As always, a lot to get to. This is everything that wasn't in any of the other categories. Bad News You might have to find a way to actually enjoy the work. Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): Sustained great work often demands enjoying the process for its own sake rather than only feeling joy in the end result. Time is mostly spent between results, and hard to keep pushing yourself to get to the next level if you’re not having fun while doing so.
On your comments about junk science and juries: I think you overestimate the cognitive capacity of the median juror. I know this is not politically correct to say, but: the median juror I've encountered in the four juries I have served on is not one who could parse the notion of statistical validity, let alone the notion of p-hacking.
To make this claim more concrete: one of the juries I served on was a grand jury, and there were jurors on that jury who could not discern the difference between an indictment (our remit) and a verdict (the remit of a petit jury). This was in spite of the prosecutor holding forth at length, in what I think he assumed was simple language, explaining the difference between the two juries and what a grand juror's remit was.
Or, if you prefer, Sol Wachtler's famous claim that he could indict a ham sandwich.
Re cocaine overdoses I have still never heard a logical explanation as to why someone would mix fent into the coke they're selling to people. Cross contamination explains some of it; increased cocaine overdoses maybe a result of changes in where and how it's getting packaged for market? Maybe a change in cocaine purity or a decline in the overall health of the average user making them more susceptible to cardiac events?
Regardless I've never bought the theory that any dealer is purposely doing this. Why would you risk overdosing casual users of powder cocaine with a lethal downer for marginal financial benefit and all sorts of potential heat? Nobody cares about the average fent addict overdosing but if you kill some 19 year old student athlete you might actually spark an investigation. Can't see the executive level gangsters who run these operations signing off on such a thing either when they're printing money anyways. Just doesn't add up.
Regarding regrets about one’s life, I am skeptical that more of the answers don’t include “I regret not divorcing that crazy B’ sooner.” If 40% of marriages end in divorce, even if it is quite a bit fewer than 40% of married people (modal number of marriages is 1, some people marry multiple times) you still should see that crop up, or even just regretting getting divorced. It makes me suspect there is serious social desirability bias at work in people’s responses, or just lack of deep consideration of what they would have changed.
Just seems a bit pat that such a common, life upending event never seems to get mentioned.
> Funding people to do cool things that don’t have obvious revenue mechanisms, being a modern day patron, whether or not it fits anyone’s pattern of charity, should be near the top of your list. Find the cool things you want, and make them happen. Some of them should be purely ‘I want this to exist’ with no greater aims at all.
It actually kinda drives me crazy. How hard can it be for a tech billionaire to start and run a foundation to solve (or put a big dent) into xkcd 2347 ? It’s right into their core skill, they can evaluate most of the impact by themselves (tech being their domain), it’s such a low hanging fruit, that it should be a no brainer.
Re blue collar jobs: not clear to me that there’s a market failure here. I suspect that most of the well paid blue collar workers are highly conscientious in a way that would make them quite valuable in the white collar world too. The difference between a good plumber/electrician/foreman and a bad one is the same attention to detail, responsiveness, perceptiveness, etc. combo as in an email job, plus you are much more likely to be up to your elbows in someone’s poo or break your arm.
> Claim that the beauty premium can be explained away by the correlation with intelligence plus publication bias, with the exception of sex work where I could not have (if necessary) said ‘I defy the data’ fast enough
This is something I would love someone like Andrew Gelman to chide upon.
Everyone is using "controlling for a confounder" as a magic wand that makes spurious correlations disappear if you add enough variables to it, with no downside.
Alas, that’s not the case. For it to work the way you think it works, you have to make a big assumption, namely that the variables you’re controlling for are indeed confounders. It’s in the name. If they aren’t confounders, you mostly are going to kill real, innocent correlations.
