2025-09-15 23:15:00
This is a dumb topic for a post but it keeps bothering me and I want there to be a canonical link explaining this fallacy.
Here's my latest example: someone online referenced the Latin quote Vox populi, vox Dei – "the voice of the people is the voice of God."
Another person replied that in fact the full quote says the opposite:
|
Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit. |
And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness. |
I see this kind of thing and think, "oh, how interesting!" – it scratches a kind of puzzle-itch in my brain, there is something magnetic about reversals. I think other people feel the same, because the Full Quote Dunk gets a billion reposts.
But then I look up the source and discover I've been lied to: that longer text is in no sense The Full Quote, it's simply one guy's critique of an existing popular phrase. Vox populi, vox Dei was a well-known saying; someone felt that it was incorrect; in order to talk about it he inevitably had to write it out; but the fact that his quote-plus-criticism is longer doesn't make it Full.
Now, Full Quotes don't have some magical truth status; it may well be that the original saying is wrong and the critique is right. In this case the guy doing the critiquing is Alcuin of York, advisor to Charlemagne and "the most learned man anywhere to be found" in the 700s. I am not even the most learned man to be found on this blog, so who am I to say whose vox is whose?
But the people dunking don't actually believe X or not-X based on what the Full Quote says; they just believe not-X for separate reasons,1 and then repost anything that agrees with their preexisting beliefs, especially if it's in Latin and makes them feel smart (but I repeat myself).
Populi: this is bad! Bad arguments are still bad even if the thing they argue for is correct. As the great Alcuin of York said, those people should not be listened to.
[^1]: most likely reason being that their opponents believe X, of course.
2025-09-12 23:05:00
I guess the fact that I'm back means that y'all didn't hate this. If you do, tell Uri and Jehan!
Matt Holden and I are doing a YouTube show about building with AI called --dangerously-skip-permissions. The first episode is “How did we get here?”. Matt and I have been having 1:1 conversations for more than a year now about what tools we’re using and how we’re using them… and now we’re having those conversations in public. I especially enjoy the way that Matt is able to connect what’s happening with LLMs today with previous eras of computing innovation. Give it a listen if that’s your thing!
Matt Holden on Markdown coding
OpenRouter has market share by LLM model. Interesting and unexpected in some ways!
On fact checking with AI. I really enjoyed this one. I have a draft blog post in my head called “Vibe Craft: How to do serious work with AI” but every time I try to write it, it falls flat. This is spiritually related to that.
Office building visits are up among people that live less than 5 miles from their office. As someone who made major life changes during the pandemic, I feel the pang of regret.
“A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” — Napoleon
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” — Mike Tyson
Get the original Good Tokens and other excellent items at jdilla.xyz
2025-09-10 22:15:45
I'm convinced that some amazing ideas never catch on because they have a terrible, unmemorable name. One of those ideas is the (principle underlying the) Wason Selection Task. If you can think of a catchy name for it please send an answer by email or comment, I am desperate for this.
Most of the people in my life are conflict-avoidant (I suspect it's most people in the world, honestly, but there's a chance this is just an example of self-selecting groups).
Accordingly, it's relatively rare to hear anyone directly contradict anyone else on a matter of importance – if someone passionately exclaims X, mostly other people will not-disagree out loud, even if they passionately disagree internally.
The upshot is that the people with the most confident views can't easily tell how popular or unpopular their opinions are with everyone else; I think often they go around feeling gobsmacked that 1) everyone agrees with them about X, and yet 2) the world still doesn't understand.
Of course, there are also lots of things that everyone in the group does agrees about – "pizza is delicious," "Jehan is handsome" – so it's not like "nobody contradicts me when I passionately advocate X" is a sign that people necessarily disagree. But I still think there's signal to be found here, by trying to figure out which things you go into conversations assuming everyone will agree with, and questioning whether they might feel differently if you came in less strong.
A nice thing that is easy to forget to do: when someone does (or is) something nice in your life, think about who introduced you to that person and send them a note.
E.g. A few times now I've connected two people who live in the same city, and discovered only years later that they became good friends, sometimes without even knowing they even met up in the first place. And I'm sure I've similarly forgotten to thank people for an intro that led to a friendship, I don't think it happens unless you actively try to remember to do it. But it's so nice on the receiving side to hear "by the way, me and Jo hang out all the time now, thanks for putting us in touch!"
One additional benefit of sending a note to thank someone when a different person does something nice in your life is that it gets through the defences of the Person Who Doesn't Easily Take Compliments – if you tell them they're great they'll deflect, but if you thank them for an intro to someone great they can more easily accept the compliment.
2025-09-08 22:15:12
There's a lot of ways to (potentially) ruin your life at 18: addiction, bad marriages, get pregnant without wanting to, commit a crime that gets you locked up for decades.
I think a lot of us have a very uncomfortable relationship with the rights of 18 year olds. It's our societally-defined cutoff for Adulthood, and modern western individualism fundamentally rests on the premise that all adults are equal (except for some exceptions).
