Mistakes in the other direction are also common! It’s easy for young professionals to use the average value of their time to calculate tradeoffs, rather than the marginal value. When you’re making $80 per hour, doordashing every meal starts to make some sense, as do laundry services, etc. I’m not against these things, but the time savings often go to leisure rather than career reinvestment.
This is totally fine, and sometimes necessary, as long as people are correctly identifying what they’re really buying and what the price is.
KyleM
Karma: 8
On “LLMs as Tools for Alignment”:
Wanted to respond to one specific paragraph from this. Kids famously ask “why?” over and over until their parents go insane.
LLMs tirelessly answer “why?” just for you. Is that curiosity still inside the average adult?
Ways LLMs improve coordination:
Helping people define problems (many of which we all share)
Pointing out stable solutions involving coordination when they exist and are described by literature
Suggesting coordination mechanisms
GPT-5 can do all three of these to a useful degree today, even if no further progress was made. It’s not a PhD level thinker, but it can connect you to PhD level ideas. Sycophancy is a problem, as is distraction. Either could kill the concept. Maybe we get the Wall-E world. But I think people want to know “why?”.
What LLMs don’t do:
Make everyone agree (although disagreements may converge to cruxes faster, enabling better understanding [or more direct conflict?])
Quorum sensing[1] - the ability to detect when enough actors are willing to cooperate to make cooperation effective. People often avoid being the first to move, unless they know they have support.
I have been thinking about this a lot, and would appreciate links to further reading. OP[2], you should look into Pol.is if you haven’t already. It’s on my reading list. Also, see Nepal [3] for some tech-enabled coordination on a large scale.
I’m not sure how things can change, other than economic pressure by consumers or the government on welfare.
1. PE rollups of companion vet clinics are a contributing factor, as with human medical clinics. Consolidation combined with metrics-based optimization leads to harsh local incentives.
2. Vets in poultry and cattle operations don’t necessarily care more about animal welfare than the owners or the consumers. Large animal / poultry vets have been desensitized to harm for many years, understand the economics, and understand their role in that system. I believe all of them care deeply about welfare, but the machine is optimizing for cost. There are selection effects in career choice too—if they share your ideals they probably won’t end up in those roles. Companion vets have more room for empathy, even if they are still constrained by economics.
Vets are the HR of the production animal world—there to help unless your needs conflict with the org’s.
I’d like to see someone trying a version of this, and European foundation owned businesses seem like a decent template. Do those businesses actually win due to charity ownership? If I were an investor or funding allocator, I’d like to see the pitch be much more concrete.
Edit: Brad addressed or clarified most of these points. Leaving it up as a reference, but most people can safely skip the below.
How much are customers willing to pay to buy charity-owned, by sector? The “tie-breaker” framing should correspond with some dollar amount.
My expectation is that commodity consumers and B2B customers are not willing to pay much more. Consumer luxury goods seems like a good market, and we see businesses appealing to charitable sensibilities there already.
Can charity acquirers pay market prices without expecting to profit from multiples arbitrage or synergy?
You suggest LBOs. Is the cash flow going to paying back a huge loan or to charity? I don’t see how it can be both.
You would lose the ability to raise capital in markets. Are we sure we’ll get the same lending terms if we can’t backstop the loans with equity? Probably there are some details about the actual ownership structures that matter here.
As a consumer, would I rather pay a “charity tax” or direct my own charity spend intentionally?
Are the employees you’ll be inheriting actually in the group of employees willing to accept 4-7% lower pay for mission aligned work? Will they leave when you shift to paying below market?
You’re considering “the entire economy” as the scope. It’s good to point at a huge TAM but it’s also more than you need to claim. As an aside, was this written with AI?
You might suggest a specific beachhead (establish a philanthropic search fund or vehicle run by me, Brad West, with $XXX,XXX,XXX in market X in geography Y, with expected returns of z% over time frame).
If you have <20 year AI timelines, is it a good time to buy a bunch of legacy businesses or are there better uses for the money?