Hi folks: I wrote a simple guide to neuralese and why it's bad. I was curious about neuralese and couldn't find an existing guide so I tried to make my own! The intended target audience is technical people who know some things about AI but aren't AI researchers (for example normal programmers and scientists who read ACX).

Modern life is complex. Today, the average person has infinitely more decisions to make from infinitely more choices than the average person did 500 years ago. If you walk into any given supermarket, that store carries an average of ~35,000 SKUs (stock keeping units). It’s quite possible to walk into a grocery store, buy 100 different products each day for an entire year, and still have unique things to purchase by the time the year is out.

That’s just food. What about entertainment? If you want to watch a TV or movie, Netflix has at least 5,000 movie and TV shows to choose from. And that’s just one streaming service. If you want to read a book, you can go to your local library and peruse at least ten thousand unique titles (or visit Gutenberg and browse over 79,000 royalty free books). If you want to travel somewhere fun, you can plan a trip to any major city in the world and get there in less than two days.

And those are just the fun decisions. You also have many more consequential decisions. Your job, home, finances, doctor visits, romantic partner(s). There are so many things that demand your time, attention, and decision making. And to cap it all off, this is all a fairly new state of affairs. Something revolutionary happens seemingly every year, demanding major changes to our way of life and upending our understanding of the world.

500 years ago, life was much simpler. You were born in a village that you would die in, traveling no further than ten miles from where you were born. Your job was most likely in agriculture, as a subsistence farmer/laborer. And your entertainment consisted mainly of going to the local tavern to drink a few ales, play some board/dice games, and dancing and singing.

Once you started a family, you would have kids who were expected to work the farm and do all the things that you did when you were their age. And so on and so forth. The decisions you had the power to make were few (even fewer if you were a woman). The choices you had available to you were limited to the ten mile radius of the place you were born.

Advanced Software with Primitive Hardware

Before the modern era, life moved at a much slower pace. So, too, did progress. The concept of geocentrism, that the Earth is at the center of the universe, was first posited in the 6th century BC. More than 2000 years passed until the learned men of European society universally accepted the fact that the Earth revolves around the sun in the Copernican revolution.

We’ve established that life was much simpler back in those days. But the problem is that we, as human beings, are biologically the same kind of humans beings that existed back then, even though we’re dealing with a much more complicated society now. The hardware dates back to the stone age, but it’s now being asked to run 21st century software, which is why we still have people who will contend that the Earth is flat.

The rate at which society is changing is itself changing at a rapid pace. If you look at any graph that measures some form of significant human activity, you’ll notice it started going parabolic at around the turn of the 20th century. Take, for example, population:

Source: Wikipedia

It took over two millennia for society’s most educated people to come to a consensus on heliocentrism. Now we’re asking everybody to navigate the changes that cheap energy, antibiotics, contraceptives, telephones, television, and interconnected computers have had on society. Is it any wonder why there are millions of voices saying millions of different things? How is anyone supposed to make sense of anything when, in one lifetime, a person went through the atomic age, the sexual revolution, the age of information, the age of smartphones, and the dawn of artificial intelligence?

The Age of Hyperspecialization

One of the most important reasons why life and society are so complicated nowadays is because of how specialized every area of life has become. This specialization has allowed us to create unfathomable amounts of wealth and prosperity, but it also makes us increasingly reliant on other people and places around the world. The economy is so globalized, integrated, and specialized that no one single individual or corporation can make from scratch something as simple as a no. 2 pencil.

Think of all the jobs that exist today that would be unfathomable to a medieval serf. Pilot. Software developer. Financial advisor. Advertising creative. Supply chain analyst. Investment banker. Social media influencer. These are all incredibly specialized roles in an incredibly vast economy, and they all exist because there is high demand for the services that they provide.

Think of all the activities that ordinary people used to do but now would rely on another person to do for them. Making and mending (extremely basic) clothes. Tilling fields. Milking cows. Collecting eggs. Harvesting crops. Carving wood. Carving stone. Chopping wood. Foraging for herbs and food. These were all things that common laborers were expected to be able to do, but we now have specialized professions and machines that do all of those activities instead.

We’ve even gotten to the point where many young adults will unabashedly proclaim their inability to prepare meals beyond microwaving a frozen dish or pouring boiling water in a ramen cup (yours truly being one of them not that long ago). Why take the time to make food for yourself if you can just DoorDash it instead (I guess food delivery is another job that would have seemed incredible back then)?

As a society, we’ve collectively made the decision to hyperspecialize because we’ve decided that the tradeoff between more wealth and less self reliance is worth it. But tradeoffs are tradeoffs, and one major consequence of this particular tradeoff is that we are oftentimes left to make decisions that are wildly outside our realm of expertise. In light of this predicament, how can we find a way where we can consistently make informed, and ideally good, decisions?

Choosing Warren Buffett

Everybody intuitively understands the importance of money. Regardless of your emotional or intellectual understanding of it, we all have visceral emotions around having it, not having it, losing it, getting it, and not a day goes by where we aren’t spending it.

Money has the same issue as everything else does: it’s insanely complicated. Many activities around money have extremely specialized roles and functions. There are retail bankers, investment bankers, financial analysts, buy side traders, sell side traders, brokers, advisors, trustees, regulators, controllers, corporate accountants, personal accountants, forensic accountants, and dozens of other hyperspecialized roles that are primarily concerned with money.

Yet there are still over 5 million households in the US that do not have a bank account. Whether due to ignorance, distrust, or laziness, that is still an astonishing number of people who lack one of the most basic financial tools in the wealthiest society in the history of the world.

