> What lies at the bottom of the Cambridge Capital Controversy well?
The recognition that we don't yet have a good analytical framework to study emergent, chaotic systems. Computers, machine learning and advancements in chaos theory will be essential here.
> Nevertheless, this is a great artistic and cultural mystery. Even the fact that there is not more discussion of the disappearance of poetry is a mystery in itself.
Good question. My first-order analysis: poetry is challenging in a way that isn't true of music, in that, you can appreciate the latter even without understanding the lyrics. Music will necessarily always have wider appeal as a result. The constraints of poetry are also more challenging.
Furthermore, technological development amplifies natural power laws, which means forms of entertainment that have wider appeal benefit from a positive reinforcement effects, and the converse is true of niche entertainment. You literally can't walk through life without being exposed to music, movies and other popular culture, but you actively have to look for less widespread forms like theatre, art museums, and poetry.
> Why is so little fantasy and science fiction writing literary in the capital L sense? Why has no one written Love in the Time of Cholera except with fae? Ulysses with familiar spirits? Obviously there's magical realism, but I'm surprised more people haven't tried a blend of literary writing and genre fantasy. Maybe fantasy writers are too smart to fall into that trap?
I'd guess self-selection and gating.
> How much smarter than a human would you have to be to trigger a singularity?
Supposing the "singularity" means a point where "technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible", then it can't happen until either:
1. Civilization is multiplanetary because nuclear weapons and engineering bioweapons can easily reverse technological progress on any one planet by killing everyone or destroying supply chains.
2. An AI with general intelligence is created that has access to sufficient resources to keep itself operational, since it could potentially survive such disasters on any one planet.
I'm not sure intelligence alone is sufficient to achieve either of these outcomes, because resources and manpower are needed for the first possibility, and it's not clear that intelligence can ever make up for the deficiencies in knowledge and tools needed to create a general AI within a single human lifetime.
How long would it take Tony Stark to create his Iron Man suit had he been born in the paleolithic era? Almost certainly more than a lifetime to advance material science and production capabilities for metal, silicon, polymers and everything else that would be needed in all its various shapes and sizes. The RepRep movement is directed towards building self-replicating machines, but building a metal 3D printer with the tolerances required is a daunting task even given our current infrastructure.
> Imagine a person started off in good health in a first world country with an apartment, internet access and $5000. How much smarter than a human would they have to be to take over the world in one year?
Depends what's meant by "take over the world"? Become as rich as Bezos? Become a dictator? Become leader of the free world? I don't think intelligence on its own can guarantee any of these. Delegation is critical. If you're not super-smart, you have to be charismatic to get people on your side and do the work that needs to be done for you in order to take over the world.
If you're only leaning on intelligence, then you have to be smart enough to automate nearly everything ala Tony Stark, but it's not clear that everything that needs to be done can be automated without creating AI with general intelligence, and per above, it's not clear that that can be done with intelligence alone given our current level of understanding.
> Is there anyway we could safely slash these times by a third or even a half (e.g. six years to become a psychiatrist out of high-school)? Is the specialty structure itself, where everyone learns to become a doctor and then specializes, the best way to handle medicine?
Almost certainly not. At least, not a full doctor. I think front-loading with more human biology, simple diagnostics and pharmaceuticals in high school would also be a no-brainer. We are collectively far too ignorant of medicine and our own bodies.
> Linked to the above- medicine generally has been more resistant to proletarianisation than any of the other professions (law in particular has been smashed, pharmacy even more so). Could medicine be proletarianised and doctors made just another type of worker? Should it be?
It will be with the advancements in machine learning. It has already started in specialized domains like neuroimaging, where ML has now exceeded diagnostic experts. It will then proceed to progressively more generalized domains. This may eventually somewhat alleviate the demand for doctors.
> How close are we to the ceiling of performance in chess?
If you mean human performance, probably near the top of what humans can figure out without assistance. It's possible that computers will find new strategies that humans can then learn which would further push that ceiling up.
> Is there a relatively simple way to describe an excellent strategy for this chess super being to increase the likelihood of its human opponent slipping up and making a move which throws the game into a win state for the chess super being?
