7 ms·

The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

126 points by tush726 1y ago

nosefurhairdo 1y ago
Lots of bold assertions without evidence. Author claims Google's high salaries killed entrepreneurship. Is there any data to back this claim? Or the idea that democracy can't adapt to social media discourse; not everyone is chronically online. Politicians still respond to public sentiment to similar degree as they always have. Then there's this: > AI systems aren't just tools—they're deployed faster than we can develop frameworks for understanding their social implications. If they aren't just tools, what are they? Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications? Post feels like a fever dream of someone who fell asleep to the Navalmanack audiobook.
- bluetomcat 1y ago
  With a lot of fancy wording, the article basically proposes that slow-moving, bureaucratic educational institutions should catch up with TikTok’s latest algorithm, helping raise the next generation of influencers.
  - RajT88 1y ago
    To the effect it clearly proposes anything!
  - Perepiska 1y ago
    "billions of influencers"
- thrawa8387336 1y ago
  The only thing worse than the author claiming that is you asking for "data". Like what data? This is qualitative. And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke
  - motorest 1y ago
    > And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke To me, it reads like a desperate far-fetched argument to deny employees a fair compensation for their work. As if there is any virtue in stiffing people out of their paycheck.
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    It’s always kind of funny when people respond to a subjective opinion with “where’s the data?” because unless you’re responding with data it’s pretty much just a way of saying “I don’t like this”
    - trinsic2 1y ago
      Yeah, I noticed this too. It's a kind of response one would make if one felt threatened by the subject matter.
    - rwmj 1y ago
      The blog post makes a bold claim about how the rise of tech salaries at Google killed entrepreneurship. The poster could have at least given this a sniff test: how about, for example, showing a graph of Google salaries overlaid with a graph of the number of start-ups from the crunchbase database? As he didn't even go to this minimum effort, it's valid to ask "where's the data" here.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - jrflowers 1y ago
        This is a good point. When somebody says something “killed” an intangible thing, they are obviously speaking literally. Honestly we don’t even need a graph, surely if he’s alleging a murder he would be able to produce the weapon, like a knife or a gun Now obviously someone could mistakenly interpret that sentiment as “incredibly high salaries attracted talent of such caliber that they could have started their own companies but did not” but that simply can’t be possible because there is no graph that shows all of the businesses that didn’t happen, therefore it is literal. It’s not like anybody on here has worked with somebody that could easily have started their own company but chose SWE at a FAANG. It’s just not a thing
- jrflowers 1y ago
  >Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications? I would guess that the argument for wanting a framework for understanding language models’ social implications would be the social implications of language models. Like a phenomenon existing is a valid argument for understanding it. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatgpt-ai-self-mutilation-satanism/683649/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatg... https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250... >not everyone is chronically online Do you have data to support this? What does “chronically” mean and why would its absence invalidate the idea of social media impacting how people act and vote?
- la64710 1y ago
  This is a blog post not a research paper. The evidence is anecdotal and most people with common sense know it by intuition all the facts that the author mentions.
- sien 1y ago
  The number of unicorns was 39 when the term was coined in 2013. Then there was 119 by 2018 and then there were 1284 unicorns by May 2024. From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)#History So not only is there no data to back up the authors claim but it is wrong and could be checked by looking at wikipedia. You don't have to be right, you can make claims, but when you make grand claims you should at least check wikipedia.
  - nothrabannosir 1y ago
    Your broader point may stand but that’s not a counter argument if you give the original claim the benefit of the doubt: it can reasonably be interpreted as referencing lifestyle oriented businesses, niche b2b companies, anything small growth with a low ceiling. Counting unicorns only serves to bolster that point : those are large VC fueled ships which operate on a completely different level. Because it is clear at founding time which type of company they are , it’s reasonable to include that as a qualifier. Now if the data showed more small-growth companies were started , that’d be a stronger counter argument.
    - vlovich123 1y ago
      What do businesses need? Startup capital. What’s a good way to obtain it? Having a high salary and saving. The counter argument is that high salaries enable more people to save and take risk rather than just those that start out wealthy. The main counter is that people get comfortable and don’t take risks is definitely true, but I’m not sure how much that impacts the amount of entrepreneurship that would have otherwise happened.
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    Not sure about that. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/google-stanford-and-the-idf-professional-backgrounds-of-unicorn-founders/ https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/google-stanford-and-the...
  - jrflowers 1y ago
    This makes sense so long as you define “entrepreneurship” as the act of making a legal entity with the goal of using venture capital to hit a billion dollar valuation as quickly as possible. In fact since the number of billion dollar valuations goes up by an order of magnitude every few years we are on track for every person on earth to start a billion dollar corporation in a few short decades. This is proof that you could see on Wikipedia that entrepreneurship is doing great
- bbor 1y ago
  If they aren't just tools, what are they? I wrote a lot more below, but I think you've picked up on two important things here: 1. This post seems likely to have been written with the assistance of a chatbot, which explains this phrase. The "they aren't just tools" phrase is only there because he needed a third example for a "it's not just X--it's Y" paragraph, one of ChatGPT's all-time fave constructions. 2. Another cause is more fundamental: the third "leverage" doesn't really apply to this discussion IMO. It's probably useful elsewhere, but owning a large social media company is just a different variety of capital, not some mutually-exclusive group. All expressions of capitalist power in 2025 have some amount of technological amplification going on.
- reissbaker 1y ago
  Given the frequent "it's not X—it's Y" type of constructions, lack of researched data, and the em-dashes, unfortunately I think this is the fever dream of a GPU cluster humming away somewhere.
- vineyardmike 1y ago
