domain:alexepstein.substack.com
yofuckreddit
6hr ago
Knowing what little we do about your side hustle, I think you're fine.
Paying for API access can be valuable if you have a lot of data you want to curate/generate. Imagine you are selling 10k items and want to take the specs + reviews to make better descriptions or something.
That's it though, you won't get much better quality from another model or benefit out of building your own rig. Yet.
Pigeon
coo coo
6hr ago
I tend to think of it this way -- a Timmy is drawn to cool stuff represented by the playing of the game (whether it be through roleplaying, through big fat numbers, the social aspect of the game, etc.), while a Johnny is drawn to cool interactions created by the game mechanics, up to and including bizarre 5 card combos relying on arcane rules minutiae that doesn't work out 9/10 of the time but that one time it works it looks really impressive...
A Timmy would be happy winning conventionally but in a "cool" way (think more "would look cool on a movie screen" rather than "would impress other players"), while a Johnny is more interested in doing unconventional stuff.
On the other hand Spikes just want to win at all costs within the rules of the game -- and if the most effective deck is utterly braindead and uninteresting otherwise, so be it.
In an RPG you could maybe translate it thus:
- Timmies would try to spec their character to feel the most badass
- Johnnies would be more interested in weird builds or challenge runs
- Spikes would minmax the shit out of the game (though TBH I think in a solo context even Spike-y people tend to loosen up a bit)
ControlsFreak
6hr ago
I have a vague recollection of a podcast. My Google fu isn't good enough. I think it was Conversations With Tyler. I think the guest was someone of means and a track record of disruption (Patrick Collison/Peter Thiel tier). The question came up about disrupting academia. In my continued jumble of vague recollections, the response was some form of, "We looked into it, but the academic cartel is too strong." They have piles upon piles of government subsidies. They have complete control of accreditation. I've seen, for example, a state uni system where the components also leverage control over the other components (one wanted to offer a new grad degree program, and the others cried to the state gov't to force an impossible requirement on them to "prove that there is a need", a la Certificate of Need requirements in the medical industry). If you were news-conscious around a decade ago, you saw the knives out for "for-profit universities". I'm sure there are all sorts of tactics-level games being played and tricks being employed.
They also suffer from a two-sided market. It's not enough to only convince employers; you have to convince prospective students, too. Thrown in here are difficult questions about the relative value of signaling in education. Various folks have various estimates (some quite high) for the amount of value in a degree simply being that the institution chose you and put their stamp on you, because they were able to choose from the best. If there is a significant amount of that, then the students might not actually care all that much whether you're really offering a better education; you just need to offer a better signal. If you're trying to recruit a top-crust student, you have to realize that all of the legacy institutions are already offering them a full ride (maybe even perks hidden as lifestyle amenities) and a time-proven signal. You have to compete with that... somehow. You have to do both these things... simultaneously convince prospective students and employers, because if you don't do both simultaneously, the group that was falsely convinced will quickly realize that they were duped and stop (either top students realize that you haven't convinced employers already and will stop enrolling or top employers realize that you haven't convinced students already and will stop hiring).
@zeke5123a has a plausible idea of just paying students. But again, you're looking for top students; they're already effectively getting paid by the legacy unis. So, you're going to have to front significant cash. Since you can't subsidize this with the donations of wealthy aristocratic alumni, high tuition from a lesser tier student (since this will immediately devalue your budding brand), and piles of government assistance is likely not forthcoming, you will have to burn significant piles of cash for probably a significant number of years before you can start to turn the tide back to even breaking even.
If you're thinking that you could maybe you could stem the bleed by doing the typical thing of having your faculty also chase research grant money, you now have a three-sided market. How many academics out there can stomach the grant-chasing life, succeed at it, and also buy in to give the high levels of effort you're going to require to have super high educational standards? When you find one, they're going to be expensive, because they do just half that work for plenty of money and near infinite job security at a legacy.
Where along the way do you make sure you don't slip into the same mode of operation as the legacies, since you sure seem to be playing their same game now, just without the entrenched endowments? What's your mechanism to ensure that?
I wouldn't be surprised if whoever I vaguely recall on a podcast already went through this exercise. I wouldn't be surprised if they already tried to make an estimate of how much top students are already being effectively paid by legacies. I wouldn't be surprised if, with some reasonable assumptions on how long it would take to build the brand in both directions so that you could start to stop the bleeding, they just computed that it would just be an unreasonable pile of money.
