The Economist said that in 2002 all developed nation real estate was worth 62T$.  Since raw land value is on average about a third of total real estate value, that puts New York area real estate at over 30% of all developed nation real estate in 2002!  Whatever the exact number, clearly this agglomeration contains vast value.

New York land is valuable mainly because of how it is organized.  People want to be there because they want to interact with other people they expect to be there, and they expect those interactions to be quite mutually beneficial.  If you could take any other 50 mile square (of which Earth has 72,000), and create that same expectation of mutual value from interactions, you could get people to come there, make buildings, etc., and sell that land for many trillions of dollars of profit.

Yet the organization of New York was mostly set long ago based on old tech (e.g., horses, cars, typewriters).  Worse, no one really understands at a deep level how it is organized or why that works so well.  Different people understand different parts, in mostly crude empirical ways.

So what will happen when super-duper smarties wrinkle their brows so hard that out pops a deep math theory of cities, explaining clearly how city value is produced?  What if they apply their theory to designing a city structure that takes best advantage of our most advanced techs, of 7gen phones, twitter-pedias, flying Segways, solar panels, gene-mod pigeons, and super-fluffy cupcakes?  Making each city aspect more efficient makes the city more attractive, increasing the gains from making other aspects more efficient, in a grand spiral of bigger gains.

Once they convince the world of the vast value in their super-stupendous city design, won’t everyone flock there and pay mucho trillions for the privilege? Couldn’t they leverage this lead into better theories enabling better designs giving far more trillions, and then spend all that on a super-designed war machine based on those same super insights, and turn us all into down dour super-slaves?  So isn’t the very mostest importantest cause ever to make sure that we, the friendly freedom fighters, find this super deep city theory first?

Well, no, it isn’t.  We don’t believe in a city-ularity because we don’t believe in a super-city theory found in a big brain flash of insight.  What makes cities work well is mostly getting lots of details right.  Sure new-tech-based cities designs can work better, but gradual tech gains mean no city is suddenly vastly better than others.  Each change has costs to be weighed against hoped-for gains.  Sure costs of change might be lower when making a whole new city from scratch, but for that to work you have to be damn sure you know which changes are actually good ideas.

For similar reasons, I’m skeptical of a blank-slate AI mind-design singularity.  Sure if there were a super mind theory that allowed vast mental efficiency gains all at once, but there isn’t.  Minds are vast complex structures full of parts that depend intricately on each other, much like the citizens of a city.  Minds, like cities, best improve gradually, because you just never know enough to manage a vast redesign of something with such complex inter-dependent adaptations.

Some military folks I know emphasize that their efforts are primarily defensive; they help resist enemy attack and protect civilians from harm.  They are clearly asking not to be treated as if they were just an average part of the military machine.  But I wonder: why don’t we make it easier for such people to show that their efforts are mainly defensive.  Why don’t more parts of the military, and more military contractors, officially distinguish themselves as more emphasizing defense over offense?  Why can’t I work for a particular “defense” contractor with a clear reputation for only working on the defensive side of war?

Now it is true that in this case orgs that did not explicitly identify as defensive would look more offensive, making some folks less willing to associate with them.  But many a brash young man is eager to show he is a front-line fighter, so there might be overall sorting gains from making this distinction.  Is it that those who run our military hate the idea of officially acknowledging and accomodating citizens who don’t offer full unconditional (offense or defense as required) support of our military?

This is of course one of the prices we pay for being dreamtime richies – stories about our suffering just aren’t going to elicit much sympathy from our distant descendants.  We can hardly get worked up about them ourselves.  The far future may, however, be fascinated to gawk at our freaky facades, ginormous growth, strange scenarios, and bizarre beliefs.  We are history’s circus; which circus wonder are you?

The main general approaches I know [to avoid total collapse] are refuges, to directly protect against the worst case, and the robustness rewards above, which counter-act known problems that distort our world economy toward fragility.

