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Mark Neyer's avatar

I read this book and felt like the authors were missing a few pieces. Once i put those pieces in place, i think the picture of the future looks a bit better.

At a few points the authors kept saying things like 'why make $X/year when you can make 3$X living somewhere else." In my case, I relocated from California to be closer to my family in Ohio, and I have no intention of ever leaving. My guess is that there are many such people like me; a college friend had a similar journey. He spent his early career in Washington DC, and then after a trip back home to Ohio, he said 'what am i doing here' and decided to relocate his family.

The world 'loyalty' stirs a powerful feeling in my heart, and I have a desire to help make the city i grew up in healthy and do well, because that just feels like it'd be an awesome thing to do. I've got no idea who you are, having just met you, but I have the impression you're working professional who just tinkers with ideas in his free time because it feels import to him to do so. I suspect people like us have never really been capable of exerting large scale influence in the past because specialization + the cost of communication made it so that much of the world was run by a kind of priestly class, which has always had its own incentives.

The kind of person who leaves their place of birth for a career has, for the last few decades or so, been exclusively the kind of people leading the world. So there's been something like a "high intelligence, high drive, but low loyalty" selection filter for global elites. I think the collapse of global order will lead to lots more effective forms of localized order. I know people of people who stayed home and never went out of state for college, not out of stupidity, but because they didn't want to leave their family and friends behind. I think the rootlessness the authors worry about is more an artifact of the economic and political selection mechanisms of the last 50 years than something true of all intelligent adults.

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Matrix Rotator's avatar

Yes, evoking "loyalty" one way or the other is going to be key. I think my main skepticism towards the vision of the future painted in the book (btw not because I didn't think it was plausible, just that it didn't seem that desirable) was that rational self interest, especially when construed narrowly as economic interest, just did not strike me as strong enough a centripetal force to hold a new community / a new ethics together.

Or, as AGM wittingly put it in one of his recent podcast episodes, "who is willing to take a bullet for the DAO?"

I'm glad that loyalty to your place of nativity works out for you as that centripetal force. As for me, I'm an immigrant to the US from another continent, and it seems pretty clear to me that the odds of returning to my hometown and finding enough people I can connect with at a deep intellectual level would be slim. There is no clear place for me to go back to, so it will have to be constructed.

Nice to meet you.

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Mark Neyer's avatar

Welcome to America!

One of the people I met in California that I really liked was guy from Serbia. The stories he told me about his childhood were nuts. When I told him I had a sense of connection to my hometown, he made it really clear to me how valuable that is and how impossible it is to recreate. Those conversations are one of the things that motivated me to return home. I have a kind of pipe dream of rebuilding a network here and making it into something effective at local governance. If you're considering a place to relocate, Cincinnati has plenty of affordable housing (really affordable from a bay area perspective) and is a short drive from a huge number of eastern seaboard cities. Columbus, two hours north of here, is growing really fast and is soon to be the site of a giant intel fab.

If that doesn't interest you, what you might be able to find among peers that you've met are people like me, who have been considering relocating to their hometown. Best of luck to you!

On additional point to add: bitcoin uses incentives, and it's so resilient it can handle the folding of any one of its members. I have no idea about the dao, but i dont' think governments can possibly stop bitcoin at this point. It would require global coordinated action by every state on earth, with any state that defected obtaining possibly huge rewards for defecting.

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