Some hot takes

• Factory farming should be illegal. Animal suffering is the world’s most pressing immediate problem. 
  
• It sounds weird, but there’s a legitimate risk that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could cause human extinction -- I’d say something like a 1 in 20 chance in the next 100 years. There’s also more plausible-sounding risks like a sharp rise in inequality from being able to automate most tasks in the future. We should regulate companies like DeepMind and OpenAI more carefully, and fund labs working on making AI go safer. 
  
• Nuclear power is good, but overrated. The focus of climate policy should be solar, wind, and, more speculatively, geothermal. 
  
• Fracking should be legal in the US. It creates jobs and generates economic efficiency. Banning it would make energy sources more unclean and empower Russia and Saudi Arabia. 
  
• Gas tax holidays are bad. Gas taxes should be coupled with carbon taxes on corporations. 
  
• In general, hiring more police officers is a good idea. Most countries have fewer police officers than optimal. This might require increasing law enforcement budgets. Police over prisons is a good approach to criminal justice reform. 
  
• The current government in India has done more harm than good, both by mismanaging the economy and hurting India’s advancements on social justice. It’s quite plausible to me that even the Indian National Congress would have done a better job. 
  
• On balance, India’s system of quotas for disadvantaged caste groups has done more good than harm. 
  
• Feminism does more good than harm. 
  
• Abortion should be safe, legal, and accessible, as should contraception. 
  
• Biden is partly responsible for the ongoing inflation crisis in the US. 
  
• Developed countries should admit a lot more immigrants, including low-skill immigrants. 
  
• The War on Terror was, on balance, a success. 
  
• The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was, on balance, a good idea, even with the benefit of hindsight. Biden pulled out of Afghanistan too early, and, by cutting aid flows to Afghanistan, has since been an absolute failure there. 
  
• Biden’s response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has been, on balance, pretty good. The same goes for Zelenskyy’s response. 
  
• Rent control is a bad idea in most cases. 
  
• Excessive zoning regulations, like the Floor Space Index in Indian cities, are very bad. Most coastal American cities are seriously hurt by it. Denser cities are both greener and more efficient. 
  
• We should ban gain-of-function research and fund the Biological Weapons Convention a lot more. There’s a legitimate risk of major epidemics or even a pandemic that’s man-made. 
  
• Developed countries are underpopulated. The US doubling its population would mostly have positive consequences. Population growth should be driven both by systems that make it easier for people to have kids (e.g., child allowances, efforts to lower the cost of living) and large increases in immigration. 
  
• Biden has done a poor job on COVID vaccines. It’s time to invest in creating cross-variant vaccines, and speed up access to nasal and oral vaccines in developing countries. 
  
• Conferences and events in US cities that continue to have mask mandates should abolish them. People can wear masks if they want to, but we’ve reached a point in the pandemic in the US where mask mandates are no longer required, and are frankly kind of silly. 
  
• Free international trade is broadly a good thing. 
  
• It is very hard for developing countries to grow through services. Export-oriented manufacturing is the best tried-and-tested model for developing countries to catch up. 
  

War on terror as in what specifically

• The Iraq War was an absolute failure, and the War in Afghanistan was way more prolonged than it could’ve been.
  
• I opposed US intervention in Libya, the War in Iraq (though evidence shows the 2007 surge saved lives), and US support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen. 
  
• American human rights abuses in the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are evil.
  

• Lots of research points in the direction of drone strike efforts resulting in reductions in terrorism, with fairly low civilian casualty counts. 
  
• People who actually live under drone strike-targeted regions, on balance, don’t oppose them. This is according to several polls. 
  

Factory farming should be illegal. Animal suffering is the world’s most pressing immediate problem. 

It sounds weird, but there’s a legitimate risk that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could cause human extinction -- I’d say something like a 1 in 20 chance in the next 100 years. There’s also more plausible-sounding risks like a sharp rise in inequality from being able to automate most tasks in the future. We should regulate companies like DeepMind and OpenAI more carefully, and fund labs working on making AI go safer. 

Nuclear power is good, but overrated. The focus of climate policy should be solar, wind, and, more speculatively, geothermal. 

Gas tax holidays are bad. Gas taxes should be coupled with carbon taxes on corporations. 

Developed countries are underpopulated. The US doubling its population would mostly have positive consequences.

 Biden pulled out of Afghanistan too early, and, by cutting aid flows to Afghanistan, has since been an absolute failure there. 

What is your feelings about world population?  What do you suppose is the carrying capacity of the Earth?  If you think the Earth is overpopulated do you have any policy proposals?

Very wrong and very wrong. Animal intelligence has not been objectively defined, that's why none of the tests match up and why they haven't a clue if they're getting warmer or colder in artificial intelligence.

Inverse of reality. Nuclear power is infinitely scalable. What we have built so far is a dingy compared to the supertankers we could make.

By contrast we've already enough windmills to learn we don't like them very much and they're not nearly enough. (that was predicted long before the first government grant)

There are plenty more places to stick solar panels but in order to make them cheap enough you're going to need really cheap power, leading to a chicken egg problem. Nuclear (as I said) is scalable now because it is efficient now. When energy is cheaper it will still be easier to build bigger nuclear reactors.

Solar panels have a place as an auxiliary system that you slap on for redundancy and because it doesn't cost much. Like oars on a sailboat.

Taxes are immoral, CO2 is almost certainly not warming the earth.

That is something I've only heard Indians say, and since you talked about India in several other points I think you have some affinity with it.

Very wrong and very wrong. Animal intelligence has not been objectively defined, that's why none of the tests match up and why they haven't a clue if they're getting warmer or colder in artificial intelligence.

