Tyler Cowen launches fellowship and grant program for moon shot ideas
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I was at a launch event for 'Create Your Own Economy' in Washington DC. It was a small event, at least small enough I had a chance to talk with Mr. Cowen uninterrupted for five or ten minutes while I bought a copy of his book.
Having read Satoshi's whitepaper a month or so prior, and being pretty excited about it, I attempted to describe the idea of a currency without a central authority to Mr. Cowen. I don't remember his exact words, but his basic sentiment was 'That's not possible, and even if it is, nobody would value it'.
The conversation made enough of an impression on him he signed my book 'To Tim - To the Idea of Fantasy'.
So I 100% agree, there's no way he would have funded Satoshi.
Or maybe he's just jumping on bandwagons. I'm not sure that's the case, but it's another possibility.
Actually, it looks like he was in fact correct.
Anyone know if this the case?
I'm not weighing in on how good or bad his ideas are. But I see way more of the blockchain in the world than I do (knowingly) of Peterson.
What am I missing?
I have also consumed a lot of Peterson content, and much of what he says has a lot of value, and not just for young men. He also holds positions I think are indefensible, unscientific, and highly prejudiced. It is important to embrace nuance and subtleties, loving parts of what we dislike and disliking parts of what we love.
Sure, all of that exists in various crappy people in obscure corners of academia. But he makes it out to be widespread, and he makes it out that no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia. Neither of which is true. But more troubling, there's a community of right wing pundits who use Peterson and his theories to justify total vilification of the left and academia in their entirety. The impression you get from Peterson is that no gender studies professor has ever done anything except hate traditional values and the people who love them.
There are people out there making constructive criticisms of overzealous leftists. Peterson seems to be choosing a purely divisive path. You can tell because he never talks to or about anyone on the left with more moderate views. He only engages the center right and the radical left, because fundamentally his goal isn't to reform the left, it's to justify his own rightward shift in his personal politics.
I simply cannot agree with your assertion that Peterson et al are cherry-picking and that academia is fundamentally sound. These pathologies are too common and too widespread not to constitute some kind of systemic issue. I find your arguments unconvincing. Instead, I believe that a correction is long overdue.
Disciplines that reject reason, empiricism, and rigor, that claim all truths are equally valid, and that hold the only valid goal of pedagogy is tearing down power dynamics --- these are indoctrination, not inquiry, and the public should not fund this activity.
> no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia
Academia really does apply extreme social and political pressure to unorthodox thinkers. Look at the campaign against Rachel Fulton Brown.
> use Peterson and his theories to justify
It's become common lately to argue that we shouldn't acknowledge certain facts because unscrupulous people might use them to justify something bad. This position is not tenable. The truth always gets out, and when it does, those suppressing it lose all of their influence and credibility. It's far better to acknowledge facts and work with them.
The fact that unscrupulous people lean on Peterson to villify the left is not my concern. My concern is that Peterson seems to engage exclusively with those people, and he himself doesn't appear to see any variance amongst people in the various groups he targets (leftists, academics, feminists, antifa, etc).
A ton of modern physics theoretical research is basically math that doesn't lead to verifiable results, and this leads to very valid questions about wasting our time. I think an argument can be made that physics in this area, in a sense rejects empiricism, because people's entire careers are going to be research that can't be verified. Of course people strongly want verifiable claims. I understand that not all of physics is that way. Would you ban this area for public funding? Probably not, but I think it fits in your description. I'd venture that business colleges have a lot more conservatives than liberals and it's probably hard to be a far leftist in business (like a practicing communist!). Just to continue on business, I think a lot research about the effectiveness of different management strategies is not well supported by research, it's more anecdotal - the research about the genius of Jack Welch, well we didn't know about all that unaccounted for financial management that lead to GE being removed from the DOW. That's not to say there there is not good scholarship, in business, I think there is.
I do strongly support verifiable research, but some areas are hard to directly verify, especially dealing with humans and society, leading to hard to evaluate results. Writings about literature, analyzing texts in different ways, well that's all pretty subjective.
“The law recognizes that everyone has the right to self-identify their gender and that “misgendering” is a form of discrimination.”
“Refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity, or purposely misgendering, will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social area covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services like education.”
http://www.ohrc.on.ca/en/questions-and-answers-about-gender-...
His followers have absorbed some pretty terrible ideas from him. This was a comment about the recent decriminalization of homosexuality in India: https://i.imgur.com/W80VytS.png
What/where is the best list of moon shots being currently worked on and backed?
Positron Dynamics is putting up a cube sat in the near future to demonstrate feasibility.
Generating antimatter is easier in space and using it instantly gets rid of storage hassles.
The amount needed for a trip to Mars would be around 10mg, the journey time would be measured in weeks.
Possibly the best hope there is for constant acceleration spacetravel.
https://www.positrondynamics.com
https://medium.com/dissected-by-propel-x/positron-dynamics-p...
Matthew Weinberg, former Special Advisor to the SBA's Office of Investment and Innovation, disagrees with you. With respect to the SBIR program, he said:
"It’s fundamentally astounding that the federal government—not private venture capital firms or banks—is the entity backing these moonshot investments that end up changing the world[1]."
He also wrote an article about the SBIC and SBIR programs entitled, "Your federal government drives innovation by investing in moonshots[2]".
(My italics)
1. https://www.fundera.com/blog/sbir-program
2. https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/03/your-federal-government-dr...
"And individual federal agencies that participate in the program can decide what they are interested in researching."
This is true, I never said something different. I just know from people two who got SBIR I and II who discouraged me to apply since they know how the selections process works.
The are more fundamental gov't programs for "moon shots" within NASA and DARPA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Institute_for_Advanced_Co...
