I think you’re right to ask “Is there a sense?”

That is, the naive answer is like the story of the economists in the bar. Bill Gates walks in, and the economists start dancing and cheering, shouting “Hooray! On average, everyone in this bar is really rich right now!”

A lot of worries about immigration sound kind of like economists in a bar, and then a homeless guy walks in, and then they start crying and sobbing because now on average the people in the bar are poorer.

I think there are some people kind of developing the intellectual work it would take to be more sophisticated than this - like Garett Jones - but I’m not convinced that actual immigration opponents have read them or are familiar with them.

Man, I don’t know. I think during that scene I was thinking that I would leave without the watch, then have a friend get it a few weeks later and mail it to me. I know that’s a cop-out answer, but cop-out answers are all I’ve got.

But if I did, I definitely wouldn’t stay around to make Pop-Tarts.

I assume you’ve found Adderall and Ritalin give you problems? Have you tried modafinil?

I’m not sure I have this thing. Or, I mean, my eye has a corner, and it itches sometimes, but it doesn’t seem like there’s a specific thing there that can be cut out. Am I missing something?

I didn’t define them that way, I just explained that that’s the accepted definition. As you point out, autism is an edge case.

Request fewer of these “you are wrong and bad but I will not explain why” asks.

My cabinet/related picks:

Attorney General: Preet Bharara
Commerce: Peter Thiel
Defense: James Mattis
State: Tulsi Gabbard
Housing & Urban Development: Matt Yglesias
Homeland Security: Anonymous Mugwump
Health & Human Services: Julia Wise
Transportation/Energy: Elon Musk
Treasury: Satoshi Nakamoto
Education: Eva Moskowitz
Veterans Affairs: David Petraeus
Agriculture: Buck Shlegeris
Labor: Bernie Sanders

White House Chief Of Staff: Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
Head of NIH: Stephen Hsu
Surgeon General: Dr. Chris Ballas
Head of FDA: Alex Tabarrok
Welfare Czar: Charles Murray
Chair of Federal Reserve: Scott Sumner
Budget Director: Holden Karnofsky
Head of CIA: Philip Tetlock

Everything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.

First order of business: in addition to being my Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders is now vice president. I don’t care what he does with the position, it’s just so that the Republican Congress knows that if they impeach me, they’re getting a pacifist Jewish socialist as the leader of the free-world.

Second order of business is to get Robin Hanson to set up a national prediction market to help me figure out all my other policies. All other orders of business conditional on approval from national prediction market and from new CIA head Philip Tetlock. Then:

- Legalize marijuana and hallucinogens, lessen penalties for other drugs. Replace prison sentences for nonviolent crimes with corporal punishment.

- Build Trump’s wall, because it’s a meaningless symbol that will change nothing, but it’ll make Republicans like me, and it will make Democrats focus all their energy on criticizing that instead of anything substantive I do.

- Tax the rich. Maybe a Georgist land tax?

- Get rid of most occupational licensing restrictions. I’m probably too chicken to get rid of medical licensing entirely, but make it way easier to become a nurse-practitioner, and vastly expand the amount of stuff nurse practitioners can do. Allow psychologists to prescribe most psychiatric medication.

- Declare War On College. Forgive all existing student loans, then refuse to give out any new ones. Prohibit the government from asking about college degree when hiring new employees, and put pressure on private industry to follow suit for any position less absolutely-requiring-of-specialized-knowledge than doctor or engineer. Increase government loans to boot camps, online courses, et cetera.

- If Tabarrok hasn’t already solved everything about prescription medication by this point, do it myself.

- If Yglesias hasn’t already solved everything about urban housing by this point, do it myself.

- Carbon tax, with the money going into massive investment into ways to sequester atmospheric carbon.

- Basic income guarantee if possible, otherwise just sneakily increase income tax credits and stuff so that nobody notices.

- Tell Russia that if they can defeat ISIS, they can have as much of Syria as they want, and if they can do it while getting rid of Assad we’ll let them have Alaska back too.

- Agree with Russia and Ukraine to partition Ukraine into Pro-Russia Ukraine and Pro-West Ukraine. This would also work with Moldova.

- Recognize Somaliland.

- Tell Saudi Arabia that we’re sorry for sending mixed messages by allying with them, and actually they are total scum and we hate their guts. Ally with Iran, who are actually really great aside from the whole Islamic theocracy thing. Get Iran to grudgingly tolerate Israel the same way we got Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc to grudgingly tolerate Israel, which I assume involves massive amounts of bribery. Form coalition for progress and moderation vs. extremist Sunni Islam throughout Middle East. Nothing can possibly go wrong.

- Tell China that their artificial islands in the South China Sea are stupid and if they don’t stop, then we’ll show them what real artificial islands look like. If they call our bluff, send Patri Friedman over with ten billion dollars in state funding to create seasteads in whichever spots are most inconvenient for China.

- Eliminate the penny.

- Probably other things, I would have to think.

I don’t know.

I recently learned that the main reason planes haven’t been getting any faster lately is because there’s a really nonlinear discontinuity in fuel requirements as you get close to the speed of sound, to the point where it becomes economically prohibitive. This seemed really interesting to me as an example of apparent technological stagnation actually having a meaningful physical-sciences explanation (although poorly-written regulation around sonic booms doesn’t help either). It does seem to me that we’ve cracked certain easy diseases where your thyroid is ten times normal size or something, and we’re left with really complicated things that require full knowledge of the immune system.

I don’t want to rule out “science has gotten worse” either. Now that Peter Thiel is Official Shadow President, I hope he does something useful about this. Maybe make Michael Vassar Secretary of Energy.

Overregulation of drugs is really bad, but I doubt it’s to blame. Drug companies still really really want good blockbuster drugs and if there were really good ones they would spend whatever it took to push it through. Overregulation of the pharmaceutical industry probably prevents a lot of marginal drugs from existing, and makes existing drugs cost much more, but I doubt it’s the reason we haven’t cured schizophrenia.

A three minute Google on this topic suggests that death rate is increased among all groups, including severely demented Alzheimers patients (who don’t know it’s the holidays) and institutionalized people (who don’t get to celebrate the holidays), suggesting it has something to do with worse medical staffing. But I don’t think anyone really knows for sure.

No.