Corvos
1d ago
No idea. I'm not OP, just an annoying guy with a theory about why 27% of sales being non-financed is reasonable.
I'm just saying, you took the maximally negative interpretation of those results and the maximally positive looks very different.
More importantly, you are trying to build a picture of the 'average incel' by consulting a survey whose gloss begins:
This community operates almost exclusively online, often serving as an outlet for misogynistic hostility. Concerns about violence from incels have positioned them as a growing (inter)national security threat. This study, the largest primary investigation of incel harmful attitudes and beliefs to date
and then taking the worst possible combination of responses as representative of the average person who persistently can't get a girlfriend in 2026 (which is how the common parlance uses the term). I'm sure you're posting in good faith but I think your sampling and interpretive strategy is very bad.
Corvos
1d ago
Ignoring the fact that this is obviously a very extreme selection, combination effects mean that potentially as few as 3% of surveyed incels were "an autist who lived with his parents and contemplated killing himself every single day".
(0.5 * 0.3 * 0.2=0.03)
Then you get into the fact that these people in 1986 wouldn't be living with their parents (the proportion has massively gone up recently), would have had more opportunities to meet people in IRL and improve their social skills, etc.
Corvos
1d ago
Isnt this basically selling A for cash, buying B using that cash? If youre moving from owned house to owned house, or downsizing, theres no reason to take on debt.
Corvos
2d ago
Okay, that's fair. They executed well, though, and my point is more that NVIDIA (and Huang) weren't just silly gamers who got the AI revolution magically dumped into their laps.
The Rosenbergs exported the power to obliterate millions of innocent people in an instant. Huang exporting the power to break up America's attempted stranglehold on globally-relevant technology seems to me to be quite another matter. Especially since they're his own damn products.
Corvos
2d ago
Imagine you never saw dice before, but God made some and told you to roll them. You roll them. Then they disappear, and nobody has any interest in making dice again. Does it make sense to talk about the probability distribution of the dice roll? I think it does.
I don't personally believe that thought experiment is applicable, or a wise way to think about one-off massively-multicausal events in the world as it actually is. You do, I get that, but I don't.
It could say he got lucky a few times.
I think this is hubristic. Strive to attribute to luck what was luck, sure, but assume merit before you assume luck. If you assume merit, the worst that can happen is you will overindex. If you assume luck, there is a very real danger you won't learn anything at all, to protect your ego.
Right, but you should counteract survivorship bias by looking at all the people who also did that and did not get super lucky.
What would I learn from that, beyond to temper my expectations and not to take super risky moves? Which I already know.
The fact of the matter is that some people succeed and some fail, and the ones who succeed are usually more interesting and more qualified along multiple axes than the ones who fail, and provide more to learn from.
Corvos
2d ago
Thank you, I know what probability is. Talking about probability for one-off events where a true probability can never be established is intellectually and philosophically dubious, in my personal opinion.
Forecasting is one thing, you have no choice, but when we're talking about the past and other people's actions and the consequences thereof, I think it behooves one to show humility and study what successful people did rather than assigning their success too confidently to 'luck'. I think it produces a more accurate analysis.
Your analysis will be confounded if you can't separate the luck from the decision. A lot of people have this issue actually and it leads to cargo culting.
Certainly this can happen. To my mind, the point is to look at what they did in advance, and how much that put them in position to get whatever lucky break they ended up getting. I have no idea about Musk specifically but he's done well a few times now and that says something. Reading hagiographies uncritically can be fun too, of course, but that's more like a vicarious fantasy.
To quote Napoleon: "I like my generals lucky."
Corvos
2d ago
I've no idea? I don't really believe that you can model the world like that - Rawlsian 'but what if you were somebody else' philosophy has never really held much interest for me.
Certainly every very rich man had a lucky break. More so now, when the world is more global and competition is fiercer. So hypothetically Musk / Huang / whoever would have some lower median net work spread over all the infinite worlds that don't exist. Unless they are actually genuinely special: I haven't met any of them. I've met someone comparable and he was definitely a cut above most people in risk-management/politics/drive/intelligence but how far is hard to tell.
