Yes, I used to think I was a very smart person, smartest in most rooms I entered. I now realize I had never entered any really smart rooms. I now say publicly and often that Scott Alexander is the smartest person I have ever encountered as well as one the best explainers--and his commenters are often nearly that smart and persuasive as well. It has been humbling to recognize what a truly smart person looks like . . . but also a great blessing.
I've never doubted the existence of people like him, in the abstract, but being in such a milieu and experiencing the salience of the gap between myself and these people is humbling. Speaking of "genius" often triggers a snort, but I'm ready to defend it anyway in this case.
i can't tell if you guys are joking or not. scott is very smart and a truly great writer, but he is still substantially lacking in science and math for this worship.
I'm perfectly serious and I don't know why you think that defining certain people as geniuses causes me to worship them. For the "math" thing, Virginia Woolf was another genius I can name who knew next to nothing about math.
scott being a literary genius i could understand. but scott being a person you would strongly trust on a medical intervention i don't get (i know he is a doctor).
I am so glad to find here a corner to share my adoration of "S.A.S. the essayist" - it is too corny to do so on ACX (and we do not want to embarrass him, right - just humble adulation and veneration).
It's worth emphasizing two things, one about Scott and one about Lumina:
1. "Critique" is in a sense too strong a word for my thoughts on Scott. I think he's chosen a role that suits him and does incredibly good work in that role; my interest in writing that was in sketching out why it strikes me as a consciously chosen role and the tradeoff and sense of wistfulness inherent in it. Standing above the fray has benefits, but it also means he started a crescendo in ~2014 in a symphony he has of yet not precisely finished. "Takes Scott Alexander seriously" is the common thread among the great majority of thinkers I enjoy and my own intellectual journey was both heavily within communities his work spawned and heavily inspired by his work; however he chooses to take his path, I'm very glad he's taking it.
2. On Lumina in particular, while I have sounded my own excitement as well (https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1778632308334993484) I do want to pair it with a note of caution, inspired in part by a mutual friend. The people taking it right now are the clinical trials, and trials do exist for a reason. Many things that sound plausible and good in vacuums do not work in vacuums, and the notes I'm hearing from people with reason to know are basically "We'll see."
My current model is this:
The company is good and well-intentioned. They found something cool and ignored and figured it would be worth giving a serious shot at.
Scott, and the others who have promoted it, are good and well-intentioned. Everyone's excited about the magic mouth bacteria that make people not have cavities.
Lumina has been the subject of an incredibly effective advertising blitz tailored perfectly to appeal to people in this general Sphere.
Clinical trials exist for reasons beyond sheer bureaucratic tedium. There are many unknowns remaining.
Putting these all together, my current impression is that it's a low-cost, high-potential-upside intervention on an individual level that the company is doing a service in providing, but I'm wary of aiding a consensus impression that it's a miracle product while hard data remains so sparse. It's cool, it's fun, I'm hyped like everyone else, but I don't want everyone to get ahead of the evidence for pure trust-network reasons.
“Putting these all together, my current impression is that it's a low-cost, high-potential-upside intervention on an individual level”
Exactly my view. I think 50% in the piece might’ve been too high of an estimate, I go back and forth on it. But I trust the rationalists enough to believe they haven’t missed some catastrophic tail end risk, and it’s worth trying. If it ended up you had to reapply it twice a year it would still be a miracle product, and more affordable than standard dental care. It’s just brushing your teeth!
>"But I trust the rationalists enough to believe they haven’t missed some catastrophic tail end risk"
Um, what? You know where Sam Bankman-Fried came from right? I'm not saying this as a gotcha; I love the Rationalists too, but the ideology is very much "high variance." I would have been a lot more interested in the product before FTX.
Scott's post reminds me a lot about his totally-not-an-endorsement of Carrick Flynn. On his face, he was a pretty reasonable candidate. He *probably* would have been fine, but it was in fact a pretty big missed tail risk that he would have been a lackey of the biggest fraud since Madoff.
If the treatment had catastrophic tail risks the rationalists would be the first to notice it. They might still go ahead with it when the average person wouldn’t. But the fact that they haven’t found any is a good heuristic.
In my experience risk is never noticed until it happens. I've seen too many things go wrong in ways that make you say "I didn't even know that *could* happen"
Not at all. Rationalists are excellent at nickle-diming risks based on "available evidence", but no better, and possibly worse than everyone else in imagining possible tail risks.
