predicting the future ➡️ improving the future
London 🇬🇧
Joined March 2009
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Over 85% of oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center use OpenEvidence.
Together, @MSKCancerCenter and OpenEvidence have built OncoKB, MSK’s expert interpretation of a tumor’s genetics, directly into OpenEvidence, putting it in the hands of oncologists across the United States.
As Dr. Anaeze Offodile puts it: “Our mission is to end cancer for life.” As of today, we are widening OncoKB’s reach so that patients everywhere benefit from the same rigor as patients at MSK. Watch the story.
There’s been a quiet wave of these governance failures recently. It’s surprisingly hard to find directors/trustees willing to stick to a core mission amid social rewards for drift
My @thetimes column: An incredible tale of how an ancient royal charter charity founded to look after London’s bridges was hijacked by left-wing causes
We may not have feral youth on the street, but make no mistake: this is looting
With @lfg_uk
times-comment.com/3b6d00ae
When we compare human and AI reasoning performance we often use human exam performance as our benchmark. This is the environment where humans are strongest (no distractions, purely abstract questions, no emotional valence to the answers). But real life thinking is fraught with feelings and social incentives which get more intense the more important the issue. On “big questions” like rent control, how many people, even those whose job it is to think and make rules about this stuff, could reason as well as this without getting emotionally overwhelmed?
Based on evidence from similar second-generation rent controls (e.g. Germany's Mietpreisbremse), expect roughly 5-15% fewer overall housing completions, with multi-family apartments down 20-40%. Investor uncertainty and capped returns deter rental builds even when new units are exempt. Historical UK rent controls nearly halted private rental construction.
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
In my teens I became passionately interested in evolutionary biology, prompted in large part by the books of @RichardDawkins. The thing I found so fascinating (so much so that I would go on to do a PhD on it) was the idea of genetic inheritance - or indeed *any* inheritance - as a powerful algorithm that will blindly promote whatever traits are associated with reproductive success.
In Chinese local government, bureaucrats’ promotion up the ranks of politics is strictly linked to delivering economic growth in their jurisdictions. This, together with certain other aspects of how the system is set up, creates an algorithm that is virtually guaranteed to produce wealth. That is why @bswud and @RobinRivaton call Chinese cities ‘growth machines’ in this excellent article.
Most Western government ‘algorithms’ are not ones that will produce wealth. If we look at the incentives at play, at which traits are associated with ‘reproduction’ in our systems, we can see that the result they are programmed to deliver is inaction and stagnation. To get different results, we need to change these incentives.
China has become the most important manufacturing economy in the world because it is a continent-sized Silicon Valley.
worksinprogress.co/issue/chi…
Every Chinese city govt acts as a VC firm trying to create clusters in its region, because it has both the means and incentive to do so.
Local govts generate their revenues, nearly all of which they keep, from selling leases on land and from stakes they have taken in local companies, which together allow them to capture economic spillovers.
Chinese officials have their entire careers graded and determined by how much growth they have been able to create in the areas they run. Career progression is determined according to a great tournament that pits official against official and gives promotions to whoever has grown their region the most. If they don’t reach a certain stage by a certain age they are blocked from promotion forever.
This is why so many economic clusters have centred on Chinese cities, for high- and low-tech products alike. Shaodong makes 70% of the entire world's cigarette lighters; Danyang makes half of the world's spectacle lenses; Zheng'an makes 1/7 of the world's guitars; Datang a third of its socks.
Whereas many of the West’s most important city governments capture only a small amount of the spillovers from successful clusters, and thus have very little reason to foster them, in China, they get a huge amount of the upside and can re-invest it in further growth. This also gives them a great incentive to solve problems for companies, like when Shanghai's govt got Tesla's factory there built even faster than Elon himself had expected (and twice as fast as his Fremont, CA factory).
But this is not some exotic 'oriental' innovation – this is how America used to do things when it grew fastest, in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Catching up with China on advanced manufacturing does not require a wise and strategic approach, let alone authoritarianism or the end of democracy. It may just mean fixing city government.
This is why I care so much about local in Britain and America: if we give our own local governments the same incentives and means to grow, the crazily dysfunctional entities we have become used to may be transformed into corporation-like bodies that are ruthlessly focused on making their cities rich, safe and prosperous.
Read more in Works in Progress worksinprogress.co/issue/chi…
What would you do if you woke up as CEO of Madame Tussauds, tasked with a turnaround after a £250m brand write-down? It’s a tough brief:
Celebrities with mass appeal are declining as people splinter into micro communities, each with their own stars unknown to the wider population, plus there's tons of competition now for the different bits of the Madame Tussauds “bundle”.
Who cares about your selfie with waxwork Tom Cruise when I can generate a million pics like that with a cheap subscription to a second-tier AI company?
