Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them, and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlighte...
With skills and agents, that's a lot more fuzzy. Because for every higher complexity problem the obvious answer is that agents would be able to do that also.
Some folks (with significant agency) embrace that future with open arms while others (99.9% of humans) are tepid.
* where tool replace with agent, map, AI
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
Utterly idiotic.
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.
Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.
I speak of toddlerhood.
Billionaires act like toddlers because toddlers have most of the experience of being billionaires.
Most toddlers grow out of it. As far as I can tell, no billionaire who has sunk that low ever has.
It somehow worked out that there is exactly one interviewer in the United States that is willing to fail The Test. Because Isaac Chotiner is the only journalist who ever fails The Test, his guests are frequently completely unprepared for what to say in the case that someone doesn't just agree with whatever babble they're spouting and will sometimes just blurt out the true thing they weren't supposed to say.
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The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.
Horseshoe theory is alive and well.
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Yes, because the point of the article is that these are things rational every-day people recognize as being worthy of mockery.
If the author needs to explain to you why not knowing your own address is foolish, how handing your child an AI instead of spending time with them is bad, then you aren't going to get the rest of the thesis. As the author puts it, you've passed the test, you're part of the cult of personality.
I have indeed forgotten how to do long-division, or how to multiply 3-digits numbers in my head. I also forget things without writing them down in a calendar.
How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
> How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
The bad thing is not bothering to learn basic arithmetic. If kids don't learn that they won't understand what the tools are doing.
To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.
If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.
Sounds like a cheap stunt if it wasn't immediately followed by both remedial teaching and a shake up of the teaching at the institutions that had so signally failed those students.
I was just wondering about the motivation of the professor in question and whether they had really properly thought through what they were doing and the effects it might have together with whether any effort was being made to rectify the state of the education system that caused the problem.
I'm so glad you asked! Many smart people are now eating Snickers Bars(tm)! For you, I think, to get ahead of this trend, it would be the perfect smart person choice right now. It's nutty and has this amazing new invention called Nougat and chocolate!
Here's how it works. First you have to use your fingers to tear open the wrapper. Don't worry, the wrapper isn't going to hurt you. It might be a little effort, but you'll get it. Then you take a bite. Try to use your back teeth to chew it a little. Yeah, I know it's work, but it's good for you. And then just swallow it down!
Anything else I can help with?
If, for example, an interviewee said in all seriousness "I want to shoot all dogs and make the poor eat their babies" would you expect the interviewer to go go "Hmmm very interesting. Why do you think that?"
No.
It is vital that interviewers challenge the subject. Especially when they say something profoundly ludicrous or disturbing. Otherwise they might has well just be in PR.
Saying "Well, our listeners can decide for themselves" is a cowardly cop-out.
You might not be able to change the interviewee's mind but you can sure as hell send social signals to your audience that you condemn their views or think they're ludicrous.
Case in point - why are you trying to change my mind here? You're pushing back because you want to signal to others that my point of view is incorrect. That sort of basic interrogation seems completely missing in (especially American) media.
Why wouldn't you do the same if I said something outrageously offensive in public?
Actually yes if a interviewee said something like that I’d like to know why they’re saying that because it doesn’t make sense to me!
Sometimes it helps for institutions to point out the the emperor has no clothes. The social reinforcement of norms is hugely influential.
Doing that well should inevitably involve challenging your guest's framing of certain issues. As an absurd example, if you ask the guest why they spin around 3 times when they stand up and they say, "better that than doing three somersaults", you would be doing your audience a huge disservice by asking your guest how they assess the relative difficulty of spins versus somersaults.
Why Jensen Huang thinks a fabulously wealthy person not knowing their own address is analogous to a child not learning basic math skills would be, in my opinion, much more interesting and informative of his viewpoint than the actual point he was trying to make.
It could be argued the role of an interviewer is to present and understand the interviewee and their views, to dig deep into their unique knowledge.
An interview which is just “it’s sunny outside, isn’t it” isn’t a very good interview, and neither is one where the interviewee says “I genuinely believe there is a portal to heaven and hell in the butthole of my pet chicken” and the interviewer moves to the next question without a followup.
You don’t need to debate a guest to challenge their views.
> I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
A good interviewer wouldn’t just “call it out” to the audience, they would ask the interviewee to expand on the topic. They would put themselves in the shoes of their viewers (who the interview is for) and ask what is interesting to them.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
Makes no sense.
