"Transgender mice" was never about transgenic mice, as far as I can tell (and confirmed by Claude[1]). They were studies about the health effects of hormone therapy (for gender care or otherwise), which used mice as their model organism. Doubling down is the correct response.
Response
Searched the web
Here's the background:
The origin: In March 2025, during a joint address to Congress, President Trump claimed the federal government (via DOGE cuts) had exposed $8 million in NIH funding "for making mice transgender," citing it as an example of wasteful spending.
What the underlying research actually was: The claim referenced six NIH grants, and all six actually focused on the safety of various hormone treatments rather than on whether it was possible to make mice transgender — the studies looked at how hormone therapy affects things like breast cancer risk, HIV vaccine response, asthma symptoms, and fertility. NIH funds these hormone-therapy experiments in mice to determine how sex hormones affect humans undergoing gender-affirming care, as well as people with conditions like endometriosis, infertility, and certain cancers. ForbesScienceadvancement
The "transgender" vs. "transgenic" confusion: Many people initially assumed the term was a misquote of the scientific term "transgenic mice" (genetically modified mice), but researchers themselves actually used the term "transgendered" in their own publications — so it wasn't purely a media/political mix-up, though critics argued the framing ("making mice transgender") mischaracterized the research goal.
The dollar figure grew over time: The claim didn't stay at $8 million. A watchdog group, White Coat Waste Project, had earlier claimed the government "wasted" over $10 million on "transgender mice and monkeys" research, then later claimed spending had reached "a quarter-billion and counting" on transgender animal experiments. Later reporting from the group cited to the Washington Times put active NIH grants at 26 projects totaling $64 million. Washington Times
Fact-checker back-and-forth: CNN initially declared Trump's $8 million claim false, saying reporters couldn't find the research, but hours later had to retract and acknowledge the $8 million figure was accurate, while still saying the claim needed context. Washington Times
Aftermath: Following the speech, NIH terminated at least 14 additional grants focused on transgender human health research, and placed seven employees from its former Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office on administrative leave. This became part of a broader pattern of NIH funding cuts to LGBTQ-related research under the administration. One case — a UC San Diego transgender mice study — has continued to draw legal and political attention, including being reinstated under court order and drawing a FOIA lawsuit from an animal-testing watchdog group.
So in short: the "transgender mice" phrase is real (used by the researchers themselves), but it referred to legitimate hormone-therapy safety studies, not literal attempts to change mice's gender identity — the political framing simplified genuine biomedical research into a viral "government waste" talking point, whose dollar figures kept escalating across different reports.
My go to karaoke song, by the way, is Bohemian Rhapsody.
Ok, so that leaves 3 possibilities. What's the breakdown between them?
It’s a quiet week so let’s do the monthly right on schedule.
Table of Contents
Bad News
I wouldn’t have explained or modeled it quite the way Paola does here but the principle seems right to me. If people don’t trust you, or don’t trust people in general, that usually you can’t trust them either.
Naked Capitalism considers The Hypersociality Hypothesis, which is the latest take on the cluster of things that includes Moral Mazes and The Inner Ring, with link back to my old post from 2021 about Why I Am Not In Charge of the CDC.
This variation is that there is everywhere a clique of people who are:
These people then form what I have called The Implicit Coalition, the alliance of all of those who are focused on advancing in the hierarchy (which he calls Pursuing The Main Chance) and rewarding alliance membership and punish all non-members, or what C.S. Lewis calls The Inner Ring. By default any organization gets increasingly taken over and run by this group over time, and they control many social perceptions including most shifts in various versions of the Overton window.
I think of these descriptions as different Fake Frameworks grasping at the same underlying elephant.
Some actually practical DoorDash discourse (full post coming eventually) comes from Justin Wolfers, who compares various methods of ordering and the relative prices. Search costs are indeed high. If you’re doing a one-off order after which you’d get amnesia, comparison shopping or trying to track down restaurant websites is probably not worth it, and you end up paying quite a lot.
Wolfers suggests better price transparency, up front in the process, and especially on markups. I can get behind that, to reduce search costs, although on average it won’t save customers money because prices will adjust.
The reasons we check the prices anyway are primarily two-fold.
