AI continue to accelerate and dominate the schedule, which is why this is a bit late, but we do occasionally need to pay our respects to the Goddess of Everything Else.
There’s cool or interesting things everywhere. Also maddenning things. But did you hear, for example, that they’re making some exceptions to the Jones Act?
The gambling industry is indeed out of control, the example here being that Carton filled out a self-exclusion form for online gambling in New Jersey, and a brick-and-mortar casino in Atlantic City used this fact to market to him to come on over.
Yes, this is a big problem:
roon (OpenAI): it’s a difficult position to be in when all your private comms are de facto public comms. it means you may as well coordinate in public, which is hard to balance with the basic principle of “don’t argue with the family in front of strangers”
it also means “manhattan projects” were not really in the option space, you just have to consistently out accelerate your adversaries in public.
Dean W. Ball: Very few tweets resonate for me personally more deeply than this one, though there are creative solutions to this problem which, appropriately, should never be discussed in public.
This can often be true, but at least at Anthropic it seems clearly not true, as Dario Amodei’s strategy memos usually do not leak. Could OpenAI pull off a Manhattan Project from an OpSec point of view? My guess is if they cared they could do about as well as the actual Manhattan Project did, which as we know was infiltrated by Russian spies.
It’s true:
Amanda Askell: Tech companies pay millions of dollars for their employees and then stick them in open-plan offices that make it nearly impossible to get work done. Best strategy for poaching employees is probably to just offer them an office with a door.
It’s one thing when you work at Jane Street on a trading desk and everyone has to communicate. If you’re at a tech company, there’s no excuse. You’d have to at least double my pay to get me to work in an open office at this point.
I am with Grant Slatton in that I don’t understand why Lyft, Uber, DoorDash and similar services don’t lean harder on customer (and driver) reputation when evaluating claims. And also perhaps look for impossible situations like claimed 3 minute rides.
Sheel Mohnot: Alarming how bad @lyft is at fraud detection.
It logged a ride from SFO to SF in 3 minutes. The driver never picked me up but claimed he did and I got charged. It should auto-flag an error. When I complained that I didn’t get picked up they sided with the driver. Wtf.
Grant Slatton: I’ve always felt that companies should invest in the idea of “known reliable/sane customers” whose reports should be taken as default-true
Like if someone takes 1000 Lyft rides without issue and only then submits a report, it’s very likely they are truthful!
nic carter: I think about this all the time when something goes wrong with my Uber Eats or whatever. Yes I know there's a bunch of losers that claim there's an issue every time to try and scam the system - but if I make a complaint one in every 500 times it should be considered credible!
sadly this is apparently impossible for PMs so we will remain tyrannized by the bottom quintile forever
Deva Hazarika: Amazon is like that. Any complaint I make (I almost never complain) is instantly approved.
Grant Slatton: They are great at making it right for you, but not great about making it right for future customers by banning the fraudster
Also, I mean, this response to the OP is another sign that they are doing the wrong amount of vibe coding over there. Could be too much, could be too little.
Good Advice
A classic. Is he right? He’s kind of right, remarkably often, but not always.
PoIiMath: My entire worldview is that Calvin’s dad is not only correct about the definition of “control freak” but that people like Calvin’s dad are the key to every good thing that we collectively enjoy
Misha: unfortunately they are also the key to very many bad things that suck
‘Control freak’ also can mean something else. Golden mean and all that. But there’s no reason to assume that the golden mean can’t lie in the fat tail of the distribution.
Eliezer Yudkowsky: Places I did not acquire any character or personality: school.
Sources from which I did acquire character: Calvin’s Dad, Hobbes, Calvin, Calvin’s Mom
All four have much to teach those with eyes to see.
Slutcon 2026 tickets are live. It will be September 25-27 in East Bay, CA. Based on all reports from the first version, this is an excellent product.
Who Judges The Judges
Could we provide judges with better incentives, as Alex Tabarrok suggests via Landsburg, by paying judges a bounty when they release a defendant but charging them fines for later crimes?
It is a fun thought experiment, but you don’t want to go there. It destroys the sacred values of asking the judge to follow the law, to serve justice and temper with mercy, to treat people equally and ignore inadmissible evidence, and to consider broader implications.
Instead, many judges will quickly look to start maximizing expected revenue, at least on many margins. So you shift the question to what that decision might be, and soon that has a huge weight on trial outcomes. You also have to worry that judges will then intervene to get future charges dismissed, lest the judge be fined.
The general principle is that economic incentives are great, but you can quickly crowd out other considerations, so you need to cover all your bases or you likely do more harm than good. You don’t want to turn our courts into a Minority Report situation.
A judge shouldn’t primarily be thinking about the recidivism rate when passing judgment, in most cases. They should be thinking about truth, law and justice.
If you narrowly applied this to some parole decisions, that might be reasonable, but only once you are ready to toss out all other considerations.
I also think there is much wisdom in this:
Thornmallow: This is a good proposal, but the cultural changes among American elites that would have to take place for such a policy to ever be implemented at all would bring us most of the way to a solution anyway, which is a problem I have with how economists think about policy.
Indeed. If we were capable of implementing this policy, we could choose a better policy.
Close Socrates
Benjamin Hoffman writes that Socrates is Mortal, explaining his view of Socrates acting in particular situations for particular grounded reasons, who he views as one of the few remaining alive persons in an Athens in crisis, where people still felt obligated to engage with him. He views Agnes Callard’s vision as wanting a Socrates that is timeless, and thus lacks the aliveness, and thus is bad, and that I did not need to spend so many words responding to the fake decontextualized Socrates and winning a lame debate, instead of engaging with the real one.
Hoffman pulls out stories and details about Socrates I hadn’t heard before, and frames his actions there in different lights than either what I’ve read in the books or what Agnes presented, even taken in their original contexts. I felt I did look at the original contexts that she chose to offer, and did not find the good thing.
The Socrates that proposes borrowing money to put refugees to work with wool or funding countersuits sounds great indeed. He’s coming up with solutions to practical problems by thinking in concrete terms. But he also sounds completely different from the one I’ve read about.
Similarly, Hoffman offers an alternative reading of the questioning of Euthyphro, where Socrates is motivated by a need to know how to defend himself in court against charges of impiety, that he has a practical need. One could imagine it so, even if his approach to solving this was higher level than the situation warranted, and would have been better served by raising his own particular example and in focusing on how others would view it rather than trying to solve for an abstraction.
