Has anyone identified the Rickover quote that is alluded to at the end of the article?
"At the end of his life, when he may have been somewhat senile, he did also say that it should all be sunk to the bottom of the ocean."
Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
171–180 of 312 posts
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#172> Nothing came of Paul Graham’s plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what’s the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing the…
It's not specific to VotePlz. In swing states, high voter turnouts have always favored Democratic candidates.
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you think it's wrong?
To call people monkeys because they didn't accomplish as much as Mark Zuckerberg? Yes it's very wrong! And ironic given that MySpace had a much better exit and impact than FriendFeed (the company created by the partner quoted)
It's particularly unfitting when you're asking people to run startups with an uncertain future. It might boost moral in the short run, but doing so on other peoples expense always comes back to haunt you. To quote the article:
> Graham wrote an essay, “Mean People Fail,” in which [...] he declared that “being mean makes you stupid” and discourages good people from working for you.
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#174The brilliance of YCombinator, IMO, is HackerNews. It's turned YC into a self-perpetuating machine by getting smart people to congregate and talk about news YC itself partially generates. I heard about YC, PG, and sama all through this outlet.
If you mean the fund(s), I disagree. The strength of YC is the relatively large value they provide in exchange for your equity. Their "price" is still excellent and continues to clear the market. This becomes rapidly obvious if you attempt to raise early stage funding and start comparing options. Aside from the actual cash and the famous network, YC and its partners have earned a reputation for sticking with their in…
> I've learnt to value people in the "cooperate cooperate" quadrant of the Prisoner's Dilemma very highly, and it's not a reputation you can "buy" quickly.
This is a great way to put it. People who act in good faith are the only people I'd want to do business with, and YC has (rightfully IMO) earned a reputation for being a partner you can trust.
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#175> Nothing came of Paul Graham’s plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what’s the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing the…
You could also say that laws that are aimed at reducing voter fraud (from zero) are a smokescreen for a favored candidate/party, because they tend to reduce voting among younger people (less likely to vote in a place that matches their home address) and the poor (less likely to have various types of identification, most importantly a driver's license). There are also people trying to pass laws to reduce the number of locations you can vote (hurts the working poor's ability to vote), the hours polling places are open (ibid), and reducing weekend polling for primaries (ibid). State agencies are also trying to pass laws that reduce or eliminate places you can register to vote, or change the rules regarding how long you have to register before you can vote. They also have laws on the books or are trying to pass laws that allow them more flexibility to not count your vote after you've cast it, and in many cases you have little to no ability to find out if your vote was actually tallied.
IOW, the ability to vote is highly contested. Pressure in the opposite direction is probably necessary if we want to consider ourselves a representative democracy.
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. I had to stop reading as the cult worship stuff started to get thicker and thicker.
Are you sure that you are in disagreement with the article's author? I think both you and te_chris may have missed some of the irony in the article.
This is a thought provoking question. I didn't miss it, but I didn't read it as irony, I read it as a sort of awe-struck breathlessness on the part of the author... or at least, the slightly emotionally distant (aloof, not really ironic) version of that that the New Yorker is very good at.
The idea of writing this sort of piece about someone whose grand ambitions have not yet been realized is both to make the reader aware of the grandeur of the ambitions, and also to draw a line in the sand so that his accomplishments can be judged later, aided by the glimpse into his unfettered idealism.
This is not a criticism of the New Yorker (I love it). Just a phenomenon of the unique genre of personal profiles that the magazine produces. The same tone would also work if writing about an artisanal butcher in Maine, for example.
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's completely wacky, but if you've got a few mil to drop on wacky ideas, it starts to seem a bit less wacky in the grand scheme of things. It's basically a wager: "There's a small, but perhaps nonzero chance I'm living in a simulation. I've got the throwaway cash to fund an escape attempt. This investment has a massive chance of being completely wasted, even if this is a simulation. But if there is even a tiny chan…
What would it even mean to 'escape' a simulation? In my mind I'm imagining when I write code to model a real process and even at some super high-fidelity simulation I can't imagine an 'escape'. Maybe if the simulation were so self-aware it could conduct local privilege-escalation attacks and replicate itself like a worm/virus? EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines [1] https://…
Assume a non omnipotent being, with non-infinite resources is creating a universe simulation. What decisions would we expect a person like this to make, when designing this simulation?
Since they do not have infinite resources, they would likely take shortcuts, and make compromises and tradeoff when designing the simulation
For example, if light did not have a speed limit, and interacted with the entire universe instantly, this would be very hard to simulate. You would save resources by giving light a speed limit.
We also expect that they might abstract out the nitty gritty details of how things work at the atomic level. If you don't really care that much about how very small particles interact with each other, you might have these numerous calculations evaluated lazily, when they are "observed" by the higher level entities.
Things get really interesting when you start thinking about what kind of bugs a god programmer might be likely to make when designing their simulation.
Are there any weird natural processes, that would be much more elegant if our equations modeling them were changed very slightly, almost as if the equation was a mistake in the first place? Another attack avenue is to combine two natural processes in unexpected ways, to try and find "edge cases".
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#178> Nothing came of Paul Graham’s plan for tech to stop Donald Trump, but Altman, after brooding about Trump for months, recently announced a nonpartisan project, called VotePlz, aimed at getting out the youth vote. Looking at the election as a tech problem—what’s the least code with the most payoff?—Altman and his three co-founders concentrated on helping young people in nine swing states to register, by providing the…
Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats, because the young and poor tend to be the ones who don't vote and tend to vote Democrat. Back in the 90s MTV had "Rock the Vote" (actually it was a progressive non-profit who partnered with MTV) and their goal was the same.
> Get out the vote campaigns are always in favor of Democrats
What? This is only true if you believe that get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operations are exclusive to Democrats.
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
"It doesn't resemble the Hacker News I look at, and I look at HN a lot." Given your position, do you think that you can look at HN objectively?
If you won't take Dan's word for it, maybe you'll take mine? I spend a lot (too much) time here, I've been quite critical of PG, a fair number of YC investments that I think behaved in an un-ethical way, and have read most of what Maciej has written through HN (and the associated comment threads). When PG was still at the helm I would not have come out in support of the balance in the moderation and some of what you…
Same!
Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny
#180I do admire all the ambition. But does it really have to be mixed in with views such as "Democracy only works in a growing economy. Without a return to economic growth, the democratic experiment will fail. And I have to think that YC is hugely important to that growth." I'm sure Sam (and other SV types) is well aware of the complexity of reality and that YC, as one company, cannot be hugely important to that growth.…
And if you think about it, most of these disruptive companies are not offering real growth. Both Über and Air BNB, for instance are diverting dollars from the legacy provider. And they're doing this by offering better service and/or lower prices. There is no value creation to see here.
Think what you will about Uber and AirBnb (I happen to dislike Uber as a tech employer) -- they are certainly offering real growth. I have used Uber (and Lyft) and Airbnb (and VRBO/HomeAway) to do things that I otherwise wouldn't have done. In other words, rides I wouldn't have called a taxi for, and trips I wouldn't have taken because I find the typical hotel experience to be more trouble than it's worth with two small children. I think you should also consider the utilization side of things -- people are getting value out of a depreciating asset that would otherwise be unutilized. Simply from an account perspective this is valuable (and probably more economically valuable than helping support rent-seeking medallion owners).
The Freakonomics podcast had a really good economic justification for Uber specifically that goes beyond what I've described here. It's worth listening to (and I can't seem to link to it directly: http://www.npr.org/podcasts/452538045/freakonomics-radio -- September 7th).