AI might not yet be eating the physical world. AI is still eating the world of news, and I am finding less and less opportunity to post about other things. My backlog of items grows across most of my secondary topics and I haven’t had time for any side projects.
The monthly, no matter what, is sacred. We continue.
The story of our time, told once again: Americans are abandoning quite a lot of formerly popular activities, especially hosting at home, as Derek Thompson discussed. Phones and other electronics are in, most things that are not phones are out, with notably rare exceptions.
That last line rules everything around us. And we all spend more time at home, which then exploded during Covid and mostly did not recover afterward.
Derek does discuss the last two lines later on.
You can view exercise classes as an adaptation in four ways: To a lack of other physical activity, to a lack of social activity, to a lack of motivation, and as a wealth effect. Regular people can afford this, and it is a safe way to get things they now lack.
Then there are the concerts. This one is what some call a Narrative Violation. We have this collective story about how in the good old days, like the 1960s, people went to all these great cheap concerts, that was part of the good life, and we’ve gotten away from that. But actually they’re making a quiet comeback despite people getting older and all the competition, and also they are great. On the flip side, they are also ‘free’ actions, in that you don’t have to overcome any social barrier. You can buy a ticket.
Whereas hosting is, as Derek says, a lot of work to set up, often not fun work. If you’re both working, and children now require vastly more time investment because our society went insane there, who has the time and energy to earn the payoff? Parties also require (and help create and maintain) friends, and creating and maintaining those friends takes even more time.
Meanwhile, being alone at home is no longer boring. Being alone at home is great, in the short term.
Derek Thompson: Machines in the last half century have accomplished something stranger. They have made other people less necessary to our leisure. Every generation has acquired better ways to entertain itself without leaving the house. The result is a peculiar triumph of modern abundance: We have built a world in which being alone has never been easier, more comfortable, or more fun. And then we wonder why everybody stopped coming over.
… Is this what we want? At the risk of invoking Clintonian levels of abstruseness, it depends on what “want” means. Everybody might prefer, in the abstract, a world of dinner parties, neighborhood friendships, and spontaneous gatherings. But on any given Wednesday at 7:45pm., it is easier to look at a screen than to host a party; easier to listen to a podcast while doing yoga than to plan a gathering. This is not so much an individual failure as a coordination failure.
There is some coordination failure, but I think this is the wrong central diagnosis. Coordination failure can be overcome, and given the will to do the thing the logistics are far easier today with all our social and communication and logistical tools.
The bigger problem is hyperbolic discounting in the face of the new alternatives. In order to get the returns from social activity, you have to invest energy and effort now, and also endure some mild social awkwardness and delay gratification and tolerate some boredom now, and often do things for someone else, in order to build up your friendship and other networks and get into regular habits.
I’m also guilty of this trap. I don’t socialize enough. I don’t host enough, and I don’t visit enough. I realize this. But it’s tough. There’s too much to do, both for work and for play. In my case I like to think I have a good excuse, but it is still a mistake.
The Men Have Never Been Okay
Institute for Family Studies reports at length on America’s demoralized and lost men. Their central presentation is not that young men have, as Senator Hawley put it, ‘no vision for what it is to be a man,’ or that their vision would be bad and captured by toxic influences. It’s that they do have such a positive vision, and it would be good but they despair of living up to it and do not see a path to getting there. We no longer lay out a simple ‘success sequence’ style strategy where you play by the rules and it does not work even for those without problems, and many have problems. The men are culturally told that, by default, they are worthless and unwanted.
Or is that the real story? There are some strange sets of beliefs reported.
42% think they are failures and 60% feel they have little control. 72% say who you know is more important than hard work, and 49% saying ‘no matter how hard I work, people like me will never achieve the American dream.’
But 84% say they are at least somewhat ambitious and 81% say they can ‘do just about anything I really set my mind to,’ 75% say their opportunities in life will be greater than their parents, and 82% say they have more potential to succeed than people think.
This seems like a lot of very strong framing effects combined with the Revolution of Rising Expectations. The men believe all these things at the same time, in different ways, and you can ‘activate different personas.’ Connections can beat hard work and the deck is stacked against you, but hard work is valid, and if you want it enough and keep your head on straight and resist temptation and despair you can still succeed. But do you want it enough? Can you keep your head on straight and resist temptation and despair?
And can you keep searching for an unknown, rather than for a known, so long as the ultimate odds have not changed so much?
Another way of looking at this is that if you succeed, there was some way in which you got lucky or did something extraordinary. Something individually atypical is part of every typical success story, even more so than in the past. But if you keep pushing, and try to make your own luck, you will probably eventually get lucky.
There are charts and statistics about the usual suspects, like unemployment, depression, disabilities, games, social media, atomization, gambling and pornography.
Social media is not like the others, where ‘once a day’ is considered infrequent.
Over half of young men feel lonely ‘at least some of the time’ but it is kind of weird not to, isn’t it? The right rate of feeling lonely, like many bad things, is not zero.
The report has many other interesting charts. It would be cool to see time lapses.
Mostly I came away from this report feeling better rather than worse, if you don’t think AI will upend everything. Ways exist to be found, at least for now. Remember that throughout history, a huge percentage of men failed to have children. It is not a new situation for men to be tested and have to find a way to prove themselves.
Broadly my current perspective is the men as a group have never been okay. The difference is that we used to sort of think not being okay was fine. Now we don’t.
Frequency of YouTube and TikTok use was associated with lower life satisfaction, which partly can be explained the same way. Here I bet it runs both ways.
There was no association from use of other social technology, which implies other social technology is modestly negative, since it should be positively correlated with friends.
YouTube is changing its short-form algorithm to further prioritize original content, and especially to reduce reach of content ‘re-uploaded from other creators without adding anything of your own.’ I mean, yeah, why is that even allowed?
If you don’t want to wrongspeak, you have two strategies. You can suppress thoughts, or you can suppress words.
Paola: I’m realizing that my ratio of “thoughts that explicitly enter my consciousness mind” to “thoughts I share out loud” must be absolutely crazy relative to the general population. My sense is that agreeable people basically suppress their thoughts as opposed to just their words and it’s at least slightly weird that I’m doing basically 0 thought suppression and a large amount of word suppression.
I was always confused about my levels of agreeableness because I felt like a lot of people saw me as “reasonably agreeable” and people close to me always saw me as “extremely disagreeable” and my self perception was somewhere in the middle.
Astrid Wilde: for what it’s worth i am probably top 5% agreeableness and i just say what i think.
I think Paola is at least directionally right. On reflection I think I have all four modes in the 2×2: suppressing or not suppressing thoughts and also speech. One strives to be in places one can suppress neither, but it is not always possible.
