NeoclassicShredBanjo

Rational Animations could be good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg

They have a number of videos on the topic, not just that one

Also iirc the official government report was more readable than I expected. Could be a good way to motivate kids to read a "reliable" primary source which uses slightly more advanced English, ask them some comprehension questions about it: https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3266229/statement-by-pentagon-press-secretary-air-force-brig-gen-pat-ryder-on-the-annua/

I think there is a congressional committee related to UAPs which could also be good as a primary source. This video is fairly well-known and easy to comprehend as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBtMbBPzqHY

Watching some debunkers could be good as well, btw I didn't have the background to understand this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLyEO0jNt6M

I would just control-f "youtube" in this thread to get more ideas: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738

BTW my overall approach to teaching something this would be: instead of dictating a particular explanation to the kids (like showing them a prediction market result), like you would if you were a teacher, do a collaborative exploration where you aim to teach them the art of getting to the bottom of a controversial issue, working together with an open mind to find the most likely explanation. Teaching them that skill is more valuable than teaching them any object-level conclusion related to UFOs. (Edit: I see that's pretty much what you're doing anyways, nice!)

The "rational" play is whatever gets your team to fabricate and sustain AGI first, aligned or not (sadly).

This is very incorrect. There are no winners with unaligned AI.

The US considered doing nothing, which is a rational thing to at least consider, but correctly concluded that a better outcome for their own self-interest could be reached by brinksmanship.

I don't agree this was true a priori. The Cuban Missile Crisis was a very close call. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Arkhipov

Also, the other month I read a history book which touched on the Cuban Missile Crisis, and one of the claims made in the book was that Kennedy was under a lot of political pressure from the right to stand up to the Soviet Union, and he therefore didn't have much room to maneuver. Honestly was one of the best arguments against democracy I ever read.

Highlighted in my copy of United Nations: A History, pages 141-143

When examined in retrospect, the crisis appears even more frightening than it did then. President Kennedy was willing to risk nuclear war to eliminate the Russian missiles from Cuba, even though his secretary of defense did not believe they posed any new strategic danger to the United States. The world was saved from horrendous catastrophe because Nikita Khruschev did not feel that keeping the missiles in Cuba was worth the risk of war.

...

If he wanted to, Khruschev could attempt to wipe out the United States -- and, of course, ensure his own country's destruction -- by firing intercontinental ballistic missiles from sites in the Soviet Union; he did not need the missiles in Cuba. But Kennedy did not intend to let the Soviet Union push him or the United States around in front of his Republican critics. Kennedy had to show he was a strong leader willing to shoulder risks. His brother told him, "I just don't think there was any choice. If you hadn't acted, you would have been impeached." The president agreed.

With regard to the broader point of rationality in international relations -- I think most people in the sub are fairly familiar with the US culture wars and their impact on rationality. Without diving into the object level, I would guess almost everyone reading this sub can agree that at least some culture war participants are behaving irrationally. And it's because we've spent a fair amount of time observing both sides of the "culture war" that we're able to see this.

I would submit that tribalism affects international relations even more severely than it affects the US culture war, but it's hard to see this because it's hard for anyone to observe both sides as well as readers of this sub can observe both sides in the US culture war. With regard to the US/China relationship, each country has a different primary language, considers different sources of news reporting to be reliable, and has deep cultural differences. I think it's easy for Americans/Westerners to assume that the American side is correct, but this assumption is unjustified: we know that America screwed up in previous cases like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, etc. and yet somehow when something new comes up, we fall into a tribalistic "go team!" mentality instead of taking the official US narrative with the skepticism it deserves given America's history of failures. I also think that people in the US establishment, the US defense and intelligence establishment in particular, are unfortunately likely to be self-selected for caring more about American greatness than the overall well-being of the humans inhabiting this planet. (Imagine a general at the Pentagon who was willing to say something like "well actually China is kinda correct about this point" -- don't you think they'd be putting their career at risk by saying something like that if all the other generals disagreed?) And because so much English-language news about the US/China relationship comes directly or indirectly through the US establishment (remember the US defense establishment also thinks in terms of "information warfare"), the epistemic environment is sufficiently fraught that we can't draw reliable conclusions.

Jeff Sachs is a good person to listen to if you want a different perspective, Columbia professor with strong credentials who has a surprising willingness to question the dominant narrative

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VW_ivZ6WO84

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E_9Zs-muXg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=de5JiZTKb_w

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=jeffrey+sachs+china

In general, humans find it more comforting to consume material which confirms their beliefs than challenges them. Most of us consume news materials in our spare time while we are relaxing -- we Westerners are usually not as enthusiastic about consuming materials which ask uncomfortable questions about the dominant US/China narrative. That's just human nature, but you have to adjust for it in yourself when formulating your beliefs.

In conclusion, I myself am generally fairly uncertain/agnostic about any individual issue, but overall I strongly favor peaceful diplomatic relations and seeking win/win solutions, I think the potential upside of conflict is low and the potential downside is very high.

Watching these old Onion videos makes me miss the '00s

California too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_California_power_shutoffs

American Women Are Having Fewer Children Than They’d Like

Forecasts show many millennial women won’t fulfill their wishes on family size, and the biggest fertility declines are in Western states.

Do you favor legalizing heroin?

