- Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treating them as an expense weren’t even really necessary, but it took a few years. It wasn’t obvious in 2002 that this is how it would play out.
And relevant to the title quote: maybe it should be amended to “good ideas do not need a lot of lies to gain public acceptance eventually”. The dynamic here is that a significant part of public opinion is simply “well, this is how things work now, and it seems to be working”, and any new and innovative idea by definition is not going to be how things work now. The lies are needed to spur action and disturb the equilibrium of today. But if you’re still telling lies a few years in, you’ve failed and it’s a bad idea to begin with.
- The specific lie discussed was the idea that granting options was not somehow an "expense" and could be excluded from the accounts.
(Google tells me this is a relevant summary of US GAAP https://carta.com/uk/en/learn/startups/equity-management/asc... )
- > The specific lie discussed was the idea that granting options was not somehow an "expense" and could be excluded from the accounts.
Stock options for the company's own stock are kind of weird because the company can issue its own stock, which puts them in a much different position than someone selling uncovered calls.
An uncovered call is a potentially unbounded liability. If you issued someone options to buy 10,000 shares for $10 each and then the price went up to $1000, you could be on the hook to have to buy $10M in shares and then sell them for $100,000, i.e. you'd take a $9.9M future loss, and the risk of that is a significant liability.
Whereas if you have 10,000 shares and agree to sell them for $10 each and then the the price goes up to $1000 before they pay you, you don't actually owe anyone that extra money, you just failed to make the $9.9M gain you otherwise would have. It's the same as if you'd sold (or issued new) shares for $10 immediately. But we don't generally book "opportunity cost of selling shares for the current market price" as an expense, do we?
- The IRS rules on AMT for that transaction might have you thinking it was generally booked. Though any sensible accounting seems like it wouldn’t book it.
- We like to pretend we have rule of law, but every part of the government is inherently a political animal.
Old money deferring capital gains forever? No prob. Some nerds who built something but mostly don't have a sophisticated understanding of finance or an organized political machine? Haha screw those guys.
- That's not what the quote in the article is:
> Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were.
That's saying that it's stock options themselves which are the bad idea. The lie is in how they are expensed or not expensed. The point the accountant is making is that if stock options were a good idea, they could be expensed, thus not needing the lie.
But nowadays, stock options are expensed, right there in public, and they are still considered a good idea.
- Nah I think the advice generally is "ignore options."
- People who sell lottery tickets, on average, do better than those who buy them. The same applies to stock options. Which is why "bonus" options are fine, but "buying" them by taking ESOP over potential salary, can be a bad choice.
- I think it depends on the ESOP, the companies i've worked at ESOP happened at 10-15% discount of the real price at the buy time and those stocks are instantly sellable. They can be taxed differently yeah but depending on how much you are buying and sell its capital gains tax which can be lower than income tax.
Edit: I am conflating RSUs and stock options never worked somewhere without RSUs so there might be a gap in my experience
- Options are a bit riskier than RSUs. If you have RSUs issued at $100 and the stock goes down to $50, then your RSUs are worth half. If you have the option to buy stock at $100 and the stock goes down to $50, then that option is worthless.
- What behavioral incentive do lotto tickets give the buyer? Options/stock work for both parties because of alignment.
- > stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation
Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.
- Right, options go underwater precisely when the company is not doing well and you are at greatest risk of losing the job. That's not a great risk profile.
- > options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants)
RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.
- I learned long ago (when my company decided they couldn't give me options because we were too big so they did these "I can't believe it isn't an option", which expired worthless): until cash is in my bank account it is just a promise waiting to be broken. If I want to invest I want it my choice.
In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for - unless you are high enough up in the company that you see the real books, or you have so much invested they have to show you as a large shareholder. (nobody is the later - large shareholders have a full time job managing their money not working for someone else). There have been a number of cases where a company has unexpectedly filed bankruptcy and someone lost their job and their savings on the same day.
- > In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for
I'd question this conventional wisdom, simply because you have a lot more information about the company as an employee than a random investor does, even if you are not in possession of things like financials that the SEC considers "material non-public information". Things like culture, intelligence of your coworkers, whether or not you're actually delivering on your commitments, how many feature requests and bug reports you get from your customers, mood of management, perks offered, etc. are all intangibles, but they are usually better predictors of long-term company performance than the financials that the company gives investors.
If your company is not doing well enough or is not something that you would consider investing in, you should find a different company to work for. Bad things are going to happen in your future, regardless of whether you own shares or not.
- I used to be on a project that, IMHO, had possibly considerable impact on capabilities and even some specific financials in a publicly traded corporation.
After about third earnings call (which happened a tiny bit before the trading window for our stock grants opened), I (re)learned the hard lesson that even if we delivered and I had actual, material, move the needle impact on corporate financials, that would not translate in any way to stock price. Except maybe if I pushed it really, really, down by causing an avalanche of problems that resulted in some big name deal going down.
The stock prices are vibe based, once its publicly traded your share value will be based on whatever vibes pushed numbers in excel around earnings call, and it's perfectly normal occurrence to beat expected earnings per share for 3 quarters straight and every quarter get a different vibed-off reason as to why the price should go down.
- No you don’t. If you did, you would be subject to lock outs. The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.
Amazon for instance has over 1 million employees. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured
- > The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.
They know the clients, the contracts, hiring, cost cutting way before the general public does. The problem is that many BigTech is sum of many units which might not be correlated, but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from.
