Clinton's campaign was against Bush, so they were throwing these words back at him.

A Few Lessons from Dominic Cummings on Politics

Barbell model of voters (or "delusion of the centre"), where many in the electorate are far to the left of politicians on white collar crime and higher taxes on the rich but far to the right of politicians on violent crime, anti-terrorism, and immigration. 

You want to be empirical in a way almost all in politics aren't: run tons of focus groups and really listen to how your voters think, not just what policies they want.

Use a best-in-class data model. Polls naturally swing all over, much polling is bad; if you use these, make them Bayesian and get great people who really know what they're doing to figure them out. Then use these models to focus relentlessly on whatever has the largest effect size, which is swing voters. [Some other tricks here that seem worth not being as explicit about.]

Don't be patronizing, do have integrity—very hard in politics. 

Stay on message. Bill Clinton's campaign had 3 talking points, each phrased to maximize punch. "It's the economy, stupid", "read my lips", and another that I forget. Carville was incredible at focusing relentlessly on turning every interview question into a response on one of these three. People won't care about most of the stuff you could talk about, and you can't optimize everything, so just choose the few best messages that are most powerful to people and drive everything back to them. Watch The War Room about the Clinton campaign if you haven't yet.

Note that
A) zooming in on most city hubs will find you monetary concentrations like this, e.g. Manhattan has a GDP pc of $370k
B) I have never actually heard anyone argue that making the city richer is the path to solving homelessness despite living there for a long time, so suspect this might be an error—are you conflating this with deregulating the housing market? Or do people actually argue somewhere that more money would solve homelessness?

~same. I use a Kinesis Freestyle with 20" cord, that finally ~fixed my wrists after 4 years, and I'm extremely excited for the Kinesis Advantage360 coming out some time this year.

I think my current expectation of risk reduction from antigen tests is more like 20-60% than <10%, but I'll also note that it matters a lot what your population is. In Elizabeth's social circle my guess is that most people aren't coming to parties if they've had any suspected positive contact, have any weak symptoms, etc, such that there's a strong selection effect screening out the clearly-positive people. (Or like, imagine everyone with these risk factors takes an antigen test anyways—then requiring tests doesn't add anything.)

I haven't read this whole thread but for the record, I often agree with Michael Mina and think he does great original thinking about these topics, yet think in this case he's just wrong with his extremely high estimates of antigen test sensitivity during contagion. I think his model on antigen tests specifically is theoretically great and a good extrapolation from a few decent assumptions, but just doesn't match what we see on the ground.

For example, I've written before about how even PCRs seem to have 5-10% FNR in the hospitalized, and how PCR tests look even worse from anecdata. Antigen tests get baselined against PCR so will be at least this bad.

We also see things like a clinical trial on QuickVue tests that shows only ~83% sensitivity. Admittedly other studies of antigen tests show ~98% sensitivity, but I think publication bias and results-desirability bias here means that if the clinical trial only shows 83%, then that's decent evidence that studies finding higher are a bit flawed. I would not have guess they could get to 98% though so there's something that doesn't make sense here.

I know the standard heuristic is to trust scientific findings over anecdata, but I think in this case that should be reversed if you're extremely scientifically literate and closely tracking things on the ground. Knowing all the things that can go wrong with even very careful scientific findings, I just don't trust these studies claiming very high sensitivity much—I think they also contradict FDA data on Cue tests, data/anecdata about nasal+saliva tests working better than just nasal, etc. 

(Maybe I'm preaching to the choir and you know most of this, given your range was 25-90%. But I guess I see pretty good evidence it can't possibly be at the high end of that range.)

Reminder that US is crossing 50% BA.2 in the next few days, CA and NY have started to uptick, so probably in 4 weeks it will be a serious wave peaking in like 6-8ish weeks. Plan accordingly!

(So ~4 weeks where things are fineish, then ~7 weeks where rates are higher, then 4 weeks to come back down. I.e. plan for May and June to have lots of COVID, and potential restrictions to continue into July.)

I at least partially agree with this. I'm less interested in virtue signaling per se than I am in using it as a brief exploration to highlight a common misconception about how signaling works. Plausibly virtue signaling isn't the clearest example of this, but I do think it's a pretty good case of the broader point: people tend to talk about signals mostly when they are deficient in various ways, but then that tarnish rubs off onto all signaling universally. I think it's really important that signals are extremely good in general, except ones that are dumb because they're costly to implement or goodharted or what-have-you.  This really does not come through when people talk about signaling. 

Remember remember remember, costly signaling is supposed to be about cost-to-fake, not cost-burnt-to-signal. It is not like Bitcoin. If you own an original Picasso, it is costless to show that you own it, but very costly for someone to fake owning it (have to commission an elaborate copy).

“Virtue signaling” should be thought of with this in mind. If you or someone else is frowning upon a virtue signal, that’s not because of the inherent structure of signaling. It means either it’s a corrupted signal, they’re being annoying with their signal, or it’s not a signal to begin with. For example, if someone can post a bunch of tweets about Latest Crisis costlessly, that’s not really a costly signal to begin with. If someone volunteers for many hours at soup kitchens to be a politician even though they hate it, that’s a corrupted signal. If you casually drop all your volunteering accolades in conversation apropos of nothing, that’s a real signal but really annoying.

In many ways this structure mirrors force projection! Cf Luttwak's Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. In the same way that good force projection doesn’t require costly forces to be applied, good signaling doesn’t require cost to be burnt on a signal. The adept will signal perfectly fine through various proofs provided, without breaking social norms or splurging resources.

Mimesis has re-revealed its awesome and godly power to me over the last few months. Not Girardian mimesis, but hominid mimesis. Best way to do almost anything is to literally copy others, especially the best people but really the triangulation between any few people will do. Don’t know how to write an email? Copy it from an email you received. Don't know how to do any chore, cooking, dance, etc? Just look it up on youtube. This is a long ways from Connor of 2018, who fastidiously avoided watching youtube videos of poi so I could explore it all on my own for months.

Mimesis has a bad rap in my local culture. But, huge postulate: mimesis is ONLY bad when coupled with such tight need for approval that it is a hard constraint on what you can do. That's the combination that results in whole segments of society that can't innovate, can't fix basic problems, general cheems mindset. In our scene of non-conformists, there is essentially no downside, I postulate!

You can make arguments like “thinking things through for yourself first can help avoid anchoring”, or “you can genuinely learn better if you take a first stab yourself and then see the diff”. Sure, but I think these are the exception that proves the rule. Holding off on mimesis is very useful in a few contexts, and all the time for a few occupations; for most people, 99% of stuff is best to do starting from the shoulders of giants. If you like thinking for yourself, trust me that you will do that just the same while cooking from a recipe compared to trying to derive it yourself. If I had just started learning poi as the experts do it, I would have much more quickly gotten to a place where  creative energy and first principles yielded interesting new results, rather than just new results. 

I think I basically mean it straightforwardly. In my mind it is pretty similar to other moral injunctions like "tell the truth" or "speak up for the bullied"—it is important to resolve to do it ahead of time, because in the moment it might be quite hard and costly to do so. So if someone were to start talking about how actually the bullied need to learn to stick up for themselves, etc etc, I would want to remind myself and others that while this is true, it shouldn't change my moral resolution to stand up to bullying. (It's perfectly fine for people to discuss whether maybe we shouldn't stand up for them, but if someone gives an argument that doesn't apply, or evidence that later turns out to be false, I want to again reiterate the resolution.)

Maybe this is overkill or something but I think it feels pretty straightforward to me. I think sometimes my moral resolutions do in fact get eroded by people questioning them, and not "re-committing" afterward.