More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substack author is to take a basic object level opinion e.g. "I don’t like pronoun people" or "AI people are dumb" and turn it a whole pseudo intellectual rant without ever getting to the point.
I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that was proven to be bad by the passage of time.
The rhetorical sleight of hand is that it's not true that feeling you're being censored - and needing to self-censor - is the same as actually being censored.
Self-censorship and self-selection are endemic in the corporate world, and the associated beliefs are mostly taken for granted without dissent.
You're not going to get far in fintech, management consulting, or media channels such as Fox if you start questioning why so many people are poor, ill, and homeless.
Similarly, if you work for FAANG you're not going to have a job for long if you start suggesting these BigCos should reinvent themselves as worker co-ops.
That's a very different kind of argument to the one about pronouns, because most people are not actually threatened in real terms by (say) LGBTQIA+ or unionisation.
Of course plenty of people are just fine with how things are and the article is right to the extent that it points out that ideological conformity is a middle class luxury.
Edit: Just to specifically point out the effects of this author’s “motivation,” the cited article on myside bias actually doesn’t say this:
> Students and graduates of top universities are more prone to myside bias. They are more likely to “evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.”
It says everyone is prone to myside bias, and that more intelligent people are less prone to detecting it in themselves. This is important due to what it implies about the inverse. If it’s true that the woke lib professors are more prone to forming their beliefs based on their social surroundings, it’d suggest they’re more liable to be wrong. If, however, everyone is liable to form beliefs in this way (which they are), then there’s no implication whatsoever about truthfulness on either side, at least not stemming from this effect.
And in fact, if anything, it’d suggest the exact opposite of what the author implies by virtue of a really simple, obvious fact: an expert’s social circle is more likely to be well-informed on the domain of expertise than the social circle of a complete outsider.
Exceptions obviously exist and experts ought to be questioned vigorously, but to suggest that social circles are have spent collectively zero time learning about and thinking about an area are going to have a better grasp on that area than a group of individuals who have spent careers in it is really just dismissing the entire concept of expertise — the concept of learning — altogether.
Which makes it really important to determine the actual boundaries of that domain of expertise.
A decent corollary to that: how the pro-Israel media campaign is working out in the latest flare up with Palestine now that TikTok has been added into the mix, a fantastic illustration of the real reason they want to take it down.
Looking ahead… Probably these vector db company valuations, most companies doing AWS competitor DX plays.
I think the author thinks more along the lines of Steve Jobs trying to cure his cancer with herbal tea, Elon Musk sleep depriving himself into a twittering idiot, Scientology, NLP and various "success hacking" fads etc.
The answer there might be that in reality successful people are not really very different from unsuccessful ones, and have very little control over the contingencies and luck that put them onto their respective paths. This is certainly the case with financial success.
I don’t think that any of the named ones were particularly well-executed, and people were trying to warn that all of them were problems for a while. Madoff might be the closest, but even there it was verging on being an open secret that there was something up; again, Madoff’s investors were not actually that sophisticated.
It's also important to remember that vacuum tube trains are an 1800s idea, which everyone started pretending is some revolutionary new transportation concept.
But: it's probably still a dumb idea, but one that is borderline.
(the answer of course is nothing: the Hyperloop would be stupidly expensive, and however fast it is wouldn't solve the logistics problem of loading and unloading it - so whatever quote you've seen for rail, just triple it if you tried to build a hyperloop).
So both from a density perspective and a topology perspective there are serious challenges to overcome. Which makes things like highway one even more impressive (especially when you take into account some of the territory it runs through, I think that its construction should rank right up there with the Panama Canal and the Chinese wall).
As it is it did not look sustainable to me while I was living there.
In principle that's true. But in practice mining rights and such have been split off from the right to the land and some reasonable depth underground. And any objection to an easement would be much harder to establish if it doesn't actually affect you. But for those parties that own the underground and mining rights for a given location there could well be a viable opposition to such a development. But that would then risk an eminent domain claim.
