Madoff, WeWork, Theranos, NFTs, …

Looking ahead… Probably these vector db company valuations, most companies doing AWS competitor DX plays.

All of those listed were well executed financial frauds. I don't think successful people are particularly more likely to fall for scams - they just have the necessary capital/disposable income and are targeted by more sophisticated scammers.

I think the author thinks more along the lines of Steve Jobs trying to cure his cancer with herbal tea, Elon Musk sleep depriving himself into a twittering idiot, Scientology, NLP and various "success hacking" fads etc.

The answer there might be that in reality successful people are not really very different from unsuccessful ones, and have very little control over the contingencies and luck that put them onto their respective paths. This is certainly the case with financial success.

I mean, define “well executed”. Theranos, in particular, it’s notable that very little of their money came from _conventional_ sources (traditional VCs, sovereign wealth funds etc). It was largely, essentially, _personal_ investment by stupid rich people; often via a family office, but ultimately at the direction of the stupid rich person. IIRC one attempt by Theranos to get investment from a real VC collapsed because they _could not provide audited accounts_. Like, they didn’t even have a fake set, they were not providing them to their investors _at all_.

I don’t think that any of the named ones were particularly well-executed, and people were trying to warn that all of them were problems for a while. Madoff might be the closest, but even there it was verging on being an open secret that there was something up; again, Madoff’s investors were not actually that sophisticated.

As a "poor" person by Madoff investor standards, I am paranoid of any investment where I don't know what it is invested in. That said the other side are people who invested with the guy who bet against the CDS crap in 2008 (sorry forget his name), who I think were also in the "trust a guy with my money" camp. So I can see why people do it. But I would diversify, maybe max 10% in any one fund that is a black box, maybe max 40% in black boxes in total. Assuming you are rich - maybe 10% for most of us.

I have one that I think is worst than all of them. CloudKitchen.

Hyperloop is probably a good example in the context of the article.

I think musk knew very well. It's the investors that fell for it.

There's nothing physically impossible about the Hyperloop (basically a maglev in vacuum tube, nothing wrong with the tech, just not particularly economical). Maglevs have been deployed successfully in some parts of Asia, they are just dreadfully expensive and nimbys have fears about radiation but they are hardly new technology.

Note that the main point about the hyperloop was the vacuum tube, not the maglev part. And the vacuum tube doesn't actually work. It's not actually feasible to create a vacuum tube hundreds of km long. It's just about physically possible, but it's not really technologically feasible - not for a system that is supposed to be in constant operation all year long.

It's also important to remember that vacuum tube trains are an 1800s idea, which everyone started pretending is some revolutionary new transportation concept.

And besides that you don't have to have a really good vacuum, you just have to have a 'good enough' vacuum that you can attain high speed without losing the stabilizing effect of a bunch of air constrained by the walls of a tube. Bonus points of you can get the air to move at a speed a bit slower than your vehicle, more bonus points if you can use the air to propel your vehicle.

But: it's probably still a dumb idea, but one that is borderline.

I'm still waiting on the giant pneumatic tubes from Futurama.

The problem is that if any of that was a good idea, the question is why is the Hyperloop specifically a good idea, but regular old high speed rail is not? What factor are you changing that makes one good, and the other not good enough to get done right now?

(the answer of course is nothing: the Hyperloop would be stupidly expensive, and however fast it is wouldn't solve the logistics problem of loading and unloading it - so whatever quote you've seen for rail, just triple it if you tried to build a hyperloop).

Yes, there isn't anything in particular about Hyperloop that makes it stand out, but it is different in high speed rail in that it is underground and so more complex in almost all ways but one: right of way (and possibly aesthetics, which depending on the landscape can matter a lot).

Not a lawyer and might be wrong but as far as I know land rights go all the way to the core in the US, so going underground wouldn't help with right of way. I know, "HN is more than the US," but we seem to have the most trouble with trains.

I think you're referring to the 'all the way to heaven and all the way to hell' bit.

In principle that's true. But in practice mining rights and such have been split off from the right to the land and some reasonable depth underground. And any objection to an easement would be much harder to establish if it doesn't actually affect you. But for those parties that own the underground and mining rights for a given location there could well be a viable opposition to such a development. But that would then risk an eminent domain claim.

It's all pretty complex. But I would still assume that going underground is easier than going above ground where the parcels are small and the interests are immediate due to interference with existing activity.

