3 stars
A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives | Symbolic Capital(ism)
Musa Al-Gharbi:
All the prominent but obviously false narratives about the 2024 election prepared for burial in one convenient post. […]
Harris is black. Trump says racist stuff on the regular. Trump won. It must be because of racism, right? Open and shut case.
Not so much. […]
Meanwhile, Harris did quite well with whites in this cycle. She outperformed Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden with white voters. […]
This cycle proved 2020 was not a fluke: in 2024, Democrats had their lowest performance with black voters in roughly a half-century. Much attention has been paid to black men in generating this outcome. However, Harris didn’t do particularly well with black women either. […]
Trump is known for his derogatory words and behaviors towards women. He defeated a woman, Hillary Clinton, in 2016. He lost to a man, Joe Biden, in 2020. He then bested yet another woman, Kamala Harris, in 2024. Misogyny must be driving these outcomes, right? It must be that Americans, especially men, just can’t stand the idea of a female president.
Not really. […]
So let me put it bluntly: Democrats lost in 2024 because Harris performed extremely poorly with women. Going all the way back to 1996 (when the partisan gender divide kicked into high gear), there has been only one Democrat who performed worse with women than Kamala did: John Kerry in 2004.
Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity | Astral Codex Ten
The rise of Christianity is a great puzzle. In 40 AD, there were maybe a thousand Christians. Their Messiah had just been executed, and they were on the wrong side of an intercontinental empire that had crushed all previous foes. By 400, there were forty million, and they were set to dominate the next millennium of Western history. […]
Now we can maybe reframe the “virtue and love” advantage. Because Christians were so good, they could interact with pagans without feeling any temptation to leave the faith (Christians were just better to know and have around than pagans). Because they were so kind, they could make friends and social connections quickly. Because they loved one another so deeply, they could have tight-knit communities even in the absence of the normal cultic ban on communicating with outsiders.
Is this all there is? I’m not sure. Also, talk about Jesus is cheap, but I still don’t understand how they managed to be so virtuous and loving, in a way that so few modern Christians (even the ones who really believe in Jesus) are. I’m not making the boring liberal complaint that Christians are hypocritical and evil, although of course many are. I’m making the equally-boring-but-hopefully-less-inflammatory complaint that many Christians are perfectly decent people, upstanding citizens - but don’t really seem like the type who would gladly die in a plague just so they could help nurse their worst enemy. I’m not complaining or blaming Christians for this - almost nobody is that person! I just wonder what the early Christians had which modern Christians have lost.
Maybe it was just selection effects? The kindest 1% of Romans became Christian, whereas later ~100% of people in Western countries were Christian and you had to operate the software on normal neurotypes? But this would imply a very different story of early Christian conversion than Stark gives us!
2 stars
The Business School Scandal That Just Keeps Getting Bigger | The Atlantic
Some degree of disillusionment was common among the academics I spoke with for this story. The early-career researcher in business academia told me that he has an “unhealthy hobby” of finding manipulated data. But now, he said, he’s giving up the fight. “At least for the time being, I’m done,” he told me. “Feeling like Sisyphus isn’t the most fulfilling experience.” A management professor who has followed all of these cases very closely gave this assessment: “I would say that distrust characterizes many people in the field—it’s all very depressing and demotivating.”
It’s possible that no one is more depressed and demotivated, at this point, than Juliana Schroeder. “To be honest with you, I’ve had some very low moments where I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is not the right field for me, and I shouldn’t be in it,’ ” she said. “And to even have any errors in any of my papers is incredibly embarrassing, let alone one that looks like data-tampering.”
The Death and Life of Prediction Markets at Google | Asterisk Magazine
Over the past two decades, Google has hosted two different internal platforms for predictions. Why did the first one fail — and will the other endure?
Getting started with AI: Good enough prompting | One Useful Thing
Instead, let me propose a new analogy: treat AI like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation, one that comes highly recommended but whose actual abilities are not that clear. And I mean literally treat AI just like an infinitely patient new coworker who forgets everything you tell them each new conversation. Two parts of this are analogous to working with humans (being new on the job and being a coworker) and two of them are very alien (forgetting everything and being infinitely patient). We should start with where AIs are closest to humans, because that is the key to good-enough prompting
Sitters and Standers | The Pudding
This story is about two kinds of workers in America: Sitters — people who sit for a living — and Standers — those who stand, crouch, crawl, and lift.
I poured all the galaxies in the Universe into a pool | Epic Spaceman [YouTube]
In many ways this video is an homage to the Hubble Deep Field image and the profound answers it brought us about the scale of what's out there.
Parmita Mishra | X
We recently saw an insane discovery in biology, which if true, in my opinion, makes extraterrestrial life far far more likely. New research suggests that life on Earth became surprisingly complex very early, reshaping our understanding of life’s origins and its implications for the existence of life elsewhere in the universe.
The 25 Most Important Recipes of the Past 100 Years | Slate
A century of American braising, baking, and imbibing, in one nation-spanning list.
Hopium comes at a high price | Silver Bulletin
The story explores why people are perpetually so dissatisfied with polls even when they have a really good year like in 2022 — or a fine year like this one. And there are a few obvious answers to that. […]
Another reason for polling skepticism is simply that we’re in an era of very close elections. Nobody cares much when a candidate who was ahead by 11 points wins by only 7 — or romps to victory by 15. But if Kamala Harris was ahead in Wisconsin by 1 point and loses by 1 instead, that will seem like a big deal — even though the polling miss (2 points) was only half as wide as the 4-point error in the hypothetical election I described.
