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Primitive steel only becomes common in the middle ages... 2000 years later.

Alexander had an iron sword. Julius had an iron sword.

The problem with iron is that it is very hard to make. Requires lots of fuel, labour and technology.

The problem is that ironworking doesn't actually precede the bronze age collapse archeologically. Ironworking has mysterious and archaic origins... but it doesn't proliferate untill all those empires are fallen and forgotten.

The mining infrastructure didn't collapse. But tin was traded over very large distances,mostly from outside of that civilization's brotherhood of great kings (the rabbu surru system).

Iron bloomeries (via slag finds) appear in the record sporadically. It starts before the collapse, and may have very archaic uknown origins. But... they become common as recovery happens.

So... Causation seems to be backwards. Bronze production mostly ends. Iron working starts gradually expanding in the absence of bronze.

Also... The "superior weapons" angle isn't very strong. Bronze and early iron were not in a different league.

Iron just has more potential for scale, because the material itself is abundant. It requires a lot of labour and fuel, but if you can scale those you can scale ironworking. Eventually iron surpasses bronze and steel is vastly superior... but this takes many centuries.

So... He's saying ironworking caused the collapse, or prevented recovery. age

That is interesting, but it requires evidence of sudden wide scale production in the 12th century or earlier.

The conventional take is that ironworking developed gradually because tin/bronze became unavailable. The know evidence of iron working is gradual. Rare pockets gradually becoming more common over centuries. ities, states and empires actually come back as ironworking grown. Slag and reurbanization track one another.

Also interesting that Egypt survived and did not do "iron age." They were sitting on vast hordes of tin and bronze. Bronze can be remolded. They were also less trade dependent. Egypt exported gold, grain & textiles. They imported tin, copper and slaves.

Personally, I suspect that it could have been "financial crisis." Debt cycles and their consequences appear heavily in late bronze age sources. The Ugarit archive. The armana letters etc.

Earlier scholars took this theory too far in the 60s and forced it into ideological moulds.

But... I find it hard to ignore direct* accounts of people in that time. People were becoming endebted, debt bonded... and growing hordes of "outlaws" form to eacape. These institutions were apparently international. There are international treaties dealing with them.

I also don't discount "axial age" hypothesese. A "death of god" paradigm, perhaps related to Zoroaster (elam), akhenatan (Egypt), etc.

Yes, landlords have and rental markets are not securatized commodity markets. There's always some noise.

The point is that the price is determined by supply and demand, primarily. Speculative market responses at the margins if the transition is analyzing the noise. Besides the point.

The much bigger issue at transition, is that landlords are going to be underwater across the board. The whole point here is a permanent transition from high land prices to near-zero land prices.

Yes.

Henry George talks about "fixed supply" and a lot of his language speaks to the conomic ideas of the time. Remember that the liberal philosophy of property rights was all about adding your own labour to establish value and property rights.

But... We've moved on from those things.

We both said the same thing, just using different words. But... Using simple, modern economic explanations makes it a lot easier to follow.

I think people get totally lost unless they understand (in modern, marginalist microeconomic terms) why (a) rent does not change (b) the value of land becomes near-zero (c) what "land value" attempts to describe.

Meanwhile, the part of this that inevitably dominates the politics and decision making is this: (x) land loses all it's value and real estate investing no longer yields capital gains (y) Homeownership is no longer a safe haven. Owner-occupiers becomes exposed to future housing costs, just like renters.

These are two major changes, and Georgism and needs to own them (imo) to maintain coherence. There's no room for confusion here.

>It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value

No. The land can have negative value, if the tax is too high. This is the kind of confusion I'm talking about... and where georgism gets genuinely confusing.

The "land value" in Geogist land-value-tax.. is not market price. It is whatever the land price would be.. in a market without property taxes. It is a theoretical price. The tax rate is applied to the theoretical price. That is LVT.

The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism. Soviet economics was developing similar concepts in the 60s-90s. Eg linear programming.

In all honesty, I don't think this is all that important. Irl georgist policies would have to make do with an innacurate estimate of LVT, erring on the side of low taxe rates relative to "real/theoretical" LVT. They could even abandon the concept entirely, and go with a more tangible proxy.

But... long before you get to that point, you have to contend with the losers of this paradigm shift. (1) Anyone holding valuable real estate loses. Both homeowners and investors. That is a lot of private wealth disappearing (2)Then, the economic safety of home ownership disappears. You can no longer buy to lock in a price and guarantee yourself housing forever.

