Ben Landau-Taylor
@benlandautaylor
Followers
8,455
Following
28
Media
311
Statuses
3,779
Investigating power, society, and industry. Research at @bismarckanlys . Please don't get your ought all over my is.
San Francisco
Joined June 2018
Don't wanna be here?
Send us removal request.
Explore trending content on Musk Viewer
North Carolina
• 933452 Tweets
Hurricane Helene
• 744146 Tweets
FEMA
• 379638 Tweets
Dikembe Mutombo
• 155235 Tweets
Mets
• 133684 Tweets
Game 2
• 89761 Tweets
Verizon
• 87714 Tweets
Diaz
• 87586 Tweets
Lübnan
• 73206 Tweets
Braves
• 72183 Tweets
#النصر_الريان
• 66644 Tweets
Franklin Graham
• 46002 Tweets
Kemp
• 43599 Tweets
#KızılGoncalar
• 38529 Tweets
#KYSvBJK
• 36860 Tweets
Jessica
• 34935 Tweets
Lindor
• 24041 Tweets
Onana
• 23151 Tweets
رونالدو
• 21250 Tweets
Zeynep
• 20942 Tweets
الجيش اللبناني
• 19899 Tweets
Gavin Creel
• 14027 Tweets
Bournemouth
• 12512 Tweets
Southampton
• 12422 Tweets
Ozzie
• 10588 Tweets
#الاجتياح_البري
• 10426 Tweets
تاليسكا
• 10336 Tweets
When people talk about selectively adopting technology to preserve culture, they usually bring up the Amish, and that’s fair. But the French ban on paternity testing is a much funnier example.
75
1K
17K
Why the hell has iodized salt become so much less common? Is there some newfangled solution to iodine deficiency I haven’t heard about, or is one of the world’s great public health achievements just lapsing for no particular reason? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
308
512
9K
Of course orcs have menus. Restaurants are the tip of the iceberg. Think about it. Mordor sends out gigantic armies with well-drilled formations and excellent discipline, which clearly require a sophisticated logistical operation to keep them fed and supplied, and with a terrific
wait a minute. when the orc in lord of the rings says "looks like meat's back on the menu boys" how does he know what a menu is
349
2K
28K
78
473
4K
Therapy was better when it was 45-year-old men on cocaine trying to fully comprehend and reengineer the human mind rather than 28-year-old women on SSRIs trying to make you feel valid.
78
285
3K
There are about 50 million people with Alzheimer's disease. This fraud resulted in 16 years of misdirected research before it was discovered. Depending on how much that delays finding treatments, this fraud might cause more suffering than any ongoing war.
Major development in important Alzheimer’s research scandal: Authors of landmark study move to retract, admitting that key images in the paper were doctored. My story in
@newsfromscience
1/2
38
414
1K
19
505
3K
I propose the 9-Year-Old Boy Theory of Economics: Building any machine which a 9-year-old boy would stare at in awe and fascination will lead to prosperity.
It's not a perfect theory, but it does surprisingly well.
63
268
3K
I know bunch of people who took LSD once or twice, learned something about themselves, and moved on with their life a little bit wiser.
I know a bunch of people who took LSD regularly for years and just totally lost their grip on reality.
117
78
3K
>NYT wins the OpenAI lawsuit
>AI companies purge all training data that hasn’t aged out of copyright
>Chatbots retrained on 1880s guys who’d call a debate club an “athenaeum”
>Renaissance of culture, wisdom, and civilization
44
274
2K
A traveler asks a guard at the city gates, "What are the people like in this city?" The guard says, "What were the people like in your home city?" The traveler replies, "They were boring and unfriendly." The guard says, "Then you will find people here to be the same."
23
123
2K
It’s true that LSD won’t destroy your entire life and put you out on the street the way some other drugs can. Still, I've seen lots of heavy users turn from competent rising elites into third-rate mystics. It's dangerous stuff if you have any ambition at all.
277
77
2K
Holy shit even *I* am shocked to learn of a *Nobel Prize winner* being caught as a massive serial data fraud.
