2024-12-22
o3
o3, including ARC, and frontier math results. Feeling the AGI.
Alex Telford on the potential for drug discovery to start coming out of China. Similar, you have companies like PopVax coming out of India. Depending on how this goes, I think the argument that drugs are excessively expensive in the United States to incentivize innovation is either wrong or an admission of failure.
Brett Devereaux defends Bread and Circuses, claiming that it cannot be blamed on social problems in Rome because there were so many other problems and the bread only provided 30-60% of the required calories instead of 100%. It’s unclear how much of discussion, including this, includes the subtext of socialism and basic income. But it seems to me that if you buy the argument that declining fertility was a structural cause of Roman collapse, this calorie-based basic income system would have to be implicated.
Paul Skallas discusses men without purpose: “if you FIRE young without fatFIREing and then just smoke weed all day then yeah you're a loser”. Actually, the Twitter comments are unclear which part is the relevant one, the retiring young with a cheap lifestyle, or the smoking weed all day. My opinion is that both are (despite doing the former myself), based on the Status Categorical Imperative, that any process which could not become a universal law should be low status, because of the utilitarian implications. That being said, it constantly amazes me how bought in some people are to the idea of money and status, with many commentors claiming that this individual who has passive income of over $80,000/year (much more than me, or Gwern) is actually poor and will run out of money quickly.
Some general principles held by Sarah Constantine.
Richard Hanania makes the case for bio-acceleration from a conservative lens. I actually think that’s the easy case though, since it’s easy to convince the right using arguments of benefits, liberty, and familial implications. It’s actually the left objections which are more fundamentally values based.
Regan probably has the best articulation of the idea that unfair household labor divisions are actually usually just a values mismatch.
Noah Smith on Elon being too powerful. My personal feeling on this is that the concerns are overblown. If for example Trump decided he no longer liked Elon, his influence would decline precipitously. Actually, my hunch is that’s one of the reasons people bring up the subject, as they are trying to arouse Trump’s jealously (and the ire of the legislature, although Musk is doing that fine on his own) towards that effect. That’s aside from money being too influential, which I think warrants large increases in estate and gift taxes.
Scott Sumner summarizes his model of inflation. It does seem to be the most accurate model (to me), but at the same time it seems to be incomplete by design.
Quanta Mag year in review.
