We found out that what they really worshipped all along was money. I’m sure this is self-evident to many, but I was optimistic and naive about it. I saw the good in people that have no good inside them.
One of the chief arguments for low taxes on the 1% is that governments do dumb things with money. Billionaires are more likely to invest it in beneficial research, enterprise, etc.. If left to their own devices and not stripped of their resources, good billionaires will do great things for society. Or so the claim goes.
The problem is, although much potential for good may exist in billionaires, the average billionaire spends next to nothing on philanthropy or research. It's only highly unusual exceptions who do. Next to nothing, even when well invested, accomplishes next to nothing.
If billionaires won't open their purses to support the society that has provided them with opportunity, that's what taxes are for. If billionaires aren't lining up to fund research institutes, that's what tax-funded government research is for.
It sounds like you don’t think allocating capital to new business ventures or supporting the funding of existing businesses counts as supporting society?
Businesses are made up of people, and last I checked all of the things I use on a day to day basis come from companies. Companies seem pretty important.
Why do things like venture funding, which I think a lot of billionaires do engage in directly or indirectly, not count as supporting society?
The market is far from free, big money is near impossible to compete against. In effect, when they pour tens of billions the work that gets done could have been done perhaps with millions.
Take a look at Chinese AI accomplishments and at what point it has been achieved. Granted plagiarism might be reducing some of the costs, but in a free market, things would have been a lot cheaper.
Business ventures use long-term, curiosity driven research and educated workers to produce goods/services as a byproduct of generating profits for their owners.
If the owners are not paying taxes that fund education or long-term research, nor directly funding same, then they're both short-sighted and parasitic.
(Something theologians debate about endlessly and absolutely uselessly. That is all they are good, er, bad, for.)
Yeah, right. Pontificating much? Pathetic.
How do you know he/she is "weak"? No argument provided. And the same for "incorrect".
And who the hell are you to judge them?
Let me apply some of your own judgement "ointment" on you:
>essentially always incorrect.
Your use of the word essentially in that phrase is essentially inessential. :) The meaning is equally well conveyed without that word. IOW, it's fluff, and can be done away with, fluffy kid. (wags wings at you. hi!)
It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be different.
A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
I don't think it's naive. That was in all of Google's marketing, and at the time I think that marketing was broadly true. It's impossible to know how long a good culture will last, certainly a high school kid wouldn't be expected to assume that.
They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.
I feel the exact same way about tech today as a 90s kid who embraced personal computing and who was inspired by the histories of Apple, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and other pioneering places. As late as 2014 I thought highly of FAANG and I was proud of the two summer internships I had at Google, which were enjoyable.
Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.
These companies also attract that sort of person. Most software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger
Nah people with the "hacker inclination" are just as easy to buy but in other ways. There are people who will solve any interesting problem put in front of them and have a great time doing it without reflecting on why someone put it there or what it will be used for when they're done. Giving them more interesting problems, more autonomy to pursue intellectually stimulating solutions to them, is the reward you can use to keep them building your drone assassination algorithms or whatever.
In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long been that skillfully solving problems that are personally interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet significant number of the people who work at for example palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little eichmanns."
My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.
This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"
I don't think it's entirely wrong as a model but it struggles to explain thiel himself having degrees in philosophy and law. I think there is a certain contempt engineers can have for other domains and ways of knowing that might be closer to the source of this. But I'm not very confident in that explanation either fwiw.
I think when you get to a high-enough level of running a company, you figure out ways to turn off your empathy, and ignore your principles.
Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I actually could do something, but I probably wouldn't be able to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle that I don't know about who dies.
I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I think that they actively taught themselves to value their respective companies instead of fellow humans.
That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech corporations has shown me that these people are extremely short-sighted.
You can make millions and keep your empathy but I don't think you can be a billionaire unless you're just a voracious unsatiable machine without much empathy to begin with. You can get good at projecting a facade and saying the right things and maybe even actually doing some good in some cases but it's usually just in service of expanding your wealth or power.
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
I agree that you can reach a few million without becoming too evil. Hell, having a decent-paying desk job and putting a good chunk of money into VOO (or something equivalent) has historically been a relatively surefire way of doing that if you're willing to wait a few decades.
I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with what's good for society, because the only appeal at that point is seeing a number get bigger. It's not like you're "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
> They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I don't actually even agree with that. Microsoft, for example, seems to routinely overhire and then fire large percentages of their employees (edit, correction, said "corporations" before).
