I expect that there's no simple relationship between these factors and success.  Both are required, and it's idiosyncratic which one is most lacking in any given margin between not-success and success.

Assuming all cars are traveling at a speed that gives 3 seconds of time between cars, any change to speed limit cannot affect the traveler throughput, and each car added lowers the speed of all other cars, including those at the front.

I don't think this assumption holds.  I don't know what shape the actual speed-distance relationship is, but it's not a straight line at a given number of seconds.  

I also think the throughput measure (cars entering/exiting per hour) is rarely the most important thing for drivers or even planners.  Average trip time outweighs it heavily.

1. European Roulette has a house edge of 2.7%. I think in the UK, gambling winnings don't get taxed. I think in the US, you wouldn't tax each win, but just your total winnings.

If you go the casino route, craps is slightly better.  Don't pass is 1.40% house edge, and they let you take (or lay, for don't pass) "free odds" on a point, which is 0% (pays true odds of winning), getting it down below a percent.  Taxes may not matter if you can deduct the full charitable contribution.  

Note that if you had a perfect 50% even-money bet, you'd have to win 10 times to turn your $1000 into $1.024M. 0.5 ^ 10 = 0.000977, so you've got almost a tenth of a percent of winning.   

Also, you don't necessarily need to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions in a coop, since you can grant someone a proxy.

You definitely need to think about these things to value working in a coop (or a corporation in which part of your compensation is voting stock) vs "just a job".  If you are going to just grant a proxy, you'd prefer to be paid more in money and less in control.

Also also, why are socialist-vibe blogposts so often relegated to "personal blogpost" while capitalist-vibe blogposts aren't? I mean, I get the automatic barrage of downvotes, but you'd think the mods would at least try to appear impartial.

I upvoted, but I don't expect it to be particularly popular or front-page-worthy.  It may be partly about the vibe, but I suspect it's mostly about the content - it's a little less rigorous in causality of impact than the more common front-page topics, and it comes across as an attempt to influence rather than to explore or analyze from a rational(ist) standpoint.

There's an important question of scale here.  One size almost certainly does not fit all, and the best governance for a multinational many-billion-dollar enterprise is different from that of a local consumer-service organization.

Also, there's a large group of people who seem to prefer to have a "pure employment" model, without having to think about investment strategy or influencing corporate decisions.  

1. If you spend 8000 times less on AI alignment (compared to the military),
2. You must also believe that AI risk is 8000 times less (than military risk).^[1]

No.  You must believe that spending on military is 8000 times more helpful to your goals.  And really, in a democracy or other multilateral decision framework, nobody actually has to believe this, it just has to be 8000 times easier to agree to spend a marginal amount, which is quite path-dependent.

Even if you DO believe the median estimates as given, you have to weight it by the marginal change that spending makes.  Military spending keeps the status quo, rewards your constituents, makes you look good, etc.   AI spending is ... really confusing and doesn't really help any political goals.  It's absolutely not clear that spending more can increase safety - the obvious thing that happens when you spend is acceleration, not slowdown.

Ah, yes - bargaining solutions that ignore or hide a significant underlying power disparity are rampant in wishful-thinking academic circles, and irrelevant in real life.  That's the context I was missing; my confusion is resolved.  Thanks!

I'm missing some context here.  Is this not obvious, and well-supported by the vast majority of "treaties" between europeans and natives in the 16th through 19th centuries?  For legal settlements, it's generally between the extremes that each party would prefer, but it's not always the case that this range doesn't include "quite bad", even if not completely arbitrary.

"We'll kill you quickly and painlessly" isn't actually arbitrarily bad, it's only quite bad.  There are possibly worse outcomes available if no agreement was available.
 

Overall this feels comfortable and reasonable to me in some situations, but I had a very strong negative reaction to the opening, as I applied it to other situations until I'd read the whole thing.

one is constantly called to account for one’s behavior. At any moment, one may be asked “what are you doing?” or “why did you do that?” And one is expected to provide a reasonable answer.

This sounds like a nightmare.  But that depends a whole lot on the frequency and intensity of such questions and discussion.  "constantly called to account" just isn't going to work for me.  "able to discuss goals and behaviors when useful and appropriate" is mandatory for happy coexistence (for me).  And they're the same thing, just slight variants.

I think the key underlying context to call out is "presumption of alignment".  Among people who overall share a philosophy and at least some goals, this all just works.  Among less-trusted acquaintances, it does not.