Homicides are plummeting.

In all 10 cities with the most 2023 homicides—for which we have data—homicides are falling. The pandemic crime wave is crashing hard.

If these percentage decline numbers were percentage growth numbers, it would be the lede of every cable news show—> Link: wsj.com/us-news/murder…

New pod: The 4 dark laws of online engagement, according to psychologist @jayvanbavel

1. Negativity bias drives headline clicks
2. Extreme opinions drive in-group sharing
3. Out-group animosity drives engagement
4. "Moral-emotional" language goes viral

open.spotify.com/episode/5axHxi… 1. Negativity bias drives headline clicks

The most fundamental bias in news is not left, right, pro-corporate, or anti-tech. It's a bad toward catastrophic frames. An analysis of 105,000 different variations of news stories generating 5.7 million clicks found that "for a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%"

In the last 25 years:

1. The U.S. had the fastest decline in church attendance in history

2. Socializing time fell for all groups—but declined the most for those whose religiosity fell the most

I wrote about what America loses when it loses religion

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… One myth of religion in America is that, since secularism in the west is old, the great dechurching is an old phenomenon, too.

That's not quite right.

Church attendance was remarkably steady in the 20th century. This wave of religious un-affiliation is only 30 years old.

Austin is building housing like crazy.

Rents are down 7%.

But rather than frame this achievement as a win for renters—or for the arg that housing prices respond to supply growth—WSJ frames it pretty clearly as bad news across the board. Seems important to arguments about supply side growth and prices that Austin

(a) leads the nation is apartment construction as a share of supply, and
(b) rent prices have meaningfully declined

Political scientists recently coined the phrase "Need for Chaos."

Trust me that when you learn what the term means, you’ll see it everywhere: in polls, in Trump speeches, on Twitter, in Rogan clips.

Today I wrote about the new American nihilism.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Need for Chaos is a politics that transcends partisanship and polarization, as we understand it.

It's not about being a Republican. It's not about hating Democrats. It's about hating *both* parties, distrusting *every* institution, despising *any* individual branded The Elite.

I wrote about the collapse of face-to-face socializing in in the 21st century.

From 2003-2022, American adults reduced socializing by 30%. For teens, the decline was nearly 50%. There is no record of any period in history when ppl spent more time alone.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… In the last few weeks, I've spent a lot of time with the American Time Use Survey to understand how socialization has declined and for whom it's fallen fastest. 5 points.

1) Socialization is falling—and loneliness rising—more for teens than other age groups (ht @jean_twenge)

For a few years, I've said education polarization is the most powerful force in politics.

I might need to amend that.

Gender polarization in Gen-Z is seismic and global. And these are sensitive years for political ideology, where ppl's views harden.

via @jburnmurdoch The gender polarization gap—young women becoming much more liberal; young men becoming a little more conservative—is also about education polarization.

American colleges now enroll roughly 6 women for every 4 men—the largest gender gap in history. And it's widening.

Every year, I ask some of the smartest scientists and tech ppl I know what they consider the most important, amazing, or merely interesting breakthroughs of last 365 days.

It's one of my favorite pieces to write all year.

Here is 2023's list:
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… The no.1 breakthrough of the year—the top choice from several ppl—is the new gene-editing therapy for sickle-cell disease.

It is the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy in history, a landmark moment for a technology that could reshape medicine in the next few decades.

New pod: The biggest questions about ketamine sparked by Matthew Perry's overdose
- a brief history of the k-boom
- the amazing effects it (+ psilocybin & MDMA) have on depression
- the unsolved mystery of why it works
- the science of placebo and belief

open.spotify.com/episode/73kCbJ… This year, the @TheBorisLab published a much-discussed double-blind study where they gave ketamine or placebo to ppl under anesthesia.

The big surprise: A huge anti-depressant result in both groups

https://twitter.com/TheBorisLab/status/1654916428011798528

Thread: It sure looks like phones are making students around the world dumber

I wrote about the new PISA report on student test scores, which have been falling steadily in OECD countries since 2012 —>

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
It's not just that student scores have been declining in almost every western country since smartphone-social media penetration passed 50%.

It's also that the OECD finds a dramatic correlation between "leisure" phone use in school and *much* lower test scores.

“Marriage is the single most important differentiator when it comes to happiness.”

Good piece by Olga Khazan on the biggest lesson of 50 years of U.S. data ->

Some further thoughts about what this conclusion does and doesn't tell us ... theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…


Look hard at this chart.

