That’s awesome to hear! Hope you enjoy
Maxwell Tabarrok
Karma: 619
Enlightenment Values in a Vulnerable World
A Double-Feature on The Extropians
R&D is a Huge Externality, So Why Do Markets Do So Much of it?
Fertility as Metascience
Why Did NEPA Peak in 2016?
The Offense-Defense Balance Rarely Changes
Contra Scott on Abolishing the FDA
It’s not a Motte and Bailey because I don’t switch between positions. My definition of the hardline position is to “restrict the FDA’s mandatory authority to labeling and make their efficacy testing completely non-binding.”
I could have made an argument for removing FDA safety testing as well but I didn’t. I am arguing only for the Motte against Scott’s plan to expand supplements and experimental drugs.
Thank you for reading!
There’s a great chapter in Deustch’s Beginning of Infinity on counterintuitive properties of infinite sets. One of them is relevant to anthropic reasoning type arguments sometimes made by longtermists.
For example, the grabby aliens paper deducing a lot of information based on the fact that human’s appearance seems astoundingly early relative to the lifetime of the universe. Or the Doomsday argument which says we should expect the world to end soon as that’s the only outcome which would make our presence average rather than being an outlier right at the beginning of human history.
However, as Deustch points out that if you pick any number in an infinite set, it will be astoundingly close to the beginning. More precisely, notions of ‘average’ or ‘common’ are not well defined in infinite sets. There are just as many odd integers as odd + even integers. There are just as many integers divisible by a trillion as there are integers. So if the universe is confirmed to be truly infinite then these anthropic reasoning arguments will have to change.