I’ll share links here with low or no explanation. Why?
It lets people form (and say) their own opinions with less bias.
People here are interested in whatever I consider worth sharing.
My prior writing often already said my opinion.
Questions are fine. I’m just not going to preemptively explain everything.
Other people, when sharing a link at this forum, should express an opinion or goal. Opinions include what you think is good or bad, or agree or disagree with. A goal can be a question you’re trying to answer about the link, or any other reason you’re sharing it (such as providing useful, relevant information in reply to someone, or providing footnote-like information with an inline link).
I have an ongoing goal in this thread beyond sharing stuff: to provide opportunities for unbounded discussion, including criticism and feedback. I recommend replying to lots of stuff with short comments, particularly saying short opinions, questions and problems/disagreements. People didn’t reply much in last year’s topic and I think they were wrong. When I was learning from DD, I would never have commented so little on stuff he shared.
As a male, it’s not intuitive to me how much adults creep on teens. I didn’t experience that because I’m not a non-ugly female. (Conventionally “ugly” females also get treated badly way more than men, but in different ways.) It’s good to have some exposure to other common experiences in our culture. That’s one of the reasons I’ve shared videos about harassment of women (I don’t recall anyone asking why those matter, agreeing about it, or saying anything about the importance of those videos).
Claims analog computing will have high value in the future despite its disadvantages. This may be relevant to CF’s claim that binary/digital epistemology is superior to the analog epistemology of degrees of goodness of ideas. Part 1 is most explaining context and seems reasonable. There will be a part 2 video with more info about what analog computers some startups are currently working on and why.
Those “pick-up artists” on Twitter are so bad. Decent critical commentary.
It’s similar to how Twitter “CritRats” give real Popperians a bad name. They contribute to e.g. lots of Objectivists or mainstream philosophers (like most people studying philosophy in university and their professors) not respecting Popper.
Decent theory on one way most people’s psychology is broken (and how to manipulate them).
It intuitively struck me as objectionable and transparently manipulative, but I’m a bad test case, and I find it plausible that it would work well with many people.
It’s also interesting how the creator doesn’t admit he’s advocating manipulation. He presents it more like he’s teaching effective communication.
One problem might be that it seems like it would take a lot of work to find where in the 100+ hours of videos the “practice activities” can be found. Another issue is that—in contrast to written material—it would be a lot of work to find which parts of which videos are relevant to one’s own problems.
Most videos have some activities that you could practice.
Another issue is that—in contrast to written material—it would be a lot of work to find which parts of which videos are relevant to one’s own problems.
I think you’d have a hard time finding any irrelevant video. They are largely the same stuff I’d teach anyone else – CF stuff and some stuff related to common problems like motivation and procrastination. Did you try some and find that they were irrelevant?
Do you skip much of my written material as irrelevant? I’d be curious what/why, especially if it’s anything recent (last few years).
I think I listened to like 30 minutes of the very first Max tutoring video. You guys were talking about grammar, which is at the very bottom of my to-do list. I also already knew most the grammar stuff that you were discussing with him.
A while ago I listened to the two YesNo philosophy ones. They were relevant, but I don’t recall any talk of “practice activities.”
No, I don’t recall intentionally skipping CF/FI articles. Some of your forum posts aren’t interesting to me, but I don’t think that’s what you are referring to.
The reason I brought up and taught grammar is because I think it’s generically important and should be a priority for people interested in philosophy. It’s an intentional design decision and topic choice by me, which I would do with ~anyone. It was not a request or choice by the student, nor a customization to cover a weakness of theirs.
If you already know parts of speech, clauses/phrases, sentence diagramming, and the material in Peikoff’s grammar course, you could skip a few bits. But I think you’d still find some things you don’t know in my grammar article. And I’d still think learning grammar trees is worthwhile (those are not standard knowledge that you would already know, though some grammarians already know them), and is a good way to build up to analyzing and making trees for texts.
Was rereading this after it was linked today and I really like it.
It can be dangerous for people with revolutionary, rationalist, anti-tradtionalist and arrogant tendencies though, who will infer from it a bunch of changes to their lives that I didn’t actually say (and then either actually do stuff or feel bad about not doing it).
