Virgin Earth Challenge
The Virgin Earth Challenge would be a great idea if we could count on it being awarded for a solution that resembles the headlines it’s been getting (e.g. $25M Bounty Offered for Global Warming Fix)....
View ArticleDrug Prizes instead of Patent Exclusivity
Bernie Sanders has introduced a bill to replace patent monopoly protection for drugs with awards based in part on Quality Adjusted Life Years added by the drugs. This would eliminate the harm due to...
View ArticleCarbon Sequestration Prizes
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) has introduced a bill to create prizes for carbon sequestration: This is how it would work. There would be four different levels of prizes. The first level award would go to...
View ArticleReasonable Rx
Book review: Reasonable Rx: Solving the Drug Price Crisis by Stan Finkelstein and Peter Temin. This book provides a mediocre analysis of what is wrong with drug prices, and presents a solution that is...
View ArticleHow to spend $10 trillion
This post is a response to a challenge on Overcoming Bias to spend $10 trillion sensibly. Here’s my proposed allocation (spending to be spread out over 10-20 years): $5 trillion on drug patent buyouts...
View ArticleForesight 2010
Some comments on last weekend’s Foresight Conference: At lunch on Sunday I was in a group dominated by a discussion between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky over the relative plausibility of new...
View ArticleBrain Preservation Prize
Ken Hayworth has created an interesting prize for Brain Preservation Technology, designed to improve techniques of relevance to cryonics and mind uploading, but intended to be relevant to goals that...
View ArticlePrizes
Aubrey de Grey has a good interview in Wired. I want to object to one claim: You want prizes to be ways to attract people who get scared when you talk about science for more than ten seconds. So the...
View ArticleThe Coronavirus Stock Market Crash
The stock market crash of the past two weeks looks like an over-reaction to COVID-19. Is COVID-19 really the reason for the crash? I can’t find any other news that would explain the timing and which...
View ArticleThe Resilient Society
Book review: The Resilient Society, by Markus Brunnermeier. This is a collection of loosely related chapters on current political topics such as pandemic response and macroeconomics. I haven’t read...
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