The practical Socrates would know not to try and do too much or solve too general a problem here given limited time, and pivot to his own. His failure to do so makes me think he was following a far more general procedure, rather than trying to solve a particular problem.
Even more than that, the practical Socrates would know that ‘impiety’ was the nominal charge, but was not why he was on trial. No one could even define piety, which was a central point of the dialogue, and this issue was wisely not his defense at trial. Formally, Socrates was actually on trial for ‘impiety and ‘corrupting the youth of Athens’ but everyone agrees that was Obvious Nonsense, an excuse to get rid of him. To the (likely small) extent it was ‘impiety’ it was that Socrates claimed divine guidance, and you don’t need a full definition of piety to know that doing this is going to have piety issues. So Socrates saying ‘I need this information for my own defense’ is also Obvious Nonsense.
Realistically, he was on trial because of some combination of:
He kept humiliating people and being an intellectual subversive.
People (quite reasonably given the events described in Open Socrates) people blamed him for causing the crimes of Alcibiades, who helped ruin Athens and then defected to Sparta, and they associated Socrates with aristocratic rule.
These are entirely consistent with Hoffman’s view that Socrates was trying to wake people up and cut through a bunch of bullshit that was dominating public life, but he’s not going to be helped by definitions.
It’s also possible that ‘corrupted the youth of Athens’ was partly literal, as per Plato’s own descriptions in The Symposium. He was not not running a child sex cult, including in ways that might have led to Alcibiades. We presume everyone was basically cool with this, but maybe they weren’t. Combine that with the rhetorical brainwashing skills I go over, and yeah, the charge seems rather accurate to me.
At heart, of course, the Athenian justice system at the time was majority votes, not due process of law, so ‘everybody hates you, sir’ was a valid charge.
I also hold to my read on Meno, contra Hoffman, that Socrates was not actually asking the slave to solve the math problem in a meaningful sense.
So essentially, I am all for the importance of the aliveness characteristic that Hoffman is pointing at here. I simply don’t see that character coming through in my (admittedly limited) experience of the source material.
I also notice this reaction to my writing up of the review of Open Socrates is helpful, I am glad to get it, but makes me sad, as it indicates that in this way I missed the mark - I was trying to use winning that ‘lame argument’ as a jumping off point or baseline to do things that were less lame, but that seems not to have come through to him, and yes of course it is too long. So that was disappointing.
So far I have not seen a response from Agnus herself, which is also disappointing.
I’m glad I ran the experiment of writing my review of Open Socrates (part 1,part 2). Even though it was a ton of work and didn’t get the reception I hoped. I know at least some people got a kick out of it, at least, but that definitely isn’t good enough here.
Still, I had a lot of fun and interesting thoughts in the act of writing it, and I learned a lot, including by watching it not work. If none of your ambitious posting falls flat, you don’t do ambitious enough posting.
I suspect there’s a lot of good material in there that would do better if it I cut the parts that didn’t land, and it was written in a sequence form that no longer referenced the original. I may try that project out, perhaps as a LessWrong-only series.
Also, there’s this:
Ben Landau-Taylor: I once saw a production of Gorgias where everyone read "Very true, Socrates" "To be sure, Socrates" "Indubitably so, Socrates" in the most exasperated I’m-sick-of-your-shit tone of voice imaginable and it permanently changed how I view all of those dialogues.
While I Cannot Condone This
Birth Tourism, as in ensuring that your child gets birthright citizenship, has highly positive selection for future citizens that will have high value, but that depends on the Levels of Friction and costs involved in doing it. Thus, you want to make this doable, but you do not want to make it too easy.
You are not being watched by alien drones. But it is a fun exercise to ask, as Tyler Cowen does, how you should change your life decisions if you are being watched by alien drones.
Tyler Cowen suggests, uncharacteristically, that you would want to slightly lower your level of ambition, in case the aliens kill us, or cap human achievement, and because this should update you towards humans having lower marginal product.
Jehan Azad responds that instead this shows incredible physics is possible, so who knows what is possible, and AI is less likely to kill us and we are in a competitive environment, so it’s time to build and get more ambitious.
I award this debate to Jehan. You would want to get more ambitious. I think ‘physics does not bind the way you think it does, and the aliens exist but are not grabby and presumably did not all die to their AIs’ should be a whitepill to get to work.
The famous Netflix culture slide deck. There is room for a small number of companies to work this way. I’d have loved to give this a shot when I was younger.
You do not need to fully be heroicsmaxxing (as in, going above and beyond to solve problems) and there are times when heroics do harm by masking the problem, but you absolutely need to be rewarding or expecting heroics if you’re doing something that matters. The right amount of heroics is highly nonzero.
My favorite anecdote about this will always be when I was sat down during a corporate annual meeting, along with many similar others, and we were told ‘the age of heroes is over.’ That was the exact second I mentally checked out of most (but not all) aspects of that job and I thought about how to be a hero somewhere else.
Violence Is Never The Answer
If you needed a demonstration of the fact that the endorsement of violence mostly is completely unrelated to AI, the recent interviews and discussions in The New York Times and involving Piker should make this extra clear.
There is an entire utterly distinct faction that thinks that it is some combination of understandable, sympathetic and praiseworthy to steal and to shoplift, and also to commit ‘social murder,’ and is being ‘platformed’ to discuss this, as they would say, in The New York Times. And then those people will say ‘90% of people on the streets of our cities would agree’ and find such views unremarkable.
Cool factsabout The Pitt, from an interview with Noah Wyle. I didn’t understand the impact of the camera angles in particular until Noah pointed it out here but yeah it works so well. I had definitely noticed the impact of going in real time, and that it was competence porn, and I am usually in for some good competence porn.
If I had to make one change to The Pitt, it would be creating an interactive or enhanced version of some kind that allowed you to use the show to learn about medicine for real - I feel like I’m just on the edge of actually learning stuff worth learning, and would love to do so if it could be done without pausing to chat with Claude. I could totally do that in theory, but in practice I won’t.
Speaking of competence porn, Andy Weir, author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary, pitched a Star Trek show, but was shot down by Paramount, who is not interested in producing actual Star Trek. Weir is correctly responding by pointing out that Star Trek is no longer Star Trek, while taking the generous position of being willing to allow Enterprise and Strange New Worlds and not even be mad at Lower Decks. But yeah, at minimum the rest can totally go. My choice of cutoff for canon would be to count Enterprise and stop there.
James Hibberd: “Yeah, I saw a … I forgot who it was — I wish I could remember who it was who said it, some analyst — he said something like: ‘All modern science fiction TV shows and movies have been heavily influenced by the original Star Trek — except for the current batch of Star Trek shows,’” Weir said.