In Western Massachusetts, in the year 2026, there was a lesbian bar still requiring KN-95 masks. They changed Saturday nights to mask optional, and all hell broke loose like it was still 2020: “Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with.” “People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.”
Someone else wished the venue would be firebombed.
Annalisa Quinn: The thread grew to 442 comments, some supportive, but many furious. The people running the bar were accused of being ableist — eugenicist, even — for relaxing their signature policy in the face of what commenters consider an ongoing pandemic (Greenfield hasn’t reported any COVID cases in more than two months).
And then it got worse, or better, I’m not sure which.
Instead of defusing the situation, the apology seemed to make things worse. The bar had erred: it posted an Instagram card without providing alt-text for the visually impaired. This set off a fresh round of accusations of ableism.
“This is not an accessible post,” wrote one user. “It indicates the lack of care or interest in Disability intersectionality.”
It keeps going from there. On the second mask-optional Saturday the dance floor was empty, the hoped-for unmasked customers never came, and the owner ended the night alone on it, still masked.
Merlins Bread: In certain parts of Latin America where it’s difficult to fire people, this is what they do. You clock in to the basement each day, sit in the uncomfortable cold with nothing to do, and clock out. No mobile reception, and you can still be fired for reading a novel on the job or refusing to follow safe work instructions.
This is obviously a terrible deal if you have better options or important work to do, but otherwise? The consensus strategy, of course, is to sleep. You shift your sleep schedule to be from 6am-2pm, learn to sleep either in the chair or on the floor, and that’s it. If you ban sleeping, this turns into the trying-to-get-you-to-quit scenario of Oidashibeya, where we have run the experiment, and some people quit but others do not, depending on their circumstances.
Unfortunately, I briefly checked the subreddit, and most posts there are super lame.
Good News, Everyone
We have an excellent permitting deal, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (S. 5653), if we can get it over the finish line into law. I don’t have time to properly geek out on all the details, but this is a big deal. Even better would be huge sweeping ‘cut the Gordian knot’ changes, but if you’re going to do incremental stuff this would be pretty great.
Halloween not only is not the ‘deadliest day for child pedestrians,’ it is the safest by a huge margin, because everyone knows to watch out for child pedestrians that night. Yes, the absolute number of accidents is higher, but that is because normally we don’t let our children go outside and on Halloween everyone goes outside.
I confirm, based on both personal experience and what I see in others, that Justin Skycak is correct here: High performers start out with an edge that motivates more work with increasing returns to scale, then work more and harder than everyone else, and end up acquiring a vast array of related skills as they climb the entire associated tech tree. You can see it in various places. In sports, where the top players are better at actual everything, including all the tiny details. In media, where high quality things are just high quality across the board, with no limit. And so on.
Excellent short series I wouldn’t count but can confirm (6): 19, 35, 39, 72, 81, 86
In some cases we are pretending later seasons do not exist because they don’t.
True Detective is a weird case, where they’re finally going to make Season 2 soon, and they’re calling it Season 5. Nicolas Cage will star.
Picks I am confident are excellent, but which I cannot fully confirm as I have not seen them, or seen enough of them (9): 3, 16, 27, 32, 50, 58, 73, 74, 96.
That’s already 41 out of 100.
That’s also nine series I am suddenly tempted to watch, that I haven’t, but that I can crack open at any time. Several are because they’re ‘tough watches’ despite greatness. As in, I know Andor is great, but do I actually want to watch Andor? Unclear.
I see a number of picks here that aren’t for me, or that I wouldn’t count for being too short, but only a handful where I could plausibly say, in the abstract, bad pick.
The next question would be, how many are conspicuously missing?
I have 7 Tier 1 TV shows. 5 of the 7 make the list, and the other two are obscure and thus highly forgivable mistake. All the straight dramas on my list make their top 20, including their #1 and #2.
I have 40 Tier 2 TV shows, 30 of which are eligible. Here the list does a lot worse, and only has 10 of them. I’d only call maybe 5 of the remaining 20 objective mistakes, rather than differences of opinion. That illustrates how long is the long tail of television. This did remind me that I have to make some updates here.
In any case, yes, Matthew Yglesias, there are not only 100 good TV shows but 100+ great TV shows out there, and yes you do need a canon so people can find the great ones. Matthew’s main argument is that if you have a great TV show, and then before it gets cancelled it gets bad, then the whole TV show is now not good, and this happens often enough that there aren’t that many good TV shows.
I think this is bollocks whenever you can pretend the later seasons do not exist.
If Shogun counts as great now (to use his example), and it does so long as you think it is long enough to count, and they then come out with two more seasons that are mid, then Shogun Season 1 is still great because it did not depend on ‘paying off’ in future seasons. The Diplomat, to use another of his examples, is different, because it is building to and paying off things, so you take some damage if it can’t nail the ending. Then you have shows like Lost (whoops) or Severance, the ‘mystery box’ shows, where it really hurts. I can see Severance ending up anywhere from my 8th Tier 1 show down to Tier 4 out of 5.
Do I think Game of Thrones at #6 is high? Yes, I’d probably put it more like #25, but I think there are very obviously 100+ good TV shows in the 21st century and this is obviously one of them. You do not have to look back and say ‘oh that ruined everything.’ It hurt a bit, largely via missed opportunity, but it didn’t ruin everything.
For Your Entertainment
There is talk about rezoning the Kips Bay AMC 15 site, my second-most common theater location, which will close at the end of the year due to termination of its lease, which was bought by NYU Langone, who wants to use it to expand the hospital. Some including the Borough President are insisting that a cinema and a grocery store (currently there is a Fairway next door with a long term lease) be kept. The grocery store part is absurd.
In general I am all for upzoning all the way and letting the market sort it out. I still kind of get the movie theater part. Movie theaters are public anenities that produce a lot of surplus. I would pay substantially more for housing that was very close to a good movie theater, so there is an externality here.
But if you believe that, you should do it with a subsidy, not by taxing those who deign to provide the public good in the first place. And since the new use is literally to expand a hospital, objecting to that is kind of nuts?
I agree with Adi that The Altruists looks like borderline slander against Caroline Ellison, setting her up as the mastermind that she very obviously was not. SBF was running this show. I would add that the SBF in the trailer is completely unrecognizable from the SBF of which there is quite a lot of film and documentation, and not only in physical appearance. For both of them, this is sub-SNL levels of character study. So I’m planting my flag in advance and saying, no, do not take this series as reflecting events that actually happened.
Christian Lorentzen: The problem with adapting SBF for drama is that, protagonist or antagonist, your main character has to have relatable desires, characteristics or motivations while the real SBF seems pretty alien to a normie audience.
