I am writing this up because a few people I talked with, in my view, have a slightly wrong model of agency decision-making in the federal government. In particular, some people think that as ICE becomes less popular, you should expect a retreat from their least popular activities, policies, and decisions.

I think the folk theory is pretty reasonable in many circumstances.

1. Agencies need support to continue doing their work. People hired at an agency generally support continuing the activity of the agency and think it’s a good thing to do. People hired by the FBI want to make the world a better place, bring some measure of relief to victims of crime, be part of an elite team, and uphold the Constitution. DHS hires people who want to destroy the flood, defend your culture, and deport tens of millions of US citizens. Agency ultimate goals are a mix of expanding power and budget and accomplishing what they understand the mission to be.

2. Agencies have substantial uncertainty over how the public will view various activities (in part because it’s frequently impossible to predict in advance, as views will crystallize based on the particulars of a semi-random incident and then be applied to an entire category).

In this theory of the world, while agencies will occasionally do something very unpopular if it’s in pursuit of their core mission, support is broadly useful for all activities, so you get something like this.

But, of course, agencies don’t necessarily know in advance where a given activity will fall, and so will sometimes need to walk back their decisions.

In addition to the uncertainty factor, like most things in life, public support has declining marginal value. If you’ve got 70% support, moving to 75% is nice. If you’ve got 49% support, moving to 54% is vital. This is somewhat complicated by a need for at least reasonably bipartisan support: 52% from one party and 56% from the other is much better than 30/78.

Furthermore, Congress exercises oversight on agencies, and I think the folk theory, quite reasonably, expects sharper and more critical Congressional oversight on more embattled and politically vulnerable agencies.

But what if you assume that it’s going to become impossible to complete the mission?

There’s a related problem in corporate finance. Under normal conditions for a company that is doing well, the company will seek to repay the people it owes money to, even though the mission is to send money to shareholders. Legally speaking they get money before shareholders in event of bankruptcy, so why not send them the money they’re owed?

However, shortly before bankruptcy, companies are understood to have a duty to maximize returns for their shareholders. Which means that, if you can, the day before you declare bankruptcy there is some desire to sell everything the company owns, send out all that money as dividends, and then show up to the bondholders with empty pockets. There are various legal and covenantal restrictions on what companies can get away with here, but the point I want to make is this: if you know that you’re going to die tomorrow no matter what, the optimal actions to achieve your goals can look very different from when you have a longer time horizon.

A DHS funding bill was just passed in the House with support from every single Republican except Thomas Massie. If the Senate passes a funding bill, until September 30th 2026, at least, DHS leadership is largely free to do as they please, so long as it pleases the President.

If ICE’s support is bankrupt among democrats, such that DHS leadership and domestic policy advisors whose goals are closely tied to ICE activity feel that moderating for the sake of public support isn’t worthwhile, I expect to see a rapid increase in activities in the mission-critical/unpopular box above. Declaring that you no longer need warrants signed by a member of the judicial branch to break someone’s front door down, for example, would be convenient for many parts of law enforcement, not just ICE. DEA isn’t going to declare it, at least partially because they want to have support from both parties.

The bankruptcy model is not the only factor in play. DHS leadership and Stephen Miller report to the President, and if President Trump feels that ICE actions are causing sufficient political problems for him, he may order different policies. There may be pressure from other law enforcement agencies that seek to practice “policing by consent”, and fear that ICE actions could interfere with that for all law enforcement. But I think there is a substantial chance that ICE responds to declining popularity with increased urgency and willingness to sacrifice public/bipartisan support to accomplish the mission.

What the mission of ICE, and more broadly Noem’s DHS, is is up for debate, and almost certainly internally contested. I don’t think I can pass an ITT for all of them reliably, so I’ll refrain from trying to describe them.

One of the effects of the massive hiring spree ICE has gone on is to help leadership shift organizational culture, which can be extremely slow to change when hiring is at a slower pace. New hires in a slow-hire world tend to be acculturated into the existing norms, while hiring at this rate enables the new hires to bond over the factors that brought them in, and bring a new culture to the organization. Having a very short training period, reportedly just 47 days, will also help the new hires resist any old norms, practices, and expectations.

Quantitative predictions:

1. The agent(s) who shot Alex Pretti will face credible non-ICE investigation by the federal government during Trump’s time in office: 10%

2. On January 27th, in my judgement, there has not been an explicit “backing down” by senior administration officials from the claim that Pretti approached agents with a handgun: 90%. “We’re investigating the matter” does not count, nor does silence on the topic or refusing to answer questions on it.

3. On February 27th, ““: 75%

It would not seem a fitting place, a manger, packed in with the asses and what they leave. Not for the future King of Kings, who would later receive gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold. Not even for the child of a respected carpenter, an honorable middle-class profession. It was not much.

But it was enough to keep a very pregnant woman warm. It was a roof over their heads, and hay that was softer than the ground in mid-winter, and easy access to water.

It was much better than nothing. It was much better than saying that he could not help, and that he had no room at all. I hope that that innkeeper, if he became a Christian, felt proud. I hope he recognized that he offered something, even if it wasn’t much, and that was more than others had, and it was something that mattered. He may have regretted that he did not give more, but I hope he was proud that he gave what he had.

There are three important things I take away from the story of the manger. The first is YIMBYism, obviously.

The second is that it is good to offer what you can, even if it’s not much, just as you appreciate when people share the best of what they have with you. I don’t have a guest room for my friends and acquaintances, but I do have an air mattress that they’re always welcome to. If you can’t offer what you’d like to, you can still offer something. I think this is a particularly important point for people in their 20s, not able to live up to their parents’ standards for hosting. Let people crash on your couch. Offer to bring a tupperware meal to new parents you know. It’s good to help people in your community, even if you can’t do everything. Little bits help, close to home and far away.

And the final and most important point is that a good roof matters. There are people without them, in the world, right now. Metal roofs are one of the most common things people buy with money from Give Directly. If you want to put a roof over someone’s head, you can do that. You can click this link, and send money.

A house in Rwanda costs about $600. Give Directly has other donors who cover all of their operational costs: your money just goes to someone who could use it. And so I want to ask you if you have a little room in your budget, to help someone else have a room.

The essay makes two claims: firstly, that technology determines societal outcomes, and secondly, that the default world after high degrees of automation will be very good. The first has an extensive argument, while the second is a paragraph and a half of possibilities that provides no evidence or argument, so I will focus on the first.

I’m writing this because, compared to most, I’m a technodeterminist. I think that the nature of a society can be substantially predicted from the mode of economic production. While “technodeterminism” is a term of abuse in STS circles, it’s also obviously correct, at least as defined. It matters whether you grow rice (needs irrigation funded and controlled by a larger group, and coordination of when you drain your fields) or wheat (more suitable for family farms), as studies have shown (including quasi-experimental work). Both of those are practically identical compared to the difference between plow cultures and hoe cultures, the latter of which put minimal value on physical strength and enable women to do much more economically valuable work, creating less patriarchal societies.

It matters whether you have abundant natural resources, which tilt governance towards control over the resources rather than good treatment of individuals (usually called the resource curse). The impact of guns is typically overstated (the crossbow is actually pretty comparable to the early musket), but guns → democratization is at the very least a credible theory.

