4 stars
Practically-A-Book Review: Rootclaim $100,000 Lab Leak Debate | Astral Codex Ten
This was very well explained — and managed to change my mind:
So, in the grand tradition of very rich people who think they have invented new forms of reasoning everywhere, Saar issued a monetary challenge. If you disagree with any of his Rootclaim analyses […], he and the Rootclaim team will bet you $100,000 that they’re right. If the answer will come out eventually […], you can wait and see. Otherwise, he’ll accept all comers in video debates in front of a mutually-agreeable panel of judges. […]
Rootclaim also found in favor of the lab leak hypothesis of COVID. When Saar talked about this on an old ACX comment thread, fellow commenter tgof137 (Peter Miller) agreed to take him up on his $100K bet. […]
This was one of my favorite topics to write about this year, for a few reasons.
First, on the object level, I learned a lot about the origins of COVID, which is a great story. I feel like I know much more now about this disease that came out of nowhere and ruined all of our lives for a few years. […]
Fourth, for the first time it made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate stayed acrimonious for years to come.
But fifth, if the coronavirus’ story is a comedy, all of this - Rootclaim, the debate, the $100K - is a tragedy. Saar got $100 million, decided to devote a big part of his life to improving human reasoning, and came up with a really elegant system. He was so confident in his system, and in the power of open discussion, that he risked his money and reputation on an accept-all-comers debate offer. Then some rando who nobody had ever heard of accepted the challenge, turned out to be some kind of weird debate savant, and won, turning what should have been Rootclaim’s moment of triumph into a bitter defeat. Totally new kind of human suffering, worthy of Shakespeare.
3 stars
The Foreign Language That Changed My Teenage Son’s Life | New York Times
A beautiful piece:
Even as a little kid, my son Max had a way of immersing himself in the subjects he cared about. The first one I can remember was Thomas the Tank Engine. Max had a hand-me-down wooden train track set up on a low platform in our living room, and at age 3, he would spend hours toddling around the outside, pushing trains and telling made-up stories, lost in the world of Thomas and Percy and Gordon. […]
There was a part of me that felt proud of his deep dives, but if I’m being honest, they often made me uneasy. When you’re a kid, knowing a ton about obscure subjects can be an early sign of intellectual curiosity, but just as often, it can be a symptom of misfiring neurons, an omen of future mental struggles. Sometimes the child who can tell you everything there is to know about dinosaurs or baseball statistics or the solar system grows up to be a groundbreaking scientist or a brilliant entrepreneur. Sometimes he just grows up to be a guy who never moves out of his parents’ basement. […]
Over Christmas break when he was 12, Max’s curiosity led him in a new direction: He started learning Russian. I don’t know why he chose Russian, and if you ask him, he doesn’t have a good answer, either. Our family is not Russian. We don’t have any Russian friends. It’s possible that the absurdity of the pursuit was exactly what appealed to him about it. […]
Our flights from Austin to Samarkand took a total of 24 hours, and I spent the time either sleeping or in a state of agitation. Usually when Max and I traveled together, I felt responsible for him, not just in the standard keep-your-kid-alive sense, but responsible for his mood, for his mind, for his emotional well-being. On this trip, somehow, our roles had reversed.
“Everything is going to be fine,” Max told me.
That was supposed to be my line.
But it soon became clear that Max was right. Everything was, in fact, fine.
What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain? | New Yorker
Since then, it’s been the Conservatives again. In 2010, the Party returned to government in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. Since 2015, it has held power alone. Last May, the Tories surpassed the thirteen years and nine days that New Labour had held office. But the third political era of my lifetime has been nothing like the previous two. There has been no dominant figure or overt political project, no Thatcherism, no Blairism. Instead, there has been a quickening, lowering churn: five Prime Ministers, three general elections, two financial emergencies, a once-in-a-century constitutional crisis, and an atmosphere of tired, almost constant drama.
The period is bisected by the United Kingdom’s decision, in 2016, to leave the European Union, a Conservative fantasy, or nightmare, depending on whom you talk to. Brexit catalyzed some of the worst tendencies in British politics—its superficiality, nostalgia, and love of game play—and exhausted the country’s political class, leaving it ill prepared for the pandemic and the twin economic shocks of the war in Ukraine and the forty-nine-day experimental premiership of Liz Truss. Covering British politics during this period has been like trying to remember, and explain, a very convoluted and ultimately boring dream. If you really concentrate, you can recall a lot of the details, but that doesn’t lead you closer to any meaning.
