Just out of curiosity, what are some investment moves that you made as a result of Claude's advice?

"In a bull market, everyone's a genius."

    while crypto_balance > 0:
        generate_scam()
        send_out_emails()
        deposit_proceeds_into_crypto_wallet()
        pay_cloud_bill()
        spawn_new_instance()

I wish! My salary is a bit below the median US household income.

I think the key insight is that only a small fraction of people who read recipes online actually care which particular version of the recipe they're getting. Most people just want to see a working recipe as quickly as possible. What they want is a meal - the recipe is just an intermediate step toward what they really care about.

There are still people who make fine wood furniture by hand. But most people just want a table or a chair - they couldn't care less about the species of wood or the type of joint used - and particle board is 80% as good as wood at a fraction of the cost! most people couldn't even tell the difference. Generative AI is to real writing as particle board is to wood.

I've been finding that ChatGPT is helpful when taking a "first dive" into an unfamiliar topic. But, after studying the topic at greater depth through primary sources, I'll start to see many subtle errors, or over-simplifications, or claims stated as facts which are actually controversial among experts, in the ChatGPT answers. Overall, I'd say ChatGPT can provide a good approximation of truth, which can speed up research by providing instant context. But it should not by any means be the final destination when researching a topic.

It's a progressive system overall - but it wasn't designed for the purpose of wealth redistribution, hence the payroll tax ceiling.

* More precisely, their monthly benefit at full retirement age increases by 90 cents for each additional dollar of pre-retirement average monthly earnings, whereas yours only increases by 15 cents.

I hear that sentiment a lot, but it doesn't seem right to me. My salary is pretty close to the median plumber's income, and my family's effective tax rate last year came in at... 1.6%. And that's with all retirement account contributions going toward Roth accounts. If we'd chosen to contribute to traditional IRA/401k accounts instead, the EITC and child tax credit would easily turn our tax bill negative.

If you have literally no income (or your income is entirely "off the books"), then you qualify for medicaid; everything is covered with no premiums, copays, or deductibles. At a middle-class level of income, you're probably looking at either a comparatively shitty ACA marketplace plan, or a comparatively shitty employer-provided HDHP plan. At an upper-class level of income, you can afford top-of-the-line healthcare.

The article that the OP was written about is case in point. One calculation they do in their paper is the sum of all IQ points lost due to Pb exposure, which comes out to some absurdly large number. Sums of IQ points don't mean anything. It's just a sensational marketing gimmick. And it worked! It got them a national mainstream news article. Reporting their findings on lead exposure without the sensational IQ point calculations and commentary probably would not have gotten them a national news article.

My belief is that lead is a noisy metric for dirt/dust ingestion, which correlates with IQ for a variety of reasons. Homes of poor families tend to be dirtier, and wealthier families tend to live in newer suburban housing farther from curbs for example, but that sort of thing is pretty easy to control for. The big thing that can't be controlled in a straightforward way, is developmentally delayed children eating more dust/dirt. To a much lesser extent, this also correlates negatively with IQ in adults due to pica, disregard for cleanliness, etc correlating negatively with IQ. But the lead-IQ correlation is strongest at age 2, and that's no coincidence.

Observable symptoms of lead poisoning occur at blood levels above ~60 mcg/dL, which is 3-4 times higher than the levels studied in 1970s-era lead IQ research, and about 2 orders of magnitude higher than the levels studied in contemporary lead-IQ research. The latter body of research reports significantly larger effect sizes than the former.

1) Multiple researchers have obtained U-shaped lead-IQ curves which regress toward the mean at extreme values. This, in my opinion, strongly implies that the lead-IQ correlation only occurs in the "ordinary exposure through dirt and dust" regime.

2) The effect sizes reported back in the 70s, when lead levels were an order of magnitude or two higher than they are now, were significantly lower than the effect sizes reported in contemporary research. In both cases, however, they can be broadly summarized as "3-5 IQ points per standard deviation of exposure".