jnicholasp

We could quibble about the meaning of "irrational", but I do agree that markets can be mistaken for longer than most people can financially back their conviction that it's mistaken.

In the case of Tesla vs Ford, there is probably a sense in which the longer the market is 'irrationally' convinced of the value of Tesla, the less irrational it actually is - it's a bet on Tesla's viability and vision, and the longer it seems like a good bet to most people, the more likely it is that it is a rational bet to have made.

The sentiment in general is reasonable to me: that humans are generally more effective and more productive when they have something to do and work on, even when they're not getting anywhere with their main project(s).

It's not at all clear to me that a menial job is a strong solution to that problem. I would expect that in, say, a world with UBI, that also recognized this problem, people would find better ways to keep themselves feeling like they are at least doing something and making some contribution, than working on things they don't care about or believe in. There are plenty of meaningful volunteer opportunities in the world that would be much more effective "make you feel useful" solutions than filing papers in a bureaucratic office.

> Note that having a job seems necessary though.

I'm not sure that's true. It would be interesting to see some numbers. My naive impression is that there are at least two things needed to make intellectual history: genius, and opportunity to practice your genius. Both are rare, and given that there are far, far more people who need to earn a living than people who don't, I would expect the absolute numbers of (Genius)(NeedsAJobHasAMenialJob) to be greater than (Genius)*(Doesn'tNeedAJob).

My impression is that gentlemen of leisure have, especially in the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, been a very disproportionate percentage of intellectual history, and that even the nominal jobs in that group (parson, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge) were wholly orthogonal to whether they produced.

What do you think having an unrelated, undemanding job would contribute to intellectual work?

> The market could be wrong, Tesla could fail to achieve their vision, Ford and other existing big companies could somehow turn themselves into organizations that aggressively pursue ambitious new visions.. but the market is betting not. You're welcome to make an opposing bet.

I don't know about 'we', but I don't believe in an irrational market - the market may well be wrong, but it's not usually wrong for unreasonable reasons. And potential is all investors ever care about: they're looking to put their money where it has the most potential to turn into more money. Predicting the future is necessarily uncertain and involves ambiguous judgment; you can call that touchy-feely if you want to be dismissive, but there is no such thing as data on things that haven't happened yet.

I don't know what this is meant to mean.

Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) was (became; established a whole tradition of being) a hermit/beggar/monk; Socrates was a stone mason (occasionally); Diogenes the Cynic lived in a barrel and begged for food; Jesus was a carpenter and then a wandering preacher; Spinoza (as you note) was a lens grinder; Kant was a tutor; Einstein was a patent clerk. And, as you note, especially in the 19th and 18th centuries, many proto-scientists were people with either an established income or independent wealth, who had the freedom to pursue whatever interested them.

We ought to be finding ways to broaden the number of people who can pursue their interests, while not forfeiting security, dignity, and social respect. This is one of the arguments for universal basic income, that it could decouple (some) people's desire to pursue knowledge from the need to earn a living, and maybe even especially from the need to produce regular, measurable results. Right not we're channeling most of our people who are interested in and capable of developing new knowledge into jobs which demand "results" more than they demand that truth be followed wherever it leads, and however long it takes. This will lead to a great deal of dubious Normal Science [0], and very little revolutionary thought [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re...

Ford doesn't have much room to grow because they are a mature company in a mature field. Tesla is creating new fields. Ford doesn't know how to create new fields, therefore they're stuck making small improvements to existing things, and, once someone like Tesla makes it very clear that a new field exists and is viable, Ford will reluctantly follow the market trend.

Ford does normal science [0], Tesla does revolutionary science [1].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_science [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_...

Being innovative at small details of existing concepts isn't likely to produce huge gains in stock value, as opposed to being innovative at entire categories of new industry- and infrastructure-disrupting products. Ford does the former, Tesla does the latter, and the market is valuing them accordingly.

The market could be wrong, Tesla could fail to achieve their vision, Ford and other existing big companies could somehow turn themselves into organizations that aggressively pursue ambitious new visions.. but the market is betting not. You're welcome to make an opposing bet.

The language is a little ambiguous. It seems it's meant to suggest that having a folding pocket knife with a blade less than 3 inches is allowed, but that is not actually said, only implied by contrast to the explicit statement that folding blades longer than 3" are prohibited. In a regulatory environment like the current UK, I don't like those kinds of rights being only ambiguously implied.

The guidelines go on to say that butter knives with no cutting edge and no points are considered prohibited blades under the law, which is ridiculous, and that folding pocket knives with blades less than 3" are not considered folding if they lock open (because they are not "immediately foldable"), and are therefore prohibited. Which is, again, ridiculous, and also undoubtedly​ leads to many unnecessary injuries as unlocking blades close on the fingers of their users.

Not impressed with this policy's risk assessment.

> same with a knife

Any knife? You can't carry a pocket knife in the UK? That's ridiculous. Knives were nearly the first tool proto-man ever made, and they're still the most useful general purpose tool you can have.

