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I have to say there is quite a lot to learn from Levandowski.[0] I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life a

• xiphias2 6y ago
  I believe that the most useful parts of the history are the parts that are not taught in history classes. Especially monetary history and past enterpreneurs, inventors and scientists. Not history written by winners of wars. Here’s an example: https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/ https://nakamotoinstitute.org/shelling-out/
  • keiferski 6y ago
    > winners of wars What do you think the global acceptance of capitalism is?
    • xiphias2 6y ago
      While there are temporary monopolies, great products win long term. Without capitalism we would live like monkeys in the forest. That would be an interesting life as well, but far not as interesting than what we have now.
      • keiferski 6y ago
        Humans were living like monkeys in the forest prior to 1700?
• dionidium 6y ago
  I’d go further. Most current news is purely entertainment. You really don’t need to know everything that’s going on. Almost none of it is actionable. It’s fine as entertainment, but people are convinced they’re doing something important when they read the news, when as far as I can tell it’s just something they enjoy as a leisure activity.
  • Bakary 6y ago
    I wholeheartedly agree. I am currently trying (and failing miserably) to quit news-watching altogether.
    • dionidium 6y ago
      My current approach, for whatever it's worth: I subscribe to the Sunday print edition of my city's daily newspaper. For those too young to remember, this is the week's largest edition, which includes summaries of many of the week's stories. I read it over coffee on Sunday morning (away from my laptop). I'm roughly as informed as anybody else about the events of the day.
• CydeWeys 6y ago
  Is there a lot to learn from him? His amorality has left his reputation in tatters. Yes he earned some money but at what cost? Is being a reviled shadowy billionaire really worthy of praise or respect?
  • xwdv 6y ago
    Once you have all the money you need what value is a reputation?
    • joeyo 6y ago
      Your reputation only matters if you wish to have relationships with other humans.
      • josefresco 6y ago
        When you've bought everything there is to buy, the only thing left is human relationships.
      • xwdv 6y ago
        It doesn’t matter. You can have a good reputation and zero human relationships simply because you are not extroverted enough to initiate or maintain them.
  • Bakary 6y ago
    I don't know what his personal life is like. But a person with the freedom to do the things they want and the energy to embark on ambitious projects will have no trouble having a genuine social circle and having great experiences barring some serious psychological obstacle in doing so like Howard Hughes. This is far more important than this vague idea of reputation. Just because a person has a good reputation doesn't mean they are respected or loved. It could just be that they do not figure at all in people's minds. You can live up to people's expectations and die having never really lived. Honestly it's somewhat reflective of the infamous slave morality vs. master morality debate
• curtis3389 6y ago
  Every single second of your life doesn't need to be dedicated to your work.
• drewcon 6y ago
  This seems naive at best. The goal of studying history is not to be paralyzed and constrained by it, but to learn from it. Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes. Nor is every goal of our existence is about “building stuff”, it can also be about just living a just and considered life. These types of boorish egotistical statements from tech talking heads masquerading as cerebral contrarian thought are much of what’s contributed to our current mess.
  • dionidium 6y ago
    > Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries, there is much to gain from understanding past mistakes. It strikes me that this an argument for the uselessness of reading history. People are basically the same as they always have been and just as you can’t simply explain to a teenager that they’ll feel differently about the world when they’re thirty, every generation has to figure life out for itself.
    • 0xdde 6y ago
      > People are basically the same as they always have been And you came to this conclusion without reading any history? This is too absolutist a statement. Sure, some things need to be relearned through experience, but there are also plenty of cases where you don't want to waste time reinventing the wheel.
      • dionidium 6y ago
        The downvoters are thrashing a straw man. Obviously nobody believes you're supposed to recreate society every 20 years ex nihilo. What I'm arguing is that the case for reading history has been overstated. Specifically, I was reacting to the claim that, "Human behavior seems to be notoriously consistent across centuries." I agree. It is. Human beings react to the same emotions and incentives they always have and there's no library big enough to change that. This is like arguing about whether dieting "works." On the one hand, obviously, yes, it works. There's no credible debate about the efficacy of calorie restriction for losing weight. It simply works. On the other hand, most human beings can't actually follow a diet, so, no, it doesn't actually work, for any reasonable definition of "works." Reading history is probably a lot like that.
• dsr_ 6y ago
  If you don't study what people have done in the past, you're going to be severely disadvantaged when you have to deal with them in the future. Santayana was pithier.
• leto_ii 6y ago
  > "But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow." To me this is a mind-numbing display of ignorance. Once you understand that you're not the first human being to ever have existed and that the people that came before you (even way before) are not dumber than you, you will immediately realize that there's a lot to learn from what has happened before. This should be very obvious when it comes to political/social endeavors (e.g. how to push for substantial social change without having things degenerate into some form of totalitarianism), but it's equally as important for scientific and technological ones. For a simple and increasingly popular example just look at Sabine Hossenfelder's line of criticism of contemporary theoretical physics. A lot of it draws on the sociological and historical study of the scientific process.
