Viewing profile — NumberWangMan

I have thought about whether banning advertising would be a good idea prior to stumbling onto this article. I'm not saying there would be no downsides, but I think there would be a…

I think the whole problem with externalities is that even if everyone gains a private benefit from their choice, you can all be worse off due to the externalities. To take your exa…

I believe that if you're doing some heavy chopping, that orientation keeps the cutting board in good condition for the longest time, as you're not cutting through the wood grain an…

My intuition, based on what I know of economics, is that a UBI policy would have results something like the following: * Inflation, things get more expensive. People attempt to con…

I agree that all regulation is written in blood. But at the same time, regulation can result in bleeding, and we don't always carefully weigh the costs and benefits of regulation. …

I don't think that the scientific consensus on nutrition as unsettled as you say. As an example, there are a lot of people making money selling various diets as well as promoting u…

Sure, but you still have to balance your "who benefits" against the harm of the thing they're proposing to ban. In the case of these models, you can fine-tune the model all you wan…

I've heard it said that paying public servants well is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for avoiding corruption (this was as applied to Singapore). You don't want people …

> how development of an unpredictable technology might pan out > how one decision would pan out I'm not sure what point you are making here. Are you trying to say "see, the AI not-…

Everyone is better off if children don’t work, but if everyone else has their children work and you don’t, you lose. Sounds like moloch! (I’m ignoring corporate profits and consume…

I would say...not necessarily. The technology that lets someone create a gun does not give the ability to make bulletproof armor or the ability to treat life-threatening gunshot wo…

The trick is to once every couple of days when it's starting to get to that point where it'll go bad soon, take it out, and re-cook it somehow to kill any bacteria. This could be t…

Zvi Mowshowitz has a nuanced viewpoint I like -- we should be very careful and move very slowly with any tech that has a chance of wiping out humanity, and embrace the "move fast a…

We need more people to say this out loud, so thank you…

There absolutely could be (profit I mean), if we taxed fossil fuels enough.

It’s multipolar trap/ coordination problem. The costs of carbon emissions are diffuse and borne by everyone, while the costs of changing your behavior are mostly borne by you. It’s…

This is the best argument I've heard against billionaires--one I had never heard before: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/billionaires-surplus-and-re... . I think most arguments fo…

This is called a multipolar trap. “If I don’t build it, someone else will, so I might as well cash in”

It is for now, but rest assured that people will be working very hard on fixing that problem. I don’t doubt they will succeed.

Yep, and that’s rather terrifying, is it not? Is there any good reason to assume that future AGI will share our sense of morality, once it is smart enough to surpass human thought?…

The only way AIs won’t reach the point of being better than humans is if we intentionally stop, I fear. Once an AI is trained, you can copy it a million times over. A human takes m…

Surely there are limits. But it matters a LOT how far away they are. Anyone betting on humanity hitting limits to its exponential growth would have been unpleasantly surprised many…

> If you step way back, the simple fact that the Earth still exists in its current form tells us that no recursive process in the multi-billion-year history of the planet has ever …

This is also, I believe, why so many are cavalier about the difficulty of avoiding catastrophic outcomes after inventing general artificial intelligence. We are really good at lyin…