Monthly Roundup #46: September 2026

AI has taken over this blog.

I have moved to a schedule of seven posts per week, and I still cannot keep up.

We still refuse to abandon the rest of the world. Who knows when I will get to post some of my huge backlog on education or dating or other such topics. But the monthly is a sacred tradition. We continue.

Bad News

A good reminder that most news is bad news, and chosen because the bad news in question is rare, which is good news, but the pattern overall of choosing this to be news is bad news, and often the bad news is that the bad news was chosen as news and now people are talking badly about it.

Alibaba uses your computer’s audio system, and other tricks, to at least try and assign you a device fingerprint.

Things you cannot buy in America at any reasonable price. Mostly it is impressive how little makes the list, how it feels like corner cases.

The one thing I am envious of is the exterior roller shutters, and the ability to be in actual pure darkness on demand. I would pay quite a bit to get that, if I could integrate it into my apartment.

Wrong answers are a skill issue.

shellac! in the bay!: what does telling someone “skill issue” mean
A: “you’re doing this wrong, this is pretty easy to fix if you actually try”
B: “there are good returns to being more skilled about this” Aprii: if you tell someone “skill issue” it’s A but if you describe something as a skill issue it’s B.

I see this as being both A and B at different times.

It turns out that TSPI’s polling was outright fraud, with their explanation fully AI generated. It is a shame that this is not treated as criminal.

Is it a curse?

__eloïse__: The curse of a good trait is that people around you will have it less. Being smart sounds good, but the experience of being smart is being surrounded by retards. Being considerate sounds good, but the experience of being considerate is getting much less consideration from the world than you put out. I think about this when I’m around someone with a lot of rizz. They live in a world of dullards.

That’s true only if you judge relative to yourself. Intelligence, consideration and rizz greatly raise your access to others with intelligence, consideration and rizz, including across such traits. So the question is, are you only thinking in relative terms?

Only about half of all psychology professors said, when asked to pick, that they put social equity concerns before truth, although the rest are overwhelmingly ‘it’s complicated.’ It’s not complicated. There is also a gender divide here, and the OP tries to make it look worse than it is, but neither of those is the story.

I strongly agree with David Perell that it is sad that we used to make it a priority to make a variety of things beautiful, and now we don’t and merely make them functional. The big one is architecture, but this also applies to things like tickets, as per Ted Gioia’s The Banishment of Beauty From Everyday Life.

It’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake. That beauty buys so much goodwill.

I knew coal plants got people killed but I did not know they also have a lot of radioactivity, or that this is still an active subject of a cover-up.

Nature incinerates what credibility it has left, says ‘the death of Jason Arday must prompt deep reflection.’

Which is the context that means this is not as funny as I was hoping it would be:

This from Jack is a remarkably apt metaphor for the whole situation:

Jack: I work at a famous hospital, one that people around the world visit in order to receive state-of-the-art treatment. My department, cardiology, does vital work every day. We have saved countless lives, and people are right to trust our work. Recently my hospital has been the source of some controversy – some of it fair, much of it overstated. One of our emergency medicine doctors, Dr. Jones, had fraudulent qualifications, despite work that was broadly respected within his field. A few patients treated by him died preventable deaths in the emergency room. When news media started poking around the story, the hospital ran an internal investigation that cleared him of wrongdoing, and he used legal threats to keep the story quiet. The story eventually came out when Dr. Williams, who had been previously dismissed from our hospital, documented Dr. Jones’s fraud, kicking up a media firestorm that ruined Dr. Jones’s life. It’s not that some scrutiny was unreasonable – we want doctors to be honest – but the story spiraled far out of proportion. The attention caused the hospital Dr. Williams works at to reevaluate his position, and it ultimately suspended him and reduced his work duties – reasonably so, because Dr. Williams advocates for unproven and controversial treatments. Leading medical journals have spoken out in defense of Dr. Jones. Other people have raised some concerns about our chiropractic and homeopathy departments, but their work is standard within their fields, and medicine works best when each medical department governs itself. My hospital is doing fine, actually.

Even among a relatively conscientious group, most people will read private DMs?

Not cool, everyone. I can kind of see arguing the glitch is Musk’s fault, but no.

Focus Only On What Matters

Much failure is about failing to realize what is important. Hindsight sometimes helps, and sometimes it does not.

