Now of course, there are exemplary speakers who keep you engaged the whole time, but they're rare.
I feel like that is a trait necessary to do what Woz did throughout his life.
Because a lot of resentment people have later in life for career choices and failures in their adulthood are based on advice from their youth given from out of touch councilors and boomers who told them them sweet lies like "you can be anything you want to be if you just work hard and apply yourselves, the world is your oyster, etc", which turned out to be BS once their rubber hits the brutal road of the present day competitive jobs market, and the way the government backed system rewards asset ownership over labor, meaning a wrong choice here makes the difference between a homeowner or not.
The housing and tech jobs market today isn't the one Woz had in the 1970s in the bay area. There's a big chance his way of thinking that got him to be the cofounder and CTO of Apple back then would get him chewed out and spit out in the jobs market of today, just like how famous FOSS devs of tools that Google use internally couldn't even get past the resume screen at Google to get an interview. Same how I love my parents and they love me, but their out of touch career and life advice did more harm than good to me, even if that's not what they intended. Just like Woz, they're not malicious, but the world is much harsher today and moves faster than what older people who had it easier in their day can comprehend, so you have to take their advice with a generous portion of salt.
Ultimately just like councilors and boomers, it costs Woz nothing to BS young people with speeches filled with idealistic hopes and dreams that sound good and get cheers, since his set for life financially, only doing computing today as a hobby for fun, but he's not gonna be the one sending resumes looking for jobs based on his own advice, dealing with 7 stage interviews, and then wondering why he's getting rejections and how he's gonna afford rent.
As a Embedded programmer and HW tinkerer, I hate Schmidt and I like Woz, as people I mean, but I'd rather base my important life choices that affect my ability to get a job and pay rent on harsh truths from successful business sharks that I hate, rather than nice sounding but broken fallacies from people I respect. I'm old enough to have lived through this once, and if I were to have the chance to go back and try again, I definitely would pick the other side this time simply based on the fact that the people who did pick the ugly pragmatic side rather than the idealistic side, pulled out ahead, and they always will because that's what the world rewards.
What Erich Schmidt is doing is not about describing hard reality. He is trying to make a particular version of the future come true by painting it as inevitable. It's literally a propaganda technique.
AI has made my life so much easier. If I need to change non-standard lightbulbs (e.g., G9, MR11, A19), I'm taking a picture and asking my AI what kind are they. If I need to create the first pass of test scripts, I ask my AI. It's reduced technical debt and let me focus on the things I care about.
Did you just tell a "how many X does it take to change a lightbulb" joke about yourself?
I know because I bought a house in 2013 where the builder delighted in using a dozen weird fixtures and the cheapest bulbs they could find and I spent a lot of 2015 doing just that.
There are lots of things that LLMs are genuinely good at, searching by image isn't something we need LLMs for. I asked Google's LLM when google image search launched and it reported
> Google officially launched its "Search by Image" feature—allowing users to upload a picture or image URL to find related content—in 2011
I think that's a misunderstanding of the phrase.
AI may have reduced your immediate technical burden.
However AI, if not carefully used, increases technical debt because it builds up a vast heap of code and business logic that nobody understands. The agent that created it forgets about it once it's out of its context window, the programmer that scripted it just knows it passed some tests.
In two, five, ten years from now trying to maintain that vibe-coded slop will be a battle between various agents making conflicting changes and some poor human trying to get it into a shippable state.
There used to be pushback to have 100% test coverage. If you don't have that, then you can't merge. AI can write the tests but a programmer must own them.
Funny how reducing the friction with technology eventually increased the friction of the older transportation methods.
I once made a travel friend who just didn't get the point of me taking eight hours to slow travel by train or by bus across a country that we were both visiting, when she could just hop on a plane and get to the next city in an hour. Earlier in my youth, transportation choices were economically motivated, but what I got from it would influence all future visits to other countries. When chilling with other travelers, exchanging tips and stories, it was as if my friend was visiting a completely different place. She left the country shortly after, confiding to me in the end that she really didn't see what the big deal was with it and that she would probably never be back.
I understand that some people may not resonate with this outlook -- and maybe it's just me getting older -- but I've grown to see that there's indeed such a thing as going through life in a hurry. I do think that the jury's still out as to the overall impact of AI on what I would label "useful friction".
