Yes, this is a short term thing which is (usually?) unstable and requires actively pouring energy into maintaining. A group that has a chance of this working long term usually has specific people that act as gateways - sometimes introducing a new person, sometimes getting rid of a person who shouldn't be there. It's another side of keeping gardens well pruned. They also tend to be insular, as otherwise it's too easy for the wrong person to enter.

I was somewhat afraid that using "unthinkable" would be too excessive. It's more like you (hopefully!) not needing to worry about being murdered during a random shopping excursion. There are places where this is something you have to keep in the back of your mind. There are other places where the probablilty of this is so low that it just won't occur to most people. Or how as a tall male, I don't think I've ever worried about being raped (though I acknowledge it as a possibility) - it's just too unlikely to bother thinking about it.

I'm currently in Iceland on a trip. Today I stopped at a rest area and someone had left a plastic box with jam jars and a money box, the idea being that if you want a jar, you take one and leave the appropriate amount of money. For me it's astonishing that someone can be so trusting in other people that they'd just leave it there. But here it seems that the person who left it just... assumed that people are honest? If this assumption holds (and I'm guessing it does?) they've saved a whole bunch of time in that they can just drive up once a day to take the cash, where otherwise they'd have to either sit around waiting for someone to buy a jar or just forgo the opportunity. 

Strictly speaking, I think it's a matter of the brain just disregarding outcomes with a probabilty below a certain threshold (assuming correct calibration - people scared of planes or hoping to win the lottery are using other mechanisms). If you have a high enough trust in a given group of people, you can just disregard a lot of potentially negative outcomes, as the probability of them happening are below the threshold of caring. So if you think it's 0.01% likely for a person in a given group (where group can be "one of my friends", "a random punk", "a fellow dane" or whatever) to take your money, and your threshold for thinking about that possibility is 0.1%, then you just won't think twice about leaving your wallet with a person from that group. 

Money trust is a subset of general trust. Someone running away with your money has different consequences that someone ruining your reputation. Maybe its more that the resulting costs are in different dimensions? From that perspective there's not much of a difference in the deeper mechanisms - you have to invest in defenses and that reduces your options a lot.

I think the deeper thing here is that if you have a high enough trust between members of a group, certain whole categories of danger just disappear. You don't have to consider whether you'll be able to recoup costs or whether you will be able to credibly threaten them with consequences. These kinds of actions just aren't on the table. Leaving your wallet on the table is not an issue, as it's unthinkable that someone would take it. Letting people know that you think pineapple on pizza is actually good isn't something to worry about, as it's unthinkable that you'd lose reputation because of it.

(unthinkable being an exaggeration here - its in the sense of not worrying about being hit by a meterorite)

Economically, yes. Though that's just one aspect of it. On the margin I'd expect more to go further, as you can absorb costs easier. But again, that's just economically (although it's very important!). There's also a difference between society in general and people around you, e.g. can you trust a random person with your most embarrassing secrets is a different matter from whether you can trust them to not abscond with your wallet - both require trust, but of a different kind.

It's hard to say what a minimum is. Just avoiding hunger and having a roof over your head in practice won't be enough for lots of people as long as the Jones' have more. And that's also part of the problem, as then you have to invest in defenses against other people's envy or requests.

I think this conflates high trust in the sense of economics (that you won't be cheated) with high trust in the sense of not being emotionally (or whatever) betrayed. In the sense of economical trust it's obviously correlated - every now and then I'm struck with wonder at e.g. self checkout or in general that you can pick up a bunch of products and it's assumed you'll pay for them. This is really valuable and often unappreciated. Credit cards are both terrifying and wonderful - you use a bit of plastic to say that at some point you'll give it back and pretty much everyone takes you at your word. To the point that there are places that prefer this to hard cash! This is amazing! If someone does take your money, you let the bank know and they basically just give it back to you? How does this still work?!

That being said, I think Duncan is pointing at something else. Or maybe an extension? That if you can have this kind of trust in other areas, the equivalent of credit cards becomes possible. But by default this doesn't happen. In places where you have to continuously be on guard against people cheating/stealing from you, you have to invest a lot of resources in mitigating the downsides of this happening. When you can safely assume no one will steal from you, those resources can go to more productive areas. This generalizes.  

On reflection, it's me who was lacking imagination, or rather I failed to properly appreciate the scale you were thinking of. I was only thinking of ~western cultures where it's quite easy to avoid starvation and get the basics needed to survive (albeit often in a demeaning way). Removing extreme poverty is pretty much a prerequisite for high trust groups to be able to form, and so easy access to cheap energy is certainly worth a lot of attention in that it helps bring people to the starting point.

Religion? This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but being wealthy is not that well correlated with high-trust? As a simple counter argument, if it correlated well, I'd expect rich countries to be a lot more high-trust that poor countries. This doesn't seem to be the case, as the article was written in the context of pretty much the richest place on earth.

The highest trust places I've been in were in dirt poor Christian communities. As a child I never starved, though there were times when the cupboards were empty. Resources just appeared, as some other family noticed that we were low and brought stuff over. An when we noticed someone else was low, we'd share our stuff.

Physical wealth is an important component, as a hungry mob is an angry mob (as an aside, Orwell describes that well). This is more of a matter of a minimum being supplied, though. Much more important is social/emotional/? wealth. You have to be able to trust that your neighbors aren't Out To Get You. You have to be confident that people will pretty much always cooperate in prisoners dilemma. But at the same time you have to know that they know that you also will cooperate. A trivial example being Punks in a mosh pit - you don't have to worry about falling over, because you know that everyone around you will pick you up. This only works when there is a (~correct!) assumption that helping is the default. That not helping (unless you're even more in need of help, but even then you should do what you can) is defecting.

Being part of something bigger or having a common goal is probably a much better pathway than maximizing wealth. Something like Earthseed (potential spoiler alert for Parable of the Sower) or the Utopia fraction from Terra Ignota (ditto for spoilers). That being said, Duncan is pointing at something crucial here - lots of people can't even comprehend such a society, and they act as prions.

Having studied Latin, or other such classical training, seems to be but one method of imbuing oneself with the the style of writing longer, more complicated sentences. Personally I acquired the taste for such eccentricities perusing sundry works from earlier times. Romances, novels and other such frivolities from, or set in, the 18-th century being the main culprits.

I suppose this sort of proves your point, in that those authors learnt to create complicated sentences from learning Latin, and the later writers copied the style, thinking either that it's fun, correct, or wanting to seem more authentic.

I can do more projects in parallel than I could have before. Which means that I have even more work now... The support and maintenance costs of the code itself are the same, as long as you maintain constant vigilance to make sure nothing bad gets merged. So the costs are moved from development to review. It's a lot easier to produce thousands of lines of slop which then have to be reviewed and loads of suggestions made. It's easy for bad taste to be amplified, which is a real cost that might not be noticed that much.   

There are some evals which work on large codebases (e.g. "fix this bug in django"), but those are the minority, granted. They can help with the scaffolding, though - those tend to be large projects in which a Claude can help find things.

But yeah, large files are ok if you just want to find something, but somewhere under 500 loc seems to be the limit of what will work well. Though you can get round it somewhat by copying the parts to be changed to a different file then copying them back, or other hacks like that...