
Questions - tosh
https://patrickcollison.com/questions
======
chucky
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?

Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup
will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office.
So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10
million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened
their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more or less
simultaneously.

With that said, a commonly stated reason for why Sweden in general has such a
high prevalence of tech startups comes from a bunch of fortuitious decisions
in the 90s and 00s. In 1998 Sweden's government started a program that allowed
employers to sell their employees computers under a tax free scheme (the so
called Hem-PC-reformen [https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-
reformen](https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hem-PC-reformen)). This was extremely
popular, and led almost every Swedish home to get an often extremely
overpowered personal computer. Thus, practically everyone who was a kid in
1998-2006 (the rebate was cancelled in 2006) grew up with a computer. This
gave Sweden a huge advantage compared to other countries in the early Internet
revolution.

Sweden has also invested heavily in building a fiber network, you have access
to gigabit Internet even in some extremely rural areas.

Another thing is that Sweden doesn't have the tradition of dubbing movies.
That means kids will be exposed to English from an early age. This leads to
Swedish tech companies not being afraid of hiring talent globally and
generally use English as their business language.

Finally, out of the 5 examples posted, one is Mojang, which is clearly an
outlier. I'm not saying what Notch accomplished wasn't extremely impressive,
but it was essentially a one-man operation, and probably shouldn't be held as
an example of a trend.

~~~
unixhero
Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland,
Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless
you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking
deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it
software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work,
engineering, knitting or just reading loads of books.

I found this to be almost impossible to achieve when I moved from Norway to
Australia. There I was outside hanging out with friends or just doing stuff on
the beach or whatever. The deep focus was harder to achieve. Quality of life
was insanely better there, yet somehow I missed the possibility to sit down
and be productive in some narrow topic.

~~~
elorant
Israel doesn't have long dark winters and yet they're the pioneers of
innovation and start-up culture.

~~~
petra
I'm an Israeli and it comes from a few factors:

1\. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income,
working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is
one of the very few good options.

2\. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the
army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of
responsibility and strong ambition at a relatively early age.

The army is also a place where a lot of new tech is being developed , so
people get exposure, and often in roles of major responsibility.

3\. The Jewish people have lived among other people, in very hostile
conditions, often forced to do banking(loans) and commerce at times when most
people did agriculture. That forces a certain entrepreneurial spirit, and
possibly higher intelligence(also witnessed by the higher rate of genetic
illnesses in Ashkenazi Jews). That, plus a culture that always focused on
learning(religiously).

~~~
novaRom
>> and possibly higher intelligence

I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have
equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education,
environment, common wealth, and social inequality.

~~~
taneq
This seems like a dogmatic response rather than a reasoned one. All other
aspects of human beings vary by region to some degree, why would intellectual
be an exception?

------
hyperpallium
> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? ... one-on-one tutoring using
> mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance.

When I tutored, I found students often had some misunderstanding, somewhere.
So my task was to _listen_ , to find that misunderstanding, so I could correct
it. This "teaching" is listening, more than talking. The idea is they are
lost, but to know what direction they need, I first must know where they are.

To correct misunderstanding without this guidance can be very difficult, and
might only happen serendipitiously, years later... assuming they continue with
study. Which an unidentified misunderstanding can prevent.

Recently, I'm seeing the other side, while self-learning some maths. I can see
how much one-on-one tutoring would help clear up misunderstandings. Instead,
I'm using the strategy of insisting on starting from the basics, chasing down
each detail as much as I can, using online resources, and working out proofs
for myself. Each step is a journey in itself...

Luckily, I have enough skill, confidence, motivation and time. By working it
out myself, I think I'm also gaining a depth of understanding I could not get
from a tutor's guidance.

But it sure would be a lot more efficient!

[ PS I haven't yet read the two pdf's in the question ]

~~~
JepZ
I think the One-on-One Tutoring things is something the AI current movement
could make a difference. Everybody seems to be obsessed with building really
cool stuff, but our teaching system is quite obsolete and could get better by
adding smart systems.

That said I must to add, that I am referring to teaching humans who are 12
years and older (IMHO young kids require physical interaction if you want to
avoid psychological conditions).

~~~
germinalphrase
I agree, generally; however, I believe the lownhanging fruit is in assistive
tools for teachers.

The commenter above made a good point about the value of removing barriers to
learning as a primary asset of a good teacher. People tend to focus on content
knowledge/curriculum as the mark of good teaching, but removing barriers is
the real, difficult work. Tools that assist the instructor in understanding
their students’, their students’ knowledge, and their learning behaviors would
be valuable. Don’t focus on content delivery. Focus on making in-class
assessment more frequent and trustable. Focus on tools that assist an
instructor understand thirty students as they might understand five.

------
trimbo
> The Empire State Building was built in 410 days

At least one reason is that we have substantially different safety regulations
since we're not accepting of deaths on a project like that. 5 people died on
that project. 11 died to build the Golden Gate. Original Bay Bridge? 24.

They actually had a rule of thumb at the time: 1 death for every $1M spent on
a project[1]. Any metric like that would be absolutely unacceptable today.

[1] - [https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-
buil...](https://www.npr.org/2012/05/27/153778083/75-years-later-building-the-
golden-gate-bridge)

~~~
qaq
This will sound horrible but is it rational? E.g. say you are building a huge
hospital and due to the above it will take 4 years longer at 2x the cost so
basically you could loose X lives due to hospital not being there and due to
increased cost of care.

~~~
JauntTrooper
Yes, it is rational. We should live in a society where the expected human
sacrifice of a construction project should be 0.

Pure utilitarianism leads to outcomes that are clearly out of step with almost
everyone's moral codes. For example you could kill someone and take their
organs to save the lives of 4-5 people. Is it rational that we're not allowed
to do that? Why do some people get to keep 2 kidneys when there are others
with none?

This is solved at least somewhat by using 'rule utilitarianism' instead of
'act utilitarianism'. Society is better off as a whole if we adhere to rules
such as protection of the human body or safety regulations when constructing
buildings.

~~~
raldi
Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're
accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life
is not, in fact, infinite.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Has this been tried? I would expect more speeding and maybe even more
fatalities.

~~~
raldi
Not if there were an ironclad law that cars have to be manufacturered to be
physically incapable of exceeding that speed.

------
sakoht
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

Because we are lying about inflation. It's not a conspiracy, just a mutually
agreed-to delusion. By pretending inflation is lower than it is, the poor feel
like they are standing still instead of sinking ...though instinctively they
know. And the people just keeping up get to feel richer. Since technology and
efficiency improve, the people staying in the same place have cooler things.

If inflation were reported correctly, average would see their paychecks
dropping as wealth and power consolidate elsewhere. There is no interest in
creating alarm around this fact. Instead the public is distracted by social
drama, and political discourse consumed by things that do not affect the real
shift in power.

~~~
mariushn
I have a different take. Healthcare, education, construction costs are all
regulated by governments. Unlike companies, governments are systems of people
who thrive from complexity. More complexity = more work, more power, more
benefits (direct on indirect).

To give you an example from construction, a company producing a complex part
is "giving away" 3 day training in fancy locations, with all hotel & meals
paid by the company. As a government employee who gets a fixed salary no
matter the results, would you prefer using a product which gives you to these
free trainings (free mini-holiday), or using a cheap part which does the same
thing, minus the fancy training sessions?

I think the root cause is having some people in charge of other's people
money, without clear responsibilities (vs. evaluations which happen in private
companies, with the possibility to getting fired anytime if you have a poor
performance on result-oriented KPIs), AND having a monopoly. You can't simply
start another healthcare or education system, without complying to all
existing complex regulations & processes.

~~~
gahikr
From a US perspective, these are all markets that depend on expensive skilled
US labor. Many things like manufacturing have shifted to labor markets that
are cheaper. How much is due to currency differences, cost of living
differences, etc. vs. employee safety or anti-pollution regulations ... I
don’t know.

------
lisper
> Why are programming environments still so primitive?

Because we as an industry made a strategic decision in the late 20th century
to value run-time efficiency over all other quality metrics, a decision which
has manifested itself in the primacy of C and its derivatives. Everything else
has been sacrificed in the name of run time efficiency, including, notably,
security. Development convenience was also among the collateral damage.

> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?

Because you use C or one of its derivatives instead of Lisp or one of its
derivatives. In Common Lisp you can not only debug a function without
restarting your program, you can _redefine classes_ without restarting your
program. It is truly awesome. You should try it some time.

~~~
candiodari
> Development convenience was also among the collateral damage.

Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of your
argument ?

They're "secure" (meaning we let anyone's javascript code just run in our
browsers, even embedded in other people's code, and seriously expect no ill
effects)

They're extremely inconvenient to develop with. Especially compared to those
"run-time above all else" environments you mention. For one, you need to know
5-6 languages to use the web.

> Because you use C or one of its derivatives instead of Lisp or one of its
> derivatives. In Common Lisp you can not only debug a function without
> restarting your program, you can redefine classes without restarting your
> program. It is truly awesome. You should try it some time.

I think you'll find that pretty much any environment allows this. Even without
debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs. On the web, you
can't, because every call immediately gets you into overcomplicated minified
libraries that you can't change anyway, assuming it doesn't go into a remote
call entirely.

