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Can the author provide example of dumb ideas? Or is it "dumb ideas" == "ideas I disagree with" More generally, it seems like the recipe of this breed of substa

• Apocryphon 3y ago
  Seems relevant to the past couple days’ of events re: OpenAI.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  Madoff, WeWork, Theranos, NFTs, … Looking ahead… Probably these vector db company valuations, most companies doing AWS competitor DX plays.
  • cornholio 3y ago
    All of those listed were well executed financial frauds. I don't think successful people are particularly more likely to fall for scams - they just have the necessary capital/disposable income and are targeted by more sophisticated scammers. I think the author thinks more along the lines of Steve Jobs trying to cure his cancer with herbal tea, Elon Musk sleep depriving himself into a twittering idiot, Scientology, NLP and various "success hacking" fads etc. The answer there might be that in reality successful people are not really very different from unsuccessful ones, and have very little control over the contingencies and luck that put them onto their respective paths. This is certainly the case with financial success.
    • rsynnott 3y ago
      I mean, define “well executed”. Theranos, in particular, it’s notable that very little of their money came from _conventional_ sources (traditional VCs, sovereign wealth funds etc). It was largely, essentially, _personal_ investment by stupid rich people; often via a family office, but ultimately at the direction of the stupid rich person. IIRC one attempt by Theranos to get investment from a real VC collapsed because they _could not provide audited accounts_. Like, they didn’t even have a fake set, they were not providing them to their investors _at all_. I don’t think that any of the named ones were particularly well-executed, and people were trying to warn that all of them were problems for a while. Madoff might be the closest, but even there it was verging on being an open secret that there was something up; again, Madoff’s investors were not actually that sophisticated.
      • quickthrower2 3y ago
        As a "poor" person by Madoff investor standards, I am paranoid of any investment where I don't know what it is invested in. That said the other side are people who invested with the guy who bet against the CDS crap in 2008 (sorry forget his name), who I think were also in the "trust a guy with my money" camp. So I can see why people do it. But I would diversify, maybe max 10% in any one fund that is a black box, maybe max 40% in black boxes in total. Assuming you are rich - maybe 10% for most of us.
  • ksec 3y ago
    I have one that I think is worst than all of them. CloudKitchen.
• jacquesm 3y ago
  Over unity, infinite compression algorithms, perpetual motion machines, tidal energy (unless you think subsidy is the goal in itself) and so on.
  • YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    Which smart people believed in infinite compression algorithms or true perpetual motion?
    • eatonphil 3y ago
      Various folks into the 21st century. Edit: point taken. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_machines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_...
      • LtWorf 3y ago
        Well he lived before modern laws of physics were known… I'm not sure that counts.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          Actually: he was instrumental in inspiring others to search for those modern laws of physics and at that point such experiments must have helped to figure out where exactly the line was culminating in the laws of thermodynamics.
      • KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
        He lived 2 centuries before Newton, 3 centuries before Laplace, 4 centuries before Maxwell and 5 centuries before Noether, Einstein, and Shannon. That he doesn't believe the first law of thermodynamics is hardly his fault.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          And all of those names effectively built on a foundation that Da Vinci helped establish. It wasn't modern science just yet but it was a massive step up from what came before. And in a way that is probably his biggest contribution: to show that if science focuses on that which works and can be generalized there will be massive progress. Because for a single individual, especially in that age his output was extremely impressive and that couldn't have worked if he didn't channel his energy to areas that were deemed to be fruitful.
• danbruc 3y ago
  Hyperloop is probably a good example in the context of the article.
  • LtWorf 3y ago
    I think musk knew very well. It's the investors that fell for it.
    • KRAKRISMOTT 3y ago
      There's nothing physically impossible about the Hyperloop (basically a maglev in vacuum tube, nothing wrong with the tech, just not particularly economical). Maglevs have been deployed successfully in some parts of Asia, they are just dreadfully expensive and nimbys have fears about radiation but they are hardly new technology.
      • renox 3y ago
        Nobody said they're impossible but believing that they would make sense economically even after they switched to maglev was the dumb part.
      • tsimionescu 3y ago
        Note that the main point about the hyperloop was the vacuum tube, not the maglev part. And the vacuum tube doesn't actually work. It's not actually feasible to create a vacuum tube hundreds of km long. It's just about physically possible, but it's not really technologically feasible - not for a system that is supposed to be in constant operation all year long. It's also important to remember that vacuum tube trains are an 1800s idea, which everyone started pretending is some revolutionary new transportation concept.
        • jacquesm 3y ago
          And besides that you don't have to have a really good vacuum, you just have to have a 'good enough' vacuum that you can attain high speed without losing the stabilizing effect of a bunch of air constrained by the walls of a tube. Bonus points of you can get the air to move at a speed a bit slower than your vehicle, more bonus points if you can use the air to propel your vehicle. But: it's probably still a dumb idea, but one that is borderline.
• carlosjobim 3y ago
  Communism is one of the worst ideas, with the worst track records, and have always captured the most intelligent people, even today. A casual browse through HN comments is enough evidence.
  • amelius 3y ago
    You're probably one of those people who read any criticism of capitalism as a cry for communism.
