One argument could be that maybe entrepreneurial personality traits aren't normally distributed, and unless you find a way change people's personalities in mass, the imbalance in wealth attraction will remain inherent.

Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

It's simply because money is compoundable. The more money you have the more you can make, and the more you make means less other people have.

https://fortune.com/2026/01/13/us-workers-smallest-labor-sha...

Having lots of wealth does not mean other people have less. If that were the case, there'd be as much wealth today as there was 1000 years ago. Making a company and having it valued at whatever value, does not remove that amount of wealth from other people.

> There's not a finite amount of wealth.

I think there is a finite amount of wealth, at any given time, same as "money". Money is a transactable medium to measure value, rather than as a type of good on its own. The medium can change region to region and over time.

Wealth is an aggregate of all valuables you possess, including expected gains. Wealth is also subjective, because of these properties. People agree on some approximations for the purposes of transactions with money.

> Making a company and having it valued at whatever value, does not remove that amount of wealth from other people.

Depends on perspective, I would say. When the value rises in a public company, even when it's just the expectation, you have people dumping their wealth (as money) into the company. So yes, it does for large public companies. While it does grant some rights, in a practical sense it's a hole you dump money into with the expectation that you can reach in and take out some amount in the future. I can understand this is what is envisioned, when people talk about wealth as zero sum. I don't agree, but I get what they are going at.

> If that were the case, there'd be as much wealth today as there was 1000 years ago.

Wealth is partially based on expectation. The growth in population fuels increases in wealth, because that's the part of the equation that is speculative.

That's not how it works at all.

If I have a $200K net worth, and I'm living in a city where the range is $1M to $500M, then I'm pretty much living in poverty, even though I have "more wealth" than in scenario 1.

This is also why, although my absolute wealth today is hundreds or thousands of times more than a king in the middle ages, I'm not actually living like a king today.

It's also how gentrification works. You're living somewhere and all of a sudden a bunch of very wealthy people move in, raising the prices of everything. You're no more or less wealthy than before, but everything has become slightly worse.

Can everyone be rich enough to not be in the bottom 20%? No, no matter how rich we become.

Can everyone be rich enough to have servants? No, unless you count machines as servants. But if you do, then I'm rich enough to have several.

You live way better than a king. Your expected lifespan is higher than kings because of access to better food, nutrition, and medical care. You have access to luxuries like chocolate, and coffee that kings might have tasted once in their life, or at best every few weeks.

Not understanding what wealth is, is precisely what leads to this mistaken thinking.

As for gentrification, it is often just confusing correlation and causation. People blame rich people moving in, when really a place just actually became better due to improvements in goods or services like public transit exapansion.

It's not an issue that they are wealthy, it's that they are abusing that position to gain even more wealth at the expense of the rest of the population.

Proverb from my granny to contemplate: the devil always craps on the larger heap.

Lots of people with great ideas, skills, and work ethic don’t have $250,000 lying around to invest.

And Bezos's biological dad was a unicyclist, his mom got pregnant with him at 16 and later dropped out of college, and his stepdad was a Cuban refugee who got an education and became an engineer for Exxon. Going from zero to billionaire in two generations actually says something remarkable about our system.

Think about it another way. If the government doled out $500k to fund business ideas, do you think that investment would be available to kids of refugees? Of course not. There would be gatekeeping behind credentials and connections, and it would be open to a lot less than 10% of the population.

[1] In terms of birth lottery, having top 10% parents is like being born smart enough to get a 1290 on the SAT or having a 120 IQ. Not exactly rarified aid! https://research.collegeboard.org/reports/sat-suite/understa...

I don't buy that this is a common scenario. How many of those actually own a franchise and how many of them are drowning in debt trying to pay off the loan?

The average retirement savings at that age is around $500,000 according to Edward Jones. That’s average, not median, which means that a ton of people have a lot less money saved up than that by that age.

The Bezos family had $500k adjusted for inflation in money they could risk and lose 100% on. That money was also in an account the presumably was liquid enough to spend (I.e., I can’t spend my 401k money before retirement age without enduring a massive penalty and tax burden).

I must reiterate that no parent would liquidate their entire 401k for a business investment. Middle class people are not starting McDonald’s franchises. At best they are starting a Subway or a Dunkin with borrowed money, and usually the families that do that are putting the whole extended family in on that investment.

Finally, I will address the way in which you our bootlicking our hyper-capitalist system: you praise the virtues of a system that allows people like Jeff Bezos to make it big while downplaying the wild inequalities in that system caused by under-taxation of people like him.

10% of Americans, over 20 million people, have no health insurance. Why is that okay?

How do we know that it wasn’t a financially irresponsible move that in this case happened to pay off?

It does? I mean, sure, it's better than having only the already rich stay rich, but let's not kid ourselves that this is a life outcome that everybody, or even 10% or 1% of the US can shoot for. The vast majority of people stay closer to zero. Who gives a shit that a few people get to win the right-time-right-place lottery?

So it matters a lot where a society’s elites come from. In most societies, entering the elite requires family pedigree, credentials, and connections. If your society is such that simply becoming upper middle class gives your kids a sufficient platform to become a billionaire, that has a huge effect on who makes up the elites. Having elites whose parents were refugees or restaurant owners is hugely different from most countries.

My point is that having tycoons with 1,000,000 times the wealth of the median person is not a fair distribution, no matter which reasonable function you choose.

If you think superficially of "fair" like in a game, then yes a winner-take-all system can be fair. But when talking about socioeconomics, I think fairness goes a bit deeper. For example I would say a society with a lottery that picks one winner and tortures all others is not fair to those who lose (even though it's game-fair).

Amazon does not have an exceedingly high profit margin, and my understanding is that a lot of it comes from stuff like AWS, not Amazon deliveries - correct me if I'm wrong here. So I'm not sure that "three amazon deliveries a day" - if this is even common - is why that man is personally rich. Even if it were a big source of revenue, that would go into Amazon's coffers, not necessarily his directly.

Another way to look at this: Even if Amazon is wildly successful, does that mean Jeff Bezos specifically should become filthy rich as a result, instead of all its employees and investors? How should the gains from successful entrepreneurship be distributed?

Jeff Bezos owns 9% of Amazon. So 9% of the expected value of the money going "into Amazon's coffers" indefinitely into the future is counted as part of his current "wealth." It's not money under his mattress.

Is your argument that people shouldn't be allowed to own 9% of a company that they started?

The term "capital" is an abstraction that's not helpful here. The big "wealth" numbers are all about equity ownership in highly valued companies. Bezos owns 9% of Amazon stock. That's why he's "rich." What should happen to that stock? What happens to his voting control over Amazon?

It was not so abstract when Musk came up with 44 billion to buy Twitter... The details are complicated but in the end it's still wealth.

> Bezos owns 9% of Amazon stock. That's why he's "rich." What should happen to that stock? What happens to his voting control over Amazon?

Presumably he would sell the stock to pay the wealth tax (or whatever mechanism is there to limit wealth)?

