Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Growth and Opportunity. Really into this whole progress thing.
elidourado
Karma: 100
The latter, although sometimes they overlap with academia. For example, CGO and Mercatus publish a lot of academics and are situated within universities.
Yes, sounds plausible to me.
It looks like certain wellness programs that are allowed, but there are limits on what you can do if you make it outcome-contingent. https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/about-ebsa/our-activities/resource-center/publications/caghipaaandaca.pdf
Yes, from what I hear, it seems very hard. I’d point you to some recent pieces:
The NEPA lawsuit is brought by an environmental org against an agency. I could be wrong but I don’t think a different party can appeal the decision.
I think airships could in principle approach rail costs but it would add a lot of complexity relative to just running another train on the same track. Big container ships are always going to be cheaper, I think.
FAA and pilots get mad about people pointing laser pointers into the sky.
I agree winds are super important and must be designed for and planned for in routing. Using them for sailing (added propulsion) is also promising.
The ability to charge people more and less based on observed (but not demographic) characteristics got pretty limited by the Affordable Care Act. I’m not sure of the details, however.
The party of record is a federal agency, though. I’m not sure IJ can defend them.
I like this Alan Watts quote:
“Things are as they are. Looking out into the universe at night, we make no comparisons between right and wrong stars, nor between well and badly arranged constellations.”
And Nietzsche’s new year’s resolution is words to live by:
“I want to learn to see more and more as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who makes things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all and all and on the whole: someday I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
I’m amazed that existence exists at all. Every moment is a gift.
I still like that idea too, but it’s pretty weird and unlikely to pass any time soon. A more likely reform that I also like is ranked choice voting.
That’s a broad question, but as it relates to progressy things, I think imagination about what the future could hold is certainly a factor in the kind of social ambitions that we aspire to.
It’s a common belief among some economic historians, for example, that we have already picked the low-hanging fruit. There are no new inventions in their mind that could match the inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries in terms of providing explosive growth. Maybe they’re right, but I can certainly imagine new inventions that could change everything.
As I argued previously on Progress Forum, futurism is important for producing a concrete vision that can inform our goals.
1. Housing is, depending on the year, 15-18% of GDP, and if we could get that for free, it would tautologically increase productivity. Also, high housing costs limit agglomeration effects by pricing some people out of the most productive markets. There are a bunch of other negative effects of high housing prices. I’d refer you to “the housing theory of everything” for a discussion.
2. I think the “lobbying super-army” we need is elite consensus. If we convinced all the smart people that vetocracy is a bad way to achieve environmental goals, that would basically do it.
3. If we deregulated housing, people in general would not have to commute as far! But yes, transit construction in the US is often a mess.
4. The price of solar is truly going down. It’s not just because incentives are offsetting the cost. However, I do think it is an open question how far the costs can keep falling.
5. Department level? Department of Energy. Agency level? FAA.
I don’t think there is any account of political authority that isn’t defeated by the standard objections.
For purely prudential reasons, I think people should give some deference to governments as long as the government is mostly functional and aligned with the population. Living in a state where the government is ineffective is not generally pleasant, and we should all in some sense be rooting for the government to succeed at least at its basic functions.
I don’t think there is a set of given-from-on-high proper limits to what the government should do, but I prefer modest aims executed with competence and focus compared to what we have now.
My recommendations don’t generally speak to the overall size or role of government. For the most part, I am trying to help the government succeed by its own lights—often by helping it get out of its own way. I think this approach gets me in with both Democrats and Republicans and makes me more effective than if I founded my ideas in a more explicit ideology.
I think it’s true to some extent that the masses exert some demand for stagnation.
The way I’ve been thinking about it is that laws and norms are ways of solving iterated prisoner’s dilemmas. But because of loss aversion, there isn’t symmetry in the kinds of PDs that get solved this way. The “prevent something bad from happening” PDs get solved more than the “make something great happen” PDs do. (This is essentially the Nietzschean distinction between slave morality and master morality, applied to laws as well as morals.)
I don’t think the masses are ever going to change. Rather, I think elites need to compensate and be advocates for great things happening. There needs to be an elite conspiracy to elevate humanity far above where it would otherwise be willing to go.
A lot of policy change can happen with only elite consensus. In my work I focus a lot on small changes that need not concern most people, like a categorical exclusion for geothermal energy. Or changing how the Department of Energy does contracting for demonstration projects. I think a promising way to increase progress is to subtly remove a lot of small obstacles like this.
Maybe if we can get a few great, visible achievements it will soften mass opposition to some degree.
