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Comment by Fomite | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I want to get really angry, I convert the funding the latest Uber But For Pets On The Blockchain Using LLMs into "R01s" - the standard $1.250 million dollar NIH grants that are considered career making in the biological sciences.

You could change the world with the amount of money he's been given to...do whatever it is he can't even articulate.

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Yeah, but you can change the world, and it doesn't necessarily mean you'll make a lot of money, and that's all anyone cares about, so what are you gonna do?

I think one of the problems is there are ludicrous amounts of money to be made changing the world, enough to make whatever's happening for 99% of most hype-fueld ventures today look like drops in an ocean. So if what I'm saying is to be believed then why doesn't the market optimize for it? Like, if there's so much money to make why doesn't it happen?

I think the answer is in two parts. One, there is a political environment that is very much interested in preserving itself regardless of whatever so-called benefits could come from actually changing the world, and two the market isn't really some kind of god like oracle that always does the "right" thing.

I'll give you an example to better explain what I mean to say.

The Roman Empire had a lot of good things going for it. They had many of the necessary ingredients for an Industrial Revolution to take place more than a thousand years earlier. So why didn't it? Clearly there was a lot of money to be made in hindsight, but in their political environment it was never going to happen.

Rome, as impressive as it was, had a small political class of movers and shakers who owned most of the wealth, and to those people if given more money they'd just buy more farmland. That's it. Literally, to them, the Roman political elite, the only way to invest money was buy farms.

I think in today's day and age we're in a similar conundrum. Obviously it's more nuanced and sophisticated than where the Romans were at, but most of the people who have power today can't understand or imagine the benefit of improving the world. The market isn't magically selecting for those things because they are a large part of the market.

The market favors the market. Capital begets capital.

Humans are at best an afterthought.

Humans are the ones who own and deploy capital. It's ordinary people's savings and pensions. But people like to invent boogymen so that they don't have to take responsibility for their action, so they blame wall street and conveniently forget that its their own money that wall street is managing.

Why does there have to be anyone held responsible at all? Couldn’t it be possible that given the present day’s circumstances everybody just does the best they can, and, nonetheless, it leads to regrettable results?

My example of Rome earlier want meant to point to their political elite as a Boogeyman. I meant it more like despite their best efforts an Industrial Revolution was virtually impossible in that environment.

Funny enough having slaves and oligarchy was exactly the kind of thing that held Rome back. I mean only to imply that in todays day and age, we have our version of that same situation, and similarly there is untold prosperity forever waiting to happen until the status quo changes.

> Why does there have to be anyone held responsible at all?

Because they were granted power, and responsibility was the other half of that equation.

Someone's having a "Are we the baddies?" moment :-)

Ordinary people don’t have savings and pensions, at least not in the US.

Almost 50% of Americans directly or indirectly benefit from the stock market. You don't think they're ordinary?

> Humans are the ones who own and deploy capital.

This is a silly argument, Hitler was human too.

> It's ordinary people's savings and pensions

Exactly, so my pention is being used to reward unrpoductive businesses that just do damage to society.

Note that by "capital" meant material, not financial (although the latter reflects the former). Corporations are growing in power at a rate faster than people are. B2B grows faster than B2C.

Even then, private pension funds are a scourge indeed. State-managed PAYGO systems are far less destructive.

Beside, the distribution of economic power is heavily lopsided. Most people have close to none.

Those who have the brunt of it are setting up the system for their own benefit. Under the guise of FreeMarket™ we end up with an economy planned by the wealthy so that they can grow their fortune.

State managed pension systems are a pyramid scheme. Government shouldn't be involved in things that society can manage on it's own.

*can manage on its own well. The market manages - explicitly or through regulatory capture and toadies - a hell of a lot of things that the state probably should, like the Texas power grid. Markets are rarely efficient except in the very short term and very small scale.

The market is the best solution when the optimum is a maximum. Growth is absurd in many fields.

- Food => A steady state is optimal. Growth seeking directly leads to the obesity crisis

- Health => the sector should be working on planning its own obsolescence, not on growing.

- Housing => Ever increasing humanity's footprint is destructive and should be limited.

etc...

> - Health => the sector should be working on planning its own obsolescence, not on growing.

That's what it was before government intervention, at least in UK and US. Worker's organisations had employed their own doctors and managed very good, driving medical professionals wages down. Doctors associations asked governments to intervene, license their profession and used this licensing to punish doctors who would work for such organisations.

And now people see broken systems and think that even more intervention would improve things.

That sounds like an argument that someone with an unusual amount of wealth and power might make to downplay the unusual amount of responsibility that wealth and power confers on them.

In today's economy power and wealth are not even close to evenly distributed.

Claiming that responsibility should be evenly distributed is therefore a highly disingenuous argument.

Technology itself has an emergent will that is independent of humans who create and operate it. A global technological system is not subject to rational human control.

Please see the book Technological Slavery by Dr. David Skrbina and the books of Jacques Ellul on this matter.

The book Technological Slavery is not "by" David Skrbina. It is by Theodore Kaczynski. Skrbina just wrote the "afterward" in that book.

Right, I thought the attribution was to him, since afaik he compiled Ted's writings.

No, Kaczynski compiled his own writings. He also wrote a second book, Anti-Tech Revolution. In Kacynski's latest edition of Technological Slavery Skrbina's introduction doesn't even appear. It was a shitty introduction anyway.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

No snowflake blames itself for the Moloch avalanche it creates.

Ps I just want to be clear that I don’t use the word “political” in its normal, toxic and conspiratorial way. I just meant to say the present combination of policies and their incentives for the various stakeholders.

Indeed. The investors and boards care not about total amount od wealth a venture could generate, but about the amount they can capture. A $100B benefit to the world, of which the people involved can capture only $1K is useless, compared to $10M world benefit of which they can capture $9M (and the preferred one is the one which earns them $100M while giving the world negative $1B).

With the amount of money I spent on my car (which is not a lot compared to what most people spend) I could have saved several people by donating to givewell, at a comparatively trivial inconvinience of having to bicycle/take the bus to work.

But I didn't, because the money is mine to do with as I please. Just like the billionairs money is theirs to do with as they please.

Technically correct, but can be applied to a lot of things that were technically correct:

- Land was the Lord's to do with as they pleased

- Slaves were the owner's to do with as they pleased

etc.. if the wealth is gathered through exploitation, I think it is appropriate to criticize how that wealth is being used. Hell, it's appropriate to just criticize the wealth, I think.

But these things are shades of gray and rarely as clear-cut as slavery. For example, let's say you're the only job in XYZ town. People aren't forced to work there, but they kinda gotta. Things are not so simple in most cases.

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