Blog Moving; What to Read Here

I've finally become tired enough of Blogger's terrible interface to write elsewhere. For now, I'm posting on Medium and on Lesswrong (mostly crossposting the same stuff to both).

If you're here looking for my older writings, here's an overview of what I consider the best posts on this blog. They are ordered chronologically within categories. If you're only going to read one, go with either From Personal to Prison Gangs or The Broken Chain Problem.

Posts on How the World Works

• Theory of Extreme Wealth: High-wealth occupations mainly solve coordination problems.
• Rich People Pay Consumption Tax: Running a business gives a person de-facto tax options which cannot be changed by any reasonable tax code.
• Coordination Economy: The main economic bottlenecks across most industries most of the time are coordination problems.
• College Costs, part I and part II: I follow the money to find the root cause of college cost growth, and find a cambrian explosion in course topics driving small class sizes.
• From Personal to Prison Gangs: Increased regulation, litigation, licensing, credentialism, stereotyping and tribal identity are all driven by community growth.
• Post-Scarcity: "Post-scarcity" worlds, as we usually think of them, will still have scarcity in the form of signalling goods, and developed countries are already most of the way to such a world.
• Computational Limits of Empire: Pre-modern empires tend to max out around 60M people. The US hit 60M around 1890 - right when IBM was created to handle the census.

Political or Semipolitical Posts

• The Problem with Atheism and The Value of Religion, By an Atheist: Atheists need to accept that religion does offer real value, God or no, and change messaging to say "look, you can still get this value even without God existing per se".
• How to Implement a National Popular Vote: Could probably be done by half a dozen people working full-time for a year.
• Summers' Hypothesis: Summers' hypothesis seeks to explain the STEM gender gap by the difference in IQ variance across genders. I got so tired of seeing people incorrectly "refute" this by looking at means (not variances) that I decided to run some numbers myself.
• The Immigrant Superbug: A parable of science and politics.
• Prerequisites for UBI: Universal basic income would be great in a sufficiently post-scarcity economy, but what exactly does "sufficiently post-scarcity" mean? This post answers.

Other Posts

• Kosher Hot Dogs: Religious restrictions can create real market value.
• What Signalling Feels Like: Guess post, title says it all.
• The Broken Chain Problem: Unifying principle behind four parables.
• Be More Evil: In the movies, Good is Dumb. So when real-world people try to act good, they mostly end up acting dumb.
• The Scientific Bottleneck: The main bottleneck to progress across multiple scientific fields is a lack of mathematical theory for adaptive systems.
• What's the Point of Capital Markets?: Under what circumstances does trading in capital markets generate positive-sum gains, versus zero-sum gambles?

John's Tips for Low-Effort Housekeeping

Many people out there are endlessly fascinated with organizing things into shelves, boxes, and shelves within boxes. Some of them write blog posts about the joy of organizing their living spaces.

I am not one of those people. This post suggests a couple ideas for people who think folding laundry is a waste of time, and who like to “clean” by picking up everything on the table and dropping it in a pile somewhere else.

Two-Hamper Technique

I’m sure we’ve all wondered, at some point in our lives, why people fold laundry. You’re just going to unfold it again as soon as you use it! What’s the point?

To be fair, folded clothes are more convenient for storage - they fit better, and are easier to sift through. On the other hand, I only use a fraction of my clothes on a regular basis. I’m perfectly willing to accept somewhat less efficient storage for those clothes, in exchange for not having to fold them.

I present: the two-hamper technique. Clean clothes go in one hamper. Dirty clothes go in the other hamper. On laundry day, the dirty hamper is dumped into the washer, wash, dry, and dryer is emptied into the clean hamper. No folding required.

I keep less often-used clothes folded or hanging in the closet. They don’t take up hamper space, and since they’re rarely used, the overhead to fold them is minimal.

I’ve also tried a few ways to generalize the two-hamper technique to other areas, but they haven’t worked out. Dishes are a good example - keeping dirty dishes in the sink and clean dishes in the dishwasher failed for multiple reasons. First, when I use dishes, I use too broad a variety of dishes to fit all of them in the dishwasher - whereas all the clothes I regularly wear do fit easily in one hamper. Second, I usually don’t use dishes at all - I mostly go out to eat. When I put dirty dishes in the sink, they end up sitting there growing unpleasant. I eventually just switched to disposables, which suit my infrequent use much better.

