(2024-11-18) Zvim Monthly Roundup24 November2024

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #24: November 2024. A paper via MR says that across seven studies ‘attractiveness discrimination’ goes undetected because people lack the ability to do so, not because they think it is fine, and warn that interventions to increase salience of the issue would likely decrease detection of gender and race discrimination.

Study claims that white flight from Asian immigration is a thing in California public schools among the wealthy. MR commentator raises doubts on validity, OLS gives a different result, the measures aren’t robust or justified, also points out that since one does not simply build housing a lot of this is pure replacement effects.

Morality

Moral Thin-Slicing via MR, here’s the abstract: Given limits on time and attention, people increasingly make moral evaluations in a few seconds or less, yet it is unknown whether such snap judgments are accurate or not

Using controlled stimuli, we find that people are capable of ‘moral thin-slicing’: they reliably identify moral transgressions from visual scenes presented in the blink of an eye (< 100 ms).

I interpret this result as strong evidence that when people talk about ‘morality’ they mostly mean something quite superficial, the superficial surface appearance of morality

Thus, I say all the claims about ‘moral judgments are complex’ here are bullshit. Yes, if you wanted your moral judgments to be consistent, to provide good incentives, to measure what the actual best decision was for the good of all, or any neat stuff like that, moral decisions are often complex and can be infinitely complex. If you want to give an AI system a moral code that does what we want, that’s incredibly complex. If you study moral philosophy, that never ends. All that would require being willing to look at people’s actual moral judgments, in many cases, and quite correctly say you are all wrong.

Only Connect

What conclusions make sense to draw from this graph of suicide rates, originally from Bowling Alone, combined with people now experiencing peak happiness after age 60, versus people previously peaking much younger?

Yes, the numbers are pretty scary.

One option, which is how Ted Gioia reads this, is it is generational, a new malaise impacting the young. That can at most explain the half that’s getting worse

The timing also really does not line up with ‘blame social media.’ Social media might make it harder to make connections, or it might make it easier, but the problem and the entire above graph predate smartphones and all social media

Here are Ted’s core suggestions:

Here are my eight pillars of connection—and none of them require Wi-Fi access.

If you want a happy life, you nurture them. If you let them all topple, you’re at grave risk.

there’s a lot more to life than connection, and you can use your phone to connect if you use it wisely. It’s weird to say ‘do the things a computer can’t provide’ as if the computer not providing them makes them better. Seriously, how did we ever communicate and coordinate or find out things before? I vaguely remember and it was super annoying.

In terms of what connections are most important, that’s going to vary from person to person. Think about what would actually work best for you, and note that #2 seems to tower above the rest, especially if you include the missing element of having children.

It’s Not Me, It’s Your Fetish

*Lilly Allen (yes that one, TIL): Haven’t posted in a while but you can still check out the archive [shows some feet pics]

ColdEdge: Imagine being one of the biggest pop stars/musicians in Europe and then being reduced to this.

Lily Allen: imagine being and artist and having nearly 8 million monthly listeners on spotify but earning more money from having 1000 people subscribe to pictures of your feet. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.*

Lily Allen charges $10 a month on OnlyFans, of which she keeps $8 after the 20% site cut, or $8k/month. So this is weird, because every calculator says that she should expect in the range of $34k/month in streaming income – but I do not think she would be lying about this.

It Takes a Village You Don’t Have

Cartoons Hate Her reports that the problem with ‘it takes a village’ and having community is that we don’t actually want all the obligations or to interact with the people who happen to be physically near us. We don’t want it enough to be the kind of reliable and generous that makes this happen. Sounds right.

Stephanie Murray reports that the village thing can still be done, and in particular has pulled off a ‘baby swapping’ system that periodically pools child care so parents can have time for themselves

The catch is that you have to give up your say in what happens during that time, in terms of your kids getting exposed to high fructose corn syrup, or screen time

The other catch is that you need a walkable neighborhood, which most people don’t have.

Owen Cyclops similarly notes that your village can only help if they know what you need from them and what roles you should have, and we’ve made everything contingent and special and negotiable, which makes that much harder. Yes, everyone always wanted the ‘perfect village’ but you used to take what you can get, and now you don’t. That seems closer to the issue, that we now have the optionality to reject or accept every individual interaction and relation each time

The Joy of Cooking

*grilling is awesome and the number one thing I miss living in NYC.

VB Knives: The “grill” did not exist in mainstream American culture until the later 20th century*

chart shows BBQ rising over time, with a big jump in 1900-20 and the big jump being steadily over 1965-2000 or so.

