So if you have a project that will improve the world, as your friend, I suggest considering applying. You can write a project, what it would do, why people should think you are competent and how much you’d have to be paid to do it. That would take about 10 minutes and for a few such applications (1%? 10%?) it would be hugely worth it.

I think people don’t go out on a limb enough and this is a funder unusually willing (I think) to fund strange projects or untried poeple. So if you have an idea that has been stewing, bang it down.

https://www.lightconecommons.com/apply

Deadline tomorrow, 23:59 in any timezone.

I disagree.

I think what they mean is that you should be willing to take new arguments on board. That we should change our minds when presented with new evidence (and be willing to). And maybe that’s right if you have a small social circle and you’re meeting someone different to you for the first time. But I have 30,000 followers on Twitter and engage in multiple intellectual sparring matches a day, many of my friends are evangelicals, UK right wingers or bay area liberals. I am not lacking for content.

So implicit within the request is to be more open-minded to good ideas or sometimes, to me. This is a much flimsier request.

See what I need is to be more judicious—to triage the conversations coming in and engage with the ones that are actually likely to change my mind, or that are important somehow. Or that come from people who have a forecasting track record, or who have made a lot of money.

The thing the “be more open-minded” people miss is that changing your mind takes energy. Open-mindedness has a cost. And I am already near my limit. The advice then implicitly resolves to one of two things: develop huge new amounts of capacity, or be more closed-minded somewhere else to free up space. And it’s kind of exhausting to say this at the moment of challenge. Sometimes I prefer to say “No”.

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I generally think that there is an underrated emotional component to changing one’s mind. That one often has to feel safe or relaxed. And unlimited open-mindedness doesn’t cause this in me. If I am at conferences for too long, able to be talked to by anyone, I want to go hide somewhere. This is how I feel about taking every new idea on board also. It gives me a burst of high cortisol (which is probably partly why I do it)1.

What about people in general? Again, I tend to think “be more calibrated in your open-mindedness.” Are you in a new space, with kinds of people you haven’t met before? Or full of much wiser people than you tend to hang out with? I recommend being open-minded for a day or a week. Then going back and thinking about it, perhaps writing it down.

Perhaps be more openminded when reading community notes or prediction markets or wikipedia. Things where there is some mechanism that generally causes coherent things to float to the top. Perhaps be much more willing to take the seriously the first disagreement of each day and engage with it seriously, perhaps change your mind2.

Overall I think people worry about epistemic lock-in. That if we stop being open-minded then we might get locked into bad decisions. And sure, this is a risk, but but I think too much open-mindedness can lead to harms too.

I recall reading one of those books telling white people how not to be racist. At the end of the first chapter it said that if I felt defensive, this was a sign that the book was especially for me. So I put it down. I know what it looks like when either answer (not feeling defensive or feeling defensive) leads to the same conclusion (one is probably racist). It’s a cult-y tactic. But uhhh, what happened to a lot of white liberals who engaged with such works and took on board any level of criticism. Are they glad of their open-mindedness? How did many vote in the last US election? I am not so sure that huge open-mindedness was the optimal strategy here3.

So open-mindedness in general? It’s a mixed bag. There are many ideas out there and most of them are bad. I do not need to engage with them all. I am much more willing to update on someone with a track record than a reply guy with a blank profile picture. Most people implicitly know this—they’re more open-minded with their friends than with strangers4. So next time someone tells you to be more open-minded, consider if you should be more closed-minded to them!

I am trying to advance the technology described in this video.

Happy to answer questions. If I am a world-class expert on anything, it’s this1.

https://www.ted.com/talks/keith_coleman_jay_baxter_how_community_notes_reduce_viral_misinformation

https://nathanpmyoung.substack.com/p/...

The practical effect: Anthropic is excluded from government contracts. The symbolic effect: if the government is willing to do it to Anthropic, perhaps they are willing to do it to anyone.

It’s a shocking move. That will resonate beyond its legal effects.

As part of the Metaculus Spring Tournament, where I am this season’s paid antagonist1, I’ve been researching the following question “Will Anthropic be a designated supply chain risk on May 1, 2026?” The Metaculus currently puts it at 50/50. I’m at 43%.

But I’m at 91% that Anthropic will still be de facto blocked at that time.

Here’s my Monte Carlo model and the historical data that informs it2.

What “Supply Chain Risk” Actually Means

The relevant statutes — 10 U.S.C. § 3252 and 41 U.S.C. § 4713 — give the Secretary of Defense authority to exclude vendors from contracts when they pose unacceptable supply chain risk.

10 U.S.C. § 3252 focuses on the DoD, 41 U.S.C. § 4713 affects federal agencies more broadl3y. 4713 is more vague on how it is meant to apply, but there is a chilling effect, which is why Anthropic is taking this to court. Federal agencies will stop doing business regardless. Private businesses that serve Federal agencies may also. The designation is immediate.

But that’s not all. President Trump truthed that all agencies should immediately cease using Anthropic’s technology. This too has real world effects. Agency heads are appointed by President Trump and will not easily contradict him. Many private companies wish to signal cooperation with this administration. And these effects will very likely not be overturned by an Anthropic legal victory. I’ll cover these at the end.

So what might things look like for the two statutes on May 1st?

Path 1: Courts Block It (~49%)

Five days after the designation, Anthropic filed two simultaneous lawsuits4:

• On in the Northern District of California, challenging the entire exclusion — the §3252 designation, the Presidential Directive, and all agency actions taken in response — and seeking a TRO and preliminary injunction that would block them

• One in D.C., challenging the §4713 designation specifically (statute requires that challenge be filed there)

The legal arguments are strong. Anthropic’s core claim is that the Pentagon stretched the supply chain risk statute beyond its statutory authority — it was designed for procurement decisions, not as a general-purpose tool to punish a domestic company for its AI ethics policies. There are also First Amendment dimensions: the designation came shortly after Anthropic publicly refused to remove restrictions on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use. Legal commentary has been blunt — Lawfare called the designation something that “won’t survive first contact with the legal system.”

Base rates

The closest precedent comes from the 2021 wave of “Chinese Military Company” designations under EO 139595 and the 1260H that followed it. The DoD designated dozens of companies with little public explanation. Several sued for Preliminary injunctions (PIs) to hold up the effects until the case was decided in court. All cases where the company sued that I can find details of are below. In the few cases that sought emergency relief, they got it and either won their cases or the Government withdrew.

• Xiaomi — CMC list (EO 13959). Sought PI → granted day 39. DoD withdrew.

• Luokung — CMC list (EO 13959). Sought PI → granted day 62. Not re-listed.

• DJI — Section 1260H list. No PI sought → lost on merits after 18 months.

• Hesai — Section 1260H list. No PI sought → lost on merits after 18 months.

• AMEC — Section 1260H list. Sought PI → DoD voluntarily removed before ruling.

• YMTC — Section 1260H list. Sought PI → pending (filed Dec 2025).

127 more that didn’t sue.

There are other cases, such as Huawei and Esquel, but those aren’t directly comparable. Huawei was banned by an act of Congress that named it specifically, not by an executive agency decision. Esquel challenged a Commerce Department listing, but the court found Commerce was using that tool exactly as intended. Generally, courts defer much more to Congress than to executive agencies on national security.

The judge

The N.D. Cal case drew Judge Rita F. Lin, a Biden appointee. In Thakur v. Trump, a case involving APA violations and First Amendment retaliation against government contractors, Judge Lin granted a preliminary injunction on a similar legal theory Anthropic is advancing. The 9th Circuit upheld her reasoning on appeal.

That doesn’t guarantee the same outcome. But it seems likely to me. The model puts P(N.D. Cal grants relief) at 83%.

The two-statute problem

Here’s the wrinkle that makes this harder than it looks. The cases are about different statutes, and they live in different courts.

§3252 (DoD-only procurement exclusion) is challenged in N.D. Cal. That’s the case before Judge Lin, and it’s moving fast — hearing scheduled March 24.

§4713 (government-wide exclusion) is challenged in the D.C. Circuit. By statute, challenges to these orders must be filed there. The D.C. Circuit is a separate court with its own timeline.

For the Metaculus question to resolve NO, both statutes need to be blocked. If the N.D. Cal injunction only covers §3252, then §4713 keeps Anthropic locked out of federal agencies. As I’ve mentioned above, this may be the case even if both are overturned, since President Trump has still make his view clear, but the Metaculus resolution criteria seem very reasonable to me.

The key question: could Judge Lin’s N.D. Cal injunction reach broadly enough to cover §4713 too?

Anthropic’s complaint names five counts, including ultra vires Presidential Directive and APA §558 challenges that sweep broadly. The prayer for relief asks the court to block “all Challenged Actions.” But “Challenged Actions” is defined as the Presidential Directive, the Secretarial Order, and actions taken in response — it does not explicitly mention the §4713/FASCSA designation.

I give the probability of the N.D. Cal injunction covering §4713 at 45%. Not impossible — the complaint’s broad framing could pull it in — but the complaint wasn’t drafted to target §4713, presumably deliberately, and Judge Lin might reasonably say that’s the D.C. Circuit’s job.

The D.C. Circuit is the backup. Model gives it a 70% chance of granting relief, but its timeline is slower and less certain. It just might not have judged by May 1st.

Timing

The N. D. Cal hearing is scheduled March 24th. The model expects a ruling within days of that hearing.

I give the D.C. ruling a median of March 30th, 21 days after filing.

The May 1 deadline is 53 days from filing. Xiaomi’s PI came at day 39. Luokung’s at day 62. Over 99% of simulations have at least one court ruling before May 1.

The stay risk

If a court blocks the designation, the government can seek an emergency stay while it appeals. This administration has been aggressive about stays. The model gives an 85% chance the government seeks one.

But getting a stay granted is hard. The combined probability through the 9th Circuit and potential SCOTUS escalation is about 22%6. Neither of the Xiaomi/Luokung blocks were successfully stayed. The government would need to show a “reasonable probability of success on appeal,” which is tough when the lower court just found your process arbitrary and capricious.

Path 2: The Government Withdraws (~8%)

The government could pull the designation at any time. In the model, this mostly happens after courts have ruled — either as a face-saving exit after losing (the Xiaomi pattern, where DoD called it a “mutual agreement” ~60 days after the PI) or as a quiet removal (the AMEC pattern, no announcement).

About 8% of simulations end with a government withdrawal. Most of these happen after court setbacks, not before. I think that Anthropic is quite minded to do a deal with the Government, as long as it doesn’t cross their red lines, but I expect most of the probability mass of that after May 1st. The model gives 6.6% unilateral withdrawal, 1.6% withdrawal via deal.

The Polymarket market on “Will Anthropic make a deal with the Pentagon?” prices a deal at about 14% before May 1st (at time of writing). My model’s deal path before May 1st is much smaller7. This hasn’t been the central focus of the model, but I’m loath to push it up based on vibes. Anthropic is currently blocked, the courts might rule in the Government’s favour, and there can be stays afterwards and appeals (likely after our deadline). I think unless Anthropic is going to cross their red lines (very unlikely) a deal comes if the Government faces setbacks, not in the next month.

Path 3: The Designation Stands (~43%)

This is the scenario the Metaculus community is roughly pricing in. My simulation agrees it’s substantial.