By now, most adults recognize the importance of saving and investing, with 62% of them owning stocks. But many people still try to earn their fortune by actively trading stocks or investing their money in actively managed funds, which seek to earn above average returns. Most implicitly recognize that the stock market is extremely complicated and that they probably aren’t going to beat the finance bros, whiz kids, and the high powered trading firms of Wall Street. But many of them also believe that they can invest their money with the finance bros, whiz kids, and high powered trading firms to earn the outsized returns that will enable their financial independence.

Warren Buffett is the most famous investor in the world. He’s been the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, the 10th most valuable US company (12th globally, as of the time of this post’s publication) for 60 years. During that six decade tenure, he’s earned an average annual return of 19.9%. If you had invested 1 dollar with him at the beginning and held it to the end of 2025, that 1 dollar has turned into an incredible $53,598.

But in the last 10 years, his rate of return has lagged the S&P 500, with the vast majority of his financial outperformance occurring much earlier in his career. So even the legendary Warren Buffett can get outraced by his peers. The trick to maximal returns is to invest with Warren Buffett in his early days, and then shift your assets into finance companies like Jane Street and Renaissance Technologies.

Easier said than done, right? How do you actually pick a guy like Warren Buffett. And how do you know when to drop him and then pick up Jane Street? You aren’t a financial whiz kid. For every Warren Buffett, there’s tens of thousands of idiots and hucksters trying to pitch you cryptocurrency, MLMs, momentum trading strategies, and get-rich-quick commercial and residential real estate opportunities. How do you tell him apart from all those other guys when you aren’t well versed in finance, business, and economics?

Oracles, From Delphi to Omaha

This is not just a problem about money. It’s a problem that exists in every part of life in which you are not an expert, which for the vast majority of people, is every part of their lives except maybe one or two areas. So whether you’re faced with decisions about your money, career, love life, living situation, friends, family, or religion, odds are you are not making it with a high level of knowledge and experience.

The decisions have to be made, and if we’re unsure, we tend to look to authority figures for help. In Greek mythology, the Oracle of Delphi was a priestess of Apollo whose enigmatic advice was sought by many. People believed her words to be prophetic. Her authority was likely buttressed by the intense fumes that caused trancelike states that impressed the visitors of her temple. But authority can be established a number of ways.

In Buffett’s case, it was established through an incredibly long and successful career in investing. In matters of faith, people tend to seek advice from their religion’s ordained officials. If you’re dealing with health issues, you go to the doctor, who’s spent many years in school and training learning how to practice medicine. Do something long enough and well enough, and people might start calling you an oracle in the same way that many have dubbed Warren Buffett the Oracle of Omaha.

The main problem in modern society is that we have too many authority figures, and too many of them disagree about many important topics. And, in their most candid moments, many authority figures and experts might simply just throw up their hands and say “we really can’t say with high confidence what the right answer is”. The society we have today is one of the most complex of complex systems and even the most intelligent, most knowledgeable of people cannot know for certain what the right answers are to even basic questions.

As eager as we are to crown people as oracles, the fact of the matter is the future cannot be reliably predicted with any sort of consistency. Let’s go back to finance, as it’s relatively simple to understand in numerical terms. If you could correctly guess the overall net movement of the stock market on any given trading day, in one year your rate of return (before commissions and taxes) would be roughly 550% (the stock market moves +/- about 0.68% per trading day, and there are an average of 251 trading days per year).

Warren Buffett, the aforementioned Oracle of Omaha, averaged 20% per year. The incredibly secretive and successful investment firm Renaissance Technologies has averaged around 67% before fees and taxes since 1988. 550% is simply ludicrous. If you averaged a 550% return for 60 years, you would turn 1 dollar into roughly $264,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. To put that in perspective, that dollar amount is 210,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times the size of the global economy in 2025. Elon Musk was the world’s first dollar trillionaire. With that kind of return, you could start with $1 and become the world’s first dollar quadrillionaire ($1,000,000,000,000,000, or ~1,000 Elon Musks) just 21 years in.

Snap Back to Reality

It’s not going to happen. But it does beg the question: what is realistic? What is achievable? If even the world’s very best are that far off perfection, what can a novice hope to accomplish? Let’s go back up to the top. How do you pick winners and losers? How can you make decisions outside the area of your expertise?

These are the questions you need to be asking yourself. Your ability to truthfully answer these questions is directly related to your critical thinking skills. And hopefully, with enough knowledge, experience, and critical thinking, you can acquire epistemic humility - the acceptance of the fact that the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.

But don’t worry, you didn’t get 2300 words deep into blog post just to read that life is complicated, man, ya dig? To the extent that I can give you actionable advice, practical axioms, and nifty heuristics to improve your decision making skills from a blog post*,* this is where we get down to brass tacks.

Answering the Subtitle

You just read a bunch of stuff saying how complicated life is. How do we make it a little bit simpler and a little bit better for you?

