> if someone claimed more than a few decades ago that certain economic strategies and structures are good or bad

As you point out, it is all game theory.

But things that arrange for the game to be more beneficial to everyone, that align our interests more, deserve to be called "good", regardless of their inability to universally do so.

The latter would be an impossible bar for anything.

Where I find things frustrating, is when someone thinks because something is "good", it somehow becomes "enough". (Think, capitalized versions of different economic schools of thought.)

Looks to my uneducated eye like China has been enforcing competitive markets internally, with consistent economic policies. Meanwhile the US has stopped enforcing antitrust altogether and keeps violently changing its mind about economic policy every four years.

And then externally Chinese policy is oriented around suppressing the value of its currency, which is basically a monopolists' tactic--artificially lowered prices in order to crowd out competition.

I think that's mercantilist-ish, but kind of a modern version?

It's definitely the opposite of what the US does, the currency is the world reserve and therefore drives the price of the dollar above what it would be without trade, which I guess makes exporting from the US much more difficult?

Anyone who is an expert in global economics please correct me here :)

How would a bad monopoly be likely to be taken down if not by government intervention?

Good for whom, exactly?

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically any societal function for decades without any actual data.

This seems like a classic straw man argument. Plutocratic oligarchs have been making the argument that private monopolies are better than representative democracy at basically anything for decades.

>Haven't read his book, but the idea that monopolies are good isn't typically made in a vacuum, it's made relative to alternatives, most often "ham-fisted government intervention". It's easier to take down a badly behaving monopoly than to change government, so believing monopolies are better than the alternatives seems like a decent heuristic.

What? How is the first alternative poor government instead of multipolar competing companies? When was the last time a Monopoly was actually broken up in the US? ATT/Bell 50 years ago? lol

Are you serious? People get upset about losing jobs because they need jobs to pay their bills. Further, we often build our life identities around work; if you're a good car mechanic or a successful restaurant owner, you're proud of that. It's a part of you.

Having to repeatedly restart your career is risky, painful, and demoralizing. I have no problem seeing why people don't like that and why it can lead to populist backlash or even violent revolutions (as it did in the past).

By the way, to address your closing comment: people don't like dying either and tend to get upset when others die?

> these tools until AI had the common property of being enhancing of human cognition, because they couldn't do the thinking for you

I have a different take, centered around this idea: Not everyone was into thinking about everything all the time even before AI. I'd say most people most of the time outsourced actual thinking to someone else.

1) Reading non-fiction books:

Not all books, even the non-fiction ones, necessarily require any thinking by the reader. A book that narrates history, for example, requires much less thinking than something like "The Road to Reality" or "Godel Escher Bach."

Most of us outsourced the thinking and historical method to the authors of the history book and just passively consumed some facts or factoids. Some of us memorize and remember these factoids well, but that's not thinking, just knowledge storage.

Philosophically, what's the difference between consuming books this way and reading an LLM's output?

2) Reading research papers:

Most people don't read any research papers at all. No thinking there. Most people don't head to some forum to ask about latest research either. Also, researchers in most fields don't come out and do outreach regularly.

Indeed, an LLM may actually be the only pathway for a lot of people to get at least _some_ knowledge and awareness about latest research.

Those of us in scientific, engineering, humanities, healthcare fields may read some to many papers. But only a small subset reads very critically, looking for data errors, inconsistencies, etc. For most of us, the knowledge and techniques may be beyond our current understanding and possibly without any interest in understanding them in future either.

Most of us are just interested in the observations or conclusions or applications. Those may involve some thinking but also may not involve any thinking, just blind acceptance of the paper's claims and possible applications.

3) Coding:

Again, deep thinking is only done by a small set of programmers. Like the ones who write kernels, compilers, distributed algorithms, complex libraries.

But most are just passive consumers who read some examples online or ask stackoverflow or reddit for direct answers. Some even outsource all their coding entirely to gig sites. Not much thinking there except pricing and scheduling. What's the difference between that and asking an LLM or copying an LLM's answers? At least, the LLMs patiently explain their code, unlike salty SO users!

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IMO, most people weren't doing much thinking even pre-AI.

Post-AI, it's true that some people who did do some thinking may reduce it.

But it's equally true that those people who weren't doing much thinking due to access or language barriers can actually start doing some thinking now with the help of AI.

* For certain speculative definitions of AI

There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education, at least not for the current rate of teacher salaries (and it's very far off). The educational strategy has to scale to real people, real teachers and real students as they are in the flesh, not some ivory tower pipe dream. We've had decades of this "we should teach how to think, not what to think".

Alternatively,if you don't care about scale, as in rolling out a system to the population at large, then yeah, this kind of advanced education exists, it's just very selective and is in advanced extracurricular or obtained through private tutors.