I fail to see the relevance of your own post as well, and frankly, I don’t see why I’d have to explain myself to you or anyone else, just as I don’t expect any from you.

The point of my post is that there is nothing particularly significant about claiming that you would refuse to take money from someone who is never going to offer it to you to begin with. It's a completely worthless and trivial statement that comes across as posturing.

As opposed to posting an opinion as a "comment" to try to get that last word?

I mean, it's called a hypothetical. They're pretty common. They can even be used as thought experiments to bring out interesting aspects of moral questions.

If the person bringing up the hypothetical were remotely as talented as the people on this list and then made a claim that they'd refuse a free $100,000 in order to advance their interests, that would be a worthwhile discussion. Then we can expand on their point of view, what tradeoffs they make, what actual resources or funding they made use of as well as the kind of diligence they performed when accepting money...

In the absence of those qualifications, some random person saying they'd refuse 100k knowing full they're not in a position to have it offered to them is nothing more than a cheap claim and does nothing but demean the talent and judgement of those who choose to accept it.

I don't see what that has to do with anything. They are equally qualified to discuss the moral aspects of the question, which is what they are discussing. This feels like a lame attempt to shame the other commenter out of a point you couldn't answer - and on the basis of a standard you wouldn't pass yourself either.

No they are not equally qualified to discuss the moral aspect of it because they have nothing at risk. It's very easy to make cheap moral claims when there is nothing at stake. What's interesting is the kind of moral decisions and tradeoffs an individual makes when there is something at stake.

The fact that this person is not in a position to stake anything makes their claim entirely vacuous and superficial. First go off and start a company working on nuclear energy or electric airplanes, get to a point in your life where someone cares to offer you $100k for nothing in return, then feel free to talk about the tradeoffs and difficult balancing act that leads you to refuse it. That can be an interesting discussion...

Some nobody just chiming in with nothing other than a claim that they'd refuse to take money that they're in no position to even be offered is cheap posturing.

OK, this is now closer to approaching a cogent counter-argument. So why exactly is it that having something at stake would lead someone to answer that question differently?

And why do you think human beings can't think hypothetically about the condition of having something at stake, the same way we can think hypothetically about most everything else?

Tens of thousands of FAMANGA employees get $100K+ per year above and beyond a great income, which they can use for whatever they care about. A $100K fellowship gift isn't so different.

Yeah, I don't think I've seen such an incoherent attempt to ban someone from having an opinion. It's on a level with saying you can't disapprove of Harold Shipman until you've got a medical degree.

Presumably we all have to spend the rest of our lives running around getting various professional qualifications and careers, just so that we can have opinions on utterly generic moral questions which happen to be faced by someone with that degree.

Indeed - apparently my Trump bashing was "unqualified", so I now have to go and run for President, get elected, be President for 4 years, and then I can start bashing him.

There are some other things on that todo list ('rape first wife', 'cheat on pregnant third wife with pornstar', 'publicly blame your failed business on a dead man before his funeral had even taken place', 'send deranged tweets to Kim Jong Un while on cough medicine and alprazolam') but you'll get to them ;)

But nah, seriously, I don't know how some people can say such absolutely witless stuff, and still see fit to click 'send'. I think they are just nonplussed that not everyone else has the same Ubermensch ethic as they do, where anyone sufficiently rich or accomplished is exempted from the moral requirements incumbent on normal human beings.

They worship them, to put it simply - the rich and powerful - and they don't understand & can't process that not everyone else does.

Exactly.

I'm not a Facebook user, mostly because of the vast and repeated privacy violations they've committed in the past (not to mention their monopoly behaviors and political influencing, etc.) - but because I don't run/own/fund any similar monopolistic entity, I'm essentially forbidden from even talking about it??

Another is ClearView AI (oh look, another Thiel-funded thing!) - I oppose the existence of that company based on their entire business model being the abuse of people's information without consent, and how they expect you to cancel yourself to prevent being abused by them [1]. But according to some people [2], anyone that hasn't been abusing people's privacy cannot have an opinion on ClearView AI's actions [3], until you actually do so yourself [4], otherwise you're just "posturing" [4][5].

Yeah, great logic!

> They worship them, to put it simply - the rich and powerful - and they don't understand & can't process that not everyone else does.

What's worse are the ones that go out of their way to justify or even apologize their behavior (not unlike those part of a certain political cult right now).

[1] https://app.clearview.ai/privacy/deindex

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Kranar

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858726

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858764

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29858663

Yeah, it's an absurd claim. And of course it never applies to their own hagiographic opinions of these people and these companies - it only invalidates critics. Handy! Who wants to be the one to tell the Holocaust historians?

And yeah, ClearView is absolutely typical. I'm not going to genuflect to some seasteading-obsessed professed libertarian whose entire business career, practically, has been in the realm of surveillance companies targeted at the bloated and despotic American state. Not even if you wrap it in some cod-philosophy blog post that namedrops Bayesian probability and game theory and Taleb.