larnmar

You could well be right, maybe Iran’s air defences are on a par with Syria’s.

I’ve suddenly realised something important — I’m commenting on important issues based on nothing but information gleaned from probably equally ignorant comments posted somewhere else. Why the heck am I doing this? I’m no expert on Iranian military capabilities.

Why do we all feel compelled to pollute the Internet with our ill-informed speculation on important issues?

I feel like I should just quit commenting on anything outside the narrow areas in which I’m a proper expert, and so should everyone else.

If casualties are zero, we can laugh it off as an impotent hissy fit by an incompetent adversary.

If casualties are non-zero, the President will be obliged to carry out his “52 targets” threat. This is probably the right move — don’t play tit-for-tat against a less powerful adversary, instead immediately escalate to a level they can’t possibly match.

Unfortunately Iran’s air defences are more potent than anyone the US has bombed recently, so we might be about to find out just how good US technology really is.

What happens next? I’m not sure. I can’t imagine the US committing to a ground invasion of Iran, but it should be possible with an air campaign to reduce Iran to the level of a 2000-era Iraq.

Edit: President Trump’s latest “all is well” tweet, and his intention to hold off on doing a briefing until tomorrow, seems to imply that US casualties were zero after all and that he’s chosen the “laugh it off” response, which is a great relief to me.

As always, thinking about flat Earthism is a terrible exercise for your brain. The fact that a few people exist who are utterly and obviously wrong about something, and that you’re not among them, should not encourage you to think that you’re probably right about any other issue.

I like Scott Alexander’s essay on this subject, The Cowpox of Doubt: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/

Basically, I think an irrational tendency towards “both sides have a point” is a lot better than an irrational tendency towards “my side is right”, and that humans tend to err in the latter way about ten thousand times more often than they err in the former.

Counteranecdote: I made a fake account for work purposes (needed to look at certain things on Facebook that you can only see while logged in, and didn’t want to use my personal account) and it got deleted pretty quickly.

Is anyone aware of any compelling evidence that these fires were meaningfully worsened by climate change?

Pretty easy to get the “consent of the governed” when you kill anyone who comes close to expressing dissent.

I’m guessing you’re not an Uyghur?

Bushfires haven’t got any worse over the decades, but the writing about them sure as shit has.

Sure, in the same way that trying to build a ladder to the moon might eventually lead to inventing rocketry.

Money terrible spent, just another billion poured down the drain on inefficient renewable energy technologies that would have been much better spent developing better technologies.

For a billion dollars you could hire five hundred brilliant (or at least clever) scientists and pay then each $200K pa for ten years to work on promising technologies in photovoltaics, ranging from sexy stuff like multiple exciton generation to prosaic stuff like how to make silicon sheets cheaper.

If people choose to give their money to others, then that’s fine. The problem with society is that it is taken from us against our will.

What’s really odd is that this is an article at all.

In a world where billions of things happen every day, how does a garden-variety franchisee contract dispute in Japan become an article in the New York Times?

Yes, which gives you an idea of what the standards of rigour in the field of psychology are like.

I would say there’s no evidence whatsoever which would tell us whether CA was more or less effective than any other agency might have been.

Investment idea: build a bunch of projectors that fool orbiting satellites into reading empty parking lots as full, then short retailers’ stocks at earnings time, knowing that all the big smart money will be on the other side.

If this were really true, you’d expect to see most people with full freedom to set their own hours gravitate towards that 30-hour mark.

Professors working 30-hour weeks would write more papers than their harder-working colleagues. Business owners would show up for 30 hours a week and go home. Fruit pickers, paid by the bucket, would pick more fruit in 30 hours than their colleagues could pick in 50. Professional athletes who spent less time training would beat their harder-working competitors.

As a pretty good estimate, roughly zero?

Do you have any proposed mechanism for how Australia’s coal production would lead to increased property losses, aside from the very marginal effect of Australia’s coal production on global warming multiplied by the very marginal effect of global warming on bushfires?

My solution:

“Thanks for posting your review on goodreads! As a final step, please enter the fourth word on page 93 of the book you’ve just reviewed”

Personally, I buy the big brand name drugs over generics for the somewhat-rational reason that I trust the quality control and deep pockets of a Johnson and Johnson or GlaxoSmithKline more than I trust whatever random company makes those generics. It’s probably a minuscule extra risk but my medication budget is a few bucks a year and I am happy to have the extra peace of mind of knowing that a $300 billion company’s reputation is resting on these pills not being contaminated.

I still remain unconvinced that was really “Russia” (as opposed to, say, some bored Russian teens).

The reason for my skepticism is the crappy podunk nature of the leaked material. The FSB spends billions every year spying on US politicians, surely they’ve managed to find stuff a lot more embarrassing than the boring emails of some dude whose password was “passw0rd”?

Since having kids I’ve been realising that a lot of the things in life that other people do, that have never made sense to me, suddenly make a whole lot more sense in the context of kids.

With a kid, I’m suddenly super grateful for my little lawn.

Lawns are aesthetically pleasing to humans.

It has been widely observed that humans, having adapted to life in the African savannah, have a tendency to turn everything into an idealised version of their natural habitat.

Regents Park, or your local golf course, is like a superstimulus version of the nicer parts of prehistoric Kenya. Lots of nice green grass; not too long, indicating grazing animals nearby. Trees scattered around for shade, but not too many. A bunch of clearly visible landmarks for easy navigation. Flowers, indicating... fruit maybe? I’m not sure. Either way, it’s exactly the sort of environment that an omnivorous savannah ape ought to prefer over any other.

Anyway, I like lawns because my genes tell me to like lawns.

Personally, I feel safer knowing that all my embarrassing personal data is at Google, along with everyone else’s, rather than somewhere else.

I’m confident that Google can’t do anything genuinely shitty with my data without also pissing off millions of people more powerful than myself.

Borges once wrote something about his father’s library. As a boy, his father told him that he was allowed to read anything he wanted from his vast library, on one condition: that if he found himself reading something he wasn’t interested in, he should immediately put it back rather than try to finish it.

This is a liberating perspective that I try, and fail, to maintain. If I abandon a book it’s no failing on my part, it’s a sensible reallocation of my time based on improved information. Continuing to read something you don’t want to read, just because you started it, is a terrible dunk cost fallacy.

I wish people would stop using the word “simple” to describe problems like massively realigning all the incentives in a huge decentralised system against the wishes of the existing power-holders in that system. That’s not simple, it’s probably the most complex problem that exists.

Isn’t a brief glance at the shape of some congressional districts a smoking gun that it happens all the damn time?

Cynically, the difference is that they don’t own much and other people do. If you’re a 19th century new-money factory owner [] looking enviously at all those old-money landed aristocrats it’s easy to see why you’d be able to persuade yourself that actually it’s assets you don’t* own rather than assets you do that should be taxed.

(Or a ruined old-money aristocrat turned novelist. Or a 21st century San Francisco tech bro who has just realised that he’ll never be able to afford a house.)

It keeps getting clicks, so they’ll keep writing it every year.

So should we tax people based on their political power? A heavily-read blogger might have thousands of times more ability to affect the political landscape than an eccentric billionaire. If you were to do a scatter plot between wealth and ability to affect the political landscape I believe you’d find they were correlated but not that heavily; the things that give you political pull include charisma, eloquence, and gregariousness.

If we are concerned with cancelling out the ability of the wealthy to influence politics should we not also be doing something about charismatic individuals?

For me as a non-US person, this reads like a spec sheet for “here’s something you should build, because there’s customers waiting”.