I believe that’s what’s happening here. Let’s suppose that promotion = intelligence + beauty, and beauty = "good genes" (whatever it is) and intelligence = "good genes" (such that we have, in our toy model, a perfect correlation between intelligence and beauty). What happen if you control for intelligence ? Well, your correlation between promotion and beauty disappears, even if there is a real, direct, causal effect from beauty to promotion (it’s right there, explicit, in our toy model). In practice, most people will see the correlation disappear and conclude "well, guess it was a confounder, so there’s no real link between the two".
The old people advice stuff was so predictable and uninteresting. They should have interviewed some old people barely getting by on SS, or maybe a few in prison, one or two living on the streets after a life of smoking so much pot that their brain doesn't work right anymore. Or maybe a few old guys living in Thailand spending their retirement money banging Thai whores.
I'm 55. They could have asked me and I would have said it was very important not to get married because half of my male friends are divorced with 4 kids and poor because they got screwed over in the divorce.
> I continue to strongly think that the right amount of alcohol is zero.
Alcohol consumption is apparently _very_ heavily tail-weighted in the US. The research is iffy enough that I don't want to trust the numbers too much. But apparently, if you go much below the 70th percentile in alcohol consumption, it's anywhere from zero to two drinks a week. 10% of the population has a horrifying drinking problem, 10% really ought to cut back, and a third 10% would be at least a bit healthier if they cut back. And the rest just don't drink that much.
I'm in the "2 drinks a month" category, which doesn't even make it into the top 10 worst health decisions I make. And I might still be slightly above average in drinking. My lifetime record for drinking was a single bottle of wine split three ways over the course of a 3-hour dinner, which means I've probably never reached 0.05 BAC in my life. But that was a delightful evening that I still remember with fondness 20 years later. (In fact, now that I look up how much is actually in a bottle of wine, and given my body size, I'm pretty sure that 75% of the effect was psychosomatic.)
The strongest argument against drinking, I think, is the possibility of latent alcoholism in part of the population. I don't know if that's real, but if it is, it means the odds for taking that first drink aren't great. But if someone has been drinking a glass of wine a week for 20 years, I doubt that cutting that to zero is a remotely worthwhile intervention.
I am deeply unhappy about the recent medical use of the phrase "there is no safe level of _____". It's technically true, but it's true of a lot of things. There's no safe level of driving cars, or of playing most sports, or of doing half the interesting things in life. For example, the EPA insists that there's no safe level of radiation. But tons of perfectly ordinary substances are mildly radioactive, including granite. So you should never visit any monuments or look at any statues or vacation anywhere with a granite coastline. This is not a sensible way to live.
So for the ~40% of the population that drinks, but only rarely, the logic of "the right amount of alcohol is zero" is not a logic that we'd want to extend to anything else in life.
> The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive
Claude was only able to name 5 billionaires who are podcast hosts. And then 5 more who regularly comment on social media. That leaves 99.6% of billionaires who are not involved in such things and do other stuff.
Regarding squatters -- and I am in complete agreement that the laws in question are insane and unjust -- part of me always wonders how much social connection squatters have. Like, presumably they aren't living normal-people lives with normal-people social connections and normal-people jobs where someone would notice if they didn't show up. If irate homeowners simply murdered the squatters (without them being able to contact 911) and disposed of the bodies....would anyone notice? If they did, would they be aware of the squatter's address?
(The better solution, of course, barring the legislature actually doing its job, is for DAs to decline to prosecute squatter "eviction" cases rather than declining to prosecute actual crimes).
*Eventually* you beat Kasparov just by playing randomly, just like eventually the gas molecules all collect in the corner of the box. I guess it’s implied (without anyone making this explicit) that you’re supposed to beat him after a polynomial rather than exponential number of retries? :-)
But also: do you get to do anything else while in the time loop, besides play chess? Losing every game would seem like an easy way to attain eternal life.
Tying loose threads: Conservatives worry that if lab grown meat gets close enough to real meat in quality, real meat will get banned, leaving a lower quality option. And as electric cars demonstrate, once lab-meat gets better than real meat, it will become less popular with liberals as it will no longer require sacrifice. That shitty showers are worse with water demonstrates that the sacrifice is the point.
