ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
I'm a bit of a dissenter on this one. I get the point; I really do. I don't want to be bombarded by every single little thing that happens. That said, from an objective perspective, I think there is a 100% chance that TheMotte will discuss a story that is this impactful and this close to the culture war. There is a 0% chance that it will not be discussed. This is not some random little news story that, if it's just not posted with a low effort comment, it'll skate by and never take up precious Motte real estate (which is the fate that I hope for with most of the random little news stories that the rules are trying to filter out). I felt the same way about the (main) Trump assassination attempt. (I will note that this is not some pet topic of mine; I almost never comment on Israel matters and would actually prefer less of them in general; I have not otherwise commented in this one, either. But this is truly a "C'mon" one.)
Thus, in my mind, the only question is how such 100% stories make it to the Motte. Speaking personally, it feels almost impossible to write a 'quality' top-level comment on it. There's not some ultra-unique take I'm going to have that provides an independent reason why I'm bringing it to your attention. What is the actual bar to clear? I don't actually know. Just fluff it up a bit, like you're re-reporting from a few sources? Seems weak to me. If we actually deleted these low-effort comments rather than just temp banning them, what would we get? Would this story just never get discussed? I doubt it. At worst, it'll end up in one of the links posts that are (allowed!) in the Transnational Thursday Thread, and then the entire discussion will blow up there.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
An alternate solution that has sufficed from time to time is a megathread. You can see how that works with, e.g., US election results. There's little point in making someone have to come up with the gumption to think that they're going to have some 'quality' TLC for the discussion to happen. Everyone knows there's a 100% chance that discussion is going to happen. It just happens to be that the mods know in advance that that's the case, so we don't have to have someone eat a ban in the process. They don't know that in advance for a major Israeli attack on Iran or a presidential assassination attempt. The dream would be to have some mechanism by which a topic is so obviously a 100% topic that it prompts the mods to say, "C'mon, this is obviously a 100% topic; just click this button, and it'll make a megathread, so no one has to eat a ban." Yes yes, this is not a trivial mechanism to design.
To not leave this comment without at least some suggestion that might be plausible, I'll at least try one. IF the community were to embrace some version of this "100% topic" terminology, we could just include an additional reporting option. We could report low-effort comments like this one with the report, "Low-effort, but c'mon, this is a 100% topic." If enough people report [EDIT: and it actually meets the mod-declared standards for 100% topics], the mods could then respond with, "Approved on grounds of being a 100% topic," rather than a ban. Paired with this, to discourage low-effort comments that only might be a 100% topic, I would also support locking/deleting the entire chain of comments that follow a low-effort TLC that doesn't get approved as a 100% topic. I think the resulting equilibrium would be a lot better than just having to have someone eat a ban every time for no real reason.
EDIT: Concerning the "first" incentive, why does that exist? I'd maybe guess it's because people think that whoever posts it first will get upvotes for whatever reason. Right now, I guess they trade that off with bans or something? We could develop a norm of just downvoting them. Make the report option say, "I have downvoted this low-effort comment, but c'mon, it's a 100% topic." Since the incentive to be "first" is so minor, this disincentive to be "first" will also be minor. At least, it'll be less harsh than eating a ban. You can do the needful, eat a -50, then actually participate in this and other discussion. And if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic, you eat the downvotes, eat the ban, and your topic disappears.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
There is a lot of tension in the problem statement that has been pointed out a few times. To what extent can "low IQ normies" actually understand somewhat complex topics that require a fair amount of marinating and perspective? So, I guess I'll contribute one little route that helps with one little ingredient that can go into the marinade and hopefully help them gain perspective over time. Hopefully, it's a simple enough contribution that it can actually somewhat stick with a normie. It's not meant to be a "now you oppose communism" point, but just a little contribution to make them slightly less susceptible and slightly more likely to fit other pieces into the puzzle. The first part is heavily lifted from Russ Roberts talking to Mike Munger in EconTalk.
The issue is that many have a very naive understanding of "fairness", as other folks have pointed out here. They imagine that you can just just elect the right politicians to grab the "fairness" knob and turn it toward "good", with no ill consequences. They obviously wouldn't be willing to trade off "fairness" for something as cold as "economic efficiency", which sounds like how capitalists exploit everyone. So, the point is to use two examples to argue that 1) Yes, you absolutely would give up some amount of fairness for some amount of efficiency, and 2) In fact, we have easy-to-understand historical examples of the relentless drive toward "fairness" being wildly harmful. The first proceeds with a theoretical exercise that feels practical enough to be within every normie's daily experience, and the latter hopefully helps connect the idea to practice in case they think it's just too disconnected and theoretical.
The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".
(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)
The bonus could actually be a good connection to the second thing, which is a real-world example of exactly how the commie logic goes. Not only can you not do any of the fun things in life (or even get through an intersection to get to work), but you certainly can't acquire anything that could even help you do work. The Khmer Rouge took commie logic as logic, "fairness" above all else. Absolutely no chance that any Big Men of Capitalism could arise. In order to do that, you simply have to ban free enterprise. No one can hoard goods or money if they can't build an evil Big Business. If you let them just go start a business, they might make a bunch of money, and then we get inequality and unfairness. So, everybody works on the State farm, and they're definitely not allowed to do stuff that makes them rich, unequal, and unfair. At least, not without one of those "societal conversations" (don't ask when those actually happen, but spoiler, it's only when we want to give Party Insiders extra goodies). Don't even think about getting a computer; if you had a computer, you might program something and start a tech company, which might make you rich, unequal, and unfair. Hammers? Ladders? Literally anything that could be used to make money with? Banned, unless it's owned by the State, for use on State projects, which have presumably had a "societal conversation" approving them. Hell, the Khmer literally banned people who wanted to have a little more food for their family (because they apparently weren't satisfied by the outcome of the "societal conversation") from going out into the countryside and picking berries. Because that's "hoarding goods", and besides, you might try to sell them for other stuff, acquiring extra wealth, becoming rich, unequal, and unfair.
The result is hopefully that they can see that, while there is often an intuitive drive toward "fairness" (and some amount of this intuition may be fine), it actually gets extremely wonky as you blow it up in scale. It's directly connected to how it would negatively impact their normie life and a historical example of exactly that happening. They'll hopefully realize that they will, deep down, be willing to trade some amount of "fairness" for some amount of "efficiency", and I think that's enough of an accomplishment for a normie who is commie-curious. They'll definitely need more marinating to go much beyond that.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
America had public ballots up until the 1890's
I've told the story of the "Australian ballot" here before:
When Australia was colonized by the Brits, they used it as a penal colony. Of course, they didn't go full Lord of the Flies with the convicts, but sent good, upstanding Brits to run the place and maintain good order. After serving out their sentences, many convicts did have the option of returning to Britain, but lots of them chose to stay. They were free citizens, but obviously, their jibs were cut a bit differently than the better class of good, upstanding Brits who were sent to run the place. The convicts were even free to run for elected office, and some even did. Yet somehow, confusingly, even as time went on and there were many more freed convicts than there were good, upstanding Brits, none of these convicts ever won any elections. Maybe everyone just realized that it was better if good, upstanding Brits continued running the place.
