Fifty of the most interesting things I've learned

A personal update: I’ve been hired as a visiting scholar by Forethought, where I’ll work for six months. Forethought is a non-profit that researches how a world with very advanced AI goes well. I think the research they’ve produced has been super high-quality, and the people on the team are amazingly nice and talented. Super excited to be working for them. This will maybe reduce my blogging output somewhat, though it’s a bit unclear (every other time I’ve predicted some event reducing my blog output, I’ve been wrong!)

Starting February 2, I’ll be in Berkeley for a few weeks. Then I’ll move to Oxford. If you’re a reader of the blog who lives in either area, feel free to shoot me a dm if you’d like to hang out. I’ll also be at EAG Bay Area and probably London—feel free to say hi!

Okay, without further ado, here are 50 interesting facts.1

1. Lots of leading experts think that mirror bacteria—bacteria with reversed molecular structure—could bypass biological defenses and end life on Earth. Despite this, the number of people working on this huge threat is around 10.

2. The era of declining global poverty has likely ended. Historically, extreme poverty has fallen dramatically. The places it remains are mostly countries with sufficiently screwed up institutions that they haven’t really seen economic growth in decades. For this reason, progress looks to be hitting a wall. Countries without growth in GDP per-capita also tend to experience unusually fast population growth.

3. Lots of population numbers are pretty made-up. In many countries, there just isn’t really the infrastructure to do a good census. In Papua New Guinea, they’re not sure if the number of people is ~9 million or ~17 million. Similar things are true in other countries like Nigeria, which may have tens of millions more or fewer people than is standardly reported. In lots of countries, the way they get their official census numbers is “do napkin math on population growth from the corrupt census they did 30 years ago, which wasn’t trustworthy then.” Our estimates of the number of people in the world might be off by tens of millions.

4. Similarly, GDP statistics in lots of poor countries are largely fake. Many nations’ economies are mostly informal and thus hard to estimate. For this reason, GDP statistics are often loose guesses from surrounding countries. Sometimes

...