Links Archive

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• "Monty Hall, Monty Fall, Monty Crawl" [Probability.ca]: "With this additional assumption, the original Monty Hall problem is solved as follows. Originally the car was equally likely to be behind Door #1 or #2 or #3, and you selected Door #1 (say). The probabilities of the host then choosing to open Door #3, when the car is actually behind Door #1, Door #2, and Door #3, are respectively 1/2, 1, and 0. Hence, the updated probabilities of the car being behind each of the three doors are respectively 1/3, 2/3, and 0. That is, your chance of winning the car is 1/3 if you stick with Door #1, and 2/3 if you switch to Door #2. In the Monty Fall problem, suppose you select Door #1, and the host then falls against Door #3. The probabilities that Door #3 happens not to contain a car, if the car is behind Door #1, #2, and #3, are respectively 1, 1, and 0. Hence, the probabilities that the car is actually behind each of these three doors are respectively 1/2, 1/2, and 0. So, your probability of winning is the same whether you stick or switch." (
  '23 Jan 21Added Sat 2023-Jan-21 8:53 a.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• GDPR: A View on the Ground [Erichgrunewald]: "This might be a clue as to why there has been so much disagreement around the question of whether GDPR is good. That is because you have a really complicated cost-benefit calculation on your hands – that is, unless you specify for whom it is supposed to be good. It seems pretty likely to me that GDPR is good for users, or at least those users who care about data and privacy, but also not good for businesses, or at least those businesses that deal with sensitive user data. I don’t know whether it’s good in the absolute sense." (
  '23 Jan 01Added Sun 2023-Jan-01 1:36 a.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Doubts about Track Record Arguments for Utilitarianism [Erichgrunewald]: "I think it’s true that early utilitarians were better on social and political issues than e.g. Kant and his followers. However, I think this (implied) difference is exaggerated [...and] I think this tells us very little about the soundness of the utilitarian philosophy" (
  '23 Jan 01Added Sun 2023-Jan-01 1:13 a.m. CST
  in philosophy | a)
• Engineering Org Structures— The QRF Team Model [Betterprogramming.pub]: "[M]any products and engineering teams at startups struggle with being agile. The shortcuts the startup took early on getting to the point where they could grow had benefits, but also costs. At some point, enough technical, capability, knowledge, and organizational debt has been created such that there is a constant stream of bugs, internal asks, interruptions that only the engineering team can handle. These ask come in at a rapid pace, sometimes several days, greatly disrupting the work of an engineer. [...] How can an organization handle these in a way that makes sense? [...] The QRF model works incredibly well in certain contexts without the negative drawbacks of other approaches. [...] You split your engineering organizational unit into two discrete, independent teams: Team 1, designated as the Main Effort. Team 2, designated as the QRF. Team 1’s charter is simple: build what’s on the roadmap. [...] Team 2’s mission is to tackle any item that would cause an interruption to Team 1. They act as the QRF, the Quick Reaction Force, to jump in front of any problems that would otherwise interrupt the sprint." (
  '22 Dec 30Added Fri 2022-Dec-30 2:52 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• Is America a Gerontocracy? [Simonm.substack]: "My best guess on the US is that nothing strange is really going on with the age of it’s legislators. They have been ageing roughly inline with the population - society is just getting older." (
  '22 Dec 27Added Tue 2022-Dec-27 6:18 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The Twenty Dollar Bill [Evidenceinvestor]: "A financial economist, and passionate defender of the EMH, was walking down the street with a friend. The friend stops and says, “Look, there is a $20 bill on the ground.” The economist turns and says, “Boy, this must be our lucky day! Better pick that up quick because the market is so efficient it won’t be there for long. Finding a $20 bill lying around happens so infrequently that it would be foolish to spend our time searching for more of them. Certainly, after assigning a value to the time spent in the effort, an ‘investment’ in trying to find money lying on the street just waiting to be picked up would be a poor one. I am certainly not aware of anyone who has achieved their wealth by ‘mining’ beaches with metal detectors.” When he had finished, they both looked down and the $20 bill was gone!" (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 11:12 p.m. CST
  in economics | a)
• How to Get Lucky: Maximizing Exposure to Life Changing Serendipity [Nateliason]: "If you want to get lucky in anything, then you need to maximize your positive luck exposure while minimizing your negative luck exposure. To maximize your positive luck exposure, work and play in domains where a good luck event can have a massive impact. Your boss is unlikely to walk in and say “Congrats! You get a 1,000% raise today!” but if you write a book and it hits the NYT list you could certainly see a 1,000% earnings increase. [...] The luck-seeker increases his or her odds of getting lucky by creating as many opportunities as reasonably possible for good luck to strike. So long as luck is at play, you cannot simply put one thing out there and hope it does well. You can’t try just one business idea, can’t write just one book, can’t publish just one article. You have to keep going, assume that some things will perform while others won’t (for reasons you’ll never understand), and wait." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 6:18 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Stop asking these 4 questions during your one-on-one meetings - Know Your Team [Knowyourteam]: "(1) "How's it going?" -> "How's life?" (Bigger picture, more answers). (2) “What’s the latest on __?” -> “What’s most frustrating about how X has been going so far?” or “Where do you feel you need more support in working on X?” or “Can you tell me about what’s been most surprising about working on X so far?”. (3) “How can I help you?” -> “I was thinking I’m being too hands-on on this project. Should I back off and check-in with you only bi-weekly? What do you think?”. (4) “How can we improve?” -> “What do you think is the most overlooked area of the business?” or “Where do you think we’re behind in, that other companies are excelling at?”." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 5:53 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• Systems Without Goals is a Path to Mediocrity [Nateliason]: "Systems allow you to create repeatable processes to move in the direction you want to go in. Goals are simply mile markers that you run towards for a while, then either quickly pass or never reach. That’s all fine, but with how overplayed this idea has gotten in the productivity-sphere, it feels like it’s been taken too far. The popular interpretation has become to dispense with goals entirely, and just create good systems instead, assuming that things will fall into place in the long term as long as you’re improving your systems. But here’s the problem. We can’t discuss what it means to improve a system without some idea of what improvement means. And it’s easy to get stuck in short term planning if you try to think about improvement without goals to shape your thinking." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 5:39 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Interviewing for Potential - Brent Baisley - Medium [Medium]: "Almost all skills and knowledge become obsolete eventually. This is especially true in technology, where in a span of a few years things can change drastically. What sets people apart is their ability to change, adapt, and evolve before it’s required. Those who proactively obtain new skills and knowledge have the highest potential to succeed." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 5:28 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Learning By Writing [Cold-takes]: "I organize my learning around writing rather than reading. This doesn’t mean I don’t read - just that the reading is always in service of the writing. Here’s an outline: (1) Pick a topic, (2) Read and/or discuss with others, (3) Explain and defend my current incredibly premature hypothesis, (4) Find and list weaknesses in my case, (5) Pick a subquestion and do more reading/discussing, (6) Revise my claim / switch sides, (7) Repeat steps 3-6 a bunch, (8) Get feedback on a draft from others + and use this to keep repeating steps 3-6." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 4:50 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• "What does artificial intelligence know about polling? | #208 - December 11, 2022" [Gelliottmorris.substack]: "Chatting with ChatGPT about polling is a bit like asking a college freshman in a survey methods class about how polls work (assuming you’re talking to a studious student): You get a good overview of methods, a slight reckoning with the surface-level challenges of those methods and… not much else. For example, it knows that the traditional margin of error is too small, but not exactly why: ChatGPT misses things like coverage error and partisan nonresponse above normal patterns of nonresponse; It treats nonprobability panels and random-digit-dialing as interchangeable in terms of challenges with representation and weighting; And it formulates a textbook but underwhelming answer about how polls can be used for democracy." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 4:35 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• You Don’t Have to Call Yourself an Effective Altruist or Fraternize With Effective Altruists or Support Longtermism Just Please for the Love of God Help the Global Poor - EA Forum [EA Forum]: "You don’t have to call yourself an Effective Altruist or fraternize with Effective Altruists or support longtermism, just please, for the love of God, help the global poor Even if all EAs are terrible, you really should be doing something about malaria." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 3:47 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• How to Lose Time and Money [Paulgraham]: "A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work. When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. [...] And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 3:44 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Comparing experts and generalists [Gleech]: "Forecasters definitely outperform the public and simple models. It's unclear if forecasters outperform experts. Strong aggregation of multiple top forecasters appears to have a small and uncertain advantage over the same for experts, but this is largely untested. It helps if the bar for being a top forecaster is higher and helps if pooling is used instead of market mechanics when markets are small and illiquid." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 3:22 p.m. CST
  in forecasting | a)
• Challenges and Charity [Jesswhittlestone]: "This got me thinking more generally about this idea of 'doing sponsored challenges for charity.' Where exactly did this come from, and why does it work? It's kind of weird, when you think about it. Why is it that me restricting my diet for a week, or running a ridiculously long way, means that you should donate to a charity? Perhaps it's because by undertaking a challenge, I'm demonstrating a level of commitment to the cause. I'm saying, 'Look, I'm doing this really hard thing to demonstrate that I care about this cause. The least you can do is donate a few pounds.' It can also help make the cause you're raising money for more salient and emotionally compelling in peoples' minds." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 12:58 p.m. CST
  in culture | a)
• A one-question Turing test for GPT-3 - LessWrong [LessWrong]: "what food would you use to prop a book open and why?" (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 12:23 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Election Denial Is Really Unpopular [Split-ticket]: Candidates which refused to accept the results of the 2020 election saw a large electoral penalty in 2022. (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 12:13 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• YCombinator fraud rates [EA Forum]: "I estimate that 1-2% of $100M+ YCombinator-backed companies have faced serious allegations of fraud." (
  '22 Dec 26Added Mon 2022-Dec-26 11:33 a.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Democrats Should Back More Moderate & Conservative Independents [Politicalkiwi.wordpress]: "2022 was the year of the moderate Independent. Not in the sense that any of them actually won, but in the sense that it was conclusively shown that if Democrats want to compete in red districts and states, especially in the West, they should refrain from running their own candidates and should instead back moderate/conservative Independents where possible." (
  '22 Dec 24Added Sat 2022-Dec-24 10:04 a.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Staring into the abyss as a core life skill [BenKuhn]: "Staring into the abyss means thinking reasonably about things that are uncomfortable to contemplate, like arguments against your religious beliefs, or in favor of breaking up with your partner. It’s common to procrastinate on thinking hard about these things because it might require you to acknowledge that you were very wrong about something in the past, and perhaps wasted a bunch of time based on that (e.g. dating the wrong person or praying to the wrong god). However, in most cases you have to either admit this eventually or, if you never admit it, lock yourself into a sub-optimal future life trajectory, so it’s best to be impatient and stare directly into the uncomfortable topic until you’ve figured out what to do." (
  '22 Dec 23Added Fri 2022-Dec-23 3:12 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Police for America [Slowboring]: "Right now, very few people with progressive values or any qualms about the status quo in the criminal justice system are willing to consider a career in policing. But that dynamic is only going to make everything people worry about in policing even worse. We’re both exacerbating ideological selection into and out of policing, and also making general staffing problems harder. This only makes chiefs more reluctant to dismiss bad cops and more likely to accept retreats who’ve washed out for misconduct elsewhere. If we accept that policing is important and that high-poverty, high-crime communities want to see policing improved rather than defunded, it would be more constructive to create a program that challenges people who believe policing can be done better to actually roll up their sleeves and do it." (
  '22 Sep 30Added Fri 2022-Sep-30 10:47 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Lovecraftian intelligence [Noah]: "My concept of a 'Lovecraftian intelligence', therefore, is something along the lines of 'a system that behaves like a human-analogous intelligence some or even most of the time, but behaves in catastrophically alien ways in fundamentally unpredictable circumstances.' [...] Lovecraftian intelligences are so alien that we’ll never really be able to resolve the argument over whether they’re truly intelligent or not. But unlike other alien intelligences that display their incomprehensibility at all times, Lovecraftian intelligences trick us most of the time — they seem human right up until they don’t. [...] Anyway, I obviously have no idea if AI will always be a Lovecraftian intelligence. [...] But in any case, if you’re wondering whether all of this has a point or policy implication, the answer is yes: Do not, under any circumstances, no matter what, give AIs control over weapons of mass destruction." (
  '22 Sep 24Added Sat 2022-Sep-24 2:55 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• my assistant thinks she’s my peer [Inc]: "Sometimes the most effective way to make it clear to someone that you have authority over them is to really clearly exercise that authority. It's great that you want to be nice and supportive -- you should be nice and supportive -- but you're not doing her any favors by allowing this behavior to continue. [...] You have two different ways you can deal with it: You can sit her down for a conversation about it or you can try calling out the behavior in the moment when it's happening[...], but you also might be able to get the results you want just by being more forthright in the moment as these situations happen. [...]Of course, in general, managers should be open to hearing employees' ideas, hearing dissent, and so forth. But in this case, you have someone who's really unclear on the boundaries of her role, and so clearly calling out those boundaries might prompt her to realize that she's overstepping -- and even if it doesn't, these are still reasonable boundaries for you to assert. But if you do this a few times and don't see a change -- or if you'd rather just cut to the chase -- then sit down and name the pattern you're seeing. You could say: "I want to talk about how we work together. It's great that you have ideas, but I need you to be clear on our roles on the projects we work on together. I need to make the decisions I think are best for my projects. When I make a choice different from the one you hoped I'd make, I need you to roll with that -- not argue or be short with me. The same thing goes when I correct your work or ask you to do something differently; I need you to accept that, not become snippy. And overall, I need you to operate with the understanding that I'm managing these projects and will be calling the shots on them. Can you do that?" If that doesn't result in a dramatic change, you'd need to consider whether she's going to be able to function effectively in the job or not. But first try naming what you're seeing and clearly asking for a change." (
  '22 Sep 24Added Sat 2022-Sep-24 2:28 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Animal Welfare vs. the Environment [Jaysonlusk]: "“ Across all presentation designs and information treatments, participants are far more willing to pay for animal welfare attributes than for environmental efficiencies.”" (
  '22 Sep 03Added Sat 2022-Sep-03 1:49 p.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• GPT-3 Catching Fish in Morse Code [LessWrong]: "The current version of GPT-3 has a strong tendency to encode mangled versions of a specific phrase when asked to write morse code in zero-shot situations. This is possibly the result of a previous version of the model using essentially a single phrase for all morse code writing, which the newer version then learnt to modify. " (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 1:30 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• The longest training run [LessWrong]: "Training runs of large Machine Learning systems are likely to last less than 14-15 months. This is because longer runs will be outcompeted by runs that start later and therefore use better hardware and better algorithms." (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 1:06 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Climate Change & Longtermism: new book-length report [EA Forum]: "More people need to hear good news on climate: * Previously 4ºC warming was the median path. Now, thanks to hard work on policy/advocacy, the chance of that is ~5% * Median now 2.7ºC * Chance of 6ºC warming from ~10% to <1%" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 12:38 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• everything is okay [LessWrong]: "it's been four years since the singularity. someone pressed the button, and their preferences were implemented across the cosmos. i don't think anyone knows who pressed the button; that is probly how they'd like things to be. maybe they don't know themself. i wake up and cuddle with my partners for a while. we live in a log cabin, which was currently somewhere near forests and mountains, somewhere in washington state i think. i don't know if it's actually washington state, because i don't care about being uploaded. it could be that 10¹⁰⁰ objective years have passed since the singularity and that now that it's got the compute it needs, Elua has started running our simulations. it could be that it's entirely remade the cosmos into a shape we cannot conceive. or it could be that this is actually earth, in its full physical continuity, actually four objective years after the singularity. all of these are okay to me." (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 12:35 p.m. CDT
  in xrisk | a)
• Using the “executive summary” style: writing that respects your reader’s time [EA Forum]: "EA researchers would benefit from adopting communication norms from the policy world, which emphasize clarity and ease of reading. [...] 1. Put your key points up front. 2. Use bullet points or numbered lists. 3. Use headings and bolding to make your document easy to skim." (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 12:26 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• A concern about the “evolutionary anchor” of Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines. [EA Forum]: Cotra's evolutionary anchor for AI timelines may not account for additional compute needed to simulate the environment in which the neurons take place. (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 12:24 p.m. CDT
  in xrisk | a)
• Survey advice [LessWrong]: "If you write a question that seems clear, there’s an unbelievably high chance that any given reader will misunderstand it. (Possibly this applies to things that aren’t survey questions also, but that’s a problem for another time.)" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 12:21 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Protest movements: How effective are they? [EA Forum]: "Summary of six months research by Social Change Lab on the impacts and outcomes of particularly influential protests / protest movements. Future research will look at what makes certain movements more effective, and more generally to understand if social movement organizations could be more effective than current well-funded avenues to change. Headline results include that protest movements often lead to small changes in public opinion & policy, moderate in public discourse, and with large variance between specific cases. Public opinion shifts of 2-10%, voting shifts of 1-6%, and increased discourse of >10x were observed in natural experiments. (Summary by Zoe)" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 12:11 p.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• "A critical review of GiveWell"s 2022 cost-effectiveness model" [EA Forum]: "Suggestions for cost-effectiveness modeling in EA by a health economist, with Givewell as a case study. The author believes the overall approach to be good, with the following major critiques: Extremely severe: no uncertainty modeling - we don’t know how likely they think their recommendations are to be wrong Severe: opaque inputs - it’s hard to trace back where inputs to the model come from, or to update them over time Moderate: the model architecture could use best practice to be easier to read / understand (eg. separating intervention and moral inputs) (Summary by Zoe)" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 11:53 a.m. CDT
  in costeffectiveness | a)
• EAs Underestimate Uncertainty in Cause Prioritization [EA Forum]: "Argues that EAs work across too narrow a distribution of causes given our uncertainty in which are best, and that standard prioritizations are interpreted as more robust than they really are. As an example, they mention that 80K states “some of their scores could easily be wrong by a couple of points” and this scale of uncertainty could put factory farming on par with AI. (Summary by Zoe)" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 11:51 a.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Critique of MacAskill’s “Is It Good to Make Happy People?” [EA Forum]: "Discusses population asymmetry, the viewpoint that a new life of suffering is bad, but a new life of happiness is neutral or only weakly positive. Post is mainly focused on what these viewpoints are and that they have many proponents vs. specific arguments for them. Mentions that they weren’t well covered in Will’s book and could affect the conclusions there. Presents evidence that people’s intuitions tend towards needing significantly more happy people than equivalent level of suffering people for a tradeoff to be ‘worth it’ (3:1 to 100:1 depending on question specifics), and that therefore a big future (which would likely have more absolute suffering, even if not proportionally) could be bad. (Summary by Zoe)" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 11:47 a.m. CDT
  in philosophy | a)
• ChinAI #195: A Handsome Panda Riding a Motorcycle [Chinai.substack]: "If you write a question that seems clear, there’s an unbelievably high chance that any given reader will misunderstand it" (
  '22 Aug 29Added Mon 2022-Aug-29 10:34 a.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Effective Altruism As A Tower Of Assumptions [Astralcodexten.substack]: "Q: I don’t approve of how effective altruists keep donating to weird sci-fi charities. A: Are you donating 10% of your income to normal, down-to-earth charities?" (
  '22 Aug 27Added Sat 2022-Aug-27 5:03 p.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• The Hard Part About Creating New Teams Within an Engineering Organization [Product.hubspot]: "put new people on established projects and established people on new projects" (
  '22 Aug 27Added Sat 2022-Aug-27 3:40 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Your posts should be on arXiv [LessWrong]: Putting posts on arXiv is a relatively low cost way to get wider recognition and adoption (
  '22 Aug 27Added Sat 2022-Aug-27 11:49 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Are You Too Busy? [Tombartel.me]: "If there is some support task that is nobody’s responsibility (e.g., finding appropriate giveaways for your conference booth), then put it on yourself and sacrifice some of this dubious management time instead. What would you do in that time, anyway? Talking? Reading? Get real! Often, this kind of self-overloading of managers has a noble touch to it: “I don’t want to be all boss-like and offload this onto one of my people. They are busy themselves. I’ll just do it, it won’t take that long.” And thus, you add to the fragmentation of your already heavily fragmented time. You add one more responsibility to the pile of responsibilities you already have, causing you to hurry up even more. Not much time for real management left." (
  '22 Aug 20Added Sat 2022-Aug-20 6:16 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Language models seem to be much better than humans at next-token prediction [LessWrong]: "Contrary to some previous claims, we found that humans seem to be consistently worse at next-token prediction (in terms of both top-1 accuracy and perplexity) than even small models like Fairseq-125M, a 12-layer transformer roughly the size and quality of GPT-1. That is, even small language models are "superhuman" at predicting the next token. That being said, it seems plausible that humans can consistently beat the smaller 2017-era models (though not modern models) with a few hours more practice and strategizing. We conclude by discussing some of our takeaways from this result." (
  '22 Aug 14Added Sun 2022-Aug-14 12:09 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• "Three pillars for avoiding AGI catastrophe: Technical alignment, deployment decisions, and coordination" [EA Forum]: "The three pillars model attempts to describe the conditions needed to successfully avoid the deployment of unaligned AGI. It proposes that, to succeed, we need to achieve some sufficient combination of success on all three of the following: (1) Technical alignment research, (2) Safety-conscious deployment decisions, (3) Coordination between potential AI deployers. While how difficult success is depends on the difficulty of solving any given pillar, this model points toward why we may well fail to avoid AGI catastrophe: we need to simultaneously succeed at three difficult problems." (
  '22 Aug 10Added Wed 2022-Aug-10 10:38 p.m. CDT
  in xrisk | a)
• Why I view effective giving as complementary to direct work [EA Forum]: "Until the 700 million people living in poverty reach significantly better standards of living, or factory farming is a horror from the past, we’re funding constrained, and my “drop in the bucket” can still do a lot of good. To this end, I try to remind myself as much as possible that the drop I contribute to the bucket might be small in the grand scheme of things, but is still huge for someone out there. This line of thinking runs parallel to my desire to make sure the long run future goes well for people and non-human animals I will never exist alongside." (
  '22 Aug 02Added Tue 2022-Aug-02 8:03 p.m. CDT
  in giving | a)
• "Without specific countermeasures, the easiest path to transformative AI likely leads to AI takeover" [EA Forum]: "if AI companies race forward training increasingly powerful models using HFDT, this is likely to eventually lead to a full-blown AI takeover (i.e. a possibly violent uprising or coup by AI systems)." (
  '22 Jul 24Added Sun 2022-Jul-24 4:38 p.m. CDT
  in xrisk | a)
• 10 strategies to read more books [Alifeofproductivity]: " Many of us want to read more but are unsure of how to do it. A handful of tactics to try: set specific times to read, create a comfortable physical environment, identify less meaningful activities and replace them with reading, read shorter books, have multiple books on-the-go, put down books you’re not enjoying, make reading a social activity, know which reading format you prefer, and schedule a reading day" (
  '22 Jul 09Added Sat 2022-Jul-09 6:07 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Forecasting Timelines of Quantum Computing [Arxiv]: "We consider how to forecast progress in the domain of quantum computing. For this purpose we collect a dataset of quantum computer systems to date, scored on their physical qubits and gate error rate, and we define an index combining both metrics, the generalized logical qubit. We study the relationship between physical qubits and gate error rate, and tentatively conclude that they are positively correlated (albeit with some room for doubt), indicating a frontier of development that trades-off between them. We also apply a log-linear regression on the metrics to provide a tentative upper bound on how much progress can be expected over time. Within the (generally optimistic) assumptions of our model, including the key assumption that exponential progress in qubit count and gate fidelity will continue, we estimate that that proof-of-concept fault-tolerant computation based on superconductor technology is unlikely (<5% confidence) to be exhibited before 2026, and that quantum devices capable of factoring RSA-2048 are unlikely (<5% confidence) to exist before 2039. It is of course possible that these milestones will in fact be reached earlier, but that this would require faster progress than has yet been seen." (
  '22 Jul 09Added Sat 2022-Jul-09 2:27 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• AI Forecasting: One Year In [Bounded-regret.ghost.io]: "[M]y research group created a forecasting contest to predict AI progress on four benchmarks. Forecasts were asked to predict state-of-the-art performance (SOTA) on each benchmark for June 30th 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025. It’s now past June 30th, so we can evaluate the performance of the forecasters so far. [...] Forecasters’ predictions were not very good in general: two out of four forecasts were outside the 90% credible intervals. However, they were better than my personal predictions, and I suspect better than the median prediction of ML researchers (if the latter had been preregistered). Specifically, progress on ML benchmarks happened significantly faster than forecasters expected. But forecasters predicted faster progress than I did personally, and my sense is that I expect somewhat faster progress than the median ML researcher does. Progress on a robustness benchmark was slower than expected, and was the only benchmark to fall short of forecaster predictions. This is somewhat worrying, as it suggests that machine learning capabilities are progressing quickly, while safety properties are progressing slowly." (
  '22 Jul 08Added Fri 2022-Jul-08 9:56 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• You don’t have to respond to every comment [EA Forum]: "When you publish a post, you might get comments. Some of them might be pointing you to additional resources or expressing gratitude for the post, while some might give constructive feedback and point out disagreements or errors. It can be nice to engage in a conversation to get to the bottom of the disagreement but, crucially: you don’t have to respond to every comment." (
  '22 Jun 22Added Wed 2022-Jun-22 1:21 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Are you really in a race? The Cautionary Tales of Szilárd and Ellsberg [EA Forum]: "In both the 1940s and 1950s, well-meaning and good people – the brightest of their generation – were convinced they were in an existential race with an expansionary, totalitarian regime. Because of this belief, they advocated for and participated in a ‘sprint’ race: the Manhattan Project to develop a US atomic bomb (1939-1945); and the ‘missile gap’ project to build up a US ICBM capability (1957-1962). These were both based on a mistake, however - the Nazis decided against a Manhattan Project in 1942, and the Soviets decided against an ICBM build-up in 1958. The main consequence of both was to unilaterally speed up dangerous developments and increase existential risk. Key participants, such as Albert Einstein and Daniel Ellsberg, described their involvement as the greatest mistake of their life. Our current situation with AGI shares certain striking similarities and certain lessons suggest themselves: make sure you’re actually in a race (information on whether you are is very valuable), be careful when secrecy is emphasised, and don’t give up your power as an expert too easily." (
  '22 May 21Added Sat 2022-May-21 2:42 p.m. CDT
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Outer Space and the Veil of Ignorance: An Alternative Way to Think About Space Regulation [Rand]: "Just as the treaty drafters had little idea about if or when environments suitable to life beyond Earth might be discovered, they did not know what the future of space might look like in terms of militarization or occupation of orbits and celestial bodies. And still, they crafted principles that prevented nuclear weapons from being placed in orbit around the Earth, and they prohibited the possibility of imperial or colonial claims to orbits or celestial bodies. The genius of making these rules before knowing the conditions in which the rules would be applied is that, had the rules been crafted after the fact, the calculations by the nations making and agreeing to the rules would have likely been quite different." (
  '22 May 18Added Wed 2022-May-18 1:26 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Learning by Writing [EA Forum]: "The rough basic idea is that I organize my learning around writing rather than reading. This doesn’t mean I don’t read - just that the reading is always in service of the writing." (
  '22 May 17Added Tue 2022-May-17 4:22 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• "I can only promise you that it"s going to get weirder" [Noah]: "Ten things that were basic, regular, near-universal experiences for most people in the world’s most technologically advanced societies just four decades ago, all of which are either rare or almost unimaginable today. And go back decades further, and you’ll find even more experiences like this — things that were mainstays of the human experiences, that were then just gone. At a fundamental level, technology changes what it means to live a human life." (
  '22 May 15Added Sun 2022-May-15 4:37 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Everyone Was Surprised By The Senate Passing Permanent Daylight Saving Time. Especially The Senators. [Buzzfeednews]: "With unanimous agreement, you can do pretty much anything. Any senator can go to the Senate floor any time and ask for unanimous consent to skip all of the debate and the votes and just pass the bill immediately. If no one objects, it is done. But all it takes is a single senator to object and the bill is blocked." (
  '22 May 13Added Fri 2022-May-13 8:04 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Teaching is a slow process of becoming everything you hate [Dynomight.net]: Four stories from teaching about how terrible-seeming policies have to be implemented because the non-terrible versions will inevitably get abused (
  '22 May 13Added Fri 2022-May-13 7:59 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Human error [Philvenables]: "In every incident or close-call [...] where there was an assignment of root cause to human error it actually turned out [...] the humans were in fact performing heroics [...] in the face of a poorly designed environment, terrible user interface" (
  '22 May 13Added Fri 2022-May-13 7:59 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Against credentialism [Marginalrevolution]: "Sure credentials are helpful, but not perfect. Many people without credentials can do the job just fine. And many people with credentials are pretty bad. Good thing we often have ways to predict performance other than credentials!" (
  '22 May 13Added Fri 2022-May-13 7:58 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• EA Tours of Service [EA Forum]: "“ jobs in EA organizations are often unusual in ways which makes candidates uncertain if they want to have that job indefinitely (e.g. people may have a less prestigious title because EA's tend to be “overqualified”). Hiring people through a "Tour of Service" which is time-bound and has specific outcomes can address these concerns. An example summary of a Tour is: join CEA for two years with the goal of doubling the percentage of respondents to the EA survey who say they made an important connection on the EA Forum.”" (
  '22 May 11Added Wed 2022-May-11 9:33 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Cheems mindset [Normielisation.substack]: "[C]heems mindset is the reflexive belief that barriers to policy outcomes are natural laws that we should not waste our time considering how to overcome. [...C]heems mindset is automatically dismissing an idea on the basis that it cannot be done, or would be hard to do" (
