LessWrong 2.0 Reader

If you mean the Manhattan Project: no. IIUC there were basically zero Western groups and zero dollars working toward the bomb before that, so the Manhattan Project clearly sped things up. That's not really a case of "centralization" so much as doing-the-thing-at-all vs not-doing-the-thing-at-all.

If you mean fusion: yes. There were many fusion projects in the sixties, people were learning quickly. Then the field centralized, and progress slowed to a crawl.

As a point of comparison - do you think the US nuclear programme was substantially slowed down because it was a centralized government programme?

I think probably we don't have that great a reason not to roll this out to more users, it's mostly a matter of managing UI complexity

I think this is missing the most important consideration: centralization would likely massively slow down capabilities progress.

thanks! added to post

Great post, thanks for writing it up! 

In addition to the 80K list, I can recommend the Arkose database of professors with open positions (you can filter specifically for PhD openings at the top). 

• Money.
• Insecurity about money.
• Not being able to afford kids or the house to raise them in.

My gut reaction is that these are more perceptions than real obstacles. There's a strong perception that there's a certain dollar amount or level of wealth before one should have children. Somehow changing the perception first would probably help fertility more than simply paying per child.

This isn't about liking or disliking RFK Jr

If you care about evidence, how about starting with acknowledging that the answer to your first question about why one would believe RFK Jr is that because he's factually correct with the claim that no randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines are run?

You seem to have had a false belief that needs updating, and if you just gloss over that, that's not good reasoning. 

The key question is about what policy you want. Given what RFK Jr. said, it's likely that the policy he is going to advocate is some form of a requirement of randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines.

Currently, the reasoning of why there's no randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled trials for vaccines has nothing to do with evidence-based reasoning but with a mix of a certain medical ethics and pharma lobbying. 

Meaning it was proven to be safe and effective against a placebo and, therefore, is the new standard. 

Safe is a relative term and you are using the term "proof" quite losely. 

Vaccines are by law unavoidably unsafe, which is the legal justification from the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Act for giving the producers immunity from lawsuits over the vaccines. The whole idea at that time is that vaccines have some side effects but the benefits outweigh the risks. The vaccines from that era are the one's that are used in the controlled studies. HHS did not follow the law to report on the progress on how vaccines got more safe after that in the way the act requires.

In medicine, it frequently happens that drugs have side-effects that were not picked up in initial clinical trials, so obviously if you follow evidence-based reasoning, a trial does not proof anything absolutely safe. As a relevant recent example, the increased risk of myocarditis and pericarditis from mRNA Covid-19 vaccines was not picked up by the placebo-controlled trials that they ran. 

evidence-based reasoning instead of his distrust of scientists

Distrust of scientist was part of the motto of the Royal Society. When studying bioinformatics one of my professors made a point to say something in every lecture to foster our distrust. The replication crisis of the last decade was inherently about distrust of scientists and one of the greatest things that happened to science in that timeframe.

Saying scientists who are not running enough placebo-controlled trials should be distrusted, is an evidence-based argument. Ideally, there would be meta-science that better tells us when we need to to run placebo-controlled trials and when we don't but the NIH under past leadership did not like to fund that meta-science. 

Policy-wise, I think that focusing on standards of evidence is the most likely choice he could make as HHS secretary because he's unlikely able to just declare certain vaccines he doesn't like to be off-the-shelves. 

So if you want an evidence-based discussion it makes sense to focus on the merits and costs of placebo-controlled trials.

I'd love to donate to Lightcone ~5K€ next year, but as long as it's not tax-deductible in France I'll keep to French AI safety orgs as the French non-profit donation tax break is stupidly good: it can basically triple the donation amount and reduce income tax to 0.

I know that Mieux Donner, a new French effective giving org, is acting as French tax-deductible front for a number of EA organisations. I'll contact them to check whether they could forward a donation to Lightcone and give an update under this comment.

I understand the mechanisms of your metaphor and while they are undeniable they are also, IMO overly simplistic and not helpful as it leaves out the most important element of willpower.

Just like freewill, willpower implies making a decision then using your "freewill" or willpower to act on it. Willpower, as with freewill, is meaningless without making a conscious and preferably well informed decision. 

Regardless of living or dead if you do not have reasonably accurate and somewhat complete info aka less wrong-ish its a crapshoot as to the outcome. 

I posit that humans in general and Americans and most Europeans too have been so thoroughly and consistently lied to that any discussion of willpower or freewill is moot. 

What IS being shut down or weeded out is truth, right and wrong, reality, critical thinking, honesty, and on and on, without which we all loose our ability to make good decisions.

I don't know how our species can overcome this but IOM nothing else matters until we do.