techblueberry

Yes, I think that the shift from a more training oriented system to a more research oriented system started the shift that goes back o the fifties. The imbalance may have created more hostility leading to a feedback loop, but the core reasons conservatives left wasn’t the hostility, though that may have exacerbated things recently.

But take away the hostility and conservatives wouldn’t self selection into an institution that doesn’t prioritize the things conservatives prioritize.

I honestly don’t think you can prove directionality here.

I 100% believe the country has gone too far in discounting traditional/conservative values. (On both the left and right, but I digress) And I think this divide is unhealthy for the future of the country.

I think it would be healthier for the country if there was a greater balance in education. But I don’t think you can prove that the right in this country hasn’t itself opted out. You hear it in thought leaders at the top and bottom of the economic spectrum. More trade schools, less college. And all the like tech thought leaders valuing experience over education.

Anyway Christopher Rufo is on a tear and the Trump administration has declared victory over woke, so maybe we’ll see the tides turn.

Sure, but you can argue the same thing about anything where there isn’t equality of outcomes.

I’m not even sure I disagree with the argument, but this feels like a classical “DEI” argument FIRE would be skeptical of because it’s politically convenient.

What if there’s just something about academics (and I do actually think this is true) that is not attractive to conservative professionals. The prestige of academics has been falling. Salaries aren’t equivalent to the private sector.

So why are we looking at equality of outcomes and assuming there’s a problem with equality of opportunity?

Also and of course like this may be the most relevant point, the political realignment of the past 15 years has been around educational attainment! How can you design a Republican Party that specifically realigns around education level and not expect that to show up in academics.

Why is it inherently bad that university faculty lean left?

I know right? What does the seventh highest grossing director of all time know about what audiences want?

Geez, I hope you do not pay give any money to Google, Microsoft and such.

Yes? I have been divesting from big tech. Not only do I feel good about it but the side effects have been positive too.

Fraud is just what losers call disruption.

For sure I think part of the problem would be my suspicion of how these tools are being trained. If they’re hiring conservative philosophers to weight the value of tacit knowledge, then great. But if they’re just mashing the “only two genders” button, or like scoring up articles about immigrant crime, as I suspect they are, they the question is, circumvent that process enough, and I wonder if it bleeds into the reasoning process.

To be honest I don’t think an LLM that more accurately represents this kind of reasoning would actually be more representative, per your observation, I’ll say plainly I don’t think the types of people on the right who are most likely activists in this area are doing so because of a passion for different types of reasoning. I think it specifically does desire to advance positions without needing reason.

The best we can do is put forward as many points of view on a topic as possible and let the reader choose.

If an LLM equally weighted flat earth and spherical earth or creationism and evolution so I could decide I would never use that LlM again. And I suspect I’m not alone. I think you’ve outlined an LLM that would hypercharge my concerns.

But also I want to point out the specific nature of my concerns isn’t monodirectional - it’s that if a political position is not arrived to rationally, and it is trained to ignore structured argument - than does that form of epistemology bleed over into subjects they aren’t specifically political.

Grok is described as one of the less accurate LLMs. I wonder if it is possible to both be politically “unbiased” and maximally truth seeking.

I’ve been going down a bit of a conservative philosophical rabbit holes lately — and while conservatism may be maximally truth seeking in a religious sense, in an epistemological sense, it’s suspicious that rationality is the right way to determine how institutions should be organized. Conservative arguments aren’t meant to be built on a rational foundation.

Not that liberal positions are inherently rational, but if you’re position is that there should be no abortions no exceptions, than the entire chain of thinking that may lead to some kind of compromised position on abortion is inherently “liberal”.

The greatest tech companies haven’t let the government dictate their ambitions toward disruption. The resignation described by the flock CEO suggests to me maybe he doesn’t have the right mindset for success?

These results are consistent with AI hiring tools being completely racially unbiased, and real-world hiring managers feeling social pressure to hire underqualified black people

And so managers are feeling social pressure to hire under qualified Asians as well? I must not be up to date on the latest culture war talking points, because I thought Asians were underrepresented.

