Scott Alexander digs deep into wage stagnation and the great decoupling. Unsurprisingly, it's complicated.
Sarah C argues that GPT-2 results support the claim that humans not concentrating very hard aren't really intelligent, and discusses the implications for the future of education and debate.
Related: you can now ask the public distribution of GPT-2 questions via Tumblr.
80000 Hours clarifies what they should have said instead of introducing the ambiguous term "talent gap". A lot of discussion about earning to give and the effective altruism scene hinges on assumptions about what "talent gaps" actually are, and this goes a lot way towards reducing the confusion.
Kaj Sotala explains internal family systems using the analogy of a poorly-programmed robots. Evolution doesn't seem like a very good programmer, so the comparison seems quite plausible.
Crime appears to be going up in Canada. It's not clear why, nor is this a sudden new development; the rates bottomed out in 2014.
Speaking of 2014, here's an old article arguing that poor waste disposal systems are what actually killed President Harrison.
New Hampshire considered becoming the second state in the nation to use ranked choice voting, with the legislature tabling a bill that would have applied RCV to state's presidential primary. The bill's supporters in the legislature promise to continue pushing for electoral reform in the Granite State.
In a related story, the case for using ranked-choice voting in any replacement for the Electoral College.
A bipartisan group of Senators led by Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Cory Booker (D-NJ) are reintroducing the Nuclear Energy Leadership Act that died in committee last fall. Coupled with other energy bills, NELA could provide the necessary impetus to test, certify, and license the next-generation reactor designs necessary to make clean energy financial viable in the coming decades.
