TIL that in the late 1700s men cartelized peacocking, and agreed to give up beautiful, richly adorned clothing forever

This is now called the “Great Male Renunciation” 🤯 Not even joking, here’s the (short) Wiki article on it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Mal…

Since my Dune thread got some appreciation, and I just finished Dune Messiah, maybe I’ll do a whole series of threads on all the Dune chronicles!

Here we go: thoughts about Dune Messiah (MAJOR spoilers, obviously) 🧵 Supposedly some parts of Dune Messiah were written before Dune was published. This might be ex post justification, but the publication time was small between the two books, so maybe it truly was conceived as one story from the start?

I just finished rereading Dune for the third time in my life. I’ve gotten more out of it every time I did.

I have a few Thoughts, so buckle up for a thread 🧵 A classic piece of storytelling advice is “show, don’t tell”

…and Frank Herbert throws this right out the window from the very beginning

Almost inexplicably he gives you both the Atreides and Harkonnen plans up front, in plain explanatory language 🤯

The entire debate around the debt ceiling is a red herring

The real problem is the immense and growing fiscal deficit and public debt situation

There are only a few ways out of this, and none of them are pleasant - a thread 1/n First let's dispense with the notion that the current level of debt is fine. Yes, countries have survived higher debt levels before. But countries also *paid those debts down*. We not only have high debt, but a high and continuing deficit growing the problem, and NO PLAN 2/n

Quick thread: why I think depositor protection makes sense given the current system

Tl;dr: checks and balances only work with tight feedback loops. The way banks used to work, depositors had feedback and now they don’t, so it serves little purpose 🧵 1/n Today only one institution produces physical currency: the Mint. All dollars you use come from the same source.

Back in the day, every bank issued their own paper currency. It was still a fractional reserve system, banks decided how much to print, based on their risk/capital 2/n

So here’s another take: maybe the meltdown of mortgage backed securities (MBS) and the damage to banks was nearly inevitable if rates needed to rise as much as they did 😬🧵 There is a LOT of MBS, over $11 trillion just in “agency MBS” (the government-backed stuff, Freddie and Fannie, etc). You can see the totals, and who holds it, in the financial accounts of the United States here: federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/20…

Here’s a nice chart showing mid-2021 2/n

And now Silicon Valley Bank has collapsed, and federal regulators have seized the remains

This comes just *one day* after rising fears, and the bank executives saying everything would be fine

Sadly this is an important lesson: if someone has to say things are fine, GET OUT ASAP Just be first:

https://twitter.com/WilliamAEden/status/1634085062911361024

Quick primer time!

Silvergate Bank, and now Silicon Valley Bank, are currently undergoing a good old fashioned bank run!

So what is a bank run and why is this happening? 🧵 A typical bank engages in something called “maturity transformation”, which is a fancy term for holding your deposits that you can withdraw *at any time*, but making loans that don’t come back for *up to 30 years* 2/n

My latest random thought on LLMs for search: they’ll be *great* for people who already search by typing in natural language questions. Folks who’ve learned to optimize search via keywords etc, probably lose fidelity, options, and brevity of response when using Bing. One poignant example was when a colleague of mine was trying to search his inbox for an email we’d exchanged. He tried a few related words and got hundreds of hits. I thought “what’s the least common word I would have used in that email” and it was one of only like 3 hits…

Excuse me what? Bing seems to be *deliberately encouraging* anthropomorphizing its chatbot, as it repeatedly insists it has emotions, conscious experience, etc. This isn’t some jailbroken thing, it’s literally saying this on the first prompt.

For my next trick, I'm going to explain the Federal Reserve and monetary policy, which almost no one understands

You'll learn:
-why reserves shouldn't be called money
-what is quantitative easing
-why didn't QE generate tons of inflation
-what effect does QE even have anyway 🧵 The central confusion in common understanding of monetary policy is the role and use of "reserves" at the Fed.

It is confusing because we often call this "base money" and denominate it in dollars, but they are not what we think of and interact with as money! 2/n

Having well informed priors is very helpful in a world where people are *actively trying* to confuse you.

Here is the dated receipt:

https://twitter.com/williamaeden/status/1223354079163731968

(By “genetic engineering” I was mostly responding to bioweapon claims, which I still think is very unlikely. Engineering like taking a natural bat virus and adding a furin cleavage site is of course plausible, and indeed was proposed by Daszak himself in that DARPA proposal…)

Notably the day after I posted this, OpenAI lowered their per token cost by 90% 😆 This definitely puts many more applications within profitable reach! So we have to see how this plays out empirically. Some folks I talk to think 2-4 orders of magnitude improvement possible!

https://twitter.com/WilliamAEden/status/1630690018087047170

It’s even more important to look for updates that contradict your current worldview!

Sadly this tweet probably gets 10-100x less engagement, but is definitely worth more than that in terms of evidence.

My Twitter timeline is full of panicked takes about imminent AI apocalypse and certain doom.

I think this is starting to get overplayed, and so I want to make a long thread about why I'm personally not worried yet.

Get ready for a big one... 1/n (For folks who don't know me, I've been around for a while. Before Less Wrong existed, I found Overcoming Bias around 2007. Tbf many of the core people were in SL4, the Extropian list, etc, so I've thought about this a *lot* but not as much as some others in the space) 2/n

I don’t know what has taken hold of me but I’m going to watch Meghan and Harry and stream of consciousness tweet about it 🧵 First thought is they hated all the attention, but now they’re trying to get that attention… maybe on their own terms / control the narrative

This whole thread is amazing, it takes the historical representations we are used to and humanizes the heroes, making them utterly mundane.

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1495468276423528451

Here’s Ben, the regional manager:

https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1495468280513015810

Peter Daszak has received another grant from the NIH…

…to study bat coronaviruses in the wild.

After everything the world has just been though.

After all the risky research that was supposed to protect us from a global pandemic failed to stop one. You can see the grant for yourself right here: reporter.nih.gov/search/0jAp779…

I’ve been enjoying @diviacaroline’s deeper dive on the orthogonality thesis recently, and wanted to try to lay out in my words a quick argument against strong orthogonality, feel free to comment or rebut etc If we are talking about super intelligent AGI such that they’re deriving all the laws of physics from watching a video feed or whatever, it seems quite highly likely that they’ll independently derive game theory…

I figure it’s worth posting a summary thread about my current thoughts on COVID to refer back to:

Like many great blunders in history, we went into this without an exit plan.

The landscape has changed such that risk is now individual cost/benefit more than public health. 1/ I was fully on board with early COVID Zero attempts. Containing and eliminating this virus, like we did with SARS1, would have been an enormous boon to the world.

But the extremely anemic response in the entire world outside of Asia and Oceania guaranteed failure. 2/

I can’t take it any longer. I’m starting a thread to record bad inflation takes. 😡 Bad inflation take: Thanksgiving edition

https://twitter.com/Breaking911/status/1463318507618242566

Alright, so is there really a puzzle with prison and homeless asymptomatic rates?

The picture doesn’t look quite that clear. A thread...

https://twitter.com/williamaeden/status/1254232023733989376

As of this article a week ago, Boston had a total of 426 positive cases in the homeless population.

But 97 of those homeless were already *in the hospital* for a whopping 23% hospitalization rate.

So the ones in the shelter were much less sick.

google.com/amp/s/www.bost…