All of myst_05's Comments + Replies

Assuming you're at liberty to comment, do you wish more companies adapted Elon's "show your work from the last 2 weeks or get fired" approach to managing engineers?

7patio111yI wouldn't love the sort of culture this creates with regards to increasing perception of career risk from team constantly and making it almost impossible to construct longer-term plans or vision, as a general statement, but have some non-zero level of regard for the notion of "Sometimes one needs to radically change cultures in a hurry and the transition period for them may not resemble the new steady state." Either way, I think that if pulled off correctly the Twitter transition will be one of the most important experiments done in the history of scaled management. I perceive 'smart money' (both literally and metaphorically from the management class) as assigning very low likelihood to success here. I think some smart money has not updated sufficiently on the track record of people confidently predicting Elon Musk will fail. I think I am slightly better calibrated than smart money in that regard, and find myself in agreement with smart money anyway.

Patrick McKenzie AMA

myst_051y1

Why is it so rare to see politicians running on the promise of eliminating government inefficiency? Closest we've got was Trump promising to "drain the swamp" but I doubt anyone took it to mean "I'll get the Department of State to issue passport in 72 hours instead of 6 weeks". I've heard numerous complaints about the California DMV but haven't heard of a major politician running on a promise to reduce the wait times there.

4patio111yI do not perceive this as being particularly rare? But the problem is systemic, the specific issues are individually generally low-salience or they would have long-since been fixed, and a lot of the things necessary for true change run up against entrenched concentrated interests like e.g. government employee unions, the contracting apparatus, etc. Our polity does not consider "EINS will be issued within an hour because obviously we are a high-functioning society seriously what the actual #*(#(%#" to be a reason to vote for a candidate at the margin and so our political system does not prioritize making that happen by default.

Patrick McKenzie AMA

myst_051y2

What do the Japanese think/write internally about being the nation with the highest median age in the world? Are there any drastic fertility-improvement proposals in the works, such as paying a $1m bounty to families with 6+ kids?

2patio111yIt is difficult for me to comment on issues of grave concern to the Japanese polity and I feel your first question is adequately answered (including in English) by appropriate Google searches, so I'd encourage you to make those Google searches. Your suggestion with regards to policy is materially outside of the present Overton window and almost all of my models for the Overton window in 10 years. Suggestions which are much more inside the Overton window include gradually making Japan more hospitable to immigrants, which a) has already happened to a degree far underappreciated ex-Japan b) is more palatable to power than people model it as and c) would still have many kilometers to go to address long-term demographic trends.

Patrick McKenzie AMA

myst_051y3

How many years are we still away from being able to make (nearly) instant payments between developed countries with fees under 0.1%? (including hidden exchange rate fees)

This is currently possible in the Eurozone but AFAIK not possible between any other countries.

4patio111yI do not perceive we are within 10 years of that happening (defined as "instant ~free money movement between banked people in US, JP, Australia, UK, Canada, and all present members of EU") and my estimate is increasing over time rather than decreasing, which is counterintuitive. The reason here is that the first companies to do it would necessarily be tech companies with global reach, and not the traditionally-understood financial sector. There are many governments which, for reasons which sound excellent to them, would prefer a) clipping the wings of large tech companies doing business globally and b) increasing the height of the firewall between BigTech and the financial system. I also think the salience of this particular measure is lower for institutions than it is for individual humans who are routinely exposed to exactly this need, because the types of life situations which expose you to exactly this need are anticorrelated with having power over institutions.