  '22 Mar 07Added Mon 2022-Mar-07 10:33 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Make Desertion Fast [Betonit.blog]: "The EU, in cooperation with Ukraine, offers $100,000 plus EU citizenship to any Russian deserter. Russians can either go directly to the EU, or surrender to Ukrainian forces for speedy transport to the EU border. The key gain: Deserters no longer have to gamble on Ukrainian success. As long as they escape from the Red Army’s zone of control, they survive. A much better gamble. [...] How much of a burden is this on the EU? Chump change, really. Even in a magical scenario where all of the roughly 200,000 Russian troops in the vicinity take the deal, $100,000 per soldier is a mere $20 billion. [...] If paying deserters big bucks is such a great idea, how come hardly any country does it? I suspect that many governments view this tactic as akin to poison gas: It’s a ghastly weapon – and if we use it on them, they’ll use it on us. This might make sense when brutal dictatorships fight each other. But if a country that people habitually flee to fights a country that people habitually flee from, the poison gas analogy breaks down. Scary countries are deeply vulnerable to paid desertion, while the nicest countries are almost immune. How much would Russia have to offer Germans to desert to Russia? Nein, danke!" (
  '22 Mar 03Added Thu 2022-Mar-03 9:53 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Advice for newsletter-ers: Seasons [Robinsloan]: "Here’s my piece of advice for newsletter-ers, new and aspiring: A personal email newsletter ought to be divided into seasons, just like a TV show. [...] Here’s what you get from the nomenclature, the metaphor, of the “season”: a sense of progress: of going and getting somewhere. an opportunity for breaks: to pause and reflect, reconfigure. an opportunity, furthermore, to make big changes: in terms of subject, structure, style. When do you break between seasons? Anytime! When life gets weird. When you’re feeling burnt out. When you sense a new obsession taking shape. When you want to bring in a guest writer. When it’s raining outside. Really: anytime. [...] Some of those seasons have been long, others short, and the gaps between them have been variable, too: many months, a few days. A break, no matter how short, and a refresh, no matter how minor, is a shot of energy for writer and reader alike; totally a little magic trick. But that’s all secondary to this, the metaphor’s most precious gift: an opportunity to stop: gracefully." (
  '22 Mar 03Added Thu 2022-Mar-03 9:50 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• “10x engineers”: Stereotypes and research [Jasoncrawford]: "Differences in productivity are real, large, and important, and probably underappreciated. If the difference is not quite “10x”, then it’s large enough to matter a lot. [...] Work environment matters a lot. [...] Productivity is a combination of inherent traits and acquired skills. [...] Productivity is not strongly correlated with experience." (
  '22 Feb 07Added Mon 2022-Feb-07 2:11 a.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Schlep Blindness [Paulgraham]: "“The most striking example I know of schlep blindness is Stripe, or rather Stripe's idea. For over a decade, every hacker who'd ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was. Thousands of people must have known about this problem. And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why? Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure? Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.“" (
  '22 Feb 05Added Sat 2022-Feb-05 10:01 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Book Notes: The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar [Nateliason]: Don’t defer your happiness to some future time (
  '22 Feb 05Added Sat 2022-Feb-05 9:53 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Precedents for economic n-year doubling before 4n-year doubling [Aiimpacts]: "If this analysis is right, 'fast takeoff' in GWP has happened 2x before - once in 10,000-4000 BCE with agriculture and once in 4000-3000 BCE with Bronze Age / writing. The industrial revolution caused a notable growth acceleration, but not 'fast takeoff'." (
  '22 Jan 15Added Sat 2022-Jan-15 2:12 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Jhanas and the Dark Room Problem [Astralcodexten.substack]: "“The Dark Room Problem in neuroscience goes something like this: suppose the brain is minimizing prediction error, or free energy, or whatever. You can minimize lots of things by sitting quietly in a dark room. Everything will be very, very predictable. So how come people do other things? […A]ctually, sitting quietly in a dark room is really great.“" (
  '22 Jan 08Added Sat 2022-Jan-08 8:46 p.m. CST
  in psychology | a)
• Startups are Frontier Communities [Meltingasphalt]: “ The point is that founding and growing a company is fundamentally an act of exploration and colonization” (
  '22 Jan 08Added Sat 2022-Jan-08 8:42 p.m. CST
  in culture | a)
• Hire managers of one [Signalvnoise]: "When you’re hiring, seek out people who are managers of one. What’s that mean? A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves. [...] You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less." (
  '21 Dec 30Added Thu 2021-Dec-30 1:22 a.m. CST
  in management | a)
• Tricking Your Team Isn't The Answer [Fuzztechnology]: How to stop phishing? The answer isn't to send phishing simulation emails to your employees. Instead: 1.) Teach what phishing looks like 2.) Tell employees to reach out for help 3.) Pre-filtering 4.) Be able to handle phishing after 5.) Hardware tokens (
  '21 Dec 29Added Wed 2021-Dec-29 5:57 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• How Our Startup Beat Burnout [Groovehq]: "1.) Offering vacation time is not the answer because people don't use it. 2.) If you can afford it, hire people before you need them. 3.) Keep work pace realistic. 4.) As CEO, model good work-life balance" (
  '21 Dec 29Added Wed 2021-Dec-29 4:39 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• How to Work Hard [Paulgraham]: "One thing I know is that if you want to do great things, you'll have to work very hard. I wasn't sure of that as a kid. Schoolwork varied in difficulty; one didn't always have to work super hard to do well. And some of the things famous adults did, they seemed to do almost effortlessly. Was there, perhaps, some way to evade hard work through sheer brilliance? Now I know the answer to that question. There isn't. The reason some subjects seemed easy was that my school had low standards. And the reason famous adults seemed to do things effortlessly was years of practice; they made it look easy. [...] Working hard is not just a dial you turn up to 11. It's a complicated, dynamic system that has to be tuned just right at each point. You have to understand the shape of real work, see clearly what kind you're best suited for, aim as close to the true core of it as you can, accurately judge at each moment both what you're capable of and how you're doing, and put in as many hours each day as you can without harming the quality of the result. This network is too complicated to trick. But if you're consistently honest and clear-sighted, it will automatically assume an optimal shape, and you'll be productive in a way few people are." (
  '21 Dec 28Added Tue 2021-Dec-28 7:03 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Aiming for the minimum is dangerous [EA Forum]: "Make sure to still have some fun time and not feel guilty about it, or you will go mad." (
  '21 Dec 10Added Fri 2021-Dec-10 7:41 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• A Deterrence by Denial Strategy for Addressing Biological Weapons - War on the Rocks [Waronthe Rocks]: Make a clear plan to be able to early detect + quickly mitigate + quickly retaliate means there's a disincentive to do biowarfare in the first place. (
  '21 Nov 28Added Sun 2021-Nov-28 8:36 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• [2011.14999] An Automatic Finite-Sample Robustness Metric: Can Dropping a Little Data Change Conclusions? [Arxiv]: "If you randomly drop 1% of the data, findings should be robust. But they often aren't. This is a good test for detecting noisy effects." (
  '21 Nov 28Added Sun 2021-Nov-28 8:05 p.m. CST
  in metascience | a)
• Does the _timing_ of practice relative to sleep make a difference for skill consolidation? - LessWrong [LessWrong]: It does not (
  '21 Nov 25Added Thu 2021-Nov-25 11:23 p.m. CST
  in None | a)
• 6 secrets for building a super team – Gigaom [Gigaom]: Only hire people you want to be around. Hire people who bring up the team average. Don't hire just to fill an immediate need. Take time to integrate new team members. Be willing to fire people. Give people a veto. (
  '21 Nov 25Added Thu 2021-Nov-25 3:12 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• Jon Stokes: Why a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would be a catastrophe for China and the world [Jonstokes]: "If China invaded Taiwan, they wouldn't be able to use Taiwan's unique semiconductor industry and this would set back semiconductors (and the whole global supply chain) by years, and would be even more devastating for China." (
  '21 Nov 21Added Sun 2021-Nov-21 12:39 a.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• What if Xi Jinping just isn't that competent? [Noah]: "But other than turning a bureaucratic oligarchy into a personalistic dictatorship, what are Xi’s accomplishments, exactly? In my experience, people tend to assume that Xi is hyper-competent because: There’s a general impression that the Chinese government is hyper-competent, and Xi has made himself synonymous with the Chinese government, and Under Xi’s watch, China has arguably become the world’s most powerful country. But this doesn’t mean Xi actually deserves his reputation as a one-man engine of Chinese greatness. Much of his apparent success was actually inherited from his predecessors. He has taken absolute control of the apparatus built by people such as Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao, but I think it’s hard to argue that he has added much to that apparatus. In fact, I think there are multiple signs that Xi has actually weakened the capabilities of the Chinese juggernaut. So far, China’s power and general effectiveness are so great that these signs seem to have gone largely unnoticed, but I think they’re there. The three big ones are: Slowing growth, an international backlash against China, and missteps related to the Covid pandemic. It’s time to consider the possibility that for all his self-aggrandizement, Xi Jinping is just not that competent of a leader." (
  '21 Nov 09Added Tue 2021-Nov-09 9:36 a.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Our Worst Idea About “Safety” [Slate]: "When it comes to rapid tests, experts fearful of risk compensation may be missing this bigger point. Sure, the tests may encourage riskier behavior when it comes to COVID. Sure, people may use the tests incorrectly sometimes. And it’s true that a false negative on a rapid test just before a wedding or before school could result in spread that wouldn’t have happened if everyone had just stayed home. It is well worth considering how to reduce those instances, by educating the public on how to use the swabs and making it easy for us all to access high-quality test kits. But it is too much to ask that the tests eliminate risk. Life is not just about staying safe by avoiding everything. It’s about balancing COVID risk with the very real downsides of staying inside all day. People need to work, to socialize, and kids need to go to school. In a sense, the point of these measures is to allow for a small amount of risk compensation. Masks, vaccines, and rapid tests let two things to be true at once: Individuals can take more risks to do what they like, and society stays safer. If you think of certain public health tools as ways to enable risk-taking, it becomes clear that the language of risk compensation—particularly without evidence to back up the fears—isn’t helpful, and may even generate mistrust. For months, public health authorities have implored politicians and the public alike to “follow the science.” When it comes to risk compensation, these experts would do well to heed their own advice." (
  '21 Nov 09Added Tue 2021-Nov-09 9:34 a.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The leader’s anti-asshole list [Lnbogen]: "The anti-asshole checklist for delivering negative feedback as a manager: act with empathy, clarify expectations, and practice what you preach." (
  '21 Nov 05Added Fri 2021-Nov-05 12:20 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• How the experts messed up on Covid - UnHerd [Unherd]: "The “expert view” vs “the misinformation” is a false dichotomy. It can be tempting to offer only certainty in times of crisis — but part of being an expert is knowing when to be uncertain, and being strongly aware of the provisional nature of our knowledge. Trustworthiness doesn’t just come from being right, but from communicating the limits of the evidence, and regularly updating one’s view in light of new data and analysis. Overconfidence from the experts, coupled with a willingness to denigrate and even pathologise those who publicly dissented, might have made it harder for us to change course during the pandemic, costing us precious time that we couldn’t afford. If experts fail to reckon with the inevitable uncertainties of our current times, we risk delaying the next crucial update — or worse, overlooking it altogether." (
  '21 Nov 05Added Fri 2021-Nov-05 12:19 p.m. CDT
  in metascience | a)
• Automate as much traffic enforcement as possible [Slowboring]: "In a well-functioning enforcement system, fines should bring in very little revenue because the rules are both reasonable and well-enforced, so people don’t break them. You optimize for revenue by doing the reverse: lulling people into a false sense of security with spotty enforcement, then hammering them while selectively exempting people with political clout from meaningful penalties. All that really is bad. But the solution isn’t to say that traffic enforcement is a sham, it’s to try to actually fix it" (
  '21 Nov 04Added Thu 2021-Nov-04 3:37 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Much of what you've heard about Carter and Reagan is wrong [Noah]: "So what do we learn from the misunderstandings surrounding these two Presidents? One lesson, obviously, is that the narratives we tell about history are largely constructed after the fact, by actors who have a stake in painting a certain picture of the recent past. But another is that successful policy takes a long time to work. Carter deregulated, appointed a tough inflation-fighter to the Fed, and funded the USSR’s military opponents. But it wasn’t until the 80s that the economy boomed, inflation came down, and the USSR weakened and fell. In 1980, when Reagan beat Carter for the presidency, it still looked as if nothing was working and everything was still going wrong — even though the crucial policy steps that would turn things around had already been largely taken. Another lesson, I think, is that American policy is driven less by ideology and presidential personality than we think. There was far more continuity than rupture between Carter and Reagan." (
  '21 Nov 04Added Thu 2021-Nov-04 12:23 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads [EA Forum]: "When I started undergrad, I decided to take almost as many classes as I could that term—wouldn’t want to miss out on limited opportunities to learn, right? I spent that whole term hunched over books and stressing over how behind I was (so, not meeting people, not getting research or job experience, not figuring out what problems to prioritize, not getting others into high-impact careers), only to later realize my classes had taught me little of value. That doesn’t seem to have been a unique experience; many impact-driven undergrads fill their schedule with many classes (often, time-consuming ones). Consider not doing that—I think taking many classes each term is one of the most costly, easily avoidable mistakes that impact-driven undergrads tend to make." (
  '21 Oct 25Added Mon 2021-Oct-25 9:04 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Elad Blog: 5 People Who Destroy Your Culture [Blog.eladgil]: "Watch out for the jerk, the whiner, the credit taker, the charming do nothing, and the loyalty monger" (
  '21 Oct 23Added Sat 2021-Oct-23 11:13 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Is Zero a Special Price? Evidence from Child Healthcare [Aeaweb]: "Do consumers react differently to zero prices? We test the presence of a zero-price effect in child healthcare and find that a zero price is special as it boosts demand discontinuously. A zero price affects resource allocations by encouraging healthier children to use more services and exacerbates behavioral hazard by increasing inappropriate use of antibiotics. A copayment, of as small as USD 2 per visit, alleviates these problems without substantially increasing financial risk. However, a zero price may be used to boost demand for highly cost-effective treatments. Zero and non-zero prices should be strategically chosen to achieve specific goals." (
  '21 Oct 15Added Fri 2021-Oct-15 5:20 p.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• Children are unsuspecting meat eaters: An opportunity to address climate change [Sciencedirect]: "Children are not reliably accurate in identifying the origins of common foods. • Forty-one percent of children claimed that bacon came from a plant. • Children do not judge animals to be appropriate food sources. • Most 6- and 7-year-olds classified chicken, cows, and pigs as not OK to eat. • Children's food concepts may help to normalize environmentally-responsible diets." (
  '21 Oct 15Added Fri 2021-Oct-15 5:19 p.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• Gift Tax Limits: How Much Can You Gift? [Smartasset]: "Apparently in the US any gift under $15K/yr is not taxable, the gift receiver never pays taxes (only the gift giver), and the gift giver is credited $11.7M total over their life towards paying any gift tax." (
  '21 Oct 13Added Wed 2021-Oct-13 4:56 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Working at Wave is an extremely effective way to improve the world [Wave]: "Most people in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have a bank account, because the nearest branch is too far away or they can’t afford the fees. Instead, when they can’t use cash, they use mobile money—digital wallets, usually built by telecoms, carrying a balance that you can send to other users. [...] When Wave launched in Senegal, our average transfer would have cost 3-5x more if done via the largest existing mobile money system. [...] A less-obvious, but equally important, benefit of Wave is that our customers get access to their money much faster. [...] The impact we’re having today is already exciting, but what’s even more exciting is what we can build on top of it. We’ve now reached critical mass in Senegal, where most adults use Wave every month to send money or pay their bills. That makes it possible for us to work on the next step of our mission: building a better way to do any type of economic transaction on Wave. [...] In the longer term, though, our biggest impact of all will be what we enable others to do. A puzzle: why are most of the most successful African startups fintech companies? What prevents companies from succeeding in other areas? Part of the answer is that if you’re not collecting payments yourself, there’s no one else to do it for you." (
  '21 Oct 10Added Sun 2021-Oct-10 2:41 p.m. CDT
  in development | a)
• The high-return activity of raising others’ aspirations [Marginalrevolution]: "At critical moments in time, you can raise the aspirations of other people significantly, especially when they are relatively young, simply by suggesting they do something better or more ambitious than what they might have in mind. It costs you relatively little to do this, but the benefit to them, and to the broader world, may be enormous." (
  '21 Oct 09Added Sat 2021-Oct-09 11:30 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Lessons Learned from 5 Years and 5000+ Students in Top Performer [Scotthyoung]: Don't focus on machine learning - produce what you say you’re going to produce at a high level rather than learn an esoteric skill. Invest in your idea before trying to crank it out. Don't focus on grad school without a good reason. Don't ask for advice but rather learn people's stories. (
  '21 Oct 03Added Sun 2021-Oct-03 11:14 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Gell-Mann Earworms [Cold-takes]: "Most of what you read is some combination of underinformed, biased, and systemtically misleading. The solution to this is to learn about fewer things, more deeply; acknowledge your own ignorance; think about what’s really worth understanding; think a lot about which writers and sources to trust most; separate learning about how things are from learning about how things are discussed from entertainment; reserve judgment." (
  '21 Oct 02Added Sat 2021-Oct-02 6:36 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• Book Review: The Scout Mindset [Astralcodexten.substack]: "Status Quo Test: If you’re defending the status quo, imagine that the opposite was the status quo. Would you be tempted to switch to what you have now? [...] Conformity Test: Imagine that some common and universally-agreed idea was unusual; would you still want to do it? [...] The Selective Skeptic Test: How credible would you consider the same evidence if it supported the other side?" (
  '21 Oct 01Added Fri 2021-Oct-01 1:32 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• Kyrsten Sinema must be stopped [Slowboring]: "Progressives should love and cherish Joe Manchin. If you look at West Virginia’s underlying partisanship, he is clearly the person with the highest Value Over Replacement in the whole Senate. [...] And then there’s Kyrsten Sinema. Her home state is much less red than West Virginia. And her electoral performance is unimpressive compared to the partisan fundamentals. Beyond that, her objections to the Biden agenda — as far as we can tell — don’t really come from a standpoint of political prudence or electoral calculation at all. Instead, she largely seems to object to the most popular, most populist ideas that Biden has. [...W]hile I don’t believe Kyrsten Sinema will be the future of the Democratic Party, one can at least squint and sort of see it. So far, most of the newly elected Democrats from favored quarter suburbs are pretty solid liberals who still back taxing the rich and expanding the welfare state. But Sinema and a handful of her allies in the House do portend a possible alternate route where Democrats try to turn themselves into a pro-business identity politics movement that mostly just gets creamed by the populist right." (
  '21 Oct 01Added Fri 2021-Oct-01 1:29 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• Summary of history (empowerment and well-being lens) [Cold-takes]: "When you look at history from a lens of what best promotes empowerment and well-being over time, it looks very different from the history presented in e.g. textbooks. For example - Rome and Greece don't really matter, but Tanzimat, Ibn al-Haytham, and Paul Ehrlich (the turn-of-20th-century chemist, not the author of The Population Bomb) do." (
  '21 Oct 01Added Fri 2021-Oct-01 11:17 a.m. CDT
  in history | a)
• 10 things not enough kids know before going to college - Vox [Vox]: "Try careers on for size - don't wait until after law school to find out you don't like law. Develop skills that are hard to get outside the university. Learn how to write well. Focus more on learning from great teachers than on specific topics. When in doubt, choose the path that keeps the most doors open. Do the minimum foreign language classes. Go to places that are unfamiliar to you. Take some small classes with professors who can write recommendations. Unless you're required to write a thesis, think twice before committing to one. Blow your mind." (
  '21 Sep 30Added Thu 2021-Sep-30 8:12 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Guaranteed Way to see the Aurora Borealis [Mattbell.us]: "Wait for a giant solar flare / CME. Get up north before the solar flare reaches Earth." (
  '21 Sep 30Added Thu 2021-Sep-30 6:58 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Cultured meat: A comparison of techno-economic analyses [EA Forum]: "We reviewed 3 TEAs on cultured meat. Our summary is that Humbird is very high quality and suggests cultured meat cost-competitiveness is hard and needs everything to go right. CE Delft outlines some of what will need to go right, but doesn't provide much evidence that any of it is possible, has internal validity errors, and arguably has too much motivated reasoning. Risner, et al. is decent, within the narrow limits it sets itself, but too many details are underespecified for it to reflect the full costs and challenges of scaling up cultured meat. Reading the TEAs and doing surrounding research has turned Linch from a cultured meat optimist to being broadly pessimistic. Neil wants to be more agnostic until further research from Rethink Priorities and others." (
  '21 Sep 26Added Sun 2021-Sep-26 2:46 p.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• Climate optimism of the will [Noah]: "That’s where optimism comes in. Activists need to realize that even though projections have worsened and the 1.5C target will probably be missed, technology has flipped what would otherwise be a truly hopeless situation into a very winnable battle. 10 years ago it looked like in order to stop climate change, activists would have to convince the world to make huge material sacrifices. But now, there’s no need to embrace degrowth, or demand that people live ascetic lives, or abolish capitalism, or any of that stuff. Economic logic is on the activists’ side now. All that’s needed is to overcome the entrenched political power of the lobbies of sunset industries, and their culture warrior allies. Those are powerful enemies, but they’re fundamentally beatable ones." (
  '21 Sep 24Added Fri 2021-Sep-24 2:14 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Want to Write for a Living? The 7 Things I Wish I’d Known [Scotthyoung]: "Remember that nearly all writers would make more money if they just had a day job. Don't try to monetize your audience until you have 5000 regular readers. Don't worry about essay quality until after you have written your first 100 essays. Write what you like to read. Don't worry about being "smart enough". Don't write alone. Look to make big bets and capitalize on them. Use writing to identify other indirect opportunities - success usually does not just come from writing." (
  '21 Sep 21Added Tue 2021-Sep-21 12:31 a.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Cultured meat predictions were overly optimistic [EA Forum]: "Of the 273 predictions collected, 84 have resolved - nine resolving correctly, and 75 resolving incorrectly. Additionally, another 40 predictions should resolve at the end of the year and look to be resolving incorrectly. Overall, the state of these predictions suggest very systematic overconfidence. Cultured meat seems to have been perpetually just a few years away since as early as 2010 and this track record plausibly should make us skeptical of future claims from producers that cultured meat is just a few years away." (
  '21 Sep 17Added Fri 2021-Sep-17 7:19 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• Maybe voters aren’t as uninformed as elites like to think [Vox]: "There is still a real margin of public ignorance here. But it’s much smaller than a surface reading of the poll results would imply. A big part of the story is simply that ordinary Americans — especially ones who haven’t gone to college — use these terms somewhat differently than do professionals [foreign aid to include military spending and government waste to refer to 'programs I don't like']. And while some of this is genuinely just semantic, some of it masks a real substantive critique of American policy priorities that is largely absent from mainstream politics." (
  '21 Sep 10Added Fri 2021-Sep-10 1:37 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Comparison of Weight Loss Among Named Diet Programs in Overweight and Obese Adults [Jamanetwork]: "Significant weight loss was observed with any low-carbohydrate or low-fat diet. Weight loss differences between individual named diets were small. This supports the practice of recommending any diet that a patient will adhere to in order to lose weight." (
  '21 Sep 07Added Tue 2021-Sep-07 7:37 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The piranha problem: Large effects swimming in a small pond [Stat.columbia.edu]: "There cannot be a very large number of independent important causes of the same outcome x, because there is only so much variation in x to be explained. If a is a correlation between x and y that represents a genuine causal link, then x must be one of the 1/(a^2) most important influences on y." (
  '21 Sep 07Added Tue 2021-Sep-07 7:19 a.m. CDT
  in metascience | a)
• This Can't Go On [Cold-takes]: "We're used to the world economy growing a few percent per year. This has been the case for many generations. However, this is a very unusual situation. Zooming out to all of history, we see that growth has been accelerating; that it's near its historical high point; and that it's faster than it can be for all that much longer (there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate of growth for even another 10,000 years). The world can't just keep growing at this rate indefinitely. We should be ready for other possibilities: stagnation (growth slows or ends), explosion (growth accelerates even more, before hitting its limits), and collapse (some disaster levels the economy)." (
  '21 Sep 06Added Mon 2021-Sep-06 2:19 p.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• "Identity Theft, Credit Reports, and You" [Kalzumeus]: "How to file a report that actually gets acted upon... stay away from online and phone communications and use certified mail for everything, which shows them you're collecting a paper trail and scares them; key incredible fact is that you're not allowed to use form letters because ... well, because credit reporting agencies don't want you to and they've lobbied to prohibit it." (
  '21 Sep 05Added Sun 2021-Sep-05 2:01 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Matt Levine on the Archegos failure [EA Forum]: Beware overleveraged investments (
  '21 Jul 31Added Sat 2021-Jul-31 12:54 p.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• Don’t farm bugs [Aeon.co]: "Insect farming bakes, boils and shreds animals by the trillion. It’s immoral, risky and won’t resolve the climate crisis" (
  '21 Jul 27Added Tue 2021-Jul-27 9:54 p.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• "What does the "new Cold War" with China even mean?" [Slowboring]: "Several disanalogies between the US-Russia Cold War and the potential upcoming US-China Cold War II: there are not lots of pro-China communist parties around the world like there were pro-USSR communist parties, there are massive US-China business interests when there weren't the same between the US and USSR, and there aren't a lot of US-China proxy conflicts (yet)." (
  '21 Jul 25Added Sun 2021-Jul-25 8 p.m. CDT
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Why is China smashing its tech industry? [Noah]: "There is a distinction between AI / military / R&D tech and consumer-focused tech (e.g., Facebook). China is cracking down on consumer-focused tech, which seems counterintuitive because usually a robust tech sector is helpful for innovation. However, it is hypothesized that China may prefer a clearer focus on AI / military / R&D tech instead." (
  '21 Jul 25Added Sun 2021-Jul-25 1:10 p.m. CDT
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• You are likely spreading false information on Twitter even if you are a critical thinker [Jsmp.medium]: "Millions of tweets with false information will be tried, and most of them fail, either because they are un-interesting or because they are easy to debunk. But the ones that survive are both interesting and hard to debunk, and they are the ones that spread, so they tend to be the ones you see. Meanwhile, there is rarely a large incentive to go through a laborious fact checking process." (
  '21 Jul 25Added Sun 2021-Jul-25 1:09 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• "Yes, lockdowns were good" [Noah]: "Let’s do a little thought experiment. Suppose in City A, they lock down. People stay home. The economy gets hurt, but the virus gets suppressed and infections go to a low level. Eventually, they can start to reopen safely, and they don’t immediately get another wave of COVID because there just aren’t that many sick people in town. But in City B, they don’t lock down. 80% of people stay home because of fear, so the economy gets clobbered anyway. But the 20% who go out end up spreading the virus, raising the infection rate to a high level. That causes more fear, and eventually even the 20% who were going out get scared enough to stay home. But now it’s too late — infection has a higher baseline, and takes much longer to go down. So the fear lasts longer, and so does the economic pain." (
  '21 Jul 24Added Sat 2021-Jul-24 11:22 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know [Astralcodexten.substack]: "Lockdowns exist on a pareto fronteir of maximizing lives saved and minimizing economic cost. Many lockdown policies did not land on this frontier and thus could've been pareto improved. Once you have a pareto optimal policy, reasonable people could disagree about the relevant tradeoffs between economic / emotional harm and harm from COVID. It seems that some sort of lockdown policy would be justified." (
  '21 Jul 24Added Sat 2021-Jul-24 11:15 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• "There Are Aliens, but Probably Not Here" [Fakenous.net]: "It took me under an hour on the internet to find the above explanations. I looked for explanations on YouTube, and the first video I found referenced Mick West. I then looked up Mick West’s web site, which lists all his videos. That was my research. So we can infer that the “journalists” working for the UFO-crazed media sources did less than that amount of research. Which is to say, they must have made no effort at all to find explanations for the videos that they keep replaying clips of." (
  '21 Jul 22Added Thu 2021-Jul-22 11:31 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Track records for those who have made lots of predictions [Cold-takes]: Holden says I have a good track record! Also some other people do too. Also Scott Adams does not. (
  '21 Jul 22Added Thu 2021-Jul-22 9:35 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• "An examination of Metaculus" resolved AI predictions and their implications for AI timelines" [EA Forum]: "There are three main types of questions I looked at - Date based questions, numeric range questions, and binary questions. For date questions, slightly fewer than the Metaculus community expected have resolved by now, but the sample size is small. For numeric questions, it did not seem like the community was biased towards predicting faster or slower timelines than the question resolution implied, but it did look like the community was quite overconfident in their ability to predict the resolution. For binary questions, it looked like the community expected more developments to occur than actually happened, but they were appropriately not very confident in their predictions. Overall it looked like there was weak evidence to suggest the community expected more AI progress than actually occurred, but this was not conclusive." (
  '21 Jul 22Added Thu 2021-Jul-22 1:57 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• Haiti vs. the Dominican Republic [Noah]: "So there are a bunch of theses for why the D.R. is so infinitely more successful than Haiti, but none of them quite satisfy on their own. The temptation, of course, is to throw all of the explanations in a bag and mix them together. If you do that, you arrive at a story like this: Haiti was punished by external powers for its revolution in a way the D.R. was not. That created an enduring culture of suspicion of the outside world in Haiti, which prevented it from pursuing trade and exports as a goal like the D.R. did. The struggle against foreign powers also left Haiti with dysfunctional politics that didn’t support environmental protection or spending on infrastructure and education, as in the D.R.; instead, corrupt leaders looted what they could. Corruption and poverty combined to produce political and macroeconomic instability that has held the country down to this day. The problem with this is that it’s a just-so story, conveniently engineered to make everyone happy by including their favorite causal factors. It just says “everything is important, everything is connected”. Which we may or may not ever know." (
  '21 Jul 20Added Tue 2021-Jul-20 12:03 p.m. CDT
  in development | a)
• Here are some ways to change things [Slowboring]: "Change perceptions via changing media, try to win hearts and minds, attempt elite persuasion, help legislatures write legislation, primary Democrats, and defeat Republicans." (
  '21 Jul 20Added Tue 2021-Jul-20 12:44 a.m. CDT
  in activism | a)
• Tough Parenting Decision? Take a Page Out of the CEO’s Playbook. [Feeds.hbr]: "First, emphasize self-care by taking tiny steps toward health and renewal. Next, manage your emotions in the moment by creating calming rituals in advance. Third, tie your decision making to times of day when you have the most energy. Fourth, create a sanctuary where you can escape to collect your thoughts. Finally, curate a board of directors for advice or for brainstorming options." (
  '21 Jul 18Added Sun 2021-Jul-18 11:42 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Xbox before its time: Using the famous 1936 Literary Digest survey as a positive example of statistical adjustment rather than a negative example of non-probability sampling [Statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu]: "The usual way the Literary Digest poll is used in statistics textbooks is as a warning: Use non-probability sampling, and the boogeyman will get you! That’s pretty silly, actually, given that all polls use non-probability sampling if you consider nonresponse as part of the sampling procedure, which in effect it is. I much prefer the positive message: All samples of humans are flawed, but we can do our best to adjust for those flaws, while also recognizing the imperfections of our adjustments." (
  '21 Jul 18Added Sun 2021-Jul-18 11:33 a.m. CDT
  in politicalscience | a)
• Coding with GitHub Copilot [Tmabraham.github.io]: "GitHub Copilot, is a mind-blowing and extremely powerful tool. Additionally, it is a very interesting and practical application of AI. With the domains that it is most familiar, GitHub Copilot works exceptionally well and can write most of the code for you! It may very well change the approach and workflow many programmers have and lead to documentation-driven and test-driven development. But it’s not yet ready for prime time. There are clear issues with leaking of personal information copyright/licensing issues, accessibility to foreign-language users, and its use on more cutting-edge projects. Thankfully, the GitHub team is working on these issues and I’m excited by the future of AI-augmented programming!" (