The Thiel Fellowship seems to be an attempt that embraces a reasonably strong prior on the signaling theory, which allowed them to at least just give up on the educating part of the huge pile of money. $100k over two years, and starting with 20-30 students. That's with the Thiel Brand discount and no overt plan for how to turn it from a $2-3M/yr charity project into a revenue-neutral competitor to academia with any sort of scale.
This is not to say that they cannot be disrupted, but the challenge is pretty steep.
Dean
Flairless
6hr ago
Ah, I vaguely remember that!
If you're keeping notes / a running version, it'd be interesting to see an update at the end of this year or so and see you reflect on what changed in the political slang discourse.
astrolabia
6hr ago
You've almost exactly described elite STEM PhD programs!
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6hr ago
Insurance
n. An ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.
INSURANCE AGENT: My dear sir, that is a fine house — pray let me insure it.
HOUSE OWNER: With pleasure. Please make the annual premium so low that by the time when, according to the tables of your actuary, it will probably be destroyed by fire I will have paid you considerably less than the face of the policy.
INSURANCE AGENT: O dear, no — we could not afford to do that. We must fix the premium so that you will have paid more.
HOUSE OWNER: How, then, can I afford that?
INSURANCE AGENT: Why, your house may burn down at any time. There was Smith’s house, for example, which —
HOUSE OWNER: Spare me — there were Brown’s house, on the contrary, and Jones’s house, and Robinson’s house, which —
INSURANCE AGENT: Spare me!
HOUSE OWNER: Let us understand each other. You want me to pay you money on the supposition that something will occur previously to the time set by yourself for its occurrence. In other words, you expect me to bet that my house will not last so long as you say that it will probably last.
INSURANCE AGENT: But if your house burns without insurance it will be a total loss.
HOUSE OWNER: Beg your pardon — by your own actuary’s tables I shall probably have saved, when it burns, all the premiums I would otherwise have paid to you — amounting to more than the face of the policy they would have bought. But suppose it to burn, uninsured, before the time upon which your figures are based. If I could not afford that, how could you if it were insured?
INSURANCE AGENT: O, we should make ourselves whole from our luckier ventures with other clients. Virtually, they pay your loss.
HOUSE OWNER: And virtually, then, don’t I help to pay their losses? Are not their houses as likely as mine to burn before they have paid you as much as you must pay them? The case stands this way: you expect to take more money from your clients than you pay to them, do you not?
INSURANCE AGENT: Certainly; if we did not —
HOUSE OWNER: I would not trust you with my money. Very well then. If it is certain, with reference to the whole body of your clients, that they lose money on you it is probable, with reference to any one of them, that he will. It is these individual probabilities that make the aggregate certainty.
INSURANCE AGENT: I will not deny it — but look at the figures in this pamph —
HOUSE OWNER: Heaven forbid!
INSURANCE AGENT: You spoke of saving the premiums which you would otherwise pay to me. Will you not be more likely to squander them? We offer you an incentive to thrift.
HOUSE OWNER: The willingness of A to take care of B’s money is not peculiar to insurance, but as a charitable institution you command esteem. Deign to accept its expression from a Deserving Object.
-Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
Tree
6hr ago
I understand this is what is taught, I was taught it in uni. Nevertheless, I disagree.
This model of a man they have conjured to justify insurance, is neither a homo rationalis economicus (for whom it would be far too inefficient), nor your neighbour (who enjoys gambling).
There is no good reason to privilege the 'original state', your living standard now. Yes one (insurance) maintains it and the other (lottery) changes it, but why does that matter?
Some people live in a house, but they prefer some randomness in their life, so they take a 50/50 chance of living either in a mansion or a condo. It's fine. I mean I think it's a cool way to live, but it's an aesthetic preference, I would never advise people to essentially burn money to get that volatility (like economics profs are advising people to burn money to get rid of it).
You could say the neighbour is just gambling when he purchases insurance, it's just that he uses the high from winning to compensate for the psychic pain of the loss of his house.
Dean
Flairless
6hr ago
That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...
...but the people who led and cultivated the critical thinking of 1900-1914 were also the people who thought throwing the flower of your civilization into flowering shrapnel on the French frontier was a better national policy than not.
And most of the generation raised to be critical thinkers in the 1900-1914 range- which is to say, the generation born in 1890s and before- went along with it, and shamed, ridiculed, or forced others to do so as well. Theirs was a critical thinking shaped by / built upon nationalism, propaganda, imperialist delusions, and various pseudo-sciences racial and otherwise.
And then the people born or with their own formative years between 1900-1914 went on to do it again.
WW1 was a madness born from the civilization it ended, not an external imposition. WW2 was an extension of that turn-of-the-century generation. Any exceptional critical thinkers were despite, not because, of the nature of that era.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
6hr ago
better off for having studied history at university, in a way I doubt I could have achieved by pure dilettantism.
