I've actually come to the impression that the extensive use of contempt in the Sequences is one of the worst aspects of the whole piece of writing, because it encourages people to disown their own actual experience where it's (near) the target of such contempt, and to adopt a contemptuous stance when faced with perspectives they in fact don't get.

Contempt usually doesn't help people change their minds, and when it does it does so via undermining people's internal epistemic processes with social manipulation.  If the argument in "section 2 above" turns out to have flaws or mistaken assumptions, then an attitude of contempt (particularly from a position of high status) about how it's embarrassing to not understand that will not help people understand it better.  It might get them to spend more time with the argument in order to de-embarrass themselves, but it won't encourage them to take the arguments on its merits.  Either the argument is good and addresses relevant concerns people have (factual and political) and if so you'll be able to tell because it will work!  Shaming people for not getting it is at best a distraction, and at worst an attack on people's sensemaking.  And generally a symmetric weapon.

Meanwhile, contempt as a stance in the holder it tend to block curiosity and ability to notice confusion. Even if some argument is clearly wrong, it somehow actually made sense to the person arguing it—at least as a thing to say, if not a way to actually view the world.  What sense did it make?  Why did they say this bizarre thing and not that bizarre thing?  Just because energy-healing obviously doesn't work via [violating this particular law of physics], that doesn't mean it can't work via some other mechanism—after all, the body heals itself non-magically under many ordinary circumstances! And if interventions can make it harder for that to work, then they can probably make it easier.  So how might it work?  And what incentivized the energy healer to make up a bad model in the first place?

Contempt may be common among rationalists but from my perspective the main reason Rob didn't include it is probably because it's not actually very functional for good discourse.

Sure but ideally it would raise them an amount that's worth it.  That's kind of the whole idea.  People aren't infinitely incentivized by money and zero incentivized by anything else.

The bit about merging the casinos... in the limit, you've got an entire town/city in the desert that is completely owned by one owner, who pays nominally zero land value tax because the property itself isn't worth anything given there's nothing nearby. But it seems plausible to me that having an equation for tracking a multiplicity of independent improvements on a single nominal property and taxing the whole situation accordingly... would be relatively easy compared to the other LVT calculation problems. (I have not done the math here whatsoever.)

The splitting and merging thing is a great point. I sense that @Blog Alt is continuing to missing the point about the "everyone else's improvements" by how they frame it, but once you take splitting and merging into account...

...well, for people who actually live there, hopefully the presence of a new garbage dump would itself be more costly than the decrease in tax. And in principle, if it's NOT more costly, then it would then be correct to build it! (Maybe it's not a dump, maybe it's something else.) So there's a bringing back in of externalities.

But of course, if someone doesn't live there... maybe this can be solved by zoning? I'm normally suspicious of zoning but "you can't put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood" seems pretty basic.

That still doesn't solve the simple notion of a factory toxic waste pool, but once again, maybe such things should be solved by directly addressing the reason why they're bad.

I've always been a bit confused by "low-income housing'. Is the plan to make the housing cheap via price capping? Won't that have the usual economic issues and cause demand to continue to outstrip supply forever and ever? Is the plan to make the houses ugly as fuck so that they will cost less than the pretty houses nearby? That won't really work; people will rent a closet for $1000/mo in SF sometimes.

The "land values are property values" section struck me as a weird strawman of LVT.  A huge part of the point Georgists are making is that the value of a given property depends in most urban cases FAR MORE on what is built next to it, than what is built on it.  And thus by making property taxes go up when you build things on a property, you disincentivize building, whereas by making them the same regardless of what is built, you incentivize building.  Whether you accept any of the other arguments, this is straightforward math afaict. Thus when you say "Build more 1. houses", if you intend to achieve that by market means and not coercion, then you probably want to get your incentives aligned.

There are a bunch of buildings currently sitting empty in Berkeley, CA and my understanding of why is that if they were to rent them at market rates (which have declined) then the sale price would go down, but currently the sale price is still going up.  So "build more houses"...

The irony that you mention in the last paragraph reminds me of another LW post that was already on my mind while reading this one: Slack matters more than any outcome. It points at the funny way that systems fight back in predictable-yet-in-practice-unexpected ways, all the way up and all the way down, and is I think an attempt at a more precise expression of the kind of Green wisdom referred to around "harmony with the Way of Things".

[as our oldest sees it] Sentences are things we build together, rather than a way for different people to share their own perspectives with each other.

I've gone through a huge growth arc as an adult in recognizing the extent to which (especially in really good conversations) sentences are things we build together. Not that we don't have different perspectives, but when conversation is really flowing, it makes way more sense to view it as "our collective mind is thinking" and not "I am transmitting information to you, then getting information back" etc.

(When we're more at odds with someone, whether adversarial or just conflict with a loved one, it can be more like the transmit mode, and sometimes (tho not always) it seems to work best if we can get into the co-thinking mode again. Though there's not a hack for that—it's a deep trust-dancing puzzle!)

The 2nd half of this video is about this collective mind thing: https://youtu.be/G3vcXZPlsDc

Probably be grounded in more than one social group. Even being part of two different high-intensity groups seems like it should reduce the dynamics here a lot.

Worked well for me!

Eric Chisholm likes to phrase this principle as "the secret to cults is to be in at least two of them".

My guess is that part of what's going on here is that in certain ways attempting to optimize for coordination is at greater risk for goodhart than other things. To take an example from the post to its limit, the freelancer who invests 100% in selling their services and 0% in being skilled at them or providing them is a fraud. But also the freelancer who invests 100% in skills but 0% in selling is out of business.

So there's a need for some sort of dynamic balance.

But my guess is that for whatever reasons (documented in Moral Mazes no doubt) certain kinds of organizations put pressure on the managers to go all the way in one direction, rather than finding that balance.