I don't think HN needs the top comment to be a vague attack on someone in response to a blog post that the comment doesn't even interact with.
replyThis trope also contains a trap, however. There have been major insights from people stepping outside their lane. Physicists went into econ and built a whole subfield called econophysics, with Pareto and Mandelbrot among them. Mathematicians have transformed biology with population genetics, which led scientists to predict how genes spread through populations. Or the SIR model for how infections spread. Hidden Markov models lead to gene finding. Closer to home, we have exceptional programmers making giant piles of money in finance, with Simons and his Medallion Fund returning some 66% before fees. And then there's Bitcoin.
replyThe common thread in all of your examples is people with mathematical training bringing mathematical formalisms to disciplines that lacked them.
replyIf you're just offering the wisdom gleaned from your life experiences, they're unlikely to be more insightful that anyone else's.
Many of the advances in biology in the middle of the 20th century were also helped along by physicists who switched to biology, often inspired by Schrodinger's What is Life? (1946). The list includes Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and (coming from physical chemistry) Rosalind Franklin.
replyExactly the same on the other side though. If we believed that Dario Amodei or Sam Altman really knew how The Economy in its entirety worked, which is what they’re constantly pretending to do, then we should give them the central planning keys to the kingdom and declare communism tomorrow. I’m not being entirely facetious.
replySound like a description of Elon and the X fanboys firehose.
replyYou don't have to be a fanboy to respect outcomes.
replyHe's got a winning track record. You may not agree with his politics or his morals but that's separate from his effectiveness.
Specifically he's effective at stepping outside the domain he currently operates into create inside another.
> He's got a winning track record
replyWhat exactly would that be a winning track record in - as near as I can tell, his actual track record is in buying companies with an already-successful product team, and managing not to run them into the ground for a while?
Effectively helping elect a dictator who is in love with fossil fuels undercuts at lot of his "wins". Never mind the Nazi saluting, fraudulent advertising, or bypassing safety regulations.
replydeleted
replyHe never shook the name "Egohot" from the Playstation days and it's just continually reinforced every time he comes back out of the woodwork.
replyDid he struck a nerve? All I'm seeing here are attacks on his person rather than discussing his post, which is not even that controversial, just some common sense stuff.
replyI haven't yet read what the post submitted here is about, and personally I already have the same opinion as the comment you replied to. So I suspect they just wanted to comment about that rather than caring about this specific post, to remind people not to make the mistake of assuming that someone being well known doesn't automatically mean they're worth listening to.
reply