One of the themes with these communication failures is that people can’t or won’t consider their audiences’ context. The person reading this can’t see their screen, doesn’t know what app they’re in, doesn’t know what they’re trying to do, etc. People leave out tons of information which is obvious from their point of view, but which the person they are communicating with would have no way to know.
They’re still working for me. Maybe the issue is your VPN or a browser extension.
TikTok cares a lot more about their mobile app than their website, so opening in the app can also fix stuff.
If I add random numbers to the video ID, I get “Video currently unavailable” not 404. I think I’ve seen “Video currently unavailable” before when a video is deleted by the creator and/or by TikTok.
If I change the word “video” in the url to “blah” then I can get a 404.
Certain gaming communities have good attention to detail.
He doesn’t say what the issue is in words, but I think he’s right to expect his target audience to understand. I caught it on first viewing no problem. But I better explain because people here are not in the target audience.
He’s repeatedly doing a sequence of two attacks (with a tiny walk forward after the second attack to reset his attacks and avoid the third one in the sequence). The green wind animation for an attack doesn’t always happen after he does this a few times (in other words, you see one green sphere instead of two in a row). The sound still plays. If I had to guess, the attack still happens and does damage – it’s just a visual bug – though that’d be worth testing.
Psychiatrists have often violated confidentiality when they found it convenient. In “The myth of psychotherapy”, Chapter 10, Section V Szasz wrote:
In his “On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement,” Freud resorts to an extremely revealing tactic in trying to destroy Jung as a modern psychotherapist by identifying him as just another old-fashioned pastor: he quotes the confidential communications of a patient who had been a former patient of Jung’s.
Starts around 4min in and I’m 10min in. So far he’s talked about how you really need to understand the basic concepts before trying to learn more advanced stuff. (Also I used to know the guy who’s talking. Besides chess, he’s a fan of Ayn Rand.)
The arrogance and confessions about rationalism are interesting, particularly near the start of the thread. He says he felt like he should win because he thinks he’s rational, and that lots of people liked Less Wrong due to this vibe. I agree and some of my readers have the same problem.
The difference is LW encourages and sanctions it when you talk to others, whereas I challenge and criticize it, which is a major reason that people dislike me.
I don’t understand the last sentence. It reads like you’re saying that you challenge and criticise talking to others. Does this mean you discourage trying to use CF as a way to increase your status with other people by looking like an intellectual? Or does it mean something else?
When people post at LW, they are encouraged in their arrogant rationalism. They are encouraged to think that the community in general, including them personally, are smarter and more rational than Other People. The discussion atmosphere reinforces that they are special and deserve to win and get their way about stuff.
When people come talk at my forum, I discourage that stuff. I don’t treat them as one of the Chosen. I don’t assume they’re super great in return for them assuming it about me. I challenge and criticize stuff. Instead of saying “yay, nice to meet another genius” I look for flaws. People were often expecting to be respected and sanctioned, and accepted into the ingroup, not challenged and told they need to focus on self-improvement. Then they get upset. (Suggesting they work on basics, like grammar, makes this worse.)
Item duping found in breath of the wild. It’s interesting partly from the perspective of what bugs programmers are still writing. You might think people would be more careful with pointers by now, and never deal with them directly (only indirectly via some library/framework/tool that’s gotten tons of effort, been reused on tons of projects, and is super robust and safe), but nah… Or maybe just don’t even write in a language where there’s any expectation that you deal with pointers… Maybe even consider not mutating state all the time since so many of the bugs are from that… So many games think they can just add some effect to your character, in a permanent way, and rely on some other code running in the future to properly remove it, and over and over again that turns out to be unsafe and buggy. The least they could do is have variables for permanent stuff and variables for temporary stuff and then be easily able to refresh and recalculate your stuff by clearing the temporary stuff and just using the permanent stuff. This could be done automatically every time your character rests. Yet so many RPGs have bugs that can ruin the game with no way to ever get your characters stats recalculated from the base values again. They also do stuff like make you invulnerable for a cutscene and then you use some glitch to cancel the cutscene early so then code to make you vulnerable again never happens. It’s the same kinda issue as e.g. when Pillars of Eternity had people permanently losing hp on characters because a temporary hp loss debuff was not being properly removed every time, which proves the fundamental design of their system is unsafe. None of the 3d games seem to be able to prevent characters from going through walls, either, but that involves some other issues.
