This actually isn’t true: nuclear power was already becoming cheaper than coal and so on, and improvements have been available. The problem is actually regulatory: Starting at around 1970 various reasons have caused the law to make even the same tech to become MUCH more expensive. This was avoidable and some other countries like France managed to make it keep going cheaper than alternative sources. This talks about it in detail. Here’s a graph from the article:
Andrew Vlahos
[Question] What was my mistake evaluating risk in this situation?
The homework assignment incentives, and why it’s now so extreme
Often, enemies really are innately evil.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (book review)
Hardware is already ready for the singularity. Algorithm knowledge is the only barrier.
Intelligence without Consciousness
Failing safely is the anomaly
Useless knowledge; why people resist education improvement
I’m a tutor, and I’ve noticed that when students get less sleep they make many more minor mistakes (like dropping a negative sign) and don’t learn as well. This effect is strong enough that for a couple of students I started guessing how much sleep they got the last couple days at the end of sessions, asked them, and was almost always right. Also, I’ve tried at one point going on a significantly reduced sleep schedule with a consistent wakeup time, and effectiveness collapsed. I soon burned out and had to spend most of a day napping to catch up on sleep.
At this point I do think enough sleep is important, and have a different hypothesis that needed sleep is just different for different people.
Decisions about covid policy have been mostly political, but vaccines weren’t political before that. Consider smallpox. Smallpox was all over the world and apparently unbeatable. It was described in China in 340. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln got it, and if they died history could have gone way differently. https://rootsofprogress.org/smallpox-and-vaccines. It was just a thing that sometimes happened to people, and nothing could be done about it. Suddenly, as soon as vaccines were applied to a region. Smallpox was completely eliminated there.
A similar thing happened with Polio, Tetanus, Hepatitis A and B, Rubella, Measles, Hib, Whooping Cough, Pneumococcal Disease, Mumps, Diptheria… They are almost gone, and the only people who get them now are in places that haven’t gotten consistent and almost complete vaccination.
In fact, there’s one that most people alive remember. Chicken pox used to be seen as an inevitable childhood disease, to the point that people used to throw “pox parties” to get it over with. but when the vaccine was invented in 1995 it rapidly decreased, and I don’t know anyone my age who has gotten it (born in 1996). It’s pretty much gone now.
Zvi isn’t trying to have “fairness in a political fight”, as if the sides were equal. The “vaccines are effective” side is totally crushing the “vaccines are bad” side. And plague doesn’t care about your politics.
Cryonics companies should let people make conditions for reawakening
I didn’t say that she learned nothing of value, I said that the marginal value of reading additional books at this point is close to zero. The first few books were probably different. Also, one incompetent professor isn’t close to the only reason I have for opposing affirmative action. Finally, I didn’t simply “not think of them as different”, I didn’t even have the mindset to understand the argument that he was when I first heard it, which is clear evidence against the claim that “every white person has internalized racism against black people and these are the stages of racism awareness”. One paragraph is not my entire mindset.
Social media could be a factor, but a much bigger one is that kids are so ludicrously overcontrolled all day every day that they often get no opportunity for good experiences.
My childhood was much closer to Comazotz from A Wrinkle in Time than to a healthy upbringing.
Suspected reason that kids usually hate vegetables
Not really helpful for understanding the history of factory safety, but here’s a funny German workplace safety video, Forklift Driver Klaus: (note, you do not need to speak german)
woah, birth control is way more complicated than I thought. I started looking and it turns out I can’t just read a bunch of studies about each method and say what the side effect risks are. There are quite a lot of birth control methods and chemicals, each with tons of complicated chemical interactions, tons of complicated hormonal interactions, side effects, etc. Each article talks about lots of fancy biological terms like “venous thrombosis” that I have to keep looking up. I also don’t really have the medical knowledge to really put things in scale: for example, one medication treatment is said to raise a hormone level to a peak of something ng/mL, and I don’t know how much of a change that is.
Thanks for the help finding sources, everyone, but this bounty won’t be claimed until a doctor looks at it.
Can you give an example of this happening in the real world? I don’t quite see what it applies to.
You missed my main reason for avoiding spoilers. It’s not because something is intended a certain way or that I think it would train rationality better to not do something, it’s because doing things myself is way more fun than having things done for me. I found trying to figure out how to solve a rubix cube myself to be way more fun than being told would have been. (Or figuring out the villain’s plot before the monologue, or whatever).
Really? That’s your argument? Do you really think people wouldn’t have small talk topics or understand authority figures or learn anything without these classes? If after reading this, you still think those courses are essential to learning those skills, let alone teach them efficiently, I eagerly await your reply to this.