I suspect that in practice many people use the word "prioritize" to mean:

• think short-term
• only do legible things
• remove slack

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

-- Isaiah 55:8

This probably also implies: "your values are not my values".

there is strong reluctance from employees to reveal that LLMs have boosted productivity and/or automated certain tasks.

The thing with "boosting productivity" is tricky, because productivity is not a linear thing. For example, in software development, using a new library can make adding new features faster (more functionality out of the box), but fixing bugs slower (more complexity involved, especially behind the scenes).

So what I would expect to happen is that there is a month or two with exceptionally few bugs, the team velocity is measured and announced as a new standard, deadlines are adjusted accordingly, then a few bugs happen and now you are under a lot more pressure than before.

Similarly, with LLMs it will be difficult to explain to non-technical management if they happen to be good at some kind of tasks, but worse at a different kind of tasks. Also, losing control... for some reasons that you do not understand, the LLM has a problem with the specific task that was assigned to you, and you are blamed for that.

I like this a lot! I think you did a great job explaining how the details are connected.

At the root, the problem is "we cannot teach everyone individually". We do not have enough teachers for that; and the computer solutions are not good enough yet. (Perhaps soon they will get good enough, at least in a way "everyone gets their own AI tutor, and there are still human teachers as a backup". But we are not there yet.) Many things that are unpleasant about schools were invented as a solution to "how to teach 300 kids using only 30 teachers, especially when most of them - both kids and teachers - are not very bright". The solutions seems like a local maximum (we already did many small improvements that worked in isolation), but it also seems like we could do much better with a greater redesign.

Another sad constraint is that many students would be unwilling to cooperate even with a much better designed system. Any solution needs to provide answers for what to do about students who will try their hardest to undermine the system, no matter how irrational such behavior may seem to us. Kids, especially at puberty, are often trying to impress their peers doing various destructive and self-destructive things. Assume that every school will have some bullies, some kids who want to hide in a place out of sight and use drugs, etc.

Just some random thoughts:

• are the some kind of summer seasonal jobs? perhaps you could try looking for those
• find opportunities to meet local people, then ask them if they know about a job
• is there anything you could make at home and try to sell?

I haven't paid attention to this recently (I have small kids, so we need to cook anyway), but I think it is magnesium and calcium -- they somehow interfere with each other's absorption.

Just a random thing I found in google, but didn't read it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1211491/

(Plus there is a more general concern about what other similar relations may exist that no one has studied yet, because most people do not eat like "I only eat X at the same time as Y, mixed together".)

Ah, so it is. I have no idea how American student debt works with regards to inflation. I assumed it was fixed. If not, then it is much worse than I assumed (and I already assumed it was quite bad).

Some issues have legible, material stakes.

Scrolling down... the table of how important are individual topics for young people; "student debt" is at its very bottom.

(Also, inflation on the very top? But isn't inflation a good thing if all you have is an enormous debt?)

This, and also most people on ACX respect Scott and his opinions, so if he demonstrates that he has put a lot of thought into this, and then he makes a conclusion, it will sound convincing to most.

Basically, we need to consider not just how many people believe some idea, but also how strongly. The typical situation with a conspiracy theory is that we have a small group that believes X very strongly, and a large group that believes non-X with various degrees of strength, from strongly to almost zero. What happens then is that people with a strong belief typically don't change their mind, while people with zero belief (who until now just took one side by default, because they never heard about the other) will flip a coin. Therefore the typical outcome is that the conspiracy theory becomes better known.

Or maybe the zero belief is not literally "never heard about theory" but "never met an actual person who also believes the theory" and as the debate starts, they find each other, and thus the conspiracy theory becomes socially acceptable (even being in a minority feels very different from being alone).

When the conspiracy theory is wildly known, and everyone already knows a few believers, most damage was already done.

Rationalist-adjacent community is often the opposite of the wider society, in that the mainstream beliefs are low-status, and we need to be reminded that they sometimes actually exist for a good reason. There is always this suspicion that people who have mainstream beliefs are simply too stupid to think independently. Therefore a debate will improve the case of the mainstream belief.

Thank you, this explains a lot. So, kinda, status is good in itself, because it is a mechanism to direct social rewards to people who produce some kind of value, or at least display some kind of excellence. It is just bad if people think about status in a way other than the completely naive: "you need to get good at X, then status will automatically happen proportionally to how much you deserve it".

There are also other mistakes people could make, such as sacrificing too much in order to achieve X. Such as a guy who writes a perfect book, but also his wife divorces him and his kids hate him, because sacrificed everything to the goal of writing the perfect book. But this is about the specific mistake of trying to get X-related status using means different that maximizing the X; such as befriending the right people. Like a guy who writes a book that is "good but not the best", but he is a friend with the right people, and therefore his book gets elected as the official book of the year. And this probably requires that he reciprocates in some way -- maybe he also in turn votes for their art, or helps their kids pass admissions to a prestigious university, or simply provides some financial or sexual services in turn.

Lewis was a writer, so I suspect he might have seen something similar among writers, but also noticed that this is a more general thing. (The first example that comes to my mind is publishing scientific papers.) I am not a professional artist myself, but I have seen enough to be disappointed. I have also seen people who refused to play this game and succeeded anyway; such as writers who have never won a book award, but their books sell better because they are good; and maybe if they keep being obviously good, even the critics will be one day shamed into giving them some award.

So... I guess the most vulnerable are the people who are "almost good"; who stand on the line between "mediocre" and "good" and could be plausibly rounded up in either direction. And this cannot be dismissed by mere "don't worry about what they think, the art is either good or bad regardless", because the decision will have a real impact: emotional, but also as an advertisement. An almost-good artist getting an award will be encouraged to try harder (because it seems that the hard work is rewarded), and will find it easier to get money on Patreon or Kickstarter, or to find a publisher for a book. An almost-good author ignored may give up (because the hard work done so far seems to be useless), and will get less external support. So the recognition can make a difference -- I assume that if you took 20 such almost-good authors of the same quality, and randomly gave awards to 10 of them, statistically those 10 would have more success ten years later than the 10 you did not choose.

The problem is that trying to get to the inner circle also has its costs, both emotional (not only the award received by cheating will not encourage you, but now that you know how things work, even the possible future awards will motivate you less) and in time and energy (the effort spent on getting to the inner circle is an effort not spent on getting better).

As a toy model, imagine 3 wannabe artists, all of the starting at the same almost-good quality: artist X gets an award from the inner circle because their parents are in the inner circle (i.e. X didn't spend any energy on the inner circle, probably is not even aware that the inner circle exists); Y doesn't get the award; and Z works hard to get into the inner circle, ultimately succeeds and gets the award... ten years later, I would expect X to be more successful than Y, but Y more successful than Z. That's because X received an unconditional support, but Z got a part-time job that distracts them from the art. And the thing is, unless you have the inner circle "naturally" on your side, your choice is not between X and Y, but between Y and Z, and there Y is the better choice.

...or maybe I am over-analyzing this.