All of ryan_b's Comments + Replies
This post is fantastic. Also, the last 8 months have been an eternity for LLMs. Have you been tinkering with any of the new ones since this experiment, and if so how'd they do?
I want one, if any remain! DM sent.
This review is fantastic, well done. I am now going to go seek out books about American government written by people in Japan or Finland or something.
For other aspiring policy hobbyists:
- A lot of changes at the legislative level are non-obvious, because stuff gets hidden away in huge bills ostensibly about something else. For example: The National Defense Authorization Act Contains AI Provisions
My understanding of the last 10 years or so of policy is wide agreement that this is both the easiest way to get small changes made when you want them, and the hardest to stop when you don't, which is why the US government shuts down periodically.
- Most of the executive details can actually be influenced by we
I agree that making direct comparisons don't make sense on their own merits; I used them as stand-ins for the previous period of American growth (which may be in the book, but were not in the link). I don't think the frontier-vs-catch-up distinction matters to the point argued in the post, though: I strongly expect the American technical frontier 1920-1970 period looks more like the China or India catch-up 1970-2020 period than it does the American technical frontier 1970-2020.
Phrased another way, the time-price method gives us the same stagnation story as... (read more)
This is a fantastic writeup, thank you for putting in the effort!
I like this time-price comparison mechanism, because it looks like it will better for tracking human-level impact than money will. I am looking forward to the book!
Out of curiosity, what was the time price gain for the previous 40-50 year spans before the ones you mention? The stagnation claim isn't that progress is literally zero, but that the last 50 years has shown us much less than the 50 years before that, and the 50 years before that. Thiel's position is more specific to the United States, and I note that in the link you compare the Chinese, Indian a... (read more)
In the context of federal government action, 5 years feels like a huge win! Out of curiosity, was there any kind of generic background on the kind of policy being worked on? For example, with ARPA-H, did the background include the founding of other ARPA-pattern agencies, the references about the relevant authority, or budgetary shenanigans?
It's unrelated to the OP, but what I am driving at here is how much pre-work on behalf of the government is a valid optimization target. I want to make a comparison with the legislative case, where a successful strategy in lobbying is providing draft language for a bill; is there an equivalent in the executive case?
Do you have any methods of analysis or threads of scholarship that you think are definitely wrong, or seriously misleading, and so should be avoided?
This is an interesting post, and the arguments make sense to me. Upvoted.
I did find one idea which is very popular in economics thinking that I want to push back on:
Some amount of time that the second group spent will have been duplicative and so wasted.
I claim none of the effort spent by the second group is wasted: all of the duplicative effort pays out as reduced time to understand (and therefore use) the discovery. In cases where two groups are very close, that amount of time is basically zero; in cases of multiple discovery it is actually zero. I stron... (read more)
This is a cool project! I am going to spend some time poking around in there, and if I think of anything in the way of improvements I’ll let you know.
This is a fantastic write-up, and I would like to see more like it.
I always enjoy seeing love lavished on important intermediate artifacts, like a particular paper, or particular tool, or particular storytelling technique. For papers in particular I would love to see piles and piles more highlights, walkthroughs, and appreciation of great papers across all fields.
Comments in no particular order:
Marc Andreessen continues to sound just like himself. I think this is good for the piece, it feels very genuine. In the main I agree.
Markets is the biggest section. This feels telling and also kind of wasteful. It also had the clunkiest bits which were, but of course, the ones about economics. By contrast the Technology section felt a bit thin, but I could easily forgive a certain amount of c'mon, you know why you are here in the effort.
What is this for, really? I can tell who it is for, because it doesn't seem like it would... (read more)