All of Richard121's Comments + Replies
If you already know that an adverse event is highly likely for your specific circumstances, then it is likely that the insurer will refuse to pay out for not disclosing "material information" - a breach of contract.
Loss leaders are common, but rely on a reasonably accurate prediction of what that loss will be. and simple errors are of course common.
I think "nobody knows what they're doing" is an overstatement. Insurance companies make significant profit, and very rarely fail. The usual complaint I see from investors is that some years an insurer has made l...
In the majority of cases the insurer has more knowledge, as they can afford the time to do the research.
This is of course why any insurance market must have a great many suppliers. If there are only one or two insurers, they can easily set the premiums to make supernormal profits because they are 'competing' against consumers with very little knowledge, instead of other insurers who have similar knowledge levels.
Indeed. In reality, the vast majority of people do not have sufficient information to make reasonable estimates of the probability of loss - and in many cases, even the size of the loss.
Eg a landlord is required to rebuild the place and temporarily rehome the tenants while that's being done in the event of the house being destroyed by fire or flood. They're also liable for compensation and healthcare of affected third parties - and legal cost of determining those figures.
They can probably calculate the rebuilding cost and a reasonable upper bound on temporary housing. But third party liability?
So, it still comes back to vibes.
A refused claim is (legally) an event that was never covered by the insurance, and is therefore irrelevant if the question is "take policy A or not at all".
After all, if that event occurred without insurance, it is still not covered.
However, this is important to consider when comparing different policies with different amounts of coverage. Eg "comprehensive" car insurance compared with "third party, fire, and theft".
"Rates" of unpaid claims only make sense in a situation where the law allows the insurer to breach their contracts. In that situation, the value of insurance plummets, and possibly reaches zero.
For those who would like a hint.
In English, "And" generally indicates addition, "Per" division.
Now consider which of the following makes sense:
Ferrets and seconds
Ferrets per second
1The issue there is that "best X" varies wildly depending on purpose, budget and usage.
Take a pen: For me, I mostly keep pens in my bag to make quick notes and lend out. The overriding concern is that the pens are very cheap, can be visually checked whether full or empty, and never leak, because they will spend a lot of time bouncing around in my bag, and I am unlikely to get them back when loaned.
A calligrapher has very different requirements.
1The really short answer:
No. The lab would not shut down. It would probably not even notify anyone outside the company of the alignment problem or the escape attempts.
The evidence would be buried, and is unlikely to come to the attention of anyone outside the lab until after a devastating incident.
For real-world examples, look to other industries.
Perhaps the two clearest examples are:
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The UK Post Office "Horizon" computer system. This was known to be making egregious errors, yet postmasters were prosecuted and imprisoned on the known-faulty say-so of the
The advice we were given was "Fed is best".
However, we also very much wanted to breastfeed, primarily due to convenience and cost.
Getting started was very difficult. We used a small number of premixed formula bottles, two of which were "free samples". We almost gave up.
A lactation consultant helped us find a comfortable position, and eventually ended up with the "rugby hold", which makes no intuitive sense whatsoever - the infant is held under the arm, legs almost behind the mother.
Once started, breastfeeding turned out to have several clear advantages, so...
Indeed. The incentives to put new ones on the market are very limited, due to legalities and economics.
A corporation has a limited window of patent monopoly, so a fairly short time period to recoup their investment to develop, licence and build out manufacturing capacity - thus need to sell it for a high price or sell high volumes.
It is a long and expensive process to get a new compound approved for use as a food additive, and it needs to be done separately in each major jurisdiction - at least China, USA and EU.
A new sweetener is directly competing agains...
I think there is a significant societal difference, because that last step is a lot bigger than the ones before.
In general, businesses tend to try to reduce headcount as people retire or leave, even if it means some workers have very little to do. Redundancies are expensive and take a long time - the larger they are, the longer it takes.
Businesses are also primarily staffed and run by humans who do not wish to lose their own jobs.
For a real-world example of a task that is already >99% automatable, consider real estate conveyancing.
The actual transaction...
1000x energy consumption in 10-20 years is a really wild prediction, I would give it a <0.1% probability.
It's several orders of magnitude faster than any previous multiple, and requires large amounts of physical infrastructure that takes a long time to construct.
1000x is a really, really big number.
Baseline
2022 figures, total worldwide consumption was 180 PWh/year[1]
Of that:
- Oil: 53 PWh
- Coal: 45 PWh
- Gas: 40 PWh
- Hydro: 11 PWh
- Nuclear: 7 PWh
- Modern renewable: 13 PWh
- Traditional: 11 PWh
(2 sig fig because we're talking about OOM here)
There has only been a x10 mult...
2I think you aren't engaging with the reasons why smart people think that 1000x energy consumption could happen soon. It's all about the growth rates. Obviously anything that looks basically like human industrial society won't be getting to 1000x in the next 20 years; the concern is that a million superintelligences commanding an obedient human nation-state might be able to design a significantly faster-growing economy. For an example of how I'm thinking about this, see this comment.
I strongly disagree. The underlying reason is that an actual singularity seems reasonably likely.
This involves super-exponential growth driven by vastly superhuman intelligence.
Large scale fusion or literal dyson spheres are both quite plausible relatively soon (<5 years) after AGI if growth isn't restricted by policy or coordination.