The biggest YES path isn’t “courts reject Anthropic.” It’s the two-statute structure.

~13% — N.D. Cal rules narrowly in Anthropic’s favour, no DC judgment, §4713 survives. Judge Lin blocks §3252, but her injunction doesn’t reach FASCSA. The D.C. Circuit hasn’t ruled yet, or rules against Anthropic. The government-wide exclusion stays in place. This is the single most likely YES outcome and it’s the one most forecasters seem to be missing.

~12% — Court blocked, but stay granted. A court issues the PI, the government gets an emergency stay reinstating the designation and this runs through May 1st.

~12% — N.D. Cal denies relief outright. Judge Lin rules in favour of the Government, likely on national security grounds. Not the most likely outcome given her track record, but not negligible.

~5% — Both courts deny relief. Everything goes wrong for Anthropic. Both courts find the designation lawful.

~1% — Limbo. A catch all set of weird outcomes. Neither court rules before May 1. Very unlikely given the March 24 hearing.

The Full Monte Carlo

What Metaculus “NO” Actually Means

One thing worth flagging: Metaculus resolving NO does not mean Anthropic gets its government business back. The supply chain risk designation is one of several mechanisms keeping Anthropic out. Even if the courts block it:

• The Presidential Directive ordering agencies to “cease all use of Anthropic products” is a separate instrument. A narrow injunction might not touch it.

• The administration could issue new restrictions under IEEPA or the Defense Production Act. I haven’t thought deeply about this, but I give that about 10% before May 1st.

• No contracting officer wants to be the first to sign an Anthropic deal while the White House is actively hostile.

The model estimates a 91% chance Anthropic remains effectively blocked even if the designation is lifted8. The Metaculus question is a legal question, not a practical one. I can see this changing via a deal (likely after May 1st or the Government losing so decisively that agencies feel comfortable using Anthropic products again. I think these outcomes are very unlikely before the deadline. Note that since there is a 6 month wind-down period, Anthropic might still have Government business but it’s still tailing off.

Metaculus, I was wrong.

The Metaculus community is at 50% YES. My model produces 43%. This seems close enough that I’ll just go with mine.

The original version of this post had a model that returned 14% and contained the following pair of paragraphs:

The Metaculus community currently prices this at 50% YES — the designation stays in effect. Our model says 14%. That’s a 36-percentage-point gap.

This confuses me, but my current read is that when there isn’t an effortful comment, most of the community doesn’t think that hard about multi-step processes. There is currently a designation in force, will there be in 50 days, who knows? I doubt the median Metaculus user has researched how quickly these tend to be challenged in court.

My bad. Though I still do think this is a bit true. But I’ll defer a bit more in future.

In my defence my forecast was always a blend of my thoughts and Metaculus’ (it never got below 23%). But in this case, I was wrong. I thought that either court could rule on both determinations. Now that seems much less likely.

What I’m Watching

The March 24 hearing. Judge Lin’s line of questioning will signal how she’s reading the case.

The government’s response brief. In Xiaomi, the government’s inability to articulate a factual basis was fatal. I look forward to the DoD’s response.

Whether Judge Lin addresses §4713. If she signals willingness to reach the FASCSA designation, P(CA broad) goes up and YES probability drops.

D.C. Circuit scheduling. Any indication of expedited review there would move the model, making the Metaculus NO resolution more likely (though not changing the overall picture much).

Executive orders. I find President Trump hard to Predict. This model is primarily about the designations, but for a more accurate picture, I am watching his statements on this. There is more the Government can throw at it.

The Bottom Line

My model says 43% chance the designation is still in effect on May 1. And a 91% chance that in some deep sense Anthropic’s business with federal agencies is still tailing off.

Fifty days to find out.

Forecast as of March 12, 2026. Based on a 200,000-simulation Monte Carlo model.

Model details

Model parameter9:

• P(CA grants relief) = 83% — N.D. Cal grants preliminary injunction

• P(CA broad injunction) = 45% — CA injunction covers §4713 too

• P(DC grants relief) = 70% — D.C. Circuit grants relief

• P(CA stay granted) = 22% — Stay granted (9th Cir + SCOTUS combined)

• P(DC stay granted) = 12% — Stay granted on DC ruling

• P(govt seeks stay) = 85% — Govt seeks emergency stay

• CA ruling median = 19 days — Median time to CA ruling from filing

• DC ruling median = 21 days — Median time to DC ruling from filing

• Post-PI withdrawal hazard = 0.5%/day — Govt withdrawal rate after PI granted

• Post-stay withdrawal hazard = 0.8%/day — Govt withdrawal rate after stay reinstates

• P(agencies keep complying) = 90% — Agencies obey directive even if designation lifted

• P(new EO before May 1) = 10% — New restrictions under different authority

Sensitivity analysis (sorted by swing):

• P(CA grants relief) 0.65→0.95 — YES moves 54.9%→34.7% — 20.2pp swing

• P(CA broad injunction) 0.20→0.70 — YES moves 48.6%→36.7% — 11.9pp swing

• P(DC grants relief) 0.45→0.80 — YES moves 50.4%→39.7% — 10.7pp swing

• P(CA stay granted) 0.05→0.30 — YES moves 35.6%→45.9% — 10.4pp swing

• DC ruling median 14→35 days — YES moves 42.0%→46.5% — 4.5pp swing

• Post-stay withdrawal hazard 0.001→0.015 — YES moves 44.9%→40.8% — 4.2pp swing

• P(govt seeks stay) 0.70→0.95 — YES moves 40.5%→44.2% — 3.6pp swing

• P(DC stay granted) 0.05→0.25 — YES moves 41.7%→44.5% — 2.8pp swing

• Post-PI withdrawal hazard 0.001→0.01 — YES moves 44.0%→41.3% — 2.8pp swing

• CA ruling median 16→30 days — YES moves 42.6%→42.4% — 0.3pp swing

Model code available to paid subscribers on request, I intend to write more of these behind a paywall, currently I have a lot of analysis on whether there will be an Iran ceasefire and on silver and oil prices. Thanks Metaculus. This analysis took 2 - 5 hours, and the writing (which involved a lot more analysis) about 8 hours. I would charge somewhere between $1000 and $5000 for analyses like these.

• I am a mid- to upper-ranking member of OpenAI or Anthropic.

• I offload some of my shares and wish to give some money away.

• If I want to give to a specific charity or Coefficient, fair enough.

• If I am so wealthy or determined that I can set up my own foundation, also fair enough.

• What do I do if I wish to give away money effectively, but don’t agree with Coefficient’s processes, and haven’t done enough research to have chosen a specific charity?

Is EA prepared to deal with these people?

Notably, to the extent that such people are predictable, I feel like we should have solutions before they turn up, not after they turn up.

What might some of these solutions look like, and which of them currently exist?

Things the Currently exist

Coefficient Giving

It’s good to have a large, trusted philanthropy that runs according to predictable processes. If people like those processes, they can just give to that one.

Manifund

It’s good to have a system of re-granting and such that wealthy individuals can re-grant to people they trust to do the granting in a transparent and trackable way.

The S-Process

The Survival and Flourishing Fund has something called the “S-process” which allocates money based on a set of trusted regranters and predictions about what things they’ll be glad they funded. I don’t understand it1, but it feels like the kind of thing that a more advanced philanthropic ecosystem would use. Good job.

Things that don’t exist fully

A repository or research (~EA forum)

The forum is quite good for this, though I imagine that many documents that are publicly available (Coefficient’s research etc) are not available on the forum and then someone has to find them.

A philanthropic search/chatbot

It seems surprising to me that there isn’t a winsome tool for engaging with research. I built one for 80k but they weren’t interested in implementing it (which is, to be clear, their prerogative).

But let’s imagine that I am a newly minted hundred millionaire. If there were Qualy, a well trusted LLM that would link to pages in the EA corpus and answer questions, I might chat to it a bit? EA is still pretty respected in those circles.

A charity ranker

As Bergman notes, there isn’t some clear ranking of different charities that I know of.

Come on folks, what are we doing? How is our wannabe philanthropist meant to know whether they ought to donate to AI, shrimp welfare or GiveWell. Vibes?2

I am in the process of building such a thing, but this seems like an oversight.

EA community notes

Why is there not a page with legitimate criticisms of EA projects, people and charities that only show if people from diverse viewpoints agree with them.

I think this one is more legitimately my fault, since I’m uniquely placed to built it, so sorry about that, but still, it should exist! It is mechanically appropriate, easy to build and the kind of liberal, self-reflective thing we support with appropriate guardrails.

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A way to navigate the ecosystem

There is probably room for something which is more basic than any of this that helps people decide whether or not they probably want to give to give well or probably to Coefficient Giving or something else. My model is that for a lot of people, the reason they don’t give more money is because they see the money they’re giving as a significant amount, don’t want to give it away badly but don’t want to put in a huge amount of effort to give it well.

One can imagine a site with buzzfeed style questions (or an LLM) which guides people through this process. Consider Anthropics recent interviewing tool. It’s very low friction and elicits opinions. It wouldn’t, I think, be that hard to build a tool which, at the end of some elicitation process, gives suggestions or a short set of things worth reading.

This bullet was suggested by Raymond Douglas, though written by me.

A new approach

Billionaire Stripe Founder Patrick Collison wrote the above tweet. I recommend reading and thinking about it. I think he’s right to say that EA is no longer the default for smart people. What does that world look like? Is EA intimidated or lacking in mojo? Or is there space for public debates with Progress Studies or whatever appears next? Should global poverty work be split off in order to allow it to be funded without the contrary AI safety vibes?

I don’t know, but I am not sure EA knows either and this seems like a problem in a rapidly changing world.

There is a notable advantage for a liberal worldview that is no longer supreme in that we can ask questions we are scared of the answer or of tell people to return when they find stuff. EA not being the only game in town might be a good thing.

Imagine that 10 new EA-adjacent 100 millionaires popped up overnight. What are we missing?

It seems pretty likely that this is the world we are in, so we don’t have to wait for it to happen. If you imagine, for 5 minutes that you are in this world, what would you like to see?

Can we built it before it happens, not after.

If you wish to fund an opportunity ranking tool or EA community notes, please get in touch. If you like my work, consider subscribing—I’m not paid to write article like this.

[A picture of two doors, one that says “$2 billion immediately” in red. The other says “$1 that doubles everyday”]

I chose the green door ninety-three days ago.

At the time, it seemed obviously correct. Not even a close call. The red door offered two billion dollars immediately—a sum so large it would solve every material problem I’d ever face, fund any project I could imagine, and still leave enough to give away amounts that would meaningfully change thousands of lives. But two billion is a number. It has a fixed relationship to the economy, to the things money can buy, to the world.

The green door offered one dollar that doubles every day.

I remember standing there, doing the mental math. Day 30: about a billion dollars. Day 40: over a trillion. Day 50: a quadrillion. The red door would be surpassed before the first month ended, and after that, the gap would grow incomprehensibly fast. Choosing the red door would be like choosing a ham sandwich over a genie’s lamp because you were hungry right now.

So I walked through the green door.

The first few weeks were unremarkable. I had a dollar, then two, then four. A week later I had $64, which felt like finding money in an old jacket. By day twenty I had over a million, and I started getting calls from financial advisors I’d never contacted. By day thirty-one I had crossed the two-billion threshold—officially richer than I would have been behind the red door.

