domain:forecasting.substack.com
Corvos
20m ago
In the case of Elizabeth Holmes, I think people were desperate for a female Steve Jobs. Don’t forget she never got significant amounts of VC money; she got the funds from blinding politicians and supermarket CEOs with science.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
24m ago
Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.
This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
42m ago
Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.
You would reject any procedure they have and any amount of work they do that ostensibly furthers that procedure in non-political cases as just covering it up.
The stated procedure they have doesn't enter the picture here, so I'm not even rejecting it. I'm saying they'll try to come up with any excuse to remove that photo.
I expect someone who's seeking the truth to attempt to falsify their belief first, especially if they're well aware the test they proposed is onerous. What you're doing, on the other hand, is the equivalent of a flat earther who smugly offers their interlocutor to go to space and see for themselves.
What are you talking about? I'm offering to do it myself, I just don't want to go through the process you describe as onerous yourself, if it will be met with an after-the-fact justification, and a refusal to change one's mind.
I'm putting the onus on you because I believe my case is more plausible
I'm not talking about the onus of going through the work, I'm talking about the accusation that I'm not willing to change my mind. I'm the one that put forward a test, you and sarker are coming up with excuses for why it won't necessary prove anything, if it comes out the way I predict.
When you hear hooves, you think horses, not zebras
And by that logic I think that an organization that doesn't have a healthy balance of opinion in positions of influence will use their rules in a biased way.
and if you're convinced a malicious agent has replaced your random sample with 100% zebras
Who told you the sample was ever random?
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.
Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)
Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.
mrvanillasky
1hr ago
All I hear is how every founder who made it is an angel who is just better than everyone else, how all of them did it because you can too. Even here, I cannot fully say that I suspect that there is some chance that a lot of new-age tech firms likely cut deals with governments that we have zero clue about and how many of them can be astroturfed.
I did not want to believe it because I started reading PGs essays and thought that startups were the only fair thing in the world, how you cannot get ahead here without being super honest about everything, how everyone else is that way, how these are the saviours of humanity. Saying that Musk or Gates or Jobs may have actually done a whole bunch of shady shit that we conveniently wish to pretend could not have happened was my frame. I will get downvoted and get called a frustrated negative loser here, even though I hope Charles is incorrect. The idea that a lot of them happen to have fairly rich families that somehow did have connections with various agencies or services adjacent to them does seem fishy. Alexey Guzey made a post about Nobel prize winners and all their parents mostly worked white collar jobs like academics, engineers and maybe business owners but very few were active in politics.
Even in the case of Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos ran for years with VCs head of national agencies in the board and somehow never asked for a working white paper or patent, or how Adam Neumann raised money from a16z despite causing a lot of loss to people with his wework stuff. PG lies to people about how uni does not matter yet YC favors your undergrad and past experiences a lot more than most jobs do. Adam Neumann fucked innocent people over who lost money and jobs because of weworkm somehow he is still a better person than everyone else.
Last week on a thread before the elections got over I joked about voter fraud at which point I got a reply from a guy asking for substantial proof. This is the same thing as casting couches, if you actually investigate this stuff, it is very hard to prove as defection means punishment, with the P Diddy stuff, many who got raped by him will likely never come and accept it. How is it that most large crypto projects (exchanges) somehow have extensive money laundering issues to the point where if you run one, you likely fail jail sentences because you implictly either helped or rugpulled people
I don't want to be a conspiracy nut who thinks CIA or aliens or "the jews" run the world and do everything good or bad. The idea that there is still far more corruption in everything, especially startups, where the extent of the rot is sealed pretty well behind the personalities of founders and VCs who LARP as thought leaders whilst writing blogs that would make my incoherent ramblings look sane should make you suspcious.
RococoBasilica
Actually a Quality Retribution
1hr ago
Trump just announced his plans to go forward with a Milei-style AFUERA campaign radically cutting government spending and jobs. And because nothing in government ever gets done without increasing the government first, the plethora of American Departments to do Stuff is joined by one newly-formed Department of Government Efficiency. Apart from proving once again that we are living in the dankest timeline, the DOGE will also give Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy something to do.
Musk has quite the track record when it comes to trimming fat but it remains to be seen whether those skills are transferrable.
Culture War angles are plenty. It would be trivial to craft a narrative either of a hostile, "fascist" takeover of Our Sacred Democracy or of a laptop class that siphons resources from everybody else via the instrument of an ever-expanding bureaucracy consisting of bullshit sinecures for the credentialed.
But the more interesting angle is that this is a fight between the executive and the entrenched bureaucracy. Were I a betting man, I am not sure where I would put my money. Others have tried and failed to cut the bureaucracy to size. But maybe it takes a chainsaw-wielding maniac to get the job done. How is Milei doing, by the way?
sun_the_second
1hr ago
Literally why would it?
