Moving to Substack
After finding the wordpress editor way to frustrating, I’ve finally decided to move to substack. I’ve copied over the post history (ironically, wordpress was much better about exporting it while substack had issues with importing it), but future posts will probably be substack only.
The substack can be found here: https://shakeddown.substack.com
Against David Shorism
Disclaimer: There’s a horde of political movements I actually think are much worse than Shorism, but this is the only one I think is bad that most of my friends actually support. Also, came out a bit disjointed.
There’s a classic party question that goes “what’s something where you believe that most smart people around you don’t?”. I usually go with something about science (I think we’ve discovered most of it) or what makes good writing (I need to write up my Norse Star Wars review here sometime). But for politics, it’s that I think that David Shor and his approach to politics are mostly bad.
To briefly sum up the relevant points, Shor is a self-proclaimed hardcore progressive who runs a data science political consultancy to help Democrats win elections. He believes democrats face an almost insurmountable geographic disadvantage in the senate, and as a result of this advocates that they should run moderate candidates and focus on issues with wide public support, like social security and (since Dobbs) abortion rights. It’s noteworthy that this is a new belief – before the political map shifts of the 2016 election, he believed that Demorats should stick to the left and wait for thermostatic politics to put them in power again, then pass all the harder-progressive policies he wants.
Most of my smart politics-following friends are technocratic liberals of some degree or other, and are big fans of this approach. I can see why: It’s a genuine attempt to solve a problem using the tools that actually work for it, rather than just empty signalling. A few years ago I’d be a big fan of it too. I don’t think that anymore, along multiple axes I’ll try to decompose.
Deontological Argument
The best way to convince people to trust you is to actually be trustworthy. We saw this again and again with government agencies trying to gain credibility during covid, focusing on trying to look credible instead of actually being credible. This failed, because they were not good enough at actually trying this. And more importantly, it’s a good thing that it failed, because their actual advice was, by and large, inconsistent and terrible.
I think Shor is a lot better at PR advising than whoever was advising the CDC (for a start, at least he actually tries). He’s probably even good enough to help win more elections. But he’s never going to be as good at it as Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown, who just are people who genuinely believe popular messages that win red state elections (or if they’re cynical, are good enough actors to fool me).
But more importantly, it bothers me that Shor actually shouldn’t be trusted by the voters. He’s not himself a moderate – when he thought it was better strategy, he wanted Democrats to all stick to the left. So he’s still, on some level, setting out to manipulate voters.
There’s an aside here, about my moral values. I think on some level, the fundamental moral worth people have is their ability to choose. It might mean that people make choices that are worse than the ones I’d make for them. But, and this is important, I do not, a priori, know that your choices are better than someone else’s. I generally think I’m pretty smart and have good choices, but I wouldn’t trust myself to run anyone else’s life better than they could. And even if I thought I could, i could easily be wrong. And either way I don’t get to do that, because they own their own choices and have their own worth and the right to go ahead and try to prove me wrong. And if they fail? Well, it was their try.
So you shouldn’t tell people what you think they want to hear to get them to vote for you, even if you’re good enough at it to make it work. It’s taking something away from them.
All this is pretty detached, but it gets to me on a pretty visceral level. I’ve been in New York long enough to know a lot of these people and this culture. It’s a mix of genuine idealism, fashion-based morality, and good old social climbing (often all found in the same person), meeting up at a party for a fun drink. It reminds me a bit of FTX, in the “we know what’s right and should use Science to get the resources to make it happen” style (there’s even a significant overlap with New York crypto people). I’m fairly certain Shor isn’t secretly embezzling billions of dollars (people almost never do that, and he doesn’t really have any of the obvious-in-hindsight red flags that SBF had). And I honestly like and respect a lot of the people involved and like hanging out with them. But I’m still uncomfortable with the idea of this pretty-unrepresentative group trying to manipulate politics.
Consequentialism in Policy
The less abstract part of this: I don’t think this approach to politics is actually likely to be the optimal strategy for getting good people elected.
Part of this is that I’m much more centrist than Shor is. I don’t want to reduce this entire argument to a partisan left/right debate – I’m trying to make a more general point than “Shor is too far left to be trusted” – but it probably does matter than I don’t believe that the worst democrat is better than the best republican on every issue.
More importantly, there’s a huge gap between the worst and best Democrats. New York and California have unitary democratic control, and are generally agreed to be terribly run. Colorado also has Democratic control, and seems like one of the best run states (disclaimer: I’ve never lived in Colorado). Supporting Democrats you don’t agree with because they’re more likely to win seems like a recipe for ending up with mediocre democrats – I think you end up with better results by pushing for the better democrats to win, even if they win less often. And you get even better results if you can also push for the better republicans to win over the worse ones, if there’s also some issues where you like some republicans. Do it enough, and you might risk ending up with an actual functional government.