Other folks disagreed, and they managed to implement the 'Australian ballot', where each individual's vote would be totally, completely secret. Suddenly, magically, freed convicts began winning elections and were able to curtail some of the
harshest abusescurious practices of the good, upstanding Brits.
The Australian Ballot was first introduced in Victoria and South Australia in 1856. Being adopted literally halfway across the world only forty years later is a testament to how compelling the idea is to solving genuine concerns.
I understand that you've had mail in voting for a decade and that you personally have not encountered any issues with it. But basically right before you got mail in voting, international pro-democracy organizations had all agreed that in-person secret voting was basically the only way to do it. If you expand your scope beyond an extremely-restricted, probably high-trust (and high-other-things) setting, there are plenty of reasons to significantly favor an actually secret ballot.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Big Peter Thiel interview with John Gray H/T MarginalRevolution
This hits quite a few topics, but one cluster I'd pull out is science/achievement/religion/wokeness:
[JG:] Part of the resistance to your analysis of science is a kind of quasi-religious conception of the salvific possibilities of science. Science can do what religion hasn’t done, which is to actually change worldly life in a way which rids it of its deepest contradictions. And for some people, if they gave up that faith in science, they would be left with nihilism, or left with despair, or left with unbearable anxiety.
PT: Yeah, although there’s a very complicated history of science. In some ways it was a by-product of Christianity, in some ways it was in opposition to Christianity. And certainly in its healthy, ambitious, early modern forms, whether it was a substitute or a complement to Christianity, it was supposed to be a vehicle for comparable transformation. The indefinite prolongation of human life was an early modern science project in which people still believed in the 17th and 18th centuries. There was a sub-movement within the revolutionary Soviet politics in the 1920s called Cosmism, where a part of the project of the revolution had to be to physically resurrect all dead human beings, because if science didn’t do that it would be inferior to Christianity.
[...] So there is this anti-Christian or derivative from Christianity, very ambitious version of science. And of course, there is also a more defeatist version of science, where science actually tells us about limits and things you cannot do. To use a literary example, when Hamlet’s evil mother, Gertrude, says that all that lives must die, the question one must ask is, is that a law of nature? Or is this just a rationalization for the rottenness that is Denmark? And certainly the early modern conception was that you wanted to transcend this, both in a Christian or a scientific form. By late modernity, as science decayed, that sort of ambition is only on the fringes of science, not the mainstream.
...
One particular example of science’s slide from early modern ambition into late modern torpor is the climate change debate. If one took climate change seriously, there are all kinds of progressive science things one could do. You could be pushing for the construction of hundreds of new nuclear reactors. You could be pushing for nuclear fusion. But in practice, we don’t lean into that. We’re instead told that we should ride bicycles. So much of science today has this Luddite feeling.
The theme is that science used to be ambitious, especially ambitious in thinking that it would easily replace religion in all aspects, even in hope. I don't think he's claiming here that science has directly stalled out technologically, but the way the culture views it and uses it is uninspired and uninspiring. He seems to extend this decline to the science of social technology:
You know, McKinsey was a real thing in 1985 in the United States. If you hired a consultant they actually helped you improve your company, because the companies were badly run. At this point McKinsey is a total racket, it’s just all fake. The Reagan and Thatcher administrations empowered McKinsey because they allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s. At this point, McKinsey is not ever going to be anything other than a super corrupt, fake racket in 2023.
I think that toward the end, he possibly comes to some sort of root of it:
one of my colleagues says that institutions have embedded growth obligations, EGOs, in short. A healthy institution has exponential growth. A healthy, exponentially growing company, for example, creates more jobs and everybody can get promoted. Other institutions have their equivalents. And then at some point, the growth stops, and you have a choice. You can become more honest and say, well, you know, the university isn’t growing anymore. There’ll be very few faculty slots available. If you’re in a PhD program, we’re gonna make sure that 80% of the students drop out of the program within six months so they don’t waste their time. Or, the thing that I think unfortunately happens a great deal, is you just lie and the and the institutions become sociopathic. They pretend that the growth is still going on and then it’s only years and years later that people figure out that there are no jobs.
To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.
That is, I think he is saying that the problem with society and science stems (STEMs?) not from the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up, but from the fact that people just didn't take seriously the idea that number don't go up (of faculty), which could be the fundamental driver for why there is the screwed up incentive to publish ever more just to make number go up. That this core problem drove the messed up incentive system, made the whole thing go sociopathic, generating apathy/lack of ambition (you can't have that wide-eyed of an optimistic ambition within the muck of a clearly sociopathic endeavor), and ultimately giving birth to extremely degenerate behavior like wokeness.
I think some here would say that the only reason why number don't go up (of faculty) is a problem is because society has this strange idea that everyone is completely equal in terms of potential/capability, so they think there's no reason why we couldn't have vastly higher quantities of faculty-capable people. But I'm not sure whether that's the case or if we're genuinely dealing with a weird numbers problem. Literally this morning, I saw a new video from a top chess grandmaster, talking about how the rating system is messed up post-COVID. How a ton of young kids across the world poured obscene amounts of their lives into online chess during that time, due to quarantine/addition/general rise in popularity, and they genuinely got really good at chess. But their skill isn't reflected by the traditional "over the board" rating, because they may just not have played enough games in those settings to have it adjust properly.
I do lament that the vast majority of what gets published is totally worthless, but I'm wishy-washy on whether the fundamental driver is that less capable people are getting into these positions or if it's almost purely a result of incentive structure. In the end, I think it's probably both, but let me sketch it out. This is basically an attempt to steelman the possibility that, say, the 85th percentile of folks who could have even plausibly thought about pursuing a career in academia actually has gotten to be a lot better than they were in the past. Then, since total faculty numbers are stagnant, it wasn't as easy to just look at traditional measures and pick out the highest quality folks (akin to how you can't necessarily just look at OTB chess rating nowadays), but since you couldn't just wait and let the rating system self-correct over time, because, uh, you don't have a self-correcting rating system like ELO for academics, they had to go hard in on shit like just making some number or other go up. Then, even though the quantity of reasonable-tier candidates (and their general quality) may be higher, Goodhart's law still takes over, and you end up selecting the ones that are just better at gaming your metric or stabbing each other in the back (and they focus their efforts on gaming metrics/backstabbing, so that even if they're actually more capable, their output becomes generally worse, which would explain how many crap papers are out there). Apathy, lack of ambition, and dysfunction follow.
(I still don't know whether I actually think the 85th percentile of potential faculty actually has gone up, or just people really want to believe in the absence of an actually good measure.)
