Don't Worry About the Vase

Zvi's AI-focused blog is great: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/ Also, GPT-4 response: Here are a few ways you can use the custom instructions field to maximize our interactions: Specify the desired style: You can request responses in a specific style - professional, casual, bullet points, detailed explanations, etc. Indicate areas of interest: Provide details on specific topics you're interested in, to guide the focus of our discussions. Indicate preferred depth of information: You can request more surface-level information, in-depth analysis, or something in between. Highlight sensitive topics: If there are subjects you prefer to avoid, you can note them here. Note specific needs: If you have particular needs - e.g., information related to a specific medical condition, business advice, educational resources - you can specify this. Remember, the more specific your instructions, the better tailored my responses can be to your needs.

To all those going around in circles debating the legality of hiring similar-sounding voice actors (spoiler: it’s still illegal) there’s a great round up post by Zvi M on this — you want to be looking here if you’re interested: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/do-not-mess-with-scarlett-joha…

We may be inundated with too much data, and more information may not improve our situation, but appointing any person or institution to limit our information inflow will certainly worsen things. I fully stand with thezvi's points over at https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/02/20/on-investigating-conspiracy-th… ; especially 1 to 3: 1. Think for yourself, shmuck! 2. When it seems worthwhile, do your own research. 3. The ones telling you not to ‘do your own research’ are probably the baddies.

Reading Zvi's taxonomy of pizzas ( https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/03/17/restaurant-guide-2-pizza/ ) was when I realized that NY style pizza is the type I love. Bookmarking this list to go through on a future trip to NYC!

Zvi has been blogging approximately weekly about covid since the beginning, and has a very good track record. Look through some of his posts and see how they've held up? https://thezvi.wordpress.com/?s=covid (On credentials, it looks to me like you ended up with his credentials specifically in the context of game design? He's also worked as a trader, which is some practice at turning unclear information coming out in real time into good concrete predictions.)

I am extremely skeptical of this. I think the best summary of why this isn't the story is provided by Zvi[1]. See the section "Delta Variant." It's not something I can summarize in a couple short sentences, but the base rate of infections we're seeing from the actual data of delta infections doesn't match the 39% intuition at all. Additionally, the Israel Study seems to be thrown around a lot, but the data is suspicious if you look at our actual delta infection data from every other source. In short, I think there's a lot of panic here that is being done by people who are looking at a single study. [1]: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/08/19/covid-8-19-cracking-the-booste…

I'm all for this type of thinking, but like the others point out, you still need to keep yourself in check and put active effort into figuring out when it makes sense. 'Spartan' isn't the only relevant quality. The Hobart mixer is cool, but might it consume too much energy, or is it too heavy to move around when needed? The beakers are sweet, but am I yet wealthy enough to pretend money isn't real? https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/more-dakka/ All things considered, I would love to see more people put together their own lists of ways you can do better than the consumer default. I'm sure there's plenty of opportunities of this kind.

> Why does random newsletter guy have a better system than two “we care a lot about the truth” news corporations each worth billions? Because the news corporations are solving a very different (and much harder) problem. It's the same reason the rationalist community was ready for the pandemic weeks or months ahead of the general populus. A small entity (such as a newsletter) has the slack to actually optimise for truth. A large entity must instead optimise for power. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/webmd-and-the-tragedy-of-legible and https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/02/07/why-i-am-not-in-charge/ .

Prediction markets ain't that great either: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/predictit-presidential-market-…

The article links to this page, which offers a definition near the beginning: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/12/how-to-identify-an-immoral-maz… FWIW, this author seems to use the terms "moral maze" and "immoral maze" interchangeably, which makes their writing harder to follow than it needs to be. EDIT: On rereading, that page only offers an implicit definition of the term. Basically, it's an organization that is steeped in perverse incentives. Most individuals are incentivized to behave in ways that are detrimental to society and to the long-term profitability of the organization, and the corporate culture implicitly accepts this.

Interesting idea, but based on personal anecdata I wouldn't advise it. See also Zvi's recent series on what he terms "Immoral Mazes": https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/how-escape-from-immoral-mazes/ His claim is that power in large organizations is a zero-sum game, and merely competing in this game in order to advance necessarily alters your personality and lifestyle. This is due to the demands that the game places on you. The whole series is worth reading.

Incompetent and unreliable labour is dirt cheap. I found the following link describing hiring a nanny illuminating in terms of where the bar is and how many people limbo under it. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2018/07/22/who-wants-the-job/

I recommend reading this review before deciding to read the book. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/book-review-weapons-of-math-de…

I mean, patents only apply in the nation where they're granted. So "ignoring" IP is just a matter of refusing to recognize foreign patents, which is something that all nations do implicitly. Also, in most foreign countries, court cases are cheap. (They could literally be 100x cheaper to litigate than they would be in the US.) If you're talking about in a US context specifically, then if absolutely necessary the federal government could either buy or nationalize the patents in dispute, just as all states nationalize land from time to time under eminent domain. Zvi recently wrote about this in the context of the state buying the Ozempic patent: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2025/01/21/sleep-diet-exercise-and-glp-1-… > [The US Government] should buy out the patents to such drugs. > This solves the consumption side. It removes the deadweight loss triangle from lost consumption. It removes the hardship of those who struggle to pay, as we can then allow generic competition to do its thing and charge near marginal cost. It would be super popular. It uses government’s low financing costs to provide locked-in up front cold hard cash to Novo Nordisk, presumably the best way to get them and others to invest the maximum in more R&D. > There are lots of obvious gains here, for on the order of $100 billion. Cut the check.