As for the voting control: when you're down to 9% this ship has sailed hasn't it? Anyway I don't think society has a moral obligation to allow individuals personal control of a trillion dollar company because they founded it (and if society disagrees with me, super-voting shares can be used as Alphabet does).

The question boils down to a feeling that when the revolution comes, that no one person needs more than, say, $100 million for themselves, or not. Trying to distract the conversation into defining "for themselves" will only prolong your time before the firing squad, comrad.

The answer depends on how should the losses from unsuccessful entrepreneurship be distributed?

For whatever reason, construction hits a snag or revenues are not enough to cover expenses, how would it become “society’s” problem? Do I get made whole by the government giving me $1M, and the government takes posession of the property?

If so, I foresee a lot more opportunities for corruption.

You declare bankruptcy. Your vendors who extended credit get hosed. Your employees go on unemployment benefits. Each of these costs money, and each of these reduces taxable income.

The aforementioned suggestions are a great way to kill any incentive to take risks and start a new business with one’s savings, further tilting the playing field to SP500 dominance.

The above would be Microsoft for context. For some reason your comment assumes that what a company was "founded as" should dictate what they do decades later.

This is a false zero sum view of wealth that is unfortunately all too common.

No, that logic doesn't follow. Say my wealth grew by 3% and my neighbor's grew by 5%. That doesn't imply any sort of "siphoning" at play.

Which is exactly the same as "my neighbor's the same and my wealth decreased"

Which is exactly the same as "getting siphoned to the rich"

Money have no intrinsic value: its only value is relative the others (and also depends on what can be bought ..)

> Which is exactly the same as "my neighbor's the same and my wealth decreased

No, not even remotely true. This is a fixed sum view of wealth that assumes the only way to obtain wealth is to take it from someone else.

Say I have a 3,000 sq ft house on a quarter acre lot, and so does my neighbor. My neighbor's company has a successful IPO and he sells his equity to buy a 6,000 sq ft house on a half acre lot, then how has my wealth decreased?

It may be easier to understand globally: if you have no raise but everybody have a raise, then you are poorer (because everything cost more, but you have no raise)

This is just factually wrong. If my neighbor gets a raise and I don't, and stuff costs the same amount then I have not gotten poorer. If my neighbor doubled his income tomorrow, how would I be any poorer? In theory, you could argue that his higher income results in inflation, but that's only the case if total productivity doesn't match the increase in the money supply.

Wealth is not zero sum: inflation adjusted wealth has increased over time: more houses and cars get built, more advanced industries increase productivity, etc. Wealth is not a fixed pie, the total amount of wealth in the world increases.

Wealth has no intrinsic value, it is only relative to other and to what can be exchanged with money

The numbers may always go up but the things that can be exchanged does not. Hence the "you become poorer"

No, the things that can be exchanged for money does go up. More houses get built, more cars are manufactured, etc. The total value of goods in the economy increases.

The economy is not zero sum.

Yes indeed, every body can have everything. In the end, everybody will have a palace near the beach, everybody will have a mansion with a qualitative neighborhood, everybody can have a mona lisa at home

(trying ad absurdum to see if it helps you)

We don't live in a post-scarcity society, but we also don't live in a world where economic output is zero sum.

If you have a 3 bedroom house, and your neighbor builds a palace on the beach, you still have a 3 bedroom house. Nothing was taken from you, someone else created a new asset.

Capitalism concentrates capital in fewer hands.

And thinking about bubbles, imagine what happens when the GenAI one pops. The wealth some new billionaires had will go up in smoke, their assets will go on sale, and they'll be gobbled up by the old billionaires.

But I think still a lot of people would argue the distribution is too unequal.

Compound interest, and as (admittedly) an armchair economist I buy into the argument that goes along the lines of:

"when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth".

In my view, r has been greater than g for some time now.

> Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

To me, it is clear that while Europe optimizes for quality of life to a large extent, Americans really drink the coo-laid and enthusiastically optimize for shareholder value. I highly encourage you to give life in Europe a go at some point. I hope you'll return (or stay) also having reached the same perspective.

I think for competitive and talented people, US in general offers much more lucrative opportunities as long as you're OK with the US specific drawbacks. For non-competitive people, living in Europe would probably be a more convenient.

I think the problem though is in the future, both the US and Europe has grave societal and economic issues but from the different angles. Europe lacks economical drive and seems to discourage change on a cultural level. The US on the other hand seems to be an extreme catalyst.

I'm not familiar enough with quantitative data to judge on the compound interest, nevertheless I think in the last few decades we have already been witness on the global level to major changes in wealth: empires like UK have shrank, giants like China have risen. This had been very different a few decades ago and is an anecdote at least that compound interest can only do so much for empires, in the face of major changes.

Only issue is, when you account for depreciation, you find that r>g applied to housing (so boomer NIMBYs) not billionaires.

This is not a Karl Marx thing, but a Henry George thing.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/deciphering-the-fall-and-...

Luck always plays the biggest role. Maybe the billionaires would have always been successful in some way, but not be a billionaire or even a millionaire.

Also, your argument sounds like a just-so story designed to support the status quo.

> the imbalance in wealth attraction will remain inherent.

Is is really a good idea to be ruled by the people with the greatest "wealth attraction?"

> Then you might ask, if that's true, do you I want to enforce equality, potentially dragging down the economy to mediocracy (for example many stagnating European economies) or maybe accept that current nature does not meet our societal desire for equality.

Yes, because regardless of anything else, the wealth imbalance has been politically destabilizing. Your comment strikes me as out-of-touch quantitative thinking: making certain easily-measured numbers going up the highest goal, while ignoring other things that are harder to quantify. That's a blind spot shared by a lot of people, especially tech people.

So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.

We can try and moderate it as a system (e.g some forms of democracy, socialism, etc.) to maybe lower the amplitudes, but it would be ignorant to deny that this might be a core part of current human nature. Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.

Now imagine, there'd be some alien government, who'd be like "whoa humans are making way too disproportionate progress compared to the other species, let's tax/prune them so they don't get too much power".

What do you mean, you found that out? And what does that have to do with anything?

> So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.

To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.

> Humans themselves are a specie with disproportionate power & influence compared to other species, so I think it would only make sense if this trait would also apply within the specie.

I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?

It's all an interpretation, never claimed it to be anything beyond a thinking model I like.

> To me, that doesn't sound like an observation, but rather an interpretation. We could apply various epistemological carpet beaters to see what remains. One would be the critique of ideology. A few others can be found in the philosophy of science. It also seems to contradict your reference to thermodynamics. Wouldn't that mean that personality traits don't play a role at all? We don't look at individual particles, and certainly not at their personality traits.

No we don't, but I don't think it's necessarily because we don't want to, but because we often can't. Nevertheless, I think my rationale still applies. For example, if you take a bunch of matter, for example water, you'd find out that the distribution of Deuterium and definitely Tritium is really "unfair". Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?

> I cannot understand this conclusion at all. Why should the structural relationship to other species be reflected within the species itself?

