LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Possibly of interest: the fastest rocket sled track uses similar idea, they put a helium filled tube over the final section of the track:

Just as meteors are burned up by friction in the upper atmosphere, air friction can cause a high-speed sled to burn up, even if made of the toughest steel alloys. An engineering sleight-of-hand is used to increase those "burn-up" limits by reducing the density of the atmosphere around the track. To do this, one needs a safe, non-toxic, low-density gas such as helium. Helium is only one seventh the density of air, significantly reducing friction between the high speed sled and the atmosphere. Enter the "helium bag" concept.

No one person takes ownership of the idea, so it was probably a combination of brainstorming and inspiration. But like any elegant engineering solution, simplicity is at its heart. It involves enclosing a portion the track with a plastic sheet, not unlike the plastic drop cloth found at the hardware store. This tube is sealed off and pumped full of helium to force out the air. A helium-filled tube that can stretch for more than a mile then covers the track.

Shows that the idea can basically work without any advanced technology. I think this is a video of it in action, where the white thing above the track is the polyethylene tunnel which is then destroyed as the sled goes through it:

Not inconceivable, I would even plausible, that surreal numbers & combinatorial game theories impact is still in the future.

There is a belief among some people that our current tech level will lead to totalitarianism by default. The argument is that with 1970's tech the soviet union collapsed, however with 2020 computer tech (not needing GenAI) it would not. If a democracy goes bad, unlike before there is no coming back. For example Xinjiang - Stalin would have liked to do something like that but couldn't. When you add LLM AI on everyone's phone + Video/Speech recognition, organized protest is impossible.

Not sure if Rudi C is making this exact argument. Anyway if we get mass centralization/totalitarianism worldwide, then S risk is pretty reasonable. AI will be developed under such circumstances to oppress 99% of the population - then goes to 100% with extinction being better.

I find it hard to know how likely this is. Is clear to me that tech has enabled totalitarianism but hard to give odds etc.

I would guess that Lorentz's work on deterministic chaos does not get many counterfactual discovery points. He noticed the chaos in his research because of his interactions with a computer doing simulations. This happened in 1961. Now, the question is, how many people were doing numerical calculations on computer in 1961? It could plausibly have been ten times as many by 1970. A hundred times as many by 1980? Those numbers are obviously made up but the direction they gesture in is my point. Chaos was a field that was made ripe for discovery by the computer. That doesn't take anything away from Lorentz's hard work and intelligence, but it does mean that if he had not taken the leap we can be fairly confident someone else would have. Put another way: If Lorentz is assumed to have had a high counterfactual impact, then it becomes a strange coincidence that chaos was discovered early in the history of computers.

I think the Diesel engine would've taken 10 years${}_{60\%}$ or 20 years${}_{45\%}$ longer to be invented: From the Wikipedia article it sounds like it was fairly unintuitive to the people at the time.

Wow, it's worse than I thought. Maybe the housing problem is "government-complete" and resists all lower level attempts to solve it.

To me "generally avoid processed foods" would be kinda like saying "generally avoid breathing in gasses/particulates that are different from typical earth atmosphere near sea level".

People have been breathing a lot of smoke in the last million years or so, so one might think that we would have evolved to tolerate it, but it's still really bad for us. Though there are certainly lots of ways to go wrong deviating from what we are adapted to, our current unnatural environment is far better for our life expectancy than the natural one. As pointed out in other comments, some food processing can be better for us.

You might be interested in reading this [LW · GW]. I think you are reasoning in an incorrect framing. 

What if you build your school-as-social-service, and then one day find that the kids are selling drugs to each other inside the school?

Or simply that the kids are constantly interfering with each other so much that the minority who want to follow their interests can't?

I think any theory of school that doesn't mention discipline is a theory of dry water. What powers and duties would the 1-supervisor-per-12-kids have? Can they remove disruptive kids from rooms? From the building entirely? Give detentions?

I really can't get the point from the "3. Solve or Reduce Aversions", specifically: 
> Meanwhile, un-endorsed aversions should be targeted with exposure therapy or CoZE.

As I can see, here we should get rid of bad aversions. But the rest part of the text sounds like we should... reinforce them?..
> To apply exposure therapy, build a path of incremental steps towards the aversion