I have a personal anecdote about your statement here.
I was at a launch event for 'Create Your Own Economy' in Washington DC. It was a small event, at least small enough I had a chance to talk with Mr. Cowen uninterrupted for five or ten minutes while I bought a copy of his book.
Having read Satoshi's whitepaper a month or so prior, and being pretty excited about it, I attempted to describe the idea of a currency without a central authority to Mr. Cowen. I don't remember his exact words, but his basic sentiment was 'That's not possible, and even if it is, nobody would value it'.
The conversation made enough of an impression on him he signed my book 'To Tim - To the Idea of Fantasy'.
So I 100% agree, there's no way he would have funded Satoshi.
It's possible (though perhaps not likely) that episodes like yours have made him more likely to take further-out ideas more seriously now than he did then. I mean, to me it seems like he should have stuck with his original reaction, but he seems pretty bullish on that stuff now, so maybe the feeling that he was wrong has chastened him.
Yeah I alluded (maybe too subtly) to my agreement on that point. But I read guys email blog and he doesn't seem to think cryptocurrencies are worthless.
Jordan Peterson is so controversial, why would you mention him in that interview? "Team" Satoshi actually solved fundamental problems and moved the world forward in cryptocurrency and associated underlying technology like blockchains, but Peterson has just stirred people up.
I am also curious about the allusion to Peterson. I am not aware of any huge societal contribution he has made beyond encouraging dueling op-eds. Certainly he has a devoted fan base, but I essentially never hear about him in real life.
I'm not weighing in on how good or bad his ideas are. But I see way more of the blockchain in the world than I do (knowingly) of Peterson.
I have thoroughly consumed a lot of Peterson content. I can vouch that aside from the political controversy, that he has a powerful message for young men: to find the meaning in life through responsibility and sacrifice, to go out there and make something of themselves. I have no idea why that it is "controversial" to be told to strive for something, and I don't see much alternatives other than self-help books. There are much more troubled, aimless people out there than you think, because if you've lived a fairly decent life yourself, you almost never come into contact with the guys that aren't doing so well and are in need of such a message. He's almost filling in as a father figure for young men where self-help did not suffice. The opposing side likes to attempt to character assassinate him by labelling as a right-wing bigot, but have never bothered to really listen to his message while holding the empathy that more unfortunate people DO need a message like that.
The other reply to this comment does a good job of summarizing a lot of the problems Peterson poses. I would also say he has a cultish following, which means he holds a fair amount of influence, which he doesn't always wield responsibly.
I have also consumed a lot of Peterson content, and much of what he says has a lot of value, and not just for young men. He also holds positions I think are indefensible, unscientific, and highly prejudiced. It is important to embrace nuance and subtleties, loving parts of what we dislike and disliking parts of what we love.
There is much truth to what you write. However, the problem occurs when Peterson conflates his politics with his advice for how individuals can improve their lives. As an experienced clinical psychologist with some acquired life wisdom, he seems very well-suited to providing positive, beneficial messages to individuals. His political punditry is not founded on the same sort of genuine expertise.
To me, his controversial argument is the idea that the academy is infested with communists who think you should be thrown in jail for using the wrong pronouns, and that an entire generation of college students is taking women's studies classes wherein they are taught that the problem with the world is that men exist and that they aren't enough like women. And that in these leftist circles you're not allowed to talk about sexism perpetrated by muslim men. And a bunch of other such theories.
Sure, all of that exists in various crappy people in obscure corners of academia. But he makes it out to be widespread, and he makes it out that no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia. Neither of which is true. But more troubling, there's a community of right wing pundits who use Peterson and his theories to justify total vilification of the left and academia in their entirety. The impression you get from Peterson is that no gender studies professor has ever done anything except hate traditional values and the people who love them.
There are people out there making constructive criticisms of overzealous leftists. Peterson seems to be choosing a purely divisive path. You can tell because he never talks to or about anyone on the left with more moderate views. He only engages the center right and the radical left, because fundamentally his goal isn't to reform the left, it's to justify his own rightward shift in his personal politics.
After the events of the past few years, I don't think it's tenable to cast the problems Peterson highlights as occasional and obscure. Look at FIRE's speech code analysis: most universities have administrative restrictions on free inquiry. Look at Heterodox Academy's work on ideological bias: social science is 90% left, with something like 30% (from memory) calling themselves "radical". Look at the current replication crisis, which arises in part from fabrication of ideologically convenient results.
