It’s that time again for all the sufficiently interesting news that isn’t otherwise fit to print, also known as the Monthly Roundup.

Bad News

Beware the failure mode in strategy and decisions that implicitly assumes competence, or wishes away difficulties, and remember to reverse all advice you hear.

Stefan Schubert (quoting Tyler Cowen on raising people’s ambitions often being very high value): I think lowering others’ aspirations can also be high-return. I know of people who would have had a better life by now if someone could have persuaded them to pursue more realistic plans.

Rob Miles: There’s a specific failure mode which I don’t have a name for, which is similar to “be too ambitious” but is closer to “have an unrealistic plan”. The illustrative example I use is:

Suppose by some strange circumstance you have to represent your country at olympic gymnastics next week. One approach is to look at last year’s gold, and try to do that routine. This will fail. You’ll do better by finding one or two things you can actually do, and doing them well

There’s a common failure of rationality which looks like “Figure out what strategy an ideal reasoner would use, then employ that strategy”.

It’s often valuable to think about the optimal policy, but you must understand the difference between knowing the path, and walking the path

I do think that more often ‘raise people’s ambitions’ is the right move, but you need to carry both cards around with you for different people in different situations.

Theory that Starlink, by giving people good internet access, ruined Burning Man. Seems highly plausible. One person reported that they managed to leave the internet behind anyway, so they still got the Burning Man experience.

Tyler Cowen essentially despairs of reducing regulations or the number of bureaucrats, because it’s all embedded in a complex web of regulations and institutions and our businesses rely upon all that to be able to function. Otherwise business would be paralyzed. There are some exceptions, you can perhaps wholesale axe entire departments like education. He suggests we focus on limiting regulations on new economic areas. He doesn’t mention AI, but presumably that’s a lot of what’s motivating his views there.

I agree that ‘one does not simply’ cut existing regulations in many cases, and that ‘fire everyone and then it will all work out’ is not a strategy (unless AI replaces them?), but also I think this is the kind of thing can be the danger of having too much detailed knowledge of all the things that could go wrong. One should generalize the idea of eliminating entire departments. So yes, right now you need the FDA to approve your drug (one of Tyler’s examples) but… what if you didn’t?

I would still expect, if a new President were indeed to do massive firings on rhetoric and hope, that the result would be a giant cluster****.

La Guardia switches to listing flights by departure time rather than order of destination, which in my mind makes no sense in the context of flights, that frequently get delayed, where you might want to look for an earlier flight or know what backups are if yours is cancelled or delayed or you miss it, and so on. It also gives you a sense of where one can and can’t actually go to when from where you are. For trains it makes more sense to sort by time, since you are so often not going to and might not even know the train’s final destination.

I got a surprising amount of pushback about all that on Twitter, some people felt very strongly the other way, as if to list by name was violating some sacred value of accessibility or something.

Anti-Social Media

Elon Musk provides good data on his followers to help with things like poll calibration, reports 73%-27% lead for Donald Trump. There was another on partisan identity, with a similar result:

If we (approximately) give 100% of the Democratic vote to Harris and 100% of the Republican vote to Trump, then that would leave the 35% of self-identified Independents here splitting for Trump by about 2:1.

I didn’t get a chance to think about an advance prediction, but this all makes sense to me. Elon Musk’s Twitter feed works very hard to drive Democrats and those backing Harris away. I doubt he would even disagree. I still follow him because he still breaks (or is) enough news often enough it feels necessary.

Twitter lets you use certain words if and only if you have 30,000 or more followers? I’m almost there. I actually think it is reasonable to say that if you have invested in building a platform, then you are a real account rather than a bot, and also that represents ‘skin in the game’ that you are risking if you break the rules. Thus, it makes sense to be more forgiving towards such accounts, and stricter with tiny accounts that could start over and might outright be an AI. I understand why the OP interprets this as ‘only the big accounts get to talk,’ but I’m below the 30k threshold and have never run into trouble with the rules nor have I ever censored myself to avoid breaking them. It seems fine.

What continues to not be fine is the throttling of outside links. All of Musk’s other changes are somewhere between fine and mildly annoying, but the War on Links is an ongoing series problem doing real damage.

Some chats about group chats, with this quote for the ages:

“Whenever I create a group chat, I am Danny Ocean assembling a crack team of gymnasts and code breakers. Whenever I am added to one, I feel as put-upon as if I’d been forced to attend the birthday party of a classmate I particularly dislike.”

Periodically I hear claims that group chats are where all the truly important and interesting conversations take place. Sad, if true, because that means they never make it to the public record (or into LLMs) and the knowledge cannot properly spread. It doesn’t scale. On the other hand, it would be good news, because I know how good the public chats are, so this would mean chats in general were better.

I’m in a number of group chats, most of which of course are mostly dormant, on permanent mute where I rarely look, or both. I don’t see the harm in joining a chat since I can full mute it if it gets annoying, and you have the option to look or even chat occasionally. The downside risk is distraction, if you’re careless. And there are a few counterfactual (or hidden?!) plausible group chats that might be cool to be in. Right now there are maybe two where I might plausibly try to start a chat. I think that’s close to optimal? You want a few places you can get actual human reactions to things, but they’re big potential distractions.

Technology Advances

There’s a USB-C cable with a display that tells you what power it is charging with? Brilliant. Ordered. I’m not sure I want to use it continuously but I damn well want to use it once on every outlet in the house. Poster offers an AliExpress link, I got mine off Amazon rather than mess around.

Great wisdom, take heed all:

Joshua Achiam: I can’t tell you how many products and websites would be saved by having a simple button for “Power User Mode,” where you get 10x the optionality and control over your own experience. Give me long menus and make it all customizable. Show me the under-the-hood details.

I am OK with it if the power user experience has some sharp edges, tbh. I use Linux. (And besides, we’ll get AI to help us solve these quality assurance problems over the next few years, right?)

What to do about all the lock-in to products that therefore don’t bother to improve? Flo Crivello calls this the ‘Microsoft principle,’ also names Salesforce, Epic and SAP. I’m not convinced Microsoft is so bad, I would happily pay the switching costs if I felt Linux or Mac was genuinely better. Epic is, by all accounts, different.

I wonder if AI solves this? Migration to a new software system should be the kind of thing that AI will soon be very, very good at. So you can finally switch to a new EMR.

High Seas Piracy is Bad

So, in the spirit of the picture provided…

Sam Lessin: Silicon Valley Needs to Get Back to Funding Pirates, Not The Navy…

Timothy Lee: The Navy is important, actually.

I know Steve Jobs didn’t literally mean that it’s good to sail around stealing stuff and bad to be part of the organization that tries to prevent that. But if the literal Navy is good maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss people who join metaphorical navies?

Matthew Yglesias: I was going to say I don’t know that the Bay Area needs more people who break into parked cars and steal stuff.

Three things to know about the high seas:

Pirates and piracy are ‘we take your stuff, often violently.’
Thus pirates and piracy are actually really, really terrible. Like, really bad.
Navies is great, because they stop piracy and enable trade and production.

Also, your country’s navy is very important for trade and self-defense and prosperity, so in most cases helping it is good, actually.

Look. Sam Lessin is not alone. A lot of people like Jack Sparrow and think he’s cool.

And there’s nothing wrong with having cool movies where villains are cool, or decide to go against type and do a good thing, or what not. And sure, you like the equality among the crew, and the pirate talk and the peglegs and the duals and the defying the stuck up authority and the freedom and the attitude and so on.