  This isn’t particularly controversial tbh. Yes Google’s high salaries are part of a system that has been reworking entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. This has been documented and discussed at length. Did you look for data? Big tech pays in valuable stock, and salaries can reach upwards of 500k for relative rank and file positions (not rare one offs). Over a decade, that’s $5M. At the same time, VC firms have been holding companies private longer raising more rounds, which often dilutes the employee shares and reduces the “reward” for employees waiting for an IPO. If that new diluted IPO rewards an employee under $5M for a decade of employment, they were better off at Google/Meta/etc. Startups were always a lottery ticket, but if a “winning” ticket is less profitable than not playing, why join at all? This plays directly into the thesis that the powerful are extracting additional resources at the expense of the cultural expectations and understandings. VC firms diluting employees is profitable for VCs, but it jeopardizes the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem if smart people prefer better compensation. Same with the recent AI aqui-hire controversies like Windsurf. Why join a startup if the CEO will take a billion dollar payout and leave the employees with worthless stock.
bjornsing 1y ago
Or maybe it just feels that way because the world is being fixed at unprecedented rates? For example I had the misfortune to needing help from the mental health community a decade ago. I sometimes think about how much easier that part of my life would have been if TikTok and Claude had existed back then. It’s easy to forget, but many of the institutions we’ve built over centuries are deeply dysfunctional and very much in need of disruption. The night often seems darkest just before dawn. (With that said, I agree there are risks of the kind you describe.)
- ehnto 1y ago
  I don't think you should be getting mental health advice from LLMs, it has been shown that their sycophantic nature reinforces your own diagnoses not that of a professionals. Using an LLM in a field you're knowledgeable in would make you think twice about their accuracy in fields you are unable to know the correctness of personally. It will all sound very convincing, but may be a fundamentally flawed diagnoses. Another way of thinking about, a non-trivial amount of training data is internet comments and blogs, which have an alarming amount of self diagnoses, non-professional diagnoses, and totally fabricated facts about mental illness.
  - hyperadvanced 1y ago
    Agree, pointing to TikTok and LLMs as a “disrupter” to the prevailing psychotherapeutic industry is crazy town. Those media reify / amplify the exact same crazy of their training set into absurdity.
    - bjornsing 1y ago
      To be clear I have nothing against the prevailing psychotherapeutic industry. I’m very thankful for that part of the mental health community. I think it’s rather well-aligned with TikTok too, btw.
      - hyperadvanced 1y ago
        I’m fairly opposed to both, but respect the difference of opinion
cokeandpepsi 1y ago
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gtsop 1y ago
While the reasoning I believe to be utterly littered with weak arguments, I agree with the final conclusion/question of the author. But what the author isn't clearly saying is that he is describing a free market opposed to a planned economy, even if he doesn't specificly say that, that's the implication of the final question. And I am all for planned economy. I want to cooperate with my human fellows, not compete to crush them. In this day and age it is obsurd not to this. The technology is there, we just need to use it the right way. I know many will do a knee-jerk reaction to this statement and start spitting out the old anti-soviet economy arguments about planned economy, I'm bracing. If you want competition then accept the social outcomes. Wanting to equalize competition through regulation is exactly like banning war crimes. When war is raging all kinds of war crimes will be commited.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Technically the market economy we live in is designed to function by containing a whole lot of smaller planned economies (businesses).
- r14c 1y ago
  We already have a planned economy in a lot of ways anyway. We just don't have much collective control over who governs those levers. Particularly when it comes to resource allocation. VC might look like a free market approach on the surface, but it gives huge power to shape the economy to unaccountable un elected randos who likely "come from money" with a lot of skeletons in their closets. Even if they don't, having that kind if power with essentially no checks is a recipe for disaster. We don't have to copy the Soviets exactly, but it's foolish to pretend like their system didn't work. Sure they killed and imprisioned people, but we do the same on at least the same scale. Socialism at least in principle isn't specifically aiming for that outcome. Whatever we're doing here kinda does. Our country would crumble if the war machine ever stopped. Changing our approach to anything is just too expensive to consider and dissent can't be tolerated for the same reason. What options do we really have? Surely we can do better
- an_0bserver 1y ago
  An economy is only free if left uncontrolled. IMO emergence of "cartels" and colluding entities (including politicians), have destroyed the notion of truly free markets.
germandiago 1y ago
Bureaucracy and institutions are by definition slower. It has always been like that. If they want to have more impact, they need to adapt to more market-like techniques. Whether an institution moving faster would be good or bad, I am not sure actually. Probably moving too fast for something that belongs to "everyone", with all kinds of heated opinions, etc. is not the best place to move fast. OTOH, and this is as a spanish (I do not know enough about the specifics of America), I feel that nowadays part of the insritutions are "injected" changes that the society is not demanding from them. Destroying the established base and traditions of the (in this case) society. Social engineering and influencing campaigns I would say. Maybe this is not the main topic of the article. Just was a brain dump I was doing about observations of my own. These things have always existed actually. It is just that with technology and many people using it, information from individuals, etc. this influence is probably made more effectively.
dvt 1y ago
> making employment more attractive than company-building This is decidedly untrue. You can make a few clever(er) points here: VC meddling is rotting at the core of ingenuity (which I happen to agree with) or even that large companies (GOOG/MSFT/etc.) are tangentially capturing startups via incentives (think free credits, etc.). But author doesn't make these, so I won't argue against (or for) them. > Today, higher-leverage actors are strip-mining institutional commons—democratic norms, social trust, educational relevance, economic mobility—faster than lower-leverage actors can regenerate them. This will seem like a technicality, but for a pedant like myself, it's quite important: this is absolutely not the tragedy of the commons. It might be a new tragedy (maybe we'll call it "theft?"), but the interesting and paradoxical nature of the original has nothing to do with this reformulation. What makes the tragedy of the commons interesting is that all agents will favor maximizing their local maxima in spite of minimizing the global maxima. A sort of "missing the forest for the trees" thing. > The stakes couldn't be higher. If we don't develop conscious approaches to managing leverage arbitrage, we risk a future where technological capability advances exponentially while social coordination capacity deteriorates linearly—a recipe for civilizational breakdown. This seems a tad dramatic; "leverage arbitrage" was significantly higher during colonial or industrial times and society didn't exactly collapse. I agree with the sentiment, but not sure about all the "боже мой."
halayli 1y ago