I would take lumina right away except for one thing - I seem to have finally conquered my cavity problem (and it has been a serious problem most of my life). Whatever I'm doing now has clearly worked so it is not worth the risk of early adoption.
Scott Alexander is utterly wrong on pediatric transgenderism. An example of his writing on the topic (from August 2023):
"The effects of birth-sex puberty are irreversible and will make it much harder to transition in the future. The effects of puberty-blockers are mostly reversible, and preserve the option to either transition or return to birth-sex in the future. Like all drugs there are potential side effects, some of which are irreversible, but in the case of puberty blockers these seem mild and comparable to other psychiatric interventions. I think the precautionary principle supports having confused children who don’t know what they want do the reversible rather than the irreversible thing."
The fact that he thinks puberty blockers are essentially harmless tells me a lot about his risk tolerance mindset. The extreme tail risk here seems obvious to me and Scott seems to have blinders on, not even acknowledging that "blocking puberty" might effect the rest of your adult life.
What a true high IQ trustworthy super duper smart "rational" guy. Boy I sure am glad I have people like him to listen to instead of my stupid conservative uncle who thinks puberty blockers for children are bad.
Alexander should have known. From a comment on the post that I cited:
"If the use of puberty blockers are more beneficial than harmful, why did Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the UK rethink their use?"
Alexander replied: "I haven't looked into this, but my prior is that it's because Europeans are hopeless communist nanny-staters who ban anything cool on general instinct. Cf. melatonin, GPT-4."
He hasn't looked into it??? But he'll make authoritative comments anyway.
Alexander and his fellow "rationalists" (eg Eliezer Yudkowski) have been down the trans rabbit hole for some time. It proves they are not immune to biases, no matter how much they praise themselves.
Not the first time he's forgotten material posted to his own blog, although given the volume that's understandable and I read him anyway. On his last post I got into a debate with him where he revealed he'd forgotten the original justifications for lockdowns ("flatten the curve"), despite writing a whole section with that title in a post about lockdowns just a few years ago. He's now decided COVID didn't leak from a lab after all because he watched a supposedly rationalist debate in which the winner admitted making up totally fake probability calculations!
Scott is smart, interesting and relatively humble given that smartness, but the span isn't that wide. He's a bit like Richard in that regard: regularly wrong about some key things that he thinks he reasoned his way into, but reason isn't that reliable.
I absolutely love Scott's writing and trust him immensely too, but I think you might be trusting him a bit too much here. He says himself in his post on it,
>[Conflict of interest notice: Lantern is mostly rationalists and includes some friends. My wife consulted for them early on. They offered my wife and me free samples (based on her work, not as compensation for writing this post); she accepted, and I’m still debating. Consider this an attempt to spotlight interesting work that people I like are doing, not a hard-hitting investigation.]
If Scott did do one of his hard hitting investigations, and came to the conclusion it was a trust worthy product you should have high hopes for, that would be the ultimate endorsement in my eyes. But it's not that, it's as he said, it's him highlighting work personal friends have done. And Scott's been very open about how the opinions of others, especially those he is close to, have a strong impact on him. Not enough that it'd make him outright lie, I hope, but probably enough that he's not digging deep into all the ways mouth bacteria could go wrong like he might if total strangers created the product.
I don't have any particular reason to think the mouth bacteria project will go wrong, and certainly no reason to think it'd go disastrously wrong and cause a super-spreading contagion that ruins everyone's biome forever like you'd assume the FDA fears judging by their standards. But, I am very happy to not be among the first people trialing the product, and will gladly wait a few years to see if it actually works and whether it has side effects.
Scott wasn’t rational enough to consider the real possibility that not enough is known about the oral microbiome to guarantee this won’t have terrible consequences in some people. Please read why some people consider this to be bordering on fraudulent: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38565695
The prime drive of Elite Human Capital 💯 is to front-run itself, but it's hard to front-run one of its apex paladins such as Scott Alexander, so we merely follow.
Scott writes a lot of good posts, and I think it's okay to privately assign some blind trust to him, but to explicitly announce that you do that and extol the virtues of doing so, at length, seems dangerous.