But fundamentally, pirates? Super Bad Dudes. A pirate is the troll under the bridge or the smash-and-grabber who knocks over a liquor store, or the villain in every western, but with good PR. If you are equating yourself to a pirate, then you might be the baddies.

You do not want your ‘new frontier for pirates,’ that means ‘a place where people are constantly trying to hijack and rob you, and violence and theft rules.’ That’s bad, actually.

What you want is a new frontier for everyone else. For explorers, for settlers, for farmers and builders.

Intellectual property is a special case, where the metaphorical piracy is non-violent, non-destructive and one can argue it creates value and fights against injustice. One can make a case for, as an example, Pirate Radio. Details matter. Reasonable people can disagree on where to draw the line.

But if your model of The Good, or the good business model, is pirates, as in pirates on the water engaged in piracy, as is clearly true here? Without a letter of marque? You are not the heroes you think you are.

I think this helps explain some of what we see with certain people in VC/SV/SF land arguing against any and all AI regulations. They think they get to be pirates, that everyone should be pirates, bound to no law, and that this is good.

With notably rare exceptions, most of which are highly metaphorical? It is not good.

The Michelin Curse

Paper reports that Michelin stars make NYC restaurants more likely to close, due to conflicts they cause with stakeholders, overwhelming the impact of more customers willing to pay more. This seems so crazy.

Employees demanded higher wages and had better alternative opportunities, which makes sense for chefs. I’d think less so for others, especially waiters who should be getting better tips. Landlords try to raise the rent, causing a hold-up problem, potentially forcing a move or closure. That makes sense too, I suppose moving costs are often very high, and sometimes landlords overreach. Suppliers don’t squeeze them directly, but there is ‘pressure to use higher quality ingredients’ and competition for them. I suppose, but then you get the ingredients. Customers have raised expectations and you get more tourists and ‘foodies’ and critics. And yes, I can see how that could be bad.

My guess is that a lot of this is the universal reluctance to properly raise prices, or to properly use price to allocate scarce resources. You are providing a premium service that costs more, and demand exceeds supply, but you are still struggling? The default reason is you won’t raise your prices. Or you will – a lot of these places very much are not cheap – but you won’t raise them enough to clear the market. If you’re charging $350 a plate, but the reservation sells for $1,000 online, you know what that means.

It is also possible that this is something else entirely. Michelin rewards complexity, and various other things, that are hard to maintain over time. They are also things many diners, myself included, actively do not want. It is a distinct thing. And it has a strong pull and pressure, including for the prestige that goes beyond the money. So if restaurants are doing things to ‘go after’ stars, even if they did not start out that way, often I am guessing they start distorting themselves, getting obsessed with the wrong questions.

When I see Michelin stars, I know I am getting high quality ingredients and skill. I know I am going to get a lot of bold flavor and attentive service. That’s good. But I am going to pay both for that and for certain kinds of service and complexity and cleverness and ‘sophistication’ that I if anything actively dislike. What they care about and what I care about are too often diverging, and they are chasing a fickle crowd. So yeah, I can see how that can end up being highly unstable several times over.

Right now I have two places ‘in my rotation’ that have a star, Casa Mono and Rezdora. I love both of them and hope they last, and both are places you can walk-in for lunch and aren’t that much more expensive for it. I don’t think it is a coincidence that neither has a second star. The places with 2-3 stars are mostly these multi-course ‘experiences’ that don’t appeal to me at all, but that’s also the market at work pricing me out.

What’s the Rush?

Tyler Cowen asks a great question: Why do the servers always want to take our cutlery and plates and glasses away? How should we model this behavior?

He tries to find economic or efficiency explanations. Perhaps they want to turn over the table faster, and provide another point of contact. Or that they know they may be busy later, so they want to do something useful now. And the responses in the comments focus on efficiency concerns, or breaking up the work.

Yet Tyler Cowen correctly notes that they are far less interested in promptly taking your order, which both turns the table over and gets you to your food.

Also I see the same problem with the check. So often I have to flag someone down to ask for the check. Here I more understand why, as many diners think it is rude to give you the check ‘too early’ and they are pressuring you to leave. I see that, but I don’t let it get to me, I hate feeling trapped and frustrated and being actually stuck when I want to leave and don’t want to be rude in flagging someone down.

It seems far ruder to take my plate before I am ready, which does actual harm, then to give me the option to pay, which helps me.

Indeed, I actively loved it when a local place I enjoy (Hill Country) started having people order at the counter and pay in advance, exactly because that means now you can leave when you can both order quickly, and then leave when you want, and never be under any pressure, and I now go there more often especially when dining alone.

A meal really is nicer, and more efficient, when you have paid in advance, and know you can walk out whenever you’re ready.

So while I buy that efficiency concerns play a role, there would still remain a mystery. Why do restaurants whose livelihood depends on turnover often fail to even take your order for extended periods, even when you signal clearly you are ready? Often they are the same places that rapidly clear your plates, although I mostly do not mind this.

I think the missing answer, even if it often isn’t conscious, is that servers feel that not clearing the plates is a ‘bad look’ and bad service, that it fails to be elegant and sends the wrong message, and also makes the waiter potentially look bad to their boss. It is something to easily measure, so it gets managed. They are indeed far more concerned with clearing too late than too early. Too early might annoy you, but that is invisible, and it shows you are trying.

Good News, Everyone

India getting remarkably better in at least one way, as the percentage of the bottom 20% who own a vehicle went from 6% to 40% in only ten years.

Seeing Like a State has its advantages. Technocracy is often great, especially when there is buy-in from the people involved. See this story of a vineyard where the textbook solutions really did work perfectly in real life while everyone who ‘knew wine’ kept insisting it would never work, from this 1999 review of Seeing Like a State. The full essay is great fun too.

Your survey data contains a bunch of ‘professional’ survey takers who take all the surveys, but somehow this ends up not much changing the results.

Reports say that frozen French croissants are actually really good and rapidly gaining market share. It seems highly plausible to me. Croissants freeze rather well. We use the ones from FreshDirect on occasion, and have tried the Whole Foods ones, and both are solid. The key is that they end up Hot and Fresh, which makes up for quite a lot.

They still pale in comparison to actively good croissants from a real bakery, of which this area has several – I lost my favorite one a few years back and another stopped baking their own, but we still have Eataly and Dominic Ansel Workshop, both of which are way way better, and if I’m willing to walk options expand further. However the cost is dramatically higher at the good bakeries. For me it’s worth it, but if you are going to otherwise cheat on quality, you might as well use the frozen ones. You also can’t beat the convenience.

50 ways to spend time alone. Some of them are reaches, or rather stupid, but brainstorming is good even when there are some dumb ideas. Strangely missing from this list are such favorites as ‘do your work,’ ‘play a video game,’ ‘listen to music,’ ‘go to the movies’ and my personal favorite, ‘sleep.’ Also some other obvious others.

Let it Go

An excellent point on repair versus replace, and the dangers of the nerd snipe for people of all intellectual levels.

PhilosophiCat: I live in a country where 80ish is roughly the average national IQ. Let me tell you what it’s like.

The most noticeable way this manifests is inefficiency. Obvious, easy, efficient, long term solutions to problems are often ignored in favour of short term solutions that inevitably create bigger or more expensive problems down the road or that use far more labour and time than is necessary.

For example, if something breaks, it may be way more cost effective to simply replace it and have the problem just be solved. But they’ll repair it endlessly (often in very MacGyver-like ways), spending way more money on parts than a new item would have cost, spending hours of time repeatedly fixing it every time it breaks, until they can’t fix it anymore. And then they still have to buy a new one.

