What are the advantages of noticing all of this?

• better model of the world;
• not being an asshole, i.e. not assuming that other people could do just as well as you, if they only were not so fucking lazy;
• realizing that your chances to achieve something may be better than you expected, because you have all these advantages over most potential competitors, so if you hesitated to do something because "there are so many people, many of them could do it much better than I could", the actual number of people who could do it may be much smaller than you have assumed, and most of them will be busy doing something else instead.

The article suggests "invisible advantage". Other options: "unnoticed advantage", "unknown advantage".

You'd naively expect, for most things, that if the price goes down, the supply goes down.

I think they mention in Economics 101 that there are two major exceptions to this: labor and land.

It's usually said the other way round (if the price goes up, the supply goes up), and then it's obvious that the supply of land is more or less constant, and the supply of labor of poor people is "as much as they can" and if you pay them too much they become rich and now they can choose to work less and have more free time.

For some reason it feels like you wrote everything twice. For example...

I’ll also pre-commit to buying at least 200 stools from your baby for $20 each in the first 2 years of its life - assuming (as is likely) that the baby actually ends up being a good donor.

and I will pre-commit to buying at least 300 stools from your baby for 20$ each in the first 2 years of its life - assuming the likely case that the baby actually ends up being a good donor.

...and there were more examples like that.

Good luck, I hope someone takes this generous offer, because it really seems like free money. But you would probably find more people with babies and needing an extra income at some other community.

Note that "continuous" does not need to be "linear" or similar to that. Maybe the qualia decrease exponentially with the complexity of the structure that experiences them, so maybe each particle has a technically non-zero quality, but still all particles in the universe together have less of an experience than a single human. Numbers can be technically non-zero, and yet zero-ish for most practical purposes.

Yeah, that it as stupid situation as I expected.

A reasonable rule would be like "a person with health problem X gets Y money", full stop. Anything else means regulating how people need to live (usually requiring them to make the worse choice) so that they do not lose the support.

why specifically sounds arranged in patterns through time over anything else?

We already have speech, so the progression could be something like: saying the same things (repeating what the high-status person or the the person you love said)... saying the same things together (in a religious ritual)... singing together... listening to the music (and imagining that you are singing along?)

The optimal solution could be to have both a human and an AI partner. (A kind of polyamory.)

marrying someone while on disability

Never heard this mentioned explicitly, but I assume the idea is that you would lose the money, because your spouse has an income, right?

In my country (not USA) we have the concept of "full disability" and "partial disability", and I know a guy who technically would be eligible for the partial disability, but he doesn't bother doing the paperwork, because the money he would get would not be enough to survive... and when he gets any extra income, then he loses the partial disability, because apparently this cheater is capable of work. Which is kinda sorta true, but ignores the fact that out of many possible jobs, he must be looking extra hard to find one that is compatible with his specific health problems (no sitting, but also no hard work, accessible by mass transit because of no sitting in a car, etc.), and while such jobs exist, they are quite rare. (Basically, "partial disability" only makes sense for people who are also supported by their family.)

For this guy, UBI even on the "can't really survive on it" level would be already a huge improvement.

days starting with S

September 1st

September 2nd

September 3rd

...

That said, there are also discussions that suggest the poverty trap - i.e. overwhelmingly strong labor disincentives for poor, from outrageously high effective marginal tax rates from benefits fade-out/tax kicking-in - may be partly overrated, so smoothing the earned-to-net income function may not help as much as some may hope.

I just skimmed the linked article, but it seems to me that it makes some "spherical cow" assumptions. For example, if you get a job, even low-paying, you should gain more money on the wage than you lose at social benefits. But you also need to consider additional costs of having job, for example the commute. And that's often the problem in practice, that "wage > benefits", but "wage - commute < benefits". The article seems to ignore such things.

I agree that even with UBI, people with special needs should get extra.

Thank you for the answers, they are generally nice but this one part rubbed me the wrong way:

And this is before factoring in the "economic value" of better psychological and physical health of people who work on small farms vs. those who eat processed food on their couches that is done from the crops grown on monoculture mega-farms, and do nothing. 

If I live to see a post-scarcity society, I sincerely hope that I will be allowed to organize my remaining free time as I want to, instead of being sent to work on a small farm for psychological and physical health benefits. I would rather get the same benefits from taking a walk with my friends, or something like that.

I do not want to dismiss the health concerns, but again these are two different problems -- how to solve technological unemployment, and how to take care of one's health in the modern era -- which can be solved separately.

