This is the non-Covid part of what would previously have been the weekly Covid post. About half of the content written for the post this week is being withheld for topic-level future posts, both with longer time horizons (e.g. policy roundups don’t need to be weekly and should benefit from more integration over time) and elevating worthy sub-topics to their own posts, which this week seems likely to include the colonoscopy study.
We will retain the broad categories of Bad and Good news for various short notes.
Bad News
Sysco Teamsters are on strike in three cities, and there are a lot of people cheering the strikers on mood affectation grounds because Sysco is buying up rivals, slashing staff and service and treating everyone like garbage. Is it a monopoly worth investigating? It sure sounds like it has monopoly power and is actively seeking to assemble more of it. If you keep hiking prices (no you cannot simply say ‘inflation!’) and cutting service and everyone hates you and they live in fear of you, you might be a monopoly. If it was my job to investigate such things, I would investigate.
Signal to stop letting one send SMS messages on Android phones.
Paper (via MR) claims that there is a causal effect on call center workers where they are ‘less productive’ when they report they are happier. This effect might replicate with respect to call centers in particular, I would be shocked if it replicated to workers in general (and thus my answer to Tyler’s generalized ‘are happy workers less productive?’ is ‘no, quite the opposite, and happy to bet on this.’) If this effect is real and causal, my mechanism is that call center ‘productivity’ is about getting through calls quickly whether or not that is good for the business or customer (or victim/target), and also being willing to engage in essentially hostile interactions with the target to get the desired result. There are particular professions and times and places where one wants to Drive Angry. On the other hand I would have been more productive happier at any job I have ever had.
Kamil Galeev has an interesting thread, more explicitly than usual going beyond Russia, talking about the difference between violent and non-violent entrepreneurs, and how Musk’s instinct to ‘make a deal’ with China and Russia is exactly how the non-violent creators have gotten owned and curb-stomped for almost all of history. That in Kamil’s model of the world, where someone being allowed to create value non-violently without being wiped out is weird. His version proves too much, but the lesson he is giving here is vital, that we do not know how good we and the world have it right now in this sense. We live in a world where Musk is the rogue who doesn’t play by the rules and abuses and doesn’t respect the law. He’s the bully, not the victim. While it would be even better if he didn’t do that, we should be thrilled about this level of happy problem.
I want it to be the way where they don’t gaslight us. Alas, it is not that way.
Market pricing in three years of rough winters for Europe.
The far forward contracts might be a good buy here given the uncertainty. There are ways to have access to bountiful energy and Europe and its ‘environmentalists’ seem to be strongly against them.
The rich get higher returns than others on their real estate holdings. Presumably some of this is that rich people prefer areas that are getting richer and more expensive, whereas poorer people do not. Alternatively, rich people are buying real estate as more investment relative to consumption, and can afford to buy ‘too much house’ in order to get an area with better future prospects, and thus this effect is somewhat moderated by lower effective consumption. This still seems to suggest (very correctly, I believe) that the real estate market is not efficient and that moves in prices are predictable.
Several accounts I trust think this is best described as Cartoon Network RIP.
Autism researcher looking into theory of mind lacks good theory of Autistic mind.
Good News, Everyone
Sarah Constantin lists some good things she wants to see more, I almost entirely agree.
Terrance Tao offers worksheet on Bayesian probability. No idea if this would be helpful to someone who didn’t already ‘get it.’
Brave browser offers feature to block cookie notifications. Tempting.
David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center NYC has gone back to 2,200 seats as originally planned, NPR claims sound is now much improved. This is NPR’s wheelhouse, so I am inclined to believe it.
New York City finds a way to figure out that trash piles are better inside containers.
Four million dollars? If that’s what it takes? Worth every penny.
Most people who are ‘missing’ do not need or want to be found.
This is the stat that jumped out most to me. These are only the 93% where the status of not missing was verifiedso a good chunk of the remaining 7% presumably also would have fallen into this category if they had been located. Although the sheer number of ‘runaways’ was also impressive:
Note the argument from inefficiency. If a missing persons notice is not carefully geographically targeted then it seems highly unlikely to be worth sharing.
Also the periodic reminder that ‘stranger danger’ is not real, when something goes wrong it is almost always someone the victim knows.
I mostly don’t cover crypto, making an exception for this purely because it is funny.
Don’t hate the player. Hate the protocol.
