As it just so happens, I was struggling with this in Python recently and this post describes a better solution than what I came up with.
> Essentially, if this is a feature you must have, Python seems like the wrong language.
While I don't disgree in the absolute sense, there are constraints. You can't just switch language or change the problem you're solving. If you have the need for more type safety, then this is a price worth paying.
I agree with the overall sentiment, but it's is not necessarily the case that "the world has collectively decided to lose their minds with this AI crap". You only need a relatively small number of bad actors for this to be the case.
I don't think it's common for people to wait for flow to come in order to get things done. You can set up the conditions for it and likely reliable trigger it, but getting things done (or concentrating on a problem) is how you get to flow in the first place.
You might be in the flow state without knowing. :)
Is that a well-defined thing? How is one supposed to know whether the FooBar WomBat 20 is the same vehicle or not as the FooBar WomBat 20i? Do auto industry insiders have a clear concept of this?
There were plenty of people 'complaining' about Copilot and there are plenty 'complaining' about Devin.
However, what can you really complain about? Technological progress? We can't just decide to ignore AI. Just to play devil's advocate, if there really were clear signs of this impending distruction, there could be some sort of international agreement to halt progress. Realistically, this will never happen.
> All along, we are incrementally improving AI because it is an intellectual amusement
You're contradicting yourself here. Is it just 'intellectual amusement' if this technology is as disruptive as you claim?
> You're contradicting yourself here. Is it just 'intellectual amusement' if this technology is as disruptive as you claim?
Let me be more clear: individual programmers are improving AI for its intellectual amusement, but organizations use it for its disruptive powers. Two different groups of people, with a bit of an intersection.
MOreover:
> Just to play devil's advocate, if there really were clear signs of this impending distruction, there could be some sort of international agreement to halt progress. Realistically, this will never happen.
Of course not, are you joking? There are clear signs of climate destruction as well with CO2 levels rising. Did international agreements work there? Nope, no flattening in the CO2 curve yet.
We are fundamentally destructive species, who cannot see long-term problems if there is short-term gain. The only mechanism we have on a global scale to decide what to do is capitalistic motivations.
> Let me be more clear: individual programmers are improving AI for its intellectual amusement, but organizations use it for its disruptive powers. Two different groups of people, with a bit of an intersection.
That's clearer, but I still take issue with it. You can say the same about any software project or maybe even most work in general. As software engineers (I assume that's your profession too), we automate things that could have kept hundreds of people employed. There isn't that much different with AI - as long as there is money spent on the problem, there will be people willing to work on it, especially at the forefront of technolgy.
---
I agree with your second point. With that said, climate is way clearer distructive behavior, while also being more of a nuissance, a side effect of growth. AI has enormous potential and could, in the most optimistic outcomes, lead us to a utopia. Obviously, we all know that will not happen.
Also, the reason why AI progress will not be halted - we cannot allow our adversaries take the lead on this. It's really that simple.
Note that the adversaries don't have to be foreign. The same dynamics happen within domestic markets unless enforcement is ramped up to constrain the worst actors.
> We are fundamentally destructive species, who cannot see long-term problems if there is short-term gain. The only mechanism we have on a global scale to decide what to do is capitalistic motivations.
So if AI destroys us as a species and...
> There are clear signs of climate destruction as well with CO2 levels rising. Did international agreements work there? Nope, no flattening in the CO2 curve yet.
Seems like we're in good shape?
If the end game is destroying ourselves, looks like our long term "problems" are solved.
I hate this framing of humanity as a “fundamentally destructive species” it’s a meaningless sound that people make with zero serious thought given to it. Exactly which species are not destructive? All animal life must consume other life in order to survive and exactly zero of them have any inhibition that would prevent them from maximizing their consumption and reproduction at the expense of all other life if they could. Humans are the only species that cares at all what happens to other forms of life and makes efforts at our own expense to limit or temper our impact. The only reason the world around you seems even remotely safe and comfortable is due to thousands of years of sustained human effort to make it so.
Humans are the unique species that have created a highly rigid capitalistic system where the only reward for the differential survival of ideas is short-term profit. So other species do have the consumptive tendency but we are the only ones that found a ruthlessly efficient system for actualizing our consumption without bound.
That is why I used the word destructive instead of "having the tendency to destroy". All animals have that, but only we have actualized it. Hence we are destructive to a level that is unseen in other species.
The evolutionary record is piled high with the bones of extinct species, extinctions caused by changes in the environment or by other species. We are not unique, we are just one of many millions of species to find a way to rapidly outcompete others but the difference is that we often choose not to. So far we can’t even hold a candle to the humble cyanobacteria in terms of wanton destruction of their environment and all life on the planet when they evolved the ability to photosynthesize. Similar though less dramatic events have likely occurred with each major evolutionary adaptation that allows a species to exploit something not available to others. For us it’s intelligence but for others it was eyes, fins, teeth, legs, claws, etc. all leaving a path of destruction and allowing the possessors of such traits to multiply and differentiate until their unique attributes are now the common necessities for survival.