At first, I would get very frustrated by this sort of thing, but eventually I realised that they like it this way. They enjoy puttering and tinkering and solving these little daily problems.

…

Many don’t understand that if you spend all your money today, you won’t have any tomorrow. Or that if you walk on the highway at night in dark clothes, drivers can’t see you and may run you over. Or that if you don’t keep up on the maintenance of your house, eventually things will break that you won’t be able to afford to fix (because you don’t ever put money away to save). I could give endless examples of this.

Robin Hanson: Note how creative problem solving can be a mark of low IQ; smarter people pick the simple boring solution.

I think this comes from the fact that we used to be a lot poorer than we were, and that we used to be unable to efficiently turn time into money outside of one’s fixed job. And even that we usually had half a couple that didn’t have a job at all. So any way to trade time to conserve money was highly welcome, and considered virtuous.

I keep having to train myself out of this bias. The old thing doesn’t even have to be broken, only misplaced, if your hourly is high – why are you spending time looking when you can get it replaced? Worst case is you now have two.

Yay Air Conditioning

I knocked air conditioning a bit when analyzing the technological richter scale, but yes having it allows people to think and function on days they otherwise wouldn’t. That is a big deal, and Lee Kwon Yew called it the secret of Singapore’s success.

Ethan Mollick: Air conditioning lets you use your brain more.

Students do worse when its hot. Over 13 years in NYC alone, “upwards of 510,000 exams that otherwise would have passed likely received failing grades due to hot exam conditions,” and these failures delayed or stopped 90k graduations!

Peter Hartree: Meanwhile in France: in office buildings, it is illegal to switch on the air conditioning if the interior temperature is less than 26 °C or 78.8 °F.

(Décret n° 2007-363)

Why tax when you can ban? What is a trade-off anyway? Shouldn’t you be on vacation, do you want to make the rest of us look bad?

I am curious how much I would reduce my air conditioning use if we attached a 1000% tax to it. That is not a typo.

Beast of a Memo

Thanks, Mr. Beast, for this memo. It is 36 pages, and it is glorious. Whatever else you may think of it, this feels like a dramatically honest attempt to describe how YouTube actually works, how his business actually works and what he thinks it takes to succeed as part of that business. It is clear this is a person obsessed with maximizing success, with actually cutting the enemy, with figuring out what works and what matters and then being the best at it like no one ever was.

Is it a shame that the chosen topic is YouTube video engagement? Your call.

Is it over the top, obsessive and unhealthy in places? That’s your call too.

The central theme is, know what things have to happen that might not happen, that are required for success, and do whatever it takes to make them happen. Have and value having backups including spare time, do check-ins, pay for premium things as needed, obsess, take nothing at face value if it sounds too good to be true, make it happen.

So, suppose you have some task that will be a bottleneck for you. What to do?

Mr. Beast: I want you to look them in the eyes and tell them they are the bottleneck and take it a step further and explain why they are the bottleneck so you both are on the same page.

“Tyler, you are my bottleneck. I have 45 days to make this video happen and I can not begin to work on it until I know what the contents of the video is. I need you to confirm you understand this is important and we need to set a date on when the creative will be done.” Now this person who also has tons of shit going on is aware of how important this discussion is and you guys can prioritize it accordingly.

Now let’s say Tyler and you agree it will be done in 5 days. YOU DON’T GET TO SET A REMINDER FOR 5 DAYS AND NOT TALK TO HIM FOR 5 DAYS!

Every single day you must check in on Tyler and make sure he is still on track to hit the target date.

…

I want you to have a mindset that God himself couldn’t stop you from making this video on time. Check. In. Daily. Leave. No. Room. For. Error.

If I am Tyler and every time I get a request I get this lecture and I get a check-in every single day I am not going to be a happy Tyler. Nor am I going to be a Tyler that likes you, or that carefully ponders before sending the ‘everything is on track’ reassurances.

If this was a rare event, where 9 out of 10 things you ask for are not bottlenecks, and the reminders are gentle and easy, then maybe. Or perhaps if that’s known to be the standard operating procedure and it’s like a checklist thing – daily you verify you’re on track for everything quickly – maybe that could work too? You’d also need to hire with this in mind.

The reverse mistake is indeed worse. So often I see exactly the thing where you have a future potential bottleneck, and then assume it will be fine until suddenly you learn that it isn’t fine. You probably do want to be checking in at least once.

Similarly, as he points out, if you shove the responsibility onto someone else like a contractor and assume they’ll deliver, then it’s absolutely your fault when they don’t deliver. And yes, you should build in a time buffer. And yes, if it’s critical and could fail you should have a backup plan.

He says before you ask a higher up especially him for a decision, ensure you provide all the key details, and also all the options, since others don’t know what you know and their time is valuable. I buy that it by default does make sense to assume higher ups have a large multiplier on the value of their time, so it should be standard practice to do this. It is however clear Mr. Beast is overworked and would be wise to take on less at once.

He emphasizes following chain of command for practical reasons, if you don’t then the people in between won’t have any idea what’s going on or know what to do. That’s a risk, but feels like it’s missing something more central.

He is big on face-to-face communication, likes audio as a backup, written is a distant third, going so far as to say written doesn’t count as communication at all unless you have confirmation in return. I definitely don’t see it that way. To me written is the public record, even if it has lower bandwidth.

If there’s one central theme it’s responsibility. Nothing comes before your ‘prios’ or top priorities, make them happen or else, no excuses. Own your mistakes and learn from them, he won’t hold it over your head. No excuses. But of course most people say that, and few mean it. It’s hard to tell who means it and who doesn’t.

This section is unusual advice, on consultants, who he thinks are great.

Mr. Beast: Consultants are literally cheat codes. Need to make the world’s largest slice of cake? Start off by calling the person who made the previous world’s largest slice of cake lol. He’s already done countless tests and can save you weeks worth of work. I really want to drill this point home because I’m a massive believer in consultants. Because I’ve spent almost a decade of my life hyper obsessing over youtube, I can show a brand new creator how to go from 100 subscribers to 10,000 in a month. On their own it would take them years to do it.

Consults are a gift from god, please take advantage of them. In every single freakin task assigned to you, always always always ask yourself first if you can find a consultant to help you. This is so important that I am demanding you repeat this three times in your head “I will always check for consultants when i’m assigned a task.”

Doing Mr. Beast shaped things seems like a perfect fit for consultants. For most things, consultants carry many costs and dangers. You need to bring them up to speed, they’re expensive, you risk not developing core competency, they are used to fight turf wars and shift or avoid blame and so on. A lot of it is grift or the result of bad planning.

But here, it is a lot of tasks like ‘build the world’s largest slice of cake.’ You don’t actually want a core competency of on your own making largest versions of all the things or anything like that – you want the core competency of knowing how to hire people to do it, because it’s a one-off, and it doesn’t link back into everything else you do.

If your consultant is ‘get the world’s expert in [X] to do it for you, or tell you what you need to know’ then that’s probably great. If it’s a generic consultant, be skeptical.

Here’s one I appreciate a lot.

Pull all nighters weeks before the shoot so you don’t have to days before the shoot.

Yes. Exactly. I mean, I never pull an all nighter, those are terrible, I only do long days of intense work but that’s the same idea. Whenever possible, I want to pull my crunch time well in advance of the deadline. In my most successful Magic competitions, back when the schedule made this possible, I would be essentially ready weeks in advance and then make only minor adjustments. With writing, a remarkable amount of this is now finished well in advance.