AI is mental comfort zone so deep it will be extremely hard to ever get out of it, basically back to beginning of rat race. Maybe not applicable to you in your blissful ignorance, but sure as hell I won't put literally all my eggs into one tiny foreign-owned basket.
You should ask how ai people make their slides. It is a crazy exercise in micromanaging what used to be a couple minute task. And the people engaging in that think they are saving time somehow or ending up with a better thing than they could make themselves.
To quote Adam Grant, "Procrastination is an emotional management problem not a time management problem"
There are so many examples of this. Removing small friction points that significantly make me happier and my life better. It means I have time to go grab a beer with friends instead of driving. The lightbulb was a recent example so it was fresh in my mind.
Plenty of people have the wrong dreams, like being an influencer, but how many actually work hard. Like spend 60 hours a week analyzing youtube videos to find the perfect thumbnail or spend time learning every aspect of production from design, lighting, pacing and everything in between. Probably not a lot. And chances are if you do spend the time (on even a vapid dream like being an influencer), you'd do pretty well and learn a very valuable set of skills.
My experience is the bar is pretty low. It's hard enough to find someone that's competent in their field of expertise and is easy to work with. A lot of people are just missing the basics. They don't put in the work or are willing to take instruction.
If you want to take yourself from where you are to the best chances at your dream, work as hard as you can towards it. But it's also more than fine if you don't want to take that risk, you can often have a perfectly good life without working yourself to death on the promise it'll make your dreams come true if you do.
It is meant to be a loftier take of the world around you. It is prescriptive: A call to action to make the world a different place than it is today, armed with your discipline and knowledge.
In lieu of this, Eric Schmidt walked on stage and gave an advertisement.
Weren’t Schmidt’s comments on AI the harsh “truth” from the perspective of someone who directly benefits from the wealth extraction capabilities of AI?
It’s not the only possible truth. And definitely not the one I’m rooting for personally. That’s what you are hearing from the audience of graduates who are probably quite fearful of their future and also prefer another possible truth.
Can you imagine a few decades earlier some former corporate executive giving a commencement speech at a US college extolling the virtues of offshoring, and how it will make his mega corp a lot of money?!
“You see that Ferrari out there on the parking lot? If you work really, really hard this year and meet all of your targets, then next year I’ll be able to afford another one.”
There are no wealth extraction capabilities yet. It's a money pit. They're certainly hoping it'll surpass some breakpoint and become profitable by brute-forcing compute power, but that's very optimistic. The propaganda Schmidt is pushing envisions that future in hopes of raising current stock prices so they can afford the brute-forcing that's very unlikely to succeed.
My prediction is that we'll keep the tools we've acquired, probably refined a bit, but the LLM path is eventually a dead-end. After this, if they still try to monetize, remote models will be extremely expensive.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/eric-schmidts-family-office-...
He's putting money where his mouth is.
Their view of what AI promises is some kind of secular eschatological fantasy that’s only partly rooted in anything the technology or methods do.
Here's the link to the leaflet: https://www.instagram.com/p/DYOdBRJlPe6/
Sure the AI comment brought a bit more boos, but he would be booed regardless of what he said.
Here is a link to uncut version of his speech:
Obvious to the grads he’s yet another “visionary” corporate hack waxing to them about how they’d better not miss the AI rocket ship.
If I'm short with a bad temper, then implicitly I'm NOT a bad enough public speaker, or that would have been mentioned top of mind.
Not really a lie (unless you think the students are not intelligent?); regardless, usually you don't get "harsh truths" at these ceremonial, epideictic events. Though I guess funerals in the Schmidt family must be a lot of fun. "We begin with the airing of grievances. Then let's bury this piece of shit"
As a former Googler, Homebrew was not ever officially supported at Google, or even particularly recommended, particularly because you were not allowed to store source code on your laptop anyway. Homebrew was definitely not used in any production-critical workflow. It's more accurate to say that some Googlers used Homebrew (I myself used Macports and never encountered any additional friction). Homebrew at that time was also unsuited to anything like Google's scale, so it's no surprise the author didn't get any brownie points for it.
What’s your rationale and on the basis for such a claim?
