I had been a small-time LW regular for about 3 years and witnessed its decline until I stopped commenting a couple of months back. It was frustrating to see Eliezer, Yvain, Luke and others leave for other social media platforms, and even more to watch them fragment their writings further between personal blogs, FB, Reddit and tumblr. Not because it's a wrong thing to do, just because it's harder to follow and the commenting system is usually even worse than here. Well, except for Reddit. Without a strong leader charismatic emerging and willing to add quality content and drive the changes, I don't expect any site redesign to revive this rather zombified forum. Or maybe if the forum is redesigned one would emerge, who knows. Chicken and egg.

Or maybe it should be a rationality-related aggregator/hub, where all relevant links get posted and discussed. So that one could see at a glance that Scott A posted something on his blog, Eliezer on tumbler, Brienne on Facebook, gwern on his site and someone else on twitter or reddit. All on one page. There are various sites like that around. With the ability to comment locally, or go to the source and discuss it there. Maybe even add linkbacks to this site.

Just my 2c.

I would take such data as evidence if it was peer-reviewed (and not just a report by the organizers who claim that "we introduced it and it's great"), and, more importantly, if we had information about its long-term effects. All of these projects are very recent. What will happen after a year? The initial enthusiasm might prompt people to spend the money wisely, but what will happen if they grow used to take it for granted? What will happen after ten years? Or after a whole new generation grows up?

I'm living in Eastern Europe, where, although no "basic income" was introduced, the changes in the last few decades led to a situation similar to basic income. And it had a disastrous effect. I'm not exaggerating with the word "disastrous", because this region was invaded, looted and burned regularly during its history, by Mongols, Ottomans, Russians and others, and it was always rebuilt. The last few decades brought a greater devastation than any war from which it might never recover, with abandoned villages, destroyed culture, and a general hopeless mood despite a more comfortable living people in this region ever had.

Please let me elaborate. In the past, people had to work very had just to survive. They had no other choice. Still, as everyone was almost equally poor and had to work equally hard, they were relatively happy. This I can attest from all the cultural artifacts which remain from that period, beautiful clothes, handcrafting, made by simple villagers and decorating every house, cheerful folk songs, and childhood memories of my grandparents who had to work on the fields even as children, walked barefooted most of the time, but still have very happy memories. I know, there might be some bias in those happy memories, but still, the society as a whole survived and even prospered. If an army devastated the village and burnt the houses down, the survivors rebuilt everything without any outside help from the government, and life went on. Today, although the economic situation is quite bad, especially when we compare it to the rich Western Europe, you can get away with not working. You can get away with being irresponsible, and you can get away with being an alcoholic. You will not starve. Life might be hard for you, but basic food is cheap enough, basic clothing is almost for free, and there are plenty of opportunities for survival even for the very lazy and very uneducated people. They can do some seasonal jobs for a short while, receive some financial aid, then loiter around for months. They might live uncomfortably, but they won't starve to death. Life is much easier, compared to what was the norm for many centuries. But as the rich West is nearby, people are depressed. They are depressed that they only make 5 times as much as their grandparents did, and not 50 times as much, like they do in the West. Although in the past the villages were mostly self-sufficient, and they worked even the hardest fields on the mountainsides, today there are vast fields with good quality soil on the plains, most of which are abandoned. Corruption is rampant, in many villages people were first used to not being required to work from morning till evening because they got a little financial aid, and now they bribe the doctors to put them on disability pension. And there are opportunities for working, there are a few motivated people who start again with mostly self-sufficient agriculture, but for most people the low wages are not attractive. They rather loiter, barely surviving, instead of going to work for just a little bit more money as what they can get without having a stable job. Of course, if the wages were higher, that would motivate more people, and of course, the low wages can be partly responsible form many people to choose welfare instead of work, but the biggest problem is that the damage to culture is already done. And such a trend is very hard to be reversed, if the majority of society is used to something. The point is, that in the past people didn't have the possibility to choose this lifestyle, as they would have starved to death. These psychological changes happen through decades, not over a few moths. This is why I would be very careful in evaluating the "basic income" projects too soon.

Sadly, all this will remain anectodal evidence, because the region is not interesting enough to be featured in any English-speaking media, besides very one-sided and politically-motivated rants about racism against Gypsies. And speaking of Gypsies, you will not find it in the media, but if you come here, 100 people out of 100 will be able to testify that since they started getting financial aid (which they didn't get back before the fall of communism) they are poorer (and work less) than before. Human advancement is (and always was) motivated by need. If you take that need away, you will take the motivation away.

And sadly, in this ever-faster world people don't see the side-effects of very slow social changes, which will be measurable only after several decades. Maybe they don't even care, because the next election is in 4 years, not 40.

Is it still somewhat controversial? Meaning, are there respected physicists who think that conscious observers do magically cause things to happen?

Yeah but even if it's known that the human kindis a "social kind" i don't think such big societies are very necessary ...

I have an intuition that if we implemented universal basic income, the prices of necessities would rise to the point where people without other sources of income would still be in poverty. I assume there are UBI supporters who've spent more time thinking about that question than I have, and I'm interested in their responses.

(I have some thoughts myself on the general directions responses might take, but I haven't fleshed them out, and I might not care enough to do so.)

I've been through the free will sequences a second time now, and I'm trying to figure out how to apply it to my life.

See, even that sounds weird, because applying to my life...trying...figure out...whether I do or not is inevitable, right?

Speaking from the naive standpoint, how does the determinist viewpoint affect your decisions? How do you think about it, incorporate it? Do you compartmentalize and pretend you're in control, or what?

That it all "adds up to normality".

So I can finally ignore all those articles shared on social networks about how conscious observers magically cause things to happen. Without the nagging doubt that I may be preserving my peace of mind by ignoring some existing aspect of reality.

Would an AI necessarily have something like a system 1/system 2 distinction? Might it have additional layers?

Is the human kind made to live in such big societies ?

Regardless of how well it follows the random walk, it already violates the assumption of rational agents.