Recent content on Ineffective Theory
For a few years now, I’ve had this vague sense that the U.S. flag is at
half-staff more often than it used to be. This appears to be true. 
 
 This is generated from presidential proclamations downloaded from the federal
register. You can find the CSV I produced by processing this data
 here . Many of these data points could easily be off by a few
days, since much of…
Price discrimination accomplishes: redistribution from rich to poor, without
government intervention, on a strictly voluntary basis, tending to increase
efficiency. What’s not to love? 
 We already accept price discrimination! Coupons famously serve this purpose
(among others), allowing price-sensitive customers to get access to cheaper
groceries while still charging the…
I used to think Schindler’s List a beautiful movie. It’s a story of a man who
is, fundamentally, an outlaw. He has little allegiance to the society around
him; he is immune to the moral zeitgeist of the time; obeying the law is a
matter of practicality, not conscience. He wishes to run a business, but his
talent isn’t business, but -schmoozing- networking.…
(This is all written with low confidence.) 
 The usual story of the Baumol effect—or Baumol’s cost disease for the pessimists—is as follows. Sectors of the economy directly affected by technological progress (historically, anything like high-tech manufacturing) experience strong productivity growth. Other sectors (education, healthcare) experience little or no productivity growth. This…
When a sequence of six digits is chosen at random: 
 
 All digits are distinct 15.12% of the time. 
 The sequence matches ‘x**x**’, ‘*x**x*’, or ‘**x**x’ 9.07% of the time. 
 At least two distinct digits are repeated 28.31% of the time. 
 A digit occurs 3 or more times 15.76% of the time. 
 At least one of the above is true 63.71% of the…
Every once in a while, the topic of peer review (and, usually, why it’s Horrible™) comes up on Hacker News, X, and I guess pretty much everywhere else. Here is a not-so-recent example (it was recent when I first started drafting this post). A typical quote begins: 
 
 Peer review is completely broken nowadays […] 
 
 Obviously, since I’m writing this note, I…
Under many models of voting behavior, elections disproportionately (relative to
present-day demographics) represent the interests of the elderly. This happens
organically, without needing to consider anything like the accumulation of
wealth, social capital, or other relatively “un-democratic” structural factors.
We need only assume that people’s interests are…
I show you a coin, and I tell you “both sides of this coin are heads”. However,
I refuse to give you the coin—for whatever reason, I insist on
demonstrating this fact by repeatedly flipping it. If I’m telling the truth,
it’ll always come up heads. 
 Okay, so I start flipping it, and lo and behold it always comes up heads. I
flip it, say, \(1000\) times,…
Decide who you’re going to vote for years ahead of time. 
 Congratulations! No politician cares what you think about any issue. You have removed your thoughts, desires, interests from the decision-making apparatus of democracy. You are, for all practical purposes, a non-voter. 
 “But I can still vote in primary elections!” Under ordinary circumstances, reasonable…
I don’t maintain anything like a “blogroll”—I imagine there’d be some pressures associated with that—but since I’m no longer doing regular links posts, heres a short list of sites I’ve found to be consistently worth reading over the last year or so. It’s roughly in descending order of how excited I am when I see that something new is available. 
…
There is a strain of thought, common among those who are both technically
literate and policy- or economically minded, that energy production and
consumption underlies the economy in a fundamental way. Energy, in this view,
is afforded status as a special quantity, of greater importance than any
other—possibly including capital. This attitude is
exemplified in Vaclav…
Another plagiarism affair. This time the culprit is the current president of the University of Maryland, where I received both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. These affairs attract a lot of commentary working to obscure the truth, and I’ve complained before about selective silence, so here is my view of the matter. I view most of this as just “stating the obvious”, but…
At least in Julia 1.10 (also 1.9), macros are not compiled. That means that 
 macro m()
 for i in 1 : 1000000 
 # do something 
 end 
 end 
 
 @m 
 can be quite slow. This is analogous to how running code directly from a script, instead of creating a function main() and calling that function at top-level, is not advised. Only code in functions is compiled/optimized,…
Bryan Caplan started it (and seems to have dropped it), and I think it’s a good idea, so here goes. 
 C. S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength . Probably my favorite Lewis book, at least for adults. Like Narnia , clearly has an evangelic thrust towards Lewis’s particular flavor of Christianity. (This will be much more obvious if you’ve read e.g. Screwtape Letters or Mere…
A common sentiment is that trained scientists have an important skill, often called “taste”, which is crucial in identifying worthwhile work. For a recent example see Tim Hwang and Caleb Watney’s most recent piece at Macroscience, which summarizes this view pretty well: 
 
 Scientists will often scoff at traditional metrics like citations or patents because, in their…

