Suppose there are some economic activities that are zero sum, where R&D just steals market share. Maybe advertising, signaling education credentials, political campaigns. As an economy grows richer, do these sectors occupy a larger share of the economy? Is there a name for this?
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Endogenous sunk costs —- not zero sum but potential for concentration independent of market size
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, know any links to examples of RCTs for campaign strategies that would qualify?
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fwiw you could reframe all of these as communication or coordination costs
and as the economy becomes both larger and more complex, it makes sense that those costs would increase
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Fred hirsh’s “social limits of growth” isn’t exactly on point but has some very good related ideas.
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This is honestly half of AI X-risk criticism
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Remembering a girl I used to work with who didn’t believe in dinosaurs, not for religious reasons but bc “It’s just so silly…” Any time I tried to get her to elaborate, she’d be like “I mean…big monsters? Like…” and mime being a T-Rex until she was giggling too much to breathe
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Once the writer's strike is resolved, this has to be the entertainment industry's top priority.
slowboring.com/p/start-of-sum
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This is very tangential, but even among scientists, debunking doesn't work.
Let's look at some of the empirical work on the topic of replication failures.
First: papers that don't replicate receive more citations than ones that do.
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So uhm….A new meta-analysis of >200 effect-sizes (n > 60,000) in @NatureHumBehav found that on average debunking scientific misinformation had no effect
Yikes!
nature.com/articles/s4156
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I always wonder whether the people who use this tactic of making people's lives a misery rather than using persuasion and democracy, envisage that theirs is the last cause that justifies this, or whether they're OK with a future of continual misery for ever.
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Two women were detained in Stockholm after they threw “some kind of paint" at a painting by French artist Claude Monet and then glued themselves to the frame, Sweden's National Museum said on Wednesday.
bit.ly/42OHluE
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