Dear readers,

U.S. — After the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a ban on the Chinese social media platform TikTok, Gen Z managed to stay upset about the ban for a full 4.3 seconds, which is the maximum amount of time they can focus on anything thanks to TikTok.

[I haven’t independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can’t guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.]

1: Why running for Congress will ruin your life (unless you’re already rich). It costs ~$100K out of pocket before you get campaign funding, and you have to take a ~yearlong break from your career to campaign. If you win, you need to maintain two residences (one in DC, one in your district) on your $175K Congressional salary. Also, you have no power your first term, nobody will let you do anything, and you spend the whole time trying to get re-elected.

2:

I agree with this solution.

3: Ruxandra Teslo and Willy Chertman: The Case For Clinical Trial Abundance

4: This month in nominative determinism: NYT article calculating your chance of winning the lottery, by Victor Mather (h/t Yafah Edelman).

5: Someone is working on a dating site that uses your conversations with Claude to find a match. Link here, although so far it’s just a landing page where you can register interest (h/t @venturetwins)

6: The Lyttle Lytton Contest searches for the worst possible opening line for a novel; it’s been going on since 2001 and this year’s results are in.

7: Gary Marcus and Miles Brundage have made a bet about AI progress. I agree with @tamaybes and others in saying that Miles let Gary off too easily; Gary’s public statements all sound like “modern AI is mostly hype, it doesn’t really do anything like thinking”, but the bet is about things like “will AI make a Nobel Prize caliber scientific discovery by 2027?” and “will AI write Pulitzer-quality books by 2027?” I don’t blame Gary for taking the best terms he could find. But I am worried that if AI makes a Nobel-quality scientific discovery in 2026, but doesn’t quite write the Pulitzer-quality book, then Gary will get to claim victory over the AI optimists, whereas in fact that would be at probably the 95th percentile of fast timelines by most people’s estimate.

8: “The probability that cows (or other non-human animals) are experiencing constant bliss, lack tanha (craving, aversion, and the resulting suffering), or are "enlightened by default" is, by my estimation, very low”.

9: Recursive Adaptation (blog on addiction policy)’s predictions for 2025. 75% of FDA approval of GLP-1 for a substance use disorder by 2029!

10: In my post on the economics of GLP-1 receptor agonists (eg Ozempic), I wrote about how they’re currently widely available because of a loophole suspending patents during a shortage, and predicted there would be a big fight when the shortage was over. Sure enough, the FDA tried to declare that the shortage of tirzepatide (a next-generation Ozempic relative) was over, compounding pharmacies sued, and tirzepatide is still available while the issue goes through the courts (and will the administration have an opinion?) Also, compounding pharmacy access startup Mochi says that they will continue to prescribe even if the shortage is over, using another loophole saying doctors can do this for specific individual patients in cases of medical necessity. This is an extremely fake use of this loophole, but will the government be willing to call their bluff?

11: Jacob Falkovich has a blog on dating advice, which he plans to turn into a book of dating advice. I can’t really comment on the accuracy (my dating strategy tends to look more like waiting for women to send me emails saying “I like your blog, would you like to go on a date?” which probably doesn’t generalize), but I’ve had many good interactions with Jake, and he has a beautiful family which means he must be doing something right. Also, Jake is poly, and I sometimes wonder if poly people are the only ones qualified to give dating advice: if you’re monogamous, you either met your future spouse quickly (in which case you have no experience), dated for years without meeting your spouse (in which case you can’t be very good), or aren’t looking for a committed relationship at all (which is just pickup artistry, and follows very different dynamics). Poly people are the only ones who can break out of this trilemma!

