samhbarton
Bio
Interested in how complexity science help answer questions in moral and political philosophy.
Host of the Talk of Today podcast.
Comments3
www.ideamarket.io is working on something that's in the same vein. It's not a prediction market, but seeks to use markets to identify credible/trustworthy sources.
Disclaimer: i started working with Ideamarket a month ago
Something that could increase economic growth, dramatically reduce inequality of opportunity, and improve well-being of people worldwide:
Try to get as many people connected to the internet with a personal device as possible.
The stat is that ~50% of the world is connected to the internet is misleading. To be connected you must have used a networked device once in three months, which is far from what most people would expect.
The importance of internet connectivity is hard to understate. It's necessary to function as 21st-century citizens and is the backbone of our societies. It's also necessary for securing various human rights.
Some quick reasons why internet access is important:
- Grants access to free education on just about anything
- Access to banking, communication technologies, etc.
- Increase economic growth, which well-being is somewhat a function of as internet access effectively increases the computational power of the economic system and can 'improve' the substrate upon which it runs (people).
- Increase awareness of EA in general
Wrote this quickly so apologies for the brevity. I've been working on a longer post where I dive into this in a lot more detail.
Yeap, it's incredibly exciting.
I see a few issues with it in this context, though.
In the short-run, it will be prohibitively expensive for most of the world's population, and it doesn't solve for the device ownership necessity.
I also don't like the idea internet access being in the control of a company that is subject to the national laws. I feel that we need a censorship-resistant internet, especially in the existing climate. We're increasingly seeing crack-downs across the world, and I don't the US will be immune from increased internet suppression.