His review process is ‘when you want one ask for one,’ including saying what your goals are so people can tell you how you suck and what needs to be fixed for you to get there. I love that.

Here’s some other things that stood out that are more YT-specific, although implications will often generalize.

The claim that YouTube is the future, and to therefore ignore things like Netflix and Hulu, stop watching entirely, that stuff would fail on YT so who cares. Which is likely true, but that to me is a problem for YT. If anything I’m looking for ways to get myself to choose content with higher investment costs and richer payoffs.
Mr. Beast spent 20k-30k hours studying what makes YT videos work. It feels like there’s an implicit ‘and that won’t change too much’ there somewhere? Yet I expect the answers to change and be anti-inductive, as users adjust. Also AI.
Mr. Beast seems to optimize every video in isolation. He has KPMs (key performance metrics): Click Through Rate (CTR), Average View Duration (AVD) and Average View Percentage (AVP). He wants these three numbers to go up. That makes sense.
1. He talks about the thumbnail or ‘clickbait’ needing to match up with what you see, or you’ll lose interest. And he discusses the need to hold viewers for 1 min, then for 3, then for 6.
2. What he doesn’t talk about much is the idea of how this impacts future videos. A few times I’ve seen portions of a Mr. Beast video, it’s had a major impact on my eagerness to watch additional videos. And indeed, my desire to do so is low, because while I don’t hate the content I’ve been somewhat disappointed.
3. He does mention this under the ‘wow factor,’ a reason to do crazy stunts that impress the hell out of people. That doesn’t feel like the thing that matters most, to me that’s more about delivering on the second half of the video, but I am a strange potential customer.
He says always video everything, because that’s the best way to ensure you can inform the rest of your team what the deal is. Huh.
The thumbnail is framed as super important, a critical component that creates other criticials, and needs to be in place in advance. Feels weird that you can’t go back and modify it later if the video changes?
‘Creativity saves money’ is used as a principle, as in find a cheaper way to do it rather than spend more. I mean, sure, I guess?
He says work on multiple videos every day, that otherwise you fall behind on other stuff and you’re failing. I mostly do the same thing as a writer, it’s rare that I won’t be working on lots of different stuff, and it definitely shows. But then there are times when yes, you need to focus and clear your head.
He asks everyone to learn how to hold a camera. Makes sense, there are versions of this everywhere.
Do not leave contestants waiting in the sun (ideally waiting in general) for more than 3 hours. Ah, the lessons of experience.
If something goes wrong always check if it can be used in the video. Nice.
What is the core secret of a Mr. Beast video, underneath all the details and obsession? It seems to be roughly ‘hammering people with very loud cool exciting s*** taken to 11 as often and intensely as possible, with full buy-in’?
A key format design is to have step-function escalation (a bigger firework! no, now an even bigger one! And again!) or ideally a huge end-of-video payoff that you get invested in, like who wins a competition. The obvious question is, why wouldn’t people skip ahead? Do people not know they can do that? I do it.
The audience for Mr. Beast is 70% male, and 77% ages 18-44. There’s a big drop off to the 45-54 group and another to the 55+ groups. I suppose people as old as me don’t care for this style of content, it’s the kids these days.
All the details on YT mastery make sense, and also point towards the dangers of having too much information, optimizing too heavily on the micro, not having room to breathe. I can only imagine how bad it is in TikTok land (where I very on purpose don’t have an account). No dull moment, only abrupt endings, and so on.

So I was about halfway through and was thinking ‘yeah this guy is intense but I appreciate the honesty and given the one-off and high-stakes nature of these tasks this all makes a lot of sense, why would you cancel someone for this’ and then I got to page 19, and a section title of, and I quote: “No does not mean no.”

Where he says never take a no at face value, that ‘literally doesn’t mean ****.’

Oh. I see.

I mean I totally get what he’s saying here when I look at details. A producer produces, and doesn’t let obstacles get in their way, and uses all the angles at their disposal. They don’t give up. Especially with a Mr. Beast production, where you could have fans or allies anywhere to help, and you have a lot of resources to throw at the problem, and the stakes can be high. But yeah, as Archer says, phrasing!

Other potential points of contention could be the emphasis on metrics, the idea that regular ‘C’ players who aren’t looking to go intense and level up to ‘A’ players are toxic and need to be fired right away, or the generally intense high expectations. Or perhaps a few things taken out of context.

This seems like a great place to work if you are one of Mr. Beast’s A-or-B players: Highly aligned with the company vision, mission and content, and want to work hard and obsess and improve and probably not have great work-life balance for a while. It seems like a terrible place for anyone else. But is that a bug, or is it a feature?

For Science!

A simple guide on how to structure papers, or as Robin Hanson points out also many other things as well.

For Your Entertainment

Reagan as a truly terrible movie, as anvilicious as it gets, yet somehow still with a 98% audience score. Rather than telling us critics are useless or biased, I think this says more about audience scores. Audience scores are hugely biased, not in favor of a particular perspective, but in favor of films that are only seen, and thus only rated, by hardcore fans of the genre and themes. Thus, Letterboxd ratings are excellent, except that you have to correct for this bias, which is why many of the top films by rating are anime or rather obviously no fun.

Reminder that my movie reviews are on Letterboxd. There should be less of them during football season, especially for October if the Mets continue making a run.

A good question there is, why don’t I work harder to watch better movies? Partly I consider the movies that are both good and not ‘effort watching’ a limited resource, not to be wasted, and also because often I’m actually fine with a 3-star comfort movie experience, especially with stars I enjoy watching. There are a lot of movies that get critical acclaim, but often the experience isn’t actually great, especially if I’m looking to chill.

Also I notice that ‘what’s playing’ is actually a cool way to take the standards pressure off. So heuristics like ‘what’s leaving Netflix and evokes a sure why not’ lets me not fret on ‘of all the movies in the world, I had to go and choose this one.’ It’s fine. Then distinctly I seek out the stuff I want most. Similarly, if you’re at the local AMC or Regal and look good I’ll probably go for it, but traveling beyond that? Harder sell.

In television news, beyond football and baseball, I’ve been watching UnREAL (almost done with season 2 now), which recently was added to Netflix, and I am here to report that it is glorious, potentially my seventh tier one pick. I have not enjoyed a show this much in a long time, although I am confident part of that is it is an unusually great fit for me. I love that it found a way to allow me to enjoy watching the interactions and machinations of what are, by any objective measure (minor spoiler I suppose) deeply horrible people.

I’m also back with the late night show After Midnight. They made the format modestly worse for season 2 in several ways – the final 2 is gone entirely, the tiny couch is an actual couch and Taylor’s point inflation is out of control – but it’s still fun.

Properly Rated

Sarah Constantin notices the trend that critical consensus is actually very, very good.

Sarah Constantin: My most non-contrarian opinion:

Critical consensus is almost always right about the performing arts.

Prestige TV (Breaking Bad, Succession, Mad Men) is in fact the best TV.

High-Rotten-Tomatoes-scoring movies are (objectively) better, for their genre, than low-scoring movies.

I’m not a huge fan of today’s pop music, but Taylor Swift songs are reliably better than other pop songs.

I’ve seen Renee Fleming live, and she was in fact dramatically, shatteringly better than other operatic sopranos; she’s famous for a reason.

Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, etc are, in fact, that good; none of the greats are overrated.

(IMO Tchaikovsky is slightly underrated.)

On a slightly different note, the “Great Books” are also, in fact, great. None of this “Shakespeare was overrated” stuff.

