All of Emerson Spartz's Comments + Replies

“Heretical Thoughts on AI” by Eli Dourado

Thoughtful piece - I updated a bit towards discontinuous takeoff. Thanks for sharing!

Humanity Lacks Imagination to Solve Aging

I've considered putting bounties out to create content related to this this. DM me if you want to jam on this!

We won the war on infectious diseases, but now we need to learn from it

Fascinating! The more I study medicine and medical history the more disappointed I am with the field. Do you know of any good critiques of the McKinlays' paper?

2jasoncrawford2yI think the general thesis here, that most of the mortality improvements were from sanitation/hygiene rather than from pharma or even vaccines, is fairly well-accepted. But see my comments above for how to interpret this—I don't think there's any reason to be disappointed with the medical field.

2ericgilliam2yI don't but I'm sure they could exist. My expertise with sources in this area is not as in depth as economics or physics history. The reason I was happy to go about publishing is because Grant Miller is known in econ world to be quite expert/careful and good at what he does. So I did have a certain faith that if in the three decades between Mckinlays writing and their papers he'd have rooted out and addressed the primary counterarguments in their two part research. And of course I'm always open-minded to update my views as things come out now as well

Jason's links and tweets, 2022-06-08

Emerson Spartz2y1

I enjoy these posts! Two suggestions:

Open links in a new tab
Just paste screenshots of standalone tweets, or the full text. (Reduces friction vs having to load a new page.)

1jasoncrawford2yDoesn't seem to be a way to have links open in a new tab, but if you click through to the original post, the links on that page will open in new tabs. I have experimented with embedding, screenshotting, or quoting full tweets but I haven't liked how it has turned out in practice, so I keep reverting to simple links. Thanks for the suggestions!

Emerson Spartz2y2

Big fan of this idea! My team (Nonlinear.org) created The Nonlinear Library so people can use their podcast app (Spotify, Apple, etc) to listen to top posts from the EA Forum, Alignment Forum, and LessWrong.

If there's enough interest, we could make a Progress Forum podcast feed as well!

2jasoncrawford2yVery cool! Would love a Progress Forum channel at some point

Death is the default: Why building is our safest way forward

Emerson Spartz2y2

Important idea, easy to lose sight of - thanks for the reminder!

One Process

Emerson Spartz2y1

Loved this! Possibly my favorite innovation hack is just assuming innovation-related distributions are power laws.

Starting prior: assume it's a power law.

Secondary prior: assume it's quadratic or pareto-ish.

Book Review: Owning the Earth, a history of land ownership

Emerson Spartz2y2

Good review and good rec - just bought the book and am enjoying it so far. Thanks!

About us and FAQ

Emerson Spartz2y2

Ahh, didn't know it was linked to karma. Thanks!

About us and FAQ

Emerson Spartz2y1

Really excited about the potential of this forum!

Question: when I strong upvote the vote count only ticks up by one. Is this intentional? I'm a big fan of casting two votes at a time for stellar contributions!

2sismail2yThe magnitude of a strong upvote is a function of the user's total karma and a multiplier range, see the code here [https://github.com/progressforum/ForumMagnum/blob/a47830309ecbfdbac4222f96271deeb72acd2218/packages/lesswrong/lib/voting/voteTypes.ts#L21] .

1jasoncrawford2yHmm, I think it is supposed to tick up by 2. Are you sure you're getting a strong vote in? You have to click and hold for a while until it takes.