It doesn't necessarily have to but: 1. It seems to have been very favorable trait evolutionally to force your will on other species. I'm no brain nor social expert but it seems to me that in order to stop this trait internally, there would need to be some pretty strong inhibitors to counter that. 2. Regardless of the species claim, you can see the pattern of exceptional individuals with disproportionate influence in many other places in nature: queen bees, pack leaders, and human kings of sorts. in I think practically every culture on earth in recorded history?

I really struggle to think of any mass systems, in human society or nature in which power is not distributed disproportionally to a relatively small portion of individuals.

Sorry, but if that's your yardstick for acceptable models of thought, then only nonsense can come out of it. No one has any reason to take any of your thoughts seriously if you don't question your own thinking more critically.

> Why only so few particles get to have that extra neutron and others do not?

This has nothing to do with thermodynamics and even less to do with unfairness. It's a completely meaningless analogy. You might as well just flip it around and say that it's good that so few particles have to carry around that annoying extra neutron, or whatever. If you're going to draw any conclusions about humans from this, you might as well read coffee grounds or clouds or animal bones scattered on the forest floor. That's not thinking!

I have people like that in my personal circle. They're not exactly the brightest minds.

Edit: A queen bee is simply fed in a special way during the larval stage. Ultimately, it doesn't matter which larva is selected for this purpose. That said, it is also wrong to imagine her as an actual queen or as the CEO of the bees. She does not rule over the other bees but is simply responsible for laying eggs. If you wanted to, you could see from this example that your thinking does not proceed from premises to conclusions, but rather begins with conclusions and then rather loosely gathers together premises that might fit.

What can certainly be done, and what has already been done quite productively, is to transfer the thermodynamic concept of entropy to other areas. The first thing that comes to mind is Shannon's information entropy. But there is also Georgescu-Roegen's bioeconomic entropy, social entropy in the social sciences, and some (rather speculative and perhaps primarily metaphorical) concepts of psychological and psychodynamic entropy.

However, I do not think that if one were to zoom in further in these areas, one would find hard evidence for the worldview that is seeking justification here.

Where did I say that?

> If everyone was billionaire level money obsessed society would cease to work. There is nothing to indicate billionaires are giving us a disproportionate amount of what makes society work, and without working society to host it there is no progress.

I think if you wouldn't have the crazy risk takers who want the power/influence/money, either other people would need to take the lead on that, or there'd be a lot less advancement and we'd be closer as a society to our ancestors.

I've yet to see mass systems of groups in which work is being done without the leadership and initiative of a small proportion of people. For example, imagine a movement that is not founded by 1 or few people, but instead a company that is founded Day 1 with thousands of people, instantly. I think that's practically impossible without a hypothetical hivemind, but I'd like to be proven wrong!

By completely ignoring the facts about it.

> So in regards to this economic issue, it seems that human personality traits that lead to disproportionate power/influence/money are distributed non-uniformly to an extreme extent.

It doesn't seem that way to people who look at ALL factors, not just this one that is chosen to justify a sociopathic ideology.

Why is it that we have to trim out nails when they grow? Why not leave it natural?

Why do we remove the weed in between the pavers in our backyard? Why not let it be natural?

The fact is the world around us needs constant work. Our capitalism is no different. It needs constant pruning or it becomes gluttonous. There was a book I think which said most people involved in illegal drug trafficking are barely getting by, most of the income is soaked up at the top. I don't remember the point the bio was trying to make but it feels like that way for any enterprise these days.

The richest people in the US have reportedly increased their net worth by over 1.5T over the course of the last year or so.

How is this sustainable?

The notion I'm getting is that these forces that drive change are bigger than all of us, and they are inherently unsustainable in the larger scale of things, pretty similar to how solar systems are not really sustainable in a scale much larger than us, but not that is still pretty small in a universal scale.

So for your perspective it might be unsustainable, but for the bigger system what you describe is smaller than a grain of sand.

Besides, there's this thing called tax incidence and it's not as simple as "tax the billionaires" because it's not clear how that plays out in terms of people's wages or middle class investments.

On the other hand, land value taxes would actually be incident on landowners.

Therefore devaluing the value of the dollar so that those who had basically steady state income (wage earners) have been completely fucked while the lucky ones had their yachts rise with the tide.

I'm not particularly in favour of high taxation, but I think that the argument is a bit more subtle than that. The general point is that "the ultra rich" are able to benefit from a whole host of loopholes which allow them to pay proportionally less than the plebs.

Now, this specific point seems somewhat debatable, judging by the fact that people don't seem to agree; I personally have not looked into the matter to form an opinion.

Maybe our tax code hasn't kept up with the financialization of the economy. In any case, this whole tax increase thing, at least as I see it in France, since to spill over to "regular rich people", as in engineers or similar who "just" have a relatively high salary.

Another issue, which I think is different but is rolled into complaints about rising tax rates is what the state actually does with the money. As in "I'm ok with paying tax, but not to fund this or that thing". In France, specifically, many "public service" offices have closed, having people either travel great distances or fight half-assed computer systems, while, at the same time, the number of public servants (so, cost) has increased.

Do you not see this? Probably because you don't feel it in your pocket (yet, let's see what happens when the USD crashes. I will feel it too, no doubt.)

There's the belief that the economy can be a mighty tool to improve our lives, but isn't it going pretty much overboard since some time? Is this materialistic growth-at-all-costs ideology really making average US lives better these days?

From the outside the US feels like a runner that is stretching its arm towards the finish line (total automation) while also falling on their ass.

Before visiting Japan, I learned to read in both Hiragana and Katakana, but I didn't really know more than a dozen or so words in Japanese. While visiting Japan, I found Katakana to be a lot more useful, because it's commonly used and often is just English words converted to Japanese letters. I think all my Hiragana reading abilities were completely useless as I couldn't tell what I was reading.

This is what many people don't realize when they wish they wouldn't have to learn Kanji or Hanzi. They make a lot of sense for languages with lots of homophones.

Edit: typo because of autocomplete

I think you meant homophones. At least I hope so.

In Korea, Hanja are still actively used for disambiguation of homophones in complex texts. Public debate was divided for a long time, and even though Hanja are slowly being phased out, it is a slow process. It's hard to tell for sure, but even in North Korea the process seems incomplete.

There may be a neutrino background behind the CMB, where the universe was even smaller, and the gravitational wave background behind that with even more of a size difference.

Are there even more events further back, or is the next one after gravity the big bang?

What a fascinating subject, thank you for expanding my own little universe!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_neutrino_background

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutrino_decoupling

and for gravity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_wave_background

But our universe has black holes in it. Forgive the layman thinking, but does that mean we're just one of an infinite series of "nested" universes?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background

What is the Cosmic Microwave Background? -- https://youtu.be/AYFDN2DSVgc

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4c-gX9MT1Q

That edge is a sphere in space that was far enough away when the CMB was emitted in the past that we only see the light from it now.

https://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/educators/programs/cosmictimes...

