2025-08-01 22:09:45
Sometimes I'll remember something bad that happened and get mad or sad about it, and have a strange sensation that I'm not sure whether 1) I remembered the thing and then got mad/sad about it, or 2) my body was getting mad/sad first, and then my brain cast around for a Reason, and it picked up one of my main existing madness/sadness reasons to superimpose on the feeling.
I suspect my ideal amount of alcohol-drinking would be one moderately-soused evening every quarter, and no other alcohol in between. But I find it incredibly hard to maintain this: I can go teetotal perfectly fine, but as soon as I have a happy evening of drinking again it re-opens some kind of mental gate, and the next time I'm at dinner and someone else orders a cocktail I find myself unwittingly ordering one as well.
I don't really know what to do with/about this. I assume it's partly a decision-rule thing, my brain needs a simple decision rule and "I don't drink" is simple, while "I drink sometimes" is an invitation to endless difficult in-the-moment choices.
Some religions create tradition-and-community structured drinking decision rules, so you can get drunk occasionally without getting drunk often, but without that community structure I don't know a good solution.
I think the same problem exists for lots of other products – other drugs, of course, but also things like meat-eating, where I think a very reasonable position is "it's good to eat a small amount of meat but bad to eat a large amount of meat," except that psychologically it's much easier to be a Person Who Never Eats Meat than to constantly evaluate whether to eat it on each occasion. I don't know what to do about this.
2025-07-30 22:22:23
To run for president (in the US), you usually have to be a senator or a governor, which means coming from a state where your party is electable. This means ~half the politicians in the country[^1] are unlikely to become president simply because their state is not realistically going to elevate them to the necessary stepping stone, through no real fault of their own.
You could argue that this isn't actually true, for a number of reasons:
On the other hand, you might expect the best national candidates to be blue politicians in red states or vice-versa: obviously these candidates are unusually well-placed to understand their political rivals and speak across the aisle, etc. "Swing State Governor" is a sought-after presidential archetype for basically this reason, but in some ways a state-defying politician would be even better.
I'm not sure it's a coincidence that the most transformative figure in modern American politics is a red politician from a deep blue state, who got into office by bypassing the traditional senator/governor route.
Finally, I think it's worth noting that I might be committing a common fallacy here. Basically: "leapfrog from mayor to cabinet" or "shift your entire state's politics to the right/left" are incredibly hard to do, but so is becoming president. Maybe politicians from states that disagree with them are deeply disadvantaged in the presidential race, but maybe that doesn't matter: in order to win the presidential race, you should also be the kind of person who could have massively outperformed in an unfavorable state political environment.
I'm not sure this is true – sometimes even a generational talent needs stepping-stone experiences to unlock their full potential – but I do think it's an interesting fallacy that people often fall into.
I have deliberately kept this post free of specific names, would appreciate if you do the same in comments.
[^1]: it's complicated: more than half the states are in play for any given politician (your party's states + swing states), but some of the largest states are safe for one party or another, I don't know exactly how it shakes out.
2025-07-28 22:50:19
At the best cocktail bar in New York[^1] you can get a cocktail for about $18.
At various other mediocre cocktail bars, you can get a mediocre cocktail for $16. (If you really care to you can go to a classy hotel and get a mediocre cocktail for $32).
My question is basically: why?
Surely, either:
1) better cocktail-making-technique should spread among bars, such that there isn't as big a quality-gap between the good ones and the bad ones,
or
2) the best cocktail bars could charge higher prices
This isn't (I think) unique to cocktails: the best croissants (etc) I can find are maybe 20% more expensive, which to me feels completely inadequate to the difference in quality. Why don't these better places either franchise themselves and out-compete everyone else, or charge 2x (or more) what the mediocre spots charge?
One answer is that the diffusion of quality does happen, it just takes time. I can't personally vouch for this but I'm told third-wave coffeeshops dragged up the average quality of coffee everywhere, it just took 20 years to do it.
Another answer is that the "product" component of the price of your vittles in big cities trends towards zero: if $14 of the price of your drink goes to rent and taxes, and only $2-4 goes to actually making drinks, then maybe the high-quality places are indeed charging twice as much on that component.
One more answer is that other people just like different stuff than I do. But I don't think that's an adequate explanation: I fully understand why there's a market for (say) watery American beer, which is completely detached from the market for high-end cocktails, and there's no reason why the ratio of these two prices should match my opinions about their relative merits.