Patrick McKenzie: I would assume the thesis of most of the projects is “The main character wants money and power” and that is not an unknown character archetype as either protagonist or antagonist. Character would be extremely intelligent, well-spoken, and quite forward with regards to desires.
The way this is played in the Big Short is “X is so comically self-interested and upfront about this fact that I can’t even hate him” (that is close to a quote from another character) and I think there are a variety of opinions one could have re: sincerity of the character.
But a pretty defining element of the character is “Wowza does he say a lot of things that polished professionals do not say, constantly, including when it is not obviously in his interest. This is part of his charm on other people. Strategic or not? Unclear?”
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
I agree with Sam Black that unbanning Library of Alexandria in Commander would be fine, even in less competitive brackets. The games go so fast, there are so many powerful things going on, and you won’t win attrition wars with a Library. It just makes games more fun. And yeah, the main bad thing if you unbanned Ancestral Recall would be that it would be an auto-include, not that it would disrupt games.
Sam Black on the changes to Booster Packs. Changes seem okay. I agree with Sam Black that there in insufficient emphasis on ensuring a good, non-confusing limited experience, especially in draft.
Jeff Dean: The safety data for Waymo gets better and better.
Comparison w/ human drivers on rate of crashes with serious injury:
Latest data: 270M miles, 20X better
Mar 2026: 170M miles, 13X better
Before that (forget exactly when): 10X better
Elan Bechor: Waymos are really safe (80-95% safer than humans depending on the metric), but they also seem to be getting *safer* over time. This is the worst they’ll ever be.
A quick analysis of the police-reported crash rates in three cities from Waymo’s published safety data.
What is the optimal rate of accident reduction, versus making trips faster? My guess is around this point you want to take your further wins largely in speed.
Tesla is taking more risks than Waymo, such as not pausing in the rain. That pausing does get Waymo some ‘free safety’ that one has to correct for. I endorse it. There’s so much risk that one stupid accident could ruin everything.
The Chinese are very much in the driverless car race.
David Manheim: I just wondered why other countries weren’t deploying autonomous taxis, then checked. China’s Baidu has ~2000 cars under “Apollo Go” in 6 cities. Waymo has ~4000. I’m pretty unsure who wins scaling globally, given the larger addressable domestic market in China, vs Waymo’s lead.
This is presumably not winner-take-all, rather it is a threshold oligopoly. If you can get the necessary efficiencies and safety, you can put on the road however many cars you can manufacture, until the market of all rides is saturated. Then yes you compete, and probably we settle into a 1-4 service world in any given place, with 1 for rural areas and 3+ for big urban centers.
Meanwhile, yes, it is slow going but Waymo is steadily expanding.
I don’t much mind the competitive imbalance. That’s not exactly new. What I do mind is the constant player movement. There’s too much to learn and I want to be able to root for coherent teams, and also it would be nice to have the players go to a single actual college, get an education, have friends and an identity and so on. You can pay the players without them constantly moving around, at least while we’re prioritizing attempting to pass federal laws to ‘save college sports.’
Airlines will no longer be required to provide compensation for lodging, meals and other assistance when flights are delayed or canceled due to certain causes now classified as ‘uncontrollable.’ I am torn. On the one hand, dealing with vouchers is annoying and the cost gets priced into the tickets. On the other hand, it makes travellers feel a lot better, and due to ticket booking via de facto auction airlines are forced to not offer such features unless they are mandatory. The airlines do have some influence on outcomes, especially since the top reclassified cause is ‘unscheduled maintenance.’
My gut says it is better to make the airlines pay, but it seems fine either way.
Argentina is selling golden passports, and a lot of people will fail this intelligence test.
Mike Bird: Weird, surely you’d choose to make the non-refundable $350,000 donation rather than the non-refundable $800,000 donation.
It is not quite that simple, but it is close to that simple. You are not allowed to sell the bond for seven years, and if you do the math on comparable tradable bonds it is cheaper to pay the $350,000 while also requiring less money up front. Choice is easy.
Of course then, he’s promising to pay the 200 people to not drive horses around, and also paying for the horses people will not ride in on. You can imagine what I have to say to Mamdani, and also his horse.
Yes, America still massively subsidizes shipbuilding, but so does everyone else. If you want to build ships domestically, for strategic reasons, you are going to have to subsidize that. I don’t love doing that, but I also don’t mind it at all. Sure, we can afford it. The key is to do that with money, not with a ban on other ships.
I certainly have my critiques of Effective Altruism. Most famously I have my Book Review of Going Infinite. I had Altruism is Incomplete back in 2017. In 2022 I entered a criticism of the EA Criticism Contest into the contest itself, including my 21 points that attempt to summarize the EA framework, of which I strongly disagreed (and still do disagree) with 13, in order to argue that they want critiques but only within their frames. I won an honorable mention.
At one point they paid me to come to EAG Boston and give a presentation about my disagreements with EA, which is exactly what I did. And so on.
That’s because the EAs are trying hard enough to be worthy of critique. So critiques they shall have, good ones, that hold them to the standards they aspire to fulfill.
This wave is different. This is a deliberate campaign of attack, the true face of politics. No one involved is trying to make anyone better.
That’s not cool. No one picks on my little brother but me, especially in bad faith.
There are plenty of public and acknowledged connections between various EA orgs and people and funders, which causes some to then try and force QAnon styles of connections, such as ‘person [P] who funded or invested in [X] also funded [Y], therefore [X] funded [Y].’ Which of course is not how it works.
It’s fun to now continuously see claims of the class ‘Asterisk is funded by Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). It really is remarkable that @NYMag didn’t disclose the ties that one of its co-authors on the piece has’ when the piece does actually disclose this as the lede of the article. Welcome to Politics, capital P.
A lot of the time, the true argument is of the form ‘there are these weird (and other attributes you or your politics will dislike) people who care about AI safety, but as I’ve shown such people are weird and bad, therefore you shouldn’t care about AI safety.’
Then there are those who accuse the EAs of saying ‘only they can be trusted with AGI’ or that they want to take over the world. Some form of this is narrowly true of the leaders and many employees of the major labs, which includes many EAs at Anthropic, but the same is true of many at OpenAI and Google DeepMind and also Elon Musk, which mostly are not EAs. The active ingredient lies elsewhere.
There is also, yes, a faction that says ‘no one can be trusted, but someone is going to build it and this is our best option,’ the same way that most people are not happy about their choice of Presidential candidate these days. Many are quite upset that Anthropic turned into another race participant, and then there is a split about whether that still makes Anthropic a good enough least-bad option. I believe, in both cases, that those saying ‘you have to pick one’ are making a mistake, but it is similar.