  '21 Jul 15Added Thu 2021-Jul-15 9:13 a.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• What is the climate left doing? [Slowboring]: "Rather than mass pressure dragging a reluctant and cowardly political system into climate action, an elite consensus inside the Democratic Party keeps pushing climate onto the agenda even though the mass public is not that engaged with it. [...T]he idea that blowing up the bill from the left would induce Jon Tester to get behind a much more left-wing, much more climate-focused reconciliation bill is absurd. As is the idea that making Joe Biden unpopular so Democrats do poorly in the midterms would somehow pave the way for more aggressive rather than less aggressive climate policy." (
  '21 Jul 15Added Thu 2021-Jul-15 9:06 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Honesty about reading [Cold-takes]: "Skimming is necessary, even good. Writers should accommodate it, readers should own it. [...Authors] shouldn’t force or expect readers to wade through all their prose to find a TL;DR on what they are arguing, what their main evidence is, why it matters, and what their responses to key objections are." (
  '21 Jul 15Added Thu 2021-Jul-15 12:11 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Use Prediction Markets To Fund Investigative Reporting [Astralcodexten.substack]: Prediction markets could be used to fund investigative media because the outcome of their investigation would move the market. (
  '21 Jul 13Added Tue 2021-Jul-13 4:37 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• "All Possible Views About Humanity"s Future Are Wild" [Cold-takes]: "[T]his century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more. This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. I illustrate this with a timeline of the galaxy. (On a personal level, this "wildness" is probably the single biggest reason I was skeptical for many years of the arguments presented in this series. Such claims about the significance of the times we live in seem "wild" enough to be suspicious.) But I don't think it's really possible to hold a non-"wild" view on this topic." (
  '21 Jul 13Added Tue 2021-Jul-13 4:31 p.m. CDT
  in xrisk | a)
• Research Debt [Distill.pub]: "Programmers talk about technical debt: there are ways to write software that are faster in the short run but problematic in the long run. [...] Research can also have debt. It comes in several forms: Poor Exposition – Often, there is no good explanation of important ideas and one has to struggle to understand them. [...] Undigested Ideas – Most ideas start off rough and hard to understand. [...] Bad abstractions and notation [...] Noise – [...] Countless papers scream for your attention and there’s no easy way to filter or summarize them. [...] The insidious thing about research debt is that it’s normal. Everyone takes it for granted, and doesn’t realize that things could be different. For example, it’s normal to give very mediocre explanations of research, and people perceive that to be the ceiling of explanation quality. On the rare occasions that truly excellent explanations come along, people see them as one-off miracles rather than a sign that we could systematically be doing better." (
  '21 Jul 10Added Sat 2021-Jul-10 4:55 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Tales from Prediction Markets [Misinfounderload.substack]: "Stories of people manipulating prediction markets, or other unintentional side effects of prediction markets. One example: "There was a market on how many times Souljaboy would tweet during a given week. The way these markets are set up, they subtract the total number of tweets on the account at the beginning and end, so deletions can remove tweets. Someone went on his twitch stream, tipped a couple hundred dollars, and said he'd tip more if Soulja would delete a bunch of tweets. Soulja went on a deleting spree and the market went crazy." (
  '21 Jul 10Added Sat 2021-Jul-10 12:11 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• Engineering levels at Carta [Medium]: "Fortunately, it’s easy to articulate the single most important thing for leveling: your impact on the company. We can sum up the entire system by describing the (rough) impact we expect employees to have as they progress: on tasks (L2), on features (L3), on problems (L4), on teams (L5), on the organization (L6), on the company (L7), and on the industry (L8). You’ll note that this is not a linear progression, especially at the top of the range; moving the trajectory of the industry is exponentially harder than moving the trajectory of the company. This is why our levels aren’t linear, and neither is compensation." Other important principles: you have to do the work of the next level before getting promoted to it, that there is a terminal level at L5 where further promotion is no longer expected, and that management and IC are compensated the same." (
  '21 Jul 10Added Sat 2021-Jul-10 11:11 a.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• How can you evaluate the caliber of people at a company before joining it? Ten tips [Twitter]: "Look to quality of interview questions, hiring process, and their responses to your questions. Watch their tone and style. Look at the background of your interviewers. Once you get an offer, do reverse interviews." (
  '21 Jul 10Added Sat 2021-Jul-10 10:51 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction [Constructionphysics.substack]: Why is it hard to get people to adopt new construction techniques? Construction is very risky and the industry is fragmented so most players aren't big/integrated enough to have the risk-tolerance for innovations (
  '21 Jul 10Added Sat 2021-Jul-10 9:54 a.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• "The "noble lie" on masks probably wasn't a lie" [Lessonsfromthe Crisis.substack]: "This week we look at why Western public health went all-in on their campaign against masks before the abrupt change of course. The standard explanation is it was all a cunning plan to preserve mask supplies for healthcare workers. [...] I don’t think this is true. We can’t see what the US experts were saying to each other at the time, but the UK government has published the internal minutes of deliberations by expert science teams who would have had very similar information to their American counterparts. Those documents don’t reveal a coherent plot to pretend they thought masks wouldn’t work, unless months of fraudulent minutes and other kayfabe were also part of the conspiracy- it just seems more likely that most of them just really believed masks were ineffective, or at least weren’t confident enough about what they thought to fight about it." (
  '21 Jul 09Added Fri 2021-Jul-09 7:42 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Which of these 6 time traps is eating up all your time? [Ideas.ted]: "The six traps are technology interruptions breaking hours into confetti (seemingly harmless notifications combine to overtake leisure time), focusing too much on money, undervaluing time (and not spending money to buy time), regarding busyness as a status symbol, having an aversion to idleness, and thinking we have more time tomorrow than we actually do." (
  '21 Jul 09Added Fri 2021-Jul-09 7:37 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Philosophy Labs [Imperfectcognitions.blogspot]: "STEM fields frequently use labs to enable tighter academic collaboration. Philosophy could benefit from this too, by creating philosophy labs." (
  '21 Jul 09Added Fri 2021-Jul-09 6:04 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• How to be Happy in 15 Clear Steps [Screwthe Zoo]: "Be in control of your life, have good health, do physical activity, have frequent flow states, have strong social bonds, cultivate a sense of gratitude, give back, cultivate frequent novelty, cultivate positive anticipation, experience love, spend time outdoors, cultivate minimal distress, cultivate a positive attitude, cultivate knowledge, and cultivate a sense of purpose." (
  '21 Jul 09Added Fri 2021-Jul-09 6 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Masks Masquerade [Medium]: "Six reasons why the establishment missed masks as a good idea for COVID prevention: "IX ERRORS: 1) missing the compounding effects of masks, 2) missing the nonlinearity of the probability of infection to viral exposures, 3) missing absence of evidence (of benefits of mask wearing) for evidence of absence (of benefits of mask wearing), 4) missing the point that people do not need governments to produce facial covering: they can make their own, 5) missing the compounding effects of statistical signals, 6) ignoring the Non-Aggression Principle by pseudolibertarians (masks are also to protect others from you; it’s a multiplicative process: every person you infect will infect others)." (
  '21 Jul 09Added Fri 2021-Jul-09 4:58 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• The Lin Wells Memo [Library.rumsfeld]: "By 1980, the Soviets were in Afghanistan, Iran was in the throes of revolution, there was talk of our 'hollow forces' and a 'window of vulnerability,' and the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation the world had ever seen. By 1990, the Soviet Union was within a year of dissolution, American forces in the Desert were on the verge of showing they were anything but hollow, the U.S. had become the greatest debtor nation the world had ever known, and almost no one had heard of the internet. Ten years later, Warsaw was the capital of a NATO nation, asymmetric threats transcended geography, and the parallel revolutions of information, biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, and high density energy sources foreshadowed changes almost beyond forecasting. All of which is to say that I'm not sure what 2010 will look like, but I'm sure that it will be very little like we expect, so we should plan accordingly." (
  '21 Jul 07Added Wed 2021-Jul-07 10:41 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• (a) for Archive [Flightfromperfection]: "For a while now, I've been using "(a)" notation to denote archived versions of linked pages. This is a small effort towards creating Long Content[. ...] I think basically anyone whose writing includes links to other work should include archived links alongside the original hyperlinks, if the writing is intended to be long-lived." (
  '21 Jul 07Added Wed 2021-Jul-07 6:17 p.m. CDT
  in random | a)
• Responsible Transparency Consumption [Jefftk]: "When people react negatively to an organization sharing an instance of failure one thing they're doing is putting pressure on the norm that organizations should be sharing this sort of thing. If the norm is very strong, then the pressure is not going to keep people from sharing similar things in the future, and it also means that seeing a failure from this organization but not from others is informative. On the other hand, if the norm is weaker we need to be careful to nourish it, not pushing it harder than it can stand." (
  '21 Jul 07Added Wed 2021-Jul-07 4:39 p.m. CDT
  in culture | a)
• Why Are Gamers So Much Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud? [Atlantic]: "If unpaid Minecraft mods can produce a 29-page mathematical analysis of Dream’s contested run, then scientists and editors can find the time to treat plausible fraud allegations with the seriousness they deserve. If the maintenance of integrity can become such a crucial interest for a community of gaming hobbyists, then it can be the same for a community of professional researchers. And if the speedrunning world can learn lessons from so many cases of cheating, there’s no excuse for scientists who fail to do the same." (
  '21 Jul 04Added Sun 2021-Jul-04 6:05 p.m. CDT
  in metascience | a)
• The most successful EA podcast of all time: Sam Harris and Will MacAskill (2020) [EA Forum]: Why was this so impactful? Sam set an example (by joining GWWC) and Sam made a rare endorsement. The conversation is really good - with an expansive definition of EA and connection of EA to topical questions (yes and approach). (
  '21 Jul 04Added Sun 2021-Jul-04 11:15 a.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Everyday Longtermism [EA Forum]: "We help decision-makers care for the right things, and make good choices. We practice this at every scale, with attention to how much the case matters. Abide by commonsense morality." (
  '21 Jul 03Added Sat 2021-Jul-03 1 p.m. CDT
  in ethics | a)
• The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship [LessWrong]: "The lesson I take from these and a hundred other examples is to employ the rationality virtue of scholarship. Stand on the shoulders of giants. We don't each need to cut our own path into a subject right from the point of near-total ignorance. [...] Study enough to have a view of the current state of the debate so you don't waste your time on paths that have already dead-ended, or on arguments that have already been refuted. Catch up before you speak up. This is why, in more than 1000 posts on my own blog, I've said almost nothing that is original. Most of my posts instead summarize what other experts have said, in an effort to bring myself and my readers up to the level of the current debate on a subject before we try to make new contributions to it." (
  '21 Jul 01Added Thu 2021-Jul-01 11 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Why you should write a “how to work with me” user manual [Medium]: "Picture this common situation: You’ve joined a new company or a new executive is now in charge of the team you’re working in. You may get a face to face introductory meeting but it will take weeks (or even months) of working closely together to get to know each other and truly understand the best way to work with each other. [...] But is there a better way? [...] Claire thinks that founders and other leaders and managers should write a guide to working with them." (
  '21 Jun 22Added Tue 2021-Jun-22 8:05 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Rational Decision-Making under Uncertainty: Observed Betting Patterns on a Biased Coin [Papers.ssrn]: "“In one study, each participant was given $25 and asked to bet on a coin that would land heads 60%. Remarkably, 28% of participants went bust and the average payout was just $91. 30% of participants bet everything on one toss, while 66% gambled on tails on at least one toss.”" (
  '21 Jun 22Added Tue 2021-Jun-22 5:21 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• New York’s mayoral race shows progressives are out of touch with ordinary Democrats [Washingtonpost]: "Last year’s presidential primaries showed how out of touch progressive activists are with the concerns of ordinary Democrats. Then-candidate Joe Biden refused to endorse left-wing pet causes such as the Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all and defunding the police — and it didn’t hurt him one iota. He decisively defeated the darlings of the left: Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Now the lesson of the presidential race is likely to be confirmed in Tuesday’s mayoral election in one of the most liberal cities in the country — New York." (
  '21 Jun 22Added Tue 2021-Jun-22 2:33 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• Can This New Map Fix Our Distorted Views of the World? [NYTimes]: "Use the back of the page, too. Make the world map a double-sided circle, like a vinyl record. You could put the Northern Hemisphere on the top side, and the Southern Hemisphere on the bottom, or vice versa. Or to put it differently: You could deflate the 3-D Earth into two dimensions. And if you did, you could blow the accuracy of previous maps out of the water." (
  '21 Jun 20Added Sun 2021-Jun-20 7:53 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Inevitable Planetary Doom Has Been Exaggerated [Atlantic]: "Climate change and extinction are real and bad. But headlines like "we are in the 6th mass extinction" or "we have ten years to fix climate change" can obscure the fact that doom is not inevitable and there's no threshold at which it isn't worth fighting." (
  '21 Jun 20Added Sun 2021-Jun-20 5:47 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Common statistical tests are linear models (or: how to teach stats) [Lindeloev.github.io]: "The most common statistical tests are nothing but special cases of linear models" (
  '21 Jun 20Added Sun 2021-Jun-20 5:46 p.m. CDT
  in statistics | a)
• DATA: Post-Pandemic Silicon Valley Isn’t A Place [Blog.initialized]: "Pre-pandemic, the Bay Area was still the leading choice for our founders in terms of where to start a company. There were many other cities that were distant seconds or thirds including New York and Seattle. Post-pandemic is a different story. More than 40 percent of founders say that the best place to start a company will be in the cloud. We expect to see decentralized or remote companies displace venture-backed companies based in the Bay Area over time." (
  '21 Jun 20Added Sun 2021-Jun-20 5:38 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• "A QAnon ‘Digital Soldier’ Marches On, Undeterred by Theory’s Unraveling" [NYTimes]: "Harvard educated, Jill Stein supporter animal activist turned Q-Anon supporter is pretty good evidence of horseshoe theory" (
  '21 Jun 20Added Sun 2021-Jun-20 5:34 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• "What We Know, Are Still Getting Wrong, and Have Yet to Learn about the Relationships among the SAT, Intelligence and Achievement" [Mdpi]: "the predictive power of the SAT holds even when researchers control for socioeconomic status...it is remarkably difficult to increase an individual’s SAT score...high SAT scores are generally difficult to acquire by any means other than high ability" (
  '21 Jun 15Added Tue 2021-Jun-15 12:07 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Buying time promotes happiness [Pnas]: "Despite rising incomes, people around the world are feeling increasingly pressed for time, undermining well-being. We show that the time famine of modern life can be reduced by using money to buy time. Surveys of large, diverse samples from four countries reveal that spending money on time-saving services is linked to greater life satisfaction. To establish causality, we show that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase. This research reveals a previously unexamined route from wealth to well-being: spending money to buy free time." (
  '21 Jun 15Added Tue 2021-Jun-15 12:05 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Covid-19 has shown humanity how close we are to the edge [The Guardian]: "What could the UK government do to protect humanity from existential risk? In this new Guardian piece I give three suggestions: 1. A national biosecurity centre, 2. Improve government risk assessment, 3. A new international treaty on risks to humanity" (
  '21 Jun 15Added Tue 2021-Jun-15 midnight CDT
  in policy | a)
• People systematically overlook subtractive changes [Nature]: "We naturally search for additional things to do, rather than things we can stop doing, even when the latter would be better: "Defaulting to searches for additive changes may be one reason that people struggle with overburdened schedules, red tape..." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 11:57 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Metacognitive supports as cognitive scaffolding [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Learning requires metacognition, but environments can take some of that metacognitive burden off of learners’ shoulders. In a classroom setting, teachers do much of the monitoring, evaluation, planning, and executive control. Of course, they sometimes do too much of it, but in many situations, this can free students to focus on the material at hand. [...] Metacognition is inherently dynamic, so to design an environment which offers metacognitive supports, that environment must dynamically behave and respond to participants’ engagement with the material." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:56 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• People generally develop skills to a plateau and then stop [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Effective deliberate practice [...] offers students opportunities for focused repetitions. During a baseball game, a batter may only swing a dozen times, but a batter working with an expert coach may attempt hundreds of pitches a day. Even better: those pitches may all be designed to exploit a specific weakness." Normal work doesn't have this. Instead, people generally develop skills to a plateau and then stop. One reason is that they tend to lack external cues that they are still an amateur (whereas it is obvious if you are an amateur piano-player). Moreover, performance plateaus often require a change in approach to surmount and naive approaches to practice rapidly plateau." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:56 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Deep understanding requires (and is a result of) intense personal connection [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Seen through this lens, perfunctory learning activities (“fine, I guess I’ll attend that workshop”) often subvert their own goal. Without personal connection to the ideas, participants’ intellectual participation will be relatively shallow. [...] When an activity’s real purpose is something intrinsically meaningful to the participant, their earnest intellectual participation will naturally produce effortful engagement with the ideas involved. Deeper understanding was not the goal, but it will likely occur anyway." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:56 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Tags are an ineffective association structure [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Tags are an easy way to relate heterogenous items, but they’re quite a low-signal way of describing relationships. [...] Links between materials in an information system can be fine-grained (like a citation in the middle of a sentence of a paper) or coarse-grained (like a “see also” section). It’s generally better to make fine-grained associations [...] This is particularly true when links are bidirectional, since you’ll need help to see why the “backwards” relationship makes sense. [...] It’s often not enough to say “X is related to Y”: better to say “X goes into more detail about Y in the context of Z.”" (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:55 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Enabling environment [Notes.andymatuschak]: "You can read a book about starting a startup, or you can join Y Combinator. Which do you choose? This is the power of an enabling environment. [...] An enabling environment significantly expands its participants’ capacity to do things they find meaningful and important. Powerful enabling environments usually arise as a byproduct of projects pursuing their own intrinsically meaningful purposes. [...] The Apollo program was an incredibly powerful Enabling environment, but it did not emerge from a project aiming to give scientists lots of great opportunities for personal growth. Rather, it was about putting people on the moon (and, er, saving the world from the Soviets). The enabling environment was a byproduct of that deeply meaningful effort. [...] Authored environments are significantly colored by authors’ motivations (e.g., Haskell is more about the authors' interest in computer theory than production-ready code); that often means powerful enabling environments focus on expert use. [...] Those purposes are usually best served by enabling experts, not novices" (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:55 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Anti-marketing [Notes.andymatuschak]: "When speaking publicly, researchers and entrepreneurs alike tend to present the rosiest possible picture of their work. This often leads to harmful over-claiming (Pitching out corrupts within) and a less personal, more transactional relationship with others. An interesting antidote is to actively practice 'anti-marketing': to make a point of focusing publicly on the least rosy parts of one’s projects—what’s confusing, what’s frustrating, what’s not working. If you make anti-marketing the goal, then interesting challenges become a positive thing: fodder for public conversation, not something to be swept under the rug." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:55 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• "Scenius, or Communal Genius" [Kk]: "Scenius is like genius, only embedded in a scene rather than in genes. [...] Scenius is based on mutual appreciation (Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy), rapid exchange of tools and techniques (As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared), ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility, network effects of success (when a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene), local tolerance for the novelties (the local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene and the renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone)." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:54 p.m. CDT
  in culture | a)
• A reading inbox to capture possibly-useful references [Notes.andymatuschak]: "To avoid a proliferation of anxiety-inducing browser tabs and a terrifying folder of PDFs, it’s important to have an automatic procedure for capturing references to readings which might prove useful. Once captured, each item in the inbox either: gets trashed (doesn’t look like it’s worth a detailed read after all), gets read in a serious fashion, gets read shallowly and filed in the reference library, (maybe) gets added to some other list like 'recipes to be cooked'. Importantly, this isn’t a 'someday maybe' list. It doesn’t accumulate indefinitely." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:54 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Executable strategy [Notes.andymatuschak]: "In creative work and in life, many goals seem unpredictable and unwieldy, reliant on hope and luck [...] Cleaning the kitchen isn’t like that. Even clearing out one’s inbox isn’t like that[. ...] A lot of knowledge work is ad-hoc and does not rely on an executable strategy, but maybe it should. [...] To construct an executable strategy, we must factor the task into activities such that: completing more of those activities will reliably bring you closer to the goal, each activity consumes a predictable amount of effort, each activity feels doable, and little effort is required to select and plan an activity." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:53 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Why books donʼt work [Andymatuschak]: "All this suggests a peculiar conclusion: as a medium, books are surprisingly bad at conveying knowledge, and readers mostly don’t realize it. [...] Books don’t work for the same reason that lectures don’t work: neither medium has any explicit theory of how people actually learn things, and as a result, both mediums accidentally (and mostly invisibly) evolved around a theory that’s plainly false. [...] Like lecturers, many authors would offer a more plausible cognitive model when pressed. Readers can’t just read the words. They have to really think about them. [...] Unfortunately, these tactics don’t come easily. Readers must learn specific reflective strategies. 'What questions should I be asking? How should I summarize what I’m reading?' Readers must run their own feedback loops. 'Did I understand that? Should I re-read it? Consult another text?' Readers must understand their own cognition. 'What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?'" (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:53 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• People who write extensively about note-writing rarely have a serious context of use [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Many bloggers and 'life-hackers' have made a full-time job of suggesting how you should organize your journal[. ...] We should take this advice seriously insofar as those practices have helped the authors achieve meaningful creative work: 'Better note-taking' misses the point; what matters is 'better thinking'. But most people who write about note-taking don’t seem particularly accomplished in their own fields, whatever those may be. In fact, most such writers aren’t applying their notes to some exogenous creative problem: their primary creative work is writing about productivity. These writers offer advice on note-taking to help scientists and executives with the challenges of their work, but the advice was developed in a context disconnected from those external realities. [...] Startups and technologists often fool themselves by working with and talking to early adopters who are mostly interested in playing with new technologies." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:53 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• 'Better note-taking' misses the point; what matters is 'better thinking' [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Lots of people write about solutions to the problem that Note-writing practices are generally ineffective. The vast majority of that writing fixates on a myopic, 'lifehacking'-type frame, focused on answering questions like: 'how should I organize my notes?', 'what kind of journal should I use?', 'how can I make it easy to capture snippets of things I read?', etc. Answers to these questions are unsatisfying because the questions are focused on the wrong thing. The goal is not to take notes—the goal is to think effectively. Better questions are 'what practices can help me reliably develop insights over time?', 'how can I shepherd my attention effectively?' etc." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:52 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Deep understanding requires detailed knowledge of fundamentals [Notes.andymatuschak]: "In response to People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice, many suggest that they don’t want detailed recall. They do most of their reading 'to get a general picture,' or 'just to get a conceptual understanding.' That might sometimes be possible, but in many cases it’s not possible to really understand a concept without a firm grasp of the details on which it’s built." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:52 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• How rapidly do people forget practical knowledge? [Notes.andymatuschak]: "In Quantum Country, we find that a typical reader forgets about a third of the material after a month without review. A more conservative figure in medicine:Medical students forget roughly 25–35 percent of basic science knowledge after one year, more than 50 percent by the next year, and 80–85 percent after 25 years. Reading natural text in a contrived experimental setting, Amlund et al (1986) find <50% free recall minutes later, even when readers knew it was a test." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:52 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• "Powerful innovations often focus on creating new paradigms, not solving problems of the current context" [Notes.andymatuschak]: "The XEROX Alto wasn’t trying to solve the problems of existing offices: it attempted to create a completely new context, which would have its own benefits and challenges. Likewise, one can’t invent the iPhone by trying to solve the problems of the Motorola ROKR: it’s a new thing, more an act of invention than of reaction or iteration. Expanding from technology, one can apply this observation to certain political systems (democracy), economic systems (crypto), spiritual systems (Dzogchen), etc." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:51 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Programmable attention [Notes.andymatuschak]: "When you choose whom to follow on Twitter, you’re choosing what types of mindsets and aesthetics to expose yourself to on a regular basis. You’re choosing what types of conversations to have. You’re choosing to be reminded regularly of certain things, and not of others. This is a kind of Programmable attention." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:51 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Deliberative practice is activities focused specifically on improving skills. It's hard to build deliberative practice in knowledge workers because there isn't very specific feedback and skills are not clearly defined. However, there is some ways to improve - knowledge workers seem to forget what they read and don't really notice and typical note-taking practices are very ineffective, and workers usually don't have concrete processes for developing ideas." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:50 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Generation effect [Notes.andymatuschak]: "The generation effect suggests that people are better able to remember material which they themselves generate, compared to material which they read or which is presented to them." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:50 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Inboxes only work if you trust how they’re drained [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Inboxes only let us close open loops if they’re reliable—that is, if you can add something to it with total confidence that it’ll get 'handled' in some reasonable timeframe. [..] In efficient inboxes, it may be easy to maintain this kind of confidence: the departure naturally rate exceeds the arrival rate. But most knowledge worker inboxes don’t look like this." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:49 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• "Use phones to collect and triage, not (usually) to read" [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Because it’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply, we should be wary of reading on our phones: we’re usually not in a position or mindset to write! This can be dangerous because reading articles on the phone can feel like it’s doing work, but Knowledge work should accrete, and this kind of reading mostly doesn’t." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:49 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Evergreen note-writing helps insight accumulate [Notes.andymatuschak]: "Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates. [...] Accumulating tabs, saving PDFs, and making bookmarks feels like progress, but we systematically overrate its value. Understanding requires effortful engagement; you are not likely to draw much understanding from a folder of barely-skimmed PDFs. [...] Most people don’t seem to take note-writing very seriously as a skill. [...] In contrast to Evergreen notes, Most people use notes as a bucket for storage or scratch thoughts. These are very convenient to write, but after a year of writing such notes, they’ll just have a pile of dissociated notes. The notes won’t have added up to anything. [...] It’s important to Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply, but instead of just writing about the specific book you’re reading, you can (and should) write your notes such that your reading observations accumulate over time as they interact with each other and with your own ideas. [...] If you had to set one metric to use as a leading indicator for yourself as a knowledge worker, the best I know might be the number of Evergreen notes written per day." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:48 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Write about what you read to internalize texts deeply [Notes.andymatuschak]: "If you want to really understand an idea, you have to grapple with it. [...] Writing is a great way to put pressure on your thinking: it’s hard to summarize something you don’t sharply understand." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 10:48 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Why it’s difficult to build teams in high growth organisations [Jchyip.medium]: "Two reasons why building teams in high growth is difficult: can’t assume stable teams, can’t rely on cultural osmosis. [...] How to deal with high growth: structure follows strategy, organic org design, deliberate culture. Structure should be stable where strategy is stable; structure should be flexible where strategy is volatile." To grow teams, add new people to existing teams and then slowly separate them into subteams." (
  '21 Jun 14Added Mon 2021-Jun-14 12:03 a.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• "BIRD: Bound, Input, Recommend, Decide" [Notion.so]: "Bound - This person says “Do anything, as long as you don’t do X”. They put fences around cliffs to stop us falling off them. Input - This person says “I think that option A is most promising - I think option B has downside Y”. They give you information to help you find the high points. Recommend - This person says “I recommend that we pick option A”. They incorporate the information from the Bs and the Is, and make a holistic non-binding suggestion about which mountain to climb. There is only one R. The R needs to be someone who has broad context, and who is trusted by everyone else involved. Decide - This person says “we’re going to carry out option A”. They look at the R’s recommendation, and make a biding call to commit to action. Ideally, there is only one D. The D should be the person closest to the issue area, with the ability to understand the trade-offs at play. The D and the R can be the same person." (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 11:52 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• How Life Sciences Actually Work: Findings of a Year-Long Investigation [Example]: "Academia has a lot of problems and it could work much better. However, these problems are not as catastrophic as an outside perspective would suggest. My (contrarian, I guess) intuition is that scientific progress in biology is not slowing down. Specific parts of academia that seem to be problematic: rigid, punishing for deviation, career progression; peer review; need to constantly fundraise for professors. Parts that seem to be less of a problem than I initially thought: short-termism; lack of funding for young scientists." (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 11:41 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Forecasting How Long It Takes to Make a Baby [Usrsb.in]: "Pregnancy involves conceiving, staying pregnant, and giving birth. Via a Monte Carlo simultion, 50% of couples aged 35-39 have a baby within 1 year and 4.2 months of trying. Data for other perentiles and age ranges are provided." (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 11:39 p.m. CDT
  in random | a)