My fault: I read your comment in the context of the two comments directly above it visually, which were talking about differences of culture, rather than in the context of the comment you were directly replying to, which was talking about standard of living. I certainly agree that Denmark and the US are closer in standard of living than North and South Korea are.

Sorry for making you pull that data, but thanks for responding with data.

I'm interested in and sympathetic to the vision I believe you're trying to express - that we have powerful new opportunities with computers/software to develop and express ideas in more powerful, more intuitive ways, and that we should be explicitly thinking about how we can take advantage of this opportunity to increase the range of ideas that it's possible, and easy, to think about and with.

I agree with the other commenters, though, that the statement of vision is unclear; the meaning of it is hard to pin down to something concrete. What the Flex group is actually trying to do remains ambiguous after reading it. If it matters that people who run across that statement without other context can understand it, you may be leaving value on the table that could be captured with a more intelligible version of it.

Justify your second claim, please. I am no expert, but that seems very unlikely.

It's much more about giving up the attempt to hack people. The last three sentences of the article sum it up well:

Stop trying to impress people or "win" the conversation. It's really much simpler than that. Just listen intently and make people feel good about themselves.

> I would argue, however, that very few of the issues we are facing at the moment stem from lack of understanding.

My 11 year old nephew sprained his ankle a few weeks ago playing basketball, badly enough that he started walking in an odd way to compensate for the discomfort. He kept playing sports, including soccer on a rough grass field, every day at school recess, despite us having talks several times about how he needs to stay off it and let it recover or else he risks causing lasting damage. He nods and says, "I know" when I tell him that, but he keeps doing it. I think we are collectively much the same: we 'know', but we don't really believe that the abstract, distant bad thing will ever really happen to us.That is not understanding. That is lip service.

My argument isn't that IQ makes every individual behave better - it is the statistical argument that if the population average went up 20 points (and that number is one I just threw out, but I do think it's close), then we might cross a tipping point where there would then be enough people who take abstract, distant bad things seriously enough to take meaningful action, to form a significantly politically effective bloc.

I'm not saying that cooperative behavior requires intelligence. I'm saying that cooperative behavior is a reasonable and effective choice for creatures intellectually capable of choosing between behavioral strategies, no matter what the evolutionary forces were that developed them to the point of being intelligent.

Bridges require foundations, pier columns, truss cables, and roadways in order to function. Each is necessary to the function of the whole; none has priority, and it doesn't make sense to single out any one of them as the thing that allows any of the other things to matter at all. In particular, it doesn't make sense to point at a bridge under construction that doesn't have the final piece in place yet, sneer at it because it doesn't have that piece, and suggest that it's pretty much exactly the same as no bridge at all.

20 points on average might push enough people from "unable to genuinely perceive long-term threats as threats" to "able to genuinely perceive long-term threats as threats", that it would move us past the political tipping point of collectively caring enough about doing something meaningful to both figure out what to do (devote money and resources to research) and to do it.

Individual carbon footprints are not meaningful - it doesn't matter how well an individual paddles their canoe when that canoe is in a swimming pool on a cruise liner. What matters is how the liner is piloted. If all people suddenly disappeared off the earth, except for those people who happened to be standing in Walmarts at the time, do you think that society would be better or worse at recognizing and handling abstract, long-term threats like global warming than the society composed only of graduate students would be?

I'm not conflating IQ with values, I'm arguing that as average IQ goes up, the percentage of the population who will recognize that certain problems of non-immediate import will inevitably become immediate, personal problems, will also go up.

I agree with you that the mechanisms through which greater awareness and active concern for seemingly abstract problems will trickle into the global zeitgeist are things like education, culture, and social/political structures. But where do those come from, and what allows people to perceive their value and meaning? You can't teach people things that you don't understand, and they can't learn things that they can't understand. Better cultural and social structures are a result of better understanding; better understanding is more common with brains that are better able to perceive patterns and project consequences.

I'm not arguing here that we are. I'm arguing that it is conceivable that intelligent creatures could exist that were.

Yeast can't make metaphors, can't understand that they're in a fermenting bottle with limited food and increasing amounts of excreted toxins, and couldn't imagine or implement plans to do anything about that situation even if they could comprehend it. Humans can do all of those things - except, so far, muster the collective political will to take meaningful steps. So I don't know in what sense it would be useful to make that analogy.

If you don't think 20 IQ points make a significant difference, consider some questions: do you believe that the average IQ 100 person is more or less likely than the average IQ 120 person to be concerned about global climate change? What about IQ 100 vs. IQ 80? If IQ numbers have no tangible meaning to you, do you expect the average Walmart shopper to be more or less concerned about climate change than the average graduate student (in any field at all, your choice: agricultural engineering just as much as climatology or gender studies).

I don't recall that being in the books, though maybe it was in the movie or radio show or something.

But "How many roads must a man walk down?" is the 'Question' that the pan-dimensional mice who commissioned the Earth decided to run with to save their careers and possibly lives, after the Earth was destroyed 5 minutes before outputting the final result of its multi-million year computation to determine what the actual Question of life, the universe, and everything, was.