Marsden replied, “Yes!” and they both laughed.
Remember this Star Trek competence porn, where Data explains how the professional chain of command works? Yeah, we need more such competence porn that lays out how to Do Competence and set high expectations. Star Trek also has a bunch of other things it wants to do, but it also needs to do this.
Matt Yglesias is of course correct that movies are too long (and rotate too fast). Most of the time if your movie is over two hours that is you making a mistake. Distribution issues used to help us more with this, and then it stopped helping.
Are there exceptions? Of course, when it is justified by all means go long. Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is probably my favorite movie and it’s four hours long, but you have to earn it. Whereas if you get done in 90 minutes, and give us a short ass movie, we can forgive quite a lot.
Someone in New York City really should open a full ‘30 years ago’ theater, which just plays things from 30 years ago and advances one week at a time, movies are minimum one week and then rotate when they stop selling, maybe you round out some stuff in the early year lull with broader greatest hits.
It is still an amazing deal there are things you want to watch, and yes you should pay to avoid the ads. If you’re cheap, don’t suffer through ads, instead rotate between services and only have one active at a time.
I’m actively disappointed by this trailer for the new Street Fighter movie in several ways, including that this wasn’t AI even though it totally could have been, and also no one cares about Ken what are we even doing, and in general it’s going to be terrible on every level, although I’m going to watch it anyway cause why not. I’d be shocked if the old version isn’t ten times better.
How are prediction markets changing the music industry? Rolling Stone’s answer is essentially that they aren’t. Everything is as before, except there are some people betting on outcomes at Polymarket and Kalshi. Okay, then, sure.
1. Lands (MTG) 2. Gain 1 resource per turn (HS) 3. Resource deck to draw from (RFT) 4. Playing cards face-down (SWU) 5. No resources - rules constraints (YGO)
Sam Black: I’d swap 4 and 5, and think the ceiling on 5 is very high (it’s definitely this system with biggest range from horrible to good). I think Epic is my favorite that I’d put in the space.
My opinion is that lands are the best system if and only if you can get away with it.
As in, Magic: The Gathering is a vastly better game, and remains the gold standard, because it has successfully grandfathered in the right to use lands. Players accept it, along with the cost that there will be many non-games with mana flood and screw, in order to get all the good things that go along with it.
Alas, when making a new game now, you basically don’t get to do that. Players won’t put up with it in a tabula rosa. So you’re basically forced into some form of one resource per turn, or alternatives that are worse.
Emergents, the game I created, used one per turn, with special rules for building faction resources based on what card you played or tried to play via wildcard, plus having temporary access based on the top of your deck. I think it did a great job of creating interesting decisions where you had to plan your game out and providing variance. It wasn’t as good as lands, but you don’t simply get to have lands.
I think at this point I’m with Sam Black that I swap 4 and 5, even knowing that no resources can go rather horribly wrong when you get it wrong. As fun and interesting as it is in theory, and I’m the one who invented ‘play the cards face down and then cast the spells by turning them face up’ system in Versus, forcing the face down decisions that often want to use the most expensive cards is hell on a lot of players and often takes forever. In the end it simply isn’t practical.
Hire gamers who are good at games, they are good at life, as in this study that good players of Civilization V do well in business school student experiments. Guild leaders are great picks, as are high performers in MOBAs, and my favorite pick is players who excel at Magic: The Gathering.
One exception found here is you don’t want FPS winners. It’s not a strike against you, but it’s not an argument in your favor either.
I’ve Got The Magic In Me
Tranquil Domain put out quite the video about my old days on the Pro Tour, including clips from a new interview I did. I had a lot of fun watching it back, even if it gets a bit excited at times.
One correction or clarification that I was explicit about in the interview, and that I simply cannot get to stick, is that the designer of the main deck of The Solution was my British teammate, John Ormerod, including the inclusion of Crimson Acolyte. That was a brilliant move that I doubt anyone else would have found, and his proposal for the main deck did not change throughout testing.
I did build the sideboard, including searching every card and finding Pure Reflection.
I love talking about cEDH (competitive commander) but wow the timing situation is rather out of control. Sam Black thinks the problem is that the format is being warped by Rhystic Study, and it needs badly to be banned.
Sam Black: Designed a deck to maximize my chances of winning in untimed rounds in top 16. Unfortunately, top 16 isn’t untimed—it’s 3 hours, then the highest remaining seat wins. I reached an unassailable position, but ran out of time. I was too focused on my game rather than the tournament-
I made the deal with player 2 that I wouldn’t win before my next turn. I should have offered to renegotiate our deal such that the outcome of a Gamble would adjust our deal in a way that would allow one or the other of us to win instead of seat 1.
I am aware that this sounds very toxic. It is. Half of the top 16 games went to time. Rhystic Study has incentivized building decks that generate game states that can’t naturally resolve in 3 hours. A lot of king making style and games are unavoidable, but—
The specific situation where games regularly can’t end is not a necessary function of the format, it is because Rhystic is legal. Again, this is not to say that the problems with cEDH don’t exist, I get it, I don’t need to hear about it in the replies, but Rhystic is a PROBLEM.
I promise the games it leads to can take this long if actions are happening as fast as they do at the PT.
What is going on? Oh, it’s amazing. In theory. Not so much in practice.
There’s an increasingly popular strategy that revolves around using mulligans to tutor for Rhystic or similar advantage engine, then copying it. When playing this strategy, you want others to also have them so you feed each other and bury the remaining players…
This leads to an “end game” state that happens around turn 4 where everyone basically draws 1/2 to all of their deck, and the game becomes about navigating turns where the storm count goes above 50–
The innovation was to include Kozilek to loop my deck, but that’s not enough by itself, because every meaningful play just gets buried forever on the stack, so I also played artists talent and sudden substitution so that I could effectively give the shuffle split second
The idea is that after every other player uses their 20 0-1 mana counterspells, I get mine back to eventually force something through. This takes an insanely long time, but if you don’t have a Rhystic while other players have multiple Rhystics and never pay taxes…
Sam Black: cEDH needs a Rhystic ban more than any format has needed a ban since Urza’s block.
cEDH is popular because commander is popular, and so are winning, playing competitively, and doing powerful things in Magic. cEDH is popular because competitive players who play EDH often slowly drift toward that direction until they decide to go all the way. Having a different banned list than commander would crush the format’s growth and popularity—
It would stop being the logical extension of a thing everyone plays and become an entirely separate format, so fewer people would move to it from EDH. Therefore, I very strongly don’t want it to have its own banned list because I like that it’s popular enough to have big events-
Despite that, I think the Rhystic situation is bad enough that if it were up to me, I’d consider banning it in cEDH even if it’s not banned in commander. I can’t overstate what that says about how big the problem is. I *really* wouldn’t want to do that.
