As a white-collar worker, it really does seem like my programmer friends are living in a different reality when it comes to AI. They have totally restructured their workflows around AI, and I'm still struggling to find the value in it for my legal and compliance consulting work. (And I consider myself pretty tech savvy, with some programming and web development knowledge and having spent 10 years at crypto startup.)

Even in my personal life, while I've been addicted to using Claude and ChatGPT as a first step for research/projects/etc, I'm still not convinced they are actually saving me time -- just too many errors, too confidently stated, and I have to re-do all the research myself.

I wonder if the validation piece is easier with coding?

EDIT: To be clear, when I say I'm having trouble incorporating AI into my white-collar work, I'm talking about producing GOOD work. On a few occasions I have given in to the temptation of using Claude to produce work that looked good (superficially), without verifying everything.....it worked out, and I'm sure others are doing it. But that scares me, because it feels like a ticking timebomb.

As a programmer, I think your reaction is most people’s reaction- it’s ok but if I want good work I have to retrace its steps. Many programmers I know use AI, but our work isn’t scrutinized like I imagine a lawyers would be. Software breaking is on the rise, accountability in tech is on the decline, so using AI is all upside since no one checks any more if users actually like and use the product.

Sizing the steps matter. Disclaimer up front: we are all figuring it out as we go along, there are no hard and fast rules that fully generalize. You just need to try and develop your own feel for it.

In my case, for some types of work - which sound similar to things you mention - I started slowing AI down intentionally. Software development, if it's something simple/common and thus "in-distribution", LLMs can zero-shot complex projects just fine. But in more R&D work, I found that errors crop up quickly and accumulate, and end result of "go and just make X" is usually bad.

Now, the problem I found with usual workflows for this kind of work is, agents race ahead and very quickly, I can't keep up anymore. So I reworked my workflow to make AI work in small steps optimized strictly for maximizing my ability to validate the outcome, and minimize time I spend doing it. So now, the thing (say diagnosing a performance regression of some complex codebase run on a cluster) may take me a whole day, where "unchained", agentic swarm would do it in 30-60 minutes - but, at the end of the day, my method is near 100% guaranteed to be correct, with every intermediate step vouched and reusable for future work, whereas "agentic swarm" approach, that hour of work, 90% of the times I'd just skim and throw away and reprompt, because I couldn't even begin to guess which part is correct, which isn't, so in the end, it was just a fast way to waste lots of tokens.

I see many people have complex systems involving skills, agent swarms with roles, agent factories, 20 termux panes and whatnot. Maybe that's the way, I don't know. Nobody knows. But it's not necessary to start getting value from LLMs. I therefore recommend my "lazy person's basic approach":

- Throw a task at LLM

- Check result, see what you like or not like about it

- If you just can't keep up, ask it to do smaller steps; if you don't understand, ask it to explain

- Just do that a lot, and don't be afraid to make both absurdly large and absurdly small asks

- You'll quickly get a feel for where AI can help you, and where it's not yet worth the time handholding it

Thanks, I'll continue to experiment!

I've used LLMs for some very small coding and math tasks, and I've found it much easier to work with on "formal" types of problems.

But for my consulting and legal work, which is "fuzzier," I struggle more with verification. I feel like I have to verify every single fact/premise in the LLM's output (this problem doesn't seem as big with coding?), as well as every single logical conclusion. Plus, even with explicit instructions I feel like the LLM is not great at anticipating what certain audiences will be interested in or find compelling.

Compared to the black-and-white nature of a computer program, all the components of a legal memorandum (premises, logical structure, conclusions, etc) seem so much fuzzier and require so much specific and accumulated context to apply reliably.

Really well put. This parallels my approach and it's good to see someone advocating a more tactful use of LLMs.

The output of agent swarms will of course grab attention, just like when you saw those same Microsoft Frontpage themes in the first few years it came out. But there's a deeper value in using the tool in harmony with your own experience and value additions.

I mean it depends exactly what you do. But for me for example, dumping HUGE pdf docs for external systems / vendors in a folder and just.... asking claude about what I want to know works amazingly well (while giving access to the folder obviously), it never failed me or gave me wrong info since the latest few models.

