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Economic behavior is inherently game theoretic - agents take various actions and get some positive/negative reward as a result. Whether an agent's reward is positive or negative and of what magnitude, depends on the strategies employed by all agents. If some agents adopt new strategies, the reward calculus for everyone involved can completely change [1].

Over the past few centuries, countless new economic structures and strategies have been discovered and practiced. The rewards for the same action today and in the past can be completely different due to this.

So to me, if someone claimed more than a few decades ago that certain economic strategies and structures are good or bad, its simply not worth listening to them, unless someone reconfirms that the old finding still holds with the latest range of strategies. In that case, the credit and citation goes to that new someone, not the ghosts of the past.

[1] A good interactive demo https://ncase.me/trust/

The government is a rare example of an extremely strong monopoly and not just a duopoly or a company holding significant marketshare. And yet people never seem to criticise it on those grounds despite it suffering from all of the same problems that corporate monopolies are accused of.

> arguments against mercantilism

It has been funny to watch the rise of "China is beating us" rhetoric against the steady backdrop of "mercantilism is obsolete/bad" dogma, because the elephant in the room is that China has been running a textbook mercantilist playbook.

> Thiel's book has influenced so many entrepreneurs into believing Monopolies are Good.

Haven't read his book, but the idea that monopolies are good isn't typically made in a vacuum, it's made relative to alternatives, most often "ham-fisted government intervention". It's easier to take down a badly behaving monopoly than to change government, so believing monopolies are better than the alternatives seems like a decent heuristic.

No it wasn't. Look at Joseph Stiglitz (Globalization and Its Discontents) and Ha-Joon Chang (Bad Samaritans, Kicking Away the Ladder) for counter-examples.

Oh come now - globalizations was great at the regional level.

It was not that great for sub groups within developed nations.

The original thesis believed that people would be retrained into other equally well paying roles.

Turns out people can’t retrain into new domains, and led to under employment.

This isn't correct. The deal is that the poor countries get development and increased employment, and the rich countries get lower prices. Generally speaking both types of countries get richer.

That some workers lost their jobs is a symptom of any change. I don't know why people always get upset people losing their jobs. It's like death, if no one died relatively few people would be born. If you resist job losses you reduce overall employment and economic development.

Yes. Tools like Khan Academy help lots of talented kids to progress in the curriculum beyond what's available in physical classrooms available to them.

Indeed. Education isn't supposed to "scale". We've mucked around with education so much and subjected it to tech fad after tech fad that we hardly have anything resembling education.

Because this has been going on so long, most people's reference point for what constitutes "education" is simply off, mistaking "training" or something like that for it. But the purpose of education is intellectual formation, the ability to reason competently, and the comprehension of basic reality, which enables genuine intellectual freedom (there are moral presuppositions, too; immorality deranges the mind). This is what the classical liberal arts were about.

The very bare minimum criterion (and it is a very bare minimum) for someone to be able to claim to be educated is not only knowledge of their field, but knowledge of the intellectual nature, foundations, and basis of their field in the greater intellectual scope. I would not hold someone with only that bare minimum in especially high esteem vis-a-vis education, but even that bar is higher than what education today provides.

A common error in historical thinking tends to see human tools essentially as a positive linear plot between time and progress. But these tools until AI had the common property of being enhancing of human cognition, because they couldn't do the thinking _for you_. AI can do just that, and for all the benefit it brings, seeing it simply as the next step in the "natural evolution of human tools" is alarmingly disarming coming from frontier thinkers.

> Like all technology before it AI will improve most people's lives.

1. Let's be clear: what you're describing is faith.

2. And what are you smoking to assert "all technology before ... AI [improved] most people's lives"?

It's actually a strange situation. Tao is the only high-profile mathematician who tries to resolve the reproducibility crisis in math by popularizing proof checkers, and who used LLMs in probably the most legitimate way: to produce formal undeniable proofs with them, that cannot really suffer from LLMs being wrong all the time.

On the other hand, I still find content and arguments he produces to be quite weak, and honestly it's getting annoying to hear them that often. It's the case when he could really get some help of a ghost writer who is more experienced in popularization, otherwise this repetition might cause some serious harm instead.

A big trend in AI spam is to take achievements in one field that could be called "AI" and use them as evidence of advancement in other fields that happen to be called "AI".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package-deal_fallacy

Tao has been doing a lot of demonstrations of using LLMs for search and translation by experts who already know enough about a field to judge whether generated text is valid or meaningful. Those are valid demonstrations, but they don't justify the LLM-as-intelligent-agent narrative being pushed by most of the reporting on the topic, so the whole situation reeks of payola.

This comment is spam. When Tao says something we should take it seriously.