It's all pretty complex. But I would still assume that going underground is easier than going above ground where the parcels are small and the interests are immediate due to interference with existing activity.
Yes, easily 3 to 10x.
> A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it won't even completely avoid the need for buying above ground lands.
Indeed, so it's both a technical and economical non-starter. But it's not a 'dumb idea' in the sense that it is impossible. Merely impractical, too expensive and too complex and besides cheaper solutions exist (aircraft, for one, which scale much better with increasing distance than rail ever will).
One thing all of these 'dumb ideas' and the hyperloop, tidal energy and so on all have in common: they are great ways to get your grubby fingers on subsidies.
Why not? It's just a series of smaller sections that must each individually achieve near vacuum.
For reference, the largest existing vacuum chamber is some 30mx35m (100 feet x 120 feet). Each one of the sections you would need here would have to be many times longer than the biggest vacuum chamber ever built to make any sort of sense.
Sometimes this sort of skepticism is warranted because our understanding is sufficient (like our understanding of material science needed for a space elevator), but sometimes this is less clear, and I think hyperloop concepts fall into the latter category.
Still, the LHC is hardly maintaining that vacuum continuously all year round. And it is one of the most sophisticated engineering and scientific projects attempted in history. Hardly a good idea for a train project.
Even so, once you've built one LHC, subsequent ones would be substantially cheaper because the primary difficulty is building the scientific and engineering knowledge needed while you're building it. Similar factors apply to programming: the first version of your program took awhile to build, but if you suddenly lost all of the code, rebuilding it would take a fraction of the time because you don't have to build your understanding of the domain the second time around.
Maybe all of these factors combined still wouldn't be enough to make hyperloop economical, but that conclusion is not obvious.
It would probably be ideal if you could factory make each section and ship it on a standard truck, but with the growth of additive manufacturing, other possibilities also open up, like 3D printing the large metal container onsite.
It would have been insanely difficult to maintain a useful enough vacuum over huge distances that the hyperloop was supposed to run.
A single failure in such a system could have catastrophic consequences across a huge range.
edit: beaten by @tsimionescu by a minute.
> Musk admitted Hyperloop was about getting legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California. He had no plans to build it
https://twitter.com/alexdemling/status/1557221632837505025
https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...
For instance, take the “moon deniers” that is the idea being dismissed by “correct” people. When in reality there a whole range of arguments — “we landed on the moon, recordings were faked” to “aliens told us to tell everyone we landed”, etc it’s the reasoning that matters. Quite often “smart” people have the same information as everyone else. That’s also why IMO “smart” people are equally likely to believe in conspiracies as anyone else, they have the same info.
"They found that highly educated people are the most concerned about losing their jobs or missing out on job opportunities because of their political views".
If I was being charitable, I would say that title is trying to capture attention while sacrificing the expectation one may have of its content.
Edit: point taken.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_...
And in a way that is probably his biggest contribution: to show that if science focuses on that which works and can be generalized there will be massive progress. Because for a single individual, especially in that age his output was extremely impressive and that couldn't have worked if he didn't channel his energy to areas that were deemed to be fruitful.
> Leonardo da Vinci made a number of drawings of devices he hoped would make free energy. Leonardo da Vinci was generally against such devices, but drew and examined numerous overbalanced wheels
Just drawing some stuff that looks like perpetual machine isn't the same as actually believing in it. In fact this is how science should work. Even if something has a small chance to be correct try that and think about it. Einstein didn't believed in black holes but thought about breakdown of his equations.
Cynicism isn't wisdom though.
People gobbled it up with the justification that random researchers on twitter "replicated" the results under the assumption that these anonymous researchers are putting their entire career on the line and therefore should be paid attention to. That is literally playing into the point the article is making. I.e. people believing lies because the information came from a higher status individual.
Communism is the idea that in order to be successful you have to kiss asses at the location where you want to eventually become someone, for example a government agency or a political party.
Capitalism is the idea that in order to be successful you should be able to kiss asses wherever and however you can and be able to move the provents from the aforementioned ass kissing at some other place (in the form of money) so you don't have to start all over. So you can make some ass kissing arbitrage in order to minimize the amount of ass kissing that you do.