I didn’t understand the problem until day forty-four.

The money, you see, had to exist somewhere. Not philosophically—I mean physically. Digitally. When I checked my bank balance, a computer somewhere had to store that number. And storing the number 2^n requires n bits.

One bit per day. That’s it. That’s the rate at which my fortune’s representation grows. A linear function. Almost comically modest.

But here’s what I’d failed to understand about exponential growth: the value doesn’t care about the representation. The bits grow linearly. The dollars they encode grow exponentially. And dollars make claims on the physical world.

Day forty-four. My balance: 2^44. 17 trillion dollars. A measly sixth of global GDP. The number itself required only 44 bits to store—about 6 letters of text, trivially small from an information-theoretic perspective.

But money is not information. Money is a claim.

The Treasury Department called on day forty-four.

$17 trillion has a specific significance: it’s roughly the M2 money supply of the United States. All the cash, checking deposits, savings accounts, money market funds—everything Americans think of as “money”—adds up to about that much. I now held more than that. In a single account. Attached to a single person.

The man on the phone was very polite. He explained that they weren’t accusing me of anything. They understood this wasn’t counterfeiting, wasn’t fraud, wasn’t any crime they had a name for. He said that for a time they had entertained that hypothesis, but—a note of fear entered his voice—it had been falsified. Now they had other questions. Macroeconomic questions. The kind of questions that, he implied, it would be better for everyone if we discussed in person.

I flew to Washington the next morning. Day forty-five. My balance: $35 trillion. Global GDP is about $100 trillion. I was now worth a third of annual planetary economic output, and by the time my return flight landed, I’d be worth two-thirds.

The meeting was in a room with no windows. There were people from Treasury, the Fed, someone from the Bank for Internal Settlements, and three others who didn’t introduce themselves or their agencies. They were not hostile. But they weren’t friendly either.

“You have to understand our position,” said a woman from the Fed. “You could, at any moment, attempt to purchase anything. Any asset, any commodity, any company. Markets cannot function when a single actor holds infinite potential demand.”

“But I’m not trying to buy anything,” I said. “I don’t want to crash the economy. I just want—” I paused. What did I want? I’d never actually thought about it. The green door had seemed so obviously correct that I’d never considered what I’d do after walking through it.

“It doesn’t matter what you want,” she said. “It matters what you could do. Every market in the world now has to price in the possibility that you wake up tomorrow and decide to corner it. Do you understand? The existence of your account is a systemic risk.”

“And if I don’t agree?” I asked.

One of the men at the back of the room coughed meaningfully. Point taken.

Day forty-seven. $140 trillion. Congress passed the Emergency Monetary Stabilization Act in a rare unanimous vote. The key provision: the federal government would purchase my doubling dollar at fair market value.

I want to be clear about something. They didn’t seize it. They didn’t nationalize my account or invoke eminent domain or declare me an enemy combatant. That would have been simpler, legally cleaner, and probably would have survived constitutional challenge given the circumstances. But I am genuinely unsure if they could have. Don’t screw with a magical dollar. Instead, they bought it. Fair market value. Which, since fair market value was “functionally infinite,” they paid me by issuing a new class of Treasury instrument that would mature in ten thousand years at a value pegged to whatever my dollar would have been worth by then. They paid me $100 million. I pushed for $2 billion but they said I should have walked through the other door.

The math doesn’t work. I know the math doesn’t work. I have a piece of paper that entitles me to a number that could not be written down using all the atoms in the observable universe as ink. The Treasury Department knows this too. Everyone knows this. We performed a legal ritual to transfer ownership of something that had become, in some fundamental sense, ontologically unsafe for a private citizen to possess.

I signed the papers two days later. My balance at transfer: $562 trillion. Enough to buy every asset on Earth and have most of it left over.

Today is day ninety-three. My dollar—the dollar that was mine—is now worth 2^93 dollars. About 10 octillion. If you wrote it out, it would be a one followed by twenty-eight zeros. The global GDP, by comparison, is a one followed by fourteen zeros. My former dollar could purchase the entire world economy about a trillion times over.

Sometimes I wonder what happens on day 200. Or day 300. Or day 1,000. At some point, doesn’t the number become larger than any physical quantity? Larger than the number of atoms in the solar system, then the galaxy, then the observable universe? What is a dollar worth when it could theoretically purchase more matter than exists?

The economists I’ve talked to—and I’ve talked to many, since I’m something of a minor celebrity in certain academic circles, not to mention conspiracist ones—say this is the wrong way to think about it. Money is a social technology, they remind me. It only has meaning within a network of agreements and expectations. A dollar that claims more than reality can provide simply... stops meaning anything. It becomes a very large number attached to the word “dollars” in the same way that “one million happiness points” is a very large number attached to the word “happiness.”

But that’s not quite right either. Because the dollar is still there. Still doubling. Still, in some sense, valid. The government accepted it as legal tender. And I very much doubt they are gonna send it into space. So it’s sat there, doubling, waiting. For what?

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By Magnus Hambleton, Claude Opus 4.5 and me1.

Most of the words in this story were written by AI. Inspired by a viral tweet (the image), Magnus prompted Claude Opus 4.5 to write the first version which got 6 million views on twitter. I then made some edits, which make it a less pure artifact, but in my view a better story.

Magnus is very humble but I think that most of the work here is in noticing the possibility for a story and then prompting it well. Here is his prompt:

Can you write a 1000 word short story in the style of slatestarcodex/scott alexander or jack clark/import AI about a world in which the dollar doubles every day, and the horrifying implications. Eg implications of storing the bits of the dollar value in bank systems, and how the economy is affected by all this money being created. Write it from the perspective of the one who made the choice.

He then added this in response to what he received:

make it mathematically accurate, i.e. bits to store the monetary value will scale linearly with number of days, since it’s doubling and bits also increase the number they can represent by 2^x

Finally, I think the quality of Opus 4.5’s writing is solid and the solutions it comes up with are good. I didn’t ask for the specific solution of a bond pegged to future value, it generated that (as it generated all but about four sentences of text). Claude 4.5 is a useful tool for me in writing fiction.

But anyway, I’m not sharing this just because it’s AI. I also liked it as a story. Please judge it based on that.

Magnus showed Claude the response to the original story. Here is its response:

The readings

There were two readings I’d requested, read by Lucinda and Henry:

Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Won’t he first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.

Luke, chapter 14, verses 31 - 32

Fred and George exchanged worried glances.

“I can’t think of anything,” said George.

“Neither can I,” said Fred. “Sorry.”

Harry stared at them.

And then Harry began to explain how you went about thinking of things.

It had been known to take longer than two seconds, said Harry.

You never called any question impossible, said Harry, until you had taken an actual clock and thought about it for five minutes, by the motion of the minute hand. Not five minutes metaphorically, five minutes by a physical clock.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, Chapter 25

Talk

There are four talks today and frankly I feel sorry for the others. I’m talking about pragmatism, good decision making. What could be more applicable for marriage? What else could you want to talk about? This is the whole shebang. The entirety of the law. I guess they’ll do what they can.

When preparing for this talk, I was struck by how much good decision making matters to Linden and Aria.

First because on one of the most important days of their life, they’re giving 7 minutes to it. There are 100s of you, that’s 700 minutes, so 10 or so hours of focus2. That’s a lot.

Aria talked about how when choosing a boyfriend, she’d really thought about the characteristics that she wanted in a good partner. She calculated how many such men existed in London, if any.

Aria talks about Linden’s traits in these terms, praising how he often asks “is there a better way of doing this”.

And when talking to Linden I was struck by how passionate he was. He talked about how he realised that one could make good decisions and that they would compound. And if I can be so bold, it’s worked. That if one makes good decisions for 5 years, one can be in a materially better place.

He used to have a thinking hour every Thursday where he just thought about how things could be better. I think this is more radical than it seems.

So I want to talk about good decisions:

• Better decisions are possible

• Decision making is hard

• One decision making tip

Good decisions are possible

I would argue that almost everybody lives as if they believe that changes are possible. People give advice, they try and find better jobs, better holidays, better outcomes.

This isn’t new either. People are always giving advice in historical text, sometimes in specifically decision-theoretic terms. E.g. the first quote was by noted decision-theorist Jesus Christ. He is using an example people understand. Surely a king would consider whether he would win or lose before he fights a battle.

Even people who think there is no free will make decisions. Whether that’s the religious determinists or scientific atheists, and I know some of each. All are choosing what to cook, who to hang out with, how to educate their children. I can’t recall ever having met someone who acts as if decisions don’t matter.

But this takes us to our second point, good decision making is hard.

Because lurking beneath the acknowledgement that people can make good choices is that they can make bad ones too.

I have had years where I didn’t want to face up to things going wrong in my life. I guess you have too. I didn’t want to face up to that responsibility.

And I guess that’s why many people keep decision making in a box, for their finances, or board games. Because it’s scary to acknowledge they could make better decisions about their job or any large aspect of their life. They still can. You can in this moment decide to shift how your life works. You can make better decisions, even though it’s hard.

Waiting can feel like it allows more time for decision, but really it’s a kind of decision itself. I have missed a number of opportunities due to waiting. Sometimes it’s better to jump.

And I think we see a little evidence of good decision making here. Sure, Aria and Linden have been lucky, in where they were born and their immutable qualities. But they’ve made good choices in their jobs, their friends and choosing each other. But I think they’ve also made good choices.

So finally, a tip. Spend 5 minutes thinking about it.

Aria is a fan of the rationalist writers, and the second reading was from their canon. A Harry Potter fan book, where rather than being a mysteriously well-adjusted orphan, Harry is a mysteriously confident nerd. But he has some good advice

In the reading Fred and George (they exist in this story) are struggling to make a decision.

And one piece of advice is that to think about something, you have to actually try. You should take 5 actual minutes by an actual clock. Or sand timer.

[At this point I revealed a sand timer that I use]

So there you go. So that’s my advice. When I feel the anxiety of a big decision. Take 5 minutes to think about the decision and only the decision. I write down as many as I can think of and think which is best3.

It’s easy to go with the easiest choice (which is often waiting) but even 5 minutes of focused thought is much better than my snap decision.

Perhaps that helps.

If you have a big decision perhaps talk to someone over lunch4.

And so that’s my talk. One, better decisions are possible. Two, often the hardest thing is facing that fact. And three, perhaps spend five minutes thinking about the question at hand. At least, if someone asks, you’ve really spent 5 minutes.

If everyone did that, I think the world would be a better place.

Thank you for listening.

I said I found driving in a foreign country stressful and that I hoped my younger brother would have success in his photography business.

After that, they prayed for each other and for me.

I stopped being a Christian six years ago, but I think prayer has some interesting features even if one doesn’t believe in the supernatural.

Upsides of prayer

Getting thoughts in order

When I am required to pray, I have to think about what to pray about1. What is important to me? What do I feel troubled by or guilty about?

I take time in my day to do this anyway, but I sense many people don’t. Do you know what your most important goals or questions are? Perhaps imagine someone asks you for praye—what would you say? Is it what you’d expect? Perhaps consider talking through those things with someone.

Natural fulfilment of the prayer

Prayers cause people to spend time thinking about the thing they are praying about. This is a solid problem solving method, even positing no deity. Perhaps while praying for my brother’s photography business one of the group might think of a friend who needs a wedding photographer. In this example, prayer would have worked (though not supernaturally2).

