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[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: The data show teenage depression rates going way up around 2012, lending credibility to stories about social media harming mental health. But Alex Stapp (readable) and David Wallace-Wells (paywalled) argue it’s an artifact of Obamacare-related changes to hospitals’ depression reporting practices. Now I feel silly - for anything that sudden, reporting changes should always be your first guess!

2: Congress passes a “monumental” act to promote nuclear power and “launch a reactor-building spree”.

3: Claims:

EtymologyOnline supports Gunnhilda → gun, though it seems less certain of the role of that specific crossbow.

4: William “Wild Bill” Langer was governor of North Dakota in the 1930s. He’s best known for his corruption trial; after receiving a guilty verdict, he “signed a Declaration of Independence of North Dakota, declared martial law in Bismarck, and barricaded himself in the governor's mansion”. The North Dakotans didn’t go along with it, but they didn’t hold a grudge either - they re-elected him two years later.

5: When I studied Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the textbook cases would involve people with ridiculously distorted thoughts, like a billionaire who worried he wasn’t successful enough. I always wondered if any real people were that messed-up; as always, Twitter delivers:

6: Mind and Mythos essay club looks at GK Chesterton’s Defense of Heraldry. Key quotes:

When the great trumpet of equality was blown, almost immediately afterwards was made one of the greatest blunders in the history of mankind. For all this pride and vivacity, all these towering symbols and flamboyant colours, should have been extended to mankind. The tobacconist should have had a crest, and the cheesemonger a war-cry … Instead of doing this, the democrats made the appalling mistake—a mistake at the root of the whole modern malady—of decreasing the human magnificence of the past instead of increasing it. They did not say, as they should have done, to the common citizen, 'You are as good as the Duke of Norfolk,' but used that meaner democratic formula, 'The Duke of Norfolk is no better than you are.'

7: Alex Tabarrok: three years after the government set aside $42 billion for rural broadband, nobody has been connected, partly because the government added too many "progressive wish list" items to the contract (must hire union workers, must hire ex-cons, etc). The $42 billion would have been enough to give every American without broadband access to a 4-year Starlink subscription. [update from comments: maybe this still counts as on track?]

8: Leopold Aschenbrenner makes the case for a near-term singularity and what to do about it. Aschenbrenner was at the center of yet another recent OpenAI scandal when leadership apparently fired him for telling the company’s board about a security incident they were trying to cover up; he also reports that HR accused him of racism when he warned about being hacked by China.

9: Did you know: a century ago, insurances didn’t cover earthquake damage. After the 1906 San Francisco quake, “Word spread throughout the city that fires were covered by insurance and people started burning down their properties. Fires raged on for 3 days.”

10: Claims:

The Google comparison briefly confused me - “queries” here means “messages to the AI”, so a conversation with a hundred back-and-forth questions counts as 100 queries (whereas most people only query Google a few times daily). In terms of total visitors, c.ai is still only at about 0.02% of Google’s. Still, this is way more than I expected, given that even trying to follow AI trends I’d never really heard anything about this. “People getting addicted to AI girlfriends en masse” should be considered a present-day problem rather than a future one.

11: The founders of Iowa divided it into 100 equally-sized square-ish counties, giving it a pleasing and orderly geometry. Then Kossuth County annexed its northern neighbor, Bancroft County. Now there are 99 counties, and they look like this (Kossuth in red):

Iowans keep trying to split Kossuth County to make their state pleasing and orderly again, and the Kossuthians keep refusing.

12: Did you know: Emory Tate, the father of martial arts influencer Andrew Tate, was a history-making black chessmaster. See also the discussion in Part III here about why members of the same family might become famous in very different fields.

13: Related: Technocracy, Inc was a 1920s US/Canadian movement to replace democratic government with technocrats, ie brilliant engineers and scientists who would make rational decisions. They claimed a membership of 100,000s of people, easily distinguishable by their identical gray suits and gray cars (it might have been kind of a cult). The American leader was a man named Howard Scott; the Canadian leader was Joshua Haldeman, now most notable as Elon Musk’s grandfather.

14: Arc Institute (Patrick Collison et al’s biotech research lab) claims to have discovered a gene editing method which is safer and more precise than CRISPR (Nature paper, Twitter discussion).

15: Adragon De Mello was an apparent child prodigy who became famous for graduating college at age 11. After his parents divorced, it came out that his father was an abusive jerk obsessed with raising a child prodigy, that De Mello was only moderately smart, and that his accomplishments probably owed more to fear and driven-ness than actual intelligence. He is now “an estimator for a commercial painting company”. (h/t TracingWoodgrains)

16: Harvard claims to be adopting Chicago principles of “institutional neutrality”, ie swearing off cancel culture and promising to be fair to all opinions. Real-world enforcement remains to be seen.

