Our Teetotaling Elites | The American Conservative

That may come as a nasty shock to Christ Himself, who was known to serve wine at supper, and enjoyed the odd tipple with prostitutes and tax men.

Everything Is Broken

Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

Everything Is Broken

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

Everything Is Broken

The homogeneity of these spaces means that traveling between them is frictionless, a value that Silicon Valley prizes and cultural influencers take advantage of. Changing places can be as painless as reloading a website. You might not even realize you’re not where you started.

 

OTL: The Losses of Dan Gable

When asked by Al Gore to appear with him at an Iowa rally, Gable had a single question for the vice president: What is your position on Title IX? (He did not appear at the rally.)

OTL: The Losses of Dan Gable

A Des Moines newspaper reporter once wore an Iowa hat to a Russian village during the Cold War, in the mountains near the Siberian border, where an American had never been. A young man stepped out of the crowd, pointed toward the hat and said one of the few English words he knew: “Gable.”

OTL: The Losses of Dan Gable

She ducks into the suite, scans the room and calls, “Mom?” Kathy Gable comforts Dan, talking softly to him, and soon he returns, drying his eyes, trying to explain something he doesn’t understand.

OTL: The Losses of Dan Gable

When the machine had asked his age, Gable, who is 64, typed in 29, as always, and began attacking the pedals, grinding out frustrations about the IOC and the collapsing Hawkeyes.

Ontology Of Psychiatric Conditions: Taxometrics

Apparently if you have a blog about your field, that can make it harder to get or keep a job in academia. I’m not sure what we think we’re gaining by ensuring the smartest and best educated people around aren’t able to talk openly about the fields they’re experts in, but I hope it’s worth it.

Learning To Love Scientific Consensus

Scientific consensus is the best tool we have for seeking truth. It’s not perfect, and it’s frequently overturned by later scientists, but this is usually – albeit not literally always – the work of well-credentialed insiders, operating pretty quickly after the evidence that should overturn it becomes available. Any individual should be very doubtful of their ability to beat it, while not being so doubtful that nobody ever improves it and science can never progress.

All Debates Are Bravery Debates

There are so many people from extremely functional communities saying that people need to be more trusting and kind and take people at their word more often, and so many people from dysfunctional communities saying that’s not how it works. Both are no doubt backed by ample advice from their own lives.

Eyes Wide Shut, Explained

You can get rid of ignorance, but you can’t get rid of knowledge.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

The solution to that is obvious: remain irresponsible. It will be hard, though, because the apparently random projects you take up to stave off decline will read to outsiders as evidence of it. And you yourself won’t know for sure that they’re wrong. But it will at least be more fun to work on what you want.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

What can one do in the face of such uncertainty? One solution is to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with any hedge, you’re decreasing reward when you decrease risk

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

But you can never be sure. In fact, here’s an interesting idea that’s also rather alarming if it’s true: it may be that to do great work, you also have to waste a lot of time.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

What You Can Learn from How to Ace a YC Interview

One thing few people realize about billionaires is that all of them could have stopped sooner. They could have gotten acquired, or found someone else to run the company. Many founders do. The ones who become really rich are the ones who keep working. And what makes them keep working is not just money. What keeps them working is the same thing that keeps anyone else working when they could stop if they wanted to: that there’s nothing else they’d rather do

Analysis | The Daily 202: Charles Koch congratulates Biden and says he wants to work together on ‘as many issues as possible’

Claude-Frédéric Bastiat, who said: “For a law to be respected, it must be respectable.”

Where Are They Now? Catching Up With the Members of the 1998 University of Colorado XC Team 20 Years After “Running With The Buffaloes” – LetsRun.com

“I have 8 min legs but still have a 4 min mind,

How to Think for Yourself

Do you want to do the kind of work where you can only win by thinking differently from everyone else? I suspect most people’s unconscious

Cut Medicine in Half

Am I being too allegorical? Then let me speak plainly: our main problem in health policy is a huge overemphasis on medicine. The

What’s wrong with the media

The Internet has just been a huge ongoing wave of competition, with much ad revenue and consumer attention being diverted not from print journalism to digital journalism, but from print journalism to things that aren’t journalism at all.

A Draft Critique of the Meritocritique

Until the critique of meritocracy arrives at something like, “We want meritocracy done better, and he have a practical way to achieve it,” we should just treat it the way we treat complaining about death and taxes—to be ignored by serious people.

The Tragedy of Group Selectionism

J. R. Molloy said: “Nature is the ultimate bigot, because it is obstinately and intolerantly devoted to its own prejudices and absolutely refuses to yield to the most persuasive rationalizations of humans.”

Meditations On Moloch

technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else

Meditations On Moloch

Henry Ford was virtuous because he allowed lots of otherwise car-less people to obtain cars and so made them better off. What does Vegas do? Promise a bunch of shmucks free money and not give it to them.

Leave a Line of Retreat

The hope is that it takes less courage to visualize an uncomfortable state of affairs as a thought experiment, than to consider how likely it is to be true. But then after you do the former, it becomes easier to do the latter.

Leave a Line of Retreat

When you surround the enemy Always allow them an escape route. They must see that there is An alternative to death.

The Meditation on Curiosity

Mark Twain said: “A classic is something that everyone wants to have read and no one wants to read.”

The Observer Effect – Daniel Ek

A great meeting has three key elements: the desired outcome of the meeting is clear ahead of time; the various options are clear, ideally ahead of time; and the roles of the participants are clear at the time.

Just Lose Hope Already

. If you set out to teach someone how to not turn little mistakes into big mistakes, it’s nearly the same art whether in hedge funds or romance, and one of the keys is this: Be ready to admit you lost.

The Crackpot Offer

Whenever you are tempted to hold on to a thought you would never have thought if you had been wiser, you are being offered the opportunity to become a crackpot

The Importance of Saying “Oops”

It is important to have the watershed moment, the moment of humbling realization. To acknowledge a fundamental problem, not divide it into palatable bite-size mistakes.

What’s Wrong with Social Science and How to Fix It: Reflections After Reading 2578 Papers | Fantastic Anachronism

“Simkin & Roychowdhury venture a guess that as many as 80% of authors citing a paper have not actually read the original”

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors.

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

The seventh virtue is simplicity. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Twelve Virtues of Rationality

“If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool

Opinion | How Many Lives Would a More Normal President Have Saved?

It’s precisely when events seems to vindicate your deepest anxieties, though, that you should be careful about your conclusions.

Maybe Lying Can’t Exist?! – LessWrong 2.0

“We lie all the time, but if everyone knows that we’re lying, is a lie really a

Andrew Sullivan: Why the Reactionary Right Must Be Taken Seriously

Their rage eclipses their argument.

Andrew Sullivan: Why the Reactionary Right Must Be Taken Seriously

I’m even tempted, at times, to share George Orwell’s view of the neo-reactionaries of his age: that, although they can sometimes spew dangerous nonsense, they’re smarter and more influential than we tend to think, and that “up to a point, they are right.”

The Trap The Democrats Walked Right Into

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.” And

Fixing Private Health Insurance

As a result, while premiums for employer-sponsored coverage increased by 14% from 2013 to 2017, premiums on the individual market soared by an average of 105%.

Fixing Private Health Insurance

. Although only 19% of workers with employer-sponsored coverage are in HMO plans, 72% of enrollees on the individual market are enrolled in HMOs or plans with even narrower networks.

Fixing Private Health Insurance

As a result, from 2011 to 2017, increased spending on hospital and physician services accounted for 94% of the $285 billion growth in private health-insurance costs

Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary

To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right

When None Dare Urge Restraint

Yes, it matters that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards. Not just for understanding the enemy’s realistic psychology. There is simply too much damage done by spirals of hate. It is just too dangerous for there to be any target in the world, whether it be the Jews or Adolf Hitler, about whom saying negative things trumps saying accurate things.

When None Dare Urge Restraint

But just as the vast majority of all complex statements are untrue, the vast majority of negative things you can say about anyone, even the worst person in the world, are untrue.

Evaporative Cooling of Group Beliefs

The ones who really, really believed in her—and perhaps some of the undecideds, who, after the voices of moderation left, heard arguments from only one side.

Uncritical Supercriticality

And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.

Superhero Bias

You cannot reveal virtue by trying to reveal virtue

Superhero Bias

How tough can it be to act all brave and courageous when you’re pretty much invulnerable

Evaluability (and Cheap Holiday Shopping)

If you have a fixed amount of money to spend—and your goal is to display your friendship, rather than to actually help the recipient—you’ll be better off deliberately not shopping for value. Decide how much money you want to spend on impressing the recipient, then find the most worthless object which costs that amount. The cheaper the class of objects, the more expensive a particular object will appear, given that you spend a fixed amount. Which is more memorable, a $25 shirt or a $25 candle?

Hold Off On Proposing Solutions

Maier’s advice echoes the principle of the bottom line, that the effectiveness of our decisions is determined only by whatever evidence and processing we did in first arriving at our decisions—after you write the bottom line, it is too late to write more reasons above. If you make your decision very early on, it will, in fact, be based on very little thought, no matter how many amazing arguments you come up with afterward.

How to Seem (and Be) Deep

If you don’t stop at the first answer, and cast out replies that seem vaguely unsatisfactory, in time your thoughts will form a coherent whole, flowing from the single source of yourself, rather than being fragmentary repetitions of other people’s conclusions.

How to Seem (and Be) Deep

If you want to sound deep, you can never say anything that is more than a single step of inferential distance away from your listener’s current mental state. That’s just the way it is.

How to Seem (and Be) Deep

ou know, given human nature, if people got hit on the head by a baseball bat every week, pretty soon they would invent reasons why getting hit on the head with a baseball bat was a good thing. But if you took someone who wasn’t being hit on the head with a baseball bat, and you asked them if they wanted it, they would say no. I think that if you took someone who was immortal, and asked them if they wanted to die for benefit X, they would say no.”

How to Seem (and Be) Deep

A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject

In praise of negativity

We need negative criticisms from others, since they lead us to understand weaknesses in our arguments that we are incapable of coming at ourselves, without them being pointed out to us.

In praise of negativity

reason cannot readily be separated from the desires of the reasoner

Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?

This suggests—to say the very least—that we should be more careful when we expose ourselves to unreliable information, especially if we’re doing something else at the time. Be careful when you glance at that newspaper in the supermarket.

Do We Believe Everything We’re Told?

Spinoza suggested that we first passively accept a proposition in the course of comprehending it, and only afterward actively disbelieve propositions which are rejected by consideration.

Priming and Contamination

The more general result is that completely uninformative, known false, or totally irrelevant “information” can influence estimates and decisions. In the field of heuristics and biases, this more general phenomenon is known as contamination.

Artificial Intelligence Is the Hope 2020 Needs

it accepts that being weird sometimes is a necessary part of being smart

Being a Noob

Though it feels unpleasant, and people will sometimes ridicule you for it, the more you feel like a noob, the better.

Is That Your True Rejection?

that what your failed prospects tell you is the reason for rejection, may not make the real difference; and you should ponder that carefully before spending huge efforts.

How to Write Usefully

Useful writing tells people something true and important that they didn’t already know, and tells them as unequivocally as possible.

Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn’t make it worse. Not being open about it doesn’t make it go away. And because it’s true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn’t there to be lived. People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.

Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

To do better: When you’re doubting one of your most cherished beliefs, close your eyes, empty your mind, grit your teeth, and deliberately think about whatever hurts the most. Don’t rehearse standard objections whose standard counters would make you feel better. Ask yourself what smart people who disagree would say to your first reply, and your second reply. Whenever you catch yourself flinching away from an objection you fleetingly thought of, drag it out into the forefront of your mind. Punch yourself in the solar plexus. Stick a knife in your heart, and wiggle to widen the hole. In the face of the pain, rehearse only this:

Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

More than anything, the grip of religion is sustained by people just-not-thinking-about the real weak points of their religion. I don’t think this is a matter of training, but a matter of instinct. People don’t think about the real weak points of their beliefs for the same reason they don’t touch an oven’s red-hot burners; it’s painful.