Or that a competitive startup won't lean on AI to get ahead?
Doesn't matter how much stock prices move up and down...AI is here to stay and no amount of booing changes our desires to compete.
The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
I recall all the bemoaning when IT jobs started going overseas... businesses always go with the cheapest labor.
The world is dog eat dog, and those that prepare for the future are better equipped to deal.
And governments pushing quantum computing, presumably to be first to crack Internet security: it's easier to imagine some of those future threats.
Specifically, with the way both economy and politics is structured, everything will be about big corporations with centralized power. A competitive startup leaning on AI getting ahead will be either destroyed or bought.
>The world doesn't hold hands with anyone, there is no global consensus, no policy.
It is totally holding hands and helping out - to Schmidts, Trumps, Musks, Epsteins. Just not to poorer people.
> Do you think AI will go away and suddenly businesses will start hiring people back?
In fact, with well run economy that systematically prevents monopolies, yes it tends to hire people no matter what technological level. Currents state where few super powerful companies are able to push themselves into everything and create monopolies via dumping prices, even as they are not profitable and can count on their friends in administration to bail them out once if all goes pop is the ineffective economy.
Probably easier to ask a question than argue a point: How eager are you to use Government services?
Businesses are only well-run if they make profit: hiring the cheapest labor to produce something people will actually spend money on. And the more frictionless that process, the more our economy advances it. AI fits in there very well.
I also want to point out: startups are usually happy to be bought up by the bigger guys.
Right now so many companies are trying to use AI just to use AI, rather than using it when and where it actually makes sense. This is the big thing that drives me, and I think many others, a bit crazy. I don’t expect a bubble pop to make us go back in time to 2022, but I expect it will put an end these the AI mandates, token maxing, and other foolish behavior.
AI will be the same in the future. Not sure what to say about the ups and downs of stock price, or hype cycles.
The crash did not make the internet go away. I don't foresee a world where we will go back to the pre-AI times either. In the same way that post dotcom crash, you would be a fool to not have your business online, I think we will find similar things to be the case around AI. Even if the bubble bursts AI is here to stay and that will have major consequences for labor.
There are lots of datacenters going up in similar fashion. I don't know if they'd have the same utility decades later (very unlikely), but it's interesting.
Schmidt took Google to the moon financially, speareding projects like Chrome and Android that cemented Google as THE tech titan(couch monopoly cough), whereas Woz was a top HW engineer of his time, but Apple would have quickly failed if he was at the helm calling the shots, instead of Jobs.
From which would you take advice, the successful entrepreneur/investor, or the nice hacker geek who was a one trick pony with the Apple computer but hasn't been in touch with the tech economy and jobs market for decades?
The nice hacker geek? By the way, the Woz has a net-worth of 140MM, so he's more wealthy that the vast majority of "successful entrepreneur/investors", and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them.
In any case, that's a false dichotomy and actually the wrong question entirely.
So are a lot of people who invested(gambled) early in Bitcoin and Tesla, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from them just because they managed to make a lot of money.
But if you design and developed several successful tech products in your career, I think people should at least listen because it's a pattern rather than just luck.
>and also vastly more beloved than virtually all of them
So is Taylor Swift, that doesn't mean people should take career advice from her.
When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver successful products repeatedly, like Erich Schmidt or Steve Jobs, not one trick ponies like Woz who managed to get lucky once in a completely different era, then coast the next 50+ years on past glory giving speeches.
Again, I really like Woz as a person, he's my spirit animal, but that doesn't mean he's correct and in tune on the status of the tech market, the challenges people and entrepreneurs will face today. His experience being a HW tinkerer in his garage in the 1970's isn't relevant anymore today. The world has changed massively since then.
A more modern day woz would be Palmer Luckey of Anduril. Love him or hate him he's more up to date on what the industry rewards today if you want to be a garage tinkerer made billionaire entrepreneur founder than Woz.
> When I look for people to take advice from I want to see a pattern of home runs, that they can deliver repeatedly...
For those of us with more modest aspirations, listening to a cool person talk about cool stuff is a far better of use of time and attention.
If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit. Bring some logic into the discussion and stop fishing for points.