I simply cannot agree with your assertion that Peterson et al are cherry-picking and that academia is fundamentally sound. These pathologies are too common and too widespread not to constitute some kind of systemic issue. I find your arguments unconvincing. Instead, I believe that a correction is long overdue.
Disciplines that reject reason, empiricism, and rigor, that claim all truths are equally valid, and that hold the only valid goal of pedagogy is tearing down power dynamics --- these are indoctrination, not inquiry, and the public should not fund this activity.
> no dissenting voices are allowed to exist on the left or in academia
Academia really does apply extreme social and political pressure to unorthodox thinkers. Look at the campaign against Rachel Fulton Brown.
> use Peterson and his theories to justify
It's become common lately to argue that we shouldn't acknowledge certain facts because unscrupulous people might use them to justify something bad. This position is not tenable. The truth always gets out, and when it does, those suppressing it lose all of their influence and credibility. It's far better to acknowledge facts and work with them.
None of what you've said looks like evidence to me. I see arguments and anecotes.
The fact that unscrupulous people lean on Peterson to villify the left is not my concern. My concern is that Peterson seems to engage exclusively with those people, and he himself doesn't appear to see any variance amongst people in the various groups he targets (leftists, academics, feminists, antifa, etc).
I don't find those arguments persuasive. I do want people to be able to discuss controversial things. But I just don't believe in grand conspiracies behind the scenes. Just because there are lots of liberals in social science doesn't mean academia is some unfair conspiracy overall. Let me give a couple of examples that I think run into your examples, one in physics, one in business.
A ton of modern physics theoretical research is basically math that doesn't lead to verifiable results, and this leads to very valid questions about wasting our time. I think an argument can be made that physics in this area, in a sense rejects empiricism, because people's entire careers are going to be research that can't be verified. Of course people strongly want verifiable claims. I understand that not all of physics is that way. Would you ban this area for public funding? Probably not, but I think it fits in your description.
I'd venture that business colleges have a lot more conservatives than liberals and it's probably hard to be a far leftist in business (like a practicing communist!). Just to continue on business, I think a lot research about the effectiveness of different management strategies is not well supported by research, it's more anecdotal - the research about the genius of Jack Welch, well we didn't know about all that unaccounted for financial management that lead to GE being removed from the DOW. That's not to say there there is not good scholarship, in business, I think there is.
I do strongly support verifiable research, but some areas are hard to directly verify, especially dealing with humans and society, leading to hard to evaluate results. Writings about literature, analyzing texts in different ways, well that's all pretty subjective.
I find the obsession with gender studies particularly funny coming from a psychology professor. Given his fav topics he could be a men's studies professor for all I'm concerned.
“The law recognizes that everyone has the right to self-identify their gender and that “misgendering” is a form of discrimination.”
“Refusing to refer to a trans person by their chosen name and a personal pronoun that matches their gender identity, or purposely misgendering, will likely be discrimination when it takes place in a social area covered by the Code, including employment, housing and services like education.”
I think you've mostly got it. AFAIK, other academics and such in Peterson's field(s) find his work mostly mediocre to laughable, so my best guess is that the person in question falls into the "avid fan" camp.
Cowen wouldn't be funding someone like Peterson for their academic credentials. Vitalik Buterin wasn't a heavy weight in academia when Peter Thiel took a chance on him.
I had to do a double-take. Satoshi and Peterson in the same sentence? One is famous for kickstarting decentralised currencies/markets/etc., and the other is famous for... Lobsters? Pronouns? [Saying that women shouldn't be allowed to wear makeup at work?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZrSrZpX5l8). Very strange that Cowen seems to think they're somehow comparable. [Unrelated](https://i.redd.it/w412971qqf011.png).
I would like to hear what strikes people as so controversial about Peterson? He and Satoshi are poor examples for article. But besides that I cannot understand how he is controversial when he appears to say not very much, though something part of the population in parts wants and needs to hear. I just don't understand why interviewers take shots at him or why YouTubers make obnoxious video clips from his videos.
He argued against women having the right to be addressed by a gender inclusive pronoun in the 80s fell off the map and is now doing the same thing with minority and trans-people. Currently he is touted as a champion of freespeech while he is actively sueing a public university for defamation (millions).
His followers have absorbed some pretty terrible ideas from him. This was a comment about the recent decriminalization of homosexuality in India: https://i.imgur.com/W80VytS.png
Doesn’t defamation specifically require false statements represented at truths? I’m not sure free speech is meant to allow for that as well (negative truths, represented as truths, are fine though)
Both Bitcoin and Jordan Peterson's ideas require serious investment of effort to understand them in context. Unless you get cypherpunk, it takes time to get what's the point of Bitcoin. And unless you read Carl Jung, it takes time to get what in the hell Jordan Peterson is talking about in his lectures.