78
374
2K
OpenAI is producing heretical offshoots faster than a Protestant church.
22
115
2K
I've been seeing a lot more editorializing in Community Notes and I don't like it. Its proper role is correcting false statements of fact and nothing else.
Like, I vehemently agree with this note's content, but it belongs in a reply that ratios OP, not in a Wrongthink Alert Box.
66
71
2K
I’ve often heard that when a dynasty loses the Mandate of Heaven, it's revealed by natural disasters like floods.
It’s because the Chinese state was responsible for the canals and levees. If you fuck up the maintenance, you get *huge* megafloods. There's a direct connection.
24
118
2K
@misha_saul
What's the confusion? You mean explain the deal with iodized salt? It's basically "some people have iodine deficiency, which sucks, but adding a tiny trace of iodine to all the salt is super cheap and totally solves the problem, because everyone eats salt."
11
13
2K
We must chisel the full text of Wikipedia into stone tablets.
52
106
2K
A modest proposal: Before advocating for revolutionary social change, you must first name one human society that you think is good. It can be present or past, domestic or foreign, but it must be specific. I just want to know that there's *something* real that you don't hate.
59
160
1K
Sitting here with my third cup of oolong and I am once again astonished at how our society treats caffeine as a source of totally unremarkable "energy" rather than acknowledging it as a psychoactive drug that puts you in an altered state of consciousness.
24
53
2K
This map of the world's railways remains one of the most illuminating economic documents I've seen in my life.
Notice the large differences. Notice the subtle differences. Notice the surprising concentrations and gaps. Meditate on it.
76
440
1K
Oh noooo
@benlandautaylor
A lot of my CA friends switched to pink salt en masse and then began all feeling run down by what turned out to be mild iodine deficiency.
And that’s when they decided everyone at a company/social circle shouldn’t change their diet in the same direction at once.
23
41
2K
8
27
1K
These pests were once kept in check by their traditional predator, the fedora atheist. But we have hunted that noble beast almost to extinction, so now creatures like this run amok.
@pahowho
@PAHOCaribbean
@OPSOMSMexico
@WHOWPRO
@WHOAFRO
@WHOPhilippines
@WHOSEARO
@WHO_Europe
@WHOEMRO
@WHOPakistan
For millions of people around the world
#TraditionalMedicine
is their first stop for health and well-being.
Which of these have you used?
🖐️ Acupuncture
🥣Ayurveda
🌿Herbal medicine
💊 Homeopathy
🍃 Naturopathy
💆♀️ Osteopathy
🍵 Traditional Chinese medicine
☀️ Unani medicine
1K
210
818
18
171
1K
The weirdest thing about The Simpsons was the conceit that Lisa was destined to be President of the United States. Every Lisa Simpson I grew up with is now peddling fraudulent social science as Director of Media Relations for an NGO called the Alliance for Justice, or something.
33
86
1K
Coronavirus once again proving that “underemployed nerds with tons of spare time” is a vital strategic resource
20
131
1K
@LeahLibresco
Suffering for lack of the lost technology of the ancients (available at Safeway for $1.50/pound)
4
25
1K
We're in a weird linguistic spot where we need a word for "crazy rich guy", which used to be "millionaire", but nowadays the break point is more like ~$50 million, so dudes with like $150 million or whatever get called "billionaires" because that's the closest word we have.
49
25
1K
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when he gets slightly more retweets for not understanding it.
8
114
953
As a kid I'd hear people say "America is the freest country in the world" and not really think about it.
Then in college I was like "That's just some bullshit, every country has its propaganda".
Now I'm older and I realize, oh, America is the freest country in the world.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov arrested in France. His “crime” appears to be enabling free speech online.
547
2K
12K
64
45
977
My most American belief is: I support crazy shit.
Your commune will probably crash and burn but I wanna see what comes out of it. Your prediction market sounds naive and unworkable but please go for it and prove me wrong. Your political movement will never catch on, but what if.
12
79
957
I can’t stress this enough. When an accountant fabricates accounts, he loses his license *at least*. States care whether accountants commit fraud. When a researcher fabricates Alzheimer's research, nothing. Universities do not care whether researchers commit fraud.