And there's environments that go further. .Net not only lets you debug any C
function you run within it, you can even modify it's code from within the
debugger and "replay" to the same point. I believe there's a few more
proprietary compilers that support that functionality too.

~~~
lisper
> Don't you find that web & javascript are pretty much a straight denial of
> your argument ?

You should probably direct that question at Patrick because his original
question was kind of based on the premise that the answer to your question is
"no".

My personal opinion? No. OMG no. Javascript and HTML are both poorly designed
re-inventions of tiny little corners of Lisp. In that regard they are
improvements over C. But no. OMG no.

> Even without debug symbols you mostly can do this for C, C++, ... programs

No, you can't. You can grovel around on the stack and muck with the data
structures, but you can't redefine a function, or redefine a class, or change
a class's inheritance structure without restarting your program. In Common
Lisp you can do all of these things.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Can you/someone explain for this noob why you can't redefine a function, etc.?

I'm not a programmer, so I'm imagining you hook in to the call that addresses
the function (like modify a jump instruction), overwrite any registers that
need changing, nullify caches, so the program runs new code -- this I think is
how some hacks work?

Ultimately couldn't you just write NOP to addresses used for a function?

Is it something structural about C/C++ that stops this, like the ownership of
memory (I'm assuming a superuser can tell the computer to ignore that
addresses written to are reserved for the program being modified).

How does the computer know that you pushed a different long jump in to a
particular address and stop working, rather than keep going processing
instructions.

Apologies if I've misunderstood, please be gentle.

~~~
lisper
It's a good question, and I'm a little disappointed no one has answered this
yet.

There is no reason you couldn't redefine a function in C. It's really more of
a cultural constraint than a technical one. It's a little tricky, but it could
be done. It just so happens that C programmers don't think in terms of
interactive programming because C started out as a non-interactive language,
and so it has remained mostly a non-interactive language. Lisp, by way of
contrast, was interactive and dynamic on day 1, and it has stayed that way. In
the early days that made C substantially faster than Lisp, but that
performance gap has mostly closed.

However, there are some things that Lisp does that are actually impossible in
C. The two most notable ones are garbage collection and tail recursion. It's
impossible to write a proper GC in portable C because there is no way to walk
the stack, and there is no way to compile a tail-call unless you put the
entire program inside the body of a single function.

------
panic
_> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?_

 _> Books are great (unless you're Socrates). We now have magic ink. As an
artifact for effecting the transmission of knowledge (rather than a source of
entertainment), how can the book be improved? How can we help authors
understand how well their work is doing in practice? (Which parts are readers
confused by or stumbling over or skipping?) How can we follow shared
annotations by the people we admire? Being limited in our years on the earth,
how can we incentivize brevity? Is there any way to facilitate user-suggested
improvements?_

The great thing about books is that no matter how long they've been sitting
around, it's easy to take one off the shelf and read it. The cultural
infrastructure of written language has been around much longer (and been much
more stable) than the computational infrastructure you'd need have your "magic
ink" still work in 1000 years. At some point we need to start treating
computers and software more seriously if we want to have things like this.

~~~
Mizza
This isn't for everybody, but I would say Rapid Serial Visual Presentation
(RSVP), where words are sequentially presented in place to the reader, which
has significantly changed the way I read.

I wrote my own implementation of RSVP, which has eBook reader support, and now
it is absolutely my preferred method of reading, and I read at 1000WPM. Though
normal books are still enjoyable, they feel tedious and slow.

The project is here:

[https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-
Android](https://github.com/GlanceApps/Glance-Android)

(It needs some help being updated for recent versions of Android, please let
me know if you'd like to be involved! It has a new back-end API in place
already and it just needs a few simple updates.)

~~~
sincerely
Isn’t recall way worse for books “read” this way?

~~~
personlurking
Here is 1000wpm:

[https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s](https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s)

I wouldn't recall a thing at this speed, nor at 600 which is shown just prior
to the time stamp above.

~~~
Mizza
A few things here:

This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the
same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should
words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered
rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the
whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context.

Even still, I didn't have a problem reading and recalling this text, though I
wouldn't recommended it for a beginner.

~~~
unhingingdog
I made a similar app (iOS) which varies the display time by word length,
punctuation, and each word's place in a list of the 100 most common words
(under the assumption that common words contain less information, thus take
less effort to read). To be honest, I'm not sure it works any better than one
running at a constant speed. There seems to be a surprising lack of research
in this area.

([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8)
if you're interested.)

------
ddevault
>Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
the past than the present?

I'm no historian so this is probably misguided, but I feel like this is an
indicator for a society on the decline. Corruption is increasingly rampant in
both the public and private sectors, and money is being siphoned off at every
step. If we don't figure out how to fix it, mounting costs and inefficiencies
could put and end to our era prosperity soon. We've allocated power to people
interested in screwing others for short-term (e.g. their lifetime) gains. Rah
rah doom and gloom.

>Could there be more good blogs?

>Are there incentive structure tweaks that yield more good blogging?

The missing validation mechanisms like Facebook likes the author mentioned are
largely filled by link aggregators. Posts on HN and Reddit have a score which
acts as a similar dopamine drip to likes. I feel validated and encouraged to
write more when my blog generates discussion around the net (though often with
an equal sum of embarassment when my flames make it to my colleague's desks).

>Why are programming environments still so primitive?

This guy should try working with plan9 and acme for a few months. Author, if
you're reading these comments, you should install 9front, spend a weekend
grokking it and becoming comfortable in a workflow there, then set up a Linux
VM with vmx(3) and a 9P mount to your host system to get your Real Work done
while continuing to learn about the plan9 model. Be prepared for your entire
workflow to be turned on its head and to have to find creative ways out of
your problems. Maybe today is one of those days where you change your life in
a big way :)

~~~
evgen
> Corruption is increasingly rampant in both the public and private sectors,
> and money is being siphoned off at every step.

This is utter bullshit when it comes to the sort of major public
infrastructure projects hinted at in the original post. In fact, what slows
things down significantly is the fact that there are so many controls in place
to reduce and eliminate this corruption. Contracts that could have been
settled with a fat envelope to the brother-in-law of the county commissioner
are now handled in a much more open and transparent process. Corrupt profits
that could be skimmed by using sub-standard materials are now prevented by
layer upon layer of inspection and sourcing paperwork (which all increases
cost.) Projects that could once move quickly because unions were weak and
safety regulations were non-existent, to the point where contractors could
simply throw human lives at the problem until it was solved, now move at a
slower pace and with far fewer deaths as a result.

Infrastructure may take more time and cost more, but the cost in lives during
construction and after the project is completed are much lower.

~~~
humanrebar
"Corruption" is word with multiple definitions. It can mean underhanded. In
that case it's a sort of shorthand for "moral corruption". It indicates the
person or system is far from a moral ideal.

But, generally speaking, corruption can just indicate something that has
deviated from its original use. A corrupted file on a computer does not meet
its intended purpose, at least not fully. A corrupt organization, likewise,
could be 100% honest in all its dealings (1) and fail to meet its intended
purpose.

If government agencies partnering with private contractors cannot reasonably
build the project _all of them exist to build_ , then there is some sort of
corruption going on. It's possible there is graft or underhandedness, but it's
also possible that there is emergent dysfunction inhibiting their ability to
execute. That is also corruption.

(1) That is, the organization is not morally or ethically corrupt.

------
bpizzi
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? Emacs, Smalltalk,
> Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing: if the
> application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment it to
> suit your purposes. Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates
> behind bulletproof glass. This is especially true in the growth areas:
> mobile and web apps.

I'll pick this one: end users back then (emacs/vba/smalltalk era) are the
power users of today. Today's end users are a new kind of users.

~~~
MrQuincle
This is an interesting one to me.

Will voice recognition at home coupled with AI allow people to start
"programming".

Currently home automation systems through something like Alexa are only
listening to direct commands. Interesting follow-up functionality:

* The capability for introspection. Alexa, who is home? Alexa, why are the lights on? Alexa, why are the lights not on? Especially the latter means advanced reasoning capabilities.

* You preferably also want to adjust the behavior by voice. Alexa, when I enter the room I want the lights to go on. Alexa, the lights only need to turn on when it's dark outside.

I had one student working on this problem:
[https://crownstone.rocks/attachments/thesis/nannewielinga.pd...](https://crownstone.rocks/attachments/thesis/nannewielinga.pdf)

Recently I got a request from a person who works a lot with blind people. A
system that allows them to query the state of the environment is very valuable
to them as well.

It's a different take on being "truly programmable", but I think the different
modality makes it an interesting one.

~~~
runevault
Huh this is an interesting thought. I've been reading On Lisp off and on
lately and perhaps similar ideas of building both top down and bottom up apply
to voice tools like Alexa where we create chainable series of commands to do a
wider variety of tasks.

------
throwawaybbqed
Regarding the question of education/college costs rising drastically, I
thought a key answer was that govt started to fund education a whole ton less.

In Canada (where this has not happened as badly), an undergrad in CS used to
cost 3K annually a decade and a half ago, and costs 10K now. Other disciplines
cost 6K I think .. CS degrees cost more since colleges decided that students
earn a lot more and there is huge demand anyways. That doesn't seem
unreasonable to me.

So .. Patrick's education costs question has an easy answer - govt funds got
pulled in the US, and the wide availability of student loans acted like
steroids. In places where got funds didn't get cut (e.g. Canada), things cost
about the same (when adjusted for inflation and increases in salaries
necessary due to things like rent/house price increases).

The question why we could get to the moon in just 9 years, or make the tallest
building in 140 days? That is simple too. As a society, we are less desperate
than our parents. We are more demanding when it comes to life (hence, wages
and living conditions). This has spilled into the regulations we make as a
society. I read it was near impossible to make some types of factories in the
US anymore - due to our concern form environment, etc. I personally find a lot
of red tape frustrating but then I remember .. we (as a society) put it there
for some reason.