As someone who majored in engineering, I've come across a few largely-self-taught coworkers. Some of them are quite talented, but most seem to have more trouble than the degreed folks when we get into the deeper parts of the subject that aren't quite as fun to study (linear algebra, complex analysis, there is probably part of this in any field). I think there is real value to an engineering curriculum that makes us study the useful but un-fun parts that puts tools in the tool belt to solve real-world problems.
I've seen analogous outcomes from home-school students that were allowed to focus near-exclusively on their interests, and, even while otherwise bright, can't have a coherent conversation about some reasonably-part-of-the-curriculum topics -- for example, "the Spanish-American war and its consequences".
Kevin_P
6hr ago
I remember a well-known poster here (Tracing Woodgrains? Not 100% sure) having the same plan, then they took longer than a traditional degree to graduate because a large part of the university experience is social pressure and the WGU experience doesn't provide that part.
TheRealMcCoy
6hr ago
My problem with all the people calling it rigged is this: I've been a poker player for half my life. And in poker you very quickly learn that 1.8% odds of something happening is not the same as 0%.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
6hr ago
Undergrads here are typically 3 years. I remember having 8 crunch periods per year for my degree. 4 quarters with one review exam in the middle and one big one at the end. Besides this, nobody stopped you from taking extra courses to graduate earlier and many did.
By no means continental European university system is great. Most countries have their own pathologies and the Bologna Process makes everything typically shittier but it’s pretty strange to claim students got to goof around because they don’t have constant deadlines to write parroting essays about queer indigenous history.
I fail to see how almost any of my education would had been disrupted by the LLMs the way the New York mag article is describing. The only courses I can imagine are currently swamped with LLM problems are the bunch of liberal arts inspired nonsense courses I had to follow for credits.
2rafa
7hr ago
As @Pasha said I think the classic Anglo humanities model where you do essays at home for practice (but which count nothing toward your final grade) and then have a combination of (hand)written exams in class and an oral exam seems like the best. That was true even before AI, but it’s especially true now.
In this case there is really no real to use AI to do homework since it doesn’t affect your grade and is pointless as a learning tool (which is not to say AI can’t be a useful learning tool, but ‘write 1200 words on x that I will never read but will email to the TA’ isn’t it).
Owlify
7hr ago
The reason housewives aren't higher status is because they have no money and they do unpaid work. They have no independent ability to take care of themselves and make life decisions either, and are financially dependent on someone else. Unless that changes (due to AGI/UBI), things will remain the same.
roystgnr
7hr ago
assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley
doesn't accurately describe
most of the Motte works in Sillicon Valley
but I'm more astonished by the contrast between
uncontroversial
versus
you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork
It looks like you might have a habit of choosing words inaccurately for the purposes of hyperbole, and that's a bit rough when you're some place like this where Aspergery people like me and your challengers upthread are welcomed, but it's easy enough to fix: when you get called out on it just admit the error, compose an accurate rewording (without pretending it's just an equivalent paraphrase) instead, and you're done. Everybody makes mistakes. Doubling down is just digging the hole deeper.
veqq
7hr ago
Has there ever been a golden age of critical thinkers, schooled to think well, untainted by the technology of its era, or the character of its students?
Those growing up around 1900-1914 seemed closest, the great flower of our civilization, who died under flowering shrapnel on the French frontier.
I base this belief on reading historical (highschool/Gymnasium/lycée) exams (and submitted answers, with sample bias, of course) and cheat books (with more detail than modern academic treatments of the same... This is how I originally came to this.) They should write poetry on different topics in a certain style (movement or author), find problems in economic or business data, articulate various thinkers' contrasting beliefs about a topic etc. Transposed to modern times, have a student write a memoization macro, calculate some vector angles, write an essay on LaRoche, McKinley and and Teddy Roosevelt's views on tariffs, another on leadership (why the most popular kid's popular and what prevents the writer from taking his place, and to what extent the (chosen group/nation/state/movement) needs good leaders vs. institutions) ...written in Mandarin. The Overton window was far wider in those days, with multiple popular opinions about why x or y state was illegitimate with justifications from Renaissance, Classical and Biblical sources, advocating for paganism/atheism/state controlled religion etc. etc. Unfortunately, the war seemed to invalidate the whole framework and civilization behind this and mass education never recovered.
That's still a far cry from our ideal, but...
ChickenOverlord
7hr ago
That's exactly my point. The kids will just goof off for 90% of the semester and just cram it all in before the exam. If so when what's the point of even having the rest of the semester.
