In my experience, it’s scary how often such vibes prove correct in the end.
Yeah. I have the same experience. (Unless it is a selective memory, of course.)
But that alone does not prove that the experience is universal. Maybe we are just exceptionally well calibrated. If so, there is a potential self-improvement area: figure out how well calibrated you are about people, and maybe try to improve somehow. Not sure how, though. Make predictions about other people, and check them later? A prediction market for whether your neighbors will divorce, and which of your friends will end in prison?
It also seems possible (at least to my inner psychoanalyst) that some people have an unconscious desire to get hurt in some ways. Like, the real bottleneck is not detecting the bad vibes; it is acting on the information. Some people choose to ignore the bad vibes; some people may even be attracted to them. ("This person seems dangerous. I am sure it will be okay." "This person seems safe. Boring!")
TikTok as intermittent reinforcement, a slot machine for children.
An interesting point made in the video, TikTok rewards new accounts by giving them more attention than they would normally get. So the user starts with a more positive experience ("hey, everyone loves me, this is an awesome platform"), and when they lose it later, they probably respond by trying harder.
Which is the same strategy that many games use, where completing the first levels is easy, and then it gets exponentially harder (but don't worry, you can always pay to win).
Also, I think Chinese online shops use this strategy where they give huge discounts to new users, so you remember "oh, buying here is much cheaper than buying anywhere else" and you stay there even when it gradually stops being true. (I tried it with AliExpress, different people get different prices.)
i’ve heard ppl who lost a lot of weight talk about some angry cynicism when people start treating them better, even ppl they’ve known for a long time. I’m having a bit of that now that twitter seems to like me. i’ve been consistently myself this entire time, what’s happening.
How we perceive ourselves is often very different from how other people see us, and the huge jumps in popularity when you change one detail make it painfully obvious that people care about this little detail a lot, and about the rest of you... well, not much. That hurts, if you primarily identify with the rest.
It's like, dunno, winning at a poetry contest, and then finding out that the voters actually didn't listen to your poetry at all, they just voted for you because they e.g. liked your shoes. And you're like: okay, my shoes are nice and I am happy that someone appreciates that, but this was supposed to be a fucking poetry contest, does anyone care about that at all? And the next time you are trying to compose a poem, it feels like you shouldn't bother, because apparently no one cares about that, and even when it seemed so, it was incidental.
There is some overlap, so not all is lost. For example, people around me appreciate that I am smart, or a good listener, which are important parts of my identity. But things like... uhm, all those things that I would put in a "generally being a good person" set... they probably matter way less than the fact that I have nice blue eyes.
When I scroll through my old Facebook posts, it is often sad to see how the stupid stuff gets upvoted a lot, but the things that seem important to me are mostly ignored. I would prefer a system that rewards effort and thought more than it rewards cat videos. But Facebook is what it is, and handle this thing by spending less time on Facebook.
And what do these people constantly yell at us, if we have ears to hear? That they, their preferences and causes get no respect.
Seems like polarization is the cause of the problem. It doesn't feel like all causes can be cared about, only the selected ones. Then people switch to zero-sum mode.
Then again, people probably overestimate (by orders of magnitude) how much support the other causes actually get. They often get tons of attention, but not enough funding, etc.
We could probably make everyone happy by paying more lip service to the things most people care about, and simultaneously increasing the funding for the effectively altruistic things from epsilon to twice the epsilon. But there are probably no incentives to do that, so nope, not going to happen.
A theory from Benjamin Hoffman on various Trump executive order fiascos: That the administrative class feels compelled to do perverse interpretations of the (usually very poorly drafted) EOs.
Is anyone even able to coherently model Trump? I admit I don't pay enough attention to him, but his words seem to me mostly random, one day contradicting what he said on another day, it's all just vibes... like if he is talking to a group of X people, then X is best, the next day he is talking to Y people, so obviously Y is best, etc.
My point is, if the EOs are poorly drafted and there is no way to model what he actually wants... then you shouldn't blame the administrative class for failing to do the impossible. (Although, blaming the administrative class is fully vibes-compatible with Trump fans. "The Czar is good, the boyars/bureaucrats are bad.")
Rationalists have noticed this tendency too, but they usually come to the wrong conclusion: “If there is no clear reason not to do A, then as a rational person, I should be fine with A.”
True. If there is no legible reason. If there is no reason that your opponent is willing to accept. That basically means that a sufficiently forceful opponent who can use the right keywords can push you anywhere. It works not only against objections you can't put in words, but also against objections that are low-status.