It's important to remember that in most periods, Georgists like georgism because it is a better tax system. It's not really a solution to housing availability or affordability... not directly.

There are interesting discussions to be had about indirect consequences.. but you can only have those once you have the direct consequences straight.

There are real, genuine tradeoffs. Policy advocacy tends to obfuscate these... and that balloons out into a general confusion.

I learned a little bit about georgism as the idea started crossing my feed.. 5-ish years ago.

What I've noticed, especially in online spaces is that advocates have quite disperate notions of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work.

Relatively contentious and complex arguments about 2nd and 3rd order effects seem to dominate. EG rent will decrease because of incentives and political economies.

I think this comes from defensive arguments.

Here, he defends against the argument thelat taxes will be passed on to tenents. I agree that the answer is no, but how that is established is important. It's core to understanding the whole framework.

The premise of georgism is that land is scarce. Hi demand, and low supply yields a price. That price does not change because the landlord owes taxes. Supply and demand remain the same, and yields the same price/rent.

LVT is the maximum, non distorting tax rate. The rate at which land itself is worth zero. If tax exceeds LVT building becomes unprofitable and land has negative value.

When tax equals lvt... Tax revenue is maximized and land value is zero.... in the theoretical chalkboard economy.

This is the whole core reasoning underlying Georgism. It is about capturing the value of land, in taxes. All of it, ideally.

Price, scarcity, abundance, affordability... These are peripheral. Also the same rules, more or less apply.

Skipping onto YIMBY, supply constraints and whatnot tends to obfuscate the key parts.

Georgism wants to crash the property market. Zero out the location component of real estate value.

If I actually instituted, an enormous class of wealth goes poof.

That's the key fact to consider.

IDK. This can be a banal point.

Product, technology, implementation, police department, policing method, workflow. These aren't discreet. Incidents involve all of them.

Responsibility is on people.Technologies cannot be "found guilty." But... this isnt' a trial. There are consequences to doing policing any particular way, and that's the subject.

Doing it this way... using baby skynet for command and control has advantages, like response time. It has disadvantages, like false positives. "Law enforcement error" is technically correct, but not informative about the matter at hand. The error

I think a lot of this is "accelerating trends."

That is, the www was "being killed" already in a lot of ways. "Democratization" and suchlike open ideals had already been receding for a long time.

In part, this is because of "democratization" of access. The old web was a self selected, subpopulation. After smartphones, it is the whole population.

Facebook's walled garden and other apps using the web as "merely infrastructure." Algorithic recommendations replace hyperlinks, until it no longer "a web."

Google, imo, represents a sort of intermediate stage. "Pagerank" the original tech behind their search relied on the hyperlink web structure... and also degraded it.

That was SEO paradigm. Now there is the LLM equivalent of SEO.

So... LLMs eat the web, while also making it redundant. The previous paradigm and all it's contents whill exist as a ghost within the new one.

The idea of designing incentives far less useful social scientists and policy wonks we're hoping circa 2010.

I agree with and enjoy the overall sentiment of this piece. Incentive are fit losers. BYO incentives is the way to go.

That said, IRL, the structural advantage of external incentives... especially artificially designed ones... Can be near impossible to overcome.

Let's say you are a researcher working in one of the fields tested by 21st century mushiness. Replication failures. P-hacking. An unstructured stream of published research adding up to noise.

This outcome is not just because of publish-or-perish, or other incentive structure. It's also because the field is just hard. Harder than it seems it should be, intuitively.

It seems like science should have uncovered a decent, workable "theory of nutrition" or a promising pathway to one. It hasn't. That means thousands of researchers are working in their little corners... And when they look up from their desk there is no big picture forming. No big project that they are contributing to.

Maybe we just need a new theory, when you research methods.. or something. But... we don't know what that is.

Intrinsic motivation vs academic grind... Facing a near impossible challenge. A good chance of modest success within the pigeon-incetives paradigm... Vs near-guaranteed failure of an alternative, intrinsic motivation path.

Even if you take the intrinsic motivation path... There will probably come a point where you have invested years, achieve nothing... and proudly refusing to publish banal papers like everyone else will seem like folley. This person probably just leaves the field.

Startups are different than the corporations they become. 19th century science is different to modern academia. Trying to replicate qualities is always sysephean.

When "ai slop" became a concept, it mostly came into spaces where "human slop" had already been firmly established.

Obvious ones like content scroll fodder. But also, there's slop everywhere. Even things like longform journalism or trade publications... these are often "slop." A string of platitudes and generalizations that superficially seem serious.

