Culture Is High Dimensional
Systems allow for more complex analysis, further from direct experience, using longer chains of reasoning.| Overcoming Bias
Systems allow for more complex analysis, further from direct experience, using longer chains of reasoning.| Overcoming Bias
Today Yudkowsky & Soares published their book If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All. I spent the day reading it.| Overcoming Bias
Abstract beliefs have two big causes: vibes and analysis.| Overcoming Bias
One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.| Overcoming Bias
I’ve previously posted on how US foreign policy, and how left vs right ideologies, both seem less coherent that most expect them to be.| Overcoming Bias
DNA evolution takes place both within and between species, with the between part mattering more for long-term innovation.| www.overcomingbias.com
For Leslie Kean’s book “UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Record”, the only social scientists I know who have written on UFOs, Alexaner Wendt and Raymond Duvall, wrote “a new essay … incorporating their ideas … into one designed for nonacademic readers, with some new thoughts added.” They say:| www.overcomingbias.com
(This post is more of an essay, intended to be especially widely accessible.)| www.overcomingbias.com
Status seems pretty central to the UFO phenomena.| www.overcomingbias.com
The last three centuries can be broken into six fifty-year periods, and we can rank these periods in terms of how much institution/policy change the West saw during each period.| Overcoming Bias
When I wrote “politics isn’t about policy”, I actually didn’t know how many respected thinkers (e.g., Machiavelli, Hume, Marx, Weber, Pareto, Mosca, Schmidt, Schumpeter) had long before also concluded: politics is only to a minor degree a process whereby we adopt policies that are effective at achieving realistic goals that we have agreed together to achieve.| Overcoming Bias
"On or about December 1910, human nature changed." Virginia Woolf.| Overcoming Bias
One big obstacle to getting firms to adopt futarchy is this: firm execs are reluctant to open up to wider review decisions that they feel they “own”.| Overcoming Bias
To a large extent, your happiness results from your comparing your situation to your expectations for that situation.| Overcoming Bias
By now humanity has seen hundreds of thousands of UFO reports, accumulated over more than eight decades.| www.overcomingbias.com
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
Consider a typical firm or other small organization, run via a typical management hierarchy.| 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.| www.overcomingbias.com
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
