I found the argument of the counterfactual to be persuasive. Do you have a sense of how much of the time would people actually be doing something better with the extra bandwidth?
Possible, but seems high to me. I'm not sure if those planes were really destroyed or just damaged. My knee-jerk estimate would be somewhere in the hundreds of millions. Still a very successful operation by Ukraine though.
Good point. For me the issue is the variance which governs the time that I have to leave. For the subway, if I give myself a 10 minute margin beyond the median time, I'm quite likely to be on time, for walking or biking if I give myself a 5 minute margin, I'll almost certainly be on time. For driving on the other hand... as per the article, a trip with a median travel time of 17 minutes can take me over an hour when traffic backs up.
I see these changes as expanding freedom, not reducing it. Car ownership costs thousands annually, which many young and low-income New Yorkers can't afford. Improving buses, creating safe bike lanes, and making parking more efficient gives everyone more affordable transportation choices. From my perspective, the current system restricts freedom, which excludes precisely the young and less affluent.
The idea was not that San Francisco does everything perfectly, but instead that there are things they've tried that have been demonstrated to be successful we can learn from in NYC.
I actually own a car in NYC and think these would make things more practical. I would happily trade time spent looking for parking for a minor fee and would happily trade time spent in traffic for a toll.
Even if every housing reform went into effect tomorrow, construction timelines mean it could be years before we see meaningful improvements in affordability or availability. To improve quality of life and opportunity in the near term, we need high-leverage, low-friction interventions that reshape how people live and move right now.
Mobility is the highest leverage near-term option we have.
haha, your point is taken that democratic guidance will have its problems. The idea I wanted to push though was that even if AI can do all work, people will still have the option to do something that they will find meaningful and important. The attempt was to illustrate a potential counter-narrative to the idea that human existence will become pointless / unnecessary after the advent of advanced AI.
Taken too far, it might seem that way, but an important point from the article is that:
The “judicious prospecting” mindset is worth balancing against the “really trying” mindset. There are times where both frameworks are useful, but distinguishing one from the other is a challenge...there are a multitude of scenarios where futarchy could shed light on where to best apply effort.
One reason why Excel should never be used for anything real is because it lacks type safety. For example if you have to sum a columns of numbers and one of them was mistakenly input as text, rather than throwing an error, it will just ignore that entry. There are lots of other problems related to type safety as well.