domain:alexepstein.substack.com
Hieronymus
9hr ago
Is there a reason it's committing to vote with the board rather than abstain from voting?
Hieronymus
9hr ago
((There's also some messiness involving Intel ARC, which is both strategically very important to the Western world's military, not obvious, and which has an entertainment business case that it's only barely starting to credibly begin to compete with kinda, but is a short investment away from being a really big deal.))
This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?
Certainly the whole computer gaming world has been begging Intel not to kill off Arc before it's reached maturity. Everybody expected it to lose money for the first couple generations, but Intel has been incredibly strapped for cash, so it wouldn't be a shock to see it sacrifice long-term interests for short-term ones.
The current CEO and board have been abandoning new development processes since December of last year.
This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.
Maybe that's what a government stake in Intel is supposed to resolve?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
Ballmer also likely Knows People. Hoi polloi might need to pay lots of money (and Ballmer may well be paying lots of money) but I imagine there's a switch the youtube people can flip to artificially boost channels they like, regardless of money. Youtube is part of google and google doesn't like Trump or Trump policies, some middle manager could easily decide that people should be seeing more Ballmer videos and make it so.
I wrote that... and then I checked his channel. It's extremely, blatantly inorganic. 18 M views, 16 M views, 23 K views, 7 M views, 5.6 K views. There should never be a factor of 1000 in views of videos from around the same time. He has 3 videos with the same title and slightly different lengths: 'Get to the Source'. 60K views, 258K views, 4M views. Very strange. Maybe 1% of those 200,000 subscribers are real people and not bots?
I think google is better at propping up inorganic celebrities, this is very amateurish stuff.
cjet79
9hr ago
I'm not willing to say it's an all around bad practice with gift giving.
As corvos points out quite a few cultures adopt a more transactional nature for gifts. I feel that even the standard American culture has some aspects of gift giving that feel more transactional in nature. Wedding gifts are often basically a ticket price for attending the wedding. I currently have young kids everyone buys cheap crap for each other's kids, and then gives out gift baggies of cheap crap for the party. The kids barely know each other well enough to buy meaningful gifts. They certainly don't have some idealized understanding of gift giving. Tipping at restaurants which is supposed to be a gift is often just an assumed revenue stream for servers.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
9hr ago
Fantastic response. Would fit in well with “Your God Is Too Small” by J.B. Phillips.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
9hr ago
If your concept of God is more closely tied to the definitional one (God as the first cause) then to your direct experiences with him, then in my hypothetical, the being who performed everything in the Old Testament, performs miracles, atoned for our sins, etc. would not be God.
We are running into the problem here where I believe it is clear that the God of the Old and New Testament clearly identifies with Being itself, "I Am Who Is." St. Paul explicitly links together the Greek concept of the God of the philosophers with the God of the Bible in Acts 17 by quoting a Greek philosopher and identifying that definition of God as the one he has come to preach. Then there are hundreds of other places where it's clear that God is not in the created order, not changing, sustaining the being of everything at all times. (Psalm 102:25-27):
In the beginning you laid the foundations of the earth, and the heavens are the work of your hands.
They will perish, but you remain; they will all wear out like a garment.
Like clothing you will change them and they will be discarded.
But you remain the same, and your years will never end.
Acts 17:27-28:
God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’
My belief in God is based on my direct experience of Him in my life, including revelations through contemplation and meditation. It is based on the Divine revelation of the Bible and the personal revelation that Christians have recorded throughout the centuries. And these both point to the Classical conception of God. Learning more about the classical conception of God helps me then go back and interpret the revelation I have received and which was revealed through the public ministry of Jesus Christ. It is all a positive feedback loop bringing me deeper and deeper into Love.