Then there is the larger group of EAs warning that no one can be trusted to build AGI and ASI, period. People are accusing an atheist group of being monotheist because they don’t believe in anyone else’s Gods.
I especially don’t appreciate those who accuse EAs and rationalists of being ‘uniquely isolated’ or ‘ideological’ or attached to their beliefs or anything like that, as in:
Wes (quote is from Sarah Haider): “They tend to hold very binary understanding of emotions and reason, which are, of course, not actually mutually exclusive”
Everyone who views rationalists as caricatures says things like this. Nobody does who has talked to any rationalists for more than 10 minutes.
This is the pure form of the Straw Vulcan style of critique that is remarkably common and has little bearing on reality. Another common one, also available within that thread, is ‘if you follow their logic to its conclusion it implies bad things.’ Yes, if you blindly and endlessly extrapolate from chosen beliefs, in a way that approximately zero people actually do, without pausing to realize your mistake, you eventually get to some rather large mistakes. That is true of everyone who believes something, and also is an important hint about difficulties with AI alignment.
I do think, similarly to Trace Woodgrains, that EAs in particular will often use calculations to imply things that if fully naively extrapolated would go badly, biting bullets in theory, but then in the face of messy reality they wisely pull back in practice. Sometimes things get taken too far, but if there is not a dramatic penalty for too far and you never take things too far then you are not taking things far enough. Note that I explicitly disendorse the strong form of impartiality, among other related bullets.
The classic good faith mistake is to take the ‘in theory’ pronouncements, and then presume people who rhetorically bite those bullets actually fully bite them in practice, or that they would if given the opportunity.
Others, such as the Economist profile, talk about EA as having been ‘led astray.’ Usually it is that they abandoned other causes for AI. In the Economist case it is the better critique that they inadvertently sped AI up in various ways, which is highly valid, I was mad about it at the time, but it cannot be undone. The other critique, about becoming a ‘strict-church’ and encouraging earning to give are less clear, and hopefully few people are still doing classic ‘earning to give’ at this point.
It got bad enough that Tyler Cowen had togo and write In Defense of Effective Altruism. The defense is measured. EA is endorsed on the margin and as directionally correct. As much as Tyler ‘just says things’ regarding AI existential risk, he agrees that obviously we should pay more attention to AI safety, as well as other EA causes like global poverty. Does Tyler have digs and critiques as well? Why yes he does, but to be directionally right on the margin is high praise from a coauthor of Marginal Revolution.
Coefficient Giving’s Alexander Berger responded to Tyler’s defense, while accepting that yes EAs can be arrogant. I will sidestep the AI existential risk rhetoric on both sides, since we’ve heard it all before.
I think ‘directionally correct’ is important and spot on. Yes there can be overshooting. I do not, for example and as noted above, endorse impartiality, but most people could be less partial. You don’t want to rely on only doing calculations, but most people desperately need to do more calculations and rely on them more. And so on.
The particular failure mode people often highlight is to use utility arguments to plausibly favor some other consideration over humanity, saying that if you multiply, the other consideration is more important. It can be insects or shrimp or what not, or it can in some cases lead to AI successionism, or it can be negative utilitarianism and the focus on suffering to the exclusion of other values. The good news is that all the EAs I know who are actually influential do not make these mistakes where it matters, and I do not think that is a coincidence.
I think it is actively a good thing that some people make stupid and stupid looking mistakes like the Shrimp Welfare Project, that then are endlessly mocked, and there is very little call to try and jettison such views or people. You can be wrong.
Zac Hill: As someone who’s been pro-EA for a pretty long time, and who appreciates the fundamental philanthropic innovations, I really think “makes consequential choices based on thinking rigorously about doing good” is a strong and emulable trait we could use a lot more of.
Ozymandias points out that no, you can’t join the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists, because there is no single inner circle, whether or not EAs are cool.
There are of course various EAs and rationalists and associated persons with money and power and connections. There is no inner ring. There are only other rings.
roon (OpenAI): this is so stupid. there is an inner ring of effective altruists and they are well on their way to being trillionaires, or they’re professors at Oxford, or have a tremendous political lobbying machine
The top of the community really is a bunch of people who basically never talk to each other. What’s your guess when Will last talked to Dario last talked to Eliezer last talked to Leopold last talked to Alexander Berger?
I think modeling EA as an inner ring doesn’t match how power is actually distributed.
Aella: i get the impression there’s a few different inner rings, each with different flavors, and there’s super high variance in communication within and between the rings
Oliver Habryka: Yep, this seems right to me. There is an Oxford-EA-ish inner ring. There is somewhat of a rationalist inner ring. There is an Anthropic-adjacent inner ring. There is a Constellation inner ring. And maybe 2-3 more I am forgetting.
Walk Away
One of the best rationalist norms is that if you are in a conversation, and that conversation is boring to you, or you otherwise want to leave, you can quietly leave.
Words cannot express how wonderful this norm is. A lot of why Lighthaven is so wonderful is that within its confines you can use this norm. You are not stuck in a conversation, or in a presentation.
There was at least one case during The Curve, despite it being at Lighthaven, where I found myself with someone who I was worried did not understand this, that I did not want to offend, and who kept rejecting my polite bids to wrap up the conversation, and that was super frustrating as the opportunity cost of time was high.
The fact that you get in trouble doing this in other cultures only emphasizes this.
Rachel: you can tell how rationalist a subculture is based on how socially ok it is to just walk away from things / conversations / talks
I made a point of being weird like that in other spaces too though bc often ppl just don’t even realize it’s an option
Paola: I love that this norm exists. It feels quite liberating, and I practice it relatively regularly when among people who I believe are part of subcultures that allow for it.
HOWEVER, I would never in a million years do anything like this (intentionally) among most subcultures.
There are many social moves similar to this one that I often watch rationalist-adjacent people make among non-rats (eg, saying “I’m bored, “I don’t want to be spoken to right now”, etc.) and cringe each time I see it happen.
For people who want to be taken seriously (or even liked on a basic level) among non-rationalist subcultures, learning how to code switch is one of the most important things you can do. This is especially the case when your standard culture has norms than when applied elsewhere will end up communicating disrespect/disregard for the other party.
Yes. You need to be rather confident you can do this within a given space before you do it, especially if you are not especially skilled at doing so.
One danger, also often brought up regarding school, is ‘well your life is often going to suck in this way, so we’d better make sure you are prepared by ensuring it sucks now.’
Wes, the Dadliest Catch: This is why I worry about people who pretty much only engage with the rats. The norms are pretty good! But they are very strange and will not work anywhere else
Paola: yeah and unfortunately the failure mode is not *just* “people find you weird and unapproachable” but rather “people feel insulted and disrespected.”
