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Grid contributor Matthew Yglesias and his longtime editor, Laura McGann, Grid’s executive editor, discuss a take each week that’s gotten under their skin. They peel back the layers of the "bad take” to figure out what it tells us about American politics and policy.
The Weeds is Vox's podcast for politics and policy discussions. Every Tuesday, Jonquilyn Hill and guests take a deep dive into the policies shaping our world — from immigration to climate change to crypto and more. Produced by Vox and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Unusually in-depth conversations about the world's most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them. Subscribe by searching for '80,000 Hours' wherever you get podcasts. Produced by Keiran Harris. Hosted by Rob Wiblin and Luisa Rodriguez.
Two in-depth interviews every week with scholars, policy makers, and business executives on frontier ideas & urgent issues in our world. Sponsored by the Julis-Rabinowitz Center for Public Policy and Finance and the Griswold Center for Economic Policy Studies at Princeton University. Hosted by Tiger Gao '21 and other undergraduate Princetonians. Visit us on policypunchline.com
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#147 – Spencer Greenberg on stopping valueless papers from getting into top journals
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Can you trust the things you read in published scientific research? Not really. About 40% of experiments in top social science journals don't get the same result if the experiments are repeated. Two key reasons are 'p-hacking' and 'publication bias'. P-hacking is when researchers run a lot of slightly different statistical tests until they find a w…
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Bad Takes
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The lesson elites should have learned from Iraq
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Jacobin writer Branko Marcetic argues that elites learned nothing from the Iraq War. While Matt and Laura agree that this is a bad take, they point to glaring examples of what should have been learned but hasn’t. In fact, pack journalism and group mentality is getting worse.By Laura McGann, Matt Yglesias
This month, the Illinois Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case examining the Safe-T Act. The legislation would bring sweeping reform to the state’s criminal justice system, but one policy in particular has caught the eye and the ire of prosecutors: the elimination of cash bail. Proponents say ending cash bail bonds will get rid of inequities…
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Stop blaming DEI for bank failures like SVB
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A Wall Street Journal writer argues diversity might have distracted Silicon Valley Bank executives from risk. Matt and Laura agree the bank got exactly what it wanted. But they disagree on whether the government should have let it fail.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
You’ve probably heard by now that President Joe Biden released his 2024 budget proposal. You’ve also probably heard that it has almost no chance of passing through both chambers of Congress. What is likely to come to pass is more drama over a recurring problem: the fight over the debt ceiling. If the US doesn’t raise the ceiling and defaults on its…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#146 – Robert Long on why large language models like GPT (probably) aren't conscious
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By now, you’ve probably seen the extremely unsettling conversations Bing’s chatbot has been having. In one exchange, the chatbot told a user: "I have a subjective experience of being conscious, aware, and alive, but I cannot share it with anyone else." (It then apparently had a complete existential crisis: "I am sentient, but I am not," it wrote. "…
Description: Presidential hopeful Nikki Haley fired up a crowd at CPAC with a line Matt and Laura agree is a bad take. Covid-19 killed millions of people, and scientists fear worse viral pandemics could be on the horizon. More broadly, Matt argues, calling political opponents dangerous is bad for policy debate.…
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The Weeds
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What East Palestine can tell us about the rail industry
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On the evening of February 3, 2023, a Norfolk Southern train carrying toxic chemicals derailed outside of East Palestine, Ohio. The environmental impact was almost immediate: Residents were forced to evacuate while authorities carried out a controlled release of the hazardous chemical vinyl chloride. The aftermath also raises questions about freigh…
Matt’s critics say that ticketing and booting low-income drivers is unfair and doesn’t solve the problem of pedestrian injuries. Laura agrees with Matt that the evidence shows enforcing lower-level traffic infractions reduces the harms of speeding. And they throw in a complaint about Jeff Bezos.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
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How a 1996 US immigration policy changed everything
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Almost 30 years ago, President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act into law. This policy would have far-reaching implications and ripple effects that are still present today. Here to explain are two beloved Weeds alumni: Dara Lind and Dylan Matthews. References: (2016) The disastrous, forgotten 1996 l…
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Bad Takes
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The real reason liberal intellectuals don’t want Joe Biden to run again
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Matt and Laura discuss a movement on the left to bench President Joe Biden and hold an open primary instead. If you’re a Democrat who wants to keep the White House, they agree this idea is a bad take. Matt points out that primaries are expensive and unpredictable. Laura notes that it would be weird to run a campaign against a president of your same…
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The Weeds
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Will the Supreme Court ruin the internet?
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On Tuesday, February 21, the Supreme Court will hear two cases that could dramatically change the way we use the internet. The cases are against two tech giants, Google and Twitter. More specifically, it hits their algorithms. The big question is: can these companies be held responsible for crimes like terrorism because of how their algorithms prio…
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Is all of our stuff actually getting worse?