- And this is again an obviously naive assumption. Your average developer at Apple has no idea how many iPhones Apple sold in China. Nor do Nvidia employees they know how many GPUs NVidia sold. Your random Amazon developer didn’t know Jassy was going to announce at the earnings call that Amazon was going to announce that they were going to spend more this year on Capex for AI related hardware than they’d free cash flow tanking their stock.
Again, I worked at AWS and we had no insider knowledge
- > but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from
Isn't Apple pretty famously secretive even internally around stuff like product launches? I would expect a company that runs a tight ship to have rank-and-file employees who would have less potentially actionable info than ones at companies that don't control information as well.
- In a tiny company this is true. In any medium (much less large) company you don't know much more than anyone else on the street - and the independent analysts who just watch public information closely usually know more than you do about all that. (it is their job to read the data from China and figure out what that means for the companies involved).
- > The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.
Huh? We're not talking about the custodial staff.
> Amazon for instance has over 1 million customers. You know nothing about most of your coworkers or whether other teams are delivering featured
This is a hilarious example; especially at Amazon, "rank and file" employees are privy to $100M+ AWS deals, they have to implement them after all.
- I worked for AWS in Professional Services (full time blue badge employee). Part of “sales”. Even when we talked internally asking for advice from the service teams (the people who worked on the various AWS services) or even internally within ProServe outside the project team, when we spoke on Slack, we didn’t mention the customers in Slack channels outside of a need to know basis and used the acronym “IHAC” (I have a customer) when referring to the customer.
I assure you the random developer on the EC2 service team for instance knew nothing about the sales deals.
Also a “$100 million dollar sales deal” is nothingburger for AWS not enough to move the market.
Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?
- > Do you think someone on the Alexa team in the retail division (“CDO”) knew anything about what was going on within AWS?
Hmm, no?
As a solutions architect at Amazon I was very much a "rank and file" employee, and privy to large deals, so I'm not sure what you're on about. I haven't heard of Professional Services, presumably you guys had different responsibilities.
- So you worked at AWS as an SA and never tried to sell its own internal consulting services?
https://aws.amazon.com/professional-services/
But either way, it’s monumentally a kind of weird statement to think that anyone besides “janitors” would know anything about the deals that would go through or to think a “$100 million sales deal” would move the needle especially as we see right now that AMZN is tanking because they reported they will spend more than all of their free cash flow on CAPEX for AI. You couldn’t have predicted that
- > So you worked at AWS as an SA and never tried to sale its own internal consulting services?
Not sure I understand the value proposition here, but then again Amazon is known for having redundant teams every now and again.
- SAs are not allowed to give the customer code or actually do anything. When a customer signs a contract (SOW) with ProServe, they are billable consultants who actually do implementations. Even they can’t touch production workloads and basically do everything in non production environments and teach the customer hope to do the work and move it into production
- You have more information, but only in a small area. if there is fraud by the executives they will hide it from you. If a different division doing poorly bringing everyone down you won't know before anyone on the street. even in your own division you won't know all the important numbers, a great feature coming doesn't mean customes really want it, you might be sucked into thinking a useless vanity project is something customers care about.
- What makes them more or less controllable? I know they can have specific triggers applied to them so as to delay vesting. Are options somehow immune to that or is it something else entirely?
- Note that I’m speaking more about private companies than public ones. But an RSU is basically only liquid if the company says it is. Shares, out of exercised options, have a lot more flexibility.
- Right, but that seems to be comparing unvested RSUs to vested and exercised options. Are options more strict about what games can be played with vesting triggers?
- It’s been standard advice on this forum for at least 10 years to value options at $0, and only consider cash comp + RSUs.
- Options have some minor value in signalling that you're a true believer. You should in fact care only about base salary, but not telling the people doing the hiring that can be quite useful. Doing a fake come-down on base in exchange for options shows you are invested and surely worth hiring.
- Lots of things succeed after early hype not because the lies were necessary, but because the underlying idea was good enough to survive them
- There was a body of evidence far before 2002 that dealing employees in was a good move.
- > and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not
What are you basing this claim on?
- That of the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 [1], all but Broadcom and Berkshire Hathaway give generous stock options, and also that of the top 10 in 2000 [2], only one (Microsoft), maybe 2 (Cisco) did. If you look at change in index composition, or even total earnings by company, you'll see a very steady and dramatic replacement of companies that did not spread the wealth through stock options & RSUs with companies that did.
[1] https://www.slickcharts.com/sp500
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-largest-sp-500-c...
- Conflating stock options and RSUs?
- > Interesting that this quote was initially about stock options at tech companies. It turned out that stock options did become nearly universal in tech compensation, and companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not. So the management that was ostensibly “doing a massive blag at the expense of shareholders” wasn’t really, time vindicated their practices and things like option backdating and not treating them as an expense weren’t even really necessary, but it took a few years. It wasn’t obvious in 2002 that this is how it would play out.
I happen to have read probably everything that Warren Buffet wrote on this subject, and in my opinion your take is confused at best.
First, you say that “stock options did become nearly universal“. No, they were already nearly universal at the time that this conversation was happening. I remember that Warren Buffet was quoting, going by memory, something like all but 3 out of 500 S&P DONT companies do it, or nasdaq or whatever index he was talking about. The fact that almost all companies do it doesnt mean its the right thing to do and if almost no company did it, Buffet wouldnt be complaining about it.
Second, you say “companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not“. I literally have no idea how you came to this conclusion since, like I said, at the time this conversation was going on almost all company did it. Not because the companies that didnt do it died out, but because companies that didnt do it switching into doing it.