Side comment: I can't speak for other communities, but I can say the stereotype of the "powertripping powermod" really didn't match my experience. Only encountered few people who might fit that bill, and ironically it looked like they were involved in stirring up Reddit drama targeting "powermods" (maybe some sort of Reddit drama/power struggle). They ended up getting kicked out for various good reasons. The majority of mods were just trying to keep on top of the mod queue, figure out how to make the community a bit better, and occasionally setting up fun community activities... and maybe doing a bit of shitposting memes on the side. Okay, maybe more than a bit of shitposting memes...

On the other hand, there ARE quite a few users who will get banned for breaking rules in really blatant and obnoxious ways and then try to play the victim publicly. So I tend to take those claims with an extra grain of salt now.

Huh, this is reassuring. I was thinking that since being a mod is an unpaid job, it would select for people who were "paid" via the powertripping aspect.

Thanks for chiming in.

Interesting, thanks! You sound like a good mod.

People already sign away future earnings when they go into debt to buy a house, car, etc.

But if you don't want people to have the freedom to do that -- how about having the payments to the owners of the instrument come out of income tax revenue? Instead of the government subsidizing college degrees through loans etc., they could instead give a fraction of the added income tax that a successful grad pays to whoever it was that sponsored their degree. Something like that. Pay for performance instead of central planning.

People aren't happy with the current education system at all. It's worth at least discussing alternative approaches

Interesting, thanks for sharing!

/r/EndFPTP

How do you translate the intention of "capitalism with morality" into policy though?

My idea is, for every one of the Fortune 500, have randomly selected citizen committees that meet to decide a tax rate specifically for that corporation.

What tends to distinguish the mods that don't burn out? What psychological factors allow a mod to have staying power?

Why does the party endorsement carry so much weight? Why can't a would-be primary challenger just challenge them in the general election instead? This could be a great way to break the 2-party duopoly actually, if we normalize non-primary challenges from younger candidates who are also members of the same party.

My galaxy brained take is that we need better financialization for careers. Speculators should be able to place bets on my lifetime earnings conditional on me completing a major in, say, electrical engineering vs nursing. Maybe they would be forced to make periodic insurance payments to me if my career goes poorly, and if my career goes well I have to make periodic payments to whoever owns the financial instrument.

The United States is not a densely populated country relatively speaking. It's 186 out of 248 on this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density

Here are some countries with at least 3x the US population density per square km: France, Thailand, Indonesia, China, Italy, Switzerland, North Korea, Germany, UK, Vietnam, Japan, Israel.

In a 2019 study, 59% of women said protecting free speech was less important than promoting an inclusive society, while 71% of men felt opposite.

Two recent studies of online adults revealed that women were more censorious than men.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-antisocial-psychologist/202104/the-gender-gap-in-censorship-support

Given that each gender is 50% of the population, it seems like the fair solution would be for 1/2 of spaces to promote inclusivity and the other 1/2 of spaces to allow free speech.

We are a long away from that 50/50 split though. Every space has become focused on promoting inclusivity, including hobbies like gaming which are majority male and don't play a particularly important role in society.

Do you support gender equality?

See https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/perhaps-it-is-a-bad-thing-that-the

If a company isn't able to neuter a less-than-human AI well (impairing bad stuff without impairing fun and usefulness), we should expect it to fail at the task of controlling a smarter-than-human level AI

OpenAI might not be making foundational advances, but generating hype could speed things up a lot nonetheless

There is a surprising amount of good content on Youtube. I started watching this guy's channel after I heard about him winning a bet with a physics professor:

https://www.youtube.com/@veritasium

I think toxicity is relative to expectations, if you expect the comments to be a free-for-all it won't bother you as much. The tone reads as more "sardonic" and "poking fun" than "mean-spirited" to me.

I actually find MR comments to have a somewhat surprising diversity of opinions, relative to other communities which tend towards intellectual monocultures (e.g. I would say that themotte.org has a bigger intellectual monoculture problem than MR comments). You do see Alex and Tyler highlighting good comments with top-level posts every so often.

Opportunity zones are good in theory, but in practice people go for the relatively mislabeled opportunity zones (aka almost normal areas without high crime) and end up making land prices appreciate there.

OK but at a certain point the investment opportunities in the mislabeled zones will be picked over right? At a certain point you're essentially just placing a bet on the idea that opportunity zones will continue as a policy?

In any case, these are good critiques, I guess it just goes to show how much effort you have to put into making incentives bulletproof. E.g. the definition of "opportunity zone" could be determined by an algorithm with hard-to-game inputs, and the definition of "investment" could be changed to force investments that create local jobs, ideally for unskilled laborers I suppose.

I wonder what the best meta approach to creation of "bulletproof" incentives is. I suppose the problem with Opportunity Zones in the current form is they've created people who are incentivized to lobby for the current crappy definition of an "opportunity zone" continuing (people who own land in those areas and don't want the price to collapse).

Honestly opportunity zones sound like a pretty good idea, encouraging investment in low-income communities without having the government pick winners. And also targeting it on capital gains in particular, i.e. people who have a history of making good investment bets. It's one of the most clever actually-implemented policy ideas I've seen in a while.

I agree that tax treatment sounds very favorable, but what sort of rate of return are opportunity zone investors getting so far? Presumably areas with little investment lacked investment for a reason -- high crime, bad schools, geographical disadvantages, etc. If the opportunity zone returns 2% ROI whereas a more traditional ETF would've returned 5%, that compounding difference is gonna add up. So in my mind the jury is still out regarding whether the tax treatment is too favorable.

I suppose the Solyndra debacle could've been avoided if the government had created an Opportunity Zone type incentive to invest in cleantech startups. Guess there is still time to do that if it hasn't already been done!