Ben Vinegar: I recommend people look at indie game postmortems (there’s a lot on Reddit, Youtube) A recurring theme: “It turns out I was just making games for other indie game devs, and I found out too late they don’t actually buy games” Rich Uncle Pennybags: i watched a failed cafe post mortem on youtube for whatever reason and the failed proprietor spent more time talking about subtle variations to the coffee due to weather than his decision to locate himself in a commuter town and open at 9:00 the decision to buy the absolute most expensive equipment he could afford and not do anything about the office standard issue grey carpets and unadorned white walls also struck me as questionable.

Woke 1 Was Crazy

Matthew Yglesias points out the arguably worst part of it, which is that even the people who successfully avoided saying absurd or false things were still scared into silence.

Once the reasonable people are running for the hills, everything is f***ed.

Matthew Yglesias: And what I personally remember most bitterly about Woke 1 is not the behavior of the most hysterical people; it’s the behavior of the people who knew perfectly well that others were behaving hysterically and who carefully avoided saying false or insane things (that’s how you can know that they knew) but who also avoided actively contesting them. This was, for the most part, savvy behavior. Those who actually said nutty things have suffered for it to an extent, which is exactly why there’s now this effort to slink away from them. But those who ended up on the wrong side of Woke 1 fads also suffered. The winners were those who ducked the storm — budget experts who knew it wasn’t true that cities spend more money on police than schools but didn’t say so — and emerged with their reputations unscathed. That incentive structure to avoid being the “well, actually” guy is still very much with us and means that any kind of discourse could go wildly off the rails.

During Woke 1, I very much stuck my neck out with regard to Covid-19, but I was very careful about picking any other battles, and mostly did shut up about everything else. Indeed, I don’t say things I don’t believe, but on a number of fronts I still pick my battles and instead stay quiet.

That was and remains, I believe, savvy behavior, as I would not have gotten much benefit out of the risks and costs I would have endured. If everyone picked one big thing and was loud, that would be enough. But yeah, I still do feel weird about it.

Good Advice

These are two key lessons in spending:

1. When the price is too outrageous, you want to choke on it, to build good habits.
2. Focus on absolute price difference, not percentage price difference. Be willing to pay 10 times as much for 10% better, if that’s actually a better deal for you.

Early on you want to focus on lesson one, then later shift to lesson two. Then you strategically and selectively unlearn lesson one.

Armand Domalewski (August 2021): I am 32 years old and still deeply terrified that consuming anything from the hotel room minibar will bankrupt my entire family somehow. Armand Domalewski (August 2026): Today, I am 37 years old and still deeply terrified that consuming anything from the hotel room minibar will bankrupt my entire family somehow Jack: Every once in a while when I’m staying at a hotel I think “maybe I’m feeling lazy enough to pay the price premium for a bag of candy or something” and I go up and I ask the price and then back away wearing an expression of combined fascination and horror. Patrick McKenzie: One of my most indelible I-am-now-officially-old moments was when I realized I was now the target market for the “green car” overpriced shinkansen tickets which, on my first trip to Japan as a student, I was flabbergasted anyone would ever buy. And as if it were scripted in a movie, next to me at the ticket machine were some twenty-something backpackers commenting on how they weren’t going to be idiots and accidentally hit the Green Car button. (Green cars are premium cars on the bullet train with slightly nicer seats and a hot towel service, otherwise exactly equivalent to the service in the car adjacent to them, and cost about 50% more.)

The reason the green car can be worthwhile is that the marginal value of the green car is vastly higher than the cost of the train. At some point, one hopes, the train costs you approximately nothing.

What’s the best way to take a break?

How I Write Clips: The 4 elements of an effective break according to Daniel Pink:

1. Motion beats sitting. A walk restores you more than a chair.
2. Outside beats inside.
3. Breaks [for writers] with people beat breaks alone, even for introverts.
4. Staring at your phone on your walk is not a break. Detach completely. “They’re part of our performance, not a deviation from the performance.”

I buy this, which must be balanced against the cost of the break, and sometimes you really do need an introvert break rather than an extrovert break. They serve different needs.

The question then becomes, detached from what? The phone is not automatically not detached, the same way that being with a person may or may not be detached.

I’ve heard similar versions of this enough that I believe it but I basically don’t get bitten in NYC or Berkeley so it never comes up:

Crémieux: After a month of using it, I can attest: This thing is magic. Whenever you get bit by some bug like a mosquito or a sandfly, you just put this on the bite for a few seconds and the itchiness goes away and it heals way faster. I’m using the Beuer BR90, but it’s the same principle as the old advice to heat up a spoon and put it on bites.