(For example, there is no "clear" reason why people shouldn't experiment with drugs. At least, no reason that the people who like to experiment with drugs would accept as "clear", if they can instead accuse you of being too stupid to think independently and do our own online research.)
The reasons people give you for things are often fake, in the sense of not being a True Objection.
This is so true. In my experience, the reasons people give for doing things are mostly useful for determining how someone wants to be perceived. Otherwise, I dismiss them as fake and made-up on the spot.
[Un]surprisingly, there's already a Sequences article on this, namely Is That Your True Rejection?.
(I thought this comment would be more useful with call-for-action "so how should we rewrite that article and make it common knowledge for everyone who joined LW recently?" but was too lazy to write it.)
I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation.
Table of Contents
Bad News
Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people, excellent advice from Kaj Sotara. This matches my experience as well, if your instincts say there’s something off, chances are very high that you are right. Doesn’t mean don’t be polite or anything, but be wary even if you can’t identify exactly where it’s coming from. In my experience, it’s scary how often such vibes prove correct in the end. If you identify the reason why and you don’t endorse it (e.g. prejudice) of course that’s different.
The art of the French dinner party: It seems you must have an opinion on everything, no matter the topic, and argue for it. Only a boring guest would have no opinion. Heaven forbid you are curious and want to explore with an open mind. This explains a lot.
The full bad news is that the American rate of going to dinner parties has fallen dramatically, on the order of 90%, as Sulla points out you can just invite your friends to dinner and I can verify they often say yes. But of course we don’t, and also we largely don’t have friends.
It seems 75% of restaurant traffic is now takeout and delivery? I’m not against either of these things but whenever possible eat at the restaurant.
Antisocial Media
You love to see it? Apple Blasts EU Laws After First Porn App Comes to iPhones, via state-mandated third-party software marketplace AltStore PAL, falsely claiming that Apple meaningfully approved it, which they very obviously didn’t. I do not believe Apple should be banning porn, but the EU has zero business mandating that they allow porn. Apple is offering a curated ecosystem for a reason, it’s their call.
TikTok as intermittent reinforcement, a slot machine for children. This model seems right to me, and explains why something can be so addictive despite the vast majority of content shown being utter junk in the eyes of the user it is shown to (based on my experience watching people use TikTok on trains).
In the future people might like you more!
The moment itself might seem trivial, but a lot goes into that moment happening. It’s about consistently being the type of person who gets and executes on opportunities like that, puts themselves in spots where good things can happen, or vice versa. The system is not as dumb as it might seem, especially in terms of the sign of the reaction. There are also various ways to go more viral, that encourage very bad habits and patterns, and that you need to fight against using.
My experience has been different, largely because Substack is far more linear and gradual, whereas Twitter and true social media are all about power laws. I’ve had the ‘big hits’ but they are not that much bigger than my usual hits. Recently I got quoted by Cremieux, and that post has 6.4 million views, so the majority of people who have been exposed to anything I’ve said in the past year online probably saw that alone.
In terms of the weight loss thing, as someone who has made that transition, this… simply never bothered me? It seemed like an entirely expected and reasonable thing for people to do? But also I got a lot less of it, because I had friends largely from the Magic: the Gathering community at the time, whose reactions changed an order of magnitude less than most others do, and I’d previously never attempted to date anyway so there was nothing to contrast to there.
Variously Effective Altruism
Scott Alexander tries to make the argument that if you care about the grooming gangs in England, then you care about people you don’t know who are far away, and so ‘gotcha’ and now you have to either admit your preferences make no sense or else be an effective altruist who goes around helping people you don’t know who are far away.
I believe that this was a highly counterproductive argument. Scott was so busy saying this was a contradiction that he never asked why people could be outraged and say things like ‘maybe we should invade the UK’ even in jest, in response to this particular outrageous situation, but not care about (his example) preventing third world domestic abuse. And he all but asserts that his philosophy is right and theirs is wrong, and they would agree with him if they Did Philosophy to It and ‘realized they were a good person.’
Whereas I think there is are several perfectly coherent and reasonable positions that explains why one might care a lot about this particular scandal, without caring about the causes Scott implores people to embrace.
And what do these people constantly yell at us, if we have ears to hear?
That they, their preferences and causes get no respect. That they are constantly being gaslit and lied to and no one cares, that they are told they are bad people, told they are racists, told other people should get preference over them because they are ‘privileged’, told that other people should get what they think is rightfully theirs. They are sick and tired of exactly this kind of treatment, only this is if anything worse.
I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t respond with a very clear ‘f*** you.’
Indeed, this seems like an excellent way to make those people hate Effective Altruism.
