Piece argues that health wearables offer little in the way of marginal health insights or benefits while exacerbating health anxiety, discounting signals from the body, and providing data to big tech and insurance companies.

Where are the weirdos? Is it all just AI now?

Appreciate the comment. This is the author here. Unfortunately, due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law as pointed out by another comment, there is an asymmetry of effort in making vs finding/disproving false claims. I was just lucky to have been recently primed with the information to notice this mistake. My usual niche is writing about climbing and skiing, but if I'll be sure to share future thoughts in this realm.

Ezra Klein

I have listened to a lot of Ezra Klein over the years- like, a LOT.

And I believe he is one of the scummiest people in journalism. There are very, very few people I think are genuinely malicious and entirely self interested, but he is one.

Would love to hear why you think this. Couldn’t disagree more at first glance. He feels like a breathe of sanity and rationality in a crazy political world.

I have not listened to him - can you explain a bit for the uninformed among us?

The order of magnitude of his mistake makes it damning. Especially considering he began his commentary by noting that "the data can be confusing"

"Data is hard, let me interpret it for you" is specifically crafted to get people to trust the speaker ("wow this guy understands data I better listen") and discourage independent corroboration ("I don't want to look at it myself if it's hard and I'm likely to misinterpret, best leave that to an expert").

Government spending is how a Keynesian combats a recession. For perspective, though, look at this chart of government spending as a % of GDP. It has never gotten even close to 85% of GDP (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=8fX). Chamath claimed it was 85% of GDP growth, which is a different calculation, but looking at [this data](https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2024-10/gdp3q24-adv....) from the past couple of years you can see that the claim is still incorrect.

It's frustratingly impressive how grifters are able to maintain a grift even after it's made evident that they are grifting...

One of the effects of a successful grift is that contrary facts don’t matter — in fact contrary facts just reinforce the grift by strengthening the us against them dynamic.

How do the costs not apply to the tens of thousands of lives that could have been saved?

Because the thousands of lives were never entitled to how someone decides to spend their money in the first place, and if you believe otherwise then this literally applies to everyone and their income. Example: How can we justify going out for an ice cream, when that same money could be spent to vaccinate several people from malaria and save their lives? Why is it ok for middle class earners to spend money on frivolous things, but not for the wealthy? All that surplus money can save tens of thousands of lives!

Think about the counterfactual: a student doesn’t go to Harvard, they instead go to Duke or a public Ivy. They’re only marginally worse off. All of these schools already have enough money to where families making under $75-$100k won’t be paying anything.

Donations to Harvard are exposed to extremely diminished marginal utility at this point.

I think a lot of this investment for him is personal brand. Giving millions to community colleges would probably create tens of thousands of opportunities versus marginal benefit to Ivy leaguers, but having your name on a building at Harvard versus 180 community college libraries is big difference in prestige and brand-recognition for the types of graduates you want to apply to your firm.