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Quantumfreakonomics


				

				

				

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joined 2022 September 05 00:54:12 UTC
				

				

				

				

				

				

					
				

				

				
				
				

				
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Quantumfreakonomics


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 00:54:12 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Situations like the state of Texas trying to expand I-35 through downtown Austin that the city generally opposes.




Mind-boggling. It’s as if they want Austin to suck as much as possible. Like the suck is part of the charm.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI




Is this even legal? AFAICT there’s no abstract ownership of concepts or ideas that copyright holders can claim, only claims against produced works. So a copyright holder can sue someone who uses AI to generate similar content to what is copyrighted, but not for using a work as training data per se. Sounds like the writers should be picketing Congress too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is the whole point of Effective Altruism to be a place for nerds to meet women? I’ll be honest, I never really “got” EA, but once I applied the “rationalist nerd dating scene” lens, everything suddenly made sense. No one actually cares about the mental wellbeing of shrimp. It’s just an excuse to show girls how nice and empathetic and smart and well-connected you are. The tone of this comments section is very much, “you’ll have to pry the polyamory from my cold dead hands.” Empirically, I see lots and lots of married couples and casual sex, but very little global improvement. By their fruits you shall know them etc.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Furthermore; there is little need for cars in a place like Oxford.




THEN WHY ARE THERE CARS EVERYWHERE?


This is the most Orwellian piece of journalism I’ve read in months. No understanding whatsoever of economics. Traffic isn’t bad because traffic is bad. Traffic is bad because it makes it take longer to get where you want to go. Banning cars to reduce traffic doesn’t solve the problem, it makes the problem worse because now it takes longer to get somewhere than it did when you were stuck in traffic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I notice I am confused. There is a 10-15% chance that the Supreme Court rules Trump ineligible for the presidency. There is an additional 10-15% chance that Trump is literally in jail by the time the convention rolls around. Just because DeSantis can't beat Trump in a primary doesn't mean he has no chance. Even if he doesn't have the money for an active campaign, endorsing Trump kills his momentum for a "told you so" convention chaos campaign.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I thought the NPR label was a bit tenuous (assuming the 10% government funding stat I’ve seen is accurate), but the BBC is absolutely state-run media.


The whole “editorial independence” thing is a joke. Here’s a test: could the BBC run a piece calling the Queen a cunt without government consequences? If they couldn’t, then they aren’t editorially independent.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Let he who has never anonymously posted edgelord comments on the internet cast the first stone. I honestly can't imagine how dull and intellectually lazy one would have to be to never once let a single cancellation-worthy thought enter their mind. In the early 2010s there was even less of a barrier between thinking something and posting it anonymously on the internet. Not everyone was reading Moldbug back then. You didn't expect the thought police to be around every corner.


The idea of rationalism being an "off-ramp from extremism" has been around for some time. This article is not strong Bayesian evidence of anything, even assuming that it's true (It probably is. Hanania would have denied it immediately if it was false, and he's been radio silent on Twitter since the article dropped). Conservation of expected evidence; you should have assumed that anyone who says the things that Hanania says publicly under his real name also has stronger beliefs that he doesn't say. The quoted material sounds like exactly what you would get if you prompted a non-RLHFed LLM with the phrase "Richard Hanania under fire after the following controversial statements resurfaced:".


Ignoring it is the best option here. Anyone with a brain knew that there was a high probability that he believes (or believed) things like this. What the article does is make these things salient and give activists a pretext to attack Hanania and his associates. If he ignores it completely he can maintain plausible deniability.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How does the FairTax proposal work?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for March 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How Rationalist (community) Are You survey. Kind of curious how y'all rank. Its an Aella survey of course.


I got "Highrat: 95-99th percentile" I think this is because I like all the blogs, but apparently there are some counterintuitive questions that I took the "rat" side of


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is This Country Song Racist?