My technodeterminism is exactly why I’m concerned about the impact of AI. If you run through the world where governments don’t depend on their citizens for economically valuable labor, it does not follow that those citizens have great lives. You’d have to believe, really strongly, in the kindness of rulers or the power of a populace that is, by definition, not doing economically valuable work. Neither is a good bet.

But I committed to an explanation of how my technodeterminism differs from theirs, which returns to the metaphor of water. Barnet, Besiroglu, and Erdil use the metaphor of water running to a valley.

Rather than being like a ship captain, humanity is more like a roaring stream flowing into a valley, following the path of least resistance. People may try to steer the stream by putting barriers in the way, banning certain technologies, aggressively pursuing others, yet these actions will only delay the inevitable, not prevent us from reaching the valley floor.

It’s not, here, excessively pedantic here to point out that not all water is in the Mariana trench. Nor is it even all on the ocean. There is water in clouds. There is water in lakes and glaciers, in some cases miles above sea-level. And yes, in theory all the water “should” follow the path of least resistance to the lowest possible point. And yet there are a few things standing in the way.

1. People do not always follow the path of least resistance. In the worst days of feudalism, when the rich could do as they willed and the poor suffered what they must, a certain Francis of Assisi gave all he had to the poor. He did not give a small token at feasts, or even 10%: he gave all he had. The water can rise out of the depths, even to the very heavens. We need not follow our incentives to our graves.

2. The modern era is one of human capital and democracy, as I have said. Yet the last king is not yet dead and buried, nor is he even a representative of the last monarchy, nor is it even obvious that he will not have successors, nor is he stripped of all power. I am thinking of Vajiralongkorn Boromchakrayadisorn Santatiwong Thewetthamrongsuboribal Abhikkunupakornmahitaladulyadej Bhumibolnaretwarangkun Kittisirisombunsawangwat Boromkhattiyarajakumarn, better known as Rama X, King of Thailand, whom it is still illegal in Thailand to insult. Water will generally flow down the mountain and towards the valley, but flowing towards a valley is different from being there already.

3. The Amish still exist, despite all the pressures and incentives of the modern world. In an era of feudalism, less efficient societies would be conquered. But even if water will eventually run downhill, it can be frozen for years or centuries, and outwait the current trend. There is ice that has remained frozen for over a million years, and the Trump Administration is currently on a quixotic campaign against wind and solar: a society can stand still, even in the face of incentives, for a little while.

So, I shall grant myself the point that we can influence the motion of the ocean, even if we can’t stop it. And if all you or I can do is stand athwart history yelling stop, slowing down the brave new world, there is dignity and honor in such a doomed fight, if it preserves a better world for but one day more. In the long run we are all dead: what will make a better world today and tomorrow?

But our agency is not so circumscribed. America was going to eventually be independent of Britain’s Parliament, just as India and Canada and Australia would be: the costs of administering a far-flung empire were too high, and Britain too small, for it to last forever.1 But America won its freedom rapidly. Canada and Australia had a slow and stately withdrawal of real power vested in the monarch. India saw millions displaced, with hundreds of thousands dead. You can say that those were all paths to the same end, but India today has border disputes with two nuclear-armed neighbors, Australia and Canada are doing well for themselves, and America is the most powerful nation on the planet, with freedom of speech still protected more strongly than anywhere comparable, because that was a priority in the 1780s.

The path these nations took towards independence mattered. The path we take towards a highly automated future will matter. In economics we call this path-dependency, and it rules a tremendous amount around you. There are people trying to make it go well, and none of them think we’re really ready for what will come.2

It is not free to slow the progress that will come: I care about the children who will die. I’m scared of a world where we don’t build AI, and something terrible happens that could have been prevented. I don’t want to unilaterally stop American AI progress. Ultimately I think we have decent odds on a good future. I expect a great deal of futile fights as, to pick an example, the Teamsters try to stop self-driving cars that will save millions of lives, and those efforts will be measured in those killed by the delay more than anything else. That fight will look simple and quick compared to the defense the AMA will put up to keep work in the hands of doctors and out of reach for nurses and assistants. We need to accelerate getting advanced tech into the hands of everyone in the world, and I focus on lifesaving tech like self-driving cars.

The way we get there matters, and it matters more the longer and more important you think the AI age will be. It will go better if AI is under the control of liberal democracies with fully free and fair elections3 that understand what is coming. Those liberal democracies will do better if they pass wise laws that focus on critical risks and don’t listen to rent-seeking guilds. Cyberattacks that wreck moderately important infrastructure4, engineered plagues that kill billions: these are real and clear problems.

If we are to be people of integrity, we should not pretend that we are innocent agents of gravity, doing only what is inevitable. Speeding up means that society has less time to adapt, to plan, and to prepare. It increases every risk associated with the impending transition. Perhaps that is worth it. Barnet, Besiroglu, and Erdil should actually make that case with more than a token fantasy, not pretend that they’re helplessly caught in the current.

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• Can’t comply: don’t have the resources; time; or knowledge, skills, and abilities

• Won’t comply: don’t see the policy as important or valuable, the punishments for failure to comply are lighter than the burden of complying, etc

• Don’t know the policy exists: a fun question to track bureaucracy in your society is how much paperwork would be needed to set up a lemonade stand legally. How much of it can a 10 year old know?

I like this framework because it starts to break down the human factors involved in policy failure, which are constant and numerous.

History

An entertaining alternate history of Wakanda

Fascinating piece from Techdirt on free speech, and the differences between a bar and an enterprise software provider, on the subject of Substack Notes. The question of “what rules and norms needed to be in place to allow the modern gay rights movement, and how do we protect those rules and norms from current anti-liberals” is of deep importance to me. I’ve seen the political winds shift back and forth, over the years, and right now the consensus among dominant factions on both parties is relatively anti speech that they don’t like and pro speech that they do. This is pretty common, admittedly, but you can track how people are more or less blatant about it.

Ultimately, I find the difference that the writer draws persuasive for considerations on when a private company that genuinely believes in free speech should restrict it. In short, in a bar you can’t control who else you’re interacting with once inside, while an enterprise software provider imposes no additional requirements to speak or interact with fellow customers). However, I think that Substack Notes comes down on the other side of it.

You’re probably familiar with the following meme. So here’s a fun little history of how it was modified through the bowels of the internet.

Oh Money Money

Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) failed because of a textbook case of mismanagement by the bank. Its senior leadership failed to manage basic interest rate and liquidity risk. Its board of directors failed to oversee senior leadership and hold them accountable. And Federal Reserve supervisors failed to take forceful enough action, as detailed in the report.

From the report by the Federal Reserve, on the collapse of SVB, which was taken over this weekend by another bank. One framing of the issue that I think is interesting is that SVB grew much faster than the Fed is used to banks growing.

Fascinating image from a report on family offices: firstly, the places where family offices, the investment and odd jobs companies for the extremely wealthy (9 figures in wealth for the family), are categorized into US, Latin America, China, Western Europe, Middle East and Africa and Asia-Pacific. Eastern European extremely wealthy people don’t have family offices, they have [redacted so I don’t

Secondly, Chinese family offices put three fifths of their money into Western Europe.

Personal Updates

I wrote Ending Open Philanthropy Project, an April Fools day post on the EA Forum. Self-recommending.

