This whole situation made me realize that the mechanism for holding presidents accountable for campaign promises really doesn’t exist. None of this is what people voted for, and is almost directly the opposite. That isn’t a new thing, of course, but this seems like a pretty huge turnaround from what the campaign was about.
This seems like a fundamental problem with the system to me.
If you can’t count on the candidate to at least attempt sticking to campaign promises, then the entire process is irrational.
Presumably the mechanism is supposed to be Congress and impeachment, but that doesn’t work if the president is directly influencing their election campaigns.
I do wonder if / how something could be implemented that addresses this, beyond just losing at the next election.
A lot of people voted on a platform of pissing off a lot of people. A lot of people are pissed. Polls on the day of the invasion indicated a lack of support; since then a lot of people have shown that they're pissed, and now that voter base is supporting the admin and these actions because they see people getting pissed.
It sounds petty and dumb. Unfortunately, that's what's happening. 44% support the invasion. [1] That's identical to the constant 40-45% support the admin has had since day one. There has been no change in support and there never will be. There's absolutely no convincing them, leaving us with the only option of figuring out how we're supposed to deal with nearly half the country that has a mindset no different from willing kamikaze pilots.
This used to be the job of the third estate, but traditional media has all been captured and the algorithms have done the rest, drowning us in a sea of content.
It may indeed be the case that the candidate promised one thing and the voters acting irrationally (or correctly assuming he's a liar) voted with an expectation of him doing the exact opposite. The GP, however didn't say anything about voting. He was talking specifically about the mismatch between campaign promises and actions taken once in office.
Well yeah but he is a pathological liar, fraudster and a criminal. This was well known during 2nd election campaign.
Expecting to hold any promises just because they were said and got him where he wanted is a bit naive, don't you think? Or does the idea of 'but now he will act completely differently to his entire prior life!' makes any sense to you?
I guess I must be in the first group, because I can’t really understand how someone would find it insufferable. It’s basically just telling you not to be cynical about everything, and to notice that some things do indeed get better.
It reminded me of wabi-sabi, which essentially says you should appreciate the imperfection and impermanence of things.
I don’t think people actually read the article; because it makes a unique point about certain types of queries:
I would have been interested in the experience and thoughts of someone whose opinions I respected, both as a social thing and to learn something.
In other words, some types of questions are aimed at 1) building a social connection with the person you’re asking and 2) because you want to know what they, specifically, think about their topic.
AI can’t really replace either of these. AIs might function as a weak social replacement for some people, but you aren’t really going to advance in your personal or professional life by making friends with Claude.
A good example of the second one are AskMeAnything type forum posts: I don’t care what some generic celebrity/famous figure thinks about something, I care specifically about what George Clooney thinks about it. The AI will always be guessing, building a model on what George has said in the past, but it will never actually say what he thinks right now.
For a more serious and contemporary example: there are dozens of videos on YouTube right now, interviews with various experts and pundits on the situation in Iran. Many of them have hundreds of thousands of views. But why would someone watch this instead of just asking ChatGPT what’s going on in Iran? Because we want to know what this particular person thinks.
> It doesn’t really matter how good AI systems get, that’s not going to change, and since most white collar work deals with these kinds of problems, there is little danger in it being replaced.
Does the accounts payable team keep their jobs because their manager enjoys chatting with them? Does the junior analyst stay employed because the VP values their specific personal opinion on the Q3 revenue forecast? Note the article is about work
I wouldn’t frame it as “chatting with,” more like, corporations want people in certain roles to deal with things, more than they necessarily want just the results that said person gives. Depends on the job and situation of course.
When you have X employee in a certain role, you know someone is “handling” a particular thing. With AI that isn’t really clear. Maybe you just get the same person owning the responsibilities that previously were under 3 people.
I think the word "entirely" is missing from the last line. A significant amount of white collar tasks are getting replaced, and eventually that leads to a need for fewer white collar employees, which subsequently also leads to less communication overhead and less of a need for humans in the loop to interpret subtleties, desires, etc. But that need will always be there at some level, or we'll have very intelligent AI agents that very intelligently blackmail your vendor's CEO because they have determined that to be the fastest way to get the TPS report you asked for. Humans still need to be there as guardrails at a minimum, but also because humans understand humans, and humans are your customers.
So yes, white collar jobs will be replaced, but they won't be replaced entirely.
Astroturfing was already a thing 20 years ago with fake comments on blogs. AI is no different, except now it's much easier to both create content and upvote that content.
Not sure if there is a real solution to the Eternal September problem, other than moving to a more niche space that the marketers and bots don't care about.