This is a discussion that started about preparing for the future and has spawned multiple[2], fluid threads[3] of conversation[4] that aren't quite in line with "predicting and preparing for the future", some even with their own throwaway responses unrelated to "the topic"[5]. Should we lambast the person who posted the Lisp joke, too?
This particular conversation chain is about how one measures success, which I've discussed with logic in a separate[0] response. Future success looks different for all of us, and there are a wide variety of ways for us to get wherever those goals are.
>If you want to be snarky: this is hackernews, not reddit.
Oh, no snark was intended. OP asked a question on a public forum and started getting snarky themselves[1] towards people who shared their subjective response, and my intent was to point out that it's OK for us all to view success differently.
>... stop fishing for points
Is this not snark based on your own assumption that I care about meaningless internet upvotes?
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235299
[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48235315
[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234258
[3]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48234631
"When it comes to jobs, I'd rather listen to a business wizard from 2011 than a technical wizard from 1981" is hardly contentious, but if people liked hearing "AI has changed the world and you're all fucked", the students wouldn't have been booing in the first place.
Honestly, if you don't like what Eric Schmidt was saying, you should have a long hard think about whether unchecked capitalism is really as great as advertised.
The Apple II was Woz, the Mac was okay but mostly got shepherded into what it was by the other Apple leadership, the Lisa was a flop, Pixar he was an investor but was mostly Lasseter’s baby, NeXt went nowhere until the Apple acquisition.
The guy had somehow managed to make a successful career out of shipping very opinionated, interesting, and cool products that were commercial failures. If you were going purely by commercial performance you would not have picked him, you’d be picking him based on that ineffable reality distortion field of his that makes you BELIEVE everything he’s doing will change the world.
The fucking things you read on this website, I swear to god.
History tends to shows the pragmatists wiping out the luddites out of the gene pool/business market, but you are free to make your choice the way you see fit, nobody is forcing you to follow anyone.
Everyone defines success differently, and Schmidt's "success" is, frankly, unappealing and gross to myself and, I'm sure, many others.
There's a lot more to life and the world than the economy and massive financial gains. Focusing on "economic, market and product results" yet mentioning nothing about the impact to people and customers is how Zuckerberg sleeps at night, and that's ugly to me.
I think that taking advice from a sociopath able to amass a lot of money is usually bad idea. Their advice is designed to make you make him a lot of money. His advice is not about what is good for you - he does not care. And if you succeed you are his competitor.
It is only a "truth" if we allow the oligarchs to make it a truth. This is capitalism run amuck. Late stage capitalism if you will.
The serious question that keeps getting kicked aside, is when the majority have no jobs (or low wage jobs at best) and can't afford your freaking "tokens" and trinkets, what then? But nobody cares because that isn't what's happening this quarter.
To me, with my rather rich life experience, his words are generally true. There is some ceiling for each of us but its insanely higher than we ever achieve to reach. I've tested mine couple of times, and happy with the results.
And of course, if given society doesn't work for you, move to a better place. High quality of life can be achieved without massive effort if one is smart about it and a bit disciplined.
I live and work in Europe.
We have internet here.
- You either ignored your history education, or (more likely) you are yet another victim of the systematic gutting of history education over the past half-ish century. (Which our society's "rich get richer" 0.01% are mostly responsible for, generally in the names of "replace with job skills" and serve-them-better ideologies.) Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children. Once you know (say) that the US has >300M people, but only 50 state governors - it's kinda obvious that it can't literally be true for even the children of the 0.01%. But if you're a well-intended parent/teacher/councilor without any special knowledge of the future, the "work hard and apply yourself" is still good general advice. Statistically, there have been very few situations where being an idle layabout turned out better, long-term.
- At least in people who care about children, there is a very real cognitive bias toward keeping kids happy. Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be. And telling them certain things about Santa Claus and such. Whether this bias is genetic, culturally transmitted, or both - natural selection seems to favor it.
- Over the long term, societies vary greatly in how equitably their wealth is distributed...but large, externally-secure societies have a very strong bias toward the rich getting richer, and everyone else getting poorer. Basically that's because the most sociopathic and greedy folks keep doing whatever it takes to move up and "satisfy" their longings, vs. decent folks aren't motivated enough to keep fighting back hard. Though as things get worse and worse for the 99%, it gets tougher to keep the poor from rising up and overthrowing in their masters. Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today...
