It's an instance of a more general intuition that excessive consumption of fiction distorts people's beliefs about the world. For example, at some point I saw a study that showed people who watched more TV tended to overestimate rates of violent crime significantly, but I can't find it now.
Anecdotally many people seem to think that human genetic engineering would create permanent class divisions, and they tend to refer to fiction, eg, Gattaca, when asserting this. But that doesn't really make sense. Any rational nation-state would subsidize it massively for the population once it was cheap enough.
> Hanson is not breaking new ground; he's recycling SF as economics.
World-building for purposes of entertainment generally has little to do with successful prediction. Hanson has made this point in a few places, eg, http://www.overcomingbias.com/2015/11/science-fiction-is-fan.... I'm not sure if you've read Age of Em but it didn't feel like reading scifi, so much as reading an encyclopedia.
RE: the list of "wild ideas." He estimates that maybe a third of them are true. Quoting a few and acting shocked that that's the case is not a very epistemically hygienic criticism.
It would be pretty hard to separate the effects of nicotine from the effects of a lifetime of smoking + potentially poor dental hygiene (gum disease is rampant https://www.perio.org/consumer/cdc-study.htm) + aging.
Per wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine) the general medical consensus is that nicotine poses few risks on its own for nonpregnant adults, besides vasoconstriction and dependence.
Do you have a source for the first assertion? I can't find any studies on google.
I'm skeptical because people so often attribute many of the negative effects of other chemicals in tobacco to nicotine with no evidence (a point the OP hammers home at https://www.gwern.net/Nicotine). Even the FDA seems comfortable with this conflation, as evidenced by their disposition toward e-cigs.
That's not true. The returns in happiness are just logarithmic with respect to income (diminishing returns but still positive at each level). The story about no benefit beyond a certain threshold was generated by journalists misreading the plots in those studies.
Or just pay MTurk workers to annotate texts with intonation cues.
I kinda doubt that would be profitable relative to just hiring readers, but in general you don't need to replace workers completely to cannibalize some of their wages/jobs.
It looks like y'all are really aiming for Bret Victor-style direct manipulation, which is a bit more ambitious, but Tonic has incorporated some similar ideas, including time-traveling debugging, and it seems like there's a lot of overlap around the more basic features, like the automagical approach to packaging and the data visualization stuff.