If I was running it I'd lean in to stuff that you can't do online: real life artefacts from famous lives, especially the darker true crime side- maybe you can get a unabomber sketch to hang on the wall, a Theranos blood testing machine, or procure dictators actual cars and uniforms to go with the waxwork likeness. Madame Tussauds used to display the death masks of executed murderers and personal effects captured from Napoleon at Waterloo. Time to get back to its roots! Saddam had several palaces full of stuff, it must be for sale somewhere in enough volume to recreate a room.
imo the interesting move is to get return custom by leaning into the cafes and dining where you can make the celebrity/fame interest part of the theme, but overall good enough that it could become some families go-to fun evening, like when my parents used to take me to the Hard Rock Cafe as a standard “parents are in town” treat growing up. Planet Hollywood, but more macabre
So good having memberships to attractions when you have children. I'm at Legoland with my son today and he's spent the first half an hour fascinated by the pumpkin display at the entrance. Imagine I’d paid £40 just for this! I'd be so annoyed
This lives on among politicians as their belief in "narrative", where public opinion is never driven by real events or material concerns but is instead controlled by social media algorithms and influencers. Hence many just giving up on improving living standards and spend their efforts on censorship instead
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
The Victorian elites who ran the British Empire did NOT sauna, or plunge, or work out, or use red lights. They didn't learn much at school. Instead, they partied all night, drank amounts that would make us wince, and worked a relaxed five- or six-hour day, sometimes from bed.
The elites of Victorian Britain got up late, drank ceaselessly, worked short hours, partied through the night, and knew nothing about science, technology or engineering. And yet, by their own lights, they were hugely effective.
worksinprogress.co/issue/the…
The Victorians are often held up as a model against the supposedly soft, feckless, humanities-educated elites of today. But I argue that the genius of their system may have been its drastic weighting towards soft skills, team-building and intra-elite networking:
- A Victorian’s gentleman’s office hours typically began about 11am and finished about 5pm, including a multi-course lunch with wine.
- Upper-class Victorians drank ceaselessly. Conduct guides recommended four or five glasses of wine at dinner *for married women*. Port was often served in pints.
- Party culture was intense and nocturnal. Balls started at about 10pm, peaked after 1am, and continued till dawn. During the social season, bankers, judges and politicians might go to several balls per week.
- Elite Victorians learnt almost no STEM at school or university. At least half of class time was given over to ancient languages, often as much as 80 percent. One leading educationalist remarked that it was not worth teaching science to gentlemen because it does not involve ‘continued reasoning’.
- Sports and character formation were valued far above transmitting facts. A top headmaster described his school’s priorities as ‘First – character, second – physique, third – intelligence, fourth – manners, fifth – information’.
This cannot have made elite Victorians more productive individually, but maybe the dense social and emotional network it created helped them to work as a sort of extended team.
Perhaps we should think again about what makes groups of people effective.
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
Briefly, on why I pay attention to the EA/rationalists:
Imagine you have an extremely nerdy friend who, in the mid-2000s, would not shut up about how Donald Trump was going to become president and reshape American politics. "Stop saying weird shit," you say. "He's a joke. He's a clown. The Apprentice isn't even good this season." But this guy won't stop. He's obsessive. Read McLuhan, he says. Read Postman, read Meyrowitz, read Ong, this is where everything is headed. God, he can be so incredibly annoying ... and then, ten years later, Trump becomes president and reshapes American politics.
This is the most relatable frame I can think of to explain my experience with EA/rationalist people in the AI space. I became friends with EA folks after my mom died and I found really profound meaning in donating to Against Malaria and GiveDirectly, which struck me as a way to honor a life by saving a life. Then, these peple started talking about AI. And talking, and talking. Constantly. They said AI would solve impossible math problems; that it would mimic PhD-level achievement in a variety of fields; that it would change parts of life like education in ways we couldn't imagine; that it would become the dominant sector in the economy; that it might teach itself to code itself and escape test environments; that it would, in a decade, be the only thing many people talked about in the news. My response then: Stop saying weird shit! You sound deranged. Go back to talking about malaria nets and direct cash aid to poor families.
And then, so much of what they said would happen actually happened. And, even crazier, they made it happen. Many of the ppl who contributed to, or were influenced by, all that EA/rationalist stuff ten years ago literally built the damn thing in the labs.
Like every group, the EA/rationalist world seems uniform to outsiders, but it has a ton of internal divisions. I still think some of their predictions are nuts. I don't think AI will kill us all. I don't foresee Dyson Spheres in the 2030s or millions of robots making millions of robots in the next few years. These are crazy predictions, and I hope most of them are wrong.
But when I see people shitting on the EA/Rationalist worldview, all I can think of is me, 10 years ago, thinking a lot of these folks were crazy for predicting that AI would by the mid-2020s be the center of the the news cycle, the engine of the economy, the hinge-point of geopolitics. That was an insane call. They got many of the details wrong. But they got the big picture right. They said: Pay attention. And they were right about that. The EA/Rationalists deserve skepticism, criticism, and doubt, like any other ideology. But I think it's wise to pay attention to the people who have been saying to pay attention.
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
Nice to think about what's better and what's worse.
> Litter is way better now. The 1970s were very heavy in litter.
> The facades are much cleaner and better painted now. Everything is much, much cleaner now. It's all filthy then.
> The signage is regulated here, and so better now (usually old signage is better).
> The fact that the waterfront was a fenced-off hoarding then is notable. Now it's a bustling, upmarket town centre with thousands of tourists visiting the UNESCO World Heritage site.
