It's also possible you just think of ETH Zurich as great and automatically associate the people and products as amazing. Could be a circular dependency here.
I took courses online from ETH Zurich before the formula was "perfected" and I'd say they were ahead of the curve in quality, concise but info-dense educational content.
That is indeed how things work. I can think of a few 'good' media-relevant examples, including e.g. that recent super-quick cart project [1], that reach beyond the more vanilla startup-spinoffs or basic media efforts.
I had no idea what ETH means 2 years ago, I thought it's ethereum club in switzerland or something. Then I kept hearing about it, noticing people wearing ETH stuff.
obviously I don't know if it's university or people there because I haven't been there, but I keep hearing about ETH Zurich in different areas and it means something
Language is mostly used for conditioning people into doing things. People will continue using language to manipulate you into giving your time or money to them. You cannot change others from trying to manipulate you. You can only change yourself and stop taking language seriously.
You assume Alan Turing actually cares about what a bunch of British politicians think of him and the award they choose to give him.
You believe he cares about external validation and things like awards.
You believe he cares about being a billionaire.
You are more or less projecting your beliefs and ideas on what a successful life is on him.
Alan pursued truth throughout his life. Not external validations. He was a scientist not a politician or celebrity or a wannabe make world better startup founder.
Only truth could have set him free. And I hope he found his truth.
it’s okay to idealize people, but don’t take away their humanity. Turing might not have been exactly like you, but he was human and not a robot. He wanted the same sort of things that you do.
1. You assume that what press reports and public opinion is the same thing. It's not.
2. You assume majority of the public actually has an opinion or time to think about whether Sam should run OpenAI. They don't.
3. You assume public opinion is an accurate metric of justice. It's not. We have judicial system for that.
4. You assume Sam makes decisions through his ego and not any other system. You don't know that. Your ego thinks it's true. But honestly you have zero information unless you are really close to Sam in that case you have no reason to make this comment.
Interesting. So you make decisions based on what the press tells you? Do you believe the news the press choose to report and not to is based on what they think is good for you? Do you believe the press actually can know what is good for you?
The press is the press and my opinions are my own. The press can be right or wrong about Altman and that doesn’t affect my opinions. I believe, regardless of the press, that Altman is operating for profit (as self interest dictates he should) and I politely disagree on his stance for OpenAI. Just because some of the press agrees with me doesn’t necessarily mean I’m wrong.
I am not trying to educate anyone. I am just asking questions. If you think I am trying to educate you that's your ego again trying to make you miss the point being conveyed here.
Do you know how to calculate sample sizes? For a population around 300m people you can survey some 7500 (if those are representative of the overall population, not just a homogeneous cohort of the population) and get a confidence level of 99% with 1.5% margin of error.
I recommend studying a little of basic statistics.
Does this also balances out the fact that these are people who choose to respond to their survey and not random sample of all Americans? Are you saying the list of people who choose to respond to their survey is an accurate sampling of the entire American population?
Also why not say we surveyed 6000 people in our list instead and 30% of them have this view? That is more true than saying 30% of Americans have this view which is quite a big jump. There is ofcourse some lying going on here. What are they trying to achieve by lying here is my question.
survey statistics work by computing the margin of error for a specific sample size.
for example, if you toss a coin, say 10times and it shows heads 9 out of ten times, would you say "oh this was completely coincidental, you have to throew it more times before you can know!" or would you already say the coin is biased after ten tosses?
And the key thing is: there is math for that. "How probable is it that this result that I see is representative for all the possible coin tosses that I could ever make with this coin?" or, in our case here "How probable is it that the result of _these_ 6000 people here is close enough to what I'd get if I ask all Americans with a College degree?"
and let me assure you, a sample size of 6000, properly controlled for biases, gives a very representative result.
If you'd cry foul for 30 respondents, I'm with you.
but for 6000? and a professional research institute which klnows how to do their homework? nah.
If you doubt what I say here, feel free to brush up your statistics (udemy, udacity, ...) and then review the Pew methodology. I'll be curious about your findings.
> Also why not say we surveyed 6000 people in our list instead and 30% of them have this view? That is more true than saying 30% of Americans have this view which is quite a big jump. There is ofcourse some lying going on here. What are they trying to achieve by lying here is my question.
Because their methodology is designed to work through sampling, and sampling can determine results with very high confidence (95-99%) from a quite small sample size of the overall population, they don't need to qualify further given Pew has a trustworthy methodology for sampling.
It's not a big jump, it's how sampling works. I really recommend you read about it, it might be very helpful to understand and stop thinking "they're lying!", they are not.
