Monthly Roundup #21: August 2024

Strictly speaking I do not have that much ‘good news’ to report, but it’s all mostly fun stuff one way or another. Let’s go.

Bad News

Is this you?

Patrick McKenzie: This sounds like a trivial observation and it isn’t:

No organization which makes its people pay for coffee wants to win.

There are many other questions you can ask about an organization but if their people pay for coffee you can immediately discount their realized impact on the world by > 90%.

This is not simply for the cultural impact of stupid decisions, though goodness as a Japanese salaryman I have stories to tell. Management, having priced coffee, seeking expenses to cut, put a price on disposable coffee cups, and made engineers diligently count those paper cups.

Just try to imagine how upside down the world is when you think one of the highest priority tasks for a software engineer this Monday is updating the disposable coffee cup consumption spreadsheet.

And no, Japanese megacorps are not the only place where these insanities persist. And there are many isomorphic ones.

Dominic Cummings: Cf No10 Cafe.

One of the secrets of my productivity, such as it is, is that I know many (but not all!) of the things to not track or treat as having a price. Can you imagine thinking it was a good idea to charge the people at No10 for coffee? Well, bad news.

Tyler Cowen asks, why do we no longer compose music like Bach? Or rather, why do we not care when someone does, as when Nikolaus Matthes (born 1981) produced high quality (if not as high quality as Bach’s best) Bach-style work. All reviews strongly positive, stronger than many older musicians who are still popular, yet little interest.

To me the answer is simple enough. There is quite a lot of Bach, and many contemporaries, and we have filtered what is available rather well and turned it into a common frame of reference. One could listen to that music all of one’s life, and there is still plenty of it. Why complicate matters now with modern mimicry, even if it is quite good? In popular music there are cultural reasons to need ‘new music’ periodically even if it is only variation on the old, yet we are increasingly converging on the classic canon instead except for particular ‘new music’ spaces. And I think we are right to do so.

The fabrication of the Venezuelan election wasn’t even trying. This matches my model. Yes, it is possible to generate plausible fake election data that would make fraud hard to prove, but those with the fraudulent election nature rarely do that. Often they actively want you to know. The point generalizes well beyond elections.

Indeed, it seems that in the wake of his new 0% approval rating, Maduro is going Full Stalin, with maximum security reeducation camps for political prisoners. Also the antisemitism, and I could go on. The playbook never changes.

I am guessing this happens a lot, including the He Admit It part.

Kelsey McR: ‼️ HVAC rep legit just said "We know our prices are competitive because we meet with all the other vendors in the area at least once a year to make sure we're in alignment." ‼️

This was their defense to my husband's complaint on how they completely took advantage of my mother.

Some $h!t about to go down in Charlotte, NC if they don't fix their mistake.

A whole different reason to beware when engaging in Air Conditioner Repair.

Disney tries to pull a literal ‘you signed up for a Disney+ free trial so you can’t sue us for killing your wife’ defense, saying that he agreed to arbitration in ‘all disputes with Disney.’ Others claim this is bad reporting and it’s due to buying tickets for Epcot, and I guess that is slightly better? Still, it’s a bold strategy.

I’ve been everywhere, man. Where am I gonna go?

Kevin Lacker: Peter Thiel on his struggle to leave California:

Seattle: worst weather in the country

Las Vegas: "not that big a fan"

Houston: just an oil town

Dallas: has an inferiority complex

Austin: government town

Miami: the vibe is that you don't work

Nashville: <just looks away>

Americans spent 1 hour, 39 minutes more per day at home in 2022 than they did in 2003. Or are we sure this isn’t good news?

Abstract: Results show that from 2003 to 2022, average time spent at home among American adults has risen by one hour and 39 minutes in a typical day. Time at home has risen for every subset of the population and for virtually all activities. Preliminary analysis indicates that time at home is associated with lower levels of happiness and less meaning, suggesting the need for enhanced empirical attention to this major shift in the setting of American life.

Vivek: There’s no proof of causation here, but it is interesting that participants reported sleeping half an hour more and commuting half an hour less. And then they reported working at home 40 minutes more and away about the same less, and a smaller identical ~1:1 shift for leisure activity towards home.

As someone who spends most of their time at home? Home is amazing. Up to a point.

I do think I spend too much time at home and don’t go to enough things. It is because home got more awesome, not because away got worse, but it still happened. It’s too damn easy to not go outside.

Tyler Cowen warns that larger teams and difficulty in attributing credit and productivity often means greater credentialism. Without other ways to tell who is good, companies fall back upon legible signals like degrees or GitHub profiles. He predicts credentialism will become more important, not less. I agree with his problem statement, and disagree with his assessment of the impact of AI on this, for which see the post AI #78 (when available).

Grocery Store Blues

As with many things, when the capitalists declined to open a grocery store in a ‘food desert’ there was probably a reason. In this case the reason was ‘there aren’t that many people around and they mostly prefer to shop at a Dollar Store or a relatively far away WalMart or other store anyway because it is cheaper.’

I do see the argument. A grocery store in an area provides substantial consumer surplus over and above existing options. It is not crazy to think that such a store could be socially good even if it is not profitable. The problem is that these are poor communities. We might think what the inhabitants want is fresh produce and better availability of otherwise healthy food.

The residents disagree. Their revealed preference is that what they need are lower prices, the ability to buy in bulk and feed families for less, and independent stores have higher supplier costs. Which is another way of saying that consumers mostly prefer the big businesses and their lower prices. Yes, they like having easily available fresh lettuce and a store that is closer, but how much are they willing to pay for that? Not much, as it turns out.

What would happen if we broke up the big supermarket chains, including WalMart? Or if we invalidated their deals with suppliers and forced such suppliers to price match for other customers? There is certainly actively talk of going after Big Grocery. The problem is that where Big Grocery is using its market power is primarily not to raise prices on customers, but to lower prices charged by suppliers. If you destroy that, you do not lower prices and make consumers better off. You raise prices and make consumers worse off.

This could also offer perspective on all the talk about supposedly predatory evil capitalist grocery chains, and how they are supposedly engaging in ‘price gouging’ while their profit margins are 1.5% and often their retail prices are better than some wholesale prices.

In conclusion:

Good News, Everyone

On the congestion pricing front, NYC comptroller Brad Lander has filed two new lawsuits to challenge Hochul’s shameful indefinite pause order. Attempts to replace the lost revenue remain stalled.

(Whereas Congressman Hakeem Jeffries betrays NYC, calls the pause in congestion pricing ‘reasonable.’ No.)

Track records of various people on Manifold. I no longer am mysteriously winning actual 100% of the time, but it is going well.

