This has been a thing in the USA for a long time hasn't it? Iirc, they have (legally not mandatory, but functionally mandatory) pledges at the start of every school day right?
I definitely never did it in high school in Denver, nor did any of the other schools that my friends went to in the city.
I don’t have a list of schools for you.
Sure peer pressure can be a thing (at the school I went to you would have been bullied for doing the pledge), but it is pretty firmly established law that a student has every right to not participate and not be pressured to participate by public school staff.
Interesting, didn't know that was a thing in Denver. No need for a list of schools.
In my case the pressure came from my teachers and the principal. I never got in any official trouble but I was sent to the principal's office for refusing to say it and it required a phone call with my dad for them to begrudgingly let me continue to not say it.
The earliest bits of the paper cover the case for significantly smaller life expectancy improvements. Given the portion of people in the third world who live incredibly short lives for primarily economic (and not biological) reasons it seems plausible that a similar calculus would hold even without massive life extension improvements.
I'm bullish on the ai aging case though, regenerative medicine has a massive manpower issue, so even sub-ASI robotic labwork should be able to appreciably move the needle.
>Given the portion of people in the third world who live incredibly short lives
Third world countries have lower average life expectancies because infant mortality is higher; many more children die before age 5. But the life expectancy at age 5 in third world countries is not much different to the life expectancy at age 5 in America.
Maybe incredibly low is an overstatement, but Nigeria for example could easily add another 18 years of life expectancy (to match that of white Australians) at age 15 if their economic issues were resolved.
Schild's ladder by Greg Egan is a pretty good novel for this. You have groups of people vying to collapse and try to coexist with a new but threatening form of nature, and I think both are treated as reasonable actors.
As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects.
I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
I think part of the problem/difference is that all "important work" needs to be auditable and understood by humans. We need to be able to fix bugs, and not just roll the dice and hoping that a lack of symptoms means everything is cured.
Any chance of raising the paywall on this article?
I was quite enjoying it, but then the paywall hit me right in the middle of the chemical synthesis section.
I have no problem with you wanting to earn money from your work, but it's a bit odd to post an unreadable article to hn (odd enough that I assume it was by mistake?).
I'm not sure that I'd call [2] it not working out, just like I wouldn't call the equivalent pressure from the USA to dismantle medicare our public health system not working out.
The biggest issue with the scheme is the fact that it was structured to explicitly favour media incumbents, and is therefore politically unpopular.
Y combinator has funded a significant portion of the most harmful tech companies of this century. They're profoundly amoral, just like you'd expect from a profitable venture capital firm.
On the bright side, they also hire dang, so that's one against 100 million.
Most of the bad ones IPOd in 2021, when there was a huge overvaluation of speculative tech companies... Marking performance since IPO is also a bit weird since it's kind of arbitrary date in the firm's history.
They have collectively had a return of -49% when the S&P 500 have had a return of 58%. It shows that all of the value went to the VCs and the public markets were the “bigger fools”.
It's surprising to me that investors have been so wrong about combinator IPOs. I wonder if this has been driven my retail, or by the expectation of a small probability of enormous success.
Oklo seems to have recovered thanks to the AI boom and they made a deal with Meta to deliver power fir their data centers. It looks like the best performing YC stock
To be honest, I have personally funded almost all of the most harmful companies that are around today, too.
But that's because I funded pretty much all the companies via my investment in an index fund.
YC pretty much takes something like an index fund approach to startups: they finance a lot of them. So naturally they would also have a significant portion of what you deem to be harmful ones.
What part of buying index funds of public shares in a company (aside from direct investment, IPO or private placement which are not hallmarks of index funds) funds the company?
Thieves steal because they know a fence will take the goods of their hands. The fence will take the goods of their hands, because they know they can sell them on.
People buy into IPOs partially because they know a lively secondary market exists, where they can offload the shares later. Index funds are part of that secondary market.
Just to be clear, I don't think investors in IPOs are thieves. I'm just saying that you can legitimately say that the secondary market financies companies just as much as the primary market does. Perhaps a better example might be farmers selling to food factories selling to retailers selling to me. I never hand money directly to the farmers, but you can still say with a straight face that my purchase of bacon funds the pig farm.
No money reaches a company when you purchase shares on the secondary market. Unlike a purchase of bacon, where some amount of that money is passed along to the farmers.
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