I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies.
Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president.
Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.
I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool.
I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term.
It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.
The powerful don't need to convince. They simply command. They get used to it in their personal surroundings and then they expect it to work everywhere.
If by command you mean by using coercion or compulsion. Then history has told multiple stories that show to sustain power you need more than just to command. Whether it be centuries ago like in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the more recent complex stories of power like Euromaiden in 2013.
In my opinion history and modern time supports the theory of hegemony very well.
Ironically one the top modern examples of the powerful understanding the need to convince and executing on those goals is the global dominance of Silicon Valley tech platforms and the billionaires that lead them.
They shape what is "common sense," and political discourse worldwide without direct command.
This is simply speaking of something you wish to be true as though it already were. It's a very old trick of con artists.
People make bad assumptions about the ultra-rich. e.g. "We should listen carefully to whatever Elon Musk says because he had to be really smart and wise to have become the world's richest man!" No. He was unethical, opportunistic, and very, very lucky. What he says is frequently imbecilic. Every billionaire out there is a grifter who got lucky beyond their wildest dreams and is desperately afraid of being revealed as the criminal shams they are. Remember that, and the cults surrounding them become ridiculous.
This is the real reason why an artificial state would fail. Billionaires just aren't that bright and LLM's won't be able to hide that. AGI might, but who knows when that will actually be developed? Also, the first act of real AGI could well be to place the billionaires who claim to own them in cages.
What does it mean to be “smart”? I could list a ton of synonyms just to highlight not only the ambiguity of such a claim, but also its relative worthlessness:
Or, here’s another question, who’s the smartest person in Las Vegas? Is it the person who won the most money? The best poker player? The most successful real estate broker? The one who breaks the most laws for financial gain without getting caught? Maybe the guy who repairs the elevators?
We nevertheless have a concept of smartness and able to judge - imperfectly and subjectively - other people on this perceived dimension.
Take, for example, Elon Musk in SpaceX. Elon knew enough of rocket science to assemble the early team and participate as a self-assigned chief designer. In many cases such actions would qualify a person as a smart one.
Yes, it's hard to objectively measure - very hard perhaps. Yet we can still allow that some of those billionaires are smart at least by some reasonable measures.
My point is that the evaluation of Musk in that particular passage seem to be also subjective, and other people might have other opinions. We don't see good evidence here - and have some kind of counter-evidence elsewhere.
> Take, for example, Elon Musk in SpaceX. Elon knew enough of rocket science to assemble the early team and participate as a self-assigned chief designer. In many cases such actions would qualify a person as a smart one.
There’s so much mythologizing about this man and his companies that I can’t imagine taking anything at face value. He seems to frequently put it all on red and it’s worked out for him. Recently I learned a bit about a guy named H L Hunt and the similarities are a bit striking. But H L Hunt didn’t spend nearly as much money ensuring there was mythology around his character.
My point is, they’re smart, so what? What does that actually mean, and does that matter? I went to a top state university and was immediately humbled by people who were unimaginably smarter than me in so many capacities. I don’t particularly think I should go back to those peers and ask them if they think if democracy is a failed system or whatever the pet billionaire issue du jour is. I would imagine my Russian polylingual polymath lab partner that carried my ass through accelerated chemistry while getting elected to student government is quite a bit smarter than Musk as well, judging solely on how articulate the two are comparatively.
> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy
It is true for multiple topics too, like economics. It is almost worse off for people to take these 100 level classes without then taking 200 and 300 level continuations. They think they have extra knowledge in the subject because of the classes but it was really just a primer later to tell them why all that stuff sounds good at first but is completely wrong and useless.
A kindergarten science education person suggested their kids have a human right to understand their world then, rather than a lifetime (for them) later. So atoms, etc.
I think that far far harder than they thought - "adapt later material for a younger audience" vs "wield lots and lots of research community domain expertise to craft largely novel content".
But I've found it an interesting probe question: How would you teach some domain differently, if you primarily cared about... what to call it... non-deferred epistemic agency and calibrated/unfiltered sense-making? No learning linear systems without learning how to do linear approximation of systems in a mostly non-linear world. Ideal Gas Law chapter questions still have numbers for solid argon, but the intended learning outcome is "nope!" not mindless "PV=nRT!". No "this course will leave you with lots of new misconceptions about the world, but we'll clean those up in later years for those who stay with us".
> No learning linear systems without learning how to do linear approximation of systems in a mostly non-linear world.
That's why Common Core trains kids on estimation from Grade 2. Instead of adding 12 + 23 = 35, you add 10 + 20 = 30 to get a number close to the right answer.
This plants the idea "I can simplified numbers to get the answer if I don't need the last digit, which lets me solve problems faster". Which gets generalized as "I can use the simplified Ideal Gas Law to model a complex system if I don't own a supercomputer".
Even in university I had this: my physics course heavily emphasized properties of linear systems to demonstrate why I'd want to use one and we ran linear regressions in other courses if we didn't "know" the true equations.
Nod. A random TIL from Friday, courtesy to qwen.ai: In contrast to USA educational estimation, which emphasizes point estimates, China reportedly emphasizes directional estimation to establish an envelope, upper and lower (strict) bounds - Da Gu and Xiao Gu.
I've long though we'd be better off doing incremental bounding, hard and soft, in part because the group discourse dynamics are so much better. "Ok, who can suggest another bound, upper or lower, hard or soft?" vs "Your step 2 is too big. Well, your step 4 is too small!".
Which raises a question - might this diversity be leveraged? Science education content improvement is often bottlenecked on regional conditions. As when a high-stakes exam doesn't cover topic X, so there's regionally less interest/opportunity to explore better teaching of X, or using X to better teach other things. This especially bites when you wish to explore mashups, X+Y+Z with each taught well, but they're every one both in poor shape and bottlenecked.
Both countries largely fail to create a physical intuition, a feel for reasonable values - in the US because it's a secondary priority, and in China reportedly because estimation has become nationally high stakes, so memorization gets emphasized over feel.
Can we leverage that regional difference? For a strawman, might one develop content with improved bounding facilitating a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values, in China where it's sort of aligned with the flow, even if off to the side, rather than in the US, where the aligned energy is much less. And then, having developed that content in China, bring it back to the US, where again off to the side, there's perhaps the flexibility and inquiry perspective for the material to appeal in its developed form? And WeChat Groups seem potentially a way to get heterogenous ad hoc communities around content development, for which I don't know a US equivalent.
For analogy, I'm told the US advanced placement exam for French, is both hard, and narrowly focused on a style of conversational French. So people teach to the test, and all else that is "French", is deemphasized. But let's say you have a VR app which develops both that conversational, but also cultural and business and travel. You might develop it the US, leveraging the conversational incentive. And release elsewhere, where there's interest and room for the other bits, even if there wasn't sufficient incentive elsewhere to build the app in the first place. Maybe?
This kind of market shopping is common in grant-funded domains. There's a project that you know is a good, but nobody wants to pay for it… but grant body X will pay for component A, which can be slightly modified into component A' which grant body Y will be enthused by, and fund components B, C and D; and component C isn't very useful, but you can make sure to develop a generic architecture that makes implementing component E easy, and now you have a basic BEAD product…
A little more effort than VC-funded work, but there are fewer strings attached.
Oh my... Braided stacking of a global pedagogic exploration supply chain? Conceptually a repo with long-term ngss and gaokao forks, and a third neutral space (IB schools?) integrating them? Entrepreneurial Sarasvathy-effectuation market co-creation? ... Thought provokingly fruitful - thank you.
It annoys me, though, that there's a prescribed method of estimation, which is hard to remember. I always used to get the "wrong" answer because I picked easier-to-add approximations, even though my estimates were generally both faster and closer. (To use your example, I'd have estimated 35 or 36: the sum of two small numbers, like 2 and 3, is normally about 5; and this sum is a little bit less than (1 + 2)×12 = 3×12.)
Yes, teaching and assessment of estimation can get quite dreadful. Wish I'd saved a video I saw years ago, intended as an exemplar of best practices in early primary, where it was clear neither teacher nor students had a clue, all the effort was around attempted signalling of the expected but misguided answers, and everyone was collaborating to pretend that understanding had occurred. Recording a class can be hard, but it was wild.
mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense.
If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like:
> How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion
One of the first useful things that philosophy teaches you is how to construct a well-rounded argument in support of any position. Following up "philosophy is useless" with "I don't know how to argue my own opinion" demonstrates quite a lack of awareness.
Apparently they don't teach you about straw-man arguments. I didn't say philosophy was useless, I said a lot of philosophy is bullshit. That is not the same thing. A lot of physics nowadays is bullshit (like string theory) but that is not to say that physics is useless.
I think it's ironically telling about your opinion on philosophy that your argument is illogical and boils down to:
1. people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
2. don't you dare point out people who don't do philosophy shouldn't have their ramblings labeled philosophy
Ayn Rand, a 20th century writer without a university education; Paul Graham, a computer scientist; and the Austrian School, an economics movement, are categorically not entities that have produced or ever will produce philosophy.
That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy. It is a strict application of the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics. Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth. And, again, the other name you dropped is not even a philosophical school.
> Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth
In his defence, Graham does hold a BA (Philosophy) from Cornell University in 1986.
Is your distaste here due to BA degrees rather than PhDs, a dislike of Cornell, or that Graham didn't chase academic philosophy and join a philosophy department?
> people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
Wow, I didn't expect to be vindicated quite so definitively when I predicted: "The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy."
> That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy.
It absolutely is:
> the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics.
I see nothing in that definition about writing in a particular time period or having a university degree, which are the two features you cited that allegedly disqualify Ayn Rand. I also see an awful lot of wiggle-room in the "specific topics" and how one measures whether one's analysis is sufficiently "deep". You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made. Your argument is a paragon of muddled thinking, and does more to support my position than refute it.
> You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made
Oh, so you're not at all engaging in good faith. Thanks for wasting my time. It breaks credulity when you try to argue that economics is a field of philosophy in some attempt to demonstrate I'm engaging in a NTS fallacy.
Well, yeah, obviously. I didn't say that all philosophy is BS, only that a lot of it is, including a lot of what is included in SEP. But as a source for making the field accessible, SEP is excellent.
There's a lot of BS in most fields. The problem with philosophy is that it has no criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff. All other fields have some kind of external forcing function. In science, its experimental data. In the arts, it's the ability to produce novelty or exhibit skill or attract an audience. In philosophy there is no external forcing function. The only thing that makes a great philosopher is other philosophers saying they are great philosophers.
There are definitely some non-BS philosophers, like Dan Dennett and Tim Maudlin. But really they are more like scientists than philosophers. In Maudlin's case, he's really a physicist, he just happens to work in a philosophy department.
The problem is that you're citing people known for their popularisation, not academic work. None of that is subject to the kind of critique that happens between academics.
Yeah, well, the topic at hand is how Silicon Valley tech bros abuse philosophy. The philosophy they abuse includes a lot of non-academic stuff.
I can cite a lot of bullshit in academic philosophy, but so what? There's a lot of bullshit in academia in general. There is bullshit in physics (string theory). There is bullshit in chemistry (James Tour). There is bullshit in botany (John Sanford). There is bullshit everywhere. If you really want an example from academic philosophy, I'll give you John Searle and the Chinese Room.
I'm not sure if providing a counterargument to a point not being made is a good way to argue against a field that trains people to notice when you do that.
He's gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when he get to James Lemon, and then he's gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- he's gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators.
In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings.
A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
> At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms.
While I think these guys have an addiction to wealth, I also think they are even more addicted to having more than anyone else.
I’m like 80/20 on if these guys would take living in the medieval era but we’re the king or emperor vs being a regular citizen in a Star Trek level of technology and post scarcity society.
There is no way these individuals would want to be demoted to "regular citizen" in Star Trek compared to being a medieval feudal lord. You don't even have to make them emperors.
This feels a bit like those rich survivalists who think they are going to fix bomb-collars to their bodyguards to ensure loyalty in the apocalypse... stock certificates aren't worth a whole lot in a world where the rule of law has broken down
Well, right, but I'm not sure the tech elites actually own much in the way of resources in that sense. Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way.
Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones.
Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
> Land, housing, water, energy, food, medicines, healthcare, security, and proximity to influence. I'm sure I forgot a few.
And you think the vast majority of people do not have access to the overwhelming majority of those things? The evidence suggests the opposite. The only item in your list I would agree with is "proximity to influence", but it is also the one thing that is totally different from the others in the list.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSqCjMRXWA Granted, the wealthy may not have the resources of the US military, but I am willing to bet that push comes to shove, the corporate security forces of companies like palantir and anduril, let alone actual mainstream military hardware providers would be a far greater threat than armed civilians in a fully deregulated or collapsed American state.
I don't care much about the 2nd amendment absolutists, and the myth of the American heroes who will stand up to tyranny, because so far the only thing they appear to have stood up for in the last hundred years are gun rights, religious fundamentalism, and in 2020, a demagogue.
American exceptionalism and gun culture are important to Americans, but are pretty much viewed as narcissism and with skepticism outside of the US. YMMV, but like another comment I made recently, this isn't an anti-American sentiment, it's just a perspective from one of your neighbours to the north who has lots of Canadian and American friends and family living in the US.
In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
> Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power.
And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers.
The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example?
But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive.
Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.
This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
> If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
I think it is a little bit more complicated:
I think there exists some very specific personality trait (my guess is either narcissism or at least some predisposition for narcissism; for the rest of this post, let's assume that this is the personality trait) which makes some people prone to this phenomenon.
So, at these hackathons, VCs look for students with two properties:
1. smart (e.g. achieving a good place in the hackathon)
2. has a predisposition for narcissism
It should be obvious why VC have very limited use for people who are not smart. On the other hand, students who don't have a predisposition for narcissism will be much harder to control via the mechanism that you mentioned. So, even if such a student initially get the attention of some VC, he will sooner or later get "dropped" by the VC.
Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
Sure, why not? The founding charter of every D1 football school claims that it is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of education.
It is still a mystery to me how recruiting "student athletes", with well below-average academic qualifications and superior athletic qualifications, giving them full-ride scholarships (which can be revoked if they fail to perform on the field) and allowing them to take the easiest courses (with dedicated tutoring staff looking over their shoulders), all while paying coaches the highest salaries on campus and using ticket sales to fund ever-bigger stadiums, has anything at all to do with education.
Perhaps the connection to education is that it is meant to be an object lesson (for the rest of the student body) in how to spot corruption and hypocrisy within power structures.
So I see two paths forward: Admit that the whole thing is a sham and just pay the football players their due; or turn legit and take the big money out of college sports by having actual student-athletes (who are students first).
Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want.
The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect.
It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.
Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
They started with nothing, in a garage! An unused three-car garage next to their parents' mansion. While living at home, without having to pay for basic things like food. And with a $100k loan from the other guy's parents. And with daddy's business contacts being the first customers, and being the angel investors. Absolutely nothing, all their own hard work!
This is a naive take. Sure they had wealth, but multiplying wealth to the scale some of those people do is no easy feat. I am not defending them, just trying to state a fact.
In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. Believing this axiom, people vote to hand over every possible service to private enterprise.
Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
We've let the government get bloated, inefficient and corrupt by allowing private enterprise to have an outsized effect on it. Private enterprise can hire people to live next to DC and spend every waking minute pushing their agenda on politicians. Private enterprise can funnel huge amounts of money into campaigns for their preferred candidates. It only benefits the corporations when we have ancient, technically illiterate politicians jockeying their favorite hobbyhorse policies while throwing up their hands at how "the other side" is blocking them. It's a designed deadlock.
> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.
Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.
In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.
This doesn't make me anti-government.
I see the need for it & I want it work well.
But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.
I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.
It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government].
To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?
I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).
It's easy to give businesses a pass on internal inefficiency because you don't typically need to do business with any particular company in order to live your life and businesses don't tax you in order to pay for that inefficiency like governments do. If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately. Health care insurance companies definitely "tax" you for their inefficiencies (through higher costs) and they are definitely something you "need to do business with".
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently".
Health insurance is so regulated and so intertwined with public policy aims, that ostensibly private health care companies are themselves essentially an arm of the government. Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation. The American health insurance system is one of the most unpleasant (sets of) bureaucracies I personally have to deal with, especially because I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance (which itself really annoys me - I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with). I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so; and I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
> I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance
COBRA is always an option when you leave a job and don't have another one lined up that will give you another insurance plan without a gap.
Yes, it's annoying to have to make the switch in general to a new employer's plan, since your existing slate of doctors might not be covered by your new plan, deductibles reset, and you have to navigate a new-to-you bureaucracy.
> I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with
You can, you just aren't going to like the price tag. ACA marketplace plans are open to everyone, even if your employer offers health insurance. You can always decline the latter and sign up for your own plan. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get a barebones plan for as low as $350/mo, but in some markets your cheapest option could be hundreds of dollars more. And that's going to be a HMO-type plan with a high deductible, so you'll be paying out of pocket to the tune of thousands of dollars for anything other than preventative care, and your choice of providers will be limited. If you want something similar to what an established tech company offers (for example), you'll be paying north of $1k/mo in most situations.
(Source: our COBRA just ran out a couple months ago, we don't have jobs that offer health insurance, and I went down this rabbit hole and spent hours researching options.)
> I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so
I'm with you there. What we have sucks. We (or our employers, which we end up paying for indirectly) pay much more for care than people in other developed nations with socialized medicine, and our outcomes are not meaningfully better, or at least not anywhere near better enough to justify the added cost.
> more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can
That's good that you're able to, but in the absence of an insurance system, and no state-supported subsidy, healthcare would be something only a relatively privileged few would be able to afford in the US.
While our private insurance system does cause inefficiencies that raise the price of care, eliminating it won't solve enough of the cost problem to matter.
I don't think there are better options than some sort of single-payer, government-subsidized healthcare system. Those systems do of course have their flaws (some of them quite significant), but they tend to provide care to everyone more or less equally, with generally good outcomes, and completely avoid the problem of people facing a choice between foregoing needed care and bankruptcy.
> Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation.
No, it isn't. Life without health insurance (in some form) is awful.
> I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
Getting cancer is like winning the shit lottery and you're effectively saying that people should just "save for if that happens or die of they don't". The fucked up health insurance system in the US makes medical bankruptcies a thing. Your idea here turbocharges that.
More importantly, you ignored the main point in my reply. Please respond to this:
"It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately.
[...]
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently"."
> If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
Right, but if someone’s point is that bloated government should be replaced by lean, efficient companies, then it does matter whether they are actually lean and efficient.
One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.
Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…
Often "minimizing costs" for a for-profit organization means providing worse services to their customers, though.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
It's funny you should bring this up in the context of healthcare. Amazon acquired One Medical a few years ago. Within no more a year, One Medical got so much worse. Harder to book appointments, wait times increasing, and care team not responding to in-app messages as quickly. (And sometimes being significantly less helpful than they used to be; e.g. "you don't need a recommendation or a referral for a general surgeon since you're on a PPO; just look through UCSF Health's directory and pick one". And this, after I specifically asked for a recommendation, twice. Not to mention most of UCSF's departments will turn you away without a referral, regardless of what kind of insurance you have.)
So I don't know if Amazon is bloated, corrupt, or inefficient, but Amazon acquiring what used to be a genuinely useful medical group made it much, much worse, and I assume that was all in the name of "minimizing costs".
Amazon also owns whole foods and it seems to be doing just fine. Maybe not the exact same as when it launched, but in many places it is one of the best places around to buy groceries.
One Medical, I had before/after Amazon and was never that impressed. They had nice offices and a good booking system, but the GPs were a couple notches above webmd IMO.
> That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.
The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.
> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.
This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
Don't know, yes, and don't know.
For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc.
I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.
With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.
Also, whether an organization (private or public) is bloated and inefficient is often only a reference to what you think the goal of the organization is.
If the goal of the USPS was to turn a profit, then serving rural addresses is inefficient and the jobs and infrastructure to do so is bloat. Luckily that’s not the goal of the USPS.
I hesitate to mention Mamdani in this forum but it seems like he has done a lot to make NYC’s government “more efficient” in many ways. But also many people disagree on who that government should primarily serve.
I feel that a lot of government spending on roads is inefficient and would be better spent on transit systems. Many people disagree with my values tho.
Stop voting for politicians who keep starting pointless unwinnable wars and you can cut the military budget in half. Boom, 10% of the expenses gone, and $500B less of a budget deficit. Tax some billionaires and it'll be net-positive in no time.
No kidding. Eliminating the federal deficit isn't particularly difficult in mathematical terms; the political will just isn't there, and both Democrats and Republicans can blame the other party when they're in power for out of control spending.
(At least the Democrats seem to be more open to actually taxing to make up for shortfalls, unlike Republicans.)
Your government clearly is dysfunctional (at least the part that is supposed to serve the ordinary citizens). But look around the world and you can see that it doesn't have to be that way.
Also, in the US, there are a lot of forces who see the government straight-up as the enemy and want to have it as dysfunctional as possible. It's where "starve the beast" and DOGE comes from.
2. You have been brainwashed into thinking that government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
If I believe that government is dysfunctional... then surely that belief is informed by the observation that my government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient, not due to brainwashing?
I never said government should be in charge of everything or claimed our current government to be perfect. I’m pointing out the prevailing ideology (especially among HN and the rich) that government is incapable of being efficient so we don’t even try. Then we hand over critical services to private enterprise with no checks and balances.
Our current ideology is so skewed toward “gov bad” that the first step toward moderation is acknowledging that it’s possible for government to do things well in the first place.
I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.
I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.
On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?
So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:
1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.
2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).
> building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that
The NYC subway is one of the few (the only one?) to run 24/7, and it is one of the largest in the world. Construction is expensive because the operators choose to make it expensive. Digging giant new tunnels under existing skyscrapers also isn't exactly easy.
Yeah there's corruption and waste, but not to the order-of-magnitude level.
The 24/7 thing on the NYC subway costing so much has always been the tagline... I don't buy it.
The costs of running the NYC subway are no more unique than any other large city, some argue shutting down/starting up would be just as expensive.
The subway daddy[1] was my last straw at having any hope that it would be fixed in my lifetime, it is clear the people running it do not want any part of NYC subway "fixed".
Step 1: Start giving contracts to buddies that will become part of your oligarchy and start making them rich with government funds.
Step 2: Start hiring their crew members to government positions to later aid them in acquiring licenses for industries they want to monopolize.
Step 3: Pass some regulation that your buddies can easily comply with but nearly impossible for everyone else to comply with.
Result is a bloated government that spends a ton of money to seemingly achieve nothing, except serve your oligarchy.
Now blame the poor and welfare state. So you can keep more of the taxes.
Deregulate so your buddies who are now running monopolies can spend less.
Give more contracts to new buddies to share the spoils from aforementioned taxes you kept more of.
So on, so forth.
Oh, remember to keep telling the public about communism and how big governments are bloated and point at the one you designed as evidence that it’s inevitable.
I'm amazed the Ayn Rand books are still part of US school curricula. The world view those books promote is straight-up that the only people in society that count are a few Genius Individuals, the rest is dead weight and leeches. (but everyone is fine with it because they could be one of those Genius Individuals, who knows...)
There's a certain school of economics that achieved this brainwashing. I forget the name, but it's the one of Milton Friedman. But the trouble is, weren't they right during the Cold War?
Very possible they were right. Hell, I'd agree it's true of the US gov today. If the message was "the government is currently bloated and corrupt, let's fix that" that's great. Today though the message is "government is inherently bloated and corrupt by it's very nature, and therefore unfixable, let's burn it all down" which is not true and actively harmful to democracy.
No, the Chicago monetarists and neoliberals have never been right. Their dogma, and that entire school, is literally the creation of the banker class who got together after WWII because they didn't want to see Western civilisation degenerate into (the horror...) social democracy.
They're the source of all of decades of nonsense about "small government" and "inefficiency" and "rational markets."
They pretended to be liberal, and they were fervently anti-communist.
But they've always been primarily about the protection and promotion of private monopoly and aristocratic privilege. And influences like von Mises were more than fascist-adjacent.
See the Mont Pelerin Society for a partial history.
I think it’s important to highlight they were correct in identifying problems but the solutions were flawed. The book “Wither Socialism?” Explains it well.
I don’t really understand this perspective? I’m not a small government guy, I think the government ought to play an important role in providing a good regulatory framework and a strong social net. But if someone’s going to have direct power over my life, I’d much prefer a business owner or boss I can freely choose in principle rather than a government official who may not view me as part of their winning coalition.
The flip of this is that businesses aren't elected, and you have no control over them. If they have a monopoly, then you're 100% fucked, you have no choice.
And realistically, they don't require a monopoly. If there are 1000 competitors but they all have the same evil ideology at the helm, the result is identical. Your choice is now "flee the country".
Except, wait no. Those companies have the entire western world by the balls. Want to avoid extreme surveillance from Google? Maybe there's a forest somewhere you can forage in.
I really don't like this type of arguing where people try to play stupid. You know it's different, because you used the word "sanctioned". And this was really the whole point of my comment.
We live in a representative democracy. We all have a choice in who we vote for, what polices we support. In addition, we have checks and balances in place to prevent the consolidation of power. The government is not "one thing", it's hundreds of things working together.
Now, the system is not perfect, and I never claimed it to be. But compare this to how corporations functions. Corporations function as totalitarian dictatorships. You cannot vote. You have no influence. And they make decisions unilaterally, regardless of how harmful or stupid said decision may be.
The arm in which we control corporations IS the government. It IS regulation. The only reason you're not working 80 hours a week and dying young is because of the government. Now, again, that doesn't mean the government is perfect. But those regulations were protested for and voted in by people just like you and me, and I think that's good. So sue me.
You seem to be putting a lot of viewpoints on me I never proclaimed.
That is not the only arm we control corporations with, corporations even die sometimes for doing the wrong thing. And voting internally is not the only way to change a corporations behavior. I think talking about them being a dictatorship is confusing the aspects we're talking about.
I don't know when I said the government and corporations were the same thing when monopolies, but I still hold one is much more destructible than the other when they are properly separated (they aren't).
I don't think markets and capitalism solve everything. I would say when democracy and capitalism are both working well (not right now) their combo is awesome.
I don't think placing all blame on corporations is productive because it's a misdiagnosis. I am more afraid of the ratchet effect than I am of Google, but they both scare the shit out of me.
Edit- I admit my original comment wasn't very good, I apologize.
I will agree one benefit of corporations is that they're more destructible, but the flip side of that is there are less guarantees. The constitution is pretty indestructible, and I consider that largely good, because it guarantees some baselines for us. I also agree they need to be properly separated, which they are not currently and haven't been for a while.
I think, though, when we see many (all?) corporations exhibiting the same bad behavior, and said bad behavior materially negatively affects the population, that's a sign we have a gap in legislation. We shouldn't, and really can't, play wack-a-mole with corporations individually with individual actions. We should fix it upstream.
How do you ever choose your boss at work? Never. Oh, by quitting that job and getting another? That's called "moving" when applied to politics. Which is super unattractive in much of regular life, unless you don't need people.
> Which is super unattractive in much of regular life
Which is, imo, one of the primary reasons of the stagnation of US society over the past 50 years.
We are at all time lows for internal migration. This reduces dynamism drastically. People used to chase economic and social opportunity. Sometimes multiple times through a well lived life.
The whole point of states was you could relatively trivially pull up stakes and move for better opportunity. Once people decided that was impossible (and historically speaking, it's actually less risky than ever before) things really went to shit.
Overall and in generally speaking terms: US citizens have chosen comfort over every other metric when it comes to every single daily decision they make in aggregate.
Most people change jobs much, much more frequently than they move between even states, much less countries. The latest cohorts for which we have full-career data held about 12 jobs over their lifetimes, and job hopping is much more normalized now than it used to be. Obviously it's hard enough that we all have to put up with some frustrations and inconveniences in our career, but it seems like it mostly works out.
For example, I find it very annoying to have to fill out time cards or such, and other people find it very annoying to have any demands whatsoever on their time outside of core working hours. If we had to have a political debate about which is the one true working model, we'd get pretty worked up about it, and if I lost I'd go away bearing a pretty strong grudge about the daily annoyance that was inflicted on me against my will. Instead, there's some companies that do it one way and some that do it the other, and we self-sort between them according to our preferences.
Getting a new job is completely different from denouncing your citizenship and moving to a different country. Oh also there are no territories without government so you can’t even do that.
You certainly don't need to "denounce your citizenship" to move to another country and work there - I strongly recommend that everybody live at least for a few years in another country for school or a job. Even if you end up settling back in your home country as I did, the experience is incredibly valuable as it teaches you how arbitrary so many of the customs you grew up with are.
We seem to be quickly approaching, if we are not already there, a point where you can no longer choose to simply not associate with the billionaires anymore. They have such extreme access to resources and power they essentially control the direction of society whether we want them to or not.
We believe it because it’s true. I think it’s actually way more common for people to have your opinion that governments are not bloated or inefficient as a general rule. And you always criticize the private industry and not the government when it’s the government who has this power in the first place. That’s like over feeding your cat and then blaming the cat.
I don't know about the disruptive innovation history thing which seems interesting, but the stuff about science fiction, its role as knowledge especially related to politics, reading/misreading and so on just seems confused. Science fiction is primarily fiction and should be treated as such. Why exactly should I agree with the implied (or not) politics of a fictional world if I like the work? Why is it even necessary to take the works whole-sale and not just parts here and there as they seem reasonable? Straussian reading is also a possibility that is completely bypassed even with some big figures being into that, for good or ill.
The stuff about nation states and corporations taking over seems confused as well, since pretty much everywhere goverments, regulation and taxation are highest/largest they've ever been. Also, it is very strange taking the interest of some people in getting rid or moving beyond nation states as sinister since this has been a stated goal of democratic projects like the EU. Furthermore, in China technology is completely subservient to the state and they intentionally kneecapped the whole sector fairly recently since it grew too big.
If the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point.
Like the people calling Starship Troopers fascist. Or even funnier, the people calling Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers, which just proves they haven't read any of the rest of his work.
It depends on how good the point is, doesn't it? I am more aiming at the "Torment Nexus" type of argument which essentially assumes that writers know technology better than technologists and the mere existence of scifi dystopia that somebody thought up is a good reason ipso facto to not do something.
I don’t think writers have automatic oracle status or anything, but they tend to issue commentary that has a better track record of being borne out than what is communicated by business leaders with a very strong vested interest in advancing their own interests.
Like, you can find plenty of historical examples of writers saying that automobiles will cause a social collapse or whatever, but you can find a lot more historical businesspeople who advanced insane claims about their business interests.
