Humans are fundamentally irrational. Studies with chimps have proven exactly how irrational we are.
One classic experiment has the reseacher give the chimps tokens in exchange for simple tasks, like finding a pebble and bringing it to the reseacher. Then the chimp can exchange the token for food. The chimps will do this all day for slices of cucumber. But if a chimp sees the researcher give another chimp a grape in exchange for the token then suddenly cucumber isn’t good enough any more. If the researcher keeps giving the first chimp cucumber then it will scream and throw it back, even uselessly threaten the reseacher.
Rationally the chimp is still as well off as before. It still prefers cucumber over kibble, and it is still worth the chimp’s time to earn the cucumber. What it doesn’t like is the _unfairness_.
> But seeing valuation rounds of tens of billions and now a net worth of a trillion dollars - million times million - it just feels like the game is eternally uneven and I can't in good conscience support these ideas anymore.
Do you see how you are making the same mistake? If you earn the millions you wanted then you will still be just as well off as you would have been before you found out about someone earning a trillion.
Of course it’s not entirely a mistake to want fairness. Fairness is a good thing in many cases. But when it comes to self–improvement we have to look beyond fairness and try to be more rational. Earn those millions and be satisfied. They will provide you just as much stability now as they ever would have.
The thing tied to the dictionary shared by the people here - SAFEs, pre-seeds, Sand Hill Road - has shifted.
~Ten years ago SF and the Valley represented the opportunity to meet quirky people, have smart fun, build something and maybe get an order or two magnitudes richer than your parents.
Now Paul Graham is lecturing Oxford students about how you can become a billionaire in 9 months.
It's all gotten insane.
I used to respect him, have his book in print and now I feel like everything he and his world represents is shifting further and further away from what I consider a disciplined, virtuous life.
I no longer want to play their game.
Having a YC badge on my front page has turned from something I longed for to an idea that's oddly cringe now.
You didn’t answer my other question, but I still wanted to return to this point.
Consider two scenarios:
1. Chimp A does a task, gets a token, gives the token to a human, and gets cucumber in return.
2. Chimp A does a task, gets a token, gives the token to a human, and gets cucumber in return. Chimp B does the same thing but gets a grape instead.
In which scenario is Chimp A better off? Answer: neither. He gains the same amount in each case.
Now consider your future:
1. You start a company, sell things people want, profit, sell the company for $2½ million after taxes, and retire with financial security (assuming you have some financial discipline).
2. You start a company, sell things people want, profit, sell the company for $2½ million after taxes, and retire with financial security (assuming you have some financial discipline) and Elon Musk has a net worth (on paper) of a trillion dollars?
See how in both cases you have gained the same thing? Don’t let your envy of Elon Musk cause you to lose out on something that would be good for you. The chimp loses his head and throws the cucumber at the researcher who was unfair to him, but you can be better than that.
The way I see it, you have five basic options:
1. Elon Musk has a net worth of $1 trillion, you work for someone else, earn a salary, live paycheck to paycheck, and retire penniless.
2. Elon Musk has a net worth of $1 trillion, you work for someone else, earn a salary, save ~50% of your income, and retire with millions (exact figure depends on your age, your exact savings rate, and how many kids you send to college).
3. Elon Musk has a net worth of $1 trillion, you start a company, work hard for a few years, go bankrupt, then start over.
4. Elon Musk has a net worth of $1 trillion, you start a company, work hard for a few years, succeed, sell it, and then retire with millions.
5. Elon Musk has a net worth of $1 trillion, you start a company, work hard for years, never quite have enough yearly revenue to sell the company, but still manage to pay yourself a salary and save for retirement, and then retire with millions.
Just to belabor the point, Elon Musk’s net worth doesn’t really affect the outcome you get.
1.) You are average, get exploited and retire penniless.
2.) You are in the small minority whose knowledge is valued highly enough by the market that they're not predestined to become part of the precariat and might have some pennies by the end of their lives.
3.) You are part of the small circle that has the resources to start over.
4.) You win at capitalism.
5.) You provide a service, live a normal life, enjoy the fruits of it.
I am lucky enough to not be option 1. Most (most!) people aren't.
Elon's wealth doesn't affect my wallet directly. However, % of total wealth owned by his caste obviously does affect the % remaining to the ~8 billion people not in hist caste.
I have friends who are great at their trade, but it's somehow not marketable, and mine or yours might as well not be, nobody really knows what's happening to our industry in the next few years. I don't consider myself one bit more valuable than my poet friend whose yearly revenue is about the same as the monthly salary I can get today.
And I find it bizarre that #4 is somehow considered a better goal than #5. The dream is to build something that gets sold to someone with more capital, thus concentrating their power even more? We celebrate stories where a trillionaire behemoth buys up your startup? Are we really only building stuff where we want an exit?