I thought CMB was emitted everywhere.

~300M years is the time between the Big Bang singularity and the CMB, but not really relevant. The entire universe was everywhere as hot as the surface of a star at the time of the CMB, so any evidence of galaxies forming before that is surprising.

The surprisingly high uniformity of the temperature of the CMB — isotropic to roughly one part in 100,000 — is one of the reasons the Big Bang model replaced one of the older competing hypotheses (continuous creation IIRC).

So it is in fact the case that everything cooled very very uniformly and I'm not sure why you think otherwise?

I'm also not clear what you're saying with

> so we should see a transition somewhere

Given the CMB is itself the transition that we see.

> Sometimes, somewhere there must be a galaxy past CMB.

I think here you're mixing up space and time.

It's reasonable (please permit my use of conventional language rather than 4-vectors) to assume that a galaxy exists on the other side in space of the CMB as we see it now, but that happens at a point in time after the recombination epoch began and space became transparent, and light from that event hasn't reached us yet; when it does, the apparent distance of the CMB will be large enough for the galaxy to appear on this side.

Are you familiar with light cones and the convention of one space axis and one time axis? It might help you visualise it if you draw what's going on.

GLASS-z12 is 33.2Bly away from us. It should be behind some of the CMB produced by BB, isn't?

> Given the CMB is itself the transition that we see.

In BB model, CMB emitted by hot plasma. Where it is, that plasma?

In steady universe model, CMB is light with z=1000, emitted by distant galaxies, in range of 4Tly. It explains high uniformity of temperature. It's like the temperature of a water stream from underground: it's uniform across a climate area because underground temperature averages seasonal temperature shifting.

A reasonable mistake, but no.

If you look at the info box on your link, you'll see there are two different distances:

≈33.2 billion ly (10.2 billion pc) (present proper distance)

≈13.6 billion ly (4.2 billion pc) (light-travel distance)

The latter is what we're talking about when we say the CMB is about 13-point-whatever billion years old.

The difference with the other number is that the universe got bigger in the meantime, and that's where we recon it is now.

> Where it is, that plasma

The plasma itself?

Everywhere. The whole universe, including here.

The bit we see?

An echo made of light emitted at the last moment in time that it stopped being plasma — the light from the plasma that was here is now as far away from us as the plasma that caused the light we can see.

Echo requires something to reflect of. Moreover, echo will be an order(s) of magnitude weaker and will have a stamp of the reflective surface on it properties.

Nothing including this galaxy can beat light locally.

Look up the balloon (or raisin bread) analogy.

> echo will be an order(s) of magnitude weaker and will have a stamp of the reflective surface on it properties.

It does. That's in the CMB.

In bread analogy, sugar is the source of energy and CO2. In balloon analogy, new air is added to balloon (with lot of turbulence). What is added to our Universe, which causes the inflation? Where we can see it?

In case of Steady Universe model, light just changes it's properties over time, for example, because gravitational waves are stretching photons and photon beams. Gravitational waves are produced by massive objects, which are orbiting each other.

It's a free parameter in the equations, just like the initial value for the energy in the space or the baryon number.

Or the number of space-like and time-like dimensions.

Or their inherent topology.

Not that it matters, as the point of what I suggested is that it's an analogy for all objects within the space observing the same relationship, and the implications thereof.

> Where we can see it?

In the relationship between distance and redshift. More distant objects move away faster, the further away the faster they move on average, and that relationship best matches "accelerated expansion" than any other model.

Or, more locally, it's (perhaps by coincidence) about the right level to explain the moon's orbit slowly getting bigger.

> In case of Steady Universe model, light just changes it's properties over time, for example, because gravitational waves are stretching photons and photon beams. Gravitational waves are produced by massive objects, which are orbiting each other.

Great!

Unfortunately for you, those gravitational waves can't act anything like the ones predicted by GR which we've actually observed, because those are far too weak (or spacetime too 'stiff', IIRC).

GR has known weaknesses, to be sure, but they're all annoying beyond any observations we've been able to make, and people really are looking as it's considered both important and prestigious to find a way to tie it and quantum physics together properly.

In the meanwhile, the same equations for GR describe the (just about) detectable gravitational influence your body has, and the various demonstrations of gravity influencing the flow of time and path of nearby light.

IIRC, the best atomic clocks are just about at the level where an extra 100kg sitting next to them can change the last digit relative to another otherwise identical clock, but I'm not sure how long you have to sit there.

They're definitely good enough for it to matter which floor of a building you put them on.

Let's play with numbers. Two kinds of gravitational waves are claimed to be observed: 1) HF waves by LIGO/Virgo and 2) LF ones by NANOgrav[1].

I assume, that the meter is defined as c1s/299792458 in steady vacuum*. Same for the second. I assume, that speed of light can go down only, in other words, speed of light cannot be higher than c.

Gravitational wave background strain amplitude calculated to be ~ 2.4E-15 y-1. For simplification, I assume average slowdown (stretching) of light to be 1E-15 per year.

LF gravitational waves are quite powerful, with strain amplitude 2.4E-15 y-1, but their low frequency does almost no impact to the wave length of light. In 1 billion of years, wave length will be enlarged by up to 1,0000024.

HF gravitational waves are much weaker, say 1E-21, but their high frequency, say 20kHz, may increase wave length up to 1.88, which is much closer to expected Red Shift of 7.

[1]: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/acdac6

a pair of objects orbiting 24 thousand times per second.

This happens when black holes or neutron stars merge and that's it; this means you don't have enough of them to do what you're claiming, not even if I trusted what looks suspiciously like you blindly asserting without evidence how much they should alter wavelengths.

The effect of gravitational waves is barely anything even on the LIGO detector, and they need to use a squeezed quantum state to even notice because it's much smaller than the wavelength of the light even over the length of the entire beam-line.

Also, gravitational waves don't redshift the photons, they change the length of the path the photons take.

-

And as LIGO, NANOGrav etc., are relying on a prediction of the exact same GR equations that also lead to the big bang etc., you trying to shoehorn that in is roughly analogous to a Young-Earth Creationist talking about carbon dating.

> Also, gravitational waves don't redshift the photons, they change the length of the path the photons take.

Yep, more length to travel - larger wave length. :-/

> And as LIGO, NANOGrav etc., are relying on a prediction of the exact same GR equations that also lead to the big bang etc

I had a discussion about that recently. I have no power to repeat the discussion. You can find it in my comment history.

no, and for the same reason you can't use the output of a quarter million 2.45 Ghz microwave oven magnetrons to produce monochromic teal light (612500 Ghz).

The maths is basically equivalent for EM and gravity waves, except for the constants.

Well, that and the fact it's changing the space-time through which the waves themselves propagate, but the effect is usually small enough to be barely detectable even when you want to.

> Yep, more length to travel - larger wave length. :-/

no, same wavelength, going further on one half of the cycle, then not as far on the other half of the cycle. Same wavelength within the space, it's the space itself which changes.

