Review
Former debater here (around 2009-2011). The discussion about kritik strategies in policy debate has been frustrating to read, (even where I agree with parts of the critique of kritik!). Frankly, I think the kritik-critical bloggers have been following the model of "strongest statement I can make while still being true", and should be read accordingly. (This makes me sad! They are good people and I wish they would do better!)
Some specific notes, as sub-comments:
(parallel discussion of these at the substack post)
7) Look, I dunno, all of this is years out of date. Maybe the game really done changed. But nothing that I've read from the concerned side makes me think that they've got a clear picture of what's on the ground (and in this way, I am not acting like a tabula rasa judge).
5) More fundamentally, what is debate for? Should it be practicing good, persuasive, honest argumentation by doing exactly that? Is it practice thinking about the structure of arguments, or their form, or their truth? Other?.
My $0.02 is that it's perfectly reasonable that policy debate bears the same relationship to persuasion that fencing bears to martial prowess. I think that training for this sport with these rules is good even though none of the constituent skills make any sense for self-defense.
In this view, CX isn't useful because debaters practice the whole of good persuasive speaking (seriously, watch any twenty seconds of any policy debate video from the last 10 years); but it's more narrowly good for practicing thinking critically about how arguments fit together into conclusions. I have -- exactly once -- made the mistake of arguing that their plan makes X worse and also (three arguments later) that X is good actually; that loss stung so much that I think I never did that again. I still think about the difference between "impact defense" (if I'm right, you get none of your claimed Y) and "impact offense" (if I'm right, you get bad Z) -- which are diametrically different in their implications if they're 95% to be true. The debate-the-rules-of-the-game stuff isn't useful for its content, but is mostly just fine for its structure.
6) I haven't judged a CX round in ten(?) years, but personally, if I did tomorrow, I'd give a pre-round disclosure (as per the norm) that I'm not going to put down my pen or throw anyone out of the round for what they say or how they say it, and if you have a legitimate problem with what the other side is doing -- and you're right that it's bad for debate -- you should have an easy time winning on that and convincing me to hand them a loss.
4a) This is a misinterpretation:
it requires arguing obvious nonsense, with failure to accept such nonsense as the baseline of discussion, or insisting that it is irrelevant to the topic, treated as a de facto automatic loss.
On the contrary, an argument that [insert K here] is irrelevant to the topic, this is bad for debate, and the Neg should suffer an instant loss (we'd call this "framework") is bog-standard in the Aff reply. Only rookies get caught without their framework file.
On one hand, this is mostly the sort of nonsense flak that the Neg's topicality argument was -- spend 30sec setting up the skeleton of an argument that you can put real meat on if the other side really flubs their reply. But in a very real sense, if the Neg spends 13 minutes dumping critical Marxist theory on you, it is entirely valid to spend 4.5 minutes of your 5-minute reply on some flavor of "this is off-topic and bad for debate, this judge-is-a-revolutionary-historian bit is a fiction, we are high school students and you are a debate coach and I wanted to debate military policy because debate in high school is important for shaping a future generation of political leaders who can solve real problems so can you please give this Neg team the loss to avoid this whole activity going off the rails?" I have done exactly that, multiple times. Won on it about as often as we won on any other off-case stuff.
The biggest thing that makes policy different, as a format, is that it's expected that it's valid to debate the rules of debate. The majority of TOC judges in 2010 would vote for a K -- if the Neg won the debate-about-what-debate-is-for to put the K in-bounds -- or vote against a K, if the Aff won that it should be out-of-bounds. I'd bet at 1:1 odds that that's still true today.
4b) Some judges gonna judge judge judge judge judge, but that's why teams get (or at least got -- I'm not current) a fixed number of "no, not that judge" vetoes at most tournaments. We called these "strikes", and yes they were used by K-disliking teams to avoid being judged by the most K-friendly judges, and by K-liking teams to avoid being judged by judges that wouldn't ever vote for the K even if their opponent was a dead fish.
3) More generally, there's a (dominant?) school of thought that policy debate judges, unlike any other humans, should be "tabula rasa" -- a blank slate not bringing any conclusions into the round -- and willing to accept the stronger argument on any point that comes up. Does building housing raise or lower property prices? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument. Will 3.5C of warming cause half the planet to die from food system collapse? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument. Will India and Pakistan start a nuclear war if [US trade policy plan]? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument.
By default, and to a shocking degree, this extends to the rules of debate itself. The topic says "reduce troops in Afghanistan", the Aff wants to reduce them to zero, and the Neg says that's out-of-bounds? Shrug, I'll accept the stronger argument, which will very likely be based on what is good for debate. The Aff wants to move troops from Afghanistan to Syria and the Neg says out-of-bounds? Give me the arguments. Team A wants their stronger debater to do both cross-examinations? (Is that even against the rules?) Give me the arguments why that's good or bad for debate. Team B wants one debater to give three of their four speeches? Arguments. Team C says their debater should get an extra two minutes to correct for systemic injustices? Give me the arguments. If the other side convinces me that this is bad for debate, I'll either strike your extra-time arguments from the record, or give you a loss, based on...which has the stronger arguments. Team D wants me to award a double loss with 0/30 speaker points as a protest against the institution of debate? I'll act on the stronger arguments.
Team E wants me to vote down the Aff because "Afghanistan" is a colonial construct that they accept and repeat, and silence is violence? And their opponents say "no fair, that's not the topic, plus the topic says Afghanistan and if we proposed withdrawing troops from Khurasan you'd jump down our throats on topicality"? Look, I want both of you to make your cases and explain how I should be using my vote, and the one of you that has the stronger argument that I should vote for you is going to get it.
2) As Zvi would have it, consider how this can be both true and the strongest possible true statement:
I reviewed all Tournament of Champions semifinal and final round recordings from 2015 to 2023, and found that about two-thirds of Policy rounds and almost half of Lincoln-Douglas rounds featured critical theory.
One huge part of the answer is that Standard Operating Procedure on the Negative side is to throw out several arguments against the Affirmative team's case, suss out where they were weak (or just blundered their reply), sever the rest and pile on that one. I don't think there's a more standard first-year CX debater strategy than starting the first negative speech with "I'll have 4 off and case". Meaning something like:
Off-case argument 1 (Topicality): Your proposal is not in-bounds on the official resolution because [tiny, dumb, technical reason out of the list of ten I prepared] and therefore you should lose.
Off-case argument 2 (Politics Disadvantage): Your plan is going to make [political faction] mad and they'll block [other thing] which is more important because it will prevent a nuclear war that kills everyone.
Off-case argument 3 (States Counterplan): Instead of [your plan], do [basically the same thing] at the state-by-state level. This is good because [something about federalism] and also it avoids the politics disadvantage.
Off-case argument 4 (Capitalism K): Your plan has [capitalist element], capitalism is bad because [reason], in fact plans that are based on capitalist reasoning categorically suck because [reason].
On-case arguments: You claim [advantage] but actually you make the problem worse because [reason], also your plan doesn't solve the problems you identified because [reason].
...and all of that will get delivered (with citations and quotes from references) in eight minutes. I said "first-year CX debater" because really this would be considered amateur stuff, and a "real debate" would more often be six or seven off-case arguments (extra Topicality objections, disadvantages, or counterplans), plus case. I can probably still deliver a Topicality argument in 30 seconds, from memory.
So when Maya says that two-thirds of policy rounds "featured" K, I am entirely unimpressed that two-thirds of 1NC speakers stuck some 1-minute K module in their opening speech at least to see if the Aff would fumble it.
