(2025-02-27) Zvim Monthly Roundup

Zvi Mowshowitz: Monthly Roundup #27: February 2025. I have been debating how to cover the non-AI aspects of the Trump administration, including the various machinations of DOGE. I felt it necessary to have an associated section this month, but I have attempted to keep such coverage to a minimum, and will continue to do so. There are too many other things going on, and plenty of others are covering the situation.

Table of Contents

• Bad News.
• Antisocial Media.
• Variously Effective Altruism.
• The Forbidden Art of Fundraising.
• There Was Ziz Thing.
• That’s Not Very Nice.
• The Unbearable Weight Of Lacking Talent.
• How to Have More Agency.
• Government Working: Trump Administration Edition.
• Government Working.
• The Boolean Illusion.
• Nobody Wants This.
• We Technically Didn’t Start the Fire.
• Good News, Everyone.
• A Well Deserved Break.
• Opportunity Knocks.
• For Your Entertainment.
• I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets.
• Sports Go Sports.
• Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game.
• The Lighter Side.

Bad News

Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people, excellent advice from Kaj Sotara. This matches my experience as well, if your instincts say there’s something off, chances are very high that you are right.

The art of the French dinner party: It seems you must have an opinion on everything, no matter the topic, and argue for it. Only a boring guest would have no opinion. Heaven forbid you are curious

The full bad news is that the American rate of going to dinner parties has fallen dramatically, on the order of 90%, as Sulla points out you can just invite your friends to dinner and I can verify they often say yes.

It seems 75% of restaurant traffic is now takeout and delivery?

Antisocial Media

You love to see it? Apple Blasts EU Laws After First Porn App Comes to iPhones, via state-mandated third-party software marketplace AltStore PAL, falsely claiming that Apple meaningfully approved it, which they very obviously didn’t. I do not believe Apple should be banning porn, but the EU has zero business mandating that they allow porn. Apple is offering a curated ecosystem for a reason, it’s their call.

TikTok as intermittent reinforcement, a slot machine for children. This model seems right to me, and explains why something can be so addictive despite the vast majority of content shown being utter junk in the eyes of the user it is shown to

In the future people might like you more!

Aella: i’ve heard ppl who lost a lot of weight talk about some angry cynicism when people start treating them better, even ppl they’ve known for a long time. I’m having a bit of that now that twitter seems to like me. i’ve been consistently myself this entire time, what’s happening.

*literally last weekend i had multiple ppl come up to me at a party and go ‘oh are you aella? i see you on twitter cause everyone hates you’.&

if the thing that causes ppl to like me is that i just publicly was patient and knowledgeable with a doofus then this feels kind of shallow and fickle and bad incentives for me. Like what, i win the tribal allegiance game by doing very easy, low-brow things? oh no

it just seems exceedingly clear that public opinion is based on kinda trivial, salient, emotional stuff and not actual work. I’ve been putting out consistent good-faith attempts to do science and been patient with people who were mean to me for YEARS but nobody cared until now

Variously Effective Altruism

Scott Alexander tries to make the argument that if you care about the grooming gangs in England, then you care about people you don’t know who are far away, and so ‘gotcha’ and now you have to either admit your preferences make no sense or else be an effective altruist who goes around helping people you don’t know who are far away.

I believe that this was a highly counterproductive argument.

this seems like an excellent way to make those people hate Effective Altruism.

I (uncharitably, but I think accurately) interpret Marc Andreessen as saying either or both of:
You shouldn’t save a child drowning in a river, because that means you don’t care enough about yourself and your family (or others closer to you).
America should spend no dollars on even existing super efficient lifesaving foreign aid like PEPFAR, even though the price is absurdly low and it pays for itself many times over in goodwill alone

The Forbidden Art of Fundraising

If you run a charity and you want to raise money, but I repeat myself, you need to convince people their contribution is making a tangible marginal difference. This is most extreme in Effective Altruist circles, where the thought is fully explicit, but it’s also true everywhere else. The goal must be at risk, the project must be in danger, and the best goal at risk of all, by far, is for you to be on the verge of shutting down.

