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Comment by willeh | Hacker News Reader

It is like mankind woke up one day in 1980s and gave up on the future, a world that had gone the first powered flight to landing on the moon in a generation, woke up that one morning realizing the problems that this evolution has caused. We started rewarding the pessimists pointing out the problems, the zero-sum gamers of wall street. Our universities emptied of optimists and filled up with problematizing relativists... These pessimists are smart of course, we are destroying our planet, our political economy is unjust, our chances of survival are slim to none. On the whole this depression of the human soul produces more accurate predictions, but the prognosis becomes self fulfilling and we stagnate.

I think we need the dreamers today more than ever, to find the unlikely solutions that are closer than we think, to find the miracles of the cosmos stil hidden from us and to find a better live for us all. Let's all dare to dream.

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100% agree. To add, even here on HN, pessimism is very much rampant. So many comments here are just about unfairly dumping on an individual or an organization or just pointing out "flaws" by analyzing someones hard work in 10 seconds before writing a comment. I truly believe some of this is due to over-confidence in ones abilities. With the widespread access to knowledge, it is tempting to feel like an expert without actually having any hands-on experience on the topic. Covid has shown that quite amply.

We should celebrate the downfall of so called 'gatekeepers' of knowledge, and average joe's being able to disrupt entrenched players in industries. But at the same time I believe we need to be very humble, and not overvalue knowledge and information over experience and hard-work.

I don’t understand this viewpoint unless it’s literally just rose colored glasses. Is your argument that nothing cool has been invented in the past 40 years?

Dude you can instantly speak face to face (digitally) with someone anywhere in the entire world right now. I play games with a group of people who’ve never met, but chat all the time from all over the world. I can travel the world renting other people’s homes, have a device that translates my speech into theirs, can look up their history in seconds, don’t need to use a map, and it’s all way way cheaper than it was in the 80s.

There are dreamers and they are changing the world, you’re just too much of a pessimist to see it yourself.

While there obviously has been innovation over the last 40 years, the pace of innovation seems to have slowed.

We got lots of dubious things like bitcoin and twitter. Not a lot of things that required real world risk and engineering - maybe because that's a harder way to make money and the low hanging fruit has been picked.

That's what makes Elon Musk so interesting, he tackled two incredibly hard real engineering challenges and succeeded wildly at both. He changed the world and brought the future closer. That's impressive. I wish there were more entrepreneurs like him.

In my opinion the perception that the pace of innovation has slowed down is the result of a shift away from the physical to the digital. For the last 25 years or so there have been massive innovations in software. A lot of things that were once largely locked to the physical world (banking, diverse entertainment, catching up with old friends and acquaintances) have now been digitized and implemented at a massive scale. It's great and all, but it's not the same as something you can reach out and touch. Even considering something like Neuralink, the hardware to sense brain signals needs to be there before the software can do anything. Innovation in the physical world is what makes things feel like we're living in the future.

There was an article about this that I read years ago that goes into much more depth about this, but I'm having a hard time finding it. If I remember correctly it discussed the job opportunities of people in post world war 2 era, and that many of the (feelings of) innovations were a result of the booming material sciences in response to the cold war, though I'm likely mis-remembering some details.

Elon is willing to go wildly unprofitable, which allows him to be a few years ahead of everyone else on the natural tech. curve. That’s literally all there is to it.

I strongly disagree, if you look at either SpaceX or Tesla, what they've accomplished is far more than a simple willingness to lose money for a number of years while developing the business. Also, that's not how you use the word literally.

Second definition from MW: literally: used to emphasize the truth and accuracy of a statement or description

This so incredibly wrong and un-informed its mind blowing.

SpaceX has been profitable from pretty early on in its history and were until they need massive cash for the Starlink project.

Tesla is a attempting to get into a very, very capital intensive industry and during the early growth and again in 2017 they had to be less un-profitable. But the companies consistently showed that if it stopped growing it could be profitable.

The idea that it literally all there is to it is insane. Pretty much every startup is willing to make loses for growth, it happens literally all the time.

This is simply empirically wrong.

Musk’s companies continuously raise funds, even SpaceX. Spending money in order to grow is easy, and not necessary given sufficient profitability. Look at Apple, Amazon etc. for examples of successful transitions to profitable hypergrowth.

Startups who spend money to grow eventually make it, or die. Musk’s self-promotion, combined with a low interest rate environment, has allowed him to continuously raise enough money to stay in a zombie state, neither dead, nor profitable: only spending.

SpaceX: 39 total funding rounds (missed a few): 2002, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019 (4x), 2020 (x2), 2021

Tesla: 35 total funding rounds (missed a few): 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013 (3x), 2014, 2015, 2016 (2x), 2017 (4x), 2019, 2020 (2x)

Both companies are profitable. This is simply a lack of understanding of business and accounting. Both companies are re-investing all of their profit in massive capital expenditures to support business growth - that's not a money losing endeavour, that's the same strategy that made Amazon into the behemoth it is today. It's also the logical strategy if you have a long time horizon for investment - which is arguably much better than companies which have short-time horizons.

You are crazy if you think Tesla margins are different than other automakers.

They do the exact same thing, and building cars is the worst business there is.

Regardless...now is the moment when the rubber meets the road. Market cap cannot grow more than 1 trillion, Musk now has to start posting margins in line with such marketcap.

> You are crazy if you think Tesla margins are different than other automakers.

Tesla's margin's are about triple Ford's margins over the last decade. That can't last, but it's far from the worst business there is.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/F/ford-motor/profi...

> Regardless...now is the moment when the rubber meets the road. Market cap cannot grow more than 1 trillion, Musk now has to start posting margins in line with such marketcap.

Tesla stock is wildly over-valued in my opinion. Even if everything goes fantastically for the company it may not grow into its own stock price. I would like like to short the stock, among others, to hedge my long positions.

I still believe the company will be a success though - just not as quickly as the market seems to think.

Point being. Will all Musk bootlickers be around when Tesla "succeeds" but is a paltry 87 billion dollar automaker company and Musk goes way down in the Forbes list?

My guess is no. People want to talk about success and success is measured with marketcap and net worth. 99% of people who know Musk name have really no business knowing his name and care very little about electric vehicles.

My guess he also can't handle going back to 2014 levels of social relevancy and will try and run for governor or some other thing like that.

Musk is fundamentally an attention whore, he pumped the marketcap before the company was mature, it's not like Tesla marketcap grew spontaneusly.

This is you: http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

Entrepreneurs aren't rockstars or popstars

Nobody loves/hates Sergey Brin, Lawrance Page, Jim Simons, John Overdeck, Clifford Assness, Andrew Beal etc...

If you worked in the promotional industry you'd know that rockstars/popstars have to be dragged kicking and screaming , away from drugs and parties, to do interviews and media appearences.

Entrepreneurs who want to be famous such as Musk and Trump...nobody is dragging them, they are the ones who want to do it.

As per the article, master promoters, because they know their business is not capable of making it on their own merits.

I remind you that Microsoft never ever took VC money, just organic growth and re-investing revenues. People who do it the proper way don't need the flashes, quite the contrary they are busy hiding their margins to avoid other people getting in the space.

They continuously raise funds not because the product they sell are losing money because they are making money and they want to make more of them.

How is this hard to understand I don't understand.

Go and compare Amazon and Tesla in terms of time since IPO if you want to claim Amazon of example of a good company.

Also, much of the money Tesla raised in the last couple of years is not actually spend, but rather is part of the cash balance of the company.

Also the argument that 'his companies are not as successful as the two most successful companies in the world today' is complaining on a pretty absurd level.

When was the last time you got lost and couldn’t navigate your way to safety?

For all of human history “getting lost” was one of the most prominent plot devices in all of art and we literally solved that within what, the past 10 years?

I think the true problem is that innovations went from solving sensory discomfort (I can’t see in the dark, this chamber pot smells bad) to preventing problems we don’t have yet.

"incredibly hard real engineering challenges" like building a battery powered car?

A random list of real world innovations I can think of which are imo more impressive:

- Large Hadron Collider

- Multicompter. Had you expected 40 years ago the posibilities and commonness of camera drones or having hundreds of multicompter doing light shows?