When you read the title, "Why everything feels broken and what can we do", it is obvious op turned a me problem into an us problem. It's a common pitfall to take yourself out of the equation when you are about to make assertions without evidence to back them up. The title could have been written as: "Why do I feel everything is broken, and what can I do about it". you will end up writing a completely different post as a result. a more sincere one, and one that is closer to the reality of the situation that needs to be addressed, and that is one's perceptions, biases, and feelings that come from our own personal experiences.
- King-Aaron 1y ago
  Except the OP is kind of right I feel.
- icehawk 1y ago
  Actually, when I read this, it was obvious that this issue was an us problem and not just a me problem.
- zwnow 1y ago
  No OP is right. Everything is broken. Thinking your system isn't and its OPs issue is not sincere.
- Guthur 1y ago
  Well certainly, some of us are all in on psychopathic material accumulation and so of course in that case the only things that are broken are those that stand in your way, such as morality or society.
- root_axis 1y ago
  Seems like you've fixated on a detail about the title and have ignored the substance of the post. Whether or not some everyone agrees that "everything feels broken" doesn't really matter.
  - randomcarbloke 1y ago
    But the substance of the post appears to be word-salad and I've already had my five-a-day.
dyauspitr 1y ago
So VCs bad for funding ideas, big tech bad for paying high salaries. I completely reject your notions.
- mdavid626 1y ago
  It feels like, you completely missed the point.
raincole 1y ago
The articles on this blog before 2025 never contained em-dashes. Not even a single one. And the articles from 2025 onward all use em-dashes. Curious, huh? > Each operates at a different mathematical order: linear, exponential, and systematic respectively. This was where I stop reading. "Systematic" mathematical order. Sure.
- xxs 1y ago
  It has all the classics
  - raincole 1y ago
    I know I shouldn't care at all. However I can't help but feel a little bit sad knowing that a (I suppose) once genuine blogger simply gave up and decided to delegate his thinking process to a token machine.
    - xxs 1y ago
      >I know I shouldn't care at all. Personally I do care about punctuation, it's part of the (my) style and presentation, the way to convey meaning, etc. Still a reference to a classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865024
      - raincole 1y ago
        Oh I do care punctuation (at least when I'm writing long-form stuff). I mean I shouldn't have cared enough to look at the past articles or comment here. The proper response to AI submissions is ignore and optionally flag.
    - endymion-light 1y ago
      I hate AI writing, but I get it on pointless B2B marketing & awful linkedin posts, they're worth nothing, and it's a great way to block and ignore an account. But the fact that blog trying to communicate an interesting idea is using a predictive machine to word things is just so depressing. Is it your blog, or is it chatgpts? Did you come up with the term leverage arbitrage, or did a predictive model? Did OP just provide an outline and let the predictive model write the entire thing? It just feels sad.
joules77 1y ago
Engineering/STEM training doesn't have what is required to fix such problems. So they have to get involved with multi-disciplinary groups or nothing useful will ever get built that actually fixes things. This is why lot of people within tech/science circles feel lost and defensive about their work. They barely understand anything about the humanities/social sciences. Consciousness of what is missing is increasing slowly, thanks to the info tsunami the internet has unleashed. But that info delivery architecture relies on pseudo experts and celebs whose survival depends on collecting views, and is delivered to the mind in such random order, with high levels of over stimulation and noise, that it creates even more confusion. What's missing? No foundations in Philosophy. No idea where Value Systems come from. No idea how they are maintained - learn - adapt to change. No idea why all religious systems train their priests in some form of "Pastoral Care" involving constant contact with ordinary people and their suffering. So the Vatican survives the fall of nations/empires/plagues/economic downturns/reformation/enlightenment/pedo scandals etc but science/engineering orgs look totally helpless reacting to systemic shocks and go running to Legal/HR/PR people for help. That's at the org level. At the individual level, most tech folk pretend the limitations/divisions of their own brain/mind don't exist and have no impact on what they build. There is no awareness of what Plato/Hume/Freud/Kahneman have to say about it and how those divisions of the non united mind and denial of it effect what gets built. And since the article mentions systems running at different speed think about the electrical and chemical signaling in your own mind. Are they happening at the same speed? So don't try to work all this out by yourself. Multi-disciplinary groups are our only hope. If the org is filled with only engineers, history already shows us how the story unfolds.
Peteragain 1y ago
I liked the blog post. I try not to "game the system" and usually get all judgemental about people who do. Okay I am old fashioned. Putting on my Gordon Gecko hat ("greed is good"), of course, it is the disparity between system reaction times that enables gaming it. What system can one develop to get inside an adversary's OODA Loop (observe, orient, decide, and act). I like the idea that it's a (meta)system problem, it's about leverage.
raydenvm 1y ago
Excuse me, I can't help but cite this one wonderful song: "When everything's made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am" (c) Iris by Goo Goo Dolls I feel it touches on something deep that has to do with the current state of the tech world.
exmadscientist 1y ago
What a strange article. It feels like one of those cases where the author gathers so many of the pieces, then, just... fails to solve the puzzle. Or get anywhere close. I agree that everything feels broken. I'd like to do something about it. Let me deploy my leverage to work on that. Here's my "labor leverage", right here, this comment. Check. Leverage strength... not much. Let's bring my "capital leverage" to bear... okay, done, my 401(k) is invested in my favorite companies. Did you notice? No? Okay, leverage strength... let's go with epsilon^2. And my "code leverage"... uh... I don't think I have any. So, wait, I, personally, don't have any third-order leverage at all? How am I supposed to go up against trillion-dollar, billion-node networks, with my epsilon^3 "leverage"? That's the real problem: I don't actually have any meaningful leverage. I'm not in the game. Is that actually true? Doesn't matter: I believe it to be true. Sure looks like everything is broken to me.
- kelseyfrog 1y ago
  What are you talking about? This is about hyper-scaling unicorns who can create and scale a business faster than the regulatory framework[government] can respond. "Disruption" is a dog whistle for "we're going to break the law faster than the government can keep up." The game is scaling from disruption to entrenchment before the first "The United States vs You" hits your desk. If you don't have the ability to play the game then you can believe it doesn't exist, but those playing it found a slot machine that only lands on 777.
  - exmadscientist 1y ago
    Right, that's one of the pieces. The article does not really fit that piece into the framework of "why do people in society feel that things are broken?" (which your comment seems to do just fine). Hence my complaint about the article. Unfortunately sibling comments have exposed this article as likely to be AI slop, which would explain pretty everything about it. Now I am reassessing my own ability to be taken in by slop, and that's depressing in different ways....
