Johanna

As job tasks get replaced, the same humans might be able to spend their time doing more productive stuff — they’re still employed, and they get paid more (or get paid the same but have more leisure time). Meanwhile, mass automation will increase society’s income, which will increase labor demand and create whole new categories of jobs that these... See more

There is a limit to what most people are willing to work on for something called a company that does not exist if it’s just a project. The risk of seeming stupid when something is just a project is almost zero, and no one cares if you fail. So you’re much more likely to work on something good, instead of derivative but plausible-sounding crap.

Most advocates propose UBI not because we have solved mankind’s big money problems and the next stepping stones clearly lead us to Star Trek. Rather, they advocate for UBI because they foresee even more problems if we do not try something new in the near future to stave off real pain.

Work in ProgressAmerica’s Most Important Economic Storyteller Is ConfusedAn old economy is dying, and a new economy is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monstrously confusing data.By Derek ThompsonAn illustration of the dollar-bill portrait of George Washington shrugging in confusionThe Atlantic; GettyJune 17, 2022About the author: Derek... See more

Scientists often bemoan the state of originality in their field. New ideas are getting “harder to find.” Progress in large fields of science and technology is “slowing down.” Scientific knowledge has been in “clear secular decline.” (One wonders about the originality of their bemoaning.) But today’s researchers aren’t getting worse at coming up... See more

Because scientific papers are not easily accessible, we can’t easily use the data to train generative models like GPT-3 or DALL-E. Can you imagine if a researcher could propose an experiment and an AI model could instantly tell them if it had been done before (and better yet, give them the result)? Because scientific papers are not easily... See more

Among many memorable events, I saw a talk by David Allison about his efforts to correct simple statistical mistakes in the published literature. He would notice a clear and obvious error, like a claimed interaction that wasn’t actually tested properly. He would then send a polite email to the authors to explain the situation so it could be... See more