(The LW team hired a professional editor to make line edits to the above post. Buck went through and accepted/rejected the edits, and we updated the post before curating, so that the many people on the curated email list got the edited version. This was an experiment, we may do more of this.)
Overall I continue to think it’s very healthy to write down your major updates and mistakes, and I’m curating this for similar reasons I curated Buck’s last piece. It feels to me like records of these updates allow one to do something like actually update on the highest level. Related, something about the insights in this piece feel very ‘hard-earned’, in a way where I think a person can only write this kind of post after a lot of time and effort and cycles of thought have passed. (Ray’s Sunset at Noon feels similar to me, where I think that Ray will only be able to write that specific kind of post every 5 years or so, and shouldn’t try to write another one much faster.)
And I learned a ton from this post. Everything is explained very simply and concisely, no section is written in a way that signalled to me “You should be afraid of math and experts” which happens to me often for stuff about econ, and I think I basically understood all your updates. I mean, I need to read Friedman’s essay in full and think on it, and I also need to actually use the insight about there being many dimensions on which markets compete other than price (e.g. quality, employee work standards, etc) to feel like it’s truly-part-of-me, but they were at least very effective pointers to ideas that I want to use when thinking about these questions.
I also really like your predictions at the end and meta-level updates.
Curated – and for the first time, edited!
(The LW team hired a professional editor to make line edits to the above post. Buck went through and accepted/rejected the edits, and we updated the post before curating, so that the many people on the curated email list got the edited version. This was an experiment, we may do more of this.)
Overall I continue to think it’s very healthy to write down your major updates and mistakes, and I’m curating this for similar reasons I curated Buck’s last piece. It feels to me like records of these updates allow one to do something like actually update on the highest level. Related, something about the insights in this piece feel very ‘hard-earned’, in a way where I think a person can only write this kind of post after a lot of time and effort and cycles of thought have passed. (Ray’s Sunset at Noon feels similar to me, where I think that Ray will only be able to write that specific kind of post every 5 years or so, and shouldn’t try to write another one much faster.)
And I learned a ton from this post. Everything is explained very simply and concisely, no section is written in a way that signalled to me “You should be afraid of math and experts” which happens to me often for stuff about econ, and I think I basically understood all your updates. I mean, I need to read Friedman’s essay in full and think on it, and I also need to actually use the insight about there being many dimensions on which markets compete other than price (e.g. quality, employee work standards, etc) to feel like it’s truly-part-of-me, but they were at least very effective pointers to ideas that I want to use when thinking about these questions.
I also really like your predictions at the end and meta-level updates.