The majority of Italian food doesn’t actually use tomatoes. That impression is mostly because internationally-known Italian foods tend to use tomatoes (pizza for example.)
Pizza like its predecessor Focaccia (panis focacius in Roman times) was initially tomato-less. Even today many pizzerias offer pizza bianca in their menus
From what I understand, it’s not so much that all disagreement is to be avoided entirely, but rather that it should be done on an individual level prior to the meeting. So the fundamental difference is that a western company may use the meeting as an opportunity to discuss and debate an issue, whereas that process is done before the meeting in Japanese corporate culture.
Yeah, the concept of "nemawashi" (根回し) is very important there, this idea that all the groundwork and decision making is agreed upon before the meeting happens.
The term literally comes from the concept of "preparing the roots", that is, the process of softening the ground and trimming around the roots of a tree (often a bonsai) in preparation for moving it safely.
> In Japan and in many East Asian cultures, debate is behind closed doors.
East Asia consists of only 4 countries, two of them (China and Taiwan) sharing the bulk of their main language.
In the other 3 East Asian countries, meetings being for ceremony isn't nearly as pronounced as in Japan. Plenty of meetings where discussion are had and new decisions are made.
I’ve been here awhile (since 2010 also) and I think it’s changed a little bit, but more because of culture at large.
The AI obsession seems to be slowly dying down, thankfully. For awhile it felt like every single link was about AI, now it seems to only be 10-20%. I expect this to continue.
In general culture I think people are more impatient, cynical, and frustrated, and this shows on HN. But it’s still better than X, where everyone seems absurdly confident in their obscure ideas and viewpoints.
It feels to me like there are less long form “thoughtful” comments with a personal touch than maybe 5 years ago. If I could adjust HN’s settings, I would incentivize those types of comments and not the quick takes that get all the upvotes.
Several time when this comes up I do a count on the front page and it's usually 15-20%. Just now I counted 4/30 or 13%.
I think it feels worse than that because for better or worse a lot of the interest is in AI at the moment even if it's not that big a percentage of stories.
Many prominent tech and science leaders have been disparaging philosophy for decades now. Not surprising that in the absence of any serious ethical thought, “make money = good” is the default position.
No, that isn’t what my comment suggests at all, on any level.
I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)
Seems pretty straightforward to me.
I think there are definitely many positions with which I disagree, but are nonetheless well-thought through and coherent.
But it seems pretty clear that the people making these decisions haven’t done the work of thinking it through, and are instead just trying to maximize money. That’s my claim, at least.
> No, that isn’t what my comment suggests at all, on any level.
I don’t think you can have intelligent ethical opinions if you disparage and ignore the field that studies ethics (philosophy.)
You're not suggesting that, but then put up your own requirements for someone's ethics to be "valid". So in the end you are filtering others ethical choices by your own requirements.
And your logic seems to work backwards: someone does something you disagree with based on your personal ethical view -> assume they aren't well thought out
One of my best friends is a philosophy grad, and another is a very intelligent financier. What we've come to realize is that speaking and writing and making arguments is fruitless. You either have had the embodied experiences to recognize a statement is directionally correct -- to various magnitudes -- or you don't.
No amount of words will change that.
It is my experience -- after seeing the quality of thinking from those philosophically trained (I am not) -- that learning philosophy is learning how to think, and by extension figuring out for oneself what is capital g Good.
Morals and ethics are different and you conflate them. That is the crux of your confusion. Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it; but ethics requires actual intentional thought over years and years of reflecting on lived experience. What is good for you and your small circle can be grasped intuitively, but to grasp what is good "at scale" must be reasoned about. Without having seriously grappled with this, one is liable to have simplistic views, and in many cases hold views that have already been trodden through and whose "holes" have been exposed and new routes taken in unveiling ethics.
Without seriously having interfaced with it, it's like talking to someone about the exercise science when all they know is do steroids, lift weight, and eat. Sure, that works, but it lacks nuance and almost no thought has gone into it.
Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers. It requires intimacy and is a deeply personal conversation one should have with those close to them and explore together.
> Someone can understand morality inherently without ever thinking about it;
How so? This would infer some universal set of morality, which doesn't exist.
> Anyway, this is tiring. Philosophical discussions are not something to do with strangers.
I think it's tiring because you view ethics and morality as a box that thinking has to happen in. But it's not. Ethics and morality can be anything (as we've seen through human history).
My requirements for someone's ethical opinions to be "valid" are that they don't criticize the field of ethics as useless. I guess that is a "requirement" I have, but it's a pretty nitpicking, useless distinction to make.