This may be the most viewed article I wrote, but it didn’t do well at first. Articles making fun of Trump tended not to do great, but it was satire malpractice not to do it. This article was in reaction to Trump saying he did more for religion than any other president, and I just tweaked that a little. But not enough, because how this one took off was the left picked it up thinking it was a serious article, and it got spread far and wide. Despite the charges that the Bee was misinforming people on the right, many of the articles that got the most spread as “fake news” were spread by people on the left.
Anyway, I love just taking a ridiculous position and arguing it seriously, so it was fun to write Trump’s argument that he was more important to Christianity than Jesus in Trump’s voice. I thought I nailed it.
Or maybe some combination of higher prices and online order limits. I could see routinely not being able to order online during the lunch and dinner rushes leading to complaints and customer attrition as well. Perhaps limiting open hours, with more staff working at the same time, could be another response to the labor shortage.
To be clear, I didn’t intend to comment on pricing. I was just trying to briefly say what the point of the video is.
A problem with raising prices to reduce demand (which I don’t recall any economics literature ever mentioning) is a lot of people are too mathematically illiterate to notice the price difference and change their behavior accordingly. People are pretty awful at budgeting, at remembering numbers, at comparing numbers, at understanding what numbers mean in their lives, etc. A lot of people literally don’t notice, and don’t change behavior, when services like instacart or doordash use 10-40% hidden markups on prices (in addition to multiple other fees). Those people might eventually find they are short on money, have no idea why, complain that minimum wage is too low, and come up with some kind of plan to save money – which might be cooking their own food more, or buying new clothes less, or avoiding starbucks, or buying their kids fewer video games, or lowering the speed of their cable internet, or driving further out of their way to go to gas stations with slightly cheaper gas. They might target their budgeting at the wrong thing, and possibly at something where the amount to be saved is tiny. Their plan to save money might even be counter-productive, just like e.g. people’s plans to lose weight are sometimes counter-productive.
I thought this episode was pretty good talking about Wall Street investment stuff. This stood out to me:
12:31
We’re at the mercy.
12:33
Of greed.
12:35
Like flat out greed.
12:37
Presented as free market capitalism.
12:39
It is not a free market.
12:42
I don’t even know if it’s capitalism.
12:43
It’s certainly “crony something.”
When Jon Stewart said “free market capitalism” I wanted to deny it. And then he, a leftist, actually himself said it isn’t a free market and maybe not even capitalism, and said it’s a crony system – he said my point for me. I did not expect but appreciated that. The other guy (a former SEC commissioner) then responded by emphasizing that it’s not a free market.
I also agreed with Stewart’s earlier comments that the SEC is too rigid and by the book. What he didn’t say is that, when the leadership is poor like that, more money won’t fix it. It’s not a money problem. (This applies to school and teacher quality too btw. It’s not primarily a money problem.) He only said that given the lack of SEC budget, they need to deal with the situation and change strategies, which is reasonable.
Yes it is, by any reasonable standard. But we tolerate behaviour, such as the visitor’s behaviour described above, that makes a mockery of our aspirations to be a discipline. Can you imagine any other discipline in a university where someone might agree to give a presentation on their research, while happily admitting that they knew none of the existing literature on the topic?
He says, without negative comment, that early-career people want to publish academic philosophy papers in order to get a job. He’s an academic philosopher (who teaches at a university position and has published a bunch of papers) who is familiar with this stuff, and the video is based on a talk he gave.
That is a corrupt motivation for writing a philosophy paper. It’s not about having an idea worth publishing. And he’s just open about it, like he doesn’t see the problem.
oh my god. that’s horrible. (the rehoming runway modeling)
I recognized the narrator voice – it’s from an Australian program called 60 minutes that does investigative type stuff (the quality varies). If anyone is interested, here’s the original program – from 3 yrs ago – 'Re-homing': America's shocking trade in unwanted children | 60 Minutes Australia - YouTube. Not sure if it’s the complete episode or not. I haven’t watched it.
wow there are over 200 retracted papers listed just for COVID:
i guess for every retracted paper there is at least one more that should be retracted but isn’t. maybe ten more. i don’t know how many.
looking only at retractions is a little like looking only at divorces or at covid deaths. there are also a lot of bad marriages that don’t divorce and bad covid outcomes that aren’t death.
