A century ago, it was predicted that by now, people would be working under 20 hours a week.
And this prediction was basically correct, but missed the fact that it's more efficient to work 30-40 hours per week while working and then take weeks or decades off when not working.
The extra time has gone to more leisure, less child labor, more schooling, and earlier retirement (plus support for people who can't work at all).
The Overpopulation FAQs is about overpopulation, not necessarily water scarcity. Water scarcity can contribute to overpopulation, but it is only one of multiple potential causes.
My point is that when LessWrongers see not enough water for a given population, we try to fix the water not the people.
I wrote that EA is mostly misguided because it makes faulty assumptions. And to the contrary, I did praise a few things about EA.
Yes, I read your argument that preventing people from dying of starvation and/or disease is bad:
In some ways, the justification for EA assumes a fallacy of composition since EA believes that people can and should help everyone. [...] To the contrary, I’d argue that a lot of charities that supposedly have the greatest amount of “good” for humanity would contribute to overpopulation, which would negate their benefits in the long run. For example, programs to prevent malaria, provide clean water, and feed starving families in Sub-Saharan Africa would hasten the Earth’s likelihood of becoming overpopulated and exacerbate dysgenics.
So yes, maybe this is my cult programming, but I would rather we do the hard work of supporting a higher population (solar panels, desalination, etc.) than let people starve to death.
I'm partially downvoting this for the standard reason that I want to read actual interesting posts and not posts about "Why doesn't LessWrong like my content? Aren't you a cult if you don't agree with me?".
But I'm also downvoting because I specifically think it's good that LessWrong doesn't have a bunch of posts about how we're going to run out of water(?!) if we don't forcibly sterilize people, or that EA is bad because altruism is bad. Sorry, I just can't escape my cult programming here. Helping people is Good Actually and I'd rather solve resource shortages by making more.
One other thing I didn't think to mention in the post above is that I used to think of fiber as one category, so if I was eating something "high fiber" like vegetables or oats, I wouldn't take psyllium since "I'm already getting fiber", and then I'd feel worse. Since reading this, I'm taking psyllium with my oats and it improved the experience a lot (since the psyllium helps counteract the irritating effects of the insoluble fiber in oats).
I've had the same experience a few times and can confirm that it's not great. At this point I drink a whole glass of water when I take it, and I usually take it with a meal (my theory is that this might mix it up more so even if there's not enough water, it won't be one solid clump).
I'm excited, I've never actually had an ACX meetup in the town I live in.
The food court in Lincoln Square South has been working surprisingly well for a boardgame meetup. I wonder if it would work for this too.
I think you might be living in a highly-motivated smart and conscientious tech worker bubble. A lot people are hard to convince to even show up to work consistently, let alone do things no one is telling them to do. And then even if they are self-motivated, you run into problems with whether their ideas are good or not.
Individual companies can solve this by heavily filtering applicants (and paying enough to attract good ones), but you probably don't want to filter and pay your shelf-stockers like software engineers. Plus if you did it at across all of society, you'd leave a lot of your workers permanently unemployed.
It would be expensive, but it's not a hard constraint. OpenAI could almost certainly raise another $600M per year if they wanted to (they're allegedly already losing $5B per year now).
Also the post only suggests this pay structure for a subset of employees.