On not talking past each other
I recently read the back and forth between Scott Alexander and Robin Hanson on whether modern medical spending is effective.
Cruxing on crime
My views on crime and justice are fairly unusual for my class. I tend to believe that:
* crime is a
It's tricky to tell what % of the economy the state controls
Let’s say you want to find out roughly how much of a country’s economy is controlled by the
Brief Thoughts on Justifications for Paternalism
Lisa wrote an article on coercion, paternalism and irreversible decisions. I have some thoughts.
The basic groundwork goes something like
Seconds Thoughts About Counterfactual Impact as an Ethical Standard
(Positive Srdjan) An argument I read years ago when first hearing about EA goes something like this.
* many people think
Is the far future inevitably zero-sum?
In this twitter post, Richard argues that in the distant future there will be far more zero or negative sum
Unstructured thoughts on Tech X Risk
Imagine a bag of pebbles. It’s deep. You don’t know how deep. You draw a thousand pebbles. They’
Misunderstanding the St Petersburg Paradox
I talked to Andrea last night. Turns out I misunderstood what the St Petersburg paradox was.
* I thought it was
Startup Idee: On Demand Books
I read a lot of blogs. Around 200 articles per month get streamed to me via RSS. A lot of
Against cardboard cut-out characters
Just like there are rules for writing non fiction, so there are rules for writing fiction. One thing I notice