(2024-07-23) ZviM Monthly Roundup #20 July2024

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #20: July 2024.

Bad News

Alexey Guzey reverses course, realizes at 26 that he was a naive idiot at 20 and finds everything he wrote cringe and everything he did incompetent and Obama was too young. Except, no? None of that? Young Alexey did indeed, as he notes, successfully fund a bunch of science and inspire good thoughts and he stands by most of his work. Alas, now he is insufficiently confident to keep doing it and is in his words ‘terrified of old people.’ I think Alexey’s success came exactly because he saw people acting stupid and crazy and systems not working and did not then think ‘oh these old people must have their reasons,’ he instead said that’s stupid and crazy. Or he didn’t even notice that things were so stupid and crazy and tried to just… do stuff.

Google short urls are going to stop working. Patrick McKenzie suggests prediction markets on whether various Google services will survive. I’d do it if I was less lazy.

Silver Bullet

Nate Silver, who now writes Silver Bulletin and runs what used to be the old actually good 538 model, eviscerates the new 538 election model.

Kelsey Piper: Nate Silver is slightly too polite to say it but my takeaway from his thoughtful post is that the 538 model is not usefully distinguishable from a rock with “incumbents win reelection more often than not” painted on it.

Shame on Kathy Hochul

The beatings will continue until we have congestion pricing or a new governor.

This is (One Reason) Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

We actually do want a 24-hour coffee shop and bookstore (with or without a cat, and 18-hour get you 95% of the value), or the other nice things mentioned in the Josh Ellis thread here. We say we do, and in some ways we act like we do. We still don’t get the things, because our willingness to pay directly says otherwise.

There are many similar things that genuinely seem to make our lives way better, that warm our hearts by their mere existence and optionality. That people actively want to provide, if they could. Yet they are hard to find, because they cannot pay the rent.

You can have your quaint bookstore, on one condition, which is paying a lot more, directly, for some combination of a membership, the books and the coffee.

I have to remind myself of this constantly. I pay a lot in fixed costs to live in a place I love (NYC), including the extra taxes. Then I constantly have the urge to be stingy about actually paying for many of the things that make me want to live here. It is really hard not to do this.

(Don’t) Hack the Planet

The CrowdStrike incident was covered on its own. These are other issues.

The Laptop Trap

Unless you’re in San Francisco I don’t think your laptop work is adding to GDP. Use cafes to meet friends.

Americans will complain endlessly how America lacks “third spaces” and enjoyable public life but then like the idea of turning European cafes into sterile workspaces where professional laptop-typers sit in silent rows avoiding eye contact pretending to do important work. (coffee shop)

Courage

Marko Jukic claims that what distinguishes others from ‘normies’ is mainly not that normies are insufficiently intelligent, but not normies have astounding and incurable cowardice, especially intellectual cowardice but also risk taking in life in general

Actually practicing personal loyalty, principled self-sacrifice, or critical thinking in a way that isn’t camera-ready is not just uncommon or frowned-upon but will get you treated like a deranged, dangerous serial killer by average cowards. It’s actually that bad these days.

Note that even in places where rare forms courage are actively celebrated, such as in the startup community, there are other ways in which being the ‘wrong kind of’ courageous and not ‘getting with the program’ will get this same reaction of someone not to be allies with. The principle is almost never properly generalized.

Friendship

We really, really aren’t more connected. No, time spent texting or especially in ‘group chats’ is not a substitute to time spent with friends. Indeed, the very fact that people sometimes think it is a substitute is more evidence of the problem. Is it something at all? Yes. It is not remotely the same thing.

The Gravest Mistake

*Tyler Cowen asks, what is the greatest outright mistake by smart, intelligent people, in contrast to disagreements.

His choice is (drum roll): attempting to forcibly lower prescription drug prices.*

though particularly beneficial for low-income and elderly populations, could dramatically reduce firms’ investment in highly welfare-improving R&D.

I think this points to what may actually be the gravest genuine mistake, which is: Causal Decision Theory!

You Need Functional Decision Theory

This is a case where economists and casual decision theorists and politicians look at regular people and call them ‘irrational’ for noticing such things and reacting accordingly. What’s the matter with Kansas?

This, from the agenda setter’s perspective, is the matter with Kansas. If you set the agenda to something that looks superficially good, but you having control of the agenda is bad, then I should vote down your agenda on principle, as you haven’t given me any other affordances.

Antisocial Media

Roon weeps for the old Twitter. He blames the optimizations for engagement for ruining the kinds of communities and interactions that made Twitter great, reporting now his feed is filled with slop and he rarely discovers anything good, whereas good new discoveries used to be common.

I continue to be confused by all the people not strictly using the Following tab plus lists (or Tweetdeck), and letting the For You feed matter to them.

I see Twitter as having net declined a modest amount for my purposes, but it still mostly seems fine if you are careful with how you use it.

For Science!

This paper points out a flaw in our funding mechanisms. The NIH, NSF and their counterparts make funding decisions by averaging peer review scores, whereas scientists say they would prefer to fund projects with more dissensus

Does the Nobel Prize sabotage future work?