In a just world, the trial of Sylvian Lesne would be an event on par with the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, but instead academics have closed ranks and nothing will happen to him. As critics of police often point out, their peers' behavior proves that it's not a few bad apples.
6
73
638
14
147
959
The second-most exciting thing about the potential LK-99 superconductor is watching the rush to replicate the result. Actual review by peers, not "peer review" rituals and back-office politics.
14
65
944
THIS is what I'm talking about!! A sweeping history of metallurgy across the ages of man! Synthesis of classical scholarship, archaeology, and a lifetime of experience as a mining engineer! The bleeding spiritual wound left by the Great War! The destiny of civilizations!!
Why did historians stop publishing nine-volume opuses with titles like THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION
It’s a more productive use of a career than publishing fifteen different airport books with titles like INFINITY: HOW ONE MATHEMATICIAN CHANGED THE WORLD
26
20
377
16
71
821
Being in your 30s is weird because you wake up and out of nowhere you have a stiff neck and very strong opinions about architecture.
8
53
822
In my entire life I have never seen a stronger case of Gell-Mann amnesia than rationalists believing the account of the OpenAI board's motives from literally the guy who wrote the Scott Alexander hitpiece.
15
57
789
My new article is out.
The problem isn't that academic scientists sometimes lie. The problem is that their peers don't care when they do. When scientists are caught making up fake data, universities sweep it under the rug. There are too many examples at the top. 1/
Academia is not just bloated or out of touch, it is committing outright scientific fraud—fake data, doctored images, and all—and normalizing it by not naming and punishing culprits.
Science is in danger.
Read the new article by
@benlandautaylor
here:
36
385
1K
30
162
786
“Nuclear winter” is a psyop. It was dreamed up by Paul Ehrlich and Carl Sagan and other peace activists as an argument for nuclear disarmament. They invented a bunch of unjustified models of how dust would persist in the atmosphere and threw them into computers (computers were
63
64
770
Westerners translate “天命” as “Mandate of Heaven” and interpret it like being anointed by the gods, but “天” is less like Jesus or Zeus, and more like “everything working together like it should”. In today's English the closest usage to “天命” is probably “state capacity”.
I’ve often heard that when a dynasty loses the Mandate of Heaven, it's revealed by natural disasters like floods.
It’s because the Chinese state was responsible for the canals and levees. If you fuck up the maintenance, you get *huge* megafloods. There's a direct connection.
24
118
2K
46
64
763
It's worrying that today's weirdo subcultures aren't producing any good art.
63
49
633
In 1960, "futurism" meant the future—flying cars and fusion power.
In 2000, "futurism" meant the present—ipods and the internet.
In 2022, "futurism" means the past—Star Trek and Apollo 11 and aesthetic posters of skyscrapers.
18
65
719
@cremieuxrecueil
Gerontocracy aside, I'm in favor of raising Dogger Bank solely because it's rad as hell.
9
2
739
You can believe “most office jobs are bullshit make-work” and you can believe “GPT-4 will be an economic revolution” but you can’t believe both.
59
54
704
Americans are the most gullible people in the world. They’ll look at a government program which has spent a hundred billion dollars while building literally nothing, then be like “maybe the contractors are bad at their jobs.”
It's just graft, man.
12
52
694
Statistically speaking, murders with legally-owned long guns are a rounding error. Most “gun deaths” are suicides. Of the homicides, the overwhelming majority use illegally-carried pistols. Fear of "assault weapons" is just innumeracy.
21
45
651
This is a hell of an operation. You don’t get 97% of any group to do anything just by posting a link to a google doc and saying “sign if you agree”. This suggests a team calling every employee, hours-long debates with holdouts, coordinators with spreadsheets, the works.
53
30
639
In a just world, the trial of Sylvian Lesne would be an event on par with the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, but instead academics have closed ranks and nothing will happen to him. As critics of police often point out, their peers' behavior proves that it's not a few bad apples.