I am working on a list of 100 short stories and essays, aimed at people who say that they want to read more classics but don’t have the time. Recommendations welcome, particularly for more of a global perspective. That is, I am *reliably* informed that there exist countries other than Russia and America, possibly even entire regions that might contain as many as three authors. I don’t promise to include them, but I do promise to read them.

Taking on this project has been intensely educational for me, and I recommend giving it a stab yourself. You can go for 50, if you want, and lean more to your personal taste than “objective” standards. I’ve noticed places where I’m missing people, been reminded of authors I’m neglecting, and more.

If you’re just going to read one, I think I will go for my abuse of Bible Gateway to create “abridged” versions of Genesis and Matthew. 8,000 words each, they try to get across as many biblical references that you are likely to encounter in later work as possible.

I have some upcoming travel: I will be in London for EA Global May 17-22, in DC May 23-30 for some RAND work. Shoot me a message if you want to meet up!

Firstly, we can establish that nobody listened to the President of the United States and the White House clearly, explicitly, and repeatedly saying that the Russians would invade. On April 5, 2021, rates were 11.7%, in February 14th 2022 they were 13.6%, lower than their January peak.

Secondly, it’s impressive to see how fast the financial markets updated that the Ukranians actually had a pretty good shot at winning this. Remember that even in the world where Ukraine wins, repayment will still be pretty difficult. And countries have a strong incentive not to repay the lenders to their opponent, in order to incentivize not lending to their opponent, so if the Russians win you *certainly* shouldn’t expect repayment.

Thirdly, I don’t do anything other than broad stock market investing as a matter of professional practice, but I suspect you could do worse with your money, both ethically and pragmatically, than Ukranian war bonds. This is not investing advice! That’s the magic incantation to take what I just said and make what I did legal. Why does that work? What follows is pure theorizing.

Well, firstly, because the SEC is not all that interested in locking me up. If they locked up every fool who spouted about money, they would have to expand the jails even further.

Secondly, by having to say “this is not investing advice”, I make it clear that I am not a Licensed Professional. If someone who pretends to expertise has to make that disclaimer, their audience can notice, wonder why, and perhaps avoid being drawn into the scam.

Hey, Japan! Glad to see you’re doing better.

Image courtesy of a critique of YIMBY usage of Japanese house prices, and more broadly easy international comparisons (which I have some meta-objections to, but it’s a good piece and worth integrating).

Systematic review on the experiences of grad students

AI Alignment horror story, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Happy new year! It’s been another good year of blogging. There was a temporary burst in viewership, which has since entirely returned to normal. I look forward to continuing next year.

Chana Messinger has a good post on emotions about money and how it should be spent, if you’ve been following the latest EA internal debate round on it.

We’ve since had some very different discussions about money, prompted by changing events. I don’t have a lot to say here. Some of these people were friends of mine. I wish they hadn’t done it. I hope they’re OK, I hope justice is served. It won’t be. I hope we don’t all die. I wish I had gotten paid1. I want things to be good instead of bad, and the world today has many bad things, and figuring out what to do about them is hard. That’s why I’m an EA: I think we have a good set of intellectual tools.

But speaking of pieces that were better when I wrote them, let’s talk about

AI

Me: Who cares about no-press diplomacy? No-press removes almost all of the difficulty!

Meta AI: Hold my caution and watch this.

Yeah, everyone’s talking about ChatGPT. It’s scary. It’s not the most impressive model I’ve seen, but it’s public and it’s communicating that yes, this is real. Of course, that’s not all. Stable Diffusion is good enough that people doing personal projects won’t necessarily search for art: they can just make it themselves, like in this example. We’re approaching an interesting age. Terrifying, but interesting.

We’ve done it. You can now have an AI flirt for you. I’m looking forward to the first (mildly unethical) experiment where someone runs this, sticks a photo of an attractive woman, and sees what happens.

In lighter news, the dismal science

Fantasy Econ league! Because saying that academic publishing is about as important as the NFL is a great way to anger everyone.

Here’s a piece I enjoyed on the benefits of intensive parenting. It’s as well argued as the pieces I preferred arguing that they don’t exist, at least to the level of (minimal) investigation I subjected them to, so I feel obligated to pass it on as I would Caplan.

Urbanization is (still) really good.

Best piece of journalism I’ve read in at least a few months is this piece by Dylan Matthews on Robert Greenstein is about a particular person, and a broader approach to lobbying and politics, and the American welfare state. Worth reading, particularly for the second piece: Greenstein was extremely effective, and he did it mostly through research and people, not massive sums of money. Of course, the critique is to fault him for all the bad things that happened to the American welfare state on his watch, which isn’t wrong.

How Credit Cards Make Money is fascinating.

The primary component of profitability is net credit margin (NCM), which is the profitability of revolving balances.12 Credit card lenders receive revenues in the form of finance charges borrowers pay and fund the revolving balances with interest expense. On average, the credit function of credit cards—that is, NCM multiplied by the share of balances that are revolving balances—makes up around 80 percent of aggregate credit card profitability.

…

The share of revolving balances is highly seasonal, as revolving balances rise around the winter holidays and subsequently subside.

Spending on your credit card is now net costly for credit card companies because of all the rewards, and this is a recent development.

But see also Who Pays for Your Rewards, which shows that only 13% of credit card users make a net profit from their cards. The numbers are compatible, of course, even assuming identical data-sets and data cleaning and processing decision-making: making net money off of rewards, to a first approximation, requires that you pay no fees or interest.

Miscellany

In case you have somehow been laboring under the delusion that we can rescue science with meta-analyses, here’s Data Colada. It’s the second in a series, and it’s not looking good for finding the average effect size of interventions in a category as a meaningful value. So if you want to make a guess of how much impact some change will have, you can’t read individual papers and you also can’t trust the average meta-analysis. We’re still a long way from good science. Relatedly, though it really shouldn’t be a surprise, the effects of air pollution on health are exaggerated. Not zero, but substantially lower than previous (published) research estimated.

It turns out that people in the American West have been murdering federal agents a lot longer than I realized, going back to 1907. Congress was absolutely furious that the investigators…were investigating members of Congress for land fraud. The Congressional attitude that they should be immune to criminal punishment and laws isn’t new either.

It’s probably worth keeping track of how easy it is for an individual to make a machine gun in their house out of 3D printed + easily commercially available parts.

An interview with a Russian asset who, after being captured in Estonia and returned to Russia in a prisoner swap, defected to Estonia.

Map of Indian poverty, raw data on page 136.

For how important poverty/wealth in those states are, you can look at

That data was drawn from Wikipedia, while the population map distortion was done with this program, which I suspect I will use myself one of these days. Comparing the two isn’t trivial, but you can certainly see that, for example, it’s pretty important that Bihar is poor and Kerala is not. OK, so I checked the List of Indian State and Union Territories by GDP per Capita just in case my assumptions were wrong, and wow they were. Kerala has a multidimensional poverty index a fifth that of Goa’s while Goa has twice the per capita GDP of Kerala. Goa on a PPP adjusted basis is still substantially poorer than the poorest American state, but it’s richer than Greece while Kerala is closer to pre-invasion Ukraine. Something interesting is going on. The answer seems to be “functional communism”? Unfortunately, limited time and many things to do.