- you mention dubious inovations in software world but why dismiss the hardware development. Chips smaller than what people 40 years ago thought is physically possible, stacking chips onto each other, quantum computer, filling hard drives with helium to make them more dense (something many people where skeptial about when it first came up), using heat to make hard drives store even more data, e-ink displays

- jetpacks

- improvements in robotics (most popular Boston Dynamics)

- nuclear fusion

- most recently: flying a helicopter on another planet

- maglev trains (but that kind of strech the 40 years range)

- mRNA-vaccins

- or e-bikes. Electic cars are revolutionary why not electric bicycles or planes. They are far from finished but solar powered planes exist. Is such a plane and the people working on it so much less impressive?

You are vastly underestimating how hard it is to build an electric car that people want to buy. Tesla very likely accelerated the adoption of electric cars by at least a decade.

There are, but you need to remove personal cult from the filter. Musk did not design the rockets or come up with the idea of electric car - he cleverly positions himself as the technology guru running whole factories with his own hands but in fact it's a massive effort to hide the names of people who created his products and avoid giving them any credit.

> he cleverly positions himself as the technology guru running whole factories with his own hands but in fact it's a massive effort to hide the names of people who created his products and avoid giving them any credit.

Musk is quick to give credit to his employees if you've actually heard him talk. Also I in no way men to imply that he did anything single handed.

>Musk is quick to give credit to his employees

to whom, for example? And it's true i dont listen to his talks, maybe i missed important details.

Why are so quick to judge someone you don't know anything about?

I don't judge, just state the fact that he will not let any of his employees take even smallest piece of the show. Everything is about Elon Musk and only him, no one else is allowed to speak or show any achievement - anonymous bunch of idiots who can't even run factory without Musk showing everyone how to do their job. And they would apparently be nothing without the self proclaimed genius. Sorry I thought it only happens in North Korea but I was wrong.

> it's true i dont listen to his talks

So you admit you don't know what you're taking about. Then you say the don't judge and then proceed to do exactly that.

This is you: http://paulgraham.com/fh.html

We have some uninformed judgment here, don't you think? Btw I have heard enough of Musk talk to know what's on the show. Don't need to listen to it anymore.

Apparently not, because you don't know that he gives credit to his employees. You also say he calls himself a genius, but I've never heard him say that - although technically he may well be. Certainly he's well above average intelligence to teach himself rocket science.

You have this opinion of him in your head and you're just trying to say that's the real Elon Musk. But it's not, and you haven't actually seen enough of him to know that. It's a strong opinion held in ignorance - which is something the world could use less of.

That's true i haven't seen him give credit to anyone but himself. We can agree here that he's a master of self promotion.

As Peter Thiel said, we got the Star Trek handheld computer and nothing else from Star Trek.

I understand the sentiment of the parent post. All of the things you've described are cool, but aren't exactly awe-inspiring feats of engineering.

I think the fact that Elon actually does take on these high-risk, high-difficulty challenges is what makes people so excited.

Its not that technological progress has stalled but that the outlook of people has stalled.

> I don’t understand this viewpoint

Well no wonder you don't understand this viewpoint because what follows is a loud attempt to invalidating it by shouting it down with your own.

As if people pointing out what's gone wrong with technology aren't aware the internet and AirBnB exist.

The oceans are full of garbage and the planet is on the path to runaway global warming. There are bigger problems than expanding your gaming clique and titillating your need for consumption.

I think your point on zero-sum vs. positive-sum is illuminating. Innovation is positive-sum. When games are perceived as positive-sum, people collaborate. When games are perceived as zero-sum, people compete. Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together.

> Changing the perception - not even the game itself! - has implications for how effectively people work together.

It also has other implications. If you change the perception of reality, while reality remains the same, you're creating a deception. Eventually people will see through the facade, and then you're worse off than before.

How certain are you that the current reality is not a constructed deception?

With a sufficiently strong feedback loop, it very much is.

For example, to the extent our aggregate perspective on the future influences our market decisions now (and by "our" I mean everyone, including the political and industrial leadership), we can pretty much state outright that our outlook on the future will determine the severity of climate challenges ahead. Markets are as good in being affected by hard reality as they're good at amplifying our collective delusions and making the reality conform.

What I noticed is that the really cool scifi novels sort of disappeared.

The ones I remember that filled me with wonder were rendezvous with rama, gateway, ringworld, asimov's robots, etc.

Somehow they were replaced with more dystopian cyberpunk stuff.

I also think franchises like star wars/star trek sucked a lot of mindshare (steady paycheck vs independent writing). And fantasy has changed... lots of urban werewolf/vampire stuff.

