HORRIFIC FOOTAGE: A 21-year-old woman was pushed off a 40-meter bridge in Limeira, Brazil by bungee jump workers who failed to attach her safety rope. She died from the fall.

This is a deeply frustrating conversation. Samuel Moyn wrote a book about gerontocracy. Derek Thompson interviews him, and opens by telling us that 50% of the federal budget is shoveling money to old people. Yet across the entire conversation, neither the host nor guest advocates cutting Social Security and Medicare. They talk about politicians and professors being too old. Ok, but 99% of people will never be Senators or professors. They also focus on issues that indirectly favor the old over the young like NIMBY. But they never go: "You know how half our federal government is about shoveling money from young people, who have less of it, to old people, who have more of it? Maybe we shouldn't do that!" In fact, Moyn says the opposite! Give old people more money, and then they'll have less political power. Let's walk through the logic here: 1) Old people use political power to rig the economy in their favor 2) Let's just give them all the money in the hopes they'll stop doing that. I'm amazed by this. The most direct way government can advantage group X over group Y is to take money from Y and give it to X. Everything else is much less efficient in terms of adjusting people's material conditions. So Moyn is advocating continuing to give direct transfers to old people, even increasing those transfers, in the hope that the political system will lead to policies that indirectly help young people. By way of analogy, imagine you're worried about someone robbing you. So your plan is "I'll give him all my money. Then, there's a chance he might stop harassing me and do something that indirectly benefits me in the long run." This is not serious analysis. It's a desperate cope from someone who sees that we've become a gerontocracy and refuses to believe that the entitlement programs he likes are the main causes of it. Entitlements are headed toward a crisis, and we're going to have to make a decision soon about whether or not the federal government should exist mostly to make old people wealthier, crowding out everything else. There is no serious approach to tackling gerontocracy without pushing entitlement reform. Yes, it's politically difficult, but what's even the point if we're going to cower in fear from the actual issues facing the country?

The strongest evidence for tadalafil as a longevity candidate is large scale observational. In a propensity matched cohort of 509,788 men with erectile dysfunction, tadalafil over 3 years was associated with 34% lower all cause mortality, 32% lower dementia, 27% lower MI, and 34% lower stroke. Supporting cohorts show the same direction, including a dose dependent gradient: in higher risk men the top PDE5 inhibitor exposure quartile reached a mortality risk reduction of 49%. For a drug discussed as “longevity medicine,” that is close to the ceiling of current human evidence. No drug, tadalafil included, has a completed RCT with lifespan or healthspan as the primary endpoint, so observational signal on hard endpoints is the best the field has, and tadalafil’s is unusually large and consistent. The mechanism is also coherent. PDE5 inhibition raises cGMP, improves endothelial function and NO signaling, and the cardiovascular event data line up with that pathway. That supports causal plausibility for the vascular benefit, though it does not establish a lifespan effect. Disease specific and healthy user bias cannot be ruled out. The disease specific part: ED is itself a sign of vascular disease or dysfunction, which tadalafil’s mechanism can help directly. The healthy user part: wanting to maintain a healthy sex life in older age is a marker of relatively good health. None of this is a recommendation to take tadalafil on your own. It should follow from your individual health and biomarker profile, and only under specialized physician advice and oversight.

F*ck Allah

UC soc sci & humanities faculty endorse reinstatement of SAT for admissions: ucstudentsuccess.org/socscih… The UC is an incredible engine of progress and knowledge. We need this to ensure our students are those best able to use what it offers and move it forward.

Dear @Aella_Girl, I’ve heard a lot of people seeming to think that I reject you wholesale, or that I don’t approve of you for being a sex worker. I want to set the record straight about why I do not want to work with you and have made certain comments, and offer the chance for a dialogue if you want. I also want to apologize. I don’t like you because of how my ex-husband, Ronny Fernandez, your plzdontkillus cofounder, would make sexual and romantic bids at you in front of me (presumably also in private) while we were in a monogamous relationship. This was his fault, and it contributed to our divorce, but because it caused me to resent you as well, I came to you about it, hoping to give you a chance to show you weren’t down with it. You were cold to me, dismissing my concerns with “he’s not my type.” At that point I realized we were not friends. It wasn’t your responsibility to stop him, but your priority was him and my feelings weren’t part of the equation. When you’re in an abusive relationship, it’s easy to feel more angry and betrayed at the people around you than at the abuser. I felt angry at you and many others from the rationalist community, as well as general rationalist culture, for supporting him. It’s not your fault that I was in an abusive relationship. It was his fault. Even though I think my feelings are valid, especially when you opted not to help me when I reached out, I recognize that I’m transferring anger onto you that really belongs to him. I saw you once say that I judged you for being a sex worker. I think you were remembering a time when I argued that, because Ronny had your nudes, you didn’t just have a platonic relationship. I have also critiqued the blurred line between your sex work and your intellectual content, where engaging with you without sex is still a form of flirtation and erotic connection, for a similar reason. My issue has never been with the sexuality. It had to do with how you and our mutual friends were insisting that I had no recourse against my partner cheating on me— that I was in the wrong for feeling jealous. Perhaps you regret this, or would regret this now that you know how I felt. It would make a big difference to me if you did. There are also subject matter disagreements I have with you on AI Safety work, and I wrote a lot of them up, but upon introspection I think that discussion would be pretty collegial if I saw you have empathy for a wound in me that’s still healing. The breach of trust was really a personal thing. I’m also writing to share my concern about your current relationship with Ronny. Ronny lovebombs you epically on main, and I think that could lead to epic devaluation and exploitation if you’re not careful. I have wondered if he’s pushed you to do and share more and more extreme things when I see him seeming to get dividends. I saw him negging you and undercutting you even when he and I were together, and he’s good at portraying that destruction of self-esteem as rationalist introspective virtue and fucky intimacy. No matter how annoyed I may feel at you, I would never want you to go through what he did to me. I’m going to unblock you, and you can DM or reply if you wish. Holly