Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
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Peasant revolts would be fights for retained rights, even if informal - not just new rights, if at all about new rights.
Labour mobility predates the modern era.
At least I know of likes of Infy, TCS etc doing this (in the home country) — making freshers sign bonds for 2-3 years and if you want to leave within that period the only way is to pay a good amount irrespective of whether you didn’t receive a salary raise or didn’t get the opportunities which were good good for you. If you don’t pay the bond — they won’t usually drag you to a court (they send legal notices for sure) but they will also not issue you an experience certificate.
As is usually the case with government social and economic dictates that attempt controls against the practical social and economic reality of the world around them, these laws slowly but inexorable failed, leading to the steady erosion of feudalism throughout Europe (though not everywhere at similar times, and in some places this repressive system lingered for centuries longer, ie: Russia, Sicily, etc)
If anything, for all its grim deadliness, the Black Death was oddly beneficial to the future social and economic flourishing of Europe, starting with the rise of the Renaissance, and leading from there to so many other things, for better or worse for the rest of the world.
I sometimes wonder if we could design a better system today taking today's knowledge of psychology (and psychopathology) into account and optimizing for values we have today like freedom, balance of power and equality of opportunity.
No nationalization needed when houses aren't worth investing in.
Also, give people something else worth investing into. Make laws that move all the incentive out of the housing market and into something that helps in the long run. Energy, research, etc.
You can still have investment in real estate, but it will be a competitive market. You can't sit on land and let it appreciate without putting in the work, because appreciation of land means higher taxes.
It dosen't really have anything to do with what you are saying because the Nikkei underperformed relative to FTSE or S&P 500.
Isn't this because most of Asia has just copied the western capitalist housing asset monetisation scheme with Japan being the only exception?
Land are worth something because it's undertaxed. If you tax land high enough, the price of land is zero. This means you don't have to take out a loan to buy the land, but maybe you need to do so for the building. Lands in cities are often high enough that they exceed the value of buildings. So, land price being zero save you money up-front, but you have to pay higher taxes on the land.
The improvements are naturally depreciating assets. Your house, much like your car, fall apart over time without maintenance. Ideally, you aren't taxed on improvements.
So, in a properly functioning market, you can buy property, but it's depreciating in price all the time, while you are left with a tax bill on the land. Each time, land value roses, you are left with a higher tax bill every year.
Homes get torn down all the time because they aren’t worth anything - not exactly environmentally friendly.
Even in America today you have plenty of things worth investing in that don’t have to be homes if you can’t stomach the initial investment. Idk what you envision about replacing investment in homes with “research” though certainly curious to learn more about what you envision.
And the homes I've seen in Japan personally didn't seem to stand out to me as particularly nice but maybe you have some examples that you are thinking of or a different experience?
And yeah, the houses might be cheap, but they are also tiny and most Japanese cities are ugly as sin. Not a great example IMHO.
There are many many reasons that go into explaining an economic outcome.
Reducing everything to a perceived cultural difference is wrong and intellectually uncurious.
The problem isn't setting up a great system, the problem is what happens when charismatic leaders and people like Stalin turn up.
Has anyone tried to write a constitution based on all this? Not with the expectation that it will actually be used, but as a way to teach these important theories and give a good example of how they can be applied to law?
Someone has already written a "here's how to bootstrap modern technology again if all is lost" book. We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
I'm not certain.
Both the US Constitution and the first French Constitution, for instance, were the produce of one century of thinking ideas through. Each successive French Constitution has been redesigned to avoid the problems that led to the fall of the previous one.
I'm less familiar with other examples.
Link?
> We also need a "here's how to write a constitution that wont immediately be twisted into a bludgeon against the people" book.
Open up a git for the book and let the people do PRs and bug reports. One file per article.
Everybody has a "right to an opinion" but some people's opinions are fundamentally invalid because they are not constructed on facts and personal preferences but on an incomplete and incorrect understanding of the world and repeating other people's personal preferences.
The hard part is how to separate truth from lies, how to quantify uncertainty, how to tell apart objective and subjective, and how to make people introspect enough to realize when their preferences are not really theirs.
Intelligent and educated people have a much higher chance to get the objective part right. (To state the obvious, nothing is certain, people looking for absolutes or pretending I am talking in absolutes are either dumb or manipulative.) But they can also have different personal preferences from the unintelligent and uneducated. I still think weighting votes based on a test of knowledge and intelligence should be tries.
I also see very few reasons for massive nation states to exist beyond common defense. Perhaps laws should have much smaller jurisdictions, down to individual towns, so they can be experimented with and people can move not far if they are really unhappy. But that requires a much smaller and cleaner law system, so common people can understand the differences, otherwise it becomes a mess.