> I had a discussion about that recently. I have no power to repeat the discussion. You can find it in my comment history.

TBH, that would be a colossal waste of my time. I'm only even bothering to reply to this this now because discussion is supposed to be helpful while I learn things.

Why we need monochromatic light? Gravitational wave background is just noise. A lot of orbiting objects in a galaxy will produce steady noise, due to interference. It's easy to check just by putting a bunch of wave generators with different frequencies in a same pond, and then move. Interference between waves will create noise with higher frequencies than original.

Even small effects are producing significant results over large periods of time. 1 billion years is 31.5E15 seconds.

If we integrate over all frequencies of gravitation noise floor, then we may have a number, which will explain a part of red shift.

More over, gravitational noise is important for Pilot Wave theory, because it may explain the source of energy for the pilot wave.

> no, same wavelength, going further on one half of the cycle, then not as far on the other half of the cycle. Same wavelength within the space, it's the space itself which changes.

It implies FTL speed at the second half of the cycle, which is impossible. If wavelength of light will be enlarged, then it will stay enlarged, because light traveling at c, so c-delta is possible, but c+delta is not.

> TBH, that would be a colossal waste of my time. I'm only even bothering to reply to this this now because discussion is supposed to be helpful while I learn things.

I have the same filling. I only reply because my pleasure to talk with you overcomes the inconvenience of Hacker News.

Maybe we should switch to email, or to a wiki with a proper set of tools for scientific discussion.

You have to be careful with what you mean by "distance" at cosmic scales. Space is expanding with time, and there are several different definitions of "distance" that give very different results at cosmic scales.

The best "distance" measure here is simply redshift. GLASS-z12 is at redshift z=12, as the name suggests. The CMB is at redshift z=1100, so it's father away.

In fact, for very straightforward physical reasons, no light can reach us from beyond the CMB. The universe was opaque before the time of the CMB, because it was ionized and dense. Before the CMB time, photons could not travel very far at all before they hit an electron and were scattered.

Yes, CMB emitters are much further away, at a distance of about 4Tly, while BB claimed to be just 14By ago. Your claim, that CMB is produced by BB, requires a lot of stretching.

If you take the time to learn General Relativity, and to learn how to apply it to cosmology, you will see that there are rigorous mathematical answers to the various questions you're raising.

I want to point out that this isn't esoteric stuff that only a few people understand. General Relativity and cosmology are part of a standard undergraduate physics curriculum. It only takes a few years of study, starting from Physics 101, to get to the point where you can derive the answers to all your questions from scratch.

I'm listening with both ears.

Spacetime being dynamic is kinda the point of GR.

"How" this specific expansion happens is an open question — not because nobody has any idea, but because we can't distinguish between three of them and a forth leads directly to the unsolved challenge of combining GR with quantum mechanics.

Static Universe model of evolution doesn't requires such stretching: CMB is just light of distant galaxies. End of story.

THE WHOLE POINT of GR is that it explains things that "classical" physics did not, while also explaining everything that classical physics did. Nothing in GR "breaks the laws of physics" because GR largely IS the laws of physics now.

If you want to throw away GR by using a "Static Universe" theory, you have to re-derive a hundred different solutions to problems you bring back into physics by doing so. Einstein literally TRIED to put a static universe into GR because he thought it felt better, and turned out to be dead wrong!

In terms of "what drives the expansion", to us, within the universe, it's just what we see. It could very well be that it's a property of whatever "substrate" or "Stuff/emptyness" that a "Universe" exists in, if "exists" even makes sense in that context. It could be a completely unknowable to us thing. There are very likely phenomena and questions that we cannot ever answer, because we simply have no way of probing them.

All we know is that the way GR says to do the math works out really well for like 99.99% of things, and if you want to come up with a model that doesn't allow space to change "size", you have a shitload of math left to do at a minimum. If you want to understand how we got here, you have 400 years of physics history to read up on. None of this is about the "correctness" of GR either. It just makes the best predictions so far, and in science, all that matters is who makes the best predictions. Want to supersede the GR model? Just predict something correctly that GR cannot, while also predicting everything else correctly.

GR will be a special case in a new theory, which will explain laws of Universe better, which may join together GR and QM. If a formula does a good job, then it will be used anyway. We are not throwing away Newton physics just because GR does a better job in some cases.

> In terms of "what drives the expansion", to us, within the universe, it's just what we see.

Are you talking about a "light sail" effect? Yes, EM radiation creates pressure on dust particles, which pushes them away, but gravitation doesn't let it go. The same effect happens at size of galaxy. I'm not sure about superclusters, but it looks like we are falling into Great Attractor then into Shapley Attractor with all that dust.

So yes, this is possible, but EM radiation must be stronger than gravitation.

> It just makes the best predictions so far, and in science, all that matters is who makes the best predictions.

Predictions are very important, because they allow to prove or falsify a theory, but this is a game for theoretical physicists only. There is only one reality, which can be describer in many ways. Many different formulas can fit the same data. Many different techniques can be used to achieve the same result.

Moreover, every formula works in a range, then it doesn't work. Pi is an irrational number, which cannot be reproduced correctly in reality, thus every formula or path, which contains the irrational number, can be reproduced by physical reality with limited precision only. Multiply the error by many iterations, and new physics will emerge in the same place.

The only way to prove a theory, as I see it, is to make physical demonstrations at human scale, an analog, and then study it.

Hydrodynamic quantum analogs allows us to see pilot wave at work, so no mysteries in double slit experiment anymore: it just self-interference of the pilot wave. The same can be done for space effects.

It's easier to make computer model, to make predictions, but to make a correct model, we need to understand physics first. Egg and chicken. In case of a physical demonstration, nature performs all these calculations for free, automatically. Even when they are partially correct, they are still helpful.

GR doesn't conserve energy. What follows is a bit beyond my level so I may be misremembering, but IIRC Noether's theorem is that conservation laws are always identical to some symmetries, and the symmetry for energy (time?) just isn't true in GR.

(I don't think it's even true in SR because space and time are observer dependent, but at least in SR you can get a different conserved quantity because all observers agree on a space-time interval; but as I implied in a different comment where I mentioned brilliant, this is my hobby not my profession).

The CMB is a perfect blackbody. Galaxies are far from a blackbody. Your explanation fails if one knows even a tiny amount about astronomy.

Before you criticize Big Bang cosmology, you should learn the theory. That means studying General Relativity, learning to derive the Friedmann Equations, learning about the (utterly overwhelming) observational evidence for the theory, etc. Then you'll be in a position to ask intelligent questions about the theory.

I promise you that if you learn the theory, you'll understand that the questions you're asking either don't make sense or have obvious answers. For example, conservation of energy does not hold in General Relativity. You keep saying that expansion is an ad hoc assumption that breaks physical laws. However, if you solve the Einstein Field Equations, you'll see that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. This fact bothered Einstein so much that he tried to modify General Relativity to get rid of it, something he regretted when observational evidence firmly established that the universe was indeed expanding. This was all the way back in the 1920s, and the evidence is so overwhelming now, a full century later, that it's impossible to deny.