• Underrated Risks of Buying a Home [Usrsb.in]: "Expansive soil and collapsible soil causing foundation cracks (more common than people think and hard to diagnose), asbestos (more common than people think and more easily disturbed than people think), flooding (increased by climate change + underrating risks + poor insurance coverage), correlated risks, the seller’s disclosure can be unreliable (many home owners simply don’t know what’s going on with their homes, or the seller can claim ignorance even if they weren’t ignorant)." (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 11:36 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Why is there only one Elon Musk? Why is there so much low-hanging fruit? [Guzey]: "There are many smart people around. There are many ambitious people around. There are many people with big visions. There are very few people who are all of those things combined. Thus, we shouldn’t be surprised there’s so many big interesting things left to do, so many thoughts to be thought, and so many companies to be built. Very few problems can afford having Elon Musks working on them." (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 11:25 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Countering imposter syndrome for interns and new staff [Docs.google]: "Imposter syndrome is not a formal mental health diagnosis, but is an informal term used for the experience of believing you are not as competent as others perceive you to be. It’s particularly common for people to experience this when they’re starting a new role. [...] Some amount of uncertainty about how you’re doing is normal and helpful. We all have our shortcomings and all make mistakes, and being able to look at those realistically is a strength. Signs that your worry is getting disconnected from what’s useful or realistic: (1) Lots of negative self-talk (the sometimes-brutal things we say to ourselves), (2) Feeling you can’t enjoy your time outside of work because of worries about work, (3) The amount you’re worrying is making you less effective at work" (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 9:30 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Phantom Tyler Cowen [Marginalrevolution]: "If you write enough about what you like and dislike, other people can model you inside their heads and follow your guidance without you having to give it" (
  '21 Jun 13Added Sun 2021-Jun-13 9:06 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• The Secret to Getting Replies to Your Emails: The One Hand Test [Managementcenter]: "“Imagine the person you’re emailing going from one meeting to the next and walking while holding her phone. Could she reply to your email while typing with one hand? Or will she glance at the email, see that it requires a longer reply than she has time to type, and set it aside for later (a later that may or may not ever come)?”" (
  '21 Jun 08Added Tue 2021-Jun-08 12:24 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• How Substack Became Milquetoast [Nintil]: "We have lost an important part of the internet. Substack (and similar trends) have pressured bloggers to have less personality, be less likely to have unusual/creative/detailed thoughts, and give less options to readers." (
  '21 Jun 06Added Sun 2021-Jun-06 8:42 p.m. CDT
  in random | a)
• Data on forecasting accuracy across different time horizons and levels of forecaster experience [EA Forum]: "When looking at individual predictors, it seems that a very common failure mode among newer or less dedicated predictors is overconfidence, and that it is more prevalent than underconfidence across most subgroups. Across both PredictionBook and Metaculus, there seemed to be a significant bias towards overestimating the chances of positive resolution. This effect seemed to get stronger as time to resolution increased. At least in the PredictionBook data, there was some weak evidence to suggest prediction performance improves with making more predictions, but there were too many confounding factors here to draw any confident conclusion. The conclusions I was able to draw from this were limited, and working to improve this by expanding the amount and quality of data available for analysis like this seems worth doing." (
  '21 Jun 03Added Thu 2021-Jun-03 9:49 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• "Some thoughts on "faculty lounge politics" [Slowboring]: "He is using a colorful turn of phrase to contrast Biden’s style of politics with a style of politics in which a politician — who is staffed entirely by young college graduates — adopts modes of rhetoric and policymaking that ignore the fact that the median educational attainment of the electorate is much lower than that of the staffer class. That was always the case, but it traditionally didn’t matter that much in practice. Today, however, there is a lot of ideological polarization on age and educational lines so it matters a lot to remember that the majority of the electorate is over 50 and didn’t go to college." (
  '21 May 07Added Fri 2021-May-07 9:43 p.m. CDT
  in advocacy | a)
• Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19 [Science.sciencemag]: "Brauner et al. amassed and curated data from 41 countries as input to a model to identify the individual nonpharmaceutical interventions that were the most effective at curtailing transmission during the early pandemic. Limiting gatherings to fewer than 10 people, closing high-exposure businesses, and closing schools and universities were each more effective than stay-at-home orders, which were of modest effect in slowing transmission." (
  '21 Apr 30Added Fri 2021-Apr-30 9:42 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• On Sleep Procrastination: Going To Bed At A Reasonable Hour [EA Forum]: Going to sleep on-time and getting enough sleep seems like a quite important thing to do. (
  '21 Apr 30Added Fri 2021-Apr-30 12:06 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Ally with Vietnam [Noah]: Allying with small countries like Vietnam can be a good way for the US to gain long-term power against China (
  '21 Apr 22Added Thu 2021-Apr-22 7:08 p.m. CDT
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Wittgenstein’s Ruler [Wisdomsummary]: "According to Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust the ruler’s reliability, the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table." That is, if you seek to measure something and you get a non-intuitive result, that may mean that it is your measurement system that is wrong." (
  '21 Apr 21Added Wed 2021-Apr-21 3:59 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• "The Fragile World Hypothesis: Complexity, Fragility, and Systemic Existential Risk" [Sciencedirect]: "Technology is fragile - we build very complex system that need ongoing maintenance just to remain functional. Modern systems are more fragile generally. The question I ask in the paper is whether this increasing fragility is inevitable - and if it is, the first implication is that monotonically increasing fragility will inevitably lead to collapses.Even today, if one of several key systems breaks, it could cause cascading failures. If power goes out, so do communication systems. If GPS stops working, some farms can't use their complex irrigation systems or their tractors." (
  '21 Mar 21Added Sun 2021-Mar-21 8:39 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Hindsight is 2020 [Predictingpolitics]: "The polls were wrong but not unpredictably wrong by having a normal amount of polling error. The models were both wrong and good by being accurate, though not properly pricing in polling error. The markets were right for the wrong reasons by being generally pro-MAGA biased than smart." (
  '20 Nov 17Added Tue 2020-Nov-17 10:10 p.m. CST
  in forecasting | a)
• Estimation of probabilities to get tenure track in academia: baseline and p... [EA Forum]: "conditional on wanting to get a permanent position in academia, you should have a baseline chance between 15-30% of landing a permanent job at academia" (
  '20 Oct 28Added Wed 2020-Oct-28 9:17 a.m. CDT
  in careers | a)
• Some learnings I had from forecasting in 2020 [EA Forum]: "Forming (good) outside views is often hard but not impossible. For novel out-of-distribution situations, "normal" people often trust centralized data/ontologies more than is warranted. The EA community overrates the predictive validity and epistemic superiority of forecasters/forecasting. The EA community overrates Superforecasters and Superforecasting techniques. Good intuitions are really important. Relatedly, most of my forecasting mistakes are due to emotional rather than technical reasons." (
  '20 Oct 05Added Mon 2020-Oct-05 4:07 p.m. CDT
  in forecasting | a)
• EA Group Organizer Career Paths Outside of EA [EA Forum]: "Being an organizer of an effective altruist group, while impactful in its own right, could be good training for community management work in for-profit roles." (
  '20 Sep 01Added Tue 2020-Sep-01 6:17 a.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• "Use resilience, instead of imprecision, to communicate uncertainty" [EA Forum]: "Suppose you want to estimate some important X (e.g. risk of great power conflict this century, total compute in 2050). If your best guess for X is 0.37, but you're very uncertain, you still shouldn't replace it with an imprecise approximation (e.g. "roughly 0.4", "fairly unlikely"), as this removes information. It is better to offer your precise estimate, alongside some estimate of its resilience, either subjectively ("0.37, but if I thought about it for an hour I'd expect to go up or down by a factor of 2"), or objectively ("0.37, but I think the standard error for my guess to be ~0.1")." (
  '20 Sep 01Added Tue 2020-Sep-01 6:10 a.m. CDT
  in costeffectiveness | a)
• The next challenge for plant-based meat: Winning the price war against animal meat [Vox]: "That said, neither Bollard nor Zak Weston, a researcher at the Good Food Institute, thought direct monetary subsidies were the main reason meat was so cheap. More important are invisible forms of subsidization like not enforcing worker’s rights, exempting factory farms from animal cruelty laws, not requiring companies to engage in environmental cleanup, and not restricting practices — like antibiotic overuse — that impose costs on the whole world. [...] In other words, if the animal meat industry were held accountable for the costs their products and their workings inflict on society, meat would be much more expensive." (
  '20 Aug 20Added Thu 2020-Aug-20 5:02 p.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• Agreeing to disagree: reports of the popularity of Covid-19 conspiracy theories are greatly exaggerated [Cambridge]: "When using a balanced Likert scale with as many disagree options as agree options (as opposed to slanting towards having more agree options), support for conspiracy theories dropped from ~20% to ~1%." (
  '20 Jul 28Added Tue 2020-Jul-28 8:08 a.m. CDT
  in statistics | a)
• The Goldbarch conjecture is probably correct; so was Fermat's last theorem [LessWrong]: Pretty interesting way of demonstrating the Golbarch conjecture has a ~99.6% chance of being true. (
  '20 Jul 16Added Thu 2020-Jul-16 10:09 p.m. CDT
  in math | a)
• Giving GPT-3 a Turing Test [Lacker.io]: "We have certainly come a long way. [...] GPT-3 is quite impressive in some areas, and still clearly subhuman in others. My hope is that with a better understanding of its strengths and weaknesses, we software engineers will be better equipped to use modern language models in real products." (
  '20 Jul 15Added Wed 2020-Jul-15 9:30 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Red flags to keep an eye out for in startup recruiting [Medium]: "When you join a startup, you’re doing more than investing your money — you’re investing your time, energy, and attention. That means that you deserve to be treated well, and have a positive experience in your work environment (as does any employee). But, startups are known for being particularly difficult work environments — people get stressed, and may not have the right experience for the roles, all while extreme growth or lack of growth puts the pressure on. So, here are a few flags to look out for in recruiting processes that can help you steer clear of investing effort in companies that just aren’t worth it." (
  '20 Jul 06Added Mon 2020-Jul-06 10:44 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Exploring the Streisand Effect [EA Forum]: "The Streisand effect occurs when efforts to suppress the spread of information cause it to spread more widely. It occurs for several reasons: because censorship is interesting independent of the information being censored; because it provides a good signal that the information being suppressed is worth knowing; and because it is offensive, triggering instinctive opposition in both target and audience. Would-be censors can risk triggering Streisand effects for a variety of rational and irrational reasons; however, even if a given incident has strong potential to backfire, a significant actual Streisand effect typically requires concerted and media-savvy opposition. It is difficult to estimate the actual rate of Streisand effects as a proportion of attempts at censorship; however, even if "general" Streisand effects that reach national news are very rare, smaller effects that remain localised to particular communities can remain a major concern." (
  '20 Jul 04Added Sat 2020-Jul-04 4:06 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• How deepfakes could actually do some good [Vox]: "In Chechnya, LGBTQ people have faced significant persecution, including unlawful detentions, torture, and other forms of abuse. Because survivors can rarely reveal their own identities safely, the team behind the film Welcome to Chechnya turned to the same sort of technology typically seen in deepfake videos. They’re using artificial intelligence to overlay faces of volunteers on top of those of survivors. This application of deepfake-like technology can replace more traditional ways of keeping sources anonymous, like having them sit in a shadow or blurring their faces. The tech also helps better display the emotions of the survivors." (
  '20 Jun 29Added Mon 2020-Jun-29 4:47 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• The Lost Art of True Rest [ZenHabits]: "Think about it: when you get a break, what do you normally do? Go on your phone or computer? [...] What happens when you’re done with work for the day? [...] When do we ever truly rest, not only our bodies but our minds? [...] For me, there are a handful of ways to rest that feel very nourishing and replenishing: Closing my eyes, lying down, and doing nothing. [...] Going outside without using a device. Connecting to nature. [...] Relaxing with someone else. Feeling connection with them. [...] Being fully present with a simple non-work activity, like having tea. [...] There are probably other ways to truly rest. Playing music, creating art, dancing, perhaps. But these four are my favorite." (
  '20 Jun 29Added Mon 2020-Jun-29 9:49 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Myth of Quality Time [NYTimes]: "I used to think that shorter would be better, and in the past, I arrived for these beach vacations a day late or fled two days early, telling myself that I had to when in truth I also wanted to — because I crave my space and my quiet, and because I weary of marinating in sunscreen and discovering sand in strange places. But in recent years, I’ve showed up at the start and stayed for the duration, and I’ve noticed a difference. With a more expansive stretch, there’s a better chance that I’ll be around at the precise, random moment when one of my nephews drops his guard and solicits my advice about something private. Or when one of my nieces will need someone other than her parents to tell her that she’s smart and beautiful. Or when one of my siblings will flash back on an incident from our childhood that makes us laugh uncontrollably, and suddenly the cozy, happy chain of our love is cinched that much tighter." (
  '20 Jun 26Added Fri 2020-Jun-26 12:47 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Life science jobs at Berkeley give precedence to candidates’ diversity and inclusion statements [WhyEvolutionIsTrue]: "We’ve recently been discussing the use of mandatory “diversity statements” for academic job candidates, and the University of California’s commitment to not just using them in all searches, but giving these statements precedence in the hiring process, so that if your statement doesn’t exceed a minimum numerical cutoff for promoting diversity, increasing it in your past, and promulgating it in the future should you be hired, your candidacy is terminated[. ...] I find this process chilling in its commitment to a specific form of social engineering. While I favor affirmative action (many readers here don’t), I think it should be enacted not through eliminating candidates because of insufficient diversity statements, but through departmental initiatives to identify and hire good minority candidates. [...] In other words, it enforces not just diversity, which I favor, but ideology, which I don’t. Further, only race and gender were involved here as aspects of “diversity”—not things like class, political viewpoint, background independent of race and sex, and so on." (
  '20 Jun 24Added Wed 2020-Jun-24 1:52 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• Fewer but poorer: Benevolent partiality in prosocial preferences [EA Forum]: "People often choose to help people from more disadvantaged groups "even when this transparently implies sacrificing lives." However, people are much more likely to make the decision that saves the most lives possible if they are asked to explicitly reflect on and rank which criteria they should use to make." (
  '20 Jun 24Added Wed 2020-Jun-24 9:38 a.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Why the tails come apart [LessWrong]: "extreme outliers of a given predictor are seldom similarly extreme outliers on the outcome it predicts, and vice versa. Although 6'7" is very tall, it lies within a couple of standard deviations of the median US adult male height - there are many thousands of US men taller than the average NBA player, yet are not in the NBA. [...] The trend seems to be that even when two factors are correlated, their tails diverge: the fastest servers are good tennis players, but not the very best (and the very best players serve fast, but not the very fastest); the very richest tend to be smart, but not the very smartest (and vice versa)." (
  '20 Jun 22Added Mon 2020-Jun-22 10:09 a.m. CDT
  in statistics | a)
• The Great American Eye-Exam Scam [Atlantic]: "The ordeal led me to look into a fact that has puzzled me ever since I moved to the United States a dozen years ago. In every other country in which I’ve lived—Germany and Britain, France and Italy—it is far easier to buy glasses or contact lenses than it is here. In those countries, as in Peru, you can simply walk into an optician’s store and ask an employee to give you an eye test, likely free of charge. If you already know your strength, you can just tell them what you want. You can also buy contact lenses from the closest drugstore without having to talk to a single soul—no doctor’s prescription necessary. So why does the United States require people who want to purchase something as simple as a curved piece of plastic to get a prescription, preceded by a costly medical exam?" (
  '20 Jun 21Added Sun 2020-Jun-21 9:35 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• My weekly review habit [BenKuhn]: "Every Saturday morning, I take 3-4 hours to think about how my week went and how I’ll make the next one better. [...] While each individual tweak is small, over the weeks and years they’ve compounded to make me a lot more effective. Because of that, this weekly review is the most useful habit (or habit-generating meta-habit) I’ve built." (
  '20 Jun 21Added Sun 2020-Jun-21 9:12 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Democrats Should Just Stick to What’s Popular [Atlantic]: "ductive as these arguments may seem, they fly in the face of compelling evidence about the kind of radicalism that American voters are—and, just as importantly, are not—willing to countenance. While Americans seem more open to progressive economic policy now than in the recent past, for example, they are not nearly as opposed to capitalism as some Democrats like to claim." (
  '20 Jun 21Added Sun 2020-Jun-21 3:29 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse [Atlantic]: "Narendra Modi has been emboldened by reelection. The American president could be too." (
  '20 Jun 21Added Sun 2020-Jun-21 2:52 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• How to Find Sources in an Unreliable World [Acesounderglass]: "(1) Search “best book TOPIC” on google. Look for a list author with deep models on both the problem they are trying to address, and why each book in particular helps educate on that problem. A bad list will typically have a topic rather than a question they are trying to answer, and will talk about why books they recommend are generically good, rather than how they address a particular issue. (2) Search for your topic on Google Scholar. Look at highly cited papers. Even if they’re wrong, they’re probably important for understanding what else you read. Look at what they cite or are cited by. Especially keep an eye out for review articles. (3) Check Reddit. (4) Ask your followers on social media. Better, announce what you are going to read and wait for people to tell you why you are wrong. (5) Ask an expert. (6) Follow interesting people on social media and squirrel away their recommendations as they make them." (
  '20 Jun 20Added Sat 2020-Jun-20 10:54 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• My Fitness Odyssey: 2008-2020 (38-51yo(M)) [Reddit]: "2008, age 39 - fat, but tanned. 2009, age 40 - still fat, but pasty. 2012, age 43 - began running. 2016, age 47 - been working out, but weak. Still running. 2018, age 49 - after 3 cycles of Building the Monolith + lots of cardio, + endurance challenges. A bit stronger. 2020, age 51 - after a year of doing a Murph a week, and midway through Average to Savage 2. Still running. A bit more strong: 5x190kg deads and 1x240kg Farmers Lift. Currently bw of 81kg/180lbs I've worked hard, and I've worked consistently over the last 5 years. No HRT or steroinks." (
  '20 Jun 19Added Fri 2020-Jun-19 8:21 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Slightly Skew Systems Of Government [SlateStarCodex]: "Yyphrostikoth is a meta-republic. Every form of government has its own advantages and disadvantages, and the goal is to create a system of checks and balances where each can watch over the others. The Yyphrostikoth Governing Council has twelve members: The Representative For Monarchy is a hereditary position. The Representative For Democracy is elected. The Representative For Plutocracy is the richest person in the country. [...] The Representative For Minarchy is an honorary position usually bestowed upon a respected libertarian philosopher or activist. It doesn’t really matter who holds it, because their only job is to vote “no” on everything, except things that are sneakily phrased so that “no” means more government, in which case they can vote “yes”. If a Representative For Minarchy wants to vote their conscience, they may break this rule once, after which they must resign and be replaced by a new Representative. The Representative For Republicanism is selected by the other eleven members of the council. The Representative For Theocracy is the leader of the Governing Council, and gets not only her own vote but a special vote to break any ties. She is chosen at random from a lottery of all adult citizens, on the grounds that God may pick whoever He pleases to represent Himself." (
  '20 Jun 18Added Thu 2020-Jun-18 9:38 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• The Startup Egg-Basket Principle [Feedproxy.google]: "The startup egg-basket principle is: put all your eggs in one basket. Be laser-focused on the one thing you’re best at. If you’re scrambling for survival, focus only on the one most promising thing for making the startup sustainable. For example, most startups should focus exclusively on their premium plans and not have a free plan." (
  '20 Jun 15Added Mon 2020-Jun-15 11:39 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Tarnished Bullets: How Productivity Blogs Waste Your Time [Nateliason]: "If you want to be successful like Tim Cook, the secret isn’t waking up early, the secret is doing great work till you get to the point of being CEO of Apple. Waking up early is a minuscule, minuscule part of that success." (
  '20 Jun 15Added Mon 2020-Jun-15 10:59 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Obligatory GPT-3 Post [SlateStarCodex]: "GPT-3 is very big, but it’s not pushing the limits of how big an AI it’s possible to make. If someone rich and important like Google wanted to make a much bigger GPT, they could do it. [...] It’s always possible that the next AI will be the one where the scaling curves break and it stops being easy to make AIs smarter just by giving them more computers. But unless something surprising like that saves us, we should assume GPT-like things will become much more powerful very quickly. [...] And how many parameters does the adult human brain have? The responsible answer is that brain function doesn’t map perfectly to neural net function, and even if it did we would have no idea how to even begin to make this calculation. The irresponsible answer is a hundred trillion. That’s a big number. But at the current rate of GPT progress, a GPT will have that same number of parameters somewhere between GPT-4 and GPT-5. Given the speed at which OpenAI works, that should happen about two years from now. I am definitely not predicting that a GPT with enough parameters will be able to do everything a human does. But I’m really interested to see what it can do. And we’ll find out soon." (
  '20 Jun 15Added Mon 2020-Jun-15 10:24 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• A Practical Guide to Conflict Resolution: Comprehension [LessWrong]: "Seek always to understand. Actively look for the best version of everyone’s arguments. Separate the problem and the solution. To truly understand, you must explain how both sides came to be." (
  '20 Jun 13Added Sat 2020-Jun-13 6:10 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Pepsi’s $32B Typo Caused Deadly Riots [Medium]: "So here is Pepsi, churning along each month, not knowing they accidentally sent $32 billion worth of winning caps to the Philippines. Meanwhile, everyone in the Philippines is going bananas for this promotion, buying up all the soda bottles. This disruptive campaign increased Pepsi’s market share from 4% to 24.9% in just two months. Fast Forward. The big day arrives. All the Filipinos have their TV’s on. Pepsi goes on to announce the winning bottlecap number, 349, and across the Philippines, crowds of people are cheering. They’ve won enough money to buy a large house. Pepsi then realizes they’ve made a terrible mistake. They do their whole, “Whoa whoa whoa, hold up.” The optics of the situation aren’t pretty. You have this first world multibillion-dollar business that has made this huge monetary promise to these poor people, only to backpedal and blame it on a system error. One could see how it wouldn’t sit well with a rice farmer. [...] A 349 Alliance consumer action group forms. They begin protesting across Manila, in front of government buildings as well as Pepsi’s local headquarters. Things start to get more violent. Then, full-blown riots break out. More than 30 Pepsi trucks are firebombed in the process." (
  '20 Jun 11Added Thu 2020-Jun-11 4:36 p.m. CDT
  in random | a)
• Defund the police? - The Weeds [Podcast]: "(1) There is a distinction between people focused on shifting the Overton Window and imagining an alternative utopian society and people focused on implementing incrementalist reforms. We need both discussions. (2) While the discussion seems focused on federal intervention, a lot of the more tractable and impactful interventions are likely in local areas. (3) Defunding the police is going to be a very hard sell given how popular the police are and how much people actually do want some sort of police force. (4) It would be really helpful to have a large portion of the police be unarmed, but this may be difficult to do given the level of gun violence in the US. (5) There is actually a lot of progress being made in cities in reducing crime and reducing police violence. (6) Many police trainings don't work, but trainings to teach police to non-violently subdue criminals (e.g., no chokeholds) would be helpful. (7) Police unions make it very difficult to fire police who repeatedly violate the rules and bad police officers can easily be rehired in other jurisdictions. This would have to be reformed. (8) I'm surprised there was no discussion of ending qualified immunity." (
  '20 Jun 08Added Mon 2020-Jun-08 11:16 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• 95%-ile isn't that good [Danluu]: "Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things." At 90-95%-ile of those who play a game, a lot of players still make basic mistakes. Getting feedback and practicing can easily make you 95%-ile or better." (
  '20 Jun 03Added Wed 2020-Jun-03 3:15 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Is a trillion-dollars worth of programming lying on the ground? [Blog.cerebralab]: "At first glance, there's a bunch of countries where you can get a programmer to work for you at under 10,000$ a year (on average) and others where you can get a programmer to work for over 100,000$ a year (on average). [...] If the market is all-knowing and all-optimizing, how can this be? Programming jobs are silly easy to move around and most of them can be done remotely." It's unlikely the explanation is due to regulations. Differences in English language mastery and scientific explanation only explain a small part of the variation." (
  '20 Jun 03Added Wed 2020-Jun-03 3:12 p.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• What's the difference between neoliberalism and social democracy? [Twitter]: "Left-neoliberalism on this site is often conflated with social democracy. It really, really shouldn't be. [...] Social Democrats generally want high minimum wages, particularly nationally. Left-neoliberals are more cautious, preferring minimum wages set based on cost of living[. ...] Neoliberals want expanded markets to improve human prosperity. While they generally want adjustment assistance in the agreements, there's less of an emphasis on setting environmental & labor standards. Social democrats generally want tougher rules in trade agreements." (
  '20 Jun 03Added Wed 2020-Jun-03 3 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• The Cold Cultural Civil War [Twitter]: "The Cold Civil War is largely an asymmetric struggle. The Left launches moral/rhetorical attacks, while the Right retaliates with actual policy." (
  '20 Jun 03Added Wed 2020-Jun-03 2:58 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• More Leftists Should Run For Local Office Rather Than Congress [Current Affairs]: "It's hard for leftist to win national offices, but by building a bench at the local level one can more easily get into federal office. Also power at the local and state level is still very important and neglected." (
  '20 Jun 03Added Wed 2020-Jun-03 1:36 p.m. CDT
  in activism | a)
• How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change [Medium]: Protests must be nonviolent and non-destructive. Achieving change requires both protest and politics - frustrations must be channeled into very specific legislative demands. (
  '20 Jun 03Added Wed 2020-Jun-03 11:46 a.m. CDT
  in activism | a)
• The US-China Tech Wars: China’s Immigration Disadvantage [The Diplomat]: "A decade ago, longtime Singapore leader Lee Kuan Yew predicted that China would not overtake the United States in the 21st century because China’s “Sino-centric” culture would force it to rely mainly on its domestic workforce, while the United States’ openness meant that it could draw the best and brightest from a global talent pool of 7 billion and stimulate innovation through diversity. His argument still rings true today. Whether it also will another decade down the line is up to U.S. policymakers." (
  '20 Jun 01Added Mon 2020-Jun-01 3:19 p.m. CDT
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• How to Measure Capacity for Welfare and Moral Status [EA Forum]: "How to measure moral status of animals? 1.) Expert intuition seems dubious 2.) Better to generate theory-neutral list of characteristics, find empirically measurable proxies, weight by importance, score animals, and estimate uncertainty" (
  '20 Jun 01Added Mon 2020-Jun-01 11:38 a.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• Should You Do Couch to 5K? Don’t Make These 5 Mistakes [Nerdfitness]: "(1) Don't run but neglect your diet. (2) Don't run if you don't like it. (3) If you are obsese or very overweight, focus on walking a 5K first. (4) Make sure you have good running form. (5) Have a plan for what to do after completing Couch to 5K." (
  '20 May 31Added Sun 2020-May-31 9:16 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Paul Krugman Is Pretty Upbeat About the Economy [Bloomberg]: "Is this a demand shock or a supply shock? Yes. And no. The aggregate-demand-aggregate-supply framework doesn't work well for this crisis, because it assumes that the economy can reasonably be represented as producing a single good -- a fine approach most of the time, but not now. What's happening now is that we've shut down both supply and demand for part of the economy because we think high-contact activities spread the coronavirus. This means we can't just use standard macro models off the shelf." (
  '20 May 31Added Sun 2020-May-31 8:55 a.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• What we’re missing when we condemn “violence” at protests [Vox]: "First, it’s important to understand the mandate of the news, and that is to get eyeballs on the screen, whether that is your television screen or the one in your hands. Networks focus on spectacle: fires, people crying, and broken windows, instead of the larger story. In most cases (such as with the Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, protests a few years ago), property damage and fires are limited to a small area, and even during those times many people are just milling about, but shaking camera angles and tight shots want you to believe that every reporter is an extra in Saving Private Ryan and every protest looks like Kanye’s “No Church in the Wild” video. In reality, these protests are usually not completely consumed with chaos." (
  '20 May 31Added Sun 2020-May-31 8:46 a.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• Q: What if the particles in the double slit experiment were conscious? Could you ask them which slit they went through afterwards? [Ask A Mathematician]: "When we actually do this experiment, we find that the same pattern continues to show up. Evidently, each individual photon interferes with itself, as though it had gone though both slits; a realization that’s more mind blowing than anything else. [...] It turns out that if there’s any way whatsoever to figure out which slit the photon went through, even if you don’t bother to find out, then there is no interference pattern. If you know that the photon went through the left slit (and genuinely doesn’t matter how you know), then the pattern it follows impacting the screen will contain no contribution from the right slit." (
  '20 May 31Added Sun 2020-May-31 8:41 a.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• "In marginal decisions, favour action over inaction" [Sivv.io]: "n this study, University of Chicago professor and Freakonomics author Steven D Levitt conducted a large-scale randomised field experiment involving 20,000 people who were struggling to make a major life decision (such as whether to change their job or relationship). After following study participants for six months after making their decision, Levitt found that those who had opted for the choice that involved making a change (as opposed to sticking with the status quo) were more satisfied with their decision and generally happier. " (
  '20 May 31Added Sun 2020-May-31 7:50 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Every Stock is a Vaccine Stock [Feedproxy.google]: "It’s not surprising that when Moderna reports good vaccine results, Moderna does well. It’s more surprising that Boeing and GE not only do well they increase in value far more than Moderna. On May 18, for example, when Moderna announced very preliminary positive results on its vaccine it’s market capitalization rose by $5b. But GE’s market capitalization rose by $6.82 billion and Boeing increased in value by $8.73 billion. A cure for COVID-19 would be worth trillions to the world but only billions to the creator. The stock market is illustrating the massive externalities created by innovation. Nordhaus estimated that only 2.2% of the value of innovation was captured by innovators. For vaccine manufacturers it’s probably closer to .2%." (
  '20 May 30Added Sat 2020-May-30 5:41 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• The Anti-Magic Principle [Feedproxy.google]: "In software, don't do things that your users don't expect." (
  '20 May 30Added Sat 2020-May-30 5:40 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Riot or Resistance? How Media Frames Unrest in Minneapolis Will Shape Public’s View of Protest [Nakedcapitalism]: "Journalists contribute to this hierarchy by adhering to industry norms that work against less-established protest movements. On tight deadlines, reporters may default to official sources for statements and data. This gives authorities more control of narrative framing. This practice especially becomes an issue for movements like Black Lives Matter that are countering the claims of police and other officials." (
  '20 May 30Added Sat 2020-May-30 5:12 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• Racism Is the Biggest Reason the U.S. Safety Net Is So Weak [Bloomberg]: "First, U.S. institutions -- the Senate, the electoral system, the legal system -- were designed much earlier than their modern European equivalents, and are thus more oriented toward protecting private property above all else. But in addition, the economists found evidence that racial animosity was a source of American exceptionalism" (
  '20 May 30Added Sat 2020-May-30 4:28 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Bush Did North Dakota [SlateStarCodex]: "I’ve previously talked about a lizardman constant of 4% on polls. That is, it’s hard to get a poll result much lower than four percent for anything, because of respondents making mistakes or trolling. If 4% of people supposedly believe something, that doesn’t mean we need to be concerned about that fraction of the population, it just means that poll has it its floor and it’s hard to conclude what the real number is. In the same way, maybe we can posit a North Dakota constant of 33%. This is how many people believe in conspiracy theories when there’s no reason at all to believe them, not even the flimsy reasons conspiracy theories usually provide." (
