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Austin Chen's avatar

Quick note of gratitude: thanks for taking the time to highlight the Twitter discussion in a permanent and discoverable way! I generally stay off Twitter to avoid unbounded time sinks, but it comes at the cost of missing cool exchanges like these.

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Eye Beams are cool's avatar

Forget it Zvi, its <strike>Chinatown</strike> Man-of-System town. Man of system will never understand local knowledge and just think it measn "can't observe as much" because local is smaller geographically than global is. You can beat them over the head with the fact it means, say, a hot dog vendor has an intuitive grasp on what traffic on their street looks like and are better at spotting bombers than than any rules the man of system can devise (look up Duane Jackson's story, for reference). Deviant Olam's first, second, and third bit of security advice at home is "get to know your neighbors".

I'm 100% on board with the give based on your local knowledge, with a little bit of seeking out donations that aren't tax incentivized. One of my hobby horses is giving a car to folks who would lose their jobs without transportation - not wildly expensive cars, just cars that ran well but would only trade in for <$3,000. This is basically the white trash version of giving a laptop to a grad student.

Holding an open application process (what some people might call an All-Pay Auction...) to give money to a grad student is the Man of System version, and, uh, yeah do the math. Its a negative EV proposition.

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