I plan to continue to leave the Trump administration out of monthly roundups - I will do my best to only cover the administration as it relates to my particular focus areas.
Re rituals, c.f. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles:
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.
What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements
In fairness, being forced to read a book can make even a good book terrible and 100 years of solitude really does top my list of "books I should never recommend to zvi specifically"
It's a book that goes for writing vibes that feel interesting as you read them but doesn't care to do any sort of consistent worldbuilding or theme or goals, which feels like it would annoy you.
100 Years of Solitude is a pretty bad book. It opens with a short amazingly beautiful section and closes with a short amazingly beautiful section, but the middle 350 pages is quite bad and absolutely does not justify the payoff
Re, this: "The most interesting one is no impact of ‘scientific trust’ on astrological belief. You would think that belief in science, whether it was real science or Science™, would mean you trusted the scientists who tell you astrology is Obvious Nonsense. This isn’t the case, suggesting that a lot of ‘trust in science’ is actually ‘trust’ in general."
I think trusting science can feel the same as trusting religion for people who find it difficult to take in a lot of information and analyze it. You pretty much need to do or else be at the mercy of someone else's narrative. And as we know, there's no lack of narratives for just about anything. Lots of people default to those narratives and think they have reasons, they did their homework, etc. Plus, most persuasive narratives for religion or science include either data or "data," either facts or "facts," and if you're not committed to sussing all that out (or you can't), then you're just adrift and probably latching onto the nearest and/or most convenient narrative.
Apropos of false positives / negatives in popular music, I think that Sugar Man makes for an interesting border case. And I just find it interesting how a work can burrow into the cultural consciousness far beyond what the author actually brought to the table.
If we’re imagining the Snow Crash universe, you can put an orange triangle on failed trucks within 10 minutes if the thing that delivers the orange triangle to the failed truck moves really, really fast.
Orange triangles are pretty light. Seems a lot cheaper to store drones every ten minutes of flight along the freeway, rather than humans (or maybe the trucks have their own triangle delivery drone onaboard?).
Unfortunately, for the same reasons that are holding up autonomous trucks because of safety triangles, that's probably not possible in our society.
I'm very much not an autonomous AI engineer, but a quadcopter deploying orange triangles seems an obvious solution. Current Russo-Ukrainian war creates a lot of expertise in dropping things from copters, and having a quad onboard each truck can be helpful in more than one situation.
> If we’re imagining the Snow Crash universe, you can put an orange triangle on failed trucks within 10 minutes if the thing that delivers the orange triangle to the failed truck moves really, really fast.
Yeah - forget drones, we need glowing hot, supersonic, half-cyborg / half-dog "rat things" delivering these orange triangles at ~700mph.
MUCH easier logistics that way - you just need a rat thing every ~100 miles or so, instead of drones planted every 1-2 miles (or just *on* the truck, duh).
I'm wondering why they can't install orange cone deployers directly on the trucks. Something like an arm that lowers at the needed distance and direction, but otherwise is covered during normal use. This seems like a really easy engineering problem for a company that makes automated trucks.
Don't be obtuse Zvi, you know exactly why banning arguments against "free markets" can be troublesome, because you make such arguments yourself re:AI all the time.
Or to put it another way -- do you think Jeff Bezos, owner of the world's largest cloud computing platform, will gladly allow an op-ed from a guy like you in the Post, calling for slowdown in the tech industry?
Is it being obtuse or a convenience? If you think the fundamental flaw in the Less Wrong/rationalist thought is that it tends towards egotistical thinking that "I'm smart so I must be right" that ignores logical inconsistencies.
Likewise thinking Jeff Bezos is arguing for a pure free market is laughable. Given Amazon's history, it's an argument for unrestrained monopoly power.
Yeah, my thought on the Bezos thing is that I don't necessarily trust his interpretation of either free markets or personal liberties. Just because I am in favor of my interpretation of those things doesn't mean that I'm in favor of his.
I think Zvi respects the "other outlets can cover the opposing views" line. If the WP was the only outlet for news for or against the free market, we might need to be concerned about them only being on the pro side.
