171–180 of 293 posts
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1. Your email is not in your profile. 2. The job link throws a certificate error, and then 404s if I ignore it.
Sorry, didn't realize that my email address didn't automatically show. Added it. As for the job link, there's not a lot I can do.
I work on climate software at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory[1]. My team works with big data and visualization. We support ACME[2] (the Department of Energy's climate modeling program), PCMDI[3] (a team that's been evaluating climate models since 1989), and a number of other projects and groups. If you are interested in what you can do for the climate, we need all the help we can get. Our code may not be the…
It show a 404. BTW this is open for remote work? devs outside USA?
I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…
As far as I can see, the bottleneck of social coordination is information transfer, especially information transfer towards facilitation of trust.
Solving epic problems usually requires making long-term investments. I think many individuals would make more long-term investments towards solutions to epic problems if they were able to establish more trust in the cooperative behavior of other individuals.
I think it comes down to counteracting the dilemmas studied in game theory. I think there is opportunity to leverage software and the internet to create new/stronger information flows that can more often raise us above the pessimistic equilibrium of game theory dilemmas.
Despite the increasing ubiquity of internet-connected hardware, messaging systems, and search engines, I think there is still a lot of opportunity for tech-trained people to improve and build information systems that provide key information to key places in support of social cooperation. Software and the internet has made information flow a lot more liquid, but there is still a lot of opportunity to improve query-ability of data sources, and improve the value of information propagation across communication networks.
Ultimately, we can seek to increase cases where an individual changes his/her behavior, due to trust in other individuals changing their behavior.
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So from slide 2 of that link: Note, the green life along the Nile river and the dead desert elsewhere. When co2 is greater in the atmosphere, plants need less water to thrive. When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole Near catastrophe when co2 declined to 180 ppm, since below 150 ppm plants, then animals die. If you promote a green healthy planet, then you sho…
> When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole ... If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere. Genuinely embarrassing as a key argument. He neglects to mention that sea levels fluctuated 50-150m higher during the period of the dinosaurs! God knows how many major cities around the worl…
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There is absolutely, positively nothing wrong with making "lots" of money in a conventional manner, and donating it to an effective charity taking on the target task. In fact, in the spirit of the Kantian imperative, if everybody actually dropped their "merely productive" jobs and then tried to "directly solve poverty", we'd have just made the poverty problem much, much worse! You may want to Google the term "effecti…
There's quite a bit wrong with this model - most of all, it starts from the assumption that the lack of capital is the main limiting factor. World hunger is not a resource problem, it is a distribution and ideology problem.
I'd also observe that if you agree with the statement "People just don't care enough about the problems to fix them.", that that is morally all but the same thing as saying "People don't give enough of their money to solve the problem.", especially if people are careful about who they give it to. Caring basically is money, be it in the form of concrete donations, donations of time, or anything else that money can be converted into. If you can't solve the problem with careful monetary donations, it is approximately equivalent to saying you can't help the problem at all. In which case, under most reasonable moral systems, you can unburden yourself of worry over the problem, if there is literally nothing you can do.
If I were speaking to a multi-billionaire who potentially had resources to realign the world political stage, we might have to be a lot more careful, but we're talking a fairly normal first-world person.
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> When dinosaurs roamed we had 3 to 5 times current co2 and planet was nearly all green, pole-to-pole ... If you promote a green healthy planet, then you should lobby for a co2-fertilized atmosphere, not a co2-starved atmosphere. Genuinely embarrassing as a key argument. He neglects to mention that sea levels fluctuated 50-150m higher during the period of the dinosaurs! God knows how many major cities around the worl…
What's genuinely embarrassing is that you think there is enough ice on the planet to raise sea levels 150m.
I've asked this question a few times but haven't really gotten a satisfactory answer. There are a lot of what I might call "epic problems" out there. Malaria, homelessness, HIV, refugees, war, climate change, income inequality, gender inequality, hate crimes. I don't know anything about creating vaccines or cures for malaria or HIV. I don't have a degree in social work or behavior science. I don't have any experience…
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Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable. Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all coal with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar…
Peak uranium is about as believable as peak oil. And given that uranium is a tiny fraction on the operating cost of a nuclear plant, it is viable at much higher prices. Which means much lower yield ores can be used for fuel. | And then there is thorium, which we have more of than we know what to do with. Then there's mining Uranium from the Ocean which puts a ceiling on the price of Uranium at 15x the current price.…
The only thing to dispute is "when."
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Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable. Earth has a set amount of uranium that is destroyed when creating energy. Currently we have about 200 years of uranium available for economical extraction. But if we tried to replace all coal with nuclear, we would be out within a few decades. Then we'd need to move to other non-renewable materials (thorium?) or start mining astroids. http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar…
> Nuclear is low-carbon, but it's not renewable. Sure it is, Nuclear doesn't just mean uranium fission, fusion reactors are nuclear as well and they will be a big thing in the future and we get better at doing it.
I used to think this as well, but I'm not sure I believe it anymore. I suspect that by the time we're able to make fusion power work, the solar/wind/batteries combo may be so cheap as to make fusion pointless for mainstream power generation.