Recency Cache and Cleaning

From time to time I used to wish I had room to work at my desk, rather than covering literally all of it with stacks of paper, folders, and random objects.

One day it dawned on me: this is a caching problem.

I gave various surfaces in my apartment different cache levels:

• L0 is table and desk
• L1 is bookshelf and counter
• L2 covers cabinets (lower shelves are L2a, upper are L2b)
• L3 is the black hole, a.k.a closet.

When I want to clean something, I simply empty all of its contents into the next higher cache. For instance, to clean my desk, I literally pick up all the shit on my desk and move it to the counter. That’s it. Done.

Then, time passes. As I use things, I put them down wherever is convenient, which usually means L0 or L1. Pretty soon, the things which I use most often have migrated back to convenient low-numbered cache locations. Things I never use gradually move to higher and higher numbered locations, until they get buried in the closet, leaving behind space for more oft-used items.

This has worked pretty well so far.

The main hiccup was that I realized a second use case for high-priority cache locations. It isn’t just about making things easy to retrieve. I also leave things on my desk as a reminder to look at them later or to check them regularly. In retrospect, this never worked very well. After noticing this use-case, I’ve started looking for more effective (but still non-intrusive) ways to handle such reminders.

Trump 1-yr Retrospective

Shortly after Trump’s election, I wrote a few pieces on the subject, including “Why I Like Trump… AND Hillary” and “What Might Trump Actually Do?”. Both of these included predictions, so it’s time to evaluate how those predictions played out.

Qualitative Expectations
My main argument in favor of Trump was:
“If ever there was a complete huckster, a con-man who is master at the art of schmoozing and suckering, it's Trump. One of the two things that I really like about a Trump presidency is that there's no way in hell this guy is keeping his campaign promises. [...] The other thing I really like about Trump is that he has an established reputation for bringing in the most competent people to do the actual work. [...] if Trump's presidency goes anything like I expect, he'll be offloading all the work to extremely competent people, and he'll spend his time going around blustering and bullshitting and generally telling the public whatever they want to hear. In the best case, the competent people will get a great deal of freedom to do what needs to be done, while Trump bullshits the media.”

Over the past year, I’ve sat down at least four times to write a post saying I was wrong about Trump and he’s an awful president. Every time, I started by re-reading the above. And every time, I thought “actually, that’s mostly still true”. In every case, Trump was doing something really awful under a huge media spotlight… but ultimately with little impact. (Most notable examples are the Muslim travel ban and the trans military ban, both of which withered away in court.)

That said, I definitely got some parts wrong. Even without explicitly predicting much competence from Trump himself, I still overestimated his general competence and underestimated his awfulness. The trans military ban in particular was completely indefensible, even if it ultimately had little impact other than a media circus. Also, covfefe.

On the “hiring competent people front”, six months ago I was totally ready to admit that didn’t happen. But since then, the incompetent people have largely been fired - most notably Bannon. Tillerson’s great, Kelly’s great, Mnuchin’s solid, Gorsuch’s stellar. I don’t like Sessions, but I can’t fault his competence (and I’m sure many of you would say the same for some of the other names I’ve listed). It’s still not 100%, but overall, the “Trump serves as media shit umbrella while competent people do their thing” model seems to be up and running.

Specific Prediction Performance
Alright, time to march down the list of more specific predictions from “What Might Trump Actually Do?”. Here were the main predictions, by header:

• Term limits/lobbying/etc. Predictions: no term limits, lobbying & fundraising limits unlikely, hiring and regulation freezes plausible. Result: no term limits, no lobbying & fundraising limits, hiring and regulation freezes both happened. 
• Trade, jobs, EPA. Predictions: abandoning TPP and renegotiating NAFTA were plausible, and cutting various environmental regulations and funding was likely. Result: NAFTA is still on hold, but this stuff has mostly happened. 
• Immigration & Misc. Predictions: pro-judicial-constraint, mostly ignore abortion & gay marriage, lots of noise but not much substantive change on immigration. Result: judicial appointment specifically known for “textualism”, mostly ignored abortion & gay marriage, mostly noise on immigration so far. 