Relatively simple? Doubtful. Given recent results from the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma along these lines [1], I suspect it should be possible if you're already positing a being that can see all possible game trees.
> To what degree are there political or social ideas which, even now, if someone dreamed them up and went to some modest effort to promulgate them would transform the world? Are such remaining unthought ideas relatively few, and their effects mostly modest? Relatively many, and quite a few with great effect? Some other combination? The real underlying question here- to what extent is theorizing about political and social issues an effective strategy for changing the world?
It can be very effective, but overcoming people's skepticism is difficult . Some ideas to consider: at least some part of parliament/congress based on sortition rather than election (same argument for promotion in corporations), universal basic income, forbidding any kind of money or perks in politics (public funding for everything needed).
> What would be the social effects of a working lie detector?
Power hierarchies will act to preserve themselves, as always. Therefore, there will be countermeasures for a certain class of elite people. If no countermeasures are possible, then compartmentalization of information and decisions so they cannot reveal knowingly being complicit in unethical collective choices that benefit them. This already takes place to some degree, and a lie detector will only amplify the incentives.
> Similar to the question about a lie detector. A wizard waves a wand. From that point onward, no one can lie. Does society A) collapse B) get much worse on net but continue C) continue with surprisingly little change D) get much better on net E) become a utopia?
Some mix of B and C. My quibble is on "much". I think the affluent won't have much change, I think the poor will suffer more.
> To what extent are people who make comically bad takes about politics acting in bad faith- versus stupid or self deceiving?
Explicit bad faith in politics and self-deception is common place. Politicians voting on partisan lines is clear as day. Two public polls on the current state of the economy inverted completely between Republicans and Democrats only 24 hours after Biden took office, showing the exact same partisan bias at play in the population as a whole.
This is somewhat a natural ingroup/outgroup bias and blind spot bias at play, but corporate media coverage hammers these partisan divisions to drive revenue. So yes, it's stupidity and ignorance resulting from our natural inclinations, but driven mad by an unnatural environment that preys on those weaknesses.
> Why the aren't democratic politics more effective? There are certain issues on which the average member of the public disagrees greatly with the average politician, and yet there is very little movement. Obviously money in politics has something to do with it, but how does money exert its influence exactly? It's easy to get blase about this replacing incredulity with a faux wise cynicism, but if you stop and think, it's weird that 70% of the public can strongly support something, yet it be considered a fringe position among politicians. How much of it is caused by monopoly power wielded by political parties due to existing voting systems? How much of it is due to rational or irrational voter ignorance? How much of it is caused by voters deceiving themselves about what they believe? How much of it is due to the action of the media? What forms of action by the media (and other ideological apparatus) count here?
Popular doesn't mean much in winner-take-all voting systems. Politicians appeal to the median, and the others are forced to strategically vote for the less of "two evils".
However, popular support shouldn't necessarily mean much either, because the majority of the population lives in urban centers, but urban problems are not the same as rural problems, and rural concerns should get equal weight. Nearly all of our food comes from rural areas after all.
Finally, the media is absolutely 100% complicit in suppressing some popular movements/opinions, sometimes for direct self-interest, sometimes for indirect reasons (don't anger politicians if you want to have access to them).
> Is neoliberalism a useful concept for understanding this phase of economic and political life that began sometime in the mid 70's? Was it ever useful and is it still useful?
There's no single, coherent conception of neoliberalism, so hard to say. If it's just "create markets and encourage competition wherever it makes sense and enforce strong anti-trust laws since monopolies harm the country", then it's incredibly useful. However, that's no longer what's really going on because market regulators have been thoroughly captured.
> What the hell are qualia? How do they fit into the world?
They don't! ;-)
> Is consequentalism self-effacing? Would we consequentialists be well advised not to hope that consequentalism becomes widely appreciated common-sense because this might have various bad consequences (undermining integrity, inspiring a certain callousness, allowing people to rationalize their preferred course of action)?
Not if it's presented correctly. Clearly consequentialism entails an ethics that is uncomputable, even in principle. Consequentialism must therefore derive sets of general rules and principles similar to deontology for any applications, at which point, is it practically much different from deontology?