That is true, and it is a good point. But the rate at which we are causing the extinction is much faster, and we do it consciously, causing harm to millions of species including ourselves. But you do have a point, I'll acknowledge that. We are not much different than a plague or a massive infection. Nevertheless, the fact that we do have intelligence means we have the moral obligation not to destroy other life and NOT to destroy at the rate we are.
I mean, for CO2, the U.S. and the EU (who were once the largest emitters) have not only flattened the curve, but have in fact reduced emissions over the past 20 years:
China has blown up emissions astronomically, though. To a lesser extent other Asian countries have as well.
I generally agree that international regulations controlling AI are unlikely to work, though, since it seems like it might be such a powerful and disruptive technology: if it doesn't stall, it could effectively be single-shot Prisoner's Dilemma, and when you have 193 players, someone's going to defect.
Personally though I think there are two possible outcomes:
1. Progress stalls, and it turns out getting from GPT-4-Turbo to better-than-human intelligence just doesn't pan out. LLMs are stuck as junior engineers for decades. If so, this is largely good for software engineers (and somewhat good for everyone, since it means we're more productive), but society doesn't change too much.
2. Progress doesn't stall, and we hit at least slightly-superhuman intelligence within the next decade. While this would obviously be a tough shift for most knowledge workers, especially depending on how quickly the shift happens, I also think this would likely bring about incredible medical advances, as well as incredible advances in robotics that reduce the cost of physical labor as well: meaning the price of goods drops enormously, and thanks to the medical advances we significantly increase either our lifespans, or at least the quality of our lives in old age, which seems quite positive. We'd need to figure out some sort of UBI system once the labor costs drop enough, but I think most people will be in favor of that, and also most stuff will just be really cheap at that point: ultimately just the cost of electricity (even "raw materials" are priced based on the cost of labor to get the materials, and the labor would be... the cost of electricity to run the robotics).
There are probably some in between scenarios, but TBH it's hard to see anything other than "stall" vs "takeoff" as being likely: either you never get past human intelligence (stall), or you do break through the wall, and then intelligence self-improves faster than before, up to some sort of information theory limit that I think is a lot higher than the average human is operating close to (consider just the variation in intelligence between individual human beings!).
Takeoff could also result in some sort of doomsday scenario, but the current LLMs haven't seemed to have the problems that the early doomers predicted, and so I think the like, humanity-enslaving or destroying outcomes are probably just not gonna happen.
As with everything else, it's all about incentives. If well-crafted software made more money, then all we'd have would be craftsmanship. But it doesn't.
There is plenty of software which has to be reliable and without surprises, and that is where you will find craftsmanship. Except that doesn't usually make as much money as "big tech", so it won't pay as much and that is the problem. People want to have their cake and eat it too - spend countless hours on problems that tickle their intellectual curiosity and sense of achievement, while also being paid handsomely.
> If well-crafted software made more money, then all we'd have would be craftsmanship. But it doesn't.
The problem is that people fall for shiny but low-quality things that break or are hacked into after being used for a week. And then they can't get their money back or cancel their subscription, or they are simply too lazy for it.
We're basically asked to produce a quick dopamine hit, instead of rock-solid long-term solutions.
There's a market for disposable software as much as there is for permanent software.
Disposable software is more like the fast food industry. You're looking to minimize cost. Craftsmenship is not ideal in that situation. I find a lot of B2C software fits into this category. If it's trying to get a monthly subscription, it's probably disposable software. You'll want something that works well to steal them from the competition, but probably will only capture people's attention for a few years before some new competition arrives and steals your customers.
Unless it's reducing costs by automating some business function (like a bank's UI). Then it's important that it just works and is stable.
On the other hand, a lot of B2B software needs to work for a long time without breaking, so it's easier to justify paying for something stable and reliable. You don't want your public API to be unreliable or your clients will leave.
I'd agree that the highest paid engineers are most likely to be building B2C at the big SV companies, but I've made a pretty good living working mostly in the B2B space. I tend to enjoy it more because the business wants reliability. Usually when I'm arriving the project is in major disrepair so they need someone to clean and fix it all up, and they are motivated to pay for it.
I think quality does make more money, but there is no direct relationship. It is much easier to see the very direct relationship between quality and the expense, so that’s where the focus will be.
This is my take as well. Quality is important, but at least in big tech, it's not what's going to get the quick win on the stock market. But when your product is falling apart within a few years, management won't have the faintest idea why. Must be bad engineers.
If what you were saying was accurate and taken at face value, then we would see companies and products simply crumbling every few years, for seemingly unknown reasons.
There is definitely some amount of truth to this but, by definition, it cannot be as bad as you portrey it.
