There are many reasons why one might buy art but I took the discussion in the post as mainly about ones one enjoyment/pleasure from the art. Personally I have a hard time finding visual art that I really connect with and I could imagine a professional being quite helpful, but I’m not sure how to find someone who would be a good fit.
> Local coffee shop sets up a bot farm with hundreds of phones to amplify their messages on Instagram.
Catching this threat model (for YouTube actions) was my first job out of grad school. If Instagram has anything remotely similar to the system we had this bit farm should be easily caught.
(Iirc we were catching most of the publicly available paid spam, but there were some big farms that would only boost engagement for their own stuff and were more sophisticated. Still, it requires more resources to bypass than it sounds like this coffee shop put in).
I'm fairly confident, given the reasons you give for disliking Lawrence of Arabia, that you will *hate* Last Year in Marienbad. That ones an acquired taste, even for People Who Like That Sort Of Thing.
I think EA/rationalist type people reading the post from Lennox are skipping over a point that he mentions at the end, which is that most of the psychological pressures at work on Marxists are also at work on EAs, and in fact the same pressures drove Lennox towards both movements at once. The story is not "socialist overcomes irrationality, figures out effective altruism is objectively correct".
However if you have to pick a political ideology to use as an emotional defense, EA is definitely one of the least bad choices, as long as you aren't prone to scrupulosity.
The lab meat situation is disappointing. Both sides jump to the worst tool (bans) in correct expectation that the Other Side would totally ban their preferred thing if they got the chance.
We should have learned from incandescent bulbs. They still have utility. A tax would have done the job. Even just mandatory labelling of "this bulb uses $X per year" would have steered consumers.
For the anti-real-meat side: why not just tax the externalities (water, animal suffering, etc.) and let markets do their job?
And for the pro-real-meat side: why is nobody planning for the US splitting along food lines? They should be preparing fortress economies NOW - incentivizing local supply chains, veterinary pharma, feed processing. Think about long-term stability when your meat costs more than lab "meat" in other states, even if quality is better.
I would be genuinely thrilled if "tax animal suffering" was even theoretically on the table.
In reality, though, I'm anti-animal-meat and my proposed solution is "remove ag-gag laws and allow free trade of lab-grown meat at market rates". The win condition I find most plausible is one where I can legally buy lab grown meat, money from people like me goes into R&D for a while, it gets cheaper & faster to produce & better quality, and then eventually capitalism does its job and we win. "Ban animal meat" would be awesome in theory but, even if we could implement, seems much more of a nightmare to maintain in practice than winning the economic victory.
This is a winner-takes all play. Probably the cost for maintaining 2 separate food chain would be higher than the utility, so each side is trying to make sure his side wins and is the only effective choice.
I keep seeing these talks of a war on AC in Europe. As an European, I am confused. My workplace has AC, and no one ever comments negatively on it. I was on vacation in the hotter parts of Europe this summer, with AC in both vacation homes I went to, and the vast majority of non-outdoors shops and restaurants, and everybody was very thankful to have it.
I don't have AC at home but it's not clear why I would install one. Based on my usage when AC is freely available, I think I would use it at most maybe 50-100h a year, of which maybe a fifth would be actual 'AC-is-great' rather than 'it's there so I may as well use it'. It's not so much that I've done the math and found it less cost-effective than other improvements to my comfort - rather it's just never seemed relevant.
Neither potential regulations nor green ideology play any role in my not having an AC. Regulations probably matter more for people in more urbanized or in 'historically significant' settings, though in any case I think they're at most third place in potential explanations for the difference between US and Europe. I would guess the two most relevant factors are that we just don't value AC all that much, and that the places were it is more valuable are also comparatively poorer (southern countries, retirement homes, etc).
Yes, I broadly agree. There have been more heat waves lately, so this might change, but by and large I just don't need it most times, and the places that do need it (offices, hospitals, etc etc) have it. I'd probably turn on the AC for like three weeks a year.
I'm an immigrant from a high-AC country (Canada, yes it gets hot during the summer there in many places), but don't find it this mega backwards thing here overall.
The resistance to automatic transmission on cars, let alone self driving, is a whole different issue though...
Regarding the murder of the drug boat, didn't we already decide to do this with the similarly defined 'War on Terror" a couple decades ago? we already passed the "drone striking US citizens without due process" without a whole lot of hullabulloo...