CMB is not emitted by a single galaxy or even group of galaxies. It's light of trillions of supeclusters, like our Visible Universe, averaged. I expect that almost any local unevenness should be polished out when averaged over such large area and distance. We are not seeing stream of photons from individual emitters, we see random photons from extremely huge range of emitters at extremely huge range from us.

If clump together all radiation from all our Visible Universe into single stream of photons, then we will see something very similar.

> For example, conservation of energy does not hold in General Relativity.

Then something is wrong.

Do you know what does give you a blackbody? An optically thick medium with a uniform temperature, which is what the CMB "last scattering surface" is.

I just have one question for you: do you think that physicists are all a bunch of dunces? You're doing extremely simple questions. Do you think that physicists haven't worked out the basics of the theory? Again, instead of raising extremely simple objections, your time would be better spent understanding the theory first.

>> For example, conservation of energy does not hold in General Relativity.

> Then something is wrong.

Energy conservation only holds locally, when space is nearly flat. The true conservation law in General Relativity is more complicated (energy-momentum conservation).

Black body averages emission of trillions of trillions of atoms. Why it will not work for emission of trillions of trillions of galaxies? Can you prove that?

> Energy conservation only holds locally, when space is nearly flat.

Space is flat in all directions.

No, that's not what a blackbody is. A blackbody is an optically thick medium in thermal equilibrium. Galaxies are not blackbodies (not even close), and when you average a bunch of non-blackbody spectra, you don't get a blackbody. You'll get a spectrum with all sorts of atomic and molecular features. There is actually something called the "Cosmic Infrared Background," which is caused by distant galaxies, but it's not a blackbody and it has much larger amplitude variations than the CMB (because galaxies are distributed in a clumpy way).

> Space is flat in all directions.

Globally, spacetime is not flat (i.e., it is not Minkowski). Spacelike surfaces of constant coordinate time are flat, but the whole manifold is not flat. If this is all a bunch of gobbledygook to you, then you need to learn the basics of General Relativity.

Black body can be simulated by a cavity with small hole, so incoming light will be scattered and fully absorbed, with zero reflections. In case of CMB, light from our Visible Universe will never return back to us, because it will be too weak and too stretched.

Moreover, this is really big journey for a photon, with very high probability to hit something on the way to us, so we may see a large portion of re-emitted EM radiation instead of the original light.

What is the difference between black sky and black body?

> Galaxies are not blackbodies (not even close), and when you average a bunch of non-blackbody spectra, you don't get a blackbody. You'll get a spectrum with all sorts of atomic and molecular features.

Emission from multiple random objects can be approximated as black body radiation, even when they are not in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings.

Moreover, we use statistic to distinguish between different emitters. In case of CMB, years may pass until we receive second photon from a same galaxy. Statistic doesn't work in such extreme cases, unless we will point an antenna in the same direction for a millennia or even longer.

> There is actually something called the "Cosmic Infrared Background," which is caused by distant galaxies, but it's not a blackbody and it has much larger amplitude variations than the CMB (because galaxies are distributed in a clumpy way).

CIB emitted mostly by stars and dust particles, which are hit by the star light, which are much closer to us than CMB emitters. We may get different picture from outside of our galaxy, or when we filter out local emitters.

> Spacelike surfaces of constant coordinate time are flat, but the whole manifold is not flat.

You are talking about model. Can you map your model back to physical reality, please? As I understand, you are trying to tell me that a point in the non-flat space-timecan have less or more neighbourhood points that in flat space time. In other words, wormholes or space-bubbles are possible in your imagination.

> then you need to learn the basics of General Relativity.

I'm too stupid to understand this great theory. I need simple explanations.

Yes, you.

(I suspect also GR, but not for any reason you give — the maths presumes no singularities from what I've been told, and yet they happen anyway with easy initial conditions).

For the broader point, if there were galaxies trillion of light years away whose light had time to reach us, they'd be trillions of years old by now, and therefore we'd expect a lot more galaxies near us to be that age too.

We don't see any evidence of nearby galaxies that old; denying the conclusion means falsifying the hypothesis.

Also, they'd have to go on forever to not look clumpy, and then we would still need a source of red-shift to stop them being as bright as the surface of a star in all directions.

I know that. I'm heretic. Moreover, I'm too stupid to understand all these great theories. I need simple explanations.

> For the broader point, if there were galaxies trillion of light years away whose light had time to reach us, they'd be trillions of years old by now, and therefore we'd expect a lot more galaxies near us to be that age too.

Of course, not. Space is mostly empty. If elementary particles are generated constantly from pure energy (which doesn't violate laws of conservation) just of pure luck at cosmic scale, then light from distant neighbors slowly pushed this newborn dust into the center of a gigantic void, where it started to concentrate. In such case, we will have huge gap of void between our region of space and our neighbors.

> Also, they'd have to go on forever to not look clumpy, and then we would still need a source of red-shift to stop them being as bright as the surface of a star in all directions.

Surface area of a distant object reduces at r^2, while brightness of the distant object diminishes at r^3. Moreover, the probability of hitting something grows with d^1, so total brightness diminishes with (d^3*d)/d^2 = d^2. The number of objects in the sky increases with area = d^2. So, d^2/d^2 = const. I see no infinity. At average, the brightness of sky must be very similar in all directions. The larger the distance - the closer to average brightness must be. CMB must be almost ideal.

Requires simultaneous behaviour from all directions at great distances while also not having that behaviour here, and also having us being really close to the physical center of this phenomenon rather than off to one side — even a fraction of a percent would be easily noticeable given the CMB is so close to the same in all directions; we see a red/blue-shift dipole from us moving at 370-ish km/s relative to it's comoving rest frame, so that's the scale of fractional away-from-perfect-centre you'd have to explain.

> Surface area of a distant object reduces at r^2, while brightness of the distant object diminishes at r^3.

If space was flat, which is your presumption, those would both be 1/r^2.

> Moreover, the probability of hitting something grows with d^1

You should be able to tell that's wrong by it being an unbounded function, when probability stops at 1.

You should look up Olber's paradox.

You forgot about red shift, which also diminishes the source, so, very very roughly, it's 1/r^3.

> Requires simultaneous behaviour from all directions at great distances while also not having that behaviour here, and also having us being really close to the physical center of this phenomenon rather than off to one side — even a fraction of a percent would be easily noticeable given the CMB is so close to the same in all directions; we see a red/blue-shift dipole from us moving at 370-ish km/s relative to it's comoving rest frame, so that's the scale of fractional away-from-perfect-centre you'd have to explain.

When we are in a fog, we always in the center of the visible area. With such larger distances, the probability of hitting something for a photon is very near to 1, even when interstellar space is extremely clear (hard to calculate exact numbers for me).

> You should be able to tell that's wrong by it being an unbounded function, when probability stops at 1.

