challenger22

This is mostly as a reply to Eliezer Yudkowsky-

I've been in the rationalist community for quite a while, this is the first time I've noticed you here on HN. It is really funny to observe how much people want to argue against you when you condense your point down into a terse statement. Looking through your past comments, it is a very common pattern of behavior.

syn0byte- the man you are replying to is fairly well-connected. I would take the words he said as a credible anecdote- he hangs out with plutocrats enough to know what he said.

I think that even long-term the approach as described in TFA will always require many hours of work for an hour of time saved. The saner way to do it is probably have direct personal assistance for the blind. Phone call systems for the deaf and hard of hearing have been in place for decades, and many of these systems rely on direct personal assistance.

The expected steady-state outcome of this situation is that all website-owning educational companies will be targeted for lawsuits, many of which are valid, and many of which are not. The net effect of these lawsuits will primarily be a massive loss of productivity. It is very technically challenging and labor intensive to make websites accessible to the blind or otherly disabled, and doing so is to the benefit of a very small population, who will continue to primarily use other communication platforms anyway. Net effect: For every hour of time saved for the blind or otherly disabled, dozens of hours of time spent by others. A saner society would choose a different path.

I wish I could see actual statistics on this, I admit this is wild speculation on my part.

I see a screaming face in the article's top picture. A gaping maw of horror!

You state that there is nothing cultural about birth rates and then list several cultural factors influencing birth rates. And then you state that there is nothing we can reasonably do to increase birth rates, even though most of the factors you mentioned are not set in stone.

I'm not even sure what you are trying to say.

no Excel as an alternative to google sheets? aww.

Congratulations, you have disproven statistical evidence by providing an anecdote.

I would argue that the primary mechanism is cultural changes effecting the fertility rate. Japan suffers a declining population not because of its technology, but because of its culture. Population growth rate peaked in 1968. Up until 1968, lots of evidence social scientists had to work with indicated that technological and social advancement increased the fertility rate (notwithstanding life expectancy changes and rich vs poor countries). Just because cultural changes over the past 51 years have been toward lower birth rates, does not mean that this will continue.

You cannot predict the direction that culture will change. Any predictions I make about this are extremely speculative, but it is easily imaginable that 20 years from now the zeitgeist reacts against the corpus of current culture to be more family-oriented. Think about how much you hear people complain against "the machine." Whether it's on r/latestagecapitalism, or r/the_donald, everyone hates the piss out of broad society, and may find solace in tight-knit families.

More like:

The guy that designed the flight control surfaces of the F-22 did so using an elaborate Excel spreadsheet powered by 4,000 lines of uncommented VBA filled with aerodynamics equations, and he retired 3 years ago.

You didn't make an effort to charitably interpret my question. My question is essentially about whether transient response to changes in albedo occur primarily over the course of days or primarily over the course of years.

Albedo is important, being snide is not.

Interesting, thanks. The mechanisms that cause such a delayed temperature response are still opaque though, figure I gotta read more in-depth technical stuff to really understand.

Because China is emotionally distant enough from most HN commenters that it does not trigger a flame war.

>Even if we completely stop emitting CO2 right now (which we can't), there would still be too much CO2 in the atmosphere for some time, leading to further heating and longer melting

Do you have any data on this? If you look at how quickly things cool off at night, Earth's biosphere reaches steady-state thermal equilibrium over the course of a few days. Your claim is essentially that we've already set off an albedo forcing function that we can't stop, and which is also stronger than existing negative feedback loops. Seems unlikely to me.