I feel like having a conversation about our differences on AI will probably go nowhere. I think a bunch of scaling (i.e., increasing compute to be similar in size to the human brain) and improving the efficiency of a large model are enough to get a system able to do most tasks that people can do. And I think a system that can do that, make copies of itself on the Internet, and be able to do some of the calculations computers can do much better than humans is potentially really dangerous.

I recommend this resource for one argument for why we’re reasonably close. I don’t think it depends on having a definition of intelligence. I also don’t think you need to be a “telekinetic god” to pose a serious threat to humanity.

The market isn’t moving quickly on nuclear. You need tons of government subsidies and loan guarantees to make nuclear viable. Deregulation is enough to make solar viable. 

I disagree that it’s as scalable as you think it is. That’s because nuclear is really expensive, and solar is incredibly cheap.

Even if we cut nuclear costs in half in the US through something like deregulation, making it cheaper than any country on Earth, it would still be more expensive than solar.

Another important factor is that nuclear plants take a long time to build -- ~5-10 years worldwide in general, compared to under a year for solar.

Taxes are immoral, CO2 is almost certainly not warming the earth.

Both bare assertions. 

14 out of 17 climate models between 1970 and 2001 predicted future warming accurately

And I remember 16k did a BOTEC a few years back that suggested that even a 1.2 degree Celsius equilibrium climate sensitivity suggested that CO2 emissions explained ~60% of post-19th century warming -- so a 1.8 to 5.6 degree range suggests that a lot of the observable warming is a function of CO2. 

So efforts to decarbonize the world seem good.

But I’ll also emphasize that a major part of the argument for pollution taxes is that outdoor air pollution causes six percent of all deaths in the world (and indoor and outdoor combined cause twelve percent of global mortality) -- that’s a huge externality that should probably be taxed. 

• Factory farming should be illegal. Animal suffering is the world’s most pressing immediate problem. 
  

• Fracking should be legal in the US. It creates jobs and generates economic efficiency. Banning it would make energy sources more unclean and empower Russia and Saudi Arabia. 
  

• Feminism does more good than harm. 
  

• Abortion should be safe, legal, and accessible, as should contraception. 
  

• Developed countries should admit a lot more immigrants, including low-skill immigrants. 
  

• Biden’s response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has been, on balance, pretty good. The same goes for Zelenskyy’s response. 
  

• Developed countries are underpopulated. The US doubling its population would mostly have positive consequences. Population growth should be driven both by systems that make it easier for people to have kids (e.g., child allowances, efforts to lower the cost of living) and large increases in immigration. 
  

• Free international trade is broadly a good thing. 
  

• Factory farming should be illegal. Animal suffering is the world’s most pressing immediate problem. 
  

• It sounds weird, but there’s a legitimate risk that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could cause human extinction -- I’d say something like a 1 in 20 chance in the next 100 years. There’s also more plausible-sounding risks like a sharp rise in inequality from being able to automate most tasks in the future. We should regulate companies like DeepMind and OpenAI more carefully, and fund labs working on making AI go safer. 
  

• Nuclear power is good, but overrated. The focus of climate policy should be solar, wind, and, more speculatively, geothermal. 
  

• Fracking should be legal in the US. It creates jobs and generates economic efficiency. Banning it would make energy sources more unclean and empower Russia and Saudi Arabia. 
  

• Gas tax holidays are bad. Gas taxes should be coupled with carbon taxes on corporations. 
  

• In general, hiring more police officers is a good idea. Most countries have fewer police officers than optimal. This might require increasing law enforcement budgets. Police over prisons is a good approach to criminal justice reform. 
  

• The current government in India has done more harm than good, both by mismanaging the economy and hurting India’s advancements on social justice. It’s quite plausible to me that even the Indian National Congress would have done a better job. 
  

• Feminism does more good than harm. 
  

• Abortion should be safe, legal, and accessible, as should contraception. 
  

• Biden is partly responsible for the ongoing inflation crisis in the US. 
  

• Developed countries should admit a lot more immigrants, including low-skill immigrants. 
  

• The War on Terror was, on balance, a success. 
  

• The invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 was, on balance, a good idea, even with the benefit of hindsight. Biden pulled out of Afghanistan too early, and, by cutting aid flows to Afghanistan, has since been an absolute failure there. 
  

• Biden’s response to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine has been, on balance, pretty good. The same goes for Zelenskyy’s response. 
  

• Rent control is a bad idea in most cases. 
  

• Excessive zoning regulations, like the Floor Space Index in Indian cities, are very bad. Most coastal American cities are seriously hurt by it. Denser cities are both greener and more efficient. 
  

• We should ban gain-of-function research and fund the Biological Weapons Convention a lot more. There’s a legitimate risk of major epidemics or even a pandemic that’s man-made. 
  

• Developed countries are underpopulated. The US doubling its population would mostly have positive consequences. Population growth should be driven both by systems that make it easier for people to have kids (e.g., child allowances, efforts to lower the cost of living) and large increases in immigration. 
  

• Biden has done a poor job on COVID vaccines. It’s time to invest in creating cross-variant vaccines, and speed up access to nasal and oral vaccines in developing countries. 
  

• Conferences and events in US cities that continue to have mask mandates should abolish them. People can wear masks if they want to, but we’ve reached a point in the pandemic in the US where mask mandates are no longer required, and are frankly kind of silly. 
  

• Free international trade is broadly a good thing. 
  

• It is very hard for developing countries to grow through services. Export-oriented manufacturing is the best tried-and-tested model for developing countries to catch up.