Wilsoniumite

Why is it strange? To me, it could only be strange if one was considering that someone planned this, and then yes, it's hard to come up with anyone who would benefit from this. OpenAI looks dumb, but also their models sound impressive, Chinese models look dangerous, but also useful. No clear winner.

Thing is, I don't think anyone planned this, so to me the timing isn't strange at all. The models really were getting close to being able to have a big cybersecurity impact (I started seeing that after teams were reporting their Mythos usage), and an event like this is not so surprising, given that.

I like this article. Rings very true.

I like Anthropic, I don't think all their talk of safety is bluff and bluster, or at least, I want to believe that the people who left OpenAI because it had lost its focus of helping humanity still want that to be their main goal. However, yes, it seems that business fears are once again causing those in charge to turn "we want to help humanity" into "we are the only ones who can help humanity, and therefore we need to be the most profitable, and the only survivors".

If you want the former ideal to survive, at Anthropic and outside of it, you need to be willing to collaborate beyond profit incentives and recouping capex. Show other labs a commitment to research and community and they will follow. Better to bring teams together rather than implicitly say you distrust them, pushing them that way instead.

"What's your unique contribution to the world" is a good question, and I've been thinking about it a lot. One framing I very much like is thinking about the priceable versus unpriceable contributions of a person. As an example, your software engineering ability is priceable (it's your labor). Your value to your parents isn't priceable. The problem is, right now the default assumed value of the latter is 0. Our society only tries to put a value on priceable facets of a person. There's reasons for that, wisdom of the crowds and whatnot, but of course it also means that if an AI can do that thing, economics drives society to adopt AI over employing people.

It's possible to set that latter value to be nonzero. You can't use free markets to set it because they necessarily cannot see what price to set, so you kinda have to guess, but IMO, it isn't zero, and I'd hazard to say it's positive.

They already are out! They're linked at the end of the post, but here's a link to the next one:

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/19/make-work-and-sub-subsis...

In my follow up pieces in the series, I detail a way to make the economy actually see a lot (not all, but way more than before) of that value. I'm pretty proud of it. It might be politically hard, but it's theoretically very sound.

I don't take it as a personal attack, I've wondered the same. It is definitely like a grand theory. I have a couple therapists I'm talking to.

I have a better response now.

The ability to take leisure is still conditioned on labor. To take time off, you have to save up. To save up, you have to work. Labor is distorting the real value of leisure if the production of that leisure needs less labor (leisure time still requires you to be fed, housed, and more if you go on holiday, travel, or consume to keep yourself entertained or educated).

I have a new version that uses US and Finnish consumption data to model the mechanisms effects.

https://wilsoniumite.com/2026/06/14/labor-pressures-causing-...

I've changed it a bit, but yeah that's true, sorry.

That's fair, they seem similar at first glance.

The difference is that we are asking the economy to create jobs even when it doesn't "want" to. It still will, the lump of labor fallacy is indeed a fallacy, but that doesn't mean this isn't causing a lot of harm.

We aren't draining the earth's oceans (yet) because its supply is more than the earth needs right now. One day we might, but how much we draw is decided by the economy.

But for labor supply is forced, capital flows there when it shouldn't, politics chases it. The economy, ever adaptable, provides jobs where it can.

That's true, I think the real problem is a liiiiittle more nuanced than just the great stagnation. But that's the graph people know. The issue can be read out in more detail from other graphs too, I'm working on an updated piece. I mention georgism at the end of the piece as well.

But do you agree with the theoretical framing? People not being able to not work forces them to find something. It's like an iron ore deposit being forced to be mined rather than being mined when it's needed?

I agree, and in some sense I argue this at the end, but I didn't want to make the piece even longer.

In fact if you look at the economics of this policy over the long term it leaks capital through rents, so it doesn't actually work forever.

A sovereign wealth fund can solve this (essentially an expansion of the "buffer" I wrote about). That functions as almost exactly what you want, giving a stake in every company to every worker (except broader, to every citizen).

If you buy the framing that labor is currently a distortion, you wouldn't want to only give stakes in companies to workers of those companies, if you do that the distortion will continue.

Perhaps, but this is actually a both a somewhat novel framing of the problem and of the solution. If academic economists agree with this theory and subsequently get behind it, it could be like climate change.

Except this change isn't anti growth and is a lot simpler to fix than climate change. It can be bi-partisan, if framed right, we have to at least try.

That's a very sad outlook.

This problem is hard because it's hard to spot, but the fix is actually surprisingly easy (at least in the short term).

The scale is on the order of climate change. If the academic base of economists were to unify behind this theory, change could happen. Only a few countries need to adopt this to show merit to the idea (although, that will take like a decade to truly show). Unlike climate change though this isn't fighting growth, it can recover it, and it's much, much easier to implement. That's why I think it can be truly bipartisan.

The rich spend close to none of their wealth, but they do still, in absolute dollars, spend more than the poor per individual. This means the VAT collects more from the spending of a rich person than of someone that is poor. The full construct with a UBI is not regressive, and is actually progressively redistributive.

