As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.
Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.
This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
If this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!
> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which
he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can
nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them,
and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If
he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good
conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s
use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...
The public/private distinction Kant introduces is interesting, but it's not what I'm getting at here.
To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.
If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.
The risk of not remembering how to do long division was limited because we could point to more complex problems that we would be solving instead. That was the trade off.
With skills and agents, that's a lot more fuzzy. Because for every higher complexity problem the obvious answer is that agents would be able to do that also.
Some folks (with significant agency) embrace that future with open arms while others (99.9% of humans) are tepid.
We are each a nest of functional dependencies. Perhaps discernment is the ability to know which to introspect. Some people absolutely need to know where the water comes from, some do not.
I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
So many truths in this post…
With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam.
Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.
Professor? So this was at a university? What point was he trying to prove? And did those who failed the test go on to somehow magically develop the critical thinking skills that they were lacking?
Sounds like a cheap stunt if it wasn't immediately followed by both remedial teaching and a shake up of the teaching at the institutions that had so signally failed those students.
It could have been a story or something that I read in an article, but the point remains. We shouldn't blindly trust results/calculations if we don't have a feeling of the correctness or how the result is derived.
I understand that this isn't valid for many cases where difficult and complex computations are performed, but for many real life scenarios and situations it's valid.
As stated in the original article, the people holding the AI strings are somewhat disconnected from us real people and they lack this human and real life touch.
I hope I've explained it correctly :-)
I was just wondering about the motivation of the professor in question and whether they had really properly thought through what they were doing and the effects it might have together with whether any effort was being made to rectify the state of the education system that caused the problem.
The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly.
However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".
I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
> "Hey Claude, can you be smarter than me and tell me what I should tell you to get the thing I don't know I want yet?"
I'm so glad you asked! Many smart people are now eating Snickers Bars(tm)! For you, I think, to get ahead of this trend, it would be the perfect smart person choice right now. It's nutty and has this amazing new invention called Nougat and chocolate!
Here's how it works. First you have to use your fingers to tear open the wrapper. Don't worry, the wrapper isn't going to hurt you. It might be a little effort, but you'll get it. Then you take a bite. Try to use your back teeth to chew it a little. Yeah, I know it's work, but it's good for you. And then just swallow it down!
I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
> These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit.
It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.
Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.
The current situation reminds me of feudalism, specifically those monarch-vassal dynamics. There is a complete disregard for the state and the needs of the masses, who are treated as just another expendable resource like wood or ore.
This model is returning because the current level of technological progress makes it viable again. We enjoyed 100 beautiful years not due to the inherent virtues of democracy and capitalism, but because the technology of the time favored them. It required an educated working class and a consumer society, which ultimately generated more wealth and power for the elites.
In the post-AI era, they simply won't need that many "peasants." The average citizen will merely consume resources, effectively becoming a burden. Why would the elites bother teaching them multiplication tables, providing healthcare, or paying unemployment benefits?
At one point in most of our lives, we have had everything provided for us. When we wanted something, we took it or pointed at it and it was usually brought to us. Not getting a whim indulged was the most horrible thing ever, and we screamed and yelled and sulked when that gross injustice happened.
I speak of toddlerhood.
Billionaires act like toddlers because toddlers have most of the experience of being billionaires.
Most toddlers grow out of it. As far as I can tell, no billionaire who has sunk that low ever has.
This is how the "Chotiner interview" became such a meme.
It somehow worked out that there is exactly one interviewer in the United States that is willing to fail The Test. Because Isaac Chotiner is the only journalist who ever fails The Test, his guests are frequently completely unprepared for what to say in the case that someone doesn't just agree with whatever babble they're spouting and will sometimes just blurt out the true thing they weren't supposed to say.
I think the end of this post misses the point of Ezra Klein's interviews. You can listen to him podcast about podcasting, and he explains very clearly what his goals are when he talks to someone. He's an interviewer, not a debater. His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view, not to win an argument with them or get them to admit that they're making up a silly anecdote like they don't know their address, because thats counter productive the the goal of helping his audience understand their viewpoint. I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
That's not an interview, that's at best stenography and at worse sycophancy.
If, for example, an interviewee said in all seriousness "I want to shoot all dogs and make the poor eat their babies" would you expect the interviewer to go go "Hmmm very interesting. Why do you think that?"
No.
It is vital that interviewers challenge the subject. Especially when they say something profoundly ludicrous or disturbing. Otherwise they might has well just be in PR.
You can have different types of interview, they don't all have to be permissive or challenging. If someone said "I want to shoot all dogs and make the poor eat their babies" during a podcast interview what good is it going to do for the interviewer to challenge that? The interviewee has already declared something horrendous, telling them they're beyond the pale on the spot is unlikely to change anything. Asking them why would be much more valuable since they could expose more of their deranged fantasies (at least in this scenario) which would subject them to even more revulsion and scrutiny by listeners. If you watch police interrogations this is often the tactic used even in the most horrendous crimes. They aren't confrontational, they don't denounce, they often don't even challenge inconsistencies at first. They let people speak and encourage them to say more or go over something they talked about previously in more detail. It appears almost friendly or compassionate to a casual observer but they're really just giving the subject more rope to hang themselves with.
