Elizabeth1dQuick Take

Angry ex-wives are the best IRS informants

Public criticism of people who aren’t already in the dog house is an act with concentrated costs and distributed benefits. Sometimes those costs are quite high.
As such, we should expect it to be underprovided.
Occasionally criticism will be provided by very prosocial people, or some other prosocial person will cover some of the costs.
But mostly you should expect public criticism to come from people who are being irrational. Maybe they’re generally fragile, or are angry about being dumped for their ex-husband’s secretary.
Therefore, you cannot dismiss criticisms because the person is fragile or has a grudge.
Under many circumstances- when the target is very well loved and the problem

... (read more)

Elizabeth5d

Depends. Are you strictly following standard of care, or personalizing for yourself?

Replying toStone Age Billionaire Can't Words Good

Elizabeth6d

Stone Age Billionaire Can't Words Good

and the alternative minimum tax... and whatever the new thing is...

Replying toStone Age Billionaire Can't Words Good

Elizabeth6d

Stone Age Billionaire Can't Words Good

without minding the effects on everyone else

seems like a job for Pigouvian taxes

Elizabeth6d

datapoint: this was my exact argument for not learning to vibecode (after working as a programmer for 10 years and quitting 9 years ago). Last month was when (I noticed that) vibecoding (had) crossed the threshold where it quickly paid off the time I put into it, and that was with private tutoring from someone who'd been on the cutting edge for >1 a year.

I'm not sure if this supports your argument (because I do think any time I put into learning to vibecode before the recent transition would have been wasted) or counters (because this is the month things transitioned).

Elizabeth6dQuick Take

I'm working on a piece for Asterisk magazine on how biohackers (broadly defined) think about risk. Are you interested in being interviewed? Do you know someone who is? I'm taking a very broad definition of biohacker (self-medicating to save money counts), but some people I'm especially interested in talking to are those who:

biohack for its own sake- no one needs magnets in their fingernails, but you want them.
receive treatment within the standard medical system, but playing an active role in personalizing it (e.g. trans people adjusting their HRT, diabetics figuring out their insulin dosing)
strongly prefer herbal to allopathic medicine
the aforementioned driven-to-self-medication by financial constraints
people who chronic mystery illnesses
Use peptides besides GLP-1s (love

Elizabeth15d

Canada Lost Its Measles Elimination Status Because We Don't Have Enough Nurses Who Speak Low German

Measles causes immune amnesia, which sets your immune system back 2-5 years. You'd need to follow people for years to know what the true cost was.

Elizabeth17d

TBC I agree with you that becoming president was more complicated than win the dam, win the day. But that more complicated story is still much less complicated than I expected it to be.

Elizabeth17d

I'm not sure if you're disagreeing with my point (that Johnson's rise had fewer moving parts than I expected) or just sharing an additional interesting fact.

Elizabeth18d

what % of credit would you assign to Brown and Root, Sam Rayburn, and Richard Russell?

After reading volume 1 of Robert Caro's biography of Lyndon Johnson, I'm struck by how simple parts of (Caro's description of) Johnson's rise were.

Johnson got elected to the House and stayed there primarily because of one guy at one law firm which had the network to set state fundraising records, and did so for Johnson primarily because of a single gigantic favor he did for them^[1].

Johnson got a great deal of leverage over other Congressmen because he was the one to realize Texas oilmen would give prodigiously if only they knew how to buy the results they wanted, and he convinced them he was the only reliable source of advice on how... (read more)

Things I learned from reddit fashion

Elizabeth

21d

When it comes to clothes, I live at the “low cost/low time/low quality” end of the pareto frontier. But the bay area had a sudden attack of weather this December, and the cheap sweaters on Amazon get that way by being made of single-ply toilet paper. It became clear I would need to spend actual money to stay warm, but spending money would not be sufficient without knowledge.

I used to trade money for time by buying at thrift stores. Unfortunately the efficient market has come for clothing, in the form of resellers who stalk Goodwill and remove everything priced below the pareto frontier to resell online, where you can’t try them on... (read 1452 more words →)

•••

Over in this comment, DAL suggests that one reason for polarization is a lack of local news leading people to vote based on party's national reputations rather than knowledge of local candidates. If he was right, we'd expect other signs of the nationalization of races, such as an increase in out-of-state fundraising.

