Open thread, September 15-21, 2014

Official update: HR "explored every possible option" but "ultimately we have to move forward with your termination process" after "making certain there was unanimous consensus".

Apparently several people in my now ex-office are upset about this.

Is Austin on the list? I work at a not-evil tech startup called SchoolAdmin that does school admissions software for a mix of public/private/charter schools. We're not hiring devs right now, but that might possibly change since we have a product manager coming in October. The company is REALLY not evil; we've had three different people come down with mental or physical health issues, and the president's mantra has been 'your job is to get better' in every case.

I could possibly also offer a place to crash, I've got a futon, a study it could be moved to, and already have cats.

That narrative is unambiguously a case of illegal discrimination. Idaho law Defines:

"Disability" means a physical or mental condition of a person, whether congenital or acquired, which constitutes a substantial limitation to that person and is demonstrable by medically accepted clinical or laboratory diagnostic techniques. A person with a disability is one who (a) has such a disability, or (b) has a record of such a disability, or (c) is regarded as having such a disability;

and

It shall be a prohibited act to discriminate against a person because of, or on the basis of, disability in [employment]... provided that the prohibition against discrimination because of disability shall not apply if the particular disability, even with a reasonable accommodation, prevents the performance of the work required in that job.

I am also very confused as to how actual HR drones in an actual HR department wouldn't be familiar with the law and able to create a suitable enough pretext for termination.

Woah, well done everyone who donated so far. I made a small contribution. Moreover, to encourage others and increase the chance the pooled donations reach critical mass, I will top up my donation to 1% of whatever's been donated by others, up to at least $100 total from me. I encourage others to pledge similarly if you're also worrying about making a small donation or worrying the campaign won't reach critical mass.

I also hope someone can help out with writing a better resume, this one is seriously subpar. A single page of achievements based on http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-programmer/ might be a start: "describe yourself by what you have accomplished for previously employers vis-a-vis increasing revenues or reducing costs".

What sort of current events do you want to find out about how quickly, and why?

You should consider, if you haven't already, the possibility that the value of learning about such things quickly is almost always almost exactly zero. Suppose e.g. there's an enormous earthquake half-way around the world from you, and many thousands of people die. That's a big deal, it's very important -- but what immediate difference should it make to your life?

One possibility: you might send a lot of money to a charity working in the affected place. But it seems unlikely to me that there's much real difference in practice between doing so on the day of the disaster and doing it a week later.

Another possibility (albeit a kinda callous one): it may come up in conversation and you may not want to sound bad. But I bet that in practice "social media, blogs, word of mouth or personal research" do just fine at keeping you sufficiently up to date that you don't sound stupid or ignorant. In any case, what you need to know about in order to sound up to date is probably roughly what you get from existing news sources, rather than from a hypothetical new source of genuinely important, sensibly prioritized news.

I can't find it, but I once read an article from a guy a trust about how he just stopped following news, assuming that if anything sufficiently important happened, he'd find out about it anyway. His quality of life immediately rose. Having followed this approach for a few years now, I would suggest consuming zero news (is minimalist, completely devoid of noise, and exceptionally well-organized).

Wikipedia's current events portal is relatively minimalist and low-noise. It's not prioritized very impressively.

The Economist has a Politics This Week and Business This Week section. Both are only a page each and are international in scope.

Get an RSS reader and read only the headlines. That way you can process hundreds of news in a few minutes and only open the ones that seem seriously important.

In a similar vein: How do I find out what to read and what to learn more generally? I don't care about reading the latest Piketty but I want to read the best summary and interpretation of a philosopher from the last 10 years instead of the original from 500 years ago. Same goes for Physics text books and so on, and literature.

I scan google news headlines, top stories section and click on the items of interest. Yes, there are still attention grabs and non-news, but this is usually fairly clear from the article names.

I don't think it's a problem. Social media is good enough to tell you about significant events in world politics.

When a new topic bobbles up were I want to have an informed opinion I found vox.com or the Wikipedia summary to be good.

My foreign news comes almost exclusively from the CFR Daily News Brief, which sounds like exactly what you're looking for. The daily briefs also link to their Backgrounders, which are excellent and relatively short summaries of the backgrounds to many hot-topic issues.

