I thought your last post sounded exactly like "some crypto is a scam; other crypto isn't. Don't blindly invest without looking it up." So will probably be taken as too pro-crypto the next time a big crypto market fails, unfortunately
I wrote a follow-up to the cryptocurrency post with a very different slice of the story. If you're unconvinced by the economic, regulatory, and decentralization arguments, the research angle might give you a new perspective.
Maybe you can estimate migration flows from internet usage? Try to convince ISPs to give you anonimized roaming data, or get/find data about country distribution of readers for websites popular in the source country.
Some neat news on fusion - the Lawrence Livermore laboratory managed to get more power out of it than the power in the lasers. It's not anywhere near close to breakeven on power (since the lasers themselves aren't particularly efficient in power), but still kind of progress.
I'm not totally certain on this, but a fusion plant (even one that runs on using steam turbines to generate power, like a fission plant) seems like it should be cheaper and easier to build than a fission plant once you actually have a reactor that can produce sufficiently positive net energy. The worst that can happen if it's magnetic confinement is that the superconducting magnets "quench" and then melt, which isn't going to turn the plant into a disaster zone like a melt-down. That means the non-reactor parts of it don't require as precise and exhaustive testing for safety purposes, and you don't need to spend a ton of money on a giant concrete containment dome.
When a migrant arrives in a country X, they will probably be on a roaming SIM. The handset ID will be associated with a country Y telco SIM when they arrive; soon after they will acquire a new SIM and that handset ID will be associated with that new SIM for an extended period of time (probably months -- longer than a tourist from X to Y would use a SIM).
So: telcos in country Y will have information about how many people from X are in country and can distinguish tourists from long-term stayers.
My first thought on migration was via remittances (like Dirichlet-to-Neumann... and yes WU etc definitely work with all migrants!), but they are very unlikely to give you data. Next thought (like tgr) was internet data, e.g. perhaps google searches for certain very concrete time-specific terms that would only right before or after an actual journey. [Btw note that many migrations take weeks or months, so high-frequency data would need to be defined carefully for the purpose at hand.] I did find this paper using facebook data, along similar lines: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224134
A related approach would use mobile phone data, and I found one recent paper doing that although I think it's smartphones only which would seem to skew the sample slightly (since many poor migrants, like many poor people around the world, don't have smartphones). Anyway see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0875-0
Finally, as someone who mostly uses primary data myself, the most obvious method (ignoring labor intensiveness, as suggested) is to simply ask people in surveys. You could ask possible migrants themselves, or you could ask organizations (government, NGOs, civil society, local neighborhood leaders, etc) to estimate. These numbers would probably be hard to directly compare across countries, but they could easily be calibrated to better data at aggregated time scales (monthly or quarterly) and then applied at shorter frequencies. It wasn't clear from the question whether you need historical data, which this wouldn't work for, but if you have a year or so then could do this and match to crypto over the same period. Plus such a dataset would be like crack for other researchers (not my area however!).
Feel free to get in touch (google Julian Jamison) if it would be helpful to discuss further, and good luck.
I run an annual prediction / forecasting tournament where I ask 24 true / false questions in January and ask participants to offer probability scores that the statements are true by December.
Every year, I try and find a psychic who will agree to play, to act as a benchmark for players who don't win (eg you might not have won, but at least you did better than average, or than random chance, or the psychic, or whatever). Howver, I've not yet found a psychic willing to participate.
I'm prepared to pay a standard rate for a psychic, and prepared to keep their participation anonymous if their are reputational concerns about making public predictions. I thought maybe the 'probability score' bit might weird some people out, so I've also suggested that the psychic could just predict 'directionally' and say whether something is likely to be true or false and I'd interpret that into a probability somehow.
Does anyone practice psychic reading who could help me? Or know someone who does? Or perhaps even knows why psychics are declining my approach so I can adjust it?
I can't remember where I read this (think it was when Scott talked about Nazim Taleb) but there was an argument that went something like:
"Housing is uniquely susceptible to financial bubbles because there's no financial instrument that lets you bet on a fall in house prices. So even if only 10% of investors expect a rise in prices, they're the only ones making bets, the 90% bears don't register, so the market is always bullish."
Is this true, should we try to find some new bearish financial instrument for housing? Can't you just short mortgage derivatives or something? How to house prices ever fall then?
If you don't like spam or porn, this doesn't mean email and the internet are not useful. The same goes for crypto, the majority of crypto is ponzi schemes, but this doesn't mean crypto is not useful.
In 2019, we were just getting started on screwing up our response to climate change. Then covid came along, and we screwed up our response to that instead in pretty much exactly the same sorts of ways.
Luckily covid was a much faster-moving problem, and after a couple of years we're already in a position to look back and see what mistakes were made and why. We can then apply this knowledge to the slower-moving problem of climate change and stop screwing up in those exact same ways. Unfortunately it seems like everyone has resolutely decided not to learn a thing and to continue to screw up in the same ways. But it was a nice idea while it lasted.
What lessons for climate change can we learn from covid? Well, we should learn not to trust team "We Are The Science", who we have learned will quite happily exaggerate or lie in any way they can if they think it will push things in the direction of their desired outcomes. On the other hand we can't trust team "Fuck Those Guys, Believe The Exact Opposite" either. We know that the more the first team acts in an untrustworthy way, the more the second team will grow, and that moderate voices will get squeezed out. We know that a lot of high-cost, low-benefit strategies will be pursued.
Finally (and this is more my guess than a definitive conclusion) we will come out of the problem having mostly mitigated it technologically. Some bad stuff will happen along the way which will turn out to be somewhere in the vast gulf between what the doomers and the deniers predicted. And in a few years we'll have found something else to worry about instead.
I've got myself sectioned in a mental health ward. Voluntary admission turned involuntary. Anybody find similar experiences helpful? Is there research on how length of patient stay relates to patient outcomes?
This ward is a bit of a limbo space. We can't go outside and theres not much to do. If a bed becomes available tho there are wards with more intensive care. Not sure whether to wait or try and organise intensive treatment in the community.
