I’m now on number three.
Definitely on board with children shifting your value function a lot. One of them in particular (the newborn in the photo) shifts my value function more than I had anticipated.
In the recent interview Volodomyr Zelenskii said “if someone takes your child away, you’d bite his head off.” …Definitely true. And come to think of it… is that a Count Ugolino reference from the Divine Comedy?
Futarchy within Civilization 5.
When I participated in the Good Judgment Project’s IARPA research, we had to predict things about a game of civilization. Now, imagine if you had a game of civilization. Six players all playing against each other, and AI agents representing and having full access to each civilization’s data. Then, a common betting market for particular outcomes of the game. For example, by turn 100, who will have the largest army? What will culture be for this civilization at turn 150? Questions of that nature. If futarchy is largely based on betting markets, and AIs are can simulate various betting agents, then WHY NOT SANDBOX THEM AND TRY IT? Surely, someone is already working on this?
You can buy bulk tamiflu powder here: https://www.selleckchem.com/products/oseltamivir-phosphate-Tamiflu.html And instructions for preparation are here: https://dph.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idph/files/publications/tami-flu-flyer-050316.pdf $300 for 13 doses, which would last you about 6 days, dosing the recommended twice daily during a pandemic. Shelf life of the powder is 2 years. Would any medicine nerd sanity check that I am not missing something essential?
Incentives!
Don’t forget that reported cases of H5N1 are actually just reported cases, and that if you don’t test your cattle, you won’t have anything to report. It would be inconvenient if your cows had it, or any of your workers were sick with it (luckily tests aren’t really available), because there would be a pause and perhaps a loss in your already razor thin margins of operation. The incentive to track and understand aren’t there. So just let it rip through the herd. It doesn’t kill cows anyway...
From a historical perspective this is an excellent treasure cache. Truly when you are the cutting edge of something ideas, relationships, personality, and economics all truly come together to drive history.
I would not be surprised if lurking in the background of my thought is Tyler Cowen. He’s a huge influence on me. But I was thinking of specific examples. I don’t know of a good general history of “humanizing”.
What I had explicitly in mind was the historical development of automobile safety: seatbelts and airbags. There is a history of invention, innovation, deployment, and legal mandating that is long and varied for these.
How long did it take between the discovery of damaging chlorofluorocarbons and their demise? Or for asbestos and its abatement—how much does society pay for this process? What’s the delta between climate change research and renewables investment?
Essentially, many an externality can be internalized once it is named and drawn attention to and the costs are realized.
Well said.
The casual policing of positive comments about Sam Altman is unnecessary. Is this Sam Altman sneer club? Grok the author’s intent and choose your own example. SA is a polarizing figure, I get it. He can be a distraction to the point of an example, but in this case I thought it made sense.
It is something for authors to be on the lookout for though. Some examples invite “missing the point.” Sam Altman is increasingly one example of a name that invites distracted thoughts other than the point intended.
Yes I’m assuming a locally run open weight model will be useful, but not ultimately not sufficient for very complex tasks. I hope that something of the sort I describe can and will exist before too much regulation and optimized monetization occurs.
And we don’t have good social models of technology for really any technology, even retrospectively. So AI is certainly one we are not going to align with human flourishing in advance. When it comes to human flourishing the humanizing of technologies take a lot of time. Eventually we will get there, but it’s a process that requires a lot of individual actors making choices and “feature requests” from the world, features that promote human flourishing.
At my school all the students have to deposit their cell phones into pouches at the office the beginning of the day.. cell phone strictness alone does not create interpersonal chatter. You just also spend a lot of time and work creating an actual culture of conversation. It’s an explicitly taught skill!
Your data on the elasticity of behavior matches my experience well..
Oh weird! I didn’t create this one.
You are correct! Let me fix that!
I for one am definitely worse off.
I now have to read Scott on Substack instead of SSC.
Scott doesn’t write sweet things that could attract nasty flies anymore.
I already have a Logic Tournament ques ion and rule set built for middle and high schoolers if you want to use it.