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Great Filter, 20 Years On

Twenty years ago today, I introduced the phrase “The Great Filter” in an essay on my personal website. Today Google says 300,000 web pages use this phrase, and 4.3% of those mention my name. This essay...

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World Government Risks Collective Suicide

If your mood changes every month, and if you die in any month where your mood turns to suicide, then to live 83 years you need to have one thousand months in a row where your mood doesn’t turn to...

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Vulnerable World Hypothesis

I’m a big fan of Nick Bostrom; he is way better than almost all other future analysts I’ve seen. He thinks carefully and writes well. A consistent theme of Bostrom’s over the years has been to point...

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Consider Controlled Infection

In many places long ago, in families with many kids, as soon as one kid caught an illness, parents would put the other kids in close contact, so they could all catch it at once. Because it was less...

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Deliberate Exposure Intuition

Many have expressed skepticism re my last post on controlled exposure. So let me see if I can’t communicate my intuition more clearly, so we can all examine it more carefully. Assume we have a virus...

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For Fast Escaped Pandemic, Max Infection Date Variance, Not Average

In an open column, … to provide greater dispersion, the vehicle distance varies from 50 to 100 meters, … distance between dismounted soldiers varies from 2 to 5 meters to allow for dispersion and space...

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Vouching Fights Pandemics

As I’ve pitched vouching as a general solution to both law and medicine, the looming coronavirus pandemic offers a good and challenging concrete test; how well could vouching handle that? If you...

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Three Futures

Recently, 1539 people responded to this poll: ~0.108T (trillion) humans have ever lived, & only 0.0078T are alive now. How many “humans” (however you mean that term) do you think will ever exist? —...

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2 Lockdown Cost-Benefit Analyses

Back on Mar. 21 I complained that I hadn’t seen any cost-benefit analyses of the lockdown policies that had just been applied where I live. Some have been posted since, but I’ve finally bothered to...

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Lost Advanced Civilizations

Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth? If you frame such panspermia as an “extraordinary claim” for which you demand “extraordinary evidence”, you will of course...

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