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Yes, humans still provide value. Correspondence chess players will for example read chess opening books to find if there any mistakes in that book and even if they find just one, they'll try to lead their opponent into that dubious line, which is often a mistake that computers can't easily spot. Also as a former highly-ranked chess player, I'd use multiple chess engines at the same time to compare and contrast and also I'd know their strengths and weaknesses and which possibilities to explore.
Anecdotally this feels very true. Those outside of the AI community feel way more optimistic than those I know who work in AI. The general population who are aware of GPT and LLM's seem way too optimistic. When I talk to people about an AGI capabilities moratorium, AI researchers are way more likely to agree than those not working in AI.
Just because good behavior is contagious doesn't mean it will necessarily spread. There are people and/or organizations that purposefully want to troll or be bad actors either for monetary gain (false short report to manipulate a stock price), political gain (foreign interference in an election) or out of their enjoyment or possibly some mental disorder or to show off or enjoyment of breaking norms. A rational discussion or showing good behavior might not be effective in stopping the intolerant speech or behavior. So just displaying good behavior in response to bad behavior doesn't always solve the problem and sometimes the bad or evil actions need to be fought and/or not tolerated. In terms of hate speech, I've noticed that often people that conduct hate speech don't want to engage in rational discussions and a lot of the hate speech on social media is generated by bots. That intolerant hate speech then might become contagious in a negative way!
The book claims that authority by government is never justified and you state also that private agencies are expected to outperform the government. I take issue with both of these claims. Free markets fail to solve tragedy of the commons problem for which collective solutions through government are the best solution. Free markets also often fail in solving inequality, externalities, asymmetry of information, monopolies and the free rider problem. A world under anarcho-capitalism would likely lead to a large monopoly by a powerful force controlling security and weapons for which life for the average person would be worse than our current system run by democratic governments. Countries with higher amounts of government spending have higher levels of Quality of Life after adjusting for level of development.
Aging/longevity is likely one of the top problems facing humanity especially when it seems possible to solve aging within your lifetime, so would add that to the list of topics to study. Also the rise of social media and in general the increase in the instant pleasure industry is having a huge impact on humanity so a topic worth exploring.
When looking at polarization in the US, it's more at the Congressional level than at the presidential level and this is often due non-competitive general elections so the winner of the primary will be the winner of the general election. This has gotten worse as gerrymandering has continued to increase. In more competitive races, you see the political parties trying to select more moderate candidates.
Nothing is 100% accurate, but if you want the most accurate news then it's best to get closest to the primary source and large news organizations are usually the ones with the budget to get closest to the primary source, which often makes them more trustworthy. They also have large editorial boards and have a reputation to upkeep. They often have a bias towards being pro-corporate since most are for-profit and rely on advertisers, though every single source of news has some bias.
Also, stocks had a rather large rally today and it was newsworthy for the short-term so not sure showing today's rally vs a YTD downtrend is supporting your point that news isn't trustworthy
Conspicuous consumption luxury spending is not a good use of resources and is a negative externality. Some spending is very beneficial such as that on basic research or demand for healthy goods which leads to more production of that healthy good. Spending money on something signals that their is demand for that good or service so leads to more production of that good or time spent on that service. Society would be better off with more medical research and less yachts and JPEG NFT's so we want to encourage spending on health instead of some luxury goods.
More humans leads to more knowledge. There will be more people doing basic research and adding to humanity's collective knowledge which will improve collective wellbeing. There are efficiencies of scale as someone else mentioned and in the book Scale the author mentions productivity in cities scales 1.15x superlinearly with population. There is an upper limit, though the current population growth rate is well below the peak and very likely a much higher growth rate than today's can be sustained.
You claim lockdowns are almost certainly net negative but plenty of research papers on the cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns come to the opposite conclusion. Lockdowns saved plenty of lives, prevented long Covid and stopped hospitals from being overwhelmed at the costs of ~5% of GDP and decreased mental health. I could see that for certain segments of the population such as young people that lockdowns are a net negative, though a large decision like lockdowns should likely be decided based off the benefits to all of society and for older people lockdowns were definitely a huge net positive.
I do wonder about the positive $1000 of impact per each reader. That estimate does seem quite high to me and if it was actually the case then we should have way more people reading these articles.
You're right about all the downsides of Pocket listen feature. I use it often and it does have a lot of shortcomings. Way better on the podcast apps.
A few comments:
-The disenfranchised (bottom quintile in income) vote at 20% lower rates in the US compared to more wealthy people so increasing disenfranchisement is not necessarily as strong a path to get more votes as other tactics would be, such as making it easier to vote through mail-in voting and automatic voter registration or making election day a national holiday
-People do learn from past policy mistakes and do vote in the future based off of those, so policies that lead to negative outcomes do make it less likely to elect those politicians in the future
-Those with college degrees vote left at very high rates so promoting education which is a good is more likely to promote future leftist voters than more disenfranchisement. The past disenfranchised who are know better off I would think are more likely to vote left as they understand what it takes for improvement and how easily people can slide back to disenfranchisement with worse govt policies.
-Rent control is basically all in NY/NJ/CA which are very blue and I haven't seen research showing that it leads to disenfranchisement
-In a utopia where all possible progress was achieved then yes a "conservative" approach where things shouldn't be changed makes sense, though the current right-wing politics in the US is more about helping elites and lower taxes (while relying on Christian Evangelical voting base) than it is not having anything change.
-Also progressives are often wealthier liberals while poorer liberals tend to have more moderate views though they do still vote overwhelmingly Democrat
Some of the other top causes of obesity include endocrine disruptors, Adenovirus-36, antibiotics (especially in childhood), C-sections, foods that spike blood sugar (carb-heavy), certain medications (antipsychotic drugs, anti-depressants, steroids, birth control)
The Fed uses the short-term interest rate to either promote growth or fight inflation. The government has other methods to do this using fiscal policy and some MMT economists argue that the Fed should freeze interest rates at 0 and use fiscal policy instead for promoting growth by more fiscal spending or fighting inflation by raising taxes. If the free market was to determine interest rates without central bank intervention it would probably prefer growth and not fear inflation as growth benefits the market and companies and wealthy investors would offset inflation by rising prices and holding real assets. High inflation would lead to instability so it probably does make sense to have a government role in managing the economy to prevent instability.
Rutger Bregman just released a book on this topic called Humankind: A Hopeful History where he argues humans are good and dismisses some of the historical arguments that humans are bad with examples.
How would a standardized social network work? Maybe it would let you download your friends lists and posts in a format that could be easily uploaded to a different social network? That way there's less switching costs for social networks.
Hertz corporate bonds are trading at 39 cents on the dollar so the equity is 99%+ to be worth 0. The reason the equity is trading above 0 is that there's a borrow fee so to short the shares you have to pay a borrow fee. Also there's legal implications of being short the shares throughout the bankruptcy process which might reduce the liquidity of your position or ability to get out.
It seems a lot of retail traders bought Hertz shares without understanding that they are going to end up worth nothing. Probably there should be some regulations added to prevent retail traders from making stupid investment decisions like this. Was similar when they bought oil futures close to $0 and then oil futures went negative and they got crushed.