Somebody on Twitter wrote, addressing old-school programmers in the context of vibe coding, “Your once exclusive access just got democratized.”

I wonder if that’s the same or at least analogous to minds error correcting some skill to the point they automatize it.

In both cases, access to knowledge becomes cheap and fast.

I like the thrust of the idea.

Like, when parents worry that their kids are having too much fun, and when socialists are suspicious of companies turning a profit… is that an expression of the same fear?

I believe these both stem from the same zero-sum worldview: that any gain anywhere must come at an equivalent cost somewhere else. Businesses making profit must be exploiting something or someone to do so. Children doing what is fun must come at the cost of their Proper Education or their dopamine receptors, etc.

To this sort of person, no good thing can ever be an unmitigated good thing.

Maybe fun = profitable thought. Not in the sense of ‘thought that leads to good monetary decisions’. I mean it in the literal sense that there’s a kind of wealth being created inside your mind.

Unintended consequences also apply to minds and economies.

You can’t just outlaw certain kinds of trade and expect nothing bad to happen. You certainly can’t expect people to get wealthier.

Likewise, you can’t just force yourself or others to do something and expect nothing bad to happen.

Coercion in the economy is when a trade happens even though the price would otherwise be too high for at least one of the parties involved.

If emotions are price signals in the mind, maybe bad emotions signal a high price. Coercing yourself to do something you don’t want to do then means to disregard that high price and do the thing anyway. You pay a high price you wouldn’t otherwise pay. Similar to coercion in the economy.

Is there a universal evil at work in both coercive economies and coercive minds? A kind of socialism of the mind?