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Many hands make light work.
Too many cooks spoil the broth.
The optimal solution seems to be one cook with many hands.
In response to
A brief history of ethically concerned scientists
A good article, but one thing that sticks out of me is the overall ineffectiveness of these scientists at preventing the actual use of their technology. Only the recombinant DNA experiment was stopped before actually being carried out.
This may be partly because technologies that were used are more conspicuous. We would know if Napier designed a better cannon, but we don't know how much he delayed the development of artillery by concealing his results.
There are various meta-level questions left unanswered by textbooks, such as "how do I go about deciding which textbooks to read in a particular subject," "how do I go about deciding which subjects to study," "what resources other than textbooks are good for learning math," and "say, what's the big picture here, anyway?" The goal would not be to regurgitate the content of any particular textbook.
I also expect rationalists to be more goal-oriented than most people, so my recommendations for them would be different from my recommendations for people who just want to learn whatever math is cool and interesting. My recommendations would depend heavily on what those goals are, which is why I'd like to know what those goals are.
I would be very interested in something like this.
This case is different in an important way. Most people will go inside during a thunderstorm and check for cars before crossing a street, so avoiding these risks doesn't require an unusual degree of vigilance. katydee is claiming that unusually good situational awareness is frequently a decisive factor in avoiding death or serious injury. If that's true, then we should expect to hear about people dying due to inadequate situational awareness fairly often because most people don't have above average situational awareness.
However, I think this is possibly explained by the fact that people with good situational awareness are far more likely to place themselves in situations were good situational awareness is required.
There's another effect as well. Humans compete with each other; at the moment, all literate people can claim a legitimate advantage over the illiterate people (and, in the case of some, this may be an excuse to stop self-improving). Once there are no illiterates, that excuse falls away.
Most potential scientists don't view illiterate children in Third World countries as their competitors.
Theoretically there is an optimal use, practically you can't calculate the optimal use and nothing you do is optimal. Anyway I retracted my previous 2 comments because this is kind of going in circles.
It doesn't follow from the fact that you don't know the optimal use of resources that you should settle for anything slightly positive.
In response to
[Link] 12 Myths about Hunger
The myths that were actually about hunger contained some useful information. Unfortunately, this ended up being more of an argument for some vaguely leftist political ideology than an actual list of myths about hunger. It seems to me that labeling widely-held political beliefs as "myths" in an article that is supposedly about hunger is not a very good strategy for reaching a wide audience. I personally considered sharing this article when I was about a third of the way through reading it, and then strongly changed my mind when it turned sweeping political generalizations.
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Why do you find the idea of having the level of technology from the Roman empire to be so extreme? It seems like the explosion in technological development and use in recent centuries could be the fluke. There was supposedly a working steam engine in the Library of Alexandria in antiquity, but no one saw any reason to encourage that sort of thing. During the middle ages people didn't even know what the Roman aqueducts were for. With just a few different conditions, it seems like it's within the realm of possibility that ancient Roman technology could have been a nearly-sustainable peak of human technology.
Much more feasible would be staying foragers for the life of the species, though.
What makes you think that? Technological growth had already hit a clear exponential curve by the time of Augustus. The large majority of the time to go from foraging to industry had already passed, and it doesn't look like our history was an unusually short one. Barring massive disasters, most other Earths must fall at least within an order of magnitude of variation from this case.
In any case, we're definitely at a point now where indefinite stagnation is not on the table... unless there's a serious regression or worse.