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
This is probably what I think was most lacking from the 3min clip I saw. Should have gone straight to reversed hypotheticals or had a bank of actual, real world cases where they policed mere opinions. Start off with the most basic reversed hypothetical: "Would calling for the genocide of African Americans be a violation to the campus code of conduct?" Then move down the chain, even all the way to the meme, "Would displaying a poster saying, 'It's okay to be white,' be a violation of the campus code of conduct?" Get them on record. Double bonus points would be if they could point to actual examples on those campuses. In fact, that the questioner did not move to actual examples on those campuses of speech being policed makes me lean slightly more toward thinking that, in reality, the universities may be ever so slightly better on this score than I would have thought before, but that's perhaps only an epsilon movement, because I think that if I did take the time to dig in to past cases, we'd likely be able to show definite hypocrisy.
Weight Loss (...yes, again...)
I listen to a variety of podcasts, and I generally do what I can to avoid listening to ads along the way, even if that's just manually skipping ahead through them. But occasionally, my hands are busy with something else, and I just have to deal. In any event, last week, I heard an ad for GOLO, a weight-loss program.
I'm not at 'current episode' on all of my podcasts; I'm listening to back catalog for some of them. I didn't think to go check the date on it, and I don't even remember which podcast it was in at this point, so I don't know if it was a few years old or brand new, but at whatever time it was, they were touting it as a "new approach". Forbes' review of GOLO says 2023 on it, so presumably it's pretty recent.
I was curious about what the Kids These Days are doing, and you may have seen me here before talking about weight loss, so I decided to check it out. I was sooooo ready to hate it. After checking it out, though, in some sense, it actually pleases me a fair amount. In another sense, it illustrates quite well a phenomenon I've been seeing in terms of our society's collective psychology about the topic.
What's GOLO about? From their website... insulin resistance! Muscle loss! These are the bad buzzwords. Metabolic efficiency! Immunity Health! Hormone Balance! These are the good buzzwords. Plus, they have a magic supplement! It's easy! Just take one capsule with each meal. It's in a paragraph that starts with "The Science Behind GOLO", in bold and everything. The Science (TM) is right there! They even shit on CICO, helpfully pointing out in all caps:
YOU DON’T NEED TO COUNT CALORIES, COUNT POINTS OR FOLLOW AN APP. THE TRUTH IS, LOW-CALORIE, LOW-FAT APPROACHES DON’T WORK.
Let's dive in, see what's really going on. Obvious first place to start is their supplement; what's in it? 7 plant extracts and 3 minerals, of which, best as I can tell, chromium is the star of their show. Of course, best as science can tell, there is just the barest degree of plausibility, and Examine concludes by pointing out:
Anyone wishing to supplement chromium should be aware that chromium supplementation is not associated with any reliable benefits on markers of glucose metabolism.
Ok, so if their magic suppliment isn't exactly Ozempic, what do they have going on? Gotta dig into 'More Information' on their site.... then be careful! Don't fall into the trap of clicking on any of the distractions, even the one that promises to tell you what their 'GOLO For Life Plan' is. Gotta go to the FAQ. That's where you've gotta dig down into the question about what the GOLO For Life Plan is. It helpfully states:
The GOLO For Life Plan combines the right foods together to help manage and optimize glucose and insulin levels while creating a thermogenic effect. The GOLO For Life Plan improves weight loss in two ways:
- Minimizing or eliminating muscle loss and maximizing fat loss
- Providing proper nutrition that includes healthy fats and carbohydrates which eliminates nutritional imbalances and promotes steady weight loss and better health.
On the GOLO For Life Plan, you can eat more food and lose weight without the obstacles you may have faced with other diets.You will be eating between 1300 and 1800 calories each day, and will:
- Stay full and energized
- Keep insulin steady throughout the day
- Give your body proper nutrition
- Reduce hunger and cravings
- Learn how to eat to promote weight loss
- Learn how to maintain your weight when you reach your goals
I tried to be helpful and cross out all the noise that isn't relevant for us at this point. What is the real key to a fancy new diet for weight loss that has all the buzzwords that people use when they say that CICO is garbage? It was CICO all along! There are more telltale signs that this is just a recycling of what we've known for a long time. 1300-1800 is a pretty wide range, so what's going on? Two more items further down in the FAQ, under How is the GOLO For Life Plan Personalized?, we see:
The GOLO For Life Plan is based on your energy needs. We help you determine the right amount of food that you need, to lose on average, 1-2 pounds per week.
That Forbes article fills in some more details:
While everyone has the same food guidelines, your specific caloric intake recommendation is based on your gender, age, current weight and activity level.
The government of Canada has helpfully published basically exactly this sort of thing on their website for years. We've known how to do this for years. Weknowdis. Moreover, the real, actual science has confirmed for decades that to a pretty darn good level of approximation, 500cal/day from your TDEE is right about a 1lb/wk weight loss/gain. Weknowdis.
Forbes says, "Programs range from 30 to 90 days," but I can't find solid details on the GOLO website. Most of the examples are people who did stuff for 6mo-1yr. Best I can tell, they're basically just selling the supplement, and then I guess giving away the meal planning to put you in the right calorie range. So, for a bit, with the Forbes wording, I was wondering if they were actually going to have some trick to try to get you to do it for 1-3mo, then 'cycle off', but try to figure out how to get you to just go back to maintenance caloric intake, then say that you should start another 1-3mo cycle. Maybe that's buried somewhere in the planning tool they're giving away with every purchase of the supplement. Final thing to point out, which I couldn't really find in detail on the GOLO site, Forbes says:
GOLO also provides eating guidelines, encouraging you to eat more whole foods (including fruits, vegetables, meats, eggs and grains) while avoiding sugar and processed foods.
In the end, what have they done here? It actually almost makes me proud of capitalism. They've found a way to package and monetize the bog standard, traditional advice for losing weight. You could just listen to the CICO people, the honest doctors, the fitness people, etc., who tell you the same basic advice. Stop eating total crap like piles of dessert all the time. Stop drinking big gulps of straight sugar calories, no matter whether they're soda, juice, or whatever other trendy beverage is happening right now. Eat at about a 500cal/day deficit to shoot for 1lb/wk of weight loss, eat regular foods, and maybe if you're feeling physical/psychological effects after getting somewhat deep into a cut, go back to maintenance for a bit, and then start again.
But the packaging. Ohhhh the packaging! Insulin resistance! Metabolic efficiency! Immunity Health! Hormone Balance! CICO SUCKS! They do what they can to try to meet people where they are. To try to get them used to the idea that they're shooting for about a pound a week, so it'll be longer than other people promise (though, of course, they say 1-2lb/wk, just to get your brain to think it could be twice as fast). And of course, the cherry on top, a supplement that probably doesn't really do anything is the mechanism by which they monetize. Hell, after people lose the weight, I bet the GOLO For Life thing basically steers them toward how to stay at maintenance for the rest of time... but you probably better keep buying/taking their supplement, just to make sure you don't ruin all your gainz! It's a thing of sheer beauty, designed to bob and weave around all the CICO bashers who are going to scream from the rooftops that CICO doesn't work and trash your weight loss program if it even hints at the idea that CICO is what's going on rather than repeating the buzzwords and bowing at the god of, "It's not your fault, it's... check cue card... insulin resistance!"
