solveit

> How to succeed: pick the right thing to do (this is critical and usually ignored), focus, believe in yourself (especially when others tell you it’s not going to work), develop personal connections with people that will help you, learn to identify talented people, and work hard. It’s hard to identify what to work on because original thought is hard.

You have to be somewhat lucky to be able to do this, but also you have to actually try. Your comment seems needlessly dismissive as well as inaccurate.

Anyone with the expertise to have insightful takes in AI also has a financial incentive to steer the conversation in particular directions. This is also the case for many, many other fields! You do not become an expert by quarantining your livelihood away from your expertise!

The correct response is not to dismiss every statement from someone with a conflict of interest as "basically worthless", but to talk to lots of people and to be reasonably skeptical.

I mean, the article says it formed as Africa and Europe came together, and that's not the only time continents collided to form larger landmasses. Certainly we've had larger supercontinents that could've accommodated larger lakes.

Even if every problem you mentioned was real, "let's kill literally everyone until we figure things out" does not seem a reasonable response.

> Unfortunately, public intellectuals in our current society don't hold themselves to these kinds of standards (which would have been considered obvious for public intellectuals a couple of centuries ago)

Have you read anything a couple of centuries old? The problem was, if anything, much worse!

Dresden took literally hundreds of thousands of bombs...

Eh, I know you're being facetious but the opposite of bad advice is not good advice. Things are more complicated than that. Which is why even a 20% hit rate (say) could be very impressive.

Prices lower than the market-clearing price necessarily mean rationing or empty shelves. If you have a hundred potatoes and two hundred people, lowering prices just mean some people won't be able to buy at the low price.

No, that's not what real wages mean. Real wages going up means we can afford more stuff, full stop.

The fact that real wages haven't kept up with productivity means that we can't afford as much more stuff as is being produced, but we can still afford more stuff.

I'm not making a point about society, I'm making a point about what real wages mean.

Wikipedia?

People have looked very hard, and there is not a shred of evidence that Abagnale passed the Louisiana bar exam other than his own claims.

I think a better way to formulate the same rule of thumb is that zero, one, and infinity are the only numbers that don't need to be justified. You should always have an answer to the question "why 5000 and not 6000?"

Of course, the justification can be as simple as "it has to be some number and 5000 is as good as any", but that opens the door to the discussion of whether 5000 really is as good as any other number, which is often surprisingly enlightening.

Or you're just old and you don't believe in investing. Lots of people are like this.

Yes, "hard" in this context refers to worst-case complexity. In practice, lots of NP-hard problems can be solved, or approximately solved, in a reasonable amount of time. This is why traveling salesmen can exist, for instance.

> My guidance counseler suggested I dont attend college, just a community college (despite the fact that I got admitted to a decent state school)

What's wrong with guidance counselors in American high schools? Why do I keep hearing about them giving kids incredibly stupid advice?

No. People aren't clocks. The best way to make something great is to make ten meh things and discard a hundred crap things. I guarantee you everyone whose takes you admire also have many, many bad takes (which they perhaps don't tweet, but there's a definite trade-off here and PG's lower threshold for tweeting seems to work well enough for his goals).

You're certainly not disagreeing with the person you're replying to, so why the combativeness? You're literally saying the same thing (no amount is perfectly safe, we choose what level we're willing to take by analyzing costs and benefits).

467 pages. https://www.epa.gov/system/files/documents/2023-01/naaqs-pm_...

Eh, it depends. The USA does have some of the most stringent protections for speech in the world.

The Last Question is actually the origin story of a paperclip maximizer.

Most studies in this reference class (social science) don't replicate, so I'm fine with that being the default assumption.

First, of course you can understand a theorem without knowing the proof! Uniqueness of prime factorization, for instance, is notoriously tricky to prove, but it would be a stretch to say people who haven't majored in maths haven't learned it in any real sense.

Second, even if you wanted to understand the proof of a theorem, doing it with a proof assistant is an atrocious way to go about it.

See also SMBC making this point a few years ago: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/college-level-mathematics

The problem is that being privately tutored by UC Berkeley faculty is worth much less than a UC Berkeley degree[1], even though you might learn a lot more. And starting a new university from scratch is apparently difficult, although I share your confusion on exactly which part is so difficult, and whether the difficulty could be circumvented by getting a billion or so in private donations, or if it's a case of "no matter how much money you pump into Brown, it'll never become Harvard. Only Harvard can become Harvard".

[1]: Unless you go and make yourself famous for it, which in this case might be quite doable[2]. But the general point that just learning the material without an official piece of paper recognized by the system is often worth significantly less than having the piece of paper.

[2]: And someone should do it and make headlines.

You're looking for the Conway base 13 function (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_base_13_function).

No, it's we don't need factory workers and factory towns any more, so travel across the country for a job because there's no alternative, the town is gone and nobody can save it. Learn to code isn't going to work for most people, sure, but travel across the country isn't something that can be avoided.

"Bullish" is a terrible word to describe his position, for one thing. Scott doesn't claim crypto will appreciate in price, which is the standard meaning of the word. Nor does he make the weaker claim that crypto is net good for society. He merely claims that crypto is sometimes genuinely good, without saying much about how the pros compare to the cons. So all he is really saying is "I hate crypto less than some other people, who see literally zero redeeming qualities", and his title gets that point across fairly well.

> rather than swallowing his medication (Ritalin?), he crushed it & snorted it like cocaine.

I'm having a hard time pinning this on the meds honestly...

> Technology does tend to get cheaper over time, though not always.

What technology didn't get cheaper?

I mean, yeah. For arbitrage to stick around for years it requires that the person who first found it be years ahead of the curve, and that's really hard to do just by being smarter than the competition. The vast, vast majority of these will be collusion, or regulatory capture, or literal fraud, or whatever where the competition knows full well what you're doing, but can't/won't jump in for completely unrelated reasons.

But finding lots of different things to arbitrage and consistently being two weeks ahead of the competition is something you can do with a dedicated team of smart, experienced people, and this is the business model that Jane Street and others claim to be running.

"You don't understand billionaires because you're not a billionaire. I, on the other hand, watched a satirical TV show, so naturally I have a deep understanding of how the minds of billionaire heirs work."