I also find the argument against Bezos pretty ironic, given that he's owned the WP for 12 years and we're worried about him directing the paper now? That's a long time for him lose money if he wasn't directing coverage at all. Why would he do that? More plausibly, he was directing coverage then but the employees and outsiders reporting on it were more sympathetic to his choices.
He's making choices to intentionally not antagonize Trump's administration, which seems like a smart thing to do even if we question the morality of feeling the need. That many outlets were being pressured by Biden before that seems relevant and important to the discussion.
It's too bad there are not any outlets that Bezos does not own. If there were, we might be able to occasionally read an argument for regulation or imposing more laws restricting personal liberties.
So, w/r/t Gatsby and 100YoS - being forced into reading these books during one's adolescence can certainly make one dislike them. I strongly, STRONGLY suggest going for a Straussian reading of the former book; Gatsby is NOT about "rich people from LI". It's about genetic determinism and social Darwinism.
With 100YoS, the key thing is to not take the "magical realism" shit as literal, but as allegorical. Like, when something weird/magical happens, you need to interpret it as symbolic of some other psychological or social change. I think you also need to have lived in a South American shithole (like yours truly) for a significant portion of your life to truly appreciate certain aspects. Let me tell you about the Latino steppe nomads and how they dealt with a malfunctioning TV remote once. Witchcraft was involved, hilarity ensued. What's your Bayesian prior on "boiling the TV remote will make it work better"? 0.5%?
For me I've noticed that the style of music I like best was solidified between when I was 13 and 23 but the actual music hasn't. I would much rather listen to new music by bands that I liked in the 80s than the music that they made in the 80s for some reason. It may be that I'm just tired of listening to Screaming For Vengeance because it's old and I've heard it too many times. Given a choice I'm going to listen to Invincible Shield instead. I would also rather listen to new music in that style than listen to that music from the 80s. I do, however, think that newer musical styles are just terrible. Pop music has always been terrible but new pop music is distilled terribleness.
I agree that music from my childhood years that I didn't hear at the time also sounds better to me than newer styles. Similarly with a lot of movies and other media.
The coordinated suppression of the lab leak hypothesis, much like the Hunter biden laptop suppression, and just the categorical refusal to truly apologize for these are just perfect examples of why excessive talk about "mis/dis-information" now just registers as propaganda to me. And it comes entirely from the same people prattling on about trumps "post-truth world"- as if they themselves haven't repeatedly demonstrated the cause will *always* be more important than the truth, and they're same people who claim that the "expertsTM" must never be doubted.
The most oblivious part of their behavior of course is the fact that they've taken a sledgehammer to institutional trust over the past decade because of their nakedly propagandistic behavior, and yet still blame everyone and anyone else - Trump, the GOP, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, "billionaires", Peter thiel , twitter, and of course RUSSIA.
It can both be true that suppressing the lab leak hypothesis while blaming Trump for Covid is an unacceptable attack on the epistemological commons and that a fascist dismantling of what's left of a balance of power while blaming the woke is worse. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
It can both be true, but the question is "is it actually true?" Obviously politics is going to overwhelm that discussion, but it's not at all certain the Biden years weren't throwing even more mis/dis-information at people than Trump is or was. It is fairly certain that more of the media was and is sympathetic to Biden and Democrats generally, so if you follow major news you will be both less aware of and less bothered by Biden's issues.
I don't follow major news much, but yes, a lot of shady stuff was going on, Pelosi's husband meme, revolving doors, pardoning Hunter Biden, climate change extinction propaganda, "no genocide in Gaza" and "Israel is bestie", very serious people like Fauci openly disinforming the public as admitted by themselves, etc.
Looking in from the outside, I'd say that the grift was at least more hidden, law-abiding and polite, which limits their options somewhat. Compared to the pretty unrestrained taking of bribes, ignoring the law, stabbing allies in the back, being immune to prosecution due to Supreme Court capture, and dishing out favors the Trump administration is doing, that seems preferable.
