sarbaz

As copyrighted material, it should be required that a copy be stored with library of Congress.

It used to be that LoC submission was part of the deal with copyright, but somehow we forgot that and important history has already been lost.

And, in particular, I also think that nuclear winter is another one of these over-hyped scenarios. If you do the napkin-math it doesn't really work out.

Nuclear war will probably result in every major metropolitan area in the participating countries being obliterated. But I'm willing to bet that non participating countries will survive with their civilization intact. Especially countries with high food security that can deal with total collapse of international trade.

The article has some great examples of risks that were hyped out of proportion to their true severity. Should these things be considered? Yes. But only a little. If you halt programs completely for tail risks you'll never get anywhere.

Modern examples, IMO, are:

- Kessler Syndrome

- Trying to prevent an asteroid hitting the earth

- Nuclear war making the entire earth uninhabitable

It's worth pointing out that the worst possible layout for keyboards might actually be one of the best possible layouts for phones.

It's just that a name is a case-sensitive string. If you said 'france is having a heatwave', 'FrAnCE is having a heatwave', or 'FRANCE is having a heatwave', I would be confused.

Approximately half the math textbooks I study from basically do this already. It works very well, but IMO mostly because the questions are not easy. You actually have to stop and think for a few minutes before moving on.

The problem is that directly in front of a microwave antenna, power output is on the KW order of magnitude. This is like standing in front of a microwave oven with the door open - in a few seconds you will have severe burns.

This is interesting because I work with professional mathematicians and they are the exact opposite. They always start off with a semi-formalized idea and play with it a lot before trying to hone in on something formal. And conversely they have absolutely no problem listening to / thinking about non-rigorous ideas. They also do excellent work, so I would say this is a positive trait wrt productivity.

One way to shorten the time is to constantly increase hospital capacity, so that in each month lets you infect more people. Especially if plasma donations turn out to work to reduce severe cases.

Another way is to separate young people from old people more effectively. Then you might be able to permit 1m young people to be infected each month with the same hospital budget we have today

It's a relatively natural consequence of the fact that doing work creates value. One of the things you can work towards is creating more workers (by creating more humans, or better efficiency, or robots). Because these processes are basically exponential, you expect to see constant neverending growth.

The only real physical limit to productivity is our energy input. When we create things, we use energy and time to turn raw materials into useful stuff. Today most of our energy comes from the plants we eat (ie the sun) and from the ground. But we are not close to using even a small fraction of the energy that the sun gives us, so there is still lots of room to grow.

Nuclear waste can basically be safely solved by dumping sealed containers into the sea. We're talking about extremely small amounts of waste. A swimming pool can contain a year's supply of waste, and 20 ft of water is extremely effective radiation shielding. The ocean is so large that this would be totally negligible even if the worst happened.

Basically, why aren't we treating the null hypothesis as "neanderthals and modern humans eat exactly the same foods"? Rather than "neanderthals don't eat at all" which seems to be the case here.

This sounds pretty silly. There's bound to be a way to make online (or semi-online) learning agile too. Distance learning is basically a solved problem and has been done for hundreds of years.

How about recorded lectures and in-person small group recitations? Or longer office hours? Obviously you have to change the methodology of learning a bit, but I'm sure it can be figured out.

In any case undergrad level science lectures are basically a one-sided info dump where the lecturer is lucky to get so much as an ACK that someone is listening.