Case in point: Regular people have spent years watching the price of goods increase "due to inflation," despite the fact that the increase in pricing was mostly driven by — get this — corporations raising prices. Yet some parts of the legacy media spent an alarming amount of time chiding their readers for thinking otherwise, even going against their own reporting as a means of providing "balanced" coverage, insisting again and again that the economy is good, contorting to prove that prices aren't higher even as companies boasted about literally raising their prices. In fact, the media spent years debating with itself whether price gouging was happening, despite years of proof that it was.

There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.

This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world. But the misinformation crisis is not always what we think it is.

Why was everyone telling these founders the wrong thing? That was the big mystery to me. And after mulling it over for a bit I figured out the answer: what they were being told was how to run a company you hadn't founded — how to run a company if you're merely a professional manager. But this m.o. is so much less effective that to founders it feels broken. There are things founders can do that managers can't, and not doing them feels wrong to founders, because it is.

The way this equation is written, it leads to two sources of confusion, which I’ll call the “two myths”:

1. Many people wrongly assume that imports reduce GDP, because they appear in the equation with a minus sign.

2. Many people wrongly assume that if consumers become pessimistic and decide to spend less while saving more, this will cause GDP to fall. That’s because consumer spending appears in the equation with a positive sign.

Why in Turing's name would I want to have AIs attend a meeting for me that I don’t want to go to myself? What’d the AI do to deserve this? Let me give you a litmus test: if you think you would rather send an AI to attend a meeting for you rather than waste your time, your life, on that meeting, consider just taking it to email, or not having that meeting at all. Don’t punish the poor AI, wasting all those kilowatt hours of GPU time on that nonsense. Think of the planet!