(The next thing that happens is the 2AC speaker gets 8 minutes to reply to all of the arguments, then the Neg gets 13(!) minutes to either continue the spray-and-pray or dump on the single contention that the 2AC answered weakest.) Sometimes you would see the second Aff speech throw up a "come on, judge, letting them throw up eight things and sever seven of them is unbalanced and abusive", but I have never, ever seen an Aff team win on that. More often they're just doing it for the "time skew" -- to make the Neg spend more time responding than it took the Aff to make the original claim.
Honestly, I'm shocked it's as low as 2/3 of TOC elimination rounds; I would not have been surprised by something like 7/8.
1) K (which is what it's ~always called in the local lingo) is definitely not new. It's old enough that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez would have been doing it if she had debated policy in high school. Sure, it's gotten more prevalent over time, but if you walked into a debate round in 2009 and you couldn't answer "your plan is bad because your entire argument is capitalist", you were going to lose that round in front of nearly any judge. I'm willing to believe that social-location K is getting more popular/prevalent over time, though again, in 2009 critical-race Ks were already in the standard set of things you prepped for if you were in central Maryland. (NB: Likely this isn't nationally representative; the nearby Baltimore urban debate league influenced this some, and the arrival of Daryl Burch as the coach for Howard County's teams influenced it a lot. But HoCo traveled from Columbia to Wake Forest, so really it's more like "there was already plenty of CRT K up and down the East Coast".) If your narrative is that K is a reflection of woke, then no, serious K in CX debate goes at least as far back as the Clinton years. (To her credit, Maya does report this in her post.)
A fine explanation of the dangers of all loyalty statements, which have now come to mathematics.
Mathematicians coming from ex-communist countries have the advantage of knowing how to navigate these things at workplace... but probably also a strong aversion against doing so.
It has been explained but I will never stop being confused by the dislike of personalized advertisements, which are universally far superior to the alternative. [...] What we actually deserve, and might benefit from requiring, is user control over ad customization.
I suppose most people's objection is that you can't do targeted advertising without spying on users, and they object against the spying part. So if you gave them a list of topics to choose from (with a warning: "if you don't choose any, you will still get the same amount of ads, only randomly selected", or maybe just with an "everything" option selected by default, which you can only unselect after selecting something else), this objection would go away. I am not sure it would make the advertisers happy though, for several reasons:
All these objections go away if you simply spy on users.
this is trivial, the sequence has limited memory so it will repeat in a loop
Is the memory really limited? As I understand it, you move a cursor starting at the start of the sequence, and append one or two digits to the end. The distance between "where the cursor is now" and "where I am appending now" keeps growing (if the 2-digit numbers keep happening once in a while). So the sequence is not necessarily periodic... unless I missed something.
Personally, I'm opposed to targeted ads partially because of the spying and partially because they increase the value of ads. Since ads are bad, I want their value to be as low as possible to the advertiser so they have an incentive to use better monetization strategies.
If the strategies to increase sales are either to increase the quality of the product, or to improve the marketing, as a customer I would prefer to live in a world where increasing the quality is the winning move for the producers.
Okay, maybe we should distinguish between situations where the market is saturated and the producers are playing a zero-sum game against each other... and situations where some people are still unaware that a certain type of product exists, in which case the advertising provides them useful information. But if you show me the same ad for the hundredth time, the "just providing information" argument is no longer plausible.
Re: mileage, if the car is a Tesla, it's not an accident: they set their numbers to the maximally optimistic ones at every stage (without regard for e.g. temperature) and have a team dedicated to diverting people who call in about the reliable inaccuracy.
One of the glories of America is that many of the standards – such as Heinz Ketchup or Oreo Cookies, or famously Coke – are flat out the best version of that product known to exist and the rich man cannot do better.
Hmm, have you tried Hydrox cookies? I personally have not (yet), but fans claim Oreo's success is due to better marketing (including tactics one might consider unfair), not a better product.
I grew up with them, because they are kosher and Oreos are not. Hydrox are a reasonable substitute, but I think Oreos are slightly better.
If you're bothered by the McNuggets, then notice that McDonalds prices are way more inconsistent than that. In many times and places you can get 2-for-5 10 piece McNuggets, or pay $6.29 for a 20 piece. One time I was presented with a choice of a 20 piece, 2 large fries meal for $9.99, or a 2-for-5 10 piece plus 2-for-$4 large fries. They very much reward ordering in code, whatever the code of the day happens to be. But the codes change, and often aren't reflected on the menu but only buried in a deal section or on a poster in the corner of the dining room (and not at all at the drive thru). Prices and deals are often different if you order online vs in person. If you order at the counter instead of a kiosk, the price depends on whether the employee enters your order in the system using the same code you ask for.
On the gluten free waffle cones: this sounds like an argument for those unobtrusive-but-visible GF symbols off to the side of a menu item's name, rather than changing the item's name.
Makes sense that McDonalds would use price discrimination on the basis of willingness to study the menu - they want to pick up the very bottom of the market that needs the help.
Yes, it does. Maybe it works better now with kiosk and app ordering, because in the past, in practice, they never gave the cashiers enough info on what the deals were for them to reliably enter them into the registers anyway. Even if you ordered with the exact same words you'd sometimes get quoted different prices depending on who was working.
I very rarely eat McD's anymore, it just always struck me as kinda extreme in how complicated they made ordering. AFAIK none of the other fast food chains do that.
On McNuggets, I tweeted the following response:
I will gladly pay more money for a six-pack of candy bars than for a ten-pack.
Why? Because a six-pack means everyone in my family gets one, and there is no fighting or crying, and no kids end up eating more candy than is reasonable.
But that is different, you might say.
Yes, in the case of my family, I have a largely coherent decisionmaker choosing for a set of partially aligned and incoherent agents.
But do you really think your mind works so very differently?
It's clear to me that many people prefer buying less because they have some level of self-awareness about their likely future behavior.
Given that, paying more for fewer items seems perfectly rational - despite violating constraints of simplified models.
the people choosing this many white cars seem low-level insane
The increase in white cars seems to follow a 2007 study An Investigation into the Relationship between Vehicle Colour and Crash Risk which says light-colored cars are safer. Maybe it's just a coincidence.
EU to require online Visa applications by Americans before visiting...in retaliation to a similar set of rules by the USA
That's very US-centric view.
Which makes "we want to somewhat vet people coming in" (same as US) more likely than "let us show those yankees who's the boss"
It can also be retaliation, which sort of makes sense - there's a reason tit-for-tat is so successful. That being said, it's generally very unfortunate that they're being introduced, on all sides. I can sort of understand why countries would want to limit people from poor countries (which is not the same as agreeing with the reasoning). Enforcing visas for short term, touristy style visits doesn't seem like a good idea however I look at it. As Zvi notes, it's about the friction.
ESTA is very much a visa (I filled it out yesterday), but under a different name and purely electronic.
Oh, I agree. As a non-us person who will have to fill that additional friction is not welcome.
But the system was in the making for years, I remember discussing it with someone 4+ years ago. Which, again, points against "retaliation to the US" as a main explanation.
I'd love to know your views on Christopher Alexander. It seems like a topic that hasn't received much attention in this community.
Why is turbulence worse on planes? The headlines blame it on ‘climate change.’ The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight. This then became ‘because climate change.’ This kind of thing damages public trust in all such claims, making solving climate change (and everything else) that much harder.
There are benefits to optimized profile descents (fuel, time, reduced air traffic controller instructions, reduced noise over populated areas), which they did studies on to confirm since in high traffic airspace the stepwise approach can be easier for ATC. This change could conceivably increase turbulence on approach but would not explain the increase that "the narrative" is attributing to increased wind shear at higher altitudes.
What a month. So much to cover.
What this post does not cover beyond this introduction is the biggest news story of the month, a potential room temperature superconductor.
If this discovery is real, it could be transformative. Think of the potential. We could be so back. Chances are that instead it is over, but even a small chance of something this big is huge. Even if it ends up being all over, it was amazing to see people around the world come together and do science to this to try and actually figure out something physical and real. Even in failure, we are so back.
