individual words to general bloat, and make you better. And during the writing process, some amount of this type of feedback is super valuable, especially on a macro scale, allowing you to spot stupid mistakes.
This applies less to a non-fiction book or textbook, which already are often revised, and whose components more stand on their own. You still risk trying to solve the wrong problem using the wrong targets and the wrong model of what matters, your mistakes will not cancel out.
You can of course say, oh, you are free to ignore all that if you like. Maybe this is true, especially if there are no feedback mechanisms in the metric – if no one is going to feed pages read into an algorithm for book recommendations, if the revenue model is a flat fee, there will be far less pressure.
Yet despite this, we see more and more games that focus on keeping players playing, the same way Netflix wants to compete with sleep and win. We have run this experiment, and that is the result.
Another way to look at this is to ask, once again, who and what is the book for?
If you are modifying your work based on when people stop reading, then your customer is the marginal person who might stop reading, and your book’s purpose is to be optimized to stop that from happening. That is not going to result in great literature.
Productive Productivity Discussion
Tyler Cowen notes productivity has been down for five consecutive quarters, which explains how wages can be down and yet the labor market robust. You need more workers to do the same work, so you need more workers, but you can’t afford to pay them more when they are producing less.
He considers work-from-home an insufficient explanation for the changes, but the changes don’t seem so big that the explanation obviously fails us. This is especially true if your model of work-from-home is that it is a short term dramatic increase in wages (commuting and going into an office really suck) and also neutral-to-good for existing team short term productivity while everyone is on the same cultural page, everyone knows what needs to be done and expectations are that everyone actually works.
Whereas over time, as many have theorized and I strongly believe is true, you’re spending down your cultural capital, new employees aren’t integrated properly, team cohesion declines, and people slowly slack off more. That all fits the data, and the trend to increasingly try to force workers back in the office.
Tyler Cowen asks why a deal isn’t struck for higher pay and higher productivity. My answer is that this isn’t an efficient deal. The lower productivity level is mostly efficient, people are taking large experiential wins and effective pay increases, they don’t want to give that up for a few more dollars. Where is the trade to be had?
Arnold Kling correctly sees work from home as a massive human welfare improvement, irrespective of the measurements from the GDP factory. He suggests that the blip in productivity could be merely a measurement error, or due to workforce compositional effects. I’d also check if commute times are being handled properly, presume they aren’t, and see how that impacts the calculations.
Or:
People will vote with their feet, or their refusal to use them. We will see what happens. I think we are doing fine in this particular trade-off, in a way that isn’t showing up in the productivity statistics.
Selection effects may throw a wrench in this. If you are a true superstar and want to perform like one, or otherwise care deeply about the company’s or product’s success, you are more likely to actively embrace a return to office. If you need to be hiring superstars, many of the superstars will be willing to do whatever it takes. They really do want to do more work, and take their pay in money and in equity and career building.
The ideal would be to not impose too much deadweight loss in order to solve this sorting problem or competition. The needles might filter out the unmotivated, it would still be better to not have our best performers paying extra to step around needles. It is still better to pay a high price and assemble the highest performing possible teams, rather than not doing that.
We really do pay a much higher price than we realize to align incentives, solve principle-agent problems, sort for the best people and keep everyone on the same cultural page. Then we pay additional huge alignment taxes to enforce norms and relative social status, to ensure everyone is conforming and thinking the right ways. There is, as Adam Smith put it, ‘a lot of ruin in a nation.’ There is an even bigger amount of ruin, surplus to burn off in various ways, in almost any productive activity.
That is why I am increasingly optimistic about our ability to pay a high ‘alignment tax’ on our AIs. We pay a huge alignment tax on humans for highly imperfect results, because the alternative is too dangerous even locally to do otherwise. Have you seen what teams can do when they can truly set such worries aside? The sky’s the limit.
Thus, there’s every economic justification for paying extremely high alignment taxes on AIs, purely to control local self-interested dangers. That still isn’t as much as we should be willing to pay, the externalities involved and lack of understanding of the dangers is still quite likely to get us killed, but if you say ‘this alignment solution will add an order of magnitude to costs’ I do not treat that as a dealbreaker anymore.
Think Like an Economist
Insurance for home and auto is becoming difficult to find in California, which is unsurprising given rate increases have been rejected for three years. It turns out that they only sell you insurance when they think it makes them money.
