This is a special post for quick takes by GeneSmith. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I'm thinking about writing a practical guide to having polygenically screened children (AKA superbabies) in 2025. You can now increase your kids IQ by about 4-10 points and/or decrease their risk of some pretty serious diseases by doing IVF and picking an embryo with better genetic predispositions.
There's a bunch of little shit almost no one knows that can have a pretty significant impact on the success rates of the process like how to find a good clinic, what kinds of questions to ask your physician, how to get meds cheaply, how to get the most euploid embryos per dollar, which polygenic embryo selection company to pick etc.
Would anyone find this useful?
3Consider finding a way to integrate Patreon or similar services into the LW UI then. That would go a long way towards making it feel like a more socially acceptable thing to do, I think.
1That could be great especially for people who are underconfident and/or procrastinators.
For example, I don't think anyone would want to send any money to me, because my blogging frequency is like one article per year, and the articles are perhaps occasionally interesting, but nothing world-changing. I'm like 99% sure about this. But just in the hypothetical case that I am wrong... or maybe if in future my frequency and quality of blogging will increase but I will forget to set up a way to sponsor me... if I find out too late that I was leaving money on the table, while spending 8 hours a day at a job that doesn't really align with my values, I would be really angry.
The easiest solution could be like: if someone has a Patreon link, put it in the profile; but if someone doesn't, put there a button like "dude, too bad you don't have a Patreon account, otherwise I would right now donate you $X per month". And if someone clicks it and specifies a number, remember it, and when the total sum of hypothetical missed donations reaches a certain threshold, for example $1000 a month, display a notification to the user. That should be motivating enough to set up the account. And when the account is finally entered in the profile, all users who clicked the button in the past would be notified about it. -- So if the people actually want to send you money, you will find out. And if they don't, you don't need to embarrass yourself with setting up and publishing the account.
I also have some negative feelings about it. I think the most likely reason is that websites that offer the option of payment are often super annoying about it. Like, shoving the "subscribe" button in your face all the time, etc. That's usually because the website itself gets a cut from the money sent. I think if this incentive does not exist, then the LW developers could do this option very unobtrusive. Like, maybe only when you make a strong upvote, display a small "$" icon next to the upvote arrow, with tooltip "would you like to support the author financially?" and only after clicking on it, show the Patreon link, or the "too bad you don't have Patreon" button. Also, put the same "$" icon in the author's profile. -- The idea is that only the people who bother to look at author's profile or who made a strong upvote would be interested in sending money, so the option should be only displayed to them. Furthermore, hiding the information behind a small "$" icon that needs to be clicked first makes it as unobtrusive as possible. (Even less obtrusive than having the Patreon link directly in the profile, which is how people would do it now.)
Linkposts to articles that are subscriber-only should be outright banned. (And if they are not, I would downvote them.) If you require payment for something, don't shove it to my face. It is okay to make a few free articles and use them as advertisement for the paid ones. But everyone who votes on an article should see the same content of the article. -- But that's how it de facto works now; I don't really remember seeing a paid article linked from LW.
Basically, if someone wants to get paid and believes that they will get the readers, there is already a standard way to do that: make a Substack account, post there some free and paid articles, and link the free ones from LW. The advantage of my proposal is the feedback for authors who were not aware that they have a realistic option to get paid for their writing. Plus if we have a standardized UI for that, the authors do not need to think about whether to put the links in their profiles or their articles, how much would be too annoying and how much means leaving money on the table.
1I don't think the government is going to borrow much money. I think they're probably going to just print it. If we can actually control superintelligence and we don't just die (a big if), the tech is going to be massively deflationary. At the same time government revenues from income tax are dropping, income from corporate tax is going to go up and deflation is going to make money printing extremelly compelling.
1This may seem like small peanuts compared to AI ending the world, but I think it will be technically possible to de-anonymize most text on the internet within the next 5 years.
Analysis of writing style and a single author's idiosyncracies has a long history of being used to reveal the true identity of anonymous authors. It's how the Unabomber was caught and also how JK Rowling was revealed as the author of The Cuckoo's Calling.
Up until now it was never really viable to perform this kind of analysis at scale. Matching up the authors of various works also required a single person to have read many of the author's previous text.
I think LLMs are going to make textual fingerprinting at a global scale possible within the next 5 years (if not already). This in turn implies that any archived writing you've done under a pseudonym will be attributable to you.
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