Links
3 stars
One William Woods was telling the truth. The other was living his life. | The Economist
15-minute read
The teller at a branch of US Bank in Los Angeles listened patiently as a customer, a middle-aged homeless man, outlined his problem. Someone had stolen his identity, opened a number of credit and current accounts in his name—William Woods—and run up $130,000 in debt. Could the bank help him please?
It was an August day in 2019 and the homeless man presented his identity documents to the teller, who noticed that the accounts had been opened in a different state and that some contained large sums of money. The teller asked him some security questions: where and when had the accounts been opened? How much money was in them? The homeless man didn’t know. The teller called the phone number listed on the accounts. A man with a high-pitched voice picked up and said that he was William Woods. He answered the security questions correctly and said “he was never in California,” the teller would later recall in court.
Original link | Archive.is link
Creature of the Late Afternoon | n+1
11-minute read
A few years ago, my mom’s brother in South Korea, the oldest son, announced that he would be getting rid of their parents’ graves. My grandparents had been buried separately, in far-flung cemeteries, and this uncle and his wife were their keepers. They made several annual visits to the burial mounds (endless gridlock) and prepared Buddhist ceremonies at home (endless cooking and cleaning). Now that they were in their mid-sixties and their grown children were unlikely to carry on any of these rituals, they wanted out. They set a date to exhume my grandparents’ bodies, cremate their remains, and say goodbye again in an elaborate service run by our family friend, the head monk at a temple east of Seoul.
My mom wasn’t happy about this. When her father died, the family only had money for a basic burial. By the time her mother died, Mom was working in the US and could afford an elevated plot with a view, in keeping with the principles of pungsu, or Korean feng shui. Mom hoped to combine their graves, not eliminate them, but my aunt didn’t think that a man should have to move to where his wife was. In any case, my mom had no real say. She’d surrendered her rights when she left the country.
AI As Profoundly Abnormal Technology | AI Futures Project
26-minute read
Circumstances seem to have cast us as foils to the AI As Normal Technology team; in the public imagination, they’re the “AI will be slow” people, and we’re the “AI will be fast” people. It’s not quite that simple - but it’s pretty close. We really do expect AI to advance much faster than they do.
[...]
We think this happened because AI is, in fact, a profoundly abnormal technology. There is no way that millions of people around the world would voluntarily (and often against company policy) employ a linear predictor like the criminal recidivism algorithms of the 2010s; only a tiny fraction could understand them, install them, make use of them properly, etc. But because AI is so general, and so similar (in some ways) to humans, it’s near-trivial to integrate into various workflows, the same way a lawyer might consult a paralegal or a politician might consult a staffer. It’s not yet a full replacement for these lower-level professionals. But it’s close enough that it appears to be the fastest-spreading technology ever.
2 stars
Fell in a hole, got out. | Medium
12-minute read
I’m gonna write the wonky post of Medium’s turnaround. I’m not sure if a company is allowed to be this blunt about how bad things were. But it’s very much of the Medium ethos that if something interesting happened to you, then you should write it up and share it. So hopefully this will give some inside info about what happens to a startup in distress, and one way to approach a financial, brand, product, and community turnaround.
Confessions of the Working Poor | Maclean's
11-minute read
In a culture where social standing is measured by job titles, having a respectable-sounding role—like private investigator or emergency manager—can translate to social credibility, even when the pay is precarious and the hours unstable. This is why nobody knows I’ve become one of Canada’s working poor: someone who works regularly but still falls below the poverty line. We’re often saddled with unpredictable hours and little to no access to benefits like dental coverage, disability insurance or pensions.
Officially, only 10 per cent of Canadians are considered poor. But if you measure poverty not just by income but by standard of living—whether a person can afford basics, like new shoes, small birthday gifts or going out for special occasions—the number rises to roughly 25 per cent. That’s about 10 million people. I never expected one of them would be me.
Suddenly, Trait-Based Embryo Selection | Astral Codex Ten
14-minute read
In 2021, Genomic Prediction announced the first polygenically selected baby.
When a couple uses IVF, they may get as many as ten embryos. If they only want one child, which one do they implant? In the early days, doctors would just eyeball them and choose whichever looked healthiest. Later, they started testing for some of the most severe and easiest-to-detect genetic disorders like Down Syndrome and cystic fibrosis. The final step was polygenic selection - genotyping each embryo and implanting the one with the best genes overall.
Best in what sense?
