2024-08-14
everything
ACX on Ozempic weirdly showing signs of being a cure-all. In my opinion this is mostly just evidence of how important diet really is (Edit: here’s Eurydice’s hypothesis that being overweight is due to metabolic dysfunction which is related to all manner of other disorders, which I take to be the same thing. Also, here’s a podcast with Peter Attia about Ozempic, not mentioning it’s cure-all properties but noting that it seems to raise the resting heart rate. Also, an article in Asterisk about scaling production in the US).
Experimental History linkthread.
Bryan Caplan on open borders and the welfare state, referencing an interview done by Milton Friedman. The idea that you can’t simultaneously have unrestricted immigration and a welfare state seems obviously true. Statements to the effect that a supermajority of immigrants prefer to work ignores adverse selection. It’s more convincing as an argument that, tactically speaking, you can use unrestricted immigration as a trojan horse to dismantle the welfare state, but that’s exactly why the policy is unpopular. My own pet policy is a 18 year vested citizenship, in which you and your direct family members gain 1/18th (entitling you to 1/18th of a vote, 1/18 of annual welfare benefits, or even 1 of 18 years of free public education) each year that your income tax exceeds a certain threshold.
Derek Lowe on therapeutic interfering particles. The fear of TIPs leading to cancer is interesting because if you think of all the viruses in a single individual as one entity, then DIPs are sort of their equivalent to cancer. On an unrelated note, it does seem like there is a pronatalist case for referring to purposely childless individuals in the same way (speaking as one of that group), although I assume that would be even more controversial than cat ladies.
Roots of Progress blog building group is pretty stacked, consisting of people who already have over 6K subscribers, probably the correct decision not to apply.
Andrew Gelman on Nate Silver’s new book On the Edge, an interesting review as a River denizen who lives in the Village. That being said, he says that the book leaves out everyone who isn’t well connected, but the strength of the River is that unlike the Village, you don’t need any connection to live there, only to adopt the right mindset.
Redwood Research on sources to use when thinking about safety. In general, I feel like the AI safety field could use more tactical, physical, and detail-oriented thinking in lieu of hand-wavy big picture scenarios.
Interfluidity on Chinese overproduction. It’s interesting to contrast this with Noah Smith, who has similar conclusions (albeit tempered) arriving from very different starting points. Personally I think Noah’s analysis is the better one, because it actually shows that Liu and Steve’s views are ultimately the two sides to the same coin: the US should become more independent, and in doing so will likely force China to alter their model.
