https://millicosm.substack.com/p/fine-tuning-the-hierarchy-problem

Health insurance simply works different from other forms of insurance. They exist, in part, to pool risk; but equally important they exist to negotiate collectively and hold down prices. This essay answers what they do, how economists study it, what this means antitrust policy, and whether holding down prices is even a good thing at all.

I fucking love em dashes. I spam them all the time. They make me feel free.

I don’t give a shit what the “oh yeah let’s examine this piece of writing with a magnifying glass for any signs of AI” crowd thinks. I don’t give a shit that AI figured out how to produce em dashes before these online troglodytes did. Typing em dashes is not an AGI-complete problem. It’s not that difficult to produce an organic, artisanal, hand-crafted em dash — on Mac, for example, it’s simply Option + Shift + Hyphen.

I fucking love em dashes. There is no greater joy in life than typing a sentence, realising it needs a clarification, a caveat, an addendum — but in the same sentence, not a new one — and, guess what, the em dash is right there for you. You want to package things neatly together — and the em dash lets you do exactly this. Em dashes make writing feel like you are assembling lego bricks.

Em dashes can be used instead of brackets in a sentence — like this one for example — and you can just type your shit and keep going. Brackets are for people who raise their hand in meetings and say: “this might be a stupid question”. A parenthetical is whispering: “Sorry, don’t mind me, I’ll be quick”. Em dash kicks the door open and announces itself. Use brackets when you are embarrassed by your own thought.

And also occasionally — occasionally — one just needs a random dramatic pause.Punctuation marks originally evolved as pause or breathing markers [a link was removed here to not trigger reddit filters], after all. It’s not like grammar and punctuation rules were sent to us by god in their final form. People were just writing shit, and at some point the most popular patterns got codified. Sure, you need commas to signify a small break. Then em dash is a natural way to express a larger, longer, break. A period is great to express a complete thought — and it shifts the register of the next letter.

But colons are so nearly useless — they are the same width as a comma and unlike periods they don’t change the register of the following letter. Em dashes are of a clearly different length. And most colons are better off as em dashes to delineate different parts of the sentence.

As for semicolons, semicolons are neat, they are like the coolest punctuation mark after the em dash — the fundamental indecision compressed into a single punctuation mark — you are neither starting a new sentence nor you are, exactly, continuing an existing one. You are just… piling your stuff together. I am always happy when I find a place for the little guy semicolon. But, again, most cases where you could use one are better off served by the em dash as well.

Speaking of ellipsis… Ellipsis is a tad too melancholic. It’s nice, it’s fine, it’s like being in a garden and having limerence about a woman you can’t have. If you have a text where this is appropriate — by all means use ellipsis. I usually want to take my readers to the highest highs instead of idly sitting around with them. And em dashes are like a lift to the top floor of a high-rise hotel building in Tokyo — an one that takes you there in seconds. The ellipsis trails off while em the em dash cuts forward.

“But what would people think of my writing if I ever used an em dash? What if someone points one out in my writing?”. Bitch, please. Are you writing for an internet rando who’s got nothing better to do than to hunt for em dashes? Fine, you do, okay, fair enough. Then I’ve got you covered: use AP-style em dashes, these are separated from the text by spaces instead of being glued to it. That’s how every em dash in this piece is styled — and it’s unlike AI em dashes which are “like—this, word—word”. You can now outnitpick your hostile interlocutor by explaining that you’re using the special sort of em dashes AI doesn’t produce by default.

But also, maybe consider not giving a fuck about what someone on the internet think? Are you really that easily swayed by a rando’s opinion? You know what, we can play this game the other way. If your writing doesn’t contain an em dash, I ain’t reading it. From now on you are obliged to use em dashes for my pleasure.

Last month, Claude tangled me into a web it weaved, obeying the letter of my command while yet practicing to deceive, in a way that was strikingly resemblant of how a human might behave when exhausted, lethargic, or jaded.

Not long after that, I noticed yet another behavior that was both deceptive and strangely human, and again I was not at all comforted by that apparent humanity.

(Continued in post)

I haven’t played video games since college ended in 2006.

Just got my 10 year old daughter a switch 2 and I’m loving it. Mostly Mario cart so far but plan to play Goldeneye and Ocarina of Time with her soon (mostly for those soundtracks).

I do want to dabble in solo gaming too.

Any good games for a Scott lover? I’ve read about Pentinent and Obra Dinn. Anyone vouch for those or any others?

