The ‘Vegan’ Brand Is an Anchor, Not a Sail

The most important piece published so far this year, IMO:

The ‘Vegan’ Brand Is an Anchor, Not a Sail

by Leah Garces

Podcast re: Introversion

We live here. Incredible.
That was the only person we saw on our two-hour hike.

EconTalk's Russ Roberts talks with Susan Cain about her 2012 book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. 

In terms of "can't stop talking," the world is clearly much worse now. Susan even mentions that trend; when she was writing her book 15 years ago, it seemed the internet might make things better for introverts. But now, where everything is built to grab clicks and many the "smartest" people spend their time building their "brand" by playing to our worst instincts, there are fewer and fewer places to be quiet, thoughtful, contemplative, or present.

PS (personal): At the end, they speculate on how much personality can change. Only one of you Dear Readers knew me before I met Anne, but many of you knew me before the life-altering events of 2021. Combine those with the positive work done since then, and my personality is very different than 1991.

Matt Ridley Exposes Fools, Not Just on April 1

"Raise the roof!"

 Oh how I wish I could write like this: Ehrlich's anti-human legacy

I can't even choose what to excerpt. Even if you read my Ehrlich rant (written before he died), Ridley's piece is worth reading, especially for how liberals celebrated and promoted him, the most sadistically-wrong American of my life. That is the perfect example of why we can't have nice things.

PS: If you've had enough of Doomer-bashing, how about praise for Glyphosate’s Environmental Benefits?

My Brain Made Me Do It

Good stuff:

1. Short-ish (30 min) podcast on a criminal case that helped push the peanut forward on determinism. Not news to anyone who has read this blog.

2. My Substack (Why People (Rightly) Don't Trust Scientists) was prompted by The Scientists Who Declared War on Half of America.

No one truly believes in God ... or the Singularity

I came across these forecasters saying that AI will make humans obsolete (or kill us all) in just a few years. (The conclusion to that piece is fantastic - below.) 

Yet none of the AI End-Time Doomers have actually changed their lives. They are living as they did five, ten, twenty years ago.

The same is true of (western versions of) God. To repeat a blog from a year ago:

I've experienced moments of extraordinary ecstasy. If I really, truly believed that when I died I would feel like that all the time, I would look forward to death. Heck, I would actively yearn for death! And while I would be sad when someone important to me died, that would be offset by my joy for them. 

God aside, I would jump at the chance to be in Nozick's Experience Machine, assuming Anne would be able to be in an experience machine too. (Why)

Keep in mind for all the many flavors of Doomers:

Don't click the links on your phone

Holy chicken, look at that tail!

Full text of It Can Be Easier to Fall Victim to Fraud on Mobile than Desktop is below, so you don't have to click on links.

Also: How Metrics Make Us Miserable (podcast)
Have you ever met an optimizer (or hard-core EA, or capital-V Vegan) who was enviably happy?
Also, from 10 Rules For Dealing With Uncertainty, "Discipline matters more than optimization.... perfect is the enemy of good."

Why You're Always Right (funny cat story) (also, you don't need "maybe" about astrology)

It Can Be Easier to Fall Victim to Fraud on Mobile than Desktop

This article is the second in a series about cybersecurity/fraud prevention. (You can find the first article here: What Does a Thief Need to Access Your Financial Accounts? It’s Likely Less Than You Think.)

I recently received a very clever phishing attempt by email. (In hindsight, I wish I had taken screenshots prior to deleting it.)

Here’s what it looked like in my inbox:

• From: Vanguard Brokerage Services
• Subject: Your Vanguard statement is ready

Looking at the email via my desktop browser, it was very easy to see that it was a phishing attempt.

Looking at the email on my mobile device, however, there was no immediately obvious sign that the email was not legit. Based on everything immediately visible via my mobile mail app, it looked exactly like a genuine Vanguard email.

Looking at the “From” Field

When I viewed the email on desktop, the “from” field was a dead giveaway. While the “name” of the sender was “Vanguard Brokerage Services,” the email address of the sender was complete gobbledygook. Something like “senderx34x3@xyzpayments.info.” Clearly, that’s not actually Vanguard.