Why Do Men Dominate Chess? | Quillette
On a chess board, the queen is the most powerful piece. But in the human world, the fair sex accounts for only about two percent of the world’s chess Grandmasters. Even at lower competitive levels, males not only outnumber, but also outrank females by a large margin. The Queen’s Gambit (2020) made for great television, and inspired many girls to pick up the game. But contrary to what some Netflix viewers might have assumed, its world-conquering protagonist, chess prodigy Beth Harmon (actress Anya Taylor-Joy), is a fictional character: No woman has ever achieved the title of U.S. Chess Champion; let alone World Champion. […]
But I’m far from convinced that sexism and harassment are the main reasons why men outperform women at chess. We’ve already come a long way in battling sexism during my lifetime. And yet, even as women have made great strides in such areas as medicine, law, engineering, and academia, the sex gap in chess has barely budged since second-wave feminism took off in the 1960s. This all suggests there’s something else going on. […]
Being smart, having a “killer instinct” (or whatever your preferred cliché might be), and putting the necessary hours into practice may not be enough. In addition, chess excellence may require a particular thinking style—a way of processing information. There are plenty of smart people who attack chess with great gusto from an early age, but never get past an intermediate level. In some cases, it may be because they can’t quite match the competition in some of the cognitive skills that would give them an edge, such as the ability to recognize and recall patterns, visualize and analyze options on a two-dimensional grid, and make decisions that balance multiple strategic considerations. Spatial ability, the subject of my own dissertation research at Harvard University, may be particularly important for success in chess. The lower ranks of FIDE’s lists, therefore, may be littered with chess enthusiasts who are destined to play out their careers in obscurity because they struggle to develop the particular kinds of cognitive skills that elite chess demands.
Andrew Huberman’s Mechanisms of Control | New York Magazine
The private and public seductions of the world’s biggest pop neuroscientist. […]
For the past three years, one of the biggest podcasters on the planet has told a story to millions of listeners across half a dozen shows: There was a little boy, and the boy’s family was happy, until one day, the boy’s family fell apart. The boy was sent away. He foundered, he found therapy, he found science, he found exercise. And he became strong.
Today, Andrew Huberman is a stiff, jacked 48-year-old associate professor of neurology and ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He is given to delivering three-hour lectures on subjects such as “the health of our dopaminergic neurons.” His podcast is revelatory largely because it does not condescend, which has not been the way of public-health information in our time. He does not give the impression of someone diluting science to universally applicable sound bites for the slobbering masses. “Dopamine is vomited out into the synapse or it’s released volumetrically, but then it has to bind someplace and trigger those G-protein-coupled receptors, and caffeine increases the number, the density of those G-protein-coupled receptors,” is how he explains the effect of coffee before exercise in a two-hour-and-16-minute deep dive that has, as of this writing, nearly 8.9 million views on YouTube. […]
There is an argument to be made that it does not matter how a helpful podcaster conducts himself outside of the studio. A man unable to constrain his urges may still preach dopaminergic control to others. Morning sun remains salutary. The physiological sigh, employed by this writer many times in the writing of this essay, continues to effect calm. The large and growing distance between Andrew Huberman and the man he continues to be may not even matter to those who buy questionable products he has recommended and from which he will materially benefit, or listeners who imagined a man in a white coat at work in Palo Alto. The people who definitively find the space between fantasy and reality to be a problem are women who fell for a podcaster who professed deep, sustained concern for their personal growth, and who, in his skyrocketing influence, continued to project an image of earnest self-discovery. It is here, in the false belief of two minds in synchronicity and exploration, that deception leads to harm. They fear it will lead to more.
Secrets of Japanese urbanism (part 2) | Noahpinion
Briefly, I attributed the awesomeness of Japanese cities to:
Zoning that tells you what you can’t build in an area, instead of what you can build, which allows most areas to have shops and restaurants
Zoning that forces shops and restaurants to be smaller in more residential areas
Policies to promote small, independent retail businesses over large ones
Public safety
Noiseproofing and noise ordinances
Excellent trains
Nice public spaces
That list was, of course, pretty reductionist. You could implement those same policies elsewhere in the world, and while you might get a really awesome city, it would still be very different from Tokyo. There’s a huge amount of historical context involved in how Japanese cities became the way they are — events like World War 2, planning choices, cultural preferences and aesthetic style, business and government institutions, broader economic policies, and so on.
A group of authors, led by Jorge Almazán, has written a book that tries to boil down a lot of these historical, institutional, and contingent factors into a few key elements that give Tokyo its distinctive look and feel. That book is called Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. It’s a short book, filled with pictures and diagrams of Tokyo’s neighborhoods and buildings — which the authors were able to create using the Tokyo city government’s excellent digital records. I highly recommend it; you could easily finish it in a couple of hours, and you’ll walk away with a million thoughts about how the urban spaces around you could be more interesting.