Even if this is true, the costs of digging are much higher than the costs of above-ground construction + the legal costs of acquiring the land. A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it won't even completely avoid the need for buying above ground lands.

> the costs of digging are much higher than the costs of above-ground construction

Yes, easily 3 to 10x.

> A hundred kilometer tunnel would be one of the longest tunnels ever built, and the longest train/track tunnel by quite some margin. And it would need copious safety features and auxiliary tunnels leading to the surface, even before the whole vacuum part gets added in. So it won't even completely avoid the need for buying above ground lands.

Indeed, so it's both a technical and economical non-starter. But it's not a 'dumb idea' in the sense that it is impossible. Merely impractical, too expensive and too complex and besides cheaper solutions exist (aircraft, for one, which scale much better with increasing distance than rail ever will).

One thing all of these 'dumb ideas' and the hyperloop, tidal energy and so on all have in common: they are great ways to get your grubby fingers on subsidies.

I understand your point much better now, yes. These are all different from things like cold fusion.

We used to discuss this back in university days! NA is extremely allergic to copy something that’s been done extremely well in the east (e.g., high speed rails) and instead tries to come up with some “cool better way” of doing things. After all, we are different, and copying something would be an extreme ego hit. This thought process applies to Hyperloop as well. I live in Canada, and it is really disappointing how we don’t have reliable rails between metro areas of large cities. Or even cross-border ones like Vancouver-Seattle corridor. Even sadder knowing it will never happen.

Canada has a massive infra problem. That is not strange when you consider that it has an enormous area to deal with a relatively low population and that most of that population lives along a relatively narrow strip of land, and long strips are very much sub-optimal compared to a circle (which is the ideal for infra).

So both from a density perspective and a topology perspective there are serious challenges to overcome. Which makes things like highway one even more impressive (especially when you take into account some of the territory it runs through, I think that its construction should rank right up there with the Panama Canal and the Chinese wall).

You’re absolutely correct. Highway was built around 1941 though, NA was still building itself up during that time. In an ideal world, we would be building up new cities, new rail lines, new infrastructure and etc., but I guess the momentum is lost. Now we’re stuck in “upgrade and spend a lot more for a km of subway line”. Maybe we’ll figure our way out of it eventually!

I suspect that eventually immigration will solve it but it will take a very long time.

As it is it did not look sustainable to me while I was living there.

Anything that can be called "a vacuum" is very very hard to achieve in a large volume.

Yes. That's why any kind of vacuum solution is likely a non-starter both from a technical and an economical perspective. And the 'obvious' solutions (multiple smaller evacuated chamber that connect as trains pass through) have a whole raft of safety and complexity issues and are going to increase the costs massively.

> It's not actually feasible to create a vacuum tube hundreds of km long

Why not? It's just a series of smaller sections that must each individually achieve near vacuum.

I think the main problem is that the failure of a small section is a catastrophic failure of the whole system.

I don't see why you can't compartmentalize it exactly like how I described. A leak in one of the ISS's modules wouldn't take down the whole ISS.

And then what? The train just stops in the middle of nowhere for however many days until the one chamber is fixed?

It returns obviously. Making repair or replacement of damaged sections economical is one of the engineering challenges. This by itself suggests compartmentalizing along the same lines I suggested.

It would probably be ideal if you could factory make each section and ship it on a standard truck, but with the growth of additive manufacturing, other possibilities also open up, like 3D printing the large metal container onsite.

I think you'd have to print it onsite, otherwise you have no gain in the loop being underground as you'd have to dig basically the entire ground up to swap sections.

Having a vacuum chamber large enough for a train to not only fit in but actually move through at high speed before getting to the next section still requires a few hundred meters per section if not more. That in itself is insanely difficult. Connecting multiple such sections while maintaining the vacuum is more difficult still. And still, you'll need thousands of pumping stations all around the middle of nowhere, that typically need constant maintenance.

For reference, the largest existing vacuum chamber is some 30mx35m (100 feet x 120 feet). Each one of the sections you would need here would have to be many times longer than the biggest vacuum chamber ever built to make any sort of sense.

The LHC achieves a hard vacuum over 27 km, and also features superconductors along its length, so clearly it's doable. I'm not trying to trivialize the engineering challenges here, but I've seen that people have tendency to immediately jump from "it's hard" to "it's impossible or infeasible", even though no one's even made an attempt. Some clever engineering could await discovery that makes it all simpler.

