LLMs are prone to hallucinate and agree with you (and hallucinate in order to agree with you). An LLM output like this is no evidence of anything.
Why did you ask it about "short term success" instead of the more important "long term success"? Is that because when you asked it about "long term success" it told you judgment is more important?
> And surprise, surprise, people rich in those features have not looked very favorably on institutions that would deemphasize those features.
If "a bet is a tax on bullshit", then people with a comparative advantage in bullshit will be threatened by betting norms & institutions built on betting.
This post, and your previous one, both showed status matters more in politics, culture, and intellectual discourse, than in business and innovation.
(I question how separable "business" and "innovation" are: most business successes are due to innovation; most technological innovations produce businesses; most other innovations are likely considered intellectual rather than "innovation".)
I think we /want/ status to matter in culture, but that asking people "do you want status to matter more or less than it does in culture?" will produce a wrong answer, because when you use the word "culture" they think of, say, Booker Prize-winning novels or symphony orchestras. Yet these very-high-status cultural artifacts are not even part of our culture anymore. No one reads Booker Prize-winning novels, which mostly suck; no one writes symphonies that the public wants to hear anymore. Our culture is Marvel movies, pop music, and Instagrams. Entertainment. And entertainment is about the stars, not about the aesthetic experience. People go to see movies for the actors, listen to songs by singers who are young, beautiful, and exciting, and follow the tweets and YouTube channels of the people who are most-provocative.
(I might even say there is nothing "wrong" about this shallow but natural elevation of instant gratification over art in culture--that "art" is inherently at least as much /anti/-culture as part of it; that any art that is truly part of a culture thereby becomes kitsch.)
What's more disturbing is that status is also the most-important thing in politics and intellectual discourse. This suggests that today they're just entertainment.
Perhaps it's always been this way. But I think Western culture became more this way after the Nazis popularized the notions of social constructivism and post-modern subjective epistemology, and the praxis of performativity with behavioristic conditioning. Those ideas and practices, imported from Heidegger to the US via Marxists and French philosophers, changed the US from a mistake-theory culture to a conflict-theory culture.
What if the outcomes of peer review judgements were tracked over time, so researchers who were best able to make successful predictions of future impact are rewarded (particularly with the privilege of distributing resources to young researchers). This kind of scientific prediction market work could even begin with university students from their first years of study (with appropriate discounting of early bets over time).
Researchers could play politics and form back scratching cliques, but if none of them end up doing break through work then their power wanes as careers reaches their potential high point, and the capacity to influence the direction of future work shrinks.
LLMs are prone to hallucinate and agree with you (and hallucinate in order to agree with you). An LLM output like this is no evidence of anything.
Why did you ask it about "short term success" instead of the more important "long term success"? Is that because when you asked it about "long term success" it told you judgment is more important?
I was trying to avoid the tendency of LLMs to idealize.
> And surprise, surprise, people rich in those features have not looked very favorably on institutions that would deemphasize those features.
If "a bet is a tax on bullshit", then people with a comparative advantage in bullshit will be threatened by betting norms & institutions built on betting.
This post, and your previous one, both showed status matters more in politics, culture, and intellectual discourse, than in business and innovation.
(I question how separable "business" and "innovation" are: most business successes are due to innovation; most technological innovations produce businesses; most other innovations are likely considered intellectual rather than "innovation".)
I think we /want/ status to matter in culture, but that asking people "do you want status to matter more or less than it does in culture?" will produce a wrong answer, because when you use the word "culture" they think of, say, Booker Prize-winning novels or symphony orchestras. Yet these very-high-status cultural artifacts are not even part of our culture anymore. No one reads Booker Prize-winning novels, which mostly suck; no one writes symphonies that the public wants to hear anymore. Our culture is Marvel movies, pop music, and Instagrams. Entertainment. And entertainment is about the stars, not about the aesthetic experience. People go to see movies for the actors, listen to songs by singers who are young, beautiful, and exciting, and follow the tweets and YouTube channels of the people who are most-provocative.
(I might even say there is nothing "wrong" about this shallow but natural elevation of instant gratification over art in culture--that "art" is inherently at least as much /anti/-culture as part of it; that any art that is truly part of a culture thereby becomes kitsch.)
What's more disturbing is that status is also the most-important thing in politics and intellectual discourse. This suggests that today they're just entertainment.
Perhaps it's always been this way. But I think Western culture became more this way after the Nazis popularized the notions of social constructivism and post-modern subjective epistemology, and the praxis of performativity with behavioristic conditioning. Those ideas and practices, imported from Heidegger to the US via Marxists and French philosophers, changed the US from a mistake-theory culture to a conflict-theory culture.
Success breeds success.
What if the outcomes of peer review judgements were tracked over time, so researchers who were best able to make successful predictions of future impact are rewarded (particularly with the privilege of distributing resources to young researchers). This kind of scientific prediction market work could even begin with university students from their first years of study (with appropriate discounting of early bets over time).
Researchers could play politics and form back scratching cliques, but if none of them end up doing break through work then their power wanes as careers reaches their potential high point, and the capacity to influence the direction of future work shrinks.
Trump's Play on words from import tax to tariff
;https://apnews.com/article/tariffs-25-supreme-court-import-taxes-120895adbee7ae06157cd5f4bf5c7583?user_email=7dd954628c46b8ef616a90424f172af7078f06c3156f2dd4ce6db9573f861330&utm_medium=APNews_Alerts&utm_source=Sailthru_AP&utm_campaign=NewsAlert_Aug03_2026_0