Johanna

You cannot swap one life for that of another. But if friends are primarily attributes, then you could swap two people with the same attributes. Or even get someone else with better attributes.What you cannot do is remove someone from their web of entanglements and replace them with an identical twin. To do so would be to disrupt the networks of... See more

On the face of it, this makes the numbers come close to acceptable. It also means that UBI schemes essentially take money out of the pot currently reserved for the needy and disabled, and distribute it to able-bodied people plus the needy and disabled. Such a scheme has the potential to have good effects: by eradicating welfare traps that keep... See more

The guy is amazing and has done great work for me before. Why shouldn’t I show him that I appreciate it? So I emailed him one day and said “hey, I want to do this right and I want you to know I appreciate your work. I’m raising the contract to $6,000.” He didn’t ask for that, I just did it.

Basically, this boils down to “use your personal networks more”. By at least a 10x margin, the best candidate sources I’ve ever seen are friends and friends of friends.

To implement UBI at the expense of every other social program is to make the presumption that the people helped by those programs are competent and capable of shifting to a life of budgeting and managing their own money and of avoiding exploitation. Think of the most vulnerable people you’ve ever encountered and remember that, with UBI, they all... See more

If you pivot, do it fully and with conviction. The worst thing is to try to do a bit of the old and the new—it’s hard to kill your babies.

Critically, we need to be much more strategic in the way we use published research findings (from the lab) to inform what we do next (e.g. clinical trials). We need to combine and integrate — systematically — the full granularity of research claims and their provenance to provide a richness of detail to our understanding. This process of... See more