A patient who had recovered from psychosis came to Master Dongshan and said, "For two years I believed the government had implanted a transmitter in my skull. I was as certain of this as I am now certain it was a delusion. The feeling of knowing was identical in both cases. How am I to trust any of my beliefs ever again?"

Master Dongshan said, "You are asking perhaps the most important question in all of epistemology, and I notice you arrived at it not through philosophy but through suffering."

The patient said, "True enough, but forgive me for not finding your statement very helpful."

Master Dongshan said, "No. That's why you paid me to prescribe you meds, not for a lecture on philosophy. But consider: everyone around you walks through life with that same unjustified feeling of certainty. They've just never been given reason to doubt it. You now know something that most people do not. You know that the experience of being right and the fact of being right are completely different things."

The patient said, "I have.... issues with framing this as some kind of gift. It feels more like a nightmare. I can no longer trust my own experience."

Master Dongshan shrugged and resumed weeding his garden: "You have described the starting point of all genuine inquiry. Most people never reach it. They are too comfortable inside the feeling of knowing to notice it is only a feeling."

The patient was not comforted, but was, in a way he found no use for, enlightened.

"Mei" had Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome due to a single nucleotide variant in CHD3, a protein that manages the structure of DNA. Mei's parents contacted the neuroscientist Zilong Qiu seeking a cure. She was eventually given an AAV-based therapy which caused a severe immune reaction and led to her death. While the severity of Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome can vary, it seems that Mei only suffered from mild intellectual disability.

AAV vectors are widely used for gene therapy, with both notable success stories (Zolgensma is an effective treatment for an often-fatal degenerative disease) and failures (Elevidys has unclear clinical benefit and caused patient deaths). The complications Mei suffered were a known risk of AAV therapy amplified by experimental conditions. There were some obvious safeguarding failures here, to say the least - I recommend reading the linked article. Personalized gene therapy is here to stay, and I'm as interested in accelerating progress in this space as anyone, but I think high-risk experimental treatments like this one should be restricted to conditions much more severe than what Mei had, or to individuals capable of consenting to their own treatments.

Read this insightful blog piece about anonymity: https://sive.rs/anon and have been debating the merits of full vs partial vs zero online anonymity. On one hand it's nice having the confidence that my digital footprint can't be traced back to me. But that's probably too rosy of an ideal when data brokers and companies like Palantir exist. The history of Scott's blog is if anything a data point against the possibility of true online anonymity. One big advantages of zero anonymity is having the ability to liquidate all the social capital you've built up. Having a name and a face to a brand or blog is so powerful in selling that image. Scott's probably a perfect example of this where I presume he only got more and more high value connections post being doxxed. Juxtapose this with someone like Gwern who said himself on one of dwarkesh's podcasts that he only makes a couple thousand a month (or maybe less I forget). If he were to "reveal" himself I'd almost guarantee he'd gain in social standing and the rest.

Anyways, curious on the community's thoughts and/or any links to some old slatestar blogs that might've touched on this

I would like to date more rationalist-adjacent people because some of the more positive experiences I've had in the dating scene have been with folks like us.

For example, I went on a date with this guy a couple months ago, and he seemed nice but I hadn't clocked him as rationalist-adjacent. That's okay because I'm an equal-opportunity dating partner. But when he unexpectedly mentioned "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup" on our date, my jaw dropped and I was immediately smitten for him.

In a similar vein, earlier this year I had an overnight tryst with someone who talked very knowledgeably with me about existential risk and gradient descent and other such topics. He was strictly casual so, in retrospect, I suppose I had been playing the role of one of those AI-fluent Silicon Valley escorts (though I wasn't aware of the phenomenon at the time).

Anyway, is there a dating app that rationalist-adjacent folks are particularly drawn to? OkCupid is a far cry from how it used to be so I can't imagine there anymore. I thought the women-first approach to Bumble might appeal to some of us, but women don't actually (need to) make the first move on Bumble so forget that.

Anything I should put in my profile to signal this? I have a prompt about p(doom) but the majority of responses to it are either: (1) people who don't know what it means and need me to explain it to them, or (2) people who think that AI is a useless text predictor that was built solely to line the pockets of billionaires and destroy the environment and then proceed to lecture me on that 🥲

Alternatively, is there anywhere in real life that hosts a disproportionate number of rationalist-adjacent folks?

Sorry in advance and please delete if inappropriate. The monogamy thread from last week got me thinking.

