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
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
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
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.
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
Part of the secret is not to overbook yourself in the first place. I’m a long-time practitioner of this technique — I say a straightforward no to lots of things, and if I say yes to something, I almost never cancel. And lately I’ve been saying yes more often, because as Khazan writes, getting out and doing stuff, even if it’s potentially uncomfortable and maybe not even your cup of tea, is part of caring for yourself. Human souls are not meant to be left on shelves; they need to run and play with others in the real world.
Running the numbers, Amazon has 35% of US ecommerce. But, it competes with physical retailers as well – it competes with Macy’s, Walmart and Barnes & Noble. On that basis, Amazon’s real market share of its real target market is closer to 6% (it’s 2/3 the size of Walmart)
Prior to 2012, AI results closely tracked Moore’s Law, with compute doubling every 2 years. Post-2012, compute has been doubling every 3.4 months (for a net increase of ~10Mx since then)
The initial advocate for off-planet colonies now concedes that the additional difficulties associated with constructing a space colony would encourage the successful construction of terrestrial lifeboats before attempts are made to construct one on another body. The only reason to still countenance their construction at all is an issue which revealed itself to the advocate for terrestrial biospheres towards the end of the collaboration. A terrestrial lifeboat could end up being easily discontinued and abandoned if funding/political will failed, whereas a space colony would be very difficult to abandon due to the astronomical (pun intended) expense of transporting every colonist back. A return trip for even a relatively modest number of colonists would require billions of $ allocated over several years, by, most importantly, multiple sessions of a congress or parliament. This creates a paradigm where a terrestrial lifeboat, while being less expensive and in many ways more practical, could never be a long term guarantor of human survival do to its ease of decommissioning (as was seen in the Biosphere 2 incident). To be clear, the advocate for terrestrial lifeboats considers this single point sufficient to decide the debate in its entirety and concedes the debate without reservation.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 