This month’s roundup of non-AI things, with the good, the bad and the uncondoned, along with several additional individual topics. I’m also trying out running some blog-focused surveys near the end, right before the jokes.

Bad News

RIP Doyle Brunson.

Alabama head baseball coach at center of college sports gambling scandal, is fired. Looks like no athletes were involved. It isn’t that easy to throw a baseball game as the coach, especially without it looking weird, but every little bit helps.

I was reminded of this 2020 post by Tim Ferriss about the downsides (and upsides) of becoming famous. So far I guess I’ve hit the sweet spot twice, once for Magic and now again as a writer, where many of the people I’d want to recognize me know who I am and think I’m cool, whereas most normal people have no idea who I am. So I get a lot of the being-famous upside, without almost any of the downsides. So far.

Pete Buttigieg is the Secretary of Transportation. He had one job, to help people and things get transported, and he screwed it up. He says “I strongly support the Jones Act” and justifies it using arguments he has to know are deeply false and disingenuous, given his background. A real shame. In so many ways I really like the guy.

Lab grown meat is currently much worse in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than actual meat, as in 4-25 times worse. Turns out doing something highly bespoke to get some semblance of imitation is currently highly energy intensive. One always always must check to see if a suggested alternative is actually better for the planet, rather than going with the vibes. They hope efficiency can improve with time.

Director of Economic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute tells everyone that life is entirely about working hard.

Michael Strain: My takeaway from this article is that the most successful people obviously do not completely “log off” (whatever that means) on nights and weekends.

Friends, life isn’t a vacation. Work hard. Put in the hours. Impress your boss. The world doesn’t run on your feeling. The world doesn’t bend around your desire to binge Netflix. Have ambitions. Strive. Actual achievement is more meaningful than massive amounts of leisure!

The article asks CEOs what they think of a proposed rule that employees should have a right not to be on call 24/7 constantly responding to emails and other pings. Which some of the CEOs say doesn’t match what makes sense for a particular business, especially across time zones or that provides services at odd hours. In which case, sure, of course. But there’s definitely a real problem here, where people can’t ever relax, and that’s not even good for their productivity, with several of the CEOs making it clear they need to figure out how to unplug.

I do think that in a real emergency one should be reachable, and doing some amount of checking in can pay dividends when the costs are not so high, ‘completely’ logging off for the full weekend every time has its costs, but life depends on actually taking time off for yourself every week, ideally most days as well.

Patrick McKenzie once again points out that building government payroll systems is difficult because governments are using tons of special rules and loopholes to ensure their employees get paid a lot more than anyone thinks they are being paid, in ways that any system has to fully formalize. If you try to deploy best practices or otherwise make the system make any sense or look like it isn’t stealing a bunch of public funds under the cover of night, those involved do not take kindly.

We need real heroes, whether or not they wear capes.

Troubling Mind: I’ve finally figured out what bothers me about the work of Charles Dickens. His fiction is epic, but not heroic. Protagonists flail about in a storm of events that they never get under control. Plots driven by villains, idiots and chance occurrences.

Richard Ngo: It’s not just Dickens. These days there are very few heroes with meaningful agency. Their actions are all reactive and plot-driven.

Scott Alexander (quoted by Ngo): Every part of the fantasy universe is optimized to justify why a person with no special ability or agency can save the world.

It seems worse than that. To the extent that our fictional heroes do have special abilities, they are granted by birthright or chance, not by effort or virtue. When those heroes do make choices, they reliably make terrible choices in terms of ensuring good outcomes, other than than the choice to fight against evil at all. The biggest offenders are scope insensitivity, which is universal, and always giving in to threats and distractions of all kinds.

Perhaps the problem is that if the hero wasn’t flailing about and was instead driving the plot over the long run and displaying superior intelligence, either they would win in a walk and it wouldn’t be interesting, or you’d need to up the degree of difficulty to ludicrous levels. Also would make a hard story to follow and keep suspenseful and interesting. The world gets really weird when you have optimization processes that are more powerful or smarter than the reader and writer.

Imagine a world where we had onion futures.

Study shows targeted advertising makes a lot more money than untargeted advertising, so if you ban targeted ads aps impacted make less money and get abandoned or not made. Linked study was of children’s apps, which doesn’t show it would carry over to adults, except also this is one of those ‘supply curves slope upward’ studies that we did not actually need.

My take is that targeted advertising is almost purely good, it provides more utility and less disutility to users while being worth more to advertisers. With notably rare exceptions, it should be actively encouraged, and people should be happy to actively help advertisers out here as long as the data isn’t used for other worse things.

I feel like I must be missing something but this story claims Amazon got the government to seize a couple’s (including the author’s) assets for two years via civil forfeiture, then not tell them what they were accused of even after the money was returned. If true, and I didn’t see any denials despite it being distributed widely, this is of course totally insane as a thing the law lets happen.

Replication crisis, why would we ever get one of those?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: The thing to remember about academic science is that nobody in the system – journal editors, grantmakers, conference organizers, tenure committees, deans, university administrators, PhD defense committees, or scientists – gets paid an extra $10,000 if the theory is actually true.

Geoffrey Miller: Having worked in academia for 35 years, I can confirm that this is accurate. I’ve never once been in a faculty meeting in which a colleague was congratulated for one of their theories or findings being proven _true_ by replication, confirmation, or daring prediction succeeding

Sarah Constantin reminds us that doing new good things with tech is good, whereas most people think it is at best ‘cute’ or ‘idealistic’ or quirky to seek such uses out, and those who are uninterested or ignore such gains are rarely criticized. This is far more general than AI, where at least we have a gold rush for mundane utility, and also a uniquely powerful reason to worry about downside risk.

Paper: “Twitter algorithm amplifies emotional content, and especially those tweets that express anger and out-group animosity.” Well, yes, obviously, any algorithm will do that unless intentionally sacrificing other things to not do that. The alignment problem is hard.

Periodic reminder that veganism entails serious trade-offs and health dangers, from the highly sympathetic Elizabeth van Nostrand.

Matthew Yglesias reminds us that misinformation is a problem across the political spectrum. I’d add the reminder that none of this is new.

Disney removes content from Disney+ and Hulu in order to get tax write offs. The list here seems far less tragic than the HBO Max one, still seems like a terrible system. We need to change the tax code to remove the incentive, so this stops happening.

Good News, Everyone

Introducing the Base Rate Times, a prediction market-based news source.

Murder rate down 12% in USA in over 90 cities, at least so far this year.

SCOTUS rules unanimously that MN can’t sell woman’s home for $40,000 over a $15,000 tax bill and keep the profits (ruling). Gorsuch and Jackson further note that, while it is understandable for procedural reasons here that the court declined to deal with the issue of excessive fines, the fines were pretty obviously excessive – the original tax bill was about $2300 versus $13,000 in interest and penalties, seriously, wtf. If both Jackson and Gorsuch are chomping at the bit about that, maybe we can hope for some action on it soon.

Jobs report first week of May revealed a job market that is still red hot, with unemployment falling to 3.4%, a 50-year low.

Adversarial collaboration (via ACX) finds that tenure-track women in STEM academia are at parity with tenure-track men in grant funding, journal acceptances and recommendation letters, and are advantaged in hiring.

