Philip McAllister

@naval Agree! But I am not aware of any major candidate proposing any meaningful equal outcome policies?

Vote to protect the American dream of equal opportunity, not a Marxist fantasy of equal outcome.

@JonHaidt @candice_odgers There is a lot of chatter about the Nature review happening on the other micro-blogging platform @JonHaidt. It would be great to hear your voice there.

A review in Nature, by @candice_odgers, asserts that I have mistaken correlation for causation and that “there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness.” Both of these assertions are untrue. nature.com/articles/d4158… @zachmrausch and I have been collecting the published studies on both sides since 2019, organizing them, and making them available for public viewing and commenting, in multiple Google docs available here: anxiousgeneration.com/resources/coll… In the “social media and mental health” doc, we currently list 22 experimental studies (16 of which found significant evidence of harm) and 9 quasi-experiments (8 of which found evidence of harm. Odgers cited only the 9th one.) We also examine the many meta-analyses and review papers. I lay out the evidence for causality (not just correlation) and walk the reader through the Google doc in this post at After Babel: afterbabel.com/p/social-media… People really need to stop saying that the evidence is “just correlational.” Sure, there are a lot of correlational studies (79 in our Google doc, of which 64 found significant correlations with variables related to poor mental health.) But there are also many experiments supporting my claims of causation. I’ll write a post at Afterbabel.com in April responding more fully to the arguments of the skeptics (including Odgers). For now, I point interested readers to a post in which I laid out 6 problems with the way that the skeptics have conceptualized the debate: afterbabel.com/p/why-some-res… I just want to note two more problems with Odgers’ review. First: She says that I am offering a simplistic one-factor explanation: it’s social media! But I am not. My story is about two major factors (end of the play-based childhood, rise of the phone-based childhood), each of which has many components that bring a variety of harms to different children in different ways. My book is full of lists of causal pathways. There is no one causal pathway that, on its own, explains “the kind of large effects suggested by Haidt.” Yet when you add up all the different ways that the phone-based childhood is harming different kids, some of which we learned about in that Senate hearing on January 31, you end up with a lot of kids being harmed in many ways, and these many harms combined can easily explain the “large effects” even though most pathways affect only a subset of kids. Yet Odgers and the other skeptics focus intently on studies that operationalize social media in one crude way (total # of hours per day), and then correlate that number with some measure of anxiety, depression, or other mental ailment. When the correlations turn out to be around r = .15 for girls (which is actually a number we agree on, as I explain in the previous link), the skeptics conclude that this is not large enough--by itself--to explain the epidemic, so social media must be only a trivial contributor to the epidemic. This is an error caused by an overly narrow operationalization of a complex phenomenon: the radical transformation of daily life that happened for teens between 2010 and 2015. Only a sliver of the story is captured by the crude measure of “hours per day” on social media. The skeptics’ skepticism would be more compelling if they had an alternative explanation for the multi-national decline in mental health that happened in the early 2010s, but they do not. Odgers claims that the “real causes” of the crisis, from which my book “might distract us from effectively responding,” are the lingering effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, which had lasting effects on “families in the bottom 20% of the income distribution,” who were “also growing up at the time of an opioid crisis, school shootings, and increasing unrest because of racial and sexual discrimination and violence.” I agree that those things are all bad for human development, but Odgers’ theory cannot explain why rates of anxiety and depression were generally flat in the 2000s and then suddenly shot upward roughly four years after the start of the Global Financial Crisis. Did life in America suddenly get that much worse during President Obama’s 2nd term, as the economy was steadily improving? Her theory also cannot explain why adolescent mental health collapsed in similar ways around the same time in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, as Zach and I have shown: afterbabel.com/p/internationa… Nor can she explain why it also happened in the Nordic countries, which lack most of the social pathologies on Odgers’ list: afterbabel.com/p/internationa… Nor why it also happened in much of Western Europe: afterbabel.com/p/internationa… Nor why suicide rates for Gen Z girls (but not alway boys) are at record levels across the Anglosphere: afterbabel.com/p/anglo-teen-s… I just can’t see a causal path by which America’s school shootings, lockdown drills, inequality, or racism caused girls in Australia to suddenly start self-harming or dying by suicide at the same time as American girls. In short: There is a great deal of evidence for my claims that something terrible is happening to teens in many countries, and that a major contributing factor is the sudden international arrival of the phone-based childhood. I lay out this evidence––with hundreds of footnotes––in chapters 1, 5, 6, and 7 of The Anxious Generation. I have also laid it out in many posts at AfterBabel.com. All along, Zach and I have “shown our work” in public Google Docs and Substack posts, and we have invited others to critique it. Zach has made supplemental files for every chapter in The Anxious Generation, which give links to the datasets and data points that he used to create the graphs in the book. We invite you to check our work: anxiousgeneration.com/resources/supp… Our work has benefited from cordial, normal, academic debates with the skeptics. We will continue to welcome their critiques. But please, everyone, stop saying that the evidence is “just correlational.”

You're a great engineer if you know: • Simple is beautiful • To focus on the problem, not the tech • How to reuse what already exists • Launching is the start, not the end • How to step back & let others lead • How to get different views & change your mind • Your customer

@floydophone @zeeg Guess I’m that one guy who still loves Java. Universal, easy to grok, stable.

