11,166 karma · joined September 11, 2011
This is not the same situation as someone who is the victim of a violent crime they didn’t volunteer for, choosing language that creates that confusion won’t change the reality that officeholders are chosen by the electorate.
Meetings in DC are probably not the right focus. Every congressional officeholder has offices in the region they represent, most have multiple. Most people don’t use them for the same reason they outsource their understanding of current events to Fox News or Rogan & guests. Some people do contact offices by phone or message, but fewer band together with others who care about a policy topic and leverage collective influence.
Sure it’s hard and time consuming. I’m not speaking from a position of full ability or particular privilege (though I have enough time to post on HN). But it’s also a bit like the old saw about meditation — 10 minutes a day, and if you’re too busy, 20 minutes. The activities themselves don’t always produce immediate leverage but once they lock in the return is powerful.
There are differences in how individual congress members and coalitions handle policy, so who voters choose matters.
Also, some of that research you’re invoking shows that most officeholders try to keep their promises:
https://theconversation.com/do-politicians-break-their-promi...
I agree lobbyists have influence. What is a lobbyist and why aren’t more people lobbying?
Donors also have influence, and yet the electorate has every opportunity to determine who donors must influence every election. Why would they choose someone who is only beholden to donors?
But ultimately, money doesn’t remove the fundamental electoral mechanisms (yet) or opportunity for volunteer direct lobbying. It primarily distorts to the degree that it can be used to buy the focus of the electorate and to the degree it can be used to buy other people’s lobbying time.
People could spend their time managing their own political /public policy focus and volunteer lobbying instead of any other leisure activities. I’ve done it and I know others who do. Most Americans don’t, and that’s a revealed preference. Other leisure activities are more important.
electorate.
Congress is composed of people who the electorate sends there.
Once there member choices are shaped by the people who contact and persuade them.
If the USPS is poorly funded or managed, it’s because US electorate either wanted that, or was inattentive about the relevant funding and management and cares more about other things.
And if the postal service dies or is captured and privatized, that’s a reflection of the preferences of voters, or a testament to the limits of their attention and intelligence to the point where they voted for people who did things they don’t want.
Most Americans also prefer to blame political folk devils to for the failures instead, and seem to be more happy with that than personal and community discipline that would be necessary to engage responsibly, though, so the system is arguably working to reflect people’s revealed preferences already.
EDIT: I should probably add that it’s not obvious to me that it’s poorly managed. I’ve enjoyed decades of adequate-to-impressive service via USPS over a variety of locations.
And in keeping with our theme of the limits of both LLMs and humans, unfortunately many exercise and medical professionals may not focus on how some specific genetic lots work until a catastrophic problem presents itself.
> ignoring feedback that a movement was causing pain, prescribing stretches to increase flexibility in a hypermobile person
So glad you found better advice than this!
LLMs are fantastic tools for exploring a topic, coming up with good questions and lines of understanding to pursue with professionals, and in picking professionals. I think they're also poor outright replacements for people especially when it comes to deep and important domains, but still quite useful.
Who are the religions without ghosts?
And is the overall point “just because we’ve made big leaps of progress doesn’t mean every challenge is tractable let alone a moonshot sprint away especially those we have solid theoretical limits on”? That’s a point I certainly find amenable to I just want to make sure I’m not missing something more subtle or sophisticated.
Some of this might be applicable to LLMs, but some isn’t and much of it would be resisted. This is one reason we’re not likely to get “as good as a human” because at some level we’re not optimizing for the outcomes; we’re optimizing for speed, convenience, some participant’s economics, and underlying beliefs.
I also think that holding important ground involves understanding the terms of the argument, including the problems people say they’re trying to solve.
But these days I see a lot more talk about the developmental effects of parasocial media on kids. There’s a whole segment of buy-in there that didn’t exist before.
This is a lane I’ve been experimenting in —- seeing what I can get out of models that work in 16GB VRAM for simple tasks (screen scraping, decision tree navigation, natural language queries). It’s interesting for sure (certainly reveals non-deterministic limits) and promising for low criticality review-opportunity tasks, but I also feel like I need better sources/community for understanding and reflection. Preferably those that aren’t hype channels. Any pointers?
Also - I think if you look at the data you’ll find periods off the gold standard where food prices grew more slowly than inflation and even wages, ie food becomes cheaper. 80s and 90s for example.
I’m on Insta and WhatsApp and I use them a few times per year. I’m on Messenger and have seen a dramatic dropoff in messages. I’m on FB frequently and notice only a small fraction of my friends bother anymore and it’s become an interest platform to make up the lack, so I’m trending toward less time there. I’m on Twitter/X but check in maybe once a month.
I may not be a typical user, but I’m probably not unique either.
Schools are the place where the product is a more fully developed person. There's no LLM shortcut for generating that. There are many ways you could use LLMs that would discourage it. There may be some that can encourage it.