Sure, maybe I am. Though, the history taught in school books is a warped, "history is written by the victors" take on how events actually unfolded back then, not an objective source of truth. So you being a product of an ungutted education(more like indoctrination) system doesn't really put you in a better light as you think it does, especially when you look at how boomers vote and how in touch(or otherwise) they are with current day reality. At least Gen-Z had access to alternative sources growing up thanks to the internet, for better and for worse.
>Test: How many of the following huge changes do you think back-in-the-day young people were warned well in advance of, by the older folks - Crash of '29, Great Depression, WWII, Nuclear Cold War, Civil Rights Era Upheavals, Arab Oil Embargo, Inflation, ... ?
The question is how much you want to bet that humanity will repeat the same mistakes that led to those events? I bet 100%.
>- The "you can be anything you want..." line is obviously for (1) emotional encouragement and (2) younger children.
And what happens to people who've been groomed with that mindset since childhood? Do you think they suddenly flip a maturity switch and forget all that indoctrination when they turn 17/18 and get access to student loans? Your frontal lobe isn't fully developed till 25. If you want kids to make mature choices you need to hit them with mature harsh reality which nobody wants to do.
>Yes, that means working to making the world look better (to the kids) than what it actually seems to be.
Kids making the world look better, should be about keeping your environment clean and planting trees and such, not programming their minds with unreal platitudes that ignore the way current economy is set to work(against them). Because you're gonna create a lot of unhappy and disgruntled young adults that will want to see the world burn to the ground once they realize they've been duped their whole lives.
>Historically, the #1 strategy of the 0.01%, to keep themselves on top and the oppressed masses in their place, has been https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_conquer. Which, sadly, still seems to be doing a "great" job today.
So then we should ignore or clap for people who ignore this known fact, and lie to kids that the world doesn't work like that, when we all know it does?
Even if it is true.
The job of a speaker at an event is to meet the goals of the event, in the spirit of the event. Schmidt didn't do that.
I'm sorry but that one-liner is reddit level cringe. I want to see the actual speech and more of what he said rather than one line.
Ah, here it is. It was CalArts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0vTVWyY47s
> ... protesting recent staff layoffs, severe program cuts, a mounting structural deficit, and the administration's controversial push for generative AI adoption through corporate tech partnerships
Marvin Minsky spoke at my graduation. It was around the time when it seemed like genetic therapies might solve all kinds of problems, and there was a big debate, moral objections, etc.
Most of the talk was a rambling rant against religion holding us back from scientific improvements to life. It did not go over in the mostly christian crowd. I loved it.
I don't know about mentioning that one.
Anyway, Minsky, perceptrons, great debunking of AI hype at the time, but a horrible person, ya know, just like Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov.
https://www.christopherkremmer.com/post/to-sir-with-love
https://web.archive.org/web/20240519113411/https://skepchick...
Anyway, they're all dead. Can we move on? Although I remain astonished that Foundation got made when they cancelled Sandman and Good Omens after Neil Gaiman turned out to be pretty awful too. Maybe you have to still be alive to matter? What exactly are the rules here? I am so confused by this.
However, I will give credit to Bernie Sanders for admitting he opposes datacenters because he doesn't feel he can hit the root cause in time so at least he's honest about it. Meanwhile, the top 0.01% continues to enjoy its bespoke 5000 or so pages of the tax code and buying politicians for pennies on the dollar of revenue each one creates for them with no end in sight. But at least we all know now that the late Marvin Minsky got a happy ending from one of Jeffrey Epstein's sex workers. I wonder how many more members of the Harvard and MIT faculty did.
The issue of not wanting to give money to a (perceived to be) horrible person, or company, or cause seems somewhat valid to me, hence it does seem like there’s a distinction to be made between, for example, Asimov and Polanski. On the other hand, I might encourage the conflicted to question whether the fraction of a penny Polanski gets when somebody streams Chinatown really moves the needle…
https://deadline.com/2023/04/roman-polanski-rape-victim-sama...
> Maybe you have to still be alive to matter?