Also in ‘because it’s funny,’ Patrick McKenzie has a thread that includes this line.
Never change, Patrick.
Many innovative start-up pitches start off, says Paul Graham, as ‘X for Y.’ This implies someone should program a large language model to automatically generate and evaluate an endless stream of X for Y ideas and find the good ones. As a startup?
People Are Trying To Destroy the Internet
Yout legal ruling seems to be latest attempt to destroy the internet if you look at the details, featuring such winners as ‘modifying the URL to access content is illegal under 1201’ and ‘it counts as an effective protection measure if you don’t actively have a feature allowing it’ so anything that adds a feature to a website would be illegal.
The sheer rate of such rulings and warnings I now see, in large part due to following Mike Masnick who both is on top of these things and likes to point out how rulings might destroy things, implies that they are mostly overblown and/or that someone out there is dealing with them. I hope. There really are a lot of them, and he’s also warning us that another ruling could potentially destroy art by decimating fair use.
PayPal May Not Be Your Pal, You Still Must Pay
It is important to note when things still have the ability to surprise you.
Musk is responding to Marcus here.
The announcement of reversal is always interesting (Reuters version):
I wonder what happens on November 4th?
I wonder how something like this gets into your policy ‘in error’?
It also is only a partial reversal, as the Volokh Conspiracy notes that there are still $2500 fines for ‘intolerance’ or ‘discriminatory’ content. One I like is ‘involve the sales of products or services identified by government agencies to have a high likelihood of being fraudulent’ even if they’re not fraudulent. The whole current policy is essentially carte blanche if someone wants to get creative.
To be fair, this isn’t entirely a new tactic, PayPal is a fan of ‘take the money and laugh.’
It is never clear how many people respond to such things.
Does anyone know an instance of PayPal taking money out of your bank account in this way, unauthorized? Would there be legal remedy if they did? As in, if they felt like it, could they literally change their terms of service again, then decide to drain the entire linked bank account, and then that’s that?
What is clear, whether or not I close the account, is that I have no intention of ever keeping a substantial PayPal account balance ever again.
The market disliked what it saw, stock down 9% despite partial reversal.
Fun With Bayesian Updating #1: Dustin Moskovitz AMA
Effective Altruism Twitter AMA by Dustin Moskovitz.
Mostly basic questions, mostly useful for insight into how Dustin personally thinks.
In terms of our disagreements, this confirmed how deeply he is committed to his effectiveness calculations, believes in institutions (e.g. he thinks world government would be an importantly good thing), doesn’t model first world or American conditions as having strong spillover effects (although he donates to the Democrats anyway, and is properly worried about 2024), and defers to certain individuals.
He mentioned he’s soured on prizes, I think unfairly given how much has been spent on them (aka not much).
This was the first one I found surprising:
Then there’s this:
I wouldn’t have him buy a giant yacht, but I say Dustin Moskovitz should go to space. It is not that expensive, and doing so would be highly educational on many levels. Worth it on that alone, also come on man, you’ve earned it.
An underappreciated point by many, you love to see it:
Love me some Zohar Atkins, insightful including into how Dustin thinks about ‘interventions’:
Fun With Bayesian Updating #2: No One Understands Me
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic asks people, what no one understands about their job. It’s a fun one. It’s both a chance both to learn rarely known things about people’s jobs, and also to see how well-calibrated people are about what other people know or expect about their jobs.
The biggest pattern is pure Robin Hanson. You think my job doing X is mostly about X and I’m free to X all day. Well, you’re wrong. It’s actually about this other less exciting thing Y, usually a mix of paperwork and meetings and other things no one likes, which is what allows me to do what little X the job as a Doer of X affords me. This came up [12] times (Aid Worker, Book Editor, Chef, Corporate Communications Executive, Data Scientist 2, Opera Singer, Pastor, Pharmacist, Postal Worker, Sailor, Screenwriter, Camp Director), of which [3] was surprising to me.
I do think a lot of people lack the knowledge being given here. Even for me, it was good to see it spelled out. I would say to these folks, some of us do get it. In some cases, I’m guessing most of us.
Then there is the flip side, where you think we all do X all day and can’t or never do Y, but actually we also do Y and it’s central so stop stereotyping and selling us short (Data Scientist 1, Debate Coach, Nurse, Real Estate Agent, Timpanist). This came up [5] times and was surprising [2] times.
