It seems clear to me that the Tallyman itself is the AI in this allegory, a man-awoken sentience that's mechanical and mathematical in its behavior.
It's also bound by rules it can't violate. It won't say more than it needs, it can't collect without squaring the account first, etc.
But I agree with you about the moral message, I can't find it. In the story, the rules it abides by seem to be its own, and there's nothing saying those rules should not exist.
You're on Hacker News. This is a site full of developers who are convinced that "proper software engineering" is 100% of what makes a business successful, and everything and everyone else is useless. You can't just waltz in here and point out that code in business is a means to an end and expect not to get downvoted.
> … ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it. I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis
To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
We have a world built for humans, designed for humans to walk around and get things done. How, exactly, would it not be useful to have a robot that looks, walks, runs, jumps, lifts, carriers, pushes, pulls, twists, bends, steers, and labors like a human? It would obviously be incredibly useful.
> There's no risk because, like you said, "I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily." You can always go back to selling your labor on the market.
The risk is the opportunity cost. Going and getting a job at Google pays a lot of money. Repeatedly starting and failing at startups, or getting rejected by YC, doesn't pay you anything. I was a student and then a recent grad with lots of debt, so I had all the normal risk of a college student living on ramen and giving up nights and weekends.
> I think that startup founders are in weird sandwich between being exploited by VCs
What makes an agreement between two parties exploitation, exactly?
> the star quarterbacks leave as billionaires.
I think it sucks that the NFL destroys people's brains and bodies. But why is it so bad that the star quarterbacks command such high pay?
I didn't say that AOC said that things were better 70 years ago. I said she makes it sound like people have decreasing power due to income inequality, so I'm comparing to times where income was vastly more equal, and I simply don't think her claims hold up. Your-income-relative-the-richest-people's-income is, imo, a very small factor of how much overall power you have in society as an individual, compared to the other factors I listed. Yet it is repeatedly harped on as if it's the only factor that matters.
I don't believe I said that AOC thinks government spending should go unchecked. But the vast majority of comments I've read from AOC seem to blame the plight of the poor on the success of the rich.
I feel like you should read about systems thinking. You're ignoring so many potential side effects, so much history, so many statistics, incentives, human psychology. The idea of capping wealth in order to try to prevent certain power imbalances like sex trafficking, is similar to firebombing your house to fix a leaky pipe. Not only would it mess up a ton of stuff, but it wouldn't even fix the problem.
I think she's wrong in almost every way. AOC is a demagogue who focuses on getting her constituents to dislike people with money, and in order to do so, she massively oversimplifies things.
First of all, the average person has more power today than at almost any point in the past. If you're obsessively focused on making people hate others with money, then, of course, you're going to spread the message that money is the only thing that contributes to power, but that's far from the case. Any scholar of personal power would tell you that that's incredibly oversimplified to the point of being almost laughable.
Compared to, say, 70 years ago, the average person has a greatly increased ability to: publish and distribute ideas, organize large amounts of people quickly, start a business, influence culture without being gate-kept by institutions, gain and maintain attention without being gate-kept by institutions, etc. Education is better and more broadly available, capital is more accessible, legal and bureaucratic tools are easier to use, geographic constraints matter much less, more paths to elite influence exist. And of course, far more people are included in what "the average person" is, more can vote, more can be part of society. And this is over the exact same time period that income inequality has increasing. Income equality is only part of the picture when it comes to personal power, not everything, as AOC would have you believe. Also, there are more people in the upper and middle classes today than there ever have been in the United States!
Also, she's hugely oversimplifying the economic landscape. There aren't just two parties, rich and poor. There's a huge third party known as the government. And that party's express mandate is to take care of the people. And the people pay into that party's coffers in order to help it do so. And they pay at progressively higher rates based on how rich they are. The top 1% alone pay about 40% of federal income taxes.
So yeah, if you just completely oversimplify things and pretend that this entity doesn't exist, and you came into a situation where the rich had all they money and power, you might propose a system exactly like this. And I would agree. We should tax people, and that tax should be progressive, and that tax should go to a central government, and that central government should have stewards who we elect to help redistribute the money. And that's what we do.
But these stewards are also so busy telling everyone to hate each other -- hate the trans, hate the atheists, hate the rich, hate the men, hate the conservatives, hate the business owners, hate the elites, hate the immigrants, hate the blacks, etc. The average person is extremely susceptible to demagoguery. It's much easier to hate and blame your neighbor than it is to actually look into government budgetary figures.
And it's much nicer as a steward of the government budget to get everybody hating their neighbors than to have everybody scrutinizing what you're doing with their money.
Can you not join an intentional woodland community? What about moving to another country and living in the woods? If almost everybody you know would rather do this, it sounds like you've got quite the group. Why not pull together and make it happen?
