Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
So I read the free preview of Nate’s guest post on Aella’s Substack. If you can believe it, I think that she and the people close to her are confused as to why people respond to her with disgust. Maybe she isn’t stinky. Maybe she isn’t riddled with STDs. Maybe she adheres to the highest standards of Bayesian data hygiene. None of that had anything to do with the why the Sankey diagram went viral.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I'm currently reading a deposition where the head of safety at the facility freely admitted that he had never actually looked at 29 CFR 1910.119.
I also really appreciate the one victim's mother who hired her own lawyer seperate from the ones representing the other plaintiffs just so he could ask if they knew that one victim in particular and to berate them especially hard for their failures.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
I just finished the United States Chemical Safety Board Final Report on the 2005 BP Texas City Refinery Exploision. I vaguely remember as a kid when this happened, but I had never realized it was the same company that caused the massive oil spill just a few years later.
The report hits all the standard beats for this genre, penny-pinching management, shoddy maintenance, "procedures" that exist only on paper and which may or may not even work, but all of it is cranked-up to 11 for 300 pages.
One of my favorite anecdotes is that at one point the call came down from London for all facilities to cut fixed costs by 25%. Most BP refineries realized that this was insane and didn't do it, but Texas City really did cut 25% and ended up running the facility into the ground.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
What the fuck is happening?
Elon isn't an idiot. He knows how math works. He successfully gutted foreign aid. Congradulations, DOGE shaved 0.5% off of the federal budget, maybe, who really knows?
Anyone who has ever spent more than ten seconds investigating the federal budget already knows that the bulk of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. I suspect that Elon has finally discovered the haunting truth that the rural white underclass loves gibs almost as much as the urban black underclass. Arguably, it is insulting to human dignity to be tasked with cutting waste while at the same time being barred from touching the giant money pit.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Maybe, but all they have to do is take selfies and go, “tee-hee, I love coffee,” which I understand is what they do anyways.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Is there a big spike in female dating app usage at 35? That’s about when “admitting defeat” becomes the rational thing to do.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
I had about 60 first dates in 2022
Uh, what? Are we even talking about the same concept at this point? How does one both have the opportunity to go on 60 first dates in a year and also none of them go well enough to terminate the process? Is this some poly thing?
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
This may be a thing that happens, but it cannot explain the effect.
To be absolutely clear, what needs to be explained is the anomalous predominance of men on dating apps (and in the dating pool more broadly) when a naive gender-symmetrical model of monogamous pair-bonding would imply equal prevalence of men and women in such spaces when the population sex ratio is 1:1.
Pointing to the existence of even a large number of male-female pairings does not help explain the discrepancy because such pairings (should) remove one woman and one man from the dating pool, leaving the absolute discrepancy unchanged.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
So that Kindergarten teacher who likes to crochet and collect Disney Memorabilia would need only start up an Instagram account and post a couple photos of herself holding her cute Tinkerbell ornament wearing a hat she made herself and has a decent shot at getting a guy's attention.
This sort of implies that the optimal male dating strategy is shameless simping, which… would probably explain why there is so much male homosocial stigma against it.
Has this been the solution all along?
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Studies consistently show that approximately 75-85% of Tinder users identify as male, while women make up only 25-15%.
Accepting these facts as true, what are all the young single women doing?
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Do they not care about being single for the rest of their life?
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Are they stupid and can’t comprehend cause and effect? (i.e. “If I make a Bumble profile, I am more likely to get a boyfriend”)
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Are they slutting out? (I’m including having a Chad fwb who obviously won’t commit in this category)
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Are they in church and expect to find a worthy man there?
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Are they mindkilled with wokeness to the point where they fail to understand normal human behavior?
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
This is actually pretty easy to figure out.
Swipe right on everyone. Then, observe whether you get zero matches, or whether you get matches with obese single moms and MtFs.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’).
Protip: on the off chance you end up dating a woman who is a virgin in her 20s, be sure that it isn’t because of SSRIs interfering with her sex drive.
