2026-01-19 15:37:43
This is one of the worst things you can do for your own intellect, what you think the social benefits may be. I know some reasonable number of famous people, and I just do not trust the media accounts of their failings and flaws. I trust even less the barbs I read on the internet. I am not claiming to know the truth about them (most of them, at least), but I can tell when the people writing about them know even less.
I am not saying everyone is an angel — sometimes you come to learn negative information that in fact is not part of the standard press reports or internet whines.
If you are going to possibly be working with someone on a concrete and important project, absolutely you should be trying to form an assessment of their moral quality and reliability. (And you are allowed to do it once per electoral race, when deciding for whom to vote.) But if not, spending real time and energy morally judging famous and semi-famous people is one of the best and quickest ways to make yourself stupider. Focus on the substantive arguments for and against various policies and propositions, not the people involved. Furthermore, smart people do not seem to be immune from this form of mental deterioration. Here is my 2008 post on “pressing the button.”
A corollary of this is that if you read an internet comment that, when a substantive issue is raised, switches to judging a famous or semi-famous person, the quality of that comment is almost always low. Once you start seeing this, you cannot stop seeing it.
Addendum: If by any chance you are wondering how to make yourself smarter, learn how to appreciate almost everybody, and keep on cultivating that skill.
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2026-01-19 13:51:09
Salvador is 17, and is an EV winner from Portugal. Here is the transcript. Here is the list of discussed topics:
0:00 – We’re discovering talent quicker than ever 5:14 – Being in San Francisco is more important than ever 8:01 – There is such a thing like a winning organization 11:43 – Talent and conformity on startup and big businesses 19:17 – Giving money to poor people vs talented people 22:18 – EA is fragmenting 25:44 – Longtermism and existential risks 33:24 – Religious conformity is weaker than secular conformity 36:38 – GMU Econ professors religious beliefs 39:34 – The west would be better off with more religion 43:05 – What makes you a philosopher 45:25 – CEOs are becoming more generalists 49:06 – Traveling and eating 53:25 – Technology drives the growth of government? 56:08 – Blogging and writing 58:18 – Takes on @Aella_Girl, @slatestarcodex, @Noahpinion, @mattyglesias, , @tszzl, @razibkhan, @RichardHanania, @SamoBurja, @TheZvi and more 1:02:51 – The future of Portugal 1:06:27 – New aesthetics program with @patrickc.
Self-recommending, here is Salvador’s podcast and Substack more generally.
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2026-01-19 06:43:10
Now, many sweeps, including those in the Firkins family business, say the trade has been experiencing an improbable resurgence.
According to the National Association of Chimney Sweeps, demand has been bolstered by high energy prices, the popularity of wood-burning stoves and an international climate that has prompted warnings that electricity supplies could be vulnerable to attack by hostile states like Russia.
“People are thinking, ‘Let’s have a backup, let’s have a fire, let’s have a stove in case the electricity goes off,’” said Martin Glynn, the president of the chimney sweeps association, whose membership has risen to about 750 today, from about 590 in 2021. “If you have the ability to burn logs or smokeless fuel, you can keep cooking and have some heating. There is a big increase in demand and people are reopening their fireplaces.”
On a recent day, he said, three people had booked training courses. The association’s membership now includes 40 female sweeps. “It’s alive and kicking,” he said of the group, adding: “We don’t send little boys up chimneys any more, instead it’s CCTV and smoke testing equipment. It’s almost like being a chimney technician.”
Here is more from the NYT, via Mike Rosenwald.
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2026-01-19 00:09:32
Here is the link, I should add that in addition to my enthusiasm for the students, the faculty also seemed quite good, most of all knowledgeable and open. I know very little about how the school is run, you might try this short piece from Arnold Kling, who has been visiting there for a week.
Here is an excerpt from Tim:
Tyler made a remark that he didn’t think fighting grade inflation matters very much. I respect his opinion, but I think he’s wrong. And I hope I can change his mind. Here’s why I care so much about it, and why I think a GPA target is the only — literally the only — effective solution. A college cannot fight grade inflation with rhetoric and goals and hand-wringing. Genuine academic rigor requires strong limits on what faculty can do with grades.
Professors everywhere have a large incentive to give higher grades. The situation has inflated asymptotically to the ceiling for 8 decades, particularly at the Ivies…
At University of Austin, all professors have to give an average grade of B. Here is more from Tim:
Consequences?
