The sequences can be distilled down even further into a few sentences per article.

Starting with "The lens that sees its flaws": this distils down to: "The ability to apply science to our own thinking grants us the ability to counteract our own biases, which can be powerful." Statement by statement:

• A lot of complex physics and neural processing is required for you to notice something simple, like that your shoelace is untied.
• However, on top of noticing that your shoelace is untied, you can also comprehend the process of (noticing your shoelace is untied) - i.e. by listing the steps through which light reflects off your shoelace and your visual cortex engaging, etc.
• The ability to consider the steps of our own thinking appears to be uniquely human.
• If we recognise that our process of comprehension and understanding is potentially flawed, you can choose to consciously counteract it.
• Science is repeatedly and deliberately making measurements of our own observations over time, attributing theories to those measurements, and constructing experiments to produce further measurements to potentially disprove those theories.
• The ability to apply science to our own thinking grants us the ability to counteract our own biases, which can be powerful.
  • One example of reflective correction is correcting for optimism by noticing that optimism is not correlated to good outcomes.

The tool I am using to distill the sequences is an outliner: a nested bulleted list that allows rearranging of bullet points. This tool is typically used for writing things, but can similarly be used for un-writing things: taking a written article in and deduplicating its points, one bullet at a time, into a simpler format. An outliner can also collapse and reveal bullet points.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8

There's an alien race in the above called the baby-eaters who eat their sentient offspring because this alien species is genetically unfortunate enough to produce thousands of immediately-sentient offspring at a time, and therefore they must cull their offspring.

More and more each day I think we are becoming like baby-eaters. Except of course we don't murder our offspring by directly consuming them.

What is murder? What is consumption? It is the reclaiming of productive resource and the denial of future growth. When a poor person, having lived through years of their life giving what little they must to society in order to survive, dies on the street, there is another person that has been eaten by society.

We are eating each other, and often by the time someone has reached their preteens we know that they will be one of the ones that will be eaten. Therefore, in many ways, we are becoming baby-eaters.

However unlike the baby-eaters, not all of our society has normalized baby-eating to the point that we cannot see it as anything other than unquestionably good.

What would we ask of the baby-eaters? How should we act today?

Anyone remember a series of quick shorts posted by alexander scott (i think?) which includes a nation which includes prediction markets in its political process and a dictator takes over by opening a market that he will become the dictator in the next election cycle?

we will never have a wealth tax because pirate games, so marry the rich v2

original: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/G5qjrfvBb7wszBgWG/daijin-s-shortform?commentId=4b4cDSKxfdxGw4vBH

1. why have a wealth tax?
we should tax unearned wealth because the presence of unearned wealth disincentivises workers who would otherwise contribute to society. when we tax unearned wealth, the remaining wealthy people are people who have earned their wealth; and so we send a signal 'the best way for you to be privately wealthy is for your work to align with public utility maximisation' which privately incentivises work which helps increase utility.

unearned wealth includes: hereditary wealth, wealth due to being at the right place at the right time (you just so happened to buy a tract of land that contains your nation's entire supply of unobtanium / you just so happened to found a company that became the dominant news outlet for the entire world when other similar but less well timed companies failed)

on my original point about monopolies: monopolies are a special case of ^above. The loss of utility due to monoplies is recognised by economists as deadweight loss.

2. why will [countries where the game-theory supports the creation of ultrarich people] never have a wealth tax because pirate games?
Suppose a whole bunch of us got together and demanded that wealthy oligarchs pay a wealth tax. the wealthy oligarchs could instead take a small amount of money and bribe 51% of us to defect, while keeping their money piles. therefore we will never have a wealth tax.
re [countries where the game-theory supports the creation of ultrarich people]: nicky case's wonderful interactive game theory primer tells us that the specific payoffs/noise in zero sum games decide which strategies (cooperate, defect) tend to survive. I suspect countries with ultrawealthy tend to have payoff/noise combos that result in dominant strategies that would participate in pirate games

but hang on, what about the democracies that do have wealth taxes?
> Norway recently tried to increase their wealth tax. a whole bunch of rich people left Norway. I do not constitute this as a successful raising of the wealth tax
> [wikipedia] at its peak, only 12 countries have a wealth tax, representing as a whole less than 6% of global GDP; they are exceptions not rules (Austria, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland)

3. what to do instead? marry rich
this is not easy. EA consultants are in some ways marrying rich people.
 

Superstimulus should be avoided because 

• it increases perceived opportunity cost, leading to indecision
• It saturates one end of a complex system which can cause downstream parts of the system to fail

we will never have a wealth tax because pirate games.

why have a wealth tax? excess wealth is correlated with monopolies which are a failure to maximise utility. therefore wealth taxes would help increase total utility. monopolies include but are not limited to family wealth, natural monopolies, social network monopolies. 

however, suppose a whole bunch of us got together and demanded that wealthy oligarchs pay a wealth tax. the wealthy oligarchs could instead take a small amount of money and bribe 51% of us to defect, while keeping their money piles.

therefore we will never have a wealth tax.

what to do instead? marry rich