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Comment by shafyy | Hacker News Reader

Here's something some software engineers need to understand: Most things in society and the world are not technical problems. Just because you can invert a binary tree doesn't mean you understand how society works.

It seems like some people, just because they are smart in one area, think they know everything. We see this with many VCs, Elon Musk, Vitalik etc.

Reading this post, I don't even know where to begin. This sounds like the ramblings of a kid that never had any real friends and community, and never lived in the real world. But maybe we have peaked as a society (at least in the US), and it's all going downhill from here?

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I think an extension of this is that a remarkable portion of people in SV have no interest in research. They don't go "I want to solve problem X, I'm going to do some research into what already exists in that area" they go "I'm going to solve problem X from first principles", and then they slowly and painfully discover all the things that everyone else already knew. This is just pseudo-philosophy. You would've thought that network states, being very obviously juxtaposed to nation states would have an idea of what a nation state is. But it's pretty obvious he doesn't even understand the concept he's opposing - he confuses a nation state for a country... because it's never occured to him that he needs to actually understand the words he's using.

Abstract ramblings indeed. But also interesting in the sense that it's tiresome to share a state with people who are motivated differently, so why not try this "Network state" instead?

While I don't want to surmise as to the state of his friends and community (1729 which Balaji runs does have a good amount of people in it and I have made a good friend from there personally), I think that anyone interested in this topic who is an engineer should go and spend a year or two working in government just to see how it really works (and also put up or shut up at a certain point)

That is the kind of criticism that the idea of a constitutional republic got back when all we had were kingdoms.

Precisely said.

> It seems like some people, just because they are smart in one area, think they know everything. We see this with many VCs, Elon Musk, Vitalik etc.

Totally correct. Elon's wild claims on solving FSD (Fools Self Driving) seemed to be a total disaster, and Vitalik's claims on his decentralized slot machine utopia 'Ethereum' on how using a generalized blockchain to solve 'anything' from voting, social networks, DAOs, NFTs, etc has manifested into a tinkerbell griftopia [0] as feared by even the most fierce critics of blockchains.

Finally, VCs really don't care on being wrong on thousands of failed investments. They just need one massive return to make up for all of it hundreds of times over and somehow they are viewed as 'experts' which is a great example of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. We don't hear them screaming about Clubhouse which was hyped to the extreme since it is isn't doing great as expected after being copied to death.

Also reading this article in particular, it is gearing close to sophistry.

[0] https://www.stephendiehl.com/blog/tinkerbell.html

This is exactly how I feel about anarcho-capitalism (also known in the USA as libertarianism), and ideology that seems devised by a 10 year old with no life experience. How a grown-up person can take this nonsense seriously is beyond me. Bewildering.

I'm sure they would say the same thing about whatever nonsense you believe.

The difference is that mainstream liberal capitalism has decades of real world results across dozens of countries while anarcho-capitalism has nothing.

They do have the Satoshi ;)

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/sep/07/disastrous-voya...

You can achieve the stated goals of anarcho capitalism or anarcho communism with policies that have nothing to do with these movements.

In fact the problem with anarcho capitalism is that the freedoms it provides are also the rope on which it hangs itself. It is the dodo of economic systems with no sense of self preservation.

Getting rid of the rope involves taking away some freedoms that nobody should have, but that would go against the spirit of both anarcho capitalism and libertarians.

good point

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