My only “wtf, why is this person revered, including them in the canon was a mistake” example in literature is Anne Sexton. Read Sexton and Plath side by side and it’s clear one of them is a real poet and the other isn’t.

Most of the canonically “great” movies (Casablanca, Godfather, etc) are, actually, that good.

In general, the “middlebrow” zone — complex enough to reward attention, emotionally legible enough to be popular — is, in fact, a sweet spot for objective Quality IMO, though not the only way to go.

Weirdly I *don’t* find this to be true in food. More highly touted/rated restaurants don’t reliably taste better to me.

Artistic quality, IMO, is relative to genre and culture. i.e. someone who dislikes all rap is not qualified to review a rap album. but within genres you often see expert consensus on quality, and that consensus points to a real & objective thing.

I think this is mostly true, and it is important to both respect the rule and to understand the exceptions and necessary adjustments.

As I have noted before, for movies, critical consensus is very good at picking up a particular type of capital-Q Quality in the Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sense. The rating means something. However, there is another axis that matters, and there the problem lies, because critics also mostly hate fun, and are happy to send you to a deeply unpleasant experience in the name of some artistic principle, or to bore you to tears. And they give massive bonus points for certain social motivations, while subtracting points for others.

Sarah nails it with the middlebrow zone. If the critics like a middlebrow-zone movie you know it’s a good time. When they love a highbrow movie, maybe it is great or you will be glad you saw it, but beware. If you know what the movie is ‘trying to do,’ and also the Metacritic rating, you know a lot. If you know the Rotten Tomatoes rating instead you know less, because it caps at 100. You can go in blind on rating alone and that is mostly fine, but you will absolutely get burned sometimes.

I strongly suspect, but have not yet tested, the hypothesis that Letterboxd is actually the best systematic rating system. There is clearly a selection issue at times – the highest rated stuff involves a ton of anime and other things that are only seen by people inclined to love them – but otherwise I rarely see them misstep. If you did a correction for selection effects by average in-genre rating of the reviewers I bet the ratings get scary good.

The canonically great movies do seem to reliably be very good.

Prestige TV is generally the best TV, and ratings are overall pretty good, but of course there are many exceptions. The biggest mistake TV critics make is to disrespect many excellent shows, mostly but not entirely genre shows, that don’t fit its prestige conditions properly.

Music within-genre is a place our society tends to absolutely nail over time. The single is almost always one of the best songs on the album, the one-hit wonder rarely has other gems, justice prevails. The best artists are reliably much better. Short term ‘song of the summer’ style is more random, and genre is personal taste. The classic favorites like Beethoven and Bach are indeed best in class.

Books I’m less convinced. I endorse literal Shakespeare in play form, but I was forced to read a Great Books curriculum and was mostly unimpressed.

Food is directionally right. I’ve talked about it before, but in short: what you have to beware is confluence of service and ambiance ratings (and cost ratings) with food ratings. If people say the food is great, the food is probably great. If people say the food is bad, it’s almost always bad. Personal taste can still matter, as can knowing how to order, and there are the occasional mistakes. For me, the big catches are that I cannot eat fruits and vegetables straight up, and if they try to get fancy about things (e.g. they aim for more than one Michelin Star, as discussed earlier) things reliably go south.

More than that, the things I love most are not things critics care about enough – half the reason I respect Talib so much is ‘the bread, the only thing I cared about [at the Michelin starred restaurant] was not warm.’ Exactly.

Government Working

In Germany it takes over 120 days to get a corporate operating license, and 175 days to get a construction-related license. They’re going to have a bad time. What happened to German efficiency? These kinds of delays are policy choices.

Alex Tabarrok looks at the utter insanity that is The UK’s 2010 ‘Equality Act’ where if a judge decides two jobs were ‘equivalent,’ no matter the market saying otherwise, an employer – including a local government, some of which face bankruptcy for this – can not only be forced to give out ‘equal pay’ but to give out years of back wages. Offer your retail workers all the opportunity to work in the warehouse for more money, and they turned you down anyway? Doesn’t matter, the judge says they are ‘equal’ jobs. Back pay, now.

The details keep getting worse the more you look, such as “Any scheme which has as its starting point – “This qualification is paramount” or that “This skill is vital” is nearly always going to be biased or at least open to charges of bias or discrimination.”

My first thought was the same as the top comment, that this will dramatically shrink firm size. If you have to potentially pay any two given workers the same amount, then if two jobs have different market wages, they need to be provided by different firms. Even worse than pairwise comparisons would be chains of comparisons, where A=B and then B=C and so on, so you need to sever the chain.

The second thought is this will massively reduce wages, the same way that price transparency reduces wages only far, far worse. If you pay even one person $X, you risk having to pay everyone else $X, too, including retroactively when you don’t even get the benefits of higher wages. This provides very strong incentive to essentially never give anyone or any group a raise, unless you want to risk giving it to everyone.

The result? Declines in wages, also resulting in less supply of labor, unfilled jobs and higher unemployment. Also massive investment in automation, since low-wage employees are a grave risk.

There is also a puzzle. What do you do about jobs like the warehouse worker, where someone has to do them, but you can’t pay the market clearing price to convince people to do them?

Same as it ever was.

It also sounds like someone forgot to price gouge.

My only explanation at this point is that the United Kingdom likes trying to sound as sinister and authoritarian as possible. It’s some sort of art project?

South Yorkshire Police: Do you know someone who lives a lavish lifestyle, but doesn’t have a job?

Your intelligence is vital in helping us put those who think they’re ‘untouchable’ before the courts.

Find out how here.

A good way to think about high skill immigration to the United States.

Tyler Cowen: “I work with a great number of young people… from all over the world.

It’s just stunning to me how many of them want to come to the United States… and it’s stunning to me how few say, ‘Oh, could you help me get into Denmark?’”

Adam Millsap: I heard something the other day that stuck with me—every year there’s a draft for human capital and America has the first 100K picks and every year we trade them away for nothing.

The unforced error here is immense.

Grapefruit Diet

The new GLP-1 drugs make weight loss easy for some people, but far from all. And there continue to be a lot of people confidently saying (centrally contradictory to each other) things as universals, that are at best very much not universals.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: From @exfatloss’s review of Pontzer’s _Burn_. I could do with a less angry summary of the book, but reading this summary was still valuable.

Summary: tl;dr

• Adding exercise barely increases your total cArOliEs out.

• If it does at all, less than expected, and the effect diminishes over time.

• The body cannot magically conjure up more cArOliEs if you go jogging, it just takes the energy from somewhere else. Just like spending money doesn’t increase your income, it just re-routes existing expenditures.

• This is what actual measurements show, everything prior was total speculation.

•This explains why the “move more” part of “eat less, move more” is garbage.

• Unfortunately, the rest of the 300-page book is fluff or useless mainstream cAroLies & ulTRa procesSed fOOD nonsense.

Experimental Fat Loss: When I was in college I fantasized about being wealthy enough to afford having all my meals cooked for me, healthy, by a chef.

Then I got into the tech bubble, got wealthy enough and did it for like 3 months.

And I didn’t lose any weight.

Andrew Rettek: It’s weird how he has this graph but the text all describing a world where the top of the dark grey area is horizontal. IIRC from when I read about this result a few months back, you can’t get your Calories out up by a few hundred without a herculean effort (like the Michael Phelps swimming example). When I see mainstream sports scientists discuss these results, they always emphasize how important it is to climb the steep part of the slope and how it’s barely useful to go further.