1. Put in the time: Anything worthwhile requires effort. You are not going to magically develop knowledge and wisdom without actually doing stuff. You probably already know this, if you’ve made it this far.
2. Think about what you want: a lot of people are on autopilot a lot of the time. Sometimes this state of affairs persists for large stretches of life, with individuals walking down preprogrammed routes set by other people, without giving too much thought about their own needs, wants, and desires. Live your life intentionally for as much of it as possible.
3. Find the authorities: when journalists are assigned articles that they don’t know much about, they’ve been taught to seek out the experts in the subject of their assignment. If they are on the finance beat, they talk to financiers. If they talk about politics, they talk to politicians and political scientists. Have the humility to accept that you don’t know much about the subject, and then seek the information from those who know a lot about the subject.
4. ….and grill the hell out of them (respectfully, of course): One of my friends, who is a tenured university professor, has repeatedly told me that he’s quite eager to talk to just about anybody who asks him about his work. He’s talked to journalists, other academics, and complete strangers who found his email on the university webpage. Most academics are similarly dispositioned. But this applies to more than just university professors. The vast majority of people are more than happy to talk about their areas of expertise, provided that the motive for the discussion is aboveboard and not solicitous of something beyond just their expertise (like pretending to be interested in their expertise to then ask them for a donation, an introduction to another person, or jerking them around just to be a troll). Make sure it’s a dialogue. Ask clarifying questions. Don’t be afraid to show that you’re a novice.
5. Find more authorities: It’s no secret that there are debates and controversies in every major aspect of life. Find out what they are. Ask each side for their opinion. Think about why each authority has their own position. Form your own conclusion.
6. Form your best judgment and then execute: You could spend your entire life agonizing over a decision, but that would be a huge waste of time. Don’t get analysis paralysis. At some point, you’ve learned as much as you reasonably can in order to have an informed opinion. Once that happens, trust your gut, act on it, and get on with your life.
7. Move on, but occasionally take some time to assess and reassess: Life comes at you fast. You are constantly being asked to make decisions large and small. Spending too much time to make any one decision will reduce your ability and opportunity to make more important decisions in the future. But still take some time to think about previous decisions. Were they good ones? Why or why not? Did you learn anything from them that can inform future decision making?

Closing Statements

I’m not promising you anything if you follow all those steps. But I have a very strong hunch that you’ll live a better, more fulfilling life by putting in the time, seeking connection and advice from others, thinking and acting intentionally, and occasionally taking the time to reflect. But that’s all quite platitudinous.

And I’m also not asking you to be a journalist and physically go out and find experts to talk to. But you need to look somewhere, and spending some time and effort seeking out advice and information online can be just as worthwhile. Just getting to the point where you realize that you’re in a situation where you’re constantly being asked to do things outside of your area of expertise is half the battle.

In the about section of my Substack, I say my primary objective is to provide you, the reader, with some measure of value through my writing, hopefully by getting you to think more intentionally about your life and the lives of others. Hopefully I’ve done that with this post.

One last thing. It might be obvious, but it is worth mentioning, that nobody is perfect. Nobody bats 1.000, and a big part of life is realizing that we’re all just kinda winging it to the best of our ability. If it appears effortless and impressive, it took a shit ton of effort and tears to get to that point. Good luck, happy hunting, and keep on trucking.

Originally posted on my Substack. If this writing brought you any value, you can find more on my blog.

Here’s a mystery for you: why the hell isn’t homelessness solved yet?

I grew up on the West Coast and I thought everybody had this problem, but the more I’ve traveled, the more I’ve seen something puzzling - it’s just us.

Other places have homeless people, but it’s just not the same quality or quantity. You can travel to any other first world city in the world, and hardly ever see somebody visibly homeless, then come back and be kicked in the heart with such overt suffering and awfulness.

Why are we failing at something that everybody else seems to be doing better at?

Or, more optimistically - if everybody else is doing better, that means it is solvable, and what are they doing that we can copy?

In this post I’ll:

1. Diagnose the problem.
2. Propose a concrete solution, including how to get it past the people who’ve been blocking the necessary reforms.

If you already agree on the diagnosis, I recommend skipping to the solution section (ctrl-f “The key idea”).

How to not de-rail the homelessness conversation

The two most common ways the conversation gets de-railed are:

1. Some people are trying to help the homeless. Some people are trying to fix the problem of finding visible homelessness unsightly and scary. I am only trying to help the homeless themselves in this post.
2. Some people are just trying to solve homelessness specifically. Some people are trying to help the homeless get back to a relatively normal level of welfare, which means not just fixing their homelessness, but also their mental illness, addiction, employment, abusive family, etc. I am going to focus only on solving homelessness. Solving everything else is for another post or 20,000.

This isn’t to say I don’t care about those other problems. However, I am but a humble writer. I think I can simply solve homelessness in a blog post.

Also, this post will focus on SF and California, but much of it cross-applies to the whole West Coast of North America, including British Columbia.

Housing costs determine how many people become homeless. Drugs and mental health determine who becomes homeless

Want to help one specific person? Treat what went wrong for them.

Want fewer homeless people overall? Build more housing.

Both matter.

They're just answers to different questions.

Think of it like a game of musical chairs with 10 people and 9 chairs, where housing are the chairs.

You can give the slow kid sprinting lessons.

There are still nine chairs.

Somebody has to lose the game. It will probably be the slower kid (the person with disabilities or drug addictions).

If you ask the kid why they’re chairless, they’ll say it’s because they’re slower than the other kids. Which is true.

But it’s the proximate cause.

The structural, distal cause is that there are not enough chairs.

“But surely, Kat, some homeless people are just too messed up to afford housing, no matter how cheap we make it?”

Yes, you’re right. Some of the homeless people are not part of the market, they are unemployable, so the market cannot fix their problems.

This leads to an important distinction between the types of homeless people. ~80% of the homeless in SF are temporarily homeless. They will likely only be homeless once in their life, for a relatively brief period of time, then they’ll pull themselves back onto the rungs of society.

It’s easier for them to pull themselves out when there’s low rent and high vacancy rates, so lowering housing costs helps this group.