I suggested fixing current biases in intellectual property, empire bias, crisis metrics, and missing standards.  Here is a finance regulation proposal in the same spirit:

The Obama proposal for bank taxation has simple flat rates on uninsured bank liabilities. This is a better target than total liabilities since deposits were already insured, and the intervention bailed out wholesale funding.  But is such a flat tax designed to control risk creation? John Kay (2010) argues against it. Meanwhile Viral Acharya and Mathew Richardson (2010) argue that the bailouts have generated more moral hazard and suggest a fee discouraging all activity that creates systemic risk – not just leverage – and moreover that banks should be paying more in the good times when risk taking is more attractive.

In recent research, Javier Suarez and I (2009a, b) suggested a more subtle policy than President Obama’s – a Pigouvian tax based on banks’ individual contribution to systemic-risk creation, measured by their exposure to uninsured short-term funding. As in the Obama tax, this approach exempts insured deposits and targets the risk of sudden withdrawals of wholesale funding, which was the engine of the last crisis. Critically, our tax is sharper for shorter-term funding and decreases to zero for medium-term liabilities that do bear risk. In other words, it targets the externality caused by funding fragility and offers strong incentive effects in good times.

I’m not a banking or macro expert, and there is clearly a danger of fighting the last war here, but at least this seems focused on the right sort of problem.  HT Rob Wiblin.

Which brings us to everyone’s favorite topic: sex. Our minds have been evolved in great detail to handle human sex. How might our descendants reuse and adapt those well-honed capabilities to deal with future mental challenges?

First, it is pretty obvious that within a century or two at most our descendants just won’t be creating descendants by randomly mixing the features of two parents, any more than firms today design new products via random mixes of old product features. No, our descendants will be more deliberately designed, with design components inspired by, if not directly taken from, a great many predecessors.  They just won’t make babies the bio-sex way.

Even so, our distant descendants will continue to form long-term alliances between minds whose qualities and loyalties are opaque. Even when one can directly peer inside, most complex minds simply have no clear place to look to see their overall abilities and loyalties. Such features are instead spread across such minds and best seen in actual behavior.  So to infer such features it can help to probe and test such minds in particular ways.  Our mental sexual toolkit is full of such ways to probe and test.

Also, when complex minds last longer than the multi-mind tasks they tackle, they must choose which minds combine to do which tasks.  And to create good incentives, minds must share some consequences of their joint performance, while committing in certain ways to outcomes they might not prefer after the fact.  Our sexual toolkit also has many useful ways to deal with these issues.

Our descendants will therefore likely recruit variations on our sexual toolkit to such tasks.   They will distinguish flings from “true love” while adapting human feelings of lust, romance, attachment, jealousy, and intimacy, and also variations on our mating dances of watching, displaying, flirting, wooing, testing, seducing, accusing, betraying, etc.

Our descendants may also distinguish male from female patterns of such behaviors. For example, some will pursue while others evaluate, some will take more risks while others play it safer, some will invest more vs. less in each relation, and some will protect against outside dangers while others nurture inside growth.

Our mental adaptations to sex are subtle and well-tuned for our mating task of slowly teasing out the abilities and intentions of others while becoming increasingly committed to and dependent on those others.  Our distant descendants will likely adapt such abilities for their many purposes.  Future sex may well change greatly to meet future needs, but it will still be recognizably sex all the same.  Long live sex!

1. Slack – As measured either by kids per mom or hours of work a day, most recent pre-industrial societies were ~30-70% below their simple Malthusian limit.
2. Interest – Even after correcting for depreciation and failure-to-pay, for many thousands of years interest rates have been far above population growth rates.

(Data on both clues in Greg Clark’s Farewell to Alms.)

The slack clue can be explained via local cultural norms (i.e., signaling equilibria).  For example, pre-industrial English women married at ~26; those who married earlier had more kids, but at the cost of lower husband quality and threatened kid survival.  In societies with low work hour norms, harder workers faced ridicule and theft.  They attracted worse spouses and couldn’t use all their extra product to feed more kids.