Avoiding Your Belief’s Real Weak Points

My point is that, when it comes to spontaneous self-questioning, one is much more likely to spontaneously self-attack strong points with comforting replies to rehearse, than to spontaneously self-attack the weakest, most vulnerable points. Similarly, one is likely to stop at the first reply and be comforted, rather than further criticizing the reply. A better title than “Avoiding Your Belief ’s Real Weak Points” would be “Not Spontaneously Thinking About Your Belief ’s Most Painful Weaknesses.”

Knowing About Biases Can Hurt People

I recall someone who learned about the calibration/overconfidence problem. Soon after he said: “Well, you can’t trust experts; they’re wrong so often—as experiments have shown. So therefore, when I predict the future, I prefer to assume that things will continue historically as they have—” and went off into this whole complex, error-prone, highly questionable extrapolation. Somehow, when it came to trusting his own preferred conclusions, all those biases and fallacies seemed much less salient—leapt much less readily to mind—than when he needed to counter-argue someone else.

Rationality and the English Language

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.

Andrew Sullivan: See You Next Friday

f liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear,”

What You Can’t Say

Argue with idiots, and you become an idiot.

What You Can’t Say

This second group adopt the fashion not because they want to stand out but because they are afraid of standing out.

What You Can’t Say

I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That’s where you’ll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them.

What You Can’t Say

When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as “divisive” or “racially insensitive” instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention.

What You Can’t Say

Almost certainly, there is something wrong with you if you don’t think things you don’t dare say out loud.

Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence

Someone once said, “Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” If you cannot place yourself in a state of mind where this statement, true or false, seems completely irrelevant as a critique of conservatism, you are not ready to think rationally about politics.

Are Your Enemies Innately Evil?

This looks to me like the deep-seated yearning for a one-sided policy debate in which the best policy has no drawbacks. If an army is crossing the border or a lunatic is coming at you with a knife, the policy alternatives are (a) defend yourself or (b) lie down and die. If you defend yourself, you may have to kill. If you kill someone who could, in another world, have been your friend, that is a tragedy. And it is a tragedy. The other option, lying down and dying, is also a tragedy. Why must there be a non-tragic option? Who says that the best policy available must have no downside? If someone has to die, it may as well be the initiator of force, to discourage future violence and thereby minimize the total sum of death.

Correspondence Bias

To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally

Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided

I don’t think that when someone makes a stupid choice and dies, this is a cause for celebration. I count it as a tragedy. It is not always helping people, to save them from the consequences of their own actions; but I draw a moral line at capital punishment. If you’re dead, you can’t learn from your mistakes.

Absolute Authority

“The power of science comes from having the ability to change our minds and admit we’re wrong. If you’ve never admitted you’re wrong, it doesn’t mean you’ve made fewer mistakes.”

The Fallacy of Gray

When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

The Fallacy of Gray

“Everyone is imperfect.” Mohandas Gandhi was imperfect and Joseph Stalin was imperfect, but they were not the same shade of imperfection. “Everyone is imperfect” is an excellent example of replacing a two-color view with a one-color view. If you say, “No one is perfect, but some people are less imperfect than others,” you may not gain applause; but for those who strive to do better, you have held out hope. No one is perfectly imperfect, after all.

The Third Alternative

It’s amazing how many Noble Liars and their ilk are eager to embrace ethical violations—with all due bewailing of their agonies of conscience—when they haven’t spent even five minutes by the clock looking for an alternative. There are some mental searches that we secretly wish would fail; and when the prospect of success is uncomfortable, people take the earliest possible excuse to give up.

The Third Alternative

False dilemmas are often presented to justify unethical policies that are, by some vast coincidence, very convenient. Lying, for example, is often much more convenient than telling the truth; and believing whatever you started out with is more convenient than updating. Hence the popularity of arguments for Noble Lies; it serves as a defense of a pre-existing belief—one does not find Noble Liars who calculate an optimal new Noble Lie; they keep whatever lie they started with. Better stop that search fast!

The Proper Use of Humility

Therefore it is written: “To be humble is to take specific actions in anticipation of your own errors. To confess your fallibility and then do nothing about it is not humble; it is boasting of your modesty.”

“Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

Someone is bound to say, “If the light bulb were unknown to science, you could gain fame and fortune by investigating it.” But I’m not talking about greed. I’m not talking about career ambition. I’m talking about the raw emotion of curiosity—the feeling of being intrigued. Why should your curiosity be diminished because someone else, not you, knows how the light bulb works? Is this not spite? It’s not enough for you to know; other people must also be ignorant, or you won’t be happy?

“Science” as Curiosity-Stopper

But what does the phrase “scientifically explicable” mean? It means that someone else knows how the light bulb works. When you are told the light bulb is “scientifically explicable,” you don’t know more than you knew earlier; you don’t know whether the light bulb will brighten or fade. But because someone else knows, it devalues the knowledge in your eyes. You become less curious.

Making History Available

Don’t imagine how you could have predicted the change, for that is amnesia. Remember that, in fact, you did not guess. Remember how, century after century, the world changed in ways you did not guess. Maybe then you will be less shocked by what happens next.

Positive Bias: Look into the Dark

I have been writing for quite some time now on the notion that the strength of a hypothesis is what it can’t explain, not what it can—if you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. So to spot an explanation that isn’t helpful, it’s not enough to think of what it does explain very well—you also have to search for results it couldn’t explain, and this is the true strength of the theory.

Say Not “Complexity”

Marcello and I developed a convention in our AI work: when we ran into something we didn’t understand, which was often, we would say “magic”—as in, “X magically does Y”—to remind ourselves that here was an unsolved problem, a gap in our understanding. It is far better to say “magic,” than “complexity” or “emergence”; the latter words create an illusion of understanding. Wiser to say “magic,” and leave yourself a placeholder, a reminder of work you will have to do later.

Say Not “Complexity”

concepts are not useful or useless of themselves. Only usages are correct or incorrect. In the step Marcello was trying to take in the dance, he was trying to explain something for free, get something for nothing. It is an extremely common misstep, at least in my field. You can join a discussion on Artificial General Intelligence and watch people doing the same thing, left and right, over and over again—constantly skipping over things they don’t understand, without realizing that’s what they’re doing.

Andrew Sullivan: Coronavirus Will Be the Real Swing Voter in November

(Yes: Churchill was a racist. But, as the joke goes, wait till they find out about the guy he was at war with.)

The Futility of Emergence

“Emergence” has become very popular, just as saying “magic” used to be very popular. “Emergence” has the same deep appeal to human psychology, for the same reason. “Emergence” is such a wonderfully easy explanation, and it feels good to say it; it gives you a sacred mystery to worship. Emergence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You can explain anything using emergence, and so people do just that; for it feels so wonderful to explain things. Humans are still humans, even if they’ve taken a few science classes in college. Once they find a way to escape the shackles of settled science, they get up to the same shenanigans as their ancestors—dressed up in the literary genre of “science,” but humans are still humans, and human psychology is still human psychology.

Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions

To worship a phenomenon because it seems so wonderfully mysterious is to worship your own ignorance.

Semantic Stopsigns

What distinguishes a semantic stopsign is failure to consider the obvious next question.

Semantic Stopsigns

Jonathan Wallace suggested that “God!” functions as a semantic stopsign—that it isn’t a propositional assertion, so much as a cognitive traffic signal: do not think past this point. Saying “God!” doesn’t so much resolve the paradox, as put up a cognitive traffic signal to halt the obvious continuation of the question-and-answer chain.

Fake Explanations

The deeper error of the students is not simply that they failed to constrain anticipation. Their deeper error is that they thought they were doing physics. They said the phrase “because of,” followed by the sort of words Spock might say on Star Trek, and thought they thereby entered the magisterium of science. Not so. They simply moved their magic from one literary genre to another.

Fake Explanations

And as we all know by this point (I do hope), if you are equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledg

Slate Star Codex and Silicon Valley’s War Against the Media

“if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.”

Your Strength as a Rationalist

Alas, belief is easier than disbelief; we believe instinctively, but disbelief requires a conscious effort.

What Is Evidence?

This is why rationalists put such a heavy premium on the paradoxical-seeming claim that a belief is only really worthwhile if you could, in principle, be persuaded to believe otherwise

Applause Lights

Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new informatio

Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable

Most people’s concept of rationality is determined by what they think they can get away with; they think they can get away with endorsing Bible ethics; and so it only requires a manageable effort of self-deception for them to overlook the Bible’s moral problems. Everyone has agreed not to notice the elephant in the living room, and this state of affairs can sustain itself for a time.

Illusion of Transparency: Why No One Understands You

Be not too quick to blame those who misunderstand your perfectly clear sentences, spoken or written. Chances are, your words are more ambiguous than you think.

Availability

Memory is not always a good guide to probabilities in the past, let alone in the future.

Availability

Compared to our ancestors, we live in a larger world, in which far more happens, and far less of it reaches us—a much stronger selection effect, which can create much larger availability biases.

Politics is the Mind-Killer – LessWrong 2.0

As with chocolate cookies, not everything that feels pleasurable is good for you.

The Fallacy of Gray – LessWrong 2.0

Thus Abraham Lincoln’s famous riddle: “If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have?” And the answer: “Four – because a tail isn’t a leg regardless of what you call it.”

The Fallacy of Gray – LessWrong 2.0

So it’s important to keep these two sorts of statements separate, and remember that in no case can an agreed-upon set of borders or a category boundary be factually incorrect.

Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease – LessWrong 2.0

: if giving condemnation instead of sympathy decreases the incidence of the disease enough to be worth the hurt feelings, condemn; otherwise, sympathize.

“Just Suffer Until It Passes” – LessWrong 2.0

(2) “Just Suffer [Endure/Wait/Whatever] Until It Passes” — it’s possible to accept negative affect and wait, and it… passes. This is often more productive than trying to banish it via distraction or stimulation, which often compounds the problem at hand.

Andrew Sullivan: You Say You Want a Revolution?

The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were.

Chapter 1: A Day of Very Low Probability – LessWrong 2.0

Don’t believe everything you think

The Gospel According to Peter Thiel

instead. . . . Rivalry causes us to overemphasize old opportunities and slavishly copy what has worked in the past.”

The Gospel According to Peter Thiel

We resent those who have what we think we want—but we want what we do because those whom we resent have it.

When Is It Time to Claim Victory in the Gay Rights Struggle?

: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

Advice for ambitious teenagers

– you must ensure that, if there is an important goal you’d like to achieve, the clear-eyed version of yourself sets up a system to ensure that a later, less motivated of yourself will get it done.

Why non-distanced social and commercial interactions have resumed so quickly – Marginal REVOLUTION

Most importantly, peer effects are remarkably strong. Most people are not willing to accept a small additional risk of death to say eat in a particular restaurant. But they are willing to accept a small additional risk of death to live life as other people are living life.

Jon Stewart Is Back to Weigh In

The enemy is noise. The goal is clarity.

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues – J.K. Rowling

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity

J.K. Rowling Writes about Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues – J.K. Rowling

I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I Actually Read Woody Allen’s Memoir

Some wrongs are so great that no legal or bureaucratic process can ever make things right. At some point, the only way to get unchained from a monster is through forgiveness

I Actually Read Woody Allen’s Memoir

—“disagreed on every single issue except Hitler and my report cards.” Still

I Actually Read Woody Allen’s Memoir

“If we behave like those on the other side, then we are the other side. Instead of changing the world, all we’ll achieve is a reflection of the one we want to destroy.”

The American Press Is Destroying Itself

In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.

Eight Short Studies On Excuses – LessWrong 2.0

The general principle is that by accepting an excuse, a rule-maker is also committing themselves to accepting all equally good excuses in the future.

We Cannot Allow ‘1619’ to Dumb Down America in the Name of a Crusade – 1776 Unites

riposte

We Cannot Allow ‘1619’ to Dumb Down America in the Name of a Crusade – 1776 Unites

However, the simple question is: Who are the people who, if they underwent a grand realization that “It isn’t their fault” beyond the basic “root causes” wisdom, now entrenched among the educated for 50 years, would fashion impactful changes in legislation on health, drugs, education, or housing? Which officials, in which positions? What exactly are we thinking they would do? “I finally understood that the problems in black communities trace back to injustices that began in the 17th century, and that is what finally made me _______.” With what would the 1619 people fill in that blank?