In the end, I can't help but love it. Could you have listened to me tell you basically all the same underlying facts? Sure. Could you find a plethora of communities or official government public health documents that outline how you can do all this same stuff, but for free? Yup. But man, we're too dry in the delivery, and we tend to be abrasive to the folks who want to believe that there is some other magic going on in the world. I can't help but think of how Matt Levine might put it. The market wants the bog standard advice that works and that is backed by science, but it also doesn't want it to sound like that. It wants to hear some buzzwords, platitudes, shitting on CICO, and having a magic supplement. That's an arbitrage opportunity, and GOLO seems to have filled it.
EDIT: Sigh, I tried so hard to get the strikethroughs to work inside the bulletpoints. It displays correctly in the comment preview (and still displays correctly in the preview as I'm editing). But it's broken in the actual comment. @ZorbaTHut Help?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Frankly, hearing this makes me trust the developers less. A solid reason to trust, for example, Signal, is because they have straight bitten the bullet of saying, "Our software may end up helping deplorables at times, but we're still utterly committed to it, and nothing else is as important to this organization as this one thing." It's a commitment that helps me be comfortable that they're not going to roll over and sneak shady shit into the code if, like, I don't know, some Canadian truckers protest, the Canadian gov't declares an emergency, and the narrative is that they are the spawn of Satan and Hitler's gay love, and oh, if we could just peek in to their files, we'll stop the next holocaust.
I don't know that I trust Syncthing to do that anymore. I now really worry that they may be compromised... or at least that the snowball of their personnel is rolling downhill, ejecting anyone not on board with the narrative enough, on its way to being fully compromised.
This leaves me unsettled. I love their software. I use it everywhere. I might not yet be "too committed to pull out", but I'm considering revamping some things that might push me even closer to that line. Yet now, I sort of want to pull out. There's probably not a great alternative yet, I'm guessing. But is there any way for me, as a regular user, to affirmatively signal that I really really want them to make this commitment and cut the other shit out? Anything stronger than just "not donate"? Is there an alternate project that has such a commitment and which is close to being as good that I can donate to (maybe not even use yet if it's not there yet)? Anything?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
A PMC Revolt Will Hold Us Back From The Glorious Automated Future
I've heard a few variants on this. When Tyler Cowen was on Dwarkesh, he said that people will be the bottleneck to automation. His prediction seemed part mechanistic, but part hearkening to the Luddites, that automatable members of the PMC will band together to do whatever it takes to save their weak, deplorable skins. Pass destructive policies, regulations, restrictions, maybe even try to physically break the machines. A minor variant on the Woke Capitalist Wrecker, if you will; the PMC wrecker.
Some might be concerned that these sorts of predictions are a bit vague. What will they actually do? What will it look like? How could we watch events unfold and categorize what is happening? Of course, as the old joke says, fascism comes with smiley faces and McDonald's, so it's unlikely that their activities will be immediately apparent on just a surface glance. Thus, I will turn to the impetus for this post and submit that one need look no further than current events.
This morning at the gym, I listened to Phil Magness, an economic historian who specializes in tariffs, on Reason's Just Asking Questions Podcast. Then, when I got home, I read Alex Tabarrok's latest on Marginal Revolution. They both pointed out something that I had not realized. America still manufactures a lot of value. More value than ever before in history. In real terms. So why all the hullabaloo about manufacturing? Jobs. And why are jobs somehow impacted? It can't be that China has stolen all of the manufacturing value add from us; we've already established, from the data, that we're doing more of that than ever before.1 Nah... it's automation. We're manufacturing gobs more value with fewer human laborers.2
This is the backlash to automation. This is the "wrecker class" implementing destructive policies in response to being automated away. This is just what it looks like. It doesn't say it on the tin. The talk is always about jobs, but the blame is misplaced for why they're going away. It's automation. It can cause people to reach for whatever tool can possibly cause shortages and contract the economy, just hoping that doing so somehow reverses the impacts of automation. Nevermind that the intermediate steps are "cause shortages" and "contract the economy".
If you're worried about how the PMC will eventually sabotage the progress of automation or just want to find a way to model how humans might be a bottleneck on the way to a glorious automated future, one might need look no further than current events.
1 - Perhaps one wants to just compare total manufacturing value add. China does have approximately double of that than the US does. China also has approximately four times the population of the US.
2 - It also does not seem to be purely a population growth phenomenon.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
I think you might be sounding like a transphobe. Tests, forms, doctor's notes, medical gatekeeping?
But no worries, I think @Gillitrut's position can come to your rescue. See, you don't have to actually make any decisions about what test/forms/notes/gatekeeping will occur. You can sit back, remain completely agnostic about any underlying Big T Truth, and just be law-brained enough to observe that different jurisdictions will make different choices. Some jurisdictions, we can call them the Transphobe Jurisdictions, have rulers and tests and stuff like you might want. Other jurisdictions, the Nontransphobe Jurisdictions, don't. Australia happened to choose already that they are a Nontransphobe Jurisdiction, having no rulers, no tests, no nothing. They have a much simpler process that lets you quickly and easily change the authoritative document, which declares, with authority (thus the adjective), how the law views the situation. One can then just sit back, be law-brained, and see that the conclusions follow from the premises.
...but now, Person B is considering going to a local amusement park, a private service provider. There happen to be two amusement parks in the area. Amusement Park Z is run by young, hip folks. They have electronic controls everywhere. You can scan your driver's license and swipe your credit card at the entrance, and then just use the nifty electronic system to access any rides you desire. Amusement Park X is run by old fogies, practically boomers. You have to hand physical tickets to the white guy standing next to the ride, and he points to the sign that says, "You must be this tall to ride." Can Person B sue Amusement Park X for not caring about the authoritative document and simply observing, "Your head don't touch the top of the ruler, dawg"?
After riding a ride that mayyyyyyyyyybe wasn't super safe for short people, Person B isn't feeling so good. B makes his way to the emergency room. B tells the doc everything about what's happened in the time period leading up to that moment. B's last physical act is to pull an insurance card out of a pocket and hand it to the doc, but since it was right next to B's driver's license in the pocket, both are grabbed and passed to the doc. (Can insert/remove a hypo here about B's last words being, "Please help me doc; do anything you need to.") Then, B passes out.