When we see direct light, then probability is below 1. When don't, then it's 1. :-/

> You should look up Olber's paradox.

You should look at the picture of the darkest spot on the sky: it's full of stars. :-/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field

Several have been made, the suggestions have issues.

> Usually, coordinate system doesn't expand with time.

Define "usually". Do you have experience of other universes?

> An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.

Indeed, but this comment box is too small to do the evidence justice.

Edit: that's unhelpful in retrospect, so I suggest the Youtube channel "PBS Space Time". The videos build on each other, so start at the beginning and work through the back catalogue.

> Yes, CMB emitters are much further away, at a distance of about 4Tly,

I have no idea where you got this belief from.

I have experience with coordinate systems. I can bend or expand space-time on my computer all day long, to simulate reality, but I cannot do that in the real world at all.

> Indeed, but this comment box is too small to do the evidence justice.

Looking for the paper or a blog post! However, I suspect that you will just stretch evidence until it will match your model.

> I have no idea where you got this belief from.

Just by looking in the window, I see that some object are close, other are far away, then even further away, and so on, up to 4Tly. Nothing extraordinary. No Big Bangs, no FTL speeds, no hidden sources of energy of epic size, just ordinary physics.

Sure you do, just by sitting there.

Reminds me a bit of my dad; he did radar simulation for military IFF and one of his work anecdotes was about increasing the number of decimal(!) digits of pi the software used.

He stopped boasting about that when I pointed out the extra digits were less relevant than the curvature of spacetime caused by Earth itself.

> Just by looking in the window, I see that some object are close, other are far away, then even further away, and so on, up to 4Tly

I had dreams like that once. Woke up to find I was suffering from testicular torsion.

If you seriously believe you can see 4e12 light years through your window, that's probably hallucinogens of some kind (not necessarily intentional).

I 100% sure that I cannot bend or stretch imaginary coordinate system outside of my imagination. Can you point to real physical process which causes stretching or bending of the mathematical abstraction?

> If you seriously believe you can see 4e12 light years through your window, that's probably hallucinogens of some kind (not necessarily intentional).

I cannot see objects smaller than a star or galaxy with naked eye. However, we can see light stretched to the microwave range.

"General relativity" as we keep telling you.

> I cannot see objects smaller than a star or galaxy with naked eye.

Only a factor of about a trillion in the size of those two things.

> However, we can see light stretched to the microwave range.

With your eyes? No. And certainly not through your window, whose own thermal emissions relative to the CMB makes your previous claim roughly as unphysical as saying you can look through the sun's photosphere to see Jupiter during an occultation.

The atomic clocks (as I mentioned in another comment) demonstrating gravitational time dilation within a building is another fun example.

I see strong annual signal in GPS: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10291-017-0686-6 .

Why it there?

The engineers implemented results from GR.

> Why it there?

Not that it matters, but the answer is in the introduction.

Nobody else has pointed out my mistake here, the time between them is ~380ky not ~300My. My bad.

A transition from what to what?

> which is not the case.

Why not?

> Sometimes, somewhere there must be a galaxy past CMB.

If there is we'd have to wait for the light from it to get to us, by which time the CMB will have receded further and it would then be in front of the CMB.

A transition from plasma to the cold mater in the form of galaxies we see.

> Why not?

As you see, there are big clusters everywhere. It means that some regions were cooler from the start, to form these cluster in so short period of time. It means that regions around them were hotter, thus they should emit light longer.

> If there is we'd have to wait for the light from it to get to us, by which time the CMB will have receded further and it would then be in front of the CMB.

300My is a short period of time. Why they cannot sometimes overlap?

I did it once, now doing it for the second time. I think most people will not bear it, but for me it feels like the only natural thing to do.

I can never imagine enjoying either running a hyper-growth VC funded company or being an employee, and I realize most people are not like that.

So on that end, maybe ask yourself if you were OK with cutting costs like losing the car, moving to a smaller apartment (even back with your parents) etc. and be happy about it even if your company flops.

Just as an example, in high school learning trigonometry was really difficult for me, like why would I even care about finding an angle in a triangle, etc.?

Only once I studied physics or game dev, this has started to become relevant, and then studying it got SO MUCH easier.

"Alright everyone, let's make a video game character out of triangles".

"Let's make a little cannon that you can change the angle of. How do you calculate the angle? Funny you should ask.."

"Now let's learn how you'd make the fireball move up and down as it travels. That's a sine wave!"

Every single student understands the basic concept of a game visually, even if they don't play them regularly. It's just a perfect frame of reference and context for applying the concepts in 2D, and then in 3D. And it's so easy to help the students understand how easily those concepts get extrapolated to other things (engineering, sports, whatever).

There's probably an untapped opportunity here, but ed-tech is such a difficult industry.

Kids aren't stupid. If you take the usual boring curriculum with choreful exercises, and try to "make it more fun" by half-heartedly sprinkling in some colors, characters and cheesy stories, it will backfire spectacularly - kids will see you're just trying to trick them, and not even putting much effort into it.

The right way is the reverse: you need to make something honestly, inherently fun, but design it so that it educates users/players as a side effect. Take Kerbal Space Program: it's not designed to be an educational game, but it's fun, and models real-world physics well enough that you get 12 years old researching and understanding the math of orbital mechanics, all because they'd like to do better than "point roughly half-turn ahead of the Moon and go full throttle", and they'd like to not run out of fuel on the way. Or, look how Minecraft is tricking kids into learning electronics, boolean logic, low-level programming, etc.

(I'd mention Factorio, but I think it's a wash - any gains society gets from the game educating kids are cancelled out by the amount of productivity loss the mere exposure to this game inflicts on software devs.)

(EDIT: or, remember Colobot? A very simple third-person perspective game that had you find and refine resources to build robots, which then you used to kill some big bugs. The twist being, instead of controlling the robots like in a shooter, you had an option to program them in a Java-like DSL, inside the game. It was a great way to organically learn programming. The IP owners later made a "fork" of the game, Ceebot, that was pretty much the same, except it focused on teaching you to program robots instead of having fun exploring and shooting stuff. Predictably, that simple change of focus made the game flop.)

It doesn't even have to be a game: leave a kid in front of Google Earth, and they'll learn geography much faster and much more thoroughly than they would from a globe or a book. Not because the software is better at teaching, but because the kid is just messing around with a virutal model of Earth, and learning stuff along the way.

Etc. Etd.

I think it's a tough sell to adults, particularly parents and educators - that if you want to motivate kids to learn, you need to... stop trying to motivate them to learn. Give them something that's honestly fun, involving or benefiting from real-life knowledge and skills, but actually trying to teach them - and then trust that they'll pick that knowledge up on their own.

I think games, have lots to teach, but that most of the time they are a catalyst for learning or inspiration to learn, but on their own, they will rarely actually teach you. It's hard to put the finger on it, as for example, I'm not a native English speaker, but I learned and practiced most of my English from playing video games, and they were the catalyst to make me WANT to learn English, but they didn't exactly *teach* me English.

