A lot in here about Google, which hilariously has done a bunch of studies that concluded it's hiring process is awful (is sure is!) and the takeaway is that candidate evaluation is impossible, not that Google in particular does it badly.
3,162 karma · joined October 21, 2013
The bit about "using only private aviation" and "hir[ing] an elite team" sound satirical at first, but then the next sentence sounds earnest, so I can't tell?
I looked up this person on wikipedia, so the "I want to live a cosmopolitan life and fly private" seems like something someone who was involved with occupy wall street would say sardonically, but I am not sure?
Regardless, this person's technical work seems incredible and I really hope we can find a way to support people who work independently and aren't obsessed with capturing the value they create in the US.
It's clear that social media are natural monopolies, and are being politically leveraged by the people who run them. So the status quo is definitely far from free speech. It's more of a "command economy of ideas" than a "marketplace".
But is this a reasonable solution? I feel like rules around algorithmic neutrality and penalties for misinformation might be better?
Vague story without references featuring the takedown of an uninteresting political caricatures
Most of the other big tech companies make their revenue from other companies paying them to leverage the influence they have over their users. So they are not constrained in the same way.
I believe that most Googlers are pretty aligned with the principles of the HN crowd, but Google the machine is not.
when something you think is bad gets better but not better enough, say "more please"
- Patrick's Parabox
- Blue Prince
con: this improves the chances if the world to devolving into an authoritarean hellscape
I think the author is brushing against some larger system issues that are already in motion, and that the way AI is being rolled out are exacerbating, as opposed to a root cause of.
There's a felony fraudster running the executive branch of the US, and it takes a lot of political resources to get someone elected president.
I would guess that this is because the larger the number for major players, the more incentive they would have to invest in supporting open standards (or try and get a standard of their own).
This is evidence that the patent system is not doing what it's supposed to be doing imo.
And then externally Chinese policy is oriented around suppressing the value of its currency, which is basically a monopolist's tactic--artificially lowered prices in order to crowd out competition.
I think that's mercantilist-ish, but kind of a modern version?
It's definitely the opposite of what the US does, the currency is the world reserve and therefore drives the price of the dollar above what it would be without trade, which I guess makes exporting from the US much more difficult?
Anyone who is an expert in global economics please correct me here :)
This is a predominantly America-specific piece of propaganda, and it's pretty recent.
Adam Smith's ideas are primarily arguments against mercantilism (e.g. things like using tariffs to wield self-interested state power), something he showed to be against the common good. The "invisible hand" concept is used to show how self-interested action can, under conditions of *competitive markets*, lead to unintentional alignment with the common good.
Obviously that's a significant departure from the way it's commonly used today, where Thiel's book has influenced so many entrepreneurs into believing Monopolies are Good.
But the history of this is very Cold War-influenced, where "free markets" were politically positioned as alternatives to the USSR's "planned economy", and slowly pushed to depart further and further from Adam Smith's original argument about moral philosophy.
It is only through the collective demand that systems serve us that they can be aligned.
If you believe that the system is corrupt then your decisionmaking function will conclude that taking action to demand systems serve you is useless.
But it's only useless if we collectively believe it is useless.
This is what I mean when I say that cynicism is malignant. The more people believe it, the more true it is.
That disaster causes $10,000,000 of harm, but only causes you $90 of harm individually.
You've gained $10, but your $10 gain is a millionth of the harm caused.
Generally-speaking, there's an enormous asymmetry between the cost to create/build and the cost to destroy. So now we have a mechanism by which individuals have a financial incentive to cause harm...
Don't these markets create a mechanism for society to race to self-destruction?
https://greyhaven.co/insights/how-greywall-prevents-every-st...
greywall.io