(There is a problem here where for much of the media and twitter, “better” always means “further left”, leading to equating moderates with settling for worse policies. I think most of my Shor-supporting friends don’t actually think this, though, and I suspect even most media figures have some issues they care about that don’t easily map onto the “more left=better” axis).
(“But Shaked”, you might ask, “Aren’t you generally in favour of the kinds of elitist-democrat technocratic policies this bias might support?” The deontological argument aside, not really – I like technocracy when it’s run by competent technocrats with good ideas, but as we saw during the pandemic response, that’s rarely what we actually have).
Consequentialism to the Social Fabric
The biggest counterargument to everything here: “But Republicans want to overthrow democracy, which is a big enough issue that we should throw everything else out to maximize chances of Democrats winning elections, since it’s the only way to protect democracy”.
I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this, but I think the results of the 2022 midterms are pretty convincing counterevidence. First, in that anti-democracy candidates lost pretty badly up and down ballot, which is good both because it means there’s fewer anti-democracy elected officials and because politicians all saw some pretty strong evidence that being anti-democracy costs you votes. So I’m generally much less worried about this than I was in October.
Second, what’s the proposed solution here? It can’t just be “Figure out how to get Democrats winning elections forever”, since that (a) wouldn’t work (politics really is thermostatic) and (b) would just be exchanging one one-party rule for another. Eventually there has to be some form of improving the republican party. The best-case scenario here is “win enough elections that Republicans feel they have to reform the party”, but that works much better if you have social conditions that encourage reform. And it requires reducing partisanship – saying you’ll take any compromise so long as it gets democrats elected isn’t great for that. The Biden approach of lowering the temperature and running more moderates (while also making some genuine compromises) does seem to have helped with that. And it works for him because Biden is a career politician who genuinely likes bipartisanship and is good at making deals. It wouldn’t work if he were just trying to win enough seats that he never had to actually deal with Republicans.
But is it worse than the Alternative?
All that said – sure, Shorism has problems. But what’s the alternative? I complain about partisanship and manipulation, but it’s not like those wouldn’t exist without Shor’s brand of politics.
I think the answer depends on who you are in this scenario. If I’m me, the answer is straightforward: I think that advocating for what I genuinely believe, and trying to convince people that it’s good policy on the merits, is the best way to go. I won’t always win, but when I do it’ll be aligned with outcomes I actually want, and I’ll have enough credibility that people who agree with me on 80% of issues will hopefully believe I’m honest about the other 20% and be willing to listen.
If I’m imagining a scenario where I’m suddenly put in charge of Shor’s organization though, would I do his job better than him? (in terms of ideology, not data science skills). I think I do for the first day. I think that given a fixed organization with a fixed group of people and level of reach, running it with sincere moderation is better than running it his way.
But I don’t do nearly as well on the second day, and it probably collapses by the end of the month. Because sure, I believe in moderation, but the people I work with mostly don’t, and I’m not good at holding on to them. Shorism addresses a specific problem: Most political operatives and volunteers are young elite college-educated liberals who are left of like 95% of the actual democratic party base. And Shorism gives them an excuse to act moderate and data-driven – “pander to the centrist base to win elections” – which helps counteract this bias. I’m pretty unusual in being an elite college-educated urbanist who actually is centrist. I like how I am, and try to convince more people to be like me. But I guess having a bridge for the majority here is is a useful bandaid.
The counterpoint to that though – it is a band aid, and the underlying problem of disconnected values among political operatives is a bad thing that we should try to reduce and not just bandage over.
Muffin’s Story
Guest post by Allison
Chapter 1
She was supposed to be a RTF – return-to-field. Shelter policy said that all non-microchipped adult cats brought in as strays would be sterilized then released where they were found.
At the time, my nonprofit job was stationed in a county shelter and I would help them release cats if they were low on staff. Which was frequent. Muffin’s found location was mostly on my way home, so I offered to release her. This specific neighborhood was borderline rural, most plots over 1acre large. I parked in front of the address then let her out of the cage. Instead of running off like 95% of the cats, she walked around meowing and confused. After 10 minutes, I opened my car door and she literally jumped on my lap. I drove home that night with her still on my lap.
The next day she was evaluated to go through adoption, but some missing patches of hair were flagged by the vet tech — a litter of kittens also recently tested positive for ringworm. Since its contagious, Muffin needed to go into quarantine while the sample was tested. Did I mention my work office was also the quarantine room?
At first I superficially fell in love with her stumpy crooked tail and raspy meow. You could tell they were products of a rough life, wherever that was. When I opened the cage daily, she would crawl on my lap and purr and drool. The next day, I let her sleep on my lap while I worked. I’ve never seen a cat so grateful for affection, and I couldn’t deny it when her intentions were clearly innocent and gently. Then I named her. And started visiting her while off on weekends. And then the staff started calling her my cat..