Full disclaimer: I voted for Trump in 2016, and 2024. I still DO NOT wish I had voted for Kamala, but accept that Trump is a monster. Until now one could say, you can't compare Trump to Hitler because he hasn't ordered millions killed. Well he has a ways to go to reach Hitler levels, but 8 on the first boat, and 3 on the 2nd boat--that's double-digit direct murders . . . but Mangione and Robinson are the evil ones ??
I agree about the parallel, although one could argue that the difference is that there is a simple non-lethal way to keep the people on the boats from doing harm to Americans - just take them into custody if and when they try to enter the US.
On showing your work vs doing things quietly. My strategy was to fish for the kind of people who were willing and able to pay attention to that steady stream of quiet competence. It took a lot of work, to make that work, and I would have been much better off paying even a 25% overhead to make my quiet competence more transparent. I bet it would have cost more like 5-10% overhead, actually, for the understated yet visible signage that would do the kind of filtering I was trying for.
Re Italy, if you have US citizenship none of these deals are a massive saving. If you do not, you can get Italian residence with a flat EUR 200k tax bill, which is obviously very attractive compared to many countries.
Switzerland is more expensive, double and up depending on your wealth, but better schools and safer.
Some of your X links are dead by the time I get to the post.
> SolDad: I unironically do this in my papers, sort of. Not inserting new stuff, but leaving fairly-obvious but not super important work undone as “low hanging fruit” for the reviewers to notice and ask for.
On the art thing I think you are making a bad mistake by not having art, or not at least hanging up those MtG prints you mentioned.
There are two reasons to have art: to impress visitors, and to make your living spaces more livable and appealing. For the first reason, sure, you need to have a knowledge of art and not get scammed. But for the second, finding nice/cool/interesting art that you can hang up is so easy and cheap that it feels like it shouldn’t have an impact - but it does have an impact, massively. Just having a space that you can look around and see things that are pleasing to the eye and that you are happy to own makes a noticeable improvement in life. Just buy some $10 prints, or even find some cool art online and find a local print shop and have them print it for you.
Admittedly, there is still the part of you that is “what does this say about me?” But there’s plenty of inoffensive, beautiful, and less nerdy things you can buy - I like buying replica tapestries, it’s a cool talking point and it looks good.
Similarly, I think basic statuary is underrated too, things that used to be really common like a candle holder in a cool shape or something.
Just decorate, is the point, find stuff you like to look at
I think wet bias might be eclipsed by the fact that I and probably >99% of people don't know for sure what a 60% chance of rain for a given place and time is supposed to mean in the first place. I just looked it up on Wikipedia [1], and trying to tell the (obviously multiple) definitions apart makes me feel like programming with time zones. I give up 🙃
If I were rich enough to do it, I would hire people to make media based on my random ideas. Not to turn a profit, just whatever I'd like to exist. I'm surprised this is not more common, honestly.
Regarding policy not only failing to help but often hurting, that does empirically seem to be the case. My expectation is that the mechanism is some mix of enabling poor decision making (moral hazard as well) and training people to be dependent.
I am moderately surprised by your take on the art question!
The hypothetical well-off SV individual's problem - "I have a depressing living space I don't know how to fix, and I don't know how to properly spend $10k+ to fix it, so I will just give up" - sounds like a classic self defeating logical leap that you rather mercilessly (and imo correctly) dismiss in many other topics, particularly your excellent writing on dating.
The art question is pretty simple to work through practically speaking: start small, with what you enjoy, realizing you can liquidate and iterate as time goes by and your tastes, interests and level of knowledge change.
Hanging the MTG prints sounds like a classic low cost, low stakes action that might have limited downside and potentially small but long-term upside.
You grow from there by experiencing the print in your room, noticing what you like and don't like about it, and maybe learning bits about other objects you might display in your living space by reading about some, seeing some in museums or galleries, or in other people's living spaces.
As for the hypothetical well-off SV individual, maybe *starting out* where Paul Graham started isn't a terrible idea: a plane ticket to Florence and some painting classes can probably be had for less than a desert meditation retreat.
There are many reasons why one might buy art but I took the discussion in the post as mainly about ones one enjoyment/pleasure from the art. Personally I have a hard time finding visual art that I really connect with and I could imagine a professional being quite helpful, but I’m not sure how to find someone who would be a good fit.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/monthly-roundup-34-september-2025
> Local coffee shop sets up a bot farm with hundreds of phones to amplify their messages on Instagram.