I'd imagine just that could already be pretty useful for your line of work ? That does require to have a claude subscription and using Opus 5.5 for it to be worth it or cost efficient.

Then you can compound this: give it access to more of these docs, have it memorize, create skills on where to find what, then move on to more and more "vague" prompts and you'll notice it knows what to search for, where, and how.

Quickly enough you can ask it to generate an artifact explaining really complex stuff super succinctly and gain a ton of time. You can ask it for links to its sources in your docs for each point it makes in order to easily confirm it doesn't make anything up etc...

But to reach that point, you might need to go step by step so you know you can trust it because it didn't fail you on the smaller, easily verified steps you tried early on.

"Superhuman" in what sense? With respect to legal work.

Is it just faster? More persuasive? Better at coming up with novel arguments?

Speed is great from a client perspective, but not as important as accuracy on important stuff. I haven't seen LLMs produce arguments that are more persuasive than those crafted by good lawyers. Finding the "perfect case" in Westlaw is helpful, but rarely the deciding factor.

I could see asking an LLM to reproduce your work AFTER you've done a first pass, to see if you missed anything -- that seems like a real value add. But I truly can't understand how not using it would be "malpractice." In fact, I still think committing malpractice would be MUCH more likely with AI. (Now if by "malpractice", you meant pissing off clients with expensive bills, that's a different story...)

I've found it depends a lot on how Claude is setup, and spending some real time on the default Private Instructions to focus on accuracy, identifying/flagging uncertainty, citing sources, checking itself, and first surfacing all assumptions and asking questions dramatically pays off in terms of getting concise and solid usable results.

Edit: add: I've found this to the degree that a relative who works at a top biglaw firm and has their internal AI (MS-based) and used to find ChatGPT and Claude actively time-wasteful, when I posed a question they'd spent a day+ fruitlessly researching (multiple areas of law and international), Claude came up with a very useful answer in ~10min — they were quite impressed.

The last year has made a huge difference

I think the parent post meant that it's very good at writing code and operating the computer. I think we're also biased because we've used older generation models and the latest ones are orders of magnitude better than what we had 6 months ago.

For example, for your legal work, it can:

Develop a machine learning model (CRF, running on CPU) for clause extraction from scratch, Find training documents and training data and train the model for various provisions (you might help it here by pointing it to the directory with annotated documents),

Build an app where you upload your legal documents and it extracts the provisions you want from all documents.

Integrate semantic search and an AI agent into your app which lets it answer any question about your documents with exact evidence from the documents.

All of this from one well crafted prompt, a few skills and a workflow. It could probably complete this in one night, while you sleep.

Or you can point it to your saas of choice and tell it - 'create me a copy of this app'.

All you need to know is how to steer it through the planning/research phase.

So it's not that it's 'accurate' in legal terms, it's that it can build you any tool you want from scratch so that you can become more accurate.

I'm not in the legal world, so my experience is limited from a coding perspective. I don't think AI could ever truly come up with novel arguments, at least not yet, but their value for you may be to sharpen your arguments or pull on every thread that you may not even have thought about.

For example, theres a very popular coding skill set call Matt Pocock's Grill Me where it just asks you a relentless amount of questions about the feature you're trying to build. You may be able to tailor this somehow to act as the opposing counsel and have it poke holes in your argument. I suppose the closest analog would be a sparring partner.

Its helpful for me and my ADHD brain because I can go down all sorts of rabbit holes and it can easily keep track of all the ideas i have while grilling and it can send sub-agents out to investigate other claims to add more context to the grilling session.

I think this analogy works with respect to stuff like coding, engineering, etc, where the AI is capable of validating the success of its own efforts and where the result just has to "work", regardless of its elegance or aesthetic quality.

I also think the analogy works if we're talking about average photographs, or even very good photographs, that are conventionally well-composed, balanced, etc, but lack the special spark that we associate with true art.

But if the photographer on the hill is a real artist, it's hard for me to imagine a current frontier LLM winning the contest. I suppose it may stumble upon a winning photo sooner than a roomful of monkeys would, but I believe the number of attempts would still be so vast that it would be more efficient for the human to make one single attempt at taking a photo, rather than dealing with prompts and sorting through the millions of AI-generated options.