What about finding an entrance to something that's enriching in a way that's worth doing long time? Finding some kind of meaning? The way great writers often publish their best work after they're 70?
I do want financial freedom, but financial freedom is also tied to being able to do something meaningful, about serving my community, not about sipping mai tais while the rest of the world is drinking polluted water.
> Do you see how you are making the same mistake? If you earn the millions you wanted then you will still be just as well off as you would have been before you found out about someone earning a trillion.
It’s not the same mistake. I’m doing fine. I have completely tuned my life and aspiration to my income. I need know more and I am personally satisfied. But forget morality and “who has enough”. Money is just not moving sufficiently in the system. And even traditional capitalists are sounding the alarm on this. It’s not about how much Elon Musk has compared to me. It’s looking at the total distribution of money.
But like all the rules about the economy and capitalism not being a zero sum game are dependent on moderation and a set of rules. AI companies really are sucking up all the capital leaving less money for smaller firms.
Depending on how AI companies tie themselves to the government, you could see bailouts and inflation that make us all poorer.
I was reminded more of the alien AI from Constellation Games, which spawned sub sub sub agents to interview humans.
The protagonist sends a message to the aliens asking to be allowed to review the alien civilization’s computer games. An AI submind called Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic-Musteline is given the task of contacting him by IM to begin the conversation. Its job is only to verify that they are talking to the right human (since not every human has a unique name) so it is only a simple chatbot and can only understand YES and NO responses. It asks if the protagonist understands and gets a sarcastic NO. It has to contact its parent mind Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite-Singsong-Polychromatic to ask what to do next. After working his way up the tree of subminds by answering questions of increasing complexity asked by subminds of increasing capability, the protagonist briefly talks to Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite which sets him a task to prove that it’ll be worth an (alien) anthropologist’s time to talk to him.
Smoke-ccs-762d: Well, if it isn’t Mr. Sarcasm
ABlum: YES
Smoke-ccs-762d: Don’t quit your day job.
Smoke-ccs-762d: I’m Smoke-Cursive-Cytoplasm-Snakebite.
Smoke-ccs-762d: Let’s get down to business.
I need to re-read Constellation Games soon. Lately I keep coming back to considering the expectations that its alien society has for the caretakers of artificial intelligence.
Spinning up AI isn't hard for them from a tech standpoint, but since the AI is advanced enough to be considered life, anyone who creates it needs to be responsible enough to be qualified to adopt.
Well, I dunno. Sometimes the fix speaks for itself but the other party is as dumb as a box of rocks and doesn’t understand. It can be hard to tell the difference.
This is not true; there are quite a few people with guns who have never killed anyone, and quite a few people without guns who found a way to kill someone anyway. Poison, knives, hammers, rocks, windows, their bare hands. You name it someone has killed someone with it.
I have watched literally zero ads on Youtube since I installed uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock many years ago. If it’s a continuous fight then it’s one that adblockers continuously win.
Yea, fiber is great. They can do hundreds of terabits/s per fiber today, and petabits/s is not far away. Bandwidth is fundamentally cheap enough that my ISP offers 50Gbps residential service!
I live in Oregon. The price was $900/month last time I checked. I believe they do provide a QSFP+ module to plug into your equipment. They also allow residential customers, at any tier of service, to announce their own IP blocks via BGP.
Yea, I suppose if you gave the land to an organization dedicated to building parks then you could reasonably expect to get a park out of it. Of course, they might decide to build a garage to house and maintain their fleet of mowing and gardening equipment instead.
No, Kessler syndrome is pretty unlikely in this case. All of the guilty satellites are in Molniya orbits. Debris from destroying them would not greatly effect geosynchronous orbit or the low earth orbits used by Starlink.
One classic experiment has the reseacher give the chimps tokens in exchange for simple tasks, like finding a pebble and bringing it to the reseacher. Then the chimp can exchange the token for food. The chimps will do this all day for slices of cucumber. But if a chimp sees the researcher give another chimp a grape in exchange for the token then suddenly cucumber isn’t good enough any more. If the researcher keeps giving the first chimp cucumber then it will scream and throw it back, even uselessly threaten the reseacher.
Rationally the chimp is still as well off as before. It still prefers cucumber over kibble, and it is still worth the chimp’s time to earn the cucumber. What it doesn’t like is the _unfairness_.
> But seeing valuation rounds of tens of billions and now a net worth of a trillion dollars - million times million - it just feels like the game is eternally uneven and I can't in good conscience support these ideas anymore.
Do you see how you are making the same mistake? If you earn the millions you wanted then you will still be just as well off as you would have been before you found out about someone earning a trillion.
Of course it’s not entirely a mistake to want fairness. Fairness is a good thing in many cases. But when it comes to self–improvement we have to look beyond fairness and try to be more rational. Earn those millions and be satisfied. They will provide you just as much stability now as they ever would have.
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