What I am not going to do is pivot to suddenly becoming an expert on physics or get into the weeds myself. There is no need for that, I work fast and it would be fun but there are limits and I simply haven’t the time. We have a whole world stepping up to replicate the results and soon we will know the answer.
In the meantime, it is easy to know the probability of the answer. All you have to do is check Polymarket, for the largest real money prediction market. Size talks.
Polymarket does not allow Americans and requires crypto. So if you are in American or want to get involved via charity funds instead, you can bet much smaller amounts at Manifold Markets instead. They also have an endless running discussion, whose quality I am choosing not to be qualified to judge.
You can also enjoy my movie retrospective, Barbiehammer: Across the Dead Reckoning. It has been quite a good year for movies.
So what else has been happening?
Bad News
How bad are car break-ins in San Francisco and Oakland? A CNN reporter shooting a story about crime gets her rental cars broken into so often she is careful not to even leave candy bars behind. Then we get the hard data, which is that of 250 cars returned the previous day, 27 had been broken into. A reasonable guess is that the average rental period is 5 days. So that means that there is a 2% car break-in rate per day.
Portugal is struggling with drug legalization, Washington Post reports, as rates of use go up and the systems for dealing with drug use increasingly aren’t working. Whenever full legalization happens, this effectively means that drug users are violating a whole host of regulations and rules and degrading general quality of life, in ways that would never be tolerated from other ordinary citizens or ordinary business activities, but no one has any leverage for enforcement once you lose the teeth of illegality.
We make many aspects of ordinary living illegal unless large regulation-imposed mandatory costs are paid, but we enforce that be threatening your standing in society, which drug users are willing to lose or have already lost. And allowing more drug use increases the number of people who end up like that over time. What to do?
You now have even better reasons to be completely done with RFK Jr. The list goes on.
US issues travel advisory to consider avoiding China because of arbitrary law enforcement and exit bans and risk of unlawful detentions. What changed? I presume that we wanted to say boo China. The risk is real and does give me pause, but this issue has been there for a long time.
The ‘cut your losses’ streaming approach continues.
Yet another debate debate continues. Previously I looked at claims from The Free Press that debate had been taken over by judges uninterested in debate who instead rewarded whoever successfully deployed the proper left-wing shibboleths. That post failed to provide statistics or base rates. After looking at judge profiles, it was not clear that there was a severe problem.
Maya Bodnick’s Slow Boring post was more convincing. By doing a systematic tabulation of high-level debate tournaments, she finds that the strategy of ignoring the debate topic entirely in favor of advancing an arbitrary and orthogonal critical theory – a strategy known as a ‘kritik’ – is highly popular and successful. As level of competition intensifies, frequency of kritik strategies goes up, composing a majority of policy debates and almost half of Lincoln-Douglas debates. Which means that even when opponents are ready for it, such tactics work. There is a dominant strategy of debate for those with the resources to learn to use it, and it does not involve the topic of the debate.
Instead it requires arguing obvious nonsense, with failure to accept such nonsense as the baseline of discussion, or insisting that it is irrelevant to the topic, treated as a de facto automatic loss. The format is broken when played at the competitive level, so you can perhaps get value playing it casually, but that’s it, and if someone pulls out a bazooka then you lose. A shame.
Car colors by year.
Are we indeed this lame? It seems that we are. We also don’t value unique identifiers sufficiently, also the people choosing this many white cars seem low-level insane. Product variety is one of the things that make America great and we are letting it slip away. Worst of all is that Uber and Lyft seem to encourage black cars, the hardest ones to distinguish, when strangers have to find your car constantly. Give me the purple or green Uber every time.
A fine explanation of the dangers of all loyalty statements, which have now come to mathematics.
Why are Kosher restaurants so bad? The economics. You can’t be open 30% of the time due to Jewish holidays and Shabbat, including half or more of the Friday and Saturday nights. Your food costs are through the roof since you have to buy from the handful of Kosher venders, and you need to hire extra staff for certification. Taken together, that’s a nightmare, especially with many Jews not keeping strict Kashrut. Perhaps a crazy idea is to combine the restaurant with the Synagogue? If one is open, the other is closed, so you get to reuse space and even employees, and everyone dining there knows the proceeds support the shul and gets to complain to the rabbi.
Tech No Longer or Not Yet Calling Itself Artificial Intelligence
Patrick McKenzie and Ryan Peterson warn and remind us that SMS for two-factor authorization is very much not secure when it matters, that you can get your account taken over by the method of finding a gullible Verizon employee willing to swap SIM cards. It is vastly more secure than relying only on a password, so as a standard thing for most people it makes sense, but do not confuse it with security against a determined attacker. This echoes many other safety issues, including in AI both present and more importantly future. There is safety for practical purposes that breaks down when you need it most, and there is safety that is robust to adversarial attack, and solutions for the first often are useless for the second.
Dustin Mowshowitz (private account) lays out the reasons Twitter’s current owner engages in censorship, in addition to the ones we mostly all agree upon: When it’s about him, when competitors are being promoted, when authoritarians ask him to, and sometimes on left-wing things he disagrees with. I have yet to see substantiation on the left-wing thing happening often enough to matter, the others seem clear and need to stop. In particular, treating Substack as competition and a rival, as opposed to part of the same synergistic ecosystem, is a huge unforced error doing real damage. Yes, Substack Notes technically exists, which is what caused Elon’s fit of pique, but I’ve never seen a link to it or had it be relevant to anything at all. Does anyone actually use it?
An accusation from United States v. Twitter that the FTC flat out told Ernst & Young to produce a negative report, and that E&Y feared retaliation if they didn’t.
It has been explained but I will never stop being confused by the dislike of personalized advertisements, which are universally far superior to the alternative.
I get the view that this could be predatory or what not, but in practice what you get are fewer, higher-priced, higher-relevance ads that people actually do not mind seeing. The alternative is a scattershot army of random useless junk. Perhaps we can have a compromise, where we define certain types of advertising as potentially predatory – such as things like gambling or recreational drugs or multi-level marketing schemes – and say that those in particular can’t custom target.
What we actually deserve, and might benefit from requiring, is user control over ad customization. This would benefit everyone. The ads I want to see are the ads you want to show me. For me, the best ad types are movie previews, game advertisements, restaurants and of course delicious Goldbelly-style temptations.
Flashing elements of websites are increasingly ubiquitous. Scott Alexander cannot stand any amount of them however unobtrusive and harmless, like the site saying ‘draft saved,’ and 16% of his users agree. As with many similar design choices, I think the ‘draft saved’ level is a good default, I don’t even notice it, but am baffled that there is no settings option to turn it off.
Car knows some things in some places, not in others.
There are quite a lot of time or duration estimation systems that are reliably horribly wrong, with sufficient reliability that you can adjust to find the right estimate. Often you see exactly the above, where you get two answers from two different processes, one of which is lying. It always points to something very wrong on some level, so if you care about fixing problems it is highly useful.
It continuously baffles me that such estimations cannot be done better. Food delivery time estimates consistently make no sense to the point that I ignore them.
San Francisco residents attempt to sabotage driverless taxis by putting orange cones on the car hood. Tyler Cowen says solve for the equilibrium. I believe the equilibrium is a software patch. There is no law of nature that says this trick has to work. Certainly the solution won’t be that authorities enforce the law and stop this, not in San Francisco. Also I cannot express how much I deeply dislike the people doing this, or endorsing it. No, they’re not asking you to be guinea pigs, they are offering an amazing service.