EDIT: I also think it's very easy to underestimate the size of the nearly limitless set of possible "solutions" to the photograph, and also easy to overlook the constant feedback loop in the artist's mind as he considers each option and looks through the viewfinder, while the LLM is shooting blind the entire time.

What's being "forced"? And what boundaries aren't being respected? If someone attempts to strike up a conversation and you're not interested, you can signal that. Or just be direct and say you don't feel like talking. Sure, that can be uncomfortable, but you can't expect humanity as a whole to repress its social nature just to spare you occasional, fleeting moments of mild discomfort. (And despite the wide spectrum of social inclinations -- I'm definitely on the introverted end -- I think it's accurate to say that humans, as a species, crave social interaction.)

In your ideal world, how would someone even signal they are a "willing participant" without talking to someone?

Because it is this "talk to anyone" thing, like if they say no you just need to keep trying because really deep down they just don't know how nice you're being by giving them a chance to talk to you.

It's supreme arrogance. Read the body language and just leave people alone.

If someone is up for talking they'll show the obvious signs - facing you, eye contact, smiling, that sort of waiting-for-something look/expression. I've had e-fucking-nough of people thinking they can "fix" me when I am trying to get some time to myself waiting for a train or whatever after a stressful day at work or being woken up endlessly by kids/neighbours/whatever.

Otherwise it should be "talk to anyone who is obviously open to and willing to have a conversation with you", at which point it's a total tautology anyway and you don't need a guide, it's just natural chat that you don't need to force on someone to make it happen.

> keep trying because really deep down they just don't know how nice you're being by giving them a chance to talk to you.

I don't fathom what kind of trauma would lead you to take this positive, light-hearted advice to connect to fellow human beings, and to spin this into such a vile, evil, anti-social narrative.

How does that help?

And that's precisely the point: you can't fathom what someone has been through.

Don't assume people want to talk. Respect boundaries, leave people alone.

I never enjoyed Shakespeare UNTIL I started reading his plays, and now he’s one of my favorites.

The drama and stories in his work don’t do much for me, I view them more as a vehicle for his poetry (which is some of the greatest ever written). And I enjoy it more on the page than spoken by others.

I know there are at least some others out there like me! Nabokov cleverly said something along the lines of “with Shakespeare, the metaphor is the thing, not the play.”

Interesting.

I also see the plays as vehicles for the poetry; but like a lot of poetry, it's made to be spoken aloud. In particular, it should be spoken as if it were prose - the metre is in the words, and comes through on its own. It's clunky to speak it as lines of verse.

Indeed it should be spoken aloud (or at least 'aloud in your head'). But if it should be spoken as if it were prose, why do you think he took all the trouble to put it in to verse?

I'm neither a poet nor a playwright; I really don't know (but I'm glad he did).

Prosody - the musical, rhythmic quality of speech - is emphasised in verse. If a sentence runs over one-and-a-half lines, you can speak it as a normal sentence, with no pause after the first line and a pause in the middle of the second; the song-like quality will still come through, but it becomes easier for an audience to make sense of.

I think this applies to a lot of verse; not just Shakespeare's plays. If you read a sonnet like Ozymandias as a set of distinct lines, it sounds boring and stilted. If you speak it as a tale told by a traveller in a bar, it's much more engaging and exciting. The metre is carried by the words, they don't need help from the speaker.

Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.

Well, I sort of agree. A halting, too-strongly-pushed, stopping-at-the-end-of-every-line reading doesn't exactly let the lines sing. But there is an art to reciting iambic pentameter whereby it can attain the naturalness of speech while still retaining that underlying rhythm. When it's done well, you might not even realise they're doing it - until your ear is attuned enough to pick it up.

I really think this is a dying art, by the way. If you see a Shakespeare production, at least here in the UK, the actors older than about sixty are able to imbue the lines with that underpinning iambic rhythm; the younger actors don't know how or don't bother. For me, that means they don't really catch that song-like quality. I really think those older actors might be the last generation to properly know how to scan.