I prefer the latter because I don't like to be constrained in one place and might have a bit of commit-o-phobia but it's not a stretch to think that people who like to put the work day-in and day-out in the same place, see familiar faces everyday and don't have commit-o-phobia might prefer the former.
In the end it's all about kissing asses and there are very minor differences. Long gone are the days of low hanging fruits where you could singlehandedly invent the wheel or fire, now every minor marginal improvement in anything requires some serious ass kissing and given that it's a practice that nobody likes you see emerge these big ideological battles between factions who say:
"There would be more stuff and less need for ass kissing in a libertarian free market haven"
and those who reply :
"In a proper commune the need for ass kissing would be at an all time low and the stuff would be at an all time high"
Reality is nobody knows if the wheel or fire were invented in a commune or libertarian haven because it was something so self-evident and straightforward that these sort of mega ideological battles were a non-factor.
ROFL.
Minus the last paragraph. Remember primes are infinite. Improvements are infinite, the slow down is only to log speed, still plenty fast.
Yeah but the brain gets more excited going from 0 to 10mph on a self built skateboard than from mach1 to mach2 on the Concorde, because you are in the exciting part of the S-curve.
Also because skateboard you singlehandedly crafted and it's yours, Concorde you need a million people give or take to build and billions of man hours and you get to rent 1/160th of it for about 3 hours. And those 3 hours cost some serious ass kissing to acquire.
Which means that, if this continues indefinitely, more and more things belong to fewer and fewer people - which is exactly what we've been seeing over the last couple of decades.
The actual issues of our current world happen because this pure version of capitalism doesn't happen. There's all sorts of things which lead to non-efficient people / organizations accumulating a lot of capital.
In general, it's not true that companies would merge without regulation. Why would Apple merge with Samsung? It doesn't make any sense.
Usually, regulation causes monopolies to form. A prime example is the patent system, which literally grants a monopoly to an idea. There would be much more competition without IP protection laws, which in my opinion doesn't belong in capitalism. For example, if all Apple's patents and copyrights were openly licensed, there would be much more competition with higher quality, but cheaper products.
Are we forgetting how Microsoft absolutely dominated the PC market in the 90s and early 2000s? How today, there's basically two mobile operating systems that can determine much of today's mobile experience?
I agree that IP laws serve to entrench monopolies (although they also have the effect of encouraging development (e.g. of expensive drugs) in the first place - so it's a double edged sword). But so do a lot of other, much more "natural" mechanisms such as network effects, brand recognition, etc.
I feel like the libertarian, "pure capitalism" world view only makes sense if you think that consumers are omniscient and perfectly rational, but we know fully well how neither of these things are true.
I used to work for a company that would just buy up a bunch of smaller companies and then drive them into the ground. The smaller companies had the better tech, but the large company had a user base, a brand and money.
It's true that there are a lot of natural centralizing forces, such as network effects. Not sure how to resolve those.
However, getting back to the original point, no matter how you think about it, capital efficiency requires that 'a few' manage the capital, because naturally there are 'a few' who manage capital better than the rest. The problem is selecting those few. I think it's a misconception to argue that capital shouldn't centralize in principle, or that it's a morally bad thing.
Also, efficiency in a free market is really about fulfilling the needs of people according to their free will in the most efficient way possible. There's no forcing function to produce more if people don't want to consume more. In Soviet Union, they were very efficient at producing some stuff, but they made stuff that no one needed (they made lots of cheap shoes in big factories, which no one wanted). I.e. there's a difference in being efficient in isolation, and efficient at fulfilling needs of the market.
And I don't believe that this is what we should optimise for. "More of everything, for cheaper" somehow doesn't seem to make people happier. I think that more shared ownership is more important, especially if you consider the effects of increased inequality on intangible goods such as democracy (e.g. how currently a few tech companies can influence global political discourse).