> “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said.
Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates to have latched on to the lingo of Stranger in a Strange Land while apparently never having read a sentence of Heinlein's prose. As a rule of thumb, those who say "grok" do not.
And it's always Stranger in a Strange Land for the messiah figure. Here, have a better Heinlein story.
> “ Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates”
Jesus Christ. You people, smelling your own farts. It’s just ridiculous.
A bunch of nobodies, pending they are some sort of intellectual powerhouse, reining down on a guy that revolutionized, electric vehicles, space communications and space travel, like THEY are actually his mental superiors.
> "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]."
With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. Instead I'd suggest John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [1] from 1996:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."
...and on and on it goes. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.
Sometimes, I wonder how these guys are doing these days. They were utterly, spectacularly wrong about almost all their points.
What do they do now? Are they grumpy libertarians living in the woods? Did they fall in line behind Thiel and his bullshit religious pseudo-philosophy? Did they just shrug and changed ideas?
Barlow died in 2018. As for others, I dunno... it was a different time and the net was new and exciting. JPB undoubtedly got a bit over-enthusiastic though.
This was a fascinating interview, and there were a lot of ideas packed into it. Honestly, it makes me want to read her book.
That said, I disagree with a lot of her conclusions.
Contra her assertions, I believe that technological change is the principal cause of historical change. Lawrence Lessig wrote Code is Law, which highlights how specific software system decisions constrained the available legal regimes that could apply. The same thing happens for all technology: the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization, which is the real reason nation states are eroding.
I do agree with her about the undesirability of an "artificial state"--an algorithmic government that rules by deterministic rules instead of representative human judgement. And I do agree that many technologists think that we'd be better off being ruled by machines instead of people. But that is (a) not a new phenomenon, and (b) equally found outside Silicon Valley. Paul Krugman often writes about Asimov's psychohistory being a strong influence on him. He longs for a world of Philosopher Kings who make decisions logically and without the messy delusions of the masses.
What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.
I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.
The book also deep and wide-ranging analysis of tech oligarchs ability to misread science fiction. So detailed and consistent is her coverage of the genre that I can actually imagine the book being assigned in a survey course on SF.
I very sure that she would disagree with my attempt at summarizing her ideas, nevertheless, I think her key insight is that technology is corroding democracy because:
1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
As I said, I don't agree with her on this, mostly because it's a very subjective perspective. She has a certain view of an ideal society and criticizes deviations from that.
I find it fascinating because it raises good points. She paints a vivid picture of the modern world--I just think it is incomplete.
> 1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
Hardly any proof is given for this. It's just "Twitter is now the town square", but it's not as if the town square was ever a state service created specifically to provide a place to discuss politics. That happened in many, many places, including things like (privately owned) inns. A pertinent question is: What services are now not supplied by the state that were before and to what extent is that mediated by 'artificial' technology?
The actual relevant insight here imho is "privatization and anti-government sentiment has pushed society towards positions where it is beholden to megacorporations".
"Artificial state" is a red herring there, papering over the exaltation of private industry and capitalism in general.
> 2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
This is a very old insight (and quite a debatable one at that).
> 3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
This is just conjecture on her part, no proof is provided. I can't classify this as an insight. A hypothesis at best.
> I find it fascinating because it raises good points.
I think only well-founded points are 'good' points. In this case I would argue that it is very much a bandwagon set of views with some fancy sounding unsubstantiated labels like "artificial state" slapped on to it.
I don't know Lessig's work, but that chain of thought sounds like a more narrowed down version of Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1) The way in which technology shapes our world varies greatly, and I like his writing concerning how nuclear technology shapes politics towards centralization of power.
There's probably nothing powerful in society than the wealthy elite. They have the power to slow down or stop technological change if it threatens their sources of continued wealth.
People have been taking Knuth's 'premature optimization' in vain for almost as long as he had it written down, and only after 'performance is a feature' did I see any daylight at all at the end of the tunnel.
I've learned to lower my expectations a bit. Not enough to be pleasantly happy, but enough to not be incandescently furious on a periodic basis anymore.
There is no bigger fool than a smart person who confuses intelligence with wisdom. Intelligence is polarizing. Either you notice immediately you're being dumb, or you find a way to rationalize your dum-dum behavior for ages past when everyone else would have figured it out. We literally outwit ourselves.
I would love to be a fly on a wall for a shop-talking conversation between Silicon Valley psychotherapists. Those stories must be amazing.
I think it’s true that when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, “Yes, this story is a template for what I should do with my company,” that’s bonkers. But there is [also] this technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on.
Is there some evidence for this claim? Lepore in her reply says "I guess Bezos is a big Robert Heinlein fan" and then there is a lot of talk about Asimov. I also read a very old article about Amazon, and the journalist noted that a book by David Niven was the only one on Bezos' office bookshelf.
But, so what? I read Heinlein and Niven and Asimov when I was young, too, along with a bunch of much pulpier stuff (James P. Hogan, anyone?). Does that make me and millions of other science fiction fans technocratic libertarians? If not, why do people regularly point to science fiction as the source of these three men's libertarian leanings?
The historian in the article I don't think has a billion dollars either. She still seems pretty inclined to that type of thinking. Lots of cherry-picking and very little data. I think its a lack of consequences for bad decisions and ideas that is what is in common here. When that happens, people go off the rails and fall for this type of magical thinking.
Think about it from the POV of psychology and it will make more sense. She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap.
Look at the arguments. They are all over the place, and almost schizophrenic. There is a lot of reaching and pulling of narratives from individual quotes. When someone is selling you something, its probably best to ignore any sort of deeper meaning in what they are saying. They are selling you something, full stop. Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection. They will say whatever they think will get you to buy. There is no deeper meaning. People with actual life experience know this. Somehow, she doesn't. The executives will say whatever they have to to get you to buy.
> Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection.
It's sort of funny that you accuse the author (using evidence only from an interview) of projection and also write this in the same comment:
> She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap.
> I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.
> Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
I've read a lot of books whose messages I partly or wholly disagree with, but wouldn't cite them as inspirations, quote from them or name my startup or its products after them.
Actually, come to think of it Starship Troopers would be a much better source for military industrial complex startup nomenclature than LOTR or the Culture series...
>Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
I am kinda tired of those [expletive]. Paul Verhoeven the first in line.
Heinlein's thesis was that power unearned is power abused. And since voting is gifted power - people abuse it. Heinlein's idea that the only way to earn the franchise is to first serve the society may be wrong, but no one engages with its bigger idea - that the franchise must be earned. And it is true - people will gladly vote hitler and hamas into power. They will vote on tribal, ethnic, cultural and religious lines. They will vote to troll.
What people rarely vote for is the best interests of themselves or their nation.
I mean, exploring how people make irresponsible voting decisions in sci-fi contexts might be an interesting, but Starship Troopers is actually a story about how a structure of power dedicated to conflict with faceless aliens seeks to perpetuate itself by only permitting those who have had obedience to it literally beaten into them to vote, and Heinlein (at least 1950s Red Scare Heinlein) isn't exactly critical of it or even ambivalent about it.
It doesn't have a lot to say about not voting on tribal, ethnic, cultural or religious lines or voting for candidates to troll, but does have an awful lot to say about the virtues of militarism.
The government has expanded by any objective measure:
From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
From a 34 regulatory agencies/offices to 77 today.
From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects.
From almost zero collective bargaining agreements in the public sector in 1950 to approximately 36 percent of public sector workers being covered by them today.
From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
This idea that the private sector is crowding out the government isn't supported by any empirical evidence, though it's a very common narrative and widely believed.
> How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?
> medicaid, medicare
You can't. You're dealing with the inevitably increasing costs of human labor as it becomes more valued over time.
To decrease the costs without devaluing human labor inherently requires the use of labor-magnification tools to perform cost amortization, or use machines to move the performance of labor up by one layer of abstraction (directly performing the work -> maintaining the machines that perform the work) and amortize the costs that way.
> social security, and welfare
Both schemes require a sufficiently large working population that is multiple times larger than the recipient population to remain sustainable & relatively painless (Ratio of > 3).
In scenarios where the aforementioned ratio is lowered, whether incrementally or suddenly, the total supply from the working population decreases whilst total demand remains the same. As told in conventional economics, this results in an increase in prices as the same amount of resources chases a decreasing amount of labor.
(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")
I'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.
The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
The end of World War II to the present is a fairly stable regime, so it can be instructive to see what changed over the course of that era.
In any case, no matter what two points of time you choose, you see the role of government in society increase, whether you want to look at government spending as a share of GDP or the compliance costs paid by corporations as a share of the revenue or the percentage of the workforce who specialize in navigating government-constructed regulations.
Just because the PR dept of a company spouts some bullshit doesn't mean that it actually represents the company's views. A super bowl advert referencing 1984 does not literally mean the company sees itself as the protagonist of 1984
I see no evidence they even read these SciFi books in the first place let alone misunderstood them.
I think some of them intentionally model themselves after the evil characters in fiction. I remember seeing Musk talk one time about how he loves the game Deus Ex. And there's an almost uncanny resemblance between his actions and Bob Page's.
The other canonical example of this is the naming of Palantir, of course.
In many cases I think it's less that they misread the fiction, and more that they intentionally model themselves after the villains in fiction.
There is quite a bit of literature about the Palantir and the related philosophy, whether thy were allegories, etc.
AFAICT the consensus is that they are a very catholic concept and an illustration of what could happen when you use the weapon of your enemy and in general don’t understand the means you use to your end and how even strong people deceive themselves willingly when they think they act for the greater good (movie Denethor is a fool but book Denethor is wise and shrewd, but misguided by despair and Sauron’s manipulation).
So yes, strictly speaking the palantirs are neutral. But that’s missing the whole point of the story.
To me it’s completely fitting. They want to use Evil’s tools but they are Denethor, not Aragorn (who did not over-estimate his will and knew not to get too close). They think that what is good for them is good for the world, and it completely warped their perception.
I'm not familiar with the literature and consensus on them being a Catholic concept, but I am sure they are not about using the enemy's weapon, at least in the sense that you're arguing.
They were created by the high elves and given to the kings of Númenor. The only rightful uses of them in LoTR is by Denethor and Aragorn.
I suppose it could be argued that the illegitimate use of them by Sauron and arguably also Saruman eventually factors in their downfall, and as such it is their use of the enemy's weapons which is fraught--in Saruman's case, that he gets corrupted (but I interpret him already vain and arrogant, and thus on a downward path even before).
In Sauron's case I think lies a nugget of what wisdom Tolkien hoped to confer, especially in his interaction with Pippin. The palantír invites speculation, in that it lets you see things but not all things. Sauron knows a little (the ring is with a Hobbit), is shown a little (here is a Hobbit in Saruman's stone) and in speculating draws wrong conclusions (this is the Hobbit I've been looking for!, etc).
His seeing Aragorn in the stone is different in that Aragorn is the rightful heir, has authority over the stones, and shows truth with intent, which scares Sauron, sends him in a panic and drives him to make foolish decisions.
So, while we are told about the danger of using the enemy's weapon, I'd argue it's from the opposite perspective, and also not quite whatever moral or other lesson Tolkien hoped to confer, rather I believe the moral of the story is to avoid speculation about what happens in another place, or time, and instead trust in yourself, follow your heart and do what is good.
Play devils advocate for a bit: of course they should model themselves after the villains! Villains get shit done and change the world, and use it to the fullest potential.
'Heroes' are the schmucks who get roped around and fail to make things better until the very end at best, and even then leave massive amounts of preventable harm.
If one sets out to change the world don't be a hero, be a villain. It is horrifying, sure but it is the logical conclusion.
I remember my first pass reading of Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was bedazzled by some of the tech … it was later readings that the comments like “biomass” (the recent echo in AI “meat proxy”), or how the Primer was ultimately a failure sank in later readings.
Except the strange dysgenics reason for the downfall of high civilization in Idiocracy it is a interesting movie. It should have talked more about cultural enshittification.
> Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
They took most of us employees to see Ready Player One in the cinema when it came out (sometime after the Oculus acquisition, but before "the metaverse")
Correct...and that is why the type of analysis in this interview is useless. The word cherry-picked was invented for this type of thinking. And its really similar to a lot of those executive talks too. Its like that spiderman meme where everyone points to everyone else. Its psychological projection at scale. Neither side really has any idea what they are talking about. Its just creating and framing debates for their own purposes.
Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities.
Every child starts out thinking, "if I was in charge, I could fix this. It's so simple!"
Then you actually see that when you make bad choices, you or others get hurt, and you realize that you don't always know what's best.
But these guys never get hurt, because they have the money to be shielded from it, so they end up being these delusional wrecking ball assholes, who think they know better than everyone else and don't need anyone else's consent (I.e. votes) to make whatever overly simplistic or authoritarian changes their underdeveloped brains concoct.
I think you're talking about a specific form of the larger problem. The very wealthy only know the world of the very wealthy. They know nothing, let alone care, about people who aren't "in the club".
Every worse, they -- like pretty much all of us -- tend to think that most people are just like them, so they think not only that they understand normal people, but that they are normal people. And the ones that don't either tend to think that their will should be imposed on the rest of us because we're too stupid to understand what's good for us and/or just view us as resources to be mined.
I think that's true for one specific kind of wealthy person. Specifically those born into it. Its absolutely not true for the self-made. I do have a solution to this.
If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader.
I figured that was the case, I just wanted to give them a chance to prove their point instead of just stating over and over again something false. I guess hunterpayne follows the "repeat a lie often enough" approach to truth and facts.
She is an out of touch nepo baby. Her policies haven't exactly been big successes. Jobs are leaving and the specific stated reasons usually have to do with her. Because of her tax increases and the Laffer curve, tax receipts are falling and there are now significant budget shortfalls opening up. If you didn't know this, perhaps you want to get your info from more places than MSNow/MSNBC.
Yeah the college professor's kid became mayor due to nepotism. That makes total sense.
You can dislike her policies but this is just bs:
> "If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader."
> Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities
other than musk, were the tech bros rich? most seem to have grown up middle class.
that said, the fact they are still rich suggests that they do know how to analyze risk. You don't keep your money if you dont have any concept of risk.
Compared the the majority of the population in the US, and like 95% of the population in South Africa, he seemed to grow up pretty damn wealthy. Musk himself told stories about his father having stacks of cash.
No, that isn't what made him rich now, holding onto paypal shares did, but part of the reason he could hold onto those shares is because he had a wealthy family supporting him so he could just sit on them.
If you don't think Musk grew up wealthy after listening to what he says about his childhood, I could only assume you also grew up in an extremely privileged environment and just don't realize how far above the median your life was.
> Musk didn't inherit his wealth, nor did he receive above average family support.
that is an entirely separate question from if he grew up wealthy.
to be fair, i dont actually know how wealthy he grew up, i was relying on the general internet view that he did, but i haven't actually looked into it, so maybe that is wrong.
I don't think there's anything deep here. Good fiction is entertainment. The author may or may not also intend to send a message or teach a lesson, but above all fiction has to be entertaining, or it won't get read. A sense of morality is obviously not required to be entertained. People like Musk are science fiction fans who also happen to be morally bankrupt. I believe those two factors are mostly unrelated. Space, rockets, aliens, lasers, pew pew pew, end of story.
Right, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here.