Every time my mom comes to visit me, she insists on going to the store to buy things just like she always did. There are plenty of stores. In most cases, these brick-and-mortar stores have significantly fewer options than online stores, for obvious reasons -- because they're physical and have limited space. The online stores are often competitively priced, often cheaper, even with shipping, because they have the benefit of scale. I can get an incredible amount of high-quality goods off Amazon at blazing speeds, often the same day, without having to leave my desk, drive my car, burn any fuel, or clog any roads. It provides tons of value.
Not only that, but I have an incredible amount of competition. Thousands of alternative products, listings, websites, etc. I went to buy a standing desk last week, and there were literally thousands of choices all over the internet: solid wood standing desks, aluminum standing desks, tall ones, short ones, mid-century modern ones, futuristic ones, etc.
I have no idea what planet y'all are living on to say that people now have no leverage, few alternatives, no stores, slow delivery, and get no value.
So you're evil if you make a tool that "can enable" other people to do evil stuff. I guess most software developers are evil. Anyone who makes silverware is evil. Etc.
As I already pointed out above, your bar is going to be incredibly unrealistically low for what counts as evil, and I was right.
You're also just ignoring most of the people on my list anyway, picking on one person (quite poorly), and then trying to generalize that to all billionaires.
Every day, there are trillions of prices that are set by sellers, and either accepted or rejected or counter-offered by buyers. Of course, sellers want higher prices, and buyers want lower prices. There is no one person who can determine what a fair price is. A fair price is one that both buyers and sellers agree on, that creates a successful transaction.
Importantly, people are free to walk away from a bad deal. If you don't like a store's wares, you can go to another store. If you don't like a job offer, you can apply to a different job. Freedom of choice creates competition, which puts pressure on buyers and sellers alike to actually come to terms.
Your post comes across as someone who is consistently in the seller position (selling your labor for compensation), and who's simply advocating for his own personal interests in wanting higher wages. But for some reason, you think your own personal opinion about exactly how much you should be paid is what the bar is for "fair", rather than the prices set by the market, that is, the repeated agreements by tens of thousands of people day after day for years.
And that perplexes me. Why are you so special? Why is your opinion or anybody else's opinion supposed to be the basis of what's fair? I've never met someone who's not just going to argue for their own interests here, exactly as you're doing.
If you don't think it's a good deal to work at a startup and get the equity that you're offered, then you can negotiate or you can just walk away from the deal and work somewhere else. There are many tens of thousands of jobs that I personally don't think are a good deal, or I wouldn't work there. But for other people, they are a good deal. I don't really understand where this belief comes from that, because you personally don't find it to be a good deal, that it's objectively unfair for everyone else, even as they're accepting it willingly.
> But you said earlier that YC pays founders for living expenses. What risk are YC founders taking?
I could have easily gone and gotten a job at Google and made a lot more money very easily. Instead, I spent a ton of time and effort trying to create something new in the world and take it from zero to one. That was a lot of personal sacrifice, giving up my nights and weekends and living off Ramen noodles and almost no money. Just that I could get something successful and useful enough to be in a position to realistically even apply to YC and hopefully get accepted. And I was still rejected twice before finally getting in.
If you think being a founder is so risk-free, so easy, and such a good deal because of how much equity you get to keep, then presumably what should happen is many more people should find the prospect attractive and become founders, relative to becoming early-stage employees, and that should drive up the prices that early-stage employees are able to charge.
Do you seriously believe the by limiting people's wealth, we'll solve problems like this? Humans used to have thousands of times less wealth than we do now, yet people still had power and influence, harems and slaves, cults and gangs.
> No, her argument is not that people have too much money, it's that the system allows for it.
What's the difference? Either way, she's trying to change it so people can't have so much money.
And why? To what end? How does trying to tear down people who have money help anyone else? Why doesn't she instead spend that time trying to create more worth and opportunity for people who don't?
Capping the ceiling would be a tremendous mistake. It would eliminate the "if" in your scenario. The same value in wealth would not be created. You would be massively disincentivizing people to stay here and innovate, and that innovation would flow elsewhere or simply diminish.
Luckily, we've never actually capped the ceiling, and it's unlikely we ever will.
Yeah, there's almost a religious belief nowadays that the world is worse, people are worse off, things are sliding downhill, etc. People are married to the idea and get upset at any evidence to the contrary. It's such a shame.
It's very poetic though, in a tragic sort of way. Very human. I can't think of anything more human than to live in the best age of all time, one others could scarcely have dreamed of, and yet to complain about it incessantly because some have more than others.
It seems clear to me that the Tallyman itself is the AI in this allegory, a man-awoken sentience that's mechanical and mathematical in its behavior.
It's also bound by rules it can't violate. It won't say more than it needs, it can't collect without squaring the account first, etc.
But I agree with you about the moral message, I can't find it. In the story, the rules it abides by seem to be its own, and there's nothing saying those rules should not exist.