I don't see why he should have engaged with them any more than he did, because AOC's claims are BS. He gave them more attention than they deserve.

What he should have engaged with is, what happens when a startup stops being a startup? All three of his poster children for startups, Apple, Google, and Facebook, are now notorious for treating their users badly and making money in ways that at least a substantial number of people don't think are "earning" money, such as monetizing users' data. And at the last of those three, the founder is still in charge, so even if PG can argue that Zuckerberg earned what he got from Facebook in its startup phase, that doesn't mean he's earning the money he makes now from Facebook in the same way. (And the other poster child he mentions, AirBnB, can't be said to have clean hands either at this point.)

To me that's the biggest gap in PG's worldview more generally, that I never see him address in his essays: once the startup phase is over, the company drops off his radar and he pays no attention to the collateral damage it causes when it's a tech giant. (And of course AOC's claims have nothing to do with this genuine issue either.)

No, we can't say that at all, because most businesses are small businesses, owned by the people who run them, and capital gains are the owners' income from running the business.

The money startup founders make, from building something as PG describes, is also capital gains. So again, no, we can't say at all that capital gains are unearned.

I think that was a figure of speech, the intended meaning of which was "nobody is really fit for it".

I agree that the movie portrayal was totally unlike the Denethor in the books.

> He knows Sauron is trying to manipulate him

To some extent, yes. But I'm not sure he fully realizes what's going on. For example, he sees the fleet with black sails coming up Anduin--but he didn't see any of the events that led to that fleet being taken over by Aragorn and his followers? He could have.

> because his claim is weaker than Aragorn's

I don't think this is given as a cause of Denethor's doom in the books.

> because he keeps using it repeatedly over the decades

This is mentioned in the books, yes.

Of course there isn't one; the notion of the "rightful king" in Middle-Earth does not have a real world counterpart.

Tolkien might have believed it did, since he was a Catholic and might have believed in some version of the divine right of kings that the church supported for many centuries. But even then, the power the "rightful king" has in Middle-Earth is very limited. There is no hint that Aragorn, once he becomes King, micromanages everything in Gondor or makes rules by royal decree about everything, or even any very great number of things. The only actual official acts of his that are described are making peace with the Haradrim and the Easterlings, giving Sauron's freed servants the lands about Lake Nurnen, and pronouncing judgments of particular cases, of which Beregond's is the last. He certainly doesn't seem to be dictating what everyone in Gondor should do in their daily lives. Nor is there any hint that previous Kings did any such thing.

And even Tolkien's real world attitudes weren't necessarily monarchist. In a letter to his son, he wrote:

"The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity..."

If this espouses any kind of political view, it's libertarianism.

Not really. Denethor was the trueborn steward, whose ancestor had been officially appointed by the King, and though it isn't mentioned in the Lord of the Rings, the essay on the Palantiri in Unfinished Tales says that stewards were often deputized to use the Palantiri. So Denethor had the right to use the Palantir of Minas Tirith. But he didn't have the wisdom to realize that Sauron was manipulating what he saw.

So the lesson is that you have to use the intel you get wisely, or else very bad things will happen. I'm not sure if that makes the name any better for the tool it's applied to, though.

Richard Feynman told of a time when he made the claim that every conscious experience came down to words--basically that you talk to yourself to describe your conscious experiences--and the person he made the claim to, John Tukey, responded as follows:

Tukey: "Do you know the crazy shape of a crankshaft in a car engine?"

Feynman: "Yes, of course."

Tukey: "What words did you use to describe it when you talked to yourself?"

Feynman could not answer, and this made him realize that not all conscious experiences come down to words.

"Empathy and understanding for the human condition" is not an emotion. As the post I responded to said, it's an objective thing, not subjective.

You're assuming that because Claude produces text that appears to express these qualities, Claude must have them. I don't think that's a good assumption.

Even many humans produce text that has the same appearance, but don't actually have those qualities--which becomes clear when you look at what they do, not what they say. So the assumption isn't even a valid one for humans. Talk is cheap.

On top of that, Claude doesn't even have the same kinds of connections to the outside world that humans do. All Claude has is text. So if you can't even trust humans to back up their words with actions, you should be much, much less trusting of Claude. Talk is a lot cheaper for Claude than it is for a human.

The word "bomb" has a particular significance in the context of an airplane full of people who can't escape.

If you don't think it should, start your own airline and advertise that you have no problem at all with people using the word "bomb" freely aboard your planes, and see how many customers you get.