Trust me, the mathematical chance of approximately 10% has nothing to do with your real chances which could be much lower, or much higher.
If they’re typical recipients of MacArthur Grants then the Emergent Ventures grantees will definitely look worse on average. Some of them will try and fail. None of the MacArthur grant awards are going to fail and drop into obscurity. They’ve all already reached some level of success.
Whatever about Peterson Satoshi Nakamoto developed a financial technology on a par with at least international wire transfers and possibly fiat money. Even if BitCoin as such is insecure and collapses, worthless some altcoun is going to be traded in 100 years. The technology is a big deal.
> what is one mainstream or "consensus" view that you absolutely agree with? (This is our version of a “trick” question, reversing the now-fashionable contrarianism.)
I searched Google for variations on the contrarian inverse of the question, but couldn't find anything that seemed relevant.
Can you help me?
Of course, Cowen is also a market actor. So, I'm not sure where the inconsistency lies.
"Individual actors usually receive most of the benefit and pay most of the cost of their actions, making market failure the exception, not the rule. On the political market individual actors—voters, politicians, lobbyists, judges, policemen—almost never bear much of the cost of their actions or receive much of the benefit. Hence market failure, the exception on the private market, is the rule on the political market."
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Machinery_3d_Edition/Market%20...
Socialists are concerned with giving more, and libertarians are concerned with taking less, but bureaucrats and plutarchs are aligned in taking more and giving less.
And yet we fight each other...
I've read two of his books. I don't find his views to be very libertarian. He supported bank bailouts.
I've never heard him say this. Can you direct me to one such interview? I'm not a huge Peterson fanboy, but neither do I think the man is the demon-being that he's sometimes portrayed as by many in the media.
I have seen quite a few of his interviews and never heard him say that he is smarter than the interviewer. So I think some citations are needed here.
Slater Systems LLC
Wish us luck (Slater and me)
I don't understand this quote. Satoshi is a fictional person as far as I'm concerned, who's idea has already succeeded to the extent that it can.
I don't even want to know what this Jordan Peterson guy needs funding for. He already has a very vocal, supportive fan base. He can probably raise a lot of money with Kickstarter if he needed to.
HN can't be a community without members. Disembodied comments are not community members. No one is required to use their real name here, but users need to have some consistent identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all.
A disembodied-comment forum would be a different kind of site—perhaps an interesting one, but not Hacker News. You're free to find one or create one, but not to turn this one into that.
Edit: that link no longer seems to work, but it was to a page of the book discussing an anonymous community that the WELL tried in the 80s, which quickly became abusive.
I don't have a solution to offer here, but I increasingly sympathize with those that create throwaway accounts, especially now that intent is not longer considered when interpreting comments. People have been losing their jobs not for what they meant, but due to how their words were interpreted by someone else. The fact that HN doesn't allow one to delete their comments, makes these cultural changes increasingly concerning. Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.
It's also inaccurate about deletion. We're happy to delete or redact older comments when users ask us to, and we do this all the time. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion.
I was talking mostly about users who create throwaway accounts for everything, including uncontroversial stuff, so I don't see the relevance of the culture wars here.
As for Eternal September, people have been saying these things for almost as long as HN has existed. If you want a plus-ça-change moment, take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646871 from eight years ago (edit: or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=926604, from nine).
HN's system is long established. I don't see much upside to reordering it, and considerable downside.
People will downvote for whatever reason they want; HN admins can't control that, and couldn't stop people downvoting for disagreement even if they wanted to (though the karma threshold helps to limit downvoters to people who value the health of the community at least to some degree).
The best comments are those that people needn't strongly agree or disagree with, but that cause one to learn something new or think about something in a way they hadn't previously.
If you try and phrase most comments like that (which is surprisingly achievable, even - or especially - on the more contentious topics), downvotes needn't be a problem for you.
You can control downvoting for disagreement by explicitly stating a norm against it, as StackOverflow does with alt text over the downvote and Reddit does with Reddiquette.
I don't believe I had had a comment downvoted before this one expressing disagreement with downvoters. However, I have found that many downvoted comments do contribute to the discussion, and even earn my upvote about 25% of the time. I don't think the downvote inner circle has a wholly positive effect on the site.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=corrective%20upvote&sort=b...
Your desired solution only deepens such problems. It agrees that one is guilty and deserving of being fired instead of pushing back against that idea.
Disney recently fired someone for decade old tweets. Shortly thereafter, some publication stood by its decision to hire someone when their old not PC tweets came to light.
Civil liberties can be lost at any point in time. Gaining them doesn't guarantee them in perpetuity. They need to be guarded and promoted.
Your proposed solution does the opposite of that.
I doubt you have the energy to try and enforce your one-username policy against all the users who do this, but even if you did, you're just contributing to making this place even more of a monoculture than it already is. People who keep their usernames are mostly playing a popularity contest with silly karma points. Are you sure you're incentivising the right group for healthy and enlightening discussions??
I do think both are examples of how constraints and a long, unusual background lead to outstanding results. A fund like this attempts to shortcut that long climb but I think that would prevent the result from being unusual enough to be remarkable. I think funds like this are better for defined needs that are difficult to fund, such as open research questions.
Satoshi made a ton of money off bitcoin
Jordan Peterson is one of the top 10 earners on Patreon: https://graphtreon.com/top-patreon-creators
In any case, he couldn't make any money off it between ~2006 - Bitcoin Pizza Day 2010, because it either didn't exist or it did but bitcoins were worthless and he couldn't give them away.
The minute possibility of being a billionaire in a decade does not pay any bills in the present, any more than it does for regular startups, who need VCs or other forms of investment.