Third, and most important, I believe you misunderstand what the conversation is about. Expensing stock options is not a competitive advantage. Granting stock options might be, the rationale that paying management and staff more attracts the best people is an argument worth having. But the conversation isnt about whether its a good idea to grant stock options, the conversation is about which entry you should put your stock options when preparing financial statements. The author says clearly that this is about accounting, but you missed that. Theres no competitive advantage in doing one way or the other. The reason why Buffet complains about them is that A) it makes harder to discern from financial statements how much staff is costing the shareholders, not that its a competitive advangage or disadvantage, and B) if theres a cost that you need to pay in order to run the business, thats called an expense, and by your own argument you need stock options to run the business, therefore those are expenses and thats how they should be labeled in the income statement. The argument of companies doing it is that “earnings“ is bigger if there are things which are expenses but you dont call them that. Its literally saying that pnl = P - L but you know what, its bigger if I just report the P and hide the L.
- >...The reason why Buffet complains about them is that A) it makes harder to discern from financial statements how much staff is costing the shareholders, not that its a competitive advangage or disadvantage, and B) if theres a cost that you need to pay in order to run the business, thats called an expense,
Yes, that is true - that is what Warren Buffet says are his reasons. It might also be true that the actual reasons might have more to do with the fact that he didn't like the idea of having to potentially dilute his 100+ billion dollar wealth in shares of Berkshire or that he didn't like having to increase employee compensation to compete for workers since he refused to give out options.
- So in your view, even a useful innovative idea cannot gain traction without being overhyped?
- Almost any useful innovation is going to have a right tail of people who overhype it. They shouldn't, and I wish they wouldn't. But if your strategy for evaluating new ideas is to find the biggest sources of hype and fact check them, you're going to systematically undervalue innovation.
- The problem is that many care more about presentation than substance. The irony gets overwhelming where boring is usually the best solution and the least exciting.
- The flip side is that good ideas with honest framing often lose to bad ideas with better marketing. Being right isn't enough if you can't communicate it and most people don't have the patience to evaluate the honest version.
- The point the post is making not that good ideas win or lose, its that if you need to lie (that's not better marketing) to persuade your idea probably isn't good and your predictions about the outcomes are false. The context is deceit about the second Iraq war. I think the reason why this post is returning is because we are in the middle of a war where the goals and justifications are being misrepresented and yet people accept predictions about the outcome. "The straight will open itself." ?
Right or wrong, an interesting (and ironic) historical analogy.
- You still need rhetoric, timing, emotion and narrative. But I'd say the lesson is "good ideas need good communicators" not "good ideas need lies"
- You are correct that ideas do not compete based on how true they are but how easily they are remembered.
- I'd add (not saying you said otherwise) that marketing bad ideas well isn't quite the same as good communication. I guess a funny thing is that the more naive or blind or optimistic one is, the more one might wiggle their way out of some definitions of “liar.” If they're good at lying to themselves, maybe it doesn’t count as lying to others.
- Is "better marketing" a euphemism for "more willing to misrepresent the other side, turn a practical issue into an emotional one, and generally trot out every logical fallacy they can think of"?
Because that's what I see constantly on social media in response to progressive ideas the rest of the world has largely accepted but apparently just can't possibly work in the United States...
- [dead]
- I'm not sure. Don't underestimate the power of inertia.
I bought an EV last year and it's definitely been a "good idea" for me. Luxurious ride, fuel costs a tenth, doesn't stink.
Seems such an obvious upgrade it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home.
- This feels irrelevant - it's not an idea about which lots of lies are being told in favor? (quite a lot of .. misapprehensions against, though)
- Yes. It's a good idea, therefore should not need lots of lies, indeed lots of lies aren't told, and so the idea should just catch on of its own strength? But it doesn't seem to and I'm identifying that as due to inertia. You may disagree
- The contrapositive of "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance" is not "good ideas will succeed without any messaging at all".
- What are the arguments being used to sell electric cars?
I would say that investing oneself and one's money in an idea changes how one feels about the choices that was taken. I would say that those not invested might think that some of the arguments might have untruths more than those who have invested.
(For me inertia does play a role too! "Why fix what's not broken")
- EV marketing in the US is super dumb.
We get these ads emphasizing the luxuriousness, the status, the high-tech, the exclusivity of EVs. Meanwhile... BYD.
Surely it can't be entirely conspiracy to bludgeon the public with messaging that EVs are premium goods and ICEVs are for the mass market.
Could it be that the maxim should really be something like "bullshit too often and too greedily and you forget how to sell something that sells itself"...?
- That's not just marketing; that's a reality of the market. A corolla is cheaper than any EV on the market, so why would I even consider them? They might as well be luxury cars.
- Perhaps you're just not used to US car advertising? Even the cheapest cars are always advertised as though they're cool luxurious status symbols. The Bolt and Leaf match the price point of the RAV4 they're competing with. (Genuinely budget-conscious buyers don't buy new cars at all in the US.)
- Sometimes good ideas just have to fight habit
- EVs got really good in the last two years. If you bought anything that wasn't a Tesla ten years ago you were faced with some pretty bad compromises if you insisted on driving an EV.
- The original Leaf looks like a Nokia 3210 compared to a current-gen iPhone. The tech has been moving at high speed and continues to do so.
- I don't think it's a tech issue. I have a Tesla, it's a few years old now, and it's still better than most of what legacy car makers produce. The tech has been mature for several years.