Barbeque has three big advantages. The first is that it turns the meal into an event

second is that, let’s face it, barbeque makes things better.

The third is that it got male coded, allowing men to embrace doing it who would otherwise realize and hate that they are cooking, but actually cooking is great.

Decision Theory

Scott Alexander asks why the early Christian strategy of essentially Cooperate-Bot won out over the classic mystery cult strategy of Tit-for-Tat

You can also see his full review of The Rise of Christianity more generally. That review makes it clear that Christianity had a lot of important unique advantages and opportunities. The existing network of millions of Jews was an advantage its competition did not have, giving them extensive traditions and many structures of beliefs that many people badly needed but that aren’t natural fits for mystery religions.

Scott then goes on to ask, what is the right strategy today, especially for groups like rationalists or effective altruists, or individuals?

You can be over-the-top generous and have it work, if and only if this inspires growth of that pattern, but this requires sustained exponential growth. Eventually, most people are now either a Christian, a freeloader or both, and most of you need to get back to work.

Liberal democracy has a lot of the same dynamics.

FTC on the Loose

The FTC is one step closer to instituting a ‘click-to-cancel’ rule. Most everyone agrees this rule would be great if implemented. The problem is that a lot of people are counting their chickens. The FTC’s authority to do this is not so clear

FTC also finalizes its rules banning fake online reviews and testimonials

The problem is, similar to the click-to-cancel rule, does this accomplish that? How will it get enforced? Can it be enforced, without putting undo frictions on the ability of people to post reviews? Will there be jurisdictional issues?

Then there are the other FTC actions, especially those attacking individual companies, which tend to be… let’s say less good.

Lina Khan (Chair of FTC): 1. Firms that lure workers with false earnings claims are breaking the law. @FTC has taken action against @Lyft for deceiving drivers about how much they could expect to earn on its platform.

Lyft told potential drivers they could make up to $33/hour in Atlanta and up to $31/hour in Miami. In reality, these figures reflected earnings of the top one fifth of drivers.

Lyft failed to disclose that these amounts did not represent the income an average driver could expect to earn

This is completely insane. That’s what “up to” means. (I agree, this is nuts.)

Lina Khan: Lyft also enticed drivers by promoting “earnings guarantees,” which supposedly guaranteed that drivers would be paid a certain amount if they completed a specific number of rides in a certain time—like an offer of $975 for completing 45 rides in a weekend.

In reality Lyft would only pay drivers the difference between what they actually earned and Lyft’s advertised guaranteed amount

Seriously, what the actual fuck? Yes, that is what an earnings guarantee is. It means you get at least $975 if you compete 45 rides

FTC also scores this win: Right to repair may soon enable the fixing of McDonalds ice cream machines. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, this still has various steps to go before it actually happens

The real value is going to be in things like farm equipment, medical equipment, cars and household appliances and consumer electronics especially iPhones.

Good News, Everyone

Scott Alexander reports from the Progress Studies conference. Everywhere but AI, I quibble on details but it’s all great stuff. On AI, ‘supports acceleration out of a general obligation to progress but feels weird and bad about it’ seems like a good description, on many levels. It’s not a good reason.

Noah Smith reports he used to be an economist who endorsed a bunch of highly economically destructive propositions in the name of progressivism in the 2010s when everyone else on the left was doing it, and now years later the vibes have shifted so he can notice that some of them are deeply economically destructive? Yet he still frames this as the issues being ‘stuck,’ as if more progressive always equals good, and that therefore he ‘feels adrift.’

*Shaggy: The optimal amount of people not liking you is not zero. I only realized this for the first time just now and it fixed everything.

This is importantly true in non-trivial ways, you really do want to be fine with some people not liking you and not expend too much effort to prevent this. But also remember to reverse any advice you hear, some people need the opposite message.*

Antisocial Media

In Defense of ‘Surveillance Capitalism,’ arguing that big tech tracking your actions online is good, actually. I agree on targeted advertisements, and in general I do not think the surveillance is the problem in any of this

In a fun post via ACX that I’d read first if you’re curious, Naomi Kanakia spins the hypothetical that if you use all the ‘is social media bad?’ tests and instead apply them to reading books, you would get a book called The Literary Delusion, that argues that books are actually quite bad for you, far worse than social media, with high-brow books being worst of all. It’s a fun exercise, but ultimately I think it’s clearly wrong

Australia prepares to set social media minimum age to 16, without specifying an enforcement mechanism, presumably due to there being no non-awful enforcement mechanisms

It seems fine to have ‘illegal but not strictly enforced’ as a category?

Technology Advances

*but not in Europe.

