I find these guys are pretty insightful when discussing tech and VC news. The politics talk is awful. Chamath is a lightweight who doesn't know anything about how our government works but speaks confidently -- I remember one time he was talking about how raising the debt ceiling will allow the President to spend more money. Sacks is a partisan hack who will spin everything as a positive for Trump and MAGA politics. That's after he was a hack for Desantis.
100%. I read the article and the moment author mentioned Chamath, I realized it must be some bs he peddled. It is surprising to me how many HN readers in this thread don't know how big a scammer Chamath is.
I find that I listen to them mainly for the tech and VC discussion as you said. The politics conversations are very drowning and I am gladly looking forward to not having to hear as much of this given the election is over.
I have an imprecise and somewhat tongue in cheek measure of a leader’s quality that suggests it is inversely proportional to the frequency with which they appear in the news. I seem to remember from his last term that Trump is at least a daily fixture even within the British media. I think I’m just going to spend even less time consuming mainstream media.
People have short memories, but the last time Trump was in office you had to hear about him all the time. (Of course the real concerning trend is that every recent R administration ends in an economic collapse.)
"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
"In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
It's fascinating that Michael Crichton would have a quote like that when he's been guilty of falling into the same trap himself. It really shows how difficult it is for the human mind to have perspective on itself.
There's a corollary to the Gell-man Effect which I will dub the Crichton Effect. If somebody is a compelling enough prose stylist then it is easy to be duped into believing that they know more about the topic of their fictional works than they really do. Crichton was a crank, but he knew how to craft a narrative.
Michael Crichton’s State of Fear is a prominent example of climate science denial wrapped in a techno-thriller narrative. In the book, he portrays mainstream climate science as alarmist and driven by political motives rather than factual evidence. Crichton uses the plot to imply that climate change fears are exaggerated, fueled by a coalition of media, scientists, and activists with hidden agendas. Despite claiming to be based on scientific data, the book misrepresents studies, cherry-picks data, and cites outlier opinions to undermine the overwhelming consensus on human-caused climate change. The novel’s presentation has been criticized for promoting misinformation and distorting the complexities of climate science to fit a skeptical narrative.
That isn't actually an example of the Gell-Mann Amnesia, as he described, but just an example of the cherry picking of data and selective interpretation. The Gell-Mann Amnesia, as he described it, refers to how people will not read a source with skepticism when they are not familiar with it's subject matter, even when they have read an inaccurate article from the same source about subject matter that they are familiar with enough to spot the inaccuracies.
> these guys are pretty insightful when discussing tech and VC news
They seem insightful. They’re generally behind the curve and remind of Stratfor.
If anything, All In is better connected on politics. But that may be my Gell-Mann amnesia at play because I know the finance side of tech very well, and they’re not only frequently but paradoxically consistently wrong on it in ways that one sees institutional-versus-retail flows profit off.
Sounds like it is. When somebody is confidently wrong in an area you're familiar with, and confidently speaking about areas you're not, isn't that an instant epistemic red flag?
Do you think that of the four of them, Friedberg has a best grasp of the finance side of things? I would think he would be since he was apparently formerly involved in IB, PE, then corp dev when he was younger.
Interestingly, I agreed with the idea that they are better when discussing tech and VC (after all that's their day job). Do you have any examples of where they have been significantly off on tech finance?
Likewise for VC/tech. I started listening for those topics and in those days that used to be almost entire show then they slowly started pivot to politics & social commentary which I dont care much for (from them). they are a bunch of centi/billionaire and should stick to that lane but I feel now they have become the podcast arm of RW. I have to say I find myself skipping lots of portions now, its almost not worth it but I still do it to catch up on the dog-whistle to other closeted republican tech/VC/leadership but then WSJ does that better than them.
some observations, IDK if others have noticed:
- chamath always speaks last as if he is some kind of village elder, I think it allows him to present a better pov than he actually has
- sacks is good at logic/debating and It seems they use that to push a RW pov without sounding like they are endorsing it by presenting a weak/half baked opposition to it.
overall I find hard to take them seriously outside of core tech/VC stuff. the science guy is okay but meh.
> sacks is good at logic/debating and It seems they use that to push a RW pov without sounding like they are endorsing it by presenting a weak/half baked opposition to it.
This is a really great point I completely hadn’t considered.