I think legacy car makers have been slow rolling. They might have to in order to allow their organizations and customers to adapt.
- I looked into buying an EV but it turns out it would be a little over four times as expensive as running an old Landrover with a massive V8 engine.
So I still run an old Landrover with a massive V8 engine.
- Would you be willing to share your math?
- Okay, it immediately costs more to buy an EV than it does to run my existing car. The monthly payment to buy an EV is more than I spend on fuel.
Then I'd be paying roughly ten times as much for insurance, because it's a new and valuable car, and being "keyless" it cannot be secured in any meaningful way without locking it in a garage, which I don't have.
Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home. So I'd have to park an EV up at the nearest charging point several miles away, cycle home, and then cycle back to the car to retrieve it. This would then be costing roughly the same per mile to charge it up as it costs per mile for propane (my car is dual-fuel).
That's before you add in the exorbitant cost of servicing an EV, which can only be done at a dealer.
All told, I'd be spending a grand a month to replace a vehicle that costs a couple of hundred a month, that - crucially - wouldn't allow me to actually do the things I need it to do.
- > Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home.
IMO, this matters more than anything else.
If you can't charge at home, then an EV becomes rather nonviable unless you drive very little and your usual grocery store has a fast charger. But then public chargers are typically at least double the price per kilowatt hour compared to charging at home.
- My insurance went down not up when I switched.
EV servicing is cheaper and I do it less often.
I bought used. The monthly depreciation is less than my previous fuel bill.
YMMV.
- > EV servicing is cheaper and I do it less often.
Most EVs need serviced every year and it's about £300 to do so. This is a ridiculous amount.
- What do you need to get serviced every year? Do the tires wear out that fast?
- They need the oil and coolant changed apparently, or they won't warranty the battery.
Mine needs a set of tyres every few years, a set of brakes every few years, and an oil change or two a year. None of this is especially expensive.
- First time I hear that all EVs are keyless and have expensive insurance.
What model were you considering and why only this one?
- Pretty much everything is keyless these days, which makes them expensive to insure since you can steal them with a very small and inexpensive device. The problem is not just limited to EVs though.
- Those are arguments, not math. Will you share your actual math?
- What would the math look like to make an EV cheaper than using an ICE car you already own? It looks an awful lot like you're just dodging the numbers yourself.
- I would be happy to share the exact numbers I used to figure out replacing a 2017 Ford Fusion with a 2023 Tesla Model 3 would save me money. And it has.
When most people make these comparisons, they don't consider depreciation, trade-in value, or maintenance costs.
I don't understand what I was dodging though. Can you be really specific? Help me out.
- Okay, for even a very basic EV I'd be paying £400 per month.
This is more than the £200-300 or so it costs to run my existing car.
Straight off, it's costing me more just to even own one - that's before it turns a wheel.
Tax on an EV is free just now, and about £300ish a year for the vehicle I have now, so that's got the difference down a little.
Insurance on even a fairly basic EV would be a couple of hundred quid a month, as opposed to a couple of hundred quid a year. This immediately makes running an EV uneconomic.
At the end of the five year lease (you can't buy them outright, without getting entirely ripped off) I'd have spent 24 grand to still not actually own a car. This is roughly 100 times as much as I spent to actually own a car. This too makes things uneconomic.
- Thank you, this makes sense out of the gate, and I appreciate you sharing!
I'm not seeing you calculate any repair costs for your vehicle. Or depreciation overall, especially not replacement. What year do you expect to replace your vehicle? What would you replace it with? How much would you get for trading in your vehicle if you buy a new car now?
I think you're missing pretty large parts of the math - what happens if you take your likely depreciation/replacement costs into account over time?
- > among people who like me can charge at home
OP said this, you clearly don't fall into this category. And if servicing an electric car costs more than servicing an old Landrover I will not eat for a week
- At the dealer it costs about £300 to get a Kia Niro EV serviced, which needs done every year.
It just cost me £75 to service my car, of which nearly £15 was just the cabin air filters which have got bizarrely expensive since last year.
- That sounds like a charge the dealer has made up to try to get you to spend money, not an actual need.
- Why? Don't you think they need serviced or something?
- I've owned my Tesla for 6 years and 50,000 miles.
The only service it's needed beyond tires, wiper blades, and wiper fluid is a replacement of the low-voltage battery last year, which was under $200.
If you're paying $300/year to service your EV, either you drive a LOT or you're getting ripped off. There's nothing in an EV that requires $300/year in service.
There's no oil changes, no transmission fluid. Brake pads will last forever since regen should be doing at least 90% of your braking. Sure, maybe you still need tire rotations, but most tire shops will do it for free if you buy tires from them. I do them myself when I do the swap between winter and summer tires.
- > it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home
No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.
- There are very few 20yo+ cars on the road, mostly because the probability of a totalling over the course of this many years is pretty high.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/ag...
I know for a fact that the figure for Poland is exaggerated, because plenty of cars which are currently shaving people's beards and have been performing this duty for years now remained in the registry and were purged from it only in 2024. That was 7 million out of 41 million originally there and most likely there's many more, as the criteria were set to avoid false positives.
- The average car in the UK is ten years old: https://www.racfoundation.org/media-centre/average-car-in-th... ; while I have an 18 year old car, I'm an outlier on my street.
It's true that most people don't buy new, but there's still 20% of purchases new, and a steady flow of EVs into the used market.