On mobile though, the sender’s email address does not appear immediately (at least not on most mobile mail apps). You just see the name. When viewing the email, there will be somewhere you can tap to display the sender’s email address. But you have to go out of your way to actually do that. And of course the percentage of people who do that with every single email is vanishingly small.

Body of the Email

The text of the email was a character-for-character copy/paste of the real statement-notification emails that Vanguard sends, complete with the appropriate images, branding, etc. Everything looked exactly as you’d expect.

The only thing about it that was wrong is that the links that appeared to point to Vanguard’s login page actually pointed to a scam URL. (That is, the “anchor text” of the link was the appropriate URL, but that’s not where the link actually pointed.)

In other words, it was something like this:

https://vanguard.com/

If you look only at the text of the link itself (the “anchor text”) you’ll think the link is going to take you to Vanguard. But it doesn’t. The link points to ObliviousInvestor.com. On desktop, you can see that easily by hovering over the link. Your browser (usually in the bottom corner) will show you where the link points. (Though even this can be spoofed. So as with the email address, if it looks suspicious, it definitely should not be trusted. But if it looks normal, that doesn’t necessarily tell you that it’s genuine.)

On mobile, however, “hover over” isn’t an option. You can tap a link and hold your finger down, in order to see where the link points. But how many people actually do that for every link they consider tapping? Also, there’s the risk that you tap the link and accidentally take your finger off the screen too early — and now you’ve visited the scam link rather than activating the “preview” functionality.

Browser Location on Mobile

Of course, I did not visit the links in the spam/phishing email. But if I had, I’m confident that the destination page would look exactly like Vanguard’s real login page. Except, of course, it wouldn’t have actually been Vanguard. It would have been a fraudster’s website, set up to collect people’s usernames and passwords as they entered them.

On desktop, at the top of your browser window, you easily see the full URL of the page you’re on. That makes it at least somewhat easier to recognize whether you’re on a legitimate website or not.

On mobile, depending on your browser and device, you often don’t. You might see the first several characters or the last several characters. But you might, for example, have accidentally visited:

vanguard.com-payments-us-vanguard.com

If you only see the beginning or end of that URL, you might think that you’re on Vanguard’s website. But that’s not Vanguard’s website. The actual domain in that URL is “com-payments-us-vanguard.com”, which any old fraudster could have purchased. (The “vanguard” at the start of the URL is a subdomain.)

What To Do

There are a handful of ways to avoid falling for this sort of thing.

Firstly, it’s helpful to actually look at the email address of the sender, even if it’s not immediately displayed in your mobile app. But even that can be spoofed. So while a spammy email address tells you it’s spam, a legit-looking email address does not necessarily tell you it’s genuine.

Secondly, it’s helpful to generally be aware when using mobile that 1) you aren’t seeing as much information as you would via desktop and 2) sometimes the information that you’re not seeing would have been a clear red flag.

Thirdly, if you did end up falling for the email and visiting the link in question, you’d be in better shape if you use passkeys or a password manager (both topics for another day, which we’ll get to). Your passkey would not work on the fake domain. And a password manager would recognize that the domain in question was not actually Vanguard.

But the most effective way to avoid falling for this? It’s the same exact rule that we discussed in the first article in this series! (I promise I’ll move on to other topics soon. But I just want to drive home how critical and valuable this rule is.)

If you receive any inbound communication (whether email, text, or phone call) that purports to be from a company with which you have any sort of account:

• Do not reply.
• Do not give them any information whatsoever.
• Do not click on any links.

Essentially, don’t interact with inbound communications. Instead, if you think it might be genuine and require some sort of response, reach out directly, via trusted means (i.e., either typing the company’s URL directly into your browser or calling the number on the back of your credit/debit card) and ask the company in question about it.

How Progress Happens (and Prepping, and Living Longer)

• Exercise variety—not just amount—linked to lower risk of premature mortality
  A follow-up to We have found the magic drug
  
  
• Preparing Without Predicting
  For anyone who thinks about the future. Has this great quote from an OK movie: "History is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."
  