Multiple top chess players lost today in the final pre-knockout round of the 3rd and last phase of the tournament that determines two qualifications for the 8-player candidates tournament, the winner of which plays a 1 vs. 1 match against the world champion to potentially become world champion.
Starts by talking about governments printing money, spending more money than they have, and inflation.
He measures the power of a country by 8 factors which he said he “averages”. So it’s just the kind of problematic thinking that CF criticizes.
They must be that are normalized and/or weighted first before averaging. Something must be done to try to convert between the different dimensions. He didn’t mention that though.
His factors are themselves complex things like “trade” or “education” that are presumably weighted averages of many other factors. Or else judgment calls using intuition.
He basically thinks there are repeating cycles in human affairs. While I don’t fully agree with that, it can happen if people don’t understand the causes of typical cycles and how to avoid them. The US government does seem to be falling into some of the standard patterns and traps (and has been for a long time) such as devaluating their currency.
It’s basically about the rise and fall of empires which he blames a lot on finances, and somewhat on the rich people getting lazy/decadent/etc. as a few generations on top go by.
I do think he’s raising (unoriginal) concerns that are worth consideration. (He actually really makes it sound like original research but he wasn’t really saying anything new.)
His final two conclusions were we need to spend less than we earn and treat each other well.
Essay claims we have a shortage of geniuses today and that most geniuses come from aristocratic tutoring. Many geniuses didn’t go to school until they were teens, and had multiple tutors first (including sometimes their parents).
Interesting discussion of how awful editors are, how places like The New Yorker consistently want to cut 60% of your article, how pitching articles is a lot of the job (and is shitty), and how most writers don’t care about the final article as long as they get published and paid.
Tips for getting to 2000 substack subscribers: start with over 2000 twitter followers. Also write stuff that popular people will like and promote. Also have spent the last decade writing for mainstream publications like The Atlantic. lol.
Kafai has been editing films for 30 years. Since the beginning, he loves FCP classic and he could never find a better NLE. Even when he edits the TOP2 box office Chinese film (WOLF WARRIOR 2, $870M worldwide), he still uses FCP7. Asking him about FCPX, he said the software is promising but not ready yet for big budget films. He wants to co-sign this letter to encourage Apple to improve FCP. Almost the whole Chinese film industry relies on FCP7 and wish they can switch to FCPX.
– From Kafai Cheung, Editor
Litquidity put out a league table of dinner allowances, where a $35 allowance (Centerview, Morgan Stanley, etc.) was good, $30 (Evercore, Greenhill, Lazard, JPMorgan, etc.) was fine, and $25 (Goldman, Jefferies, Deutsche Bank, Citi, etc.) was bad. Goldman was bad, and there were headlines about Goldman’s cheap meal allowances and disgruntled bankers. Nobody did a league table of free breakfast and lunch at investment banks, so Goldman got no points for being generous with breakfast and lunch. 3 So Goldman sensibly added $5 to bankers’ dinner allowance, saving the bankers $5 per day, and removed the free breakfast and lunch, costing them considerably more than $5 per day. The result was a good Post headline and congratulations from Litquidity. The bankers are strictly worse off, but Goldman looks better in the rankings, which is what it is optimizing for.
I don’t like doing lame things just because other people are being dumb and looking at local optima.
I think the right method to determine if it’s fraud is to compare it to the definition. I think there are at least two relevant definitions: technical/moral, and legal.
I think the technical/moral definition of fraud is a false or intentionally misleading representation designed to produce financial gain. Regarding the non-GMO label on products for which no GMO alternative exists, it’s not false. But it is intentionally misleading & designed that way to help sell a product. So I think it meets the technical/moral definition of fraud.
I don’t know what the legal definition of fraud is and whether it meets that. I’d look up the relevant laws if I cared enough about whether it was legally fraud or not, like if I was considering suing the companies putting the non-GMO label on products for which no GMO alternative exists.