ball_of_lint 1y ago
> helping people recognize the type of power they're actually wielding and use it more consciously lol, lmao even. I don't even think this would work if there wasn't capitalism in play. > Most importantly, we need to redesign how we measure success and allocate resources. Oh, they Are suggesting we dismantle capitalism. Even if we were to dismantle capitalism in America, TikTok is a Chinese business/product. So this has to be a global solution. While we're wielding our lever that can move the globe let's fix global warming, war, hunger, etc while we're at it. No point in half measures. Does feel good to read though, nice and fluffy.
joshtbradley 1y ago
Excellent observation. But I believe your proposed solutions could be strengthened. Improving “leverage literacy” may be a first step, but the fundamental mismatch in velocity will continue expanding the gap between technology and social institutions. The question then becomes, how do we increase the velocity of social institutions to keep pace with technology? Balaji’s blockchain native societies come to mind. The comment in the thread about needing philosophical roots in engineering is interesting too. Curious what you think.
sakoht 1y ago
Remember that for the vent majority of human history, most people have not felt like they were truly in control of their lives. If it was not God, it was the king. Remember that nearly every animal except humans dies by being eaten. We and our pets are nearly the only creatures that die in their sleep. To suggest that the world is supposed to “work” in a way that leaves us feeling un-anxious is a modern sense of entitlement. For most animals, and most humans the only thing you were entitled to was to scrape by desperately until you finally, eventually, failed and died. Our institutions were more stable before because people were more dedicated to maintaining them. They were created because overt pain or death was the alternative. But then they began to protect us from discomfort. Then from fear of discomfort. And for discomfort that exists in the mind. This was bound to come apart around the time some people asked to be afraid simply said “meh” Will this go badly? Certainly from the perspective of whether people feel safe and content. But we have had 10,000 years of self generated strive from humans. It is our fuel.
bbor 1y ago
Interesting and well written, thanks for posting! That said, I think there's ample reason to file this under "writer steeped in SV-coded libertarianism unintentionally rediscovers the arguments in favor of socialism." The framework begins with a simple observation...: there are three types of leverage. I get where he's coming from, but "leverage" (AKA competitive advantage in a market?) seems like a woefully inadequate framework with which to understand the overall direction of society. Regardless: What's a "systematic" growth rate...? I'm obviously a math noob, but I've never heard of that, and don't see it mentioned on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_rate_%28group_theory%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_rate_%28group_theory%29 In general this seems like a good summary of the most Marxist dichotomy of them all-labor vs. capital-with "code" tacked on to the end even though it doesn't really fit. I've cut a lot of responses to the examples below, but I think it's easy to pick out the ones that don't fit once you start looking -- I leave it as an exercise for the reader ;) Today, higher-leverage actors are strip-mining institutional commons—democratic norms, social trust, educational relevance, economic mobility—faster than lower-leverage actors can regenerate them. Another way to say this would be[1]: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned... The leverage arbitrage creates a vicious cycle. As the gap between different leverage types widens, traditional coordination mechanisms become increasingly ineffective. This drives more actors toward higher-leverage approaches, accelerating the divergence. Meanwhile, the institutional commons that make civilization possible—shared truth, democratic discourse, economic mobility, social cohesion—continue degrading because they depend on lower-leverage maintenance that can't compete with higher-leverage extraction. This seems to be the main thesis, which I'd rephrase as: "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital."[2] But understanding this dynamic also suggests solutions. Instead of trying to slow down technological change or somehow make institutions faster, we need "leverage literacy"—helping people recognize the type of power they're actually wielding and use it more consciously. And this is why I felt compelled to write a long response in the first place. The solution to "the capitalists are controlling everything and I don't like the results" is to band together as workers and exert control over the situation! The stereotype of libertarians as the kind of people to offer the destitute "financial literacy" classes instead of help is a trite one, but clearly not obsolete... Most importantly, we need to redesign how we measure success and allocate resources. Current systems reward short-term optimization within single leverage types while ignoring long-term effects across leverage types. The result is systematic underinvestment in the institutional commons that higher-leverage systems depend on to function sustainably. Yes, I agree -- we need to greatly reduce/eliminate the power that shareholders have to prioritize YoY equity growth over the needs of society! Another way to say this would be "As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. "[3] Or, in the words of noted anti-Capitalist Sam Altman: "We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project."[4] The choice isn't between technology and tradition—it's between conscious coordination across leverage levels and unconscious optimization within leverage silos. This really sums our disagreement. He thinks the solution to the problems he details is to coordinate more closely with the capitalists -- I feel confident that it's to disempower them. To put it in libertarian terms: their incentives are not a good fit for this situation! [1] The Communist Manifesto: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m... [2] Das Kapital, Chapter 25: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm [3] Das Kapital, Chapter 10: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm [4] The OpenAI Charter, April 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.com/charter https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.co...
PeterStuer 1y ago
Agility is the one trait by which a new entrant can unseat incumbants. Lose that, and you'll be stuck in a stagnated first past the post world. Does that mean all new is good and old is bad? No. And 'hypernovelty' has huge problems as it leaves no time for individuals nor society to adapt. But tread carefull with what you whish for.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
homeonthemtn 1y ago
I agree with the premise and appreciate the definitions that capture a situation that's still being understood, but the solutions are vapid. "Awareness" as an option for an information saturated society is not the pathway for anything right now
treetalker 1y ago
> Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between how fast some actors can change the world and how fast others can respond to those changes. I disagree that the way «Power» works has fundamentally shifted. This is a classic pattern of hegemony/insurgence/counter-insurgence.

