When you don’t know that a “sound bite” is both audio and video. Happy three years to me finally making it to Reddit.

It’s striking that some past jobs seemingly had few demands - eg Tolkien could write LotR. I’d guess management has grown more efficient, contributing to growth. But otoh it may have made those jobs more strenuous, meaning growth numbers overestimate life quality improvements.

How should we enforce traffic laws? If we were designing a system today, there's no chance we would choose a 0.01% probability of getting caught, matched with a highly unpredictable and sometimes exorbitant fine. Crazy case of path dependence where we could do so much better.

This thread makes an important point. This platform's elimination of age hierarchies has destabilized American society.

Many people’s meritocracy ideal is something like: ability is randomly assigned at birth, the best rise to the top. Half of people in this society would be downwardly mobile, some of them a lot. They would tear each apart in a generation.

The most essential stabilizing feature of a society is a status hierarchy that young people—especially young men—can reliably climb by following a clear and pro-social set of rules. 1/

"Science" is now the third highest supported institution in the US, after small business and the military. Higher ed is fifth.

There are 10^80 atoms in the universe. If there is even a 0.0000000000000000001% probability that atoms feel pain, then ending the universe is the most important cause area for EAs by far. We clearly can't reject a probability so low— this just swamps all the other causes.

60% of the American companies on Fortune's list of top AI innovators have an immigrant founder. The world’s top talent overwhelmingly wants to come to US. This is a incredible advantage. American leadership in AI depends on allowing, even encouraging, high-skilled immigration.

My potentially unpopular opinion? I think this trend has been disastrous for the overall quality of economic history.