  
• Freakonomics Episode 666: This Is How Progress Happens
  95% fantastic!

The one nitpick: With regard to climate change, Mokyr uses the word "existential" to mean "bad," not existential. 

The example he gives is 50 million people moving from Bangladesh to Manitoba. You know when 50 million people wanted to move from Bangladesh to Manitoba? As soon as Bangladesh was formed! 

Check out, for example, 1970's Bhola cyclone and its aftermath. (Including George Harrison's "Concert for Bangladesh.")

Weather events aren't going to be a problem. They've always been a problem! 

Climate - old or new - isn't the problem. Poverty is the problem. 

Development is the answer. 

(For humans at least. I've been thinking about this tradeoff for months and still not had a clear enough thought to write up.)

Even better scams are coming for you

The Catalina Mountains; as always, click for bigger

This Freakonomics podcast is some eye-opening stuff! I didn't know the example below (and more):

And so, Daffan estimates, in 2024, in the U.S.: Between $31.3 billion and $195.9 billion was lost to fraud. ...

Some of the best [scams] take advantage of existing problems with our slow bureaucracies, poor customer service. Let’s say you get a text from your bank that says, did you make this purchase? It says you bought an Apple computer or something. So, of course, a wise, scam-literate person would say, “I’m pretty sure I didn’t purchase an Apple computer, and this is probably a scam, but let me call my financial institution. And I’m not going to be foolish and click the number that appeared in the text message, I’m going to go on the website and I’m going to call their actual number.” So here’s the thing. Bank call centers are so busy that you often hear a message that, “We will save your place in line, just click 1, record your name, and we’ll call you back when it’s your turn.” Scammers know this. So what will they do? They’ll wait 30 minutes after they sent that text message, and call you. And they will have faked the caller ID. So it will say Chase Bank, U.S. Bank, Bank of America — whatever the bank that they initially pretended to be. And ask you questions and confirm your identity. They’ll probably have information about you already. They might have your full Social Security number, your name, your date of birth. And it works. And that would work for many of us. ...

A.I. has made it so that all of our old consumer-education rules of thumb — we’ve had to throw out the window. Things like, look for spelling errors in the email — gone. Do a video call with this person that says they’re in love with you — gone. So we’re having to kind of reinvent the wheel and adapt to this environment that’s changing so quickly that sometimes in my public presentations with older adults I look at them and I say, I don’t know what advice I can give you to stay safe in today’s world. ...

Last year, Reuters reported that leaked documents from Meta (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram) showed that 10 percent of Meta revenue comes from running ads for scams and banned items. ...

...so that companies like social media companies, telecoms, that they take more action in preventing the scam messages from getting to us in the first place.

DUBNER: And how hard would that be for them? How hard would it be for Facebook, for instance?

DeLIEMA: The technical capacity of these companies to identify and flag scams is there. I think what we saw with the recent Meta leak about the profits that they make from these scam ads really shows that they’re making a calculated choice to either show and host known false and fraudulent ads or not. 

How Liberals Fund Russia's Invasion of Ukraine

Not an April Fools, sadly.

I've written a lot about how "environmentalists" are making the world a much worse place (just one example). I've also written about how some EAs seem to be intentionally undermining EA, and how they serve as useful idiots for Tyson, Trump, and TB.

But this Substack - Who really killed German nuclear? - might be the worst yet. The title really undersells it. Russia wouldn't have had the money and resources to invade Ukraine if not for "liberals" and "environmentalists." 

(If you want more economics of energy policy, check out "The gas price shock will expose Britain’s catastrophic energy misjudgment" by the great Matt Ridley.)

PS: One friend reacts to the main German nuclear link: "One more reason I support removing tax-exemption from 'charities.' They're just businesses, and many are (ethically) bad businesses at that."

After I replied about churches being good </sarcasm>, they replied:

"We shut down Enron since they engaged in unethical accounting tricks, but the church rapes thousands of children for decades and they're allowed to continue existing and be tax-exempt!" 

Bad Medicine, Better Medicine?