Not at Lighthaven? That is unfortunate for you. You’ll need different norms.

Raye: you can tell how rationalist a subculture is based on how socially ok it is to just walk away from things / conversations / talks brooke bowman: God it’s so nice I made a point of being weird like that in other spaces too though bc often ppl just don’t even realize it’s an option Paola: I love that this norm exists. It feels quite liberating, and I practice it relatively regularly when among people who I believe are part of subcultures that allow for it. HOWEVER, I would never in a million years do anything like this (intentionally) among most subcultures. There are many social moves similar to this one that I often watch rationalist-adjacent people make among non-rats (eg, saying “I’m bored, “I don’t want to be spoken to right now”, etc.) and cringe each time I see it happen. For people who want to be taken seriously (or even liked on a basic level) among non-rationalist subcultures, learning how to code switch is one of the most important things you can do. This is especially the case when your standard culture has norms than when applied elsewhere will end up communicating disrespect/disregard for the other party. General rule of thumb: if less than 80% of the people you’re interacting with are also people you’ve also hung out with at lighthaven, behaving as if you’ve been invited over for dinner with a group Christian Conservatives from the Deep South who are all over 50 will get you better outcomes than behaving as if you are at lighthaven.

I also do not recommend acting like you are with a bunch of Christian Conservatives, which will get you absolutely destroyed among most groups in blue states. There used to be a ‘one generic code’ you could fall back on, and largely be okay. Mostly now there isn’t, because part of the code of one color is reflective dismissal of the codes of a different color. Tricky.

When choosing careers,

Opportunity Knocks

You could instead be at Lighthaven soon.

Inkhaven 3 is coming. If you are thinking about going, you should probably go.

vishal: I’m running Inkhaven 3 Join us Nov 10 – Dec 11 to publish a blog post every day – or begone! Hone your craft. Get mentored by Scott Alexander, Jesse Singal, Alexander Wales, Scott Sumner, Aella, John Powers, Clara Collier, and more. First, the facts. You pay for the privilege: $2,000 admission, housing from $1,500. Generous financial aid is available for those who need it (and are daring enough to actually ask for it). Apply at https://Inkhaven.blog. You’ll get a decision within 10 days. Now, I attended both Inkhaven 1 and 2, and am persuaded that Ben Pace and Lightcone have created a magical institution. The image of 40-60 people living together to work on a common craft is a true vision of Utopia. Under these conditions, people become more open, more ambitious, and more creative. You basically get a full year’s worth of socializing crammed into a month. It’s sort of like living in a dorm in the first year of undergrad, but much more intense, and your peers are more mature and interesting. I was sad when I heard that Ben was considering not running any more Inkhavens, so last week I bumrushed the Lightcone offices and made some demands. And here we are, working together.

The thread has examples of some writing that came out of previous editions, and doesn’t include my favorite of the blogs, which is by Paola, here are some of her posts. I agree with Vishal that the biggest problem so far is that a lot of residents haven’t sustained their writing after Inkhaven.

Alas, I will probably not be an advisor, because when we tried this in Inkhaven 1 it turned out that I was a poor fit, although it would not be impossible to convince me to try again if there was demand.

The University of Michigan robotics curriculum is on GitHub. A second away.

While I Cannot Condone This

I sympathize greatly with Scott Alexander falling into ‘I am staying out of the Substack religion debate [proceeds to get sucked into religion debate].’ This reinforces that if you don’t want to get sucked into a debate, it is often wise to not explain why.

Whenever you hear an 80/20 or other distributional statistic, consider changing ‘Just the top [X]% were [Y]% of [Z]’ to ‘The top [X]% were just [Y]% of [Z]’ and see which one seems more appropriate.

Patrick McGee: Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told [Rose Horowitch].

I would be very surprised if the top 20% of book readers only read 82% of the books. There is an extreme right tail here, and a lot of people read zero.

I too am an Honest Fake Expression Enjoyer:

Paola: I like how noticeably “fake” facial expressions are often actually completely honest, but are just carrying a more specific message. If the goal were deception, it is well within most people’s capacity to fake an actually convincing smile. However, fake smiles communicate “I’m just being polite and am not actually smiling.” And you’re actually meant to notice all of the information conveyed and behave accordingly.