One big opportunity in the election prediction markets is the spread between electoral college and popular vote. Nate Silver thinks there is a 12% chance that Kalama Harris will win the popular vote but not the electoral college. Polymarket says this is 21%. It could of course happen, but 21% seems clearly too high.

Opportunity Knocks

Shameless plug, take two: My 501c3 Balsa Research is looking to fund two Jones Act studies, but only has the funds right now to do one of them. Help us do both instead. I think these are very worth doing, and if it works out we have a model we can scale.

My dear and deeply brilliant and talented friend Sarah Constantin is looking for work on ambitious science and tech projects on strategy, research, marketing and more. Here is her LinkedIn, an in-depth doc and her Caldenly. You should hire her. But also if you cause her to move out of NYC I will not forgive you, you bastard.

YC is doing a fall batch, deadline is August 27 so move fast. If you are considering doing this than you should do it.

If you think you’re applying ‘too early’ or without enough done yet:

Paul Graham: I was sent stats for the YC board meeting tomorrow. The second number is the fraction of companies with no revenue when YC funded them. High is good because it means we're investing early. If this doesn't convince you that you don't have to wait to apply, I don't know what will.

Adam Veroni: Can you apply with just an idea?

Paul Graham: Yes, many people do.

If I wasn’t already so deep into my writing and didn’t have a family, especially if I was younger, I would 100% be applying, and assume I was getting positive selection - if I was accepted it would be a big sign I should do it and a giant leg up doing it.

(I also would note that this is an example of how metrics, especially involving revenue, can get very weird with venture capital, if you can’t get impressive revenue there are reasons to consider postponing revenue until it can look impressive or you don’t have to get funding for a while.)

IFP is hiring an Assistant Editor for Santi Ruiz, and paying $3k for a successful referral.

While I Cannot Condone This

Who has food the locals are actually excited to constantly eat?

Epic Maps: Europe’s great divide.

Maia: Revealed preferences for which countries have good cuisine.

The locals, they know. The interesting zone is the Balkans (not counting Greece), you essentially never see their cuisine in America so it’s hard to know if they’re right to stay local. Iceland is presumably more about supply than demand. Otherwise, the border seems to clearly be in the right place.

Tyler Cowen offers thoughts on Ranked Choice Voting, saying it reduces negative campaigning and calling it a ‘voting system for the self-satisfied.’ Yes, it has a moderating influence, but it also opens the door to real change and third parties or independent runs. Tyler has made several similar arguments recently, essentially saying that it is good to shake things up and let essentially arbitrary major party groups govern despite minority support and see what happens, if things are not by default going well, which he believes they are not. This is at most a highly second-best approach, especially given who I expect to most often be doing the shaking up. He doesn’t get too deep into the game theory here given the venue, so I will finish by noting that I do think that if you are going to do something complex, RCV is the way. It has theoretical game theory issues, but from what I can see the similar issues for other complex systems are far worse.

Antisocial Media

Blackberry invented push notifications exactly so you didn’t have to check your phone.

The goal is to hit the sweet spot. You want sufficient notifications that a lack of them means you can relax and ignore, without notifications that hijack your attention. On the instinctive margin you want less notifications.

Twitter to remove the like and comment counts from replies, and soon from the news feed as well.

I notice I am confused. This is a really stupid idea. The replies were 90% ‘don’t do this.’

Like counts have their downsides. I do like that ACX does not have likes. But in the context of Twitter it is necessary to have that context.

And taking out the reply counts is madness. Taking reply counts out of the newsfeed? That would be complete and utter insanity. You don’t know if there are replies unless you click through? What the hell?

The question to me is not ‘is this a good idea,’ it is ‘is this the kind of thing that does enough damage to endanger Twitter.’ In its full version, I think it very much might.

Emmett Shear: As a (very small) investor in SubStack maybe I should be rooting for this change. It’s the first idea I’ve seen that’s so bad that it could actually destroy Twitter. Incredible stuff. Reminds me of when Digg self-destructed and thrust Reddit into the lead.

Making a tool much shittier does mean it’s harder to do bad things with it, I suppose that’s true. I’ll make you a deal: if this happens you can stay and use the plastic kids cutlery, and I’ll go somewhere they let me have a real fork.

I hope they think better of this, and also hope Tweetdeck does not follow this change.

Also it would be great if Twitter stopped all-but-blocking Substack links.

We keep seeing results like this: 41% of people in this survey would enter a Utopia-level Experience Machine, 17% would do it purely if it was ‘better than real life’ and I am guessing this group is less inclined to do so than many others. This is the experience machine from the thought experiment ‘you would obviously never plus into the experience machine.’ Something is very wrong.

Technology Advances

A bizarre claim that the Pixel Watch has a terrible UI, especially by not automatically showing notifications, and this was largely because Google didn’t force those building its products to switch away from iPhones and Apple Watches. Except that I asked Gemini and Claude and no, the Pixel Watch does notifications in the obviously correct way?

The culture issue is still there. You absolutely have to use your own products.

Emmett Shear: On the other hand, when I interned at Microsoft on Hotmail in 2004 everyone used Internet Explorer and Outlook. So when I tried to tell them about Gmail on Firefox and that they were in deep trouble, no one really reacted. They didn't disagree but they didn't really *get* it.

PRoales: Yes this is why when in an all hands meeting Eric Schmitt was challenged about being photographed using an iPhone he shot back that everyone in Google should switch back and forth between iPhone and Android once a quarter

Switching back and forth is plausibly even better.

Periodically I see people reinvent the proposal of communication services (here text and email, often also phone and so on) where the sender pays money, usually with the option to waive the fee if the communication was legit and worthwhile.

Switches and physical buttons are better than touchscreens, navy finally realized in 2019. When will the rest of us catch up? Certainly there are times and places for touchscreens, but if a system includes a touch screen then on the margin there are never, ever enough buttons and switches.

Google Enshittification

An in depth case study on the enshittification of Google results, and how major media products and brands are one by one being mined in ‘bust out’ operations that burn their earned credibility for brief revenue via SEO glory. And that’s (mostly) without AI generating the content, which will doubtless accelerate this.

Why is this a hard problem to solve?

I get the argument that ‘if 99% of SEO spam is detected you still lose to the 1%.’

The problem with that argument is that these are brands.

Suppose Google has to deal with 10 million pages, all from different sources, 9.9 million of which are SEO spam optimized to defeat whatever algorithms Google was found to be using yesterday or last month or last year. They can iterate more and faster than you can. You have to use some algorithm on all of it, you have lots of restrictions on how that works, you move at the speed of a megacorp. Sounds hard.

I think there are solutions to that, at least until everyone adjusts again, given that Google has Gemini and can fine tune (or even outright pretrain) versions of it for exactly this purpose.