Ben Landau-Taylor: Lightcone’s months-long fundraiser meeting its $2m goal in the last 6 hours is the clearest illustration I’ve seen yet of the “by default, people give money to nonprofits if and only if the alternative is that the nonprofit will literally die” thesis.

Patrick McKenzie: There are different parts of the curve. A lot of donations are to non-profits whose brand doth exceed their deployment ability, and who will basically drown in money given reasonable execution on the usual playbook. In other parts of curve: unceasing precarity.

There Was Ziz Thing

If you’re not wondering what was up with that shootout with the border patrol in Vermont or a landlord in Vallejo, as reported in places like this, skip this section.

If you didn’t do that, well, here are some links with information.

That’s Not Very Nice

Aella offers us a ‘Zizian Murdercult summary, for those out of the loop.’ It has a timeline with some basic facts

The Unbearable Weight Of Lacking Talent

Money without talent and drive ends up not going much.

Misha: I’ve asked this before but what are all the bitcoin millionaires doing with their gainz? It seems like distributing lottery payouts to a bunch of weird nerds should result in more wacky ambitious megaprojects and stuff but afaict it hasn’t

How to Have More Agency

Nick Cammarata: I hate how well asking myself ‘If I had 10x the agency I have what would I do’ works.

If you’re given a pile of money, and you are most people, you might live comfortably and enjoy nice things and raise a family. But if you lack talent and ambition, then no one will remember your name and you won’t change things. You will not do much of anything with the opportunity. Which has opportunity cost, but is also pretty much fine, it’s just a missed opportunity to do better?

Amjad Masad: What’s agency in this context? Is it like discipline and ambition?

Nick Cammarata: it was mostly creativity for me. Like instead of “I have a fear of X” being treated as a constant it’s how do you plan to work on that, what have you tried, and a strong belief it’s fixable. It involves discipline and ambition too, but in my case that wasn’t the bottleneck.

If you want to do better, and you should, you will need to seek more agency.

he’d just assume I have 10x the agency I do, and I’m like okay well he’s wrong but if he were right what would I do, and every time I tried that my agency went up.

File this one under More Dakka. The trick works, because: Figuring out what the high agency person would do requires a lot less agency than being that person or actually doing it.

Government Working: Donald Trump Administration Edition

There is an endless stream of what sure look like ‘Control + F’ mistakes, where they fire people or cancel projects for containing a particular word or phrase

I probably shouldn’t have written this section at all, but here we are.

They talk about the need for more power and say it’s time to build then shut down solar ppower and wind power projects on government land.

Remember that time JD Vance complained about Canada and the flow of drugs into this country and said he was ‘sick of being taken advantage of’? No, I do not think this and related tactics are, as Tyler Cowen put it, a strategy to shift our culture to be better by being more assertive and sending the right message, and I don’t think it is in the slightest way defensible in either case. Anyone who did try to defend them was being bad, and they should feel bad.

Again, as the Daily Show used to put it, do not rely on us as your only source of news.

There’s at least some good news:
Election Wizard: NEW: President Trump has issued an executive order that eliminates government requirements for low-pressure showerheads and low-flow toilets.

Government Working

A fun ongoing New York City story is that yellow taxis have long gotten insurance from a boutique insurance company with very low rates. The problem is that the low rates aren’t enough to pay the insurance claims, so the insurer is insolvent. When NYC said actually you need to buy insurance from a company that is solvent, drivers panicked, and the city said fine, you can all keep buying ‘insurance’ below cost, from the company that can’t pay claims. Which presumably means the taxpayer is going to end up on the hook for the difference.

I very much do not like where any of this is going.

Of course, these trade barriers don’t actually make any more or less sense than trade barriers between the USA and Canada, but here it’s that much harder be confused about it.

The Boolean Illusion

There is a general tendency, closely related to people’s failure to understand Levels of Friction, to assume that all things must be either Allowed or Not Allowed. The instinct tells us that not only All Slopes are Slippery and that people eventually can Solve For the Equilibrium, which are approximately true, but that you will always very quickly end up at the bottom of them, which is usually false.