There were [9] others (ER doctor, Financial Analyst, Humanitarian, Government Consultant, Grape Grower, Lobbyist 1, Lobbyist 2, Neuroscientist, Managing Director, Software Engineer, Stenographer), which were basically ‘yes this job is exactly what you think it is’ and were thus surprising to me zero times. To them, I say that actually, Everybody Knows. People are not as clueless as you think.
Fun With Bayesian Updating #3: And The Cheaters Gonna Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat Cheat
The investigation into the poker cheating incident at Hustler Casino continues.
It does not get less weird. It does get clearer.
Even if some things are a coincidence, this does not seem like a coincidence.
So let me get this straight. After the incident, on camera, someone who is involved in the production took $15,000 chips out of Robbi’s stack. The same stack which is counted continuously on camera, so she has to know she was shorted, from the same recording that contained an incident sure to be investigated in some fashion. Then she declined to prosecute.
As someone else put it, this has very large ‘questions already answered by the shirt’ vibes to it. I can think of one very obvious explanation for these facts. I cannot think of an alternative explanation for these facts.
After I wrote that, Doug Polk weighed in, including with some new information. All of it points towards this being cheating, and offers plausible mechanisms for how it happened. He can’t come up with a plausible alternative explanation either.
Here is Garrett Adelstein (the other one in the original hand) on all this, he unsurprisingly has high confidence of cheating and details.
Why am I paying this much attention to this? I find it fascinating, it is Relevant To My Interests, I find it a great place to practice thinking about what is going on in a situation, and most of all we see a lot of great examples of people doing their best to think well and do so out loud in public, and what different people focus on and think is important.
Seems only fair, then, to give my percentage as well. I’m at something like 90% cheat at this point, due to not being an expert and thus having a bunch of model uncertainty.
Also only fair, the fishing cheater has been indicted. Excellent.
Legalize It
Biden issues full pardons for all federal cases of simple marijuana possession, moves to reclassify marijuana as a drug that is not, as it turns out, on the same level as heroin and more dangerous than fentanyl.
There are about 6,500 such cases, because most drug convictions are at the state level, so this is starting small. If governors honor Biden’s call to do this at the state level as well, then the direct effect will be much larger. If the reclassification goes through, that too would be a huge deal.
Even without those steps, this seems like a big additional step towards effective legalization of marijuana. That is not an unmitigated good. If I had to choose whether people should generally smoke more marijuana or less marijuana, I would choose less. There are times and places where it makes life better, yet in general marginal consumption is something I would expect to make life worse. Drugs that make one stupid, that are anti-motivational, that cause accidents and are often used irresponsibly, are drugs it is wise to mostly avoid, and for society to discourage.
I would say all the same things for alcohol, and also think prohibition of either of them makes a similar amount of sense. The popularity of those two proposals is also converging, straight towards being very, very unpopular.
Thus, when I announced Balsa, I put full marijuana legalization on the list of obvious wins. It was the thing on the list I was most confident would likely happen on its own. Which seems to be exactly what is happening here. Good job all around.
Now we need to study marijuana to know how to reschedule it, except of course that it being scheduled makes it much harder to do the study.
“It’s something that we constantly communicate: We really need to figure out a way of doing research with these substances,” Nora Volkow, thedirector of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, told The Health 202. Her agency is a major funder of studies on drug use and addiction, and Volkow said she’s working to find pathways to ease research into Schedule I drugs.
Either way, a final determination over how to classify marijuana could take years. The prospect is sure to ignite a flurry of lobbying and a renewed push in Congress to decriminalize the drug at the federal level.
People Are Increasingly Worried About Nuclear Weapons
Up front overall view here, so it isn’t missed: While nuclear war risk is higher than normal and highly unacceptable, in my view it remains low, and the Metaculus and prediction market estimates seem substantially too high. Please do not obsess or lose sleep over this unless you are trying to change the outcome. I do not believe any costly actions (like relocating) are justified at this time in terms of personal safety, although purchasing basic emergency supplies is a good idea even under baseline conditions so nothing wrong with doing that. If you are going to have a trigger for leaving, I believe the most aggressive reasonable trigger is a Russian nuclear detonation, and it would also be reasonable to continue to wait until there was an offensive detonation.
OK, then. Onward.