And yet, I'm not sure I can truly believe that there are people who value (say) a badly-made Gin and Tonic equal to a well-made Last Word[^2], so I think the relative prices of those two things should vary accordingly. But perhaps this is one more of those taste-issues of which nothing can be said, and I'm just confusing my is and my ought.
The title of this blogpost is borrowed from Adam, whose Things Could Be Better you can read here .
[^1]: I believe it's Dutch Kills, and I believe $18 is correct, but maybe it's gone up again. I'm cheating slightly because Dutch Kills is in Queens and the best cocktail bars in Manhattan charge higher, but somewhere $18-22 is market as of summer 2025. I still don't think this is at all proportionate to the quality gap.
Incidentally, the funniest cocktail bar in New York is Sunken Harbor Club, which is pirate themed, and has a unique combination of Tiki Bar-level decoration with A-grade (though not A*) drinks. It's funniest if you don't know what you're in for, so I recommend taking someone and not-telling them about the theme beforehand. This is extra funny because it's on top of Gage & Tollner, a very classy oyster-bar-looking establishment which you walk into beforehand, such that going up the stairs to Sunken Harbor feels ridiculous.
[^2]: the best cocktail I ever had (in my memory, at least) was called Coffee & Cigarettes from The Violet Hour in Chicago. It is not the same as the Coffee & Cigarettes from Death & Co in New York, the cigarette came from tobacco bitters rather than smoky whisky. I can't for the life of me find a recipe online, if you know it (or how to find it) I beg you to contact me.
2025-07-25 22:09:29
One of my guiltless pleasures is watching this new generation of youtube gameshows where a panel of funny people has to Guess the X, e.g. which of the contestants behind the curtain is secretly a 5 year old child while the others are all adults?
I would have thought these shows would design their scenarios so that it's genuinely very difficult to guess the answer, and the reveal at the end has stakes and meaning, but instead most of them have solutions that are flagrantly obvious within the first 4 minutes, to the point where I have to assume the producers are specifically aiming for that.
The panelists don't pretend to not-know the answer either, they'll often spend 40 minutes making jokes about how "obviously number 4 is the child, everyone else here can draw social security." Why does this work? Why is it still interesting even though there's no drama?
Francis Bacon had a model of three types of scientists: "The men of experiment are like the ant, they only collect and use; the reasoners resemble spiders, who make cobwebs out of their own substance. But the bee takes a middle course: it gathers its material from the flowers of the garden and of the field, but transforms and digests it by a power of its own." That is, the ants are empiricists, using material from outside themselves; the spiders are theorists, using only the material inside their own selves/minds; the bees take the outside world and process it internally to create something new.
I think this is a good model for podcasters: Many podcasters are ants, they just take external events and rearrange them for you; some are spiders, spinning up thoughts without reference to external material; few are bees, taking external events and processing them internally to give you something new.
2025-07-24 00:09:48
I was thinking about the famous behavioral norm "no sex before marriage," and immediately had the thought that there's a weirdly wide space of unclaimed possible no-sex-before rules.
Then I realized that this isn't exactly true, there are other no-sex-before rules.
And then I thought I would catalogue some existing and could-be-existing rules:
I'm very intrigued by "no sex before love" – I don't think I've ever heard anyone even talk about it as a possible norm, but it's got an intuitive plausibility to it. Sure, it's less concrete than marriage or n dates, and to the extent you're waiting for mutual love then the other person could lie about it. But it seems philosophically appealing, and I'm surprised it doesn't have more traction.
Another one I'm interested in is "no sex before you meet their parents" (or, less effectively, best friend). It feels like "willing to introduce you to their parents" is at least for some people a credible signal of genuine interest. But perhaps it's too confounded by different people's varying baseline parent-introduction-willingness to work. "Willing to introduce you to their colleagues/friends/something" maybe has some of the same impact, but not all of it.
2025-07-21 21:54:21
I learned about prisoners' dilemmas in college and didn't find them super useful/applicable. A lot of the contexts seemed very contrived, both the literal prisoner example and the macro-political, cold-warish vignettes. It was a fun puzzle to think about but I didn't believe it would ever affect my life.
Then I learned about corporate America.
Corporate America now seems full, to me, of very real prisoners dilemmas where the parties really do act accordingly. For example:
I think these kinds of problems are at some times the dominant dynamic in a large organization (including, of course, being dominant over "doing the actual work that the organization supposedly does").
A final, important twist is this: in corporate America, the outcome of failing a prisoner's dilemma is getting removed from the game. As a result, over time, organizations gets filled entirely with people who defect. Knowing this increases your proclivity to defect. And so on.