There's an interesting and suddenly relevant connection between not engaging with media beyond its surface and the belief that media should be seen the same regardless of whether it's created by human or by algorithm. If you only see it as words, the extra subtext of its creation and intention really aren't relevant to you.
You also don't have to agree with the message to enjoy a work.
I enjoyed a lot of Heinlein. Do I believe the only way to save the world is to form a free-love sex cult? No, i don't. Do i think only ex-soldiers should get the vote? No. The novels were still interesting.
If you only read books you agree with, then you aren't really reading.
As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death that is an artifact of modern mass media. In the Abrahamic traditions idolatry and an aversion to imagery exists exactly for this reason, because it leads to a culture in which people cease to be able to distinguish how something appears from what it's supposed to point to.
They aren't unrelated at all. People like Musk or Zuckerberg are the way they are, because they grew up in an environment that disregards the moral, intellectual, religious and even aesthetic dimensions of fiction (or non-fiction) and are effectively overgrown toddlers as a result, and in that they're just like most people now, except with more power.
They know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.
> what dominates today is this 19th-century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress, and therefore all technological change is progress, as opposed to — objectively, it’s only progress if things are getting better.
And, worse, our technological change has converged to enshittification on all fronts, but it's still called progress. The idea that it's only progress if things are getting better is actively being fought against.
Silicon Valley has been heavily influenced by a different author. It just happens to be Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand sold this idea that selfishness is a virtue. Taken further, you see a strong thread between objectivism and transhumanism.
In the early days of Silicon Valley, tech companies were disrupted. But we shouldn't forget that the true origins of Silicon Valley were in defense contracting. Modern tech companeis have become so large that they have become almost indistinguishable from the state (ironically, in a way that people accuse Chinese companies of doing). Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are now in the same category as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman and Boeing.
Put another way, tech companies haven't sought a utopia, they've simply amplified the current system, which is one of increasing inequality.
> “I’m not an anti-technologist,” Lepore insisted.
The usual easy cop-out. Everybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-semite and everybody who criticizes SV is an anti-technologist. If that's your defense, you have none.
I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
They just got uberrich and now worry more about the concerns of the uberrich than the concerns they had when they were normies.
Rule of law, functioning government providing services, functioning public commons, free press, freedom of speech for all, any social safety net, etc don’t matter when they are so far removed from the public they can just go buy yourself an island/citizenship/president.
Suddenly small differences in marginal tax brackets, antitrust enforcement & limits on the ability to simply buy the government they want are the biggest encroachments on freedom they feel.
I listened to a few Marc Andreesen interviews and occasioned some Thiel talks, and one thing I realized is the difference between philosophy as obligation or compass and philosophy as tool.
I realized that when Marc Andreesen said things - specifically he was talking about the political realignment after the 2024 election. He wasn’t making an observation. He was manifesting - to borrow a new age term.
It wasn’t propaganda in the way we think about it. He wasn’t strictly speaking trying to convince me the listener it was true. He was trying to make it true through the force of his influence.
Well said. Your last stanza is Orwellian.
The powerful don't need to convince. They simply command. They get used to it in their personal surroundings and then they expect it to work everywhere.
If by command you mean by using coercion or compulsion. Then history has told multiple stories that show to sustain power you need more than just to command. Whether it be centuries ago like in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the more recent complex stories of power like Euromaiden in 2013. In my opinion history and modern time supports the theory of hegemony very well.
Ironically one the top modern examples of the powerful understanding the need to convince and executing on those goals is the global dominance of Silicon Valley tech platforms and the billionaires that lead them.
They shape what is "common sense," and political discourse worldwide without direct command.
This is simply speaking of something you wish to be true as though it already were. It's a very old trick of con artists.
People make bad assumptions about the ultra-rich. e.g. "We should listen carefully to whatever Elon Musk says because he had to be really smart and wise to have become the world's richest man!" No. He was unethical, opportunistic, and very, very lucky. What he says is frequently imbecilic. Every billionaire out there is a grifter who got lucky beyond their wildest dreams and is desperately afraid of being revealed as the criminal shams they are. Remember that, and the cults surrounding them become ridiculous.
This is the real reason why an artificial state would fail. Billionaires just aren't that bright and LLM's won't be able to hide that. AGI might, but who knows when that will actually be developed? Also, the first act of real AGI could well be to place the billionaires who claim to own them in cages.
Why don't you think that those successful people - or at least some of them - are also very smart?
What does it mean to be “smart”? I could list a ton of synonyms just to highlight not only the ambiguity of such a claim, but also its relative worthlessness:
Or, here’s another question, who’s the smartest person in Las Vegas? Is it the person who won the most money? The best poker player? The most successful real estate broker? The one who breaks the most laws for financial gain without getting caught? Maybe the guy who repairs the elevators?We nevertheless have a concept of smartness and able to judge - imperfectly and subjectively - other people on this perceived dimension.
Take, for example, Elon Musk in SpaceX. Elon knew enough of rocket science to assemble the early team and participate as a self-assigned chief designer. In many cases such actions would qualify a person as a smart one.
Yes, it's hard to objectively measure - very hard perhaps. Yet we can still allow that some of those billionaires are smart at least by some reasonable measures.
My point is that the evaluation of Musk in that particular passage seem to be also subjective, and other people might have other opinions. We don't see good evidence here - and have some kind of counter-evidence elsewhere.
> Take, for example, Elon Musk in SpaceX. Elon knew enough of rocket science to assemble the early team and participate as a self-assigned chief designer. In many cases such actions would qualify a person as a smart one.
There’s so much mythologizing about this man and his companies that I can’t imagine taking anything at face value. He seems to frequently put it all on red and it’s worked out for him. Recently I learned a bit about a guy named H L Hunt and the similarities are a bit striking. But H L Hunt didn’t spend nearly as much money ensuring there was mythology around his character.
My point is, they’re smart, so what? What does that actually mean, and does that matter? I went to a top state university and was immediately humbled by people who were unimaginably smarter than me in so many capacities. I don’t particularly think I should go back to those peers and ask them if they think if democracy is a failed system or whatever the pet billionaire issue du jour is. I would imagine my Russian polylingual polymath lab partner that carried my ass through accelerated chemistry while getting elected to student government is quite a bit smarter than Musk as well, judging solely on how articulate the two are comparatively.
> I don’t even think most of it is deeply philosophical.
Part of the problem is that a lot of it is shallowly philosophical. I used to attend Zuckerberg town halls, and as smart as the guy may be, it's pretty evident that he dropped out of Harvard after 1st-year philosophy
Lucky we have the counterexample of a tech company run by a guy who did a humanities PhD under Jürgen Habermas...Palantir.
In his case, it could be called opposition research
And thus you have demonstrated the irrelevance of academic background as a meaningful data point for explaining motivations at the individual level.
Karp had to complete his PhD under another guy BC Habermas declined
Doesn't seem like they had any deep interactions tbh
Otoh Thiel probably anticipated this outcome when he encouraged his lefty friend to seek Yoda lol (Never meet your heroes etc)
A lot of “shallow philosophy” seems more like “pseudo-philosophy”.
I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
People really don't get how poorly freshman philosophy presents the field. It's not even a survey of an introduction to a prologue.
So every passing thought feels like "philosophy".
It is true for multiple topics too, like economics. It is almost worse off for people to take these 100 level classes without then taking 200 and 300 level continuations. They think they have extra knowledge in the subject because of the classes but it was really just a primer later to tell them why all that stuff sounds good at first but is completely wrong and useless.
A kindergarten science education person suggested their kids have a human right to understand their world then, rather than a lifetime (for them) later. So atoms, etc.
I think that far far harder than they thought - "adapt later material for a younger audience" vs "wield lots and lots of research community domain expertise to craft largely novel content".
But I've found it an interesting probe question: How would you teach some domain differently, if you primarily cared about... what to call it... non-deferred epistemic agency and calibrated/unfiltered sense-making? No learning linear systems without learning how to do linear approximation of systems in a mostly non-linear world. Ideal Gas Law chapter questions still have numbers for solid argon, but the intended learning outcome is "nope!" not mindless "PV=nRT!". No "this course will leave you with lots of new misconceptions about the world, but we'll clean those up in later years for those who stay with us".
> No learning linear systems without learning how to do linear approximation of systems in a mostly non-linear world.
That's why Common Core trains kids on estimation from Grade 2. Instead of adding 12 + 23 = 35, you add 10 + 20 = 30 to get a number close to the right answer.
This plants the idea "I can simplified numbers to get the answer if I don't need the last digit, which lets me solve problems faster". Which gets generalized as "I can use the simplified Ideal Gas Law to model a complex system if I don't own a supercomputer".
Even in university I had this: my physics course heavily emphasized properties of linear systems to demonstrate why I'd want to use one and we ran linear regressions in other courses if we didn't "know" the true equations.
Nod. A random TIL from Friday, courtesy to qwen.ai: In contrast to USA educational estimation, which emphasizes point estimates, China reportedly emphasizes directional estimation to establish an envelope, upper and lower (strict) bounds - Da Gu and Xiao Gu.
I've long though we'd be better off doing incremental bounding, hard and soft, in part because the group discourse dynamics are so much better. "Ok, who can suggest another bound, upper or lower, hard or soft?" vs "Your step 2 is too big. Well, your step 4 is too small!".
Which raises a question - might this diversity be leveraged? Science education content improvement is often bottlenecked on regional conditions. As when a high-stakes exam doesn't cover topic X, so there's regionally less interest/opportunity to explore better teaching of X, or using X to better teach other things. This especially bites when you wish to explore mashups, X+Y+Z with each taught well, but they're every one both in poor shape and bottlenecked.
Both countries largely fail to create a physical intuition, a feel for reasonable values - in the US because it's a secondary priority, and in China reportedly because estimation has become nationally high stakes, so memorization gets emphasized over feel.
Can we leverage that regional difference? For a strawman, might one develop content with improved bounding facilitating a rough quantitative feel for reasonable values, in China where it's sort of aligned with the flow, even if off to the side, rather than in the US, where the aligned energy is much less. And then, having developed that content in China, bring it back to the US, where again off to the side, there's perhaps the flexibility and inquiry perspective for the material to appeal in its developed form? And WeChat Groups seem potentially a way to get heterogenous ad hoc communities around content development, for which I don't know a US equivalent.
For analogy, I'm told the US advanced placement exam for French, is both hard, and narrowly focused on a style of conversational French. So people teach to the test, and all else that is "French", is deemphasized. But let's say you have a VR app which develops both that conversational, but also cultural and business and travel. You might develop it the US, leveraging the conversational incentive. And release elsewhere, where there's interest and room for the other bits, even if there wasn't sufficient incentive elsewhere to build the app in the first place. Maybe?
This kind of market shopping is common in grant-funded domains. There's a project that you know is a good, but nobody wants to pay for it… but grant body X will pay for component A, which can be slightly modified into component A' which grant body Y will be enthused by, and fund components B, C and D; and component C isn't very useful, but you can make sure to develop a generic architecture that makes implementing component E easy, and now you have a basic BEAD product…
A little more effort than VC-funded work, but there are fewer strings attached.
Oh my... Braided stacking of a global pedagogic exploration supply chain? Conceptually a repo with long-term ngss and gaokao forks, and a third neutral space (IB schools?) integrating them? Entrepreneurial Sarasvathy-effectuation market co-creation? ... Thought provokingly fruitful - thank you.
It annoys me, though, that there's a prescribed method of estimation, which is hard to remember. I always used to get the "wrong" answer because I picked easier-to-add approximations, even though my estimates were generally both faster and closer. (To use your example, I'd have estimated 35 or 36: the sum of two small numbers, like 2 and 3, is normally about 5; and this sum is a little bit less than (1 + 2)×12 = 3×12.)
Yes, teaching and assessment of estimation can get quite dreadful. Wish I'd saved a video I saw years ago, intended as an exemplar of best practices in early primary, where it was clear neither teacher nor students had a clue, all the effort was around attempted signalling of the expected but misguided answers, and everyone was collaborating to pretend that understanding had occurred. Recording a class can be hard, but it was wild.
State of the art of philosophy is IMHO Popper and scientific method.
Everything that came after is BS, everything that came before is obsolete.
It doesn’t help that a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit.
mind defending that? I suspect that opinion would only come from one who took philosophy 101 and stopped there. If all you took was philosophy 101, this sounds a lot more reasonable and runs right into the point made by the pos you just responded to
How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion. I could give you a long list of things in philosophy that I consider BS, but what good would that do? Do you really doubt that I could provide such a list? The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy and say, "Oh, of course those things are bullshit, but that's not real philosophy." And the fact that I can make that prediction with confidence is my defense.
If you really want my list, since this is HN, I'll start with Ayn Rand and the Austrian school. You can read this if you like:
https://blog.rongarret.info/2013/03/murray-rothbard-was-idio...
Oh, and since this is HN, I'll also invoke an argument from authority and cite:
https://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
> a lot of philosophy is actually bullshit
> How would you expect me to defend it? It's my opinion
One of the first useful things that philosophy teaches you is how to construct a well-rounded argument in support of any position. Following up "philosophy is useless" with "I don't know how to argue my own opinion" demonstrates quite a lack of awareness.
Apparently they don't teach you about straw-man arguments. I didn't say philosophy was useless, I said a lot of philosophy is bullshit. That is not the same thing. A lot of physics nowadays is bullshit (like string theory) but that is not to say that physics is useless.
I think it's ironically telling about your opinion on philosophy that your argument is illogical and boils down to:
1. people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
2. don't you dare point out people who don't do philosophy shouldn't have their ramblings labeled philosophy
Ayn Rand, a 20th century writer without a university education; Paul Graham, a computer scientist; and the Austrian School, an economics movement, are categorically not entities that have produced or ever will produce philosophy.
That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy. It is a strict application of the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics. Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth. And, again, the other name you dropped is not even a philosophical school.
> Neither Rand nor Graham is educationally equipped to plumb that depth
In his defence, Graham does hold a BA (Philosophy) from Cornell University in 1986.
Is your distaste here due to BA degrees rather than PhDs, a dislike of Cornell, or that Graham didn't chase academic philosophy and join a philosophy department?
> people who aren't philosophers said some bullshit
Wow, I didn't expect to be vindicated quite so definitively when I predicted: "The most likely outcome of that exercise would be for you to invoke the no-true-scotsman fallacy."
> That's no a No True Scotsman fallacy.
It absolutely is:
> the definition of philosophy, a deep analysis of certain specific topics.
I see nothing in that definition about writing in a particular time period or having a university degree, which are the two features you cited that allegedly disqualify Ayn Rand. I also see an awful lot of wiggle-room in the "specific topics" and how one measures whether one's analysis is sufficiently "deep". You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made. Your argument is a paragon of muddled thinking, and does more to support my position than refute it.
> You exclude economics and computer science from your list of "certain topics" but you don't say what topics are allowed or on what basis this assessment of admissibility is to be made
Oh, so you're not at all engaging in good faith. Thanks for wasting my time. It breaks credulity when you try to argue that economics is a field of philosophy in some attempt to demonstrate I'm engaging in a NTS fallacy.
> when you try to argue that economics is a field of philosophy
You obviously haven't read Murray Rothbard.
It really depends on what you mean by philosophy. Academic philosophy? Ancient philosophy? Pop philosophy? Self-help content?
