It's not possible for the people with money to pay bribes to get the policy outcomes they want. You have a middle class coalition who's voting for politicians who block construction and the politicians fulfill their mandate.
the only votes come from current residents, many of whom are landowners and thus invested in the current system...
Politicians doing what their voters want is the opposite of them being corrupt.
There are also improvements in prevention; screenings, HPV vaccine, whatever.
Given that we have relatively constant cancer death rates it's unclear whether the changes in cancer screenings are improvements. They might very well about taking organs from people who would otherwise live healthy lives if they wouldn't be screened.
Oh, and they turned around a vaccine against a relatively novel pandemic virus in under a year.
You could do that with inactivated viruses the way Sinopharm and Sinovac do, also in 1970. The last year saw a lot of burocracy that made vaccine production harder and there's a good chance that people in 1970 would have been better at producing and administering vaccine's then we are today.
They identified that virus, sequenced its genome, and did a ton of other characterization on its structure and action, in time that would definitely have sounded like science fiction in 1970.
We have a relatively poor understanding of action. We don't have crucial information about the long-term effects of getting infected. Our instiutions took an embarrasingly long time to recognize that masks are a good idea.
For construction, corrupt local jurisdictions can block construction of modular buildings, forcing expensive custom designs.
It's the opposite. Local jurisdictions aren't corrupt anymore to allow a billionaire to just pay bribes to get to build the modular buildings he wants to build.
We can posit an AI agent that could design a custom edit to a single patient's genome. Or even invent a new treatment in realtime, during the period a single individual is in the process of dying.
While an AI theoretically could do that, we have a burocracy that outlaws such progress. As a result it's now a lot more expensive to develop new treatments then back in 1970.
Some of Scotts posts draw a lot of political discussion and there are concerns to what extend it's good to have those posts on LessWrong.
The decision to import posts was made on a case by case basis, I'm not sure whether by Scott or someone else.
C. elegans indeed has a fixed number of neurons and that's partly the reason why it gets used as model organism.
There's the OpenWorm project (googling also finds WormSim) that tries to model C. elegans whole neurology. From what I heard from people with domain expertise the model isn't good enough for us to say that we truly understand everything.
The term was proposed by Wilson in the paper Substances without Substrata for a way to figure out what people actually mean. It's a way to decide that the claim Caesar was a Roman dictator is supposed to refer to Julius Caesar and not some other individual named Caesar. In practice Philosophers do use the term to mean a variety of different things but the original definition was about that.
If you're talking about using it as evidence that at least one person makes this claim, then I see your point
The concept Principle of Charity cames from linguistics and was created to speak about what people actually mean (which claims they make).
I believe that you can learn from observing others, and from critically analysing their work.
Also, as someone that watched the same movie nineteen times in a row in the theatre (this was before DVDs were a thing, it was on the same day of the week, week after week) I can tell you that you cannot help but see the structure after that many viewings. When you go deep and really study something then you will learn that which others are blind to.
Yes, you can learn something but it's a bad strategy for becoming a comedic. Being a good commedian is a lot of audience interaction. It's a lot about having deliberte practice as a comedian in front of an audience.
It's not obvious from outside that focusing on getting stagetime is better then spending your time alone watching footage but it happens to be the better strategy.
Without already knowing something about what it takes to become a comedian, to get a good strategy for becoming one, it might be required to go out and ask a few people with subject matter expertise about what kind of training is needed.
I would say that not identifying the most manipulatable element in a situation is the thing that most people fail at.
It's possible for a person to spend effort into thinking what the most manipulatable element in a situation is and still fail at coming up with the correct answer.
I think most people already fail at putting in the time to seriously think about it, so the first level is to actually spend the time.
The second level is to think about how to actually get good at identifying the manipulative element.
Then the third level is to actually stop putting your effort on other elements and focusing on the most manipulative element. (that usually learns being able to say no)
Part of what this post says is that you shouldn't use timeless decision theory or use any game theory analysis when playing a 4-player game of Catan.
I don't think you do a good job at supporting that claim. Interactions between players during a game of Catan are an itereated game.
If you engage with an existing project you actually have to good arguments that convince other people. That isn't easy but a very different problem then no business man wanting to fund it.
A new project needs a value proposition that allows people to make a decision that it solves their problems better then other solutions. In your description here you haven't articulated any value proposition that would make a person prefer to write something in your framework.
The page about LES doesn't say anything about who might have problems that LES solves and what kind of problems that happen to be.
In contrast Vue.js has a clear target audience. It's for people who want to build larger html/js projects and thus need a js framework to manage the complexity, then it promises to be approachable, versatile and performant which are things that some of the users want.