Even though I think the comment was useful, it doesn't look to me like it was as useful as the typical 139 karma comment as I expect LW readers to be fairly unlikely to start popping benzos after reading this post. IMO it should've gotten like 30-40 karma. Even 60 wouldn't have been too shocking to me. But 139? That's way more karma than anything else I've posted. 
 

I don't think it warrants this much karma, and I now share @ryan_greenblatt's concerns about the ability to vote on Quick Takes and Popular Comments introducing algorithmic virality to LW. That sort of thing is typically corrosive to epistemic hygeine as it changes the incentives of commenting more towards posting applause-lights. I don't think that's a good change for LW, as I think we've got too much group-think as it is. 

I think you should write it. It sounds funny and a bunch of people have been calling out what they see as bad arguements that alginment is hard lately e.g. TurnTrout, QuintinPope, ZackMDavis, and karma wise they did fairly well. 

@habryka this comment has an anomalous amount of karma. It showed up on popular comments, I think, and I'm wondering if people liked the comment when they saw it there which lead to a feedback loop of more eyeballs on the comment, more likes, more eyeball etc. If so, is that the intended behaviour of the popular comments feature? It seems like it shouldn't be.

Good point. I grabbed the dataset of gdp per capita vs life expectancy for almost all nations from OurWorldInData, log transformed GDP per capita and got a correlation of 0.85.

Although GDP per capita is distinct from this expanded welfare metric, the correlation between GDP per capita and this expanded welfare metric is very strong at 0.96, though there is substantial variation across countries, and welfare is more dispersed (standard deviation of 1.51 in logs) than is income (standard deviation of 1.27 in logs).^[9]

I checked the paper and it looks like they're comparing welfare by "how much more would person X from the US have to consume to move to another country i?" Which results in equations like this:

which says what the factor ${\lambda }_i^{simple}$ ,  should be in terms of differences in life expectancy, consumption, lessure and inequality. So I suppose it isn't suprising that it's quite correlated with GDP, given the individual correlations at play here, but I am suprised that it is so strongly correlated since I'd expect e.g. life expectancy vs gdp to correlate at maybe 0.8^[1]. Which is a fair bit weaker than a 0.96 correlation!

1. ^{^}

   I checked. It's 0.67. 

This looks cool and I  want to read it in detail, but I'd like to push back a bit against an implicit take that I thought was present here: namely, that GDP takes into account major technological breakthroughs. Let me just quote some text from this article: What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?
 

More generally: when the price of a good falls a lot, that good is downweighted (proportional to its price drop) in real GDP calculations at end-of-period prices.

… and the way we calculate real GDP in practice is to use prices from a relatively recent year. We even move the reference year forward from time to time, so that it’s always near the end of the period when looking at long-term growth.

Real GDP Mainly Measures The Goods Which Are Revolutionized Least

Now let’s go back to our puzzle about growth since 1960, and electronics in particular.

The cost of a transistor has dropped by a stupidly huge amount since 1960 - I don’t have the data on hand, but let’s be conservative and call it a factor of 10^12 (i.e. a trillion). If we measure in 1960 prices, the transistors on a single modern chip would be worth billions. But instead we measure using recent prices, so the transistors on a single modern chip are worth… about as much as a single modern chip currently costs. And all the world’s transistors in 1960 were worth basically-zero.

1960 real GDP (and 1970 real GDP, and 1980 real GDP, etc) calculated at recent prices is dominated by the things which are expensive today - like real estate, for instance. Things which are cheap today are ignored in hindsight, even if they were a very big deal at the time.

In other words: real GDP growth mostly tracks production of goods which aren’t revolutionized. Goods whose prices drop dramatically are downweighted to near-zero, in hindsight.

When we see slow, mostly-steady real GDP growth curves, that mostly tells us about the slow and steady increase in production of things which haven’t been revolutionized. It tells us approximately-nothing about the huge revolutions in e.g. electronics.

Important notice: benzodiazepines are serious business: benzo withdrawals are amongst the worst experiences a human can go through, and combinations of benzos with alcohol, barbiturates, opioids or tricyclic antidepressants are very dangerous: benzos played a role in 31% of the estimated 22,767 deaths from prescription drug overdose in the United States.

If you're experimenting with benzos, please be very careful!

Probably it would have been worse as a perpetual draft.

An example of you writing psuedocode woud've helped a great deal, especially if it illustrated what you thought was a core skill. 

Thank you for this, I'm conducting user interviews right now and there were some suprising things in your review, as well as obviously good ideas that I would probably have missed. Organizing meetups in the field would not have occured to me, and is a good idea.