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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)

#71

Post by lmm »

asdff wrote: post #33
rawgabbit wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?

The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

> The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.

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

#73

Post by nostrademons »

asa400 wrote: post #70
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?

That of the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 [1], all but Broadcom and Berkshire Hathaway give generous stock options, and also that of the top 10 in 2000 [2], only one (Microsoft), maybe 2 (Cisco) did. If you look at change in index composition, or even total earnings by company, you'll see a very steady and dramatic replacement of companies that did not spread the wealth through stock options & RSUs with companies that did.

[1] https://www.slickcharts.com/sp500

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-largest-sp-500-c...

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

#74

Post by nostrademons »

bluGill wrote: post #66
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for

I'd question this conventional wisdom, simply because you have a lot more information about the company as an employee than a random investor does, even if you are not in possession of things like financials that the SEC considers "material non-public information". Things like culture, intelligence of your coworkers, whether or not you're actually delivering on your commitments, how many feature requests and bug reports you get from your customers, mood of management, perks offered, etc. are all intangibles, but they are usually better predictors of long-term company performance than the financials that the company gives investors.

If your company is not doing well enough or is not something that you would consider investing in, you should find a different company to work for. Bad things are going to happen in your future, regardless of whether you own shares or not.

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

#75

Post by nostrademons »

pjc50 wrote: post #22
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…

The specific lie discussed was the idea that granting options was not somehow an "expense" and could be excluded from the accounts. (Google tells me this is a relevant summary of US GAAP https://carta.com/uk/en/learn/startups/equity-management/asc... )

That's not what the quote in the article is:

> Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were.

That's saying that it's stock options themselves which are the bad idea. The lie is in how they are expensed or not expensed. The point the accountant is making is that if stock options were a good idea, they could be expensed, thus not needing the lie.

But nowadays, stock options are expensed, right there in public, and they are still considered a good idea.

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

#76

Post by asdff »

lmm wrote: post #71
asdff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

> The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad. Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what order…

> An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them.

Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.

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

#78

Post by asdff »

flextheruler wrote: post #59
asdff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.

You're confusing autocratic with authoritarian. Total war reached its most recent zenith in the 20th century. If governments have always been able to control people to the same degree, why was not until Napoleon that we saw the beginnings of nationalism? I say this rhetorically, as it is quite obvious that it was technology and industrialization. When we look at ancient Empires and see their territory on a map it wou…

There was nationalism pre napoleon. Arguably east asia is a better example than european history IMO. I would say there is strong sense of nationalism among han chinese both now and in history. Likewise for Japan and Korea. Pre islam Persia as well. I guess the source of this was consistent centralized authority over a large region vs any technological change. You had that in east asia. You didn't have that in europe after roman times. Even larger empires like kingdom of spain were not really seen as "spain" as we know it but a unified monarchy over the kingdoms of castile, leon, aragon, sicily, and napoli. Interestingly you didn't really have that in india either, no one controlled the continent until mughal times and by then the religious and cultural regional differences were pretty set in stone.

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

#79

Post by strongpigeon »

Gigachad wrote: post #65
jcgrillo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They invested a ton in their Private Cloud Compute though, but are barely using their capacity.

https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...

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

#80

Post by idontwantthis »

Something interesting about my experience with the Iraq War was that, as a 9 year old living in DC at a wealthy, liberal private school, everyone knew from the beginning it was all a lie. I only learned fairly recently that a vast majority of the country thought invading Iraq was a good idea.
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