A month later Muffin was cleared by the vet. No ringworm thankfully, she is just permanently missing matches of fur in a few places 😭😭😭 She couldn’t be my office cat forever and had to go through adoption. I was terrified that someone would adopt her for the wrong reasons. Someone that wouldn’t appreciate her daily drooling. Or would withhold her the affection she desires. Or give her unlimited food without caring about the health risks of obesity. Hundreds of models of bad cat owners overwhelmed my mind and I couldn’t risk it. She didn’t deserve anything less than a loving cat mom. Yes, I adopted her.
Chapter 2
I first heard Muffin’s wheezing a couple days after bringing her home. It sounded like an asthma attack just once every few days, but then the frequency increased to daily, then multiple times a day.
[Muffin wheezing for 1 min straight]
At the first vet visit, they did a radiograph (internal x-ray scan). This vet visit changed everything. I learned exactly how special Muff is.
Surprise #1: there’s a bb gun bullet lodged in Muffin’s abdomen. It appears healed and isn’t in any life-threatening state, but it was probably very painful 😭
Surprise #2: the stumpy tail is actually kinked in many places, like an extended Z. Vet said it was likely also caused by some traumatic experience that involved not only losing most of her tail but multiple breaks also 😭😭😭 Seeing the scars of Muffin’s past, I wonder how she has come to not just trust humans, but adore them.
#3: there was some mucus in her lungs, and they referred me to an internal medicine vet. We found the symptoms are kept at bay by microdosing Prednisone: one half of the steroid tablet every 3 days.
She will likely be on medication her whole life. I never expected myself to be a medication-dispensing animal parent, but it has opened my eyes to the depth of love. It’s terrifying to watch your loved one in pain.
Her health troubles have continued, including stress-induced urinary tract disease and most recently, a claw that tried to grow into her paw pad. Muffin has been an incredibly expensive cat. But when I see the happiness she brings to my life, I don’t regret bringing her into my life.
Chapter 3
Now 3 years later, I’m still obsessed with Muffin. Occasionally I find myself wondering if I truly know her, not my interpretation of the derpy & cuddly Muff Muff, but how she sees herself in this world. Despite that uncertainty, I have a good understanding of her preferences:
- Affection
She is the most affectionate cat that I’ve personally ever known. It’s as if she wants to be attached to me at all times. Every night she falls asleep on my chest, and every morning I wake up with her on my shoulder. She spends several hours each day sitting on my lap as I WFH.
- FOOD, all the time and always
I think her time as a street cat gave her food scarcity mentality, because she gets pushy in order to get table food. Some of her favorites include Beyond burger patty and frozen peas.
- Assertive
She is very comfortable making her needs known. She will express herself verbally, in the form of a raspy meow, on specific occasions. Like when I enter the house after being away, or when she expects me to feed her. She also meows when I exit the shower (which I interpret as she either dislikes the shower or prefers dirty humans?)
Most of the rest of our communication is nonverbal. Like a certain gallop that is an ask for play, or a body position asking for lap. Recently she has started asking for attention my making this derpy face with a slightly open mouth
- Quirky
There are a few unique preferences, such as her dislike of cardboard boxes. She is a ground shark and doesn’t want to jump to high surfaces. Except she chooses to defy gravity to by hopping over her cat tube
Affectionate, food-motivated, assertive, and quirky are just 4 of her lovely characteristics.
It’s difficult to imagine a life without Muffin. And based on behavior, I don’t think Muffin likes life without her Allison either😻
Addendum (Shaked): Muffin and ChatGPT
One of my weird hobbies lately is getting ChatGPT to write stories about Muffin. For example, here’s one with multiple dragons:
Once upon a time, in a small village nestled in the heart of a dense forest, there lived a beautiful orange cat named Muffin. Muffin was a friendly and affectionate cat, but she had one distinguishing feature that set her apart from the other cats in the village: a crooked tail. Despite this, Muffin was loved by all who knew her and she lived a happy and contented life.
One day, as Muffin was out exploring the forest, she stumbled upon a mysterious cave. Being the curious cat that she was, Muffin decided to investigate. As she made her way deeper into the cave, she came across a magnificent dragon. The dragon, however, was not like any dragon Muffin had ever seen before. It was able to speak and it had a kind and gentle demeanor.
The dragon introduced itself as Ember, and explained that it had been cursed by a wicked sorcerer and was unable to leave the cave. Muffin, being the kind and compassionate cat that she was, offered to help Ember break the curse. Ember revealed that the only way to break the curse was to retrieve a magic sword that was guarded by a fierce dragon deep in the heart of the forest.
Muffin bravely set out on her quest, determined to help her new friend. She journeyed through the forest, facing many dangers and overcoming many obstacles. Along the way, she met a wise old owl who taught her the ways of the forest and a brave fox who joined her on her quest.
Finally, they reached the dragon’s lair, where they found the magic sword. Muffin bravely fought the dragon and with the help of her new friends, they were able to defeat it and retrieve the sword.