University fires actual good professor who does outreach with a good blog. In other words, he works a ton of unpaid overtime doing something effective on his own initiative. He’ll be OK I guess because he’s getting $4,400/month on Patreon for his blog. But the university actually got (presumably by dumb luck) one of the good historians who can write clear explanations about stuff (I bet at just a regular professor salary, not a high salary) and they are giving up that. You should not fire your professors whose articles and lectures provide enough value for the internet to pay them a whole salary!
Imagine if Jordan Peterson worked for you at a regular professor salary and then you fired him. That would be idiotic. This is a mini version of that.
World of Warcraft speedruns are done with in game time. The timer only runs when you’re logged in. For long runs, you have a limited time, like a week, to finish a run. This is problematic because stuff happens in the game world while you’re logged out. In particular, you can kill a group of monsters with a 10 minute respawn timer, then instead of running to another group of monsters you can log out for 10 minutes then kill the same group again with no travel time. And repeat. It’s not fun at all for the runner but it gets a better time. You can also log out while traveling on an automatic vehicle like the zeplin, tram or ship.
A big problem with MMOs is it’s hard to design good content for flexible group sizes. Also, a group size of one is mostly bad/boring. Good tactical combat comes from group vs. group or group vs. boss (which usually has adds but at least has many complex abilities).
Flexible group sizes actually make it easier to play with your friends (imagine doing a 5man WoW dungeon, whenever you want, with no waiting or strangers, with 1 or 2 friends when you don’t have 4 friends online).
A solution MMOs haven’t tried (that I’m aware of) is allowing players to control multiple heroes at once. How can the UI enable that? RTS-style controls with selection groups and issuing orders to the currently selected unit(s). These controls have been used for some RPGs like Baldur’s Gate. This would make LFG less needed. If WoW-type controls are desirable when playing one hero, the game could support switching between two sets of controls. (RTS controls work better with one hero for controlling summons, mercenaries, an NPC army fighting by your side, etc – a game could be designed to use those things more and let you control them if you want to or AI can do it by default.)
With built-in multi-hero-control with actual good controls (not stacking heroes in the same place and repeating your keypresses to all apps), you can tackle group content alone or with any number of friends, at the cost of it being harder, which for some people is worth it or even a benefit. It also makes the game more alt-friendly (e.g. you can powerlevel your alt with your main, or gear multiple alts at the same time).
Are some people capable and willing to get good at multitasking with RTS-style controls? Yes we know that because some people are good at RTS games, and some RTS players do like RPGs too. Also I was a hobbyist game developer on The Kingdom of Kaliron (TKoK), an RPG map for Warcraft 3. That was an RPG (designed as basically a simplified WoW) with RTS controls. A lot of people chose to simultaneously control multiple heroes sometimes, often for farming lower level content to counteract the difficulty increase (older content is also the hardest to find other players for). I recently wrote more about this as suggestions to Frost Giant, a group of ex-Blizzard people making a new RTS: Reddit - Dive into anything In it, I suggest that real-time-with-pause controls would allow people to control many alts at once with much less challenge, so they could e.g. do 40man raid content with a few friends or even alone. Pausing and issuing commands during pauses would presumably have to be limited to instances.
A downside of playing multiple heroes is you may need to scale overworld enemies based on the number of heroes present so you can’t trivialize enemies by bringing many heroes. Or a limit of controlling 3 or 5 heroes max might work. You don’t need scaling in instances because they have a limit on the number of heroes that can enter and are balanced around the max group size. TKoK scaled by hero count. Controlling multiple heroes can be problematic in PvP too, but one solution is just disable it for PvP. Another potential downside is people feeling disadvantaged if they don’t exploit controlling multiple heroes to maximum benefit at all times.
Lots of interesting stuff from Matt Levine in Money Stuff today including Musk tweeting about maybe not buying Twitter and Terra/Luna crypto crash stuff:
Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones. This is I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis, and crypto loves re-learning the lessons of traditional finance. Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity-like assets — tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin — are risky, and everyone knows they’re risky, and everyone accepts the risk. If your stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20% you are sad, but you are not that surprised. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined.