I give this week’s Good Use of Prediction Markets award to this question:
Another question in this tournament asks Will an offensive nuclear detonation cause at least 1 fatality before 2024?. If that does happen, how predictable will it be in the days beforehand? To what extent will it be a bolt from the blue?
If there’s a fatality from an offensive nuclear detonation by 2024, will the Metaculus community prediction on the question about that be >20% for at least a day during the week before the detonation?
This question conditions on Will an offensive nuclear detonation cause at least 1 fatality before 2024? resolving positively; that is, this question resolves ambiguously unless that other one resolves positively.
This question resolves positively if:
- That other question resolves positively, and
- For a full 24 hour period sometime in the 168 hours (i.e., 7 times 24) before the first detonation that resolves that other question positively, the Community Prediction on that other question is greater than 20%.
Then there’s the question of how high risk is now. Everyone agrees it is too damn high, because it is always too damn high and also it is clearly elevated. How far?
Here’s the current prediction of this risk, which was 7% when I grabbed it (it has since gone down, then back up to 9%). The distribution is that most people (including me) think that is high, while some think the risk is very high.
Here is Polymarket with the question that ends at the end of 2022 rather than 2023, and restricted purely to Russia and ‘in an offensive capacity’:
The new meta-question is a great question to be asking. If we are worried about whether to bug out or otherwise do something about to protect ourselves, we need to know how much warning we will have that things are likely to go south. If we used a 20% threshold on this market as our trigger, how often would it be in time?
Responses are all over the map from 2% to 90%, with the community prediction at 50% chance that Metaculus will flag the risk at 20%+ for at least 24 hours before the first detonation, which could plausibly be a point of no return where a lot of actions get impossible or far more expensive.
My evaluation is that the 50% here is low, given a good quickly-updating-on-new-predictions community prediction, which I think Metaculus mostly has. There is already a 7% chance given right now. There are a number of concrete steps that Russia has to or is likely to take before an offensive detonation. If there is a demonstration or ‘test’ detonation by Russia, I would assume the community prediction would jump on the spot to above 20%. Then there is the claim that the logistics involved in getting the weapon ready would take several days and would be observed by American sources, who (based on their track record so far) would likely scream about it in advance. I would also expect a much more explicit threat to come down first. So I’d be inclined to be in the 80% range here.
There is value in helping people calm down and not overreact in these spots, and there is also value in learning how to think about such spots, which is why this is worth our thinking about. I do not think that the practical personal risks yet justify a lot of time spent.
Max Tegmark offers this post putting the chances of nuclear war at 1 in 6 (!). I do not buy the logic here, especially his <10% chance that Putin would ‘accept’ defeat (and also the <10% chance that the West would ‘accept’ defeat if it somehow lost). I also think it is much less likely that NATO’s response would be as escalatory as he thinks it would be – my baseline is that the response would be centered around much stronger diplomatic isolation that reduced the need for military strikes inside Russia, also the third step seems overconfident too. On the flip side, he is ignoring other scenarios.
Jeremy Shapiro comes out here and argues that a nuclear war is the expected outcome of the conflict – the whole thing seems misguided, requires Shapiro to be much more insightful than anyone involved in making the real decisions, and is a classic case of not thinking in probabilities let along stepwise probabilities.
Seth Baum here seems better grounded but is assigning no probabilities. Thread contains links to additional good threads.
Timothy Snyder here argues the risk of nuclear use is very low, since it would make Putin’s situation worse. Tyler Cowen found this to be the strongest such argument so far. I agree it is well stated and that its conclusions seem right to me.
Of Boys and Men
Matthew Yglesias reviews Richard Reeves’ book Of Boys and Men. The core observation of the book is that boys educational achievements are falling further and further behind those of girls, which is attributed to a combination of, whether or not among other things, (1) boys being less mature at any given age while school ignores this distinction and (2) a lack of male teachers as a combination of role models and an ability to relate to and make things in school interesting to boys.
Tyler Cowen points with skepticism to finding that gender equality is correlated with boy subjective well-being but not with girl subjective well-being. The obvious response is that the controls on any such study are a true joke, tons of other stuff is going on here, so the result does not at all mean what they think it means. Also, given that in ‘equal’ areas boys are now falling well behind girls in terms of educational attainment, it is interesting that they are also seeing themselves as better off.
These problems are difficult to solve in part because interventions to help kids to get more education have a pattern of working for girls and not working for boys, as Reeves notes in National Affairs. This suggests that as we Do More to get more children more education, boys will ‘fall behind’ more and more.
