4er_transform

While technology has empowered governments, it’s also empowered the individual, and more importantly shifted the material dynamics to better align the incentives of governments with the people. Democracy followed material change, it didn’t precede it. Democracy came about because it was optimal for a power seeking government, not out of the kindness of their heart.

A resource extraction based economy sees people as slaves. The true source of power is the resource, people are just a means to an end, so you mistreat the people as much as you can get away with in pursuit of the resource while avoiding revolt.

With stable infrastructure, the government makes far more from an educated, rich population that it can tax and use the innovation from. It’s against its own quest for power to interfere too much in the prosperity of its citizens. The incentives are aligned.

Solving the AI problem isn’t about stopping the tech or making a bunch of brittle laws. It’s always been about alignment: aligning the large AGI-like entities that are the modern state, the modern economy, representative democracy, or AGI itself, with human prosperity

Who cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better.

Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.

Gold Standard is probably a force that acts against inequality but the forces pushing inequality today are just much stronger. Technology that creates winner take all markets and incredible leverage with few people being one.

Surprising how tech people on a tech forum are some of the biggest Luddites. Maybe it’s because the creative destruction is coming to your industry this time?

It’s reminiscent of Dune: - Small devoted religious sect seeds messiah myths in the distant land for generations, so that in their time of need, they can tap of this devotion from “the people in the south” to fight on their behalf

Everything everywhere does this. All human progress has been making common and accessible the rare and expensive. Universities, online courses, textbooks, etc all exist to make economics as accessible as possible, there’s just a really tight reward loop with programming so your rate of learning it is more tangible

No VC makes an investment off the star count. It’s a signal to identify opportunities in the noise.

Once surfaced, there’s other signals to filter if an initial conversation is even worth it.

Assuming everyone else is just stupid and it’s all luck is a good way to hold yourself back from your potential.

If you’re wondering what is left when you have a swarm of generally intelligent agents working on your behalf and can do every task as well as a human, we already have the answer. That is the life of a CEO.

Humans are left deciding the direction, choosing what matters and what to spend attention on, and making judgement calls on the edge cases.

In the future, everyone is a CEO. How many CEOs are there though in that future? Probably not 8 billion

Yes it is.

Kids grow up to run the world, a world I’m going to live in. I have a stake in that. This should be obvious if we take our civilization seriously.

Yes of course. Unfortunately many of those decisions get distorted and captured by bad actors, creating a reasonable skepticism.

If you care about solving climate change: instead of yelling at climate change denialist you should direct more effort into advocating for policy and messaging that acknowledges and mitigates the harms while keeping you expect people to endure

Actually I think a lot of climate change denialism has more to do with the “…and so we have to do X to solve it” part of climate change. It’s “climate change activism” that turns people off.

Climate change is real. That doesn’t mean we should halt economic growth. Unfortunately this is another area that gets so wrapped up in political power and incentives where: Democrats have factions and groups that want to implement world changing measures and redirect billions of dollars in a way that benefits their interests, and climate scientists seem to weigh the climate costs far higher than the economic devastation a hard switch would bring, so naturally there’s a level of skepticism at the whole affair.

There should be level headedness about it: climate change is real, it’s not world ending yet but we should get ahead of it, we need to make investments in changing our societal behavior to get on a track that balances mitigating the harms while keeping the real economic boon that comes with our current approach.

Individualism taken to the insane.

“How the next generation of your society is raised is none of your business”. Take some ownership

Or make them part of the consequences. Give them skin in the game. “Let’s not use AI” is dumb and impossible

“You’re not imagining it. You’re not weak.”

If “I get exhausted that I have to check in on my coding agent while it does my job” isn’t weak, what is? This has to be satire.

What is well-being to you?

You’re right: all things should serve humanity, including markets.

Rent-seeking behavior of any kind, including unions, including business engaged in rent-seeking, are anti-human.

Well-being needs to be properly understood though. Well-being is the state of being most sustainably and perfectly aligned with forwarding humanity.