~~~
mhjas
To some extent I think people just underestimate what education costs. Sweden
pays ~€40k to educate an engineer (5 year, B.Sc + M.Sc). On top of that there
is another ~€20k in student benefits to the student and ~€40k in a government
backed student loan (for books and living costs).

~~~
JProthero
My first reaction to the education and healthcare question was that growing
demand must be an important factor.

The idea that a university education is a requirement for anyone wanting a
career that guarantees a comfortable lifestyle is relatively new - a post WWII
development.

Demand for healthcare has also risen as western populations have aged and more
conditions have become treatable. Sixty years ago there were many more health
problems that you couldn't spend money on if you wanted to, because they were
incurably fatal. Now a significant number of those conditions have become
chronic complaints that patients can spend decades paying to treat.

I don't know how much of the cost increase in education and healthcare can be
attributed to increased demand, but it seems like it must be part of the
answer.

------
mvilim
>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects
in the past than the present?

A large contributing factor is that major projects today are much more
complicated than they were in the past. The tools we have built are always
advancing, but the size of the human brain is not. As projects become more and
more complicated, they require a larger number of people to collaborate, and
that comes with almost unavoidable slowdowns and inefficiencies. The Lockheed
P-80 is nowhere near as complex as the F-35. The BART extension might take
longer to build than the transcontinental railroad, but there was no
networking equipment on that railroad.

It's also important to distinguish between projects that are deep vs. broad
(i.e. those solved by new thinking vs. those solved by scaling up). To be
fair, most of the examples in the original article are indeed "deep" projects,
but, for example, the Empire State Building was constructed quickly partly
because there were 3500 people working on it. As technology has advanced, deep
projects just get deeper. Although each level of technology builds on the
last, there is still complexity added at every level.

~~~
tvanantwerp
I travel to Hong Kong every few years to visit family. Each time, there are
more MTR stations--and on some occasions, entirely new lines. The MTR is just
as complex as BART, if not moreso. I think it's worth considering why some
places _can_ build things like a metro fast, but others can't.

~~~
foolfoolz
before they build a new station....

do they do environmental impact studies? was enough time given for the study
to complete and people to challenge the results? possibly with another study?
are there community meetings to discuss the impact? does everyone in the area
have a chance to voice their opposition at an open hearing? do all workers on
the construction team have strict safety regulations? require certified
training for specific tools? the company selected must pass random workplace
safety visits? are they allowed to impact existing traffic flows during
construction?

we did this to ourselves

~~~
mhjas
I would guess they do that in Denmark and Copenhagen has a very modern subway
system.

~~~
LeonidasXIV
It is modern but the metro is just 1.5 lines and the new ring line takes
forever to build. Some of the other extensions are only planned to open by
2024. So it is quite glacial.

------
xupybd
I really like this format. Asking questions without answering them, this
causes the reader to think a lot more than the usual blog post. I also look
forward to gaining more insight from the HN comments.

------
kylecordes
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

This is a great question, and I echo many of the sentiments here and elsewhere
around general complacency, slowing rate of change (even as bits of technology
get better faster), and so on.

But...

One of the reasons that big projects used to happen so fast, is that the
interests of people negatively affected by those projects were quickly and
efficiently ignored. Of course that's great being able to look back at the big
projects is inevitably good, but it's not so great if you were one of the
people whose interests were ignored. An advantage of the stasis we seem to be
stuck in now, is that we as a society are not quite so willing to stomp all
over the interests of whoever happens to be in the way of a great new idea. Is
this a good trade-off overall? That's not so clear, but there are good
intentions on both sides of the "how fast should be do big things?" question.

~~~
alexpetralia
Louis C.K. has a joke exactly about this called "Of Course, But Maybe":

"Of course, of course slavery is the worst thing that ever happened. Of course
it is, every time it’s happened. Black people in America, Jews in Egypt, every
time a whole race of people has been enslaved, it’s a terrible, horrible
thing, of course, but maybe. Maybe every incredible human achievement in
history was done with slaves. Every single thing where you go, “how did they
build those pyramids?” They just threw human death and suffering at them until
they were finished."

Link: [https://youtu.be/0O5h4enjrHw](https://youtu.be/0O5h4enjrHw)

~~~
Sgt_Apone
I realize this does not necessarily change the point of the joke, but evidence
points to the Egyptian Pyramids being constructed by skilled tradesmen, not
slaves. [https://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-
pyramids-h...](https://harvardmagazine.com/2003/07/who-built-the-pyramids-
html)

------
rahimnathwani
"Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

Because relative prices (e.g. the ratio of the price of a 42" TV to the price
of a cinema ticket) are constantly changing due to changes in technology and
competitive dynamics.

Some things have gotten (and continue to get) much cheaper due to
technological progress and economies of scale. So, relative to those, anything
that hasn't benefited from the same trends looks like it's getting expensive
(in real terms). And if that thing (e.g. undergraduate degrees in the US) has
weird competitive dynamics (e.g. willingness to pay is driven by the
availability of credit, and availability of credit is driven by sticker price,
and sticker price is driven by willingness to pay), then that effect is even
more pronounced.

~~~
tobr
This is very interesting and implies a kind of paradox. As some things become
radically cheaper, it should leave us with more resources to spend on things
that are difficult to make more efficient. But instead, it makes it appear as
if they have become so expensive we can barely afford them anymore!

Does this fallacy have a name?

~~~
closeparen
Yes, it's called Baumol's Cost Disease [0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease)

~~~
zbentley
How is the Baumol effect relevant here? The posts you're replying to seem to
be pointing out the _perceptual_ increase in price in areas that haven't
benefitted from cost reduction. To my (admittedly limited) understanding, that
doesn't seem to have anything to do with the Baumol effect.

------
ziaddotcom
Tangentially related, for the chart related to american gdp embedded in this
article, even though it claims to be on a logarithmic scale, that doesn't mean
it doesn't have some sort of "banking to 45" applied.

[http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/banking](http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/banking)

Paradoxically (to me at times, perhaps to you) banking to 45 is supposed to
make the chart more accurately read. It does so by more apparent to the viewer
where the relevant inflection points are (in this case, the great depression
really sticks out visually).

Theoretically, the great depression might not stick out as well if banking to
45 were not done (as I suspect may have been done here).

Whether or not it turns out to be the case here, I suppose lots of the other
curious questions in the article have similar answers. When dealing with
qualitative measures using qualitative measures, I think even ethical people
can forge a system where emergent fudging arises.

I think we (the tech folk) need to sort of up our game in casual analysis from
tools like excel (which in actuality relatively good) to something like
www.anylogic.com. With systems dynamics
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_dynamics)
software I think we have a tool that can better elucidate this curious
phenomenon where we notice questions whose data "feels a little funny" but may
turn out to actually have a demonstrable excuse/justifiable explanation for
looking so.

~~~
strainer
The chart is logarithmic - as such its overall slope can be selected by
altering the base (aesthetically here to 45%) buts its curvature and
smoothness is not manipulable.

------
jaggederest
The easy answer for the "Two Sigma" problem is that you... don't try to
reproduce it on a large scale by finding some other method.

You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student, if that
is the analytically best method. It's worth it, since educational spending is
close to the most effective public spending imaginable - something in the
$3-$5 return per dollar spent, which you'd be hard pressed to find any other
available investment that can do that consistently.

This also does away with some substantial percent of the overhead of
maintaining separate public schools, assuming that this tutoring occurs in
either the tutor's home or the child's home.

~~~
pliny
>You provide individual, one-on-one full time tutoring to each student

So, at a modest 2 hours of instruction per day, and assuming people spend on
average 12 years in education and 48 years in the workforce, you need at
minimum for 1/16th of your adults to be teachers. Not 1/16th to be employed in
education but just teachers and just for this education scheme. Today it's
about 1/40th (in the us) and that includes post-secondary and administration,
logistics etc. so you're scaling up the education sector by 3x or 4x AND you
need to find something to do with the kids for the other 5-6 hours when their
parents are working.

