Cats, charts, and politics
That's right, I've been blogging for 20 years: first on my own; then for the Washington Monthly; then for Mother Jones; and now back on my own again. This is longer than I spent on my allegedly "real" career in the high tech industry from college graduation through 2001.
But I haven't yet achieved my primary blogging goal: persuading someone to change their mind. Someday it'll happen!
I don't know why, but I didn't expect the Seine to have locks. I thought it flowed freely to the sea. But this isn't so, and we traversed half a dozen locks on our way from Paris to Normandy. Here's one of them at dawn while I was meandering around the upper deck waiting for everyone to get up and have breakfast.
Matt Yglesias wrote recently on his Substack about the Effective Altruism movement, but I think he makes a serious mistake in his historiography.
The EA movement began with a group of rationalists and philosophers who argued we were doing charity all wrong. Instead of wasting your money on, say, a new gym for your alma mater or a food bank for your middle-class neighborhood, EA enthusiasts say you should donate to organizations that demonstrably provide the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to saving and improving lives. For example, mosquito netting, deworming, clean water, etc., in impoverished regions. Obviously there are plenty of things to argue about here, and EA advocates happily argue about all of them.
EA is a thriving movement and a valuable one. Like all movements, however, it suffers from the occasional crank who takes things too far. We should give all our money to longevity research, and here's a 300-page white paper showing expected efficacy of 10 billion QALYs with a probability of 0.034. Etc.
Now, there's also an entirely different movement that originated with artificial intelligence theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and the LessWrong community. This movement is also rationalist based, which means it has overlaps with the EA community, but LessWrong is, um, considerably farther from the mainstream. It's best known for its concern that artificial intelligence is more dangerous than we think.
The most common illustration of how AI could be dangerous is a self-replicating robot that plays chess. The only thing it cares about is getting better and better at chess, and it correctly deduces that this requires more brainpower. As a result, it starts breaking down the earth to provide feedstock for building more processing power, followed by the rest of the solar system. Result: the end of humanity.
There are other, more sophisticated scenarios in the LessWrong arsenal, though all of them seem to rely on awfully stupid versions of intelligence. I find it vanishingly unlikely that any of them would be created by ordinary AI teams, but it's certainly possible that one could be created by a malevolent AI genius. At that point, it comes down to an arms race—just as it already has in the arenas of nuclear bombs, manmade viruses, and chemical weapons. There's nothing new here, folks.
Bottom line: Effective Altruism is a worthy movement even if true believers and lunatic philosophers like William MacAskill piss all over their own creation with ridiculous doctrines like longtermism, which suggests that the most effective altruism should value the trillions of humans living in the future far more than the mere billions of us who are currently living. This is both analytically barren and empirically impoverished. Can you imagine teaching this doctrine to a race that has trouble passing the marshmallow test? The mind reels.
Anyway, both historically and practically you should treat Effective Altruism and longtermism as separate things even if there's a bit of overlap in their adherents. The former is good stuff if you take it in bite-sized chunks. The latter is basically crackpotism.
The Washington Post gets us up to speed today on the latest meme/vibe/tiktok taking over the business world. It's called "quiet quittting":
Kathy Kacher, founder of Career/Life Alliance Services, said that “quiet quitting” is a new term for an old concept: employee disengagement.
But it’s arriving in a moment of “unprecedented burnout,” Kacher said. It’s coming in on the heels of the “Great Resignation,” which saw an average of nearly 4 million employees leave their jobs each month in 2021 amid clashes over flexibility and a widespread reevaluation of how work should fit into their lives.
And it’s also gaining steam at a moment of peak tension between managers and employees, as many companies prepare for another push to bring workers back to offices.
For some workers, office mandates aren’t just a pain. They’re harmful. “If some one is giving their best in 40 hours and then want to spend rest of time for living isn’t terming/labeling that behavior quiet quitting derogatory?” a HomeAway employee asked earlier this week on Blind, an anonymous corporate messaging board.
Consider what we've been told—and what we haven't:
Absolutely no evidence is provided for any of the claims about burnout, tension, or reevaluating work. None. But here's some:
God knows there was an uptick in general unhappiness during the pandemic. It would be remarkable if there hadn't been. But stress on the job seems to have gone up only a bit, and even at that only to the level it was at for most of the aughts. So where did "quiet quitting" come from?
As near as I can tell from the article, last month a TikTok user named zaidleppelin invented the term in a banal 17-second video that told people there's more to life than work. For some reason this bit of threadbare advice has gotten 3 million views and this is enough for people who should know better to go gaga over the claim that Millennials and Gen Zs are widely unhappy with their work/life balance.
And maybe they are. So were boomers, who made "work/life balance" practically a mantra in the '70s. Gen Xers did the same in the '90s, and now Millennials are doing it. Welcome to the workplace, folks.
A cat and his shadow. This is Charlie sitting on a kitchen cabinet that looks into the late afternoon sun. He's probably watching the birds outside the dining room window, who tend to congregate around the bird feeder at this time of day.
Carl Quintanilla of NBC News provides us with a sampling of charts from a recent JPMorgan report:
The easing inflation/supply-chain crisis, in four charts.
(via JPMorgan) pic.twitter.com/F38bpA73Mp
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) August 19, 2022
Of course, there's always this too:
The monthly change in CPI (i.e., velocity) peaked in January and has been easing off ever since. Likewise, although the monthly acceleration of CPI has been declining for nearly two years, the trendline crossed into negative territory in January.
If you use other measurements you get roughly the same results: inflation seems to have peaked in early 2022 and has been slowly softening ever since. The monthly data is volatile, but the trendline tells all.
Some of you may have noticed and others might not have, but the blog went kablooey last night and didn't get fixed until this morning. The cause was something to do with a plug-in from my hosting service, which they promptly fixed as soon as I contacted them.
In any case, no harm done since I had nothing to say anyway. But maybe I do now that I've finally awakened this morning! Let's go find out.
This morning I got a call from the transplant folks and I now have a date for my CAR-T treatment. I'll do a bunch of testing over the next two weeks followed by a plasma collection in early September. The plasma will then be shipped off to the CAR-T factory, where it will be turned into personalized cancer-killing T-cells. The treatment itself will take place in early October, and after that it's just a matter of waiting and hoping that my response is strong and the side effects are mild.
Assuming everything goes well, total recovery time will likely be a few months and I will be cancer free (sort of) by 2023. This treatment is still pretty new, however, so there's no telling how well I'll respond or how long it will last. If I'm average, it will last at least a couple of years, during which I'll need no chemo at all.
For those of you curious to know more, the treatment is called Carvykti and you can read more just by googling it. It was originally developed in China and is marketed in the US by Johnson & Johnson. It was approved by the FDA in February.
It's the end of the week.
As we all expected, home sales continued to slide in June:
The number of existing homes sold in July was 20% lower than it was in July last year. The median selling price is still 2.1% higher, but declined by $10,000 over the past month.
The official consensus is that home prices will continue to fall, but only by a little bit. That's my bet too, but the more it congeals into conventional wisdom the more I wonder if we might be looking at a bigger fall in house prices than we think.