I don’t see how to interpret those verses any other way, which is why I strongly hold my opinion rather than cousin_it’s.

Neither is generically healthier considered in isolation. One wouldn’t want to strictly focus on replacing imports, or maximizing export value, but doing each when it’s more profitable to do so.

Export orientation seems very bad for e.g. child care when fertility rates are below replacement & educational institutions have almost uniformly been deeply sabotaged. OTOH it would be stupid for most groups to try to grow all their own crops.

The Rationalist movement is explicitly premised on the idea that people seeking to do well on crucial decisions can and ought to do a lot of import replacement with respect to knowledge at least temporarily.

This is pointing in an interesting direction. In hindsight I wish I'd noticed your post on RadVac and written to you for help getting (or making) a dose, as I mainly didn't do it because the prospect felt overwhelming and you probably would have been happy to help. The sparsity of social fabric that led to this course of action not occurring to me seems important to repair.

The main reason I haven't been motivated to do much of the sort of thing you're describing is that it seems to me like there's an oversupply of people trying to do something impressively interesting and novel, relative to people doing (or controlling the surplus of) primary production, to be legitimately impressed and interested. I've tried various ways of occupying the latter position without losing my mind, and gradually downshifted to just trying to raise good children in a politically non-naive way without lying to them, supporting their agency as much as possible, and crippling their agency as little as society will let me get away with.

So I don't know if I'm a good candidate for a primary contributor to the sort of event you're describing. But the life circumstances you're describing seems like a central case of the sort of thing I'd be willing to move and/or spend some money to make available to my family; highly aligned with my vision here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xNf9ZkjXLkFYPDscs/levels-of-republicanism

I don't know how to move this forward but I'll try to reveal some information related to potential opportunities for collaboration:

• Automation of high-value massage
• Basic physical science education for a toddler
• Some things I can do

Automation of high-value massage

Recently a friend wrote to me asking for advice^[1] about how to use a massage gun effectively. Valentin Rozlomii ( visceralcure.com ) is the one I learned this from - I decided to try his services out when Michael Vassar told me he uses an infrared camera to find areas of the body that have poor circulation to the muscles (they're cold). One piece of advice I gave was that the muscles running along the spine are especially high leverage to work on, since if they're chronically tight they can impinge on major nerves innervating large sections of the body, so they can be responsible for a lot of referred pain. This is hard to get at with a massage gun for obvious anatomical reasons, but Valentin is working on a solution. Last I checked he's designing parts with a 3D printer but could use a mechanically inclined collaborator to get the whole thing working, so if you're interested I'd be happy to connect you.

Basic physical science education for a toddler

My 2 1/2 year old son Danny has various toy trains he plays with, including a couple Thomas the Tank Engine style trains. His Thomas is a Brio-style train you can push along a wooden track, but his Percy has an electric motor he can switch on and off that drives the wheels. When I found him touching Percy’s wheels to Thomas’s to drive Thomas's wheels with the power of Percy's motor, I decided he was ready to absorb information about gears and other simple machines.

The iPad "educational games on machines we could find seemed actively bad, and the main apparent transfer learning effect was that he started hitting his little brother.

One thing we tried was watching the David MacAulay cartoon series The Way Things Work, on YouTube. He hated it a few months prior when I offered it to him, but now he appreciates it some. We started with the episode on gears. When we got to an episode on flight, he was interested enough - and mentioned that he wanted to fly - that I looked up which kites were recommended on Metafilter and Reddit, and ended up buying an Into the Wind Kids’ Delta kite, which we flew on the next convenient windy day. I'm glad I bothered to find a nice one, as it flew noticeably more easily than the ones I remember from my childhood (which kind of put me off kites).

I bought a toy gear set from a local toy shop with bolts to attach them to a board, and drill bits you can put on either a fixed handle or a toy power drill to drive the bolts or the gears. He's getting proficient with that.

Another thing I did was order a bunch of educational kits through Walmart.com. He enjoyed helping me put together an LED-powered windmill (he handed me the screws) and was excited to go out and see the wind turn the blades fast enough to power the light. He likes playing with the pulley set we ordered, but it’s flimsy, and I’d like to buy or build him a better one. Other kits I have queued up:

• Water purification kit
• Electric motor circuit kit
• Battery-powered fan circuit kit
• Fruit battery powered light circuit kit
• Magic Schoolbus 10-activity mechanics kit we found at Barnes and Noble for $10 - haven’t looked carefully at it yet.

Danny’s also interested in the idea of rockets and I’d love to give him some safe practical experience with very simple rocketry principles, so I wrote to a localish rocketry group asking if anyone would be interested in showing him what they know.

