Arthur Baker

Development professional, effective altruist. Tweeting about economics & development

@DILatUChic. Formerly @cgdev and @poverty_action. Views my own.

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@DisplayNom Exactly. You should feed children less and less the more they grow.

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

Should a child be fed, so they can grow?

They cannot grow infinitely, or they would be too big. Maybe we should stop them from growing immediately.

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@JesseTayRiver Sounds unsustainable to me

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@salonium Clifford is probably too big tbf, a good counter-example

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

https://t.co/93Mdlz9hov related

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

My 3-month-old son is now TWICE as big as when he was born.

He's on track to weigh 7.5 trillion pounds by age 10

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

Ofc, everything we do is the perfect balance.

Anything less accessible is an impenetrable, jargon-filled status game.

Anything more accessible is un-rigorous pop-science nonsense.

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

Sounds like when he says academia he means humanities.

The benefit and cost of broad accessibility probably varies a lot across disciplines.

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

Academics write for each other, not for people.

Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort."

"There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other? Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times?

It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

I do not think this is the “default purely logical inference” from observation.

[alz @alz_zyd_]

Consciousness is a fundamentally moral judgment. The default purely logical inference from any individual's observed behavior is: "I am conscious, no one else in the world is". But the society that results from solipsism is, of course, horrific for all participants

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@Nerland87 @ryancbriggs I think people have many goals, but an important one is often income.

If universities’ main goal becomes producing well rounded citizens but the dollar RoI is ~0, I think there’ll be low takeup.

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@ryancbriggs I think if we get real abundance from AI, people will study for its own sake.

BUT until then, I think people are pretty interested in the economic returns, I’m guessing this won’t be reassuring to them.

I think people lifting weights mostly also have an instrumental goal tbh

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@TomMillerUK Is that because you think that no amount of market-rate housing would sufficiently alleviate pressure on the social housing stock, or because you think that commercial incentives aren't sufficient to build enough even if we removed restrictions on supply?

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@gemlpaterson AGI must be getting close if it's figured out how to make the printer work

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

If you’re about to create a super intelligence with “nation-state hacking capability” isn’t the hobby you want “cybersecurity”?

[Polymarket @Polymarket]

JUST IN: Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark reportedly warned new recruits to “get hobbies that aren’t computers,” saying the company is building a “superhuman coder with nation-state hacking capabilities.”

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@gemlpaterson You'll be alright mate, you already have a "hobby outside computers"

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

It's crazy how zombie facts proliferate.

There's a factoid that Mississippi has higher per capita income than the UK. Depends on measure and time.

@ianbremmer says on @ezraklein show that it was higher than *every* European country. That's false on any metric!

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@atrembath Like, this is a real live issue right now. Voters' revealed preference is that they're willing to pay a bit more to avoid a cruel practice. These will happen one at a time, but I suspect that more would follow.

https://t.co/umgFF5DvXJ

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@atrembath Fair, maybe "factory farm" is an imprecise term, so let's scrap that.

But I do think that through a lot of low-cost incremental regulations you can have a big change, avoiding much of the suffering of current animal ag.

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@atrembath And it goes both ways, speed & direction of tech depends on policy. We should invest in new tech, and use regulation to encourage R&D.

Like, would you have opposed European bans on shredding chicks, and insisted we wait until in-ovo sexing was cost competitve?

[Arthur Baker @AW_Baker]

@atrembath I think this is a false dichotomy, same as in climate. Technology and regulation are complements. E.g. in-ovo sexing technology makes it cheap to avoid throwing chicks in shredder, enabling regulation.

Regs still needed though, what's the tech-only solution to gestation crates?