If there was obvious really bad conduct during the Biden administration, I think it's likely the new administration would have publicized most of it already, if only for political reasons (that's ostensibly why DOGE, after all) - unless it was better hidden than I would expect. Yet what has been publicized looks mostly like very weak stuff. So to the degree that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, this should update us somewhat on how much DIE misinformation and fraud was probably going on.
But I'm curious if you have any particular pieces of misinformation in mind that are worse than what is being thrown at the public now (such as "Tariffs will lower prices", "DOGE is uncovering billions and billions of fraud", "many 150 year olds receiving social security", "Putin wants peace", "the immigrants, DEI and trans and woke people are to blame for everything", "energy is good except if it's renewable", "Israel still bestie", "TikTok is good actually", and so on)?
The drone is going to launch from the truck, fly under highway overpasses/around blind corners in snow/wind storms and deploy the orange triangles)? Even if you solve the drone function IRL in crap conditions issue the CFR already prohibits this:
FWIW the triangles are like 3-4 pounds each, you need at least 3 on a highway + more if you're on surface streets. A human driver can deploy the triangles in pretty much any weather nearly trivially and without issues about "what if you're in a covered highway section? [696 by Detroit has a few long underground sections that spring to mind] How does the drone launch/operate in a tunnel?
None of these are impossible to solve (well the legal ones might be), but I think the ease of handwaving these legal/design problems away is being very overstated. It's one thing to make a drone that works in tolerable conditions, it's another thing to make one that launches and functions in intolerable conditions.
Was going to make the same point: commercial drones don't work well in stormy conditions or high wind, which is when you're mostly likely to need these triangles.
Now, don't get me wrong, the entire objection is clearly in bad faith, bright lights or unfolding reflectors would be fine Vs triangles, but cheap drones aren't actually a good solution here.
More seriously, this was my best tech bro/sv vc impression, not an actual suggestion. I already kind of assumed that an autonomous car company of all things would have thought of this solution and went ahead with it if it was legally feasible, so there are probably regulatory issues with it. Thanks for the confirmation, though.
That said, object level oriented, I doubt the orange triangles add that much safety in bad weather conditions either way. Bright flashing lights might actually better in e.g. a snow storm or fog than a small pyramid close to the ground.
"Bright flashing lights might actually better in e.g. a snow storm or fog than a small pyramid close to the ground." Maybe, maybe not, but what's more likely: A simple low tech solution can be found to comply with current DOT regulations requiring orange triangles placed on the ground 10 feet and then 100'-500' behind the truck as the situation requires or the DOT decides to change their regs/move to a means-end regulation?
Thinking laterally and simply here: Some kind of guide-by-wire rolling robot could probably place/remove these front and behind the truck (possible 2 bots). FIFO loading, flat stack them and one deploy front/one back. Still situations where (bad jack knife) a person would be able to deploy the triangles and the robots couldn't, but OTOH also situations where the person would be disabled/stuck (front collision/roll) and the robots would probably be fine.
I think DOT way more likely to approve this than a flying contraption or an attempt to change the triangles.
Right, or just put the triangle drone ON the truck, to deploy within 10 minutes if the truck pulls over? The cost of a triangle-drone versus the cost of the truck is tiny.
Re rituals, c.f. Rules of Civility by Amor Towles:
Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane--in the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath--she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger.
What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the conclusion of his own course, was that this risk should not be treated lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one's simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements
> consider music
Hence 'Video killed the radio star'!
I have long thought that political jingles are underutilized by serious people. One of Trump's strength is that he does things people like to copy.
Your take on One Hundred Years of Solitude is the only thing that's absolutely dreadful here.
In fairness, being forced to read a book can make even a good book terrible and 100 years of solitude really does top my list of "books I should never recommend to zvi specifically"
Very curious why you would have predicted this one in advance!
It's a book that goes for writing vibes that feel interesting as you read them but doesn't care to do any sort of consistent worldbuilding or theme or goals, which feels like it would annoy you.