I also think there's a meaningful distinction between "good actions" and what it means to be a "good person", but I don't really see this distinction reflected in most of the literature, which seems to take as a given the notion that "good person" means some variant of "someone who does good".
> To what degree are people motivated by sadism in everyday and political life?
Everyday more than political life. My perception is that political life is more driven by egoism and ignorance. Sadism doesn't enter the picture because they're too divorced from the civilians that are suffering; there can be no joy in seeing suffering if you don't see it.
> Is self report a reasonable measure for variables like personality and happiness?
Depends what you mean by "reasonable". Reasonableness depends on context.
> What is the optimal amount of caffeine to ingest? How does this vary by life you are trying to live.
There is no universal optimal amount, some people metabolize it faster (there's a genetic component), and some people suffer adverse health effects. Caffeine can be a useful stimulant when stimulants would be useful, absent negative health effects.
> Sovereign citizens believe both A) That the legal system is run by incredibly evil people entrenched in power B) That if they can just say the right sequences of words, those people will be compelled by the rightness of their arguments to let them off various crimes, civil liabilities etc. Obviously this combination of beliefs is irrational- that's not in dispute- but what about it makes it so compelling? Shouldn't the factors that make you feel the legal system is incredibly evil also make you feel like you're not going to be able to sway them just by making a strong argument? Why is this seemingly contradictory combination of beliefs such a potent attractor?
Because they see rich people get off all the time, therefore there literally is a "right" argument to let them off, but not necessarily a "just" one. The beliefs aren't necessarily mutually inconsistent, as stated.
> Would the Milligram & Stanford Prison experiments replicate if ran properly today?
If by "properly" you mean "ethically", then almost certainly not. If by "properly" you mean, "without Milgram's interference", then some of it almost certainly would. Sadism is present in a subset of the population after all, as are maladaptive responses to authority.
> What the hell is going on with the replication crisis? A lot of the failures to replicate are in really simple experimental designs. How much of it is outright fraud? How much of it is pure chance and the file drawer effect? How much is ad hoc analysis and statistical fishing? How much is participants giving the experimenters the "expected result"?
1. No incentives to publish negative results and failures, therefore we have a over representation of allegedly positive results.
2. As a result of incentives to publish only positive results and the requirements and prestige of publishing, many researchers just gather data and search for a hypothesis that fits the data and publish that. This guarantees a high rate of false positives.
3. Few incentives to replicate studies, therefore (false) positives get cited and repeated unchallenged for long periods of time.
These seem to be sufficient to explain the vast majority of poor replication rates. Notice how "harder" sciences like physics do better on publishing negative results and replication, and subsequently don't suffer from the replication crisis.
> How can we make trying to replicate experiments an honourable and attractive path given the structural incentives of academia?
Pre-registration is already on the rise, as is open source data. These will both go a long way. I would also prefer incentives to replicate. I think every journal should be required to publish some number of replications, both successes and failures.
> What percentage of convicted incarcerated people are innocent?
A lot higher than it should be. Law enforcement and prosecution have very perverse incentives.
> Under what conditions -if any at all-, and in what ways -if any at all-, should society informally punish people for whom a criminal conviction is likely impossible?
I think that's a terrible idea. If standards of evidence cannot be met, then what justification is there for collective retribution?
> Are people who have done horrific things (rape, premeditated murder) generally all round bad people? Or is human character contradictory in such a way as to allow at least a significant minority of such people to be, despite it all, good or at least average or not far below in most other areas of life? This may sound absurd to some readers, but a lot of anecdotal evidence tends to suggest it might be true. What is going on here? To what degree do people have consistent moral character?
People do not have consistent moral character, but consistency is a moral virtue. People who have committed horrible crimes can be reformed, although in some cases we do not yet know how to do so.
I love this list, I've written thoughts on most of these, but here are some choice ones:
> What percentage of convicted incarcerated people are innocent?
I wonder if there is some way to infer this based on the success of the Innocence Project.
> What would be an acceptable false positive rate in a just criminal law system?
I’m going to be a good sport and just try to come up with some numbers. My actual beliefs would probably vary wildly after a lengthy or serious analysis. But I think it’s worth it, for now, to just get some numbers on the table. So for shoplifting, I’d say 1 in 50. For murder, 1 in 200.