Since social norms varied greatly across societies, however, it is puzzling that competition between neighboring societies didn’t favor societies with norms that put them closer to the Malthusian limit.  When neighboring groups clashed, why didn’t those with norms favoring denser populations tend to win out?

Interest rates appear in prices for renting land, borrowing silver, etc.  Social norm variety also makes high interest rates puzzling.  Local subgroups with a norm of saving capital and reinvesting as much as possible should in principle quickly outgrown groups who instead borrowed, rented, etc.  Soon even a small fraction of the interest on their wealth could paid for many more kids.

We can explain each of these puzzles by assuming that labor and capital have a different value relative to labor in conflicts, relative to more directly making food etc.  However these two explanations are somewhat at odds.

On the slack clue, cultures that limited their fertility and work hours should have had more capital per person.  In conflicts with neighboring cultures, perhaps low capital cultures were more often intimidated or seduced by folks from individually-richer high capital cultures.  Or perhaps such capital was especially useful in warfare.

On the interest clue, subgroups in a society who accumulated more wealth, relative to other groups, would end up with more capital relative to labor than other subgroups.  Other groups would then be tempted to steal that capital.  Perhaps labor is just especially useful in stealing capital, while capital is especially easy to steal relative to labor, especially given very large capital to labor ratios.  Perhaps this Biblical rule was to limit harm from predictable periodic predation:

The Jubilee year … required the compulsory return of all property to its original owners or their heirs, except the houses of laymen within walled cities, in addition to the manumission of all Israelite indentured servants.

Problem is, these two explanations are somewhat at odds – the first assumes that capital is especially strong, relative to labor, in conflicts with neighboring societies, while the second assumes that capital is especially weak, relative to labor, in conflicts within a society.  Can both really be true?

• Show – Show the world new ideas (or insights).
• Sort – Attach quality signals to shown ideas.
• Shill – Push ideas, via other sorts of influences.

Many new ideas or insights can be expressed clearly in just a few paragraphs.  Others may take a few pages; a few need whole books.  With more work, one can express ideas in different ways, for more chances to connect to different readers, and attach good descriptors and connections, so that folks searching for such things can find your idea.

The vast majority of intellectual effort, however, is not such “showing”, but instead “sorting” and “shilling.”  Advocates push ideas via repetition, celebrity endorsement, etc., pundits are witty, engaging, elegant, etc, and academics make impressive-looking math models, theorems, data collections, stat studies, prototypes, etc.

When readers have good reasons to think that ideas with certain associations are objectively more true or valuable, I’ll say efforts to create such associations “sort” ideas.  Otherwise, such efforts “shill”, i.e., they direct attention or belief but not preferentially to objectively better ideas.

Now sorting is no doubt a required function — we need to know where to focus attention and belief.  But while intellectuals often suggest that their effort is efficiently directed toward this goal, I am skeptical.  Instead, I suspect audiences of pundits and academics mainly want to affiliate with credentialled-as-impressive folks.  Academics are mainly rewarded for doing impressive-looking idea-work, that can be credentialled as such.  Pundits, wonks, columnists, etc. are similarly rewarded for writing that is witty, engaging, elegant, etc.

Now academics and pundits do sometimes have original ideas and news, and such contributions can add a bit to impressiveness.  And many audiences, all else equal, prefer to hear news.  But mostly the finding and showing of such ideas and news is a side effect of trying to be and affiliate with impressiveness; institutions designed primarily to achieve that function would do it far more effectively.

To me, the great charm of blogging is that I can think about interesting things, have an apparently-original insight about something, and then in a few paragraphs I can show that insight to the world.  If an idea seems especially valuable, I can re-express it again in future posts, to better explain and index it.

My great anxiety about blogging is my fear that merely-blogged ideas will not get the attention or belief they deserve, if they do not get the usual quality signals, and that if I don’t give my ideas such quality signals, no one will.