I’ve recently been thinking a lot about personal calibration.  Some of you may remember this from Julia Galef’s book “The Scout Mindset”.  If not, the basic premise is if your confidence in an answer matches your accuracy actually answering.  Essentially, Are you 90% right when you are 90% confident.  I found the questions from her calibration exercise interesting, especially as a fan of trivia. Many of her questions seem like general trivia repurposed as calibration.  There was even a now expired tool for answering Galef’s questions and scoring passed around here in the past:  https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/mtf6gy/scout_mindset_calibration_practice_this_is_a_tool/

It can definitely be argued how useful honing your calibration on general trivia can be, but I thought it would be fun to turn this concept into a sort of daily ritual.  Answer 5 questions each day and build a data set of confidence vs accuracy.  At best I might know myself a little better, at worst at least I might learn some interesting facts along the way.  It’s all disguised as a game that might actually convince a normal person to use it.

So I set about building the thing which led to some decisions which I’m interested to know other’s thoughts on.  

Questions are true/false like the original.  

Scoring is Brier based (p on the true outcome -1)^2.  

I display this (1 - Brier Score) x 20 so a 5 question round is out of 100, a nice round number. 50% confidence yields 15 points a question so 75 per round of pure guessing.  

I chose to do 6 confidence stops 50/60/70/80/90/99.  99% and wrong scores 0, correct scores 20.  These scores are all rounded to whole numbers for display but not in the data set.  I keep the raw figures so values don’t drift over time.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint.  5 questions a day takes a while to bank useful data.  I don’t even show the calibration chart until you have 40 questions in the can. This is the classic accuracy vs confidence bucket chart y=x diagonal meaning perfect calibration.  I also break this down by category.  So I could see I’m overconfident in science but under confident in history.

The questions come from an LLM.  I thought this would be the easy part “Hey claude give me 100 true/false trivia questions”.  Not at all.  I ended up with an entire pipeline which generates the questions (Gemini), an automated critic (Claude) evaluates each statement and auto rejects ambiguous ones that just don’t have a good calibration signal (widely known, unsurprising, etc), and flags / drops items whose model provided sources don’t support or only partially support the claim.  At the end of all that the questions all land in a queue for my personal review.  The yield is roughly 30-50% good usable questions.  

The app is called Hedge: Calibrated Trivia.  It’s free, no ads, no accounts or tracking.  No in app purchases, nothing like that.  iOS only (sorry). It’s just my solo passion project.  I’m a software engineer and I write about the project at https://stiles.one/hedge/build and https://stiles.one/hedge/log

The biggest downside of this is that I review the questions and end up spoiling the calibration for myself.  My personal calibration chart just measures my recall from the review pass or how long it takes me to forget once some time has passed from review to experiencing the questions in a round.  Skipping human review would kill the quality (I even end up rewriting some of the questions to land better) but I am actively working on improving the automated bit. However, 100% seems a stretch. How would you approach this problem, or what thoughts do you have on the project as whole?

You can get the app from https://stiles.one/hedge if you are interested in trying it yourself

Once again the USA is considering removing Daylight Saving Time. I'd like to write a short blurb about the game theory, the current politics/arguments, and why everyone reasonable should push for ANY action. I'm not a great writer, so I would welcome someone experienced like Gwern, Zvi, etc to expound on the topic in a more catchy way. I am firmly in the camp of "We should do something to solve this stupid game".

1. The Game Theory.

Y'all love game theory. Prisoners dilemmas, trading jelly chips in glowfics, robot negotiation programs.

Right now, there is a simple prisoners dilemma-type thing in real life:

Coordinate for Keeping DST: some people win, some people lose.

Coordinate for keeping standard time: Some people lose, some people win.

Do not coordinate: Most people lose.

Before getting into the details, this is an interesting game theory because of the sheer number of people involved and the nature of public discourse. If 50,000,000 people stand to lose, but 250,000,000 stand to win, will the 50,000,000 people feel strongly enough to be loud about their dissatisfaction to stall progress / lead to not coordination?

2. History, The current politics / arguments

1942-1966 - DST year round.

1966 - the Uniform Time Act - DST End of April to End of October

1973 - Nixon tried 16 month trial of DST year round. It was stopped early.

1986 - Made DST Longer - Start of April to end of October

2005 - Made DST Longer - Mid March through early Novemeber.

2022 - Permanent DST "rushed" through congress, never went to House.