Quality takes time. So the trade-off is well-crafted software vs. more software, but of lower quality. If "more" makes more money than "better, but less", then you can't be surprised that management chooses "more".
I mean, given a choice between two boxes, one of which said "twice as many features", and the other said "crashes half as often", I suspect the majority of users would choose the "twice as many features" box.
Whatever the truth may be, we now have people testifying in Congress - under oath - that the UFO phenomenon is real. David Grusch has gone through the official whistleblower process in order to make this happen, and there have been private briefings with the ICIG and members of Congress, who have given credence to his claims [1].
So while it's difficult to know what the truth is at this point in time, it's either that aliens are real or there are a lot of nutjobs in the US government.
It’s actually a false dilemma. They’re real, but they’re non-human Earthlings living here in an environment we haven’t yet discovered or stumbled upon is the option few talk about, fits the full body of evidence better than any other explanation, and would prove most everyone wrong in different ways. So I bet that is what is going on.
Edit: it’s always funny that I get downvoted for just writing a theory out that is a pretty good one, as though you’re supposed to downvote people for this kind of post. People get really upset by this subject.
I don’t think anybody is upset by what you wrote, it just sounds like a nutty theory with no evidence, which doesn’t contribute to an informative discussion.
Lots of people in this thread are speculating about the plausibility of an ET hypothesis, which is far more nutty than what I wrote here. What I wrote here is unorthodox, but an ET hypothesis comparatively is absurd, particularly if you are going to entertain that based on the existing evidence. The existing evidence would not imply ET as much as another Earth species interacting with us. It also can imply that people are crazy or lying, of course, but I'm talking within the realm where we are going to speculate about ET.
I don't think it's a pretty good one. It sounds crazy. What do they eat? Where is any evidence of their existence and history? Where do they make their technology? Why is there no heat signature? Why not a single one ever tried to run away and expose them, or just got lost into our world?
Yeah I mean ultimately I can put forward falsifiable tests for most of these. My hypothesis is they are in a large void under one of the oceans, in physical pods. They don't eat solid food, but absorb a liquid diet. They probably do produce a heat signature, if we looked. I don't have a good explanation for the relative lack of evidence of their surface phase, but we do have some evidence that timelines around technological civilization are very off base. For your last point, I think most of them are not physically able to travel to the surface at all, and any instance of crashed manned UAPs (which imo, are no longer manned at all) may have explanations of the kind you state. But that's all been eliminated now - I would be surprised to find out we have any surface visitations by anything other than things which absolutely must be manned. (Of which I can speculate, but the null set is a possibility.)
In the sense of existence, sure. But it's pretty clear that one side has gone far, far further down the conspiracy hole. Can you think of anything in the dem side as widespread as, say, the ivermectin+antivax crap was?
This stuff isn't new, either, but the scale of it is. A major wing of the Republican party is effectively the John Birch Society, who were nuts mostly kept at arms length in a previous generation. And that's seemingly the way that many Republican voters want their party to behave.
'Can you think of anything in the dem side as widespread as, say, the ivermectin+antivax crap was?' Russian conspiracies. To be clear, I think the left and the right are bad.
> either that aliens are real or there are a lot of nutjobs in the US government
Well, they caught David Grusch in multiple factual lies he made during that congressional hearing and called him out on it immediately after[0]:
> Contrary to assertions made in the hearing, the central source of those allegations has refused to speak with AARO.
> Further, some information reportedly provided to Congress has not been provided to the office, Kirkpatrick said, “raising additional questions about the true commitment to transparency by some Congressional elements.”
With his credibility already being questionable, those easy to disprove things don't make his credibility look any better at all. So I am heavily leaning towards the nutjob take on the situation. If we have presidents willing to perjure themselves during a trial, I can easily believe we have a bunch of random government employees willing to make up lies in congressional hearings.
P.S. It doesn't have to be all nutjobs either. All it takes is one nutjob and a good number of opportunistic grifters.
I believe it is a coping mechanism for many people.
Software engineering is a field in which many revel in its perceived complexity, the 'status' that comes with doing a job that brings so much to the table, yet is not understood by the average person.
Now, all of a sudden, there is a tool that is starting to bite into that and it is very easy to dismiss it using phrases such as "half broken garbage".
To be fair, regardless of the status and what have you I've seen a lot of people in my time complain that they're making unoptimized garbage with half broken tooling and they weren't shy about saying it.
For now AI in this context is often just another piece of such tooling and people using it may experience for example github copilot or the like spit out faulty blocks of code most of the time when it's not doing something cookiecutter.
When you then know full well it needs to improve till it's almost correct 100% of the time and do a whole lot more then yeah people are going to be dismissive for a good while longer.
I definitely believe that wealthy people should be taxed at similar or higher levels than the average middle class employee, and I am definitely not some Elon fanatic.