Solutions proposed by Reeves to boys falling behind are to ‘red shirt’ those ‘not ready’ for kindergarten, who will mostly be boys, and hold them back until they are older, which Matthew interprets as implying universal free pre-K (I don’t think this is obvious at all?), to recruit more male teachers, and to promote vocational training.
We lost more than 20k teachers in September on net, another strong argument that we need to get rid of pointless occupational licensing requirements here.
I see holding children back as another way of saying some combination of four things here:
- Time-shift boys relative to girls to level the playing field (Reeves’ term).
- Move towards grouping children smarter than simply doing it by age.
- Dumb down education further.
- Keep kids in the educational system until they are even older.
The theory on #1 seems plausible. I’m a big fan of #2, tracking and customization are great, this is a crude way of doing more tracking. I’m against #3 and #4, if anything we keep kids in the system far too long already.
I note that there’s been no mention here or on the podcast I heard Reeves on about whether ‘boys who are more ‘mature’ in the same classroom’ might be worrying to parents of girls for other reasons? That could be a worry especially in high school.
Vocational training is something actual everyone agrees is needed and then no one does anything about it. Presumably for Hansonian reasons.
Recruiting more male teachers is plausibly a pure win other than the politics. The proposal to do this via recruitment and subsidies and favoritism seems wrong to me. The simple solution is to ask why we are seeing so few male teachers, and fix it. That problem is that we require not only college degrees but also educational graduate degrees in order to let people teach grade school, and men aren’t graduating from college let alone willing to sit through what follows these days. By waiving those requirements, we would get better gender balance while also getting rid of a bunch of useless credentialism and addressing our teacher shortage. Win win.
Then there are the other elephants in the room, which are more difficult to talk about these days yet without which the problem is not explained. Why are boys relatively more happy when achievement is higher for girls (and things are generally more equal)? That seems to be a hint that perhaps the reason boys do not Do More in school is in large part that they are choosing not to given what they are offered, and that this choice is making them happier, at least short term.
I would put some of the school-specific parts of it like this:
School is all about negative selection. You get punished for wrong answers far, far more than you are rewarded for right answers. You get punished for disruptions or any deviation from expectations, while you are not rewarded for doing something exceptional. One size fits all. Complete circle. Stay in line. Raise your hand. Ask permission to go to the bathroom. Give the teacher back their password. Zero tolerance policy.
Grade point average is the score, which is the average of components that are often maximized, which in turn are an average of components many of which are fully maximized, which in turn are composed of components that are basically ‘did you mess this up’ whether it is a homework assignment, a test question, a ‘classroom participation,’ attendance or non-disruption, whatever it is, you name it. You start with 100 points, and then points are subtracted. Almost all of the focus is on what you did wrong. In the extreme, if you have seven classes, six A+ and one F means you get held back, whereas seven C- are fine. And that’s fractal.
Meanwhile, what I would describe as normal boy behavior is pathologized because it interferes with running a classroom, in response to which our society puts huge pressure on parents to drug their kids into a stupor and/or get them constantly high on things they are somewhat pretending are not literal meth.
Men are and always have been higher variance so they do relatively poorly under negative selection.
If you are surprised that boys underperform in this situation, that is an error.
Even more centrally than that, the problem is that we are tying the value of people to their educational attainment.
Yes, women are outpacing men in college graduation. There is unlikely to be anything we would want to and be willing to do that would remedy this, nor is it clear that ‘fixing’ it would matter much for net welfare if the total number of graduates was unchanged.
The problem is that we then take those that did not graduate from college, and we ruthlessly discriminate against them for the rest of their days. Whereas the things that are traditionally valued instead, where men are happy to strive to excel, we no longer value or even punish. If we didn’t do that, this would all mostly be fine, tying back into why we don’t see male teachers even more than we used to not see them.
That still doesn’t begin to tell the full story of what is going ‘wrong with boys and men’ more broadly and I am sure I have several commenters chomping at the bit about all the things I am not talking about here that will point some of them out. I am not discouraging them or others from doing exactly this, it seems like a reasonable time and place to do that. It simply is far beyond the scope of what I am attempting to do here.
I have added this to the list of books I would read if I had lots of time to read books, with my prior on reading it remaining low.
