Lucas Kohorst
- The United States could produce all its power by covering 2% of its land with solar panels - for comparison, we use 20% of our land for agriculture, so this would look like Nevada specializing in farming electricity somewhat less intensely than Iowa specializes in farming corn
from Notes From The Progress Studies Conference by Scott Alexander
- The remaining limitation is high-density use cases; for example, a passenger jet needs to get a lot of power from a source light enough to fit on the plane. So far batteries can’t do that. The solarists are undaunted: you can use solar power to “mine” carbon from the air and convert it into fossil fuels, then use the fossil fuels on the plane. Sinc... See more
from Notes From The Progress Studies Conference by Scott Alexander
- Progress is good. As Steven Pinker has argued, most things are getting better over time. We are richer, healthier, safer, and better-educated than our ancestors. Although redistribution and social changes can make things better or worse around the edges, most of our current fortunate position comes from simple economic growth.
from Notes From The Progress Studies Conference by Scott Alexander
- Monthly visitors remain relatively stable with over 150k unique visitors and 3 to 4 million page views
from Is Trump really 62% to win? by David Chee
- The facts that (a) an AI somewhere could in principle do this task better, and (b) this task is no longer an economically rewarded element of a global economy, don’t seem to me to matter very much.
from Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei
- One concern in both developed and developing world alike is people opting out of AI-enabled benefits (similar to the anti-vaccine movement, or Luddite movements more generally). There could end up being bad feedback cycles where, for example, the people who are least able to make good decisions opt out of the very technologies that improve their de
... See morefrom Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei
- housands of economists and policy experts in the US currently debate how to keep Social Security and Medicare solvent, and more broadly how to keep down the cost of healthcare (which is mostly consumed by those over 70 and especially those with terminal illnesses such as cancer). The situation for these programs is likely to be radically improved i... See more
from Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei
- This might seem radical, but life expectancy increased almost 2x in the 20th century (from ~40 years to ~75), so it’s “on trend” that the “compressed 21st” would double it again to 150. Obviously the interventions involved in slowing the actual aging process will be different from those that were needed in the last century to prevent (mostly childh
... See morefrom Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei
- deaths from heart disease have already declined over 50%, and simple interventions like GLP-1 agonists have already made huge progress against obesity and diabetes.
from Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace by Dario Amodei