Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

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People get brushed off as being haters when they point out that a lot of SV is morally bankrupt. It has nothing to do with "achievement" to point out that a lot of the people running the show are people that intend a lot of harm outside their class through either carelessness or active malice. IE, I didn't hate Sam Altman or Dario Amodei until they started doom trolling and selling ridiculous fantasies non-stop. I don't hate them because they're successful -- I don't even view them as successful -- I hate them because they take actions that are detrimental for me and the rest of society. I would hate them a lot less if they stopped taking such actions.

Paul Graham, man, the whole reason I'm even on this site was because I was a fan of his essays back in the day. But I think he's too connected to this world to see how shady it is.

Graham's book "On Lisp" is really good. I think we should all try to recognize what's good from people, and call what's bad what it is.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of bad in SV now.

> when they point out that [some ideological outgroup] is morally bankrupt...

The phrasing already belies the problem. I would naturally and automatically brush off as a "hater" someone who said things like this about me, because it is suggestive of treating one's own idiosyncratic value judgments as objective truth.

Incidentally, "intend... through carelessness" is a contradiction in terms.

You can be careless in a way where it's obvious you'll cause harm, but you just don't do anything about it because you don't care. Drunk driving for instance. SV is the equivalent of a societal drunk driver right now because our normal institutions for regulating these things have been captured mostly by financial interests and corruption. The harm might not be the goal, but SV is not going to do anything to prevent it when it comes to their products (Read "Careless People", as a great example). SV's big projects right now are things that harm almost everyone (surveillance state, data centers, education, massive financial bubble, job losses, AI that's "more dangerous than nuclear weapons but we can't figure out how to build a sandbox".) Most these guys do not give a shit about what they're doing to society, until we start shaming them for their recklessness or even better start voting and enacting policies to stop the bullshit. I will happily own the title hater for saying that.

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