>It's worth it, since educational spending is close to the most effective
public spending imaginable - something in the $3-$5 return per dollar spent

Marginal ROI does not work that way. Even assuming you get that return on what
you're spending now, that doesn't mean the marginal dollar invested in
education is getting that return nor that you can scale up the amount you
spend and continue getting that return.

~~~
jaggederest
Closer to 1/3rd of the working population as teachers, actually, by my
numbers. Current spending is $13k/yr per student, I'd bump that comfortably up
4x to $52k per year. That's about one full time teacher per student.

As for marginal ROI, if the effects are as dramatic as the stated research
implies, it'd be more than worth it. It would be a larger increase than the
entire implementation of formal secondary and tertiary education system
combined, which cost a lot more than K-8. I don't think you can overstate how
large the demonstrated effect size was. Think "industrial revolution" or
"invention of the printing press".

Essentially you'd be spending an extra 3x the amount we currently spend to
get... 5x? 10x? better outcomes. Results from those studies were equivalent to
making the current best students in the country suddenly the very lowest tier
of educational attainment - top 1% suddenly becomes the minimum standard.
Think Rhodes scholars being "the new special ed kids", or the new
"functionally illiterate must-pass graduates".

(This is all assuming that the research was accurate, and the magnitude of
difference is really that large. I'd want to see a lot of follow up.)

------
csomar
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

This is something I noticed too. And it can't be just blamed to "inflation" of
the US GDP. Almost any other country I checked does have fluctuations. Goes
through booms and bust. China has gone through an exponential rise but slowed
down and seems like it broke the pattern recently.

The US is the only country so far that has been going decades through a
constant rate of change. And you can't blame that on inflation since inflation
is neither constant; or it would mean that the GDP is constant (and inflation
is increasing it). The GDP being constant would be weird too.

So is the US the singularity? Is the US dollar affecting the US GDP; and does
it being the reserve currency of the world changes the landscape of the US
economy?

~~~
0x445442
Not sure what you mean by "constant rate of change"?
[https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-
growth](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth) looks to me to
a noisy overlay of [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-
cpi](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/inflation-cpi).

~~~
csomar
In this case the GDP of the US would have been either constant or linear. In
both cases making it different from the rest of the countries which experience
booms and bust whilst having inflation.

------
sqs
Why are programming environments primitive? That’s worth a blog post-length
reply, but I think it’s because coding is relatively silo’d and non-
standardized (in languages, build systems, deployment schemes, and other
tools). The impact of a single better tool is minimal because it could only
address a tiny fraction of all developers. This is changing quickly, though,
so I’m optimistic.

We are working on making programming environments less primitive. Here is our
master plan:
[https://about.sourcegraph.com/plan/](https://about.sourcegraph.com/plan/).

~~~
the_clarence
Acrually. For recently popular languages like javascript things are way better
than say C or assembly. Resources, tools, debugging, etc.

I'm still wondering why we are forcing people to write assembly with short and
rubbish opcode mnemonics when we are going to compile it anyway.

Even if you look at C vs Rust/Go we have made huge improvements. People don't
need to write Makefiles anymore. Packages are easily sharable and re-usable.
Security is by default. Etc.

------
stepvhen
>How do people decide to make major life changes?

before the change, on those days when it seems like nothing is happening,
those people are thinking around the change. constantly, subconsciously (or
not) and internally weighing options and possibilities. then, one day, they
say "Im done." they find the words needed to make the change, which until then
were elusive and, like a key, finding them makes the action doable, and doable
without opposition. like a analog-to-digital switch that activates only when
the analog portion is in the last 10% of either direction, the pwrson has
their finger on the switch for days weeks months before the pressure builds up
and things change.

this hypothesis excludes changes made in reaction to other external or
involuntary changes in a persons life.

------
ricardobeat
> Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to
> see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed?
> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? Why in the name
> of the good lord are REPLs still textual? Why can't I copy a URL to my
> editor to enable real-time collaboration with someone else? Why isn't my
> editor integrated with the terminal? Why doesn't autocomplete help me based
> on the adjacent problems others have solved?

I think _all of these_ are possible already in VSCode/Atom, and especially
true if you’re doing reactive UI programming for the web - time travelling,
improved REPL, live debugging are all there. A very good spot to be in :)

~~~
Gibbon1
> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?

This was/is true in C# for 32 bit programs. Being able to code with live data
is really productive. Live unit testing also would be a big win.

~~~
alkonaut
C#/.NET 64 bit does this too but there were always limitations such as not
being able to reload the code if method parameters were changed, closures were
modified etc.

~~~
reitanqild
On Java you can often do most of this using either JRebel or DCEVM.

~~~
Gibbon1
When I saw how C#/.net could do this I found myself annoyed because you could
in theory do with with even C. There isn't any reason you couldn't monkey
patch a new function in a running C program. At least for a pure function.

I used to work with a OG (with a pocket protector no less) who did this when
debugging assembly by pasting op-codes using a debug monitor.

------
sakoht
"Why are programming environments still so primitive?"

Try JetBrains tools (IntelliJ,Pycharm and kin). I still use vim to edit from a
shell, but the JetBrians suite is higher-order coding.

Editing a function while debugging it was available in VB in the 90s. Drag the
execution arrow to code you have already run, rewrite it, and step-over.

------
mrborgen
Shameless self-promotion:

"Why can't I copy a URL to my editor to enable real-time collaboration with
someone else?"

That's one of the things we (Scrimba) are trying to enable dev teams to do
seamlessly these days:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsorl3-TjdY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsorl3-TjdY)

Instructions on how to try our beta can be found here:
[https://scrimba.com:9000/@welcome](https://scrimba.com:9000/@welcome)

------
keithpeter
_" End-user computing is becoming less a bicycle and more a monorail for the
mind."_

I shall steal this quote. The humble spreadsheet is just about the only
'programmable' application left on the typical corporate endpoint/educational
client PC.

~~~
ntxy
this plagues my sleep. yes, spreadsheets! I always wonder: what's so special
about spreadsheets?

~~~
kerbalspacepro
Spreadsheets are the best! They are literally THE killer app for PCs.

~~~
keithpeter
They do allow people to walk up and start building models with minimal
introduction. Low floor, and, alas, as many know here to their cost, a high
ceiling in the sense that spreadsheets often get used for more advanced
modelling that would benefit from being constructed in a more maintainable
way.

------
rsp1984
_Why are programming environments still so primitive? In different ways,
Mathematica, Genera, and Smalltalk put almost every other programming
environment to shame. Atom, Sublime Edit, and Visual Studio Code are neat, but
they do not represent a great improvement over TextMate circa 2007. Emacs and
Vim have advanced by even less._

Why pretend IDEs don't exist? For my C++ development I couldn't be happier
with Qt Creator (which happily manages non-Qt projects too), which does _a
lot_ of nice things to speed up my coding and code understanding.

I only use text editors like the ones mentioned when I have to and IDEs
whenever I can.

~~~
nikki93
C++ IDEs and Smalltalk / Lisp visual environments are in very different
leagues. It’s worth giving, eg. Pharo Smalltalk, a shot.

~~~
leoedin
I've heard great things about the productivity of Smalltalk. Is Pharo the best
way to explore the language?

~~~
nikki93
Sorry for the late response. Yeah I mostly played w/ it in 2015 but I think
Pharo was the most modern option then and there were good resources like
"Updated Pharo by Example" (a free book).

------
_wzsf
Not to be critical, but I pose this question in response:

Why do billionaires so often love to muse about interesting things outside of
their field, get attention and praise for their thoughts, and then publicly
allocate only tiny portions of their wealth and time to these projects so
ineffectually while passing down the majority of their wealth to disinterested
heirs?

e.g. Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Edgar Prince, Steve Jobs, Richard DeVos, Bill
Ackman, Mark Zuckerberg, Ken Griffin.

~~~
sumedh
billionaires can afford to muse about interesting things outside of their
field, they get attention because they are billionaires.

Just because they are asking questions does not automatically mean they have
the passion to solve the other problems.

I dont know about others but isnt Zuckerberg donating majority of the wealth?

~~~
coldtea
> _I dont know about others but isnt Zuckerberg donating majority of the
> wealth?_

As an "I control everything anyway", tax evasion scheme.

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-
mar...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mark-
zuckerbergs-altruism-helps-himself.html)

[https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-
zucker...](https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zuckerberg-
fake-charity-an-estate-tax-avoidance-scheme/)

~~~
adventured
You're flat out wrong in your premise that it's a tax dodge, and it's very
easy to demonstrate. Neither of those links support a claim about tax evasion
in any regard.

There's no special tax benefit to what they set up. There are only structural
benefits, in that the LLC can give to political campaigns and make private
investments (neither of which are tax deductible). It also enables Zuckerberg
to continue to directly control the Facebook stock while it's held by the LLC.

Any shares sold by the LLC generates a tax event as it would with an
individual. You know the best way to avoid taxes like that? To keep the stock
to yourself and not sell it at all.

The only tax deductions the LLC can take are identical to what an individual
can take, the money must have gone to a 501c charity to generate a tax
deduction. Nothing is gained in regards to avoiding taxes.

The first link openly admits it doesn't benefit Zuckerberg to use it as a
means of tax avoidance (much less tax evasion, which is a crime that you're
claiming is being committed). He'd be just as well off to directly donate the
stock to a charity instead, as the ideal example given lists the LLC doing
exactly that instead.

Any potential tax deductions accrued are saturated instantly, as they're
limited to a fraction of the LLC's income in a given year and the total value
of the deductions expire after five years (ie any charitable tax deduction
carries forward for a maximum of five years and may only deduct against a
maximum of 50% of your income in a year). There's nothing special about this
deduction with the LLC, an individual gets the same arrangement. Again,
there's no special angle.

Gates for example once gave a very large single year donation to his
foundation, back in 2000. He saw very little tax benefit, because it saturated
his ability to deduct a hundred times over.

The second link - an angry personal blog post - has the title calling it a
fake charity. The first paragraph opens by insulting Zuckerberg's marriage.
The second paragraph opens by insulting the Zuckerbergs love of their
daughter. You can throw that one out as being biased immediately.

