I'm actually curious as to how many HN users find The New Yorker useful or insightful. It's always struck me as rather middlebrow and perhaps couched in the would-be-elitism of the east coast.
68 karma · joined February 3, 2014
I don't, and I don't think it's appropriate to make generalizations unless one has access to a sufficient body of empirical evidence. So I'm not making generalizations.
With that in mind, none of your opinions strike me as self-evident in an objective/empirical sense. Perhaps they're self-evident to you, but that doesn't make them the basis for sound argumentation.
It's unclear to me how I might have come across as defensive with respect to your comments; I merely don't find what you're saying to be convincing.
An appeal to personal experience does not constitute a refutation of the assertion that a technology cannot possess sensibilities. Nor does it provide evidence that the majority of the present Bitcoin community shares such beliefs -- asserting otherwise constitutes a fallacy of improper generalization.
It's quite possible that the views most frequently articulated on Bitcoin Talk, etc. are those of a vocal minority.
It's nonsense.
A technology cannot possess sensibilities.
But there are plenty of people willing to assert otherwise.
"computer money invented to buy drugs." -- come on.
I get that the New Yorker is middlebrow yuppie polemic, but they could at least put a modicum of effort into an attempt at satire.
The scientific method enables one to deliver results because its models are predictive, not merely explanatory. The engineering and science we do today is also predictive because it relies on models cultivated within this methodology.
Equating today's "best guesses" with those in medieval or ancient times is absolutely inane.
On one hand, crypto-currency in general is a relatively new phenomenon -- it seems unlikely that there could be a well-established gender bias in the community, given its youth.
On the other hand, perhaps Bitcoin, etc. have inherited the apparent male-dominated attributes of the tech scene from which they emerged?
What might begin as an underground colony full of social elites or skilled professionals required to run the infrastructure could result in a fully-habitable environment.
But if you don't plant the seeds and experiment with this, then it certainly won't get anywhere. Elon Musk is planting the seeds.
When he says "back-up the species" (not /save/, one would note), he's referring to planting the seeds for a long-term habitation which very well could be self-sufficient and continue progressing in the event of an extinction-level occurrence here on Earth.
Saying that corporations are risk-averse followers is inane. Governments broadly fund a great deal of seed-level research. Sometimes they develop applications based upon it. Sometimes corporations get there first.
We're seeing an instance of the latter with SpaceX, I think.
Isn't this self-evident? It's unclear why this should necessarily equate to greater respect for developers in the developing world, as a general assertion.
Elon Musk seems more focused on affecting meaningful change and driving technology forward. He's using corporations as a vehicle to do that and making money is an incidental side-effect.
If profit was his primary motive, there would have been many other ways to invest his fortune from PayPal which entailed far lower risk and potentially significant gain.
After all, SpaceX's plans for a reusable rocket are certainly more ambitious than anything governments have been doing for the last several decades.
A major point of SpaceX is distributing humankind so that such a thing wouldn't wipe us all out.
Yet, if such a thing is construed as an admission of guilt in the greater "court of public opinion" then there's an incentive to actively avoid any attempt at transparency.
/s
Foreign policy, affected by GDP, certainly plays a role in this.
There's a great deal of risk and uncertainty involved in foregoing the completion of a degree, a potentially-salaried position at a stable firm, and so forth in favor of starting a company that is statistically unlikely to succeed.
Foreign policy, which is decided by governments that tax the aggregate population (and thus draw from the GDP)? Not in the slightest.
Of course, they might have been relatively more powerful in relation to their contemporaries, but that hardly implies anything relevant about the modern era.
Are you implying that the sort of people who assume the degree of risk required to build a financially-successful business (specifically of the "home-run" magnitude implied by a multi-billion-dollar acquisition, IPO, etc) are merely "self-aggrandizing money-chasers?"
Companies of that scale sometimes have the ability to improve society. There's also the potential for abuse.
But if a culture's general attitude toward aspiring to construct such a business entails disdain and mistrust, it hardly seems illogical to consider the possibility that cultural pressures are turning people away from the desire to do something entrepreneurial.
And that, I think, is the point that the author was attempting to make.
But research professors who either can't lecture or don't try to lecture well? It's almost inevitable. Lectures are a commodity that can be recorded and broadcast at a massive scale. Individual or small-group instruction isn't a commodity.
Consider Game of Thrones -- I'm perfectly able to discuss Seasons 1 and 2 with my friends who haven't yet seen Season 3, if I'm mindful to avoid spoilers.
Community discussion can be had, it just needs to be conscientious.