As a great example of this read Paul Graham’s essays that aren’t anout his core expertise.
I disagree with PG on economics and politics, but much of his writing on that is subjective.
We might also want to delve into what "evil" means here. Presumably he's talking about evil in the way that they treat their employees?
As sibling says, that's his core expertise, so not quite relevant.
https://bsky.app/profile/isilanor.bsky.social/post/3ldx24kvc...
So I think what he's saying here, with some brevity, is: startups require lots of smart people to succeed. If the boss isn't nice to them, then those people can easily find work elsewhere. Therefore, the boss will have to be nice to them. Therefore, the boss can't be a horrible person.
What would you say is incorrect about this?
You should study up on logic. You are saying that since person A has to be nice to people who work for startups they can’t be a horrible person. This means that if a person is horrible they can’t be nice to people who work for startups. This is egregiously wrong.
Good science is dead, isn’t it?
My original point was that when PG is writing outside of his core competencies, it's usually about subjective opinions. Such as, is wealth tax a good or bad thing? That is a subject about which you can have an opinion, but there is no absolute.
My concern is that when people say "he doesn't know anything when he talks about, say, economics or politics" what they really mean is "I disagree with him and therefore he is wrong." (I disagree with PG on many such things, but that's like, just my opinion, man)
I guess I'm invested in the debate because I want people to be more open-minded and charitable and not less.
Yes they are, that’s literally what a wealth tax is.
How were you defining wealth?
That’s substantially different from one that starts at $0.
This doesn’t feel like a generous reading.
I’m not against a wealth tax and I’m not aligned with PG, but I do think it’s important to be generous in your interpretation. I think PG is just arguing wealth taxes are unfair on founders.
$2m starting point is reasonable btw, that’s a good ballpark for a founders share at pre seed.
- A small time founder losing 2/3rds of their stock - OH NO, wealth tax is terrible!
- A businessman worth $162 of stock ends up being worth billions as their stock appreciates, despite having to pay wealth taxes. Huh, maybe wealth tax is alright.
Indeed, while the existence of socioeconomic experts seems more likely we don't have any way of reliably identifying them. The people who actually end up making social or economic policy seem to be winging it by picking the policy that most benefits wealthy people and/or established asset owners. It is barely possible to blink twice without stumbling over a policy disaster.
Except for, I don't know, the many thousands of people who work at various government agencies (diplomatic, intelligence) or even private sector policy circles whose job it is to literally be geopolitical experts in a given area.
They are not experts. As said above, some things are too complicated to have expertise in.
It's plausible that geopolitics may work the same way, with the ones who get lucky mistaken for actual experts.
People like Musk, who are often absolutely clueless about countries' political situations, their people, their makeup, their relationships and agreements with neighboring countries, as well as their history and geography, are obviously going to be terrible at predicting outcomes compared to someone who actually has deep knowledge of these things.
Also we seem to be using the term "geopolitics" a bit loosely in this thread. Maybe we could inform ourselves what the term we are using even means before we discount that anyone could have expertise in it[1]. I don't think people here meant to narrow it down to just that. What we really seem to concern ourselves with here is international relations theory and political sciences in general.
Now whether most politicians should also be considered experts in these areas is another matter. From my personal experience, I'd say most are not. People generally don't elect politicians for being experts - they elect politicians for representing their uninformed opinions. There seems to be only a weak overlap between being competent at the actual job and the ability to be elected into it.
The gambler who learned the entire observable history of a tumbling RNG will not be in a better position to take the jackpot than the gambler who models it as a simple distribution. You cannot become an expert on certain things.
Geopolitics may or may not be one of these things, but you've made no substantial argument either way.
It is like economists - they have 0 predictive power vs. some random bit player with a taste for stats when operating at the level of a country's economy. They're doing well if they can even explain what actually happened. They tend to get the details right but the big picture is an entirely different kettle of fish.
Geopolitics is much harder to work with than economics, because it covers economics plus distance and cultural barriers even before the problem of leaders doing damn silly things for silly reasons. And unlike economics there is barely the most tenuous of anchors to check if the geopolitical "experts" get things right even with hindsight. I'd bet the people who sent the US into Afghanistan and Iraq are still patting themselves on the back for a job well done despite what I think most people could accept as the total failure of those particular expeditions.
The problem with that is that when at such a level, political factors start to come into play.
The net effect is that in any conflict, the winning side will have competent and qualified expert geopolitical analyses, while the losing side will have propagandists.
So the geopolitical expert is, at best, a liminal species.
Geopolitics can be studied and learned, and is something that diplomats heavily rely upon.
Of course, those geopolitical strategies can play in certain ways we don't foresee, as on the other side we also have an actor that is free to do what they want.
But for instance, if you give Mexico a very good trade agreement as a strong country like the US, it's very likely that they will work with you on your special requests.
Then Lindsey Graham outright mentioned the mineral wealth and it became a topic, though not a prominent one.
Access to the Caspian Sea via the Volga-Don canal and the Sea of Azov is never mentioned. Even though there are age old Rand corporation papers that demand more US influence in that region.
The best public pundits get personalities and some of the political history correct (and are entertaining), but it is always a game of omission on both sides.