Sometimes this sort of skepticism is warranted because our understanding is sufficient (like our understanding of material science needed for a space elevator), but sometimes this is less clear, and I think hyperloop concepts fall into the latter category.

Is it large enough for a train?

The LHC tube is 27km long but ~6cm in diameter. It is true that they are pumping down a more impressive vacuum volume though, but not in the tube, but around each of the many, many superconducting magnets. That's about 9000m³ (compared to the ~150m³ of the actual tube).

Still, the LHC is hardly maintaining that vacuum continuously all year round. And it is one of the most sophisticated engineering and scientific projects attempted in history. Hardly a good idea for a train project.

It was the most sophisticated engineering not because of the long vacuum, but because of the tolerances, the semi-novelty of the superconducting coils at the time, the sensitivity of the equipment needed, and the extreme data collection capabilities needed to capture and store as much information as possible on picosecond timescales. None of these factors are necessarily applicable to a hyperloop.

Even so, once you've built one LHC, subsequent ones would be substantially cheaper because the primary difficulty is building the scientific and engineering knowledge needed while you're building it. Similar factors apply to programming: the first version of your program took awhile to build, but if you suddenly lost all of the code, rebuilding it would take a fraction of the time because you don't have to build your understanding of the domain the second time around.

Maybe all of these factors combined still wouldn't be enough to make hyperloop economical, but that conclusion is not obvious.

Nobody said they're impossible but believing that they would make sense economically even after they switched to maglev was the dumb part.

Physically impossible? Maybe, but the vacuum tube part was actually insane.

It would have been insanely difficult to maintain a useful enough vacuum over huge distances that the hyperloop was supposed to run.

A single failure in such a system could have catastrophic consequences across a huge range.

edit: beaten by @tsimionescu by a minute.

We didn't miss the part where

> Musk admitted Hyperloop was about getting legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California. He had no plans to build it

https://twitter.com/alexdemling/status/1557221632837505025

https://time.com/6203815/elon-musk-flaws-billionaire-visions...

<Insert a quote about a fool and the departure of their money here>

Over unity, infinite compression algorithms, perpetual motion machines and so on.

Cold fusion is posted here every few months. Does it fall in this category?

On that note, the entire LK-99 debacle.

But super conductors do exist and room temperature superconductors may be possible. Nobody has ruled that out at all.

Yeah but why did so many people take those guys so seriously before their work was replicated? Shouldn’t extraordinary claims be filtered early before we give them the time of day?

I'm pretty sure that most people that have a basic idea of materials science were simply intrigued (myself amongst them) because there wasn't anything that ruled it out and it seemed like a potentially promising path. And obviously: the truth would come out anyway given enough time. The HN threads of the time make for interesting reading: I think a lot of people approach technological progress from the point of something very close to wishful thinking, their enthusiasm isn't proportional to the likelihood of the thing being true but to the perceived good a particular invention would do if it were real. And that then overwhelms any kind of reasoning ability. Incidentally: that may well be as good an answer as I can provide to the original question posed by this article.

I would contend that everyone discussing LK-99 took it very rationally. The idea that there were people "falling for it" is made up post-facto by a group who want to feel smugly superior about everything.

Cynicism isn't wisdom though.

No, lots of people were falling for it and were twisting themselves into all kinds of knots that were not supported by evidence. And lots of people were similarly twisting themselves into all kinds of knots to claim it couldn't possibly true. And neither position was supported by evidence or physics.

You should go back and read the comment threads. People were incredibly level headed (actually tripping over themselves to make sure everyone knew how skeptical they were).

You are missing the point of the article.

People gobbled it up with the justification that random researchers on twitter "replicated" the results under the assumption that these anonymous researchers are putting their entire career on the line and therefore should be paid attention to. That is literally playing into the point the article is making. I.e. people believing lies because the information came from a higher status individual.

Some did, but not everybody did. I recall those threads vividly and I tried very hard to keep an even keel and to keep it all grounded in evidence. But a lot of wishful thinking happened as well as categorical rejection and these had the same element in common: a lack of evidence. Though the categorical rejection faction had history on their side I still think that that's just an argument from statistics without any relevant insight in to the subject matter.

Come on, that was fun and engaging. A floating rock is pretty harmless.

The funniest part of that whole debacle was watching side liners in HN get their ego personally hurt when it was exposed.

Ah yes, that one too.

Which smart people believed in infinite compression algorithms or true perpetual motion?