Wikipedia

In 2022, Canada acquired a border with a second country. This came out of reading the surprisingly interesting Talk Page for the Wikipedia article on 2022. I was pinged because I’d made a small edit, but it’s fun to read Jim Michaels 2 argue for deleting almost everything, while other people try to defend smalltime filmmakers for inclusion. Normally I’m very strongly anti-deletionist, but when it comes to content on a year page I’m more sympathetic.

The edit that got me dragged in was changing a disambiguation link to correctly point towards the January 2022 coup d'état in Burkina Faso, as opposed to the 2022 coup: in January “the 2022 coup” was sufficient but by September there had been a second. You know you’re having problems when Russia calls for a return to a framework with “legitimacy”.

I do recommend reading Wikipedia pages for a year to get a sense of what is happening. It’s not the only thing, but if you want to be “well-rounded” in some sense, it’s a better starting point than most alternatives. If you don’t understand something, click the link, and read the first paragraph.

On the topic of Wikipedia, the two largest cities in New England (excluding the parts of New York that extend over Connecticut) are Caribou and Ellsworth Maine! This is because the largest cities by land area in America are *not* in New England.

Militaries

Something that can happen when you get too into political theory is that you lose track of the obvious. Yes, moral authority was used in pre-modern Europe as a political tool!

Sometimes the point needs to be made that the US military does many things that you and I are unaware of. Some of that is because the right hand doesn't always know what the left is doing, but more often it's because there is effective operational security and secret operations. Now everyone involved is willing to be open that, prior to the invasion, the US military had a team of 40 hunting Russian cyber-infiltration. I knew nothing of this. You probably knew nothing of this. It's public solely because it is now good PR for Ukraine and America alike, but this sort of operation can be very touchy for politicians, who have their pride and belief in sovereignty. How many operations don't we know about?

The National Defense Strategy 2022 is out! Read it alongside the unclassified summary of the 2018 Strategy to see the changes.

The obvious change is predictable: Russia has been downgraded.

2018

The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions

2022

The PRC remains our most consequential strategic competitor for the coming decades.
…
The 2022 NDS lays out our vision for focusing the Defense Department around our pacing challenge [China], even as we manage the other threats [Russia, North Korea, Iran, “violent extremist organizations” AKA terrorists, climate change, and pandemics, in that order] of our swiftly changing world.

Other 2022 highlights

Conflict with the PRC is neither inevitable nor desirable.

A wide range of new or fast-evolving technologies and applications are complicating escalation dynamics and creating new challenges for strategic stability. These include counterspace weapons, hypersonic weapons, advanced CBW, and new and emerging payload and delivery systems for both conventional and non-strategic nuclear weapons. [Notice what isn’t in that list.]

Our current system is too slow … will instead reward rapid experimentation, acquisition, and fielding [This has been said for decades, and I expect to see similar statements indefinitely]

We will fuel research and development for advanced capabilities, including in directed energy, hypersonics, integrated sensing, and cyber. We will seed opportunities in biotechnology, quantum science, advanced materials, and clean-energy technology. We will be a fast-follower where market forces are driving commercialization of militarily-relevant capabilities in trusted artificial intelligence and autonomy, integrated network system-of-systems, microelectronics, space, renewable energy generation and storage, and human-machine interfaces

So, uh, there has also been Russian propaganda saying that the government of Estonia is infested with neo-Nazis. Just in case you were feeling optimistic about peace. On the bright side for Estonia, they’re considering building a nuclear power plant!

Cars

It’s a very standard urbanist talking point that Americans buy cars that are hideously expensive, and those child-killer trucks (if you can’t see a small child five feet in front of your car, you’re much more likely to kill them because of your desire to loom over everyone else) are expensive. But I am a fool who hadn’t let it properly sink in how expensive. One seventh of all Americans buying a new car with an auto loan will commit to paying $1,000/month on that loan. The average amount lent for a new car is $40,000, with a payment of over $700: if that was just the principle, loans would take four years to pay off. But less than 10% of auto loans have terms for 48 months or less: it’s a fairly tight grouping, with the mean loan length at origination (so, not counting changes that happen at the debtor’s request) between five and six years.

Now, it’s possible that people are rationally taking auto loans: APR for new cars that were financed averages 5.7%, long-run stock market returns are typically estimated to be in the 5-7% range (Vanguard, Bogleheads wiki), and there may be above-market returns available to individuals1. My parents taught me to never buy a car with a loan, and the observation that a large fraction of dealer profit margin seems to come from financing has reinforced that, but it’s possible, and I try not to say that people are making bad choices without a lot more evidence than I’ve garnered. They're certainly well-equipped to pay back those loans: default rates in the first four years are under 1%, and there's no reason I'd expect consumers to be more likely to default on loans just when there's the least to pay off.

The increase in loan prices is driven by two simultaneous factors, at least I assume. One is that cars are just more expensive!

A 20% increase over two years is going to increase the fraction of loans that charge $1,000 a month or more. The other, as we’ve all noticed, is that interest rates have spiked.

Assorted

Sometimes a single table can be surprisingly revealing. For instance, the commissioners of the CFTC are supposed to serve staggered five-year terms.

The Onion has a beautiful piece of writing on the legal form and parody, that is also a legally persuasive amicus curiae.

I try to avoid linking Twitter threads, but this one is all recommendations on the history and transmission of governance structures: thrilling stuff.

Tracing Woodgrains has a series on the benefits of enlisting in the US military for a young leftist cynic.

The biological evidence on whether SARS-CoV-2 was a lab escape keeps being confusing and hard to parse, and the political evidence keeps being “everything is absolutely consistent with a deliberate coverup starting from the earliest days, including, now, some things from November 2019.” Now, an obvious reason to do a coverup is that you don’t know the results (and don’t want to roll the dice). Similarly, you don’t want to only make the obvious signs of a coverup when you’re actually guilty.

P.S. I’m experimenting this month with somewhat longer-form content, diving a little into an area as opposed to dropping a link and moving on. Please tell me what you think!

So, you know how everything started going wrong in America between 1969 and 1980? That’s also when the age of senators started rising.

You can pay money to get taller! 3-6 inches, and months of extremely painful recovery. Price tag, $70-$150k. We’re getting to the glorious transhumanist future day by day

The Canvas Cycle is a series of pretty images. All done in exactly 256 color options, and instead of rotating an actual image, individual locations get changed to different colors at a set speed. Look at the options and play around: it’s a really fun art style.

So, the reason I haven’t been reading much this month is that I’ve been writing. A lot. Some of it you will be able to see eventually (I hope). And I’ve been going back to a piece by Anton Howes I read early in September on the balance of writing, something that I think is more true than many people want to admit. It makes one key point:

• If you’re stumped writing, it’s probably because you’re not done thinking.

Finally, I leave you with a short piece I’ve written, because it’s been percolating for a while. I’d love feedback if you want to argue with it.

In Defense of Technodeterminism

The technodeterminism thesis:

The state of technology is the most important cause of social structures, because technology enables most human action. People act in the context of available technology, and therefore people’s relations among themselves can only be understood in the context of technology.

From An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies, by Sergio Sismondo. You can argue about the details, but it’s a description by someone who is largely critical, and I like it as someone who is largely positive: it will do.