The broader point is more important, though, which is that an exception weakens a rule but in no way must break it. It can lead to that, but often it doesn’t, without any ‘good reason’ why.

Nobody Wants This

there’s no reason that a certain amount of ignoring court orders has to mean that all court orders are meaningless, or various other ‘end of democracy’ scenarios. It can escalate very quickly, and may yet do so. Or it might not.

There’s lots of unprincipled situations like this where such behavior does not escalate. Civilization would not survive if every time someone successfully violated a norm or got away with something, the norm or law involved de facto went away.

The reasons people give you for things are often fake, in the sense of not being a True Objection

the people giving false reasons, whether they are intelligent or not, often do not even realize the reasons are false. They are not “lying.”

A second crucial thing: “False” does not mean untrue. It could even be a valid logical reason for the thing. But it is not the instinctive reason you believe in or want the thing.

*So here is what false reason-giving looks like:

I cannot do A, because B.
Oh, good news, B is not true! So you should be able to do A, right?
Well… but also C and D. And also B is true because E and [blah blah blah].*

false reason-giving can be very subtle.
In the sophisticated version, the words are logical!

but the emotions might not match, or seem disproportionate. If you are sensitive, you will notice something is off, or their words are not grounded.

It took me a long time, both with clever and unintelligent versions of this, to realize this person simply does not want to do A, period.

This is extremely common. I would perhaps even claim 90% of modern communication is this type of nonsense.

Rationalists have noticed this tendency too, but they usually come to the wrong conclusion: “If there is no clear reason not to do A, then as a rational person, I should be fine with A.”
No! If you do not want to do A, that is important to account for, even if you do not know the reason.

Emmett Shear: This is a good thread on noticing what is happening when people’s reasons do not seem internally consistent, and how to handle the situation... they say whatever is strategically optimized to achieve the outcomes they want.

And of course they would! This is a reasonable strategy in a world where boundaries are disrespected and people are alienated from their desires!

Speaking of rationalists, a key thing about false reason-giving is that intelligent people are not immune.

Likely entire civilizations have been built on the false reasons of intelligent people.

Scott Alexander uses way too many words to support his obviously correct title that ‘Money Saved By Canceling Programs Does Not Immediately Flow To The Best Possible Alternative.’

The government argues that seizing $50,000 from a small business doesn’t violate property rights because property isn’t money ‘for constitutional purposes’? What the hell?

Something can be overwhelmingly popular in a Democracy, be very simple to implement, be endorsed by 100% of experts, and yet continue not to happen anyway.

Polling Canada: “Canada should quickly work to eliminate interprovincial trade barriers

By alienated from desires I mean:

People especially do not respect the boundaries/desires of children—who then become uncertain of their own boundaries/desires, and then grow up having to justify them not only to others but also to themselves.

The dominant cosmology of our whole modern world IS Reasons and Logic, undergirded by the church Systems and Bureaucracy. So of COURSE people feel they need to provide Reasons and Logic when challenged.

I REALLY appreciate it when people play it straight and put on the table how they actually feel!

We Technically Didn’t Start the Fire

There were recently some rather epic fires in Los Angeles. (California Wildfire)

One fun aspect of these fires is that State Farm specifically declined to renew fire insurance coverage in exactly the most impacted areas, because the insurance company thought there was too much fire risk and they weren’t allowed to raise prices.

That is some killer risk management, by a mutual insurance company that doesn’t have shareholders. For which of course various people are mad at State Farm rather than suddenly being very curious about the other areas where State Farm wasn’t interested in renewing coverage.

Jakeup: translation: the state of California got 6 month’s advance warning from the best risk-assessment professionals that the risk of fire in this specific area is too high and proceeded to do nothing at all with this information

Kelsey Piper: Okay so the Eaton fire and Palisades fires were in areas where State Farm declined to review fire coverage. …what are the other areas in California where State Farm declined to renew fire coverage?

Patrick McKenzie: You’ll notice that in society we have many competing classes of prophets. The ones who actually have to be right about the future are despised, while the ones who are never scored on that continue being invited to the nicest parties.
Power likes science to precisely the extent that science supports power. When it doesn’t, science is replaced with Science (TM).