- https://www.scrap-car-dealers.co.uk/latest-news/post/average...
> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!
- What‘s the source for the 20 years? Seems unlikely to me.
b) You can also buy used EVs. I bought one last year, 2 years old, for 56% of the original price.
- Yes mine was used. Battery is fine. Of course I made sure to buy one with a suitable range for my needs. There's lots of options.
- How is the battery?
- I roll my eyes at this question because it's often framed as good faith curiosity, but it's often asked in bad faith by people that think it's a "gotcha" question, because they have this incorrect notion that EV batteries need to be replaced frequently. They see the warranty is 100K miles/8 years or whatever and think that means they have to replace the battery after 100K miles/8 years, yet fail to recognize that they don't apply that same logic to combustion engines with 30K mile/3 year warranties.
- My source is just personal observation, but I'm clearly not far off:
https://www.scrap-car-dealers.co.uk/latest-news/post/average...
> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!
...
> You can also buy used EVs.
True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years. Maybe you can get an old Tesla for not too much but that's pretty undesirable for obvious reasons.
- > True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years
You'd think that, but (I am shopping at the moment) it is routine to see last year's EVs on Autotrader, at 30-50% off list price. That does make me a little suspicious (is this being got rid of because it's a lemon?), but they're there.
I think we can narrow the statement to "if you are buying a new or nearly-new car, or leasing, and you can charge at home or work, you should seriously consider an EV". Fleet and business use should definitely be thinking very hard about it.
- If most people kept cars for 20 years, and the secondhand market exists, then by the time an average car is scrapped it must be substantially over 20 years old.
- Is there not a big image factor? Like, people don't want to be seen as the type of person who'd drive an electric.
- I'm sure this impacts certain cultures in the US, but I've got to imagine that's a pretty tiny impact compared to pragmatic concerns like "where can I charge this" and "how often do I need to charge this".
- Mine is a model available with different power trains, so nobody knows. Or cares, I'm sure!
- Maybe in the US. The rest of the world doesn't hate the environment quite so much.
- This is what scares me the most about AI. You have a handful of really big companies trying to outdo each other as they race to implement it and deploy it as quickly as possible.
To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data centers; they are incentivised to exaggerate its current capabilities and also what it will be capable of 'soon'.
There is no time to evaluate each step to make sure it is accurate and going in the right direction, before setting it loose on the public.
- When companies are spending that much capital, they almost can't help becoming unreliable narrators about what the technology can do right now versus what they hope it will do in two or three years
- I guess a counterpoint might be Apple's "strategy". Scare quotes because I truly don't know if it was deliberate or just a happy accident. But somehow they've managed to not get so intensively exposed to the downside risk--if the wild claims about AI don't pan out they're not going to lose very much compared with the other megacorps.
- Apples plan has been pretty obvious. They invested in small locally running features that provide small utility rather than massive hosted models that cost a fortune and aren’t profitable.
There also doesn’t seem to be much risk in falling behind. If you wait longer you can skip buying the now obsolete GPUs and training the now obsolete models.
- They invested a ton in their Private Cloud Compute though, but are barely using their capacity.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...
- Having worked in public advocacy advertising, I’d frame it like this: “Good ideas don’t need lies” is a compelling ideal but in practice, public acceptance isn’t a reliable signal of truth or societal benefit. It depends on incentives, narratives, and how information is presented.
History shows that even harmful or suboptimal ideas (like coal power) can gain widespread support if presented persuasively, while genuinely beneficial ideas can struggle if they’re complex or unintuitive.
A useful heuristic is: if an idea relies on misleading claims to survive scrutiny, that’s a warning sign. But public acceptance itself is not proof of goodness or correctness.
In short: persuasion and truth are related—but far from identical.
- I think you just reinforced the articles point. Coal power needs lots of lies to justify it, as per your own statement.
That is in fact because coal energy is a terrible idea. It has 0 upsides compared to renewable alternatives, and is on the whole worse than even other non-renewable alternatives.
If you have to lie to make it sound good, that's probably because it isn't actually good
- You can turn it around. If stopping using coal is a good idea then all that should be needed it present the facts and all the people will cheer and support stop using coal - if not it means stopping using coal is a bad idea?
- No, turning it around doesn't work because it's cause and effect.
"Present the facts and all the people will cheer and support stop using coal" -> correct
"If not it means stopping using coal is a bad idea?" -> incorrect, because people are against switching to renewables because of lies, not because of facts
- > incorrect, because people are against switching to renewables because of lies, not because of facts
Do you really think that if you presented the truth to a MAGA follower that believes climate change is a communist scam that they will just see reason and support your position just because you presented them with the facts?
- I think we’re still talking past each other. I’m not arguing that any specific idea is good.
My point is just that public acceptance itself isn’t reliable evidence either way: ideas can gain support (or fail) for reasons other than their actual merit.
- I think you are missing the point:
Some good ideas might need a whole lot of marketing to catch on. Some bad ideas might need very little. The quote merely argues that if you must deceive people for an idea to catch on, the idea is not good. A corollary is that if you are tempted to lie in your advocacy, you should probably reexamine what you are advocating for.
- You just raised another example of a bad idea that needed lies to gain public acceptance.
- I’m not making a claim about whether any particular idea is good or bad.
I’m pointing out that the process by which ideas gain acceptance is somewhat independent from their actual quality, so acceptance alone isn’t a strong signal.
