i’m generally receptive to the idea that our economic systems could be changed significantly for the better, but looking historically i don’t think any of this “demands” a rethink of the dominant economic system in play today. it will mutate in the same patchwork way it has ever since the invention of the printing press (an early device that turned a previously scarce resource into an abundant one). it somehow made it through both the explosive decrease in energy scarcity of the industrial revolution and the explosive decrease in information scarcity of the past 50 years.
i think there’s some argument here that the periods which experience outsized economic growth are largely those same periods which experienced rapid decrease in scarcity of some underlying resource, though i don’t have the data to properly claim that. on the other hand, the industrial revolution while successful in economic terms had some pretty terrible social consequences at the time: generally poor living and working conditions for large segments of the population. the response to this was largely social and political: unions, regulation. the actual economic system has proven itself to be robust to these kind of changes and also faster at responding to them than the social/political systems, so i think the more appropriate focus is on the latter: are our social and political systems of today up to the task of handling another rapid decrease in scarcity?
ponkaloupe
On the other hand, every known living creature on Earth uses essentially the same DNA-based genetic code, which suggests abiogenesis occurred only once in the planet’s history.
well this alone doesn’t suggest abiogenesis occurred only once: just that if any other abiogenesis occurred it was outcompeted by DNA replicators.
when i was in school there was a theory that RNA was a remnant of pre-DNA abiogenesis: either that it bootstrapped DNA life, or that it was one such distinct line which “lost” to DNA. in the latter case, hard to say how many other lines there were which left no evidence visible today, or even how many lines/abiogenesis events would have occurred if not for DNA replicators altering the environment and available resources. hopefully research has provided better predictions here that i just haven’t heard about yet.
this does help the original question: “where is everybody” can reasonably be answered with “they’re on the other side of a coin flip”. in the point estimate version it was “they’re on the other side of some hundreds of consecutive coin flips”. so it helps the original question in that there’s far less that needs to be explained.
if the code base for Google Search represents wealth, but is itself a critical component of Google-the-company’s success, then doesn’t that mean that for any financial instrument based on Google (i.e. Google stock, bonds issued by Google), to consider it also a form of wealth would be to double count that code base?
i’m skeptical that money can be both a claim on wealth and also a form of wealth. it seems like it should be strictly one or the other, else you end up with a bank owning a bank owning a bank owning … with each additional layer of ownership somehow resulting in more wealth, and that seems questionable to me.
The underground bunker is only weird if I’m vocal about it. Am I posting this from behind tor? Do I pass my messages through an anti-stylometry filter before sharing them? I’m already operating behind a nonsense pseudonym, but if I used a real-sounding name that wasn’t my legal name, would you question it? It’s often the case that effective privacy techniques simply aren’t easily detectable by 3rd or even 2nd parties: the goal is frequently to blend in (to become a part of some larger “anonymity set”).
just don’t watch the subsequent film, which completely unravels the original ending 😢
how broad did you intend “status quo” to read here (status quo of the non-crypto society, status quo of the crypto-only society, or status quo of all of society)? there’s a certain interpretation of this comment which is almost tautological: the things any social system is good at are (definitionally?) the things about it which can’t be exploited, the things it isn’t robust against are those where it can be exploited. but i can’t tell if that’s exactly what you’re getting at, or not.
does value extraction always decrease the utility of the thing being monopolized? in the troll example there are fewer crossings; the bridge gets less use, so it does decrease utility. in a modern toll system, it might be the case that restricting traffic flow allows those who do use the thing to get places faster (less traffic congestion). tolls also select such the remaining people — who can now get places faster — are exactly those whose time is “worth more”, the ones they benefit are exactly those who are able to be “most productive” with the saved time. is it plausible that an extractive toll system could increase net utility (value)?
further, the distinction you make between value capture and value extraction seems to be framed through a moral lens. IF an extractive system could increase value, could it ever be justified morally? for example, the above hypothetical toll system which increases net value: if it also redistributed the extracted value such that no individual is measurably “worse off” from it (say, it distributes the tolls as a UBI across everyone in the region), could it be morally just even though the value extraction is happening by someone other than the creator?
