Trump supporters are by and large moral degenerates, and they know it.

I have trouble with statements like this. Then again, I'm remarking on the direction from where I've experienced weaponized shame—the left—and generalizing. It's helpful, if also reductive.

So here we are with our generalizations making us feel better about ourselves.

Flattering, and I know all about the instagram scroll. Hope it was positive and not anything like the doom scrolling that I sometimes do

As in, "Sam isn't listened to around here"? Or as in you find him unacceptable?

55 pounds. Time has gone down from like 36 minutes to sub 18 last session. Have one more session left. But I'm ok with not doing more swings for a while after this.

Denver is still the shit. It so happened that the Twitter mutual that invited me to meet him was in Austin, and the visit turned magical.

A ranch out west isn't out of the cards.

There's nothing like exercise to reset, induce the hormones and preferable body feedback loops, break up the monotony of a day job, boost the flow of feel good endorphins.

I pulled my MCL day 3 learning jiu jitsu. It sucked, I stayed off it for 6 months. It gets better!

Now that you mention it, I do have some lower back pain and it might be from that. I thought it was from the weird positions I get into when I sleep, but the swings sound more likely. Good thing I only have 1 set of 500 left.

You as well. How goes it? How has the last quarter or two treated you?

It's on.

I don't have a car and, shockingly considering that I'm in Texas, have managed to not need one? Austin is dense and walkable and the odd times I need a ride I uber, but so far I've managed well without one. But those longer trips to San Antonio will be tougher for now. But a hit a brother up and come north! Austin is a jewel

SQL, eh? I've the barest experience. I don't wind up using it for work, although I know it's something so many developers, data scientists, analysts use, so it does seem eminently useful.

I do most of my workouts at home, although I went to this gym and quite like it, feel good that it's largely outdoors.

I'm at ~11% bodyfat percentage per Amazon's Halo and am considering going all out and hitting 5 or 6 percent, just to have done it once in my life in peak shape. Take some pictures, eat ten burritos. It's a vanity project, and it's so hard. We'll see.

Congrats on the paper. Do you have a website? I'm curious, how much different a style is it written in than, say, the style you'd write it in if it were a blog post?

That's remarkable. I edited the typo in the prediction, because indeed I meant February 2019 not 2018. That said, to the extent my prediction counts for something because I was accurate about the cause, I feel I was wrong. My understanding of the yield curve is that it's something like a bet about the state of interest rates in the future. Implicit in estimates of low rates in a year or two (which gives the curve its inversion) is that the Fed pursued a course of accomodative monetary policy in response to some crisis or business cycle. Now, the Fed certainly did do that, but not for "standard" recession reasons which I prophesied, something original to the financial sector, not a pandemic. It feels hollow to claim victory.

But it's fun to follow up on these. More predictions!

Damn. I was relying on hubski's dupe link detector, but the URL is long and filled with tons of those additional tags.

Thanks. Bethesda is an hour away from me, Hopkins Hospital five minutes. Emailed the contact address to be included in study.

And they also eliminated reserve requirements--dropped them to zero--for thousands of commercial banks. Not sure if that includes the big ones, but in an effort to boost spending, the Fed is pushing banks to have nothing in reserve. That seems cross-purposes to long or even medium-term solvency. That 5% cash to cover what's out will now drop to... near-zero? Or will banks bulk up on reserves so actually increase?

You were approached by them? Interesting--how did that work?

I wonder how popular the program has gotten. I get their targeted ads everywhere now, so it's hard for me to judge.

I'm going the data science track. With the intensity of the schedule, I'm told it's as much or more coding as a four-year CS degree. Seems like a good way to get competent quickly, then get a foot in the door.

All I'm hearing from you is that I'm forbidden from thinking these things. And with an urgency that totally confuses me. That workers have become more productive, causing employers to compete for them along axes like higher wages and providing more hospitable working conditions, not only has no explanatory power to you but apparently paints me a mental invalid or worse for thinking, and stupid for falling for.

Does that mean people who consider these things are stupid? Even if it somehow did, why would your sanctimony push edge cases like me to your side? You know how hard it is to persuade anti-vaxxers to change their minds with condescension and outrage, and that sort of position actually has clearly persuasive data refuting it. Here we're talking about the economy, something at the edge of our epistemic limits, and I'm getting told I'm stupid for considering critiques 1, 2, 5, and 8 are onto something and worth discussing.

I understand that you think Caplan is an invidious, pernicious shit, but surely there are lots of really interesting theories as to why wages and productivity decoupled. And now I don't want to even bring them up because hubski is off limits for this stuff for fear of looking stupid to you.