Dan Luu predicts Threads will have more daily active users within a year, Manifold Market put this at 41% earlier, it is now down to 22%. Dan’s logic is that Meta will make better decisions than Twitter or other alternatives. He notes that Threads is exactly what he does not want, but that could be a lot like what most people want. Prove him wrong, kids. You’re off to a great start.
Several studies show that Facebook’s algorithms create echo chambers, far in excess of what would occur with a chronological or balanced feed, yet a short term correction of this did not noticeably alter political views. Tyler Cowen sees this as vindication of social media. One could also view this as reflective of damage already being done, a temporary reduction in the error chamber effect on one website being insufficient to reverse it, or more generally as reflective of an insufficiently powered or specified set of studies. I do think people unfairly blame Facebook for its impact on politics, when we should instead be blaming it for making our lives directly worse in other ways.
A theory that academic research recently has been similar to when you could not compete for the Tour de France without doping. Not all academics cheat, but the rewards for cheating have been high and the chances of being caught low, so among the ‘successful’ academics we should expect to see a lot of cheating. If academia is asking big questions and seeking important truths, this effect will not be as big, because your fortune or skill in other ways can overcome this. If the game is all about bureaucracy and signaling and social games and p<0.05, perhaps not so much.
Government Working
EU to require online Visa applications by Americans before visiting, including background check and work history, in retaliation to a similar set of rules by the USA. It seems that the response to shooting oneself in the foot is to follow suit. The following is very right, although it won’t fully be half.
More related bad news you can use:
Will the UK really drive all encrypted messaging services out of the country? (BBC)
Some claim that this is actually on track and going to happen.
This seems like the kind of thing that continuously threatens to happen, then does not actually happen when people realize the consequences. They do on occasion actually happen, though.
Our system of ‘any old judge can stop anything for any little procedural reason no matter how much buy-in it has’ has to end. This is so far beyond ridiculous.
In other NEPA news, the CHIPS bill is not going to do much if we don’t address those concerns, as well as other regulatory requirements effectively nullifying our efforts. There is a bipartisan bill to streamline NEPA for this particular purpose, the Building Chips in America Act, creating a limited carve out from review. What we actually need is complete reimagining of the entire NEPA process, which I hope Balsa will be able to outline.
Why is turbulence worse on planes? The headlines blame it on ‘climate change.’ The actual answer is the FAA told airlines to prioritize saving fuel over passenger comfort, despite passengers having a strong revealed preference for spending the extra cost of fuel to have a more pleasant flight. This then became ‘because climate change.’ This kind of thing damages public trust in all such claims, making solving climate change (and everything else) that much harder.
Sugar shortage threatens candy production ahead of Halloween. There is of course no actual sugar shortage, there is a shortage in America because of Big Sugar’s import quotas. I mostly want to say ‘good’ here, we are too generous with Halloween candy and it devalues the whole experience. A supply shortage makes it fun again.
A cute tax trick (direct link):
There was a 14-year gap in which some appreciation doubtless did occur. Still, not like this, also this was literally higher than any recorded private home sale in the country.
Emmett Shear notes that with FOIA and streaming of Congress we ran the experiment on a more transparent government, and the result is the real work mostly moving away from monitored channels towards unmonitored ones. If you read everything I write down, my response is to not write anything down, and so on. If you went full 24/7 surveillance you’d make things even more implicit and also drive actions towards whatever looks and sounds superficially good.
I think this is right. You want to protect against corruption. You want transparency of who does what, and who gets paid what and how, and other such outcomes. You also need to allow the people involved to sometimes speak freely, ideally also to write freely, especially in the age of social media.
Yes, we do need to fix this, requiring ID to buy spray paint is an outrage.
I would actually be mostly fine with mandating porn sites require ID in order to upload material, for authorization reasons, there are already plenty of similar rules. For viewing it? The issue is that there is no ‘flash you ID badge to prove you are 21 without creating any stored data’ on the internet.
I notice I remain confused that no good technological solution exists here. In such a solution, some websites would be classified as ‘adult.’ To access them, you present a token that contains only the information ‘this is an adult’ as provided by, say, Apple or Google or whomever, with no identifying information and no ability to trace it back, and they check your ID one time at some point. If you want your child to not do this, you give them a phone or computer without such verification, and you can easily do a spot check to see if they’ve hacked around it. Yes, it’s not bulletproof but it does not need to be. Why is this impossible or non-viable?
On a podcast, Connor Leahy pointed out that there are larger regulatory barriers to selling a sandwich than there are to deploying a superintelligence. There are two different ways to fix this and I am open to both of them.
FTC attempting to rewrite American merger guidelines via administrative fiat. Together with their actions against Amazon (and one could add OpenAI and others) it seems clear the FTC has gone off the rails in terms of its alignment with consumers. Alex Tabarrok has a follow-up here including links to more analysis. The new guiding principle seems to be that big corporations are presumed to be no good and opposed to consumers, so if mergers are good for big companies then they must be bad for consumers.
There is no more vile industry or lobbying group than the tax preparation firms, whose entire existence seems mostly to be lobbying the government to require mountains of completely unnecessary paperwork so that citizens will pay the firms to make this problem go away. The fight has now shifted to a new file-free electronic tax system the IRS hopes to debut.
Can I say, perhaps, new EA cause area? Since 2006, total lobbying by these companies is on the order of $40 million, if we assume all their lobbying money is opposing filing reform. Public opinion is overwhelming here, and there are approximately zero other people on the side of more paperwork, so presumably you would at most have to match that rate of spending.
The logic invoked by those who take the bribes is so absurd.
The idea that the IRS is going to use this opportunity to cheat the taxpayers is, well, it’s an idea I suppose. We have an existing service, which is designed to intentionally not be used for obvious commercial reasons.
No, seriously, we could devastate China if we allowed skilled immigrants to come contribute here instead of there (or from other places as well), until we do this I do not want to hear anyone talk about having to ‘beat China’ some other way, and I will keep talking about this.
In related news, we put arbitrary limits on H1B visas, our loss is Canada’s gain.
Our immigration system is utterly broken, and no one seems to care to fix it. Masoud here documents a student who gets turned down for a visa for the very common reason that the person given authority felt like it.
People mostly agree that high-skill immigration helps the economy, as do foreign students, but they are split on low-skill immigration. It is so crazy that both sides continue to hold high-skill immigration hostage to try and extract other concessions.
Money Stuff
Your periodic reminder: AML/KYC direct laws cost $300 billion a year and recover about $3 in illicit funds while gumming up the works in far more costly ways. There are are remarkably large classes of transactions and business were AML/KYC is a gigantic effective tax on activity, often prohibitive. What do we get for this? Almost nothing.
Finch downgrades American sovereign debt from AAA to AA+, the second rating agency to downgrade us. As other have noted while speculating on the motives involved, this is obvious nonsense.
It seems to be true, VCs rarely pay for third party due diligence, despite the very obvious positive expected value of doing that, although Aadik claims Khosla Ventures at least used to do so.
[tells story of VCs making technically dumb bets, then story of VCs not understanding the basics of the regulatory barriers they would face, at all.]
These seem like highly different failure modes, if they even are failures. For sufficiently large investments a lot of investigation makes sense, but VCs have learned to focus on certain aspects in general rather than others. In a hits-based business, it can be right to mostly not sweat future regulatory hurdles, and focus on other considerations.
The Fed has a lot of work yet to do in order to get inflation back to target, made harder by people’s inability to realize that money is not tight, we are doomed to never listen to Scott Sumner.
I agree inflation is looking better for now, with supercore down to 4% and headline at 3% earlier this month, and the news since then good as well. That’s still very much not 2%, let alone proper level targeting. I do not think ‘team transitory’ was vindicated, but their position looks less wrong than it did a few months ago. It’s fine to admit you were wrong and then say now you were not as wrong as you thought when you admitted it, the issue is pretending this actually made your previous claims right.
