> "Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence."

This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace crosses my face at the thought of these sort of Marvel references and I'm not entirely sure why.

I pulled it up because I was familiar with this fact.

Given that they already pre-approved various language and marketing materials beforehand there's no real reason they couldn't just leave it lined up with a function call to go live once the key players make the call.

I suppose coincidences happen too but that just seems too unlikely to believe honestly. Some sort of knowledge leakage does seem like the most likely reason.

An example I like is that if you measured the heritability of depression in 2015, and then you measured the heritability of depression in 2021, you would likely see changes due to environmental effects (namely, there's the pandemic/lockdowns and this could conceivably cause more people to experience depressive symptoms). Let's assume we make those measurements and the rate of depression did increase, and we could tie it causally to the pandemic or related events.

In that scenario, the heritability of depression would have decreased. I don't think anyone would argue there were massive genetic changes in that 6 year time period on a population scale, but the environment changed in a way that affected the population as a whole, so the proportion of the effect on the trait which is genetically explained decreased.

For something like lifespan in the above example, you can imagine that in a period of wartime, famine, or widespread disease the heritability would also decrease in many scenarios (if random chance is ending a lot of lives early, how long the tail of lifespan is influenced genetically is much less important).

Given that note, it's generally tricky to talk about whether heritability increases or decreases, but with more accurate estimates of how genetic predispositions form you could see the heritability of certain traits increase with the environment held stable, as there's certainly ones that may be underestimated or genetic factors that aren't currently accounted for in many traits.

*edit: I realized I never mentioned the other thing I wanted to mention writing this! since you mentioned what the percent heritability means here, I think the best way to think of it is just "the proportion of phenotypic variation for this trait in a measured population which is explained by genetic variation." So it's dependent on the amount of variation in several aspects (environmental, genetic, phenotypic).

What sort of social changes did you notice after that period of time?

I've never used TikTok, but the techniques they employ sounds seriously addictive.

Is my personal site. I've only recently started doing some writing, I'd like to do more this year. I should probably add an RSS feed.

1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.

2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."

3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.

The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.

On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.

It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.

For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!

Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.

Companies based around advertising would die, yes, but they only exist in the first place because of how lucrative the activity is. Nobody is sitting around dreaming of how they could sell ads better than anyone else while not thinking of the financial compensation. At least I hope they aren't.

If someone was saying "many people have jobs in running offshore internet sports betting companies, if we put regulations on offshore internet sports betting, it would remove jobs" wouldn't the natural question be whether those industries are actually productive to have people employed in, or if it's a harmful industry overall? Generally in my view its somewhat sad that the system as a whole optimizes for advertising work rather than orienting in a way that everyone could be putting their work towards something they see as more fulfilling.

There is certainly more need for product discoverability broadly than something like online gambling, but I think the more relevant conversation is if the current advertising model is more like a local minima preventing progress towards a more economically viable method of handling product discoverability.

How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.