Welcome again to the slums of Hollywood. Your boss took a look at how much his projects pay for licensing IP rights to various current books and comics, nearly fainted, and resolved to do things differently. Accordingly, all new projects have to be based on IP that's in the public domain. Luckily there's stuff out there that's been out of copyright for literally thousands of years.
Your assignment is to devise a film concept based on a story in the Bible that doesn't feature any of the usual big heroes. That means Jesus, Moses, David, Noah, Solomon and another couple I'm forgetting are all off the table. Find a more obscure figure with a good story, and figure out how to make a movie of it. You can play the story straight or adapt it heavily. And you can make anything from a $100-million CGI-filled blockbuster to a single-actor effort filmed on a smartphone and funded by pocket change; your choice.
Also staring down the barrel of having to take antidepressants for life. Perspectives know this? Benefits costs vs tapering off after some number of years?
Would people care to put together a list of sf authors who are rationalist, rationalist-adjacent, or (especially) likely to appeal to rationalsits?
I got interested in the question because I'm rereading Katherine MacLean's _The Trouble with You Earth People_. It's a collection of short stories. A lot of them are about communication, failed and successful, with emphasis on what people can perceive depending on their preconceptions.
I realize that prediction is not exactly the purpose of science fiction, but it was oddly satisfying to have an ebook start with a story from 1968-- (same title as the collection)-- "She pushed a button that turned a page of the book projected on the ceiling."
Anyway, a lot of her work is about the ability to think clearly, or not.
Other writers: Heinlein, Vance, Bujold, Vernor Vinge, Joan Vinge, Greg Egan....
Re: estimation of migration flows, maybe could look at Google search data to see people using their home country's language to make searches in their adopted country?
I recommend this NYT article on E. Fuller Torrey (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/health/fuller-torrey-psychosis-commitment.html), a schizophrenia expert whom Scott has mentioned positively a few times. It shows a psychiatrist in different roles: healthcare provider, policy advocate, kin of someone with serious mental illness.
I'm not sure whether the writer intends to imply that Torrey's role as kin has had excessive influence on the other two roles.
The last four paragraphs were one of the most memorable things I've read this month:
> Dr. Torrey also knows that his time is limited. The tremor in his hand began just after his 77th birthday, and he knew right away that it was Parkinson’s. Since then, he has tracked the progress of the disease with close attention that verges, at times, on enthusiasm.
> “I’ve tried to learn about the brain my whole life, and now my brain’s gone south,” he said. “I get to observe it! That’s exciting! The brain is fascinating! It is me! I am an N of one!”
> He is now in his 12th year with the disease. By year 15, he said, 80 percent of people with the disease have developed dementia. This is something he wanted Mr. [Mayor Eric] Adams to know.
> “They better work fast in New York,” he said. “I want to know what happens. I want to see the results of this experiment before I become demented.”
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or if you don't want to give it away here, you can email me at an address specified at my about page:
There has been a large migration wave from Russia to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Israel, and maybe some other countries this year. There were two peaks: march-april and september-october. I am one of such people. Many people like this use cryptocurrencies although it's far from 100%. I can, like, point you towards Russian expats chats, Russian expats chats about cryptocurrencies, etc.
The other day my ENT doctor said that allergies are some of the most mystical phenomena of the human body: sometimes you develop them as an adult, sometimes you had them as a child and it goes away and nobody really knows why they do that.
That being said, is there a blogpost/summary of what we do know about allergies and how they work, if they are treatable etc? In the vein of Scotts "much more than you wanted to know" posts
The README has the following information, plus a couple tips, but:
- There are 335 episodes in "All". The LISTING file lists each one.
- In "Classics" are 25 where Jeremiah went "deep into the archives".
- The "Yours" folder is one you can edit for any reason. In there, I list my 50 favorites--and you could do similarly. (Since this is my own Google account... gulp... it's possible this could be abused and I'll have to revoke edit perms.)
If you want to make the archive complete (!),... you could add all the remaining episodes to a subfolder in "Yours". (I could then move them to the "All" folder.)
What bugs me about crypto is not the pointless speculation - it’s a digital asset, go wild - but the ideologues who claim it’s going to replace “fiat” real soon now. Or the people who think that a drop in the value of the dollar by 10% relative to goods and services is inflation, while a Bitcoin drop in value of > 50% isn’t inflation, though Bitcoin is “definitely a currency”
Given the widespread use of SSRIs and serotonergic antidepressants, there needs to be more awareness of instances of enduring sexual dysfunction that persist despite discontinuation. I wrote about it here and this might of interest to some ACT readers:
"Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction & Medical Decision Making Under Uncertainty"
> "... while there are some theoretical and actual good uses for cryptocurrency, the vast majority of existing crypto has nothing to do with this and is pointless (or mostly-pointless) speculation ..."
Scott says that he agrees with this statement, and so do I, as it is literally stated. But I also believe that people badly misinterpret its real import.
It's a cliché to say this, but I think it's absolutely true and relevant, so I'll say it anyway: an analogous statement to the above would have been true about the internet in 1999.
The key lies in reasoning about the statistical import of the "vast majority" in the statement. Look at the matter from a VC's perspective. VC famously works by a power law. The "vast majority" of the companies in a VC portfolio either fail or, if they survive, yield a quite modest return. And yet it's possible for the portfolio to be fantastically successful based on the "small minority" that yield an outsized return.
Let's assume that 85% of crypto projects are speculative crap. (Hell, if you're super cynical, I'll give you 95%. The exact percentage really doesn't matter.) That in no way precludes the small minority that endure based on serious work from introducing technologies that prove transformative.
(If you want a hint regarding my bet on places to look for that small minority, take at the look at the recent work around zero-knowledge proofs, and ZK-SNARKs in particular.)
Since this is anything goes, and people often talk about large numbers, even infinitely large numbers, I thought I would share an explanation of how large truly large numbers are.
Yes, I realize people know that, for example, the solar system contains fewer than 10^100 atoms, but that is such a trivially small number to mathematicians. And no matter how you phrase it, nothing can get anywhere even CLOSE to infinity. Digits after digits after digits.
Forgive me if this comes across as gossipy, but has Roko's twitter presence taken a sharp turn into the pop alt-right in the past few weeks? Like, overtly posting anti-trans and anti-gay stuff, spending more time sneering at woke strawmen and doing right-aligned virtue signaling, and generally being distinctly less measured than usual?