And we should teach people about manipulative techniques and abusive / anti-social personality traits from childhood, teach them to recognize them and even take tests depicting interactions between people where they have to detect use of manipulation.
It has nothing to do with what GP was suggesting of "banning campaigns" lol
How do you allocate that? Surely you can't give anyone who asks the same amount. So you favour parties which are already entrenched. Of course that has quite a few upsides but it doesn't seem like an inherently democratic system.
In worst (of course not unavoidable) you also might end up with indirect equivalent of what your re trying to ban, e.g. private media companies with a lot of resources that are biased towards certain candidates influencing public opinion (without crossing the legal boundaries) or those already in power using the state media to do the same.
e.g. in Hungary most funding comes from the government. How did that work out for them?
- parties repeatedly getting 2% over 4 years get gov donations
- parties can take capped membership fees
- private citizen can forward a minuscule part of incomes tax towards a specific party, fully anonymously
- during campaigning, private people can donate to parties, capped to a small percentage of donator official incomes.
Fun thing is, this was put in place after an attempt to install a local equivalent of Orban. Bankrolled by a businessman with close ties to Russia.
In a representative system where you vote directly for candidates and not parties like in the US you need to know who is who and what they support.
Banning campaigning hurts challengers to the status quo.
I could keep picking your naive suggestion apart but this is I believe sufficient evidence that you haven’t done your homework.
e.g. that doesn't seem to be working that well in Hungary or Turkey and presumably quite a few other countries. Banning or severely limiting external funding or support makes it rather easy for politicians with authoritarian policies to keep their grip on power.
You win the election, you tweak the system to make it easier for you to win next time, you get more funding and your opponents less. Rinse and repeat and you can weaken the opposition to such an extent that you can stay in power more or less indefinitely. That's what Orban or Erdogan are doing.
Another option is you spend a lot of money, win, then change the rules to ban or limit external funding so that nobody else can do that to challenge you.
And in our case the alternative is Russian money making it into politics. Which is exactly what could lead to issues.
What prevents the green team from registering 200 yellow candidates who will all submit yellow-sounding platforms in order to split the vote?
Don’t we want to allow the public to judge candidates on more than their ability to write a single speech? Politics and representation is picking someone to perform tasks as our agent that go well beyond writing a single short speech with lots of lead time.
But, what if instead of doing typical advertising, a candidate coordinates secretly with people outside your jurisdiction. Co-conspirators could spend months or years running stories about some issue—crime, homelessness, drugs, etc, that might even have some kernel of truth (but be wildly overblown). People in your society might jump in with their own stories related to the problem, legitimate stories of things that happened to them, but filtered up by “the algorithm.” Then, the malicious candidate can just reference the well-known (overblown) issues in their pamphlet. It’s perfect because they don’t even have to make or defend any specific claims, just gesture broadly at the fears that individuals have self-selected.
What do we ban? Getting your news from outside the jurisdiction? Discussing your experiences? Politicians meeting people outside jurisdiction? I don’t really see it…
I dunno. My gut feeling is that we just have to come to terms with the idea of democracy requiring some sort of media literacy. But then if people were good at identifying ads and ignoring them, they wouldn’t be used so widely.
Currently, they are only used for some positions like presidency, are usually 2 terms and don't apply to other positions.
IMO:
1) We should get rid of presidents and other single-person positions altogether and replace them with groups of at least 5. Power concentrated in the hands of one individual attracts the worst individuals.
2) Term limits should apply to many more positions.
3) I am undecided whether the limit counter should be shared among all positions (i.e. if 2 terms is the max, you can serve 2 years as president, 2 as senator, or 1 as president and 1 as senator - changing position would not reset it). This would mean there would be no career politicians but also the politicians would be less experienced. The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town) but only allowing one term in each position. That way people can judge them on their past performance.
Then there is room for quite a lot of direct or indirect corruption. e.g. if you know you won't have a job in 4-8 years major corporations and other organizations offering you a cushy job if you do the "right things" might become quite a bit more appealing.
But yes, having a distinct class of career politicians has some significant downsides as well..
> The opposite is requiring people to ascend through the ranks (perhaps starting as low as a mayor of a town)
Might work fine or there might be a lot of gatekeeping if you just want to get on the first step since that will likely be controlled quite tightly by the established parties/cliques.
With tongue in cheek, that qualifies you as the "people like Stalin" category. Not a good idea.
You are confusing narrative, a positive spin with actual rules of the system. In political system they are never the same.
Freedom, equal opportunity etc are not objectives of our political system, they are just the narrative.