This is nowhere near optimal. It means I will probably find out about innovations in robotic bees before I find out about natural disasters or significant events in world politics.

Meh. Sufficiently big natural disasters or political events find a way onto my Facebook feed anyway.

Once in a while when I'm bored I check out the Android app of my country's wire service (I think the American equivalent would be the Associated Press) and/or the box in the top right of the English Wikipedia's home page. But it's a rare week that I spend more than half an hour seeking out news deliberately.

This is nowhere near optimal.

In what way? Do you wish you spent more time following current affairs? I don't follow them, but don't see any problem with it - if anything, I occasionally have to resist the urge of looking up what's going on in the world, which I put in the same mental bucket as the urge to look at the top entries of /r/funny.

I don't think in ten years time having read one more news item on the Gaza Strip will change my life more than having seen one more picture of a cat stuck in a bowl.

(I do however sometimes go more into a binge of "reading up on something and trying to understand it", but I rely more on Wikipedia than on news for that; "breaking news" tends to repeat the same points over and over again, and doesn't put much focus on the big picture)

I used to read the wikipedia current events page, which I found a nice summary of what's going on without going into too many details.

I get my news from instapundit.

Funds take a fraction of the earnings out, as management fees, and you want the fund that charges the lowest such fees. The early retirement blogs I read seem to agree on Vanguard being the best choice, at least in the US.

IIRC real estate prices in the US rise about 1% per year inflation adjusted while stock markets rise about 7 % on average. An average person needs a huge loan to invest in real estate and go all in which means zero spread of risk. Real estate is also relatively illiquid not only because of practical reasons but because the return of investment depends on timing of the transaction. You're shit out of luck if you need money while the price of your house is plummeting.

How should one find the 'best' one?

Depends on your risk tolerance. The bigger the index, the lower the risk and the lower the possible returns, generally. Also bigger index funds are usually more liquid. Transaction costs matter quite a lot unless you have a big lump sum to invest, and even then you should consider dollar cost averaging.

I an efficient market the expected value wouldn't be all that different between options, so base it on your risk management preferences.

Ungated version?

I was this moment moved to search for the origin of a certain quote, and the process described in that paper seems to apply quite well to the promulgation of wrong citations. Here's a history of the idea of "three stages of truth". Actually, the situation for citations is even worse. The doctors in the example of the paper are observing their own outcomes as well as copying their predecessors' decisions, but someone copying a citation may make no observation of its accuracy.

More generally, memetic propagation.

See also EYs Failed Utopia #4-2

FAI-created X ... is this a problem?

I'm not sure we can extrapolate this currently. If we knew more, thought faster... maybe.

For me this means that one contraint on FAI is that it may not perform changes arbitrarily fast. Too fast for humans to react and adapt. There must be a 'smooth' trajectory. Surely not the abrupt change suggested in Failed Utopia.

You've asked that before.

I don't have any new thoughts on this question, so I'll just quote my answer from there:

Yeah. People need to be needed, but if FAI can satisfy all other needs, then it fails to satisfy that one. Maybe FAI will uplift people and disappear, or do something more creative.

I'm not talking about catgirls-- if some difficulties in relationships are part of making relationships better in the long haul, then the FAI will supply difficulties.

I thought that was already part of catgirls?

What's a catgirl?

Let's first separate sexual aspects from the need for other companionship. Suppose everyone gets their sexual needs, if any satisfied by catgirls+ (+ for the upgrade which includes relationship problems if necessary). If you have a crush on your coworker (or your sibling, ew!), just add a catgirl copy of them to your harem.

Further suppose that the reproduction aspect is also taken care of.

Now you have a race of essentially asexual humans, as far as human-to-human interactions go.

The question is, does it make sense to have friendbots? What, if anything, is lost when you switch from socializing with meat humans to socializing with simulated ones?

If people eventually have relationships with FAI-created humans rather than humans generated by other means, is this a problem?

This looks to be wireheading lite and if you got there I don't see why you wouldn't make the next step as well -- the FAI will create the entire world for you to enjoy inside your head.

I say it's not a problem, but my views are outside the LW mainstream on this.

If people eventually have relationships with FAI-created humans rather than humans generated by other means, is this a problem?