@zeeg i think you can find smart people who will defend each of c#, nodejs, and scala as the best language to build your product not so with java. no one likes java

this is a popular pov but i disagree. you will hire from very different talent pools, and have a very different engineering culture, depending on whether you pick c#, nodejs, or scala

@davidmarcus California has about a 45% higher incarceration rate per capita than NY (Wikipedia). Maybe it’s more localized to city policy, but a heavier hammer doesn’t seem to have yielded qualitatively better quality of life results.

Spent 5 days in Japan. Hadn’t been in a few years. It reminded me how great it was to see my daughters feel safe walking outside at night, not having trash on the ground, or drug addicts randomly screaming at you. California could be like this too, if we elected the right people and pushed for the right policies. It’s such a disgrace to live in such a prosperous country and state to see it being burned to the ground by delusional, non-sensical policies. SFPD and LAPD are both massively understaffed and under funded. DAs are not charging people for outrageous crimes, and incentives are doled out so drug addicts can buy more drugs with no strings attached on tax payers’ backs. Insanity.

@Jason A weekly status update

What’s the least creepy, best remote worker management software that helps employees improve their productivity with feedback on their time spent?

@mualphaxi Seems more like the phenomenon of mimetic desire more than anything.

I’m at the Taylor Swift Eras tour in Santa Clara. I have never been more optimistic about the future of capitalism or America. 🇺🇸🇺🇸 Communism and ugliness are going to lose. This is the biggest event in a generation; and it's a complete cultural nightmare for the trans/BLM cult Almost 100% of the women are trying to look as beautiful as possible. And it's a very specific type of traditional, middle-American white girl beauty. Denim, sparkles all over the body, short skirts and short skirts, cowgirl boots, bikinis, spraytans, makeup. Many people have beautiful, elaborate outfits. I'm gay but the womenfolk here are undeniably hot. This is 40,000 (or more idk) people worshipping the beauty and excellence of one woman, who is going to be a liquid billionaire by the end of this tour And it's all about the women here! The men (dads and gays basically) are subordinate to the female beauty. Lots of mother-daughter and father-daughter pairs. T Swift is great for the family! Taylor has basically monopolized her column. Nobody is even trying to compete. They have entire semi-trucks full of merchandise here. Everyone paid hundreds or even thousands for a ticket. It's a powerful affirmation that talent matters, beauty matters, excellence matters. And you can be a global sensation. The woke stuff has to be shoved down the throat of the population for even moderate adoption. Taylor could fill a stadium in any city in the western world and people will pay a fortune. I have great hope for the future!

Woww Drag Your Gan is so cool: vcai.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/DragG…

@gonzalo__nunez GitHub iOS has that @ryannystrom magic touch.

For comparison, here’s GitHub. Apps like this are extremely rare, I’m thrilled to see OpenAI go in the same direction.

I’m extremely impressed by the ChatGPT app. They’ve taken the strategy that I have for the last few years lauded GitHub for: Simple, plain, and vanilla with the exception of a few extremely intentional tweaks to highlight the brand. Fits right at home on iOS. I love it.

This is straight-up the most interesting climate idea I have ever seen. Mitigate climate change! Reduce sea level rise! Create new ecosystems, energy sources, & economic opportunities! There must be some fatal flaw but damn. unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/seaflooding

@deliprao nyc has a big tech/startup scene but it is blended into the rest of the city and you have to work harder to connect. but that is also why so many sf tech folks moved here: greater diversity of people/experiences outside of tech.

It has been one year since I moved to NY from SF, and I’m not gonna lie — NY is an extremely depressing and lonely place for a builder, even if you are working in the hottest area of AI, LMs, and whatnot. I miss working in San Francisco.

@ryannystrom @CARROT_app This is an extremely quirky app.

Only lasted a week with just Apple Weather and already back to @CARROT_app. It’s not even close.

What's the SOTA for getting GPT chatbot coding support for libraries not in the GPT4 model? (Besides non-public Copilot X)

@jtaby Have you tried asking ChatGPT for ambiguities in your prompt?

Imagine if something like ChatGPT was able to identify ambiguities in your prompt, and asked you clarifying questions so that it doesn’t make its own assumptions. I imagine that’s the difference between pattern matching vs cognition? would make prompt engineering unnecessary…

What happened to these guys? Where did they all go?

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@paul_arnold What happens at 58?

An argument here for wanting to live a longer life

@rbranson Life finds a way

it’s getting biblical in sf #cawx

@soopa @__aston__ Though shared vacation days are often the only times when employees feel truly free from work FOMO

@__aston__ I don’t see how it makes sense that I, as an employer, get to choose what holidays employees can take. Meanwhile, I have no obligation to offer let alone allow PTO as an employer. A minimum PTO should be mandatory and employees should use time as they wish.

Federal holidays make as much sense as annualized tax brackets, reduced minimum wages for tipped employees, or daylight standard time. This whole system should be much simpler.

@DavidSacks Just be sure to keep a holdout so you can accurately verify the greatness of your intuition in a month’s time.

An ounce of product intuition is worth a pound of A/B testing.