Those don't seem to fit the application I'm thinking of but thanks for trying.
I sometimes carry a notepad and pen, but I thought something might exist - electronic - but with the speed and flexibility of an analog pad and pen - then I could incorporate ideas with orgmode or other organization software.
Literally I wanted to be making notes a moment after thinking a thought - no lag of any sort.
The basic policy of every political faction used to be an extremist position. Free markets were a radical idea (the Kings and Queens of Europe favoured mercantilism), readopting an interpretation of Greek democracy from 2500 years ago was a revolutionary idea and everything to do with political liberalism was definitely considered by the monarchy and aristocracy to be extreme.
I suspect this appears to be true but it is an illusion. This is because although you're right there's an incredible complexity to manage - we've been actually doing that using abstraction for a long time by inventing black boxes - sometimes literally white coloured boxes like fridges and washing machines that take away the necessity of thinking about the nuance in domain X but also the development of ideas that abstract out.
We can also make something look very complicated if we try, by switching context, multitasking, improper coordination.
The natural world (think of coal mining, making bicyles, stream engines) always looks very challenging if you're starting out.
> It's also important to distinguish between projects that are deep vs. broad (i.e. those solved by new thinking vs. those solved by scaling up).
Agree.
> As technology has advanced, deep projects just get deeper. Although each level of technology builds on the last, there is still complexity added at every level.
But we see conceptually simple projects everywhere that aren't being done!
We literally use the same tech to construct roads as the Romans. That is trillions of dollars in maintenance.
We know that natural sunlight and biomes would improve people's health in buildings where we spend 99% of our time. We just don't do anything about it apart from a window and a potted rubber plant or two.
We clean our butts with paper! The Koreans and Japanese had this one solved years ago!
There is no great wealth of complexity in any of these - it's just that we've decided not to think about them for legacy reasons.
I'm not sure what aspect of construction you are in, but there is an amazing amount of inefficiency. For example, a friend of mine was working on the Tappan Zee bridge project several years ago. Union job, very good salary, benefits. He was working the night shift, making an added bonus night differential. However, there was a noise regulation in place where no work could be done after a certain hour, so for 6 hours a night this extremely well paid union construction crew was sitting around collecting very good money + night differential for doing absolutely nothing. Now his job is very real, and it requires skill, but for the purposes of argument, this was a "bullshit job" that went on for weeks and weeks and added literally millions of dollars to the cost of the job in which absolutely no work was done.
There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently. There are only so many Gwerns and Scott Alexanders and Dredmorbiuses out there. There really are not that many people out there thinking about and discussing the Big Ideas and you keep running into the same ones over time. I fear many club members are lost in the blogosphere and near impossible to find with Google.
Some possible answers:
> Spending on healthcare
> cost of college
> construction costs
> childcare costs
There are many complex reasons why costs can rise in any area, but the common theme between them is something you already know - the propaganda machine told everybody that university degrees meant belonging to the middle class club with accompanying benefits aka house ownership, a high status mate, healthy income, respect.
Turns out this is a bad model. There are diminishing returns for not only college degrees but even that knowledge itself in relation to what other parts of society do. The fuzzier and understudied/underappreciated areas of construction skill, caring (including healthcare - recall Robin Hanson's contention that 50% of healthcare costs are just people wanting to feel supported) have been deprived of talent and that is what is driving up costs across the board - supply and demand.
> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?
My opinion is the same as Thiels I think - it's that our ability to do complex coordination is dropping. The reasons why? Information is an ecology - Cal Newport will tell us distraction or context switching is a sin if you want complex coordination and that is right - but also I believe in The Ladybird Book Theory which is that our education - taken broadly - has given us a false impression of complexity instead of thinking from first principals (notice how the old ladybird books are written - the kind of thing kids used to read) - which is something Musk puts a lot of weight on. The Elon/Cal thesis might be that "leave out some stuff - focus on key principals intensely". It sounds trite but I think it is right.
From a ROI point of view - not very many people in society need to be very very good at driving projects - so if you focused on making super-coordinators aka a new form education for those selected for Big Tasks should pay off immediately.
> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?
My guess is energy.
> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?
Sunset clauses are one but I don't really know because the main way seems to be just forgetting. I think when our institutions screw up it can get bad enough that the fix was a thousand years later we forgot that was even a problem.
> How do we help more experimental cities get started?
An idea.
You need to build a machine that compacts garbage into a substrate that can be used to form new land offshore. Nearly all prosperous cities are near water and produce garbage. It should be possible to gradually build experimental islands while solving the garbage problem so it's all in the technical detail of designing a machine that makes blocks/substrate out of the garbage. It pays for itself and building pyramids starts with understanding how to make a single brick.
> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
Maybe human to human communication is weirder than we think. In education you're conventionally thinking about transmitting information, understanding from A to B but maybe because our common ancestors have spent millions of years in forests and other environments instead of classrooms they transmit information to each other in ways which sound a bit odd to us. Think of pheromones, our sense of smell, hearing somebody's voice unmediated by electronics, seeing somebody's posture body language - these could all form metainformation about the information in language that is very helpful in the student/tutor relationship.
Think also of the 'sleeping dictionary' - a person in a couple who learns his or her spouse's native language learns it really fast. It can sound a bit woo-ish but I think it'll be objectively measurable.
> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?
I don't know but I really like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (subtitle: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer").
Wikiquote:
"At the age of four, Nell receives a stolen copy of an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, &c., originally intended for the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw's granddaughter. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth and Fiona, girls who receive similar books. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an "interesting life" is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop."
> Could there be more good blogs?
I've been moping about this recently too. I hope this was not a passing trend. The main social networks seem sterile.
Its not hard to make something look consistent when you are constantly changing the algorithm you use, and substantial changes are made every few years. Comparing GDP from year to year when different formulas were used to calculate it (even if the underlying data was all accurate) is comparing apples and oranges. For example, a 2013 change in the GDP formula gave an instant 3% boost to GDP.
Your guess is correct. Energy is what drives the economy. We've been going from least concentrated to most concentrated energy sources: human/animal muscle to wind, river flow, to coal, oil, nuclear. Oil being the best tradeoff between ready-to-use and energy concentration. GDP is what people are paid, but the people have magical machines that run on energy.
Any bell curve looks exponential in the beginning, but when you run out of that concentrated energy you're left with less concentrated energy unable to sustain the same level of growth.
I didn't say anything about formal education or credentialling.
The original and still key purpose of universities is to gather academics together.
Teaching was a by-product of that origin. Would-be students flocked to the cities where scholars had clustered and eventually, folks started to organise.
The word "university" means "of one", or "guild", or "group". That reflects its origin as a club for academics.
Literally people whose reason for being at university is to be in a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently.
The closest alternative are the many and various think-tanks, most of which are intertwined with academia.
Does he have a point?