It's basic statistics, you are trying to argue against very established mathematics.
These links will hopefully help you understand surveys and statistics more. If you need more links, let me know. I can find a lot more courses on these topics if you need.
My vague guess is they need money to spend on advertising and investments made by Alameda and FTX.
For that, they can't use FTX. They need USD or a stable coin like USDC.
They can't convert hundreds of millions of dollars of FTT to USDC since demand for FTT is relatively small. And a transaction like that might cause a huge decline in the price of FTT.
So they must have used ETH, BTC etc deposited by customers for swapping to USD or USDC.
I guess their theory must have been the surbowl ads, celebrity endorsemens and all would result in demand of FTT going up after some time. And they can later swap them back to customer funds when required.
But then crypto crashed.
Now customers want to withdraw the funds and they don't have it to give back. And nobody wants FTT.
The only lesson I learend from this whole debacle is never trust people and organisations you know from the Internet no matter how famous or humble or good they are. Trust the tech. But never the people. Especially for financial advices.
Be it Sequoia. Or Yc. PG, Chamath, Mark Cuban ,Balaji or the Collision brothers. Tom Brady or SBF or CZ. Never fucking trust people or organisations.
They are all here for their financial upsides.
Only trust the tech. The maths. If you can't do the work you would be fucked by them.
That's all.
I am not saying PG did something shady. I am saying even a well regarded figure like him in this community should not be taken for granted unless they back their claims by sold evidence.
What I learned from this mess: nothing new. If anything this just reinforces what should already be painfully obvious: invest in real world value that you understand. I have not seen the real world value of crypto or understand how that makes makes outside of itself. Even before crypto currency markets were a thing and were like setting money on fire.
I apply that reasoning to all investments. Sure, I miss out on all the easy money hype trains, but the investment decisions are almost always safe and still better than market average.
Funny how my takeaway (as someone completely removed from the action) has been the opposite: don't trust the tech, filter for trustworthy people. Time and time again we are shown that tech is not solving the human problem of greed and malice, and some kinds of tech rather amplify it.
By iterated experimentation, mostly. Social relations are a skill built on give-and-take actions on all levels, from the trivial chit-chat to lifetime friendships.
Look for signals and be skeptical I guess. Watch for over-promising. For someone giving advice, try to imagine how they could be paid or gain from selling you on this, or whether they could be influenced by people who do. For someone offering to take your money, do due diligence, look for track record and whether they make legal recourse early available. For example, transacting in cash or something similarly attractive to money launderers could be a red flag. (And yes 98% of subject industry should probably not be trusted so your filter has to be really selective.)
Make sure they have skin in the game[1], make sure they know they have skin in the game, and trust them with big things only if they have a good track record with smaller ones.
[1] In the case of dealing with money, 'go to prison if they steal it' does a pretty good job of filtering out the most common hucksters.
Why trust the tech if it is built by the same untrustworthy people?
The truth is that for something to be truly spectacular in moving humanity along, you need both tech AND people. You named a bunch of celebrities…OF COURSE you shouldn’t trust those people, you don’t even know them.
Not trusting anyone is just a good way to grow old and bitter about the social state of the world.
But if you trust people on the internet, at least your personal life won't implode in formation with your financials. MLM like herbalife and countless smaller ones, many of them in financials also on the product side, had already been preying on personal relationships before Satoshi even tossed his first coin at a hash function. Don't trust anything that looks to good to be true, and be wary of those that might be carefully tuned to stay just below that threshold.
they have provided no evidence for which trust should be placed on their company or product.
Trust needs to be earned, and over a long time. Even a large company like google, have lost the trust they used to have, and have barely retained any back.
That sounds techno-utopian to me. You can't get around trust to people. Technology is run by people using rules and abstractions people agreed to adhere to.
If there comes a day pg makes his twitter handle pg.eth or whatever nonsense a bunch of these guys were doing, I would lose all respect for him. But without that what PG and YC have provided is incredible value. Real world tangible value. Do you remember what snakes VCs used to be before YC came to the scene? Now my only fear is that Garry Tan on the other hand is indeed deep inside these scams whether knowingly or unknowingly. I hope better heads around him keep him and YC safe.
I have spent and worked with VCs for over a decade. I agree that VCs like a16z and Sequoia are still snakes but YC is a forcing function for them to at least act like they are better.
That is a statement one can easily verify through tech and from first principles. For example you can go through the wallet source code and verify the algorithms used.
Trust me we have the funds backed 1 to 1 in our exchange is not unless proven cryptographically.
