Monthly Archives: February 2023

Previously: On Car Seats as Contraception [Editor’s Note: This post assumes the perspective that more people having more children is good, actually. I will not be engaging with any of the arguments against this, of any quality, whether they be … Continue reading →

No news is (often) good news. At old Magic: The Gathering tournaments, judge Tony Parodi would often tell us, ‘if your opponent did not show up, that is your best possible situation.’ Every week, when I set out to write … Continue reading →

Previous AI-related recent posts: Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day, Next Level Seinfeld, Escape Velocity From Bullshit Jobs, Movie Review: Megan, On AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities. Microsoft and OpenAI released the chatbot Sydney as part of the search engine … Continue reading →

Scott Alexander wrote yet more words defending his decision to write two posts totaling 25,000 words about Ivermectin. Then he wrote a second post trying again. More centrally, his first post, of which I very much approve, is defending the … Continue reading →

Sure, why not, let’s do it. In past years, I looked at Scott Alexander’s prediction as a baseline. This year, thanks to Manifold Markets and Scott structuring his predictions and contest differently, I’ll be looking at market prices. The markets … Continue reading →

I have a lot of open tabs from today’s incoming information. They are all about Bing, and its new AI-enabled chat. It is rather unhinged and engaging in a wide variety of hostile and manipulative behaviors. One hopes this will … Continue reading →

Joe Biden harped on junk fees during the State of the Union. While I do not think it is the problem of our time, I take things in the reference class of resort fees, or fees to have adjacent seats … Continue reading →

Previously: 2022 ACX Predictions Buy/Sell/Hold, Evaluating 2021 ACX Predictions As is the yearly tradition, let’s see how we did. Scott noted in his results post that on pure numbers I did pretty well, coming in 54th out of 508 entries. … Continue reading →

The big development this week is a sudden rise in concern over bird flu, or H5N1. I say rise in concern rather than rise in risk. Risk from H5N1 has been around for a long time. We have known for … Continue reading →

There are two big pieces of pandemic news this week. One is that there is growing alarm about the dangers of avian flu, or H5N1. Likely mammal-to-mammal transmission has been identified, a lot of wild animals are infected, and there … Continue reading →