2026-05-13 19:11:33

One of my long-time hobby-horses is that people are way weirder than they realize, and that our politics would look different if more people understood how massively unrepresentative they are of the rest of the population. So here's a little quiz designed to demonstrate how unrepresentative you are (of the US population – sorry non-Americans).

I did shockingly little of the work on this, so compliments should largely go to Claude, but if you have complaints or think this is wrong please do let me know. If you're interested in the process you can see the conversation here.

2026-05-12 19:11:33

1) Evolution of species by natural selection is the classic of the genre, of course. If you have a bunch of finches trying to drink nectar out of flowers, the finches with the long pointy beaks can more easily get deep in those nectaries, and over time the finch population becomes dominated by the long of beak.

2) I think some of my more anti-capitalist friends are flabbergasted at the idea that the invisible hand could possibly guide businesses to figure out what customers want. If you've ever been inside a business, that doesn't seem to be how it works! But that's not the theory of capitalism, really: it's that if a bunch of different businesses try to please customers, even if they're all wildly flailing around at random, the ones that happen to figure out What People Want will stay in business, and the ones that don't will die out.

3) What we post online in any algorithmic environment is subject to brutal evolutionary pressures. Even here on my relatively insulated blog, it's hard to ignore the incentive to write what people seem to enjoy. E.g. you guys love lists, empirically, and all my most popular posts in the last few months started with a number, so here I am writing another list. But this effect is 1000000x fold on a platform like Instagram or Twitter or YouTube, where your most popular offerings can get 1000000x the attention. Soon you find yourself desperately iterating towards whatever the algorithm most rewards from you, until one day you wake up and you're posting bulls**t rage-bait because your audience applauds when you do.

4) What I don't think is nearly as heavily acknowledged is that the same pressure exists in our non-algorithmic environments, like our everyday lives. Every time you say an opinion at a party you get feedback based on other people's responses; without even necessarily knowing it consciously, you get trained that some opinions are far more popular than others; unless you really make huge and deliberate efforts, the natural glide-path is towards only saying the views that get you good responses. It's like social media just without the quantification, and with real people whose feelings about you matter immensely, and who are more likely to be selection-biased to have similar views to each other versus the diversity of the internet as a whole. I sometimes wonder if the only progress in society is made by disagreeable people who are able to withstand the crushing social pressure to only say (and think) already locally-popular things.

5) At least in Europe, professional sports leagues are evolutionary: the teams at the bottom of the league get demoted, the teams at the top (of the league below) get promoted in their place. American sports somehow don't function this way, they're like a managed zoo where the animals are insulated from evolutionary pressures, I am pretty confused about it.

6) Corporate politics is all about evolution. The most successful managers sneak more and more of their proteges into the firm, the least successful managers get booted from the firm and don't get to hire any more people in, and can't protect the people they hired in previously. Fitness is determined by your fitness at playing the game, not at how good you are at [thing the organization was supposedly set up to do].

7) Political parties get formed by evolution: the ones whose platforms are unpopular wither away, the ones whose platforms are popular live to fight another election. And this is true fractally for coalitions within each party, and politicians within each coalition. The upshot is that, over time, parties can evolve beyond recognition as they seek to respond to the changing environment and survive within it. And as always with evolution, this doesn't necessarily mean the actors are manipulative or even conscious of what they're doing: it could be that 100% of politicians are 100% sincere in their beliefs, but over time the politicians with unpopular beliefs will get selected out of the party, until the only people left are the ones who hold the views that the majority of the selectorate endorses. Survival of the fittest, where "fitness" doesn't mean "good" but just "good at surviving."

2026-05-11 19:11:53

Look, I realise this is an oddly specific gripe but I do feel it strongly whenever I see a highway or a public building and the name of a politician (often a Mayor, sometimes a Governor or President) on it: this just shouldn't be allowed. The politician did not pay for it, the public did. And it's naked electioneering on behalf of the incumbent, trying to get voters to associate the incumbent's name with public spending, which is unfair on the non-incumbents who will sooner or later be trying to unseat her. It's nakedly against the spirit of liberal democracy, I don't know where it started and I don't know why we put up with it.

2026-05-08 19:11:49

For most newsletters, I would like to receive neither All Newsletter or No Newsletter, but Some Newsletter – depending on the author, I'd like to get 10% or 20% or 50% of their best posts.

I don't think as a writer I have any way of knowing which posts are great. (There's definitely posts where I feel confident they are not-amazing, I just want to get that idea out my head, but I don't think I've ever correctly predicted a break-out post would break out).

Here's how I wish the newsletter-sending business worked: I would just mail out whatever's in my head, at whatever volume, and you all would opt in to a certain threshold of email receipt. You could choose whether you want to get 100% of my posts, or only the best 50%, or only the best 10%.

Each day the newsletter would first go out to the people who agreed to receive 100% of posts, and they would vote on how good it was, and only if it crossed a certain threshold of positive votes would it get sent to the 90%ers, who would then vote on how good it was, and so on till it had either hit its quality-bucket or (in the rare 10% of cases) been sent to the whole list.

