Many economists say we are living through a Great Stagnation. The term, was made famous by Tyler Cowen'sbook of the same name and the latest iteration is, of course, Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. But they usually look at economic factors like Total Factor Productivity (TFP) or GDP per hour worked. By these measures, we are living through a stagnant period. Some expected that the stagnation would go away once we properly accounted for the Internet and similar hard to account for innov…

Robin Hanson has a recent post in his blog that is best summarised by his tweet: https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/723905628004073473 Do read the full post, though. Here, I argue that there are good reasons to reject the argument, even if we grant Hanson his view on personal identity. From his drawing, I don't get exactly what he means. (Are the dots a period of amnesia? Of 'mind jump'?) So I redrew them to present the cases better: So the Case A is you going to a party, and then forgetting about it.(…

Here are some, in increasing order of difficulty Magic The Gathering and Hearthstone. As far as I know, there is no meaningful work on AI here, but DeepMind is trying to read cards into code directly. Perhaps a first step. Somewhat easy because the game is turn based. But difficult because of the high number of possible combinations of plays, long term thinking needed, and incomplete information: you can't see your opponent's deck or hand, only what is on the board. Starcraft or Civilization. Right now Sta…

Someone in the Slate Star Codex subreddit wasn't very convinced by my previous post. I copy here 4bpp's comment: I don't find the Artir post's section on homeopathy very convincing. He writes: Against homeopathy: Violation of the laws of physics, the consensus of medical scientists, several meta-analysis finding no effects. Most of the evidence for homeopathy comes from homeopaths. Except for the laws of physics (and I doubt that Artir has a sufficiently good understanding of physics to arbitrate on that…

I recently wondered how the Soviet healthcare system worked. Initially, I thought, based on broad ideas about the USSR, that it wouldn't work very well. After a literature review, I confirmed that it was the case. But would it have been epistemically responsible to proclaim that it was awful without having done that literature review? Probably yes, but without much confidence. Before the review, I just had my opinion, based on background knowledge about how central planning works. Perhaps I was wrong on thi…

EDIT: Read beyond the first paragraph! Also, read this to understand how to reject something without reading it. I have never  read a piece of work from Ayn Rand, beyond some paragraphs and extracts here and there on the internet. I never gave Objectivism, her system of thought, much importance. But there are people -Objectivists- who think she is one of the greatest, or the greatest, philosopher ever (along with Aristotle, they'll add). Sometimes, Objectivists tell people who have not read Rand to read her…