Also, yes, it’s crazy that a single card in a 100 card deck in a 4 player game can be that much of a problem
Sam Black: The issue is that Rhystic earns top marks in every metric—power level, ubiquity, play pattern, and tournament logistics. It sucks when a card is too strong and it makes games end very early, but it’s less of a disaster than a card’s legality adding 5+ hours to a tournament
As Sam also adds, the tournament he is reporting from was well-run and was fun and a unique experience. But that doesn’t mean you would want to do it again.
The core problem is that if enough people are playing Rhystic Study this way, either you follow suit and play mostly for the (multi-directional) mirror, or you lose, period.
The correct answer is that Rhystic Study is a rather silly card in a four player game even when it is not competitive, and regular Commander should respect the situation and ban the card even if it wouldn’t otherwise rise to that level. cEDH is willing to roll with the Commander banned list even in places where it is silly in a competitive context, in both directions, so you should be willing to let them have this one.
If regular Commander does not do that, then yes, I think banning the one card in cEDH is totally fine. If you’re throwing that card into a normal deck it’s no skin off your back to swap something else in. If you’re building around it, well, stop it.
I don’t think ‘fix the tournament design’ is a reasonable answer here. You shouldn’t have a strategy that dominates except that it makes tournaments take 5 more hours, even if that were to make it fair again. There are infinite cards. You can go without one of them.
Waymo reveals it has 70 remote workers managing over 3,000 automated vehicles on over 400,000 rides per week, or ~2% of total ride time. That’s still a relevant ‘last mile’ but is down to a small portion of total costs. If I was Waymo I would move those 70 jobs to America. You’d be paying a premium for mostly the same work, but the PR benefits would be orders of magnitude larger than the cost.
Washington DC is stalling against Waymo by claiming to be waiting for a pointless report due in 2022 that would take less than a month for one person to write.
The public comments are out for blood in Portland, full of claims of safety and worry about Uber jobs. Public comment meetings made sense back before we had telecommunications, now by all reports they are hellholes.
Bloomberg’s David Zipper argued “We Still Don’t Know if Robotaxis Are Safer Than Human Drivers.” That’s completely bonkers, so Kelsey Piper got out a big hammer to explain that yes, Waymos are staggeringly safer than human drivers, as in they have a 80%-90% lower risk of serious crashes even when among human drivers.
Kelsey Piper: In many places, Zipper’s piece relied entirely on equivocation between “robotaxis” — that is, any self-driving car — and Waymos. Obviously, not all autonomous vehicle startups are doing a good job. Most of them have nowhere near the mileage on the road to say confidently how well they work.
But fortunately, no city official has to decide whether to allow “robotaxis” in full generality. Instead, the decision cities actually have to make is whether to allow or disallow Waymo, in particular.
Zipper says we don’t have the ‘raw data’ on Waymos, but we very much do, and Kelsey goes on to identify various statistical errors or slights of hand, depending on your perspective. This is all very settled.
And yet we have various politicians, here DC mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George, opposing Waymo due to supposed safety concerns. Within reason I think mayoral races where this is in doubt justify one-issue voting.
Mike P: I don’t mean to say this in a way that discredits what they’ve done, but ngl, this stuff isn’t even surprising to me anymore like ya, makes total sense. I went from Philly to Raleigh NC to Tennessee and back to Philly and the only thing I had to do was re park the car at 2 charging stops when the car parked in the wrong place.
Tesla did the thing
There’s still a difference between full self-driving (FSD) that can take you across the country, and the point when you can sleep while it drives.
A Waymo moving 17mphhits the breaks instantly upon seeing a child step in front of it from a blind spot, hits the child at 6mph and dialed 911. If a human had been driving, the child would likely have been struck at 14mph and be dead.
What did some headlines call this, of course?
TechCrunch: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica
Samuel Hammond: A more accurate headline would be “Waymo saves child’s life thanks to superhuman reaction time”
This was another good time to notice that almost all the AI Safety people are strongly in favor of Waymo and self-driving cars.
Rob Miles: Seems worthwhile for people to hear AI Safety people saying: No, self driving cars are not the problem, they have the potential to be much safer than human drivers, and in this instance it seems like a human driver would have done a much worse job than the robot
Senator Ed Markey is going after Waymo on the basis that they employ people in The Philippines ‘8000 miles away’ to ‘guide’ the cars, as if that is dangerous. Such opposition is what is dangerous, but also this seems like an unforced error by Waymo. The money you save is not worth the talking point, and Waymo should bring those jobs back to America.
Humans don’t typically want to drive the Ubers for long, or as a full time job. Weekend morning shifts pay decently, here about $100 in Texas, and weekday evenings $35, but pay at other times is worse. And reports I’ve seen are that turnover is extremely high.
This is not how our government works, but Trump would to just declare things, so he’s trying to threaten NIH or other funding to force the universities to do what he wants, even when what he wants has been ruled illegal by courts and doesn’t actually have a working legal definition or plan to deal with the existing court rulings. He just thinks he can say ‘implement these things or else I will cut your funding, even though the courts probably think that is illegal, I don’t care,’ and sit back.
Kyle Saunders: And here’s the thing Heitner caught that deserves more attention than it’s getting. Section 4(b) of the order conditions the NCAA’s rulemaking mandate on actions taken “to the extent permitted by law and applicable court orders.”
The order contains its own limiting principle. It knows it can’t override the courts. It says so, in its own text, and then directs the NCAA to do things that courts have already ruled are antitrust violations.
The good news is that there seems to be momentum behind passing something, and everyone smiled about the order. The bad news is that all of that is meaningless.
How did we end up with a legal system where there is no punishment for repeatedly issuing orders that you yourself know are illegal, other than ending enforcement of those illegal orders after someone sues, thus allowing this to be used as leverage?
Shrug.
What should the NCAA committeehave done with Miami OH, which had a perfect regular season despite facing hard opponents or being, according to gamblers and those with eyes, not all that good at playing basketball?
I agree with Seth Burn, my good friend and inventor of WAB, that this illustrates that you are better off if you pick a metric in advance and then stick by it. If you do not like WAB, you need to offer something better. And you definitely shouldn’t care about who is injured or is coming back from injury. Your record is your record.
