Here is my thesis: the real reason why humans cannot build a fully-functional butterfly is not because butterflies are too complex. Instead, it's because butterflies are too simple.

 

Humans design lots of things that are less complex than butterflies and bacteria by your definition, like shovels. I would guess that the wax motor and control system that locks and unlocks your washing machine has a lower complexity than the bacteria in your example.

I'm glad my suggestion was helpful! 

(I continue to be quite unsure how to think about saving for retirement and kids college.)

In normal worlds, I think you are in excellent shape, with how your greater than $2 million net worth compares to median of around $100,000 and mean of around $800,000 net worth for households in their 40s in the US. Also, I think you have greater net worth than more than 99% of households in the world. If you let your taxable account go to zero, then you would likely have to pay less for college, because often the retirement accounts are not included in those calculations. If you didn't add anything more to your retirement account and it just grew 8% per year for twenty years, you would have ~$4 million. Then with the rule of thumb of drawing 4% per year during retirement, you would have an annual income of ~$160k. And that would not be counting any Social Security, income from home downsizing, inheritance, etc.
As for AGI worlds, as many have pointed out, we could be all dead or all rich, so it wouldn't matter. One person pointed out that wealth at the singularity might allow you to buy galaxies, but at least if you're altruistic, the impact of reducing existential risk is many orders of magnitude greater. Others have pointed out that even if humanity on average is rich, there may not be UBI. As long as one has significant net worth, this should grow at least initially, and then the cost of living should fall, so you should be fine. However, for people without any net worth, especially outside countries that benefit a lot from AI, there is reason to be worried. I personally think that even if there is not universal UBI, the rich of the world would not allow the poor to starve en masse. But if you want to do better than just not starving, then having a modest amount of net worth I think is quite prudent.

I think the probability of nuclear war in the next 10 years is around 15%. This is mostly due to the extreme tensions that will occur during takeoff by default. Finding ways to avoid nuclear war is important.

Or resilience to nuclear war. What's your probability of an engineered pandemic in the next 10 years?

I think a more accurate way to model them is “GiveWell recommends organizations that are [within the Overton Window]/[have very sound data to back impact estimates] that save as many current lives as possible.” If GiveWell wanted to recommend organizations that save as many human lives as possible, their portfolio would probably be entirely made up of AI safety orgs.

 

Sounds about right - this paper used an older AI Safety model to find $16 to $12,000 per life saved in the present generation. Though I think some other GCR interventions could also compete on that metric, such as neglected work on engineered pandemics, and resilience to food catastrophes.

The key benefit that’s missing and might have sold me on it, given Sasha Cohen wrote this, is that this doesn’t let you marry your own Cate Hall.

I think you mean Sasha Chapin. But thinking that it was Sacha Baron Cohen did get me to click on the link.

Then recently we have the example where an 11-year-old (!) walked less than a mile into a 370-person town, and the mother was charged with reckless conduct and forced to sign a ‘safety plan’ on pain of jail time pledging to track him at all times via an app on his phone.

Though there was some pushback that the mother did not know where the kid was, this still seems confusing given rules around school commutes. Many schools do not provide bus service within half a mile up the school, expecting kids to walk or bicycle. In Alaska, it was 1.5 miles even though it got down to -40°! And there generally does not appear to be an age limit where parents are required to go with their kids, so it sounds like it's okay for a 5-year-old to do this.

For something in the range of $10M/y we think you can operate a system capable of detecting a novel pathogen before 1:1000 people have been infected.

Sounds promising! I assume this is for one location, so have you done any modeling or estimations of what the global prevalence would be at that point? If you get lucky, it could be very low. But it also could be a lot higher if you get unlucky.
Have you done any cost-effectiveness analyses? Do you think that many people would be willing to take actions to reduce transmission etc in a case where no one has gotten sick yet?

Ground shipping is both a complement and a substitute for water shipping, so the net effect isn’t obvious. (Or at least, it’s not obvious to me).

Since overall freight moved wouldn't change that much (see my comment in this thread), the main economic efficiency of repeal is obtained by using ships instead of ground transport, because ships are cheaper. So overall, ships must be a substitute for ground transport. However, it's possible that some routes would be nearly all rail right now, and if it switched to primarily ships, there may be some additional trucking involved because it's not worth putting on a train for a relatively short distance. Have you looked at any studies examining effects on different modes (I haven't)? If repealing the Jones Act actually did increase trucking, then it could be positive for overall employment as the labour intensity of trucking is so much higher than the other modes.

Also, if a certain interest group has not lobbied in a policy area in the past (as I think is the case here?), then that's nonzero evidence that they will continue to not lobby in that policy area in the future.

It does look like ground transport has not lobbied, which is surprising to me, but I agree it does provide evidence that they will continue to not lobby.

Since I couldn't find it quickly on the web, GPT o1 estimated that the labour hours per ton kilometer of trucking is about 100 times as much as ships, and rail is just about the same as ships (I would have thought rail would have been at least a few times higher than ships). So based on the historic US and current Europe, maybe water transport in the US would increase an order of magnitude if the Jones act were repealed. As Zvi points out, even though the US ship manufacturing jobs would be lost, there probably would be an increase overall shipping employment because of repairing ships and staffing ships. So let's say staffing the ships is 3 times as much as the current employment of manufacturing and staffing very few ships. I suspect that most of the lost inland transportation due to the shift from shipping would be rail, but even if 10% of it were trucking, that would mean the loss of jobs in trucking would be 10 times as much as the staffing of the additional ships, and 30 times as much as the employment constructing and staffing the current ships.^[1] So if you had to compensate 30 times as many people, it would be much more difficult. Now it is true that the majority of total cost of rail and shipping is energy (it's about even between energy and labour for trucking), so the large overall economic savings of moving to shipping should be sufficient to compensate all those truckers, but it's just not nearly the slamdunk that it appeared to be when only looking at marine employment.

1. ^{^}

   Technically not all the freight that would be moved by ships is currently moved by truck/rail/pipeline because a smaller amount gets transported because of the higher cost. But using Zvi's example of $0.63 per barrel increase, since it is 42 gallons per barrel, that's 1.5 cents/gallon, or ~0.5% of the total cost, which wouldn't change quantity demanded very much, well within other uncertainties of this analysis.

The thing is, there really are not all that many of them. Even if you counted every job at every shipyard, and every job aboard every Jones Act ship, and assumed all of them would be completely lost, it simply is not that many union workers.

But the Jones Act is massively benefiting truck and rail staff (and to some extent, pipelines), so I think there are a lot more workers you would need to compensate. Also, I would expect the truck and rail lobbies to try to save the Jones Act.