I’m not sure nuclear power is fundamentally different in France or South Korea or China. Nuclear plant are heavily regulated centrally planned things everywhere, and for good reasons—nuclear is quite safe if done correctly but has the potential to go immensely wrong. The only example I know well is France, which is one of the very few countries that relies massively on nuclear power and it is thanks to massive government planning and funding from the 60′s onward.
And I want to point something up : we have nuclear power plant thanks to heavily centralised government funded research. Same thing for the computer (Turing), satellite telecommunications, and basically everything (DNA, relativity, quantum mechanic, computers, radioactivity are fields were a huge chunk of the applications (and most of the ground work in fundamental research) have come from public spending and planning. CRISPR-Cas9 is a recent example too. Oh yeah, and AIDS discovery. And Space X by the way also benefits from disguised NASA funding.
Now it could also be argued that the academic world is in itself a kind of free market for ideas—the currency being citations and reputation rather than hard dollars… and in this view public spending in research is useful but government planning less so.
Dirichlet-to-Neumann
Actually I’d say the jobs best placed for avoiding quick automations are mostly jobs in the agricultural and building sectors—i.e. low skills* physical work.
In a few years some Silicon valley start-up will discover that Indian or Vietnamese or Nigerian engineers/data scientists can do the same job at a fraction of the cost… and this will have no economic impact whatsoever since basically everyone working on a computer will be made redundant by GPT-N or something (without even taking into account AGI).
But the guy who put his hands inside the engine of your self-driving car is here to stay for a long time (as is the one doing the pipes in your house or even the guys plucking out strawberries in a farm).*a lot of so-call low-skills are actually pretty challenging and require a wide variety of intellectual and physical skills. I’d recommand Shop class as soulcraft by Matthew Crawford on this subject.
The room of requirement canonically does not appear on the Marauder’s map.
In fact the Marauder’s map has no reason to show the Chamber of Secret since if it is supposed to show only places that the Marauders know (I don’t remember what is the origin of the map in HPMOR though).
I’m pretty sure I could bring any society with iron metallurgy, easily accessible coal and a relatively stable centralised power to 19th century technological level. I’d need a lot of help from the government but there are a couple of very easy to implement technology that can give you enough prestige to get this help (mechanical telegraph, basic cryptography, mathematics, gun powder, plough, basic medicine (scurvy is very easy to prevent), compass...)
The limiting factor is mostly natural resources extraction.
I doubt bicycle would be very useful without good roads and latex tire. Synthetic latex is way above my knowledge—but natural latex is easy to find in Southern East Asia.
Clock were on my short list too, as they are necessary for long distance navigation. Pasteurization is probably by itself good enough to take over the word.
Lot of knowledge is obviously required. If your aim is 21st century technology, I doubt anyone can learn enough stuff. If your goal is 19 century technology, and a rough draft of the road to follow too 21 century it is easier.
I’m sure I could do that, with the exception of chemistry where I certainly lack a lot of basic knowledge (and chemistry include metallurgy so this is huge).
2. I think on the contrary that the longer you go back in time, the easier it gets (up to a point, established metallurgy is I think a necessary starting point). The reason is that the skill and knowledge gap between you and the rest of the world is smaller in more recent period. If you went back to 1700, chances are Louis XIV or someone like him would hear about you and find a way to copy some of your “inventions”.
3. This has a second consequence : you want a period that is stable enough that you get a bit of slack at the beginning—you need time to get rich somehow—and already has a functioning society. You don’t want to risk getting stabbed two weeks after your arrival.
You also want a geographical area that has the right natural resources—iron and coal are a must, good agricultural land and ocean access too.
Your early strategy should be to become friend with the local king. In fact, I doubt you can succeed without political power at your side. Fortunately you also have in mind a few way you can help a king to stabilize his power so you only need a strong centralised kingdom or empire to start in, with a good monarch that can help you get started.
Good choices include August, Charlemagne, probably a handful of Abbasid caliphs, Ottoman sultans and Chinese emperors.
I’d go with Charlemagne because 1) inheritance rule is way better than during the Roman empire (you’d just need to stop him from dividing the empire between his sons), 2) France has enough coal and iron to get you started, good agriculture and good harbours and 3) being at the Western end of Europe is a huge advantage when you will want to “discover” America.