That means valuable work that contributes to the progression of humanity, the circumstances that make reproduction viable and abundant, the resources to support cultivating oneself and others to your and their maximum potential serving humanity.

It doesn’t mean the ability to spend your days on the couch, or sitting on the beach, or devoting all your time to a hobby that does nothing to serve humanity.

Unions are rent-seeking behavior and that’s the problem. Voluntary unions are one thing, but the way unions are build today is requiring labor to participate and for businesses to buy from the union.

Rent-seeking behavior of any kind holds humanity back.

Who cares about capitalism? It’s a label. What matters is eliminating rent-seeking behavior. Unions are rent-seeking. Business cartels/groups are also rent seeking. Abolish them all

If I did, would it change your mind?

Unions are everywhere and always a market distortion. Using political power to pull wealth into your union that would otherwise spread to the rest of society via competition (in labor and capital markets) is bad.

The only good unions are the ones that serve geopolitical interests of states that are positive for humanity. A steel workers union is subsidized by the rest of society, but if it keeps steel production in the US, making the US more formidable and able to project humanity-advancing policy, then it is good.

Unions freeze market forces, which raises wages, but those raised wages come directly from other parts of the economy and do so inefficiently (cost more than a dollar elsewhere to increase the wages by a dollar). This is because it distorts comparative advantages. Inequality can be reduced by unions, but only in short term. By freezing market forces in this pocket you are creating inefficiencies, which come at a cost over time (like competitive and bad actors becoming dominant).

Wages and inequality was better in the 1950s/60s US despite of unions. The US was 50% of the global economy, had dollar dominance, just about the only industrial base intact, a skilled workforce with a clear competitive advantage. These are what made wages high and inequality low.

Take the long-term perspective and center humanity rather than picking winners and losers. Unions are an emotionally charged topic because labor groups reap power from them and business groups lose power from them. This is noise. We should make decisions like this based on what serves humanity’s long term interests, and unions (and business cartels/lobbies) hold humanity back.

Honestly this sounds like a Luddite mindset (and I mean that descriptively, not to be insulting). This mindset holds us back.

You can imagine the artisans who made shirts saying the exact same thing as the first textile factories became operational.

Humans have been coders in the sense we mean for a matter of decades at most - a blip in our existence. We’re capable of far more, and this is yet another task we should cast into the machine of automation and let physical laws do the work for us.

We’re capable of manipulating the universe into doing our bidding, including making rocks we’ve converted into silicones think on our behalf. Making shirts and making code: we’re capable of so much more.

People are animals like any other. That’s not a slight. Managers respond to incentives much like dogs do too, and so do execs, and board members, and every human.

You have to look a level deeper. Life has always been productive, it’s the only way you maintain negative entropy and thus life itself. If you found a species that stopped being biologically productive, you would recognize that as a maladaptive deviation from the norm (and that species would quickly go extinct).

You should work hard to be productive for humanity, not owners, who themselves are also subject to their own biological drives and pressures that channel them just like these same drives channel others.

If you feel exploited, then be productive in ways that circumvent your exploitation. Working hard and being productive is far older and more fundamental that capitalism though, and for your own sake and humanity’s sake you should embrace it.

If your alternative meaning of life is harnessing as many feel good chemicals in your brain as possible, that’s an objectively pointless existence

If we’re all just particles and fields, we might as well be as thermodynamically productive as possible

NFTs from first principles looked like a bad idea even then. They solved 0 problems. When a technology solves 0 problems, it’s doomed to fail.

Also: democracy, capitalism/the global economy, your HOA, a tribe, etc etc

Even a weather system is a kind of computational process and “intelligent” in a way

In which periods in human history has that been possible? In the parts of the world with the highest birth rates is that possible?

This looks more like a return to form than anything.

The first ventures were funding voyages to a New World thousands of miles away, essentially a different planet as far as the people then were concerned.

Venture capital for a new B2B application is playing it safe as far as risk capital goes