The Inside Story of Leverage Research 1.0 by Lydia Laurenson is out. This is a bizarre story, told in meticulous detail. Many found it interesting. Opinions on how well the article’s presentation of the facts emphasizes the right things are mixed but there is agreement that the facts are broadly accurate. Oliver Habryka claims in particular that, as crazy as the story is as written, even more craziness is importantly left out and this changes the overall takeaway a lot.
JD Vance, the person most likely to be our next president, is loudly being rather ignorant and terrible on economics in his new book, outright calling to not think economically. Given what we know about him, this is a conscious decision by Vance. To be fair, the book’s main topic is Catholic conversion, and the Pope while good on ethics is far worse than Vance on economics, although in entirely different ways.
Good Advice
Use air conditioning and also heating. The exact optimal number doubtless varies by person and task, but we can easily simplify it by ‘not super hot and not super cold.’
If you are very intelligent, beware getting caught too permanently in some worthless rabbit hole. You have to pick a useful rabbit hole.
I heartily endorse grocery store tourism and enjoy it far more than most of the traditional tourist activities.
Don’t invest your political capital in sketchy people, as Nate Silver says, for a broad definition of both political capital and sketchy. If you know someone is sketchy, there is more sketchiness, and yes the leopard will also be inclined to eventually eat your face. It is almost always worse than you know.
New York versus San Francisco as something similar to sexual orientation. One might say that if you care more about things other than vibes, and focus on vibes vibes you the wrong way, then the San Francisco vibes will be off.
The best way I know how to describe it, as a pure New Yorker: I am safe in the coven of Lighthaven, but when I step outside of it I am attacked by paradox spirits.
Opportunity Knocks
Roots of Progress Institute is hiring a Head of Communications and a Program Manager.
GiveWell expects to direct >$800 million in 2026, more over time, and is hiring program officers at $200k-$300k, remote, US and international.
While I Cannot Condone This
Stolen fries taste better, and the more risk you take to covertly steal them the better they taste, up to 39% better. This included perceived saltiness, crispiness and intensity. Guilt was positively associated with enjoyment. Love it.
Yes, regular people really are bizarre enough that these questions are worth asking. Often they just go with pretty much anything.
I do understand how to be in the ‘don’t care at all’ mode, and turning your brain off like that has its advantages, it can be thrilling and I definitely don’t kink shame, but maybe it shouldn’t be a 24/7 experience with no safe words?
There are quite a lot of places you can live without ever getting bored, and relatedly also many places you can indefinitely visit or hang out in. The idea that one would spend a week and think ‘oh I guess that’s all Tokyo, Osaka, London, Rome, Paris or York City (or pretty much anywhere a lot of people father) has to offer since I’m not a niche food traveller’ is rather absurd. You might run out of ‘completely standard high-level non-food tourist activities’ but if that’s your measure you are Doing It Wrong. My pick is still to stay home, but that’s largely because I can hang out indefinitely and oh look, I am already here.
Wait, you think the context is a negative?
If you’re not willing to embrace ‘low-status TV’ on the level of something as cool as Rick and Morty, you’re not going to make it.
An argument for Substack as a valid place to Do Philosophy rather than purely relying on journals. As you would expect, I approve. Journal-based philosophy seems entirely unappealing. I especially buy the argument that our best and most influential works of philosophy all look super different from a journal article, and different from each other.
How does a high decoupler deal with a community of low decouplers? The answer involves engaging with such people on their own terms, and knowing what moves absolutely will make the situation worse. You can and must both be a high decoupler, and still notice the couplings that others will draw. Sometimes that means you can’t get the central thing done, and you need to be okay with that.
One way to catch a remarkable amount of fraud is, as Patrick McKenzie suggests, to ‘sort by amount received’ and forward that to the fraud department. Allowing pension spiking and other ‘technically legal’ cheats is also everywhere a policy choice.
Good News, Everyone
Ramadan fasting does not do substantial harm to chess performance. As someone who will often do similar intermittent fasting, I find this as well. If you are used to skipping meals, then it does not impair you.
