Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot | Hacker News Reader

Sam Altman is not a blithering idiot

unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com

15 pointsrdl5 comments

I wonder if there's a fancy (latin?) word for someone who attempts to defeat someone else's argument by making points which actually reinforce the opponent's argument.

e.g.: the "more of the Earth is dangerous to walk today with an iPad than in 1950 with a typewriter" is patently false. Anywhere in USSR, China, etc., a white man with a typewriter would be pretty doomed. In a lot of colonial areas, too. Now, outside North Korea, it's crime which is the only real threat.

There are definitely parts of today which are worse than 1950, but the big problems are the higher derivatives -- growth slowing, and rate of improvement going negative, or at least rate of growth of rate of growth going negative) -- not absolute status.

In the US, being a black man with a typewriter might have been a serious problem in large areas in 1950, too.

Mencius is generalizing, incorrectly, from the horrible anti-growth, anti-civilization policies of San Francisco (and California, and to some extent, the US) and claiming they're universal.

I came across this several days ago, and it failed to make any impression on me.

What's the point of this article? Sam Altman is arguing that democracy doesn't work without growth, and hence the government should be trying to promote and measure growth.

Mencius is arguing that the government should manufacture busy work for people to do. Because there's no other viable solution. But he says it will never happen. So the whole article seems pointless to me.

I have read Mencius's blog because he had a good article on the state of CS research. But it is becoming increasingly discursive and low on utility.

Also I think the title is basically link bait. It doesn't have anything to do with anything; it is basically name dropping for no reason.

I'm prepared to believe that this writer is smart and serious and just makes consistently unfortunate style choices. But at some point, if you insist on walking like a troll and quacking like a troll, what does that matter? This stuff makes huge demands of any reader who doesn't get off on the author's snark groove, which I don't. Am I missing anything valuable?

I think the relevant thing is that the "option C" he dismisses out of hand is actually what we're getting:

<blockquote> Beyond the creepy A and B, all solutions to the problem involve a State which compels, through economic or other means (it hardly matters), humans who are not economically productive to submit to work or some simulation thereof. For instance, especially with the Oculus Rift, technology is beginning to present us with a Solution C, which combines physical imprisonment with virtual enrichment. It's not clear what a life-scale virtual environment would consist of, but it would surely involve work or something like it. I don't find Solution C particularly creepy, but I may be alone in this. It is certainly less creepy than A or B. I suspect that if it was done right, the customers would vastly prefer it to their present vile circumstances. But I also suspect it will never happen. </blockquote>

That sounds like the life of virtually everyone on HN. Some rival goods are in shorter supply even for relative winners than they were in the past (even the relatively rich in the Bay Area don't have very nice houses; a $10mm house in Hillsborough is nice, but it's essentially a $1.5mm house elsewhere.)

We'll put more and more value into information goods and services, relative to a much more slowly growing physical economy.

This seems like a great example of how inflammatory language makes an argument less effective.

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