If you're worried that superfans have different tastes than the average, you could instead set it up so that each post gets sent to a random 10% of the audience, that 10% votes, and then the post gets sent out to a suitable share of the remaining audience. So it's no longer the case that you can get only the best N%, but you can get the best N% plus some ungraded posts, where your contribution to the project is to grade them.

Another theoretical way to do this, especially for a paid newsletter, would be to have a small pool of people who volunteer as the Test Pool (in lieu of paying for the newsletter), and they vote on the quality, and then the curated selections get sent to the paid reader pool. I'm not sure how you could possibly incentivize the voters to vote accurately, though – famously the Oscar voting was historically full of people who had not-seen the movies voting on which was the best one, and that's in a setting where the result matter a lot.

One problem with this system is if/when people have idiosyncratic views about which posts are best. This seems obviously true, some posts will resonate with some people and not others, but I'm not sure how to avoid that. At the extreme you could imagine a recommender algorithm, "people who enjoyed Post X also enjoyed Post Y", but 1) that totally seems like too much work for a simple newsletter, and 2) maybe it's just reinventing social media from first principles?

I'm pretty sure I wrote this idea before, maybe in an Is This Anything? post, but since I'm not sure maybe you won't be either.

2026-05-07 19:11:12

I famously have some issues with email procrastination. It’s pretty classic situation: I didn’t reply to an email right away, and I feel avoidant about the fact that you've been waiting 4 days, and that feels really bad after two weeks, which induces guilt about the fact I didn't reply for a month.

Here’s the thing. Every so often, for reasons largely beyond me, I sit down for a day or week and MOSTLY clear my inbox: I send a bunch of messages saying so sorry for late reply, and I mean every one of them, and I slowly chug my way until there's only a few unanswered messages left.

But I really, really struggle to get that down to zero. When there’s ~10 emails left in the queue, some dastardly imp inside me pulls me away.

I used to think this was a classic selection effect: I cleared out the easier ones, and what's left is the hardest of the hard, and that's why it's left. But empirically I don't think that's actually true: I often clear some of the hardest ones first, and then some easy ones, and what's left is a mish-mash of easy and hard.

What it feels like, emotionally, is that some part of me doesn't want the work to be done; that some part of me dreads having answered all the emails, or (better) secretly wants the comfort of the partially-unfinished task. If anyone can explain this to me I'd be grateful.

2026-05-06 19:11:57

Here's a problem that is rampant among ATVBT readers: a person is both very good-looking and also has a great personality. They want to find a partner who is not just with them for their looks. How can they do this?

The traditional solution (per rom coms, etc) is to start out looking extremely plain (but with a great personality), meet someone who is way out of your league visually but forced into your proximity for some reason, have them fall in love with your personality despite their initial indifference (hence proving they're serious about you), and then later have a glowup and also see their face go WOW so you know for sure they're also really into your looks.

I think this points at one of the core struggles of the not-just-with-me-for-my-looks problem: we have a weird relationship with things like looks, where we mostly want to be with someone who is 1) not just with us for our looks, but 2) still does extremely enjoy how we look. Even as an extremely gorgeous person who is fed up with people objectifying our gorgeousness, it would be disappointing to meet someone who loves us for who we are but then is like "yeah I mean I'm just tolerating your face because I love you so much." Conditional on them truly liking our personalities, we then do want them to love our looks, after all.

The second problem I see is embodied in the following thought experiment: suppose you're extremely gorgeous, and trying to find someone who isn't just interested in you for your looks. You try to achieve this by making yourself less attractive: wearing unattractive clothes, getting an unattractive haircut, etc. Are you now going to match with people who are interested in your brain (or soul, or spleen?) I think potentially not, you're just going to attract people who are still with you for your looks, at a lower level of looks.

I don't have a solution to this, at all. I think ideally we would encounter each potential partner simultaneously (but separately) in a realm of ideas and a realm of embodiment, and find out who we're attracted to in each realm separately, and then only discover later that Personality_t and Face_t (each of which you liked separately) belong to the same person, congratulations.

Of course, this all doesn't just apply to looks: there are other traits that people have which they want people to like about them, but don't want people who only like that about them. "Being rich" functions in a similar way, as does having a prestigious pedigree. It would be kind of interesting to figure out what ties together the traits that people don't want to be just-liked for; I don't think I've ever heard someone complain that "ugh, I think my date is only into me for my brain and personality, gross," and it would be fun to work out why.

The same basic problem applies outside dating. For example, suppose you have an organization that pays way above market rates. They want to pay well to get The Best People, but they also don't want to have employees who are only with the org for its money. But without extremely careful filtering on hiring, they're liable to end up with employees who are there for the super-high salaries, and it's unclear what they can ultimately do to stop this: if they pay less money, will they get mission-driven people again? Or just people who are doing it for the money at a lower level of pay? Again, I don't know what the solution to this is, I just know that it's a problem.