But even if I was willing to concede your point, somehow most people who argue for "pure meritocratic capitalism" never seem to suggest that we should have a 100% inheritance tax. Because people being born into wealth is exactly one of the reasons why "non-efficient people" (a problematic term in and of itself, btw) end up accumulating a lot of capital.
(I don't personally believe we should have a 100% inheritance tax, although I think it should be higher than it is right now in most places, but I think that this would be an almost inevitable conclusion of a "purely meritocratic" conception of economics.)
Historically in America or current day in developing countries, the rate of growth in living standards negatively correlates with the amount of regulation.
It is of course true that some (bad) regulation, like protectionism of various sorts, can also lead to the same outcome in a different way.
On the other hand, we have the diminishing marginal utility of money - rich people overspend all the time, often on frivolous stuff. Musk bought an entire publicly traded company and crashed it on the way home, the way an upper middle class person might a shiny red Dodge Viper. One might say the VC ecosystem is chiefly 'dumb' money sloshing around trying to not be left out of the next big thing, while having no clue what that might be.
Talking about "completely unregulated" markets is also somewhat specious. In a completely ancap context, we'd likely get structures similar to governments, funded by wealthy people cooperating rather than continuing to compete in less-productive ways (say through physical force). In fact some might even say that this is the character of the current US government in a few different regards.
People who are well off have more opportunities to start other ventures that make them even more well-off, and if they're especially powerful, they can use that influence to further their benefit. I don't think that's particularly controversial.
Capital begets capital.
Here is an easy one. Excess capital doesn't earn enough money to compensate for losses relating to depreciation, storage and maintenance costs i.e. the expectation is that capital income disappears in the long run. All further investment turns into consumption instead. That is kind of at odds with what people consider "capitalism" where the marginal productivity of capital is considered constant.
Specifically, which of these systems do you mean by "capitalism"?
1) The status quo in the US where the economy is dominated by private corporations but the government has some regulations and some safety net. Also, corporations receive a significant amount of welfare from the government, generally control the regulatory agencies and some are primarily funded by the government either directly (NPR/PBS, Amtrak, etc.) or as its primary customer (defense contractors).
2) The system that existed in Gilded Age America where there was very little regulation but lots of corporate welfare and a US Army that would "remove" any American Indians who were causing trouble for the railroads.
3) The libertarian utopia where absolutely everything is privatized.
4) A system where everything except the police and military is privatized, there are virtually no regulations and there is no corporate welfare. Basically the more moderate form of libertarianism.
5) Basically the system we have in the US but with a larger safety net, more regulations and less military spending. In other words the European system that is one of the things commonly called "socialism" in US politics but it is also called "capitalism" when convenient to contrast it against other types of economies.
6) An economy where most people have a reasonable chance of eventually becoming running their own business and where large businesses are generally rare. In this system, creating a corporation might even require an act of a state legislature or the national legislature and would be generally rare and mainly for utilities like long distance transportation. This is the system that generally prevailed in the free states of the US prior to the Gilded Age.
7) The system that existed in the mid-20th century US that is somewhere between 1) and 5). Strong unions, regulations (often captured by corporations), large corporations that make stuff domestically, restrictions on imports, defense contractors exist, etc. The main distinguishing characteristic of this system is a high degree of income equality. CEOs don't make dramatically more than typical workers and even entry level pays a living wage.
At one point, I would have defined "capitalism" as 3 or 4. Today, I'd define it as 6. Most people would probably define it as 1, 2 or 7 which is what I would call "corporatism". I'm also undoubtedly leaving out other definitions of capitalism. The term "socialism" is also unhelpful for the same reason.
People who like "capitalism" or "socialism" define it as an economic system they like then use the other word to define a system they don't like. Then they talk past people who have different definitions of those terms. An argument about Venezuela or the USSR is not a reasonable argument to use against somebody who wants the Nordic model in the US or to go back to the mid-20th century economic system. An argument about corporate welfare or defense contractors is not a reasonable argument to use against a libertarian.
How about all the dumb ideas that lead smart people to basically blow up the financial system in 2008 to start.