Have I fallen into a similar trap in the past, to varying degrees, at various times, on other issues? Oh, absolutely. And that was stupid, and counterproductive, and also wrong, no matter what I think of the opposing positions involved. I am sorry about that and strive to not do it, or at least do as little of it as possible.
Scott Alexander seems like he’s been on tilt lately dealing with all the people coming out and saying ‘effective altruism is bad’ or ‘altruism is bad’ or ‘helping other people is bad’ and then those people respond yes, they actually think you should let a child drown in the river in front of you, stop being such a cuck.
I (uncharitably, but I think accurately) interpret Marc Andreessen as saying either or both of:
I’ve always hated the ‘drowning child in a river’ argument, because it was trying to equate that scenario with giving away all your money and not caring about your family more than other people. That’s a magician’s trick, hopefully people can see why.
But I never thought I’d see the response be ‘actually, that argument is wrong because you shouldn’t save the child.’
This is, in general, an equal opportunity motte-and-bailey situation. There are also those who occupy the equal and opposite bailey, and assert that you do not have special obligations to those close to you, there is no distinction. Those people can be quite assertive and obnoxious about this. Now we deal with the new version instead.
Benjamin Hoffman offers arguments for why ethical veganism is wrong.
The Forbidden Art of Fundraising
If you run a charity and you want to raise money, but I repeat myself, you need to convince people their contribution is making a tangible marginal difference. This is most extreme in Effective Altruist circles, where the thought is fully explicit, but it’s also true everywhere else. The goal must be at risk, the project must be in danger, and the best goal at risk of all, by far, is for you to be on the verge of shutting down.
I endorse essentially all of this. I do think there are some circles that have people more explicitly and intentionally ‘playing chicken’ or other adversarial CDT-agent games with each other.
The times I was at SFF, I tried my best to mostly not do this, and instead mostly do what Oliver suggests – allocate the money where I thought organizations were doing the best work and not only funding on pain of death, although ‘you already have enough’ as to be a factor at some point.
There Was Ziz Thing
If you’re not wondering what was up with that shootout with the border patrol in Vermont or a landlord in Vallejo, as reported in places like this, skip this section.
If you are wondering, probably skip it anyway.
If you didn’t do that, well, here are some links with information.
Aella offers us a ‘Zizian Murdercult summary, for those out of the loop.’ It has a timeline with some basic facts.
Here is a color-coded Zizian fact sheet, with links to additional resources.
This article was widely endorsed except for its sentence on decision theory, and provides facts: Suspects in killings of Vallejo witness, Vermont border patrol agent connected by marriage license, extreme ideology.
Here is a thread of people trying to address the decision theory issue, which is totally not ‘journalist from local paper has any chance of nailing this on the first try’ territory, best suggestion seems to be this one. If you want an in-this-context longer explanation, Eliezer has one. Or if the journalist has much longer, Eliezer wrote a guide to decision theory for ‘everyone else’ a while ago.
Here is another news article.
Here is a longread community alter about Ziz from 2023.
Here is Jessica Taylor offering some basic info and links.
Here is an interview from Curt Lind, the landlord the Zizians are accused of killing, months before his death.
Here is a thread where a vegan responds to these events by saying most people commit murder, calls those who disagree ‘speciesist’ and asks how they can ‘be so concerned about murder now?’ And being glad that the murder victim is dead, and several others essentially back this up, illustrating that the philosophical positions involved justify murder. And Tracing Woods explains that he does not feel especially confident in the amount of moral prohibition against murder involved in those who generate or defend such statements.
Here is an NBC news piece on Ophelia and Ziz and all of this.
Some reporters reached out to me to discuss this because I am on the board of CFAR. So I’m going to take this opportunity to tell everyone that I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of the events in question whatsoever.
That’s Not Very Nice
Yes, it is on net a very good development is that you became able to say ‘that’s not very nice’ and be taken seriously, even if some people weaponized this previous ‘vibe shift’ in rather absurd ways. The bad news is that part of the latest ‘vibe shift’ is people trying to assert once again that ‘vibe makes right’ and you have to do what vibes say, except this time in the opposite direction. I’m probably going to say this again, but regardless: F*** that s***.
Mostly I’m sick of people trying to use ‘vibe shifts’ to attack me with paradox spirits.
The Unbearable Weight Of Lacking Talent
Money without talent and drive ends up not going much.
Roko is correct as well, but the point stands. If you’re given a pile of money, and you are most people, you might live comfortably and enjoy nice things and raise a family. But if you lack talent and ambition, then no one will remember your name and you won’t change things. You will not do much of anything with the opportunity.