126 points by tush726 1y ago

Lots of bold assertions without evidence. Author claims Google's high salaries killed entrepreneurship. Is there any data to back this claim? Or the idea that democracy can't adapt to social media discourse; not everyone is chronically online. Politicians still respond to public sentiment to similar degree as they always have. Then there's this: > AI systems aren't just tools—they're deployed faster than we can develop frameworks for understanding their social implications. If they aren't just tools, what are they? Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications? Post feels like a fever dream of someone who fell asleep to the Navalmanack audiobook.

bluetomcat 1y ago
With a lot of fancy wording, the article basically proposes that slow-moving, bureaucratic educational institutions should catch up with TikTok’s latest algorithm, helping raise the next generation of influencers.
- RajT88 1y ago
  To the effect it clearly proposes anything!
- Perepiska 1y ago
  "billions of influencers"
thrawa8387336 1y ago
The only thing worse than the author claiming that is you asking for "data". Like what data? This is qualitative. And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke
- motorest 1y ago
  > And yes, Google killed one particular flavor of startup that paid its employees with smoke To me, it reads like a desperate far-fetched argument to deny employees a fair compensation for their work. As if there is any virtue in stiffing people out of their paycheck.
- jrflowers 1y ago
  It’s always kind of funny when people respond to a subjective opinion with “where’s the data?” because unless you’re responding with data it’s pretty much just a way of saying “I don’t like this”
  - trinsic2 1y ago
    Yeah, I noticed this too. It's a kind of response one would make if one felt threatened by the subject matter.
  - rwmj 1y ago
    The blog post makes a bold claim about how the rise of tech salaries at Google killed entrepreneurship. The poster could have at least given this a sniff test: how about, for example, showing a graph of Google salaries overlaid with a graph of the number of start-ups from the crunchbase database? As he didn't even go to this minimum effort, it's valid to ask "where's the data" here.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - jrflowers 1y ago
      This is a good point. When somebody says something “killed” an intangible thing, they are obviously speaking literally. Honestly we don’t even need a graph, surely if he’s alleging a murder he would be able to produce the weapon, like a knife or a gun Now obviously someone could mistakenly interpret that sentiment as “incredibly high salaries attracted talent of such caliber that they could have started their own companies but did not” but that simply can’t be possible because there is no graph that shows all of the businesses that didn’t happen, therefore it is literal. It’s not like anybody on here has worked with somebody that could easily have started their own company but chose SWE at a FAANG. It’s just not a thing
jrflowers 1y ago
>Why do we need a framework for understanding their social implications? I would guess that the argument for wanting a framework for understanding language models’ social implications would be the social implications of language models. Like a phenomenon existing is a valid argument for understanding it. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatgpt-ai-self-mutilation-satanism/683649/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/chatg... https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/ https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi... https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/202507/the-emerging-problem-of-ai-psychosis https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/urban-survival/20250... >not everyone is chronically online Do you have data to support this? What does “chronically” mean and why would its absence invalidate the idea of social media impacting how people act and vote?
la64710 1y ago
This is a blog post not a research paper. The evidence is anecdotal and most people with common sense know it by intuition all the facts that the author mentions.
sien 1y ago
The number of unicorns was 39 when the term was coined in 2013. Then there was 119 by 2018 and then there were 1284 unicorns by May 2024. From : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicorn_(finance)#History So not only is there no data to back up the authors claim but it is wrong and could be checked by looking at wikipedia. You don't have to be right, you can make claims, but when you make grand claims you should at least check wikipedia.
- nothrabannosir 1y ago
  Your broader point may stand but that’s not a counter argument if you give the original claim the benefit of the doubt: it can reasonably be interpreted as referencing lifestyle oriented businesses, niche b2b companies, anything small growth with a low ceiling. Counting unicorns only serves to bolster that point : those are large VC fueled ships which operate on a completely different level. Because it is clear at founding time which type of company they are , it’s reasonable to include that as a qualifier. Now if the data showed more small-growth companies were started , that’d be a stronger counter argument.
  - vlovich123 1y ago
    What do businesses need? Startup capital. What’s a good way to obtain it? Having a high salary and saving. The counter argument is that high salaries enable more people to save and take risk rather than just those that start out wealthy. The main counter is that people get comfortable and don’t take risks is definitely true, but I’m not sure how much that impacts the amount of entrepreneurship that would have otherwise happened.
- cluckindan 1y ago
  Not sure about that. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/google-stanford-and-the-idf-professional-backgrounds-of-unicorn-founders/ https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/google-stanford-and-the...
- jrflowers 1y ago
  This makes sense so long as you define “entrepreneurship” as the act of making a legal entity with the goal of using venture capital to hit a billion dollar valuation as quickly as possible. In fact since the number of billion dollar valuations goes up by an order of magnitude every few years we are on track for every person on earth to start a billion dollar corporation in a few short decades. This is proof that you could see on Wikipedia that entrepreneurship is doing great
bbor 1y ago
If they aren't just tools, what are they? I wrote a lot more below, but I think you've picked up on two important things here: 1. This post seems likely to have been written with the assistance of a chatbot, which explains this phrase. The "they aren't just tools" phrase is only there because he needed a third example for a "it's not just X--it's Y" paragraph, one of ChatGPT's all-time fave constructions. 2. Another cause is more fundamental: the third "leverage" doesn't really apply to this discussion IMO. It's probably useful elsewhere, but owning a large social media company is just a different variety of capital, not some mutually-exclusive group. All expressions of capitalist power in 2025 have some amount of technological amplification going on.
reissbaker 1y ago
Given the frequent "it's not X—it's Y" type of constructions, lack of researched data, and the em-dashes, unfortunately I think this is the fever dream of a GPU cluster humming away somewhere.
vineyardmike 1y ago
This isn’t particularly controversial tbh. Yes Google’s high salaries are part of a system that has been reworking entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. This has been documented and discussed at length. Did you look for data? Big tech pays in valuable stock, and salaries can reach upwards of 500k for relative rank and file positions (not rare one offs). Over a decade, that’s $5M. At the same time, VC firms have been holding companies private longer raising more rounds, which often dilutes the employee shares and reduces the “reward” for employees waiting for an IPO. If that new diluted IPO rewards an employee under $5M for a decade of employment, they were better off at Google/Meta/etc. Startups were always a lottery ticket, but if a “winning” ticket is less profitable than not playing, why join at all? This plays directly into the thesis that the powerful are extracting additional resources at the expense of the cultural expectations and understandings. VC firms diluting employees is profitable for VCs, but it jeopardizes the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem if smart people prefer better compensation. Same with the recent AI aqui-hire controversies like Windsurf. Why join a startup if the CEO will take a billion dollar payout and leave the employees with worthless stock.