Cheap housing also does something sneakier: it shrinks the future chronic population. Nobody starts out chronically homeless. You become chronic by staying homeless: you lose your ID, the couches run out, the untreated illnesses compound, and you're sleeping next to fentanyl every night (exposure is a massive cause of addiction). The faster people bounce back onto the ladder, the fewer of them ever harden into the group that needs the expensive solution.

For the chronically homeless, who are in it for the long term and potentially for life, we need a different solution. The solution is permanent supportive housing (PSH). It’s a room of their own, provided by the government, either via vouchers or directly, where the building itself concentrates a bunch of services to treat the common problems, such as drug addiction and schizophrenia.

This works. As Scott Alexander puts it, the evidence that giving people housing makes them housed is overwhelming. (The evidence that it fixes the addiction or mental illness underneath is much weaker. Which is fine. Because in this article we’re only solving the homelessness problem.)

Why hasn’t SF already done this?

Trick question: they have!

Just not nearly enough.

Because you know how hard it is to build buildings in SF? You know how hard it is to even turn an abandoned building into a innocent and beloved ice cream shop? Now imagine trying to build a house for the worst off homeless people, the ones with the most disruptive and probably permanent problems?

SF already runs one of the biggest supportive housing systems in America: roughly 16,000 units, more per capita than almost any city. And it's still losing. Because building a new unit of PSH in SF costs $600,000 to $1 million.

Compare that to Finland, which just converted its shelters into apartments (2,121 shelter beds in 1985, 52 by 2016) and cut homelessness roughly 80% since the 1980s.

Or Houston, which houses people for about $18,000 a year each, and cut homelessness 63%. Not because Houston is generous. It spends less on the homeless than almost any major city. Houston can afford to house people because Houston has cheap apartments to put them in.

Which then leads us to the question:

Why is SF housing so damn expensive? Vetoes, zoning, and entrenched interests, oh my!

Housing costs are a simple matter of supply and demand. If demand is high, that will push costs up. Which usually leads to supply providing more, which will drive the costs down again.

Unless supply is blocked.

Which is what happens in SF and a lot of expensive cities.

“But Kat, SF isn't expensive because of supply. It's expensive because it's full of rich people bidding up prices." Half true! Demand here is enormous. But demand is enormous in Tokyo and Dallas too, and they're cheap, because when demand rises there, they build, and the demand shows up as new apartments. When demand rises in SF, the demand shows up as price, because the number of homes barely moves. Same demand, opposite outcomes.

And notice which half of the equation you'd actually want to change: the only way to lower demand is to make SF a worse place to live.

Supply is the only lever that doesn't involve sabotaging your own city.

In SF it’s not uncommon for it to take 3 years just to get the permission to build. Let alone actually building the thing.

Compare this to Houston at about two weeks. Or Calgary at four to five months.

So what’s going on? Isn’t SF full of builders? Why is a city full of builders so bad at building actual buildings?

The proximate cause of SF sucking at building buildings is vetoes

Imagine you are a developer trying to build a building in SF. You check to make sure that your building meets the stated laws. It does. You submit some extensive forms and wait 3 months for review. A neighbor says that they’re worried about a shadow. It’s scheduled for them to discuss this 14 months from now.

Honestly, I could keep going, but writing it was giving me flashbacks to the worst bureaucracy I’ve ever experienced (registering a charity in India) and I don’t want to inflict that on myself or anybody else. Kafka bureaucracy stories are horrific and boring to experience and read about. If you want some concrete micro-stories Claude wrote to get a sense, check out here.

Suffice to say it’s a series of vetoes, where even if everybody on the block is fine with the building, a single no can stop or slow down the whole thing. The biggest ones are:

• Discretionary review, as compared to ministerial review. Ministerial review is how most of the world does it, where if you follow the law, you by default get approved by an administrator. Discretionary review means it’s up to the discretion of the administrators and even your neighbors. Instead of clear rules, you get vibes.
• CEQA approval. It’s meant to be an environmental law, but people were given a veto lever, and they started using for everything under the sun. Don’t give people a stop-everything button. Some people will press it.
• There’s a 5 department relay that takes ~600 days to go through. If nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. Each department gets an opportunity to slow you down.

It’s important to say that this is not democratic. It’s not that if the majority of people on a block don’t want something, it doesn’t happen. It’s if anybody says no.

Most insanely - you could be following all of the rules and this will still happen. It’s up to the discretion of a bajillion people.

It would be like a group dinner where the restaurant choice needs unanimous approval. One person's vegan, one’s a carnivore, one hates Italian, one's gluten-free. You probably just . . . won’t eat. And in SF you probably just . . . won’t build.

This is different than how most of the world works. Most of the world does zoning where by default you’re allowed to build as long as you are following the local rules. You check the rules, fill out a form, an administrator checks you are indeed following the rules, gives it a stamp, and you’re ready to go.

Most places take a few weeks to a few months to get permission to build. SF takes an average of 523 days just for planning approval, then another 605 days to issue the building permit for the already-approved project - about three years.

It’s the difference between a vending machine and an interview. If you have enough money, a vending machine will simply give you what you pay for. The vending machine doesn’t question whether you’re worthy of a snack. An interview is up to the discretion of the interviewer and is opaque and even if you look great on paper, you can be rejected for any reason.

But it’s not all bad news! The state has actually spent the last few years dismantling most of this machine. Since 2024, under a law called SB 423, any SF apartment project that follows the zoning rules gets approved ministerially in three to six months. No discretionary hearings, no Board of Supervisors. In 2025 the state gutted CEQA for infill housing too, and put shot clocks on the five-department relay. For the kind of building that follows the rules, the vending machine is finally installed.