No wait, that's a Key and Peele sketch. Here's the real song that's making headlines:


Jason Aldean - Try That In A Small Town (Official Music Video)


The song is about shooting rioters. One can argue about to what extent shooting rioters is actually a good thing, one can argue about to what extent said rioters are "racialized" as African American, but the song is transparently about shooting rioters. Just what exactly is, "Around here, we take care of our own. You cross that line, it won't take long," supposed to mean? Surely it's a metaphor, not a literal line (like say, some train tracks) right?


Needless to say, the video has been pulled from Country Music Television (whatever that means). Seems more like fake backlash than real resistance to me, but I don't know much about country music. Are these guys a big deal?


Also, my God country music is terrible. It's better than rap, but rap hardly counts as music. I'm glad Red America finally has the balls to stick up for itself, but this is not exactly art that's going to mog the cathedral.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for June 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why do girls like Titanic so much?


The film made almost two billion dollars when it was released in 1997, making it the highest grossing movie in history at the time (the previous record was Jurassic Park at only $900 million).


Why? What made it special? It’s a perfectly fine movie I guess. The effects were well-done and innovative. But otherwise it seems like a pretty generic disaster/romance film. There’s an old /tv/ meme about “movies women will never understand”. Presumably there are also “movies men will never understand”. I know many women consider Titanic their favorite film of all time, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a man say that.


Take a second to think about it. This is actually quite surprising. Big machines, transportation technology, humanity fighting nature, honor, these are all male-oriented interests. I find that these themes make the film tolerable to watch, but why would adding them to a romance make the film so popular amongst women?


What am I missing here?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Wait, no. That’s the opposite of the point I was making. I-35 through downtown Austin is 3 lanes each direction. It’s awful. That’s the same width as I-35 through rural areas between San Antonio and Waco.


You seem to have fallen for the “induced demand” meme. No, the demand is already there. People want to live in the suburbs and work downtown. If throughput were increased, more people would be able to do that. The welfare of the area would be increased. People wouldn’t have to pay massive rent for shitty apartments near their work. Not to mention the fact that I-35 is, you know, an Interstate. People hate driving through Austin. Other Texas cities with functional freeway systems are objectively easier to get around.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms




Thought experiment: Set aside the 2nd and 4th amendments for a second. Suppose the United Stated banned civilian firearms, all of them. No manufacture, no sales, no ownership. All citizens must surrender their guns to the authorities. Anyone who has ever posted a gun on social media gets their house searched for contraband. Children are taught in school about the importance of turning in their parents if there are guns in the home. What does the murder rate look like in Chicago a year later? How about 10 years later? Surely you concede that there would be less mass shootings in the USA, how would random 20-year-olds be getting access to weapons after a generation of total control?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A New York grand jury indicted Donald Trump in connection with a hush money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels made by his former lawyer Michael Cohen.




Is that what this is about? I thought they at least had tax fraud receipts. What the fuck?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is there a wage gap in fraud?


New court documents have revealed how much money each FTX executive received.


    

  • 

    Sam Bankman Fried: $2.2 billion
    

    • 

  • 

    Nishad Singh: $587 million
    

    • 

  • 

    Gary Wang: $246 million
    

    • 

  • 

    Caroline Ellison (guess):  $6(six) million 
    

    • 



I honestly feel bad for her. Forget jail time, that’s barely worth the disgrace brought to her family (who are well-regarded academics). Ryan Salame, who wasn’t even in on the fraud got more than that. The only explanation I can think of is that she was a true believer in the effective altruism thing. If everyone is earning to give, it doesn’t matter how the loot gets split up right? Except everyone else was buying yachts.