Digital retail bank introduces four day work week, reports good results. Better recruiting, less staff attrition, better productivity, higher profitability, higher customer satisfaction, although causation is always tricky. Note that pay was held constant, so this was a ~9% hourly pay bump. I’d want to differentiate the drop in hours, the drop in days and the rise in effective compensation.

A good idea raised by Alex Tabarrok on Twitter: Are there joint term life insurance products that only pay if BOTH covered individuals die within that time period? Seems like insurance like that would be really cheap (in absolute terms) but really valuable to working parents of young kids.

What to make of woo? Advocates of woo are usually advocating terrible woo, and look to make it your fault if you don’t go for it or it doesn’t work. Scott Alexander expresses the frustration while treating woo as some unified group of similar things. Ben Hoffman explains the problem is that most woo, like most everything else, mostly fake or terrible, and provides a solution, which is to locate woo providers who can win quick local bets against you, thus verifying that they know real things. Such people do exist, find the ones offering things you value. Everyone else is sufficiently probably fake you should ignore them. Then you still have to decide if it’s worth pursuing what is offered.

In my case, Ben successfully located a highly real Tai Chi master, and if anything it was a remarkably good fit, but I don’t have the spare cycles required to take the study seriously and it’s real knowledge which means if not taken seriously it won’t work. I do still hope to do this for real some time.

Orwell predicted in 1937 the UK would stop growing if it lost India and the empire, whereas when this happened in 1947 it looks like it had no effect.

Skanda Amarnath breaks down the jobs report, finds the jobs growth and recovery remarkable in size and scope.

Skanda Amarnath: Folks who tell you that labor force participation (LFPR) is the critical variable need to take note: Gains in age-adjusted participation coincide w/ (and are driven by) outright employment gains. Prime-age LFPR made another historic high. We are not “running out of workers”

To the extent that we should disfavor part-time underemployment and favor full-time jobs, the quality of jobs in this recovery has also been strong.

Prime-age *FULL-TIME* employment rates made yet another high!

0.4% gain from 72.2% to 72.6%. Way better than last two decades.

This recovery simply doesn’t have the generationally disastrous qualities of the previous two recoveries.

The 2000s recovery was basically left incomplete.

The 2010s recovery took over a decade.

The prime-age employment rate among black and African American persons has been rocketing up, another 0.3% gain from March to April. Now at 78.4%, just shy of its January 1999 high of 78.8%

So much about this recovery and expansion worth celebrating…*and defending*

Scott Sumner points out that this is happening because monetary policy is loose. If the Fed cared about hitting its targets, it would keep moving until it hit its targets.

Motivations to work hard.

Harj Taggar: Some rich people keep working hard because they love doing what made them rich. I’ve found three other types (not mutually excl): the ambitious who keep moving the goalposts, the creatives who keep finding new passions and the Calvinists who are afraid to not be working hard.

I personally experience the three types differently: the ambitious are inspiring, creatives are fun and Calvinists are draining.

To the extent that I am rich enough to count here, I’m in at least the first three of these and have a non-zero amount of the fourth. Definitely against anyone knocking any of them. The Calvinist design clearly has a bug for the very successful from an individual perspective, and can be very hard on others as well, but we are all better off if more people are more motivated to work hard.

80,000 hours revises its guidelines in wake of FTX.

1. They tone down talk of maximization, of doing the most possible good, in light of SBF’s ‘bet the universe on a 51/49 coin flip’ approach to risk in the name of maximization, even in theory.
2. There is a greater emphasis on ‘nice norms’ and not cooperating with those who don’t follow them, which seems directionally good even if I’d rewrite the section.
3. There’s an update in favor of protecting against downside risk, I am especially happy to see endorsement of robust personal financial security and savings rather than telling people to give it all away in ways that put them at risk or under severe stress. I do worry a bit about having people be risk averse in other ways that don’t make sense, and encouraging ‘safe’ career paths in a world where that doesn’t pay off or make sense.
4. I especially want to endorse their “Why you should think about virtues – even if you’re a consequentialist” which I think is excellent.
5. They downgraded ‘founder of new project tackling top problems’ one level, because they now have less funding and have more founders doing more projects. My position is that if someone is capable of being a founder, having them do anything else is rather insane. If there are enough EA projects already and not enough funders, great, how about some commercial start-ups then. There are plenty of net-positive start-up ideas out there.

HT to Rob Bensinger who also likes the emphasis on virtues. He worries about diluting the ‘most good’ language, which I agree is a concern. It’s a tough balance. You want to emphasize maximization and optimization, without making people go crazy in various ways. This is a hard problem without known good solutions.

The Ringer does an oral history of the finale of The Americans. Amazing finale, amazing series, one of six where I’d outright say: Watch the series if you haven’t.

TikTok viral video counts falling off a cliff.

Decline is not echoed in videos at the 0.1 million view level, so speculation is this is an algorithm tweak. It’s a hell of a tweak if that’s the whole story.

Analysis of how various types of CEO spend their time.

I am skeptical that actual hours worked is this low overall. If this is the margin, it makes sense that CEO time spent would cause better returns.

I strongly agree, why don’t more museums sell replicas?

Morphing chart of income distribution over time. Statistics say things improve. Alas, the good objections to this theory aren’t answered by such charts.

In Medical and Health News

CDC issues new ventilation guidelines for buildings. From what I’ve seen, it’s a substantial improvement. Here’s their ‘what you need to know’ section, paraphrased for length:

• First do no harm, your intervention can backfire. Consult experts.
• Viruses spread more indoors than outdoors, ventilation indoors is important.
• Ventilation system upgrades or improvements can help, often cheaply.
• Mitigation strategies work best when customized for building details and seasons.
• Multiple effective mitigations have positive cumulative effects.
• Buildings can participate in the Clean Air in Building Challenge.
• Here are the Frequently Asked Questions.

Improving ventilation continues to be low hanging fruit worth implementing. Common sense seems present in this report throughout.

An efficient market in ADHD diagnoses.

“If you’re willing to pay for an assessment, you’ll get a diagnosis.”

The Promising Pathway Act is proposed, where a drug that looks promising in early trials gets preliminary approval, which requires full third-party tracking of all use. Not a first-best solution but seems like a clear improvement over doing nothing.

In Poland and Lithuania, among other places, you can get contact lenses from vending machines. The Optometry Racket, indeed. There exists no argument against such offerings that I can say with a straight face.

Reminder that if you ever think we’d never ban something, maybe think again.

Elle: kind of wild that it’s literally illegal to find out polygenic risk scores for embryos in the UK like, information about your unborn child’s future health and happiness exists, it’s knowable, but if you try to access it you can go to prison.

“can I check that my child won’t carry a gene that means they’re almost guaranteed to get breast cancer?”

“no :)”

“why not? I desperately don’t want them to get breast cancer”

“well maybe god does :)”

Arguable Mutual: Wait till you see what France is like.

Stat News: Then again, her underworld of choice is more socially acceptable than most: Jovanovic-Floricourt is a self-styled fixer for black-market genetic tests.

“In doing these genetic ancestry tests, we’re risking a fine of 3,750 euros.”

…

“These tests can be dangerous. They can induce needless panic,” explained Christian Dina, a geneticist at the University of Nantes, who specified that he isn’t necessarily against the use of these kits but understands the need for prudence. “They can, in this country of Molière, create imaginary invalids.”

Scott Alexander goes in depth on the dystopian nightmare that is the IRB.