12: Christ And Counterfactuals is a blog on effective altruism from a Christian perspective. Some previous attempts at this have felt kind of forced, but the first post I read here was actually pretty interesting. Richard Swinburne (apparently “the world’s best Christian philosopher”), thinks that:

“[One] reason why it is good that the human race should sometimes be in an initial situation of considerable ignorance about the causes and effects of our actions, is this. If God abolished the need for rational inquiry and gave us from childhood strong true beliefs about the causes of things, that would make it too easy for us to make moral decisions. As things are in the actual world, most moral decisions are decisions taken in uncertainty about the consequences of our actions. I do not know for certain that if I smoke, I will get cancer; or that if I do not give money to some charity, people will starve. So we have to make our moral decisions on the basis of how probable it is that our actions will have various outcomes—how probable it is that I will get cancer if I continue to smoke (when I would not otherwise get cancer), or that someone will starve if I do not give. Since probabilities are so hard to assess, it is all too easy to persuade yourself that it is worth taking the chance that no harm will result from the less demanding decision (the decision which you have a strong desire to make). And even if you face up to a correct assessment of the probabilities, true dedication to the good is shown by doing the act which, although it is probably the best action, may have no good consequences at all.” (Could a Good God Permit so Much Suffering? A Debate, pp. 52-53.)

This is pretty galaxy-brained, but something galaxy-brained must be going on for God to tolerate the existence of evil at all, and this is a surprisingly natural extension of some common premises on the subject.

13: Swedish study: diagnosing the marginal patient with a psychiatric condition makes their life worse. Of the two mechanisms they looked at, stigma seems more involved than drug side effects. My opinion: this study was done on conscripts undergoing a mandatory psych evaluation for the army, who had no previous reason to think they had a psych disease and had not sought treatment. This is a different situation from somebody who comes to a psychiatrist asking for relief from specific symptoms they have noticed. Also, Sweden c. 2005 is a different culture from America 2025 in terms of how much stigma a psych diagnosis carries. I think it’s possible that if you never considered that you had psychiatric problems, and were suddenly given a diagnosis in 2005 Sweden and told you couldn’t serve in the army, that’s likely to destabilize your self-image more than a person who knows they’re depressed going to a psychiatrist in 2025 US and getting antidepressants.

14: RIP Felix Hill, research scientist at DeepMind and mentor to many in the AI community. You can read his suicide note here, though the obvious content warning applies. He says he took ketamine for mild anxiety and it plunged him into an incredibly deep depression that he couldn’t get out of; he leaves his story behind as a warning for others. I appreciate his warning, but I wish he had said more about what dose he used; different people’s ketamine doses vary by almost two orders of magnitude, I’d previously thought that the low doses were pretty safe and the high doses were sketchy, and I would like to know whether I should update or not.

15: RIP Max Chiswick, professional poker player, effective altruist, and ACX reader.

16: Adrian Dittman, a Twitter account widely accused of being Elon Musk’s alt, has been revealed to be . . . a guy named Adrian Dittman. Congrats to Maia Crimew and the Spectator for actually investigating this, unlike many other news sources which spread the Musk conspiracy theory. Also, the people involved got banned from X for some reason, maybe because this qualified as doxxing Dittman.

17: Related: Musk claims to be among the top players in the world at several computer games. A veteran Path of Exile gamer presents evidence that Musk faked his PoE2 accomplishments by hiring a Chinese guy to play on his account. Some Musk supporters in the comments suggest that maybe he hires the Chinese guy to level up his account, but his accomplishments (eg speedruns) are still his own?

18: Related: Sam Harris says he has been friends with Musk since 2008, but he noticed a sudden shift for the worse in his personality around 2020 which made it impossible to stay friends with him. He gives the example of Musk losing a bet with him that there would be 35,000+ COVID cases in the US, refusing to pay up, and launching personal attacks on Sam when asked to do so. What happened? Some theories:

• Musk turned right-wing, which ended his friendship with Sam for the same reason political differences have always ended friendships (but then what about the bet, which seems like objectively bad behavior?)

• It’s the ketamine (I still think people should be more open about what doses of ketamine they take so I can calibrate my opinions better!)

• Gwern’s longstanding theory that Musk is bipolar (I keep objecting to this because he doesn’t show the right kind of mood shifts; a single shift from a steady state age 0-40, to a different but worse steady state in his fifties is, if anything, even weirder).

• I wonder if he’s doing some kind of steroids. Side effects are irritability, aggression, paranoia, mood swings. He appears to be extremely physically fit, but also claims to “almost never work out”. Imagine that you’re the kind of guy who hires people to play computer games for you so that you can appear on the leaderboard as the best in the world. And imagine that you bring that same attitude to looks and fitness. What’s the obvious low-hanging fruit?