So yes, you need to emphasize that this is only available within the sacred space.
Etiquette norms are now sufficiently fractured, or those with different norms have been sufficiently scattered, that it gets harder to know which norms are in play. Kelsey Piper here analyzes the classic example of attempting to visit a friend in another city and ideally stay with them. Depending on the subculture, the dance and way of communicating the ask, and a possible yes or no, is very different, and there is no ‘safe’ answer except IYKYK.
Kelsey Piper: Given our blend of mores, my advice is to reach out to the friend while planning the trip and ask their advice on what neighborhoods to stay in in their city. Then, if they say you can stay with them, say that sounds wonderful but you wouldn’t want to be an inconvenience.
Then you’re good, haven’t offended any friends, and are unlikely to have missed out on staying with someone who’d be happy to have you.
(In my subculture you can just directly ask. But this is not true in all subcultures).
Kelsey’s suggestion is safe in one direction, not putting the other person in a corner or forcing them to turn you down, but it seems risky in terms of potentially missing out. I think you’ll have a substantial number of ball drops at both steps. Guess culture where you have to guess which guess culture leads to a lot of wrong guesses, especially if you’re actually an asker or straight doer and you’re improvising.
Or, you could take the approach suggested by Artemis on all this. I don’t advise it.
Artemis: most people’s norms are bad and deserve to be disrespected and disregarded
michael vassar: This doesn’t get said enough. Trying to avoid accusations of disrespectful treatment of bad norms has already taken us to the brink of the abyss. There’s still hope that we can afford to tolerate tolerance but we absolutely can’t survive by ‘respecting’ symmetry breaking respect
Paola: I would hate it if my child grew up thinking these norms were perfectly sane and valid, and I also would want them to know how to navigate them in order to get what they want.
One of the best rationalist norms is that if you are in a conversation, and that conversation is boring to you, or you otherwise want to leave, you can quietly leave.
I actually didn't know I was allowed to do this but come to think of it, I've had people do this to me a few times and I did not mind at all
Matthew’s main argument is that if you have a great TV show, and then before it gets cancelled it gets bad, then the whole TV show is now not good, and this happens often enough that there aren’t that many good TV shows.
I think this is bollocks whenever you can pretend the later seasons do not exist.
I agree with Zvi. You should judge shows on their best, not their worst, because you can just not watch the bad parts.
IMO Game of Thrones deserves its #6 spot even though only half the seasons were great, because it still had four great seasons.
I also notice the top 100 does not include any anime (unless I missed one). There are surely at least a few anime that deserve a spot in the top 100. Attack on Titan is my #2 TV show which I realize many people might disagree but surely it's in the top 100? In fact, BoJack Horseman is the only animated show I spotted on the list. IMDB's top TV shows includes tons of animated shows: Avatar at #6, Bluey at #14, Attack on Titan at #16, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood at #17, Rick and Morty at #22; all of those are from the 21st century.
AI might not yet be eating the physical world. AI is still eating the world of news, and I am finding less and less opportunity to post about other things. My backlog of items grows across most of my secondary topics and I haven’t had time for any side projects.
The monthly, no matter what, is sacred. We continue.
Table of Contents
Home Alone
The story of our time, told once again: Americans are abandoning quite a lot of formerly popular activities, especially hosting at home, as Derek Thompson discussed. Phones and other electronics are in, most things that are not phones are out, with notably rare exceptions.
That last line rules everything around us. And we all spend more time at home, which then exploded during Covid and mostly did not recover afterward.
Derek does discuss the last two lines later on.
You can view exercise classes as an adaptation in four ways: To a lack of other physical activity, to a lack of social activity, to a lack of motivation, and as a wealth effect. Regular people can afford this, and it is a safe way to get things they now lack.
Then there are the concerts. This one is what some call a Narrative Violation. We have this collective story about how in the good old days, like the 1960s, people went to all these great cheap concerts, that was part of the good life, and we’ve gotten away from that. But actually they’re making a quiet comeback despite people getting older and all the competition, and also they are great. On the flip side, they are also ‘free’ actions, in that you don’t have to overcome any social barrier. You can buy a ticket.
Whereas hosting is, as Derek says, a lot of work to set up, often not fun work. If you’re both working, and children now require vastly more time investment because our society went insane there, who has the time and energy to earn the payoff? Parties also require (and help create and maintain) friends, and creating and maintaining those friends takes even more time.
Meanwhile, being alone at home is no longer boring. Being alone at home is great, in the short term.
There is some coordination failure, but I think this is the wrong central diagnosis. Coordination failure can be overcome, and given the will to do the thing the logistics are far easier today with all our social and communication and logistical tools.
The bigger problem is hyperbolic discounting in the face of the new alternatives. In order to get the returns from social activity, you have to invest energy and effort now, and also endure some mild social awkwardness and delay gratification and tolerate some boredom now, and often do things for someone else, in order to build up your friendship and other networks and get into regular habits.
I’m also guilty of this trap. I don’t socialize enough. I don’t host enough, and I don’t visit enough. I realize this. But it’s tough. There’s too much to do, both for work and for play. In my case I like to think I have a good excuse, but it is still a mistake.
The Men Have Never Been Okay
Institute for Family Studies reports at length on America’s demoralized and lost men. Their central presentation is not that young men have, as Senator Hawley put it, ‘no vision for what it is to be a man,’ or that their vision would be bad and captured by toxic influences. It’s that they do have such a positive vision, and it would be good but they despair of living up to it and do not see a path to getting there. We no longer lay out a simple ‘success sequence’ style strategy where you play by the rules and it does not work even for those without problems, and many have problems. The men are culturally told that, by default, they are worthless and unwanted.
Or is that the real story? There are some strange sets of beliefs reported.
42% think they are failures and 60% feel they have little control. 72% say who you know is more important than hard work, and 49% saying ‘no matter how hard I work, people like me will never achieve the American dream.’
But 84% say they are at least somewhat ambitious and 81% say they can ‘do just about anything I really set my mind to,’ 75% say their opportunities in life will be greater than their parents, and 82% say they have more potential to succeed than people think.
This seems like a lot of very strong framing effects combined with the Revolution of Rising Expectations. The men believe all these things at the same time, in different ways, and you can ‘activate different personas.’ Connections can beat hard work and the deck is stacked against you, but hard work is valid, and if you want it enough and keep your head on straight and resist temptation and despair you can still succeed. But do you want it enough? Can you keep your head on straight and resist temptation and despair?
And can you keep searching for an unknown, rather than for a known, so long as the ultimate odds have not changed so much?
Another way of looking at this is that if you succeed, there was some way in which you got lucky or did something extraordinary. Something individually atypical is part of every typical success story, even more so than in the past. But if you keep pushing, and try to make your own luck, you will probably eventually get lucky.