Ed Elson looks back at his old crypto pitch deck. If you invested based on a pitch like this, I have absolutely zero sympathy for what happened next.
SEC has made their opinion official that every cryptocurrency other than Bitcoin is a security, as they requested Coinbase halt trading in every other coin. Coinbase asked the SEC to justify that position, the SEC refused. This is not a reasonable position. As Matt Levine has pointed out, Dogecoin is quite obviously not a security, so now we are talking price, even if you throw out the court ruling on Ripple.
Usually a technical issue is only a technical issues, but in many contexts such as crypto it is also Bayesian evidence of deeper problems even if it is indeed a technical problem. One must balance the reasons to run and not run on a given bank-like thing.
Robin Hanson disproves EMH by finding $20 bill on the sidewalk. Eliezer reports that 1 in 5 young people surveyed had found one and 1 in 20 had found two.
New non-profit rating agency for stable coins, none of which got an A+. As with all such rating systems, there will be mistakes and one cannot fully rely on them in either direction, but it is a very good heuristic, although not investment advice, to avoid trusting anything that has a bad rating from such an agency. Tether has a D.
I am one of many idiots who did not get in early on the ‘buy thing with superconductor in its name’ trade, although not one of the bigger idiots who buy late and lose money. Happens every time. This is about how false the EMH is.
DeSantis plans to make student loans dischargeable in bankruptcy, with the school responsible for payment if that happens. Model this if it somehow actually happened? My first thought was that this would create interesting incentives for schools, including to generate goodwill. My second thought was how this would greatly impact who gets admitted. Perhaps we should allow both types of loans to compete in the marketplace, and learn about which institutions believe in their students?
Sadly, FTX
Thus, The Caroline Diaries. It seems Caroline Ellison kept one, which SBF is trying to keep sealed.
The need for SBF to avoid this, that is?
Good News, Everyone
Base Rate Times continues to be an excellent source for probabilistic future news, which also makes it an excellent source for knowing what is the important news about the past. All it needs are better and more robust and expansive prediction markets from which to report, especially real money markets – Manifold and Metaculus are remarkably good but there is no substitute for large amounts of cold hard cash changing hands.
There is still time to sign up for the Roots of Progress Blog-Building Initiative, deadline is August 11. If you want to start a progress-relevant blog and can invest 10-15 hours a week for 8 weeks, this seems like a fantastic opportunity. This is not intended for me, but I did consider applying anyway, and if those involved said ‘no actually you should participate at least somewhat’ then I probably would.
What if they declared a mugging, and everyone ignored it?
If you pump your own gas you’ll have to go with Thursday:
From the legal filing in question, I will be in the future somewhat less mad about all the Taco Bells wasting valuable New York restaurant slots:
Paint the desert to solve climate change?
Someone’s reaction to this proposal tells you a lot about what it is they actually value.
Also works wonders insulating buildings.
The joys of an industry having good ops that trust and work with each other. It is a miracle that things work as often and as safety as they do.
Report on the Civic Futures Summit and unconference. If you are interested in a topic and expect to encounter people you want to talk to, I have yet to hear even one person regret going to an unconference. The format remains highly underrated. Tyler Cowen encouraged Brits to be more optimistic as South England is still one of the only areas in the world ‘where you can start ideas and get things done.’ That is indeed a huge deal, but time seems like it is running out for one of those ideas to be ‘build a house.’
Did you know you can often use most the services of a hotel without being a guest?
How does Patrick McKenzie keep getting all these mountains of paperwork that would presumably drive ordinary people to tears? Either way, be in the bug fixing business.
Much less inequality than even I was expecting.
It seems we still have >20% of people smoking and taking on credit card debt. Stop it, everyone. Having credit card debt should be an act of desperation, not something about half of people carry, which is the only way the 83% number is that small.
The most surprising are the last two. The top 20% only have half of the sex partners and alcohol? I would have assumed both were highly fat-tailed distributions. About 20%-25% of American adults don’t drink at all, many of the rest drink only rarely, and alcoholics often drink quite a lot. The sexual partner distribution seems like it should have quite a lot of 0s and 1s in it. A CDC source says the median number of partners is 4.3 for women and 6.3 for men (which is quite the contrast), whereas 28.3% of men have 15 partners or more as do 12.9% of women. It’s still in theory possible (I think) to get to only 47% there, but it is not easy.
While I Cannot Condone This
Eliezer Yudkowsky lays the smackdown of the righteous on UFO claims. Standard betting line is 150:1 against any of this being shown to be real, the odds should if anything be far longer.
List by Anna Gat of things you learn from travel updates me towards feeling less need to travel. Is that the best we can do? Tyler Cowen instead suggests one reason is that travel makes you a better reader, especially for history, geography, (factual) economics and political science. This seems like an excellent reason for Tyler in particular to travel, since his goal is to read everything about everything. My experience however is that this effect is minimal unless you ‘travel well’ in the sense of immersing yourself deeply, in a way that almost no one considering marginal travel does.
In Medical and Health News
Everyone else is right, Boris Johnson can write. He missed his true calling. In this case, he writes about the promise of Ozempic. Worth reading purely for the phrasing.
An actual quote (direct).
What does he mean by this absurdity?
This is the branch of philosophy that says that anyone who disagrees with you, or makes decisions of which you do not approve, you are right and it is the people who are wrong. Also that there are no trade-offs or preferences, only that which public health thinks is right and that which stupid ugly Americans do instead that causes them to die.
All the crusades Califf actually lists are petty. He’s at least mostly not wrong, but none of the issues in question kill that many people. Instead Califf is essentially saying that ‘misinformation’ is behind every decision to not eat optimally healthy food, or engage in proper exercise, or not seek proper health care, or to take various other risks.
This is such nonsense. People have other preferences and other things to do. They make choices, sometimes badly, sometimes foolishly, sometimes out of laziness or short time horizons or addictions or feeling like it. They get to do that.
Misinformation is not ignorance, nor is it lack of wisdom, or lack of caring, nor is it having different priorities. Misinformation, to the extent it is a thing, is when people are told things and those things are false.
When one attributes smoking to ‘misinformation,’ or blames it for more deaths than heart disease which kills 23.5% of us, one reveals a failure to understand this distinction. And also one reveals… misinformation.
I find this dilemma oddly relevant. What do you value, exactly?
Paper claims to find strong causal relationship where higher income causes improved mental health, also claiming to have corrected for reverse causation and various intermediating effects. The correlational effects are clear enough. The causal ones seem so confounded as to almost be a wrong question, I have no faith that the methods here, while creative and effortful, are sufficient.
Suicide rates among young people are rising in America, but falling in many other countries, most of which also have a lot of iPhones and social media.
Did you know you can use a shot blocker to minimize pain and fear of injections, for kids and also for adults? It appears asking for this annoys techs, so I guess we’ll simply have lots of people avoid their shots, then, instead. Or did you also know that you can request a smaller needle called a butterfly for blood draws that reduces pain? Also:
How about at the dentist?
No doubt the list goes on.
David Sinclair claims chemically induced reprogramming can reverse cellular aging (direct to paper), and that they are planning human trials soon. Huge if true. As with most such things I will assume not true until I see much stronger evidence.
Sarah Constantin notices paper by Eric Vallabh Minikel and others that existing genetic linkage doubles the chance a drug will test as effective, but most successful drugs lack such a link. Is this an inefficiency? Could we look at genetic correlations with disease to identify more good candidate drugs? Perhaps, also perhaps not. My hypothesis is that many of the ‘obvious’ drug candidates have such a link and often succeed, driving the average up without impacting the marginal case.