For a list of topics that aren't bullshit, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good starting point.
https://plato.stanford.edu/contents.html
Well, yeah, obviously. I didn't say that all philosophy is BS, only that a lot of it is, including a lot of what is included in SEP. But as a source for making the field accessible, SEP is excellent.
That's a super philosophy lisper
Well “a lot” in volume sure, but that feels unnecessarily (maybe ignorantly) dismissive of the core corpus of the field.
Find me any field in which there isn’t “a lot” of BS.
There's a lot of BS in most fields. The problem with philosophy is that it has no criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff. All other fields have some kind of external forcing function. In science, its experimental data. In the arts, it's the ability to produce novelty or exhibit skill or attract an audience. In philosophy there is no external forcing function. The only thing that makes a great philosopher is other philosophers saying they are great philosophers.
There are definitely some non-BS philosophers, like Dan Dennett and Tim Maudlin. But really they are more like scientists than philosophers. In Maudlin's case, he's really a physicist, he just happens to work in a philosophy department.
> it has no criterion for separating the wheat from the chaff
This comment does nothing but make you look ignorant.
Then by all means please do enlighten me: what is that criterion?
Academic argument, same as any other field.
The problem is that you're citing people known for their popularisation, not academic work. None of that is subject to the kind of critique that happens between academics.
Yeah, well, the topic at hand is how Silicon Valley tech bros abuse philosophy. The philosophy they abuse includes a lot of non-academic stuff.
I can cite a lot of bullshit in academic philosophy, but so what? There's a lot of bullshit in academia in general. There is bullshit in physics (string theory). There is bullshit in chemistry (James Tour). There is bullshit in botany (John Sanford). There is bullshit everywhere. If you really want an example from academic philosophy, I'll give you John Searle and the Chinese Room.
You're basically pointing at RFK Jr's speeches and saying, "See? Biology is bullshit."
I trust you are smart enough to immediately extrapolate more than I would be able to type in the same amount of time.
That being said, I don't get the feeling you're acting in good faith, which is why I'm not spending more time on this.
If it is known that a lot of the marbles are pink there would have to be other colors. That means there is something to it!
I'm not sure if providing a counterargument to a point not being made is a good way to argue against a field that trains people to notice when you do that.
> I feel like a lot of people just take “thoughts” and label that philosophy.
Isn’t that just philosophy?
No.
I don’t believe you.
He's gonna be convinced of that 'til next month when he get to James Lemon, and then he's gonna be talkin' about how the economies of Virginia and Pennsylvania were entrepreneurial and capitalist way back in 1740. That's gonna last until next year -- he's gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin' about, you know, the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
I like apples.
I think part of the problem this go around is that the information landscape has changed so much in ~30 years, that we are still trying to grapple with how to navigate this new terrain. If information and technology is causing everything to accelerate, we need new democratic structures to properly counter the perverse incentives of capital to compound it's power endlessly.
> Rule of law, functioning government providing services
Jokes on them, without rule of law and functioning government to enforce it there is no ownership.
Jokes on you. When there isn't a functional system of government there is nothing to stop rich psychopaths from paying poor psychopaths killing those who get in there way and declaring themselves dictators.
In the absence of effective laws to align people in the direction of the society they want, and constant effort to realign in response to pressure, we will fall back to tribalism and all of the attendant forms of feudalism and government that came before it. Ownership then reverts to might (or those with the resources to buy might) makes right.
At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms. It's the typical outcome in the vast majority of autocracies. It's all over development economics literature, based on purely empirical studies. There's little reason to believe that the US is somehow an outlier. Weaken trust in the system, go from a system of laws to a system of deals, and watch growth go away, with all the unrest that brings.
A pity that so many people in SV only read what flatters them.
> At which point, GDP growth sinks like a rock, and those rich people become poorer in absolute terms.
While I think these guys have an addiction to wealth, I also think they are even more addicted to having more than anyone else.
I’m like 80/20 on if these guys would take living in the medieval era but we’re the king or emperor vs being a regular citizen in a Star Trek level of technology and post scarcity society.
Rather rules over ashes and all that.
There is no way these individuals would want to be demoted to "regular citizen" in Star Trek compared to being a medieval feudal lord. You don't even have to make them emperors.
> or those with the resources to buy might
This feels a bit like those rich survivalists who think they are going to fix bomb-collars to their bodyguards to ensure loyalty in the apocalypse... stock certificates aren't worth a whole lot in a world where the rule of law has broken down
I said resources not money. Charisma, religion and promoting hate have empowered just as many psychopaths in history as wealth.
Well, right, but I'm not sure the tech elites actually own much in the way of resources in that sense. Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
Not when he has to compete for them with Zombie Steve.
> Is the Apple fandom strong enough to get Tim Cook his own private army of zealots when society breaks down?
Society won't break down (in the chaos sense) and resources will still be allocated. Power abhors a vacuum as they say. It's just that resources and power will controlled and distributed in an openly feudal way.
Technology's egalitarian objectives will be replaced by overtly oligarchic ones.
Tech fandom will be replaced with other identities constructed to gain access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
> access to real resources owned and controlled by the few.
What’s an example of such a real resource?
Land, housing, water, energy, food, medicines, healthcare, security, and proximity to influence. I'm sure I forgot a few.
> Land, housing, water, energy, food, medicines, healthcare, security, and proximity to influence. I'm sure I forgot a few.
And you think the vast majority of people do not have access to the overwhelming majority of those things? The evidence suggests the opposite. The only item in your list I would agree with is "proximity to influence", but it is also the one thing that is totally different from the others in the list.
Tim Cook might be not. One of the AI companies might.
Imagine what one could do with an infinite Charisma, propaganda generating machine.
The problem for them is that in the US, "those who get in the way" are armed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSqCjMRXWA Granted, the wealthy may not have the resources of the US military, but I am willing to bet that push comes to shove, the corporate security forces of companies like palantir and anduril, let alone actual mainstream military hardware providers would be a far greater threat than armed civilians in a fully deregulated or collapsed American state.
I don't care much about the 2nd amendment absolutists, and the myth of the American heroes who will stand up to tyranny, because so far the only thing they appear to have stood up for in the last hundred years are gun rights, religious fundamentalism, and in 2020, a demagogue.
American exceptionalism and gun culture are important to Americans, but are pretty much viewed as narcissism and with skepticism outside of the US. YMMV, but like another comment I made recently, this isn't an anti-American sentiment, it's just a perspective from one of your neighbours to the north who has lots of Canadian and American friends and family living in the US.
In societies like that, Silicon Valley’s rich nerds might discover that they’re not the ones with the real might, see Putin’s Russia, which many of them adore. Money is but one of the facets of power.
Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
In the absence of effective laws, one of the biggest threats to rich people would be their own hired thugs. If the thugs decide that they don't respect you and they would make better rich assholes, they will kill you and take your property. Historically, societies like that were often ruled by the biggest and the most charismatic thugs, who could command the respect of lesser thugs. Or warrior nobility, if you want a fancier term. Today's billionaire nerds would not be among those.
> Russia is a country with a strong centralized government capable of enforcing laws whenever it wants.
Russia is 15 slots lower than Nigeria on government corruption. Putin can easily have someone killed but the idea that if he needed money for the war he could get it by e.g. enforcing the law against taking kickbacks for misallocating public funds is so ridiculous that even attempting to do it might be one of the few things that could cause him to be removed from power.
And for a similar reason he can't enforce laws that require any form of localized information, because everybody is just fabricating the numbers.
The trouble with running a kleptocracy is that there's no honor among thieves.
Russian state is a final form of the thug-centric governance. The economic oligarchs maintain their riches at the behest of thugs, but they don’t have the power nor freedom.
that is the lesson of Khodorkovsky
you can be the boyar and punch down, but you get uppity and challenge the Tsar you end up in a cage
If I was a semi-rich thug boss I'd hire out my thugs as security to all the nervous billionaire nerds. Including cybersecurity.
Then I could make a move whenever.
It’s no accident that the schmoozer media/real estate/car dealer/mining/energy guys in US wield more power than their wealth relative to SV VC bros would seem to merit.
laughs in Chechen
That was my first reaction too. Did the ultra rich not need to concern themselves with these petty matters in 1917 Russia, for example?
But thinking more, things are different today. Wealth is international on a qualitatively different level than it was a hundred years ago. If you’re the richest of the rich in revolutionary Russia a century ago, you'll probably lose all of your wealth if not your life. If you’re very lucky you might end up in exile, struggling to survive.
Now imagine something similar happening today in the home country of people like Zuck and Musk. It’s unlikely there would be any threat to their life. They might lose a chunk of their wealth, but they’re sufficiently diversified that they’ll still be among the wealthiest people in the world no matter what happens.
This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
And many start with a personality disorder already so it only compounds
> This is what happens when you have VCs putting on hackathons at NorCal universities and scooping people off the campuses before they ever get their degrees.
> If you take a guy under the age of 25, give him millions of dollars, and tell him he's a genius, he's going to develop a personality disorder.
I think it is a little bit more complicated:
I think there exists some very specific personality trait (my guess is either narcissism or at least some predisposition for narcissism; for the rest of this post, let's assume that this is the personality trait) which makes some people prone to this phenomenon.
So, at these hackathons, VCs look for students with two properties:
1. smart (e.g. achieving a good place in the hackathon)
2. has a predisposition for narcissism
It should be obvious why VC have very limited use for people who are not smart. On the other hand, students who don't have a predisposition for narcissism will be much harder to control via the mechanism that you mentioned. So, even if such a student initially get the attention of some VC, he will sooner or later get "dropped" by the VC.
I had a friend who tried to get a job as a trader with one of the big banks. They fired him after six months because he "wasn't hungry enough."
People with NPD make terrible leaders and they literally have a very tenuous grip on reality.
These are exactly the people who get promoted to billionaire status, which hugely amplifies their ability to damage everything and everyone.
The entire system is insane.
why would you willingly look for a narcissist in a junior, albeit it sharp, coder? these people are terrible to work with and delusional af
you look for ambitious, maybe, but anti-social personality traits are a burned bridge waiting to happen.
the sociopaths, narcissistic or not, know to STFU and roll with it until there is a conflict of interest
Same with D1 NCAAF athletes. They’re getting millions starting at age 18 from NIL. There’s just no way that’s healthy even if we all agree NIL was the morally correct path forward.
The true morally correct path would have been to take big money out of college sports (not to mention high school sport) entirely. Of course this is now essentially impossible without what I imagine will be extensive rioting countrywide.
How? Charge stadium ticket prices and jerseys at cost?
Sure, why not? The founding charter of every D1 football school claims that it is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of education.
It is still a mystery to me how recruiting "student athletes", with well below-average academic qualifications and superior athletic qualifications, giving them full-ride scholarships (which can be revoked if they fail to perform on the field) and allowing them to take the easiest courses (with dedicated tutoring staff looking over their shoulders), all while paying coaches the highest salaries on campus and using ticket sales to fund ever-bigger stadiums, has anything at all to do with education.
Perhaps the connection to education is that it is meant to be an object lesson (for the rest of the student body) in how to spot corruption and hypocrisy within power structures.
So I see two paths forward: Admit that the whole thing is a sham and just pay the football players their due; or turn legit and take the big money out of college sports by having actual student-athletes (who are students first).
This is only a problem in the USA.
In Sweden, we don't have enormous college stadiums.
Sci-fi works are surfaces in which you can project future realities allegorically. Every single person has the right to project what they want.
The issue here is that people don't have the education to make those projections, so they borrow for meaning they can't derive for themselves. Wealthy people know this and abuse this effect.
It is, however, a self-correcting mechanism (you can't actually conjure realities, opinions are very ephemeral things). Might take a couple of centuries, but reality will show itself.
Clarification. None of the silicon valley elite were ever "normies". I would guess most of them come from the top > %1 of society. This is just a rival elite not a non-elite.
They started with nothing, in a garage! An unused three-car garage next to their parents' mansion. While living at home, without having to pay for basic things like food. And with a $100k loan from the other guy's parents. And with daddy's business contacts being the first customers, and being the angel investors. Absolutely nothing, all their own hard work!
This is a naive take. Sure they had wealth, but multiplying wealth to the scale some of those people do is no easy feat. I am not defending them, just trying to state a fact.
In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient. Believing this axiom, people vote to hand over every possible service to private enterprise.
Now we are in a situation where a handful of unelected business men have more power over our lives than the elected government.
We've let the government get bloated, inefficient and corrupt by allowing private enterprise to have an outsized effect on it. Private enterprise can hire people to live next to DC and spend every waking minute pushing their agenda on politicians. Private enterprise can funnel huge amounts of money into campaigns for their preferred candidates. It only benefits the corporations when we have ancient, technically illiterate politicians jockeying their favorite hobbyhorse policies while throwing up their hands at how "the other side" is blocking them. It's a designed deadlock.
To some degree CIA also infiltrates private orgs to manipulate from inside out. It’s like a private-public partnership /s
> In the US at least, we've been brainwashed to think that government, by definition, must be bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
I don't know that I've been brainwashed, but living most of my life in Chicago & Los Angeles, I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.
Many of friends lost their homes in the Palisades & Altadena fires. If it weren't tragic, it would be laughable the challenges they've faced in rebuilding. Several have kids about to enter high school. A dilemma they face is should they both building a house for their teenage children or assume they'll be off to college -- knowing it could be 3+ years until they're have a permanent home again.
In Chicago, I watched the mayor sell of all the parking meters for a fraction of their value. In Los Angeles, I'm watching them struggle to complete the people mover at LAX, a project years later & billions over budget.
This doesn't make me anti-government.
I see the need for it & I want it work well.
But comments like this make me frustrated that people would rather close their eyes & try to gaslight people, rather than acknowledge the problems & talk about how we fix them.
I feel our country is split between one side that doesn't want the government to do anything, even when it works, and another side that wants the government to do everything, even when it fails.
It's not clear to me where someone in the middle goes.
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency [in government].
To what extent is this due to the public nature of the organisations and to what extent is it just the size of them? Are private organisations of similar sizes free from such bloat, corruption and inefficiency?
I feel like people often give "businesses" a pass on this. Government projects that are over budget, especially IT-related ones are widely and publicly bemoaned, but this isn't that much different from such projects in private enterprises (although the moaning remains more within the company itself).
It's easy to give businesses a pass on internal inefficiency because you don't typically need to do business with any particular company in order to live your life and businesses don't tax you in order to pay for that inefficiency like governments do. If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately. Health care insurance companies definitely "tax" you for their inefficiencies (through higher costs) and they are definitely something you "need to do business with".
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently".
Health insurance is so regulated and so intertwined with public policy aims, that ostensibly private health care companies are themselves essentially an arm of the government. Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation. The American health insurance system is one of the most unpleasant (sets of) bureaucracies I personally have to deal with, especially because I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance (which itself really annoys me - I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with). I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so; and I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
> I have changed jobs a lot recently which entails losing and then regaining employer-benefit insurance
COBRA is always an option when you leave a job and don't have another one lined up that will give you another insurance plan without a gap.
Yes, it's annoying to have to make the switch in general to a new employer's plan, since your existing slate of doctors might not be covered by your new plan, deductibles reset, and you have to navigate a new-to-you bureaucracy.