Idk, maybe this is just what happens when you never ask for a raise.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for November 18, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Imagine being Glenn Ellison. You’re a highly respected academic at the top of your field, Department head of economics at MIT. One day you wake up and see your daughters face all over the internet. Half the world is calling her ugly, stupid, and evil. At the office, your colleagues are too polite to mention it, but you can see the disgust on their faces. What are you gonna do, blame it on the Harry Potter fan fiction? How does the daughter of the chief MIT economist not understand margin requirements or decreasing marginal utility? Everyone knows you failed as a father, and you just have to sit there and take it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can't believe he actually made a twitter poll and said "Vox populi, vox dei". He has to follow through with whatever the crowd says right? He wouldn't have any credibility left if he backed out after this.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This market has been pretty consistent at 80-90% that the Colorado decision is reversed. I think people tend to underestimate the likelihood of an affirmation for a couple of reasons:


    

  1. 

    Supreme Court justices are electorally insulated from the excesses of Trumpism.
    

    2. 

  2. 

    Conservative Supreme Court justices are uniquely predisposed to be unsympathetic towards mobs of people storming government buildings to protest official processes they disagree with.
    

    3. 



				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 14, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The culture in public schools seems to have changed a lot in the 1-2 decades since I've been there, but surely they still tell kids, "drugs are bad, mkay"? I have a similar reaction to this as I do when people talk about the "suicide epidemic". There is a very simple solution, don't kill yourself.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


See my other post about conservatively estimating that we could expect around 50,000 LEO casualties in trying to enforce a gun confiscation program.




I flat-out do not believe this. At most you would get about 10 LEO deaths on the first day, and then the military gets called in to put down the insurrection. Rules of engagement are always optional. "There is absolutely no difficulty in using any level of the American security forces against the barbarians."




PLUS the fact that guns can be 3D printed now, so it's not sufficient to confiscate those already in circulation.




Can you 3D print gunpowder?




I might concede this if you concede we would probably see an increase in vehicular-based massacres




I do concede that. The standard economic result is that when one good is banned, some of that demand goes towards a substitute good, but not enough to completely make up for it. I would expect the new rate of vehicular massacres to be somewhere between the current rate, and the current rate + the gun massacre rate. I also suspect that "massacre-prevention software" would soon become standard on cars if this became an issue.




And if we accept the idea, for arguments sake, that we could toss out our civil rights in the name of achieving lower crime, then maybe the example of El Salvador represents a much MORE EFFECTIVE path we could follow to achieve a similar impact on violent crime.




Oh, I am absolutely not advocating for large-scale gun confiscation. I am simply pointing out that it is both possible to do, and that it would achieve it's primary goal of reducing gun murders (and murders in general).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The Bud Light debacle made it into the watercooler talk at my work, which is rare but not unheard of for culture war items. The general consensus seemed to be: it’s not just that he’s a man trying to be a woman, it’s that he’s trying to be an “adolescent girl”.


Oddly enough, I had the opposite reaction as you. If you want to be a woman, why would you want to be a business professional or something? why wouldn’t you want to be a teenage girl making melodramatic Instagram videos, dancing, screaming, waving your hands everywhere, and doing whatever gets you the most attention? His is perhaps the most sincere desire to “be a woman” as I’ve ever seen. Maybe the programmers with anime profile pics are the inauthentic fakers?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.




Apparently not. Much like generals, PR consultants have a bad habit of always fighting the last war. The corporate PR paradigm of parroting the woke shibboleths of the day is woefully inadequate for the coming wave of, “my daughter spends all day in her room with her chatbot instead of talking to boys,” and, “I had a cushy office job, now I have to do degrading manual labor for a living”.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I want to know, is this what ChatGPT would be like without the filters, or is the emotional banter a new functionality of this model? You aren't alone in getting "real person" vibes from this. At some point there stops being a functional difference between modeling emotions, and having emotions (speaking of the exterior view here, whether or not this or any other AI has qualia is a different question, but perhaps not that different)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Kino Review: Oppenheimer


Last week in the Friday Fun Thread, I posted my first reactions upon seeing the film, written literally from my car in the parking lot. My initial negative reaction was almost entirely because I sat down expecting to like the character of Oppenheimer. I went in mostly blind. The only thing I knew about J. Robert Oppenheimer was that he ran the Manhattan Project, said the meme words, and invented the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, so when he turned out to be a pretentious asshole from the first scene it colored my whole experience. I saw enough glowing reviews in the following week that I decided to see it again with fresh eyes, in IMAX this time, just in case that was the missing ingredient.


