Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilverBirch | Hacker News Reader

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This gets under my skin for perfectly encapsulating the know nothing blogger type.

> Today, we are in a crisis.

No it's fine.

> Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest.

That's literally what you're doing.

> Log scale.

There's no scale on your axis.

Also, this peice seems to entirely fail to define what a good quest is. They define what a good Thing is. Is it good to solve aging? Obviously. Is it a good quest? I don't know, if you look at Bryan Johnson it sure does look like ridiculous ego driven mid-life crisis rather than a Good Quest. All the historic examples are Good Things that succeeded. Space Flight was a great quest! Well would you have advocated for the Wright brothers to stop mucking about with airplanes and get on with the better quest of space flight? Or advocated for someone in the 15th century to focus on building airplanes?

One of the authors, Trae Stephens, is a co-founder of Anduril, the Anduril that is applying AI (and other tech) to military usage.

And he wants to lecture the rest of us about choosing a "good quest". A middle-finger seems like an appropriate response.

> Log scale. It's worth noting that the hard, good quests here are also significantly more consequential than the easy, good quests.

literally log scale means this. but i guess he is explaining that to people who don't know log scale doesn't linearly scale.

But there's no numbers on the scale! Like what even is 1 unit of difficulty on this chart? Is it 1 person year of effort? It seems to say that the difference in difficulty ratio between the 10th NFT market place and an undifferentiated CPG brand is the same as the difficulty ratio of the Cure for Aging vs a Mars colony.

If you're just hand waving and saying "Hard things over there, easy over there". Fine, but in this article we've now established we're not doing that, we're specifically working on a log scale where the Colony on Mars is equally difficult as the Apollo programme...?

Oh and obviously, since it's a log scale you can't have 0 - which means that somehow, so what does "Doing Nothing" appearing as having a non-zero value on the chart mean?

Log scale can be -1000, -100, -10, 0, 10, 100, 1000. No need to be pedantic. And “doing nothing” is bad because of the opportunity cost. But you’re right that it is at the wrong place on the chart because “doing nothing” can’t be worse than actively making the world a worse place.

> Is it good to solve aging?

No. It's not.

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