With the magic sword in hand, Muffin and her friends returned to the cave and presented it to Ember. The dragon was overjoyed and with the sword’s power, the curse was broken and Ember was free.
Muffin and Ember became the best of friends and together they explored the forest and went on many more adventures. Muffin’s crooked tail became a symbol of her bravery and determination, and she was loved and respected by all who knew her.
The end.
NYC sit down coffee shops guide
Epistemic status: Mostly focused on Manhattan, LIC, and Williamsburg, where I’m most familiar. I have not been to every single coffee shop in NYC, or even in Manhattan. Please Let me know about any good places I’ve missed.
Chains (mostly in Manhattan)
Ground Central
There’s a couple of locations in Midtown, which are probably the best places to go in the fifties. Generally have good seating space (including sofas!), Wifi, and outlets. Have some great cookies and above-average scones, coffee is okay. Normally closes at 7pm.
Downsides: Decor is kind of dark, the music can be a bit loud.
Fun fact: The apparently also have a shop in Cape Town.
Joe Coffee Company
There’s a lot of these around Manhattan. They’re mostly a pretty solid option – they’ll have wifi and seating and will usually have outlets, their muffins and coffee are decent. Not super comfortable for long sit ins and tends to close a bit early, but a perfectly good option if nothing better is easily available.
Generally closes until around 6pm.
Joe and the Juice
A bunch of these scattered around Manhattan. As implied by the title, they have juices (which are pretty good if you like smoothies). Aside from this, pretty much identical to Joe Coffee (actually took me a while to realize these were two different chains).
Think Coffee
There’s a bunch of these in the village and lower Manhattan, and they’re generally great. Solid wifi/coffee/outlets, good coffee and muffins, very comfortable seating. Main downside is they tend to be crowded – I’ve sometimes had trouble finding somewhere to sit. Still, generally the best option when there’s one around.
Starbucks
Avoid whenever possible, but acceptable in some circumstances (like if you’re out on a winter night at below-freezing temperatures and just need somewhere to hide out for fifteen minutes and get warm for a bit). Bad coffee, bad cookies, deliberately uncomfortable sitting area. I’m generally a fan of big chain stores for some things, but Starbucks is just bad, and should be avoided.
That said, it does have all the basics (wifi/outlets/tables). It also has the advantage of usually staying open later than most places. So they are usable in an emergency, I guess.
Smaller places in LIC
51st Bakery & Cafe
Probably my favourite overall go-to place. It’s right by Hunter’s point, has all the wifi/outlet/seating basics with good coffee and baked goods. Nothing outstanding, but conveniently located with basically no downsides.
Black Star Bakery & Cafe
There’s actually two of these (one with the “cafe” in its name and one without), located two blocks apart. If you’re planning to meet someone there, make sure you specify which one you’re going to.
I’ll start with the downsides on this one: They don’t want people working on laptops on weekends, and there’s no wifi (even my 4g there is kinda spotty, so hotspots are inconsistent). This is a very popular place for families with small children, which may consider a plus or a minus (personally, I like it).
That said, the upsides are pretty great. They have some of the best toasts and the best baked goods of any place in the city, and they’re located right by the park. They’re nice enough that I’d still go there semi-frequently even with the downsides.
Partners Coffee
Downsides first: No outlets, no wifi. Although unlike Black Star I’ve never had issues setting up a phone hotspot connection here.
Upsides: Very comfortable, really nice backyard area if the weather’s good. Probably the best place immediately around court square.
There’s also one of these in Williamsburg.
Ghaya
Attached to a food hall. A bit of seating space, outlets but no wifi. Mostly noted here for pastries (pictured above), which are amazing.
Williamsburg
Copper Mug Coffee
Best Overall place in Williamsburg.Has all the basics and good coffee (and even a backyard area). Downside is that it can be a bit crowded.
Blue Bottle Coffee Williamsburg
Right around the corner from Copper Mug coffee. I’ll go here if it’s crowded over there or I’m sitting with people. Great seating space, got all the basics, slightly expensive coffee.
This is a chain with a lot of locations, but they’re a bit inconsistent on whether they have good seating space, so I didn’t list them in the chain section. This location is great though.
Manhattan
787 Coffee
Probably my favourite place overall in Fidi, on Pearl street. All the basics, solid coffee, Just generally nice and comfy.
Ost Cafe
A bit south of the Williamsburg Bridge, Surprisingly pleasant space for the neighborhood. Friendly people, limited baked goods. Downside: Short hours (closes around 3pm).
Some thoughts on FTX and EA
Epistemic Status: Some points I wanted to make, in no particular order. I have tried to be scrupulous about only making claims about what I thought at the time when I have records of expressing those opinions before the crash.