There are also a bunch of other things one could try. Google has not even tried integrating direct user feedback despite this being the One Known Answer for sorting quality, and Google having every advantage in filtering that data for users that are providing good information. I realize this is a super hard problem and a continuous arms race. But I flat out think if you put me in charge of Google Search and gave me a free hand and their current budget I would solve this.

Where I don’t understand at all are the major brands getting away, for extended periods, with their ‘busting out’ and selling out their quality, often dramatically.

If a large percentage of users know that (without loss of generality, going off the OP’s claim without verifying) Better Homes & Gardens is now SEO Optimized Homes & Gardens, and has increasingly been for years, don’t tell me it is hard for Google to notice.

The point of a major brand is that it has an ongoing linked reputation. It is not as if such moves are not naked eye obvious. If you have to, you can have a human annual review, at a random time, of all major websites above some traffic threshold, based on a random sample of recent Google Search directed activity. Then that modifier gets applied to all searches there for a year, up to and including essentially an Internet Death Penalty. Even if you went overboard on this, it likely costs only eight figures a year to maintain, nine at the most. A small price to pay in context.

For Science!

Here is a new candidate for most not okay thing someone openly did in a study. So this is mostly offered for fun, but also because Oliver Traldi is importantly right here.

Oliver Traldi: However low your opinion of "studies", it should probably be lower.

sucks: lmfao. the "dAtA jOuRnAliSt" who did this study didn't believe the alcoholics either so he just doubled their numbers for no good reason. now people quoting it as if it's fact. really amazing stuff. at least every other study besides this one is Real And Reliable!!

Forbes: The source for this figure is "Paying the Tab," by Phillip J. Cook, which was published in 2007. If we look at the section where he arrives at this calculation, and go to the footnote, we find that he used data from 2001-2002 from NESARC, the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, which had a reprentative sample of 43,093 adults over the age of 18.

But following this footnote, we find that Cook corrected these data for under- reporting by multiplying the number of drinks each respondent claimed they had drunk by 1.97 in order to comport with the previous year's sales data for alcohol in the US. Why? It turns out that alcohol sales in the US in 2000 were double what NESARC's respondents—a nationally representative sample, remember-claimed to have drunk.

I mean… you can’t… just… do that. You know you can’t just do that, right?

One obvious reason is that the distribution looks like that because it is missing people who say they don’t drink and are lying. And in general there’s no reason to think drinks unreported scale linearly with drinks reported.

The other reason is that not all alcohol that gets sold gets consumed? You can’t simply assume that every time someone buys a drink or a bottle that it gets fully consumed. That very obviously is not what happens.

Government Working

Government actually working, hopefully.

More Perfect Union:

BREAKING: Banks, credit card companies, and more will be required to let customers talk to a human by pressing a single button under a new Biden administration proposed rule.

The @CFPB rule is part of a campaign to crack down on customer service “doom loops.”

The @FCC is launching an inquiry into considering similar requirements for phone, broadband, and cable companies.

And @HHSGov and @USDOL are calling on health plan providers to make it easier to talk to a customer service agent, according to the White House.

Rachel Tobac: From a personal perspective: I love this.

From a hacking-over-the-phone perspective: I’m hoping these Banks, Credit Card companies etc update their ☎️ identity verification protocols or we’re going to see quicker hacking / account takeover when reaching a human is required quick.

Andrew Rettek: Does this apply to when I reach out to government services that have frozen my bank account? It took over a week to get a person on the phone who could do anything at all about the issue.

My cynical take is that this won't apply to federal or state call centers that cause way more damage than any private company. I hope I'm wrong.

Imagine being so despairing that you think slowing down bank phone calls is necessary to introduce friction into identity theft. Still, yes, that is a real concern, especially if banks are actually stupid enough to continue to allow voice ID. Every time the bank apologizes for asking me security questions, I reply “no, this is good, I would be worried if you weren’t asking, thank you for checking.”

Is graft here in the good old USA different?

Ben Landau-Taylor: Every time I talk about graft in the U.S., someone says “Oh but graft here is different, they have to go through sinecures and patronage networks, no one just steals the money.” And no, that’s ridiculous cope, they can also just steal half a billion dollars. [links to a story about Medicaid fraud and provides text]

Certainly the PPP showed that we do fraud on a massive scale when given the opportunity, or at least allow it, same as everyone else.

America F*** Yeah

Your periodic moment of appreciation for the First Amendment, and periodic reminder that this degree of free speech is a very specifically American thing.

British politician Miriam Cates: But the invention of social media has exponentially increased the speed at which protests can be triggered, organised and spread.

…

Yet online anonymous users can say whatever they like without repercussions. Freedom without responsibility is just anarchy.

…

We should not try to regulate what is said online. But what keeps society civilised offline is the accountability of being responsible for what you say. Online anonymity is destroying the values and virtues that underpin peaceful society - responsibility, dignity, empathy.

Richard Ngo: Absolutely disgusting behavior from British authorities, who are becoming more authoritarian on a daily basis.

I lived there for six years, and the decline since then has been deeply disappointing.

If Brits can’t retweet what’s going on then the rest of us will have to.

Joe Rogan: The fact that they're comfortable with finding people who've said something that they disagree with and putting them in a f—king cage in England in 2024 is really wild.

Especially, they’re saying you can get arrested for retweeting something.

Or here’s a call for ‘militant democracy’ which means shutting down the opposition’s media entirely.

Or here’s the UK National Health Service data analytics blaming Twitter having private likes for the UK’s riots.

3,300 people in the UK were arrested in the same year for social media posts.

Or it seems even for posting in private?

Francois Valentin: In the UK you can get arrested and sentenced to prison for offensive jokes in a private whatsapp group.

I'm not an American free speech absolutist but such a vile overreach by the state could radicalise me.

As in, 20 weeks for offensive jokes in a WhatsApp chat group with friends. What?

Also, come and take it has never applied more:

In summary:

The EU also joined the fun, having the nerve to threaten Americans who might dare talk to each other online.

Mason: The EU is threatening X with legal action "in relation to" a planned interview between Elon and Trump, as it may "generate detrimental effects on civic discourse."

Thierry Breton: With great audience comes greater responsibility #DSA

As there is a risk of amplification of potentially harmful content in 🇪🇺 in connection with events with major audience around the world, I sent this letter to @elonmusk.

EUROPEAN COMMISSION

Thierry Breton

Member of the Commission

Brussels, 12 August 2024

Dear Mr Musk,

I am writing to you in the context of recent events in the United Kingdom and in relation to the planned broadcast on your platform X of a live conversation between a US presidential candidate and yourself, which will also be accessible to users in the EU.