Depends on what the machine has optimized for. I'm not convinced that many definitions of better friends or lovers are vital optimization goals, or even good ones, in themselves. It's quite easy to imagine a set of relationships that trigger every desirable stimuli trigger an individual enjoys, complete with short-term difficulties if necessary, but leaves the victim trapped in a situation where his or her preferences remain at a local optima or are otherwise Not Correct by some grander standard.

Interaction with external minds and external situations not built toward you seem like very important parts of jostling folk out from such environments. Better optimization goals might do that, but it's not an assumption you can easily take.

I'd argue that non-catgirl created beings are people (tautologically), and while relationships with artificially-produced people is fine itself, there are also some possible ethical issues with creating minds optimized for better relationships for certain people, as well, though they're likely outside the scope of this thread (energy efficiency compared to sorting existing minds, harmful desires, House Elves).

I don't understand... The point of the essay is that one should not anthropomorhize Moloch, and your meme does exactly that.

Getting people to read HPMOR is easier than getting them to read the sequences.

That sounds like App Academy or one of its competitors.

I don't think there is a general answer to the question "How much should I consume?"

Putting money into an emergency fund here it can gather interest doesn't mean that you can't donate the same money 10 years from now.

I don't have a link, but I suspect cutting this fine is not very valuable. That last $10k would be a lot to you, but that wouldn't make it more than any other $10k to a charity. Instead, ask how you could come to have a vast amount of disposable income. Including whether it makes sense to spend some money toward that end. You may be able to get a very high rate of return investing in yourself.

to me EA is more about how to answer the question "how should I be charitable?" than "Should I be charitable and to what extent?"

Most of the EA stuff I've seen doesn't appear to me to assume vast amounts of disposable income; merely enough to be willing to give some away. Then EA is about what to do with your charity budget, whether it's large or small.

How you prioritize helping others versus helping yourself (and your family, if any) is a more or less orthogonal question.

(I might suggest, snarkily, that for someone who requires "vast amounts of disposable income" before being willing to give any away no term with "altruism" in it is very appropriate. But that wouldn't be fair because e.g. your intention might be to secure yourself a reasonably comfortable life and then give away every penny you can earn beyond that, or something.)

I would be up for it.

I seem to have picked up 30-40 karma I can't account for over the past week. I wondered if it was some effort to undo the efforts of identified mass-downvoters.

Recently the discussion on modeling a better version of yourself was moved to Main. Had you made any comments there?

You can download your raw SNP-call data from them and run it through a plethora of third-party programs. Won't have the slick interface or the collation of multiple SNPs that affect the same trait but definitely tells you what you want to know about Mendelian diseases and you can sift through the rest.

See http://www.23andyou.com/3rdparty for some of the tools.

I don't, but the cases of identity theft I hear about in the news aren't done by entering someone's home to acquire their papers. What scenarios are you intending to defend against with the safe?

Whatever argument you have in mind about "the measure of those worlds" will go through just the same if you replace it with "the probability of the world being that way". You should be exactly equally concerned with or without MWI.

The question that actually matters to you should be something like: Are people with such intrusive thoughts who aren't generally suicidal more likely to jump in front of trains? I think I remember reading that the answer is no; if it turns out to be yes (or if you find those thoughts disturbing) then you might want to look into CBT or something; but MWI doesn't have anything to do with it except that maybe something about it bothers you psychologically.

You don't see other people doing so, and I can assure you many more people than jump have such thoughts. Any MWI weirdness would only affect what you recall of your OWN actions in this case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton%E2%80%93Babinski_syndrome

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosognosia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anosodiaphoria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatoparaphrenia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confabulation

Terminology regarding missing symptom awareness depends on what is thought to be the cause. Anosognosia and other agnosias would be used for neurological disorders where self-monitoring is specifically impaired while denial, delusions and hallucinations would be used for psychiatric disorders. Denial could also be a psychiatric symptom concerning a somatic disorder. I'm not sure if other somatic fields than neurology have special terminology.

If a patient suffers from something that is not recognised as medical problem we call it hypochondria.

Not really. For example grief is not recognized as a medical problem, people suffer from it and we don't call it hypochondria.

Hypochondria is excessive worry about having a serious illness.

