I believe so friend. An exponent is short form for exponential or an order of magnitude. Do you work in SV? You're free to ask what X is.

Orders of magnitude are typically in log 10, 2^2 being 4 is in the same order of magnitude.

The national average wage for the USA is roughly 70k according to a quick Google search, unless you’re suggesting the devs are making $4.9 billion per year I think you’re not using exponents correctly.

I said "likely on a wage x^2 their national average"

It looks like there's a lot of assumption on X. Trolling a bit because you know, SV folk.

Please don’t troll here.

If there is something that x is referring to that is not wage, then please enlighten us because I honestly cannot read it as any other way.

There are no realistic values of x for x^2 that work with this argument.

I'm not trolling. My basic point was that people in SV make orders of magnitude more money than the average person. But if we want to be pedantic, you don't know X so you can't refute.

If OP wants to say I don't know what exponents are, that's on them. The whole thing stands.

@macmcirish fair enough, I meant in context to the reply.

Folk can be pedantic about numbers and take the mick out the average intellect of the average HN user I suppose. I'm not on the spectrum so not especially retentive to those minor points.

The main point was that a lot of these employees were on very large sums of money, and in control of the information flow across the web. It's a centralised platform. Anyways, doubt it's worth making the point any more.

Your last comment literally says you were “trolling a bit”.

I don’t think you’re having this conversation in good faith and I’m going to stop interacting because of it.

> What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage x^2 their national average

> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the median wage for workers in the United States in the second quarter of 2022 was about $1,041 per week or $54,132 per year

Which puts your estimate of the average silicon valley wage at $2,930,273,424 per year.

What is X in this example?

:) or what nation.

OP is correct if the strongest rebuttal to the argument being put forward is semantic pedantry.

You can spot stupid[*] replies miles away when there's no attempt to engage with the substance of the argument.

[*]: Yes, stupid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc

I don’t think it’s unfair to call out the first sentence of the argument, if you’re trying to persuade with several paragraphs of content and the very first sentence has a gross error, it transcends pedantry in my opinion.

Rather, I think it makes the original argument look irrational if they have an extreme exaggeration if they have to use that to make their point.

It's a typo. There isn't some kind of grave epistemic problem with the first sentence where everything that follows is predicated on a falsehood. We don't discard the contents of books just because the publication has a typo.

As noted in their other reply, it is actually not a typo. A central part of their point is in that first sentence they note the extra eyes on marginalized people making more money than other marginalized people, but it’s blown out to being extremely exaggerated.

So yes, I think there is a “grave epistemic problem” with the first sentence that hurts the argument and its credibility as a whole, without having to get into the details of the argument itself.

That you called the first replier “stupid” or even their argument “stupid” is wholly unjustified.

The charitable interpretation of the argument was the exponent was intended to be a multiple of two. That's reasonable when comparing salaries in big tech to elsewhere, and I agree with this. The fact that nobody will engage in the good faith argument, but rather take the least charitable interpretation is further evidence of the point.

Eating a gallon of motor oil a day is great for your digestive system. Now let me tell you about my other nutritional insights.

The entire argument rests on a calculation that a third grader can see is absurd.

Sorry pal, did someone reveal what X was to you? Guess it's a bit like the Twitter algo then.

Restated:

What I get from this whole experience is big tech employees, likely on a wage double their national average, are able to communicate more widely to the world about their disenfranchisement about being unemployed than others made unemployed who are not.