Month: December 2023

Some farmhouses in front of a peak in the San Juan Range of the Rocky Mountains. This picture was taken a few miles north of Pagosa Springs.

In exchange for more funding for Ukraine, Republicans are demanding tighter border security. Talks have been ongoing for a while, but Sen. Chris Murphy, the lead Democratic negotiator, says they're pretty much dead:

“Right now, it seems pretty clear that we’re making pretty big compromises and concessions and Republicans aren’t willing to meet us anywhere close to the middle,” said Murphy, who noted that talks stalled out on Friday. The senator said the door is open to reengaging. But, “there’s no path based upon the place where things were at the end of last week.”

....Democrats have previously indicated that they were willing to tighten up the standards under which migrants can claim asylum. Murphy said they’ve also had “very good discussions around” changing some parole policies, another potential Democratic concession that would likely anger progressives.

....Republicans have demanded Department of Defense detention camps on U.S. military bases, long detentions for families with children, and “unworkable” nationwide mandatory detentions, according to a person familiar with the negotiations. Such demands would be virtually untenable for Democrats.

The lead Republican negotiator says talks are still ongoing, but his description of things makes me think that Murphy is pretty much right. On the other hand, this could just be a normal negotiating tactic: Murphy is warning that Democrats have gone as far as they can and Republicans need to accept the deal. Stay tuned.

California has been experimenting with reading education lately. To simplify a bit, the state chose several dozen of its worst schools and introduced a phonics-based reading program in third grade. Here are the results:

The authors say that the gain from the program is equal to 0.14 standard deviations, which is about a quarter of a grade level. These are early results from a smallish set of schools, so it's not definitive. However, it's yet another bit of evidence that phonics works.

I haven't looked at the traffic on my blog for a long time, but tonight I got curious. After a bit of fiddling around, I came across this:

What happened in August? And it's even stranger than it seems. Traffic didn't drop off a cliff on a single day, but gradually over a week:

• Monday, August 21: 37,000
• Tuesday, August 22: 33,000
• Wednesday, August 23: 26,000
• Thursday, August 24: 15,000
• Friday, August 25: 7,000

This is obviously a reporting artifact of some kind, but what? And which count was more accurate, the old one or the newer one? It's mysterious.

Here is traffic over the past month by country for countries with more than 350 visitors:

I'm surprised that the US isn't the winner by a far greater margin. And I sure seem to have a lot of fans in Singapore! Unless it's just one guy who refreshes a lot.

The New York Times has a pretty good piece today about the recent history of AI development among Silicon Valley techbros. (With the exception of a couple of brief asides, not a single woman is mentioned in the story.) I enjoyed reading it even though I'm already fairly familiar with this stuff.

My favorite anecdote is a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist and founder of DeepMind:

Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. Dr. Hassabis replied that the plan would work — so long as superintelligent machines didn’t follow and destroy humanity on Mars, too. Mr. Musk was speechless. He hadn’t thought about that particular danger.

Dude! Fred Pohl wrote a whole novel about precisely that in 1976. It won a Nebula Award!

Admittedly, you were only five years old then, but still. It's a pretty famous book in the kingdom of the nerds. Everyone knows that killer robots are going to follow us into space.

Tyler Cowen points today to a post from Robin Hanson expressing alarm at declining fertility rates:

I’ve recently come to estimate that the world population and economy will suffer a several centuries fall, with innovation grinding to a halt, ended by the rise of Amish-like insular fertile subcultures.... As a result, I’ve been watching many documentaries about various insular fertile subcultures, trying to get a feel for what it is that distinguishes them, and which of those distinguishing features we should credit for their successfully achieving persistent high insularity and high fertility.

This is hardly a difficult question:

Keep your women in the home and poorly educated. It's a simple strategy for high fertility if you're willing to pay the price.

