The Daily View: 1/1/7/2025: Merit and Punditry, Trump Crypto Reserve, Coca-Cola, the LSATs

1. Interesting tweet:

@TheRealZBlog is correct. Trace sorta comes off as smug here by saying right-wingers are coping. Rufo benefited from huge branding by being backed by wealthy donors. Just making oneself useful is necessary but alone insufficient. Punditry tends to be a winner-take-all market in which the supply of commentary vastly exceeds consumption of said content, so most commentators are doomed to fail no matter how meritorious they are. I have seen plenty of people on Twitter who consistently make astute, good tweets whose accounts never ‘blow up’, instead languishing forever at a low follower account. I would say Zman is more talented than Rufo, and in a pure meritocracy would have a bigger brand or platform. Someone as smart or astute as Zman with the equivalent of Rufo’s platform and donor backing, would be even more effective. But it’s more than intellect–being an activist is a job with responsibilities and dealing with ‘inside baseball’ and such.

For all the doomsaying about AI destroying jobs–society has an unquenchable need for ‘vague white-collar jobs’. Many jobs cannot be readily automated, such as IT (e.g. resetting accounts after a data breach). Or dealing with suppliers or vendors. Or onboarding clients or customers. People who are reasonably intelligent and good at following orders can still expect to do well despite these technology trends. So the meritocracy is intact as far as that is concerned. But political commentary is one of those thing where there is no obvious cap on supply; the barriers to entry are too low.

2. Crypto reserve: Shock Trump Leak Sparks Huge Crypto Price Rally.

There is a lot of confusion here. The executive order is not the same as the reserve. The reserve is something more involved, presumably legislation that stipulates that federally-seized Bitcoin (e.g. Silk Road Bitcoin) will not be sold, but instead moved to a separate account for long-term storage, that being ‘the reserve’. This is a much higher bar to clear that will necessitate legislation if it’s to survive his term. I don’t see Trump issuing any executive orders preventing said sales. The executive order instead will be about crypto accounting, which is an unrelated matter. For this reason, I predict Silk Road coins will continue to be sold despite Trump being in office.

From Polymarket, someone writes:

People said the same thing during his first term regarding other policy “all Trump has to do is blah blah,” and it never happened. This is Trump we’re talking about. He can be 1 yard from the end zone and still miss. Trump is known for bricking easy lay-ups, either due to inaction, poor implementation, appointing ineffective people, or no follow-through. I remember in 2019 he created a portal to report internet censorship, and nothing came of it.

Again, during his first term everyone gave the same rationale for why Trump would do something, delineating obvious or simple legal or legislative blueprints of how said policy could be enacted, and it never got done. Some Republicans and donors being pro-crypto or holding crypto is irrelevant in such matters.

3. Drink soda to lose weight?

Not sure why this went so viral. All he was doing was eating at a caloric deficit. 1,500 kcal of carbs from Coca-Cola and a small meal is probably 2,200 kcal/day. A 215 lbs man can be expected to have a 3,000-4,000 kcal/day TDEE, so weight loss is assured. The fact Mexico has among the highest obesity rates in the world and also highest Coca-Cola consumption in the world, soundly refutes this Cola metabolism-boosting hypothesis. This is because soft drinks are cheaper than water. If anything, soft drinks are worse due to higher bioavailability compared to solid foods and fewer calories burned in the digestive process (e.g. more calories extracted from liquids compared to solids controlling for calorie content).

4. For some reason, a tweet about the LSATs went hugely viral:

A common refrain is “all you have to do is learn the trick or strategy to what the test-designers are asking.” Yes, this is true, but obviously it’s more involved than that. This advice is circular in that it presupposes this knowledge of what the test designers had in mind. It’s easy in hindsight after it’s explained to know why a certain answer is the correct one. It goes without saying this is harder to do without such information supplied beforehand, hence why LSAT scores above 170 are uncommon despite considerable practice. True, practice can help in terms of becoming more familiar with the format or learning certain tricks, but score gains tend to be modest.

The majority of LSAT test takers take many practice tests, are tutored, re-take the test, or use apps, yet in spite of this preparation, top scores are still uncommon. Unlike the SATs, the LSAT tends to select for individuals who are higher in conscientiousness: law is a competitive profession that requires a lot of credentials and time. The type of person who aspires to becoming a lawyer can be expected to be more ambitious compared to the general population. So we can expect LSAT test takers to spend more hours practicing compared to the SATs. But all practice accomplishes is raising the mean of the raw score, so IQ is still the deciding factor when the raw score is scaled–there is no getting around this.