Where did I say that?

> If everyone was billionaire level money obsessed society would cease to work. There is nothing to indicate billionaires are giving us a disproportionate amount of what makes society work, and without working society to host it there is no progress.

I think if you wouldn't have the crazy risk takers who want the power/influence/money, either other people would need to take the lead on that, or there'd be a lot less advancement and we'd be closer as a society to our ancestors.

I've yet to see mass systems of groups in which work is being done without the leadership and initiative of a small proportion of people. For example, imagine a movement that is not founded by 1 or few people, but instead a company that is founded Day 1 with thousands of people, instantly. I think that's practically impossible without a hypothetical hivemind, but I'd like to be proven wrong!

It's all an interpretation, never claimed it to be anything beyond a thinking model I like.

> To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.

No we don't, but I don't think it's necessarily because we don't want to, but because we often can't. Nevertheless, I think my rationale still applies. For example, if you take a bunch of matter, for example water, you'd find out that the distribution of Deuterium and definitely Tritium is really "unfair". Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?

> I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?

It doesn't necessarily have to but: 1. It seems to have been very favorable trait evolutionally to force your will on other species. I'm no brain nor social expert but it seems to me that in order to stop this trait internally, there would need to be some pretty strong inhibitors to counter that. 2. Regardless of the species claim, you can see the pattern of exceptional individuals with disproportionate influence in many other places in nature: queen bees, pack leaders, and human kings of sorts. in I think practically every culture on earth in recorded history?

I really struggle to think of any mass systems, in human society or nature in which power is not distributed disproportionally to a relatively small portion of individuals.

So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.

We can try and moderate it as a system (e.g some forms of democracy, socialism, etc.) to maybe lower the amplitudes, but it would be ignorant to deny that this might be a core part of current human nature. Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.

Now imagine, there'd be some alien government, who'd be like "whoa humans are making way too disproportionate progress compared to the other species, let's tax/prune them so they don't get too much power".

I think for competitive and talented people, US in general offers much more lucrative opportunities as long as you're OK with the US specific drawbacks. For non-competitive people, living in Europe would probably be a more convenient.

I think the problem though is in the future, both the US and Europe has grave societal and economic issues but from the different angles. Europe lacks economical drive and seems to discourage change on a cultural level. The US on the other hand seems to be an extreme catalyst.

I'm not familiar enough with quantitative data to judge on the compound interest, nevertheless I think in the last few decades we have already been witness on the global level to major changes in wealth: empires like UK have shrank, giants like China have risen. This had been very different a few decades ago and is an anecdote at least that compound interest can only do so much for empires, in the face of major changes.

But I think still a lot of people would argue the distribution is too unequal.

The notion I'm getting is that these forces that drive change are bigger than all of us, and they are inherently unsustainable in the larger scale of things, pretty similar to how solar systems are not really sustainable in a scale much larger than us, but not that is still pretty small in a universal scale.

So for your perspective it might be unsustainable, but for the bigger system what you describe is smaller than a grain of sand.

One argument could be that maybe entrepreneurial personality traits aren't normally distributed, and unless you find a way change people's personalities in mass, the imbalance in wealth attraction will remain inherent.

Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.

I did it once, now doing it for the second time. I think most people will not bear it, but for me it feels like the only natural thing to do.

I can never imagine enjoying either running a hyper-growth VC funded company or being an employee, and I realize most people are not like that.

So on that end, maybe ask yourself if you were OK with cutting costs like losing the car, moving to a smaller apartment (even back with your parents) etc. and be happy about it even if your company flops.

I should probably give KSP a try again. I guess there's an initial threshold I got to power through first, as I got a bit exhausted after the first mission hehe.

I'm actually working now on a game of my own, with themes of science, and it's indeed a game-first approach rather than an educational game, but I do hope to maybe inspire some ideas and motivation with at least a few players.

I totally believe there's a lot of untapped potential in this area, and advancing towards cracking learning motivation + capabilities could have a huge impact.

I think games, have lots to teach, but that most of the time they are a catalyst for learning or inspiration to learn, but on their own, they will rarely actually teach you. It's hard to put the finger on it, as for example, I'm not a native English speaker, but I learned and practiced most of my English from playing video games, and they were the catalyst to make me WANT to learn English, but they didn't exactly *teach* me English.

Another part of it, is I bet if you sample today's scientists and engineers at places like NASA, you'd probably find that a lot of them loved watching Star Trek/Star Wars as kids. So while sci-fi hasn't taught them how to work with Schrodinger's equation, it probably had a major part of what sparked their motivation to get started. Games probably do that too, and then some, thanks to interactivity.

There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.

Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult for me, like why would I even care about finding an angle in a triangle, etc.?

Only once I studied physics or game dev, this has started to become relevant, and then studying it got SO MUCH easier.

As a game dev, I think at this stage AI can be a helpful utility, but it does not replace a designer's touch for professionally looking games.

Seems as if Duolingo had been more conservative with its fundraising, it wouldn't have needed to resort to actions that might take it further away its goal of teaching a language? Do you really need almost $200M to build a business like Duolingo?