One of the biggest questions in the world with the most grossly insufficient amount of brainsweat applied to it:

Are we experiencing unprecedented levels of institutional failure or unprecedented levels of transparency into prevailing competence levels?

I do not have a very strong opinion on this one, and think we are plausibly seeing both in different places, but it really, really matters which of those is the bigger factor.

An underappreciated (I think) data point into “It’s not just institutional failure” is how much observably works where the working is an impossible to fake proof-of-work.

“What’s an impossible to fake proof-of-work?”

Produce an automobile. Take off and land an airplane. Deliver a package from Tokyo to NYC in 36 hours. Settle a stock trade.

And do all the above millions of times a day, so consistently that they’re reliably boring.

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills on this occasionally but it matters *a lot* whether we literally could not build a 100 story building or whether we are simply choosing not to, because those imply very very different policy solutions.