Could you say more about where the whole sequence is going / what motivated it? I am curious.
I believe I did explain/decompose the underlying mechanism
A simple way to see this: even a relatively crappy factory will make more goods in a month than it & its employees consume in a month. Likewise for farms, mines, fishing vessels, etc etc.
I could also have mentioned that it's relatively easy for two people to make three.
If someone prints money for themselves, they'll devalue their currency, but they won't be making factories less productive.
Intel makes more stuff than they use, no technical progress required.
I should've said "a dollar's worth of stuff can produce 1.03 dollar's worth of stuff". That would have been more clear.
Easy to say when you're already known by almost everyone in your world, have total career security, and have a full-sized family! I've never really done teaser links, but I can see why anyone would. You're more likely to gain some reputation or a job or a spouse if the reader goes to your website and sees your name there at the top.
Also, in terms of value to the reader: my life has changed in a big way because of a blog post I read two times that I can think of, but never from Twitter, despite spending more time reading Twitter than blogs by now. When I see something important on Twitter, I usually bookmark it and forget about it; when I see something important in a blog post, I often act. This is my own fault, but I suspect it's a common experience. Infinite scroll certainly doesn't help.
No that should be one of the fastest and most cachable queries
I appreciate this post very much! What a great question you have found. Some old thoughts I had on this topic came back to me.
Personally I think of wealth as neither extractive nor hyper-efficient. I think of it as blind dumb compounding growth. A dollar has a lifespan of 1 year and bears 1.07 offspring in that time. A simple way to see this: even a relatively crappy factory will make more goods in a month than it & its employees consume in a month. Likewise for farms, mines, fishing vessels, etc etc. If nothing major goes wrong, money just grows, like a pile of rabbits if the air were made of carrots. Sometimes there's lots of opportunity to be clever and bump up a couple productivity notches and go rags to riches. Other times there's no low fruit on the technological/economic tech tree and you can only get richer quick by stealing/scamming/pillaging. But the core dynamic is that it's relatively easy for anyone to make more than they use, once they have 1/.07=14x their annual spending available as liquid cash (or tied up in decent investments).
This is all because we live in a universe that clearly wants things to happen. We have the greatest endowment ever, a whole damn star, and others nearby! Nuclear energy sitting in the ground if you need cash fast. It's better than ZIRP, better than a stimulus check! You don't even have to find a trade partner; you can use it directly to do anything you want, no questions asked. No credit check or collateral. No minimum hours per week; in fact, nothing is asked in exchange at all; you couldn't give anything back even if you tried — usable energy seems to only go down — but we start with so much that it won't matter for a trillion years.
This notion hasn't made me rich and it's not much use for my day-to-day decisions, but I think it does describe the reality I see. My parent's friends are all rich (compared to young people) from a lifetime of saving, even the dumb ones. Half the crappy stocks I owned doubled simply because the companies stayed in business; if energy is free then "stay in business" is all you need to do once you reach $10M in annual profits or so. If an individual holds more than ~$100M, they'll make a good profit indiscriminately investing in every single startup and land offering that shows up in their face: with compounding growth and diminishing losses, the losses just don't really matter. This seems to me to essentially be the fundamental law of our universe, at least until some pine tree is tall enough to block out everyone's light at once. (That pine tree may only be 1-4 years away now.)
Wrt swimsuit+umbrella, I feel similarly to Dave Orr. I don't see why eg the matter of AI Safety vs Global Health has to be settled. Effective altruism is more coherent IMO than most social movements and even some governments (eg I know someone who is paid by the US federal govt to help immigrants avoid ICE). I don't know if coherence much beyond the current level can be achieved without just falling into blind ideology. Even a very thoughtful and rational collective decision making process might be worse than the current chaotic one, due to missed opportunities. You disagree?
I am glad to see somebody make the point properly. It's a weird state of affairs. We know the models can implement PoCs for CVEs better than most coders. We know the models can persuade people pretty effectively. Obviously the models can spread and change very easily. It's also easy for a rogue deployment to hide because datacenter GPUs draw 70W idle and update scripts constantly use tons of bandwidth. There's just no urgency to any of it.
How do you measure results?
I have been using raindrop.io for my bookmarks for seven years or so and it is pretty good. Comments all have permalinks as you know.