Fuck willpower | Useful Fictions
4-minute read
Here is what I think: Willpower is an incoherent concept invented by smug people who think they have it in order to denigrate people who they think don’t. People tacitly act as though it’s synonymous with effort or grindy determination. But in most cases where willpower is invoked, the person who is trying and failing to adhere to some commitment is exerting orders of magnitude more effort than the person who is succeeding.
Why Are Men and Women More Politically Divided? | City Journal
11-minute read
Nowhere is this divergence more striking than in politics. Since 2014, young women in the U.S. have grown increasingly left-leaning, while the political orientation of young men has remained relatively stable. By 2021, 44 percent of young women identified as liberal, compared with just 25 percent of young men—the largest gender gap in political affiliation recorded in 24 years of polling.
[...]
Despite growing equality in education and the workplace, men and women remain shaped by deep-seated biological and psychological differences that influence their values, behaviors, and politics. Paradoxically, in affluent and egalitarian societies, these differences become more pronounced, not diminished.
Yes In My Bamako Yard | Asterisk
9-minute read
A back-of-the-envelope calculation makes clear what’s at stake in the apparent decoupling of urbanization and economic growth throughout the region. If Africa’s urbanization yielded the same growth dividends as urbanization did in East Asian countries between 2002 and 2018, we would expect its GDP per capita to be just over $18,000 by 2050. If, however, Africa’s urban transition continues on its current growth trajectory, the average African’s income will be only $10,300 by 2050. Finding a way to ensure that Africa’s growth trajectory parallels East Asia’s would mean a continent nearly 75% richer than it’s expected to be under status quo growth trends.
Susan Choi: My Days as a Fact-Checker at The New Yorker | The Yale Review
7-minute read
What i always say is that I wasn’t a very good checker. I don’t mean I made mistakes—mistakes being, in fact-checking, failing to catch someone else’s mistakes. I mean that the things I checked weren’t serious or difficult, that generally, the bar was pretty low.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Surprising Durability Of Africa’s Colonial Borders | Noema
7-minute read
The great surprise of the first quarter of the 21st century has been the endurance of Africa’s colonial borders. The durability of Africa’s multiethnic states, most of which project power unevenly over vast territories and possess relatively small militaries, has everything to do with their tradition of multilateralism, a tradition born out of the social networks of anticolonial struggle and the Pan-African Congresses of the first half of the 20th century. Rather than a continent where “war made the state and the state made war,” one might say conferences made the state and the state held conferences.
Puzzled | The American Scholar
6-minute read
Had the time I’d spent been rest or labor? Pursuit of pleasure or product? Had I been wasting time or living life? Of all this, I am still not certain. One thing I do know: no other jigsaw puzzle I’ve done has ever left an essay in its wake.
The Bitter Lesson versus The Garbage Can | One Useful Thing
5-minute read
The Bitter Lesson suggests we might soon ignore how companies produce outputs and focus only on the outputs themselves. Define what a good sales report or customer interaction looks like, then train AI to produce it. The AI will find its own paths through the organizational chaos; paths that might be more efficient, if more opaque, than the semi-official routes humans evolved. In a world where the Bitter Lesson holds, the despair of the CEO with his head on the table is misplaced. Instead of untangling every broken process, he just needs to define success and let AI navigate the mess. In fact, Bitter Lesson might actually be sweet: all those undocumented workflows and informal networks that pervade organizations might not matter. What matters is knowing good output when you see it.
Donald Trump just laid out his vision for AI policy | Understanding AI
6-minute read
In short, the Biden administration aimed to strictly control AI in order to prevent harmful uses and contain China. The Trump administration, in contrast, wants to unleash American AI companies so they can compete more effectively with their Chinese rivals.
Abandoned by Trump, a farmer and a migrant search for a better future | Washington Post
16-minute read
The federal government had promised JJ a $200,000 grant, spread across two years, to cover the cost of a seasonal farmhand from Latin America. In a place where local, legal help was nearly impossible to keep, the extra worker would give him the freedom to handle more jobs and invest in his own equipment. It was an opportunity that could transform his family’s future, but, JJ explained to his friend, President Donald Trump had frozen the money.
“Good,” the man said, grinning. “Too much spending here and there. I’m okay with a little hurt.”
JJ took a breath.
“It needed to be done,” JJ said, softly, because he was also a Republican who, like nearly every farmer he knew, thought the country wasted too much money.
“But not all of it,” JJ said, because he rejected the notion that his grant was a waste.
“I guess,” JJ said, because he didn’t want to argue.
