Quantumfreakonomics
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User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
In the two minutes of Paw Patrol footage I watched in response to this comment, it feels more like propaganda for Apple or Tesla than anything. Every single problem no matter how minor was solved by deploying a neat technological gadget.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
It's eerie to see a twitter thread like that one these days that isn't overflowing with noticeposting. It's easy to forget that the Austrian School focus on individual human motivation and action is by no means universally held. To see concepts like "white flight" or "the car lobby" tossed out as explanations as if they are fundamental forces of society, and not simply the aggregate preferences of individual actors, is jarring. The real questions are, why are the white people fleeing? and why was the car lobby so popular?
Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
Is it instability if Israel just wins? Do any Iranian officials really want to spearhead a new anti-Israel campaign? Sounds like a death wish.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
17d 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
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
12d 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
7d 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
12d ago
For what it’s worth, I thought you were going to say that news cycles have shortened.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Oxford has shut down the Future of Humanity Institute.
This was Nick Bostrom's organization within the University of Oxford for those of you wondering what on Earth the Future of Humanity Institute is. FHI has been a powerhouse on the intellectual wing of the Effective Altruism/existential risk movement. Everything in "orthodox" AI thinking that didn't come from Yudkowsky came from FHI.
What happened? Why would a premier university shut down such an influential and respected organization? The easy answer is Bostrom's N-word email from 2023, but the timeline doesn't quite line up. The final report of the institute gives their side of the story, and they paint a picture of bureaucratic strangling, leaving the reader to put the pieces together.
"Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down"
Obviously you don't impose a freeze on fundraising unless you want the organization to die. Funding was not the issue.
"Where we failed
Any organization embedded in a larger organization or community needs to invest to a certain degree in establishing the right kind of social relationships to maintain this embeddedness. Incentives must be aligned, and both parties must also recognize this alignment. We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty.
There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important."
Translation: They hated us, they hated our ideas, and they hated our autism.
As stated before, this is FHI's accounting of the events, but they sure seem upset.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Found on Twitter:
This caught my attention because there is an important point to be made about both the realities of sham "recycling" for the vast majority of discarded material and the shamelessness of corporate advertising/propaganda, but I am (for some reason) surprised at the amount of people using this to dunk on wind power.
To start: Yes, this whole process is probably a waste of time. Landfills are safe and effective™ (and cheap). There is no real reason we can't just bury the blades in a glorified hole in the ground. That said, sending waste materials to cement kilns to be burned is actually a very common method of disposal. Cement kinds have lots of desirable properties for waste disposal. They're typically used for high-calorie materials like oil or organic solvents, but this isn't some hairbrained scheme someone cooked up when they thought EPA wasn't looking.
Does this prove that "green energy" is a scam? Some quick back of the envelope calculations (provided by ChatGPT, but spot-checked by me) indicate that a typical wind turbine over the 20-year life of the blades will produce about as much energy as 18,000 tons of coal. That's 6000 tons per blade. I couldn't find a consistent figure for the weight of a turbine blade, but all of the numbers I saw were between 5 and 35 tons. The idea that burning the turbine blades counteracts the environmental benefits from the clean energy provided is absurd.
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues. I spent about 15-minutes figuring out the right numbers because I wanted to write this post, but I knew intuitively that there would be at least an order of magnitude difference. Gell-Mann amnesia suggests that actually, all public discussions are this bad, I just recognize this one because of my STEM background.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d 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
10d ago
...why? This feels like a complete non-sequitur.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d 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
10d ago
The Justice Department. Jack Smith. Alvin Bragg. You know, the people currently prosecuting him for felonies.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d 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
10d 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
27d ago
What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?
American sports was completely canceled for 48 hours because a domestic abuser in the process of kidnapping a child and holding a knife was shot by police.
Quantumfreakonomics
25d ago
Or that the conduct is different if different people are doing it?
I challenge any gay man to have sex with his husband by inserting his penis into his husband's vagina.
More seriously, I've never read Lawrence, and don't particularly feel like subjecting my eyes or brain to tortured legal reasoning at the moment. Is it written in a way that would allow a state to criminalize anal sex in general without regard to the sex of the persons?
Quantumfreakonomics
14d 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
1mo ago
This is a miscarriage of justice in my opinion. If Ethan Crumbley had run over 4 people with the family car, would the parents have been prosecuted for leaving the keys on the counter? The parents didn't shoot anybody. A school shooting is not a reasonably foreseeable outcome of storing unsecured weapons in the house. Its hard to say that the Crumbley parents didn't do anything wrong, but its a stretch to say that they caused the death of those 4 people, in a way that they should be feloniously liable for.
Quantumfreakonomics
28d ago
They all seem pretty tame to me. “Group of protesters tries to exclude person who disagrees with them from their protest,” isn’t exactly the kind of thing that made “mostly peaceful” a meme.
Yeah, it’s a shame that Universities cancel classes at the drop of a hat nowadays, but Kristallnacht this ain’t.
Quantumfreakonomics
1mo ago
Is the guidance the same for all children? If so, it's unironic, literal white supremacy.
It's easy to forget how much closer to the equator the United States is than Europe. White people did not evolve to tolerate the Summer Texas sun.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d 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.
Are Teslas any good? I need a new car soon and I’m thinking about getting a Tesla. What is autopilot like? Is listed range legit? Is maintenance a nightmare? How do they hold up to wear and tear? Will Elon throttle me if he finds out I’m short Tesla stock?
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