more and more the sphere of individual action shrinks and that of collective action grows and, as a result, nothing can get done because there are so many veto players in the system. We have locked ourselves into an innovation prisoner’s dilemma where each player can say no and as a result we are all worse off
Month: December 2019
Multiplex editing
Enhancing Organs for Cryonics, Space and Transplants
They are able to multiplex edit on the repeating gene sequences. The repeating gene sequences are key to many aspects of antiaging and cancer and other diseases. They are working to multiplex editing for enhancing organs. The can make the organs more resistant to cryopreservation and disease immunity. They can make people better able to travel in space and be more radiation resistant

Phone in the bedroom

NIMBY index
the number of veto points over new construction is increasing. 50% of all communities in the Regulation Change index increased regulation, 33% decreased, while only 18% showed no net change
Senior songs
You're so engaging, but we're both aging
At age 99 Alan Tripp wrote a poem called “Best Old Friends” to celebrate the many new friends he made at Beaumont at Bryn Mawr, the Pennsylvania retirement community where he lives. As a gift for Alan’s 100th birthday, his younger friend and neighbor, 88 year-old Marvin Weisbord, set the poem to music. That was the spark that launched Senior Song Book with this dynamic songwriting duo, and inspired a whole community to sing, dance and perform along with them
A Causal Sequence
Here is how I currently understand the relationship between correlation and causality, and the collective findings of meta-scientific research: a shockingly large fraction of psychological research and other fields is simple random noise which cannot be replicated ‘everything is correlated’—even things which seem to have no causal relationship whatsoever most efforts to change human behavior and sociology and economics and education fail in randomized evaluation in every field from medicine to economics, when we directly ask how well correlations predict subsequent randomized experiments, we find that the predictive power is poor all variables are part of enormous dense causal graphs ‘folk causality’ often performs badly, especially in extremely complex fields with ambiguous long-term outcomes
Human Diversity
Nothing we are going to learn will diminish our common humanity. Nothing we learn will justify rank-ordering human groups from superior to inferior — the bundles of qualities that make us human are far too complicated for that. Nothing we learn will lend itself to genetic determinism. We live our lives with an abundance of unpredictability, both genetic and environmental
Automation Crisis?
Even if nearly all currently existing jobs will eventually be automated, as we progress toward that point new jobs will continue to be created for humans, preventing the kind of mass unemployment or low wages that might be expected, as long as the market has time to adjust (which isn’t necessarily the case– if the pace of automating jobs were to speed up enough, we could still see a crisis.) However, once machines surpass human capabilities for a low enough price in all jobs, the entire economy will change and something else will take its place. What that is we can’t really say– our economic models break down, and the future becomes even more difficult to predict. Beyond this point, we don’t even know to what extent humans are still guiding the course of civilization, let alone how employment will work.
Embryonic Selection
Embryos have been chosen to reduce disease risk using pre-implantation genetic testing for polygenic traits, and this has resulted in pregnancy
NYC fails to build
Should the Left embrace Robert Moses more?
Since the mid-1960s—really since the opening of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connecting Brooklyn to Staten Island—no major new piece of public infrastructure has been built within the 5 boroughs of New York City