Nobody wants grandma to get scammed. But I feel this is a false comparison, the real comparison would be against the grandma's who are today paying for multiple $20/month subscriptions because they got signed up and can't figure out how to unsubscribe.

I agree with Brendan Long below, and while there are always horror stories, I don't think most banks want the bad press of bankrupting grandma.

It might feel like extra costs in the moment, but I doubt it would end up being more expensive, since you're more able to "fine-tune" what you're paying for.

I think most humans prefer a subscription to not have a marginal cost to use what they enjoy / find useful

I disagree here, I feel like I regularly see people online complaining about needing a subscription for everything nowadays, and also about the price of those subscriptions quickly adding up to large amounts.

Oh this looks cool, thanks for the link! Interesting to see something similar and how that worked out.

Jamba! had drawn criticism for allegedly misleading customers in its service advertisements. In general, Jamba! services were sold as a subscription, despite advertising that seems to imply that customers are buying a one-off phone ringtone.

I couldn't find anything about purchases/subscriptions in the WAP Wikipedia page?

From a business perspective, there's always some price the business can charge that would make running adverts comparatively unprofitable. This price might be very high, but it's not infinite. I'll agree that many existing "subscription" services that also run adverts despite you paying the subscription, which is just frustrating.

I'll agree that browser support wouldn't be required, but I've got a feeling that browser support would reduce the friction past some threshold and make this "enabled by default". The number of people with a Stripe login is strictly less than the number of people with a browser, so requiring a Stripe login would be some amount of extra friction. These feelings are weakly held though.

But if I spend money on a single article and then it's uninteresting, it feels like I wasted money

I feel like this might end up being a good thing. If you consider a subscription as a low-frequency high-risk high-reward bet (you could lose the value of the subscription, or gain the value of multiple articles), and many one-off payments as high-quantity low-risk low-reward bets (at worst you lose the value of one article, at best you gain the value of one article), then having multiple bets will give you more information about the underlying distribution. Practically, I imagine that I'd discover whether or not I like a publication faster if I can purchase a couple of low-risk articles rather than having to spend the full subscription fee.

You certainly can spend money on an article and later regret it, but this argument applies equally to subscriptions. Except with subscriptions, you've wasted significantly more money.

This would feel particularly bad if I get charged automatically as soon as I click a link

Agreed, having read your case I now think automatic charging should be off-by-default, so you only enable it for websites you've got high confidence in. Note the parallel with subscriptions essentially being on-by-default.

I'd also be curious to hear about your thoughts on Inkhaven as a program, and not just your thoughts about writing every day and what that taught you? I've also been writing every day in November so am curious to hear what the "inkhaven experience" was like, since I've got a good idea what the writing-every-day aspect has been like.

Another perspective: I don't feel sad about not personally solving the problems of the past (e.g. figuring out calculus, steam engines, nuclear power, etc) and am extremely happy that I live in a world where these problems are already solved.

I think there's a small chance that having all the big problems be solved by AI will feel similar. Instead of "historical persons" solving the majority of the problems, it's a historical AI that solves all the problems.

This is a fair point. An assumption I had (but forgot to include in the post) was that most english-speaking schools spend several years teaching children a non-english second language, and very few kids come out of it speaking that language. So sign language could be a better default second-language to teach to kids.

I'm not super convinced that things would be better if everyone spent those years learning sign language, nor do I think that learning sign language would be magically more likely to stick than a spoken language. But I do think that sign language has some interesting possibilities due to the different medium of communication, and I rarely (if ever) see this brought up.

I feel my point still stands, but have been struggling to articulate why. I'll make my case, please let me know if my logic is flawed. I'll admit that the post was a little hot-headed. That's my fault. But having thought for a few days, I still believe there's something important here.

In the post I'm arguing that survivorship bias due to existential risks means that we have biased view about the risks of existential risk, and we should take this into account when thinking about existential risks.

Your position (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that the examples I give are extremely unlikely to lead to human extinction, therefore these examples don't support my argument.

To counter, I think that 1. given that it's never happened, it's difficult to say with confidence what the outcome of nuclear war/global pathogens would be, but 2. even if complete extinction is very unlikely, the argument I posed still applies to 90% extinction/50% extinction/10% extinction/etc. If there are X% fewer people in the world that undergoes a global catastrophe, that's still X% fewer people who observe that world, which leads to a survivorship bias as argued in the post.

This is similar to the argument that we should not be surprised to be alive on a hospitable planet where we can breath the air and eat the things around us. There's a survivorship bias that selects for worlds on which we can live, and we're not around to observe the worlds on which we can't survive.

Claiming that literally no nuclear incident nor biological risk could "particularly reduced it's population" seems like a very strong claim to make? Especially given that your argument only holds if you're correct. (e.g., if one of these would have ended humanity, we wouldn't be having this conversation)