I think this could be improved by praying with a notepad and leaving silence to think about the answers to prayer. When I was a Christian, often I would want to get prayers over with and perhaps these days I would try and sit in the moment and see what comes to mind.

Closeness

I guess that thinking about someone fondly increases my closeness to them. This is even more true of group prayer. How often do my other friends sit in a circle, rapidly listen to each of their issues in turn and then spend time thinking about them? Not often! Notably prayer is pretty egalitarian—prayer requests are offered by both high and lower status members of a group, by loud and quiet people.

My Christian friends will offer care not just for each other but for their extended circle. I recall someone’s cousin going for an operation, or talking about my friend having a mental health crisis. In each case, the group offered to pray.

Groupthink

It’s interesting to note what things people do and don’t pray about. I am pretty sure that if I’d said I really wanted to find some friends to get drunk with, the prayer that was later spoken might have been censored somewhat to “please let Nathan find some friends”.

For good and ill prayer serves to signal to community members what is good and not good. I recall being at a church service where a woman asked for vengeance for the people killed in Israel on October 7th. She used very Biblical language (it was slightly shocking). That the minister didn’t try and round that set of prayers off said something about the church (eg by saying “and we pray for mercy on Palestinian civilians”).

Generally I think groups of people are better at thinking than individuals, so for many person to person problems, I imagine group advice will be better. For new kinds of problems or policy discussions, I imagine a typical small group’s reflexive answers might be worse.

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Costly signalling

Let’s imagine someone offers to pray for me. Either they will do so, which suggests they do care for me. Or they lie, which, given my Christian friend’s beliefs on lying, is costly to them. Therefore I am more likely to believe that they care for me. This is an avenue of showing care that someone with integrity who doesn’t pray doesn’t have.

This might seem meaningless—I could tell you that I am going to make a donation in your name and then send it to you, or tell you that I was thinking of you. But each of those seems odd to me. Prayer is an existing social technology that performs this function. And it does affect me. I do appreciate when people offer prayer.

Deals

When my friends ask me for prayer suggestions, I give them. Partly for the above reasons, but partly because I like deals. They are behaving as if we are on the same team. I like that. I want to be on a team with my friends. I like forecasting, even though many don’t think it’s useful. If I suggested they give a prediction of a future outcome I hope they’d go with it for similar reasons.

Likewise, in some circumstances I am happy to pray for people if they ask. A friend’s child died and they asked for people to pray for them. If I were them, I would want prayers, even from people who didn’t believe it. I try and act as I would want someone else to do.

Downsides

If I am going to write the benefits I want to cover the downsides of prayer also:

Bad explanations

I have seen people thank the Christian god for finding parking spaces. Finding parking spaces is not a particularly rare thing to happen. If people nod to this, as humans often do, these people will be affirmed in believing that a deity is micromanaging their parking experience. I imagine this leads to quite warped perspectives on the world.

Many things have this feature, whether prayer, astrology, vaccine scepticism. Most of these aren’t too expensive… until they are.

How to pray

I think there is something quite alive-feeling in discussing how I actually used to pray. I have prayed 10,000s of times and it was once a deep part of my routine.

This was my personal practice, as a fairly conservative evangelical Christian, so other Christians probably do it differently.

Quick prayers

If I needed help or confidence I might pray a single line. If I were a little scared walking home at night I might pray:

“Please help me get home safe”

I prayed like this five or more times a day. Some Christians call them “arrow prayers” in that you fire them off quickly.

Morning prayer

Often prayers are more structured. I read my Bible each morning and then prayed. My general practice was as follows:

• Lifting God up

• Thankfulness

• Asking for forgiveness

• Asking for help for myself and others

A prayer might go like this:

“Dear God,

You are mighty and gracious, you have made the mountains and the sunsets.

Thank you that I am able to come on this holiday. Thank you for my friends and their kindness.

I am sorry for not helping tidying up the food as much as I could have.

Please could you help Tim with his low energy. Help Anne with her relationship with her sister.

Please help me to know what I want to work on next.

Please end the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza and help people in poor nations to have more economic growth.

In Jesus’ name,

Amen”

Group prayer

A third common type of prayer is group prayer. People might go around the circle and say what is troubling or important to them. Then there might be a quiet time where anyone can pray into the silence:

“Dear God,

Please help Anne in her relationship with her sister.

Amen.”

A fun feature of group prayer is the second “amen”, which many Christians will recognise. After the group has prayed for a while and there has been a long silence since the last prayer, some leader will say a slow “amen” (often aaaaamen) to bring the session to a close.

Thoughts and reflections

I have tried here to give a fairly unvarnished account of prayer.

While I was a Christian, I saw this kind of prayer as natural, but looking again, I imagine it could seem bizarre, informal or contrived. Is this really the way to talk to the creator of the universe? There is a notion in evangelical churches of God as Father vs God as Dad. This highlights our fathers as authority figures vs someone we are relaxed around. Different people think that different tones are appropriate.

I still pray sometimes, though rarely. I find it can settle my mood when I’m extremely stressed.

I find this a little hard to talk about because I predict people will assume a lot based on what I say. I guess I wish people didn’t do that. Can’t agnostics have opinions on prayer too? Can’t an experience be raw without necessarily implying that there is some deep truth I’m hiding from myself? Honestly, I find it tiring.

I think we can take too binary an approach to truth sometimes. I am not surprised to find something that billions of people do has use even if the supernatural isn’t true. It’s easy for agnostics to throw this stuff out without thinking why people do it in the first place.

Will my children meditate? If I meditate on things as a non-religious replacement to prayer, will my children? I find we often don’t consider how we will propagate the ways we are to the next generation and as an ex-Christian, I think about this often. I see Christians passing on their habits, but it seems to be likely much more difficult for me.

The Substack image for this article3.

2

Get in, loser, we’re fulfilling prayers. My brother’s wedding photography portfolio is here.

3

I asked for photos they’d taken that might be suitable for an article on prayer and this one is frankly absurd. What an image!

Since then there have been several other successful notes. In total, in the last three weeks, our notes have been seen over 700,000 times.

A minimal explanation of AI community notes

I intend to write a longer article, which will get into the weeds, but let’s start with the basics.

Community Notes is a fact-checking function. You know, like Snopes, Politifact or the BBC fact-checks. Generally such functions have two key features—who writes the fact-checks and who decides to display them. Typically, social media fact-checks are written by external fact-checkers and then a moderation team decides what to display.

X (formerly Twitter) is different. Their Community Notes feature takes notes written by users and lets users vote on which should be shown. Now, AIs can write the notes too (though voting is still solely done by humans).

So our AI writes notes, then humans vote on whether they get shown.

How our bot works

The code is available here, but below is a short description of the current note writer:1

I am now going to explain the above diagram:

1. Users signed up to Community Notes can click on tweets and request a community note. If a tweet gets enough requests, it gets sent along this pipeline. Currently, only a very small fraction of eligible tweets are sent to the AI note writer because this is a test features and because our note writer is mediocre.

2. The bot sends the tweet to Perplexity. Perplexity is a research LLM which searches the web much like Google would with many different search terms. It then takes the articles that were returned, reads them, and summarizes them with clear citations. The model used is Perplexity Sonar Pro.

3. The bot takes the original tweet and the research block and attempts to write a community note. Currently, the bot decides whether it ought to write a community node, but probably in future I will move that to a filtering step. The model used is Claude Sonnet 4.

4. The bot checks whether the URL is accurate. The community note that was written has a URL in it, and if it doesn't, it will just fail automatically. If it does, then we take the URL, we search that page, we scrape the text, and then we check that the text supports the community note. LLMs are pretty good at hallucinating URLs, so you want to make sure that the URL actually covers the thing that it claims the community note claims. The model used is Claude Sonnet 4.

5. The bot runs another set of filters. We were previously showing far too many mediocre/bad notes so we have put a much more robust filtering mechanism. The model used is Claude Sonnet 4. The filters are as follows:

   1. Was the original tweet rhetorical or sarcastic (really this should be at the start of the process),

   2. is the not “positive” ie it describes something that did happen as opposed to did not2

   3. Is this a significant correction (as opposed to mostly agreeing with the tweet)

6. If the note passes all these three, it gets sent back to X. A fraction of such notes get posted, based on our rating factor (I think). Currently we haven’t written a lot of good notes so we have a limit on how often we can post.

The full prompt is in a footnote here:3

Thank yous

I’d like to do some thank yous.

I’d like to thank my Lead Developer Rob for his work on this. I’d like to thank for the X team’s support, particularly Jay Baxter and Keith Coleman.

I want to thank Jaan Tallinn and separately, the Future of Life Foundation (who were funded significantly by Vitalik Buterin). I doubt we’d have done this work without their funding.

I’d like to thank Deger Turan, Dan Schwarz and Devansh Mehta for their insight into this project.

Finally I’d like to thank my partner Katja for her inspiration in terms of caring about what’s true. There are not easy answers to being good, we just have to do the work.

To sum up

We've built one of the first AI community note writers, and our note writer displayed the first note ever to be approved by the public.

I've been interested in mechanisms which can improve thinking for a long time—whether that be prediction markets or different voting mechanisms or clustering algorithms for getting opinions. I think Community Notes is one of these. I think it's a really effective way, and by having AI-written community notes, community notes can be displayed that much faster. My sense is that Community Notes is far more approved of than many comparable systems. It's something I really like to see exist more in the world.

If I can speak for myself briefly. Getting work done has always been quite hard for me. I spent the first 5 years of my early 20s running an unsuccessful web development business from home. I then bounced between different jobs at a civil service and in NGOs, was unemployed for a bit. All I've ever really wanted is to be good, and this is one of many attempts to do so. Whether now or in the future, on expectation, I hope to earn your respect.

What next?

There is a lot we could do to improve the note writer, and I'm currently making changes to do so. I’ll go into more detail in the next blog, but briefly:

• Write using user-submitted feedback

• Search based on keywords rather than the tweet (which is often biased/confusing for LLMs)

• Build much better filtering for bad notes

• Continue building tools to compare note-writers

I imagine I will look to raise money to start an organisation to do this work as well as pushing the Community Notes algorithm (which is open source) to other social media platforms. If you are interested in supporting my work please get in touch (or buy a subscription to this substack!)

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Happy to discuss in the comments. I maybe very wrong. I wrote this up in about 30 minutes.

Note I still think that AI is probably a very serious issue, but one to focus on and understand rather than to necessarily push for slowing in the next 2 years. I find this very hard to predict, so am not making strong claims.

My current model has two kind of AI risk:

• AI risk to any civilisation roughly like ours

• Our specific AI risk given where we we were in 2015 and are right now.

Perhaps civilisations almost always end up on paths they strongly don’t endorse due to AI. Perhaps AI risk is vastly overrated. That would be a consideration in the first bucket. Yudkowskian arguments feel more over here.

Perhaps we are making the situation much worse (or better) by actions in the last 5 and next 3 years. That would be the second bucket. It seems much less important that the first, unless the first is like 50/50.

