ranprieur

The number we need to know is the death rate in the absence of hospitalization. Because if we let it ride, and the hospitals fill up, that's the number we're looking at.

If it turns out to be only 1%, then shutting down the economy is probably a mistake. But if it's more like 10%, then without quarantine we would get an economic collapse anyway, plus a much higher death toll.

What people call "hard work" is two different things.

One is the puritan work ethic, forcing yourself to do shit you don't feel like doing, day after day, to achieve some goal. That may or may not lead to a better life, but it always leads to burnout.

The other thing is obsession. You are intrinsically motivated to put in a ton of hours on something, and you get really good at it.

The problem is, society is veering farther from human nature, so that there is less and less overlap between what we're obsessed with, and what society considers useful.

Gaiome by Kevin Scott Polk, about the potential for highly ecological artificial worlds in space.

None of these examples are about being good, exactly. They're about being a good fit for another thing.

Depreciating currency would help, or permanent negative interest. Then the default behavior of wealth would be to shrink, rather than grow.

The deeper problem is that wealth is power, and power can be leveraged into greater power. I can't see any way to fix that except a culture where it just really bothers people to see any differences in power.

In hundreds of years, if we manage to eliminate all suffering from lack of food, health care, etc, the next thing might be to eliminate the suffering of lack of social influence.

Missing from this post is anything about whether the piano player is enjoying the process. The subtext seems to be that we should force ourselves to do hard stuff, whether or not we like it, so that other people will admire our skill.

When I'm doing something I really enjoy, I don't have to make myself do it in a way that's harder -- I already feel driven to add complexity and constraint. If I don't want a task to be harder, that probably means I don't enjoy it, and the best move is to try to get out of doing it.

This is why Consumer Reports doesn't take ads. In any ad-funded review platform, corruption is inevitable. And we could solve it with a simple (but difficult) law: that review platforms may not receive any income from whoever they're reviewing.

IQ is not intelligence. IQ is a number determined by a culturally biased test.

The most likely reason scores are dropping, is that test-makers are not keeping up with changes in culture. People are 2019-smart and getting lower scores because they're not 1970-smart.

> Each time they would laugh afterwards, like they were just playing around, or like it was a big party or something.

Terrorists in TV and movies are never like this. They're always super-serious evil, like Voldemort, like nobody ever is in real life. I wonder how much violence could be prevented if Hollywood didn't give us such a bullshit view of human nature.

I agree that popular music was better in the old days. But that's just because the rise of indie labels, and then the internet, have enabled the more creative artists to thrive on the fringes, instead of having to compete for mainstream popularity.

If employers are looking for a radical utopian reform, I'd rather see them do away with the interview. Interviews slant hiring toward personal charm, and toward the cultural uniformity of the workplace, at the expense of competence.

If we're in a simulation, it's almost certainly not a computer simulation, but some technology that we can't even imagine, any more than cavemen could imagine computers.

Do not fixate on particular goals, but practice broadly scanning for brief opportunities.

> we'll reach the limits of what our brains can grasp.

But different brains are good at different things. There will never be a line where everyone can grasp everything on one side, and no one can grasp anything on the other.

If one in ten brains can grasp something, there might still be academic departments that study it. But if only one in a thousand brains can grasp something, what do these people look like to the rest of us?

Popular American storytelling is centered on something even more precise than conflict. It's centered on the question of which side is going to win. Not only fiction, but even reality TV, always has to trick us to make the conflict seem exactly balanced until the very end.

Sometimes I want to see a conflict that's an obvious blowout from setup to resolution. That can still be vastly entertaining with a little creativity.

Supporting your family is not a third kind of motivation. It's totally extrinsic, because you get more money for doing the job than not doing the job.

The aesthetic argument is weak, because it doesn't make sense to talk about anyone but us having an aesthetic perspective. Mars is beautiful? Fill those canyons with life and make it even more beautiful.

The stronger argument is: look at what we've done to Earth, and it's obvious that we don't know yet how to make a planet better.

I think it's obvious that some of the descendants of today's games will be art. Comparing games to movies is a distraction. The important thing is to compare games as they are now to games as they could be.

This is a terrible puzzle. I'm glad I didn't rack my brain for hours looking for the "flash of insight" when all I had to do was be reminded of the 50 move rule.

"If human labor were to become wholly unnecessary, we are going to substitute for it through transemployment. That is, we will create work that is not strictly needed."

In other words, bullshit jobs: http://web.archive.org/web/20161017003907/http://strikemag.o...

That's fine if employment becomes fully optional, but I fear we'll be forced into a life without the meaning of useful jobs, and without the freedom of technological unemployment.

Could we make a drug that makes everyone highly susceptible to the placebo effect?

They should just legalize squatting.

You kill procrastination by making everything fit in a meaningful larger context. This is much harder than making it fit on a calendar.

Some of those jobs look more fun than any jobs I could get now.

I don't quite see his argument that this is a ponzi scheme. Wouldn't that mean, if a city stops growing, the whole thing collapses and the streets fall apart?

It seems more like parasitism, where the urban core is burdened with supporting more and more suburbs, and stopping growth is a step toward stability.

This makes some important points but misses a big one: The authorities become concerned about people not paying attention, when the things they want people to pay attention to are not interesting.

This whole debate seems philosophically sloppy. The rate of return on capital investments, the pace of technological change, the disposable income of ordinary people, and subjective quality of life are all different things that are only loosely related. But if we throw around the word "progress" without carefully defining it, we might imagine they're all the same thing.

Economic inequality is harmful when it results in centralization of power, where decisions are increasingly top-down and made by a smaller number of people who are more out of touch because they're more insulated by wealth. This leads to bad decisions, and unhappiness among the increasing number of people who sense that they have no meaningful participation in society.

"Can you have a healthy society with great variation in wealth?" Only if there is no great variation in power, and this would require redefining wealth as something disconnected from power, like consumption of luxuries.

You can't be betrayed if you weren't promised anything. Users simply have no power inside the system.

Eh, it could be worse. At least the clickbait is mostly "Look at this cool thing" and not "Look at these bad people doing these bad things. Outrage!"