He used to be one of the few conservatives/reactionaries whose perspectives I considered valuable to see, and occasionally had really good takes orthogonal to either narrative, and I feel like that quality has dropped significantly.
EDIT: Apparently @RokoMijic just got suspended, so, uh. Yeah.
If anyone here has kids in middle school or high school... I'm running an online formal logic class for that age group Jan-May. It's hosted by Royal Fireworks Press, a great little outfit for gifted children. We use a Wonderland theme based on Lewis Carroll's books, and I've had kids as young as 10 do fabulously in the class. Both the mathematically gifted and the mathematically averse seem to thrive. It would be fantastic to have a few kids from this community in there!
Once our off-world manufacturing base gets good enough, and it's possible to build telescopes in orbit or on other celestial bodies like the Moon at relatively low cost, won't the construction of all new observatories on Earth end permanently? Doesn't the atmosphere and light pollution make Earth a fundamentally worse place to put telescopes than, say, the dark side of the Moon, or one of the LaGrange orbital points?
Putting my question another way, imagine it's possible for me to create a big telescope by snapping my fingers. It's free and there is no build time. I only have to choose where to emplace the telescope, and the locations can be outside of Earth. Under that condition, and assuming I am rational and want to do useful astronomy, would I put ANY of my telescopes on the Earth's surface?
My entirely anecdotal perspective is 1. Some regard Blockchain as promising, 2.Stablecoins may work out, and 3. everything else should be regarded with some skepticism. Is this too simplistic?
Even though it isn't the same kind of AI as in Scott's new AI post, problems with different kinds of AI are crushing all sorts of companies who you'd think would have incredibly strong incentives to have their AI not be trash.
For instance:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Paradox AI in possession of something valuable, must be in want of a brain.
Paradox AI is famously terrible. Which is why it is so wild that in their newest game they created a system where the AI is in control of far more important stuff relevant to the player's experience than ever before. The AI predictably is garbage and also predictably totally screws over the experience of players. Essentially you need to import various resources to power your economic engine, and anything outside of the economic engine is also simplistic yet shitty and poorly designed, and the only place to import from is AI nations. Too bad the AI nations are weak and powerless because they don't understand how to build a strong industrial base or even natural resource harvesting base. So the player constantly runs out of resources like wood or iron or coal which were never serious problems in real life.
Players will often import every resources of a common and useful type in the whole world because the AI can't raise their production. This actually causes another major and game wrecking problem.
A major draw of Victoria 3 is supposed to be playing tall and avoiding world conquest. You should use soft market power and diplomacy instead. But because the AI can't handle the goals of the economic simulation you are virtually required to conquer the world so you yourself can properly manage all the resources in the world because the AI is totally incapable. Additionally unlike the real world the game doesn't have a lot of support for basically soft conquering developing countries and having your private companies build up their infrastructure, which would be both historical and also useful since the AI can't properly improve itself economically.
Paradox seems to be totally incapable of either solving this AI issue, although some may argue as I do that you need to use a turn based format to give the AI time to function, and also incapable of sidestepping it. They basically plunged headlong into what they have to know is the weakest part of their competency.
Maybe they should hire one of these pro futurism AI tech companies to develop an AI for their relatively simple and shallow games!
RE: crypto and you-know-what, news just in that the Bahamian police have arrested Sam Bankman-Fried on the request of the USA and are awaiting the extradition warrant:
"Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has been arrested in the Bahamas.
The Bahamian attorney-general Ryan Pinder said the country’s police force had arrested the disgraced crypto tycoon after receiving “formal notification” from the US that it had filed criminal charges.
The US is “likely to request his extradition”, Pinder added in a statement."
__Spooky action at a distance, and the Universe as a cellular automaton__
Suppose the author of a simulation wrote some code that would run a cellular automaton. Suppose further that unlike Conway's Game of Life, cells in this simulation could influence other cells that are not their immediate neighbour. This would be simple enough to code up, and the cellular automaton could still be Turing Complete, and indeed could perhaps be a highly efficient computational substrate for physics.
(Suppose that this automaton, instead of consisting of squares that would turn black or white each round, contained a series of numbers in each cell, which change predictably and in some logically clever way according to the numbers in other cells. One number, for example, could determine how far away the influence of this cell extends. This I think would make the automaton more capable of encoding the logic of things like electromagnetic fields etc.)
A physicist in the simulated Universe might be puzzled by this "spooky action at a distance", where "cells" which are treated as particles appear to influence one another or be entangled in puzzling ways. Think Bell's Theorem and that whole discussion.
Perhaps...we might be living in such a Universe, and if we could figure out the right kind of sophisticated cellular automaton, run on a computer if not pen and paper, physics would be making more progress than under the current paradigm of using extremely expensive machines to bash particles together?
Pain threshold: I am fascinated by this topic, I hope you can write on it sometime. I frequently find myself basically disabled from pain caused by conditions that our ancestors only a few hundred years ago must have experienced almost constantly. With no dentistry besides extraction, no antibiotics, no really effective painkillers. People must have had toothaches/earaches/sinusitis whatever all the time. It is of course possible that they were out of commission for weeks of every year, but somehow it seems more likely to me that your pain threshold is tuned at some age and in the 21st century it is tuned very low compared to the 18th century or 20 thousand years ago.
On 4: How do you square this with your earlier remark at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250/comment/10498576, where you apply the fact that you made money on crypto to argue against people who refuse to invest in it? If the vast majority of crypto by dollar value is pointless speculation, then how could investing in it be smart?
So I finally started my own Substack. Check out the first post if you want by clicking on my name. I was formerly "Jack Wilson" here but naming my Substack with a different author changes my posting name.
The Manchester Financial Post and People Magazine both describe my blog as "The worst blog on Substack". I still think it’s pretty good. Worst is relative. Like maybe all the others are really fucking good.
Here's a "isn't there a program/app for this" question:
I manage N instructors and there are T time slots available. I need to assign K classes to each instructor, but I can't have more than 3 classes being taught at the same time.