100 Years of Solitude is a pretty bad book. It opens with a short amazingly beautiful section and closes with a short amazingly beautiful section, but the middle 350 pages is quite bad and absolutely does not justify the payoff
Re, this: "The most interesting one is no impact of ‘scientific trust’ on astrological belief. You would think that belief in science, whether it was real science or Science™, would mean you trusted the scientists who tell you astrology is Obvious Nonsense. This isn’t the case, suggesting that a lot of ‘trust in science’ is actually ‘trust’ in general."
I think trusting science can feel the same as trusting religion for people who find it difficult to take in a lot of information and analyze it. You pretty much need to do or else be at the mercy of someone else's narrative. And as we know, there's no lack of narratives for just about anything. Lots of people default to those narratives and think they have reasons, they did their homework, etc. Plus, most persuasive narratives for religion or science include either data or "data," either facts or "facts," and if you're not committed to sussing all that out (or you can't), then you're just adrift and probably latching onto the nearest and/or most convenient narrative.
The true value of Zvi posts is that it costs very few Weirdness Points to read but quite a few to reference in conversation.
Here is the podcast episode for this post. I really hope some people are finding value in these conversions:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-28-march-2025
Re the current administration:
> That is ‘if I start down this road there is nowhere to stop’ and ‘other sources are left to cover that topic’
I appreciate this, I think your newsletter has more value with a narrower focus. What sources would you recommend?
Well there's this...
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/tpNSDrAjcoHjHvjkA/sentinel-s-global-risks-weekly-roundup-11-2025-trump-invokes
Apropos of false positives / negatives in popular music, I think that Sugar Man makes for an interesting border case. And I just find it interesting how a work can burrow into the cultural consciousness far beyond what the author actually brought to the table.
If we’re imagining the Snow Crash universe, you can put an orange triangle on failed trucks within 10 minutes if the thing that delivers the orange triangle to the failed truck moves really, really fast.
Orange triangles are pretty light. Seems a lot cheaper to store drones every ten minutes of flight along the freeway, rather than humans (or maybe the trucks have their own triangle delivery drone onaboard?).
Unfortunately, for the same reasons that are holding up autonomous trucks because of safety triangles, that's probably not possible in our society.
I'm very much not an autonomous AI engineer, but a quadcopter deploying orange triangles seems an obvious solution. Current Russo-Ukrainian war creates a lot of expertise in dropping things from copters, and having a quad onboard each truck can be helpful in more than one situation.
Job opportunities for a drone operator post-war:
1. FPV racing championships
2. Orange triangle speed delivery
3. “4K flyover over Alps” youtube channel operator
> If we’re imagining the Snow Crash universe, you can put an orange triangle on failed trucks within 10 minutes if the thing that delivers the orange triangle to the failed truck moves really, really fast.
Yeah - forget drones, we need glowing hot, supersonic, half-cyborg / half-dog "rat things" delivering these orange triangles at ~700mph.
MUCH easier logistics that way - you just need a rat thing every ~100 miles or so, instead of drones planted every 1-2 miles (or just *on* the truck, duh).
I'm wondering why they can't install orange cone deployers directly on the trucks. Something like an arm that lowers at the needed distance and direction, but otherwise is covered during normal use. This seems like a really easy engineering problem for a company that makes automated trucks.
Don't be obtuse Zvi, you know exactly why banning arguments against "free markets" can be troublesome, because you make such arguments yourself re:AI all the time.
Or to put it another way -- do you think Jeff Bezos, owner of the world's largest cloud computing platform, will gladly allow an op-ed from a guy like you in the Post, calling for slowdown in the tech industry?
Is it being obtuse or a convenience? If you think the fundamental flaw in the Less Wrong/rationalist thought is that it tends towards egotistical thinking that "I'm smart so I must be right" that ignores logical inconsistencies.
Likewise thinking Jeff Bezos is arguing for a pure free market is laughable. Given Amazon's history, it's an argument for unrestrained monopoly power.
