site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29296 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Reading about OpenAI's success with ChatGPT it becomes quite clear that a major reason why they are perceived as being ahead isn't because they are technically superior to Google/Meta/Microsoft but simply that they have fewer inhibitions. Most of the underlying tech that powers ChatGPT was invented by the major tech firms, they simply sat on that tech and slowed down its release. Exactly why is not explicitly spelled out, but reading between the lines it does appear it was a fear of bad PR + regulatory scrutiny. OpenAI, being smaller and thus escaping the same scrutiny, decided to simply implement the readily available technology and rush it out the door.

Nobody is denying that they have great engineers, but they are not inventing anything fundamentally new. That, at least, is the view of Yann LeCun in his latest interview. Perhaps he is an embittered man trying to protect his turf, but even OpenAI boosters will admit that Google has a similar chatbot which they simply have not publicly released yet.

Google's response has been quick, basically loosening internal controls and "ethics reviews" in order to boost the release cadence. This prompted Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to publicly criticise Google. This is of course cynical, draping yourself in the flag of responsibility while having had your success based upon being more reckless than the big boys.

I think these developments are part of a larger shift. The ever-increasing "wokism" of Big Tech has not only slowed down but arguably is even starting to decline, albeit gently. The slaughter of a substantial part of Google's AI "ethics" team in recent years come to mind. Timnit Gebru was its most high-profile victim but hardly the only one. OpenAI's success is simply yet another factor that will allow the further sidelining of naysayers inside Big Tech who are preoccupied with slowing down AI development due to social concerns.

I read a lot of inflamed commentary of how SJWs will destroy Silicon Valley during the height of the BLM mania. Ultimately, these developments tell us that once the bottom lines of Big Tech companies are even remotely threatened, they will cast aside any moral qualms without a moment's hesitation. Whether or not that is good is debatable, but it seems to be final. Obviously, this also has implications for any hopes of "holding back" AGI if it ever came close to fruition, i.e. the likelihood of that ever being feasible is probably close to nil.

Google would’ve been better off just not spending all that money and returning a bunch of cash as dividends. But P-A problem leads to empire building.

But P-A problem leads to empire building.

In the case of a well-regarded tech company like Google, I don't think it is necessarily a P-A problem. It is hard to talk about the usual metrics like PE vs index because so much of the S&P 500 is tech megacaps nowadays, but I think for most of the last 10 years stock market investors valued $1 of cash in Larry Page's pocket higher than $1 cash in their own pocket because they thought Larry was able to buy companies like Waymo and Deepmind and they couldn't.

Notoriously, growth investors hate dividends.

I understand the argument. It just turned out not to be true. Has Google really created anything super successful outside of Google and gmail

I think there is a common mistake among tech investors of overestimating the chance that a successful founder/CEO will do it again. There was something similar going on with Tesla - if you asked Tesla bulls what the trillion dollar company Tesla would grow into looked like (it is hard to justify a valuation of more than about $300 billion for a pure-play car company), they would generally was lyrical about some non-automotive business (energy and AI being the main ones) that Musk was going to expand into.

Musk does seem like a bit of an outlier. He was pretty important in PayPal. Then SpaceX and Tesla. That’s three very different companies but all really successful.

Tesla battery tech is actually pretty advanced. I could see a non car use case, but to me to really accomplish that you need to spin it out for fit and focus reasons.

Same with SpaceX and Starlink. Starlink seems to have a clear use case of internet provider (Elon didn’t reinvent this but basically improved on historic DSL). To really harness this, need to focus on Starlink qua telecom.

With all of that said, the company on most bullish on is SpaceX. Asteroid mining could be incredibly valuable.

I'm bullish on SpaceX too - so is Musk given that he doesn't let peasants invest in it. I suspect if there was a SpaceX IPO the fanbois would drive up the stock price to the point where I ceased to be bullish.

Musk is clearly more likely than the latest Y Combinator wunderkind to build another $300 billion company. But I still think the overall chance of him doing so is <50% (particularly given that he is suffering from the great fame->loss of focus->loss of productivity problem that ends Nobel laureates research careers). And the chance of him doing so in a way which generates value for non-Musk SpaceX or Tesla shareholders is even lower because he has demonstrated a willingness to found new companies while remaining CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, and the Tesla and SpaceX boards have demonstrated a willingness to let him do it.

Agreed that musk is probably “done” founding new companies. But basically founding two 300b+ companies + playing a large role in a third is already almost unprecedented.

The closest I can think of is Jobs (Pixar and Apple—and with Apple he basically reinvented it)

Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.

Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).

Android

Chrome

I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.

Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.

I felt that was true pre-pandemic (and I used it, and wrote reviews), but Trip Advisor's coverage seems crap now, and it's scores not really to be trusted.

That hasn't been my experience.

Just now I randomly picked a restaurant in Rome and it has 1300 reviews on Google maps and 800 on trip advisor.

I’m not talking about useful; I’m talking about profitable. Android I’ll concede.

I’m in a very large professional service firm and we exclusively use office products along with everyone I know. I think it’s quite rare to use Google Drive.

  • The free DNS server 8.8.8.8 and other Internet backend services which feed their ad servers

  • Android mobile OS (though “created” might be too strong a term

  • Chromebooks for schoolkids

  • Chrome browser is now the guts of MS Edge after Windows deprecated IE

  • Google Play successfully monetized the YouTube infrastructure they bought

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats