alt Hacker NewsBeing thorough and accurate might make you a lot of money in the stock market, but it's not a good way to get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day. Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers. And at that point, you might as well just align with an audience and not care too much about whether you are predicting anything accurately.
We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art. That's the pundit way. If you want accuracy, you become like Charlie Munger, have maybe 2, 3 really good insights througout your career, and hope do to well using the insights yourself, not by being a pundit
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> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time.
Yeah uhm so I'm not sure if you've like seen the world recently, but uh.
Yea
> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art.
That's quite the conflation, and a very subtle way to tie a claim that's still unresolved to one that is to try and make the first one seem wrong with no evidence. Recessions are almost guaranteed in our system, they're a part of a cycle. Unless you think that the Great Recession was the last one in history, saying the next one is 'imminent' would be correct for any other viewpoint. We just don't know when it'll officially start.
...get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day
What? Zitron is getting a lot of media attention by repeating the same takes hundreds of times. He's not a general pundit.
This is exactly right. Now, that does mean something about Zitron: he’s a pundit, not an expert or a forecasting genius. You could point to any number of analogous booster types. Twitter/X somehow loves pushing these people onto my recommended feed. I remember reading breathless threads about how o3 was going to single-handedly end white collar work. There are just more of that sort of person, so none of them in particular gets the same amount of attention as Zitron, who seems to be the only person willing to go on the record against AI. Maybe his overall worldview is sound, and maybe it isn’t. But he’s not really making confident, specific predictions about the future.
Which leads me to a criticism of the piece: several assertions are described as “Wrong,” with no explanation or citation, which are not obviously wrong to my mind. For example, the assertion that “DeepSeek has commoditized the [LLM]” is at least debatable. It is a prospect that the major labs seem to have at least considered.