Don't Worry About the Vase 
Mostly 16-18 yr boys with 13-15 yr girls in one class each day? Oops. ‘Get thee to a nunnery-girl-school, and do so: Now!’
“There were [9] others (ER doctor, Financial Analyst, Humanitarian, Government Consultant, Grape Grower, Lobbyist 1, Lobbyist 2, Neuroscientist, Managing Director, Software Engineer, Stenographer), which were basically ‘yes this job is exactly what you think it is’”
God, I wish software engineering involved spending most of your time software engineering.
Can also personally vouch that the “neuroscientist” experience is even further along that axis of damage.
The solution to schools is easy. Take all the teachers and administrators, and put them on a boat to Australia. That is what Australia was made for. If Australia goes all “YOU WILL NOT CALL AUSTRALIA HOME” and sinks the boat instead, that’s, you know, no skin off my nose.
On the marijuana research problem with scheduled substances, “We really need to figure out a way of doing research with these substances” – is there some extremely obvious, blatantly straightforward reason that you can’t just do the research in a country where it’s fully legalized, e.g. Canada? I mean, when adults can just buy it and use it recreationally, I don’t see how research would be particularly harder with it?
Presumably there’s some sort of extremely obvious reason that you couldn’t just pay some Canadians to do whatever studies are required, right? I can’t bring it to mind, though…
In general the FDA doesn’t think studies done in other countries count. Wish I was kidding.
One (probably stupid) reason for this is to make sure that the peoplr doing the studies aren’t doing “unethical” things that you can’t do in the United States. (Like the villains in the thriller novel The Constant Gardener were doing.)
On the other hand…
https://premierconsulting.com/resources/blog/use-of-data-from-foreign-clinical-studies-for-us-approval/
Same reason the FDA wouldn’t accept vaccine trials done in other countries.
That’s what I get for not refreshing before commenting.
The HR one is fascinating because while they are correct that many people leave a job because of reasons other than money, that reason tends to be ‘a terrible boss’. Yet the proposed solution of ‘get rid of bad bosses’ is not listed as an HR option.
Crypto fun: I can’t not mention the Portuguese banknote forgery incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alves_dos_Reis
Tangential, but the debate coach thing gets at something that used to annoy me a bunch on the internet (by which I mean, it still annoys me when I see it, I just no longer typically hang out on websites where it’s so common). Which is, the “big ball of data” argument, where someone attempts to argue by just presenting a bunch of data, while no substantial argument to show that the data implies their conclusion. Usually the data will be related to the conclusion, but they’ll just take it that that is enough, and not do any arguing to rule out alternative explanations or anything. It’s enough to make me say, I’ll spot you the data, just show that you know how to construct an argument!
…well, like I said, I eventually learned better than to hang around on the websites I remember that being so common on…
Zvi, I notice that you are using Manifold Markets much more heavily than I would have expected based on your initial highly-negative comments about them. As far as I can tell their product hasn’t changed much, so what changed your opinion?
>(2) a lack of male teachers as a combination of role models and an ability to relate to and make things in school interesting to boys.
I’d be less interested in whether things in school are interesting to boys and more interested in whether assessment is inappropriately done in ways that disfavour boys (e.g. essay assessment in physics class, mandatory yr12 English with essay assessment counting toward tertiary entrance, but no mandatory yr12 Maths).
It’s strange that when a guy like Moskovitz speaks in public and seems to be speaking, in the main, honestly–it’s strange that this does nothing to increase my trust in him.
World government would be great, he says. First impression: Bond villain. Is he auditioning? A really clever such villain would indeed first brand himself and his movement as immaculately, objectively, technocratically philanthropical. I don’t think he’d do well in a debate against a functional opponent on this matter. I also don’t think he’d survive James Bond. Imagine the level of tyranny required just to maintain a world government after the likely terrible bloodshed involved in its establishment. World government is the best way to ensure that there is no escape when tyranny is perfected by aid of machinic intelligence. On the other hand, world government may be the only way to prevent the rise of superhuman AGI–which I consider the only serious, though not necessarily sufficient, justification for world government.
Nationalism Bad: The best way to ensure that there is an escape when tyranny is perfected by aid of machinic intelligence–might some day be rendered an anachronism by the threat of superhuman AGI.
2024 election: Yes, those who are complacent about global government are core Democrats. They even pay obeisance to such absurdly corrupt global organizations as the UN and the WHO.
