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A thought experiment: how would you feel about betting on a market that is an the outcome of a medical procedure? On a negative outcome? On a market for a negative outcome of your own procedure?

Is it bad to take out a life insurance policy right before you have a medical procedure?

If the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages.

If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).


This is why people who work in sports can't bet on sports. This is literally a solved problem. The current laws outlaw your examples already.

Not if it's your own procedure.

If it is someone else's? Bad, because I'll just take a life insurance on them and then promise the doctor half of the proceeds if they ensure that the outcome of the procedure leads to an insurance payout.


But killing someone is a crime, and fraud is a crime, the insurance in itself isn't.

Chris Olah and other leaders at Anthropic, OpenAI, and others would do well to consider the principles of Social Doctrine spelled out in the encyclical. The question they should ask themselves is how their corporations advance those principles.

Olah argues that "if we want this technology to go well, it is enormously important that there be people outside those incentives."

That sounds part hypocritical and part evasive; the responsibility starts with the people inside the incentives — with him.


If he says that it starts with him, it won't ring well because it doesn't structurally change anything and only looks like posturing.

"I promise to be a good guy" doesn't convey anything meaningful.


I'm not sure why you worry about how Chris Olah appears to others.

Talking is cheap, but even talk is better then the impotent call for "people outside."


It's not really impotent when he's referring to a very specific person who's the head of a religion with 1.3 billion adherents, is it? What is this but a moment when a person on the inside and a person on the outside of the incentives Olah mentions are coming together to talk about the same thing?

You have to Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive

What a disgusting way to refer to humans. Might as well go with Biomass.

>the avian lineage had split from crocodiles

Aren't crocodiles and dinosaurs seperarte branches ?


They have common ancestors, but it really should be "the crocodiles had split from the avian lineage", with avians including dinosaurs at that moment in time


A split is a split. Archosaurs split into a crocodile line and a dinosaur/bird line--"the avian lineage" (birds being a kind of dinosaur, and the only ones still living) ... that's what "the avian lineage had split from crocodiles" means -- it is not saying that birds are an offshoot from crocodiles, it's saying that the two lines (both kinds of archosaur) split from each other. Likewise, crocodiles are not an offshoot of dinosaurs.


The funny thing is that it would make more sense (going by our popular impression of what dinosaurs looked like) if dinosaurs were in the same lineage as crocodiles, not birds.


Note the word "lineage". That would include the dinosaurs that were ancestors of birds. Birds are dinosaurs, so reword the statement as

> the dinosaurs had split from crocodiles

Birds and crocodiles are both archosaurs (which includes all dinosaurs as well as crocodiles) and are each others' closest living relatives.


> The legal system will not look fondly upon this stuff

True, but the legal system didn't look fondly on outlawing jaywalking, until it did. Took it about 20 years in the US.


Whenever you think AI snakeoil salesmen can't possibly make a more deranged argument, Hackernews delivers


A more charitable reading might be that the comment you're replying to was specifically referring to how jaywalking was a made-up offense that was specifically created and promoted to cynically protect the auto industry from liability. So there are parallels. [1]

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26073797


That's is a deeply bizarre article. In a world where 90% of people would rather drive than walk, you'll obviously have laws that regulate when and where people can walk. You think that if the auto industry hadn't done that, we wouldn't have jaywalking laws today?


A 100 years ago that ratio was the other way around. There were powerful technological and financial insetives to change the public's attitude and the law.

They say that history rhimes.


The incentive was convenience. People have rushed to have cars as soon as they can afford it almost everywhere that there is enough space for cars.


The grave of Douglas Adams in the Highgate cemetery.


Somewhat larger, but still quite modest compared to some of the surrounding monuments, is the grave of Charles Babbage in Kensal Green cemetery.


Some do:

U.S. Is Not a Piggy Bank for Europe’s Socialist Policies

https://waysandmeans.house.gov/2024/03/11/u-s-is-not-a-piggy...


To quote Captain Willard:

"And if his story really is a confession, then so is mine."



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