That is true in work culture too. A lot of people jump in on emails, superficially seem to be working... but contribute little of value. Now they do this, but with ai.

This is not a complaint.

I think your assessment of this result being as expected... but this is about the LLM equivalent of SEO becoming an area of interest

Is this cognitive dissonance, or is this just people being normal?

You pursue business strategies as a profit maximizing business person concerned with outcomes for your company and investors. You comment on the regulatory/political matters as a pro-social citizen concerned with societal benefits.

Cognitive dissonance tends to occur when attempting to avoid hypocrisy... and doing mental gymnastics to make it so there are no clashes between your different perspectives.

≥jet engines have a market structure that's uniquely terrible for traditional free market societies.

A lot of the theoretical concepts behind this... They need updating to account for the last generation of experience. For the most part, the concepts were developed in the context of the industrial revolution(s) and manufacturing.

We are talking about manufacturing here, but the US economy in the last generation is a story about software, services, non-manufacturing firms and manufacturing firms the side step (as best they can) the core paradigm of manufacturing economics.

Competitive pricing, substitutes and alternatives, a strategic paradigm governed by market prices, marginal costs, and manufacturing quality... This is relatively marginal paradigm in the US economy, certainly in terms of market cap. In china, it is their bread and butter.

Low margin, highly competitive components manufacturing... Is that really a forte a free market societies in 2026? We outsource the "commodity value add" parts of the process. We certainly do not put them at the center of corporate strategy.

I agree about "corporate rot." I don't think anyone has a good answer to this either. China included. In practice, the best solution appears to be young vibrant companies. VW or Ford vs Tesla & BYD. VW and Ford exist because of history. Tesla & BYD exist because they perform well.

Schumpeter's free market solution was creative destruction... But, we've never really had a system for promoting this.

Part of the problem is that in a global market, allowing a company to fail creates room in the market for renewal, but there's no guarantee that your country will fill it. If Germany had come down hard on VW after the turbo diesel scandal... They probably would have just ceded market share to Korea or China or the US or something.

Apologies for the meta:

I feel that our understanding of trust and antitrust, along with the legal and regulatory premises... Just isn't very useful in the 21st century.

I understand the motivation, and justification for employing antitrust. Google's business model, and much of modern tech economy is really all about Monopoly-like market power.

In fact, one of the main concerns for AI investors is price competition, insufficient lock-in, weak network effects and consumer choice. They call this commodification... a telling choice of word. It's a worry that $trn valuations are impossible without something resembling monopoly to ensure longevity and high margins.

Peter Thiel gave a talk in favour of monopoly. It's worth reading. Even if you completely disagree, there are some subtle points that are relevant either way. A company facing market dynamism, price competition... Is unlikely to be investing billions in speculative r&d, for example.

Our core ideas about Monopoly, and antitrust... Tend to be highly derived of the industrial revolution, which is in turn all about manufacturing. Capital, labor, technology, marginal costs, marginal utility, price theory, etc. you can count the number which it's coming off the assembling line to understand the productivity of the firm. The product is concrete, and therefore productivity can be reasoned about.

There's no real way of applying this to Google. Google's users generally don't pay anything. Google doesn't have marginal costs.There is no price. The AdWords auction, is very clearly designed assuming monopolistic dynamics.. the seller is price maker and the buyer is a price taker. Prices are set as close as possible to buyer marginal value. Competition has no effect on pricing.

Otoh, where is the EU or any other antitrust regulator going with any of this. In the 90s, the Microsoft Monopoly was the biggest antitrust case. They used their os Monopoly to crush Netscape.

Now that it's history, we can look back and learn that the antitrust case just didn't matter one way or another. Nothing was really gained by victory, and nothing would have been lost by defeat.

The theory appears to be (a) regulated capitalism is good (b) tech monopolies clearly have market power and abuse it. There is no theory of desired outcome or the benefits of such an outcome. Are they regulating monopolies, preventing monopolies, pursuing an abstract notion of Justice?

I'm not sure that is the modern idea of education. As you can see in the linked example, it's there 200 years ago at the sunrise of universal and education. I'm sure it was there when Aristotle taught Alexander.

I think we can just call that "good" education vs.. the best we can do.

If you are thinking about the individual, you are going to be thinking about individualization... Like the coach of a gymnastics team, chess club or whatnot.

I agree that from a societal, governmental or taxpayer pov... It's different. That is the "true" perspective if you are doing national policy, which is why that "woke stuff" is so often a disaster when applied to national education systems.

But... as a student or parent... not thinking about it individualistically is pretty pathological.