I think all they know how to do (I mean this pretty literally) is spend money. They are given money and then they spend that money. Sometimes spending that money leads to growth. Sometimes it leads to having to lay off 20% of the company. The important part is that the money is spent.
> I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
I'm not opposed to what you suggested but I'm not 100% sure how you'd define "luxury goods" with any kind of consistency.
The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction (or rent-seeking). You can create societal incentives to encourage generation and discourage extraction. A patent-troll firm is maybe 90% parasitic to 10% productive. SpaceX is probably closer to the opposite (IMO). People are going to play the game to win but its up to society to decide what that means.
> The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction.
This is the crux of the matter, a critical assumption. It breaks at many places.
One can make a boat load of money by predicting market movements slightly better. The value produced is not zero, but does not seem proportionate.
The size of the HFT market seems disproportionate to the value they purportedly produce by removing microsecond scale inefficiencies in the market. A bulk of the futures and options market is not from hedging but just gambling, it's not creating value, at least not in any proportionate sense.
This is vacuous as a followup to the original claim - which was that they're provably good at allocating resources to create value (the last part being implied).
"The system is good because it selects the ones who can create value" "No actually they don't create value" "Well, at least we know they're either creating value or destroying it" you see how that doesn't support the original claim at all
What's worse is they can then give it to their children and have an infinite line of oligarchs who don't have to lift a damn finger in life but use the system to keep concentrating wealth the top. We should really eat the rich.
Yeah, and if they put it into an S&P500 fund, they're likely to earn about double that long term, which is even more depressing.
That's kind of what I am getting at; a billion US dollars is basically infinite money. With that much, you can easily get more money than most people will see in their entire lifetimes by literally doing nothing. I do not understand why they want more at that point.
The reason I want more money is so that I can buy more or better stuff than I have right now. More money translates to a tangible thing. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for a billionaire to accrue more money is just to watch a number get larger, and if that is your motivation to do something, then clearly something is wrong with your fucking head. If you're willing to screw over everyone by lobbying to lower taxes solely so you can watch a number grow, then you kind of have to be a sociopath.
I can understand the desire to continue to grow your companies, but no I do not understand the motivation to make more money when you already have more money than God. At that point, the drive to get more money seems like it’s primarily about watching a line go up.
It’s a subtle difference; I understand corporations trying to lower corporate taxes and the like, but there are lots of attempts from billionaires to lower their personal taxes by creating loopholes and bribing congress away from a wealth tax. That’s about personal wealth, and no, I cannot think of other reasons, no matter how dismissively you ask.
I save money to buy a bigger house, or fund my retirement, or to buy a car, but by the time you’re a billionaire you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can buy dozens of nice houses, you can stash away $20 million into a savings account and still be set for retirement, you can buy a new car every week, etc. A billion dollars is infinite money for an individual human, let alone multiple billions. It’s impossible to justify “more”.
If you're looking for justifications as to why, I posted the other day at https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/science-funding-was-already-wa... outlining eleven of them: longevity (living longer), defense (wars of the future), returns (pays for itself), prosperity (only real long-term driver of productivity growth), innovation (better everday products), resilience (insurance for future calamities), jobs (creates them now and better jobs in the future), frontier (sci-fi is cool), sovereignty (reduce single points of failure), environment (new tech needed for climate change and energy efficiency), and power (maintaining reserve currency, among other things).
It's not that people don't support these goals. It's that people don't trust the folks who say they're pursuing or funding them. There seems to be very little transparency in how money gets spent or what the tangible benefits are.
Addressing this lack of trust and transparency would go a lot further in healing the country than most other solutions being proposed.
Sean Carroll has talked about your concerns. This is impressively apolitical for the most part, and covers much of what you have brought up. I highly recommend listening or reading.
I think longevity is a bad goal. No matter what you achieve, it won't be enough, and in the grand scheme if things it doesn't matter (and is probably a net negative, socially). Hundreds of thousands of people are born every day, and hundreds of thousands die. It is the natural way of things for older generations to die so that younger can prosper.
Hard disagree. Many great people throughout history didn't complete the great works they were remembered for until they were in their 50s or 60s. Some even kept doing cool stuff well into their 90s. If we can keep our health and faculties that long and beyond, civilization will continue advancing and providing a higher quality of life all around. We lose so much experience and hindsight with every death. That experience could, for example, be used to make larger populations sustainable.
But you're also assuming that people aged 50+ are necessarily inclined to keep contributing to science and passing on their "wisdom" (quotes because they're actually fallible) to the younger generations. In reality, the vast majority of them would just go on to consume, while also being content enough to be prepared to die any minute.