I'm unable to find any connection between Teddy Ruxpin and sarin gas online, so I don't see why a pilot would make such a connection. Am I missing something?

> If you can't know whether something is a threat or not, the only reasonable response is to treat it as a non-threat.

Have you ever been in a position where you were responsible for the safety of several hundred people?

> What are the predictable effects for the scenario in question?

That not turning that Bluetooth device off when told to was going to end up delaying the flight.

And there are other human rights besides the right to free speech, which have to be balanced. One of them is the right to safe travel. That means people who are responsible for the safety of a planeload of people have to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry. And mature adults are suppposed to recognize that fact and not insist on exercising their free speech right everywhere they go, to the detriment of other rights.

To you, who made up the scenario and specified that it's not a threat, sure, it seems that way.

To the pilot of an airplane full of people whose safety he is responsible for, even a tiny probability that it might be a threat has to be paid attention to. In real life you don't get to specify what "clearly" is or is not the case. People have to make judgment calls, and in certain contexts they are going to err very strongly on the side of being safe rather than sorry.

> Being on the plane doesn't remove your right to free speech

This is not a free speech issue. This is a safety and consideration for others issue. The right to free speech does not mean the right to ignore the predictable effects that saying certain things is going to have in certain contexts. We're all supposed to be responsible adults who understand that we can't push our pet issues everywhere we go.

> We've just grown accustomed to security theater.

Easy for you to say since you're not the one responsible for the safety of a planeload of people. This is not a "security theater" issue either. You don't have the right to trumpet your pet issue everywhere you go.

A search engine that just indexes the web and gives me results is of course a great improvement over my local library.

But LLMs are not the same as a search engine. LLMs don't give me links. (Well, sometimes they do, and sometimes the links don't even exist, or if they exist, they don't actually say what the LLM said they say. At least with a search engine it's just the link, with no claims about what I'll find if I click on it.) They give me authoritative-sounding text. That's what they're for. And no, that text is not coming from "compressed knowledge". Text is not knowledge. Knowledge requires connections with the real world. LLMs don't have that. All they have is text.

A comparison I've used before is between LLMs and Wolfram Alpha. If I ask an LLM what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, the LLM has no idea that New York and Tokyo are places on the Earth, that the distance is a physical distance that can be measured, and that there is a right answer to the question. LLMs just generate text based on what their algorithm spits out as the most likely text to follow my prompt. The LLM doesn't even have any concept of what's happening if it gives me a wrong answer and I tell it the answer is wrong. It will spit out text saying, oh, yes, you're right, that's a wrong answer...and then spit out more text that might contain a different wrong answer, or even the same wrong answer. It literally has no concept that I am trying to extract meaning from its text.

Wolfram Alpha, on the other hand, if I ask it what's the distance from New York to Tokyo, figures out that I'm asking for a geographic distance, looks it up in its database of geographic distances (which has been curated by humans using actual geographic data from actual measurements on the actual Earth), and formats the answer in readable text. That's still a very simple connection to the real world outside of text, but at least it's some connection. LLMs have none. And that is what makes them useless as tools for trying to learn actual knowledge.

Only with respect to some kinds of production. The article is talking about AI replacing "cognitive labor", which it defines rather vaguely. But, for example, the article does not seem to be claiming (nor are AI proponents claiming) that AI will be able to fix your car or your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks, or cut your hair, or produce food, or many other things. So it is not talking about AI decoupling all forms of production from humans.

The article does then go on to talk as if the decoupling is for all forms of production, when it talks about the political crisis that would produce. But that just means the article is going way beyond its premise at that point.

There is a better and more realistic premise that the article briefly mentions, but then skates on by:

"[F]irms are deploying...“excessive automation,” using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes."

In other words, a bubble, that takes up a large enough segment of the economy to cause a serious disruption when it pops. And the pop is not about allocation of what gets produced: it's about production crashing because of misallocation of capital. But the crash in production won't be in the sectors that produce material goods like food: as I said above, AI proponents aren't claiming that AI will decouple that from humans. The crash will be in sectors where a lot of the "value" produced is already questionable anyway. It will cause disruption because there are many people whose on-paper wealth is tied up in the notional value assigned to those things, which could evaporate overnight if it turns it that it was all a bubble and the bubble pops. But there's any easy way to avoid that: don't be one of those people. Or, if you can't avoid being exposed to that risk because of whatever particular area you work in, hedge against it by not having all of your wealth tied up in the notional valuations of those things. Which is a prudent thing to do anyway.