With that said, I do think that there is a reason they have so much money and that they are inventors that are pushing the boundaries. I don't understand why people refuse to accept that some people are smarter, work harder, think at a grander scale.
When's the last time you've done manual labor full time?
I'm so tired of this "hard work" meme. The hardest job I've ever had was to stack shampoo bottles in boxes for shipping. After 8 hours of that, I had to curl up in the fetal position. And the job paid crap.
I also don't believe that Elon Musk is smarter than the engineers who work for him and make nearly infinitely less money. In any case he's certainly not orders of magnitude smarter.
I see this argument frequently and I never could understand quite where it's coming from.
Throwing manual labor into the conversation is disingenuous since nobody would ever make the argument that some tech billionaire has a harder working life than someone shovelling gravel 16h per day. It's obvious that's not what anyone means, so why even point this out?
Elon Musk may not be "smarter" than the engineers who work for him, but then why didn't they start a company like Tesla? The argument for Elon's success is built into the results themselves. There's no going around that, without serious mental gymnastics.
Regardless of what other people mean by "hard work", what exactly do you mean by it, and how exactly do the wealthy work harder than everyone else?
> why didn't they start a company like Tesla
Musk technically didn't "start" Tesla, but anyway there are several reasons. For example:
1) They didn't have the capital. Musk himself didn't have the capital to invest in Tesla or SpaceX until several previous businesses were acquired by bigger businesses. eBay acquiring PayPal was the big one.
2) They didn't want to? The smartest people in the world tend not to be motivated primarily by money and greed. Also note that Musk started out working on websites and financial services, which is how he made his initial capital, but that wouldn't necessarily interest auto or space engineers.
Remember that Steve Jobs made most of his wealth from Pixar and selling it to Disney rather than from Apple. Was Steve Jobs "smart"? Sure, but WTF did Steve Jobs know about making films in 1986? Nothing. He was just a rich dude with some capital to invest. Why didn't some indie filmmaker become a billionaire instead? Because indie filmmakers don't have the capital.
> Regardless of what other people mean by "hard work", what exactly do you mean by it, and how exactly do the wealthy work harder than everyone else?
You get too caught up in the meaning of "hard work", as if your only purpose it to use its pedantic definition as a gotcha.
Hard work in the way you define it is not and should not be rewarded just for the sake of hard work. It cannot work this way and you don't want it to work this way, regardless of what you may think. If we did that, the world would stop working. So whether the wealthy work more or not is irrelevant.
> Musk
The anti-Musk sentiment is now at cult-like levels and I'm afraid that rational conversation is not on the table anymore. Somehow Elon's name is associated with some of the most revolutionary companies of the past decade, yet still you'd argue that he doesn't work hard, isn't smarter than his engineers, is basically just lucky. Whatever makes you feel better about yourself. If the guy who created SpaceX is not impressive to you, then I'm not sure who is.
He is kind of a moron in his tweets and has done some despicable shit, but I am able to separate this from his accomplishments.
> You get too caught up in the meaning of "hard work", as if your only purpose it to use its pedantic definition as a gotcha.
No, I personally don't use the phrase myself in normal conversation and would be glad if it simply disappeared entirely. I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.
> The anti-Musk sentiment is now at cult-like levels and I'm afraid that rational conversation is not on the table anymore.
The submitted article is about the "Five richest men", of which Musk is one, so it's not like I'm bringing up his name out of context. He is the context here.
> yet still you'd argue that he doesn't work hard
I didn't argue that. I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here, which is why I'm asking you. You're the one who said, "I don't understand why people refuse to accept that some people are smarter, work harder..." Yet you seemingly refuse to say what you mean by that. If manual labor isn't hard work, then what is hard work, exactly?
> is basically just lucky
He is lucky. You don't think the following is a lucky set of circumstances to get a massive payoff?
"Even though Musk founded the company, investors regarded him as inexperienced and replaced him with Intuit CEO Bill Harris by the end of the year. In 2000, X.com merged with online bank Confinity to avoid competition, as the latter's money-transfer service PayPal was more popular than X.com's service. Musk then returned as CEO of the merged company. His preference for Microsoft over Unix-based software caused a rift among the company's employees, and eventually led Confinity co-founder Peter Thiel to resign. With the company suffering from compounding technological issues and the lack of a cohesive business model, the board ousted Musk and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000. Under Thiel, the company focused on the money-transfer service and was renamed PayPal in 2001. In 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock, of which Musk—PayPal's largest shareholder with 11.72% of shares—received $175.8 million."
Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.
> Whatever makes you feel better about yourself.
I don't really care. I'm not a "failed billionaire". I've never in my life even aspired to wealth. It's not among my priorities. What I do care about is the disproportionate political power exercised by the ultra-wealthy, and how it makes our whole society worse.
> If the guy who created SpaceX is not impressive to you, then I'm not sure who is.