I don't find it unreasonable either to limit this. A 1B company should probably not be in the hands of a single person.
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A person can have an ownership share of $1B and not own the entire company if the entire company is worth more than $1B. For instance, if you own 1% of a company that's worth $100b, the company isn't "in the hands of a single person".
But even still you're saying that one person cannot create a $1B company which would mean a lot fewer $1B get created. Which under "big company bad" mentality, sure maybe it's a good thing. But that's obviously an insane position to take
It makes no sense if you reason backward from "I should be allowed to have infinite dollars" as a premise. You simply can't do enough work to create a billion dollars[1]. It is just not physically possible to create that much value through sheer effort, nor is it even possible to keep that much value stored anywhere you can physically defend yourself. We're not talking about some chest of gold you keep in a bedroom closet in your very big house. It's so much more than that. Every billionaire is a beneficiary of a large organization of hundreds, usually thousands of people, that they've managed to put themselves at the top of or make a direct beneficiary of, or owns a special kind of currency that the markets have inflated to a valuation. Similarly, defending the integrity of a sprawling set of assets like that takes a virtual army of security, even if it's just the stock certificates you supposedly have in your name.
And I reject the premise that there isn't a limit on ownership. Ownership is a social construct. Ownership requires a functioning justice system and police force to maintain. Both of said things are collectively agreed upon social contracts that absolutely are negotiated. If you disagree, then by all means, build a moat around your island with a trillion gold bars and man it with automated sentry guns. No one does that because we've negotiated a system that actively helps wealthy people maintain their wealth and defends them against pitchforks, which have a nasty habit of turning up when said justice and organization breaks down and leads to anarchy.
Don't want anarchy where rich people a lynched by mobs? Well, yeah, that's why we negotiate limits. I'm saying the social contract just doesn't let you have more than a billion dollars.
[1] And incidentally, one cannot even enjoy that much wealth, even if they dedicated themselves to it! The kind of enjoyments that us regular people enjoy, like hockey games and surf trips, wouldn't even put a dent in a billion dollars, even if done for a lifetime. It's absurd that we think hundred million dollar yachts and private jets for the lucky ones are a birthright of our system or something. Because that's what we're really talking about--obscene wealth, not just living comfortably.
Or, you know, pay your employees better¹. You want more money? Help other people earn more, get your rich friends on it, raise the median. Then you can earn more. And on a multiplier! The more you give everyone else, the more you can raise your cap.
¹ Seeing as we’re talking Bezos, not exploiting people to the point they have to pee in bottles and work next to dead collapsed coworkers would already but an improvement.
It is not a flaw in the system if the system is theirs.
Complaining about billionaires instead of about greedy mega corporations just makes your objections seem like they’re based in jealousy, not fairness.
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I'm referring to the fact that the author self-identifies as a "communist, feminist, antifascist," which implies a strict adherence to the exact same kind of cult-like conformism to something "completely off the rails" that he criticizes in the article.
For example, to him, the statement "Lake Ontario is now called Lake America" is absurd, but what do you think his thoughts on the statement "men can get pregnant" are?
If people recognize something as being worthy of mockery and they are also aware of the situation, they gain nothing from reading some tripe that provides zero new information.
Also, a blog post shouldn't assume that all readers have seen the interview in question. What's the value of talking nonsense about something the readers have never been informed about? At most, the rational readers would be disgusted by the attempt to influence their opinion before they'd seen the facts.
> If the author needs to explain to you why not knowing your own address is foolish,
Well, the readers may not know that the mocked person doesn't know his own address, so when the author doesn't explain it, the author is the foolish one.
If the readers know the facts, mocking someone for trivialities without pointing out some novel reasons "why" is double foolish.
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Knowing your zip code isn't a skill though.
I don't know my ATM pin. Does that make me an idiot? Turns out I just don't need to know it.
But again, I think you're missing the point of the article. The point of him bragging that he can't remember basic stuff about his own life is both in-group signaling and a test to the interviewer. If the interviewer pushes back and asks "You really don't know your zip code? Are you insane?", the interviewer is never going to get any more time with any of these rich and powerful people. It's an easy way to filter out any critical coverage and a way for the media to show fealty.
The title of the podcast episode is "Jensen Huang vs the AI Doomers", not "Shovel seller is so rich he cannot conceive of what it's like to be a normal person".
