Andrei Stoica

But it's also true that right now is a great time to do something ambitious. Robin Hanson calls the present "the dreamtime", following a concept in Aboriginal myths: the time when the future world order and its values are still liquid, not yet set in stone.

The default outcome?

Let's grant the assumptions at the start of this post and the above analysis. Then, the post-labour-replacing-AI world involves:

• Money will be able to buy results in the real world better than ever.


• People's labour gives them less leverage than ever before.


• Achieving outlier success through your labour in most or all areas is now

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The Gervais Principle is this:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The Gervais principle differs from the Peter Principle, which it superficially resembles. The P... See more

I'm still puzzled by how China can have both a demographic collapse and massive youth unemployment. You'd think with fewer young people being born, the ones who are around would be in high demand. One explanation I heard while there is that there are plenty of menial jobs available, but today's educated youth - who've gone through high school and c... See more

I got quite mixed messages about the state of public opinion in China. This is to be expected in a society where you can't establish common knowledge. One person told me that the new generation is quite nationalist, unlike the older reform generation which personally experienced the catastrophes of Mao and the tangible benefits of liberalization. H... See more

Free market logic describes how the laws of supply and demand incentivize providing the best goods at the lowest prices. But custom means economic decisions are made unthinkingly, outsourced to tradition, which might be political, ideological, or even aesthetic in origin. By law and in practice, the entire U.S. banking system has been fully guarant... See more

The difference between Saudi Arabia's wealth and Venezuela’s poverty is mainly that Venezuela's national oil company PDVSA is dysfunctional, but Saudi Aramco isn't. Two-thirds of native Saudis work for the government. The profligacy of the Saudi economy is underwritten by oil exports by Saudi Aramco, which has a special arrangement for autonomy in ... See more