> I wish I could just pay for ordinary health care in a way completely unrelated to my job and that my job had nothing to do with
You can, you just aren't going to like the price tag. ACA marketplace plans are open to everyone, even if your employer offers health insurance. You can always decline the latter and sign up for your own plan. Depending on where you live, you might be able to get a barebones plan for as low as $350/mo, but in some markets your cheapest option could be hundreds of dollars more. And that's going to be a HMO-type plan with a high deductible, so you'll be paying out of pocket to the tune of thousands of dollars for anything other than preventative care, and your choice of providers will be limited. If you want something similar to what an established tech company offers (for example), you'll be paying north of $1k/mo in most situations.
(Source: our COBRA just ran out a couple months ago, we don't have jobs that offer health insurance, and I went down this rabbit hole and spent hours researching options.)
> I don't have a grand theory of how best to reform the entire American health insurance system, but I'm in favor of doing so
I'm with you there. What we have sucks. We (or our employers, which we end up paying for indirectly) pay much more for care than people in other developed nations with socialized medicine, and our outcomes are not meaningfully better, or at least not anywhere near better enough to justify the added cost.
> more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can
That's good that you're able to, but in the absence of an insurance system, and no state-supported subsidy, healthcare would be something only a relatively privileged few would be able to afford in the US.
While our private insurance system does cause inefficiencies that raise the price of care, eliminating it won't solve enough of the cost problem to matter.
I don't think there are better options than some sort of single-payer, government-subsidized healthcare system. Those systems do of course have their flaws (some of them quite significant), but they tend to provide care to everyone more or less equally, with generally good outcomes, and completely avoid the problem of people facing a choice between foregoing needed care and bankruptcy.
> Indeed, the fact that I "have to do business with" them is itself a consequence of particularly-complicated government regulation.
No, it isn't. Life without health insurance (in some form) is awful.
> I suspect that a better system would look a lot more like removing the insurance component of it in more contexts, and having more medical procedures paid for out of pocket at point of use by ordinary people - which is something I try to do right now anyway when I can.
Getting cancer is like winning the shit lottery and you're effectively saying that people should just "save for if that happens or die of they don't". The fucked up health insurance system in the US makes medical bankruptcies a thing. Your idea here turbocharges that.
More importantly, you ignored the main point in my reply. Please respond to this:
"It's more about making a fair assessment of whether servicing a market via private or public enterprises is more or less efficient. What you mention is a comparison between different markets, not a fair comparison of the same market run either publicly or privately.
[...]
The classic "government can't do anything right"-trope is quite strong and influences voting and policy making. My hypothesis is that the reality is closer to "cooperating with many many people in big organisations is very very hard to do efficiently"."
> If a business is inefficient and has projects that go over budget, that's not my problem in the same way it is if the city government where I live does.
Right, but if someone’s point is that bloated government should be replaced by lean, efficient companies, then it does matter whether they are actually lean and efficient.
One issue with private, for-profit organizations is their major focus is “creating shareholder value”, which is apparently the modern way of saying “making money”. That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily. It’s inarguable that the US Federal Government is bloated, corrupt, and vastly inefficient. Despite taking in $trillions in revenue every year, the US has $40 trillion in debt. That’s utterly inexcusable, and heads should roll.
Getting back to the discussion about private enterprise, would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly? I would not, though I’ll admit I have no data on the corruption aspect…
Often "minimizing costs" for a for-profit organization means providing worse services to their customers, though.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
It's funny you should bring this up in the context of healthcare. Amazon acquired One Medical a few years ago. Within no more a year, One Medical got so much worse. Harder to book appointments, wait times increasing, and care team not responding to in-app messages as quickly. (And sometimes being significantly less helpful than they used to be; e.g. "you don't need a recommendation or a referral for a general surgeon since you're on a PPO; just look through UCSF Health's directory and pick one". And this, after I specifically asked for a recommendation, twice. Not to mention most of UCSF's departments will turn you away without a referral, regardless of what kind of insurance you have.)
So I don't know if Amazon is bloated, corrupt, or inefficient, but Amazon acquiring what used to be a genuinely useful medical group made it much, much worse, and I assume that was all in the name of "minimizing costs".
Amazon also owns whole foods and it seems to be doing just fine. Maybe not the exact same as when it launched, but in many places it is one of the best places around to buy groceries.
One Medical, I had before/after Amazon and was never that impressed. They had nice offices and a good booking system, but the GPs were a couple notches above webmd IMO.
> That, along with competition (if applicable, see below), drives them towards minimizing costs, increasing efficiency, and innovating.
Highly debatable. Not making a profit on paper (or moving it to low tax-environments) is a great way to dodge paying taxes. Innovation is a side effect of competition, not of profit-seeking. Plenty of examples of oligopolies and monopolies where innovation ground to a halt in favor of siloization, buying up competitors, dark patterns, regulatory capture, etc.
The right way too look at this is that the organisation of private industry creates a selection pressure on "making money" (not profit!), with the minimum being "able to cover costs" and thus stimulates evolution of strategies to do so. Like in biological evolution, there are many, many pathological situations that can occur.
> Government has the major focus of taking money, and largely spending it arbitrarily.
This is false. The US is a bad example because it has an incredibly corrupt political system, especially since Citizens United. In general in most modern developed democracies spending by the government is supported democratically to a very large extent. That is not to say that 80% of citizens support each bit of spending, but for 95% of the things where money is spent by the government, a majority agrees that money needs to be spent there. The word "arbitrarily" is definitely not warranted.
> would you characterize Amazon as bloated, corrupt, and inefficient, despite being an effective monopoly?
Don't know, yes, and don't know.
For corruption, I think it is necessary to determine how it would even look like for Amazon. Corruption in government is often "favoring entities friendly to the people making the decisions over objectively better options". I'd argue that that is wholly accepted in private enterprises and even encouraged. A "quid pro quo" in private enterprise is just "a business deal" or "customer relations". "Nepotism" is just "helping your friends out". Etc. I would assume that things like that are very, very common within Amazon.
With regard to bloated/inefficient: This is incredibly hard to make definitive statements on without having worked there and having a lot of intimate knowledge, so I'll refrain from doing so. I think it is, but I don't know.
Also, whether an organization (private or public) is bloated and inefficient is often only a reference to what you think the goal of the organization is.
If the goal of the USPS was to turn a profit, then serving rural addresses is inefficient and the jobs and infrastructure to do so is bloat. Luckily that’s not the goal of the USPS.
I hesitate to mention Mamdani in this forum but it seems like he has done a lot to make NYC’s government “more efficient” in many ways. But also many people disagree on who that government should primarily serve.
I feel that a lot of government spending on roads is inefficient and would be better spent on transit systems. Many people disagree with my values tho.
Stop voting for politicians who keep starting pointless unwinnable wars and you can cut the military budget in half. Boom, 10% of the expenses gone, and $500B less of a budget deficit. Tax some billionaires and it'll be net-positive in no time.
No kidding. Eliminating the federal deficit isn't particularly difficult in mathematical terms; the political will just isn't there, and both Democrats and Republicans can blame the other party when they're in power for out of control spending.
(At least the Democrats seem to be more open to actually taxing to make up for shortfalls, unlike Republicans.)
Your government clearly is dysfunctional (at least the part that is supposed to serve the ordinary citizens). But look around the world and you can see that it doesn't have to be that way.
Also, in the US, there are a lot of forces who see the government straight-up as the enemy and want to have it as dysfunctional as possible. It's where "starve the beast" and DOGE comes from.
Ok, but these two things are incompatible:
1. Your government clearly is dysfunctional
2. You have been brainwashed into thinking that government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient.
If I believe that government is dysfunctional... then surely that belief is informed by the observation that my government is bloated, corrupt and inefficient, not due to brainwashing?
I never said government should be in charge of everything or claimed our current government to be perfect. I’m pointing out the prevailing ideology (especially among HN and the rich) that government is incapable of being efficient so we don’t even try. Then we hand over critical services to private enterprise with no checks and balances.
Our current ideology is so skewed toward “gov bad” that the first step toward moderation is acknowledging that it’s possible for government to do things well in the first place.
I really like this comment. Yes, it's the worst of both worlds: the right says that government is inefficient, I told you so; the left says it's the only solution to solve many social issues. Unfortunately they're both right and wrong.
I'm very familiar with New York politics, and I watch in slow motion while enormous amounts of money disappear into government salaries and pensions, programs that go nowhere, and corruption where no one is held accountable. I can give examples of any of these but the school system is one - it's the highest per-pupil cost almost anywhere in the U.S. but has some of the lowest standardized scores. The last two mayors were corrupt, one with his wife who received almost 2B on a program that went unaccounted for (look up ThriveNYC), had a friend in the ferry system that he funneled money to; the mayor after that was a borderline banana republic leader in terms of corruption.
On the other hand, look at construction costs. We know that despite the supposed high costs of doing business in Europe, and the high costs of places like Japan, that building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that?
So I have two theories to explain what's overall going on here:
1. Local government. I think local government was a great idea in 17th century philosophy; in practice look at how efficient countries like Japan and France are at providing healthcare and excellent infrastructure. And how much cheaper they do it. Those are strong, central governments without layers to worry about. In the U.S., you have NIMBY community councils, cities, counties, states and the federal government, all with a say in it. Then you have lawsuits, organizations that span states, etc. And those people are elected officials who have no interest in what happens to US in 10 or 20 years. They care about their election cycle and terms. In my opinion, local government is evil as a result of what I see here compared to overseas.
2. Others have said it - the influence of big business. What is illegal in those other countries as bribery or undue influence in electoral process, is legal, a 1st Amendment right and called "lobbying" in the U.S. This is why the Democrats will talk a big talk about identity politics to get elected, but they can't talk about a Medicare for All to get elected, because their sponsors block it (unless you're a fringe politician like what just happened in Michigan).
> building subway/metro infrastructure costs 3-4 times in New York what it costs in Tokyo, London or Paris. Why is that
The NYC subway is one of the few (the only one?) to run 24/7, and it is one of the largest in the world. Construction is expensive because the operators choose to make it expensive. Digging giant new tunnels under existing skyscrapers also isn't exactly easy.
Yeah there's corruption and waste, but not to the order-of-magnitude level.
The 24/7 thing on the NYC subway costing so much has always been the tagline... I don't buy it.
The costs of running the NYC subway are no more unique than any other large city, some argue shutting down/starting up would be just as expensive.
The subway daddy[1] was my last straw at having any hope that it would be fixed in my lifetime, it is clear the people running it do not want any part of NYC subway "fixed".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Byford#New_York_City_Tran...
> I've seen a lot of bloat, corruption, & massive inefficiency.
Been working for more than 20 years in corporations and I've seen the same.
Step 1: Start giving contracts to buddies that will become part of your oligarchy and start making them rich with government funds.
Step 2: Start hiring their crew members to government positions to later aid them in acquiring licenses for industries they want to monopolize.
Step 3: Pass some regulation that your buddies can easily comply with but nearly impossible for everyone else to comply with.
Result is a bloated government that spends a ton of money to seemingly achieve nothing, except serve your oligarchy.
Now blame the poor and welfare state. So you can keep more of the taxes.
Deregulate so your buddies who are now running monopolies can spend less.
Give more contracts to new buddies to share the spoils from aforementioned taxes you kept more of.
So on, so forth.
Oh, remember to keep telling the public about communism and how big governments are bloated and point at the one you designed as evidence that it’s inevitable.
I'm amazed the Ayn Rand books are still part of US school curricula. The world view those books promote is straight-up that the only people in society that count are a few Genius Individuals, the rest is dead weight and leeches. (but everyone is fine with it because they could be one of those Genius Individuals, who knows...)
But sure, socialist ideology is pure evil...
There's a certain school of economics that achieved this brainwashing. I forget the name, but it's the one of Milton Friedman. But the trouble is, weren't they right during the Cold War?
> weren't they right during the Cold War?
Very possible they were right. Hell, I'd agree it's true of the US gov today. If the message was "the government is currently bloated and corrupt, let's fix that" that's great. Today though the message is "government is inherently bloated and corrupt by it's very nature, and therefore unfixable, let's burn it all down" which is not true and actively harmful to democracy.
No, the Chicago monetarists and neoliberals have never been right. Their dogma, and that entire school, is literally the creation of the banker class who got together after WWII because they didn't want to see Western civilisation degenerate into (the horror...) social democracy.
They're the source of all of decades of nonsense about "small government" and "inefficiency" and "rational markets."
They pretended to be liberal, and they were fervently anti-communist.
But they've always been primarily about the protection and promotion of private monopoly and aristocratic privilege. And influences like von Mises were more than fascist-adjacent.
See the Mont Pelerin Society for a partial history.
Yea the economic ideology that seems most correct is the Austrian school.
I think it’s important to highlight they were correct in identifying problems but the solutions were flawed. The book “Wither Socialism?” Explains it well.
[1]: https://archive.org/details/whithersocialism0000stig_i9j5/pa...
I don’t really understand this perspective? I’m not a small government guy, I think the government ought to play an important role in providing a good regulatory framework and a strong social net. But if someone’s going to have direct power over my life, I’d much prefer a business owner or boss I can freely choose in principle rather than a government official who may not view me as part of their winning coalition.
The flip of this is that businesses aren't elected, and you have no control over them. If they have a monopoly, then you're 100% fucked, you have no choice.
And realistically, they don't require a monopoly. If there are 1000 competitors but they all have the same evil ideology at the helm, the result is identical. Your choice is now "flee the country".
Except, wait no. Those companies have the entire western world by the balls. Want to avoid extreme surveillance from Google? Maybe there's a forest somewhere you can forage in.
If the government is in control, it's a sanctioned monopoly. You seem to be opposed to monopoly?
I really don't like this type of arguing where people try to play stupid. You know it's different, because you used the word "sanctioned". And this was really the whole point of my comment.
We live in a representative democracy. We all have a choice in who we vote for, what polices we support. In addition, we have checks and balances in place to prevent the consolidation of power. The government is not "one thing", it's hundreds of things working together.
Now, the system is not perfect, and I never claimed it to be. But compare this to how corporations functions. Corporations function as totalitarian dictatorships. You cannot vote. You have no influence. And they make decisions unilaterally, regardless of how harmful or stupid said decision may be.
The arm in which we control corporations IS the government. It IS regulation. The only reason you're not working 80 hours a week and dying young is because of the government. Now, again, that doesn't mean the government is perfect. But those regulations were protested for and voted in by people just like you and me, and I think that's good. So sue me.
You seem to be putting a lot of viewpoints on me I never proclaimed.
That is not the only arm we control corporations with, corporations even die sometimes for doing the wrong thing. And voting internally is not the only way to change a corporations behavior. I think talking about them being a dictatorship is confusing the aspects we're talking about.
I don't know when I said the government and corporations were the same thing when monopolies, but I still hold one is much more destructible than the other when they are properly separated (they aren't).
I don't think markets and capitalism solve everything. I would say when democracy and capitalism are both working well (not right now) their combo is awesome.
I don't think placing all blame on corporations is productive because it's a misdiagnosis. I am more afraid of the ratchet effect than I am of Google, but they both scare the shit out of me.
Edit- I admit my original comment wasn't very good, I apologize.
I will agree one benefit of corporations is that they're more destructible, but the flip side of that is there are less guarantees. The constitution is pretty indestructible, and I consider that largely good, because it guarantees some baselines for us. I also agree they need to be properly separated, which they are not currently and haven't been for a while.
I think, though, when we see many (all?) corporations exhibiting the same bad behavior, and said bad behavior materially negatively affects the population, that's a sign we have a gap in legislation. We shouldn't, and really can't, play wack-a-mole with corporations individually with individual actions. We should fix it upstream.
