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Useless ambitious people are the most dangerous people in the world

The value of finance and law professionals is found in the facilitation of real useful work. The aim of increasing the efficiency of a productive society is to lower the percentage of accountants and lawyers to the minimum required amount. Increasing the number of these useless workers and increasing their power leads to negative outcomes. Many issues in modern society are attributable to this class in two ways: (1) inefficiency leads to suffering and (2) jobs that don’t inherently produce value are susceptible to becoming part of the Professional Managerial Class.

Hospitals demonstrate the suffering of inefficiency. There are countless reasons government-sponsored institutions are inefficient, but in the case of hospitals finance people are doubly to blame through insurance. Increasing efficiency is the goal, do not be complicit in these systems.

The Professional Managerial Class is a part of the the deep state. A decentralized system of middle men and beauracrats that are not inherently useful themselves. Decentralization is a point of the deep state that must be highlighted (I am using the word deep state to mean groups or individuals with power over society that aren’t obvious). Every group has ways of profiting off of events and movements around the world and this sets the incentive structure. Powerful groups (politicians, corporations, PMCs (both meanings)) are incentivized to support certain outcomes of movements. They piggy back on these movements to support their own goals - not quite hijacking but slightly nudging in their preferred direction. This means the teachers making your kids gay are not doing it because of a secret meeting they had with Big Gay. They are doing it because they think it is the right thing to do and this is supported by deep state groups, sometimes quite obviously.

How many watts do you use?

We must to chose which metric to work on increasing to expand society. The economy or the S&P 500 aren’t the correct metric because it is very scammable as we’ve seen in the last 5 years. On the other end of the scammable spectrum is total energy output and to a lesser extent gross domestic product.

The S&P 500 can’t be the metric we use because it’s scammable by the government. We must avoid scammable systems because they incentivize scammers. Lawyers convince you they are needed by supporting the creation of laws. A system of arbitrating disagreements is needed, but remember, efficiency is the goal. The Professional Managerial Class are scammers in that they do not provide value themselves but rather hijack systems that provide useful output. Energy output measures what we truly produce and is one of the least scammable metrics. This is why the Kardashev Scale is the ultimate measure of a society.

Increasing output increases human flourishing

I was careful when writing the title of this section to not say: “Increasing output increases human happiness.”

However, increasing productive output does increasing the flourishing of humanity. We can explore the universe and connect people on opposite sides of the planet. Increasing the tech level of humanity leads to a higher potential for happiness, exploration, and everything else. One of the core outputs of humanity has been increasing the time and impact of leisure (Think heating, soft beds, TVs, TikTok, Starbucks). This will hopefully increase happiness.

If everyone followed Andrew Tate’s teachings you would have no engineers. Tate is part of the group that harnesses technology to increase either their own economic worth and/or power. Someone has to harness technology and there are many more individuals that play this role rather than those who build technology. Building technology is more useful - and harder - than harnessing it.

Don’t be a scammer

A scammer is an individual who does not provide value themselves but rather forcefully extracts value from productive systems. Think back to finance bros and lawyers.

One of the best outcomes of capitalism is giving the option to harness selfishness for the good of society. However, this only occurs when this fundamental rule of capitalism is followed: goods, services, and currency are exchanged consensually. Increasing the efficiency of society means decreasing the number of scammers - those who do not follow the above rule of capitalism, exchanges are consensual.

Every scammer is an individual that could be increasing total output instead of manipulating the systems built around real productivity to favour themselves. Atoms cannot be scammed. The closer you get to the base level of reality the less scamming is possible and the more impactful the work is.

Misallocating the time of scammers to scamming - which depending on their field requires immense intelligence - is a waste of human capital. Building the core productive systems that scammers exploit is far more useful than being one of the individuals that extracts value from these systems for their own benefit, you also get more rich. The inefficiency of scammers currently infects and will continue infect AI. Many H100s are wasted on activities that are not increasing productivity.

BUILD

The four principles laid out above:

  1. Do not be complicit in increasing the inefficiency of the world
  2. Do not create or work on scammable systems and minimize your participation in them
  3. Increasing productive output increases human flourishing
  4. Instead of scamming, BUILD!

Increasing the productive output of humanity by building useful things is one of the best uses of life. Your creations will directly impact the future flourishing of humanity, or, if you work on something farther from the base level of reality, you will at least be one of the real productive people - someone has to do the real work. A life well lived is one directly useful to the future of humanity.

Deep tech is the least scammable sector and the place where the most true impact and innovation occurs. This is why You Should Be Working On Hardware.