The doc runs a bunch of tests. In the process, they strip off B's clothes and replace them with a standard hospital gown. They can't help but happen to notice B's genitals in the process. The hospital bed automatically provides B's weight. Maybe even in the future, there's a ruler built into the bed, too. The tests come back, and they happen to include chromosomes and other indicators. All of the medical indicators correlate perfectly toward B having a particular sex, height, and weight. But the doctor noticed that B's drivers license disagrees on some/all of these things. The only problem is that the next step that the doctor has to take depends on one or more of those things. Perhaps it's just a dosage selection; perhaps it's an even more significant change in the course of treatment.
Suppose the doc, a private service provider, proceeds according to the authoritative document and not the measurements, and B happens to die. Is that a successful lawsuit by the estate, according to pure law brain? Suppose the doc proceeds according to the measurements and not the authoritative document, and B happens to live. Is that a successful lawsuit by B?
I'm pretty law-brained for a lot of things, but when it comes to these issues, I cannot escape the phrase, "Live not by lies." If we bake lies into the premises, the principle of explosion surely follows. It is utterly unsurprising that if we start off with baked in lies, then attempt to simply close our eyes to the entire realm of truth and try to proceed purely by law-brain, contradictions will follow.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Totally get where you're coming from. However, the last paragraph has I think the most important bit:
everything other than plugging in something
Most IoT devices are billed as, "You just plug it in, and it just works!" No one anywhere is standing at a store, looking at the baby monitors, seeing that one of the options lets them listen to it from their phone, and thinking, "Ya know, I really better not think about buying this and plugging it in unless I become an expert in network security." Just how no one stands in a store looking at toasters, thinking, "Ya know, I better not think about buying this and plugging it in unless I become an expert electrician." Like, should people learn more about network security and how their electrical system works? Yeah, sure. But while the breaker boxes in the store might have some sort of warning on them or cultural expectation saying that they mayyyyyybe shouldn't buy it and try to install it on their own without any expertise while the toaster doesn't have anything of the sort, nobody's internet devices have any such warning or cultural expectation. Even effin' routers, people just buy the box and plug the box in; it's easy! It's magic! Best case, they have the guy from the ISP show up to plug in the modem and the router, but he's not going to be fiddling with the security settings for them, either. Everyone is perfectly happy just letting it seem like plug-and-play magic.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.
As a Science person with engineering degrees who doesn't like to do engineering1, I am suuuuuper skeptical of other Science people. More of them are simply actively bad at their jobs than is remotely acceptable, and you are 100% right that many of them face no repercussions from this due to the fucked up way the system evaluates work. Furthermore, totally agreed that the engineering folks have a much more visible benchmark for things working, and that is incredibly useful.
That said, if I were to defend those among my people who are good, I would say that one cannot reductively claim that it is only engineering that is pushing boundaries and driving progress. The story I once heard that might resonate with you was that if you were wanting to invade and occupy a country, you need four different types of people: spies, marines, army, and police. The spies have to be there early, get the lay of the land, a sense for what's going on, background information that informs choices of what it is that you're going to try to do and why. Once you have some idea, the marines have to go establish a beachhead, so that you can start to bring serious resources to bear on the problem. Then, the army has to very practically churn through huge piles of materiel, kicking in skulls and establishing concrete facts on the ground. Finally, once you've occupied the place, the police need to maintain order and keep everything somewhat functional.
The analogy is that the Science types are the spies. We try to figure out the lay of the land, when you don't even have a clue as to what types of things may be possible or not. The experimentalists who bridge the gap, pun possibly intended, between the scientists and engineers are the marines; they are often operating on shoestring budgets, trying to read our shit, figure out which ideas are most plausible, and cobble together at least some sort of proof of concept that it could actually work in the real world. Then comes the literal army of engineers. I admit that I'm a little jealous of how they get to see their stuff actually work, but maybe it's their ridiculously fat budgets that I'm more jealous of. They have to very practically establish routinized ways for the idea to consistently work in practice. Finally, you have the cops who maintain the whole thing and are more supposed to interact with the 'customer' to make sure that their needs are being met. Presumably, if you just try to dive in to a country with just your army, with no intel and no established beachhead, one could see the inherent difficulty of pushing the boundaries and driving progress. Maybe you could still get there, but damn if the endeavor isn't likely to blow even fatter budgets of even more obscene amounts of materiel, possibly toward goals that simply don't make any sense and are eventually doomed to failure, which you might have known if you had a proper understanding of the lay of the land.
Now here's the part of the analogy that I've come to add, but which I think makes sense. Not only do you need different types of people for these different jobs, but the way you evaluate the work that is being done in each stage is completely different. There is no sense in which you're going to evaluate a pre-invasion spy by the same sort of metric that you're going to evaluate the face-kicking army. It is, frankly, an unfortunate fact of reality that the nature of the work of spies leads to the possibility that they could totally bullshit you, and it can sometimes be very difficult to tell truth from falsehood. I don't know any honest-to-goodness real life spies, but I really wonder if they have some sort of similar dysfunction/skepticism toward each other that we Science types have toward our own. I also wonder if there just is a significant population of them who kind of suck at their job, the way many of ours do, but don't face many consequences because of the inherent difficulties of evaluation.
1 - I do math, and it's a tossup on whether reviewers will actually pay close attention to whether my proofs do, indeed, prove my theorems... or if they'll even bother reading the proofs and instead make their judgment entirely on the basis of shit like how many of their own papers I've cited.
EDIT: After reading @TheDag's comment, I would amend this by saying that your spies have a very analogous failure mode that is really really bad for you - double agents. They're actively working against you, against providing you knowledge of the truth, and for the adversary. This can be widespread, but also sort of localized. For example, if the Soviets totally convert your spy network there, they can completely wonk up your knowledge of what the hell is happening there, but maybe you still have perfectly good coverage of China. I would agree that there are vast swaths of the social sciences who have been entirely captured. They're worse than just having an evaluation problem; they're an adversarial problem.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
All of this can be true, but with the conclusion reversed. Nearly every time a "scandal" came up during the Trump administration, I chuckled and said, "...so today is the day that people are going to learn how X works, eh?" And when my left-leaning buddies would get into why it was a scandal, we'd discuss how X actually works, with the clinching question being, "So, what are you willing to do about the problem of X? The only constraint on your answer is that you need to be willing to apply the same standard to politicians you like as you do for politicians that you don't like." That's when it became clear that they didn't have any "solution" to the "blind spot" that they could embrace. Their initial reaction was not, "Oh my, this is a blind spot that is a problem with the system in general, and it would be nice if we could fix the system." It was always, from the first moment, motivated by and embraced specifically for its ability to get Trump, because he's obviously crooked and only someone so crooked could do such a thing.
We can check this in hindsight, too. If and when this mostly blows over, because people realize they can't take Trump's scalp on it without taking too many other scalps, how much energy do you think there will be to 'fix the blind spot'? What's an example policy fix that you expect is likely to be adopted in order to bring about changes to the system and then applied evenly to politicians on both sides?