In short: come at me, noob ;-)

Competition is not the only response to being one entity among many, and it is not even necessarily the most reasonable response. Cooperation is also possible, and it is one of the necessary elements in every human organization, from the family to global cultures. We have civilization because we are to some degree able to cooperate, and if you simply turn up the dial on that trait, it is easy to imagine that other creatures could exist who were even better cooperators - and who would be collectively even more successful because of it.

We already know that thermodynamics and evolutionary pressures can allow for intelligent beings with a population average IQ of 100 (on the arbitrary scale we've devised for ourselves) to exist, since we humans do exist. I'm suggesting that a slight increase in that population average might be enough to make a large difference in how we collectively respond to mid- to long-term problems.

If you're arguing against that suggestion, it seems you would have to be arguing that human intelligence exists at a level that is nestled directly up against some kind of hard thermodynamic limit, even though a non-trivial portion of our species already exists on the other side of that line. I don't see how that argument could plausibly be made.

I feel like your imaginative capacity could stand to be exercised more. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways in which intelligent entities could meaningfully differ from us, and which would lead to different political circumstances​.

And we ourselves are not that far from being able to deal reasonably with problems like this. If nothing else were different about us, except that average IQ were, say, 120 on the current scale, I think we'd be able to respond sensibly to non-immediate threats.

I agree with your point, too, although I'm skeptical we can do much more than, maybe, polish the brass while the ship founders. Still, shiny brass (slightly nicer surroundings) is better than not.

I do think we need radical reforms if we want the ship to not sink, though, so I don't feel that encouraging people to vote, without urgently arguing that voting reform is necessary, is deeply meaningful.

On another current HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939645), a Show HN about a tool for interactively modeling dynamic systems, I followed the tool's author back to their website, and found a really great interactive blog post about Building a Better Ballot [0]. I'm going to be spreading that around as much as I can; it seems to me the best tool/post for really understanding the various voting methods and some of their flaws. I hope you'll check it out and share it, if you also like it. (I'm in no way affiliated with the author or tool, for the record; just impressed by it.)

[0] http://ncase.me/ballot/

Our voting system is itself flawed, and leads to the entrenchment of power in two parties, which are private organizations built for the purpose of consolidating political power.

As long as we have First Past the Post voting [0], we will be stuck with whatever candidates those two parties choose to offer us. We will not be able to use our votes to elect candidates who accurately reflect our political will - we will only be able to choose the lesser evil out of the options presented to us.

The political discontent arising from Trump's election and presidency should be used to change our voting system to something that doesn't suffer from Duverger's Law [1] or the Spoiler Effect [2], and that will allow the outcomes of elections to closely map the range and number of actual political opinions - i.e., something that makes electoral results accurately reflect the real will of the people.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect

Have you considered, "How many roads must a man walk down?"?

Seriously, though, it's not unthinkable to me that the simulation argument is right, and that one of the reasons why simulations might be created is to explore questions that the parent civilization is curious about and needs minds of a certain character or experiential background to examine.

We're basically doing that right now, after all, with things like AlphaGo being created to 'understand' the game of Go at a level we don't. At some point, the quotes around 'understand' will not be apt, and AlphaGo++ will be able to put its understanding into terms that will be useful to us.

Your point is valid. It's not clear to me that my claim is true, either. I made it in part because I wondered whether it were true, and I subscribe to the idea that the best way to find out if something is true is not to ask whether it is, but to assert that it is and wait for arguments to the contrary.

But I think it might be partly true, too. As you said, currently "sellers are fine selling at the current prices less commission". When those commissions disappear, sellers who were previously content to get Price - 6%, should still be content to get Price*0.94, since those are the same, and at least in buyer's markets, competing sellers have an incentive to undercut one another in the effort to get their house sold. It seems probable that those would lead to houses moving to a new normal pricing structure 6 percentage points lower than the old normal (less whatever amount the new model is capturing).

The seller does not pay for the buyer to receive their agent's service, except in accounting terms. The commission to the agents is (should be; if you as the seller aren't thinking of it that way, you're misconceiving the situation) priced into the cost of the home. All the money in the deal comes from the buyers.

When realtors' business model gets disrupted, sellers will not end up getting the same prices for their houses as they do currently, or get to keep the 6% that now goes to agents - that money will simply drop out of the cost of buying homes (except for the new, smaller, cost that will be captured by the new business model).

Tangential quibble: For anything that could be called "human-style" learning, which presumably requires abstract intelligence and cultural transmission, we're probably looking at something that has existed only during the period of human behavioral modernity - commonly taken to date from roughly 40-50,000 years ago. Assuming a generation is ~20 years (and there are some arguments that the average generation might have been closer to 25 years), that's only 2500 generations.

I think it's fascinating that we have developed from un-self-reflective animals, to abstract thinkers on the verge of creating wholly new abstract-thinking entities from scratch, in only two and half thousand steps. Especially given that the majority of the technical knowledge necessary was developed only in the last 500 years, or 25 generations.