Civilisational AI risk considerations and their direction (in some rough order of importance):

• More risk. I find it credible that this is a game we only get to play once (over some time period). AGI might lock in a bad outcome. The time period seems important here. I think if that time period is 1000 years, that’s probably fine - if we screw up 1000 years of AI development, with many choices, that sort of feels like our fault. If the time period is 10 years, then that feels like we should stop building AI now. I don’t think we are competent enough to manage 10 years the first time.

• Unclear risk. The median “do AI right” time period seems about 6 years. A while back Rob and I combined a set of different timelines for AI. Currently the median is 2030 and the 90th percentile is 2045. If we say the ChatGPT launch was the beginning of the AI launch in ~2024 then about half the probability mass will have been in 6 years. That’s longer than 3 years, but shorter than I’d like. On the other hand 20 years to do this well seems better. I hope it’s at the longer end.

• More risk. We live at a geopolitically more unstable time than the last 20 years. China can credibly challenge US hegemony in a way it couldn’t previously. AI development would have, I predict, been a clearly more US/European thing 20 years ago. That seems better, since there seem some things that western companies obviously won’t do - see the viciousness of tiktok’s algorithm2.

• Less risk. Humans are naturally (and understandably) apocalypticist as a species. Many times we have thought that we are likely to see the end of humanic and almost all of those times our reasoning has been specious. In particular, we see problems but not solutions.

• Uncertain risk. AI tools were trained on text, which seems to align them far more to human desires than one might expect. Compare this to training them primarily on the Civilisation games. What would that AI be like. That said, it now seems like if you even slightly misalign them during training, i.e., training them on making errors rather than making clean code, they can be misaligned in many other ways too. Perhaps giving them a strong sense of alignment also gives them a strong sense of misalignment. Likewise, future tools may not be trained on text; they might be primarily trained in RL environments.

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More local considerations and their direction (in some rough order of importance):

• Less risk. AI is progressing fast, but there is still a huge amount of ground to cover. Median AGI timeline vibes seem to be moving backwards. This increases the chance of a substantial time for regulation while AI grows. It decreases the chance that AI will just be 50% of the economy before governance gets its shoes on.

• Uncertain risk. AI infrastructure seems really expensive. I need to actually do the math here (and I haven’t! hence this is uncertain) but do we really expect growth on trend given the cost of this buildout in both chips and energy? Can someone really careful please look at this?

• Less risk. AI revenue seems more spread. While OpenAI and Anthropic are becoming far more valuable, it looks less likely that they will be $100T companies to the exclusion of everything else. Google, Meta, Tesla, US Government, Chinese Government, DeepSeek, Perplexity, Tiktok, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Thinking Machines. The more companies there are that can credibly exist and takes shares of the pie at the same time, the more optimistic I am about governance sitting between them and ensuring a single actor doesn't deploy world destroying AGI. Companies are already very powerful, but why doesn’t Tesla have an army? Why doesn’t Apple own ~any land it controls the labour laws of? The East India Company has fallen and no company has ever taken its crown3. Governance is very powerful.

• Less risk. AI revenues more spread part 2. The more revenue is likely to spread between multiple companies, the harder it is to justify extremely high expenditure on data centers which will be required to train even more powerful models. I think someone argued that this will make OpenAI/Anthropic focus on ever greater training runs so they can find the thing that they can take a large share of, but I think this has to be a negative update in terms of risk—they could have far more revenue right now!

• Less risk. The public is coming to understand and dislike AI. Whether it's artists, teachers, people who don’t like tech bros. Many powerful forces are coming to find AI distasteful. I think these people will (often for bad reasons) jump on any reason to slow or stymie AI. The AI moratorium was blocked. People cheer when Tesla gets large fines. I don’t think AI is gonna be popular with the median American (thought the median Chinese person, perhaps??).

• More risk. Specific geopolitical conflict4. If China seems likely to pull ahead geopolitically, the US may pull out all the stops. That might involve injecting huge amounts of capital and building into AI. Currently China doesn’t seem to want to race, but they are much better at building energy and trying to get their own chip production. Let’s see.

What do you think I am wrong about here? What considerations am I missing? What should I focus more attention on?

People don’t like extra thinking

Epistemic tools already exist. You have been able to google anecdotes for years, but most people don’t. Now it’s even easier. I can use Perplexity to check things with a higher success rate. I doubt most people still will.

If people are writing a tweet or telling an anecdote, I reckon the “checking” process has to be sooooo cheap for them to do it. The underline feature on word processors is good. I guess twitter’s “are you sure you want to send that sweary tweet” works. But in general I don’t think people can be bothered to uses even quite simple processes.

I write more about that here:

Predictive Text

Careless thinking

Have you ever noticed how differently we approach buying a car versus choosing what to watch on Netflix? One might involve spreadsheets, research, and asking friends for advice. The other? We might just click on whatever catches our eye. I argue a lot of our thinking is more like the second than the first. This argument was originally made to me by Katj…

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2 years ago · 5 likes · 4 comments · Nathan Young

Many ideas are good in theory

We’ve built some neat tools. The visualisations we built for findingconsensus.ai. The voting process for viewpoints.xyz. A whole forecast question generation site3.

Initially there was often interest, but these ideas didn’t actually get traction when built.

I suggest prototyping quickly (and getting funding that supports this).

Dashboards work, but have their moment

We built BirdFluRisk.com and it got a solid amount of traffic. I think had bird flu become worse (or nearly dones so) it would have gotten even more.

Dashboards seem to me to work if built at exactly the right moment when many people are seeking to make sense of something.

I wouldn’t be surprised if this is true of many epistemic tools (that are often offered for free, rather than a subscription)

There are many successful epistemic tools already

• Google search

• Spreadsheets

• Wikipedia (but you probably know that)

• LLMs in chat interfaces

• Anki

• Infographics

• Prediction markets

• Community notes

• Notion, Roam, Obsidian, Logseq, etc

• Reference manager

• Reddit, Quora

I think it’s sometimes easy to forget things that already exist. These days I’m more interested in widening tools that already work than trying to build entirely new ones.

Can you do it with a google doc/ airtable/ prompt/ vibecoded-app?

Many things can be quickly prototyped in existing tools before needing to get down and dirty building proper infrastructure.

We built Doubtful, a beautiful prediction market question generation app, but noone ended up using it. I spent wayyy too much on developing that. I should have tried getting a group on an airtable first.

This is an obvious learning but I wish I always thought it. Actually I’m gonna go make a TAP for it.

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What do you think?

What do you think of this? Do you have learnings of your own? Please send them in the comments.

Hey, what can you say? We were overdue
But it'll be over soon, you wait

Growing up I recall being scared of Heaven.

I lay there in my bunk bed, just imagining that time went on and on and would never nearly be over.

I don't think this was fear of bad things, either. I recall worrying about endless games of Monopoly, which I enjoyed. I think it was the unendingness that was the main concern.

I see this mirrored in media.

But I'm not sure it will be over soon. I think, almost certainly, it'll continue for a long time yet.

I think our civilisation is going to continue. I don't think human civilisation is going to be destroyed by AI. And I don't think the US is going to be destroyed by China. Though in both cases, things might get weirder than people expect and there are opportunities for bad outcomes.

I think our lives might continue for a long time yet. That there is a real chance—not high, but real—that we live for functionally forever. I am very confident our brains are physical things that decay according to physical processes. If we can halt that decay, we can live arbitrarily long times. Again, I’m not saying this will be perfect, it will come with its own set of problems.

For me, I think my fear was a failure of trust, imagination, and responsibility.

I didn’t fully trust that God would have Heaven in hand. Many people have similarly lost trust in capitalism or a US-led world order. We have, in some larger sense, become atheists.

I think this is misguided1. We have a reasonable track record of improving things. I trust the human race to further improve. This seems a strange time to give up.

Next, I couldn’t imagine an enjoyable life of arbitrary length. Somehow the distance stretched away from me like looking down one of the new Elizabeth Line trains. Vertiginous.

I think many struggle to imagine a good world that branches off this one. Bo Burnham seems depressed. And it seems bad to have such a wealthy, successful cultural icon mired in depression. Many such cases.

These days, I think I can imagine Heaven being good for a long time. There are many books to read, many games to play, many problems to solve, many new people to be. And if after all of that fails, I imagine Heaven contains suicide too. But just not for a while.

Predictive Text

The Good Place: All Good Things Must Come to an End

I used to think I’d live forever. And the thought terrified me…

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6 years ago · 1 like · Nathan Young

I am wary that my views of the future are in fact a diagnosis of my mental state. I think in reality the future and my mental wellbeing are not closely correlated. I worry that a crop of unhappy artists is convincing us that everyone is unhappy. That our problems are unfixable. So we shouldn’t try. I don’t think that’s true.

Finally, it was a failure of responsibility. Several of my friends have at times been suicidal. And they have discussed being surprised to still be alive, figuring that they would end their lives at 20 or 30.

As a child, I think I struggled to really imagine being stable and happy. Doing work I liked. Being married. And so I didn’t try to figure out what was wrong. Only in my mid 20s did I make big strides to get a life that I actually enjoyed.

On some level, I think that Western people are stuck in a similar malaise. They cannot imagine a world better than this one so they would rather imagine that it blows up somehow, that rather than having to fix their mistakes step by step2.

But I think things will go on regardless, in which case, why not fix some of the issues we dislike—try and allow more people to live safe, happy lives, find a way to solve conflict between China and the US as we did between Europe’s great powers, fall in love and get married.

Hate it or loathe it, I don’t think we can get off this ride any time soon. The future will likely stretch out from the present and we will have new problems and new opportunities. There is some chance that AI kills us (far higher than I’d like) but I wouldn’t bank on it3.

I think there is a small chance that you will live as long as you wish. And good odds that the transhuman race will muddle on for millenia in some form or other. And yes, that scares me. But it thrills me too.

It won’t be over soon.

So put on your trousers, one leg at a time, and face the world.

Theory: Any debates are good.

Are any debates actually good at all? Should I give up?

Test: Watch different debates.

Evidence: I much prefer some debates to others.

Good debates:

• Dr. Richard Carrier andDr. Michael Licona. I like how they chat to one another.

• Destiny and Ben Shapiro. I recall liking this one. I remember them as having good chemistry.

• Jubilee’s “Surrounded” debates. I love an experimental format and these get a lot of different arguments in a short amount of time1.

Bad debates:

• Finkelstein, Destiny and M. Rabbani & Benny Morris. Long and acrimonious. I think Lex Fridman is deeply guilty of the “I’ll just let them talk it out” school of debate. I think this is lazy.

• Most things with William Lane Craig. Craig is an excellent debater on theology. I’m not sure I recall him ever losing. But his debates always hinge on niche points or technical arguments I don’t care about.

• Anything with Jordan B. Peterson. Like trying to nail a cake to a wall.

• Presidential debates. Trump in particular can lie with no cost at all, so he does.

Unclear:

• Ezra Klein, Sam Harris. Bad that they don’t understand one another, but pretty interesting as a historical artefact to see two clever men who I like really fail to understand one another for very ~2018 culture war reasons.

• Matt Dillahunty, Matthew Adelstein (aka ). Dillahunty is sloppy but somehow his audience think he’s making good points. Frustrating to watch.

Status: Theory survived attempted falsification2.

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Theory: The format is the problem.

Test: Run some different debate formats (see next).

Theory: Debates are bad because debaters focus on their own status.

They have to focus on how they appear to the audience and this stops them admitting points where they are wrong.