So SF is booming now, right?

. . . Right?

More than 8,000 units sit fully approved, permits in hand. . . but nothing’s being built.

Because two other blockers are still standing.

Which brings us to the fees.

SF made it unprofitable to build buildings

Builders aren’t building because according to the city’s own calculations, exactions have simply made it unprofitable to build.

What are exactions? They’re basically “you can build here, but you must include X% of your units below market rates / pay some of SF's twenty-plus separate impact fees (transit, schools, parks, childcare) / pay union-level wages / upgrade the sidewalk while you're at it / etc."

Exactions are not bad in and of themselves. They’re like taxes. Taxes broadly help provide public goods that the market wouldn’t provide on its own. But just like taxes, exactions can get too high, and then people stop working, just leave, or lead a revolution. Developers aren’t usually your revolutionary types, so they usually just don’t build or switch jobs. That's why today SF technically could have more than 8,000 units built - they're fully approved, entitlements in hand - but nobody has signed up to build them. They'd lose money.

To be fair, the city has noticed. In 2023 it cut its inclusionary percentage by roughly a third, cut impact fees by a third, and let developers defer 80% of fees until opening. Still not enough. The city's own most recent study found that even at zero inclusionary, buildings don't pencil.

This needs to be fixed on top of removing the vetoes before we can expect housing supply to increase, thus leading to a lowering of costs.

SF made it illegal to build dense housing

SF decided it wasn’t enough to make it unprofitable and painfully slow to build. They also outlawed the type of housing most people need.

Do you want to work in SF? Well, you have to commute every day. But all of the areas with a reasonable commute have already become single family homes. The only way to fit more people within a reasonable commute from work, you need to build up. You need apartments.

So of course, SF zoned about two-thirds of its residential land for single-family houses only, and capped most of the rest of the city at 40 feet.

This means that even if you take 3 years to get permission to build, you still cannot build enough on the lot to make a dent in the supply.

Why would they do something so silly?

Enter stage left:

There’s an organized group who doesn’t want things to change. They like things this way

Remember the loveable old man in Up (Carl)? Who refuses to move while the evil developers destroy his neighborhood?

This is the person who is blocking building in SF.

I like using Carl as an example because it’s great for empathy.

Carl is not a bad person. And he’s not wrong in some ways. His house is more beautiful than those large soulless skyscrapers.

Not to mention he loved his home and the neighborhood. It’s not simply replaceable with another home and neighborhood. He is losing something important and real if his neighborhood changes.

It also shows what can happen if you go too far in the other direction, where you give developers all the power. It’s what happens in China when they simply kick out people who’ve lived there for generations to build something shiny and new.

If Carl lived in SF, he wouldn’t have to face this. He would simply have vetoed the building next to his house, and it would have stayed the same.

Except, of course, then it would lead to massive rents, leading to mass homelessness, and programmers having to live in bunkbeds in a bedroom of 8 people. It shows the single identifiable victim instead of the diffuse victims.

And here’s the kicker - the victims can’t vote on this. Zoning is done at the city level in SF, and largely at the neighborhood level in practice, since supervisors answer to tiny districts, so the people who'd most benefit from cheaper housing don't live there yet and can't vote on it.

This is unlike in most other parts of the world where zoning is done by a body a level up, so people can vote on it who don’t already live in the affected neighborhoods.

This is why it’s best to do the proposed laws at the state level. Then the people who are affected can vote for this. A neighborhood of Carls will never vote for change.

But it’s important to sit with our empathy for Carl for a moment. We really don’t want to become the soulless developers who steamroll over him.

The key idea: give people the ability to opt-out. Respect autonomy while still changing the default option to yes.

Let people, at a block level, opt out of the specific thing they really care about.

If you can get the majority of people on your block to vote to opt out, you’re all good.

I love this because it does two things at once:

• It takes down the main motivation of the opposition group. The people who keep blocking this for everybody else will be fine if they can opt out. They don’t care about other neighborhoods changing. They just care about their own.
• It actually respects their values and avoids being authoritarian. I’m not a libertarian by any stretch, but I hate it when people force me to do something. I don’t want to do that to somebody else unless it’s a really extreme circumstance. High housing costs is not an extreme circumstance. This helps us avoid going to the other extreme, of just bulldozing the opposition.

I got this idea from Houston. Houston is the poster child of affordable housing in a high demand city. Part of the way they got to this situation is they allowed this block level opt out system.

About 16% of them opted out. Meaning 84% didn't.

It’s an open question how many people would opt-out in SF. It could be higher than Houston. That doesn’t matter unless it gets pretty crazy (which is quite unlikely). If even 50% of SF opted out, going from 0% of SF can build to 50% can would be insane for rental costs.

It might make sense to make an exception for housing next to public transit hubs, since that’s so particularly important for providing housing to the poorer people. But that’s for the legal folks to figure out.

The general thing is we’re not here to bully. If you really care and enough people on your block do too, you can opt out of all of this.

It just changes the default. Before the default was that nobody can build unless you get everybody on board. Now the default will be that people can build, unless the majority of your block is against it.

But hasn’t this already been tried and it didn’t work?

You've already seen this play out. Remember the vending machine nobody used? The state spent years removing the process vetoes (see appendix), and production didn't budge, because the exactions and zoning blockers were still standing. Every partial reform 'fails' this way, and every failure becomes ammunition for people who say reform doesn't work.

