I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that, it'd be $1 billion.
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
Most uberwealthy aren't doing it for the extra money. And if they are, I think it's fine if they call it quits early. There are plenty more people who could be rich if Bezos/AMZN didn't suck all the air out of the room.
Once someone has a billion dollars do we really want them to continue accruing more wealth (power)? Isn't billion dollar people and companies unduly influencing our government the source of many of our problems?
billionaires are a flaw in the system. it's an obscene amount of wealth for one person to have. A million is a lot for most people but a billion is 1000 of those.
This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
If this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!
> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which
he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can
nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them,
and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If
he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good
conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s
use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...
The public/private distinction Kant introduces is interesting, but it's not what I'm getting at here.
To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.
If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.
I think the end of this post misses the point of Ezra Klein's interviews. You can listen to him podcast about podcasting, and he explains very clearly what his goals are when he talks to someone. He's an interviewer, not a debater. His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view, not to win an argument with them or get them to admit that they're making up a silly anecdote like they don't know their address, because thats counter productive the the goal of helping his audience understand their viewpoint. I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
The risk of not remembering how to do long division was limited because we could point to more complex problems that we would be solving instead. That was the trade off.
With skills and agents, that's a lot more fuzzy. Because for every higher complexity problem the obvious answer is that agents would be able to do that also.
Some folks (with significant agency) embrace that future with open arms while others (99.9% of humans) are tepid.
We are each a nest of functional dependencies. Perhaps discernment is the ability to know which to introspect. Some people absolutely need to know where the water comes from, some do not.
The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly.
However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".
I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
So many truths in this post…
With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam.
Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.
Professor? So this was at a university? What point was he trying to prove? And did those who failed the test go on to somehow magically develop the critical thinking skills that they were lacking?
Sounds like a cheap stunt if it wasn't immediately followed by both remedial teaching and a shake up of the teaching at the institutions that had so signally failed those students.
As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.
Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.
I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
> These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit.
It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.
Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.
I have indeed forgotten how to do long-division, or how to multiply 3-digits numbers in my head. I also forget things without writing them down in a calendar.
How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
You are not a child whose basic brain biology is being formed and improved by learning how to do these. Neuroplasticity is gone for you and it's all downhill from there. Children _need_ to learn because it builds the basis of every single thing they're going to improve on later. They're already being given a world in a catastrophic state, if the only answer they have to things is "i input it in the funny chatgpt box", you might as well condemn them to die.
Jensen saying huehuehue i don't know how to do math in my head in indicative that 1/ He never has normal, day to day interactions where simple calculation needs to be made on the spot 2/ He also doesn't give a shit about making the world worse.
No, neuroscience agrees that there is a slowdown, as well as specific points at which different parts of the brain stop improving at the rate it used to. 35+ years old is widely agreed upon to be a point at which it is extremely difficult to form new neural connections at the rate it used to when you were 16.
No, you are not on track to become a vegetable the day you turn 25. Yes, it requires more and more investment, and literally noone in neuroscience disagrees with that.
I’m kind of sad I can’t do that sort of multiplication in my head anymore. But I think you are missing the point of the article. It’s not that it’s bad people can’t do mental math, it’s about why it is that all these supposed geniuses and titans of industry keep publicly admitting (bragging?) that they lack basic skills, such as knowing their own zip code.
This is how the "Chotiner interview" became such a meme.
It somehow worked out that there is exactly one interviewer in the United States that is willing to fail The Test. Because Isaac Chotiner is the only journalist who ever fails The Test, his guests are frequently completely unprepared for what to say in the case that someone doesn't just agree with whatever babble they're spouting and will sometimes just blurt out the true thing they weren't supposed to say.
At one point in most of our lives, we have had everything provided for us. When we wanted something, we took it or pointed at it and it was usually brought to us. Not getting a whim indulged was the most horrible thing ever, and we screamed and yelled and sulked when that gross injustice happened.
I speak of toddlerhood.