On the other hand safe assets — AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stablecoins — are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they’re worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely. Bitcoin is valuable at $50,000 and somewhat less valuable at $40,000. A stablecoin is valuable at $1.00 and worthless at $0.98. If it hits $0.98 it might as well go to zero. And now it might!
They make it really fragile/brittle to make it seem stable. They try to hide all variance and won’t let it go down a bit, so all it can do is be stable or crash all the way.
Twitter stock is currently at $37, but the deal is at $54.20, indicating stock market investors have little faith in Musk fulfilling his contractual obligations or the courts enforcing the contract. If either of those happens, Twitter stock is worth $54.20 (minus a little bit for the time delay between now and when you get paid).
Two of those don’t deny being catcalled a bunch when underage. They just say they still get it at later ages like when they were legal teens or early twenties. That actually potentially agrees with some of the other comments saying e.g. they get catcalled at 24 because they look 16.
Anyway wtf? Maybe it’s a good example of how men don’t fully know what it’s like to be a female? Or maybe just chess club members like me didn’t know? Many men actually are involved in this dynamic (but don’t really understand what it’s like for their victims), but men can also opt out of being cat-callers. By contrast, girls can easily get catcalled in sweatpants or other casual clothes or school uniforms (I’ve been reliably informed that avoiding skirts, not wearing makeup, having messy hair, etc., does not opt them out.).
he says he has never seen so many people making $2,500 a month owing $1,000 a month in car payments.
Lopez says banks are in turn leasing more land to handle an expected car-repossession surge.
“A lot of the banks—they’re smart. They control the market, like diamonds,” Lopez says. “As repos pour in, they only release them so often,” he says, meaning auto prices will probably remain stubborn even as economic growth wanes and more repos mean more used-car inventory.
I don’t know anything specific about the car market. But with regard to houses, that’s not what goes on with “repos” (house foreclosures). I expect (but don’t know) similar dynamics apply to cars. So I’ll write about houses but would assume similarities with cars.
Banks have rules about how much they can lend given how much reserves they have. When they take back a house, the value of the loan still counts against what they can lend, but they’re not getting any income from it. So they don’t want to own the house. They’re in the business of lending and collecting interest and owning the house interferes with that.
Banks might actually want to own a house where the loan was only, say, 50% of the house’s value. When the bank does eventually sell such a house they’ll make enough to offset the loss of interest over the time they held it plus the costs of sale. But that’s a rare situation because most of the people who default on a house payment have a loan balance at or above the house’s actual value. They’re they type of people who don’t keep up on maintenance. They take cash out whenever they actually start to build equity. Etc. People who have their house half or more paid off don’t let things go to the point that the bank takes the house. If they can’t make the payment, they sell & keep the extra cash themselves.
So most of the time a bank takes back a house they’re going to lose money vs. if the loan was paid as agreed.
When banks do take the house for non-payment they have another problem with selling it. Each house is different. It’s not a commodity that you can accurately mechanically price. Set it too high and it won’t sell and will further degrade & eat expenses while sitting. Set it too low and the bank takes too much loss vs. the loan amount. So it takes skilled people to look at the houses the bank takes back and decide what they should sell for, manage the process of selling them, decide when a price adjustment is needed, etc. Banks do use Realtors for the actual selling, but they need someone from the bank to work with the Realtor on pricing and respond to offers. For houses these people work in the bank’s REO department (for “Real Estate Owned”). I don’t know what they are for cars.
How many of these people does the bank have on staff? It varies, and in good economic times when hardly anybody stops paying these jobs get cut to save money. When there’s a sudden increase in banks taking back houses, the people in the REO department get completely overwhelmed. That’s what happened in the 2008 housing crash. The banks had like 10X the number of houses they had staff to handle.
It’s hard to hire more, because at the time one bank is overwhelmed with foreclosures chances are all the other banks are too since it’s a result of the broader economy rather than a single bank. It takes a while to train for that job too. While they do train new ones of course, it doesn’t happen as fast as the bank would like to get the houses sold. So instead, inventory sits on the bank’s books until they have the staff to dispose of it properly.
