There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently. There are only so many Gwerns and Scott Alexanders and Dredmorbiuses out there. There really are not that many people out there thinking about and discussing the Big Ideas and you keep running into the same ones over time. I fear many club members are lost in the blogosphere and near impossible to find with Google.

Some possible answers:

> Spending on healthcare
> cost of college
> construction costs
> childcare costs

There are many complex reasons why costs can rise in any area, but the common theme between them is something you already know - the propaganda machine told everybody that university degrees meant belonging to the middle class club with accompanying benefits aka house ownership, a high status mate, healthy income, respect.

Turns out this is a bad model. There are diminishing returns for not only college degrees but even that knowledge itself in relation to what other parts of society do. The fuzzier and understudied/underappreciated areas of construction skill, caring (including healthcare - recall Robin Hanson's contention that 50% of healthcare costs are just people wanting to feel supported) have been deprived of talent and that is what is driving up costs across the board - supply and demand.

> Why do there seem to be more examples of rapidly-completed major projects in the past than the present?

My opinion is the same as Thiels I think - it's that our ability to do complex coordination is dropping. The reasons why? Information is an ecology - Cal Newport will tell us distraction or context switching is a sin if you want complex coordination and that is right - but also I believe in The Ladybird Book Theory which is that our education - taken broadly - has given us a false impression of complexity instead of thinking from first principals (notice how the old ladybird books are written - the kind of thing kids used to read) - which is something Musk puts a lot of weight on. The Elon/Cal thesis might be that "leave out some stuff - focus on key principals intensely". It sounds trite but I think it is right.

From a ROI point of view - not very many people in society need to be very very good at driving projects - so if you focused on making super-coordinators aka a new form education for those selected for Big Tasks should pay off immediately.

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

My guess is energy.

> How do you ensure an adequate replacement rate in systems that have no natural way to die?

Sunset clauses are one but I don't really know because the main way seems to be just forgetting. I think when our institutions screw up it can get bad enough that the fix was a thousand years later we forgot that was even a problem.

> How do we help more experimental cities get started?

An idea.

You need to build a machine that compacts garbage into a substrate that can be used to form new land offshore. Nearly all prosperous cities are near water and produce garbage. It should be possible to gradually build experimental islands while solving the garbage problem so it's all in the technical detail of designing a machine that makes blocks/substrate out of the garbage. It pays for itself and building pyramids starts with understanding how to make a single brick.

> Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?

Maybe human to human communication is weirder than we think. In education you're conventionally thinking about transmitting information, understanding from A to B but maybe because our common ancestors have spent millions of years in forests and other environments instead of classrooms they transmit information to each other in ways which sound a bit odd to us. Think of pheromones, our sense of smell, hearing somebody's voice unmediated by electronics, seeing somebody's posture body language - these could all form metainformation about the information in language that is very helpful in the student/tutor relationship.

Think also of the 'sleeping dictionary' - a person in a couple who learns his or her spouse's native language learns it really fast. It can sound a bit woo-ish but I think it'll be objectively measurable.

> What's the successor to the book? And how could books be improved?

I don't know but I really like Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (subtitle: "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer").

Wikiquote:
"At the age of four, Nell receives a stolen copy of an interactive book, Young Lady's Illustrated Primer: a Propædeutic Enchiridion, in which is told the tale of Princess Nell and her various friends, kin, associates, &c., originally intended for the wealthy Neo-Victorian "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw's granddaughter. The story follows Nell's development under the tutelage of the Primer, and to a lesser degree, the lives of Elizabeth and Fiona, girls who receive similar books. The Primer is intended to steer its reader intellectually toward a more interesting life, as defined by "Equity Lord" Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, and growing up to be an effective member of society. The most important quality to achieving an "interesting life" is deemed to be a subversive attitude towards the status quo. The Primer is designed to react to its owner's environment and teach them what they need to know to survive and develop."

> Could there be more good blogs?

I've been moping about this recently too. I hope this was not a passing trend. The main social networks seem sterile.