ETA: I think that whatever we choose to call a medical problem largely depends on our values and mere diversion from the biological norm does not a medical problem make. So the hypothetical patient could also simply disagree with others about what constitutes a medical problem.

I think the standard terminology is "undiagnosed illness".

2 is Squirt, a speed-reading application that takes the text of any webpage and displays it to you one word at an adjustable speed. The default is 450wpm I think, but after you make an adjustment, it remembers what speed you want for next time.

Which speed are you using at the moment and how long did it take you to come to that speed?

1 didn't work for me.

For example, trying it on tvtropes.org got me http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/%3Chttp://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=%3Ehttp%3A//tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HomePage

javascript:window.location.replace("http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=" + escape(document.URL))

Considering that this is the state-of-the-art in animal-like robot movement, I can see why we still use meat-soldiers.

Because warfare is complicated? Are you talking about drone robots?

Are you operating under Crocker's rules?

Also, if you want strictly writing help, I was recently made aware of the existence of /r/destructivereaders (h/t Punoxysm).

Done. See comments by name Carlos.

Another possibility is that a new reader, or more than one, is reading through the archives and voting on whatever they feel voteworthy. That's fine as well.

I too have had some unexpected karma-jumps lately, and I feel the same way.

I recall this being the norm before the dark days of Euginiering.

I got this too, but I was probably the worst recipient of downvotes percentage-wise and the upvotes didn't even make up for the downvotes yet in terms of absolute karma value (let alone in ratio, which would require getting many times the upvotes).

I also noticed that my recent upvotes included a fair number of 2s and 3's and higher numbers, and there were some posts that didn't get voted up at all--in other words, they were distributed in a way I would expect if the upvotes came from multiple people. The downvotes from Eugine were not distributed that way, making it a dead giveaway that they all came from one person.

Now I'm listed among the 15 "Top contributors," which is absolutely not possible.

If that's a side effect of reverting the votes of systematic downvoters, fine, but if we now have a systematic upvoter, I really don't want to see this.

Given that we just got a new moderator, it might very well be that someone wants to test out the response about what happens when he goes and votes up systematically.

I personally also got similar jumps in my karma.

I carry at all times a tiny notebook (smaller than my hand) and a pen so small I can barely use it comfortably. That's low tech and not very efficient (because I'll need to type it up later), but very quick, easily survives the sometimes inhospitable pocket environment, doesn't need electricity and works for non-textual thoughts.

Do you have a smartphone? Just hit the voice command button and say "Make a note: [whatever you need to make a note of]"

Alternatively, I find it's easier to do things when you've already started. Maybe make a note on your phone and add a couple ideas. Then, the next time you have an idea, you already have a dedicated place to put it, so you just put it there instead of wondering what to do with it and ending up doing nothing because you can't get past the inertia of starting. Then award yourself a mental point as a reward to train your mind to keep coming up with ideas and writing them down.

And if you do forget something, don't worry about it too much. The whole "I just had a really good idea but now I forgot, oh no!" pattern is really common. Much more common than the "I just had a great idea and I wrote it down and I still think it's great" pattern. I've always taken this as evidence that the idea you forgot wasn't actually that great and it only feels that way because you forgot about it and you're suffering from a kind of forbidden-fruit/grass-is-greener bias. People tend to remember really good ideas because they're contextual or actionable.

Here's my system for that:

I always carry an LTE-connected smartphone capable of gesture typing, so I'm able to quickly write down anything whenever and wherever it occurs to me, be it in a park, in a forest, at work, on a toilet etc. (My personal preference is a high-end big-screen phone with a stock Android (currently Nexus 5), but as of September 17 2014, you can use iOS 8 with a custom keyboard).

I use several mobile apps intended for capturing different kinds of thoughts: Wunderlist, Trello, Google Docs. I prefer these apps because they all sync to the cloud, which means that 1) I can access the content on any platform, and 2) that the phone is essentially disposable and I won't lose my notes when it gets lost or stolen.

Here's how I capture thoughts:

1. If the thought is actionable, it goes to Wunderlist (a classic todo list app which I hate but alas, I can't seem to find a better alternative).