Arnold Kling points out that marijuana use tends to be net negative. He suggests fines for public use, and generally a regime similar to alcohol where society signals its disapproval. Both are drugs we cannot in practice ban, and that some people use responsibly in ways that leave them better off, but that many others use in ways that leave them worse off, and that on net I believe do great harm and where we would as a society greatly benefit from reducing usage. On a personal level, I think almost everyone would be better off if they cut out both mostly or better yet entirely, especially alcohol.
There exists a theory, says Scott Alexander with links, called the Social Theory of Disability that ‘individual limitations are not the cause of disability.’ There also exists, he says, a Medical Theory of Disability, which says disability is only caused by disease (or other physical limitations, presumably, I wouldn’t call ‘missing your arms’ a disease but it sure is disabling), and also that no one should ever accommodate anyone on any level and presumably it’s also good to stigmatize them. I would like to think everyone instead believes the obviously correct Interactionist Model where disability comes from a lack of ability, which is a combination of your lack of ability and society’s failure (reasonably or otherwise) to address that. Scott then spends a bunch of words explaining in detail how people decided to use rather strange word choices that result in absurd-sounding claims and occasionally believe their implications, rather than making the case most everyone agrees with, that we should strive to make accommodations for people.
We need better research on the cognitive effects of CO2. There are potentially large effects here, or it might have remarkably little impact on its own and mostly be an indicator of other air quality issues.
Paper reviews most common happiness interventions for scientific validity: Expressing gratitude, time in nature, exercise, talking to strangers and mindfulness.
My view continues to be that different people are different. All five interventions make it easy to run the experiment and cheaply gather data on whether it works for you. Nature and socializing in particular seem like things that benefits some people a lot and others little or not at all, for me socializing is iffy and nature mostly doesn’t work. Exercise I am confident is helpful overall but the people who expect it to make you happy directly rather than as a secondary effect of being healthy are highly annoying, that does not work for me or many others I now. Mindfulness I strongly suspect is mostly a scam.
My experience says that gratitude does work, and that it has a lasting effect when you feel gratitude in a systematic way, or for things that mattered in your life. It can make a big difference. But while you do have to actually do it to get the benefits, I do think you have to mean it, this can’t be forced or it won’t work. And no doubt there are people for whom it won’t work at all.
Lying About the Lab Leak Hypothesis
We likely will never know whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab.
What we do know is that there were those that also did not know the answer, yet misrepresented their beliefs and suppress the lab leak hypothesis, as the result of a collaborative process that did so in part for political reasons and in part to protect gain of function research. If people knew they might have caused the pandemic, how would they be funded to go cause another pandemic?
Central to this was the Proximal Origins paper in Nature. There is a petition circulating to demand its retraction.
I have not independently gone into the details, because I do not find them so important, and do not think it makes much difference whether this was deliberate explicit coordination or implicit forces pushing outcomes in a particular direction. That failure to care itself reflects a problem. To me, the biggest scandal of all is our collective failure to take this issue seriously as a scandal. The scandal is that at this point such behaviors are expected, considered standard procedure, do not represent news, are not something I have even bothered diving into so deeply, do not seems likely to make any difference.
Nate Silver is still all-in on this issue. He fleshed out his full argument in this post.
Here’s Ryan Grim on the subject, decrying that the NYT essentially ignored all this.
Here’s Francois Balloux considering it all as Greek tragedy.
Doing Science To It: Marinara Edition
Three cheers for Terese, who went on an epic taste test of (almot) all Marinara brands.
This matches my general experience more generally. The big brands, the standard products, are popular for a reason. You can sometimes do better by moving up the cost curve and finding a bespoke alternative that fits exactly your preferences or is that good, but most of the small brand alternatives will be worse. One of the glories of America is that many of the standards – such as Heinz Ketchup or Oreo Cookies, or famously Coke – are flat out the best version of that product known to exist and the rich man cannot do better.
I would expect the correlation to not be as strong as most people would expect, but almost none surprises me as well. There are clear price-quality tradeoffs one makes when producing sauce. Among the bigger brands, I would expect price to indeed predict quality quite a bit.
I hadn’t thought about temperature. Texture issues are clear.
Her ratings, all with detailed descriptions in the thread:
10/10: Rao’s
8/10: Newman’s Own
7/10: Barilla, Michael’s of Brooklyn
6/10: Classico, San Merican
5/10: Mantova, Bove’s
4/10: Victoria, Prego
3/10: Cucina Antica, Pizza Girl, Di Bari
2/10: Carbone
1/10: Billy’s Italian Market
Here’s her note on Rao’s:
What is missing is the sauce I actually use, which is Lidia’s, and also Trader Giotto’s Marinara, and one commentor mentions il Mulino. America, what a country.
To the extent I have tried the sauces, which is not that many of them at this point, I can confirm these ratings make sense. To the extent that I haven’t, based on my general heuristics, they continue to make perfect sense.
While I Cannot Condone This
I would both watch and prediction market the hell out of this, let’s f***ing go.
Did you know explicit racial discrimination is illegal, no matter in whose favor?
IANAL and none of this is legal advice, but as I understand it, this is at least kind of how all laws work. If everyone is doing it and no one is suing or bringing enforcement actions over it, is it illegal? There is a reason Jewish law says no, a law that is not enforced is null and void. American law is not something that can, strictly speaking, be entirely adhered to, and if your action is popular locally such that a jury will likely not find you liable or guilty, and the government is doing similar things and unlikely to sanction you, I do not see the urgency in calling one’s employment lawyers.
May want to click through to better see the graphs. This was definitely not the best possible way to graphically represent this data.
A clear preference on the one side for compensation, on the other for reduced hours.
Note that having children leans male here, and overall there is much more balance.
Another stark contrast. One is free to ask what outcomes such preferences would produce.
What kind of incompetent person would have to rate limit something like Twitter?
How are things going?
Tyler Altman asks why we no longer carve statues into building facades, after doing it for thousands of years. Some good partial answers:
I would combine them, especially the economics response from Miles, extending that to include standardization and a system of regulations and permissions. You used to be able to go ahead and do any old awesome thing without asking permission. Now you would need to get all sorts of approvals, risking destroying the entire timeline or approval of the project. That simply is not worth the trouble.
Except that it is. We need to go back. We need to build awesome statues again. We need uniqueness, character, art, awe, and we can damn well afford it. The problem goes well beyond the statues – before AI went crazy I was planning an extensive series inspired by Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language.
This is not a lost cause I intend to spend my ammunition on given the opportunity costs, but it must be said.
Almost all the gains from A/B testing, and new ideas, come from a handful of very good ones. At Bing, the top 2% of ideas resulted in 75% of gains. Oh no, inequality! The takeaway is that if your gains mostly come from very big wins, you do not need to do extensive testing of new ideas – if it isn’t naked eye obviously (ten times) better then you do not lose much ignoring it.
How is this for irony? Of course the Paperwork Reduction Act causes paperwork.
Men repay their student debt a lot faster than women, who on average barely repay it at all, whereas men were repaying it during the pause with no interest payments like a bunch of chumps.
The loans given out in 2009 were typically in the 5%-8% interest range. This amount of failure to repay during the late 2010s reflects some combination of extreme illiquidity, extreme insolvency and extreme economic illiteracy. Whereas for loans from 2020, indefinitely paying the legal minimum seems highly reasonable. I’d love to see the crosstabs on this in terms of income and family size and marital status and economic literacy.
George Mack offers a thread of 25 charts illustrating what he says are neglected trends. Here are some of them, noting that they are important but not obviously neglected.
I would caution there on correlation versus causation. If you are healthy you are more likely to exercise. I am sure there is a big and real effect, but it isn’t 400%.
I’d also add this one:
Nim: Agree, I think it’s missing the forest for the trees (source).