And believe it or not, whatever knowledge or discovery you think you're losing with one death isn't actually contingent to that person. Given enough time, someone else will figure it out, and it becomes especially less valuable if you believe that AI tools are only going to get better.
More people and longer-lived people also means destruction of nature. We have already eradicated so much, so I also agree that longevity is a bad goal.
> Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out... we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation.
I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped caring that there was a pandemic.
That's not true. The pandemic ended as Omicron became the dominant strain, which was by some measures 90% less fatal than Delta.
It's selective breeding; because we became careful about recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore, Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer deemed as much of a threat.
I don't disagree with the general vibe here, but a few points:
- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc.
- Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
Rather than asking for “inventors and donors” or the Government to do this (not that it shouldn’t do it) a few rich people can have tremendous effect with relatively little investment. How?
1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue; it's hard to fund the really long-running projects that are essential for making progress in a lot of areas. And from an industry standpoint, being an academic researcher is a personal sacrifice: more prestigious, sometimes, but often a lot less lucrative than if you'd have spent that time climbing the ladder at a major tech company or developing skills that were more immediately job-relevant.
So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
>it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue;
Not only that, with some efforts a lifetime is not even enough unless you beat the odds plus get lucky early too.
Rich people are also humans. Marketing can influence their behavior just as well as it influences everyone else.
There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
When the government takes a greater responsibility of the former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts and sciences. This has happened in many European countries, where grants from private foundations are a more important source of research funding than in the US.
With less government support, you have large capable organizations that provide services and rely on donations. Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
There is no private entity that will broadly fund basic research. The most likely candidates, like Harvard, are also being attacked. The point of all this is to promote anti-intellectualism. No one is coming to save us from it.
Shareholders are not interested in anything that doesn't have an obvious and sort-term payoff - the days of companies funding any significant degree of basic science research are long gone. Our ruling class has become so selfish and myopic that they are willing to derail our long-term future for short-term gain.
There are quite large private funded organisations like Polybio. As the public funding has dried up there are people like Vitalik of Ethereum fame who have Long Covid and funding further Covid research. Its out of necessity at this point.
We still need a vaccine that stops transmission and stops people getting Long Covid. We really badly need a treatment for the 400+ million people who have Long Covid around the world. The situation just keeps getting worse and worse as the years roll on and more people die and are disabled and the funding has dropped drastically due to political choices.
Ironic given the entirety of tech elites are bending the knee (and funding) an administration out to gut funding for it. NSF is being gutted:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr...
We found out that what they really worshipped all along was money. I’m sure this is self-evident to many, but I was optimistic and naive about it. I saw the good in people that have no good inside them.
To pretend someone has “no good in them” is weak, and essentially always incorrect.
One of the chief arguments for low taxes on the 1% is that governments do dumb things with money. Billionaires are more likely to invest it in beneficial research, enterprise, etc.. If left to their own devices and not stripped of their resources, good billionaires will do great things for society. Or so the claim goes.
The problem is, although much potential for good may exist in billionaires, the average billionaire spends next to nothing on philanthropy or research. It's only highly unusual exceptions who do. Next to nothing, even when well invested, accomplishes next to nothing.
If billionaires won't open their purses to support the society that has provided them with opportunity, that's what taxes are for. If billionaires aren't lining up to fund research institutes, that's what tax-funded government research is for.
It sounds like you don’t think allocating capital to new business ventures or supporting the funding of existing businesses counts as supporting society?
Businesses are made up of people, and last I checked all of the things I use on a day to day basis come from companies. Companies seem pretty important.
Why do things like venture funding, which I think a lot of billionaires do engage in directly or indirectly, not count as supporting society?
In a free market with competition, probably yes.
The market is far from free, big money is near impossible to compete against. In effect, when they pour tens of billions the work that gets done could have been done perhaps with millions.
Take a look at Chinese AI accomplishments and at what point it has been achieved. Granted plagiarism might be reducing some of the costs, but in a free market, things would have been a lot cheaper.
Similar example India's accomplishments in space.
Business ventures use long-term, curiosity driven research and educated workers to produce goods/services as a byproduct of generating profits for their owners.
If the owners are not paying taxes that fund education or long-term research, nor directly funding same, then they're both short-sighted and parasitic.
Absolutism doesn’t tend to win long term, that’s fair, but I’m personally content to critique sama's ongoing lack of good actions and behaviour.
Sometimes it's a sensible approximation. For example, Hitler had no good in him.
