NondescriptTransfer

@WestsideLAGuy @Noahpinion And New York

@Noahpinion College campuses are one of the very few areas of America where you routinely see couples where the girl is more attractive than the guy.

Regular, average guys are out there getting romance every day. The incels are wrong.

@StatisticUrban There are tons of ways to improve the cost/output function for childcare, education, eldercare and healthcare. We are not even close to optimum. Having medical school start right after highschool like everywhere else in the world is an easy one.

Baumol's cost disease is so devastating. It drives up the price of major, necessary services (education, childcare, eldercare, healthcare), there's no solution, and it makes people SO mad and discontent. They just require too much human labor atm. No productivity gains in sight.

@misraetel @agingroy Drive down employer insurance. Drive up medicare expenditures by far more.

@agingroy Do you think the health benefits of these drugs will actually end up dropping insurance premiums in the longer term?

You don't take Ozempic or Mounjaro. You're still paying for it. 1 in 8 American adults is on a GLP-1 drug. These drugs strip muscle along with fat (up to 40% of weight lost is lean mass). Doctors prescribe protein to every patient. That's 40 million new protein buyers, all at once, competing for the same supply. Whey protein concentrate doubled in 6 months. Isolate hit $12.75/lb. Processing plants are booked through 2026. The bodybuilder, the college athlete, the 70-year-old trying to keep her muscles. None of them are on Ozempic. All of them are paying Ozempic prices for protein. But protein is the visible cost. The invisible one is your health insurance. Employer premiums could rise 5 to 14% from GLP-1 coverage alone (EBRI simulation). 15% of employers who started covering these drugs have already stopped. Diageo's tequila sales fell 23%. Bariatric surgery volume dropped 46%. Torrid (America's largest plus-size chain) closed 151 stores. PepsiCo posted five straight quarters of snack volume declines. One drug class. You don't have to take it to feel it.

@mattyglesias The thing is whether you just want to get laid, a relationship or a marriage it all starts with convincing a girl to go on a date with you and her having a good enough time to want to go on a second.

I've been consuming a bunch of "dating advice for men" YouTube content (for research purposes, I'm happily married) and the extent to which it just skips the step where you're deciding what you're trying to accomplish out there is striking.

@PoisonDartagnan @misraetel @cafreiman Or it's because if you work more you are much more likely to end up wealthier. Every partner track lawyer I know hates their fucking job with a passion while working 80+ hrs a week.

@misraetel @cafreiman Generally this is because the rich like what they're doing for work, and so they either deliberately or subconsciously fold more of their leisure time into their working hours.

This is the one. The worst post of the year.

@myhandle @OpenAI Or they received too much and can't tell fiction from non-fiction.

"you're absolutely right! *riffs on your wacky idea*" is psychologically healthy for a 4 year old to hear, just not for a 34 year old did people who crave sycophantic AI not receive enough affirmation as kids? if @OpenAI cared about public benefit they'd publish their research

@justalexoki It doesn't trigger most zoomers. It triggers a few zoomers who get retweeted to the end of the earth.

why does it trigger zoomers so much to tell them they can't eat out every day? genuinely, what is the deal? why is it so upsetting? are they really that chronically social media brained that they cannot imagine a life where you don't live like the influencers every single day?

@mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc @paulnovosad Widely regarded as one of if not the best mathematicians alive.

@KelseyTuoc @paulnovosad I don’t even know who that is 🥲

I realize this is marketing and most likely massively overstating effect sizes, but even so you'd have to be a bit crazy to choose this one

@Mark_Confidant @mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc @paulnovosad That's obviously erdos.

@mattyglesias @KelseyTuoc @paulnovosad The Kevin Bacon of math citations.

@thinkingshivers The second is punchier and snappier. And Claude will punch up and make every sentence snappier until it's too one tone if you let it.

I submitted a draft of my short story to Claude for copy editing. Sometimes he’ll suggest a re-write of a particular sentence. My version: “She was just a rich girl, with a carelessness about her that could only come from being born into privilege.” Claude’s suggestion: “She was just a rich girl, careless in the way only privilege allows.” It's a matter of taste, but I personally think Claude's version is better. It's saying the same thing but more deftly. But when I swap his sentence in then plug the paragraph into Pangram, it goes from being high confidence that it's human to low confidence that it's human. If I keep doing this, will it start to read like AI slop? If I keep doing this, is it even my writing anymore? So I'm keeping my version, the one I think is worse, and I'm disquieted by the fact that there could be a better version of this story that I now need to specifically avoid.