Nabeel S. Quershi on puzzles. He notes that the better you are at chess the more time you spend falsifying moves versus generating them. There is some amount of wisdom to get from that, but also generating potential moves in chess is mostly the easy part, then things get exponential. In his third section ‘conviction that there is an answer’ he notes the following puzzle:
To me (and I’d assume anyone else who did math competitions) this is trivial, the sequence has limited memory so it will repeat in a loop, all you have to do is find one containing a 6, and I did not do well on the USAMO or Putnam. He solves this by not giving up based on knowing there is a solution, and concludes that scientists and founders have faith that there is an answer out there.
The next level is to be able to do the search where you look for the path to victory with the same determination as if you knew it existed, without assuming that the path exists, and indeed instead also trying to prove that no such path exists, so that you figure out why you can’t prove that yet. Or so that you do prove it, and can stop. My biggest failure as a founder was, quite literally, not knowing when to quit.
In section five he discusses science brain versus founder or CEO brain, where scientists need to be driven by curiosity to find the value, whereas CEOs and founders need to get their heads in whatever game is most valuable right now. I wonder if part of what I have, for both better and worse, is a strange hybrid of both.
Also curious: Despite my being (last time I checked) only a B-player at best, in the [4] footnote, which was meant to be an example of complacency, my first candidate move was the right one and instinctively looked like it would work, whereas the move he says is ‘automatic’ didn’t occur to me since I was confident I’d found a forced win.
The second example is even weirder to me, even if you discount the fact that the question didn’t say ‘integers.’ The moment you write out a 1 you have to know that’s wrong. That’s not complacency, that’s a complete failure to do sanity or error checks.
Sports Go Sports
Winning turnover battles wins football games, but a lot of that is that teams that are behind take more risks (and are also worse) and this causes more turnovers. Thus, being +1 in turnovers means you win 71% of NCAA football games, rising to 80% for +2 and 88% for +3, but that greatly overstates their causal effects. Lots of good work here, especially on expected turnovers for the game circumstances of various quarterbacks, but alas Mike Bursik does not run the trickier calculation of how often an extra turnover results in victory, or even better that measure as a function of the size of the game’s point spread. Further research is needed.
Why is Saudi Arabia spending billions on Western sports? The natural explanation could be that there are not so many ways to spend the kind of money Saudi Arabia makes on oil in order to make long term investments. By drawing in sports, they get positive attention, make people more excited to work and live there, provide compliments for other investments, where they are capacity limited. Or that they are using it to buy connections and networking and create investment ties, for similar reasons.
A rival explanation is this is ‘sportswashing’ designed to distract us from their failure to uphold proper Western values, or to buy indulgences for it. This does not make sense to me. Sports instead is a giant beacon, drawing more attention, making people suspect they are up to something. It didn’t work for Qatar and it won’t work for Saudi Arabia. No one is going to forgive them for anything because they have good soccer.
An alternative explanation that I have not heard, but that seems obvious, is what if this has nothing to do with the national interests of Saudi Arabia? This is a kingdom, not a democracy, ruled by one family. They want sports because they want sports, and by framing it as for the country, they justify spending billions for the same reason every Western billionaire buys sports teams. Because it’s fun.
Tyler Cowen looks at NBA contracts, expecting prices to go up as Saudis and others compete for our talent and basketball gets more valuable. I found the discussion weird, because it was not structured around the salary cap. Overpaying for a player can thus cripple your team. The Saudis could potentially make existing deals look good if they substantially drain talent out of the NBA with a new league, although that could also lower revenue and thus the salary cap, and would likely take some years to get set up.
Oh, college football, what are we going to do?
The Pac-12 has now completely collapsed. Colorado fled to the Big 12, then Washington and Oregon went to the Big 10 (which it seems is keeping that name despite having 18 teams) which triggered Arizona, Arizona State and Utah to also flee for the Big 12. As Nate Silver puts it in the link above, there is a complex optimization problem here, and no obvious solution to it. Individual teams are following their incentives, which is leading towards a world of two super-conferences, the SEC and Big 10, and then everyone else. Or it is leading to a second reorganization, where the best teams cut out the underperformers and form some sort of super league.
If it were strictly this with no way in for other teams that would be unacceptable. However, if you included some form of relegation and some way for wild cards to enter the playoff, kept rivalry games and ensured everyone had a free slot to schedule a non-premier team every season, then it seems fine? Say, the top two division champions outside the league get to play wild card games against the bottom two Premier teams to steal their slots (which is great for drama) and if they succeed and win their challenge game (or get so far along that they don’t have to play one, and instead the two bottom finishers play to see who gets relegated, the problem there is you have to factor in TV ratings somehow without being obvious that you are doing so), then they get promoted to the Premier league.
Conferences seem forced in the long run to treat all their members mostly or entirely equally, temporary junior status of Washington and Oregon notwithstanding, so whoever is a bigger draw will inevitably defect to bigger and better things, geography and rivalry be damned. There is no stable equilibrium.
There also is no way to expel a school from a conference. Which means that a conference with a number of underperforming schools, like the Pac-12, loses its best schools, then either downgrades a tier like the Big 12 did or it falls apart entirely.
I suppose the long term plan is that the SEC and Big 10 expand more, all the best teams play each other for a while, then after a while there is enough dead weight in both that the top teams start thinking about breaking away, and the cycle continues? We get a kind of slow-motion relegation, except chaotic and without giving the games drama and breaking things apart in ways that don’t make sense.
It is a shame. Things were better for everyone – fans, players, schools, everyone – when we had conferences with geographical and cultural identities that mattered. What to do about this?
My presumption is that for now there is nothing that can be done. The money is what it is and money talks.
But the money could be different. That will be especially true in the 16 team playoff era. At that point, there should be little need to game the system on that front, your scheduling will probably mostly be a wash on the new bubble or reward tougher schedules, and no one capable of going deep will be that likely to miss.
What everyone will want are the best individual games, as often as possible. So what system would we design to do that? Well, what do we want?
That all is good for pure fans, and also makes more money. And it has to be something that is incentive compatible, given the money. That’s what make it so hard.
I’ve gone over this many times over the years. Thought about options. Relegation. Swiss pairings, either within or between years. Legislation. Different revenue schemes. I don’t have a good answer. Not one that might actually happen.
If I was Czar, and given the power to go wild, here is what I might do to your city.
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
Game of the month was a new Tier 2 roguelike my friend Alan Comer introduced me to called Brotato. It’s kind of a cross of Vampire Survivors and Slay the Spire. You get 20 waves of enemies, a hero with six auto-firing weapons and lots of helpful items, and tons of stats those items and your leveling bonuses move up and down. Here is a very Jorbs item tier list from Jorbs for Brotato, which you should not look at until after you’ve formed your own opinions. I continue to be a strong fan of ‘play games as blind as possible.’
I’ve also been playing Siralim 3, then I found out there’s a fourth one called Siralim Ultimate but I’m going to at least finish the story on this one anyway. It is a monster catching and breeding while grinding randomly generated levels game with 6-on-6 battles. I love the sense of humor and I’ve been enjoying the steady progress and ability to chill, main story is something like 25-30 hours long. My guess is that the best version of this is a Tier 3 game, good for those who want this experience but not to general tastes.
I put down Diablo 4, and with time to reflect on that experience, I’d say this was a Tier 3 game, while being modestly better than Diablo 3 which I would also have at Tier 3, whereas Diablo 2 was Tier 2 and remains the best game in the series. The best and only Tier 1 ARPG remains Path of Exile and it is not close. If you want a rather uninspired and completely generic but exquisitely crafted, relaxing and less demanding ARPG experience, Diablo 4 will give you exactly that.
Both Final Fantasy 16 and Baldor’s Gate 3 are in my ‘play eventually’ queue. I’ve heard nothing but great things about Baldor’s Gate 3, but I want to wait for some upgrades and patches and for when I have the right mindset, and maybe finally play the first two first. I’ll eventually get to FFXVI as well but I am in no rush there either, and am going to continue replaying the old ones first if I continue enjoying that, although FFV is proving to be a grind once again.