In general I'm not a huge fan of things that are okay to do but not to talk about, but in this case my point is that if people do trust Scott more as a result of this post, it's going through *two* layers of indirection - "I'm following Scott off a cliff because he told me to and I trust him, and I trust Scott because Richard Hanania told me to and I trust *him*"
And I'm claiming that part of rationality is minimizing the number of layers like that, and maximizing object-level understanding of why to do something.
(In particular I'm quite worried about the branch of possibility where EAs start feeling pressure to donate a kidney to demonstrate their commitment to EA. At that point we really are an organ-harvesting cult.)
(if you're confused about that last bit - Scott and a few other high-profile EAs have donated kidneys on EA grounds and written posts about it. Most, including Scott, were careful to avoid explicitly pressuring people about this, but (1) it's the sort of thing that could snowball and (2) many people will feel social pressure even if people explicitly tell them there's no pressure)
I know this isn't the primary crux of the article but your point about the free marketers being at the table with the rest of the conservative movement; in not sure you're right about that
The people pushing things like YIMBYism, permitting reform, increasing immigration- the biggest free market reforms necessary in our day in age- are people like Matt Ygllesias and Noah Smith. That is to say moderate democrats.
Meanwhile the future of the republican party is Ron DeSantis outlawing lab grown meat because it's ick.
My number one priority is likewise free markets but I'm not convinced the way to achieve that is supporting the current iteration of the GOP
Perhaps today, but the housing they build is usually restricted to highly regulated suburban sprawl
My feeling is that it'd be best to throw my money behind moderate democrats who explicitly support these policies
I'm open to supporting down the ballot Republicans on a case by case basis; but to me it looks like the current situation is just red states with a legacy of reaganism can build and blue states with a history of CEQAism (ironically also reagan) can't. That doesn't mean that today's politicians are more pro market.
I'm just not convinced that Trump is more likely to push through any of the things I listed above than Biden. It seems more likely to me that it will come from a Joe Manchin type than a Ron DeSantis. Hochul and Adam's have been beating a fairly YIMBY beat recently, Minneapolis has seen much success as well. I don't know of any GOP legislation that has been improving the ease of building
How can someone claim to be rational when they use words like this?
“But we’ve also seen their critics — MAGAs, tankies, the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Putinists and other kinds of third world fetishists, etc — and realized that they’re no less crazy, just less powerful.”
I’ve posted many, many times about this on Twitter, always evidence-based. This is not about Trump, nor is it about his post-election behavior.
I was a professional pollster and political scientist for many years and I am quite familiar with the FACT that American elections are frequently stolen. Both parties do it when they can get away with it, although for structural reasons it is easier for Democrats (just as for the same structural reasons it is easier for Republicans to gain partisan advantage by gerrymandering but both parties do it when they can).
I really recommend you collect evidence of this claim and prove it in the courts, or at least write a book about it. As of now the only book I am aware of that tries to make the case for any game-changing election fraud is 2000 mules
If you weren't right (and obviously so) we'd be able to fully audit elections. You know, like anywhere in the world that uses paper ballots with fingerprints and ID can.
I'm skeptical, and would place this on the same level as a supplement. There's a good biological model to support it working, but no human data right now?
Infecting myself with magical bacteria is a bit over the line for me. Unless you know you're very prone to cavities and they're plaguing your life (I don't know any such person IRL in our generation) I don't know why you'd do that except that it sounds cool : the upside appears very limited?
When you talk about right-wingers, I think you're missing the main reason why they are right.
They have excellent intuitions about ancient evolutionary problems. If you talk to a right-winger about vaccines, he will say terrible nonsense. But if you talk to a right-winger about how to eliminate jihadism, he will speak to the point, because he is well acquainted with the pre-modern world of jihadism and barbarism. He has an evolutionary memory.
A rational person will understand how important the trial and error of evolution are and will listen to right-wing people to get information from their evolutionary memory. The evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a lot about this.
I guess, but they're also very bad at assessing risk. So Israel today is actually threatened by jihadis, which meant conservatism is useful, while America really just was unlucky on 9/11, and their instincts ended up being wrong. Same with the border today, where conservatives are consistently ranting about terrorists sneaking into the country, which appears to be a complete fantasy.
I mentioned Chinese buying farmland, which I guess makes evolutionary sense but is so incredibly retarded today that it drives me crazy.
I agree about the right assessing risk but the right can at least identify risks. The left can't even do that as the only risks they see is climate change or letting right wingers talk to much online.
