nopassrecover

Rather interesting timing after the US accused China of supplying Iran with high-res imagery used to support attacks on US bases, then a Chinese satellite mysteriously broke apart

Okay great point I hadn’t considered - makes the parent comment more sensible. Thanks!

I think this might be a US vs international thing then on the value of life insurance (typical payouts here are around $100k, 10% or more are rejected, and that policy would be around $10k a year). But nonetheless it’s the smallest/irrelevant part of my point.

The parent comment suggested taking an experimental drug would mean they couldn’t give their children inheritance, implying that the government might seize your assets or something.

I firmly disagree with the “take the death” argument made here, but I do respect the intellectual integrity of committing to your argument at least, and suspect we just hold extremely different moral perspectives.

Sorry what’s the inheritance logic here? Are you talking about life insurance or something? Otherwise, and again presuming the cure doesn’t work which seems absent from your assessment as a possibility, how would it affect someone’s inheritance?

My general understanding is life insurance almost never actually pays out, and if it does it’s after a long fight and for less than you signed up for, and in any case should typically not be the largest portion of your inheritance.

That all aside, taking a risky but possible option that may mean survival, as a conscious and informed decision, even if aware it may void a possibility of a life insurance payout, doesn’t seem like a decision we have more right to make than the person affected by it.

I'm not in the startup scene or the US but I've come to understand this as 6 days a week of working 9am-9pm - typical hustle virtue-signalling nonsense and/or the latest move to exploit/shame/scare driven/desperate people to sacrifice their lives unsustainably for the wealth creation of others (and I take the comment you were replying to was criticising this as well).

Agreed this was well expressed, and I value this sort of reflection and cultural introspection, even if I lightly disagree with elements of the author's piece (that perhaps I'm wrongly overreading).

Per the well-expressed article, I agree there's a problem that lies can be bundled as truth through elegance (and I have strong views that there are broader forms of this, as the author alludes to, effectively style over/instead of substance, for instance in our ability to discern capability through hiring processes or overweight our assessment of the merit of ideas based on who expresses them and how), but I challenge (1) the premise that many situations are effectively represented by a singular "truth", in which case the representation of truth may be relevant even if possible to game, (2) that style / aesthetic is pointless (it might be "useless" for a definition of utility, but I contest a philosophical perspective that sees humanity and culture best exemplified by reductionism and efficiency), and (3) that style and beauty cannot be truth itself (stare at a painting that moves you, listen to a favourite song or one of the great works, look upon a beautiful scene in nature, or experience any of the myriad forms of love, and consider how that resonates with truth as much as any proof; indeed this last point is one of the themes across pg's work that still resonates strongly for me despite feeling increasingly detached from many of his other positions over time, and is well reflected by his book title of Hackers and Painters).

Agree with you, though potentially easily remediated if that third party provisioned for the “+” convention.

A superb question that hits at the heart of the trail above.

I think we’re using different terms for value but I agree with your argument about comparative advantage and non zero sum trade, while also noting the other comments here that price is intended to correlate with marginal value in a suitably free market, to the degree that individual measures of value can be mediated through a price mechanism.

This is perhaps the broader point, which is that to the degree economics acknowledges non-priced value it’s a hand wave to “there’s some economic surplus here otherwise these people wouldn’t reach agreement to exchange”.

But to the degree that senses of value are the motivating factor behind economic exchange it’s oddly absent from the discussion. I get the reasons: philosophical inquiries about value and aesthetics are a lot more challenging to work through than concepts of utility reflected by measurable actions, but this goes to the overall point about the limitation and overreduction of current mainstream economics, and the criticism of people like Graeber of its politicised and somewhat arbitrary intellectual grounds.

To the degree mainstream economic reduction is useful to support understanding that’s fine - it absolutely allows reasoning and insight in many scenarios, especially microeconomics - but to the degree that decision-makers double down on it (especially macro) despite it being incomplete or absolutely wrong in certain environments and contexts because it promotes certain power structures and power plays that is highly problematic, especially when people jump to its defence out of misplaced loyalty to a school of expertise.

> The price of something and the value of something were never expected to be the same

While I agree with you (quite firmly: it’s a great starting point to put on the table to challenge orthodoxy in this space), and think you’re agreeing with the parent comment, it is a fundamental tenet of mainstream economics and the political arguments of neoliberal (aka current mainstream) policy that [price == (market averaged) value], or at the very least [price ~= value].

Another interesting line of argument is to explore things that are valuable that don’t typically get a price: for example household labour, or love and friendship (at least directly: I’m sure a Friedman acolyte would reduce all relationships to exchange and reframe gifts and acts of love as investments).

As an aside for the parent comment: thanks for sharing this, it’s one of the top category of comments/quotes I’ve seen on HN in being useful, insightful, and challenging of conventional understanding in a way that improves understanding and future prediction.

Personally it was why I noticed the interactivity of the post, and I thought it was really cool.