brindlejim

The difference between Mochary and Campbell is stark.

Campbell did not receive compensation for his coaching. He used to say "I don't take money, options, or bullshit."

There was a reason for that. Campbell knew that if he took CEOs' money, he enter the circle jerk of people telling each other what they wanted to hear.

Mochary is part of that circle jerk, unfortunately. He is passing on received and second-hand wisdom, supposed lessons that he didn't learn the hard way, and may not be true at all.

He is well known in Sequoia circles, and you might say he's their in-house coach. But Sequoia, well, they also backed FTX ...

I've worked for and with some of the companies that Mochary mentions in his podcast interview with Lenny.

https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-fire-people-with-grace-...

They work nothing like he says. It makes me doubt all his other advice. I used to like to read Mochary. Now I think he is selling a line of bull that tech people like to read.

Mostly because he's too high-level and he doesn't have enough windows into the company. "Amazon is good at innovation"... Really? People don't need equity to get motivated? Really?

Amazon employs more than one million people and I guarantee you that many of its teams suck at innovation. Many are full of bozos led by the blind. That's why they buy so many little startups. They failed to build it themselves.

People don't need equity to be motivated? Well, cheap hiring managers want to believe that. Good luck hiring that crucial engineer...

Mochary's experience as an operator is out of date, and his updated opinions depend on news reports and self-reporting.

He fails the Cedric Chin test:

https://commoncog.com/verifying-believability/

Definite guru vibes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgHaFvmY3s

As a sidenote, many of the commitments that SBF made to the FTX Future Fund were either in FTT or paid in installments, which means that they will never be paid at all. Huge impact on the EA movement and their grantees.

I think that making humanity a multi-planetary species, by definition, derisks the possibility that humanity will die out, especially if the extra-terrestrial colonies are self-sufficient. I actually don't see how you can logically dispute that. I find Elon's drive to make us multi-planetary totally respectable, and a logical action based on the nuclear and climatic risks we face on Earth.

Making cars electric means that we could swap in an alternative form of fuel, like nuclear, without breaking an economy and society that depends on driving.

I think Musk has demonstrated mixed motives, and in that, he resembles most people. His political and geopolitical opinions are regrettable, and if we wants to operate a large social media platform and appease advertisers of many stripes, he should probably shut up. But I doubt he has the humility or self-awareness to do that.

> That's a false dichotomy. In a western democracy, do you vote for the things you believe in, or do you vote for one of the few representatives that pretends to approximate your beliefs closely?

No it's not, actually. Democracy devolves power to individual citizens in ways that allow them to impact decisions about collective action. In western democracies, citizens have many ways of impacting collective action, which include speaking out and rallying others to their cause. It is common in places like Russia and China for citizens to be jailed or killed for speaking out about government policy. Therefore, those countries are undemocratic not just in how they approach voting, but about the civil rights they recognize and protect ... or trample.

> Is that true? What if the people likes authoritarians? What if it doesn't care about scandals? What if it democratically decides it doesn't want "free and fair elections" anymore? If the majority wants "the wrong things", the outcome will be poor. Democracy is not the distinguishing factor, it's not inherently good or bad, functional or dysfunctional.

Given that authoritarian figures control the media, information and feedback loops that are available to citizens in their countries, how would you even know what "the people" like? You can't know; you can only speculate. Authoritarian states systematically falsify voting results and other expressions of popular will. They obliterate the feedback loops because they are afraid of what people would say. That's one crucial property of an authoritarian state. To put it bluntly, you have no idea of knowing what people want under authoritarianism, and that should trouble you.

> The proceedings may be illegitimate, but there's no doubt in my mind that the Russians would have elected Putin over Navalny again. Of course there is an opposition in Russia, but it's not a majority and in any event Navalny isn't all that popular.

You have no way of testing this hypothesis. It's an opinion without evidence or the possibility of evidence, and I will treat it as such.

You should ask yourself why Putin is so afraid of running that experiment himself.

I agree with the author that there is a good Elon and a bad Elon.

But I think Twitter only gets the bad Elon.

At Tesla, Elon is producing EVs to help save the planet. At SpaceX, he is producing spacecraft to help save humanity. At Twitter, he is making the world a better place for unfounded conspiracy theories and Russian talking points, which he himself promotes.

In the last month, Elon has claimed on Twitter that 1) the attack on Nancy Pelosi's aging husband was due to a dispute with a gay lover; 2) Ukraine, a sovereign nation, should give up its industrial heartland to a bunch of rapists and war criminals; 3) Taiwan, a sovereign nation, should subjugate itself to the Chinese police state.

That is, Twitter employees don't get the visionary. They get an abusive boss who is also bad at filtering information, leaning into stupid theories, and willing to traffic with police states to forward his interests.

Frankly, I miss the good Elon, and I wonder where he went.

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-taiwan-china-ukraine-...

* https://www.vice.com/en/article/ake44z/elon-musk-vladimir-pu...

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-paul-pelosi-tweets-li...

