Yes, I include myself in that. The system doesn't work, and it needs to be reconfigured. We've listened to decades of BS from politicians and rich people on TV telling us we just need to work harder, but the truth.
The more I learn about the financial system and how it works with government, the more I have become convinced that the whole thing is a scam, robbing the working class in a way that only benefits the very wealthy.
Probably the most obvious place to start would be to end programs like QE by the central bank, and replace it with UBI. Instead of giving free money to big banks and high net worth individuals, put that money directly in the hands of consumers and those who need it most.
QE can be thought of as a tool to accelerate the wealth transfer from poor to rich. Every time we go through one of these cycles the whole thing speeds up.
Additionally, I think we should reconsider the idea of making it easy to acquire debt. An economy based on debt serves only to inflate assets that are easy to acquire debt for (i.e., houses) and prices out everyone who isn't in a position to acquire debt (which is a huge number of people, mostly young and poor people, including myself).
>QE can be thought of as a tool to accelerate the wealth transfer from poor to rich.
This is no true. It’s QE is funded by other rich people who buy bonds. If we do pay off the debt, again it will be rich people paying it off. The top 10% pay 70% of federal taxes.
Also, the megarich don’t lose much when the stock market collapses. Even if they lose 90%, of their wealth, they’ll live comfortably. Meanwhile, millions of working class people will lose their jobs because companies run out of credit to pay them.
Wealth is in owning, not shenanigans of currency. The wealthy hardly lose anything. Meanwhile, people find "wealth" in working longer hours, renting and buying unhealthy food.
Benefits of UBI would immediately disappear. Landlords would know you have more money and they would raise rents the same day. Car mechanics would know you have more money so they would just charge more. Same with hairdressers, painters, restaurants...
Ending QE definitely seems like a step in the right direction. If money is inflated away, what's the point of it really? I don't know enough about UBI to say if it's a good replacement. I am curious to learn more about your reasoning.
The debt thing to me seems like a "band aid" on keeping consumption going. If people have no meaningful money saved, then to keep consumption going cheap credit needs to be made available.
This should surprise no one, the whole system is designed to move wealth away from poor people working for wages, into the hands of rich people who earn returns on capital. Surely this comment will get downvotes, but it's useful to learn about how the entire financial Rube Goldberg machine works in order to understand this in depth. Ray Dalio's talks (you can find many of them on YouTube) are a good place to start if you want a light introduction.
IMO it's time to rethink the financial system (and I'm a strong proponent of UBI as a way to redistribute wealth). Just because it's been done a certain way for decades doesn't mean it should continue to operate that way.
The financial system as we know it today was designed in an era where information did not flow freely, and we did not walk around with an internet connected computer in our pockets.
The financial system as we know it today wasn't really designed but rather evolved in an era of genuine technical growth. Since we can't deliver the inputs (real innovation), but desperately try to maintain the outputs (economic growth), it has become more and more unstable (bubble prone).
There are people, like Warren Buffet, who do very well riding these waves. What I find weird is that some of them are revered on HN.
The HN community has always been about finding ways to get rich. The startup/VC culture is entirely about getting rich. Pretending it's not is a big lie that SV has always perpetuated.
So, naturally, people admire those rags to riches stories.
For the record, I'm not against people trying to get rich, but I really dislike the fact that so many people try and pretend it's about something other than getting money.
Being a VC is not a charity, it's literally about growing an investment. Starting a company is not about charity, it's about generating revenue and ROI.
There's growth through technical innovation, which has pretty sweet positive externalities, and there's growth through through speculation, which is more like gambling really, looking for an edge in the game. I'm not opposed to the latter but I don't find it very impressive.
It's not correct to think that capitalism is some natural force. We form states to decide on the rules of the game. The fact that some of the rules are made by people like buffet in conversations with public officials and lobbyists is where the whole 'this system was designed' thing comes from.
Billionaires and millionaires speak with presidents all the time and develop strategies publicly with them, it's foolish to think this has no effect on the structure of the capitalistic system at all.
Of course it was designed. The wealthy pay an obscene amount of money on lobbying and political campaign donations, at every level of government from top to bottom. They don't do it out of charity, they expect a nice return on that investment, and they've gotten it. The laws are all in their favor.
Managers are the wealthy. Corporate governance is a joke, and shareholders are only nominally the "owners" of companies. They're not making the day-to-day decisions and have only very coarse influence over how corporations operate. Much like the voters' relationship to politicians.