The biggest problem that I see in college education is that most people don’t actually want to learn very much. College social life is undeniably fun, and although most people find a few classes they enjoy, they’re there for the experience + the credential.
I don’t know how to fix it because I think there is demand for the current system, but there should be at least one college with unlimited enrollment that is rigorous enough that it weeds out the people who aren’t giving it their best effort. Maybe it should be self-paced, with a massive total learning requirement so that it takes the best students four years and others longer. The degree would be worth more than other degrees in the end because it is so rigorous.
I think recorded lectures would be a part of it, but you’d probably still need/want human tutors and performance coaches. Motivation is often the scarce factor; if it wasn’t you could learn just about anything with a library card.
AI can help with both content and motivational scripts but I don’t think it’s a radical difference from what we can do now with non-AI methods.
If Rigorous U took off this would separate researchers further from undergraduate students. Research labs could be separate institutions even. I’d like to see researchers spend more time exposed to industry. At least once in their career they should take a basic science breakthrough and try to take it all the way to commercialization. Yes, there are gains from specialization, but there are also gains from a broader range of experience and contacts.
I’m not optimistic that any of this is socially or politically feasible.
In the short term, I am doing some geothermal projects, and then possibly writing a book.
Longer term, I have a lot I’d like to do. If I ever found myself in a position where I could seize real power, I would take it and use it to promote progressy things.
I really enjoy the part of my job where I talk to people working on promising hard tech startups; often they need a bit of advice or some introductions to people in my network. I’d like to do more to help them, as they are often brought into contact with the barriers and obstacles I spend so much time thinking about.
I do wish someone else besides me would start a cargo airship company and do it right, with iterative design and a focus on getting to 500+ tons of cargo as quickly as possible.
I think the kinds of tests that prove that a human is intelligent or sentient or whatever are not the same as the kinds of tests that prove a computer program is sentient.
For example, imagine a test where we timed the test-taker on how long it takes to multiply two 8-digit numbers together. For most humans, this would take several minutes. For even a dollar-store calculator, it would take under a second.
For many decades, Alan Turing’s proposal that a computer that could converse indistinguishably from humans would be a sign of human-level sentience and intelligence was widely accepted. I myself thought, “Sure, sounds good,” when I first heard of it.
But actually, it turns out that carrying out a conversation for machines is easier than we thought. There is no real cognition going on inside ChatGPT. It is spitting out answers based on a statistical function trained on encoded inputs and outputs.
I think it is quite possible that an AI will achieve a 98th percentile score on a Mensa test by 2028 (maybe earlier). What I don’t think is that that will be a sign of human-level sentience or intelligence. It’s a sign of being able to mimic a few salient aspects of human intelligence.
To get to parity with human brain experience, we need several orders of magnitude higher computational efficiency to match neurons. We don’t need to get there all the way on efficiency; we can do some by burning more energy. Even so, it will take a couple of decades in my estimation.
And even so, there is still the possibility that we don’t really understand how the neurons work and we could be way off base! Michael Levin has pointed out that a caterpillar essentially disassociates its brain to become a butterfly, and yet somehow it retains at least some memories. I think we are far from really grokking it.
If I understand the tethering question, I don’t think that would help. A train or container ship can already carry many times more cargo than an airship can.
When I looked at space-based solar power, I was struck that the wireless transmission was not much denser than solar (otherwise, they would pose a danger to the ground if they missed the receiver). I think putting thin-film solar could buy its way onto the top of the hull if it was cheap and light enough. I have heard about very high-powered laser propulsion systems for high-speed aircraft, but those seem a long way off.
If you’re talking about drones using rotary lift to carry 1 container at a time, those might need to be pretty powerful to work! I am not sure it calcs out. Would be cool if it worked though.
I am not aware of any no-go areas for wind. Would assume Antarctica might be bad, but it’s already no-go for altitude and few people live there anyway. I think you would want to design the mission to route around storms and just get there a day late if necessary (with a contract structure that reflects this possibility). You probably never want to scuttle the ship since it’s likely expensive compared to the cargo value.
Thank you!
The key to the process on this one was first spending several years thinking about cargo airships and how you could make a business around them. I made my first phone call asking if I could buy a cargo airship over three years ago.
All charts other than the one I cribbed from the Review of Maritime Transport are original, either to me or to the engineer that did the trade study.
Once I sat down to write, the narrative came pretty easily. I just wrote what I thought, trying to explain why I thought airships are interesting and why they could be profitable and why it’s hard to get there from here (i.e., why I’m not starting an airship startup).
Good catch. Looks like in the district court Geertson sued federal officials as per usual but Monsanto filed a motion to intervene and join the case.