alt Hacker NewsThe Test
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This post resonates with me but for reasons not given in it. It calls to mind Immanuel Kant's famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" Where he says this:
> Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment.
Counterpoint: the person who understands how do to a task without the tool often winds up being the more capable user of the tool.
So many truths in this post… With regards to division and mathematics, I remembered this article/study I saw some time ago about a maths professor handing out “crooked” calculators to the whole class and then having them take an exam. Most of the kids took the results from the calculators as they were, without challenging them and hence failed the test. The minority had the knowledge and critical mind needed in order to understand that what their tool* was telling them was off.
* where tool replace with agent, map, AI
The idea of "the test" sounds plausible. I wonder if there is evidence that this happens regularly. However, I kinda have a hard time taking arguments seriously which rely on judging certain people to be "weird".
I think the reality is even simpler: Huang, Altman and Amodei are in the end of the day head salespeople of their respective company… and they use these social platforms to sell their products.
Their job is to convince people that AI has a large upside while minimizing any downside, they dont need to believe in those themselves.
I'm always surprised by statements about "things we don't need to learn anymore" with AI.
It's sort of a litmus test for how little someone understands how learning in humans works or AI itself even. "Agentic" AI acts as a mirror: the more insight have yourself, the more powerfully you can pull the distribution ... the more you get out of it. (there's a bloodborne-inspired parable in here somewhere ...)
I think it's why the software from AI companies has "garbage" qualities. They are assuming that AI is going to fill in skills ... when it is a reflective amplifier.
But back to the discussion of "things we don't need to learn anymore": do we go to the gym, and say ... oh I don't need to do pull ups anymore, because there's an assisted pull up machine and I can just set it to my weight ...
Utterly idiotic.
I watched the Hulu documentary about WeWork. A podcaster was interviewing Rebekah Neumann while she spewed absolute word-salad about "elevating the public WeConsciousness".
The podcaster had a glassy look in his eyes and a rigid smile. No pushback, no interrogation, no polite challenging.
He passed the test.
People need to get a lot more comfortable about providing negative feedback - especially to batshit ideas. It is such an important social signal to know that people disagree with you. Otherwise your worst instincts run rampant.
> These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit.
It's actually a bit more subtle than that. Many (possibly even most) humans are deviant and put a lot of effort into hiding that to conform with the herd. The more power and status they have, the more insulated they are from the risks of the herd turning on them and the more willing they become to just let their weaknesses shine through. So these are embarrassing things to admit, they're probably uncommon in themselves. But most people have different embarrassing things they would admit if they had lots of money and power.
Random but fun tangent, I learned about Crown Prince Sado [0] the other day. Historically there have been some true lunatics walking among the halls of power. The modern crop are actually pretty tame compared to the historic examples of how powerful people lived before it became intolerable.
I think the end of this post misses the point of Ezra Klein's interviews. You can listen to him podcast about podcasting, and he explains very clearly what his goals are when he talks to someone. He's an interviewer, not a debater. His goal is to guide the person he's talking to critical places that explain their own world view, not to win an argument with them or get them to admit that they're making up a silly anecdote like they don't know their address, because thats counter productive the the goal of helping his audience understand their viewpoint. I listened to this, I marked what a ridiculous metaphor that was, and how inapplicable it is the to topic of learning math, and didn't need Ezra to call it out.
At one point in most of our lives, we have had everything provided for us. When we wanted something, we took it or pointed at it and it was usually brought to us. Not getting a whim indulged was the most horrible thing ever, and we screamed and yelled and sulked when that gross injustice happened.
I speak of toddlerhood.
Billionaires act like toddlers because toddlers have most of the experience of being billionaires.
Most toddlers grow out of it. As far as I can tell, no billionaire who has sunk that low ever has.
This is how the "Chotiner interview" became such a meme.
It somehow worked out that there is exactly one interviewer in the United States that is willing to fail The Test. Because Isaac Chotiner is the only journalist who ever fails The Test, his guests are frequently completely unprepared for what to say in the case that someone doesn't just agree with whatever babble they're spouting and will sometimes just blurt out the true thing they weren't supposed to say.
I find the framing of distrusting/attacking people because they behave in ways you don't understand somewhat off putting.
If you the fail The Test on HN you get downvoted and flagged. This is no different.
I don't think it's unreasonable to limit a person's total wealth to, say, 100x the median person's lifetime earnings. In America, the median income is about $50k/yr. So 40 years as a wage earner means $2 million. With compounded interest, inflation, and wage growth, it's still under $10 million. So if we capped individual net worth at 100x that, it'd be $1 billion.
The fact that we live in a society where people don't bat an eyelash at people who have literally 100,000x the median lifetime earnings of a person (literally, 1000x what I personally consider reasonable) and yet want more says that our society has passed one of these absurdity tests and just suck down whatever stupid propaganda they promulgate.
> Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.
> This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
There's something deeply saddening about people who correctly call out such subversive behaviors and their effects on others, yet are completely blind to the way they themselves are not only falling victim to, but also perpetuating these exact same behaviors on the opposite end of the spectrum.
Or worse, maybe they are perfectly aware of it, and simply pretend not to be, in service of furthering their own agenda. Rules for thee, but not for me.
Horseshoe theory is alive and well.
Very strange article.
I have indeed forgotten how to do long-division, or how to multiply 3-digits numbers in my head. I also forget things without writing them down in a calendar.
How are these bad things ? We have tools for a reason
As others have said: this was not a good faith discussion. Huang was using the interview as an opportunity to “talk his book”, and Klein was using it to sell his own Serious Interviewer brand. Both were getting something out of this.
Given this arrangement, Klein had a limited ability to push back (well, he could, but that would mean a bunch of future interviews wouldn’t happen). Instead, he left it up to the viewer to make their own inferences. And some people are going to see Klein’s lack of push-back as a legitimization of Huang’s views.
After watching the first twenty minutes or so (I couldn’t watch any more), I had a much lower opinion of Klein as an interviewer who is willing to ask the tough questions no matter who he’s talking to.