>In wartime these delays would be unacceptable. In peacetime, I don’t see why I care.
Do warnings of (potential) impending WW3[0] change your thoughts on this? If one were to assume those warnings were completely accurate, would you think that these were acceptable timelines? I don't know how seriously to take these warnings. I generally think of Noah as a relatively good thinker (who I often disagree with), and this line of argument doesn't seem completely crazy to me.
I have a small YouTube channel and those revenue numbers match my experience.
On NPR - I used to listen to every Planet Money and only gave up in 2023 when I had to skip through 3 ad breaks that were 5 promo slots in a row for other NPR programs about topics of zero interest to me. I was training for a marathon at the time, so sweaty hands + phone interaction was a huge PITA and frankly the content quality had dropped enough for me to not continue that ~12 year habit.
On Screen setups - as an accountant, definitely #3 or #5 for working with multiple spreadsheets, needing to compare and link files together. Working on more coding focused activities, I liked Landscape-Landscape-Portrait so I could have IDE on one landscape screen, other reference program on the other landscape (e.g. browser for prototyping a dashboard I was building, spreadsheet for manual interrogation of input csv files) and a browser for reading documentation or LLM consults on the portrait monitor.
Speaking of being an accountant - I would also point out there is a lot of underexploited opportunity in that career, without the physical labour. If you're not in a Big 4 job, you will typically have to work long days for maybe 3 days per month - outside that, if you're reasonably bright you can get paid a good amount (relative to the median worker) and the work isn't very hard. The tradeoff is: no one outside of work gives a shit about what you do; if you're good at what you do everybody inside work cares too much about what you do. The easiest way to skip a conversation about careers if any random stranger asks what you do: say you're an accountant.
On your comments about junk science and juries: I think you overestimate the cognitive capacity of the median juror. I know this is not politically correct to say, but: the median juror I've encountered in the four juries I have served on is not one who could parse the notion of statistical validity, let alone the notion of p-hacking.
To make this claim more concrete: one of the juries I served on was a grand jury, and there were jurors on that jury who could not discern the difference between an indictment (our remit) and a verdict (the remit of a petit jury). This was in spite of the prosecutor holding forth at length, in what I think he assumed was simple language, explaining the difference between the two juries and what a grand juror's remit was.
Or, if you prefer, Sol Wachtler's famous claim that he could indict a ham sandwich.
Re cocaine overdoses I have still never heard a logical explanation as to why someone would mix fent into the coke they're selling to people. Cross contamination explains some of it; increased cocaine overdoses maybe a result of changes in where and how it's getting packaged for market? Maybe a change in cocaine purity or a decline in the overall health of the average user making them more susceptible to cardiac events?
Regardless I've never bought the theory that any dealer is purposely doing this. Why would you risk overdosing casual users of powder cocaine with a lethal downer for marginal financial benefit and all sorts of potential heat? Nobody cares about the average fent addict overdosing but if you kill some 19 year old student athlete you might actually spark an investigation. Can't see the executive level gangsters who run these operations signing off on such a thing either when they're printing money anyways. Just doesn't add up.
Regarding regrets about one’s life, I am skeptical that more of the answers don’t include “I regret not divorcing that crazy B’ sooner.” If 40% of marriages end in divorce, even if it is quite a bit fewer than 40% of married people (modal number of marriages is 1, some people marry multiple times) you still should see that crop up, or even just regretting getting divorced. It makes me suspect there is serious social desirability bias at work in people’s responses, or just lack of deep consideration of what they would have changed.
Just seems a bit pat that such a common, life upending event never seems to get mentioned.
> Funding people to do cool things that don’t have obvious revenue mechanisms, being a modern day patron, whether or not it fits anyone’s pattern of charity, should be near the top of your list. Find the cool things you want, and make them happen. Some of them should be purely ‘I want this to exist’ with no greater aims at all.