Personally, I can see aggressively keeping kids away from LLMs until they've learned effort, living in tension/frustration, the pleasure of breaking through to discovery, trust evaluation, hypothesis/test cycles, and good socratic dialogue from the learner's side.
It may be possible at intermediate phases to prime some models to help with this process.
It's also more or less true that the Biden administration took more responsibility and initiative in antitrust enforcement:
https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2...
https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/10/02/biden-ftc-antitrust-...
https://rooseveltinstitute.org/blog/the-biden-administration...
2) I think it’s important to recognize that one of the things models are good for is astroturfing, and any given conversation you see may be direct or secondary effects of that (among other marketing).
An argument can be as old as the search engine and hold real value. There are ways in which unreflective search engine use has misled and mistrained people.
There’s always been argument to be had about how we manage and offload attention, what we gain and what we lose when resistance is reduced. It’s part of reflection that’s been necessary in order to make progress solid ground, and is more necessary with non-deterministic tech.
The phrase “Tactical tornados” may be older than web search and describes people who also got a lot done.
Models can be incredibly helpful boosters and situationally effective subordinates… and also patchy as a real engineering IC or org.
(I’m team CSS standards although my knowledge is a bit tilted towards late 2010s, currently revisiting)
L2 issues are already involved in some way often revealing some kind of system failure, requiring context and exploration to understand, and judgement (and perhaps even system overrides) to fix.
I could see “automated L2 is the new L1” improvements, but without a big capability jump and/or a resource bonfire, I don’t think even frontier models would effectively replace good L2 staff.
They might magnify good L2 staff so fewer are needed (and maybe even help L1 staff become L2).
But not one about extra lines of code when it came to table layout.
And claiming non-table alternatives always needed polyfills and more code doesn’t sound like an accurate reflection of the time either. It sounds more like resentment of people who actually did invest in understanding of the domain because they might not just let you use the small toolset you knew without thinking about anything else.
And I say that as a person who did a lot of table-layout markup too.
A careful re-reading of my comment will reveal that I did mention rent as a factor in at least two places: one as an opportunity cost to be reckoned with for people following the PFI plan (with which my example still comes out looking good), one as a cost of living substantial enough for many working people that they do not have significant disposable income, which makes leveraging their largest living cost appealing.
> Interest rates are closer to 6.7% which means your $2500/mo doesn't even cover your principal and interest of $2600 which is to say nothing of PMI (which will be required since you didn't put 20% down), homeowner's insurance, HOA fees, or property taxes.
Using a 5% interest rate was one of several simplifying assumptions that I chose to be generous to the Buy Housing on a Loan plan.
You are correct that interest rates are presently and historically higher than that, and that mortgage insurance, homeowners insurance, property taxes, and some maintenance costs that under the BHL plan can add up to significant housing costs that aren't going to equity and therefore aren't well-leveraged. In other words, the BHL plan actually comes off worse than I made it look.
(If there's a counter side of that, it's that landlords can and will pass on those costs so they're reflected in rents... but sticklers will notice that landlords who are done with amortized costs or who financed at lower rates can choose not to do that and may have incentives to depending on the market.)
That's in absolute terms. There's a relative point too: the higher the interest rates, the more the field tilts towards the PFI. It magnifies debt/leverage, making that path more expensive, and it magnifies return from invested income, making that path more rewarding if you can swing it.
> And don't forget that other than insurance and taxes, your mortgage payment is capped for 30 years.
I did leave out the bounding effect that a mortgage can have, and that's arguably an important missing point.
Wy would someone do that? My observation is that incomes also tend to grow in rough parity to rents in many markets -- in fact, local income growth is probably the primary variable local rents are dependent on (at least in a functioning market). This means during prime earning years decades from retirement, rent changes might be an acceptable simplification. But you're probably right that the closer you get to retirement, the more important bounding costs is. And there might even be other situations where the tradeoff starts to make sense even for earners with significant disposable incomes.
I considered putting it up in the bullet points. Apparently deciding against that lost my expressions of this point to some readers, including yourself.
But yes, this is why the analysis after the bullet point mentions the profile of people who don't have $2500 disposable income. The leverage matters more to people in this situation.
Having seen this conversation play out more than a few times and even turn a tad fighty, I think this is the fault line:
* people who do this kind of analysis frequently and generally have high disposable income often see that they can leverage compound interest rather than pay it, so the Pure Financial Investment plan seems like a slam dunk to them, and for their profile they're probably right.
* people who generally don't have high disposable income see that they can use leverage to make their rent payment do double duty, which seems like a huge win for them, and for their profile they're probably right.
What I did leave out is how a mortgage can bound your living costs. Another commenter correctly pointed out rents can expand dramatically. Where incomes track rents, I don't think this makes a dramatic difference, and that's why I didn't include it, but it's true this isn't guaranteed, and mortgage can function pretty well as a hedge.