>Some of the best political speeches have that kind of song-like rhythm, although they aren't verse. I'm thinking of e.g. Churchill, or the Gettysburg Address.

Incidentally, somewhere I came across Arthur Quiller-Couch discussing this. He used as his example this speech of Edmund Burke, which he claimed achieved its power by means of hidden iambic pentameter:

>The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand times their price. The blood of man should never be shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

He points out that three fragments are actually iambic lines:

>Are purchased at ten thousand times their price... >Be shed but to redeem the blood of man... >The rest is vanity; the rest is crime.

Of course, this was in a time when the audience's ear (though perhaps not conscious mind) would be better attuned to that rhythm.

I like the idea of "blind" or anonymous congressional voting. It feels counterintuitive, but donors might be less willing to "buy" votes if they can't confirm that they're getting what they pay for. And a representative who has accepted lots of corporate money might feel safer "betraying" those donors.

I think representatives would still feel pressure to vote in line with the interests of their constituents and get results, otherwise they get replaced by the next exciting candidate.

Your solution eliminates accountability to donors, but it also eliminates accountability to voters.

Both houses essentially have this. It is called a voice vote.

How will voters know whether their reps are voting for the right things though

They wouldn't! That's the downside. Or maybe not a downside -- there could be an even stronger incentive for politicians to get stuff done. Since voters would have to make their decisions based entirely actual results, and not an individual politician's voting record, the politicians might have a stronger incentive to build coalitions and influence other politicians' votes.

My half-baked point is that the harm of voters NOT having access to this information is less than the harm of lobbyists and major donors having access to it.

That doesn’t really work though, people vote for their rep, not some amorphous party blob.

On the other hand, it gives pols plausible deniability that they aren’t getting bought out.

I should point out that places like Germany do vote for the party, not the person for positions like Parliament. In each region the parties submit slates of people they would put into the positions if they got all of the votes, and then once people vote they get a proportionate number of their slate into actual offices. There are lots of details here, but it is a system that works.

They vote for both party and person in MMP. Voters submit both a party list preference and a candidate preference.

Any differential privacy experts care to weigh in? Is there a differential privacy method that can introduce a specific amount of noise in voting results in order to not fully hide nor fully reveal specific representative voting records?

What they say and how they behave. I really don't believe there are a relevant number of people who can consistently say one thing and vote a completely different thing for years on end.

Maybe I'm naive, though. I really do think nearly everyone in congress does want to make the world a better place, they're just lost/confused about how to go about that, often getting caught up in the game of staying in congress rather than using their time there for good.

It's actually how congress worked before the "sunshine" act of 1971 which made voting records public.

The vast majority of people don't actually go and look up their senator's/congressperson's voting records, where as lobbyists do. So I think the voter disclosure argument is overblown; I don't think that voters actually need to know the exact voting records of their congressperson. I think voting should be selecting people based on character and rhetoric and then letting those people act as representatives.

It would be less democratic, but more functional (and more akin to what the founders imagined anyway).

I'd prefer the regular public voting and a secret non-binding vote. You'd get a lot of information out of the secret vote telling you what representatives really thought. Especially if it were a landslide in the secret ballot and down party lines in the public one. You can think of plenty of examples of past issues that would have gone that way.

In firing squads, one rifle holds a blank to preserve the possibility in the hearts of the shooters that theirs was not the shot that killed.

I imagine blind voting would also serve to assuage the worries of legislators. If only we knew what each worried about.

Firing squad members don’t usually fire more than one bullet, and it’s very obvious if your case was blank or not.

Not sure quite what you mean. It sounds like list voting, is that it?

I don't know how exactly it would work, I just mean a system where only the final vote tallies are made public -- not WHO voted for what.

As Emerson put it, "the mind loves its old home". (http://transcendentalism-legacy.tamu.edu/authors/emerson/ess...)

Quality and depth of information in a good library, at least for many subjects, is much greater than what you'll find for free on the internet.

I've only started to develop an aesthetic reaction to, and appreciation for, poetry in the past year. Before that, it was a complete mystery to me.

Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most people have very particular taste in poetry. (So particular that some people might never discover their own!) It doesn't help that there is a lot of bad poetry out there, as well as poetry that might be good in some superficial "academic" sense, like you described, but doesn't produce any reaction in the reader.

There's also the fact that reading poetry is so different from reading regular prose, and it can take some getting used to. It took me several re-readings before poems that I now love first started to "click."

For me, it all started with discovering Nabokov's novels last summer -- his writing sparked an appreciation of prose and imagery that I never experienced before, despite being a lifetime reader. I read that he loved Keats, so I picked a few of Keats's best-known poems and read them over and over, until I internalized them and eventually came to love them. As I've explored other poets, I find that the more I read, the more I become sensitive to. But still, I'd say that 80% of the poetry I encounter (especially modern stuff) leaves me feeling stupid and insensitive, at least after the first couple readings. Better than the 99% a year ago, though!

EDIT: I went through something similar with classical music a couple years ago. Despite being a musician and music lover, I could just never get into it. I immersed myself in it for a few months and began to see/feel the beauty in it. I think it's just a very different way of approaching music compared to modern genres and structures, kind of like how poetry is fundamentally different from the novels most of us grow up reading.

Keats was the gateway for me as well. For me, good poetry is simultaneously unconventional in its design and convergent in its meaning. The poem introduces a novel way of understanding or describing its subject. In a political environment of constant repetition, loaded phrases, mottos, memes, etc., this is refreshing.

However, this classification sort of breaks down the walls of poetry, since many poems are ostensibly divergent i.e. arbitrary and pretentious. At the same time, many mediums (visual, aural, kinesthetic) can be "poetic" without having anything to do with literal poetry. Is there a better word to describe this quality? For example, I don't care for poetry as far as it is a category of written works, but I really like those lines that Keats wrote down.

Similar story here. Getting older has helped a lot and suddenly I'm way more open to different genres and they land with me. Being educated about those genres also helps me get into them. Poetry, classical music, jazz, hip hop, absract sounds, art from other cultures, lots of abstract visual art...in earlier times of my life much of that was just not going to land with me.

Why did this get flagged as a dupe? This particular article hasn't been linked yet, and it seems to have more substance and analysis than the other two posts today.

Which Bitfinexed posts?

This one added something that I hadn't seen previously, which was Tether's behavior during the recent "crash."

All of them?

https://twitter.com/Bitfinexed/status/953398351889944576

There was a comment about the political influence and aspirations of certain big names in tech, but it has suddenly disappeared. It contained some criticism of Paul Graham and Sam Altman, but seemed totally reasonable to me -- can anyone say why it was deleted?

I wrote it, I don't feel like being an ass and I'm feeling overly aggressive today, not to mention I am a guest in someone else's house.

...but my overall point is that the tech elite is composed of a lot of rich white guys with connections, who naturally help each other out. Sam Altman runs YC now and as of last year was apparently seriously considering running for governor of California. That strikes me as grandiose and not good for society. Sam is 33 and because he's a tech billionaire thinks that he should run the most developed economy in the world? He genuinely believes that people outside of tech and business know who he is? He's qualified, because he's shook hands with the best off of society for the past decade?

Why does he deserve that power? Why does Zuckerberg deserve to be president? What makes him qualified? He made a PHP app that got big. Come on. That's what all this boils down to: money and power and a lot of people value that more than anything else in life.

How about we be honest with ourselves as individuals and societies and stop enabling that?

Trump lowered the bar so much that most people think they can do a better job than the current president, and are probably right.

What they miss is that running as a republican is very different than running as a democrat (as I guess most tech people would want to). Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that. But he won't be in front of Trump, he would be in front of many experiences politicians who actually have a clue about how one manages a country.

> Zuckberg would beat Trump in the democratic primaries, no question about that.

So, where is this all coming from -- that Zuckerberg wants to run for president? I'll bet my house and every last penny I own, he does not want to be president, he will never run for president.

Oh, and he would never win. He's an insanely smart dude, but he hasn't got the charisma to win presidency.

(I do think that a lot of people on HN should run for some higher office in gov't, particularly tptacek and rayiner).