For example we could phase out all marketing and advertising. We could simplify and automate accounting and many other jobs. We could reduce the work week to 30 hours. We could make jobs teenage friendly and replace high schools with entry level jobs so that people get to try to be in multiple fields before they commit to years of studying anything. We could eliminate most university programs and again replace them with entry level jobs, 20 hours/week - people can study new material on their own free time and at their own pace - eliminate all memorization based learning to pass arbitrary tests and have people progress based on performance on the job. Make moving down on a career ladder or switching careers entirely a common and non-humiliating occurrence, etc.
The most pertinent question to ask is - why haven't any of these already happened? What kinds of people prevent these changes from occurring and what should be done about it? Do you know any of these people - are some of them your family members. Are you one of them? Why does no one seem to ask these questions and seek answers? :)
Most of your comment I agree with but I take issue with this part.
Some time in recent history education became a means to an end: getting a decent job. This is not strictly speaking the point. Learning for the sake of learning still has tangible value that cannot be substituted by requisite training for entry level jobs.
I'm not really sure what caused this shift (but I definitely understand and respect it) but it's heavily misguided. If only we could all be so lucky as to be highly educated in a mundane job.
I don't want to live in a world where we only learn what we need to know in order to do our job. Do you?
I think it's important to point out that some people... don't seem to share the same ground-assumptions, and it's forming a rather sharp divide in modern US politics.
There's a model for analyzing "how could you think that" disagreements which I've found useful, from a (leftist) video essay:
> See, when you talk to our conservative friend, you operate as though you have the same base assumptions [...]
> Since we live with both of these frameworks [democratic egalitarianism, capitalist competitive sorting] in our minds, and most of the things we do in our day-to-day lives can be justified by either one, we don't often notice the contradiction between them, and it's easy to imagine whichever one tends to be our default is everyone else's default as well. [...]
> Your conservative friend thinks you're naive for thinking the system even can be changed, and his is the charitable interpretation [...] Many conservatives assume liberals [...] know The Hierarchy is eternal, that there will always be people at the top and people at the bottom, so any claim towards making things equal must be a Trojan-horse for something that benefits them. [...]
They're right... when the other is someone like them.
And they have a blind spot for an other who is not like them.
Meanwhile, what is the blind spot of the people who are not like that (i.e., who believe in equality)?
Is their blind spot that they can't imagine so many people who are trying to gain advantage, and being deceitful about it?
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
Oh and how do you intend to solve that most "communists" leaders were fake and intended to become dictators from the very start. There's many cases of various dictators, from anarchist, to just self-interested people, fascists, religious lunatics, ... pretending to be communists to grab power. In many cases, communists supported these awful people with extremely bad results. Examples: Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Poland, Venezuela, ... all are cases of communists supporting would-be dictators that had ZERO intention of ever making those societies equal or tolerant or democratic.
In fact there's plenty of people who got support by pretending to be communists, even going so far as committing terrorist attacks on behalf of communism, to turn around and become capitalist "leaders", like ... well, most of the members of the EU commission for example. Jose Manuel Barosso, for example, was part of communist protests that lynched people. He was also the EU commission president that pushed Greece into debt servitude.
Not necessarily the first cancer, but eventually one will.
Cancer is when a component of a system acts to replicate or enrich itself instead of acting to perpetuate the system.
But for states, they still feverishly cling to the idea of unity even as it brings increasing fragility and stagnation.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Yes, I certainly agree.
The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).
It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.
Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.
My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them?
Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "instilling" part. (Of course to be fair there a few success stories (to an extent) like France)
I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to see.
The methods seem more concerning. First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.
It works if the consensus already exists in the society. Clearly these days that's not the case in quite a few places.
What do you then? Force children of people who have a radically different understanding of what these civil virtues are to attend schools which teach them against their will? Take them away if the parents refuse? Well that's what totalitarian states do...
Once you have a democracy, you are not supposed to dictate from the top but distribute political power, and decision-making. The US has seen the executive's usurpation of power from the other branches of government since the turn of the century. Such an unbalanced government is by definition inimical to democracy.
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
Then again, outsized influence is a problem in democracies as well; this is what creates the conditions for a Caesar figure to emerge in the first place.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
No way. I'm shocked.
>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.
And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?
Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.
>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.
You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.
>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.
Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.
Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.
> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures
Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.
Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.
> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.
Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.
> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.
But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.
We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Interesting thought exercise though.
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
No, Capitalism can only reinforce hierarchies. Its core tenet is accumulation of capital, and thus power.
> corruption and incompetence are a great way to reach that goal.
Corruption is what happens when the capitalist class gets powerful enough to bend the rules. Incompetence is what happens when they figure out they can put a puppet in place and order him to bend the rules faster for them.