If you begin with the premise that Wikipedia has a habit of deleting pictures politically under made-up pretenses, then sure, it wouldn't. You would reject any procedure they have and any amount of work they do that ostensibly furthers that procedure in non-political cases as just covering it up.
Also, why are you criticizing me for not changing my mind, when I'm proposing a test that would falsify my belief, and you're just looking for excuses to never change yours?
I expect someone who's seeking the truth to attempt to falsify their belief first, especially if they're well aware the test they proposed is onerous. What you're doing, on the other hand, is the equivalent of a flat earther who smugly offers their interlocutor to go to space and see for themselves. It's a strategy for winning pedant arguments, not truth-seeking.
I'm putting the onus on you because I believe my case is more plausible. When you hear hooves, you think horses, not zebras, and if you're convinced a malicious agent has replaced your random sample with 100% zebras, I expect you to present something in favor of that.
curious_straight_ca
1hr ago
Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past
veqq
1hr ago
there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people
This is the most shocking thing I've read in months. No wonder I didn't understand what the conspiracy was. Surely you did school projects and saw people do little getting a lot of credit, surely you've heard of Enron, Theranos and thousands of other companies...? How could you suspend such a thought for so long? How did this Bolt guy of all things break the glass?
Incorrect, varnas are from Aryans, jati or caste from IVC, other Aryans and their descendants also had it, Scythians, Germanics etc. There is very little out there is honest about it though Razib Khab is pretty good.
mrvanillasky
1hr ago
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.
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.
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
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.
You cannot read the New York Times every day and not be a liberal
in my case here it would be
You cannot follow tech stuff every day and not believe that PG et all are heroes
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.
2rafa
2hr ago
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
Not really, I mostly meant to state that I do not believe fully that all the super mega corps that are being run are completely clean entities that represent everything good about the world. Charles Johnson is a nutcase in many cases, the cases he makes for most of VC stuff being for show, where you do have mostly legit companies but the super mega corps most likely have fishy connections, motives and backstories is more believable than I was previously led to believe.
Nuclear technology did get stolen, most of what intelligence agencies do is classified and not reported on much universally in most nations. My theory is that a lot of what we are told about how the absolute outliers came about obfuscates a lot of things and there is a good chance that they are complicit in doing things with either domestic or foreign regimes for their own gain, where the incentives are far higher than what we can think.
Hollywood has casting couches, we know this, most of us know that if you are an actress, you very likely did have to sleep with some sleazy guy. Harvey Weinstein was caught but he was one of likely hundreds of thousands alive who did it. It still is happening and no one talks about it. In many cases, the people who later get hired by the actresses or their friends and families are unaware too. In such a scenario can it not be possible that there is quite a bit that happens inside Silicon Valley that we don't know about because none of us are founders of firms that are extreme outliers?
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
My previous understanding was that people who build large firms do so entirely on their own fighting impossible odds and are helped by fellow founders, that unlike academia, there is zero corruption here, no scope for dishonest people to survive, those at the very edge are people who are not only competent but just better people.
Reading this breaks that, how can you trust anything? Thiel was a legit FBI guy for a year and there is zero mention of it by anyone anywhere and this is not because of Palantir being related to him either. Similarly, Marc Andreessen is seen as this American patriot, /ourguy/ but a VC whereas his firm has taken money from Saudi Arabia and likely China too, how can you not have a conflict of interest then?
I used to take everything at face value before, I think I will probably lean towards believing things that I have seen as true instead of taking everyone else word for it.
Tree
2hr ago
I don’t let people choose their colors. They get on the binary tree like everyone else.
“grey tribe” : left-right-right
“communist”: left-left-left
“center-right” : right-left-right
“conservative”: right-right-left
Hyperion
2hr ago
My impression is Johnson's brain got eaten by the sorta connection-stitching that normally gets thrown up on Pepe Silvia walls.
I think my grandparent's called that paranoid schizophrenia. Everything is connected, if you are mentally ill enough.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
You're missing the point. The point is that there's nothing to distinguish this photo from the 150 other photos deleted in those ten minutes except that you feel strongly about this image. There's no indication at all that the process has been abused.
I'm not missing the point, it's just not relevant to my views. There's a lot of work in an org like Wikipedia including deletions, so these other 150 deletions don't move the needle either way.
There's no indication that the process was abused, because you cannot access the licensing info of the image at the time it was deleted anymore.
At this point, it seems it is you who has the unfalsifiable belief,
I literally proposed a test that would falsify it.
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
The VC scene has been shady and two-faced forever. Graham is bad, so are the rest of them. Johnson has an extreme axe to grind and is a fabulist of hilarious proportions, but like you say he’s never entirely wrong. He’s basically an extremely autistic compulsive liar with a huge axe to grind.
