Philosoraptor

One of the wilder parts of this is that Nordhaus was actually one of the better people on this for a long time, and remains better than a lot of his colleagues. The DICE model at least attempts to incorporate what are called "non-market impacts" into its estimate of the cost associated with climate change--it tries to factor in things like impacts on human health, longevity, and other """"intangibles""" that don't directly contribute to GDP, as well as factor in impacts associated with systemic changes and low-probability/high-impact events. Many other integrated assessment models, especially the early ones, didn't even try. Here's a comparison of a few of the leading model projections (including Nordhaus) for economic impacts associated with climate change from The Stern Review:

Even his worst case scenario is laughably optimistic, but it does at least try to account for some stuff the other models don't, and thus at least gives a slightly more sane estimate of damage. It still doesn't account for so-called "socially contingent impacts" (things like mass migration, war, the rise of far-right governments, and similar things that can happen as a result of environmental destruction), nor does it reach into events that are both low-probability/high-impact AND non-market. This isn't a defense of Nordhaus, but rather an indictment of how bad other economists working in this space have been. I'm about to give a final on this stuff in about, oh, half an hour.

I should probably track down this anecdote, but I read that a Nobel-prizewinning economist once dismissed the impact of climate change on agriculture because it only contributes 5% to the US GDP.

That would be William Nordhaus and his DICE model.

I have a very good friend who totally ghostwrote the master's thesis of a Russian oligarch's failson when we were all in grad school. My friend and I were doing PhDs in topics pretty closely related to the failson's master's (my friend's dissertation topic was pretty much bang-on). The guy paid my friend a low four figures amount for him to do it; the topic was an obscure technical field, and the guy was clearly just getting the credential to pad his CV. This kind of thing has always been around--ChatGPT has just sort of democratized it.

I'm honestly more worried about the increasing number of people who are using ChatGPT as a substitute for friends or soft skills. The people who are using it to do their essays probably wouldn't have written particularly scintillating essays even if they didn't have it (or would have found some other way to cheat). Lots and lots of ordinary people are using it as a socialization outlet, though, and we don't know what effect that's having.

Holy shit.

Except it'll be working for no pay in a Tesla lithium mine.

My wife has never seen a single Star War, and refuses to even try to watch one.

Tesla's humanoid robo plumber shows up, walks directly into a wall, and catches on fire. The clogged pipe is no longer a problem because your house burned down. reports it as a success in his statistics.

I'd bet real money that if you gave ChatGPT $5 billion and had it """invest""" it would do as well or better than most of these idiots. Poster children for "born on third base and think they hit a triple."

Well you also have to give dumbfuck interviews about things you fundamentally misunderstand and (apparently) participate in dozens of fascist group chats at once. Truly the pinnacle of human behavior and development.

Functionalism and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.