If you publish a podcast where your guest encourages heinous behaviour without you challenging - that's a you problem.
Saying "Well, our listeners can decide for themselves" is a cowardly cop-out.
You might not be able to change the interviewee's mind but you can sure as hell send social signals to your audience that you condemn their views or think they're ludicrous.
Case in point - why are you trying to change my mind here? You're pushing back because you want to signal to others that my point of view is incorrect. That sort of basic interrogation seems completely missing in (especially American) media.
You're assigning motives to me that I don't have. Maybe that is the distinction, you think how you appear to an audience is important, I'm viewing this no differently than I would a private conversation. I'm not performing or signalling to anyone.
This really isn't the same thing as an interview. I'm not talking to you for the benefit of an audience or as a way to document your thoughts. I'm saying what I think and responding to what you think (and accuse me of thinking). I'm expressing my own opinion, I'm not trying to win a debate or make myself look good.
No it’s not. There’s a trade off to make between letting someone explain themselves and challenging them. The audience has their own braincells and can make their own decisions on what they are hearing.
Actually yes if a interviewee said something like that I’d like to know why they’re saying that because it doesn’t make sense to me!
If a leading politician says something deranged like "all crime is caused by gay people" - should the newspaper simply report that verbatim? Or should they say "the President lied today, and here are the facts that shows he is wrong"?
Sometimes it helps for institutions to point out the the emperor has no clothes. The social reinforcement of norms is hugely influential.
OK. If you interview the President and he repeatedly lies - is it OK to just publish that interview? Or should you push back on those lies? Do you owe it to your audience to let them know the king is mad?
The risk, of course, is that you don't get invited back. That's "The Test" in the post.
It could be argued the role of an interviewer is to present and understand the interviewee and their views, to dig deep into their unique knowledge.
An interview which is just “it’s sunny outside, isn’t it” isn’t a very good interview, and neither is one where the interviewee says “I genuinely believe there is a portal to heaven and hell in the butthole of my pet chicken” and the interviewer moves to the next question without a followup.
You don’t need to debate a guest to challenge their views.
> I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
A good interviewer wouldn’t just “call it out” to the audience, they would ask the interviewee to expand on the topic. They would put themselves in the shoes of their viewers (who the interview is for) and ask what is interesting to them.
> His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view
Doing that well should inevitably involve challenging your guest's framing of certain issues. As an absurd example, if you ask the guest why they spin around 3 times when they stand up and they say, "better that than doing three somersaults", you would be doing your audience a huge disservice by asking your guest how they assess the relative difficulty of spins versus somersaults.
Why Jensen Huang thinks a fabulously wealthy person not knowing their own address is analogous to a child not learning basic math skills would be, in my opinion, much more interesting and informative of his viewpoint than the actual point he was trying to make.
I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that, it'd be $1 billion.
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
A person can have an ownership share of $1B and not own the entire company if the entire company is worth more than $1B. For instance, if you own 1% of a company that's worth $100b, the company isn't "in the hands of a single person".
But even still you're saying that one person cannot create a $1B company which would mean a lot fewer $1B get created. Which under "big company bad" mentality, sure maybe it's a good thing. But that's obviously an insane position to take
Most uberwealthy aren't doing it for the extra money. And if they are, I think it's fine if they call it quits early. There are plenty more people who could be rich if Bezos/AMZN didn't suck all the air out of the room.
Right, because it's totally normal for an online book retailer to grow to $2.5t company. It was just coincidental that Bezos was involved. Plenty of companies grow at this pace for this long.
I honestly haven't done enough thinking on it, but it doesn't strike me a priori as ridiculous to limit people's ownership of these nation-sized companies, and to possibly limit the size of the company as well
If it was illegal for someone to own enough Amazon stock that they had a net worth of larger than some limit you think is reasonable, then either the government would own and run every major corporation, or those corporations (like Amazon) simply wouldn't exist. I don't think I or ordinary non-rich people in general are better off in that world.
Who's talking about the government? The most obvious natural owners of a company to me are the employees, who are actually the ones responsible for its success.
Once someone has a billion dollars do we really want them to continue accruing more wealth (power)? Isn't billion dollar people and companies unduly influencing our government the source of many of our problems?
Seems pretty evident that once you get beyond that point you stop considering regular people fully human, and start doing crazy things like threatening to destroy entire civilizations or buying and selling children.
You don't "have" a billion dollars, you created a billion dollars. Wealth is created. If Amazon stopped in 1998, it's not like the $2.5t Amazon is worth today would be distributed across Barnes and Noble, Pets.com and other retailers. Maybe some of it, but it's likely that the world would just be ~$2.5t poorer, likely more since AWS is the backbone of much of the online economy.
I do wonder what your economic philosophy is. It seems to assume that money's existence is its own societal good. I would argue that resources are finite so 2.5trillion is not new money but a representative part of a ratio of resources allocated. Ie, every one else got 2.5 trillion units poorer
What creates wealth? Mining raw materials? Work? Ideas? Services? Do you think any billionaire has created this wealth in these ways? No, they "create" a billion dollars by creating not value, but valuation. If it's a public company, they issue stock, which people buy for money. In the open market, the price of the stock goes up. Their valuation goes up. Their currency goes up.