There are charts and statistics about the usual suspects, like unemployment, depression, disabilities, games, social media, atomization, gambling and pornography.
Social media is not like the others, where ‘once a day’ is considered infrequent.
Over half of young men feel lonely ‘at least some of the time’ but it is kind of weird not to, isn’t it? The right rate of feeling lonely, like many bad things, is not zero.
The report has many other interesting charts. It would be cool to see time lapses.
Mostly I came away from this report feeling better rather than worse, if you don’t think AI will upend everything. Ways exist to be found, at least for now. Remember that throughout history, a huge percentage of men failed to have children. It is not a new situation for men to be tested and have to find a way to prove themselves.
Broadly my current perspective is the men as a group have never been okay. The difference is that we used to sort of think not being okay was fine. Now we don’t.
Antisocial Media
Texting more often is associated with higher life satisfaction. Tyler Cowen asks ‘should you text more?’ and my response would be ‘yes, but only insofar as you should have more friends that you want to text.’
Frequency of YouTube and TikTok use was associated with lower life satisfaction, which partly can be explained the same way. Here I bet it runs both ways.
There was no association from use of other social technology, which implies other social technology is modestly negative, since it should be positively correlated with friends.
YouTube is changing its short-form algorithm to further prioritize original content, and especially to reduce reach of content ‘re-uploaded from other creators without adding anything of your own.’ I mean, yeah, why is that even allowed?
Twitter identifies and suspends a Chinese bot farm of ~200,000 accounts engaged in influence operations. This included 200 working to build American opposition to data centers. Those 200 were shown. The other 199,800 were not shown. I wonder what they were up to.
While I Cannot Condone This
If you don’t want to wrongspeak, you have two strategies. You can suppress thoughts, or you can suppress words.
I think Paola is at least directionally right. On reflection I think I have all four modes in the 2×2: suppressing or not suppressing thoughts and also speech. One strives to be in places one can suppress neither, but it is not always possible.
In Western Massachusetts, in the year 2026, there was a lesbian bar still requiring KN-95 masks. They changed Saturday nights to mask optional, and all hell broke loose like it was still 2020: “Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with.” “People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.”
Someone else wished the venue would be firebombed.
And then it got worse, or better, I’m not sure which.
It keeps going from there. On the second mask-optional Saturday the dance floor was empty, the hoped-for unmasked customers never came, and the owner ended the night alone on it, still masked.
Zero Marginal Product
Fun hypothetical:
This is obviously a terrible deal if you have better options or important work to do, but otherwise? The consensus strategy, of course, is to sleep. You shift your sleep schedule to be from 6am-2pm, learn to sleep either in the chair or on the floor, and that’s it. If you ban sleeping, this turns into the trying-to-get-you-to-quit scenario of Oidashibeya, where we have run the experiment, and some people quit but others do not, depending on their circumstances.
Unfortunately, I briefly checked the subreddit, and most posts there are super lame.
Good News, Everyone
We have an excellent permitting deal, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act (S. 5653), if we can get it over the finish line into law. I don’t have time to properly geek out on all the details, but this is a big deal. Even better would be huge sweeping ‘cut the Gordian knot’ changes, but if you’re going to do incremental stuff this would be pretty great.
Back in July we got a report to the president called Science: A New Golden Age. In a better or quieter world I would have looked into this in detail. I am sad I never got to do that, but I need to admit defeat. By all accounts there were a lot of good ideas here.
Halloween not only is not the ‘deadliest day for child pedestrians,’ it is the safest by a huge margin, because everyone knows to watch out for child pedestrians that night. Yes, the absolute number of accidents is higher, but that is because normally we don’t let our children go outside and on Halloween everyone goes outside.
I confirm, based on both personal experience and what I see in others, that Justin Skycak is correct here: High performers start out with an edge that motivates more work with increasing returns to scale, then work more and harder than everyone else, and end up acquiring a vast array of related skills as they climb the entire associated tech tree. You can see it in various places. In sports, where the top players are better at actual everything, including all the tiny details. In media, where high quality things are just high quality across the board, with no limit. And so on.
100 Good Television Shows
A remarkably good list, the product of an industry survey:
I don’t agree with every call, or every omission, but I do not have to.
As usual with such lists, there are many excellent picks:
That’s already 41 out of 100.
That’s also nine series I am suddenly tempted to watch, that I haven’t, but that I can crack open at any time. Several are because they’re ‘tough watches’ despite greatness. As in, I know Andor is great, but do I actually want to watch Andor? Unclear.
I see a number of picks here that aren’t for me, or that I wouldn’t count for being too short, but only a handful where I could plausibly say, in the abstract, bad pick.
The next question would be, how many are conspicuously missing?
I have 7 Tier 1 TV shows. 5 of the 7 make the list, and the other two are obscure and thus highly forgivable mistake. All the straight dramas on my list make their top 20, including their #1 and #2.
I have 40 Tier 2 TV shows, 30 of which are eligible. Here the list does a lot worse, and only has 10 of them. I’d only call maybe 5 of the remaining 20 objective mistakes, rather than differences of opinion. That illustrates how long is the long tail of television. This did remind me that I have to make some updates here.
In any case, yes, Matthew Yglesias, there are not only 100 good TV shows but 100+ great TV shows out there, and yes you do need a canon so people can find the great ones. Matthew’s main argument is that if you have a great TV show, and then before it gets cancelled it gets bad, then the whole TV show is now not good, and this happens often enough that there aren’t that many good TV shows.
I think this is bollocks whenever you can pretend the later seasons do not exist.
If Shogun counts as great now (to use his example), and it does so long as you think it is long enough to count, and they then come out with two more seasons that are mid, then Shogun Season 1 is still great because it did not depend on ‘paying off’ in future seasons. The Diplomat, to use another of his examples, is different, because it is building to and paying off things, so you take some damage if it can’t nail the ending. Then you have shows like Lost (whoops) or Severance, the ‘mystery box’ shows, where it really hurts. I can see Severance ending up anywhere from my 8th Tier 1 show down to Tier 4 out of 5.
Do I think Game of Thrones at #6 is high? Yes, I’d probably put it more like #25, but I think there are very obviously 100+ good TV shows in the 21st century and this is obviously one of them. You do not have to look back and say ‘oh that ruined everything.’ It hurt a bit, largely via missed opportunity, but it didn’t ruin everything.
For Your Entertainment
There is talk about rezoning the Kips Bay AMC 15 site, my second-most common theater location, which will close at the end of the year due to termination of its lease, which was bought by NYU Langone, who wants to use it to expand the hospital. Some including the Borough President are insisting that a cinema and a grocery store (currently there is a Fairway next door with a long term lease) be kept. The grocery store part is absurd.