And yet, ~everyone over the age of 19 thinks that their 18 year old self was dumb and made very bad decisions.
I hear people making all kinds of ad-hoc arguments about this, often citing the claim that our brains aren't fully formed till 25, though to my knowledge that's a made-up cutoff at an arbitrary point on an asymptote.
The arguments are usually very selective, claiming that we can't hold 18-25 year olds responsible for X, without asking what that implies about their ability to Y.
Anyway.
When I think about the ways that people I know personally have seriously and negatively impacted their lives for decades, a lot of it comes down to signing contracts at age 18.
Some of them committed themselves to government-sponsored programs that irrevocably tied them to terrible jobs for a decade or so; many many others got into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, often for graduate degrees that have proven almost-worthless.
My friend group is unfathomably selection-biased, and shouldn't count for much. But I recently stumbled on a personal finance podcast[^1] where the (generally working-class) guests describe their financial issues.
From the few episodes I've listened to, the original sin for many of them is a massive student, car or medical loan they took out at 18.
I'm not sure where this leaves me. I understand that if you ban long-term-contracts for 18 year olds, the alternative isn't magical free money for 18 year olds, it's that they wouldn't be able to get that house/car/masters degree at all. It's obviously illiberal (in the classic sense) to prevent people freely agreeing to contracts, and I care a lot about classical liberty.
And yet.... something sits uneasily for me about allowing someone who days or months previously was not allowed to do basic things without their parents' permission suddenly being able to commit themselves to obligations that can haunt them for longer than they've yet been alive.
Could we have a phase-in? Could we cap how much you can borrow at 18, or how many years of your life you can commit yourself to something, and then raise it a bit every year till your mid-20s?
I don't know, I just don't know.
[^1]: I'm not naming this show because I partly hate it. The host is aggressively rude to the guests, which I guess could be justified if it functioned as a wake-up-call for the guest, but seems like it's mostly for the audience's amusement. He also reads ads for financial services companies that I think are a terrible idea for a financially un-savvy audience.
2025-09-05 23:04:17
Hello! I'm James, Uri's friend and Atoms vs. Bits's biggest fan. Uri and Jehan have graciously invited me to share my weekly-ish list of things that have caught my attention. Let us know how you like it!
Replacing lawns with wildflowers 💐. When I’ve made it, I won’t tell anyone, but there will be signs.
Cate Hall on how to increase your surface area for luck, which is one of the biggest things I learned from Henry Oliver’s book on Second Acts. Cate is quickly rising up the list of people whose work I rush to read. Along the same lines: How to Get Ahead in DC.
“Even the context has context”. Wherein Soren blows my mind and sells me on decentralized edge intelligence.
Should I have kissed her? Some how I missed this one in August of 2022. It’s my favorite type of Uri post.
How can you not love this? A 3,700-year-old Babylonian clay tablet holds a trigonometric table more accurate than any today. Humans are amazing and beautiful.
Drones are downing helicopters.
Yucca man. I’m a sucker for “does this Bigfoot like creature actually exist” stories (see season 1 of the Wild Thing podcast), but this one also has so many great Southern California places in it. Like taking a mini vacation.
Nuclear batteries. “A 157W Voyager-based RTG that launched in 1977 will produce about 88W today.” The clean up problem seems insurmountable.
Noah Smith, Dan Wang, and James Cham talk about Dan’s new book Breakneck.
Why Swiss Kids Walk to School Alone. This is one of the things that made me fall in love with Switzerland. They do this as 5 year olds! Part of it is safety but part of it is teaching agency. The walk to school is a part of the education. This should be our aspiration for American neighborhoods.
Your idea sets the ceiling for your videos potential and other good advice from Paddy Galloway.
Chips on shoulders put chips in pockets.
What’s the steel man case for formality?
What does our society overemphasize now in a way that will seem silly in 25 years?
The secret to engineering is embracing that getting new errors equals progress.
2025-09-03 22:14:06
When people ask me if I play chess, I usually say "I know how the pieces move." And I think this is much more helpful than e.g. "I'm not very good", which could cover a very large range of abilities depending on modesty: "I know how the pieces move" succinctly conveys 1) I am able to play chess with you 2) I don't know any strategy.
I often want similar phrases for other activities, ways to unambiguously convey how good/bad at something I truly am, without the added layer of self-presentation questions. I suppose in this case it's easier because I'm bad at the thing: "do you play chess?" "yes my ELO is 2000" would also convey true and precise information, but is harder to say without sounding like a brie.
Organizing group-trips is incredibly costly for the one person who organizes, both in terms of time/effort/energy and even financial risk or carrying costs. In theory you could split the work between multiple people but in practice this never seems to work. It's also repeatedly the same person in each group who does the trip-organizing.
How would you feel if that person charged, say, 20% of the trip cost as a tip? Friend-of-the-blog H says everyone would hate this, and I assume he's right. But the alternative is not having trips at all, because nobody is motivated enough to organize them.