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Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

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Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#61

Post by 6510 »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #46
peacebeard wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So in your view, even a useful innovative idea cannot gain traction without being overhyped?

Almost any useful innovation is going to have a right tail of people who overhype it. They shouldn't, and I wish they wouldn't. But if your strategy for evaluating new ideas is to find the biggest sources of hype and fact check them, you're going to systematically undervalue innovation.

The problem is that many care more about presentation than substance. The irony gets overwhelming where boring is usually the best solution and the least exciting.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#62

Post by wredcoll »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #35
roenxi wrote: post #32

It is also a useful trick to keep in mind the opposite of critical thinking - following the herd. Just copying everyone around you is often a great strategy. So good that even if everyone around you are making mistakes it can still be the dominant strategy (there is a reason a lot of people who don't like war are cowed into silence when war fever descends). Most people are using it. That implies that it is ridiculous…

> That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong I think this true but misleading — conditioned on other people going with the herd in the wrong direction, it is easy to be right. However, often the herd is going in a right (or at least acceptable) direction. The continual effort to check if the herd is going in the right direction _is not_ easy. If a magic eight ball could alert yo…

Very often the fact that the herd is going in that direction causes it to become the right direction, e.g. the stock market.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#63

Post by aidenn0 »

appstorelottery wrote: post #13

Having worked in public advocacy advertising, I’d frame it like this: “Good ideas don’t need lies” is a compelling ideal but in practice, public acceptance isn’t a reliable signal of truth or societal benefit. It depends on incentives, narratives, and how information is presented. History shows that even harmful or suboptimal ideas (like coal power) can gain widespread support if presented persuasively, while genuine…

I think you are missing the point:

Some good ideas might need a whole lot of marketing to catch on. Some bad ideas might need very little. The quote merely argues that if you must deceive people for an idea to catch on, the idea is not good. A corollary is that if you are tempted to lie in your advocacy, you should probably reexamine what you are advocating for.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#64

Post by 6510 »

whackernews wrote: post #57

> This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyse traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, together with performance and security metrics, to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics and to detect and address abuse. I’m kind of conflicted and confused faced with this message on this site, especially with the content of the post. Can someone explain why I’m…

It's a generic blogger blogspot cookie banner. It's a free blogging platform but you can attach your own domain to it. (not sure about hosting)

For example: http://fototour.blogspot.com

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#65

Post by Gigachad »

jcgrillo wrote: post #42
didgetmaster wrote: post #20

This is what scares me the most about AI. You have a handful of really big companies trying to outdo each other as they race to implement it and deploy it as quickly as possible. To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data centers; they are incentivised to exaggerate its current capabilities and also what it will be capable of 'soon'. There is no time to evaluate each step to make sure it is accurate…

I guess a counterpoint might be Apple's "strategy". Scare quotes because I truly don't know if it was deliberate or just a happy accident. But somehow they've managed to not get so intensively exposed to the downside risk--if the wild claims about AI don't pan out they're not going to lose very much compared with the other megacorps.

Apples plan has been pretty obvious. They invested in small locally running features that provide small utility rather than massive hosted models that cost a fortune and aren’t profitable.

There also doesn’t seem to be much risk in falling behind. If you wait longer you can skip buying the now obsolete GPUs and training the now obsolete models.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#66

Post by bluGill »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48
commandlinefan wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.

> options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.

I learned long ago (when my company decided they couldn't give me options because we were too big so they did these "I can't believe it isn't an option", which expired worthless): until cash is in my bank account it is just a promise waiting to be broken. If I want to invest I want it my choice.

In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for - unless you are high enough up in the company that you see the real books, or you have so much invested they have to show you as a large shareholder. (nobody is the later - large shareholders have a full time job managing their money not working for someone else). There have been a number of cases where a company has unexpectedly filed bankruptcy and someone lost their job and their savings on the same day.

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#68

Post by bluGill »

mememememememo wrote: post #37
asdff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why bother with all that though? Just ask them to do their job for the party. If they don't, or you suspect they don't align with the party, you just execute them. Don't need tech for this. The tech is just for some people to get rich, not to really enable any new evil that can't already be achieved today with pen and paper and bullet (as modeled extensively in the last century). Put it this way, if Hitler had grok,…

Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. But you can spy on people under "national security" while keeping them feeling happy enough. And that arrangement can last 1000 years.

Most of Nazi Germany is after the fact revision. They were popular around the world in the 1930s - for their plan to deal with the Jews. It is only after they went to war that we decided they were bad for that plan as well. (some people were opposed to the plan all along, but there were plenty who were in favor of it)

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#69

Post by qsera »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #35
roenxi wrote: post #32

It is also a useful trick to keep in mind the opposite of critical thinking - following the herd. Just copying everyone around you is often a great strategy. So good that even if everyone around you are making mistakes it can still be the dominant strategy (there is a reason a lot of people who don't like war are cowed into silence when war fever descends). Most people are using it. That implies that it is ridiculous…

> That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong I think this true but misleading — conditioned on other people going with the herd in the wrong direction, it is easy to be right. However, often the herd is going in a right (or at least acceptable) direction. The continual effort to check if the herd is going in the right direction _is not_ easy. If a magic eight ball could alert yo…

>magic ball

The comment mentioned it..

>principle-based analysis..

Re: Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

#70

Post by asa400 »

nostrademons wrote: post #7

Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treatin…

> and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not

What are you basing this claim on?

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