Billionaires act like toddlers because toddlers have most of the experience of being billionaires.
Most toddlers grow out of it. As far as I can tell, no billionaire who has sunk that low ever has.
> Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.
> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.
I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that, it'd be $1 billion.
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b? So everyone would cease productivity after that point because you'd essentially be working for free. Even worse, you have downside.
Suppose you own 10% of a company worth $10b and you love grinding so you keep working, grow it to $20b and your net worth is now $2b on paper so you have to give up 5% to the government, leaving you with 5%, bringing you down to $1b cap. Now the company drops back down to $10b and you now have $500m.
Bezos would have retired when Amazon was worth ~4-5b. But according to the kind of people that want this kind of cap, Amazon would just continue to grow to 50x over the next 25 years just through inertia. Because it's totally normal for a book retailer to 50x over 25 years.
Makes no sense.
> So you're not allowed to own a company whose share is worth more than $1b?
I don't find it unreasonable either to limit this. A 1B company should probably not be in the hands of a single person.
Most uberwealthy aren't doing it for the extra money. And if they are, I think it's fine if they call it quits early. There are plenty more people who could be rich if Bezos/AMZN didn't suck all the air out of the room.
Once someone has a billion dollars do we really want them to continue accruing more wealth (power)? Isn't billion dollar people and companies unduly influencing our government the source of many of our problems?
billionaires are a flaw in the system. it's an obscene amount of wealth for one person to have. A million is a lot for most people but a billion is 1000 of those.
Just so happens those people are in power, and, checks notes, you are not in power to do anything about it.
It is not a flaw in the system if the system is theirs.
This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
If this is not just about the wikipedia quote here, what do you mean? Because its rather silly trying to apply it such that all these CEO guys in these instances are Kant's scholars, making "public use" of their reason. Rather than, you know, the pastors and unenlightened monarchs of the essay using their reason privately!
> He thereby extracts for his congregation all practical uses from precepts to which he would not himself subscribe with complete conviction, but whose presentation he can nonetheless undertake, since it is not entirely impossible that truth lies hidden in them, and, in any case, nothing contrary to the very nature of religion is to be found in them. If he believed he could find anything of the latter sort in them, he could not in good conscience serve in his position; he would have to resign. Thus an appointed teacher’s use of his reason for the sake of his congregation is merely private, because, however large the congregation is, this useis always only domestic...
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/kant_whatisenlighte...
The public/private distinction Kant introduces is interesting, but it's not what I'm getting at here.
To draw a broad strokes historical parallel you could say this: in pre-Enlightenment Europe, responsibility for reasoning was signed away to various authorities (the church, the prince, etc.), "liberating" common people from the need to reason or ask questions or make self-directed use of their intellectual faculties. The vision of enlightenment Kant puts forward gives us an alternative ideal: maturity and freedom come from the self-directed use of one's intellectual faculties, the choice to take on responsibility for one's beliefs oneself, even if the freedom to think and discuss is constrained within the confines of public law. The ideal is inquiry, questioning, the desire to understand things from first principles and the refusal to accept the dictates of external authorities as given without being able to participate in the reasoning that justifies their claims.
If Huang, Altman, etc., are offering us all a future in which nobody is indepdendent minded enough to be able to perform arithmetic or even know their own address, what they're offering is "liberation" backwards into the world of intellectual immaturity, into a kind of serfdom disguised as leisure or carelessness. Maybe some people want that, and maybe they can even argue that it's good, but it's worth being clear about the fact that "liberation" from the need or desire to know or reason about the basic facts of one's life is not empowering, and does not yield greater personal independence or maturity. It is, in Kant's terms, anti-Enlightenment.
I think the end of this post misses the point of Ezra Klein's interviews. You can listen to him podcast about podcasting, and he explains very clearly what his goals are when he talks to someone. He's an interviewer, not a debater. His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view, not to win an argument with them or get them to admit that they're making up a silly anecdote like they don't know their address, because thats counter productive the the goal of helping his audience understand their viewpoint. I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
Counterpoint: the person who understands how do to a task without the tool often winds up being the more capable user of the tool.