@Noahpinion I've heard water use mentioned several times by people as the primary reason they are reluctant to use it, followed by what they believe to be IP theft.

The people who think anti-AI sentiment is actually about water use are becoming more annoying than the people who actually think data centers use lots of water

@CartoonsHateHer I think the cause of this that sex hormones increase jealousy which makes polyamory/threesomes more difficult.

Noah Smith isn't wrong though, the couple on the right are probably having way more fun than someone who isn't having sex at all. That said, I find it hilarious how many jump scares I've had from seeing my own cartoon in my feed lol

@firetruckguy39 @Aella_Girl That isn't how she gets most of her responses. You should also look at how most of the academic studies find their samples. Just need to apply a little more rigor ;)

@Aella_Girl Stupid restrictions like not asking only people weird enough to follow Aella on Twitter dot com to take a survey

honestly if I did have the level of rigor common in this academic field, the research would be way worse

@DKThomp Also just distractions/entertainment. If you're bored in bed you're more likely to bang then if you are both entertained watching a show on your phone.

This has been a fun debate to follow. One week ago, I think I was 70-30 on the side of smartphones being over-blamed for the decline of birthrates in the US and around the world. The timing just didn't seem to match up for me, given the long-term decline in fertility rates. But Lyman, @jburnmurdoch, and @JesusFerna7026 have changed my mind. I think several phenomena related to phones—declining socialization; declining coupling; smartphone-mediated distribution of western values, including feminism—have probably had a global effect on birthrates

@captgouda24 Curious how it fails. Is it in not understanding the papers, not having interesting insights, having interesting but incorrect insights?

Unfortunately, Claude is still extremely bad in discussing the merits of econ papers in the same way normal people talk about baseball players. Whenever it gets better, though, I’m going into the Matrix.

@dshestakov @BrianCAlbrecht I haven't read much acemoglu, levitt reminds me of someone who is in love with his own cleverness. But mankiw and krugman takes seem reasonable even if I disagree with them. Stiglitz though says some weirdly insane shit for a top econ professor.

@BrianCAlbrecht Why only Stiglitz? You got awful takes from MOST of the big names in economics when they venture outside their narrow field This includes Acemoglu, Krugman, Mankiw, Levitt... The list goes on

Stiglitz was AI before AI. Imagine you had Claude in 1970. He could solve every model under the sun, just churning through fields. But absolutely the most basic takes outside of formal, controlled environments.

@jeremyphoward @_sholtodouglas Yeah it seemed to start with 4.6. I feel like the agentic training is causing it to spend too much time doing depth first thinking and then it's attention mechanism isn't great at differentiating what I've said, what it's concluded, and what it's brainstormed.

@_sholtodouglas I've stopped using Opus for brainstorming/strategizing, because it keeps wanting to jump to a conclusion and the end of every response. It's too confident it knows the answer every time. It makes it hard to have a back-and-forth. Also, it's too expensive vs Codex 5.5 sub.

When do you reach for other models instead of Claude? What can we do better? Hit me with all of your frustrations. dms open. If you can give me detail (e.g. specifics/transcipts) - it'll help a lot in finding out exactly what we need to do to improve the next model

@mattyglesias Given we were a rook down we played excellent chess. Yeah let's maybe figure out how to not end up down a rook.

@lennysan Management. They spend most of their time in meetings and AI hasn't had nearly as much of an impact there.

Question on my mind right now: What role is least impacted by AI (so far)?

@paulnovosad @DouthatNYT Yeah I think it's mostly an excuse. Over the past 50 years raising kids got harder, free time got more fun, and women started earning more.

@DouthatNYT A simple answer is to notice that downward fertility trends are just as strong or stronger in places that don’t have these silly memes.

Something I struggle with is how to assess the impact of "don't bring kids into this effed-up world" anti-natalism on fertility trends -- since it seems necessarily marginal at the macro level but you encounter it all the time in public conversation. x.com/LeahLibresco/s…