The counterargument is that any fixed system can be gamed. You want to care about margin of victory, but be able to penalize teams that run up the score, or do various ugly things. You want room to do things that are cool and fun for fans on the margin, or very good for business, even if they’re not technically correct.
In particular, you want to be able to care about who is actually good and what the gamblers think, but for various reasons you can’t actually bake that into explicit criteria. So I am sympathetic there. It would actually be cool to have the final 2-4 bubble slots in the play-in games be ‘the gamblers picks’ now that gambling is legal, and do it via conditional game odds against whoever their opponent would be. So much fun. But I presume we can’t have nice things.
The bottom line is simple. Does anyone in MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL think it’s unfair when the ‘worse’ team gets in because they won more games? No, of course not, they know the rule. That’s sports. So have a rule, and then follow that rule.
In any case, so long as you avoid egregious errors, it’s a small mistake to let a team in ‘on the bubble’ over another bubble team, because they’re not that likely to win.
NJ Transit is going to jack up ticket prices to $100 during the FIFA World Cup. Not prices for the matches. Prices for the trains returning to New York City, up from the usual $12.90. If one must do demand destruction on public transit, best to do it by price, but one would hope there are ways to avoid falling short on supply.
Michael Mulvihill: Total viewing of the first week of the MLB season on national partners was up +54% over last season.
Includes FOX/NBC/NFLX/TBS/FS1 this year, FOX/ESPN/FS1 last year.
Umpire shaming is fun for the whole family and I agree with Derek Thompson that more leagues should do it. I especially love the ‘tap the helmet and start walking to first base’ move.
Unbiased Mets Fan: If you’re a fan of this, there’s genuinely no argument against just fully automating the strike zone.
I actually think this could be a great compromise. In most situations, you still get the human umpire and their ability to make different games unique, adjust the strike zone to the count, slightly favor the home team and create a level of randomness and uncertainty, and reward pitch framing, all of which is part of what makes baseball interesting. But, when the error is sufficiently egregious or high enough stakes, we can get it corrected, and being able to know the strike zone and when to challenge becomes another skill and discussion to keep things interesting.
Ultimately, yes, robot umps now, but I am conceptually enjoying this middle zone. Alas, I’m not actually enjoying it, in the sense that I am not watching any baseball, because I don’t have that kind of time.
How should we fix the NBA draft and associated tanking? Nate Silver has a self-described radical (April Fools Day) proposal. Obvious first revision is to break ties for max bid players via whoever has least recently won a max bid player, rather than having teams draw lots, obvious second revision is remove the hoarding tax and also remove to max bid, third is to revise the penalty for missing playoffs repeatedly to be a cap on total gains.
As usual, the actual league is considering something simpler and easier that they can feel they came up with, in this case getting rid of rewards for records entirely and just starting everyone with 100 draft credits each year. That’s obviously second best in various ways but actually might be flat out better than Nate’s proposal. Why reward losing and punish winning at all? If you do a better job you get to win more.
There is also a compromise between these two proposals. Teams still want to make the playoffs if they can do so, so all you have to do is give all teams that don’t make it to a play-in game 100 points, and then assign teams beyond that fewer points. That still gives you some amount of self-balancing, and if you didn’t drop that number off too much too fast then presumably no one would tank.
How sports team math works:
Joe Pompliano: Wrexham has filed its 2025 financial report:
• $44 million in revenue • 58% of income comes from North America • $20 million in losses last year
Reynolds & McElhenney paid $2M for the club in 2021 but recently sold shares at a $475M valuation. [Read more here.]
One can model this as ‘people want to be associated with successful and popular futbol franchises, sufficiently so that they can afford to always lose money.’
Zac Hill and Matthew Yglesias point out the problem goes beyond tanking, even if you love basketball.
Zac Hill: The NBA is confronting three existential problems at once:
Much of the regular season doesn’t matter and is a bad product.
Playoffs are a good product, but playoff performance is a function of injury.
Minimizing injury has an inverse relationship with product quality.
Conor Sen: On some level I think the NBA’s problems stem from the league getting overpaid for media rights because streamers were desperate for content and agreed to uneconomic deals, which made the owners rich and reduced the financial pressure on them to improve the product.
Major League Baseball, on the other hand, has had relatively more stagnant franchise valuations, was losing younger viewers, and had looming media rights deal concerns, so it felt more pressure to actually improve the game, which it successfully has done.
Derek Thompson is even more brutal. If you wanted to make a meaningless regular season, could you do better than the NBA?
Derek Thompson: I think one way to get at the NBA’s problem is to start w the question: What would it look like for a professional sport’s regular season to be the equivalent of a pre-season exhibition period—that is, something that genuinely, truly does not matter at all?
1. For starters, seeding wouldn’t matter ... bc home court advantage would barely exist, in which case the best teams could win the championship as an 8th seed just as easily as they could win as the 1st seed.
2. The playoff series would be long enough that (a) the best teams had ample opportunity to prove their superiority [unlike in March Madness, or the NFL playoffs, where 20 bad minutes can end the best team’s season] and (b) you’re giving casual fans a LOT of basketball to watch so they don’t feel bad about skipping most of the regular season.
3. Also, you’d let the vast majority of the teams make the playoffs -- maybe by adding a “play-in” that extends potential playoff qualification to, like, 2/3rds of the league.
4. You’d have several teams that recognize (and practically celebrate!) the futility of the regular season by spending much of this period *actively and flagrantly trying to lose* bc the draft is so much more valuable than the outcome of any particular week, or month, of regular-season competition. In fact, you’d have fans actively rooting for about 1/3rd of the league to throw away most of the regular season bc they only really care about getting a high draft pick.
5. Finally, you’d have a sport where it was basically impossible to win a championship without a top 10 (or, really, top 5!?) player, in which case many franchises are rationally fixated on throwing away regular seasons to maximize their chance to draft or trade for a top 10 guy.
... okay, I think you get my point :)
I love listening to basketball podcasts in the autumn and winter, and I love watching playoff basketball in the spring. But I think there are very deep structural reasons why the NBA regular season, for many casual fans, feels like a prolonged preview of an actual sport that begins in April.
My point about the value of seeding is not that “this year’s 8th seed could win the championship.” I’m saying “If the Thunder, Spurs, and Nuggets entered the playoffs as the 8th, 7th, and 6th seeds, everybody would still pick one of them to make the conference finals” Everybody who wants to watch Wizards-Bucks on the second Tuesday in November should do that! Nobody is trying to get them to stop doing that!