That's true even in the most leftist and forcefully egalitarian regimes like communism. There are a few taking the ultimate decisions and there are some that benefit.
People even relatively far down may believe The Hierarchy offers predictability and stability—even if I think their belief is incorrect.
Authoritarians tend to be fearful, and it offers a partial answer to those fears.
Violence like shooting political opponents for voicing their opinions?
That would work in MMO games,not in reality. If the system is not naturally evolving, it will produce tragedies. Look at communism. It was supposed to produce "a better" society but resulted in tens of millions of deaths, loss of freedom and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.
I would say that it's rare that a hierarchy is deliberately constructed to funnel surplus upward.
Rather, many hierarchies emerge organically, but those at the top seek to eliminate any that do not funnel surplus upward.
It's less a process of deliberate construction, and more a process of deliberate curation. Something like cultural bonsai.
Many people have anti-social traits which manifest by seeking power and then using it to extract value from other people at their expense.
Meanwhile the people doing real work are almost always pro-social but are too busy to play these power games, unless the power imbalance gets too large.
University of California, Berkeley - 26 founders Stanford University - 21 Massachusetts Institute of Technology - 17 Cornell University - 10 Georgia Institute of Technology - 7 Carnegie Mellon University - 7 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign - 7 Harvard University - 6 University of Oxford - 6 University of Cambridge - 6 University of Pennsylvania - 5 University of Washington - 5 Columbia University - 5 Johns Hopkins - 4 Yale - 4 Caltech - 4 UCLA - 4
YC is, last I heard, largely an in-person thing. And it makes sense for CA schools to be highly represented because of that.
Imagine a world where workers decided how much to pay their assistant ("manager") according to how much tangential effort and overhead he saves them so they can focus on their core competency.
I mean, project 2025, heritage foundation, Thiel, Trump ... like in fact they are exactly on it.
I have heard about that a few times now. But this series really emphasizes how much surplus labor the rich could extract. And hence shows how much social impact it had when that labor reduced, and could suddenly negotiate.
I wonder if the black death, and subsequent social change, might have been the best thing to happen to the peasant class.
Today's demographic situation also involves a shrinking population, but it's for lack of young people. The world is getting a lot older really quickly, and that means less energetic and dynamic, and it means a lot of resources flowing to older unproductive people.
And much lower real estate prices could amortize a lot of wages shrinking, from labour perspective.
I haven't had the time to read this series yet but I can recommend for example his articles about the industrial revolution, making of iron and steel or sieges in the Lord of the Rings compares to read world tactics.
He has a knack for analyzing society from a systems level perspective and going into the right amount of depth for somebody who wants to understand the principles without having any background in history.
The joys of progress.
It's probably true that there was less work in the winter (although you still had all your maintenance tasks, e.g. repairs and preparing firewood), but this was compensated by much more intense labor in the spring and summer.
Overall, though, it makes no sense to say medieval peasants worked less than people do now, it's likely very comparable, and the variations would depend on the quality of your soil/irrigation and how much you were going to get taxed.
> Ultimately, we found that the claim that medieval peasants worked around 150 days a year is still largely accepted as a valid estimate by academic economic historians, at least in England for a period starting around 1350 and lasting between a few decades and more than a century, depending on the methodology used to study the data.
The thing is, no one knows what medieval peasants were doing, cos we weren't there. We have this or that piece of evidence, but evidence can be misinterpreted.
Highly recommend this book on the subject.
10/10 couldn't recommend more.
I believe the Sparta series is the most popular, but I really enjoyed the one on iron.
(Btw he's not a tenured professor, much to his chagrin, he's an adjunct professor. This is exactly why he wrote A LOT about broken academia system too.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wd6jt/what_d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210619035356/http://www.columb...
My impression is that it is correct enough the look good on surface. Like learning Freud, you see his points, it makes sense, but the details are wrong and so you spend most of your time learning why he wasn't exactly right.
As a side note, I've read some interesting critiques on Diamond's theories. But I did find the whole book to be an interesting perspective, even just thinking about things North America lacked such as animal husbandry that may have drastically changed the way it developed.
_his_ blog. It’s all written by one man. But I agree that it’s a remarkable blog, so fascinating and freely given.
While I’m in grumpy-old-man-shakes-fist-at-newfangled-grammar mode, I can _almost_ accept that people writing in the “historical present” is unavoidable these days since TV historians have made it so trendy, but it’s especially jarring when he changes tense in the middle of a sentence (emphasis mine):
> These settlers _were_ remarkably well compensated, because part of what the Hellenistic kings _are_ trying to do is…
However, now I see the mistakes as an indicator that it hasn't been written with an LLM which then makes me more inclined to want to read it.
Conflicted.