  

19: Ozy profiles George Perkins, an early 20th century businessman and reformer who thought that monopolies combined the best features of capitalism and socialism, and dreamed of an America where JP Morgan employed everyone with enough benefits to serve as a social safety net. Related: Weekly Anthropocene profiles Ozy.

20: Claim: since their 2010 fund, at least until our last data source in 2018, Andreessen Horowitz (aka A16Z, a famous Bay Area VC firm) has overall underperformed the S&P500.

This is especially surprising because A16Z is famous for going all in on crypto early. But during the 2015 - 2018 period, Bitcoin - the absolute dumbest and most obvious crypto bet - went up 2,000%. So how is performance this bad even possible? The Twitter thread speculates that just as Uber used to happily lose money on every ride in order to gain market share, A16Z is happily losing money on every investment in order to gain VC market share. But ride-sharing is a natural monopoly; how will A16Z prevent competitors from entering venture capital? And why should people give it any market share at all if it can’t make them money? Maybe their pitch could be that you’ll make less money, but it will be uncorrelated with the regular stock market? But is that true? Aren’t tech startups pretty cyclical? Also, I wonder if this was framed to their LPs as “yeah we’ll definitely lose your money for the first ten years, but eventually it’ll all work out”. They must be the most trusting people in the world.

21: Nathan Young has a bird flu risk dashboard.

22: Garrison Lovely argues that AI progress “is becoming invisible” by focusing more on science and coding problems rather than the sort of chats and pictures that ordinary users can appreciate, leading to a false sense of calm among policy-makers and the public.

23: Related: 54% of the public thinks AGI will be developed in the next five years.

24: Related: Scott Wiener, author of the SB 1047 AI safety bill, has submitted a “placeholder bill” on AI safety to this session of the California legislature, suggesting that he’s going to try again. There’s some speculation that he’s waiting for Newsom’s pretend investigative panel to return their pretend results so that he can pretend to include them, making it awkward for Newsom to veto it again.

25: Ten big animal welfare wins of 2024. “Against the giant wrongs of factory farming, these wins may appear small. But for the animals affected, they’re a big deal. And they were all achieved by a small group of advocates operating with less funding than Harvard spent renovating a single residential house.” Related: AI For Animals conference in Berkeley, March 1 - 2.

26:

Here is some speculation on the topic - historians’ best guess is that Henry murdered someone at Oxford, the king tried to pardon him for political reasons, and Oxford decided they weren’t on board.

27: Asterisk: The Making Of Community Notes. Describes the thought processes of the designers of Twitter/X Community Notes; I was most impressed by how much they bent over backwards to avoid any framing resembling “misinformation” based on data showing that this would make people view their work as partisan and trust it less.

28: Max Tabarrok: AGI Will Not Make Labor Worthless. Teenagers’ labor isn’t worthless, even though adults are more skilled in every way and there are ~ten times more adults than teens. So even if there were tens of billions of AIs that were better than humans at everything, human labor would retain value. The counterargument is that if AGI labor cost less than human labor and you could always build another AI, then why would you ever use humans? I think the synthesis is that there will always be a finite number of AIs, and even if it’s some very high number like a trillion, you can always use humans to do a few extra jobs after all the AIs are busy. But would these human jobs pay a trivial salary, because they’re only the trillionth most useful job? Or would they pay a decent salary, because an economy of a trillion AIs is so impressive that even its scraps are lucrative? Also, most teenagers can find work, but most severely disabled people can’t - is there some limit to how outclassed you can be before the economy stops including you? More comments and debate at the subreddit. Related: Philosophy Bear wants anti-AI workers movements.

29: Claim: global fertility decline is not caused by fewer children per couple, it’s caused by decreased coupling/marriage. Back on the October links roundup, I included an article making an opposite claim. The full article for this one is gated and I can’t access it, but I hope someone else looks at it and figures out who’s right.

30: Related: Turkish fertility collapse:

I have the same question as this Twitter commenter - why is this even happening in Turkey, a country which I wouldn’t expect to be too plugged into Western cultural and political trends?