A lot of people are impressive to me, but I don't give a damn about SpaceX. I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds, and I wouldn't bat an eyelash if SpaceX folded and stopped operating tomorrow. Furthermore, I think there are too many rocket launches polluting the atmosphere and too many satellites being put in orbit. I'm not a fan.
Look, to be honest, I just think we have vastly different opinions and views on the world and how it works. There is absolutely nothing in your message that gave me any pause, and I think we start from irreconcilable positions.
> I'm only responding to the people who use the phrase to justify massive inequality of wealth, so I'd like to hear what you think it means, and how it justifies that inequality.
I do think that there is probably too much inequality for it to be healthy for society, but I am not of the opinion that "billionaires should not exist" or that anyone rich is some version of evil.
I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output. Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.
> I don't even know what "hard work" is supposed to mean here
In previous replies you associated hard work with physically strenuous work. I think they are orthogonal concerns. Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities. By your definition, someone shovelling bricks for 8 hours is working harder than someone working 8h in an office. By mine, that is not necessarily true.
Also, even if your definition was true, paying someone purely on how 'hard' they work would still not be a good idea.
> Without that lucky jackpot, none of your "revolutionary companies" would exist.
This sentence does not sound as good as you think it does.
Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".
> I don't believe in the Mars fairy tale that's been sold to space nerds
Me neither, but have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX, in a field entirely dominated by national agencies. No matter which way you cut it, SpaceX has ushered in a new era in space exploration. I won't even bother arguing more about this, this is honestly ridiculous.
> I believe fundamentally that two workers who have different productivity and/or different work ethics should be compensated differently. Elon Musk (and many rich people) have, on average, better work ethic and considerably better output.
Half the population has better than average work ethic.
Does Musk have a better work ethic than his lesser paid employees? That's dubious. After all, he infamously demanded that Twitter employees be "extremely hardcore" and work "long hours at high intensity". But these employees are not compensated nearly as much as Musk. They're not even rewarded at all in many cases. He still fired a bunch of them afterward, even the women who tweeted a photo of herself sleeping in the office.
What about the work ethic of the poor people who work multiple jobs because one job doesn't pay enough? How is there any relation whatsoever between work ethic and income? Note that Jeff Bezos, one of the other five richest men whose income doubled, actually quit his job! You don't make massive money from working for wages, you make massive money from owning assets and waiting for them to appreciate. This is how Musk got his PayPal payoff despite having been removed from power by other investors.
There are countless people in the world who are extremely smart and have a great work ethic. But that doesn't automatically bring great wealth. A lot of it is being in the right place at the right time. Do you need to be smart and have a good work ethic to take advantage of the opportunity? Yes, probably. But most people aren't lucky enough to get those opportunities in the first place.
It also helps to ruthlesslessly pursue wealth with no regard for ethics...
> Just by the fact that Elon has been involved in so many successful ventures at a global level, that is by definition proof that he is doing something better than virtually all of us.
He makes more money than virtually all of us. That's beyond dispute, and indeed the subject of the submitted article. It's basically a tautology though and not an explanation.
> Working hard means making progress on problems at the edge of your abilities.
Well, as I mentioned, loading shampoo bottles into crates for 8 hours was definitely on the edge of my abilities.
> Sure, loads of people end up with the biggest percentage of shares in a company like PayPal and then also continue with other extremely impactful ventures, one after the other at the edge of technology. Repeated moonshots is "lucky".
You're missing the point. Musk was kicked out of his own company not just once but twice for incompetence. Yet he still got a $175 million payoff. That's failing upwards.
He ought to be kicked out of Twitter for incompetence too, but unfortunately he can't be.
> have a look at how many launches have happened each year before and after SpaceX
I did, and I already said I don't like it: "I think there are too many rocket launches polluting the atmosphere and too many satellites being put in orbit."
Why would I pretend? That makes no sense. I have nothing to gain from pretending.
At this point, more than 24 hours after the article submission, which is apparently now flagged, and 14 hours after my previous comment, nobody is reading this thread except for you and me.
You can call me stupid if you want, though you would be sorely mistaken, but don't call me a liar.
I don't think you're stupid or a liar, but there are two strong trends I'm noticing recently - playing the contrarian and a hate for the rich.
To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth. What you've done in previous replies is a typical reductionist approach, which is to pretend that a multivariate problem, with those variables on various continuums, can be presented as "Elon Musk doesn't work harder than someone stocking shelves with shampoos". I honestly do not understand how someone frequenting HN could genuinely think that this is a valuable argument.
In simpler terms, if you exclude all the obvious counter-examples like inheritance, crypto pump and dumps, lottery winners and so on, it is empirically true that richer people work harder than poor people. Before you give some example of how some billionaire simply got lucky, I did say about that this is a multivariate equation. There are many, many things that go into it, and luck is one, hard work another.
The simple logic is: you work harder -> your productivity is higher -> you make more money. You may find some exaggerated counter-example, but this is the truth.