at the end of this article the interviewer clarifies that she verified this to be SBF, but does not clarify that SBF understood this conversation to be public (which suggests he may not have). hoping for some clarification there, because it’s relevant to understanding the broader ethical context in which this is all playing out under.
you cite software. turnover in that industry tends to be pretty high, which means the successful companies end up with some structure where when any particular engineer leaves, their responsibilities are re-distributed quickly. so (1) if a team member is out for a week their most urgent responsibilities can already be picked up by their peers and (2) wherever this isn’t the case, the employer is likely to see that as a failure in need of fixing.
unaligned week-long holidays sort of serve as a dry run to ensure that things are set up such that when the employee on leave were to leave permanently things would still continue.
there’s another way to address this coordination, btw: ask that employees schedule their time away 2 weeks in advance: when the team plans the next chunk of work, sequence things such that this employee won’t be working on a blocking task near the interval where they’re away.
regardless, certain Schelling points do arise naturally. it’s far more common for someone to take individual Fridays off than it is to take Tuesdays off, for example. weekends themselves are some example of what you’re getting at: extending those (by occasionally adding Fridays or Mondays) seems an easy course to follow.
Why do you think my post is being shot down?
my first instinct is general “politics is the mindkiller” weariness, but i wonder if it’s more an issue of scope. it’s framed to be relevant only to Floridians, and relevant answers would have to be very broad with little depth (“vote A, B, … and Z”) or deep but tangential and not a direct answer (“i like candidate Q because of their proposed policy R which is good because S but has some uncertainties around T…”).
it also feels like you’re offloading too much to the reader. it’s easily mistaken as a “do my homework for me” request, even. i have no idea what’s on the ballot, and i guess if i were in Florida i’m supposed to fish out the ballot and study up on it first? just hope i happen to be near my desk or i’ll have to google around for an online version.
if you want, you might get more discussion by taking one policy on the ballot, decoupling it from the specific geography, and then identifying a few intriguing ramifications/uncertainties as starting points for a (more focused) discussion. food for thought, as i’m in no position to speak for all LWers.
since this post isn’t getting much traction i’ll propose a different angle. most of us here are very aware of coordination problems, and those of us living in democracies are explicitly given regular opportunities to participate in a system of which one of its claims is to overcome certain coordination problems (e.g. legislate some thing which works only if universally adopted, and then force everyone to adhere to that legislation).
this particular system of democracy has its successes and its flaws, but viewing it as a tool, what’s the best way to make use of it? for example, should one simply vote for their self-interests? should one eschew voting because the time required results in negative EV? should one publicly discuss alternatives and then use their vote as a lever to direct more attention to these alternatives (think: voting for “obviously bad” nihilistic policies/representatives)?
i can’t think of another (pseudo-)acronym which gets used as an all-caps unit, off the top of my head. i may toy around with “Flop” as a unit, like GFlop for a billion operations, GFlop/s for a billion operations per second.
this could make certain statistical measurements less noisy, but as you point out there are so many confounding variables to deal with (e.g. period effects). if we couldn’t conclude anything from the 50 years ago where we made this same change (in reverse), i don’t quite understand what’s different this time around such that we will be able to conclude things from this change.
Not only do our brains say “no fuck you, you don’t get to work on rockets”
getting yourself to somewhere on this curve which is not the far left but also not too far to the right can be unbelievably productive. there’s a certain type of infatuation which drives one to show off their achievements, which in turn requires one to make achievements. building a rocket, and inventiveness in general, is a decently high status thing: you may experience a greater drive to actually do these things during a certain period of infatuation.
