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My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls. Might not make everything false, but you might as well read chicken entrails if you want something specific enough to actually say.
There's probably a steelman of that Allred piece -- heaven knows Lambda's collapse has a lot to be embarrassed about -- but it has such a scattered grab-bag of every disagreement possible that it's a little hard to take at face value. The clear illegality of operating as an unregistered school is damning, and then it's undercut by the 'oh and the legislature had to update the law later to make clear it was really-illegal not just I-want-it-to-be illegal'. Allred's homelessness was a lie, because he could have gone back to his parent's spare bedroom, as evidenced by this example of a guy who... was homeless until he made calls and went to a friend's spare bedroom. He did that incredibly dumb Sample Size of One Gimmick, but he also considers a court holding an arbitration clause intact as winning (spoiler: yes) and ran a pretty stupid 500 USD hustle to try to promote a YouTube channel (congrats, you've found an influencer). He's made three references to Elon Musk, which is tots a sign of delusion, and not just having different political aspirations, which is near-certainly what really set Sandusky off. There's some serious criticisms of Lamda excluding 'no-longer-searching' students that weren't searching because Lambda left them with no change or dropouts that Lamda went after for pennies, and also here's a claim of 27% job placement that's behind a paywall, which, once you roll the rock aside depends on interpretations of a leaked slide deck that, afaict, isn't anywhere online and allegedly is disputed by third-party auditors.
Which is probably is big difference. Graham's definitely got some serious faults here, and that he's not more critical where Lamda has fucked up says a lot about whether he's on the outside pissing in or the inside pissing out. But his sort of people have an answer about an indefensible fellow insider: they never mention them again. That's what you're seeing with Breslow -- Bolt faltered like most companies trying to upscale too fast in a highly competitive field (albeit with some hilarity when the pivot to profit collapsed, which isn't especially interesting, but that he dissed them and no one cares enough to accuse Breslow of eating faces means you couldn't get Graham et all to mention his name without a set of pliers.
Graham doesn't damnae memoria Allred not because of some complex conspiracy, but because he thinks there's some defensible variant of Lamda's goal that the school simply missed (and to be fair, I could be persuaded!), and at a more importantly, because so many criticisms of Allred were and are somewhere between exaggerated and junk.
That is fair but having a little more skepticism about the consensus on topics that you see in the startup sphere would serve all of us well. Johnson is incorrect about a lot but he is right about some stuff too, enough to warrant one to read and judge for themselves, I can point out for instance that his stuff about Yarvin and anything related to Indonesia is totally wrong but he is correct in pointing out that you have quite a lot of charlatans here.
He wrote pieces on lex friedman and eric weinstein where he at least did point out that both these people were immediately thrust into the limelight, how manufactured it all was and the ways they used credentials to later justify them being astroturfed. Lex went on JRE for the first time when he did not even have a podcast, even the views he got on his obviously incorrect tesla videos were very less. At that time, if you looked his name up (which I did) the first result was his BJJ match against Garry tonon. He would talk about MIT despite only being a post doc who spent little time there and had academic output that was about as good as Amy Chuas which zero.
Eric somehow got a job at Thiel Capital doing god knows what, claiming that his wife and he were noble science-winning minds or close to it and would throw fights whenever he was asked about his time spent in Jerusalem after his PhD and how somehow he has no output from that duration. For someone who worked as a managing director at Thiel Capital, I have never once heard him say anything about startups or investing at all that would indicate much interest or experience.
Chuck is the wrong to point this stuff out as he is not trustworthy and has a personal axe to grind.
Perfectly reasonable take. I guess I reacted fairly harshly to knowing this stuff and finding out that people who LARP as the bastions of everything good with the modern day world are well LARPers. In PGs case, he absolutely has favorites, no matter what bolt did later, them not selecting them seems fairly unreasonable. Adam Neumann of wework also somehow managaed to get another firm started post wework issues and still could raise money so people certainly have some form of strong preferences here.
The post I made here was somewaht difficult to write for me, I wish to be as good as one can be at what I want to do despite having been a total failure till now due to well just bieng lazy. In the case where I make an argument for favoritisim and other issues whihc for sure have to exist if you have money on the line, I kinda feel that I am making exuses but at the same time we all know that we are lied to on the regular about important things.
in my case here it would be
And that is hard to swallow. I have a hard time fathoming that Elon can work 4 jobs on his own and still be more onlline than me because time is limited, even if yu have all other attributes working for you, or how somehow the most important man in AI is sam altman even though he did not write down the code for the LLMs they use which use a combination of Transformers (Google) and Transfer learning stuff Jeremy Howard talked about in ULMFiT. Eric Schmiddts mistress, Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried were mytholgical figures. I remember very clearly how much literally everyone, even the people over at ssc liked Sam becuase he would comment there occasionaly. If you told people that the same guy would end up in jail because of being incompetent and hiring an even more incompetent Stanford grad, no onew would have belieaved it. I personally would not have. I thought CZ was clean till he himself got sent to jail.
I hope I make sense. i dont want to end up on the same path as conspiracy theorists or make myself believe that you can onlly do well if you are a crook wokring for something or in the cabal but I just want to know what reality is. Obviously I know I will do well if I do things right but the mythos around it shaky at best.
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I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.
This is not a coincidence, because nothing is ever a coincidence :)
I think he would call themotte a cia psyop if he got to hear about it.
Quite possibly! It’s actually a quote from Scott’s web novel ‘Unsong’, which I recommend if you haven’t read it. It’s a bit clever-clever in places but pretty good and genuinely intelligent for the most part.
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