So “only release them so often”, at least with regard to houses during a housing crash, was a function of staff shortage rather than lack of desire to sell. For about 3 years (2008-2011) not only were banks losing interest income from all the bad loans, taking a loss from almost every house they did sell, but every month their houses sat in inventory they were losing value since the housing market kept going down. They badly wanted to move them but couldn’t.
I don’t think buying Twitter was a clever plot (to create an excuse to sell Tesla shares, then back out) as I’ve seen Redditors and UEG claim. Nor do I think it was a clever plot to cover up negative news stories then back out as UEG suggests. I think Musk thought he could get a good deal then changed his mind. Rather than being clever, he failed to think very far ahead and/or was badly wrong about future market conditions. And he doesn’t actually care much about a free speech platform or he wouldn’t be backing out now. I don’t think it makes any sense to have a clever plot where you commit yourself to specific performance to pay tens of billions of dollars, and sign that contract, and then try to back out.
Otherwise I thought the video was good. I have followed details of this stuff.
In 2020, a company signed a deal to buy a company, similar to Musk’s. Then they tried to get out of it for the same reason as Musk (changes in market conditions made it look like a worse deal). They made similar excuses to what Musk is trying, plus they sabotaged the debt financing from their bankers because the contract said they only had to close the deal if they got the loans. They did very badly in court, lost on everything, and were ordered to buy the company anyway despite not having their financing currently available, so they did pay full price and buy the company (apparently, when they were actually trying to get loans, they still could).
The judge who handled that case has since gotten a promotion to the top and will be the one to hear Musk’s case.
Do institutional investors invest efficiently? To study this question I combine a novel dataset of over 16,000 startups (representing over $9 billion in investments) with machine learning methods to evaluate the decisions of early-stage investors. By comparing investor choices to an algorithm’s predictions, I show that approximately half of the investments were predictably bad—based on information known at the time of investment, the predicted return of the investment was less than readily available outside options. The cost of these poor investments is 1000 basis points, totalling over $900 million in my data. I provide suggestive evidence that over-reliance on the founders’ background is one mechanism underlying these choices. Together the results suggest that high stakes and firm sophistication are not sufficient for efficient use of information in capital allocation decisions.
(I have not read more than the abstract which I quoted.)
Interesting broad, basic explanations about where the elements come from (the big bang and particularly nuclear fusion) and what mass exists in our universe.
Large corporations generally shouldn’t leave the comments enabled for their ads (which says something bad about them). So many people hate them. And they have so many known flaws that they don’t fix which people can comment on.
Sometimes they do leave the comments on. The comments on this car ad are really harsh. Here are the first few I saw:
As I have been writing I’ve found myself fighting a desire to make myself look better. A big part of me wants to present myself as some kind of sage who has always been wise. But that isn’t true.
If you watch 50 shorts from a YouTuber, YouTube still won’t recommend their longer videos to you (and vice versa, I think). This level of segregation between shorts and regular videos seems terrible.
I originally thought that the quote meant something like:
Would you rather: have bad rationality and be alive because important people have good rationality, OR: good rationality and be dead cuz the important people have bad rationality?
But re-reading the sentence, I noticed the “also”. So instead of choosing between either you or important people having good rationality, your actually only choosing whether the important people have rationality or not, and you in both scenarios don’t have rationality.
Says: Newborn baby deaths double in Scotland. Reason unknown but not due to acute covid infections. Experts/authorities refuse to investigate, or gather data about, whether it’s being caused by covid vaccines or longer term consequences of covid.
Elon Musk trying to cheat a bunch of Twitter workers he fired.
On a related note, he’s also trying to cheat the executives he fired.
He breaks contracts in such obvious bad faith. I think the legal system doesn’t penalize this stuff appropriately (partly there’s a bias to be soft on white collar crime compared to blue collar crime; the lawmakers and judges are far more likely to get in white collar crime trouble than blue collar crime trouble, so maybe that’s why). If a powerful entity chooses to do business with Musk, that’s partly their fault; people should have researched him and known better years ago before doing business with him. But both the regular Twitter workers and the executives did not want to do business with Musk and didn’t trust him (in general; doesn’t apply to every individual). So I sympathize with them.