Hitler ironically was a vegetarian because he supposedly felt compassion for animals.
(Such contradictions obviously)
well, that shows him up as being even more of a fool and/or hypocrite (apart from being an ultra-evil swine), because, gasp, humans are also animals,
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
Read full article before yapping a reply.
J. F. C.
... And angels (how many) can dance on the head of a pin.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_many_angels_can_dance_on...
(Something theologians debate about endlessly and absolutely uselessly. That is all they are good, er, bad, for.)
Yeah, right. Pontificating much? Pathetic.
How do you know he/she is "weak"? No argument provided. And the same for "incorrect".
And who the hell are you to judge them?
Let me apply some of your own judgement "ointment" on you:
>essentially always incorrect.
Your use of the word essentially in that phrase is essentially inessential. :) The meaning is equally well conveyed without that word. IOW, it's fluff, and can be done away with, fluffy kid. (wags wings at you. hi!)
Grok what I mean?
Grr.
;)
It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be different.
A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
I don't think it's naive. That was in all of Google's marketing, and at the time I think that marketing was broadly true. It's impossible to know how long a good culture will last, certainly a high school kid wouldn't be expected to assume that.
They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.
I feel the exact same way about tech today as a 90s kid who embraced personal computing and who was inspired by the histories of Apple, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and other pioneering places. As late as 2014 I thought highly of FAANG and I was proud of the two summer internships I had at Google, which were enjoyable.
Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.
These companies also attract that sort of person. Most software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger
Nah people with the "hacker inclination" are just as easy to buy but in other ways. There are people who will solve any interesting problem put in front of them and have a great time doing it without reflecting on why someone put it there or what it will be used for when they're done. Giving them more interesting problems, more autonomy to pursue intellectually stimulating solutions to them, is the reward you can use to keep them building your drone assassination algorithms or whatever.
In fact the overwhelming consensus on this site has long been that skillfully solving problems that are personally interesting to you is at worst morally neutral. I'll bet significant number of the people who work at for example palantir are like this. Curiosity-driven "little eichmanns."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns
My personal theory is that tech folks are often under-educated -- in the sense that they've specialized so much, that they missed out on a well-rounded human education.
This makes it easy to hijack the "ooh look! shiny/sexy technology" part of their brain, to work on Palantir-type stuff, whereas anyone with a more liberal, broad education would go "wtf! I don't want to help build that!"
I don't think it's entirely wrong as a model but it struggles to explain thiel himself having degrees in philosophy and law. I think there is a certain contempt engineers can have for other domains and ways of knowing that might be closer to the source of this. But I'm not very confident in that explanation either fwiw.
I think majoring in philosophy makes people want to work on weapons and buy themselves ownership of the state.
money corrupts
I think when you get to a high-enough level of running a company, you figure out ways to turn off your empathy, and ignore your principles.
Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I actually could do something, but I probably wouldn't be able to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle that I don't know about who dies.
I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I think that they actively taught themselves to value their respective companies instead of fellow humans.
That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech corporations has shown me that these people are extremely short-sighted.
[1] Well, if I weren't unemployed :)
You can make millions and keep your empathy but I don't think you can be a billionaire unless you're just a voracious unsatiable machine without much empathy to begin with. You can get good at projecting a facade and saying the right things and maybe even actually doing some good in some cases but it's usually just in service of expanding your wealth or power.
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
I agree that you can reach a few million without becoming too evil. Hell, having a decent-paying desk job and putting a good chunk of money into VOO (or something equivalent) has historically been a relatively surefire way of doing that if you're willing to wait a few decades.
I honestly am not entirely convinced that billionaires should be allowed to exist, I kind of think we should start taxing like crazy when personal wealth gets above a certain number. If you're not happy with a billion dollars, you're not going to be happy with a trillion dollars, or a quadrillion, or a quintillion. I think after a certain amount of wealth, your interests aren't really aligned with what's good for society, because the only appeal at that point is seeing a number get bigger. It's not like you're "saving up for something" when you get to that much wealth.
They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
> They are provably good at allocating resources (assuming they are generating value via real innovation and not through monopoly/rent-seeking) so you want them doing that.
I don't actually even agree with that. Microsoft, for example, seems to routinely overhire and then fire large percentages of their employees (edit, correction, said "corporations" before).
I think all they know how to do (I mean this pretty literally) is spend money. They are given money and then they spend that money. Sometimes spending that money leads to growth. Sometimes it leads to having to lay off 20% of the company. The important part is that the money is spent.