It actually kinda drives me crazy. How hard can it be for a tech billionaire to start and run a foundation to solve (or put a big dent) into xkcd 2347 ? It’s right into their core skill, they can evaluate most of the impact by themselves (tech being their domain), it’s such a low hanging fruit, that it should be a no brainer.
Re blue collar jobs: not clear to me that there’s a market failure here. I suspect that most of the well paid blue collar workers are highly conscientious in a way that would make them quite valuable in the white collar world too. The difference between a good plumber/electrician/foreman and a bad one is the same attention to detail, responsiveness, perceptiveness, etc. combo as in an email job, plus you are much more likely to be up to your elbows in someone’s poo or break your arm.
I'd encourage you to read some official sources on 702 and see if you come to the same conclusions.
Text of House Bill under question: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/7888
Law authorizing 702 (has been reviewed by the Ninth Circuit and found constitutional): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/50/1881a
Fact Sheet on 702: https://www.intelligence.gov/assets/documents/702%20Documents/FISA_Section_702_Fact_Sheet_JUN2023.pdf
> Claim that the beauty premium can be explained away by the correlation with intelligence plus publication bias, with the exception of sex work where I could not have (if necessary) said ‘I defy the data’ fast enough
This is something I would love someone like Andrew Gelman to chide upon.
Everyone is using "controlling for a confounder" as a magic wand that makes spurious correlations disappear if you add enough variables to it, with no downside.
Alas, that’s not the case. For it to work the way you think it works, you have to make a big assumption, namely that the variables you’re controlling for are indeed confounders. It’s in the name. If they aren’t confounders, you mostly are going to kill real, innocent correlations.
I believe that’s what’s happening here. Let’s suppose that promotion = intelligence + beauty, and beauty = "good genes" (whatever it is) and intelligence = "good genes" (such that we have, in our toy model, a perfect correlation between intelligence and beauty). What happen if you control for intelligence ? Well, your correlation between promotion and beauty disappears, even if there is a real, direct, causal effect from beauty to promotion (it’s right there, explicit, in our toy model). In practice, most people will see the correlation disappear and conclude "well, guess it was a confounder, so there’s no real link between the two".
The old people advice stuff was so predictable and uninteresting. They should have interviewed some old people barely getting by on SS, or maybe a few in prison, one or two living on the streets after a life of smoking so much pot that their brain doesn't work right anymore. Or maybe a few old guys living in Thailand spending their retirement money banging Thai whores.
I'm 55. They could have asked me and I would have said it was very important not to get married because half of my male friends are divorced with 4 kids and poor because they got screwed over in the divorce.
> I continue to strongly think that the right amount of alcohol is zero.
Alcohol consumption is apparently _very_ heavily tail-weighted in the US. The research is iffy enough that I don't want to trust the numbers too much. But apparently, if you go much below the 70th percentile in alcohol consumption, it's anywhere from zero to two drinks a week. 10% of the population has a horrifying drinking problem, 10% really ought to cut back, and a third 10% would be at least a bit healthier if they cut back. And the rest just don't drink that much.
I'm in the "2 drinks a month" category, which doesn't even make it into the top 10 worst health decisions I make. And I might still be slightly above average in drinking. My lifetime record for drinking was a single bottle of wine split three ways over the course of a 3-hour dinner, which means I've probably never reached 0.05 BAC in my life. But that was a delightful evening that I still remember with fondness 20 years later. (In fact, now that I look up how much is actually in a bottle of wine, and given my body size, I'm pretty sure that 75% of the effect was psychosomatic.)
The strongest argument against drinking, I think, is the possibility of latent alcoholism in part of the population. I don't know if that's real, but if it is, it means the odds for taking that first drink aren't great. But if someone has been drinking a glass of wine a week for 20 years, I doubt that cutting that to zero is a remotely worthwhile intervention.
