Satellites were also plausibly a very important military technology.  Since the 1960s, some applications have panned out, while others haven't.  Some of the things that have worked out:

• GPS satellites were designed by the air force in the 1980s for guiding precision weapons like JDAMs, and only later incidentally became integral to the world economy.  They still do a great job guiding JDAMs, powering the style of "precision warfare" that has given the USA a decisive military advantage ever since 1991's first Iraq war.
• Spy satellites were very important for gathering information on enemy superpowers, tracking army movements and etc.  They were especially good for helping both nations feel more confident that their counterpart was complying with arms agreements about the number of missile silos, etc.  The Cuban Missile Crisis was kicked off by U-2 spy-plane flights photographing partially-assembled missiles in Cuba.  For a while, planes and satellites were both in contention as the most useful spy-photography tool, but eventually even the U-2's successor, the incredible SR-71 blackbird, lost out to the greater utility of spy satellites.
• Systems for instantly detecting the characteristic gamma-ray flashes of nuclear detonations that go off anywhere in the world (I think such systems are included on GPS satellites), and giving early warning by tracking ballistic missile launches during their boost phase (the Soviet version of this system famously misfired and almost caused a nuclear war in 1983, which was fortunately forestalled by one Lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov) are obviously a critical part of nuclear detterence / nuclear war-fighting.

Some of the stuff that hasn't:

• The air force initially had dreams of sending soldiers into orbit, maybe even operating a military base on the moon, but could never figure out a good use for this.  The Soviets even test-fired a machine-gun built into one of their Salyut space stations: "Due to the potential shaking of the station, in-orbit tests of the weapon with cosmonauts in the station were ruled out.  The gun was fixed to the station in such a way that the only way to aim would have been to change the orientation of the entire station.  Following the last crewed mission to the station, the gun was commanded by the ground to be fired; some sources say it was fired to depletion".
• Despite some effort in the 1980s, were were unable to figure out how to make "Star Wars" missile defence systems work anywhere near well enough to defend us against a full-scale nuclear attack.
• Fortunately we've never found out if in-orbit nuclear weapons, including fractional orbit bombardment weapons, are any use, because they were banned by the Outer Space Treaty. But nowadays maybe Russia is developing a modern space-based nuclear weapon as a tool to destroy satellites in low-earth orbit.

Overall, lots of NASA activities that developed satellite / spacecraft technology seem like they had a dual-use effect advancing various military capabilities.  So it wasn't just the missiles.  Of course, in retrospect, the entire human-spaceflight component of the Apollo program (spacesuits, life support systems, etc) turned out to be pretty useless from a military perspective. But even that wouldn't have been clear at the time!

Maybe other people have a very different image of meditation than I do, such that they imagine it as something much more delusional and hyperreligious? Eg, some religious people do stuff like chanting mantras, or visualizing specific images of Buddhist deities, which indeed seems pretty crazy to me.

But the kind of meditation taught by popular secular sources like Sam Harris's Waking Up app, (or that I talk about in my "Examining The Witness" youtube series about the videogame The Witness), seems to me obviously much closer to basic psychology or rationality techniques than to religious practices. Compare Sam Harris's instructions about paying attention to the contents of one's experiences, to Gendlin's idea of "Circling", or Yudkowsky's concept of "sit down and actually try to think of solutions for five minutes", or the art of "noticing confusion", or the original Feynman essay where he describes holding off on proposing solutions. So it's weird to me when people seem really skeptical of meditation and set a very high burden of proof that they wouldn't apply for other mental habits like, say, CFAR techniques.

I'm not like a meditation fanatic -- personally I don't even meditate these days, although I feel bad about not doing it since it does make my life better. (Just like how I don't exercise much anymore despite exercise making my day go better, and I feel bad about that too...) But once upon a time I just tried it for a few weeks, learned a lot of interesting stuff, etc. I would say I got some mundane life benefits out of it -- some, like exercise or good sleep, that only lasted as long as I kept up the habit. and other benefits were more like mental skills that I've retained to today. I also got some very worthwhile philosophical insights, which I talk about, albeit in a rambly way mixed in with lots of other stuff, in my aforementioned video series. I certainly wouldn't say the philosophical insights were the most important thing in my whole life, or anything like that! But maybe more skilled deeper meditation = bigger insights, hence my agnosticism on whether the more bombastic metitation-related claims are true.

So I think people should just download the Waking Up app and try meditating for like 10 mins a day for 2-3 weeks or whatever-- way less of a time commitment than watching a TV show or playing most videogames -- and see for themselves if it's useful or not, instead of debating.