In general I am all for upzoning all the way and letting the market sort it out. I still kind of get the movie theater part. Movie theaters are public anenities that produce a lot of surplus. I would pay substantially more for housing that was very close to a good movie theater, so there is an externality here.
But if you believe that, you should do it with a subsidy, not by taxing those who deign to provide the public good in the first place. And since the new use is literally to expand a hospital, objecting to that is kind of nuts?
I agree with Adi that The Altruists looks like borderline slander against Caroline Ellison, setting her up as the mastermind that she very obviously was not. SBF was running this show. I would add that the SBF in the trailer is completely unrecognizable from the SBF of which there is quite a lot of film and documentation, and not only in physical appearance. For both of them, this is sub-SNL levels of character study. So I’m planting my flag in advance and saying, no, do not take this series as reflecting events that actually happened.
Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game
I agree with Sam Black that unbanning Library of Alexandria in Commander would be fine, even in less competitive brackets. The games go so fast, there are so many powerful things going on, and you won’t win attrition wars with a Library. It just makes games more fun. And yeah, the main bad thing if you unbanned Ancestral Recall would be that it would be an auto-include, not that it would disrupt games.
Sam Black on the changes to Booster Packs. Changes seem okay. I agree with Sam Black that there in insufficient emphasis on ensuring a good, non-confusing limited experience, especially in draft.
I enjoyed Sam Black’s analysis of his latest Old School deck, but this is niche and requires that you know the format or at least the old cards.
I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars
Waymo was already absurdly safer than human drivers, and it keeps getting safer, despite reports that the driving is getting less passive.
What is the optimal rate of accident reduction, versus making trips faster? My guess is around this point you want to take your further wins largely in speed.
Tesla is taking more risks than Waymo, such as not pausing in the rain. That pausing does get Waymo some ‘free safety’ that one has to correct for. I endorse it. There’s so much risk that one stupid accident could ruin everything.
The Chinese are very much in the driverless car race.
This is presumably not winner-take-all, rather it is a threshold oligopoly. If you can get the necessary efficiencies and safety, you can put on the road however many cars you can manufacture, until the market of all rides is saturated. Then yes you compete, and probably we settle into a 1-4 service world in any given place, with 1 for rural areas and 3+ for big urban centers.
Meanwhile, yes, it is slow going but Waymo is steadily expanding.
The Waymo debate is happening right now in DC. There is a strange emphasis on ‘countless’ ride share drivers, given DC only has 200 full-time ride share drivers among its residents, and as always calls not to ‘rush’ legislation.
Sports Go Sports
A classic: Nick Saban’s Five Enemies of Greatness. Worth a periodic read.
College football has been completely transformed now that players get paid and can transfer fully, in some ways for the better and others not. Here are the salary ranges, also known as the long term viability index if no one adjusts.
I don’t much mind the competitive imbalance. That’s not exactly new. What I do mind is the constant player movement. There’s too much to learn and I want to be able to root for coherent teams, and also it would be nice to have the players go to a single actual college, get an education, have friends and an identity and so on. You can pay the players without them constantly moving around, at least while we’re prioritizing attempting to pass federal laws to ‘save college sports.’
Government Working
You can just whiten teeth, except you can’t, because dentists. Many such cases.
Airlines will no longer be required to provide compensation for lodging, meals and other assistance when flights are delayed or canceled due to certain causes now classified as ‘uncontrollable.’ I am torn. On the one hand, dealing with vouchers is annoying and the cost gets priced into the tickets. On the other hand, it makes travellers feel a lot better, and due to ticket booking via de facto auction airlines are forced to not offer such features unless they are mandatory. The airlines do have some influence on outcomes, especially since the top reclassified cause is ‘unscheduled maintenance.’
My gut says it is better to make the airlines pay, but it seems fine either way.
Argentina is selling golden passports, and a lot of people will fail this intelligence test.
It is not quite that simple, but it is close to that simple. You are not allowed to sell the bond for seven years, and if you do the math on comparable tradable bonds it is cheaper to pay the $350,000 while also requiring less money up front. Choice is easy.
I get that maybe you need cannabis to be legal because of the alternative but why the hell are we advertising its legality in the subway with public service announcements?
Mamdani to ban Central Park’s horse-drawn carriages, one of the famous things to do in New York. I’ve never actually done it, but I feel like I should do it now while I can. Sounds like we will have until June 2028. You know it is deeply stupid when they are laying off 200 people and destroying a cultural touchstone purportedly in large part because of one accidental death, of Romanch Mahajan, and also because people think it is inhumane to the horses to have them draw carriages, and various other things that are not true.
Waymo, beware.
Of course then, he’s promising to pay the 200 people to not drive horses around, and also paying for the horses people will not ride in on. You can imagine what I have to say to Mamdani, and also his horse.
Jones Act Watch
US Navy considering building its ships overseas. As well they should.
Yes, America still massively subsidizes shipbuilding, but so does everyone else. If you want to build ships domestically, for strategic reasons, you are going to have to subsidize that. I don’t love doing that, but I also don’t mind it at all. Sure, we can afford it. The key is to do that with money, not with a ban on other ships.
Variously Effective Altruism
The bad guys have come with bad faith attacks against Effective Altruism, as has the Department of War, and the neutral guys are suddenly paying attention and creating profiles that often miss the mark, as per the usual Gell-Mann experience.
I certainly have my critiques of Effective Altruism. Most famously I have my Book Review of Going Infinite. I had Altruism is Incomplete back in 2017. In 2022 I entered a criticism of the EA Criticism Contest into the contest itself, including my 21 points that attempt to summarize the EA framework, of which I strongly disagreed (and still do disagree) with 13, in order to argue that they want critiques but only within their frames. I won an honorable mention.
At one point they paid me to come to EAG Boston and give a presentation about my disagreements with EA, which is exactly what I did. And so on.
That’s because the EAs are trying hard enough to be worthy of critique. So critiques they shall have, good ones, that hold them to the standards they aspire to fulfill.
This wave is different. This is a deliberate campaign of attack, the true face of politics. No one involved is trying to make anyone better.
That’s not cool. No one picks on my little brother but me, especially in bad faith.
There are plenty of public and acknowledged connections between various EA orgs and people and funders, which causes some to then try and force QAnon styles of connections, such as ‘person [P] who funded or invested in [X] also funded [Y], therefore [X] funded [Y].’ Which of course is not how it works.
It’s fun to now continuously see claims of the class ‘Asterisk is funded by Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). It really is remarkable that @NYMag didn’t disclose the ties that one of its co-authors on the piece has’ when the piece does actually disclose this as the lede of the article. Welcome to Politics, capital P.