How do you ever choose your boss at work? Never. Oh, by quitting that job and getting another? That's called "moving" when applied to politics. Which is super unattractive in much of regular life, unless you don't need people.
> Which is super unattractive in much of regular life
Which is, imo, one of the primary reasons of the stagnation of US society over the past 50 years.
We are at all time lows for internal migration. This reduces dynamism drastically. People used to chase economic and social opportunity. Sometimes multiple times through a well lived life.
The whole point of states was you could relatively trivially pull up stakes and move for better opportunity. Once people decided that was impossible (and historically speaking, it's actually less risky than ever before) things really went to shit.
Overall and in generally speaking terms: US citizens have chosen comfort over every other metric when it comes to every single daily decision they make in aggregate.
Most people change jobs much, much more frequently than they move between even states, much less countries. The latest cohorts for which we have full-career data held about 12 jobs over their lifetimes, and job hopping is much more normalized now than it used to be. Obviously it's hard enough that we all have to put up with some frustrations and inconveniences in our career, but it seems like it mostly works out.
For example, I find it very annoying to have to fill out time cards or such, and other people find it very annoying to have any demands whatsoever on their time outside of core working hours. If we had to have a political debate about which is the one true working model, we'd get pretty worked up about it, and if I lost I'd go away bearing a pretty strong grudge about the daily annoyance that was inflicted on me against my will. Instead, there's some companies that do it one way and some that do it the other, and we self-sort between them according to our preferences.
Getting a new job is completely different from denouncing your citizenship and moving to a different country. Oh also there are no territories without government so you can’t even do that.
You certainly don't need to "denounce your citizenship" to move to another country and work there - I strongly recommend that everybody live at least for a few years in another country for school or a job. Even if you end up settling back in your home country as I did, the experience is incredibly valuable as it teaches you how arbitrary so many of the customs you grew up with are.
We seem to be quickly approaching, if we are not already there, a point where you can no longer choose to simply not associate with the billionaires anymore. They have such extreme access to resources and power they essentially control the direction of society whether we want them to or not.
We believe it because it’s true. I think it’s actually way more common for people to have your opinion that governments are not bloated or inefficient as a general rule. And you always criticize the private industry and not the government when it’s the government who has this power in the first place. That’s like over feeding your cat and then blaming the cat.
Honestly, at this point both the government and private enterprise are fucking me so vigorously I don’t know who to hate more.
That's not brainwashing, that's lived experience.
I don't know about the disruptive innovation history thing which seems interesting, but the stuff about science fiction, its role as knowledge especially related to politics, reading/misreading and so on just seems confused. Science fiction is primarily fiction and should be treated as such. Why exactly should I agree with the implied (or not) politics of a fictional world if I like the work? Why is it even necessary to take the works whole-sale and not just parts here and there as they seem reasonable? Straussian reading is also a possibility that is completely bypassed even with some big figures being into that, for good or ill.
The stuff about nation states and corporations taking over seems confused as well, since pretty much everywhere goverments, regulation and taxation are highest/largest they've ever been. Also, it is very strange taking the interest of some people in getting rid or moving beyond nation states as sinister since this has been a stated goal of democratic projects like the EU. Furthermore, in China technology is completely subservient to the state and they intentionally kneecapped the whole sector fairly recently since it grew too big.
If the author was trying to make a point (as many sci-fi authors were), it's totally reasonable to call out someone who misses the point.
Like the people calling Starship Troopers fascist. Or even funnier, the people calling Heinlein a fascist for writing Starship Troopers, which just proves they haven't read any of the rest of his work.
It depends on how good the point is, doesn't it? I am more aiming at the "Torment Nexus" type of argument which essentially assumes that writers know technology better than technologists and the mere existence of scifi dystopia that somebody thought up is a good reason ipso facto to not do something.
I don’t think writers have automatic oracle status or anything, but they tend to issue commentary that has a better track record of being borne out than what is communicated by business leaders with a very strong vested interest in advancing their own interests.
Like, you can find plenty of historical examples of writers saying that automobiles will cause a social collapse or whatever, but you can find a lot more historical businesspeople who advanced insane claims about their business interests.
> “But what’s funny about Musk is, the stuff he likes actually completely defeats and defies all of his political beliefs,” she said.
Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates to have latched on to the lingo of Stranger in a Strange Land while apparently never having read a sentence of Heinlein's prose. As a rule of thumb, those who say "grok" do not.
And it's always Stranger in a Strange Land for the messiah figure. Here, have a better Heinlein story.
https://archive.org/details/Unknown_v04n06_1941-04_PDF_unz.o...
> “ Musk is only the most recent in a long line of semiliterates”
Jesus Christ. You people, smelling your own farts. It’s just ridiculous.
A bunch of nobodies, pending they are some sort of intellectual powerhouse, reining down on a guy that revolutionized, electric vehicles, space communications and space travel, like THEY are actually his mental superiors.
Also on the front page this morning:
"An OpenAI Strategist Says AI Labs Should Rival Government Power"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49232778
> "So, to the degree that we can locate an origin point for the promise that better computer technology would make for better democracies, I think the moment you would first look to would be January 1984, that Super Bowl ad that Apple ran for the release of the Macintosh, with the the sort of George Orwell, 1984 [theme]."
With the greatest respect to Ms. Lepore's scholarship, I would suggest that that ad is too pop-culture and too early for our current Valley overlords. Instead I'd suggest John Perry Barlow's Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace [1] from 1996:
"Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.
"We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear."
...and on and on it goes. Some kind of strange Davos fever dream from thirty years ago.
Sometimes, I wonder how these guys are doing these days. They were utterly, spectacularly wrong about almost all their points.
What do they do now? Are they grumpy libertarians living in the woods? Did they fall in line behind Thiel and his bullshit religious pseudo-philosophy? Did they just shrug and changed ideas?
Barlow died in 2018. As for others, I dunno... it was a different time and the net was new and exciting. JPB undoubtedly got a bit over-enthusiastic though.
This was a fascinating interview, and there were a lot of ideas packed into it. Honestly, it makes me want to read her book.
That said, I disagree with a lot of her conclusions.
Contra her assertions, I believe that technological change is the principal cause of historical change. Lawrence Lessig wrote Code is Law, which highlights how specific software system decisions constrained the available legal regimes that could apply. The same thing happens for all technology: the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization, which is the real reason nation states are eroding.
I do agree with her about the undesirability of an "artificial state"--an algorithmic government that rules by deterministic rules instead of representative human judgement. And I do agree that many technologists think that we'd be better off being ruled by machines instead of people. But that is (a) not a new phenomenon, and (b) equally found outside Silicon Valley. Paul Krugman often writes about Asimov's psychohistory being a strong influence on him. He longs for a world of Philosopher Kings who make decisions logically and without the messy delusions of the masses.
What we call "globalization" is the really the second version of globalization. In the late Victorian period goods from all around the world were available in the West, and even to a degree the other way around (a trick of colonization was to process the raw materials from the colony in the home country and sell the finished products back to the colony). What killed the first version of globalization were the world wars.
I happened to read an ARC of her forthcoming book. Lapore is well aware and discusses in detail the history of technocratic dreams dating back centuries.
The book also deep and wide-ranging analysis of tech oligarchs ability to misread science fiction. So detailed and consistent is her coverage of the genre that I can actually imagine the book being assigned in a survey course on SF.
I'm looking forward to reading it, particularly for the SF part.
> there were a lot of ideas packed into it
One could equally say that it is all over the place.
> This was a fascinating interview
Can you give us one or two new insights you gained from it?
I very sure that she would disagree with my attempt at summarizing her ideas, nevertheless, I think her key insight is that technology is corroding democracy because:
1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
As I said, I don't agree with her on this, mostly because it's a very subjective perspective. She has a certain view of an ideal society and criticizes deviations from that.
I find it fascinating because it raises good points. She paints a vivid picture of the modern world--I just think it is incomplete.
> 1. Technology companies are subsuming services traditionally supplied by the state.
Hardly any proof is given for this. It's just "Twitter is now the town square", but it's not as if the town square was ever a state service created specifically to provide a place to discuss politics. That happened in many, many places, including things like (privately owned) inns. A pertinent question is: What services are now not supplied by the state that were before and to what extent is that mediated by 'artificial' technology?
The actual relevant insight here imho is "privatization and anti-government sentiment has pushed society towards positions where it is beholden to megacorporations".
"Artificial state" is a red herring there, papering over the exaltation of private industry and capitalism in general.
> 2. Technology promises enhanced democracy (Twitter as a town square, or the Mac as a fight against Big Brother) but ends up degrading it instead (wealthy/powerful voices drown out others in a global arena).
This is a very old insight (and quite a debatable one at that).
> 3. Tech entrepreneurs are inspired by the grand society-changing concepts of sci-fi, but are either picking the wrong (harmful) parts or misunderstanding the true consequences.
This is just conjecture on her part, no proof is provided. I can't classify this as an insight. A hypothesis at best.
> I find it fascinating because it raises good points.
I think only well-founded points are 'good' points. In this case I would argue that it is very much a bandwagon set of views with some fancy sounding unsubstantiated labels like "artificial state" slapped on to it.
I don't know Lessig's work, but that chain of thought sounds like a more narrowed down version of Langdon Winner's "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" (1) The way in which technology shapes our world varies greatly, and I like his writing concerning how nuclear technology shapes politics towards centralization of power.
There's probably nothing powerful in society than the wealthy elite. They have the power to slow down or stop technological change if it threatens their sources of continued wealth.
(1): https://www.jstor.org/stable/20024652?seq=1
> the invention of containerized shipping plus the internet led to globalization
Did it? Or did the globalisation invent the need for containerisation?
Americans needing fresh bananas did it.
Re: replacing functions of democratic government, this was already predicted in Democracy Incorporated almost 10 years ago now: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178486/de...
People have been taking Knuth's 'premature optimization' in vain for almost as long as he had it written down, and only after 'performance is a feature' did I see any daylight at all at the end of the tunnel.
I've learned to lower my expectations a bit. Not enough to be pleasantly happy, but enough to not be incandescently furious on a periodic basis anymore.
There is no bigger fool than a smart person who confuses intelligence with wisdom. Intelligence is polarizing. Either you notice immediately you're being dumb, or you find a way to rationalize your dum-dum behavior for ages past when everyone else would have figured it out. We literally outwit ourselves.
I would love to be a fly on a wall for a shop-talking conversation between Silicon Valley psychotherapists. Those stories must be amazing.
And how her thesis holds when evaluated against the system in China?
I think it’s true that when Musk or Altman is just unambiguously being like, “Yes, this story is a template for what I should do with my company,” that’s bonkers. But there is [also] this technocratic libertarian thread in science fiction that they are picking up on.
Is there some evidence for this claim? Lepore in her reply says "I guess Bezos is a big Robert Heinlein fan" and then there is a lot of talk about Asimov. I also read a very old article about Amazon, and the journalist noted that a book by David Niven was the only one on Bezos' office bookshelf.
But, so what? I read Heinlein and Niven and Asimov when I was young, too, along with a bunch of much pulpier stuff (James P. Hogan, anyone?). Does that make me and millions of other science fiction fans technocratic libertarians? If not, why do people regularly point to science fiction as the source of these three men's libertarian leanings?
Did you also get hold of a billion dollars at some point? For some reason, those of us who work for a living seem less inclined to such psychosis
The historian in the article I don't think has a billion dollars either. She still seems pretty inclined to that type of thinking. Lots of cherry-picking and very little data. I think its a lack of consequences for bad decisions and ideas that is what is in common here. When that happens, people go off the rails and fall for this type of magical thinking.
I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.
Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
Think about it from the POV of psychology and it will make more sense. She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap.
Look at the arguments. They are all over the place, and almost schizophrenic. There is a lot of reaching and pulling of narratives from individual quotes. When someone is selling you something, its probably best to ignore any sort of deeper meaning in what they are saying. They are selling you something, full stop. Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection. They will say whatever they think will get you to buy. There is no deeper meaning. People with actual life experience know this. Somehow, she doesn't. The executives will say whatever they have to to get you to buy.
> Anything else you are reading into what they are saying is pure projection.
It's sort of funny that you accuse the author (using evidence only from an interview) of projection and also write this in the same comment:
> She thinks she deserves more status than she has. Other people have more status than her. She doesn't like this, so she smears their reputation to reduce that gap.
Talk about projection.
> I'm baffled by the claim that tech oligarchs are bad readers, as opposed to getting the point but disagreeing.
> Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
I've read a lot of books whose messages I partly or wholly disagree with, but wouldn't cite them as inspirations, quote from them or name my startup or its products after them.
Actually, come to think of it Starship Troopers would be a much better source for military industrial complex startup nomenclature than LOTR or the Culture series...
>Some authors seem to think that readers may only read Heinlein if they are prepared to join the army the next day or renounce their citizenship.
I am kinda tired of those [expletive]. Paul Verhoeven the first in line.
Heinlein's thesis was that power unearned is power abused. And since voting is gifted power - people abuse it. Heinlein's idea that the only way to earn the franchise is to first serve the society may be wrong, but no one engages with its bigger idea - that the franchise must be earned. And it is true - people will gladly vote hitler and hamas into power. They will vote on tribal, ethnic, cultural and religious lines. They will vote to troll.
What people rarely vote for is the best interests of themselves or their nation.
I mean, exploring how people make irresponsible voting decisions in sci-fi contexts might be an interesting, but Starship Troopers is actually a story about how a structure of power dedicated to conflict with faceless aliens seeks to perpetuate itself by only permitting those who have had obedience to it literally beaten into them to vote, and Heinlein (at least 1950s Red Scare Heinlein) isn't exactly critical of it or even ambivalent about it.
It doesn't have a lot to say about not voting on tribal, ethnic, cultural or religious lines or voting for candidates to troll, but does have an awful lot to say about the virtues of militarism.
The government has expanded by any objective measure:
From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
From a 34 regulatory agencies/offices to 77 today.
From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects.
From almost zero collective bargaining agreements in the public sector in 1950 to approximately 36 percent of public sector workers being covered by them today.
From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
This idea that the private sector is crowding out the government isn't supported by any empirical evidence, though it's a very common narrative and widely believed.
> From 5 percent of occupations needing a license in 1950 to 23 percent today
Most of these are state-level though?
> From zero federal environmental review in 1950 to 26 months today for major projects
That's because they didn't give a shit about the environment in the 50s. They just yeeted nukes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nevada_Test_Site) and people watched them from the Las Vegas strip. One river caught on fire 14 times holy mackerel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River.
> From 9,700 pages in the Code of Federal Regulations in 1950 to 200,000 pages today.
That doesn't tell us anything. There's just more stuff today that simply didn't exist in 1950.
It's possible the regulation dial has been turned too far the other way. But arguing for going back to 0 regulations is also insanity.
> From 20% of GDP to 40% of GDP today
Yeah, let's cut where all that spending went- medicaid, medicare, social security, and welfare...oh
How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?
> How do you cut any of these without everyone losing their minds?
> medicaid, medicare
You can't. You're dealing with the inevitably increasing costs of human labor as it becomes more valued over time.
To decrease the costs without devaluing human labor inherently requires the use of labor-magnification tools to perform cost amortization, or use machines to move the performance of labor up by one layer of abstraction (directly performing the work -> maintaining the machines that perform the work) and amortize the costs that way.
