Thanks for the explanation. 

Yeah I tried Connected Papers, as well das Research Rabbit, but somehow they never turn out to be super helpful. Do you have a specific strategy when you use them?

Could you elaborate what you mean with 2) ? What reference manager are you using?

What was the criticism of the university? I would have been pretty happy if my bachelor students would have been able to cobble something like this together. 

Yes I think posting it on a preprint server would be worth your time. As long as this stays an EA Forum post or a thesis hidden in a university archive no one can take a look at it. If you put it on a preprint server other people can find and reference it, if they find it helpful. Worst case that can happen is that nobody will built on it, but also the cost of putting it on a preprint server are essentially zero and if it stays an EA Forum post that chances that somebody uses this are much lower. 

Pretty interesting stuff. If these are your "rough drafts" then your polished papers must be wild. 

Have you considered putting this on a preprint server (e.g. https://eartharxiv.org/), so others can properly cite it? 

Also, you might want to use another projection for your maps. I found that Winkel Triple works better if you want to display such global indices. 

Hadn't thought of that, but yeah that does indeed sound like another large problem. I hope that everything turns out well for your project in the end!

Thank you!

For Figure 3 you have to keep in mind that this is biomass. This does not necessarily mean it could be eaten, as it also includes things like crop residues, which probably make up a good chunk of that arrow. 

The paper (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X16302384?via%3Dihub) also includes some other interesting plots, but unfortunately not the ones you would like to see. 

Given the results from Wand and Hoyer, I would expect it to just take time. It seems a pretty consistent pattern that many civilizations increase in complexity over time once they have adapted agriculture. Their scale-up takes around 2500 years and then plateaus. Also many of those complexity developments happened completely independently, e.g. China, the Incas and Egypt.

Tangentially related: Effektiv Spenden created a donation fund for interventions that strengthen democracy. However, so far it only focuses on Germany. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RRDAzpi6vS8ARvsDF/introducing-the-effektiv-spenden-defending-democracy-fund

I do think that things like voting are dominated in their impact not by direct, but by indirect effects, which cannot really be captured in simple numbers. For example, if I vote I set a good example for my friends, which in turn makes them more likely to vote, which in turn makes their friends more likely to vote. Repeat this enough times and you have more stable democracy. I get that you could also model this in a relatively simple way, but my point is that there are a lot of interacting factors like this.

Making a only numbers based argument in such and similar cases gives the illusion of certainty, while actually you likely have not considered many important factors, which makes the number kinda random and not something that you can base solid decisions on. However, I think having such a number anchors you strongly, which makes it harder to change your opinion in the future, especially if the arguments are non-number based. 

Just out of curiosity, how much time did you spend on modelling and writing this? 

I am asking, because you are saying that you probably need 0.75 hours to vote. Let's say your remaining life expectancy is 40 years. If we have a 4 year election cycle, this means 10 elections. So, in total you would need 7.5 hours in your remaining life to go vote. 

And I wondered if convincing yourself to not go vote took more time than to just go vote?