Each instructor has constraints/requests. For example: I can't teach on Mondays. I can do a class before 10am, but if I do, then I don't want to teach after 4pm. I don't wants more than 2 classes on one day, etc.
What's a good way to come up with an assignment of time slots and classes to instructors?
I can imagine making a spreadsheet that has a big grid of instructors and time slots, and a bunch of formulas that check to make sure I'm abiding by all the constraints. But how would I actually generate allowable assignments for each instructor?
I suppose I could code something up in Python, but it seems like there might be an easier way.
If you're into military drama, you may enjoy the BBC miniseries "SAS: Rogue Heroes". It's about the formation of the Special Air Service, when the allies were fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa in the 40s.
I'm not sure how close the series hews to the truth; the preamble suggests the series is at least slightly fictionalized. But the early SAS managed to do some really impressive things in simply appalling conditions.
The series is available on Prime Video in Canada and Roku in the US.
SBFs failure to protect himself legally and/or flee prosecution when he had a chance, instead giving lots of incriminating interviews is a good object lesson in how optimism can be dangerous for you and those around you. He's not only implicated himself but he's implicated a whole bunch of his co-workers. Even fighting extradition might be a big an optimism failure.
Feeling good is not the same thing as being in a good situation. This might be related to the antidepressant medications and stimulants that he takes on a regular basis, but it might also just be him. Feeling good does not mean you are okay. Things that make you feel good whether they be people around you, mental training like meditation or chemicals do not automatically mean that you are okay. Even looking at the attitudes and practices of Highly Successful People is not a guarantee that you will be doing things right. They are not you and looking at successes implicitly creates a survivorship bias.
I read about a website in a previous Open Comments section that allows you to post the details of your own personal medical mystery and offer money for people to try to solve it for you. I can't for the life of me find it now, does anyone know what that might have been?
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (see links on page 2)
1) How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 by Eliezer Yudkowsky
2) Truth-by-repetition: No matter how outrageous, repeated lies become the truth by Tim Brinkhof
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 - LessWrong includes audiolink.
Pick something that you are sure or nearly sure of and describe what would convince you you were wrong, It can be 2+2=4, the correctness of your last vote, the existence of God, the rightness of your favorite economic system, or the love of your dog. Share your thoughts about something you think is obviously and conclusively proven to be true or false but that many people don’t accept despite the evidence.
2) Truth-by-repetition: No matter how outrageous, repeated lies become the truth includes audio
Do these results surprise you? Do you believe them? Would you interpret them differently? What role do you think social belonging, social conflict, and social status competition play in the acceptance or rejection of big lies? What big Lies do you think are pervading our world?
Does anyone know of any good data sources regarding the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews? I feel like I've accepted the idea that they're a standard deviation smarter because it seems obvious without actually looking at any research.
Is there any other country where the college admission process is as complicated as in the US, with consideration for extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation and all of that? Most first-world countries have some sort of high-stakes exam or exams at the end of high school, and that's all there is to it. The brits add an interview at the college for finalists, but only at Oxbridge.
Based on the Wiki page, I get the impression of a functional working-class suburb that lost an Air Force base that had been the hub of the local economy, and just couldn't recover. The city went bankrupt in 2012, and today is basically a Latino ghetto.
I thought your last post sounded exactly like "some crypto is a scam; other crypto isn't. Don't blindly invest without looking it up." So will probably be taken as too pro-crypto the next time a big crypto market fails, unfortunately
Why hasn't Scott predicted that SBF will be arrested and then, later, freed? Seems almost overdetermined at this point.
I wrote a follow-up to the cryptocurrency post with a very different slice of the story. If you're unconvinced by the economic, regulatory, and decentralization arguments, the research angle might give you a new perspective.
https://paperclip.substack.com/p/blockchain-history-the-trilemma
Maybe you can estimate migration flows from internet usage? Try to convince ISPs to give you anonimized roaming data, or get/find data about country distribution of readers for websites popular in the source country.
Should the beneficiaries of FTX and SBF, including charities, return what they were donated, since it appears to be stolen funds?
You can probably estimate migration flows from cash transfer usage, unless Western Union and the like refuse to work with illegal immigrants ?
Some neat news on fusion - the Lawrence Livermore laboratory managed to get more power out of it than the power in the lasers. It's not anywhere near close to breakeven on power (since the lasers themselves aren't particularly efficient in power), but still kind of progress.
I'm not totally certain on this, but a fusion plant (even one that runs on using steam turbines to generate power, like a fission plant) seems like it should be cheaper and easier to build than a fission plant once you actually have a reactor that can produce sufficiently positive net energy. The worst that can happen if it's magnetic confinement is that the superconducting magnets "quench" and then melt, which isn't going to turn the plant into a disaster zone like a melt-down. That means the non-reactor parts of it don't require as precise and exhaustive testing for safety purposes, and you don't need to spend a ton of money on a giant concrete containment dome.
Migration research: visit our lab! We do similar things based on Twitter/Facebook/Linkedin/Whatever data. Your idea sounds really good.
When a migrant arrives in a country X, they will probably be on a roaming SIM. The handset ID will be associated with a country Y telco SIM when they arrive; soon after they will acquire a new SIM and that handset ID will be associated with that new SIM for an extended period of time (probably months -- longer than a tourist from X to Y would use a SIM).
So: telcos in country Y will have information about how many people from X are in country and can distinguish tourists from long-term stayers.
For Elijah (DM didn't work on twitter):
My first thought on migration was via remittances (like Dirichlet-to-Neumann... and yes WU etc definitely work with all migrants!), but they are very unlikely to give you data. Next thought (like tgr) was internet data, e.g. perhaps google searches for certain very concrete time-specific terms that would only right before or after an actual journey. [Btw note that many migrations take weeks or months, so high-frequency data would need to be defined carefully for the purpose at hand.] I did find this paper using facebook data, along similar lines: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0224134
A related approach would use mobile phone data, and I found one recent paper doing that although I think it's smartphones only which would seem to skew the sample slightly (since many poor migrants, like many poor people around the world, don't have smartphones). Anyway see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0875-0
Finally, as someone who mostly uses primary data myself, the most obvious method (ignoring labor intensiveness, as suggested) is to simply ask people in surveys. You could ask possible migrants themselves, or you could ask organizations (government, NGOs, civil society, local neighborhood leaders, etc) to estimate. These numbers would probably be hard to directly compare across countries, but they could easily be calibrated to better data at aggregated time scales (monthly or quarterly) and then applied at shorter frequencies. It wasn't clear from the question whether you need historical data, which this wouldn't work for, but if you have a year or so then could do this and match to crypto over the same period. Plus such a dataset would be like crack for other researchers (not my area however!).