I understand that you are currently doing a stress test of the platform. In this context, I am compelled to remind you of the due diligence obligations set out in the Digital Services Act (DSA), as outlined in my previous letter. As the individual entity ultimately controlling a platform with over 300 million users worldwide, of which one third in the EU, that has been designated as a Very Large Online Platform, you have the legal obligation to ensure X's compliance with EU law and in particular the DSA in the EU.

This notably means ensuring, on one hand, that freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming, which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security. This is important against the background of recent examples of public unrest brought about by the amplification of content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.

It also implies i) informing EU judicial and administrative authorities without undue delay on the measures taken to address their orders against content considered illegal, according to national and/ or EU law, ii) taking timely, diligent, non-arbitrary and objective action upon receipt of notices by users considering certain content illegal, iii) informing users concerning the measures taken upon receipt of the relevant notice, and iv) publicly reporting about content moderation measures.

In this respect, I note that the DSA obligations apply without exceptions or discrimination to the moderation of the whole user community and content of X (including yourself as a user with over 190 million followers) which is accessible to EU users and should be fulfilled in line with the risk-based approach of the DSA, which requires greater due diligence in case of a foreseeable increase of the risk profile.

As you know, formal proceedings are already ongoing against X under the DSA, notably in areas linked to the dissemination of illegal content and the effectiveness of the measures taken to combat disinformation.

As the relevant content is accessible to EU users and being amplified also in our jurisdiction, we cannot exclude potential spillovers in the EU. Therefore, we are monitoring the potential risks in the EU associated with the dissemination of content that may incite violence, hate and racism in conjunction with major political - or societal - events around the world, including debates and interviews in the context of elections.

Let me clarify that any negative effect of illegal content on X in the EU, which could be attributed to the ineffectiveness of the way in which X applies the relevant provisions of the DSA, may be relevant in the context of the ongoing proceedings and of the overall assessment of X's compliance with EU law. This is in line with what has already been done in the recent past, for example in relation to the repercussions and amplification of terrorist content or content that incites violence, hate and racism in the EU, such as in the context of the recent riots in the United Kingdom.

I therefore urge you to promptly ensure the effectiveness of your systems and to report measures taken to my team. My services and I will be extremely vigilant to any evidence that points to breaches of the DSA and will not hesitate to make full use of our toolbox, including by adopting interim measures, should it be warranted to protect EU citizens from serious harm.

Yours sincerely,

Cc: Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X

Thierry Breton

Elon Musk: Bonjour!

Smart People Being Stupid

Remember the absurdity that is Einstein, Descartes, Feynman and others saying ‘oh I am not especially talented or smart?’ Yeah. Not so much.

Ross Rheingans-Yoo: Once upon a time at [trading firm], I realized that most interns were terribly miscalculated about their own skill level because they only really thought about the other interns who are at their skill level or better.

This rhymes with @RichardMCNgo's observation that highly-intelligent people are often bad at understanding what it's like to not be highly-intelligent -- I would posit, because their attention tends to slide off the cases around them where people are not!

Today's mental lightning bolt, courtesy of Richard, is that the same process can happen on other qualities. He notes empathy, but I'd add: - conscientiousness - appearance - enthusiasm for bird-watching - artistic skill - wealth - EA-ness - blog readership.

I definitely underestimated (and at other times overestimated!) my talents and advantages, but I was never under the illusion that I had ‘no special talent.’ But I didn’t before think I was that special about recognizing I had talent, and still can’t actually relate to Einstein thinking he didn’t have any (beyond curiosity).

Richard Ngo is saying, this applies to a lot of other things beyond intelligence.

Richard Ngo: Highly intelligent people understand most things very well, but are often terrible at understanding what it’s like to be dumb. Similarly, highly empathetic people understand most experiences very well, but are often terrible at understanding what it’s like to be selfish or evil.

Anecdotally, people who are brilliant in most other ways can be terrible teachers - picture academics giving talks that only a handful of people can follow.

That last part I thought was common knowledge, which perhaps reinforces the point. Brilliant people can be brilliant teachers, or they can go over your head, and I have been known to draw from both columns.

Some theories on why people do not take advice. It’s a good list. My main emphasis would be that mostly people absolutely do take advice, especially the standard advice. So we’re left giving the advice that people already aren’t listening to, or we focus on the parts they don’t listen to, rightly or wrongly. If I had to guess, I would say people take advice roughly as often as they should?

More speculation on why Rome never had an Industrial Revolution, this time from Maxwell Tabarrok.

What We Have Here is A Failure to Communicate

Music as intentional barrier to communication, to facilitate communcation?

TLevin: I'm confident enough in this take to write it as a PSA: playing music at medium-size-or-larger gatherings is a Chesterton's Fence situation.

It serves the very important function of reducing average conversation size: the louder the music, the more groups naturally split into smaller groups, as people on the far end develop a (usually unconscious) common knowledge that it's too much effort to keep participating in the big one and they can start a new conversation without being unduly disruptive.

If you've ever been at a party with no music where people gravitate towards a single (or handful of) group of 8+ people, you've experienced the failure mode that this solves: usually these conversations are then actually conversations of 2-3 people with 5-6 observers, which is usually unpleasant for the observers and does not facilitate close interactions that easily lead to getting to know people.

By making it hard to have bigger conversations, the music naturally produces smaller ones; you can modulate the volume to have the desired effect on a typical discussion size. Quiet music (e.g. at many dinner parties) makes it hard to have conversations bigger than ~4-5, which is already a big improvement. Medium-volume music (think many bars) facilitates easy conversations of 2-3. The extreme end of this is dance clubs, where very loud music (not coincidentally!) makes it impossible to maintain conversations bigger than 2.

I suspect that high-decoupler hosts are just not in the habit of thinking "it's a party, therefore I should put music on," or even actively think "music makes it harder to talk and hear each other, and after all isn't that the point of a party?" But it's a very well-established cultural practice to play music at large gatherings, so, per Chesterton's Fence, you need to understand what function it plays. The function it plays is to stop the party-destroying phenomenon of big group conversations.

My experience is usually that a conversation with 2-3 people and 5-6 observers is fine, even 20 observers can be fine (that’s a panel!), but only if those 5-6 observers know they are observers. When there are 5+ people trying to actively participate, that is usually a disaster.

There are of course other conversations where you do not want observers, and you benefit from intimacy or privacy. And yes there can be that situation where it would be higher value to split the conversation, but people do not feel social permission or see a good way to do so.

So I can see an argument that some amount of this can be useful. But also, no.

In general, we should be wary of this sort of ‘make things worse in order to make things better.’ You are making all conversations of all sizes worse in order to override people’s decisions.

You should be very suspicious of this, especially given that you have to do actual damage in order to have much impact.

