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Comment by bthornbury | Hacker News Reader

A giant fallacious argument. Hard even to read. See examples below.

> "That your post elicited outrage from a large body of people who study sociology, politics, and culture should provide you with some evidence that, perhaps, you are wrong."

Argumentum ad populum. Appeal to Authority. Slightly softballed with the perhaps, but it doesn't make it better.

If all we ever did was listen to the experts, the earth would be flat still.

> "So, maybe it’s a real problem when you share your thoughts on something you don’t understand."

Where's the line where you're "understanding" enough to talk about things?

I can't get through the fallacious logic enough to see the real argument here.

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> If all we ever did was listen to the experts, the earth would be flat still

That's mostly a myth. In almost all cases, at least in objective fields, the people who establish a new understanding that replaces the old expert consensus are themselves experts in the old understanding.

The people who established a round earth in any given culture were experts in that culture's flat earth view.

Copernicus was an expert in geocentric cosmology.

Galileo was an expert in Aristotelian physics.

Einstein was an expert in Newtonian physics.

Sources required, for all our benefit

ad populum or no, the original post "E Pur Si Muove" struck me as some kind of dog-whistle for eugenics-lite, along with a side of butthurt for being tsk-tsked about it, so I see where this dude is coming from--even if his argument could use a little work.

However, I am purely going off the tone of Sam's article. I know very little about Sam Altman. He could have been coming from a place of goodwill and sincerity. If he was, "E Pur Si Muove" also needs a little work, 'cause at face value... dog whistle.

> dog-whistle for eugenics-lite, along with a side of butthurt for being tsk-tsked

What does this even mean..

From the original:

'More recently, I’ve seen credible people working on ideas like pharmaceuticals for intelligence augmentation, genetic engineering, and radical life extension leave San Francisco because they found the reaction to their work to be so toxic. “If people live a lot longer it will be disastrous for the environment, so people working on this must be really unethical” was a memorable quote I heard this year.'

Unless the plan is to give a dose (or a prolonged treatment, if that's what it ends up being) to all ~7.6B people for free, that basically puts more wind in the sails of the team that is already ahead--as opposed to grandpa's old-school eugenics that sought to end the race then-and-there for the team that was already behind. Eugenics-lite.

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