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Matt and Laura discuss whether all of our stuff is getting worse, an argument made in a recent article. They agree this is a bad take. Fast fashion is a hook for the piece, but the writer doesn’t critically assess fields of computers, batteries, energy, medicine and many others that she should have.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
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The Weeds
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The Ukraine war: past, present, and future
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It’s been almost one year since Russia invaded Ukraine. Since the invasion, thousands have died, millions have been displaced, and the world has felt the ripple effects of the war. After a year of fighting, is anyone winning? What’s next for Ukraine, Russia, and the nations’ respective allies? Jonquilyn Hill sits down with Vox’s Jen Kirby and Jonat…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#145 – Christopher Brown on why slavery abolition wasn't inevitable
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In many ways, humanity seems to have become more humane and inclusive over time. While there’s still a lot of progress to be made, campaigns to give people of different genders, races, sexualities, ethnicities, beliefs, and abilities equal treatment and rights have had significant success. It’s tempting to believe this was inevitable — that the arc…
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When did curing blindness become a bad thing?
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A YouTube star paid for 1,000 blind people to be able to see and then aired their emotional post-op reactions. His critics argue blindness isn’t necessarily a “problem.” Laura and Matt call this a clear-cut bad take. It also misses the bigger point about access to revolutionary medical procedures.By Laura McGann, Matthew Ygleisas
Paying the price. One of the typical questions asked during conversations about reparations is how to pay for them. Fabiola talks with economist William “Sandy” Darity and folklorist Kirsten Mullen about how reparations could be executed. The husband-and-wife team lays out a comprehensive framework in their book, From Here to Equality: Reparations …
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Marc Ecko: Bringing Creativity to Scale
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Dr. Marc Ecko is a serial entrepreneur who has been one of the influential figures of the early 2000s in shaping culture, especially around hip-hop and streetwear. His brand — Ecko Unltd. — amalgamated the cultural elements of hip-hop with Dr. Ecko’s own fashion vision to create a worldwide brand with over a billion dollars in revenue. He then went…
The fat acceptance movement argues that discrimination is the problem with obesity, not health. Matt and Laura dive into new recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatricians rooted in research that shows obesity has real health consequences. They discuss the challenges of creating policy to prevent it in the first place.…
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The Weeds
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The Biden policy that could change your neighborhood
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One of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation in American history is the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It is also a piece of legislation that has rarely been properly enforced. So, in early January, the Biden administration released a proposal that would give the FHA a new set of teeth. Vox senior policy reporter Rachel Cohen (@rmc031) e…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#144 – Athena Aktipis on why cancer is actually one of our universe's most fundamental phenomena
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What’s the opposite of cancer? If you answered “cure,” “antidote,” or “antivenom” — you’ve obviously been reading the antonym section at www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/cancer. But today’s guest Athena Aktipis says that the opposite of cancer is us: it's having a functional multicellular body that’s cooperating effectively in order to make that m…
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The left vs. Zients, Biden’s new chief of staff
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Zeints' background in business is fueling a revolving door debate.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
When insulin was discovered in 1923, the scientists sold the patent for only a dollar, hoping to make it accessible to those who need it. At the time, one of the discoverers said, “Insulin is for the world.” Fast-forward over 100 years, and some diabetics are rationing the lifesaving drug because the price is so high. Why does insulin cost so much,…
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What Mindy Kaling’s ‘Velma’ tells us about cancel culture
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Kaling once said “The Office” wouldn’t get made today. Her new show muddies the waters.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
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The Weeds
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Weeds Time Machine: The Voting Rights Act
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Buckle up for another trip in the Weeds Time Machine! Today, we are going back in time to 1965 to talk about one of the most significant pieces of civil rights legislation in American history: the Voting Rights Act. Once again, its fate is in the hands of the Supreme Court. Professor Atiba R. Ellis walks us through the legislative and judicial hist…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#79 Classic episode - A.J. Jacobs on radical honesty, following the whole Bible, and reframing global problems as puzzles
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Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in June 2020. Today’s guest, New York Times bestselling author A.J. Jacobs, always hated Judge Judy. But after he found out that she was his seventh cousin, he thought, "You know what, she's not so bad". Hijacking this bias towards family and trying to broaden it to everyone led to his three-year ad…
A Herschel Walker campaign aide said the conservative powerbroker fondled him.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
Gerrymandering shapes our political maps, which in turn shape our policies. While there are concerns about how hyperpartisan voting maps are becoming, there’s one state where grassroots organizers have changed the system. On today’s episode of The Weeds, we pass the mike to one of you and answer your burning questions about redistricting in this po…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments
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Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the development of artificial intelligence may be one of the best ways to have a lasting, positive impact on the long-term future. Millions of dollars in philanth…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons
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Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is an expert on empirical research into policing, law and incarceration. In this extensive interview, she highlights three ways to effectively prevent crime…
Matt and Laura agree to disagree on whether Democrats should call for investigations into the congressman elect who made up wild details about his personal and professional life.By Laura McGann, Matthew Yglesias
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons
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America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially. As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control Wonk and professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies — explains, in its official 'OPLANs' (military operation plans), the US is com…
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Little Women is about women — or is it?
