Written by Claude, and very lightly edited.
In a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast, guest Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and the Blueprint project, laid out a thought-provoking perspective on what he sees as the most important challenge and opportunity of our...
Originally posted on my blog
A very interesting discussion I came across online between Cosmicskeptic (Alex) and Earthlings Ed (Ed Winters) brought forth several points that I have wondered about in the past. In one segment, Alex poses the following question: ...
Thanks for the comment. I suspect there are a couple of distinct elements that have been conflated in your arguments that I will try to disentangle.
As far as practical considerations in the context of personal changes to limit harm towards animals go, I not only agree with you that first-order veganism is sensible, it is also one of the key reasons why I am a 99% first-order vegan. Forget animals, I am just being kind to myself and eliminating decision fatigue by following a simple rule that says : animal products, no go. It just makes things s...
My definition of “capitalism” is:
An economy with capital markets (in addition to markets in goods and services).
Most of my friends and acquaintances generally don’t have a precise definition of “capitalism”, but use the word to mean something like:
...The
But how is public ownership of firms compatible with ownership of firms being exchanged on markets?
Because governments can trade. E.g., if the governments of the Netherlands and Germany are looking to sell some firms they own, and the governments of Belgium and Luxembourg are giving competing offers to buy those firms, we have a market without the firms being privately owned.
We recently published a new core career advice series. It provides a concise, accessible intro to some of the most important ideas for planning an impactful career. Check it out on our site!
The core advice series distills the most important...
Hey Jamie, thanks for the comment!
80K and Probably Good have the same goal: get more people into impactful careers. Where we differ is mostly in emphasis and approach.
At a high level Probably Good differs in a few significant ways:
I started working in cooperative AI almost a year ago, and as an emerging field I found it quite confusing at times since there is very little introductory material aimed at beginners. My hope with this post is that by summing up my own confusions and how I understand them...
Oh, interesting, thanks for the link—I didn’t realize this was already an area of research. (I brought up my collusion idea with a couple of CLR researchers before and it seemed new to them, which I guess made me think that the idea wasn’t already being discussed.)
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The Centre for Exploratory Altruism Research (CEARCH) is an EA organization working on cause prioritization research as well as grantmaking and donor advisory. This project was commissioned by the leadership of the Meta Charity Funders (MCF) – also known as the Meta Charity...
Hey, Arden from 80,000 Hours here –
I haven't read the full report, but given the time sensitivity with commenting on forum posts, I wanted to quickly provide some information relevant to some of the 80k mentions in the qualitative comments, which were flagged to me.
Regarding whether we have public measures of our impact & what they show
It is indeed hard to measure how much our programmes counterfactually help move talent to high impact causes in a way that increases global welfare, but we do try to do this.
From the 2022 report the relevant sectio...
Very few of my peers are having kids. My husband and I are the youngest parents at the Princeton University daycare at 31 years old. The next youngest parent is 3 years older than us, and his kid is a year younger than ours. Considering median age of first birth at the ...
Some of this seems to be inherent to a modern society (High birth rates in past society were because of high mortality rates, women being treated as baby factories, etc.), but in my own experience the reason the birth rate is so low is that people simply can't afford to have children.
In Japan and South Korea, the "salaryman culture" is such that employees are expected to devote their entire lives to their employers, to the extent of sleeping in the office at times. Needless to say, this makes it extremely difficult to have a relationship.
In short, wealth inequality and a society that's entirely focused on the generation of profit will both cause catastrophically low birth rates. I may be biased here, but then again it's exactly these situations that convinced me that our current economic system has outlived its usefulness.
A corporation exhibits emergent behavior, over which no individual employee has full control. Because the unregulated market selects for profit and nothing else, any successful corporation becomes a kind of "financial paperclip optimizer". To prevent this, the economic system must change.
I thought this summary by TracingWoodgrains was good (in terms of being a summary. I don't know enough about the object-level to know if it was true). If roughly accurate, it paints an extremely unflattering picture of Johnson.