The important thing is you can go from X maintenance Calories while completely sedentary to X+300-500, and it’s incredibly useful to do so for a bunch of reasons including weightloss.

Right, this graph is not saying exercise does not matter for calories burned. It is saying there are positive but decreasing and much less than full marginal returns to exercise within this ‘sane zone’ where other has room to decrease.

In addition to the obvious ‘exercise is good for you in other ways,’ one caveat listed and that is clear on this graph seems super important, which is that going from completely sedentary to ‘walking around the office level’ does make a huge difference. Whatever else you do, you really want to move a nonzero amount.

At the other end, the theory is that if you burn more calories exercising then you burn less in other ways, but if you burn so many exercising (e.g. Michael Phelps) then there’s nowhere left to spend less, so it starts working. And there is an anecdotal report of a friend doing 14 miles of running per day with no days off, that made this work. But the claim is ordinary humans don’t reach there with sane exercise regimes.

So I have my own High Weirdness situation, which might be relevant.

I lost weight (from 300+ lbs down to a low of ~150lbs, then stable around 160lbs for decades) over about two years in my 20s entirely through radical reduction in calories in. As in I cut at least half of them, going from 3 meals a day to at most 2 and cutting portion size a lot as well. Aside from walking I wasn’t exercising.

One result of this is that I ended up with a world-class level of slow metabolism.

The mechanisms make sense together. Under the theory, with less calories in, every energy expenditure that could be cut got cut, and I stayed in that mode permanently. If brute force doesn’t solve your problem, you are not using enough (whether or not using enough is wise or possible to do in context, it might well not be either), at some point you push through all the equilibrium effects.

Which in turn is why I seem to be in a different situation, where exercise does indeed burn the extra calories it says on the tin, and on the margin CICO is accurate.

Similarly, it means that if I were to build muscle, as I am working on doing now, it will directly raise calories out, because again I’m out of adjustments in the other direction. The math that people keep saying but that doesn’t work for most people, in this weird instance, actually does hold, or at least I strongly suspect that it does.

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Has anyone found that semaglutide/tirzepatide failed for them, but the Eat Nothing Except Potatoes diet succeeded for weight loss or weight maintenance?

The keto brainfog never goes away for me, even months later.

Kiddos, I will repeat myself: Anyone serious about fighting resistant obesity has already tried diets equally or less palatable than ‘exclusively boiled potatoes’. Some such people report that ‘just potatoes’ did work. ‘Palatability’ is thereby ruled out as an explanation.

F4Dance: Semaglutide had modest effect on me (maybe about 5 lbs/month, but I was still ramping up the dosage) where the potato diet did better (about 10 lbs/month until it failed as I did more fries).

On the other hand, GLP-1 drug Semaglutide seems to reduce all-cause mortality, deaths from Covid and severe adverse effects from Covid?

Eric Topol: Also @TheLancet and #ESCCongress today 4 semaglutide vs placebo randomized trials pooled for patients with heart failure, mildly reduced or preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF)

Graphs below

A: CV death and worsening heart failure

B: Worsening heart failure (drove the benefit)

These are rather absurd results, if they hold up.

North Carolina covers GLP-1s for Medicaid patients, but not state employees. Govind Persad and Ezekiel Emanuel argue in the WSJ that the drugs are worth the cost. As that article points out, Wegovy and other GLP-1s are more cost effective than many things we already cover.

I don’t think this is primarily about obesity, it is primarily about us wanting to cover drugs at any cost, and then running into actual overall cost constraints, and GLP-1s being desired too broadly such that it exposes the contradiction. It’s easy to justify spending huge on an orphan drug because the cost and who pays are hidden. Here, you can’t hide the up front costs, no matter the benefits. We can only value lives at $10 million when we have limited opportunities to make that trade, or we’d go bankrupt.

GLP-1 agonists cause dramatic shifts in food consumption.

Frank Fuhrig: Their grocery bills were down by an average of 11%, yet they spent 27% more on lean proteins from lean meat, eggs and seafood. Other gainers were meal replacements (19%), healthy snacks (17%), whole fruits and vegetables (13%) and sports and energy drinks (7%).

Snacks and soda took the brunt of reduced spending by consumers after GLP-1 treatment: snacks and confectionary (-52%), prepared baked goods (-47%), soda/sugary beverages (-28%), alcoholic beverages (-17%) and processed food (-13%).

If you want to get some GLP-1 agonists and pay for it yourself, there’s technically a shortage, so you can solve three problems at once by using the compounding loophole and get a steep discount without taxing the base supply.

Here’s a skeptical take warning not to go too far with universal application of GLP-1 agonists. He agrees they’re great for people with obesity or diabetes, absolutely go for it then, but like all drugs that do anything useful there are side effects including unknown unknowns, at least from your perspective. So while the side effects are very much acceptable when you need the benefits, perhaps don’t do it if you’re fine without.

We could have had GLP-1 agonists in the 1990s, the former dean of Harvard Medical School had a startup with promising early results, but their pharma partner Pfizer killed the project for reasons that seem really stupid, thinking it wouldn’t sell.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

Magic: The Gathering announces new global Magic tournament series. The first wave has eight. They’re $50k weekend tournaments with 8 qualification slots, so essentially an old school Grand Prix with a better prize pool. Great stuff. I worry (or hope?) they will get absolutely mobbed, and you’re need a crazy good record.

Nadu, Winged Wisdom is now thankfully banned in Modern. Michael Majors offers a postmortem. It is a similar story to one we have heard many times. A card was changed late in the process, no one understood the implications of the new version, and it shipped as-is without getting proper attention. No one realized the combo with Shuko or other 0-cost activated effects.

In response, they are going to change the timing of bans and restrictions to minimize fallout on future mistakes, which is great, and also be more careful with late changes. As Majors notes, he knew he didn’t understand the implications of the new textbox, and that should have been a major red flag. So rather crazy error, great mea culpa. But also Ari Lax is right that they need to address more directly that the people who looked at Nadu late weren’t doing the correct thing of looking for worst case scenarios. I agree that mistakes happen but this is a very straightforward interaction, and when you add a ‘if X then draw a card’ trigger the very first thing you do is ask if there is a way to repeatedly do X.

Sam Black updates us on the meta of cEDH (four player competitive commander) play. As you would expect, competitive multiplayer gets weird. The convention increasingly became, Sam reports, that if Alice will win next turn, then Bob, Carol and David will conspire to threaten to allow (let’s say) David to win, to force Alice to agree to a draw. That’s ‘funny once’ but a terrible equilibrium, and all these ‘force a draw’ moves are generally pretty bad, so soon draws will be zero points. Sounds like a great change to me. If Bob can be Kingmaker between Alice and David, that’s unavoidable, but he shouldn’t be able to extract a point.

The problem is that what remains legal is outright collusion, as in casting a spell that intentionally wins your friend (who you may have a split with!) the game, without it being part of some negotiating strategy or being otherwise justified. That is going to have to get banned and somehow policed, and rather quickly – if that happened to me and the judge said ‘aint no rule’ and didn’t fix it going forward either, I don’t think I ever come back – to me this is a clear case of ‘okay that was funny once but obviously that can never happen again.’

There is now a debate on whether competitive commander (cEDH) should have a distinct banned list from Commander. Sam Black says no, because the format is self-balancing via having four players, and it is good for people to know their decks will remain legal. You could unban many cards safely, but there wouldn’t be much point.

I think I’m with Sam Black on reflection. It’s good that cEDH and Commander have the same rules, and to know you don’t have to worry about the list changing. It would take a big win to be worth breaking that. The format is not exactly trying to be ‘balanced’ so why start now?

