Isn’t whether a project is “worth funding” depend on whether you think it’s proposed output is an actually valuable public good? If it is, then you shouldn’t mind not getting a refund that much. If it isn’t, there are other places to look for arbitrage.
teageegeepea
Karma: 529
I’m pretty sure there are limits to the pre-tax income you can put in an index fund (like a 401K).
The consideration war tax resisters have is that it’s bad for the government to get tax money it can spend on wars. Thus refusing to pay what one owes and not owing are equivalent in their effects.
For instance, maybe you think our current tax rules are bad, but perhaps you’d like the ability to have and enforce any tax rules at all, even when some of your fellow citizens disagree with you about what rules are ideal.
I think income taxes are dumb. Instead I think taxation should begin with Pigovian taxes on negative externalities, then if more money is needed Georgist taxes on supply-inelastic factors, and then finally if the government somehow needs even MORE money it should resort to consumption taxes like VATs and stop there. Does this method inhibit the ability to collect those?
Pregnancy is certainly costly (and the abnormally high miscarriage rate appears to be an attempt to save on such costs in case anything has gone wrong), but it’s not that fatal (for the mother). A German midwife recorded one maternal death out of 350 births.
Forager societies didn’t have below-replacement fertilities, which are now common for post-industrial societies.
Having children wasn’t a paying venture, but people had kids anyway for the same reason other species expend energy on offspring.
The distinction between “somatic” and “germ” cells only exists for sexually reproducing species.
There is a remaining mystery about Epstein: where his money came from. He claimed to be a financier, but didn’t seem to do any trading. Hence Eric Weinstein (who actually met him), concluding he was a “construct” whose supposed finance work was merely a cover story.
The Yanomamo maximize the number of females in their tribes by kidnapping them from other tribes sucker enough to feed & raise females rather than males (which they could have used to raid females from other tribes).
It seems odd for mitochondria to be causing the mutation problem sex is supposed to solve, when mitochondria themselves don’t reproduce sexually.
Restricting mitochondria reproduction to one mating “type” does not by itself prevent a “selfish” mitochondria from arriving. If one mitochondria develops a new mutation, it is now competing against all the other mitochondria in that same organism without the mutation (like a cancer). But in fact the restriction goes beyond merely the “type”, as all the somatic cells are dead-ends for mitochondria.Robin Hanson has a worthwhile post on why some organisms are exclusively male rather than being hermaphrodites capable of male & female mating “types”.
Nikolas Lloyd has an evolutionary theory on why human females have breasts instead of teats (well before they even get pregnant).
I think there’s an obvious problem with the theory of runaway sexual selection: once a trait gets deleterious, there will be selection for different preferences. As Lloyd theorized, initially there would be a preference against large breasts (it would indicate not being immediately fertile), but the trait could still get going because the male who mated with such a woman anyway would turn out to be making the right move (as it no longer signalled that). And in other species of animal, large breasts would be deleterious in females. They’re possible in humans because our females no longer have much need to outrun anything while while carrying such encumbrances (but there are still limits to that, which is why fantastically large breasts of the sort some men prefer are usually the product of surgery rather than genes).
I would have contributed… if I hadn’t been required to use Paypal. I closed my account a while back.
By 2011, Hanson concedes at least somewhat to Yudkowsky’s position and states that Cyc might not have enough information or be in the wrong format (FOOM, 496).
I looked for it on that page, but instead it’s on 497 (second-to-last numbered paragraph), where he says:
4. The AI system Eliezer most respects for its promising architecture is eurisko. Its author, Doug Lenat, concluded from it that our main obstacle is not architecture but mental content—the more one knows, the faster one can learn. Lenat’s new Cyc system has much content, though it still doesn’t learn fast. Cyc might not have enough content yet, or perhaps Lenat sought the wrong content or format.
How is “success” measured among AI safety proponents?
When did this happen?
I went to his account via a different link here and found this:
https://twitter.com/DoomsdayDebunks/status/1471204307609477123
which links to this:
https://twitter.com/SetteLab/status/1469007626306392064
I couldn’t see which tweet Robert Walker was linking to, and the images here as just images rather than links to tweets, so I tried to link them here, but it’s not letting me submit a comment.
Immigration and clustering people together seems to have been key to the success of various intellectual hubs throughout history, like the Bay Area recently, Vienna in the 20th century, and Edinburgh in the 18th century
Was there really that much immigration in 18th century Edinburgh? And in terms of agglomeration, I’m sure it was denser than, say, the highlands of Scotland, was it really that much compared to other cities in Britain?
I was wearing a shirt designed by one of your colleagues.
It was nice to hear from Robin in person. I hope others didn’t think I hogged too much of the question time.
Tyler regularly disagrees with his colleagues. If he were one of them he might think to himself “Alex is the best truth-tracker, so I should check what he thinks on the issue”, but Tyler doesn’t regard truth as something to optimize for.