bjornsing 1y ago

Or maybe it just feels that way because the world is being fixed at unprecedented rates? For example I had the misfortune to needing help from the mental health community a decade ago. I sometimes think about how much easier that part of my life would have been if TikTok and Claude had existed back then. It’s easy to forget, but many of the institutions we’ve built over centuries are deeply dysfunctional and very much in need of disruption. The night often seems darkest just before dawn. (With that said, I agree there are risks of the kind you describe.)

ehnto 1y ago
I don't think you should be getting mental health advice from LLMs, it has been shown that their sycophantic nature reinforces your own diagnoses not that of a professionals. Using an LLM in a field you're knowledgeable in would make you think twice about their accuracy in fields you are unable to know the correctness of personally. It will all sound very convincing, but may be a fundamentally flawed diagnoses. Another way of thinking about, a non-trivial amount of training data is internet comments and blogs, which have an alarming amount of self diagnoses, non-professional diagnoses, and totally fabricated facts about mental illness.
- hyperadvanced 1y ago
  Agree, pointing to TikTok and LLMs as a “disrupter” to the prevailing psychotherapeutic industry is crazy town. Those media reify / amplify the exact same crazy of their training set into absurdity.
  - bjornsing 1y ago
    To be clear I have nothing against the prevailing psychotherapeutic industry. I’m very thankful for that part of the mental health community. I think it’s rather well-aligned with TikTok too, btw.
    - hyperadvanced 1y ago
      I’m fairly opposed to both, but respect the difference of opinion

cokeandpepsi 1y ago

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gtsop 1y ago

While the reasoning I believe to be utterly littered with weak arguments, I agree with the final conclusion/question of the author. But what the author isn't clearly saying is that he is describing a free market opposed to a planned economy, even if he doesn't specificly say that, that's the implication of the final question. And I am all for planned economy. I want to cooperate with my human fellows, not compete to crush them. In this day and age it is obsurd not to this. The technology is there, we just need to use it the right way. I know many will do a knee-jerk reaction to this statement and start spitting out the old anti-soviet economy arguments about planned economy, I'm bracing. If you want competition then accept the social outcomes. Wanting to equalize competition through regulation is exactly like banning war crimes. When war is raging all kinds of war crimes will be commited.

XorNot 1y ago
Technically the market economy we live in is designed to function by containing a whole lot of smaller planned economies (businesses).
r14c 1y ago
We already have a planned economy in a lot of ways anyway. We just don't have much collective control over who governs those levers. Particularly when it comes to resource allocation. VC might look like a free market approach on the surface, but it gives huge power to shape the economy to unaccountable un elected randos who likely "come from money" with a lot of skeletons in their closets. Even if they don't, having that kind if power with essentially no checks is a recipe for disaster. We don't have to copy the Soviets exactly, but it's foolish to pretend like their system didn't work. Sure they killed and imprisioned people, but we do the same on at least the same scale. Socialism at least in principle isn't specifically aiming for that outcome. Whatever we're doing here kinda does. Our country would crumble if the war machine ever stopped. Changing our approach to anything is just too expensive to consider and dissent can't be tolerated for the same reason. What options do we really have? Surely we can do better
an_0bserver 1y ago
An economy is only free if left uncontrolled. IMO emergence of "cartels" and colluding entities (including politicians), have destroyed the notion of truly free markets.

germandiago 1y ago

Bureaucracy and institutions are by definition slower. It has always been like that. If they want to have more impact, they need to adapt to more market-like techniques. Whether an institution moving faster would be good or bad, I am not sure actually. Probably moving too fast for something that belongs to "everyone", with all kinds of heated opinions, etc. is not the best place to move fast. OTOH, and this is as a spanish (I do not know enough about the specifics of America), I feel that nowadays part of the insritutions are "injected" changes that the society is not demanding from them. Destroying the established base and traditions of the (in this case) society. Social engineering and influencing campaigns I would say. Maybe this is not the main topic of the article. Just was a brain dump I was doing about observations of my own. These things have always existed actually. It is just that with technology and many people using it, information from individuals, etc. this influence is probably made more effectively.

dvt 1y ago

> making employment more attractive than company-building This is decidedly untrue. You can make a few clever(er) points here: VC meddling is rotting at the core of ingenuity (which I happen to agree with) or even that large companies (GOOG/MSFT/etc.) are tangentially capturing startups via incentives (think free credits, etc.). But author doesn't make these, so I won't argue against (or for) them. > Today, higher-leverage actors are strip-mining institutional commons—democratic norms, social trust, educational relevance, economic mobility—faster than lower-leverage actors can regenerate them. This will seem like a technicality, but for a pedant like myself, it's quite important: this is absolutely not the tragedy of the commons. It might be a new tragedy (maybe we'll call it "theft?"), but the interesting and paradoxical nature of the original has nothing to do with this reformulation. What makes the tragedy of the commons interesting is that all agents will favor maximizing their local maxima in spite of minimizing the global maxima. A sort of "missing the forest for the trees" thing. > The stakes couldn't be higher. If we don't develop conscious approaches to managing leverage arbitrage, we risk a future where technological capability advances exponentially while social coordination capacity deteriorates linearly—a recipe for civilizational breakdown. This seems a tad dramatic; "leverage arbitrage" was significantly higher during colonial or industrial times and society didn't exactly collapse. I agree with the sentiment, but not sure about all the "боже мой."

halayli 1y ago

When you read the title, "Why everything feels broken and what can we do", it is obvious op turned a me problem into an us problem. It's a common pitfall to take yourself out of the equation when you are about to make assertions without evidence to back them up. The title could have been written as: "Why do I feel everything is broken, and what can I do about it". you will end up writing a completely different post as a result. a more sincere one, and one that is closer to the reality of the situation that needs to be addressed, and that is one's perceptions, biases, and feelings that come from our own personal experiences.