~~~
eigenloss
This absolutely has to be Mark Zuckerberg. Nobody else could get this mad.

The dishonesty is in the description of the event by Zuckerberg and the media.
It was covered as "Zuckerberg donates $45 billion to charity," but he
effectively donated it to himself.

------
jacquesm
Reading this I'd feel a lot better if YC was run by Patrick, I prefer people
that know what questions to ask over those with all the answers.

~~~
tomhoward
As I understand it, Patrick and Sam are friends. You don’t think they’re
discussing these and other hard questions socially?

Also, Sam founded YC Research and donated $10M of his own money into it to
find answers to hard questions about AI, UBI, medicine/health and other big
challenges. He also toured the country interviewing Trump voters to find
answers to questions about what was underlying the political climate that led
to the election result.

What makes you think YC’s leadership think they have all the answers? At least
in Sam’s case, the evidence seems to point to the opposite.

For what it’s worth I think there are other questions that are more important
and potentially valuable to society than Patrick’s or the ones YCR is
currently working on, but that’s just from my own experience and
contemplation, and I don’t criticise people whose own journeys have not
pointed them to these issues/ideas yet. I commend anyone making serious
efforts to understand and solve the biggest issues they can identify with
their own experiences and best efforts.

~~~
jacquesm
I read Sams posts whenever they come out and they strike me as someone who has
good intentions, little experience and who believes that they are able to see
what is good for the world. I read Patricks writings as someone who is
genuinely curious about the world and who by thinking about problems reaches
points where he does not have all the answers but is able to at least phrase
the problems coherently enough that future solutions might be defined.

The difference in style is tremendous, and no statement on their friendship or
private discussions was implied or intended. To me it is the difference
between 'smart' and 'wise'. You can be very smart and still not be very wise
(though it is hard to be wise and not smart).

As far as the evidence is concerned, that we can agree on, the 'changing the
world for the better' mantra has outlived its usefulness and should for
transparency's sake simply be replaced by the one thing that matters: money.

Watsi is still from the PG days, the UBI experiment is so broken it is
embarrassing, the 'hard questions about AI' have been raised since Asimov's
days and do not - to me at least, feel free to differ - move the needle at
all.

~~~
tomhoward
It's a valid assessment, thanks for sharing it.

------
eigenloss
> Part of the problem with blogs is that they're less rewarding than Facebook
> and Twitter: your post may perhaps get some thoughtful responses but it
> doesn't get immediate likes.

To me, this is not a problem. People should not be rewarded with instant
dopamine for low-effort actions. [0] The reward for publishing on a blog is in
the responses you receive from readers and not from a counter incremented by a
click or pageview.

I rarely see more than shallow insight on Twitter/Facebook, as posts have a
short visibility lifetime and replies longer than a sentence are collapsed. By
contrast, blogs (not like Medium or Stack Exchange) will often receive deep,
thoughtful replies months or years after they are published. There's no
"algorithm" to please when you're writing a blog; your post will stay there
until your domain name expires.

If you are having issues finding worthwhile blogs to read, ask people around
you for suggestions. Not everything needs to be indexed by software.

> And part of the problem is, of course, that writing a good post is much
> harder than writing a witty tweet.

Where is the problem here? Thermodynamics and information theory tell us that
a valuable long-form post ought to be more difficult to write by several
orders (of orders) of magnitude. Yes -- it would be wonderful if we could all
spit out fascinating 17-page theses every week or two, but that just isn't
compatible with our biology. On the other hand, publishing 17 pithy tweets in
a week is pretty easy, and people will probably give you plenty of attention
for it.

[0] [https://yihui.name/en/2017/12/so-
bounties/](https://yihui.name/en/2017/12/so-bounties/)

------
chubot
_Why doesn 't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have
solved?_

I'm working on writing a shell with autocompletion now [1], and something like
crowdsourcing completions in the style of Google query completion has occurred
to me.

But privacy seems to be a dealbreaker in this case, and probably with many of
the applications that Collison is thinking of.

If anyone has any ideas, let me know :) I know (and have worked on) about
differential privacy but I'm not sure it helps here.

[1] [http://www.oilshell.org/](http://www.oilshell.org/)

------
zbentley
> Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program?

Given the number of people here pointing out mature, powerful systems where
this is totally, easily possible, I think a more to-the-point question might
be "given the availability of debuggable systems, why are systems that do not
value this capability so much more common/used?"

...however, I have yet to see a good answer (or even discussion--people love
to feel superior and defend their choices) to that question, and it comes up a
_lot_.

~~~
marcosdumay
It's not that much of a gain.

And that requires learning new things.

This is the worst combination available for a new tool to have.

------
dvdhsu
(I work at Retool, and Patrick is an investor.)

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?

I think that most end-user applications now have APIs that allow you to
manipulate the data. For example, Salesforce, Lever, Excel, etc. all have APIs
for reading and writing data. Allowing end users to build custom UIs on top of
those APIs seems like a simpler problem.

Retool ([https://tryretool.com](https://tryretool.com)) is a fast way of
building UIs on top of data. And so if there are APIs for reading and writing
data from “end-user applications”, Retool lets you build custom UIs and
workflows on top of them quickly.

I think this is an interesting problem, and I’m not sure what the right
solution is. If anybody else has ideas, feel free to email me — I’d love to
learn! I’m david@. :)

~~~
barrkel
Total cost of ownership for malleable software is higher than for something
you pay someone else to specialize in modifying, and businesses have gradually
learned this. They increasingly realize that software shouldn't be their core
business, especially if it's applicable to more than just their own industry.
So this is just the normal tinkering -> specialization dynamic seen in most
new technologies.

------
joefreeman
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

I recently read Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and suspect the answer lies in there.
The examples Patrick lists are all service industries driven by labour costs.
This probably influences the following two questions too (project delays and
GDP).

~~~
bachbach
In the construction industry there are no bullshit jobs. Zero.

However only 50% of the house price comes from the construction industry, I
have another comment suggesting part of why here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040633](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040633)

~~~
StanislavPetrov
I'm not sure what aspect of construction you are in, but there is an amazing
amount of inefficiency. For example, a friend of mine was working on the
Tappan Zee bridge project several years ago. Union job, very good salary,
benefits. He was working the night shift, making an added bonus night
differential. However, there was a noise regulation in place where no work
could be done after a certain hour, so for 6 hours a night this extremely well
paid union construction crew was sitting around collecting very good money +
night differential for doing absolutely nothing. Now his job is very real, and
it requires skill, but for the purposes of argument, this was a "bullshit job"
that went on for weeks and weeks and added literally millions of dollars to
the cost of the job in which absolutely no work was done.

------
plaidfuji
> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? > What's
> the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?

I think the answer to both of these looks something like a text- and figure-
heavy Jupyter notebook distributed with a Docker container and embedded
datasets.

The point being that books and papers introduce people to certain datasets,
then teach how to gain insight from them. This would add the ability to
interact programmatically with the data and equations being presented. I’m
talking about technical textbooks here specifically.

I don’t know what the successor is to the scientific journal. I’ve talked to a
lot of people about this and every time I’m less convinced it can be
disrupted. It will require a coordinated international effort.

------
dmoo
Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? How about
adding some sort of block based scripting language line Scratch or Snap. Make
it more approachable and encourage experimentation

------
qwerty456127
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? Emacs,
> Smalltalk, Genera, and VBA embody a vision of malleable end-user computing:
> if the application doesn't do what you want, it's easy to tweak or augment
> it to suit your purposes... With Visual Basic, you can readily write...

Lisp was great and VBA was fun back in the days and I love it nostalgically
but today VBA looks ridiculous because it actually is neither functional nor
an object-oriented but a toy language and the fossil VBA IDE kept integrated
in all the modern MS Office apps without an improvement for decades feels like
a disaster. It ought to be replaced by either a modern dialect of Lisp (which
is improbable as Lisp looks ugly and feels unintuitive to non-geeks and geeks
are not the relevant target audience of Excel macros functionality) or
something like Python (the best candidate that can probably satisfy
everybody).

> Today, however, end-user software increasingly operates behind bulletproof
> glass. This is especially true in the growth areas: mobile

I believe the main reason here is the cost of supporting (and developing too)
the apps and forcing users to do what you want. It's easier when you know all
the possible use cases in detail and you are who designs them.

> and web apps.

Web apps don't operate behind bulletproof glass. Thanks g-d we still can view
source, inspect, change and script almost everything in the web with the
developer tools integrated in every major browser.

------
BenoitEssiambre
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

Scott Alexander has a great post with lots of data on this:

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-
cost-...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-
disease/)

The numbers are pretty incredible. There is no single clear answer as to the
cause of it all unfortunately. It looks like funds becoming available allow a
whole bunch of areas to suck more and more money arguably without providing a
lot of value. Universities compete to have the biggest stadiums and the most
luxurious dorms. Hospitals pay more and more people to manage, oversee,
verify, systematize and inefficiently computerize everything.

In a lot of areas, we seem to pay a lot to achieve marginally safer
conditions. In the case of health care, if paying 5x the cost extends the life
of an additional 0.1% of patients, it's hard for deciders to justify not doing
that spending since saving 0.1% of people in hospitals is still saving a ton
of people.

Construction projects are like that too, you might be able make construction
safer, have 1% fewer injuries, if you are willing to pay 5X more for the
project. These safer, but much slower methods often become mandatory.

How do you decide on these trade-offs though?

------
abraae
> While a lot happened in the US during World War II, it's easy to forget how
> short the period in question was: American involvement lasted 3 years 8
> months and 23 days.

How does this stack up against US involvement in other"good" wars, where the
foe is the unambiguously bad?

I.e not a Vietnam style ideologically motivated confrontation.