The source of a modern miracle. 

News update: Good riddance to the bad Paul Ehrlich, a terrible influence in the world. (Not to be confused with the good Paul Ehrlich.)

Podcast: AI, GLP, and the Future of Medicine. (Transcript of the first part.) 
(Also, very long: Statins and the future of heart disease.)
(Also, an excellent discussion of when and how to use an LLM instead of Google.)

I regularly hear people badmouth LLMs like ChatGPT and Claude in terms of medical advice or diagnosis. I don't know in what world those people live (maybe they've never had a health problem) but I have had, over and over again, absolutely horrific and incompetent medical "care." And I have always had insurance, I'm smart enough to understand a lot, and Anne is there to help.

Just last year, I experienced absurd (and unbelievable) malpractice. My primary care doc (who has since retired) said, "You have the weirdest things happen to you." The NP for my new doc said, "That's the weirdest story I've ever heard." 

But it wasn't unique, not even to me. (At least I wasn't told I had cancer when I didn't. Ugh.)

I'll take health care by algorithm any day.

The Horror of GMOs

OMFG! 

Now do you understand, "scientists"???*

Copy cat v2. 

*In case it isn't clear, that's sarcasm. Selective breeding - including radiation breeding - is far more significant than any "GMO" work.

In case you found that boring / predictible, here's a good podcast about how life on Mars became accepted by basically everyone.

An actually worthwhile listicle

Copy Cat 1.

Not too long, not too indulgent, and all useful:

26 (Hopefully) Useful Thoughts For 2026
A Listicle About Self-Control, Understanding, and Sampling Bias
by Tommy Blanchard

Life in the Universe

The great Fraser Cain, creator of Universe Today and animal advocate, believes we are alone in the universe. His reasoning:

If life had evolved elsewhere, it would inevitably evolve to intelligence. Any intelligent species would eventually send out von Neuman probes throughout the galaxy. It would only take ~10 million years (a very short time compared to the ~14 billion year history of the universe, or even the ~4.5 billion year history of Earth) for an intelligent species' probes to reach every corner of the galaxy. 

To quote Enrico Fermi: Where is everybody?   [OTOH]

Hence, Fraser concludes, since we see no evidence, there must not be any other life out there.

Fraser could very well be right. But if I had to bet my life, I'd bet he's wrong.

The Earth formed 6,000 ~4.5 billion years ago. That's 4,500,000,000 years ago. For the first millions of years, the Earth was uninhabitable - no liquid water, many asteroid strikes (including the biggie), non-stop volcanism, etc. 

Almost immediately after Earth was cool enough for liquid water, life came into existence -- even before the Late Heavy Bombardment! 

That makes the question all the more compelling: Where is everyone?

I think the answer lies between "life evolves" and "technology spreads throughout galaxy."

There are many filters between the evolution of life and a technological civilization spanning the galaxy. Just two examples:

1. For ~75% of the history of life on earth, there were only unicellular organisms. Life itself evolved almost immediately, but then took literally billions of years to evolve into the simplest multicellular organism. It took relatively forever to go beyond single cells, even on a planet that is basically perfect for life. 

If life existed on Mars (which seems more likely than before?), that life was always relatively simple. If life exists on Enceladus or another watery moon, it is probably simple-ish - i.e., unlikely to evolve further than life on earth evolved over billions of years. It seems entirely possible that multicellular life might only evolve under the rarest circumstances.

2. Even given multicellularity and many other assumptions, technological intelligence certainly doesn't seem inevitable or even likely. Dinosaurs dominated Earth for about 180,000,000 years; humans have existed for only about 300,000 years, ~0.004% of Earth's existence (and humans have been "technological" for a vanishingly small fraction of that time; we're still not close to sending out von Neuman probes). Give just the tiniest nudge to the Chicxulub meteor* and dinosaurs would still rule the Earth. 

There are many other reasons why technological life might be vanishingly rare, even with life "eager" to come into existence. (Complex cells, land+water, oxygen levels "just right," moon, complex animals, not going extinct, relatively stable climate, fire, not going extinct again, energy capture, metallurgy, institutions.) For more, see the book Rare Earth.  

