Disqus - Latest Comments for albert

Re: Power and Progress (Book Review)

albert — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 09:59:29 -0000

The key takeaway is that the distribution of gains from technology is dependent on power and we shouldn't assume that it will automatically benefit everyone.

Re: The Banking Crisis: More Kicking the Can

albert — Tue, 14 Mar 2023 11:02:11 -0000

Yes indeed. Lyn Alden also had a good thread about this, see here https://twitter.com/LynAlde...

Re: Not-Yet-Full Self Driving on Tesla (And How to Make it Better)

albert — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 19:08:06 -0000

Yeah. There are a lot of exceptions and many of them require some kind of understanding of the world at large in order to make a judgment about what to do.

Re: Personal Update: Rage Against the Dying of the Light

albert — Tue, 10 May 2022 15:04:34 -0000

I am sure there are many more instances but both of these are intriguing, thanks for sharing.

Re: Personal Update: Rage Against the Dying of the Light

albert — Tue, 10 May 2022 15:02:21 -0000

Definitely working on white piling myself. Sometimes works better than at other times.

Re: Personal Update: Rage Against the Dying of the Light

albert — Tue, 10 May 2022 15:00:38 -0000

Thanks. Feeling much better now. I definitely need to work on acceptance and forgiveness.

Re: Personal Update: Rage Against the Dying of the Light

albert — Tue, 10 May 2022 14:59:07 -0000

That sounds super scary. Glad to hear it turned out the diagnosis was wrong.

Re: To Infinity and Beyond

albert — Thu, 24 Mar 2022 18:06:26 -0000

Thanks -- I don't see the lines on my machine.

Re: Startups and Macro Risk

albert — Sun, 27 Feb 2022 12:36:13 -0000

There is definitely a risk in that direction also. That's what makes these decisions so difficult. Generally what I am suggesting here isn't some dramatic pull back. Rather being deliberate about spend levels and prioritizing efficient lower growth over inefficient high growth.

Re: Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?

albert — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:40:36 -0000

Once the data is accessible in a permissionless fashion many other people can provide that / other functionality. Furthermore Web3 does of course also have functionality in the form of smart contracts. I simply didn't want to overload the post by also talking about permissionless composability of code. But that's of course a crucial feature. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Google etc. all have varying degrees of APIs but they and only they control who has access to those. Btw, I do believe that this is something regulators should change by enforcing API accessibility.

Re: Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?

albert — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:37:42 -0000

Agree. The role and influence of VCs is being exaggerated. Also many of the worst abuses during the ICO days were being committed by folks entirely outside the traditional VC investor realm.

Re: Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?

albert — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:33:19 -0000

Distributed and decentralized are two different concepts and commingling them creates confusion. We have been able to do distributed for some time but that was always under fairly tight control. As for indexing being a point of recentralization that's an interesting suggestion -- I can see some scenarios where that might happen but also plenty of ways it can be avoided.

Re: Web3/Crypto: Why Bother?

albert — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 10:29:16 -0000

That is a totally fair question and one that is yet to be answered. I can definitely see scenarios where Web3 never crosses into mass adoption. Much will depend here on what happens with regulation of both crypto and the big existing platforms. Their lock in is quite profound. I have written extensively about one way to address that through requiring the platforms to be programmable.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:59:15 -0000

That would be a good idea. Sadly we no longer have any influence here as the company was acquired a couple of years ago.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 20:56:05 -0000

I agree that self censorship is rampant. People care way too much what other people think. When we started homeschooling with our kids, we heard time and again from other parents who loved the idea of a highly personalized approach, but ultimately didn't do it because they worried about how their peers perceived homeschooling.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 13:39:56 -0000

Oh well. I just tried what I thought would close just this thread but it closed the whole discussion. So best I can do is to appeal everyone her to bring this back up when I actually write about Marxism.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 13:30:46 -0000

I agree with Mats. This thread feels pretty off-topic and its length makes it harder to find the comments directly related to the topic of the post. Trying to figure out if Disqus gives me enough fine grained control to stop a thread like this.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Wed, 29 Jul 2020 13:21:39 -0000

Not sure why that comment was flagged, I just released the original so it can be where you had put it.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 15:20:02 -0000

Agreed. We have a big crisis of meaning. This is related to the end of the Industrial Age and I write about that in World After Capital (I just did a huge rewrite of the first half but still not need to publish that). We have spent a couple hundred years shifting meaning from religion towards work and consumption. Work is changing rapidly due to technology and consumption was always a terrible idea for meaning (but of course trillions of dollar of advertising are trying to tell us otherwise). No wonder people are lost.

Also agree that we have excessive financialization. Lots of making money from money without any positive impact in the real world, often downright negative impacts, eg housing bubble.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 14:53:08 -0000

Ooooh. I need to add pardoning war criminals to my list. What is that if not a blatant attempt to undermine military leadership and embolden the elements inside of those institutions that would happily pervert them?

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 12:30:03 -0000

Yes, some of the institutions are working as designed. Fingers crossed that winds up being good enough.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:09:30 -0000

The perspective of an enormous gap exists for a combination of reasons including actually terrible reporting (e.g. NY Times in lead up to Iraq War, simply awful), made worse by news as propaganda/entertainment (e.g. much of cable television) but is dramatically compounded by the President's rhetoric. As I said in a different comment, the President's words matter a lot for what people believe to be true. The number of people who actually do the work to form their own opinion about these matters is unfortunately extremely small.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:01:38 -0000

Yes to all of that.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 10:55:33 -0000

Yes you can get the results there. But the operative question is not where you "can" get the results but where "do" most people get the election results?

Btw, also a reminder that I should add funding cuts at the Election Assistance Commission and not appointing FEC commissioners to the list of Trump actions.

Re: The Threat of a Trump Dictatorship

albert — Tue, 28 Jul 2020 10:21:16 -0000

The "we are hierarchical by nature, as are all animals" line is a favorite talking point of Jordan Peterson's but it sells humans short. Of course we are also animals, but unlike all other species we have developed knowledge (I provide a precise definition of knowledge in my book). Knowledge is the source of humanity's great power (and responsibility). Knowledge is what lets us be more than animals, including for example recognizing that there are many hierarchies (eg I am low down in the tennis hierarchy, but high up in the investor one), it also lets us deliberate about hierarchy and recognize explicitly that being higher up in a hierarchy (eg as a professor or as the President) comes not just with more power but also with more responsibility.