I love the idea of having a library of mega-projects ready to go if things get magically cheap. I was going to suggest the "flood the Geat Basin with desalinated water" idea, but you beat me to it. After that, the Quaise Energy plan of blasting 12-mile deep holes using crazily-powerful microwaves so as to enable "geothermal anywhere" is also a personal favorite, but it may be further along than you're imagining. The most awe-inspiring mega-project proposal I know is an idea to drill a large number of wells obliquely under the Yellowstone super-caldera so as to capture it's heat using liquid copper as the working fluid, powering everything in North America west of the Mississippi. So many possibilities. A fleet of multi-modal drones to hunt invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades? Satellite shading to restore melting glaciers? Intentionally return the Great Plains in the US or the Australian Outback to nature? Certainly the astronomers and particle physicists can come up something, starting with the word "circumglobal" and then graduating to "circumsolar". Oh, the places we'll go.
My reinvented science has been about the presently taught but badly biased subject of macroeconomics which is often regarded as a pseudo-science. It has many separate topics that cannot be directly connected, although this actual social business system can be more accurately modelled and represented as a number of sectors each having a different role to play. They are connected by the many trading operations that pass between them. Nothing in that past pseudo representation can get close to this kind of structural model or representation.
So after much research, analysis and writing, I have managed to express this vital matter as a true science instead, and it does follow the explanation I have just written above. This kind of thing certainly lays within what REINVENT SCIENCE is all about.
I will gladly share my work with your organization. It is now written up in a 320-page book "Consequential Macroeconomics--Rationalizing About How Our Social System Works" that you may wish to see. Ask me for an e-copy and even if you are just skimming this message, I will gladly send you for free this carefully engineered, prepared and meaningful work. chestdher@gmail.com
I am concerned that the use of AI will soon enable reports and papers to be so quickly written and sent for publishing, that there will not be sufficient time nor motive to try to read all of them, after being published and distributed on any chosen topic. This is already true when it applies to international conventions of scientists. The amount of time it takes to join in many of them and makes it impossible to attend so many, which first seem to be of real interest and concern. Could we not have a way for the AI to summarize these works so that the experts can better decide which ones actually do suit the more detailed matters on which they REALLY do need to participate. The abstracts that are presently used are still too long for making a study of these many works.
I’ve been alternatively arguing, preaching, begging, and shouting at the AI safety people to account for hardware people’s perspectives. The reactions range from being ignored to banned. Scott Alexander has been complaining lately about EA being referred to as an insular cult. Well, when you behave like an insular cult, don’t be surprised when people call you a small insular cult.
> This is because, despite all contentions to the contrary, the fundamental building block of matter is the unpleasant surprise
This is really good, I enjoyed this essay a lot. I also think a lot of it is correct. It is really difficult to explain to "bits people" how many more _degrees of freedom_ physical stuff has compared to software representations. I tried to do a little bit of this in https://aclevername.substack.com/p/the-world-has-a-grounding-problem but the differences in scale are to be frank quite mind boggling.
I love the idea of having a library of mega-projects ready to go if things get magically cheap. I was going to suggest the "flood the Geat Basin with desalinated water" idea, but you beat me to it. After that, the Quaise Energy plan of blasting 12-mile deep holes using crazily-powerful microwaves so as to enable "geothermal anywhere" is also a personal favorite, but it may be further along than you're imagining. The most awe-inspiring mega-project proposal I know is an idea to drill a large number of wells obliquely under the Yellowstone super-caldera so as to capture it's heat using liquid copper as the working fluid, powering everything in North America west of the Mississippi. So many possibilities. A fleet of multi-modal drones to hunt invasive Burmese pythons in the Everglades? Satellite shading to restore melting glaciers? Intentionally return the Great Plains in the US or the Australian Outback to nature? Certainly the astronomers and particle physicists can come up something, starting with the word "circumglobal" and then graduating to "circumsolar". Oh, the places we'll go.
My reinvented science has been about the presently taught but badly biased subject of macroeconomics which is often regarded as a pseudo-science. It has many separate topics that cannot be directly connected, although this actual social business system can be more accurately modelled and represented as a number of sectors each having a different role to play. They are connected by the many trading operations that pass between them. Nothing in that past pseudo representation can get close to this kind of structural model or representation.
So after much research, analysis and writing, I have managed to express this vital matter as a true science instead, and it does follow the explanation I have just written above. This kind of thing certainly lays within what REINVENT SCIENCE is all about.
I will gladly share my work with your organization. It is now written up in a 320-page book "Consequential Macroeconomics--Rationalizing About How Our Social System Works" that you may wish to see. Ask me for an e-copy and even if you are just skimming this message, I will gladly send you for free this carefully engineered, prepared and meaningful work. chestdher@gmail.com
I am concerned that the use of AI will soon enable reports and papers to be so quickly written and sent for publishing, that there will not be sufficient time nor motive to try to read all of them, after being published and distributed on any chosen topic. This is already true when it applies to international conventions of scientists. The amount of time it takes to join in many of them and makes it impossible to attend so many, which first seem to be of real interest and concern. Could we not have a way for the AI to summarize these works so that the experts can better decide which ones actually do suit the more detailed matters on which they REALLY do need to participate. The abstracts that are presently used are still too long for making a study of these many works.
I’ve been alternatively arguing, preaching, begging, and shouting at the AI safety people to account for hardware people’s perspectives. The reactions range from being ignored to banned. Scott Alexander has been complaining lately about EA being referred to as an insular cult. Well, when you behave like an insular cult, don’t be surprised when people call you a small insular cult.
> This is because, despite all contentions to the contrary, the fundamental building block of matter is the unpleasant surprise
This is really good, I enjoyed this essay a lot. I also think a lot of it is correct. It is really difficult to explain to "bits people" how many more _degrees of freedom_ physical stuff has compared to software representations. I tried to do a little bit of this in https://aclevername.substack.com/p/the-world-has-a-grounding-problem but the differences in scale are to be frank quite mind boggling.