More than one that I've personally known. They miss just a tiny sliver of theory and they believe that their smarts are large enough to be able to see something that everybody else must have missed.

Various folks into the 21st century.

Edit: point received.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_....

He lived 2 centuries before Newton, 3 centuries before Laplace, 4 centuries before Maxwell and 5 centuries before Noether, Einstein, and Shannon. That he doesn't believe the first law of thermodynamics is hardly his fault.

And all of those names effectively built on a foundation that Da Vinci helped establish. It wasn't modern science just yet but it was a massive step up from what came before.

And in a way that is probably his biggest contribution: to show that if science focuses on that which works and can be generalized there will be massive progress. Because for a single individual, especially in that age his output was extremely impressive and that couldn't have worked if he didn't channel his energy to areas that were deemed to be fruitful.

Well he lived before modern laws of physics were known… I'm not sure that counts.

Actually: he was instrumental in inspiring others to search for those modern laws of physics and at that point such experiments must have helped to figure out where exactly the line was culminating in the laws of thermodynamics.

The replies don't make a ton of sense, did you change the contents of your comment?

Yes, the comment was changed considerably. Originally it gave Leonardo Da Vinci's attempts to create a perpetual motion machine as an example of a smart and successful person falling for a dumb idea.

Even in the source it says he was against such ideas.

> Leonardo da Vinci made a number of drawings of devices he hoped would make free energy. Leonardo da Vinci was generally against such devices, but drew and examined numerous overbalanced wheels

Just drawing some stuff that looks like perpetual machine isn't the same as actually believing in it. In fact this is how science should work. Even if something has a small chance to be correct try that and think about it. Einstein didn't believed in black holes but thought about breakdown of his equations.

That source wasn't there in the first version.

Seems relevant to the past couple days’ of events re: OpenAI.

Communism is one of the worst ideas, with the worst track records, and have always captured the most intelligent people, even today. A casual browse through HN comments is enough evidence.

In your own words, define communism. $5 says you can't.

Communism as defined by Marx and as practiced by the Soviet Union, China, and the DDR. But you can expand to socialism in the widest sense if you like. Still a bad idea that attracts some very smart people.

I said your own words, not "as defined by" others.

I've yet to meet anyone who throws around "communism" like that who uses it as anything but a vacuous memetic catchphrase, detached from any real understanding.

I'm not the father of communism, Marx is, and he defined it pretty clearly in the Communist manifesto, which is still well worth reading.

It's his definition that is interesting for intellectual discussion.

You're probably one of those people who read any criticism of capitalism as a cry for communism.

We should reject the false idea that it's either capitalism or communism. Capitalism is a crucial step for a society to take in order to be sufficiently vulnerable to fall for a communist revolution. Marx goes into great detail about this.

I don't read any criticism of capitalism because there is basically none. 99% of it is just people claiming that some abstract bad thing in human society is due to "capitalism" without any sort of argument that would actually rise to the level of what I would call criticism.

In an unregulated market, capital very naturally tends to accumulate more capital - while, if you have nothing, it's very hard to build up capital in the first place.

Which means that, if this continues indefinitely, more and more things belong to fewer and fewer people - which is exactly what we've been seeing over the last couple of decades.

Also: externalities.

You have it backwards. Regulation has gone up a lot over the last two decades which is why you're seeing what you're seeing.

Historically in America or current day in developing countries, the rate of growth in living standards negatively correlates with the amount of regulation.

You haven't responded to my main point: do you believe that a completely unregulated market doesn't lead to wealth accumulation in the hands of few people?

It is of course true that some (bad) regulation, like protectionism of various sorts, can also lead to the same outcome in a different way.

Yes, completely unregulated would lead to that. We need laws to protect against coercion and adjudicate in the case of disagreements between parties. Warring tribes where physical force wins is not a good place to be.

I don't think you're seeing the whole picture if you think only about physical force.

People who are well off have more opportunities to start other ventures that make them even more well-off, and if they're especially powerful, they can use that influence to further their benefit. I don't think that's particularly controversial.

To wit, I live in a mid sized town in the Midwest - about 80 years ago a family started a business that was pretty successful and is on its third or fourth generation of ownership now — that’s all well and good but it’s insane how much of the town is owned or directed by them now. Do you want to buy a car, foreign or domestic? Host a convention? Rent a hotel room in the urban core? Put on a concert? How about go to the hospital or buy health insurance? Go to college? Send your kid to preschool? Build a commercial building?