Feel free to get in touch (google Julian Jamison) if it would be helpful to discuss further, and good luck.
I run an annual prediction / forecasting tournament where I ask 24 true / false questions in January and ask participants to offer probability scores that the statements are true by December.
Every year, I try and find a psychic who will agree to play, to act as a benchmark for players who don't win (eg you might not have won, but at least you did better than average, or than random chance, or the psychic, or whatever). Howver, I've not yet found a psychic willing to participate.
I'm prepared to pay a standard rate for a psychic, and prepared to keep their participation anonymous if their are reputational concerns about making public predictions. I thought maybe the 'probability score' bit might weird some people out, so I've also suggested that the psychic could just predict 'directionally' and say whether something is likely to be true or false and I'd interpret that into a probability somehow.
Does anyone practice psychic reading who could help me? Or know someone who does? Or perhaps even knows why psychics are declining my approach so I can adjust it?
I can't remember where I read this (think it was when Scott talked about Nazim Taleb) but there was an argument that went something like:
"Housing is uniquely susceptible to financial bubbles because there's no financial instrument that lets you bet on a fall in house prices. So even if only 10% of investors expect a rise in prices, they're the only ones making bets, the 90% bears don't register, so the market is always bullish."
Is this true, should we try to find some new bearish financial instrument for housing? Can't you just short mortgage derivatives or something? How to house prices ever fall then?
Is anyone else here into quiz bowl? Not trying to get a team together or anything, just curious.
The majority of email is spam.
The majority of internet content is porn.
If you don't like spam or porn, this doesn't mean email and the internet are not useful. The same goes for crypto, the majority of crypto is ponzi schemes, but this doesn't mean crypto is not useful.
In 2019, we were just getting started on screwing up our response to climate change. Then covid came along, and we screwed up our response to that instead in pretty much exactly the same sorts of ways.
Luckily covid was a much faster-moving problem, and after a couple of years we're already in a position to look back and see what mistakes were made and why. We can then apply this knowledge to the slower-moving problem of climate change and stop screwing up in those exact same ways. Unfortunately it seems like everyone has resolutely decided not to learn a thing and to continue to screw up in the same ways. But it was a nice idea while it lasted.
What lessons for climate change can we learn from covid? Well, we should learn not to trust team "We Are The Science", who we have learned will quite happily exaggerate or lie in any way they can if they think it will push things in the direction of their desired outcomes. On the other hand we can't trust team "Fuck Those Guys, Believe The Exact Opposite" either. We know that the more the first team acts in an untrustworthy way, the more the second team will grow, and that moderate voices will get squeezed out. We know that a lot of high-cost, low-benefit strategies will be pursued.
Finally (and this is more my guess than a definitive conclusion) we will come out of the problem having mostly mitigated it technologically. Some bad stuff will happen along the way which will turn out to be somewhere in the vast gulf between what the doomers and the deniers predicted. And in a few years we'll have found something else to worry about instead.
I've got myself sectioned in a mental health ward. Voluntary admission turned involuntary. Anybody find similar experiences helpful? Is there research on how length of patient stay relates to patient outcomes?
This ward is a bit of a limbo space. We can't go outside and theres not much to do. If a bed becomes available tho there are wards with more intensive care. Not sure whether to wait or try and organise intensive treatment in the community.
Welcome again to the slums of Hollywood. Your boss took a look at how much his projects pay for licensing IP rights to various current books and comics, nearly fainted, and resolved to do things differently. Accordingly, all new projects have to be based on IP that's in the public domain. Luckily there's stuff out there that's been out of copyright for literally thousands of years.
Your assignment is to devise a film concept based on a story in the Bible that doesn't feature any of the usual big heroes. That means Jesus, Moses, David, Noah, Solomon and another couple I'm forgetting are all off the table. Find a more obscure figure with a good story, and figure out how to make a movie of it. You can play the story straight or adapt it heavily. And you can make anything from a $100-million CGI-filled blockbuster to a single-actor effort filmed on a smartphone and funded by pocket change; your choice.
Also staring down the barrel of having to take antidepressants for life. Perspectives know this? Benefits costs vs tapering off after some number of years?
How do you feel about the concept of “separation of money and state?”
Is it:
- a bad idea?
- purely wishful thinking but would be good?
- desirable and feasible?
- what God wants for us?
- a plot by the lizard-Jews of Narbulon 7?
- something else?
Share your thoughts!
Would people care to put together a list of sf authors who are rationalist, rationalist-adjacent, or (especially) likely to appeal to rationalsits?
I got interested in the question because I'm rereading Katherine MacLean's _The Trouble with You Earth People_. It's a collection of short stories. A lot of them are about communication, failed and successful, with emphasis on what people can perceive depending on their preconceptions.
I realize that prediction is not exactly the purpose of science fiction, but it was oddly satisfying to have an ebook start with a story from 1968-- (same title as the collection)-- "She pushed a button that turned a page of the book projected on the ceiling."
Anyway, a lot of her work is about the ability to think clearly, or not.
Other writers: Heinlein, Vance, Bujold, Vernor Vinge, Joan Vinge, Greg Egan....
Does anyone know what the level of crypto fraud is in the countries where crypto is in common use?
Re: estimation of migration flows, maybe could look at Google search data to see people using their home country's language to make searches in their adopted country?
I like this idea of using SSC as a braintrust to think up ways to measure migration flows.
Can we do a meta-braintrust next open thread, where we brainstorm questions like this to ask the readership?
I recommend this NYT article on E. Fuller Torrey (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/11/health/fuller-torrey-psychosis-commitment.html), a schizophrenia expert whom Scott has mentioned positively a few times. It shows a psychiatrist in different roles: healthcare provider, policy advocate, kin of someone with serious mental illness.
