Fertility Roundup #5: Causation

Posted on January 2, 2026 by TheZvi

There are two sides of developments in fertility.

  1. How bad is it? What is causing the massive, catastrophic declines in fertility?
  2. What can we do to stabilize and reverse these trends to a sustainable level?

Today I’m going to focus on news about what is happening and why, and next time I’ll ask what we’ve learned since last check-in about we could perhaps do about it.

One could consider all this a supplement to my sequence on The Revolution of Rising Expectations, and The Revolution of Rising Requirements. That’s the central dynamic.

Household Composition

What is happening? A chart worth looking at every so often.

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AI #149: 3

Posted on January 1, 2026 by TheZvi

The Rationalist Project was our last best hope that we might not try to build it.

It failed.

But in the year of the Coding Agent, it became something greater: our last, best hope – for everyone not dying.

This is what 2026 looks like. The place is Lighthaven.

Table of Contents

  1. Language Models Offer Mundane Utility. 2026 is an age of wonders.
  2. Claude Code. The age of humans writing code may be coming to an end.
  3. Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility. Your dog’s dead, Jimmy.
  4. Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon. Keep your nonsense simple.
  5. Fun With Media Generation. YouTube facing less AI slop than I’d expect.
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2025 Year in Review

Posted on December 31, 2025 by TheZvi

It’s that time. It’s been a hell of a year.

At the start we barely had reasoning models. Now we have Claude Code and Opus 4.5.

I don’t code. Yet now I cause code to exist whenever something about a website annoys me, or when I get that programmer’s realization that there’s something I am planning on doing at least three times. Because why not?

The progress has simultaneously been mind bogglingly impressive and fast. But a lot of people don’t see it that way, because progress has been incremental, and because we were reasonably expecting to often get even more than this.

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Dating Roundup #9: Signals and Selection

Posted on December 30, 2025 by TheZvi

Ultimately, it comes down to one question. Are you in? For you, and for them.

You’re Single Because They Got The Ick

The Ick, the ultimate red flag, makes perfect sense and is all about likelihood ratios.

Koenfucius: The ‘ick’ is a colloquial term for a feeling of disgust triggered by a specific—typically trivial—behaviour from a romantic partner, often leading to the relationship’s demise. New research explores why some are more prone to getting it than others.

Robin Hanson: “Women also experienced the ick more frequently, with 75% having had the ick compared to 57% of men … Those with a higher tendency for disgust … [&] grandiose narcissism was linked to stronger ick reactions, as was holding partners to exceptionally high standards.”

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Dating Roundup #8: Tactics

Posted on December 29, 2025 by TheZvi

Here’s to everyone having a great 2026 in all ways, so I figured what better way to end the year than with a little practical advice. Like everything else, dating is a skill. Practice makes perfect. It helps to combine it with outside analysis, to help you on your quest to Just Do Things.

You’re Single Because You Lack Reps

A common theme in these roundups is that the best thing you can do as a young man, to get better at dating and set yourself up for success, is to get out there and engage in deliberate practice.

Cartoons Hate Her: Today I wrote about some of the worst dating advice that young men get. Namely, the advice to delay dating or relationships until they’ve “built themselves,” usually into their 30s.

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Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids Be Kids

Posted on December 26, 2025 by TheZvi

The Revolution of Rising Requirements has many elements. The most onerous are the supervisory requirements on children. They have become, as Kelsey Piper recently documented, completely, utterly insane, to the point where:

  1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.
  2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.
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AI #148: Christmas Break

Posted on December 25, 2025 by TheZvi

Claude Opus 4.5 did so well on the METR task length graph they’re going to need longer tasks, and we still haven’t scored Gemini 3 Pro or GPT-5.2-Codex. Oh, also there’s a GPT-5.2-Codex.

At week’s end we did finally get at least a little of a Christmas break. It was nice.

Also nice was that New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the RAISE Act, giving New York its own version of SB 53. The final version was not what we were hoping it would be, but it still is helpful on the margin.

Various people gave their 2026 predictions. Let’s put it this way: Buckle up.

 

Continue reading →

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Zvi’s 2025 In Movies

Posted on December 24, 2025 by TheZvi

Now that I am tracking all the movies I watch via Letterboxd, it seems worthwhile to go over the results at the end of the year, and look for lessons, patterns and highlights.

Last year: Zvi’s 2024 In Movies.

The Ratings Scale

You can find all my ratings and reviews on Letterboxd. I do revise from time to time, either on rewatch or changing my mind. I encourage you to follow me there.

Letterboxd ratings go from 0.5-5. The scale is trying to measure several things at once.

5: Masterpiece. All-time great film. Will rewatch multiple times. See this film.

4.5: Excellent. Life is meaningfully enriched. Want to rewatch. Probably see this film.

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Keeping Up Against the Joneses: Balsa’s 2025 Fundraiser

Posted on December 23, 2025 by TheZvi

Several years ago Zvi Mowshowitz founded Balsa Research, a tiny nonprofit research organization currently focused on quantifying the impact of the Jones Act on the American economy, and working towards viable reform proposals.

While changing century-old policy is not going to be easy, we continue to see many places where there is neglected groundwork that we’re well positioned to do, and we are improving at doing it with another year of practice under our belts.

We’re looking to raise $200,000 to support our work this giving season, though $50,000 would be sufficient to keep the lights on, and we think we are also well positioned to do more with more funding.

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The Revolution of Rising Expectations

Posted on December 22, 2025 by TheZvi

Internet arguments like the $140,000 Question incident keep happening.

The two sides say:

  1. Life sucks, you can’t get ahead, you can’t have a family or own a house.
  2. What are you talking about, median wages are up, unemployment is low and so on.

The economic data is correct. Real wages are indeed up. Costs for food and clothing are way down while quality is up, housing is more expensive than it should be but is not much more expensive relative to incomes. We really do consume vastly more and better food, clothing, housing, healthcare, entertainment, travel, communications, shipping and logistics, information and intelligence. Most things are higher quality.

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