IMO the part about Bureaucracy is likely not true 10k years ago, although it is (as you cite) 6k years ago. The Academia part is not clear to me as a parallel - becoming a priest was (I would expect) mostly a thing of actual belief, as people used to actually believe things, in ways that our Academia (the Eldritch kind) is not.
AFAIK the breast milk also contains antibodies which reduces the number of sick days in infants, on priors that should also have a (small) positive effect.
Anecdata:
My wife is usually much better at telling when a girl was flirting, and when bets are made, she confirms later with the person on the side (these are usually people she already knows and so people who trust her, but also she maybe can read their particular tells, confounding the result). I often would read the same signals as "she's just having a good time with me/the person" and be wrong. I'm not sure if I have the same advantage for men, I do more often bet on them flirting than she does, but I usual am unable to have independent confirmation, it's random men we observe being possibly flirty.
Maybe it's just the case that both of us see our genders as more flirty than the other does, and that bet pays on average? I'm not sure, that doesn't feel like it explains my wife's accuracy or my inaccuracy in predicting female flirting (although my prediction did get better through time).
1As a father of an almost-two-years-old who is infinitely curious, I would benefit greatly from a write-up of what you found works and doesn't. I also don't live in the West and visit only occasionally so it is costly to buy things to try out; I'd appreciate learning from your experience!
Oh, I didn't notice, but yeah, just a link to it, not the whole text!
I did somehow get this in my email, so it is curated?
Quicky thoughts, not fully fledged, sorry.
Maybe it depends on the precise way you see the human take-over, but some benefits of Stalin over Clippy include:
Humans have to sleep, have biological functions, and have need to be validated and loved etc which is useful for everyone else.
Humans also have limited life span and their progeny has decent random chances of wanting things to go well for everyone.
Humans are mortal and posses one body which can be harmed if need be making them more likely to cooperate with other humans.
A crux I have on the point about disincentivising developers from developing parts of their own land - how common is this? In my own country, the answer is - not at all, almost all development comes from the government building infrastructure, schools, etc. and developers buy land near where they know the government will build a metro line or whatever to leech off the benefits. Is the situation in the US that developers often buy big plots of cheap land and develop them with roads, hospitals, schools, to benefit from the rise in value of all the other land?
I think this view is quite US-centric as in fact most countries in the world do not include mineral rights with the land ownership (and yet, minerals are explored everywhere, not just US, meaning imo that profit motive is alive and well when you need to buy licences on top of the land, it's just priced in differently). From Claude:
In a relatively small number of countries, private landowners own mineral rights (including oil) under their property. The United States is the most notable example, where private mineral rights are common through the concept of "mineral estate." Even in the US though, there are some limitations and government regulations on extraction.
The vast majority of countries follow the "state ownership" model, where subsurface minerals including oil are owned by the government regardless of who owns the surface land. This includes:
Most of Europe (including UK, France, Germany)
Russia
China
Most Middle Eastern countries
Most African nations
Most Latin American countries
Canada (where the provinces generally own mineral rights)
Mexico (where oil specifically is constitutionally defined as state property)
Australia (where states own mineral rights)
Even in countries that technically allow private mineral ownership, state-owned companies often have exclusive rights to develop oil resources (like Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia or PEMEX in Mexico).
The US system of widespread private mineral rights is quite unique globally. There are a few other countries that have limited forms of private mineral rights, but none with the same extensive private ownership system as the US.
My past self is super guilty of this and for a decade now working on it - I'm a younger brother, and being unable to do a thing was a sure way to get someone else to do it (i.e. someone older), so I'd make myself unable to do it (through making myself tired, hurting myself in the process by doing it recklessly or other not-quite-conscious but actually beneficial to me strategies). It's a pattern I noticed at 16, but didn't fix until 23 or so, and I still find a part of me scheming to do similar stuff. An issue I have now is that my 2 year old has absolutely learned this - he wants to roll up his sleeves, he gives it a horrible effort, and starts crying at the failure, waiting for us to fix it. Instead I guide him to do it since he can do it with patience and effort, and he seems happy to do it, and for some things he just learned it and is now not having the pattern - but it doesn't generalize, he does it for new challenges. It'll just take time, but it really starts early.