I do wish to know more about this, there are barely any accounts on any of this at all but people on the inside are extremely tight. For instance, I do not know how Elon Musk can tweet at all hours of the day, play video games and still be involved in various firms, even part-time involvement in 4 different firms is enough to chew you out completely even if you work more than the hard-working Investment Banking guy. He probably is passive in what he does because I don't know how else you can do all that and still spend so much time online. These are not agencies that outsource Web Jobs to Indians, they are hard-tech firms, even if you spend 25 hours a week on one, you still get 48 hours for the rest of your week where you have to eat 21 times, meet your dozen kids, play your video game, tweet at all hours, go on podcasts and now work with the government.
I bring this up because I am certain that a lot of what we are told has pr spin on it combined with our innate desire to have heroes. You would rather want to believe that he does this and more than be told that a lot of what we are told is given charitable spins for preserivng ones image. He is certainly fairly capable, beyond what most people can comprehend but I doubt he is newton, far from it.
The boyfriend died shortly after he showed up unannounced at Thiel and his husband’s Christmas party and apparently made a big scene. (Classic case of a mistress with unwarranted confidence). Was he killed? Hard to say, but probably not. Thiel stayed out of this election to hedge his bet, he still needed all those contracts for Palantir etc if Harris won, and Vance is his guy so he doesn’t need to suck up to the Trump campaign.
Apparently, he has quite a few more of them with him, his mistress (feel weird using it for a guy) did tell people that he was under threat a few days before his demise. Thiel got contracts even after 2020, donatng this time around would most certainly been helpful.
benny
2hr ago
That sounds real good. My November so far has also been going well. Maybe it's in the air.
Rock on!
2rafa
2hr ago
As others have said, this is only an issue in dense old-world cities where a high percentage of the population use public transport already. In these cities I imagine SDCs will be taxed, banned or discouraged as necessary to avoid extreme congestion. In the US it’s irrelevant outside of Manhattan because everyone already drives everywhere.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
And I'm assuming producing another log of innocuous-looking deletions for that same "made-up" procedural reason will not change your mind either?
Literally why would it? Also, why are you criticizing me for not changing my mind, when I'm proposing a test that would falsify my belief, and you're just looking for excuses to never change yours?
Do you believe organisations are unlikely to have procedural reasons that don't serve political agendas contrary to yours?
It's not about "contrary to mine", and yes I believe it's rare for organizations to neutrally apply their procedural rules, unless they have a healthy balance of worldviews, political agendas, and values, in their decision-making positions.
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
I think it’s more that there’s a clear delineation between caste supremacy and Hindu nationalism. The latter can’t be too casteist because most Hindus are of either middling caste or casteless. For the same reason a British nativist might be hard-pressed making the argument that the aristocracy should be put back in charge of everything after the revolution.
Most of modern-day urban India is mostly leaning towards the casteless future BJP imagines or Congress did before it. There is no caste supremacy, arranged marriages exist a relic, and people who are living in urban centres and not poor don't really care as much about who they marry. BJP is not and never reactionary even when it first started out. They follow Arya Samaj which makes corrections to the Vedas to justify annihilating castes. Savarkar in his texts very directly talked about this. BJP has to appeal to upper castes because they vote for BJP in unison.
You cannot discuss any of this here publicly nor point out the HBD implications of castes, how brahmins in various parts Sanskritized people for money or how every single scripture is explicitly in favor of having castes and varnas. Indus Valley civilisation had a concept of caste despite not being aryan and the Aryans who came from the Eurasian steppes had Varnas, two are different but nearly identical in most cases now. I am not some caste obsessed lunatic, I have to mention all of this since it gives a complete model for understanding religion, denying birth-based varnas is not far from denying the divinity of Christ. Anyone who does that is calling scriptures wrong, and not the fake new ones but the Vedas which are the equivalent of the bible in Hinduism. Again I am not asking for people to follow it, its just that you cannot believe in the Vedas, call them divine and then go against things they explicitly tell you to not do.
The reality of being poor plus having stark contrast with people who live beside you who not only inherit everything good but also were responsible for everything bad done to you and have slightly different ancestry is a recipe for disaster. Also why they push against Aryan Invasion Theory as it makes things even worse. On the flip side, most upper castes are people who got Sanskritised in that fold, their y haplogroups don't match those of others so there are no good outcomes.
Very well. I'll copy sarker here.
If you upload the image to Wikipedia and state that it's free use (similar to the Charleston example), I do not think it will be removed due to missing licensing info (which is what happened last time).If they do remove it again, for any reason, I'll grant that this case smells fishy and that you were correct to doubt it in spite of information that pointed towards lack of malice.There are different available degrees of confidence about this. "They'll be marginally quicker than usual to delete the picture if it clearly breaks the rules" is one degree. "They will not stop at anything to keep this picture off the wiki" is another.
Looks random enough to me.
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