> social security, and welfare
Both schemes require a sufficiently large working population that is multiple times larger than the recipient population to remain sustainable & relatively painless (Ratio of > 3).
In scenarios where the aforementioned ratio is lowered, whether incrementally or suddenly, the total supply from the working population decreases whilst total demand remains the same. As told in conventional economics, this results in an increase in prices as the same amount of resources chases a decreasing amount of labor.
Which government has expanded? Most communist governments felt after 1990 and privatised their economies.
So you're saying it's improved.
(If you're not, I think you have to explain why the expansion of between say, 6k YBP and 1950 was good expansion, and the growth between 1950 and today was bad expansion. Otherwise it looks like you're picking an arbitrary point and saying it was "best")
I'm not making a normative claim. I'm saying that the narrative in the article — that the private sector has taken over functions of the government and the government has been in retreat — is exactly the opposite of what the statistics show.
The article is claiming it's happened in the last 20-25 years but you seem to have used 1950 as your starting point, so you're not excluding the possibility it's been in reverse since 2000 but not yet fallen to 1950 levels.
It's up since 20 years ago:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1CFpQ
Fair enough. But why stats from 1950?
The end of World War II to the present is a fairly stable regime, so it can be instructive to see what changed over the course of that era.
In any case, no matter what two points of time you choose, you see the role of government in society increase, whether you want to look at government spending as a share of GDP or the compliance costs paid by corporations as a share of the revenue or the percentage of the workforce who specialize in navigating government-constructed regulations.
Reminds me a bit of this article that got submitted a few times recently and got a little discussion:
https://aeon.co/essays/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49050173
Feels like a bit of a strawman.
Just because the PR dept of a company spouts some bullshit doesn't mean that it actually represents the company's views. A super bowl advert referencing 1984 does not literally mean the company sees itself as the protagonist of 1984
I see no evidence they even read these SciFi books in the first place let alone misunderstood them.
It doesn’t misread anything, it doesn’t read at all.
I think some of them intentionally model themselves after the evil characters in fiction. I remember seeing Musk talk one time about how he loves the game Deus Ex. And there's an almost uncanny resemblance between his actions and Bob Page's.
The other canonical example of this is the naming of Palantir, of course.
In many cases I think it's less that they misread the fiction, and more that they intentionally model themselves after the villains in fiction.
Of the 5 users of the Palantirs that we know of 2 are good, 2 are evil, and one is tragic.
There is quite a bit of literature about the Palantir and the related philosophy, whether thy were allegories, etc.
AFAICT the consensus is that they are a very catholic concept and an illustration of what could happen when you use the weapon of your enemy and in general don’t understand the means you use to your end and how even strong people deceive themselves willingly when they think they act for the greater good (movie Denethor is a fool but book Denethor is wise and shrewd, but misguided by despair and Sauron’s manipulation).
So yes, strictly speaking the palantirs are neutral. But that’s missing the whole point of the story.
To me it’s completely fitting. They want to use Evil’s tools but they are Denethor, not Aragorn (who did not over-estimate his will and knew not to get too close). They think that what is good for them is good for the world, and it completely warped their perception.
I'm not familiar with the literature and consensus on them being a Catholic concept, but I am sure they are not about using the enemy's weapon, at least in the sense that you're arguing.
They were created by the high elves and given to the kings of Númenor. The only rightful uses of them in LoTR is by Denethor and Aragorn.
I suppose it could be argued that the illegitimate use of them by Sauron and arguably also Saruman eventually factors in their downfall, and as such it is their use of the enemy's weapons which is fraught--in Saruman's case, that he gets corrupted (but I interpret him already vain and arrogant, and thus on a downward path even before).
In Sauron's case I think lies a nugget of what wisdom Tolkien hoped to confer, especially in his interaction with Pippin. The palantír invites speculation, in that it lets you see things but not all things. Sauron knows a little (the ring is with a Hobbit), is shown a little (here is a Hobbit in Saruman's stone) and in speculating draws wrong conclusions (this is the Hobbit I've been looking for!, etc).
His seeing Aragorn in the stone is different in that Aragorn is the rightful heir, has authority over the stones, and shows truth with intent, which scares Sauron, sends him in a panic and drives him to make foolish decisions.
So, while we are told about the danger of using the enemy's weapon, I'd argue it's from the opposite perspective, and also not quite whatever moral or other lesson Tolkien hoped to confer, rather I believe the moral of the story is to avoid speculation about what happens in another place, or time, and instead trust in yourself, follow your heart and do what is good.
Does this include Pippin ?
Yes
Play devils advocate for a bit: of course they should model themselves after the villains! Villains get shit done and change the world, and use it to the fullest potential.
'Heroes' are the schmucks who get roped around and fail to make things better until the very end at best, and even then leave massive amounts of preventable harm.
If one sets out to change the world don't be a hero, be a villain. It is horrifying, sure but it is the logical conclusion.
Does this article mention Adam Becker at all ?
So, a cool shortcut is that you can go to a website and press "Ctrl-F", which will let you search for a given string on the page.
It's okay that you didn't know that! https://xkcd.com/1053/
But the answer is, no, it doesn't. I would say that Becker covered a lot of the same ground, and does it better.
With Musks ideas I often think I saw that movie/read that book. For his Mars plans I see the Mars colony from Total Recall, the Schwarzenegger film
Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
They take warnings in popular culture as instructions or inspiration.
Maybe they got sucked into the cool tech?
I remember my first pass reading of Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age, I was bedazzled by some of the tech … it was later readings that the comments like “biomass” (the recent echo in AI “meat proxy”), or how the Primer was ultimately a failure sank in later readings.
Heck, we're living Idiocracy right now.
The UFC fight on the Whitehouse lawn was a bit much.
That, and the FIFA Peace Prize. Too on the nose.
Except the strange dysgenics reason for the downfall of high civilization in Idiocracy it is a interesting movie. It should have talked more about cultural enshittification.
Camacho made the most intelligent man secretary of the interior, Trump would never do that.
So it’s kind of worse than Idiocracy
Brought to you by Carl's Jr.
It's basically the Torment Nexus meme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus
... but I guess some people took this as positive reinforcement.
Yeah. A bit overused by now I refrained from quoting it.
Someone here on HN crowned Sam Altman as a "sociopat sociapat" i.e. playing sociopats for money. I think that was the insight of years for me.
Battle Royal explodeing collars for the working class in his doomsday bunker. Or was that Seth of Reddit?
It is a especially visible concept in the new tech sector war industry. Edgelord as a Service.
> Like Zuckerberg‘s shift to VR that looks like he came out of the theater of Ready Player one.
They took most of us employees to see Ready Player One in the cinema when it came out (sometime after the Oculus acquisition, but before "the metaverse")
What did you all think of the, "without triggering seizures" scene?
Zuckerberg style the idea from snow crash
I'm going to assume you mean stole...
Correct...and that is why the type of analysis in this interview is useless. The word cherry-picked was invented for this type of thinking. And its really similar to a lot of those executive talks too. Its like that spiderman meme where everyone points to everyone else. Its psychological projection at scale. Neither side really has any idea what they are talking about. Its just creating and framing debates for their own purposes.
Haha it would make sense they're not even sci-fi ball-knowers.
Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.
> Mars was actually discovered before Total Recall was released.
No one suggested otherwise.
Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities.
Every child starts out thinking, "if I was in charge, I could fix this. It's so simple!"
Then you actually see that when you make bad choices, you or others get hurt, and you realize that you don't always know what's best.
But these guys never get hurt, because they have the money to be shielded from it, so they end up being these delusional wrecking ball assholes, who think they know better than everyone else and don't need anyone else's consent (I.e. votes) to make whatever overly simplistic or authoritarian changes their underdeveloped brains concoct.
I think you're talking about a specific form of the larger problem. The very wealthy only know the world of the very wealthy. They know nothing, let alone care, about people who aren't "in the club".
Every worse, they -- like pretty much all of us -- tend to think that most people are just like them, so they think not only that they understand normal people, but that they are normal people. And the ones that don't either tend to think that their will should be imposed on the rest of us because we're too stupid to understand what's good for us and/or just view us as resources to be mined.
I think that's true for one specific kind of wealthy person. Specifically those born into it. Its absolutely not true for the self-made. I do have a solution to this.
If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader.
> Its absolutely not true for the self-made.
I disagree. From my observations, it's true nearly as often for that crowd as the inheritance crowd.
> Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either.
Where is your evidence for this? It's a pretty strong claim.
The fact that its been verified by multiple sources, including the mayor herself.
That's just a claim, not evidence. If she's said it, it should be easy to link to an interview or an article showing these statements.
It's not true (https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=3880890&GUID=4...).
I figured that was the case, I just wanted to give them a chance to prove their point instead of just stating over and over again something false. I guess hunterpayne follows the "repeat a lie often enough" approach to truth and facts.
You're making it seem like the mayor is an out of touch nepo baby when she's living a regular life dedicated towards helping others.
You may want to get your info from more places than Fox News.
She is an out of touch nepo baby. Her policies haven't exactly been big successes. Jobs are leaving and the specific stated reasons usually have to do with her. Because of her tax increases and the Laffer curve, tax receipts are falling and there are now significant budget shortfalls opening up. If you didn't know this, perhaps you want to get your info from more places than MSNow/MSNBC.
Yeah the college professor's kid became mayor due to nepotism. That makes total sense.
You can dislike her policies but this is just bs: > "If you haven't paid your own bills with money you earned (no jobs from family) for the last 10 years, you can't run for office. Literally the mayor of Seattle has never paid her own bills and her husband has never worked either. There is no universe where someone with that life experience makes a good leader."
> You're making it seem like the mayor is an out of touch nepo baby when she's living a regular life dedicated towards helping others.
If it's true she has never paid her own bills and her husband has never had a job, then I'd like that sort of regular life.
If she has been paying her own bills or her husband has had a job in his life, then say so.
You can find her resume here: https://seattle.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=3880890&GUID=4....
Her parents are biology professors. It's not like they're putting her on the board of companies.
> Being and especially growing up rich tends to shield you from seeing the consequences of bad decisions, and I think that results in a lot of these rich tech bros being unable to properly analyze not just risk, but any negative externalities
other than musk, were the tech bros rich? most seem to have grown up middle class.
that said, the fact they are still rich suggests that they do know how to analyze risk. You don't keep your money if you dont have any concept of risk.
Musk didn't inherit his wealth, nor did he receive above average family support.
https://thetechleaders.com/was-elon-musk-born-rich-exploring...
Compared the the majority of the population in the US, and like 95% of the population in South Africa, he seemed to grow up pretty damn wealthy. Musk himself told stories about his father having stacks of cash.
No, that isn't what made him rich now, holding onto paypal shares did, but part of the reason he could hold onto those shares is because he had a wealthy family supporting him so he could just sit on them.
If you don't think Musk grew up wealthy after listening to what he says about his childhood, I could only assume you also grew up in an extremely privileged environment and just don't realize how far above the median your life was.
> Musk himself told stories about his father having stacks of cash.
Do you have a credible source for this? At best I'm seeing EDS conspiracy nuts (and Erol, though he seems to be all over the place).
> No, that isn't what made him rich now, holding onto paypal shares did
I think there's a little more to it than that.
> Part of the reason he could hold onto those shares is because he had a wealthy family supporting him so he could just sit on them.
He didn't hold on to them long, at most a year or so after he left (the sale to eBay was 2002).
And why would his family be supporting him when he was already a millionaire and had paid off his 100K+ student loans?
Again, do you have any credible sources for any of this?
> Musk didn't inherit his wealth, nor did he receive above average family support.
that is an entirely separate question from if he grew up wealthy.
to be fair, i dont actually know how wealthy he grew up, i was relying on the general internet view that he did, but i haven't actually looked into it, so maybe that is wrong.
I don't think there's anything deep here. Good fiction is entertainment. The author may or may not also intend to send a message or teach a lesson, but above all fiction has to be entertaining, or it won't get read. A sense of morality is obviously not required to be entertained. People like Musk are science fiction fans who also happen to be morally bankrupt. I believe those two factors are mostly unrelated. Space, rockets, aliens, lasers, pew pew pew, end of story.
Right, an individual viewing of an individual work can be only entertainment and there's no shame in that. Sci fi in its totality has greater meaning and subtext, and fully ignoring it or misunderstanding it is not ideal and does say something about how we got here.
There's an interesting and suddenly relevant connection between not engaging with media beyond its surface and the belief that media should be seen the same regardless of whether it's created by human or by algorithm. If you only see it as words, the extra subtext of its creation and intention really aren't relevant to you.
You also don't have to agree with the message to enjoy a work.
I enjoyed a lot of Heinlein. Do I believe the only way to save the world is to form a free-love sex cult? No, i don't. Do i think only ex-soldiers should get the vote? No. The novels were still interesting.
If you only read books you agree with, then you aren't really reading.
>but above all fiction has to be entertaining
As Neil Postman points out in Amusing Ourselves to Death that is an artifact of modern mass media. In the Abrahamic traditions idolatry and an aversion to imagery exists exactly for this reason, because it leads to a culture in which people cease to be able to distinguish how something appears from what it's supposed to point to.
They aren't unrelated at all. People like Musk or Zuckerberg are the way they are, because they grew up in an environment that disregards the moral, intellectual, religious and even aesthetic dimensions of fiction (or non-fiction) and are effectively overgrown toddlers as a result, and in that they're just like most people now, except with more power.
I very much doubt that Silicon Valley people actually read the books they talk about.
They know exactly what they are doing. Elon Musk talks a lot about freedom but he has never practiced it with regards to others, only himself. He has always considered the technologically well educated to be superior. He is also an egotistical narcissist. You can't believe anything he says he believes because he projects what he wants others to believe of him, not what he truly believes. The same is true of many of the techno bros whose actual technical abilities are heavily accentuated by their salesmanship. They lie and manipulate and call it human progress while actually being focused on their net worth. It's exactly what these sci-fi stories warned us about, but they used it as a playbook, not a warning, because they envisioned themselves as the tyrannical leader, not as the repressed masses beneath them.
> what dominates today is this 19th-century notion of technological progress as the only kind of progress, and therefore all technological change is progress, as opposed to — objectively, it’s only progress if things are getting better.
And, worse, our technological change has converged to enshittification on all fronts, but it's still called progress. The idea that it's only progress if things are getting better is actively being fought against.
Silicon Valley has been heavily influenced by a different author. It just happens to be Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand sold this idea that selfishness is a virtue. Taken further, you see a strong thread between objectivism and transhumanism.
In the early days of Silicon Valley, tech companies were disrupted. But we shouldn't forget that the true origins of Silicon Valley were in defense contracting. Modern tech companeis have become so large that they have become almost indistinguishable from the state (ironically, in a way that people accuse Chinese companies of doing). Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon are now in the same category as Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman and Boeing.
Put another way, tech companies haven't sought a utopia, they've simply amplified the current system, which is one of increasing inequality.
> “I’m not an anti-technologist,” Lepore insisted.
The usual easy cop-out. Everybody who criticizes Israel is an anti-semite and everybody who criticizes SV is an anti-technologist. If that's your defense, you have none.
Science fiction is entertainment.
There's no way to like, "misread" it.
"I’m really excited about all kinds of intellectual revolutions that we’re in the midst of right now."
They she doesn't understand centralization, surveillance to the nth power, and IQ loss that comes with AI.