All this is an inferior substitute to having friends doing interesting physical work that they are happy to explain and demonstrate to their very young new friend. Our live-in landlord is happy to let Danny watch and when safe and convenient participate in the home improvements he does. In another year or so Danny might be ready to learn some basic carpentry from the father of a childhood friend of mine if he's willing to teach. Designing and bulding his own kite might actually be a good craft project for him after he's able to draw simple shapes like rectangles freeform.

Some things I can do

I've invested a fair amount of time into cooking. I often optimize on time-quality tradeoffs but frequently throw things together from why's laying around that impresses people. When I lived in Harlem there was a Paulownia tree with branches touching our balcony. I looked it up and found the flowers were edible, so I made cheese omelettes with Paulownia flowers for houseguests. Eventually I set up a drip agriculture garden on the balcony to grow herbs, which are relatively high value per square inch of space. We didn't have an outdoor tap, so I bought a rain bucket to feed the drip system, and filled it up with a hose running from the kitchen sink about once a week.

I also have some accumulated knowledge on simple nutritional health hacks that seem to frequently get good results when people bother to try them (e.g. for anxiety, try magnesium BEFORE trying benzos, the side effect profile is much milder and MANY people are deficient in magnesium).

I'm not an expert at Tai Chi but I can teach a few things about balance; this causes people to think I'm a lot stronger than I am because with clear consciousness of balance (center of mass etc) it's much easier to pick up heavy objects and move them around without much strain. Looking into Feldenkrais and other paradigms has given me an implied catalog of cheap-to-try mind-body heuristics that some friends report legit helping them, which I only bring up in conversation when I have reason to think they'd be actually useful (e.g. a friend reported hip problems that made me suggest wearing an eyepatch sometimes, which seemed to help with identifying and fixing lateral asymmetries).

1. ^{^}

   Here's my whole response to the friend in case anyone could use the info.

   A few principles & heuristics:

   • If you are already readily conscious of the sensation in a muscle, and know how to move it through its full range of motion under normal loads, then the only reason to massage it is to transiently relax it in order to access muscles under it. Blank spots, ticklish spots, extremely tender muscles, or very weak or chronically shortened muscles are good candidates for massage.
   • Pay attention to which muscles are partial or total antagonists. If you have conscious trouble with one muscle, check for its antagonist or other muscles in the cluster to see whether one of those is a better candidate for focus.
   • Start with fast vibrations to superficially relax, work up to slower deep penetration.
   • If you start feeling warmth or itching that's a good sign that you're oxygenating tissue that needed it. Ideally go deeper once the warmth/itching fades. I don't have a strong sense of whether it's good or bad to push through some muscle pain in the process; Valentin seemed to think it was fine as long as it's not so painful that you involuntarily brace or something. But plausibly it would be more effective in the long run to be more patient. FAFO I guess.
   • The muscles running along the spine just to each side are particularly high-leverage since it's common for them to be weak and tight, and they impinge on major nerves that innervate much of the body. You won't be able to reach them well at some spinal latitudes holding a massage gun yourself - Valentin is developing a machine to help with that - but a partner or a lacrosse ball can help. Twisting around the point in various ways once you've got some pressure on it can help too.
   • Looking up images or videos of e.g. the deep shoulder muscles (rotator cuff, pectoralis minor, serratus, etc), the deep hip/abdominal muscles (e.g. iliacus and psoas) was helpful for me.

I built the explanatory model based on my experience employed by and reading about other vaguely analogous institutions, but an acquaintance who'd previously worked at the World Bank said it seemed like an accurate characterization of that institution as well.

The post describes how predation creates a specific gradient favoring better modeling of predator behavior. While fact that most predated species don't develop high intelligence is Bayesian evidence against this explanation, it’s very weak counterevidence because general self-aware intelligence is a very narrow target. More importantly, why would sexual selection specifically target intelligence rather than any other trait?

Looking at peacocks, we can see what appears to be an initial predation-driven selection for looking like they had big intimidating eyes on their backs (similar to butterflies), followed by sexual selection amplifying along roughly that same gradient direction.

Contempt of court penalties for noncompliance with an investigative process is a mainstream example of 1.

Burning Man has some aspects of the second, as do some camping trips, or simply living in a relatively harsh climate. Compare measured levels of corruption in southern vs northern Europe, for instance. When modern democracies fight big wars, the first year involves learning which parts of their warfighting institutions are corrupt and incompetent, & repairing or replacing them.

Your proposal is well-structured and interesting but has a fundamental flaw that needs to be addressed. Interest keyword-based filtering will primarily encourage politics-as-identity, which is actively harmful - it directs attention towards zero-sum thinking and performative identities, rather than creative problem solving. As Bryan Caplan demonstrates in The Myth of the Rational Voter, people already tend to vote to express identities and affiliations rather than to achieve better outcomes. We shouldn't build tools that further entrench this destructive pattern.

