alt Hacker NewsGeohot is the epitome of someone who thinks because they're exceptionally intelligent and competent in a niche area, they're in a position to confidently explain how the world "really" works, without having to put any effort into actually researching areas outside of their niche.
His blog posts and general opinions voiced in his streams in any other field than what he's working in are so incredibly stupid and put forward with so much misguided confidence that they make me cringe in pain.
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Exactly 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.
Sound like a description of Elon and the X fanboys firehose.
He never shook the name "Egohot" from the Playstation days and it's just continually reinforced every time he comes back out of the woodwork.
This 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.