Most interesting novel ideas originate at the intersection of multiple disciplines. Profitable trades could be found in the biomedicine sector when the knowledge of biomedicine and finance are combined. That's where I see LLMs shining because they span disciplines way more than any human can. Once we figure out a way to have them combine ideas (similar to how Gwern is suggesting), there will be, I suspect, a flood of novel and interesting ideas, inconceivable with humans.
Your suggestion basically amounts to: digitize and centralize welfare. There are already electronic cards for food. If the money is drawn directly from the central bank as credit instead of from the state welfare fund, it won't make it any more efficient. In fact any experimentation among states will disappear. Also, if CBDCs become a thing, you could see a slow slide into behavior control. What people eat, and where they live becomes a concern for the central bank, because they get to decide who the approved vendors are for those things. "Central" anything is a design smell in most cases.
Getting rid of cash also requires proper paper work and identification so you can sign up for the CBDC wallet. In that case you're excluding the very people from the system who need it the most.
Products will become advertisements themselves. It could be cheaper and more effective to send everyone a box of Tesla Tasty-Electrons cereal than TV or Social media and slots.
Casinos provide free drinks, cartels offer free prostitutes, it's not unprecedented.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?
My kids are enrolled in a homeschool parent partnership program (because its one of the few public montessori programs within an easy before-school-drive for our kids). My experience has been that the families attracted to that school fall into one of two categories:
1) Families who are skeptical of standard American public school methods and/or families who have recognized that standard public school methods don't work for their children's peculiarities. They treat the program (and especially the Montessori program) as like a school acceleration program.
2) Families who do not want the government dictating the terms of their children's education in any way shape or form. Within this latter category, the minority are active participants in their children's education, and the majority are the weirdly religious and/or abusive sorts.
The school's administration seems to cater to category 2, and expend a lot of time and effort to try to communicate that whatever requirement they're enforcing (like "your child must actually talk to, in-person, on the phone, or via video call, a teacher holding a state-issued teaching certificate at least once per 2 school weeks") is not a school requirement, but a state requirement, and failing to meet these minimum requirements will trigger a state investigation, not a school investigation. Its sort of unsettling to hear them belabor the point, but then, during the parent orientation where I was hearing that sort of thing, it seemed like most of the audience was not at all interested in suspending whatever they were doing (conversations, watching youtube videos, etc) while the principal was talking through that stuff. Like, its telling that the administration goes to great pains to say "we aren't holding you to the rules designed specifically to prevent child abuse and neglect, so don't send us your death threats or whatever", and most of the audience to that actual message of how to comply with those rules are themselves completely disengaged from the presentation of them.
I'm going to hazard a guess with zero grounding in data to attempt to answer that, caveat emptor. Please also note that even though these are my guesses, these assertions do not really reflect where I personally land on this. I'm not really sure what the breakdown is, but I think I can understand how someone gets to this point of view.
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In order for parents to choose homeschooling, some (but not all) must be present in the parents:
- a conviction that the herd choice of sending a child to school is wrong, and not just a little bit
- the belief that you know education better than expert educators with many years of hard earned experience
- relatedly, the belief that you are fully qualified to teach anything of importance, and that anything you can't teach is not of important
- the ability to forgo the opportunity cost of an in-home full time tutor
Add these up and you will skew towards parents who either have extremely strong convictions (faith related or otherwise) and a mentality that presupposes that the parent is "right."
In the best case scenario, this is an extremely well educated/informed parent who knows enough to keep their pride at check and can handle their emotions well in the face of at times extremely frustrating circumstances, all well being under more financial strain than they would be if they weren't showing up every day to school. These people definitely exist, and I think most parents strive to be this for their children regardless of how they educate their child.
But the "average" human is not well informed, often makes rash and/or emotional decisions, and is struggling to make ends meet. Thus, the "average" parent that chooses homeschooling skews towards dogmatic thinking and/or a presumption of "I'm right and you're wrong" that over a period of a childhood easily leads to abuse, especially if the parents are struggling to make ends meet.
