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Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

geohot.github.io

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Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#371

Post by YCpedohaven »

safety1st wrote: post #330
keiferski wrote: post #318

As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended. He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work. I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my o…

I mean it's a title. Titles are under no obligation to condense the entire content of the article into one sentence. People who want to comment on the article should read it first, and then write in good faith. The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be…

> 1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.

> 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.

> None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.

They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ.

There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think.

> If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!

lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#372

Post by UncleMeat »

neuralkoi wrote: post #325
ramraj07 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone knows who geohot is and even if they do they may not see the url handle. They may (like me) think why is a glorified shower thought tweet on top of HN. They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further. As much as ad hominem a…

Ad hominem attacks are never good approaches. They're irrational in nature. Ad hominem is one of the first fallacies taught in a critical thinking class.

Ad hominems are formal fallacies. They are not valid deductive reasoning.

But people basically never use valid deductive reasoning for anything. Using available evidence to make predictions about things and act on those predictions is fine. If somebody has a history of poor thought or writing and then I encounter more of their thoughts or writing it is not unreasonable to say "this new material is likely to be poor and I don't need to spend time on it."

If somebody says "hey do you want to see Transformers 7", responding "I did not like Transformers 1-6 so I'll pass" is fine even if it is not deductive proof that you won't like Transformers 7.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#373

Post by otterley »

tolerance wrote: post #365
keiferski wrote: post #318

As is often the case, the title is a bit misleading and implies a universality that I don’t think the author intended. He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work. I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my o…

I think that the friction lies somewhere in between what you’re observing and what ~safety1st addresses below. The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties.…

I don’t think it’s demographic changes as much as it is fear of displacement.

Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.”

I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#374

Post by bombcar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #226
deaux wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's look at other wealthy countries with large economies. Germany, Japan, UK, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, Australia, South Korea, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Taiwan.. Which of these have trouble verifying identity reliably, to the extent that it would be a meaningful obstacle to UBI?

Even if governments were perfect at ID verification it wouldn't change the argument above, right? Being perfect at verifying UBI eligibility would require a large government infrastructure, just like today, so you can't claim that the U part makes it super cheap to administer. But no government is close to perfect. Here are some examples for your edification. The UK doesn't even know how many people are living there,…

> Even in UBI, there would be a strong expectation that each person only receives it once. But checking stuff like that requires a huge bureaucracy.

Or you issue UBI all at once during the month, and you stamp everyone who receives it with an indelible ink mark that takes longer than a day to wear off; like they do in poor countries to prevent double voting.

It's a solvable problem. The problem is that the "cost of managing welfare" is a small percentage of the cost of welfare, you can't pay for doubling/tripling it by saving 5%.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#375

Post by UncleMeat »

titanomachy wrote: post #281
swores wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't yet read what the post submitted here is about, and personally I already have the same opinion as the comment you replied to. So I suspect they just wanted to comment about that rather than caring about this specific post, to remind people not to make the mistake of assuming that someone being well known doesn't automatically mean they always know what they're talking about.

In fairness to geohot, who exactly is an expert on what's going to happen to the labour markets as a result of AI? Whose take should I be weighing more heavily than this one? Or should people just not bother sharing their opinions on this matter? Since it's impossible to predict the future.

Nobody can predict the future. But there are people whose job it is to deeply study the ways that various technologies have changed labor markets. Plenty of historians of science out there who can draw connections to and distinctions from the past.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#376

Post by braebo »

cjs_ac wrote: post #247
fragmede wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This trope also contains a trap, however. There have been major insights from people stepping outside their lane. Physicists went into econ and built a whole subfield called econophysics, with Pareto and Mandelbrot among them. Mathematicians have transformed biology with population genetics, which led scientists to predict how genes spread through populations. Or the SIR model for how infections spread. Hidden Markov…

The common thread in all of your examples is people with mathematical training bringing mathematical formalisms to disciplines that lacked them. If you're just offering the wisdom gleaned from your life experiences, they're unlikely to be more insightful that anyone else's.

I’m biased as generalist, but I believe there is science behind the emergent insights afforded to us.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#377

Post by UncleMeat »

fragmede wrote: post #195
mike_hearn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone needs to make a website explaining why UBI doesn't work conceptually because this comes up over and over again on HN. You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't: • Dead • Non-citizen • Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc • In prison • M…

I'll come out and get kicked out of communism club to say that I don't support UBI on the basic fact that money is exchanged for goods and services is just so foundational that I can't support UBI. I think everybody should have a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day, but UBI isn't the way to get there.

I am not aware of any mechanism to ensure that everybody has a roof over their heads and 3 square meals a day besides direct payments to the poor.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#378

Post by otterley »

fsckboy wrote: post #358
neuralkoi wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ad hominem attacks are never good approaches. They're irrational in nature. Ad hominem is one of the first fallacies taught in a critical thinking class.

if ad hominem attacks were of no value, humans wouldn't have evolved the strong tendency to engage in them. they are not proofs in logic, hence the fallacy, but that does not mean they are irrational. it's irrational to think that human discourse can be capture by logic.

Isn’t rational a synonym for logical, though? People can subjectively rationalize their behavior, but that doesn’t make it objectively rational.

Re: Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns

#380

Post by bombcar »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #317
coffeebeqn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like government borrowing sometimes and government borrowing more and more every year and never paying it down until the end of time or more likely bankruptcy are two different things

As long as you keep new borrowing below growth then you can do that indefinitely. The problem is when the next pandemic (or war) comes along you don't have much room to deal with it.

You can do the same with printing money, as long as you do it below growth you can do it indefinitely.

The problem always is that you can't stop and get off the tiger. No country can withstand the shock of a major cut in spending, because the population can't absorb the hit.

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