IIUC, 1000x was chosen to be on-the-order-of the solar energy reaching the earth
I think the gap between AI R&D being 99% automatable and being actually automated will be approximately one day
That's wildly optimistic. There aren't any businesses that can change anywhere near that fast.
Even if they genuinely wanted to, the laws 99% of business are governed by mean that they genuinely can't do that. The absolute minimum time for such radical change under most jurisdictions is roughly six months.
Looking at the history of step changes in industry/business such as the industrial and information revolutions, I think the minimum plausible...
The main reason for everything being in a crappy state is almost certainly (>90%) widespread corruption.
Everyone who can is creaming off a little bit, leaving very little for the actual materiél and training.
So shoddy materials, poor to no training, missing equipment, components and spares.
That said, while it is very likely that the Russian nuclear arsenal is in extremely poor state, and I'd possibly go as high as 50/50 that their ICBMs could launch but cannot be aimed (as that takes expensive components that are easy to steal/not deliver and hide that ...
It is absolutely certain that there will be more "variants of interest".
This is basically the evolutionary modelling that pretty much all Governments have ignored, every time - Delta and Omicron were predicted by all eviolutionary biologists.
The open questions are:
- Whether there will be a new variant of interest that is notably more infectious, and thus becomes dominant after Omicron.
In the UK, Delta completely outcompeted all other variants in around 3-4 months (>95% of all sequenced cases were Delta). Omicron is expected to do the same by Feb if not ea
In many ways COVID19 is irrelevant.
It's already spreading in multiple countries, and is very likely to become endemic.
However: It is not alone, there will be future viruses.
We should be looking to create habits that will protect us from both COVID19 and all future local epidemics and pandemics.
That means habits that can be maintained indefinitely, not short-term changes that are not sustainable.
Things like washing hands and using hand sanitizer and creams are habits you can learn and maintain.
Checking everyone for fever, selling your stocks to buy X is not sustainable, and so these behaviours will be quickly forgotten.
This makes little sense to me. Viruses are different, spread differently, and will react differently to environmental changes.
And I do not understand why checking for fever routinely is less tractable as a routine habit than, say, using humidifers. And distracting from exclusively promoting handwashing seems like a huge net negative, given that we still haven't gotten people to change their habits.
Hand sanitizer is a poor substitute for actually washing your hands with soap and water.
Coronaviruses are "enveloped" viruses, which means they have a fat-based shell that protects the genetic material and (presumably) aids it in infecting a cell.
Destroying this shell "kills" the virus.
While an alcohol sanitizer can of course dissolve the fats in the shell, it is difficult to get enough alcohol all over the skin to do this.
Soap is more effective because it actively attacks fats, and of course washing your hands provides far more volume and time in which to destroy the virus shells.
Some data from the BBC comparing them: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105
The current overall death rate is estimated at approx. 1%, with a fairly large number of cases.
It has spread much further and faster than SARS or MERS, but is far less dangerous than either.
Which makes sense - a disease which incapacitates or kills in a high percentage of cases is unlikely to spread as fast as one which has mild symptoms in most infected people.
It now appears almost certain to become endemic. The real goal is to slow down the spread sufficiently to develop vac
...Couple of numbers to think about:
A flu shot covering the four or five "most common" viruses (inc. bird flu) in 2019/2020 cost $10 privately in the UK, and $20-$75 in the USA.
In the UK, everyone registered with a GP who is at increased risk of pneumonia is offered the shot for free, regardless of status. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/vaccinations/who-should-have-flu-vaccine/
In the USA, the Affordable Care Act made the flu shot free for most people who have health insurance, and for some groups without insurance. Approx. 10% of US citizens have no health ins
...If you live in a nation that has universal and free healthcare, then there is in fact very little reason to worry.
Wash your hands and practice good hygiene.
- As you should anyway, because that reduces the spread of other diseases inc. flu and colds, which are already endemic.
If you live in a nation like the USA, then you should worry, for several reasons:
-
Many workers cannot afford to take any time off, and cannot afford to go to their doctor for any treatment until it is already life threatening to them. By that time they are likely to have spread it
D is based on a serious misunderstanding of how private health insurance works.
NHS:
The only limiting factor chosen by the NHS (undertaken by the NICE commitee) is to determine which specific investigations and treatments are 'worth' funding.
For treatments, they use a value function called a "Quality Adjusted Life-Year" (QALY), and compare that to the cost of the treatment. At the time of writing, it's automatically approved if the cost is shown to be under £10,000 per QALY gained, more efficacious at the same price than an already-...
I think the USA antipathy to a general health service likely stems from this irrational argument:
"If I don't do anything bad, I will not become poor, lose my job, or have a chronic illness that causes me to lose my health insurance.
Thus anyone who is poor or has a chronic illness must deserve to be so.
If they deserve it, then I should not have to pay towards their care and so they should lose their health insurance."
This is of course backed up and encouraged by the insurance and private health providers who benefit greatly from the excessive fees they can charge.
"Corporate leaders might be greedy, hubristic, and/or reckless"
They are or will be, with a probability greater than 99%. These characteristics are generally rewarded in the upper levels of the corporate world - even a reckless bad bet is rarely career-ending above a certain level of personal wealth.
The minimum buy-in cost to create have a reasonable chance of creating some form of AGI is at least $10-100 billion dollars in today's money. This is a pretty stupendous amount of money, only someone who is exceedingly greedy, hubristic and/or reckless is likely... (read more)