“No strong spillover effects”: I disagree. It’s both untrue and a false framing. Most of the places capable of absorbing modern economics, science, technology have done so–very strong spillover in NE Asia and in Eastern Europe, significant spillover into the Second World, little into the Third World. Where the natural talent pool is inadequate for such absorption–which is now almost every place that has not yet done it–only a renewal of colonialism would permit this outcome, unless…we optimize the ultimate spillover app: eugenics. It is already technologically and commercially available, to a limited degree and for a fee. Of course, old-fashioned eugenics has always been available and has always been supremely privately popular. Is anything in life quite as good as good genes? Those who deny the affirmative here–take a good look at them. They are the enemies of humanity. I predict eugenics will spillover into NE Asia more effectively than into the Western nations that develop it.
Timothy Snyder threw the kitchen sink of arguments that Russia is unlikely to go nuclear. He’s a flagrantly biased analyst. Some of his many arguments are stupid. The notion that Russia wouldn’t send nukes into the war zone because of trouble “keeping hold of their own stuff” is nonsense. Or that they wouldn’t fire a nuclear missile in Ukraine because it might be shot down. Dumb. They’d just fire another. But, then, this is a guy who considers the notion of people having a right to self-determination to be “ridiculous.” Does he know how America was founded? He does. What he means is that a right to self-determination that runs contrary to the wishes of the American ruling class is “ridiculous.” When a disputant adds such stupidities and such bigotries into a mix that also includes a few good arguments, I wonder why? Purifying the ore and excluding the tailings shortens the brief and bakes it more persuasive for those who are not fellow travelers. The reader shouldn’t have to waste so much time and effort filtering, He also has quite a bit of mixed ore in there, like the dogmatic claim that a tactical nuke would make no military difference. Once this taboo is breached, why would there be only one detonation? Fifty such would severely degrade Ukraine’s military, and if the Russians were wise, also their logistics. Who wants to drive trucks or trains through radioactive zones? Who would repair destroyed tracks or roads in radioactive zones?
The last part of his essay is speculation, and not of the most brilliant kind. He suggests Kadyrov is a contender for the crown. He is not. Russia will never be ruled by a Chechen or any other sort of Muslim. He may be able to acquire a Caucasus kingdom or formalize the one he has. Prigozhin is a contender, but Snyder is mostly projecting his own paranoid political nightmare in supposing he’s at all likely to rule. If Putin is deposed, the perpetrator is far more likely to be a palace insider. At least Snyder didn’t let himself go to the extent of venting his dreams of a color revolution and abysmal Russian submission to him and his ilk. Snyder omits an important point, which is the manifest stupidity of Putin’s Ukraine policy from the start and continuing today. A stupid man is also an irrational man is also an unpredictable man, rendering nuclear use more likely even if the risk/reward is unfavorable. That America has a dementia case in the Oval Office and an uncannily dysfunctional VP may further raise the risks of witless escalation dynamics on both sides. Stupidity is unpredictable because it is not rational.
On Tegmark, he’s less politically biased, but his estimates seem high. Snyder is not really in this game, preferring rhetoric to an honest statement of odds. I’ve raised my estimate of tactical nuclear use from 3% back in April to 8% today because the chance of Russian conventional loss is now ~90%, and my opinion of Putin’s mental abilities and available epistemic horizon have declined. Unlike Tegmark, I still think Putin can survive losing the war, though his odds are dropping. If nukes are used, NATO conventional retaliation would probably be limited to Russian forces in Ukraine; the strikes on such forces might continue indefinitely. I give Ukraine-confined strikes by NATO 60%, strikes on Russian proper–which is how Tegmark defined his second number–10%. Then, the odds of conventional strikes in Ukraine going to full nuclear exchange I would place at zero, and strikes on Russia proper going to full nuclear exchange I would place at 30%. Tegmark’s odds are 30/80/70 = 16%. Mine are 8/10/30 = 0.24%. It’s ironic that I am giving much more credit (8x) to American restraint than a liberal like Tegmark. Part of this is that I don’t credit America’s rulers with any more concern for the Ukrainian people than they displayed 90 years ago, when their good friend Stalin was busy treating them to the century’s first genocide of six million. They will not flinch if thousands of Ukrainians are incinerated, irradiated, starved, frozen. They might even welcome it, given that, in the case of limited nuclear use, the strategic implications favor the American empire. Their response is therefore less likely to be intemperate. There are a lot of unknowns on this issue, high stress can warp judgments, and there are many escalation ladders to choose from.
