A Man Who Invented the Future | Hacker News Reader

A Man Who Invented the Future

hedgehogreview.com

67 pointsapollinaire16 comments

What a fun little essay. It takes a lot of skill to write such a nonlinear story of ideas and history, and to have the structure and the actual point emerge gradually like this. It also takes some attention and some faith on the part of the reader, and it sounds like a few people here got frustrated that it doesn't feel like a normal essay that tells you upfront where it's going and why.

One commenter saw the long second sentence and assumed that the author had messed up somehow, instead of clocking the heads-up that this is piece is going to be a bit unusual and demanding. We're slowly getting used to how LLMs keep every sentence short enough to digest without much effort.

An LLM could never write this, as others here have pointed out, at least not without some very involved, nonstandard prompting. I think it's going to be important for our brains to keep reading stuff like this that is structurally unique. It almost reads like a miniature Benjamin Labutut story.

Agree, I felt initial discomfort reading it because it goes against the grain of the simplistic technical style that is most of hacker news. Surprised it got to the front page.

> His empiricism dismissed in a single swipe all of the strange hermeticism and cracked occultism that marked the Platonism of the Renaissance in favor of a cold, calculated, and careful ethos of observation that ultimately did prove more effective in parsing the particulars of the material world (if not at assessing their value).

And still so

The scientific method stands alone as the singular technology produced by humanity that has never failed to produce a successful outcome

The Scientific rigor described in the Novum is the singular north star that can cover literally every possible question humanity has, should we be bold enough to actually insist on rigor and not succumb to “rationalism” or some other dualist nonsense

Interesting article. Assumes a fair amount of background knowledge of the reader that may not be reasonable and definitely has a unique style.

It is interesting that many of the comments critique it for being meandering, lacking in utility. I think the author is talented enough to write it that way intentionally. Its oblique direction and far flung references help make the point. The reactions against this style made the argument more compelling.

> that same positivism was leading less to liberation than to disenchantment, smashing the sacred icons and reducing the world to what can be instrumentalized, commodified, and calculated

This essay is--oddly--both threadbare and meandering, and has turns of phrase that look like they were kept from an earlier, tighter version, such as the second sentence's "may have [...] but by".

I read some AI slop earlier today and then read this. The AI slop was better than whatever this is.

Now that people know what ai slop is, they start having higher expectations from prose because vacuous articles like these might be misconstrued as slop

It's a shame you feel that way as articles like this were extremely common 30 years ago in the Saturday and Sunday papers. And I do miss them.

I wonder if it's a generational thing, where now every essay must focus on one idea instead of taking a meandering path of curiosity to the author's final point.

I agree with you that this is a Parade-level essay, and I think those were always basically fluff: enough to give a sense that something had been learned about two or three seeming-disparate topics from a great distance, but not enough to actually satisfy curiosity about any of them. In the 80s as a pre-teen, those were the first part of the Sunday paper I claimed, but they never did more than whet.

I don't think it's even about staying on one topic. It's just that the topics were too broad for such a short essay, even had it been relatively dense, and then to that problem the author added long phrases where a short phrase would do, as if trying to pad the length to some predetermined mark.

You might not be the target audience for this, and that's ok.

Alan Kay.

(Ok ok ... the real quote is actually: "The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It", and I actually think he also had that quote from someone else, earlier, but I forgot the name.)

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/09/27/invent-the-future/

Thanks. I just went down a little rabbit hole into Dennis Gabor and then the book Cybernetics. Fun. :-)

The article concludes, stating that LLMs are the “apotheosis of knowledge stripped of animating spirit and reduced to mere utility.” Maybe, but LLMs have far more utility than this directionless essay.

So he's the guy who promised us flying cars.

And all we got was this wide-ranging essay that introduces about 140 different characters.

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