California electricity prices to vary based on your income. The electricity company gets to know your income. This is going to be so enraging. Isn’t this what the taxes are for? Why not simply charge people progressive tax rates?
Somehow James Medlock is continuing to get the best bets on the planet, where you can hedge out at a single digit percent of your risk and the rest is pure profit. Turns out if you dare the hyper-inflationist advocates to bet on their beliefs they don’t understand or don’t care that they can trade in the market. What a gig.
Kenya sings trade pact with EU, other East African Community members invited to join. Most promising EU move I’ve seen in a while. How much the EU then works with its regulatory arms to cripple the resulting activity is an open question.
A simple model of taking down Binance: When the ~100th biggest financial institution is a brazen criminal enterprise, either you crack down on it, or your regulatory regime fails. The choice was clear.
More historical grounding to Mint the Coin.
Is college actually getting more expensive? This is less clear cut than you might think. Private college tuition is up, but private average tuition paid on net might even be slightly down. Price discrimination, featuring 100% marginal tax rates on your entire family and its assets, is the order of the day, unless you want to downgrade to a place that needs you more than you need them.
What’s the move here, though, if this is true? What’s the point of ‘saving for college’ if you’re about to face a 100% asset tax? So you can either go big or stay home.
Two places in Switzerland raise minimum wage to about $25/hour, the city of Zurich and the cantor of Winterthur. A quick Bing Chat inquiry said this will only bind for about 2% of Zurich jobs, so this might not be as crazy high as it sounds.
Is a 4% inflation target now proven to be politically unsustainable? We know that large amounts of sustained or unexpected high inflation, noticeable large price hikes, are deeply unpopular. A sustained 4% inflation rate could potentially be accepted, but any misses on the high side would be quite unpopular. If people are willing to tolerate up to about 4%, then you can’t target 4%. I essentially agree that to the extent we have a target 2% is about right, except I would advocate for switching to targeting the level of NGDP.
Tyler Cowen asks: Should Nairobi burn elephant tusks it confiscates to indicate they are sacred, or should they sell in the open market to lower the price and thus the incentive to poach? My instinct says at a minimum hang onto the confiscated tusks, perhaps displaying them in some sort of museum as a tourist attraction, so you have the ability to lower or crash the market at any time, thus lowering prices now. If I had to choose, I’d sell on the open market. Yes, I see the long run argument for trying to create sacredness, but even if it works people collect sacred things and there will always be people willing to break the principles involved. I don’t see it.
Crypto bot borrows $200 million in a flash loan to secure $3.24 in profits.
One must understand, no. This is dumb. Something has gone horribly wrong. There’s picking up pennies in front of a steamroller but this is ridiculous. If you use $200 million to secure a $3 profit over a series of transactions, you are going to end up broke. At some point the result will not be what you expected.
That does not mean the bot has one horribly wrong. The $200 million does not belong to the bot. It is borrowed. Who in this chain of agents is taking on the inevitable calamity risk is not clear. It still has to be someone.
Will stores be able to sustain 30-day no-questions-asked return policies? Patrick McKenzie points out that this is an excellent policy when applied to almost all people. Mostly the cost of returns is well worth it for the goodwill, even efficient. Except there is a fat tail of anti-social behavior where people will treat such policies as an invitation to maximize – buying a TV to watch the Super Bowl and returning it, or returning 99% of the clothes they order.
What is needed is some form of ‘show that you are one of the people who generally acts reasonably,’ and that you have what this EconTalk episode discusses, a concept introduced by Lord Moulton: Obedience to the Unenforceable. Over time, people are getting more efficient at exploiting such weaknesses, and are less willing to obey the unenforceable, both in terms of techniques used and willingness to use them. AI is the extreme version of this. AI will obey rules to the letter, but the common sense middle will fall away.
Snowing Pine offers (via ACX) an overview of trucking from a while back. The first thing that struck me is that we massively subsidize roads, damage to which is almost entirely due to trucks. We don’t similarly subsidize railroads, leading to widespread abandonment of them. If we were serious about our green goals, we would fix this.
From a while back: Why do so many prices end in 99 cents?
The Lighter Side
Not the answer I was expecting.
The weightlifting forum thread about how many days there are in a week. So much better than you expect.
Twitter community notes continues to overperform.
Usually with emergent order I can at least guess what the original planner was thinking. Not always.
Last month’s diagram, expanded.
An angle I had not considered.
An angle someone else had not considered.
It is still previously there (original was posted Nov 27, 2022).