In general though I'm more interested in analysing how people make good decisions to maximise their potential for lucky breaks than to what extent people do get lucky breaks.
Corvos
2d ago
See my reply to @dailydogma. Other companies may have dropped the ball, but NVIDIA definitely picked it up early.
NVIDIA began working on high-performance parallel computation 2003-2007. They created and released CUDA in 2007, long before AlexNet, so that scientists could do high-performance calculations in a dedicated computing language instead of formatting their work as gimped shaders. In 2007 NVIDIA had already released a separate GPU for scientific research: the Tesla.
Between 2009 and 2011 NVIDIA's annual reports repeatedly made it clear that they considered scientific computing to be one of their three top priorities, on par with gaming. They saw this as investing in financial modelling, pharmaceutical modelling and others potentially large markets.
AlexNet didn't come out until 2012.
Yes, Huang was fortunate that AI ended up being based on linear algebra, but business development is about going hunting for Lady Luck and being ready to welcome Her when she arrives. NVIDIA definitely did that.
TLDR: The reason that NVIDIA is a giant and AMD is barely an afterthought (in GPUs) is because NVIDIA made a lot of expensive and tactically insightful investments in the 2000s, long before deep learning came along.
Corvos
2d ago
Because a guy who is only half-American, who didn't grow up in America, had a Chinese girlfriend and may have told her his own company's private secrets although there is no evidence of it? The Manhattan Project was a government military project during wartime, the two are not remotely comparable.
Corvos
2d ago
Its not like it happened by accident. Nvidia foresaw the use of their cards for scientific computing when none of their competitors did. Like all siccess stories, Huang was lucky that the future came in a particular shape, but he also made very savvy moves.
The thing is, you can't achieve anything by not talking to important people. And important people aren't necessarily safe. It's totally possible to get more value out of a relationship with someone who you know is passing on some of that information, vs. ceasing contact. Risk-reward. That's why the top levels aren't bound to the same restrictions the lower levels are.
Corvos
2d ago
"Mademoiselle, we would like you to sleep with a foreign politician."
"Already on it! On y va!"
"And listen to him talk about his work."
"Je suis obligée?"
So take responsibility and clean it up. At least the midterms have sent the vague message that random wars are bad for Presidents, though I doubt the lesson will stick.
Corvos
2d ago
Countries are sending the message to America that they won't clean up the mess just because America shits the bed. Boomer American ego is a bigger problem right now than Iranian tolls, though that may change.
Corvos
3d ago
One of the things I was impressed by about the LW community was that they'd got pretty good at finding techniques to prevent the usual pitfalls of internet arguments. Taboo your terms, politics is the mindkiller, etc. etc. Sometimes it could get compulsive or silly, and it doesn't jive with everyone, but it did broadly help them have better discussions IMO.
Corvos
4d ago
I agree that the Motte has long since lost most of its high decouplers, and that this is a shame. That said, it is easier for everyone to decouple when the topic is historical or fantastical or obscure and thus has minimal emotional charge. If you want to discuss the legitimacy of states, somewhere like Cambodia would be a better bet.
Corvos
4d ago
Okay, but you can at least inhabit a perspective where one of them is more correct than the other, right? Yes, the interpretation of the winner tends to win out in practice because the winner can apply power to make it so, but that doesn't actually make him correct any more than the Chinese emperor can turn a deer into a horse.
I'll look into that, I wasn't aware. You may be right, but I do think that current licensing has remained extremely restrictive long after better arrangements could have been sorted out, primarily because publishers find the extra restrictions extremely beneficial in other ways. They have consistently resisted attempts to organise e.g. inheritance of digital property.
A bit, but I'm sure Elon genuinely respects him. Software is full of such situations where people are of equal capability but different ranks, because seniority has as much to do with timing and founding status as skill. Usually those relationships work out fine. Sometimes they can even be a nice break.
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