Here’s a passage.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Beecher’s activism, Shannon’s CRCs, and the mounting level of Tuskegee-style scandals came together in a demand for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to create some official ethics report. Most ethicists demurred to dirty their hands with something as worldly as medicine; after some searching, they finally tapped Hans Jonas, a philosopher of Gnosticism. In retrospect, of course bioethics derives from a religion that believes the material world is evil and death is the only escape. I’m barely even joking here:

[QUOTE}: In his most compelling passage, Jonas attacked the belief that we must pursue cures for the diseases that ravage us, that we cannot afford to forego continued medical advances. To the contrary, he wrote, we must accept what we cannot avoid, and that includes disease, suffering, and death. What society genuinely cannot afford is “a single miscarriage of justice, a single inequity in the dispensation of its laws, the violation of the rights of even the tiniest minority, because these undermine the moral basis on which society’s existence rests.” He concluded that “progress is an optional goal.”

The creator of the IRB said “progress is an optional goal” and that it was more important to avoid a single inequality in the dispensation of the laws than it is to find cures for diseases.

That is what ‘bioethics’ is. That is what the IRB is. It is the embrace of death. Period.

In practice it looks like this.

This changed in 1998. A Johns Hopkins doctor tested a new asthma treatment. A patient got sick and died. Fingers were pointed. Congress got involved. Grandstanding Congressmen competed to look Tough On Scientific Misconduct by yelling at Gary Ellis, head of the Office For Protection From Research Risks. They made it clear that he had to get tougher or get fired.

In order to look tough, he shut down every study at Johns Hopkins, a measure so severe it was called “the institutional death penalty”. Then he did the same thing (or various lesser penalties) at a dozen or so other leading research centers, often for trivial infractions. Duke got the axe because its IRB hadn’t properly documented whether a quorum of members was present at each meeting. Virginia University got the axe because, although it had asked patients for consents, it hadn’t asked the patient’s family members, and one family member complained that asking the patient for a family history was a violation of his privacy.

On good days it looks like this.

They ended up creating a sixteen-country study. In the British arm of the study, the UK regulators told doctors to ask patients for consent, and let them use their common sense about exactly what that meant. In the US arm, the Harvard IRB mandated a four page consent form listing all possible risks (including, for example, the risk that the patient would be harmed by the aspirin tasting bad).

…

The US recruited patients 100x slower (relative to population) than the UK, delaying the trial six months. When it finally ended, the trial showed aspirin + streptokinase almost halved heart attack deaths. The six month delay had caused about 6,000 deaths.

Using ‘delay in the studies that still finished’ as the measure of deaths caused should miss the level of actual overall damage by multiple orders of magnitude. Scott’s post contains enraging and maddening story after story, of obviously insanely great studies that were held up by IRBs, then saved via extraordinary action after a delay, predictably costing thousands of lives purely from that particular delay. Now imagine the studies that are never run at all.

This is the cost-benefit when only measuring direct effects of delays, not including that many studies never happen at all and general progress is permanently slowed.

So the cost-benefit calculation looks like – save a tiny handful of people per year, while killing 10,000 to 100,000 more, for a price tag of $1.6 billion.

In response to this, Alexander despairs of returning to the old somewhat less death embracing system.

Whitney doesn’t want a revolution. He just wants to go back to the pre-1998 system, before Gary Ellis crushed Johns Hopkins, doctors were replaced with administrators, and pragmatic research ethics were replaced by liability avoidance. Specifically:

• Allow zero-risk research (for example, testing urine samples a patient has already provided) with verbal or minimal written consent.
• Allow consent forms to skip trivial issues no one cares about (“aspirin might taste bad”) and optimize them for patient understanding instead of liability avoidance.
• Let each institution run their IRB with limited federal interference. Big institutions doing dangerous studies can enforce more regulations; small institutions doing simpler ones can be more permissive. The government only has to step in when some institution seems to be failing really badly.
• Researchers should be allowed to appeal IRB decisions to higher authorities like deans or chancellors⁵

These make sense. I’m just worried they’re impossible. IRBs aren’t like this in a vacuum. Increasingly many areas of modern American life are like this.

Alexander also offers a case that we should consider environmentalism and eugenics to be in the same reference class of idea, including pointing out that environmentalism is responsible for 10 times as many forced sterilizations.

Potential innovation, via both addition and addition by subtraction?

Derek Thompson: Too many restaurants have it backwards with QR code menus and paper checks. Pulling up a menu on your phone to zoom in and out of a digital PDF, when printed paper exists: absurd

“scan this code to find and pay your check whenever you want”: brilliant!

Oh my, paying online for restaurant bills would be so amazing. It’s so frustrating to have to flag someone down to be allowed to pay. If you implement this, I will go to your restaurant more often.

While I Cannot Condone This

I am starting to think Binance might be in some legal trouble. SEC sues Binance.

Patrick McKenzie: The entire finance industry will repeat this quote for a thousand years as an example of Things To Not Put In Writing during employee training.

The gears of justice grind slowly but they grind exceedingly fine.

“You seem to enjoy this.”

The shorthand I’ve used for the last several years is “Bond villain compliance strategy”, because a Bond villain magically teleports between jurisdictions without facing apparent hindrance. Everywhere and nowhere all at once, wherever the plot demands.

We appear to be in the early minutes of Act 3. Guess what happens to the Bond villain in Act 3.

Matt Levine points out on Twitter that Binance’s CCO was very on the ball.

Boneconder reads the legal complaint, and yeah, it doesn’t look good.

Crypto VC financing, also not going so great.

I am become noise, destroyer of productivity. Paper here.

Paul Graham: My whole adult life has been a search for quiet. I’ve had 3 different buildings soundproofed. I can continue working on something in a noisy place, but to *start* working on something I need quiet.

Leo: Wow. I thought I was crazy in this regard. I use earplugs even when I’m completely by myself in the room while working. Whenever I forget, or think I can do without, it seems that my focus level drops. Interesting distinction wrt starting things vs other work.

Ethan Mollick (Quoted by PG): Noise is a secret destroyer of productivity. It is secret because it impacts cognition, not effort, so we don’t notice, but a 10db noise increase (from a dishwasher to a vacuum) lowers productivity by 5%. Noise is also greater in poorer neighborhoods…

Noise really hurts detailed work. With a little noise software engineers find fewer bugs, productivity drops, & many tasks are disrupted. But moderate noise may help creativity by disrupting your thinking! It makes it harder to think, but that may actually prompt new ideas.

A lot of people are asking about music. The results there are not 100% clear, but recent studies have found a negative impact on complex and creative tasks.

No difference if the was instrumental, foreign language, or a particular genre. Silence or low-level noise was best.

The paper shows people were unwilling to pay for quiet working conditions even when they were paid for performance. This could reflect unwillingness to pay for quiet as an unreasonable thing, but I mostly agree that people aren’t aware that quiet matters. Note that the effect seen, 5% decline in productivity per 10Db, is not so large.

The impact seems to be more along the lines of noise being an extreme problem for some people doing some kinds of work, especially the most valuable types of intellectual work, while it is a minor annoyance for most activities.

