I guess is depends on the kind of work you do (and maybe whether you have ADHD). From my perspective, yes, attention is even more scarce than time or money, because when I get home from work, it feels like all my "thinking energy" is depleted, and even if I could somehow leverage the time or money for some good purpose, I am simply unable to do that. Working even more would mean that my private life would fall apart completely. And people would probably ask "why didn't he simply...?", and the answer would be that even the simple things become very difficult to do when all my "thinking energy" is gone.

There are probably smart ways to use money to reduce the amount of "thinking energy" you need to spend in your free time, but first you need enough "thinking energy" to set up such system. The problem is, the system needs to be flawless, because otherwise you still need to spend "thinking energy" to compensate for its flaws.

EDIT: I especially hate things like the principal-agent problem, where the seemingly simple answer is: "just pay a specialist to do that, duh", but that immediately explodes to "but how can I find a specialist?" and "how can I verify that they are actually doing a good job?", which easily become just as difficult as the original problem I tried to solve.

This made me wonder whether the logic of "you don't care about your absolute debt, but about its ratio to your income" also applies to individual humans. On one hand, it seems like obviously yes; people typically take a mortgage proportional to their income. On the other hand, it also seems to make sense to worry about the absolute debt, for example in case you would lose your current job and couldn't get a new one that pays as much.

So I guess the idea is how much you can rely on your income remaining high, and how much it is potentially a fluke. If you expect it is a fluke, perhaps you should compare your debt to whatever is typical for your reference group, whatever that might be.

Does something like that also make sense for countries? Like, if your income depends on selling oil, you should consider the possibilities of running out of oil, or the prices of oil going down, etc., simply imagine the same country but without the income from selling oil (or maybe just having half the income), and look at your debt from that perspective. Would something similar make sense for USA?

The most likely/frequent outcome of "trying to build something that will last" is failure. You tried to build an AI, but it doesn't work. You tried to convince people that trade is better than violence, they cooked you for dinner. You tried to found a community, no one was interested. A group of friends couldn't decide when and where to meet.

But if you succeed to... create a pattern that keeps going on... then the thing you describe is the second most likely outcome. It turns out that your initial creation had parts that were easier or harder to replicate, and the easier ones keep going and growing, and the harder ones gradually disappear. The fluffy animal died, but its skeleton keeps walking.

It's like casting an animation spell on a thing, and finding out that the spell only affects certain parts of the thing, if any.

Ouch. Sometimes the answer to "Why don't you simply X?" is "What makes you so sure I didn't already 'simply X' in the past, and maybe it just didn't work as well as advertised?".

It's not necessarily that the strategy is bad, but sometimes it needs a few ingredients to make it work, such as specific skills, or luck.

Could you maybe somehow flip everything upside down in the middle of baking? So you get two tops.

Sounds like pair programming, except the programming part is optional.

I’d like a large rolodex of such people, both for me, and other people I know who could use help.

Maybe different people need different assistants.

Seems to me that being a good assistant has two components: good communication skills (patience, clarity of explaining, adjusting the advice to target's current skills and knowledge), and skills in the specific thing you want to assist with. With the communication skills, different people may prefer different styles, but there probably would be a general consensus on what is better. With the task-specific skills, it depends on what you already know. Someone could provide useful advice to beginners, but have nothing useful to say to an expert.

I guess, if you make a list for other people, it should make clear what is the level of your skill where the assistant will be useful for you. There is nothing wrong with only being useful to beginners, if there are beginners who will use the list; and in a large group there will probably be more beginners than experts on any specific topic.

You can create another account to make an anonymous comment. But it's inconvenient.

(Not sure whether this is an argument for or against anonymous commenting.)

I would need more data to make an opinion on this.

At first sight, it seems to me like having a rule "if your total karma is less than 100, you are not allowed to downvote an article or a comment if doing so would push it under zero" would be good.

But I have no idea how often that happens in real life. Do we actually have many readers with karma below 100 who bother to vote?

By the way, I didn't vote on your article, but... you announced that you were writing a book i.e. it is not even finished, you didn't provide a free chapter or something... so what exactly was there to upvote you for?

(Sorry, this is too blunt, and I understand that people need some positive reinforcement along the way. But this is not a general website to make people feel good; unfortunately, aspiring rationalists are a tiny fraction of the general population, so making this website more welcoming to the general population would get us hopelessly diluted. Also, there is a soft taboo on politics, which your post was kinda about, without providing something substantial to justify that.)

Seems to me like a "glass half full vs half empty" situation. What was the standard alternative to a society that preached freedom and oppressed many people? Probably a society that oppressed even more people, and also taught everyone that it was the right thing to do.

In your historical examples, you mention the negatives, but don't mention the positives. For example, revolutionary France has abolished slavery; so if we (rightfully) criticize USA for the slavery, it seems fair to mention this as a point in favor of France.