> I'd just progressively tax all luxury goods at like 10,000% so that they are encouraged to continue to invest and build more companies rather than creating socially unproductive empires of empty houses and yachts.
I'm not opposed to what you suggested but I'm not 100% sure how you'd define "luxury goods" with any kind of consistency.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44086621
They are provably good at allocating resources in ways that make them richer. That's all we know. It says nothing about, say, value to society.
The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction (or rent-seeking). You can create societal incentives to encourage generation and discourage extraction. A patent-troll firm is maybe 90% parasitic to 10% productive. SpaceX is probably closer to the opposite (IMO). People are going to play the game to win but its up to society to decide what that means.
> The money is generally coming from value generation or value extraction.
This is the crux of the matter, a critical assumption. It breaks at many places.
One can make a boat load of money by predicting market movements slightly better. The value produced is not zero, but does not seem proportionate.
The size of the HFT market seems disproportionate to the value they purportedly produce by removing microsecond scale inefficiencies in the market. A bulk of the futures and options market is not from hedging but just gambling, it's not creating value, at least not in any proportionate sense.
This is vacuous as a followup to the original claim - which was that they're provably good at allocating resources to create value (the last part being implied).
"The system is good because it selects the ones who can create value" "No actually they don't create value" "Well, at least we know they're either creating value or destroying it" you see how that doesn't support the original claim at all
If you’re a billionaire, at 4% interest you’ll earn $40 million a year, or over $100,000 a week.
You and I, we earn money and hope to put a little aside. But these guys worry “How will I spend this incessant flow of money?”
What's worse is they can then give it to their children and have an infinite line of oligarchs who don't have to lift a damn finger in life but use the system to keep concentrating wealth the top. We should really eat the rich.
Yeah, and if they put it into an S&P500 fund, they're likely to earn about double that long term, which is even more depressing.
That's kind of what I am getting at; a billion US dollars is basically infinite money. With that much, you can easily get more money than most people will see in their entire lifetimes by literally doing nothing. I do not understand why they want more at that point.
The reason I want more money is so that I can buy more or better stuff than I have right now. More money translates to a tangible thing. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for a billionaire to accrue more money is just to watch a number get larger, and if that is your motivation to do something, then clearly something is wrong with your fucking head. If you're willing to screw over everyone by lobbying to lower taxes solely so you can watch a number grow, then you kind of have to be a sociopath.
> As far as I can tell, the only motivation for a billionaire to accrue more money is just to watch a number get larger,
Really? You can't think of any other reasons?
I can understand the desire to continue to grow your companies, but no I do not understand the motivation to make more money when you already have more money than God. At that point, the drive to get more money seems like it’s primarily about watching a line go up.
It’s a subtle difference; I understand corporations trying to lower corporate taxes and the like, but there are lots of attempts from billionaires to lower their personal taxes by creating loopholes and bribing congress away from a wealth tax. That’s about personal wealth, and no, I cannot think of other reasons, no matter how dismissively you ask.
I save money to buy a bigger house, or fund my retirement, or to buy a car, but by the time you’re a billionaire you don’t have to worry about any of that. You can buy dozens of nice houses, you can stash away $20 million into a savings account and still be set for retirement, you can buy a new car every week, etc. A billion dollars is infinite money for an individual human, let alone multiple billions. It’s impossible to justify “more”.
If you're looking for justifications as to why, I posted the other day at https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/science-funding-was-already-wa... outlining eleven of them: longevity (living longer), defense (wars of the future), returns (pays for itself), prosperity (only real long-term driver of productivity growth), innovation (better everday products), resilience (insurance for future calamities), jobs (creates them now and better jobs in the future), frontier (sci-fi is cool), sovereignty (reduce single points of failure), environment (new tech needed for climate change and energy efficiency), and power (maintaining reserve currency, among other things).
It's not that people don't support these goals. It's that people don't trust the folks who say they're pursuing or funding them. There seems to be very little transparency in how money gets spent or what the tangible benefits are.
Addressing this lack of trust and transparency would go a lot further in healing the country than most other solutions being proposed.
Sean Carroll has talked about your concerns. This is impressively apolitical for the most part, and covers much of what you have brought up. I highly recommend listening or reading.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...
I think longevity is a bad goal. No matter what you achieve, it won't be enough, and in the grand scheme if things it doesn't matter (and is probably a net negative, socially). Hundreds of thousands of people are born every day, and hundreds of thousands die. It is the natural way of things for older generations to die so that younger can prosper.