I’m going to keep posting gorgeous Premodern deck pictures. This is arty with Mr. T. Huge.
Land Tax is banned in premodern now, but oh what fun that was.
Sam Black has thoughts on the post-Land Tax era of Premodern.
Here’s good old Phyrexian Dreadnaught that won a NYC monthly.
And here’s RG Survival in the hands of Brian Kowal.
World of Warcraft Classic introduces hardcore characters. Seems remarkably well thought out in its implementation detais, and puts the focus back on the part of the game that is most fun, which is leveling up a new character, while making every moment meaningful via threat of death. I won’t be playing, but I love the idea. It is telling that this applies to WoW Classic and not to modern WoW, which has destroyed the leveling experience so that players can ‘get on with it’ faster.
There is a strict limit on how much people spend on Magic cards, you see.
Or, alternatively, if it’s more than that, you’d prefer not to answer.
Should Magic: The Gathering Arena offer a subscription model?
Vic Jenny notes one perversity of the free-to-play model, where the goal of the game is to keep playing it.
Right now Arena offers you essentially four options.
Invoking options one also means letting the release schedule dictate what you play when. As a set is first released, that’s when constructed is most fun, yet you need to stick to limited for a while. Otherwise you lose on both ends, your limited pays out less usefully and you need to pay up front.
When I played Arena, I was good enough that my lifetime spend was only $50, which was for the Eldraine package when I saw how nuts the set was and I didn’t want to risk being stuck drafting it forever. I would have happily paid more, but like most free-to-play games, the game mostly does not give you a reasonable way to pay a reasonable price.
The issue with a subscription is you risk being stuck, where you no longer build your collection, so you then have to keep subscribing forever to play constructed. It also would draw many whales away from very large fees, so it’s likely a nonstarter, that’s the whole point of not giving you a reasonable way to pay. And also if you let it be month-to-month, a lot of players would come back for set releases, then quit again, over and over, which is a good way to lose those players when they decide not to come back one time.
Still, it is sad that Magic is so all-or-nothing. Now that I have quit for a few years, if I wanted to come back and not spend tons of either (A) time or (B) money, I couldn’t play most constructed competitively. I wish there was a solution, but the economics seems to be saying there is not.
My position is I would happily pay quite a lot per month for full access if I (1) wanted to be playing Magic again and (2) there were goals to strive for, a strong outer loop. Right now, if you exclude currency grinding, all that’s left are the Arena Opens (which are fine but kind of mid and uninspired) and the ladder grind. I need another reason, or another mode, at that point.000The “goal” of arena for me is to play for free and stack up gems while rank up. A subscription model basically takes this goal away, that would drive me to away more than the subscription money would.
Jorbs thread on the infinites in Slay the Spire. I think Jorbs is right that Slay the Spire is now ‘too easy’ for those with a deep mastery of its systems. For the rest of us, not so much. I very much play Act 1 in order to win Act 4, but not in a ‘not afraid I will suddenly die in Act 1 or Act 2’ kind of way, or especially in a ‘I can take Acrobatics on floor 1 and not be terrified’ kind of way. I do go infinite sometimes and win that way, but there is a lot more to winning at Ascension 20 than that, you need to know how to get there without dying first. The point that games should quickly end once you get an infinite is very on point, as several other deckbuilders have hammered into me the hard way.
I think what Slay the Spire needs, if this was still possible, is… Ascension 25, where perfect (limited information) play is only ~50% win rates at best, rather than 80%+, and also probably a few nerfs to some of the infinite-related Watcher cards balanced by strengthening a few others that don’t help you go infinite. The new restrictions would be designed to kneecap anything that would take forever or shortcut the game too much. You could even have the 25 restriction be something that outright kills infinites, such as ‘When you play a card for the (fifth?) time in a battle, it exhausts.’ Perhaps the 23 could be ‘limited buff stacks’ and 24 could be ‘limited debuff stacks.’
I know!
I’ve always said if you can’t have fun playing Magic, don’t play. The same applies to poker, unless you have an hourly rate that justifies a different strategy. Some future year I will go to the World Series of Poker to play the main event, and I will presume I am lighting $10,000 on fire, and I will be 100% fine with that and do my best to have a total blast and play as if only first place matter. Otherwise, I realize there is some +EV in the main event in particular because of the extra value of doing well, and that might even exceed the taxes involved, but if you are sitting there miserable do yourself a favor and do something else next time.
World Series of Poker was a lot of fun to watch either way, a fine way to relax, although I definitely worry it doesn’t contain efficient training data. Also new agony of defeat just dropped, great run Nate Silver (clip here). Pretty good way to go, absolutely nothing you can do.
Here’s Part I of his report on the tournament. Due to its length, being able to keep your B-game reliable for weeks on end is key, as is exploiting weak players. My worry with lighting the $10,000 on fire is not that I couldn’t learn relatively quickly to play reasonable poker, it is a combination of my expectation that I would still have tells that the better players would figure out over many days, and more than that simply that I wouldn’t be able to play for 10 hours, well into the night Vegas time, for two weeks straight, I’m too old. It’s a young person’s game.
87% of all games released prior to 2010 not available for commercial purchase, unless you buy used I suppose, or of course if you use a technically illegal emulator or other source. It would be better if this was more like 75%, there are many good games from the past but far more not good ones. I endorse the general consensus that it is on game companies to give you a reasonable way to buy their old content, or else they are giving you the green light to get it another way. The law should reflect that, after some reasonable period of time software would become official abandonware.
I like watching people play games but this flat out boggles me: “How to Make Money by Losing $300,000 a Year on Slot Machines (WSJ)” via people watching your livestream.
Yeah, I don’t know what to say to any of that except token-style ‘I’m out.’
The Lighter Side
I too have a strict no spoilers policy.
It is legit. If they do not know, let them have this one.
Things that sound crazy and deeply stupid, but are not.
Whenever possible, it is wise to avoid anything that is labeled ‘free’ of anything, or of any hint that something is an imitation of the form and function of a different thing. Or that tells you something you didn’t think you had to confirm – if you tell me the fish is fresh, or the bagels are baked fresh daily, that is better than the alternative but it is very much not a good sign.
An ongoing question to find the restaurant with the greatest number of brothers. The over comes in.
Genius does crazy things.
This strike could go on long after it has peaked, but the peak was really good.
Where you been searching, boy?
Odd that we haven’t been able to create better filters than this.
If you missed the clip of the woman leaving the airplane, watch (30sec).
As Misha reminds us, it was foretold. Also it had already happened, of course.
[and so on, several more such cases.]
Occupational listening and commercial regulations explained.
No Context Brits: Never deleting this app.
Alec Stapp: How is this real? (I assure you that it is.)
This is nothing. It used to get so much worse…
Nixon has nothing left to say.
One can only hope it is coming soon everywhere, for now only at Shopify:
One does need to be careful with such calculations. Much of what we buy is optionality and slack, and reliability in moments of maximum leverage. Other people need to engage in extended deep work with increasing returns to scale. Thinking about people’s hourly rate tells you little about the value of their marginal hour.
Tyler points to this point:
A central reason you don’t get to expense a $500 dinner is that the incentives involved are dangerous and destructive. A meeting does not create a similar principle-agent problem. While that does not fully invalidate the point, most things in business that are worth doing, and most things not in business too, are not close calculations, and are instead overwhelmingly valuable. There is tons of surplus. Often it is wise to obfuscate the ‘cost’ of such things, since the benefits are similarly elusive.
I feel seen.
More actual progress.
Less progress.
They didn’t know the Australia was the Cocaine Australia.