Against The Generalized Anti-Caution Argument | Astral Codex Ten
Toy example: suppose you’re a doctor. Your patient wants to try a new experimental drug, 100 mg. You say “Don’t do it, we don’t know if it’s safe”. They do it anyway and it’s fine. You say “I guess 100 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 250 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 250 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.” They try 500 mg and it’s fine. You say “I guess 500 mg was safe, but don’t go above that.”
They say “Haha, as if I would listen to you! First you said it might not be safe at all, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 250 mg, but you were wrong. Then you said it might not be safe at 500 mg, but you were wrong. At this point I know you’re a fraud! Stop lecturing me!” Then they try 1000 mg and they die.
The lesson is: “maybe this thing that will happen eventually will happen now” doesn’t count as a failed prediction.
I’ve noticed this in a few places recently.
America doesn't really have a working class | Noahpinion
Why class politics is unlikely to succeed where identity politics failed.
A Chance to Build | Stratechery
The second point, though, is that there does seem to be both more risk and opportunity than many people think. Tariffs do change things; by virtue of my location I talk to plenty of people on the ground who have been busy for years moving factories, not from China to the U.S., but to places like Thailand or Vietnam. That doesn’t really affect the trade deficit, but things that matter don’t always show up in aggregate numbers.
To that end, the risk for tech is that tariffs specifically and Trump’s approach to trade generally do more damage to the golden goose than expected. More expensive hardware ultimately constricts the market for software; tariffs in violation of agreements like the ITA give the opening for other countries to impose levies of their own, and U.S. tech companies could very well be a popular target.
The opportunity, meanwhile, is to build new kinds of manufacturing companies that can seize on a tariff-granted price advantage. These sorts of companies, perhaps to Trump’s frustration, are not likely to be employment powerhouses; the real opportunity is taking advantage of robotics and AI to make physical goods into zero marginal cost items in their own right (outside of commodities; this is what has happened to chips: assembly and testing are fully automated, which makes a U.S. buildout viable).
Kamala Harris was a replacement-level candidate | Silver Bulletin
Trump's win is mostly Biden's fault, not hers. Still, she was a mediocre candidate in a year when Democrats needed a strong one.
What Working-Class Voters Wanted | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
At the end of the presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates placed a bet on a hard-edged closing argument: that Donald Trump is a fascist and friend of dictators. She offered herself as the alternative, a messenger of hope, aspiration, and good will. But her bet failed badly, prompting many Democrats to theorize that Trump voters had simply chosen autocracy over democracy, a bleak house over a bright one.
Perhaps that was true of many of Trump’s hardest-core, most right-wing supporters. But what if the Democrats got it wrong regarding the rest — the many working-class independents and former Biden voters who turned against Harris?
What if, in fact, many Trump voters didn’t see darkness in his message but a kind of light?
‘It should not taste marine-like’: Would you eat a burger made from processed sea squirts? | The Guardian
Odd-looking creatures called ciona are naturally rich in protein and one company aims to farm and process them for the table
1 star
Star imaged in detail outside the Milky Way for the 1st time (image, video) | Space.com
"For the first time, we have succeeded in taking a zoomed-in image of a dying star in a galaxy outside our own Milky Way."
Some scientists think | Diagram Monkey
Nothing but a funny tale:
When an article says “some scientists think” then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn’t given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.
I should also, on reflection, have practiced in private. I had an audience, which grew as my initial satisfaction at an hypothesis well proven, slipped rapidly through stages of qualm, disquiet, then alarm (mild through severe) and ended in full blown panic.
When one panics, one’s muscles tense, which is of course, the opposite of what I needed here. I had been quite relaxed at the start, but now I couldn’t get a finger between the orange and the very taut edges of my mouth.
Above and below, the orange, which was now under some pressure, deformed to make a nearly perfect seal against my teeth. I hadn’t previously been aware of how much oxygen one needs to consume an orange, but I was made aware of it now by its sudden and ongoing lack.
"Too much love" - project in progress. | Behance
I show old, much-loved teddies and dolls and compare them with as good as new doppelgangers. I think the broken stuffed animals have a lot of soul. The project is inspired by my older daughter, who took her plush dog everywhere when she was little. One day I found this dog again without button eye and torn seams in the store and bought it. She did not like him. The old one was better and could not be replaced.
Signaling Quality in Crowdfunding Projects with Refund Bonuses | Marginal Revolution
The idea of a refund bonus is simple. In an ordinary Kickstarter-like contract, if a project fails to raise enough funds to reach its threshold, the funds are returned to the investors. In a refund bonus contract, if a project fails to reach its threshold the investors get their money back plus a refund bonus. The effect of the refund bonus is to make investing in socially valuable projects a no-lose proposition. Either the project succeeds which is great because the project is worth more than its cost or it fails and you get a refund bonus. The investor is better off either way.
Now consider the refund bonus from the point of view of the entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur who offers a refund bonus has a special reason to want their project to succeed, namely, if the project succeeds they don’t have to pay the refund bonus. Entrepreneurs know more about the quality of their project than investors. The entrepreneurs, for example, know the truth about their advertising campaign. Does the cool demo really work or was it puffery or worse? Entrepreneurs who offer refund bonuses are thus implicitly offering a kind of testament or bond–I am so confident that this project will succeed that I am willing to offer a refund bonus if it doesn’t succeed. As with a warrantee, the point of the warrantee is not that consumers will use it but that they won’t. The warrantee is a signal of quality. Similarly, we show that offering refund bonuses can signal quality.