Not the art we want, but the art we deserve!

Jim "Silicon Ronin" Keller talks about working with Elon. The day to day burden of painfully peeling off your own assumptions about life, you, things. The brain, AI, and so on. How driving is easy and it's just a data problem. (I think it's a model problem, like climate modeling, you just need a few decades worth of fine tuning and millions of lines of ... uh... FORTRAN? What!? Okay, maybe it's not like that, but have fun with millions of lines of non-mypy Python. And hand rolled C/C++ CUDA.)

New York, the City, the Big Apple, and how the worms can't agree on what to do with its rotting :(

This is especially mind-blowingly typical, traditional, tone-deaf, tortured and too true to have a nice ending. Both the essay and the story, plus that sentence too. Only in a world where people call a round building without any greenery a Square Garden, can they spend decades trying to argue about how to make the train station and subway station underneath it somehow "better".

Gwern's February newsletter mentioned it as the tragedy of the anticommons. But I think the whole bloody debacle screams for an exogenous forcing, just create a legal structure that taxes all involved (putting the funds into a separate account) according to their income/means/profit/whatever. Eventually enough money will have been accumulated to finance whatever scheme the participants come up. And if they can't come up with anything? The money keeps on tricking.

Sure, it's not easy to fairly allocate taxes and controlling votes, but instead of the mindlessly Sisyphean cycle of planning and negotiating followed by fighting for funding (and just in general among themselves), and then the inevitable failure people should start working on the abstract problem.

Yeah, I know, dream on, dream on, people are bad at coordination problems, and are even worse when they should recognize to step up or down the meta ladder.

Speaking of politics, this Wait But Why (Tim Urban) "book" is an amazingly detailed illustration on the complexities of coordinating among ourselves.