Slow Boring

I don't think it's possible to have it both ways. A commitment to free speech means you get more garbage and conspiracy theories, but in exchange you get more intellectual conversations for adults, something you increasingly can't find on Reddit due to its overbearing moderation. Reddit itself has a good track record of banning subs, with only a few exceptions, but it's mostly the moderators and Reddit-enforced mod policies that have caused its decline. As far as recommendations, it depends what you're interested in. I'd generally agree with the first two and disagree with the last two, but they are all high-quality reads (for me). https://www.slowboring.com https://jessesingal.substack.com https://freddiedeboer.substack.com https://fakenous.substack.com

There is a general human bias to do something, without considering if doing nothing could be better. Israeli people must jail Netanyahu and his gang and negociate seriously for a two-states solution. There is no other way out. Military retaliation has exactly zero role to play here. It only creates more hatred and more Hamas militants to come. https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-two-state-solution-is-still-best

Fair point, I can see where you're coming from and I'm aware of the origins of the word on 4chan. I use the term not with the intention of placing anyone above others, but denoting the difference between insular forum culture and every day people you see when you go outside. In the political world this word has taken on a similar meeting for the difference between commentariat and every day people and that's the way I use it in conversation. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/towards-a-normie-politics https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-lot-of-the-best-political-messages

Smart of OpenAI to shut down a tool that basically doesn't work before the school year starts and students start to get in trouble based on it. I think this upcoming school year is going to be a wakeup call for many educators. ChatGPT with GPT-4 is already capable of getting mostly A's on Harvard essay assignments - the best analysis I have seen is this one: https://www.slowboring.com/p/chatgpt-goes-to-harvard I'm not sure what instructors will do. Detecting AI-written essays seems technologically intractable, without cooperation from the AI providers, who don't seem too eager to prioritize watermarking functionality when there is so much competition. In the short term, it will probably just be fairly easy to cheat and get a good grade in this sort of class.

Excellent analysis from Matthew Yglesias: https://www.slowboring.com/p/19-thoughts-on-affirmative-action

The IRA increased taxes. Taxes are the most effective means of fighting inflation.[1] Long term, the IRA will reduce energy prices. Energy is a huge component of inflation. 1: https://www.slowboring.com/p/tax-increases-are-the-best-cure-for

> It is a deterrent. You could pretend it’s not but that doesn’t make it less true. When more crypto scammers go to jail, it has an effect on people’s risk taking behavior. The only thing that is actually a deterrent is actually catching criminals [1]. No criminal does what they do expecting that they'll get caught and then weighing the crime against the potential sentence. > Of course it does. To say it doesn’t is fallacious. "trust me bro, its common sense" [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-best-way-to-end-mass-incarceration

While I am an Yglesias fan, I don’t think your take is unfair. Matt often describes himself as a professional take-haver, and admits to trying to put out somewhat contrarian takes on topics. One of my favorite recent columns of his was a love letter to the “Slatepitches” that Slate.com used to be known for, as an example of unique voice and differentiation in mainstream media that may be going by the wayside in the age of social media: “ Slate had a whole editorial style that was based around provocative — some would say trolly — articles and up-is-down theses. At its best, Slate championed unpopular causes and provoked fantastic debates. At its worst, Slate seemed to be deliberately stretching to come up with indefensible ideas.” https://www.slowboring.com/p/slatepitch?s=r

I've really enjoyed https://www.slowboring.com/ for this reason. There are plenty of hot takes that shouldn't necessarily be taken at face value, but I appreciate how the site focuses on long term trends rather than the news treadmill.

I really appreciated Matthew Yglesias’s take on this a couple of weeks ago. Highly recommended: https://www.slowboring.com/p/slate-star-codex

It's not out of context, and a great many people have observed the same. Here's Yglesias, not exactly known for right-wing takes: > You’re opting for a strategy that leads to more Black deaths and more white deaths than the “vaccinate seniors first” strategy, but deciding that it’s better for equity and this is what ethics requires. https://www.slowboring.com/p/vaccinate-elderly

If the government "prints" money and immediately distributes it uniformly to the population, it benefits the poor most of all. Especially debtors. This year was a great example. Mortgage refinancing bonanza. If inflation really takes hold, those debtors will be very happy. > And that’s not a “rich get richer” kind of thing — the poverty rate fell. And it’s no surprise. Peter Ganong, Pacal Noel, and Joseph Vavra found that under the CARES superdole, “two-thirds of UI eligible workers can receive benefits which exceed lost earnings and one-fifth can receive benefits at least double lost earnings.” https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-cares-superdole-was-a-huge-success

