tl;dr

• Basic market competition effect: Ambiguous (higher customer rents; lower producer rents by other firms), see Econ 101 and Econ 102 as detailed below.
• Bullshittiness of markets: Totally!
• But these are two rather separate effects and should be more cleanly separated for fruitful analysis
• All in all: But despite all, hard to quantify the net effect of an 'average' successful business; I find your title insufficiently substantiated.

Explanation:

Econ 101 model of Monopolistic Competition describes exactly the basic market effect you're going at.

While Econ 101 is though in its most basic form a bit stupid and blind on the more interesting questions you address, when you start from that model and look at effects of market entry, you see that two first-order effects challenge your a priori of there automatically being a reduction of net welfare:

• Yes Tom bites into Fred's profit, i.e. negative externality on others' producer rent. But he also could not attract any single customer w/o increasing consumer welfare (alias consumer rent). Which of the two dominate is absolutely unclear and will depend on subtle market parameters.
• Together the competitors drive down each others' prices, as Richard_Kennaway points out. This increases net rents in the market.

This may be called Econ 102. You find a ton written about it under keyword "business-stealing effect". Conclusion: In some cases free entry has, on the margin at the equilibrium, positive net welfare effects, in some negative.

I'm actually sympathetic that many firms are mostly gaining because of sneakiness that is remote to actual increase of value for customers and society, but it seems to me your post is mixing up (i) fundamental effect that you analyze not in the depth required (the above mentioned additional fundamental basic competition effects) and - in some of your examples later - (ii) the more tricky marketing/sneakiness advantages some profiteer from. These should be separated more clearly for a fruitful discussion of the topic. To be clear what I mean with the latter: Acc. to my experience, a large share of firms mainly tinkers around how to beat competition not in terms of creating better products but in terms of how to better sell it etc., or how to cut costs in gray-zone areas or at least in ways that are not mostly value-adding but instead leading to other negative externalities, so all w/o it necessarily going in the direction of yielding higher value for customer and/or society. And thus also: huge share of bullshit jobs; plus if some jobs aren't full bullshit jobs, they still have a high share of bullshit components (although I guess we should be careful to distinguish within-company bullshittiness and indeed outwardgoing bullshit created, of which only the latter goes in the direction of your argument).

Agree now turning 40 or 20 need not make a bit difference for those aware of the weirdness of the time.

But: Seems like a stretch to say it's already been like that few decades ago. Now the sheer uncertainty seems objectively different, qualitatively truly incomparable, to 20y ago (well, at least if the immediacy of potential changes is considered too).

Agree. Wonder whether one should go a step further: Rather than a specific 'wiki'/series of comments, maybe the domain would deserve an entire tagged (and ideally hideable for those rather categorically uninterested) sub-part of LessWrong, which which I mean: entire LW domain with posts of all LW categories and genres etc., but clearly targetting mostly only parents of children.

I guess that would then become a question of filtering out specific tags for users.

[There's also a much more banal answer that I wouldn't be surprised if it is a major, deep underlying driver, with all the interesting psychology provided in OP being some sort of half-conscious rationalization for our actual deep-rooted tendencies:] Not going insane simply is the very natural default outcome for humans even in such felt dire situation:

While shallowly it might feel like it would, going insane actually appears to me to NOT AT ALL be the default human reaction to an anticipation of (even a quite high probability of) the world ending (even very soon). I haven't done any stats or research, but everything I've ever seen or heard of seems to suggest to me:

• While they're not anywhere nearly the majority, still very many people have very high P(doom soon) yet stay nearly perfectly calm (at best you might call them insanely calm, given the [true or imagined] circumstances).
  • I think this applies to many people e.g. on this forum, but I'm reminded of much more 'normal' persons uttering even more dramatic 'I'm sure AI might already TMORROW kill us all' - all while simply going on with their usual lives.
• Slightly less 1:1 but imho still underlining our sanity's resilience in closely as dire situations: Many people seem egoistic enough such that the ending of their own life to mean a very large part of the world they care about to be going to end, and yet they face many situations of more or less imminent death rather calmly as opposed to going insane
  • Extend to various cases where family and/or friends and/or tribe is facing extinction; at least I haven't heard of them to usually be going insane by the prospect of not-yet-actually-visible but forthcoming extinction.
    • Once a torturous way of you or your close ones being killed has actually started, that's of course different, that's when you go insane.