31: There’s now an lmarena leaderboard for image models (I can’t link it directly for some reason, you’ll have to click through). On top is something called “Recraft V3”, I didn’t find it too impressive but apparently I’m wrong. You can test the models against each other in the associated arena.

32: China has abandoned “wolf warrior diplomacy” where they insult everyone for no reason. Seems like a smart move.

33: I hate recommending/endorsing therapists or life coaches because they’re so hard to judge and “personal fit” is so important, but Chris Lakin makes a pretty good case for himself:

I do worry that even if you officially say “pay on results”, therapy results are naturally fuzzy and hard to assess, and it’s too aggressive to refuse to pay your life coach who’s put dozens of hours of work into your case, so most people will say “yeah, I guess that kind of worked in a sense” and pay the money (this works even better if your clients are “lifelong pushovers”). How would one design a version of this system which avoided this failure mode?

34: Why does China, an advanced economy, have the tap water issues that we associate with developing countries? Maybe because Chinese people near-universally believe that drinking cold water makes you sick, so they all boil their water anyway, so there’s no incentive to have water that’s safe to drink without boiling. I notice there are many things like “Chinese think drinking cold water will make you sick” and “Koreans think you’ll die if you leave the fan on overnight” - is there any health belief that foreign countries make fun of Americans for? (I’m not looking for conspiracy theories about vaccines, more like something we all take for granted).

35: The NASDAQ has almost doubled in the past two years, so how come it doesn’t feel like we’re in an amazing tech boom? Maybe because it crashed before that and is just making up lost ground? But any way you slice it, it’s doubled in the last four.

36: AskReddit gives their favorite historical facts:

The circumstances surrounding the death of Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) are shrouded in conspiracy. In the months leading up to his death many people reported that Lewis had become paranoid, claiming that he was being followed and that his life was in danger. In a desperate attempt for help, he sent a letter to his close friend, and then president Thomas Jefferson to request an audience. While traveling along the Natchez Trace, he stayed a night at an inn. During the night, the owner reported hearing multiple gunshots but never went out to check on the source. In the morning, Lewis was found dead in his cabin, sitting against the wall looking at the door, rifle in hand and shot in the back. In addition, while the room was ransacked, the only missing objects of note were Lewis’ riding back and personal documents.

After an official investigation, his death was ruled a suicide and all further inquiry into the instance have been barred by the Us government. While Lewis himself did not have any immediate descendants, his extended family have submitted requests every year to have his body exhumed in order to confirm the cause of death. To this day their requests have unanimously been denied.

Some speculation here.

37: In response to my post on H5N1 bird flu, Alina Chan asked about the risk of a bird flu lab leak. Here’s my response, Nuno Sempere’s response, and Peter Miller’s pre-response.

38: Claim on Skeptics StackExchange, so far neither proven nor debunked:

After seeing a basketball game for the first time, [Chinese warlord Zhang Zongchang] allegedly asked "Why the hell are they fighting over a single ball? We're the hosts. Are we seriously this poor?" He ordered all the players be given a basketball.

39:

Many people responded that an IQ-increasing pill would be great, which I think misses the point. Obviously it would be great - but I think the tweet succeeds at giving an analogy for the sort of nervousness people might feel about losing what makes them special.

40: The kingslayer jellyfish got its name after killing American tourist Robert King in 2002.

41: Using ChatGPT Is Not Bad For The Environment. There’s some misinformation disinformation fake news DAMMIT IS THERE ANY WAY OF SAYING THAT FALSE INFORMATION IS GOING VIRAL ANYMORE WITHOUT SOUNDING LIKE A POLITICAL HACK?!? an incorrect claim that AI is unusually bad for the environment, especially water compared to other computer technologies, especially water. Andy Masley debunks demolishes destroys writes an article arguing against it, key point is conveyed by these graphs:

Some discussion at the site of what “consuming” water means, although not as much as I would like. My other concern is that I can’t tell whether this is inference only, or also amortizes the cost of training over all inference queries. I think it’s the former. If you did the latter, then Andy calculates 2L per kWh consumed by a data center. The last AI that we have good data for, GPT-3, took 1.3 mWh to train; let's say modern AIs are 10x that or ~10 mWh. That suggests 20,000L of water consumed in training. Since an AI model will get hundreds of millions of queries through its life - no, it seems like amortizing this per query doesn't change things at all, unless I'm missing something.