Billionaires become billionaires by creating indirections of wealth. They create currencies. Like bankers, they create wealth by lending money they don't have. Those stock certificates are a currency, and trading the currency on the open market pumps up its valuation. Who buys it? People who think they too can make money off it in the future. Who pays them back? Maybe with dividends? Who makes those dividends? Who creates revenue? Mostly the organization they create.
There aren't words you say sitting around your desk that will create a billion dollars. But the desks they sit at, they can say words and a billion dollars are "created." I think that's what you don't want to admit. Their decisions are just amplified by a huge apparatus that they sit at, and the market scrambling to snip off a little profit by trading their stock in the future.
Sure they have businesses and things, but holy cow, we lionize the words they say around desks like it's some kind of magic holiness. I just don't get it.
I would say the millions of people working at Amazon over the years is what made 99.9999% of that value. Capitalism just lets a single person take the value of their labor.
"it's not like the $2.5t Amazon is worth today would be distributed across Barnes and Noble, Pets.com and other retailers" I'm not sure how you get to this conclusion, it seems sort obvious to me that it would. It's literally why businesses go out of business from competition - someone else is providing the services in their place. Instead of AWS, Azure and Google's cloud offers would likely be significantly more widespread/valuable.
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free.
Or, you know, pay your employees better¹. You want more money? Help other people earn more, get your rich friends on it, raise the median. Then you can earn more. And on a multiplier! The more you give everyone else, the more you can raise your cap.
¹ Seeing as we’re talking Bezos, not exploiting people to the point they have to pee in bottles and work next to dead collapsed coworkers would already but an improvement.
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
You can't individually do enough work to do much of anything we take for granted in our modern era but you can design and build systems, mechanical and social, to do that work. A corporation is such a system often put in motion and helmed by a single person for a significant portion of its existence. It accumulates many people and a lot of capital along the way by means of exchange, cash for goods and services rendered, physical capital in exchange for cash or debt and people's work in exchange for wages. Those people don't own the corporation unless they are given or purchase stock in it. They have already been paid for their input. Expecting otherwise is like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
These people get wealthy by making a pyramid-shaped apparatus that funnels the actual productive output of their employees up to them.
> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.
Your employees are not barred from and often do get a piece of that speculation if they receive shares or choose to buy them. If they aren't willing to buy stock in the company they work for then how does that square with the idea that they should in some other way own more of the profit the company produces? i.e. if they choose to only put in the required labour in exchange for pay what claim do they have on that secondary market when they haven't participated in it?
A business selling grass clippings is a tortured metaphor, just use something sensible like farming. Say I buy land, pay for it to be cleared or clear it myself, buy farm machinery to work it, seed to plant it, arrange to sell it and deal with all of the business overhead of taxes, surveying, planning permissions, records, fees, etc. and maybe I even do some labour at the start to get it running before hiring others. Once I've hired other people and I'm paying them for the work they're doing, which they agreed to as a fair exchange, then what additional claim do they have on the profit I'm making from selling turnips or whatever? Why do you think they should be able to claim more if turnip prices skyrocket? Worse, what claim do they have if turnip futures go through the roof (if I had also speculated on them)?
You're talking millionaire problems and I'm talking billionaire problems. You're not getting to the billionaire class through any self-started farming business.
Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.
It doesn't really matter what the business is, farming was an example but if you need a concrete example of a billionaire that started as a farmer and built his fortune in agriculture and ag related business then look to Harry Stine[0]
There are plenty of other billionaires that started as small business owners putting in their own work. They became billionaires by successfully managing their business and scaling, expanding and pivoting it. There are also ones who derive their wealth strictly from investing or purchasing other businesses, maybe that doesn't seem like work or seems unfair for some reason but you can't just take a random person and hand them millions of dollars and expect them to turn that into a billion dollars. Most would go bankrupt if they tried, smarter ones would just be low risk millionaires living off interest or broadly diversified investment returns. To me, those ones would be the only people I'd say aren't really earning their money but if it's their money then it's their choice what they do with it.
Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.
The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".
billionaires are a flaw in the system. it's an obscene amount of wealth for one person to have. A million is a lot for most people but a billion is 1000 of those.
Do you really think your world would be any better? Big corporations would still act under the same incentive structures as they do today (and in fact would continue to do so even if you forced them all to become workers’ cooperatives), you’d just find that these companies’ owners just try a little harder to hide their assets.
Complaining about billionaires instead of about greedy mega corporations just makes your objections seem like they’re based in jealousy, not fairness.
> Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.
> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.
So I guess I'm not exactly clear what you're saying here. A surface reading would be that you're equating somebody saying "It was stupid when Trump tried to rename Lake Ontario" with getting a swastika tattooed on themselves, but that's so stupid that you must mean something else.
Don't know how you could possibly reach that conclusion, it makes no sense.