What I like a lot less are Dishonest Fake Expressions, where the person is acting and trying to present the smile as if it is real, and does not want you to know it is fake.

Know a guy who owns a truck. Then you can move things, or all the things. The cost is buying the pizza afterwards, plus helping out when it is your turn to help. The system works, and it makes everyone richer in a real sense and builds community, but lowers measured GDP. A lot of the story of vibecession and related topics, where economists say you are richer and poor people insist they are instead poorer, is explained by this.

The account here, Nobunaga, has many similarly good stories about a particular American set of norms around community cooperation, reputation, honesty and virtuous norms. I do not take them to be literally true, but this is not important. They are fables in support of norms. Those that have such norms will vastly overperform measured GDP, and people will be happier. Those that lack such norms will underperform measured GDP, and people will be less happy.

The norms are not always efficient, and can be taken too far. The electrician should not be impossible to reach. When you are in higher demand you should charge more, and so on. Growth and productivity rates suffer. I am generally a fan of more capitalism. But something important and valuable is being lost.

If there is going to be an Unexpected Hanging some day this week, what are your options?

Eliezer Yudkowsky: Apply Ultrafinite Recursion:
– The teacher reasons that they cannot give the test on Friday, or students will know.
– The teacher realizes that students may realize the teacher realizes this, ruling out Thursday.
– Humans recurse at most 3 levels, so Mon/Tue/Weds all possible. Note this assumes a teacher operating at actual max recursion, modeling students modeling teacher modeling students. Less smart teachers, or teachers who model their students as dumb, may give test Thursday. You may observe that to solve this problem I had to model the teacher modeling the students modeling the teacher modeling the students. I can do this because secretly at WIS 22 the max level goes up to 4. Robert Garritty: But each iteration of this reasoning starts the recursion back at 0. If Mon/Tuesday/Wednesday are all possible, then Wednesday’s not possible, and so on. This doesn’t resolve the paradox. Eliezer Yudkowsky: Nope, the teacher could test you on Wednesday and it would be a surprise to you (uncertain) because given that the teacher has already waited until Wednesday, you don’t know whether the teacher is smart enough, or thinks you’re smart enough, that they wouldn’t test on Thursday.

Which in turn, I argue, means you can also test on Friday, because on Friday you will think it would not be a surprise so therefore they can’t give the test, which means it will be a surprise.

Astrology is a hell of a placebo, with people who read horoscopes exhibiting 0.2 standard deviations of self-reported personality movement towards their sign, whereas the effect size for others is exactly zero.

Good News, Everyone

If you want to ensure you can cancel your subscriptions, credit cards do offer some options. You can use X1, Rho or privacy.com to spin up a new card for each subscription. You can use Mercury, which allows you to easily block merchants. And so on. I presume AI will soon be able to handle this for you rather easily either way.

The Apple Vision Pro is a dud with consumers. They did not deliver the killer apps, interface and linked capabilities to justify the price point, charging issues and weight. But technically it is an excellent product, such as improving performance in endoscopic lacrimal surgery while being under 1% of the cost of an endoscopic display tower. The linked study has low sample size, so treat with caution.

The NFL press box food offerings, ranked. I appreciated this, I eat very differently but we are kindred spirits in the ways that count. Amazing how many teams are bad at it.

Ordinary Abundance. Many found this highly moving.

For Your Entertainment

Coyote vs. Acme is the third 5-star movie of 2026, matching 2024 and 2025 combined. Recommended for literal everyone of all ages.

I tried an experiment with turning Letterboxd’s top algorithmic picks for me into a Manifold market. It did not go great. Almost no strong opinions were expressed, and the top pick, The Grand Budapest Hotel, was a bitter disappointment. Perhaps my readers can make better picks. You can add new suggestions to the market, as well.

I agree with Tyler Cowen that it does seem like movies peaked in specifically 1999, as per the speech in The Matrix about that being the pinnacle of your civilization. Then movies got worse in key ways, including too many franchises wasting top budgets and talent. Now movies are getting better again. 2026 has been fantastic.

What about Game of Thrones? We have two narratives fighting to this day, between ‘Season 8 fell off a cliff’ and ‘seasons 5-7 also kind of sucked.’

