Favorites: Negative Polarization, Zoning, and a California SEZ

Buffett’s richer, Trump’s tariffs get weirder, and ChatGPT 4.5 nails the Turing test

April 2025, Tokyo

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Negative polarization is super powerful, and that's true both when your side is making policy and when the other side is. Noah Smith jokes that Trump is singlehandedly reinvigorating Neoliberalism with these tariffs. Follow-up has this data broken down by party, everyone is more pro-free-trade than previously.

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Here's some recent reporting on what happened during Trump's first term, Gary Cohn fought tooth and nail (cached) last Trump administration to keep these tariffs from happening.

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GPQA is a set of multiple choice questions. It’s not an ideal measure of performance, this is still a measure of the ability to do super advanced information retrieval in my opinion. “Human phd” is how well a human with a phd and internet acts does on these questions within their own field.

Longer Reads

• I tend to agree with Tim Lee's short thread in response to Scott Alexander's AI 2027 post. It's a nice website, and it's great that they've integrated some good forecasting work into the piece, but I'm still pretty much unmoved. (src)(cached)

Flotsam and Jetsam

– Klein and Thompson's book, Abundance, isn't arguing that abundance is something we should strive for while abandoning redistribution. They say so pretty clearly in the book. There are places where Klein has made mistakes in his defenses during his book tour. He argues that there are axes of progressivism separate from being pro-competition, and that we can pursue those as well. But a better defense (cached) would be to point out that also, zoning reform is pro-competition. (src)(cached)
– Dwarkesh Patel expresses admiration for @gwern, who pretty much summarized Patel's life's work, how he aims for a mix of undiscovered topics with novel guests and extracting new insights from standard topics through better interviewing techniques. (src)(cached)
– Trump’s trade ideas are bad, but there are structural reasons that having the President handle tariffs is advantageous. Diffuse benefits and concentrated harms. Too bad that this only works if the president isn't a moron. (src)(cached)
– Seems bad that the Trump admin is using the FCC to block Apple from continuing to improve the iPhone's satellite communication capabilities. (src)(cached)
– 1.5% of speeders are responsible for 20% of pedestrian fatalities. (src)(cached)
– Some folks are reporting that the majority of kids at SF schools are getting around using Waymo. And this is a new kind of usage, kids weren't using Lyft and Uber before. (src)(cached)
– I had previously heard of Orchid Inc, which does detailed disease screening for IVF. But I had not heard the story behind it, the founder’s mother went blind due to an untreatable genetic abnormality. (src)(cached)
– Noah Smith highlighted some clips from a whole thread of colorized hundred-year-old footage. The kids look terrible, the young adults look even worse (cached), you don't want to live in the world of a century ago. (src)(cached)
– The Signal group chat fiasco appears to have burned Israeli intelligence, it may have lost them on-the-ground sources. (src)(cached)
– Real estate transfer taxes are bad, even when they only apply to expensive homes. Here’s a study about how they’ve totally messed up Los Angeles. (src)(cached)
– San Francisco has made significant progress on reducing car breakins in the last year. Some in the comments are arguing that folks stopped reporting them, but it's not clear why they'd suddenly stop reporting them in 2024 specifically, especially when you still need to file a report for stolen items. (src)(cached)
– Roosevelt institute position on tariffs from September looks even worse now that it’s been co-opted by the right, implemented, and has crashed the economy. (src)(cached)
– Trump learned from his first term it’s riskier to be transparent and accountable about mistakes, doing so invites sustained media scrutiny. If he stonewalls, eventually the press gets tired of it and moves on. No one getting fired oven Signal leak. (src)(cached)
– Here's an interesting explanation for how the fact that NAFTA really did hurt existing manufacturing jobs doesn't even show that it hurt manufacturing in the US overall, and that our data is consistent with the possibility that it increased manufacturing employment in the US overall, just not in the parts of the nation that already had a lot of manufacturing. (src)(cached)
– A high-achieving highschool student complained on Twitter that no good university would take him, folks were surprised until he shared his personal statement essay. They're not discriminating against him, he just seems like an ass. (src)(cached)
– Fun thread from Mollick where he generates fake book covers for sequels that should really never be made. Revenge of Gatsby! (src)(cached)
– UCSD researchers have quite definitively shown that ChatGPT 4.5 passes the Turing test as originally defined. This still uses non-expert judges, expert judges can still tell the difference. (src)(cached)
– Looks like Taiwan was categorized as a country in Trump's tariff announcement. So they've got that going for them. (src)(cached)
– Apparently midjourney v7 is a big improvement. Tbh it was so good that it’s getting hard to tell, and I don’t think it does any better with input images than the previous version. So I’m not sure it’s competitive with ChatGPT’s image model yet. (src)(cached)
– Out of the four richest men in America, only one has gotten richer over the last four months, and he’s also the one who did not attend the inauguration: Warren Buffett. (src)(cached)
– New mayor of San Francisco is proposing significant upzoning on the West side of the city. He’s turning out to be quite YIMBY friendly despite not getting YIMBY’s top endorsement. (src)(cached)
– Reform of the ridiculous laws making elevators expensive in the US failed in Washington state. What a pity. (src)(cached)
– Trump’s statement about extending the deadline for TikTok to stop operating is pretty directly illegal. The law says one extension, not two. (src)(cached)
– Matt Levine’s writing about the tariffs is very funny. (src)(cached)
– Cutler jokes that Newsom should make California a Special Economic Zone (src)(cached)