I'm not sure whether the writer intends to imply that Torrey's role as kin has had excessive influence on the other two roles.
The last four paragraphs were one of the most memorable things I've read this month:
> Dr. Torrey also knows that his time is limited. The tremor in his hand began just after his 77th birthday, and he knew right away that it was Parkinson’s. Since then, he has tracked the progress of the disease with close attention that verges, at times, on enthusiasm.
> “I’ve tried to learn about the brain my whole life, and now my brain’s gone south,” he said. “I get to observe it! That’s exciting! The brain is fascinating! It is me! I am an N of one!”
> He is now in his 12th year with the disease. By year 15, he said, 80 percent of people with the disease have developed dementia. This is something he wanted Mr. [Mayor Eric] Adams to know.
> “They better work fast in New York,” he said. “I want to know what happens. I want to see the results of this experiment before I become demented.”
Another interesting article on him (https://www.nytimes.com/1998/02/22/magazine/schizophrenia-s-most-zealous-foe.html). And a book review which provides a contrary take to Fuller on the credibility of psychiatric evaluations of poet Ezra Pound's sanity (https://www.commentary.org/articles/kenneth-lynn/the-roots-of-treason-ezra-pound-and-the-secret-of-st-elizabeths-by-e-fuller-torrey/).
I have three more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or if you don't want to give it away here, you can email me at an address specified at my about page:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about/
How is "AI safety startup" a phrase that makes any sense? What services could they conceivably sell?
Re: cryptocurrency use and migration
There has been a large migration wave from Russia to Georgia, Armenia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Israel, and maybe some other countries this year. There were two peaks: march-april and september-october. I am one of such people. Many people like this use cryptocurrencies although it's far from 100%. I can, like, point you towards Russian expats chats, Russian expats chats about cryptocurrencies, etc.
The other day my ENT doctor said that allergies are some of the most mystical phenomena of the human body: sometimes you develop them as an adult, sometimes you had them as a child and it goes away and nobody really knows why they do that.
That being said, is there a blogpost/summary of what we do know about allergies and how they work, if they are treatable etc? In the vein of Scotts "much more than you wanted to know" posts
**If you'd like to bulk-download the SSC podcast**
I've got you covered... up to June 2020 (when Scott moved here, to ACX).
**Here's the Google Drive link:** https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1ilAc_UE42Cbugp8TlPnItKIA5Ij6ui43
The README has the following information, plus a couple tips, but:
- There are 335 episodes in "All". The LISTING file lists each one.
- In "Classics" are 25 where Jeremiah went "deep into the archives".
- The "Yours" folder is one you can edit for any reason. In there, I list my 50 favorites--and you could do similarly. (Since this is my own Google account... gulp... it's possible this could be abused and I'll have to revoke edit perms.)
If you want to make the archive complete (!),... you could add all the remaining episodes to a subfolder in "Yours". (I could then move them to the "All" folder.)
Re migration estimation methods:
-- Trad-fi remittances, although complicated by the fact that crypto is itself a substitute.
-- year-over-year wages for low-skilled seasonal labor (anti-correlated with migration flows).
-- Much more tenuous: year-over-year budgets for border patrols and enforcement.
What bugs me about crypto is not the pointless speculation - it’s a digital asset, go wild - but the ideologues who claim it’s going to replace “fiat” real soon now. Or the people who think that a drop in the value of the dollar by 10% relative to goods and services is inflation, while a Bitcoin drop in value of > 50% isn’t inflation, though Bitcoin is “definitely a currency”
Does anyone know what's going on with Popehat? His tweets are currently protected.
Given the widespread use of SSRIs and serotonergic antidepressants, there needs to be more awareness of instances of enduring sexual dysfunction that persist despite discontinuation. I wrote about it here and this might of interest to some ACT readers:
"Post-SSRI Sexual Dysfunction & Medical Decision Making Under Uncertainty"
https://awaisaftab.substack.com/p/post-ssri-sexual-dysfunction-and
Anyone else seeing comments come back repeatedly as "new reply" in a box to click on?
> "... while there are some theoretical and actual good uses for cryptocurrency, the vast majority of existing crypto has nothing to do with this and is pointless (or mostly-pointless) speculation ..."
Scott says that he agrees with this statement, and so do I, as it is literally stated. But I also believe that people badly misinterpret its real import.
It's a cliché to say this, but I think it's absolutely true and relevant, so I'll say it anyway: an analogous statement to the above would have been true about the internet in 1999.
The key lies in reasoning about the statistical import of the "vast majority" in the statement. Look at the matter from a VC's perspective. VC famously works by a power law. The "vast majority" of the companies in a VC portfolio either fail or, if they survive, yield a quite modest return. And yet it's possible for the portfolio to be fantastically successful based on the "small minority" that yield an outsized return.
Let's assume that 85% of crypto projects are speculative crap. (Hell, if you're super cynical, I'll give you 95%. The exact percentage really doesn't matter.) That in no way precludes the small minority that endure based on serious work from introducing technologies that prove transformative.
(If you want a hint regarding my bet on places to look for that small minority, take at the look at the recent work around zero-knowledge proofs, and ZK-SNARKs in particular.)
Since this is anything goes, and people often talk about large numbers, even infinitely large numbers, I thought I would share an explanation of how large truly large numbers are.
I was first introduced to the concepts of the Ackerman function and Graham's Number from a webcomic annotation, of all things. https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/2317.html
Yes, I realize people know that, for example, the solar system contains fewer than 10^100 atoms, but that is such a trivially small number to mathematicians. And no matter how you phrase it, nothing can get anywhere even CLOSE to infinity. Digits after digits after digits.
Forgive me if this comes across as gossipy, but has Roko's twitter presence taken a sharp turn into the pop alt-right in the past few weeks? Like, overtly posting anti-trans and anti-gay stuff, spending more time sneering at woke strawmen and doing right-aligned virtue signaling, and generally being distinctly less measured than usual?
He used to be one of the few conservatives/reactionaries whose perspectives I considered valuable to see, and occasionally had really good takes orthogonal to either narrative, and I feel like that quality has dropped significantly.
