It looks like there's a good chance that it's going to rain tomorrow, so we will gather at the trainstation and decide based on the weather and the number of people that show up whether to go with the original plan or just go grabs some drinks in the city center.
We'll probably wait for about half an hour. If you are planning on coming and can't make it at 15:30, please let me know so we can wait for you/let you know where we are going.
If the thing your making exists and is this cheap then why is Pharma leaving the money on the floor and not mass producing this?
There are a number of costs that Moderna/Pfizer/Astrazenica incur that a homebrew vaccine does not. Of the top of my head:
1. Salaries for the (presumably highly educated) lab techs that put this stuff together. I don't know johnswentwort background, but presumably he wouldn't exactly be asking minimum wage if he was doing this commercially.
2. Costs of running large scale trials and going through all the paperwork to get FDA approval. I think I'm generally more in favour of organisations like the FDA than a lot of people
here, but even I expect this to be a very non-insignificant number.
3. Various taxes and costs of shipping/storing the vaccine until it can get to customers.
4. Costs of liability and a desire for the company to make a profit on this (as well as to pay the salaries for the all of the people needed to keep a large company running).
Given all that I don't think the gap between this and the commercial vaccines is that insane.
Would also prefer fewer twitter links.
You're not limited to one simulacrum level per unit of information. What you're describing is just combining level 1 (reasonable intervention) and level 2 (influencing others to wear a mask).
I honestly don't understand what that thing is, actually.
This was also my first response when reading the article, but on second glance I don't think that is entirely fair. The argument I want to convey with "Everything is chemicals!" is something along the lines of "The concept that you use the word chemicals for is ill-defined and possibly incoherent and I suspect that the negative connotations you associate with it are largely undeserved.", but that is not what I'm actually communicating.
Suppose I successfully convince people that everything is, in fact, chemicals, people start using the word chemicals in a strictly technical sense and use the word blorps for what is currently the common sense definition of chemicals. In this situation "Everything is chemicals!" stops being a valid counterargument, but blorps is still just as ill-defined and incoherent a concept as it was before. People correctly addressed the concern I raised, but not the concern I had, which suggest that I did not properly communicate my concern in the first place.
There isn't an obvious question that, if we could just ask an Oracle AI, the world would be saved.
"How do I create a safe AGI?"
Edit: Or, more likely, "this is my design for an AGI, (how) will running this AGI result in situations that I would be horrified by if they occure?"
I don't think it is realistic to aim for no relevant knowledge getting lost even if your company loses half of its employees in one day. A bus factor of five is already shockingly competent when compared to any company I have ever worked for, going for a bus factor of 658 is just madness.
One criticism, why bring up Republicans, I'm not even a Republican and I sort of recoiled at that part.
Agreed. Also not a Republican (or American, for that matter), but that was a bit off putting. To quote Eliezer himself:
In Artificial Intelligence, and particularly in the domain of nonmonotonic reasoning, there's a standard problem: "All Quakers are pacifists. All Republicans are not pacifists. Nixon is a Quaker and a Republican. Is Nixon a pacifist?"
What on Earth was the point of choosing this as an example? To rouse the political emotions of the readers and distract them from the main question? To make Republicans feel unwelcome in courses on Artificial Intelligence and discourage them from entering the field?
Funding this Journal of High Standards wouldn't be a cheap project
So where is the money going to come from? You're talking about seeing this as a type of grant, but the amount of money available for grants and XPrize type organizations is finite and heavily competed for. How are you going to convince people that this is a better way of making scientific progress than the countless other options available?
The media very rarely lies