I can see ‘light dinner music’ levels in some settings, especially actual dinner parties, where you really want the groups to stay small. Also the music itself can be nice.

I would still confidently say that by default, the music ends up far too loud for everyone, and a nightmare for people like me that don’t have the best hearing.

For example, I’d offer this slight modification: Dance clubs make it impossible to maintain conversations bigger than 1. The sound is by default, to me, physically painful at all times, potentially injuriously so. You have to yell to the person right next to you to do even the most basic things. Yes, the argument is that you let your body do the talking. Perhaps getting rid of people like me is part of the point. But yikes.

Does typical bar music ‘facilitate easy conversations of 2-3 people?’ Perhaps, but mostly I see it make even those conversations harder. It’s impossible to make an N-person conversation actively hard, without making an (N-2) conversation worse.

It’s so easy to go so loud it’s hard to talk. One of my otherwise favorite restaurants, Tortaria, plays music loud enough that I don’t take people there for conversations.

Video Killed the Radio Star

Eliezer Yudkowsky asks a question I often wonder about: Why do people so often choose to learn via video rather than over text?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: I don't understand people who learn better from video than text. Why would your own thoughts about absorbing material always run at the same rate, and that rate is the lecturer's voice?

Do they never stop and think? Do they never need to?

Huh, maybe this is a skill issue and I need to learn the UI? (Quotes Great Big Dot saying “I find it a lot more annoying if it's not YouTube, because on YouTube I have keyboard shortcuts for pausing, rewinding, fastforwarding, speeding up, and slowing down.”)

I should clarify for the benefit of yung'uns: My words are meant literally enough that when I say "I don't understand" I actually mean that I am epistemically confused and curious not that I morally disapprove of the act of preferring video.

I really had not expected, before today, that video-likers would consider frequent ongoing speed-manipulation to be part of their standard process! Today I learned!

To me there are two big advantages to voice or video over text.

1. You can listen to voice in situations where reading won’t work well. The central examples are you are walking down the street, or in a vehicle, or working out. Or you want to do it as more of a relaxation thing.

2. Audio and especially video is higher bandwidth than the transcript. You get to see people interact and move, you get to hear the details of their voices. If all you do is read the words, you are potentially missing a lot. Sometimes that matters. Or it is important to have good fluid visual aids.

I vastly prefer reading in most cases. I especially hate that videos are impossible to search and scan properly, or to know if you have the right one. Super frustrating. When people send me videos, I have a very high bar to watching, whereas it’s easy to check out text and quickly tell if it has value.

But also I recognize that my hearing and audio processing is if anything below average, whereas my ability to process written words is very good (although vastly slower than others like Tyler Cowen).

Too Much Information

Scott Aaronson’s daily reading list is to reading what I am to writing. I am honored that he spends 12 hours a week on my blog, one does not have many of those bullets. He also reads WaPO and NYT, ACX, Not Even Wrong (although this one rarely updates anymore), Quanta, Quillette, The Free Press, Mosaic, Tablet, Commentary, several Twitter accounts (Graham, Yudkowsky, Deutsch), many Facebook updates and comments that he says in total often take hours a day, ~50 arXiv abstracts per day plus books.

He has noticed that this is approaching eight hours a day, seven days a week. And that this means often the day ends and Scott hasn’t created anything, and often without him even feeling ‘more informed.’

So the obvious first thing to say is: He’s going to have to make some cuts.

Let’s start with the newspapers.

I subscribe to Bloomberg, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, so I can access links as needed, and likely I ‘should’ bite the bullet and add a few more to that list even though it feels very bad to subscribe to things you mostly don’t read or even check (e.g. NYT, The Atlantic, FT…)

How many newspapers do I ‘read’ on a daily basis? Zero. I will occasionally scan one, or check for news on a particular event or on AI generally. What I do not find useful is the thing my family used to do in the mornings, which is to ‘read the newspaper.’

Twitter allows me to do this, while having confidence that if something is important it will still come to my attention. I do not think Facebook can substitute for Twitter here, so if concerned with current events one would otherwise still need to scan and partially read one newspaper.

I do think you can very safely cut this down to one newspaper. If you want two, it’s to have both a blue paper and a red paper. You don’t need both WaPO and NYT.

So I would absolutely lose one or the other, and also be more selective on articles.

If you are literally Tyler Cowen and can read at 10x speed, sure, read five papers. The rest of us mortals, not so much.

Next up are what one might call the magazines. This seems like a reasonably sized list of choices here, in terms of places to look for good material. But surely one would not be so foolish as to read most of their offerings? I have The Free Press on my RSS feed, but well over half the time I see a post headline, maybe read one paragraph or do a few seconds of skimming, and move along, most of what they offer is not relevant to my interests. That will be less true for Scott’s interests, but still a lot of it is doubtless irrelevant or duplicative.

As an experiment, I’m going to go to Quanta, a name I didn’t recognize. Okay, it’s a science magazine. A decent chunk of these posts sound potentially interesting to either of us, but how many of them seem vital enough if one is overloaded? I say none, unless I recognized a good author or otherwise got a recommendation.

I decided to keep going with Quillette, which I remember can host good posts sometimes, but again when I checked I didn’t see anything important or compelling. It is odd what they choose to focus on. I went back as far as June 2, when they had a post on AI existential risk that if I’d seen it at the time I would have been compelled to read and cover, but I can already tell it’s bad. I tried the least uninteresting other teaser (about the X trilogy, since I’ve seen two of them) and it was a snoozefest. So I would definitely use the ‘you need a reason’ rule here.

As I do on every magazine-style website. If it’s worthwhile, you’ll find out. At most, check once a month and see what catches your eye, with a short hook.

Then there’s Facebook. One of the decisions I am most happy with is that I am not on Facebook - although many others could say the same about Twitter. Given I’m writing this, I checked it again, and wow the feed was stupider than I thought. If this is taking hours of reading, that’s got to be a big mistake. If it’s a place to chat with friends, sure, I could see that working and being worthwhile. This sure sounds like something else, given it is taking hours. At minimum, I’d start very very aggressively unfollowing all but a core of actual good friends and a few high hit-rate other accounts.

People often ask how I am so productive. One of the keys is that I am ruthless about filtering information and choosing what to consume in what amount of detail. And I’m still nowhere near ruthless enough.

Memory Holes

It is indeed frustrating when people deny one’s own lived experiences.

Brittany Wilson: One disorienting thing about getting older that nobody tells you about is how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you personally remember pretty well.

Memetic Sisyphus: I worked retail when Obama care became law and before I could work OT as much as I wanted but when it passed it meant my hours got restricted to 34 a week so they didn’t have to give me full benefits. So I didn’t get healthcare and my paychecks were smaller.