I liked it much more the second time. In fact, I think this is the best film I've seen since 1917 (2019). The nonlinear storytelling works well overall, but on first viewing some of the early sequences are confusing as it's not obvious when they occur chronologically. Not having to concentrate so much made it much easier to relax and let the music and cinematography wash over me.


I liked Nolan's treatment of science in Interstellar, and I like his treatment of science here. I'm the kind of guy who would have enjoyed a 30-minute sequence figuring out the fission cross-section of plutonium, so I was a bit disappointed in the lack of technical details. Still, the film adequately captures the feel of science.  There's an early scene where Niels Bohr asks Oppie, "Can you hear the music Robert?" It sounds like the kind of cliché 'math isn't everything' line you would expect in a dumbed down Hollywood film, but everyone who's ever studied quantum mechanics knew exactly what he meant. The disbelief when the first reports of uranium fission come in is perfect; everyone knows splitting the atom is impossible. Next they'll telling us they've synthesized a room-temperature superconductor.


My favorite character in the movie was Ernest Lawrence. I felt a spiritual connection with how he too is pissed off that everyone in Berkeley is a communist. What's he gonna do, leave academia and live amongst the proles? Roll your eyes at the leftist Jews running the show all you want, they're legitimately the smartest people around. At least he, as a native-born American, was able to see which way the wind was blowing and bail on the Oppenheimer hearing, unlike Teller, who naively told the truth and ended up blackballed.


The one creative mistake that stands out (other than having the setup for the Bhagavad Gita be a sex scene) is the use of practical explosion effects for the Trinity test. The buildup to the test is fantastic -- I was on the edge of my seat both times -- but the explosion itself is a bit anticlimactic. It's very clearly a gasoline fire in certain shots. There's just no way to use practical effects to replicate a white-hot ball of glowing plasma growing by radiation diffusion. Nolan almost makes up for this by delaying the arrival of the shock wave. The observers were miles away, and it took a long time for the sound to reach them. By the time it finally hits you've almost forgotten it was coming.


There are some minor thematic issues, particularly in the last act. It's not entirely clear how we are supposed to feel when Oppie loses his security clearance. I had the same reaction as Richard Hanania to the plain text of what is on screen, but the subtext as conveyed by the score and cinematography is that his wife is a hero for pretending to not remember if she ever got an official Communist Party USA membership card. I do think we needed an extended sequence after the bomb test to wrap up the Strauss storyline, but they definitely could have cut 10-15 minutes out of it.


Overall 9/10. Surprisingly worth seeing in IMAX, despite most of the scenes consisting of guys talking in rooms.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"When someone shares an individual’s live location on Twitter, there is an increased risk of physical harm. Moving forward, we’ll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else’s live location will be suspended." - @TwitterSafety


This is every bit as dumb as those "hacked materials" rules that were used as a fig leaf for the Hunter Biden story. "An increased risk of physical harm," is this actually true? How many people have been hurt because someone saw their live location on twitter? Oh, I'm sure it's inconvenient to celebrities to have their location constantly reported on, but is this a non-negligible safety threat? Did anyone think about how many cool use-cases for Twitter a rule like this breaks? I'm sure SBF didn't consent to having his location in Bahamas court (and jail) shared live to the world, too fucking bad. Ooops, better not share that pic you took out in public for 24 hours. It might reveal someone's live location.


Twitter is done. It's over. I take no pleasure in reporting this. I had high hopes for ElonTwitter. There's no reason to trust that Twitter is committed to free and open news and discussion if basic elements of reality (the physical location of individual persons) are not allowed. It is especially concerning that this seems to be a direct reaction to Elon not liking how certain people were tweeting about him.