(I don't know, maybe crappy stuff like this happens in all eras and I've forgotten the unimportant stuff from then)

I wonder if this has sort of stunted the growth of our imagination.

Perhaps it's the average buying power of US citizens. People today aren't able to afford as comfortable a life in the important things as their parents despite all the new tech, so what use is all the dreaming.

Maybe idle dreaming has been replaced by "more stuff to do".

And I just thought -- maybe reading has been replaced with scifi/fantasy "experiencing" like Halo or Skyrim or WoW

I don't understand why people like hype, being realistic is more helpful than selling dreams. I prefer a pessimist researcher explaining why some things are really difficult and need a lots of work to achieve, or even saying some things might not be achievable, than someone claiming L5 self driving is coming next quarter

Investors and customers don't pay for pessimistic explanations. They want someone to say it'll happen and many people are okay paying for it then. Just take a look at kickstarter and things like Star Citizen. They still make huge money, six years past their planned release date. It's also partly an identity thing. Many get so invested that driving a Tesla is part of their identity and lifestyle.

There's a difference between a kickstarter product being delayed, and solving self driving. The first one you know it's doable, for the second you only hope it's doable.

I agree with the identity part, it's more like a status symbol and hype feeds that.

I think there is a similarity, though. As a customer or buyer, you don't know if Tesla will ever be able to do L5 self driving.

Neither does someone spending 1k dollars on items in a video game ever know if it'll actually be done.

You can take a wild guess in both cases and for most kickstarter projects there might just be some normal hickups and delays.

People are still willing to shell out a lot of money based on some promises, because of "wanting to be involved" or part of that lifestyle.

Pessimism is weirdly addictive. It is a king size chocolate muffin of the soul.

Also, people reward pessimists by paying them attention. We are always more ready to hear bad news. It makes evolutionary sense, but, similar to said sugary muffin, it can be easily overdone, especially with technology ready to serve you large amounts of pessimism every waking hour.

We've seen massive innovations since the 1980s.

This nostalgic pessimism seems to be exactly the kind of pessimism you're complaining about

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

You really just need one disastrous monetary decision to precipitate all the rest of what you mention.

I see this thrown up regularly and often the poster implies that everyone knows why wage growth separated from economic growth. You've alluded to monetary policy, so in this case I guess inflation.

It's a lot more complicated than that. Up until the 1970s unions were incredibly powerful and this was coupled with labour friendly "full-employment" policies. People still argue over exactly what triggered the inflation, but it's clear (at least in my reading) that this was a rare period were labour held sufficient negotiations power to claim it's share of productivity growth.

What follows is known as the revolt of capital, where for many reasons, including the inflation, it became impossible for return on capital to keep up with the printing press.

Then begins a continuing period of dismantling of labor's power through union busting, policy, and globalization. Fundamentally, labour lost it's negotiating power, and hence it's claim to wage growth. Inflation was merely a driver of change.

Yes, there is much more besides the change away from the gold standard in '71. For example, starting '73 congress got electronic voting; since then, becoming more accountable to those who observe and influence them. With the 401k introduction in '78, retirement money was directed to the stock market, reshaping main street investment for decades. In '80, software became expressly copyrightable, opening the frontier of intellectual property. It's a history novel, not a single cause or effect. Our legal/business environment is under constant change, every year transforming the civil game that is our economy.

It's just goldbugs being goldbugs.

Great charts but unfortunately the site is hawking Bitcoin! Newsflash: some faux limited supply monopoly money is not sound currency. In fact there is no place in the world where Bitcoin is used a general currency. None.

>prognosis becomes self fulfilling

It's not self fulfilling if it's accurate to begin with. I assume that what you are trying to say is that they became to pessimistic at the dismal state of affairs and "gave up". But that is not the case at all. Our progress as a species is faster than ever in every account and that is the problem, we are going very fast an the errors we make have larger consequences as a result an we have less and less time to fix them.

The first step to solve a serious problem is to diagnose it correctly. You cannot lie yourself out of a bad situation. The "relativist" as you call them or "realist" as I prefer to call them did their contribution by identifying the problems and setting up a framework to do so going forward, now is up to the rest of society to solve them. That is perfectly within our grasp if we stop pointing fingers at each-other and get to work.

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