September 26 is the anniversary of the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident—item #24 on Wikipedia’s upsettingly long “List of Nuclear Close Calls”—in which Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov did an excellent job at not starting World War III. Quarterly Performance Review, Autumn 1983 Colonel Yuri Kuznetsov looked out the window...
“I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member” -Marx[1] Adverse Selection is the phenomenon in which information asymmetries in non-cooperative environments make trading dangerous. It has traditionally been understood to describe financial markets in which buyers and sellers systematically differ, such as a market for...
With thanks to Scott Alexander for the inspiration, Jeffrey Ladish, Philip Parker, Avital Morris, and Drake Thomas for masterful cohosting, and Richard Ngo for his investigative journalism. Last summer, I threw an Every Bay Area House Party themed party. I don’t live in the Bay, but I was there for...
When Alice harms Bob, it is likely that one of the following three things went wrong: 1. Model: Alice’s mental picture of what Bob would want, or of what is going on in the situation (which we’ll call her model), was incorrect and led her to behave in ways that...