Doug Rand and friends have launched a new immigration podcast: The Melting Pod. A must-listen.
My friend Josh Martin is launching Peace Per Dollar - a GiveWell for conflict reduction.1
New York is considering banning chatbots from giving medical advice. Look, ChatGPT is already vastly better than my GP.2
Being tough on crime… works? And lowers all-cause mortality.
Abortion bans reduce housing prices.
Residents of Istanbul are 2.4x likelier to search “Tinder” than “prayer times”.
Ezra Klein makes the case for Just Doing The Intellectual Work. Just sit down and read all the things. Do The Work.
People are more likely to apply to a particular college if they visit when the weather is good. This is basically UCSD’s entire recruitment strategy and honestly, it works.
And to close: a tweet from Ava I’ve been thinking about:
my problem w the popular conception of agency is that most people are trapped not by an inability to act but rather by an inability to conceive of a wider range of things to use their free will on. their actions are constrained by the aperture of their desire
May the aperture of your desire be wide enough for you to use your free will to its fullest extent.
I would like to take, like, 0.0001% credit for this initiative, because Josh and I have talked about an EA approach to peacebuilding a lot.
My GP’s website turns off at night. I am not joking.
Presumably in a city with a lot of mosques, most people don't have to google 'prayer times'? They'll hear a muezzin, or probably more than one.
What's the GP surgery policy????? That's nuts
About weather affecting college choice, I left sunny Southern California for college in New England partly because I visited campus on a beautiful spring day when kids were playing frisbee in t-shirts. I learned my lesson and went to grad school at UCSD.