Original link | Archive.is link
Gerrymandering | News Items
4-minute read
An emerging drive to ramp up gerrymandering, creating more artificially designed congressional districts in which politicians choose their own voters rather than the other way around, continues an unsettling trend in our democracy: Voters just don’t matter as much as they used to.
[...]
This is a big deal. What’s happening today threatens to reverse one of the most positive trends in America’s troubled political system in recent years. A growing number of states—including, notably, California--had begun taking the drawing of district maps out of partisan state legislatures and putting it instead into the hands of independent commissions in hopes of producing districts that are more representative of the broad cross-section of voters. Now, instead, politicians are making changes that threaten to extend the worst political trends of the last generation: the rise of extreme partisanship and the decline of the political center.
Original link | Archive.is link
Is Epstein the new Russiagate? | Silver Bulletin
6-minute read
But isn’t Trump’s approval rating plummeting again? You can find plenty of headlines to that effect. But the overall impact is pretty modest in our tracking. On July 7, Trump’s net approval rating was a −6.7, now, it’s −8.4. I don’t need to remind readers how easy it is to cherry-pick polling data to create a narrative that Trump is perpetually in a worsening crisis.
How an Ancient Ice Age Froze the Entire Earth—And Helped Humanity Flourish | Literary Hub
5-minute read
We owe our own existence, in certain ways, to a series of ancient ice ages that spanned between 717 million and 635 million years ago. Strata from this geologic period tell us that life as we know it today may have bloomed in the wake of Earth’s coldest, hardest times.
Should Democrats go back to neoliberalism? | Noahpinion
6-minute read
But at the same time, there are important reasons Democrats shouldn’t just copy-paste the Bill Clinton economic approach. For one thing, the country still needs industrial policy if it’s going to stand up to China effectively, both on the economic front, and militarily. Also, a key piece of the Abundance agenda is state capacity — the ability of the government to get things done in-house. The government needs to build infrastructure and energy (and hopefully housing), and continuing to outsource those crucial functions to overpriced consultants and ineffectual nonprofits is not going to cut it. The U.S. needs a bureaucracy big enough and competent enough to be able to carry out projects that the private sector won’t do — or won’t do fast enough and at big enough scale.
The First Soda in Space: When NASA Got Caught Up in the Cola Wars | New York Times
8-minute read
In space travel, the firsts are often what matter most: the first woman in orbit and the first man to walk on the moon, or, less famously, the first time astronauts grabbed a wobbling satellite with their hands.
Yet in the 1980s, America’s two biggest soft drink companies raced for another milestone: to serve the first fizzy drink in orbit.
Original link | Archive.is link
My Heart Of Hearts | Astral Codex Ten
5-minute read
To the anonymous Redditor: no, I can’t actually feel emotions about everyone in Gaza, and I’m not sure anyone else can either. This doesn’t mean concern must be virtue signaling or luxury beliefs. It just means that it requires principle rather than raw emotion. One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. But if you’re interested in having the dignity of a rational animal (a perfectly acceptable hobby! no worse than trying to get good at Fortnite or whatever!) then eventually you notice that a million is made out of a million ones and try to act accordingly.
The anti-immigration backlash comes to Japan | Noahpinion
9-minute read
Some of this — for example, the antivax stuff and the ranting about globalist elites — is clearly just the spread of memes from the U.S. and Europe to Japan. Kamiya Sohei, the party’s leader, even said some stuff about “Jewish capital” in a speech; Japan’s banks have essentially zero Jews in them, so you know this is just something he read on the internet.
But the party’s main issue — restrictions on immigration and tourism — isn’t just mimicry of Trump or AfD. Instead, it’s a response to a real and important trend that has affected the entire world, and happened to hit Japan a little later than other countries.
Why Colbert got canceled | Silver Bulletin
10-minute read
Economics played a role. Politics might have, too. But mainstream liberal comedy has struggled between the death of mass culture and the rise of Trump.
Xi Jinping is the main thing holding China back | Noahpinion
11-minute read
I’m not going to claim, of course, that all of China’s shortcomings will be due to the actions of a single leader; that would be absurd. Every country has major limitations, even at the height of its power. China’s cities sprawl too much, for reasons that have nothing to do with Xi Jinping. Xi didn’t create the real estate bubble whose aftermath is now slowing Chinese growth. Nor did Xi cause the low fertility rates that will weigh heavily on China’s economy in the latter half of this century.
And yet I think there are many ways in which Xi’s overwhelming power and personal limitations are combining to hold China back from its potential greatness.