SBIR Grants are supposed to finance "moon shot" projects. Unfortunately the way they are granted is very "opaque" to put it mildly and without going into more detail.
What do you mean? SBIR grants are intended to support early stage innovation projects. They should be able to be commercialized, but too high risk for normal investors. That's not really the same thing as a moon shot program. And individual federal agencies that participate in the program can decide what they are interested in researching.
> That's not really the same thing as a moon shot program.
Matthew Weinberg, former Special Advisor to the SBA's Office of Investment and Innovation, disagrees with you. With respect to the SBIR program, he said:
"It’s fundamentally astounding that the federal government—not private venture capital firms or banks—is the entity backing these moonshot investments that end up changing the world[1]."
He also wrote an article about the SBIC and SBIR programs entitled, "Your federal government drives innovation by investing in moonshots[2]".
"but too high risk for normal investors." what brings it pretty close to "moon shot", doesn't it?
"And individual federal agencies that participate in the program can decide what they are interested in researching."
This is true, I never said something different. I just know from people two who got SBIR I and II who discouraged me to apply since they know how the selections process works.
SBIR grants are more for pursuit of regular technology expansions in foreseeable topic areas as seen by various gov't agencies. SBIR funding stages aren't really setup for moon shot funding, more like lighting kindling hoping something catches fire.
The are more fundamental gov't programs for "moon shots" within NASA and DARPA.
Honestly most govt PMs use SBIR to fund small projects that nobody else would take, or big contracts failed to deliver on. They are often laughably specific.
There are many lovely reasons to apply (or ignore) SBIRs: http://seliger.com/Should-your-startup-seek-Small-Business-I..., but the review process is not particularly opaque. It is true that most agencies receive far more applications than there are awards available, so even "fundable" applications may not be funded.
You are wrong. Unfortunately I know how opaque it is and can not use another word, which I would prefer, to describe the process. I can not, will not, must not give more information to protect myself and others.
Trust me, the mathematical chance of approximately 10% has nothing to do with your real chances which could be much lower, or much higher.
In 25 years we can look back who has had a greater impact on society - the people awarded a McArthur grant or the people awarded an Emergent Ventures grant. My money would be on Phil Baran and Carolyn Bertozzi, not Jordan Peterson and Nakamoto Satoshi. Nota bene: John McArthur was a financier himself.
Both of the chemists you mention were already wildly professionally successful before they got their MacArthur Grant. The MacArthur Grant was not encouraging success, it was rewarding it.
If they’re typical recipients of MacArthur Grants then the Emergent Ventures grantees will definitely look worse on average. Some of them will try and fail. None of the MacArthur grant awards are going to fail and drop into obscurity. They’ve all already reached some level of success.
Whatever about Peterson Satoshi Nakamoto developed a financial technology on a par with at least international wire transfers and possibly fiat money. Even if BitCoin as such is insecure and collapses, worthless some altcoun is going to be traded in 100 years. The technology is a big deal.
This part of the application is making me nervous because I feel like I'm missing something:
> what is one mainstream or "consensus" view that you absolutely agree with? (This is our version of a “trick” question, reversing the now-fashionable contrarianism.)
I searched Google for variations on the contrarian inverse of the question, but couldn't find anything that seemed relevant.
It’s interesting to see the America's most prominent libertarian economist state that capital markets aren’t adequately funding risky business ventures...
David Friedman (anarcho-capitalist)'s comment on market failures is that they do happen, but what might be called government failures also happen, and are probably a worse problem.
"Individual actors usually receive most of the benefit and pay most of the cost of their actions, making market failure the exception, not the rule. On the political market individual actors—voters, politicians, lobbyists, judges, policemen—almost never bear much of the cost of their actions or receive much of the benefit. Hence market failure, the exception on the private market, is the rule on the political market."
This is an excellent point, and a place where libertarians and socialists have some agreement, that we have a wealth/power distribution that fails to encourage social innovation. I think the argument is mostly how it got this way, and how it should be addressed.
Socialists are concerned with giving more, and libertarians are concerned with taking less, but bureaucrats and plutarchs are aligned in taking more and giving less.
Interesting that the two examples are Satoshi and Jordan Peterson. When I see "moon shot" I typically think of space elevators and such. Perhaps this is a truly unique type of fund but at first glance, I have a hard time seeing the similarity of these two folks other than having initially fringe ideas.