It's very possible that a lot of his current rhetoric and actions are part of PR and image control for Facebook as a brand and even a genuine desire to extend his horizons.

However, some of his actions are distinctly political.

http://people.com/politics/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-team-202...

He hired "Joel Benenson, a former top adviser and longtime pollster to President Barack Obama and the chief strategist of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign", and prior to that he hired "David Plouffe, campaign manager for Obama’s 2008 presidential run".

Your statement is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm not sure Zuckerberg is actually "insanely smart". He's similar intelligence to a lot of people on HN, but people conflate power and success with visionary ability. Maybe he is that, or maybe he's just a relatively smart guy with lots of connections, a very favorable background, and the same hangups, limitations, biases, and delusions as everyone else.

> He's an insanely smart dude

That's why I agree with you that he wouldn't run for president.

In all fairness, the prior President was a one-term Senator, who pretty much started running for President just 18 months into that one term.

The actual merits of Trump or Obama notwithstanding, it's been three election cycles now since without traditional career politician in the White House. I'm not sure I can fault tech billionaires for thinking that this might be a real emerging trend, rather than just a pair of consecutive flukes.

Obama was a community organiser in 1985, 22 years before the presidental election. He had already made political speeches in college previous to that (where he majored in political science). After that he was a civil rights attorney, and his first elected position was to the Illinois senate in 1996, 8 years before he was elected to the United States Senate.

That is 100% traditional career politician in almost every way, it's just he was good enough to do it faster than most people.

From state legislator to launching an (ultimately successful!) Presidential campaign in a year-and-a-half? We'll have to agree to disagree.

Either way, if anything in U.S. politics is non-controversial... it should be the observation that three Presidential cycles in a row have been won by upstarts, whose credentials are strikingly out of place alongside their peers of the past century. That's not arguing equivalence, but ignoring all commonality is absurd.

Maybe it's attributable to being "good", or "lucky", or "racist", or some other factors of sheer coincidence. Or maybe it's a symptom of fundamental social or media shift, and signifies a new norm.

George W Bush was not an upstart by any definition of the word. To be sure, he had no particular claim to talent but then his father had been President and his grandfather had been Senator.

He's also outside the range that I just said.

As old as this might make one feel, George W. Bush's last victory was four election cycles ago.

And he'd been a governor.

FWIW Texas is a weak governor system. Pretty much the only thing the governor does is throw the switch during executions which W did with abandon.

The Roman Republic had a concept, the New Man. W was not a New Man nor was his father. Neither were upstarts.

If you feel like you can do a better job of winning an election against a Clinton and the entirety of mainstream media, you should run in 2020. Against Trump, naturally, so we confirm the hypothesis.

It boggles the mind that some people think that utter and complete feathering and tarring of Trump in the runup to the election can even be interpreted as any kind of "enablement".

My point was, the dude is not as clueless as the media and pundits portray him, and he did accomplish the impossible more than once in his life, most recently in the 2016 election.

Trump was opposed by mainstream media, and he capitalized off it.

> What they miss is that running as a republican is very different than running as a democrat

Yeah the republican primaries are more fair and balanced - we all saw what happened to Bernie in the democratic primaries.

> we all saw what happened to Bernie in the democratic primaries

I don't know what you saw, but I saw Clinton winning 55% of the vote.

I voted for Bernie in the CA primary. Hillary won the Democratic primary pretty handily. Actually, I was surprised by how well Bernie did. In November, I voted for Hillary.

Which, as somebody who voted for Hillary the whole way through, I really appreciate. I wish that the fact-free narratives that came up hadn't helped convince a number of other Bernie supporters not to do the sane thing.

> Sam Altman runs YC now and as of last year was apparently seriously considering running for governor of California. That strikes me as grandiose and not good for society

Arnold Schwarzenegger was the Governor of California. At least as far as the 'what makes him qualified' thing goes, apparently that's not a real concern for voters :)

> Let's not forget Grey Davis' being a politician didn't help California against rolling brownouts and massive deficits in the 2000s.

The correct spelling is Gray Davis [1].