I have just read a text of an Israeli left-wing writer, Moti Gigi, from 2016:
"While we were sitting in one of the public gardens, a white woman about 60 years old approached us and asked for a cigarette. We gave her one, and she asked where we were from. "From Israel," we replied. The conversation evolved, and she asked us who we supported in the upcoming elections. We answered that it didn't matter much to us since we don't have the right to vote, but we hoped for their sake that Trump wouldn't win. She immediately responded that the USA needed Trump to win. "You in Israel," she said, "even though you have many terror events, you are protected. Everyone has guns." We tried to explain to her that it's not the case and that not everyone can carry a weapon, and in fact, most people do not carry weapons and one needs a license for it. She really didn't believe us and said that in any case, Trump needs to win so that everyone here can have guns and we can protect ourselves. "The situation here is terrible," she said, "all because of Obama who let 200,000 Muslims enter and gave them citizenship. Everyone needs to have a weapon so we can shoot all the Daesh people around here."
So maybe this woman was right after all. October 7 could have been less catastrophic with second-amendment culture. Evolutionary wisdom.
Very good - Scott Alexander is always worth taking seriously. Keep us posted on the cavities - this is a really exciting development (I did read some of the literature on the product).
Yes, I used to think I was a very smart person, smartest in most rooms I entered. I now realize I had never entered any really smart rooms. I now say publicly and often that Scott Alexander is the smartest person I have ever encountered as well as one the best explainers--and his commenters are often nearly that smart and persuasive as well. It has been humbling to recognize what a truly smart person looks like . . . but also a great blessing.
I've never doubted the existence of people like him, in the abstract, but being in such a milieu and experiencing the salience of the gap between myself and these people is humbling. Speaking of "genius" often triggers a snort, but I'm ready to defend it anyway in this case.
i can't tell if you guys are joking or not. scott is very smart and a truly great writer, but he is still substantially lacking in science and math for this worship.
I'm perfectly serious and I don't know why you think that defining certain people as geniuses causes me to worship them. For the "math" thing, Virginia Woolf was another genius I can name who knew next to nothing about math.
scott being a literary genius i could understand. but scott being a person you would strongly trust on a medical intervention i don't get (i know he is a doctor).
He doesn't go around suggestion random medical interventions.
So if he does suggest something, that's still a strong signal.
I am so glad to find here a corner to share my adoration of "S.A.S. the essayist" - it is too corny to do so on ACX (and we do not want to embarrass him, right - just humble adulation and veneration).
I dunno. I think he's an excellent analyzer and writer. He's probably terrible at keeping his home tidy.
And why does that matter?
A virtuous person need not be beautiful; a brilliant thinker need not be neat.
His writing has shaped my thinking. That's sufficient reason for veneration and adulation.
It doesn't matter to Scott the writer, but if someone is idolizing him it's good to mention his humanity
Hear, hear.
It's worth emphasizing two things, one about Scott and one about Lumina:
1. "Critique" is in a sense too strong a word for my thoughts on Scott. I think he's chosen a role that suits him and does incredibly good work in that role; my interest in writing that was in sketching out why it strikes me as a consciously chosen role and the tradeoff and sense of wistfulness inherent in it. Standing above the fray has benefits, but it also means he started a crescendo in ~2014 in a symphony he has of yet not precisely finished. "Takes Scott Alexander seriously" is the common thread among the great majority of thinkers I enjoy and my own intellectual journey was both heavily within communities his work spawned and heavily inspired by his work; however he chooses to take his path, I'm very glad he's taking it.
2. On Lumina in particular, while I have sounded my own excitement as well (https://x.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1778632308334993484) I do want to pair it with a note of caution, inspired in part by a mutual friend. The people taking it right now are the clinical trials, and trials do exist for a reason. Many things that sound plausible and good in vacuums do not work in vacuums, and the notes I'm hearing from people with reason to know are basically "We'll see."
My current model is this:
The company is good and well-intentioned. They found something cool and ignored and figured it would be worth giving a serious shot at.
Scott, and the others who have promoted it, are good and well-intentioned. Everyone's excited about the magic mouth bacteria that make people not have cavities.
Lumina has been the subject of an incredibly effective advertising blitz tailored perfectly to appeal to people in this general Sphere.