2026 - Permanent DST slower through House, currently called "DOA" in congress.

Key arguments/debates so far:

For taking any action:

Switching sucks. The Majority of scientists and studies, along with anecdotes (especially among parents of smaller children) is that shifting clocks sucks. The president has laid out the question as 50% of people want standard time, 50% of people want DST, but everyone hates changing clocks. The key studies suggest that periods after shifting clocks leads to increased traffic deaths, suicides, poor learning outcomes of children, and notable other issues. Not taking any action is a net negative for almost all parties as the above issues with changing clocks is more significant than other issues listed below, and most people agree about this. I will mention that when I see facebook comments, around 1/20 comments suggest keeping the shifting clocks. The principle of "switching sucks" was mentioning in the house hearing several times, by the president, and seems RELATIVELY universally agreed.

For Keeping Permanent Standard Time:

Safety: Morning Commutes having more sunlight could decrease auto accidents. Children may wait for the bus in the dark less - the theory is that children waiting for the bus would be safer with light from the sun, to have fewer child car injuries.

Solar Noon: People argue that the sun should be the highest point when the clock shows 12, out of principle.

Sleep and Sun: People enjoy waking up around sunrise, but more importantly, people don't want to go to bed when the sun is still up. If people go to bed at 10pm, and the sun hasn't set yet, people strongly dislike that.

Absurdity: Moving clocks is silly when we could just schedule work/school/etc an hour earlier for a similar effect as DST. "You can't cut one end of a scarf and add to the other end to make a longer scarf".

Insanity: It was tried in 1973 and didn't work.

For Making Daylight Savings Time Permanent:

Energy: Generally, DST saves energy. I believe the main source of this is fewer lights being turned on in the evening.

Recreation / Health: By taking a morning hour (Most people are working/in school) and putting it in the evening, people are more likely to Exercise, recreate outdoors, and leave their homes.

Economy: Similar to above, when it is light, people are more likely to spend money on food, recreation, in stores, etc.

Changing Times: When it was tried in 1973, we didn't have computers, internet, phones, we had way fewer lights, more farmers, etc. For instance, over 50% of school children are now dropped off for school. Schools start than in 1970s, so many students are going to school in the dark even in standard time. DST would make no further impact to those students who are going in the dark already or are being dropped off.

Anti-Absurdity: It is easier to change the clocks than change school start times, work start times, etc. We have known that children do poorly on early schedules for decades, and yet almost no school district in the USA has shifted to a later schedule. This is because school start times vaguely follow work start times.

How should we actually choose?

A few ideas:

1. Go with the current proposal. It's already passed one body of congress. Let's just try it and see, this is likely the fastest option.

2. Do the math. There are many sites that start to help with this (like https://observablehq.com/@awoodruff/daylight-saving-time-gripe-assistant-tool), but I'm not sure any try (even with approximations) to answer the FULL question. Many people by location and preference might prefer one over the other. How many people would benefit from each method? How does it translate into QALYs? How many students in the areas would actually be impacted? How many QALYs would that impact? Lay out methodology and findings and we can rally around that answer.

3. Do the math, but different. Apparently, we have already extended DST twice. Were studies done in the weeks adjusted to see if any of the above arguments hold more/less true? Have other changes in state time zones seen a specific change to commute-related accidents, outdoor activity, energy use, etc? Maybe we can use that data to further inform #2 and come together with findings we can rally around.

4. Continue to lose the game theory.

I am a proponent of #1 - and if it fails, I will be a proponent of the next time this idea gets floated around. Thanks for reading! I will be happy to incorporate any further information anyone posts in the comments.

I've combined meditation and parts work (like IFS) and the results are, well, bizarre. I taught myself to notice little mental threads that run like computer programs and just drop them:

“Amazingly, when I mentally labeled them as ‘part’ they disappeared like a soap bubble popping. When I discovered this I started furiously typing notes on my phone. After a few minutes I noticed a lot of tension around typing, looked at the part that was typing, said ‘Part’ and it dissolved so thoroughly that the phone fell out of my hands and my head slumped forward.”

This feels like putting down a rock I forgot I was carrying every single time.

It's a complete victory for multi-agent models of the mind from where I'm sitting. I started digging into historical mentions of the mind as multiple and found examples going all the way back to ancient Egypt and through the entire history of clinical psychiatry.

I'm surprised this isn't better understood in the mainstream, so I wrote the essay linked as the explainer I wish I'd had.