We Cannot Allow ‘1619’ to Dumb Down America in the Name of a Crusade – 1776 Unites

And the fact remains that this obsession with white people understanding that it “isn’t our fault” goes against the basics of what we consider healthy tutelage to any human being. “Who cares what he thinks about you?” we tell our child. The psychologist treats minimization of obstacles, an almost willful denial, as a healthy kind of coping strategy for busy humans grappling with the challenges of life.

We Cannot Allow ‘1619’ to Dumb Down America in the Name of a Crusade – 1776 Unites

Who seriously condemns persons of the past for being unable to see beyond the confines of their time, when the ability to do this is precisely what we otherwise consider one of the quintessences of greatness

Chris Joslin: Born Under a Bad Sign

I’ve looked at things where it seems like there is no light at the end of the tunnel, no bottom to the bottle. But you don’t have to be in pain.

The Confessions of the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

“There’s [a] misconception that to be a security expert you must dabble in the dark side,” Hutchins wrote. “It’s not true. You can learn everything you need to know legally. Stick to the good side.”

The Confessions of the Hacker Who Saved the Internet

“For most of us, anything good we ever do comes either because we did bad before or because other people did good to get us out of it, or both.”

Say What You Really Mean

At scale, public indifference and apathy all too often swallows up nuance and precision.

Why Won’t Trump Wear a Mask?

Find the easiest marks and you can make a lot of money, even if they’re a tiny fraction of the overall population. That’s a logic, by the way, that can also work for party-aligned media, and one way that party-aligned media can undermine the party as a whole, which needs broad support from majorities (or at least very large pluralities) to win elections.

Zoom Technologies, Inc. vs. the Efficient Markets Hypothesis – LessWrong 2.0

If China was likely to be a basket case in a few months, then you would expect Chinese assets to be priced lower by this competitive market of lots of smart guys who I don’t need to personally trust because the ones who are wrong will lose money; what do you know that none of them do?

Zoom Technologies, Inc. vs. the Efficient Markets Hypothesis – LessWrong 2.0

“if you knew your destination, you would already be there.”

Why Won’t TV News Book Tara Reade?

the media equation The stakes are high for the media in the case of a sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden. Tara Reade in Penn Valley, Calif. Ms. Reade has accused former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. of sexually assaulting her in 1993, when she worked on his Senate staff.Credit…Max Whittaker for The New York Times Listen to This Article Audio Recording by Audm To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. There were good reasons to be skeptical of her 20-year-old allegations: She’d changed her story and said some weird stuff, and even denied the whole thing under oath. And while the candidate had his flaws, he’d never been accused of sexual assault. So not everybody believed Juanita Broaddrick’s claim that Bill Clinton raped her. “You cannot blame them,” Ms. Broaddrick told me on the phone Wednesday. “Here I had lied in the Paula Jones suit, and that naturally threw very harsh criticism toward me, rightfully.” You don’t have to believe Mr. Clinton assaulted Ms. Broaddrick in 1978. If you’re a journalist, it doesn’t really matter what you believe, as long as you report what you know. But the handling of Ms. Broaddrick’s story was one of the most damaging media mistakes of the Clinton years. And the treatment of Mr. Clinton’s accusers by the Democratic Party and the media alike is one of the original sins that led to today’s divided, partisan news environment. The mainstream American media in 1999, for reasons that are hard to explain or excuse today, got cold feet on a credible allegation of rape against the president. And after NBC News sat for weeks on an exclusive interview, Ms. Broaddrick went to the only people who would listen to her, Mr. Clinton’s partisan enemies at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. That move helped turn her straightforward allegation into a weaponized political story. And while Americans watching at home could make up their own minds about Ms. Broaddrick’s credibility, they were left with new reasons to shake their heads at the media. The same thing is about to happen again. A former Senate aide for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Tara Reade, has accused the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexually assaulting her in 1993. Reporters have found other accounts that indicate that she has been telling her version of events for a long time. There are, as with Ms. Broaddrick, reasons to doubt her story; there aren’t good reasons not to hear her out. As The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, told me in an interview two weeks ago, Ms. Reade has “standing.” And yet, Ms. Reade told me Wednesday that the only offers she’s had to appear on television have come from Fox News, including a call from the prime time host Sean Hannity. She has so far turned them down. “I’ve been trying to just kind of wait to get someone in the middle,” she said in a phone interview. “I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a progressive, I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a Trump supporter.” CNN, NBC and MSNBC, whose DNA — even in a pandemic — is politics, have covered her on their websites and on air but haven’t put her on camera. “They’re not offering to put me on TV — they’re just doing stories,” Ms. Reade told me. “No anchors, no nothing like that.” She’d most like to tell her story to a network television anchor she admires — CBS’s Gayle King is one, she said — but they haven’t called. So she’s planning to accept Fox News’s offer for an interview to air this weekend, she said, with “someone a little more up the middle.” She declined to say who, but a person who has spoken to her said Ms. Reade is in talks with Chris Wallace. The booking would be a coup for the conservative network, and give its on-air hosts a club with which to beat a mainstream media that can’t quite explain why it won’t book Ms. Reade, while Julie Swetnick, a woman with a shaky claim against a Supreme Court nominee, got airtime during a prime time evening broadcast. Some of the reasons this story seems muffled right now are fairly straightforward: The global coronavirus pandemic has eclipsed almost everything else. There’s also the way Ms. Reade first tried getting attention, mostly on Twitter, “stumbling forward with no P.R. person and no attorney,” she said.“I emailed Ronan Farrow like four times to the point of stalking and I didn’t hear back,” she added. “Now of course he’s one of the investigative reporters on this.” After The Times’s story was published Thursday, Ms. Reade said that she had meant that Mr. Farrow had not initially responded to her, but they were now “actively communicating.” Then she found partisans willing to hear her out. First it was among supporters of Bernie Sanders, like the podcast host Katie Halper, who put Ms. Reade on her show. Then The Intercept, an anti-establishment liberal news website, reported that a friend and brother of Ms. Reade’s recalled her describing the

True Freedom-Lovers Wear Face Masks

letting one’s views be defined by opposition to anything the mainstream media says is not free thought

Price Gouging Could Actually Fix Our Face Mask Shortage

Incentives matter. Pride or fear or kindness will motivate you. But so does money. And because responding with urgency is usually expensive, money makes it easier to indulge your kindness

Price Gouging Could Actually Fix Our Face Mask Shortage

Pride or fear or kindness will motivate you. But money makes it easier to indulge your kindness.

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

important: how to cope with the two greatest enemies of a well-lived life, fear and failure.

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

You could see it in their eyes, the universal fear of the lunatic. Heh, heh, heh, those eyes said nervously, this is just a game, right

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

Of course, one fringe benefit of laughing at intensity is that it enables you to ignore the claims that a new kind of seriousness makes upon you.

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

. You were always skiing. As a skier, you developed a conviction, buttressed by your parents’ money, that life was meant to be easy. That when difficulty arose, you could just hire someone to deal with it. That nothing mattered so much that you should suffer for it.

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

It enabled you to do what money could buy instead of what duty demanded

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

privilege corrupts

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

The kid with the fuzz on his upper lip bounced crazily off third base, oblivious to the fact that he represented a new solution to an adolescent life crisis

Coach Fitz’s Management Theory

There are teachers with a rare ability to enter a child’s mind; it’s as if their ability to get there at all gives them the right to stay forever.

LeSean McCoy and the Chip Kelly Experience

Not now, with the boss having learned from Olympic runners that the best way to maximize performance is to run hard the day before the

LeSean McCoy and the Chip Kelly Experience

SCORE POINTS

America’s Reopening Will Depend on One Thing: Trust

In sum: Americans are about to find out just how trusting a nation this is. We might not like everything we learn.

Andrew Sullivan: Nature, Nurture, and Weight Loss

My first thought was: Wow, she doesn’t look like herself at all. My second was: Good for her. My third was: I actually thought she was cuter carrying more weight. My fourth was: Well, whatever makes her happy. All of that happened in a few seconds in my lizard brain, corrected by whatever moral restraints I had previously attempted to insert there.

The Last Day of My Old Life

Those cocktails were the best idea of my life.

Take Those UFO Sightings More Seriously

“This is almost certainly nonsense,” that’s still a case for further investigation, as long as the word “almost” remains.

The 2020 Commencement Speech You’ll Never Hear

Nothing in life is better than being needed

Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies

fiat,

A Failure, But Not Of Prediction

“there’s no reason for panic, there are currently only ten cases in the US”. This should sound like “there’s no reason to panic, the asteroid heading for Earth is still several weeks away”

Coronavirus: Links, Speculation, Open Thread

But again, I can’t help feeling like my information environment is being optimized to prevent stupid people from panicking, and not to help me make good decisions. I would love if the average news site I went to had an interview with an immunologist who gave their honest probability estimate for whether zinc would be helpful or not. In the real world, all we can do is make dumb guesses on our own.

Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders – The Markup

“There are a lot of people who get an auto policy and they stick with that auto insurer forever because the decision is hard in the first place, figuring out what policy you want,” Born said. “Most people just never go back to look to see that they’re paying more than they should.”

Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders – The Markup

“The issue with Allstate wasn’t as much the individual variables as it was that the decision to increase an individual policyholder’s premium was based on the probability of them leaving the company,” he said. “If they were not likely to leave the company, they wanted to charge more. That’s not cost-based.”

Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders – The Markup

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners, which includes insurance regulators from all 50 states, said in a report that its members are essentially outgunned: “Regulators do not currently have the data necessary for an independent evaluation of most of the insurer modeling and calculations.”

Suckers List: How Allstate’s Secret Auto Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders – The Markup

“Let’s say that someone gets cancer and doesn’t have time to shop and just buys the first thing because they have other things to worry about. Is it O.K. to charge more to that person because they don’t have the resources or time or attention to invest in shopping?”

I Quit New York

People said you can’t do that, it’s too hard. But moving to a new country was this way to uproot some of these limiting beliefs, the idea that you can’t just go and do something totally different. Sure you can.

A Sick Giant — Wait But Why

But for most of us, our instinct tells us that political bigotry is not as terrible as other kinds of bigotry. Maybe because it seems like it’s disgust about ideas more than disgust about people. Or maybe because, at least in the U.S., racial and other kinds of bigotry have historically been more prominent and the cause of more strife. But the paper goes on to talk about evidence that partisanship in the U.S. has increasingly become a “primal” kind of bond, much like ethnicity or race, making political bigotry a lot more like other types of bigotry.

A Sick Giant — Wait But Why

Then the video ended, and YouTube offered me my choice of nine more videos in the road rage genre. I clicked on one of them and watched it. Then YouTube offered me nine more. I had a lot of work to do, so I held down the Command key and clicked on all nine, opening them in nine new tabs, and watched them all.

A Sick Giant — Wait But Why

“45% of young Americans with a college degree moved states within five years of graduating, whereas only 19% of those with only a high-school education did.”

The Equality Conundrum

what feels like a necessity to one person seems like a luxury to another

CBT In The Water Supply

The therapists I’ve seen ask patients to question whether their anxiety and their negative thoughts are rational, ever so tactfully, and the patients say “No shit, Sherlock, of course they aren’t, but just knowing that doesn’t help or make them go away, and I’ve been through this same spiel with like thirty people already. Now shut up and give me my Xanax.”

The Sure Thing

He went out of his way to take a personal risk in order to avoid a professional risk. Reputation, after all, is a commodity that trades in the marketplace at a significant and often excessive premium. The predator shorts the dancers, and goes long on the wallflowers.

The Sure Thing

The Illusions of Entrepreneurship

This Ex-Naturopath Is Speaking Out Against Her Former Profession

Tim Caulfield, a professor of law and the School of Public Health at the University of Alberta who has spent his career studying science policy, says its one of this movement’s greatest tricks: to assert that medicine is on one side of a ideological divide, and “natural” is on the other.

