> We (humans) should help humanity flourish. I understand that not everyone agrees. I have been called a “speciesist” for being “too human-centric”.
this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.
> if an industry commits to the axiom of helping humanity flourish
where does he see such industries, outside of maybe nonprofits?
weird bias by authority aside, do you really think that the daily decisions in this world today, and anytime soon, will be made based on the "let humanity flourish axiom"?
In daily decisions perhaps not, and certainly not when we were in the cave. But from time to time, we will face fundamental questions that need addressing clearly and decisively, and I believe it’s the case with AI. The more advances we make, the more frequent such questions will arise. That is also one of the main reasons why we don’t see any alien civilization. It’s getting harder and harder to keep the entropy low as we gain more knowledges and cognitive power.
How's humanity tackling that climate change question then? Lots of talk. Even lots of action I would argue. And yet, not enough.
Why do you think that's going to change with discussions around AI when there are trillions of dollars at stake?
> Po-Shen Loh (Chinese: 罗博深; pinyin: Luó Bóshēn; born June 18, 1982) is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics. Loh teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, and from 2014 to 2023 served as the national coach of the United States' International Mathematical Olympiad team. He is the founder of educational websites Expii and Live, and lead developer of contact-tracing app NOVID.
Nobody in their right mind would start a rocket company in order to make more money. I feel like he just wants to play real life Factorio and he wants everyone to tune in on his Twitch account and watch him play. Meanwhile he was trying to fix democracy [1] (and protect his own companies) by buying Twitter and at some point he realized he fucked up.
But who knows, I could be wrong.
I'm not exactly a fan. I'm not exactly against him either. He just seems like a hardcore geek to me that got way too much money and way too much buy-in.
[1] I'm not saying I that I think he was fixing democracy. I'm saying that I think that he thought he was fixing democracy.
Meanwhile he was trying to fix democracy .
He was literally giving checks for people if they voted a certain way and promoted it.
There is not more anti democratic than this.
probably also preferable to buying votes by making and executing promises to give people free stuff/programs. at least they aren't using tax payer money
you should really listen to one of his full town-hall videos and reflect if anything he said could not have have been said by any of the Clintons or McCain. Then compare the few differences to what you might think of Elon Musk.
This is really a matter of taste, but i (personal opinion) think that Zuck, Karp, Thiel and others who (partly by sucking the inauguration dick) have the ear of the current powers that be, produce much more demented shit than Musk. But the exact personalities really don't matter, the whole jolly crew running the show does not seem very humanistic in their writings or actions.
> working 12~18 hours doing one moonshot after another.
Does anyone actually beleive Musk works 12 - 18 hour days?
He hires the right people and his companies solve hard problems, but they make a few electric cars, design and build some rockets, and launch some satelites. Most of that shouldn't require much of Musk's time since he has experts working on it.
Other than designing new rockets, there doesn't seem to be many new innovations coming out of Musk-owned companies.
To me, it feels like we all think he must be doing a ton of work even though his companies don't seem to be generating much output.
Feel free to name the recent innovations. Has Tesla released a new car with an incredible range? Have US homes adopted solar using Tesla batteries and ow we don't know what to do with our excess energy?
Catching rockets on landing for one, and making made electric cars actually popular & desirable.
Man either the jealousy or hate on Elon is on another level on HackerNews
Those aren't recent. Electric cars were popular 15 years ago. There are now multiple groups with reusable rockets. Elon doesn't need to work 12 hours/day on things his employees have already built.
I can't believe the rewriting of history on this topic. They were definitely not popular. The Model S had just been released 14 years ago. They were not popular. Tesla transformed the world in terms of rolling out electric cars.
> There are now multiple groups with reusable rockets
Not really, and nowhere near the same operational experience. They are still figuring out Starship. They're deploying new types of Starlink satellites.
My point was that the work to make them popular was done back then. The model s is what made Tesla cool to the public and made people want electric cars. Since then there have been some improvements to the car like better FSD, but no huge technical leaps.