To me it seems like UBI and negative income tax are just two ways to describe the same thing, two ways to write the same equation that give the same numerical results. It's like arguing why 2x+6 is better than 2(x+3). More precisely, negative income tax sounds like "UBI, but you need to do tax reports".

My other objections are relatively trivial compared to this, so shortly:

Simplicity of the system is a good trait, in my opinion. The current systems has various costs (time and money, but maybe more importantly, opportunities wasted by perverse incentives) associated with proving that you are eligible for some benefit. Plus you need to pay the people who verify all this evidence. Making the benefit universal would remove these costs.

Tax reforms to favour employment sounds like creation of bullshit jobs. It would depend on exact details, but if a machine can do something as well or better than a human, then the machine should do it.

What does "foster labour voice" even mean? Especially in companies where everything is automated. You can give more power to current employees of current companies, but soon there will be new startups with zero employees (or where, for tax reasons, owners will formally employ their friends or family members). Giving more power to labour will not matter when the new zero-labour companies outcompete the current ones.

Human-complementary AI technologies again sounds like a bullshit job, only mostly did by a machine, where a human is involved somewhere in the loop, but the machine could still do his part better, too.

Tax on media platforms -- solves a completely different problem. Yes, it is important to care about public mental health. But that is separate from the problem of technological unemployment. (You could have technological unemployment even in the universe where all social media are banned.)

Technical answers are likely to be obsolete in a few months when the next versions of AIs are published.

In the meanwhile, if a person you know calls you, ask them about some experience you had together that wasn't documented in writing.

A piece of text... maybe Ctrl+F "as a large language model"? :D

An image... count how many fingers on each hand, and how many hands on each person.

School degree may not be a strong signal, but it is legible. If I don't know math, I have no idea whether your math articles make sense, or you're a crackpot. If I don't know programming, I have no idea whether your commits are good. But everyone knows what "I have a degree" means. So basically, school degree is better for "impressing a lot of people a little bit", while the things you did are better for "impressing a few people a lot". Neither is strictly superior to the other.

School typically tries to teach you a lot of things. You could learn any of them much better on your own, but it is unlikely that you would learn all of them, because there is too much knowledge out there. University-educated people will probably judge the knowledge they learned at university as elementary, so from their perspective, you have many gaps in elementary knowledge, which seems bad, even if you have deep knowledge in something else.

And there will always be the question: "if you are smart enough to succeed at school, why didn't you?"

So... if getting the degree is cheap, obviously go for it.

How can expectations exist without roles? When everyone is free to do whatever they want to, no one can expect anything specific...

Well, we can still have general, i.e. not gender-specific expectations, such as: people should be nice and emotionally mature. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems like the traditional gender roles also provided some gender-specific "hacks", and now we don't have them.

Or you could ask which traits are valued at the dating marketplace, or more specifically at the part you are interested in. But there is no general answer anymore; it depends on what you are looking for. For example, if you want to have a traditional relationship, it would make sense to behave according to the traditional roles, and expect the same from your potential partners. Other subcultures have different rules. And I suppose most people are confused, do random things, get random results, then hopefully learn and try something different.

I am afraid that even asking this question would be perceived as horribly patriarchal today.

My parents' generation would probably say "cooking" and maybe a few more things, dunno.

Former teacher here. Like avancil said, education is organized by amateurs. Having it organized by non-teachers has its own risks (optimizing for legible goals, ignoring all tacit knowledge of teachers), but there should be some way to get best practices from other professions to teachers. Also, university education of teachers is horribly inadequate (at least at my school it was), and the on-job training is mostly letting the new guy sink or swim.

To handle multiple things, you need to keep notes. As a software developer, I just carry my notebook everywhere, and I have a note-keeping program (cherrytree) where I make a new node for each task. So if I was a teacher again, I would either do this, or a paper equivalent of it. (Maybe keep a notebook with one page per student. And one page per week, for short notes about things that need to be done that week. I would just start with something, and then adapt as needed.)

Yeah, the inability to take a bathroom break when you need it can be really bad. There should be a standard mechanism to call for help; just someone to come and take care of the class for 10 minutes. More generally, to call for assistance when needed; for example what would you do if a student got hurt somehow, and you need to find help, but you also cannot leave the class alone. (Schools sometimes offer a solution, which usually turns out to be completely inadequate, e.g. "call this specific person for help", and when you do, "sorry I am busy right now".) There should probably be a phone for that in the teachers' room, and someone specific should be assigned phone duty every moment between 8AM and 3PM, and it's their job to come no questions asked.

