sari

"Ben Hunt’s canonical essay “Snip!” from 2019 is one of my favorite short reads of all time. It’s a prescient look at the seismic shifts that will occur as the cord that once connected taxes and spending is cut. Read the piece later, but for now just know that it outlines the enormous real and psychological impact of renouncing the most important m... See more

At age 26, 59% of engineering and computer science grads work in occupations related to their field of study. By age 50, only 41% work in the same domain, meaning a full ~30% drop out of the field by mid-career

In other words, the heterogeneous nature of creators makes it challenging for the most powerful creators to have the motivation or cohesion to organize. In contrast, labor movements typically harness the collective power of large workforces who have similar shared experiences.

In the 50 years since Vernon Smith did his first experiment in [wisdom of crowds] and published the results, they have been replicated thousands of times in ever more complex variations. But the essential conclusion of those early tests has not been challenged : that, under the right conditions, imperfect humans can produce near-perfect results.

The repugnant conclusion of never-ending well-being arbitrage: everyone ends up with a life that is just barely above the subsistence level. Effective altruism wants to arbitrage all the extra happiness away and fairly distribute it amongst the global population.

I think there are three algorithms that have reshaped the American press in ways that we are just now starting to confront. You have Google and Facebook, which can serve up this incredible fire hose of traffic to publishers so long as they cater to the ever-shifting whims of that algorithm.