> Under what conditions -if any at all-, and in what ways -if any at all-, should society informally punish people for whom a criminal conviction is likely impossible?
Shame is the kernel of informal punishment. I wouldn't want a society without shame, but I guess this question has more to do with extreme levels of shame, the kind that would make you lose your job. We can conceive of violations of workplace norms that would and should lead to someone being shamed out of a job even if the courts can't convict them. For example, while Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, may not get convicted, she should be shamed out of being an entrepreneur for a long time.
> Why aren’t democratic politics more effective? ...
I'm surprised democracy even works as well as it does. Why on Earth should mass voting pick the best leader? Imagine having all the employees of a company vote who should be CEO? It'd be a nightmare. Democracy is one of those "just so" things. It just so happens to work out.
> An argument can be made that poetry was once the most important of the arts, yet now it is effectively dead!??!!
Amazing question. It's probably related to the same reason that non-musical theater is effectively dead. All the other similar forms of content have exploded in terms of production and consumption. The paperback revolution of the 1800s was probably one major ruiner of poetry.
> Why is so little fantasy and science fiction writing literary in the capital L sense?
This is related to the reason why writing and story in video games are so bad. All incentives point to spending less effort on the story and more focus on the gameplay and set pieces. If you make a sci-fi book, you're shooting for the aisles of the bookstore with other sci-fi, or you're hoping to get written up in sci-fi blogs, so you're privy to the same incentives as everybody else in that "genre." Heck, on some level, you're writing for young adults.
That’s an interesting list. Here’s a question I’ve pondered about politics and history: When are protests effective? When they succeed, has this happened due to a strategy that the protesters had that worked, or due to other factors?
I personally suspect that the reason "genre fiction" and "literature" don't overlap is because the people who decide what counts as literature don't let them overlap even when "genre fiction" displays incredible artistic merit. Can't help you on the rest.
Great questions. Where to put drafts of answers? Or more questions?
Great questions!!
> What lies at the bottom of the Cambridge Capital Controversy well?
The recognition that we don't yet have a good analytical framework to study emergent, chaotic systems. Computers, machine learning and advancements in chaos theory will be essential here.
> Nevertheless, this is a great artistic and cultural mystery. Even the fact that there is not more discussion of the disappearance of poetry is a mystery in itself.
Good question. My first-order analysis: poetry is challenging in a way that isn't true of music, in that, you can appreciate the latter even without understanding the lyrics. Music will necessarily always have wider appeal as a result. The constraints of poetry are also more challenging.
Furthermore, technological development amplifies natural power laws, which means forms of entertainment that have wider appeal benefit from a positive reinforcement effects, and the converse is true of niche entertainment. You literally can't walk through life without being exposed to music, movies and other popular culture, but you actively have to look for less widespread forms like theatre, art museums, and poetry.
> Why is so little fantasy and science fiction writing literary in the capital L sense? Why has no one written Love in the Time of Cholera except with fae? Ulysses with familiar spirits? Obviously there's magical realism, but I'm surprised more people haven't tried a blend of literary writing and genre fantasy. Maybe fantasy writers are too smart to fall into that trap?
I'd guess self-selection and gating.
> How much smarter than a human would you have to be to trigger a singularity?
Supposing the "singularity" means a point where "technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible", then it can't happen until either:
1. Civilization is multiplanetary because nuclear weapons and engineering bioweapons can easily reverse technological progress on any one planet by killing everyone or destroying supply chains.
2. An AI with general intelligence is created that has access to sufficient resources to keep itself operational, since it could potentially survive such disasters on any one planet.
I'm not sure intelligence alone is sufficient to achieve either of these outcomes, because resources and manpower are needed for the first possibility, and it's not clear that intelligence can ever make up for the deficiencies in knowledge and tools needed to create a general AI within a single human lifetime.
How long would it take Tony Stark to create his Iron Man suit had he been born in the paleolithic era? Almost certainly more than a lifetime to advance material science and production capabilities for metal, silicon, polymers and everything else that would be needed in all its various shapes and sizes. The RepRep movement is directed towards building self-replicating machines, but building a metal 3D printer with the tolerances required is a daunting task even given our current infrastructure.