Every so often the Trump administration seems like they might actually care about getting my vote. A recent executive order making it easier to do research on psychedelic therapy is another example [0]. A policy shift to reform IRB review for social and behavioral science [1] would be really targeted at me. I know politics is hard to talk about, but I generally think that we underappreciate the importance of being agentic in politics. Obviously I prefer that our government follow the law and uphold the constitution. But the many ways in which the current administration got things done by being quick, by "flooding the zone" [2], and by using tactics that apparently no one noticed before [3-4] are worthy of study and emulation. I know the obvious response to this is to note that a lot of what they're doing is illegal, and again, I think that's bad. But they really make the current Democratic leadership seem out of touch and old [5] by comparison. Combined with policy positions that are far from the median voter's [6], it doesn't make for a winning look/platform. [0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/04/accelerating-m… [1] https://www.cspicenter.com/p/its-time-to-review-the-institutional [2] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/trumpian-pol… [3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/10/27/russell-vought-profile-d… [4]…

Drug laws would need to change first before any dent in organized crime. And there's still sex work, and good old influence peddling, etc. And then still there's a long way to go with immigration reform. (Undocumented immigrants are a very vulnerable and lucrative victim group. From human trafficking to no-contract cash-only jobs, the classic sweatshop model, and more.) At this point, I'm fairly certain that it's a pipe dream to assume that it's possible to "fix it" without serious sustained effort (which costs some money obviously) and without also drastically improving the adjacent systems (as you said also). Sure, we can call it social services, but the goal is to really reduce both crime and police brutality. It's a complex problem, but very simply the funding issue is that militarization was cheap (because military handed off a lot of things for cheap/free), and any and all social service thing got more expensive simply due to big "external" factors like the Baumol effect (human labor is relatively getting more expensive compared to anything that benefits from capital investment, ie. industrialization, mass production, technological progress), the Southern Strategy culminated, War on Drugs revved up, social polarization increased, inequality shoot up, these all led to more crime, more tough-on-crime programs, more people in the criminal justice system, and that's a lot more expensive. And of course reintegration and related social programs got worse for the same…

Even though I'm inclined to believe people have deeper issues that would prevent them from thriving anywhere, I find Yglesias persuasive on this one [0]. Drug abuse and mental illness prevalence don't predict homelessness rates... rents do. Obviously you want to lower the rents in the places with housing crises, but those crises exist for deep and persistent reasons. Meanwhile, if in fact some currently homeless people are capable of thriving under conditions of lower rent, getting them into those conditions where they actually exist today could be cheap and cost-effective. A corporate relocation package is like $5,000, and a permanent BMR unit is like $500,000-$1m. It's orders of magnitude. I would love to see someone do the RCT. Even if the success rate is low, let's help the people we can help. Hell, I'll pay for a few out of pocket. But I doubt it would get past an ethics committee, and if it did there would be a huge scandal. We're pretty deeply committed that the huddled masses of the world must be housed within SF. Even as we're equally deeply committed that they not exist at any particular site within SF, and won't contemplate anywhere near the unit counts (from a budget perspective or a permitting perspective) that would be required. [0] https://www.slowboring.com/p/homelessness-housing

> So, progressive groups support minorities, and then promote minorities with progressive opinions Progressives promote minorities with progressive opinions and pass those progressive opinions off as representative of those minority groups. White progressives self-consciously wear that label; non-white progressives invoke their ethnic identity without the progressive qualifier. Progressives in media, academia, and politics often use their institutional power to manipulate the public narrative surrounding minorities. As my dad once lamented, "CNN made Ilhan Omar into the face of American Muslims." > you don't like that because you're a minority with non-progressive views and feel underrepresented? I personally don't like it because I have fairly typical views for my minority group and I don't like being misrepresented. I'd like a more honest public discourse that acknowledges something like "brown people love Obamacare, but really don't want their young kids learning about sex." More importantly, it disenfranchises the very minorities these progressives purport to speak for. It enables white progressives to hijack the political power of minorities within the broader center and center left (Democrats and Democrat leaners). For a spell in 2020, progressives turned "Defund the Police" into the "Black" position on policing, and weaponized claims of "racism" against anyone who opposed violent protests and riots. They got the Op-Ed guy at the New York Times fired for…

> It's harmless if you consider it in isolation. But I think it reflects a troubling power dynamic. At Northwestern they renamed "Hispanic Heritage Month" to "Latinx Heritage Month" (https://www.northwestern.edu/msa/programs/heritage-months/la...). Big deal, sure. But it shows that white progressives and their allies have tremendous power over issues relating to minorities--down to what to call a group of minorities--and minorities have very little power to assert their own preferences. I don't think that's harmless. Our Latino law school classmates at places like Northwestern and Columbia are by and large progressive, and thus that change likely reflected the preferences of the Hispanic student body at Northwestern Law. I'm not sure why the preferences of moderate Hispanics who aren't there should matter in that context. > I think this illustrates my point, though. In the primary, Black and Latino New Yorkers overwhelmingly supported Adams, while Asians supported Yang. But the Black, Latino, and Asian progressive activists mostly opposed both and sided with the candidates preferred by white progressives. Matt Yglesias wrote an excellent article addressing the disconnect between Asian actvists and asian voters: https://www.slowboring.com/p/yang-gang?s=r...*It doesn't matter because they don't get a vote.* Bro, as you stated, they literally voted in the mayor in one of the most important--if not the most important--cities in the country lol. While the academic bubble is…

