gwern comments on This Failing Earth - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 May 2009 04:09PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Golovin 24 May 2009 08:16:54PM 8 points [-]

Michael Vassar has an extended thesis on how the scientific community in our Earth has been slowly dying since 1910 or so, but I'll let him decide whether it's worth his time to write up that post.)

Sounds scary. Michael, if writing up the full post will take too long, could you post a short summary / key facts here in the comments?

Comment author: gwern 25 May 2009 07:53:08PM 3 points [-]

If you'd like a second source, you could read Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment; he dates decline in excellence to roughly the same time period, although he has no strong explanation of the statistics.