I am deeply unhappy about the recent medical use of the phrase "there is no safe level of _____". It's technically true, but it's true of a lot of things. There's no safe level of driving cars, or of playing most sports, or of doing half the interesting things in life. For example, the EPA insists that there's no safe level of radiation. But tons of perfectly ordinary substances are mildly radioactive, including granite. So you should never visit any monuments or look at any statues or vacation anywhere with a granite coastline. This is not a sensible way to live.
So for the ~40% of the population that drinks, but only rarely, the logic of "the right amount of alcohol is zero" is not a logic that we'd want to extend to anything else in life.
> The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive
Claude was only able to name 5 billionaires who are podcast hosts. And then 5 more who regularly comment on social media. That leaves 99.6% of billionaires who are not involved in such things and do other stuff.
Regarding squatters -- and I am in complete agreement that the laws in question are insane and unjust -- part of me always wonders how much social connection squatters have. Like, presumably they aren't living normal-people lives with normal-people social connections and normal-people jobs where someone would notice if they didn't show up. If irate homeowners simply murdered the squatters (without them being able to contact 911) and disposed of the bodies....would anyone notice? If they did, would they be aware of the squatter's address?
(The better solution, of course, barring the legislature actually doing its job, is for DAs to decline to prosecute squatter "eviction" cases rather than declining to prosecute actual crimes).
*Eventually* you beat Kasparov just by playing randomly, just like eventually the gas molecules all collect in the corner of the box. I guess it’s implied (without anyone making this explicit) that you’re supposed to beat him after a polynomial rather than exponential number of retries? :-)
But also: do you get to do anything else while in the time loop, besides play chess? Losing every game would seem like an easy way to attain eternal life.
Tying loose threads: Conservatives worry that if lab grown meat gets close enough to real meat in quality, real meat will get banned, leaving a lower quality option. And as electric cars demonstrate, once lab-meat gets better than real meat, it will become less popular with liberals as it will no longer require sacrifice. That shitty showers are worse with water demonstrates that the sacrifice is the point.
>In wartime these delays would be unacceptable. In peacetime, I don’t see why I care.
Do warnings of (potential) impending WW3[0] change your thoughts on this? If one were to assume those warnings were completely accurate, would you think that these were acceptable timelines? I don't know how seriously to take these warnings. I generally think of Noah as a relatively good thinker (who I often disagree with), and this line of argument doesn't seem completely crazy to me.
[0]https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-still-not-worried-enough?pos=7&utm_source=%2Fbrowse%2Frecommendations&utm_medium=reader2
I have a small YouTube channel and those revenue numbers match my experience.
On NPR - I used to listen to every Planet Money and only gave up in 2023 when I had to skip through 3 ad breaks that were 5 promo slots in a row for other NPR programs about topics of zero interest to me. I was training for a marathon at the time, so sweaty hands + phone interaction was a huge PITA and frankly the content quality had dropped enough for me to not continue that ~12 year habit.
On Screen setups - as an accountant, definitely #3 or #5 for working with multiple spreadsheets, needing to compare and link files together. Working on more coding focused activities, I liked Landscape-Landscape-Portrait so I could have IDE on one landscape screen, other reference program on the other landscape (e.g. browser for prototyping a dashboard I was building, spreadsheet for manual interrogation of input csv files) and a browser for reading documentation or LLM consults on the portrait monitor.
Speaking of being an accountant - I would also point out there is a lot of underexploited opportunity in that career, without the physical labour. If you're not in a Big 4 job, you will typically have to work long days for maybe 3 days per month - outside that, if you're reasonably bright you can get paid a good amount (relative to the median worker) and the work isn't very hard. The tradeoff is: no one outside of work gives a shit about what you do; if you're good at what you do everybody inside work cares too much about what you do. The easiest way to skip a conversation about careers if any random stranger asks what you do: say you're an accountant.
Plot twist: e/accs are actually pro squatter's rights, because if someone managed to get into your house it was really meant to be theirs