It can seem a little too strong: what about love? The technodeterminist can respond that trying to understand any type of love in a subculture where men spend six months of the year away on boats in homosocial environments without taking that fact into account is futile, and if other societies need not consider that aspect it is because of differing technologies. Similarly, the ability of people to write letters to each other, or make video-calls, structures our artistic interactions, our friendships, our wars, and everything else.

That said, technodeterminism is often used to frame political and economic analyses. It underdetermines them: three popular frameworks, all techno-determinist, violently disagree with each other.

Progress Studies Thesis: Technodeterminism is true, therefore technological changes are more important than social changes, so you will do more good by working for technological progress than by advocating policy shifts. Productivity growth uber alles.

Orthodox “Marxist” Thesis1: The technological changes we faced in Marx’s time of de-skilling and factory work will largely continued unchanged. By the 21st century, advanced industrial countries will look like a bunch of factories with workers paid barely above starvation wages and an ever-shrinking number of bosses, who have no skills but merely possess capital. This continuing immiseration of the working class will inevitably yield proletarian revolution in the most advanced countries like the United States and Europe, followed by a spread to more agricultural countries like Russia, China, Vietnam, Korea, and Cambodia.

The youth are being corrupted: Smartphones cause teen suicide, anxiety, short attention spans, psychosis, family conflicts, depression in kids, and the productivity crisis. XKCD covers 1871-1915. The new technology is always terrifying and bringing about the end of the world.

But there’s a lot more out there!

Ten techno-determinist claims, for breadth and consideration:

1. A society that centralizes economic power into the hands of a single person can’t remain a democracy.2

2. America’s North did not start off much more inherently moral or inclined to abolitionism than the South. It started off less physically proximate with slave labor because of technological differences between the agricultural South, with better growing land for cash crops with easy observation, and the more industrialized north with better transportation infrastructure. Because there was less direct reliance on slave labor and fewer people owned slaves, there was less resistance to manumission and abolitionism.

3. The needs of military power in a pre-1600s society will strongly influence who has power and how much they have. If the most militarily effective force is a tiny elite of well-trained well-equipped well-fed individuals, those individuals will call themselves “knights” and serve as the base layer of governance in a feudal society. If the most militarily effective force is a moderate to large fraction of the population, lightly equipped, you will tend towards the semi-democracies of ancient Greece. There was no unique and critical moral breakthrough about the equality of non-enslaved men.

4. High demand for labor during WWI and WWII contributed to increases in the power in America of unions, African-Americans, and women. That was an important factor in women getting the right to vote in both the US and the UK during the inter-war period.

5. Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Taylor, and many other historical British feminists were no less right, no less dedicated, and no less thoughtful than their successors who, well, succeeded in getting women education, the vote, and more. Rather, what changed was that returns to education increased, the value of land decreased as a fraction of total capital, and returns to physical strength in labor decreased. This increased the relative economic power of women. The increase in political power that followed is at least substantially attributable to the increase in economic power.

6. The primary determinant of maternal mortality is tech, GDP, and inequality, not how much a society cares for its women / supports women / empowers women / uplifts women / however you wish to operationalize and describe the concept I am pointing at.

7. Without access to abortion, women’s3 political rights will regress. The Pill, by being a form of birth control that did not require male action, enabled greater economic, social, and political independence for women.

8. The rise in assortative mating (and corresponding contribution to income inequality) is driven in part by a diminished need for housework, in turn caused in part by the rise of labor-saving devices. Modern couples seem to have more complementarities of consumption (you enjoy spending time together) rather than production (without either of you the economically productive household would fail to produce critical goods like pressed shirts for business meetings).

9. Cultures that farm with a plow have very different gender norms from ones that farm with a hoe, and this is caused by the difference in mode of economic production.

10. “Rice cultures are more interdependent than herding cultures and wheat-farming cultures”

None of them are necessarily implied by technodeterminism, nor do they imply it. But they all assume weaker or stronger technodeterminism.

If you are convinced by this argument, but unsure what it implies, think about how you understand history and the present. Then apply a lens of technological change to the problem. Not everything has a clean solution: “why did Russia invade Ukraine?” has relatively little, directly, to do with new technologies. But if you want to understand why the same amount of corruption is a bigger problem for a military now than it was in 1980, let alone 1880, now a technology-focused answer looks attractive.

Some technodeterminist predictions I make that I will leave you with:

• Increasing ease of surveillance is a principle cause of authoritarianism. Recordkeeping effective, facial recognition more effective, murderbots terrifying

• Work spyware, or “bossware”, will depress both wages and the quality of working conditions. Because it transfers power to the users, it can be very strongly net-negative, including to overall profits/productivity, and still be widely used

• Countries that rely on natural resources that can be controlled via military force become ruled by militaries or paramilitaries very easily. Countries that rely on taxing a skilled population that can leave strongly resist becoming very authoritarian because authoritarianism is bad. Reversing democratic decline in developing nations and raising human capital in those nations are not opposed goals: they’re the same goal

Disclaimer: as always, maintain multiple models and lenses on the world. Technodeterminism is a particularly useful one that can make broad predictions easily, but it obviously generates errors all over the place and is relatively weak at offering pathways to improve the future.

A press release from Stripe does a really good job, I feel, of demonstrating how merchants and finance people can add value in the world. It’s often incredibly abstract. How important is liquidity to me as a retail investor? If you put all my transactions on a three-day delay I probably wouldn’t even notice. And of course many people have political incentives to not see. So Stripe has a real use case where financialization options are incredibly valuable.

From Winthrop Beach to Bunker Hill, / From Cambridge to Revere,
 The voice of happiness was still, / One heard no note of cheer.
 A pallor whitened every face. / All eyes were red and swollen;
 A dreadful crime had taken place – / The Codfish had been stolen.

 The Fish that symbolized a trade / Which, in the days of old,
 The shores of old New England made / A strand of shining gold,
 The Fish that millions came to view / With ardent admiration,
 The Fish whose fame has echoed to / The corners of the nation.

 When first I set my roving feet / Upon Bostonian sod,
 I hastened blithely up the street / To view the Sacred Cod,
 And in its dull and glassy eyes, / The instant of our meeting,
 I fancied that I saw arise / A glance of cordial greeting.

 Today there is an end of grief; / No more the skies loom black;
 A chastened and repentant thief / Has brought the Codfish back.
 No Stygian gloom now broods around, / No heart with woe is freighted;
 Bostonian pulses leap and bound – / The Cod is reinstated.

Someone stole the Sacred Cod.

Hobart is reliably good: this article on Jane Street is of interest to anyone who likes good writing about markets and their participants.

Courtesy of Future Perfect, this article from the Smithsonian on American reactions to burning coal is incredibly entertaining if you have an eye for modern parallels.

“Geo”-politics

The interest rate on short-term bonds for the German government is still negative. America is having an inflationary crisis because of the generosity of our COVID response.

Gentrification does not have any relationship with evictions if you actually look at data.

Five Individuals Indicted for Crimes Related to Transnational Repression Scheme to Silence Critics of the People's Republic of China Residing in the United States. I had to explain to someone that this exists earlier this month, so here you all go: it’s not the only plan I’ve seen executed by Chinese intelligence (see also this coordinated harassment of prominent Asian women), and it’s one of the more solid reasons I’m a pessimist about long-term peace between CPC-led China and the United States. Put simply, the CPC seems to be of the view that free speech anywhere is a threat to authoritarianism everywhere, and if that is true there’s a strong lasting conflict.