One note on this: the primary way that the U.S. system differs from the rest of the world is in the average length of sentence. At any given moment we have more people in prison because the people we put in prison stay there longer, not simply because we put more people in prison. A startling fact: if you released every person in prison on a drug charge the U.S. it would still have the highest incarceration rate in the world. This is both because the reality is that the U.S. has a lot of violence and because we tend to issue very long sentences for violent criminals. This is a good thread that covers some of this: https://twitter.com/JohnFPfaff/status/1376971131039666177 The article I pulled that link from is also very good, but it might be only for subscribers (I'm not sure). This is that article: https://www.slowboring.com/p/mass-incarceration It covers a whole bunch of stuff that's relevant to this thread -- what kind of people are in prison, what kinds of crimes did they commit, what works to deter crime, why do we have such a high incarceration rate, what effect does policing have on crime, are longer sentences a deterrent, and so on -- and I'm tempted to quote it at length, but I think the best thing I can do is just link it and leave it at that.

Time. In addition to degrading infrastructure, bad forest management making the wildfires worse than they should be: https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-better-approach-to-forest-management

First of all, common people are not living paycheck to paycheck in the sense that they're at risk of not having money[0]. This is corporate content marketing that has entered the collective memory of people, not anything close to reality. Secondarily, reducing the cost of making a thing doesn't always mean you get less of a thing. For me, certainly, what happened is that I write way more software than I originally did. When we built compilers, the amount of human engineering effort required to do things plunged, but the amount of software engineering jobs didn't go down. This is as bad as models will ever be. That part is true. And it's entirely possible we go foom. But it's also possible we don't, and then it depends on where the asymptote lands. 0: https://www.slowboring.com/p/this-economic-myth-needs-to-go-away

https://www.slowboring.com/p/playing-baseball-like-its-1864 Ha! Here's the write-up I wish I had been published last week. I hope it isn't pay-walled for you.

Old man yells at cloud vibes, honestly. The idea that AI somehow ruins the environment was also mostly debunked, at least as of now. Water usage of data centers is negligible, especially compared to things that are arguably more frivolous, as meat production. See https://www.slowboring.com/p/theres-plenty-of-water-for-data-centers

There has been a lot of discussion on this recently in the blog-o-sphere. All conclusions I've seen so far are that the economy is basically fine and maybe people's expectations have risen (I'm oversimplifying). I'm also quite eager to hear different conclusions, because there is a lot of cognitive dissonance on the economy right now. - https://www.slowboring.com/p/you-can-afford-a-tradlife - https://www.slowboring.com/p/affordability-is-just-high-nominal - https://thezvi.substack.com/p/the-revolution-of-rising-expectations - https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/vibecession-much-more-t…

> What about the savings https://doge.gov/savings? Are they a bad thing? Cost versus value. E.g, what kind of soft power did the US lose when they shredded USAID? What kinds of medical research will not be done because of cuts to NIH: * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-medical-research-… What kind of tax revenue will be lost because the IRS is even more short-staffed and cannot investigate fraud: * https://apnews.com/article/irs-doge-layoffs-tax-season-0659e4b439400bf… For a comparison of DOGE's falsifiable/verifiable claims and reality see: * https://www.slowboring.com/p/yes-doge-failed-and-it-matters

I really enjoyed Matt Yglesias's take on The West Wing, and in particular on how it's a fair bit more realistic than it often gets credit for: https://www.slowboring.com/p/in-defense-of-the-west-wing

Sad. Of the ones listed in the table, I pay most attention (if any at all) to Slow Boring because the writing is confusing (or, confused, it's hard to tell :) Iglesias seems to be onto (or on?) something https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-rawlsian-case-for-smallness

Here's one: 3 months emergency savings is the median position https://www.federalreserve.gov/consumerscommunities/sheddataviz/emerge… There's a good summary on Matt Yglesias's blog of Matt Darling (economist at Niskanen Center and Twitter debunker of this paycheck to paycheck myth) on the subject: https://www.slowboring.com/i/149683266/the-median-financial-health-of-…

A many people warned that tariffs and the very political exceptions made to them are rip for corruption: https://www.slowboring.com/p/trumps-tariffs-mean-big-opportunities https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/26/business/tariff-exclusions-trump-busine… Basically tariffs and their exceptions introduce a lot of room for political considerations and there are many ways to influence those political considerations.

And most urban population growth [1]. [1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/cities-arent-back?utm_source=post-email-t…

A lot more could be done: https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-better-approach-to-forest-management