Test 1: Find ways to protect the status of the debaters

Evidence:

I tried running two debates like this at The Curve (Daniel Kokatajlo vs. Sayash Kapoor; Dean W. Ball vs. Gabriel Weil). I tried to moderate a bit more strongly than people tend to, ensuring that there were blocks of time where each was in control of the discussion.

The debates were okay but not great.

In both, it took us a long time to get to what felt like the meat of the discussion. I recall Ball and Weil saying they didn’t really understand one another’s position coming in.

In the the Ball vs. Weil debate, they weren’t really interested in being moderated, which to me felt like Ball therefore spent a lot more time defending his position and had less control over the discussion than I might like to see (though I think he was fine with it).

Kokatajlo and Kapoor felt solid debate, though not spectacular.

Test 2: Try and remove the status of the debaters and place it somewhere else.

Evidence: Courtly debates, Future of the Democratic Party, China discussion.

Ray Rafiq and I have had a goofy idea for a while of debates in a court style. king, knight, fool, etc. So at LessOnline I tried this out. Each debate had a king (or queen) to set the topic, two knights to argue it and a fool to ask questions. They took about 10 minutes each

I think our debaters (knights) were much less focused on their own positions than other rapid fire debates we could have run. In many ways it was a role play game. But it did feel like I partly succeeded in my aim - to pull status away from the debaters and put it somewhere else.

Later, Oliver Habryka wanted to run a session about the future of the Democratic Party. I pushed to try a new format there too, suggesting that Oliver would stand as the questioner and the dicussion would be about what interested him—whether somebody would speak, whether the audience would be able to ask questions would really be up to him and then I would serve as a meta-moderator to guard his time and attention. Habryka is a good candidate here because he's high status (CEO of Lightcone Infrastructure, who organise LessOnline) within the community and people respect his thinking.

This felt really good. There was a single questioner which provided a single viewpoint, rather than many questions from the audience or a rambling discussion from the panel. To me, this gave the event shape. Questions were answered, things were put to the side as new directions were investigated.

A couple of anecdotes:

• At one point someone in the audience put their hand up and one of the panel pointed at them, so they asked a question. The panel member was about to answer, but I interrupted and asked Oliver whether he was interested in the question. Oliver said no, so the panel didn't answer it. This felt jarring but good. We expected Habryka to have better taste than the typical audience question3.

• At another point, Oliver wanted to sit and think. Somebody asked if they could ask a question, and I said no. It's strange to have a room full of people sitting in silence, but the typical 30 seconds of a talk is pretty mediocre so it doesn’t actually seem that bad to lose. Then Habryka asked a question.

This felt like a genuine success in that we had a panel and they were being called on to answer questions that felt interesting to someone we resepected. For me a failure mode of debates is that debaters are scared of losing or trying to take turns and so what’s being discussed is not really of interest to anyone.

Next, I ran the discussion after a talk by Steve Hsu where he and Noah Smith discussed China. This was okay. At points it felt quite alive between them. But it could have been better for having somebody who was more willing to argue for US values. And perhaps someone to pin down Steve on specific facts about China, which Noah didn't really do (nor did he claim he would, professing not to be an expert4).

Status: This theory is doing okay. I have had a couple of good events, but it’s unclear to me what great might look like.

Current top theory: A good investigator is best

My current top theory is that it really matters who is moderating/investigating. And that if this person is willing to hold the debaters/panel and force them to answer the difficult questions or engage with them, that makes a much more interesting debate than otherwise.

I suggest that is a particularly good podcast host because he is so knowledgeable on AI topics and so willing to actually chase down his guests and say things like "okay, but what about the data centre built in Saudi Arabia?"

Suggested test: Future conferences, podcasts.

For the next set of conferences I run, I might like to focus on finding a good investigator for a topic and then choosing panelists afterwards and build an event around trying to understand AI, China, Ukraine war.

It's possible I'll also try the strategy for my podcast, which I haven't done episodes for in a while.

Other theories I may test later

• Debaters should discuss beforehand. It's fun for people to discuss on the day because there is something very alive about people discussing things for the first time. But it seems worth to me having a short discussion beforehand to figure out the exact areas of disagreement and to check that there won't be 20 minutes of discussion on the day that could be avoided.

• Debates are fun discussion pieces, but less good for sharing information. Debates are primarily useful as a way to set up discussions happening at a conference or to see discussion in the public sphere.

• The key thing is who the debaters are. This seems too powerful. The point of a debate is that it's a format that allows two people who disagree to produce valuable work for other people. But if one has to select very carefully the two people who disagree, then that suggests that debates are much less valuable than one might want.

• It would be better to have someone explain a field. It's possible I'm too focused on debate and that trying for a collaborative explanation or an overview of the field might be good. I struggle to think of a good format here.

One more thing..

Duncan Haldane built a home made Nielsen rating system that allowed audience members to twist a knob to display either red or green lights on their head. If they were interested, they turned to green. If they were bored, they turned to red. I didn't catch discussions where this was used, but it felt like a pretty interesting thing to do to be able to monitor people's interest in real time. And I can imagine using tools like this with a set of trusted “tastemakers” to guide an investigator on what interested some relevant group.

I'm not super interested in giving every audience member these because in general I think large groups of people can have quite poor taste5.

Introducing Is this true?

You can install it here

We built this tool because, frankly, I wanted to use it. It takes about 30 keystrokes to search a fact, so often I don’t do it. Now it takes 3 clicks.

How it works:

1. Install the extension for Chrome.

2. Highlight any sentence on a webpage you want to check.

3. Right-click and select "Is this true?" from the menu.

4. A small box will appear providing context and an assessment.

Context, not judgement

It's my opinion that most people don't always want a definitive, black-and-white fact-check handed down to them. They want a quick result if something is true, and if there's disagreement or nuance, they want the context to explore it themselves1.

Our extension is built on this model. Instead of just "True" or "False," it provides one of four types of responses2:

1. Almost certainly true: For statements that are straightforwardly factual. For example, highlighting "Keir Starmer is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom" (as of 12th April 2025) should yield this response.

2. Requires more context: This applies to statements that aren't easily fact-checkable. For example, opinions "I don't like cats" or things which require more knowledge about the situation to judge “things are pricey right now”.

3. I don’t know: There is an answer but the model is uncertain. For example predictions ("The trade war will end badly").

4. Recommended context: This tag appears when a statement seems clearly wrong or is missing vital context. For instance, highlighting "Rishi Sunak is the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom" (today) would trigger this response. Likewise “Covid came from a lab”

My though here is that things are true in one way, but false in many ways. A statement that is inaccurate might point to incorrect facts, be in dispute, imply incorrect things about the world or more. In this way, it’s much more about the reader’s views. A factchecking tool may struggle here. The extension aims to provide readers with context to make their own decisions, rather than tell them what meets their standard for accuracy. See footnote 1 for further discussion of this.

Under the Hood (Briefly)

How does it work? Essentially, we take the sentence you highlight and use the Perplexity AI3 to analyze it. We then process the AI's response to assign one of the above tags you see in the pop-up.

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A Note on Permissions

When you install the extension, you'll notice it requests significant permissions ("read all your data on all web pages"). We know this sounds like a lot. We built this initial version relatively quickly (in about a week) primarily to test the core concept and see if it would work. Using broader permissions was the most straightforward way to get the highlighting and right-click functionality working across different websites for this test version.

We're very open to feedback here. If you genuinely think you'd use the tool more if it had less invasive permissions, or if you have technical suggestions on how we could achieve this, please let us know! If there's real interest, we're keen to refine it.

Give it a Try!

We find the extension genuinely useful for quickly vetting claims encountered while Browse. If you think you might too, give it a try!

• Install for Chrome

Let us know what you think!

UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer answered readers' questions in the Metro, a newspaper given away free around the UK1. As a politician, he answered them vaguely and deferentially. I answer them specifically. Jamie, CEO of housing startup Tract, writes sassy explanatory footnotes.

Alexa: Will we actually get affordable housing? I've been on the affordable housing list since 2014. There have been zero properties to bid for in the past 14 weeks. We have moved twice into unaffordable private accommodations. I've been back at my parents' for 3 years.2

Starmer: This is exactly why I'm so determined to be ambitious on House Building. Everybody who opposes building houses should read about your situation, Alexa.

It is unfortunate that the previous government let this crisis fester for so long. We have a Renters' Rights bill going through Parliament that will give tenants protections against eviction and new powers to stop unreasonable rent hikes, and we are regulating to make rental homes warmer and cheaper to heat.3 And we are going to build 1.5 million new homes.4 Within that we will deliver the biggest increase in social affordable housing in a generation. And we have restored mandatory housing targets so affordable homes are built where they are needed.5

Me: Your pain matters to me, Alexa, but also I cannot help you in the way that you expect. It sucks not to have affordable housing. But if we want it, someone has to pay for it.

Should that be the private sector or the Government?

We don’t make private hospitals pay for all of the NHS, nor private schools pay for all of education.6 Similarly we shouldn’t make private housebuilding pay for all new affordable housing.

So that leaves the Government. And right now, the UK Government doesn’t have much money. Luckily there is another option. We can stop blocking housebuilding. House builders want to build on land in the UK.7 Especially in London and the South East.8

But I am sorry for your pain and many others’ pain in the meantime. Government isn’t wealthy enough to fix this problem,9 nor clever enough to centrally manage it—we need a different approach, which looks like getting out of the way.

Ben: I put an offer on a flat that was accepted. I paid for search and solicitors, but it was gazumped10 by a landlord buyer and lost £2,000. In other countries there are fines for pulling out and other protections in place. What plans do you have to protect buyers?11

Starmer: Just last week, we announced plans to digitise the house-buying process, making it quicker and easier for everyone - speeding up the process and reducing the rate of fall throughs. This will actively even the playing field between professional landlords and many people trying to get on the housing ladder.

Me: Sir Keir's answer here is quite good. Digitisation will help. If buying could be done in 5 minutes, with appropriate bank checks, there wouldn't have been an opportunity for someone to gazump you.

But I think landlords get blamed too much. They're just wealthy people, some good, some bad. The problem here is that your seller and this new buyer disobeyed norms. And with a digital process that will be much harder to do.

Paul: Will the government set a target of 50% council housing in new developments?

Starmer: Our next generation of new towns will have a target rate of 40% affordable housing, with a focus on genuinely affordable social rented homes.

Me: No. Again, we need more houses. Setting a target like this means that builders get less money. It’s effectively a tax. So it will cause there to be fewer houses. That is the opposite of what we want.

If we want more council housing, councils or the Government could buy them or give people money. As I said to Alexa, we don’t make any other private service entirely support the public version. We don’t have enough housing, we shouldn’t limit it further.

We’re going to give councils some of the uplift from new council tax, so that when new housing gets built, they can spend it on buying council housing if they want.12

Maya: As much as I want my own home, I don't want it to come at the expense of the environment.13

Starmer: I think we can build the housing infrastructure we need to protect the environment at the same time.

For example, better roads reduce great congestion. Improving public transport is good for the planet. And developing clean energy alternatives will reduce our long-term dependence on fossil fuels. Both are absolutely vital.

So new developments will not come at the expense of environment or wildlife. We will always look to use brownfield sites first14, but we know that brownfield alone won’t solve the housing crisis we have inherited.