Jensen saying huehuehue i don't know how to do math in my head in indicative that 1/ He never has normal, day to day interactions where simple calculation needs to be made on the spot 2/ He also doesn't give a shit about making the world worse.
The field of neuroscience would object to this, I think.
No, you are not on track to become a vegetable the day you turn 25. Yes, it requires more and more investment, and literally noone in neuroscience disagrees with that.
The risk, of course, is that you don't get invited back. That's "The Test" in the post.
> like expecting to use my lawn for your picnic or vegetable garden if I pay you to mow it twice a week.
The analogy is flawed. It'd be more apt if you were selling grass clippings and they were paid to run the business of growing and cutting the grass. If you just own the land and call the shots, then sure, you're doing work too, but ultimately the resource that is of value to other people is primarily produced by the work of others. You've created an apparatus and put in work, and have earned (in some sense) compensation for enabling that. That's what most people would agree is equitable. But now we have corporations and stock; that adds a whole other dimension to this where you have a side hustle of selling future revenues in the form of stock on the open market, but retain privileged stock for yourself. The price of that stock goes up, you get disproportionately rewarded for that price increase. But even worse, when the market has a lot of money available for speculation, it can inflate the price of the stock far beyond what your employees can supply in terms of grass clippings (inflated price/earnings ratio). Your employees get zero of that inflated speculation bubble, but are absolutely the underlying value. In today's hyper growth world, the disconnection between revenue, growth, and valuations is worse than ever. Billionaires exist in this super-inflated valuation bubble that is completely disconnected from the grass clippings business.
A business selling grass clippings is a tortured metaphor, just use something sensible like farming. Say I buy land, pay for it to be cleared or clear it myself, buy farm machinery to work it, seed to plant it, arrange to sell it and deal with all of the business overhead of taxes, surveying, planning permissions, records, fees, etc. and maybe I even do some labour at the start to get it running before hiring others. Once I've hired other people and I'm paying them for the work they're doing, which they agreed to as a fair exchange, then what additional claim do they have on the profit I'm making from selling turnips or whatever? Why do you think they should be able to claim more if turnip prices skyrocket? Worse, what claim do they have if turnip futures go through the roof (if I had also speculated on them)?
Design is work, and designing any of the technologies that underpin industrialized societies is also the shared work of many many people. There are specifications like 5G or BLE or browser compatibility that no single person understands, let alone could've written.
The average working software engineer contributes far more knowledge to society than their billionaire boss who is worth 1000x more with the principal contribution of "being the specialest boy".
What creates wealth? Mining raw materials? Work? Ideas? Services? Do you think any billionaire has created this wealth in these ways? No, they "create" a billion dollars by creating not value, but valuation. If it's a public company, they issue stock, which people buy for money. In the open market, the price of the stock goes up. Their valuation goes up. Their currency goes up.
Billionaires become billionaires by creating indirections of wealth. They create currencies. Like bankers, they create wealth by lending money they don't have. Those stock certificates are a currency, and trading the currency on the open market pumps up its valuation. Who buys it? People who think they too can make money off it in the future. Who pays them back? Maybe with dividends? Who makes those dividends? Who creates revenue? Mostly the organization they create.
There aren't words you say sitting around your desk that will create a billion dollars. But the desks they sit at, they can say words and a billion dollars are "created." I think that's what you don't want to admit. Their decisions are just amplified by a huge apparatus that they sit at, and the market scrambling to snip off a little profit by trading their stock in the future.
Sure they have businesses and things, but holy cow, we lionize the words they say around desks like it's some kind of magic holiness. I just don't get it.
Billionaires are sitting in board rooms paying millionaires to deal with all that bullshit why they are just trading stocks left and right and play shell games with businesses. They're at a completely different level of capital class and wouldn't touch a blade of grass.
There are plenty of other billionaires that started as small business owners putting in their own work. They became billionaires by successfully managing their business and scaling, expanding and pivoting it. There are also ones who derive their wealth strictly from investing or purchasing other businesses, maybe that doesn't seem like work or seems unfair for some reason but you can't just take a random person and hand them millions of dollars and expect them to turn that into a billion dollars. Most would go bankrupt if they tried, smarter ones would just be low risk millionaires living off interest or broadly diversified investment returns. To me, those ones would be the only people I'd say aren't really earning their money but if it's their money then it's their choice what they do with it.