By far one of the most thorough critiques of the 1619 project and its systemic racialist fallacy was from socialist academics:

https://www.amazon.com/Times-Project-Racialist-Falsification...

Banning non-competes is a great idea.

However, everyone here should be aware that lots of startups are now including "power of attorney" clauses in their employment contracts that grant to the employer power of attorney to assign inventions to themselves. Feels like there's a lot of room for abuse, which could discourage moves to competitors.

"Believing in democracy" means believing that granting real power to all adult citizens through voting and other forms of feedback is a better form of government than those governmental forms that only grant power to a few. Say, to the members of the central committee of the Communist Party, as in China. Or to a tiny group of oligarchs, apparatchiks and propagandists, as in Russia. Or to a royal family and its courtiers, as in pre-revolutionary France.

Democratic leaders can easily fall due to scandal. Authoritarian figures cannot.

China can commit the enormous mistake of its zero-COVID policy precisely because its leaders will never face a reckoning at the ballot box. Russia can stagnate in kleptocracy for the same reason.

Vladimir Putin, a former KGB officer, has controlled the Russian Federation for 22 years, starting in 2000. He has signed laws that will allow him to remain in office until 2036, at which point he'll be 84.

His chief opponent, Alex Navalny, is imprisoned in Russia. Navalny's party is not allowed to participate in presidential elections. Navalny survived one attempt to poison him, and another attack in which he lost 80% of the vision of one eye when an assailant sprayed a chemical on his face.

So sure, you can believe that Putin was elected democratically if you want. He'll be elected democratically until he can no longer force Russia to elect him democratically. He resembles an African president-for-life like Mugabe much more than he does a democratically elected leader. If you believe Putin's claims, it would be useless to debate it further.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexei_Navalny

Fwiw, Bronze Age Pervert (BAP) is actually a classics scholar named Costin Alamariu, who holds a PhD from Yale and wrote a dissertation on the tyrants of antiquity. He puts on a Slavic accent for his podcast, but he moved to the US as a boy and speaks perfect American English.

BAP wrote a book popular in right-wing circles called Bronze-Age Mindset. In the late teens, it was reviewed in a couple of the usual places by conservative figures. BAP has lost a lot of steam since then, and it doesn't look like he'll lead his group of Frogs and fringe-heads to direct action, even though he fetishizes the warrior class.

BAP and his fellow travelers were early believers in Trump and grew disillusioned. They were consistent champions of Putin as well -- after all, he appeared topless on a horse and learned karate. I can only imagine that Russia's military failures in Ukraine have made them seek other idols.

The good thing about BAP is that he knows his sources. He has mastered political philosophy and read the original texts to a depth and degree that jokers like Yarvin cannot aspire to.

Like Yarvin, BAP wants a strong man. He does not believe in democracy. He does believe in racial superiority and inferiority. While I happen to disagree with him about a lot of issues, including those, for all the usual reasons, if I were to engage him on his own terms, I would simply point out that authoritarian regimes like those he idolizes have really obvious weaknesses.

Those include the inability to maintain high-quality, transparent communication under a punitive regime, and the inability of a kleptocracy to inspire the kind of collection action that wins wars.

BAP is chasing a pipe dream.

This is true in many cases. But in many others, it is the OSS maintainers who are expending the effort responding to the needs of free-software users. Many would argue that companies and adopters of OSS are creating negative externalities for those maintainers, who presumable accept that cost for the sake of their ideals or reputation.

You could argue that reinforcement learning policies are already causal models insofar as they relate state-action pairs to the rewards and penalties that they lead to. The trial and error that RL performs in a simulation is an exploration of counterfactuals to establish cause.

But the policies lack introspection. One of the most powerful things we could do is somehow extract causal models from those policies, to see what they learned that lead them to behave more intelligently. That would increase both our knowledge as well as our trust in applying RL.

People's reputations and careers can be destroyed by a simple accusation of discrimination made on social media, let alone by an accusation levied by a founder against one of their investors.

If the accused also have a powerful position at a company, then that company also faces large liabilities, both reputational and financial. Everyone knows that the costs of litigation in the US are astronomical.

It is less known but equally true that the costs of arbitration (and to a lesser extent, mediation) can be high. Prohibitive for a startup, still painful for a larger company. Which means that all a potential accuser needs to do to get their pound of flesh is threaten litigation, and name an amount less than what would be paid in arbitration.

So our current system, on social media and in the courts, puts a tremendous amount of power in the hands of those who might accuse. And yes, the gender _alone_, or protected minority status _alone_, is enough to set off alarm bells in an executive who has already been burned.

Trump is pushing a catastrophic narrative that logically leads to violence.

https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/only-the-church-can-tr...

> After all, when people believe our national destiny hangs in the balance, they often respond accordingly. Or, as I said in a December 4 newsletter warning about potential violence, “if you argue that the very existence of the country is at stake, don’t be surprised if people start to act as if the very existence of the country is at stake.”