I recognize myself very much in the dandelion child description; makes me feel slightly better about not being gifted or a high achiever :)

https://meet.jit.si/viennarationality

The password is "schmachtenberger"

Sorry for the very late info, the organizer only just posted it (Viliam had asked a couple times without a reply)

I'm not clear on one thing: managers participate in mazes, I presume, because the higher positions pay much better.

But why do corporations pay higher positions much better in the first place? Why do they incentivize the maze like that? Surely they would rather have their managers focus on doing their job than on clawing their way up.

Sure, if the higher positions were paid exactly as much as the lower ones, nobody would want to take them (more responsibility for the same money), but in a maze on the other hand, they're paid so much better that managers will sacrifice their firstborns to get to them.

Wouldn't the corporation want to set some kind of a middle road between these two extremes? Where managers are mostly focusing on their job and are indifferent between staying where they are and taking up more responsibility?

I don't think it has to be value on Earth; economic reasons to go to space can also mean creating value in space.

True, but what I'm arguing against here is the point of the post:

there may not be good economic reasons to go to space; therefore space colonisation would be driven by non-economic reasons

I'm arguing that there are good economic reasons to go to space. (There are also good economic reasons to build things that we're not building here on Earth, but that's tangential to the discussion.)

Bridges might not be the most valuable thing you can build with your resources right now, but that's different than just letting the resources go unused

Why would we ever want to stop growing our economy and accomodating ever more people? We have always expanded and organized matter into valuable forms, why would we forever settle for the matter and energy available to us on Earth? We can create so much value with even just the matter inside the Moon or Mercury, let alone Jupiter or the Sun. Why would we pass up on it?

lots of the remote learning stuff does suffer from predicting 2019 instead of 2020

I wouldn't call it a successful prediction anyway—he predicts this to be the normal state of affairs, whereas the current situation is a temporary reaction to extraordinary circumstances

Wow, I haven't read the book so this was the first time encountering the predictions. They were… surprisingly bad, given it's just 20 years. Even adjusting for the fact that predictions tend to be ridiculous in general, this really exceeded all expectations