Here’s why State Farm had to stop writing policies, because it turns out ‘because prices were capped and the expected value of the policies was negative’ isn’t quite a full explanation.

Or rather, that was the short version, here’s the long one.

State Farm is a mutual insurer which means it’s owned by its policyholders.

Mutuals do not prioritize profit. They make much lower returns than public insurers.

What do mutuals care about?
Maximizing customer count.
Keeping their agents happy.

So why would they do it?

Because it would be financially reckless to keep growing given the CA regulatory problems.

CA is a very difficult place for insurers. It limits price increases to <7%/year and makes it difficult to drop customers who require more than that.

John Arnold: CA politicians wanted to keep the cost of homeownership from rising so they limited property insurance rate increases

People will try to rebuild their homes.

I say try, not because they won’t have the money, or because we don’t know how to do that. I say try because there will be a shortage of Officially Approved Labor to rebuild with especially with crackdowns on immigration, and because building houses is not something taken kindly to in Los Angeles.

Miles Jennings: In my 20’s, I ridiculed friends for liking Atlas Shrugged – any political philosophy can be justified if you use ridiculous characterizations of government actors with absurd approaches to problem solving.
In my 40’s, I’m going to spend a lot of time apologizing.

I also say try because:
Gavin Newsom (Governor of California): NEW: Just issued an Executive Order that will allow victims of the SoCal fires to not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape and quickly rebuild their homes.
We are also extending key price gouging protections to help make rebuilding more affordable.

Oh, price gouging protections. So much for supply

in high inflation environments these limits quickly become unbearable.

This is of course a great opportunity to upzone that area and build more. Not that they have any intention of taking advantage of that.

And because, if your home is no longer ‘conforming to applicable zoning’ you will need to fix that and then go through the entire permit process over again

If you’d rather sell your home for what the market will bear right now?

Oh, we cannot have that.

Governor Newsom: Today, I signed an executive order prohibiting greedy land developers from ripping off LA wildfire victims with unsolicited, undervalued offers to buy their destroyed property.

Emmett Shear: Ayn Rand is, tragically, wrong about her heroes but totally on point about her villains.

the Insurance Commissioner stopped approving any rate increases.

Why weren’t normal rate increases approved? 2022 was an election year and the Insurance Commissioner is elected in CA.

It’s easier to get re-elected campaigning on no price increases! Who would have imagined there would be future consequences?

Noah Smith suggests less deciding which particular carbon emissions or other scapegoats to try and blame this on and more preparing for future fires, pointing out some of the lowest hanging of fruit on that

Well hang on, those laws and regulations must not actually be that important, right? And they slow everything down? So can get rid of them and replace them with rules that don’t slow things down?

Many people are asking these questions, love to see it.

Kelsey Piper: Wait a second, could he suspend all CEQA and permit requirements by executive order at any time (after declaring emergency)? I’m not totally sure the governor should have that power but if he does – set the state free, Governor!

And we’ve saved the stupidest executive order for last.

Property owners are making fewer properties available for rent because of a state law barring new listings from charging more than $10,000 a month during the state of emergency, real estate agents and brokers say.
The price cap is below what L.A.’s pre-wildfire market would bear in many expensive neighborhoods

Eytan Wallace: BREAKING: California Insurance Commissioner @RicardoLara4CA has issued a mandatory one-year moratorium that will prohibit insurance companies from enacting non-renewals and cancellations of coverage

And yes, if you have a state ‘insurer of last resort’ that moves in and charges artificially low rates in exactly the places private insurance won’t touch, I hope that you know what will happen after that, rather than this being me having some news. As in this 2024 post calling this a ‘ticking time bomb.’ Boom

If we are playing the blame game, one thing to blame is that under CEQA, the California Bonus Double NEPA, wildfire mitigation projects must undergo years-long environmental reviews, often involving litigation.