It's a mistake to look at per-firm performance. To a large extent, the wealthy are cooperative rather than competitive with each other and collaborate on class interests. The goal is to protect their collective power. They often know each other personally, went to the same schools, sit on each other's boards of directors, and bail each other out when things go pear shaped.
Yeah, politicians share a lot of UMC views because they're UMC. That's not really lobbying though.
Either way, we don't need some marginal or even non-marginal improvement in the tax code. We need genuine, honest-to-god inventions moving the world forward.
Meanwhile, we're inventing fewer drugs and they cost more, more and more people in the academia are making slower and slower progress, tens of thousands of programmers are making slightly better IRC, USENET or Jabber programs. Trends that can't continue, won't.
You mean like people who post to HN? If you are a tech worker in the US, it’s more than likely your income is in the top quarter of household income. If you are on the west coast, you’re likely to be in top decile.
They spend all of their time focusing on the billionaires but they don’t see how the rest of the population sees them.
How many are advocating increasing taxes of people making above 200K (putting them in the highest decile)? How many admits that they have benefited from equality between their chase to “work for a FAANG” or get rich from exit?
While I'm not necessarily defending Buffett, he (like everyone else) is playing by the rules. The problem isn't the people playing the game, it's the system itself and the rules of the game.
There may be lots of free opinions, but I don't believe they have much value to the novice investor. I'll admit there are some hidden gems, but separating the wheat from the chaff requires more insight than these subreddits provide on average.
Serious question: does anyone know when/why that subreddit became what is is today? I used to follow it in the early 2010s and it actually provided some reasonable insights.
I don't remember (and maybe never read) the exact details, but as I recall it wasn't so much "infinite money" as "infinite leverage". You could somehow buy assets leveraged, then make the system "forget" that those assets were already leveraged, so it lets you leverage them again to buy something else.
Idk, it's basically been the same thing for as long as I've been following it, and I started around 2017. The only thing that's really changed is the number of subscribers has exploded.
That sub is for the lulz; it’s not a serious analysis of the market. The best description I’ve heard of it was “a jackass for finance, made all the funnier because you realize that people actually got hurt”
IQ has inherently racist origins...I think as a society we'd do better to remove it from our lexicon, as it's simply racialist pseudoscience meant to preserve the status quo.
This is somewhat off-topic, but I'm worried about closed ecosystems, the shift towards censorship, and the end of private ownership. Good examples of this are walled gardens that break basic web links (Twitter for example), or DRM-encumbered digital books.
If I buy a physical book I can lend it to someone, or sell it if I want. If I buy a digital copy (which for some reason often costs more), not only can I not lend it but I can't sell it to anyone either. I also need to ask permission from the platform to read the book I rightfully purchased.
The Google/Apple app store duopoly is another example of this. Apple for example only allows you to use Safari, and makes it very hard for you to have any choice about what software you run on your own device.
It feels like there's a slow slide into a world where we no longer have any choice about what content we consume or how we consume it. Instead, we're spoonfed what the platform decides is good for us, and in most cases good means most profitable for the platform.
I still find it odd that we call this "artificial intelligence" when it's advanced mimicry at best. There's no "intelligence" in the strict definition of the word, it's just elaborate pattern matching.
But I get it, it's exciting, and it's an easy way to get VC money. Perhaps one day we'll get something useful aside from the various pattern matching applications (image recognition, speech to text, etc). I'm skeptical but willing to be surprised.
I'm sorry, your comment explaining why deep learning & GPT-3 do not truly understand anything is more poorly reasoned and explained than GPT-3's explanation why GPT-3 does not truly understand anything: https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#why-deep-learning-will-never-tru...
While it's true that recent natural neural net models like ixvvqktiwl may sound superficially coherent and like they 'understand' things, we can see by comparison with artificial neural net models that they aren't really doing anything we'd call "natural intelligence"; it's advanced mimicry at best, just elaborate pattern matching.
I get that it's very easy to create these natural neural net models and be carried away by excitement, and it can even be profitable (witness the many VC-funded startups which use natural neural nets as a core technology), but we should remain skeptical of any claims by those natural neural net models, much less their promoters online, that they are 'intelligent' in the strict definition of the word.
I'm as impressed as anyone with GPT-3 samples, but you're sort of ignoring the symbol grounding elephant in the room regarding language models (https://openreview.net/pdf?id=GKTvAcb12b).
Language models are not grounded learners. The language produced does not really correspond meaningfully to our world except in superficial (albeit complex) ways.