  '20 May 29Added Fri 2020-May-29 7:35 a.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• "Creationism, Unchallenged" [SlateStarCodex]: "As far as I can tell, the creationists are putting in just as much effort today as they did in 2006. But the mainstream went from fiercely challenging them, to totally ignoring them. And the change didn’t help them at all. They haven’t won any major victories, or convinced any more people. If anything, they’re doing worse – nobody hears about them. Although the decline in media coverage hasn’t prevented people from being creationist, it hasn’t helped creationism spread or build clout either. I see people using rivers of ink to fight the modern equivalents of creationists. Pizzagaters, flat-earthers, moon-hoaxers, QAnon, deep-staters, people who say the coronavirus is a bioweapon, Alex Jones. Are they sure it’s not equally useless? Equally counterproductive?" (
  '20 May 28Added Thu 2020-May-28 4:13 p.m. CDT
  in activism | a)
• Thermal Imaging as Security Theater [Schneier]: "These features are so tempting that thermal cameras are being installed at an increasing pace. They're used in airports and other public transportation centers to screen travelers, increasingly used by companies to screen employees and by businesses to screen customers, and even used in health care facilities to screen patients. Despite their prevalence, thermal cameras have many fatal limitations when used to screen for the coronavirus." (
  '20 May 28Added Thu 2020-May-28 9:51 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• "If everyone else is such an idiot, how come I'm not rich? (2011)" [Atlantic]: "When I catch myself thinking along these lines, I try to stop and ask a simple question: "If everyone else is such an idiot, how come I'm not rich?" If you see a person--or a company--doing something that seems completely and inexplicably boneheaded, then it's unwise to assume that the reason must be that everyone but you is a complete idiot who is blind to fairly trivial insights such as "people desire inexpensive and conveniently available movie services, and will resist having those services made more expensive, or less convenient". While it's certainly true that people do idiotic things, it's also true that a lot of those "idiotic" things turn out to have perfectly reasonable explanations." (
  '20 May 27Added Wed 2020-May-27 11:33 a.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Reading habits that changed my life [Blog.usejournal]: "Pick up multiple books from the same area to go deeper in an area. That way to genuinely learn about a topic. Research the author thoroughly before picking up any book. Research the gist and the reason for that book to exist. [...] You’re not compelled to finish a book you don’t like. [...] Some books are more flexible and might not be read linearly. It does depend on the topic of book you’re reading. [...] Write notes every single time. Don’t copy paste notes from your kindle or phone, write manually, typing every single word. Also try to paraphrase, this way you are forced to actively think about the material you’re reading. Speed read parts that might not be useful to remember. [...] Write a summary after you’ve read the whole book. Share summarized and paraphrased information on your blog, on social media or in communities that might be interested. This will help you think more broadly about the topic of the book rather than the deep level of your notes. Discuss and refer the book to your friends and family. [...] Of course, the above are rules that worked for me and might not for everyone else. They’re not commandments." (
  '20 May 27Added Wed 2020-May-27 7:57 a.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• “Why technology will never fix education” [Jakeseliger]: "But what happens when class comes from a connected, distraction-laden device? In my experience so far, the online education experience hasn’t been great, although it went better than I feared, and I think that, as norms shift, we’ll see online education become more effective. But the big hurdle remains motivation, not information." (
  '20 May 27Added Wed 2020-May-27 7:47 a.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Facebook Has The Power To Repeal The First Amendment [Current Affairs]: "Can we take a moment to appreciate the radicalism of what has happened? Private companies now have a powerful gatekeeping capacity over public speech. They are, effectively, governments. But they are not democratic governments. You do not get to vote on Facebook’s community standards. You did not elect anybody to the lawmaking body. Decisions about how speech will be policed take place in dictatorial institutions ruled over by creepy billionaires. When public speech took place mostly outside, decisions about what could be heard were made by courts, and subject to the First Amendment. Now, because the United States gives almost limitless power to corporations to set their “terms of service,” the power to abridge the First Amendment has been handed over to private companies." (
  '20 May 27Added Wed 2020-May-27 6:51 a.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Comparing the Effect of Rational and Emotional Appeals on Donation Behavior [Philpapers]: "We present evidence from a pre-registered experiment indicating that a philosophical argument––a type of rational appeal––can persuade people to make charitable donations. The rational appeal we used follows Singer’s well-known “shallow pond” argument (1972) […] The effectiveness of this rational appeal did not differ significantly from that of a well-tested emotional appeal involving an image of a single child in need. This is a surprising result, given evidence that emotions are the primary drivers of moral action, a view that has been very influential in the work of development organizations. We did not find support for our pre-registered hypothesis that combining our rational and emotional appeals would have a significantly stronger effect than either appeal in isolation." (
  '20 May 26Added Tue 2020-May-26 12:22 p.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Risk Assessment and Prioritization for Startups [Docs.google]: "Do an honest assessment of your biggest risks. Address the biggest risks first, as it creates the most impact. Be careful to make progress along derisking, rather than just general progress within the same risk category (e.g., get one paid contract, not five more LOIs). Parallelize as much as you can." (
  '20 May 26Added Tue 2020-May-26 12:18 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Joe Biden has a plan for that [Vox]: "That conflict between what the left wants and what Biden wouldn’t give them became the dominant narrative about him in the mainstream press. Biden was defined by the things he was against, rather than by the substantial overlap between his policy ideas and those of his progressive critics. Biden is a mainstream Democrat, and as the Democratic Party has grown broadly more progressive in recent years, he is now running on arguably the most progressive policy platform of any Democratic nominee in history." (
  '20 May 26Added Tue 2020-May-26 12:11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Why Marketing Flywheels Work [Sparktoro]: "So long as a set of marketing practices have (1) A consistently-repeatable tactic (or group of tactics), (2) A system for either reaching a larger audience or decreasing the cost to reach each additional potential customer[, and] (3) Scalability: each successive investment reduces friction in the system it creates a flywheel effect. You put in the same amount of work (or less) each time, and get more and more out of it the more you repeat it. This is a beautiful, highly-rewarding system. But, it usually takes a long time and a lot of effort to get going." (
  '20 May 26Added Tue 2020-May-26 12:11 p.m. CDT
  in entreprenuership | a)
• Stevey's Google Platforms Rant [Gist.github]: "The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate -- ask anyone who worked on platformizing MS Office. Or anyone who worked on platformizing Amazon. If you delay it, it'll be ten times as much work as just doing it correctly up front. You can't cheat. You can't have secret back doors for internal apps to get special priority access, not for ANY reason. You need to solve the hard problems up front." (
  '20 May 26Added Tue 2020-May-26 12:03 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• I Just Completed a Murph a Week for a Year [Reddit]: "For time: 1 mile Run, 100 Pull-ups, 200 Push-ups, 300 Squats, 1 mile Run [...] After the Weightroom challenge I had the idea that committing to a Murph a week for a year would be a good way to regularly push myself and build/maintain my conditioning, while rehabbing and hopefully rebuilding my squat and deadlift from an ego-squashing 60kg with 531 3 day Full Body BBB/BBS. I thought that by the end of the 52 weeks, I would at the very least “get better at doing Murphs”." (
  '20 May 24Added Sun 2020-May-24 8:50 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Most book clubs are doing it wrong [Jsomers.net]: "The standard way to run a book club is to have everybody finish the book before meeting to talk about it. [...] You would never run a class this way, because it practically minimizes the value that each participant gets from being in the group. The problem is that there’s no time to cash in on anyone else’s insights. [...] What makes a class useful is precisely that it lets you compare notes with your classmates along the way, to float your working theories about a book and see how they sound to others. It’s not a retrospective, or not merely one — you’re equipping yourself for the rest of the reading." (
  '20 May 24Added Sun 2020-May-24 5:51 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Habits of High-Functioning Teams [Deniseyu.io]: "Effective teams have psychological safety (cultivated via regular retrospectives, dissociating value from their visible output, people asking help, regular feedback), taking a bit of extra time to record present-day context, rotate opportunities for people to gain experience, and charitable communication." (
  '20 May 24Added Sun 2020-May-24 5:49 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Face Masks Are Temporary. The Culture War Is Forever. [GFile]: "That’s what some of these people remind me of: Hessler, caught in an endless war. There’s no intelligent argument for turning medical masks into symbols of oppression, cowardice, or surrender to the morality of the Yellow Peril. Unless, that is, you just want another battlespace for the culture war to help it go on forever." (
  '20 May 13Added Wed 2020-May-13 11 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• "the magic of doing $10,000 per hour work" [Radreads.co]: "But are you ready for time-tracking with a twist? When I first hired my business coach, he asked me for an audit of my time. But there was a catch. He wanted to see the hours organized as follows: $10 per hour work... $100/hr work... $1,000/hr work... $10,000/hr work. [...] In the $10 category there was the constant re-scheduling Zoom calls, formatting Keynotes, responding to YouTube comments, and gathering my 1099s. [...] But whether you’re a business owner, executive or manager – there absolutely are daily actions that could have $10,000 outcomes in the future." (
  '20 May 13Added Wed 2020-May-13 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Crazy Is Better Than Stupid [Michaelochurch.wordpress]: "Something I’ve observed in the corporate world is that most people lose intelligence and creativity after 5 to 10 years. Sometimes they burn out even faster. The flame goes out; a robot stands where a person once was. A few of us don’t go that way; we’re the rebellious ones who refuse to turn stupid. [...] This midlife cognitive decline is far from inevitable; it’s not biological. [...] The norm is to peak after 40, even in mathematics, which is notable (more in romance than truth) for its early blossoming. Writers, on average, seem to peak after 50. Some of the great ones started after 50. [...] My suspicion is that the midlife cognitive decline one observes in Corporate America is, in addition, a low-grade and otherwise subclinical variety of depression." (
  '20 May 05Added Tue 2020-May-05 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• How a janitor at Frito-Lay invented Flamin’ Hot Cheetos [The Hustle.co]: "On an early morning in the late 1980s, a group of the highest-powered executives at Frito-Lay — the CEO, CMO, and a platoon of VPs — gathered in a California conference room to hear what Richard Montañez had to say. Montañez didn’t share their pedigree. He wasn’t an executive. He had no fancy degree. He had a 4th-grade-level education, and couldn’t read or write. Montañez was a janitor. But he was a janitor with an idea — an idea that would make the company billions of dollars and become one of history’s most celebrated and iconic snack foods: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. But first, he had to convince the world to hear him out." (
  '20 May 05Added Tue 2020-May-05 11 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• The High Cost of Free Parking [Newworldeconomics]: "Parking consumes valuable land area, which could be used for other things like buildings, parks and squares — in other words, Places For People. Plus, it is ugly. But, probably some parking is necessary. All of this is easily handled by the free market: when the return on capital for parking is greater than for other uses, capital for land and construction will be spent on parking, and parking will be built. Every suburban retailer knows very well how much parking they need. In general, I hold to the principle of no onstreet parking; and also, no free or subsidized offstreet parking." (
  '20 May 05Added Tue 2020-May-05 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• How an Advisory and Legal Board Can Guide Your Charity [Charityentrepreneurship]: "Clearly distinguish between your Advisory and Legal Board. The Legal Board is in charge of the legal oversight of your organization. It should be kept small initially and consist of you and value-aligned individuals. An unfriendly Board can kick you out or move the organization away from a cost-effective strategy. Ensure that you fulfill your key legal obligations as a charity, as you don’t want to risk losing your charity status. If you operate in two countries, you will likely need two different legal boards. The Advisory Board has no legal authority but increases the status of your organization and provides valuable advice. Make sure that you find a group of advisors that combines signaling value with experience in fundraising, research, operations, domain expertise, and general startup wisdom. Only form a public Advisory Board once you have tested the advisors over at least a few months. The status and fundraising abilities of a public-facing Advisory Board are particularly important." (
  '20 May 05Added Tue 2020-May-05 11 p.m. CDT
  in management | a)
• Your $15 Lunch Habit Could Be Costing You $400K of Retirement Savings [Feedproxy.google]: "The average 60-something today has ~$195K in their 401(k) retirement account. What if you could make one lifestyle change, which would cost you about 2 hours of meal prep every 40 days (~18 hours per year), and would in turn bring your $15/lunch* habit into < $2 per meal? If you invested the savings each year for 32 years (assuming you’re 35 like me, and retirement age is 67) at an average return of 5% compounding each year, you’d have ~$400,000 in additional retirement money at the end of that time." (
  '20 May 05Added Tue 2020-May-05 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• 'We're in a Bubble' [Blog.samaltman]: "The demise of the ongoing tech bubble has been predicted in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and so on." (
  '20 Apr 30Added Thu 2020-Apr-30 11 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• "Gretchen Whitmer’s smart, boring speech highlighted Democrats’ biggest 2020 dilemma" [Vox]: "Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer probably made a smart choice by trying to give an earnest policy speech in her response to the State of the Union address, rather than one addressing the president’s crimes or the blood-soaked demagoguery of the anti-immigrant rhetoric in Trump’s speech Tuesday night. The problem is that it was also a boring speech. The logic behind Whitmer’s approach is the great paradox of the Trump era." (
  '20 Apr 25Added Sat 2020-Apr-25 11 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• The recline of the American empire [Ryanavent.substack]: "Economic thinking is supposed to be clarifying. It’s supposed to help us think beyond the seemingly easy solution with the unanticipated costs. Instead, it seems to encourage many of us to turn our brains off, to accept some outcome as tolerable or desirable without pausing to ask: wait, can we really not do better? And the fact that the only alternative that many of us see to the choices made by amoral corporations is Soviet-style communism is pathetic. We can reflect on what we would like society to be like, decide that we want better things, and make those better things happen." (
  '20 Apr 23Added Thu 2020-Apr-23 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• In Their Own Words: How 19 GOP Governors Affirmed Support For Refugee Resettlement [Niskanencenter]: "In reviewing the consent letters from the 19 governors, three main themes emerged. First, that refugee resettlement aligns with American values, namely that it’s an act of compassion. Governors wrote that welcoming refugees supports U.S. traditions of taking in those fleeing religious and political persecution. Second, that refugees are hardworking and productive citizens who contribute to the economy and society. And third, that resettled refugees have been vetted by multiple federal security agencies and are qualified and nonthreatening." (
  '20 Apr 22Added Wed 2020-Apr-22 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• How to Get People to Actually Participate in Virtual Meetings [Feeds.hbr]: "Never engage a group in solving a problem until they have felt the problem. Do something in the first 60 seconds to help them experience it. You might share shocking or provocative statistics, anecdotes, or analogies that dramatize the problem. [...] Define a problem that can be solved quickly, assign people to groups of two or three (max). Give them a medium with which to communicate with one another (video conference, Slack channel, messaging platform, audio breakouts). [...] Give them a very limited time frame to take on a highly structured and brief task. [...I]f your goal is engagement, you must mix facts and stories. We encourage people to determine the Minimum Viable PowerPoint (MVP) deck they need. In other words, select the least amount of data you need to inform and engage the group. [...] Never go longer than 5 minutes without giving the group another problem to solve." (
  '20 Apr 22Added Wed 2020-Apr-22 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Ethics of Price Gouging [Bleedingheartlibertarians]: "In essence, “price gouging” is simply a pejorative way of referring to the use of market prices to allocate scarce resources. [...] Price gouging occurs because resources are scarce – because there aren’t enough goods to meet people’s needs. Banning price gouging doesn’t do anything to address the underlying scarcity – in fact it might even make it worse, by destroying the incentives to bring new supply to market. [...] In the end, allocation by market prices has two advantages over just about any other system of distribution. It leads people to cut back on their demand – especially those people who need the good less, and are therefore willing to pay less for it. And it encourages people who have excess supply – people who stocked up, people from non-affected communities, and producers who might be able to make more – to bring that supply to where it is needed most. [...] Prices might not be perfect. But they’re usually better than the alternative." (
  '20 Apr 21Added Tue 2020-Apr-21 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Don’t anthropomorphize the economy [Econlib]: "I’ve argued that the performance of the US (economic, military, social, etc.) is about 3% the president and 97% other factors. [...] (1) There are long swings in trend real growth (per capita) due to technology. Growth was fastest when low hanging fruit from fundamental inventions like electricity and gasoline engines were being rolled out across the economy. Once that was mostly accomplished (around 1973), growth slowed. (2) Presidential policies do affect the supply side of the economy, and this can have a modest impact on growth. Some good reforms happened during the Reagan and Clinton years. [...] (3) At business cycle frequencies, it’s mostly monetary policy that determines the path of output. Presidents do have the ability to pick Fed chairs, but they often re-nominate people originally picked by the other party. [...] The first point explains why Trump could never hope to achieve LBJ’s 5% real GDP growth rate." (
  '20 Apr 21Added Tue 2020-Apr-21 11 p.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• It's Time to Build [A16z]: "Why do we not have these things? Medical equipment and financial conduits involve no rocket science whatsoever. At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard. We could have these things but we chose not to — specifically we chose not to have the mechanisms, the factories, the systems to make these things. We chose not to *build*. You don’t just see this smug complacency, this satisfaction with the status quo and the unwillingness to build, in the pandemic, or in healthcare generally. You see it throughout Western life, and specifically throughout American life." (
  '20 Apr 18Added Sat 2020-Apr-18 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• You don't need to work on hard problems [BenKuhn]: "For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life. [...] Why does this happen? Probably because that’s the only thing they’ve been rewarded for over the past 15 years. School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance ceiling (an A+) is low. [...] The real world is the polar opposite. [...] Because of these differences, most graduates of elite schools—including me—start out being completely unable to identify which work is actually important. [...] Instead, we’ll keep trying to run our college playbook, and look for hard problems. Frequently, we’ll find them by making easy problems hard, with hilarious/depressing results." (
  '20 Apr 10Added Fri 2020-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Principles for the Application of Human Intelligence [Behavioralscientist]: "Before humans become the standard way in which we make decisions, we need to consider the risks and ensure implementation of human decision-making systems does not cause widespread harm." (
  '20 Apr 10Added Fri 2020-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• "No nonsense version of the "racial algorithm bias" [LessWrong]: "We can decompose fairness into false positive rate, false negative rate, and calibration/accuracy. Each of these can differ within categories (e.g., race). It is impossible to optimize all of them without being perfectly accurate. "Northpointe showed that COMPAS is approximately fair in calibration for Whites and Blacks. ProPublica showed that COMPAS is unfair in parity. The lesson is that there are incompatible fairnesses. To figure out which to apply -- that is a different question." (
  '20 Apr 10Added Fri 2020-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• Prediction Markets: When Do They Work? [LessWrong]: "For a prediction market to be successful, you need a (1) clearly and fully defined outcome, (2) a fast resolution, (3) a good chance that a resolution of some sort will happen, (4) a lack of insider information, and (5) sources of disagreement and interest." (
  '20 Apr 10Added Fri 2020-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• The Most Loved and Hated Classic Novels According to Goodreads Users [Danfrank.ca]: "Reading classic literature is like going for a 6am jog. It has its loyal fans but few enjoy it. Most people want to tell others they do; sometimes people experiment with it, but mostly, people just don’t like it at all. Curious to learn about what classics people actually enjoy, I delved into the Goodreads data to find what classics users love and hate the most. The idea is not to replace reading great novels with easy, short and fun books, but to give a greater weight to the great novels that are more likely to be enjoyed by the average reader. [...] The data is quite clear. People HATE reading The Scarlet Letter. I would not be surprised to learn there are thousands of people whose aversion to reading stems from being assigned the Scarlet Letter or Heart of Darkness in school rather than East of Eden or To Kill a Mockingbird." (
  '20 Apr 10Added Fri 2020-Apr-10 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Effective Altruism and Free Riding [EA Forum]: "A group of people trying to do good are playing a form of a public goods game. Except in rare circumstances, this will lead to inefficiencies due to free-riding (defecting), and thus gains from cooperation. Free-riding comes from individuals putting resources toward causes which they personally view as neglected (being under-valued by other people’s value systems) at the expense of causes for which there is more consensus. Standard EA cause prioritization recommends that people free-ride on others' efforts to do good (at least when interacting with people not in the EA community). If existing societal norms are to cooperate when trying to do good, EA may cause harm by encouraging people to free-ride. There may be large gains from improving cooperation." (
  '20 Apr 06Added Mon 2020-Apr-06 11 p.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• How to Display Data in the Business World [Numbers.sg]: "(1) Keep your chart clear and concise by maximizing the amount of information for the minimum amount of ink. (2) Summarize your main message in the title. (3) Use colour and patterns critically as they can distract your message. (4) Clearly label axes with units if needed. (5) Keep grid / solid lines to a minimum and in a lighter color (light grey if using a white background for example). (6) When variables have no natural ordering, order them by size. (7) Keep vertical scale for bar charts as the height of the bars are only accurate when the axes start from zero. (8) If needed, include the source of your data so your chart can stand on its own in a presentation or report." (
  '20 Apr 05Added Sun 2020-Apr-05 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Color Sorting [Allegedwisdom.blogspot]: A look at how different people perceive and reason about color by asking them to sort different colored lego pieces. (
  '20 Mar 29Added Sun 2020-Mar-29 11 p.m. CDT
  in random | a)
• Does a USB drive get heavier as you store more files on it? [Sciencefocus]: "Paradoxically, the more you save on a flash drive, the lighter it gets. This is because an empty flash drive is represetened entirely by 0's in binary, whereas files will be a mix of 0's and 1's. Having a 0 requires charged electrons, whereas having a 1 is nothing (off). Thus having more files means less electrons and less weight." (
  '20 Mar 27Added Fri 2020-Mar-27 11 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• Amazonians United Wins PTO for all Amazon Workers [Medium]: "Amazon workers win PTO through petitions, threatened strike, and a pandemic." (
  '20 Mar 23Added Mon 2020-Mar-23 11 p.m. CDT
  in activism | a)
• Rupert Murdoch Put His Son in Charge of Fox. It Was a Dangerous Mistake. [NYTimes]: "“People act like Fox is a virus — beyond our control,” said Bill Kristol, who worked for the Murdochs for 15 years and appeared on Fox until 2012. “There are people who run it, who have responsibility for it, and they could be held accountable.”" (
  '20 Mar 22Added Sun 2020-Mar-22 11 p.m. CDT
  in culturewar | a)
• Islands in the sea: A simple model of a world with endemic coronavirus [Gyrovague]: "The world is likely to soon be an archipelago of coronavirus-free islands in a sea of infection, and will remain so until an effective vaccine or treatment is globally available. Travel will remain extremely restricted. Poor countries are likelier to end up under water. Larger nation states may fragment. Herd immunity in the sea will not end travel restrictions. Only universal vaccination or an effective early-stage cure will dry up the sea." (
  '20 Mar 21Added Sat 2020-Mar-21 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 [Medium]: "Having weathered every business downturn for nearly fifty years, we’ve learned an important lesson — nobody ever regrets making fast and decisive adjustments to changing circumstances. In downturns, revenue and cash levels always fall faster than expenses.[...] A distinctive feature of enduring companies is the way their leaders react to moments like these. [...] False optimism can easily lead you astray and prevent you from making contingency plans or taking bold action. Avoid this trap by being clinically realistic and acting decisively as circumstances change. Demonstrate the leadership your team needs during this stressful time." (
  '20 Mar 20Added Fri 2020-Mar-20 11 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• The party strikes back: How Biden's prospects soared so quickly [Csmonitor]: "Biden's comeback comes down to "the party decides" theory of the primary, plus political geography and a very strong bandwagon effect." (
  '20 Mar 20Added Fri 2020-Mar-20 11 p.m. CDT
  in politicalscience | a)
• An Epidemic of False Confidence Related to COVID-19 [Blog.longnow]: Uncertainty about the outcome of COVID-19 cuts both ways and can include both pessimistic and optimistic scenarios. (
  '20 Mar 20Added Fri 2020-Mar-20 11 p.m. CDT
  in rationality | a)
• Top Risks 2020: Coronavirus Edition [Eurasiagroup.net]: Coronavirus makes a lot of risks to the global order worse to a lot worse. (
  '20 Mar 20Added Fri 2020-Mar-20 11 p.m. CDT
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• How to Be Social While Social Distancing During the Coronavirus Pandemic [The Wirecutter]: Establish a low-pressure chat environment - consider starting a Slack or Discord with your friends. Consider sharing an online-movie night with friends. Consider taking your board games digital. Consider having a digital happy hour. Consider starting a club that meets online. Shift your group workouts to your home. Ask for help when you need it. And give help when you’re asked. (
  '20 Mar 18Added Wed 2020-Mar-18 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The COVID-19 Recession Will Be Different [Urban]: "Because of social distancing and widespread closures, a COVID-19 recession is likely to be different— and considerably worse—than typical postwar recessions. In a short research note on the issue, Gabriel Mathy, a macroeconomist at American University, argues that the COVID-19 recession will be the first “services recession,” driven to a large extent by depressed activity in the service sector associated with social distancing practices." (
  '20 Mar 18Added Wed 2020-Mar-18 11 p.m. CDT
  in economics | a)
• AI could help with the next pandemic—but not with this one [Technologyreview]: "The hype outstrips the reality. In fact, the narrative that has appeared in many news reports and breathless press releases—that AI is a powerful new weapon against diseases—is only partly true and risks becoming counterproductive. For example, too much confidence in AI’s capabilities could lead to ill-informed decisions that funnel public money to unproven AI companies at the expense of proven interventions such as drug programs. It’s also bad for the field itself: overblown but disappointed expectations have led to a crash of interest in AI, and consequent loss of funding, more than once in the past." (
  '20 Mar 18Added Wed 2020-Mar-18 11 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• The 10 Slack Agreements of Buffer [Open.buffer]: You’re responsible for managing your downtime. Default to public channels. Use status and profile to communicate availability. Be deliberate about your notifications. Communicate proactively. Thread when you can. Kill/modify Slack when you need to focus. Don’t keep checking messages in chat system constantly. Prefer @here over @channel. Reply by the end of your day. (
  '20 Mar 16Added Mon 2020-Mar-16 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Democrats might have the stronger party. They also have a harder job. [Mischiefsoffaction]: "Republicans, as Seth Masket pointed out some time ago, have some advantages over Democrats when it comes to partisan consolidation. While serious fissures exist in the Republican coalition, some core messages and appeals can unify those factions to a degree. What’s more, the Electoral College map allows Republicans to win the presidency with a fairly minimal partisan coalition. Democrats, on the other hand, could win the popular vote by a substantial margin and still lose in the Electoral College[. ...] Democrats cannot afford a disgruntled party faction, even if they are capable of coordinating to defeat it." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in politicalscience | a)
• COVID-19 brief for friends and family [EA Forum]: "Coronavirus is significantly worse than the flu, but not the zombie apocalypse. No need to panic, but it probably makes sense to prepare. It is going to affect day-to-day-life in western countries, including the U.S. You and your family will probably face personal risk of illness by the end of the year." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Congress can’t rely on the courts to enforce its subpoenas. Don’t panic. [Washingtonpost]: "Congress has tools it can use to try to force executive-branch compliance. For one thing, it can arrest people who refuse to testify and hold them until their contempt is purged. Although neither house of Congress has used this power in decades, it used to frequently, and there’s no reason that it could not be revived, given the political will. For another thing, it can use its power of the purse and prohibit the expenditure of funds on, say, the White House Counsel’s Office, until McGahn comes around. [...] These are powerful tools, but their very potency may diminish how often they have to be deployed. A congressional house willing to threaten to use its arrest power or its power of the purse gives a president and his subordinates incentives to come to the table. When the president knows Congress will rely on the courts in disputes like these, he knows he has time on his side and there’s little reason to bargain." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• The Supreme Court just reminded us why this election is an emergency [Washingtonpost]: "If President Trump wins reelection, it is highly likely that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg (age 87 in a couple of weeks) and Stephen Breyer (age 81) will retire because of illness or age. At that point there would be a 7-2 conservative majority on the court. [...] Imagine if the ideologically median justice was Samuel A. Alito Jr. Roe v. Wade being overturned would be just the beginning." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Plant-Based Food Retail Sales Hit $5 Billion [Gfi]: "2019 marked another impressive year for plant-based foods! New data shows that total plant-based retail sales reached $5 billion and grew 11 percent over the past year—almost five times faster than total U.S. retail food sales. Dollar sales of plant-based foods grew 29 percent over the past two years, compared to just 4 percent growth for total U.S. retail food dollar sales over the same time period." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• "Updated Drawdown now available, incl. 2020 Review" [EA Forum]: "Project Drawdown released their 2020 Update last week. It's now completely freely available and, in my opinion, the most accessible quantitative reference on climate solutions. [...] Notably, Reducing food waste has moved up to take the top rank, followed by Health and Education and then Plant-based diets. Refrigerant management, the previous top priority, is now ranked fourth, followed by Tropical forest restoration." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Can the Cans [Slate]: "In-kind donations still help, of course, and nobody’s turning away boxes of food. But a fundamental issue is that many organizations feel that asking for money—like requesting cash as a gift—seems somewhat gauche. So, let me be rude on their behalf: Find well-managed charities in your community and trust them to know how to do their job. They have access to food at a fraction of the price. They know their clients, and they have better things to do than to sort through your canned goods. And from your perspective, it’s much easier to document a monetary donation for tax purposes. Good intentions are lovely, but particularly in hard times it’s more important to make sure your charitable dollars go as far as possible. Can the cans. Hand over some cash." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in giving | a)
• My personal cruxes for working on AI safety [EA Forum]: "AGI will be a very big deal when it shows up. And there's some reason to think this might happen within 50 years (Laplace's Law of Succession, the estimated difficulty of whole brain emulation), you can do good by thinking about AI now, good alignment systems will be put to use, and our current research agenda will work." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• A Qualitative Analysis of Value Drift in EA [EA Forum]: "Value drift is a term EAs and rationalists use to refer to changes in our values over time, especially changes away from EA and other altruistic values. We want to promote morally good value changes and avoid morally bad value changes, but distinguishing between the two can be difficult since we tend to be poor judges of our own morality. EAs seem to think that value drift is most likely to affect the human population as a whole, less likely to affect the EA community, and even less likely to affect themselves. This discrepancy might be due to an overconfidence bias, so perhaps EAs ought to assume that we’re more likely to value drift than we intuitively think we are. Being connected with the EA community, getting involved in EA causes, being open to new ideas, prioritizing a sustainable lifestyle, and certain personality traits seem associated with less value drift from EA values. The study of EAs’ experiences with value drift is rather neglected, so further research is likely to be helpful." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in ethics | a)
• "Global Cochineal Production: Scale, Welfare Concerns, and Potential Interventions" [EA Forum]: "Between 22B and 89B adult female cochineals are killed per year directly to produce carmine dye, of which between 17B and 71B are wild, and between 4B and 18B are farmed. The farming of cochineal directly causes 4.1T to 21T additional deaths, primarily of male and female cochineal nymphs, and adult male cochineals." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in animals | a)