Ukraine allocates ‘e-points’ to brigades based on casualties and damage they inflict on Russia. Those points can then be cashed in to purchase new systems directly from manufacturers. This is in addition to the many other changes discussed in the article. America’s military takes a decade to fill a precise purchase order, whereas Ukraine has each brigade act like a scrappy startup that ships. One problem is, if you are not in a shooting war, then if you order up a bunch of drones or other things now then by the time you use them they are probably obsolete.
For Your Entertainment
Keanu Reeves reveals his next movie, and I cannot imagine being more in.
Sriram Krishnan is a big fan of The Odyssey. I will see it tomorrow and report back.
Until then, The Invite is my first 5-star movie of the year, as usual see it as blind as possible.
Movie genre preferences shift as you age, towards drama, romance and war, and away from everything else especially fantasy, animation and horror.
The time preference is also clear.
My hunch remains that a lot of this is selection effects. If you’re watching movies many years after release, you’re selecting the good movies. And these graphs only have a range of about 0.6 on a 0-5 scale, so the effects are big but not out of line with that.
My ‘top rated decades’ on Letterboxd, where I started logging in December 2023, are 1990s (3.91) and 2000s (3.72), then 1980s (3.14). Recent years do worse: 2024 (3.10), 2025 (2.95) and 2026 (2.96), and I’m confident a large portion of that is selection effects.
Karaoke tastes have shifted forward to focus on the 2000s, which seems like a clear mistake in general. I definitely underproduce, and underconsume, karaoke, but I would hope we could more often travel further back into the past.
My go to karaoke song, by the way, is Bohemian Rhapsody.
I strongly agree that we need to return to producing TV shows that run 22 episodes in a season and produce a season every year. There is so, so much value in high volume and spending lots of time with the characters, including filler episodes, even if average quality suffers. It encourages building rich worlds that you want to live in, rather than going quickly through a particular story, which also helps build for future seasons.
The other problem is that the second season is de facto gated behind the first one, so you’re going to see a big drop almost no matter what.
Complex Systems podcast on the YouTube creator ecosystem.
We should very obviously allow, and also encourage, high status people to be weird in ways that bring them joy and other forms of utility, including in ways you would not want to be adopted by the broader culture, or that aren’t for most people including you, or that fail if not done with great care and a lot of work. Indeed, those who pull this off should if anything be raised in status.
There is an amount of scaling of behaviors at which you need to worry about the contagion effects of assigning too much status to behaviors most people should not be emulating, to the point of considering lowering the status of high-profile such folks. That level has to be very high before it becomes a dominating factor, but it is real.
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
PlayStation will end selling of physical discs for new games in January 2028. There is a vocal minority that wants physical copies, often due to fear of content being taken away. While that does happen, the decay rate in value of games is severe and revocations are very rare. In practice this is fine.
PlayStation is also closing the PlayStation store on PS3 by July 2027. They promise to allow downloads of purchased content ‘for the foreseeable future.’
Magic sounds like it has continued its evolution away from simple cards, ‘feel bads’ and ways to change what matters and limit the opponents’ gameplay, and towards complex cards with lots of text and competing snowball effects. I continue to think this change is for the worse.
The correlation between chess Elo and general intelligence is only ~0.25, or up to ~0.35 for young cohorts. Effort and interest matter a ton. My presumption is that chess potential, conditional on effort, is much more g-loaded.
Claim I saw: The new generations don’t really ‘game’ at all, not at scale. When they do ‘game’ usually they use things like Roblox that are endless multiplayer slop machines without off ramps, and now everyone wants a Roblox clone. The ‘game’ part is terrible but few seem to care.
I think most game time going to old games is great for players. Why not play games that have stood the test of time, are fully finished and expanded, and probably a lot cheaper? The best games will be evergreen. Alas, it is bad for the business model.
The good news is that the best local or singleplayer digital gaming experiences are still there, and mostly far easier to access than they used to be. You can return.
There is much more at the link.
There are those who speculate that the future is AI-generated customized games on demand. I think mostly this is not the case at least for a while. Playing a hand crafted game that matches a fixed experience is far more satisfying on many levels.
I think Deepfates point is well taken. There is a great need to create and build in interactive ways, so if we take that away in the real world, if we don’t even easily let kids physically visit each other, then they will need some sort of ‘virtual world’ substitute, no matter how slopified.
I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
You either die the anti-regulatory hero or grow the business enough to become the villain, many such cases.