2 things:

1. We should absolutely pursuing these kind of ideas but given then nature of technological progress and our history with “democratization” things are likely to get worse before we get better. Matt is hedging a lot here reflecting this.

2. Maybe all this stuff is as promising as the various threads suggest but it’s bizzare that this is all being argued in culture war terms (you vs the gatekeepers) and not like shared human flourishing terms. Again maybe it’s working, but it’s also being marketed to a certain kind of persons fears, not as the future of human understanding.

Seems like this could lead to some awkward Oval Office conversations. I don’t think Larry Ellison bought Tik Tok under the assumption he would be sued for billions by Republicans.

The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.

True, none of us are innocent.

When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.

WTF?

The thing that bugs me is like, how tone deaf can you be in the moment?

Mandatory disclaimer - im not a socialist and dont have a problem with wealth accumulation, but it really feels like in 2026. I would spend a lot of time thinking about how to thought lead around the good old traditional “business owners create jobs” and not “billionaires=good”. Also, in our regulatory captures, giving companies $60 billion dollars - it’s not the hardest working founders that win, it’s the best capitalized.

Sure Uber made a better product, but was it that or the subsidized rides that truly allowed them to capture the market.

So, I want people to dream big, but what happened to medium sized businesses where you could make $20 or so million dollars. Why advocate for consolidation in this scale?

Do you see how you are making the same mistake? If you earn the millions you wanted then you will still be just as well off as you would have been before you found out about someone earning a trillion.

It’s not the same mistake. I’m doing fine. I have completely tuned my life and aspiration to my income. I need know more and I am personally satisfied. But forget morality and “who has enough”. Money is just not moving sufficiently in the system. And even traditional capitalists are sounding the alarm on this. It’s not about how much Elon Musk has compared to me. It’s looking at the total distribution of money.

But like all the rules about the economy and capitalism not being a zero sum game are dependent on moderation and a set of rules. AI companies really are sucking up all the capital leaving less money for smaller firms.

Depending on how AI companies tie themselves to the government, you could see bailouts and inflation that make us all poorer.

The thing about capitalism, is that there used to be a lot of things like say - stock buybacks that were implicitly immoral or against norms.

JD Rockefeller aside from starting a monopoly had deals with the railroads most people at the time found immoral and this was either against or before the concept of common carrier.

So like - there are a lot of ways in which - I want to be a sort of economically conservative capitalist. I want to live in a world where we have a set of rules that create a level playing field. But we’ve had this slow drip of deregulation and norm breaking over the past 100 years, and yet debates of socialism vs capitalism still sort of come down to oversimplified debates of “are you meritocratic or not”.

And then cap this off with the fact that business wealth is extremely concentrated in the magnificent 7; capitalism isn’t capitalism without competition. I forget the name of the group, but there are even though leaders on the right that see that like wealth is not currently distributed the way any reasonably moderate person - left or right - idealizes it to be. It feels like we are so far from the colloquial definition of - “someone has a good idea, invents it, sells it to people, and gets rewarded”.

On some level, if Elon musk sold 100 million cars and pocketed 10k each, I might not care if he was a trillionaire, but we need to realign incentives with tangible value and not financial games.

Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

I think it’s more of a bell curve. Andrej and I clearly have different definitions of fun, if he doesn’t think deep learning is fun. In fact I’d say I’ve only learned anything when I’m having fun. I might add almost every time I’ve sweat it’s been out of fun. I’ve never gotten a good workout from “vegetables” (though I like vegetables). Being miserable might work for him, but I don’t know if this advice is generalizable (his point is not entirely terrible, but maybe taken a little far. I think the problem is less “is this entertaining” and more “is this deeply enganging”

I’m not sure how to grok your response here. If cancel culture doesn’t concern you then fine?

What’s the game theory for understanding who to believe when they’re all fucking liars?

There’s a reasons I described it as accelerationism. I think whatever the next thing is probably hasn’t been invented yet, but I would hope the discomfort of exclusion might inspire it. It only works if enough people feel left out - I.e. all under 16s

But yeah, it’s not without risks.

But there’s two sort of self-identified reasons for freedom of speech.

One is to get the best ideas on the table. I’m a little suss of this one (when taken to extremes) because speech that costs nothing is just noise.

