This seems to have gotten some attention on HN, albeit it’s a more technical audience. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33872062
branperr
Karma: 17
Question, if this holds true, then do you think that in the short-term EAs should focus more on either a) having more children (with the assumption that their children are more likely to become innovators), or b) if they don’t many any/many children, help financially support others that do want many children with the same assumption as before? Or do you think that using that income elsewhere, such as global health, would do a better job of increasing total productivity and leading to developing something like digital people?
Question, if we were to increase emigration out of developing countries, do you think this could lead to brain drain that would leave the country worse off in the long-run? Remittances would definitely help reduce this impact, but idk about how much in the long-run. Have you looked into this at all?
Overall I think this is pretty good!
Two comments:
1) It might be useful to imagine that since we’re bounded-rational and have imperfect information, that in many cases we don’t know where the frontier is, or we don’t know our orientation and are uncertain about which actions lead to a world we care about.
2) Since it’s easier to optimize for certain things like profit rather than value, certain movements on the board might be easier, meaning we will trend in the direction of those shifts.
This is unfortunate. I found AISC to be valuable for me figuring out if policy research was the right choice for me (it wasn’t), and it was very valuable for my research partner who became a professional researcher.