Also EPA admins publicly baiting them in memos is probably a very bad idea

users.iems.northwestern.edu/~nocedal/Sof... ? :)

This is what my shirts look like after our youngest cat plays with them.

My favorite way of framing this is that material prosperity is mostly not zero sum, but status absolutely is.

As someone who went through conversion talk therapy I'd kindly like to show Mark to the nearest cliff's edge

let's make this bitch so disappointed he leaves the site. fuck him

Mark out here thinks that my parents abusing, raping, and killing me in the process of "their talking" is fine because freeze peach or some liberal shit

Mark, "really abuse" is gonna be all your known for now. Your epitaph.

FYI: I am going to stop summarizing Supreme Court decisions on here as they come down. One comment has been plucked out of context of all my reporting, misread, and used as the basis of a mean-spirited pile-on. I am not going to subject myself to this. If this was your goal, then congratulations.

In the nerdiest way possible: PCA axis n2 on DW-nominate is definitely more salient. That said, in a competitive election in a swing seat, it's very difficult for a candidate to move away from unpopular stances they have previously taken.

I've never been able to book bok choi in a way that matches the taste you get in a good Chinese restaurant. I think I'm too used to cooking broccoli as an Italian (very light blanching followed by tossing in a pan with extra virgin olive oil/garlic/chillie flakes).

It's hard to capture the energy of a company when it's 5 of your closest polycule members living together in an apartment in the Bahamas.

pmarca reading Scanlon: "oh man, they got this all screwed up!"

Today, new guidelines have expanded recommendations to take cholesterol-reducing medicines early!

If you missed it, I'd highly recommend our episode on it:

Sure but according to a specific definition of understanding that is utterly unfalsifiable they don’t truly understand what they are doing.

I am so far into the Breiman camp that the idea of looking at coefficients seems so obviously flawed to me. At the very least report held out R^2s (on a data fold that wasn't used to tune hyper parameters).

Very excited to have finally found a reason to actually watch a TED talk!!!

cool post, but re:

This adequately controls for confounding but the data requirements to do this for a large number of traits are onerous, and as I might discuss in a future post, there is a good reason not to examine outcomes like relationship satisfaction trait-by-trait.

Why not do LASSO?

Our Approach to Measuring Support for Policies Our Approach to Measuring Support for Policies So, if standard issue polling isn’t reliable, how can we ascertain which policies are popular and which are not? One potential solution is to reason bac...

I found docs.google.com/document/d/1... pretty persuasive as far as polling opinion goes.

Isn't this exactly why Deciding To Win did issue polling by asking actual political consultants to frame the issue from the left/from the right? In competitive politics, you get to decide how you talk about an issue, but, the other side will not pick your framing to discuss it.

Teachers and nurses are paid less because historically they were one of the only socially acceptable professions for women, so you could get brilliant women as teachers “for cheap” because they couldn’t go into other careers.

How Cameroon Fought to Save Its Malaria Program After the U.S. Cut Critical Funding

Aside from me personally, EAs co-organized the only real-life protest against the cuts, phone-banked to get Congress to revoke the cuts, and donated between seven and eight figures to help African clinics affected by the moves (for example, CTRL+F "GiveWell" in www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/h... )

We don’t know how many people will die because of Trump’s USAID cuts The chaos of Trump’s global health cuts make the human toll near-impossible to calculate. That’s by design.

Completely agree with this, and of course it will play well with the mouthbreathers on this site. For more examples: www.vox.com/future-perfe... benthams.substack.com/p/the-upcomi... etc etc

The elites are definitely guiltier because they have more agency but there is plenty of blame to go around. It’s never been easier to be well informed and lots of focus groups showed that voters knew about the coup but thought that inflation was a bigger deal.

Figured I’d re-up this with an excerpt.

Sure, more useful to call it significant cognitive decline than dementia, but, I don't think the label is what's particularly relevant.

The single most obvious piece of evidence is that Biden did significantly less than the bare minimum level of public interaction that a president is expected to do: his staffers were aware of what he looked and sounded like when speaking in public.

There is a cool paper showing that modern LLMs “know” that p-hacking is wrong: however they can be coaxed with some creative prompting: andrewbenjaminhall.com/asher_et_al_...

It's a genuinely extremely difficult problem because VPs need a number they can track to see how their teams are doing and it's very difficult for them to appreciate how the context around a number changes.

For example: if you have an OKR to increase the number of the customers at the top of the funnel, and an objective to increase total sales - by pushing hard to increase the number at the top of the funnel, the fraction that will convert into sales will almost certainly decrease.

I largely agree, the problem, imo, is that you *inevitably* end up running into Goodhart's law. OKR's start off as highly correlated with the objective, but, by treating them as a target, you end up breaking the correlation.

The most effective ad against Harris was Trump reminding people of a stance she took under pressure from the ACLU in 2019!

I don't think I've ever seen gears shift this fast before.

What happens if you persuade a candidate to take on very unpopular positions in the primary as a price of winning progressive support? Even if the candidate tries really hard to distance themselves during the general, the opposition will do everything to remind the public of the stances they took