I'm referring to the fact that the author self-identifies as a "communist, feminist, antifascist," which implies a strict adherence to the exact same kind of cult-like conformism to something "completely off the rails" that he criticizes in the article.
For example, to him, the statement "Lake Ontario is now called Lake America" is absurd, but what do you think his thoughts on the statement "men can get pregnant" are?
> It just goes on like this. No argument, just mockery. Doesn't address any of the statements, just jeers at them
Yes, because the point of the article is that these are things rational every-day people recognize as being worthy of mockery.
If the author needs to explain to you why not knowing your own address is foolish, how handing your child an AI instead of spending time with them is bad, then you aren't going to get the rest of the thesis. As the author puts it, you've passed the test, you're part of the cult of personality.
I think if you create a Test in order to cast out anyone who doesn't approach a topic the way you do, that kind of sneering creates a brittle purity spiral, as well as the kind of worse thinking that this is supposed to be inoculating you against.
> Yes, because the point of the article is that these are things rational every-day people recognize as being worthy of mockery.
If people recognize something as being worthy of mockery and they are also aware of the situation, they gain nothing from reading some tripe that provides zero new information.
Also, a blog post shouldn't assume that all readers have seen the interview in question. What's the value of talking nonsense about something the readers have never been informed about? At most, the rational readers would be disgusted by the attempt to influence their opinion before they'd seen the facts.
> If the author needs to explain to you why not knowing your own address is foolish,
Well, the readers may not know that the mocked person doesn't know his own address, so when the author doesn't explain it, the author is the foolish one.
If the readers know the facts, mocking someone for trivialities without pointing out some novel reasons "why" is double foolish.
I have indeed forgotten how to do long-division, or how to multiply 3-digits numbers in my head. I also forget things without writing them down in a calendar.
How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
You are not a child whose basic brain biology is being formed and improved by learning how to do these. Neuroplasticity is gone for you and it's all downhill from there. Children _need_ to learn because it builds the basis of every single thing they're going to improve on later. They're already being given a world in a catastrophic state, if the only answer they have to things is "i input it in the funny chatgpt box", you might as well condemn them to die.
Jensen saying huehuehue i don't know how to do math in my head in indicative that 1/ He never has normal, day to day interactions where simple calculation needs to be made on the spot 2/ He also doesn't give a shit about making the world worse.
No, neuroscience agrees that there is a slowdown, as well as specific points at which different parts of the brain stop improving at the rate it used to. 35+ years old is widely agreed upon to be a point at which it is extremely difficult to form new neural connections at the rate it used to when you were 16.
No, you are not on track to become a vegetable the day you turn 25. Yes, it requires more and more investment, and literally noone in neuroscience disagrees with that.
The context of Jensen Huang's comments and Tante's commentary is in teaching children the multiplication table, long division, and square roots. As adults we might use a calculator to multiply or divide large numbers to high precision but we understand what we're doing because of practicing easier arithmetic by hand.
> How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
The bad thing is not bothering to learn basic arithmetic. If kids don't learn that they won't understand what the tools are doing.
I guess you'll be avoiding any thoughts that require you to do basic mental arithmetic from here on out. It actually won't be as blissful as you think. Trust me, no one envies your inner world.
I’m kind of sad I can’t do that sort of multiplication in my head anymore. But I think you are missing the point of the article. It’s not that it’s bad people can’t do mental math, it’s about why it is that all these supposed geniuses and titans of industry keep publicly admitting (bragging?) that they lack basic skills, such as knowing their own zip code.
Sure, remembering basic facts about your life isn't a "skill", per se. But it's pretty crazy to think that Jensen literally doesn't know his own address.
But again, I think you're missing the point of the article. The point of him bragging that he can't remember basic stuff about his own life is both in-group signaling and a test to the interviewer. If the interviewer pushes back and asks "You really don't know your zip code? Are you insane?", the interviewer is never going to get any more time with any of these rich and powerful people. It's an easy way to filter out any critical coverage and a way for the media to show fealty.
The title of the podcast episode is "Jensen Huang vs the AI Doomers", not "Shovel seller is so rich he cannot conceive of what it's like to be a normal person".
As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.
Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.
This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
If this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!
> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them, and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlighte...
The public/private distinction Kant introduces is interesting, but it's not what I'm getting at here.
To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.
If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.
Counterpoint: the person who understands how do to a task without the tool often winds up being the more capable user of the tool.
The risk of not remembering how to do long division was limited because we could point to more complex problems that we would be solving instead. That was the trade off.
With skills and agents, that's a lot more fuzzy. Because for every higher complexity problem the obvious answer is that agents would be able to do that also.
Some folks (with significant agency) embrace that future with open arms while others (99.9% of humans) are tepid.
We are each a nest of functional dependencies. Perhaps discernment is the ability to know which to introspect. Some people absolutely need to know where the water comes from, some do not.
I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
So many truths in this post… With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam. Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.
* where tool replace with agent, map, AI
Professor? So this was at a university? What point was he trying to prove? And did those who failed the test go on to somehow magically develop the critical thinking skills that they were lacking?
Sounds like a cheap stunt if it wasn't immediately followed by both remedial teaching and a shake up of the teaching at the institutions that had so signally failed those students.