> Imagine a person started off in good health in a first world country with an apartment, internet access and $5000. How much smarter than a human would they have to be to take over the world in one year?
Depends what's meant by "take over the world"? Become as rich as Bezos? Become a dictator? Become leader of the free world? I don't think intelligence on its own can guarantee any of these. Delegation is critical. If you're not super-smart, you have to be charismatic to get people on your side and do the work that needs to be done for you in order to take over the world.
If you're only leaning on intelligence, then you have to be smart enough to automate nearly everything ala Tony Stark, but it's not clear that everything that needs to be done can be automated without creating AI with general intelligence, and per above, it's not clear that that can be done with intelligence alone given our current level of understanding.
> Is there anyway we could safely slash these times by a third or even a half (e.g. six years to become a psychiatrist out of high-school)? Is the specialty structure itself, where everyone learns to become a doctor and then specializes, the best way to handle medicine?
Almost certainly not. At least, not a full doctor. I think front-loading with more human biology, simple diagnostics and pharmaceuticals in high school would also be a no-brainer. We are collectively far too ignorant of medicine and our own bodies.
> Linked to the above- medicine generally has been more resistant to proletarianisation than any of the other professions (law in particular has been smashed, pharmacy even more so). Could medicine be proletarianised and doctors made just another type of worker? Should it be?
It will be with the advancements in machine learning. It has already started in specialized domains like neuroimaging, where ML has now exceeded diagnostic experts. It will then proceed to progressively more generalized domains. This may eventually somewhat alleviate the demand for doctors.
> How close are we to the ceiling of performance in chess?
If you mean human performance, probably near the top of what humans can figure out without assistance. It's possible that computers will find new strategies that humans can then learn which would further push that ceiling up.
> Is there a relatively simple way to describe an excellent strategy for this chess super being to increase the likelihood of its human opponent slipping up and making a move which throws the game into a win state for the chess super being?
Relatively simple? Doubtful. Given recent results from the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma along these lines [1], I suspect it should be possible if you're already positing a being that can see all possible game trees.
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/109/26/10409.full.pdf
2/3?
> To what degree are there political or social ideas which, even now, if someone dreamed them up and went to some modest effort to promulgate them would transform the world? Are such remaining unthought ideas relatively few, and their effects mostly modest? Relatively many, and quite a few with great effect? Some other combination? The real underlying question here- to what extent is theorizing about political and social issues an effective strategy for changing the world?
It can be very effective, but overcoming people's skepticism is difficult . Some ideas to consider: at least some part of parliament/congress based on sortition rather than election (same argument for promotion in corporations), universal basic income, forbidding any kind of money or perks in politics (public funding for everything needed).
> What would be the social effects of a working lie detector?
Power hierarchies will act to preserve themselves, as always. Therefore, there will be countermeasures for a certain class of elite people. If no countermeasures are possible, then compartmentalization of information and decisions so they cannot reveal knowingly being complicit in unethical collective choices that benefit them. This already takes place to some degree, and a lie detector will only amplify the incentives.
> Similar to the question about a lie detector. A wizard waves a wand. From that point onward, no one can lie. Does society A) collapse B) get much worse on net but continue C) continue with surprisingly little change D) get much better on net E) become a utopia?
Some mix of B and C. My quibble is on "much". I think the affluent won't have much change, I think the poor will suffer more.
> To what extent are people who make comically bad takes about politics acting in bad faith- versus stupid or self deceiving?
Explicit bad faith in politics and self-deception is common place. Politicians voting on partisan lines is clear as day. Two public polls on the current state of the economy inverted completely between Republicans and Democrats only 24 hours after Biden took office, showing the exact same partisan bias at play in the population as a whole.
This is somewhat a natural ingroup/outgroup bias and blind spot bias at play, but corporate media coverage hammers these partisan divisions to drive revenue. So yes, it's stupidity and ignorance resulting from our natural inclinations, but driven mad by an unnatural environment that preys on those weaknesses.
