sutterbomb

Ok but irrelevant to my point. The experience isn’t always necessary to have positive effects.

I’ve used micro doses of psilocybin as a depression treatment and found it effective. Be definition the microdose meant I never had a “trip”, let alone a strong one with lots of introspection. It improves mood and increases energy even at low doses.

Right which is why I specifically said retributive justice. Other penal forms may still be morally justified for the sake of the “system” as it were.

I use the same line of thought, but without any modeling. Suppose you could go back in time to a major decision in your life and make it over. But you arrive at that same point in time, with all of the same information you had, no new information about the future, with all of the same hormonal and biochemistry etc. Is there any way you could have chosen differently than what you did? I don't see how. Unless you want to introduce randomness, but that's also not choice.

Well your ethics should shift considerably. Retributive justice is morally repugnant for someone who does not believe in absolute free will.

I'm not sure he totally underindexes on experience. He was long Apple at a time it was very common to think that Android + OEMs would soon be "good enough" and thus price would be only factor and Apple would suffer. He recognized the importance of user experience and that "feeling of good will" more than most industry analysts.

Did you not expect that going in? Or it was worse than anticipated?

If it was mostly turn key, how’d he do such a bad job? I’m mostly at that point with my business and am aiming to “fool-proof” operations so looking for things I may be overlooking.

Seconding Sapolsky's course.

I mean I'd say that in civil conversation, face to face. Is swearing the problem? I was providing substantive contributions to the conversation, whereas conversant was, in my opinion, doing neither of these:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

But perhaps doing neither of them more "civilly"? I'm genuinely looking for guidance on handling of this thread, not trying to argue. Thanks.

I can’t let this go. It’s nothing like that. Yes, you are just positing opinions as if they’re facts, but that’s not everyone. There has been reviews of the literature. E.g I can’t recall the book off the top of my head but something like out 120 studies on effectiveness of different policing strategies, only ~20% of studies showed statistical significant effects for any given strategy and a fair amount of those failed to replicate. Meanwhile we’ve continually had studies pointing to lead as a significant driver with significant effect sizes. You keep strawmanning this “solely” argument that no one is making while also ignoring the plethora of data pointing to it being a huge driver, and by the far the largest driver with any body of evidence. It’s not like this stuff isn’t being studied, yet I challenge you to find studies that can show anything near the evidence for these other factors.

I had too much lead in my coffee this morning

Your standards are bullshit and you know it. We can't say such statements of indisputable evidence about anything that happens in the world. Should we throw our hands up and just say, well it could be invisible llamas, or tree gnomes, or the boogey man, or should we use the best available evidence to guide future decisions?

From one of the papers cited in the parent article:

"A growing body of evidence in the social and medical sciences traces high crime rates to high rates of lead exposure. Scholars have shown that lead exposure and crime are positively correlated using data on individuals, cities, counties, states, and nations. Reyes (2007) exploits state-specific reductions in lead exposure due to the Clean Air Act to estimate the effect of lead emissions from gasoline on violent crime. She reports that reductions in childhood lead exposure in the 1970s and 1980s accounted for more than half of the violent crime decline of the 1990s.2 Stretesky and Lynch (2001) estimate that, from 1989 to 1991, counties with air lead levels equivalent to .17 μg/m3 had homicide rates four times as high as counties with air lead levels equivalent to 0 μg/m3. Mielke and Zahran (2012) show that air lead and aggravated assault rates were strongly associated in a panel of U.S. cities. Longitudinal studies of individuals document a positive relationship between pre- and post-natal lead exposure and delinquency (Dietrich et al., 2001) and arrests for violent offenses (Wright et al., 2008). Cross-sectional research on individuals (Denno, 1990; Needleman et al., 1996, 2002) and counties (Stretesky and Lynch, 2004), studies using cross-national panel data (Nevin, 2007), and analyses of national time-series (Nevin, 2000) have yielded similar results."

Are each of these going to be able to factor for every possible confounder you can think of? No. But it's not like they aren't controlling for anything. That's the whole gist of the parent article - three studies using three new ways of controlling for other variables. Have you seen multitudes of studies that point to any of those other confounder you mention having better evidence, across time and geography, while controlling for lead and all the other possible confounders? Again, nobody is arguing that there are no other factors. And nobody has a precise answer on just how much, because it's impossible. But all studies point to: very large effects, still happening in some cases, and largely preventable: https://www.dropbox.com/s/07z65p9a5wdppfl/LifeAfterLead_AEJ_...

