Richard Lucas
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Richard Lucas has not written any posts yet.
Richard Lucas has not written any posts yet.
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 opportunity, but situations that would be gleefully embraced, and productive, regardless of IQ. Work that is useful and fulfilling and... (read more)
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) on their services, so they can increase prices and not see a decline in quantity of goods. That the money is not... (read more)
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) gained by breaking the treaty grows greater as others refrain, reaching its maximum when everyone except the rulebreaker refrain.
All participants are in a dollar auction.
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 assigned, it is simply what happened. The two classes have diverged strongly, and while the upper income class will be fine, without these... (read more)
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 to reflect on whether/how he and the other cultural evolutionists are right about this when so much actual knowledge must be accumulated via tacit means. "Learning from others" might be just as bad as thought knowledge unless it is done the right way.