#pedantry

If you come into Joe's chat with pedantry, best make sure your logic is rigorous.

The tweet being quoted is of course obviously wrong: the fact that the current market price of gold is ~$3,000 per ounce is contingent on gold maintaining its current rarity, and the market price of gold would be considerably lower in a world where gold was more abundant.

But the person who has showed up to dunk on this tweet is wrong in a more subtle (and more annoying) way: gold being abundant would not make it "worthless."

We intuitively understand that many types of mineral are useful for things. For example, iron useful as a construction material (especially if you make steel out of it). And titanium offers a similar strength at less weight, making it useful if you're trying to build spaceships.

If the earth suddenly gained a huge amount of iron, this would not cause iron to become "worthless." Ditto for titanium.

If we had a magic machine that could instantly create more lithium and cobalt, that would not be a "worthless" invention: we would use the machine to create minerals that we could use to make batteries; we could make more of the grid solar, energy would be more abundant, and that would have the effect of making us all richer (in tangible ways, like cutting the price of your energy bill, and in other less-immediately-obvious but still tangible ways).

Adding more resources to the world would make the world richer, not poorer, because we could do things with them! This is true of iron, titanium, and cobalt. It is also true of gold.

Gold is useful! It has a bunch of unique properties that allow you to build useful things out of it!

If you've ever installed a CPU, you're probably familiar with this sight:

Intel did not put a gold top-coat on your CPU pins because they were expecting you to display them to ostentatiously broadcast your wealth. It used gold because that's the best material for the job!

Gold has low electrical resistance, and it doesn't tarnish, which means that properties like resistance won't change over the lifespan of the chip. Palladium-nickel is too porous and prone to cracking; silver tarnishes too easily, platinum is harder to solder.

The Intel chip in your PC has gold because in a counterfactual world where they instead had to use a different material, your CPU would be worse at doing the the things that it's supposed to do.

In fact, there are a lot of applications where gold is just straight-up better than copper, aluminum, tin, and nickel, but we end up using those (worse) materials anyway just because gold is too expensive. If price were no object, you'd really rather wire your house with gold than copper, but we use copper because it's less than 1% the cost. If gold were more abundant, we wouldn't have to settle for second-best!

But there is another way in which the annoying tweet is wrong that people would remain poor even if we accept the false premise that "gold would be worthless": those suffering under the resource curse of gold could be considerably better off!

A world where gold is valuable is a world where dictators who control a limited supply of gold have a major source of wealth that is mostly decoupled from human capital. A country whose main export is gold has considerably less incentive to do things like "build schools" and "ensure that children aren't malnourished" than they would in a world where their main export was microchips or movies or software, because in order to create chips/movies/apps, you need to have a bunch of skilled labor and you can only get that skilled labor by building schools and ensuring that your people's cognitive capacity isn't being diminished by childhood malnourishment. (In case it's not obvious, this point generalizes to many things beyond "just" building schools and getting nutrients into children.)

So, if "gold became worthless," it's quite conceivable that people could be better off: eliminating that specific source of wealth would mostly have the effect of reducing a particular kind of inequality that tends to make a tiny number of people rich at the expense of everyone else.

(That is, of course, accepting the premise that gold would become "worthless," which it wouldn't, because we can do useful things with gold: it can't be worthless because it literally has worth even absent any shared notion of it being a useful "store of value." Gold is like titanium; it's not like a piece of paper with Benjamin Franklin whose usefulness is entirely contingent on constructed factors. If humanity went extinct, aliens would struggle to find useful things to do with $100 bills, but they'd find plenty of useful things to do with all of the gold that they found on earth. This was even the premise of an extremely silly sci-fi movie starring Harrison Ford, Cowboys and Aliens.)

Since all life is related, you can say stupid shit like: "Oh yeah harvestmen, they're not actually spiders. common misconception. They're actually related to elephants."

I'm fascinated by the question of how relativity works in the Animorphs universe. This seems to suggest a model where there's a maximum speed of a massive object relative to a distant observer well below the speed of light, and trying to go faster than that reduces the proper time of the trajectory but makes the externally measured speed smaller. I'm not sure if there's any coherent picture of spacetime which would give rise to that effect, but it's very interesting.

In this post, I propose the following list of names for two-person ships within the Traveling Wilburys:

Dylorb (alt. Dylorbison) Dylynne (alt. Dylanynne) Dyletty Dylarrison Orblynne Orbetty Orbarrison Lynnetty Lynnarrison Pettarrison

Pedantry under the cut.