But another part is that someone's work is distinct from their other actions. It's definitely a tough situation and confusing line to draw. Michael Jackson without a doubt made great music. But that doesn't make up for his Epstein-esk escapades. Being dead at least creates some distance as he's not directly benefiting from the revenue streams, which is part of what empowered and even encouraged that behavior (power seems to do more than just corrupt).
> What exactly are the rules here?
We're all confused. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. It gets us to talk and figure it out. I certainly don't know what to do, but I'll at least recognize it isn't trivial. And I'll at least recognize that we're talking about men, not gods
> Can we move on?
Indeed, I'd like to propose we collectively meta 'move on' from always being required to restate the well-known moral, ethical, political, legal or inter-personal lapses of every notable artist, athlete, entertainer, scientist, writer, etc anytime they are mentioned, even in passing. Crazy... I know.
As you note, history is chock full of shitheads. If one looks carefully, it's certainly the vast majority of anyone very notable. So it would be far more efficient to assume they're all shitheads and instead only make special note of celebrating the rare outliers who weren't awful. If we all just assume the probable awfulness and take it as given, that would make it possible to mention whatever thing someone may have done that one year, in that one narrow professional domain, that may have been notable or slightly good - without evoking all the stupidest, worst mistakes and personal failures of their entire lives. Most humans have, at their worst moments, done some awful stupid shit they regret. But most of us are lucky enough to not also do something notable enough to have our lives and characters examined by the Internet.d
There is only ONE notable person who was a very well-known celebrity for many decades who actually WAS as close to a perfect fucking human as it gets: Mr. Fred Rogers. Please, please do not take this as a challenge to go digging through his high school yearbooks to find some stupidly offensive joke he made. I still need just ONE truly good person.
So let's all just agree that, aside from Fred Rogers, >90% of everyone else we've ever heard of was probably awful, stupid or terrible, at least at some points, on some things, to some people - even Mother Theresa (who didn't quite live long enough to avoid it). Some of their misdeeds became known in their own time (or they were lucky enough to die early, like JKF who escaped his Weinstein-esque treatment of Marylin and other women), and others were 'recontextualized' post mortem. For every other notable person still in the 'unaccused' column, it's a race between whether they are outed or forgotten first.
And we don't need to talk about some backwater 3rd world country (actually we do) - US has big issues allowing basic science to be taught to kids, because of some set of stories and anecdotes from various people gathered over centuries together about some potential events around one mason who started yet another sect 2k years ago, and they guard it with fanatical zeal to the last word, regardless how misguided and contradictory some of it is.
When society fails to deliver even basic known and proven truths to its most vulnerable, then don't be surprised that same people are later trivially manipulated into believing into many simply untrue things and behave accordingly ie in voting, to their own direct detriment.
If your thesis is "The US was founded on anti-intellectual principles" and your only supporting facts are:
- Some of the early colonists were religiously-driven
- The inconvenient examples otherwise (e.g. the Enlightenment-influenced founders) can be ignored because some people at the time disliked them
- Some presidents since have been populists
... and also, that could have been a 15 min video without the histrionics.
Different strokes. I found it extremely entertaining.
Forgive me for being nitpicky, but I think that is the entire point that they were making. Entertaining, but not informative. Fun, but not well-argued.
Example: I can be extremely engaged while listening to a stand-up comedian deliver an anecdote about why they believe what they believe. It can be incredibly interesting, engaging, and well put. It is not, however, an argument which supports their assertions, but merely a conduit which makes that position more palatable.
Insight is often dreary and frustratingly complex in terms of nuance and substance because what matters is everything, and what doesn't makes headlines. Entertainment is a broad stroke of a premise; a hand wave that says "like this".
In the context of the internet forum, that was an appropriate video to post.
A good example of a problem in the video is she makes the strong claim (multiple times) that America was founded on anti-intellectualism. Even stronger, that it's the only one. She jumps from saying it was ingrained in the culture before the constitution, then talks about the founding fathers, and moves straight to "early 19th century" with the discussion of Jackson. Jackson was president from 1829-1837. She's playing a bit fast and loose with the timelines here. Importantly, by the 8 minute mark she's done supporting the claim but there's no strong evidence. Then she launches into more with the education system but it feels weird that she's stressing things like sitting in rows. Europe has... classrooms too.
