I'd say that near-universal falling fertility rates already below replacement in the post-British global system, combined with continued net integration of unaligned countries into that system, implies that not taking ideas seriously isn't healthy. Taking new ideas seriously is high-variance, with more downside when few people are doing it (so there's less error-correction), so one might recommend conservatism if things basically seem to be going well. But in some key respects they don't.

The situation actually seems worse, as MIRI got more money than they knew what to do with and still didn't quite say "oops" (an April Fools' Day post endorsing "death with dignity" doesn't count since they didn't actually do a fault analysis). I think this reflects conditioning to substitute the idea of social validation momentum in place of the idea of object-level efficacy at something you care about.

If you can extend your system of accountability to include people already making product X, that's frequently going to be better than diverting productive resources already being used profitably to make product Y, to make product X instead. But the "integration" element is important; I expect vertical integration or import substitution to be profitable if it protects you from monopolistic behavior by horizontal integrationists, or if it allows you to produce intermediate goods more suitable for their purpose than can be bought externally for the same cost. I think this responds adequately to your arguments 1 and 2.

"Identical" may have been too strong, as there is an edge case where one buys a supplier and then doesn't change anything about them. This may be formally considered "vertical integration" under some schemas, but it's not an interesting case. But as I see it, the meaning of expressions like "vertical integration" or "import substitution" is their functional relation to the long-run profitability of a firm/state. And that if we don't make an unprincipled distinction between Westphalian states and other sorts of firm, the distinction collapses. Production of a good by immigrants who used to make it for export in the old country, or by people living in newly annexed territory, would generally still be considered "import substitution," and that's strongly analogous to the sorts of "vertical integration" cases you mentioned.

3 seems confused. I didn't bring up Apple and Amazon to suggest that import substitution is the most profitable strategy considered in terms of external currency, but to suggest that even firms trying to maximize long-run profits in terms of external currency like US dollars sometimes do so more effectively through developing their supply chains in-house than they could by focusing solely on exports. A fortiori people who aren't dollar-nihilists but want anything else in life also ought to see some upside some of the time in import substitution. I then suggested some specific ways in which I thought import substitution would be profitable. Either you agree or disagree with the specifics; if "economics" recommends never doing import substitution then "economics" is obviously wrong.

This doesn't seem like it implies any sort of disagreement and I don't understand why you think it's relevant additional information in this context. Maybe you're treating vertical integration as a very different thing from import substitution, while from my perspective they are identical; I didn't mean to say that the USA has done well by import substitution via Apple and Amazon, but that Apple and Amazon themselves, as statelike clients of the US-led global financial system, have done well through import substitution.

I don't think "someone tried a thing and failed" invalidates trying things. I do think the culture of paranoid secrecy at MIRI (articulately described by Jessica Taylor a couple of years ago) was bad. Growing your own grain is a bad value proposition because a lot of farmers are trying to grow grain cheaply and selling it at commodity prices to competing distributors. Doing your own health care is sometimes a good value proposition and sometimes a bad one because there is legitimate technical expertise and returns to scale for sharing costly equipment, but there's also cartelization and bad-faith gatekeeping. If the schools are trying to mentally cripple the children, it shouldn't be very hard to do better at pretty small scales. One has to look at the details.

Apple and Amazon have done very well at import substitution over the past couple decades.

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.