- lol you don’t understand at all
- I might not have been clear. I’m separating two questions: (1) whether an idea is actually good or true, and (2) how easily it gains acceptance. My point is just that (2) doesn’t reliably answer (1).
- With the current moon mission I'm reminded of how whenever someone from NASA is interviewed they like talking about how the billions spent are justified because of the practical results of the research - Velcro, Tang, etc. It always seemed like a stretch, but I have the unpleasant feeling the US is going to lean the true value of being the research leader when it's gone.
- There are so many areas where the US lead, but lost the plot. And what did we learn from them losing that leadership status?
We learned that the average citizen will never accept that as fact. And even if they do: they’ll say it never mattered much anyway.
Like life expectancy, happiness, social mobility, literacy, student performance, global soft power and their overall reputation.
- Ideas do not compete based on how true they are but how easily they are remembered.
- Idk I think they kind of do, tackling climate change is a good idea and at this point I’m ready to lie if it will make ppl do something
- I think addressing climate change is more of a policy issue. I think most people are onboard with addressing climate change (modulo some cranks who are open to idea that the earth is flat and oil company ceos ig). It just doesn't translate into policy due to corruption.
- Makes me think of academic papers that overhype their contribution. Also makes me think about AI hype.
- For me the danger of AI is that it enables the surveillance state through facial recognition and the instantaneous aggregation of all my data. For "national security" reasons, I may be detained and denied of my rights if Palantir hallucinates. Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?
- The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.
- > The thing is a government never needed technology to be authoritarian. The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence. It can be wielded in many ways good and bad.
Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.
- > An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them.
Whatever that limit might be is genuinely terrifying, given how far obedient soldiers have gone and not hit such a limit many times over the past.
- It's more that in the past widespread surveillance required a lot of people, many of whom will have a conscience which will end up disrupting your surveillance.
The movie Das Lieben der Anderen makes this point very cogently.
Nowadays you can run a huge surveillance program with far fewer people, all of whom can be conscience free.
Im not sure how the next stasi will crumble but it'll be a lot harder to wrest them from power with the tools they have at their fingertips.
- You're confusing autocratic with authoritarian. Total war reached its most recent zenith in the 20th century. If governments have always been able to control people to the same degree, why was not until Napoleon that we saw the beginnings of nationalism? I say this rhetorically, as it is quite obvious that it was technology and industrialization. When we look at ancient Empires and see their territory on a map it would be much more accurate to only highlight population centers not the entirety of the land. Illiterate farmers, who made up the majority of the world, resided in small towns and villages and their daily lives were largely unaffected by conquerors.
- There was nationalism pre napoleon. Arguably east asia is a better example than european history IMO. I would say there is strong sense of nationalism among han chinese both now and in history. Likewise for Japan and Korea. Pre islam Persia as well. I guess the source of this was consistent centralized authority over a large region vs any technological change. You had that in east asia. You didn't have that in europe after roman times. Even larger empires like kingdom of spain were not really seen as "spain" as we know it but a unified monarchy over the kingdoms of castile, leon, aragon, sicily, and napoli. Interestingly you didn't really have that in india either, no one controlled the continent until mughal times and by then the religious and cultural regional differences were pretty set in stone.
- India is a great example of how relatively recent technology was required to finally unite and control a people. One can also just observe urbanization, capitalism, communication mediums(media). While China is unique for its cycles of unity and then disunity. These kingdoms were also dynastic and worshipped the emperor as a god. Such ways of government are a justification for ruling which supersedes the need of a national identity.
- This is all true, but surely you can see how automating the authoritarian bent of the government still makes things worse than before?
- > It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840
Yea, and they were way more successful at it in 1940 than 1840. Are you accounting for all the times they tried to enforce their authority but ultimately failed?
> And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.
No one has a monopoly on violence. What they really have is called "qualified immunity."
In this particular instance, though, their violence is particularly enabled by cheap technology and computing power.
- "qualified immunity" is a legal concept on how government protect/"qualify" their employees from being sued.
"Monopoly on violence" is a political philosophy concept. What make a state a state.
- > The government today already has all the tools to ruin your life. It had them in 1940. It had them in 1840 and it had them in the year 40 as well. And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.
There are a couple of problems with this:
1. As a matter of raw empirical fact, a government around the year 40 wasn't too likely to possess a monopoly on violence.
2. A monopoly on violence isn't necessary to ruin your life. A simple nonexclusive license, which governments of the period did have, is sufficient.
- Ot worse because it didn't hallucinate, and they are coming for you, as a free thinking "radical". They can tell from a long deleted blog post you made in 2005 about green energy.
- Why bother with all that though? Just ask them to do their job for the party. If they don't, or you suspect they don't align with the party, you just execute them. Don't need tech for this. The tech is just for some people to get rich, not to really enable any new evil that can't already be achieved today with pen and paper and bullet (as modeled extensively in the last century).
Put it this way, if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jews? I don't think so. I think they would be screwed no matter what.
- > if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jew
Not grok specifically, but yes.
The holocaust in the Netherlands was remarkably bad in large part because the Dutch administration was so well-organized and had kept a registry of Jews.
Bad guys are going to use this technology to evil ends if given the chance.
BTW, there's a chilling alternate history novel called NSA by German author Andreas Eschbach about precisely that kind of idea. The premise is that computer science progressed a lot more quickly. The book opens with German data scientists in the 1930s combining census and financial transaction data (i.e., food purchases using electronic cash) to identify households that are hiding Jews and other "undesirables" .
- Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed. But you can spy on people under "national security" while keeping them feeling happy enough. And that arrangement can last 1000 years.
- Still not convinced that AI is offering anything new here. Especially when the statistics you'd reach for are often like 100 years old or more. Bayes theorem is older than the united states. I think among lay people there is a lot of conflation between AI and statistics, and also a lack of understanding of the state of that field and how mature it is. Nazi Germany of course heavily used statistical modeling and even contracted with IBM to quantify Jewish populations.
- This your point of view is kind of silly when you think about it. They used the modeling going after jews, but going after the people that were German but hid jews was much more difficult. With moden AI/statistical modeling they'd take all those people too.
- Most of Nazi Germany is after the fact revision. They were popular around the world in the 1930s - for their plan to deal with the Jews. It is only after they went to war that we decided they were bad for that plan as well. (some people were opposed to the plan all along, but there were plenty who were in favor of it)
- > Because you can't do the Nazi Germany thing these days. I mean... disgust aside, it kinda failed.
It failed because Nazi Germany was not militarily superior to combination of the nations that it got upset with it externally, not because of any internal failure of control. While its nice to think that Nazi Germany “failing” somehow disproves the viability of the same broad kind of one-party, massacre-the-opposition totalitarianism, it isn't really justified.
- Human law enforcement hallucinates all the time. This is a bit like a poor argument against self driving.
- The last line of GP's comment is key here: "Who do I sue if Palantir decides I am an illegal?"
This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.
- I think you're confused about the mechanism involved. It's hard to get satisfaction due to e.g. qualified immunity. The fact they use technology is largely irrelevant. You couldn't sue the NSA for spying on you before AI either.
- "Computer says no", look it up.
Cars measure success by not hitting things.
Cops measure success by number of people they arrest. Note, not the number of people found guilty, that's the prosecutor.
Cops will gladly use a hallucinating computer system to beat the absolute fuck out of you with qualified immunity.
- > Cops measure success by number of people they arrest.
Simply not true. Police KPIs tend to focus on crime rates.
Regardless, they can mistreat you with or without AI backing.
- The elected officials like chiefs get judged on crime rates. Individual officers are on arrests and tickets (regardless of rules against quotas)
- If we assume they are on quotas then what difference does technology make? They had quotas before the technology, qualified immunity too. 100 false arrests with no recourse are 100 false arrests with no recourse.
If anything I would expect technology favors the victim of false arrest because it gives the cop a face-saving get out. Previously, a cop who false-arrested you would have been incentivized to take it all the way, because you getting justice for it is intrinsically tied to impugning their word and/or reputation.
- So, why does Anthropic need so much aggressive marketing lately?
- Somewhat counter quote...
"Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats." -- Howard Aiken
...to mean that, usually, the good ideas are the crazy sounding ones...
- Well there's a survivor bias that I think plays into the quote.
If its a good idea that's obvious, it's already used widely. If its not obvious, you'll still have to convince people. None of that requires lots of lies, though.
- Date is actually (2004). The (2008) was just a single paragraph update (now immaterial) added at the top in response to making the news back then.
- It is a bit overstated as a universal rule, but as a practical heuristic it is excellent
- I completely disagree with the title. Good ideas should be either self evident or at least become clearly apparent with strong evidence. Typically that is not the case.
People are social critters that typically fear originality, and not by just a little bit either. Most people find originality repulsive no matter how well qualified a good idea may be. Instead, most people look towards social validation. A socially validated bad idea has vastly superior acceptance for most people as compared to any good idea.
We all like to think we are rational actors, but most of us aren’t and never will be.
- Terrence McKenna said something similar…
“The truth doesn’t require your participation, only bullshit does.”
- This is also a good reminder that Paul Krugman opposed the Iraq War from the start. The Iraq War is still the most important part of populist narratives about elite untrustworthiness, but populists never ask about exceptions, and if we judge people and institutions by their stand on the Iraq war today, it has to go both ways.
- Something interesting about my experience with the Iraq War was that, as a 9 year old living in DC at a wealthy, liberal private school, everyone knew from the beginning it was all a lie. I only learned fairly recently that a vast majority of the country thought invading Iraq was a good idea.
- the author of this post has a book called Lying for Money which I'd definitely recommend.
- my opinion is that lies have no relevance to if the idea is good or bad. liars lie and honest people are honest. ideas are not people and do not care who it is that thought them up.
- "Any idea"
- Good maxim with general applicability: cryptocurrency, wars in the middle east, online age verification checks.
- This explains why Fauci lying to the American people about masks so that they'd be "available for healthcare workers" landed so poorly.
- > This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyse traffic. Your IP address and user agent are shared with Google, together with performance and security metrics, to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics and to detect and address abuse.
I’m kind of conflicted and confused faced with this message on this site, especially with the content of the post. Can someone explain why I’m feeling annoyed?
- It's a generic blogger blogspot cookie banner. It's a free blogging platform but you can attach your own domain to it. (not sure about hosting)
For example: http://fototour.blogspot.com
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- > My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim
At the risk of missing the point, I have to say that knowing what we know now, this is a very poor heuristic. Predicting a lack of WMD was not only correct by mere coincidence, but also irrelevant to the decisions made about the war in Iraq.
What is this blog post even saying? When you can't distinguish a lie, trust the room vibes? Seeking comfort won't give you any answers or get you closer to the truth.