For me, there is a sharp divide between ‘this is drawing my attention and thus I can’t do any but the most shallow tasks,’ ‘this is no big deal unless I need to really concentrate which is rare’ and ‘this is nothing.’ It covers both sound and the extent to which I am being observed or expected to react to things – the need to ‘be on’ versus the ability to not be on and not have to mentally confirm to oneself that one isn’t on. I’d also note that expecting noise or listening for noise is not much better than noise, even if things are currently quiet. At least, in my experience.

There’s a cumulative effect, too. Working at Jane Street meant both I never had full quiet or expectation of quiet, and I was almost never not on, and that took quite a toll.

I’m sorry on several levels, but maybe this is not the best way for this particular person to be starting a Tweet these days.

President Joe Biden: We’ll never be able to repay the debt we owe…

(it finishes …to those who have worn the uniform, but this Administration won’t stop fighting to deliver timely access to the benefits and services they’ve earned.)

Great story about meeting Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, and realizing you have no idea if this person is fully authentic, fully inauthentic, or even from planet Earth. The people who make the headlines often really are different.

Public service announcement from Patrick McKenzie about currency conversions.

Patrick McKenzie: If you’re ever asked whether you want to put a transaction through in the local currency of the place you are in or the home currency of your payment method, the first will be much cheaper, as a rule.

…

Anyhow if you pick “Put it through in my home currency” the conversion is done by the credit or debit networks as part of their settlement function. You still are buying financial services, no way around that obviously, but *this* rate is much more competitive.

Musk’s new plan to solve the bot problem on Twitter is to have an army of haters out there determined to highlight how he hasn’t solved the bot problem on Twitter, thus saving him from having to do the work.

If this is surprising in any way, that’s on you.

Austen Allred: Me to my father-in-law (who is a farmer): “What determines whether food is organic?” Father-in-law: “There are some standards in theory. In reality a purchase order comes in with two sets of prices, and the farmer decides which box they’ll check.”

Was funny to read this old Danielle Steel profile. Writing all day for the love of the craft, nowhere she’d rather be, 20-22 hours a day (!), infinite book production. Always good to have someone out there that’s way more hardcore than you are. Except there’s also these stories that she does other things, and also she has nine children.

A mere 11 people are responsible for 60% of book complaint filings to get books removed from schools.

Grammy award winners make much more different and distinct future music, compared to those who get nominated and lose. They have some combination of artistic freedom to do that, and an endorsement that they can pull it off or the audience will follow them. Whereas those who lose don’t have that, and double down. Or, perhaps, winning really does mean something different than being nominated, although the effect size seems too large for that.

Should we want artists who are successful to create more or less distinct music than they do? If someone made a great album or song, and then change it because it was great, that seems to select against doing great things, it also means the best artists take more chances and capture more upside. Music labels would on their own like to force too little exploration, what artists choose on their own is less obviously miscalibrated – and it’s possible so much of the value is in the outliers they’re right.

More companies are requiring return to the office, at least for employees not grandfathered in. Flo Crivello announces that Lindy will be joining them, with a defense that includes such lines as ‘San Francisco, outside of a few bad neighborhoods, is perfectly fine.’ Yes, it requires a 26% pay bump for taxes alone, more for other living expenses, but the claim is ‘over the course of your career’ you should expect a 100%-300% pay bump. That’s one way for an employer to justify decisions, I guess.

LessWrong experiments with reacts, not your typical reacts.

Emmett Shear: Bring this to Twitter! Except only like 1/20th as many bc everyone here is not a debate nerd. But we can steal the top 3!

Alexander Oldenzeil: LessWrong enabling reacts inaugurating a Golden Age of intellectual inquiry.

My practical report so far is that in the posts where it’s enabled no one is using the emotes. If this was a list of 3-5 reactions, I would be deeply skeptical. Now that I see it’s a huge list, I’m much more curious, as it gives people the chance to provide useful information without the burden of a full response, and without raising ‘that’s all you’re saying here?’ or cluttering up the page.

Thus, it is a good experiment, provided we can evaluate the results well. My worry with such things is they quickly can become impossible to undo.

Somehow this is perfect on so many levels.

Kane: In the firehose of San Francisco local government grift, the Board of Supervisors is voting Tuesday to blanket ban new dispensaries bc existing ones lobbied Supervisor @Ahsha_Safai to limit competition.

Mike Solana: San Francisco is voting to indefinitely ban all new weed shops in the city because current shop owners have complained there’s too much competition. so, a literal drug cartel lmao.

Legalizing things and then making them get the proper permits seems like the correct way to actually limit something in San Francisco. Whereas if we want to see more of something, perhaps we should ban it?

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

Persona 5 mod lets you play as a female Joker, with new romance options. I love that people devote the extensive effort required to pull something like this off.

A two and a half hour documentary on the legal issues around Disco Elysium.

Alexis Ohanian claims play-to-earn, where you steadily accumulate real world value you can sell, is the future of gaming. After referencing old Second Life and Entropia, which were at least attempting to Do a Thing, Alexis leads with an interesting example choice:

Companies like @AxieInfinity are already leading the way by letting players easily earn crypto and sell their in-game characters as NFTs.

You say ‘leading the way,’ I say ‘already busted Ponzi scheme.’

Sure, these games may face hurdles to adoption as the wider public adjusts to crypto and NFT-trading but as these technologies scale, play-to-earn becomes a no-brainer.

I mean, why would you keep playing the same game for free when you could get paid for it?

Because if my progress in the game is measured in real world money, then you’ve placed an extrinsic value on my progress and also given me a way to buy it, which means instead of feeling like I accomplished something I am painfully aware I am making cents per hour.

Remember the Diablo 3 real money auction house? It completely destroyed the game exactly this way, until it was taken out. Then the game was fun (or at least I thought so, I give it Tier 3).

Also, it means your game probably sucks. If you are designing your play-to-earn game, chances are very low that you are designing a great game and then integrating play-to-earn in a non-disruptive way. You are instead crafting your game around the play-to-earn. And That’s Terrible.

Axie Infinity’s game play was laughably terrible from the start. I never heard anyone (not employed by the company) say anything to the contrary. It succeeded purely through being a Ponzi and promising its players a chance to work a job, then inevitably collapsed.

What are the good games that are play-to-earn for the average player, as opposed to being profitable for the highly skilled?

It’s rough out there that when I asked GPT-4 (with browsing) for a list of the ten most fun such games, the only one I had heard of was… Axie Infinity. Ouch.

It’s wild still seeing sales like this $500,000 for a CS-GO skin a month ago.

This isn’t new, you’ve played CCGs for multi-decades. CCGs have always had a play-to-earn component. You show up to your local game store, you earn promo cards. You compete at events, you win $ or limited edition SKUs. The gaming industry is just catching up…

Counterstrike has $500k skins because Counterstrike isn’t a play-to-earn game. It’s a game people play because it is fun, into which they occasionally drop cool stuff in highly not-profit-maximizing quantities.

Do CCGs have a play-to-earn component? They certainly can. Friday Night Magic with door prizes can be positive sum, certainly traders and successful competitors can profit. That’s still very little of the motivation behind most games played.

My experience with Emergents featured a lot of pressure to embrace some form of play-to-earn more explicitly than we did, and we likely should have, but it’s not a sustainable strategy and it is not the future.

Please, don’t pay us with money. You know why?