Which has opportunity cost, but is also pretty much fine, it’s just a missed opportunity to do better? If you come into a billion dollars via crypto, and you invest in the stock market and enjoy life, that’s not the worst way to invest it and move around real resources.
More people like Vitalik Buterin and Jaan Tallinn would be better, of course, but you don’t want to force it if it isn’t there, or the money will effectively get wasted or stolen.
If you want to do better, and you should, you will need to seek more agency.
How to Have More Agency
Warning: Requires sufficient agency to bootstrap. But if you’ve got even a little…
File this one under More Dakka. The trick works, because:
That’s not the only trick to having more agency. But it’s a big help.
Government Working: Trump Administration Edition
I probably shouldn’t have written this section at all, but here we are.
A thread of Trump day one executive orders.
A theory from Benjamin Hoffman on various Trump executive order fiascos: That the administrative class feels compelled to do perverse interpretations of the (usually very poorly drafted) EOs. It also seems plausible that they felt the credible threat of being fired if they failed to interpret the EOs perversely or maximally expansively, leading to things like NIH scientists being unable to purchase supplies for studies and the pausing of PEPFAR, which looked like it was going to get unpaused but then it wasn’t, and people are dying and children are being infected with AIDS and even if you don’t care about that (you monster) we’re burning insane amounts of goodwill here and with USAID overall, and getting very little in return.
There is an endless stream of what sure look like ‘Control + F’ mistakes, where they fire people or cancel projects for containing a particular word or phrase, when in context the decision makes no sense. If they were to, let’s say, feed the relevant text into Grok 3, presumably it would have known better?
They talk about the need for more power and say it’s time to build then shut down solar and wind projects on government land.
Scott Alexander uses way too many words to support his obviously correct title that ‘Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative.’ I would assume at current margins you should presume money saved by the government goes unspent, slowing increase in the debt. Which isn’t the best use of funds, but isn’t the worst either, especially if AI isn’t transformational soon.
Remember that time JD Vance complained about Canada and the flow of drugs into this country and said he was ‘sick of being taken advantage of’? No, I do not think this and related tactics are, as Tyler Cowen put it, a strategy to shift our culture to be better by being more assertive and sending the right message, and I don’t think it is in the slightest way defensible in either case. Anyone who did try to defend them was being bad, and they should feel bad.
Meanwhile, I have to listen to Odd Lots podcasts where they’re worried DOGE will break our government’s payment systems, and watch various people proclaim they are going to ignore court orders or imply that they should, or that any judge who defies them should be removed from their post. Dilan Esper says no chance they can actually ignore court orders, Volokh Conspiracy’s Ilya Somin is more worried, others seem to be all over the map on this. Trump says he will obey court orders, which is evidence but doesn’t confidently mean he actually will. They’re speedrunning the f*** around section, straight to finding out.
Oh, and quoting (1970 movie version from Waterloo, although it’s in an 1838 book ascribing it to him too but whether it’s a real quote is beside the point) Napoleon Bonaparte’s justification for why he overthrew the French Republic (‘He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.’) and installed himself as Emperor. He seems to be saying he should be free to violate the law, very cool.
I very much do not like where any of this is going.
There’s at least some good news:
Another piece of good news:
Well I didn’t say anything before, I’ve been busy, but now that you mention it…
Trump (and others in his administration, including Musk) are doing a lot of things. Most of them I won’t be covering. It’s not my department and it doesn’t fit my OODA loops and I don’t have the bandwidth. It probably would have been better to not mention any of this at all, really.
Again, that doesn’t mean the other things happening are not important, or not awful, or even that they are less important or less awful (or that everything else is awful). Even with the stuff I did mention here, I’m only scratching the surface.
Again, as the Daily Show used to put it, do not rely on us as your only source of news.
Government Working
A fun ongoing New York City story is that yellow taxis have long gotten insurance from a boutique insurance company with very low rates. The problem is that the low rates aren’t enough to pay the insurance claims, so the insurer is insolvent. When NYC said actually you need to buy insurance from a company that is solvent, drivers panicked, and the city said fine, you can all keep buying ‘insurance’ below cost, from the company that can’t pay claims. Which presumably means the taxpayer is going to end up on the hook for the difference.
The government argues that seizing $50,000 from a small business doesn’t violate property rights because property isn’t money ‘for constitutional purposes’? What the hell?
UK tells Apple it has to create a backdoor in all its encryption on all customers, around the world, for use by the UK at any time, and it isn’t allowed to tell anyone. The UK seems to think that merely not offering encryption in the UK is insufficient – Apple must still put a global backdoor into all encryption so the UK can use it. Apple has said they will refuse. Google didn’t say whether it had received a similar order, but denied that they had put in any backdoor.