Aelita (QTing MS): No, you stopped getting overtime because the economy was in a recession and unemployment spiked to 11 percent, your employer just lied to you.

MS: Yeah this is exactly what the OP was talking about.

The replies are mostly full of other people telling stories about what happened to their jobs, or ability to find jobs, or to their insurance. Almost none of it is good.

My own experience is that Obamacare made it extremely expensive to not have a legible full-time job with a large employer. The marketplace is outrageously expensive, and what you get in exchange is not good insurance. Luckily I didn’t have to deal with employers trying to dodge insurance mandates so I can’t speak to that, but it seems like what people responding to incentives would do.

Wet Ground Causes Rain (Dances)

Do not assume people understand why they do what they do, such as Praying for Rain.

It turns out you pray for rain in order to convince people you caused it to rain.

We study the climate as a determinant of religious belief. People believe in the divine when religious authorities (the “church”) can credibly intervene in nature on their behalf. We present a model in which nature sets the pattern of rainfall over time and the church chooses when optimally to pray in order to persuade people that it has caused the rain. We present evidence from prayers for rain in Murcia, Spain that the church follows such an optimal policy and that its prayers therefore predict rainfall.

In our model, praying for rain can only persuade people to believe if the hazard of rainfall during a dry spell is increasing over time, so that the probability of rainfall is highest when people most want rain.

We test this prediction in an original data set of whether ethnic groups around the world traditionally prayed for rain. We find that prayer for rain is more likely among ethnic groups dependent on intensive agriculture for subsistence and that ethnic groups facing an increasing rainfall hazard are 53% more likely to pray for rain, consistent with our model. We interpret these findings as evidence for the instrumentality of religious belief.

None of this implies that anyone involved understands why the prayers correlate with rain. Instead, everyone involved is making the mistake of confusing correlation with causation. The main thesis suggested is ‘the instrumentality of religious belief’ which seems like one of those ‘why did we need a study for this’ conclusions when this broadly construed. Yes, people choose to believe and be more religious when they think there is something in it for them, the evidence for this is overwhelming. Also overwhelming is the evidence that when people around you are religious, that makes you and future generations more similarly religious.

Still, it’s pretty cool to notice the pattern that in many places prayers for rain happen most when rain is most likely. What else follows this pattern? Many medical remedies are similar, happening when people would naturally get better. Calling timeout or anything else will ‘break up’ a scoring run, since such runs are mostly random. More generally, if there is any kind of mean reversion effect, anything that responds to poor outcomes will correlate with improvement in results.

A fun reminder that the wisdom of crowds technique works best when people do not compare notes. Otherwise people (correctly) mostly discount their private information in the wake of all their public information, which prevents proper accounting for the private info. Robin Hanson suggests the implication would be to ban people who do research from participating in markets, while observing this move would be obviously dumb. I would notice the distinguish the difference between markets, where you express opinion largely directionally, versus wisdom of crowds, where you care a lot about magnitude. For markets giving people more information is fine, you don’t mind if people move towards the market price.

Get Them to the Church

Lyman Stone is back to remind us that the cell phone-based data on church attendance makes no sense and is obvious measurement error.

I loved this especially, because… I mean…

Lyman Stone: and I commend the author for following up the 2023 version with a n~5k sample asking people religion + cell phone behaviors.

he found almost a third of Jews don't take their phones to church...

... and that's almost a third of Jews who take online surveys!

As a Jew you are very much not supposed to take your phone to church.

I mean, if you did for some reason go to a church then go ahead, presumably you are visiting a friend or viewing the architecture.

But if you are attending weekly services, which would be at a synagogue, then it would be Shabbat. You are not supposed to operate electronic equipment on Shabbat, or according to many even turn on a light. It is very hard to even carry a cell phone without accidentally doing that. For the Orthodox, it is clearly forbidden, as it is the carrying of a non-essential item. So, yeah.

Even if it were not required anyway, it would seem obvious to me that one should do one’s best not take one’s phone into religious services, for overdetermined reasons.

There is a bunch of other cool stuff in the thread.

Devin Pope then responded to Lyman here, including this chart, which suggests that this method works more generally. Devin admits the task is super hard and notes everyone mentions the Orthodox Jew measuring problem, but suggests this is the best we can do.

So, have you talked to a user?

I laugh, but I have created multiple companies and in no case did I do remotely enough user talking.

Devon: "Allegations of market failures often reflect 'imagination failures' by analysts rather than a genuine incentive problem"

"Lighthouses were long used by economists as a textbook example of the free-rider problem—until Coase discovered that many lighthouses were supported by fees charged by nearby ports"

Michael Nielsen: That's not so much an imagination failure as a basic-lack-of-contact-with-reality failure...

Patrick McKenzie: “Have you actually talked to a user?” is a question which I wish tech could export to e.g. economists researching impact of financial innovation on particular populations of interest.

Dave Guarino: I get many policy people coming to me per month and to all of them I say “oh you should help one person with the process and see what you learn.”

The take up rate is about 10%.

(Epistemic blinders abetted by social norms are blinding!)

Devon: A recent highlight was when a guy who'd never spent time in a high-inflation country sent me an email about this post saying "that's not right, theory predicts X so Y can't be true even though you're seeing right in front of your eyes" 🤣

Dave Guarino: Now that’s some “it’s simple - assume a can opener” energy right there.

Dave Kasten: Corollary: you can rapidly become the person in your office with the argument-winning anecdotes on a subset of issues with <1 week of labor.

(I now wonder if this is the actual causal arrow for why CEOs care about anecdotes so much — it was an early career cheat code for them?)

Mr. Smith: This is one of the secrets of McKinsey; I show up and do that week of work and then I'm the most credible guy until I leave

Anecdotes are a sign that you know the particulars of time and place and have some idea what you're talking about.

Most people don't. It sets you apart.

Patrick McKenzie: An internship project worth doing at any age: go out into the world, learn one relevant thing, write it down, then bring it back to us (who are equally capable of going out into the world and writing things down *but will not do this*).

I have literally suggested this to interns over the years, but it was also my default marching order for my executive assistant: if you don’t know what to do, to learn one interesting thing and write it down.

The ceiling for this being useful is crazily high.

And while one could perform years of academic effort to do a study with controls etc etc given how low the fruit hangs you can probably have an artifact worth reading for the price of a single coffee conversation or five user interviews or similar.

There are very many companies at which “conduct five user interviews” is a Deliverable and there is a Process requiring Multi-Stakeholder Coordination and *bah humbug* you have email you have Zoom this can be done any afternoon you decide to do it.

So help me if I have one more conversation with someone whose objection is “But how would I find a user of [a product which has as many users as Macbooks].”

