We found out that what they really worshipped all along was money. I’m sure this is self-evident to many, but I was optimistic and naive about it. I saw the good in people that have no good inside them.
It's sad to think as a high school student reading Wired articles about Google's wonder offices, Don't Be Evil,engineers getting time to work on projects and problems they wanted to work on, my geek friends and I really thought it was a case of the capitalists about to get a hacker/computer culture shake up - they'd penetrated the billionaire class and were going to be different.
A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
I don't think it's naive. That was in all of Google's marketing, and at the time I think that marketing was broadly true. It's impossible to know how long a good culture will last, certainly a high school kid wouldn't be expected to assume that.
They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.
These companies also attract that sort of person. Most software engineers I've met aren't the "hacker" type. A huge number of them are in it for the mo ey and don't really have a hacker inclination. I feel that it's a culture in danger
I feel the exact same way about tech today as a 90s kid who embraced personal computing and who was inspired by the histories of Apple, Microsoft, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and other pioneering places. As late as 2014 I thought highly of FAANG and I was proud of the two summer internships I had at Google, which were enjoyable.
Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.
I think when you get to a high-enough level of running a company, you figure out ways to turn off your empathy, and ignore your principles.
Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I actually could do something, but I probably wouldn't be able to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle that I don't know about who dies.
I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I think that they actively taught themselves to value their respective companies instead of fellow humans.
That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech corporations has shown me that these people are extremely short-sighted.
You can make millions and keep your empathy but I don't think you can be a billionaire unless you're just a voracious unsatiable machine without much empathy to begin with. You can get good at projecting a facade and saying the right things and maybe even actually doing some good in some cases but it's usually just in service of expanding your wealth or power.
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
If you're looking for justifications as to why, I posted the other day at https://gabrielweinberg.com/p/science-funding-was-already-wa... outlining eleven of them: longevity (living longer), defense (wars of the future), returns (pays for itself), prosperity (only real long-term driver of productivity growth), innovation (better everday products), resilience (insurance for future calamities), jobs (creates them now and better jobs in the future), frontier (sci-fi is cool), sovereignty (reduce single points of failure), environment (new tech needed for climate change and energy efficiency), and power (maintaining reserve currency, among other things).
It's not that people don't support these goals. It's that people don't trust the folks who say they're pursuing or funding them. There seems to be very little transparency in how money gets spent or what the tangible benefits are.
Addressing this lack of trust and transparency would go a lot further in healing the country than most other solutions being proposed.
Sean Carroll has talked about your concerns. This is impressively apolitical for the most part, and covers much of what you have brought up. I highly recommend listening or reading.
I think longevity is a bad goal. No matter what you achieve, it won't be enough, and in the grand scheme if things it doesn't matter (and is probably a net negative, socially). Hundreds of thousands of people are born every day, and hundreds of thousands die. It is the natural way of things for older generations to die so that younger can prosper.
Hard disagree. Many great people throughout history didn't complete the great works they were remembered for until they were in their 50s or 60s. Some even kept doing cool stuff well into their 90s. If we can keep our health and faculties that long and beyond, civilization will continue advancing and providing a higher quality of life all around. We lose so much experience and hindsight with every death. That experience could, for example, be used to make larger populations sustainable.
> Experts on the COVID-19 pandemic seem to think there are three ways out... we get a vaccine good enough that R0 for the world goes below 1, a good enough treatment that people no longer need to be afraid, or we develop a great culture of testing, contract tracing, masks, and isolation.
I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped caring that there was a pandemic.
That's not true. The pandemic ended as Omicron became the dominant strain, which was by some measures 90% less fatal than Delta.
It's selective breeding; because we became careful about recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore, Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer deemed as much of a threat.
I don't disagree with the general vibe here, but a few points:
- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc.
- Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
Rather than asking for “inventors and donors” or the Government to do this (not that it shouldn’t do it) a few rich people can have tremendous effect with relatively little investment. How?
1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
It would look very different from current research, I think, because the way things are optimized now it's far more efficient and effective to have one person dedicate their entire life to basic research versus lots of people spending a little time on it. We already have an attention span issue; it's hard to fund the really long-running projects that are essential for making progress in a lot of areas. And from an industry standpoint, being an academic researcher is a personal sacrifice: more prestigious, sometimes, but often a lot less lucrative than if you'd have spent that time climbing the ladder at a major tech company or developing skills that were more immediately job-relevant.
So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
Rich people are also humans. Marketing can influence their behavior just as well as it influences everyone else.
There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
When the government takes a greater responsibility of the former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts and sciences. This has happened in many European countries, where grants from private foundations are a more important source of research funding than in the US.
With less government support, you have large capable organizations that provide services and rely on donations. Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
There is no private entity that will broadly fund basic research. The most likely candidates, like Harvard, are also being attacked. The point of all this is to promote anti-intellectualism. No one is coming to save us from it.
Shareholders are not interested in anything that doesn't have an obvious and sort-term payoff - the days of companies funding any significant degree of basic science research are long gone. Our ruling class has become so selfish and myopic that they are willing to derail our long-term future for short-term gain.
There are quite large private funded organisations like Polybio. As the public funding has dried up there are people like Vitalik of Ethereum fame who have Long Covid and funding further Covid research. Its out of necessity at this point.
