HaukeHi

Plants want to be eaten only by big animals that take them on long and random walks and then die far away from where they are picked up to fertilize the seed.

Fluid intelligence is higher when younger.

Crystallised intelligence increases with age.

Your comparative advantage changes.

Demis Hassabis says that half of all innovations that caused the recent AI boom came from DeepMind, which is London based.

Isn't Airbnb doing the same?

Continued reliance on outdated nuclear technology might not have the same crucial global technology spillovers as investments in other clean energy (including advanced nuclear). Since the best path towards global decarbonization is through global technology spillover into emerging economies, the actors that have the best emissions score may, surprisingly, not be the most effective actors at reducing the global rate of emissions in the future. This has some counterintuitive implications. Consider that Germany has higher carbon emissions than France even though it has invested more heavily in solar than its neighbor, which uses much more nuclear. Should advanced economies like Germany leave their nuclear plants running? Perhaps, but it will not make a very large dent in global emissions because 75% of all future emissions will come from emerging economies, which will not adopt the kind of (non-advanced) nuclear power currently in use in Germany. Consider that German citizens environmental footprints are currently less than 4% of the global total, a share that is on the decline.

At one point, German subsidies drove ~⅓ of the global solar adoption, ~86% of which occurred outside Germany (6x) - see https://founderspledge.com/stories/changing-landscape#fnref1

There's an amazing calibration training game where you can practice Fermis and see where you are orders of magnitude off:

https://www.quantifiedintuitions.org/calibration

There's a good video by Robert Miles about that 'Why Not Just: Think of AGI Like a Corporation?' (youtube.com/watch?v=L5pUA3LsEaw)

Corporations are kind of like AIs, if you squint. How hard do you have to squint though, and is it worth it? In this video we ask: Are corporations artificial general superintelligences?

I think evolution is not an undirected process in that sense because it's an optimization process, that optimizes to create more copies of itself. Superintelligence will likely use some Evolutionary Computation (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_computation ).

Also see Karl Sims 'Creatures' from the 90s: youtube.com/watch?v=JBgG_VSP7f8 or OpenAI's Multi-Agent Hide and Seek: youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY

> Was any force ever able to get close to world domination?

Evolution? 2.5bn years ago stromatolites changed the atmosphere from a CO2-rich to O2-rich through photosynthesis, because they had no competition. Now plants dominate the earth (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom), then animals (≈2 Gt C, mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C).

In 2020, global human-made mass exceeded all living biomass ( nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3010-5).

From ""Rapid Clinical Evaluation of Anosmia - The Alcohol Sniff Test" (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaotolaryngology/article-...):"Standard 70% isopropyl alcohol preparation pad is opened such that 0.5 cm of the pad itself is visible. The alcohol pad is placed beneath the patient's nostrils while the patient inspires twice, to familiarize himself or herself with the alcohol odor, and the subject is asked if he or she detects an odor. Odor thresholds for alcohols are 2 or more orders of magnitude lower than trigeminal thresholds for the same stimuli.6 Thus, an anosmic will detect the presence of alcohol trigeminally only when it is extremely close to the nose. The alcohol pad is withdrawn and the threshold test begun. The subject is asked to close the mouth and eyes, breathe normally, and indicate when the odor is detected. Active sniffing and deep inspiration are discouraged. The basic procedure follows the method of limits. A standard metric tape measure is extended downward from the patient's nares and held in place (Figure I ). The alcohol pad is placed 30 cm below the nose and, with each expiration, is moved 1 cm closer to the nares until the subject detects the presence of odor. The distance from the anterior nares to the alcohol padis measured in centimeters at the point at which the subject first detects the odor. The procedure is repeated 4 times and the mean distance defines the threshold.Butanol ThresholdFor purposes of comparison, all of the subjects completed a standard olfactory threshold test. A series of 10 concentrations of butanol ( -butyl alcohol) was used to determine absolute olfactory threshold sensitivity. The highest butanol concentration consisted of 4% vol/vol in distilled water. Each successive dilution was one third of the preceding dilution. Two "blanks," containing only distilled water, were also prepared. All bottles, including blanks, contained 60 mL of liquid. Olfactory threshold was assessed with a modified version7 of a 2-alternative, forced-choice,ascending method of limits procedure.8 The subject was presented with 2 bottles, one containing the odorant and the other consisting of distilled water. Each nostril was tested separately. The spout of the bottle was inserted into the nos tril of interest. The subject was asked to squeeze the bottleto generate a puff of air. The subject did this with both bottles. Subjects were asked to identify which of the 2 bottles contained the stronger odor.All subjects began at the lowest concentration to avoidadaptation.9 Incorrect choices led to presentation of a higher concentration and correct choices led to continued presentation of the same concentration to a criterion of 5 successive correct responses. The presentation of the odorantand blank were randomized for each comparison trial and the nostril to be tested first was also randomly determined. There were approximately 45 seconds between trials to allow time for recovery of the olfactory system and for the odor molecules to collect in the head space of the bottle."

However, this test has been called imprecise (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2500/ajra.2017.31.44...).

If the paper is true, one could do spot checks today to estimate the true IFR in every country tomorrow on a shoestring budget.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/17/a-fiasco-in-the-making-a...

Depending on the results that might save trillions of dollars.

Agreed - I believe the meta-analysis and the underlying studies are likely of poor quality.

I think it might be worth for people here to reanalyze everything.

The effect sizes seem large and clinically significant.

So this is big if true.

You can definitely overdose:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_D

This is a more recent meta-analysis, but thanks it's helpful that you're linking to the discussion.

Drones.

https://arbital.com/p/AI_safety_mindset/

"I have not looked at this deeply, so take all of this with a grain of salt, but a quick scan makes me believe that this is very hyped.

Having skimmed the paper it seems the only thing the authors do and what is peer-reviewed is estimate earth's theoretical maximum capacity for reforestation.

There are few problems:

1) Feasibility: "200 GtC is a technical potential assuming every hectare of forestland on earth is increased to 100% forest cover"

https://twitter.com/hausfath/status/1147190442145898496

"An assessment of the biophysical capacity for restoring global tree cover provides a necessary but insufficient foundation for evaluating where tree cover can be feasibly increased. The kinds of trees as well as how and where they are grown determine how and which people benefit. In some contexts, increasing tree cover can elevate fire risk, decrease water supplies, and cause crop damage by wildlife. Reforestation programs often favor single-species tree plantations over restoring native forest ecosystems. This approach can generate negative consequences for biodiversity and carbon storage (5), threaten food and land security, and exacerbate social inequities. How restored lands are governed determines how reforestation costs and benefits are distributed."

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/24

There are no dollar signs or economic feasibility analysis in that paper. So the people who wrote it just cited some number that is not peer-reviewed and even if loosely based on previous numbers might not work at the scale.

--

2) There seems to be no scientific consensus how much (or even if!) new trees are a GHG sink on net. Some legitimate papers even suggests that new trees could be a net GHG source. (the paper does not make any new contributions to this question and I think just assumes that trees absorb GHG).

For instance, see this recent paper in Nature communications:

a) "Limited capacity of tree growth to mitigate the global greenhouse effect under predicted warming" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10174-4

b) this recent paper in PNAS (top journal as well)

"On-going carbon uptake due to forest demography is large, but much smaller than previous influential estimates have suggested. Contrary to previous findings, these latest data sources indicate that the sink is predominantly in mid-high latitude, rather than tropical, forests.

https://www.pnas.org/content/116/10/4382.short"

from

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xY3iSgDRHidue8J7C/...