EDIT: Apparently @RokoMijic just got suspended, so, uh. Yeah.
Did Scott or anyone else review https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf, Yann LeCun's vision for self-supervised learning?
If anyone here has kids in middle school or high school... I'm running an online formal logic class for that age group Jan-May. It's hosted by Royal Fireworks Press, a great little outfit for gifted children. We use a Wonderland theme based on Lewis Carroll's books, and I've had kids as young as 10 do fabulously in the class. Both the mathematically gifted and the mathematically averse seem to thrive. It would be fantastic to have a few kids from this community in there!
More info here:
https://www.rfwp.com/online-learning/courses/classical-logic/
Once our off-world manufacturing base gets good enough, and it's possible to build telescopes in orbit or on other celestial bodies like the Moon at relatively low cost, won't the construction of all new observatories on Earth end permanently? Doesn't the atmosphere and light pollution make Earth a fundamentally worse place to put telescopes than, say, the dark side of the Moon, or one of the LaGrange orbital points?
Putting my question another way, imagine it's possible for me to create a big telescope by snapping my fingers. It's free and there is no build time. I only have to choose where to emplace the telescope, and the locations can be outside of Earth. Under that condition, and assuming I am rational and want to do useful astronomy, would I put ANY of my telescopes on the Earth's surface?
My entirely anecdotal perspective is 1. Some regard Blockchain as promising, 2.Stablecoins may work out, and 3. everything else should be regarded with some skepticism. Is this too simplistic?
Even though it isn't the same kind of AI as in Scott's new AI post, problems with different kinds of AI are crushing all sorts of companies who you'd think would have incredibly strong incentives to have their AI not be trash.
For instance:
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Paradox AI in possession of something valuable, must be in want of a brain.
Paradox AI is famously terrible. Which is why it is so wild that in their newest game they created a system where the AI is in control of far more important stuff relevant to the player's experience than ever before. The AI predictably is garbage and also predictably totally screws over the experience of players. Essentially you need to import various resources to power your economic engine, and anything outside of the economic engine is also simplistic yet shitty and poorly designed, and the only place to import from is AI nations. Too bad the AI nations are weak and powerless because they don't understand how to build a strong industrial base or even natural resource harvesting base. So the player constantly runs out of resources like wood or iron or coal which were never serious problems in real life.
Players will often import every resources of a common and useful type in the whole world because the AI can't raise their production. This actually causes another major and game wrecking problem.
A major draw of Victoria 3 is supposed to be playing tall and avoiding world conquest. You should use soft market power and diplomacy instead. But because the AI can't handle the goals of the economic simulation you are virtually required to conquer the world so you yourself can properly manage all the resources in the world because the AI is totally incapable. Additionally unlike the real world the game doesn't have a lot of support for basically soft conquering developing countries and having your private companies build up their infrastructure, which would be both historical and also useful since the AI can't properly improve itself economically.
Paradox seems to be totally incapable of either solving this AI issue, although some may argue as I do that you need to use a turn based format to give the AI time to function, and also incapable of sidestepping it. They basically plunged headlong into what they have to know is the weakest part of their competency.
Maybe they should hire one of these pro futurism AI tech companies to develop an AI for their relatively simple and shallow games!
RE: crypto and you-know-what, news just in that the Bahamian police have arrested Sam Bankman-Fried on the request of the USA and are awaiting the extradition warrant:
https://www.ft.com/content/2068b928-cc17-485c-890c-3b5c2c00093c
"Sam Bankman-Fried, the former chief executive of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has been arrested in the Bahamas.
The Bahamian attorney-general Ryan Pinder said the country’s police force had arrested the disgraced crypto tycoon after receiving “formal notification” from the US that it had filed criminal charges.
The US is “likely to request his extradition”, Pinder added in a statement."
Crosspost from LessWrong:
__Spooky action at a distance, and the Universe as a cellular automaton__
Suppose the author of a simulation wrote some code that would run a cellular automaton. Suppose further that unlike Conway's Game of Life, cells in this simulation could influence other cells that are not their immediate neighbour. This would be simple enough to code up, and the cellular automaton could still be Turing Complete, and indeed could perhaps be a highly efficient computational substrate for physics.
(Suppose that this automaton, instead of consisting of squares that would turn black or white each round, contained a series of numbers in each cell, which change predictably and in some logically clever way according to the numbers in other cells. One number, for example, could determine how far away the influence of this cell extends. This I think would make the automaton more capable of encoding the logic of things like electromagnetic fields etc.)
A physicist in the simulated Universe might be puzzled by this "spooky action at a distance", where "cells" which are treated as particles appear to influence one another or be entangled in puzzling ways. Think Bell's Theorem and that whole discussion.
Perhaps...we might be living in such a Universe, and if we could figure out the right kind of sophisticated cellular automaton, run on a computer if not pen and paper, physics would be making more progress than under the current paradigm of using extremely expensive machines to bash particles together?
https://www.strongerbyscience.com/meta-analyses/
It turns out that a lot of meta-analyses aren't carefully done. This was a look at meta-analyses in strength and conditioning.
Pain threshold: I am fascinated by this topic, I hope you can write on it sometime. I frequently find myself basically disabled from pain caused by conditions that our ancestors only a few hundred years ago must have experienced almost constantly. With no dentistry besides extraction, no antibiotics, no really effective painkillers. People must have had toothaches/earaches/sinusitis whatever all the time. It is of course possible that they were out of commission for weeks of every year, but somehow it seems more likely to me that your pain threshold is tuned at some age and in the 21st century it is tuned very low compared to the 18th century or 20 thousand years ago.
Anyone have a theory as to why SBF did not flee to a non-extraditing country before he was arrested?
The Klingons were sci-fi analogs for the Russians/Mongolians.
The Romulans were analogs for the Ancient Romans and Chinese.
The Bajorans were analogs for the Jews and the Cardassians were the Nazis.
The Centauri and the Narn were analogs for the French Third Republic and Algeria.
What would an alien analog for the Persians be like? (Different answers based on different eras in Persian history are fine)
On 4: How do you square this with your earlier remark at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/open-thread-250/comment/10498576, where you apply the fact that you made money on crypto to argue against people who refuse to invest in it? If the vast majority of crypto by dollar value is pointless speculation, then how could investing in it be smart?