That isn't to say that everything she says is hogwash. But I don't exactly buy that this was all planned and coordinated. There's much better explanations than a deep state. As George Carlin put it, you don't need a deep state when everyone in power goes to the same schools and hangs in the same social circles; they end up thinking alike. Bubbles, not coordinated action. This also adequately explains the dysfunction across the US education system where different regions have different styles and curriculum. It would sound silly to say that Europe was designed for dysfunction with France having a different curriculum than Germany. The US was highly federated and became more centralized. That fracturization perpetuated through to today. It's also easier to buy this explanation given the premise of dysfunction and lack of critical thinking.
The reality of it all is much more complex than she explains. Maybe she left that because it's hard to convey in a video and is less engaging (which would undermine what she's trying to teach). Or maybe she didn't do enough research (she is a self described polyglot. Though she also criticized polyglots).
So did Sagan. If you haven't watched Cosmos in awhile it might hit a little different these days, for multiple reasons (not all bad). The book is great too. Not to mention Sagan wrote "The Demon Haunted World".
There's a new form and an old form of this same thing happening today too. We have flat earthers, but other cults too. One of the common features of this cult of ignorance: having a little knowledge and thinking it is much more general. We all know those people who read a sentence or two and extrapolate. This happens all the time. Even in flat earthers. It's often seeking evidence to support the prior belief rather than updating that belief. Updating that belief can either strengthen the belief it weaken it. But if you're seeking truth you need you be willing to throw your beliefs out the window. Resistance to that is ego
The Christian fundamentalism you decry is the shriveled remains of a branch of Christianity that failed to protect itself from drying out in the heat of modernity. Fundamentalism is actually a reaction against modernity, but the East/West split cut off part of the philosophical richness, and the Protestant reformation cut off most of the rest of the philosophical richness, as well as the pathway to the mystical/transcendent. The Fundamentalists couldn't separate the indisputable truths of materialist analysis (Science) from the assumptions necessary for that analysis (materialism), and so they just rejected both. (Except, not really; they live as functional materialists with an exception for God.)
Things like this really make it hard, as an atheist, to receive the argument that my problem is with Christianity, and not with religion.
You're saying that my beliefs mean there's no meaning, and are incompatible with flourishing in the world. I understand you feel the need to defend your beliefs as valuable and important, but somehow it seems almost impossible for religious people to do so without denigrating atheism.
And yes, a lot of atheists are dismissive of religion too. But look, I'll show you: I personally don't find religion necessary to live an ethical and fulfilling life, but I understand that many people find it valuable and compelling, and that's ok as long as they let other people live their lives too. I think people can be intelligent, rational, and respectful of the beliefs of others, while still maintaining their own religious beliefs.
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
"I personally don't find science necessary to live a modern and fulfilling life"
(I say, as I type using a computer on the internet)
People love to remove attribution when it suits their short-sighted view.
Just as you can attribute something I enjoy today to science, I can attribute something you enjoy today to religion.
Are you trying to argue that some things I consider valuable were first developed within religion (which I won't argue with, though I think there's more to dig into there than might be immediately obvious), or that I need to personally practice religion to live an ethical and fulfilling life, and I just don't realize it?
Because, if it's the latter, you're again refusing to consider the possibility that I don't need religion. And again, my argument isn't even that that isn't true, though I fervently believe that, it's that telling me that I'm wrong and I need religion even if I don't think I do is a terrible way to convince me that we can find common ground.
ethics comes from religion. modernity comes from science.
if you say - "I don't need religion to tell me not to kill people"
then i say - "ok. so, why don't you go around killing people?"
you say - "i just don't have the desire to". or "i am compassionate"
i say - "ok. you do you. what about me? I wish to kill people. what's stopping me?"
you say - "consequences. police. law & order"
i say - "so if there was no police in a suburb, or no punishment for killing, I can kill people?"
Your argument falls dead.
Because religion tells us one thing - the law of Karma - there is no place or time in the universe where an action does not have a consequence. Regardless of your belief in God or the soul or spirit or afterlife or past lives.
Almost sounds like newton drew inspiration from the old golden rule - Treat others as you'd like to be treated.
