A wonderful chart by economist Rafael R. Guthmann. Civilization, and progress itself seem to track the rise and fall of population!

"people become more liberal as they get older" is still breaking my brain

I made a GPT to teach me anything as efficiently as possible. As it teaches, it will recursively test my understanding of key concepts, and recursively fill in any gaps it finds until I understand the whole of it. Try it out - I think it's pretty good: chat.openai.com/g/g-GbLbctpPz-…

So, here's what happened at OpenAI tonight. Mira planned to hire Sam and Greg back. She turned Team Sam over past couple of days. Idea was to force board to fire everyone, which they figured the board would not do. Board went into total silence. Found their own CEO Emmett Shear

Americans at ~every level of income say they need a 30%-50% raise "to feel happy." Make $50k? "I need about 75k." Make $75k? "I need about 100k." Make $150k? "I need 200k." Make $200k? "I need 350k."

I have no details of OpenAI's Board’s reasons for firing Sam, and I am conflicted (lead of Scalable Alignment at Google DeepMind). But there is a large, very loud pile on vs. people I respect, in particular Helen Toner and Ilya Sutskever, so I feel compelled to say a few things.

mmmmm.... I'm not confident this is correct.

Having been pretty sick over the last week confirms for me pretty clearly that if I get very sick before I die, i will NOT then be especially wise, insightful, observant, or empathetic. My deathbed words would be LESS worthy than usual of being remembered, trusted, or followed.

CDC says the flu shot is on average ~50% effective. Now divide the times you've have the flu by your age to your personalized base rate. Mine is probably ~30%. If the flu deletes 1 good day from my life, it is worth ~30% x ~50% (15%) of a day to go get a flu shot.

Lately I've been thinking about how we could become an exciting accelerating space civilization without AI by focusing on bio (artificial wombs, intelligence selection, longevity). It makes me kind of sad to believe that AI will probably be what happens.

Japan will offer free college to families with at least three kids. newsonjapan.com/html/newsdesk/…

Adam Singer

"Notes on the Vulnerable World Hypothesis": michaelnotebook.com/vwh/index.html

The relativistic rocket equation is absolutely brutal. To decelerate 1kg of payload from 0.9c you’d need 20000kg of fuel using a fusion rocket, or 1e15kg using a fission rocket. Decelerating from 0.99c takes 5e9 or 5e28, respectively. For context, 5e28kg is about 25 Jupiters.

What the actual honest to god what the hell seriously what how is this not a major area of research this seems like a thing we should be looking into It literally copies dozens of species of other plants. A study claims it can mimic *plastic* plants (tho ppl doubt it)…wtf…

Seems like an incredibly valuable invention? Maybe I'm missing something here?

Is low fertility always from delayed childbearing? The Indian state of West Bengal has a total fertility rate (TFR) of 1.6, yet 90% of births occur before age 30. By contrast, the U.S. has a TFR of 1.7, and 50% of births occur before age 30.