Anyways. For what it's worth, I googled "billionares who pray". I found this article (https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/5-christian-billionaires-you-didnt-know-about.aspx), which ironically also cites Bill Gates, plus the Walton Family and some other conservative CEOs. But IMO, if you read the article you'll notice that only one of them actually mentions a daily practice of prayer. The one that does, Do Won Chang, doesn't credit it for their business success... seems like they're successful and then they just also pray a lot. For the rest, it's all vaguer stuff about how their religion gives them a general moral foundation of knowing what's right and wrong, or how God inspires them to give back to their local community, or whatever.

So, personally I'd consider this duel of first-page-google-results to be a win for meditation versus prayer, since the meditators are describing a more direct relationship between scheduling time to regularly meditate and the assorted benefits they say it brings, while the prayer people are more describing how they think it's valuable to be christian in an overall cultural sense. Although I'm sure with more effort you could find lots of assorted conservatives claiming that prayer specifically helps them with their business in some concrete way. (I'm sure there are many people who "pray" in ways that resemble meditation, or resemble Yudkowsky's sitting-down-and-trying-to-think-of-solutions-for-five-minutes-by-the-clock, and find these techniques helpful!)

IMO, probably more convincing than dueling dubious claims of business titans, is testimony from rationalist-community members who write in detail about their experiences and reasoning. Alexey Guzey's post here is interesting, as he's swung from being vocally anti-meditation, to being way more into it than I ever was. He seems to still generally have his head on straight (ie hasn't become a religious fanatic or something), and says that meditation seems to have been helpful for him in terms of getting more things done: https://guzey.com/2022-lessons/

I think there are many cases of reasonably successful people who often cite either some variety of meditation, or other self-improvement regimes / habits, as having a big impact on their success. This random article I googled cites the billionaires Ray Dalio, Marc Benioff, and Bill Gates, among others. (https://trytwello.com/ceos-that-meditate/)

Similarly you could find people (like Arnold Schwarzenegger, if I recall?) citing that adopting a more mature, stoic mindset about life was helpful to them -- Ray Dalio has this whole series of videos on "life principles" that he likes. And you could find others endorsing the importance of exercise and good sleep, or of using note-taking apps to stay organized.

I think the problem is not that meditation is ineffective, but that it's not usually a multiple-standard-deviations gamechanger (and when it is, it's probably usually a case of "counting up to zero from negative", as TsviBT calls it), and it's already a known technique. If nobody else in the world meditated or took notes or got enough sleep, you could probably stack those techniques and have a big advantage. But alas, a lot of CEOs and other top performers already know to do this stuff.

(Separately from the mundane life-improvement aspects, some meditators claim that the right kind of deep meditation can give you insight into deep philosophical problems, or the fundamental nature of conscious experience, and that this is so valuable that achieving this goal is basically the most important thing you could do in life. This might possibly even be true! But that's different from saying that meditation will give you +50 IQ points, which it won't. Kinda like how having an experience of sublime beauty while contemplating a work of art, might be life-changing, but won't give you +50 IQ points.)

It feels sorta understandable to me (albeit frustrating) that OpenPhil faces these assorted political constraints.  In my view this seems to create a big unfilled niche in the rationalist ecosystem: a new, more right-coded, EA-adjacent funding organization could optimize itself for being able to enter many of those blacklisted areas with enthusiasm.

If I was a billionare, I would love to put together a kind of "completion portfolio" to complement some of OP's work.  Rationality community building, macrostrategy stuff, AI-related advocacy to try and influence republican politicians, plus a big biotechnology emphasis focused on intelligence enhancement, reproductive technologies, slowing aging, cryonics, gene drives for eradicating diseases, etc.  Basically it seems like there is enough edgy-but-promising stuff out there (like studying geoengineering for climate, or advocating for charter cities, or just funding oddball substack intellectuals to do their thing) that you could hope to create a kind of "alt-EA" (obviously IRL it shouldn't have EA in the name) where you batten down the hatches, accept that the media will call you an evil villain mastermind forever, and hope to create a kind of protective umbrella for all the work that can't get done elsewhere.  As a bonus, you could engage more in actual politics (like having some hot takes on the US budget deficit, or on how to increase marriage & fertility rates, or whatever), in some areas that OP in its quest for center-left non-polarization can't do.

Peter Thiel already lives this life, kinda?  But his model seems 1. much more secretive, and 2. less directly EA-adjacent, than what I'd try if I was a billionare.

Dustin himself talks about how he is really focused on getting more "multipolarity" to the EA landscape, by bringing in other high-net-worth funders.  For all the reasons discussed, he obviously can't say "hi, somebody please start an edgier right-wing offshoot of EA!!"  But it seems like a major goal that the movement should have, nonetheless.