Why? Because every action has an equal and opposite reaction - you WILL be treated exactly as you treated others, whether in this life or the next. Ergo, if you don't want to be killed, don't kill. if you want to be killed, go ahead.
If you don’t believe me, explain to me how human rights, universal equality, democracy etc are based in science. You can’t, because they aren’t. Sorry for blaspheming. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do them, by the way, it just means that it’s our religion to do them.
No, "religion" is the wrong word for that. "Ideology" might be more what you are referring to, something like "societal philosophical principles".
People who don’t believe it are bad.
If you even question it, people get angry and say you’re bad.
People support wars against other people solely on the basis of their disagreement with it.
People think we should spread it to other people.
Functionally, how is that different from religion?
Sure, I am using a different definition of religion because the normal definition focuses on the mascot, but I believe that is wrong and the presence or absence of a mascot is not the important part of religion. Believing things for reasons other than evidence or logic is the important part. Which doesn’t mean we need to stop doing it, to be clear, we should just be labeling it accurately to avoid becoming confused about what we are doing.
I think you are doing quite the opposite, and your overexpansion of the term obfuscates things rather than clarifies them. As another user wrote, there is a perfectly good word that covers all your points: ideology.
And that way you don't get the side effect of claiming that cultural food preferences are religion, since they also can't be scientifically validated.
This is a religion: https://hex.ooo/library/why_not_unitarian.html
You don't need to believe in Jesus, but you do need to hold all the right beliefs. Many self described atheists would fit right in in this church.
In human rights or democratic rule of law?? What a preposterous notion. Precisely what separates religious belief from non-religious is the fact that the latter is dogmatic while the latter is not.
I'm always blown away by people who need religion to tell right from wrong.
Like "don't use goto". That's religion.
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion
They are also result of constant wars, genocide and general destruction. And Europe mainland was war free better place to live when we seek to sort of have those things. They dont even need to be perfect for making life better.
How did you miss out on learning this life lesson as a child?
The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.
(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")
Minsky, while a significant contributor to science and technology, is also a known participant in Epstein sex trafficking.
Him and a few other men at MIT are responsible for the long relationship between the university and the notorious child sex trafficker.
Y’all are welcome to offer a counterpoint, and yet…
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000221...
FWIW, I found:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
An interesting listen on this world (which I assume goes way beyond Epstein (sans sex trafficking) in elite circles) of favors, status seeking and influence peddling between cultural, academic, political and financial elites.
There are graphic descriptions in Virginia Giuffre’s diary entries as well.
>> "We told him about how our land had been stolen and our people were dying. When we finished he shook our hands and said, 'Endeavor to persevere!' ... We thought about it for a long time, 'Endeavor to persevere.' And when we had thought about it long enough, we declared war on the Union."
But I also think there's an alternate meaning which is "this is not the correct time for this" (with an implicit "there will be a better time"). If your friend is upset they got laid off at their job, it's not the right time to start telling them about your promotion. Read the room, man! You can wait.
Right... which they aren't going to be helped by continuing to find external causes or external enemies which are keeping them down instead of focusing on what they can control and what they can do to make money or make careers.
It's nice and it feels good to say these things, but it's not going to get those same students a job or help them build the next startup. Of course those students matter, and they should feel as such, but if they take away the wrong lesson here than Mr. Wozniak is doing them a disservice. Populism is incredibly dangerous.
What jobs? The job market is anemic AND these students are literally being told that jobs as we know them are soon to be a thing of the past. At the same time, no one is explaining how they are supposed to pay off debt or put food on the table outside of vague hand waves UBI or AI creating vast prosperity.
> 74% of students who answered feel their future in this industry is at risk. The top fears were no entry level jobs, laid off seniors competing for the same jobs they're going for, and AI displacement.
There is so much anxiety for the future of society and it's a real shame this seems to be going on ignored.
But... he did have the benefit of two strong examples of what NOT to do along with several days to think about it. It's to his credit that he understood and acted on it.
The "McKenzie"-style lady and Schmidt from Google (who really seemed to resent the pushback and chided graduates), can go to hell. I'm happy that someone is telling the young people who are likely to suffer because of this tech that they matter. I can't imagine how much angst much exist after taking on debt to get an education and then this is the job market.