Overall happiness has *clearly* declined since the 1970s.

But, as groups, both married people and unmarried people are happier than they were 50 years ago.

.... huh?

We're looking at a *massive* composition effect.

Degrowth, in brief.

What do we want? An abundance of high-quality housing, internet, green energy, excellent education, great jobs, and good wages.

How do we get it? Forcible reductions in the economic activity required to do basically any of that.

noahpinion.blog/p/degrowth-we-… The irony of degrowth emerging from the UK as a "radical" ideology is that there's nothing radical about British stagnation in the 21st century.

Degrowth has been the status quo for the UK for years. And it's sucked!

Keep your inability to raise living standards to yourself!

Elon's Blue Check experiment is amazing. Truly hilarious. Dude's conducting a berserk French Revolution—inviting his favorite royals back to the palace like five seconds after storming the Bastille I think there's a widespread misconception that most journalists deeply care about the status-optics of "Blue Checks" (it's actually a white check surrounded by blue, but anyway). The vast majority just want a way to reach ppl and filter out crazies.

https://twitter.com/chucknisga/status/1649203466622103552?s=20

Every country has racists and rash old crazy ppl. But US gun prevalence both arms our racists and ROCPs with handguns and rifles and increases their paranoia that random visitors might be trying to invade and shoot them. The Rosetta Stone of America's gun tragedy, to me, will always be the Philando Castile shooting:

A police officer *legally* shoots a driver reaching for his ID, bc our laws allow citizens to carry deadly weapons whose very presence on the scene can justify their execution.

I tried and failed to write a version of this for more than a year.

It's about a lot of things—virtuous hypocrisy on the left, post-material nonsense on the right, and the scourge of a phenomenon I'm calling "front-yard theater" in American politics.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… For the last few years, I'm found myself internally screaming the same thing at so many political tweets and headlines:

How do the word games we play in public make a difference in people's private lives?

There are a lot of predictions coming out about how many jobs will be transformed/displaced by AI.

Here’s a strongly held prediction:

Generative AI will waste time before it saves time. It’s a consumer technology first, “producer technology” later. I’m basing that on the observation that throughout the 20th century, “time-using” technologies (TV, radio, media) spread much faster than “time-saving” technologies (eg, kitchen appliances)

I'm really interested in the ability of AI like Midjourney to amplify artistic intelligence.

I've always been terrible at visual arts. Can't draw, can't paint, no instinct for design, or colors. Total black box for me.

So, I thought: Could Midjourney help me w/ interior design? I really like leather-and-whiskey man cave vibes.

But I have no idea how to illustrate that, or describe what I like in detail.

So I gave Midjourney really basic instructions and it made this.

New study: When superhuman AI beat human Go players, professional Go players adapted by making "significantly better decisions"

Conclusion: "... Development of superhuman AI programs may have prompted human players to break away from traditional strategies" This is all larval and nobody has any idea what's going to happen, but. One possibility is AI will serve for some as a cheat sheet (replacing intelligence) and for others a cognitive co-pilot (complementing intelligence), as @cwarzel and I discuss here
open.spotify.com/episode/2KEFXK…

To kick off today's pod with @cwarzel on his great GPT-4 reporting, I spent some time in the open discussing three implications of generative AI:

1. A ceiling-raiser for collective intelligence
2. A Star Trek replicator for content
3. A human manipulator

open.spotify.com/episode/2KEFXK… When I first wrote the intro, I thought I was writing about 2 good things (it's acing tests! it's a creativity spigot!) and 1 bad thing (it can bribe TaskRabbits!).

Then I talked to @LauraMartin531 about it and decided the good things could be bad and the bad thing could be good

This is the chart that has launched a thousand takes.

The conclusion seems obvious: Everything the govt touches goes to infinity in price. Everything pure capitalism touches goes to zero.

But there's another way of looking at this graph that dramatically changes the story. As @mtkonczal finds, if you expand your analysis to 62 CPI categories and track their price changes in the 21st century, you get a slightly different story.

It's not just govt vs. capitalism

It's also services vs. goods.

mikekonczal.substack.com/p/a-better-aei…

New paper: "Negativity drives online news consumption"

Blended study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions concludes "each additional negative word [in a headline] increased the click-through rate by 2.3%" "We find that news headlines containing positive language are significantly less likely to be clicked on. For a headline of average length, the presence of positive words in a news headline significantly decreases the likelihood of a headline being clicked on, by around 1.0%."