1) There’s been a lot of talk about whether EA deserves blame for SBF’s actions. I’ll get into what I think EA does wrong later, but to start with – I don’t think there’s any prior reason to assume this. My model is something like:
(a) SBF is motivated by wanting to have a lot of money (either to be able to donate it, or to be able to buy fancy penthouses in the Bahamas and show off how rich he is),
(b) he decides to do this via a mix of legitimate work, stupid bets on a bull market that blow up in his face once the bull market ends, and outright fraud. He and his associates all think they’re brilliant but are, in fact, thoroughly mediocre.
(c) this all inevitably explodes in his face.
I don’t think the exact reasons in (a) matter much for (b). EA as a community does care about donating money, but it’s not any more pro-getting money than most american societies (and significantly less so than Tech, Finance, and the unholy worst-of-both-worlds hybrid that is crypto trading). I don’t think there’s a case to be made that EA pushed so hard to accumulate money that he ignored all common sense for it. Conversely, this level of fraud seems pretty much the baseline in crypto – I don’t think “crypto exchange guy did fraud” requires digging for deeper explanations than that.
(I don’t think there’s anything particularly novel about this take, but it needs saying as a baseline).
2) Back to EA: Ideally, EA is similar to capitalism in that it’s an attempt to build a system where people’s selfish incentives align them to do good. EA as a social structure (as opposed to EA as a philosophy) is built on two basic observations:
(a) Capitalism’s goals are imperfectly aligned: There are all sorts of situations where pure individual profit-seeking doesn’t actually maximize human welfare and flourishing. While some of these are coordination issues that are (ideally) solved by something like government action, there’s a lot of places where individual actions by a small subset of the total population can do a lot even without society-wide coordination. Most traditional charities are not results-oriented and will not address outcomes effectively.
(b) Capitalism’s means are imprecise: Capitalism incentivises people via money, but money isn’t exactly what most people (at least in the first world) want – we’re mostly motivated by social status, and money is mainly a tool for getting that. Scott Alexander once suggested the idea of a society having jewelry that you were only allowed to wear if you’d donated above $X to an (effective) charity, so that you could burn money to get social status only if you were actually using that money to increase total welfare[1].
So there’s an obvious idea here: Set up a society where people gain social status by doing Good – in practice, by giving their time or money to good causes in ways that actually get results. Ideally, you’d be able to reward people with status in direct proportion to the expected global benefits of their actions, but even in practice you could do a reasonable approximation by giving respect to people donating to malaria eradication or working on X-risk reduction research[2].
The problem with how EA does this is that its social status system ended up being incredibly winner-take-all. Everyone knows Will Macaskill, nobody knows your average mid-level organizer who does good work. I’ve met people who’ve donated millions to global health programs or left seven-figure jobs to do AI safety research who were – well, quite liked and respected, but didn’t have the kind of social status you could get by being able to say you’d been Will Macaskill’s college roommate. I’ve been saying for a while that this is a huge problem, and I’m feeling pretty vindicated now:
Enter Sam Banksman-Fried. Sam’s talked a lot about linear utility functions, despite the fact that we all know logarithmic utility functions are better for iterated games. He believes in doubling down on bets over and over. He’s not nearly as competent as he thinks he is (as proven by the recent mess), but he’s also not stupid. He’s doing this because his social status incentives point this way: He becomes the biggest name in EA, runs a propaganda campaign to make himself a global hero, achieves the kind of social status where even your second- or third-degree associates are seen as cooler than an unrelated person doing great work on their own.
He is incentivized to do this, because his payoff curve is not logarithmic. It’s not even linear. It’s almost binary: If you can become one of the super-well-known top people, you get a massive slice of the pie. If not, you’re stuck in a limited range.
This all-or-nothing system is often seen as a risk in the real economy, where companies with a monopoly can squeeze out everyone else. It’s an even bigger problem in dating markets. But it may be even worse in EA social status circles. We need to either find a way to fix this curve, or if we can’t (which we might not be able to – fixing social status incentives is a hard problem) – then yes, we need to disband EA-as-a-community. People shouldn’t go to EAG or fund EA social events. Try to spread the ideas of effective giving and support some research institutions like givewell, but don’t do it through a centralized social dynamics game.
3) A general thought about crypto, and meme stocks in general: When gamestop was a thing, there was a guy who used his winnings to build a social rec center in his town, and people on reddit got excited over it. There is a sense in which meme stocks are just a bank – everyone who buys them to push the price up is putting money in, and then anyone who participated can take out community money by selling his shares. It’s not a great bank, for a bunch of reasons (It’s incredibly vulnerable to bank runs, for one thing). But when local communities have lost both social cohesion and the ability to actually do anything (public-built infrastructure costs in America are completely off-the-chart bonkers insane), it might be the best replacement people have.