>Why do large group differences exist?

Because "work" is a cultural construct and cultures differ.

Isn't that precisely Caplan's point? There are group productivity differences not because there's something wrong with black people--a statement nil imputes to Caplan--but because humans are wildly diverse in their preferences, preferences that are psychologically wired to be influenced by our cultural heritages and upbringing, and not because there is a compartmentalized racist shutting seven doors to African-Americans at Stuyvesant but opening four to Asian-Americans.

It doesn't start until September. But I'll be sure to update you. The pace is apparently steady but not overwhelming. And while there is some homework, there's a lot of help. We'll see how different the environment is from college.

My goal in sharing this is not to wholy convince anyone of Caplan's views. I'm not persuaded by all of them myself. But moreover, I understand how difficult it is to change minds on something so resistant to experimentation and clearly persuasive data. We're mainly left with theorizing. Caplan's list, to me, is a list of underrated explanations for things we observe.

For instance, workers' standards of living. The conventional wisdom, that but for government regulation workers would still be dying in mines or there would be child labor, is one theory. And it's true to some (immeasurable) extent. But that would mean we could wipe out poverty by installing American workplace regulations the world over. That doesn't seem like it would solve the problem. Most labor economists would say that government regulation lags the real cause of rising workplace and living standards: "economic growth, which in turn is driven by technological progress, a market system, and a culture of entrepreneurship. As the economy grows, the demand for labor grows, and workers achieve better wages and working conditions." Greg Mankiw goes on:

Economic studies of unions, for example, find that unionized workers earn about 10 to 20 percent more by virtue of collective bargaining. By contrast, real wages and income per person over the past century have increased several hundred percent, thanks to advances in productivity.

In response to Caplan's assertion that "large group differences persist because groups differ largely in productivity" you charge Caplan as ignorant of history and probably racist. I don't think he's either, but I'd ask you: Why do large group differences exist? That's a sincere, genuine ask. I think the conventional story--institutional and individual sexism and racism--is a theory that explains the state of things to some (immeasurable) extent. But Caplan alludes to another theory: groups have different preferences, affinities, and abilities, largely the result of cosmic forces no one is responsible for. Some of them are uncontroversial, like that women, not men, give birth to children because they have the reproductive organs. Or that men are more often in prison, or on death row, because they are more aggressive and prone to violence than women. More controversial: NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced plans to eliminate the test that apportions seats to the NYC elite high schools and replace with a system that would offer spots to the top students at every middle school in the city. The reason being that the composition of the elite schools does not mirror or even approximate the racial proportions of New York City's population. For instance, the city's public school are 70% African-American, while the most recent admitted class at Stuyvesant, the flagship of the elite high schools, admitted something like only 10 African-American students. That's a racial injustice, which ought to be remedied. However, Asian-Americans, who comprise 16% of students enrolled in city schools, are 62% of the students enrolled at the elite high schools.

The composition of New York City's public schools and its elite high schools would seem to foreclose the argument that institutional racism is responsible, since Asian-Americans, the object of animus and racism for much of American history, are so "overrepresented." If invidious discrimination does not explain every disparity, what does? An underrated source of explanation are that there are differences in preferences or inclinations between groups. I'm hesitant to say exactly what they are because I would only be speculating, and it's controversial enough a point already. However, because something is controversial--radioactive, even--therefore it is untrue in principle? I doubt it.

I don't follow Caplan's point on mating markets to speak knowledgeably about it. But, again, if the state of the world is not monocausal, then a full accounting would entail lots of theories and explanations, no matter the derision they're met with because of social taboos or political correctness.

I left 30% room for non-signaling value because, ya know, literacy and numeracy. But yea, it's sheepskins, baby.

Consider. No one would stop me from walking into a classroom at Cornell or Princeton and sitting in a classroom and listening to the professor everyday, all semester. Hell, they'd probably be flattered. Furthermore, a world class education exists a few clicks (or a library pass) away. But try slapping that on your resume.

I spent five years as a college dropout variously partying, traveling, working, and volunteering in all manner of places (alpaca ranch, elementary school, summer camp, to name a few). Made a lot of friends. Had a lot of fun. Had the formative experience living by my own decisions chasing my fancy, scraping my knee, and gaining some perspective.

An employer sees a five year gap in employment.

It was only because I had an (ongoing) degree at Tailgate State that Morgan Stanley offered me an internship. Non-conformism, no matter how ennobling, just does not look good.

So would Frank Bruni.