There have been many wonderful ideas and concepts for education systems over the centuries. They have/had different, sometimes contradictory philosophies. Most fall short of their values and ambitions, regardless of what these are.

IMO, the pressures leading to degradation are all somehow linked to universalization:

(a) Resource constraints. Student/teacher ratios. The availability of good teachers, at scale. A great teacher is the ultimate lever. But great teachers in every class, with enough time and energy to invest in every student... very hard to achieve at national scale.

(b) Voluntary, self-motivated students who want to learn vs checked-out teenagers that just want to pass the exam with minimum effort... it's a massive difference. It's the difference between a world class gymnastics club and the PE class from an 80s teen movie. Even if half the class is highly motivated, it can't be like the gymnastics club when half the class is there involuntarily.

The visionary, optimistic concepts are usually focused on what students can achieve when motivated and willing. Universal, mandatory education rarely achieves this attitude.

(c) The bureaucracy required for scale. Decisions about teaching methods, standardized testing and whatnot... these can be performing terribly for years and decades before getting dropped. A department starts judging schools or teachers by standardized tests... and then a whole generation falls into a stale "teaching to the test" paradigm that disillusions both teacher and student.

"Why are we doing this" - because we have to.

To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience?

It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.

But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.

> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.

High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.

TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.

Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.

This is a very interesting discovery. I'm fascinated by ancient economics. But...

>The full apparatus of commercial civilization, operating without a theorist in sight.

I don't get this framing. Who thinks that markets are a product of theory? Why does the author keep hammering this point?

In any case... there are lots of commercial/numerical tablets available. Most of them, I believe. And... the records go all the way back to the beginnings of Summerian proto-writing. Cuineform was used for records before it was used for prose.

My hunch is that many/most assyriologists are more interested in political history, myth and suchlike. There is probably a lot of room for researchers who want to work on the economics.

Hypocrisy is a form of corruption.

Anthropic's IP was created by harvesting and "distilling" other people's IP. Copyrighted materials, and the commons... which they have essentially privatized.

The commercial goal is to avoid competition. One of the main worries for AI is "commoditization" which has come to mean "not a monopoly." To that end, it doesn't matter is the competitor is Chinese American or other.

Their motivation here is clearly protectionism. The argument they make to politicians is national security. The legal argument is IP-theft, violation of service agreements or whatnot.

This is all very dangerous. Commercial interests repackaged as national security can lead to armed conflict.

The copyright questions are unanswerable in my opinion. That is, they cannot be answered by looking for an essential "truth."

Reasoning by analogy in this case is not abstraction. It's just shifting the determination to choice of analogy.

Meanwhile, irl.. The best analogy is recent tech Innovations. The internet, social media...

Online copyright was basically instituted when large tech companies were ready to do it, and it was to their advantage.

Youtube, for example, built itself to massive size and locked in network effect advantages largely by violating copyright.

At some point, the legal ambiguity was a problem for their ad business. They were ready to move into the current revenue share influencer-treadmill model for content. At this point online, copyright enforcement was necessary to reduce the risk of being flanked by a new video platform.

The iPod, which resurrected Apple, ran on copyright infringement, and copyright Greyzones.... Until the point when their interests flipped. They're negotiating position opposite labels , Network effect considerations, Etc.

Intellectual property, broadly, does not start out as an intuitive/emergent natural right. It is created by legislative process, ecplicitely taylored to the needs of an interst group and/or national interest.

Writers, publishers, inventors, IP holding companies...

The legal rhetoric around legal arguments... is rhetoric. It is not the reason why decisions are made. It is how decisions or justified post fact.

No one is going to burden aI companies, at this point. The rights of copyright holders are a trivial matter compared to the potential of AI, the risk to certain labor markets, and such.

A lot of the applications of Ai are going to have to go through "normal" innovation routes.

Eg low-end disruption. I have already seen "Ai lawyer" at play here.

A colleague of mine is involved in a long class action against a builder. The group chats have gone absolutely chaotic this year... as members consult heavily with LLMs and the (real) lawyer can't deal with the volume of action.

Another friend is a wholesaler and does a lot of small-scale commercial deals. Contracts have gotten bigger and negotiation has gotten more involved as "Ai lawyers" read and write these contracts.

Employment contracts are much more likely to be negotiated, referenced, etc.

So... These are all routes to "classic" disruptive innovation. It's not replacing billable hours at law firms. It is replacing non-consumption.

Law is adversarial. A formal legal letter requires a form of legal letter in response. Law generates its own demand.

I would be watching a lot more for ground up innovation, rather than adoption at firms.