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Verily, it seems like things are proceeding about as I predicted over a year ago. I pointed out in a parent comment that the #Resisters suffer a coordination game problem, and they lack any clear object to coordinate around. There is unlikely to be a singular event that causes all of the resisting bureaucrats to all simultaneously stick their necks out to create a large conflagration where they plausibly have more resources and power that they can bring to bear than the President. Instead, when USIP tries to resist, other bureaucrats sit on the sidelines and watch, perhaps wondering what will happen to them or if they can come up with a plan on their own. But they will not rush to allocate some alternative police force to protect USIP HQ. The head of USIP basically has to decide whether he or she is going to, on his/her own, resist and refuse to let the President's political will prevail.
...but most like I predicted, if and when it comes to the point of, "We're not going to let you into the building," the President can clearly muster the raw force of boots to force the issue. There is roundable-to-zero chance that USIP's paltry security team is going to muster enough force or start shooting bullets. This just isn't the way that the war with the bureaucracy will be fought. If an agency pulls a minor stunt to not let them into the building, the President can and will have his team show up with a very minor show of force, and that will basically be the end of that form of resistance.
Of course, they will take it to the courts, and there, battles can go different ways. Different agencies have different statutes passed by Congress, and different particular legal battles may be resolved in different ways. For the most part, the primary questions are going to revolve around the judiciary, to what extent the executive complies, on what timescales, etc. We see that playing out in other domains. "Some silly bureaucrats think they can #resist by just locking the doors to the building," was never a plausible path.
Postscript. Matt Levine sometimes talks about the question of, "Who really controls a company?" Often, this comes up for him in battles between CEOs and boards, where they're like both trying to fire each other. Similarly, there are about zero successful attempts of the type "he had the keys to the building, so he locked the doors". However, he notes that sometimes, things like, "He's the only one who has the passwords to access their bank accounts," or whatever, tend to be more annoying. Sure, you can eventually go through the courts and get them to order the bank to turn control over to whoever, but banks are reluctant to take that sort of action on their own without a court involved. Obviously, situations like, "They hold the only keys to MicroStrategy's vault of Bitcoin or the encrypted vault that contains their core product," or whatever may be even more contentious. Fun to think about sometimes, but yeah, "We locked the physical doors," is basically never a viable strategy.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Nah, you have to make friends in the government first. Generally, the way this works is that you and your fellow rodent groomers get together and decide that you want to form a cartel. You can't call it that, and you can't act too overtly anti-competitively at this stage. Instead, you're just a 'trade association' that wants to promote rodent grooming. Alone, it's hard for you to have much of a marketing budget, but if you get together and each kick in a little bit, you can market occasional fade cuts for little Mickey to a much wider audience. Yes, you're not personally capturing all of the benefit of the advertising, but maybe there aren't that many of you, so you can capture enough to make it worth kicking in to the club.
At some point, everyone's kicked in enough money that you start thinking about what the most effective use of that money is. You look at the market trends, the providers involved, etc., and perhaps that money isn't best used for broad industry advertising of services. Instead, you might think that it's best to use that money to hire some professional lobbyists who waltz into the state capital, shake hands, pass around goodies, make buddies, and impress upon them that you have a group of individuals who just might happen to be thinking about where they'd like to allocate their campaign contributions. Conveniently, they also point out that there seems to be some minor problems with some shady, low-cost rodent groomers lurking in the underworld. Since your trade association really cares about the quality of the industry, you'd be more than happy to help root out the problems. All the politicians need to do is let you. It costs them nothing; you're going to do all the work of taking care of the situation. And oh by the way, you'd be very grateful, wink wink, something something, campaign contributions. It definitely doesn't hurt if you can get a couple prominent trade association members elected into office.
Then, they pass a law, promoting how they're going to rid the scourge of seedy rodent groomers, so the public can have full faith and trust that they're getting a good one. The law sets up a Board, and the qualifications for this Board are obviously that they need to be decorated and awarded by your trade association, since you're the experts in determining who is fantastically qualified. They may even directly appoint a bunch of your leadership to the Board right off. Then, you can fly, ye formerly caged bird! You can invent all sorts of barriers to entry suitable training qualifications, most of which require payment to members of your trade association. Then, you can haul randos into your kangaroo court for brushing Mickey's hair this way instead of that way, for that may look too much like a fade and constitute unlicensed rodent grooming. You now have all the power you could have wanted, directly handed to you with the authority of the policy powers of the State. Just try not to look too outlandishly anti-competitive, and make sure to heavily heavily emphasize any possible examples of an unlicensed individual doing anything that could have hurt Mickey in any way.1 You've gotta market fear now. The more scared people are of anything going wrong, the more leeway they'll give you to put in place any silly rule that will drive out any competition you might think could be useful in some way.
1 - As seen in the linked comment, it's not even really necessary that it was actually unlicensed people who caused the harm. The vast vast majority of people who were hurt by the drug that kicked off one of the whole shebangs in the medical industry had taken it under the direction of a government-licensed doctor.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
From my contacts that run in Canadian circles, immigration was huge. When I went back to visit not too long ago now, it came up, unprompted by me, in almost every conversation I had. Even from people who were otherwise good lefties. You could just watch how their brain was trying to thread the needle, avoiding saying that it's outright bad, but talking about how it's "changing the culture" and surprising that when you go to Sobey's, you might (voice gets quieter) "be the only white person there, ya know? It's different." I've had other recent conversations with a family who lived in a different part of Canada, but recently moved to the states. Sure enough, immigration was the topic du jour there, too. How the neighborhoods were composed now, which ethnicities owned all the houses (and they rented from), etc.
Trudeau may only be the current face of a longer trend, but he is absolutely the face of it right now, in the moment that people are thinking about it. Perhaps they should be smarter and thinking about the longer trend, but I kinda doubt it. From the perspective of a fair number of people, it's almost as if they disappeared into a hole for COVID (longer than in the US), and when they emerged, at some point, they suddenly noticed that something had changed. That moment of realization happened during Trudeau, and that's likely what's going to stick.
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
The nuclear establishment is completely controlled by the feds
Don't we already have a solution for that? Nuclear sanctuary cities! Make the feds actually come use their own guns to deport your power plants.
ControlsFreak
8mo ago
No real comment on the efficacy of treatment programs that California mandates through Prop 47. It sounds like they're probably not very effective.
You don't need efficacy numbers, or really any reasoning at all, if you have the magical incantation of "treatment". The author tells us exactly how magical she thinks "treatment" is:
But tougher sentences don't keep fentanyl off the streets, and treatment does.
What plausible causal mechanism could be behind this sorcery? Especially since I have it on good authority, from advocates at the highest court in the land, that a person cannot go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
(3) concealing another crime
Nope. There's no other crime being concealed. That someone somewhere plead guilty to a non-crime as part of a package deal rather than vigorously defend the position that it was a non-crime in the courts (where they would have won) does not actually make it a crime. You still need to show that it's a crime, but that's going to run into serious legal theory problems, not least of which includes the first amendment. This result is remarkably easy to see if you've spent any time reading the Supreme Court's first amendment/campaign finance cases.
