“Ice Highway can’t work,” vs. “Ice Highway would likely never be done in our particular path-dependent timeline .”
Either way they have no utility to any reader here. An article about the theory of a particular class of restrictions on AI, or how to outsmart EMH and potentially earn alpha gets a lot more traction here on lesswrong and engagement. This is because AI obviously isn’t an unreachable outcome, it’s very reachable and dangerous AGIs may be a real future possibility. Similarly, while beating EMH is hard, you can try right now if you have some money.
As for inertia to change : so there are arguments either way on this. Main thing is that cost isn’t just a nominal number, it’s reflected in real blood sweat and tears by humans. So picking the investment that has the lowest cost for the return is quite rational.
Now, for certain technologies that we are pretty sure do work, but they are far away in development-space, it is worth massive investments to overcome the barriers in the way.
The thing is, if you write down some of the things that get such massive investments, you will notice a common factor. They promise immense gain. Like not saving 30% of the cost of freight which is a small cost of the cost of a manufactured good, but “increase national GDP 10,000%” (AGI) or “tell our enemies in the middle east to take a hike” (fusion power’s promise) or “free energy from the sky” (solar power and the associated batteries).
And that’s the issue with your proposal. It’s not, in real world terms, enough of a factor. A quick google seemed to say that the percentage cost of freight for all imports to a developed country (so it’s the average, obviously the freight cost for a container full of game consoles is a much smaller percentage than for a bulk transport of sand) is about 5%.
Not sure if that includes the port costs.
So even a project to research stable wormholes—if somehow we knew a plausible way to make them—at most makes things 5% cheaper. (If you were trying to make a business case to make money solely with freight. Obviously wormholes would be a game changer and worth almost any cost to develop if we knew they were possible)
If we have singularity level technology and could go for any tech we know about now, obviously robotic mag-lev vacuum trains would be how you do it.
“Either way they have no utility to any reader here.”
Inspiration and first drafts are valuable and valid, without needing to be a polished, market-ready, ‘perfect’ solution. And, the exploration of failure-modes is valuable for generating new ideas which avoid those pitfalls. Discussion of potential options expands the view; the ‘Bohmic’ dialogues were based on a principle: that we’ll need to say “No, because...” to a lot of ideas, and we also need to say “Yes, and...” to create those ideas. The key insight of David Bohm was to do “Yes, and...” FIRST, and “No, because...” SECOND. You want to generate a panoply, then narrow things down. Reversing that order leads to creative stagnation; we end-up begrudging imperfections, without innovating on our own.
I mentioned the strategy for idea-generation in another thread on LessWrong, involving first ‘exploration of the design space’ to understand what is possible; at that point, none of the ideas need be perfect or best, and you include the bad ones, because of Step Two. Step Two: find the pattern between bad ideas which causes those disparate solutions to suffer from a similar failure. Now, you can better identify the patterns of failure… and there are two other steps, before you might find a good solution! Those are explained here, if you’re curious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfPHTWsFhzmcXw8ta/?commentId=so7DDoMannPAYDHWb
The point of that process is to include bad ideas, and find patterns, to direct you toward good ones.
For your other point, that “It’s not, in real world terms, enough of a factor.” A problem is not deemed worthy by the total addressable market; you have to look at the ratio of capital sunk and the rate of return, regardless of total scale. So, while AGI offers +10,000%, and ice-highways might only save 30%, that 30% can be valuable enough if it is afforded at a good rate—that’s the real economic constraint. And, that only comes from accounting for all the gains and losses, not ‘pointing to a single source of loss to claim that the gains are gone.’
[[Side-Note: it would also be weird if LessWrong refused all the posts which are “not… enough of a factor” compared to AGI, as you do. That’s kinda the highest bar imaginable… and most posts are about cute, nuanced little tid-bits, of significantly lower market-value than “5% of total commercial goods’ prices”]]
“Ice Highway can’t work,” vs. “Ice Highway would likely never be done in our particular path-dependent timeline .”
Either way they have no utility to any reader here. An article about the theory of a particular class of restrictions on AI, or how to outsmart EMH and potentially earn alpha gets a lot more traction here on lesswrong and engagement. This is because AI obviously isn’t an unreachable outcome, it’s very reachable and dangerous AGIs may be a real future possibility. Similarly, while beating EMH is hard, you can try right now if you have some money.
As for inertia to change : so there are arguments either way on this. Main thing is that cost isn’t just a nominal number, it’s reflected in real blood sweat and tears by humans. So picking the investment that has the lowest cost for the return is quite rational.
Now, for certain technologies that we are pretty sure do work, but they are far away in development-space, it is worth massive investments to overcome the barriers in the way.
The thing is, if you write down some of the things that get such massive investments, you will notice a common factor. They promise immense gain. Like not saving 30% of the cost of freight which is a small cost of the cost of a manufactured good, but “increase national GDP 10,000%” (AGI) or “tell our enemies in the middle east to take a hike” (fusion power’s promise) or “free energy from the sky” (solar power and the associated batteries).
And that’s the issue with your proposal. It’s not, in real world terms, enough of a factor. A quick google seemed to say that the percentage cost of freight for all imports to a developed country (so it’s the average, obviously the freight cost for a container full of game consoles is a much smaller percentage than for a bulk transport of sand) is about 5%.
Not sure if that includes the port costs.
So even a project to research stable wormholes—if somehow we knew a plausible way to make them—at most makes things 5% cheaper. (If you were trying to make a business case to make money solely with freight. Obviously wormholes would be a game changer and worth almost any cost to develop if we knew they were possible)
If we have singularity level technology and could go for any tech we know about now, obviously robotic mag-lev vacuum trains would be how you do it.
“Either way they have no utility to any reader here.”
Inspiration and first drafts are valuable and valid, without needing to be a polished, market-ready, ‘perfect’ solution. And, the exploration of failure-modes is valuable for generating new ideas which avoid those pitfalls. Discussion of potential options expands the view; the ‘Bohmic’ dialogues were based on a principle: that we’ll need to say “No, because...” to a lot of ideas, and we also need to say “Yes, and...” to create those ideas. The key insight of David Bohm was to do “Yes, and...” FIRST, and “No, because...” SECOND. You want to generate a panoply, then narrow things down. Reversing that order leads to creative stagnation; we end-up begrudging imperfections, without innovating on our own.
I mentioned the strategy for idea-generation in another thread on LessWrong, involving first ‘exploration of the design space’ to understand what is possible; at that point, none of the ideas need be perfect or best, and you include the bad ones, because of Step Two. Step Two: find the pattern between bad ideas which causes those disparate solutions to suffer from a similar failure. Now, you can better identify the patterns of failure… and there are two other steps, before you might find a good solution! Those are explained here, if you’re curious: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mfPHTWsFhzmcXw8ta/?commentId=so7DDoMannPAYDHWb
The point of that process is to include bad ideas, and find patterns, to direct you toward good ones.
For your other point, that “It’s not, in real world terms, enough of a factor.” A problem is not deemed worthy by the total addressable market; you have to look at the ratio of capital sunk and the rate of return, regardless of total scale. So, while AGI offers +10,000%, and ice-highways might only save 30%, that 30% can be valuable enough if it is afforded at a good rate—that’s the real economic constraint. And, that only comes from accounting for all the gains and losses, not ‘pointing to a single source of loss to claim that the gains are gone.’
[[Side-Note: it would also be weird if LessWrong refused all the posts which are “not… enough of a factor” compared to AGI, as you do. That’s kinda the highest bar imaginable… and most posts are about cute, nuanced little tid-bits, of significantly lower market-value than “5% of total commercial goods’ prices”]]