Capital begets capital.

It’s not easy to start successful ventures. Most new ventures fail. Even the best VCs only have a 30% success rate.

That doesn't contradict anything. Most people can't afford to start a new venture, so they have a 0% success rate.

After pondering this question from time to time over a few decades now, I will say I still really don't know. Sure, it makes intuitive sense that wealth can be used to create setups that capture more wealth. But most examples we see of this (especially the galling zero-sum ones) are regulatory capture and regulatory escape, where wealth is used to affect government action/policy to further concentrate wealth. The most glaring of these, that facilitates many others, is the fountain of newly-created USD that the politically connected get the first cut of. That value doesn't come from nowhere - it's the central collection of technological and economic progress that would otherwise show up as distributed price deflation.

On the other hand, we have the diminishing marginal utility of money - rich people overspend all the time, often on frivolous stuff. Musk bought an entire publicly traded company and crashed it on the way home, the way an upper middle class person might a shiny red Dodge Viper. One might say the VC ecosystem is chiefly 'dumb' money sloshing around trying to not be left out of the next big thing, while having no clue what that might be.

Talking about "completely unregulated" markets is also somewhat specious. In a completely ancap context, we'd likely get structures similar to governments, funded by wealthy people cooperating rather than continuing to compete in less-productive ways (say through physical force). In fact some might even say that this is the character of the current US government in a few different regards.

But you are wrong. Inequality has not grown over the last 20 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

Why are you only looking at income inequality, only in the United States and only in the last 20 years? Look at where that graph was in 1980, for example.

Because you said "over the last couple decades"

But I didn't intend 2000 to be an arbitrary cutoff. 1980 is important because it's right before Reagan- and Thatcher-style economics. And if you look at measures of wealth inequality (e.g. the share of wealth owned by billionaires), that's actually become worse especially during the pandemic.

This was described in adam smith’s original writings about “capitalism” and he was clear for the need in government intervention to maintain a free market long term.

Do you have a specific reference by any chance?

This is a very good thing, and the reason why capitalism works. The idea of pure meritocratic capitalism is that capital is allowed to accumulate to those who use capital most efficiently. There are fewer of those, naturally. Increasing capital efficiency benefits everyone; it means less work and more production, i.e. there's more of everything and everything is cheaper.

The actual issues of our current world happen because this pure version of capitalism doesn't happen. There's all sorts of things which lead to non-efficient people / organizations accumulating a lot of capital.

I feel like you're missing an important detail: in an unregulated market, it is often times far more efficient from an individual corporation's perspective to buy up or merge with competitors than to actually compete, whereas the societal-level efficiencies you're lauding come from competition itself. Without some form of regulation, capitalism trends towards monopoly, which is the antithesis of efficiency.

I don't think this is generally true. There are exceptions, such as a monopoly on some scarce natural resource. However, there's a quite limited market for such opportunities. It's extremely difficult if not impossible to completely corner some market, even without regulations.

In general, it's not true that companies would merge without regulation. Why would Apple merge with Samsung? It doesn't make any sense.

Usually, regulation causes monopolies to form. A prime example is the patent system, which literally grants a monopoly to an idea. There would be much more competition without IP protection laws, which in my opinion doesn't belong in capitalism. For example, if all Apple's patents and copyrights were openly licensed, there would be much more competition with higher quality, but cheaper products.

> It's extremely difficult if not impossible to completely corner some market

Are we forgetting how Microsoft absolutely dominated the PC market in the 90s and early 2000s? How today, there's basically two mobile operating systems that can determine much of today's mobile experience?

I agree that IP laws serve to entrench monopolies (although they also have the effect of encouraging development (e.g. of expensive drugs) in the first place - so it's a double edged sword). But so do a lot of other, much more "natural" mechanisms such as network effects, brand recognition, etc.

I feel like the libertarian, "pure capitalism" world view only makes sense if you think that consumers are omniscient and perfectly rational, but we know fully well how neither of these things are true.

I used to work for a company that would just buy up a bunch of smaller companies and then drive them into the ground. The smaller companies had the better tech, but the large company had a user base, a brand and money.

The point about operating systems is that these are new technologies. Free markets require time to resolve. It's natural that an inventor (especially with IP protections) has an market advantage for a period of time. It's important, that at longer time scales, the market evolves towards decentralization.

It's true that there are a lot of natural centralizing forces, such as network effects. Not sure how to resolve those.