> Why the aren't democratic politics more effective? There are certain issues on which the average member of the public disagrees greatly with the average politician, and yet there is very little movement. Obviously money in politics has something to do with it, but how does money exert its influence exactly? It's easy to get blase about this replacing incredulity with a faux wise cynicism, but if you stop and think, it's weird that 70% of the public can strongly support something, yet it be considered a fringe position among politicians. How much of it is caused by monopoly power wielded by political parties due to existing voting systems? How much of it is due to rational or irrational voter ignorance? How much of it is caused by voters deceiving themselves about what they believe? How much of it is due to the action of the media? What forms of action by the media (and other ideological apparatus) count here?
Popular doesn't mean much in winner-take-all voting systems. Politicians appeal to the median, and the others are forced to strategically vote for the less of "two evils".
However, popular support shouldn't necessarily mean much either, because the majority of the population lives in urban centers, but urban problems are not the same as rural problems, and rural concerns should get equal weight. Nearly all of our food comes from rural areas after all.
Finally, the media is absolutely 100% complicit in suppressing some popular movements/opinions, sometimes for direct self-interest, sometimes for indirect reasons (don't anger politicians if you want to have access to them).
> Is neoliberalism a useful concept for understanding this phase of economic and political life that began sometime in the mid 70's? Was it ever useful and is it still useful?
There's no single, coherent conception of neoliberalism, so hard to say. If it's just "create markets and encourage competition wherever it makes sense and enforce strong anti-trust laws since monopolies harm the country", then it's incredibly useful. However, that's no longer what's really going on because market regulators have been thoroughly captured.
> What the hell are qualia? How do they fit into the world?
They don't! ;-)
> Is consequentalism self-effacing? Would we consequentialists be well advised not to hope that consequentalism becomes widely appreciated common-sense because this might have various bad consequences (undermining integrity, inspiring a certain callousness, allowing people to rationalize their preferred course of action)?
Not if it's presented correctly. Clearly consequentialism entails an ethics that is uncomputable, even in principle. Consequentialism must therefore derive sets of general rules and principles similar to deontology for any applications, at which point, is it practically much different from deontology?
I also think there's a meaningful distinction between "good actions" and what it means to be a "good person", but I don't really see this distinction reflected in most of the literature, which seems to take as a given the notion that "good person" means some variant of "someone who does good".
Good questions! My responses:
> To what degree are people motivated by sadism in everyday and political life?
Everyday more than political life. My perception is that political life is more driven by egoism and ignorance. Sadism doesn't enter the picture because they're too divorced from the civilians that are suffering; there can be no joy in seeing suffering if you don't see it.
> Is self report a reasonable measure for variables like personality and happiness?
Depends what you mean by "reasonable". Reasonableness depends on context.
> What is the optimal amount of caffeine to ingest? How does this vary by life you are trying to live.
There is no universal optimal amount, some people metabolize it faster (there's a genetic component), and some people suffer adverse health effects. Caffeine can be a useful stimulant when stimulants would be useful, absent negative health effects.
> Sovereign citizens believe both A) That the legal system is run by incredibly evil people entrenched in power B) That if they can just say the right sequences of words, those people will be compelled by the rightness of their arguments to let them off various crimes, civil liabilities etc. Obviously this combination of beliefs is irrational- that's not in dispute- but what about it makes it so compelling? Shouldn't the factors that make you feel the legal system is incredibly evil also make you feel like you're not going to be able to sway them just by making a strong argument? Why is this seemingly contradictory combination of beliefs such a potent attractor?
Because they see rich people get off all the time, therefore there literally is a "right" argument to let them off, but not necessarily a "just" one. The beliefs aren't necessarily mutually inconsistent, as stated.
> Would the Milligram & Stanford Prison experiments replicate if ran properly today?
If by "properly" you mean "ethically", then almost certainly not. If by "properly" you mean, "without Milgram's interference", then some of it almost certainly would. Sadism is present in a subset of the population after all, as are maladaptive responses to authority.
> What the hell is going on with the replication crisis? A lot of the failures to replicate are in really simple experimental designs. How much of it is outright fraud? How much of it is pure chance and the file drawer effect? How much is ad hoc analysis and statistical fishing? How much is participants giving the experimenters the "expected result"?