FTX and crypto more generally fill that niche for people, but they’re a bad way to fill the niche, because they’re hives of scum and villainy. SBF wasn’t even a below-replacement-level scammer, he was just kind of a run of the mill crypto guy doing normal crypto stuff and following their normal ethical norms. An underrated cause area would be to find a way to fill the niche of “local community organization that does things for its members” (like a city council that actually helps people), that has some degree of social reputation and accountability instead of being structured to maximize anonymity and people’s ability to do fraud without consequences.
[1] I don’t think this would actually work, and have no reason to think Scott really believes it would work in practice either. Social status games are hard to rigidly control like this, signalling is complicated.
[2] This isn’t a particularly novel idea. Traditionally the X-risks we worry about have just been other countries conquering us though, so we’ve mostly used it via “support the troops” memes and memorial days.
Reflections on Israel, one month in.
I’ve been here for a bit over a month now, and it’s time for some general reflections.
I ended up going straight from the airport to my grandmother’s funeral. This was not planned – she had a stroke a week before my flight, after I already had my tickets. Things just happen that way sometimes.
It wasn’t the best note to fly in on.
Aside from that… I decided to come here as a two-year trial run, to see how I like it and whether I want to settle down here permanently or go back to New York after that. It’s still open – it’s only been a month – but right now, I’m leaning towards New York.
First, some good things about Israel: The food is better. The music is (mostly) better – you get all the good american music, but you also get a lot of Israeli music, a lot of which is beautiful. There’s street cats, no homeless people harassing you on the street, and more general common background with strangers (for example, two old random ladies on the street asked me to help them carry a bookshelf the other day). People here recognize my name without me having to spell it out three times – this morning I even had a mix-up where a coffee shop almost gave me the drink ordered by a different Shaked. I quite like my new job here (more on that later). I got to vote last week, for the first time in my life.
But for all that, I’m still leaning towards going back to New York when my self-described fellowship period here is done. If I think of it as a temporary fellowship to learn and grow my career, I feel happy and optimistic. If I think of it as settling down here for good, I get depressed and hopeless. Some points on why, in no particular order:
1) Regular conveniences: This one I think cuts both ways. I get frustrated by a lot of things here (hard to get Amazon deliveries, some government paperwork is a mess to deal with, no subway, getting groceries is a mess and a lot of things are closed on weekends). But on the other hand, there’s also a lot of things that bother me in New York (like street garbage), and lots of things are nice and might keep getting nicer here (they are building some nice tram lines that should open over the next few years, and the parks and bike lanes are alright and likely to keep improving). So I think this one bothers me more because I’m just the sort of person who notices downsides, and is actually something I should mostly ignore.
2) Job stuff: I actually really like my job here (aside from the commute, which is terrible – 45-60 minute ride each way, and in a minibus rather than a train. I might eventually move to south central Tel Aviv, which would cut 15-20 minutes off this, but it still sucks).
Working at a small company is cool, it’s successful enough to pay me well and feel safe that it’s unlikely to implode in the next few years but also chill enough that I can relax a bit and not panic about getting fired the minute I let my guard up. The work is really interesting and I get to work on really cool and interesting stuff (at least, so far. It’s still early days and I’m still in training mostly). My coworkers here are mostly chill, nice friendly people people who I like and can socialize with. There’s an actual lunch break where people spend 45-60 minutes sitting around chatting in the dining area.
On the other hand… it’s nice and I’m learning a lot, but I’m also increasingly feeling like it’s not a calling. It’s somewhere I can be a few years (partly because I want to learn everything I can, partly because they’re investing a lot of resources in training me and bringing me up to par and I do want to repay that, and partly for the practical reason that I want to be there long enough to get good recommendations and have it look okay on my resume). But I’m also starting to feel like it’s not something I want to be the only thing I ever do for the rest of my career, so given that I typically have a 2-3 year cycle after which I reevaluate my life, I think at the end of this cycle I’ll probably be ready to move on.
3) probably objectively more minor but still, I feel pretty bad about politics this week. I know it shouldn’t get to me personally but it really does feel like the government is determined to wreck the country and has convinced people that they should let it because it’s protecting them against the arabs/antisemites on the left (while also managing to mix all the worst parts of left and right politics into one coalition). Things will probably be mostly fine if I just ignore the government and live my life, but – still, it’s something that bothers me. I don’t like feeling hopeless about the future.
4) There is a real thing where New York feels like the center of the world and the place where Things are Happening, and I want to be a part of that. It’s weird – in some ways Israel is a lot more open to change than New York (e.g. NYC can’t even build bollards or dumpsters), but it still feels more like a stagnant backwater. I wonder how people in places like Singapore and Korea feel about this – Their infrastructure is much better and looks futuristic by New York standards, but I’ve talked to people from there who’ve told me that it also feels like an out-of-the-way corner and they want to come to New York because that’s the big cool central place.
5) There’s a thing with how I relate to people here.
