All of Yarrow B.'s Comments + Replies

A potential area of overlap between effective altruism and Roots of Progress is the non-profit New Harvest, which funds research into making meat, eggs, and milk without animals.  

What’s a good alternative word for someone who has a strong conviction in the past, present, and future benefits of technology?

In theory, if they could be made to work, self-driving cars would be one of the best technologies ever. In practice, the technology seems stuck in a rut. Although exact statistics are hard to come by, the number of human interventions seems to remain high.

There is a very high burden of proof for self-driving car companies like Cruise and Waymo; they need to convincingly demonstrate, using robust statistical evidence, that their vehicles are indeed significantly safer than human drivers in the same locales. Cruise, Waymo, et al. have certainly had plenty of... (read more)

I think Ezra Klein has a lucid take on the "manifesto". Ezra observes that it's a covert anti-wokeness rant:

It's a mistake to read his manifesto as about technology. It's about how we were once brave and strong and we have become soft and weak.

In Ezra's New York Times column on Andreessen's rant, he writes:

It’s a coalition obsessed with where we went wrong: the weakness, the political correctness, the liberalism, the trigger warnings, the smug elites. It’s a coalition that believes we were once hard and have become soft; worse, we have come to lionize so