Something can be overwhelmingly popular in a Democracy, be very simple to implement, be endorsed by 100% of experts, and yet continue not to happen anyway.
It’s so absurd. The Prime Minister wants them gone too. Of course, these trade barriers don’t actually make any more or less sense than trade barriers between the USA and Canada, but here it’s that much harder be confused about it.
The Boolean Illusion
There is a general tendency, closely related to people’s failure to understand Levels of Friction, to assume that all things must be either Allowed or Not Allowed. The instinct tells us that not only All Slopes are Slippery and that people eventually can Solve For the Equilibrium, which are approximately true, but that you will always very quickly end up at the bottom of them, which is usually false.
Thus a certain class of person keeps making the mistake illustrated here:
That is certainly one way it could go, but it probably won’t. There’s lots of unprincipled situations like this where such behavior does not escalate. Civilization would not survive if every time someone successfully violated a norm or got away with something, the norm or law involved de facto went away.
Also, in this particular case, Biden paid a steep price to his reputation. History, assuming we are around to tell it, will remember him in large part for the way he chose to leave, and this will for a while be a headwind for Democrats at the ballot box, and state law still exists.
Similarly, there’s no reason that a certain amount of ignoring court orders has to mean that all court orders are meaningless, or various other ‘end of democracy’ scenarios. It can escalate very quickly, and may yet do so. Or it might not.
The broader point is more important, though, which is that an exception weakens a rule but in no way must break it. It can lead to that, but often it doesn’t, without any ‘good reason’ why.
Nobody Wants This
The reasons people give you for things are often fake, in the sense of not being a True Objection. Needless to say, I deal with this a lot.
Yep, fake reasons are all over the place, including reasons we give to ourselves. They can be ‘good’ fake reasons, or even true partial reasons, that could plausibly have been the real reason or that even are real reasons but not full or sufficient explanations and thus not true objections and not cruxes. Or they can be ‘bad’ fake reasons, that are Obvious Nonsense or are straight up lies. Or anything in between.
Here are the most important notes that come to mind on what to do about this:
We Technically Didn’t Start the Fire
There were recently some rather epic fires in Los Angeles.
Many aspects of those fires don’t fall under this blog’s perview.
Others do.
So while these may not be the most important aspect of the fires, that’s also why the wise man does not rely on us as your only source of news.
One fun aspect of these fires is that State Farm specifically declined to renew fire insurance coverage in exactly the most impacted areas, because the insurance company thought there was too much fire risk and they weren’t allowed to raise prices.
That is some killer risk management, by a mutual insurance company that doesn’t have shareholders. For which of course various people are mad at State Farm rather than suddenly being very curious about the other areas where State Farm wasn’t interested in renewing coverage.
It is a good thing that I actively prefer not to be at the nicest parties. Please don’t make me go to those parties.
Here’s why State Farm had to stop writing policies, because it turns out ‘because prices were capped and the expected value of the policies was negative’ isn’t quite a full explanation.
Or rather, that was the short version, here’s the long one.
This sounds like State Farm got pushed well past what would be my breaking point. It was willing to write losing (minus expected value, or -EV) policies for a while, but when you’re already underwater and they say no rate increases at all? Okay. Bye.
And yes, if you have a state ‘insurer of last resort’ that moves in and charges artificially low rates in exactly the places private insurance won’t touch, I hope that you know what will happen after that, rather than this being me having some news. As in this 2024 post calling this a ‘ticking time bomb.’ Boom.
So what does the state plan to do about the fires? Why, of course.
What will happen now after the fires?
Biden decided to send everyone involved a one-time $770 payment. We’re sorry we burned down your village? Yishan says this reflect the government being unable to provide basic relief supplies and imagining private entities doing it, but that seems fine? As long as you don’t then ‘ban price gouging.’
People will try to rebuild their homes.
I say try, not because they won’t have the money, or because we don’t know how to do that. I say try because there will be a shortage of Officially Approved Labor to rebuild with especially with crackdowns on immigration, and because building houses is not something taken kindly to in Los Angeles.
I also say try because:
Oh, price gouging protections. So much for supply.
Well, at least we get rid of some of the extra stupid rules, that part will help. In other cases, of course, they’re still effectively blocking almost all home construction with that same ‘bureaucratic red tape’ that he seemingly can suspend at any time.
Would it hold up in court? Maybe not, but you have to try.
Alternative suggestions anyone? How’s it look?
Nah.
And because, if your home is no longer ‘conforming to applicable zoning’ you will need to fix that and then go through the entire permit process over again:
This is of course a great opportunity to upzone that area and build more. Not that they have any intention of taking advantage of that.
