Patrick Collison's Questions

This is a straw man, $500 billion in loans (normally above market value for collateral) means banks could be anywhere from 0-500 billion dollars richer but they are certainly not poorer.

>The first person to get a new dollar has an unfair advantage, since they can spend it before the rest of the economy knows about the extra dollar.

Have you seen the stock market lately? Investors have done well in this new easy money economy and until that money trickles down they certainly have it much easier than they otherwise would.

>Inflation is a deterministic function of the money supply. There wouldn’t be inflation if we didn’t create more money.

In the long run this is true. Especially the second statement, it's almost trivial to prove: Imagine an island with 10 dollars in circulation. The amount of goods produced doubles, and everyone is able to trade and consume all the goods. The price of the goods must necessarily be cut in half on average, so that the 10 dollars are able to pay for all the goods.

1. Is steelmanned buddhism wrong in important ways? Can some sort of minimal set of claims version of buddhism even be steelmanned consistently?

2. The joint-stock corporation appears to be the most scalable coordination tech ever invented. What is the embedding space of the things that make it possible and what else is in the space?

3. Does most progress come from pairs of people in high bandwidth collaboration? How could we test this and how could we scale the matching problem implied? If this is true why aren't there more famously successful twins? (also mentioned by Gwern)

4. Are dramatically better matching algorithms possible (lemon markets, costly signal bandwidth saturation)? Ones good enough that they would encourage more geographic mobility?

5. What's the natural embedding space of 'values'? If discovered and rendered tractable would this solve problems with our current attempts at formalization (VNM, Arrow's impossibility, various decision theory gotchas etc)?

6. Why are all the general purpose 'how to navigate life' resources so poor in quality? (also mentioned by Patrick)

7. Does DNA (and RNA?) transcription error rate emerge as a natural kind in large scale biological prediction? Does this create natural limits on malleability of biological systems?

8. Is there low hanging fruit in CNS imaging? Would this directly lead to dramatically better mental health interventions?

9. Can research stagnation be undermined by funding more research review enabling more cross collaborative legibility of researchers into each other's work?

> Buses and trains are better (and more punctual); Japan's public transport is great.(where there is money)

> low-end food is tastier; 50/50 on this. Maybe gyudon or kaiten-zushi are tasty, but a lot of the low end food is over processed, over packaged, over sweetened, uninspired imitations of food, factory made, prepared by low wage workers, with all the challenging and exciting bits take out.

> cheap hotels are more comfortable; you even get complimentary right wing nationalist literature in the bedside table.. but This is probably true.

> streets are cleaner; People just throw things where no one can see, when no one is looking. They neatly tie up their convenience store rubbish in its plastic bag, and throw it into a stream. dump their fireworks and BBQS on the beach, fluorescent lightbulbs in the forest,

> grocery stores and corner stores are nicer; Every thing comes in sooo much plastic, and the selection is very limited. Corner stores are all franchises of a few big players, who don't share much profit with local owners or suppliers. sure Fami-chikin is tasty, if you don't think about where it came from.

> ostensibly unremarkable villages have more beautiful buildings and are more pleasant places to spend a few days.;

Sure they are nice to "spend a few days". But a village is supposed to be the centre peoples lives. These nice villages with cool old buildings are emptying out fast and becoming abandoned along with the rural way of life because of the lack of immigrations and the economy being so centralised on Tokyo.

It strikes me that all the writer's points are very much about what appeals to a middle class visitor. Is this a good metric to judge a society by?

I can’t give a full explanation, but there are a couple of unique aspects of Switzerland that I believe may influence the situation heavily:

1. A strong aspect of Swiss culture is to expect responsibility and interest in the affairs of Switzerland from its citizens. This is reflected, for example, in the very strict rules and tests implemented for foreigners wishing to assume Swiss citizenship, which include a wide variety of questions on the history and current affairs.

2. Allied to this, they have implemented probably the most direct form of democracy I’m aware of in the world. The country is divided into a number of cantons (roughly equivalent to American states) which are largely self governing and self determining, including (for example) setting dramatically different rates of taxation. Further, many issues are decided by way of referendum: votes take place relatively frequently. Lastly, in theory any citizen can generate a new law: a series of votes would be taken on a new suggestion, first at a local level, then at a cantonal level, and then potentially at the national level.

Economically though one aspect I don’t understand is how Switzerland can support such high salaries and high costs of living, in contrast to other countries. (What came first: the high cost of living, or the high salaries?) And therefore with it being an acknowledged expensive place for businesses to operate (in terms of salary costs) why do multinational businesses choose to open or continue operations there, in contrast to other more affordable locations? (Also noting that there is significant skilled inward migration, to support the needs of some of those large businesses.)

As an example, a 32" CRT with remote control (eg Sony Trinitron) cost about $1500-2000 back in 1997.

Today, you can buy a 32" TV for $85, delivered. And even though this will be "Brand X" and not Sony, it will have better picture quality, more functionality, be more reliable and use less power to boot.