Please Fund More Science (2020)
blog.samaltman.com
blog.samaltman.com
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr...
... And angels (how many) can dance on the head of a pin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on...
(Something theologians debate about endlessly and absolutely uselessly. That is all they are good, er, bad, for.)
Yeah, right. Pontificating much? Pathetic.
How do you know he/she is "weak"? No argument provided. And the same for "incorrect".
And who the hell are you to judge them?
Let me apply some of your own judgement "ointment" on you:
>essentially always incorrect.
Your use of the word essentially in that phrase is essentially inessential. :) The meaning is equally well conveyed without that word. IOW, it's fluff, and can be done away with, fluffy kid. (wags wings at you. hi!)
Grok what I mean?
Grr.
;)
(Such contradictions obviously)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
Read full article before yapping a reply.
The problem is, although much potential for good may exist in billionaires, the average billionaire spends next to nothing on philanthropy or research. It's only highly unusual exceptions who do. Next to nothing, even when well invested, accomplishes next to nothing.
If billionaires won't open their purses to support the society that has provided them with opportunity, that's what taxes are for. If billionaires aren't lining up to fund research institutes, that's what tax-funded government research is for.
Businesses are made up of people, and last I checked all of the things I use on a day to day basis come from companies. Companies seem pretty important.
Why do things like venture funding, which I think a lot of billionaires do engage in directly or indirectly, not count as supporting society?
If the owners are not paying taxes that fund education or long-term research, nor directly funding same, then they're both short-sighted and parasitic.
The market is far from free, big money is near impossible to compete against. In effect, when they pour tens of billions the work that gets done could have been done perhaps with millions.
Take a look at Chinese AI accomplishments and at what point it has been achieved. Granted plagiarism might be reducing some of the costs, but in a free market, things would have been a lot cheaper.
Similar example India's accomplishments in space.
If I chose to be evil, right now, my life would implode. Now that's not the only thing keeping me from going evil, but it certainly helps. The same is not true for people with the world's biggest safety net and infinite get out of jail free cards.
Just like you are weak, and essentially always incorrect, when you judge others, without substantiation of your statements - as you did above. So, you are no better than the person you replied to above.
And apart from your use of the word "essentially" being essentially redundant, and hence adding nothing of value to your statement, did you know about the word "wrong"? It can easily replace your use of the word "incorrect" (which fancy-pants people tend to use, when simpler equivalent ones exist, probably to impress others), for a saving of a whole four letters - per use! Gee!
A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.
In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long been that skillfully solving problems that are personally interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet significant number of the people who work at for example palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little eichmanns."
This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"
They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.
Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I actually could do something, but I probably wouldn't be able to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle that I don't know about who dies.
I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I think that they actively taught themselves to value their respective companies instead of fellow humans.
That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech corporations has shown me that these people are extremely short-sighted.
[1] Well, if I weren't unemployed :)
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with what's good for society, because the only appeal at that point is seeing a number get bigger. It's not like you're "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
I don't actually even agree with that. Microsoft, for example, seems to routinely overhire and then fire large percentages of their employees (edit, correction, said "corporations" before).
I think all they know how to do (I mean this pretty literally) is spend money. They are given money and then they spend that money. Sometimes spending that money leads to growth. Sometimes it leads to having to lay off 20% of the company. The important part is that the money is spent.
> I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
I'm not opposed to what you suggested but I'm not 100% sure how you'd define "luxury goods" with any kind of consistency.
it looks like microsoft growth is combination of products, investments and aquisitions. one can say that they spend money wisely.
This is the crux of the matter, a critical assumption. It breaks at many places.
One can make a boat load of money by predicting market movements slightly better. The value produced is not zero, but does not seem proportionate.
The size of the HFT market seems disproportionate to the value they purportedly produce by removing microsecond scale inefficiencies in the market. A bulk of the futures and options market is not from hedging but just gambling, it's not creating value, at least not in any proportionate sense.
"The system is good because it selects the ones who can create value" "No actually they don't create value" "Well, at least we know they're either creating value or destroying it" you see how that doesn't support the original claim at all
You and I, we earn money and hope to put a little aside. But these guys worry “How will I spend this incessant flow of money?”
That's kind of what I am getting at; a billion US dollars is basically infinite money. With that much, you can easily get more money than most people will see in their entire lifetimes by literally doing nothing. I do not understand why they want more at that point.
The reason I want more money is so that I can buy more or better stuff than I have right now. More money translates to a tangible thing. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for a billionaire to accrue more money is just to watch a number get larger, and if that is your motivation to do something, then clearly something is wrong with your fucking head. If you're willing to screw over everyone by lobbying to lower taxes solely so you can watch a number grow, then you kind of have to be a sociopath.
Really? You can't think of any other reasons?
It’s a subtle difference; I understand corporations trying to lower corporate taxes and the like, but there are lots of attempts from billionaires to lower their personal taxes by creating loopholes and bribing congress away from a wealth tax. That’s about personal wealth, and no, I cannot think of other reasons, no matter how dismissively you ask.
I save money to buy a bigger house, or fund my retirement, or to buy a car, but by the time you’re a billionaire you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can buy dozens of nice houses, you can stash away $20 million into a savings account and still be set for retirement, you can buy a new car every week, etc. A billion dollars is infinite money for an individual human, let alone multiple billions. It’s impossible to justify “more”.
And believe it or not, whatever knowledge or discovery you think you're losing with one death isn't actually contingent to that person. Given enough time, someone else will figure it out, and it becomes especially less valuable if you believe that AI tools are only going to get better.
Old people who want to pass on their wisdom are encouraged to record it.
Addressing this lack of trust and transparency would go a lot further in healing the country than most other solutions being proposed.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...
I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped caring that there was a pandemic.
It's selective breeding; because we became careful about recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore, Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer deemed as much of a threat.
- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc. - Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
1. Relying on philanpropy is generally not democratic and should be frowned upon. 2. This entire structure is legacy.
Research needs to be an integrated part of society. Something people go and out from.
Not something a few elite people get to dedicate their lifes to.
This is important to ensure diffusion, especially in highly volatile times like we are in now.
The big question should be: how can we get a 40 something year old industry professional to do research in a couple of. Years between jobs.
So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
Not only that, with some efforts a lifetime is not even enough unless you beat the odds plus get lucky early too.
Maybe at ivy league, which is a diminishingly small amount of research.
I do understand why it could seem like it is a big proportion - these institutions are being treated like religion.
Regardless, it is not reality.
There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
When the government takes a greater responsibility of the former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts and sciences. This has happened in many European countries, where grants from private foundations are a more important source of research funding than in the US.
With less government support, you have large capable organizations that provide services and rely on donations. Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
Altman does nothing for science. Neither does OpenAI. Google does a pittance for very applied things. Same as MS.
Doubling the funding for basic science in the US would be a rounding error for these places. But they don't do anything.
Except, of course, Silicon Valley, which was before his time but fully predicted in his music as early as 1978.
I can only hope Altman and his ilk are footnotes to history as much as FZ remains a headline.