It's probably worth making a closer comparison though:
* Buying a House on Loan: commit to paying off a $450k loan over 30 years at 5% interest, with an immediate $50k down payment and the home itself as collateral. So ~$2500/mo payments, another 400k in interest by the time you're done. Your home probably appreciates by that much in most markets, which gives you a million dollar asset at the end. In some good markets, it may appreciate by 3-4 times, which would mean you have a 1.5-2 million dollar asset.
* Pure Financial Investment: put $50k into a fund, add sustained regular $2500/mo contributions. Let's imagine that the fund averages a conservative 5% annual return and we do this for 30 years. The outcome should be... a bit above 2 million dollars.
All investment involves risk and variable outcomes, but the BHL plan probably has a more varied outcome. Parity may be as common as substantial profit.
The PFI plan, on the other hand, performs really well even considering conservative 5% returns: over 2 million dollars (minus 400k you would have probably paid in rent). Bump it to 8% returns and we're looking at 3 million, a performance even many good real estate markets couldn't match.
Its major problem is that you need to be disciplined about putting the chunky contributions in, which means you need to consistently have rent-payment-level disposable income to make this work. Many working people don't.
Leverage lets housing costs go to equity and interest payments, which is key leverage for people who don't have disposable investment income. But less key for people who do.
Things have reached the point where I probably could use open sync+storage options to achieve what I do with Dropbox (and perhaps eventually I will do that as a hedge against the risks of Dropbox enshitification).
But I'd love to see Dropbox continue to provide worthy convenient service.
The lynchings? Part of the problem was that enough of the societies where they happened did accept those as part of the social order. And they were undisciplined in a way that allowed them to be esentially lotteries -- no requirement for any kind of hearing, no right to defense or appeal, no right for others to know how well any accusation stands up, no right for anyone to even know who the lynchers are. Supposed offenses could be trivial if not entirely fabricated, to cover nothing more than ugly bullying.
The contrast between the two situations could scarcely be starker.
And that's before we get to the ridiculous racial fearmongering that you're selling. You want to talk about 2018 murders? It doesn't look like you want to do that carefully and honesty. If anything the 2018 data shows white people as the disproportionate threat to white people.
Because of the 3,315 white murder victims where an alleged/established perp has been identified closely enough to talk about their race, it appears that 2,677 were killed by white people.
That's 80% of white murder victims killed by white people. This is above proportion of the population that's white at a level that's beyond noise (about 60% of the US is "non-hispanic white", maybe we move up to 75% if we're lumping in white-alone-identifying hispanics and assume that the criminal justice system also errs on the side of assigning perps "white").
514 murders where the perp is black would mean about 15% of white murder victims were killed by black people. Estimates of the portion of the US that's black run about 12-15%, so this tracks proportion.
2018 statistics make it look like, if anything, whites are in more danger from their fellow white people than from a racially integrated society (and this sure tracks the lived experience of most white guys I know).
And if someone says "well, of course white people are killed by more of their fellow white people because that's where they voluntarily associate" ... that wouldn't change the statistically demonstrated nature of the threat, it would only highlight how limited racial integration actually is (and how much more ridiculous it is to complain it "kills whites").
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
Like "they didn't prepare correctly" or "they didn't do the right things" or "mondays amirite" there may even be cases where it's true, and a robust analysis of lottery situations sometimes reveals local maxima or tradeoffs that are tough to shake.
But they can also be spoken with a post-hoc resignation that discourages the very analysis that might confirm them... because such an analysis might also disaffirm them.
One question to ask is whether a way of addressing a "lottery" encourages you to stop analysis and reflection, or to work your way through analysis and reflection.
Giving examples of specific "lotteries" I see is just as likely to activate those psychological mechanisms I talked about (or a partisan frame) as it is to open anyone's eyes.
If you want hints, though, watch for where you see the psychological mechanisms in yourself or others. "Those people just didn't do the right things. They should have been more careful, more prepared, more like the people who didn't get stoned. They should have done it the right way. They should have known their place. And if it's their time, well, what are you gonna do, mondays amirite?"
If you hear someone saying something like that, if you find yourself saying it... interrogate that. There may sometimes be real truth to it. But ask yourself: is that really all there is to it? Does the world have to be that way? If it were your child who "drew the lot", would you be satisfied?
What are the lotteries you don't see, because you're used to them, and they're just part of how the world works, like this one is to the people in the story?
If you're looking, you can find them. But it's also as uncomfortable to find them in real life as it is to read the story. So, most of us are happy to keep some other ideas between us and these lotteries. Those people just didn't do the right things. They should have been more careful, more prepared, more like the people who didn't get stoned. They should have done it the right way. They should have known their place. And if it's their time, well, what are you gonna do, mondays amirite?
And if that's true, then you can be safe because you will do the right things. And nobody has to go to the bother of persuading a society with any changes at the margins on which it sacrifices random people.
In vector function space, no one can hear your eigen-scream.