It could have been a story or something that I read in an article, but the point remains. We shouldn't blindly trust results/calculations if we don't have a feeling of the correctness or how the result is derived. I understand that this isn't valid for many cases where difficult and complex computations are performed, but for many real life scenarios and situations it's valid. As stated in the original article, the people holding the AI strings are somewhat disconnected from us real people and they lack this human and real life touch. I hope I've explained it correctly :-)
Oh, I agree with you.
I was just wondering about the motivation of the professor in question and whether they had really properly thought through what they were doing and the effects it might have together with whether any effort was being made to rectify the state of the education system that caused the problem.
The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly. However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".
I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
Utterly idiotic.
Read somewhere something going like "ai is just as smart as the person using it"
> "Hey Claude, can you be smarter than me and tell me what I should tell you to get the thing I don't know I want yet?"
I'm so glad you asked! Many smart people are now eating Snickers Bars(tm)! For you, I think, to get ahead of this trend, it would be the perfect smart person choice right now. It's nutty and has this amazing new invention called Nougat and chocolate!
Here's how it works. First you have to use your fingers to tear open the wrapper. Don't worry, the wrapper isn't going to hurt you. It might be a little effort, but you'll get it. Then you take a bite. Try to use your back teeth to chew it a little. Yeah, I know it's work, but it's good for you. And then just swallow it down!
Anything else I can help with?
I suspect that's the _ceiling_ of the AI and it's often much dumber.
I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
> These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit.
It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.
Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prince_Sado
The movie about him is quite sad actually.
The current situation reminds me of feudalism, specifically those monarch-vassal dynamics. There is a complete disregard for the state and the needs of the masses, who are treated as just another expendable resource like wood or ore. This model is returning because the current level of technological progress makes it viable again. We enjoyed 100 beautiful years not due to the inherent virtues of democracy and capitalism, but because the technology of the time favored them. It required an educated working class and a consumer society, which ultimately generated more wealth and power for the elites. In the post-AI era, they simply won't need that many "peasants." The average citizen will merely consume resources, effectively becoming a burden. Why would the elites bother teaching them multiplication tables, providing healthcare, or paying unemployment benefits?
At one point in most of our lives, we have had everything provided for us. When we wanted something, we took it or pointed at it and it was usually brought to us. Not getting a whim indulged was the most horrible thing ever, and we screamed and yelled and sulked when that gross injustice happened.
I speak of toddlerhood.
Billionaires act like toddlers because toddlers have most of the experience of being billionaires.
Most toddlers grow out of it. As far as I can tell, no billionaire who has sunk that low ever has.
This is how the "Chotiner interview" became such a meme.
It somehow worked out that there is exactly one interviewer in the United States that is willing to fail The Test. Because Isaac Chotiner is the only journalist who ever fails The Test, his guests are frequently completely unprepared for what to say in the case that someone doesn't just agree with whatever babble they're spouting and will sometimes just blurt out the true thing they weren't supposed to say.
oh, man! i want to see Philomena Cunk interview some of these guys!
I bet she’d love it, starting with the opportunity to use the title “Cunk on Musk”.
I think the end of this post misses the point of Ezra Klein's interviews. You can listen to him podcast about podcasting, and he explains very clearly what his goals are when he talks to someone. He's an interviewer, not a debater. His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view, not to win an argument with them or get them to admit that they're making up a silly anecdote like they don't know their address, because thats counter productive the the goal of helping his audience understand their viewpoint. I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
That's not an interview, that's at best stenography and at worse sycophancy.
If, for example, an interviewee said in all seriousness "I want to shoot all dogs and make the poor eat their babies" would you expect the interviewer to go go "Hmmm very interesting. Why do you think that?"
No.
It is vital that interviewers challenge the subject. Especially when they say something profoundly ludicrous or disturbing. Otherwise they might has well just be in PR.
You can have different types of interview, they don't all have to be permissive or challenging. If someone said "I want to shoot all dogs and make the poor eat their babies" during a podcast interview what good is it going to do for the interviewer to challenge that? The interviewee has already declared something horrendous, telling them they're beyond the pale on the spot is unlikely to change anything. Asking them why would be much more valuable since they could expose more of their deranged fantasies (at least in this scenario) which would subject them to even more revulsion and scrutiny by listeners. If you watch police interrogations this is often the tactic used even in the most horrendous crimes. They aren't confrontational, they don't denounce, they often don't even challenge inconsistencies at first. They let people speak and encourage them to say more or go over something they talked about previously in more detail. It appears almost friendly or compassionate to a casual observer but they're really just giving the subject more rope to hang themselves with.
If you publish a podcast where your guest encourages heinous behaviour without you challenging - that's a you problem.
Saying "Well, our listeners can decide for themselves" is a cowardly cop-out.
You might not be able to change the interviewee's mind but you can sure as hell send social signals to your audience that you condemn their views or think they're ludicrous.
Case in point - why are you trying to change my mind here? You're pushing back because you want to signal to others that my point of view is incorrect. That sort of basic interrogation seems completely missing in (especially American) media.