17: William Robinson was a traveling stage magician in 1890s America. He was less successful than newcomer Ching Ling Foo, a competing magician who benefited from his exotic Chinese origins. So Robinson painted his face yellow, rebranded as Chung Ling Soo, and moved to London, where he passed himself off as a genuine Chinese man. The real Ching Ling Foo went to London, discovered the imposter, and called him out - but the fake Chung Ling Soo won the ensuing fight, and the real Ching Ling Foo left in disgust. Still, he got his comeuppance shortly thereafter: while he was performing a bullet-catching trick, his assistant accidentally fired a real bullet instead of a blank, killing him.

18: Related: the obsolete anti-malaria drug mepacrine has an odd side effect: it turns your skin yellow. During World War II, some American spies in China would take mepacrine to blend in. And more interesting facts about WWII US spies in China here:

[The Sino-American Cooperative Organization’s] official insignia, after all, was a string of punctuation marks on a pennant, like cuss words in a comic strip, symbolizing [their] unofficial slogan, “What the Hell?”

19: Claim: the Indo-European eschatology myth has left traces throughout its daughter civilizations, including the stories of Loki in Scandinavia, Tarquinius Superbus in Rome, and Bres in Ireland (Lucius Brutus = Lugh??)

20: Guardian “reporter” who wrote hit piece on the rationalist community gets called on multiple severe errors, here’s his response:

Have I mentioned I’m still annoyed about Elizabeth Spiers lecturing me on how silly I was to believe journalists have “personal investment” or “malice” when they’re covering topics like these?

21: Followup to discussion on how dictatorial Modi is vs. isn’t: famous Indian author and Modi critic Arundhati Roy is now being prosecuted under anti-terror laws for a fourteen-year-old remark that Kashmir wasn’t really part of India.

22: Slightly related: history of Danish India.

23: Powering Planes With Microwaves Is Not The Craziest Idea.

24: In the early 20th century, it was understood that the world of engineering and technology was a particular hotbed of socialist activity. Now the opposite is true. Why did that change? Proposed explanations: decreased leftist “Prometheanism” and leftist norms becoming more challenging for nerds with no social skills (but aren’t there a lot of nerdy socially-unskilled leftists? Probably we need to be more granular here, but how?)

25: Emil Kierkegaard: It Doesn’t Matter Whether Refugees Are In The Same Classroom. Large, precise study finds that even though refugees themselves do poorly in school, there is no negative effect on native children from having lots of refugees in their class. This probably implies minimal effects from classmates even within native-born children (ie you shouldn’t worry that sending your kid to a school with bad students will make them do worse), although I guess you could argue that maybe refugees are so culturally distinct that they don’t transmit social influence the same way co-ethnic kids would. I’m usually down for “lol, everything is genetic” style findings, but I’m confused because I thought I remembered pretty convincing evidence that having disruptive kids in a class is very harmful for everyone else’s learning. Maybe the refugees do poorly but are no more likely to be disruptive, so classmate effects from disruptive kids are still on the table?

26: It’s conventional wisdom in these parts that “Ban The Box” (the campaign to make it illegal to ask employees about their criminal records) backfired - unable to tell which minorities were vs. weren’t criminals, employers discriminated against all of them. But a new paper finds that’s not true and it had no effect.

27: Another lab leak debate, this one between author Matt Ridley and virologist Steven Goldstein. Ridley (lab leak) won by 65% to 12% of the audience (I don’t know what the audience believed beforehand). The debate seems strictly worse than the one I covered, so I’m not updating. [Update: it started ~51%-15%, thanks Complaint]

28: When Warren Buffet was just a young early-career businessman, he wanted to join a country club. Although he wasn’t Jewish, he was so angry that his local country club banned Jews that he applied to join the Jewish country club instead. The Jewish country club wasn’t sure they accepted non-Jews, but local rabbi Myer Kripke spoke in Buffett’s favor and he was eventually accepted. Buffett repaid the rabbi’s kindness by helping him invest his money. He turned Rabbi Kripke’s life savings of $70,000, into $25 million, helping the rabbi and his wife become two of America’s leading Jewish philanthropists. Extra bonus facts: Rabbi Kripke was the father of Saul Kripke, sometimes considered the greatest modern philosopher, and the second cousin of Eric Kripke, showrunner for The Boys.

29: Harvard Medical School poll on Americans’ support for polygenic embryo selection. Overwhelming support for selection for serious disease, but 35% support vs. 45% oppose selecting for IQ. The ordering isn’t what I would have guessed either; people are more opposed to selecting for life satisfaction (and baldness!) than for intelligence.