I did a fact check of Scott Adams claims here, and so many of them were false or unsupported I deleted the analysis – no, it doesn’t cost more to build a new house than it is worth, especially when you have to work so hard to get permission to build it. But yes, we should expect a labor shortage, and for permitting to delay things by 2+ years when you can’t rebuild exactly the same house within code and get a waiver, and 5+ years in at least 10% of cases. And the property tax resets could get ugly due to previous abuse of Proposition 13, although I won’t shed a tear there.
Elon Musk speculates that this ‘might finally spell doom for the Coastal Commission,’ haha no that is not how any of this works, this is California.
If you’d rather sell your home for what the market will bear right now?
Oh, we cannot have that.
I believe that technically, what you can’t do is make an offer that is too low. You can accept whatever offer you want? So the market can still function, it’s just weird.
And indeed, I think it would be fine to say that you need to first get an IoI (indicator of interest) from the potential seller fully unprompted, to avoid what Kendric describes above. It’s somewhat tricky to get it right, but seems doable.
Noah Smith suggests less deciding which particular carbon emissions or other scapegoats to try and blame this on and more preparing for future fires, pointing out some of the lowest hanging of fruit on that.
If we are playing the blame game, one thing to blame is that under CEQA, the California Bonus Double NEPA, wildfire mitigation projects must undergo years-long environmental reviews, often involving litigation.
It should be mind numbingly obvious that wildfire mitigation projects should be immune from CEQA and NEPA review. But forget it, kid. It’s California.
And we’ve saved the stupidest executive order for last.
Well, yes, obviously. There will be a non-zero number of places that are slightly above $10k, that will now rent for $10k plus bribes or similar. But then there are lots of places that were already well over $10k, which will sit idle during the emergency, which in turn drives up the prices of everything else during that time, and means a lot of people are forced out entirely. Oh well. Who could have seen that coming?
Finally, here’s the ultimate Gavin Newsom Tweet, except for its lack of restrictions on prices.
Good News, Everyone
Vitalik Buterin is right. You can just go back to 2013-era morality where free speech, starting companies and making good products, democracy and cosmopolitan humanitarian values are good, and monopolies, vendor lock-in, greed and oppressing people are bad.
There are obvious issues with Picardian morality, for example it thinks it’s good that we age and die, it has big scope sensitivity issues and it doesn’t know how to handle realistic AGI or various other utility monsters or other inconvenient scenarios (obvious examples: The Borg, if you don’t have Q or plot armor on your side, but it’s a very broad category, and if they’d successfully figured out how to mass produce Data all philosophical and practical hell would have broken loose). One could say it doesn’t work out of distribution, and it also isn’t that competitive in a future universe where the Federation keeps getting almost wiped out, which doesn’t seem great. But yeah, pretty great.
Important words of wisdom:
That’s exactly right. You present a better face partly because it’s nice, partly because people adjust expectations for the fact that you are likely putting on a better face.
The worst part about this is it leads to far too few gatherings. If you were to have friends over and act otherwise almost totally normally, that would be a clear win. But you think ‘if I did that I’d have to do all this work and clean up and so on.’ So you don’t invite them, and everyone loses.
You can have a fast food burger meal for the low, low cost of 20 minutes of your life, says Bryan Johnson. The obvious clarification question is ‘relative to what other choice?’
Let’s say it is true. If that’s the price of eating unhealthy, I expect most people would say screw it, that’s really not very much time. If people thought like this, I bet they’d eat a lot more fast food burgers, not less. The reason that’s a mistake isn’t that people care that much about the 20 minutes. It’s that they also spend what time they still have in worse shape and feeling worse. That’s the pitch that will far more often work.
On regret, I’ve found my instincts on ‘will I inherently regret not doing this’ are spot on and most people’s seem to be as well:
That’s distinct from predicting a good result or knowing what we will regret if we actually do it, which we are far less good at doing. But we’re very good at knowing when we’re in a ‘if I don’t try I’ll regret it’ situation, especially in scenarios where if you don’t do it, you never know how it would have gone.
I do think you should give this a lot of weight when you get a strong ‘I will regret [X] or ~[X] but not the other one’ instinct, especially if you’ve trained your predictions of this on results.
A similar lesson is to put substantial weight on ‘story value.’
The classic form of this mistake is to avoid taking a risk, but to actually then feel worse than if you’d taken the risk and failed. The fully classic version, of course, is asking someone out or saying yes to someone else, or applying for a job, where even if you get rejected it’s better than always wondering. And you never know.