You're assigning motives to me that I don't have. Maybe that is the distinction, you think how you appear to an audience is important, I'm viewing this no differently than I would a private conversation. I'm not performing or signalling to anyone.
Why are you pushing back at me in a private conversation then?
Why wouldn't you do the same if I said something outrageously offensive in public?
This really isn't the same thing as an interview. I'm not talking to you for the benefit of an audience or as a way to document your thoughts. I'm saying what I think and responding to what you think (and accuse me of thinking). I'm expressing my own opinion, I'm not trying to win a debate or make myself look good.
No it’s not. There’s a trade off to make between letting someone explain themselves and challenging them. The audience has their own braincells and can make their own decisions on what they are hearing.
Actually yes if a interviewee said something like that I’d like to know why they’re saying that because it doesn’t make sense to me!
If a leading politician says something deranged like "all crime is caused by gay people" - should the newspaper simply report that verbatim? Or should they say "the President lied today, and here are the facts that shows he is wrong"?
Sometimes it helps for institutions to point out the the emperor has no clothes. The social reinforcement of norms is hugely influential.
Reporting and interviewing are completely different exercises with different goals and motivations.
OK. If you interview the President and he repeatedly lies - is it OK to just publish that interview? Or should you push back on those lies? Do you owe it to your audience to let them know the king is mad?
The risk, of course, is that you don't get invited back. That's "The Test" in the post.
> He's an interviewer, not a debater.
It could be argued the role of an interviewer is to present and understand the interviewee and their views, to dig deep into their unique knowledge.
An interview which is just “it’s sunny outside, isn’t it” isn’t a very good interview, and neither is one where the interviewee says “I genuinely believe there is a portal to heaven and hell in the butthole of my pet chicken” and the interviewer moves to the next question without a followup.
You don’t need to debate a guest to challenge their views.
> I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
A good interviewer wouldn’t just “call it out” to the audience, they would ask the interviewee to expand on the topic. They would put themselves in the shoes of their viewers (who the interview is for) and ask what is interesting to them.
> His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view
Doing that well should inevitably involve challenging your guest's framing of certain issues. As an absurd example, if you ask the guest why they spin around 3 times when they stand up and they say, "better that than doing three somersaults", you would be doing your audience a huge disservice by asking your guest how they assess the relative difficulty of spins versus somersaults.
Why Jensen Huang thinks a fabulously wealthy person not knowing their own address is analogous to a child not learning basic math skills would be, in my opinion, much more interesting and informative of his viewpoint than the actual point he was trying to make.
I find the framing of distrusting/attacking people because they behave in ways you don't understand somewhat off putting.
If you the fail The Test on HN you get downvoted and flagged. This is no different.
I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that, it'd be $1 billion.
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
Makes no sense.
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b?
I don't find it unreasonable either to limit this. A 1B company should probably not be in the hands of a single person.
Why wouldn't that person just go start their company in a country that isn't going to yank away their ownership?
You seem to be confused.
A person can have an ownership share of $1B and not own the entire company if the entire company is worth more than $1B. For instance, if you own 1% of a company that's worth $100b, the company isn't "in the hands of a single person".
But even still you're saying that one person cannot create a $1B company which would mean a lot fewer $1B get created. Which under "big company bad" mentality, sure maybe it's a good thing. But that's obviously an insane position to take
Most uberwealthy aren't doing it for the extra money. And if they are, I think it's fine if they call it quits early. There are plenty more people who could be rich if Bezos/AMZN didn't suck all the air out of the room.
Right, because it's totally normal for an online book retailer to grow to $2.5t company. It was just coincidental that Bezos was involved. Plenty of companies grow at this pace for this long.
Is it a good thing for society that Amazon grew that large?
I think it's pretty clear at this point that it's not.
His contribution doesn't have to be worth zero to be not worth more than all the engineering and physical workers under him combined.
I honestly haven't done enough thinking on it, but it doesn't strike me a priori as ridiculous to limit people's ownership of these nation-sized companies, and to possibly limit the size of the company as well
If it was illegal for someone to own enough Amazon stock that they had a net worth of larger than some limit you think is reasonable, then either the government would own and run every major corporation, or those corporations (like Amazon) simply wouldn't exist. I don't think I or ordinary non-rich people in general are better off in that world.
Who's talking about the government? The most obvious natural owners of a company to me are the employees, who are actually the ones responsible for its success.
Once someone has a billion dollars do we really want them to continue accruing more wealth (power)? Isn't billion dollar people and companies unduly influencing our government the source of many of our problems?
Seems pretty evident that once you get beyond that point you stop considering regular people fully human, and start doing crazy things like threatening to destroy entire civilizations or buying and selling children.
You don't "have" a billion dollars, you created a billion dollars. Wealth is created. If Amazon stopped in 1998, it's not like the $2.5t Amazon is worth today would be distributed across Barnes and Noble, Pets.com and other retailers. Maybe some of it, but it's likely that the world would just be ~$2.5t poorer, likely more since AWS is the backbone of much of the online economy.