So I finally started my own Substack. Check out the first post if you want by clicking on my name. I was formerly "Jack Wilson" here but naming my Substack with a different author changes my posting name.
The Manchester Financial Post and People Magazine both describe my blog as "The worst blog on Substack". I still think it’s pretty good. Worst is relative. Like maybe all the others are really fucking good.
Here's a "isn't there a program/app for this" question:
I manage N instructors and there are T time slots available. I need to assign K classes to each instructor, but I can't have more than 3 classes being taught at the same time.
Each instructor has constraints/requests. For example: I can't teach on Mondays. I can do a class before 10am, but if I do, then I don't want to teach after 4pm. I don't wants more than 2 classes on one day, etc.
What's a good way to come up with an assignment of time slots and classes to instructors?
I can imagine making a spreadsheet that has a big grid of instructors and time slots, and a bunch of formulas that check to make sure I'm abiding by all the constraints. But how would I actually generate allowable assignments for each instructor?
I suppose I could code something up in Python, but it seems like there might be an easier way.
If you're into military drama, you may enjoy the BBC miniseries "SAS: Rogue Heroes". It's about the formation of the Special Air Service, when the allies were fighting the Germans and Italians in North Africa in the 40s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10405370
I'm not sure how close the series hews to the truth; the preamble suggests the series is at least slightly fictionalized. But the early SAS managed to do some really impressive things in simply appalling conditions.
The series is available on Prime Video in Canada and Roku in the US.
SBFs failure to protect himself legally and/or flee prosecution when he had a chance, instead giving lots of incriminating interviews is a good object lesson in how optimism can be dangerous for you and those around you. He's not only implicated himself but he's implicated a whole bunch of his co-workers. Even fighting extradition might be a big an optimism failure.
Feeling good is not the same thing as being in a good situation. This might be related to the antidepressant medications and stimulants that he takes on a regular basis, but it might also just be him. Feeling good does not mean you are okay. Things that make you feel good whether they be people around you, mental training like meditation or chemicals do not automatically mean that you are okay. Even looking at the attitudes and practices of Highly Successful People is not a guarantee that you will be doing things right. They are not you and looking at successes implicitly creates a survivorship bias.
I read about a website in a previous Open Comments section that allows you to post the details of your own personal medical mystery and offer money for people to try to solve it for you. I can't for the life of me find it now, does anyone know what that might have been?
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1V7gV4w3riK93uT55djNzhGG6MDjqchIWdwHaXRPavh0/edit?usp=sharing
Due to the Cold weather, we are meeting at my house nearby! Email me for the address. Changes in usual meeting information are struck through.
Hello folks!
I am glad to announce the 13th of a continuing series of Orange County ACX/LW meetups. Meeting this Saturday and most Saturdays.
Contact me, Michael, at michaelmichalchik@gmail.com with questions or requests.
Saturday, 12/17/22, 2 pm
1900 Port Carlow Place, Newport Beach, 92660
The Picnic tables outside the community clubhouse
33.6173166789459, -117.85885652037152
https://goo.gl/maps/WmzxQhBM2vdpJvz39
Plus code 8554J48R+WFJ
Activities (all activities are optional)
A) Two conversation starter topics this week will be. (see links on page 2)
1) How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 by Eliezer Yudkowsky
2) Truth-by-repetition: No matter how outrageous, repeated lies become the truth by Tim Brinkhof
B) We will also have the card game Predictably Irrational. Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions. This is a pet-friendly park and meeting.
C) We usually walk and talk for about an hour after the meeting starts. There are two easy-access mini-malls nearby with hot takeout food available. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zipcode 92660.
D) Share a surprise! Tell the group about something that happened that was unexpected or changed how you look at the universe.
E) Make a prediction and give a probability and end condition.
F) Contribute ideas to the group's future direction: topics, types of meetings, activities, etc.
Conversation Starter Readings:
These readings are optional, but if you do them, think about what you find interesting, surprising, useful, questionable, vexing, or exciting.
1) How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 - LessWrong includes audiolink.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6FmqiAgS8h4EJm86s/how-to-convince-me-that-2-2-3
Pick something that you are sure or nearly sure of and describe what would convince you you were wrong, It can be 2+2=4, the correctness of your last vote, the existence of God, the rightness of your favorite economic system, or the love of your dog. Share your thoughts about something you think is obviously and conclusively proven to be true or false but that many people don’t accept despite the evidence.
2) Truth-by-repetition: No matter how outrageous, repeated lies become the truth includes audio
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/repetition-lie-truth-propaganda/#Echobox=1670858076
Do these results surprise you? Do you believe them? Would you interpret them differently? What role do you think social belonging, social conflict, and social status competition play in the acceptance or rejection of big lies? What big Lies do you think are pervading our world?
Does anyone know of any good data sources regarding the intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews? I feel like I've accepted the idea that they're a standard deviation smarter because it seems obvious without actually looking at any research.
A fun video about the US college admissions process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSLfE6ld5dU
Is there any other country where the college admission process is as complicated as in the US, with consideration for extracurricular activities and letters of recommendation and all of that? Most first-world countries have some sort of high-stakes exam or exams at the end of high school, and that's all there is to it. The brits add an interview at the college for finalists, but only at Oxbridge.
Scott, there is an interesting comment (from "confused_puppy") on the latest EA movement ethics post, effectively asking you to write a post on "feminization" of EA and how the movement could survive it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/t5vFLabB2mQz2tgDr/i-m-a-22-year-old-woman-involved-in-effective-altruism-i-m?commentId=jWixx3JEurXKPx4eH
Would you be able to oblige? I think many of us would enjoy reading your thoughts on this.
So, San Bernardino, CA kinda went to the dogs over the last generation or so. Anyone here happen to know why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc3AQk7lgTA
Based on the Wiki page, I get the impression of a functional working-class suburb that lost an Air Force base that had been the hub of the local economy, and just couldn't recover. The city went bankrupt in 2012, and today is basically a Latino ghetto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Bernardino%2C_California