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All of Richard Lucas's Comments + Replies

Reality has a surprising amount of detail
Richard Lucas10

Took me zero time to adopt what jsaltiver says here. I'm fortunate to have had a lot of experience programming, and then recently done a lot of custom furniture and woodworking. There is a very large difference between just thinking about something and working with its physical manifestation (or source code). Often, with wood and buildings, theory is worth a tiny fraction of tacit knowledge.

Something to mix in here: The Secret of Our Success (Henrich) is partly about learning from others, and how that dominates over self-discovered knowledge. It's worth it... (read more)

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What technologies could cause world GDP doubling times to be <8 years?
Answer by Richard Lucas10

It's been said that about half of all people have an IQ less than 100. Some psychologists have pointed out that those with IQs less than 90 have a difficult time finding good work in advanced knowledge-driven economies, and manual labor has been either exported to other countries or replaced with robots, leaving part of the labor pool underutilized.

So the shape of the idea that would generate 9%+ GDP growth is a set of technologies and/or political configurations that bring people of all IQs enthusiastically into the labor force. Not just employment opport... (read more)

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Considerations On Cost Disease
Richard Lucas50

This is an outstanding article, and it deserves a lot more analysis and debate. Here are some of my initial thoughts.

First is that the phenomenon could be nearly entirely to rent-seeking. You said the key words: "all of the important things". Education is critical, health care is critical. K-12 is critical as preparation for college, and getting a high reputation college is critical for status and earnings throughout life. The medical system is obviously directly critical to health. The offerors of these services have an effective monopoly (as a collective... (read more)

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1Victorfencer
Sorry to revive an old topic, but there's one more factor in the education space that I want to point out for where the money goes: Supplies, textbooks, and digital resources.  These companies are often duopolies or have resisted disruption over the course of the past few years, and work hard to build a closed ecosystem as much as possible. Textbooks didn't get upgraded with anything fresh for years, ctrl+c, ctrl+v for too many of the editions.  I don't have any numbers for this next bit, just anecdotal evidence: Google Classroom is eating everyone for lunch, but there were a lot of folks who were shockingly bad at implementing it pre pandemic. There's a lot of resource bloat, underutilization, and scattered focus in the urban education field. If the district buys NewsELA for everyone, but the teachers only use it 5 times a year, is that optimal? Discovery education? Phet (amazing free resources) means that I'll only go to those pages a few times. What makes the most sense? Focus, consistency, retention, and discernment do wonders in the education field, but it doesn't scale all that effectively. 
Should we postpone AGI until we reach safety?
Richard Lucas10

It's not clear to me that we have a choice on postponement. If company A refrains, then company B has an edge. If as a nation we constrain companies A and B, then country X will not, and gain an edge. And if country X and we sign a treaty, then country Y will have an edge. And if all countries refrain, then a criminal or terrorist group outside of all civilized nations will have an edge. 

The longer that the postponement occurs, the easier it will become for an entity that is outside of the agreements to create AGI on its own. The bonus value (power) g... (read more)

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1otto.barten
Richard, thanks for your reply. Just for reference, I think this goes under argument 5, right? It's a powerful argument, but I think it's not watertight. I would counter it as follows: 1. As stated above, I think the aim should be an ideally global treaty were no country is allowed to go beyond a certain point of research. The countries should then enforce the treaty on all research institutes/companies within their borders. You're right that in this case, a criminal or terrorist group will have an edge. But seeing how hard it currently is for legally allowed and indeed heavily funded groups to develop AGI, I'm not convinced that terrorist or criminal groups could easily do this. For reference, I read this paper by a lawyer this week on an actual way to implement such a treaty. I think signing such a treaty will not affect countries without effective AGI research capabilities, so they won't have a reason not to sign it, and will benefit from the increased existential safety. The ones likely least inclined to sign up will be the countries that are trying to develop AGI now. So effectively, I think a global treaty and a US/China deal would amount to roughly the same thing. 2. You could make the same argument for tax, (not profitable) climate action, R&D, defense spending against a common enemy, and probably many other issues. Does that mean we have zero tax, climate action, R&D, or defense? No, because at some point countries realize it's better to not be the relative winner, than to all loose. In many cases this is then formalized in treaties, with varying but nonzero success. I think that could work in this case as well. Your argument is indeed a problem in all of the fields I mention, so you have a point. But I think, fortunately, it's not a decisive point.
Where do (did?) stable, cooperative institutions come from?
Answer by Richard Lucas50

A lot of the answer to this question is in Charles Murray's Coming Apart (2010). In it he makes extensive use of Government statistics from surveys and economic analysis to trace the fortunes of working class and upper income community types from 1960 to 2010. There are four key founding virtues: industriousness, honesty, religiosity, and marriage. America had these in abundance from its founding up through 1960. After 1960 upper classes retained most of them, but the working classes experienced major declines. These were societal in extent; no blame assig... (read more)

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1tivelen
Why that happened seems to be the key to reversing it, though. If the four virtues are needed to get things back together, but they can fade from society for reasons unknown, trying to get them back is like bailing water from a sinking ship.