King-Aaron 1y ago
Except the OP is kind of right I feel.
icehawk 1y ago
Actually, when I read this, it was obvious that this issue was an us problem and not just a me problem.
zwnow 1y ago
No OP is right. Everything is broken. Thinking your system isn't and its OPs issue is not sincere.
Guthur 1y ago
Well certainly, some of us are all in on psychopathic material accumulation and so of course in that case the only things that are broken are those that stand in your way, such as morality or society.
root_axis 1y ago
Seems like you've fixated on a detail about the title and have ignored the substance of the post. Whether or not some everyone agrees that "everything feels broken" doesn't really matter.
- randomcarbloke 1y ago
  But the substance of the post appears to be word-salad and I've already had my five-a-day.

dyauspitr 1y ago

So VCs bad for funding ideas, big tech bad for paying high salaries. I completely reject your notions.

mdavid626 1y ago
It feels like, you completely missed the point.

raincole 1y ago

The articles on this blog before 2025 never contained em-dashes. Not even a single one. And the articles from 2025 onward all use em-dashes. Curious, huh? > Each operates at a different mathematical order: linear, exponential, and systematic respectively. This was where I stop reading. "Systematic" mathematical order. Sure.

xxs 1y ago
It has all the classics
- raincole 1y ago
  I know I shouldn't care at all. However I can't help but feel a little bit sad knowing that a (I suppose) once genuine blogger simply gave up and decided to delegate his thinking process to a token machine.
  - xxs 1y ago
    >I know I shouldn't care at all. Personally I do care about punctuation, it's part of the (my) style and presentation, the way to convey meaning, etc. Still a reference to a classic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865024 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7865024
    - raincole 1y ago
      Oh I do care punctuation (at least when I'm writing long-form stuff). I mean I shouldn't have cared enough to look at the past articles or comment here. The proper response to AI submissions is ignore and optionally flag.
  - endymion-light 1y ago
    I hate AI writing, but I get it on pointless B2B marketing & awful linkedin posts, they're worth nothing, and it's a great way to block and ignore an account. But the fact that blog trying to communicate an interesting idea is using a predictive machine to word things is just so depressing. Is it your blog, or is it chatgpts? Did you come up with the term leverage arbitrage, or did a predictive model? Did OP just provide an outline and let the predictive model write the entire thing? It just feels sad.

joules77 1y ago

Engineering/STEM training doesn't have what is required to fix such problems. So they have to get involved with multi-disciplinary groups or nothing useful will ever get built that actually fixes things. This is why lot of people within tech/science circles feel lost and defensive about their work. They barely understand anything about the humanities/social sciences. Consciousness of what is missing is increasing slowly, thanks to the info tsunami the internet has unleashed. But that info delivery architecture relies on pseudo experts and celebs whose survival depends on collecting views, and is delivered to the mind in such random order, with high levels of over stimulation and noise, that it creates even more confusion. What's missing? No foundations in Philosophy. No idea where Value Systems come from. No idea how they are maintained - learn - adapt to change. No idea why all religious systems train their priests in some form of "Pastoral Care" involving constant contact with ordinary people and their suffering. So the Vatican survives the fall of nations/empires/plagues/economic downturns/reformation/enlightenment/pedo scandals etc but science/engineering orgs look totally helpless reacting to systemic shocks and go running to Legal/HR/PR people for help. That's at the org level. At the individual level, most tech folk pretend the limitations/divisions of their own brain/mind don't exist and have no impact on what they build. There is no awareness of what Plato/Hume/Freud/Kahneman have to say about it and how those divisions of the non united mind and denial of it effect what gets built. And since the article mentions systems running at different speed think about the electrical and chemical signaling in your own mind. Are they happening at the same speed? So don't try to work all this out by yourself. Multi-disciplinary groups are our only hope. If the org is filled with only engineers, history already shows us how the story unfolds.

Peteragain 1y ago

I liked the blog post. I try not to "game the system" and usually get all judgemental about people who do. Okay I am old fashioned. Putting on my Gordon Gecko hat ("greed is good"), of course, it is the disparity between system reaction times that enables gaming it. What system can one develop to get inside an adversary's OODA Loop (observe, orient, decide, and act). I like the idea that it's a (meta)system problem, it's about leverage.

raydenvm 1y ago

Excuse me, I can't help but cite this one wonderful song: "When everything's made to be broken, I just want you to know who I am" (c) Iris by Goo Goo Dolls I feel it touches on something deep that has to do with the current state of the tech world.

exmadscientist 1y ago

What a strange article. It feels like one of those cases where the author gathers so many of the pieces, then, just... fails to solve the puzzle. Or get anywhere close. I agree that everything feels broken. I'd like to do something about it. Let me deploy my leverage to work on that. Here's my "labor leverage", right here, this comment. Check. Leverage strength... not much. Let's bring my "capital leverage" to bear... okay, done, my 401(k) is invested in my favorite companies. Did you notice? No? Okay, leverage strength... let's go with epsilon^2. And my "code leverage"... uh... I don't think I have any. So, wait, I, personally, don't have any third-order leverage at all? How am I supposed to go up against trillion-dollar, billion-node networks, with my epsilon^3 "leverage"? That's the real problem: I don't actually have any meaningful leverage. I'm not in the game. Is that actually true? Doesn't matter: I believe it to be true. Sure looks like everything is broken to me.

kelseyfrog 1y ago
What are you talking about? This is about hyper-scaling unicorns who can create and scale a business faster than the regulatory framework[government] can respond. "Disruption" is a dog whistle for "we're going to break the law faster than the government can keep up." The game is scaling from disruption to entrenchment before the first "The United States vs You" hits your desk. If you don't have the ability to play the game then you can believe it doesn't exist, but those playing it found a slot machine that only lands on 777.
- exmadscientist 1y ago
  Right, that's one of the pieces. The article does not really fit that piece into the framework of "why do people in society feel that things are broken?" (which your comment seems to do just fine). Hence my complaint about the article. Unfortunately sibling comments have exposed this article as likely to be AI slop, which would explain pretty everything about it. Now I am reassessing my own ability to be taken in by slop, and that's depressing in different ways....

