it was a clear, cold day. i pointed my camera at the sun.

it turns out the sun is a QR code.

@dfeldman blogs too!

when you are a child and immature, whenever something goes wrong, even if it’s probably your fault, you blame your parents. but as we grow and mature, we stop blaming our parents for life’s imperfections. like adults, we blame our spouse.

every time i see the word “analytics” my heart sinks.

@matejcerny I’ve done a couple of projects in which configuration is instantiating #scala case classes. it’s worked pretty well. eg https://github.com/swaldman/audiofluidity

@Alon it’s a hard thing in general that what would be “high impact” may well correlate with what would require subtle forms of institutional capacity. both reputational defensiveness and a kind of scientism that prefers replicability according to public recipes would tilt away from that.

@akhilrao yeah. i'd say maybe it does offer a coherent and performable partial equilibrium choice structure. but (at least from my perspective) not a good end-state choice.

@akhilrao yeah, i agree! both important. you need to choose a good end point, and create conditions under which the humans can make individually coherent choices that would bring us collectively towards that end point. (the end point choice might be constrained by what's possible in terms of incentives and social theories people can easily understand and perform.) it's challenging!

@akhilrao at the end of the partial equlibrium piece i self-link, Nick Rowe wisely argues that good policy is about setting things up so that partial eqm reasoning composes to a good general eqm. 'cuz partial eqm reasoning is, for the most part, what people are gonna do. general eqm reasoning is hard in the best cases, and under ordinary uncertainty about magnitudes of countervailing effects, often the best you can say is you can't predict the final result, so how are you supposed to choose?

@Alon Yeah, development is famously hard, framed as charity via state aid or NGOs, or Bretton Woods institution style, or Belt-and-Road style. Do you think EA-ists make a contribution there, managing places like Give Well to more effectively rate and supervise NGOs than states have or can?

@Alon perhaps if the case is persuasive, perhaps we should all help to get rich-country governments to just front the $20B (although that leaves open the question of what mischief well-meaning "person with money and no relevant skills" might then get up to!)

[New Post] Some thoughts on Effective Altruism https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9660.html

@normandc (thanks!)

Since in the Fediverse, one is housed in an instance that may represent a particular interest community, is it a usual and okay to have multiple identities for each of the different communities you belong to, or is it best to stick with one identity and use federation to interact elsewhere?

if there's anyone in the Tampa Bay area interested in cool old computers (e.g. a Sun Ultra 1, Blue & White PowerMac G3), please get in touch. my heart aches to junk them, but we don't have the space.

i came up as an object-oriented programmer, and learned to be very careful about what to name as a verb vs what to name as a noun. now i'm playing with a functional-programming "effect system" (zio), and it feels like what would have been verbs can all be nouns (kind of a gerund form?), though what would have been nouns still can't be verbs.

q: why are vampires so poorly represented in Congress?

a: your Count doesn’t vote.

we're maybe getting a great example in real time about how a systematic signal can allow a coordination equilibrium to be overcome.

OMG I just realized!

Welcome to The Federation 🖖

[New Post] Real inflation cycle theory https://interfluidity.com/v2/9566.html