I do wonder what your economic philosophy is. It seems to assume that money's existence is its own societal good. I would argue that resources are finite so 2.5trillion is not new money but a representative part of a ratio of resources allocated. Ie, every one else got 2.5 trillion units poorer
> Wealth is created.
What creates wealth? Mining raw materials? Work? Ideas? Services? Do you think any billionaire has created this wealth in these ways? No, they "create" a billion dollars by creating not value, but valuation. If it's a public company, they issue stock, which people buy for money. In the open market, the price of the stock goes up. Their valuation goes up. Their currency goes up.
Billionaires become billionaires by creating indirections of wealth. They create currencies. Like bankers, they create wealth by lending money they don't have. Those stock certificates are a currency, and trading the currency on the open market pumps up its valuation. Who buys it? People who think they too can make money off it in the future. Who pays them back? Maybe with dividends? Who makes those dividends? Who creates revenue? Mostly the organization they create.
There aren't words you say sitting around your desk that will create a billion dollars. But the desks they sit at, they can say words and a billion dollars are "created." I think that's what you don't want to admit. Their decisions are just amplified by a huge apparatus that they sit at, and the market scrambling to snip off a little profit by trading their stock in the future.
Sure they have businesses and things, but holy cow, we lionize the words they say around desks like it's some kind of magic holiness. I just don't get it.
I would say the millions of people working at Amazon over the years is what made 99.9999% of that value. Capitalism just lets a single person take the value of their labor.
"it's not like the $2.5t Amazon is worth today would be distributed across Barnes and Noble, Pets.com and other retailers" I'm not sure how you get to this conclusion, it seems sort obvious to me that it would. It's literally why businesses go out of business from competition - someone else is providing the services in their place. Instead of AWS, Azure and Google's cloud offers would likely be significantly more widespread/valuable.
No, it's not; the people complaining that billionaires are the source of many of our problems cause more problems than the billionaires do.
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free.
Or, you know, pay your employees better¹. You want more money? Help other people earn more, get your rich friends on it, raise the median. Then you can earn more. And on a multiplier! The more you give everyone else, the more you can raise your cap.
¹ Seeing as we’re talking Bezos, not exploiting people to the point they have to pee in bottles and work next to dead collapsed coworkers would already but an improvement.
> Makes no sense.
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
You can't individually do enough work to do much of anything we take for granted in our modern era but you can design and build systems, mechanical and social, to do that work. A corporation is such a system often put in motion and helmed by a single person for a significant portion of its existence. It accumulates many people and a lot of capital along the way by means of exchange, cash for goods and services rendered, physical capital in exchange for cash or debt and people's work in exchange for wages. Those people don't own the corporation unless they are given or purchase stock in it. They have already been paid for their input. Expecting otherwise is like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
These people get wealthy by making a pyramid-shaped apparatus that funnels the actual productive output of their employees up to them.
> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.
Your employees are not barred from and often do get a piece of that speculation if they receive shares or choose to buy them. If they aren't willing to buy stock in the company they work for then how does that square with the idea that they should in some other way own more of the profit the company produces? i.e. if they choose to only put in the required labour in exchange for pay what claim do they have on that secondary market when they haven't participated in it?
A business selling grass clippings is a tortured metaphor, just use something sensible like farming. Say I buy land, pay for it to be cleared or clear it myself, buy farm machinery to work it, seed to plant it, arrange to sell it and deal with all of the business overhead of taxes, surveying, planning permissions, records, fees, etc. and maybe I even do some labour at the start to get it running before hiring others. Once I've hired other people and I'm paying them for the work they're doing, which they agreed to as a fair exchange, then what additional claim do they have on the profit I'm making from selling turnips or whatever? Why do you think they should be able to claim more if turnip prices skyrocket? Worse, what claim do they have if turnip futures go through the roof (if I had also speculated on them)?
You're talking millionaire problems and I'm talking billionaire problems. You're not getting to the billionaire class through any self-started farming business.
Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.
It doesn't really matter what the business is, farming was an example but if you need a concrete example of a billionaire that started as a farmer and built his fortune in agriculture and ag related business then look to Harry Stine[0]
There are plenty of other billionaires that started as small business owners putting in their own work. They became billionaires by successfully managing their business and scaling, expanding and pivoting it. There are also ones who derive their wealth strictly from investing or purchasing other businesses, maybe that doesn't seem like work or seems unfair for some reason but you can't just take a random person and hand them millions of dollars and expect them to turn that into a billion dollars. Most would go bankrupt if they tried, smarter ones would just be low risk millionaires living off interest or broadly diversified investment returns. To me, those ones would be the only people I'd say aren't really earning their money but if it's their money then it's their choice what they do with it.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Stine_(businessman)
> but you can design
Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.
The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".
They're never going to let you into the club, dude
Who let Elon in?
billionaires are a flaw in the system. it's an obscene amount of wealth for one person to have. A million is a lot for most people but a billion is 1000 of those.
Just so happens those people are in power, and, checks notes, you are not in power to do anything about it.
It is not a flaw in the system if the system is theirs.
Do you really think your world would be any better? Big corporations would still act under the same incentive structures as they do today (and in fact would continue to do so even if you forced them all to become workers’ cooperatives), you’d just find that these companies’ owners just try a little harder to hide their assets.