Actually screw that, the best places to start are 14th century Venice and 17th century Japan.
Becoming friend with a great leader has two big advantages : 1) you get a kick start in money, military power and infrastructure and 2) you get a charismatic guy to do the dirty political job that you are unable to do due to being a nerdy geek, so you can concentrate on what you do best (being a nerdy geek).
Your discovery would be accepted much faster as you would build up street creed by inventing a handful of game changing thing like the printing press, ballistic, basic anatomy, scurvy remedies, or gunpowder
The most obvious explanation is that home-made biscuits are just better than industrial biscuits—due to better quality ingredients and less concern about transportation/conservation.
The most obvious explanation is that home-made biscuits are just better than industrial biscuits—due to better quality ingredients and less concern about transportation/conservation.
For some reason I can’t see the comments without commenting.
Am I the only one who feels like I’m only getting even numbered pages ?
The pathing looks a bit like in the Manuscript found in Saragossa, only with fewer ghosts and threesomes.
I’m not sure I have anything significant to add to jaspax comment above which is excellent and summarize most of my objections to the main post.
So this comment is just here to recommand a book which I think could help make the discussion of the two last points (the ones on engagement with object level reality). It is called “shop class as soulcraft”, by Matthews Crawford, and discuss quite engagingly the different kind of relation-to-the world you can get from different kind of jobs. It is generally a defence of jobs that are often considered low status (main example being a motorcycle repairer) ; it’s main point is that those jobs engage you with the reality of the world, exercise your intelligence and give meaning to your live in a way many white-collared jobs don’t.
It’s also very well written, alternating between solid philosophical and sociological discussions and down-to-earth example out of the author experience.
Do you have a good equivalent for Firefox ?
Main expected effect : not being able to see unpolluted night sky any more.
I actually think it’s not that hard to build a good argument that will work “for the other side”, but you need to actually try, and for that you need some genuine sympathy of some sort for the opposite position.
In my experience it’s surprisingly enough easier to do with conservatives than liberals (but that may be because being conservative-leaning center myself I’m more familiar with their way of thinking).
I have a genuine question about RNA vaccines (not vaccination in general, RNA vaccines). It’s a concern about vaccine safety, and I post it hidden here because at any other place the result would be people freaking out and getting less likely to get vaccinated if there is actually no reason to be concerned.
First a bit of context. I had a conversation with a friend of my parents. He is a researcher in biology/genetic/aging at the CNRS in France, and as far as I can tell pretty good at his job (based on his career so far).
We discussed RNA vaccines, and he was saying this:
1) The Pfizer/Modena vaccine have obviously no short term side effect so we should just vaccine all old people asap.
2) for younger people it’s less clear, because of the following possibility:
RNA can obviously enter the cell nucleus (that’s RNA function). What is less-well known is that RNA and DNA can sometimes mix. This mean that viral RNA from the vaccine has a chance to insert itself randomly into your DNA. In the short term this is not a problem, but in the long term this means some chances to develop some sort of cancer (or sterility problems) - which may be a problem if young people in their twenties/thirties get a lot of cancer ten years from now.
In my model this is not really a problem, because the odds of developing a cancer due to the vaccine are still very low and the benefit from vaccinations are very high and immediate (and you protect others). But I’d like to know if some of you have sources on this question or have thought about the problem.(note: he has a long experience of targeting some gene in flies and seeing some random mutations pop out on non-targeted areas—just to say that he knows his stuff about genetics).
(note 2: also thanks Zvi for your great posts !)
Thanks—corrected.
That was my initial reaction too, but then I thought that when a virus enter a cell (or a traditional attenuated vaccines), it kills the cell when going out, so any mutation that could happen to the infected cell is irrelevant since the cell is destroyed. With a RNA vaccine the cell is not killed (unless it is then killed by our immune system ?).
Baseball and American sports in general are a bit of an exception though. Most sports are much more difficult to evaluate statistically. For example in chess the elo ranking offer good prediction of average performances but fails totally to evaluate 1) head-to-head win rate, 2) one-game results or even tournaments results, 3) relative strength on different parts of the game (for example “who is good at opening preparation ?” is typically answered by the same sort of heuristics as “who is good at maths” or “who is good at psychology ?”.