US Military doctrine on Chinese Tactics. One interesting quote from it is, I think, revealing of something most people in the US aren’t currently talking about:

More recently, it was used regularly—and with good effect—by Communist Chinese forces in both the Chinese Civil War and the Korean War, most famously at the 1946 Battle of Guanzhong and the 1951 Battle of the Soyang River.

If it turns out that Chinese forces fail dramatically, I think a lot of people will talk about a peacetime military and lack of actual combat experience.

Also, from a reddit thread on the topic, it turns out that political officers have started to turn into a chaplain/welfare officer sort of role at the lower levels, which is just fascinating.

Chronotrains tells you how far you can travel in five hours by train in Europe. I think the funniest part of this is seeing how much more central London is to Britain than two locations that are theoretically closer to each other. My favorite is York to London being faster than York to Blackpool:

In Defence of Positive Utilitarianism

AKA I was bored one lunch at a conference

1. Most utilitarianism is either negative (that is, pain vastly outweighs pleasure in importance) or neutral (pain and pleasure are of equal importance).

2. But there exists a strong and under-rated case for positive utilitarianism as an axiological stance.

3. Firstly, there is a common and necessary intuition that differentiation is important for moral weight.

   1. If you imagine a universe of quadrillions upon quadrillions of rats brains on heroin, it seems…lacking, somehow, even if they’re all very happy and having their preference for heroin satisfied. Some of this is that happy rats seem less good than happy humans.

   2. Even at the scale of entire planets, this seems true: I prefer a universe with many different worlds to one with many identical worlds, assuming that every one of those different worlds is morally equivalent, by whatever standard I otherwise use, to the one world that would be copied.

4. Secondly, Tolstoy was wrong: pleasure is more distinct than pain. If you break a leg, the pain is much like other physical pains. If you are sad and alone, that sadness and loneliness is relatively similar to that of others. But pleasures are much more unique to the person experiencing them: the joy of friendly companionship around a warm fire is very different from holding the hand of a lover, which is in turn very distinct from cracking up at the joke of a childhood friend. Suffering just hurts.

5. Therefore, pleasure is more important than pain, and we have an ethical argument for weighting it above the prevention of pain.

This fails in the real world, mostly, because preventing pain is much, much cheaper than enabling pleasure, and the cheapest pleasures are similar to one another.

A fun toy that shows how prison populations would change in response to various modifications. See how little ending the war on drugs actually does! See how cheaply you can punish drunk drivers! And remember that the majority of people in prison are in for violent crime, and a serious attempt to grapple with that will mean cutting prison sentences for violent crimes dramatically.

Well, it’s about 36 years late, but the DoJ now claims that they will no longer prosecute people for playing around with computer systems in good faith.

This article on the limitations of an elite-focused politics of identity-based deference is well-crafted, and has everything I wish I could have said.

I’ve discovered an actual origination of the million:statistic line, though it ends up being more plausibly attributed to Stalin than I’d initially expected. Kurt Tuchlsky, German journalist. He’s got a number of other quotes (more in German here, and some deeper quote history investigation here).

A country is not only what it does but what it tolerates.

Revolution! The people howls and cries, Freedom, that’s what we’re needing! We’ve needed it for centuries, our arteries are bleeding. The stage is shaking, the audience rock. The whole thing is over by nine o’clock.

You may have thought that the US military over-recruited among the nation’s poorest. Nope!

I’m not entirely clear on why. Pitch me why I should believe one theory (drug and criminal exclusions) over another (education requirements) over another (honor cultures and pride) over another (positive view of the state).

Learning

For your enjoyment, a FOIAed training game from the CIA! It’s not particularly *good*, but I think it’s interesting.

"Was Reading Recovery harmful? I wouldn't go as far as to say that," he said. "But what we do know is that the kids that got it for some reason ended up losing their gains and then falling behind."

Yes, a widely employed program for helping kids learn to read was harmful. If you make kids fall behind in reading, you have harmed them. Normally this is not complicated!

Speaking of complicated, this Pro Publica piece in Plain English on the failures of Arizona to support developmentally disabled people is fascinatingly written.

Max Gladstone is one of my favorite panelists at SFF cons, and this substack on Moon is a Harsh Mistress is good. But it’s also about something I’ve noticed, which is that many people seem to be very bad at reading, and particularly bad at reading famous books. It seems that once a book has a canonical interpretation, all of the other interesting parts get ignored. It happens to Smith and Keynes, it happens to Voltaire, it happens to everyone whose work is respected but forgotten.

And on the topic of history, here’s one from a previous set of vaccine concerns.

Geography

Come for the programming discussions, stay for the absurdity that is English place naming. How many High Streets can one city need?

Russia is still exporting oil and natural gas. But it can import almost nothing. This has led to a massive trade surplus. Many politicians tell me that this means good things for their economy.

Elon Musk was once asked about the regulatory situation of providing satellite internet without the local country’s permission. His response was uniquely Muskian:

Now, it turns out, there are also other options. Dictators can, for example, launch electronic warfare measures against SpaceX’s operations. Fortunately…it turns out that SpaceX is better than the Russians and so Ukranian internet access continues.

Fun piece on military inter-service conflict (in favor), if that’s your jam.

One of the things I’ve had to grapple with, at my age, is understanding just how meaningful 9/11 is to people older than me. Two months of car crash deaths get shown on TV, and everybody goes completely mad. I go to a panel on national security work, and every single panelist and the moderator says that their inspiration to enter government service was 9/11. The Census Bureau handed over information on Arab neighborhoods to DHS (the story is more complicated than that: DHS seems to be both lying and incompetent and the Census Bureau did something both understandable and legally required, but this is the short version). We passed the Patriot Act, setting up massive denial of civil liberties by means both legal (new authorizations) and structural (empowering a type of agency that cares very little for such things at the expense of Justice and State, which do).

DHS has seized over $500 million in currency from people who didn’t follow said signage.

State and local taxation is usually regressive in America.

Code and Consequences

This request was intended to inform the implementation work. Instead, all hell broke loose.

…

After the 2019 CNSTAT meeting made clear that evaluators were not accounting for the biases of the published data, the Census Bureau attempted to inform stakeholders that they were not comparing their analyses to ground truth. Having nothing else to compare the data to, this information was not well received by either data users or other census advocates.

…

If the Census Bureau were to publish datasets that that included fractional or negative population counts, this was bound to confuse and upset external stakeholders, including lawyers and judges.

This is a surprisingly fascinating article on the introduction of differential privacy at the Census Bureau. Reading between the lines a little, the authors imply that differential privacy reduced error, and that it was seen as increasing error because it produced different results from datasets released through more statistically “damaging” privacy-preserving processes (“swapping”). It’s somewhat an examination of the hard problems involved in communicating highly technical information to a diverse group of stakeholders, many of whom believed comfortable lies that what should have been a small process improvement made impossible. It’s a story about how a small and comprehensible technical constraint (that census data consist of census reports, not merely statistical contents)

I also get to admit an error here: I hadn’t realized the extent of data manipulation in prior census reports, and the related conclusion that the cost of introducing differential privacy is much smaller than I’d thought.