Complaining about billionaires instead of about greedy mega corporations just makes your objections seem like they’re based in jealousy, not fairness.
> Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.
> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.
Horseshoe theory is alive and well.
So I guess I'm not exactly clear what you're saying here. A surface reading would be that you're equating somebody saying "It was stupid when Trump tried to rename Lake Ontario" with getting a swastika tattooed on themselves, but that's so stupid that you must mean something else.
Don't know how you could possibly reach that conclusion, it makes no sense.
I'm referring to the fact that the author self-identifies as a "communist, feminist, antifascist," which implies a strict adherence to the exact same kind of cult-like conformism to something "completely off the rails" that he criticizes in the article.
For example, to him, the statement "Lake Ontario is now called Lake America" is absurd, but what do you think his thoughts on the statement "men can get pregnant" are?
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> It just goes on like this. No argument, just mockery. Doesn't address any of the statements, just jeers at them
Yes, because the point of the article is that these are things rational every-day people recognize as being worthy of mockery.
If the author needs to explain to you why not knowing your own address is foolish, how handing your child an AI instead of spending time with them is bad, then you aren't going to get the rest of the thesis. As the author puts it, you've passed the test, you're part of the cult of personality.
I think if you create a Test in order to cast out anyone who doesn't approach a topic the way you do, that kind of sneering creates a brittle purity spiral, as well as the kind of worse thinking that this is supposed to be inoculating you against.
> Yes, because the point of the article is that these are things rational every-day people recognize as being worthy of mockery.
If people recognize something as being worthy of mockery and they are also aware of the situation, they gain nothing from reading some tripe that provides zero new information.
Also, a blog post shouldn't assume that all readers have seen the interview in question. What's the value of talking nonsense about something the readers have never been informed about? At most, the rational readers would be disgusted by the attempt to influence their opinion before they'd seen the facts.
> If the author needs to explain to you why not knowing your own address is foolish,
Well, the readers may not know that the mocked person doesn't know his own address, so when the author doesn't explain it, the author is the foolish one.
If the readers know the facts, mocking someone for trivialities without pointing out some novel reasons "why" is double foolish.
So this is a post criticizing that Jensen doesn't know his address and somehow this is bad and something to do with AI
Very strange article.
I have indeed forgotten how to do long-division, or how to multiply 3-digits numbers in my head. I also forget things without writing them down in a calendar.
How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
You are not a child whose basic brain biology is being formed and improved by learning how to do these. Neuroplasticity is gone for you and it's all downhill from there. Children _need_ to learn because it builds the basis of every single thing they're going to improve on later. They're already being given a world in a catastrophic state, if the only answer they have to things is "i input it in the funny chatgpt box", you might as well condemn them to die.
Jensen saying huehuehue i don't know how to do math in my head in indicative that 1/ He never has normal, day to day interactions where simple calculation needs to be made on the spot 2/ He also doesn't give a shit about making the world worse.
> Neuroplasticity is gone for you and it's all downhill from there.
The field of neuroscience would object to this, I think.
No, neuroscience agrees that there is a slowdown, as well as specific points at which different parts of the brain stop improving at the rate it used to. 35+ years old is widely agreed upon to be a point at which it is extremely difficult to form new neural connections at the rate it used to when you were 16.
No, you are not on track to become a vegetable the day you turn 25. Yes, it requires more and more investment, and literally noone in neuroscience disagrees with that.
The context of Jensen Huang's comments and Tante's commentary is in teaching children the multiplication table, long division, and square roots. As adults we might use a calculator to multiply or divide large numbers to high precision but we understand what we're doing because of practicing easier arithmetic by hand.
> How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
The bad thing is not bothering to learn basic arithmetic. If kids don't learn that they won't understand what the tools are doing.
I guess you'll be avoiding any thoughts that require you to do basic mental arithmetic from here on out. It actually won't be as blissful as you think. Trust me, no one envies your inner world.
I’m kind of sad I can’t do that sort of multiplication in my head anymore. But I think you are missing the point of the article. It’s not that it’s bad people can’t do mental math, it’s about why it is that all these supposed geniuses and titans of industry keep publicly admitting (bragging?) that they lack basic skills, such as knowing their own zip code.
> that they lack basic skills, such as knowing their own zip code
Knowing your zip code isn't a skill though.
I don't know my ATM pin. Does that make me an idiot? Turns out I just don't need to know it.
Sure, remembering basic facts about your life isn't a "skill", per se. But it's pretty crazy to think that Jensen literally doesn't know his own address.
But again, I think you're missing the point of the article. The point of him bragging that he can't remember basic stuff about his own life is both in-group signaling and a test to the interviewer. If the interviewer pushes back and asks "You really don't know your zip code? Are you insane?", the interviewer is never going to get any more time with any of these rich and powerful people. It's an easy way to filter out any critical coverage and a way for the media to show fealty.
The title of the podcast episode is "Jensen Huang vs the AI Doomers", not "Shovel seller is so rich he cannot conceive of what it's like to be a normal person".