Instead, imagine a tool that:

1. Has users journal daily about their life - activities, hopes, problems, and worries
2. Uses AI to identify where their constraints are plausibly caused by or could be alleviated by government action, especially local government
3. Maps them to specific opportunities for formal recourse, with guidance on process, likely outcomes, and practical assistance (like drafting letters or legal documents)
4. For issues requiring collective action, connects users facing similar constraints and helps coordinate through mechanisms like dominant assurance contracts where appropriate

This approach would ground political participation in the solving of one's own problems rather than identity expression. While technically more challenging to implement than interest-based filtering, it would generate higher-quality engagement that expands our collective problem-solving capacity rather than just reallocating political power between existing interest groups.

The patterns emerging from aggregated user experiences would naturally reveal systemic issues and preventive opportunities, especially in how regulations and policies interact to shape people's choices and planning horizons. While building reliable AI judgment about political causation is challenging, it's better to attempt something hard that would be beneficial if feasible, than to facilitate the destructive forces of identity-based politics simply because they're easier to implement.

I agree that even if the book turned out to be entirely accurate we should not assume that this case is representative of the average development project, but we could still learn from it. Many hours from highly trained and well-paid people are allocated to planning and evaluating such projects, which expenditure is ostensibly to ensure quality. Even looking at worst cases helps us see what sort of quality is or is not being ensured.

Wow, thanks for doing the legwork on this - seems like quite possibly I'm analyzing fiction? Annoying if true.

Google's AI response to my search for the Thaba-Tseka Development Project says:

According to available World Bank documentation, the "Thaba-Tseka development project" is primarily referenced within the context of the "Lesotho Integrated Transport, Trade and Logistics Project," which focuses on improving the road corridor connecting Katse to Thaba-Tseka, aiming to enhance regional connectivity and reduce trade costs at Lesotho's borders with South Africa; key documents to reference would be those related to this project, particularly those detailing the road infrastructure development component between Katse and Thaba-Tseka. 

Key points about the documentation: 

• Project Title: "Lesotho Integrated Transport, Trade and Logistics Project"
• Focus Area: Upgrading the Katse to Thaba-Tseka road corridor
• Objectives: Improve climate resilient regional connectivity, reduce trade costs at Lesotho's borders
• Relevant documents to explore: Project Appraisal Documents, Procurement documents related to road construction and improvement on the Katse-Thaba-Tseka stretch 

There's a good chance this is an AI hallucination, though; a cursory search of the main documents didn't yield any references to a "Thaba-Tseka development project," or the wood or ponies. I'm not familiar with World Bank documentation, though, and likely the right followup would involve looking at exactly what's cited in the book.

However, the other lead funder, the Canadian International Development Agency, does seem to have at least one publicly referenced document about a "Thaba-Tseka rural development program": Evaluation, the Kingdom of Lesotho rural development : evaluation design for phase 1, the Thaba Tseka project

Initially, you argued that societal pressure often reflects genuine wisdom, using examples where a 'society who aggressively shames overconsumption of sweets' might be wiser than a child's raw preferences. You suggested that what I was calling 'intrinsic preferences' might just be 'shallow preferences' that hadn't yet been trained to reflect reality.

Now you're making a different and more sophisticated argument - that the whole framework of 'intrinsic' versus 'external' preferences is problematic because preferences necessarily develop within and respond to reality, including social reality. While this is an interesting perspective that deserves consideration, it seems substantially different from your initial defense of social restrictions as transmitting wisdom.

There's also an important point about my own position that I should clarify. When I said 'generally, upon reflection, people would prefer to satisfy their and others' preferences as calculated prior to such influences,' I wasn't making a claim about how often admonitions reflect preference inversions. Rather, I was suggesting that if people were to reflect explicitly on cases of preference inversion, they typically wouldn't want those inverted preferences to count; they would recognize these as preferences shaped by forces systematically opposed to their interests.

This connects to what I see as the core distinction: I'm not just talking about external influences or errors in the transmission of wisdom. I'm specifically pointing to cases where restrictions are moralized for the purpose of restriction itself - where the system is systematically deprecating the evolutionarily fit preferences of the person being restricted. This isn't just clumsy teaching or social pressure - it's adversarial. The system works by first making people feel guilty about their natural inclinations, then betting that they won't fully succeed at suppressing those inclinations despite earnestly trying to adopt the system's restrictions.

Consider the survival of variants of Christianity that 'do poorly' at helping people develop healthy attitudes toward sexuality. Their persistence suggests this poor performance is actually functional - they are able to exploit their members precisely because they create a system where most people must be 'bad' by design, where hypocrisy isn't a bug but a feature. When dessert companies can successfully market their products as 'sinfully delicious,' they're exploiting a system of moral restrictions that creates the very compulsive relationship to sweets it claims to prevent.