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Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
@patrissimo
Feb 14, 2020 • 9 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
Do you work at a megacorp or "prestige field" (big law, banking, consulting) where inside the walls everything is politics? Are you interested in rational critiques of capitalism's Molochian failure modes? Then go read @TheZvi's sequence on "Moral Mazes": thezvi.wordpress.com/2019/12/28/mol…
The Mazes sequence is deeply related to @slatestarcodex's "Meditations on Moloch", @vgr's "Gervais Principle", @ESYudkowsky's Inadequate Equilibria, and #NickBostrom's "Paperclip Maximizer". It's about environments where high optimization pressure creates toxic competitiveness.
The sequence was inspired by the 1988 book "Moral Mazes", a groundbreaking fieldwork on the internal status-game dysfunction of middle managers in large corporations, due to competitive pressures.

amzn.to/31WdB16
I found it gripping because I consider one of the great philosophical questions of our time to be the tension between efficiency and humanity. Competition is an incredible mechanism - we can get SOOOOO many paperclips SOOOO cheaply these days (and food, clothes, shelter...)
Yet we also have clear theory & examples to show that extreme competition will, if left unchecked, squeeze all that is good out of our lives. Sadly, 99.9% of people who point this out, and 99.99% of proposed solutions, strike me as EVEN WORSE than the problem (f**king commies).
But that doesn't mean that I don't believe in the problem. I do. I'm scared for the end of Dreamtime. I'm worried that @Outsideness is right and that what's inevitable is the emancipation of capital, not people. I desperately want to keep some "slack" (thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/sla…)
And so I thrill to see a brilliant, thoughtful analyst like @TheZvi go deep into these topics in an empirical way (ie not just the systems theory of the problem, but how to spot and avoid it in your own life).
The whole sequence is 40,000 words, so I won't even try to summarize it, just go read it if you're at all interested in Molochian dynamics. The one post I'll call out is the last one, which outlines needed essays that you (yes, YOU) could write.

thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/02/06/maz…
Tagging people who should definitely read the series if they haven't: @eriktorenberg @VitalikButerin @RafeFurst @jim_rutt @jgreenhall @WilliamAEden @diviacaroline @brijpatel @s_r_constantin

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More from @patrissimo

Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Mar 7
In 25yrs, I've heard 2 types of arguments against artificial minds ever becoming as smart as people:

Those which explicitly depend on human capabilities being enabled by some irreplicable metaphysical property (soul, etc), and those which implicitly do the same.
There are no other options: either we have a magic spark (soul, anima, quantum consciousness), or our thinking is a computational process mapping inputs to outputs, that happens to be currently implemented in a physical, wet matter device (brain).
Computation is generalizable and substrate-independent, and even if we're never able to get human-level capabilities from a different algorithm, over time our ability to scan and simulate the human brain will improve to where we can simply emulate it on silicon.
Read 5 tweets
Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Nov 3, 2020
Here’s a crazy idea for a new rule for society, the “Elitist Populist Futarchy”

Make the wealthy bet annually on prediction markets for outcomes the masses value. Ideally, a significant fraction of wealth. Ideally, betting for the outcomes valued by the masses.
Like, Jeff Bezos must bet $1B/year on markets for US GDP, racial justice, life expectancy, happiness, suicide rate. Professional bettors (hedge funds) would take the other side of the bet.

What would this accomplish?
Prediction markets are our best mechanism for predicting the future which helps us adapt, as well as make decisions (using conditional markets). For example, they can give us great estimates of likely global temp change despite it being a politicized topic.
Read 10 tweets
Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Sep 26, 2020
Here’s a way to think about the illusion that low effort can produce great results. It applies to any power law field, whether actors, entrepreneurs or meditators.

Suppose there are 300 incredibly successful ppl in a field - 100 who put in high effort, 100 medium, 100 low.
It seems like any level of effort can achieve huge success. But this ignores the huge disparity in how many people will put forth each level of effort.

Those 100 high effort folks come from a tiny population of 1,000 who worked 10-15 hours/day for years to maximize their odds.
The 100 medium effort successes come from 100,000 who consistently put in hours a day on their side hustle - far more than most ppl, who just dream.

The lucky 100 came from the 10,000,000 who tried sporadically and hit a miracle.
Read 6 tweets
Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Sep 8, 2020
I want to start a podcast / livestream called “Anything Goes”, where people can ask or say anything- however transgressive - however critical - however unreasonable - and I’ll try to wrestle with it with grace.

Even nihilism & personal attacks would be welcome.
We would have a policy of no premature, unrequired censorship. Meaning that if our platform bans a topic or video, they ban it, but we post it. If we find there are clear rules we have to follow to post, we’ll follow them, while looking for a more open platform.
The One Rule / prompt would be sth like “Honest attempts to answer sincere inquiries”.

Presumably I need a producer.

Who wants to egg me on? @cyantist @justGLew @ESYudkowsky @pmarca @RubinReport @DoTheWeirdStuff @diviacaroline ?
Read 4 tweets
Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Aug 14, 2020
Let's set aside both all moral arguments about wealth taxes, and the association with totalitarian collapse states.

Tactically, CA enacting a wealth tax is still an idiotic move, harming their competitiveness at the very moment when high-income residents are fleeing in droves.
CA has incredible weather, incredible human capital, and an incredible economy, hampered by high taxes, high regulation & incompetent state & city govts.

As in so many places, COVID & remote work have meaningfully tipped the balance s.t. for many, cons now outweigh pros.
At the very moment when Silicon Valley's decade-long diaspora has kicked into it's highest gear ever, adding a wealth tax would supercharge the GTFO trend.

I'd wager that conditional on this tax passing, CA tax receipts over the next decade would be significantly lower.
Read 5 tweets
Patri Friedman 🌆🚀 Profile picture
Jul 14, 2020
Working in a shared, long-lived codebase is very different from hacking bash scripts for yourself. Because many others will see your code many times, you spend far more time on docs, clarity, and organization.

I'm realizing the same mindset applies to cloud-first orgs.
When your job is to collaborate with others via a shared database (Docs, Notion, ...), you need to invest WAY MORE
on clarity, organization, cleanups.

"This doc doesn't link to it's related data" should "smell" awful in the same way as a variable named "x".
It should also smell bad to keep org data locally (text files, paper notes), make overly long docs, track unrelated concepts in the same node, track data in the wrong format (a text file that should be a spreadsheet).

How much of 21c org success is just following this mindset?
Read 4 tweets

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