  • twox2 6y ago
    I don't think it's ignorant, it's just another framework of looking at the world. Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. This is how this person sees technological progress, and I'm inclined to believe he's right... within the context of technology. Beyond that, I do think history does matter for understanding how humans interact with each other and with our planet.
    • leto_ii 6y ago
      > Consider a chessboard that's in the middle of a game. The moves up to that point don't matter. Only the current state of the board matters and you make the best move given the current position. Since when is reality like a game of chess? Setting aside human history for a moment, just think about natural history (Levandowski mentioned dinosaurs and Neanderthals). Evolutionary biology is to a significant extent a historical discipline - it looks at the record and tries to come up with ways in which animals have changed over time under all sorts of pressures. Can that endeavor be done a-historically? How about even something like cosmology - the origins of the universe etc.? The universe is not a Markov process. Thinking of it as such is incredibly limiting as an intellectual paradigm. To be honest I'm not even sure I can think of a way you can completely ignore history and still be able to do useful work of any kind.
• cronix 6y ago
  In order to understand why things are the way they are, we first need to understand how they came to be.
• mulmen 6y ago
  Bitcoin scams are a great illustration of how to monetize knowledge of history. Or I guess you could just use modern day regulations and emulate what they prohibit in new markets?
• keiferski 6y ago
  Literally everything about the world we live in has been shaped directly and indirectly by historical events and ideas. Everything, from what you wear, what you eat, the shape of the surface of the planet, the ideas you think, your conception of human beings in the universe, and the fact that you are reading this comment (and not listening to it or feeling it.) The idea that we all just “appear” on Earth from some formless void, then subsequently make totally independent decisions, devoid of any previous influence, is both highly naive and far too common.
  • Bakary 6y ago
    There is another layer to look at the problem. Studying history often does not do what it says on the tin for a few reasons 1. People are rarely in a position to effect changes or draw from historical lessons in the first place 2. Whatever lessons you can draw are often very contingent on the time and place and even taking into account patterns, we still end up in a situation where the lessons can't really be applied beyond general principles that are already well known without much study involved. 3. Often the understanding we think we have of historical events is hopelessly distorted anyway, and colored by the sources and narratives we have read or composed in our minds. In the end, the people who do change history tend to barrel away at problems without taking the past all that much into account beyond some general references. Even if we take into account survivorship bias this is still an important phenomenon to consider. Hence the conclusions that there is much to learn from history is either trivial or actually under its own layer of naivete.
• bcrosby95 6y ago
  I don't remember the exact quote, but one thing that struck me that Alan Kay mentioned is that one of the best way to invent new things is to look at the past. And that our modern times are just a tiny view into the last 100 years. Lots got left behind. And there's a lot of genius inventions that lost out due to no real fault of their own.
• throwaway9191a 6y ago
  I worked with a CEO who shared this sentiment about history. After two months with no paychecks, half truths about our funding, and the dev team quitting, he wanted me to start building up a crew of contractors. After asking what he would change, he told me he had no time to look at the past and could only look ahead. I learned if you have enough money and lawyers, the past doesn't matter because you can enforce trust through litigation. But if you have to take people on their word, then their history becomes important. I didn't rebuild the team. I'm sure there is some deeper lesson here between "smarmy business folks" and more principle driven individuals.
• eloff 6y ago
  He's got a point about history, it's just a story we tell ourselves that only resembles what really happened. There's value in that though, because there are many lessons that can be learned from history. Plus it's just fascinating. We like stories, and history is our story. However, people put way too much emphasis on history - their personal history - and it affects them in all kinds of unhealthy ways. In my opinion it's so much better to leave the past in the past and focus on making a better future. Learn the lessons that can be learned and then move on (easier said than done.) I'm not an expert, but that's my take on it from my life experience and also watching others struggle with their historical baggage.
• shadowgovt 6y ago
  No argument there. The story of Levandowski appears to be a story about consequences being something other people experience.
• scotttrinh 6y ago
  "The only thing that matters is HEAD+1. I don’t even know why we use version control. It’s entertaining, I guess—the commits and the bug fixes and the rewrites, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t really matter. You don’t need to have the past snapshots to make changes to the current code. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."
• deeeeplearning 6y ago
  >I am not a fan of corruption but it's undeniable that he played whatever cards he had in life and played them hard. His parents were a Diplomat and a Businessman and he graduated with 2 engineering degrees from Berkeley. So we should be lauding him for winning a game of poker when he was dealt a Full House? Lol
  • dagw 6y ago
    To stick to with the poker analogy, the measure success is not if you win the hand when you flop a full house, but how big a pot you walk away with. Anybody can walk away with the initial stakes in that situation, the real skill is to use that hand to walk away with all the money at the table. Lots of people start life with a lot more than he was given and walk away with a lot less.
    • deeeeplearning 6y ago
      He was arrested and charged with ~30 felonies and plead guilty to 1 in a plea deal and was due to spend over a year in federal prison. So what exactly did he win?
      • dagw 6y ago
        So what exactly did he win? Rich friends, a presidential pardon and no doubt a rich and easy life going forwards.