6
73
638
There are thousands of pages of game theory based on the premise that war is a result of imperfect information, because if both sides knew who would win then they’d skip the costly fight and go right to the settlement, and then Hamas is just like “lmao watch this”
45
37
584
I'd forgotten how strange the intellectual culture is in Boston. I just told someone I do social science research and she immediately asked what programming language.
16
18
540
When a people is occupied or displaced, they have a moral right and duty to reclaim their land, which does not expire just because some time has passed. That’s why I support Palestinian violence to retake Israel, German invasions to reclaim Konigsberg and Alsace-Lorraine, a
52
75
527
@SamoBurja
Musk firing 80% of Twitter to no ill effect showed that the fake programming job is already here.
As long as software companies find it politically necessary to hire 4 credentialed nonentities for every self-taught turboautist, CS degrees will remain a good career move.
25
28
476
Chernobyl kills maybe a few thousand people, and it's major world news for decades.
The Derna Dam collapses and kills twenty thousand people, and I just now heard about it three months later.
Opposition to nuclear power does not come from the danger of meltdowns.
21
62
481
I have no interest in giving Wikipedia money to blow on fake jobs for ovecredentialed paper-pushers, but if the banner said “Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia and he’d like to buy a yacht” then I’d pull out my wallet immediately.
11
41
422
In some fields, you can outperform the credentialed experts if you're diligent, careful, humble, and quick to accept correction.
In some fields, you can outperform the credentialed experts by putting on a blindfold and saying "That one looks fake to me."
(via
@AaronCharlton
)
3
74
452
One of the most powerful techniques for concealing information is making everything sound very boring on purpose.
12
51
446
@micsolana
Imagine if cars were invented and all the op-eds were like "what if dissidents use these to travel around and share disinformation"
5
19
393
I see only two likely paths for the USA over the next ~30 years:
1) Gigantic overhaul of institutions on par with Reconstruction or New Deal, yielding revival in governance, culture, industry
2) Drawn-out rearguard slide into mediocrity, similar to the British Empire dissolving
25
38
387
The most likely resolution to the fertility crisis is the same as the resolution to the overpopulation crisis of the late 20th century: Eventually the trend just reverses, and no one can really say why.
22
19
391
I can't help notice how the excitement over the mere *possibility* of an actual no-shit physical tech breakthrough makes all the years of hype around chatbots and game-playing robots look kinda shallow and forced by comparison.
20
32
383
I was confused by the start of WWI for a long time but it actually looks pretty simple:
—Lots of elites in every major power really wanted to fight, and amplified minor frictions to spark war
—Because they expected the war would be much much smaller than it actually turned out
18
21
340
Why did historians stop publishing nine-volume opuses with titles like THE RISE OF CIVILIZATION
It’s a more productive use of a career than publishing fifteen different airport books with titles like INFINITY: HOW ONE MATHEMATICIAN CHANGED THE WORLD
26
20
377
Man the *whole point* of signing official public statements is to associate your name with the statement. Recording the names of statement-signers is 100% in bounds. If they had the courage of their convictions they'd *thank* you.
If someone signs a statement with some rose
Well, that didn't take long. After less than 12 hours, Google has taken down the site with public information about which student groups endorse Hamas terrorism.
Only
@X
allows the truth!
224
2K
7K
2
35
377
I've seen dozens of different theories about what drives changes in fertility. I don't think I've ever seen a theory which plausibly explains why you'd have a baby boom after WWII but *not* after WWI.
54
11
380
I propose we say "academic consensus" instead of "scientific consensus".
Critics are right that "scientific consensus" is a bullshit idea of how science works, but there's still something there and we need a term for it. This is more precise.
14
43
367
It’s not that GDP is *fake*, exactly. It's that GDP measures spending, not results. GDP counts $100 billion spent building several thousand miles of high speed rail in China the same as $100 billion spent building zero miles of high speed rail in California.
In 2021, Congress spent $7.5B for a 500K EV charging stations. Three years later, only 8 built.
We spent $50B to jumpstart chip fabs. Result? TSMC’s fab in Arizona got pushed back to 2028.