I had a conversation over family family dinner yesterday that described this well: My super religious aunt told me “well your friends in America, I’m sure they were nice and all, but – didn’t it feel like they were fundamentally a different kind of people than you? Like you weren’t quite the same people as them, because they’re not Jewish?” And I told her honestly, that this is actually what bothers me the most since coming back. Because people here like my coworkers or old friends are actually really nice people with a lot of shared interests with me, but they fundamentally don’t feel like they’re my people. I have some friends in America – not most of them, but definitely a few – where I get genuinely happy for them when they get promoted or have successful relationships, which is something I never quite felt for other people growing up. I like a lot of the people here, but it doesn’t feel quite that way with them. They don’t fundamentally feel like they’re on my team, like there’s an “us” to be proud of.
Another story like that: I used to hear people say “aw” about seeing couples be affectionate. And I never understood it – it always felt weird and a bit embarrassing, that these people were cheering for relationships they weren’t even in. But when I first met rationalists, I just saw some people where I did genuinely feel that way. (Not all rationalists – there’s plenty I don’t like or who I do like but am still estranged from – but at least some! And also even a few of my non-rationalist friends, now).
6) There’s a thing about taking life as it comes and doing what’s right, instead of forcing what I feel I should. I get pretty frustrated with New York sometimes. And I thought that it’s not really a place you can live, not in the sense of living your life, just work there until you exhaust yourself. And I thought if I moved, well, that I’d have to move someday, because I can’t just live like that forever. But day to day, it’s fine. And more importantly, it gradually gets better – you learn how to live your life, to do things that aren’t just work you don’t like and feel exhausted all the time. And, well, I think at some point I started feeling like New York is good for me today, it’s good for me tomorrow, but it might not be good for me in ten years so I should move now. And I think that’s a wrong way to think now, because being happy for me is hard and if I’m happy somewhere I should keep it and work on the things that bother me instead of leaving. And – I guess I did leave, so in a sense I didn’t do that? At least, that’s the way to read it if I’ve decided to move away permanently. But if I haven’t, if I just decide that I’ll move back unless things change, then it’s not that, it’s just me coming here for a fellowship to try and solve a problem I had in New York (job dissatisfaction). It’s not the easiest and most direct way to address the problem, but there wasn’t an easy direct solution at the time (careers are hard), and thinking about it as making a tough tradeoff as part of my overall path towards building and improving my life in New York feels good.
Worldbuilding: What if there was no steam engine?
Epistemic status: More selected to be fun ideas that also sound plausible than to be an actual alternate history MLE. I am not a historian (they’d revoke my history license for this kind of wild speculation if I was).
A while back I ran into this post discussing why the Romans probably weren’t close to an industrial revolution, because the invention of the steam engine was very path-dependent and they weren’t close to its critical paths, and the entire industrial revolution is (probably) gated behind it. Which raises the interesting question: What does the world look like now if we never hit it?
I’m going to assume this happens because no area had large deep coal mines leading to the development of even basic steam engines. But other tech keeps developing: The original railways were horse-drawn carts set on rails, so we get to an increasingly integrated network of towns connected by them. It still takes days or weeks to travel between them, but large-scale trade and convenient passenger traffic becomes much easier than it was in the seventeenth century.
Science should keep gradually improving without industry: Isaac Newton did most of his work in the seventeenth century, before the steam engine, and while industry probably helped later scientists there’s no fundamental reason we don’t get electromagnetism and Maxwell’s laws eventually too.
Politics, communication, and state capacity… probably keep moving? Modern state capacity and institutions seems to mostly date back to Napoleon, and while I’m sure in our history the industrial revolution was influencing history in some important ways by 1800, it doesn’t seem like a strong prerequisite for Napoleon conquering Europe, so I’m calling this as still happening. Firearms and cannons keep improving up to about 1800s level, but diverge after that (US civil war style weapons require heavy industry). Ballistics do keep improving though, so presumably you have fewer but more accurate weapons.
Harder to say what happens to the global population. Some of the growth is caused by improvements in agriculture and basic sanitation that don’t require industry (you don’t need an engine to wash your hands, and tractors weren’t widespread in most places before the twentieth century even as the population and food supply grew), but it probably does help with some parts of it (modern agriculture definitely depends on industrialized fertilizer, but I’m not sure how far back that goes). So calling it somewhere inbetween – global population should end up over a billion, but probably less than two.
What happens to technology? I’m assuming we don’t have any engines of mass industry (no cheating by saying people just end up skipping to oil instead of coal with a similar development chain – no idea if that’s even possible, but it’s definitely against the spirit of the game). But we do have discoveries in electricity and batteries. Specifically, early telegraphs still happen (they ran on voltaic batteries!) More complicated devices (including some simple computation engines) also happen, but they stay the toys of weird inventor types living in universities, ivory towers, or the attic of a shabby six-floor building in Paris. They correspond with their homemade-battery-powered telegraph (which is too primitive to really bear heavy information loads anyway) about their inventions and ideas, which don’t become mainstream businesses (because you can’t mass-produce any of this anyway. Presumably sometimes rich noblemen will buy some of these as one-offs).
