Viewing profile — jakecrouch

I view modern AI as a combination of things that are too early and too late - data science hasn't changed much since the 1990s, but people have a misconception that there is still …

Raising taxes is not the only way to improve public infrastructure. One can also lower the trade deficits, improve the technology the government uses, and legislate away some of th…

> Interstellar travel will consist of information travelling at the speed of light. Pretty much nothing else is practical. What's your reasoning for this? You would only have to ac…

> But having good social skills confers life-long benefits. So, don't write them off. Get good at making a good first impression, being funny (if possible... this author still work…

While this is a cool result, I wonder if the focus on games rather than real-world tasks is a mistake. It was a sign of past AI hype cycles when researchers focused their attention…

One explanation of the inflation of the public and private markets in the US is that the Chinese are in the middle of a massive debt bubble, anyone with cash there has nothing good…

It's nowhere near as bad or pervasive as the competition to get into student debt. But I'm not really sure what psychotherapy would work. Maybe convince people to read about mimeti…

It's worth noting that this basically gives you competitive tips - how to be more effective at solving a problem after it's been given to you. I think it's much more valuable to be…

I believe that their problem will be finding the small group of users that derive enormous value from it. When you really dig into all the applications they've suggested, they don'…

The book "The Seven Signs of Ethical Collapse" tells the stories of companies that suddenly collapsed due to hidden issues, like Enron and Worldcom. Tesla fits every sign: larger-t…

I would be skeptical of new entrants to scooter / bike sharing. In China, ofo and mobike together captured about 95% of the market. If it were possible to challenge the companies t…

Lightsail Energy tried and failed to bring this to market - not sure whether this can ultimately outperform Lithium Ion Batteries, which have all the pressure of the electronics in…

I am interested in knowing if there are advantages to using blockchain generally outside of Bitcoin - I don't understand it in this case from reading the post. A centralized exchan…

What is the advantage of using the blockchain rather than creating a fully centralized debt exchange?

This is a legitimate concern. The Revolutionary War, Civil War, and World War II are all spaced roughly 80 years apart, and all coincided with deleveragings.

There are many other parallels that can be drawn between the 1930s and the 2010s. Ray Dalio's theory about long term debt cycles explains this in a non-ad-hoc way - every 50-75 yea…

It's obvious that there are limits to how well machine translation can work unless the models have sensory grounding. I wonder if the problem is that people haven't figured out how…

I'm somewhat uncomfortable with brain fixation because there is no way to actually verify that it works. Mind uploading is very far off if we still can't upload C. Elegans. It is m…

Perhaps this is the solution to the problem segways had, social acceptability. If it becomes mainstream among college students, it could easily spread to everyone else.

> And they call this a "product". To be fair, this is an absurdly competitive space. If they achieved something of similar magnitude for a problem dozens of other teams weren't alr…

My theory is that the only reason the SEC hasn't classified all cryptocurrencies as securities is that doing so would be too unpopular politically. Anything that fails to get wide …

The best way to advance AI is probably to make the hardware faster, especially now that Moore's Law is in danger of going away. The people doing AI research generally seem to be fu…

There is kind of a Gresham'a Law with these buzzwords, where if you actually have new and interesting ideas around them, it's much harder to get people to take you seriously.

This is why the US should not worry about China as a long-term economic threat - authoritarianism has never worked. The Soviet Union, 1930s Germany and Italy, all collapsed. I thin…