2. If the thought is related to an ongoing project, it goes into an appropriate Google Doc or the Trello board of that project. If the thought is large enough, it may warrant the creation of its own Google Doc.

3. If the thought is related to self-improvement / self-discovery, it goes to a Trello board dedicated specifically to that.

I usually ask these as questions on Quora. Quora is incredibly tolerant of even inane questions, and has the benefit of allowing others to provide feedback (in the form of answers and comments to the question). If a question has already been asked, then you will also be able to read what others have written in response and/or follow that question for future answers. Quora also has the option of anonymizing questions. I've found that always converting my thoughts into questions has made me very conscious of what sort of questions are interesting to ask (not that there's anything right with that).

Another idea is to practice this with writing down dreams. After waking up, I often think "It's not really worth writing that dream down anyway", whereas in reality I would find it quite interesting if I came back to it later. Forcing oneself to write thoughts down even when one is not inclined to may lead to more sedulous record-keeping. (But this is just speculation.)

I have Simplenote installed on my phone, and I pull things out and note them there very frequently.

(Later, they become blog posts/to-dos/etc)

get a twitter

I'm guessing that we get soundness :: a -> p a for free in your notation?

I think you wanted loeb :: Prov p => (p a -> a) -> p a.

Scala implementation, I think:

trait ProofLike[O[_]] {
  def sound[A](a: A): O[A]
  def dup[A](oa: O[A]): O[O[A]] //Isn't this just a special case of soundness?
  def mp[A, B](oab: O[A => B]): O[A] => O[B]
}

/**
 * type-level function. Implementation left as an exercise for the reader
 */
trait MFix[F[_], O[_]] {
    type Psi
    def ->(p: Psi): F[O[Psi]]
    def <-(fop: F[O[Psi]]): Psi
}

def loeb[O[_]: ProofLike, P](l1: O[P] => P, fx: MFix[({type F[A] = (A => P)]})#F, O]) : P = {
  val pl = implicitly[ProofLike[O]]
  type Psi = fx.Psi
  val l3: Psi => (O[Psi] => P) = fx.->
  val l4: O[Psi => (O[Psi] => P)] = pl.sound(l3)
  val l5: O[Psi] => O[O[Psi] => P] = pl.mp(l4)
  val l6: O[O[Psi] => P] => (O[O[Psi]] => O[P]) = pl.mp[O[Psi], P]
  val l7: O[Psi] => (O[O[Psi]] => O[P]) = l5 andThen l6
  val l8: O[Psi] => O[O[Psi]] = pl.dup[Psi]
  val l9: O[Psi] => O[P] = {x: O[Psi] => val y = l8(x); l7(x)(y)}
  val l10: O[Psi] => P = l9 andThen l1
  val l11: (O[Psi] => P) => Psi = fx.<-
  val l12: Psi = l11(l10)
  val l13: O[Psi] = pl.sound(l12)
  fx.->(l12)(l13)
}

loeb = loeb

data Id a = Id a

class Prov p f where
  fix :: p (f a -> a (f a))
  unfix :: p (a (f a) -> f a)
  dup :: p a -> p (p a)
  mp :: p (a -> b) -> p a -> p b

data Fix f = MakeFix (f (Fix f))
data Id x = MakeId x
data PrePsi a x = MakePrePsi (Id x -> a)
type Psi a = Fix (PrePsi a)

forward :: Psi a -> (Id (Psi a) -> a)
forward (MakeFix (MakePrePsi x)) = x
backward :: (Id (Psi a) -> a) -> Psi a
backward x = MakeFix (MakePrePsi x)

Functor is a weak typeclass; the only thing it implies about □ is that □(a→b)→□a→□b (which we already know to be true). So the idea of using Functor was just to make the minimum possible assumption.

I don't know enough Haskell to answer your question, but if you can write it in Scala I'll give it a go.

What supplements do people take?

It would be interesting to also know their reasons, and if they notice positive effects.

I take calcium and vitamin D, prescribed for medical reasons. Nothing else. No real way to tell what the effect is short of DEXA scans, but those are x-rays, so you can't do many of them. I'm not breaking any bones now, but I never did.

On what basis do you take Iron?

Iron.