Clinical trials exist for reasons beyond sheer bureaucratic tedium. There are many unknowns remaining.
Putting these all together, my current impression is that it's a low-cost, high-potential-upside intervention on an individual level that the company is doing a service in providing, but I'm wary of aiding a consensus impression that it's a miracle product while hard data remains so sparse. It's cool, it's fun, I'm hyped like everyone else, but I don't want everyone to get ahead of the evidence for pure trust-network reasons.
“Putting these all together, my current impression is that it's a low-cost, high-potential-upside intervention on an individual level”
Exactly my view. I think 50% in the piece might’ve been too high of an estimate, I go back and forth on it. But I trust the rationalists enough to believe they haven’t missed some catastrophic tail end risk, and it’s worth trying. If it ended up you had to reapply it twice a year it would still be a miracle product, and more affordable than standard dental care. It’s just brushing your teeth!
>"But I trust the rationalists enough to believe they haven’t missed some catastrophic tail end risk"
Um, what? You know where Sam Bankman-Fried came from right? I'm not saying this as a gotcha; I love the Rationalists too, but the ideology is very much "high variance." I would have been a lot more interested in the product before FTX.
Scott's post reminds me a lot about his totally-not-an-endorsement of Carrick Flynn. On his face, he was a pretty reasonable candidate. He *probably* would have been fine, but it was in fact a pretty big missed tail risk that he would have been a lackey of the biggest fraud since Madoff.
If the treatment had catastrophic tail risks the rationalists would be the first to notice it. They might still go ahead with it when the average person wouldn’t. But the fact that they haven’t found any is a good heuristic.
In my experience risk is never noticed until it happens. I've seen too many things go wrong in ways that make you say "I didn't even know that *could* happen"
Not at all. Rationalists are excellent at nickle-diming risks based on "available evidence", but no better, and possibly worse than everyone else in imagining possible tail risks.
I would take lumina right away except for one thing - I seem to have finally conquered my cavity problem (and it has been a serious problem most of my life). Whatever I'm doing now has clearly worked so it is not worth the risk of early adoption.
What are you doing now?
Finding Slate Star Codex 10 years ago or so was a mental life changer for me.
Pro: It's made me a much better thinker.
Con: I can't have a normal conversation anymore.
Scott Alexander is utterly wrong on pediatric transgenderism. An example of his writing on the topic (from August 2023):
"The effects of birth-sex puberty are irreversible and will make it much harder to transition in the future. The effects of puberty-blockers are mostly reversible, and preserve the option to either transition or return to birth-sex in the future. Like all drugs there are potential side effects, some of which are irreversible, but in the case of puberty blockers these seem mild and comparable to other psychiatric interventions. I think the precautionary principle supports having confused children who don’t know what they want do the reversible rather than the irreversible thing."
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-fetishes#§comments-that-were-very-angry-about-my-introductory-paragraph
I thought that article was dishonest and cowardly, and said so in the comments.
The fact that he thinks puberty blockers are essentially harmless tells me a lot about his risk tolerance mindset. The extreme tail risk here seems obvious to me and Scott seems to have blinders on, not even acknowledging that "blocking puberty" might effect the rest of your adult life.
What a true high IQ trustworthy super duper smart "rational" guy. Boy I sure am glad I have people like him to listen to instead of my stupid conservative uncle who thinks puberty blockers for children are bad.
Wow that’s revolting
What's your counter argument?
Very thorough report summarizing what has been known for a long time: https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-report/
Alexander should have known. From a comment on the post that I cited:
"If the use of puberty blockers are more beneficial than harmful, why did Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the UK rethink their use?"
Alexander replied: "I haven't looked into this, but my prior is that it's because Europeans are hopeless communist nanny-staters who ban anything cool on general instinct. Cf. melatonin, GPT-4."
He hasn't looked into it??? But he'll make authoritative comments anyway.
In 2018, this was guest-posted on his prior site, slatestarcodex: "Puberty blockers, though reportedly safe, may have unintended medical consequences based on a review of studies. Studies show effects on bone growth and density." https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/08/acc-entry-should-transgender-children-transition/
I guess he didn't read his own site.
Alexander and his fellow "rationalists" (eg Eliezer Yudkowski) have been down the trans rabbit hole for some time. It proves they are not immune to biases, no matter how much they praise themselves.