Good News, Everyone

Vitalik Buterin is right. You can just go back to 2013-era morality where free speech, starting companies and making good products, democracy and cosmopolitan humanitarian values are good, and monopolies, vendor lock-in, greed and oppressing people are bad

The more laborious way we entertain people we don’t know as well is not for their sake

Paul Graham: When you have good friends over for dinner, you can just eat what and where you normally do.

Maybe the reason you have to be formal when entertaining strangers is that you know they assume any such dinner is much more formal than everyday life. So if you just gave them everyday life, they’d assume in actual everyday life you ate dinner out of a trough.

David Holz: We tend to regret the things we don’t do much more than the things we actually end up doing – so you should always lean towards doing slightly more “regrettable things

The worst part about this is it leads to far too few gatherings. If you were to have friends over and act otherwise almost totally normally, that would be a clear win. But you think ‘if I did that I’d have to do all this work and clean up and so on.’ So you don’t invite them, and everyone loses.

The classic form of this mistake is to avoid taking a risk, but to actually then feel worse than if you’d taken the risk and failed. The fully classic version, of course, is asking someone out or saying yes to someone else, or applying for a job, where even if you get rejected it’s better than always wondering. And you never know.

You can have a fast food burger meal for the low, low cost of 20 minutes of your life, says Bryan Johnson. The obvious clarification question is ‘relative to what other choice?’

If people thought like this, I bet they’d eat a lot more fast food burgers, not less. The reason that’s a mistake isn’t that people care that much about the 20 minutes. It’s that they also spend what time they still have in worse shape and feeling worse.

A Well Deserved Break

*Bayesian Asian: I was confused how to ‘rest’ in a way that seems distinct from vegetating (TV, games, scrolling) or working (art, code).

I grilled my friends about how they rest, and came up with a tentative list of different types of exhaustion, which need separate solutions.*

one Classically Restful Activity that usually feels anti-restful for me is going on a walk. it works when my issue is 4, but usually 4 is far behind 1 and 5, which walking exacerbates

(Zvi:) Walking in particular works well for me in many cases. It can help with #4, but I actually really like it for #2 or #5 or #7 too, you pick some music (or a podcast if you have a relaxing one available in context) and you go.

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars and Supersonic Jets

Paul Graham: What most people don’t realize about Boom is that if they ship an airliner at all, every airline that flies internationally will have to buy it or be converted against their will into a discount airline, flying tourists subsonically.

Ticket prices will be about the same as current business class prices on international flights. How can this be? Because the flights are so much shorter that you don’t need lay-flat beds. You can use the seat pitch of domestic first class.

And here’s a report on Waymo in Phoenix, with many starting to use it as their go-to taxi service, with the biggest barrier that Waymos obey the law and thus are modestly slower than Ubers

And the most killer app of all is perhaps that society will let children take a Waymo alone?

Ryan Johnson: Parents now comfortable sending their kids to school and elsewhere. This is a major vibe shift.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

Ondrej Strasky concludes from Artifact’s failure that if you can’t teach the game in five minutes, you’re doomed

I think there’s certainly a big weight on ‘you’re having fun within five minutes’ but clearly it’s not strictly necessary, given Magic: The Gathering, and also many single player games. Anyone remember Final Fantasy X? Great game once you get into it but you literally don’t make a decision for the first 40 minutes. Many such cases. But I suppose during those 40 minutes you aren’t overwhelmed or confused either. Maybe that’s the actual lesson, that you can’t have people confronting the complexity for more than five minutes in a way they notice?

Elon Musk has now formally confessed to cheating in Path of Exile 2. And then he bragged about the character he was cheating with anyway. Pathetic

It seems only 40% of players of Civilization VI ever finished even one game, hence the emphasis in Civilization VII on individual ages. They are talking as if it involves catch-up mechanics, which I’m mostly not a fan of in these contexts

Steam emphasizes its ban on in-game ads, including optional ads that provide rewards. You can still have in-universe ads and such. Good for Valve

I also agree that the threshold win conditions tend to take the fun out of the endgame. You’re building a civilization, and then you steadily pivot into sacrificing everything in pursuit of some specific goal, everything else doesn’t matter. Or you’re going about your business and suddenly ‘oh Babylon got X culture points, game’s over, you lose.’