If Elon had just been involved in the PayPal business, yeah, he would be some forgotten rich dude living his life on some island. It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.
There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.
I don't "play" contrarian. If my views happen to be contrary to yours, or to the majority's, that's just how it is, how I am, and how I've always been from a very young age. Nonetheless, there are plenty of subjects on which I'm in agreement with the majority.
> hate for the rich
Well, my view is that our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless, so if there's any hate, I would argue that it's a rational hate rather than an irrational hate. In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.
> To me, it is just an axiom that working harder is correlated with more wealth.
To me, it's not an axiom. I don't consider it to be self-evident or even true. If you don't want to argue over your axiom and defend it from criticism, you're free to walk away, but you shouldn't be surprised when someone doesn't accept your beliefs as evidently true.
> It boggles my mind that anyone can think of Tesla, SpaceX, OpenAI as unimpressive.
The word "impressive" means "evoking admiration through size, quality, or skill". The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike? If a person that I vehemently oppose gets elected POTUS, am I supposed to "admire the accomplishment"? Only 45 people have ever been President, so in that sense it's an accomplishment, yet "admiration" is not really the appropriate attitude in these case; more like "horror". I understand that if you admire Tesla, SpaceX, and OpenAI, then you might admire Musk too, but I personally don't give a crap about any of them and even consider aspects of them to be a negative for society.
Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler? He did have a major impact, changing the world forever, doing some unprecedented things, and greatly affecting tens of millions of people. (I'm reminded of the sarcastic conversation that Paul had with Stilgar and Korba in Dune Messiah.)
Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.
> There is such a visceral hate for "rich people" that there is no room for any positives. This is looking to me more like a cult.
I was happy to ignore Musk as much as possible until recently, and to me his followers seemed very much like a cult. Unfortunately, Musk acquired Twitter, which was my social network of choice, and then proceeded to wreck it in many ways, which is mainly why I hate him in particular. Again, it's not some weird "irrational" hate but rather a direct reaction to his actions.
> In general, though, my issue is with the system, and defenders of the system, rather than with the beneficiaries of the system.
Finally, we agree on something. This is exactly it. The problem is the system, which I am happy to change. The people who get rich are simply playing by the rules the system allows.
Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.
> To me, it's not an axiom.
I struggle to understand why anyone would think this. So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money? That would be an incredible statement to defend.
> The question is, why should I have admiration for something I don't care about, or even something I dislike?
If you have subjectively decided that Tesla, SpaceX and OpenAI are not impressive, then I'm afraid we simply view the world differently. I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress.
The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures. I can.
> Just to evoke Godwin's law, are we supposed to be "impressed" by the "accomplishments" of Hitler?
Anther clue that we simply think very differently. Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example. Imagine if this same amount of work, ingenuity, scrappiness was applied from 'good'. Then we might have had two rich entrepreneurs that you'd find just as despicable simply for being rich.
> Back to the more mundane subject of wealth accumulation, from my perspective, gluttony and insatiable greed are not an accomplishment, they're a personality flaw, a pathology.
Back to what the real problem is - the system. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.
> The people who get rich are simply playing by the rules the system allows.
The rich also tend to have the power to write the rules themselves, for their own benefit.
> Rich or poor, we all do the same thing, we all try to maximize our income, reduce our taxes, use any crack in the system we find.
This is not true at all. Individual businesspeople vary vastly in their ethics. I don't actually try to maximize my income, by any means necessary. I have personal standards that can't be measured in dollars, and I try to avoid actions that could profit me if they would screw over other people or harm society.
> I struggle to understand why anyone would think this.
It's unfortunate that you appear to have such a limited imagination, an inability to comprehend the possibility of other people rationally disagreeing with your beliefs.
> So you think hard work is inversely correlated with making more money?
Why do you present a false dichotomy? There could be little or no correlation, as opposed to an inverse correlation. In any case, I still don't know what the heck you mean by "hard work". You've already rejected the notion that manual labor is hard work, yet you refuse to explain exactly what it does mean, apparently because you fear that explaining would be some kind of "gotcha".
> I cannot comprehend how someone would be unimpressed with companies at the forefront of technological progress. The only way in which I can explain your view is that you are not able to separate Musk's personality from his ventures.
Again, there's an unfortunate failure of imagination here. Have you considered, for example, that I don't necessarily view them as "progress"? The irony is that I've already given some indication, mentioned more than once: "I think there are too many rocket launches polluting the atmosphere and too many satellites being put in orbit."
Anyway, since you're having such trouble comprehending, have you considered, you know, asking me, instead of putting ideas in my head?
On the other hand, you seem to believe that I'm obligated to admire Hitler, so given that starting point, I'm not sure there's anything I could say to explain my views to you in a way you'd understand.
> Yes, I am impressed by what Hitler 'accomplished'. I am also impressed by what Bin Laden 'accomplished', for example.
