eevilspock

Their robber baron behavior reveals their true values and the reality of capitalism.

And then there is a meta-confirmation of this bias: The way people commonly interpret this poem. If Frost had that in mind all along, then he/the poem is genius.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_bias

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_attribution_error

If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.

Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.

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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair

Using GDP to measure the health or rank of a company is like rating writers by the number of words they produce.

One of the counter arguments to "LLMs aren't really AI" is: "Well, maybe the human brain works much like an LLM. So we are stupid in the same way LLMs are. We just have more sophisticated LLMs in our heads, or better training data. In other other words, if LLMs aren't intelligent, then neither are we.

The counter to this counter is: Can one build an LLM that can identify hallucinations, the way we do? That can classify its own output as good or shitty?

This dynamic far outweighs factors like moral and intellectual honesty. Humans want to be a part of a tribe and be respected within it far more than they want to do the right thing or be honest.

The fastest growing religion now is Islam, which is in many ways following the earlier playbook of Christianity.

Whereas Buddhism, the real kind, not the new agey California kind that is centered on self, or the popular Asian kind that is as close to Buddhist principles as Evangelicals are to Jesus's teachings, has nearly vanished from its place of birth, India, suppressed in favor of Islam or Hinduism, whichever the rulers of India favored at the time, and is a rarity everywhere else on the planet.

If any religion is COOPERATE-BOT, it is Buddhism, the real kind.

Anyone who's critical of, which is to say critically aware of, the underlying nature of capitalism will get what I'm saying.

Elon Musk (who proofread PG's post) is a master at extracting money from society and its government, while extracting labor from workers for minimal pay.[1] Zuck is a master at extracting money from society (by maximally playing to people's addictive tendencies and selling their attention to companies who want to extract more!). These types are driven by money and power, not by bettering society, though as masters of extraction they are masters of selling themselves as the latter.

Compare them to people who are driven not by money but by a desire to contribute: Albert Einstein, Tim Berners-Lee, Linus Torvalds. If capitalism/markets were efficient, Albert Einstein would have been the richest person in the world, not Musk. The inventor of the web would be worth a lot more than the inventor of a web app that prey's upon people's addictive tendencies. Linus Torvalds' baby runs the internet (and android phones) yet his net worth is... Remember how Microsoft said open source was un-American, akin to communism? Now Microsoft is a master at extracting money from open source.

Capitalism's measure of net worth (money in the bank) does not correlate to actual net worth (positive impact on society).

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[1]: btw, how is the Founder Mode he instituted at what was formally known as Twitter working out?

I chose the article's subtitle as it is more relevant for the HN community.