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Comment by avarun | Hacker News Reader

There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.

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To name some of his "predictions", in 2024 he was saying that "things are beginning to collapse":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

He is extremely vague in his predictions and timelines, and yet still manages to miss.

Hypothetically speaking, how does one go about being so handsomely rewarded for being wrong about everything? I feel like I am well qualified for this type of job.

Not in the divine secrets, never heard of that person before, but my wild guess would be have the relevant people in your acquaintances?

Ask Alex Jones before he got sued for being wrong, or just any politician in general.

There are three things to make money:

- tell lies to ones who want to hear lies -> riches

- tell truth to ones who want to hear truth -> modesty

- tell truth to ones who want to hear lies -> bankruptcy

p.s. read it on a blog name I dont remember :(

You never know if people who are running a skeptic grift are at the same time long the very trends they're criticizing.

I agree with the general thesis that AI is a bubble and there's a lot of over/mal-investment, but that hasn't stopped me from riding the wave and making a considerable amount of money investing in AI-related stocks.

If I was more ambitious, I'd write a $70/year newsletter ranting about how AI is a massive bubble that could collapse at any moment to make money on both sides.

I'd love to read about the predictions that have been wrong (genuinely)

He’s started a cult around anti AI basically.

That statement isn't proof of anything.

If I start a climate crisis cult, doesn't mean my predictions are wrong

I don’t have much time to compile his predictions. I’ll let someone else do that.

That said, I just wanted to point out the grift he is doing. He’s making money by telling some people what they want to hear.

If AI invents a cure for cancer, he will tell you it’s still useless because it didn’t invent immortality.

> AI's biggest critic has lost the plot

— https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...

He has said every month for the past three years that there is no technical progress left to be made in LLMs and that there is no more room in the market for inference spending to grow.

Here[0] is a fun selection of excerpts from his July 2024 post "How Does OpenAI Survive?"[1]

"I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do significantly more than it currently does."

[0]: https://xcancel.com/pathsnotchosen/status/206360940100129633...

[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/

Where is the source for that "makes seven million dollars a year" claim?

Also, I would not see "making seven million dollars a year by writing" as a reason to dismiss someone. Like, sounds like that such person is doing something other writers just cant.

The reason is obviously that engagement drives his revenue, and correctness or facts have nothing to do with it. Everyone knows that content creators will maximise engagement, and clearly he has found an audience who are seeking out a certain narrative, and will write to that narrative to generate revenue.

"clearly he has found an audience"

What do you mean "clearly"? Do you know his engagement numbers? Or you just find the content engaging?

Youtube view/subscribe/like numbers are public. His are .. definitely in the area one can make a living off, but still below popular game streamers.

I haven't fact checked anything here, I took the $7 million at face value. If he is generating that amount of money from his content creation, then I think my statement makes sense, right?

I don't wacth/read his content at all because I find AI-doomers really boring and tiresome.

Probably this: [1]

80k * $7/month * 12 months/year = $6.7M/year

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/19/ed-zitron...

I find that completely unbelievable. There’s too much high-quality free information for me to ever consume to even think about paying for it, let alone something of mediocre quality. Are we sure the newsletter subscribership isn’t just a total fabrication? Or that it isn’t just a money laundering scheme?

wrong math: usually 1-5% of subscribers are paying customers.

that's confusing "subscribers" and "paid subscribers".

from Zitron's own website [0]:

> I have 84,000 subscribers and a 55-60% open rate, as well as an 8-11% clickthrough rate.

if the 84k number was all paid subscribers, then the "55-60% open rate" would mean that ~40% of his paying audience doesn't bother to read the thing they're paying for, which does not add up.

also, that's in the "Can I Advertise On Your Newsletter?" section. if there were an even higher number of non-paying subscribers, he'd have an obvious incentive to mention that, because the total number of eyeballs is what a potential advertiser cares about.

0: https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/

The issue he highlights is purely number driven here.

His predictions timing sucks but he’s right in pointing out the insane numbers involved.

I think AI is a wonderful tool but I also think that there are many wonderful tools that if we bet our entire economy on would result in a catastrophe.

So a writer making money is not okay and means he is incorrect by default, but the CEOs siphoning billions off of circular investment schemes is fine?

Personally, I see both parties making predictions.

Meanwhile, I still must labour. How many more yachts are needed before the earth becomes the utopia they keep selling everyone on? How many more communities must have their rights trampled against their expressed will?

Or do I need to scan my retinas and provide Alt-man a DNA sample for a handful of empty crypto currency first?

Go ahead. Spend all your money on the SpaceX IPO. I always love to see newcomers in Financial Darwin Awards Prize.

Ok, so how many jobs does AI have to take (replacing existing or filling new "jobs") to pay off, then?

Any proof of this?

I am unfamiliar with his work, can you provide sources for his past incorrect predictions?

lol - the guy who thinks every single subscriber to a newsletter is a paying customer wants to be taken seriously. Zitron's POVs are always deeply researched, well-sourced and clearly formulated - things that, in and of themselves, are extremely valuable in today's world. Oh the AI bubble hasn't burst yet, so he's an idiot? Please tell me how you think the US stock market as a whole, following the Iran war, Trump's tariffs, etc. isn't just pure fraud at this point? The fact it hasn't collapsed /yet/ is not indicative of him being wrong, but rather that the 'economy' is absolutely detached from any real value whatsoever (something it historically had to be tied to, at least tangentially).

The funniest thing is that his articles are constantly pushed to HN frontpage, and every time the top comments (or the comments one level nested below top comments) are pointing out how wrong he's always been.

Either that he's HN mods's favorites or we're experiencing a special case of xkcd 1053[0]: there are always ten thousand people haven't realized how wrong Ed Zitron is.

At this point I don't think even Ed himself believes what he writes. It's just fan service for subscribers. And that is totally reasonable if we view blogging as a business.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top.

On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all

But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass flagged).

The end result is that HN's system favors "hot takes" while Reddit's system favors "preaching to the choir".

The two systems have their pros and cons, but personally I dislike being unable to downvote articles that are full of nonsense.

People (ab)use the flagging system for that. I've seen plenty of categories of article that get upvoted onto the front page and then instantly vaporized off it by flagging.

I use a pushbullet channel for HN500. I get a notification whenever an HN submission hits 500 up votes.

It's not common, but every so often one of these submissions will be flagged by the time I get around to clicking the notification.

I like how he's started preliminarily saying "Now listen, I don't make any trades on this fine thinking. And that's okay by me." So far below the standards of public markets due diligence. Sadly credulous readers will follow his advice. Which could turn out to be accurate in the public markets -- who knows? But if it's accurate it will be an accident, because the quality of analysis is so poor we should not call it analysis.

Not sure what you're getting at here. Would you be happier if he was trading on the arguments he's making, introducing an incentive to lie?

Yes, vastly. It’s not hard to do it ethically: “I’m short. Here’s why.”

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