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I get all that, it’s a fun philosophical widget to ponder over. But out here in the real world it has value to me because I can sell it for more than I paid. I’ve taken profits and converted it into real goods for myself. I am aware it could go to zero and I’ve hedged my risk appropriately.

I don’t care what you say it’s worth, I care what people willing to buy it will pay.

My crypto is still worth more than I paid for it.

Monks understand that sentience is not connected to language and reasoning. “You are not your thoughts, you are the observer” language and reasoning are just the mechanism we use to express this experience. We only believe other humans when they describe sentience because they are equipped with the same hardware as us. In fact, monks meditate to avoid thinking in order to increase their consciousness. Thinking is viewed as a distraction from consciousness.

In this sense, a very intelligent sounding language model provides no evidence of sentience. We have to understand what sentience actually is to establish a machine is sentient.

We were making too much stuff. Banks decided we needed to buy less stuff so they made less money. Now the leftover stuff will sit because we won’t make enough money for ourselves to buy it. We’ll adjust by reducing how much stuff we make so there’s no extra stuff to sit. Once that happens the economy will not be bad anymore and then we’ll make more money to buy stuff that doesn’t exist so we can start making more stuff…

It seems so strange, you’d think there’d be no shortage of problems to go around.

Great example of how the market doesn’t really care about the how, just the what.

My comment maybe came off as a criticism for academics but I was speaking from experience with my own struggle disentangling my ego from academia. I still wanted to think of myself as a physicist and it handicapped my career progress and made me unhappy. Letting go of that was key.

I did the same thing. It wasn’t conscious, it was more that they lived in a completely different world from where I went. We couldn’t really relate as much anymore. Like we now had very different approaches to life. Academy moves so slow. When I check up on people I’m just shocked at how little has changed with them.

It’s definitely partially academia that does this. When you are a grad student you are paid so poorly and worked so hard it is difficult to build a substantial identity outside of being an academic. Academia is good at marketing itself as a noble cause that imbues very high status if you can ever “make it” so quiting is giving up on that lofty dream. Where in industry it is definitely “not cool” if you build your identity around your job. That creates a helpful firewall that pushes people to develop something outside their work.

It’s not that they weren’t paying attention. It’s more that academics egos can’t handle the loss to their identity of not being an academic anymore.

Return on capital for flipping bits has been much higher than physical. SWEs are paid far more than material scientists and I think the latter is much harder.

Astounding the lengths people will go to avoid having to provide a real good or service.

Tech work doesn’t feel like something you can have a life long career in. It’s stressful and there’s ageism. Tech workers are mentally amortizing their productive tech life-span over their whole life and then comp doesn’t look as high.