Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adverbly | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely gut-wrenching.

Lars is an absolutely incredible thinker with a polymath-like range.

- He has done great professional work as a software developer

- He has pushed forward arguably one of the best economic policies for modern times(land value tax) through both a startup[1], and writing[2]. I particularly like his interview with Dwarkesh Patel[3]

- He contributes core thinking to rationalist communities. Just the other day I completely randomly encountered him as being submitter of the primary US Election 2024 market on the forecasting site manifold[1]

The two most impactful thinkers/writers in my life have now had to survive through incredible loss(Douglas Hofstadter - who lost his wife after writing GEB is the other). Wishing you all the best Lars.

Sources:

[1] https://www.valuebase.co/

[2] https://www.landisabigdeal.com/

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL-qkv7Pzxo

[4] https://manifold.markets/LarsDoucet/will-joe-biden-win-the-2...

> The two most impactful thinkers/writers in my life

I am not familiar with the author, but after reading this article I am interested in learning more him and his other thoughts. Can you provide a good starting place for reading material? Specifically something that you feel affected your life.

Land is a Big Deal is a great place to start (and his three articles summarising Georgism for SSC, also on his substack named after Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty", which contain much of the same content).

I don't know about the previous author or if it's even his best, but I learned about Lars through a Slate Star Codex guest post 2-3 years ago. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-...

Way back in 2012, this affected a lot of my thinking around software piracy/selling software, and I think a lot of it has proven pretty insightful in the intervening decade:

https://www.fortressofdoors.com/piracy-and-the-four-currenci...

The images are shot, but that may be all the attention his site is getting today.

Edit: Many others are already saying it, but thank you for sharing, Lars. No one should have go through this, and your thoughts were beautifully written. Makes me feel very grateful/humbled for so much that I take for granted.

Just in case your "not familiar with the author" meant not Lars but Douglas Hofstadter, I suppose the best place to start is the aforementioned "GEB": Gödel, Escher, Bach - an Eternal Golden Braid -- note how 'GEB' returns transposed as 'EGB in the title; that's kind of significant (IIRC, been decades since I read it). HTH!

I knew the name on Manifold as the creator of some of my favourite markets.

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