Not the first time he's forgotten material posted to his own blog, although given the volume that's understandable and I read him anyway. On his last post I got into a debate with him where he revealed he'd forgotten the original justifications for lockdowns ("flatten the curve"), despite writing a whole section with that title in a post about lockdowns just a few years ago. He's now decided COVID didn't leak from a lab after all because he watched a supposedly rationalist debate in which the winner admitted making up totally fake probability calculations!
Scott is smart, interesting and relatively humble given that smartness, but the span isn't that wide. He's a bit like Richard in that regard: regularly wrong about some key things that he thinks he reasoned his way into, but reason isn't that reliable.
Just to be clear, since I'm not a scientist, is there anything beyond effects on bone growth and density that are not reversible?
I absolutely love Scott's writing and trust him immensely too, but I think you might be trusting him a bit too much here. He says himself in his post on it,
>[Conflict of interest notice: Lantern is mostly rationalists and includes some friends. My wife consulted for them early on. They offered my wife and me free samples (based on her work, not as compensation for writing this post); she accepted, and I’m still debating. Consider this an attempt to spotlight interesting work that people I like are doing, not a hard-hitting investigation.]
If Scott did do one of his hard hitting investigations, and came to the conclusion it was a trust worthy product you should have high hopes for, that would be the ultimate endorsement in my eyes. But it's not that, it's as he said, it's him highlighting work personal friends have done. And Scott's been very open about how the opinions of others, especially those he is close to, have a strong impact on him. Not enough that it'd make him outright lie, I hope, but probably enough that he's not digging deep into all the ways mouth bacteria could go wrong like he might if total strangers created the product.
I don't have any particular reason to think the mouth bacteria project will go wrong, and certainly no reason to think it'd go disastrously wrong and cause a super-spreading contagion that ruins everyone's biome forever like you'd assume the FDA fears judging by their standards. But, I am very happy to not be among the first people trialing the product, and will gladly wait a few years to see if it actually works and whether it has side effects.
Scott wasn’t rational enough to consider the real possibility that not enough is known about the oral microbiome to guarantee this won’t have terrible consequences in some people. Please read why some people consider this to be bordering on fraudulent: (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38565695
The prime drive of Elite Human Capital 💯 is to front-run itself, but it's hard to front-run one of its apex paladins such as Scott Alexander, so we merely follow.
This post seems honestly a bit dangerous to me.
Scott writes a lot of good posts, and I think it's okay to privately assign some blind trust to him, but to explicitly announce that you do that and extol the virtues of doing so, at length, seems dangerous.
In general I'm not a huge fan of things that are okay to do but not to talk about, but in this case my point is that if people do trust Scott more as a result of this post, it's going through *two* layers of indirection - "I'm following Scott off a cliff because he told me to and I trust him, and I trust Scott because Richard Hanania told me to and I trust *him*"
And I'm claiming that part of rationality is minimizing the number of layers like that, and maximizing object-level understanding of why to do something.
(In particular I'm quite worried about the branch of possibility where EAs start feeling pressure to donate a kidney to demonstrate their commitment to EA. At that point we really are an organ-harvesting cult.)
(if you're confused about that last bit - Scott and a few other high-profile EAs have donated kidneys on EA grounds and written posts about it. Most, including Scott, were careful to avoid explicitly pressuring people about this, but (1) it's the sort of thing that could snowball and (2) many people will feel social pressure even if people explicitly tell them there's no pressure)
I know this isn't the primary crux of the article but your point about the free marketers being at the table with the rest of the conservative movement; in not sure you're right about that
The people pushing things like YIMBYism, permitting reform, increasing immigration- the biggest free market reforms necessary in our day in age- are people like Matt Ygllesias and Noah Smith. That is to say moderate democrats.
Meanwhile the future of the republican party is Ron DeSantis outlawing lab grown meat because it's ick.
My number one priority is likewise free markets but I'm not convinced the way to achieve that is supporting the current iteration of the GOP
Well even Yglesias and Klein admit Republican states are better at building housing in practice.
Perhaps today, but the housing they build is usually restricted to highly regulated suburban sprawl
My feeling is that it'd be best to throw my money behind moderate democrats who explicitly support these policies
I'm open to supporting down the ballot Republicans on a case by case basis; but to me it looks like the current situation is just red states with a legacy of reaganism can build and blue states with a history of CEQAism (ironically also reagan) can't. That doesn't mean that today's politicians are more pro market.