Michael Arouet: One really needs magnifying glasses to find European tech sector in this chart*

Did you know that if someone goes viral on the internet, they will then post a lot more content? I did, now I also have a job market paper

Analysis of Reddit finds that those who are toxic in political contexts are also toxic in non-political contexts, r=0.47

Slightly less trivially, those who comment on political contexts at all are more toxic in general, and those who comment in both left-wing and right-wing contexts are more toxic still.

When asked to estimate caloric intake, study participants who were allowed to form their own opinions before seeing others’ estimates did worse, because they put too much weight on their own opinions

Here is Reddit where production goes up 373% for a month

This seems transparently right in the case in question, where the average participant has no reason to think their estimate is any more accurate than anyone else’s

Outside of a laboratory, it is rare that you can be this confident that you can trust other opinions as much as your own, so people have learned not to do that.

Another paper that is very closely related reports that in most studies where there is social information available, people undervalue that information. One should be wary before incorporating such social information, and read the paper. There we find that they assume the conclusion, that if you rely on others opinions less than your own then that is considered underusing social information.

Tyler Cowen links to this same paper as ‘words to live by,’ highlighting a different segment entirely

Cognition

as a generalized principle, the suggested rule of full indifference between information sources is utterly insane. Even in these idolized cases, there are plausible points of failure for the information of others that don’t apply to your own

The authors cite examples of ‘failure to use social information’ that include vaccine hesitancy and climate change skepticism, which clearly shows another side of social information, where the authors think it is obvious which social information to trust and which way it should point, and I am confident that those that reach the other conclusions disagree on such points

Communication

Giving poor people money improved their cognition, but the paper found a 3-4 times smaller size impact than previous papers predicted, with the effect fading over time

The motivation is helping people escape the poverty trap, which seems better measured by whether they manage to remain out of poverty?

Honesty

Discourse

Get Involved

What is the alternative? If we think going to college should be subsidized more, we should do that directly.

Unfortunately, it is clear from Table 3 that this effect was declining over time.

Oh, and they seem (according to Claude) to use a 0% discount rate to evaluate whether the loans pay for themselves. That’s a pretty big no-no when evaluating a loan program! Almost any investment looks great at 0% discount rates.

Nor does it identify which students benefit (it is plausible that loans to STEM students pay for themselves and others don’t, etc)

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

What about DOGE? Tyler Cowen thinks this effort could do some good, yet somehow leads with imploring us to not regulate AI, then discusses crypto. Essentially it seems like he is despairing of fixing what is already broken, and warning DOGE to pick winnable battles with big payoffs? But in the long term there is no alternative to fixing the core issues, short of revolution and starting over.

The emphasis Cowen places on YIMBY and on deregulating medical trials seems good, but this seems like ‘find the ways to get high marginal value without having to fight too hard or fix the underlying issues.’ Which is a fine goal if you can’t win those fights, but when will we get a better opportunity?

Alas, it does not seem like ‘make it easier to develop new drugs’ is on the agenda. If anything quite the opposite, with the appointment of RFK Jr for HHS

Variously Effective Altruism

And here’s a terrifying thought of how this might do even worse damage if allowed, where RFK bans or messes up a bunch of fundamental things, but Ozempic’s effects mean we get healthier short term anyway, and we draw exactly the wrong conclusions

I agree, many games are addictive because they offer a sense of progression where so few other things in life do that in a reasonable or satisfying way. If you want people to dig anything, offer a sense of progression

The program relied upon screening out those with various problems, in ways that would be expensive and politically very difficult to implement in practice.

if you want to help poor people, GiveDirectly is a high bar and tough to beat.

*Most people who want them all fired would be totally fine paying the extra salaries indefinitely. What they want is one of two things:

For the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ to stop doing large portions of their work, which they see as actively massively impeding and messing with everyone else. For the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ to to their jobs properly*

Quickly On the Student Loan Claim

If this was a systemic play, predatory behaviors would have to be dealt with. And people would respond to the new incentives. We cannot look at this as a one-shot problem. If you implemented this at scale everything would change.

What happened when recently homeless Canadian citizens, without drug abuse, alcohol abuse or mental health issues, were given $7,500 with no strings attached? The researchers predicted better executive function and fluid intelligence and affect and satisfaction with life, none of which proved statistically significant and enough of which went the other way that it looks like noise (UBI)

On the concept that student loans pay for themselves, this is exactly the kind of ‘there is nothing one could possibly do to improve this, this is clearly necessary and great’ thinking that makes people want to burn it all to the ground.

If you want to cut the department of education to save $ (4% of spending), note that the vast majority of federal education spending is student loans, which are estimated to recover costs via higher tax revenue within 11 years after disbursement.