However, getting back to the original point, no matter how you think about it, capital efficiency requires that 'a few' manage the capital, because naturally there are 'a few' who manage capital better than the rest. The problem is selecting those few. I think it's a misconception to argue that capital shouldn't centralize in principle, or that it's a morally bad thing.

Also, efficiency in a free market is really about fulfilling the needs of people according to their free will in the most efficient way possible. There's no forcing function to produce more if people don't want to consume more. In Soviet Union, they were very efficient at producing some stuff, but they made stuff that no one needed (they made lots of cheap shoes in big factories, which no one wanted). I.e. there's a difference in being efficient in isolation, and efficient at fulfilling needs of the market.

First, I don't think that "capital efficiency" is something that we absolutely need to optimise for regardless of any other concerns, and even if I would concede that, there's an argument to be made that concentrating capital in the hands of more people leads to more diverse markets that cater to more, and more different, people's needs. The thesis that a few number of people are just naturally more efficient at everything seems questionable to me.

It's true that there's a lot of specialization required and other reasons why capital doesn't always scale. That's basically what limits everything concentrating to just one guy.

> there's more of everything and everything is cheaper

And I don't believe that this is what we should optimise for. "More of everything, for cheaper" somehow doesn't seem to make people happier. I think that more shared ownership is more important, especially if you consider the effects of increased inequality on intangible goods such as democracy (e.g. how currently a few tech companies can influence global political discourse).

But even if I was willing to concede your point, somehow most people who argue for "pure meritocratic capitalism" never seem to suggest that we should have a 100% inheritance tax. Because people being born into wealth is exactly one of the reasons why "non-efficient people" (a problematic term in and of itself, btw) end up accumulating a lot of capital.

Playing into the articles points to gain higher status among "capitalists"?

Here is an easy one. Excess capital doesn't earn enough money to compensate for losses relating to depreciation, storage and maintenance costs i.e. the expectation is that capital income disappears in the long run. All further investment turns into consumption instead. That is kind of at odds with what people consider "capitalism" where the marginal productivity of capital is considered constant.

I think terms like "capitalism" inherently spread confusion rather than clarity.

Specifically, which of these systems do you mean by "capitalism"?

1) The status quo in the US where the economy is dominated by private corporations but the government has some regulations and some safety net. Also, corporations receive a significant amount of welfare from the government, generally control the regulatory agencies and some are primarily funded by the government either directly (NPR/PBS, Amtrak, etc.) or as its primary customer (defense contractors).

2) The system that existed in Gilded Age America where there was very little regulation but lots of corporate welfare and a US Army that would "remove" any American Indians who were causing trouble for the railroads.

3) The libertarian utopia where absolutely everything is privatized.

4) A system where everything except the police and military is privatized, there are virtually no regulations and there is no corporate welfare. Basically the more moderate form of libertarianism.

5) Basically the system we have in the US but with a larger safety net, more regulations and less military spending. In other words the European system that is one of the things commonly called "socialism" in US politics but it is also called "capitalism" when convenient to contrast it against other types of economies.

6) An economy where most people have a reasonable chance of eventually becoming running their own business and where large businesses are generally rare. In this system, creating a corporation might even require an act of a state legislature or the national legislature and would be generally rare and mainly for utilities like long distance transportation. This is the system that generally prevailed in the free states of the US prior to the Gilded Age.

7) The system that existed in the mid-20th century US that is somewhere between 1) and 5). Strong unions, regulations (often captured by corporations), large corporations that make stuff domestically, restrictions on imports, defense contractors exist, etc. The main distinguishing characteristic of this system is a high degree of income equality. CEOs don't make dramatically more than typical workers and even entry level pays a living wage.

At one point, I would have defined "capitalism" as 3 or 4. Today, I'd define it as 6. Most people would probably define it as 1, 2 or 7 which is what I would call "corporatism". I'm also undoubtedly leaving out other definitions of capitalism. The term "socialism" is also unhelpful for the same reason.

People who like "capitalism" or "socialism" define it as an economic system they like then use the other word to define a system they don't like. Then they talk past people who have different definitions of those terms. An argument about Venezuela or the USSR is not a reasonable argument to use against somebody who wants the Nordic model in the US or to go back to the mid-20th century economic system. An argument about corporate welfare or defense contractors is not a reasonable argument to use against a libertarian.