Without the positive feedback of the classical conception of God, though, my spiritual life went nowhere. What does it matter if God isn't all that He is? If he's just like some alien dude who did everything in the Bible? That has no implications on who I am, what morality is, the Good, the True, the Beautiful. If He doesn't actually explain anything, if He's not actually the Summum Bonum? I'd be left with a cool role model but if I disagreed with His actions it's conceivable that my judgements are better than his. The Cool Role Model called God is just a potential tyrant.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
10hr ago
It wouldn't say anything about Batman, but it would say something about Warner Brothers.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
10hr ago
They almost made Batman into a Broadway musical, with Jim Steinman and Tim Burton. Is this argument that Batman is almost a girl-ish princess product? It tells more of Broadway than history of Disney.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10hr ago
Do you think he wants to run for office? It worked for Trump.
On the other hand, this would be for parodies of the "Developers! Developers! Developers!" speech that was mocked online. But that was a quarter century ago, wow.
Corvos
10hr ago
In some cultures this is of course the point - giving a gift is implicitly initiating a reciprocal relationship. And may be resisted for that reason.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
10hr ago
what about, OG Mickey Mouse and friends in comic and animation. Slapstick, mysteries, criminals, mad doctor apes in haunted castles.
I grant that "Disney" was a different in 1930s to 1950s, it was a name of a man with a company, not just a company. He certainly was aware of the boy demographic: Treasure Island (1950), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1952), Davy Crockett TV series, Man in Space (I think it was 'childrens TV' in 50s. Or perhaps family documtainment?).
1990s DuckTales had some of the same spirit, and coincidentally nearly all the DuckTales IP was ~50 years old. In comparison, "Disney Princess" line was launched in 2000. It did tap into some more effeminate than masculine aspects present in many of the animated Disney products, but it was not a conscious product line choice until after that. their target segment was family friendly / boys and girls.
slopCorp, failed theater kids, orally fixated women
Or you could do what most boys do by the age of five and stop thinking about a globohomo company that makes princess cartoons. It's not the masculine flex you might think.
many transgressive choice of word, very little sourceable facts
Tenaz
10hr ago
It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do.
My point is that "just work harder" is to some extent something people (me) don't understand how to do, so everything that hinges on this (most advice) falls into this category. There is a lot more to discipline and human psychology than just flexing your indomitable human spirit if you want something hard enough.
"Work harder" isn't bad advice so to speak but it's not that useful. So, by extension, "Just wake up every morning and exercise for 30 minutes" is also not necessarily that useful.
FtttG
11hr ago
I suppose not. In the link under "sorry my finger slipped", Scott explains the chain of reasoning better than I can.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
I looked into the archeology of the channel, and the findings were interesting. The channel uploaded its first video on August 31, 2017 (a 2 minute clip of an interview with Kara Swisher), and the first "Just the Facts" video appeared that October. There have been over 120 videos posted in the past 8 years, yet only 12 of them cracked the million views threshold, and the first video to do this was a video about immigration posted on August 1, 2024. This was following a nine month hiatus, prior to which the previous video, about mammograms, only got about a thousand views.
The obvious explanation is that the videos are being heavily promoted. But I don't know if this is the case. It's my understanding that YouTubers generally don't pay for promotions, for the simple reason that it doesn't work. An alternative explanation is that the video times increased from under two minutes to about fifteen. By 2017, most YouTubers were making longer videos, and the algorithm had adapted accordingly. Making videos that short in 2017 indicated a channel that hadn't done basic research into the zeitgeist, as the kind of viewer looking for World Almanac type information isn't looking for a two minute video. That may have been true in 2006, when streaming video that worked was novel, but there was enough better content out there by 2017 that few people would bother. That being said, under 1000 views suggests no action on the algorithm and no promotion, just uploading and forgetting about it. If these videos had been promoted but failed to take off, I'd expect at least a few thousand views.
Part of the reason YoutUbers don't like promotions is that it gives a few extra views but doesn't do anything to promote the channel. Basically, it will show more people the video in their feed, but only a certain percentage will actually click, and only a certain percentage of those will watch for any appreciable amount of time, and only a certain percentage of those will actually subscribe or otherwise become a regular viewer. It also does nothing to boost numbers from sponsors, since sponsors look at other metrics like average view time and percentage who watched the whole thing when making decisions, and those numbers are harder to fake using bot farms. We don't have access to Balmer's number for that, but one number we do have is comments. Bots don't leave comments, and leaving a comment means you were invested enough to engage with the creator and other viewers. I'd imagine that comments are more valuable than views.