Indeed, I would perhaps go a step further. The fun of cEDH and Commander was initially, in large part, finding which cards and strategies are suddenly good due to the new format. A lot of stuff is there ‘by accident.’ I can get behind that world of discovery, and the big decks and three opponents mean nothing goes too crazy, or you ban the few things that do go too far. Let’s keep more of that magic while we can. Whereas to me, the more they make cards for Commander on purpose, the less tempted I am to play it.

How would you use these new Magic lands?

Lee Shi Tian: I suppose this cycle need 12-14 core basic land type to enable the land It seems perfect for 1+0.5 color deck For example the Rg mouse at std now I wonder how good it is in the 0.5 side (Wg/Rb) Or even 1+0.5+0.5 deck (Rgb/Wgu).

The obvious first note is that a Gloomlake Verge with no Island or Swamp is still a regular untapped Island. Unless there are other reasons you need Islands (or other basic land types) or need basic lands, including these lands over basics is outright free. Missing is fine. They get better rapidly as you include even a few basics.

Note that you only get to count lands that don’t already ‘solve your problem’ that the new dualland is addressing. So if you have 5 Mountains, 7 Forests and Thornspire Verge, then those 7 forests only enable Verge to the extent you need a second green. If you need one, only the Mountains count. They’d still count as roughly two extra green sources starting on turn two. Note that with Llanowar Elves in standard, Hushwood Verge (which is base green and secondary white) plays substantially better for many decks than Thronspire Verge (which is base red and secondary green).

Either way this feels like power creep, lands good enough to make at some Modern decks. Not obviously bad power creep, but definitely power creep.

A postmortem on NFT games:

Jorbs: The thing about playing a game with nft assets is that nfts are terrible. The game can be fine, but it has nfts in it, so it is going to get shat on by tons of people and is fairly likely to result in many players (or investors) losing large amounts of money.

It’s not a solvable problem, even if your community is great and the game uses nfts in a compelling way, you are vulnerable to others coming in and using it as a pump-and-dump, or to build the worst version of prison gold farming in it, etc.

It’s also causal fwiw. The reason someone puts nfts in their game, and the reason many players are drawn to that game, is a desire to make money, and given that the game doesn’t actually produce anything of real value, that money comes from other players.

On reflection this is mostly right. NFTs attract whales and they attract speculators, and they drive away others. This is very bad for the resulting composition of the community around the game, and NFTs also force interaction with the community. Magic: The Gathering kind of ‘gets away with’ a version of this in real life, as do other physical TCGs, but they’re sort of grandfathered in such that it doesn’t drive (too many) people away and the community is already good, and they don’t have the crypto associations to deal with.

I am very happy we got Magic: the Gathering before we got the blockchain, so that could happen.

Thread on speedrunning as the ultimate template of how to genuinely learn a system, identify and solve bottlenecks, experiment, practice and improve. And why you should apply that attitude to other places, including meditation practice, rather than grinding the same thing over and over without an intention.

Gamers Winning At Life

If you’re so good at chess, why aren’t you rich?

Robin Hanson: Some people are really good at board games. Not just one or a few but they can do well at most any. Why don’t they then do better at life? How do board games differ so systematically?

He then followed up with a full post.

Here’s his conclusion:

Robin Hanson: The way I’d say it is this: we humans inherit many unconscious habits and strategies, from both DNA and culture, habits that apply especially well in areas of life with less clear motivations, more implicit rules, and more opaque complex social relations. We have many (often “sacred”) norms saying to execute these habits “authentically”, without much conscious or strategic reflection, especially selfish. (“Feel the force, Luke.”) These norms are easier to follow with implicit rules and opaque relations.

Good gamers then have two options: defy these norms to consciously calculate life as a game, or follow the usual norm to not play life as a game. At least one, and maybe both, of these options tends to go badly. (A poll prefers defy.) At least in most walks of life; there may be exceptions, such as software or finance, where these approaches go better.

I know he’s met a gamer, he lunches with Bryan Caplan all day, but this does not seem to understand the gamer mindset.

Being a gamer, perhaps I can help. Here’s my answer.

People good at board games usually have invested in learning a general skill of being good at board games, or games in general. That is time and skilling up not spent on other things, like credentialism or building a network or becoming popular or charismatic. And it indicates a preference to avoid such factors, and to focus on what is interesting and fun instead.

This differential skill development tends to snowball, and if you ‘fall behind’ in those other realms then you see increasing costs and decreasing returns to making investments there, both short and long term. Most people develop those skills not because they are being strategic, but incidentally through path dependence.

The world then tends to punish these preferences and skill portfolios, in terms of what people call ‘success.’ This is especially true if such people get suckered into the actual gaming industry.

Alternatively, a key reason many choose games to this extent is exactly because they tend to underperform in other social contests, or find them otherwise unrewarding. So the success in games is in that sense indicative of a lack of other success, or the requirements for such success.

There’s another important factor. People I know who love board games realize that you don’t need this mysterious ‘success’ to be happy in life. You can play board games with your friends, and that is more fun than most people have most of the time, and it is essentially free in all ways. They universally don’t have expensive taste. So maybe they go out and earn enough to support a family, sure, but why should they play less fun games in order to gain ‘success’?

Opportunity costs are high out there. As a tinkering mage famously said, I wonder how it feels to be bored?

(I mean, I personally don’t wonder. I went to American schools.)

There are two answers.

One is that the money is the score, and many do ultimately find games involving earning money more interesting. Often this is poker or sports betting or trading, all of which such people consistently excel at doing. So they often end up doing well kind of by accident, or because why not.

That’s how I ended up doing well. One thing kind of led to another. The money was the score, and trading in various forms was fascinating as a game. I did also realize money is quite useful in terms of improving your life and its prospects, up to a point. And indeed, I mostly stopped trying to make too much more money around that point.

The other is that some gamers actually decide there is something important to do, that requires them to earn real money or otherwise seek some form of ‘success.’ They might not want a boat, but they want something else.

In my case, for writing, that’s AI and existential risk. If that was not an issue, I would keep writing because I find writing interesting, but I wouldn’t put in anything like this effort level or amount of time. And I would play a ton more board games.

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

There are still a few bugs to work out, as the Waymos honk at each other while parking at 4am in the morning.

Nate Silver reports positively on his first self driving car experience. The comments that involved user experiences were also universally positive. This is what it looks like to be ten times better.

Aurora claims to be months away from fully driverless semi-trucks.

While I Cannot Condone This

Polymarket offered a market on who would be in the lead in the presidential market for a majority of the three hours between 12pm and 3pm one day. Kamala Harris was slightly behind. Guess what happened next? Yep, a group bought a ton of derivative contracts, possibly losing on the order of $60k, then tried to pump the main market with over $2 million in buys that should cost even more.

Rather than being troubled or thinking this is some sort of ‘threat to Democracy,’ I would say this was a trial by fire, and everything worked exactly as designed. They spent millions, and couldn’t get a ~2% move to stick for a few hours. That’s looking like a liquid market that is highly resistant to manipulation, where the profit motive keeps things in line. Love it. Gives me a lot more faith in what happens later.

In other good prediction market news, Kalshi won its case, and can now offer legal betting markets to Americans on elections. Neat.

Cancellations of musical artists matter mostly because of platform actions such as removal from algorithmic recommendations and playlists. Consumer behavior is otherwise mostly unchanged. This matches my intuitions and personal experience.

