Unqualified Reservations

If you're wondering whether there is something of value hiding underneath all of the obscurity and if it might be worth your time to do a deep dive, IMHO the answer is a resounding no. There is nothing hiding in Urbit other than a deliberately obfuscated computing model, of the same stripe as brainfuck, but with (again IMHO) very different motives. Brainfuck is obscure purely for the sake of being obscure, in the spirit of a puzzle or other intellectual challenge. Urbit has more sinister motives, not least of which is to separate fools from their money by selling them "real estate" in the Urbit cyberworld. The obscurity is there to conceal the fact that there is no there there, to entice people into investing time and effort into it, and then keep them sucked in by leveraging the sunk cost fallacy. It is a tactic taken directly from the playbook of con men and cult leaders through the ages.

What is worthwhile (IMHO) is to read some of Curtis Yarvin's (the founder and designer of Urbit) writings and compare them to the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, particularly bootlegged copies of the "secret" teachings of the "church" of Scientology, not for content, but for structure. To my eye, there are deeply disturbing similarities.

[1] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/

[2] https://www.xenu.net/archive/ot/

I think our progressive politics IS to blame: for deluding San Franciscans into believing such a thing is possible.

Actually it is possible. But the irony is that the person who came up with best idea that would have fixed/prevented this problem, has now been ostracized as a "fascist" by the left-wing tech community: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/formalist-manifesto-originally-posted.html

If circa 2007, San Francisco itself had been turned into a join-stock corporation, with all the existing residents given shares, then all residents would have grown wealthy as the city grew rich. Furthermore, the government would have had an incentive to allow new housing, since that would increase total tax revenues, and thus increased dividends for all residents. Right now, the politically powerful have no incentive to improve new building, since they do not directly benefit.

There's a big difference between a prediction market and a decision market, which is what futarchy is. Mencius Moldbug expounded on this quite a while back in this post:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2010/02/pipe-shorting-and-professor-hansons.html

I won't go into much detail (the post is worth reading), but his basic point (which I agree with) is that the reason a prediction market works (when it works) is that the only incentive governing people's bets is their beliefs about the expected probabilities of outcomes. But this can only work if the bets people make are themselves statistically independent of the outcomes, and in a decision market they obviously can't be, since people's bets determine the outcome. (In the post Moldbug gives an actual real-world example of a market which gets manipulated in exactly this way.)

By "right-thinking minds", I mean "correct-thinking minds". It is a fireable offense to say non-feminist or anti-feminist things, even in a dry academic way (look at Larry Summers) - it is politically incorrect. Non-feminist and anti-feminist thought is no longer an acceptable part of the mainstream conversation.

The range of permissible mainstream thought is determined by the left. Essentially, the mainstream follows Harvard with a ~30 year lag. The infrastructure which propagates what Harvard believes to everybody else and determines the constraints of acceptable thought is what Moldbug calls "the Modern Structure"[1] or "the Cathedral"[2].

[1] http://anomalyuk.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-modern-structure.html

[2] http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2009/01/gentle-introduction-to-unqualified.html

In this context, I hope at some point sama has a chance (if he hasn't already) to read the post "Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot" by Mencius Moldbug:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/sam-altman-is-not-blithering-idiot.html

The basic problem with our society is a disconnect between consensus reality and actual reality. We actually have no shortage of natural leaders. But they cannot actually lead us anywhere. They are operating in consensus reality rather than actual reality. Their joysticks are not plugged in. When the consensus is nonsense, sober good sense is nonsense. Nonsense is no use to anyone.

It's a long post, but if you're interested in examining the problems we face from a fresh and unusual perspective it's worth reading the whole thing.

"Comedy writer" isn't quite how I'd describe it, but I'm surprised no one has mentioned that Urbit is run by the guy who writes/wrote under Mencius Moldbug, who is perhaps one of the more controversial people to achieve internet fandom. If you read through all the archives on his site and have no opinion (probably somewhere in the "I hate him" or "I find this reasonably convincing" statistical clusters), then your sense of outrage has been diminished, I would say.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/

Note: I myself am unconvinced by his writings, and find him to be just another ironic instance of the ironic nature of American culture, eager to avoid the appearance of naivete by abandoning all hopes that are fragile. Do with that what you will.