The things you're talking about aren't things Elon is likely spending his days on. He has teams of people marketing Tesla and working on improving starship. Do you think Elon is actually handing design himself vs sitting in a bunch of meetings and giving feedback?
If he isn't doing the hands-on work, so you think he's in 18hrs of meetings each day?
I'm struggling to make out what your point is, other than to agree that electric cars definitely weren't popular back then until Elon Musk and Tesla made them so through solving a lot of difficult engineering, regulatory and financial challenges.
However I can answer your first question: I've no idea what Elon Musk does, but obviously he has a lot of very very bright people working for him. Just as how Bill Gates wouldn't write specs but he would critique them in detail[0] to make sure that the right things were being built. Whether or not that's "sitting in meetings" or "handling design himself" who knows, because I don't know what "handling design" means, and why it wouldn't involve meetings.
weird to me that people still fall for Musk's propaganda
i had hoped him lying about being an amazing video game player, literally paying someone else to play for him and taking all the credit, would open folks' eyes to the fact that he lies about the most basic things
It takes a odd kind of person to look at someone who can't tell the truth if their life depended on it... And then start bending over backwards to explain how brilliant they are.
Most of the rest of us understand that once you've said enough brazen bullshit, you forfeit the right to be believed.
I've heard people that work/worked with Musk that say he works a lot and is very knowledgeable about technical matters. I have never found someone that worked with him or knows him personally that contradicts this. So this idea that Musk just got lucky in the 7 companies he founded and he's just a bozo who happened to trip upon some new rocket designs is just insane.
> So this idea that Musk just got lucky in the 7 companies he founded and he's just a bozo who happened to trip upon some new rocket designs is just insane
I don't know who's saying that. Of course he's smart, but the amount of hours he works each day is almost certainly exaggerated to maintain this "Tony Stark-like genius narrative" he needs to keep the money coming in.
Elon knows how to hire, how to raise money, and how to profit from govt subsidies. That doesn't mean he's this lone genius who works himself to death, and that's a very unlikely story.
> how to make a lot of money from his existing assets without working 12~18 hours
This is the biggest lie in today's society. "Make money from assets". There is no such thing. Money cannot work. People can work. He's figured out how to extract a lot of money from his employees, without them realizing the trick that's being played on them.
Effective at improving the planet? Living their own lives better? Or generating profit for him? I'm sure the plantation owners of the american south had effective workers as well...
Look dude, I'm complaining about the usage of "making money from assets". It's just a plainly false statement. Assets can't make money for Musk, people can. Musk isn't generating any value for society, he's extracting value from his employees, like a leech.
You might as well say "That crypto scammer is just following his goals of making money. Don't complain that he's taking people's money for nothing, that's just his goal. He's just 'good at marketing'. He's just an 'entrepreneur'."
Let's at least call a spade a spade and admit that there's no such thing as "making money from assets".
EDIT: real mature response, LMAO. I'm the "delusional" one while you're believing that Musk's money is walking around building rockets.
Let's flip your comment to demonstrate how much substance it contains:
> You're demonstrating a completely unhinged lack of understanding of the Labor Theory of Value, and it looks like you are buying into the ridiculous Market Economy delusion there. I apologize if my response didn't correspond to your delusions.
I can only assume motivated reasoning on your part. Surely you must own a lot of capital, if you're defending it so hard.
You're demonstrating a completely unhinged lack of understanding of the function of a market economy, and it looks like you are buying into the ridiculous Labor Theory of Value there.
I apologize if my response didn't correspond to your delusions.
Call it "Labor Theory of Value" or whatever you want. Just explain why it's more "delusional" to believe that money can't work, than to believe it can?
At least me, I haven't seen any paper bills walking around screwing rockets together. Perhaps Musk has a bunch of coins putting together data centers for him? Perhaps he's writing a check and leaving it to code up new features for twitter for him. Hmm, I've never seen a check use a keyboard. But I guess it's possible. I'd be delusional to not believe it.