This Ex-Naturopath Is Speaking Out Against Her Former Profession

“Naturopaths in this way have been very savvy,” she says. “They use key talking points like ‘treating the root cause’ and hijack it for only their philosophy. Medical doctors absolutely have every intention to treat the root cause. This ‘root cause’ thing is not specific to the naturopathic profession. But naturopaths have cleverly picked up on the idea that doctors don’t care about what the patients concerns are, and they just throw pills at them.”

This Ex-Naturopath Is Speaking Out Against Her Former Profession

Levinovitz tells me that he doesn’t want to imply there’s anything wrong with religion or faith—it’s what he’s dedicated his life to studying, so he obviously finds great value in it. “But when someone’s appealing to the Bible, it’s an explicitly a religious appeal,” he says. “What I think is really strange about ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ is that it is ultimately a theological apparatus for making decisions, but it doesn’t look like religion. It looks like it’s science. ‘Nature’ and ‘natural’ are words that you associate with biology and the simple science, the natural sciences. That’s where the danger lies.”

This Ex-Naturopath Is Speaking Out Against Her Former Profession

“One of the things that kept coming up was the importance of what’s natural,” he tells me. “It’s a really powerful word, and people evoke it in the same way that someone might evoke the word ‘holy’ or ‘sacred.’ Natural is being evoked in the same way that God is evoked. I don’t think you can understand the words ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ without thinking of them as religious terms, rather than scientific terms.”

Having Kids

I remember my mother telling me once when I was about 30 that she’d really enjoyed having me and my sister. My god, I thought, this woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain we subjected her to, but actually enjoyed it? Now I realize she was simply telling the truth.

Political Disney World — Wait But Why

For example, if an opposing candidate has mostly mainstream views but holds a few extreme positions, people tend to make the assumption that the candidate’s supporters voted for them because of, not in spite of, the candidate’s extreme positions. But there’s no evidence that this is true. Another study found that “constituents are likely to attribute the actions of in-group leaders as intended to benefit the country (national interests), and the actions of out-group leaders as intended to benefit the political leaders themselves (egoistic interests)”—even when the actions in question are identical.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

But you can never be sure. In fact, here’s an interesting idea that’s also rather alarming if it’s true: it may be that to do great work, you also have to waste a lot of time.

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.

Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley

When you’re in a slump, you start to look around and find even more ways to show yourself that you’re not good enough

The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas

As a graduate student, I’d wake up early each day, pouring coffee down my throat while poring over my notes and books. Progress was gradual, and sometimes imperceptible. Chance really does favor the prepared mind; when the moments of discovery came, often unexpectedly, my hours of hard work felt newly valuable.

An Old Idea, Revived: Starve Cancer to Death

Warburg’s discovery, later named the Warburg effect, is estimated to occur in up to 80 percent of cancers. It is so fundamental to most cancers that a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, which has emerged as an important tool in the staging and diagnosis of cancer, works simply by revealing the places in the body where cells are consuming extra glucose. In many cases, the more glucose a tumor consumes, the worse a patient’s prognosis.

Jeff Bezos’s Master Plan

Wandering is an essential counterbalance to efficiency,

Why New York Can’t Have Nice Things

You know who, besides Trump, can hear those politicians when they say Gateway is necessary at any price? The construction firms that will bid on the project. And what they hear is “You can charge any amount you want, and we will pay it.”

The Hell of American Healthcare

In other words, all the other insurances would seem to be not accepted, in the way that most people understand the word “accept.”

Telemedicine could keep older patients out of the hospital. So why hasn’t it taken off?

Research suggests that about two-thirds of hospital admissions from nursing homes were potentially avoidable. In many cases, a video visit would make more sense. But there are few business models employing virtual care because payers don’t cover it, experts say.

When Medical Debt Collectors Decide Who Gets Arrested

More than half of the debt in collections stems from medical care, which, unlike most other debt, is often taken on without a choice or an understanding of the costs

How the Packers’ Extreme Makeover Turned Green Bay Into the Class of the NFC

“Their biggest asset that they’ve added to the team—more than the sacks and their personalities—is that they are a representation of people who know themselves and are comfortable being themselves,” Rodgers says. “I think that’s the beauty in what they’ve done. And I don’t think you ever plan for that. But I think it allows other guys to step into their own confidence and be their own person as well.”

‘It’s the dirty little secret that everybody knows about’

neuroscience and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and founder and director of its Center for Human Sleep Science, says: “Based on the weight of probably now about 10,000 empirical scientific studies, the number of people who can survive on six hours of sleep or less without showing any impairment, rounded to a whole number and expressed as a percent of the population, is zero.”

‘It’s the dirty little secret that everybody knows about’

the national average sleep duration on work nights has fallen from eight and a half hours to less than seven. That has consequences.

I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup

It seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. You forgive a conventional duel just as you forgive a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven.

They Had It Coming

Perhaps The American Lawyer needs to cast a wider net when selecting its Dealmakers of the Year.)

They Had It Coming

, and certain zip codes of New York City and Los Angeles, the percentage of untimed test-taking is said to be close to 50 percent.” Taking

‘Hard To Beat The Cheaters’: Harbaugh, Michigan At College Football Crossroads

“We ask them, ‘Why aren’t you playing basketball or track or baseball?'” Harbaugh said. “‘Oh, our basketball team is horrible.’ Great, then you can start! Or, ‘They’re too good.’ Great, then you can learn! Their attitude is, if they’re not going pro at something, why do it? That’s criminal.”

Opinion | Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Sign Petitions

intramural

Opinion | Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Sign Petitions

The petition writers are thinking to themselves, this time it really matters. I think it is a mistake for a philosopher to take the importance of a question as a reason to adopt an unphilosophical attitude toward it

Opinion | Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Sign Petitions

An expert understands where her expertise runs out; unlike the layman, the expert knows what she doesn’t know

Opinion | Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Sign Petitions

Socrates wants to know why the view is true, not who or how many hold it.

The Anger of Amy Klobuchar

Kavanaugh was fully absorbed in a spate of Irish Alzheimer’s (in which you forget everything but the grudges)

The Anger of Amy Klobuchar

It’s shameful to humiliate and mistreat employees, no matter your gender. It’s unacceptable to be so unable to control your emotions that you throw things toward co-workers, and despicable to do it to subordinates who are afraid of you. Trying to sell cruelty and pathological behavior as a feminist victory is yet another reason that so many women who care deeply about equality don’t identify themselves as feminists.

I Believe Her

(“To the girl about whom I will someday say, ‘I knew her when,’” my English teacher wrote in that yearbook, words that stunned me when I first read them, and that I’ve never forgotten.)

I Believe Her

I told no one. In my mind, it was not an example of male aggression used against a girl to extract sex from her. In my mind, it was an example of how undesirable I was. It was proof that I was not the kind of girl you took to parties, or the kind of girl you wanted to get to know. I was the kind of girl you took to a deserted parking lot and tried to make give you sex. Telling someone would not be revealing what he had done; it would be revealing how deserving I was of that kind of treatment.

I Believe Her

I was excited—I’d had my eye on him, and in the promise of this ride home I saw the solution to all of my problems: my sadness, my loneliness, my inability to figure out how to go to the parties the other kids were always talking about in the hallways and before class started.

The Fury of the Prep-School Parents

Here’s one thing you need to know about private schools: They have two honor codes, two community-standards contracts, and two disciplinary codes. One is for everyone, and the other is for big donors.

The Presidency of Donald Trump Never Gets Any Less Absurd

Now, one might expect New York Times reporters to believe that “racism and white supremacy [are] the foundation of all of the systems in the country,” but you can choose not to buy the Times. Public schools? Mandatory. This is where the real action is in “reframing” the entire idea of America.

The Presidency of Donald Trump Never Gets Any Less Absurd

The fact that major corporations had adopted these theories as the basis for their employment practices, that the mainstream media presents this ideology as self-evident, and that an entire elite generation has been told that the United States was founded on and is defined by brutal racism, did not seem to count.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

as I was for both of my parents’ deaths, and—only once, but how thrilling! how important I felt!—for work

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

She had wanted a revolution; what she got was a Venezuelan.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

Good thing Zoe’s Peruvians didn’t hear about those perks; they might have demanded access to an on-site gym and an annual executive physical.)

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

(Even the nomenclature suggests why a woman anxious about her choices in life wouldn’t like day care: a good mother doesn’t want to admit to having to make “deliveries” and “pickups” of her children, as though they were so many dirty shirts being sent to the laundry

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

(Good news for sweatshop workers and their children everywhere—Mom’s identity as an underpaid seamstress is vital to healthy family functioning.)

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

We’re hip to those quotation marks around “dependent,” by the way—the word is so damn insulting to women. Right on, sister. But it’s a word with a particular resonance in the case of the Bairds’ two domestic workers, seeing as they were married to each other, and neither one of them was getting Social Security contributions.)

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

ware that nearly every sentence undermines the book’s most central arguments, that the entire topic of nannies is the Achilles’ heel of the feminist campaign to help professional-class mothers earn the right to (as they would say) mother and work without guilt.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

my God, it’s worse than being a migrant farm laborer!

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

“Mommy Tax,” which seems fair enough. But she goes on to inform us that this tax is “highest for well-educated, high-income individuals and lowest for poorly educated people who have less potential income to lose.” Wait a minute—as a good liberal, shouldn’t I be happy about that last fact? Don’t I want tax burdens to fall with disproportionate weight on the wealthiest? Well, not if the wealthiest are working mothers. All working mothers, let us remember, are oppressed, and the oppression of the wealthiest is somehow more important, more urgent, more remarkable, than the oppression of the poorest

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

All that blather about having your child’s telephone calls “put through”—to the factory floor? to the sweatshop? (“Sorry to interrupt, Ms. Deng, but I’ve got Johnny on line two.”)

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

nce read in this new light, the book—couched in the know-it-all, smarty-pants tone one expects from the one-two punch of Andover and Harvard, with a little New York Times pomposity thrown in for good measure—becomes as silly as a Bazooka Joe comic

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

a series of decisions often based entirely on providing herself with maximum happiness

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

I’ll bet that $140 a week sure helps to keep the American self-indulgence at bay.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

Again, I tend to get bogged down in the extraneous details: how in the world is this woman supporting small children on $140 a week?

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

I’ll bet all three women would be stunned to read, in Chira’s section on “Working and Thriving,” that “waitresses, factory workers, and domestic workers told the researchers in a 1987 study that they would not leave the workforce even if they did not need the money.”

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

Be reasonable: “Is it really the end of the world if a mother is not at home when a child returns from school?” If all else fails, think big picture. Really big picture. “In hunter-gatherer societies,” she reminds us, “mothers could combine family life with work.”

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

Champion whichever survey or opinion poll supports your choices; debunk the rest.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

(Well, you know those black women: they have all the luck.)

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

I would posit that she was also oppressed by her own taste in entertainment, but that’s another matter altogether, I suppose)

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

On the other hand, the nonprofessional-class working mother—unhappy inheritor of changes in the American economy that have thrust her unenthusiastically into the labor market—is oppressed by very different forces. She is oppressed by the fact that her work is oftentimes physically exhausting, ill-paid, and devoid of benefits such as health insurance and paid sick leave. She is oppressed by the fact that it is impossible to put a small child in licensed day care if you make minimum wage, and she is oppressed by the harrowing child-care options that are available on an unlicensed, inexpensive basis. She is oppressed by the fact that she has no safety net: if she falls out of work and her child needs a visit to the doctor and antibiotics, she may not be able to afford those things and will have to treat her sick child with over-the-counter medications, which themselves are far from cheap. She is oppressed by the fact that—another feminist gain—single motherhood has been so championed in our culture, along with the sexual liberation of women and the notion that a woman doesn’t really need a man. In this climate she is often left shouldering the immense burden of parenthood alone.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

The professional-class working mother—grateful inheritor of Betty Friedan’s realizations about domestic imprisonment and the happiness and autonomy offered by work—is oppressed by guilt about her decision to keep working, by a society that often questions her commitment to and even her love for her children, by the labor-intensive type of parenting currently in vogue, by children’s stalwart habit of falling deeply and unwaveringly in love with the person who provides their physical care, and by her uneasy knowledge that at-home mothers are giving their children much more time and personal attention than she is giving hers. She feels more than oppressed—she feels outraged! she wants something done about this!—by a corporate culture that refuses to let a working mother postpone an important meeting if it happens to coincide with the fourth-grade Spring Sing.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

But this paradigm has led to a new assumption: that all working mothers—rich and poor—constitute a single class, that they are all similarly oppressed, and that they are united in a struggle against common difficulties. At its best this is vaguely well-intentioned but sloppy thinking. At its worst it is brutal and self-serving and shameful thinking.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

The feminist movement, from its earliest days, has always proceeded from the assumption that all women—rich and poor—constitute a single class, and that all members of the class are, by virtue simply of being female, oppressed.