“Have you considered walking into a Starbucks and briefly visually inspecting surroundings?”

“What no that’s crazy.”

Patrick McKenzie Monthly

Patrick McKenzie’s podcast with Dwarkesh Patel about VaccinateCA and how that group had to be the ones to tell people where to get vaccinated was… suppressed on YouTube out of ‘misinformation’ concerns with a banner telling the user to go to the CDC for more information. Good news is by the time I went to YouTube to verify there at least was no banner, but I can’t tell if it is still surpressed.

“What are my options,” asks the Dangerous Professional. Full thread is recommended.

Patrick McKenzie: Now returning to why I have learned to ask about options here: if you have someone who is either in a rush or very low sophistication, and you *guess* at a resolution path, you might have them engage that resolution path even if that is a much worse option.

Patrick McKenzie explains CloudStrike.

Interview with art dealer Larry Gagosian turned into maxims. Great format, would be cool to build a GPT for this, would be a good example except we don’t have the source interview handy.

Thread on ‘busting out.’ Maxing out use of your credit before you default (in any sense of both words) on it is a great trick, except you can only do it once. The good news is we have gotten a lot better at noticing this happening in real time. I had experience with a variation of it myself, the transformation of recreational gamblers into ‘beards’ that place bets for professionals, including the parallel action in actual financial OTC markets.

Patrick discusses the question of who his audience is.

One way to think about Starlink and Elon Musk.

On joining the ‘winning team.’ I consider pressure to join the winning team to be, in various forms and on various levels, one of the most pernicious forces out there. Indeed, Patrick identifies one of them, that the ‘winning team’ cares about things other than winning, and will punish you for caring about other things. But also often the winning team very much does not care about other things. Often it cares exactly about being the winning team, and supporting those who support the winning team, and will punish any signs of caring about anything else at all.

This is very different from the question of ‘do you want to be right, or do you want to win?’ Which has different answers at different times. People forget that the best way to win, either locally or generally, and especially in the ways that matter most, is often to care a lot (but not entirely!) about being right.

Patrick McKenzie on deposit pricing, as in banks not paying a fair price for deposits and in exchange providing lots of other costly stuff for free because you can’t charge directly for that other stuff. And especially this:

Patrick McKenzie: Speaking of which: a professional skill of bankers of the well-off is knowing who you should give the “We’ll knock a percentage point off your new mortgage if you have $1 million in deposits!” pitch to, who you should give the pitch to while winking, and who you never pitch.

Then there’s Wells Fargo. Where the banker will give that pitch (for 50bps not a full 1%), allow you to include other assets like stocks, and then when you flat out ask ‘are you expecting me to keep those assets with you after we close?’ will tell you he does not in any way expect you to keep those assets there after the close.

Your Horoscope For Today

Spencer Greenberg tests whether astrology works using a cool methodology. He shows lots of astrologers about twelve people. For each he provided detailed biographical information, and asked the astrologers to pick their true full astrological chart from five choices. The astrologers predicted they could do it, afterwards they predicted they had done it. As you would expect, they hadn’t done it, with a success rate under 21% versus a pure chance rate of 20%, and none of them getting more than five charts correct.

Indeed, they failed even to agree on the same wrong answers. Even the most experienced astrologers only agreed with each other 28% of the time.

Shea Levy said this was still a ‘win for astrology’ because it indulges and legitimizes Obvious Nonsense despite showing that it is indeed nonsense. Spenser points out that 20% of Americans say they believe in astrology, and also I don’t see this as ‘legitimizing’ anything.

Even I have encountered enough believers that having more convincing responses is highly useful.

Sarah Constantin: Disagree.

We live in an Eternal September world. There are people who don't know astrology doesn't work.

Every now and then somebody has to explicitly argue against an "obviously" dumb idea, or debunk an "obvious" superstition. It renews the credibility of science/inquiry.

There's an argument for not bringing more attention to bad ideas because you're "giving them a platform"...but astrology is already hugely popular.

Spencer has a gift for doing lots and lots of social-science stuff that I'd find too dull to do myself, including this study. But there's nothing intellectually wrong with it! I'm glad somebody's doing the debunking thing with high standards.

Indeed, I would find doing this study extremely boring. Kudos to Spenser for doing it.

Good Advice: Travel Edition

A group of MR links led to a group of links that led to this list of Obvious Travel Advice. It seems like very good Obvious Travel Advice, and I endorse almost all points.

My biggest disagreement is actually jet lag. It can absolutely be beaten (by most people, anyway), if you want to make that a priority and are willing to devote a day to doing that. I did a lot of things right when I won Pro Tour Tokyo, but one of them was flying in a day early in order to spend it on fixing jet lag - I basically rented a hotel room, listened to music, relaxed and did nothing else except go to sleep at the right time. If you have to ‘be on’ badly enough you should totally do that.

With the warning that jetlag when you return tends to be worse, as you’ve tapped out certain resources, and I still don’t know how to properly handle that when going to places like Japan, so ‘do something important right after coming back’ is mostly a bad idea if you couldn’t have done it on the destination’s schedule. Notice that often you very much can.

The list also highlights three things.

1. A lot of the value of travel is essentially this old Chelm story, you experience things that are worse to make you appreciate how good you have it. Yet I agree with the author here that this does not last long enough to justify such trips repeatedly. Get vaccinated once but ‘booster shots’ are not worth the side effects.

2. Travel is all about mindset and actual value and who you are with. A lot of travel is about ‘performing a vacation’ or a trip, also some people enjoy the anticipation and preparation work. Whereas for me, I’ve learned that basically the only good reason to travel far is to see particular people - it’s who you are with, and that’s something I can have a good attitude about. But otherwise, why not have the Vacation Nature at home or close to home? This is especially true in a place like New York City, there’s so much available close to home that you’ve ignored.

3. Most vacation or ‘for fun’ travel is not, as it is actually done, worthwhile, unless it is a proper Quest. Tyler Cowen seems to know how to get a lot out of travel but you are not going to do what he would do even if you follow the Obvious Advice.

Sports Go Sports

Our Olympic team is mostly based in San Francisco.

You know, in the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Erik Brynjolfsson: Athletes from four California universities won 89 Olympic medals. (The United States won 126 total).

Athletes from Stanford University alone won more medals than all but seven countries in the world.

Olympic success is a choice. You have to want it.

Caitlin Clark started off slow in the WNBA due to the learning curve, but she adapted, and now her numbers are rather insane. She did not make the Olympic team and its probable gold medal because the team was selected a while ago and one could not be confident it would go this way, which is bad for the sport, but that’s how these things go and it’s good not to warp selections for marketing even if in this case it would have worked out.

