Stuff I Found Interesting in March
1. Could bicycles be an effective intervention? This Twitter thread (and the paper it refers to) suggests they could be.
2. Caplan launched his new blog here.
3. Reddit thread on under-recognised cultural stereotypes. The claim about the English:
Most English people don’t believe they should be allowed joy and spontaneity in their lives, unless they pay a lot of money to do so in an allotted timeframe, usually abroad
4. If you’re into EA you probably already saw the FTX Future Fund announcement. What caught my eye was the project idea about producing something similar to IGM Economic Expert surveys (see ‘Expert polling for everything’ on this page). I proposed something similar a month ago:
I’m not going to do this myself (for now) but if anyone does want to do this, let me know. I may do this after my current research project ends.
5. Here’s a fun clip from the show Zelensky was in re: Ukrainian membership of the EU.
6. This critical review of the Case against Education.
7. The new ‘80k after hours’ podcast.
8. A toast to the death of the stock market on Russian television.
9. On the Peter Thiel funded film festival.
10. Interesting diff-in-diff showing that internment of Japanese prisoners in WWII might have had positive effects on the earnings of internees.
11. NUKEMAP, showing how a nuclear bomb might affect wherever you live.
12. This blog from Neel Nanda is cool, full of interesting ideas.
13. Sam Enright’s new blog looks like it will be putting out good stuff.
14. A TikTok from Ukraine. EDIT [19/03]: There are actually a few videos on her TikTok that are important - I don’t really use TikTok but these are important.
15. Pete Doherty queues for an Oasis album.
16. Some polling from Ukraine on which countries they think are doing enough to help, and some (not incredibly reliable) evidence to suggest the polling might be right. I’m dislike Johnson a lot and think the treatment of refugees has been awful, FWIW.
17. Highly recommend the movie Parallel Mothers - apparently not the best Almodóvar movie (I haven’t seen any others), but I enjoyed it a lot. Tell me which of his movies to watch next!
18. On infinite ethics.
19. Tyler Cowen interviews Sam Bankman-Fried. Must listen.
20. MrBeast is a fairly interesting character - I don’t watch his content very often because it isn’t my kind of thing, but I enjoyed this little clip with MrBeast on Rogan about his progress from 11 year-old no-mark content creator to the biggest YouTuber on the planet. Don’t forget about survivorship bias!
21. The New Geography of Remote Work - link here.
22. This post on InstructGPT3 is fairly interesting - I’m not an AI guy at all so I don’t know how much of an advance this is over GPT3. If you’re also a ‘I don’t really know anything about AI’ person, you might not have seen this video showing how the OpenAI Codex could make coding easier - it’s amazing! Here’s another post I saw, also incredible.
23. I was actually thinking of writing something similar to this EA Forum post on anecdotal evidence, which seems basically right to me. Anecdotes are underrated, RCTs are overrated!
24. Post arguing that EAs are wrong when they claim that AI risk is nothing like the Terminator movies.
25. Can do you more good by investing than by donating? Find out.
26. Not something I found interesting, but rather something I’m sure I will find interesting - George Elliot Morris will release a book on polls in July. You should pre-order it.
27. Torsten Bell’s ‘Hidden Gems From The World of Research’ column in The Guardian is pretty good - similar to the sort of stuff I want to do more of here.
28. Some of Cummings’ old stuff is great - here’s one on the EU Referendum.
29. I was thinking of writing a post called Against EA Jargon, but I didn’t realise this had been discussed at length already. This post from Wiblin is fairly useful - see above for the meat of it.
30.
31. I first read this piece by a 16 year old Marxist with a terminal illness a few years ago, and often come back to it. I find having a terminal illness so difficult to imagine, and this helps me understand what it might be like. He was a brilliant writer, especially given how old he was when he wrote this.
32. An examination of Columbia’s dizzying ascent in the university rankings.
33. Nintil on Bloom’s 2 sigma problem
34. On the value of spreadsheets, by ADS.
35. There is a new magazine, Compact, that has been widely ridiculed on Twitter - writers include Greenwald, Tracey, and Zizek. And Sam Kriss, who I actually quite like. I doubt I’ll agree with much of what is written there, but I think it’s probably worth browsing now and again. Here’s a taster article, from Hitchens. I disagree with the piece, obviously. Don’t be angry that I linked to this please!
Pain and Glory is gorgeous and perhaps helps put the earlier work in context.
I would suggest Julieta (2016) if you liked Parallel Mothers, or All About My Mother (1999) if you want to try the best example of Almodovar's more melodramatic work.