I think there are several hurdles to implement this sort of more "rigorous" scientific teaching, or at least implementing a scientific teaching method with a larger space for questioning current scientific theories. I am not saying it's impossible, my middle and highschool had a similar model and some countries have this type of model as their standard, I am just saying it takes a lot of effort. First, the teachers need to really know their science. Several things in science which make no sense at first come from some mathematical abstraction that is there to make sure that the scientific model in question retains its internal mathematical consistency. Not only do the teachers need to know those abstractions, but they also need to be able to explain them to the students in a way that will make sense to them. Also, it requires a level of maturity from the students that might not always be there, which includes intellectual, emotional and social maturity. In several countries, many (or even the majority) of middle school students don't even know the alphabet properly and can't really understand short sentences (they are functionally illiterate). Aside from that, when opening the floor to the students, it is always a possibility that they will mess around instead of actually contributing to class, which is the teacher's duty to prevent, but would also not be a problem if the kids were more mature. Aside from that, there is always the problem of "dumb questions," for which students are made of, and discouraged from asking more questions. Of course, those problems also present the opportunity for students to mature in those aspects, and that is one of the reason this method of teaching is so effective; however, it does mean that it is harder to implement. There is also a curricular problem in some countries. In Brazil, for example, college entrance exams (our version of the SAT, the "ENEM") has, as required subjects, literature, Portuguese grammar, text interpretation, sociology, history, physical geography, geopolitics, philosophy, art history, biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics, and either Spanish or English. Because of that, we don't really have the opportunity to really go deep into how science really works, most of the time, because we are busy just keeping up with the requirements. There is also the historical power dynamics between teacher and students, where it is all TEACHER --> STUDENT without any opportunity for the student to question the teacher back. All in all, it would be quite impressive to implement that teaching method globally. People are definitely trying, but it takes incredible amounts of effort and even time.

It also surprised me a lot that not enough money was put into traying to accurately predict when an earthquake would happen. It was specially surprising to me because we see that a lot of countries have really developed earthquake damage mitigating mechanisms (specially Japan), so I would expect that they would have that same level of priority for actually predicting when earthquakes would happen. Also, it surprised me how inaccurate the plate and rock movement models really are, because I remember learning about plate tectonics in middle and high school as if it were an extremely consolidated theory with a very complete mathematical model (of course we didn't go into that level of detail at the time, but that is the impression that I got as time went by).

I believe that the thoroughness and the many examples given when exploring what risk and uncertainty mean at a fundamental level are extremely helpful for non-quantitively-inclined readers. One of the main objectives of the essay is exactly giving a quantitative look at a problem many people view only qualitatively (will happen, may happen, won't happen). Considering there is no escape from the quantitative analysis, I believe the way the essay handles it is excellent, by explaining at a basic level what is risk and uncertainty, using several examples along the way, in a way that almost all readers paying attention and that understand the basics of fractions and percentages will be able to understand. I also believe that the connection back to the pandemic will be specially illuminating for readers who hadn't considered uncertainty in risk from a quantitative POV before, as it equips them to better think about the numbers and predictions that are being shown to them in the media, and reflect on what they really mean, and what would be a reasonable response.

That also had me wondering. Neuralink already managed to get a monkey to play pong through a chip in its brain, so maybe not so far in the future...

I also had the same question when watching his interview. If I am not mistaken, there are some "bots" (although I am not sure if they are AI or not) that sell, buy and hold stocks depending on their trend. That said, I would also have liked to hear from him what exactly are the difficulties in developing a model for the stock market through AI.

I also thought that it was really interesting, and I was also surprised by how much he focused on that point. If I had to guess, I think his fixation on it is (in one way) the antithesis to our fixation on personalizing things. Kids draw the sun with a face, people give a personality to their cars, and ancient civilizations would represent natural, inanimate objects or phenomena as deities with human traits. He wants us to rest assured that we are dealing with algorithms, code, machines doing operations, and only that. Another thing that he could be doing is, as you said, trying to steer us away from the goal of developing "cybernetic humans," which is probably unachievable. Even if it were achievable, we would reach a plethora of ethical, judicial and maybe even logistic problems. If they reach a consciousness similar to ours, do they deserve the same rights as we do? How much can we legally change their code? Can we not "own" AI anymore, because it would be a form of slavery? How would we deal with having another "intelligent lifeform" with us, inhabiting Earth (the last time that happened, it did not end well for the Neanderthals, as some theories suggest)? It would be probably better to avoid this problem altogether, and leave human things for humans to do, only using AI as a tool, whenever needed (as not every problem requires AI).

I also thought that view on positive feedbacks was really interesting, and something I had not really thought about before -- and it makes total sense! Generally in mathematical models, we see negative feedback, because it is near the regions with negative feedback that the system is stable, and can be properly linearized. However, once we go into non-stable regions, which have some form of positive feedback, linearization becomes way more complicated. Depending on our time resolution, we really would just observe a discontinuity or discontinuities, until the system stabilizes again. It is honestly terrifying.