I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so and thus are well resourced enough (financially or socially) to have a good shot of success, but even among the top 10% of earners you will be hard pressed to find parents that believe they can afford homeschooling.
> I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so
I would say that the vast majority the quote-unquote "normal" homeschool parents I know are broke hippies/homesteaders/vanlife/wooden-sailboat types.
Definitely are rich folks who go down this path, but they tend to pay fancy private tutors and end up with something much more resembling a traditional education
Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim. And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
I've met a fair number of other homeschooled folks over the years who had a great childhood, but I've met more for whom the lack of community/government oversight meant their parents could get away with things we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse, various forms of religious indoctrination, or just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
> Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim.
Depends what you mean by normal. My experience is kids get more freedom, meet a wide range of people, and generally get a much better education. Maybe it is different here in the UK.
> And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
The home ed community in the UK does have a lot of hippie types in it, but even if I do not see eye to eye with them I think their kids are mostly a lot better educated than the average school child.
> hings we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse,
which also happens to school going kids. it happens more often to school going kids (and as far as I can see from stats, home ed kids are at lower risk - more likely to be investigated, less likely to have action taken). On top of that there is a fair amount of abuse in schools.
> just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
that is not what unschooling is. Unschorling parents can make a great deal of effort, its just that they let kids decide what they want to learn and facilitate it.
Yes, I was originally homeschooled in the UK, and while a lot of the parents where pretty far out there, there was definitely a lower prevalence of weird religious cults and that sort of thing (than in the US).
> that is not what unschooling is
That's why I put "unschooling" in quotes. There are certainly folks doing ethical things under that banner, but the legitimacy of the term provides cover for a lot of folks who aren't doing the ethical thing.
Why do you doubt Zuck's foresight? I am not a fanboy, but he timed the pivot to mobile really well, acquired instagram, and anticipated how crucial messaging would be. All pretty good calls. The VR stuff is still playing out. In fact I think he is one of the few who do a better job of looking ahead.
Mostly because of the huge bet on "Web 3.0" and the "metaverse" stuff. I could be wrong, maybe in ten years we'll be looking at how great Facebook was at predicting stuff, but it seems like it mostly has not panned out, at least from my (admittedly very limited) perspective.
I guess the reason I'm skeptical is because there's really no reason for him to not say this kind of stuff. If he says "Meta's AI model is so good that it's on par with a mid-level engineer", there's a chance the stock price shoots up because it suggests that maybe Meta has some amazing new model and AI is the current hotness, and there's basically no penalty for being wrong.
It's not hard to find cases where CEOs just completely lie to everyone's faces in order to try and boost stock prices, so it's not a skepticism of Zuckerberg explicitly, so much as all CEOs.
Most CEOs, yes. But founder CEOs normally don't care about stock price that much. Zuck turned down yahoo, remember. Bezos kept taking losses in Amazon in the beginning for the sake of future growth despite the stock being punished so hard. Steve Jobs was like that too. Your cynicism is misguided. VR is a very long call.
I don't see how any of that proves that founder CEOs don't care about stock price. Just because they don't take the first easy-out doesn't imply that they're not susceptible to doing things to try and drum up investor hype. I own stock in Apple but I don't panic-sell every single time that AAPL drops in price.
VR is neat but the "metaverse" suggests a lot more, which is why I called it out and not VR.
When I look back on my 45 years life, there are spans which feel like a different life altogether. I thought differently, and made choices that I won't make today. I'd say "in my former life" as if that life ended and a new one began. I suspect youthful immortality would be a sequence of many deaths and rebirths. If you had the neuroplasticity of a 25 year old and the experience and wisdom of a 50 year old, I imagine it won't get boring, and perhaps new ideas and modes of living won't require a generation to die, and a new one to be born.
