(2023-04-05) ZviM Monthly Roundup #5 April'2023

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #5: April 2023. As AI eats the world and my time and news feeds, it is always good to know other things also happen

Not only do you only get about five words, you only get about one concept. Meanwhile, the only message VPs communicated was the need for high velocity.

Also note this comment of Gwern’s, also featured in AI#5, that this is why corporations are deeply stupid at core, even if they can do some intelligent things.

Biden Administration is preventing the Chips Act from resulting in that many chips, because he’s tying its subsidies to a grab bag of other requirements and priorities like child care, using women-and-minority owned contractors, strengthening unions, enforcing full NEPA reviews and so on

Nature magazine endorsed Joe Biden for President. On March 20, they ran an analysis saying that this endorsement did not change people’s views on the candidates, but did cause some to lose confidence in Nature and in US scientists generally. That’s worse, you do know how that’s worse, right? And yet, they have no regrets, and are doubling down that they did the right thing.

perhaps you are doing something other than science.

That’s right, simply giving people ‘scientific information they can use as they see fit’ would give those people ‘the permission to say things,’ we can’t let people ‘pick and choose’ what facts they will use or what they will say.

If that is the opinion of one of the top science journals, and a lot of Americans respond by losing a lot of trust in American scientists, well, can you blame them?

Patrick McKenzie shares the tale that many homemakers in Japan have effective monthly credit limits of 200k JPY (~1.5k USD)

Avery Hartmans fell victim to a SIM card swipe allowing the attacker to take control over her phone. What I find remarkable is how little of this fraud gets pulled, given our current principle that anyone who has your phone can prove they are you and it is not that hard to convince any mobile phone store employee to do the swap

Alabama will start taxing out-of-state workers of Alabama employers, leading potentially to double state taxation. I expect a lot of elasticity in response

New nuclear power plant hooks up to the grid for first time since 1996.

MIT is now thee top pick for dream school for students. Great choice. Students then picked Stanford (which hates fun, so bad pick, but with AI there’s an argument) and Harvard (maximum status signaling, the classic).

Top choice of parents was Princeton, which shows how out of touch us parents are, that’s a terrible pick.

“There’s a subconscious consensus that it’s only worth going to college if you can go to a life-changing college,” said Hafeez Lakhani, founder and president of Lakhani Coaching in New York. I mean, yes. Obviously. If you are going to spend four years of your life and likely take on a bunch of debt, that had better be a life changing experienc

That doesn’t mean you can’t get a life changing experience at [Your State] University or [Your State] Tech or some local spot (Go [Mascots]!), but if for you that wouldn’t be life changing then it’s not a good match.

This situation is indeed quite common and takes many important forms. It is a tough one to solve

• (RD Laing: They are playing a game. They are playing at not playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I shall break the rules and they will punish me. I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.) GamePlaying

My default strategy is to (1) notice the game, (2) notice the game of not being seen noticing the game and (3) decide if I could actually die on this hill and if so whether this is the hill I want to die on today, and if that is a danger, leave what clues I can to let those who pay attention figure it out. One must pick one’s battles.

More great news: FDA gives blessing to a clinical study to a drug to see if it extends life expectancy. As in, the FDA has agreed that ‘you get to live more years of healthy life’ is a good reason for a drug to exist and get taken even if there is no other disease or condition being cured

Less great is that the DEA is imposing needless barriers on telemedicine. I don’t quite think this is as pointless as Scott Alexander does, it’s still really stupid.

Health authorities in at least 30 states have been stripped of at least some of their authority by the state legislatures, and will have difficulty issuing future mask mandates, school closures or other countermeasures in a future pandemic

my counter is so what, public health authorities would simply do it anyway. Does anyone think that the things we did in early 2020 were based on the rule of law or proper legislative authority

Very little is an accident: Silicon Valley Bank hired BlackRock to study its risk controls, BlackRock pointed out it was taking too much risk, so SVB abandoned the review and changed nothing.

The Lighter Side

The consumer priceindex still represents inflation as high, 9.6% annual rate for the past three months. The producer price index disagrees, and has it averaging only 1.1% since last June. One big difference is that rent costs in the CPI lag by many months, so it is plausible that the PPI is currently the better measure. That would be excellent news.

As We Navigate a Banking Crisis

The Close Door button on elevators not working: More Than You Wanted to Know. Also the short summary of what you actually want to know, which is that like most dumb things this is government regulation – the ADA requires a minimum time before the door can close, that time is not thought to be at all flexible based on buttons pressed, and elevators typically close after that time by default anyway, so there’s nothing for the close door button to do

Matt Yglesias here notes that when we do give poor people money, it works for us, and also that those claiming it does not work for us and poverty has not gone down are doing so with measurements that by their very definitions exclude the money and other things we give to the poor (aka transfers) which is very much a I-don’t-know-what-the-f**-you-want-from-us vibe.*

His attributes of the woke, condensed: Woke is academic, immaterial, structural in analysis while individual in action, emotionalist, fatalistic, insistent that all political questions are easy and believes in the superior virtue of the oppressed.

While I Cannot Condone This

Freddie deBoer attempts to define “woke” in deep detail, continues to take position ‘if you want me to call you something else, I’m happy to do that as soon as you tell me what that something else should be.’