Javier Cañavate #HouseOfTheDragon: It hurts to see how season 8 breaks the vibe The Late Knight Show: Do not fall for the “Sh0w wAs Go0d unT1l seas0n 8” propaganda To the people are lashing out at this: This doesn’t mean that the show was Bas since season 1. GOT is fucking excellent from seasons 1 to 4. There’s merit to season 5 Season 6 sucks. Seasons 7 and 8 are a fucking travesty. I ain’t hearing you out.

Memory is blurry by now, but I think the truth is in between. Things clearly were best in the first 4 seasons, top level television. The momentum and some great moments carried us through 5, 6 and largely even 7, and fans kept voting high because they wanted it to be great and the characters and scenes were still often individually great. Then in season 8 it became impossible to pretend.

My general thesis continues to be that it is better for shows to overstay their welcomes, and to sacrifice quality on the margin for quantity. It doesn’t have to get this bad, but unless the story has a clear fixed length, keep it going. Often the later parts that aren’t strictly ‘as good’ are still very good in their own way, and occasionally they age well once you’re over the initial disappointment.

Are you ready for Avengers: Doomsday? Collect them all.

Marvel Updates: Disney+ has released a list of essential projects to watch before ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’: • X-Men
• X2
• Captain America: The First Avenger
• The Avengers
• Avengers: Infinity War
• Avengers: Endgame
• Loki
• Shang-Chi and The Legend of The Ten Rings
• Spider-Man: No Way Home
• Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
• Deadpool & Wolverine
• Captain America: Brave New World
• Thunderbolts*
• The Fantastic Four: First Steps

That is asking a lot. I am two movies short. But they’re likely a tough two movies, especially Brave New World.

The state of DVDs, I still find this beautiful even though I have abandoned all use of physical media:

Employee #84 : Bought 488 DVDs from an estate sale today for $30. I guess I’m starting a flea market in my front yard.

We need movie theaters that show a wider variety of movies, and show things for longer.

Mike Drucker: Bring back cheap second run movie theaters. I don’t give a shit if it’s on streaming already. Charge $5 for the odyssey or spider-man in December and people would go just to kill time. Don’t ask me if it’s economically feasible became I don’t fucking know. Zack Stentz: Each major studio used to have a guy whose whole job it was to squeeze the last couple million out of every theatrical release, and he was usually on a first name basis with the manager of every dollar theater in America.
It was a better time.

I have seen enough empty theaters to know that it would be viable. The opportunity cost of off-peak showings is very low. I also would love a low-cost all-theater rental option for off-peak times.

Or how about letting an individual choose the movie for some modest marginal cost? If on average you sell 5 tickets, and I am willing to buy 5 tickets a week in advance and want to put on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, do it and see if anyone else comes.

What has been working great is the Anniversary editions of older films. I am increasingly seeing movies from 20 or 30 years ago having brief runs at AMC, and it is glorious, I need to make it more of a priority to attend.

The craziest part is that they are often ‘excluded from A-list,’ which means they charge you like $20 instead of $0, and yet they sell a lot of tickets. This clearly means there aren’t enough such offerings, and they don’t hold them open long enough.

The addiction economy:

Henry Shevlin: One of these things is not like the others. Brad Wilcox: We have a generation of young men trapped in the “addiction economy”—and the numbers are staggering: 1-in-8 use porn, gamble & game daily
Almost 1-in-4 gamble daily
1-in-4+ use porn daily

I continue to be a big fan of video games, in moderation or even somewhat more than moderation, provided they are ‘good’ games. None of the three things here are inherently bad. The problem is lack of moderation, or getting trapped in bad versions. The version on your phone will usually be the bad version of all three.

I did a Twitter poll (now lost to time) where I asked which of these three things was not like the others, and got defenders of all three.

Correct toon logic: Sonic is faster than the Road Runner (probably), but if Sonic tried to catch the Roadrunner he could definitely fail and probably blow himself up.

Terminator 2 is a great move on entertainment alone, Jeffrey Ladish finally watched it and asks about how accurate it is on the AI front once you ignore the time travel and the Terminators. The answer is better than you would think, especially the emphasis that the dangerous thing was the computer that went into recursive self-improvement rather than the robots.

The big ‘real’ issue is that Skynet learns and gains power absurdly fast at first, and then stalls out at exactly the level where it can somehow be defeated by a John Connor and a ragtag group of survivors, because otherwise the time loop would not close and also we do not have a movie or franchise. This is the typical Hollywood ‘intelligence stops doing anything, and also the AI’s efforts stop scaling, at exactly the point where the humans can still barely win’ which exists for reasons that should be obvious, both in Hollywood and also in the real debates over AI. People like humans winning, and people like telling human stories.