Do you have thoughts on how to move forward on this problem? Maybe ask GPT-3 and see what it thinks :P
The problem, if I understand correctly, is that we're feeding enormous amounts of text to language models hoping that they might contain, hidden in their patterns, enough information about the real world to allow prodigiously complex NNs to extract it and create their own representation of reality.
And while this is possible, it feels there should be more effective ways to impart a knowledge of reality- if only we had huge databases of usable data to feed to these NNs instead of dumps of text. At the moment it feels like we're trying to teach advanced physics to a subject with no previous knowledge of physics or math by just feeding it with everything on arXiv and physics textbooks in random order. What you get is someone who can produce text that mimics the superficial style of scientific articles, but with an extremely confused understanding of the subject, if any at all.
I am happy to take them at their word that their theory about symbol grounding proves that no LM will ever be able to solve "Three plus five equals" (appendix B); and thus, by modus tollens, GPT-3's ability to (already) solve "Three plus five equals" means their theory is wrong and I need not consider it any further.
Symbol grounding is as much a problem in AI as whether or not our use of language is meaningful. Does our language encode particular models of the world? Yes? Good. Then AI models also encode models of the world.
> I still find it odd that we call this "artificial intelligence" when it's advanced mimicry at best. There's no "intelligence" in the strict definition of the word, it's just elaborate pattern matching.
"Advanced Mimicry" is in fact an entirely apt description of a lot of human activity that falls under the heading of "intelligence", though not necessarily particularly "smart". So, we could call it "Artificial Stupidity" instead, if you like.
> I still find it odd that we call this "artificial intelligence" when it's advanced mimicry at best.
GPT-3's amazing ability to pick up what we want from prompts lift it above mimicry. Intelligence is about fast solving of novel tasks (with little supervision). GPT-3 does this more than any other language model.
One thing that I find interesting is how children also essentially do advanced mimicry to fill in gaps of their knowledge, what would be interesting is to see a more traditional inference engine type approach that then used a GPT-3 style approach when the knowledge of a situation dipped beyond a certain level, and then take the response to the GPT-3 style approach as a datapoint for inference engine style reasoning
I'm not disagreeing with you but where's the frontier between "pattern matching" and "intelligence"?
I also think human intelligence and creativity will always be judged by other humans as _better_, more genuine - as long as the judges can trust that given creation was lead by a human.
Among creative types "derivative" is a derogatory label used frequently. "Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal" also has an implication that regardless of what else an artist/creator does: pattern matching is a big part of that process.
That's a good point. I think we need to have a better understanding about how the brain works before we can properly answer that question. At this point there's a lot we don't understand about the brain, and psychology for that matter, it's basically a black box that we can observe through a microscope or other imaging system but we don't really understand what's happening.
An ant only has around 250,000 neurons, yet they're still more intelligent than the most advanced "AI" we've managed to produce.
An ant may not be able to paint a painting or write a novel, but I think most people agree they qualify as an intelligent being.
Can we really call this ANTNN "intelligent" when it falls victim to trivial adversarial inputs? Ones that arise in the real world, not just in artificial inputs mind you. Clearly those ANTNNs are still far from anything that could rival natural intelligences.
The current leading theories on how the brain works are that yes, they are essentially very impressive prediction machines, which obviously rely on all sorts of pattern matching to make said predictions. You can look up Karl Friston's free energy principle or check this book for more details
I appreciate your comment, even if it's unpopular. I agree that our priorities (as a society) are out of whack and not supported by the data. In my opinion I think we have much bigger problems than corona, but people are largely driven by whatever makes the front page of their preferred media platform every day.
If anything, this corona thing has taught us that we can make real changes if needed. The truth is, people don't want to fix many of the problems we face day to day, for a variety of reasons, but largely because fixing them would be unprofitable for a small number of people who control most of the means of production.
Yes humanity is facing multiple issues. Racism, pollution, global warming, lack of freedom, torture, etc etc etc..
Many people monetize on this by throwing more fuel to their fires-of-preference (the bloody foreigners, the bloody <insert groups you want to blame for the misfortunes of your country>).
We can find 100 ways to hate one another but only a couple to unite and solve these.
People like Bezos have far more influence on shaping the world than most of us mere mortals, and they are not going to make it easy to redistribute wealth.
Im really excited for the next few years. If we get some real inflation rental properties are going to be a huge cash cow with the low interest mortgages being handed out now
The more I learn about the financial system and how it works with government, the more I have become convinced that the whole thing is a scam, robbing the working class in a way that only benefits the very wealthy.