I suspect that almost all work that can be done remotely can be done even more cheaply the more remote you make it (not outside-the-city, but outside-the-continent).  I also suspect that it's not all that long before many or most mid-level fully-remotable jobs become irrelevant entirely.  Partially-remotable jobs (WFH 80% or less of the time, where the in-office human connections are (seen as) important part of the job) don't actually let people live somewhere truly cheap.

I think you're also missing many of the motivations for preferring a suburban area near (but not in the core of) a big city - schools and general sortation (having most neighbors in similar socioeconomic situation). 

I wonder if you're objecting to identifying this group as cult-like, or to implying that all cults are bad and should be opposed.  Personally, I find a LOT of human behavior, especially in groups, to be partly cult-like in their overfocus on group-identification and othering of outsiders, and often in outsized influence of one or a few leaders.   I don't think ALL of them are bad, but enough are to be a bit suspicious without counter-evidence. 

I tend to use nlogn (N things, times logN overhead) as my initial complexity estimate for coordinating among "things".  It'll, of course, vary widely with specifics, but it's surprising how often it's reasonably useful for thinking about it.

Wish I could upvote and disagree.  Evolution is a mechanism without a target.  It's the result of selection processes, not the cause of those choices.

There have been a number of debates (which I can't easily search on, which is sad) about whether speech is an action (intended to bring about a consequence) or a truth-communication or truth-seeking (both imperfect, of course) mechanism.  It's both, at different times to different degrees, and often not explicit about what the goals are.

The practical outcome seems spot-on.  With some people you can have the meta-conversation about what they want from an interaction, with most you can't, and you have to make your best guess, which you can refine or change based on their reactions.

Out of curiosity, when chatting with an LLM, do you wonder what its purpose is in the responses it gives?  I'm pretty sure it's "predict a plausible next token", but I don't know how I'll know to change my belief.

Gah!  I missed my chance to give one of my favorite Carl Sagan quotes, a recipe for Apple Pie, which demonstrates the universality and depth of this problem:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe.

Note that the argument whether MWI changes anything is very different from the argument about what matters and why.  I think it doesn't change anything, independently of how much what things in-universe matter.

Separately, I tend to think "mattering is local".  I don't argue as strongly for this, because it's (recursively) a more personal intuition, less supported by type-2 thinking.  

I think all the same arguments that it doesn't change decisions also apply to why it doesn't change virtue evaluations.  It still all adds up to normality.  It's still unimaginably big.  Our actions as well as our beliefs and evaluations are irrelevant at most scales of measurement.

I think this is the right way to think of most anti-inductive (planner-adversarial or competitive exploitation) situations.  Where there are multiple dimensions of assymetric capabilities, any change is likely to shift the equilibrium, but not necessarily by as much as the shift in component.  

That said, tipping points are real, and sometimes a component shift can have a BIGGER effect, because it shifts the search to a new local minimum.  In most cases, this is not actully entirely due to that component change, but the discovery and reconfiguration is triggered by it.  The rise of mass shootings in the US is an example - there are a lot of causes, but the shift happened quite quickly.

Offense-defense is further confused as an example, because there are at least two different equilibria involved.  when you say

The offense-defense balance is a concept that compares how easy it is to protect vs conquer or destroy resources.

Conquer control vs retain control is a different thing than destroy vs preserve.  Frank Herbert claimed (via fiction) that "The people who can destroy a thing, they control it." but it's actually true in very few cases.  The equilibrium of who gets what share of the value from something can shift very separately from the equilibrium of how much total value that thing provides.

Hmm. I think there are two dimensions to the advice (what is a reasonable distribution of timelines to have, vs what should I actually do).  It's perfectly fine to have some humility about one while still giving opinions on the other.  "If you believe Y, then it's reasonable to do X" can be a useful piece of advice.  I'd normally mention that I don't believe Y, but for a lot of conversations, we've already had that conversation, and it's not helpful to repeat it.