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Comment by pas | Hacker News Reader

it's the Ed Zitron style of arguing that something big/expensive/unprecedented/hard is bad, going to fail, because [____________].

and if you put something trivially true into the blank the implication seems logical, and the argument feels powerful. but simply putting a true claim at the end doesn't mean that everything before follows from this claim. (and even if they do the argument is not a total description of all the causal chains that influence the outcomes.)

of course it's hard to do a careful survey of the facts and weigh them and then deduce some likelihoods for possibilities. because some aspects are unprecedented (investment ferocity, AI results/progress) while others are very much precedented (collapse of investment bubbles, doomsayers' wrong predictions).

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Just because something was called bad, predicted to fail and actually didn't fail, doesn't make it "definitively not bad, because it didn't fail, I told you so".

Case in point - Bitfinex was and is absolutely a criminal enterprise and scam, and it didn't have any backing for years in row. But it didn't fail, because many different criminals in the world had decided that it is quite convenient tool and put a monetary IV line in it. And now ruzzians are buying kamikaze drones with it, selling oil to India with it, drug cartels are shuffling around their money with it and so on. Does it mean it wasn't and isn't bad? Of course no. They simply found a rich sponsor to bail them out.

Or the whole 2008 crisis is another popular example.

I'm not saying absence of evidence of wrongdoing is evidence of absence of wrongdoing.

But note, you have very concrete things to claim about Bitfinex. Criminal enterprise, scam, organized crime funding, facilitating arms dealing and embargo avoidance, and so on.

Then you throw in 2008. It's definitely popular but example of what? Bad thing that didn't fail? (Things did fail, hence the crisis? Or you mean the too big to fail attitude?)

Policy proposals (eg. "coordinated AI safety R&D should be exempt from antitrust regulations" or "TARP made money on paper, but the financial sector should pay for the total cost of the crisis") cannot be divorced from the provenance of the source (sex cult, goldbugs, anticapitalists), but the same is true of bluesky screeds.

2008 was a shortened mention of the event when multiple companies by all rights went "bad", i.e. should have went bankrupt on their own merit and performance. But an external entity bailed them out and so they continue to exist and work later on. But does this mean that those companies (like Fannie Mae et. al.) weren't "bad" in 2008? No, it doesn't.

Same logic with pure AI corpos and adjacent dependents. If the doomsayers would ever be right about them being financially unsustainable, then most likely these companies would never get even close to the bankruptcy, simply because they would be bailed by external entities. So we would never be sure if OpenAI and Anthropic were "bad" or not, financially. Because either critics are wrong, or any corporate deficits would be covered by budget money (maybe foreign budget, it happens too).

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