30: Related: geneticist Sasha Gusev has a critique of (existing) polygenic embryo selection. He thinks it has medium ability to select against “threshold” traits like disease (10% reduction by avoiding high-risk embryos, ~50% by choosing the lowest-risk) and (what he describes as) relatively low ability to select along “continuous” traits like IQ (+4 points if you’re lucky, though I know other people working on this who say +6). I think these are the right numbers, but he’s underestimating how much you should want an extra 4-6 IQ points - something I would gladly take over a 50% absolute reduction in hypertension risk or whatever. And I would very gladly take it over the alternative of not doing polygenic screening at all and getting nothing.

31: Well, Harris has finally replaced Biden. Let this be a lesson to all the commenters who told me that the Democratic Party was rudderless and didn’t have enough shadowy elites to enforce obviously-correct actions. What bothers me most about this whole thing was how good some of the reporting right after the debate was - suddenly we had detailed profiles of how many times Biden had slipped up when, who was hiding it from us, which aides were more interested in continuing to deny it vs. coming clean, what their motives were, et cetera. So why didn’t we have it a few months earlier, when it could have done more good? Either the sources refused to talk until it was officially popular to talk about, or the reporters refused to listen until same. Either way, it’s a good reminder that although the media very rarely lies, the impression it gives about any topic depends at least as much on its current popularity as on the ground-level facts.

32: An r/slatestarcodex poster from Argentina describes a ground-level picture of Milei’s reforms:

To answer your question plainly, the living conditions are bad. Everything is expensive and the wages are not keeping up. I run out of money on the 21th day of each month or so, and have to use my credit card for the remaining 9. I haven't eaten cow meat in a while because it's too expensive.. etc. […] Now, according to the people that defend Milei, the growth WILL come. The people that are skeptical about Milei think otherwise. Perhaps an adjustment was needed. But how much activity are you willing to sacrifice for it?

33: List of some top psychiatry Substacks.

34: YouCongress is a platform for liquid democracy polls.

35: Metaculus is running an AI bot forecasting tournament. You write the bot, they provide the questions, best bot wins $30,000 prize. Learn more here.

36: AI-powered browser extension that can flip the political leaning of any site for you.

37: Charles Lehman responds to my posts on mentally ill homeless people: Serious Mental Illness Is An Optimization Problem.

38: Claims:

39: WeAreNotSaved reviews Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy, which reminded me to also check out Ozy Brennan’s excellent review of same. This is interesting enough that I might write a post on it. I think both ignoring/repressing trauma and exaggerating/spotlighting trauma are potentially dangerous, and that someone needs to invent the art of successfully navigating the space between them (I don’t think mainstream psychiatry has this art, though it does have pieces of it).

40: “Z-poetry” is the new genre of poetry supporting the Russian side in the Ukraine war. Konstantin Asimonov tells the story of a group of pro-Ukrainian dissidents who create and boost a fake Z-poet to make a point.

41: The Prophetic Standards Statement is an effort by a group of Christian prophets to ensure that people prophesy responsibly. Signatories “recognize that prophets do not serve as spiritual fortune tellers or prognosticators, nor is their role to satisfy our curiosity about the future or reveal abstract information”. Boring and lame!

The Index Card is a new book by Helaine Olen and Harold Pollack about simple advice for personal finance. The idea for the book came about when Pollack jotted down financial advice that works for almost everyone on a 4x6 index card.

Now, Pollack teams up with Olen to explain why the ten simple rules of the index card outperform more complicated financial strategies. Inside is an easy-to-follow action plan that works in good times and bad, giving you the tools, knowledge, and confidence to seize control of your financial life.

I learned about their book from a piece by Oliver Burkeman on why complex questions can have simple answers.

But there’s a powerful truth here, which is that people dispensing financial advice are even less neutral than we realise. We’re good at spotting the obvious conflicts of interest: of course mortgage providers always think it’s a great time to buy a house; of course the sharp-suited guys from SpeedyMoola.co.uk think their payday loans are good value. But it’s more difficult to see that everyone offering advice has a deeper vested interest: they need you to believe things are complex enough to make their assistance worthwhile. It’s hard to make a living as a financial adviser by handing clients an index card and telling them never to return; and those stock-tipping columns in newspapers would be dull if all they ever said was “ignore stock tips”. Yes, the world of finance is complex, but it doesn’t follow that you need a complex strategy to navigate it.

There’s no reason to assume this situation only occurs with money, either. The human body is another staggeringly complex system, but based on current science, Michael Pollan’s seven-word guidance — “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants” — is probably wiser than all other diets.

Burkeman wrote one of my favorite books from the past year, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.

[This is a vintage post originally from Mar 2016.]

Tags: books · finance · Harold Pollack · Helaine Olen · money · Oliver Burkeman · The Index Card · timeless posts

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