Glad you like it! I’ve found it very interesting having a look and exploring correct/incorrect predictions
beyarkay
An interactive version of the extropians mailing list
Thanks, fixed
1) does not account for the extra mental/time cost vs time saved.
The majority of extra mental cost is once-off in explaining that you’d like to schedule things differently. Once there’s shared knowledge of scheduling things in this way, I haven’t experienced any extra costs.
2) does not consider the commonly utilized alternative that a meeting has an organizer responsible for the meeting goals and agenda, for estimating the duration needed to address the agenda, and for terminating the meeting early if/when the goals are achieved faster than anticipated
I disagree that meetings commonly have an organizer who’ll adequately terminate meetings early. This might be the case for meetings with 5+ people, but for 1-1s the “organizer” is just one of the two people in the meeting.
Even in the case of a meeting with an organizer who’s role it is to terminate the meeting early, I think stating the uncertainty up-front “this meeting could be between 15m and 45m” is more productive than claiming the meeting will be exactly some duration and then inevitably running over/under time. Predicting the future is hard, I argue that we should schedule meetings in a way that accepts this.Note that without an advance goals or agenda, the proposed approach is also not usable(if there is no information of what the meeting will be about, there is no good way to estimate its usefulness)
This proves too much, without advance goals or agenda, any approach at scheduling the duration of a meeting is not usable. In this sense I agree, you absolutely need information about what the meeting will be about in order to plan for it. But what is the situation in which you’re planning a meeting and have zero information about what it’ll be about? I’m unsure about what you’re trying to show with this claim.
Schedule meetings using the Pareto principle
I consider the proposed NY bill to be mild evidence in favour of my prediction above https://statescoop.com/new-york-bill-would-ban-chatbots-legal-medical-advice/
(1) yeah this makes sense! I do think that accepting experimental work based on results rather than experimental setup is a structure that leads to publication bias, but given you’re looking to be more foundational/conceptual, I don’t think this will be an issue here.
(2) “increasing popular coverage is not one of our goals” fair enough! I look forward to seeing the first issue (:
We saw this directly in the Chinese models experiments
Could you add a link for these experiments?
Sounds promising! Curious about whether you have plans to accept papers based on experimental setup instead of results (to reduce publication bias) and if you’ll consider a “press abstract” designed to help journalists disseminate information to the broader public?
An alternate phrasing of this would be looking at what the current top-3 high salience issues are for different elected officials, and what would have to change about AI policy for AI policy to dethrone one of these issues. I imagine IA policy is quite far from usurping immigration or other high-salience issues
Yours is much better written, but this reminds me of a post I wrote a few months ago: We live in the luckiest timeline
Huh, that’s a good usecase I hadn’t thought about.
Kinda weird seeing so many mistakes (which I’ve seen being made in the past) being summarised in one post like this. Having this as a checklist would have saved many years of headache
I think you can get high-quality 100k smartphone which will be relevant for a long time
So the relevancy part (my bold) is probably more true today, but the top-of-the-line smartphones from the 2000s and early 2010s very clearly have not been relevant for a long time. I think smartphone innovation is slowing down, so it’s possible that today’s smartphone would be relevant for a longer time than those from previous years. But I think this is because of slowing innovation.
As a counter point, the cars in a billionaire’s garage aren’t just many different Toyotas with custom rims.
because phones are small and expensive to design it’s just not worth it
This would imply that luxury watches and luxury fashion don’t exist, which they do. (I see you mention the watches later in the comment, but not the fashion, although your explanation for luxury watches roughly applies to fashion as well).
I don’t really think progress being fast is quite sufficient to explain things
I’ll agree here. I don’t think my theory fully explains certain things. Books, movies, and other creative works are things that don’t quite fit into this framework nicely. I suspect that these things are limited by creative innovation, but I’m not very certain about that belief.
I think it’s because a phone, or gmail, starlink, etc. has super high fixed costs, and the smaller market for luxury goods generally means the design will be worse
The super-high-fixed-costs hypothesis would imply that we don’t have luxury watches, cars, jets. I suspect it is a factor in what causes a luxury good to come onto market, but I don’t think it can be the only factor.
So my prediction would be that the luxury smartphone business only starts up when lots of rich people have different problems from the average consumer that need a custom device (security maybe?) or subscribe to a status game that results in the phone equivalent of luxury watches
I appreciate the concrete prediction, although I wouldn’t be surprised if these conditions are already met in some way. The ultra-wealthy definitely already need more security, privacy, etc than your average joe. And I believe that many of the ultra-wealthy already subscribe to status games.
Huh, this is interesting. I think there’s something missing in my original idea, because I feel like iPhone : Vertu :!: toyota : Bentley. The fact that the Vertu phone appears like a regular phone just bejeweled might be the difference, but I’m less sure now.
It’s possible that my prediction at the end of the essay (that there’d be luxury smartphones soon OR there’d be innovation) might just be arriving early. I’m unsure.
Asking for a $100k iPhone is like asking for a million-dollar Toyota Prius instead of a million-dollar car.
I disagree, there is no company that only builds >10k smart phones (from scratch, as opposed to taking someone else’s phones and adding expensive materials). Sure there are companies that will gold-plate your iPhone, but they’re not taking on the risk that innovations in smartphones would cause their luxury product to become worthless (since they can always gold-plate whatever the most recent innovation is).
Can you say more/share screenshots? I think if you ctrl-click it should open in a new tab, or are you wanting it to always open in a new tab?