# The Collective Marshmallow Test

Nov 13, 2024

Society is even harder than passing the marshmallow test.

Instead of a single person, imagine 100 people in a room. One marshmallow is placed on a table. If everyone can leave it alone for 15 minutes, everyone gets 2 marshmallows. But if just one person eats it, everyone gets nothing (except for the guy who ate a marshmallow, he got that marshmallow).

You think we’d pass? <insert TikTok link to a guy eating the marshmallow and laughing> You need mechanisms like shame to pass, and our culture has done away with them.

The post-election glee has worn off, and while it’s so nice culturally to have a complete and resounding defeat of wokeism, the underlying issues won’t go away. Trump is no Milei, he’s a guy who declared bankruptcy four times. (though compared to the Harris campaign spending…wow it really could have been so much worse)

Wokeism appeals to people who have not exceeded their parents economically. In order to justify that they have moved up in the world, they cling to a cult of moral superiority. While their parents owned a house, they know that the land that house was built on was stolen from the Lenni-Lenape First People’s tribe. It’s a fancy form of the sour grapes story.

I think the problem is something like this. In a fair economy, Americans have expectations exceeding their market value. They don’t see a way to meet these expectations, so they reject the system.

I don’t want to become a hermit, but I feel very distant from the modern hustle and hypergambling culture. The overheard conversations in coffee shops in Hong Kong have started to trigger me, “advisors and finance influencers” can fuck off to hell. I’m a 3 hour flight from Devcon, but I’m not sure I can tolerate crypto culture anymore. I’ve been feeling isolated.

At first I was thinking about how hyperinflation would fix this, but I’m not sure it would cause the rich to lose. With nothing else to do all day they would see it coming. Basically everything screws the middle class, the only class that produces value in society (the poor don’t do shit and the rich have their money making money instead of working). Can’t steal from the poor cause they don’t have things, and can’t steal from the rich cause lol…we’re the rich. Have to take from the ever diminishing middle class, since they are the only ones who work.

I guess I’m basically saying we have to redistribute the wealth, however, the government is the absolute last group of people I’d ever trust to do this. I don’t trust the wealth redistribution in crypto either, the current rich have had too much time to adjust and the biggest morons I know are now saying blockchain.

How do we set up a society such that wealth flows to the productive? It seems so distant from what we have now. This probably happens over a long time horizon regardless, but it’s so frustrating hearing what people’s values are. Money isn’t real! It’s not the territory, it’s the map! And changing the map doesn’t change the territory, it just makes the map shittier up to the point nobody trusts it.

Of course, attaching yourself to the outcome of grand projects is no way to be happy. I wish there was still a retreat in academia, I don’t want to participate in this shit. Back to slow and steady progress on tinygrad.

(btw, I find it funny that people say I don’t stick to things. how many self driving car companies are even still around? comma has been around for 9 and growing each year. and been working on tinygrad for over 4 years almost every day, see my github for proof. what have you done?)