There are common diseases you should worry about and rare diseases you shouldn't worry about. A factor of 2 does not move Crohn's from rare to common. The difference between a 70% chance of dying of heart disease and a 30% chance sounds pretty big, but what would you do differently? Either way, it is a big chunk of likely mortality. A factor of 2 is unlikely to change the cost-benefit analysis of actions that might protect you from heart disease. If such an action is useful, it is useful for most people.

Some rare genes do move diseases from rare to common. A broken BRCA (1 in 10k) moves a woman from a 10% chance of dying of breast cancer to an 80% chance of dying of breast cancer, and dying at a young age. Mammograms are valuable for the second woman and not for the first. Some women have prophylactic mastectomies. But if you ask Myriad to test your BRCA, in addition to this useful information, it will also talk about minor variations with useless effects on the risk.

Vancouver has enough of a diversity of people interested in the MIRI who can host their own friends that I believe it will make sense to host multiple different MIRIx workshops. Like, I find the MIRI very interesting, but I want to grasp technically what it's about. Another one of my friends is interested in the philosophy of A.I., and yet another friend is a former MIRI intern who will invite a bunch of his friends from the university math department over. So, I'll likely host workshops at different levels of depth, or with different topics.

First, how is average utilitarian defined in a non-circular way?

If you can quantify a proto-utility across some set of moral patients (i.e. some thing that is measurable for each thing/person we care about), then you can then call your utility the average of proto-utility over moral patients. For example, you could define your set of moral patients to be the set of humans, and each human's proto-utility to be the amount of money they have, then average by summing the money and dividing by the number of humans.

I don't necessarily endorse that approach, of course.

Has he been officially "impressed" yet?

I think Eliezer says he's still confused about anthropics.

What reading can I do on anthropics to get an idea of the major ideas in the field?

So far as I know, Nick Bostrom's book is the orthodox foremost work in the field. You can read it immediately for free here. Personally, I would guess that absorbing UDT and updateless thinking is the best marginal thing you can do to make progress on anthropics, but that's probably not even a majority opinion on LW, let alone among anthropics scholars.

a

We managed to reduce...

Not quite reduce. We managed to develop certain approximations which, albeit crude, work sufficiently well for some purposes. Of course, not all purposes.

I seem to recall that BMI and/or WHR tend to be excellent predictors of physical health.

I seem to recall they tend not. In particular, BMI is a flawed indicator as it has a pronounced bias for short and tall people.

these predictions can further be improved

Which "these predictions" -- what are you forecasting?

A high pressure is a good predictor for someone being unhealthy. On the other hand statins that reduce blood pressure don't provide the returns that people hoped for.

Goodhard's law applies very much.

Before dying with a heart attack Seth Roberts had a year where he improvement on the score that's the best predictor for heart attacks, while most people don't improve on the score as they age.

Using metrics like BMI and WHR seems to me very primitive. We should have no problem running a 3D scan of the whole body. I would estimate that obesitey[3D scan + complex algorithm] is a much better metric than obesity[BMI], obseity[WHR] or obesitey[BMI/WHR].

That's to be further improved by not only going for the visible light spectrum but adding infrared to get information about temperature. And you can follow it up by giving the person a west with hundreds of electrodes and measuring the conductance.

The tricoder xprice is also interesting.

As quantified self devices get cheaper it will also be possible to use their data to develop new metrics. A nursing home could decide to give every member a device that tracks heart rate 24/7. After a few years time the can give the data to some university bioinformatics folks who try to get good prediction algorithms.

Can we construct a whole host of other, similar numbers, like "math skills" and thus measure the impact of education and aging?

Math skills can mean multiple things to different people. Some people take it to mean the ability to calculate 34*61 in a short amount of time and without mistakes. Other people take it to mean doing mathematical proofs.

This is a different question, but I've occasionally wondered why some franchises (like Star Trek, Buffy, or Harry Potter) generate a lot of fanfic and others generate much less. Part of this is raw popularity, of course, but quite a bit isn't; the film Avatar (the one with blue aliens, not the one with kung fu) was far more popular than, say, Pirates of the Caribbean, but the latter spawned a thriving fic community and the former has a smattering of stories mostly intended to illustrate critical points.