River Tam: THAT’S WHAT THE FUN IS FOR

This helps explain why PC Gamer reports we have successfully bullied game companies out of using or supporting NFTs. Gamers really, really hate them, for a mix of good and bad reasons. Pointing out yours are ‘clean’ is nuance that often does not play, nor does having an actual in-game justification for why they make sense, or structuring them in a way that’s good for players.

That’s unfortunate for the actual good use cases, but overall it seems positive.

My gaming focus has been playing through the Final Fantasy series, as my son can participate and I enjoy the relaxing trip down memory lane.

(Reminder, Tier scale is: Tier 1 is Must Play, everyone should play it, Tier 2 is Worth It, you won’t regret it but if you’re not into the genre it’s reasonable to skip, Tier 3 is Good and you should consider playing if it’s in your wheelhouse and nothing is higher priority, Tier 4 is Playable for those who really want exactly this thing, Tier 5 is Unplayable, avoid.)

For Final Fantasy 1, I played the original version on our mini-NES, deputizing my son when the time came to, one at a time, buy back 99 heal potions. The bugs and lack of mass purchases were definitely annoying, as was the lack of explanations. I did however actively appreciate the lack of automatic retargeting and the original balancing of progress. If you need to grind a lot, that’s because you’re supposed to have to figure out where to go – it had been so long I’d forgotten – or you keep running from things. I used Fighter/Black Belt/White Mage/Black Mage, which I think is the most natural and fun party for this level of play, but on reflection very far from optimal, I’d rather go something like Fighter/Fighter/Red Mage/Red Mage but what’s the fun in that? So it was pretty great and of great historical interest, although if you don’t have nostalgia for it, I can only put this about Tier 3 at this point – only try it if this sounds like your wheelhouse.

After that, I switched to the Pixel Remasters on the PS5.

Final Fantasy 2 is a strange beast. No experience points, you have to keep doing the things you want to improve over and over, your fourth character keeps switching and you have to repeatedly either work to make them not suck or be fine with them sucking, if you wander in the wrong direction you get mega-killed, the most dangerous enemy in the game is in random encounters in bulk and can one-hit kill your characters from full HP, and 90% of thee game’s actual difficulty comes in the final dungeon where yes you will grind and you will like it. There is a very clear ‘right answer’ for what you should be doing to win fights, which should become pretty obvious by the midgame, people might say ‘you have options’ but there’s only one good one – if you disagree, name a different one, I’m very curious. It was my first time playing it, and overall I’d say I liked and enjoyed it despite the repetitiveness. For others, though, I’d say Tier 4, for diehards and completionists only, objectively you can do a lot better. The decreases in difficulty from the Pixel Remaster had strategic downsides, and especially on reflection they lower the stakes a lot with the autosave feature and if I could experience this for the first time again I wouldn’t use it, but overall I think I approve.

Final Fantasy 3 introduces the job system and very much keeps events moving. It’s interesting that the story in 3 is solid if unspectacular, much better than 2, which is much better than 1, and then 4’s is world class. The job system creates some strange incentives, and offers a lot of cool customization and optionality, but is also hitting you over the head with the very straightforward thing you should be doing, especially at the end where Ninjas, Devouts and Sages are so obviously better than everything else. I’m curious why people think you turn your Devout into a Sage at the end, though, when this seems counterproductive to me – sure, do that with the Magus to keep your job levels, but who needs the white mage to cast black spells? Once again, the difficulty is entirely backloaded, and the extra saves greatly reduce the tension level in ways I regret but the other quality of life improvements seem awesome. I think we can put this into Tier 3.

Final Fantasy 4 is every bit the classic. These days it isn’t difficult, and the autosaves and changes to experience make it easier still, but the real time battles still put the pressure on and create lots of interesting decisions, the party changes are great. There’s a remarkable amount of required re-evaluation of what tactics to use as the game progresses. Once again, the actual difficulty and necessary grinding is all at the end. I did have the frustrating experience of getting very very unlucky in the first final boss fight, sufficiently so that I misjudged the pattern and got too many levels in response, but it was quick. The story gets me every damn time, it has it all, maximizes all its tools.

Three important change concern notes: The poem has been altered, so mentally substitute the original, or look it up as necessary – this is one of the foundational texts for a reason, and you don’t mess with it. Also ‘wish’ became ‘prayer.’ On the bright side, you spoony bard is still in.

How high to place the game is tricky, given how much times have changed – if you take a historical perspective I think Final Fantasy 4 has a non-crazy argument to be in the GOAT discussion, and it’s a fast game to play. However, the game also has its flaws, which are easy to spot now, so I think I’m going to settle on Tier 2 for the modern player – it’s not reasonable to tell actual everyone they have to go back for it – but if you are doing any sort of trip through time or want to know your history, this is Tier 1, flat out.

Next month: Diablo 4 (part 1?) and Final Fantasy 5, which likely it is the whole month.

In other news, the power creep will continue whether or not morale improves.

At the Movies: Go See Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Go see it on the best screen you can. Ask no questions. No exceptions.

(Except, if you haven’t first seen Into the Spider-Verse, see that one first, again under the best conditions possible.)

Saying anything further would only harm your experience. Tyler Cowen gives a very correct review in brief here, but don’t read it until after you’ve watched. Every reaction I’ve seen has been wildly positive.

No One Is Banning Gas Stoves, They Said

Every. Damn. Time.

Also, if you think it’s only new buildings, it’s not.

New York City is requiring its buildings to meet emission caps. It turns out this is so expensive for some buildings that their plan is to indefinitely pay the fines.

Consultants hired by the buildings, which total 33,860 apartments, estimate the bill at a staggering $2.6 billion — nearly $77,000 per unit, including financing — for the upgrades to avoid fines under Local Law 97.

The cost was so high that a leading supporter of the emissions cap literally did not believe it.

“Get some second and third and fourth opinions on this,” said Pete Sikora, the climate campaigns director of New York Communities For Change. “I’m sorry, I think these are manageable, realistic objectives over time. These kinds of buildings should be making this leap.”

For instance, replacing gas stoves with electric ones means running 220-volt lines to every unit. “To rewire buildings of this construction type and vintage is no small undertaking,” Weeden said. At $15,000 to $20,000 per apartment over 33,860 units, the low end of the estimate is $507 million.

“Many of these co-ops have sought out … third, fourth and fifth options,” said Weeden, whose clients include Manhattan’s Penn South, with 2,820 units, and the 982-unit Big Six Towers in Queens. ”If Mr. Sikora has a solution that does not have these onerous costs associated with it, we would love to know what they are.”

…

But none of that will be nearly enough. “Ultimately, compliance for Local Law 97 would require no fossil fuels to be burned on site and all equipment to be electrified,” Dziedziech said.

Did you catch that? They’re telling existing buildings to pay fines if they don’t, at great expense, tear out their gas stoves to replace them with electric.

The law was intended to reduce emissions, not collect penalties. For these buildings, however, compliance would cost more – a lot more – their consultants concluded.

…

“We could spend all that money and still not comply,” Dziedziech said. “It’s cheaper for us to pay the fines.”

The good news is that there is the option to pay fines, and (so far at least) no one is at risk of having buildings shuttered or torn down. A tax on an externality, where some people choose to get rid of it and others choose to pay the fine, isn’t a failure, it’s exactly what you should be doing. I’d love to see people do this on purpose.

No Prediction Markets, Please, They Create Jurisdictional Implications

Of all the reasons to not allow prediction markets, wow, I mean, wow.