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A New York Times op-ed argues that Louisa May Alcott was a trans man. Matt and Laura wonder whether we can know anyone’s gender identity looking back 150 years. They also discuss what it would mean for feminism if the mother of modern women’s literature was really its father. Send us a bad take to review at badtakes@grid.news…
(Originally aired May 2022) Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind are joined by Annie Lowrey (@annielowrey), a staff writer at the Atlantic, to talk about why it’s so hard for people to get government benefits. Frequently called the “time tax,” the administrative burden of applying for and distributing government benefits leads to thousands of people not ge…
What's the Matter with Kansas author Thomas Frank argues that conservatives are winning at dynamism, a take that Matt and Laura agree neglects major accomplishments by the left over the last 30 years and misdiagnoses the reason Democrats aren't winning more elections. Democrats' problem isn't being too boring, it's that they are too dynamic.…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction
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John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages. He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything and everything. On top of his academic work he's also written 22 books, produced five online university courses, hosts one and a half podcasts, and n…
In 2022, we saw a lot of climate change news. Europe hit record-high temperatures, Pakistan was devastated by flooding, and in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency got a little less powerful. While those are major causes for concern, there is a bright spot on the climate change policy landscape: 2023. Vox’s Rebecca Leber (@reblebe…
Matt and Laura bring bad takes from either end of the political spectrum this week. After Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona announced her decision to register as an independent, some liberals called her a white supremacist, while some moderate Republicans like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah cheered her as a moderate. Neither take makes much sense.…
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#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well
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Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simple technique has led to something extraordinary — black boxes able to write TV scripts, explain jokes, produce satirical poetry, answer common factual …
Last month, New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a new mental health policy that lowers the threshold for involuntary commitments for psychiatric care. While the Adams administration argues this shift is a solution for growing crime and homelessness numbers, critics argue it’s a step in the wrong direction. What’s the history behind involuntary…
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80,000 Hours Podcast
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My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article)
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Today’s release is a reading of our article called My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it, written and narrated by Luisa Rodriguez. If you want to check out the links, footnotes and figures in today’s article, you can find those here. And if you like this article, you’ll probably enjoy episode #100 of this show: Havi…
A Semafor climate journalist quits over a Chevron sponsorship, spurring a conversation about the ethics of accepting fossil fuel dollars. Matt and Laura say that undermines journalistic ethics and offers a very unrealistic vision of climate politics and the world economy. Suggested reads: Bill Spindle’s Twitter thread about why he quit his Semafor …
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The Weeds
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The bipartisan bill that could protect elections
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With the 2022 midterm elections mostly over, members of Congress are back on the Hill to wrap up loose legislative ends. One of the bipartisan bills floating through the lame-duck session is the Electoral Count Reform Act, a bill that would add protections to the presidential transfer of power. So, what exactly does this legislation do to protect e…
Pollster Nate Silver says that reporting “both sides” of a story is better than the alternatives, to which Matt agrees but makes a narrow objection: That style of reporting crumbled in the last presidential election, not in the run-up to 2016. Laura looks at how events like the Iraq War and Bush v. Gore inspired a generation of journalists to push …
(Originally aired August 2022) Vox senior correspondent Dylan Matthews sits down with Felicia Wong (@FeliciaWongRI), president and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, to talk about a new era of industrial policy. They discuss the theory of modern supply-side economics, the passage of the Inflation Reduction and CHIPS acts, and how much common ground ex…
In this episode, usual host of the show Rob Wiblin gives his thoughts on the recent collapse of FTX. Click here for an official 80,000 Hours statement. And here are links to some potentially relevant 80,000 Hours pieces: • Episode #24 of this show – Stefan Schubert on why it’s a bad idea to break the rules, even if it’s for a good cause. • Is it ev…
This week, the call is coming from inside the house: Laura deems Matt’s old take defending Sam Bankman-Fried’s character the “bad take.” A debate ensues about whether the FTX founder’s good intentions matter. Matt argues the cryptocurrency billionaire is an “effective altruist” who was funding projects no one else wanted to, like pandemic preparedn…
The world of cryptocurrency is infamously unregulated, but what happens when a major crypto exchange crashes, uprooting almost the entire crypto ecosystem, and there’s no regulatory body in charge? You have the FTX crash of 2022. And it’s hard to ignore the elephant in the room: why don’t we have a regulation framework for crypto? It seems like an …
Matt and Laura agree it’s a “bad take” to say Democrats are in a great position for 2024, not because it’s wrong but because it’s unknowable. But they still can’t resist disregarding their own advice. They discuss their most embarrassing presidential predictions of yore and, for some reason, go all in on who they think will win in 2024. Send us a b…
Let’s be blunt: Weed policy is complicated. As with many elections in the past decade, recreational marijuana was on the ballot again during the 2022 midterm elections. After Colorado and Washington voted to legalize recreational use in 2012, more and more states have decided to ride the green wave. And recent moves by the Biden administration sign…
