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The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

tushardadlani.com

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Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#11

Post by motorest »

thrawa8387336 wrote: post #7
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #2

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 devel…

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

> 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.

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#12

Post by XorNot »

gtsop wrote: post #6

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…

Technically the market economy we live in is designed to function by containing a whole lot of smaller planned economies (businesses).

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#13

Post by jrflowers »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #2

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 devel…

>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/chatg...

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spi...

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?

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#14

Post by la64710 »

nosefurhairdo wrote: post #2

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 devel…

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.

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#15

Post by RajT88 »

bluetomcat wrote: post #5
nosefurhairdo wrote: post #2

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 devel…

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.

To the effect it clearly proposes anything!

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#16

Post by germandiago »

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.

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#17

Post by r14c »

gtsop wrote: post #6

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…

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

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#18

Post by dvt »

> 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."

Re: The leverage arbitrage: Why everything feels broken

#19

Post by halayli »

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.

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