The trade and tariffs video got 12.5 million views and 688 comments. The DOE video got 11 million views and 232 comments. These numbers are pitiful. Looking at some of the channels that play to a smarter audience and looking at the numbers for videos that got around a million views:
- Adam Ragusea - Edible shelf fungus (chicken of the woods 'mushroom') - 1,182 comments
- Wendover Productions - The Logistics of Music Festivals - 1,122 comments
- Stewart Hicks - Inside the Station Nightclub Tradgedy - 1,715 comments
- Technology Connections - How Much Thrust Does a Ceiling Fan Produce? - 5,042 comments
- Practical Engineering - California’s Tallest Bridge Has Nothing Underneath - 943 comments
None of these videos are about anything that could be described as a hot-button topic that will stir engagement based on subject matter alone. So generally speaking, an established channel with an audience can expect around a thousand comments per million views. There may be some point of diminishing returns where we can't expect that to scale linearly, but I've looked at a pretty wide sampling of channels and this holds. Take a channel like Deb Armstrong's which has an incredibly limited audience that has natural constraints on its growth. Ms. Armstrong unexpectedly won gold in women's GS in the 1984 Olympics and currently works as a ski instructor and youth race coach in Steamboat, CO.
The audience for ski videos in general is small. Only around 3% of Americans skied in the past year, and most of them went skiing once. Ms. Armstrong, furthermore, does not make videos designed to entertain a wide audience, or teach tricks, or review resorts, or have bro hangouts. She makes technical videos from the perspective of a ski instructor that appeal to the kind of skier who is actually interested in improving their technique. Bode Miller, Franz Klammer, and Lindsey Vonn have made appearances on her channel. But only briefly, and not in a way that exploited her connections. Her most-watched video is titled "Use of the Inside Leg to Change Turn Radius", which got 711,000 views and 437 comments.
If you noticed, this comment ratio is below the 1,000 comments per million views average, which is interesting because most of her videos get fewer than 100,000 views but over 100 comments, in line with or a little above the average. My suspicion is that this is an artifact of a video that triggers the algorithm for no conceivable reason. I doubt there are 700,000 people worldwide with any serious interest in learning how to use their inside leg to lead turns. Hell, most skiers have zero idea what that even means. (For the layman, most carved turns are initiated with the outside leg, which comes naturally to most skiers. Pros, however, will use the inside leg as well, which takes a certain amount of practice and intentionality to get the feel for since it's not a natural movement). The video features an unusually self-aware 12-year old whom Ms. Armstrong engages in a Socratic dialogue about how use of the inside leg has improved his skiing, complete with videos of him making buttery smooth turns. I imagine that the kid caused something in the algorithm to trip, which in turn caused the video to show up in the feeds of people who wouldn't usually see it, some of whom watched a bit of it before moving on with their lives. So it got more engagement than her other videos by dint of higher viewer numbers, but not as many as one would expect if her actual audience had grown to the point where she was regularly getting those kind of numbers.
The upshot of this is that these videos aren't being viewed due to a natural audience developing for the channel. Usually when that happens it's similar to Glenn and Friends Cooking, whose 2019 video where he attempted an old Coke recipe got millions of views for a channel that hadn't broken a thousand in nearly 15 years of regular uploading. While the video certainly grew his audience, he wasn't consistently getting numbers like that video. It currently sits at 18 million views, while number two has just over a million. It should be mentioned that Glenn is very up-front about how he's not chasing sponsorships, optimizing for the algorithm, or making videos for anything other than his own personal edification, which means that his numbers are skewed by him regularly breaking all of the "rules".