I’m interested in getting to the bottom of why the NBA might have a unique problem with getting *ITS OWN FRANCHISES* to care about the regular season.
The NBA has much work to do, and not only in the draft and the three point line.
The playoffs are good times, but at the expense of the regular season. You need to raise the stakes of the regular season, by increasing the value of seeding, at minimum.
Watcher.Guru: JUST IN: $760,000,000 worth of oil shorts were reportedly placed 20 minutes before President Trump announced the Strait of Hormuz was open.
Scott Alexander is correct that Orban Was Bad, Even Though We Don’t Have A Perfect Word For His Badness. There is a continuum between free and fair democracy and full dictatorship. He was not maximally a ‘strongman,’ ‘autocrat’ or ‘dictator,’ and but neither was he entirely not those things. Him losing an election and giving up power does not retroactively make him not at all those things, and does not mean there was no serious threat to democracy there. It certainly does not mean there is no serious threat to it elsewhere and I cannot read such claims as unmotivated.
TSA lines got completely out of control for a while. Here is a video for one in Houston, where the wait was several hours at least. The problem is that there are the same number of flights and less throughput, which means the line keeps getting longer until you get substantial demand destruction. That doesn’t happen until the wait is hours long, or you otherwise make the experience sufficiently worse to drive people away, such as putting ICE agents around the airport.
The FCC made all routers covered devices, so if you want to use a foreign one you now need to go through a ‘conditional approval’ process to show a given one does not pose unacceptable risk. Luckily this does not retroactively ban existing routers or approved models.
This one isn’t even on Mamdani, it predates him but presumably is about to get worse: New York City spending per homeless person rose in six years from $28k, already quite a lot, to $81k, which is patently absurd. That is vastly more than would be required to nicely house and pay all the living expenses of such folks, and it ignores secondary costs.
I try not to opine on such matters, but there are obvious implications here.
Elizabeth Barcohana: SCOTUS poised to prohibit California & 13 other states from counting ballots received after election day. This would be MAJOR for election integrity in California, where currently mail ballots received up to 7 days after Election Day can be counted.
This is important because the law requires that the ballot be postmarked by Election Day, even if it was received afterward.
However, according to @CASOSVote CA Secretary of State, mail ballots from Sacramento, Richmond, Santa Clarita, Los Angeles, and San Diego may not have been correctly postmarked in the Prop 50 election and similar irregularities regularly happen in other elections.
The obvious problem is, who controls the US Postal Service? What happens if they are directed to not deliver the ballots until after election day, or otherwise prevented from doing so? Alas, this no longer seems like such an outlandish question to be asking. And there is no obvious limit to how long they could stall this process out for.
John Lettieri: There’s a standard exception for agreements made by business owners in connection to the sale of their businesses or disposition of ownership interest.
One reason it is so easy is that this is already a money pit that has gone absurdly badly, even at the planning stage, my lord:
Michelle Tandler: How on earth can it cost $30 million and three years for the NYC government to build a grocery store in Harlem? There are *dozens* of grocery stores for sale, all over New York City, for less than $5M. Many are less than $1M. This seems like a scam. (or vanity project)
A quick Claude analysis says that $30 million is the upper range of costs to open a full 15k+ square foot supermarket in a central location. This proposal is for 9,000 square feet in Harlem, on free land, which Claude estimates ‘should’ cost $6 million at most.
He’s saying $70 million for five stores and spending $30 million of it on the first one even if it all goes as planned.
Also, there are already five grocery stores within a two block radius (!) of the new store, so what the hell is even the point if this isn’t graft?
Claude: So there you go. Within roughly a 5-minute walk of the proposed La Marqueta site at 116th & Park, you’ve got:
City Fresh Market — 24-hour full supermarket, literally one block east on 116th
Shop Fair of 116th — full supermarket, two blocks east
Fine Fare on Madison — full supermarket, one block west
Foodtown of East Harlem — full supermarket, 4.5 stars, three blocks NE on 3rd Ave
Cherry Valley Marketplace — full supermarket, three blocks SE
Fine Fare on 1st Ave — full supermarket, five blocks east
Shop Fair of 110th — full supermarket, six blocks south
Midtown Meat Market — butcher, same block
And that's not counting bodegas, the La Marqueta vendors themselves, or the Food Bazaar on 125th. This is one of the most grocery-dense areas in all of East Harlem.
For those who don’t realize, nuclear brinksmanship is incredibly dangerous, and the fact that it ‘usually works’ does not change that, with at most notably rare exceptions, you shouldn’t do it. ‘The world did not end when I did this thing with a small chance of ending the world’ does not mean you weren’t acting crazy.
Riley Brown: No sorry you can’t invest in OpenAI, you’re not an accredited investor. But you can bet all your money on what the OpenAI valuation will be on Polymarket. It’s safer this way for you.
The two regimes are inconsistent in theory, but in practice this might be reasonable.
If you allow direct investment in OpenAI and other similar companies, this will seem like a normal investment thing one might do, and will be pitched as such. Investors will put millions of dollars into this.
Whereas if you bet on the OpenAI valuation at Polymarket, you know you are doing something inadvisable, risky and weird, and the liquidity is not so great. It is a bit of fun, a gamble. Yes, you can blow yourself up here if you want to, but you gotta want to.
Jones Act Watch
The Jones Act got selective waivers due to the Iran war.
Unfortunately the combination of ‘temporary and could be reversed any time’ with ‘only for narrow purposes’ means you can’t invest in logistical changes and thus the wins will be relatively minimal, which is why Balsa Research isn’t harping on it. But yes, every little bit helps, and there were good anecdotes even before we looked to expand this to up to 90 days.
Colin Grabow: The Gulf Coast supplying fuel to Alaska simply does not happen absent the Jones Act waiver. Nice to see new domestic supply chains materialize.
Last year, Anchorage received 38 tanker arrivals. Only two were JA-compliant — the barge QAMUN — with the remainder accounted for by South Korea (34) and China (1). The high cost of JA transport helps explain the reliance on imports rather than WA state refineries.
Some peoplewere very not happy about that. They were ‘deeply concerned’ that the waiver would be ‘abused’ by foreign shipping companies to take items from one port and then, at lower cost, ship them to another port. The horrors.
They promise to be ‘watching closely.’ Please, all of us, watch closely.
Jacqui Heinrich: The American Maritime Partnership is swiping at the White House over the 60-day Jones Act waiver, saying the maximum impact to gas prices is less than 1 cent per gallon:
Peter Meijer: It’s true that a 60-day Jones Act waiver will only lower prices by $.01/gallon.
