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by hnews_account_1 1323 days ago
The super stupidity of using math to dazzle people around you is my greatest lesson from this. In my highly technical field, I can use math without treating it like some precious scripture. But it’s good to know it is so unfamiliar to a normal person in the VC world, I can use it to justify even a startup doing genocide as a platform or something.
2 comments
darth_aardvark 1323 days ago
> He "calculated the odds he'd fail at 20%"....

What calculation? What's the formula that gives you the odds that your Ponzi scheme will be discovered? What can possibly "model" that, aside from a scifi-level reality simulation? It's not even math, it's math LARPing.

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hnews_account_1 1323 days ago
Yes, I feel so cheated that all I needed to do to get money for my ideas was to just talk like an ayn rand novel protagonist. At least Zuckerberg did all this but was legitimately a genius. Made sense that bankers put up with that shit cos they could tell he was smart af. But when you’re larping to be a banker like most VCs are, you’ll just copy what they did like a monkey without understanding why they did it. And I wasn’t there to part their money from them. Fml.
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mrguyorama 1323 days ago
It's almost like people who don't actually know anything about math, statistics, or probability shouldn't be believed when they make poor arguments using the same.

Maybe there's a reason it takes 4 years of extremely tough classes to understand the basics of "hard" math.

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hnews_account_1 1323 days ago
It’s not just that. But like if I made up bullshit like “the emerging market populations are growing hard and will strain earth’s resources. Our startup needs to kill them to save the planet, here’s a log Utility function to explain it”, some VC out there is an idiot enough to give me money. Maybe if I’m playing league of legends while saying it, I’ll get more cash than I even want to raise.
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paganel 1323 days ago
> Maybe there's a reason it takes 4 years of extremely tough classes to understand the basics of "hard" math.

On top of that, any decent tech school also has an "ethics of engineering" course somewhere along the way, or at least I did about 20 years ago when I was a student (we had quite a stupid professor, but the intention was there).

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mrguyorama 1320 days ago
I thought it was convenient how people's response to that class immediately showed me who shouldn't be allowed to run, start or control anything. "This class is bullshit and stupid" no, you are a selfish asshole who refuses to spend even half an hour a week understanding the history of the industry and the mistakes we made and how your work will have an impact on people so refuse to let that be a negative impact.
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mjburgess 1323 days ago
Four years?

Most books, yt videos, jobs and academic press releases tell me all it takes is `import tensorflow` or `git clone github://lolcoin.git`

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