So it's clear that there's something going on other than Ballmer's videos hitting the algorithm at the right time. But how does this square with promotion when most YouTubers say promotion doesn't work? I think the answer lies in the fact that most YouTubers looking to pay for promotion don't have the kind of budget Ballmer has. If the average guy looking for a boost pays $500 to get his channel going, at $0.10 per view that only buys 5,000 views, which is nothing. 20,000 views per video, which seems to be the minimum I see among people who are doing it for a living, would cost $2,000, and would be cost-prohibitive for anyone trying to jump-start a channel.
And it gets even worse. Since real channels with real audiences get a certain level of engagement, this engagement drives the algorithm as much as it drives advertisers. If you boost your video, and it's shown to people who don't like it and who don't comment, it's a black mark against your channel as far as the algorithm is concerned. So rather than jump-start a moribund channel, it can actually make things worse, since the algorithm is now less-inclined to show people the video on its own. The only way this could possibly work is to keep feeding money in until enough of your natural audience finds the channel that it can support itself (say, 100,000 average views). But you're now paying millions month in and month out to hopefully get a channel big enough to generate a middle class income.
So there you have it. Ballmer is almost certainly paying through the nose to get a synthetic YouTube audience, and I've just spent seveal paragraphs stating the obvious conclusion that OP reached in the original post. As to why he's doing this when he doesn't seem to be pushing any kind of agenda, I dunno, maybe he likes it? Maybe he wants a bigger audience and just figures that since he has the money he'll throw money at it? I don't know how billionaires think.
Tenaz
11hr ago
It doesn't mean anything to be God unless there is a something that God means.
You're still using "God" as something other than an identifier.
God is whatever person or entity did the things described in the Old Testament, performed the Atonement, etc. It's not a definition, it's an identifier. It doesn't have to mean anything--identifiers, such as our names, generally don't mean anything at all. And God isn't "a god", he's God; if the word were "Blogalsnarf" it would work just as well to signify who it is that we're talking about.
If your concept of God is more closely tied to the definitional one (God as the first cause) then to your direct experiences with him, then in my hypothetical, the being who performed everything in the Old Testament, performs miracles, atoned for our sins, etc. would not be God. They would instead be two separate entities, who I'll call scripture-god and platonic-god, and it would be questionable whether the latter even exists (in this fake hypothetical, of course).
I think this is wrong. Our belief in God should be based on direct experience with him, and relatively direct experience (e.g. through scriptures, through others' accounts with him), much more than it should be based on philosophy. This is the point of my whole line of questioning. I'm not saying philosophy is wrong, but in the end if reality and philosophy conflict, reality should win out; and even if you think they will never conflict, it still matters that you give reality precedence on the off chance you happen to be wrong about the philosophy.
Have you ever had someone who agrees with the Cosmological argument explain it, asked them questions, etc? Or is your exposure mainly by people who don't agree with it giving their rebuttals?
I haven't read any rebuttals of the cosmological or ontological arguments, they just seem obviously wrong to me. If you'd like, I'll read into them some more to make sure I understand them, and then take you up on the implicit offer, thanks.
TheBailey
soapy mop
11hr ago
why people have emergency funds[?] Why not just spend your regular savings[?]
I don't understand your confusion. What's the difference between those categories, in your mind?
Why not just…use a line of credit and slowly pay it off, spreading the cost out over a longer period of time? Or if you need a new car, why not finance it?
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Any car with a market value high enough that a bank would consider financing it is going to be depreciating at a rate I'm not comfortable being liable for.
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There will be interest, at rates likely higher than Ultrashort Treasury yields.
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If I want said interest payments to be less than ~11%, the financer will force me to purchase Collision coverage (and I remind you, avoiding purchasing this was the entire point of opening this thread in the first place.)
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11hr ago
I take it this means you are not actually up for showing me why there's a partisan side under which tariffs are sane and well thought out and are actually expected to achieve some specific goal? And you didn't actually mean it when you said
If you disagree with this, name a policy, and I'll show you its partisan sides.