Which is why @POTUS should go all the way and support a full Jones Act repeal to achieve the full benefits of up to $.10/gallon!
This would be one of many benefits.
Colin Grabow: Waiver less than 24 hours old and foreign ships are already being chartered. Each of these voyages represents a cost savings. If cheaper Jones Act-compliant alternatives were available, they would have been used. Shows the existence of demand the JA fleet couldn’t meet.
That was before we even had an official announcement that waivers were available, and it included NYC-Hawaii.
Gary Winslett: When the Trump admin pays ZERO political price for waiving the Jones Act, that will be very helpful in showing both parties it’s been a paper tiger this whole time.
Not only is there no substantive reason to have the Jones Act, there’s no *political* reason to have it either.
Indeed. There is a small handful of those capturing rents, who have convinced everyone else they can wield power through union solidarity. But the number of actual beneficiaries is tiny, and the number of people hurt is large, including vastly greater numbers of unions and union members. You can just repeal things.
And you know what? Trump is smart enough to notice this one, too, and is considering extending the exception indefinitely. That’a a great idea, and I have an idea that would be even better, which is to expand the exception indefinitely, too.
Scott Lincicome: Reminder: use of non-JA ships (tankers, etc) during waiver periods is clear evidence that the law blocks US commerce - trade among Americans! - that would otherwise occur, restricting supply & raising prices.
AND the gains would be even bigger if the law were permanently nixed.
Scott Lincicome: "Since [the Jones Act suspension], 40 tankers have been able to deliver oil between US ports from California to Texas to Florida and Alaska, increasing the de facto fleet by 70% and helping to reduce costs as a result, according to data provided to Axios by the White House."
That’s what you get with no notice, and no ability to make long term plans. It would be a much bigger effect, across all eligible shipping, if the waivers were permanent.
We are now looking at an up to 90 day extension. At some point, one wonders if it starts to have legs.
The American shipbuilders are mad, and urgently call for ‘preservation of the US shipbuilding supplier ecosystem,’ to protect our sovereign manufacturing capabilities (which largely no longer exist), because you see the United States ‘relies heavily on free-market forces’ via banning everyone else from its markets, whereas other nations ‘protect sovereign manufacturing capabilities as a matter of strategy.’
Why do LNG ships cost four times as much to build in America as they do in Asia, if you are lucky enough to get the American one on time and on budget? One problem is that steel is twice as expensive, mostly due to tariffs, although that obviously can’t explain most of it.
Laptop stands are substantial upgrades for many people, in terms of working in a cafe comfortably, as is bringing a full keyboard and mouse. My recommendation continues to be a full desktop, whenever possible, with at least two large monitors.
Variously Effective Altruism
NPR gets two gifts totaling $113 million. There is weird decision theory, where you don’t want to reward the government no longer paying for NPR by spending your own money paying for it, but actually you should anyway if you value NPR because the people cutting it actively want NPR to die, similarly to PEPFAR and USAID.
I think this is a no good, very bad position and if you have it there is a very serious problem with your philosophy, decision theory and approach to life.
I also think this goes hand in hand with Tyler Cowen claiming that our intervention in Venezuela was good as well so long as in this particular case people in Venezuela were better off, despite how much our actions broke norms and set terrible precedents.
Indeed, I would say we are already seeing, on a vastly larger scale, the consequences of what happened in Venezuela becoming a precedent and setting expectations. It’s ugly, even if you are foolishly a Causal Decision Theorist and can only look at forward consequences. Localized Act Utilitarianism is foolish.
I can totally understand arguing that it is a mistake for wealthy people to give away half of their money. You can only give away so much money efficiently before you face decreasing marginal returns, and it requires large investments of time to do well, and also potentially makes you a target. If you feel you must give away [$X] no matter what you lose your quality controls. The apparatus risks capture by ideologues or thieves and has poor legal structures that don’t protect you. Investing your money in for profit enterprises that do pro social things is arguably a far better way to deploy tens or hundreds of billions, or perhaps you should be doing out of the box things like buying and releasing major medical patents.
I have many disagreements with Elon Musk, but his plan of ‘I want to use my money to build great companies and make everyone wealthier and go to Mars’ is totally valid. My differences are more about whether projects like xAI in particular are wise ideas, or in his non-business actions.
I have not signed such a pledge, and do not plan to give half my money away. It’s fine.
However, if you make a pledge to give away money, then you should honor that pledge.
And when people break pledges, not because they need to but because they choose to, after benefiting from the halo of that pledge, you do not say ‘good’ because that is a terrible, no good thing to do. If you either do this, or you praise this, then you bring shame upon yourself and upon your house, and you weaken the very foundations of our society.
This is indeed exactly the kind of logic that leads to Sam Bankman-Fried, the argument that if you can ‘do good’ by breaking your promises then you should do so.
Zany: --WHAT IS BEING A MARINE, SOLDIER? --SIR IT MEANS WHEN YOU ASK ME TO JUMP I ASK HOW HIGH SIR! --GOOD. AND YOU, SOLDIER! WHAT ARE YOU? --SIR I AM A UTILITARIAN SIR! --AND WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? --SIR YOU ASK ME IF IT’S WRONG TO TORTURE BABIES FOR FUN AND I ASK FOR HOW MUCH FUN SIR
There is a case for asking that question, and there is a case for not asking it.
I love that approach where it makes sense, but it has nothing to do with whether one should honor pledges.
Also, you could honor your pledge that way in a simple fashion: You do that, and then use any leftover funds in other ways that scale, in the worst case you Give People Money, or donate it to the Treasury.
If you’re screaming ‘you can do better?’ Good. Do better.
What about ‘you should fund rationalist or EA things’?
Samuel Hammond: The unique thing about EA / rationalist philanthropy is that, while it has its traditional “cause areas,” it is broadly steerable by better arguments.
That is, if someone marshalled dispositive evidence that we’re headed for an AI winter or that the technical alignment problem wasn’t hard or that xyz funding strategy created more costs than benefits or that shrimp are p-zombies, EA and Rationalist funders would turn on a dime and fund something else. You can’t say that about any other big philanthropic source.
The problem is that those things take a lot of investment to understand, if you want to differentiate the good from the bad, unless you find an agent you can trust at this scale, and also the room for funding most options rapidly becomes an issue when you’re talking about 11 or more figures.