Also, the blind are not the primary reason to want self-driving cars everywhere, but they are one very good reason, and if that’s what it takes then your offer is acceptable.
If I was Uber, I would not obviously be that keen to force Waymo temporarily into offering their services on Uber or Lyft. That is good for short term business, as you can seek rent, but that is direct marketing to your best customers. What happens in three years?
Nor do I think they would have much chance at making this permanent. Once people experience Waymo, they become advocates, and the ‘safety’ concerns quickly die out.
It is not looking good for DC’s presumed new mayor allowing Waymo, including the demand that not reduce rideshare jobs.
Sports Go Sports
The ‘right’ answer is clearly around 4.5, except that football is weird and its points are scored more than one at a time. If you get to 114, you’ve gone too far.
America still sucks at futbol, it turns out. We handled the group stage but the moment we had a Worthy Opponent with real stakes we fell apart. Why do we suck? The obvious reason is that we send our best talent to football, basketball and baseball.
Another is that in other countries, a talented 14-year-old is earning money playing, whereas in America he’s costing five figures in club fees. You can play casual soccer cheaply but that’s not a way to get good.
Antisocial Media
A jury found Meta and Google liable for ‘social media addiction.’
This was, let’s face it, deeply stupid, and if it held up it would go to very bad places. Adam Thierer here predicts a wave of lawsuits against players large and small. I instead predict and hope that juries are stupid, and this gets reversed on appeal, or that Congress steps in to fix this, although it would likely extract some stupid price like age restricting social media access along all the damage that comes with, or that some way to create a liability shield is found moving forward. Meta and Google have indeed both filed their appeals.
Discord to restrict account access unless you
let your ID get stolenupload your ID.Government Working
The UK is moving to ban children from using VPNs, as in you have to use ID to use a VPN, although for now this was voted down. This would be rather high on the ‘you were warned you are now living in a police state’ and ‘are we the baddies’ scales. It also presumably won’t fully work, since VPN providers are not especially interested in respecting such rules, but most people especially on a phone are not going to be that resourceful in getting around barriers, the same way that the Great Firewall of China is easy to overcome if you care a lot but hard enough to overcome that most people don’t do it.
The new EU policy of applying customs duties to tiny e-commerce parcels is remarkably close to a de facto ban on such small parcels. Some might say the system is working as designed.
<Simpsons voice> Emergency, a middle aged trillionaire is losing faith in democracy.
Someone is attempting to community note Derek Thompson, saying Elon Musk didn’t say poor people shouldn’t vote, which is technically true, he said by implication that takers shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Very different, of course.
Jones Act Watch
The Jones Act waiver worked to the extent things were waived, more stats are in.
Speaker of the House can only get 52 GOP signatories for a Jones Act waiver revocation request. More than half of the 52 are in districts with at least one ‘Jones Act beneficiary company’ which is code for rent seeker.
This is how it was covered by the Washington Post, seems fair:
The bottom line on the Jones Act continues to be that it is supposed to be a tradeoff of accepting higher costs to get shipbuilding capacity and maritime crews, but we’ve run the experiment and all it did was destroy all three.
Highly Effective Altruism
I am highly excited by this project, spending $500 million to solve respiratory infections, in particular via either broad-spectrum preventatives or air cleaning technologies.
These are clearly highly neglected areas with huge upside, where technological solutions seem highly feasible. Even in ‘normal mode’ we lose an average of weeks per year to such things, and every now and then there’s a pandemic, potentially in the future an AI-enabled engineered pandemic or worse.
I would not say this is my top use of $500 million, but it is vastly better than almost all uses of $500 million. Excellent show all around.
Yes and no. Preventing what is next might be far more important, but common colds and flus really are a big deal.
Variously Effective Altruism
The race is on to figure out ways to quickly and wisely deploy donations from Anthropic and OpenAI employees, who are collectively going to be giving out at least tens of billions. A lot of that money is going to be deployed according to Effective Altruist (EA) principles, for a variety of traditional and non-traditional cause areas.
The linked story centers on Lighthaven, which has become the gathering point for many who seek to make this new source of money go well, including many of those who will soon be sources of that money.
