Quick question: isn’t the US depending on China for most or all of its rare earth processing ?
KingOfMadPistoleros
Interesting experience: I attempted to read the sequences ~10 years ago but kept getting sidetracked and put out of order by clicking all the links. This time, I decided to try again, but forced myself to read each post in order. All this to say that I read this post chronologically close to after reading “your strength as a rationalist”. I can’t evaluate how relevant this fact is, but I had alarm bells ringing in my head when reading the statements 3, 4, and 5. 4 especially was so incoherent to my model that I immediately thought there had to be a trick. Basically, my model:
could argue either side for 1 with equal probability
gave a >70% probability to 2
would have predicted <20% for 3
<5% for 4
<30% for 5
I’m not certain of how I did the first time I read this post, but I’m quite certain I didn’t do as well. So I’m wondering if I’ve gotten stronger or if it’s due to the reading order.
The greatest positive effect of this article on my psyche is to actually allow me to conceive of a time period BEFORE anyone located the seat of the mind inside the brain or even inside the skull. It even goes a long way towards allowing me to put myself in the headspace of one who believed the heart to be the master organ. In short, it shines a light on how non obvious the elements of common knowledge are.
I’d argue the complexity of information gathering and crappy UI of voter punishment or reward are more relevant to politics. A good model of where to start might be an efficient market of many educated actors being able to fix the political power of polticians the same way current markets fix the price of stocks today. There’s already a relatively open field for actors willing to become journalists or podcasters so the media moving piece in the current system is less systematically broken. It’s also a component in sufficient other systems that are less broken than politics that we should expect it possible to keep the current media and still have better efficiency that today be attaignable.
Not sure how to implement the specifics, however...