This will... eventually... come back on appeal to the courts that actually give a shit about legal theory. It is unlikely to come back before the election, so perhaps the damage to democracy is irrevocably done.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Meta suggestion: there should be room for this.
The reason why the community jettisoned the BLR was because it was too easy to have drive-by link dropping to dunk on the outgroup. Not having a BLR paired with a requirement to have a substantial top-level post effectively stopped this problem. However, there is some news that is so blatantly and obviously going to be the topic of water cooler talk, if only people could find where the water cooler is. It's the topic on the front of every news outlet, absolutely core ground to anything considered the culture war, at the highest levels of American government, which is the most powerful and influential institution on earth. It is going to be a topic here one way or another. Posts like this are just putting the water cooler out.
I think there is asymptotic precedent for this. Consider the limit of stories that were the story in the past. Elections. Riots. Those various things. Rather than declare that no one can say anything around the water cooler until one person has a lengthy, unique, insightful essay, this place will, in fact, just put a water cooler out in the form of a megathread. When the mods post a megathread, they're not generally pairing it with an interesting top-level comment - they're putting out the water cooler for the conversation that is going to happen.
There is a spectrum between "lazy drive-by dunks on the outgroup from obscure blog", "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper", and "obvious water cooler topics that are on the front of every newspaper and which would otherwise overwhelm the thread." I contend that megathreads are only used for the latter category, but their secondary function is extremely useful for the middle category, too.
Given the premise that it's just putting out the water cooler, I would actually prefer that the top-level comment be a short, completely neutral description of the major news item, like this comment. If we wait for an in-depth comment, then the entire following thread will be colored by the perspective of the OP. You'd need an additional top-level comment to start any offshoot perspectives on the main topic, which fractures the discussion, possibly having other topics sandwiched in between the top-level threads. This way, you can have multiple second-level comments that have more effort, but also allow for conversations with different focuses.
One concern is that loosening this rule opens up a "race to post". I don't see that that's much of a problem, practically. But even so, maybe we could have an in-between mod action that isn't quite opening a megathread, but is opening a "mini-megathread" on topics that are of this sort.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
John Cochrane opines on deficits (trade and budgetary) and tariffs
I'll start where he describes what is perhaps the most fundamental driver of cross-border investment:
For various reasons, many countries around the world including China wanted to save. For various reasons, additional domestic investment did not seem like a good idea. Chinese savers did not want even more Chinese factories. One of many reasons for this saving (more later, but it helps to make the story) is that China is aging and has little safety net, so its middle age workers want to put money aside, to withdraw when they get old. So, those savers chose to invest in the US.
This seems like a perfectly fine thing. If there are reasons that make investing in China look less attractive to retirement savers, they should look elsewhere. It would actually be a promising thing for the US if they found that investing in US businesses was comparatively attractive. He then highlights "three bedrock principles of economics":
- The capital and current account must add up. If the US imports more than it exports, it has to give foreigners something valuable in return. Even China doesn’t send us stuff for free. We give dollars, treasury securities, or stocks and bonds in return. And if other countries like China want to accumulate US securities, they must send us more goods and services then we send them, to get dollars they can use to buy securities.
- Money is a veil. Understand the underlying movement of goods and services. To understand economics, look beyond money and watch the underlying flow of real stuff. To invest in the US, other countries must put things on boats and send it here (or sell us services). One Chinese person can buy a stock from another Chinese person, but China as a whole cannot accumulate US assets without putting goods on boats (proverbially).
...
- The overall trade (goods and services) deficit equals the difference between savings and investment plus the government deficit [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)]
Put these ideas together. What happens if other countries decide they want to save more, and invest in the US? They buy US assets, which sends up the real exchange rate.
He then squarely aims at the G term in that equation:
The US reacted to the offer by other countries to borrow from them (sell them assets) at very low interest rates, not by building factories, but going on a consumption binge. Just as Greece had done. Most of that is due to the actions of the federal government. The total trade deficit is about $1 trillion. The US budget deficit is about $1.3 trillion. All of that extra saving is going to the federal government. And the federal government is not building a trillion dollars a year of productive investment with the money. The federal government is, by and large, sending checks to its citizens to support current consumption. The federal government saw an amazing opportunity to borrow cheaply, sometimes even at negative real rates of interest. Borrow it did, and sent checks to happy voters.
The Chinese are not, it turns out, financing their retirement from the profits of a new generation of factories. They are hoping to finance their retirement from the US federal government’s willingness to tax its citizens in excess of spending, some day in the far future, in order to reverse the whole process and put stuff back on boats to send to China.
...
The foreigners in the US don’t know or really care where the resources to pay them back come from. A promise to fund Chinese retirements with US taxes is just as good to them as a promise to fund them from profitable factories.
...
We have all sorts of contrary policies against saving, against investment, and for consumption. Huge budget deficits, absorbing our and foreigners savings, are sent as checks to people likely to consume. We subsidize home mortgages. We tax savings and rates of return pretty heavily, including corporate taxes, taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains. Food stamps and agricultural subsidies encourage consumption. Our Keynesian policy establishment spent twenty years pushing extra consumption, via fiscal “stimulus,” fears of “secular stagnation,” and under multiple banners that government debt never has to be repaid.
How do tariffs play in?
Tariffs are not likely to fix any of this. If we cut off all net trade, as the current tariffs seem to aim to do, this process will have to come to an end.
But how? The US will no longer be able to finance $1.3 trillion budget deficits from foreigners, and will have to do it from domestic savings. Or, it will have to cut $1.3 trillion of spending, or raise $1.3 trillion of durable tax revenue.
I'd sum this up in going back to the fundamental equation he presented: [(M-X) = (I-S) + (G-T)]. If you want to make the left hand side of that equation go to zero, then you must make something on the right hand side change, too. My last sentence was a bit too heavy on "agency of the theoretician", as though one can simply grab one of those variables and turn it up or down. In reality, the complex interaction of transactions will necessarily bring the equation to equality, and you might not get to choose how it gets there. Policy-makers sort of get to directly tweak G and T, but they have less direct tools for I and S. I read him as saying that the LHS is about $1T and that (G-T) is about $1.3T, meaning that (I-S) is presumably about -$0.3T. So, where is that $1T change coming from? Policymakers can cut G or raise T, naturally pissing off every voter who is living high on the deficit, but they obviously don't have to. If they don't, his conclusion is that we're in for a world of change when it comes to I and S. About $1T worth of change.
He does not spell it out, but seems to assume that the natural mechanism that interacts with I and S is the interest rate.
Interest rates will spike, and that’s the point. Higher interest rates encourage domestic saving, and discourage budget deficits and corporate investment, to bring investment plus government spending back in line with savings. But the spike in interest rates require to do this would be huge. And the trade shock will cause a sharp recession, or worse, putting even more stress on the budget. A debt crisis is likely along the way as the US finds it impossible to roll over debt.
