My approach to video games is to have two or three and forget that I can buy more. The ones I played as a kid were the first three Super Marios, exactly one of the Mega Man games (the one with Toad Man, can’t remember the number), and a race car game I forget the name of (it might have had the word “cyber” in it). Somehow those were like the only video games I played my entire childhood, even though my family was decently well-off and there’s no explanation for us not getting more.

I applied for a residency in Idaho and almost got it, so maybe he’s alternate universe me. How do you know he reads my blog?

I don’t get the impression that the two are substitutes. Most economists think tariffs generally hurt the economy. I understand that they sometimes benefit specific groups at the expense of others, but I don’t think those are as broad as “benefit the poor at the expense of the rich”. My guess is if you helped one group of poor people, you’d probably hurt other such groups.

But all of this is kind of beside the point, because even if factories start booming again or something, that doesn’t affect disabled people, people who can’t get a job because they’ve got a criminal record, elderly people, et cetera. Getting employable people a job is really only half the battle.

The next best thing to UBI is a sane health care system plus food stamps plus good public housing plus something to make the working poor earn more money. I understand Trump’s tariffs are an attempt at the last of these, but I don’t think it’ll work.

Unlikely. They’ve mostly avoided controversial people from the post-WWII era. I think the closest they’ve come is de Gaulle.

Honestly I have no idea. I keep swinging back and forth between “idiot who got ridiculously lucky by saying exactly the thing that tapped into a vein of anger he didn’t even realize was there” and “weird Zen genius who can consistently win everything while looking like he’s not even trying”.

Based on the healthcare thing, I’m leaning more towards the first one.

I’m not sure there are evidence-based tools for this. People can’t even consistently figure out whether parents are happier than childless people, so it seems like a lot to ask to actually start predicting something for any given person.

Most depression comes in episodes that last a year or two at the longest. It’s pretty unlikely that a depressed person will literally stay depressed forever, even if they don’t get effective treatment. Of course, there’s always a risk of recurrence.

Rule of thumb with depression is that 33% of patients will do very well with the first treatment they try, another 33% will eventually find something if they persevere, and another 33% are treatment resistant (though as above this certainly doesn’t mean they’ll be depressed forever).

I think the prognosis for anxiety disorders are pretty similar, with the exception that they’re not episodic and they mostly do stick around if untreated.

It sounds like you’re pretty interested in both medicine and computers. But see also whether anything you’ve learned makes you valuable in pharmaceutical research, which is both high-impact and lucrative.

(2/2) That is, most of the probability space is concentrated on the few dozen religions known to mankind for a few thousand years. This is a finite set and Pascal’s wager would imply that you should follow that religion that has the most expected value, no?            

I don’t think there‘s a correct solution. Or if there is, you can trivially modify the wager until there isn’t.

I guess for me the most important way of looking at it is that it isn’t just one wager about a religion, it’s Pascal’s Mugging, plus the next Pascal’s Mugging-esque thing someone can think of, plus a whole class of things, such that if you accept any of them, then your entire life is going to be spent minimizing the chance of 0.00000000000000001% probability events that somebody invented to annoy you.

At some point you either have to choose between doing that or living a normal life while knowing that doing so doesn’t perfectly follow the dictates of rational choice theory. For me it’s more of an aesthetic choice than a rational one - a universe where you could just hijack the destiny of entire civilizations full of intelligent beings by proposing weirdly-phrased choices at them is ugly.

I’m not sure what you mean by asking me my opinion of my own post. I hope it’s not too surprising if I’m in favor. Nothing that’s happened since I wrote if has changed my mind much.