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Stuff I found interesting in October

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Stuff I found interesting in October

Sam Atis
Nov 2, 2022
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Stuff I found interesting in October

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1) FDB on the odd claim that Kanye West’s recent behaviour could not be caused by his mental illness:

There’s a meme that’s arisen in the past few years, found prominently on social media: “mental illness doesn’t do that.” It’s a declaration that a given figure must not be given any special consideration, when weighing their behavior, due to their potential psychiatric disorders.

EDIT: an interesting follow-up:

For years now, the severely ill have been pushed further and further into the backseat of the public discourse about mental illness. With the new insistence that mentally ill people never do anything really bad, that process is complete; those who suffer the least from mental illness now blot out the sun.

2) Dwarkesh Patel interviews Tyler Cowen. Sorry for sharing so many Tyler interviews on these links round-ups, I just can’t help myself! And this one is especially good. Dwarkesh’s interviews are almost always fantastic listening.

3) Why did a vase valued at $2000 end up selling for $8 million? The answer given in this article is not particularly satisfactory:

Cédric Laborde, the director of the auction house’s Asian arts department, is still not entirely convinced the expert was wrong. “We don’t know whether it [the vase] is old or not or why it sold for such a price. Perhaps we will never know,” Laborde said.

4) I guess you may have seen it already, but Elon in Lunch with the FT is worth reading. BONUS/EDIT (full article here):

Twitter avatar for @brosandprose
ella dawson @brosandprose
screaming at elon musk trying to befriend nathan fielder
a quote from the new york times: "Mr. Musk has, in particular, pursued a friendship with one comedian whose public image revolves around the outrageous steps he takes to relate to other people: Nathan Fielder, who first became famous for his Comedy Central show “Nathan For You,” which turned a series of preposterous business ideas, including excrement-flavored frozen yogurt and athletic apparel dedicated to raising Holocaust awareness, into the definitive parody of modern American entrepreneurship.

Mr. Musk — a huge fan — invited Mr. Fielder to lunch at SpaceX in 2016."
a quote from the new york times: "For years afterward, the famous businessman invited the famous fake businessman to his parties and would strain to make the deadpan Canadian laugh."
4:14 PM ∙ Oct 11, 2022
7,471Likes386Retweets

5) Friend of the blog Peter McLaughlin with an amazing post giving his thoughts on the train to crazy town:

In other words, it’s not clear how anyone actually gets off the train to crazy town. Once you allow even a little bit of utilitarianism in, the unpalatable consequences follow immediately. The train might be an express service: once the doors close behind you, you can’t get off until the end of the line.

EDIT: Tom Chivers also wrote an interesting piece on this. There’s also a fun back and forth between Peter and Tom you can find if you click through here:

Twitter avatar for @ptr_mcl
Peter McLaughlin @ptr_mcl
@TomChivers (thank you for the mention!:) presumably the argument, charitably interpreted, is that Effective Altruism has failed - quite substantially - to say where exactly *it* gets off utilitarianism...
5:36 PM ∙ Oct 13, 2022

6) A book by Karoline Kan, Under Red Skies, was among the best I’ve read recently. It’s the memoir of a Chinese woman born during Tiananmen Square. I must say though, I’m generally a bit of a sucker for this kind of writing, so I’m not sure how reliable my judgement is here. Get it and tell me!

7) I only just got round to watching Boiling Point on Netflix, which I loved. It has a bit of a university play feel, and the one-shot thing is a bit of a gimmick, but it’s still very much worth your time.

8) As I’ve already doxxed myself through posting the Guardian article I wrote in the last links round-up, I may as well mention that you ought to go and check on my grandfather Jonathan Glover’s philosophy website. It’s one of my favourite sites to go and browse now and then. I especially enjoy the ‘bits and pieces’ and ‘travesties and encounters’ sections.

9) Friend of the blog Lawrence Newport writes that EA should emulate Quakerism.

10) Stephen Bush asks whether it matters who plays Stephen Bush on stage [paywalled]:

Is it necessary for an actor to be mixed race to play Stephen Bush? It’s not a question that I ever expected to have to answer, but a couple of months ago I received a phone call from Jonathan Freedland, whose verbatim play, Jews. In Their Own Words, features me as a character. The production wanted an all-Jewish cast but the Royal Court was struggling to find a mixed-race Jewish actor. Would I mind terribly if a Jewish actor who was not mixed race filled the part?

11) I’ll probably be buying the Amazon Kindle Scribe as a replacement for my ReMarkable 2. As far as I can tell, the Kindle scribe has a backlight, and I’ve always hated that the ReMarkable doesn’t. Possibly of interest to those who read a lot of academic papers. Note: this is NOT a referral link and I don’t benefit from sharing this in any way, I’m genuinely excited about this product.

12) I’m surprised there hasn’t been more discussion about the talks between MacAskill, SBF, and Musk in the EA community. Here’s an NYT article, and here’s a relevant snippet:

13) I wonder:

Twitter avatar for @sam_atis
Sam Atis @sam_atis
Imagine you're a star columnist at a major publication who is basically subsidising other writers at the publication. What's the main reason for staying rather than making £££ on Substack? Status? Enjoying the culture of [publication]? Altruism? Status quo bias? Something else?
7:46 PM ∙ Oct 10, 2022
36Likes2Retweets

14) Report from SMF’s Aveek Bhattacharya on signalling vs. human capital in education.

