As futarchy interest and activity are way up lately, this seems a good time to elaborate on one of its most technical issues, one that @metaproph3t also discussed recently: decision selection bias.| www.overcomingbias.com
The world’s dominant civilization today seems on track to decline and be replaced in a few centuries by what are now small insular fertile subcultures, like the Amish and Haredim.| Overcoming Bias
Four and five year olds famously often ask many concrete questions about the world around them.| Overcoming Bias
Imagine living long ago in a forager group, a group that specialized in following a particular kind of herd through its annual cycle.| Overcoming Bias
Sometimes choices need to be made regarding people who cannot immediately weigh in on them.| Overcoming Bias
Government redistribution is usually called “social insurance”, and in fact it does seem to function mostly as insurance against future risks.| www.overcomingbias.com
IMHO, the strongest evidence so far that (some) UFOs are aliens just dropped.| www.overcomingbias.com
Predators naturally try to kill as many prey as they can eat.| Overcoming Bias
Ngram shows how often words and phrase are used in English books over time.| www.overcomingbias.com
Consider a typical firm or other small organization, run via a typical management hierarchy.| www.overcomingbias.com
Yesterday, I talked on cultural drift, w/o slides, for 90min (~1/2 time in Q&A) to 75 smart engaged elite teens.| Overcoming Bias
I’ve written lots on specific centuries-long culture trends, and also on their plausible drivers.| Overcoming Bias
In May I read and posted on the 2008 book Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity. I’ve since recorded two discussions on the topic, one with Agnes Callard at MindsAlmostMeeting| Overcoming Bias
When you take out a loan, you promise to pay it back, and when you get married, you make wedding vows.| www.overcomingbias.com
Humanity has a huge problem, of which few are aware.| www.overcomingbias.com
Richard Hanania has done me the honor of carefully thinking through my & other fertility theories, finding consequences and data tests I didn't think of.| www.overcomingbias.com
Seven years ago, after a year of reading up on forager lives, I first started to explore a forager vs.| www.overcomingbias.com
… children, whom he finds delightful and remarkably self-sufficient from the age of 4.| www.overcomingbias.com
What happens to cultures when selection pressures weaken while pressures to change remain due to cultural activism and environmental changes?| www.overcomingbias.com
Space: the final frontier.| www.overcomingbias.com
Years ago I read Flatland and Planiverse, stories set in a two-dimensional universe.| www.overcomingbias.com
Me in 2018: Spaceship Earth is in fact a story of a brave crew risking much to explore a strange new territory.| www.overcomingbias.com
I see three levels at which we could try to fix cultural drift: specific cultural trends, cultural evolution process parameters, and meta mechanism/institutions.| Overcoming Bias
Our most basic and ancient system for learning the consequences of our actions is natural selection.| Overcoming Bias
Standard decision theory says that basic values should be constant, and not change when you learn new things about the world.| Overcoming Bias
By averaging estimates of ChatGPT 3, 4.5, I find that in these years typical people spent these hours per week consuming fiction and music:| www.overcomingbias.com
A common complaint about futarchy (see also):| www.overcomingbias.com
The 2008 book Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity is hard for me to understand, but I’ve been trying to figure it out, as the concepts it considers seem interesting and important:| www.overcomingbias.com
The following are 62 correlates that I’ve collected of things called “sacred”.| www.overcomingbias.com
I recently used cost-benefit analysis, and estimates of the dollar value of life, to consider the sensitive issue of covid masks, lockdowns, etc.| www.overcomingbias.com
UFOs are objects in the sky that often seem to display amazing physical abilities.| www.overcomingbias.com
Many have argued that as our fertility problem is caused by cultural changes, we must solve it via cultural actions, such as by gossip, religion, praising, shunning, telling stories, making art, and living exemplary lives.| www.overcomingbias.com
When the US and USSR came out victorious at the end of WWII, the world recalibrated its respect.| www.overcomingbias.com
Twelve years ago I posted on how our era is a rare unique “dreamtime” of fast growth, wide cultural integration, and delusional beliefs.| www.overcomingbias.com
The political left and right each have a big long term problem about which they cry most.| www.overcomingbias.com
I’ve often mocked science fiction stories set centuries in the future, yet with stable tech not much more advanced than our own, especially when they have big successful subgroups who resist innovation.| www.overcomingbias.com
Those who consume too much alcohol or other recreational drugs often make excuses.| www.overcomingbias.com
The last month has greatly change what I see as the default future.| www.overcomingbias.com
The most likely scenario by which world human fertility will rise again includes a big return to communism. It will be a small-scale religious “commune” form of communism, not industrial state capitalism, but communism nonetheless.| www.overcomingbias.com
Added 22Sep: I’ve changed my mind; this post is wrong.| www.overcomingbias.com
World population is widely projected to peak around 2050-90 at roughly 9-11B, with ~40% living in Africa.| www.overcomingbias.com
(Note: Bryan Caplan release his post on this book at same time as mine.)| www.overcomingbias.com
Most economic growth comes from innovation, not the accumulation of capital or labor.| www.overcomingbias.com
There have been over 100K UFO sightings reported worldwide since 1940.| www.overcomingbias.com
Compared to some, I am less worried about extreme near-term AI doom scenarios.| www.overcomingbias.com
Large language models like ChatGPT have recently spooked a great many, and my Twitter feed is full of worriers saying how irresponsible orgs have been to make and release such models.| www.overcomingbias.com
