So what is the steelman case for Nick Bostrom? Every time he comes to my attention - for existential risk, for superintelligence, for the simulation hypothesis, for uncompromising objectivity - he is being either mediocre or stupid, however counterintuitive or repugnant that may seem to him. Is this just selection bias on the people I pay attention to? Am I the victim of a world-wide conspiracy to suppress the genius of Nick Bostrom? When I look at a summary of his work, he doesn't seem to have done much else except "anthropic reasoning". Is that really really really good, or what?
If you read contemporary accounts of the banking crisis of the 1930s and FDR's bank holiday, one sees a lot of apocalyptic visions. In fact, what happened is that people wrote IOUs or ordinary checks and, somehow or another, commerce carried on. It's like the 1907 crisis where everyone in my part of the world was using Lauridsen dollars, effectively IOUs. Perhaps Biden should direct the treasury to print an IOU monetary series of bills and use it for the payment of all government debts during the shutdown. The 14th amendment guarantees that those IOUs would have to be accepted as payment, and there is nothing in the whole debt ceiling charade that expressly forbids this. It's not as elegant as the platinum coin, but it would provide a useful and constitutional workaround.
So what is the steelman case for Nick Bostrom? Every time he comes to my attention - for existential risk, for superintelligence, for the simulation hypothesis, for uncompromising objectivity - he is being either mediocre or stupid, however counterintuitive or repugnant that may seem to him. Is this just selection bias on the people I pay attention to? Am I the victim of a world-wide conspiracy to suppress the genius of Nick Bostrom? When I look at a summary of his work, he doesn't seem to have done much else except "anthropic reasoning". Is that really really really good, or what?
If you read contemporary accounts of the banking crisis of the 1930s and FDR's bank holiday, one sees a lot of apocalyptic visions. In fact, what happened is that people wrote IOUs or ordinary checks and, somehow or another, commerce carried on. It's like the 1907 crisis where everyone in my part of the world was using Lauridsen dollars, effectively IOUs. Perhaps Biden should direct the treasury to print an IOU monetary series of bills and use it for the payment of all government debts during the shutdown. The 14th amendment guarantees that those IOUs would have to be accepted as payment, and there is nothing in the whole debt ceiling charade that expressly forbids this. It's not as elegant as the platinum coin, but it would provide a useful and constitutional workaround.