I find the argument/thesis brought fwd here, in its strong form, too abstract and lacking sufficient empirical justification, even if purely directionally the main claim need not be entirely wrong (which, though, isn't a very surprising conclusion anymore). In reality, how often one might ideally share your differing opinions will depend on more subtle details of topic, colleagues, situation, incl. the exact ways how one can share/emphasize the opinion.

Intended mainly for OP but I post publicly still fwiw.

Thanks! What coincidence: I went to the doc yesterday because once again my chronic palate inflammation as been flaring up more strongly than usual in the past 1-2 months or so. Since ages, I seem to have fragile mucous membranes and some other skin/pseurasis-type issues e.g. on the head; while the latter are under control with medicinal shampoos, the palate inflammation seems to be more of a constant, although at varying intensity.

I had seen docs many times many years before that, but I also simply have gotten used to having inflammation and latent pain there as nothing can seemingly be done about it. The main worry is the broader risks from long-term chronic inflammation.

But yesterday, for the first time, a doc told me that before anything else: "go to see a dentist as very first thing - bacteria something something". I didn't want to take her seriously; rather good tooth hygiene - though indeed relatively strongly withdrawn gum.

Long story short: If you happen to have good links (or other sort of info that doesn't take you too long to provide) I'd be keen to know more details about anything you write in your post thus. I should admit, despite the amazing parallels of what you write, my hope is a bit limited, as I still guess (i) my irritated/fragile mucous membranes are somehow a rather fundamental issue, and, at any rate, (ii) gum being somewhat withdrawn can barely be changed.

tl;dr: Great reminder, agree with all of it substantially & exactly (except for the nitpicking below).

Nitpicking on wording: Strictly speaking, he did not fail to say how much he wants to go at all; and it's not that he did not strictly "say" how much he wants to go. He actually did indeed want to go (!), but because he wrongly thought the others wanted to go, so his other-pleasing motive meant, net, he had a pref for going. It's just his presumption was wrong, and has led him to want to go while with full information he wouldn't have wanted to. So, in a very strict sense, your point is even a bit more different from the Albino situation than your 'slight-of-hand' admission meant.

Or, actually, your point - if Abilene is common - should be nudged/extended to: Also make sure there's no Abilene-type misunderstanding as to the reason why you might have the particular preference you state.

Doesn't reduce the fact that your post is a great reminder and encouragement for doing more of what I sometimes try to do even if one does something a bit uncommon when indicating preference strenghts the way you rightly suggest. 🙏

Outro 1:

... Exactly, and just the same way as we humans had our predecessor apes compete with each other by outwitting each other, and thereby slowly but surely building us, to eventually superseed them. And thus the same way these predecessor apes had their predecessors ...

This story is 'true' in the sense that 'we had build them us' is a banal but still somewhat thought provoking rhetorical twist for simply saying something like 'they happened to .. which yielded ..'

Outro 2:

... As time is somehow weirder than we think, the AGI really set things up such that we and our predecessors rightly put in place everything such as for her to eventually result from it. Circular intelligent design. Who knows.

Today I had a thought that fits something here (and the sort of 'extension' I thus propose in my other comment): we're always scared of paperclip maximizers, but if we look at the heaps of resources we throw at trying to a tiny bit increase our own welfare, compared to what scales of welfare improvements we could achieve in other humans or, arguably, in animals, we are already 99.9% clippy ourselves. I guess that's not an entirely new thought of course but found it quite fits main 'complaint' in OP.

Now, the attitude that most people have is that pain doesn’t matter much unless it’s experienced by humans. When rats are poisoned to death, no one cares much. But this seems like a very untenable position.

I actually think very many people do not very explicitly think exactly this. They'd say it's absolutely not okay to hurt a rat just for the sake of it. Instead, if they nearly perfectly ignore such pains, it is just a bit as with the millions of humans starving or dying of cheaply curable diseases in Africa - many of which could be saved for (in Western scales) trivial amounts of resources - which tend to merely be "statistics" for us: also animals tend to very quickly be purely statistics for us, or simply in a different way not automatically at the fore of our mind. So while all you write is imho +- exactly true it's not that specifically only a human/animal divide. Instead, we already fail to care in any meaningful way about suffering even if its other humans. Even if, yes, 'them' being animals is yet another factor facilitating in our mind the downgrading of all others who are not direct kin or cute eyes directly in front of us or so.