27153

Piece argues that health wearables offer little in the way of marginal health insights or benefits while exacerbating health anxiety, discounting signals from the body, and providing data to big tech and insurance companies.

Where are the weirdos? Is it all just AI now?

Would love to hear why you think this. Couldn’t disagree more at first glance. He feels like a breathe of sanity and rationality in a crazy political world.

Appreciate the comment. This is the author here. Unfortunately, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law as pointed out by another comment, there is an asymmetry of effort in making vs finding/disproving false claims. I was just lucky to have been recently primed with the information to notice this mistake. My usual niche is writing about climbing and skiing, but if I'll be sure to share future thoughts in this realm.

Ezra Klein

The order of magnitude of his mistake makes it damning. Especially considering he began his commentary by noting that "the data can be confusing"

Government spending is how a Keynesian combats a recession. For perspective, though, look at this chart of government spending as a % of GDP. It has never gotten even close to 85% of GDP (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=8fX). Chamath claimed it was 85% of GDP growth, which is a different calculation, but looking at [this data](https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/gdp3q24-adv....) from the past couple of years you can see that the claim is still incorrect.

It's frustratingly impressive how grifters are able to maintain a grift even after it's made evident that they are grifting...

How do the costs not apply to the tens of thousands of lives that could have been saved?

I don’t think EAs are focused on assigning credit here. It’s very consequentialist; they would say “it doesn’t matter who saved the 100 lives, it matters that they were saved.”

Think about the counterfactual: a student doesn’t go to Harvard, they instead go to Duke or a public Ivy. They’re only marginally worse off. All of these schools already have enough money to where families making under $75-$100k won’t be paying anything.

Donations to Harvard are exposed to extremely diminished marginal utility at this point.

No, because everyone doesn’t think that way.

You don’t think doing more good with the same resources is a good thing? Is it not better to save two lives than one life, all else equal?

Nah the money he gave was unrestricted. They just decided to name the grad school after him. The money isn’t earmarked for anything in particular.

Right! That would disqualify me from going to every coffee shop and small quick service restaurant in my city.

See https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Looks like the FTC is aware of it but I'm not sure that there have been any regulations against it yet. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/events/2012/05/economics-dri...

According to Wikipedia there were some strongly worded letters sent to some hotel operators... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drip_pricing