• Finding McAfee: A Case Study on Geoprofiling and Imagery Analysis [Medium]: "Identifying past, current, and possible future locations through the geolocation and chronolocation of media provided by a specific user. This case study is based on a challenge from well-known entrepreneur, John McAfee, to show how relative geolocation of two points on a chronological timeline can give a likely path and possible locations in between. To do this, two geographical points will be used, categorised by day, to geolocate a photo that was taken between those two points." (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in technology | a)
• Science vs. 5G [Gimletmedia]: 5G is not dangerous (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in science | a)
• This Artist Shows Us What Historical Figures Would Look Like If They Were Alive Today [Buzzfeed]: Marie Antoinette as a millennial? (
  '20 Mar 15Added Sun 2020-Mar-15 11 p.m. CDT
  in random | a)
• What Pandemic teaches us about a pandemic [Mischiefsoffaction]: "Fighting a contagious disease is a race against time. The priority is containment, not eradication. Cooperation is the only way to win." (
  '20 Mar 13Added Fri 2020-Mar-13 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• "If you can stay home now, you make things safer for the people who can’t" [Vox]: "If you don’t have reason to be scared individually, that’s great, but our fellow citizens who are vulnerable matter too, and we can help save them. Take measures for people who are sick or weak or old and build a country that’ll be there for you when you’re sick or weak or old, because someday you will be." (
  '20 Mar 10Added Tue 2020-Mar-10 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Should You Change Your Investment Strategy Because of COVID-19? [Blog.wealthfront]: "While there’s a lot of speculation, the reality is we just don’t know what’s ahead. But what we do know is that these are familiar market patterns we can learn from. So what’s our advice for worried or anxious investors? The same as always: Do nothing. [...] If you invest regularly, harvest your losses, and rebalance your portfolio, you’ll end up benefiting from market corrections in multiple ways. It won’t be easy. But over the long haul, it can really pay off." (
  '20 Mar 09Added Mon 2020-Mar-09 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• Coronavirus in Brief [Docs.google]: "Coronavirus is significantly worse than the flu, but not the zombie apocalypse. No need to panic, but it probably makes sense to prepare. It is going to affect day-to-day-life in western countries, including the U.S. [...] You can prepare by stocking at least 1 month of nonperishable food, pet food, and other necessities, and 3 months of prescription medications. Relocating away from dense cities and/or shifting to working from home, if possible. Learning how to properly wash your hands, and practicing not touching your face. Avoiding travel after March of this year, and/or planning with cancellation option." (
  '20 Mar 09Added Mon 2020-Mar-09 11 p.m. CDT
  in productivity | a)
• The Bleak Job Landscape of Adjunctopia for Ph.D.s [NYTimes]: "For colleges, this was cheaper. The halls of academe are known to be hospitable to people with radical views on power relationships between capital and labor, but colleges themselves are often merciless actors in the labor market. Many adjuncts earn only a few thousand dollars per course, with no health insurance or retirement benefits. Twenty-five percent of part-time faculty receive some form of public assistance. Some adjunct postings don’t require doctorates." (
  '20 Mar 08Added Sun 2020-Mar-08 11 p.m. CDT
  in policy | a)
• Murdering reality: the spurious spies of fiction [Standpointmag.co.uk]: A dozen tropes in the espionage genre that drive practitioners crazy: James Bond never seems to fill in his expense forms. The CIA can magically find people anywhere. Cellphone conversations with sources. Sex with sources. Blackmail. Senior officials micro-managing complex operations taking place thousands of miles from home. High-tech gizmos. Trying to speed away from those watching you. Intelligence officers taking action without fully informing the team. “Sweeping” for bugs. The singleton hero. Weapons galore. (
  '20 Mar 03Added Tue 2020-Mar-03 11 p.m. CST
  in random | a)
• Q: Is silicon life possible? Why all the fuss over carbon-based life? [Ask A Mathematician]: "Carbon has a couple things going for it that silicon doesn’t. Carbon seems to be perfectly happy to form arbitrarily large and complex molecules, while silicon generally doesn’t. More than that, when carbon oxidizes if forms carbon dioxide and monoxide, which are gases even at low temperatures and are (evidently) fairly easy to break apart. That property (making gases with oxygen that aren’t too hard to unmake) means that carbon is available as a building block for anything at the bottom of the food chain playing the “anchor and filter” gambit (like plants). Silicon on the other hand mostly forms solid minerals (which is why you’re not breathing it right now) which are very difficult to chemically break apart." (
  '20 Feb 23Added Sun 2020-Feb-23 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• Is There a Libertarian Case for Bernie Sanders? [Niskanencenter]: "The libertarian case for Bernie Sanders is simply that Bernie Sanders wants to make America more like Denmark, Canada, or Sweden … and the citizens of those countries enjoy more liberty than Americans do. No other candidate specifically aims to make the United States more closely resemble a freer country. That’s it. That’s the case. Is it really that easy? I think so. But perhaps you’re skeptical. Let me explain myself more fully. Join me, won’t you, on a brief philosophical foray." (
  '20 Feb 23Added Sun 2020-Feb-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Data-Driven Cultures Start at the Top [Feeds.hbr]: "It’s only when deep expertise exists at the top of the org charts that a penchant for evidence-based decision-making will develop pervasively throughout the organization." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• The Left [Youtube]: "Let's accept that all that is true. The game is rigged. Fine. How do you respond to that situation? Do you change nothing about your strategy at all and then blame the system when the predictable happens or do you try to improve your rhetoric somehow?" " (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• Q: What’s the point of going to the Moon? [Ask A Mathematician]: "The Moon is the Ft. Lauderdale Airport of space; you only go there so you can go somewhere else." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• Why did it take so long to invent X? [Rootsofprogress]: "Some inventions obviously depended on a breakthrough discovery, such as a new scientific theory, and were developed not too long after that theory. The telegraph, for instance, was invented very soon after the physical theory of electromagnetism was worked out. Other inventions were dreamed up long before the underlying technologies were possible, such as da Vinci’s helicopter or Babbage’s computer—ideas ahead of their time. But some inventions seem to have come along much later than they were possible, raising the question: why wasn’t this invented much earlier? Alex Tabbarok calls these “ideas behind their time”. This page collects analyses and hypotheses about such ideas." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Mainstream Democrats shouldn’t fear Bernie Sanders [Vox]: He’d be a strong nominee and a solid president. Sanders has a strong electoral track record. Sanders knows how to govern effectively. Sanders’s annoying fans count in his favor (because it is important to keep them in the tent). Sanders has some good ideas. Pro-worker monetary policy could make a real difference. Stop freaking out. (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw [Atlantic]: "It’s not clear why Xi let things spin so far out of control. It might be that he brushed aside concerns from his aides until it was too late, but a stronger possibility is that he did not know the crucial details. Hubei authorities may have lied, not just to the public but also upward—to the central government. Just as Mao didn’t know about the massive crop failures, Xi may not have known that a novel coronavirus with sustained human-to-human transmission was brewing into a global pandemic until too late. [...] If people are too afraid to talk, and if punishing people for “rumors” becomes the norm, a doctor punished for spreading news of a disease in one province becomes just another day, rather than an indication of impending crisis. [...] Contrary to common belief, the killer digital app for authoritarianism isn’t listening in on people through increased surveillance, but listening to them as they express their honest opinions, especially complaints." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• "In Hot U.S. Jobs Market, Half of College Grads Are Missing Out" [Bloomberg]: "Millions of Americans are seeing little return from their expensive college degrees -- even in today’s hot jobs market. For the first time in decades, recent college graduates are more likely to be out of work than the population as a whole, according to the New York Federal Reserve. And for the lower-earning half of college grads, the wage premium is shrinking fast. [...] It’s another worrying sign for a generation that borrowed record amounts of money to get through higher education, as the cost of tuition soared." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in economics | a)
• Proporti.onl [Proporti.onl]: "Many tech leaders follow mostly men, but I want to follow a diverse group of people. Twitter Analytics doesn't tell me the gender distribution of those I follow, and it doesn't try to identify gender-nonbinary people. So I built this tool for myself and put it on GitHub. It's inaccurate and it undercounts nonbinary folk, but it's better than making no effort at all. I want you to be able to do this, too. Estimate the distribution of those you follow and see if there's room to improve!" (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• "Flashloans, The Crazy New Invention of Magic Internet Money" [Trustnodes]: "The latest building block is flashloans, a code based operation where you get money without any condition because your code guarantees it will be paid back in 15 seconds (one block). [...] For the flashloan all actions must be done in one transaction. So you have to program all the steps into one smart contract transaction: borrow, act, repay. If you don’t repay back in the end, the transaction just fails and nothing happens. So the contract gives you say 10,000 eth in the beginning. If in the end there is no 10,000 eth, then it fails because nodes execute the transaction internally and revert the whole change if it fails. [...] You have to know how to code however to take advantage of it because you have to specify every single step, but after spending a few weeks on a Solidity tutorial you can basically get free money for arbitrage or whatever opportunity you may have come up with that can be done in one set of steps. Some guy for example made $360,000 by taking numerous steps in just one transaction" (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Stop Using Encrypted Email [Latacora.micro.blog]: "Email is unsafe and cannot be made safe. The tools we have today to encrypt email are badly flawed. Even if those flaws were fixed, email would remain unsafe. Its problems cannot plausibly be mitigated. [...] If messages can be sent in plaintext, they will be sent in plaintext. Metadata is as important as content, and email leaks it. Every archived message will eventually leak. Every long term secret will eventually leak." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Anonymous contributors answer: What’s some underrated general life advice? [80000hours]: "Maintain old friendships. Figure out how to spend money to save time. Find a supportive partner. Set aside time to think about the big things, then just live your life. Have a plan for what to do if your mental health deteriorates. Consider an unconventional life. Get plenty of sleep and exercise. Be able to give and receive blunt feedback. Spend less time reading the news. Be honest with your yourself about relationships. Carefully plan for retirement. Make conscious use of your self-knowledge. Don’t live in the centre of big cities. Be brave. Have a sense of humour." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Anonymous contributors answer: How honest & candid should high-profile people really be? [80000hours]: "The devious don’t win out. You can convey a message in many different ways (so pick the nicer way). Present things differently in different contexts, but don’t distort the facts. If you say a lie often enough, you can start to believe it. There are many good reasons for not sharing information. There are real consequences for being completely candid." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Anonymouscontributorsanswer:What’s one way to be successful you don’t think people talk about enough? [80000hours]: "Consider how motivated you will be when deciding between opportunities. Be willing to do whatever matters. Be relentless at pitching ideas. Improve the performance of others. Consider becoming a fundraiser, doing high-impact academic research, or earning-to-give. Have important conversations with friends. Do something really well that others in your community can’t. Take chances for generic success. Establish close working relationships. Be patient when switching careers. Teach yourself. Actually talk to people. Develop good people skills. Just do things." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The First Days of the Trump Regime [Atlantic]: "Republican senators affirmatively voted to allow the president to use his official powers to suppress the opposition party, to purge government employees who proved more loyal to the Constitution than to Trump, and to potentially prosecute or otherwise criminally implicate his political enemies without lawful cause, while shielding Trump allies from legal sanction. The acquittal vote ratified the authoritarian instincts of the president and the ideological convictions of his attorney general." (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• I wasted $40k on a fantastic startup idea [Tjcx.me]: "You can’t just create value for the user: that’s a charity. You also can’t just create value for your company: that’s a scam. Your goal is to set up some kind of positive-sum exchange, where everyone benefits, including you. A business plan, according to this textbook, starts with this simple question: how will you create value for yourself and the company?" (
  '20 Feb 22Added Sat 2020-Feb-22 11 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Tesla cars tricked into autonomously accelerating up to 85 MPH in a 35 MPH zone while in cruise control using just a two-inch strip of electrical tape [Dailymail.co.uk]: "Researchers at McAfee placed a two-inch long piece of electrical tape horizontally across the middle of the ‘3’ on a 35 mph speed limit sign, causing the car’s camera system to misread it as 85 mph. When the 2016 Tesla Model X drove toward the altered sign in cruise control it automatically accelerated to 50 mph before being stopped by the driver – the same occurred in a 2016 Model S." (
  '20 Feb 19Added Wed 2020-Feb-19 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers [Forresthe Ller]: The computer inside a modern USB charger has more RAM and disk space than the computer that sent Apolo 11 to the moon and back. (
  '20 Feb 19Added Wed 2020-Feb-19 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• The Democratic Debates Are a Fantasy World [Atlantic]: "Yet while polls show that health care is a top priority for voters, and while the policy differences among the slew of Democratic presidential candidates are meaningful, the moderators posing highly specific questions about the issue at past debates have ignored something important: However coherent, complete, fiscally sustainable, or popular the positions the candidates are taking on health reform—and on other issues such as immigration, education, taxes, and more—presidents do not get to wave magic wands and make their policies happen. They are thrown into a governing process in which a president’s plan is almost never enacted into law fully, if it is enacted at all. The legislative process, in recent decades, has become even more toxic. But questions that press the candidates on how they would navigate through this environment—and what they would do to reduce its toxicity—have been conspicuously absent in every debate so far." (
  '20 Feb 18Added Tue 2020-Feb-18 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Why It Took So Long to Invent the Wheel [Scientificamerican]: "The tricky thing about the wheel is not conceiving of a cylinder rolling on its edge. It's figuring out how to connect a stable, stationary platform to that cylinder." (
  '20 Feb 16Added Sun 2020-Feb-16 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• How China’s Incompetence Endangered the World [Foreignpolicy]: "The bottom line is trust, which appears to be waning inside China and is increasingly unraveling across the public health world. An epidemic cannot be fought and won unless the bonds of trust between governments and people can survive the grief, confusions, emotions, and medical challenges of the battle. The Chinese government, in its negligence, has jeopardized those bonds, perhaps beyond all repair." (
  '20 Feb 16Added Sun 2020-Feb-16 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The political force of Michael Bloomberg’s tactical charity [Brookings.edu]: "Machiavelli would easily have recognized the implications of Bloomberg’s philanthropy for his position in the Democratic primary. No matter his intentions, the Bloomberg campaign’s reliance on his personal wealth threatens America’s democratic institutions at a time when those institutions are already profoundly weakened. His charitable contributions exacerbate the risks posed by his self-funded campaign. Money is power, even when it is donated." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• "Without Solid Science, Government Plans to Expand Cormorant-Killing Efforts" [Audubon]: "Among North American birds, the Double-crested Cormorant serves as a sort of Rorschach test. To some, the long-necked diving birds are an overabundant scourge. They eat about a pound of fish a day, which some commercial fish producers and recreational anglers see as a threat to their livelihood or pastime. [...] But many conservationists and bird lovers see the situation differently. To them, cormorants have long been unfairly maligned for doing exactly what they’ve evolved to do—eating fish. From this perspective, the birds are a native species that has been around since long before people introduced fish farms, sport fishing, and lake houses into their environment, and a conservation success story after their rebound from the devastating impacts of the insecticide DDT. Moreover, while cormorants can be an issue for aquaculture operations, there is no clear evidence linking them to declines in wild fish populations." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in animals | a)
• Polling Is a Tricky Business. Reading the Results Doesn’t Have to Be. [The Dispatch]: "Support for particular issues may be confused by confusion for what a particular issue actually means, what the implications of the policy actually are, or what it actually means to support it. Margin of error can be a large factor, especially in cross-tabulations (e.g., support by gender). Also, it may be important to control for other factors, like name recognition." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Mike Bloomberg for years has battled women’s [Washingtonpost]: "But others viewed them more darkly, seeing them as blunt examples of what they considered to be a hostile environment, artifacts of a workplace employees said was saturated with degrading comments. Several lawsuits have been filed over the years alleging that women were discriminated against at Bloomberg’s business-information company, including a case brought by a federal agency and one filed by a former employee, who blamed Bloomberg for creating a culture of sexual harassment and degradation." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in """allegations of profane, sexist commentsnews""" | a)
• Reimagining the PhD [Nadiaeghbal]: Tips (and a personal story) for independent research: Write your own curriculum. Stay close to your subject (spend time with your target audience). Work in public (document what you learn). Build your own support network. Find ways to hold yourself accountable. Create artifacts that work for your audience (you don't have to publish papers if that isn't what works). Resist the temptation to play “research dress-up” (you don't have to write formally or follow all of academic style). (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure [Fordfoundation]: "Our modern society runs on software. But take a closer look, and you’ll find that the tools we use to build software are buckling under demand. [...] Much like roads or bridges, which anyone can walk or drive on, open source code can be used by anyone—from companies to individuals—to build software. This type of code makes up the digital infrastructure of our society today. Just like physical infrastructure, digital infrastructure needs regular upkeep and maintenance. [...] But financial support for digital infrastructure is much harder to come by. [...] No individual company or organization is incentivized to address the problem alone, because open source code is a public good. In order to support our digital infrastructure, we must find ways to work together. [...] Any support strategy needs to accept and work with the decentralized, community-centric qualities of open source code. Increasing awareness of the problem, making it easier for institutions to contribute time and money, expanding the pool of open source contributors, and developing best practices and policies across infrastructure projects will all go a long way in building a healthy and sustainable ecosystem." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Target's Delivery App Workers Describe a Culture of Retaliation and Fear [Vice]: "The Target-owned grocery delivery company Shipt is rolling out a new algorithmic pay model that is already draining paychecks. And workers are terrified to speak out [because they get fired when they do]." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• This One Chart Explains Why the Kids Back Bernie [Nymag]: "(1) The unemployment rate among recent college graduates in the U.S. is now higher than our country’s overall unemployment rate for the first time in over two decades, (2) More than 40 percent of recent college graduates are working jobs that do not traditionally require a bachelor’s degree (while one in eight are stuck in posts that pay $25,000 or less), and (3) the median income among the bottom half of college graduates is roughly 10 percent lower than it was three decades ago." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Bloomberg’s Billions: How the Candidate Built an Empire of Influence [NYTimes]: "It is not simply good will that Mr. Bloomberg has built. His political and philanthropic spending has also secured the allegiance or cooperation of powerful institutions and leaders within the Democratic Party who might take issue with parts of his record were they not so reliant on his largess. In interviews with The Times, no one described being threatened or coerced by Mr. Bloomberg or his money. But many said his wealth was an inescapable consideration — a gravitational force powerful enough to make coercion unnecessary." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• to tweet or not to tweet? tips and tricks for (sociology) grad students [Scatter.wordpress]: "observe a while before you post, diversify who you follow, promote other people’s work, be yourself, treat conversation on Twitter like you would those in a hallway, think of Twitter as a conversation, be deliberate, think about what you are using Twitter for, try not to get into personal feuds, aim to carve out a key audience of academics and non scholars, the most valuable connections are often lateral, the failure mode of clever is “asshole”, etc." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Cancer Progress: Much More Than You Wanted to Know [SlateStarCodex]: "Age-adjusted cancer incidence rates and death rates have been going down since 1990, primarily due to better social policies like discouraging smoking. Five-year-survival rates have been gradually improving since at least 1970, on average by maybe about 10% though this depends on severity. Although some of this is confounded by improved screening, this is unlikely to explain more than about 20-50% of the effect. The remainder is probably a real improvement in treatment. Whether or not this level of gradual improvement is enough to represent “winning” the War on Cancer, it at least demonstrates a non-zero amount of progress." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• "To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China" [NYTimes]: "The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grass-roots mobilization reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades not seen in China in decades, essentially entrusting front line epidemic prevention to a supercharged version of a neighborhood watch. Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. [...] Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in news | a)
• "Activate This ‘Bracelet of Silence,’ and Alexa Can’t Eavesdrop" [NYTimes]: "The bracelet is like an anti-smartwatch, both in its cyberpunk aesthetic and in its purpose of defeating technology. A large, somewhat ungainly white cuff with spiky transducers, the bracelet has 24 speakers that emit ultrasonic signals when the wearer turns it on. The sound is imperceptible to most ears, with the possible exception of young people and dogs, but nearby microphones will detect the high-frequency sound instead of other noises." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• How Bad Will the Coronavirus Outbreak Get? Here Are 6 Key Factors [NYTimes]: "How contagious is the virus? (It seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS.) How deadly is the virus? (It’s hard to know yet. But the fatality rate is probably less than 3 percent, much less than SARS.) How long does it take to show symptoms? (Possibly between 2 to 14 days, allowing the illness to go undetected.) How much have infected people traveled? (The virus spread quickly because it started in a transportation hub.) How effective will the response be? (The W.H.O. has praised China’s efforts, but critics fear lockdown measures may not be enough.) How long will it take to develop a vaccine? (A vaccine is still a year away — at minimum.)" (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in news | a)
• Living like a caveman [Alifeofproductivity]: "Modern humans evolved from hunter-gatherers over the last 2.5 million years. Because of this, we thrive best when we adopt some of our ancestors’ habits: getting enough physical activity, sunshine, social interaction, sleep, and nutrition. I wanted to find out how living the life my body was programmed for would affect my productivity. As an experiment, I lived like a caveman for the month of April—eating like a caveman, sleeping on the floor, doubling the amount of sunlight I got each day, and walking and running 8 to 14.5 kilometers a day. While modern society values convenience over health, it’s worth adopting these ancient habits to improve our energy levels. As I found, they have a bigger impact on our health, happiness, and productivity than we realize." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Q: What is quantum supremacy? Is it awesome or worrisome? [Ask A Mathematician]: "Quantum supremacy is a historical milestone more than anything, when a quantum computer manages to do a calculation that no classical computer is likely to ever match. A few weeks ago, Google’s “Sycamore” computer did just that. But your bank accounts are safe. Sycamore isn’t nearly powerful enough to break crypto keys and the calculation it did is arguably… a little pointless. Sycamore was given a series of random quantum circuits to simulate, which it was able to do. Barely. According to Google, “Our largest random quantum circuits have 53 qubits, 1113 single-qubit gates, 430 two-qubit gates, and a measurement on each qubit, for which we predict a total fidelity of 0.2%.” That 0.2% isn’t how often it fails, that’s how often it works. We’re not launching boldly into the era of quantum supremacy so much as we’re limping across the starting line. Baby steps." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• High rates of binge drinking may be caused by extreme latitude [Bmj]: "My interpretation is that while average alcohol consumption per head is influenced by the price and availability of alcohol, bingeing seems to be influenced mainly by latitude. In our hemisphere: the further north, the more bingeing. Binge drinking probably shares a common cause with Seasonal Affective Disorder –specifically the extreme summer-winter day-length variability which increases with latitude." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• How to Survive a Natural Disaster [Nationalgeographic]: "The safest and best thing to do when facing an approaching natural disaster is to heed your area’s evacuation notices and take advantage of evacuation assistance when it’s offered. It’s possible, however, to be caught by an unexpected emergency or to be unable to leave a disaster-striken region. When faced with those situations, what should you do to stay safe? How can you be better prepared? What kinds of choices will you need to make to survive?" (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• This Is How Trump Would Destroy Bernie Sanders [The Bulwark]: "A candidate less doctrinaire than Sanders would appreciate that Republicans have gift wrapped this issue by attempting to abolish Obamacare and, with it, popular protections such as coverage for pre-existing conditions. All Democrats need do is give Americans a choice between private insurance and Medicare for those who want it. The alternative is electoral malpractice—a self-inflicted debate mired in charges that the Democrats are narrowing choice and raising taxes. Which is exactly what Bernie promises his nominal party." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Everyday Systems [Everydaysystems]: "A guide for good habits: habits need to be built on systematic moderation; habits need a sustainable minimum of compliance; maintenance is more important than progress; branding (with a striking image, pun, or metaphor) is important; the system shouldn't require you to keep track of anything beyond the day of the week; the system should free up time, not take more of it; it should be socially unobtrusive; it should be free or cheap; it should be simple but specific; and it should be enjoyable." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Urban Ranger [Urbanranger]: "I am an urban ranger, I walk, it's what I do. The city is my wilderness, Sky scrapers are my trees." Urban Ranger is an extended metaphor to convince people (starting with myself) to make a habit of purposeful, sustained walking." (
  '20 Feb 14Added Fri 2020-Feb-14 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The Twelve Best Ways to Stop the Next Pandemic [80000hours]: "(1) Roll out genetic sequencing tests that lets you test someone for all known and unknown pathogens in one go. (2) Fund research into faster ‘platform’ methods for going from pathogen to vaccine. (3) Fund R&D into broad-spectrum drugs, especially antivirals. (4) Develop a national plan for responding to a severe pandemic. (5) Rigorously evaluate in what situations travel bans are warranted. (6) Coax countries into more rapidly sharing their medical data. (7) Set up genetic surveillance in hospitals, public transport and elsewhere. (8) Run regular tabletop exercises within governments to simulate how a pandemic response would play out. (9) Mandate disclosure of accidents in biosafety labs. (10) Figure out how to govern DNA synthesis businesses. (11) Require full cost-benefit analysis of "dual-use" research projects. (12) Assign responsibility for the above to particular individuals and organizations." (
  '20 Feb 13Added Thu 2020-Feb-13 11 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Who Needs Landmines? [Waronthe Rocks]: Podcast with a nuanced debate on the use and value of landmines. Do they help deter new threats from Russia and China? Or are they basically just an unmitigated humanitarian disaster? Is there a way to develop a landmine with strategic value but minimal humanitarian risk? Should the US join the Ottawa Treaty? (
  '20 Feb 13Added Thu 2020-Feb-13 11 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Common sense as a prior [LessWrong]: "The rough idea is to try find a group of people whose are trustworthy by clear and generally accepted indicators, and then use an impartial combination of the reasoning standards that they use when they are trying to have accurate views. I call this impartial combination elite common sense. I recommend using elite common sense as a prior in two senses. First, if you have no unusual information about a question, you should start with the same opinions as the broad coalition of trustworthy people would have. But their opinions are not the last word, and as you get more evidence, it can be reasonable to disagree. Second, a complete prior probability distribution specifies, for any possible set of evidence, what posterior probabilities you should have. In this deeper sense, I am not just recommending that you start with the same opinions as elite common sense, but also you update in ways that elite common sense would agree are the right ways to update." (
  '20 Feb 12Added Wed 2020-Feb-12 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• Independent Research [Nadiaeghbal]: "These days, if you say you work in research, most people assume you work in academia. But it’s sort of odd that we assume you need someone’s permission to do research. There’s no reason that universities need to be the gatekeepers of exploring and developing new ideas. [...However, ]without external validation [...] it’s hard to convince people that you’re any good at what you do." (
  '20 Feb 12Added Wed 2020-Feb-12 11 p.m. CST
  in metascience | a)
• Charles Dickens on Management and Labor [Conversableeconomist.blogspot]: "There's a sort of parlor game that the economically-minded sometimes play around the Christmas holiday, related to A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. Was Dickens writing his story as an attack on economics, capitalism, and selfishness? After all, his depiction of Ebenezer Scrooge, along with his use of phrases like "decrease the surplus population" and "a good man of business" would suggest as much, and a classic example of such an interpretation is here. Or was Dickens just telling a good story with distinct characters? After all, Scrooge is portrayed as an outlier in the business community. The warm portrayal of Mr. Fezziwig certainly opens the possibility that one can be a successful man of business as well as a good employer and a decent human being. And if Scrooge hadn't saved money, would he have been able to save Tiny Tim?" (
  '20 Feb 11Added Tue 2020-Feb-11 11 p.m. CST
  in economics | a)
• How we promoted EA at a large tech company [EA Forum]: "Large tech companies employ hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are financially well-off and want to help the world, but who are not aware of the effective altruism movement. Because there are already many EA folks working at these companies, and because many of these companies already have the culture and infrastructure to encourage/promote giving (ex. events, donation matching), this presents a huge opportunity to promote and build an EA mindset at these companies." (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• Persistence and reversibility – long-term design considerations for wild animal welfare [EA Forum]: "When designing interventions to improve the welfare of wild animals, we want to maximize the expected benefit produced given the cost. A major factor in the cost-effectiveness of interventions is the persistence of the effects. [...] However, due to widespread uncertainty concerning the effects of our actions on wild animal welfare, it is possible that an intervention will turn out to do more harm than good. [...] In short, we want to optimize persistence given a good outcome while still preserving option value in case of bad outcomes. However, there is a tension between persistence and reversibility, since most factors that contribute to high reversibility will also lead to low persistence, and vice versa." (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in animals | a)
• Dataset of Trillion Dollar figures [EA Forum]: "Below I link to a small dataset with 130 figures of over $1 trillion (e.g. Apple’s Market capitalization: $1 trillion, or the value of Global Residential Real Estate: $163 trillion). If something costs trillions, then it might score highly on the scale criteria of some prioritization frameworks. This because even if we have to invest billions to somehow save that money, the savings would be huge. These numbers might also be helpful to get a sense of the world economy. For instance, World GDP is ~$100 trillion, and more than half of that is US, China, and EU with a GDP of ~$20 trillion each." (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• This is a 9 billion pixel image of 84 million stars [Eso]: It's zoomable (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• "How to Survive Being Attacked by Nuclear Missiles, in 60 Seconds" [Nuclearadvice]: "If a nuclear weapon is heading toward you right now, [...s]hield inside behind heavy and dense materials like walls, concrete, bricks, books and earth. Best: Run as far underground as you can (eg. a basement or subway). Second best: the windowless centre on the middle floors of a thick, wide building. Third best: The most shielded part of a residential house. Do this even if you are far away. FALLOUT: The explosion may create and disperse deadly radioactive dust. Hide from any air, dust or other material from outside. Do this even if you are far away, as fallout can travel far on wind. The radiation will only be 1% as strong after 2 weeks. [...] During the first few days, stay inside, sheltered away from fallout. Prevent any air/material coming inside. Turn off air conditioners and close up any ventilation." (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• [AN #80]: Why AI risk might be solved without additional intervention from longtermists [EA Forum]: "While all four of these conversations covered very different topics, I think there were three main points of convergence. First, we were relatively unconvinced by the traditional arguments for AI risk, and find discontinuities relatively unlikely. Second, we were more optimistic about solving the problem in the future, when we know more about the problem and have more evidence about powerful AI systems. And finally, we were more optimistic that as we get more evidence of the problem in the future, the existing ML community will actually try to fix that problem." (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• The Truth About Violence: Three Principles of Self-Defense [Samharris]: "(1) Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. Self-defense is not about winning fights with aggressive men who probably have less to lose than you do. Never threaten your opponent. (2) Do not defend your property. Whatever your training, you should view any invitation to violence as an opportunity to die—or to be sent to prison for killing another human being. (3) Do whatever you can to avoid a physical confrontation, but the moment avoidance fails, attack explosively for the purposes of escape. However bad your options may appear in the moment, complying with the demands of a person who is seeking to control your movements is a terrible idea. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques. The moment it is clear that an assailant wants more than your property (which must be assumed in any home invasion), you must escape." (
