worth a read, dare i say clear and well-written > I recoil from the neverending shell game where you say “oh sure, of course AI can now [escape from its sandbox / solve Millennium Problems / whichever dramatic thing it most recently did], no one ever denied that [I did deny it], wake me up when AI does [thing AI hasn’t yet done but is going to do next year], that’s when I’ll reevaluate my whole worldview [no I won’t].” Where no matter how fast the rollercoaster accelerates, even after your whole familiar world has vanished behind you, you’re still inventing reasons why it doesn’t count.

i have many disagreements with effective altruism, even when i was a rationalist i never thought of myself as an EA, but the recent spate of anti-EA nonsense is so blatantly obviously in bad faith i am compelled to do a "nobody gets to pick on my cousin except me" here EAs have consistently been among the most kind, thoughtful, level-headed, and principled people i've ever met. along with rationalists they are the only subcultures i've ever encountered who have a strong norm that they can in theory be persuaded to change their minds on consequential topics by good arguments. you should seriously consider the possibility that, for example, the reason tech billionaire dustin moskovitz funds one of the largest EA organizations is that EAs presented him what he saw as the best argument for what he should do with his billions, which is to find a bunch of thoughtful people to think seriously about how to best spend them to most improve people's lives globally. that is extremely laudable and pretty much the best case! many people are, i think, confused and perhaps frightened about why this relatively small insular ideological group suddenly appears to have such weirdly large amounts of power, especially power wrt AI. you should seriously consider the possibility that it's in part it's because they spent the last 15 years successfully convincing a bunch of powerful people to listen to them using Facts and Logic, and/or that they themselves decided to acquire power using Facts and Logic (such as arguments that AI would be a big deal and thus one should start an AI company, invest in an AI company, or join an AI company). there is a fairly public history here which it is trivial for you to get an LLM to explain to you which you could learn! EAs are (mostly, with of course infamous exceptions) trying to do good things for good reasons and are responsive to thoughtful serious critique. they want thoughtful serious critique! they will listen to thoughtful serious critique! you do not have to call them names and schoolyard bully them!

"Hyperscalers or frontier AI labs could likely factor RSA-1024 numbers at a cost on the order of $30 million per number — and, with a bit more optimization, likely substantially less."

this is a very sobering read. main thesis is in section 5: > Our conjecture is that a modern society makes the third child expensive and childlessness cheap, even when GDP per capita is only a fraction of the frontier (i.e., the U.S. level). Children are expensive because a child must be equipped to function in a world of formal knowledge and credentials, which takes years of costly investment (Restuccia and Vandenbroucke, 2013, Doepke and Zilibotti, 2019). At the same time, children are no longer productive in the household, not even for smaller chores, having been replaced by “engines of liberation” such as the electric appliances now available even to poor households (this idea extends the intuition in Greenwood et al., 2005). Modernity also imposes tight career schedules, set by large-scale organizations, that collide with the biological clock and with the kin networks that used to share the work of raising children (Adda et al., 2017, Compton and Pollak, 2014). And modernity makes childlessness cheap, because an impersonal society imposes next to no penalty on those who have no children: pensions and health care do the work that sons and daughters once did (Boldrin et al., 2015), and lineage counts for little. > Goldin (2026) pushes this line further with an argument about a growing mismatch between genders. Modernity also changes gender roles unevenly. Women’s opportunities expand rapidly through education, work, and greater independence, while expectations about housework and childcare often change more slowly (Goldin and Katz, 2002, Goldin, 2021). This is particularly true as economies shift toward services, where women’s comparative advantages are better rewarded (Ngai and Petrongolo, 2017). The mismatch operates at both the extensive and the 18 intensive margins: more women remain childless, and mothers have fewer children on average. > This argument is attractive because it explains why East Asia and now Latin America have such low TFRs. These are the societies where the gender mismatch is largest.19 It also suggests an intriguing possibility: societies with highly unbalanced gender norms start with very high TFRs, as men impose their preferences (Ashraf et al., 2014), and end with very low ones, as women resist (Doepke and Kindermann, 2019, Doepke and Tertilt, 2018). A paradoxical reversal of demographic fortunes. ... > In short, modernity in its current form seems largely incompatible with replacement-level fertility.

happy 4th of july and happy 250th everyone. take a moment to notice that the social and material conditions that make it possible for us to read each other's posts like this - social media, the internet, free speech, the computer, the smartphone - are overwhelmingly american

it's ludicrous how few people know about this paper, so, friendly reminder that the fermi paradox was completely resolved in 2018 and it turned out to be because multiplying point estimates of highly uncertain parameters is very bad actually