They are not the thing to blame. It's system thinking all the way down.

Give it a try. 4 letter difference. Add a few 100 tokens describing the task, such that the change becomes a tiny fraction of the input.

Discontinuities everywhere.

Also, your own example is an application of game theory; you've basically stated a 'prisoner's dilemma' problem. You state that in a high trust society, most people will choose cooperation, while in a low trust society, most people will defect.

being the key phrase. Until we get to that long term, the less price sensitve buyer can buy up all available goods.

for example, all of the gas turbines needed to generate electricity.

so it is impossible to invest in capacity for non-datacenter uses, because the raw ingredients have already been bought up by the data centers.

effectively, at current rate of investment, > 90% of investment into new power generation goes to data centers. That doesn't leave much for any kind of other economic growth, since all of our economic growth depends on electricity.

And that's what gets you excited about the future?

Keep in mind those 100 other papers also went through this kind of data compression.

So the number of ideas/concepts per paragraph is much higher than 'popular' writing, and some base familiarity with the concepts under discussion needs to be assumed.

Yes, it is hard work to read these. Even when you are active in the field. Generally I need to read at least the abstracts of a some of the key references in order to understand the paper I'm interested in.

eliminate smallpox. Check.

eliminate measles. Own goal.

please don't inflict your music on everyone around you.

If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.

'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.

Evidence in support:

Compare the number of HN posts showing disfavor towards "billionares" and/or other markers of business success, and how this has changed over time.

See the popularity of this post from the other day as one example, on 'dopamine fracking' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48440792

> His theory was introduced in 1970 and it seems has since become the standard for the corporate world

questions: WHY has it become the standard? Should it still be the standard-- the world has changed a lot since 1970, is the context that supported Friedman's arguments still true? Does this also mean corporations shouldn't try to shape government/public policy?

Additional questions: "increase profits" over what timescale? PE has a reputation for increasing profits in the short term while killing the company over the medium term.

Re social responsibility. Wasn't it Ford who helped realize that paying workers enough to let them buy your product increased your market size, thus increasing profits? Did Ford perhaps go too far in 'social policy' by requiring his employees to pass invasive inspections by his company's Sociological Department. Where to draw the line?

See also recent work on honeybees, popularized here https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/bumblebees-can-sol...

honeybees are not social insects, but maybe social insects should be added to the list?

Social insects. The original object oriented programming paradigm.

Hobbes. we create the Leviathan so we don't have to constantly act in self defense. The alternative was cold, brutish, and short.

Like you, I also don't know what would work better, nor do I believe any one individual can know.

But I do have some ideas for what would make a good framework for the evaluation?

If the idea is to allocate resources in a way that provides the most benefit to the most people, where most feel they are getting a 'fair deal' or something...

and we have social institutions that convert 'resources' to value (in quotes because time, attention, etc are 'resources'. The key principle is organizing human behavior over time to produce something humans value)...

Companies Religion Sports Government

then think about what value each creates, how it is delivered, how it is captured, ... recognizing that each offers some unique strengths and unique limitations.

But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?

both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?

Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).

And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.

We live in a blessed window.