The Contradictions of Sam Altman • Hacker News Board

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#561

Post by stonogo » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:15 PM UTC

throwawaylinux wrote: post #510

stonogo wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumption of a rational market has been fucking up people's lives for a long time now. What's it gonna take to put that conceit to bed?

The assumption of a benevolent government of experts and moral leaders making decisions for the greater good has killed literally millions of people stolen trillions of dollars in war since WWII, and that's just counting western liberal democracies. If you don't implicitly trust "the market", and you shouldn't, then you can't trust the government. What's it going to take to convince you that handing over more of your…

It's super interesting that you immediately started railing against the government, which I didn't even mention. I'm critical of currently-popular economic dogma, and I don't understand why that should imply that I'm some kind of authoritarian socialist.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#562

Post by stonogo » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 5:16 PM UTC

vasco wrote: post #507

stonogo wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumption of a rational market has been fucking up people's lives for a long time now. What's it gonna take to put that conceit to bed?

It has lifted the largest amount of people from poverty in the history of the world.

That's a nice bumper sticker, but managed markets and other non-laissez-faire economies, like the ones in India and China, could make a similar claim, even though I wouldn't want to live under them.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#563

Post by runarberg » Mon, Apr 03, 2023, 7:02 PM UTC

davnicwil wrote: post #540

runarberg wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you are arguing for is a philosophical position called atomism or reductionism, (which contrasts with holism ). It is a rather old school philosophy honestly (with holism also being old school, but not quite as much) as we are are learning more how important interactions are really to study anything honestly. Modern philosophy of science kind of rejects the notion that you can study anything really by only looki…

Is one difference in the analogy that individual humans have independent agency and do concrete things in the world, where particles don't have agency, and don't really 'do' actions in a sense that is meaningful outside of the system they're in? I guess by questioning the analogy I get back to my point. Things don't happen in history because of (truly) random behaviours converging on some emergent effect, like in a s…

I question your assumption that in history “things don't happen in history because of (truly) random behaviors converging on some emergent effect.”

Firstly there is currently a debate among quantum physics as to the true randomness of what we observe[1][2]. Turns out we don’t actually need true randomness in our models, they just need to appear as if they are random, in other words, the chaotic nature of the system is more important than true randomness.

Secondly, society is an emergent effect of individuals behaving in a chaotic manner. So is zeitgeist. To study history without looking at societal changes over time, and without accounting for zeitgeist, is bound to yield a pretty limited insights.

I am aware that my analogy between quantum mechanics and the study of history is flawed. The latter is infinity more complex than the former, and deriving laws and creating models is a good fit to study the former but extremely difficult to study the latter. However my point is merely pointing to the fact that atomism (and holism for that matter) is an incomplete philosophy of science, that doesn’t even work in our most fundamental scope. One should be cautious when applying it to the study of history.

Or to put it in other words: While ρ(λ | ab) ≠ ρ(λ) is a real possibility in quantum physics likewise it is highly likely that the probability of individual acting in society is not independent from the probability of the same individual acting outside of the influence of that society. In your original point government may very well be like the ab in this famous conjecture. I would be careful when removing it’s influence.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytyjgIyegDI

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnKzt6Xq-w4

PS: Sorry to cite youtube videos, but I’m not a physicist and these videos are the only way for me to understand the science. Otherwise I would be citing something I don’t understand, which I don’t want to do.

Re: The Contradictions of Sam Altman

#564

Post by sixQuarks » Wed, Apr 05, 2023, 5:15 AM UTC

phillryu wrote: post #418

sixQuarks wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really insinuating that Elon was simply “lucky” when it came to disrupting and transforming two gargantuan and highly complex industries at the same time?

I think my main point was more that despite what you (not you personally, anyone reading) think of Elon, at least he has this track record of visionary companies and Sam does not. Personally my take on Elon is something like this – he found a vacuum in the industry of smart engineers who want to work on something truly ambitious, the kind of people who feel most SV startups are bullshit. And as a sci-fi nerd he came…

well, you're definitely correct in that one of his superpowers is attracting some of the best talent to work for him (at least that was the case when he started Tesla and SpaceX). But you're completely overlooking his ridiculous work ethic (100+ hours per week for years on end), plus his own elite engineering chops (he was the chief engineer at SpaceX), and there are interviews of rocket engineers that worked for him stating that if you weren't on top of your game, Elon would call you out on it, even citing specific sections and page numbers of rocket science books on the fly mid-conversation. It's not just money he brought to the table.