Surely it's not poor people in Africa mining metals to put in those teslas? No, no. It's his money that's going down into those mines. Just a stack of bills wielding a pickaxe.
Oh, did you mean he's just renting out his "assets" to people? In other words, restricting access unless people pay him. Well, there are terms for that [0] [1]
Oh, wait, maybe you mean he's like a drop-shipper but for people's labor? Buying cheaply and reselling at a markup, without adding any real value? Well, that is surely a commendable goal. Market efficiency!
( For the record I didn't "flag" your response above, I think it's just annoying when people do that as it disrupts the discussion, now people can no longer refer back and see what was said. But oh well, I've been on the other side of people "flagging" stuff just because they disagree with it too. )
beyond a point of absolute comfort, the point of money is to accumulate power and power can be spent to make more money. musk doesn't need more money, he needs more power. dangling starlink to ukraine treasonously is that power that money can't buy but space x can.
moonshots are the external story told to maintain social acceptance. tax credits for spacex would be lot harder to sell to taxpayers if everyone unambiguously knew its just another profit seeking private company. tesla gets a lot of lenience because of its supposed pushing of frontiers.
musk can exchange his social capital to manipulate stocks to make others money in exchange for backchannel favors.
idk if musk actually believes mankind will terraform mars but he sure seems to be getting a lot back on earth from saying it.
That's only true for the rats. For the pigs and chickens (and rice), there will be fewer of them because they do not themselves have the capacity to exist at current population levels. The reason they're doing so well right now is purely that we want them to.
We also actively cull them, for the rats. Recently watched an episode of survivorman where he was on this tropical island infested with rats. There's absolutely nothing on that island yet there's rats all over the place. Having no humans they may explode in population.
>> We (humans) should help humanity flourish. I understand that not everyone agrees. I have been called a “speciesist” for being “too human-centric”.
> this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.
I don't think there are actually any "speciesist people." I think most, if not all, are the selfish "me people," who have disingenuously created "speciesism" by mad-libbing racism and sexism in a ham-handed attempt deflect criticism/opposition to whatever they want to do. Most of them aren't even "raking in trillions," they just don't like thinking about others or being told "no."
there are a lot of people who put the lives of dogs above those of people]. I think you'd find that a lot of people will donate to save animals rather than humans
> there are a lot of people who put the lives of dogs above those of people]. I think you'd find that a lot of people will donate to save animals rather than humans
Ok, sure. But I was talking speciesist vs AI. Is there anyone who would genuinely put AI above on on part with humanity (beyond the rare nutjob weirdo)? I think the people who trot out "speciesism" to defend AI don't care about the consequences and just don't want to be told "no."
Umm… there are a lot of people out there, more than you can imagine… I'm sure there's quite a considerable community who want to upload their minds to skynet.
Every time I see something like the Panama or Epstein files I just get reminded how many people there are in the world doing weird shit.
twelve40 · · focus · HN ↗
this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.
> if an industry commits to the axiom of helping humanity flourish
where does he see such industries, outside of maybe nonprofits?
sinuhe69 · · focus · HN ↗
twelve40 · · focus · HN ↗
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buildingapcin20 · · focus · HN ↗
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palmotea · · focus · HN ↗
That's why it's important to convince people to not try. It reduces the medium term risk to investor returns.
quietbritishjim · · focus · HN ↗
> Po-Shen Loh (Chinese: 罗博深; pinyin: Luó Bóshēn; born June 18, 1982) is an American mathematician specializing in combinatorics. Loh teaches at Carnegie Mellon University, and from 2014 to 2023 served as the national coach of the United States' International Mathematical Olympiad team. He is the founder of educational websites Expii and Live, and lead developer of contact-tracing app NOVID.
unsupp0rted · · focus · HN ↗
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mettamage · · focus · HN ↗
But who knows, I could be wrong.