 This book is a history of one corner of American politics: the debate, now approaching a century old, over which bits of nuclear information ought to be protected, and how. As politically oriented books go, it’s remarkable for being level-headed. Nuclear secrecy is a naturally emotional topic, particularly in the American context, where views on free expression and distrust of…
New substack and a good interview regarding PEPFAR . Is this replicable today? Is this a story of executive dysfunction or executive triumph? 
 Wellerstein discusses the non-destruction of Kyoto in WWII. A lot of effort to deal with a glib just-so story.
Briefly: if you hear a claim, you heard it for a reason. Someone told it to you! What caused that to happen? Well, it could be something that people like repeating because it’s true, but it could also be getting repeated for other reasons. If you notice that there are non-truth-related reasons for the claim to be repeated (easy to explain; politically convenient; just plain…
Brief context: a prominent paper from 2020 on the origins of SARS-CoV-2 leaned heavily against any sort of “lab leak” hypothesis. As far as I can tell this paper was a significant contributor to the initial dismissal of “lab leak”-style claims as (mis/dis/mal)-information or conspiracy theories. The House of Representatives alleges that the paper was fundamentally…
Paul Graham has an advice post , which is quite good. Zvi said it’s too long. That is incorrect. It should be long. 
 Constructing invalid String objects in Java . Because Java string literals are interned, you can also force all copies of a certain string literal to be interned. 
 Abusing DNS resolution to determine a user’s first name.
Here is the famous paper on atmospheric ignition after a nuclear explosion. Not often mentioned (e.g. by EY ): the article is dated 1946. 
 From RtCD, on psychological health in China . Very American (and later articles posted too).
A couple months ago, I broke my wrist ( triquetral fracture). I wouldn’t recommend it. 
 After a couple weeks, it became clear to me that, combining the actual incident, time spent in urgent care and with other doctors, the effort of taking care of the healing bone correctly, and reduced productivity from stress and all these distractions, I had probably lost the equivalent of 40 hours…
Scott Alexander on sexuality
statistics .
It’s one of those articles that, never mind the actual subject matter, is also a
good read for practice understanding statistics. Oh, and that reminds me . 
 From Tablet, on disinformation . 
 Yassine Meshkout argues that it’s okay (in fact, important) to attack the weaker form of an argument, if that’s the form…
You blow up a balloon, and don’t stop when you should. It pops. 
 Broadly speaking, there are two types of stories you can tell to explain why it popped. In one, a particular nitrogen molecule (imagine me pointing: this one ) inside the balloon had an unusually high velocity when it collided with the rubber surface. This collision was sufficient to sever a nearby hydrogen bond ( that one…
It’s time for a reminder: I put links here because they are enlightening to
read, or at least skim. There is an impressive gap between “enlightening to
read” and “good to believe”. 
 I also leave off links that are in the news too much. Lots of AI stuff keeps
being written, and I’ll link to just about none of it. 
 Vesuvius challenge . 
…
Reading James C. Scott in China’s mountains . 
 Also from China on tech-related trade restrictions (between China and the U.S.): 
 
 We can readily predict that as China’s policy of attracting talent grows
stronger and as those who return to China continue to succeed, American
suspicions of the Chinese who remain in the U.S. will increase, meaning
that the space…
Hanson on modern bandits . 
 Cowen on the Twitter files . Straussian, although of course I’m not sure it was intended that way. 
 Between 1940 and 1962, somewhere between one-third and one-half of adult deaths among the Gebusi in New Guinea were due to homicide. From 1989 to 2017, there were no recorded homicides at all. Buckner details the causes with a focus on economics and…
(I’m writing this so that I can dig it up later when I’ve inevitably
forgotten the trick in half a year.) 
 You want to initialize an \(N \times M\) array in jax . You already have a routine for computing the desired value at index (i,j) . Normally you might use a nested for-loop like so: 
 import jax
 import jax.numpy as jnp
 
 N,M = 8 , 5 # Or whatever 
…
Musings from China on expert failure. 
 There is much qualitative evidence for “democratic backsliding” around the world, but quantitative evidence is harder to come by, even when you’re looking : 
 
 The simplest explanation is that recent declines in average democracy scores are driven by changes in coder bias. 
 
 Cyanide, famously, smells like almonds.…
Hanson on Christmas . 
 Game of Life, recursive . 
 On school closures . 
 Deveraux on the withering of academic history. 
 On Oppenheimer .
Sven Bachmann: On the classification of quantum phases of matter . 
 There was a conference on academic freedom. I particularly recommend the panel with Niall Ferguson, John Cochrane, and Tyler Cowen. A recurrent theme (obvious in retrospect, maybe?) is that academics outsourcing administrative duties has made things much worse. The good news is that this can plausibly be reversed!
Data on (perceptions of) children , broken down by gender and political affiliation. Read plots; ignore text. 
 Data on what squares grandmasters and computers move on . (Bd2 and Be2 are overrated!)
Persistence! . 
 Eleven words . 
 Book review : Gambling on Development. 
 Zvi creates a new MX record, among other things. 
 And, of course, there’s ongoing chess drama . From what I saw, the initial reaction to Magnus’s implicit accusations was overwhelmingly negative. That’s not because the chess world doesn’t like to ban candidates .
PredictIt loses its special status from the CFTC; will most likely be forced to shut down. This seems like it will do real harm to the epistemological environment around politics and elections. To the extent that you’re at all worried about election security and misinformation (rather than “election security” and “misinformation”), the regulation of prediction markets…
Caplan on human smuggling . Note in particular that “smuggling is not a frowned-upon practice among migrant and refugee communities”. 
 Scaling laws for neural language models . 
 Nate Silver and the 2016 election: a story in two parts . 
 Majorana zero modes, redux . A previous claim that Microsoft had observed Majorana zero modes was retracted, but now they’re back!…
Here are two questions on Manifold markets: 
 