Readit News
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/22/upshot/nsf-gr...
A lot of reasons my present day jaded self would call out my younger self for being naive there, but it's still just embarrassing how wrong I was and how quickly the tech community fell in line with standard corporate awfulness. Nothing survives shareholders.
They've become a typical evil BigCo now, but I don't think it's naive for not assuming that that was inevitable, just optimistic.
Having been disillusioned by the state of the industry, I now teach computer science at a community college, and I get saddened when thinking about the world my students are to enter once they transfer and finish their bachelor’s degrees.
There are still many good companies and good people in our field, but I’m saddened by the rise of tech oligarchs who use tech for dominating people instead of making life better for everyone.
Most of us develop a bit of the latter. I have worked for a bunch of questionable companies that kind of go against my values, but deep down I'm a bit of a whore and whether or not I keep to these principles isn't likely to make a huge difference, so I just shut up and cash my paychecks [1].
I would like to think if I became a billionaire, I'd maintain my empathy and would keep my principles because at that point I actually could do something, but I probably wouldn't be able to become a billionaire if I maintained my principles and empathy. Sort of a catch 22, which is why I probably won't be worth any significant amount of money unless there's some kind of Mr Deeds situation and I have a long lost billionaire uncle that I don't know about who dies.
I don't think Tim Cook or Sam Altman are pure sociopaths in any kind of clinical sense. The vast majority of people aren't. I think that they actively taught themselves to value their respective companies instead of fellow humans.
That, and the last two years of layoffs in these tech corporations has shown me that these people are extremely short-sighted.
[1] Well, if I weren't unemployed :)
This isn't really a bad thing, we just need to make sure that society sets the right incentives to align these individuals properly to maximize prosperity. (e.g, preventing monopolies so value is generated via innovation vs rent seeking)
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You and I, we earn money and hope to put a little aside. But these guys worry “How will I spend this incessant flow of money?”
Addressing this lack of trust and transparency would go a lot further in healing the country than most other solutions being proposed.
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/02/12/bonu...
I think it's accurate to say the world took option #4 - stop caring. Yes there was a vaccine, but the vaccine didn't mark the end of the pandemic; the pandemic ended when people stopped caring that there was a pandemic.
It's selective breeding; because we became careful about recognizing symptoms, any severe strain would cause the infected to isolate and hence not infect others. Therefore, Omicron was often symptomless, and COVID-19 was no longer deemed as much of a threat.
- It's hard to compare Omicron vs delta because of the number of confounding variables - population heterogeneity, vaccine + infection induced immunity, etc. - Severe strains with latency periods are invulnerable to symptom recognition. I don't think the asymptomatic period for the COVID variants varied as much in the lower bound as it did the upper bound. The point being -- behavioural changes are much more likely to be general caution (i.e. limiting contacts, spacing social events in time, etc.) than responsive (I feel unwell).
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1. Get them early. Set up nationwide sifts to identify students with aptitude as early as middle school. Mix up the assortment by also adding students randomly selected.
2. Fill up summer. Fund summer schools where students from identified in (1) are gathered, room and board payed. Get world class academics to spend time with them. Think of Terence Tao teaching 30 promising students for a month!
3. Set up the path all the way up. Fund research centers where scientists can gather for critical mass after college.
4. Big shining prizes. Set up prizes for important problems, eg Millennium Problems with hefty prizes.
5. Compound interest learning. Fund development of innovative learning tools, dreamed by high-school and college students and built by the research centers. Then, sell these as kits very cheap, Eg, Geiger counters, personal interferometers, electrophoresis instruments for <$50
3 & 4 are expensive, 1, 2 & 5 are peanuts for guys like Altman, Musk, or Bezos, less than a yacht or a bunker. You also get the philanthropy points.
Which areas to focus on? Choose cheap ones at first: math is cheapest, physics. Biology may be costlier.
I have always wondered why rich people don’t do much of these and just donate to colleges (rather than tax evasion purposes). Some do fund such efforts: Stephen Wolfram has a summer school for high schoolers.
1. Relying on philanpropy is generally not democratic and should be frowned upon. 2. This entire structure is legacy.
Research needs to be an integrated part of society. Something people go and out from.
Not something a few elite people get to dedicate their lifes to.
This is important to ensure diffusion, especially in highly volatile times like we are in now.
The big question should be: how can we get a 40 something year old industry professional to do research in a couple of. Years between jobs.
So it'd have to look significantly different than what we currently have, including something to mitigate the income hit that a 40-something professional would take for spending a couple of years doing research. Might be worth building that society, but we'd have to figure out how to get there.
There are basically two kinds of donations. You can help those in need and provide services that keep the society running. Or you can support activities that may move the humanity forward.
When the government takes a greater responsibility of the former, private donors become less interested in it. Instead of funding healthcare or education, they may start supporting arts and sciences. This has happened in many European countries, where grants from private foundations are a more important source of research funding than in the US.
With less government support, you have large capable organizations that provide services and rely on donations. Those organizations hire professional fundraisers who try to make donations to their organization an easy, convenient, and attractive option. They also help with getting publicity and prestige, if that's what the donor is after.
Altman does nothing for science. Neither does OpenAI. Google does a pittance for very applied things. Same as MS.
Doubling the funding for basic science in the US would be a rounding error for these places. But they don't do anything.
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