Imagine a situation where we have alleged fraud or alleged manipulation of an election and someone coming to the CFTC and say, “You know, you have a contract listed on an election in, you know, X district  in Y state, and we believe there was fraud, because of hardware, software, news, you name it. “Right? “You need to police that fraud.” So without being too indirect, what I’m trying to say is the CFTC could end up being an election cop, and I don’t think that’s what Congress meant or intended for us to do.

That is so bonkers. So we can’t have PredictIt because if we did in theory the CFTC could be called upon to police election fraud? And there’s no way to simply say ‘no that is not our job’? I strongly agree that this is not what Congress intended. So don’t do that? It’s not your job?

There is a difference between fraud in the prediction market, and fraud in the actual event, and the fraud in the actual event is a different department. In sports betting the same applies – as a bookmaker you are keenly aware of match fixing, you limit your risk, potentially kick out customers involved in it if you need to, you alert the Proper Authorities, and you leave enforcement to those authorities.

This is a well-known concern, with a well-known solution. Fix it.

If I Didn’t Make This Its Own Section Less People Would Have Understood It

A claim about that a majority of people can’t handle conditionals.

Yishan: The majority of human beings cannot fully comprehend a statement that has a conditional as a key part of its meaning. This sounds incredible to those who can, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

When a person who can’t encounters such a statement, they don’t go “ERROR,” they just collapse it down from “If P then Q” to either “P” or “Q”. Here’s an example of how the conversation goes, and how this fact remains hidden:

A: “If I were going to Paris, where would be the best place to get a baguette?” B: “Oh! You’re going to Paris?” A: “No, I’m just saying, where’s the best place in Paris to get a baguette?” B: “Oh yeah, sure, you want to go to…. etc”

In B’s response above, they actually didn’t fully understand A’s statement, but collapsed it into a form and repeated it in a way that enabled A to (reflexively, because this is how we explain things) dumb it down to a mode that B could fully comprehend and engage with.

Once you know that this happens, YOU WILL SEE (HEAR) IT EVERYWHERE.

(Even fewer humans have the cognitive ability to easily parse sentences with multiple levels of conditionals, so don’t even try that in casual conversation).

Finally, an interesting corollary of this is that it means most humans aren’t Turing-complete.

Patrick McKenzie: I think the second part [of the first paragraph above] is a reflection of a broader phenomenon: we’re sorting into occupational and social classes so brutally on intelligence (and etc) that some people are in filter bubbles which have convinced them that their local median interlocutor is national median.

It would be good to see studies that attempt to actually measure this directly – it will be tricky to set up correctly, and in particular you will need to recruit a representative sample of people rather than volunteers walking around college campuses. Otherwise you will learn nothing.

My guess is the claim is overstated, yet largely real. In which case, what should we do about it?

For the purposes of things like this blog, one definitely needs to be writing off anyone who can’t handle conditionals. If you can’t handle conditionals, I have nothing for you. I can’t hope to teach you conditionals, and I can’t hope to communicate without them. I’ve long accepted that I’m writing for a limited audience.

That does not mean you get to ignore this group. In particular, you need to ask, for every sentence: What would this sound like, out of context, if its conditionals were collapsed? How does this sentence or paragraph vibe? If the answer comes back that this could become a distraction or even a threat, then find a way to reword to avoid that issue.

One still does spend a lot of time talking to ordinary people. In those situations, I strongly endorse that one should strive to minimize conditionals, and entirely avoid complex (two or more step) conditionals, or other similarly complex logical constructions. Even if they can handle it, it’s not going to be fun for them, nor is it going to incline them towards your cause. At best it’s going to distract them from the thing you actually want to communicate or cause to happen.

The Ongoing Banking Crisis

What has been going on with the banking crisis? Matt Levine is always helpful. As of May 5th, this Patrick McKenzie explanation matched my own. The collective authoritative ‘we’ told regional banks to buy MBS, believing that bank deposit franchises would serve as natural hedges that benefited from rising interest rates and thus the banks would be fine, and it would be great because someone had to take on all that interest rate risk. Except, no. It was not fine. Once people see you are insolvent you lose your deposit franchise.

Matt Levine frames this as two competing visions of how banking works. Under theory 1, mark everything to market and deposits are short term, under theory 2 you built relationships with your customers and thus they are sticky, and you still get your money back so loss of market value matters little. In the past, theory 1 dominated. With internet banking, modern news dynamics and in a crisis, theory 2 dominates in 2023. There hasn’t been true deposit flight beyond First Republic, but regional banks still have to pay a lot more on deposits, which makes it very hard to fix the holes in their balance sheets, and when they try to raise capital that can cause a panic.

I can envision a reasonable version of all of this. If all the mortgages had been at 5%, and suddenly the Fed was at 9% and deposits were paying 7%, then from the perspective of the banks I would ‘get it.’

Except, no, what happened was they gave out mortgages at 2.7% for 30 years fixed with optional pre-payment. As if that could possibly be a good bet to load up on. There is a reason I took the other side of that trade. That’s not hindsight. If anything, I was a coward. I did an ordinary, normal short, when I could have done a Big Short.

Chase continues to do well, even profiting from the rise in interest rates, as per theory 1. Its deposits are large and profitable and sticky, more than enough to absorb losses from its existing loan portfolio.

The banks weren’t that wrong in terms of the size of hedge they could usefully pull off. Where they were wrong was that the odds were very much stacked against them. Yes, this is a direct claim that The Efficient Market Hypothesis is False, and not slightly false, rather dramatically false for large amounts about gigantic things.

I stand by that. We also have a good explanation here. In the market for interest rates, there are overwhelming pressures on various actors to take on truly epic position sizes, both long and short. It makes sense that the people making active predictions about future rates would get overwhelmed via sheer sizing. It also makes sense that people who had only seen a decade of low rates did not understand what was about to hit them, and that people are this simplistic and easy to fool, because they totally are.

Debate Over High School Debate

RIP High School Debate, or false alarm? The Free Press provides strong evidence that there exist judges who quite openly announce that they will severely punish – including beyond the debate scoring – failure to adhere to left wing perspectives, word choices and talking points, if one dares defend such ideas as capitalism or law enforcement. At least one procedurally discriminates on the basis of race, again announcing this in writing, yet continues to judge.

What is not offered is any evidence of how many such judges exist. The OP says ‘A random scroll through Tabroom reveals there are still sane judges out there’ and cites two examples, without saying which side is in the vast majority. The OP claims that after encountering enough such judges, debate participants internalize the values and rules involved, implying that frequency is beside the point. Certainly it matters that such judges, whose principles are rejected in theory, are sometimes tolerated in practice, and debates can select to hire them.

I think frequency matters a lot here. So I ran a quick study of the first 10 names in the national championship’s list of available judges, skipping those without a paradigm listed.

(Excluded because it didn’t look like it was referring to debate, but fine (1): Ariana Esquivel.)