Yeah, my thought on the Bezos thing is that I don't necessarily trust his interpretation of either free markets or personal liberties. Just because I am in favor of my interpretation of those things doesn't mean that I'm in favor of his.
I think Zvi respects the "other outlets can cover the opposing views" line. If the WP was the only outlet for news for or against the free market, we might need to be concerned about them only being on the pro side.
I also find the argument against Bezos pretty ironic, given that he's owned the WP for 12 years and we're worried about him directing the paper now? That's a long time for him lose money if he wasn't directing coverage at all. Why would he do that? More plausibly, he was directing coverage then but the employees and outsiders reporting on it were more sympathetic to his choices.
He's making choices to intentionally not antagonize Trump's administration, which seems like a smart thing to do even if we question the morality of feeling the need. That many outlets were being pressured by Biden before that seems relevant and important to the discussion.
It's too bad there are not any outlets that Bezos does not own. If there were, we might be able to occasionally read an argument for regulation or imposing more laws restricting personal liberties.
So, w/r/t Gatsby and 100YoS - being forced into reading these books during one's adolescence can certainly make one dislike them. I strongly, STRONGLY suggest going for a Straussian reading of the former book; Gatsby is NOT about "rich people from LI". It's about genetic determinism and social Darwinism.
With 100YoS, the key thing is to not take the "magical realism" shit as literal, but as allegorical. Like, when something weird/magical happens, you need to interpret it as symbolic of some other psychological or social change. I think you also need to have lived in a South American shithole (like yours truly) for a significant portion of your life to truly appreciate certain aspects. Let me tell you about the Latino steppe nomads and how they dealt with a malfunctioning TV remote once. Witchcraft was involved, hilarity ensued. What's your Bayesian prior on "boiling the TV remote will make it work better"? 0.5%?
For me I've noticed that the style of music I like best was solidified between when I was 13 and 23 but the actual music hasn't. I would much rather listen to new music by bands that I liked in the 80s than the music that they made in the 80s for some reason. It may be that I'm just tired of listening to Screaming For Vengeance because it's old and I've heard it too many times. Given a choice I'm going to listen to Invincible Shield instead. I would also rather listen to new music in that style than listen to that music from the 80s. I do, however, think that newer musical styles are just terrible. Pop music has always been terrible but new pop music is distilled terribleness.
I agree that music from my childhood years that I didn't hear at the time also sounds better to me than newer styles. Similarly with a lot of movies and other media.
The coordinated suppression of the lab leak hypothesis, much like the Hunter biden laptop suppression, and just the categorical refusal to truly apologize for these are just perfect examples of why excessive talk about "mis/dis-information" now just registers as propaganda to me. And it comes entirely from the same people prattling on about trumps "post-truth world"- as if they themselves haven't repeatedly demonstrated the cause will *always* be more important than the truth, and they're same people who claim that the "expertsTM" must never be doubted.
The most oblivious part of their behavior of course is the fact that they've taken a sledgehammer to institutional trust over the past decade because of their nakedly propagandistic behavior, and yet still blame everyone and anyone else - Trump, the GOP, Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, "billionaires", Peter thiel , twitter, and of course RUSSIA.
It can both be true that suppressing the lab leak hypothesis while blaming Trump for Covid is an unacceptable attack on the epistemological commons and that a fascist dismantling of what's left of a balance of power while blaming the woke is worse. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
It can both be true, but the question is "is it actually true?" Obviously politics is going to overwhelm that discussion, but it's not at all certain the Biden years weren't throwing even more mis/dis-information at people than Trump is or was. It is fairly certain that more of the media was and is sympathetic to Biden and Democrats generally, so if you follow major news you will be both less aware of and less bothered by Biden's issues.
I don't follow major news much, but yes, a lot of shady stuff was going on, Pelosi's husband meme, revolving doors, pardoning Hunter Biden, climate change extinction propaganda, "no genocide in Gaza" and "Israel is bestie", very serious people like Fauci openly disinforming the public as admitted by themselves, etc.