Hard disagree. Many great people throughout history didn't complete the great works they were remembered for until they were in their 50s or 60s. Some even kept doing cool stuff well into their 90s. If we can keep our health and faculties that long and beyond, civilization will continue advancing and providing a higher quality of life all around. We lose so much experience and hindsight with every death. That experience could, for example, be used to make larger populations sustainable.
But you're also assuming that people aged 50+ are necessarily inclined to keep contributing to science and passing on their "wisdom" (quotes because they're actually fallible) to the younger generations. In reality, the vast majority of them would just go on to consume, while also being content enough to be prepared to die any minute.
And believe it or not, whatever knowledge or discovery you think you're losing with one death isn't actually contingent to that person. Given enough time, someone else will figure it out, and it becomes especially less valuable if you believe that AI tools are only going to get better.
More people and longer-lived people also means destruction of nature. We have already eradicated so much, so I also agree that longevity is a bad goal.
You'll have an older, more conservative, not to mention more crowded society.
Old people who want to pass on their wisdom are encouraged to record it.
> Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out... we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation.
I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped caring that there was a pandemic.
That's not true. The pandemic ended as Omicron became the dominant strain, which was by some measures 90% less fatal than Delta.
It's selective breeding; because we became careful about recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore, Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer deemed as much of a threat.
I don't disagree with the general vibe here, but a few points:
- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc. - Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
Rather than asking for “inventors and donors” or the Government to do this (not that it shouldn’t do it) a few rich people can have tremendous effect with relatively little investment. How?
1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
This seems like a bad idea.
1. Relying on philanpropy is generally not democratic and should be frowned upon. 2. This entire structure is legacy.
Research needs to be an integrated part of society. Something people go and out from.
Not something a few elite people get to dedicate their lifes to.
This is important to ensure diffusion, especially in highly volatile times like we are in now.
The big question should be: how can we get a 40 something year old industry professional to do research in a couple of. Years between jobs.
It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue; it's hard to fund the really long-running projects that are essential for making progress in a lot of areas. And from an industry standpoint, being an academic researcher is a personal sacrifice: more prestigious, sometimes, but often a lot less lucrative than if you'd have spent that time climbing the ladder at a major tech company or developing skills that were more immediately job-relevant.
So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
I actually don't think you are right.
Maybe at ivy league, which is a diminishingly small amount of research.
I do understand why it could seem like it is a big proportion - these institutions are being treated like religion.
Regardless, it is not reality.
>it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue;
Not only that, with some efforts a lifetime is not even enough unless you beat the odds plus get lucky early too.
Rich people are also humans. Marketing can influence their behavior just as well as it influences everyone else.
There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
When the government takes a greater responsibility of the former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts and sciences. This has happened in many European countries, where grants from private foundations are a more important source of research funding than in the US.
With less government support, you have large capable organizations that provide services and rely on donations. Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
Why can't I market to rich people and get paid a sizeable portion of their money?
It's possible private funding could build a better incentive structure but still a shame there's far less public research being done
There is no private entity that will broadly fund basic research. The most likely candidates, like Harvard, are also being attacked. The point of all this is to promote anti-intellectualism. No one is coming to save us from it.
Shareholders are not interested in anything that doesn't have an obvious and sort-term payoff - the days of companies funding any significant degree of basic science research are long gone. Our ruling class has become so selfish and myopic that they are willing to derail our long-term future for short-term gain.
There are quite large private funded organisations like Polybio. As the public funding has dried up there are people like Vitalik of Ethereum fame who have Long Covid and funding further Covid research. Its out of necessity at this point.
When this happened I was using my left over gpus from cryptomining for Folding@Home was fun knowing that I was helping somehow :)
He list 3 ways to solve covid. But covid was solved via the 4th way. https://fortune.com/2022/01/12/bill-gates-covid-seasonal-flu...
We still need a vaccine that stops transmission and stops people getting Long Covid. We really badly need a treatment for the 400+ million people who have Long Covid around the world. The situation just keeps getting worse and worse as the years roll on and more people die and are disabled and the funding has dropped drastically due to political choices.
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Frank Zappa notably said that "nobody looks good wearing brown lipstick."
Except, of course, Silicon Valley, which was before his time but fully predicted in his music as early as 1978.
I can only hope Altman and his ilk are footnotes to history as much as FZ remains a headline.
Except that basically none of these insanely rich people fund any science.
Altman does nothing for science. Neither does OpenAI. Google does a pittance for very applied things. Same as MS.
Doubling the funding for basic science in the US would be a rounding error for these places. But they don't do anything.
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