Academia functions to (A) create and confer prestige to associated researchers, students, firms, cities, and nations, (B) preserve and teach what we know on many general abstract topics, and (C) add to what we know over the long run.| www.overcomingbias.com
Recent social-science work distinguishes two classic forms of status: dominance (or “power”) and prestige (or “honor”).| Overcoming Bias
Some terminology:| www.overcomingbias.com
While other species have made do with the tricycle of DNA evolution, humans recently added the sports car of cultural evolution.| www.overcomingbias.com
Many, including my colleague Bryan Caplan, are confident that the widely forecasted world population fall based on fertility trends won’t last long, because: selection.| www.overcomingbias.com
In a review of Robert Edgerton’s ’92 book Sick Societies, Mr.| Overcoming Bias
While every choice under certainty is in some sense a “gamble”, humans have often gone out of their way to create “gambling” contexts where they can more quickly make many uncertain win or lose choices.| Overcoming Bias
If futarchy ends up as successful as I hope, the world will have to choose explicit ex-post-measurable goals to assign to their governments, and political talk and activism will turn to focus more on fighting over such goals.| Overcoming Bias
In my 1999 article “Decision Markets” (IEEE Intelligent Systems 14(3):16-19, May/June), I explained how decision-conditional market estimates could be used to advise decisions, a concept I soon called “| Overcoming Bias
Please consider three historical models for talk and politics today.| Overcoming Bias
The world economy grew by a factor of twenty over the last century, and five over the prior century.| www.overcomingbias.com
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.| www.overcomingbias.com
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
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
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
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
