The difference between science and engineering right there...
now this thought just made me have more sympathy for Sam Altman (there can actually be much worse ppl out there...)
An AI CEO was absolutely Holmes' calling. You can only imagine.
The politics are too good not too.
Amodei: AI will cure cancer
Elizabeth wasn’t ambitious and visionary enough for the current era.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z2_dhUv_CrI (The Simpsons)
Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
If you think capitalists never lose money then you're not on this planet. Obviously money is lost all the time. There are lots of investors, lots of companies, and few winners. This is mad. Of course bailouts happen, and they're done by the state. Capitalism would let them fail.
> hundreds of huge Cathedrals all over Europe
In this case the church was the capitalist. They risked the capital that paid for the cathedral. Although it was fairly low risk, as building a cathedral is pretty well understood.
> Manhattan project? Taxpayer funded. Concorde? Taxpayer funded. Walking on the Moon? Taxpayer funded. What are you talking about.
In this case the state is the capitalist, although it's taking the money by force rather than with a risk/reward voluntary investment. The worker isn't doing this by him/herself.
> Capitalism would let them fail.
and yet ... Here we are. The state paying for things is Capitalism, and the state paying for this isn't Capitalism, in the same comment.
I see what you mean.
In the first example: the context is we're talking about workers vs capitalists. The state is acting like the capitalist in that dichotomy for things like the Manhatten Project. The Manhatten Project wasn't a triumph of the ability for workers to do incredibly complex, expensive, risky projects. The money to do it came from somewhere else than the workers. So the Manhatten Project is not an example of workers over capitalists.
In the second example I'm not talking in the frame of "everything is either worker or capital" (which wasn't mine) and introducing the much richer, more dangerous, and more powerful third entity: the state. Because state bailouts are not an example of capitalism.
Can I claim to have an medical background if I failed the first semester?
(It is surprisingly common to have delusions about the scale of engineering problems in management, which causes problems even when it doesn't explode into outright fraud. I've had management insist on pursuing a project that was already quite risky and difficult in its own right but which also needed a technology that just didn't exist yet to actually be usable by customers in the field: mostly on the back of some theoretical calculations by some acadamics that masked big underlying problems. The issue was pretty obvious but just subtle enough to be easy to convince yourself it wasn't that hard)
Engineering is applying that knowledge in a effective and efficient manner.
Engineering is something that money and time can fix. There are less guarantees with science.
But broadly if you are dealing with building something in a world with constraints (time, materials, money, speed, safety) then it's more engineering. If you are studying how things work to try to build something without these constraints without then it's applied science. If you are developing new theories then that is fundamental science.
So yes, your criticism ("far more likely to sweep big practical issues under the rug because they're primarily concerned with being something working") is accurate but by design, not a weakness.
> the applied scientist is by definition not interested in changing reality, only in studying, explaining, and predicting it. The engineer, on the other hand, accepts the explanations and predictions of the applied scientist, and then acts to change reality to achieve some goal
https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/PCEEA/article/view/...
There's no excuse for defrauding investors, but at least the "aim" was to produce a product that, if it actually had worked, would have been medically revolutionary. I don't even believe that she went in on scam from the start, she must have at least genuinely believed, no matter how nonchalant, that there was going to be a product - otherwise how would she possibly expect to get away with it?
Blackrock, Citadel, KKR etc - all they do is buy up actual businesses that provide actual products and services, by using the most predatory and immoral "leveraged buyout" technique and then stripping its assets and leasing them back like some demented parasitic worm
"The chemistry works fine! We just had to figure out that pesky device stuff!"