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If you follow standard DEI criteria, I'm commenting on LessWrong; I don't do "standard."😉
More seriously, I apologize. I should have clarified what I meant by diversity. In particular, I mean that diverse groups are spread out in a parsimonious description space.
A pretty detailed example
As a concrete example of one understanding that would match my idea of diversity, consider some very high-dimensional space representing available people who can also do the work measured on as many axes as you can use to characterize them (characteristics of mind, body, experiences, etc.) and reduced by a technique to cause the remaining dimensions to give little mutual information about one another. Define a "diversity-growing procedure" for adding members to be one that chooses new members farthest away from the current subset. The more ways a diversity-growing procedure would choose a particular group, and the fewer exceptions that need to be made to the procedure to end up with that group, the more diverse the group.
Making an instance of this concrete example, imagine that our parsimonious space is 2D and that candidates are at all integer intersections of (0,1,2,3,4) x (0,1,2,3,4). If we choose candidates (2,2),(0,0), and (2,4), how diverse is that group? If you start with (0,0), the farthest away is (4,4), so you'll need to make an exception to add (2,4) (the farthest actually in the group). From (2,4), the farthest away is (0,4); once again, we need an exception to add (2,2). If we start with (2,2), then (0,0) is one of the farthest away, but we need an exception to add (2,4). The sequence (2,4) -> (0,0) -> (2,2) requires one exception. So, we have three ways with five exceptions. (I may have gotten some of this wrong since I did it in my head, but I think this gives the picture.)
This is just one example. Many ways to define diversity match my intuition of spread in a parsimonious description space.
A note on parsimony
Since we're looking for diversity to help us in a particular context, we should choose dimensions that predict differences in that context. For example, a characteristic like "ability to roll your tongue" is probably less predictive of behavior in a research environment than gender, so we might want to down-weight it. However, we don't have good models of what matters yet, so it might be hubris to down-weight characteristics until we know they don't matter for covering research hypothesis space because we've determined the effects by looking at groups actually doing research.
[I] suspect [vaccines] (or antibiotics) account for the majority of the value provided by the medical system
Though I agree that vaccines and antibiotics are extraordinarily beneficial and cost-effective interventions, I suspect you're missing essential value fountains in our medical system. Two that come to mind are surgery and emergency medicine.
I've spoken to several surgeons about their work, and they all said that one of the great things about their job is seeing the immediate and obvious benefits to patients. (Of course, surgery wouldn't be nearly as effective without antibiotics, so potentially, this smuggles something in.)
Emergency medicine also provides a lot of benefits. Someone was going to die from bleeding, and we sewed them up. Boom! We avoid a $2.5 million loss. Accidental deaths would be much higher in the US without emergency medicine personnel.
Another one to look into would be perinatal care. I haven't examined it, but I suspect it adds billions or trillions to the US economy by producing humans with a higher baseline health and capacity.
- If a product derives from Federally-funded research, the government owns a share of the IP for that product. (This share should be larger than the monetary investment in the grants that bore fruit since the US taxpayer funds a lot of early-stage research, only a little of which will result in IP. So, this system must account for the investments that didn't pan out as part of the total investment required to produce that product.)
- Fund grants based on models of downstream benefit. Four things that should be included as "benefits" in this model are increased health span, increased capacity for bioengineering, an increased competent researcher pool, and a diverse set of researchers. Readers from backgrounds like mine may balk at "diversity" as an explicit benefit; however, diversity is vital to properly exploring the hypothesis space without the bias imposed by limited perspectives. Edit: see the replies for a discussion of what I mean by diversity.
- Classify aging as a disease/disorder for administrative purposes. Set the classification to be reviewed/revised in 20 years after we have a better picture. (Whether it should be considered a single disease from a reality-modeling perspective is uncertain, but being able to target it in grants will give us more research that will help us model it better.)
- Encourage inclusionary zoning at a Federal level.
- Create a secure government-wide password manager. (If necessary, the HHS is large enough to do this alone, but the benefit would scale if used by other agencies.) Currently, HHS passwords may not be placed in password managers, leaving the HHS open to phishing credential stealing attacks. The project could be open-sourced to allow private firms to benefit from the research and engineering.
- Make all health spending tax-deductible, whether or not it is funneled through an insurance company. (This is probably the domain of Congress, but maybe there is something HHS can do.)
- Reduce the bureaucracy/red tape for TANF recipients.
- Combine FEMA and ASPR
- Work with the Census Bureau to collect and publish statistics on human flourishing in the US and push/advertise to make those numbers top-line numbers that the electorate (and thus politicians) pay attention to. Improving these statistics can be a "benefit" in the grant funding proposal above. HHS can also work to create conditional markets to predict how different decisions will affect those statistics.
1I shy away from fuzzy logic because I used it as a formalism to justify my religious beliefs. (In particular, "Possibilistic Logic" allowed me to appear honest to myself—and I'm not sure how much of it was self-deception and how much was just being wrong.)
The critical moment in my deconversion came when I realized that if I was looking for truth, I should reason according to the probabilities of the statements I was evaluating. Thirty minutes later, I had gone from a convinced Christian speaking to others, leading in my local church, and basing my life and career on my beliefs to an atheist who was primarily uncertain about atheism because of self-distrust.
Grounding my beliefs in falsifiable statements and probabilistic-ish models has been a beneficial discipline that forces me to recognize my limits and helps predict the outcomes of my actions. I don't know if I could do the same with fuzzy logic and "reasoning by model."
The next post is Secular interpretations of core perennialist claims. Zhukeepa should edit the main text to explicitly link to it rather than just mentioning that it exists. (Or people could upvote this comment so it's at the top. I don't object to more good karma.)
I think you're missing a few parts. The Autofac (as specified) cannot reproduce the chips and circuit boards required for the AI, the cameras' lenses and sensors, or the robot's sensors and motor controllers. I don't think this is an insurmountable hurdle: a low-tech (not cutting-edge) set of chips and discrete components would serve well enough for a stationary computer. Similarly, high-res sensors are not required. (Take it slow and replace physical resolution with temporal resolution and multiple samples.)
Second, the reproduced Autofacs should be built on movable platforms so different groups can get their own. (Someone comes with a truck and a few forklifts, lifts the platform onto the truck, and drives the Autofac to the new location.)
For large enough cases, changing the legal system is a way to make the debtor/lender "disappear." Ownership and debt are both based on society-level agreement.
The "current leader is also the founder" is a reasonable characteristic common in cults. Many cult-like religious organizations exist to create power or wealth for the founder or the founder's associates.
However, I suspect that the underlying scoring function is a simple additive model (widespread in psychology) in which each answer contributes a weight toward one of the outcomes. Since this characteristic is most valuable in combination - intensifying other factors that indicate cultishness, it doesn't serve very well in the current framework.