The second is to make sure everyone has an outlet to express themselves so they don’t rebel. And while I certainly don’t want to see violent rebellion, I think maybe a bit more social and political rebellion wouldn’t be the end of the world.

Despite propaganda to the contratry, meatspace is still an option.

I’m becoming something of an accelerationist on this issue. I think we’re at a dead end with like 5 companies controlling most of the internet. If this pisses people off and encourages them to get active politically or create new modes of communication. Great!

Freedom has to be more than “you can choose any walled garden you want!” We need more spaces that aren’t mediated.

I feel like we’ve accepted this terrible definition of freedom, out of fear it could get worse, not because we love what we have.

But not to worry, I feel comfortable having contrarian views, because my one vote isn’t going to radically change the world.

Creativity requires limitations.

More fundamentally, laws like this are based on the fundamental assumption that both children and their parents can't make good decisions and that the state must instead force the right decisions on them.

Also yeah? Sure? You may not like that that’s the conclusion. Why does everyone say this like it’s some kind of gotcha? Children are incapable biologically of making good decisions.

But yes, I cannot make these decisions of myself and want the state to step in. It’s way too big a surface area.

As an engineer, I tend to view solutions in terms of tradeoffs and not absolutes. 20 years ago the free and open internet was great. Now I think we’ve gone too far. And more to the point, I think freedom is protected by regulation, not by handing decisions over to whatever billionaire won a cage match.

This is the gen-x part of my xennial talking, but I can’t help but feel like something has been lost when nothing is transgressive anymore. Some people look back and say how can a gen x’er who fought against censorship be so pro censorship now.

A lot of people say this is dumb because teenagers will figure out a way to bypass it. Good! That’s what teenagers are supposed to do. I think there’s a sort of weird like - there’s something distopian about Elon Musk putting his stamp of approval on using edgy racial slurs on social media. If you’re young and want to make edgy jokes. It’s supposed to be transgressive! It’s _not_ supposed to get Elon Musk’s stamp of approval.

I don’t want to send anyone to jail for bypassing these laws or saying the wrong thing. It’s a hard needle to thread, but we need a code of conduct so people can make a choice to break it. So people can create alternate websites to the big social media companies. We need institutions without so much power so they can be jailbroken. And government is just plainly not the only powerful institution I fear.

I get that many of us were all technologists here. But it’s a weird inclusion because - it seems to imply that this was your red line and when you became aware that this administration might be racist and nationalist?

I don’t think export controls on large language models would enter my top 50 in terms of actions this administration has taken to show that.

If Musk sold a 100 million cars at $50k each and pocketed 10k of that, I’d be mostly fine with that.

But so much of the value he’s generated is hype, speculation and regulatory capture, and even if you don’t give a shit about the poor, from a more traditional business / right wing perspective his gains are not sufficiently distributed across the economy. The number of companies going public has tanked. Like wealth consolidation is impacting traditional avenues of mobility. All the things we say we want from capitalism are suffering.

It seems like at some point we completely divorced wealth and number go up as moral indicators on their own, without stopping to ask if these really were doing all the things we said capitalists did like creating jobs.

I think a while ago, Musk realized that hype was a more reliable wealth extraction than exchange with society, and it’s pretty fucked if we aren’t alarmed when incentives become this misaligned.

Anthropic really sped run their “don’t be evil” phase.

Really curious to be a fly on the wall in discussions between the exec teams (CFO specifically) of these companies.

I happen to be reading a biography of J D Rockefeller right now, and there are a lot of parallels to the early oil industry, but I think the problem is, if AI is a commodity than they’re going to be squeezed from all sides.

If prices keep dropping 90% per year from competition and not underlying economics, how do you account for the capex costs of a gpu? You buy a gpu assuming one rate of return and it’s .001 percent of that 5 years later?

On top of that the longer you can depreciate a gpu, thr more value you can get out of them, but those long depreciation schedules compete with gpu’s failing g faster than expected and GPU’s getting old, and per the above, prices may fall faster than the benefit you get from longer use.

I think the problem is most of the arguments towards the bullish case always has a compounding economic factor in the other side. Maybe this is why these companies are so desperate to cash out.