~~~
ubernostrum
A lot will depend on what you personally feel is "good" versus "ideologically
motivated".

For example: the US was in World War I for 574 days (declared war on Germany
on April 6 1917, and the war ended on November 11 1918), and entered the
conflict with the Zimmerman telegram and German submarine attacks as its
_casus belli_.

But the US had been aiding the Allied powers prior to that, and from the
German perspective the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, and the
resulting attempt to enlist Mexico to join the war against the US, was a
defensive move to stem the flow of supplies from the neutral-but-obviously-
biased US to Germany's existing opponents.

------
qwerty456127
> And part of the problem is, of course, that writing a good post is much
> harder than writing a witty tweet.

As is reading it when "a good post" implies a long post. Authors should better
realize brevity is a merit and learn to organize the information they seek to
share in more concise pieces easier to digest. If encounter a post that seems
interesting and fits on one page I will surely read it. If it's about 1.5
screens-long I may read it. If it's more than 2-screens long I will only read
it if I believe it is probably going to change my life. And my screen height
is just 900 pixels.

------
carapace
Some of these are easy.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

Observer bias. Mean construction time is decreasing at an exponential rate. In
the limit: nano-tech, with construction times approaching physical limits.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Introduce a replicator into a nearly-pristine environment and that's the
growth curve.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no
> natural way to die?

Apoptosis

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Yes. Nothing. There is no working _mass_ education system and no basis for
thinking there ever could be.

> What's the right way to understand and model personality?

Neuro-linguistic Programming.

(The "Five Factor" model is no better than Astrology. NLP is based on hard
science. It's one of the very few schools of psychology that has repeatable
algorithms.)

> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how? Why are
> programming environments still so primitive?

People ignore Prolog and Dr. Margaret Hamilton's work. (She's the person who
coined the term "software engineering".) The combination of Prolog and
Hamilton's HOS provides an end-user-programmable error-free programming
environment.

------
qwerty456127
> What's the successor to the scientific paper and the scientific journal?

Why not just a kind of an article-centric social network where scientists
would publish their articles and reference other articles, other scientists
(and whoever who has found an article relevant to their practice or research)
would write their comments, score the articles by various subjective
parameters and mark experiments they have managed or failed to replicate? Of
course, there is to be moderation to fight junk comments and a way to weight
the things that affect the ratings by the reputation of who contributes these.

If I were a scientist I would rather publish my research on my own blog if
this didn't mean almost nobody is going to find it and take it seriously. Back
in the days, there were no blogs people all over the world could view and
that's why we needed journals. I believe journals would not even emerge
otherwise. If the Internet was somehow available since the earliest days
scientists would probably just upload their works there and care no more (but
to receive feedback perhaps).

------
scandox
> It seems that the returns to entrepreneurialism in cities remain high: Hong
> Kong, Singapore, Dubai, and others, have improved the lives of millions of
> people and appear much more contingent than inevitable.

I’m interested in this as a bald assertion. Have they improved the lives of
millions of people? I wasn’t aware of that. Can someone give me a quick before
and after?

~~~
aglionby
I was also curious about this. There are high levels of disparity in all three
of those places. Hong Kong has both some of the most expensive property in the
world and people living in cage homes.

~~~
fuzzfactor
Experimental Cities

These are like experimental schools.

Not intended to be mainstream at all.

Admission criteria would seem to be a critical consideration and the further
from the mainstream that the experiments extend, the more unlikely it would be
expected to be scalable beyond very strict criteria.

Houston comes to mind as a purpose-built city founded on undeveloped land for
the primary purpose of entrepreneurship which has grown larger than average by
maintaining that approach more so than average. As an example there has never
been a zoning ordinance, that kind of regulatory obstacle would be seen as an
experiment in cutailing prosperity, certainly not normal. A failed experiment
at that after observation of long-term effects in other municipalities. Even
though in most other municipalities the removal of zoning would be thought of
as an experiment too risky for them to even consider.

In the mature real-world example of Houston it is also painfully obvious the
benefit that could have been obtained with a little well-intended admission
criteria. Besides, when's the last time you heard someone say "Hey, it's a
free country" any more anyway.

> How do we help more experimental cities get started?

You've got to find someone who wants to subdivide their ranch, and then get
settlers to move there like anyone else. Incentives might help speed things
up, and you've got to figure that the more restrictive the admission criteria,
the more people will want to apply.

Or something like that.

------
PhilipDaineko
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?

I believe a cause of this is that Sweden market is pretty small, so companies
tend to initially go to a global market and solve global problems.

Compare Stockholm to Berlin, Paris or Moscow for example. Domestic markets in
these countries are huge, so people have no reasons to go global - they have
lots of local problems to solve.

------
mhjas
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

People have become better at capturing value for themselves.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

Culture, competition and selection bias. There are still a lot of successful
projects being built, just less so in culture that don't do cooperation well
at this point in time. See previous answer.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no
> natural way to die?

Reform(s).

> How do we help more experimental cities get started?

It has become common to cite those cities as successes without actually having
spent much time there and especially not on a "grassroots" level. Chances are
that it is actually both better and easier to reform existing cities or areas.

> How do people decide to make major life changes?

Like most things people do things when they are easy. Best way to make a major
life decision is to make it easy to do so. Very few people are e.g. moving to
countries they know nothing about.

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?

Stockholm is less worse than many other places, especially so in the end of
the 90s, early 00s. Most places in the world are really quite petty and
idiotic.

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?

Multimedia like Microsoft Encarta and An Inconvenient Truth. (There is more to
it of course, but that is the direction).

> Could there be more good blogs?

No, journalism has a low enough barrier to entry now that blogs as such are
largely obsolete.

> Why are programming environments still so primitive?

Because the stakes are low and there is enough low hanging fruit elsewhere.

------
plaidfuji
> What's the right way to understand and model personality?

With data. Personality is a union of speech, writing, facial expression and
body language. Until all of the nuances of these factors are measured across a
diverse population in a unified dataset, our models will be primitive. The
hardest part of collecting this data is that you want it in up-close and
personal day-to-day interactions, from the vantage point of other humans. So
the first requisite is discrete and high-res body cameras, but then the real
challenge is how to make this type of study double-blind. (How to place the
cameras without people knowing they’re wearing them). The models will flow
from the data.

~~~
namenotrequired
Since you seem to know a bit about the topic, why can we not measure the big
five in straightforward tests just like IQ?

------
booleandilemma
_Why can 't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to
see what they last were?...Why can't I debug a function without restarting my
program?_

When he learns about Visual Studio his mind is going to be blown.

------
akrymski
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?

This requires a clear separation of functions and data. Linux pipes are a
glimpse of what's possible, and there's been some work in translating English
to Bash. I think we aren't far from AI-powered English-to-Code translation
being feasible: "order me an uber an hour before my next meeting" -> check
calendar, filter, add -1, call the uber function. Alexa must be working on
something like this. If I had billion that's what I'd work on.

------
badrabbit
> "Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?"

Incentive. Something costs X dollars because there are sufficient number of
customers that are willing to pay X amount. Even if the cost of providing
goods or services gets cheaper, businesses will charge more if they can.

Capitalism assumes things will get cheaper as a result of competition, but
that does not take into account third party involvement. if the payment is
made by a third party,the incentive to compete by lowering prices decreases
dramatically. A third party could be a credit card backer,insurance,government
subsidies,etc... The impact of reducing the price is either not felt or is
delayed significantly. It plays a much smaller role in consumer decision
making when a thirdparty is involved.

The problem cascades up and down supply chains,making trivial projects and
services cost an insane amount. I blame this for many things including
healthcare costs,car repair costs,public infrastructure costs,etc...

~~~
Aunche
The American healthcare system is the perfect combination of misaligned
incentives. In the US, patients are the ones who have to foot the bill, but
they have no incentive to keep the costs down because things are covered by
insurance. As a small example, I don't need new glasses every year, but I get
a new pair every year because it's covered by insurance. On a much larger
scale, in most countries, it doesn't make economic sense to spend tens of
millions of dollars to develop a medicine that's 1% more effective than a
currently existing one. In poorer countries like India, there will be very few
people who could afford the new medicine. In countries with socialized
medicine, the government would rather spend the money on something else. In
the US, patients are more than happy to pay for the new medicine because it
costs the same as the old one after insurance. Meanwhile, everyone's insurance
premiums bump up a few cents and nobody bats an eye. Repeat this a thousand
times and you're left with an incredibly bloated healthcare system.

------
yurylifshits
> How do we help more experimental cities get started?
    
    
        — Create better city simulation software 
        — Fund "future cities" labs and institutes
        — Pool job creators together and negotiate collectively for new cities and districts
          (like Amazon is doing for HQ2)
    

My long answer is on Medium: [https://medium.com/@yurylifshits/neocity-
aa102731911b](https://medium.com/@yurylifshits/neocity-aa102731911b)

------
sgillen
>> Why are programming environments still so primitive?