The rolling brownouts were caused by Enron [2] who was enabled by legislation (AB 1890) that his predecessor Pete Wilson signed in 1996 [3]. People went to jail for that. [4]

There were no massive deficits under Davis. When the tech bubble burst in 2001, there was a revenue decline but that's about it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_Davis

[2] https://www.ferc.gov/industries/electric/indus-act/wec/enron...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_scandal

Arianna Huffington has a different take on the issue. Others do as well. Davis blames federal regulation while at the sane time has retrospectively apologized for being slow to act as the crisis began.

No, Davis doesn't blame Federal regulation because it wasn't Federal regulation that caused the California energy crisis. The crisis was caused by state de-regulation. That de-regulation (AB 1890) was engineered and signed by Governor Pete Wilson.

  Staff concludes that supply-demand imbalance, flawed
  market design and inconsistent rules made possible 
  significant market manipulation as delineated in final
  investigation report. Without underlying market
  dysfunction, attempts to manipulate the market
  would not be successful.

This wasn't on Davis; this was on Wilson and Enron. As for Arianna Huffington, she ran as an independent against Davis is the recall election engineered by Darrell Issa. She'd been a conservative commentator (supporting Newt Gingrich) before she and Andrew Breitbart launched HuffPo.

Et cetera.

Still Pete or Gray, their experience in politics did not prepare them for the events that followed. All major players have some blame, Pete, Gray and Enron. Enron was greedy and Pete and Gray, as evidenced by their political careers, didn't handle the sitch well in the eyes of the public.

As a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, I'm greedy, quite greedy. But Enron wasn't just greedy, it was a criminal organization. As such, people went to jail and it went out of business. The job losses at Enron were 4000 but they were 85,000 at Arthur Anderson, its accounting firm.

Wilson enabled this although to be fair, he didn't foresee it. The CA energy crisis was the result of mid-90s neoliberal hubris. Like supply side voodoo economics, its lessons get quickly forgotten. Hubris is like that.

From that Wiki article you linked (just about everyone gets blamed) And to note, some of the contracts were signed by Davis:

>Some critics, such as Arianna Huffington, alleged that Davis was lulled to inaction by campaign contributions from energy producers.[28] In addition, the California State Legislature would sometimes push Davis to act decisively by taking over power plants which were known to have been gamed and place them back under control of the utilities, ensuring a more steady supply and slapping the nose of the worst manipulators . Meanwhile, conservatives argued that Davis signed overpriced energy contracts, employed incompetent negotiators, and refused to allow prices to rise for residences statewide much like they did in San Diego, which they argue could have given Davis more leverage against the energy traders and encouraged more conservation.[29] More criticism is given in the book Conspiracy of Fools, which gives the details of a meeting between the governor and his officials; Clinton Administration Treasury officials; and energy executives, including market manipulators such as Enron, where Gray Davis disagreed with the treasury officials and energy executives<

Again, these are opinions and in Huffington's case not disinterested opinions. She ran for governor in the recall.

The fact remains that the CA energy crisis was enabled by Republicans for the benefit of Ken Lay's Enron Corp. Then when it happened Republicans complained loudly and political advantage of their created crisis.

Yeah, he was powerless against the Uber of its day: Enron.

I'm not sure the fault there was Grey Davis's. Seems there was skulduggery afoot (it's actually a really interesting story, and seemingly a perennial one)

I welcome it. I'd much rather have a crowded field than what we had in the last election on the Democratic side - a field emptied by the presence of a dominant presumptive nominee. More competition is a good thing.

More competition is also how we got Trump on the republican side because the number of candidates lowered the bar for receiving a plurality of the votes. Trump never would have beaten someone like Cruz, Rubio, or even Jeb in a primary straight up.

I dont agree at all, and I do not think the data backs it up. Jeb is a clear loss mono e mono against trump in the primary, no question.

the candidates you mentioned only did well in limited/specific geographies (such as their home state). i followed the primaries on both sides, and had you consolidated the votes to trump vs other, trump would have won. its also very unlikely that 'other' would all vote for 'other' if they weren't specifically allowed to vote for someone like Cruz.