Hi guys -- Mantic Markets co-founder here! Thanks for checking out our site! Most startup ideas are counter intuitive, but I appreciate the skeptical response here. The case for user created and resolved prediction markets is that it's simple, clear, and actually what traders want. For example, Zvi, who writes on Omicron and consults on prediction markets, recently blogged that the ideal way to resolve markets is to have Scott Alexander be the judge. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/02/covid-prediction-markets-at-po… Reality gets messy and judging outcomes ultimately comes down to a person's priors and expertise. We envision a world where experts that you trust run markets on topics that you trust them on. Right now, we have launched a play-money version of our site, and are exploring options such as moving into crypto. I will say that we love how easy and fun it is to participate with play-money, and believe that the results can be accurate. Imagine if your favorite Twitter and Substack personalities mixed in prediction markets with their regular tweets and posts to help their analysis or make a point. It's like a Twitter poll, but with a system for accountability that drives accuracy! We think a super-accessible site that makes accurate forecasting fun can lead to a profound impact on our knowledge and guide us to a better world. Thanks for reading! --James

Two points: 1. The fact that the vaccine only has "emergency-use authorization" rather than full FDA approval is best explained by the fact that the FDA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy motivated primarily by CYA rather than rational cost-benefit analysis. 2. The vaccine isn't 100% absolutely safe, but neither is anything else in life. The proper question to ask isn't whether the vaccine is safe in some absolute sense, but whether it is safer than going around unvaccinated. The evidence indicates that getting vaccinated is significantly safer than regularly breathing the same air as other people while unvaccinated. And although healthy non-elderly people are unlikely to outright die of COVID-19, there is evidence that infection often causes long-term effects, including cognitive deficits [1, 2]. [1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)003… [2] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/07/29/covid-7-29-you-play-to-win-the…

Every now and then (like right now) I visit today's HN, but usually I like to follow it 48-72 hours behind (using the _past_ link). After a couple of days, the dust has settled, and you don't have to check back to see how a conversation evolved. This also keeps me from wasting time trying to get karma. I have a small list of blogs I follow. * https://www.scottaaronson.com * https://blog.plover.com * https://blog.rongarret.info * https://drewdevault.com * https://thezvi.wordpress.com * https://acoup.blog Like a barbarian, I check them every day instead of using RSS or even paying attention to their update schedules. In aggregate, I get about one new post to read every day. When I'm in the mood to know what's going on in the world, I check: * https://text.npr.org * https://lite.cnn.io I also follow the alternative weekly for a reality check on what I read here on HN. Edit: formatting

TL;DR: It doesn't currently seem like a problem, but it is definitely a topic worth keeping an eye on. "The vaccine generated a weaker immune response against the South African strain, but the antibodies remained above levels that are expected to be protective against the virus, the company said, adding the findings may suggest “a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity to the new B.1.351 strains.” “Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement." Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/covid-vaccine-moderna-working-on-covid… Source for my source, because he posts a pretty solid round-up of recent research and well-cited sources every Friday: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/covid-1-28-muddling-through/

to challenge the premise -- it is worth thinking this through: why is it necessary to drive what you're working on over the finish line? if you reduced your inputs of energy, time and caring to moderate levels that can be sustained without negative physical or mental health impacts -- would you personally receive comparable output? re: burnout > [...] level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results. > My clients are perfectionists [...] They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose [...] Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula. > Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately…

These posts by Zvi might be helpful (as in condensing the information, no analysis though): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/06/07/quotes-from-leopold-aschenbren… https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/06/10/on-dwarkshs-podcast-with-leopo…

Zvi has a pretty good summary of what happened: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2024/05/22/do-not-mess-with-scarlett-joha…

The Facebook-specific, rather long one: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/04/22/against-facebook/ The more compact one that gives a good mental model for deciding how to engage with something that seems like might be a trap (or obviously is a trap, but you have to engage with it, anyway): https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/23/out-to-get-you/

I see that TFA actually links series that covers it extensively https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/05/30/quotes-from-moral-mazes/ https://thezvi.wordpress.com/category/immoral-mazes-sequence/

I've usually heard it as "If it helps but doesn't entirely solve the problem, try doing more of it." rather than trying more even if it doesn't seem to be doing anything. (See this Zvi post: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/more-dakka/ )

Zvi has an extremely long review of the Michael Lewis book which makes it clear to me that you're right, this is hyperbole. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/10/24/book-review-going-infinite/#mo…

I've always assumed that those results are caused by exercise, and since many people exercise outdoors, being outdoors more is correlated with better health, but the better health is actually caused by by the exercise, not the being outdoors. As for the circadian rhythm, SAS should embrace More Dakka [0] and cover his entire ceiling in bright white LED modules. He has Substack money to spend after all. I thought D3 was pretty good with absorption, though he could start drinking milk and take GLP-1 inhibitors to offset that if needed. [0]: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/12/02/more-dakka/

Archived link: https://archive.is/7DYjv Discussed by Zvi: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/housing-and-transit-roundup-5/

Here is a blogpost about bypassing these canned responses: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/12/02/jailbreaking-chatgpt-on-releas…

Zvi wrote a good blog post that tried to make sense of this study: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2022/07/07/when-giving-people-money-doesn…

Related: Bring Back the Sabbath (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/10/07/bring-back-the-sabbath/)