Please Review This Podcast

Many solid choices by Dean Ball. For me this splits into ‘things that I can confirm are very good’ and ‘things I have not listened to and thus it is hard to say but they have good company.’

I am especially a fan, from this list, of Cognitive Revolution, Conversations with Tyler, Odd Lots, Dwarkesh Podcast, Money Stuff and Complex Systems. Dwarkesh suffers from being ‘too good’ so I end up often reading transcripts instead. I sometimes listen to Lex Fridman and 80,000 Hours, as well as AXRP, but long pod is long and I choose topics.

Dean W. Ball: i doubt anyone cares but here are my most listened to podcasts so far this year. many of the hosts of these shows follow me and you should know I think you’re awesome, even if we have never met or spoken. Anastasia Gamick: Dean, where does this free time come from?? Dean W. Ball: I don’t sleep very much

At some point I will write about at least some of my favorite podcasts. Two not here that I very much enjoy are Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me and Serious Trouble, and I at least sometimes listen to EconTalk, Clearer Thinking, Win-Win and Plain English.

There are also some that fall into a different category of gaming and entertainment. It can’t all be work stuff. My favorite Magic podcast is All Tings Considered, but that is constrained by my ‘I do not know what the new cards do’ problem.

Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

You can now report players on Magic the Gathering: Arena. There are five complaints: Inactivity, Hate Speech, Inappropriate Username, Verbal Abuse and Spamming.

Three of these seem silly given the lack of communication channels. But it is very good to be able to report players for Inactivity, also known as stalling, which players do either because they are mad at you, because they can or in the hopes that you will give up or accidentally time out.

Andrea Mengucci proposes ways to help bring back competitive Magic, including more focus on Pauper as a cheap format. I’m ‘out of the game’ in all senses, so it’s hard for me to evaluate the current situation, but the obvious thing is that Magic is huge yet they give you very little to strive for. Every reasonable solution starts with running real tournaments, with strong prizes, and ways to accumulate points, qualify for things and earn money, pride and titles, including room for some people to be Pros off of results rather than streaming. Wizards is not doing this because they don’t care, not because they do not know how. I guess they do not like money.

I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

Human Progress: Swiss Re, one of the world’s leading reinsurers, found that Waymo’s autonomous vehicles generated 88% fewer property damage claims and 92% fewer bodily injury claims than human-driven vehicles.

On September 1, Waymo opened service in Denver, San Diego and Tampa.

Waymo once again expands its approved service area in Greater San Francisco as well as Los Angeles. Most of this region will be waiting for a while, but this means Waymo will have no trouble finding good uses its cars for a while no matter what happens elsewhere.

I continue to eagerly await Waymo coming to East Bay, given that is where I usually visit. Alas, the odds look bad, and say a majority of the time this won’t happen even in 2027. Complaints are the prices remain too high, which is another way of saying demand exceeds supply.

Tesla asks for permits for 5,000 robotaxis in Las Vegas, was initially given 10 but has now been approved for the full 5,000. Waymo and Uber each got 1,000.

There are some things self-driving cars probably won’t ever do for you.

Nate Silver: Robotaxis are very cool but there’s probably going to be a weird equilibrium where human drivers have some competitive advantage because they’re less strict about following speed limits and traffic laws. Mike Solana: waymo already increased aggression. down in LA, especially, drivers wouldn’t let them out of four-way stops. you can feel the difference on the roads, now, even as a pedestrian. they’re not the docile creatures they were last year. Misha: Waymo will never truly replace human cab drivers until I can flag one down, jump in and shout “Follow that car! Step on it!”

Waymo gets into an accident that makes the news. As one would expect, it is minor contact and entirely not the Waymo’s fault.

Not to be outdone, Waymo ‘nearly ran over’ a two-year old, said many. This is the framing people go with for ‘actual nothing happened and it was not close.’

SFist: A father in Noe Valley says a Waymo robotaxi stopped within 13 feet of his two-year-old daughter when she fell in the crosswalk, nearly running her over, but Waymo claims the car wouldn’t have hit her. Alex Immerman: “Waymo nearly ran over a 2-year-old” is an irresponsible framing. The Waymo stopped 13 feet away. Two king size mattresses placed end-to-end fit between. If my kid fell in a crosswalk, I’d be terrified. I’d also be grateful the approaching car was a Waymo. Divia Eden : I think cars with superhuman breaking are part of what might make the world way safer for kids to roam, and they can’t arrive soon enough IMO!