I kind of like this world. A large part of why medieval fantasy is so appealing isn’t that swords are cool, it’s that it’s not systematized – you can still explore in it, instead of being stuck on the tail end of the exploit part of the cycle. OTOH, realistic medieval settings include way too much inconvenience – it’s too hard to get places, worry about food, or really get anything done. You have to worry about plague and everyone eating a lot of bread and wearing out their one shirt. This isn’t a coincidence – medieval people weren’t all dumb and were also past the easy-explore stage of development, given their environment.
So I like this idea, because in a sense it’s the best basis for exploration: On the physical level, you have enough technology (sanitation, horse drawn railcars, some form of basic telegraph) to avoid the inconveniences of your story, but not so much that it becomes a modern setting. But one level up – this isn’t a coincidence. We’ve gotten to a story where exploring is maximally interesting because we’ve opened up technology and the exploration frontier without enabling industrialization to take advantage and pre-optimize it away for us. It’s a bit like my idea of an infinite flat world with no borders (so that you could go on sailing west and discovering new lands forever). Maybe someday I’ll write out that idea too.
Thoughts about Europe
The area around the station itself seems a bit loud and dirty for Germany, but turns out Munich is much nicer once you get a bit out of that part of it.
Overall Germany does seem to have issues with being unwilling to take space away from cars. It did have some areas like this, which were great, but most of the streets of Munich still have on-street parking on both sides and full car lanes. They’ll often have bike lanes, but those mostly share the sidewalk instead of the road.
Perspectives on Adopt vs Shop
Epistemic status: Considering the area where calculated optimization and emotional attachment both overlap and contradict is an inherently risky process.
Content warning: Kittens.
I’ve been thinking of getting a cat lately, and wondering whether I should buy or adopt. The escalating list of considerations:
Level 0 (common knowledge): “Adopt, don’t shop! Adopting helps a cat who needs a home, while shopping helps create kitten mills and increases the number of sad homeless street cats.”
Level 1 (Naive EA): If, ethics aside, you would pay a few hundred dollars for a store bought pet, it’s probably because the store bought pet is giving you more value in some way. Given that this is a wide enough gap for you to pay several hundred dollars, it’s probably also enough for you to pay an extra $50 to an effective animal charity – which probably does way more for animal welfare than the adoption of one kitten would. So buying a pet + giving money to an animal charity is better (from both a personal utility and a total animal welfare perspective) than adopting a pet, and you should just do that.
Level 3 (emotional EA): On the other hand… you’re not getting a pet to maximize floof levels. You’re getting a pet for an emotional connection. Serendipity and irreplacability are kind of fundamental to having a real emotional connection. It feels like you could never really bond with a pet if on some level you’re thinking “eh I could go back and buy a new, equally good kitten whenever I want”. In which case why are you even getting a pet.
Finally, three stories, that don’t really lead me to any definitive conclusion.
1 (Bean): A while ago, a friend of mine had this foster kitten. His name is Bean. She showed me some pictures and I was severely tempted to rent a car, drive ten hours, and steal Bean away to adopt him as my own. I’m sure that objectively speaking there were cuter cars within a thousand mile radius of New York, but, well, look at him.
2 (Vase Cats): Back in March 2020, these two kittens were born in a vase in my parents’ backyard. They started regularly sending me videos of them, which helped get me through the early pandemic. This feels like peak serendipity, but we never actually adopted them, and eventually they grew big enough to jump over the fence and left the garden. I still see them around the neighborhood sometimes when I visit.
To the degree that this has a moral, it’s that serendipity is important but doesn’t necessarily lead to adoption – and that one goes both ways. They’re both nice things, but we don’t have to tie them together.
3 (Larry, Rosie, Adverse selection and FeLV): My old roommate, once he settled down with a steady then-girlfriend[1], decided to adopt some cats. So they went to the shelter, where most of the cats were kinda laid back and unplayful, except these two siblings, who were incredibly cute and nice and playful. So he decided to adopt them both.
Only Issue – they had FeLV, which gave them a roughly 50/50 chance of dying within a few years[2]. He decided to take them both anyway, on the reasoning that he could probably handle better it if they died than some kid adopting them as his first pets.
To the degree that there is a moral here, it’s a little about serendipity (we adopted the nicest cats, healed them, and now Larry plays fetch and fights Rosie over the couch, which is adorable). But it’s mostly about adverse selection – these two great cats were only left at the shelter because they were sick. If you go to a shelter (with a fixed supply and active interest), some people will already have taken the best cats, and you could have to make some compromises you might not want to.
[1] Still his girlfriend at the time of this writing.
[2] Fortunately, we ended up winning that coinflip. They’ve both since managed to clear the virus from their systems, and should live a full cat lifespan.
shakeddown 