I'm not exactly a fan. I'm not exactly against him either. He just seems like a hardcore geek to me that got way too much money and way too much buy-in.
[1] I'm not saying I that I think he was fixing democracy. I'm saying that I think that he thought he was fixing democracy.
kelvinjps10 · · focus · HN ↗
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sigmoid10 · · focus · HN ↗
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
croon · · focus · HN ↗
slopinthebag · · focus · HN ↗
i have no desire to defend musk but imo people should be criticized for valid reasons or you risk diluting the other arguments.
croon · · focus · HN ↗
You introduced a separate issue that is much more widespread, but that doesn't detract from the original criticism, nor dilute it.
mgoetzke · · focus · HN ↗
wanderlust123 · · focus · HN ↗
I don’t think we need to over complicate a megalomaniac desire for more power and wealth.
mettamage · · focus · HN ↗
But when he started it? Nah
LargeWu · · focus · HN ↗
twelve40 · · focus · HN ↗
PretzelPirate · · focus · HN ↗
Does anyone actually beleive Musk works 12 - 18 hour days?
He hires the right people and his companies solve hard problems, but they make a few electric cars, design and build some rockets, and launch some satelites. Most of that shouldn't require much of Musk's time since he has experts working on it.
Other than designing new rockets, there doesn't seem to be many new innovations coming out of Musk-owned companies.
To me, it feels like we all think he must be doing a ton of work even though his companies don't seem to be generating much output.
oilkillsbirds · · focus · HN ↗
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PretzelPirate · · focus · HN ↗
What else has he delivered?
nxm · · focus · HN ↗
PretzelPirate · · focus · HN ↗
philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
I can't believe the rewriting of history on this topic. They were definitely not popular. The Model S had just been released 14 years ago. They were not popular. Tesla transformed the world in terms of rolling out electric cars.
> There are now multiple groups with reusable rockets
Not really, and nowhere near the same operational experience. They are still figuring out Starship. They're deploying new types of Starlink satellites.
This is an utterly insane thesis.
PretzelPirate · · focus · HN ↗
The things you're talking about aren't things Elon is likely spending his days on. He has teams of people marketing Tesla and working on improving starship. Do you think Elon is actually handing design himself vs sitting in a bunch of meetings and giving feedback?
If he isn't doing the hands-on work, so you think he's in 18hrs of meetings each day?
philipallstar · · focus · HN ↗
However I can answer your first question: I've no idea what Elon Musk does, but obviously he has a lot of very very bright people working for him. Just as how Bill Gates wouldn't write specs but he would critique them in detail[0] to make sure that the right things were being built. Whether or not that's "sitting in meetings" or "handling design himself" who knows, because I don't know what "handling design" means, and why it wouldn't involve meetings.
[0] <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
myko · · focus · HN ↗
i had hoped him lying about being an amazing video game player, literally paying someone else to play for him and taking all the credit, would open folks' eyes to the fact that he lies about the most basic things
vkou · · focus · HN ↗
Most of the rest of us understand that once you've said enough brazen bullshit, you forfeit the right to be believed.
bko · · focus · HN ↗
PretzelPirate · · focus · HN ↗
I don't know who's saying that. Of course he's smart, but the amount of hours he works each day is almost certainly exaggerated to maintain this "Tony Stark-like genius narrative" he needs to keep the money coming in.
Elon knows how to hire, how to raise money, and how to profit from govt subsidies. That doesn't mean he's this lone genius who works himself to death, and that's a very unlikely story.
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
This is the biggest lie in today's society. "Make money from assets". There is no such thing. Money cannot work. People can work. He's figured out how to extract a lot of money from his employees, without them realizing the trick that's being played on them.
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
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streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
None of those other goals are in the remit of a company in a market economy. You might as well be complaining that a horse can't sing.