Not enough people ask "why". They instead argue about effectiveness or correctness. At some point you have to determine whether you're chasing the truth to make a decision or just for its own sake. In the vast majority of cases what you want is a decision that will produce the desired results. That's the real reason why lies happen and why merely knowing the truth doesn't get you anywhere and often nobody cares.
EDIT: for the sanity of any late replies. My bad. I replaced the part about AI with something I thought was more interesting.
- It pretty clearly says, "Do not give liars the benefit of the doubt with respect to their current claims." If you want to believe there are WMDs in Iraq, do it because you have evidence, or at least the word of trustworthy people. Don't assume that there has to be a little fig leaf WMD in Iraq because the Emperor wouldn't really go out in public naked.
Was it immaterial to the fact that we were going to war, regardless of the effectiveness of the "sell"? Yes, that's true, but it gives a lot of cover to the Bush administration that so many people, including 110 Democratic congressmen, voted for the authorization to use military force.
Why is it being re-posted now? Who knows... AI, Iran, whatever.
- > Right now, we have a similar situation with AI. Not enough people are asking why AI is being pushed so hard. Instead they pointlessly bicker about its effectiveness.
We know why it's being pushed so hard - people need a return on all that money being burnt.
It's effectiveness is argued about because it's not clear one way or the other where things are, where they are heading, and where they will end up.
There has been a strong push for AI/AGI since before computing, so every time there's a breakthrough to the next level there's a hypewagon doing the rounds, followed by a "oh, actually it's not there yet" - and this time, like every other time, we go through a "is this the time? It's so tantalisingly close"
Are we actually there now? Emphatically no.
Are we at a point where it's usable and improving our lives - yes, with a PILE of caveats.
Edit: I wanted to add
There's always "True believers" whenever there is a fork in the road, and con artists looking to take advantage of them, but that happens whether there is a genuine breakthrough, or not - the hype is never a guide on whether the breakthrough exists OR not, so purely being a sceptic isn't worthwhile (IMO)
- How was predicting a lack of WMD correct by mere coincidence? He ignored the blatant liars, believed people with a good record on the subject, and got it right as a result. That's not coincidence, that's an excellent heuristic.
It is a bit of a weird article, though. Correctly predicting Iraq isn't some amazing feat. All it required was being paying some vague attention to the available facts. The question is not, how did some people get it right. The question is, how did so many people not?
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- It is also a useful trick to keep in mind the opposite of critical thinking - following the herd. Just copying everyone around you is often a great strategy. So good that even if everyone around you are making mistakes it can still be the dominant strategy (there is a reason a lot of people who don't like war are cowed into silence when war fever descends). Most people are using it.
That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. People aren't trying to be right. Any sort of principle-based analysis easily outperforms the herd. When leaders in society start lying that is indeed one of those situations. Pretty much any situation where everyone knows something and the hard statistics are telling a different story is.
The more pressing problem is how to go from a lovable Cassandra to someone who can preempt major events and convince the herd to not hurt itself in its confusion. Coincidentally that is how markets work, people who have a habit of being right are given full powers to overrule the mob and just do what they want. Markets don't care if everyone believes something. They care if people who got the calls right last time believe something.
In this case, the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII and even there they waited until the war was mostly over and the major participants in the European theatres were exhausted before getting involved. The record is pretty bad. Iraq was an easy call to anyone who cares about making accurate predictions.
- > That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong
I think this true but misleading — conditioned on other people going with the herd in the wrong direction, it is easy to be right. However, often the herd is going in a right (or at least acceptable) direction. The continual effort to check if the herd is going in the right direction _is not_ easy. If a magic eight ball could alert you “hey the herd is wrong right now, take a closer look”, that would be great! But we have no such magic eight ball.
- Very often the fact that the herd is going in that direction causes it to become the right direction, e.g. the stock market.
- >magic ball
The comment mentioned it..
>principle-based analysis..
- > the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII
Korean War, Panama, and Gulf War were rather successful, resulting in a (more) US-aligned and prosperous South Korea/Panama/Gulf. Without these wars, South Korea wouldn't exist, Panama would probably still be a dictatorship, Saddam Hussein would control Kuwait and the US would have significantly less influence among the GCC.
- The Gulf war turned out to be a disaster, it set the US up for 30 years of moral humiliation and strategic degradation in the middle east. They're still fighting the same people, to this day! And slowly going bankrupt Soviet-style because of it. They'd be far better off in a counterfactual universe where they didn't get involved fighting people in the middle east; the Chinese strategy of simply investing the money in domestic industry has been far more effective.
- "set the US up" is doing a lot of non-credible rhetorical heavy lifting. In no way did the first Gulf War predetermine the Iraq War, which is what you're trying to insinuate.
- I'm going a bit further than insinuating, I think there is a link between the time Bush Sr & Cheney fought Saddam Hussein and the other time Bush Jr and Cheney fought Saddam Hussein. In the same place for largely the same reasons. The events connected. The main difference is as the internet took hold the Bush family had a much harder time covering up the fact that they were ruining their own country and eventually got forced out of presidential politics as the consequences of leaving them in command of the US military became apparent. Thank goodness for that too.
EDIT I saw that deleted comment; bit of a faux pas to respond I know but.. look, there was an invitation for you to cherry pick the most successful US military interventions after WWII. Korea is a great example. Panama too for all I know. But a Bush attacking Saddam Hussein's Iraq is not the hill to plan a defence on, the US policy there used to be one of the top 2 go-tos for US tactical success leading to strategic failure up until the unfolding Trump-Iran episode.
338 points by sedev 1 day ago | 182 comments