Old popular Neel Nanda post on making close friends. It’s full of obvious things like actually talking to people about things you both find exciting, filtering quickly, asking what you want, following up and so on, that are obvious when you say them but that you definitely weren’t doing, or weren’t doing enough (see More Dakka). Consciously having Friendship Building Questions in your queue is the most non-obvious thing here, and seems wise, but am I going to actually do it?
If you pay attention to details, it’s easy to sense which people are happy to be there. I think this is true when no one is working hard to fool you. But then Defender further claims it’s ‘near impossible to fake being genuine,’ and points to the fact that great actors try to really believe they are a given role. But people can do that performatively in real life too, to act as if, and yes I think it often remains fake.
A Well Deserved Break
A very good theory of different types of exhaustion needing different types of rest.
The principle seems strongly correct. You don’t need generic ‘rest’ or ‘to relax’ or ‘a vacation.’ You need to address whatever your particular issue is, however you in particular address it. I don’t match up with every solution proposed here, but most of them make sense.
Also, there’s a type #6, which is actual physical exhaustion? Where the solution is, as you would expect physical rest.
And I think type #7 also exists, a mental exhaustion where you’re just out of thoughts. Your thoughts aren’t racing, the issue isn’t choices, it’s just you’re out of compute. For me #4 solutions or a walk work reasonably here, but so does TV or a movie.
Walking in particular works well for me in many cases. It can help with #4, but I actually really like it for #2 or #5 or #7 too, you pick some music (or a podcast if you have a relaxing one available in context) and you go. And if it’s choice exhaustion or being out of thoughts, I have a standard ‘The Hits’ list of 400+ songs and I just randomly spin to some position in it.
I have other random notes, but I’ll wrap up there.
Opportunity Knocks
Bryan Johnson, whose plan is Don’t Die, is hiring for Blueprint, or at least he was, and offers an update.
For Your Entertainment
The ‘five-star controversy for the three-star film’ that is Emilia Perez. The real problem with Emilia Perez is that it simply is not very good, as audiences agreed. They made an awards show darling of it anyway for obvious cultural reasons, but now even those cultural reasons have turned against it, it’s on the ‘wrong side of history.’ The best part is remembering that we used to have to care about such things, and now we get to sit back and laugh at them, and hopefully have a better film win the Oscars.
My other observation for the month is that I clearly don’t rewatch movies often enough versus seeing new ones – when I do revisit the average experience is miles better. Thus there’s more 5-star ratings on my Letterboxd than the bell curve would suggest, but it’s all selection effects. That has diminishing returns, but I’m nowhere near them. Consider whether you are making the same mistake.
I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets
Good news, we also have at least a test flight of a supersonic jet!
The press was absurdly uninterested in the flying of a supersonic jet. NYT and WaPo both reportedly told Boom to come back when they were actually flying passengers. This seems like rather bigger news than that?
That same price, from the business flyer’s perspective, is of course $0. And in a world where many people charge hundreds to thousands of dollars an hour for their time, if you can cut 5 hours off a flight, ‘the sky’s the limit’ is a reasonable description of the ticket prices you can charge for business flights booked on short notice.
Supersonic travel would also highlight the need to lighten airport security and on-ground transit times, as the flight itself would be a much smaller portion of time spent.
The only problem? We banned supersonic flight. We have to make it legal. Elon Musk has promised to fix it. Manifold says 26% chance this gets done within the year.
And here’s a report on Waymo in Phoenix, with many starting to use it as their go-to taxi service, with the biggest barrier that Waymos obey the law and thus are modestly slower than Ubers. And the most killer app of all is perhaps that society will let children take a Waymo alone?
This is huge. Many parents have to effectively structure their entire non-work lives around providing transportation to children, because our society has gone completely bonkers and if you let children do on their own what they used to do all the time, the cops might get called. This fixes some of that.
In the medium-term this will be highly pro-natalist, especially if the threshold age becomes relatively young.
My understanding is that the current limiting factor on Waymo is purely their ability to manufacture the cars. Right now all of this is coming from only about 700 cars. Alas, they seem uninterested in providing details to allow us to chart their growth.
Sports Go Sports
The ACC is considering engaging in hardcore shenanigans with its title game to try and secure more spots in the College Football Playoff. Possibilities include having the regular season winner skip the game since they’d probably be in anyway, to try and secure a second slot. That would be an overtly hostile act and also ruin the actual conference season and championship, and I would presume the committee and also everyone else would do its best to retaliate.
