Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

Comment by renewiltord | Hacker News Reader

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In general, allowing people to misinform themselves and the people in their circle is a good thing. It applies competitive pressure so that superior information extractors can have an advantage over inferior information extractors. Long-term human survival depends on superior information extraction, so it is better that poor information extractors are currently culled or weakened.

For instance, I love that Bloomberg News is beloved by many Americans, notably (to this audience) HN readers. That's how I made money off the SuperMicro news. I, through pre-existing experience, knew that they were a low quality news source incapable of technology reporting of any calibre. Others, since they lacked this knowledge, sold SMCI. I bought at a discount as a result, and made money.

This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity.

¹ I am neither a tech luminary nor one of these people because I had this false picture of the competence of the CDC - an error that cost me six figures.

Your conclusion doesn't at all follow from your premise.

It's at best a modern-malthusian position, that those who are strongest at information extraction should survive. (As opposed to Malthus's original proposition, that only the wealthy should survive).

But this begs the question: what makes "information extraction" the thing that we should optimize for at social scale? If we can make it so that everyone has access to correct information, there will no longer be a need to compete on information extraction.

This similarly tracks with Malthus's wrongness: we don't actually need to compete on food prices, as we've got enough to go around, there isn't a shortage of food for only the wealthy. And this is true at world scale. Barring some kind of massive catastrophe, we aren't at risk of global starvation where a Malthusian approach would make sense.

> This is part of why so many tech luminaries were ahead of the curve in detecting the COVID-19 problem¹: they are secular information extractors for the most part, untainted by petty identity.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, you are saying that it is a better outcome that the CDC was wrong, as some tech luminaries made money, than if they had not made money and the CDC had provided superior initial guidance, saving thousands of lives.

Yes, of course. The arbitrary human life has a value less than $1k and I suspect is equivalent to almost zero dollars.

Revealing HHS incompetence is worth far more than some few human lives. This virus was harmless but a true pandemic would have destroyed us.

Now America knows whom to listen to. If a second supervirus hits us, one that is actually deadly, then when the HHS lies to the populace to save who it seems the chosen few, the populace won't listen, and society will correctly handle things.

This nice sounding theory is trivial to disprove.

Salem Witch Trials.

It’s often not advantageous to know the truth, especially when the truth is complicated or uncomfortable. It will be rejected or ignored.

You frequently have far more of a competitive advantage if you can make others believe something, whether it’s true or not.

Outside of some very specific domains (like investing, but even markets are irrational), I don’t think it’s accuracy that makes information powerful, it’s emotion.

This is true. I suppose you do need some sort of protection for exploitation of advantageous information.

Though one could argue that there is a useful information extractor necessarily knows to kill others as witches to preserve themselves. Places one on weak footing, though.

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