Looking in from the outside, I'd say that the grift was at least more hidden, law-abiding and polite, which limits their options somewhat. Compared to the pretty unrestrained taking of bribes, ignoring the law, stabbing allies in the back, being immune to prosecution due to Supreme Court capture, and dishing out favors the Trump administration is doing, that seems preferable.
If there was obvious really bad conduct during the Biden administration, I think it's likely the new administration would have publicized most of it already, if only for political reasons (that's ostensibly why DOGE, after all) - unless it was better hidden than I would expect. Yet what has been publicized looks mostly like very weak stuff. So to the degree that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, this should update us somewhat on how much DIE misinformation and fraud was probably going on.
But I'm curious if you have any particular pieces of misinformation in mind that are worse than what is being thrown at the public now (such as "Tariffs will lower prices", "DOGE is uncovering billions and billions of fraud", "many 150 year olds receiving social security", "Putin wants peace", "the immigrants, DEI and trans and woke people are to blame for everything", "energy is good except if it's renewable", "Israel still bestie", "TikTok is good actually", and so on)?
comments like these make me grateful that zvi keeps politics at arms length
Listen:
Autonomous orange triangle-deploying drones.
Mic drop.
And you don't need to put them every 1-2 miles, put them ON the trucks - the cost of the drones is miniscule compared to the cost of the truck.
The drone is going to launch from the truck, fly under highway overpasses/around blind corners in snow/wind storms and deploy the orange triangles)? Even if you solve the drone function IRL in crap conditions issue the CFR already prohibits this:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/107.145
FWIW the triangles are like 3-4 pounds each, you need at least 3 on a highway + more if you're on surface streets. A human driver can deploy the triangles in pretty much any weather nearly trivially and without issues about "what if you're in a covered highway section? [696 by Detroit has a few long underground sections that spring to mind] How does the drone launch/operate in a tunnel?
None of these are impossible to solve (well the legal ones might be), but I think the ease of handwaving these legal/design problems away is being very overstated. It's one thing to make a drone that works in tolerable conditions, it's another thing to make one that launches and functions in intolerable conditions.
Was going to make the same point: commercial drones don't work well in stormy conditions or high wind, which is when you're mostly likely to need these triangles.
Now, don't get me wrong, the entire objection is clearly in bad faith, bright lights or unfolding reflectors would be fine Vs triangles, but cheap drones aren't actually a good solution here.
So what I hear you say is: "robodogs"
More seriously, this was my best tech bro/sv vc impression, not an actual suggestion. I already kind of assumed that an autonomous car company of all things would have thought of this solution and went ahead with it if it was legally feasible, so there are probably regulatory issues with it. Thanks for the confirmation, though.
That said, object level oriented, I doubt the orange triangles add that much safety in bad weather conditions either way. Bright flashing lights might actually better in e.g. a snow storm or fog than a small pyramid close to the ground.
"Bright flashing lights might actually better in e.g. a snow storm or fog than a small pyramid close to the ground." Maybe, maybe not, but what's more likely: A simple low tech solution can be found to comply with current DOT regulations requiring orange triangles placed on the ground 10 feet and then 100'-500' behind the truck as the situation requires or the DOT decides to change their regs/move to a means-end regulation?
Thinking laterally and simply here: Some kind of guide-by-wire rolling robot could probably place/remove these front and behind the truck (possible 2 bots). FIFO loading, flat stack them and one deploy front/one back. Still situations where (bad jack knife) a person would be able to deploy the triangles and the robots couldn't, but OTOH also situations where the person would be disabled/stuck (front collision/roll) and the robots would probably be fine.
I think DOT way more likely to approve this than a flying contraption or an attempt to change the triangles.
Why not put wheels on the cones and have the cones themselves act autonomously?
Re: Grimes, did you not see the Community Note?
I don't understand the triangle thing -- can they not have a triangular orange light on the back that they can activate remotely?
Right, or just put the triangle drone ON the truck, to deploy within 10 minutes if the truck pulls over? The cost of a triangle-drone versus the cost of the truck is tiny.