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
You might as well say "That crypto scammer is just following his goals of making money. Don't complain that he's taking people's money for nothing, that's just his goal. He's just 'good at marketing'. He's just an 'entrepreneur'."
Let's at least call a spade a spade and admit that there's no such thing as "making money from assets".
EDIT: real mature response, LMAO. I'm the "delusional" one while you're believing that Musk's money is walking around building rockets.
Let's flip your comment to demonstrate how much substance it contains:
> You're demonstrating a completely unhinged lack of understanding of the Labor Theory of Value, and it looks like you are buying into the ridiculous Market Economy delusion there. I apologize if my response didn't correspond to your delusions.
I can only assume motivated reasoning on your part. Surely you must own a lot of capital, if you're defending it so hard.
pfdietz · · focus · HN ↗
I apologize if my response didn't correspond to your delusions.
streetfighter64 · · focus · HN ↗
At least me, I haven't seen any paper bills walking around screwing rockets together. Perhaps Musk has a bunch of coins putting together data centers for him? Perhaps he's writing a check and leaving it to code up new features for twitter for him. Hmm, I've never seen a check use a keyboard. But I guess it's possible. I'd be delusional to not believe it.
Surely it's not poor people in Africa mining metals to put in those teslas? No, no. It's his money that's going down into those mines. Just a stack of bills wielding a pickaxe.
Oh, did you mean he's just renting out his "assets" to people? In other words, restricting access unless people pay him. Well, there are terms for that [0] [1]
Oh, wait, maybe you mean he's like a drop-shipper but for people's labor? Buying cheaply and reselling at a markup, without adding any real value? Well, that is surely a commendable goal. Market efficiency!
[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury
( For the record I didn't "flag" your response above, I think it's just annoying when people do that as it disrupts the discussion, now people can no longer refer back and see what was said. But oh well, I've been on the other side of people "flagging" stuff just because they disagree with it too. )
nirava · · focus · HN ↗
moonshots are the external story told to maintain social acceptance. tax credits for spacex would be lot harder to sell to taxpayers if everyone unambiguously knew its just another profit seeking private company. tesla gets a lot of lenience because of its supposed pushing of frontiers.
musk can exchange his social capital to manipulate stocks to make others money in exchange for backchannel favors.
idk if musk actually believes mankind will terraform mars but he sure seems to be getting a lot back on earth from saying it.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
That wouldn't do much for rice, pigs, chickens, or rats.
ambicapter · · focus · HN ↗
analog31 · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
analog31 · · focus · HN ↗
thaumasiotes · · focus · HN ↗
> Even rats.
...what do you think "even" means?
twelve40 · · focus · HN ↗
lol quantitatively well
podocarp · · focus · HN ↗
speciesist123 · · focus · HN ↗
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palmotea · · focus · HN ↗
> this is insane. the "speciesist" people aside (the best way for all other species to flourish is for humans to eradicate themselves right now, which is completely mad), i have the opposite problem: the _axiom_ seems to be: we should help ME flourish. "Me" as in people who are raking in trillions for their own very special selves right now, at the cost of everyone else's future, while none of them can be trusted to hold my cell phone for a second.
I don't think there are actually any "speciesist people." I think most, if not all, are the selfish "me people," who have disingenuously created "speciesism" by mad-libbing racism and sexism in a ham-handed attempt deflect criticism/opposition to whatever they want to do. Most of them aren't even "raking in trillions," they just don't like thinking about others or being told "no."
jack_pp · · focus · HN ↗
palmotea · · focus · HN ↗
Ok, sure. But I was talking speciesist vs AI. Is there anyone who would genuinely put AI above on on part with humanity (beyond the rare nutjob weirdo)? I think the people who trot out "speciesism" to defend AI don't care about the consequences and just don't want to be told "no."
podocarp · · focus · HN ↗
Every time I see something like the Panama or Epstein files I just get reminded how many people there are in the world doing weird shit.