42: Paul Graham has a new essay on the causes of and possible responses to wokeness. He says the short-run cause was the rise in social media and group chats, medium-run cause was the student protester generation of the 60s growing up and taking power within academia, and the long-run cause is that people will always have an urge to virtue-signal and the fall of traditional virtue-signaling categories (sexual purity, religious orthodoxy) left an unfilled niche. He recommends as a response our usual rules around religious pluralism - everyone can have a religion, but you shouldn’t bring it to work or demand orthodoxy from your employees. I think this is mostly right, but our tolerance around religion has always gotten awkward when religion has any real-world/political implications (eg the headscarf in France, Christian schools not wanting gay employees, teaching creationism, etc) and since wokeness is made entirely of real-world and political implications, our religious norms aren’t yet well-adapted to deal with it. Also, a lot of our religious pluralism norms are “just do the neutral, non-religious thing”, but wokeness thrives precisely by challenging what “neutral” is: if a studio releases ten films, and they all have white protagonists, is that “neutral”, or is it a surrender to the opposite “religion” of racism? If a woke employee demands that the studio have more films with black protagonists, were they the first one to defect, or just responding to a previous defection? If they claim it’s a business decision (“we’ll do better with minority demographics if we have some minority characters”), then it takes an active effort beyond just applying regular pluralism norms to “accuse” them of “wokeness” and mount some kind of response.

43: In the past, I’ve used amisulpride as an example of American drug regulation failures - it’s a good antipsychotic drug which is widely used in Europe but which patent issues have prevented pharma from bringing it to the US. Now a pharma company is trying to bring a new variant of amisulpride that gets around the patent issues to the US.

44: Ashlee Vance has a new tech industry Substack, Core Memory. I enjoyed his Musk biography, and he strikes me as one of the rare people covering Silicon Valley who is neither a corporate stooge nor a reflexive anti-tech ideologue.

45: The Right Looks For Converts, The Left Looks For Traitors. There’s not much in this post beyond a natural expansion of the title, but it’s a snappy phrase, and matches my observation of the past ten years with friends and contacts on both sides. But I found myself thinking about it now because, for the first time in ten years, it no longer seems to be true - the Right has gotten much more into looking for traitors (I have yet to see leftists looking for converts, but anything can happen!), and I’m getting more harassment, illiberalism, and purity testing from the right part of the blogosphere than the left. I still basically believe the Barberpole Theory Of Fashion that cool people optimize their signals to separate themselves from the most obvious group of uncool annoying people in their vicinity; for a long time, that’s been SJWs and the Right has benefited, but I predict this has begun the very long process of changing (cf. Richard Hanania’s political course).

46: Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes. Brian Potter of Construction Philosophy disagrees with Tom Wolfe’s thesis (reviewed by me here) that modern architecture looks bare and boring primarily because artistic tastemakers promoted it as a style; Potter says that while something like this may have happened somewhat, the role of architects was secondary to the role of real estate developers, who were trying to cut costs. Modern skyscrapers cut costs both by directly being cheaper to build (eg save money on ornamentation) and because the walls are thinner (meaning more interior rentable space). Then the usual incentives of organizations to do what everyone else is doing and not rock the boat made stragglers go along. I appreciate Brian's extremely knowledgeable perspective. I also appreciate that he doesn't deny the modern architecture part of the story, since I think it's necessary - otherwise, you would expect very expensive "prestige" buildings like museums/opera houses/cathedrals to keep ornamentation, which isn't what happened. My remaining question for him is how much money is involved - would an ornamented skyscraper cost more like 2% more or more like 20% more? Also, Snav replies to the same post.

47: From Wikipedia’s bio of Jensen Huang:

Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school. Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions in order to afford the academy's tuition […]

[He] was frequently bullied and beaten. In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets everyday, learned to play table-tennis, joined the swimming team, and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14. He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars," how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press. In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".