I'm just not convinced that Trump is more likely to push through any of the things I listed above than Biden. It seems more likely to me that it will come from a Joe Manchin type than a Ron DeSantis. Hochul and Adam's have been beating a fairly YIMBY beat recently, Minneapolis has seen much success as well. I don't know of any GOP legislation that has been improving the ease of building
How can someone claim to be rational when they use words like this?
“But we’ve also seen their critics — MAGAs, tankies, the “Intellectual Dark Web,” Putinists and other kinds of third world fetishists, etc — and realized that they’re no less crazy, just less powerful.”
I’ve posted many, many times about this on Twitter, always evidence-based. This is not about Trump, nor is it about his post-election behavior.
I was a professional pollster and political scientist for many years and I am quite familiar with the FACT that American elections are frequently stolen. Both parties do it when they can get away with it, although for structural reasons it is easier for Democrats (just as for the same structural reasons it is easier for Republicans to gain partisan advantage by gerrymandering but both parties do it when they can).
I really recommend you collect evidence of this claim and prove it in the courts, or at least write a book about it. As of now the only book I am aware of that tries to make the case for any game-changing election fraud is 2000 mules
If you weren't right (and obviously so) we'd be able to fully audit elections. You know, like anywhere in the world that uses paper ballots with fingerprints and ID can.
As I mentioned in a reply to your tweet promoting this I’m surprised Scott Alexander wants his photo out there. Maybe times have changed?
What's the NYT going to do, dox him again?
I'm skeptical, and would place this on the same level as a supplement. There's a good biological model to support it working, but no human data right now?
See here
https://twitter.com/salonium/status/1778393370383065350
This sounds fine for low-stakes stuff.
Infecting myself with magical bacteria is a bit over the line for me. Unless you know you're very prone to cavities and they're plaguing your life (I don't know any such person IRL in our generation) I don't know why you'd do that except that it sounds cool : the upside appears very limited?
Meanwhile there are always unknown unknowns.
When you talk about right-wingers, I think you're missing the main reason why they are right.
They have excellent intuitions about ancient evolutionary problems. If you talk to a right-winger about vaccines, he will say terrible nonsense. But if you talk to a right-winger about how to eliminate jihadism, he will speak to the point, because he is well acquainted with the pre-modern world of jihadism and barbarism. He has an evolutionary memory.
A rational person will understand how important the trial and error of evolution are and will listen to right-wing people to get information from their evolutionary memory. The evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa wrote a lot about this.
I guess, but they're also very bad at assessing risk. So Israel today is actually threatened by jihadis, which meant conservatism is useful, while America really just was unlucky on 9/11, and their instincts ended up being wrong. Same with the border today, where conservatives are consistently ranting about terrorists sneaking into the country, which appears to be a complete fantasy.
I mentioned Chinese buying farmland, which I guess makes evolutionary sense but is so incredibly retarded today that it drives me crazy.
I agree about the right assessing risk but the right can at least identify risks. The left can't even do that as the only risks they see is climate change or letting right wingers talk to much online.
I have just read a text of an Israeli left-wing writer, Moti Gigi, from 2016:
"While we were sitting in one of the public gardens, a white woman about 60 years old approached us and asked for a cigarette. We gave her one, and she asked where we were from. "From Israel," we replied. The conversation evolved, and she asked us who we supported in the upcoming elections. We answered that it didn't matter much to us since we don't have the right to vote, but we hoped for their sake that Trump wouldn't win. She immediately responded that the USA needed Trump to win. "You in Israel," she said, "even though you have many terror events, you are protected. Everyone has guns." We tried to explain to her that it's not the case and that not everyone can carry a weapon, and in fact, most people do not carry weapons and one needs a license for it. She really didn't believe us and said that in any case, Trump needs to win so that everyone here can have guns and we can protect ourselves. "The situation here is terrible," she said, "all because of Obama who let 200,000 Muslims enter and gave them citizenship. Everyone needs to have a weapon so we can shoot all the Daesh people around here."
So maybe this woman was right after all. October 7 could have been less catastrophic with second-amendment culture. Evolutionary wisdom.
Very good - Scott Alexander is always worth taking seriously. Keep us posted on the cavities - this is a really exciting development (I did read some of the literature on the product).