Interesting reddit post as a breakdown on crypto, from a relatively sympathetic person bringing data!

Cool new technique available on Edge for beating private mode blockers.

Some of you might have thought you’d sleep well tonight. “Fun” fact: it’s possible to insert backdoors in ML models that can’t be detected by computationally bounded observers.

Typeclasses are a really nice way of doing many sorts of classes in Python!

The future of VR is very soon and very cool. Here’s Meta talking about their new experimental feature to let users fix permanent points in physical space that stick around session to session.

History

If you just want more history, here’s a timeline, with dots for every event in Wikipedia. Try clicking on them!

Nature, in its entire history, has had 115 retracted papers. 50 of them have happened in the past seven years. Retraction Watch is really cool.

Next time you fly, you can download Flyover Country in advance, and then have a guide with you to all the cool geographic features out your window! Thank you, geoscience outreach humans!

So, we talk about ransomware as this serious and emerging problem. But it’s interesting to see that part of why ransomware is hard to solve is that it’s incredibly easy. Here are the top criminal groups by ransomware revenue.

How much does Conti pay their staff? New people make $1-2k. Monthly. These can’t be the best people in the world: Google has a Moscow office, to pick but one example. And Conti is protected by the Russian government! They don’t have to worry (much) about being arrested! “Just don’t work for people doing bad things” is actually really enough for most people. The issue is that the imbalance between offense and defense in cyber is really severe.

This Vanity Fair article matches my current state of mind on lab leak vs natural origin: the biological evidence seems to point mildly towards natural origin, and the political observation is that the Chinese central government, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and a number of US scientists have frantically worked to cover it up. Which, of course, leaves the obvious implication that they’re guilty: how likely would this behavior be if they knew that it was natural origin? Oh, and also, whether or not SARS-CoV-2 was a lab-escape, we should still stop gain of function research with our existing, inadequately secure, labs.

If you want to do something about Russian censorship (which directly contributes to the viability of the war), I can recommend Snowflake, which makes being a place that Tor traffic comes from much easier. It makes Tor safer for those who use it, it makes your own traffic marginally more anonymous (because anything could plausibly be Tor traffic instead), and is very simple to run: you literally just keep the tab open.

You may have read about the Modern System, as Brett Deveraux calls it following Biddle, where young officers are given a clear understanding of the “commander’s intent”, something that you can reasonably call a goal, and an order to get the job done. It relies on flexibility, leadership, and competence in your officer corp. The US is very good at it. One of the reasons many other countries don’t like it is that it tends to produce good revolutionary leaders.

Modern authoritarian ‘coup-proofing’ makes it practically impossible to actually implement the modern system effectively (which is part of why most tin-pot dictators produce such poor military performance; though note that not all authoritarian regimes need to coup-proof in this way).

Which is probably part of why at least 8 US-trained officers have overthrown their governments in Africa alone, without US backing. The relevant Department of Defense command does not track data on the point, though it seems a rather important outcome measure from my perspective. But, of course, tracking outcomes rather than inputs is always dangerous: you’re liable to find that your training does nothing.

New Zealand suffered a 58% casualty rate of all volunteer fighters during WWI. That fact comes from Page 30 of the Wikibook on New Zealand History, which is mostly not very good, but some of the others are better. Here’s Sociology! Here’s Signals and Systems, leading into Control Theory. Or maybe you want the Fundamentals of Transportation? All free and remixable.

Let’s give German industry a round of applause! After a very long recovery period, they have managed to displace the United Kingdom, and in doing so become the only state that isn’t a permanent member of the UN Security Council to be in the top five global arms exporters! Other fun details

• The majority of Chinese arms exports are to India’s neighbors. No points for guessing why.

• The US’ biggest export target is Saudi Arabia. You might remember them from other highlights like being the homeland and training location of the majority of the 9/11 attackers, doing absolutely nothing about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and having a truly terrible record on women’s rights.

There are many types of defense.

Foreign Exchange does an excellent daily global news roundup, if you’re a recovering junkie like myself, and they also have the occasional commentary piece. This one is a fascinating work on party politics and institutionalization, particularly worthwhile for understanding it methodologically.

Growth

Neat piece making the case for agricultural productivity, in a very different intellectual framework from your traditional Progress Studies pieces.

Fascinating paper on how coding languages evolve.

America’s decline in immigration has contributed to a falling rate of Nobel prize accumulation.

The CSET Map of Science is really cool!

Good and Evil

Apparently, ethicists aren’t very good at it. They steal more books than other philosophers!

This piece, courtesy of Aella, is quite good. It’s easy for people to think of themselves as good people, and so they don’t check to see if they might be doing harm. It’s not a good fact about humans.

You may remember Columbia’s, shall we say, ethically questionable administration, from previous incidents like their harmful masters programs in extremely poorly paid fields that inadequately disclose their results1. But I had not previously been aware that they were engaged in truly impressive data fraud to juice their US News and World Report rankings. Columbia has risen from 18th place to 2nd, over the course of a mere two decades, substantially via what I believe is traditionally referred to as “creative accounting”.

Interesting example of moral harm: working on developing the atomic bomb without anyone being willing to tell you what you were actually making.

A fascinating Trumpist article on Ukraine blames the US for encouraging Ukraine to seek NATO membership without properly guaranteeing to defend it with use of force. Realists like Mearsheimer will say “when push comes to shove, strategic considerations overwhelm moral considerations”. But this one is interesting for attempting to make a moral case without really grappling with the question, at any point, “do the Ukranians want a non-corrupt democracy?”

Data Time!

Here’s Applied Divinity Studies and Bryan Caplan on why it makes sense to trust someone more if they publish their data, even if almost nobody ever checks.

Manifold is very kindly showing us their analytics dashboard!

Rather than change Excel, we just changed the names of genes to stop getting Excel errors.

MIT is bringing back SAT/ACT, and cites a great deal of research as to why.

These polling results give a useful sense of both what neoliberalism, as something that people self-identify with, actually means in policy terms, and gives a sense of how far American voters are from it. Also, they have given us the crosstabs, and it was not *enough* because they have given us the crosstabs in a PDF but I am still thankful and they should be praised.

So, it turns out that between 20 and 40% of brides were pregnant in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries in England.

About three million Americans have a security clearance, according to a fun little report that also contains information like how long it takes to get clearance.

This is a fascinating post that, among other things, reinterprets the paper you’re likely familiar with on the positive impact on a field of an elite scientist dying. Disclaimer: I think I’m paid by the same people he is? The funding network is certainly incestuous enough.

You can now read some of the useful legal code of Georgia! They’d tried to copyright it and charge money for access.

Fluff

I’ve recced Graham Factor before, and this essay is a good instance of what I get out of it. So much of the anti-cop messaging I see as someone in left-libertarian circles emphasizes individual accounts, particularly of the corruption and apathy of the NYPD and the SFPD. The SFPD did bomb and shoot service weapons to get their way in a contract dispute, and now seems useless to help my friends when they could be helpful. NYPD have different cards for different types of institutionalized corruption, social and personal, and borderline hostility to the lives of cyclists. But there are over 10,000 police departments in America, and if you’re going to read one side’s anecdotes, I think you should at least try to balance that.

