While I absolutely loved the writing, I want to challenge that last part and the dichotomy created. Perfection is an ideal. You can strive towards it at 25 or 45. It's too deterministic to say as soon as you're in your forties, it's game over. Permanent imperfection. Pure facticity. No transcendence.
"[to be human] is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there."
Land is not scarce in the US. My road trip through Nevada to Salt Lake City convinced me of that much. What is scarce is land people actually want to live in - with safe neighborhoods, good schools, restaurants, shops, etc. Restrictive zoning and NIMBYism is definitely making this worse.
I don't think the amount of "unexplored" or "undeveloped" land is a good metric for social mobility. Economic growth is. New "frontiers" are created all the time. They do not have to be in the physical world (e.g. computers, the web, biotech, the App store, social media influencer, crypto, and now AI). Even in the physical world, frontiers can sometimes expand. Desirable land can be created in the middle of a desert (e.g. Las Vegas), we just don't want to anymore.
Despite its many flaws, I think the US is still better than pretty much anywhere else in the world.
Agriculture, the Saudis get five harvests of alfalfa a year by leasing unlimited water rights in Arizona for practically nothing. The Az Governor could call the leases and stop that, but they haven't for some reason. Most water in AZ is for Manufacturing and Farming, very little is used for people.
This is one of the reasons I wish companies embraced remote work more, and which I wish the government encouraged more. Plenty of locations could be rebuilt and revitalized simply by moving working families there, and plenty of people would be happy to buy up the cheaper housing and contribute to the local economy if their places of work allowed for such flexibility.
Its a real shame that both state and federal governments do not see the advantages of this...
Most of that rust belt infrastructure from mid century population highs is actually at end of life. Some cities are having a crisis with things like their sewer systems right now. Its underreported because no one cares about the intricacies of stormwater and sewage movements, much less in a smaller midwestern city.
They are currently attempting to essentially be annexed by the small community of Suisun City in exchange for being allowed to develop the land according to their vision.
Not really, no. The land the BLM owns is mostly scrubland suitable for cattle grazing and basically nothing else. I suspect whoever told you that has an ideological bone to pick with the BLM and is bullshitting you to try and make you equally mad at them.
By the way, this is such a textbook example of how planted counter narratives brainwash people into deflecting actual criticism on a topic.
People interpret the speaker as if he is “one of those people”, who believes the counter narrative the listener has heard about.
Rarely does the listener move past this point, and check in on whether the speaker is actually one of those people, or if he is someone who has never heard of those people, or if he has ignored those people because he thinks their views are just as stupid as you think they are, and he is actually independently criticizing the topic.
This is so bizarre! We live in a world where companies invest billions and hire the best researchers all to capture our attention and serve ads. And now, to claw back any sort of agency, we resort to this.
VC and startups are fundamentally about disruption. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs (laws). The incumbent players are not going to sit still and let things be "disrupted". A common response is to make sure the public knows about the broken eggs. I would say youtube, Google, Spotify, Uber, doordash, etc. all have made my life much better.
You don't know a world without them so you actually have no idea if they have made your life compared to that world much better or much worse. How your life was at the time is irrelevant.
Why would I say something is better without a point of comparison?
I was born in the 90s. So definitely alive before YouTube and Spotify albeit as a teenager rather than an adult. I guess you're right I'm not familiar with the world of Sony Walkman, Blockbuster, and IBM PC. But I definitely remember dial-up modems, CDs, Windows 95 and XP. Technology has improved most aspect of my life better since then. (maybe minus all the ads + dopamine slot machines part...)
To be fair it did work out suprisingly well in the early days, even the really weird comment chains attracted only a small minority of the bizarrely deranged. Probably because back then the median LW commentator was noticeably smarter than the median HN commentator.
Pascal’s mugging was even coined there I believe, but then as it grew… whatever communal anti-derangement protections existed gradually declined.
And it now is more often than not a negative example.
I am not against rationalism at all despite my quoting of Hume. Reason is essential and has done much good to the world. It's just that things tend to get kooky at the tail end of any distribution.
The rationalist community have some of the smartest people and the best blogs, and they think through things much more thoroughly and are much less prone to biases and fallacies than most online communities.
I feel like it's not a question if you can, but if you should.
Are you actually smart if you spend any significant amount of time thinking through things in order to be rational?
I have a good friend that is by all reasonable metrics incredibly smart. Graduated high school and college at the same time at age 16. Doctorate at 22. Professor at a top university for several years. But lives in absolute squalor and spends his time and brain power on rational thinking and philosophy to understand life.
But, it is life, and if you don't experience it how can you understand it, and if you do understand it, what is gained?
His life is the inside of his house and a daily trip to Dollar general to buy mountain dew, cigarettes and frozen burritos.
I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random. Such snaggle-toothed thought machine, driven by a standard or even by a substandard libido, whirls with the jerky, noisy, gaudy pointlessness of a cuckoo clock in Hell.
I mostly agree with you, I don't do SR myself, but I do think the benefit of spaced repetition is solid for medical students/researchers and language learners.
Also some people just find it fun to go through their Anki deck instead of doomscrolling while on the subway or waiting in line. Whether there's any real benefit for that person is debatable. It's “fun“ in the same way going to the gym, or drinking kale smoothie is fun.
The key for improvement is deliberate practice, and one component of that is "working really hard" which you've pointed. But this is still too vague to be helpful. For those interested in the science of expertise, I highly recommend Peak by Andres Ericsson.
> Also some people just find it fun to go through their Anki deck instead of doomscrolling while on the subway or waiting in line. Whether there's any real benefit for that person is debatable. It's “fun“ in the same way going to the gym, or drinking kale smoothie is fun.