If someone criticizes the French language, but doesn't speak a word of French, sorry, but I don't have much respect for their opinion on French.
And no, I don't "assume they aren't well thought out," because many of these people have explicitly said philosophy is a waste of time.
I'm just having an intellectual argument with you, so thanks for sharing your thoughts.
In a non-theological world, the source of ethics can be anything - parents, community, study of ethhics. None of them is more valid than another - because requiring "a respect for the field of philosophy" is a ethical position in and of itself.
Excellent point. Philosophy (really anything not math-related) is seen as a waste of time by most people I know in tech. You end up getting a bunch of smart but unethical or misguided people. Engineering types end up being used as pawns in wider political games. Look at all the terrorists who are engineers, for example:
Would you consider being a contract killer (i.e. a hitman) ethical? What about being a creator of CSAM? Because those are both examples making money by providing others with what they want. And if we followed free market principles to their logical extreme then both of those would be allowed.
I think most people would agree that this would not be even remotely ethical. Nor would it lead to higher living standards than a more restricted market economy.
Sometimes I really don’t know how to reply to comments like these. Because they either seem to completely misunderstand the basic premise of my comment, or they deliberately focus on some tangential thing in order to make some trollish point. But I’ll reply here, and just assume my comment was somehow unclear.
Do you genuinely think that putting money above any other value is an ethical way to operate in the world? I certainly don’t, virtually no ethical theory does, and the vast majority of people don’t either.
This is not saying that making money is inherently a bad thing, but that placing it above every other value without question is definitely a bad thing, or at least a careless and thoughtless one.
To use your example: all sorts of things are in demand but unquestionably make the world worse. Does the fact that people are willing to pay for propaganda or chemical weapons or X other negative thing somehow mean that facilitating their sale is ethical? I really don’t understand the position.
I suppose there are some people out there who seriously have studied ethics and think making money is the ultimate good. It doesn’t seem like a serious position to me.
But I don’t think that’s become the default position because of serious analysis, but rather the total lack of it. Which is what my comment was about: when you refuse to engage in serious philosophical thought about something, you’re just going to revert to base values like the acquisition of money and power, or some variant of that which your local system is optimizing for.
He was trying to say that "making money in a free-market" is fundamentally linked to creating value for someone. It wasn't the 'money' word that you should have focused on, but the 'value'.
On average this way of creating value bottoms-up has undoubtedly produced the largest human flourishing in the history of our species. It has unlocked human creativity and has lifted millions of people from poverty. It is the best system we have been yet able to create. If you disagree - point me to an alternative (even if theoretical).
Of course, as in the case of averages, there is variance. Sure, greed, illegal money making is bad, but the total net benefit is overwhelmingly positive.
I think your blind spot is that you implicitly attribute no ethical value to 'money making'. For you they're disconnected. In fact, it's the oppositve - there is a lot of ethics in money making.
Here’s what I don’t get, and why these comments irritate me. They are just opportunities for someone to inject their ideological arguments about something that has little to do with the actual comment.
I didn’t say anything about capitalism being a bad system, nor did I say making money is inherently bad.
I said in the absence of ethical study, making money is treated as a default good. It seems pretty obvious to me that it isn’t a default good.
I’m completely uninterested in arguing about whether the profit motive has led to good societal outcomes, because a) in general I agree with that and b) it has literally nothing to do with my comment.
My original comment was just lamenting that tech leaders don’t study ethics, and therefore they just default to thinking that making money is always a good thing, no matter the consequences, no matter what values get ignored. In many situations, making money does indeed lead to good ethical situations. But my comment is about them not even bothering to ask that question in the first place. That’s all.
To add to keiferski's excellent comments: There is no such thing a truly free market. Neoliberalism is just an excuse to not care about things that stand in the way of people making more money or gaining more power.
This wealth we have built was not built on a totally free market (whatever that means), but much more social form of capitalism. The countries where there is the least povery and highest standards of living are countries that have a big social welfare state, such as the Norics.
Nothing human is perfect. However, history shows us that the more free market an economy is, the more prosperous it is. It doesn't have to be "truly free" to be effective.
In contrast, whenever socialism is tried and it fails, socialists describe it as "not true socialism". Since there is also no such thing as true socialism, the more "true" a socialism is, the more it fails.
This seems like a fundamental problem with the system to me. If you can’t count on the candidate to at least attempt sticking to campaign promises, then the entire process is irrational.
Presumably the mechanism is supposed to be Congress and impeachment, but that doesn’t work if the president is directly influencing their election campaigns.
I do wonder if / how something could be implemented that addresses this, beyond just losing at the next election.
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