It's so good! (and on audible if that's signfgiant for you)

have you read Deng Xioping and the transformation of china

Yeah i think some of the darker findings from anthropolgy are so interesting.

i would love a hot take

I'm reading "By Steppe, Desert and Ocean" at the moment and "Blood and Iron" - both excellent (and the first is free on audible although that may be less relevent you than it is to me

(and good practice particuarly when one has a strong emotational reaction)

I don't think that this is equvilent - to be very clear - but I think in hindsight the social democracts were wrong not to play dirty in weimar.

Again, I think that this action is, in expectaton, one of the worst a modern president will take, and i'm steelmanning because it is good practice.

My gut reaction is that I strongly agree and think that this is horrific.

I slightly wonder if there are good tit for tat game theroy reasons to do this.

I think almost certainly not, but that's my steelman of the case for it.

FWIW I think your shutdown problem work is pretty ambitious (although perhaps should be viewed as a special case because it's applying results in mature field to a large problem in an immatuture one, which perhaps gives us a priori reason to think that one can gain traction on the largest problems)

My guess is that this is also feild depdendent, and the younger the peak of the feild is the more ambitious one should be early on. Of course there's also a training compoant and you have more inside knowledge on this than me.

I think in areas where it's difficult, aiming for results which are unlikely on priors is socially harmful. Social psychology is the obvious area where this is the case.

I think a subtility here is around how easy false positives are to detect. In formal subjects, where I think it's roughly easist, I think it's worthwhile being very ambitious because it's easy to verfiy.

If you could know ex ante of course how likely you were to do paradigm shifting work then that would be great, but that's not obvious to me (perhaps outside of pure maths but even then most fields medalists were not IMO medalists.)

But like the EV seems worth it? Academia is extremely heavy tailed, and although plausilby for induviudal students this is bad advice with respect to their prudential interests, it could still be socially valueable for most people to take these longshots.

somewhat forshadowing a more serious post on christianity