The author ends his post by stating that the rise of crime from the 60s through the 80s is a major puzzle (to him, in 2010 when he wrote it). I don't see this as an argument against the lead hypothesis in any way.

Re: your second point, one of the three studies in the parent article looks at city level crime in the 1920s/30s using city piping infrastructure (lead vs. iron) for test/control groups. The leaded fuel was a substantial source of increased lead levels but not the only one.

I thought so, and I wish it were. But look at the threads here, and everyone who feels that they can just say "crack epidemic" and believe it is providing the same insight into the situation as scientific study.

Nobody is stating there is a single factor. But it appears to be the largest that we can plausibly put a finger on. When you see the same correlations across different countries, states, and local jurisdictions that did not have identical drug policies, immigration/migration patterns, policing strategies etc. etc. etc, it becomes convincing. The three studies in this article provide even more evidence, using clever experimental designs to control for as many of these other variables as they can. Did you read the article? Do you have specific comments on how those studies are or are not contributing to our knowledge?

>> If it's lead, did crime rates increase 20 years after leaded fuel became a thing?

Yes. The rise and fall of violent crime rates correlate very tightly to the rise and fall of leaded fuel, with a ~20 year gap. You see the same correlations in different countries that had different phase in / phase out times, and different U.S. states that had different timelines. (E.g. if a state phased out leaded gas 5 years earlier than average, their crime wave also started abating 5 years earlier than average)

It would be impossible to 100% conclusively and with absolute precision determine the exact connection between the two. That doesn't mean it's not the best available theory at the moment, that fits the most data. There are international, interstate, and even local level analysis all pointing to the same thing. There are longitudinal studies on children pointing to the same thing. And there are established and direct casual mechanisms in the brain biology that explain it. So what does waving a hand and saying "Nah nah can't prove it" do? By your standards do we have zero knowledge on all sociological matters, since it's impossible to design and implement a perfectly controlled study?

650 consecutive days?! Lock your phone in a safe for a weekend and take a walk in the woods, I beg you.

Good fiction can teach you more about human nature than any non-fiction. Marginally more knowledge about human nature can get you further than marginally more technical knowledge.

Anyone that’s interested in this and looking for a good short fiction read, pick up Sourdough by Robin Sloan. It’s a fun little tale set in the Bay Area about someone who picks up bread making as a hobby and things get weird.

The top comment right now on the thread on Apple’s new AI exec hire is entirely about how “suits” and “management” are worthless. Recent economic research, as pointed out by Tabarrok here, strongly disagrees.

With uber you are paid when you serve a customer. Creating content, on its own, is not serving either a customer or an end user, so there can be no expectation of payment.

I’ve most often heard it used in the context a man explaining something that didn’t need explaining in the first place. “If you don’t screw this screw in reallll right, it’ll come loose. And you know what happens if it comes loose right? Well first...” etc etc. It’s an assumed and implied ignorance of the issue at hand

I just read the book “1491” which covers a lot on this theme. Recommended. Short answer: it was always politicized, in various ways, for various ends. Most of those ways downplayed the size, scope and sophistication of native cultures.

Late to this... when it works, no problems at all for me. But then a random key sometimes ends up sticking, which I’ve heard elsewhere too and is a pain in the ass. Click it enough and I’ve been able to unstick them each time but still an issue.

I understand and agree with preferring the source article for the main discussion topic instead of the blog pointer. But I also strongly disagree with your categorization of this particular site/article as spam. Kottke.org has been running for over twenty years as an independent blog and a source of joy and happiness for its readers. Jason consistently points to amazing things all over the web and often adds insightful, poignant or funny commentary to boot.

Rose gold MacBook ;)

The IF literature I’ve read indicates that calorie reduction isn’t really a goal, though it often happens to some degree. But I’m generally not taking in 2/3rd of prior calories just because I’m eating 2/3rd of the meals - more like 3/4 or 4/5.

This is all new to me so curious where you’re getting this info from so I can read up.

Advising young graduates to retain humility seems a far stretch from belittling.