Another part of it, is I bet if you sample today's scientists and engineers at places like NASA, you'd probably find that a lot of them loved watching Star Trek/Star Wars as kids. So while sci-fi hasn't taught them how to work with Schrodinger's equation, it probably had a major part of what sparked their motivation to get started. Games probably do that too, and then some, thanks to interactivity.

- "chocolate covered broccoli"

- "catalyst for learning"

- "inspiration to learn"

> I learned and practiced most of my English from playing video games, and they were the catalyst to make me WANT to learn English, but they didn't exactly teach* me English.*

English is my second language, and I've also learned most of it from video games. Mostly from exposure, but initially through focused effort - I still vividly remember that time when I was maybe 10 or 12 years old, when I made screenshots from loading screens in Star Trek: Generations, and printed them out on paper, one by one, directly from MS Paint, to take back into my room and meticulously translate the story text on those screens, looking up every single word in an English->Polish dictionary. I also remember keeping that dictionary around when playing Fallout 1. The need to understand the stories and dialogues in games is what bootstrapped my English.

> I bet if you sample today's scientists and engineers at places like NASA, you'd probably find that a lot of them loved watching Star Trek/Star Wars as kids. So while sci-fi hasn't taught them how to work with Schrodinger's equation, it probably had a major part of what sparked their motivation to get started.

I agree. And Star Trek is, in fact, what got me interested in STEM. I owe my entire career and most of who I am as a person, to early exposure to captain Picard and the adventures of Enterprise-D.

(A lot of my early STEM self-education was driven by trying to understand the so-called "technobabble", which - at least in TNG - actually made sense. Probably because, in those days, they had proper scientific advisors.)

> Games probably do that too, and then some, thanks to interactivity.

Yup. I mentioned KSP for a reason - not only have I read the accounts of parents impressed by how much advanced math and physics their 8-12 years old kids can pick up, just for the sake of getting better at the game, but myself I also learned these things for the same reason. While Star Trek is what got me interested in space in the first place, KSP is what got me to finally grok how orbital mechanics and rocketry work in reality. It also made me no longer able to fully enjoy any space travel fiction, except for diamond-hard sci-fi.

I should probably give KSP a try again. I guess there's an initial threshold I got to power through first, as I got a bit exhausted after the first mission hehe.

I'm actually working now on a game of my own, with themes of science, and it's indeed a game-first approach rather than an educational game, but I do hope to maybe inspire some ideas and motivation with at least a few players.

I totally believe there's a lot of untapped potential in this area, and advancing towards cracking learning motivation + capabilities could have a huge impact.

What made all the difference for me was a mod (Kerbal Engineering ...something?) that calculated ∆v for each stage as you were building your rocket. Coupled with a ∆v "subway map" of the game's solar system, this solved the problem of running out of fuel half-way through the mission. I eventually learned how to do the math on my own, but I would've given up long before that happened, if not for this mod. It's been some time since I last played KSP, but I hear that this functionality is now built into the stock game.

Good luck with your game! Give me a shout if and when you need someone to play-test it :).

Very glad I'm living in a post-ksp world, even of I'm not playing it, for the real life rocketry it enabled.

In primary and secondary school, I had troubles with math - mostly caused by me not doing homework exercises and generally avoiding work (probably an early indication of an issue that took 20 more years to diagnose...). It all changed when I got interested in gamedev - suddenly, I've caught up with most of the material I was bad at, quickly learned trigonometry beyond the secondary school program, and then some basic vector and matrix algebra - and I distinctly remember it all starting with a simple problem: how to make a sprite rotate and move in circles?

Couple decades later, I still have a kind of theory+applications mindset: I always seek to generalize and abstract, but I feel lost when presented with a new abstraction without any context. Over the years, I realized I learn and understand things most effectively by seeking out answers to the question: why?. Not in the sense of, "what will I ever use this for?", but in the sense of "why was this invented?", "what were the problems people who invented it were trying to solve?". I trace the topic back in time until I find the point where the "why" and "how" are both apparent, and then go forward from there.

I was going to say that the curriculum is tuned in favor of those who can just learn by theory, but then I realized that's not even true. It's tuned in favor of those who will simply swallow it without any idea what it is for; it is neither contextualized in terms of what it is practically good for, nor is it contextualized in terms of theory. It's just... there.

In a sense, yes. But usually this was kind of accidental - as in, people making those breakthroughs weren't doing it because they loved manipulating abstract symbols, or believed that someone, somewhen will find it useful; rather, they had some immediate-term reason for doing the work - a problem to solve, a person to impress, or just doing it for shits and giggles - and only later it turned out their work was the key to something transformative.

I have a similar "mental make" as GP too. Over the years I realized that for me, it's not about practical use to me - it's about knowing why something was invented, what problems the inventors were trying to solve. Learning the historical motivation "grounds" the concept for me, and makes it much easier to understand.

I think procrastination and what you are describing are slightly different, though, because procrastination stems from stress and emotions for me, whereas with what you describe, it doesn't sound like you have to be stressed to experience it.

Probably the same reason that you're such an ass (genes).

- History has demonstrated clear value in discovering and understanding concepts that have no practical use today

- One should not care to understand things that have no practical use today

Seems bizarre to think both things. That's why I asked.

As a game dev, I think at this stage AI can be a helpful utility, but it does not replace a designer's touch for professionally looking games.

Many of the quirks of our technology, like audio distortion for example, quickly become key components of certain styles. I remember as a child growing up in a funny valley after the acceptance of analogue distortion but before the widespread adaption of digital distortion.

Right now I'm thinking of someone like James Gerde, where the frame-to-frame shifts of AI imagination are part of the aesthetic. I think it's only a matter of time before this effect is matched up with something that makes emotional sense, and then it will blow up.

Seems as if Duolingo had been more conservative with its fundraising, it wouldn't have needed to resort to actions that might take it further away its goal of teaching a language? Do you really need almost $200M to build a business like Duolingo?

Would it be a better situation if houses for sale/rent will have a transparent safety rating visible to tenants and contractors could choose whether they build expensive, high safety buildings, or cheaper, low safety buildings?

Might sound dystopian, but to me it seems like the preferable solution. I know I live in an old house that would probably not fit for an earthquake, but I also know that if I want to live in a safer house, I'd need to pay more or move to a less desirable location, so I'm OK with taking the risk that an earthquake will kill me while I'm in the house.

The question is whether the market could balance itself enough so contractors don't build just crappy houses and take all the new margin to themselves.

Otherwise to do ratings like you suggest you can only do it to mass produced things, in this case the closest would be mobile homes or prefabs, since you can actually destroy it and see how difficult it was and give it a rating.

A solid C# foundation for building on top of excel could probably be very useful for some companies.

I do wonder though how you can nail down a target audience for this kind of tool, seems like you'd need a special kind of tinkerer and I'm not sure how many like that are out there. In my other company, which was a small company, the ones who headed it were essentially engineers that transitioned to executive positions. I doubt there are many like that out there.