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Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

God I hate this rhetorical style - to lead with the conclusion ("The era of Artificial Intelligence is here, and boy are people freaking out. Fortunately, I am here to bring the good news: AI will not destroy the world, and in fact may save it."), to title the post with a question (which conventional wisdom says the answer is always "no").

It's been what, 30 years since Netscape, and Marc's brain has been pickled by infinite wealth, and it shows. And I say this as someone rather bullish on LLMs.

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I prefer when authors lead with the conclusion and then spend the rest of the essay supporting it.

I hate long essays that bury the lede, and force you to read through paragraphs of bloviating and pontificating until they finally get to the point. Save that for the fiction novels.

Whenever I come across an essay like that, I either skip reading it, or read it backwards starting at the end conclusion and then working backwards to see how it was justified. Marc is just saving me some work here.

I recently started copy pasting these types of articles into ChatGPT and asking it to make a bullet point summary with the thesis first.

But in this case he begins with: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”

Beginning from paragraph one I am already doubtful he will be able to convincingly support it.

I guess I'm happy that he's confident that AI wars will be better for it (you know, when we have to have those pesky things).

It was a very odd list of wishful New Foundation fantasies.

Start with a two paragraph thesis, then use the rest of the article supporting it?

I agree that wealth may have influenced Marc significantly, but as someone who is MUCH less rich, and who has been right about most major trends over the past 20 years, I think he is generally correct here.

The good news is that our predictions are pretty short term, we'll know who was right in 5 years.

I don't mind leading with the conclusion, but I do mind that this piece never actually made any arguments in support of that conclusion. It's just a list of assertions.

In other words, it's a sales pitch.

The title being a question is actually a feature of HN, which de-sensationalizes titles. The original title is “Why AI will save the world”.

I hate this "feature". It's grammatically incorrect and it's putting words in the mouth of authors.

People hate clickbait titles too. And titles are communal property, unlike the authors’ words.

A better solution is to show the original title as well as the poster’s title which includes context or clarifications

He comes off as usual too optimistic and dismissive or blind of the opposing side. a lot has been discussed about this since Marx. he is not the only authority on the matter. also, these huge sentences of breathless redundancy and lists. I think he's right in about half of it.

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