I could take a ton of time and effort to give very standard quality signals, but I can only do this for a tiny fraction of my ideas and I might really just be trying to seem impressive.  I could work to make more efficient signals of quality for a selection of my ideas, signals that do indicate their truth or value of an idea, but that do less well at showing impressiveness.  But how many would attend to such signals, and would that be worth the neglect of other insights I could instead find and show via more blogging?

Which of these options is the most fun, and how much do I really care about anything else?  I remain honestly torn and uncertain here.

Added 8a: Both sorting and shilling both have positional aspects that concern me; they both raise ideas only at the expense of other ideas.  Overconfidence could easily trick one into over-estimating the value of such efforts.

Clark claims this does not contradict the main thesis of his recent book:

A Farewell to Alms argued that for 800 years at least in pre-industrial England the rich were taking over the society demographically, and replacing the poor.  The evidence above of the dominance of regression to the mean may seem to contradict that argument.  But there is no conflict.  The rich can still have a reproductive advantage within each generation.  It is just that the rich change from generation to generation under the forces of regression to the mean.  But if the argument of A Farewell to Alms is correct then the rich in 1600, or in any generation, should have many more descendants by 1851 than the poor, even though by 1851 they are no longer distinguishable by occupation, income, or wealth. While there was complete regression to the mean in terms of economic status, we do observe that the rich of 1600 left many more descendants than the poor.  … Economic success by a man in 1600 substantially increased his share of their genes in the English gene pool by 1851, as was predicted in A Farewell to Alms.

Substantially increased?  Going from 0.45% to 0.59% of the population is a gain of 31%, but a 31% gain by the rich in six centuries is hardly enough to “take over” England genetically in anything less than tens of thousands of years!  Even if we assume twice this gain from illegitimate kids, clearly Clark’s new work has shown his main book thesis false.

1. Nobody Knows is terribly touching, and for exactly that reason, hard to watch.  It depicts dramatic story-like events, but it doesn’t give the usual cues to suggest you process it in a story-like far mode.  The main characters are children, who you see in near mode, up close and personal, mostly without words.  If you love children, you will love these children.  Things happen to them, but slowly, and without clear “here is a key event” markers.  So you process the events as near, with less story-mode emotional distance; you are more naked to the full terror of bad possibilities.  It makes me wonder what other stories would feel like, if we felt them as nearby.  And if I would dare to watch them.
2. The Third & The Seven, a free ten minute entirely CG (computer graphics) clip, is a truly spectacular demo of what CG can do today.  I’ve watched it daily for two weeks now and still marvel at its details. See the hidef version if you can.  If you doubt at all that virtual reality could really be as detailed and vivid as our reality, take a look. (HT Rob Wiblin).

The Biblical passage traditionally used … [was the first verse of] Psalm 51 [which] …. became known as the neck verse, because knowing it could save one’s neck by transferring one’s case from a secular court, where hanging was a likely sentence, to an ecclesiastical court, … [where] if the defendant swore an oath to his own innocence and found twelve compurgators to swear likewise … he was acquitted. … By the 15th century, most convictions in these courts led to a sentence of penance. …

Henry VII decreed that non-clergymen should be allowed to plead the benefit of clergy only once … [and] were branded on the thumb, and the brand disqualified them from pleading the benefit of clergy in the future. (In 1547, the privilege of claiming benefit of clergy more than once was extended to peers [i.e., Nobleman] of the realm, even illiterate ones.)

In 1512, Henry VIII further restricted the benefit of clergy by making certain offences “unclergyable” offenses; … This restriction was condemned by Pope Leo X … [and led] to Henry VIII splitting the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church in 1532.  In 1575, a statute of Elizabeth I … the benefit of clergy … it did not nullify the conviction, but rather changed the sentence for first-time offenders from probable hanging to branding and up to a year’s incarceration.

More here.  The English literate classes had quite a conspiracy going to help themselves at the expense of others!  HT Greg Clark.

Added 11a: From stats Clark showed in a talk, it seems most folks people did not invoke this benefit.  This was not a benefit given to all.