This is true, but we also have monetary policy which for the longest time we have thought of as and tried to make apolitical. I would argue this is almost just monetary policy, and that's why I set this up as something that a central bank should do. It uses the word "Tax" but it really hardly is a tax.

It's priced in, yeah. As I said in the comment and in the post, VAT on its own is not nice. The paper also states:

Nevertheless, any VAT increases, including VAT base broadening measures that impact the poor, should be accompanied by compensation measures for poorer households, such as targeted tax credits or benefit payments.

Which is essentially what I propose through UBI, I just have broader scope.

I know my tone was harsh, but that's mainly because I'm tired of people thinking I'm taking a side. Using VAT to fund this means that it isn't a tax on capital or on labor, that's why it's more neutral than all other methods. A wealth, profit, dividend tax, that's a tax on wealth or capital or rich people or business, whatever you prefer. An income tax is a tax on workers. VAT avoids that question.

It is slightly redistributive, yes, but really only slightly. Its hard to design it to not be redistributive, but if you really want to do that then you raise VAT and lower income taxes instead of funding a UBI. I wrote about that later in the piece.

VAT is regressive when you consider wealth yes, but as I wrote in the piece it's both counterbalanced by the UBI, and indeed there are mechanisms by which VAT is actually progressive. This OECD paper goes into more detail [1]. The short version is: VAT on its own and in practice is regressive but only because of savings. That's pedantic, I know, but it matters for the purposes of how the VAT-UBI loop scales. In particular, it allows you to fund a larger UBI more quickly than with any other funding method.

[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/reassessing-the-regress...

I'm not an economist either and definitely could be wrong, but my understanding of precious metals markets has been that they are mostly driven by speculative pressures rather than demand/supply ones, unlike most other commodities, which is why I framed it that way. Much more gold and silver sits in storage than is mined or used every year, so even a significant relative shift in production/use has little effect on the price.

I have worked close to the trading floor at a financial institution, and there, precious metals are sometimes modeled more as currencies than as commodities for this reason.

It's not necessarily a rush to replace fiat, people just like the idea of a safe asset whos scarcity is secured.

https://wilsoniumite.com/ - I write about things sometimes

I agree a lot with the sentiments here and I think people who want to avoid being filmed should have that right. But, as someone who doesn't mind (and is younger) I suppose I could share my rationalizion for it (as flawed as it may be)

One often mentioned reason is the fear that in some way your likeness will end up in something significant, or viral. That makes sense, it's the most invasive and significant violation. We "risk becoming the side character in someone else's parasocial relationship" as another commentator mentioned. I myself wouldn't want that either, but I derive some comfort from one main observation: virality doesn't scale. A lot of the worries come from the fact that "everyone is filming now", "everything is shared now". That's true, but the likelihood of any of this ever becoming popular or even seen goes down as the volume goes up. That alone is enough for me to not be that worried, at least not by the increased prevalence of public filming/photography.

On the other hand, this does nothing to limit the effect of data harvesting and government espionage, a real worry I might have.

I've faced this problem for almost every task in my life, from the creative stuff already mentioned too less obvious things, like socializing (Seeing what you said wrong without knowing how you could have said it better). Because of this, the only things I have been able to bear "practicing" are ones that are outside of any public view. Ones were my taste was nonexistent. Code is one of them. We don't see much code (good or bad) in public, and so it's one of few areas where my taste could only improve after I saw the failures in my own work after I had produced it, rather than during.

I think it's the case that both these systems can, should, and do coexist. When doing research or development, precision is more important than immediate grasp-ability. With people in general conversation, we operate on rules of thumb and appearances really do sometimes matter more than rigor. Colloquial speech then takes precedence, even if it is imprecise.

This article is nice because it is both interesting in the purely rigorous sense (phylogenetically), and it highlights this divide between precise definitions and the words we find useful (most of all in that catchy title!).

Yes and no. People also exhibit these biases, but because degree matters, and because we have no other choice, we still trust them most of the time. That's to say; bias isn't always completely invalidating. I wrote a slightly satirical piece "People are just as bad as my LLMs" here: https://wilsoniumite.com/2025/03/10/people-are-just-as-bad-a...

Some new ish maths has been discovered. It's up to you if this is valid or impressive enough, but I think it's significant for things to come: https://youtu.be/sGCmu7YKgPA?si=EG9i0xGHhDu1Tb0O

[...] as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today:

As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's only two options to avoid this. 1. Aggressively tune your algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity. 2. Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content. And when I say aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather than their friends. At what point (degree of intervention) does something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question, but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high engagement content would already be dead.

I wrote about this a bit on my blog [1] but to add to this idea,

Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.

Pre industrial revolution, labor was in a sense cheaper than it was during the industrial revolution, and one genuinely interesting set of professions that existed then was house servants. Butlers, maids, cooks, under butlers and so on. It would not be inconceivable to see the return of these kinds of jobs? Ones where the value of human labor is so low that working for someone with wealth in their own home is common?

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2024/09/09/how-do-we-fix-it/

I feel like there is a big risk here, which others have already mentioned, but in fact this risk has already been realized w.r.t npm packages.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41178258

I think it depends a bit on how you count but I've heard it is an 8 holed donut