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Comment by betageek | Hacker News Reader

"When Silicon Valley screws up, people who want a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer get a pointless Wi-Fi enabled juicer. Which by all accounts makes pretty good juice."

Nope. Silicon Valley screwing up has real world consequences. All the "wifi juicer" startups are taking up resources - money, people, time, materials - that would be better spent elsewhere. One of the biggest problems the valley has is that it wants to keep it's 'hey, we're just insanely great guys having some inconsequential fun' image while ignoring it's real world impact.

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>that would be better spent elsewhere

If we want to be cold about it, taking advantage of dumb money is how you re-allocate that capital to smarter people. It's low effort and an efficient want to get your own capital so you can make your own decisions and take your own risks.

The alternative is proving who is smart and will be a good use of time, money, people, and materials and simply giving them the capital in the first place.

(P.S. I'd happily take millions to launch an idea I've been working on. My thing is clearly more useful than a wifi juicer)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/09/simple-habit-2-5-million/

Yeah, it was weird reading that argument from Scott, who long ago proposed using dead children as a unit of currency: https://web.archive.org/web/20160318104428/http://www.raikot...

Scott Alexander is the kind of writer that found his niche reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes, they actually are living in the best of all possible worlds.

He's now in the same bucket as Steven Pinker, David Brooks, Doctor Pangloss, etc.

It is also called taking a glass half full view which is no bad thing. Entrepreneurs are naturally more Tigger than Eeyore.

> Scott Alexander is the kind of writer that found his niche reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes, they actually are living in the best of all possible worlds.

Huh?! You must have him confused with someone else. This assessment of his writing is so completely wrong that I don't even know where to start correcting it.

He's probably talking about the conclusions your average SSC readers ends up drawing - a literate, wordy reinforcement of the status quo and "problems are hard". Whether this is Alexander's intended effect is another story.

Compared to typical stories everywhere else, with simple and obvious solutions that are totally wrong, I'll take SSC any day. Scott is one of the rare breed of writers who seem to actually think things through.

    reassuring wealthy liberal people that, yes,
    they actually are living in the best of all
    possible worlds

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/03/15/answer-to-job/

I think both are consistent with each other. In this article, Scott is defending a group of people who he believes are a target of unjustly generalized accusations in media. In particular, wrt. the quoted "if SV screws up" argument, we're still talking orders of magnitude less damage to society and economy than the other two examples.

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