In any case, high fertility subgroups never keep it up forever. There are periodic panics that Hispanics or Catholics or evangelicals are going to take over the country, but it never happens.¹ If they stay insular they stay small. If they don't their fertility goes down. Big and insular just isn't a stable combination.

As for generally falling fertility, it's homeostatic. People who don't want kids automatically shrink faster than those who do want kids and eventually a new equilibrium is reached even in the face of cultural changes. It happens slowly but it happens.

POSTSCRIPT: If you're really interested in subcultures that retain high fertility rates, try France. Over the past two decades fertility in the US has fallen about 20%. In France it's gone down only 5% despite high education levels. Why?

¹For a great modern example of this genre, check out this Daily Caller piece predicting an Amish population of 350 million by the year 2300 "provided no other factors impact or change the current growth rate." Uh huh.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin must be doing something right. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R–LetGodSortItOut) has lost confidence in him.

Amazingly—even for Graham—all Austin said was that Israel should do more to protect civilians in Gaza or else risk driving Palestinians "into the arms of the enemy." That's it. You'd think even Graham would acknowledge the pragmatic wisdom of that.

The point at which Graham loses confidence in somebody represents approximately the highest level of bloodthirstiness any normal person should tolerate. Approval from Graham is a reliable indicator that it's time to rein things in.

Paul Graham posted a list of Yale majors yesterday sorted by how easy the grading was in each one. Economics was the toughest: only 52% of all grades were A's. History of Science clocked in as the easiest with 92% A's.

This got me curious: does easy grading attract more students? Apparently not:

There are obviously lots of things that go into choosing a major, so you wouldn't expect grades to be a huge factor. But to the extent they are, Yale students tend to be drawn to the toughest majors. Economics had 149 graduates and the toughest grading. Gender studies had only two graduates even though A's were practically guaranteed.

Things might be different elsewhere with less ambitious students. But at Yale, anyway, nobody seems to be put off by the prospect of tough grading.

POSTSCRIPT: This is solely for Yale College, which doesn't include everything. Engineering has its own school, for example, as does management.

When Ron DeSantis was a week away from being sworn in as governor of Florida, aides asked him what Bible he wanted to use for the ceremony:

DeSantis, who is Catholic, told them his family did not own a Bible.... Staff members for DeSantis had to buy a Bible for $21.74 on Amazon and have it shipped to the Republican Party of Florida headquarters less than a week before his inauguration, according to a receipt of the transaction shared with NBC News.

DeSantis doesn't own any Bibles? Hell, I'm an atheist and I own a couple.

Also: They had to buy one on Amazon? They couldn't just pop into a local store?

And one more thing: It turns out that they ended up buying a King James Bible. Really? None of them was savvy enough about religious stuff to realize they shouldn't get a Protestant Bible? But then again, apparently DeSantis didn't care, so no harm done.

Republicans sure are weird. The whole party is built around performative Christian faith, but look at their top three presidential candidates. Donald Trump is allegedly something or other¹ but obviously couldn't care less about religion. DeSantis is Catholic but only barely. And Nikki Haley converted to Methodism in her twenties for political convenience. Not a single one of them has a Christian faith deeper than a fingernail.

¹Presbyterian, for what it's worth. Which is not much at all.

Have you been keeping up with the latest COVID variants? Let's review:

• January 2023: Omicron XBB 1.5 becomes dominant.
• July: Two variants, EG.5 and FL.5.1, dubbed FLips because of their specific mutations, become prominent.
• October: HV.1, a mutation of EG.5, becomes prominent.
• Now: JN.1, nicknamed Pirola, starts to appear. It isn't prominent yet, but it's projected to become strong by the end of the year.

Put all of this together and the forecast for this winter is in the range of 1 million infections per day (green line in chart):

This is considerably milder than the Omicron surge of winter 2022, which peaked at about 5 million infections per day, but bigger than the beta and delta surges of 2020-21 and about the same size as the BA.1 surge last winter. However, the mortality rate will be much smaller since a huge share of the population is now either vaccinated or has had COVID before.