Or are you saying "the point is to break shit because I'm mad, I don't actually care about outcomes". In which case please speak directly into the microphone.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
Trump style isn’t Vance’s forte, Vance’s forte is talking like Obama- you know, where he always seemed like a reasonable person talking directly to you, even if you disagree with him. I can see Vance saying ‘now let me be clear, we’re going to keep America great’ much better than ‘we’re going to make America even greater- the best it’s ever been, you’ll be tired of winning’.
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
I mean, do you think he knows Vance is kinda ambivalent on trade(but pro-union)?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
11hr ago
My biggest negative on smartphones and tablets is how much everything on them is designed to be distracting. Like you don’t just dip into an app, it’s working hard to make you spend as much time as possible there instead of doing something else. It’s a hyper stimulating experience and im tired of looking around everywhere at people who think socializing means sitting in silence staring at separate screens and not talking or doing anything.
TwiceHuman
12hr ago
I don't think humans really attack themselves, they just close themselves off of the world in a manner which is unhealthy. It's like dying of thirst in front of a puddle of dirty water (edit: Or just water which you don't know the purity of before you drink it). Nietzsche advocated isolation for the purpose of growth, but he also wrote "whoever would remain clean among human beings must understand how to wash himself even with dirty water". I wonder if he thought of this as being possible.
It was much less true in the past, I think (at least, in our own communities. I'm not sure about our relation with strangers/outgroups). We've become much more exploitative, we're also more prone to look for the worst in others, as well as to look for weaknesses which can be exploited. I don't think old people are easier to scam because old people are dumb, I think it's because society has gotten less honest faster than old people have managed to adapt to that fact.
We're in the age of resource exhaustion, and "trust" is no less of a resource than oil is. Even "dignity" and "reputation" are resources. Companies like Blizzard are currently burning these. Resources like honor and respect are nearly depleted in the western world in my opinion. Mathematically, I think the solution is to optimize for the long-term rather than the short-term. If you optimize for an infinitely long period of time, it appears to me like you're immune to all social dilemma's and things like Goodhart's law and other harmful incentives. So the entire problem seems to be excessive short-term optimization.
Perhaps current parasites are no worse than those of old, but there seems to be many more of them now that we're all global rather than members of small local communities. And being "local" had advantages, I think it's the cause of the whole "high trust society" thing. A king would suffer if they hurt their own kingdom, so incentives like that protected against evil somewhat. But now, you can earn money by hurting somebody 1000s of miles away.
I'd ask "Which is best, to adapt well to a sick society, or to adapt poorly to a sick society"? Personally, I'm not entirely sure.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12hr ago
I mean sure, but most advice isn’t “just do the right things.” It’s generally at least something the person understands how to do. Work smarter, not harder is advice if you define or explain what that means. Setting a specific goal using SMART frameworks is good advice.
But assuming the advice is actually good advice as in useful to the person receiving it, a bigger problem is that the person doesn’t want to do the work, doesn’t want the grind, doesn’t want to miss out on fun to reach the goal. Quite often they blame the advice when it wasn’t bad advice so much as you made excuses for not doing it. I think there are plenty of things I could be getting better at, I know exactly what to do, but it’s just hard to follow through. And if I don’t, it doesn’t mean that the advice sucked. The advice is fine. The problem is me, and placing the blame in other places is not helpful.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
The health care payment system is screwed up in all sorts of ways. But even if we're going to bite the the bullet and say "If your insurance doesn't cover this operation and you can't pay, you die", it shouldn't allow the insurance companies to moot the issue by stonewalling until you die, which is exactly the sort of thing I'd expect them to do if they get away with it.
Thanks, a title like that is worth the immediate Kindle buy!
I listen to a podcast, "What God is Not," and the title has been in my head a lot in this conversation. But also so much of the Podcast is the spiritual experiences of a Byzantine priest and nun, and their spirituality is so clearly dependent on God being so Other to them. It's really beautiful and inspiring to see the witness of a healthy spiritual life going though everyday matters.
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