Seems like you could potentially also run this play with a more fully-left-coded organization.  The gains there would probably be smaller, since there's less "room" to OP's left than to their right.  But maybe you could group together wild animal welfare, invertebrate welfare, digital minds, perhaps some David Pearce / Project Far Out-style "suffering abolition" transhumanist stuff, other mental-wellbeing stuff like the Organization for the Prevention of Intense Suffering, S-risk work, etc.  Toss in some more aggressive political activism on AI (like PauseAI) and other issues (like Georgist land value taxation), and maybe some forward-looking political stuff on avoiding stable totalitarianism, regulation of future AI-enabled technologies, and how to distribute the gains from a positive / successful singularity (akin to Sam Altman's vision of UBI supported by georgist/pigouvian taxes, but more thought-through and detailed and up-to-date.)

Finding some funders to fill these niches seems like it should be a very high priority of the rationalist / EA movement.  Even if the funders were relatively small at first (like say they have $10M - $100M in crypto that they are preparing to give away), I think there could be a lot of value in being "out and proud" (publicising much of their research and philosophy and grantmaking like OP, rather than being super-secretive like Peter Thiel).  If a small funder manages to build a small successful "alt-EA" ecosystem on either the left or right, that might attract larger funders in time.

There are actually a number of ways that you might see a permanently stable totalitarian government arise, in addition to the simplest idea that maybe the leader never dies:

https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/risks-of-stable-totalitarianism/

I and perhaps other LessWrongers would appreciate reading your review (of any length) of the book, since lots of us loved HPMOR, the Sequences, etc, but are collectively skeptical / on the fence about whether to dive into Project Lawful.  (What's the best way to read the bizzare glowfic format?  What are the main themes of the book and which did you like best?  etc)

This is nice!  I like seeing all the different subfields of research listed and compared; as a non-medical person I often just hear about one at a time in any given news story, which makes things confusing.

Some other things I hear about in longevity spaces:
- Senescent-cell-based theories and medicines -- what's up with these?  This seems like something people were actually trying in humans; any progress, or is this a dud?
- Repurposing essentially random drugs that might have some effect on longevity -- most famously the diabetes drug metformin (although people aren't expecting a very large increase in lifespan from this, rather at best a kind of proof-of-concept), also the immunosuppresant rapamicyn.  Anything promising here, or is this all small potatoes compared to more ambitious approaches like cellular reprogramming?

I enjoyed this other LessWrong post trying to investigate root causes of aging, which focuses more on macro-scale problems like atheroschlerosis (although many of these must ultimately driven by some kind of cellular-level problems like proteins getting messed up via oxidization).

Fellow Thiel fans may be interested in this post of mine called "X-Risk, Anthropics, & Peter Thiel's Investment Thesis", analyzing Thiel's old essay "The Optimistic Thought Experiment", and trying to figure out how he thinks about the intersection of markets and existential risk.

"Americans eat more fats and oils, more sugars and sweets, more grains, and more red meat; all four items that grew the most in price since 2003."

Nice to know that you can eat healthy -- fish, veggies, beans/nuts, eggs, fresh fruit, etc -- and beat inflation at the same time! (Albeit these healthier foods still probably have a higher baseline price. But maybe not for much longer!)

The linked chart actually makes red meat look fine (beef has middling inflation, and pork has actually experienced deflation), but beverages, another generally unhealthy food, are near the top: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=76961

As to the actual subject of the post, I have to imagine that:

1. housing inflation feels so much worse in superstar cities than everywhere else, so for us cosmopolitan types it's hard to believe that the national average (brought lower by cheap housing across the Rust Belt, etc) isn't way higher.
2. housing inflation is being measured in a way that doesn't indicate the true severity of the economic distortion. Like you say, housing prices cause migration -- SF is not just more expensive but also much smaller, less productive, etc, than it would be with better zoning laws. So only part of the tragedy caused by restrictive housing policy, actually shows up as high housing prices. (You could say the same for health and other things -- healthcare gets more expensive, but surely that also means people forgo certain expensive-but-beneficial treatments? But maybe housing just sees more of this effect than healthcare or education.)

A thoughtful post! I think about this kind of stuff a lot, and wonder what the implications are. If we're more pessimistic about saving lives in sub-saharan africa, should we:

1. promote things like lead removal (similar evidence-backed, scalable intervention as bednets, but aimed more directly at human capital)?
2. promote things like charter cities (untested crazy longshot megaproject, but aimed squarely at transformative political / societal improvements)?
3. switch to bednet-style lifesaving charities in South Asia, like you mention?
4. keep on trucking with our original Givewell-style africa-based lifesaving charities, because even after considering all the above, the original charities still look better than any of the three ideas above?

I would love it if you cross-posted this to the EA Forum (I'm sure you'd get some more criticism there vs Lesswrong, but I think it would nevertheless be a good conversation for them to have!) https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/