Their other suggestion, however, is to have a semifinal the week before the championship game. That isn’t only not shenanigans, that’s awesome, and we should be all for it. Conference semifinals seem great, especially now that fully deserving teams who lost in the semis could be in the playoff anyway.
It’s weird to see a football player get a tattoo of Matthew 23:12 (Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted) and then point to it after a touchdown on national television. What are you trying to say?
The Mets seem to have won the hot stove league, as they resign Pete Alonso to a two-year, $54 million deal. We were always talking price, and we successfully held out for the right one. OMG, LFGM. Nixon says we’re still one bat and two relievers short.
Meanwhile, Juan Soto has the goal of ‘stay exactly the same,’ sounds good to me.
So yeah, what the hell was up with that Doncic trade to the Lakers for Davis? Nate Silver treats it as an example of a lemon market, where there’s clearly something wrong with Doncic, and the Mavericks had a reason they didn’t want to keep him on a ax contract.
Tyler Cowen instead treats this as evidence the economics of basketball have changed, noting that Doncic was causing trouble and not fun to be around, and the whole point of choosing to own an NBA team is that it is fun. There is something to that, but you know what else isn’t fun? When the entire fanbase predictably turns against you, the owner.
Seth Burn has a different proposal. Texas isn’t playing ball with the Mavericks. Perhaps this was a bribe to the Lakers and the NBA so they would greenlight a move to Las Vegas? Thus the word coming down to focus all talk on the Lakers. Seth also notes that this makes Luka ineligible for a Supermax contract, which costs him $116 million dollars, which goes right into cap space. As Seth says, given that incentive, you’d think every otherwise supermax-eligible player would get traded – if everyone knows that’s why you’re doing it, you should be able to put together a win-win deal. However, this very obviously wasn’t that, and ownership signed off for some reason.
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
Ondrej Strasky concludes from Artifact’s failure that if you can’t teach the game in five minutes, you’re doomed. I asked about DoTA and LoL, and was told that people consider the ‘click random buttons’ version to be ‘learned the game’ so it’s fine, and the other argument was path dependence, if you have existing buy-in you can push through it. Whereas I didn’t feel like the five minute explanation let me have fun or meaningfully play.
I think there’s certainly a big weight on ‘you’re having fun within five minutes’ but clearly it’s not strictly necessary, given Magic: The Gathering, and also many single player games. Anyone remember Final Fantasy X? Great game once you get into it but you literally don’t make a decision for the first 40 minutes. Many such cases. But I suppose during those 40 minutes you aren’t overwhelmed or confused either. Maybe that’s the actual lesson, that you can’t have people confronting the complexity for more than five minutes in a way they notice? And people who don’t want it can just durdle in the dark for a while and maybe restart later.
Elon Musk has now formally confessed to cheating in Path of Exile 2. And then he bragged about the character he was cheating with anyway. Pathetic.
My journey with Path of Exile 2 is that it’s been some relaxing ‘more Path of Exile’ but that it has also been frustrating. The boss fights are not easy, and they often take a long time, and several feel like DPS checks. And the grinds in areas are very large, even relatively early. So overall, it’s… fine, I guess.
Original Final Fantasy programmer Nasir Gebelli says writing his legendary code “was pretty simple” and it could even be better. Good times, man.
It seems only 40% of players of Civilization VI ever finished even one game, hence the emphasis in Civilization VII on individual ages. They are talking as if it involves catch-up mechanics, which I’m mostly not a fan of in these contexts. Let it snowball, start another game and so on.
I also agree that the threshold win conditions tend to take the fun out of the endgame. You’re building a civilization, and then you steadily pivot into sacrificing everything in pursuit of some specific goal, everything else doesn’t matter. Or you’re going about your business and suddenly ‘oh Babylon got X culture points, game’s over, you lose.’
While this is looking to be in some senses highly realistic as we speedrun in real life towards the real scientific victory condition of AGI (well probably everyone-loses condition, given how we’re going about it) and most board games have the same issue, I’d like to minimize this and keep everything mattering as long as possible, and also avoid invisible-to-you events you don’t interact with like ‘Babylon got X culture points’ effectively being like someone else built ASI and converted you with nanobots.
Steam emphasizes its ban on in-game ads, including optional ads that provide rewards. You can still have in-universe ads and such. Good for Valve.
The Lighter Side
You’re ngmi if you don’t realize that this is indeed hilarious:
Would it have better historic event if the vote said yes, or if it said no?
The vote said yes, with a 10% gap in value for approval. This likely highlights an issue with Futarchy: It’s using Evidential Decision Theory (EDT). The 10% gap is mostly because the DAO that approves this is the superior DAO.
Oh, sure they can. Try them.
We have an announcement.