Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
21hr ago
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
edit: my post just got removed from /r/books again! And this time I removed all references/use of llms and links, which is what the moderator told me got me removed last time. Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
It's not a conspiracy theory. Reddit moderators will remove posts simply because they don't like them. "AI slop" is just the newest excuse. Previously it was "bad faith", "trolling", or "we can't moderate posts this spicy". It isn't an invitation for you to remove the LLM-generated text or demonstrate your earnestness. They are telling you to shut up.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
The law that can be named is not the true law and the follow-up Against Truth give you a good feel for his style, strengths, and weaknesses (no, it is not actually good to be against truth). I'm partial to Douglas Murray, gruesome toady and The world’s first matcha labubu genocide, which is unfortunately behind a partial paywall.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I’m quite fond of the “My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes” review on ACX because it is about a simple but often ignored truth: the food that people ate in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was absolutely terrible. It was cheaper because it sucked.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
I remember a video of someone heckling Kamala Harris about Gaza, but he used the authentic Arabic pronunciation so I had no idea what he was saying.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
This was a three-person race not too long ago. Mallory McMorrow was the best candidate on paper. Every neoliberal Twitter poaster loved her, but her campaign was done in by a series of forced and unforced errors, most revealing of which was the discovery that she doesn’t actually like Michigan, preferring New York or California (shocker).
I’m not convinced that Stevens would do better in November than El Sayed. A lot of people in Dearborn simply would not vote for such an openly pro-Israel candidate.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
There is a great new Substack article about the populist backlash to AI data centers by Jasmine Sun. She also did an interview with Ezra Klein for those of you who like audio content.
I like the article because Sun speaks fluent Silicon Valleyish while also taking the time and effort to visit and talk to the people on the ground in the rural Midwest instead of condecending at them from the coasts. She asks an important question: why precisely do people hate data centers so much?
Looking only at the statistics, AI land use and water use issues are fake. Nowhere is running out of land, and nowhere (West of San Antonio at least) is running out of water. Are the people in these communities stupid? Do they not know how to shut up and multiply?
It turns out that a lot of the fear and anger stems from a combination of distrust and PTSD from deindustrialization. An interesting example is Janesville, Wisconsin, a town with a giant concrete slab in the middle of it where the GM plant used to be.
“Small communities don’t have the legal budget to negotiate well. You’ll never hold a company to a contract,” said Cathy, who feared Janesville once again tying itself to a single big employer—especially one in a “high-risk industry” like AI. City officials were promising to lower wheel and property taxes on residents, but that assumes everything goes right. What if the project gets abandoned? How does Janesville avoid “another GM plant scenario”?
Fascinating. The collapse of the auto industry in 2008 was apparently so bad that it is better to prevent industrial development alltogether in order to avoid the risk of another collapse. It almost makes sense until you think about it for 30 seconds.
"I ask the three what they envision being built here instead, but don’t get much of an answer. I suspect that Adam is partly right—maybe this is a choice between a hyperscale data center and a concrete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab."
Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.
In 2017, the Village of Mount Pleasant, Racine County, and State of Wisconsin offered over $4 billion in tax incentives and infrastructure investments to win a bidding war for a Foxconn plant. In return, Foxconn promised Mount Pleasant—population 26,000—a $10 billion investment that would create 13,000 jobs making flat-screen TVs. The village eminent domained the land and prepared infrastructure. But Foxconn kept downsizing their plans, citing high labor costs. By the end of 2024, just over a thousand jobs had been created. Mount Pleasant was saddled with over $183 million in debt that Foxconn and Microsoft are still servicing.
The memory of the Foxconn fiasco is still raw. We heard it referenced in conversation after conversation as a flaming symbol of corporate failure.
This is the steelman of the anti-data center position. People are worried that the big companies proposing data centers are going to Foxconn them and not deliver the supposed benefits.
My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.
One of the things that comes across especially clear in the Ezra Klein interview is just how unprepared the AI companies were for the backlash. They didn't realize how sketchy it comes across to insist on NDAs with local officials when negotiating deals. They thought, as a straightforward application of Coase's Theorem would tell you, that any bumps in the road could be ironed out by handing over a big bag of money. It turns out that people don't work that way. It feels like a bribe, and Americans do not like being bribed.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Now this is a real question: is it ethical to shoplift from Whole Foods to collect on a debt if Amazon owes you money and refuses to pay?