1 star
Matter vs. Force: Why There Are Exactly Two Types of Particles | Quanta Magazine
3-minute read
Beneath the richness of our world lies a pristine simplicity. Everything is made of a set of just 17 fundamental particles, and those particles, though they may differ by mass or charge, come in just two basic types. Each is either a “boson” or a “fermion.”
AI Can Make You Laugh. But Can It Ever Be Truly Humorous? | Undark Magazine
5-minute read
Last year, Toplyn and Witscript competed in a laugh off. The two spent three days writing jokes based on eight evergreen news topics. Toplyn picked his best jokes — and selected Witscript’s best material as well — then comedian Mike Perkins delivered the lines to live audiences in North Hollywood. Half the jokes in each set were written by Toplyn, the other half by Witscript. Together with Ori Amir, a stand-up comic and neuroscientist at Pomona College in California, Toplyn recorded the performances and measured the length and loudness of the laughter each joke elicited. Toplyn and Amir found that, by those measures, the AI and human-written jokes were equally funny, a result they presented in January at the 1st Workshop on Computational Humor.
Neanderthals likely ate fermented meat with a side of maggots | The Conversation
3-minute read
We suspected that maggots could have been a different potential source of enriched nitrogen-15 in the Neanderthal diet. Maggots, which are fly larvae, can be a fat-rich source of food. They are unavoidable after you kill another animal, easily collectible in large numbers and nutritionally beneficial.
We finally solved the mystery of how potatoes evolved | Natural History Museum - London
3-minute read
That is the remarkable new finding from a team of researchers who have finally figured out the origin of the potato. They have discovered that the first ancestors of the staple root vegetable likely appeared some time around nine million years ago, when ancestors of today’s tomato plants hybridised with those of another group of relatives known as the Etuberosum.
Convenience vs. Social Desirability Bias | Bet On It
2-minute read
Convenience has a massive effect on your behavior. You rarely shop in your favorite store, eat in your favorite restaurant, or visit your favorite place. Why not? Because doing so is typically inconvenient. They’re too far away, or not open at the right hours, so you settle for second-best or third-best or tenth-best. You usually don’t switch your cell phone company, your streaming service, or your credit card just because a better option comes along. Why not? Because switching is not convenient. Students even pass up financial aid because they don’t feel like filling out the paperwork. Why not? You guessed it: Because paperwork is inconvenient.
In politics, however, almost no one talks about convenience. When governments mandate extra privacy or safety or consumer protection, crowds cheer and pundits sing. From now on, you’ll be clicking a few extra boxes a day. From now on, you’ll have to stand ten feet away from the next person at the pharmacy. From now on, you’ll have to sign your name and initials twenty times on a mortgage contract. Privately, almost everyone thinks each of these is a pain in the neck. Yet almost no one goes on TV and self-righteously objects, “These high-minded ideals are going to be awfully inconvenient.”
How the brain distinguishes oozing fluids from solid objects | MIT News
3-minute read
In a new study, MIT neuroscientists have identified parts of the brain’s visual cortex that respond preferentially when you look at “things” — that is, rigid or deformable objects like a bouncing ball. Other brain regions are more activated when looking at “stuff” — liquids or granular substances such as sand.
Where are Vacation Homes Located in the US? | Construction Physics
7-minute read
Popular vacation home locations tend to remain popular. Most states that have large proportions of vacation homes have maintained that status over time. The three states with the largest ratios of vacation homes, Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire, have been the leaders since at least the 1940s.
What does consulting do? | Marginal Revolution
1-minute read
Our findings broadly align with ex-ante predictions from surveyed academic economists and consulting professionals, validating the productivity-enhancing view of consulting endorsed by most practitioners though only half of academics, while lending less support to a rent-shifting view favored by many economists.
Weird, Wonderful Photos From the Archives | The Atlantic [gift article]
1-minute read
A grab bag of curious and interesting historical images from the 20th century, depicting stunt diving, inventions, unusual war training, giant household objects, scenes from daily life, and much more
Original link | Archive.is link
New York Times’ Style Guide Substitutions for “The President Violated the Constitution” | McSweeney's
1-minute read
I don't typically include satire, but I did enjoy this...
“Faced with the choice between clinging to the letter of the law and marching to the beat of his own legal drum, the president chose the latter.”
[...]
“Perhaps unaware that he had sailed beyond the Constitution’s horizons, the president found himself drifting further and further from legal terra firma.”
[...]
“The president, tiptoeing precipitously down the sidelines of legality, inadvertently ran the constitutional football out of bounds.”