People generally expected math AI to progress pretty fast already. I was angry about machine-assisted math being a neglected area before this and my anger levels aren't substantially increased by the news.

I'm not sure that cleaving a distinction between the meanings of "possession" and "ownership" is a winnable battle.

but more because of measurement errors

I sometimes think of growing private wealth as the fee that a democracy must pay for the services of the techne that it cannot expropriate.

Actually, in my father's day, there was this one infamous landlord who people used to point at. Who was it, Claude? "Peter Rachman" yes that was it. People used to talk about "Rachmanism" which apparently just meant "being a cruel and unscrupulous landlord", but which could probably be expanded to encompass home owner associations organizing to lobby against zoning reform if efforts were made, because when people hear ism they expect to see a civic ideology.

Unfortunately one of his most prominent sins was excessive subdivision, so he wasn't exactly a nimby.

And also, yeah, in reality — for instance in New Zealand which has it especially bad, where substantially more than half of the families in the country own land — land investment is just a popular way of keeping savings. The last Labour government felt a need to promise, despite confessing the will, not to touch it.

Maybe "abstract" was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It's possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I'm not sure there's actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it's usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)

For grey civics, I don't know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that's it. I've been considering the slogan "defending zoning isn't compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don't believe in progress."

Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.

On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it's not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn't real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.

But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don't try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don't think we know what to say to that.

A focus question I keep returning to, partly out of a dark sense of humor, is what kind of slogans I would have to write before people would be willing to shed blood, to fight, in the name of George, or in the name of Approval Voting, or Minor Parties, or any other system whose merits are abstract and which is neither minarchist nor soviet.

I sometimes feel like part of the problem is that there is no villain to get mad at. Our enemy is mostly just ambient incompetence, myopia, legacy systems and institutional sclerosis. Perhaps we can call it Moloch.

Afaik rent in japan is low on a global stage, and is only high relative to japanese wages?

OTOH, japanese rent shouldn't be high relative to japanese wages (unless there are a whole lot of foreigners doing remote work or something) so I guess you could still say that the rent is too high.

I wonder who, if anyone, is in charge of deciding what Perplexity's list of reliable sources is.

Defecting becomes unlikely if everyone can track the compute supply chain and if compute is generally supposed to be handled exclusively by the shared project.

Afaik there were not Generals saying "Covid could kill every one of us if we don't control the situation" and controlling the situation would have required doing politically unpopular things rather than politically popular things.

Change either of those factors and it's a completely different kind of situation.