1. No incentives to publish negative results and failures, therefore we have a over representation of allegedly positive results.
2. As a result of incentives to publish only positive results and the requirements and prestige of publishing, many researchers just gather data and search for a hypothesis that fits the data and publish that. This guarantees a high rate of false positives.
3. Few incentives to replicate studies, therefore (false) positives get cited and repeated unchallenged for long periods of time.
These seem to be sufficient to explain the vast majority of poor replication rates. Notice how "harder" sciences like physics do better on publishing negative results and replication, and subsequently don't suffer from the replication crisis.
> How can we make trying to replicate experiments an honourable and attractive path given the structural incentives of academia?
Pre-registration is already on the rise, as is open source data. These will both go a long way. I would also prefer incentives to replicate. I think every journal should be required to publish some number of replications, both successes and failures.
> What percentage of convicted incarcerated people are innocent?
A lot higher than it should be. Law enforcement and prosecution have very perverse incentives.
> Under what conditions -if any at all-, and in what ways -if any at all-, should society informally punish people for whom a criminal conviction is likely impossible?
I think that's a terrible idea. If standards of evidence cannot be met, then what justification is there for collective retribution?
> Are people who have done horrific things (rape, premeditated murder) generally all round bad people? Or is human character contradictory in such a way as to allow at least a significant minority of such people to be, despite it all, good or at least average or not far below in most other areas of life? This may sound absurd to some readers, but a lot of anecdotal evidence tends to suggest it might be true. What is going on here? To what degree do people have consistent moral character?
People do not have consistent moral character, but consistency is a moral virtue. People who have committed horrible crimes can be reformed, although in some cases we do not yet know how to do so.
1/3?
I love this list, I've written thoughts on most of these, but here are some choice ones:
> What percentage of convicted incarcerated people are innocent?
I wonder if there is some way to infer this based on the success of the Innocence Project.
> What would be an acceptable false positive rate in a just criminal law system?
I’m going to be a good sport and just try to come up with some numbers. My actual beliefs would probably vary wildly after a lengthy or serious analysis. But I think it’s worth it, for now, to just get some numbers on the table. So for shoplifting, I’d say 1 in 50. For murder, 1 in 200.
> Under what conditions -if any at all-, and in what ways -if any at all-, should society informally punish people for whom a criminal conviction is likely impossible?
Shame is the kernel of informal punishment. I wouldn't want a society without shame, but I guess this question has more to do with extreme levels of shame, the kind that would make you lose your job. We can conceive of violations of workplace norms that would and should lead to someone being shamed out of a job even if the courts can't convict them. For example, while Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, may not get convicted, she should be shamed out of being an entrepreneur for a long time.
> Why aren’t democratic politics more effective? ...
I'm surprised democracy even works as well as it does. Why on Earth should mass voting pick the best leader? Imagine having all the employees of a company vote who should be CEO? It'd be a nightmare. Democracy is one of those "just so" things. It just so happens to work out.
> An argument can be made that poetry was once the most important of the arts, yet now it is effectively dead!??!!
Amazing question. It's probably related to the same reason that non-musical theater is effectively dead. All the other similar forms of content have exploded in terms of production and consumption. The paperback revolution of the 1800s was probably one major ruiner of poetry.
> Why is so little fantasy and science fiction writing literary in the capital L sense?
This is related to the reason why writing and story in video games are so bad. All incentives point to spending less effort on the story and more focus on the gameplay and set pieces. If you make a sci-fi book, you're shooting for the aisles of the bookstore with other sci-fi, or you're hoping to get written up in sci-fi blogs, so you're privy to the same incentives as everybody else in that "genre." Heck, on some level, you're writing for young adults.
That’s an interesting list. Here’s a question I’ve pondered about politics and history: When are protests effective? When they succeed, has this happened due to a strategy that the protesters had that worked, or due to other factors?
“ What sense to make of "The Ascension" the title track of the eponymous album? Who is Cordelia? What is a chariot hallucination?”
I believe this fits with:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merkabah_mysticism
I personally suspect that the reason "genre fiction" and "literature" don't overlap is because the people who decide what counts as literature don't let them overlap even when "genre fiction" displays incredible artistic merit. Can't help you on the rest.