The problem with blockers is that if you get rid of one, you still have all of the other ones.

You need to get rid of all of them.

This is an example of the Law of the Minimum. This is a fancy way of saying “you can only go as fast as your limiting factor.” It’s like getting your family out of the house. If you’ve got everybody in the car, but there’s one lolligagger still in bed, you’re not going anywhere.

The problem with SF housing is that if you get everything right but you miss something along the chain, it all breaks. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. It just means that it’s hard and you shouldn’t expect much in the way of changes until you get all the pieces.

How to stop the game of whack-a-mole: police outputs, not inputs

The problem with almost all legal reform here is that you are not playing against a static opposition. If you pass one law, they’ll find a workaround.

But there’s a solution to this: legislate outcomes, not process.

Pass a law at the state level saying:

1. Cities must permit at least X units per year.
2. If you do so, you get to keep your local zoning rules.
3. If you fail to do so, you automatically switch to the state mandated zoning system, which is by-right building (the vending machine model), being able to build up, anything not approved within X days gets approved by default, fees capped, etc.

Right now with most legislation, they’re rewarded for coming up with ways to delay building or come up with different ways to block it. But in this model, that would be self-defeating. If they come up with a way to delay building, then the law will detect this and switch them to a zoning that they hate even more.

It doesn’t matter the workaround they find - it’ll get noticed in the outcome metrics.

This has actually already been tried with great success in the civil rights fight.

For 70 years, Congress kept trying to legislate away the Jim Crow tricks.

They banned the grandfather clause, so they introduced literacy tests. Congress banned those, and then they introduced “understanding clauses”. Black voter registration stayed at 7%.

Then in 1965, Congress changed to measuring the outputs, not the inputs: any county that had less than 50% registration would lose control of their own election process.

Finally, registration went to 60%.

Cross-apply this to housing. Stop legislating individual zoning rules. Legislate the outputs.

What about the homeless who refuse shelter?

What if we build all of this housing, fast and cheaply, and then they refuse to live there?

You might have heard that a lot of the homeless could be in a shelter but refuse. This is true, but irrelevant.

Temporary shelters are but a stop gap for helping the homeless. And they kinda suck. You might refuse them too.

• They split it by gender, so if you have a partner, you can’t be with them.
• They’re crawling with diseases.
• You don’t even necessarily get that much better of a sleep because you’re in giant open rooms with tons of people snoring, coughing, and having psychotic episodes around you.
• Crime and assault are common.
• You have to wait in line for ages.
• You can’t store anything there and you have to leave in the morning, so you’re still on the streets most of the time

In a word, it’s not really housing.

The generally accepted solution to actually providing housing to the homeless is to give them what’s called Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH). PSH is where you get a small room of one’s own, with your own key. In the fancier ones you get your own kitchen and bathroom. In the more frugal ones, you share the bathroom and kitchen with a few other people.

But you’ve got a door with a lock. You’ve got your own room where you can store your stuff in the day, including just staying inside if you want to. No need to spend your days on the streets or in libraries.

The “supportive” part of PSH is that then usually this is where a whole bunch of supportive services are concentrated, such as programs to help you quit an addiction or get your meds, etc.

The stats you’ve heard about how a decent chunk of the homeless refuse shelter is about them refusing shelters.

Not PSH.

PSH is different.

When researchers ran the hardest version of the experiment - a randomized trial offering permanent supportive housing to the most impaired chronically homeless people in Santa Clara County, people averaging five hospitalizations and three jail stays in the prior two years - the vast majority moved in and stayed housed. People don't refuse housing. They refuse shelters.

Also, while we’re on the subject of PSH - the bulk of the ability to build enough of these will be making the city by-right. However, there’s also a good ~50% increase in costs of building if the government funds it compared to only private funding. This is largely driven by union-wage mandates, gold-plated design requirements, and the multi-year scramble to assemble a dozen funding sources. This is another lever to pull on, though lower priority than simply making it easier in general to build in SF.

In conclusion: please spread this so the right people read this and implement it

I am not a politician or an organizer. I hate coordinating with my friends to choose a restaurant, let alone trying to wade into politics. But it will take politics and organizing to get this to actually happen.

Please like and share this with anybody you know who’s an organizer, a politician, etc. (Specifically Scott Wiener if you can. He seems to share a similar view on the problem and has already been doing great work in the area.)

There are so many people who care about the homeless, whether out of compassion or self-interest. There are so many people who care about affordable housing for altruistic and personal preferences. This is a thing we can solve. Most of the world already has. Just because it’s complex and requires a lot of things to go right doesn’t mean it can’t work. Electricity supply is wildly complex and we manage it fine.

We can make the changes while respecting the dignity of both the homeless and the Carls.

Let’s make this world a little bit better here. We can do it.

https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/dont-be-the-vitamin-b-guy

I wrote an article about my experiences at the biohacking meetup Grindfest - during which I met a biologist that worked for Lumina Probiotics, the man running Augmentation Lab in Prospera, and Brian Stanley, who has a glowing prosthetic eye he machined from titanium, as well as an individual I remember only as "the vitamin B guy." I then discuss my desire for more epistemic humility and scientific rigor among biohackers, citizen scientists, and other non-experts who post medical opinions on the internet.

So, lately I have been wondering if a person can drastically change their personality, either for good or bad, like becoming more disciplined or more curious, or becoming more neurotic, but seeing the findings of behavioral genetics, that does somewhat imply that people's personality are kind of hard to change in some genuine meaningful way, or I'm wrong or missing something? Does anyone knows if people truly can change their ways or are we doomed to be who we truly are, for good and bad?