That’s why councils who cannot meet their new housing targets will have to review their greenbelt land and prioritise development on grey belt land such as disused petrol stations and car parks.

Me: The good news is, your home won’t come at the expense of the environment. Really, the places we most need housing are the places that affect the environment least: Cities! People living in cities pollute less, because they use public transport more and live in blocks that use less energy to heat.

More broadly, we should focus our environmental effort. For the same amount of effort we spend ensuring that individual houses follow complicated rules, we could protect large areas of countryside or build new carbon capture technology. It’s a question of focus.

Adam: I'm a London borough planning officer. Developers have to include affordable housing in their private schemes, but can argue to reduce that amount down to none at all. Will you change that?15

Starmer: We’re going to strengthen the system to ensure new developments provide the right balance of affordable homes and infrastructure.

This year we’ll also update viability planning practice guidance - meaning we will only allow negotiations on those critical affordable homes where genuinely necessary16. And because every community needs affordable homes when it comes to any major development involving new homes in the green belt, we’re clear they must be subject to our ‘golden rules’. That means, No site-specific viability can take place for reduced development contributions, including affordable housing.

Me: Adam, again, it is not the job of private developers to build affordable housing. If we want those things built, we should pay for them. That's got the right incentives. I think we’re gonna see more affordable houses our way too.

But if you want the Government to pay for hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, what do you want us to cut?

Leslie: Could you look into ‘Huf-Haus’ style homes, a German concept that has homes rolling out of production lines, pre-fabricated but high quality?17

Starmer: It is absolutely essential that we build more homes at high volume but that are also high quality well designed and sustainable. I'm delighted we've had more than one hundred proposals across the country to build the next generation of new towns. These will be led by local communities that local people will be able to shape what the design is important to them whether that's modern architecture or Georgian-style homes.

Me: Huf-hauses? I may check them out. Though to make my point again, it’s not the Government’s job to build houses. And its not our job to tell people how to build them. We aren’t very good at it. We are going to make clear what isn’t allowed (unsafe housing) and then developers can use whatever processes they like. I love a good system, though!

Alex: You claim to be helping first-time buyers, so why did you lower the first-time buyer stamp duty threshold from £425k to £300k? Why not increase the stamp duty for those who have many homes instead?

Starmer: We inherited an unacceptable situation in the public finances from the previous government.

This housing crisis is so acute precisely because Liz Truss thought she could introduce policies without properly funding them. If we had not taken tough decisions, the housing situation would be a lot worse.

I am confident we will make it easier for people to own their own home. Indeed, our figures suggest we are already on track for 130,000 extra transactions over the next five years from first-time buyers.

And we are launching a permanent comprehensive mortgage guarantees scheme that will open up home ownership for more young people18.

Me: First, no, I am not for first time buyers, I am for the British people, and, to a lesser extent all life, now and for the future. The UK has been trying to twist systems for first time buyers and it’s been hugely expensive and it hasn’t worked.

We are going to stop blocking homes, many will get built and house prices in expensive areas will fall.

But yes, stamp duty seems like a crazy tax. We should want a system where it’s easy to buy and sell houses. A big tax on this process makes people not want to do it. I don’t know what the right system is, but it could be a property tax, assessed against the property’s value19. And then we should give some more money to poor people.

I know this doesn’t help first time buyers very much, but reduced house prices will fix that problem.

Panos: Do you plan to review the legislation about leaseholders rights? Will it become cheaper to renew the leasehold period?

Starmer: Yes we are removing the two-year ownership rule for leaseholders. And we are beefing up powers so that leaseholders can take control of their buildings more easily and cheaply. This will help them to tackle spiralling charges and unacceptable poor service.

We are also introducing a new right to a 990-year lease extension on both houses and flats. And we will make extending a lease cheaper for leaseholders by requiring each side to pay their own process costs such as valuation and solicitor’s fees.

Me: I am going to agree and disagree. I think leaseholds can be confusing and we are going set guidelines to make it clearer what people are signing up for. But in general, I think adults can get into whatever contracts they choose. If owners want to lease buildings for 100 years or 1 year, that’s between them and the lesser.

Instead, we are going to allow there to be a lot more houses, so that if someone doesn’t want a leasehold they don’t have to.20

Sarah: Many tenants and homeowners suffer from poor quality new builds. How you ensure that Labour's removal of so-called red tape doesn't make the situation even worse.

Starmer: I don't take an ideological view on regulation. Sometimes we need red tape. Often we don't. At the moment we are trying to remove barriers to building because people across the country need good quality affordable homes but we won't compromise on quality or safety.

Me: Starmer is right here, but let's have some more specifics. Many kinds of housing that people like are illegal for safety reasons. We can’t have big windows because we fear people may fall out of them, builders have to build two staircases in 6 storey buildings. These rules don’t make people much safer, but they do make houses much more expensive.

The UK is a nation of adults, but for the last 30 years we have built housing as if we are all clumsy parentless children, who need to be coddled and protected at all costs. And so we have seen less and uglier housing than we otherwise would have.

Mrs Monteith: Builders sell a portion of new properties to foreign investors driving up prices. Would you consider changing the law, so only UK nationals, living in the UK, can purchase property

Starmer: This is something we're working on in detail—it's not right and something we must address.

For the first step we've put a stamp duty for people buying properties that are not their primary residents— increasing the higher rate of stamp duty on additional dwellings from 3 to 5%. In addition, overseas buyers pay a 2% stamp duty surcharge.

Me: I understand your frustration here. It feels like foreigners are getting a good deal, piggybacking off our country. But would we feel this way for any other good, for cars or bread or apples? Wouldn’t we be glad that foreigners were buying them? The reason that foreign buyers drive up house prices is because we have limited supply. So that’s the main problem to fix.21

More generally, I’d like to see immigrants paying into the UK in a way citizens can see. Whether that’s an additional income tax or a tax on property I don’t know, but I want British people to see money in their pocket or a new hospital ward and see that immigrants paid for it. I think that would ease a lot of tension.

Jenny: Why are you suggesting building so many new towns when there are so many empty flats in London?

Starmer: Across the country there is a housing crisis. I get to visit every corner of our country and people are constantly asking what we can do to build more affordable housing.

New towns are a part of the solution. People often say to me “we don't mind house building but we worry about there being not enough infrastructure for the homes”. New towns are a tried-and-tested way of making sure that isn’t the case

You raise a good point about empty flats, however.22 We are absolutely encouraging councils to use the tools available to them on that issue. For example, they can charge additional council tax on vacant properties.

Me: I’m sorry to say that sometimes these talking points are just wrong. The UK has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the developed world. And what happens with a low vacancy rate? House sales get tangled up in long chains.

What’s more, it’s not our business if people wish to buy and own empty flats. We should tax on the level of income and wealth. Should a person who owns 1 large house pay less tax than a person who owns two small ones of the same value? No.

Rota: What is the government doing to protect leaseholders from excessive service charges?

Starmer: By law, service charges must be reasonable and where cost relate to works and services there must be a reasonable standard, but we need to do more to protect leaseholders. So we will bring the feudal leasehold system to an end this parliament, we'll also consult on plans to give leaseholders more transparency on the charges they pay as well as greater rights, powers and protections.

Me: Regarding leaseholding, lessors need to make clear what the charges are going to be, but in general, people can run whatever system they wish. It isn’t the Government's job to legislate consensual contracts between adults.

You already know what I am going to say at this point. If there were more houses, you could choose not to lease if you didn’t want to.

M. Pantlin: If immigration was controlled properly and illegal immigrants were repatriated to their own countries then clearly far fewer homes would be needed.23

Starmer: We recognised that migration puts additional pressure on demand. The last Government's open borders experiment has left us a huge challenge. We have a two pronged approach. First, we are committed to cutting net migration. We’re cracking down on illegal migration as well as making sure we our [sic] domestic workforce has the skills to meet our labour market. The second part is to build more homes.

Me: I generally like immigration, but it does seem obvious that if you have lots of people coming into the country then we’re going to need more housing. We need to stop blocking housing and allow the market to build that housing.

I probably think we should cut immigration and then actually make the case to people. Currently lots of migrants have “No Recourse to Public Funds” on their visas, but still end up getting support from councils. This seems bad. If migrants can’t afford to live in the UK, we are going to remove them. This, coupled with higher taxes on immigrants to fund infrastructure should build trust in what I am confident of - that British citizens are better off with higher immigration.

Pauline: Please make mortgage lenders accept proof of previous rental payment over a number of years as qualification for mortgage. I have relatives who have been paying much more rent for years than a mortgage would cost. Yet, they can't get one.24

Starmer: We're demanding that mortgage rules be relaxed so they no longer block first-time buyers, but we are also going further. We will step in and back buyer ourselves through a permanent mortgage guarantee scheme that will mean lenders will loan to people with smaller deposits.

Me: Pauline, I agree with you on mortgage lenders accepting proof of previous rental agreements. This does seem crazy. We're going to be telling banks that they've got to give us a reason why they're doing this. I'm not gonna force them to, but I'm confused by it and it seems predatory.

Keir is wrong here. For the last 30 years we have constantly tried to support first time buyers by giving them benefits. It hasn’t worked. We are not going to run another scheme to juice demand. My Government is going to ensure there are more houses.

Carroll: Why are developers allowed to land bank, holding back building the 1 million homes already with planning permission.25

Starmer: This government has been very clear that once house builders have been granted planning permission, we expect them to build as quickly as possible. Our new home's accelerator has already unlocked 20,000 new homes that got stuck under the previous government.

Me: My understanding is that land banking is that this isn't really a problem in the way people think it is. Developers have long development horizons and so they need to hold land for the building work they're going to do in future. Really if we had much more land that could be built upon then much more would get built, but some of it still would be left in the planning pipeline. I think this is just a normal feature.

Jay: Where will you get enough skilled trades people?

Starmer: It's true we need to create the construction workforce required. We’ve already taken action with £140 million of industry investment for 5,000 more construction apprenticeships per year. That will join 32 new Homebuilding Skills Hubs that will deliver fast-track training to areas that need more housing. Just last week we announced 10,000 more apprentices will be able to qualify per year as the government cuts red tape to boost growth.

Me: Regarding skilled trades people, I think part of the problem in the UK is that we have inconsistent construction. If we had a lot of houses that could be built now and there was confidence that would be the case in the future, I think we'd have a much larger construction industry.

The Government shouldn’t choose how many apprenticeship places there are - the construction industry should pay people to get the training they need. We're going to work in partnership with those industries to try and find the money or create financing options to ensure these workers exist.26

Also make sure to read Jamie’s footnotes if you didn’t, he is an expert on this stuff.

As soon as I learned about this, it clicked. It is tiring to have to manage something, but nearly as tiring to be unsure of who is managing it and so sort of doing so anyway. This creates a lot of wasted effort if no-one knows who is actually in charge.

When we travel together, Katja plans where we go and I carry all the bags. This is our division of labour and it works really well. She likes to plan and book (and I loathe it) and together we are much happier if I am carrying a backpack and two carry on suitcases and she has nothing than if the luggage is equally split.

In economics, this is called labour specialisation. One country produces bolts and another produces apples. Each is slightly better at their thing. They trade the bolts for apples and both are better off. I don’t see why this shouldn’t be true in relationships too.