2 stars
The dust of God | Numb at the Lodge
Once, there were stone cults up and down the eastern Mediterranean: worshipping rocks from outer space seems to have been one of the distinctive features of Semitic religion. In Byblos, they worshipped a meteorite in connection with the goddess Aphrodite. Petra had one holy rock with a round shape and another like a rough cube. In Sidon, the black stone of Astarte was sometimes carted around in a two-wheeled chariot for processions. There was a glassy stone in a shrine on Jabal al-Aqra, which appears in the Book of Isaiah as Mount Zaphon, sacred to Baal. These cults are the prehistory of outer space. Our first encounter with the world beyond our world: not as a series of lights moving across the sky, but a zone of concrete things.
Suicide Mission | American Prospect
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane […]
John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.
Where parents make a difference | Patterns in Humanity
In the debates surrounding nature versus nurture, there are many who (incorrectly) deny the importance of nature. Then, based on their reading of the behavior genetics research, some make the completely opposite assertion. For example, in his book Blueprint, the behavior geneticist Robert Plomin has a section called “Parents matter, but they don’t make a difference.” On Twitter/X I see similar claims with some regularity. Is this true? No, I will argue, the behavior genetics literature does not support this position either. […]
A rule of thumb seems to be that genetic effects tend to be roughly twice as impactful as that of nurture in determining differences in social outcomes.
‘Mum knew what was going on’: Brigitte Höss on living at Auschwitz, in the Zone of Interest family | The Guardian
Her father was Rudolf Höss, the camp’s commandant. He was arrested by the Jewish great-uncle of the writer Thomas Harding, to whom Brigitte gave this, her final interview – and confession
The Case for Marrying an Older Man | The Cut
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this piece was pilloried when it was published — but I thought it was a well-told tale:
For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.
He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.
When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.
There Is No Point in My Being Other Than Honest with You: On Toni Morrison’s Rejection Letters | Los Angeles Review of Books
“I found it extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senior editor at Random House, liked the manuscript so much that, before responding, she passed it around the office to drum up support. The verdict was “intelligent,” but also “very ‘down,’ depressing, spiritually abrasive.” Whatever the merits of the writing, Morrison’s colleagues predicted, the potent mix of dissatisfaction, anger, and mournfulness would limit the book’s commercial appeal—and Morrison reluctantly agreed. “You don’t want to escape and I don’t want to escape,” her letter concludes, “but perhaps the public does and perhaps we are in the business of helping them do that.”
During her 16 years at Random House, Morrison wrote hundreds of rejection letters. Usually typed on pink, yellow, or white carbonless copy paper, and occasionally bearing Random House’s old logo and letterhead, these are now filed among her correspondence in the Random House archives at Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library. While many of the letters were mailed to New York, Boston, and even Rome, others were sent to writers in more obscure places; some are addressed to “general delivery” in various small towns across the United States.
Regardless of destination, Morrison’s rejections tend to be long, generous in their suggestions, and direct in their criticism.
Daniel Kahneman’s Final Exploration of Human Error | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds.” The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input from many individuals averages out the errors of each person and produces a more accurate answer. In contrast, the “madness of crowds” captures the idea that, relative to a single individual, large numbers of people are more likely to indulge their passions and get carried away by impulsive or destructive behaviors. So, which concept more accurately reflects reality?
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein provides the answer. The authors share research indicating that “independence is a prerequisite for the wisdom of crowds.” That is, if you want to use crowdsourcing to produce accurate information, you have to ensure that people make their judgments in private. If people provide their answers in a public setting where they can see everyone else’s answers, then the crowd can transform wisdom into madness.
The Worst Economists in the World | The Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter
In contrast to all this, we’re fairly terrible folk economists. If we were to make a list of all our everyday intuitions about economic matters, and then a separate list of economists’ views on the same topics, we’d find almost no overlap between the two lists.
I’m quite confident about this, because that’s roughly what the economists Amit Bhattacharjee and Jason Dana did in a fascinating recent paper titled “Lay Economic Reasoning: An Integrative Review and Call to Action,” published in the journal Consumer Psychology Review. Bhattacharjee and Dana make a persuasive case that laypeople’s views on economic questions routinely part company with those of the experts, and thus that folk economics - unlike folk physics, biology, and psychology - is systematically misguided.
The perverse incentives of euthanasia | Noahpinion
I do think euthanasia is OK in principle. I believe that as long as they’re in their right mind, people have the right to die instead of continuing to live in horrible pain. The idea does not disgust me, or trigger a deep-seated moral taboo. If you disagree with that — if you think that all human life is sacred and should be preserved and protected at any cost, or even if you just feel like there’s something wrong with euthanasia that you can’t quite express — then fine. I respect that viewpoint. That’s not the debate I want to have today.
What I do want to talk about today are some very important perverse incentives that any euthanasia policy needs to work strenuously to avoid. And watching the progress of Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID) in Canada and the discussion about it in the UK, I’m doubtful that even the most responsible, morally beneficent policymakers and professionals can entirely avoid those incentives on their own.