  '20 Feb 09Added Sun 2020-Feb-09 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The Elon Musk Forecast Correction Function [Aaboyles.github.io]: "In case you haven’t heard, Elon Musk is the World’s Raddest Man. He’s reasonably consistent about delivering on his promises, too! Just… late. His predictions may contain telling information about when we can expect him to deliver something, it’s just that his numbers are very often wrong. And because they’re wrong in a biased way (he consistently predicts things will be ready sooner than they are), we can figure out how to correct his predictions." (
  '20 Feb 08Added Sat 2020-Feb-08 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous (or “A Few Lessons Learned Since 2007”) [Tim.blog]: "The point is this: you don’t need to do anything wrong to get death threats, rape threats, etc. You just need a big enough audience. Think of yourself as the leader of a tribe or the mayor of a city. The averages will dictate that you get a certain number of crazies, con artists, extortionists, possible (or actual) murderers, and so on. In fairness, we should also include a certain number of geniuses, a certain number of good Samaritans, and so on. Sure, your subject matter and content matters, but it doesn’t matter as much as you’d like to think. To recap: the bigger the population, the more opportunities and problems you will have." (
  '20 Feb 06Added Thu 2020-Feb-06 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President [Atlantic]: "The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, and I wanted to see it from the inside." (
  '20 Feb 06Added Thu 2020-Feb-06 11 p.m. CST
  in culturewar | a)
• Text campaigns are changing American politics — and nobody's ready [Vice]: "Texting is changing American political campaigns while regulators, politicians, and the voters are scrambling to catch up. The tech behind texting is old, of course, but new peer-to-peer platforms are enabling political campaigns to text tens of millions of people without asking permission first, a change from past text message advertising campaigns. Largely free of government regulation, texts could also be the next pipeline for unaccountable money to flow into American politics, much like social media advertising in 2016." (
  '20 Feb 06Added Thu 2020-Feb-06 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• The Better-Than-Average Effect Is Observed Because “Average” Is Often Construed as Below-Median Ability [Frontiersin]: "Most people rate their abilities as better than “average” even though it is statistically impossible for most people to have better-than-median abilities. Some investigators explained this phenomenon in terms of a self-enhancement bias. The present study complements this motivational explanation with the parsimonious cognitive explanation that the phrase “average ability” may be interpreted as below-median ability rather than median ability. We believe people tend to construe an “average” target that is based on the most representative exemplar, and this result in different levels of “average” in different domains. [...] For abilities perceived as easy (e.g., spoken and written expression), participants construed an “average” target at the 40th percentile (i.e., below-median ability) and showed a marked better-than-average effect. On the contrary, for abilities perceived to be difficult, participants construed an “average” target at the median or even above the median." (
  '20 Feb 05Added Wed 2020-Feb-05 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• What Happened to America’s Political Center of Gravity? [NYTimes]: "And the United States’ political center of gravity is to the right of other countries’, partly because of the lack of a serious left-wing party. Between 2000 and 2012, the Democratic manifestos were to the right of the median party platform. The party has moved left but is still much closer to the center than the Republicans." (
  '20 Feb 05Added Wed 2020-Feb-05 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Anatomy of a rental phishing scam [Jeffreyladish]: "The phishing team—and given the work involved and the level of polish I bet it was a team—ran a pretty tight operation. Their English was perfect, their emails looked professional, and their phishing site looked identical the original Airbnb site. [...] I’m even more impressed by their subtle psychological tricks." (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• To Build a Better Ballot [Ncase.me]: An interactive guide to voting systems (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• "If you're feeling down lately, here's a quick test to figure out why" [Twitter]: "Meet friends in real life, exercise, have meaningful work, be in a relationship with the right person (could just be a relationship with yourself), have the freedom to do what you really want in life, help others with things you are good at, prefer to buy exeriences instead of things, have new expereinces at least once in awhile, eat healthy, sleep enough, meditate and/or relax, go into nature, don't drink too much alcohol, have a creative outlet, and consider therapy." (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Immigration (But Were Afraid To Ask) [Podcast]: "Current Affairs contributing editor Eli Massey interviews senior editor Brianna Rennix, an immigration lawyer working with asylum seekers at the U.S. southern border." (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Pete Buttigieg is more electable than Bernie Sanders — and more progressive than you think [Vox]: "But Democratic primary voters are weighing competing priorities. They want a nominee who is progressive but still electable. They want a leader who is smart and even-tempered but who ideally isn’t of an age and health status that puts their ability to run a presidential campaign and serve a full term in doubt. They want a president who can represent underrepresented groups while speaking to Obama-Trump voters who feel threatened by that kind of social progressivism. There is a strong case that Buttigieg is the candidate who best fulfills those competing demands." (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The weirdest people in the world? [Hci.ucsd.edu]: "Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world’s top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. [...]Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity." (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in metascience | a)
• "To understand why Republicans are sticking with Trump, think like a gambler" [Mischiefsoffaction]: "Aversion to loss, fueled by polarization, explains why a disgraced Trump is better for Republicans than a President Pence" (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• How much does agriculture depend on pollinators? Lessons from long-term trends in crop production [Ncbi.nlm.nih.gov]: "If we had a complete loss of pollinating insects, global agriculture would only decrease by ~8%." (
  '20 Feb 04Added Tue 2020-Feb-04 11 p.m. CST
  in animals | a)
• "You have a set amount of "weirdness points". Spend them wisely." [LessWrong]: "If people weren't willing to deviate from society and hold weird beliefs, we wouldn't have had the important social movements that ended slavery and pushed back against racism, that created democracy, that expanded social roles for women, and that made the world a better place in numerous other ways. [...However, w]eirdness, of course, is a drawback. People take weird opinions less seriously. [...] All of this leads to the following actionable principles: [...] Recognize you only have a few "weirdness points" to spend. [...] Spend your weirdness points effectively [by only advocating for a few, select weird issues]. [...] Clean up and look good. [...] Advocate for more "normal" policies that are almost as good. [...] Use the foot-in-door technique and the door-in-face technique. [...] Evaluate the above with more research." (
  '20 Feb 03Added Mon 2020-Feb-03 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• PANDEMIC!!! [Gimletmedia]: "If a pandemic ripped across the world, how bad would it really get? You’ve heard the horror stories, but you’ve never heard one like this. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who advises the President on emerging infectious diseases, helps us out." (
  '20 Feb 02Added Sun 2020-Feb-02 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• Machine Learning meets ketosis: how to effectively lose weight [Github]: "Using machine learning to predict weight loss giving dieting, and following ML-directed techniques lead to intermittent fasting, avoiding carbs, emphasizing lower Glycemic loads, and exercising more." (
  '20 Feb 02Added Sun 2020-Feb-02 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The New Majority Behind Sex Work Decriminalization [Newrepublic]: "For our lawmakers to take up these issues, even tentatively, reveals a few things: They are going where we lead them, and they may be willing to take on other big fights in the future. But to get them there, we need support at the grassroots, and sex worker organizing has shown the way to do it. It’s talking to your neighbors, connecting struggles in plain language, and demystifying the things that for too long we’ve been told are impossible." (
  '20 Feb 01Added Sat 2020-Feb-01 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• "Democrats should run on the popular progressive ideas, but not the unpopular ones" [Vox]: "Democrats aren’t talking about a third conclusion: Most voters are not particularly attuned to factional debates, and they just like some ideas and not others. Rather than clinging to one or the other comprehensive agenda, Democrats might want to consider opening themselves up to the idea of just running on popular ideas." (
  '20 Feb 01Added Sat 2020-Feb-01 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• "Theory vs. Data" in statistics too" [Noahpinionblog.blogspot]: "[W]hen you have solid, reliable structural theory or you need to make predictions about situations far away from the available data, use more theory. When you don't have reliable theory and you're considering only a small change from known situations, use less theory. This seems like a general principle that can be applied in any scientific field, at any level of analysis (though it requires plenty of judgment to put into practice, obviously)." (
  '20 Feb 01Added Sat 2020-Feb-01 11 p.m. CST
  in datascience | a)
• "Donald Trump, We Are Coming For You" [Current Affairs]: "The problem is not so much that other Democrats “focus” on Trump himself rather than on an agenda for working people. It is that they are incapable of making the anti-Trump case that needs to be made. He’s not a clown. A clown is funny, entertaining. He’s a monstrosity. None of this is entertaining. It’s just horrific. People are dead. So what we have to have is a politics that says: There are now going to be consequences for waging war on working people." (
  '20 Feb 01Added Sat 2020-Feb-01 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• Did Warren Get Her Ad Campaign Wrong in Iowa? [Politico]: "[T]he age of the smartphone has not led candidates to abandon TV. Each of the candidates at the top of the Iowa polls has spent heavily on TV and radio ads, and each has ramped up spending significantly in the race’s final weeks." (
  '20 Feb 01Added Sat 2020-Feb-01 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Into the Personal-Website-Verse [Matthiasott]: "There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission. [...] But maybe the most compelling reason why a personal website and also learning how to build one is incredibly valuable is this: community." (
  '20 Feb 01Added Sat 2020-Feb-01 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• "We called 75,299 Iowans. 584 took our poll. We flew to Iowa to meet 15 of them." [NYTimes]: "Erika Derrick was feeding her peacocks in Springville, Iowa, when the phone rang. It was us, The New York Times, on the other end of the line. Hers was one of 75,299 numbers called as part of a poll conducted in January by The Times and Siena College. A small subset of these likely Democratic caucusgoers — including Ms. Derrick — said they would talk to us in person. So we flew to Iowa to meet 15 of them (plus a 9-year-old) in their homes, dorm rooms, a coffee shop and two public libraries." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• The quixotic run of anti-Trump Republican Joe Walsh [Washingtonexaminer]: "On one night, Walsh was with Republicans who agreed with him on most issues except his opposition to Trump. On the next night, he was with Democrats who disagreed with him on most issues except his opposition to Trump. He is a man without a home as the Iowa caucuses approach." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Who’s Prone to Drone? A Global Time-Series Analysis of Armed Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Proliferation [Papers.ssrn]: "What determines whether countries pursue and obtain armed drones? [...] We theorize and find evidence that security threats––like terrorism––are not the only factors driving proliferation. Regime type also has a significant effect, but it varies over time. From 1994-2010 regime type had no significant effect, but non-democracies became significantly more likely to pursue and obtain armed drones from 2011-2019 due to the concurrence of three shocks in time, the most important of which asymmetrically eased supply-side constraints for non-democracies. We also find that status-seeking states are more likely to pursue armed drones. Our results contribute to the broader academic literature on proliferation by demonstrating how supply and demand shocks can lead to changes in proliferation trends over time and lending further credence to the importance of prestige in international politics." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• "I found two identical packs of Skittles, among 468 packs with a total of 27,740 Skittles" [Possiblywrong.wordpress]: "Why bother with nearly three months of effort to collect this data? One easy answer is that I simply found it interesting. But I think a better answer is that this seemed like a great opportunity to demonstrate the predictive power of mathematics. A few months ago, we did some calculations on a cocktail napkin, so to speak, predicting that we should be able to find a pair of identical packs of Skittles with a reasonably– and perhaps surprisingly– small amount of effort. Actually seeing that effort through to the finish line can be a vivid demonstration for students of this predictive power of what might otherwise be viewed as “merely abstract” and not concretely useful mathematics." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in statistics | a)
• How Private Equity Buried Payless [NYTimes]: "Why hasn’t the finance-driven capitalism of the last few decades created faster growth? What if the masters of financial efficiency are making choices that don’t actually create the more dynamic, productive economy they promise? In extreme cases, what if they don’t really know what they’re doing at all?" (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• What Does It Mean To Be A Socialist? [Current Affairs]: "We have to build a movement, we have to all get along, but we have to do it without compromising our principles. Study those who came before us. Look at what they did, understand ourselves as continuing their work. Think strategically. Avoid cargo cult politics. This is an experiment. We have to undertake the long, slow process of figuring out how to organize successfully. Maintain clarity of vision. Constantly remind ourselves exactly what it is we are fighting for. Make sure the right questions are being asked. Seize the moment. Believe in ourselves." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• A Theory of Law [Greenbag]: "It is a common practice among law review editors to demand that authors support every claim with a citation. These demands can cause major headaches for legal scholars. Some claims are so obvious or obscure that they have not been made before. Other claims are made up or false, making them more difficult to support using references to the existing literature. Legal scholars need a source they can cite when confronted with these challenges. It should be something with an impressive but generic title. I offer this page, with the following conclusion: If you have been directed to this page by a citation elsewhere, it is plainly true that the author’s claim is correct." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in random | a)
• She Helped a Customer in Need. Then U.S. Bank Fired Her. [NYTimes]: "When young Americans say in polls that they react more positively to 'socialism' than to 'capitalism,' it’s because of the hypocrisy of institutions like U.S. Bank. I’ve often noted that companies have enormous capacity to help their communities. But too often they act like American tobacco companies, which killed more people than Stalin did, or pharma companies peddling opioids, or McKinsey & Company advising a business to 'get more patients on higher doses of opioids,' or Boeing mocking regulators." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• What Really Went Wrong in Afghanistan [The Dispatch]: "In December, the Washington Post published “Afghanistan Papers,” a series of investigative reports on the war[. ...] As a former director for Afghanistan and Pakistan on the National Security Council staff under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, I was among those interviewed by SIGAR. [...] I strongly disagree with much of the Post’s analysis. Some of the Post’s investigative reports lack context, perspective, or depth. Some of the Post’s claims are simply false. The Post misdiagnoses what went wrong in the war, while the actual main mistakes of the war—Bush’s light footprint and Obama’s withdrawal deadline—get comparatively little mention." (
  '20 Jan 31Added Fri 2020-Jan-31 11 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• What Bloomberg’s $11 million Super Bowl ad would cost you on your budget [Washingtonpost]: "Mike Bloomberg spent $11 million of his own money on a 60-second Super Bowl ad. That was 0.018 percent of his net worth. For you, that's equivalent to $22, a 14-inch Domino’s Buffalo Chicken pizza." (
  '20 Jan 30Added Thu 2020-Jan-30 11 p.m. CST
  in random | a)
• Coping with Founder Depression [Youtube]: "Depression among founders is normal. Nothing ever goes right in a company all the time. What is important is to acknowledge it and be proactive. Talk to friends and be honest about things. It may be especially helpful to find trusted friends outside the start-up scene. Also, if you think other people may be struggling with things you have gone through, try to be there for them." (
  '20 Jan 30Added Thu 2020-Jan-30 11 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Who Should Founders Listen To For Advice? [Youtube]: "There's an overwhelming amount of advice out there, so you need to also pay attention to who you do and don't listen to for advice. Be careful of asking for advice too much, as it takes away time from actually doing things. Be careful of trying to just seek advice until you get the answer you want, as this is a waste of time. Be careful of trying to average a bunch of advice, because this could steer you away from the outlier advice that would make you truly great. Try to pick just a few trusted advisors, avoiding people who are overly prescriptive, people who only have experience with one particular company, or jerks. Remember that there are a lot of different ways to do things that will work." (
  '20 Jan 30Added Thu 2020-Jan-30 11 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• What Makes The Top 10% Of Founders Different? [Youtube]: "From observing ~2500 founders at YC, top 10% founders are consistently able to declare what they want to do within a two-week interval, do all of it, and learn something from it. They may not always do the right thing or do it correctly, but they don't get stuck in the execution step. Top 10% founders are also really good at communication to investors, employees, customers, etc. - they're able to explain their business to anyone at any level of understanding, without stumbling. Lastly, top 10% founders can persevere in the face of defeat and failure. Quality of ideas are hard to evaluate in the beginning and should be used sparingly to evaluate founders." (
  '20 Jan 30Added Thu 2020-Jan-30 11 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• The radical moral implications of luck in human life [Vox]: "Neither human genes nor human societies distribute life’s gifts according to any principle we would recognize as fair or humane, given the extraordinary role of luck in our lives. We all become adults with wildly different inheritances, starting our lives in radically different places, propelled toward dramatically different destinations. We cannot eliminate luck, nor achieve total equality, but it is easily within our grasp to soften luck’s harsher effects, to ensure that no one falls too far, that everyone has access to a life of dignity. Before that can happen, though, we must look luck square in the face." (
  '20 Jan 30Added Thu 2020-Jan-30 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Why the Katy Perry/Flame lawsuit makes no sense [Youtube]: "Interesting combination of music theory, law, political precidents, and good videography." (
  '20 Jan 29Added Wed 2020-Jan-29 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Language: A Key Mechanism of Control [Fair]: "Often we search hard for words to help us define our opponents. Sometimes we are hesitant to use contrast. Remember that creating a difference helps you. These are powerful words that can create a clear and easily understood contrast. Apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party. [...] Use the list below to help define your campaign and your vision of public service. These words can help give extra power to your message. In addition, these words help develop the positive side of the contrast you should create with your opponent, giving your community something to vote for!" (
  '20 Jan 29Added Wed 2020-Jan-29 11 p.m. CST
  in culturewar | a)
• "Tiny Data, Approximate Bayesian Computation and the Socks of Karl Broman" [Sumsar.net]: "Karl Broman is here putting forward a very interesting problem. Interesting, not only because it involves socks, but because it involves what I would like to call Tiny Data™. The problem is this: Given the Tiny dataset of eleven unique socks, how many socks does Karl Broman have in his laundry in total? If we had Big Data we might have been able to use some clever machine learning algorithm to solve this problem such as bootstrap aggregated neural networks. But we don’t have Big Data, we have Tiny Data. We can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps because we only have socks (eleven to be precise). Instead we will have to build a statistical model that includes a lot more problem specific information. Let’s do that!" (
  '20 Jan 29Added Wed 2020-Jan-29 11 p.m. CST
  in datascience | a)
• "Why we panic about coronavirus, but not the flu" [Axios]: "If you’re freaking out about coronavirus but you didn’t get a flu shot, you’ve got it backwards. The big picture: A novel outbreak will always command more attention than a common illness, and the coronavirus is a serious health threat. But our newfound hyper-vigilance about infections might be more helpful if we could redirect some of it toward influenza — a significantly deadlier virus that strikes every year." (
  '20 Jan 29Added Wed 2020-Jan-29 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• Discount Rates [Docs.google]: "The following document outlines a number of different arguments for discount rates in the context of choosing discount rates for a GiveWell cost-effectiveness analysis. The document is divided into four sections: an introduction, a summary of arguments, a table of the pros and cons of each argument, and a section to help determine which discount rates a staff member should use in their GiveWell top charities CEA inputs." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in costeffectiveness | a)
• Sabbath hard and go home [Benjaminrosshoffman]: "Growing up Jewish, I thought that the traditional rules around the Sabbath were silly. Then I forgot to bring a spare battery on a camping trip. Now I think that something like the traditional Jewish Sabbath is an important cultural adaptation to preserve leisure, that would otherwise be destroyed in an urbanized, technological civilization." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Why Some AI Efforts Succeed While Many Fail [Blogs.wsj]: "AI is transformation, not a technical capability; focus on boosting revenue, not cutting costs; don't let IT drive your AI strategy" (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Citogenesis: How Often do Researchers not Read the Papers They Cite? [Gwern.net]: "Such copied errors turn out to be quite common and represent a large fraction of citations, and thus suggests that many paper are being cited without being read. Simkin & Roychowdhury venture a guess that as many as 80% of authors citing a paper have not actually read the original (which I feel is too high but I also can’t strongly argue with given how often I see quote errors or omissions when I check cites)." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in metascience | a)
• High Frequency Dating [Web.archive]: "Ahhh modern romance. Turing would be proud. Unfortunately I haven’t found the time to watch any of the videos since I’m too busy optimizing the algorithm." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• How to Identify an Immoral Maze [The Zvi.wordpress]: "Immoral mazes, as laid out in the book Moral Mazes, are toxic organizations. Working for them puts tremendous pressure on you to prioritize getting ahead in the organization over everything else. They are pushed to sacrifice not only all of their time, but also things such as their morality, family and ability to think clearly. Only those who go all-in doing this get ahead, and even most of them fail. Even successfully getting ahead is little consolation." Some heuristics for identification: how many levels of hierarchy are there? Do people have skin in the game? Do people have soul in the game? How do people describe their job when you ask? Is there diversity of skill levels? Is excellence possible and rewarded? Is there slack?" (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• Cost-Effectiveness Analysis [Charityentrepreneurship]: "This article explains why and how Charity Entrepreneurship uses cost-effectiveness analyses (CEAs) as part of our research process. A CEA consists of one or more calculations estimating the ratio of the cost of a given intervention relative to its impact. CEAs are particularly useful because they allow us to quantitatively compare different interventions. Despite their usefulness, CEAs are, not our only evaluative method, since they can be prone to errors and can fail to adjust for prior views." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in costeffectiveness | a)
• Joe Biden is the only candidate with a real shot at getting things done [Vox]: "Biden has the best shot at carrying the Senate to actually implement his ideas. While he may not pass progressive purity tests, he’d still be the most progressive Democratic nominee in history if he won. Also, Trump has been running — and losing — against Biden for months." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Open-source library provides explanation for machine learning through diverse counterfactuals [Microsoft]: "Consider a person who applies for a loan with a financial company, but their application is rejected by a machine learning algorithm used to determine who receives a loan from the company. How would you explain the decision made by the algorithm to this person? One option is to provide them with a list of features that contributed to the algorithm’s decision, such as income and credit score. [...] However, these explanations do not help this person decide what to do next to increase their chances of getting the loan in the future. [...] Therefore, it is equally important to show alternative feature inputs that would have received a favorable outcome from the algorithm. Such alternative examples are known as counterfactual explanations since they explain an algorithm by reasoning about a hypothetical input. In effect, they help a person answer the “what-if” question: What would have happened in an alternative counterfactual world where some of my features had been different?" (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• High-Speed Rail Is Going Nowhere Fast in the U.S. [Bloomberg]: "So although high-speed rail is a good long-term project for carbon-emissions reduction, the U.S. would probably get more bang for the buck by focusing on local trains — fast commuter rail linking suburbs to city centers, subways and light rail to let people get around cities without cars and buses that utilize the existing road systems. These projects aren’t as grand and beautiful as bullet trains, but they would do more for economic activity and livability — and they would be a lot more cost-effective." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• It’s time for the doom-mongers to clock off [Unherd]: "It is, though, absolutely ridiculous that the Doomsday Clock considers the very real problems of modern society — Trump being mad, Putin being machiavellian, the climate getting dangerously warm — as in any way as great an imminent and deadly threat as, say, the moment in 1952 when the USA and USSR tested their first thermonuclear devices within a few months of each other. And, yet, the Bulletin put that at just two minutes to midnight. This is not scientific risk assessment: this is PR." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• "If you want to follow your dreams, you have to say no to all the alternatives" [Oliveremberton]: "People never want to do one thing. We want to do all the things. We simultaneously want to exercise and to learn Spanish and to go out for pizza. Our desires are countless, independent agents, working to nudge our beachball in their own selfish direction. And so usually, that ball is going nowhere. It’s controlled more by the terrain than by the will of what’s inside it. [...] Let's fix that." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Doing good is as good as it ever was [EA Forum]: "Try to have realistic expectations about how much good you can do and get satisfaction from that. There are lots of important problems left. There are as big and as important as they ever were, and the world needs your contributions just as much as before." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• Wealth Is What You Don’t Spend [Collaborativefund]: "You can’t measure the benefit of exercise by merely looking at how much you sweat. The gap between what you gain and how much you avoid offsetting that gain is the figure that matters most. The same goes for saving money." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• How to Write Good [Thomaswdinsmore]: "Break rules. Break rules sparingly. Use a &^%$# grammar checker. Omit needless words. Tell stories. Revise, revise, revise, revise. Close with a bang." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Check Yo’ Data Before You Wreck Yo’ Results [Medium]: "Build assertions to check assumptions on data quality. Check your join results. Validate against historical knowledge (e.g., does data match aggregations of well-known metrics reported in a commonly-referred source?)" (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in datascience | a)
• I Would Argue [Econlib]: "First, a good argument begins with premises that many people find plausible even if they disagree with your conclusion. [...] Second, a good argument carefully reasons from these initial premises to your conclusion. [...] Third, a good argument must have a conclusion more obvious than the denial of your initial premises." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• What Donald Trump and Greta Thunberg Have in Common [Bloomberg]: "Both have a blunt speaking style that makes them the most effective orators of the decade." (
  '20 Jan 28Added Tue 2020-Jan-28 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• So I'm not original enough? [Indiehackers]: "I see a lot of people here argue that if you try to solve original problems only you have, you won't have a market big enough. [...] Even if you are a very unique person with an original problem to solve, there's still probably anywhere from 1,000 to 100,000 (or more) people in the world who have the same problem. At the lower end that's 1,000 people * $10/mo = $10,000/mo [...] Micro niche, but great money for an indie maker." (
  '20 Jan 27Added Mon 2020-Jan-27 11 p.m. CST
  in entrepreneurship | a)
• Countries are not anecdotes [Econlib]: "I notice that people often think about foreign countries in terms of anecdotes. Thus if you mention Singapore, then people might say, “Isn’t that the place that bans chewing gum.” If you mention Saudi Arabia, they might talk about the fact that women are not allowed to drive (a ban that was recently lifted.) Even big, complex countries such as India and China are often described in terms of anecdotes. To see the problem with this, listen to foreigners describe anecdotes about your country." (
  '20 Jan 27Added Mon 2020-Jan-27 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The Facebook Trials: It’s Not “Our” Data [Marginalrevolution]: "Facebook hasn’t taken our data—they have created it. Facebook and Google have made billions in profits, but it’s utterly false to think that we, the users, have not been compensated. Have you checked the price of a Facebook post or a Google search recently? More than 2 billion people use Facebook every month, none are charged. Google performs more than 3.5 billion searches every day, all for free. The total surplus created by Facebook and Google far exceeds their profits." (
  '20 Jan 27Added Mon 2020-Jan-27 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Fashionable Problems [Paulgraham]: "I've seen the same pattern in many different fields: even though lots of people have worked hard in the field, only a small fraction of the space of possibilities has been explored, because they've all worked on similar things." (
  '20 Jan 27Added Mon 2020-Jan-27 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The EA events ecosystem: How to get more involved (as a participant) [EA Forum]: "Want to get more involved in the effective altruism community? Find an EA meetup on the Effective Altruism Hub, sign up for the EA Pen Pals, look at profiles on the EA Hub, use the EA Forum, look to WANBAM (Women and Non-Binary Altruism Mentorship) if relevant, go to an EAGx conference, and/or apply to EA Global." (
  '20 Jan 26Added Sun 2020-Jan-26 11 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• How to Cut U.S. Emissions Faster? Do What These Countries Are Doing. [NYTimes]: "carbon tax; require utilities to produce all their electricity from zero-carbon sources (e.g., wind, solar, nuclear); aggressive electric-vehicle incentives; efficiency targets for industries like cement, steel and petrochemicals; energy efficiency standards for new homes and commercial buildings; curb methane emissions from oil and gas operations; end the use of hydrofluorocarbons" (
  '20 Jan 25Added Sat 2020-Jan-25 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The Choice Isn’t Between Capitalism or Socialism [Bloomberg]: "The spirited online debates about socialism and capitalism are, therefore, mostly useless. They ignore and obscure the multiple dimensions of policy, as well as changes over time, and thus make it harder rather than easier to think about concrete ways to fix the problems in the U.S. system. It would be helpful to have a new consensus terminology to describe the economic systems that various industrialized countries -- the U.S., France, Japan, China, and the countries of Scandinavia -- have developed over the last three decades. But one thing is for certain -- the dichotomy of socialism versus capitalism, inherited from the ideological battles of the past two centuries, is badly out of date." (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The Gattaca Trilogy [SlateStarCodex]: "Never! So-called meritocracy is a sham designed to justify inequality. No, we’ve made our choice, and we’re going to judge you by which university accepted you at age 17 based on a combination of illegibly-inflated grades, recommendations by people who barely knew you, and how much money your parents were willing to donate." (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Online Dating Advice: Optimum Message Length [Web.archive]: Keep your messages to about 200 characters (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Exactly What To Say In A First Message [in Online Dating] [Web.archive]: "Be literate. Avoid physical compliments. Use an unusual greeting. Bring up specific interests. If you’re a guy, be self-effacing. Consider becoming an atheist." (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Don't be Ugly by Accident! [Web.archive]: "In conclusion, the data strongly suggest that if you're single, you (or someone you know) should learn a little bit about photography. Technique can make or break your photograph, and the right decisions can get you more dates. It's actually not that hard. Use a decent camera. Go easy on the flash. Own the foreground. Take your picture in the afternoon." (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures [Web.archive]: It helps to be doing something interesting in your photo that can be a basis for a conversation starter. (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• "Dating: a Research Journal, Part 1" [Putanumonit]: Actively send messages. Stand out and be controversial. (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• How Will You Measure Your Life? [Hbr]: Have a life purpose. Focus on your life purpose. It's easy to neglect relationships but you shouldn't. Focus on building a culture. Always stay true to your principles. Stay humble. Focus on measuring what matters. (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• "Human Body Temperature Has Decreased In The United States, Stanford Study Finds" [Scienceblog]: "That standard of 98.6 F was established by German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich in 1851. Modern studies, however, have called that number into question, suggesting that it’s too high. A recent study, for example, found the average temperature of 25,000 British patients to be 97.9 F. In a study published today in eLife, Parsonnet and her colleagues explore body temperature trends and conclude that temperature changes since the time of Wunderlich reflect a true historical pattern, rather than measurement errors or biases." (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in science | a)