> The road surface is about the same, but the pavement is now good York stone. Then it was mucky concrete composite.
> The clothes were better then. They are all dressed great.
> The small 1970s cars without safety features are also appealing to the eye.
> The Cutty Sark looked much nicer then without the globby museum it was put in. But the museum is useful, so that goes both ways.
Overall I'd say it's a remarkable improvement.
England's schools getting and staying good is a really interesting success story. Maintaining standards is not at all easy!
We are now in a slightly weird situation in which England's scores are basically the same as they were in 2012.
But whereas in 2012 England was about 20th - 25th in the world, now it is one of only a handful of countries to be in the top ten for every subject.
England & Estonia are the only two countries outside East Asia to come in the top 10 for reading, maths & science.
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
Ariely and a lot of “replication crisis” social psych contributed to an erroneous view of the human world, which is that little things cause big things. Instead, big things are caused either by other big things or systematically correlated agglomerations of little things.
Ariely is a much bigger issue than Arday ever was. Arday was an aberration, but nobody with a fully functioning brain takes any of that stuff seriously anyway. He was evolving in fields that are themselves aberrations. The real issue behind Arday was the people who hired him and their political agenda, as well as the fact that nobody dares to speak up against an obvious farce. Arday himself wasn’t the biggest issue in his own story.
Ariely, on the other hand, was supposed to be a serious scholar and a real “academic star.” I actually took one of his online courses and was quite impressed. A lot of smart people not only took him seriously but also devoted years of their lives to studying behavioral economics without knowing they were building on quicksand. That’s a lot of resources and years wasted.
This is how forecasting works:
1: has something similar happened before? (base rate)
2 how does today differ from the historical situation? (update)
3 do we disagree about what counts as similar and what’s different this time? Let’s average our answers (aggregate)
Done
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
This is also how I study comms. People don’t change. Every interaction between people has happened before
You can simulate reactions by literally knowing what happened last time, even if last time was centuries ago
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
Almost the entire world was colonised by European powers in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Siam (now Thailand) was one of the only countries that resisted successfully.
It did so in one of history’s biggest PR victories and state capacity-building efforts: the ‘siwilai’ modernisation campaign – its equivalent of the Meiji Restoration – in which the trappings of European civilization were adopted to turn the imperial ‘civilizing mission’ on its head:
- Siam hired Belgian lawyers to redesign its laws and royal court along European lines, which worked to stop European powers from claiming that their subjects should be exempt from Siamese laws, a common tactic for creating pretexts for invasion.
- They brought in German military advisors and replaced traditional noble levies with a standing army and a professional officer corps designed on Prussian lines.
- The state adopted the Gregorian calendar, 24-hour days, censuses, fixed borders, railways, and discouraged betel-nut chewing and promoted wearing Western dress.
- Siam’s king Mongkut spoke English and Latin, was a student of Western science and technology, and maintained a library containing everything from scientific works to Sir Walter Scott novels.
- The royal heirs were sent to Eton and European military colleges. The king negotiated with British diplomats in English over wine and cigars, in a library filled with scientific texts and Walter Scott novels.
By 1907, Le Figaro was comparing Siam with post-Meiji Japan and telling its readers that Siam’s king had the dignity of a European king. The story has been made famous in The King and I, but how it actually happened is not well understood in the West.
From the new issue of Works in Progress, how Siam Europeanised itself in just a few decades, divided the coalitions that drove imperialism in Europe, and managed to stand against some of history’s most fearsome imperial powers and win.
worksinprogress.co/issue/how…
When you notice an obvious stupidity in a government policy, it’s very important that you don’t imagine that someone MUST have thought about and dealt with your objection: they almost certainly haven’t!
Michael Story ⚓ retweeted
✏️Childcare traumatises children and literally 'shrivels' part of their brain
✏️Childcare reduces knife crime and teen pregnancy later on for kids who attend
✏️Funding for childcare gives a 7x return on investment, comparable to the gains from providing clean water in developing countries
..... are all examples of false claims on the effects of childcare made by mainstream commentators, politicians, and organisations.
Childcare has existed long enough, and been studied enough, that if there were large and obvious effects on children, either positive or negative, we would know by now.
Parents have enough to worry about already without nonsense about the brain-shriveling effects of their choice of nursery. With birth rates falling further below replacement each year we should be making it easier, not more stressful, to have kids. Please can we all just calm down and be normal about childcare?
New article by me and @PMArslanagic - read now in @WorksInProgMag:
worksinprogress.co/issue/day…
Not getting markets is not really an IQ/computation problem imo. Markets just make a lot of people emotionally uncomfortable. If you like plans, order, particular social hierarchies, equality, then markets freak you out. It’s in constant tension with prosperity
This is all well and good, but it does remain somewhat of a mystery to me that so many people are incapable of grasping this logic. You can say that most people just aren’t that clever, which is true, but what about all the socialists at elite colleges with high SAT scores?
Like, I really have to say that I don’t find the logic of markets to be all that confusing. But my lived experience is that people really struggle with it.
That’s kind of weird!