To be fair, I hedged by not giving numerical probabilities for these. Overall, things I found “unlikely” didn’t happen, things I found “plausible” or “likely” almost all happened. The biggest single thing I was wrong about was immigration: there’s already been more substantive damage there than I expected, and likely more to come. Even so, “mostly noise” still seems like an accurate description.

Next, I had a list of predictions about Trump’s legislative agenda. I won’t go through the whole list - most of them haven’t seen any major bill in Congress, which wasn’t a possibility I accounted for. The big two have obviously been healthcare and taxes; I predicted both of these would be high priorities and would definitely pass with all-Republican president and Congress. Obviously, I was very wrong about one of those, and very right about the other. Overall, I don’t think I outperformed (or underperformed) pundit predictions on the legislative front.

Finally, I predicted that Trump wouldn’t do anything particularly awful which wasn’t on the list. The trans military ban proved me wrong on that front, though happily it’s been the one exception to a generally-accurate rule. With that one exception, I think I had a generally accurate idea of what we were in for under a Trump presidency.

Main conclusion, one year later: damn, that was a LOT of media noise.

Would I do it again?
At this point… not sure. If you’d asked me a year ago, I would have predicted that Trump would perform worst relative to Hillary over the first year. Hillary’s big advantage was already having the day-to-day president skill set and knowledge base. I expect the worst of Trump has passed, and we’re just now getting to the point where the good parts might shine. We’ll see.

Perspective

There was some trouble posting this earlier; Blogger did something weird to the formatting. It's still not quite right, but I figured having something here is better than nothing, especially for people who use the RSS feed.

The first US census was taken in 1790. Boston, according to the census, housed 18,320 people. The famous Battle of Bunker Hill, Boston’s main battle in the American Revolution, saw about 2,400 colonial militia face off against at least 3,000 British redcoats.

Let’s put that in perspective. In 1970, Kent State University had about 21,000 students - slightly more than 1790 Boston. The protest which ended with the Kent State shootings drew about 2,000 students.

So, comparing the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Kent State shootings, we see communities of comparable size, and “rebel” forces of comparable size.

In 1775, a few strong writers and orators (e.g. Samuel and John Adams) could rile up the entire city of Boston to the point of armed rebellion. Imagine this today - despite the daydreams of protesters and organizers, it seems pretty unlikely that a major city would be driven to arms by politicians and activists. There’s just too many people to reach them all. But in 1775, the entire city if Boston was only as big as a mid-size modern university. The entire community could be riled up by a handful of writers and speakers.

The comparison between 1775 and today grows even stranger when we think about the battle itself. 2,000 militia - roughly comparable to a campus protest, but with guns - went toe-to-toe with the military of the world’s dominant empire. When the war was over, the student-protesters-with-guns came out ahead, and an entire new nation was founded.

In 1775, a person, a pen, and a soapbox could make that sort of thing happen. Today, no way. Why? Population growth. When the third largest city in the region is smaller than today’s universities, communities were small enough that a few people could mobilize a large fraction of the population. But as populations grew, the methods which once mobilized tight communities no longer worked.

One more piece of perspective, to drive home the point. In the 1790 US census, New York City had a population of 33,131. That’s comparable to today’s Claremont, CA, where I went to college. Claremont isn’t a tiny town - most people don’t know each other. On the other hand, their kids all go to the same high school (Claremont High). That was New York City, the largest city in the US, in 1790: small enough that everybody’s kids would have fit in one modern-day high school.

Some of the teachers at Claremont High have probably met a majority of the people in Claremont. Shaking hands with everyone in the city is quite feasible, and politicians in 1790 New York probably did just that.

And that was the largest city in the nation! When Jefferson called the US a nation of small farmers, he wasn’t waxing poetic or fantasizing. The whole nation had 3.9 million people in 1790; the 24 largest cities housed just 0.2 million. 90% of the population worked on farms - I’ll have more to say about this in a future post.