‘I literally don’t know what you want from me’ very much applies here. The Waymo did exactly what you would want it to do, complete with displaying ‘pedestrian yield,’ and the complaint seems to be that the father was worried that it might not do that?

Yes, I very much worry that one accident will ruin everything. Eventually there will be one accident.

Government Working

I will never understand the idea that it is good and right to arrest people for making edgy jokes in a private WhatsApp group, without anyone in the group even minding, as happens in the UK. How does anyone describe this as anything but utter insanity?

Flock cameras plus AI is coming, while Flock demos things like ‘how to monitor a protest in real time.’ Have we considered not allowing the creation of a dystopian surveillance network for the government or others to hook up to their AIs?

Mamdani (Again) Fails Economics Forever

I will keep harping on the Mamdani NYC city-run grocery store fiasco, mainly because it is funny.

Dan Rivoli: Lead official for Mayor Mamdani’s NYC Groceries tells me city may give grants to local grocers fearing competition from city-run stores “policies and programs, grants, incentives that can come alongside these grocery stores to support other local independent businesses” Dan Rivoli: Clean up, aisle 5. Spokesman for @NYCEDC , which oversees NYC Groceries for Mayor Mamdani, sent me a statement today saying: “We are not currently considering any grant programs” for grocers competing with city stores, but rather tax abatements and zoning benefits Catherine Rampell: Hear me out. What if instead of selling food below cost to all comers at taxpayer expense, and then using more taxpayer dollars to subsidize private companies that can’t compete with those prices, we had a program that targeted nutritional assistance just to the people who needed it, as a supplement? We could call it, I don’t know, supplemental nutritional assistance To those who think 115th & Park is a “food desert”: I have an Aldi, Costco, Shop Fair, Whole Foods, Foodtown, CTown, Food Bazaar, and Target to sell you

Here is 115th & Park, where the new store presumably will go:

Dan Rivoli: This is the second time a key part of NYC Groceries had to be walked back. First was when an official said there would be a “library card-esque” system to prevent resale. After reasonable inference that ID would be required, mayor himself had to say no ID would be required

They keep changing their story because there are zero ways to implement the thing they want that do not end in disaster.

Variously Effective Altruism

Remember what the benchmark is, in two parts.

Part 1: The super rich do things like pay a specialty agency $100,000 per year with a $1 million spending minimum above that, and then spend absurd amounts of money on whims and momentary thrills, and most of all on getting exactly the things they want whenever they want them, and yes they are often jaded. Olivia Ferney, a travel specialist they hire, confirms, as we learn in How To Make A Killing, that you might want to think this means they are miserable, but actually the super rich are happy with the results, thank you very much.

I totally get it, especially the part where you have a person you can call that makes happen whatever you want to happen. Must be nice. But I’d feel sick about it, and not only because I could have given the money away. I sometimes wonder how many extra zeroes I’d need on my net worth before I’d feel entitled to start acting like this. At least two, but less than five.

Part 2:

Yonan: Seth Rogen says his financial fear is dying with $10 million in the bank that he could have spent while he was alive. “I’m afraid I’m going to die with too much money. I don’t have children, and I’m afraid I’m going to die and be like, I could have had a place at the beach” “I don’t want to die with like $10,000,000 in the bank that I could have spent doing fun, alive things” “A jet to Paris on a whim? Yeah, exactly. I could have been jetting. I could have been jetting this whole time”

This, on the other hand, feels completely insane, even if you have Too Much Money. Which Seth Rogen clearly does. Costs are not benefits, and the point of having money is partly to spend it but also to have the peace of mind that it is there when you need it. The value of that extra $10 million spent while rich is a tiny fraction of how much you would miss it if you lived longer than you expect while in any danger of being poor.

Dying with nothing in the bank, or close to nothing, is a huge disaster, far worse for Seth Rogan than dying with $10 million.

That’s even if you discount that you could use the money to actually help people.

So, yeah, I criticize it a lot, but maybe this whole ‘effective altruism’ thing is actually pretty good.

How Sarah Constantin thinks about evaluating grant applications, here condensed with a slight Zvi slant to the explanations, as we think highly similarly here. I endorse basically all of this.