My worry is that by default a lot of that money is routed and captured by the semi-formal EA ecosystem, mostly in ways that are not so relevant to my interests, and thus in my view to varying degrees effectively wasted and also rather distortionary. With little time to think about what to do with the money, the default is looking for donor advisors like those written about in the article. And that a lot of the rest will get blindly shoved out the door into far worse institutional structures.
The worst case is that a lot of it is not only wasted but is effectively eaten by predators, similar to how things work in the existing broad philanthropic ecosystem.
FTX was operating in a mode one might call griftmaxxing. Everything about them screamed ‘come over here and grift.’ So that was a worst case scenario. But the default case is pretty bad as well. I think it was largely good that we didn’t try to optimize for this event too hard or too far in advance.
But yes, this level of money is inevitably blood in the water, and there is nothing that is going to fully stop this train.
I am working a few angles to try and improve the situation as best I can, to help ensure that people make good decisions according to their own priorities, world model and values, and yes I stand ready to help the new donors figure things out if they ask.
In the past I’ve participated in what are now four rounds of the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and I hope that related mechanisms can help, as well as hoping that I can apply what I learned directly during that process.
Build a better game. It’s a rough assignment. This level of money flooding in breaks basically every existing related group and institution’s ability to process the necessary information and manage the incentives.
I worry the most about the risks to the high-trust epistemic and social environments that I and others can currently rely upon in such places.
I very much want to avoid a version of this happening to me, which is one reason I am determined to keep my primary focus on the blog and avoid this kind of ‘direct’ optimization. I would love a $10+ million personal check and have ideas on how to use one, but am determined not to spend (almost) any optimization pressure seeking one.
These dangers are especially severe in the space of mitigating AI existential risk, where it is very easy for money to go to things that waste time without helping, or even become actively counterproductive. That is indeed my primary cause area, and that of many at Anthropic. The whole Anthropic shtick is recognizing that AI is going to get super powerful and might kill everyone.
If anything, it is remarkable that so much Anthropic money might flow to anything else. Even if you care about (for example) animal welfare, if you work at Anthropic you should understand that the way to improve animal welfare is to first make AI go well, as if it doesn’t things turn out badly for the animals too, and if it goes well then making things go well for animals should be easy.
That doesn’t mean entirely give up on funding good things in other spaces, but such considerations seem secondary.
26 minute video on the fight against malaria.
Ineffective Altruism
How should we measure MacKenzie Scott’s charitable giving?
Depending on your point of view, you might see MacKenzie Scott as having done a lot of good, or having tried and failed to do a lot of good, or as having done great harm, or as trying and failing to have done a lot of harm.
What you think depends on how you think about the typical cause areas she funds, how effective you believe she has been in either encouraging the growth of such fields, making them more parasitic or making them more effective, and what you think this does to the world at large.
What you definitely cannot do is say ‘well she did not directly save that many lives.’ That is true, but missing the point. She wasn’t trying to do that. You can’t ignore the actual impacts she had, whether or not you like them.
If your methodology says MacKenzie Scott can be summarized as ‘inefficient’ on this basis, then your system of evaluation does not work and you need a new one.
I do agree that if your goal is purely to spend money to advance short term global health and QALYs, GiveWell has a reasonable case, and MacKenzie Scott does not.
It is fine to say ‘it is unfortunate that MacKenzie Scott did not prioritize global health and short term QALY impact’ but that would require a very different phrasing. I too am not prioritizing short term global health in my charitable activities, although I respect those that do.
Prediction Markets
Kalshi reports George Santos to authorities for playing well, as in saying he would attend the State of the Union, then betting on himself to not attend, then not attending.
They want to call this ‘illegal’ and ‘market manipulation’ instead of ‘lol you bet on a prediction market for George Santos based on his public statements.
I mean, yes, he lied and manipulated the market and also if you were on the other side of these bets then there is a saying about a fool and his money being soon parted, and another about it being a sin to let a sucker keep his money.
The Lighter Side
Self driving… toilets, for people with limited mobility? Imagine how much we can save by not letting our toilets sit idle, with no on sitting on them.
I said no trans.
The best part is she doubles down.
People these days need practical knowledge more than ever.
Italy is going to go to Germany to help make their trains run on time.
From Eric Alper:
Don’t worry, there’s a better way?