    • carlosjobim 3y ago
      We should reject the false idea that it's either capitalism or communism. Capitalism is a crucial step for a society to take in order to be sufficiently vulnerable to fall for a communist revolution. Marx goes into great detail about this.
    • fallingknife 3y ago
      I don't read any criticism of capitalism because there is basically none. 99% of it is just people claiming that some abstract bad thing in human society is due to "capitalism" without any sort of argument that would actually rise to the level of what I would call criticism.
      • imtringued 3y ago
        Playing into the articles points to gain higher status among "capitalists"? Here is an easy one. Excess capital doesn't earn enough money to compensate for losses relating to depreciation, storage and maintenance costs i.e. the expectation is that capital income disappears in the long run. All further investment turns into consumption instead. That is kind of at odds with what people consider "capitalism" where the marginal productivity of capital is considered constant.
      • Tainnor 3y ago
        In an unregulated market, capital very naturally tends to accumulate more capital - while, if you have nothing, it's very hard to build up capital in the first place. Which means that, if this continues indefinitely, more and more things belong to fewer and fewer people - which is exactly what we've been seeing over the last couple of decades.
• jackcosgrove 3y ago
  If you can remember it, the American media and foreign policy establishment was fully in support of the war in Iraq. That actually is a really good example of what the author describes because I'm sure many knew it was a bad idea but went along with it to preserve their careers. I think we should be charitable with the author and not assume a "dumb idea" is something he disagrees with, but rather is something that was proven to be bad by the passage of time.
  • TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
    Well - he quotes The Cato Institute. And the graphic is clear enough, I think. The rhetorical sleight of hand is that it's not true that feeling you're being censored - and needing to self-censor - is the same as actually being censored. Self-censorship and self-selection are endemic in the corporate world, and the associated beliefs are mostly taken for granted without dissent. You're not going to get far in fintech, management consulting, or media channels such as Fox if you start questioning why so many people are poor, ill, and homeless. Similarly, if you work for FAANG you're not going to have a job for long if you start suggesting these BigCos should reinvent themselves as worker co-ops. That's a very different kind of argument to the one about pronouns, because most people are not actually threatened in real terms by (say) LGBTQIA+ or unionisation. Of course plenty of people are just fine with how things are and the article is right to the extent that it points out that ideological conformity is a middle class luxury.
  • ethanbond 3y ago
    I mean you can also just read the author’s other content which is mostly whining about woke-ism but with lots of Substack intellectualism piled on top. Edit: Just to specifically point out the effects of this author’s “motivation,” the cited article on myside bias actually doesn’t say this: > Students and graduates of top universities are more prone to myside bias. They are more likely to “evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.” It says everyone is prone to myside bias, and that more intelligent people are less prone to detecting it in themselves. This is important due to what it implies about the inverse. If it’s true that the woke lib professors are more prone to forming their beliefs based on their social surroundings, it’d suggest they’re more liable to be wrong. If, however, everyone is liable to form beliefs in this way (which they are), then there’s no implication whatsoever about truthfulness on either side, at least not stemming from this effect. And in fact, if anything, it’d suggest the exact opposite of what the author implies by virtue of a really simple, obvious fact: an expert’s social circle is more likely to be well-informed on the domain of expertise than the social circle of a complete outsider. Exceptions obviously exist and experts ought to be questioned vigorously, but to suggest that social circles are have spent collectively zero time learning about and thinking about an area are going to have a better grasp on that area than a group of individuals who have spent careers in it is really just dismissing the entire concept of expertise — the concept of learning — altogether.
• dilawar 3y ago
  Some folks have called it problem of symmetry: take an idea and turn it on its head to get an argument.
• A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  I think it is a fair criticism. The title appears does not appear to match the content, which is not as opinion-based. It still reads like a rant, but I just happen to agree with some of the conclusions like self-censorship: "They found that highly educated people are the most concerned about losing their jobs or missing out on job opportunities because of their political views". If I was being charitable, I would say that title is trying to capture attention while sacrificing the expectation one may have of its content.
• lo_zamoyski 3y ago
  The point is clear. He even summarized it neatly in the least three sentences or so. The rest is projection (and a rather transparent attempt to undermine the author’s message, dare I say reputation, by association fallacy).
• lettergram 3y ago
  IMO the author wrote a list of reasons to avoid the real intellectual discussion around debating ideas. In fact, I don’t think there’s ever a “dumb idea”, it’s really poor reasoning or lack of information that I see as the issue. For instance, take the “moon deniers” that is the idea being dismissed by “correct” people. When in reality there a whole range of arguments — “we landed on the moon, recordings were faked” to “aliens told us to tell everyone we landed”, etc it’s the reasoning that matters. Quite often “smart” people have the same information as everyone else. That’s also why IMO “smart” people are equally likely to believe in conspiracies as anyone else, they have the same info.
• voitvodder 3y ago
  Really? You really can't think of a stupid idea of from the past 20 years. I think this is being totally intellectually dishonest or you waste too much time with political bullshit so you have lost the ability to think outside of rhetorical response to win a twitter flame war. How about all the dumb ideas that lead smart people to basically blow up the financial system in 2008 to start.