This is from Dan Gardner's Don't Trust The Trust Decline, talking about how others may make incorrect assumptions about the world by making assumptions from watching American-focused media:
I’m very confident that most people assume that black Britons also have shorter life expectancies than white Britons. They don’t. In fact, the average black Briton from the Caribbean lives a little longer than the average white Briton, and the average black Briton from Africa has a much longer life expectancy — longer even than the life expectancy in Japan, which is among the world’s highest. (Similarly, all-cause mortality is lower among black Canadians than white Canadians. I doubt I’ll ever read that in the Toronto Star, although I will read headlines like this.)
"high performers benefited by just over 20% from AI advice, whereas low performers did roughly 10% worse with AI assistance. Exploratory analysis of the WhatsApp interaction logs shows that both groups sought the AI mentor’s advice, but that low performers did worse because they sought help on much more challenging business tasks."
"And yet, the Finns, mounting a defense on skis, managed for an astonishing time to hold off Soviet forces. They also showed great ingenuity—for instance, posting portraits of Stalin on targets so no Soviet soldier would dare shoot at it."
"Climate change will have some positive impacts on human health. There are likely to be reductions in cold-related mortality and morbidity in high-income populations. ... The effect of cold temperatures is
therefore not modelled in this assessment."
Milei's 2024 Davos talk, directly translated to English by AI (by heygen), in his own accent. Better than the dubbed version imo. pic.twitter.com/8OAGELuqxl
Will also be interesting to see what happens to Argentina in the wake of Milei's election as president as he's quite a change from the country's previous government given his generally libertarian positions and has tried to make some very-aggressive changes.
(Overall I'm probably a little less libertarian than Milei but suspect the changes he make to Argentina will have positive results relative to the alternative).
"The argument for why governments can’t be trusted to correct externalities across time is the same as why they can’t be trusted to correct them across borders: no one in the long-run future gets to vote in the next election."
If women opt to freeze their eggs, how likely are they to go back and use them? Seems like the answer is "not very" - "Of 921 patients who underwent planned oocyte cryopreservation, 68 (7.4%) returned to use their oocytes. Forty-six patients (67.6%) completed at least one embryo transfer. The [cumulative clinical pregnancy rate] per transfer was 47.5% and [live birth rate] was 39.3%"
"Today, consumers would need to spend at least €18 285 and €24 400 to buy an EV in Europe and the US, respectively – this is 92% and 146% more than they would need to pay for the cheapest combustion car available. In comparison, in China the cheapest EV costs 8% less than the cheapest internal combustion engine (ICE) equivalent."
