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Comment by sebmellen | Hacker News Reader

I found this to be surprisingly nuanced and accurate. Reading this gives me an entirely different impression of Jack Ma's intelligence and perspective, especially after I watched his disastrous debate/talk with Elon Musk.

> [The Basel Accords], more like a seniors club, is about solving the problem of an aging financial system that has been operating for decades, and Europe’s aging system is extremely complex. But the problem in China is the opposite: it is not a problem of systemic financial risk, because China's financial sector basically doesn’t have a system. Its risk is actually a "lack of financial system."

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There is such a thing as speech ghostwriting. I'd even wager it's pretty standard for most high-level politicians and CEOs.

It works very well when the format is a unidirectional speech, but obviously breaks down in a conversation/debate.

My point here: If you want to figure out how smart Ma is, I think your reaction to how he performed in that discussion with Musk is a much stronger signal than how you perceived this speech.

The probability of this speech being heavily managed is very high, especially since the global tech/investor crowd got that wow rection after that disastrous event with Musk.

Don't think I agree with the unstated assumption here that debating chops and ability to improvise are endemic of high intelligence.

Musk is objectively speaking quite bad at that too. Like, exceptionally bad for someone at that level.

What we saw when Ma freestyled was something quite else though. It exposed something much more important than his inability to talk eloquently in English. Which noone really expected anyway, even though his background is being an English language teacher in China.

Edit: His pronounciation, vocabulary and grammar is excellent! It's just the content...

> It exposed something much more important

Could you elaborate on what was exposed?

Sorry, you'll have to watch these five minutes of Ma vs Musk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHGd6LqAVzw

They could become a great comedian duo.

No, the question is whether it’s an easy to cheat on one proxy or another. For individually delivered speeches, it’s as much a proxy as a math test where someone else can do it for you.

He probably way better at selecting and allowing someone smarter than him do the work. He look more wise than anything in my view.

My issue with it is that it's a fancy speech and nothing he's saying is necessarily wrong. He mostly correctly bashed a bunch of strawmen to great effect. Except they have more or less nothing to do with what he actually wants, which is his ability to continue to re-securitize loans he makes until he gets to the ludicrous self-fund rate of 1.6% on the loans and offloading most of the risk to the rest of society while getting most of the gains.

Nothing he complains about are infeasible with Basel III's reserve rate of 8%. Peer to peer lending, ML analysis on spending habits etc, none of his "innovations" are inhibited by regulation. The only thing it's affecting is the profit.

If watching his conversation with Musk left you with a negative impression of Ma's intellect, he probably said some things you didn't expect a smart person to say. But that doesn't necessarily mean he's stupid. Personally, I think he just wasn't trying to fulfill your expectations, but instead targeting a different group, as I've explained in a comment in an earlier thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25006975

There was a now-deleted reply about a previous submission of mine discussing how the Belt and Road Initiative is a symptom of overaccumulation of capital that can't find a productive use (within China, anyways, hence the expansion abroad): https://pandapawdragonclaw.blog/2020/02/28/looking-at-the-be...

I guess the author deleted their comment because it was kind of off-topic, but I just realized that it's actually somewhat on-topic since that overaccumulation of capital is another aspect of what Ma refers to with "Too much money can get you into a lot of trouble." although his example is about banks desperate to make loans to companies that don't need more money.

Well, I guess it's the effect of the wisdom words that finally enlightened you. Ooooh, the wisdom words flowed out of this rich business man, carried his lies and false claims so naturally.

The things are more clear if you knew that few days ago, the CEO of Ant Finance Xiaoming Hu comes out and said "Everybody, even beggars should be given loans. Everyone should be respected" (https://36kr.com/newsflashes/895377271796488).

You know, banks don't want to give loans to beggars, and it's for a very good reason: Because banks don't want to lose any money, money that the banks don't actually own.

Now, Ant Finance claims that they have buzzword BiGdATA to prove somebody's ability to payback, and so they can safely doing their ABS business (http://finance.ifeng.com/c/8189yYOdKfw) without cause bubbles. But, at same time, it is very reasonable for a government to rise concern about it, especially after seeing whatever shit storm has been going on since around 2008.

My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply. So don't just listen to what people says, think what the speaker wants.

“My point here is, everybody, richman, world leader, scumbag and good people etc, they can all make their speech sound nice and smart and reasonable, you just need 5 episodes of JCS Criminal Psychology to get yourself to understand that, deeply.”

Watching 5 episodes of a TV show will most certainly not give you the eloquence of a JFK or a Martin Luther King. It comes from repeated practice, and in some cases a natural aptitude.

It takes a lot of effort to master the art of rhetoric and getting your point across.

I think you missread. He said you watching this show would make you understand his point, not become a first class rhetoric.

Thank you based nirui

Well put

His description of the world’s ailments is quite accurate, yes. His prescription for them, a big data-based credit system, seems frustratingly Chinese. Only time will tell if his futuristic system is the right way forward though.

Yes, I found that proposal rather myopic and disturbing. The concept of "big data" is so amorphous that in my mind it stands for "totalitarian surveillance system". I really have a hard time understanding the AI and Big Data buzzword fetishism.

And, though this is probably controversial to say, I know of very few business that apply "AI"/ML to any real benefit. At least not much that couldn't be achieved with less complex statistical models.

I would say that it's just endemic to the region. Countries in southeast Asia tend very strongly towards centralization, for a wide variety of historical reasons.

Fits right in with their social credit idea. I don't think it's even a veiled reference.

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