You should look into Western Governor's University and their model. Basically you can finish your degree as fast as you can finish testing for each course.
A lottery is very similar to insurance.
This is true only in the same sense that negative ten is similar to ten. They're both numbers, right? But they're opposite numbers. Likewise, here one gamble increases volatility (because the payoff is the only random event), and the other reduces it (because the payoff happens only when it cancels out a random expense; the net change from the random outcome is reduced).
But one of the two is supposedly justified while the other breaks their model and makes no sense whatsoever.
It makes sense, for the reasons above. Does it make sense to you too, now? If not, I'm afraid that's probably the best I can do. I've taught grad school math classes, which says good things about my math ability but bad things about my teaching ability...
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
7hr ago
I notice a parallel between the Christian's love for God and his faith in God. Your post is about the tension between loving an object for its properties, versus loving an object inherently (the latter I still maintain is quite meaningless). In faith, there is tension between believing a proposition because of evidence, versus believing a proposition inherently.
It's an old idea around these parts that Christians do not believe their religion. The Christian's behavior here is not really confusing. Professions of faith are tribal signals of group loyalty, not beliefs. But it would be wrong to ruminate on "the contradiction of belief" and ask about "is belief based on evidence" or "do people believe inherently?"
Likewise, "loving things for their properties" is just a different kind of thing than "tribal signals of loyalty." You're damned right I am loyal to my wife, what of it?
If you ever get a chance, do a self-driven review compare / contrast of ancient human-sacrifice rituals for different religions with different stakes in humans harm.
If you had good directions of where to start, I might just do that. It sounds interesting, and I expect some free time later this year. However, it is a bit harder to find structured reviews of them than, say, pointing three distinct but overlapping types of professionals.
Why don't you provide two good sources for the Aztecs and Carthaginians ethics? Good as in effectively and analytically characterizes their ethical systems. A bad work would be one that simply relegates Aztec morality to 'they conducted human sacrifice to keep the world from ending.' Yes, that is a utilitarian justification. It is not an ethical system.
And then, once you've read that, presumably you will somehow have changed your mind and believe human sacrifice is a good thing instead of a senseless waste of human life. You will probably even want to sacrifice your own children to Moloch, when the time comes. I know I haven't provided any reason why that should be the case, but apparently that's how this works now.
If that was what you took away from my post, then congratulations- you demonstrated a point by missing it.
The value of studying different forms of professional ethics isn't to change your own mind on ethics. The value is understanding what others want, or expect, the ethics of a professional to be. This has relevant insights when it comes to dealing with specific professions in isolation, when multiple professions with different professional ethics engage each other, or even how the same profession's ethics across different cultures.
Understanding other people's ethical frameworks has never been endorsement, or required conversion, unless you subscribe to some universal morality theory.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
7hr ago
I wonder if AI will make us all polyglots because it’s an incredibly useful tool of language learning or eliminate any learning altogether because it’s also really good at translating. Or perhaps it does both at the same time simultaneously so we have a bunch of conscious smart learners mastering new languages in 6 months and everyone else loses any motivation at all because any digital content they ever encounter is instantly perfectly translated (desire to access broader internet/gaming/tv shows was the reason I got good at English as a teenager, school instruction was useless)
Jiro
7hr ago
I wonder if you could have a new university that initially paid students to come.
They would have to pay the first students an amount equivalent to the increase in lifetime earnings from going to a regular university (minus the cost of a regular university). This would be cost prohibitive.
07mk
7hr ago
I absolutely think they should be. Now, maybe it's not practical to check each student's individual political preferences and assign bespoke assignments for them on that basis (which could be gamed anyway). Rather, humanities-based courses should test students on their ability to defend a wide variety of different, highly offensive and ideally "dangerous" ideas in whatever topics are at hand, to stimulate actually learning how to think versus what to think.
Hard to say if that will work, though; teaching students how to think seems to be one of those things that people in education have been trying to do for ever, without there being any sort of noticeable progress whatsoever. I just know that that was how I was educated, and it seemed to work for me and my classmates (but of course I'd think that, and so my belief that it seemed to work should count for approximately nothing), but even if it did, that doesn't mean that it's generalizable.
I have read (but not sure of its veracity) that people who owned slaves had a carrot and stick approach rather than a punishment only approach for motivating people. It's also why sometimes there was a price set that could earn you your freedom if you managed to pay it. It allowed people to tell their slaves to go off and labor on their own and earn money, of which they would take a cut, so that the slaves would do the maximally productive task.
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