I checked, and that's exactly what I found. The percentage of out-of-state funding doubled from 1998 to 2022, with an especially sharp increase starting in 2018.

And this undersells the change, because it includes only hard money (that donated directly to candidates). PACs are a larger and larger percent of campaign spending, and I expect have a larger percentage of out of state money.

This doesn't prove lack of local news is the culprit, but it does point to the locus of ~control moving away from individual candidates and towards parties.

What's a good methodology for "is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion / corruption?"

Raemon

Raemon, Elizabeth

23d

Updated title to include "corruption", and changed some framing in the post.

Critics of Trump often describe him as making absolutely unprecedented moves to expand executive power, extract personal wealth, and impinge on citizens’ rights. Supporters counter that Trump’s actions are either completely precedented, or are the natural extension of existing trends that the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much.^[1] Other supporters say "yes, his actions are unprecedented and this is good, they're tearing down corrupt things that need tearing down."

In some recent posts, some people have been like "Wait why is there suddenly this abrupt series of partisan LW posts that are taking for... (read 732 more words →)

•••

why did local news ever work?

A lot of recent political changes are blamed on the loss of local news (motivating example), which is in turn blamed on the internet undercutting ad revenue (especially classifieds revenue). But if people never cared about local news enough to ~pay for it, why did papers ever offer it? Why not just sell the classifieds and the national news people were willing to pay for, and save the expense of the local stuff no one wanted?

Some ideas:

Newspapers and tv channels were confused and didn't realize they could get away without producing local news.
1. This seems unlikely to me, because if all they cared about was national news why

... (read more)

Prestige/reputation is supposed to work like the pagerank algorithm: every person has a little bit of prestige to distribute, it flows to a few major sinks, and those sinks can themselves distribute it to the people they respect.

Real prestige isn’t like this, of course. You can improve people’s perception of your prestige, and thus your actual prestige, with the right clothes or website design. But you can also hack the pagerank algorithm. For example, let’s say we have 3 low status entities: a website, a blogger, and a small meeting of subject matter experts. We can improve their status by calling them an online magazine, a science writer, and a colloquium, but... (read more)

@Eric Raymond has a tweet in which he lays out a taxonomy of treaty enforcement. His three options are:

The US bombs non-compliant countries
1. Eric doesn’t mention economic punishments but I put them in the same category as bombs
The situation is an iterated prisoners’ dilemma where sides prefer cooperate-cooperate to defect-defect. The benefits of cheating are less than the cost of moving to the worse equilibrium
Wordcel bullshit (worthless)

The thing is, neither 1 nor 2 require a joint agreement between countries. You, a powerful country, could always just declare that you will bomb any country that creates nukes or sneezes wrong, and let them make their choices. And if it’s an iterated prisoners’ dilemma (or stag... (read 354 more words →)

Me, before getting into Song of Ice and Fire: Only an absolute idiot would think George R. R. Martin would finish this. There is no chance. It's been 30 years. Let it go.

Me, after getting into SoIaF: we can't know he'll never finish.

If it weren't for this Futurama clip (1999) I would have completely forgotten how everyone considered it a huge problem that American political parties were so similar.

My impression (primarily from former representative Justin Amash) is that individual congresspeople have almost no power. Bills are crafted and introduced at the party level, and your choices are to vote with them or not. If you don't vote with the party and are in a safe district (which most are), the party will support candidates who will go along with the party line in the primary. The only scenario in which an individual congressperson has power is a close vote in a contested district where the party can't take the risk of a primary challenger.

First, I want to know if which parts of this are true, and in more detail. One... (read more)

The Boring Part of Bell Labs

Elizabeth

3mo

It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my third grade class. Nothing he was involved with could ever be cool, especially after the standard set by his grandfather who is allegedly on a patent for the television.

It turns out I was partially right. The Bell Labs everyone talks about is the research division at Murray Hill. They’re the ones that invented transistors and solar cells. My dad was in the applied division at Holmdel, where he did things... (read 4240 more words →)

130

How Stuart Buck funded the replication crisis

Elizabeth

4mo

Stuart Buck has perhaps the largest shapley value of any one individual in uncovering the replication crisis first in psychology, and then in many fields. This is his personal account of how and why he made the choices he did.