Fun post on love languages in dance I got from Logan Strohl on FB. I once asked a friend how she would do the love languages work better, given the terrible methodology of the original. She flipped the question on me, and asked me to first understand what people got out of the original, and then figure out how to better provide that.

Request for comments: When it comes to bad institutions, the standard policy options are starve, fund, reform, and compete.

Starve: The police are bad, so we should give them less funding. Schools don’t teach anything, so we should give them less money. The TSA has literally never stopped an actual terrorist with their searches, so we should give them less money and authority.

Fund: Teachers are great and schools are great (even if almost no learning sticks; even if most of the value of education is signalling; even if it’s routine, years and decades after, for people to have nightmares about being back in school; even if schools typically open in ways that leave teenagers with chronic sleep deprivation and all the symptoms you expect of it), so we should fund them more.

Reform: The new boss has arrived, and she’s here to shake things up. The tax code is bad, so we’re going to rewrite it.

Compete: We’re just not thrilled with how the Air Force is handling space, so while they’re probably still going to do some space, we’re starting up a new Space Force: if it can do well on its own, great. If it can’t, well. Funding will be allocated accordingly. This is also private schools, the Marines, and the vast majority of economic output (particularly in sectors where failure in provision is tolerable).

What does this miss, and why is it an inadequate framework?

It’s hard to remember now, but once upon a time part of the argument for patenting was that the public would be able to understood what the new technology did. Because the patent would have the steps to replicate it. How plausible is that today? Patents are trivial or, as in the case of Theranos, impossible for the holder to achieve, and merely held against anyone else who might want to actually create something.

On the other hand …I’ve never heard the EFF referred to as an “industry lobbyist” before, and I’m not quite sure how to handle it. For context, they were formed in response to a combination of truly impressive levels of governmental incompetence and malice (though recently they’ve shifted, with the political winds, towards greater skepticism of large tech companies: they have always fought for freedom, and I have always respected them). As you might predict, the author is taking a firm opinion against the EFF’s, because the author is defending the existing patent regime, and doing so interestingly. Recommended, if partially because I rarely find anyone defending the existing patent regime.

Coolest paper I’ve found this month goes to a study that looks at the value of hierarchy in video game production, finding that flatter hierarchies produce higher ratings but more vertical hierarchies produce more sales. Now, of course, until it replicates, it should not be trusted. Still! Nifty! Confirms my preconceptions!

It turns out that the AI is at it again. Competitive programming problems and math olympiads.

Interesting piece on why journalists are willing to pay so much to live in Brooklyn.

Geopolitics

I am allowing myself a single entry from the Olympics, which even writing on the 9th I can say are dealing with both controversy (it’s not just Chinese extremely questionable calls! The Russians are, unsurprisingly, doping without meaningful consequence) and a surprising degree of apathy. Admittedly, how do I watch them: pay extra for some service I’ve never used before and will never use again? Not very appealing. Still, this dance on ice was very pretty and fun. OK, I lied, this one is also amazing, as it will remind you that ice dance is ballet dancers, who are already inhuman, dancing while constantly running around with knives on their feet.

Incidentally, the results of the Olympics surprised me, were interesting in several respects, and were utterly overshadowed by what happened afterwards. Overall, I’m inclined to call them a very bad Olympics for the IOC, a poor one for China, and an impressive success for Norway (first by both total medals and golds).

The most, shall we say, statistically surprising result is that China eked 9 golds out of 15 medals. The majority of its medals were golds. The only other country for which this is true is New Zealand, with two gold medals and a silver. It is one thing to argue over individual questionable ref calls. Another to note that, if a Chinese athlete made it to the top three, they were probably going to get the gold medal.

Feb 14: I’ve been pretty successful at ignoring Ukraine! Last month I recommended reading a history of Russia, or the Ukraine. For fun linguistic reasons that used to be regarded as the correct phrasing, and using it marked you as a serious foreign policy person. These days it just marks you as out of touch if you’re still using it, and has for at least the past five years. My grounds were pretty simple: you’d spend less time, be less stressed, and know more afterwards. Westwind argues it more eloquently here. This month, I still recommend ignoring the looming possible threat of war between nuclear-armed states. You know, if possible.

Feb 28: Two weeks later, I think it’s safe to say that I have not been ignoring Ukraine. What is there to say? I am horrified. I’m confused. Understanding The War In Ukraine, by historian Brett Deveraux, is highly recommended.

Brendan O’Regan sounds like A Character. Fight imperialism and colonialism through capitalism! And I’d argue it (mostly) worked for England: contrast her other colonies given freedom around the same time! Anyways, that link has more on him, and why we have duty-free zones in airports.

The China Initiative is worth reading from a policy analysis perspective. The goal was to identify scientists stealing secrets for the CCP. The mechanism was to prosecute Chinese-descended scientists who made technical mistakes on grant application forms. A large outcome was to decrease US-Chinese collaboration in science. It seems likely that the problem was the link between the mechanism and the goal, and in particular the part where prosecutors went after the easiest targets who looked like they met the goal.

Research and Exploration

Research as a Stochastic Decision Process, for a professional researcher, seems like the sort of paper that, if you read it with the right time and right mindset, could double your productivity. By the same author, I expect my audience might enjoy A Fervent Defense of Frequentist Statistics.

As a new manager, I asked for and received advice. One piece that I am following is that the process of doing research is very different from the report or presentation that you will end up with, and it’s important and useful to do both simultaneously. The thing is, nobody will care about your spreadsheet! Bryan Caplan wrote an incredibly provocative work, and almost nobody has even looked at the quantification behind his bold claims. So why do it? “Character is the difference between your incentives and your actions.” And in the long run, if your research is shoddy, you will not be accepted by sound crafters as a fellow.

How to actually “git gud” from someone who threw Dark Souls in the garbage twice is simultaneously an advertisement for the game, a useful explanation of a good attitude towards games in general, and a generally useful life framework for problems where failure is free. Which is not all of them! But I think many people, particularly when stuck, “try harder” too much and experiment without expectation of winning this time too little. For a general-case treatment of the problem, there’s a nice large area of mathematics and computer science devoted to solving the tractable portions.

Continuing my theme of understanding all of life through dance metaphors, I really liked Malcolm Ocean’s metaphor of building trustworthiness as dancing. It’s on my mind because I’m now managing people, and feel wildly underqualified for it.

The Plausibly Deniable Database does what cryptocryptography should: make hidden files that it is hard or impossible to prove exist. Right now, if you poke around a file system, most defenses still reveal that there is hidden information, and clever tricks like fake passwords that get you into different portions are almost non-existent. This is still early stages, but I’m optimistic.

Meta

This is the one-year anniversary of Neon Dawn. I don’t have many subscribers, but I really appreciate the ones I have. I’ve written 12 monthly links, and one piece of original writing, on Aaron Swartz’ suicide at 26. I’m going to aim for posting one original piece of writing a month from now on, done in the style of my other links.

This month’s is a rewrite of an interesting Twitter thread, because I tend to think that Twitter threads are one of the worst methods of presenting information and play to many of our worst biases. It was written before the cutoff of Russia from SWIFT, which is orders of magnitude larger but of essentially a similar character.