Catching this threat model (for YouTube actions) was my first job out of grad school. If Instagram has anything remotely similar to the system we had this bit farm should be easily caught.
(Iirc we were catching most of the publicly available paid spam, but there were some big farms that would only boost engagement for their own stuff and were more sophisticated. Still, it requires more resources to bypass than it sounds like this coffee shop put in).
I'm fairly confident, given the reasons you give for disliking Lawrence of Arabia, that you will *hate* Last Year in Marienbad. That ones an acquired taste, even for People Who Like That Sort Of Thing.
I think EA/rationalist type people reading the post from Lennox are skipping over a point that he mentions at the end, which is that most of the psychological pressures at work on Marxists are also at work on EAs, and in fact the same pressures drove Lennox towards both movements at once. The story is not "socialist overcomes irrationality, figures out effective altruism is objectively correct".
However if you have to pick a political ideology to use as an emotional defense, EA is definitely one of the least bad choices, as long as you aren't prone to scrupulosity.
The lab meat situation is disappointing. Both sides jump to the worst tool (bans) in correct expectation that the Other Side would totally ban their preferred thing if they got the chance.
We should have learned from incandescent bulbs. They still have utility. A tax would have done the job. Even just mandatory labelling of "this bulb uses $X per year" would have steered consumers.
For the anti-real-meat side: why not just tax the externalities (water, animal suffering, etc.) and let markets do their job?
And for the pro-real-meat side: why is nobody planning for the US splitting along food lines? They should be preparing fortress economies NOW - incentivizing local supply chains, veterinary pharma, feed processing. Think about long-term stability when your meat costs more than lab "meat" in other states, even if quality is better.
If you want your tumorburger, you can keep your tumorburger.
I would be genuinely thrilled if "tax animal suffering" was even theoretically on the table.
In reality, though, I'm anti-animal-meat and my proposed solution is "remove ag-gag laws and allow free trade of lab-grown meat at market rates". The win condition I find most plausible is one where I can legally buy lab grown meat, money from people like me goes into R&D for a while, it gets cheaper & faster to produce & better quality, and then eventually capitalism does its job and we win. "Ban animal meat" would be awesome in theory but, even if we could implement, seems much more of a nightmare to maintain in practice than winning the economic victory.
This is a winner-takes all play. Probably the cost for maintaining 2 separate food chain would be higher than the utility, so each side is trying to make sure his side wins and is the only effective choice.
I keep seeing these talks of a war on AC in Europe. As an European, I am confused. My workplace has AC, and no one ever comments negatively on it. I was on vacation in the hotter parts of Europe this summer, with AC in both vacation homes I went to, and the vast majority of non-outdoors shops and restaurants, and everybody was very thankful to have it.
I don't have AC at home but it's not clear why I would install one. Based on my usage when AC is freely available, I think I would use it at most maybe 50-100h a year, of which maybe a fifth would be actual 'AC-is-great' rather than 'it's there so I may as well use it'. It's not so much that I've done the math and found it less cost-effective than other improvements to my comfort - rather it's just never seemed relevant.
Neither potential regulations nor green ideology play any role in my not having an AC. Regulations probably matter more for people in more urbanized or in 'historically significant' settings, though in any case I think they're at most third place in potential explanations for the difference between US and Europe. I would guess the two most relevant factors are that we just don't value AC all that much, and that the places were it is more valuable are also comparatively poorer (southern countries, retirement homes, etc).
Yes, I broadly agree. There have been more heat waves lately, so this might change, but by and large I just don't need it most times, and the places that do need it (offices, hospitals, etc etc) have it. I'd probably turn on the AC for like three weeks a year.
I'm an immigrant from a high-AC country (Canada, yes it gets hot during the summer there in many places), but don't find it this mega backwards thing here overall.
The resistance to automatic transmission on cars, let alone self driving, is a whole different issue though...
Exactly.
[GPT estimates](https://chatgpt.com/s/t_68c9698329e881918a1452f95df3fc07) 0-5 extremely hot and humid days per year in Frankfurt, vs 20-40 per year in New York city.
Regarding the murder of the drug boat, didn't we already decide to do this with the similarly defined 'War on Terror" a couple decades ago? we already passed the "drone striking US citizens without due process" without a whole lot of hullabulloo...