It's kind of worth reading. Not to learn about AI. But... it is an interesting/historic intersection of religion and technology.

Side note: (a) This new pope is very good at "political rhetoric" and (dare I say) polemic. He's a lot more relevant than recent popes. (b) There seems to have been a vibe shift, re: secular sentiments towards religion.

There is potentially a lot happening at this intersection... say catholicism and AI.

For example... LLMs make scripture a lot more accessible. That tends to be impactful, historically. It's Augustine, Aquinas, Spinoza and Schmidt. This kind of thing is a niche interest... even among the faithful, but an important niche. And... it just answers your questions, patiently.

It's also a therapist, confidant and advice giver... potentially a confessor or priest. Talk of "making an AI god" got a little stale, but... there are many ways that LLMs might take god-like roles in people's lives.

Predictions are futile, but I suspect we are going to see AI encroachment into religious/spiritual domains. I further suspect that good, natural, conversational audio is the bottleneck.

Personally... I'm curious about this Pope/AI thing. I find it interesting.

...you could also swap out with "rich people" or "all people," "governments."

In fact, reading these sentences with ad-lib on the subject tends to give these sentences interestingly different connotations.

I think we have so many hangups about this subject that we ended up leaving it unexplored and misunderstood.

Talent, drive, inherent traits interacting with learnable traits, learning curves, etc. What you are good at. What you are good at getting better at.

"Blank slate" is a better ethic. It's sort of the basis for modern public/political moral perspectives. But also for personal ethos... the "growth mindset* is a much better ethos and mentality.

But Otoh... we are who we are. We have the body we have. The genes we have. The childhood development we have. The education and experience we have. The personality we have. Etc.

We don't really have the have the culture of weighing these, and "knowing ourselves" via a mattwr-of-fact, calculating examination.

This is a good approach.

That said... It's hard to deny the romanticization and projection point above.

Beer goggles can be a mind expanding POV, but you need to be aware of it or you just end up being wrong for silly reasons.

A sober look at different is a good thing. Ooh... I agree that better and more advanced org concepts are likely still to be developed. But Otoh...

No. Not if the valuations and downstream effects of valuations are formulaic, which they often are.

Google might be jumping the gun here... and making an innovators dilemma type mistake.

LLMs are an alternative to search engines, which endangers google's whole ad business.

"AI mode" search is a sort of bridge. It gets Gemini a lot of customers that otherwise would not have used an LLM at all.

They may get stuck trying to keep the llm pattern similar enough to the search engine that the adwords business working more or less the same way.

This could be self limiting.

Coding goodness is just "unevenly distributed."

Irl, (a) different people's ways of working with ai are a million little islands and (b) bottlenecks vary enormously by coder and codebase/task.

Also... I think our era has an intrinsic bias that change=progress, productivity, etc.

Take the "networked computing revolution" of 1990-2000. These computers did land on every desk and every pocket. They are administration powerhouses. Excellent for all manner of administration tasks.

But... what this netted out to is "change." We send a lot more emails than we did letters. We communicate a ton. Secretaries went extinct. But "administration" grew.

A university faculty typically has more admins. Companies hire more accountants, HR, project managers, etc.

Maybe administration was never really a bottleneck.

Code has a lot of this. Everyone has a road map, wishlist, etc. It appears as though "code capacity" is the bottleneck. But maybe most of those companies can't really generate much more value from more software.

Anecdotally, it seems that many mid-tier shops are migrating/ modernizing their stack, and suchlike.

I haven't heard of many belting out features, and increasing prices or sales.

Most bottlenecks are upstream of another bottleneck. Few are a "dam."

>What people typically don’t do is look at why this is taking so long, and even more importantly: long duration does not automatically mean the problem originates there.

To some extent, we tell as many lies as we can get away with. Some answers are more convenient then others.

"Why" this is taking so long, like "why did this fail?" are prone to broadly agreed lies. Sometimes this is for obvious blame liability reasons. Often, this is because the lie conflicts with some "meta."

One such fallacy is the idea that software=value. Code= money, because it cost money to write. Features=revenue. Etc.

Irl.. startups produce features very quickly because they actually need features. They start with zero features.

But... LinkedIn, visa or even Facebook.... What they are short on is opportunities to develop code with value. Ie... Something that will increase revenue.

FB aren't resource constrained. They're demand constrained. If there were a "write code, make revenue" opportunity available... they'd have taken it already.

This totally conflicts with the experience of working somewhere. That's because you have wishlists, road maps and deadlines.... and it always appears that demand for code is sky high.