You're welcome to your views, but I think you'll find, if you state them explicitly to many people, that I won't be the only one who feels differently, and you're not necessarily even in the majority.
> Don't hate the player, hate the game.
Why not both?
> Also, if Musk wanted to actually just make money, I'm sure there are better avenues than doing the hard work of creating disruptive technologies.
Musk is already the wealthiest person in the world. To say "I'm sure there are better avenues" to making money just seems ridiculous to me.
> The rich also tend to have the power to write the rules themselves, for their own benefit.
This is correct, and the 'poor' do the same, within the limits of their abilities.
> This is not true at all. Individual businesspeople vary vastly in their ethics. I don't actually try to maximize my income...
This is the Internet and saying this is free. Even so, I don't care about you specifically, I am talking about the average behaviour at the level of the society. There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.
Typical employees (the 'poor') have way fewer levers to do this, as well as less financial education, due to the way the system is structured, but the desire to keep more of your earnings to the detriment of everyone else is the largely the same.
> It's unfortunate that you appear to have such a limited imagination, an inability to comprehend the possibility of other people rationally disagreeing with your beliefs.
> Why do you present a false dichotomy? There could be little or no correlation, as opposed to an inverse correlation.
In retrospect, it is true that I presented a false dichotomy since I never considered that your defense might be "there is virtually 0 correlation".
I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.
> you're not necessarily even in the majority.
I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.
> Have you considered, for example, that I don't necessarily view them as "progress"?
Yes, I did, but then you are simply wrong.
> Musk is already the wealthiest person in the world. To say "I'm sure there are better avenues" to making money just seems ridiculous to me.
You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term). So Musk is greedy and vain. After he got his 100+ millions from the sale of PayPal, would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth? Probably not.
That's the crucial distinction. Specifically, the ability to buy politicians and elections.
> This is the Internet and saying this is free.
Once again implying that I'm a liar...
You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.
> There is no big distinction between the 'poor' and the 'rich' in terms of their behaviour to maximize their income while bending the rules as much as possible.
It's true that there are a lot of unethical poor and middle class people. (Also a lot of ethical poor and middle class people.) My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".
> I maintain that you have no decent argument to make in defence of this opinion of yours. To claim that working harder is not correlated to financial reward is completely indefensible.
You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work", so how would it even be possible for me to make any argument or defense at all? It ought to be clear from how I earlier characterized hard work (e.g., manual labor) that there's no correlation. You claimed that my characterization was silly, but it's become ridiculous how you won't say anything more about it.
Perhaps what you want to say, or at least ought to say, is that some people have more natural abilities than other people, which is absolutely true, and thus some people are capable of accomplishing things that are impossible for other people, which is also true. But I wouldn't characterize that as "hard" work, at least not for the person with special abilities. To the contrary, things come easier to them. It's only hard for the people who don't have those natural abilities. I could work as "hard" as I possibly could, to the very edge of my abilities, and never become a professional guitar player or a professional tennis player (much to my dismay), because I simply don't have enough talent.
> I'm not sure why this would be imporant. Nuanced views are rarely 'in the majority'.
It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.
> You described anyone looking to be rich as simply greedy and basically mentally ill (I forget the exact term).
Pathological. But I didn't say "simply".
> would an electric car company, followed by a rocket company, be the obvious way to increase that wealth?
Why would it need to be "obvious"? There's no obvious way to become ultra-wealthy, otherwise everyone would do the obvious.
> You're talking to someone who spent N years, for uncomfortably large N, as a grad student in a philosophy PhD program, so it ought to be very obvious that I'm not a ruthless wealth maximizer. In fact, I still have student loan debt from that undertaking.
And that's great, but your specific example is not what we are discussing here. We are talking about averages, not particular examples.
> My earlier suggestion, though, is that there's a correlation between wealth and lack of ethics, because "our economic system tends to select for people who are unethical and ruthless".
Hmm, I think we can agree here, I don't think I've said anything that would suggest otherwise.
> You still, after repeated prompting, resolutely refuse to explain exactly what you mean by "hard work"
Because I'm not sure it's worth it. However, your example with the guitar is good and actually fits exactly into what I'm trying to say.
Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.
Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".
In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.
> It's important because you seem to consider your own views as axiomatic and in need of no defense.
Not all of them. I'd be perfectly okay with having to explain my stance on the accomplishments of Bin Laden. However, yes, I do find it axiomatic that working harder is correlated with more wealth.
> We are talking about averages, not particular examples.
On the contrary, the submitted article is not about averages but rather about particular examples, namely, the five richest men in the world. I would say that happens on average is largely irrelevant here, because the average person will never become a billionarie or come anywhere remotely near the vicinity of affluence.