Full disclaimer: I voted for Trump in 2016, and 2024. I still DO NOT wish I had voted for Kamala, but accept that Trump is a monster. Until now one could say, you can't compare Trump to Hitler because he hasn't ordered millions killed. Well he has a ways to go to reach Hitler levels, but 8 on the first boat, and 3 on the 2nd boat--that's double-digit direct murders . . . but Mangione and Robinson are the evil ones ??
he surely surpassed that count by hundreds if you look at middle east drone strikes, as did Biden, and Obama before either of them?
I agree about the parallel, although one could argue that the difference is that there is a simple non-lethal way to keep the people on the boats from doing harm to Americans - just take them into custody if and when they try to enter the US.
On showing your work vs doing things quietly. My strategy was to fish for the kind of people who were willing and able to pay attention to that steady stream of quiet competence. It took a lot of work, to make that work, and I would have been much better off paying even a 25% overhead to make my quiet competence more transparent. I bet it would have cost more like 5-10% overhead, actually, for the understated yet visible signage that would do the kind of filtering I was trying for.
Re Italy, if you have US citizenship none of these deals are a massive saving. If you do not, you can get Italian residence with a flat EUR 200k tax bill, which is obviously very attractive compared to many countries.
Switzerland is more expensive, double and up depending on your wealth, but better schools and safer.
Some of your X links are dead by the time I get to the post.
> SolDad: I unironically do this in my papers, sort of. Not inserting new stuff, but leaving fairly-obvious but not super important work undone as “low hanging fruit” for the reviewers to notice and ask for.
This is the "get rid of the duck" pattern.
https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2013/06/05/duck/
On the art thing I think you are making a bad mistake by not having art, or not at least hanging up those MtG prints you mentioned.
There are two reasons to have art: to impress visitors, and to make your living spaces more livable and appealing. For the first reason, sure, you need to have a knowledge of art and not get scammed. But for the second, finding nice/cool/interesting art that you can hang up is so easy and cheap that it feels like it shouldn’t have an impact - but it does have an impact, massively. Just having a space that you can look around and see things that are pleasing to the eye and that you are happy to own makes a noticeable improvement in life. Just buy some $10 prints, or even find some cool art online and find a local print shop and have them print it for you.
Admittedly, there is still the part of you that is “what does this say about me?” But there’s plenty of inoffensive, beautiful, and less nerdy things you can buy - I like buying replica tapestries, it’s a cool talking point and it looks good.
Similarly, I think basic statuary is underrated too, things that used to be really common like a candle holder in a cool shape or something.
Just decorate, is the point, find stuff you like to look at
I think wet bias might be eclipsed by the fact that I and probably >99% of people don't know for sure what a 60% chance of rain for a given place and time is supposed to mean in the first place. I just looked it up on Wikipedia [1], and trying to tell the (obviously multiple) definitions apart makes me feel like programming with time zones. I give up 🙃
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_of_precipitation
If I were rich enough to do it, I would hire people to make media based on my random ideas. Not to turn a profit, just whatever I'd like to exist. I'm surprised this is not more common, honestly.
Regarding policy not only failing to help but often hurting, that does empirically seem to be the case. My expectation is that the mechanism is some mix of enabling poor decision making (moral hazard as well) and training people to be dependent.
I am moderately surprised by your take on the art question!
The hypothetical well-off SV individual's problem - "I have a depressing living space I don't know how to fix, and I don't know how to properly spend $10k+ to fix it, so I will just give up" - sounds like a classic self defeating logical leap that you rather mercilessly (and imo correctly) dismiss in many other topics, particularly your excellent writing on dating.
The art question is pretty simple to work through practically speaking: start small, with what you enjoy, realizing you can liquidate and iterate as time goes by and your tastes, interests and level of knowledge change.
Hanging the MTG prints sounds like a classic low cost, low stakes action that might have limited downside and potentially small but long-term upside.
You grow from there by experiencing the print in your room, noticing what you like and don't like about it, and maybe learning bits about other objects you might display in your living space by reading about some, seeing some in museums or galleries, or in other people's living spaces.
As for the hypothetical well-off SV individual, maybe *starting out* where Paul Graham started isn't a terrible idea: a plane ticket to Florence and some painting classes can probably be had for less than a desert meditation retreat.