At home, my housemate Joe manages the cleaner, I manage the bills and Jugal ensures the bins are taken out. For a while each of these was sort of everyone's job, but that meant that sometimes none of it got done. And when a task got missed, we didn’t know who should have acted differently. We just sort of felt bad, with overflowing bins.

I think 2000s Feminism made a number of good points3. One such is that much of the "being CEO" of home life falls on women. And this was one thing when men mainly worked and women stayed at home4. But now that both men and women work, it seems reasonable to split home work. But not just home work, but the "being the CEO" bit. Who realises the bins haven't been taken out? Who gets up to hoover rather than leaving things a state? Who ensures the children are fed (even if they don't cook)?

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Here then are some tasks that one can be the CEO of:

• At home:

  • Planning meals

  • Doing the washing up/ filling, emptying the dishwasher

  • Resetting private/public space

  • Managing the cleaner

  • Managing the bills

  • Doing the laundry

• Travelling:

  • Planning where to go

  • Booking

  • Packing

  • Carrying lugging

  • Navigating when out

• I don't have children, but I've lived with families:

  • Babies

    • Changing nappies

    • Breastfeeding can only by done by women, but bottle feeding, cleaning bottles etc

    • Noting down whatever complex set of data you have decided to track

    • Maintaining the travel bags

  • Children

    • Getting up

    • Morning food

    • Dressing

    • Getting to school on time

    • Managing kids if they are sick

    • Perhaps, home schooling

    • Tracking educational attainment

    • Managing emotions

• More out there:

  • Managing the emotional health of your relationship

  • Planning interesting sex

  • Setting boundaries with parents-in-law

  • Planning days out

  • Finding partners for your single friends.

  • Like 60 other things5

The point is that if a task has no CEO then no-one is going to bolt upright in the middle of the night and do it (or if someone is, it's always going to be the same person). But if a task is important, it's important enough to have a CEO6.

And being responsible for something is a bit like being on call. People are paid for even if they don't get called on. Even if everyone always tidies up, it's very different to know that if they don't, you'll have to do it. Perhaps you’ll ask everyone to do it. Again, I think that women probably feel this a lot in relationships.

Next time a task isn’t done, perhaps consider offering to be the CEO of it7.

5

This is one of the best comics ever made. I don’t make the rules.

Paris is excellent—If I had a community there, I'd love it. The housing is dense and visually coherent. The food is lovely, and the city is beautiful, maybe even more so than London. At night, the light has a warm yellow hue, making it a pleasure to walk around2.

For some reason the French always seem switch to English no matter how hard I try. My French is pretty decent and I can talk slowly about most topics. But I rarely get the chance. I am very fond of France and the French and sometimes the old rivalry gets in the way of noting they have a beautiful country and we have a lot in common3.

The Eiffel Tower is now walled off and one has to go through turnstiles to walk underneath it. I don’t remember this being the case when I was a teenager. It is a shame that public trust has fallen to such an extent. As far as museums and public monuments, it feels like the cheap damaging actions of a few cause large costs to the rest of us. Personally I’d prefer more surveillance than endless turnstiles.

Regarding travel, the Eurostar can be stressful. Traveling between similar economies like the UK and France should be easier, I don't see why full security is necessary for trains. If I don’t need my bags scanned between London and Birmingham, why London and Paris?

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Our transfer via Lebanon was hairier still. We could fairly easily have accidentally cleared immigration without seeing the small arrow, the unassuming desk and the narrow passage for transfers. As the gospel writer says, narrow is the gate that leads to Dubai, but broad is the path that leads to Lebanon4.

But onto Dubai.

I think the core takeaway from discussing Dubai is how they transformed a flat seashore into a city with impressive buildings. My dad grew up around the Middle East and visited Dubai when there were no tall buildings on those beaches5. It is amazing that in (half) his lifetime, they have built all that is there today.

So I will say it again. It is bloody impressive how much Dubai has built and it seems a lot better than what was there before. There are many places with somewhat dubious human rights records and lots of oil. Most of them aren’t building cities where people choose to live and work6.

That said, what's Dubai actually like? Everything is very big, and it has a grand feel, but it doesn't seem to have much depth. The buildings don’t have the coherence or grandeur of London or Paris nor does it screech with San Francisco’s entrepreneurial energy.

I have described Dubai as Disneyland without the cartoons. It is beautiful but in sort of a thin way, everything is accessible, but costly. Honestly, it reminded me more of a resort in Kenya with its big rooms and exceedingly polite staff, than of smaller older Western hotels.

This feels like a kind of snobbery, but I don’t think it entirely is. The Middle East has much beautiful art and sculpture. The prohibition on depictions of people has led to geometric art which I love. But then a posh hotel will throw a giant golden Rubik’s cube in the lobby. Or a huge shiny balloon dog made of smaller balloon dogs. Why? So much of the art is NFT-level in its crassness. Like someone walked in and said “make this place look more expensive”. I’m sorry, I am too middle class for that to work. Even gold-covered opulence would be better than this.

Late one night our taxi was level with a high powered sports car. As I looked inside I realised a woman was driving. She saw me looking and floored it. There was something cyberpunk and contradictory there.

The Burj Khalifa is very good. There is something wonderful about a building so tall. It’s a bit pricey, but I recommend the premium package so you don’t spend all day queuing. You can see all that is going on. We had to rush off, but I really wanted to stay for sunset, which I think would have been wonderful.

But when Dubai actually gets a concept, it can be wonderful. On the last night Katja and I ate at a much fancier hotel than the one we were staying in. It was built like an old Islamic fort and had artificial canals between the rooms and restaurants. After food, we were taken around the whole site on a sort of motorised gondola. It was wonderful. The darkness and sound of the water. One expected a musician to appear on an overlooking balcony.

Katja had her Time AI 100 dinner. I feel somewhat constrained in what I can say here. I mainly focused on telling people how great Katja is and trying to help her network. Later we talked about why the different people were there. Time (who have covered AI pretty well, in my opinion) want to be seen to be on top of a growing issue. The Emirates want to share the status that Time has. The guests were either AI people who wanted a fancy awards dinner or local folks who wanted to network with cool AI people. And so the event is fun, but strange, obviously about networking, but not built to make networking easy.

I am not really one for travel. I find planning extremely stressful, always worrying there might be some other thing to fit in. But when there is some event I can go to, like a wedding or one of Katja’s conferences, I usually say yes. I haven’t regretted it so far.

Manifold is a platform for running play money betting markets. I am a moderator. By many metrics I am a poor moderator. I make a lot of markets often with unclear resolution criteria. I am literally the reason that the moderators tag got changed from "trustworthy-ish" to "moderator". My markets are not even "trustworthy-ish".

And this had consequences. People wrote snarky comments on my markets and gave my resolutions bad ratings.

For a while it felt unfair. I am an unpaid moderator. Why should I take criticism for doing a job which takes up a reasonable amount of time (less these days) and for which I am not remunerated.

But now I realise I am paid in status. I can resolve markets, I have a tag next to my name, I get to freely attend some manifold events. Others perceive that this comes with responsibility.

So although I didn't become a moderator to get status or even to moderate - I wanted to be able to make changes to the manifold dashboards on the frontpage - I have it anyway. I accidentally became 'high status'. And that comes with benefits (and costs) whether I want them or not.

Spotting it here has allowed me to see it in other places. When people are getting paid in status, even if they don't want to be.

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Examples:

Here are some ways that people can get paid in status without wanting to and bad outcomes that can result:

Abe wants some organisations to do something and none exist so he founds them. A group of people spring up around these organisations and look to Abe for advice. When Abe says stupid things they get annoyed at him. When there are crises, Abe is considered the person who ought to speak. Abe didn't ask for this to happen and is frustrated that it does. He just wanted some organisations to exist.

Bernie is willing to say things that no one else is. Often in dramatic situations he will ask hard but pertinent questions. People assume he finds this gratifying, and while he does a bit, it is also scary and frustrating - but the questions need to be asked. As a result he receives hate mail and the perception that he desires attention. He would quite happily never ask a hard question again, as long as someone else did.

Cathy makes good content on youtube. As a result she receives lots of romantic attention. When she turns it down people say she is a prude or a tease. She didn't ask to be considered attractive and feels like if she were a man, people would judger her on her work alone.

Darren is very well dressed. People mock him for trying too hard or assume he has a high opinion of himself. He has a certain aesthetic sense and he is trying to expresse it. He didn't ask for all this attention, this style of dress used to be unfashionable and he dressed like this then too.

Ekla is the UK prime minister. She earns about $160k a year and works all the time. She has significant amounts of power. Her life is pretty expensive. She has to book leisure trips last minute, make decisions based on security and her family face huge amounts of scrutiny. If she complains about any of this everyone points out how powerful and high status she is. While this is nice, it doesn't ease the stress on her husband. She wishes they could hire a nanny.

Here are some cases that aren't part of this:

Fred is a professional athlete. He wanted to be a star since he was a child and now he is. Recently he found this a bit annoying and was able to pay to live somewhere more private.

Grace is an influencer who carefully cultivates her image and following. She sells ads and gets paid for it. While this isn't always ideal. It was roughly what she expected from her career.

Harry is a politician who ran for office seeking power and influence. The status that comes with it is a slight benefit to him - he likes public speaking and meeting people, the romantic attention is no bad thing either.

Let's recap then:

Status is part of the remuneration package for many things we do. Some people want it, some don't. If one is indifferent to status, one might feel underpaid or under appreciated if one expected to be paid in money instead. If one doesn't want it, it might feel like a cost.

Certain high status roles may therefore select against people who don't want to do it for the status, since they are remunerated “less”. This might be true of being a politician, a leader in an organisation or an outspoken community member.

Likewise those who end up in public view are often far better communicators than regular people because of a kind of symbiosis. People who like status gain more benefit from it. People who can wield public opinion more easily are more likely to get elected/respected. Bill Clinton has always had aura of charisma. My friend still talks about that time he hear Tony Blair speak.

Some roles are paid for in status, whether you want them to be or not.

I feel bad to Manifold users for my dodgy resolution criteria, I am happy to improve them if the market has much trading.

But we have a curious secret,
Something quite bizarre,
Someone lives inside our house,
You’ll not guess what they are

He is the food devourer,
Eating leftovers with haste,
If something’s to be wasted,
It goes straight to his waist.

He snacks Tuesday’s luncheon,
He’ll munch on Thursday’s tea,
If it’s chilling in the fridge,
He’ll eat that food for free.

Sometimes my babysitter,
My nanny or my driver,
When mum and dad got out,
He won’t even get a fiver,

We sometimes play at monsters,
At mermaids or at tigers,
When we lead the army
There are no survivors.

He has his friends to dinner,
He goes to work in rain,
His room is really messy,
But dad does not complain.

One day two people visited,
I was shocked, it’s true,
I’d never considered,
He has parents too,

He’s kind of like a brother,
He’s kind of like a friend,
He’s technically our lodger,
But that is not the end.

He’s really just a person
Who wants not to live alone,
So he’s in our family,
Cos he doesn’t have his own.

In my 20s lived with a family. This is written from the imagined perspective of one of their children. I don’t actually recall writing it, but it’s my thoughts and style. It was a strange life to lead and I don’t think I had much of a future at the time, but there are many happy memories.

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