Crusader (MR comments): Who ever said that major awards are supposed to increase the recipient’s future impact regardless of its merit?

Quite so. If you get a Nobel Prize then suddenly you have a ton of social obligations. The point of the prize is to give people something to aspire to win, not to enable those who win one to then do superior work, also scientists who win are typically already sufficiently old that their productivity will have peaked.

Should scientific misconduct be criminalized? The slippery slope dangers are obvious. Yet it seems a violation of justice and also incentives that Sylvain Lense, whose deception wildly distorted Alzheimer’s research, killing many and wasting epic amounts of time and money, remains at large

Truth Seeking

Paper asks how people decide who is correct when groups of scientists disagree. Here is the abstract. Uncertainty that arises from disputes among scientists seems to foster public skepticism or noncompliance

Liar Liar

Via Robin Hanson, across six studies, communicators who take an absolute honesty stance (‘it is never okay to lie’) and then lie anyway are punished less than those who take a flexible honesty stance that reflects the same actual behavior

Government Working

German marginal tax rates are a disaster and the poverty trap is gigantic. The grey lines are Euros per month. Orange is effective take home pay. You essentially earn nothing by going from $25,800/year to $77,400/year

The FTC tried to ban almost all noncompetes, including retroactively. It is not terribly surprising that the courts objected. Judge Ada Brown issued a temporary block, finding that the FTC likely lacked the authority to make the rule, which seems like a very obviously correct observation to me.

This is the new reality even more than it was before.
If you bring individual action against particular cases you can build up case law and examples.
If you try to write a maximally broad rule, the courts are going to see to it you have a bad time.

There was a lot of talk about the overturning of Chevron, but there was another case that could also potentially be a big deal in making government work even less well. This is Ohio v. EPA, which is saying that if you ignore any issue raised in the public comments, then that can torpedo an entire project.

New York City sets food delivery minimum wage to $19.56, which in turn means intense competition for work preference during busy hours. It also means fees on every order, which many no doubt are responding to by not tipping. I strongly suspect most of this mostly cancels out and the services are still totally worth it.

New York City gets trash cans. You thought the day would never come. So did I. Before unveiling them, New York did a $4 million McKinsey study ‘to see if trash cans work’ and that is not the first best solution but it sure is second best.

For Your Entertainment

Variously Effective Altruism

Johns Hopkins Medical School goes tuition-free for medical students due to massive grant, also expands aid for future nurses and public health pioneers. Nikhil Krishnan speculates that more places will end up doing this, and correctly notices this is not actually good.

The choke point (bottleneck) is residency slots. It would not be my first pick for charity dollars, but I think that ‘give money to endow additional residency slots at hospitals that agree to play ball’ would be a highly understandable choice.

News You Can Use

You can use 1Password to populate environmental variables in CLI scripts, so you can keep your API keys in your password manager

Good News, Everyone

Phil Levin: So, the first thing I think of is that you’re going to spend 1000x more time in your surrounding 5 blocks than you will in any other neighborhood in your city

So picking and influencing your neighborhood is really important. And the two big ways you can influence your neighborhood are one, determining who lives in your neighborhood by moving people there, something I am very biased on because I work on it. And two, improving your neighborhood.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

Sports Go Sports

Matthew Yglesias makes a case that high-pressure youth sports is bad for America. Sports played casually with your friends are great

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

Waymo now open to everyone in San Francisco.

> I felt safer cycling next to a Waymo than a human the other day (the first time I’ve had more ‘trust’ in an AI than a human)

While I Cannot Condone This

Matt Yglesias asks what we even mean by Neoliberalism, why everyone uses it as a boogeyman, and whether we actually tried it. 2024-06-11-YglesiasWhatWasNeoliberalism

Certainly all claims that the era of big government was ever over, or that we suddenly stopped telling people what they were allowed to do, or that we pursued anything that was at all related to ‘growth at all costs’ is absurd, although we made some progress on at least not having (fewer, although still far too many) price controls.

Nick proposes that for less than $1 million a year you could easily have the coolest and highest status cafe (coffee shop) in San Francisco, attracting immense talent, have a cultural touchstone with lots of leverage, creating tons of real estate and actual value, other neat stuff like that. It seems many engineers pus super high value on the right cafe vibe, on the level of ‘buy a house nearby.’ I don’t get it, but I don’t have to. Nick proposes finding a rich patron or a company that wants it nearby. That could work.

What activities do people enjoy or not enjoy?

‘Computer games’ are among the most enjoyable activities, probably deserve more respect. It clearly beats ‘watching TV’.

Highly social activities are more work and money to set up but still come in highest of all: ‘restaurant / pub’, ‘go to sport’, and ‘theatre / concert’. ‘Parties’ comes in behind those.

‘Homework’ came dead last, much less popular than even ‘School’. Counts in favour of reducing it where it’s not generating some big academic benefit.

There’s some preference for active over passive leisure — TV, reading, doing nothing and radio are all mediocre by the standards of recreation

The Lighter Side