Steven Adler reports that NVIDIA is attempting to stifle pro-export-control speach

Elizabeth

4mo

For months now, I’ve heard about widespread fear among think tank researchers and policy experts who publish work against NVIDIA’s interests.
NVIDIA is the most valuable company on Earth, the dominant supplier of AI chips, and is currently valued at 4.5 trillion dollars. I worry that fear of its potential retaliation—rumors of attempted firings and media hit pieces—is distorting some of the most important AI policy debates.
Based on what I’ve heard, there is no smoking gun of wrongdoing, but certainly a pattern of fear that impacts policy discussion, justified or not. This fear isn’t just limited to think tank staffers either: I’ve heard many concerning claims that the major AI companies disagree with

Elizabeth

4mo

On some level, calories in calories out has to be true. But these variables are not independent. Bodies respond to exercise by getting hungry and to calorie deficit by getting tired. Even absent that, bodies know how much food they want, and if you don’t give it to them they will tell you at increasing volume until you give in (not all bodies, of course, but quiet stomachs aren’t the target market for GLP-1s). A new breed of drugs, GLP-1 agonists, offer a way out of the latter trap by telling your body you’ve eaten, even when you haven’t, but leave many people fatigued. The newest GLP-1, retatrutide, may escape that trap... (read 2082 more words →)

I take antidepressants. You’re welcome

Elizabeth

4mo

It’s amazing how much smarter everyone else gets when I take antidepressants.

It makes sense that the drugs work on other people, because there’s nothing in me to fix. I am a perfect and wise arbiter of not only my own behavior but everyone else’s, which is a heavy burden because some of ya’ll are terrible at life. You date the wrong people. You take several seconds longer than necessary to order at the bagel place. And you continue to have terrible opinions even after I explain the right one to you. But only when I’m depressed. When I’m not, everyone gets better at merging from two lanes to one.

This effect is not... (read 793 more words →)

272

FTX, Golden Geese, and The Widow’s Mite

Elizabeth

5mo

From 2019 to 2022, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX stole 8-10 billion dollars from customers. In summer 2022, FTX’s charitable arm gave me two grants totaling $33,000. By the time the theft was revealed in November 2022, I’d spent all but 20% of it.

The remaining money isn’t mine, and I don’t want it. I would like to give this money to the FTX estate, but they are not returning my calls. If this post fails to get their attention in the next month, I will donate the money to Feeding America. In the meantime, I’d like to talk about why I made this decision, and why I think other people should do likewise.

Background

FTX... (read 1908 more words →)

Ketamine part 2: What do in vitro studies tell us about safety?

Elizabeth

5mo

Ketamine is an anesthetic with growing popularity as an antidepressant. As an antidepressant, it’s quite impressive. When it works, it’s often within hours- a huge improvement over giving a suicidal person a pill that might work 6 weeks from now. And it has a decent success rate in people who have been failed by several other antidepressants and are thus most in need of a new option.

The initial antidepressant protocols for ketamine called for a handful of uses over a few weeks. Scott Alexander judged this safe, and I’m going to take that as a given for this post. However, new protocols are popping up for indefinite, daily use. Lots of medications... (read 3375 more words →)

Church Planting: When Venture Capital Finds Jesus

Elizabeth

6mo

I’m going to describe a Type Of Guy starting a business, and you’re going to guess the business:

The founder is very young, often under 25.
He might work alone or with a founding team, but when he tells the story of the founding it will always have him at the center.
He has no credentials for this business.
This business has a grand vision, which he thinks is the most important thing in the world.
This business lives and dies by its growth metrics.
90% of attempts in this business fail, but he would never consider that those odds apply to him
He funds this business via a mix of small contributors, large networks pooling their funds, and

... (read 4752 more words →)

237

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Elizabeth

Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle

EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem

Epistemic Legibility

Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow

Elizabeth

Things I learned from reddit fashion

What's a good methodology for "is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion / corruption?"

The Boring Part of Bell Labs

How Stuart Buck funded the replication crisis

Steven Adler reports that NVIDIA is attempting to stifle pro-export-control speach

The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Actually Work

I take antidepressants. You’re welcome

Elizabeth

Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle

EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem

Epistemic Legibility

Truthseeking is the ground in which other principles grow

Elizabeth

Things I learned from reddit fashion

What's a good methodology for "is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion / corruption?"

The Boring Part of Bell Labs

How Stuart Buck funded the replication crisis

Steven Adler reports that NVIDIA is attempting to stifle pro-export-control speach

The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Actually Work

I take antidepressants. You’re welcome

Background