A lot of the time, the true argument is of the form ‘there are these weird (and other attributes you or your politics will dislike) people who care about AI safety, but as I’ve shown such people are weird and bad, therefore you shouldn’t care about AI safety.’
Then there are those who accuse the EAs of saying ‘only they can be trusted with AGI’ or that they want to take over the world. Some form of this is narrowly true of the leaders and many employees of the major labs, which includes many EAs at Anthropic, but the same is true of many at OpenAI and Google DeepMind and also Elon Musk, which mostly are not EAs. The active ingredient lies elsewhere.
There is also, yes, a faction that says ‘no one can be trusted, but someone is going to build it and this is our best option,’ the same way that most people are not happy about their choice of Presidential candidate these days. Many are quite upset that Anthropic turned into another race participant, and then there is a split about whether that still makes Anthropic a good enough least-bad option. I believe, in both cases, that those saying ‘you have to pick one’ are making a mistake, but it is similar.
Then there is the larger group of EAs warning that no one can be trusted to build AGI and ASI, period. People are accusing an atheist group of being monotheist because they don’t believe in anyone else’s Gods.
I especially don’t appreciate those who accuse EAs and rationalists of being ‘uniquely isolated’ or ‘ideological’ or attached to their beliefs or anything like that, as in:
This is the pure form of the Straw Vulcan style of critique that is remarkably common and has little bearing on reality. Another common one, also available within that thread, is ‘if you follow their logic to its conclusion it implies bad things.’ Yes, if you blindly and endlessly extrapolate from chosen beliefs, in a way that approximately zero people actually do, without pausing to realize your mistake, you eventually get to some rather large mistakes. That is true of everyone who believes something, and also is an important hint about difficulties with AI alignment.
I do think, similarly to Trace Woodgrains, that EAs in particular will often use calculations to imply things that if fully naively extrapolated would go badly, biting bullets in theory, but then in the face of messy reality they wisely pull back in practice. Sometimes things get taken too far, but if there is not a dramatic penalty for too far and you never take things too far then you are not taking things far enough. Note that I explicitly disendorse the strong form of impartiality, among other related bullets.
The classic good faith mistake is to take the ‘in theory’ pronouncements, and then presume people who rhetorically bite those bullets actually fully bite them in practice, or that they would if given the opportunity.
Others, such as the Economist profile, talk about EA as having been ‘led astray.’ Usually it is that they abandoned other causes for AI. In the Economist case it is the better critique that they inadvertently sped AI up in various ways, which is highly valid, I was mad about it at the time, but it cannot be undone. The other critique, about becoming a ‘strict-church’ and encouraging earning to give are less clear, and hopefully few people are still doing classic ‘earning to give’ at this point.
It got bad enough that Tyler Cowen had to go and write In Defense of Effective Altruism. The defense is measured. EA is endorsed on the margin and as directionally correct. As much as Tyler ‘just says things’ regarding AI existential risk, he agrees that obviously we should pay more attention to AI safety, as well as other EA causes like global poverty. Does Tyler have digs and critiques as well? Why yes he does, but to be directionally right on the margin is high praise from a coauthor of Marginal Revolution.
Coefficient Giving’s Alexander Berger responded to Tyler’s defense, while accepting that yes EAs can be arrogant. I will sidestep the AI existential risk rhetoric on both sides, since we’ve heard it all before.
I think ‘directionally correct’ is important and spot on. Yes there can be overshooting. I do not, for example and as noted above, endorse impartiality, but most people could be less partial. You don’t want to rely on only doing calculations, but most people desperately need to do more calculations and rely on them more. And so on.
The particular failure mode people often highlight is to use utility arguments to plausibly favor some other consideration over humanity, saying that if you multiply, the other consideration is more important. It can be insects or shrimp or what not, or it can in some cases lead to AI successionism, or it can be negative utilitarianism and the focus on suffering to the exclusion of other values. The good news is that all the EAs I know who are actually influential do not make these mistakes where it matters, and I do not think that is a coincidence.
I think it is actively a good thing that some people make stupid and stupid looking mistakes like the Shrimp Welfare Project, that then are endlessly mocked, and there is very little call to try and jettison such views or people. You can be wrong.
Any group that collectively takes a handful of big ‘look over here’ shots in the 2010s, where two of them are pandemics and AI, should get you asking what they did right, and yeah maybe let a few of them sound crazy and talk about electron suffering. You don’t have to help fund them.
Does EA have an ‘inner ring’?
Ozymandias points out that no, you can’t join the secret inner circle of cool effective altruists, because there is no single inner circle, whether or not EAs are cool.
There are of course various EAs and rationalists and associated persons with money and power and connections. There is no inner ring. There are only other rings.
Walk Away
One of the best rationalist norms is that if you are in a conversation, and that conversation is boring to you, or you otherwise want to leave, you can quietly leave.
Words cannot express how wonderful this norm is. A lot of why Lighthaven is so wonderful is that within its confines you can use this norm. You are not stuck in a conversation, or in a presentation.
There was at least one case during The Curve, despite it being at Lighthaven, where I found myself with someone who I was worried did not understand this, that I did not want to offend, and who kept rejecting my polite bids to wrap up the conversation, and that was super frustrating as the opportunity cost of time was high.
The fact that you get in trouble doing this in other cultures only emphasizes this.
Yes. You need to be rather confident you can do this within a given space before you do it, especially if you are not especially skilled at doing so.
One danger, also often brought up regarding school, is ‘well your life is often going to suck in this way, so we’d better make sure you are prepared by ensuring it sucks now.’
So yes, you need to emphasize that this is only available within the sacred space.
Etiquette norms are now sufficiently fractured, or those with different norms have been sufficiently scattered, that it gets harder to know which norms are in play. Kelsey Piper here analyzes the classic example of attempting to visit a friend in another city and ideally stay with them. Depending on the subculture, the dance and way of communicating the ask, and a possible yes or no, is very different, and there is no ‘safe’ answer except IYKYK.
Kelsey’s suggestion is safe in one direction, not putting the other person in a corner or forcing them to turn you down, but it seems risky in terms of potentially missing out. I think you’ll have a substantial number of ball drops at both steps. Guess culture where you have to guess which guess culture leads to a lot of wrong guesses, especially if you’re actually an asker or straight doer and you’re improvising.
Or, you could take the approach suggested by Artemis on all this. I don’t advise it.
The Lighter Side
Shuffle Casino gives a sponsorship to Jack Doherty, which he signs, that includes the condition that Jack is not allowed to post online. And they’re enforcing it. Legends.
On-topic memeing I appreciate: