digital-cygnet

I think this is exactly what the GP means when they discuss donating to political causes. If you can donate your $100 to buy a week's worth of food for a family in need, or donate it to a political campaign that credibly promises to end hunger in your country, it's not immediately obvious which is more effective (but the latter tends to be discounted by EA types, especially early in the history of the movement).

Perhaps the most effective altruism of all is that which makes Effective Altruism (TM) redundant.

I think you've misunderstood the law you've quoted. It's not about "crossing without checking", it's about the pedestrian "yield[ing] the right of way to all vehicles". It's hard to imagine from a modern perspective, but until laws like this were passed roads were not, as today, universally perceived as places for cars to drive.

In cities in much of the developing world the pre-jaywalking regime remains: road users with cars, carts, bikes, trucks, or on foot instead are in a delicate and complex (and often dangerous) dance of theory-of-mind and courtesy (or a game of chicken, depending).

The "right-of-way" dominated way of thinking about roads is hard to argue with when you look at most roadways in the developed world (cars zooming around on multiple lanes with few pedestrians in sight). But the idea that every pedestrian must yield right of way to every car is much more questionable in dense cities like NYC, on small, residential streets, where one car trying to go from point A to point C is effectively given total preference over all the people trying to live their lives (and cross the street) in B.

I agree that this time will be keeping public policy academics and epidemiologists busy for decades to come, and that it's a very interesting question what the right calls were in retrospect.

However, I want to point out that you've moved the goalposts in your arguments. You started with

> everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response

But you're now saying that because of the mutation to Omicron and the prior exposure of "almost 100% of the population", just living with it is the appropriate policy move. Neither of these were true throughout 2020 or most of 2021, so cannot be useful in determining what the correct course was in the early pandemic.

Furthermore, I think you are vastly discounting the value of a single vaccination. Just because few people have taken the bivalent shot does not negate the value that their original shots in 2021 still provide against serious/spreading cases today.

For the record, my own low-confidence prediction is that future historians will bear out the early (first two months, say) phase of lockdown, and will agree with the utility of many of the later policies but take issue with the hubris of states thinking they could impose them on an unwilling population with no blowback. There will also be an endless list of easy-to-condemn overreactions to the virus or silly policies continuing way too late (e.g. a large park near where I used to live was shut down until late 2021, well after vaccination and after we were very confident that it basically didn't spread outdoors)

The comparison of real household income to vehicle CPI doesn't really make sense. The "Real" in the first stat refers to the fact that it's CPI-adjusted, while the latter can be thought of as being in nominal (unadjusted) terms, as it is itself the adjustment factor. This means the first number is already lowered to account for the second.

Put another way, if "CPI - New Vehicles" accounted for all of CPI, the comparison you give would mean that people get 9% more car for their income than they did in 2001.

To do this right you'd need to compare nominal median household income, which has gone from ~42k to ~67k over the period in question, an increase of ~60%. This leads me to believe that the ability of the typical household to afford a car increased 2001-2020

Nominal median household income: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N

Taking this in good faith, as the HN guidelines ask us to, I'm fairly certain that either your recollection or your measuring equipment is faulty.

Taking the "less impressive" https://goo.gl/maps/t1soU1WKtb7UBuwA9 as an example, you're claiming 60kph (37 mph) for nearly an hour over flat terrain. According to this cycling calculator [1] with some generous assumptions, that's over 800W average for an hour -- smashing the world record of 440 [2]. Similarly, that handily beats the world record of 55km in one hour [3], set by a professional in a velodrome under perfect conditions with a custom bike (including being at altitude for lower air resistance)

These claims are from 30-40 years ago so I don't fault you for misremembering specific times and distances, but cycling is a sport where people really obsess over numbers and metrics, and these just don't pass the sniff test.

[1] https://www.omnicalculator.com/sports/cycling-wattage

[2] http://www.creakybottombracket.com/home/2020/1/23/events-the...

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hour_record

Federalist 10 (James Madison) does pretty explicitly state this. It seeks to explain how the proposed US Constitution protects against one of the key problems with representative government -- that of faction (aka, what we would call parties today). The tyranny of the majority is described as follows:

> When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens

And the remedy provided by the indirectness of the American system (i.e., election of representatives, senators, and electors instead of direct democracy) is that it will

> refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose

Generally I recommend reading this whole paper, 18th century prose aside, as it provides a fascinating insight into how the framers thought of some of the key points of the Constitution

https://billofrightsinstitute.org/primary-sources/federalist...

I think what you're missing is that they are not avoiding "going rock climbing one more time"; they are avoiding "being a person who habitually rock climbs", because while each excursion is low-risk the aggregate effect will be high risk. It's like smoking -- one cigarette won't appreciably impact your health, but "being a smoker" will.

None of this intended to cast aspersions on rock climbing in particular, just pointing out that a reasonable person, understanding independence of events and not falling prey to any fallacy, could reasonably make this decision based on their personal risk tolerance

The standard NYC lot is 20x100 (some a little bigger, some a little smaller). The prewar walkup rowhouses that blanket the city fill the lot basically entirely, and can easily fit 20 units (one-bedrooms or studios) in dense/expensive areas. I lived in one up until recently -- 5 stories, 4 one-bedroom apartments per floor. The rowhouse schema is very flexible: in outer boroughs they can be single family, while in Manhattan they are endlessly subdivided. For examples of the type see:

https://urbanomnibus.net/2016/04/201604typecast-the-row-hous...

Honestly, this did not resonate with me at all. It seems like more of a just-so story than a coherent argument commensurate with his sweeping hypothesis (that much of human history can be explained by our erroneously using absolute wealth to judge relative status).

I'm not sure why we need this 'status theory' to tie together the trends of modern history that he describes ("rising lifespans, lower fertility, falling violence, more school, more effort into art/travel/invention/etc"), when each of them seems much more directly related to the overarching trend of "we have more (food, economic, time, technological) surplus than ancients did". Briefly:

Rising lifespans - we have vaccines, infinite and fortified food, a safer environment,...

Lower fertility - people (particularly women) have other options, childhood mortality is lower because of the prior item, contraception exists,...

Falling violence - people living closer to subsistence have less to lose from violence than those whose survival is otherwise assured; when sufficient means of survival exist there is no need to kill each other over them; we have enough resources now to spend on policing and deterring violence;...

More school and more effort spent on art etc - obviously a society of subsistence farmers will spend less on art and invention than one where a single farmer can feed a thousand people. The modern surplus is what makes this investment even possible

I know that he gives lip service against some of these counterarguments (e.g., re life expectancy "these factors do a poor job of explaining the magnitude and steadiness of the mortality fall over the last few centuries"), but I need more evidence than that to reject the simple explanation in favor of the speculative hypothesis presented here.

He also subtly confuses status _obsession_ with an erroneous _perception_ of high status. If people believe they are already high-status, why would it make sense to devote more resources to getting and achieving status instead of e.g. fertility? I believe that status-obsession certainly drives many parts of our collective behavior, but that seems entirely noncontroversial and separable from Hanson's "miscallibration from absolute wealth" hypothesis.

In sum, I was disappointed by this post and am moderately revising down my expectations from Robin Hanson going forward.

The key driver of our apparent disagreement is likely the definition of "urban (or dense suburban)" in my post. There are plenty of places and use cases for which cars are magical things, whisking you from place to place with no effort and a minimum of cost. However, the important things to understand are:

1) Many countries effectively subsidize cars over public transit in ways that are non obvious (not charging for externalities, minimum parking requirements, huge comparative investment in automotive public works), so your accounting of the costs you see (insurance, gas, depreciation) will likely underestimate the true societal cost.

2) The problem that cars seem to solve (getting around a sparse world) is also _the problem that cars cause_ (sparsification). If you have to drive three miles to get to the grocery store, you could think "thanks cars for making this drive easy", or "boo cars for making this drive necessary". In the city I live in there are 3 grocery stores within a 10 minute walk of my apartment.

3) Some people truly do prefer the spread out, population-sparse lifestyle enabled by cars. But some other people truly prefer the dense, walkable urban lifestyle that, as I have mentioned, cars seriously disrupt. The damage comes when people in one group try to force the other to adapt to rules that make sense in their preferred environment (e.g., if Urbanite A wants to ban cars while Ruralite B wants to put highways through the urban center so she can get to work via car). I tend to side with the Urbanites on this issue at present, because it doesnt take much to see who has the upper hand in American cities right now. (viz: Rober Mosesization of most major American metros in the 60s-80s)

Great points! I am working on a post about this and will incorporate this observation.

Thanks for the comment -- yes it is, but all sides also have more apartment buildings on them so it doesnt change the analysis. I probably could have explained that better in the post

I'm not sure I fully follow "I am pretty far from your utopian dense dream yet largely living it", but I think there are two potential points of disagreement:

1) Living in dense cities is not for everybody, but given that large and (at least pre-covid) growing majority of people in the developed world do choose to live in cities, I think it's safe to say that there is a very sizable demand. For an example of the benefits of density, see [0].

2) I'm not sure exactly what you mean by a "means of escape", but getting rid of cars of course necessitates replacing them with other modalities. If you want to go skiing does it matter to you whether you take a train or a car? Or, for further afield trips, take a train to a car rental far from the city center? (If you mean escape in a literal sense, like "evacuate in the face of a disaster", then cars are clearly not fit for purpose -- if roads can barely handle rush hour traffic, mass evacuation is a recipe for gridlock)

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-11-01/how-densi...

This is something I've been musing over recently as well: cars really are responsible for much of what is unpleasant about city life. When people gripe about cities, their complaints are often around:

   * Noise. From where I sit, the only noises that filter into my apartment from the city are occasional laughs or shouted conversations from bargoers, loud trucks grinding gears on the avenues, or honking of desperate commuters

   * Lack of space. Basically every city block in the USA is surrounded on all sides by areas where, if you walk into them without your wits about you, you could be smashed by a multi ton vehicle. When streets are closed for street fairs or the like, the "lack of space" complaint often drifts away - the whole city is your space again. 

   * Danger. See above. There is of course also higher crime in cities, which I cannot find a way to pin on cars.

   * Grime/poor air quality - pretty self explanatory

I'm hopeful that, with the pandemic increasing interest in the outdoors and making cities have to work harder for their tax base (because WFH means they can no longer rest on the "you have to live here to get a job" that they've been reliant on), city governments and voters will realize how much can be gained by dialing back on car investment.

There's a chicken-egg problem at play, though. We can't build denser cities because we need to build 4-lane roads and parking; we can't get rid of these roads and parking because people need cars because the city isn't dense enough yet. It's certainly solvable on the many-decade timescale by smart, consistent city and state governments, but it's going to be a gradual slog of incrementalism (e.g., see all the changes NYC has made to shift from car centrism since the 90s - gradually adding bike lanes, closing Times Square to traffic, closing 14th street to private cars, congestion pricing for taxis,...)

The distance problem with cycling is solvable (though it pains me a bit to say this as a recreational cyclist) by electric bikes and other micromobility solutions (e.g. Citroen Ami). The streets of NYC are chock full of delivery drivers and others zipping along at 25mph on cheap, quiet electric bikes with ranges of many dozens of miles. Once we have a better regulatory regime for these (so people aren't blowing so many lights and hitting so many pedestrians), I could see them being a viable alternative to cars for many-mile use cases, at least during dry/temperate weather.

In my experience, most people really do not understand how fundamentally unsuited cars are to solving urban (or dense suburban) transportation problems. Without really staring at the underlying geometry, it is hard for laypeople to understand that automobile-centric development patterns are by-and-large incapable of producing the kind of human-scale, dense, walkable areas that are (1) instinctively pleasing to be in, (2) generators of economic value, and (3) much more environmentally sustainable than the alternative.

All this being said, I find it hard to fault 'environmentalist' politicians for their embrace of the electric car: politics is "the art of the possible", and the conventional wisdom, at least in the States, does not yet recognize automobile-centrism as a key problem. There are a lot of entrenched interests in favor of the status quo - not just the traditional car lobby (auto manufacturers, suburban developers, oil companies), but the ~half of Americans who live in suburbs, hence having their lifestyle and wealth reliant on cars remaining a dominant form of transportation. If the choice is between gas cars and electric cars (as, for a mainstream politician it basically seems to be), I am at least happy we are moving towards the latter, even though neither are the right answer.

Shameless plug: I recently attempted to visually explain the first issue (why geometry makes cars unsuited to dense transportation) on my nascent blog: https://digital-cygnet.medium.com/a-quick-visual-illustratio...

(2018) -- so bits of this already seem dated, for instance the idea of a profusion of coins being a feature, not a bug, of the crypto space:

> “Think of this as an incredibly efficient barter system,” says Harvey. “Barter is generally inefficient, but if you have a network and you tokenize the goods and services and enable it with a blockchain, it can become very efficient.”

Maybe I just lack imagination, but I am missing where the benefit of this lies. When Apple has a coin and Toyota has a coin and Kodak has a coin (as seemed would be the case at the time this was published) why is it any better to hold any one of these, barter through a set of intermediaries to get to ConvenienceStoreCoin, and settle your candy purchase with that, versus holding investments, selling them for cash, and using that everywhere? Even putting transaction costs aside, my sense is that a natural, shared unit of account / means of exchange will end up predominating and this "incredibly efficient barter system" won't be the paradigm shift the article implies.

This does not appear to be an April Fool's Day joke or otherwise satirical. It is, however, hard to make seriously. If I'm understanding him right, the claim is that it is a moral wrong to being someone new into the universe and the supporting evidence for this is:

  - The worst pain is more bad than the greatest pleasure is good
  - Satisfaction is fleeting
  - Lifespan is limited and bad things happen more than they ideally ought to
  - Humans cause ecological and social damage.