> Maybe you can never get to be like Jimi Hendrix, no matter how much you practice, but generally speaking, those who practice more, ON AVERAGE, will be better than those who practice less. Yes, there are other factors like natural talent and whatever else, but OVERALL those with 2k hours of guitar will be X% better than those with 1k hours.
> Now, in the example above, replace guitar with "hard work" (however you want to define it, that matters less) and "better" with "more money".
> In our economic system, the thing that gets rewarded is the creation of value. All things being equal, the harder you work, the more value you create. It's obviously not perfect and there are many, many caveats, but averaged across the whole economy, this is definitely true.
Now we're making progress, if we've defined "hard work" to mean "long work", i.e., hours of work. However, there's an ambiguity in your discussion above. First you talk about "on average", but then you switch over to "all things being equal". Those are two very different concepts. I actually agree that all other things being equal, people who work more hours will make more money. This is practically an axiom, if their hourly wage is among the things that are equal. On the other hand, I think the "on average" claim is dubious at best.
One major problem is that there are strict physical, temporal limitations on how many hours a human can work. There are only 24 hours per day, which you must spend not only on working but also on sleeping, eating, and other necessities not related to work. God forbid you have any free time! There's not a huge variation in the number of hours that different people can possibly work in a day, though certainly family responsibilities can take up a large chunk of hours. (Wikipedia says that Elon Musk has 11 children, but I couldn't say how much time he spends with them.) There's a somewhat broader variation in how many days per year that different people can work. It's worth noting, however, that on average (your favorite notion), poorly paid workers have the least generous vacation packages.
Another factor is the availability of work. Those who make hourly wages can't just automatically work as many hours per day and as many days per year as they desire: the money has to be in the company's budget, the hours approved by the company's management. And if the business itself runs on strict hours, opening its doors at a certain time in the morning and closing its doors at a certain time in the evening, then it may not even be possible for the employee to work more hours! Moreover, there's typically "overtime" pay, which is more costly to the employer than "regular" pay, so there's a natural reluctance to grant too much overtime. Of course it's possible to work more than one job; indeed, some people have to work more than one job, because one job doesn't pay them enough to cover their expenses. But this phenomenon calls into question the idea that hours of work are strongly correlated with higher wealth.
What I'm suggesting is that you may be reversing cause and effect. It's largely the job itself that determines how many hours per day/week/year that a person can or does work, and it's largely the job itself that determines the compensation. The "hard work", so to speak, can only vary within the confines of the job. Of course you can try to change jobs to get one that pays more — and finding a new job is itself "hard work", albeit unpaid work — but that's not quite the same thing as "working harder"; it's merely working for higher compensation. Those with a yearly salary (on average higher total compensation than hourly workers) may have more opportunities to work more hours, but it's also axiomatic that if you're working for a yearly salary, your salary for that year doesn't change no matter how many or how few hours you work. You have to hope that your bosses recognize your "hard work" (or whatever traits they happen to recognize) and reward you with bonuses and/or promotions. (I would say, by the way, that it's more important to be regarded as a hard worker than to actually be a hard worker. It doesn't hurt to brown-nose either...)
Let's go back to the wealthiest person in the world. Mr. Musk is subject to the same physical, temporal constraints as the rest of us: 24 hours per day, 365/6 days per year. Presumably, as a human, he must sleep and eat. We know that he seems to have quite a bit of time to tweet, and also quite a bit of time to read political conspiracy theories. And we've seen him photographed or recorded at parties, sporting events, interviews, podcasts, and other activities during which he's clearly not working on cars or rockets and such. So the available working hours per day are significantly less than 24. The biggest problem for Musk, though, is actually what you seem to admire most about him: his many companies. Given the strictly limited number of hours he has per day, and given that he owns so many companies, it's just numerically impossible for him to work a ton of hours per day at every company. I think it's safe to say that Musk actually works fewer hours per day at any given company than many of his much lower compensated employees at the company. Tesla engineers are working "harder" (longer) than Musk at Tesla, Twitter engineers are working "harder" than Musk at Twitter, SpaceX engineers are working "harder" than Musk at SpaceX, etc. The math just doesn't work out otherwise.
Thus, I'm extremely skeptical of the notion that "hard work", i.e., hours of work, are rewarded as much as you think they are. And they certainly don't explain the inhuman variation of wealth in the world, how one person can be worth $200 billion, while another person can be worth $0, or be in debt. The range of wealth is way out of proportion to the humanly limited range of working hours.
Incidentally, I'm in the top quartile of earners in the United States, yet I appear to have a lot of time to spend arguing with strangers on the web. ;-)
We could talk about entrepreneurs (of which am I one). But most new businesses fail, so the number of hours worked was for naught. And it's not clear that working more hours is the magical solution to making a business succeed.
> Essentially, if this is a feature you must have, Python seems like the wrong language.
While I don't disgree in the absolute sense, there are constraints. You can't just switch language or change the problem you're solving. If you have the need for more type safety, then this is a price worth paying.