I'm probably one of those people, but commuting is one of those examples where you have a small (hopefully) amount of relatively low value time, time that is somewhat interrupted. What else of value would you do in it? Maybe listen to a podcast, catch up on blogs. All fine, reasonable choices, but doing a bit of Anki is a reasonable alternative.
Only time I feel like I've wasted those periods is when I end up wasting it (just scrolling through social media or random videos). Anything else is I think a reasonable choice.
The US outsourced its manufacturing to China in the name of comparative advantage. Bob bakes bread, Alice grow apples. Everyone is better off because of specialization.
In Thomas Friedman's latest nyt column, he refers to China's manufacturing dominance as a play to de-industrializing other countries. It may just be globalization is incompatible with political realities.
Or… Bob makes bread, Alice grows flowers. Alice needs bread; Bob likes flowers but can go without if he wants to. Who’s going to come off worse if they have an argument?
On the other hand, long-term planning is susceptible to disruption and unforeseen events, and when we have long-term government plans they have a way of taking on a life of their own and defending themselves even if they have outlived their usefulness.
> These populations are more than large enough to specialize in everything.
My impression is that population size is not very relevant in the math of trade specialization profit. It's still more profitable to play on relative strengths and weaknesses. You can find other things to worry about like security (from droughts and earthquakes perhaps), or political or strategic desires. In particular, trade is likely beneficial even when local production would be cheaper than remote production - just because there are other things that can be done localy and even stronger (like phone games or advertising-oriented browser feature destruction /s).
Why would European population of almost a billion people need to specialize on anything? What would it even specialize on. What does that world need that there need to be 10% or the world working on it?
>In particular, trade is likely beneficial even when local production would be cheaper than remote production - just because there are other things that can be done localy and even stronger
This only matters if you can not do both. If your population is large the amount of things which it can do especially good can easily be exhausted before you run out of people.
I don't even see how you can specialize. What does China specialize in? (Before answering, think about the things which China is not trying to produce or the services it is not trying to perform. Can you name even one?)
"Specialize" is not quite the right word. In trade economics (from the very crudest level), trade is beneficial to BOTH parties EVEN when etc etc etc. i.e. higher profit. It's really hard to beat trade.
It's not that anyone needs to specialize as in "otherwise it won't work". It's that it's more profitable and so people will tend to prefer that plus some extra money in their pocket.
And it's not specialize as in only do wine, cheese and perfume and nothing else. It's systematically favor some things that you are relatively better at than others, and trade for the others (not even 100%, you can export some plastic parts and import some similar plastic parts at the same time). Even if the other country could themselves be better at it. So for France, engineering of all kinds, wine, cheese, perfume, meds, etc but also any manufacturing that by chance has gotten and remained strong (say, like airplanes, some electrical equipment, whatever else that really any other country also could possibly manufacture).
I do not think that Europe or the US even could specialize in anything. The population is so large that for every good and service needed there is a group of people who are specializing in it right now.
What single good/service is not at all produced in Europe. Which single good/service is not produced in China?
At the scale of 1B people specialization becomes meaningless. You can't even accomplish it if you wanted to. All you could do is letting one of your industries get out competed by some other power.
I feel we are talking past each other so I will leave it at that.
The specialization you ... expect? is irrelevant.
Business jets are not produced in China, large efficient passenger jets are not produced in China, printed silk scarves branded Hermes, silent diesel electric submarines for export are not produced in China. (See what I did there?) And that's irrelevant to why trade exists.
Even an up-to-the-minute super competitive manufacturer has no incentive (except political and some risk-aversion) to do everything in-house or in one country. It does have incentives to trade with other countries and other companies. Even if it possibly had the machines and low cost employees on hand and already trained to do that, from an economics point of view it should (in the long term), sell some production units, focus on the others and trade for the difference.
>Business jets are not produced in China, large efficient passenger jets are not produced in China, printed silk scarves branded Hermes, silent diesel electric submarines for export are not produced in China. (See what I did there?) And that's irrelevant to why trade exists.
Literally every single one of these is false. China is producing every single one of these things.
Ironically to UK probably make that mistake first. A lot of manufacturing moved to Hong Kong, which was a British Territory until 1997. During the reform of the Chinese economy, Hong Kong invested in factories on the mainland. Then of course it was handed back to their jurisdiction.
UK probably made that mistake first by moving lots of manufacturing to their colonies, like North America and later the US. The UK said the same thing the western world said about China: they built low-level low-quality stuff, and we focused on the high-value manufacturing. But guess what? Smart people are everywhere, and ambitious people will not build "low-quality stuff" forever. Sooner or later, those who sweat on factory floors will have more know-how than those who enjoy draw boxes in a cushy office. Indeed, those who know only how to draw boxes will soon find that even their boxes, no matter how pretty, will not be relevant.
comparative advantage is disproven at this point, because economists are failed math majors who don't account for the innovation flywheel effect and general network effects. Silicon Valley software industry happened because of the proximity to the existing hardware industry there. Same thing for other forms of manufacturing and the US gave it away in the name of short term profits
I often "feel" like I have all the details in my heads and LLMs effectively makes me type faster. But that's never the case. It's only when I start writing the code myself line by line that I discover blindspots.
For example, in freshman year, I remember reading previous exams solutions (rather than drilling practice problems) to prep for a calculus midterm. It felt good. It felt easy. It felt like I can easily get the answers myself. I barely passed.
My point is LLMs are probably doing more inference/thinking than we give it credit for. If it's making my life easier, it has to be atrophy-ing something right?
"[to be human] is to be constantly on the precipice of perfection – just a little further and you’ll get there – but you never get there."
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