1. It’s the donor’s money, spend it on what the donor cares about.
2. Importance, neglectedness, tractability.
3. Yay community infrastructure, especially for the donor’s community.
4. Yay niche topics, that matter to the donor.
5. Yay ‘technical’ work, involving rare unfakeable skill, like making a thing.
6. Yay straightforward public information resources.
7. Yay ‘cool shit’ even if there isn’t an obvious payoff beyond being cool.
8. Two cheers for meta. Keep a mix of meta and object level.
9. Gumption counts. If the person wants to do it, there is a reason.
10. Yay personal relationships. Use your local knowledge, including of people.
11. Check ideological orientation, in case it interacts with the project.
12. Filter slop aggressively. Do not waste our time.
13. Yay outcomes that are concrete and legible, not always but it helps.
14. Invest rather than donate where that would make sense.

If Hell does not exist, then we do not need to create it. We already have New Jersey.

A highly underrated charity strategy is Give Effective People Money, especially retroactive funding for things you loved, with no strings attached. Also speed kills.

Chris Lakin: if you’re capital looking for philanthropic stuff to fund… consider retroactively funding work that already happened that you loved. give those people no-strings funds to do more whimsical stuff (or do whatever they want) without requiring them to waste time on applications AND you build reputation for yourself as the serious funder to be connected to. (there are too many funders who say they’re “interested” in funding xyz, but never actually do anything, so you could build a great reputation really quick) Charles: I did this once (gave somebody with a good track record ~£30k to buy out their time so they could focus on whatever they thought most valuable vs whatever paid at the time) but Jan Tallinn then gave them like 10x that a few months later (not due to anything that happened in between I think) so the counterfactual impact was pretty low. Chris Lakin: Wdym seems like you got them started multiple months earlier? That’s huge Charles: Nah the lag on the money arriving due to EA regrantor lag meant I don’t think they actually had the money yet

Moral intuitions very different from my own, remember that this was asking ‘what do others do’ not ‘what should people do’:

Robin Hanson: According to poll, relative strength of moral guides others use:

Robin was as usual Robin Hansoning, as he described reason as ‘argued for by our impressive thinkers’ rather than ‘what the person thinks is right, based on their own reason.’ As you would expect, Robin then argues hard against using your conscience.

A very clear case for Effective Altruism, especially from Patrick McKenzie:

Kelsey Piper: I’m an effective altruist because 1) I care a lot about how I can best use my money and time to achieve my goals in the world, and EAs wrote a lot of the stuff I found useful on that topic and 2) EA told me in the 2010s to worry about AI and pandemics, and they were right. Patrick McKenzie: I wouldn’t self-identify as an EA, and if one hypothetically read the Day 6 Vaccinate CA memo, one would find language in it which resonated with EAs and one would find language in it which resonated with Tolkien. If I can be permitted to make personal empirical observations: 100% of funders who have expressed regret they did not fund VaccinateCA themselves self-identify as EA. 100% of funders who have contacted me post VaccinateCA offering to backfill money I personally donated the organization self-identify as EA. Given base rates among college-educated Americans, EAs were _wildly_ overrepresented among early volunteers and coordinators. Even adjusting for the tech industry lineage/seed set/theory of change I think this remains true. People who are reasonably read as barometers of community opinion tell me that VaccinateCA is wildly impressive evidence of efficacy in their community, with respect to EAs. No person in the California government or public health field has ever said this to me directly. (I will report, for completeness’ sake, that I have been told through an intermediary that the _writeup_ of VaccinateCA was considered above-replacement-rate for a postmortem by a senior official in public health. I offered a meeting. EAs have taken meetings w/ me.)

The Lighter Side

Sometimes I have sympathy for people who lose money but if you bought Hunter Biden’s $LAPTOP right before it crashed 98% within an hour of its launch then I do not really know what you were expecting.

Spotted on Letterboxd about La La Land, some people are a tough crowd:

Clayton Petty: Louvre. Immediately.

In case anyone was wondering, yes, I will also always think like this.

Proof by counterexample:

Cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat, cheat. IYKYK, if not see here.

Roger Blumenthal: Trending on social media

Fable argued hard that no, Michigan did not actually lose to The Bye (aka Western Michigan) and that there really was a mysterious extra second on the True Stadium Clock that allowed Michigan to have one more play. Uh huh.