HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

Bret Weinstein's take on it (on Joe Rogan's podcast): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I#t=1h05m40s (I recommend starting 5-10 minutes earlier, but the linked starting time is where he really gets to the heart of the matter.)

The gist of it is that he believes markets are good at solving a particular problem, given material constraints and demand, but that markets are awful at determining what problems to solve. There are relatively weak and few incentives and punishments for corporations (other than for things that are outright illegal), so the market is approximately solving whatever problems have the lowest barriers to entry. And a website you can start in your dorm room that ends up scaling and monetizing eyeballs and addicting people is a perfect example. "How do I make a lot of money with one computer and a day or a week or a month's worth of code?" Most of the answers to that question are unhelpful to society, but as long as they're profitable and legal, people will pursue them.

He offers some speculative thoughts on solutions but to me they seem relatively unlikely to solve most of our problems, even if they can solve some of them. For instance, I think (or rather, hope) the combination of fitness+nutrition+healthcare+medical tracking can be fixed if dealt with as a single system. And by fixed, I mean encouraging fitness and providing only nutritious food in the community and thereby lowering everyone's overall food+fitness+healthcare costs, even if food and fitness costs go up. But I don't see how it works as a free market opt-in cluster of services. If you set up something like that, and it is overall cheaper than the status quo, how do you keep poor people and homeless people from signing up immediately and bankrupting your new system? They have a lot more incentive to switch to that new system than rich people (who would probably be subsidizing it to some extent which is a tough sell even if they end up happier and healthier).

⬐ closeparen

The problems that really need solving are of a political nature. Who gets the rewards and who bears the risks, what are the public spending priorities, what are the rules on employers, multinationals, real estate developers, etc. Does a miraculous breakthrough in high-end medical research even matter when no one can afford basic healthcare?

The only people who can get up in the morning every day and work on these problems are lobbyists. Usually, they're working in the wrong direction. Regardless, does anyone really think we could have a lobbying-based economy?

The free market is working on frivolous problems because that's what's left to do when you don't have the force of a state behind you.

⬐ cgmg

> The free market is working on frivolous problems because that's what's left to do when you don't have the force of a state behind you.

Can you clarify what you mean by this?

⬐ closeparen

Startups are not working on the big problems in education, healthcare, housing/homelessness, income inequality, etc. because those are not problems you can solve by bringing innovative products and services to market, they're problems you solve with different public policy.

The space of problems that could hypothetically be addressed by a free-market actor is pretty well tended already; it isn't crazy that we see free-market actors working on things that look unimportant.

Bret Weinstein, the evolutionary biologist, recently discussed similar ideas in this interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzAgSp_O03I

Here is a shorter piece of the interview that focuses a bit more on the specific idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4j-jRDTlJg

If anyone has links to more discussion about this subject, I would love to hear about it.