I think adding all the features the author is requesting and have it work
seamlessly is much much harder than be seems to realize.

------
bvinc
> Will end-user applications ever be truly programmable? If so, how?

People just want things to work. Extreme customization can be valuable, but it
often devolves into subtle bugs and inconsistent behavior. People forget about
their custom modifications. Developers end up debugging people's custom
modifications for every bug report. Having 100% consistent reproducible
behavior is usually more valuable.

------
kodablah
While seemingly unrelated, I kept answering to myself "fear" as I read some of
these questions. Afraid to fire, afraid of risks, afraid of haste, afraid of
users, etc. In general with business trends of places with fewer startups,
higher costs, less customization, slower delivery, etc it's almost always
because the environment rewards the risk averse.

------
scottmsul
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

I too would like to know the answer to this question. I suspect it may have to
do with low interest rates and easily available credit. For example, if buyers
are willing to get a 50 year mortgage instead of a 20 year mortgage (and banks
are willing to lend it), prices will increase to match demand.

------
bostonpete
> K12 education spending in the US has increased by 2-3X per student per year
> since 1960.

Uh what? That's not even close to true...

~~~
nkurz
I'm not familiar with the statistics, and may be misreading them, but for what
I can find with a quick search, 2-3X seems about right, possibly even low.

Total expenditure per pupil in average daily attendance in constant 2016
dollars:

    
    
      1959-60: $3,890	
      2014-15: $14,013	
      $14,000 / $4,000 = 3.5x
    

[https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_236.55.a...](https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_236.55.asp)

Separately, here's a link claiming a 3x increase for Nevada in particular:
[https://www.npri.org/issues/publication/nevada-has-nearly-
tr...](https://www.npri.org/issues/publication/nevada-has-nearly-tripled-
its-k-12-spending-since-1960)

And here's an article claiming a 2x increase since 1970:
[https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-
char...](https://www.cato.org/blog/public-school-spending-theres-chart)

What do you think the numbers are instead?

More meta, why do you post a harsh correction like this without offering any
sourcing or evidence? If your goal was to provoke someone else into doing some
research, I guess it worked, but this seems rude. What's your model for how
others will react to your comment?

~~~
ninkendo
Maybe it’s just poor phrasing? Because:

> has increased by 2-3X per student per year

reads to me like it’s saying that every year, the cost is 2-3x higher than it
was the year before. Which is obviously impossible.

~~~
smnrchrds
He must have meant "spending per student per year has increased by 2-3X".

------
Liron
> With Visual Basic, you can readily write a quick script to calculate some
> calendar analytics with Outlook. To do the same with Google Calendar is a
> very laborious chore.

Google Calendar has a good API. The setup friction adds a notch of complexity
relative to a VBA script, but I wouldn't call it "very laborious".

------
twtw
Regarding the BART delay, does anyone know if there is a way to help them out?
Taking a year (or six months, or even three months) to get some switches is
mind-boggling to me. I've seen a similar situation before at a tech company
that was resolved over a weekend with a couple phone calls.

------
xg15
Some of those questions already seem to contain assumptions about the answers.

> _Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? [...] How much of
> the cost growth is unmeasured improvement in quality and how much is growing
> inefficiency?_

Are there other possible causes as well? If the cost growth were 100% due to
improvements in quality, would it stop being a problem worth thinking about?

> _How do we help more experimental cities get started? [...] Hong Kong,
> Singapore, Dubai, and others, have improved the lives of millions of people
> and appear much more contingent than inevitable._

To my knowledge (I have no citations though), the improvement meant that
millions of people were lifted from far-below-western to only-sligtly-below-
western living standards. Impressive yes, but how well is that even applicable
to societies _at_ our living standard. Also, are things like workplace
security or environmental effects factored into the "living standard" here?

> _What 's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved? [...]
> How can we help authors understand how well their work is doing in practice?
> (Which parts are readers confused by or stumbling over or skipping?)_

Is this a thing we want? Would the benefits of this outweigh the costs of
setting up the necessary tracking infrastructure?

> _Being limited in our years on the earth, how can we incentivize brevity?_

Is brevity a thing we should universally incentivize?

As a side note, what's with the humblebragging? If I get Wikipedia correctly,
this guy is co-founder and current CEO of Stripe and has a billion in
_personal_ net-worth. His personal opinions and descisions influence the rules
for a significant part of money transfers around the world.

Yet the website and bio read as if he were just a particularly engaged intern
at Stripe.

If this is the meritocracy in action, I can see why so many people have
problems with it.

~~~
d_burfoot
> To my knowledge ... the improvement meant that millions of people were
> lifted from far-below-western to only-slightly-below-western living
> standards.

Hong Kong and Singapore are substantially above Western living standards.
Singapore has a PPP-adjusted GDP per capita of $90K/year, which is more than
double the UK. Compared to the US, SG has better education, better health
outcomes, radically lower crime and imprisonment, lower unemployment, higher
incomes, and incomparably better infrastructure, all while spending only about
17% of GDP on government. Similar statements are true for Hong Kong, though it
is no longer such a radical outlier, since it is under the control of Beijing.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_\(PPP\)_per_capita)

[https://www.hoover.org/research/hong-kong-
experiment](https://www.hoover.org/research/hong-kong-experiment)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy)

------
tradethedelta
> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? > Why do there seem
> to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the
> present?

These two questions, IMHO, are inter-linked. Projects are slower because
things are more expensive in general. I think there are some answers to be
found as well in the populist uprisings we've seen in the US and in other
parts of the world. Here are some random thoughts that are all-related to
these questions:

\- We are worse off today than our parents were in the 60's and 70s - in terms
of purchasing power and quality of life. See the trend of 20 and 30-somethings
staying or moving in with their parents today. How easy is it for someone in
this age group to buy a house in the USA versus back then?

\- Wage disparity has grown immensely: the rich get richer - the poor move
sideways or get poorer. Capitalism, though massively positive for humanity, if
unchecked leads to social unrest.

\- The US government was "richer" back then - or at least had more power to
engage in bold new projects. See the American New Deal (WPA). NASA. Today,
space exploration seems relegated to the whims of the new gilded-age
billionaires (Musk, Branson, Bezos).

\- Current administration will continue this shift of power away from govt
into the hands of elite. Its not the government's job to dole out food stamps
- let communities or society decide how to help the poor.

\- Author cites rise of healthcare costs... See unfettered Capitalism comment.
No govt checks on what the price of a drug is leads to silly games with
insurance. Example: family member was once medivacced on helicopter for 20
minute ride at cost of $65k - but insurance only paid $5k and we ended up
paying $1k of that. They're fine now - but why even propose a $65k price tag
if you're going to be OK with a 90% price cut? Gaming imbalances between
people who have power and those who do not - and also propensity to pay. Needs
strong regulation to fix.

\- In a similar point made by Author: 2nd Avenue Subway line is most expensive
cost per mile of any subway in the world to-date. Why? See good NYT article on
answer. Labor Unions. Hiring 30 people for a task that only needs 10. Why? Bad
allocation of resources since you can't hire anyone else. This is an attempt
at thwarting unfettered capitalism. On the other hand you end up with cheap
day laborers (slaves) like the poor migrants who built Dubai. There's gotta be
a balance in between. Govt needs to step in.

------
alexashka
I think one interesting observation to make here is to think how one would
group all these questions, into a meta question. What's the common thread
among all these?

As far as I can tell, it's 'why aren't things better?'

The answer is simple: because you don't want it to be better, really. If you
simplify the question down to 'why are Americans fat?', it'll become much
clearer. We all already know the answer, most just want it to be some other,
more pleasant explanation - hence never-ending fad diets. We want to believe,
more than we want to face reality oftentimes :)

------
bshanks
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

i'm not sure about this but i get the impression that semilog plots of
exponentially growing things often look deceptively linear, and hence that the
best-fit exponential curve often looks like a better fit than it is.

The claim here is that the actual rate-of-growth has been constant over time.
What is shown is a graph of GDP growth with an exponential curve overlayed
whose rate-of-growth parameter has been fit to the data. But perhaps if you
had stopped the analysis at different times in the past, you would have gotten
similarly linear-looking graphs, but with very different best-fit rate-of-
growth parameters. What i might like to see instead is a graph showing, for
each year in the past, the value of the best-fit rate-of-growth parameter if
you looked only at a fixed-sized moving window of data ending at that year. If
the size of the moving window is '1 year', it is no surprise that GDP is all
over the map. But even when the window is 10 years, charts of GDP growth per
decade (from a google image search) show more substantial variation:

[http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/GDP-per-cap-by-
dec.jpg](http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/GDP-per-cap-by-dec.jpg)
[http://www.massline.org/Dictionary/Photos/G/GDP-US-
Cumulativ...](http://www.massline.org/Dictionary/Photos/G/GDP-US-
CumulativeGrowthByDecade.jpg)

I expect that the variation would be even more pronounced if you made a chart
that showed, for each year, the growth over the preceding 10-year window,
instead of those bar charts which only have one bar every 10 years. Also, even
10 years is too short; what i'd really like to see is charts of average GDP
growth over 30 years, but i don't have time to compute that.