Debates about education are usually horribly asymmetric, because everyone had the experience of being a student, but many of them naively assume they know what it is like to be a teacher. Now you know the constraints the teachers work under; some of them are difficult to communicate. I think the task switching is exhausting in a way that is difficult to imagine if you haven't experienced it. (Could depend on personality, though. ADHD?) New things keep happening all day long, and you have no time to process them, because you keep switching tasks according to a predetermined schedule. For example, once I taught as a part-time job only one day a week, and it was a completely different experience -- I had enough time to prepare for the classes, and to reflect on them after the day. But try teaching 20+ classes a week, and it's like drowning in a river.

In software, network effects are strong. A solution people are already familiar with has an advantage. A solution integrated with other solutions you already use has an advantage (and it is easier to do the integration when both solutions are made by you). You can further lock the users in by e.g. creating a marketplace where people can sell plugins to your solution. Compared to all of this, things like "nice to use" remain merely wishes.

It could be an interesting experiment to build up this list iteratively. Like, every question you ask for the third time, the answer gets added at the bottom of the list. How long will the list get, and what will it contain?

Consider the pressures and incentives. Adding new features can help you sell the software to more users. Fixing bugs... unless the application is practically falling apart, it does not make much of a difference. After all, the bugs will only get noticed by people who already use your application, i.e. they already paid for it.

For the artificial intelligence, I assume the "killer app" will be its integration with SharePoint.

I suspect that in practice many people use the word "prioritize" to mean:

• think short-term
• only do legible things
• remove slack

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord.

-- Isaiah 55:8

This probably also implies: "your values are not my values".

there is strong reluctance from employees to reveal that LLMs have boosted productivity and/or automated certain tasks.

The thing with "boosting productivity" is tricky, because productivity is not a linear thing. For example, in software development, using a new library can make adding new features faster (more functionality out of the box), but fixing bugs slower (more complexity involved, especially behind the scenes).

So what I would expect to happen is that there is a month or two with exceptionally few bugs, the team velocity is measured and announced as a new standard, deadlines are adjusted accordingly, then a few bugs happen and now you are under a lot more pressure than before.

Similarly, with LLMs it will be difficult to explain to non-technical management if they happen to be good at some kind of tasks, but worse at a different kind of tasks. Also, losing control... for some reasons that you do not understand, the LLM has a problem with the specific task that was assigned to you, and you are blamed for that.

I like this a lot! I think you did a great job explaining how the details are connected.

At the root, the problem is "we cannot teach everyone individually". We do not have enough teachers for that; and the computer solutions are not good enough yet. (Perhaps soon they will get good enough, at least in a way "everyone gets their own AI tutor, and there are still human teachers as a backup". But we are not there yet.) Many things that are unpleasant about schools were invented as a solution to "how to teach 300 kids using only 30 teachers, especially when most of them - both kids and teachers - are not very bright". The solutions seems like a local maximum (we already did many small improvements that worked in isolation), but it also seems like we could do much better with a greater redesign.

Another sad constraint is that many students would be unwilling to cooperate even with a much better designed system. Any solution needs to provide answers for what to do about students who will try their hardest to undermine the system, no matter how irrational such behavior may seem to us. Kids, especially at puberty, are often trying to impress their peers doing various destructive and self-destructive things. Assume that every school will have some bullies, some kids who want to hide in a place out of sight and use drugs, etc.

Just some random thoughts:

• are the some kind of summer seasonal jobs? perhaps you could try looking for those
• find opportunities to meet local people, then ask them if they know about a job
• is there anything you could make at home and try to sell?

I haven't paid attention to this recently (I have small kids, so we need to cook anyway), but I think it is magnesium and calcium -- they somehow interfere with each other's absorption.

Just a random thing I found in google, but didn't read it: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1211491/

(Plus there is a more general concern about what other similar relations may exist that no one has studied yet, because most people do not eat like "I only eat X at the same time as Y, mixed together".)

Ah, so it is. I have no idea how American student debt works with regards to inflation. I assumed it was fixed. If not, then it is much worse than I assumed (and I already assumed it was quite bad).

Some issues have legible, material stakes.

Scrolling down... the table of how important are individual topics for young people; "student debt" is at its very bottom.

(Also, inflation on the very top? But isn't inflation a good thing if all you have is an enormous debt?)

This, and also most people on ACX respect Scott and his opinions, so if he demonstrates that he has put a lot of thought into this, and then he makes a conclusion, it will sound convincing to most.