Peterson in interviews even says he is smarter than every interviewer (I've listened to a few of them). He just comes across as pretty conceited. Everyone has their areas of expertise, but the claim that you don't know anything but 'they' do comes across like a certain world leader.
> Peterson in interviews even says he is smarter than every interviewer (I've listened to a few of them)
I've never heard him say this. Can you direct me to one such interview? I'm not a huge Peterson fanboy, but neither do I think the man is the demon-being that he's sometimes portrayed as by many in the media.
One of the biggest problems Peterson seems to have, that stirs up his opponents the most, is their propensity to misquote or completely fabricate things that he has said or done.
I have seen quite a few of his interviews and never heard him say that he is smarter than the interviewer. So I think some citations are needed here.
The cult of innovation asserts that these new "technologies" are good simply because they are new and provocative and especially impractical. Adherents to the cult aren't really interested in changing the world -- a deeply banal affair and extremely political affair -- it's just the opposite, it's all about peddling the fantasy of change, the drama of change, without much work and zero sacrifice. The delicious irony here is that the real moon shot wasn't the story of a bunch of plucky Randian individualists fighting against the unthinking herd of socialists, rather it was the story of massively expensive, highly bureaucratic, and extremely risky government investment that didn't pay off for nearly a decade. This is of course exact kind of real change-the-world innovation that libertarians like Cowen absolutely hate.
I suspect GMU/Mercatus has a few early crypto adopters given the symmetry of their ideas with crypto political ideals. What does a GMU academic economist do with hodl money? Form a grant program with a heavily libertarian bent.
“People such as Satoshi and Jordan Peterson have had huge impacts (regardless of one’s degree of enthusiasm for their ideas), and yet in terms of philanthropic funding the world just isn’t geared to seed their ambitions,” said Cowen.
I don't understand this quote. Satoshi is a fictional person as far as I'm concerned, who's idea has already succeeded to the extent that it can.
I don't even want to know what this Jordan Peterson guy needs funding for. He already has a very vocal, supportive fan base. He can probably raise a lot of money with Kickstarter if he needed to.
Would you please stop creating accounts for every couple comments you post? That's explicitly against the site guidelines, and we ban accounts that do it.
HN can't be a community without members. Disembodied comments are not community members. No one is required to use their real name here, but users need to have some consistent identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we might as well have no usernames and no community at all.
A disembodied-comment forum would be a different kind of site—perhaps an interesting one, but not Hacker News. You're free to find one or create one, but not to turn this one into that.
You seem to think that a lack of usernames means a lack of community, and this is not remotely true. Anonymous forums have been around for decades and have been quite successful.
It's tangential to the main point that HN is one kind of forum and not another, but I'd be curious to know some examples of what you're talking about. I don't think I've heard of one, and I have heard of counterexamples. In fact I ran across a famous one yesterday: https://books.google.com/books?id=pwo5DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT126&...
Edit: that link no longer seems to work, but it was to a page of the book discussing an anonymous community that the WELL tried in the 80s, which quickly became abusive.
I know it is mostly a bunch of boring kids who like to be edgy to piss people off, but for me 4chan is an example of a successful community on what it does. I really think they far surpass HN in many areas : creativity, being in touch with popular culture/trends, willingness to take action,self-censorship, etc.
While I agree with this in practice, with the culture wars of the past few years, HN has recently received its fair share of people who downvote due to disagreement. It used to be that downvotes were generally reserved for poor quality comments and upvotes were given for substantive well-considered comments even when one disagreed. Eternal september and culture wars are a bad combination. It's no longer innocent ignorance in this eternal september.
I don't have a solution to offer here, but I increasingly sympathize with those that create throwaway accounts, especially now that intent is not longer considered when interpreting comments. People have been losing their jobs not for what they meant, but due to how their words were interpreted by someone else. The fact that HN doesn't allow one to delete their comments, makes these cultural changes increasingly concerning. Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.
It's also inaccurate about deletion. We're happy to delete or redact older comments when users ask us to, and we do this all the time. We don't want anyone to get in trouble from anything they posted to HN. What we don't allow is wholesale deletion.
I was talking mostly about users who create throwaway accounts for everything, including uncontroversial stuff, so I don't see the relevance of the culture wars here.
I have always wondered if its possible to have three buttons (A)gree, (D)isgaree and (U)nhealthy. The first two buttons control how high up a comment apears in the thread/page and the last does the graying out currently reserved for downvoting. If there was any forum where people could deal with three buttons, HN would be it. Any thoughts?