That said, if someone is looking to move 11-13 figures to do good, yes, I would be willing to help out for a remarkably small percentage of that, especially if we are willing to not let the perfect be the enemy of the good and I get to use a portion of it for some aspect of AI notkilleveryonism related causes, but I’m happy to confine that to technical research if necessary.
Elon Musk claims Starlink has done more to lift people out of poverty than any NGO so I thought for fun I’d have GPT-5.4 do some comparisons. ChatGPT doubts Starlink even breaks the top 300 corporations in terms of poverty reduction (its top picks? Foxconn, Apple, Walmart and Samsung.) Starlink really is not that special on this one, but also capitalism is what solves this, and only maybe 10-30 NGOs have done more than Starlink. That seems plausible to me.
Scott Alexander recently argued against the concept of telescopic altruism, in ways I found highly unconvincing. Ben Hoffman points out that to succeed, telescopes need good lenses, and offers us a lot of intuition pumps for what is typically wrong with those who purport to focus on helping distant others, and some of the reasons why by default it makes sense to first put your own local house in order, and some of the failure modes that happen if you don’t do that. You will probably disagree with some of his examples, as do I, but do not let this distract from the clear larger message.
Copious Free Time
If you’re single and childless and you say work means you have no time for socializing, then either you’re approaching 80 hours, you have a serious health problem, some massive other mandatory time sink weighing on you, or you’ve made a choice.
This is one way to realize that you have a serious health problem, in which case your focus should be on fixing that.
Allie: Every time I say “Make friends! Have hobbies!” I get comments like this from (usually childless) people who SWEAR it’s impossible to use any of their free time to have fun or see people
I’m sorry but this is exaggeration, an excuse, or just reallyyy bad time management
Stephanie Cardozo: I would also add to this conversation that even “healthy” people aren’t actually healthy. Chronic fatigue and low energy is a serious issue among the US population. It’s fueled by poor lifestyle and really bad medical systems.
The Lighter Side
If you ever make a mistake, join me in remembering this mistake, and then feel better.
Dan Elton: Many people were claiming this @NYTimes error was fake, and showing a version where it was correct. Actually, the error is real and the correct version floating around is fake! This is not the only time the NY Times has made egregious errors - many during pandemic for instance
Marginal Garfield is about as good as one could hope it to be. Rationalist Garfield is a tier below where one could hope it to be, which is still good enough that my kids laugh and I can use it to try and explain concepts.
Coors.: if Napoleon wasn’t real and you wrote a story about him people would call it unrealistic ratfic mary sue shit
allpsu: “Then he went to Egypt and discovered the Rosetta Stone” GTFO there’s no way
Joseph Hex: “After defeating the combined armies of Europe I wrote a code of law that would be used for the next several centuries. I also banged a different beautiful woman every night.”
Coors.: “i got rid of really annoying measures and made everyone use the ones i liked and im so smart and even though they bullied me in school they love me now but i hate them” ok buddy nice power fantasy
worldly bee: oh shit I have to give my overpowered Mary Sue a flaw... let’s make him “short” by modern standards but he’s actually average for his time period
Austen Allred: What’s lost in the debate about AI jobs is that when coding is free we will have jobs that we can’t even imagine right now. 50 years ago nobody would understand you if you told them your job was to turn the Flexport 404 error page into a game of Tetris
Judge here: Can't do that judge thing, it's wrong incentives for the wrong crowd. (Wrong methods, wrong model, etc.)
But let's assume a judiciary heavily incentivized by money: Judges decide if you stay in custody when arrested. Maybe we don't want to detain recently released Steve so much any more for certain violations, like failing to report or stabbing someone.
As Zvi refers to, there are statutory considerations; deterrence and public safety are some of them. Most badly, this is corrosive to a system and people; if you ask judges to be motivated by their own financial situation, you'll get people who are so motivated and you'll turn people into being so motivated.
" Does anyone in MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL think it’s unfair when the ‘worse’ team gets in because they won more games? No, of course not, they know the rule. That’s sports. So have a rule, and then follow that rule."
These pro leagues can base the playoff outcomes on wins because they determine the teams' schedules.
In college sports, the schools determine the schedules. This obviously lets simple metrics like Wins be easily gamed. Complex metrics, to various degrees, can also be gamed.
Schedules are also critical to schools and to the sports themselves for other reasons. Importantly, matchups between elite teams / big rivals during the regular season and conference championships drive interest in a sport. Another example, some schools' entire athletic budget is largely paid for by hiring their football team out as sacrificial lambs for road games against powerhouses, while letting money flow into the sport by generating another home game at a 100k person stadium that will sell out.
This is why college hasn't succeeded at having a stable fixed rule-based system. Any rule legible and comprehensible enough to seem legitimate to fans is gameable by scheduling decisions that eat away at the sport. Any rule that doesn't cause corrosive scheduling practices fails the legitimacy test (e.g. "the computers" choosing in the BCS era, or your gamblers choice).
Judge here: Can't do that judge thing, it's wrong incentives for the wrong crowd. (Wrong methods, wrong model, etc.)
But let's assume a judiciary heavily incentivized by money: Judges decide if you stay in custody when arrested. Maybe we don't want to detain recently released Steve so much any more for certain violations, like failing to report or stabbing someone.
As Zvi refers to, there are statutory considerations; deterrence and public safety are some of them. Most badly, this is corrosive to a system and people; if you ask judges to be motivated by their own financial situation, you'll get people who are so motivated and you'll turn people into being so motivated.
" Does anyone in MLB or NFL or NBA or NHL think it’s unfair when the ‘worse’ team gets in because they won more games? No, of course not, they know the rule. That’s sports. So have a rule, and then follow that rule."
These pro leagues can base the playoff outcomes on wins because they determine the teams' schedules.
In college sports, the schools determine the schedules. This obviously lets simple metrics like Wins be easily gamed. Complex metrics, to various degrees, can also be gamed.
Schedules are also critical to schools and to the sports themselves for other reasons. Importantly, matchups between elite teams / big rivals during the regular season and conference championships drive interest in a sport. Another example, some schools' entire athletic budget is largely paid for by hiring their football team out as sacrificial lambs for road games against powerhouses, while letting money flow into the sport by generating another home game at a 100k person stadium that will sell out.
This is why college hasn't succeeded at having a stable fixed rule-based system. Any rule legible and comprehensible enough to seem legitimate to fans is gameable by scheduling decisions that eat away at the sport. Any rule that doesn't cause corrosive scheduling practices fails the legitimacy test (e.g. "the computers" choosing in the BCS era, or your gamblers choice).