>It also is only a partial reversal, as the Volokh Conspiracy notes that there are still $2500 fines for ‘intolerance’ or ‘discriminatory’ content. One I like is ‘involve the sales of products or services identified by government agencies to have a high likelihood of being fraudulent’ even if they’re not fraudulent.
These aren’t new additions from the update that aren’t being walked back; they were already there as of 20 Sep 2021 (if perhaps not well-known). These are “it was already shit, and it hasn’t become less shit”.
>baseline conditions
What do you think the baseline per-year risk of two-sided nuclear war is in the 2020s?
Less than 1%/year, more than 0.1%/year, hard to know exactly. If I was doing math on something I’d be in the middle (e.g. 0.3% or whatever).
Hrm. I’ve been working off ~3% annual. Mostly off the PRC getting too big for its boots and getting into a shooting war with the US (over Taiwan or, if the PRC takes Taiwan unopposed, potentially Korea or the Ryukyus); the Chinese deterrent is a lot more fragile than the Russian one, and that makes it quite likely it’d get launched-on-warning (false or real) sooner or later.
(Obviously, 3% still doesn’t warrant *evacuation* if it’s a decadal baseline, because as you’ve often rightly noted Permanent Midnight is unsustainable. I have personally chosen to *permanently* live in the country, though – of course, this is not for everyone as the costs vary drastically with life stage, occupation, etc.)
3%/year would mean a majority chance of it happening in my (regularly scheduled) lifetime. If I believed that (and didn’t have other major x-risk worries) I’d likely be full-on southern hemisphere, then you can live in a city again, or not. It’s a lot of risk.
That’s the first Three Mountains nuclear risk I’ve heard, kind of makes my morning as an EU player. Thing is, if China invades Taiwan, even if the USA and China get into a shooting war over it, it seems like it still mostly doesn’t go nuclear. That’s in neither side’s interest and both sides can ‘take the L’ if the conventional war has a clear winner. We won’t nuke them to save Taiwan, they won’t nuke Taiwan or us for spite. If they invaded Korea I would say high risk of escalation but also I don’t see why they would ever risk that.
@TheZvi
I agree that neither side would particularly want a Taiwan war to go nuclear.
The problem I see is that to be able to have air and sea assets active near Taiwan, US strike aircraft would have to bomb radars and missile launchers deep inside mainland China – the same radars, and potentially some of the same missile launchers, that enable the Chinese deterrent to be effective, and the same strike craft that could fire nuclear weapons at the rest of the deterrent and/or Chinese cities. Meanwhile, PLA ASAT capability would degrade US launch detection somewhat. This would force hair-trigger alert, particularly on the PRC’s side fearing an alpha strike, and if things dragged on I’d predict something to eventually pull that hair-trigger.
If I was China, even in a shooting war over Taiwan, I’d assume USA is never going to first use nukes or even go after the mainland with conventional forces aside from specific military targets, and I wouldn’t be on a hair trigger. Nor, if I was USA, would I even arm the forces to strike inside China. The choice is either (1) let Taiwan fight on its own like Ukraine, and what happens happens, or (2) get into a limited war of navies plus troops if helpful in Taiwan itself. And again, if you lose, you lose, and you do enough economic retaliation that everyone always loses. But hey, they may be smarter/dumber than I am.
>(2) get into a limited war of navies plus troops if helpful in Taiwan itself
I don’t think this makes sense; if the PLA SAMs and AShMs aren’t suppressed, you can’t land troops/arms/food in Taiwan (since the entire island is in range of both from the Fujian coast – it’s in range of AShMs a few hundred kilometres inland, for that matter) without absurd losses. Taiwan *might* be able to take out the S400 SAMs by itself (and the rest can’t reach the airspace over Taiwan itself), but not the AShMs.
Your option #1 could work (assuming the PRC isn’t willing to shoot US arms/food shipments unprovoked, of course; if they do you’re right back to a shooting war and needing to suppress the AShMs), but I can’t imagine the US going for #2; they might go in or not, but if they do they’ll almost certainly be authorised to return fire on land-based PLA fires.
In fairness, it’s not *quite* literally meth. Meth would actually last for a whole day without having to have the school nurse give the kid a second dose at noon.