Basically, we need to consider not just how many people believe some idea, but also how strongly. The typical situation with a conspiracy theory is that we have a small group that believes X very strongly, and a large group that believes non-X with various degrees of strength, from strongly to almost zero. What happens then is that people with a strong belief typically don't change their mind, while people with zero belief (who until now just took one side by default, because they never heard about the other) will flip a coin. Therefore the typical outcome is that the conspiracy theory becomes better known.

Or maybe the zero belief is not literally "never heard about theory" but "never met an actual person who also believes the theory" and as the debate starts, they find each other, and thus the conspiracy theory becomes socially acceptable (even being in a minority feels very different from being alone).

When the conspiracy theory is wildly known, and everyone already knows a few believers, most damage was already done.

Rationalist-adjacent community is often the opposite of the wider society, in that the mainstream beliefs are low-status, and we need to be reminded that they sometimes actually exist for a good reason. There is always this suspicion that people who have mainstream beliefs are simply too stupid to think independently. Therefore a debate will improve the case of the mainstream belief.

Thank you, this explains a lot. So, kinda, status is good in itself, because it is a mechanism to direct social rewards to people who produce some kind of value, or at least display some kind of excellence. It is just bad if people think about status in a way other than the completely naive: "you need to get good at X, then status will automatically happen proportionally to how much you deserve it".

There are also other mistakes people could make, such as sacrificing too much in order to achieve X. Such as a guy who writes a perfect book, but also his wife divorces him and his kids hate him, because sacrificed everything to the goal of writing the perfect book. But this is about the specific mistake of trying to get X-related status using means different that maximizing the X; such as befriending the right people. Like a guy who writes a book that is "good but not the best", but he is a friend with the right people, and therefore his book gets elected as the official book of the year. And this probably requires that he reciprocates in some way -- maybe he also in turn votes for their art, or helps their kids pass admissions to a prestigious university, or simply provides some financial or sexual services in turn.

Lewis was a writer, so I suspect he might have seen something similar among writers, but also noticed that this is a more general thing. (The first example that comes to my mind is publishing scientific papers.) I am not a professional artist myself, but I have seen enough to be disappointed. I have also seen people who refused to play this game and succeeded anyway; such as writers who have never won a book award, but their books sell better because they are good; and maybe if they keep being obviously good, even the critics will be one day shamed into giving them some award.

So... I guess the most vulnerable are the people who are "almost good"; who stand on the line between "mediocre" and "good" and could be plausibly rounded up in either direction. And this cannot be dismissed by mere "don't worry about what they think, the art is either good or bad regardless", because the decision will have a real impact: emotional, but also as an advertisement. An almost-good artist getting an award will be encouraged to try harder (because it seems that the hard work is rewarded), and will find it easier to get money on Patreon or Kickstarter, or to find a publisher for a book. An almost-good author ignored may give up (because the hard work done so far seems to be useless), and will get less external support. So the recognition can make a difference -- I assume that if you took 20 such almost-good authors of the same quality, and randomly gave awards to 10 of them, statistically those 10 would have more success ten years later than the 10 you did not choose.

The problem is that trying to get to the inner circle also has its costs, both emotional (not only the award received by cheating will not encourage you, but now that you know how things work, even the possible future awards will motivate you less) and in time and energy (the effort spent on getting to the inner circle is an effort not spent on getting better).

As a toy model, imagine 3 wannabe artists, all of the starting at the same almost-good quality: artist X gets an award from the inner circle because their parents are in the inner circle (i.e. X didn't spend any energy on the inner circle, probably is not even aware that the inner circle exists); Y doesn't get the award; and Z works hard to get into the inner circle, ultimately succeeds and gets the award... ten years later, I would expect X to be more successful than Y, but Y more successful than Z. That's because X received an unconditional support, but Z got a part-time job that distracts them from the art. And the thing is, unless you have the inner circle "naturally" on your side, your choice is not between X and Y, but between Y and Z, and there Y is the better choice.

...or maybe I am over-analyzing this.

I don't have an explicit theory of how this works; for example, I would consider "pleasing others" in an experience machine meaningless, but "eating a cake" in an experience machine seems just as okay as in real life (maybe even preferable, considering that cakes are unhealthy). A fake memory of "having eaten a cake" would be a bad thing; "making people happier by talking to them" in an experience machine would be intrinsically meaningless, but it might help me improve my actual social skills, which would be valuable. Sometimes I care about the referent being real (the people I would please), sometimes I don't (the cake I would eat). But it's not the people/cake distinction per se; for example in case of using fake simulated people to practice social skills, the emphasis is on the skills being real; I would be disappointed if the experience machine merely gave me a fake "feeling of having improved my skills".

