shilling blogs is encouraged! (at least for anything related, which this is)

Is this really the opposite? Reading that post, I find very little to disagree with.

Being: “If you move these molecules around you can cure cancer and make a near-infinite amount of money”

Humans: “OK!”

For sure, thinking faster alone will hit diminishing returns pretty fast. I think you need to assume the Being is also much “smarter” along all sorts of other dimensions, too.

That’s a good point re: biology. It’s so vast that everyone seems to sub-sub-sub specialize. It’s hard to speculate about what might follow if someone was able to master literally every aspect of biology at the same time.

Re: Trump, my naive model is that people are just complicated and it’s incredibly hard to model them and say how they will respond to a given situation, or how many of the different types of people there are, or exactly what media they’ve consumed, etc. Do you really mean that just using the existing polling data, etc. it should have been possible to be confident?

The main thing that gives me pause there is that some people were very confident that Trump would win, most notably that French guy that made millions betting on the outcome. He definitely made some good points regarding polling analysis, though I wonder if there are other people who could have made equally good points if the election had gone the other way…

Currency is a great incentive. I think a good way of thinking about “rights” is a sort of structure to encourage transfers of currency. For example, should corporations be allowed to put up surveillance balloons and track every vehicle and sell that data to whoever? Or should that be a voluntary transaction, like in your case? (I don’t have an answer, just trying to point to the complexities.)

Thanks, using this terminology, I guess I’m wondering about why different places settled on “inquisitorial” systems vs (whatever the opposite of inquisitorial is)-systems. Naive, it seems like an inquisitorial system would be the obvious way to do it. I’m sure that places with non-inquisitorial systems had reasons for choosing that, but I’m not sure why or what the tradeoffs are.

Well, I have good news for you! If you’re doing pure social science research and you have no affiliation with any federal funded institution, then to the best of my knowledge, there’s absolutely no IRB requirement! (At least as long as you exclude all subjects in Virginia/Maryland/New York.)

Great, I’ll pass this along to a few folks who are interested. The demo page is pretty impressive!

https://chiscraper.github.io/ArXivRoundUpExample.html

To be honest I wasn’t very happy with the word “mentoring” either. What I really wanted was some word with a semantic meaning between “mentoring”, “consulting” and “office hours”? But I liked that “mentoring” emphasizes broader issues. I don’t like that “mentoring” sounds arrogant, but I decided that was a silly reason not to use the word and I’ll just take the reputational hit.

Re your project: I feel honor-bound to stick to my promise to only consider information in the application!