*Here’s another way some Very Serious People think about DOGE, government spending and federal bureaucrats:

Jason Abaluck: The total payroll of the federal government is about $110 billion a year. Federal government spending was $6.1 trillion. You cannot meaningfully shrink the federal government by firing “unelected bureaucrats*

Open Philanthropy strikes again, is looking to hire someone to oversee at least $30 million in spending on accelerating economic growth in developing countries

My quick takes here:

Government Working

They did however get one very strong result that makes perfect sense, which was fewer days homeless

It’s odd not to study the marginal students who go to college because of the bigger loans – do they actually benefit or do they struggle and drop out a lot?

Four states reject ranked choice voting. It was close, three states had over 40% support and two had 45%.

Engineer in state of nature never plays Factorio on computer, because they’re too busy playing Factorio in real life.

For Your Entertainment

I enjoyed this piece by Suzy Weiss on the excellent and therefore poorly named Nobody Wants This, as a friendly reminder of how people focus on different things and live in such different media worlds on top of in different cultures. There’s so little overlap in what Suzy notices, what the people she is referencing as complaining noticed, and what I noticed.

Sports Go Sports

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

Excellent news: Trump’s transition team plans federal rules enabling self-driving cars. So many people are processing this as ‘giveaway to Elon Musk’ or ‘dystopian nightmare’ rather than an enabling of the future. It is highly plausible that Elon Musk was the driving force behind this in order to benefit Tesla, but so what? What matters is the self-driving cars and especially self-driving taxis, and not burdening them with irrelevant requirements. If people want such cars to have steering wheels and gas petals and manual overrides, the market will give those things to them. If not, not.

Matt Bell reports after 130 hours in Waymos. It’s a huge upgrade, as time in the car becomes time spent in a mobile mini-office. It’s not zero commute time, but it’s effectively far less expensive lost time, and everything is super predictable, and it’s much safer.

Matt Bell: People are gradually figuring out that Waymos are incredibly docile and careful, and are taking advantage of it. I once had someone sit on my Waymo for a few minutes to prevent it from moving. Waymos are programmed to be very cautious and careful drivers. They are completely unable to deal with someone sitting on the car’s hood.

Our norms and equilibria absolutely rely on a foundation of human unpredictability, and the low possibility of a completely unhinged response or dramatically oversized reaction, and our inability to reliably predict what causes that. You don’t know. Indeed, it is the meta-level unpredictability, the ‘I don’t know what might happen or how likely it is but I sense I’m not supposed to Go There’ that does so much of the work.

A lot of this is that many interactions are effectively chicken, or stochastic chicken, so if people think you won’t back down or don’t want to risk it, and aren’t trying to be game theory optimal or uphold social norms or reputations, the local maxima is to not risk conflict.

Get to Work

Karpathy is experimenting with this: Wake up and go directly to deep work, without checking messages, email or news.

While I Cannot Condone This

John Wentworth notes that conversation guides portray conversations as a game (one might say a net token prediction task?!), where 2+ people take turns free-associating off whatever was recently said

His objection is that free association isn’t that interesting beyond being an icebreaker, although he sees why others do like it.

The skill in such a game is largely in understanding the free association space, knowing how people likely react and thinking enough steps ahead to choose moves that steer the person where you want to go, either into topics you find interesting, information you want from them, or getting them to a particular position, and so on. If you’re playing without goals, of course it’s boring…

Good Sarah Constantin post on Thinking in 2D, with the dimensions in question being small/large and radical/moderate.

In the culture and politics section, she notes the conflict between ‘radicals widen the overton window’ and ‘radicals turn people against you.’ My model is that almost all activists do both

The difference is the good activism in good spots provide a good tradeoff, and the bad activism in bad spots provides a bad one. The catch is you usually don’t have much sway over which kind you get.

Sarah Constantin: Working at a more “meta” spot in the ecosystem is a good move if you, personally, are good at meta, not because it’s “greater” generically in the same way that better success/results/performance is “greater”.

Also, there’s such a thing as ecosystems that have too much “meta” work going on relative to the object level, but that shouldn’t be oversimplified down to “meta isn’t real work”. I’ve seen examples where you absolutely can’t make progress in a field beyond a very primitive level without a meta institution to provide funding, set context, seed culture, encourage entrants, etc.

When you are thinking at the meta or portfolio level you are “taking as object” what, at the object level, is someone’s whole full-time job and personal mission, and treating it like a card in your hand

An argument in favor of studying technical thinking. I tentatively agree

A cool way to measure dishonesty: How many people claim to have completed an impossible five minute task.