No evidence of such concerns (8): Ada Sze, Akhil Perla, Amy Gorell, Andrew Tran, Anna Herrig, Anne Smith, Anna Hansen1, Aleena Joseph

At least some evidence of related concerns (2): Aniket Nighojkar (“There are some arguments that are pretty obviously morally repugnant and I am not going to entertain them… I’m not going to create an exhaustive list, but any form of “oppression good” and many forms of “death good” fall into this category.”), and Arriq Singleton (“Police apologists whose arguments rely on the fear of the criminal will gain little traction on my ballot. Discussion of crime requires nuance as it easily becomes anti-black very quickly given the history of politicians using thinly veiled “tough on crime” platforms to wrestle over power. Read the links below and avoid an automatic L.”) Links provided in original go to Vox and CNN on Willie Horton.

Eight out of ten were 100% fine. The two that are potentially concerning at all are a far cry from the examples in TFP, and seem fine too. I wouldn’t be likely to give good scores to those arguments, either, especially any form of ‘death good.’ There are lots of arguments that won’t work on a particular person or judge. Some amount of a judge telling you ‘this particular argument won’t work on me’ seems better than not doing that, in terms of encouraging freedom of diverse argument. There are always going to be some judges that don’t appreciate any given argument, so now if you don’t see such an objection, chances are higher the ‘coast is clear.’

It also better mimics real debate, where you have to adjust to be persuasive to those you want to convince most.

If this is a typical list of ten, that seems… fine? If anything, much better than one might worry would come out of hiring college students at elite institutions these days?

And it mimics the high school experience, and the college experience, no? If anything, seems like in a debate there will be much less reason to be fearful than in ordinary talk.

I don’t really know what you were expecting. I get that some people want high school debate to be some sort of super-sacred space, what I don’t get is why?

I saw three judges say explicitly they favored ‘tech over truth,’ while zero said they favored truth over tech. This seems like the much bigger actual problem?

When I read the ‘normal’ how-I-judge paradigms, it is clear high school debate is not about boldly making taboo arguments, not because of penalties for taboo arguments, but because ‘winning a debate’ is about flow, speech speed and enunciation and various versions of point scoring. If you want to seek truth, or learn how to seek truth, you’d use a different format. If you want to actively seek out taboo arguments, this is not the format for that.

This is rhetoric, not logic. Two astronauts, one with a gun.

Layoffs and Loyalties

Thread says in response to Pixar laying off Galyn Susman (who rescued the data for Toy Story 2 via having a backup): Companies in general, game companies in particular, show almost no loyalty to employees who earn them astronomical amounts or save their bacon, and the main way to get promoted or raise pay is shifting companies, better yet start one’s own. I’ve heard a lot of claims of this type and mostly believe it.

What I don’t understand is why this isn’t a huge competitive disadvantage, compared to the Nintendo/Konami approach of showing loyalty if you’ve earned it. Good workers are hard to find, hard to retain, expensive to train, and greatly benefit from loyalty. There are huge gains from trade if you show loyalty and treat your employees right in these ways, if you plan to be around for a while, since everyone can see that. Japan’s equilibrium (at least was in the past) insane in the other direction, but this lack of loyalty to employees seems like a clear general inefficiency to me.

It also directly conflicts with the long literature saying that employers passionately hate firing people and seek to avoid it whenever possible. Firing someone who does not richly deserve it, who hasn’t actively pissed you off, is for almost everyone a deeply unpleasant experience that one feels quite bad about. All the literature says that, from a profit maximization standpoint, companies tend to wait far too long to let people go when headcount is too high or someone is clearly not up to the job.

Both dynamics can be true at once. This is especially true on the promotion angle, where a company might be reluctant to fire you including out of loyalty, yet feel little urge to promote you even if you deserve it. Firing by not-promoting has a long history.

One can also look at this as dictator game. The surplus of remaining at the same company for a long period is divided up by the company, and the employee has to decide whether to accept their share or pay the costs of investigating and potentially making a switch to another company. If you don’t lose a lot of good employees by grabbing for too much of the pie, you might think that means you’re missing out on value. If there are minimal longer-term or more general effects from such dynamics, you could well be right.

Uber for Babysitters

It’s a great idea.

Anna: Half the replies are telling him it already exists and half are telling him it’s not possible.

Joe Cassandra: Where’s the Uber for babysitters? Background checked women to come watch your kids at the drop of hat for competitive rates Great for marriages too so couples can go out more for date night. “That’s not safe” Why? Because the neighbor’s second nice w tattoos is so much safer.

Anna: We actually do have a child care crisis but it’s not solved by turning childcare into gig work (because the part that should be gig work — date night or irregular babysitting — has always been exactly that)

(It’s not stranger based gig work but it’s gig work) I’m also not even touching the 31 flavors of misogyny in the tweet/thread lol

Oh lol nevermind — he just refuses to recognize that there are two different services in question here. Gig-type babysitting is usually free from grandparents and a lil pricey from sitters; regular workday is just literally a different thing with a different market

Joe Cassandra (quoted from other thread): There’s a childcare crisis in America Babysitters are $25+ an hour Day camps over summer are $500/week per kid Grandparents charge for babysitting help nowadays They need to remove all red tape from opening new daycares & running one.

It’s not for one off stuff. “Hey can you watch the kids June 28th so we can go to a show” More “Can you watch them every Monday from 10-4 so wife can get some work done” The regular stuff is what gets charged (below market rate). Again, I know others like that.

Not only does it exist, I can do one better than the replies and provide a link, it’s called Pinchsitters. No, you can’t get one on five minutes’ notice, this job is not that fungible, but in a few hours is very much a can-do. Which makes sense. If you want to match supply and demand, you can do it faster when there are large amounts of both to create better liquidity, there are a lot more taxis taken than emergency babysitters hired, and it should take longer to get someone for a long gig of specified length, at least several hours, than to get someone for a typical taxi ride.

Also, what is ‘competitive rates’? It’s $30/hour, and yes you should expect to pay more for on-demand services to allow people to be available to provide them, or the whole thing’s not going to work, it’s a more valuable service.

In any case, the service in question seems good, it exists and it works and it is valuable. First best is having someone you know already, second best is someone your friends know, this is still acceptable even for a date night.

More importantly, it’s vastly better in an actual emergency. The killer app is ‘‘your nanny wakes up sick, at least one kid does not have school and both parents have to work.”

Mutually Assured Default

All’s well that ends well this time, as we have raised the debt ceiling with only relative nothingburgers that would have happened at budget time anyway as side effects. If that’s what we mean by ‘negotiating’ over the issue, then sure, fine, whatever.

However, I do not agree that the whole thing was a nothingburger from the start and rightfully ignored. That’s not how fat tails work. It was always going to probably be a nothingburger in the end, sure, but there were good reasons to worry there was no zone of possible agreement, if McCarthy was being held hostage by crazy people that wouldn’t agree to anything that could get through the senate or Biden.

The market agrees. If a relatively blank agreement is worth several percent to the S&P, what was the move if we didn’t get one, with what probability of failure?

Businesses agreed. They took many precautions to prepare for these risks. This includes those in charge of financial infrastructure.

Were we helped by House members having stock porfolios? Oh, no doubt, that’s good skin in the game. They are also allowed to insider trade, and take very short positions, so far we’ve not encountered that particular problem.

This is similar to nuclear weapons, or other similar risks. We’ve been fortunate. Will we continue to be fortunate? Perhaps not, especially if we fail to acknowledge how fortunate we’ve been and work to ensure it continues.

In case we need it next time, yes, the Trillion Dollar Coin was ‘absolutely part of the intent’ of the legislation that authorized it. The only argument against using it is ‘people will react as if it is a meaningful printing of dollars’ and, well, exactly how false are you saying is the efficient market hypothesis? Cause that’s a pretty stupid reaction.