In addition, there is some evidence that very high rates of GDP growth are
only possible when a country is less wealthy/developed (see eg figure 4.4 from
[https://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Courses/GrDev17Warwick/...](https://www.econ.nyu.edu/user/debraj/Courses/GrDev17Warwick/Notes/RayCh3UpdatePart2.pdf)
; note that it appears to be possible for less wealthy/developed countries to
have either low or high GDP growth, whereas wealthy/developed countries appear
to only be capable of low GDP growth; this could be explained by a
'diminishing returns' argument). If true, this would imply that over very long
timescales, the rate of growth would decrease.

My "analysis" here is rather hacky -- what is the proper statistical way to
analyze this? What is the proper statistical test to see if long-term growth
rates are constant?

------
jack9
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

It's just a made up output with a wildly manipulated function. This is not
unique to the USA.

------
billsmithaustin
From the article: “K12 education spending in the US has increased by 2-3X per
student per year since 1960.”

That can’t possibly be correct.

------
Koshkin
On a tangential note, there is an Italian proverb about questions and answers.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
For those of us not well-versed on Italian proverbs, would you tell us what
that proverb says?

~~~
Koshkin
It says, _Un pazzo può fare più domande di quante sette uomini saggi possano
rispondere._

------
jwatte
As for why health care and education are getting not expensive

------
stefek99
> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm?

1) work ethics:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Sweden](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Sweden)

2) 33 sunshine hours in December:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm#Climate)

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

[http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/05/doe...](http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2011/05/does-
this-ease-your-worries-us-gdp-from-1870-2008.html)

Holy cow.

Great depression.

Hitler coming to power, WW2... Clearly observable.

------
malandrew
For that first question regarding the cost of healthcare and education, cost
disease:

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-
cost...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-
disease/)

[http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-
com...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/17/highlights-from-the-comments-on-
cost-disease/)

------
jondubois
>> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Maybe because the Fed's dual mandate of keeping employment low whilst keeping
inflation under control has this side effect.

Growth is not related to the total utility value of the work that is produced
by the country; it's a highly controlled metric; that's why the financial
system is prone to booms and busts; the metrics we use are not in sync with
reality and sometimes the discrepancy becomes so obvious that everything
crashes.

>> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

Probably also related to the Fed's manipulation of the money supply. The way
that inflation is calculated is by looking at the Consumer Price Index; this
index only accounts for prices of products based on their general
classifications; it doesn't take into account the fact that the quality of all
products overall have been steadily declining over the years. If we were to
factor in the decline of quality of products over time, we would find that
inflation was actually much higher than reported.

>> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects
in the past than the present?

Engineering practices are getting worse over time and increasingly focus on
risk-mitigation rather than productivity. Big tech monopolies don't need to be
efficient in order to keep increasing profits; they can afford to hire a ton
of engineers who have nothing to do so they become focused on risk-mitigation
instead of development efficiency.

Small companies mistakenly look up to corporations as role models for their
own businesses and they start adopting the same inefficient and expensive
tools and practices (e.g. serverless). Engineers who are efficient are shunned
as being bad engineers because their front end code doesn't have 100% test
coverage and they don't use the latest bulky over-engineered tools that came
out of Facebook.

>> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no
natural way to die?

It's good to know that people in positions of power are thinking about these
problems.

Blockchain?

>> Why are programming environments still so primitive?

This is related to the question "Why do there seem to be more examples of
rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?" \- The answer
is probably similar.

Companies that succeed don't succeed because of good engineering practices and
tooling; they succeed because of other completely unrelated reasons (business
connections, funding, etc...) but they become role models in the developer
community; a successful company's past technical decisions are treated as some
kind of recipe to success even though many of those decisions were actually
pretty terrible and developed in a rush to meet the challenges of hockey-stick
growth curves.

Tooling and developer efficiency hasn't mattered because other factors like
access to business connections and funding have been so much more important in
terms of achieving successful outcomes.

Real technical innovation can't hold a candle to social networking.

------
mrfusion
These really are the questions of our time. I wonder if we can answer them.

------
bachbach
There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions
consistently. There are only so many Gwerns and Scott Alexanders and
Dredmorbiuses out there. There really are not that many people out there
thinking about and discussing the Big Ideas and you keep running into the same
ones over time. I fear many club members are lost in the blogosphere and near
impossible to find with Google.

Some possible answers:

> Spending on healthcare > cost of college > construction costs > childcare
> costs

There are many complex reasons why costs can rise in any area, but the common
theme between them is something you already know - the propaganda machine told
everybody that university degrees meant belonging to the middle class club
with accompanying benefits aka house ownership, a high status mate, healthy
income, respect.

Turns out this is a bad model. There are diminishing returns for not only
college degrees but even _that knowledge itself_ in relation to what other
parts of society do. The fuzzier and understudied/underappreciated areas of
construction skill, caring (including healthcare - recall Robin Hanson's
contention that 50% of healthcare costs are just people wanting to feel
supported) have been deprived of talent and that is what is driving up costs
across the board - supply and demand.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in
> the past than the present?

My opinion is the same as Thiels I think - it's that our ability to do complex
coordination is dropping. The reasons why? Information is an ecology - Cal
Newport will tell us distraction or context switching is a sin if you want
complex coordination and that is right - but also I believe in The Ladybird
Book Theory which is that our education - taken broadly - has given us a false
impression of complexity instead of thinking from first principals (notice how
the old ladybird books are written - the kind of thing kids used to read) -
which is something Musk puts a lot of weight on. The Elon/Cal thesis might be
that "leave out some stuff - focus on key principals intensely". It sounds
trite but I think it is right.

From a ROI point of view - not very many people in society need to be very
very good at driving projects - so if you focused on making super-coordinators
aka a new form education for those selected for Big Tasks should pay off
immediately.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

My guess is energy.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no
> natural way to die?

Sunset clauses are one but I don't really know because the main way seems to
be just forgetting. I think when our institutions screw up it can get bad
enough that the fix was a thousand years later we forgot that was even a
problem.

> How do we help more experimental cities get started?

An idea.

You need to build a machine that compacts garbage into a substrate that can be
used to form new land offshore. Nearly all prosperous cities are near water
and produce garbage. It should be possible to gradually build experimental
islands while solving the garbage problem so it's all in the technical detail
of designing a machine that makes blocks/substrate out of the garbage. It pays
for itself and building pyramids starts with understanding how to make a
single brick.

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Maybe human to human communication is weirder than we think. In education
you're conventionally thinking about transmitting information, understanding
from A to B but maybe because our common ancestors have spent millions of
years in forests and other environments instead of classrooms they transmit
information to each other in ways which sound a bit odd to us. Think of
pheromones, our sense of smell, hearing somebody's voice unmediated by
electronics, seeing somebody's posture body language - these could all form
metainformation about the information in language that is very helpful in the
student/tutor relationship.

Think also of the 'sleeping dictionary' \- a person in a couple who learns his
or her spouse's native language learns it really fast. It can sound a bit woo-
ish but I think it'll be objectively measurable.

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?

I don't know but I really like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (subtitle: "A
Young Lady's Illustrated Primer").

Wikiquote: "At the age of four, Nell receives a stolen copy of an interactive
book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is
told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, &c.,
originally intended for the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander
Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw's granddaughter. The story follows Nell's development
under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of
Elizabeth and Fiona, girls who receive similar books. The Primer is intended
to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined
by "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an
effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an
"interesting life" is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status
quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them
what they need to know to survive and develop."

> Could there be more good blogs?

I've been moping about this recently too. I hope this was not a passing trend.
The main social networks seem sterile.

~~~
jacques_chester
> _There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions
> consistently._

They're called "universities".

~~~
bachbach
I can't believe this is still a middle class meme, some ideas die hard.

Universities have been sliding downhill for a long time and they know why
because they operate the nightclub protocol for entry.

Geography and formal education not what links the people I mentioned.
Correlation, causation, you know the mantra.

~~~
jacques_chester
I didn't say anything about formal education or credentialling.

The original and still key purpose of universities is to gather _academics_
together.

Teaching was a by-product of that origin. Would-be students flocked to the
cities where scholars had clustered and eventually, folks started to organise.

The word "university" means "of one", or "guild", or "group". That reflects
its origin as a club _for academics_.

Literally people whose reason for being at university is to be in a club of
people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently.

The closest alternative are the many and various think-tanks, most of which
are intertwined with academia.

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Zpalmtree
Nice clickbait headline

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chadmeister
Can the title of "Questions" be changed to something a bit more useful?

~~~
raldi
What would you suggest?

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amelius
A bit silly to ask questions and not have a discussion section below your post
...

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thenewewb
In order:

Inflation, regulation/globalism, corrupt system, wait, don’t, up to us all,
good question, good question, remove politics, no, books, papers, don’t try,
no, false laziness.

~~~
sgillen
Things are not this simple. I think these questions have more complicated
answers than you think.

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blablabla123
Rising costs: inflation. Assume a rate of a little more than 3.5% per year and
you're at 9x after 60. That's pretty much the same reason why college cost
rose up.

In fact inflation is necessary in our current economics. Imagine there was no
inflation. Then very wealthy people could put all their money on a savings
account, live of the interest rate and still accumulate more money. Thus the
economy would eventually stagnate because of no investments. Inflation kind of
stops that, also the central bank can control it by setting the interest rates
for credits.

There are attempts to make inflation unnecessary like currency that loses
value over time (and you need to frequently put stamps on it). But that's very
far away from any widely used currency.

