Johanna

Remember that all models are wrong; the practical question is how wrong do they have to be to not be useful.

The means of funding UBI determine so much of its long-term impact. Each funding method carries a different set of properties, a unique host of alchemical interactions with socioeconomic incentives. Some promise to ’twist’ capitalist logic and pave a road to communism. Others may pit the minority class whose tax increases exceed their UBI against... See more

A lot of the best ideas seem silly or bad initially—you want an idea at the intersection of “seems like bad idea” and “is good idea”. (It’s important to note you need to be contrarian and right, not simply contrarian.)

To do science, you don’t need to start with the dawn of all human knowledge and then work forward. You start with the current state of knowledge and go from there. Learning the history of science is helpful for shaping your intuitions and giving you perspective, but you don’t actually have to read Darwin, for example, to do evolutionary biology.

As work becomes more like life, it also becomes more of life.

There's another trait on the side which I want to talk about; that trait is ambiguity. It took me a while to discover its importance. Most people like to believe something is or is not true. Great scientists tolerate ambiguity very well. They believe the theory enough to go ahead; they doubt it enough to notice the errors and faults so they can... See more

But basic jobs are going to be selecting primarily from the very poor demographic and they’re going to get hit with the same problem as the poorest public schools – a need for people to behave, combined with inability to credibly disincentivize misbehavior.Basic income avoids this problem. It provides money to everyone, good employees and bad... See more

All of these lines of evidence lead me to the same conclusion: constant growth rates in response to exponentially increasing inputs is the null hypothesis. If it wasn’t, we should be expecting 50% year-on-year GDP growth, easily-discovered-immortality, and the like.