I also think Joe Wiesenthal has this exactly backwards.

Joe Wiesenthal: The doctrine of MAD — Mutually Assured Default — is actually very clear on this. If you don’t want to ever mint the coin, you must clearly and publicly express your willingness to mint the coin if forced to do so.

That doctrine assumes that MAD is catastrophic for everyone. If minting the coin was like that, then you want to draw red lines so your opponents know not to cross them and ensure you don’t default.

The whole advantage of the coin is it’s not mutually assured destruction or default. It’s an actual solution to the problem, and everyone goes about their day. Except that now people get to say ‘you minted a trillion dollar coin, look how irresponsible you are, this is terrible’ and pound the table. That’s the actual downside, that you might pay a political price in the zero sum game.

If you’re Kevin McCarthy, you love forcing Biden to mint the coin… if you know he’ll do that. What you really, really don’t want to do is force Biden to mint the coin or default, and have Biden choose default.

Thus, the correct answer, if available, is to secretly have the option to mint on a moment’s notice (and issue the premium bonds, same logic), while also loudly saying that minting and premium bonds are not options.

Similarly, I think Matthew Yglesias has it wrong here in his point #7. It is good to improve your BATNA (best alternate to a negotiated agreement) when seeking a better deal, but it is bad to improve your opponents’ BATNA for the same reason. Showing your willingness to mint the coin improves both, and improves the Republican one more.

I do agree with many of Matthew’s other points. In particular the need to go for a permanent solution, including point #9, that they could have gotten full elimination out of Trump, seeming probably right, and potentially relevant in the next Republican administration if government is divided. As well as noticing that Biden has generally been very good about prioritizing substance over style. I don’t always agree with the substance, but you still love to see it.

And yes, when you trade on or are creating prediction markets you need to pay very close attention to the details. We miss so many opportunities.

Joe Weisenthal: Man trading prediction markets is brutal. You nail the timing of the debt ceiling passage. And then…

CalcRisk79: Highly valuable derivative for hedging your risk that the bill will pass but the president will wait 24+ hrs to sign

CSPTrading.eth: same thing happened with infrastrcutre, there was a guy on polymarket who lost 100,000 dollars becasue he thought it was over but biden waited forever to sign

Who You Gonna Call?

New Yorker offers a very long piece on the rise of private musical gigs. Musicians used to be too good and too cool for this sort of thing, and faced revolt if they were seen as selling out. Now streaming has killed revenue, selling out is cool and no one has a problem with it in general. They do have a problem with accepting particular private hosts like Saudi Arabia, but a few million for a bar mitzvah? Sure, why not.

Seems pretty steep to me, especially when the person or group in question isn’t in awe of the artist and treats them as a servant rather than a God, what’s even the point? I can maybe see it if you have Too Much Money.

As an artist, seems hard to turn down. Six or seven figures, or even eight, for a day’s travel and an hour’s work. Of course, after you’ve done enough of them, do you sill need the money?

That depends on your answer to the same question your host is answering: If you had all this money, what would you do with it?

“We’re in love with fame,” he said. “Our entire society is addicted to it.” The addiction extends to the wealthiest among us, he went on. “But let me give you the bad news for rich people: They can only go four places. They can go into the art world, or private aircraft and yachting, or charity—naming buildings and hospitals after themselves. Or they can go into experiential.”

That’s quite dismissive of both rich people and of charity. Have you heard you could use charity to help people, perhaps save lives or help the planet, or even work to reduce extinction risks? It’s true.

If you live in a world where money is only good for putting your name on things, for collecting expensive objects that you can then say you own, or for ‘experiential’ stuff? Then experiential is the winner, and also that should max out pretty quick. If Beyonce gets $20 million for a gig, who’s she going to hire with her $10 million after taxes, if she keeps doing that? So why do that many more gigs?

Whereas if you get into the Effective Altruist mindset enough to understand that money can be a force for good, it’s really hard to turn down more gigs. But most of these artists aren’t like that. So why not chill?

Is this is a misallocation of goods? Does this new system mean an artist is performing for three people instead of three hundred or three thousand who would love it, while the artist enjoys it less too? The three get something they value more, so one could argue that it all works out.

I worry it doesn’t, not because I begrudge the rich, but because of differences in value capture. When the artist sells tickets, they usually dramatically fail to charge what those tickets are worth to their fans, and often scalpers take advantage quite a lot. Whereas with the private gig, there’s a negotiation, but the shamelessness is baked in, so perhaps a much larger portion of surplus gets captured by the artist.

As a creator myself, I can certainly say: I love the idea of ‘playing private gigs.’ I’d happily do it, if people were paying. I’m a lot cheaper than Beyonce.

Points of Order

This month I tried out “Papers, Please.” Was this a good idea?

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Should More Things Be Spun Out of or Included in Roundups?

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Should More Things Be Spun Out of AI Weekly Posts?

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The Lighter Side

(Forgot to include this last month, so it’s a double feature here.)

Squad goals.

Kaj Sotala: Heard in conversation: “You can really annoy the people who say that you can’t distinguish Coke and Pepsi in a blind test, by doing a blind test and distinguishing them.”

A new one even to me:

Jacob Kornbluh: From the lawsuit: “Giuliani said, ‘Jews want to go through their freaking Passover all the time, man oh man. Get over the Passover. It was like 3,000 years ago. The red sea parted, big deal. It’s not the first time that happened.’”

They know if nothing else that they can buy Bitcoin and then Ether for pennies, right?

Do you… really… not know… who he’s talking about?

Paul Graham: The striking thing about this list [of unicorn companies], to me, is the preponderance of software companies. Making physical stuff is hard. But don’t let that deter you, if that’s what you’re interested in. If things go right for Helion, it could be the biggest of the lot.

Elon Musk: Major misallocation of capital imo. Most on this list won’t make it. Not enough talent in manufacturing & heavy industries.

Paul Graham: Interesting point, but an example might make it clearer. Can you think of a prominent person who’s currently wasting his talents in software when he could be working on manufacturing and heavy industries?

Elon Musk: Once prominent, they’re one of the few to have succeeded. Too much talent is chasing software, much like Hollywood has too much talent chasing acting. It’s silly to have 10 talented entrepreneurs all chase same SaaS niche when they could be epically successful in heavy industry.

Microsoft, where it is not only the man who names the XBoxes.

vx-underground: Today Microsoft announced they’re changing the way they name and label threat groups. The new naming convention now aligns with “the theme of weather” The new names are absolutely ridiculous and we are having a difficult time taking it seriously.

Great work, yet you haven’t really gotten your full money’s worth until the kid reads enough of the right books to realize he’s been had.

You could end the scene there, Matt Damon. But you could leave the camera rolling (video, 2:30).

Mostly I wish my son would find better books, but they do have their moments.

Problem solved.

A good choice and also a bad choice.

Ah the Tweet put it, no f***ing way.

Perfect, no notes.

I do find this helpful. Thank you.

So true.

Good joke, but it’s here because the alt text is remarkably true and important.

Alt text: Have you noticed you can do humans to do almost anything if you pretend it is a scam?

From Bill Murdon, without comment.

Community notes may have peaked, we have a winner.

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Yes I moved her to 7th.