That's a really nasty policy. If you openly said at account creation "Privileged users are free to downvote your comments and gray them out if they disagree with them, and you will not get this privilege for months or years, because there's a high karma threshold which we don't reveal" -- I don't know why I would bother signing up. I assumed it would be a reasonably attainable privilege for defensible uses, like it is at Stack Overflow or Slashdot.
All it takes to get downvote privileges is to submit a few decent stories. Anyone serious about being a solid contributor to the community can get there within a couple of weeks or even days.
People will downvote for whatever reason they want; HN admins can't control that, and couldn't stop people downvoting for disagreement even if they wanted to (though the karma threshold helps to limit downvoters to people who value the health of the community at least to some degree).
The best comments are those that people needn't strongly agree or disagree with, but that cause one to learn something new or think about something in a way they hadn't previously.
If you try and phrase most comments like that (which is surprisingly achievable, even - or especially - on the more contentious topics), downvotes needn't be a problem for you.
I didn't share the site's unstated assumption that making comments that people upvote isn't being a "contributor to the community".
You can control downvoting for disagreement by explicitly stating a norm against it, as StackOverflow does with alt text over the downvote and Reddit does with Reddiquette.
I don't believe I had had a comment downvoted before this one expressing disagreement with downvoters. However, I have found that many downvoted comments do contribute to the discussion, and even earn my upvote about 25% of the time. I don't think the downvote inner circle has a wholly positive effect on the site.
Who knows which of our past comments will come back to bite us as society becomes less tolerant of ideas.
Your desired solution only deepens such problems. It agrees that one is guilty and deserving of being fired instead of pushing back against that idea.
Disney recently fired someone for decade old tweets. Shortly thereafter, some publication stood by its decision to hire someone when their old not PC tweets came to light.
Civil liberties can be lost at any point in time. Gaining them doesn't guarantee them in perpetuity. They need to be guarded and promoted.
Falling on your sword is a great sentiment. But not everyone has the luxury of pushing back and risking their livelyhood and the income that feeds, clothes, and shelters themselves and their family.
Honestly, Hacker News as a community, and you as a moderator, don't deserve to have a permanent username for contributors. Changing usernames is really the only option for participating in the discussion when dealing with people who down-vote or moderate based on popular opinion rather than the supposed guidelines. I've seen you in particular selectively apply those guidelines, so I know you don't have the moral high ground here. It's ok to be sarcastic and abusive if you're saying something that goes along with the group-think, but the hammer drops if you dare question, much less contradict, in anything but the absolute most polite tone.
I doubt you have the energy to try and enforce your one-username policy against all the users who do this, but even if you did, you're just contributing to making this place even more of a monoculture than it already is. People who keep their usernames are mostly playing a popularity contest with silly karma points. Are you sure you're incentivising the right group for healthy and enlightening discussions??
I saw them as recognizable examples of the type of currently unrecognized thinker he wants to fund. I agree that the fund is not big enough to provide new options to those particular two.
I do think both are examples of how constraints and a long, unusual background lead to outstanding results. A fund like this attempts to shortcut that long climb but I think that would prevent the result from being unusual enough to be remarkable. I think funds like this are better for defined needs that are difficult to fund, such as open research questions.
It's unclear if Satoshi has made any money off Bitcoin, ever. (He definitely did, however, spend at a minimum thousands of dollars just in hosting and mining costs, never mind the actual work of making Bitcoin.)
In any case, he couldn't make any money off it between ~2006 - Bitcoin Pizza Day 2010, because it either didn't exist or it did but bitcoins were worthless and he couldn't give them away.
The minute possibility of being a billionaire in a decade does not pay any bills in the present, any more than it does for regular startups, who need VCs or other forms of investment.
According to the NYT he makes 80K/mo from Patreon. I too am sort of confused about why Cowen brought those two up as examples - especially when I don't really see what Peterson's "moon shot" was.
Come on! Yes, someone or some group created the blockchain etc. But he/she/the team is fictional because there is no one individual or group identified.
That was my first post to this topic. I _have_ posted on other Cowan topics regarding his funding link to the Koch brothers. I think it's relevant as knowing, for instance exactly who funded what political ads in various media channels.
In this topic, it's particularly ironic that an organization within the Koch network would be trying to create some sort of counterflow of capital to the systemic inequality caused by many Koch objectives across our nation and government. This initiative wouldn't be needed nearly as much if all the capital weren't already in very few hands.
I'm increasingly noticing comments aimed at marketing startups, tech stacks and political agendas on here. It used to be that people just shared their opinion, but at this point there is definitely an effort to sway information on hacker news and other websites by having different user accounts harp on the same opinions.