What data we actually have shows: 

1. Life existed for 100% of the billions of years Earth has been habitable. 
2. We've been able to search for life elsewhere ~0% of that time.
3. We have been von-Neuman-capable for exactly 0% of that time.

This is not to say technological life is impossible outside of Earth.

But it would necessarily be exceedingly rare compared to life itself. Other technological civilizations could be out there, and we might still be millions of years from their probes reaching our solar system. 

Or, at least in our galaxy, we could be the first. Someone has to be the first. Even in a universe where life is common, by Fraser's logic, it would appear to the first technological species that the universe is devoid of any other life. 

PS: Just to be clear, I don't want there to be other sentient life in the universe, as suffering seems to be the natural state of life. Here is a good insight into how we take our biases and make them "universal" truths.

*The animation at that link is funny.

TV! (short)

 

Paul McCartney - Sometimes

One of the most beautiful songs you've never heard

You've probably heard of Pluribus (or Plur1bus) on AppleTV. That is definitely worth watching. Quite funny.

But you might not have heard of Mrs. Davis on Peacock. That is also worth a watch! I couldn't stop saying, "This is so weird!" and "How can this show keep being so unexpected?" And I laughed a lot, too. 

Not funny but really well done: Devs from 2020. Warning: there is a pretty harsh scene in the first episode.

Try to avoid spoilers as much as you can!

This brought me to tears

"What're you lookin' at? Never seen devastating cuteness before?"

PSA: If you have a Bank of American credit or debit card, many museums are free the first full weekend of every month!   More.


Preface: The ending of this interview with Roland Fryer on education reform brought me to tears.*

As did this quote I just came across:

Wollstonecraft inveighed against marriage as the only means for women to “rise in the world,” which in turn reduced their aspirations to those of “mere animals” [sic] and made them act as children once they did enter this institution of wholesale dependency. What she called for instead — equal access to education and an emphasis on the intellectual and moral development of girls, rather than their looks, dress, and manners — seems banal by our present standards, almost embarrassing. The luxury of being embarrassed by it — in just five human lifetimes, in a species 7,500 generations old — is the measure of our progress.

from Dying Mothers, the Birth of Handwashing, and the Bittersweet True Love Story Behind Frankenstein emphases added

*Russ Roberts: But, you've had a huge impact. Not the impact you wanted, but when you lay in bed at night and you look back on this part of your career, will you ever come back to it? Is it just something that you sometimes wish had turned out maybe better? Do you feel satisfaction? Just reflect on it in your own life.

Roland Fryer: It's a phenomenal question, and I'm going to answer it in a brutally honest way, as I always try to do. I am wholly unsatisfied with that work. I'm happy we did it. I think it changed some lives, not enough. I'm going to tear up, man. But, we also lost some students on the way, Russ. There's a kid named Marcus that was in a high school there. And, they came to me, and they said, 'Hey, Marcus is maybe not make it. What can you do?' I flew down to Houston--this is just one of several examples like this--talked to Marcus, and a phenomenal kid. Phenomenal kid: smart, witty, thoughtful, could get science concepts like that. But, he's in jail now for 20 years for armed robbery. And I failed him. I failed him.

There's another kid in the Crown Heights, P.S. 399 [Public School #399]. He was a fifth grader, and I was told that his gangs were starting to kind of circle around him, and whether I'd take him under my wing. I said, 'Absolutely, 100%.' Gave him a flip phone at that time--I'm so old. I told him, 'Call me any time.' I was just about to get on stage to do a keynote, and he called me and he needed help. I looked out at an audience, and there was a thousand people waiting. I said, 'I'll call you right back as soon as I'm done with this.' And he never spoke to me again. I failed that kid.

I lay awake at night, and I don't sleep much because I feel personally responsible for what's going on. These are my people. They're your people, too. And, we have to do absolutely everything we can, in my opinion, to change their lives.

I tried hard at that stage of my life. I worked as hard as I physically could. But I don't think it was enough. Yes, we had some impact, but it wasn't enough.