Are you ready for some football?

The top of this list is very good. Some rather awesome matchups.

However, if falls off quickly. On average there is only about one exciting non-conference game per week. Also some strange rankings here.

And as a Wisconsin fan, I must ask: We wanted Bama? Why would we want Bama?

Aside from ‘playing great games is really cool,’ which it is. With the end of the 4-team playoff era, hopefully we can see more great games. If you have any chance to actually be national champion, a game like this is highly unlikely to actually keep you out under the new system.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

How many elite chess players cheat? Chess.com analysis of its big ‘Titled Tuesday’ events says between 1% and 2% of players, and roughly 1% of event winners. They are responding by making cheating bans on major plays public rather than quietly closing accounts, to fix the incentives.

The obvious question is, can they reliably tell who is cheating, or not? If they can, then the 1% that cheats will get caught by automated checks, and we should not have a big issue. If they cannot tell, how do they know how many people are cheating? It is easy to catch someone who suddenly plays like Stockfish.

It seems next to impossible to catch a cheater who does something sufficiently subtle, especially if the cheat is ‘in the negative’ and all it is doing is avoiding some portion of your mistakes, and you do not make the mistake of using it only with high leverage.

As usual, I presume what is actually protecting us is that cheaters never stop. It takes a lot to be good enough at chess to play at an elite level even if you use subtle cheats. Once you start using subtle cheats, it is not long before you get greedier with them.

All growth in MMO gaming revenue after 2004 comes from increasing spending by whales. A large portion of the gaming world is completely dominated by whale revenue, who QCU describes here as ‘the bored children of tycoons in the developing world.’ The rest of the players either play for free or they spend amounts too small to matter, the point of all the masses being there is to provide the social context for the whales to enjoy spending their money, plus the opportunity to try to convert a tiny portion of them into whales. That’s it. The extended thread goes into various dynamics involved.

The simple rule in response to this is, of course: If the game allows any form of pay to win or other whale play, then it is not for you. It will make your life miserable in order to motivate whale purchases, use timed actions and delayed variable rewards, it is a Skinner box, get out. Spend your gaming time in places where there is a hard upper limit on what can meaningfully be spent (cosmetics excluded) sufficient for the game to be optimized for the average player and not for the whale. Ideally stick to games where there is a fixed one-time or subscription fee and nothing else.

Collectable card games are a weird case where the good ones (like Magic: the Gathering) are good enough that they can survive quite a bit of heavy spending and justify their costs, but notice the difference between paper Magic, where you can reasonably spend your way out and recoup through trade, and Magic Arena, where the price for getting out of the grinding entirely is prohibitive. You might opt into Arena anyway, Magic is that good, but it the need to minimize costs will warp your actions a lot.

Extend this to other non-game activities, as well. The club where people spend money on tables and drinks and women as eye candy to show they spend money? Don’t go there unless your business networking demands it.

From 2023: Reid Duke tells you everything you need to know about Vintage Cube.

There were more discussions this month about collusion and related issues in Magic. One note by Sam Black is that the ability of players to cooperate on prize splits, on draws and to otherwise help each other was indeed very helpful in forming a positive community. It was one more incentive for everyone to stay on good terms, and when you had a chance to help someone out it reliably won you a friend. And I definitely don’t think we need draconian penalties for people who say the incantations wrong, especially regarding prize splits.

I understand the argument that scooping or even splits can be damaging to tournament integrity. I even hear the arguments against intentional draws. But I disagree and find such arguments mostly misplaced. I especially hear Gerry Thompson’s point that it would be better if we didn’t have vastly asymmetric rewards for winning particular matches. And that the solution is to fix the incentive design.

Proposed solutions within a tournament include expanding use of the rule of ‘first players to X wins automatically make top 8’ which seems great. You could go further, if you wanted to get a bit messy, in engineering the last 1-2 rounds into an explicit bracket, where opponents had identical incentives the way they do in the top 8.

This month’s game activity included continued play of Hades, where I’m rapidly approaching diminishing returns but for now it’s still fun, and Shin Megami Tensei V Vengeance, where I’ve been postponing going for the win to try and figure out how to get to the hidden ending but one of the quests isn’t appearing right and it requires a bunch of grinding. I have enough stashed items that if I wanted to give up on being level 99 and just win on one of the other paths, I could probably do that rather quickly.

I do notice I’m disappointed in the choices I’m offered at the end, given the story, and that they don’t seem to contrast as interestingly as past games in the series.

I tried out Vault of the Void. It has some cool different mechanics than most Slay the Spire variants - you can hold onto cards but only draw up to 5, you carry energy over with a hard cap, you can discard cards for more energy, you build a deck of 20 out of your collection each battle rather than looking for card removes. The game doesn’t support a third full act, so it doesn’t have one, bravo on that.

Alas, it has severe problems. The balance is off. Each character (so far anyway) seems like it has a powerful thing you’re supposed to do that scales, but it’s always fiddly and feels like piling incremental advantages on top of each other.

Most of all, a huge portion of the challenge is in the last fight against the Void, and a lot of this is that it slowly adds a bunch of curses to your deck and otherwise scales. So in a genre where your top priority is always card draw and card selection, they’re screaming at you to do more of that.

My last run I found a card that lets you remove a curse from your deck in-battle, and it’s in a class about deck manipulation and making things cost zero, so I basically recursed that card over and over and I got bored enough I accidentally took one damage (out of 95) and I’m sad about that.

I do like the idea of ‘souls are a currency, and also they reduce the HP of the final boss which is an attrition war so try not to spend them’ but the execution needs work. Another issue is that the other boss battles simply are not scary enough, also your route planning too often forces your hand on a simple ‘which path lets me go to more stuff’ theory.

Also I’m officially sick of all these unlocks and making us play tons of runs to see what games offer.

Once Upon a Galaxy, still in early development, is potentially the lightweight successor to Storybook Brawl. I’ve given a try, and it can be fun. I do miss the complexity of Storybook Brawl, but others might appreciate something lighter. Storybook Brawl had really quite a lot going on. And while I miss (for now) playing against other people directly, being able to proceed at your own pace and never wait or feel time pressure is nice.

The Lighter Side

His day will come.

This takes the cake.

Deferrence, presumably?

So much this.

That kid has a bright future.

Paul Graham: At a startup event, someone asked 12 yo if he was working on a startup. He convinced her that he had started a company to make hats out of skunks, a restaurant where everything (even the drinks) was made of bass, and a pest control company that used catapults.

Mandrel: Such a bad idea to incentivize kids to do startups instead of enjoying life, and leaning as much as possible at school, something PG advices Stanford student to do 10 years ago.

Paul Graham: He’s not actually starting any of those companies.