Curious person asks if there were any student protest movements that were not vindicated by history, as he couldn’t think of any. The answers surprised him. Then they surprised him a bit more.

Study says (I didn’t verify methodology but source quoting this is usually good) value of a good doctor over their lifetime is very high, as is the value of not being a very bad one, with a 11% higher or 12% lower mortality rate than an average doctor, with the social cost of a bad (5th percentile) doctor not being 50th percentile on the order of $9 million. Not that we could afford or would want to afford to pay that social cost to get the improvement at scale, but yes quality matters. The implications for policy are varied and not obvious.

Turns out the price of an cozy Ambassadorship is typically around $2.5 million, payable in political contributions. Doesn’t seem obviously mispriced?

Scott Alexander defends ‘I’m sorry you feel that way’ and ‘I’m sorry if you’re offended.’ I think he’s mostly right that this is indeed a useful phrase and often we do not have a superior alternative. The things to understand about such phrases are:

It’s not a real apology. It’s (usually) also not claiming to be one.
It is instead a statement you are sad about some aspect of the situation.
People hate it because they wanted an apology.

More precisely, it is saying: “I acknowledge that you desire an apology. I am not going to give you one, because I do not think one is justified. However, I sympathize with your situation, and am sad that you find yourself in it and wish things were better.”

Sometimes people do use it to gaslight, claiming it is an actual apology. Or people use this when an apology is required or demanded, to technically claim they did it. Kids especially like to do this, since it has the word ‘sorry’ in it. That’s your fault for asking, and if you want a ‘real’ or ‘sincere’ apology, you can reasonably reject such responses. Many comments said similar things.

Let me tell you about the very young. They are different from you and me.

David Shor: It is really striking how different very young adults are from everyone else in personality data. 0.8 standard deviations is a lot!

With the ambiguous exception of enjoying wild flights of fantasy, ‘kids these days’ are on the wrong side of every single one of these. There’s a lot of correlation and clustering here. The question is, to what extent will they grow out of it, versus this being a new future normal?

Tyler Cowen interview with Aashish Reddy, different than the usual, far more philosophical and abstract and historical. I wish I had the time and space to read this widely, to know all the history and the thinkers, and live in that world. Alas, not being Tyler Cowen or reading at his speed, I do not. One thing that struck me was Cowen saying he has become more Hegelian as he got older.

I think that is tragic, and also that it explains a lot of his behavior. Hegel seems to me like the enemy of good thinking and seeking truth, in the literal sense that he argues against it via his central concept of the dialectic, and for finding ways to drive others away from it. This is the central trap of our time, the false dichotomy made real and a symmetrical ‘you should see the other guy.’ But of course I’ve never read Hegel, so perhaps I misunderstand.

Presumably this is due to different populations retweeting, since these are very much the same poll for most purposes. Also wow, yeah, that’s some biting of that bullet.

Nostalgia

Tyler Cowen says what he is and is not personally nostalgic about.

The particular things Tyler notices are mostly not things that strike me, as they are particular to Tyler. But when one takes a step back, things very much rhyme.

Much of this really is: “Things were better back when everything was worse.”

So many of our problems are the same as that of Moe, who cannot find Amanda Hugnkiss: Our standards are too high.

We have forgotten that the past royally sucked. Because it royally sucked, we took joy in what we now take for granted, and in versions of things we now consider unacceptable. That opened up the opportunity for a lot of good experiences.

It also was legitimately better in important ways that we found lower standards on various things acceptable, especially forms of ‘safety,’ and especially for children.

Tyler mentions popular culture was big on personal freedom back then, and that was great, and I wish we still had that. But missing from Tyler’s list is that in the past children, despite a vastly less safe world, enjoyed vastly more freedom along a wide range of dimensions. They could be alone or travel or do various things at dramatically earlier ages, and their lives were drastically less scheduled. And they saw each other, and did things, in physical space. To me that’s the clear biggest list item.

Gen Z says it is falling behind and has no financial hope. And yet:

The Economist: “In financial terms, Gen Z is doing extraordinarily well…average 25-year-old Gen Zer has an annual household income of over $40K, 50% above the average baby-boomer at the same age…Their home-ownership rates are higher than millennials at the same age.”

Yes that is inflation adjusted. The difference is that what is considered minimally acceptable has dramatically risen. So you need to spend a lot more to get the same life events and life satisfaction.

In particular, people feel they must be vastly wealthier and more secure than before in order to get married or have a child. They are not entirely wrong about that.

This was an excellent New Yorker write-up of what is happening with online restaurant reservations. Bots snag, various websites let you resell, the restaurants get cut out and sometimes tables sit empty. Regular people find it almost impossible to get a top reservation. I will probably never go to 4 Charles Prime Rib. I may never again go back to Carbone. Meanwhile, Le Bernardine says that when a handful of tables do not show up, the night’s profit is gone, despite overwhelming demand.

It is madness. Utter madness.

You have people happy to spend double, triple or even ten times what you charge them, and fight for the ability to do so. Then you complain about your margins.

Seriously, restaurants, I know this is a hopeless request, but stop being idiots. Give out reservations to your regulars and those you care about directly. And then take the prime reservations, the ones people value most, and auction or sell them off your own goddamn self. You keep the money. And if they do not sell, you know they did not sell, and you can take a walk-in.

This definitely sounds like it should be a job for a startup, perhaps one of those in the article but likely not. Alas, I do not expect enough uptake from the restaurants.

Paul Graham: There is a missing startup here. Restaurants should be making this money, not scalpers.

And incidentally, there’s more here than just this business. You could use paid reservations as a beachhead to displace OpenTable.

Nick Kokonas: Already did it Paul. Tock. Sold for $430M to SQSP. The problem is the operators not the tech.

Jake Stevens: As someone who has built restaurant tech before: tock is an amazing product, and your last point is dead on

Matthew Yglesias: Begging America’s restaurant owners (and Taylor Swift) to charge market-clearing prices.

If you feel guilty about gouging or whatever, donate the money to charity.

The Tortured Microeconomists’ Department.

Fabian Lange: Swanky restaurant reservations & Taylor tix derive much of their value from being hard to get and then be able to post about it on twitter, brag with your friends, etc… . Rationing is part of the business model. Becker’s note on restaurant pricing applies (JPE, 1991).

The argument that artificial scarcity is a long term marketing strategy is plausible up to a point, but only to a point. You can still underprice if you want to. Hell, you can let scalpers play their game if you want that. But you should at least be charging the maximum price that will sell out within a few minutes.

I know the argument that charging anything close to market prices would leave a bad taste in people’s mouths, or not be ‘democratizing,’ or whatever. People always say that. I can see this with a musical artist. With a top-end restaurant reservation, it is obvious nonsense. Why would you not want the place to succeed? Especially if you could then lower menu prices and offer free dishes with some of the profits, or use it to hire more staff or otherwise improve the experience.

One listed idea was that you can buy reservations at one website directly from the restaurant, with the price going as a downpayment. The example given was $1,000 for a table for two at Carbone, with others being somewhat less. As is pointed out, that fixes the incentives for booking, but once you show up you are now in all-you-can-eat mode at a place not designed for that.

The good news is that even the $1,000 price tag is only that high because most supply is not on the market, and is being inefficiently allocated. The market clearing price applied more broadly would be far lower.

If the restaurants actually wanted to ‘democratize’ access, they could in theory do a lottery system, and then they could check IDs. That would at least make some sense.

Instead, none of this makes any sense.

The Lighter Side

Dominic Pino: Time it took for moral hazard to kick in: 10 minutes