I don't think there's any single answer, but a franchise's chances seem to be improved if: it's suitable for episodic storytelling (Pirates is a self-contained story, but it's framed like an entry in a serial); it's got strong and ideally archetypal characters (Kirk, McCoy, Spock: action/emotion/reason, easy to write but easy to give depth to); and it's got an open setting with a lot of depth and unexplored bits (few settings outside spec-fic generate a lot of fanfic, and most of those that do are period pieces or procedurals). We're looking at works as toolkits for storytelling, in other words; tight plotting might actually be detrimental.

I cannot parse your question. Can you rephrase?

Is this post just an excuse for an NRxic quote? And what does the "Yudkowsky's recent pwnedness" swipe refer to?

I'll bet a thousand 2014 dollars at even odds that it's less than a quarter of that.

(Clarification: I'm talking about the population of the US, as per the PredictionBook entry, not of North America as per Moldbug's quote; the population of the latter is already over 500 million. Should probably stipulate present borders too, just in case. 2 billion isn't credible in any case, though.)

Yudkowsky's recent pwnedness

I'm not under the impression he was much less pwned in 2007. Are you thinking of something in particular?

Two billion is a crazy population prediction even if open borders was enacted. Relative quality of life would decline very quickly with open borders, and the immigration level would slow down dramatically.

I also read some estimate that "only" 500 Million people world wide want to immigrate to the US. Overall I expect the quality-of-life gap between USA and the 3rd world to continue declining over the next couple decades.

I'm dubious about borders getting opened that soon, considering how long it's taking to make moderate moves towards drug legalization.

Curiously, the anti-immigration movement in the US would be very different than those in Western Europe, and, I would guess, significantly weaker. While economic arguments are somewhat similar in both countries (although e.g. studies differ whether (and what level of) immigration actually increases unemployment levels as in the short run immigrants seem to go to the countries where the unemployment is decreasing), in Western Europe immigrants are vastly overrepresented in crime statistics compared to local population, which is not the case in the US. Nor (it was my impression, I am not from the US) immigrants are often thought as a demographic group whose individuals are the most prone to commit crimes (it must be noted, however, that immigrants aren't a homogeneous group (both in Western Europe and the US) and their effect (and/or the perception thereof) on a country of destination might differ), and as they are not at the top of crime statistics, they are less likely to be a target of blame. Furthermore, it was my impression that due to the long history of immigration, the national identity of the US is not based on ethnicity, while in most European countries it definitely is. As you can see, it is not surprising that Americans are somewhat more likely than Europeans to think that immigration should be increased, and about two thirds of them think that on the whole immigration is a good thing, only in Sweden we find similar support for it.

Nevertheless, even given this unusually positive attitude towards immigration, I would guess that the US population reaching even 600 million (let alone 2 billion, which I believe must have been a hyperbole) by 2038 (U.S. Census Bureau projects approximately 400 millions) has a probability less than 1-2 percent. The reason is that while for a pundit it is often a good strategy to make bold claims about e.g. opening all borders, as it gains him attention (therefore I can believe that we will hear a lot of such claims from people who compete for attention) whether or not the claims about doubling World's GDP are correct (in the long run it may be correct, I do not know), it might not be such a good thing for a politician or a civil servant to do bold actions as it is a risk of losing control of the situation and/or getting fired, and, as a general rule, politicians and civil servants want neither of those, therefore , I would guess, they have to more cautious when they become actual decision makers. Therefore, even if one wants to promote the idea of open borders and free mobility, one could probably try to encourage more Schengen/EU style regional agreements and then gradually "merging" them with new bilateral agreements between those unions, as it seems less risky than simply welcoming all immigrants. And in the far future it may happen that large parts of the world is covered by a Schengen-like agreement making "nobody illegal" in a similar sense that it is relatively easy for a person from one EU country to work in another. But that would probably take much more than 25-30 years. However, I would guess that even then it seems highly unlikely that US population would exceed even 1 billion, let alone 2 billion, since as the economies of the developing countries improve, there will be less incentives for people to leave them for the US. One would expect a huge influx of immigrants only if US government loosens immigration restrictions "faster" than developing countries manage to improve.

As a counterpoint look at the rise of anti-immigration movements in Europe and e.g. the success of Marine Le Pen in France.