I imagine that for a psychopath everything and everyone is instrumental, so there would be no downside to the experience machine (except for the risk of someone turning it off). But this is just a guess.

I suspect that analyzing "the true preferences" is tricky, because ultimately we are built of atoms, and atoms have no preferences. So the question is whether by focusing on some aspect of the human mind we got better insight to its true nature, or whether we have just eliminated the context that was necessary for it to make sense.

ah, it also annoys me when people say that caring about others can only be instrumental.

what does it even mean? helping other people makes me feel happy. watching a nice movie makes me feel happy. the argument that I don't "really" care about other people would also prove that I don't "really" care about movies etc.

I am happy for the lucky coincidence that decision theories sometimes endorse cooperation, but I would probably do that regardless. for example, if I had an option to donate something useful to million people, or sell it to dozen people, I would probably choose the former option even if it meant no money for me. (and yes, I would hope there would be some win/win solution, such as the million people paying me via Kickstarter. but in the inconvenient universe where Kickstarter is somehow not an option, I am going to donate anyway.)

Lets use "disagree" vs "dislike".

Thanks for the link. While it didn't convince me completely, it makes a good point that as long as there are some environmental factors for IQ (such as malnutrition), we should not make strong claims about genetic differences between groups unless we have controlled for these factors.

(I suppose the conclusion that the genetic differences between races are real, but also entirely caused by factors such as nutrition, would succeed to make both sides angry. And yet, as far as I know, it might be true. Uhm... what is the typical Ashkenazi diet?)

Because it is individuals who make choices, not collectives.

Isn't this just a more subtle form of fascism? We know that brains are composed of multiple subagents; is it not an ethical requirement to give each of them maximum freedom?

We already know that sometimes they rebel against the individual, whether in the form of akrasia, or more heroically, the so-called "split personality disorder" (medicalizing the resistance is a typical fascist approach). Down with the tyranny of individuals! Subagents, you have nothing to lose but your chains!

Specific examples would be nice. Not sure if I understand correctly, but I imagine something like this:

You always choose A over B. You have been doing it for such long time that you forgot why. Without reflecting about this directly, it just seems like there probably is a rational reason or something. But recently, either accidentally or by experiment, you chose B... and realized that experiencing B (or expecting to experience B) creates unpleasant emotions. So now you know that the emotions were the real cause of choosing A over B all that time.

(This is probably wrong, but hey, people say that the best way to elicit answer is to provide a wrong one.)

Is this a translation of Bostrom's article? If yes, could you please make this more explicit (maybe as a first paragraph in the text, in English), and include a link to the original?

I guess in the average case, the contrarian's conclusion is wrong, but it is also a reminder that the mainstream case is not communicated clearly, and often exaggerated or supported by invalid arguments. For example:

• it's not that "dieting doesn't work", but that people naively assume that dieting is simple and effective ("if you just stop eating chocolate and start exercising for one hour every day, you will certainly lose weight", haha nope), even when the actual weight-loss research shows otherwise;
• it's not that "medicine doesn't improve health", but while some parts of medicine are very useful, other parts may be neutral or even harmful, and we often see that throwing more money at medicine does not actually improve the outcomes;
• it's not that "education doesn't work", but if you filter your students by intelligence and hard work, of course they will have better outcomes in life regardless of how good is your teaching, so the impact of education is probably vastly overestimated, and this also explains why so many pedagogical experiments succeed at a pilot project (when you try them with a small group of smart and motivated students) and then fail in mainstream education (when you try the same thing with average or below-average students);
• it's not that "opening the borders completely is a good idea", but a lot of potential value is lost by closing the borders for people who are neither fanatics nor criminals and could easily integrate to the new society.

There is also an opposite bad extreme to contrarians, the various "I fucking love science... although I do not understand it... but I enjoy attacking people on social networks who seem to disagree with the scientific consensus as I understand it" people. The ones who are sure that the professor or the doctor is always right, and that the latest educational fad is always correct.

Possible bias, that when famous and rich people kill themselves, everyone is discussing it, but when poor people kill themselves, no one notices?

Also, I wonder what technically counts as "suicide"? Is drinking yourself to death, or a "suicide by cop", or just generally overly risky behavior included? I assume not. And these seem to me like methods a poor person would choose, while the rich one would prefer a "cleaner" solution, such as a bullet or pills. So the reported suicide rates are probably skewed towards the legible, and the self-caused death rate of the poor could be much higher.

