I decided to do a deep dive to figure out what it would take for European voters to change the law to allow them to deport migrants. For instance, say the voters of Italy wanted to deport Syrian terrorists to Syria. What would they need to do, legally to get that outcome? 🧵

https://twitter.com/GarrettPetersen/status/1993424270312325325

The blocker to this is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), adopted in 1950 in response to Nazi atrocities.

Article 3 bans torture. You might think torture means e.g. waterboarding someone to extract information. But through the magic of case law it means much more.

Knitting machines are a 400-year-old technology. So how come I can't buy one for $1k and have it cranking out sweaters 24/7? I can do that with a 3D printer, and 3D printers have only been around for a few decades.

Let's find out 🧵


Knitting is about repeating a series of steps that are exactly the same every time you do them. It's a natural fit for mechanization. And sure enough, textiles was the first industry to industrialize. The first knitting machine was invented all the way back in 1589.

The real issue is that we've built a society where the normal, expected, on-rails path involves 16 years of education, after which the rails abruptly end without setting people up for success. Either we end the societal expectation of college or we offer a clear path to a job.

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1879391767994511690

Imagine a conscientious person who does exactly what their elders expect of them to the best of their ability. It's easy to picture this person at age 22 having six figures of debt, a degree, and no job skills. Why do we funnel people like that down this very specific path?

Society does a lot to encourage certain choices and discourage others. Sometimes this happens explicitly, with people actually telling you to choose A over B (e.g. "say no to drugs").

When the consensus is very strong, sometimes the choice is not framed as a choice at all. Like, technically you had a choice of whether to drop out of high school or not. But I doubt you weighed the pros and cons. Dropping out is simply unthinkable for most people, like choosing to drive in the oncoming lane.

The inverse of this is when something is explicitly called out as a personal decision for you to make: whether to go to college, what major to choose, who to marry, whether to have children, etc.

When a choice is explicitly framed as a choice, society also frames the parameters for making the choice: what details to consider, what the deciding factor should be, what kind of person should make which decision, etc.

Liberals frame the choice of whether to go to college in a way that is very favourable to colleges. They ask themselves if they're smart enough to succeed in college, with it being a bygone conclusion that smart people go to college. The self-flattering answer is "yes, I'm a genius who belongs in college" so that's what most liberals do. (When a conservative comes along and says to become a plumber instead, have no student loans and start earning way sooner, it's a totally alien framing of the decision. Liberals simply aren't thinking in those terms.)

The next choice they face is the choice of a college major. The conventional wisdom when I went to college was that you should follow your passion. At least that was conventional among middle-class white liberals. Immigrant cultures saw college as more of an investment, so they all crowded into the higher earning fields while art history was white as the driven snow. I think the great recession moved white libs towards an investment framing, so now CS is bigger than all the humanities combined.

Once you get your degree and marry your college sweetheart, it's time to decide whether to have kids. My perception is that, a century ago, people didn't really consider it a choice. It was just a given that a married couple would have kids. Part of second wave feminism was to make the choice explicit, with voluntary childlessness as a socially accepted and valid option.

Now when couples decide whether to have kids, I hear them mention the same few things:

1. Sleep loss
2. Ability to go on vacations
3. How much they like kids

This is the framing. Do you like kids more than you like vacations and dislike sleep loss? There are a million other things about being a parent, but these are the things people are primed to think about.

It's funny, thinking back to the college major choice, how inconsistent these are. Nobody thinks about sleep loss in choice of college major, even though some majors lose lots of sleep studying. It's a little weird for someone who didn't consider vacation-maxxing at all when "following their passions" in college to consider it a top factor in fertility. But they were only primed to think that way in one of those choices, not the other.

I consider the current framing of fertility decisions to be pretty anti-natalist. It's framed as a lifestyle choice and mostly focused on the lifestyle of new parents with infants. Like if the choice to go to college was focused mainly on the comfort of dorm bed mattresses.

Imagine if fertility choices were framed thusly: "Do I have what it takes to be a good parent? Am I resilient enough to deal with the difficulties of parenthood? Am I a virtuous person who would make a good role model?" Imagine if it were a bygone conclusion that anyone answering yes to these questions should have kids. I think a lot of liberal DINKs would say, "you bet I'm resilient and virtuous!" and have six children. A bad framing is an infohazard. It can make you make the wrong decision even with all the correct information presented to you. We rely on framings to help us focus on what's important, but they can make us dwell on less important or wholly irrelevant factors.

DEVLOG: Napoleon's Triumph Web Implementation 🧵 Napoleon's Triumph is a wargame published in 2007. It is a very highly regarded game with unique mechanics unlike the rest of the wargaming genre.

Let's find the most delicious pizza using ChatGPT! I'll start by asking for a basic cheese pizza. Then I'll ask it to make it more delicious. 🤤 More delicious!

Here's a simple model of crime: Everyone has some latent propensity to commit crimes. For most people it's low but not zero. For instance, Alice might be the kind of person to commit one felony every 1000 years. If that's true, she most likely commits 0 felonies in her life. 🧵 For the sake of this thought experiment, I'm going to assume the crimes a person commits are Poisson-distributed. They have some fixed probability of committing a crime at any given moment, but we just don't know what the probability is for a given person.

I am very concerned about the phenomenon where organized and well-connected groups choose a person to target and then do everything they can to harm that person short of actually breaking the law. I am worried that the modern world has created new legal means to harm people. 🧵 We've seen many instances of people being booted by multiple tech companies (social media, payment processors, even basic web infrastructure and DDoS protection) for apparently unconnected policy violations. I don't think it's reasonable to assume that these are unconnected.

Here's how this works in practice:

You have a revolving door between nominally private activist groups and government offices. Businesses know that if they piss off the activists they'll make enemies in government. Not technically a 1A violation as long as it's not explicit.

https://twitter.com/DegenSpartan/status/1601377004741603328

The activists decide on a specific person they want to destroy and they go in search of a weak link in the services that person uses. That usually means a service that is (1) necessary to operate, (2) monopolistic, and (3) vulnerable to pressure.

I understand "wordcel" to not just refer to people with high verbal intelligence, but people who have been afforded high status but not high income because of their verbal intelligence. The -cel suffix denotes the frustration of being denied something they feel entitled to. Take for instance a NYT editor. It's clearly a hard job to get and you need extremely high verbal IQ to get there. But your low-status highschool classmate who became a software engineer earns a multiple of what you do.