ball_of_lint 1y ago

> helping people recognize the type of power they're actually wielding and use it more consciously lol, lmao even. I don't even think this would work if there wasn't capitalism in play. > Most importantly, we need to redesign how we measure success and allocate resources. Oh, they Are suggesting we dismantle capitalism. Even if we were to dismantle capitalism in America, TikTok is a Chinese business/product. So this has to be a global solution. While we're wielding our lever that can move the globe let's fix global warming, war, hunger, etc while we're at it. No point in half measures. Does feel good to read though, nice and fluffy.

joshtbradley 1y ago

Excellent observation. But I believe your proposed solutions could be strengthened. Improving “leverage literacy” may be a first step, but the fundamental mismatch in velocity will continue expanding the gap between technology and social institutions. The question then becomes, how do we increase the velocity of social institutions to keep pace with technology? Balaji’s blockchain native societies come to mind. The comment in the thread about needing philosophical roots in engineering is interesting too. Curious what you think.

sakoht 1y ago

Remember that for the vent majority of human history, most people have not felt like they were truly in control of their lives. If it was not God, it was the king. Remember that nearly every animal except humans dies by being eaten. We and our pets are nearly the only creatures that die in their sleep. To suggest that the world is supposed to “work” in a way that leaves us feeling un-anxious is a modern sense of entitlement. For most animals, and most humans the only thing you were entitled to was to scrape by desperately until you finally, eventually, failed and died. Our institutions were more stable before because people were more dedicated to maintaining them. They were created because overt pain or death was the alternative. But then they began to protect us from discomfort. Then from fear of discomfort. And for discomfort that exists in the mind. This was bound to come apart around the time some people asked to be afraid simply said “meh” Will this go badly? Certainly from the perspective of whether people feel safe and content. But we have had 10,000 years of self generated strive from humans. It is our fuel.

bbor 1y ago

Interesting and well written, thanks for posting! That said, I think there's ample reason to file this under "writer steeped in SV-coded libertarianism unintentionally rediscovers the arguments in favor of socialism." The framework begins with a simple observation...: there are three types of leverage. I get where he's coming from, but "leverage" (AKA competitive advantage in a market?) seems like a woefully inadequate framework with which to understand the overall direction of society. Regardless: What's a "systematic" growth rate...? I'm obviously a math noob, but I've never heard of that, and don't see it mentioned on wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_rate_%28group_theory%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_rate_%28group_theory%29 In general this seems like a good summary of the most Marxist dichotomy of them all-labor vs. capital-with "code" tacked on to the end even though it doesn't really fit. I've cut a lot of responses to the examples below, but I think it's easy to pick out the ones that don't fit once you start looking -- I leave it as an exercise for the reader ;) Today, higher-leverage actors are strip-mining institutional commons—democratic norms, social trust, educational relevance, economic mobility—faster than lower-leverage actors can regenerate them. Another way to say this would be[1]: Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned... The leverage arbitrage creates a vicious cycle. As the gap between different leverage types widens, traditional coordination mechanisms become increasingly ineffective. This drives more actors toward higher-leverage approaches, accelerating the divergence. Meanwhile, the institutional commons that make civilization possible—shared truth, democratic discourse, economic mobility, social cohesion—continue degrading because they depend on lower-leverage maintenance that can't compete with higher-leverage extraction. This seems to be the main thesis, which I'd rephrase as: "Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital."[2] But understanding this dynamic also suggests solutions. Instead of trying to slow down technological change or somehow make institutions faster, we need "leverage literacy"—helping people recognize the type of power they're actually wielding and use it more consciously. And this is why I felt compelled to write a long response in the first place. The solution to "the capitalists are controlling everything and I don't like the results" is to band together as workers and exert control over the situation! The stereotype of libertarians as the kind of people to offer the destitute "financial literacy" classes instead of help is a trite one, but clearly not obsolete... Most importantly, we need to redesign how we measure success and allocate resources. Current systems reward short-term optimization within single leverage types while ignoring long-term effects across leverage types. The result is systematic underinvestment in the institutional commons that higher-leverage systems depend on to function sustainably. Yes, I agree -- we need to greatly reduce/eliminate the power that shareholders have to prioritize YoY equity growth over the needs of society! Another way to say this would be "As capitalist, he is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one single life impulse, the tendency to create value and surplus-value, to make its constant factor, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labour. Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. "[3] Or, in the words of noted anti-Capitalist Sam Altman: "We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions. Therefore, if a value-aligned, safety-conscious project comes close to building AGI before we do, we commit to stop competing with and start assisting this project."[4] The choice isn't between technology and tradition—it's between conscious coordination across leverage levels and unconscious optimization within leverage silos. This really sums our disagreement. He thinks the solution to the problems he details is to coordinate more closely with the capitalists -- I feel confident that it's to disempower them. To put it in libertarian terms: their incentives are not a good fit for this situation! [1] The Communist Manifesto: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-m... [2] Das Kapital, Chapter 25: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch25.htm [3] Das Kapital, Chapter 10: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm [4] The OpenAI Charter, April 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.com/charter https://web.archive.org/web/20230714043611/https://openai.co...

PeterStuer 1y ago

Agility is the one trait by which a new entrant can unseat incumbants. Lose that, and you'll be stuck in a stagnated first past the post world. Does that mean all new is good and old is bad? No. And 'hypernovelty' has huge problems as it leaves no time for individuals nor society to adapt. But tread carefull with what you whish for.

deleted 1y ago

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homeonthemtn 1y ago

I agree with the premise and appreciate the definitions that capture a situation that's still being understood, but the solutions are vapid. "Awareness" as an option for an information saturated society is not the pathway for anything right now

treetalker 1y ago

> Something fundamental has shifted in how power works, and most of our institutions haven't noticed. We're living through what might be called "leverage arbitrage divergence"—a growing gap between how fast some actors can change the world and how fast others can respond to those changes. I disagree that the way «Power» works has fundamentally shifted. This is a classic pattern of hegemony/insurgence/counter-insurgence.