Theory: A lot of technologists have both the emotional maturity and intellectual maturity of 15 year olds, but they have been compensated handsomely for their technical prowess over the past decade+ and have confused that purely vocational merit with merit in other arenas.
> At some point in the evening I mentioned that it was sad that Lynx was not going to be able to display many of the HTML extensions that we were proposing, I also pointed out that the only text style that Lynx could exploit given its environment was blinking text. We had a pretty good laugh at the thought of blinking text, and talked about blinking this and that and how absurd the whole thing would be. The evening progressed pretty normally from there, with a fair amount more drinking and me meeting the girl who would later become my first wife.
> Saturday morning rolled around and I headed into the office only to find what else but, blinking text. It was on the screen blinking in all its glory, and in the browser. How could this be, you might ask? It turns out that one of the engineers liked my idea so much that he left the bar sometime past midnight, returned to the office and implemented the blink tag overnight. He was still there in the morning and quite proud of it.
The specification process was no more formal on the IE team, some years later. The span tag, which admittedly was a pretty good idea, was conceived and added to the product over a weekend.
I was very conflicted when span's creator (name long forgotten, sorry) shared this story. Young me cared very much about rules, order, specifications, standards, interoperability, QA/test and such.
this is essentially the problem with the tech boom - lots of people seem to think that being good at writing C++ or telling other people what C++ to write or whatever makes them smart in some broad way, and capitalism has enable that delusion to run wild over much of the world
Yes, generally being successful at executing on things is a good indicator of intelligence, while failing to ever even attempt things is a mark of at least timidity.
A lot of internet users think being armchair generals makes them smart, but of course like fake nails it acts as a mark of someone on the outside who doesn't know any better.
>Yes, generally being successful at executing on things is a good indicator of intelligence, while failing to ever even attempt things is a mark of at least timidity.
Being timid doesn't mean that you lack intelligence. But you're also missing the overall point that OP is making - just because you might be "successful at executing on things" doesn't mean that you are, as OP said, "smart in a broad way". No, it only means that you can finish a task.
They're clearly (and they can step in and tell me I'm reading them wrong) referring to the fact that just because, say, Joe Schmo founded the world's first ride-sharing company and made billions in the process, a cult of personality develops and suddenly everyone thinks that Mr. Schmo is going to have a valid opinion on the housing crisis, or how to prevent war between Israel and Palestine, or how to reduce drug use, etc.
But if you can execute on an idea then yes, you probably do have broad intelligence. You can manage people, file paperwork, perform your core business, strategize about the future, handle setbacks and so on.
It's not like uber execs are only skilled in driving cars back and forth. They have and use all the required skills to successfully execute on an idea - which is a lot of skills!
And yes, timidity is a strike against broad skills and capabilities because you grow skills by using them. If you're an armchair general then you've never actually grown your skills, you've only ever roleplayed. Actual engagement has costs and comes with losses, recovering from losses and trying new strategies.
You can't just think about how to weave a basket and be a good basket weaver. You have to actually weave baskets and practice.
Respectfully, I think you're still missing the point as demonstrated by your last sentence.
>You can't just think about how to weave a basket and be a good basket weaver. You have to actually weave baskets and practice.
... right. Which is why OP was saying that it's a mistake to look to a basket weaving executive for their opinions on Ukraine vs Russia. Having skills necessary to succeed in your field of work, or your hobby, doesn't mean that you're smart in every other area. Yes, you are intelligent at a generally high level, but OP was referring to how successful execs are put on pedestals and whose opinions on all kinds of subjects well outside of their wheelhouse are often sought after.
The whole point of generalized intelligence is that it's broadly applicable. That is my argument position and it is in direct contrast to what the parent is arguing that only specialized intelligence counts.
In attempting to counter my argument, you are changing it in your restatement. An executive of a basket weaving company is fundamentally different than Jeff the reclusive basketweaver who can only weave baskets.
Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions.
Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality).
It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc.
PhilosophyTube recently covered Ethical AI as a broad topic, but a lot of her points also apply to tech outside of the large-scale computing sector. (Things like algorithmic bias, which doesn't require AI/ML to accidentally implement.)
> Technology is not apolitical or value-neutral. They don't inevitably make peoples' lives better (especially when it comes to systemic issues like income or wealth inequality).
...would be to substitute "technology" with "markets". Karl Polanyi wrote an entire book (The Great Transformation) about precisely this point.
> It can. It absolutely can do good things. But only if there's political will behind those decisions. It isn't automatic, and it isn't by default. And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc.
There's a direct parallel here to what Polanyi called "social embededness". Stealing from Wikipedia...
> Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions.
And by contrast, that market societies attempt to "disembed" economic action and claim that markets are some Platonic ideal existing outside their social context, which leads to all sorts of irrational and strange outcomes.
To tie it back to technology, I think what we're seeing today is precisely the same, but rather than economic action in markets, it is a cluster of affordances from technology at scale (ubiquitous mobile computing, the cloud, etc). Techno-solutionists/optimists want to believe that "technology" exists disembeded from social context, and that it is a pure, higher thing beyond and above the petty squabbles of politics and culture.
(And I mean, taking metaphors at face value... it's called THE CLOUD. Even the name suggests it being above and beyond mere human ken.)
> And the only way we'll get from here to there is to care about the things Marc Andressen decries: Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS, etc.
Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development. Or look at the discourse around nuclear power.
Of course:
> Techno-optimism and techno-pessimism are both weak positions.
Which I wholeheartedly agree with. It just turns out that tradeoffs are difficult and that the electorate doesn't really care about nuance. They just want to know whether Andreessen is Good (TM) or Bad (TM). Should you clap for him or boo him on stage, that is the question of our times.
There's plenty of cautionary tales about mindless techno-optimism, but the role of 70s environmentalism is blocking nuclear power and making climate change orders of magnitude worse is a great cautionary tale on the dangers of pessimism and obstructionism.
A big part of the problem with 70s environmentalism is that a lot of it's rooted in the fantasy of returning to some pre-industrial mode of existence. That's never going to happen barring an extinction level event that would do as much harm to the rest of the biosphere as it would to us. We need to be looking at how to make our technological civilization less damaging to our biosphere and more sustainable long term, not wasting time with fantasies.
Social responsibility, tech ethics, Radical CS are all such vague positions that I've seen them used to justify everything from adding gentle taxes to "hanging the billionaires". I think most people agree that some amount of regulation is good. The hard part is agreeing how much, where, and how this regulation is enforced. CEQA is an example of where pro-social, pro-environmental legislation ends up obstructing progress.
"Comparing California before and after the 1970 passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), and benchmarking against performance in the other 49 states, this study finds that 1) California per capita GDP, 2) California housing relative to population, 3) California manufacturing output and 4) California construction activity grew as fast or faster after the passage of CEQA." (https://econ.utah.edu/research/publications/2013_01.pdf)
"Right but the problem with a lot of these positions is obstructionism. Take a look at the '70s environmental movement and the way its legacy, laws like NEPA and CEQA, are used to simply block development"
One of the difficulties with being young is that one tends to assume that the conditions from the beginning of time were static up until one's childhood memories. Getting older doesn't really help that, but one does remember conditions farther back.
Ever seen those pictures of Beijing on a bad air day? With the lovely brown-gray air? Los Angeles was kinda like that in the 1980s.
"Annual emissions estimates are used as one indicator of the effectiveness of our programs. The graph below shows that between 1980 and 2022, gross domestic product increased 196 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 108 percent, energy consumption increased 29 percent, and U.S. population grew by 47 percent. During the same time period, total emissions of the six principal air pollutants dropped by 73 percent. The graph also shows that CO2 emissions, after having risen gradually for decades, have shown an overall decrease since 2007, and in 2021 were 7 percent higher than 1980 levels." (https://www.epa.gov/air-trends/air-quality-national-summary)
> One of the difficulties with being young is that one tends to assume that the conditions from the beginning of time were static up until one's childhood memories. Getting older doesn't really help that, but one does remember conditions farther back.
I'm not sure why you draw a binary here. I have no problems with environmental regulation. You've posted several examples about the benefits of CEQA. I'm also not so young that I don't remember LA being covered in soot. I remember driving down to LA and putting a scarf on my face in the car with my parents as we descended into the valley.
But CEQA, today, is being used to block new housing and is calling students "noise pollution." This is the problem. Crafting regulation is very difficult. While the good intentions behind CEQA were realized quickly, NIMBYs also found that they could use CEQA to block development.
What I ultimately mean is that this high-level, mile in the sky debate about "techno-optimism" and "techno-pessimism" or "pro-regulation" vs "anti-regulation" is silly. I think almost everyone agrees that we need some form of regulation. The questions to discuss are much thornier: what do we regulate, how much of it do we regulate, what should the penalties be, and how do we enforce the regulation. The problem is that once you get into these details, the general public stops paying attention, and special interest groups (industry leaders, NIMBY neighborhood groups, union leaders, etc) start to weigh in. Most of these internet fights turn into people sparring over vague philosophies, we never get so far as to discuss what and how a regulation should be made!
FWIW, chewing thru History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps has deepened my appreciation of PhilosophyTube. (My advice to young me would not skip the humanities.)
All else equal, I'd say that I am a "techno-optimist". That is, I am optimistic about humanity continuing to invent new technologies, and optimistic that over long time horizons, those technologies will be highly net positive. And I'm excited about continuing to find ways to be involved in some of the technologies that get invented and scaled up during the remainder of my life.
But if Andreessen's manifesto is now what the term "techno-optimist" means, then you definitely have to count me out of that. I guess I'm happy to just say "I'm optimistic about technology", without needing new jargon defining it as an identity.
e/acc : for the ones that don't know its meaning [0] yet:
"E/acc is an acronym for the phrase Effective Accelerationism, which is an ideology and movement that draws from Nick Land's theories of accelerationism to advocate for the belief that artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) will lead to a post-scarcity technological utopia."
I don't see techno-optimism as being remotely under threat. I think the vast majority of humans are techno-optimist. There's some very real concerns about how AI will change society and whether it will cause some palpable harm especially in the short term. I also think it's pure sophistry to assert that technological progress can only be good. Even when it's a net positive it will still come with costs. All that being said, technological progress is hardly being hampered in any corner of the economy. Congress held some hearings on AI. Did they shut down any program or ban any products? No. Tech is proceeding at an ever faster pace and there is barely anything slowing it down. The biggest anti-tech campaign I've seen in my life was the anti-vaccine campaign of the COVID era.
At least I don't see it anywhere but Xitter which might contain the damage.