An investor is considering putting her money into a mutual fund. “I will just invest some money for the next six months,” she says, “and see how it goes.”

A philanthropist is considering donating to a charity. “I will donate some money and see how it goes.”

Harvard University is considering whether SAT scores are all that important for admissions. “Let’s make SAT scores optional and see what happens.”

A child climbs to the top of a slide and is about to jump off the edge. “Don’t jump off of that,” his mom says, “you’ll get hurt.” He jumps off the slide. He gets hurt.

Not-invented-here syndrome is when an organization unnecessarily re-invents products or tools that already exist elsewhere. The cousin of this phemonenon is not-discovered-here syndrome, in which people refuse to consider evidence unless they’ve collected it themselves.

“A wise man learns from his mistakes, but a wiser man learns from the mistakes of others.” Not-discovered-here syndrome is what happens when you insist on making mistakes for yourself.

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One day, I was at my grandma’s house reading the Sunday funny pages, when I suddenly felt myself getting sucked into a Garfield comic.

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If we are correct about the laws of physics, then ghosts can’t exist. But some people are insistent that they’ve directly interacted with ghosts. Is there a way ghosts could exist if we modified the laws of physics a bit?

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(Here is the same clip in HD, but that 2010 YouTube vibe is part of the fun)

This clip is in the running for most-mocked scene of all time, but I think it’s good, actually.

First, let’s get some things out of the way:

1. The writers of NCIS know how keyboards work. (They probably used keyboards to write this scene, even.)
2. The director of this episode knows how keyboards work.
3. I’m going to go out on a limb and say >90% of this show’s audience knows how keyboards work.

This scene was not written this way because the writers think their audience is dumb and doesn’t know how a keyboard works. It was written this way because of the Rule of Cool.

The Rule of Cool states: an audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief is proportional to how cool a scene is.

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Political advocacy is an important lever for reducing existential risk. One way to make political change happen is to support candidates for Congress.

In October, Eric Neyman wrote Consider donating to Alex Bores, author of the RAISE Act. He created a cost-effectiveness analysis to estimate how donations to Bores’s campaign change his probability of winning the election. It’s excellent that he did that—it’s exactly the sort of thing that we need people to be doing.

We also need more people to check other people’s cost-effectiveness estimates. To that end, in this post I will check Eric’s work.

I’m not going to talk about who Alex Bores is, why you might want to donate to his campaign, or who might not want to donate. For that, see Eric’s post.

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Nearly nine years after part 1, I bring three new short ideas.

1. Keep in mind that scientific fraud happens sometimes
2. Clichés are good, actually
3. You must put unnecessary decoration on your useful items, or else you’re a weirdo

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This post contains spoilers for Guardians of the Galaxy.

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Investors often say that standard deviation is a bad way to measure investment risk because it penalizes upside volatility as well as downside. I agree that standard deviation isn’t a great measure of risk, but that’s not the reason. A good risk measure should penalize upside volatility, because upside volatility is bad.

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Is it a good use of time to call or write your representatives to advocate for issues you care about? I did some research, and my current (weakly-to-moderately-held) belief is that messaging campaigns are very cost-effective.

In this post:

• I look at evidence from randomized experiments, surveys of legislators’ opinions, and observational evidence. All lines of evidence suggest that messaging campaigns are effective, but none of the evidence is strong.
• I write an estimate of how many messages it takes to get a bill to pass in expectation, and how much that costs. According to my model, changing a vote outcome takes 17,000 messages for the Michigan state legislature and 2.2 million messages for US Congress.
• I provide links to resources on how to participate in messaging campaigns for animal welfare, AI safety, and global poverty.

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(that I still remember a decade later)

Evolution on Earth

Fact 1: When foxes are bred to be more docile, their ears become floppy like dogs’ ears instead of pointy like wild foxes’.

Fact 2: Crows can learn to use a short stick to fetch a longer stick to fetch food.

The basic setup of the experiment is: There’s a box with some food at the bottom. The crow can’t reach the food. The crow has a short stick, but the stick isn’t long enough to reach the food, either.

There’s also a second box containing a long stick. The short stick is long enough to reach the long stick. Most crows figure out that they can use the short stick to fetch the long stick and then use the long stick to fetch the food.

If you add a third layer of indirection, where they have to use a short stick to fetch a medium stick and the medium stick to fetch a long stick and the long stick to fetch food, most crows don’t figure it out but a few of them do.

I wrote a rap song about this experiment, it used to be on YouTube but I think it’s gone now.

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