> > Communism is one of the worst ideas

Communism is the idea that in order to be successful you have to kiss asses at the location where you want to eventually become someone, for example a government agency or a political party.

Capitalism is the idea that in order to be successful you should be able to kiss asses wherever and however you can and be able to move the provents from the aforementioned ass kissing at some other place (in the form of money) so you don't have to start all over. So you can make some ass kissing arbitrage in order to minimize the amount of ass kissing that you do.

I prefer the latter because I don't like to be constrained in one place and might have a bit of commit-o-phobia but it's not a stretch to think that people who like to put the work day-in and day-out in the same place, see familiar faces everyday and don't have commit-o-phobia might prefer the former.

In the end it's all about kissing asses and there are very minor differences. Long gone are the days of low hanging fruits where you could singlehandedly invent the wheel or fire, now every minor marginal improvement in anything requires some serious ass kissing.

ROFL. Minus the last paragraph. Remember primes are infinite. Improvements are infinite, the slow down is only to log speed, still plenty fast.

> > Improvements are infinite, the slow down is only to log speed

Yeah but the brain gets more excited going from 0 to 10mph on a self built skateboard than from mach1 to mach2 on the Concorde, because you are in the exciting part of the S-curve.

Also because skateboard you singlehandedly crafted and it's yours, Concorde you need a million people give or take to build and billions of man hours and you get to rent 1/160th of it for about 3 hours. And those 3 hours cost some serious ass kissing to acquire.

If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq. That actually is a really good example of what the author describes because I'm sure many knew it was a bad idea but went along with it to preserve their careers.

I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that was proven to be bad by the passage of time.

Well - he quotes The Cato Institute. And the graphic is clear enough, I think.

The rhetorical sleight of hand is that it's not true that feeling you're being censored - and needing to self-censor - is the same as actually being censored.

Self-censorship and self-selection are endemic in the corporate world, and the associated beliefs are mostly taken for granted without dissent.

You're not going to get far in fintech, management consulting, or media channels such as Fox if you start questioning why so many people are poor, ill, and homeless.

Similarly, if you work for FAANG you're not going to have a job for long if you start suggesting these BigCos should reinvent themselves as worker co-ops.

That's a very different kind of argument to the one about pronouns, because most people are not actually threatened in real terms by (say) LGBTQIA+ or unionisation.

Of course plenty of people are just fine with how things are and the article is right to the extent that it points out that ideological conformity is a middle class luxury.

I mean you can also just read the author’s other content which is mostly whining about woke-ism.

> And in fact, if anything, it’d suggest the exact opposite of what the author implies by virtue of a really simple, obvious fact: an expert’s social circle is more likely to be well-informed on the domain of expertise than the social circle of a complete outsider.

Which makes it really important to determine the actual boundaries of that domain of expertise.

> If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq.

A decent corollary to that: how the pro-Israel media campaign is working out in the latest flare up with Palestine now that TikTok has been added into the mix, a fantastic illustration of the real reason they want to take it down.

Some folks have called it problem of symmetry: take an idea and turn it on its head to get an argument.

I think it is a fair criticism. The title appears does not appear to match the content, which is not as opinion-based. It still reads like a rant, but I just happen to agree with some of the conclusions like self-censorship:

"They found that highly educated people are the most concerned about losing their jobs or missing out on job opportunities because of their political views".

If I was being charitable, I would say that title is trying to capture attention while sacrificing the expectation one may have of its content.

The point is clear. He even summarized it neatly in the least three sentences or so. The rest is projection (and a rather transparent attempt to undermine the author’s message, dare I say reputation, by association fallacy).

IMO the author wrote a list of reasons to avoid the real intellectual discussion around debating ideas. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever a “dumb idea”, it’s really poor reasoning or lack of information that I see as the issue.

For instance, take the “moon deniers” that is the idea being dismissed by “correct” people. When in reality there a whole range of arguments — “we landed on the moon, recordings were faked” to “aliens told us to tell everyone we landed”, etc it’s the reasoning that matters. Quite often “smart” people have the same information as everyone else. That’s also why IMO “smart” people are equally likely to believe in conspiracies as anyone else, they have the same info.

Really? You really can't think of a stupid idea of from the past 20 years. I think this is being totally intellectually dishonest or you waste too much time with political bullshit so you have lost the ability to think outside of rhetorical response to win a twitter flame war.

How about all the dumb ideas that lead smart people to basically blow up the financial system in 2008 to start.