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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be "analyzing" the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be "inflation"
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
It's remarkable to me how far and how rapidly this guy swerved outside of his initial lane, all while having absolutely terrible voice and diction for being a long-form interviewer. He's worked on that, but it's clear that his initial success was based off of targeting high-level professionals who otherwise wouldn't very often be sought out for the type of interviews Lex does. I'm thinking of guys like Jim Keller and Chris Lattner, who would probably only make such public appearances in the form of keynotes at conferences for their specific niches.
But you can't convince me that you're really the world's best technical interviewer if you're also uncritically sitting down with Donald fucking Trump, or deciding that you're suddenly enough of a historian to take on Gibbon with your fucking podcast. Who's financing this guy, anyway? Is MIT actually kicking him cash, or is it just an RMS scenario where they give him space because they're concerned about where he might end up otherwise?
The only thing I've seen from Lex Friedman was his interview of Brian Kernighan. For most of it I just thought it was very kind of BWK to patiently indulge this kid, who was clearly still new and unaccustomed to public speaking or researching his interview subjects, despite the weirdly professional gear setup and production.
Lex hasn't optimized the skill of technical interviewing; he has optimized the skill of simultaneously stroking the interviewee's and the (implicitly) listener's ego.
Note that he uses the same strategy as Joe Rogan: invite a smart person on, ask them introductory questions about their research, and then just kind of sit there with a dumb look and fail to understand what they're saying. I gather that it's easy to empathize with and doesn't require listeners to actually learn much since they're essentially sitting in a 101 course with a professor who is reading the curriculum aloud. What puzzles me is why MIT funds this shit.
I don't think it's very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new "AI" major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that "computation" is more important than electrical engineering.
Someone's been watching too much Tuttle Twins (Warning: link to fascist propaganda youtube channel).
The links between hard money/goldbugs and (US) hard right goes back a long way, at least to the 30s I believe.
Interestingly, an almost pathological fear of inflation is also part of the foundational myth of the BRD, but if you look at the actual history, Weimar-era hyperinflation wasn't really the root cause of Nazism, the Depression arguably was a bigger contributing factor.
It makes a certain amount of sense with the conspiracy theories that are at the heart of fascist understanding of politics, though. Goldbuggery treats inflation like it's a very simple question of monetary policy rather than a complex emergent part of an economic environment centered around constant growth. This means it's a perfect tool for (((Them))) to be using from their secret position of power to invert the obvious natural order and keep Us (and more importantly from a propaganda perspective, You) away from the luxury and power that We deserve. The fascist conspiracy theories also answer the obvious problem with the goldbug narrative: if it's so easy to fix inflation and would have no negative consequences, why don't the people we keep electing to fix it just... do that?
Well put. Another example I like to play in my head (never debated a goldbug for real in my life, not starting now) is that if the gold standard is so great, how come a small-ish country like Switzerland or Singapore hasn't started using it and outcompeting everyone?
There's only 2 answers to that:
Answer 2 is obvious if you're a fascist.
Not gold, but some countries do work to an officially restricted money supply! Those that have officially dollarised, e.g. El Salvador and Ecuador.
I'm familiar with .sv. The government is horribly constricted - because they can't print money and the populace doesn't trust them to print money - so every year it's more sovereign bonds. Then a fuckwit like Bukele comes along and thinks that bitcoins will make anything better and not worse.
So yeah, turns out past 1930 that not being able to do monetary policy fucking sucks.
@gerikson @YourNetworkIsHaunted That and even hyper-cautious countries like Switzerland have been selling off their gold reserves to at least some extent, because they listen to sane economists rather than nut jobs.