• The Rent Crisis Won’t Go Away Without More Housing [Bloomberg]: We need upzoning (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• In Praise of Flavored Sparkling Water [Blog.supplysideliberal]: "Some people have the intuition that any food or drink that is pleasurable must be bad for health. I would emphasize instead that it is important to find types of food and drink that are pleasurable enough relative to less healthy alternatives that they can help one stay away from the worst foods in the long run. " (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• #3: Lessons on ‘capturing the heavens’ from the ARPA/PARC project that created the internet &amp; PC (23 June 2017) [Dominiccummings]: Finding highly talented people (and only highly talented people) and having a strong vision and strong culture can lead to transformative change. Corporations naturally tend toward stasis and this trend needs to be actively resisted with an intense hostility. (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in management | a)
• Patrick Collison's Advice [Patrickcollison]: Go deep on a bunch of things. Work hard. Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. Read a lot. Think for yourself. Don't neglect social skills. (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The Tetris Effect [Dcgross]: "It’s hard, often impossible, to predict the exact block that will cause the wave function collapse. The events aren’t sequential, and you often don’t know the entire board. In situations like sales and recruiting, your best bet is to work to increase the odds that you’re going to drop the right block[1] by showering your customers with goodness they’re interested in. Concretely: optimize the environment. Spend a lot of time with people you’d like to hire. Send them content they’d enjoy. Do the same with your users. Do the same with your food. Etc. Less time optimizing a specific thing, more time improving the environment around that thing." (
  '20 Jan 24Added Fri 2020-Jan-24 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Scientific publishers should let their online readers become reviewers [Nature]: "But in the abundance market of online journals or that of post-publication filtering, where each paper is competing with all the other papers in its field, it's more sensible to define 'peer' as broadly as possible, to maximize the power of collective intelligence. In that market, prestige is just one factor in many determining relevance for a reader, and the more filtering aids that can be brought to bear, the better. From that perspective, these are exciting times. The experiments of Nature, PLoS journals and others will reveal where and how these techniques work best. But Wikipedia and Digg have already demonstrated that they do work." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in metascience | a)
• Will there be a credibility revolution in data science and AI? [Econometricsense.blogspot]: "Understanding where AI and automation are going to be the most disruptive to data scientists in the near term relates to understanding methodological differences between explaining and predicting, between machine learning and causal inference. It will require the ability to ask a different kind of question than machine learning algorithms are capable of answering off of the shelf today." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in datascience | a)
• Explaining Warren [Ryanavent.substack]: "This is an uncomfortable train of thought to entertain, no question. Having neglected to take adequate account of the role of power in society, we have allowed power to concentrate in ways that make reforming the system very difficult. Economic growth, economists like to say, is a positive-sum affair. If you make the right policies, then you ought to end up sufficiently rich as a society that winners from policy shifts can compensate losers and everyone ends up better off than they were before. This is the sunny picture that people on the other side of the rift—those more or less happy with the status quo—like to share with each other. It’s an appealing image! Because if no one has to lose, then everyone can get on board and no one has to feel bad. But if power is the problem, then you have a different situation. Power is necessarily zero-sum. Correcting the balance of power means reducing the power and privilege that the powerful and privileged now enjoy." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Liz Was a Diehard Conservative [Politico]: "The story of Warren’s awakening—from a true believer in free markets to a business-bashing enforcer of fair markets; from a moderate Republican who occasionally missed an election to one of the most liberal senators in America vying to lead the Democratic Party—breaks the mold of the traditional White House contender and is key to understanding how she sees the world: with a willingness to change when presented with new data, and the anger of someone who trusted the system and felt betrayed." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Growth and the case against randomista development [EA Forum]: "Prominent economists make plausible arguments which suggest that research on and advocacy for economic growth in low- and middle-income countries is more cost-effective than the things funded by proponents of randomista development. Effective altruists have devoted too little attention to these arguments. Assessing the soundness of these arguments should be a key focus for current generation-focused effective altruists over the next few years." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in development | a)
• A Theory About Religion [SlateStarCodex]: "The important thing about a religion is that it has a rallying flag that encourages it to preserve a certain culture, plus walls against the outside world. [...] So when we think of America as a perfectly natural secular culture, and Jews as following some kind of superstitious draconian law code, we’re just saying that our laws feel natural and obvious, but their laws feel like an outside imposition. And I think if a time-traveling King Solomon showed up at our doorstep, he would recognize American civil religion as a religion much quicker than he would recognize Christianity as one. Christianity would look like a barbaric mystery cult that had gotten too big for its britches; American civil religion would look like home." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in skepticism | a)
• Speech on campus: A reply to Brad DeLong [Noahpinionblog.blogspot]: "Given the lack of communication, coordination, shared values, training, and clearly recorded precedent among the various arms of the ad-hoc campus speech police, students and faculty at campuses across America will have little idea of what constitutes acceptable speech. In some situations, pro-Palestinian speech might be grounds for firing; in others, pro-Israel speech. At some universities we will see queer, mixed-race leftist professors berated to tears for wearing T-shirts saying "Poetry is lit". At other universities we will see faculty instructed not to ask students where they are from." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Why Has CEO Pay Increased So Much? [Scholar.harvard.edu]: "[T]he six-fold rise in CEO pay between 1980 and 2003 can be fully attributed to the six-fold increase in market capitalization of large companies during that period." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in economics | a)
• "Finally, a Bipartisan Bill That Would Help All Families" [The Nation]: "This December there was an overlooked Christmas miracle: Two senators announced a bipartisan proposal that wasn’t terrible. Mitt Romney (R-UT) teamed up with Michael Bennet (D-CO) to endorse an expansion of the child tax credit. Crucially, the bill includes something essential to the economic security of families: a child allowance. If the government would give money to all parents, no matter their income, it would solve two major problems facing Democrats. First, by helping both rich and poor families, parents as well as children, it would unite groups that are often pitted against one another. Second, it could be passed through the process known as reconciliation, which expedites budget bills. This means if Democrats control Congress and the White House next year, the law could go into effect quickly, helping millions of families almost immediately." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• College-Educated Voters Are Ruining American Politics [Atlantic]: "Instead, they are scrolling through their news feeds, keeping up on all the dramatic turns in Washington that satiate their need for an emotional connection to politics but that help them not at all learn how to be good citizens. They can recite the ins and outs of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation or fondly recall old 24-hour scandals such as Sharpiegate, but they haven’t the faintest idea how to push for what they care about in their own communities. If you think the status quo in politics isn’t great, then the time wasted on political hobbyism is pretty tragic." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• A Pragmatic View on the Existence of Billionaires & Government [Pragcap]: "The recent direction of public discourse appears to have swung in the direction that leads people to believe that billionaires or capitalists are always good or bad. These are lazy generalizations that lead to unproductive policy discussions. Yes, there are strong arguments for inequality presently and I personally believe that there are good arguments for higher capital gains taxes and personal income taxes. But we should disavow political commentaries based on vague generalizations such as “banning billionaires” or Ayn Randian style commentaries about government always being bad. And while the “both sides” police will surely accuse me of trying to see both sides, I am afraid to inform you that that’s precisely what’s needed right now because there is a lot of truth in both sides of this discussion." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Confidence levels inside and outside an argument [LessWrong]: "More than one in a billion times a political scientist writes a model, ey will get completely confused and write something with no relation to reality. More than one in a billion times a programmer writes a program to crunch political statistics, there will be a bug that completely invalidates the results. More than one in a billion times a staffer at a website publishes the results of a political calculation online, ey will accidentally switch which candidate goes with which chance of winning." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• Americans are Right to Think the Economy is Rigged [Lithub]: "One might think that economic inequality leads to self-correction in democracies, as the public becomes alarmed or outraged by income gaps and institutes taxes or other policies to take from the rich or give to the poor. But this doesn’t happen often. Researchers have found that instead, in countries around the world, the accumulation of wealth also often leads to accumulation of political power that is then harnessed to multiply that wealth. Indeed, that’s what we’re seeing in America. Our political system responds to large donors, so politicians create benefits for the rich, who then reward the politicians who created them. How different is this from the symbiosis in the Middle Ages between a king and the nobility, elevating aristocrats who repressed the peasantry at the same time that they hailed their own magnanimity and rolled their eyes at the peasants’ morals?" (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The Cybersecurity Dilemma in a Nutshell [The Consequentialist.wordpress]: "Security dilemmas are dangerous because in seeking their own security, states often build capabilities and take actions that can directly threaten the security of other states: often creating impressions of imminent offensive intent and prompting escalation. This is especially true for cybersecurity [because] (1) states that desire options for future cyber operations must make intrusions in advance, (2) states that desire options purely to defend themselves also have the incentive to intrude early, (3) cyber intrusions for intelligence gathering will be perceived as more threatening than past intelligence operations, and (4) the traditional mitigations to the security dilemma are less effective for the cybersecurity dilemma." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Evidence-Based Exercise – Why and How [EA Forum]: "Moderate and/or vigorous intensity “cardio” exercise for at least 20 minutes per day on at least 3 days per week is recommended. Additionally, resistance exercise (~ 3 x 10 repetitions with high intensity) for each of the major muscle groups should be performed on 2-3 days per week (can be combined with cardio)." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Democrats should talk about child care costs in a broader way [Vox]: "Democrats’ child care and child allowance ideas, especially if tweaked a little to be friendlier to stay-at-home-parents, could be a big part of the solution to a problem that traditionalist-minded people care about and that anti-tax, anti-spending conservatives simply can’t fix." (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• 100 Ways To Live Better [LessWrong]: Some of these are probably good. I just don't know which ones. (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• "Current Affairs’ “Some Puzzles For Libertarians”, Treated as Writing Prompts for Short Stories" [SlateStarCodex]: "“But it really only clicked a few weeks ago, when these goons from McDonalds broke into my house on a no-knock drug raid and shot my dog, and then muttered something about how surely I couldn’t object to private coercion. And it just got me thinking – what if this whole world is just a thought experiment by a communist with a crappy understanding of political philosophy trying to weak-man libertarianism? And then I thought – frick, I better get some really good vengeful-rich-person insurance, like, right away.”" (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• "Ars Longa, Vita Brevis" [SlateStarCodex]: "“Knowledge,” said the Alchemist, “is harder to transmit than anyone appreciates. One can write down the structure of a certain arch, or the tactical considerations behind a certain strategy. But above those are higher skills, skills we cannot name or appreciate. Caesar could glance at a battlefield and know precisely which lines were reliable and which were about to break. Vitruvius could see a great basilica in his mind’s eye, every wall and column snapping into place. We call this wisdom. It is not unteachable, but neither can it be taught. Do you understand?”" (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• The Proverbial Murder Mystery [SlateStarCodex]: Death by proverb (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in random | a)
• DBBenchmark [H2oai.github.io]: data.table is fast (
  '20 Jan 23Added Thu 2020-Jan-23 11 p.m. CST
  in datascience | a)
• Is vegetarianism/veganism growing more partisan over time? [EA Forum]: "In a 60 month long food demand survey of a representative sample of the U.S. done by Oklahoma State University, very liberal participants were most likely to report being veg*n (vegetarian/vegan) at 15%, roughly 10% higher than the remaining participants. Data shows a gap in veg*n rates between liberals (9.9%) and conservatives (3.8%), and between Democrats (7.4%) and Republicans (4.8%). However, annual trends show that veg*n rates among conservatives/Republicans are rising as quickly or quicker than liberals/Democrats." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in animals | a)
• Smart People Are Not Ruining America [Michaelochurch.wordpress]: "We have a problem in this country. The economic elite is destroying it, and the intellectual elite is largely powerless to stop the wreckage, and while there are many sources of our powerlessness, one of the main ones is that we get the bulk of the hate. The plebeians lump us all together, because the economic elite has told them to do so. They make no distinction between the magazine columnist, who can barely afford her studio in Brooklyn, and the private-jet billionaire who just fired them by changing numbers in a spreadsheet. [...] The country isn’t being destroyed by people using the word “intersectionality”. No, it’s being wrecked by the weakening of unions, corporate downsizing, accumulated environmental damage, rising anti-intellectualism, and creeping plutocracy. We have a real enemy and it’s time to put our (very mild) differences aside and fight." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in culturewar | a)
• Cleaning Up the Welfare State [Peoplespolicyproject]: "Most conspicuously, it lacks many benefits found in similarly developed countries like child care, paid leave, and universal health care. These omissions tend to dominate the public debate, but creating a decent welfare system will require more than just adding new benefits. We also need to clean up and rationalize the welfare state we already have. The US welfare state has a lot of problems. In this paper, I propose a series of moderate reforms to major welfare programs including Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Supplemental Security Income, Unemployment Insurance, and Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program. The overall purpose of these proposed reforms is to move towards a welfare state that is simpler, more coherent, and more centralized." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• If the Only Way You Can Get Your Great Idea Implemented… [Econlib]: "Don’t advocate government action merely because a clever-and-appealing policy proposal passes a cost-benefit test. Instead, look at the trendy-but-awful policies that will actually be adopted – and see if they pass a cost-benefit test. If they don’t, you should advocate laissez-faire despite all those shiny ideas in the textbook." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Book Review Review: Little Soldiers [SlateStarCodex]: "My Bay Area friends treat people as naturally motivated, and assume that if someone acts unmotivated, it’s because they’ve spent so long being taught to suppress their own desires that they’ve lost touch with innate enthusiasm. Personified China treats people as naturally unmotivated, and assumes that if someone acts unmotivated, it’s because they haven’t been trained to pursue a goal determinedly without getting blown around by every passing whim." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Big Data+Small Bias [Feedproxy.google]: "How big does n have to be for you to prefer (in the sense of having a smaller mean squared error) the random sample to the 2.3 million “big data” sample? Stop. Take a guess... [...] On the one hand, this illustrates the tremendous value of a random sample but it also shows how difficult it is in the social sciences to produce a truly random sample." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in statistics | a)
• Trump Wins Round One of the U.S.-China Trade War [Bloomberg]: "The U.S. has established its seriousness as a counterweight to China, something lacking since it largely overlooked China’s various territorial encroachments in the 2010s. Whether in economics or foreign policy, China now can expect the U.S. to push back — a very different calculus. At a time when there is tension in North Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan and the South China Sea, that is potentially a significant gain. President Donald Trump’s tariffs did hurt U.S. consumers, and while that is indeed an economic cost of the deal, it is also a credibility benefit. It shows that the U.S. is in fact willing to incur some pain to oppose China, contrary to the common Chinese view that Americans are “soft.” U.S. credibility has also been improved among its allies and some neutral nations." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Ricky Gervais teaches Hollywood what speaking truth to power really means [Washingtonpost]: "In the process, Gervais neatly illustrated exactly why so many people so resent the increasingly ritualized ceremonial sanctimony. Because it turns out that this may be exactly what makes people hate hypocrites so much: They fool us into giving them credit for holding potentially costly moral beliefs without actually paying those costs." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in culturewar | a)
• Dating apps need women. Advertisers need diversity. AI companies offer a solution: Fake people [Washingtonpost]: "Artificial intelligence start-ups are selling images of computer-generated faces that look like the real thing, offering companies a chance to create imaginary models and “increase diversity” in their ads without needing human beings. [...] The AI software used to create such faces is freely available and improving rapidly, allowing small start-ups to easily create fakes that are so convincing they can fool the human eye. The systems train on massive databases of actual faces, then attempt to replicate their features in new designs." (
  '20 Jan 22Added Wed 2020-Jan-22 11 p.m. CST
  in technology | a)
• Don’t Abolish Billionaires [NYTimes]: "Fixing these policy failures might create a system that produces fewer billionaires. But that shouldn’t be the point. It might also produce more morally worthy 10-figure fortunes. That’s great, because we should be aiming to channel entrepreneurial energy into productive wealth creation that lifts us all up and away from the extraction of wealth through unjust rules that close off opportunity and deprive us of the blessings of innovation. There is a possible America where routes to extractive wealth have been closed and barriers to productive wealth have been cleared; where the wealthiest have somewhat less, and the rest of us have a great deal more. In this America, our economy and democracy are more equitable and less corrupt, and the least well-off fare better than ever. We should dearly want to live there, in a place where, if you can manage to become one, it’s more than “morally appropriate” to be a billionaire." (
  '20 Jan 21Added Tue 2020-Jan-21 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• What Rich Centrists Could Learn from Howard Schultz about Political Power [Niskanencenter]: "Wealthy centrists have an opportunity to show they’re willing to fight for democracy not through bids for the presidency in the manner of Steyer and Bloomberg, but in the way that Schultz fought in retail: with an entrepreneurial vision, a realistic plan, an army of organizers, and a willingness to compromise between values and public demands. If instead they keep to the powerless track of hobbyism, they shouldn’t be surprised when the country turns toward a form of politics they despise. And that despises them." (
  '20 Jan 21Added Tue 2020-Jan-21 11 p.m. CST
  in activism | a)
• Gay Rites are Civil Rites [SlateStarCodex]: "A shared religion binds people together. For a day, everyone is on the same side. That builds social trust and helps turn a city into a community. [...F]or a little while, everybody, old and young, rich or poor, whatever one Guatemalan political party is and whatever the other Guatemalan political party is, were caught up in the same great wave, swept together by the glory of the Easter narrative. It was the sort of thing, I thought sadly to myself, that would never happen back in America, where we didn’t have the same kind of shared religious purpose, where the liberal traditions like the separation of church and state prevented the same kind of all-consuming state-sponsored dedication to a single narrative. [...] After five minutes I realized of course this was false. I’ve been to Fourth of July parades." (
  '20 Jan 21Added Tue 2020-Jan-21 11 p.m. CST
  in culture | a)
• Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election — And We’re Not Ready [Rollingstone]: "Are we prepared going into the 2020 election? After seven months of reporting, interviewing more than 40 experts as well as current and former government officials and reviewing thousands of pages of records, the reality is this: We’ve made progress since the last election — but we’re much less secure than we should be. To use Sen. Warner’s analogy, the windows and doors are no longer wide open, but the burglars are more sophisticated, and there are a lot more of them than there were four years ago. They may try to break into our voting systems; they may push online propaganda to merely create the impression of an attack as a way to undermine our faith in the electoral process. “The target is the minds of the American people,” says Joshua Geltzer, a former counterterrorism director on the National Security Council. “In some ways, we’re less vulnerable than we were in 2016. In other ways, it’s more.”" (
  '20 Jan 20Added Mon 2020-Jan-20 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Why Political Science Doesn't Like Term Limits [Mischiefsoffaction]: "Term limits don't deliver much benefit - they don't increase representativeness, diversity, or quality of representatives... they don't reduce corruption or campaign spending ... in fact, they don't even limit terms that much! Instead, they increase polarization and lobbyist influence and reduce legislator expertise." (
  '20 Jan 20Added Mon 2020-Jan-20 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• Overly Optimistic Prediction Results on Imbalanced Data: Flaws and Benefits of Applying Over-sampling [Arxiv]: Don't apply oversampling before splitting into train / test (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in datascience | a)
• Potential downsides of using explicit probabilities [EA Forum]: "There are some real downsides that can occur in practice when actual humans use [explicit probabilities.] But some downsides that have been suggested (particularly causing overconfidence and understating the VoI) might actually be more pronounced for approaches other than using EPs. Some downsides may be more pronounced when the probabilities one has (or could have) are less trustworthy. Other downsides may be more pronounced when the probabilities one has (or could have) are more trustworthy. Only one downside (reputational issues) seems to provide any argument for even acting as if there’s a binary risk-uncertainty distinction. The above point, combined with arguments I made in an earlier post, makes me believe that we should abandon the concept of the risk-uncertainty distinction in our own thinking (and at least most communication), and that we should think instead in terms of: a continuum of more to less trustworthy probabilities the practical upsides and downsides of using EPs, for actual humans." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• The Universal Rules of Civilized Discourse [Blog.discourse]: "The principles in the default Discourse community behavior FAQ were distilled, as best we could, from the common, shared community guidelines of more than 50 forums active for a decade or more. We hope that anyone can launch a Discourse-powered forum community with confidence, knowing that they’ve got the basic guidelines for civilized discourse covered." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in culturewar | a)
• "In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization" [SlateStarCodex]: "So again we make an agreement. I won’t use the apparatus of government against Protestantism, you don’t use the apparatus of government against Catholicism. The specific American example is the First Amendment and the general case is called “liberalism”, or to be dramatic about it, “civilization 2.0”. Every case in which both sides agree to lay down their weapons and be nice to each other has corresponded to spectacular gains by both sides and a new era of human flourishing." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in culturewar | a)
• The Killer Algorithms Nobody’s Talking About [Foreignpolicy]: "Eventually, the lead-up to a strike may involve dozens or hundreds of separate algorithms, each with a different job, passing findings not just to human overseers but also from machine to machine. Mistakes could accrue; human judgment and machine estimations would be impossible to parse from one another; and the results could be wildly unpredictable." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in nationalsecurity | a)
• Electability and the Senate in 2020 [Towardsdatascience]: Candidate choice in the US Democratic Primary could make a ~50 electoral point swing in the US Presidential Election and ~1.5 Senate seats according to reasonably robust modeling. (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in politicalscience | a)
• "In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates" [Washingtonpost]: "In 2020, American voters must choose among several visions of the future. There is a serious debate going on in the Democratic Party about what is wrong with the country and what needs to be done to fix it. And I, for one, am not going to take a stance on that debate. Should we be realists? Should we be radicals? Should we be neither radical nor realistic? Yes, yes and yes! [...] This building is either on fire or not, and consequently, I advise people either to rush out of the building with their children and valuables, or take a nap! Good luck!" (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The economic policy of Elizabeth Warren [Marginalrevolution]: "Some potentially bad policies of Elizabeth Warren: She wants to ban fracking through executive order (I agree this is bad); her private equity plan would end PE which is net beneficial (I don't know enough to say); her farm plan is too nationalistic and protectionist (I don't know enough to say); her tax plan taxes too much (I don't know enough to say); her student debt forgiveness and free college plans are insufficiently egalitarian, too expensive, and leads to bad incentives (I don't know enough to say); her health care policy is too vacillating (I disagree); breaking up Big Tech would be bad (I don't know enough to say); and she wants to do too much through executive order (I lean toward this being bad but I don't know how else to accomplish an agenda)." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Socialists Will Never Understand Elizabeth Warren [Foreignpolicy]: "Warren’s politics are so confusing because we have forgotten that a pro-capitalist left is even possible. For a long time, political debate in the United States has been a fight between conservatives and libertarians on the right, who favored the market, and socialists and liberals on the left, who favored the government." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• The case for Elizabeth Warren [Vox]: "The case for Warren over her competitors is threefold. She understands America’s problems better than anyone else in the field, in part because it’s her research and analysis that now forms the base for much of the policy debate. She understands how to focus and wield the powers of the regulatory state better than anyone else, because she’s actually done it, and because it’s core to her political project. And she is, far and away, the candidate with the clearest plan for making ambitious governance possible again." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• How to argue for a wealth tax [Marginalrevolution]: "I played around with a bunch of numbers, and across 20-30 year periods came up with total net capital gains tax rates in the 50 to 70 percent range, noting that the current 20 percent long-term base rate for high earners is applied to nominal not real gains. Has any wealthy country sustained such a high net real capital gains rate? Of course, rhetorically a “2 percent tax on wealth” sounds much better than say “a 62 percent tax rate on long-term capital gains.” Don’t be fooled!" (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• Unsafe at Any Rate [Democracyjournal]: "It is impossible to buy a toaster that has a one-in-five chance of bursting into flames and burning down your house. But it is possible to refinance an existing home with a mortgage that has the same one-in-five chance of putting the family out on the street–and the mortgage won’t even carry a disclosure of that fact to the homeowner. Similarly, it’s impossible to change the price on a toaster once it has been purchased. But long after the papers have been signed, it is possible to triple the price of the credit used to finance the purchase of that appliance, even if the customer meets all the credit terms, in full and on time. Why are consumers safe when they purchase tangible consumer products with cash, but when they sign up for routine financial products like mortgages and credit cards they are left at the mercy of their creditors?" (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• They Might Never Tell You It’s Broken [Pointersgonewild]: "The more important lesson, that I didn’t understand until that point, is that you can’t count on the people trying your project to quickly and reliably signal bugs to you. Most of the time, if it doesn’t work, they won’t report the problem." (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Did Van Halen’s Concert Contract Require the Removal of Brown M&Ms? [Snopes]: "The legendary “no brown M&Ms” contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen’s contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide a simple way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read and complied with. As Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth explained in his autobiography:" (
  '20 Jan 19Added Sun 2020-Jan-19 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• A Lucky Stalemate [Fakenous.net]: Political stalemates can be good as they tend to moderate legislation and prevent bad legislation and provide a check on corruption. (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)
• *Why Nations Fail* and the long-termist view of global poverty [BenKuhn]: "Within the effective altruism community, people often talk about “long-termist” vs “short-termist” worldviews. The official distinction between the two is that short-termists prioritize problems by how they affect people alive today, while long-termists prioritize problems by how they could affect humanity’s entire future trajectory. In practice, people usually treat this as synonymous with prioritizing either existential risk reduction (if long-termist), or scaling up proven global health interventions (if short-termist). It’s a bit surprising that each worldview should have exactly one favorite cause area, though. Couldn’t you have short-termist work on existential risk, or long-termist work on global poverty?" (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in effectivealtruism | a)
• 10 tactics to stop procrastinating [Alifeofproductivity]: "The more boring, frustrating, difficult, meaningless, ambiguous, and unstructured a task is, the more likely you are to procrastinate with it. 10 strategies that will help you stop: flip these characteristics to make a task less aversive, recognize how your brain responds to “cognitive dissonance”, limit how much time you spend on something, be kind to yourself, just get started, list the costs of procrastinating, become better friends with future-you, completely disconnect from the Internet, form “implementation intentions”, and use procrastination as a sign that you should seek out more meaningful work. Whew." (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Extend gratitude beyond platitudes [Timharford]: "Writing a thoughtful thank-you letter when someone sends you a present requires far less imagination. It is the most elementary expression of gratitude. Still, it is not a bad place to start." (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Cassette Tape Thoughts [Acesounderglass]: "“The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements-all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics-to make it easy for him to “make up his own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.”" (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in rationality | a)
• The Meditation Diet: How I Lost 60+ lbs. by Savoring [ZenHabits]: "And yet, a year later I had lost about 20-30 lbs. and ran a marathon. The pounds kept dropping away, year after year, and more importantly, I was eating healthier foods. I now love fresh fruits and veggies, raw nuts and seeds, beans and whole grains that haven’t been ground up, real unprocessed food. [...] Here’s the secret: I used eating as a form of meditation." (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• Stop trying [BenKuhn]: "If there’s one thing that obsesses self-improvement junkies, it’s actually sticking with their regimens. Life hacks abound: Tell your friends about your plan so you’ll be embarrassed if you fail! Make sure you keep an unbroken streak! Charge yourself money if you don’t stick to it! Donate the money to your least favorite charity!1 Forget donations, how about electric shocks? The escalating absurdity should tell you that this problem is unsolved. But in my opinion, that’s because everyone tries to do it wrong. Personally, I’ve found my productivity habits to be extremely long-lived when I make sure they’re literally zero maintenance. That is, when it’s habit time, it requires more willpower to break the habit than to keep going." (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in productivity | a)
• The coming technocracy [Econlib]: "I suspect that the trends I see in China will eventually spread elsewhere, and at some point all governments will become “potentially totalitarian” in the sense of having the technological capability of exercising total control over the population. They’ll be able to know everywhere you move, everything you read, and everything you buy. Whether they will actually exercise that control is another question, which I can’t answer. I don’t like where the world is headed. But perhaps younger people are comfortable with all this technology." (
  '20 Jan 18Added Sat 2020-Jan-18 11 p.m. CST
  in policy | a)