I would push back on DAFs- one of the value adds of nimble donors is donating to projects that don’t have formal status.
Elizabeth
Karma: 22,436
Daniel Ellsberg on the corrosive effect of knowing secret information
First, [you feel] a great exhilaration, for getting all these amazing information that you didn’t know even existed. And the next phase is you’ll feel like a fool for not having known of any of this. But that won’t last long. Very soon, you’ll come to think that everyone else is foolish. What would this expert be telling me if he knew what I knew? So in the end, you stop listening too.
I’ve never had a security clearance. But I have had private or secret rationalist information, and it’s shocking how fast it corrupts my epistemics. Claiming to want comparative advantage I overweight the importance of the information. I flinch from imperiling my access to more secret information. Talking about a related area without divulging private information feels too hard so I don’t bother.
I can fight all these effects, but that’s a cost, and one I’ve learned to bill to the goal or person behind the secret information.
Because other people don’t find the question as-asked valuable.
You might like Raemon’s Feedback-Loop First rationality.
Angry ex-wives are the best IRS informants
Public criticism of people who aren’t already in the dog house is an act with concentrated costs and distributed benefits. Sometimes those costs are quite high.
As such, we should expect it to be underprovided.
Occasionally criticism will be provided by very prosocial people, or some other prosocial person will cover some of the costs.
But mostly you should expect public criticism to come from people who are being irrational. Maybe they’re generally fragile, or are angry about being dumped for their ex-husband’s secretary.
Therefore, you cannot dismiss criticisms because the person is fragile or has a grudge.
Under many circumstances- when the target is very well loved and the problem lies in a subtle pattern- the only criticism you should expect will come from people who seem kind of crazy or out to get the target.
This is hard to navigate, because those same irrationalities will drive people to make false criticisms too.
But “they’re irrational/out to get them” is a bad reason to dismiss criticism, because public criticism is an irrational act.
Depends. Are you strictly following standard of care, or personalizing for yourself?
and the alternative minimum tax… and whatever the new thing is...
without minding the effects on everyone else
seems like a job for Pigouvian taxes
datapoint: this was my exact argument for not learning to vibecode (after working as a programmer for 10 years and quitting 9 years ago). Last month was when (I noticed that) vibecoding (had) crossed the threshold where it quickly paid off the time I put into it, and that was with private tutoring from someone who’d been on the cutting edge for >1 a year.
I’m not sure if this supports your argument (because I do think any time I put into learning to vibecode before the recent transition would have been wasted) or counters (because this is the month things transitioned).
I’m working on a piece for Asterisk magazine on how biohackers (broadly defined) think about risk. Are you interested in being interviewed? Do you know someone who is? I’m taking a very broad definition of biohacker (self-medicating to save money counts), but some people I’m especially interested in talking to are those who:
biohack for its own sake- no one needs magnets in their fingernails, but you want them.
receive treatment within the standard medical system, but playing an active role in personalizing it (e.g. trans people adjusting their HRT, diabetics figuring out their insulin dosing)
strongly prefer herbal to allopathic medicine
the aforementioned driven-to-self-medication by financial constraints
people who chronic mystery illnesses
Use peptides besides GLP-1s (love you guys but GLP-1 users were by far the easiest to find)
relevant past work of mine:
pseudonymity is fine, happy to answer other questions. You can reach me by email at elizabeth@acesounderglass.com
Measles causes immune amnesia, which sets your immune system back 2-5 years. You’d need to follow people for years to know what the true cost was.
TBC I agree with you that becoming president was more complicated than win the dam, win the day. But that more complicated story is still much less complicated than I expected it to be.
I’m not sure if you’re disagreeing with my point (that Johnson’s rise had fewer moving parts than I expected) or just sharing an additional interesting fact.
what % of credit would you assign to Brown and Root, Sam Rayburn, and Richard Russell?
After reading volume 1 of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, I’m struck by how simple parts of (Caro’s description of) Johnson’s rise were.
Johnson got elected to the House and stayed there primarily because of one guy at one law firm which had the network to set state fundraising records, and did so for Johnson primarily because of a single gigantic favor he did for them[1].
Johnson got a great deal of leverage over other Congressmen because he was the one to realize Texas oilmen would give prodigiously if only they knew how to buy the results they wanted, and he convinced them he was the only reliable source of advice on how to do so (which he could get away with partially because the man they truly trusted, Sam Rayburn, lent his credibility to Johnson instead of leveraging it himself).
If this story was a movie, or a book shorter than 3000 pages (and counting) I would be sure it had been simplified for run time. I’m not ruling that out. But other parts of the book are more complicated than this, so I have to consider that politics can be simpler than I thought.
- ^
I’m sure he did other favors for them and their clients over the years, but as presented the relationship was set when he rescued New Deal funding for a dam.
- ^
I got a little ambitious and normed the data by value of dollar, relative to 2006Q1. 2025 looks even less exceptional than it did in nominal terms
Things I learned from reddit fashion
I agree the list of potential questions is biased towards complaints-about-Trump. Raemon and I (co-author) hear more from anti-Trumpers than pro- and it shows[1]. But if I didn’t consider Trump’s exceptionality a live question for which evidence would change my mind, I would either have not tried to quantify at all, or would have gone with the first metrics we thought of. This post is specifically attempting to counter the problem of cherrypicking metrics by inviting supporters to provide others. So far the best suggestion has come from Ben Pace. The second best is from bodry, which I checked and found evidence more favorable to Trump than expected, and became slightly less concerned for the economy under Trump (still pretty worried, but not as much as I was).
- ^
Although FWIW, I didn’t vote in the last presidential election because it wasn’t obvious to me which was the lesser evil and as a citizen of a guaranteed state it was not worth my time to figure out. I lean libertarian and my long term voting pattern is against incumbents, which in CA mostly means voting Republican.
- ^
Capital flight is a great indicator, thank you for the suggestion.
I’m dubious on Smith article though. He claims to be talking about foreign capital investment, then uses a bunch of proxies that aren’t net investment. If you graph actual foreign investment, you see a decline, but it looks like a continuation of a trend from the Biden years, or arguably even Obama. The only time investment went net negative was in 2014, which stems from Vodafone selling Verizon back to itself.
If anyone is feeling ambitious I’d love to see this graph normed for inflation or GDP.
There’s nothing physically impossible about having a president that’s substantially worse on overreach/corruption/degradation of institutions, so that has to be in the hypothesis space. We’d expect their defenders to say the accusations were overblown/unfair no matter what, so that’s not evidence. And we’d expect their opponents to make the accusations no matter what, so that’s not evidence either.
Given that, how do you propose to distinguish the worlds where the president is genuinely much worse than average, vs. one where they’re completely precedented or following a trend line?
I think for small donors, donating to the best unregistered charity is >>2x times the best registered charity, for the reasons OP outlines: registered charities are much better covered by large institutions, and lots of people are overanchored on registration so the unregistered are neglected by comparison.
The counterargument is that bednets/givedirectly are just pretty good and it’s unlikely any particular new thing beats them. Which is a fine approach, but not what we’re talking about here.