15) Apollo Academic Surveys did my idea (see tweet below). Of course, I can’t quite claim credit for this idea as my idea was just ‘copy what IGM does’, but still! I’m excited about this, here are some of their first surveys of experts on nutrition.

Twitter avatar for @sam_atis
Sam Atis @sam_atis
Why don't more social scientists have something comparable to the IGM Economic Experts panel? Something like this for political scientists would be very cool.
6:56 PM ∙ Jan 26, 2022

16) Sam Kriss has started a Substack (h/t ACX).

17) Bostrom’s claim that he set a national undergraduate record in Sweden is… odd.

18) Apparently Mormons can identify other Mormons from a simple headshot with nothing that would obviously mark them out as Mormon. Apparently it’s something to do with skin texture? (H/T an ooooold SSC post).

19) Aaron Bergman’s ‘stuff I buy and use’.

20) This Musk documentary on BBC was great. Disclaimer - my uncle was involved in its creation, but I’m pretty sure I would’ve linked to this even if he hadn’t been.

21) Dynomight on why conditional prediction markets do not imply causation. If you’re not interested in forecasting maybe don’t bother, but if you are interested in forecasting it’s a must-read. Important for futarchy.

22) Natália Coelho is extremely underrated:

Twitter avatar for @natalia__coelho
Natália 🔍 @natalia__coelho
A pet peeve of mine is when a single, never-replicated study with a dubious methodology somehow gets its bold findings repeated over and over for years on the blogosphere and Twitter as if they were settled facts.
8:06 PM ∙ Oct 10, 2022
94Likes5Retweets

23)

Twitter avatar for @m_clem
Michael Clemens @m_clem
In 1997, parts of the Philippines suddenly got more remittances due to exchange-rate shocks. 10yrs later their incomes were still much higher, mostly due to more domestic income (!): new business, more schooling. By @econgaurav @ctheoharides @deanyang —> amherst.edu/system/files/k…
Image
Image
11:40 AM ∙ Feb 27, 2021
101Likes17Retweets

24) Interesting criticism of EA from some non-EAs who went to EAGxBerlin.

25) There’s a new media site called Semafor that looks interesting, but it’s very annoying that they put random sentences in bold. Tom Chivers has a newsletter called Flagship that is worth checking out.

26) ‘My experience experimenting with a bunch of antidepressants I'd never heard of’.

27) Is gatekeeping good, actually?

28) Chris Hanretty on abortion opinion in the UK.

29) Thread:

Twitter avatar for @s8mb
Sam Bowman 🇺🇦 @s8mb
This govt has obviously been disastrous and I feel chastened for supporting it. I think Truss was right that the UK’s core problem is chronically low economic growth, but the “solutions” of front-loaded tax cuts funded by borrowing, and a blank cheque on energy prices were bad.
2:15 PM ∙ Oct 20, 2022
104Likes18Retweets

30) Future Perfect 50.

31) Old interview - Boris on Letterman:

32) Forgot about this old take down of Steve Hilton in the Guardian, worth your time.

33) Don’t buy a house.

34) Video about the Headington Shark:

35) Why do people cheat at wordle? (h/t MR):

We find that cheating behavior is negatively related to religiosity and cultural tightness. Although this is a benign example of cheating behavior, we discuss how popular trends can be used as case studies of group-level behavior.

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Stuff I found interesting in October

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8 Comments
SimonM
Writes SimonM’s Newsletter
Nov 2, 2022Liked by Sam Atis

Re: 33/ (Don't by a house)

(Since I can't comment on the author's blog, I'm commenting here)

1/

> "Stocks tend to strongly outperform real estate as an asset class – 10% over the 20th century for stocks, vs barely beating inflation for real estate."

[citation needed] (The Rate of Return on Everything)[https://conference.nber.org/confer/2017/SI2017/EFGs17/Jorda_Knoll_Kuvshinov_Schularick_Taylor.pdf] has (globally) real return on equities ~7.1% and housing ~7.7% so housing *out performed* over a very long time horizon. In the UK (where I believe the author is from) the relationship is less good (~7.5% equities vs ~5.6% housing) but even so, we're still talking about assets with very similar return profiles. Risk adjusted, housing massively outperforms across all countries.

2/

> In contrast, if the value of my stocks doubles, then I can actually spend the money on things that make my life better, such as nicer rental properties, child care, etc

This whole paragraph seems to miss the point about housing costs. If you buy a house, you have roughly speaking covered the shelter short you are born with. If you own stocks and rent, you are exposing yourself to some large basis risk between shelter and equity returns. Maybe this is a good bet, but it's not an obvious one to me

3/

> However, I have no reason to sell my stocks just because I want to move house.

Based on the authors own logic, you have no reason to sell your house just because you want to move house. You can rent out your house and rent your new house.

4/

> Secondly, the downside of leverage is that it leaves you massively screwed if your house falls in value.

One of the biggest advantages of mortgages (vs other kinds of leverage) is they are not margined. If the value of your house falls you *aren't* massively screwed. Yes, you might end up in negative equity, but as long as you continue to be able to afford your mortgage payments, no-one is forcing you to sell it

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Matthew Ritter
Nov 3, 2022·edited Nov 3, 2022Liked by Sam Atis

Just searched for “boiling point“ on Netflix, without success. Maybe not available in the US?

I can only assume it is a docudrama about the time that https://nitter.net/qualythe tried to go undercover as a line cook, in Las Vegas, in a heat wave.

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