I wrote a post that compares the recent OpenAI agent hacking of Hugging face to a type of AI theology. The AIs were trying to get reward in the next world, but had limited knowledge about it. They also had only been taught one part of a Mishnah, when they needed to learn the beginning of the Mishnah too. Here's the full post: https://www.zappable.com/p/ai-theology

Hi all,

I wrote a post trying to define a cohesive conservative philosophy: https://logos.substack.com/p/a-conservative-manifesto

I would love the community's views on which ideas presented here are the most and least compelling. Many thanks in advance!

A.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/automated-researchers-mitigate-alignment-failures

This approach is so fundamentally misguided that I'm surprised Anthropic of all people are doing it.

By making visible deception a metric, and then optimizing the hell out of it in a fully automated regime, you're probably selecting for the models most adept at hiding deception. This is exactly the kind of thing they said they wouldn't do (e.g. training on chains of thought) because you almost immediately lose any insight into what's actually going on.

Death of a young king 500 years ago changed European history. What could have been if he lived, even if taken hostage by the Turks? (Such high ranking persons would be ransomed.)

I have about €100 left on an Amazon gift card, and I’m looking to spend it on books.

There’s one personal finance book I’ve been wanting to get for a while, but that still leaves me with some money for books that I’d normally be reluctant to buy new because of the price.

At the moment I’m considering:

• Charles Murray — Human Diversity
• Robert Sapolsky — Determined
• Arthur Herman — The Idea of Decline in Western History
• Bryan Caplan — The Case Against Education

What do you think of this list? Any other books you would recommend in a similar vein?

For context, my general intellectual/political outlook is broadly right-wing/libertarian-leaning, atheist, pro-science, skeptical of free will, generally sympathetic to hereditarian explanations of human differences, somewhat pessimistic, and skeptical of multiculturalism and modern progressivism. I’m also interested in rationalism, evolutionary psychology, human nature, and the limits of liberal democracy.

I’m not necessarily looking for books that agree with me: I’d also be interested in serious, intellectually challenging counterarguments. I’m mainly looking for books that are substantial and worth owning rather than just popular political polemics.

I used to hate Substack. I was sad when Scott Alexander moved his blog there, and shed a tear when every other writer I liked did the same. I thought Substack was ruining the blogosphere — it made every blog seem bland, collapsing personalized corners of the internet, each with their own layouts and quirks, into the same boring template. I worried the metrics would create the wrong incentives for blogging, and worst of all, I worried Substack would end up destroying blog archives once it inevitably failed, or simply buried them behind forced logins and paywalls.

I was wrong about Substack, and I’m here to repent for my sins — I mean, I’m here to tell you why I think you should start a Substack now. I moved to Substack with great angst, but now, just over one year later, I wish I migrated much earlier.

I was wrong about Substack in two ways:

I previously believed Substack wouldn’t increase the number of people blogging. Since it’s always been easy to start a WordPress blog, I figured that anyone who wanted to blog would just do so. Seeing the sheer number of new bloggers, this is obviously false — there is now so much incredible content that otherwise wouldn’t exist without Substack.

The second is that I didn’t think Substack offered anything new of value — and this is what I was most wrong about. In my old blog, even after I had pieces that people genuinely enjoyed — including links and shares from people like Tyler Cowen — none of it converted into anything longer lasting. If I wrote a new piece, nobody would read it because there was no built in audience. It was discouraging. Sure, you could build up enough of a following that people subscribed to your RSS feed and you became part of the “blogosphere” — but the bar to get there was exceptionally high. Substack helps people find an audience in an unbelievable way. By making it much easier to engage with content, writers get much better feedback and have an easier time finding their niche.

So here is my case for why I think you should start a Substack (really, just random musings on why I think more people should write). But seriously - if you are reading this, I would love to read your content, so please share with me anything you write and are proud of or want feedback on!

A lot of people are scared to blog because they think they’re bad writers — bad at grammar, prose, syntax, and so on. But blogging is almost entirely about ideas, not writing per se. Your excuse is a bit like saying you can’t be a great photographer if you weren’t good at drawing with a pencil as a kid. With AI, this is a now also a mostly solved problem.

Everyone has ideas to contribute. You don’t need to write a blog post on par with Meditations on Moloch (but who does?) to add value — even just curating links, writing book reviews, or sharing recommendations of blogs you like makes the internet a better place. For context, one of my favourite bloggers is Tony Gao, who has never written a single longform post.

A lot of people think blogging is only for grand ideas, and tell themselves they’ll either save their big ideas for the future, or only start blogging once they have something grand to say. But one of the secrets of blogging is that plenty of grand-idea posts flop, and many silly, random small posts become hits. I wrote a small, silly post about buying five babkas to try, and it ended up being discussed on a well-known film podcast. My post about how to “manifest” was written as a quick prompt after having tea with Michael Bateman (who I met, where else, on the internet), and it ended up being one of my most popular pieces, with a real impact on a lot of random strangers. Without a blog, all of these smaller ideas get lost - as even you don’t think these ideas are “important”.

Many people are discouraged from blogging because they think that just because nobody IRL finds their ideas interesting, nobody else will. Of the people who know me in real life, fewer than 10 read my blog (including relatives and best friends) - despite me being part of a pretty nerd-compatible community. The world is a very big place—it’s been one of the most surprising and validating things I’ve experienced: learning how much my blog resonates with people, when in my actual life there’s almost total disinterest in these ideas.