>the candidates you mentioned only did well in limited/specific geographies

That is because the other candidates all took their own piece of the pie. The republican and democratic primaries were very similar. You had someone framed as a populist outsider who was selling themselves on their ability to fix the system. On the democratic side you had one other establishment candidate who more or less campaigned on the status quo. On the republican side you had numerous establishment candidates that basically campaigned on the status quo who split the vote and several outsider candidates that never had much support at all. The democratic side was consolidated much earlier around their candidate. The republican side never consolidated around an establishment candidate because it was never clear which establishment candidate was the favorite. This allowed Trump to succeed with his consistent 20-30% of republicans in early primaries.

Maybe, but even at the end when it was Trump vs. Cruz vs. Kasich Trump polled well ahead. I don't think that quantity really was the determining factor -- I think Trump is just the natural end state for the way America seems to be at the moment with its massive political division and the inability for either side to treat the other with good intentions.

Really agree with this post

https://medium.com/@russroberts/the-world-turned-upside-down...

People like voting for winners and it was clear that Trump was going to win the plurality of the vote by that point. It also came at the end of a long and grueling primary that served to normalize Trump and rally establishment republican behind him. There is no way he would have won against a generic republican if the race started with only two candidates.

Not always. You don't want just one or two, but you also don't want the situation where they have to have a JV debate beforehand because they can't fit all the candidates.

I think we see similar behavior with other famous/rich people; Hollywood stars are always involving themselves in politics (and are often surprised when their engagement means nothing).

That being said, the point of campaigning for office is to demonstrate why you deserve the votes. Nothing wrong with a young successful guy giving it a try. Who knows - maybe the qualities that made him successful would translate well to governing. If anything, I think we should encourage more non-lawyers to run!

I suppose everyone thinks "Trump did it, why shouldn't I? I'm certainly better than that guy!"... but I think they forget that they weren't playing a successful authority figure on TV for years.

The society can't ever be honest and collectively stop enabling whatever. Everyone all the time responds to incentives, and power goes to whoever is lucky and good at collecting votes and support. Competence, technological acumen or vision is an extra. Altman being governor would be a high percentile outcome considering all of this.

How does one measure, compare and conclude that California is the most developed economy in the world?

It doesn't make much sense. California doesn't have a super high median income or GDP per capita compared to other rich US states. The US has around a dozen states with median incomes equal to or higher than Switzerland.

California ranks #8 in GDP per capita in the US among states. It's around $59,000 for 2017, which is high globally but not particularly high vs the overall US figure of ~$57,000.

California ranks near the bottom in education and is 35th in poverty rate.

The title of most developed US state goes to Massachusetts most likely. It has a super high GDP per capita and median income, and is generally highly developed in most regards including education, poverty, and median standard of living. The problem is, it's the size of a Scandinavian nation. New Hampshire is even worse: they have one of the world's highest median incomes and GDP per capita figures, but only 1.3 million people.

GDP per capita probably. If California was a country, it would be on the top 10 list, only beat by some small oil rich countries.

Why should all of our leaders be charismatic lawyers? How are they more qualified? Or in some cases, famous actors. The current president's main qualification was inheriting a ton of money and being good at getting in the news.

The bar is not terribly high and I think successful tech leaders are probably more qualified than anyone else that shows up.

I think the idea of having representatives and leaders is a bit old fashioned to begin with. But if we are going to have them, they should be the most competent intelligent people we can find from outside of politics.

I wouldn't want to vote for them, but do you think that your actual politicians are qualified or deep thinkers? By "qualified" I don't mean "better than Trump", that's a very low bar.

Did you delete that post yourself?

Yes, there's no funny business going on.

Sorry, didn't mean to drag you back into the discussion! I posted my question because I was concerned that maybe a moderator deleted it. I guess I was being a little paranoid!

I'll be honest I had no idea who Sam Altman is so I read his wikipedia page and I still don't quite understand how he got to where he is today? Was his success started by the Loopt sale?

He's a very smart guy, according to a lot of people, and he's also nice. He made an app that was reasonably successful, sold it. When in YC, pg recognized his genius... and over time decided he's the guy who should run YC.

He got to where he is today because Paul Graham took him under his wing and made him his de facto son. It's not really a replicable model.