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
It will be interesting to see if the Mamdani administration prefers shortages, or if they prefer lines. Each way has its pros and cons.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
Dragonball Z was instrumental in teaching kids how the real world works. The guy who beat everyone up gets best girl, the autist is stuck with his childhood sweetheart, the short guy has to marry a robot, and the old guy that owns his own island is a giant perv.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
I also noticed this surprisingly major border dispute a few years ago. Growing up in the United States, this was never mentioned in school. Occasionally we had maps with a dotted line through Morocco and small-font text that said "Western Sahara", but this was never remarked on in class.
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
What is the economic case for private equity getting involved in established sports leagues? Does FIFA need capital?
Quantumfreakonomics
12d ago
”The idea that they would care about the cavitation effects of a nautical propeller but not about the interaction between humans and bullets seems absurd.”
It is entirely reasonable to prioritize propeller cavitation research over rifle ballistics. Everyone knows how rifles work. You point them at the enemy, pull the trigger, and then they die. If your nation’s ballistic missile submarines don’t have anti-cavitation propellers, then you don’t have a resilient second-strike retaliatory force to maintain strategic deterrence.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
I suppose educational cost disease and more efficient social sorting have crippled the private disciplinary institution industry. I had completely forgotten about the existence of “military school” since the time my parents jokingly threatened to send me to one. I assumed OP was talking about the service academies.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
In theory I agree with you, but there is something oddly inhuman about Anthropic. I’m not entirely convinced that they don’t want to scan me for all relevant information and then rip my spine out for convenience. I would be reassured if they showed a bit more sentimentality for physical artifacts!
Open weight frontier models are indeed incredibly dangerous. Closed-weight frontier models are marginally less dangerous but significantly more classically dystopian. We are essentially weighing an increased probability of omnicide against an increased probability of objectivist utopia.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
Just got back from The Odyssey. What did you guys think of it apart from culture-war implications?
I'm glad that there were no gratuitous sex scenes. I guess I'm one of those sexless zoomers. I actually think they went too far in this regard. They could have gotten some topless models as sirens or had Calypso be thirstier.
Lupita Nyong'o, E. Page, and Zendaya really are miscast. It's not a meme. Charlize Theron should have been Athena.
It was pretty cool how they tied in the establishment of the oral mythic history of the Trojan War and forshadowed the collapse of the bronze age (spoiler alert: the Greeks are the sea peoples).
I'd say it's better than Dunkirk and Batman Begins but worse than all of Nolan's other films (I've never seen Tenet or Insomnia).
Quantumfreakonomics
19d ago
If Penelope was much older than 40 then it wouldn't make sense for her to have so many suitors.
A ten year age gap is plausible. Matt Damon is 55 and Anne Hathaway is 43. If Odysseus left for Troy when he was 30 and his wife was 20, then he would return when he is 50 and his wife is 40.
Quantumfreakonomics
19d ago
My hot take is that The Iliad and The Odyssey just aren't very good. I'm sure they were great works for their time, but we are so much better at storytelling nowadays. Not to mention that poetry in translation is uniformly awful.
Quantumfreakonomics
19d ago
Broke: Destroying the ethnostate of Israel to end the apartheid of Palestine.
Woke: Destroying the ethnostate of Israel to ensure a source of white, high-fertility immigrants to Europe.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
The obvious conclusions are obvious. Apart from those, I find myself impressed with OpenAI's communications department. "OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation", is up there with, "Union Carbide and Bhopal City Council partner to address chemical stability incident during northerly wind event." Somehow they managed to keep this off not only the front page, but the second and third pages too.
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
Everyone uses the apps now. Are y'all only swiping right on Flakedy Ann or something?
Quantumfreakonomics
21d ago
People on here have been commenting a lot about women not showing up for dates
I'll just say that I have never once had a woman not show up for a date after agreeing to a time and a place. Every other popular complaint seems valid, but this one is fake as far as I can tell.
Quantumfreakonomics
22d ago
It is worth reading mathematics professor Peter Woit’s “The Situation at Columbia” series for an inside view of how elite faculty view the situation they are in. A particularly revealing quote:
We got the marketplace of ideas back.
If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.
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