I always wonder what people who say these things think about the fact that we have someone in the white house who was mentioned in the Epstein files more than Jesus was mentioned in the bible. Whatever it takes to get rid of those pesky aliens right?
These are completely orthogonal. That’s cool if you want to appeal to an in group, but I think you’ll find that a huge portion of the country thinks that we should have rules around immigration. So do most other countries.
You should probably argue your actual position instead of “your guy bad my guy good”. This comment is more Reddit than HN.
I have a personal belief that this is a result of the "can-do" attitude that pervades not only American society currently; but virtually all of American history.
A small group of colonies managed to win a war against what was considered at one point the globe's strongest empire. Throughout the history-narrative of America there is a prevailing sense that the underdog can always overcome their circumstances and win the day. That most Americans (myself included) have a semi-deluded sense they "can achieve anything they put their minds to" is a direct manifestation of that narrative-history. It's also why there is so much rampant anti-intellectualism here; think about it, if you can do and are capable of anything - why would you *ever* listen to an expert's opinion? It's also why libertarian-ism is so popular; why would you want the rest of society dragging you down when you yourself are capable of so much more?
I want to be clear as well, there *are* benefits to the can-do attitude, but at this point the cons outweigh the pros, and we are seeing that play out in American society. I'd also like to acknowledge that the current situation is the result of many different factors; but that this one is largely overlooked due to the assumption that it's positives outweigh it's negatives.
Well, yes and no. A can do attitude is needed to imagine taking over fighting a global British empire. All around the world people needed to muster up that courage. That said, equating the outcome of that with smartness was bound to happen. That said, they leadership got co-opted by money outcomes is where the downfall happened, IMO
Political elites in a vast colony far from the empire’s center gambled that the empire did not have the will to grind out an expensive victory against fellow elites. This proved to be correct.
I think there's something to this. And while America has always had this can-do attitude (just look at the number of self help books), it does seem to be in another gear recently. I don't know what caused it, but I think there have been a number of indicators: Trump ignoring Congress and introducing wild tariffs, Musk firing half of Twitter's staff and then later repeating this with DOGE, the quick roll-out of LLMs. There seems to be this prevailing attitude of "we can just do stuff, damn the consequences".
It appears to come with a lot of corruption and anti-intellectualism. Like you say there are also benefits to this. I think the break through of mRNA vaccines was an early indicator. I just hope we can steer this attitude back to a more optimistic world-view instead of the blatant self serving one that is currently prevailing.
> I have become so disillusioned by some of the Hacker News crowd on here.
I feel the exact same way, but it's due to comments like yours that seem to excuse anything in the name of innovation. The goosebumps people feel are them just projecting what they think the future may look like based on what the snake-oil salesmen are peddling. How long have we been "just 2 years away from fully-automated self-driving" again?
what i'm saying is retail investors don't care about the valuation and will trade on what they see. So expect a lot of ups and down in the price because of retail investors.
OP used the term incorrectly. The term was used by Smith to refer to the fact that in the market, order occurs by the alignment of incentives of different people without any central planner.
These takes are always so funny to me. The whole reason we even have the internet is because the US government needed a way for parties to be able to communicate in the event of nuclear fallout. The benefits that a technology provides is almost always secondary to their applications in warfare. Researchers can claim to care that their work is pro-social, and they may genuinely believe it; but let's not kid ourselves that that is actually the case. The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another.
Even funnier is that researchers (people who are supposed to be really smart) either ignore or are blissfully unaware of this fact. When you take that into consideration, the pro-social argument falls on its face, and you're left with the reality that they do this to satiate their ego.
Although the Rand corporation did contribute some ideas theoretically connected to nuclear survivability (packet switching in particular). All that work was pre-ARPAnet and don’t really motivate the design in that way.
It was designed to handle partial breaks and disconnections though. Wikipedia quotes Charles Herzfeld, ARPA Director at the time as below. And has much ore discussion as to why this belief is false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
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The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them.[113]
So researchers are going to be irrational and also often value other things more highly than prosociality but that doesn't really refute my point that they value it more highly than the average population.
Also your example of a bad technology is something that allows people to still communicate in the event of nuclear war and that seems good! Not all technology related to war is bad (like basic communication or medical technologies) and also a huge amount of technology isn't for war. We've all worked in tech here, "The development of technology is simply due to the reality of nations being in a constant arms race against one another" just isn't true. I've at the very least developed new technologies meant to make rich assholes into slightly richer assholes. Technology is complex and motivations for it are equally so and won't fit into some trite saying.
I never claimed any techology is good or bad; you also seem to be in agreement with me that technology used in warfare _can_ have "good" applications (I mentioned that the benefits are secondary to their applications in war, that doesn't sound like me saying there are no benefits).
Lastly, the only point I was trying to make is that the argument that researchers do these things for "pro-social" causes is kind of a facade; the macro environment that incentivizes technological development *is* mostly due to government investment. Sure, the individuals working on it may all have different motivations, but they wouldn't be able to do so without large sums of money. The CIA [1] literally has a venture capital firm dedicated to the investing in the development of technology - do you really believe they are doing that to help people?
God has been used as a justification for a lot of human suffering.
My personal belief is that the closer to god you are; the more easily you can justify evil. How could you not? If my entire belief system is derived from faith, then there are *no* conclusions I could not come to, and therefore anything can be justified.
> but stop pretending this kind of thing matters one iota
This is blatantly false and intellectually dishonest. Of course it matters. Your edit is also wrong; you are advocating for nihilism with statments like these.
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