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Jan 19, 2025 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
Capitalism is powered by greed. People want to make money, so they look hard for things they can produce and that others want. Unknowingly, however, they are powering the great information-processing machine that is the market. The output of the machine is the efficient allocation of resources and, eventually, wealth. Something we intuitively consider bad (greed) is made to work for the benefit of the entire society.
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Oct 19, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
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Sep 19, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
Lately, there has been a discussion between Bentham's Bulldog, Scott Alexander and others about the nature of the slave morality. The outcome for me is that I no longer have any clue about what people meant by it, or, for that matter, what Nietzche once meant by it. To sow even more confusion, here's my interpretation, which, I think, is different from those proposed so far. Slave morality is a child-like assumption that when you clean up your room, you'll get a cookie.
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Aug 25, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
One can definitely make referendums more complex by mixing in unrelated stuff, unnecessary restrictions, and complexities. But that's not the case with Swiss referendums. Quite the contrary, they seem to be designed for simplicity:First: There is no quorum. Even if the turnout is low, the referendum is valid. If three people cast their votes in a national ballot and two of them vote yes, the proposal is accepted. It is then written into the constitution, so even the parliament cannot overrule it.
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Aug 16, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
There's a trope among Slovak intellectual elite depicting an average Slovak as living in a village, sitting a local pub, drinking Borovička, criticizing everyone and everything but not willing to lift a finger to improve things. Moreover, it is assumed that if you actually tried to make things better, said individual would throw dirt at you and place obstacles in your way. I always assumed that this caricature was silly.
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Aug 3, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
We've been handed this old legacy system called "Democracy". It's an emergency. The old maintainers are saying it has been misbehaving lately but they have no idea how to fix it. We've had a meeting with them to find out as much as possible about the system, but it turns out that all the original team members left the company long time ago. The current team doesn't have much understanding of the system beyond some basic operational knowledge.
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Jul 10, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
Splitting large companies is an antitrust measure which, in its essence, is meant as an act of controlled creative destruction. (Read more about controlled creative destruction here.) When a company achieves monopoly status, it often becomes ridden with different inefficiencies and perverse incentives and does not serve its customers very well. By splitting such a company, the aim is to create smaller, more efficient entities driven by the competition in a free market.
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Jul 8, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
This is a crosspost from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/controlled-creative-destruction. Creative destruction is a process which lets the inefficient fail and the efficient survive. It's the economists' way of saying of "survival of the fittest". In free markets, creative destruction reigns supreme. Firms build competing products. Consumers buy the best products. The firms that cannot deliver go bankrupt. But it not just about money.
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Jun 28, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
Scott Sumner writes:Old people have a sort of double vision about the past — an ability to see the past from the perspective of today, and also from the perspective of the people who lived through those times. When then was now. This double vision, according to Scott, brings wisdom, something you gain with age, an attitude that younger people are missing:When I read some of my lamer posts from the early days, I cringe at their lack of wisdom. What was I thinking?
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Jun 9, 2024 | 
lesswrong.com | Martin Sustrik
In past few years I've been blogging in Slovak, that is, downscaling from writing in English, a language with 1457 million speakers to a language with 7 million speakers. From the point of view of the writer, this has been a very different experience. It's not only that for a topic that interests one million English speakers, the equivalent is five thousand in Slovakia, scaling down by factor of 200.