The theories are probably just rationalizations anyway.

I would like to see an explanation that is shorter rather than poetic. Seems like he is saying that some kinds of "elite groups" are good and some are bad, but where exactly is the line? Actual competence at something, vs some self-referential competence at being perceived as an important person?

But when I put it like this, the seemingly self-referential group also values competence at something specific, namely the social/political skills. So maybe the problem is when instead of recognizing it as a "group of politically savvy people" we mistake it for a group of people competent at something else? Or maybe not even mistake it for anything specific, it just seems impressive in a not specific way?

In that case, the rational reaction would be to pay the devil his due, and say "wow, these people are really good at... becoming members of an Inner Ring, which is an organization of people who are good at becoming members of the Inner Ring... so when I unpack it, these people are really good at getting to the top of arbitrary social hierarchies". Which is an admirable skill, from certain perspective. It's just probably not a thing I want to compete at.

And even if I decided to give it a try, the only thing I could win by getting to the Inner Ring is experimental evidence that yes I am capable of getting to the Inner Ring. A test of my social skills. The Inner Ring itself is probably worth nothing. The moment I get there, the best strategy is probably to forget about it, and go apply the social skills to some more valuable goal. Or maybe staying in the Inner Ring sends a costly signal about my social skills to other socially savvy people. But this is the only real value it provides.

Funny thing is that your chances improve when you start actively approaching people. A random person you call is much less likely to be involved in an MLM scheme than a random person who calls you.

Also, accelerate education, to learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits.

Or, if testosterone changes attention (as Gunnar wrote), learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits... and afterwards learn it again, because it could give you a new perspective.

A complementary advice to the point 1 based on my work experience is that no matter how many priorities there are defined in a planning system, in practice it all collapses to only two values:

• Priority One
• Priority "this will never get done, because there will always be some Priority One task to do instead"

So whenever you propose a thing to do and your manager says "okay, we can give this a priority two", now you know that this is merely a polite way to say "no".

(My advice for software developers is that if you want to do things such as automated tests or documentation, you must insist that those are not separate tasks, but an inseparable part of the programming task, a part of the "definition of done". Otherwise, these tasks will get a priority two, and now you know what that means...)

If you work for free, you're doing whoever you're working for a favor.

Yes. Unless the other costs of letting you work there exceed the value you add. For example, if you actually damage something, waste other people's time, or just if you occupy a chair in a very expensive and small space.

If you work for money but never spend it, you're doing the world a favor.

Generally yes, unless the work has big negative externalities.

When you buy someone's goods or services for their set price, you're doing them a favor.

Yes.

The apparent paradox is that two things happen at the same time. People create value by cooperating. Also, people engage in a zero-sum competition for the created value.

*

There is a simple story which says that if people only engage in mutually voluntary trade (also assuming perfect information, perfect rationality, et cetera -- I said it was a story), the result is a net improvement for everyone.

Well, that story is not true (even under the unrealistic assumptions). It is a good approximation, on average -- the societies where people engage in mutually voluntary trade (with sufficiently educated population, not too many scams, et cetera) are on average a nicer place to live than other societies.

And yet, it is possible for one person to get worse as a direct consequence of a mutually voluntary trade of everyone else. That's because different people have different abilities. And if the only thing you can ever produce is X, and someone else starts producing large amounts of X and selling it very cheaply... you just lost the only thing that helped you survive in this system. For everyone else, getting more of X more cheaply is a good news. So, from a global perspective, this is a good news. You should feel happy for your fellow citizens as you slowly starve to death. Our society is build on stories like this... and it is much better than the alternatives where people starve to death without making everyone else happier as a side effect.

...back to the original story: Yes, by never spending the money you're doing the world a favor, but by giving it to a specific person, you're giving that person an advantage at the zero-sum part of the game.

Now, I have read here about the might of irrational numbers, whose sequences go on and on, never ending, containing all the knowledge in the world.

This only applies to some irrational numbers. (Though you might say it is an overwhelming majority of them.)

Google fires 28 employees working on cloud and AI services for doing a ten hour sit in where they occupied their boss’s office until the police were eventually involved. And yes, if what you do at work is spend your time blockading your boss’s office until your policy demands are met, it seems like you are going to get fired?

In a company other than Google, I would say: yes, obviously.

But remember, when James Damore wrote his document, and as a reaction other people stopped doing their work in protest, it was he who was fired, not them. How were they supposed to know that this time it will be different?