If we compare these examples to societies that existed at the same time or the same place... well, I don't know the historical rate of political opponents murdered, but I suspect that it was pretty high; it's just that when the kings or the holy inquisition do it, most people accept it as their divine right. Similarly, Soviet Union was a horrible place, but Russia has always been (and still remains) a horrible place.

(Also, Soviet Union did not exactly consider itself Liberal. Lenin would call most liberal things "bourgeois".)

So I think the criticism is that you can declare your aspirations overnight, but it may still take years, sometimes centuries, to implement them in real life. Therefore we should think of wannabe-liberal societies as being on their way towards something good, rather than being already there.

In my experience, I only remember one example of a successful "coup". It was a private company that started small, and then became wildly successful. Two key employees were savvy enough to realize that this is not necessary a good news for them. The founders, those will definitely become rich. But a rich company will hire more employees, which means that a relative importance of each one of them will decrease. And the position of the founders towards those two will probably become something like: "okay guys, you spent a decade working hard to make all of this happen, but... you got your salaries, so we don't owe you anything; what have you done for us recently?".

So those two guys joined forces and together blackmailed the founders: "either you make both of us co-owners, right now, or we both quit". And the company couldn't afford to lose them, because one of them wrote like 90% of the code used by the company, and the other had all the domain expertise the company needed. (Now imagine how different the power balance could be one year later, if the company had maybe three new employees understanding the code, and three more employees to learn the domain knowledge.) So the original founders grudgingly accepted the deal. I think there were some symbolic concessions like "but we have spent our money to build this company, so you will have to pay that part back from your future profits", but that was completely unimportant, because until now the company was small, and soon it became huge and rich, so the money was probably paid back in a few months, and the two guys are millionaires now.

(More generally, I get the impression that early employees in companies often get a bad deal, because first they are told "the company is still small, it may not even survive, so you need to work harder and we can't afford to pay you better... but think about the bright future if the company succeeds", and then it turns out that the future is bright for the owners, and the burned out employees probably get replaced by new hires who are full of energy and bring new technologies. Oh, and if they own any "equity", it almost always turns out that for some technical reasons it doesn't mean what they thought it meant, and instead of 5% of the company they actually own 0.005%, plus they have to pay a lot of tax for that privilege.)

I think a much more frequent situation is that people predict that they would end up in a similar situation, and avoid it by starting their own project rather than joining an existing one. Now in certain contexts, this is business as usual -- everyone who starts their own company rather than joining an existing one is doing exactly this. (You don't need to organize a coup, if you are the legitimate owner.)

Problem is, we have different social norms for "business" and for "community". In business, being openly selfish is legitimate. If someone asks you "why do you want to start your own company rather than work for someone else?", if you say "because I want to get rich", this is a perfectly acceptable answer. (The person may doubt your ability, but not your motivation.) In community context however, you are supposed to optimize for some greater good, rather than your own profit. That of course doesn't prevent the smart people from taking the profit! But they must argue that what they are doing is for the greater good. And if you want to start a competing project, you must also become a hypocrite and argue the same, otherwise all the people who are there for the community feeling will boycott you.

This is why "build a 10% better mousetrap" is a legitimate goal, but "build a 10% better web portal for artists" is not. The 10% improvement means nothing if the community accuses you of being a greedy selfish bastard who only cares about money and not about art, and they blacklist you and everyone who cooperates with you. And yes, if you understand how the game is played, the initiators of the backlash are those who profit from the existing system. But you can't say this out loud; it would only prove that you care about the money. So both sides will keep arguing complete bullshit, trying to get the confused people on their side. The important thing is to get confused high-status people on your side, because then the rest will follow. The old group will argue that "we need to protect our current values" and "splitting our small community will ultimately hurt everyone". The new group will argue that "we need more diversity" and "providing more options will attract more people to our common cause". (Then the old group will whine: "so why don't you add those new options to our current community website instead?" And the new group will respond: "you had plenty of opportunity to do that already, which means that you are either incompetent or unwilling, and we need a new space for the new ideas".)

You talk about a "crypto community", which I suspect is another example of the same thing. The people who have the power are there for the money. Everyone else is there for the feeling of community. The community is an important part of how the people with power make the money. But they very likely optimize for money, the community is only instrumental. In the occasional situation where "what is good for the people who make money" is significantly different from "what is good for the community", the arguments of the people with power may sound a bit... confused... but everyone else interprets it charitably as a "honest mistake" or "well, I don't have all the information they have, so maybe it's my fault that I do not understand their perspective". This is because the people who know better are either part of the inner circle, or have already left the community (or have never joined it in the first place); or maybe are there for their own selfish purposes, which are unrelated to the goals of the founders or the community (someone analogical to publishers in the artistic community).

(By the way, these days when I hear a company owner say something like "we are all like a big family here", I treat it as a red flag. That basically means that the owner wants me to apply community norms in a business situation. Thank you, but I keep my communities outside of my workplace, where I won't lose them if one day my boss decides to press the button.)