Dark energy might not be constant after all | Ars Technica
First results from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument offer hints of new physics.
Teaching Teaching | Bet On It
The catch: When Spanish instruction began last week, I realized that my older sons knew Spanish, but not how to teach. As a result, I’m teaching teaching while they’re teaching Spanish. Since I’ve been teaching professionally for about 25 years, its principles are second nature to me. Yet if you’re now teaching for the first time in your life, they’re non-obvious. Indeed, in my experience, over half of working teachers fail to internalize them.
The U.S. would be insane to go it alone on trade and manufacturing | Noahpinion
This is all incredibly frustrating. The skeletal remains of U.S. manufacturing aren’t threatened by Japan or Europe — they’re threatened by China. It’s China that managed to devastate the U.S. middle-class manufacturing workforce in the 2000s — something trade with Japan, Europe, Mexico, etc. never did. It’s China, not Japan or Europe, that massively subsidizes its products and floods foreign markets with its cars, chips, and electronics. It’s China that deliberately maintains control over metals processing and other key choke points in the global manufacturing supply chain. […]
The U.S. will not be able to stand against that juggernaut by retreating behind a fortress of tariffs and trying to become an expensive, smaller mini-China. The only way the U.S. will be able to stand against that juggernaut is to get a big gang together. We have to weld the economies of the democratic nations into a single whole, sharing supply chains and markets and technology. Only by doing this will we be able to match the incredible size and scope of the Chinese industrial machine.
The TPP would have been a first step toward creating that unified economic bastion, but we killed it. The IPEF’s trade component would have been an important step in that direction, but we killed that too. Just like the people in the legend of Pandora’s Box, we rushed to shut the lid on trade agreements when all the monsters had already escaped, and the only thing we managed to lock in the box was Hope.
Advice That I Can't Get Out of My Head | Stay SaaSy
Across all of the reading I’ve done over the years, I’ve come across a few pieces of advice that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. These slices of wisdom have been immensely helpful to me and I wanted to share them both so that others can benefit. […]
My favorite advice about the role of feelings in decision-making is this short Quora post by Auren Hoffman (founder/CEO of LiveRamp). The concise summary of the advice is: “You should trust your gut to avoid things, but you should use data to decide to take action.” I’ve always interpreted this to mean that you should trust your gut to tell you when there’s danger, but you should not trust your gut to identify good opportunities.
1 star
The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining | Predrag’s Blog
Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! […]
That's what my dad said when I asked what was wrong with our home internet connection. "The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining."
The Evolution of Mozart’s Music (From 5 to 35 Years Old) | Kottke
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s first surviving musical composition was created at age five and in this video visualization, you can hear and see how his music evolved from that early piece to those created in his 20s and 30s. Not knowing a whole lot about music or of Mozart in particular, I was shocked at how incredible his compositions were at ages five, six, and seven. Sheesh.
Nebraska probably won't cost Biden the Electoral College | Silver Bulletin
Everything you always wanted to know about that one electoral vote in Omaha but were afraid to ask.
The US Tried Permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People Hated It | Washingtonian
Huh, who knew:
While 79 percent of Americans approved of the change in December 1973, approval had dropped to 42 percent three months later.
Milky Way Embroidery | Kottke
I love Yuliya Krishchik’s space-themed embroidery pieces, especially the ones featuring Milky Way-like star fields — she calls them “surreal space landscapes”.
Hidden giants: how the UK’s 500,000 redwoods put California in the shade | The Guardian
Researchers found that the Victorians brought so many seeds and saplings to Britain that experts say the giant redwoods now outnumber those in their US homeland
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places | Bet On It
The perils of thinking too much like an economist…
Which raises a big question: If you’re a citizen of a desirable country, why would you ever marry a fellow citizen?
To grasp the enormity of the puzzle with a little more specificity, ask yourself: “If the United States sold green cards, how much would people pay to get them?” Some of the poorest people in the world already pony up tens of thousands of dollars to migrate illegally. The right to come legally would be far more valuable, because (a) you would almost definitely reach your destination safely, and (b) you wouldn’t be limited to black market jobs after your arrival. What price would leave immigration at its current level? For the U.S., $100,000 is very conservative estimate. (Remember: Once it’s legal, conventional lenders will be eager to finance your migration).
So what? Every single adult American effectively possesses an immigration permit worth at least $100,000. Yes, there’s a catch: You can only sell it to someone you’re willing to marry. But the catch has a massive loophole: The world is packed with extraordinarily marriageable foreigners! So every single adult American is effectively choosing between the best domestic spouse they can win on their merits alone, or the best foreign spouse they can win with a six-figure subsidy.