I've bookmarked a "classic" MIT lecture by Dr. Gilbert Strang that came highly recommended for linear algebra. It just so happens that since I won't be starting the program until the fall, I can really prepare myself. Thanks for the encouraging words.

I'm not quite decided that I'll go, but it's looking more and more like it. Look out for an update though if I do!

I’m back from the west coast soon—message me the deets!

Just for fun, although I've been known to compete. There's a friendly, low-stakes association that permits anyone of any skill level to compete at any of the association's meets (meets are the competitions where two or more teams compete events). If my school continues to travel to these meets, I'll hitch a ride with them and show 'em what I got :)

I, too, think space is exciting, and I've read 1% of the science fiction you have. Saw a tweet the other day; what do you think?

We're not taught this stuff because it's pure elitism [. . .]

But let's get real: my buddy went to good schools with the kids of other people who wanted to send their kids to good schools and while we can be mad that Felicity Huffman paid for her kid to get in on a tennis scholarship or whatever, the fact of the matter is the world has been run by Old Boy's Clubs since it was Thag and Ag and always will be. Both books argue that these networks are not aberrations but are the archetypal human response to organization - you need a hierarchy for officialdom and you need a network to accomplish things in spite of the hierarchy (the "tower" and the "square" of Ferguson's book).

It certainly seems like an archetypal human response. I didn't see the connection until you point it out, but C.S. Lewis wrote much more generally about the inner ring (and then warns us that the desire to be in the inner ring is responsible for a lot of the evil):

In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant. A general is always superior to a colonel, and a colonel to a captain. The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it.

This all said, I still just see the OP as a beacon to like-minded people. Not a celebration per se, but a hey, gather round if this sounds like it's up your alley and it seems like right up Hubski Road.

I totally agree. In fact, I read the spirit of your quoted section as they did a bunch of fancy technological analysis and fooled themselves into believing what they already wanted to believe: that there was no risk and all upside. It reminds me of an exchange of my other piece of financial journalism on the crisis, This American Life episode "The Giant Pool of Money":

Alex Blumberg

It's easy to ignore your gut fear when you're making a fortune in commissions. But Mike had other help in rationalizing what he was doing, technological help. Mike sat at a desk with six computer screens connected to millions of dollars worth of fancy analytic software designed by brilliant Ivy League graduates hired by his firm. And this software analyzed all the loans in all the pools that Mike bought and then sold. And the software, the data, didn't seem worried at all.

  Mike Francis
  All the data that we had to review, to look at, on loans that were in production, that were years old, was positive. They performed very well. All those factors, when you look at all the pieces and parts, and you say, well, a 90% no income loan three years ago is performing amazingly well. It has a little bit of risk. Instead of defaulting 1 and 1/2% of the time, it defaults 3 and 1/2% of the time. Well, that's not so bad. If I'm an investor buying that, if I get a little bit of additional return, I'm fine.

Adam Davidson

Wait, Alex, I want step in here, because this is a very important piece of tape. A big part of this whole story, the whole crisis, is that a lot of really smart people, people who knew better, fooled themselves with this data. It was the triumph of data over common sense. Can you play that tape again?

Alex Blumberg

Yeah, sure. Here you go.

  Mike Francis
  All the data that we had to review, to look at, on loans that were in production, that were years old, was positive.

Adam Davidson

As we now know, they were using the wrong data. They looked at the recent history of mortgages and saw that the foreclosure rate is generally below 2%. So they figured absolute worst-case scenario, the foreclosure rate might go to 8% or 10% or even 12%. But the problem with that is that there were all these new kinds of mortgages given out to people who never would have gotten them before. So the historical data was irrelevant. Some mortgage pools today are expected to go beyond 50% foreclosure rates.

What's the actionable take-away? A single 24-hour fast? Intermittent fasting (if so, how long?)?

Had this article stickied for a while, but started fasting today and only just read it.

How do you know that was a Camphor tree in Totoro? God that movie is special. That's it, gonna watch it next.

The source of some of the negative mood is not merely that a task sucks, but that we don’t know where to start. The task is ill-defined or amorphous, and because we have no point of entry we feel a certain sense of dread. Better to do something to alleviate that dread than to merely keep feeling it, so let me alphabetize the spice rack.

I try and remind myself in moments of that peculiar helplessness to try and define just one next-step. So instead of “start project” it’s “open a browser, read three serious articles about one aspect of the project, summarize those articles”. The concreteness means that I’m doing the “easy” work of following an algorithm, not the hard work of figuring out what to do.