How Serfdom Saved the Women’s Movement

“When you’re going through hell, keep going.”

We have Stockholm Syndrome with the Insurance Carriers….all of us

In other words, we are now at a point where the coverage is so poor, most employees in America have less than one-fifth of their out-of-pocket liability in their savings account. This is causing two proble

Insurers Hand Out Cash and Gifts To Sway Brokers Who Sell Employer Health Plans

When brokers are paid directly by employers, the results can be mutually beneficial. In 2017, David Contorno, the broker for Palmer Johnson Power Systems, a heavy-equipment distribution company in Madison, Wis., saved the firm so much money while also improving coverage that Palmer Johnson took all 120 employees on an all-expenses paid trip to Vail, Colo., where they rode four-wheelers and went whitewater rafting. In 2018, the company saved money again and rewarded each employee with a health care “dividend” of about $700.

Love/Hate for 2019 season: Thoughts from a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent

Not that I thought Joe was lying, but I just thought about my own life. I will offer or agree to things sometimes and completely mean it at the moment, and then you get hit with a tons of requests for shows and podcasts and meetings. And then my wife calls and I need to pick up the kids somewhere, and don’t forget this doctor’s appointment and whatever. Life happens and you completely forget about that thing you genuinely meant.

NBA team home advantage: Identifying key factors using an artificial neural network

The study does not address why certain types of shots matter more to the home advantage–the granularity of the data does not permit this level of analysis–but we speculate that 2P shots are more likely to be contested than 3P shots and are therefore more likely to be subject to referee bias from the home crowd

Carson’s affordable housing idea drawing undue flak

That is, communities would only be able to receive CDBG funds if they respond to an increase in housing prices by allowing more homes to be built

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

No. My whole point is that if you force everyone to centralize all money and power into one giant organization with a single point of failure, then when that single point of failure fails, you’re really screwed.

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

If we restrict individuals from pursuing their own projects, and everything has to be funded by a single organization with a single agenda, we reduce the possibilities for progress to a monoculture, vulnerable to any minor flaw in the hegemon’s priorities

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

. Time after time, the government has stopped supporting things for bad reasons, and we’ve been lucky that we didn’t bulldoze over the rest of civil society and prevent anyone else from having enough power to help.

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

If this seems surprising, I think that in itself is evidence that the money is being well-spent. Billionaire philanthropy isn’t powerful, at least not compared to anything else. It just has enough accomplishments to attract attention. Destroying it wouldn’t destroy some kind of threatening power base, or enrich anyone else to any useful degree. It would just destroy something really good.

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

If the people want more money to be spent by private philanthropists instead of Congress, and they use the democratic process to produce a legal regime and tax system that favors private philanthropy, their will is being represented.

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

When I see philanthropists try to save lives and cure diseases, I feel like there’s someone powerful out there who shares my values. Even when Elon Musk spends his money on awesome rockets, I feel that way, because there’s a part of me that would totally fritter away any fortune I got on awesome rockets. I’ve never gotten that feeling when I watch Congress. When I watch Congress, I feel a scary unbridgeable gulf between me and anybody who matters. And the polls suggest a lot of people agree with me

Against Against Billionaire Philanthropy

I realize there’s some very weak sense in which the US government represents me. But it’s really weak. Really, really weak. When I turn on the news and see the latest from the US government, I rarely find myself thinking “Ah, yes, I see they’re representing me very well today.”

The Djoker Slam

“I did,” Djokovic said, and he was offended. He did not understand what made this extraordinary, did not understand that a 6-year-old child in a non-tennis playing country like Serbia should not instinctively know how to pack a tennis bag

I Can’t Imagine Why a White Nationalist With My Politics Would Do Such A Thing

Now, let’s clarify what “addressing our nation’s mental health crisis” actually means. It does not mean I’m supporting any kind of government-run healthcare initiative. It does not mean I’m going to make any effort to dismantle our criminal justice system that locks up the mentally ill instead of treating them. In fact, it does not mean I’m going to introduce a bill of any kind that does anything.

In Defense of the German Saver

Most German citizens who complain about negative interest rates probably don’t have a deep understanding of macroeconomics. But they do have a pretty good intuition of when something isn’t right. In this case, they are onto something.

In Defense of the German Saver

If there is one thing the world should have learned over the last decade, it is that politics is usually more symbolic than pragmatic. A good policy attached to the wrong symbols can fail, while impractical or even irresponsible leaders can succeed by promoting popular symbols.

God Has Heard Your Thoughts and Prayers and He Thinks They Are Fucking Bullshit

A Constitutional Amendment? Sounds kinda complicated. It can’t be done except for all those times it’s been done. Nope.”

Greta, It’s OK to Fly

I’m fine with people deciding they don’t want to fly, but the rest of us should not rush into thinking that is the mark of a dedicated purist, or an especially effective practical tool. It is one symbolic commitment among many, and not obviously the best one.

Greta, It’s OK to Fly

Obviously there is a symbolic aspect to the decision. Perhaps Thunberg and others feel they should take a public stand against all possible decisions to generate carbon emissions. But no one can meet that standard and remain alive. Arguably the symbolic message we ought to send is one of prioritization, not one of picking out a few highly visible public acts simply for the purpose of making a show of it.

Opinion | Democrats Are Having the Wrong Health Care Debate

o require more than 50 percent of their payments to physicians be some kind of value-based payment within three years.

We Need a New Science of Progress

. For example, if our discoveries and inventions improve standards of living by 1 percent a year, a child will by adulthood be 35 percent better off than its parents. If they improve livelihoods at 3 percent a year, that same child will grow up to be about 2.5 times better off than its parents.

What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

That was what Hartman had liked. “It was just that being told what to do felt so good after people saying, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what to do with you.’ ” Sitting with her new doctor, Hartman had a realization. “I was waiting to be sold something,” she said. “I’m realizing this is exactly who I need to be with: someone who is going to make me think about it instead of just telling me what to do.”

What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

. “I mean, I’ve said things to my family like, ‘Well, part of why I’m sick is because of the pressure that you’ve put on me my whole life.’ And my mom’s like, ‘Well, aren’t you sick because of a tick bite?’ And yes, that’s all true.”

What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

If you feel better after treatment, that means it’s working; clearly you have Lyme. If you feel worse after treatment, that also means it’s working; clearly you have Lyme. No circumstance could ever disprove a chronic-Lyme diagnosis —any test is suspect, any treatment provisional, any cure potentially temporary. The all-encompassing certainty of Lyme was what unnerved me, but this seemed to be exactly what patients wanted. Lyme was certainty. Lyme was authority and answers.

What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

Her description captured a central tension of chronic Lyme: a rejection of mainstream scientific authority coupled with a desire for mainstream scientific legitimacy

What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

Raxlen is currently on a three-year probation with the New York State Board for Professional Medical Conduct over allegations that include gross negligence, gross incompetence, and failure to maintain adequate medical records.

What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

like Richard Horowitz, the best-selling author of Why Can’t I Get Better

Against Lie Inflation

The moral of the story is: don’t set thresholds for category membership so far outside a distributions that they stop conveying useful information.

The Whole City Is Center

They think that some people are just bad and should be condemned, whereas he wisely believes that everything has a cause and people who have issues with motivation should be helped.

Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration by José Azar, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ioana Elena Marinescu, Bledi Taska, Till Von Wachter :: SSRN

minimum wage-induced employment changes become less negative as labor concentration increases, and are even estimated to be positive in the most highly concentrated markets. Our findings provide direct empirical evidence supporting the monopsony model as an explanation for the near-zero minimum wage employment effect documented in prior work. They suggest the aggregate minimum wage employment effects estimated thus far in the literature may mask heterogeneity across different levels of labor market concentration.

Minimum Wage Employment Effects and Labor Market Concentration by José Azar, Emiliano Huet-Vaughn, Ioana Elena Marinescu, Bledi Taska, Till Von Wachter :: SSRN

While increases in the minimum wage are found to significantly decrease employment of workers in low concentration markets,

The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager

“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”

The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager

ost managers have a performance conversation, say their piece, and then expect their direct report to retain and act on everything they heard. When they revisit these topics at the next performance review, they’re often shocked there wasn’t much progress, and fall back on blaming the report for a lack of improvement. It’s not their fault — it’s yours.

The Power of Performance Reviews: Use This System to Become a Better Manager

Some of the highest performers I’ve worked with ruffle feathers on occasion to deliver the right outcome — which can lead to negative peer feedback come performance review season.

I Am Against Identity Politics, By Which I Mean I Am In Favor of White Identity Politics

Remember how Republicans kept saying they wanted their politicians to be more politically incorrect, and then when Hillary Clinton said something that was politically incorrect — that many of Trump’s followers were “deplorable,” which the past three years have proven to be empirically true — Republicans suddenly didn’t like political incorrectness and called her cruel

Against Lie Inflation

The whole reason that rebranding lesser sins as “lying” is tempting is because everyone knows “lying” refers to something very bad. But the whole reason everyone knows “lying” refers to something very bad is because nobody has yet succeeded in rebranding it to mean lesser sins.

Chuck Klosterman Doesn’t Believe in ‘Good Taste’

Sometimes I wonder: Does anyone’s opinion really matter? Can any one person’s subjective view of a piece of music really shape the experience of listening to it? I don’t know, but it’s certainly not what I strive for. For me, it’s more about the pleasure of the act of writing—the fun of thinking about things and writing about things. I really don’t think much about how the things I write will legitimately shape someone else’s experience. I just hope they enjoy the thing I wrote. If it takes 40 minutes to read an essay, I want to provide an interesting 40 minutes. That’s probably even more true when it comes to writing fiction. The worst thing you can say about a piece of nonfiction is that the information is untrue, that the information is false. But the worst thing that you can say about a piece of fiction is that it’s boring. It doesn’t matter if the prose is structured brilliantly or the ideas in the text are arguably profound. If the book is dull, it does not succeed as a piece of fiction. So when I write novels and stories, I’m interested in being interesting, being entertaining, and being clear. That’s it. [Even so] being reviewed and criticized can be painful. If you care at all, you’re putting yourself into the work. So when someone says “This is unsophisticated,” or “This is self-indulgent,” whatever it may be, you’re going to feel as though that is an analysis of your entire being. It doesn’t matter how well or deeply you understand that the way someone receives your art is not the same as the art itself, and that the art is certainly not the same as you. It should be no problem for me to separate those things. I’ve been a critic for 25 years. I have no idea how many records, movies, and television shows I’ve reviewed. I remember once, when I was working in Akron, Ohio, I gave an exceedingly negative review of [the Dave Matthews Band] and, to a degree, the people who went to the concert. At the time, like many people who do criticism, my thinking was, He’s not going to care about this. He’s rich and successful and super talented, regardless of how I might personally feel about his music. It’s easy to think that a bad review is just something you’re doing for the benefit of the people who read your work. But now I realize that there are probably only two people in the world who remember that review: me and him. That’s the thing. I remember every review ever written about me. And yet, you can’t let that kind of thing affect you too much. While I certainly feel comfortable saying certain things are good and certain things are bad, I don’t believe that those opinions are remotely irrefutable. Art can always be rediscovered, recontextualized, reevaluated. We can say things are bad and good, and we can mean it, but it doesn’t matter if we say it or not. The shelf life of opinions isn’t long, and it wouldn’t matter at all if those things went unsaid.

Pay Transparency and the Gender Gap

. First, the disclosure laws reduced salaries on average. Second, the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women. Third, the closure of the gender gap is primarily in universities where faculty are unionized.