The risk of not remembering how to do long division was limited because we could point to more complex problems that we would be solving instead. That was the trade off.
With skills and agents, that's a lot more fuzzy. Because for every higher complexity problem the obvious answer is that agents would be able to do that also.
Some folks (with significant agency) embrace that future with open arms while others (99.9% of humans) are tepid.
We are each a nest of functional dependencies. Perhaps discernment is the ability to know which to introspect. Some people absolutely need to know where the water comes from, some do not.
The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly. However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".
I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
So many truths in this post… With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam. Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.
* where tool replace with agent, map, AI
Professor? So this was at a university? What point was he trying to prove? And did those who failed the test go on to somehow magically develop the critical thinking skills that they were lacking?
Sounds like a cheap stunt if it wasn't immediately followed by both remedial teaching and a shake up of the teaching at the institutions that had so signally failed those students.
As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.
Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.
I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
Utterly idiotic.
Read somewhere something going like "ai is just as smart as the person using it"
I suspect that's the _ceiling_ of the AI and it's often much dumber.
> These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit.
It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.
Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Prince_Sado
The movie about him is quite sad actually.
I find the framing of distrusting/attacking people because they behave in ways you don't understand somewhat off putting.
Very strange article.
I have indeed forgotten how to do long-division, or how to multiply 3-digits numbers in my head. I also forget things without writing them down in a calendar.
How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
You are not a child whose basic brain biology is being formed and improved by learning how to do these. Neuroplasticity is gone for you and it's all downhill from there. Children _need_ to learn because it builds the basis of every single thing they're going to improve on later. They're already being given a world in a catastrophic state, if the only answer they have to things is "i input it in the funny chatgpt box", you might as well condemn them to die.
Jensen saying huehuehue i don't know how to do math in my head in indicative that 1/ He never has normal, day to day interactions where simple calculation needs to be made on the spot 2/ He also doesn't give a shit about making the world worse.
> Neuroplasticity is gone for you and it's all downhill from there.
The field of neuroscience would object to this, I think.
No, neuroscience agrees that there is a slowdown, as well as specific points at which different parts of the brain stop improving at the rate it used to. 35+ years old is widely agreed upon to be a point at which it is extremely difficult to form new neural connections at the rate it used to when you were 16.
No, you are not on track to become a vegetable the day you turn 25. Yes, it requires more and more investment, and literally noone in neuroscience disagrees with that.
I’m kind of sad I can’t do that sort of multiplication in my head anymore. But I think you are missing the point of the article. It’s not that it’s bad people can’t do mental math, it’s about why it is that all these supposed geniuses and titans of industry keep publicly admitting (bragging?) that they lack basic skills, such as knowing their own zip code.
> that they lack basic skills, such as knowing their own zip code
Knowing your zip code isn't a skill though.
I don't know my ATM pin. Does that make me an idiot? Turns out I just don't need to know it.
If you the fail The Test on HN you get downvoted and flagged. This is no different.
This is how the "Chotiner interview" became such a meme.
It somehow worked out that there is exactly one interviewer in the United States that is willing to fail The Test. Because Isaac Chotiner is the only journalist who ever fails The Test, his guests are frequently completely unprepared for what to say in the case that someone doesn't just agree with whatever babble they're spouting and will sometimes just blurt out the true thing they weren't supposed to say.
oh, man! i want to see Philomena Cunk interview some of these guys!
At one point in most of our lives, we have had everything provided for us. When we wanted something, we took it or pointed at it and it was usually brought to us. Not getting a whim indulged was the most horrible thing ever, and we screamed and yelled and sulked when that gross injustice happened.
I speak of toddlerhood.
Billionaires act like toddlers because toddlers have most of the experience of being billionaires.
Most toddlers grow out of it. As far as I can tell, no billionaire who has sunk that low ever has.
> Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.
> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.
Horseshoe theory is alive and well.