$42.5B to bring internet to rural America. Three years, no results
156
367
2K
12
24
366
You think you're gonna read some cool Roman scrolls, and then stop and go back to software. But you can't stop. Soon it's the Shroud of Turin. Next, Excalibur. Then you're dueling the Swiss Guard in the stacks of the Vatican Library and you wonder when it went off the rails.
Looking for an intern to spend a month or two testing a theory about the Shroud of Turin. Ideally you can start in the next few weeks, and can work full-time. Pay is $2k/week, required in-person in SF.
127
107
2K
17
27
371
To understand the universal background techno-optimism of ~1870-1970, imagine living through a "we've invented superconductors"-level breakthrough in physical technology about once per decade for a hundred years.
5
36
354
The Yellow River is weird and doesn't work like other rivers. In Western history, there's no good comparison for a big Yellow River flood.
4
5
333
Sometimes I think about how civilizations went thousands of years without coming up with incredibly simple and useful ideas like numbering all the years, or the phonetic alphabet, or coordinate geometry.
Sometimes I wonder what ideas we're missing today.
47
39
333
We’ve known for years that recycling plastic is harmful at best and fraudulent at worst. Yet the idea that we should maybe stop doing it has never entered the Overton window.
27
27
330
The British Enlightenment came out of coffeehouses and way too many people look at this as a purely social phenomenon without paying attention to the drug that these guys were consuming in massive, massive quantities.
2
15
329
It's not that WWII sounds like sci fi. It's that sci fi sounds like WWII.
Sci fi's transition from Flash Gordon swashbuckler heroes to space opera about titanic battles and superweapons was "What if we told WWII stories in space".
"There was a six-year global war where we had non-stop and ubiquitous battles of thousands of multi-ton steel machines on land, sea, and air. 80 million people died and it ended with dropping miniature Suns that wiped out whole cities in a flash."
History or sci-fi today?
4
4
74
6
30
318
Periodic reminder that copyright on fictional characters and settings is the largest cultural travesty in the world today. There is absolutely no case that society benefits from arresting people who write unlicensed stories about Batman in the year 2024.
7
33
318
It’s also pretty difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary *does* depend on his understanding it.
1
34
318
To be clear I've got nothing against mysticism. If heavy LSD use turned you into a competent or insightful mystic, I would have no complaint.
14
5
298
This is your regular reminder that if you want to understand the world, you should spend less time on news, op-eds, “the discourse”, or anything else that involves “being caught up”, and more time reading stuff written before you were born.
5
35
290
Technological progress has slowed because we've picked the low-hanging fruit. Past dynasties saw big progress in canal-building, irrigation, gunpowder, and printing. Of course development has been slower this dynasty. It's almost 1400 and all the easy ideas have been discovered.
7
42
296
The "limits to growth" people are technically correct. I expect absolute constraints on available matter and energy will become a meaningful check on human expansion somewhere around Kardashev II.
Earth's mass is 5.972 × 10^24 kg. So almost six billion trillion metric tons. There are unimaginable quantities of iron, aluminum, copper, and so on.
We have a mere eight billion humans.
Why do we have any material scarcity at all?
1/5
88
155
2K
9
28
298
People say "Oh, Boomers could get jobs so easily, you'd just walk in the door and they'd hire you" but have never tried going door-to-door asking for work.
I've done this, and can report (1) it's way more psychologically taxing than emailing in applications (2) it got me a job.
7
12
283
The biggest problem in the U.S.—and I don’t say “biggest” lightly—is the decline in the rule of law. It matters less and less what’s written down on some paper somewhere if administrators and bureaucrats can get away with just doing whatever.
10
30
286
I've heard exactly this story more times than I can count. Every day an honest PhD student quietly drops out rather than become a liar like her academic superiors demand.
@mmjukic
@SamoBurja
@benlandautaylor
@eriktorenberg
this hit pretty close to home. My wife dropped out of her PhD after she refused to edit in fabrications to her paper that her Prof wanted her to. He eventually published the paper. He's well known and does Computer Engineering research.
1
4
91
9
37
276
Yeah, Chernobyl is probably the best comparison. Also note that a Yellow River megaflood has a death toll two orders of magnitude greater than the biggest estimates I've seen for the Chernobyl death toll.
@benlandautaylor
This is one of those "I thought it was too obvious to point out", but it isn't obvious at all so we should!
Most won't think of a Yellow River flood sometimes being an infrastructure failure with similarly discrediting effects to what Chernobyl had for the Soviet Union.
3
3
111
3
10
278
A few weeks ago I was having dinner with half a dozen people around my age, men and women, and it slowly came out that I was the only one who had never done plastic surgery.
"Man it's wild how that actor looks just the same as he did 30 years ago"
It's plastic surgery.
"Can you believe this 60-year-old politician looks like she's 40 or something"
It's plastic surgery.
"How does that singer look so good at her age"
It's plastic surgery.
8
7
172
8
4
282
In my early 20s I had a hard time finding new friends and social scenes. Wherever I was, I’d eventually find one group I got along with, but sometimes it took a while.
By my mid-20s I stopped *looking* for existing friend groups to join, and started *organizing* groups and events
4
13
295
It would be cool if the Effective Altruists took the FTX debacle as an opportunity to move away from things like DC lobbying and essay contests, and return to physical interventions like distributing mosquito nets or vitamin A.
17
12
269
The funniest possible outcome would be if Trump wins in 2024 and Biden wins in 2028
22
14
272
In my experience running events, the most underrated type of diversity is age diversity. There are too few opportunities for 24-year-olds to talk with 60-year-olds.
11
15
270
Yes please let me know immediately if Ibn Khaldun drops any "new release updates"
6
29
258
This happens constantly. The issue is that plastic recycling works incredibly poorly. Industrially and economically, it makes no sense to process most used plastics. So, after cities collect it in recycling bins, most is just discarded, with a fig leaf of plausible deniability.
A lady dropped an AirTag in her recycling bin to find out that Houston has collected 250 tons of plastic since 2022 and not recycled any of it.
1K
9K
68K
14
35
269
The beating heart of American dynamism is weirdos, prophets, mavericks, and revolutionaries with the space to make their vision real, so we can pick through their flaming wreckage for new social tech. As long as we have this, we can overcome any institutional problem.
6
29
264
Whenever I see people using the newfangled term "lindy" in place of the tried and true "tried and true", I'm briefly overwhelmed with the irony.
10
35
256
I used to think "anyone who wants to be be powerful is unfit to wield power."
After watching a couple decades where more and more of society gets controlled by people who are allergic to the appearance of power and the aesthetic of personal authority, I no longer think this.
7
22
241
If Musk hadn't bought Twitter, the people posting evidence of Gay’s plagiarism would’ve been banned for "harassment" or some shit and she’d still be President of Harvard.
8
17
254
I’ve seen too many smart people let the pursuit of online engagement shape them into vapid insight pornographers, peddlers of empty resentment, partisan shit-flingers, and all the other stock characters. It's a big waste.
10
14
252
Pet peeve: If you run across some decades-old writer who presciently described the unique situation that society is facing today, they’re not really prescient, it just means that what you thought was unique about today’s world is actually common and historically very normal.
5
29
244
"Hyperadvanced militaries limit their skirmishes to whacking each other with sticks in order to keep tensions from spiraling out of control" is one of those 100% real things I wouldn't believe if you put it in a sci novel.
New video of a clash between Chinese and Indian soliders. Date unknown.
1
2
23
17
34
254
Political philosophy is weird because the average book is so bad that taking it seriously will actively make you dumber, and even the 90th percentile books are pretty much useless, but the absolute best 99.9th percentile books are completely indispensable.
9
14
240
@micsolana
I'm not surprised that people sell out, but I'm surprised that they set their prices so low.
3
6
232
It's very funny that people used to call slippery slope arguments a "fallacy". Predicting the future is never reliable but "This trend that's happening will continue" is one of the most robust heuristics we've got.
15
8
239