Chuck Klosterman Doesn’t Believe in ‘Good Taste’

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else’s privilege.

Why Is There No Generic Insulin? Historical Origins of a Modern Problem | NEJM

It’s true that large-molecule biologic drugs are more complex and harder to copy than the small-molecule drugs on which the generic-drug industry was built, but the widely anticipated entry of biosimilar insulins may promise more competitive pricing, now that the most recent insulin patents have expired

Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal win big, with class and respect

“First of all, Roger, sorry for today. I really know how you feel right now is really tough, but remember, you are a great champion. You are one of the best of history. You are going to improve on the 14 of Sampras, for sure.”

Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal win big, with class and respect

“And here we stand in the finals,” Federer said to Nadal. “I’m happy for you. I would’ve been happy to lose to you, to be honest. Tennis is a tough sport; there’s no draws. But if there was going to be one, I would be very happy to accept a draw tonight and share it with Rafa.” The crowd gasped so loudly—Happy to lose?—that Federer added “Really.” We’ve long been taught to expect personal animus at the top of tennis, ever since Jimmy Connors approached each match as a street fight and vowed to chase “that son of a bitch,” Bjorn Borg, “to the ends of the earth.” And Connors respected Borg. Connors and John McEnroe viscerally despised each other, with a loathing of Ivan Lendl their sole common bond. “Everyone seemed like an adversary,” McEnroe says. “That was sort of the way I grew up; I watched Connors and some of these other guys, and you had to watch out for everyone.”

The Planet Kyrgios

You know, he plays every point,” Kyrgios said. “You know, he doesn’t take one point off. And I feel like we’re polar opposites. I struggle so hard to just play every point with a routine and have the same patterns, and he just — one-two punch, his first serve and his first forehand is probably the best one-two punch in the world apart from Federer. Just his ability to bring it every day and compete is special. It’s not easy.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

The result of many of these factors is shown by Medicare’s experience with its PPS for ASCs. Current relative payment rates are based on a 1986 survey. In 1998 the CMS proposed reducing payment rates for several high-volume procedures, such as cataract-related procedures and gastrointestinal endoscopies, based on a more recent survey conducted in 1994. These reductions were not implemented, which suggests that the actual payment rates—based on the 1986 survey data—exceeded costs for those procedures in 1998. 19 Now, seven years later, it is likely that the inadequacies in the payment schedule are even greater.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

Recent research conducted for MedPAC suggests that factors other than costs play important roles in determining charges and that once charges are set for a new service, the vast majority are not revisited but are updated by uniform percentage increases. 15 The exceptions among new services are those that involve expensive but easy-to-cost devices or other inputs, but few of these services get serious attention in future years, even if input prices have changed greatly. This mirrors what health plan executives told us about their approach to updating payments.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

Any one provider’s charge schedule has negligible impact on calculation of prospective payment rates by insurers. Even when private payers negotiate discounts from charges for each hospital, little is gained from a structure that more accurately reflects costs.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

lthough estimating unit costs can be relatively easy for services in which a purchased input constitutes a large share of the cost, such as drugs or devices, estimating the costs of most services is far more difficult because the most important inputs produce numerous distinct services.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

ew Medicare systems are based on actual cost data, and most of the data are very old—from the 1980s or 1990s ( Exhibit 1 ). Although the program relies on more recent data to help in updating payments, experts suggest that the lag between collecting the data and implementing the payment updates means that the information is often out of date.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

For example, a recent MedPAC analysis estimated that DRG 107, coronary artery bypass graft with catheterization, is 9 percent more profitable than the average DRG, while DRG 127, heart failure and shock, is 6 percent less profitable than the average.

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

These trends also could lead to excess capacity—with additional implications for spending. Excess capacity could spur price reductions, as it generally does outside of health care. But with third-party payment having removed much sensitivity to price, excess capacity in health care has the potential of leading to higher prices, as providers pass on higher unit costs to payers. Excess capacity also can lead to fewer providers’ having the volume of services needed to provide high-quality care. 8

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

Research shows that physician referrals are much higher when physicians have an ownership interest in the facility. 7

When The Price Isn’t Right: How Inadvertent Payment Incentives Drive Medical Care: If payment rates are not made more accurate, another powerful driver of health cost trends could be created.: Health Affairs: Vol 24, No Suppl1

The differences in profitability that are driving increased use of some services appear to be inadvertent but systematic—a shortcoming of third-party systems to pay providers that do not accurately reflect the relative costs of providing different types of medical services. Although payment systems vary by payer and by care setting, one common characteristic is that billed charges play a key role, even when payment methods attempt to reflect relative costs. And relative charges systematically differ from relative unit costs.

Mixed reviews for Maryland’s unique hospital payment system

A weakness in the program is that it only regulates hospital spending and not physician services, which also contribute to health spending.

A Modest Proposal On Payment Reform | Health Affairs

Not only does it raise a whole host of technical problems of how to calculate the proper bundled payments without incorporating in them an incentive to underserve patients, but it also would trigger vast redistributions of economic and professional power among the providers of health care.

Tracking The Demise Of State Hospital Rate Setting | Health Affairs

Maryland has not escaped the managed care pressures evident in other states; its HMO penetration rate is among the highest in the nation. In spite of this, regulators in Maryland have tightly and successfully limited negotiated discounts (available to all payers, not just HMOs) to no more than 4 percent, and only to insurers who provide certain consumer benefits such as open enrollment. Although payers in Maryland privately grumble, few openly call for deregulation, and none can claim to be suffering inordinately in the rapidly growing Maryland managed care market.

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

and the value of uncompensated care nationally is grossly exaggerated because it is valued at full-charge levels, which are unrelated to underlying costs.

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

American Hospital Association data show that the average hospital markup of charges over costs nationally has increased from 20 percent in 1980 to more than 180 percent by 2007, while mark-ups in Maryland (which are regulated by the HSCRC) have ranged from 18 percent to 22 percent and were 21.5 percent in 2007 (Exhibit 3 ).

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

On the other hand, had the nation’s costs grown at Maryland’s rate of growth, cumulative savings would have exceeded $1.8 trillion. 12

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

The system seeks to control hospital costs, but not hospital profits. Similarly, it constrains overall hospital budgets, but not hospital management. As a result, hospital managers are given maximum flexibility to allocate resources.

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

In a system with 100 percent prospective payment, hospitals are completely at risk for their spending decisions. Under a cost-based payment system, hospitals are not at risk at all. The HSCRC believed that the most appropriate policy lay between these two extremes. Hospitals should be at financial risk for managing operating costs, but adjustments should be made for other elements of their operations (for example, patients’ illness burden, levels of uncompensated care, and area wage variations).

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

The HSCRC establishes rates that enable hospitals providing “efficient and effective” care (as defined by the commission) to operate on a solvent basis. There are no discounts to specific payers, and uncompensated care is shared by all providers. These provisions enable the HSCRC to balance the goals of ensuring cost containment and the financial health of the industry

Setting Hospital Rates To Control Costs And Boost Quality: The Maryland Experience | Health Affairs

The legislature believed that the market would not achieve the multiple goals of cost containment, access, equity, stability, and accountability on its own

Designing Transparency Systems for Medical Care Prices | NEJM

This fear that such arrangements can raise prices is not a matter of idle speculation. The Department of Justice recently filed suit against Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan in part because it paid some hospitals higher prices in order to get them to charge its rivals an even higher price, thereby raising prices for everyone. In a case brought by a competitor of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas (Reazin v. Blue Cross and Blue Shield, 1990), the court considered the insurer’s MFN clauses as “evidence of, or . . . contributing to Blue Cross’ market or monopoly power.” Citing testimony that these MFN clauses “hindered the development of alternative delivery systems, thereby interfering with the introduction of competition,” the court upheld the jury’s finding of market and monopoly power by Blue Cross Blue Shield. More recently, the Department of Justice approved a hospital-price–gathering initiative by several large employers in California only after confirming that information reported back to a hospital could not be “reverse-engineered” to determine the prices charged by competing hospitals to any particular payer.

Specialty-Service Lines: Salvos In The New Medical Arms Race: Trends signal a return to the physician-hospital dynamics that predated the rise of managed care.: Health Affairs: Vol 25, No Supplement 1

It seems clear that the intent of the Stark law limitations on physician self-referral has not been achieved, largely because physicians have figured out how to take advantage of the broad exception in the law for services provided by self-referral that occurs within their own practices or for services they personally provide.1

Specialty-Service Lines: Salvos In The New Medical Arms Race: Trends signal a return to the physician-hospital dynamics that predated the rise of managed care.: Health Affairs: Vol 25, No Supplement 1

Payers are also concerned about hospitals’ raising rates for inpatient services over which they have effective monopolies, to recoup any loss of volume to service-line competitors.

Specialty-Service Lines: Salvos In The New Medical Arms Race: Trends signal a return to the physician-hospital dynamics that predated the rise of managed care.: Health Affairs: Vol 25, No Supplement 1

Health plan respondents broadly agreed that physicians’ ability to engage in self-referral when they have an ownership interest increases the use of those services.

Specialty-Service Lines: Salvos In The New Medical Arms Race: Trends signal a return to the physician-hospital dynamics that predated the rise of managed care.: Health Affairs: Vol 25, No Supplement 1

Yet hospital and health plan respondents agreed that hospitals have not yet suffered financially because they have recouped revenue losses from outmigrated services by raising prices for profitable specialty-service lines. As one respondent in Indianapolis, a community with four competing heart centers, commented, “Hospital prices never fall.”

Novak Djokovic’s Lovely, Victorious Crisis

We helped him learn to win by wanting him to lose.

Who pays when someone without insurance shows up in the ER?

Studying the effects of expanding Medicaid in Michigan – where more than 600,000 gained coverage – researchers at the University of Michigan have found no evidence that the expansion affected insurance premiums. They did, however, document that hospitals’ uncompensated care costs dropped dramatically – by nearly 50%.

The Growing Power Of Some Providers To Win Steep Payment Increases From Insurers Suggests Policy Remedies May Be Needed | Health Affairs

Respondents suggested that, because they effectively lack competition, dominant Blue Cross Blue Shield plans can accommodate substantial price increases and pass them on in the form of higher premiums. In Michigan, this approach was formalized in most-favored-nation clauses in contracts with hospitals, committing the hospitals to give Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan lower rates than competing insurers.

The Growing Power Of Some Providers To Win Steep Payment Increases From Insurers Suggests Policy Remedies May Be Needed | Health Affairs

Because employers require a broad choice of providers for their employees, most academic health centers now have the leverage to require that their contracts cover all services, rather than only specialized services, as was common in the 1990s.

The Growing Power Of Some Providers To Win Steep Payment Increases From Insurers Suggests Policy Remedies May Be Needed | Health Affairs

Our research found that although dominant health plans might be able to restrain prices and achieve other contracting advantages, they also must be sensitive to their employer customers’ preferences for stable provider networks.

‘For now it hurts’: Federer falls short of storybook ending at Wimbledon

“Like similar to ’08 maybe, I will look back at it and think, ‘Well, it’s not that bad after all.’ For now it hurts, and it should, like every loss does here at Wimbledon. I think it’s a mindset. I’m very strong at being able to move on because I don’t want to be depressed about actually an amazing tennis match.”

‘For now it hurts’: Federer falls short of storybook ending at Wimbledon

“You need to be constantly playing well throughout five hours if you want to win a match like this. I guess there is an endurance part. But I think there is always this self-belief. You have to keep reminding yourself that you’re there for a reason and that you are better than the other guy.”

‘For now it hurts’: Federer falls short of storybook ending at Wimbledon

“I guess that all of these things combined result in a courageous effort. There’s not a specific formula to find courage, at least from my perspective. You can go all out and just close your eyes and just hit the ball as hard as you can, you can call that courage. But I wouldn’t necessarily call it courage in some particular situations.

How Novak Djokovic held off Roger Federer to win Wimbledon men’s title

The pair have now played four five-set matches in Grand Slams, and Djokovic has won all four.