If the influx of foreign investment, which was keeping interest rates low, dries up, companies will have to look to domestic savers. But those domestic savers didn't want to save at the current interest rates! If they did, they would be! So companies (and the gov't) will have to offer higher interest rates. That will be necessary to draw American savings. At the same time, having to pay higher interest rates means that companies can't invest as easily in more speculative, longer-timeline opportunities. Note that it doesn't make sense that they're suddenly going to invest more in domestic factories; if those domestic factories were profitable at the current, lower interest rates, they'd already be doing it! Instead, they're going to invest in less. Thus, fewer jobs, less innovation, and thus, recession. That is how I read the predictions. (He also thinks that rising interest rates will hit the federal government, as well, precipitating a debt crisis.)
Cochrane has been a fiscal "hawk" for a while. The fundamental thing to him is that the government has been borrowing tons of money to subsidize American consumption. It's been doing this for a while. At some point, you've gotta find a way to pay the piper. You can try not to, but the equation will balance itself. He just thinks that forcing the LHS to zero by gov't policy creates significant difficulties along the way.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
the margin between my wife and I is obvious, because we lift together. I'm aware that her max is my warmup weight
My wife might have been, shall we say, less aware of the real physical differences between men/women... before she started lifting with me. At this point, she is basically dreaming of getting her maxes up to my warmup weight. (I've been lifting a lot longer.) It didn't take that long for her to become keenly aware and realize that we have significantly different ceilings.
Lots of jokes have been made about the lifting->right wing pipeline, but there really may be something to the idea that if you do get into lifting, it is completely unavoidable, looking at concrete numbers, to realize that one particular cultural soft lie is, indeed, a lie. It's not surprising that it leads to people questioning other parts of the edifice.
ControlsFreak
8mo ago
Wouldn't it be awesome if we had a category for things other than "mandatory" and "banned"?
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
This reminds me of Matt Levine's observations on net worth calculations. Own a small business (maybe you're even the only employee) that made $200k last year? Well, we're going to assume it will continue to make $200k/yr for some number of years, do a net present value calculation, and blam, your net worth is however many million. You're a lawyer who works for The Man and makes $200k/yr? Whaddya got in the bank? That's your net worth.
What is administrative burden in research for?
I think about this in a variety of domains, but it came up again when one of my tech news aggregators pointed to this paper. The idea is using LLMs to generate and evaluate protocols for biology experiments. I think the obvious key concern is related to well-known tradeoffs that people have been brought up in other contexts. Sometimes, it gets reduced to, "Well, people were concerned that with automated spell-checkers, then people will forget how to spell, but that's a silly problem, because even if they forget how to spell, their output that is augmented by the spell-checker will be plenty productive."
I wonder if there are limits to this reasoning. I'm thinking of two topics that I recall Matt Levine writing about (I can't find links at the moment; since Money Stuff always has multiple topics in each letter and he's written about similar topics that use similar words a bunch of times, I can't quickly find them).
One topic I recall is him talking about 'defensive' board meetings. The way I recall it is to suppose that a company puts in their public disclosures that they "consider cybersecurity risks". This doesn't necessarily mean that they do anything about cybersecurity risks, but they have to consider them. The way this plays out is that the board has to put an agenda item for one of their meetings to talk about cybersecurity risks. For an hour or whatever, the board has to talk about the general topic of cybersecurity. This talking can be at a high level of generality, and they don't have to really decide to do anything specific, so long as they have the official minutes that say, in writing, that they "considered" it. Without this, they might be liable for securities fraud. With it, they still might be extremely vulnerable and eventually lose a bunch of money when they're exploited (since they just talked and didn't do anything), but at least when that happens, they won't also get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud. (Really, Matt Levine would say, they'll absolutely get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud, but they'll be able to point to the minutes to defend themselves.)
The second topic I recall is him talking about where the value lies in corporate contract negotiation. He said that most times, you just start from the "typical" contract. Maybe something you've used in the past. You just pull that old contract off the shelf, change some particulars, then put it forward as a starting point. Then, the negotiations are often about just little modifications, and the phrase, "That's standard," is a pretty solid weapon against any modifications. He then talked about how a firm that does these negotiations in bulk as a service can start to sneak new provisions in around the edges in some contracts, so that they can later point to those prior contracts and say, "That's standard." Having the ability to set the "default" can have value.
So, biology. Science. Writing protocols is complicated, annoying, and time-intensive. Scott has written before about how infuriating the IRB process can be. Even with just that, there were questions about what the IRB process is for, and whether the current level of scrutiny is too lax, too strict, or about right.
Applying LLMs will potentially greatly decrease the barrier for newer researchers (say, grad students) to be able to generate piles of administrative style paperwork, saying all the proper words about what is "supposed" to be done, checking off every box that the IRB or whatever would ask for. But I do have to wonder... will it lead to short-cutting? "Sure, the LLM told us that we needed to have these thirty pages of boilerplate text, so we submitted these thirty pages of boilerplate text, but I mean, who actually does all of that stuff?!" Do they even take the time to read the entirety of the document? I can't imagine they're going to pay as close attention as they might have if they had to painstakingly go through the process of figuring out what the requirements were and why they were necessary (or coming to the personal conclusion that it was a dumb requirement that was necessary for the sake of being necessary). At least if they went through the process, they have to think about it and consider what it was that they were planning to do. This could lead to even worse situations than a board "considering" cybersecurity; they don't even need meeting notes to demonstrate that they "considered" the details of the protocol appropriately; the protocol itself is the written document that they theoretically took things into consideration in an assumed-to-be serious way.
This could also entrench silly requirements. You need to provide the subjects with pencils instead of pens? "That's standard." Who is going to be able to do the yeoman's job of subtly shifting the default to something that's, I don't know, not stupid?
I imagine all sorts of dispositions by particular researchers. There are obviously current researchers who just don't give a damn about doing things the right way, even to the point of outright fraud. There are obviously current researchers who really do care about doing things the "right way", to the point of being so frustrated with how convoluted the "right way" can be that they just give up on the whole she-bang (a la Scott). Which factors become more common? What becomes the prevalent way of doing things, and what are the likely widespread failure modes? Mostly, I worry that it could make things worse in both directions: needing large piles of paper to check off every box will lead to both short-cutting by inferior researchers, possibly producing even more shit-tier research (if that problem wasn't bad enough already; also, since they have the official documents, maybe it'll be in a form that is even harder to discover and criticize) and warding off honest, intelligent would-be researchers like Scott.
I don't know. Lowering the barrier can obviously also have positive effects of helping new researchers just 'magically' get a protocol that actually does make sense, and they can get on with producing units of science when they otherwise would have been stuck with a shit-tier protocol... but will we have enough of that to overcome these other effects?
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