Some of you have asked me what I think of the recent Politico article on University of Austin. First, I have not been involved in any of the cited disputes, so I cannot speak to their details. Second, I do not not not speak for the University at all (while I am on the Advisory Board, it is an unpaid position with no authority or fiduciary responsibility and my advice/consultation has been on the AI topic). But I would make these more general points:
a. If a university decided to be based explicitly on classical liberal perspectives and principles, I would think that is great (not saying what is the best way to describe U. Austin, this is a general observation). I would however worry that the decision is not sustainable over time at much scale, given the career incentives of so many of the people who will be hired.
b. If that decision to be “classically liberal in orientation” required the administration to set some general principles to try to assure that the faculty at said school did not evolve into being like the faculty almost everywhere else, I would be fine with that.
c. I think such a school, over time, if it stuck to its principles, would end up with more de facto free speech than most other institutions of higher education.
d. I am glad that Notre Dame and Georgetown are Catholic schools, that UC Santa Cruz was founded as a kind of hippie school, that there is Yeshiva, the New School, HBCUs, and so on. I favor schools being “more different” ideologically in a variety of directions, including those I do not agree with, which of course will cover the majority of cases. My main objection is that many of the “Catholic” schools for instance are not very Catholic anymore, having been taken over by a kind of rampant general professionalism. I hope University of Austin avoids that fate. I should add that I am well aware that the general rise in fixed costs makes such endeavors much harder to sustain these days. I would like to reverse that general trend, and that is one reason for my interest in online and AI-oriented methods in education.
e. To innovate, more and more schools will have to move away from the old “faculty control” model. This change is already substantially underway, sans the innovation however.
f. Failure to contextualize is often the greatest “sin” of media articles offering coverage of disputes.
Returning to the University of Austin, right now their entering class is about 100 students, and they offer 35 classes a semester. It is one floor in an office building, and it is not costing any taxpayer dollars. It is a tiny, tiny drop in the bucket. GMU alone has about 40,000 students, and is basically a city. My Principles class this last fall alone had about 3.5x more students than are in the entire U. Austin.
If you are very upset by whatever is going on at U. Austin, or not going on, or whatever…I would say that is the real story.
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2026-01-18 16:25:25
From a new paper by Ariel Coremberg and Emilio Ocampo:
This paper challenges the increasingly popular view that Argentina’s economy performed relatively well under the corporatist import substitution industrialization (CISI) regime until the mid-1970s, and that its much-debated decline began only after 1975. Instead, it advances the alternative hypothesis that although real GDP per capita growth during this period was high by Argentina’s historical standards, it was low relative to the rest of the world, to typical comparator countries, and to what was achievable given the country’s factor endowments and investment levels. Distortions in relative prices and systemic capital misallocation generated significant inefficiencies that constrained economic dynamism and limited productivity gains. We support this hypothesis using a range of empirical methodologies—including comparative GDP per capita ratios, convergence analysis, growth accounting, and cyclical peak-to-peak analysis— complemented by historical interpretation. Although post-1955 modifications to the CISI regime temporarily improved performance, by the early 1970s it had exhausted its capacity to sustain growth. The prolonged stagnation that followed the 1975 crisis can be explained by the inability of successive governments to overcome the resistance of entrenched interest groups and thus complete the transition to an open market economy. Abrupt regime reversals fostered social conflict, political instability, and macroeconomic uncertainty, all of which undermined the sustained productivity gains required for long-term growth.
Via the excellent Samir Varma.
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2026-01-18 13:03:15
We explore the role of immediate next door neighbors in affecting children’s later life occupation choice. Using linked historical census records for over 6 million boys and 4 million girls, we reconstruct neighborhood microgeography to estimate how growing up next door to someone in a particular occupation affects a child’s probability of working in that occupation as an adult, relative to other children who grew up farther away on the same street. Living next door to someone as a child increases the probability of having the same occupation as them 30 years later by about 10 percent. As an additional source of exogenous variation in exposure to next door neighbors, we exploit untimely neighbor deaths and find smaller and insignificant exposure effects for children who grew up next to a neighbor with an untimely death. We find larger exposure effects when intensity of exposure is expected to be higher, and document larger occupational transmission in more connected neighborhoods and when next door neighbors are the same race or ethnicity or have children of similar ages. Childhood exposure to next door neighbors has real economic consequences: children who grow up next to neighbors in high income or education occupations see significant gains in adult income and education, even relative to other children living on the same street, suggesting that neighborhood networks significantly contribute to economic mobility.
That is from a recent paper by Michael Andrews, Ryan Hill, Joseph Price, and Riley Wilson. Via Kris Gulati.
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