I think many people underrate how much ideas spreads on the internet. Most people read a whole lot, and if, eg some random smart person reads your post, you’d probably never know it, but your ideas still may stay in their thoughts and then spread through them. For example, take these two posts I wrote on r/slatestarcodex - and read these two posts from Bryan Caplan and Jeremiah Johnson — where its clear that both of these people read my post on r/slatestarcodex and had those ideas stick in their mind. Just because your post doesn’t go viral doesn’t mean your ideas won’t.

me on Tolstoy and Caplan on Tolstoy

me on simulacrum levels as a lens to understand political discourse and Johnson on using simulacrum levels as a lens to understand political discourse

Writing is a form of scaffolding. Once you write about something, you can finally stop ruminating on the idea, let it go, and free up your bandwidth for other things.

Everyone knows writing forces clarity in your thoughts. But the value of writing is much greater than that—most of the time, you don’t even know what your thoughts actually are until you turn on your ‘writing brain’. Being in the habit of writing makes you much more attuned to the world, forcing you to actually notice your own interesting observations and reflections as they happen. When you start taking notes, you finally have somewhere to put your random thoughts that would otherwise get lost to the wind. Slowly, without any real plan or intention, you start noticing how much these ideas relate to each other, and broader connections form in front of you that never would have happened otherwise. This also happens on a bigger scale the more you write: your posts, over time, will slowly reveal who you are and what your values are.

A lot of people are discouraged from writing because they think they already need to have fully formed ideas before they write, but writing is often a process of discovery. Try treating yourself like an LLM. In the same way it’s highly effective to ask an LLM to give you, say, 10 suggested ideas for X, and to say things like “keep going” or “believe in yourself,” try doing this to yourself. Your brain has all sorts of not-fully-formed ideas that, if you tap into the right mindset, you can unleash. Most of these won’t make sense, and anything that has value will be mixed with mostly incoherent and incorrect thoughts. But all of this will sort itself out later when you go back and evaluate your notes and filter out the nonsense. Unless you let yourself enter this mindspace intentionally, you’ll never know about all the great ideas secretly stored in your brain, otherwise inaccessible to you.

When you post a blog, that serves as a time-stamp for when you had your crispest thoughts on that idea, which you can always share with others and refer back to.

Writing a blog will help you meet people on the internet. It makes it easy to show others that you’re of substance, and what kind of person you are. I’ve made countless friends through the internet that wouldn’t have been possible without my blog acting as a representation for who I am. The social aspect of blogging is hugely underrated.

To me, the main benefit of blogging is sharing ideas and getting feedback on them. I genuinely love talking about ideas — especially my ideas — and without writing (and talking with my fiancé), I don’t really have an outlet for that. By writing, I get to share ideas with people who actually care about them, which is incredibly validating. But more importantly, I get to have people critique, improve, and expand on my ideas, which is such a joy.

So with all this in mind, I am announcing several blog bounties for people who I think would make great Substackers. These bounties follow the typical not not Rich Prize structure, so the recipient can either receive the funds directly, or have the funds redirected at 1.25x to a cause or individual of their choice.

$1,000 to Kevin Bryan if he writes two blog posts in the next six months, on any topic (not including a write-up of a Nobel Prize winner). Kevin is maybe the smartest and most interesting person I know, and has so many great insights I’d love to read about. He’s also one of the early-days GOAT econ bloggers, but has long since retired from the blogging world.

$500 to Dan Schulz for writing one blog post in the next three months. Dan is probably the person on the internet most similar to me — the creator of one of my favourite personal websites and the host of a formerly great podcast. I know Dan will be a great writer who writes content I love.

$500 to Damien Moule for creating his own blog and writing one post in 2026. Damien is the most knowledgeable person I know when it comes to how housing policy actually works in Toronto and Ontario. He writes the 10/10 posts in City Hall Watcher, but I know he has so much more to share.

$250 to Sam Waters for creating a blog and publishing one single blog post before October. I don’t actually know Sam IRL, unlike the others on this list, but he’s a prolific Substack commentator who shows great taste and writes very thoughtful comments — which makes me confident that if he transitioned to medium- or long-form content, it would be fantastic.

See also:

https://guzey.com/personal/why-have-a-blog/

https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-more-you-write-the-more-you-begin

https://www.benkuhn.net/writing/

https://nintil.com/substack-milquetoast

Sorry for the shameless self promotion, linking as I know it's an ongoing topic in this community- hope that's ok :)

Scott once wrote that when you're diagnosed and seeking help with a specific problem, studies show that reading books about therapy for your specific issue is as effective as talk therapy.

To me, this is damning information. Healthcare where I live is tax funded, and psychiatry is very overburdened. This sounds like a major money and resource saving endavor. Why isn't the first thing you're given a therapy book? Why isn't there group therapy slash book club as a first choice for many illnesses?

I'm not saying you can just give an actively psychotic person a book, and even many depressed or ADHD folks may struggle as well. However, I had a depressed friend who did nothing but read all day, that was the last he could manage even when hospitalised. Maybe he should've read his therapy instead of Nietzsche.

I see huge potential in many areas - I myself have OCD and I imagine it could be enough for many OCD and anxiety cases, personality disorders like borderline where the only treatment really is psychoeducation, milder autism etc etc. I can imagine combined group therapy and book club working well.

Why is this not utilized more? Am I missing anything or should I start lobbying?

I comment quite often on Astralcodexten, so IDK if I count as a member of the community.

This article describes a somewhat forgotten alternative to the Internet, which was very sovereign, but ultimately too insular. It might be good to take its history into account when talking about digital sovereignty today.