HN user

antithesizer

40 karma

admit everything, concede nothing

Posts1
Comments106
View on HN

One of the two major worldviews (ideologies) says the market is fully valued. One says it's severely undervalued. Nobody is capable of considering that their world view is wrong and they're living in a fantasy. The next 12 months will be fascinating and (for some) extremely satisfying.

You clearly are selling something, too: doubt. (Note your appeal to your own authority.)

Don't kid yourself. Skepticism is not neutrality. These days throwing shade is a growth industry. There's money to be made shorting just like there is going long. Neither is the objective, disinterested position, although skepticism always enjoys the appearance of prudence, at least to the ignorant.

Anyone who says they're not trying to sell you something lacks self-awareness about what they themselves have been sold.

It can be documents and it can be people, but it's not essentially either one. It can take many forms, including being lost when none of those forms has it on offer, as every business is different. An institution with excellent documentation, mature processes, and adept hiring could retain its "memory" without a single human member remaining from the past. Oral history and other humanistic forms of memory make everyone feel warm and fuzzy, but they're not to be idealized as the only real memory simply because they were underappreciated for a some time.

The essential meaning of technological progress is the utter inadequacy of humanity. We build cars that we never figure out how to safely drive, but being to arrogant to admit defeat and reconstruct society around trams like a sensible animal would do, we wait a century for cars that can drive themselves while the bodies pile up on the freeways in the meantime.

Yes it's true, we can't make a UI. Or a personal computer, or anything else that isn't deeply opaque to its intended users. But it's so much worse than that. We humans can't do hardly anything successfully besides build technology and beat each other in an ever expanding array of ridiculous pissing contests we call society.