Chickenality

For those who find this horrifying, the [typically unstated] assumption is that it works. I'm pretty skeptical of this. Think about it: what do you imagine the effect size is of seeing 10 articles like "4 Secrets to Losing Weight and Feeling GREAT While You Do It!" in your Facebook feed? I'd bet it's essentially 0. If seeing these kinds of articles is all it took to improve our body composition, then we'd all be absolutely shredded.

I'm not trying to argue that advertising doesn't work. Clearly it does. But there's a huge difference between being exposed to tens of thousands of Coca-Cola ads over a lifetime, and being exposed to 10 spam articles over the course of a month.

I'm also not trying to argue that this isn't creepy. Clearly it is. But the real 'target' of this scheme is the person buying the ads. I doubt this has any real effect on the person who sees them.

The atmospheric pressure and temperature on Venus are far too high for it to be habitable. Even if those problems were surmountable, there is no liquid water, and the days are very very long.

> (which lead to subsequently wiped out all our gains in a week)

This is the key point. Many strategies that yield above-market returns often do so only because they're taking on large amounts of risk, even if that risk isn't immediately apparent. Think about trading cryptocurrencies, buying penny stocks, selling naked options, etc. You _can_ make a lot of money doing any of these things, but you'll be exposed to quite a bit of downside along the way, and most people who try will end up in the red.

This is my first time hearing about art19. But after a quick visit to their site, I can guess at what GP was referring to. Looks like they do listener tracking, targeted ads, dynamic ad insertion, etc.

A lot of indices are something like "Top [N] stocks weighted by market cap in [industry/region/country]". You could call those stocks 'picked', but it's not as though someone is doing some deep analysis of the companies' fundamentals or trading history in order to decide which stocks make it into the index. I think that type of analysis is the kind of thing most people think of when they hear about 'stock picking'.

Yes, no index is perfect. But most of them provide more diversification than the average person would be able to achieve by manually managing a portfolio.

Thanks for sharing this infographic. Today is the first time I've ever heard about Kowloon Walled City. I was immediately intrigued, because it looks like something out of science fiction. It reminds me of just how breathtakingly diverse the human experience can be.

I don't understand the connection to energy consumption. Humans have been able to extract increasing amounts of energy over time without correspondingly large increases in human intelligence. I don't see a strong reason to doubt that this will continue, so I don't see a strong reason to doubt that a >= human-level-intelligence AI could do it either.

This is probably a good criticism if it turns out that the right level of abstraction for most problems is Physics. And it seems like your argument would apply equally well against the idea of human intelligence. Luckily, our minds have developed other abstractions that allow us to solve problems much faster than if we had to simulate them as physics problems. For example, I don't need a physics-level simulation of my friend's brain when I want to predict how they'll react to a gift I'm giving them.

I haven't seen anyone argue that intentionality, qualia, or consciousness would necessarily be either a precondition or a result of developing AGI. In fact, thought experiments like the "paperclip maximizer" are often brought up to argue that a machine could be very alien in its internal experience or lack thereof, but still pose an existential threat.

Maybe just commit to removing the most attention-grabbing apps from your phone? Seems like a good way to keep the aspects of your phone that you value while getting rid of the ones that you don't.

Sure it does. During a recession, people will lose their jobs, the value of their assets will go down, etc. Do you think they won't cash out any of their BTC in order to cover expenses?

I think this assumes that the value of the voting rights is constant. In OP's example, the stock buyback only happens for voting shares, which should cause the market to update its estimate of the value of voting rights.

Individual Contributor

One major difference is how concentrated the special interests are. In the case of the Chinese government, public opinion is being swayed by a single entity. In the US, a large number of interest groups are all competing to try to sway public opinion. In the latter case, I think it's harder (at least in principle) for any one group to have a large effect on its own.