If people were more aware of the limits of politics, disengagement and cynicism would probably increase. These attitudes are already a problem, particularly among the less educated, and are associated with a series of negative outcomes.
this is a particularly interesting statement to me. on the one hand, the bulk of your post is about illuminating the limits of politics, and you mention academics and such admitting to these limits. hence, “awareness of the limits of politics” is supposed to be a highly-educated view. then you illustrate the downstream effects of disengagement and cynicism, but cite these as problems among the lesser-educated — the opposite end of the education spectrum.
so which is it? is awareness of the limits of politics a good thing only when a person is “highly educated enough” to convince themselves that carrying on the illusion, and not disengaging, is a good thing? if this is true, you should be able to convince the other person of this view, and then feel safe in revealing the rest of the truth. much of this post has the vibe of “we can’t trust these fools with the truth, thus we’re going to withhold it and thereby ensure that they remain fools”… there’s a lot of hubris to that idea.
i’m not sure i’d recommend nicotine even in gum form. you’ll notice an obvious boost the first few times you do it — and the shorter half-life is nice for working in the evenings — but like most other drugs you build dependence quick. after a couple weeks you literally won’t notice any effect from taking that same initial dose. overcoming that by bumping the dose is, obviously, unsustainable.
if you do go the nicotine route, try both the gum and the lozenges. gum is more effective at quickly weening you off of cigs because it replaces one ritual (smoking) with another (chewing), whereas the lozenges are really just about physically delivering nicotine to the body without much ritual (i.e. they’re less “habit forming”).
Eth lending rates on Aave/Compound have remained < 1% for literally years. most returns in DeFi are dollar-denominated. the sustainable ones don’t seem to move much outside the 2-6% APY range (except during bull markets where people will pay a premium to leverage their Eth/BTC — but we’re no longer in a bull market). the 20% APY dollar-denominated yields have shown themselves to largely be unsustainable (e.g. UST). in an environment where the sustainable DeFi yields no longer vastly outcompete bonds/treasuries, why would you be bullish on DeFi?
follow-up: if you’re using DeFi today, which platforms are you using which i’m likely to be overlooking when i make these claims?
in areas where land is competitive — i.e. those areas where LVT is most impactful — it’s common for developers to buy a lot, tear down an existing home, and then build a new one. consider:
lot with old home (O) → empty lot (E) → lot with new home (N)
if O → N is a value-positive transition, and it’s not possible to go there without passing through E, then both O → E and E → N ought to be value-positive. O → E is valuable because it reduces the amount of work required to reach the valuable (and more liquid) state N.
so why don’t we see more empty lots go up for sale in areas where it’s routine to redevelop lots? my guess is it’s just different types of friction coming together to create a transaction cost around selling empty lots. integrating that whole process from O → N overcomes the transaction cost, yielding more profit. maybe you can say “gosh, structure X would go great on lot Y or Z”, but you have no way of communicating “i’d pay $D for an empty lot Y or Z”, and so a meaningful market for empty lots never emerges.
but create a market for empty lots — i.e. reduce the transaction costs in that area and encourage separate specialization of O → E from E → N — and you should have much more data for calculating land values. i’m not sure how to create that market other than literally creating a marketplace and then incentivizing each side of the market to participate in your marketplace until it’s bootstrapped, i.e. the Uber approach.
it’s not clear to me that this distinction is real, or would matter even if it is real. from my perspective, looking up, i am an agent within the company i work within. from the employer’s perspective, looking down, i am a tool to drive revenue. this relation exists all the way up through to the C-suite, and then the hedge funds and retirement fund managers, and back around to the employees who own those funds. in our capitalist system of ownership every agent is also someone else’s tool.
our economic systems have weathered all these events. if your point is that AI is of the same class as bubbles/recessions, then shouldn’t the takeaway be that our economic systems can handle it — just expecting it to be as painful as any other economic swing?
i suppose i probably just don’t understand what you mean when you speak of “rethinking” the economic system. that sounds like a revolutionary change, whereas for the dominant economic systems today, looking back i can trace what is more of an evolutionary path from the dawn of cities/trade up to the present day. the only time i can say we’ve “rethought” our economic system is when various countries tried to pivot from their established distributed system to a centrally managed system of production more or less “overnight”.