Zac Hill
@zdch
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Co-founder/President, 39A. Newest stuff: Mar Beauty Lounge 💅🏻✨. Professional Wizard in a previous life.
Washington, DC
Joined January 2009
Finally finished reading what are IMV the three main books that define the ‘abundance canon’: Recoding America, Why Nothing Works, and Abundance (h/t to @pahlkadot for the early edition of WNW). Some thoughts re: the actual content of the books relative to the Discourse / 🧵.
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Seth Dickinson is doing some pretty wild shit over in Magic Story for Edge of Eternities. It's without question some of the most thematically ambitious MTG narrative ever sculpted; IDK if it succeeds all the time, exactly, but I absolutely adore the big swings.
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But no amount of that solves the first three problems. So I'm skeptical of the ceiling of any 'Transcendent Third Way Option' even before getting into any of the political science behind e.g. 'first-past-the-post' constraints or Congressional-jurisdiction ladder-ups etc. /🧵.
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One of the reasons it's great to have so many upstart, policy-first, well-regarded-across-the-aisle-even-if-they're-partisan think tanks sprouting up around DC is that — along with the rise of the Policy-Entrepreneurial Poster — we are starting to make progress along this axis.
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That makes even straightforwardly solving for whatever sets of issue-specific or general optimization problems very hard, because there is by no means just a consensus best 'pragmatic' option available for every issue area.
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All of this is in addition to another very important driver, which is just that good, rigorous, really robust policy analysis is hard and also undervalued and also underfunded and also undersaturated within 'the discourse'.
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Third, ideological projects impose rationalization functions over the *interpretation* of how to think about what policies produce what outcome-level variables, such that any 'test and check' iterative function gets warped by the lens through which the 'checking' occurs.
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Second, an ideological project creates second-order optimization vectors over and above what a 'commonsense' approach solves for. I am an atheist, and am not looking for my soul to be saved. But for a Christian, it's rational for that outcome to supplant a more 'pragmatic' one.
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First, people who get into politics tend to be motivated by an ideological project, since it creates and reinforces a meaning-providing cultural worldview. This is a more powerful force than enacting outcomes, and can be at odds with the outcome-level optimization problem.
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Basically, I think there are three main drivers governing why people tend to get into politics that get in the way of 'advancing commonsense outcomes nonideologically.'.
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Now that America Party Discourse is a thing, it's useful IMO to walk through why "pragmatic nonideological party focusing on commonsense outcomes" in practice is a really difficult thing to do. There are political science reasons for this, but my angle is more psychological.🧵.
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I can’t find the lie 🤷♂️.
DC subway ads: We Are a Defense Contractor. Please nuke Iran, please please. NYC subway ads: hey girlypop! Are you fat? Kill yourself ✨- love, hers. SF subway ads: AI AI AI, use our new AI Agent!! AI.
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QASLYs.
my new EA case for Trump is that he's doing so much crazy shit that it made the last 5 nonths feel like 5 years, thereby extending our subjective life spans. Thank you DJT!.
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Man it sure does seem like people don’t love the Every Republican Congress Ever priority stack of “cut healthcare to fund giveaways for rich people”.
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The Pig Level in Split Fiction is definitely up there with The Horse Level in The Witcher III.
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Had zero idea Diesel himself went this hard on fiscal responsibility and second-order downstream sustainability implications for regional healthcare providers, but I'm HERE FOR IT.
Happy 4 more trillion in debt day. Never felt this proud as we continue to destroy the empathy we once held for those less fortunate. So I guess Happy wealthy white 1% day. Enjoy your small regional hospitals while you can. Things just continue to get greater. Happy 4th. .
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This is an underappreciated take IMO. Basically that what has encoded the moral function of current generation of popular AI tools is not the ruleset from which to DEDUCE their behavior, but the information set from which their behavior is INDUCED.
The difficulties of AI alignment research suggest that we're heading for a world where LLMs largely have the values expressed in the corpus of human writing, rather than values their creators seek to instill. I find that somewhat encouraging. Of course, things change fast in AI.
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Fairly persuaded by this (as a directional AI-at-work booster) tbh.
Wild how many people claim to be 10x more productive with AI tools and yet I haven’t heard a single person say that one of their coworkers has become 10x more productive.
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It’s really important not to conflate genuine multifaceted challenges in need of resolution with one’s own favorite culture-warrior high-horse (many such examples from my direction obv).
People who think low fertility was caused by the Pill plus abortion should look at Japan. Until recently the Pill wasn't even available, and abortion rates are a little lower than in America. Japan became the world's first ultra-low-fertility country the all natural way.
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