People are biochemically different now than they used to be.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
Lots of people will ban commenters that are too critical. Scott is like top 1% in terms of letting people he doesn't like comment on his articles. If you're used to his comment sections then everything else will look like, “gee, our benevolent leadership really is doing a great job today, aren’t they?"
If it’s illiquid on a 10-year timescale then it’s not worth anything IMO.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
A quick google search indicates that Harvard’s annual operating expenses are over $6 billion. Ten years of cushion is a lot, but not so much that they never need to worry about money again.
Probably the next administration rolls all this stuff back, but that’s not guaranteed.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
I heard a theory somewhere that the reason lockdowns became dogma is because that was what Wuhan did. By the time the virus hit the rest of the world everyone was already primed to think that lockdowns are just what you do when you get a COVID outbreak.
Quantumfreakonomics
23d ago
The people involved don’t see themselves as autocrats empowered to run the university however they see fit in order to ensure the maximization of grant-winning. The idea, “Jews have lots of political power, so we need to expel anyone who speaks out against Israel in order to stay in the good graces of the powers that be,” didn’t even occur to them in October 2023.
Why don’t universities simply put out fake studies with made up data that flatters the current administration’s priorities in order to get money? That’s just not how universities think. Even if there are incentive gradients that push in that direction, no university has a department of data fabrication.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
What is to stop the slim majority of one political party of censuring enough members of the opposing party based on similar fig-leaf reasons, depriving them of the ability to vote, and thus gaining the super-majority?
I don't know anything about the Maine constitution, but it's interesting to consider the US constitution. Article 1 Section 5:
"Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members [...] Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member."
Technically, yeah, any majority could sieze housewide legislative power for itself by changing the rules. The real reason they don't do this is that political legitimacy does not stem from the plain text of the constitution alone. There are the written rules, and there are the real rules. Sometimes, they even overlap.
Quantumfreakonomics
24d ago
The "walls guarded by men with guns" in the clip relates to the wall (well, barricaded door) guarded by a man with a gun in the footage of the shooting.
Quantumfreakonomics
25d ago
The rant from "A Few Good Men", presented without comment.
Quantumfreakonomics
27d ago
My first thought when I saw that was, “wouldn’t the higher-agency thing be not forgetting your scarf in a hotel room in the first place?” My brain couldn’t comprehend the concept of portraying dishonesty like this as a positive attribute.
What if there was no scarf? What if the cleaning lady was already on thin ice and then had to answer for allegedly stealing a scarf?
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
This isn't a real schedule. This is an artifact of legal and bureaucratic processes. Some polity passes a law that says, "Entity X must formulate and implement a plan to do Y." Entity X doesn't actually want to do Y for whatever reason (usually political opposition, but not nessesarily). The thing that Entity X always does in this situation is spend their time coming up with insane plans that will take forever and hope that they will never be implemented. The endgame is to abruptly cancel the project years later and hope nobody notices. Radioactive waste disposal projects are the poster boy of this phenomenon. Yucca Mountain was abruptly cancelled for no reason as soon as the planning was done, $10 billion over decades for absolutely nothing.
Quantumfreakonomics
29d ago
It's their position that Article 3 and the Judiciary Act of 1789 do not give courts the power to issue nationwide injunctions
From a strict textualist point of view I think this is defensible. The judicial power extends only to “cases and controversies”. There is an implication that any action which contradicts binding judicial precedent is illegal, but technically this is only an implication. The judicial branch doesn’t have authority over an action until it becomes the subject of a case or controversy, i.e. when a specific plaintiff sues over a specific action.
Practically, this creates some hurdles and perverse incentives, so I doubt the court will go for it.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
This is just how institutional Christianity talks nowadays. When Pope Francis changed the catechism to be against capital punishment, he didn’t say, “executions are a sin,” he said, “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”
It sounds like the internet stuff started leaking out into her real life a bit too much, and that triggered an existential crisis.
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