In Musk’s unfathomably long first week or so running Twitter, he has driven away and threatened advertisers, fired and then un-fired employees who he needed to run the site, rolled out and then rolled back a new verification service that didn’t work, banned a bunch of users for making fun of him, and then taken to Twitter to make fun of them. If this is business genius it is, uh, too early to see the results. If this is commitment to free speech, it is an unusual view of free speech. If he is having fun , it is an unusual kind of fun. (He changed the location in his Twitter bio to “Hell.”) But if he is displaying the symptoms of an advanced case of Twitter addiction then, yes, this is all exactly what you would expect. He spent $44 billion to buy Twitter so he could win more arguments on Twitter.
This seems to be someone who likes Musk. A few years ago I saw someone tweeting about Musk flight data who hated Musk and also tweeted other negative things on Musk. I was wondering if it was banned now and, when searching, I saw this other account. I forgot the name of the older one so it’s hard to check it.
Musk is getting actual positive news articles for this one case of not banning someone he doesn’t like. Meanwhile he, apparently, banned a bunch of other people he doesn’t like (I have not investigated to verify that). Example:
I think I missed this post or didn’t read it closely before. I’m glad that you explained your reasoning here. I had the idea to ask something about the importance of some links but held back for some reason and I’m not sure why.
What are some good books, articles, or education material on ethical sales and marketing techniques?
I haven’t read much PUA stuff. Are these kinds of sales techniques combarably manipulative to legit PUA? Or, does PUA have a more ethical way of persuasion?
Are PUA materials a good source for ideas about sales?
But why would asking about a person’s name be bothersome?
Asking about John Galt force’s people to confront the reason society is crumbling. It jolts people out of evading they knowledge that the motor that runs world is going away. In Eddie’s case, I think he just wants to be able to work and contribute to Tagart Transcontinental without having to worry about what’s going on with society. He wouldn’t know what to do about the problem even if he were to try and face it head on.
What kind of beggar isn’t interested in whether he gets money?
The beggar isn’t interested because he doesn’t really want to live. His fear of death is not a desire to live. And money is losing its proper place in the world as more and more of it is being grafted by the looters. Money can’t buy products of the mind so it’s not worth having.
In what kind of world does an intelligent person end up as a beggar? And how does that world compare to our own world?
An intelligent person ends up as a beggar in a world which doesn’t value the mind. There’s no role for people who want to think of ways to make things better because their progress is stopped by people take production and creation for granted. It’s a world where you can’t improve your life by thinking. If you do build something up, someone will just come take it from you by force. Your property right’s are not secure, so you have no way to secure the things needed to sustain your life.
That world is not exactly like our world but there are similarities. I guess, a lot of the differences are a matter of degree. There are still a decent number of people stiving to create wealth in our world but there are probably lots of people who have given up because their particular plans were squashed, or what they would have done in a free society just doesn’t exist in our world.
What low standards Eddie has to consider a street prosperous when around 20-25% of the stores are out of business! And this is New York City! Just like in real life, it’s one of the best cities…
That makes me think about how the Rust Belt of America has been hallowed out and cities in the Midwest that used to make so many things don’t do as much manufacturing. A lot of people accept that the lost of economic opportunity in America is just an inevitable step in path toward automation and globalization.
And why is Eddie clinging to memories instead of making his present life great?
Eddie is stuck on some problems that he doesn’t know how to solve. The problems with the world are bigger than any of the surface level degradation. The real problem is philosophical.
What do you think is great?
I think creating new knowledge is great. I think technology is great. I think producing things that people value enough to trade for is great.
The hero is more interested in railroads than winning battles, saving people from fires, climbing mountains, or Sunday sermons. Is she right?
She is right to focus on creating things that she values. Battles aren’t a central or necessary part of life. Creation is central and necessary. Saving people is good but it’s not the point of life either. You can make a better world where less people need saving. Climbing mountains can be novel or fun but it’s not enough to sustain one’s existence nor enough to make one what to sustain their own existence. Sunday sermons are attempts to deliver values rather than choosing values that will make you happy and proud to live. Expanding and developing the railroads are Dagny’s goal. She knows why this goal is good for her. The railroads are an excercise in creativity and the effort put into them multiplies so that she will have more resources to create even more.