How Novak Djokovic held off Roger Federer to win Wimbledon men’s title

“I don’t know if losing 2-2-2 feels better than this one,” Federer said after the match. “At the end, it actually doesn’t matter to some extent. You might feel more disappointed, sad, over-angry. I don’t know what I feel right now. I just feel like it’s such an incredible opportunity missed, I can’t believe it.

Whose advice should you take?

pontaneous advice will often be superior to the advice someone has been giving for some time.

Andrew Sullivan: Pelosi, Please Stop Coddling Trump

Whenever a serious administration abuse of power seems to demand investigation, Speaker Pelosi springs almost instantly into inaction. There is nothing she won’t not do.

| Managed Care magazine

About 20% of health plan members will move from one insurer to another every year

Why GE, Boeing, Lowe’s, and Walmart Are Directly Buying Health Care for Employees

One hospital’s contracting team believed it could not improve upon its offer of bundled rate charges 50% higher than those seen at already participating centers. Six months later the system’s CEO approached ECEN to reopen discussions matching the other centers’ pricing — only to find that the hospital could no longer be accommodated.

Why GE, Boeing, Lowe’s, and Walmart Are Directly Buying Health Care for Employees

Why would a health system want to enter into a relationship that potentially decreases profits relative to the system’s similar activities? This reservation has been a significant reason some hospitals have disengaged discussions with ECEN

Why GE, Boeing, Lowe’s, and Walmart Are Directly Buying Health Care for Employees

ecently partnered with the Pacific Business Group on Health (PBGH) and Health Design Plus (HDP) to launch the Employers Centers of Excellence Network (ECEN)

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

Of course, some patients have been less thrilled; complaints from the small percentage who are “dissatisfied” tend to center on the decision not to move forward with surgery. In most cases these patients have been told by their local doctor that surgery can heal them; learning otherwise can be frustrating and disappointing. In other cases COE surgery isn’t an option because of health issues such as obesity and tobacco use. Although we work with these patients on necessary lifestyle changes, the experience of being denied surgery and advised to lose weight or quit smoking doesn’t always sit well.

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

A known risk of bundled payment strategies is that they can create incentives for providers to perform more episodes of care. This can be mitigated in various ways, including having strict treatment criteria defined by the provider organization and selecting only providers with a track record of sound clinical decision making and integrity.

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

As mentioned, employers rarely have the in-house expertise to negotiate bundled care contracts, and Walmart enlisted the help of Health Design Plus. In developing a bundle for, say, hip replacements, HDP identifies the procedure’s standard billable components (which include imaging, tests, devices, and pre- and postsurgical inpatient care) and negotiates a total price with the provider. The negotiated rates typically average 10% to 15% less than prices paid under conventional insurance and traditional fee-for-service reimbursement. In some cases a bundle may cost slightly more than FFS, because it provides higher-quality care; unit cost reduction is far from the biggest driver of the COE program’s financial success. High-quality, ethical providers have lower complication rates and provide less unnecessary care.

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

As one of the physicians leading Geisinger’s destination care program, I’m sometimes asked by other health care providers why a health system would enter into an agreement with employers in which it is paid less for services than it would be in a conventional fee-for-service arrangement. The answer, in short, is that clinicians, patients, and the business itself can benefit.

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

Nearly 30 years ago Walmart founder Sam Walton was taped at a meeting of his senior leadership, excoriating the health care industry for gouging payers like Walmart and, by extension, their employees, himself included. Walton challenged his team to do something about it. “These people are skinnin’ us alive,” he said. “Not just here in Bentonville but everywhere else, too….They’re charging us five and six times what they ought to charge us….So we need to work on a program where we’ve got hospitals and doctors…saving our customers money and our employees money. We haven’t even started to do that. And if we don’t get it done this year, I’m gonna get real upset. I mean real upset.”

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

Employers provide the lion’s share of health care coverage in the United States. They insure 49% of Americans, while government entities (principally Medicare and Medicaid) cover another 35%

How Employers Are Fixing Health Care – HBR.org Daily

Employer spending on health care services increased by 44% per enrollee[1] from 2007 to 2016, reaching an annual amount of nearly $700 billion[2] in 2017

Historically Hollow: The Cries of Populism – Econlib

Populists are applying massive intellectual energy to major issues and ending up painfully wrong. This is strong evidence that their whole way of thinking is deeply corrupt. They don’t deserve our trust or attention – not today, not yesterday, and not tomorrow.

Historically Hollow: The Cries of Populism – Econlib

Then what privacy have we lost? The privacy to not be part of a Big Data Set. The privacy to not have firms try to sell us stuff based on our previous purchases. In short, we have lost the kinds of privacy that no prudent person loses sleep over.

Historically Hollow: The Cries of Populism – Econlib

My point: If your overall reaction to business progress over the last fifteen years is even mildly negative, no sensible person will try to please you, because you are impossible to please. Yet our new anti-tech populists have managed to make themselves a center of pseudo-intellectual attention.

Lowe: Why the collapse of the Warriors feels so abrupt

Tomorrow is always coming in the NBA, even when it seems a long way off.

Lowe: Why the collapse of the Warriors feels so abrupt

We all remember Thompson’s barrage of 3s that saved Golden State in that epic Game 6 in Oklahoma City in 2016. Don’t forget Iguodala’s crunch-time defense — how perhaps the greatest swipe-down steal artist of the last 15 years pulled the trick on both Durant and Russell Westbrook to short-circuit late Thunder possessions.

Lowe: Why the collapse of the Warriors feels so abrupt

You didn’t watch it or analyze it as much as let it wash over you

How Money Makes People Act Less Human — New York Magazine – Nymag

“You just bought a new car, and then you find that your friend has purchased the exact same car. How do you feel?” The firefighters were overwhelmingly pleased and said things like, “Fantastic. He gets a great car.” The MBA students were negative or ­ambivalent. “I would feel slightly irritated,” one said. “It spoils my differentiation,

How Money Makes People Act Less Human — New York Magazine – Nymag

. ­Lower-class people wanted to be the same as their peers, whereas ­better-off subjects showed, Stephens wrote, “a preference for uniqueness and individuation.

How Money Makes People Act Less Human — New York Magazine – Nymag

­“Money,” says Vohs, “brings you into ­functionality mode. When that gets applied to other people, things get mucked up. You can get things done, but it does come at the expense of people’s feelings or caring about them as individuals.”

How Money Makes People Act Less Human — New York Magazine – Nymag

stairs and justified your heedlessness with a ruthless but inarguable arithmetic: Today, the 9 a.m. meeting has got to come first; that lady’s stroller can’t be my problem.

Lowe: Why the collapse of the Warriors feels so abrupt

“He didn’t have a great summer,” Nash told me last year. “He was searching for what it all meant. He thought a championship would change everything and found out it doesn’t. He was not fulfilled.”

Internet 101 Should Be a Required Class

It is striking and sad that there is so much over-the-top criticism of social media yet so little faith in education as a possible remedy.

Reprieve

I’ve demonstrated an impressive resilience in the face of valuable life lessons, and the main thing I seem to have learned from this one is that I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience.

Reprieve

Time forces us all to betray ourselves and get back to the busywork of living in the world

I Know What You Think of Me

e, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.

I Know What You Think of Me

can’t believe that anyone could be unkind to us and still be genuinely fond of us, although we do it all the time.

I Know What You Think of Me

Hearing other people’s uncensored opinions of you is an unpleasant reminder that you’re just another person in the world, and everyone else does not always view you in the forgiving light that you hope they do, making all allowances, always on your side

What Would Your Teenaged Self Think of You?

, “shook his head and scowled, as if that were the most tragically disappointing outcome he could have imagined

The problem is the prices

But when you start to dive into the actual data, there is scant evidence to back up this theory. If anything, it actually turns out that we go to the doctor relatively infrequently. Data from the nonprofit Commonwealth Fund shows that on average, Americans go to the doctor four times each year. Dutch people go to the doctor, on average, eight times each year. Germans make 9.9 annual doctor trips. Japanese residents clock in an impressive 12.8 doctor visits each year — more than three times the frequency of their American counterparts.

THE TALENT MYTH

Studies show that there is very little correlation between how someone’s peers rate him and how his boss rates him

An Iconoclastic View Of Health Cost Containment | Health Affairs

Among the elderly, the 6 percent who die in any one year account for 28 percent of the expenditures in that year and the preceding one

An Iconoclastic View Of Health Cost Containment | Health Affairs

($1,000 per family per year in late 1970s dollars), with negligible benefits for the health of the average person. 5 The argument that insurance induced too much spending was further refined in the 1970s to focus on the favorable tax treatment of employer-paid insurance premiums, which was said to induce excessive insurance, which in turn led to excessive spending

An Iconoclastic View Of Health Cost Containment | Health Affairs

RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which showed that full insurance resulted in some 40 percent more spending than a large deductible

You Can Buy Prescription Drugs Without Seeing a Doctor

which is often Big Pharma, which doesn’t necessarily have the patient’s best interests at heart.”

Against David French-ism | Sohrab Ahmari

As anyone familiar with the Amelia Sedley character in Vanity Fair knows, a kind of airy, above-it-all mentality can supply its own vain satisfactions.

The Worst Patients in the World

According to another study, this one of chronic migraine sufferers, 42 percent of U.S. respondents had visited an emergency department for their headaches, versus 14 percent of U.K. respondents.

The Worst Patients in the World

But compared with patients elsewhere, American patients are more likely to push their doctors to treat rather than watch and wait

The Worst Patients in the World

For example, one cost-reduction measure used around the world is to exclude an expensive treatment from health coverage if it hasn’t been solidly proved effective, or is only slightly more effective than cheaper alternatives. But when American insurance companies try this approach, they invariably run into a buzz saw of public outrage

The Worst Patients in the World

Attempts to cut back on expensive treatments are met with patient indignation.

The Worst Patients in the World

One hint that patient behavior matters a lot is the tremendous variation in health outcomes among American states and even counties, despite the fact that they are all part of the same health-care system. A 2017 study published in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that 74 percent of the variation in life expectancy across counties is explained by health-related lifestyle factors such as inactivity and smoking, and by conditions associated with them, such as obesity and diabetes—which is to say, by patients themselves. If this is true across counties, it should be true across countries too. And indeed, many experts estimate that what providers do accounts for only 10 to 25 percent of life-expectancy improvements in a given country. What patients do seems to matter much more.

Our Top 6 Pieces of Career Wisdom for New Grads (and Everyone Else Too)

When Hurley finds himself stuck in a rut, he thinks back to something that happened many years ago, when he was hitting the waves at Huntington Beach. He ran into Wayne Bartholomew, the reigning world champion surfer at the time, who said he preferred surfing with beginners because they gave him energy. “So Bob told me, ‘Now when I have bad days, I go out and surf with the amateurs,'” Wiseman says. “He spends his time talking to them, hanging out with them, and he says it revitalizes his point of view.”

Our Top 6 Pieces of Career Wisdom for New Grads (and Everyone Else Too)

“Where rookies really outperform is when the work is innovative in nature,” she says. “Rookies learn a lot faster than people with experience because they are desperate and uncomfortable. When we get comfortable, that’s when we start to teach and mentor other people.” But it’s also where people slow down and stop contributing as much

Our Top 6 Pieces of Career Wisdom for New Grads (and Everyone Else Too)

The most powerful form of learning comes when we’re desperate. When we have no choice but to learn.

Delivering an Effective Performance Review

Performance reviews are your chance to confront poor performers and demand improvement. “People are resilient,” says Grote. “As time goes on, that person is not going to get a promotion and not going to get a raise…You’re not doing this person any favors by [avoiding their deficiencies].”

How Netflix Reinvented HR

During 30 years in business I’ve never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. HR departments might throw parties and hand out T-shirts, but if the stock price is falling or the company’s products aren’t perceived as successful, the people at those parties will quietly complain—and they’ll use the T-shirts to wash their cars.

How Netflix Reinvented HR

Even if you’ve hired people who want to perform well, you need to clearly communicate how the company makes money and what behaviors will drive its success.

How Netflix Reinvented HR

Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

How Netflix Reinvented HR

Most tech companies have a four-year vesting schedule and try to use options as “golden handcuffs” to aid retention, but we never thought that made sense. If you see a better opportunity elsewhere, you should be allowed to take what you’ve earned and leave. If you no longer want to work with us, we don’t want to hold you hostage.

