utopia
@bostromsutopia
https://nickbostrom.com/utopia optimising for nick bostrom's utopia
Maybe in 30 years we’ll be working in the back of restaurants in China washing their dishes. You laugh but why couldn’t it happen? The idea that the center of economic gravity could move from Europe to the United States was once a joke but here we are.
In thirty years, we will all be driving a scooter on the sidewalk, beeping at pedestrians? Or have a human street sweeper, working 12 hour days for less than a thousand dollars a month? Hmmmm
Men who are physically stronger and women who are more physically attractive tend to be more likely to get angry. Social emotions such an anger and gratitude evolved to help people navigate the adaptive problems posed by social interactions. Sell et al found evidence that…
🆕 Nobility in current circumstances depends on an unusual way of perceiving, understanding, and acting. You BECOME the kingdom, and positive visions emerge from your mythic engagement in it. 🔗⤵️ Link in reply tweet!
Industrialized societies may need a radical cultural turnaround that makes forming stable relationships and raising lots of children a priority. This could be fixed in 1-2 generations, but requires a total change in the mindset of media and educators.
South Korea's shocking population pyramid shows that demographic collapse is well underway. An added headwind in Korea (and China, too) is that there are a lot fewer women than men in the crucial 25-35 age range, the result of sex-selective abortions a generation ago.
Here's the female side of the South Korean age pyramid, in dark blue, overlaid on the male side. For the 25-35 age group, there are approximately 115 men for every 100 women.
If you flip this around I think you can see why modern life is so frustrating for progressives, why they’re so neurotic about everything, and upset all the time. If you ignore all the trade-offs, if you just simply don’t care about the morality of forcing third parties to pay for…
What you should notice immediately, though, is the difference in who should be responsible for solving this problem. On the one hand, you could have the mother not work, in which case her and her husband are directly solving the problem of childcare for their own family. On the…
Lol wut Like if you were a mosquito? How would that be the same in any sense of what that might mean? I think the reality is almost the exact opposite of this. Your experience in your body is absolutely unique and nothing like any other experience in any other body.
A hallmark of human intelligence is the capacity for rapid adaptation, solving new problems quickly under novel and unfamiliar conditions. How can we build machines to do so? In our new preprint, we propose that any general intelligence system must have an adaptive world model,…
It seems really nuts that we are living in the most mind-bendingly advanced technoscientific society ever and yet the answer to every theory here about the health effects of *bread* is "uhh (sweating) we're really not sure."
Made in Zimbabwe blueberries. A North American fruit. Farmed by Europeans. In Africa. Sold in Asia.
Desperate to make friends after transferring to public high school, I learned something fast: hating the same person was the quickest way to form a social identity. “Oh, you hate her? Cool, I’ll smile and nod while you talk smack.” Truly awful, but effective. That cultural…
US/China moves ahead of meeting in Sweden: US threatens to shutdown TikTok w/o US ownership. China threatens to block Hutchison sales of 40+ ports w/o stake for Cosco. Bessent said talks w/ China include Russia/Iran oil buy China has stopped importing energy product + soybean…
Fascinating conversation on the extent to which individual skill versus teaching methods matter in math. Justin’s empirical work here is phenomenal. Linking his post but the one above it is worth reading first.
Really interesting. Here's my evaluation of all the concrete examples you provided: --- EXAMPLE 1 > "But when in a process of solving something else (like a word problem) two unknown quantities come together in two different ways, and you get two equations, she wouldn't jump…
Medieval people regularly cleaned their mattresses, they actively combatted fleas and were terrified of bad smells so did everything to avoid them. They had pillows. Blankets were washed more than once a year. Livestock didn't live in the same room as the people, they lived…
Japan had a flooding problem in Saitama. To solve this, they built 4 miles of underground tunnels 160 ft below the surface, five inflows, and an underground water tank the size of 140 olympic swimming pools Most problems are solvable if you *actually* try
From my presentation at the 28th Annual meeting of the @ASSC2025 . @theASSC Presenting Cognitive Carrying Capacity (CCC), as a candidate for an algorithm that determines and predicts the scale of self in agents.
YAWN 🥱 MISSILE DEFENSE IS OVERSOLD = SCAM WSJ excerpts below - but see my remarks in this Q&A x.com/hsu_steve/stat… "inadequate for a world where cheap, voluminous ballistic missiles have become the aerial weapon of choice" “We are at long last waking up..." ARE WE? "It…
I went on at length bc there's a long history and lots of debate over missile defense that's largely forgotten outside the Physics community!
they fucking did it they genetically edited mosquitoes so they can’t transmit malaria. and made the mutation self-replicating. edited mosquitoes and every descendant can’t infect humans.