 Will there be a federal mask requirement on US domestic flights on November 8, 2022? 
 Will there be a federal mask requirement in place on domestic flights as of Nov. 8, 2022? 
 
 This is the obvious hazard of allowing anyone to create a market—people aren’t always rigorously careful to ensure that they’re not…
Hanson on selection biases for arguments. A closely related principle: hearing a well-thought-out, but ultimately unconvincing, argument for X can often give you more confidence in not-X. 
 Trying to get a robot to correctly interpret your request. I’m far from the first to note this, but Asimov’s concept of “robopsychology” is suddenly incredibly relevant. 
 Zhao…
There’s a standard piece of internet wisdom: don’t talk to the police. The canonical video link, I think, is this one . It’s a lecture by a law professor and former criminal defense attorney, alongside a police officer. The gist of it is usually summarized as “even if you believe you haven’t done anything wrong, never talk to the police—it can only harm”.…
Treat thinkers as a portfolio —that is, don’t look for a single optimum, but instead try to have a broad spread. (Don’t read too much into the “portfolio” metaphor!) 
 In apparent opposition to cold utilitarianism: “short chain justice” . It’s not clear to me that this is in actual opposition. A good utilitarian might be willing to say…
Epistemic note: I am only minimally knowledgable in matters related to cosmology. My impression is that the observation below is “well known to those who know it well”. 
 There’s a standard story of the zero-point energy of the standard model—that is, the energy density of the vacuum state of the standard model. We’re going to try to estimate it from theory, and…
Sometime around 75 BC, Gaius Julius Caesar was kidnapped by pirates who held him for ransom. Supposedly, Caesar was a remarkably chummy captive, going so far as to demand that the pirates ask for a higher ransom, to indicate his true worth. After being freed, Caesar raised a fleet, hunted down the pirates, and had them executed. 
 As far as I can tell, this was not normal behavior for pirate…
Things happen in the world. Zvi does a good job of covering them. Obviously there’s no point in mentioning any of that in a monthly links post. 
 A claim : increase in substance abuse accounts for between one-tenth and one-quarter of the pandemic-era decline in labor force participation rates. 
 Paul Graham’s musings on heresy. Mostly flagellating a deceased equine—but of…
Let’s imagine simulating a lattice field theory on a quantum computer. To
summarize how this works, for the uninitiated: physical space (the thing
we’re simulating) is discretized by a lattice. To each point on this lattice we
associate some number of qubits, which will represent the state of the fields
at and near that point. Then we apply some sequence of quantum…
Very few interesting things happened in the past month. Here is Zvi on some of the less interesting stuff. 
 Information warfare in 2003: an American perspective . 
 “ Whoever created this Rube-Goldberg machine was not as smart as they imagine. ” 
 A game . Great concept, the execution is slightly flawed—don’t click for details, because it may spoil the answer.…
This famous video is a good demonstration of just wide a range of physical sizes objects in our universe span. The same sort of extreme range exists in other contexts: time scales, energies, magnetic field strengths, and so on. These are less amenable to nice videos. Nevertheless, in all these cases, remembering the wide range of available scales is critical for good intuition. You and the Sun are…
The LHC
 performs 
something like one billion proton-proton collisions per second. Of course, this
is an instantaneous rate—sometimes the LHC is shut down. Nevertheless, run 2
of the LHC lasted for about four years. In that time, the LHC performed
something like \(10^{18}\) collisions. The total cost of the LHC, meanwhile,
is on the order of $10 billion, meaning that…
I generally don’t write—at least explicitly—about current events. This one
is close enough to me that I think I should . 
 As reported by Nature: 
 
 “My former student lives in Germany and we still collaborate. She was
informed by her superiors that any contact with Russian scientists would be
strongly discouraged,” says Mikhail Gelfand, a co-organizer of…
There’s an interesting phenomenon where many individually honest people come
together and form a hypocritical group. Take two issues: for instance, support
for disruptive protest, and support for international free trade. Considering
those two issues, our group might be made of: 
 
 Those who oppose free trade, and who think that blocking bridges is an acceptable protest…