allenwang
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I have been following this site for almost a year now and it is fabulous, but I haven't felt an urgent need to post to the site until now. I've been working on a climate change project with a couple of others and am in desperate need of some feedback.
I know that climate change isn't a particularly popular topic on this website (but I'm not sure why, maybe I missed something, since much of the website seems to deal with existential risk. Am I really off track here?), but I thought this would be a great place to air these ideas. Our approach tries to tackle the irrational tangle that... (read 497 more words →)
It seems to me that the main reason most hypertext sources seem to produce shallower reading is not the fact that it contains hypertext itself, but that the barriers of publication are so low that the quality of most written work online is usually much lower than printed material. For example, this post is something that I might have spent 3 minutes thinking about before posting, whereas a printed publication would have much more time to mature and also many more filters such as publishers to take out the noise.
It is more likely that book reading seems more deep because the quality is better.
Also, it wouldn't be difficult to test this hypothesis with print and online newspaper since they both contain the same material.
I really want to put up a post that is highly relevant to this topic. I've been working with a couple of friends on an idea to altar personal incentives to solve the kinds of public good provision problems that charities and other organizations face, and I want to get some feedback from this community. Is someone with enough points to post willing to read over it and post for me? Or can I get some upvotes? (I know that this might be a bit rude, but I really want to get this out there ASAP).
Thanks a bunch, Allen Wang
I think that something like this must be the case. Especially considering the hypothesis that the brain is a dynamical system that requires rapid feedback among a wide variety counterfactual channels, even the type of calculation in Simplicio's simulation model wouldn't work. Note that this is not just because you don't have enough time to simulate all the moves of the computer algorithm that produces the behavior. You have to be ready to mimic all the possible behaviors that could arise from a different set of inputs, in the same temporal order. I'm sure that somewhere along the way, linear methods of calculation such as your simulation attempts, must break down.
In other... (read more)
(sorry of this comment is too long, continued from above) Creating Incentives
Of course, a sense of public pride exists in many people, and this has led large numbers of people to learn about the issues without external inducements. But the population of educated voters could be vastly increased if there were these personal benefits, especially for groups where environmentalism has not become a positive norm.
While we have thought about other approaches to creating these wide-ranging personal incentives, specifically, material prizes and the intangible benefits of social networking and personal pride (such as are behind Wikipedia or Facebook’s success), it appears that these are difficult to apply to the issue of climate change. Material... (read 1141 more words →)