Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Still on Human Action.
Given how much I like Austrian Economics, I figured I should actually read(listen to the audiobook of) this.
The entirety of the first 90 minutes was spent belaboring the same two or three points about human nature. Yeah, these points are foundational to the entire discipline, and some core insights are genius, but I stand my my take that SBF was right about books.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
It's the old MetaMed problem. Anyone who understands enough about the object-level issue to weed out the total scams is someone who understands enough to just do it themselves.
If it's any consolation, I was pretty notable around these parts for not having much luck with women, but I did eventually meet my current gf on Bumble. Your experience may vary, but I don't think the apps are quite as bad as everyone says.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
From who's point of view? The voters? The average global citizen? Surely in Trump's own subjective experience getting assassinated is worse than going to prison.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
...why? This feels like a complete non-sequitur.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
The Justice Department. Jack Smith. Alvin Bragg. You know, the people currently prosecuting him for felonies.
Quantumfreakonomics
5d ago
Remember the Ground Zero mosque? Fox News and Jon Stewart milked that non-story for months. That discourse would last about 8 hours in 2024.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
What is the current prevailing Israeli opinion of the Gilad Shalit prisoner exchange? I can sort of imagine what the steelman would be at the time, but given what we know now, does anyone still seriously defend this?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
That specific scenario may or may not be plausible. I don’t know how the federal government’s payroll software works, but that is the level that these things need to be analyzed on if you want a clear or definitive answer.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
What does it mean for "the rest of DC" to say something?
APA review, NEPA review, Hiding the relevant documents from the president and hoping he forgets, lawsuits, injunctions, protests; if Trump succeeds in firing a large portion of the entire civil service, you think tens of thousands of intelligent, well-connected people in the same city all pissed off at the same guy won’t be able to do anything about it?
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
If Trump can't bring in competent staffers to implement his plans, and he doesn't have a well of 'replacement' workers to step up and actually give the old ones the boot, 4 years is almost certainly not enough to significantly cut down the Federal Bureaucracy.
Think about it. How many competent, respectable people want the job of being Trump’s lackey to fix the X department? In the unlikely event that you aren’t fired and are even somewhat successful at purging the entrenched civil service, you have a good chance of literally going to jail once the next administration gets in.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I don’t doubt for one minute that Trump had classified documents, but it does suggest that the intended audience for the indictment was the American Electorate rather than a federal judge. Thinking back to the political situation at the time the charges were unsealed, Jack Smith and the Justice Department probably thought this was the kill-shot for Trump’s campaign.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
For what it’s worth, I thought you were going to say that news cycles have shortened.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Much like the SAT requirement rollback, I suspect what happened was that internal metrics/vibes were so laughably bad that everyone started to hate it. Nobody actually wants to read that drivel anyways.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Thoughts? Yeah, the birth of one's first child is a big moment, but this is also the biggest moment of the last 20 years for his team (who gave up quite a lot to get him I might add). Apparently, he was expected to just make it back in time for tip-off, but weather delays pushed his flight back. I'd be pretty pissed if I was a Timberwolves fan tbh.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
America was already attacking German submarines in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbour
Hitler's speech declaring war on America is quite interesting, in much the same way as Osama Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Having it all laid on the table like that makes you realize why some people hate us.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
EA had 46 billion dollars in committed funding in 2021, and was growing at 37% per year, according to 80000hrs.
Look at the date. How much of this "commitment" was from SBF?
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
By definition, one party in a lawsuit is always wrong, so imposing sanctions or liability on being wrong is a dangerous game.
Lawyers can get sanctioned for filing frivolous lawsuits, but that's a higher standard than filing meritless lawsuits.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
There's an argument that we have to stop the slippery slope to banning real meat as soon as possible. I'm not sure how well it holds up.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
DeSantis seems to think connecting lab-grown meat to "elites" and the "World Economic Forum" is winning rhetoric. We on the inside know that those aren't great descriptions of "rationalist nerds", but this is the same rhetoric that red-tribe conservatives used about SBF. To Joe Shmoe of Nowheresville Baptist Church, those secularist eggheads are all the same.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.
As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
How bad is long-term use of ibuprofen really? Is taking 200mg twice a day going to wreck my GI tract or kidneys? What about only on workdays? What if I'm also on an ACE inhibitor?
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
It's truly astounding how many bad ideas and practices Hegel is responsible for. His "influenced" list is a who's who of the worst of the worst in philosophy. @non_radical_centrist below rightfully bemoans the "difficult to parse" style of certain philosophers, and there is perhaps no greater offender than Hegel. Kant isn't particularly concise, but pull up The Phenomenology of Spirit next to The Critique of Pure Reason, and the difference is night and day.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
Middle-class Americans have enough disposable income that it isn't worth the inconvenience to scoop up minor discounts like these. People with higher marginal utility for money and less marginal utility for time will differ of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
This seems like a textbook case of the law of undignified failure. The classical AI doom scenerios assumed that people would be smart enough not to build AI-powered killbots. If AI-powered killbots were floated as a load-bearing assumption of the classical AI doom case, then people would simply retort that we could just not build AI-powered killbots. The point of the classical AI doom case is that the problem is robust to minor implementation variance, not that AI-powered killbots are safe.
I was trying to come up with some candidates, and for a split-second thought, "Scott Aaronson seems pretty emotional and prone to poor decision-making on political topics. Maybe him?"
Lol. Well, I was half right.
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