What astounds me is that nowhere in this 3400 word piece does the author consider (a) the frequencies of pain vs pleasure, or (b) the good done by humans in the world. He notes that "daily life is filled with dishonesty, betrayal, negligence,... Of such harms, everybody is, to varying degrees, a perpetrator," but misses the obvious corollary: life can also be full of honesty, loyalty, love, etc. These too would not exist without people. This focus only on the debit side of the moral ledger of humanity is an oversight bordering on intellectual dishonesty.

The point about ecological damage, and the existence of adoptable children, are both more reasonable critiques of "natalism". That is a nuanced topic worthy of discussion, but this article doesnt add much to the discourse there, more adding them as an afterthought to the overwrought "existence is pain" thesis.

Edit: formatting and clarity

The pro-Tesla view is that this is like comparing an iPhone to feature phones in 2008 on the basis of sound quality and keyboard action (unfortunately I couldn't find their actual review from that year in a quick google). The question being: do you compare products on the basis of what they aspire to be, or what they offer today?

Clearly the iPhone's touch centric design and App Store turned out to be a paradigm shift in computing, and Tesla's Autopilot hopes to be the same for driving. The difference as I see it is that the App Store not living up to its hype wasn't going to kill anybody, and choosing an iPhone is a much less weighty financial decision than choosing a Tesla.

That being said, I think Consumer Reports could have done a better job of comparing the actual systems (or explaining why it chose not to), along with the exhaustive analysis of the ways in which use of the systems is curtailed for safety. What a lot of people care about is "how good is it at self-driving", even though the more important short term question, which they tackle, is "how well do its driver assist features holistically contribute to the safety of the car". Under this mode of analysis my decade-old Prius actually would do pretty well -- it has no driver assist at all, but at least it doesn't let you turn on driver assist at dangerous times, and tells you clearly when it's off (which is always).

I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the technological landscape as momentous as self-driving rarely are as simple as 1:1 replacement of the technology that existed before: the self-driving car is not unattainable, but it is a red herring.

Given this, I don't really know why he mentions the challenges involved in self-driving and his skepticism thereof -- it seems to me that his autonomous "rovers" and "software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would.

Overall I applaud the imagination that the author applies, bringing together the threads of autonomous vehicles, micromobility, and lingering anxieties from COVID into a set of bold claims about the future of urban transit.

What I am curious about is whether the future he paints ("micro-sprawl"; "walking is passé") is one people find compelling and desirable. I think he's basically right that the underlying market forces will lead us there in the next couple of decades absent strong action from municipal governments, but is this the right way to model cities of the future, or are we sleepwalking into another Robert Moses style disastrous reimagining of the urban fabric? Personally I'm undecided.

The article mentions this:

> AppleTV Plus plans to make the “Peanuts” specials free to stream for nonsubscribers during short windows around relevant holidays. But as with HBO allowing PBS to air “Sesame Street” episodes after a period in which they’re exclusive to HBO, Apple’s decision emphasizes the restriction, not the limited availability. It underscores that Americans now have different levels of access to some cultural touchstones, dividing kids whose parents can shell out for extra services from those who can’t.

The author's point is less that it is less accessible now and more that it is less shared now. Streaming has a plethora of benefits over broadcast television, but unity (in the sense of "broadly shared cultural moments") is not one.

I would be interested in hearing more about this, within the bounds of what you can share publicly. Most of the touted GPT-3 use cases I've seen to date have dried up or are still in limbo, so hearing about a real production use would be exciting!

> People signing up for a test through Verily had to do so online, using an existing or newly created Gmail account

Talk about burying the lede. I thought it was bad when Facebook required an account to use the Occulus[1]; for an Alphabet company to require a Gmail account to get a medical test under a public partnership seems quite out-of-touch. Based on this article it sounds like California made the right call to abrogate the relationship early (provided the freed-up funds could be reallocated to more traditional, less-invasive testing services)

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201306

This is one of the few articles that violates Betteridge's Law of Headlines[1], in that the answer is actually a qualified yes.

This is a topic that is often touted by the FIRE movement, but one I feel could use more mainstream understanding: very small decisions (ones that get washed out quickly by hedonic adaptation[2]), summed over a lifetime, can be the difference between comfortable financial independence and a cash-strapped retirement. The rule of thumb that I've found helpful is to remember every $5 daily decision I make not to spend, if I conceptualize it as being made for my future self in similar situations on future days, adds up to $20,000 in a decade.

The mental exercise ends up being almost Kantian[3], but in a population of one: "if I buy this latte, I am espousing the general principle that when I am bored and near a Starbucks I buy a latte. That habit costs $10k per decade. Is that worth it to me?"

Of course, there is a place for treating oneself and differences in people's saving habits are not the sole determinant of wealth outcomes because of a variety of other structural factors. But I've found that treating habitual decisions this way has been a great boost in my mindfulness and pursuit of financial independence.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headli...

[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative