Don't Worry About the Vase

to challenge the premise -- it is worth thinking this through: why is it necessary to drive what you're working on over the finish line? if you reduced your inputs of energy, time and caring to moderate levels that can be sustained without negative physical or mental health impacts -- would you personally receive comparable output?

re: burnout

> [...] level of caring couldn’t be sustained in the absence of results.

> My clients are perfectionists [...] They have very rigid ideals in terms of win-lose [...] Their expectations of success are through the roof, and when their reality doesn’t match up with their expectations, it leads to burnout—they leave no room for error or failure at all in their formula.

> Older workers, as it turns out, have more perspective and more experience; it’s the young idealists who go flying into a profession, plumped full of high hopes, and run full-speed into a wall. Maslach also found that married people burn out less often than single people, as long as their marriages are good, because they don’t depend as much on their jobs for fulfillment. And childless people, though unburdened by the daily strains of parenting, tend to burn out far more than people with kids. (This, too, has been found across cultures; in the Netherlands, a recent survey by the Bureau of Statistics showed that twice as many working women without children showed symptoms of burnout as did working women with underage children.) It’s much easier to disproportionately…

Hi guys -- Mantic Markets co-founder here! Thanks for checking out our site!

Most startup ideas are counter intuitive, but I appreciate the skeptical response here.

The case for user created and resolved prediction markets is that it's simple, clear, and actually what traders want.

For example, Zvi, who writes on Omicron and consults on prediction markets, recently blogged that the ideal way to resolve markets is to have Scott Alexander be the judge. https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12/02/covid-prediction-markets-at-polymarket/

Reality gets messy and judging outcomes ultimately comes down to a person's priors and expertise. We envision a world where experts that you trust run markets on topics that you trust them on.

Right now, we have launched a play-money version of our site, and are exploring options such as moving into crypto. I will say that we love how easy and fun it is to participate with play-money, and believe that the results can be accurate.

Imagine if your favorite Twitter and Substack personalities mixed in prediction markets with their regular tweets and posts to help their analysis or make a point. It's like a Twitter poll, but with a system for accountability that drives accuracy!

We think a super-accessible site that makes accurate forecasting fun can lead to a profound impact on our knowledge and guide us to a better world. Thanks for reading!

--James

I mean, patents only apply in the nation where they're granted. So "ignoring" IP is just a matter of refusing to recognize foreign patents, which is something that all nations do implicitly.

Also, in most foreign countries, court cases are cheap. (They could literally be 100x cheaper to litigate than they would be in the US.)

If you're talking about in a US context specifically, then if absolutely necessary the federal government could either buy or nationalize the patents in dispute, just as all states nationalize land from time to time under eminent domain. Zvi recently wrote about this in the context of the state buying the Ozempic patent: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2025/01/21/sleep-diet-exercise-and-glp-1-drugs/

> [The US Government] should buy out the patents to such drugs.

> This solves the consumption side. It removes the deadweight loss triangle from lost consumption. It removes the hardship of those who struggle to pay, as we can then allow generic competition to do its thing and charge near marginal cost. It would be super popular. It uses government’s low financing costs to provide locked-in up front cold hard cash to Novo Nordisk, presumably the best way to get them and others to invest the maximum in more R&D.

> There are lots of obvious gains here, for on the order of $100 billion. Cut the check.

TL;DR: It doesn't currently seem like a problem, but it is definitely a topic worth keeping an eye on.

"The vaccine generated a weaker immune response against the South African strain, but the antibodies remained above levels that are expected to be protective against the virus, the company said, adding the findings may suggest “a potential risk of earlier waning of immunity to the new B.1.351 strains.”

“Out of an abundance of caution and leveraging the flexibility of our mRNA platform, we are advancing an emerging variant booster candidate against the variant first identified in the Republic of South Africa into the clinic to determine if it will be more effective to boost titers against this and potentially future variants,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said in a statement."

Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/covid-vaccine-moderna-working-on-covid-booster-shots-for-south-african-strain.html

Source for my source, because he posts a pretty solid round-up of recent research and well-cited sources every Friday: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/covid-1-28-muddling-through/

Two points:

1. The fact that the vaccine only has "emergency-use authorization" rather than full FDA approval is best explained by the fact that the FDA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy motivated primarily by CYA rather than rational cost-benefit analysis.

2. The vaccine isn't 100% absolutely safe, but neither is anything else in life. The proper question to ask isn't whether the vaccine is safe in some absolute sense, but whether it is safer than going around unvaccinated. The evidence indicates that getting vaccinated is significantly safer than regularly breathing the same air as other people while unvaccinated. And although healthy non-elderly people are unlikely to outright die of COVID-19, there is evidence that infection often causes long-term effects, including cognitive deficits [1, 2].

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext

[2] https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/07/29/covid-7-29-you-play-to-win-the-game/

Zvi's AI-focused blog is great: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/

Also, GPT-4 response:

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