Austin Chen's Shortform

I've seen proposals for buying coal mines as a way of efficiently reducing emissions, by reducing the supply of coal and thus driving up coal's price on the open market. But how does that balance against the increasing the demand for coal mines, thus encouraging coal prospectors to seek out new coal sources?

Intuitively, this doesn't seem that likely; it feels like new coal sources should be pretty hard to discover? But two worrying examples that come to mind include:

• Discovery of fracking techniques, which lowered the cost of oil
• (Apocryphal) the cobra effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

One reason this has been on my mind: I wonder whether paying AI researchers lots of money to not do AI research would slow AI timelines, or would drive more people into research...

Rob Wiblin from 80k asks:

Suggestion: Inline comments for LessWrong posts, ala Google Docs

It's been commented on before that much intellectual work in the EA/Rat community languishes behind private Google Docs. I think one reason is just that the inline-commenting mechanism on a GDoc is so much better than excerpting the comment below. Has the Lightcone team considered this/what is the status?

(I vaguely recall them working on a live-collab feature, not sure if commenting would have been part of this)