How Netflix Reinvented HR

“Instead, let’s just tell the truth: Technology has changed, the company has changed, and Maria’s skills no longer apply. This won’t be a surprise to her: She’s been in the trenches, watching the work around her shift. Give her a great severance package—which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit.” In my experience, people can handle anything as long as they’re told the truth—and this proved to be the case with Maria.

How Netflix Reinvented HR

“Why bother? We know how this will play out. You’ll write up objectives and deliverables for her to achieve, which she can’t, because she lacks the skills. Every Wednesday you’ll take time away from your real work to discuss (and document) her shortcomings. You won’t sleep on Tuesday nights, because you’ll know it will be an awful meeting, and the same will be true for her. After a few weeks there will be tears. This will go on for three months. The entire team will know. And at the end you’ll fire her. None of this will make any sense to her, because for five years she’s been consistently rewarded for being great at her job—a job that basically doesn’t exist anymore. Tell me again how Netflix benefits?

Why books don’t work

What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

A healthcare system badly out of balance – The Boston Globe

Altogether, those higher rates add up to at least $800 million more for Partners hospitals and doctors than if they were paid at rates similar to competitors, based on Partners’ insurance income. That is the equivalent of $170 a year for every member of the three leading insurers – Blue Cross, Tufts, and Harvard Pilgrim.

Aging Out of Addiction – Econlib

Moreover, if addiction were truly a progressive disease, the data should show that the odds of quitting get worse over time. In fact, they remain the same on an annual basis, which means that as people get older, a higher and higher percentage wind up in recovery. If your addiction really is “doing push-ups” while you sit in AA meetings, it should get harder, not easier, to quit over time. (This is not an argument in favor of relapsing; it simply means that your odds of recovery actually get better with age

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

So although people worry that 30% of the budget goes to help the less fortunate, the real number is about 6%

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

According to a CNN poll, on average Americans estimate that about 10% of our taxes go to foreign aid. The real number is about 0.6%.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

“Trickle-down” should be rejected as an interesting and plausible-sounding economic theory which empirical data have soundly disconfirmed.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

Progressive taxation is an attempt to tax everyone equally, not by lump sum or by percentage, but by burden

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

If a poor person can’t keep a job solely because she was lead-poisoned from birth until age 16, is it still fair to blame her for her failure? And is it still so unthinkable to take a little bit of money from everyone who was lucky enough to grow up in an area without lead poisoning, and use it to help her and detoxify her neighborhood?

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

Economic success requires self-control, intelligence, and attention. It is cruel to blame people for not seizing opportunities to rise above their background when that background has damaged the very organ responsible for seizing opportunities

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

If all of our success comes from external factors, then it is reasonable to ask that we “pay it forward” by trying to improve the external factors of others, turning them into better people who will be better able to seize the opportunities to succeed. This is a good deal of the justification for the liberal program of redistribution of wealth and government aid to the poor.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

I boldly propose a different sort of answer: (80%, 100%). Most of my success comes from my own hard work, and all of my own hard work comes from external factors.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

This also helps explain why other First World countries have better social mobility than we do. Poor American children have very few chances to go to Harvard or Yale; poor Canadian children have a much better chance to go to to UToronto or McGill, where most of their tuition is government-subsidized.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

This lack of social mobility isn’t part of the human condition, it’s a uniquely American problem

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

The most precise way to measure this question is via a statistic called “intergenerational income mobility”, which studies have estimated at between .4 and .6. This means that around half the difference in people’s wealth, maybe more, can be explained solely by who their parents are.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

If we define “rich” as “income in the top 5%” and “poor” as “income in the bottom 5%” then children of rich parents are about twenty times more likely to become rich themselves than children of poor parents.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

If the employees were rationally deciding whether or not to sign up, then some outsider regulating their decision would be a disaster. But if the employees are making demonstrably irrational choices because of a lack of mental energy, and if people do so consistently and predictably, then having someone else who has considered the issue in more depth regulate their choices could lead to a better outcome.

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

It looks more like they just didn’t have the mental energy to think about it or go through the trouble of signing up. And in the latter condition, they didn’t have the mental energy to think about it or go through the trouble of opting out

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

If people are literally killing themselves because of bad working conditions, it’s safe to say that life is more complicated than the ideal world in which everyone who didn’t like their working conditions quits and get a better job elsewhere (see the next section, Irrationality).

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

. Tellingly, “firing one of your employees” failed to make the scale.

Once hailed as unhackable, blockchains are now getting hacked

Cambrian

Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management.

But there’s evidence that binge writers actually get less done than people who write in shorter bursts. You can make meaningful progress in surprisingly small intervals: When graduate students were trained to write in 15-minute intervals, they finished their dissertations faster.

Opinion | Forget Self-Driving Cars. Bring Back the Stick Shift.

impeccable

Is It Worth Being Wise?

No amount of discipline can replace genuine curiosity. So cultivating intelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one’s character—some tendency to be interested in certain types of things—and nurturing it. Instead of obliterating your idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into a tree.

Is It Worth Being Wise?

To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the debris that fills one’s head on emergence from childhood, leaving only the important stuff. Both self-control and experience have this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own nature and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively. That’s not all wisdom is, but it’s a large part of it. Much of what’s in the sage’s head is also in the head of every twelve year old. The difference is that in the head of the twelve year old it’s mixed together with a lot of random junk.

Is It Worth Being Wise?

People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the same position as the runner. There’s no way for them to do the best they can, because there’s no limit to what they could do. The closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people. But the better you do, the less this matters. An undergrad who gets something published feels like a star. But for someone at the top of the field, what’s the test of doing well? Runners can at least compare themselves to others doing exactly the same thing; if you win an Olympic gold medal, you can be fairly content, even if you think you could have run a bit faster. But what is a novelist to d

Opinion | The Scandals of Meritocracy

And who knows — the Ivies might even teach undergraduates a little more rigorously if they weren’t so determined to prove they admitted the smartest kids by never ever letting anyone flunk out

How Should We Talk About the Israel Lobby’s Power?

Here’s a sign of the times: White liberals now believe there is more racism in America than African-Americans do. A 2017 Pew study, cited by the invaluable Tom Edsall, found the that “among white liberals … 79.2 percent agreed that ‘racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.’ 18.8 percent agreed that ‘blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition. … Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition.”

How Should We Talk About the Israel Lobby’s Power?

These white super-liberals are also, according to a fascinating survey featured in The Atlantic, the most blinkered. Money quote: “The most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves … They don’t routinely talk with people who disagree with them; this isolation makes it easier for them to caricature their ideological opponents. (In fact, people who went to graduate school have the least amount of political disagreement in their lives.) By contrast, many nonwhite Americans routinely encounter political disagreement. They have more diverse social networks, politically speaking, and therefore tend to have more complicated views of the other side, whatever side that may be.”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

No one knew this better than Carl Braun, who designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule, one of many in his large, Teutonic company: You had to tell Who was to do What, Where, When, and Why. And if you wrote a communication leaving out your explanation of why the addressee was to do what was ordered, Braun was likely to fire you because Braun well knew that ideas got through best when reasons for the ideas were meticulously laid out.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

“The principal job of an academic administration is to keep the people who don’t matter from interfering with the work of the people that do.”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

An idea or a feat is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Learn how to ignore the examples from others when they are wrong, because few skills are more worth having.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Deprival Superreaction Tendency is also a huge contributor to ruin from compulsion to gamble. First, it causes the gambler to have a passion to get even once he has suffered loss, and the passion grows with the loss. Second, the most addictive forms of gambling provide a lot of near misses and each one triggers Deprival Superreaction Tendency. Some slot machine creators are vicious in exploiting this weakness of man. Electronic machines enable these creators to produce a lot of meaningless bar-bar-lemon results that greatly increase play by fools who think they have very nearly won large rewards.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

“What a man wishes, that also will he believe.”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Excesses of self-regard often cause bad hiring decisions because employers grossly over appraise the worth of their own conclusions that rely on impressions in face-to-face contact. The correct antidote to this sort of folly is to under weigh face-to-face impressions and over weigh the applicant’s past record.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Therefore, some of the most useful members of our civilization are those who are willing to “clean house” when they find a mess under their ambit of control.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

“It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.”

How to Ask for a Raise, According to a Hostage Negotiator

“How am I supposed to do that?”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

In Poor Richard’s Almanack Franklin counseled: “Keep your eyes wide open before marriage and half shut thereafter.” Perhaps this “eyes-half-shut” solution is about right, but I favor a tougher prescription: “See it like it is and love anyway.”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Wise employers, therefore, try to oppose reciprocate-favor tendencies of employees engaged in purchasing. The simplest antidote works best: Don’t let them accept any favors from vendors. Sam Walton agreed with this idea of absolute prohibition. He wouldn’t let purchasing agents accept so much as a hot dog from a vendor. Given the subconscious level at which much Reciprocation Tendency operates, this policy of Walton’s was profoundly correct. If I controlled the Defense Department, its policies would mimic Walton’s.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

As I have shared the observation of life with Warren Buffett over decades, I have heard him wisely say on several occasions: “It is not greed that drives the world, but envy.”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Franklin would often maneuver that man into doing Franklin some unimportant favor, like lending Franklin a book. Thereafter, the man would admire and trust Franklin more because a nonadmired and nontrusted Franklin would be inconsistent with the appraisal implicit in lending Franklin the book

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

He trained himself early to intensively consider any evidence tending to disconfirm any hypothesis of his, more so if he thought his hypothesis was a particularly good one

The 4 Most Common Relationship Problems — And How To Fix Them – Barking Up The Wrong Tree

Criticism is staging the problem in a relationship as a character flaw in a partner. The Masters did the opposite: they point a finger at themselves and they really have a very gentle way of starting up the discussion, minimizing the problem and talking about what they feel and what they need.

Open Letter From New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

“Incredibly, I have heard city and state elected officials who were opponents of the project claim that Amazon was getting $3 billion in government subsidies that could have been better spent on housing or transportation. This is either a blatant untruth or fundamental ignorance of basic math by a group of elected officials. The city and state ‘gave’ Amazon nothing. Amazon was to build their headquarters with union jobs and pay the city and state $27 billion in revenues. The city, through existing as-of-right tax credits, and the state through Excelsior Tax credits – a program approved by the same legislators railing against it – would provide up to $3 billion in tax relief, IF Amazon created the 25,000-40,000 jobs and thus generated $27 billion in revenue. You don’t need to be the State’s Budget Director to know that a nine to one return on your investment is a winner.

Open Letter From New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon

We underestimated the effect of the opposition’s distortions and overestimated the intelligence and integrity of local elected officials

Opinion | Stop Counting Women

The absolute best way to ruin the gradual organic process of moving toward a society where men and women can both pursue the work they want — safely, with fair salaries and equal opportunities for promotion — is to freeze and polarize the conversation by imposing a bunch of rigid laws and policies. California passed a bill last fall that mandates the presence of at least one woman on the board of any publicly traded company headquartered there, with increases in that number under certain conditions. “We are tired of being nice. We’re tired of being polite. We are going to require this because it’s going to benefit the economy,” said a co-author of the legislation, Hannah-Beth Jackson, a Democratic state senator from Santa Barbara, in a floor speech. This line of argumentation is typical, and baffling. Could it really be true that increasing female board representation is irrefutably good for business yet won’t happen unless companies are forced to do it right now?

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

“I wear the chains I forged in life,” he is talking about chains of habit that were too light to be felt before they became too strong to be broken.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

“Politics is the art of marshalling hatreds.” And we also get the extreme popularity of very negative political advertising in the United States.

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Also needed in system design is an admonition: dread, and avoid as much you can, rewarding people for what can be easily faked

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

In my long life, I have never seen a management consultant’s report that didn’t end with the same advice: “This problem needs more management consulting services.”

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

He also demonstrated that prompt rewards worked much better than delayed rewards in changing and maintaining behavior

The Psychology of Human Misjudgment by Charles T. Munger :A Harrison Barnes

Perhaps the most important rule in management is “Get the incentives right.”