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#5972·Dennis HackethalOP revised about 17 hours ago·AI-assistedForum Rules
Veritula welcomes a wide range of discussion topics. Generally speaking, people have free speech here. Unpopular topics will not automatically get people banned. The goal of moderation is to preserve productive, truth-seeking discussion.
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I’m not using AI for this response and will not do so moving forward on Veritula to respect the rules and what seems to be the sentiment behind these rules (unless they change). My criticism is made in good faith and I will try to be especially careful not to make an unwanted mistake in this regard, because usually I would ask AI to check my wording for that.
I’ve been told by someone here that they preferred to talk to a person, not to an AI. This argument is understandable when there is no effort or no thinking involved by the human who uses the AI, or even worse, when the argument is not even looked at and just fed into an LLM to produce some counter, which is disrespectful, does not honor the time, effort and good faith of the other, and why the idea of a meat proxy and the criticism regarding that behavior makes sense. However, in my opinion, AI-assisted can mean many different things, some of which should be encouraged, not restricted or even punished.
Here are two examples that come to mind:
My English is not great but the English from a Spanish friend of mine is considerably worse, and I wonder if I should tell him about this platform, because he would usually use AI to polish his English. Instead, of course, he could use Spanish and then let it be translated. I understand this would probably be possible under the current rules but I’m not entirely sure. If it is, would it also be allowed for him to use a tool that makes it sound not like a literal translation, if he still understands afterwards what is being said? An AI assist here seems helpful for everyone involved.
All my contributions on this platform before this post have been AI-assisted in part exactly because I wanted to be as respectful of my counterpart’s time and effort (and those of any observers) as possible: I am aware that we sometimes can misunderstand the other’s position or use rhetorical moves without noticing it. So I would send the conversation we have had so far to the AI, share my thoughts on how I understand it and want to proceed, ask it to steelman the other side’s view, and see if its response would help me. It would then be a back and forth where I would try to figure out for myself if I should really change my mind on this or, if not, how exactly I want to respond to the steelmanned version to make my point clear. Now, as a result here I got the criticism that the language should be simpler and the arguments shorter, which is great feedback! I would incorporate that for the future, and any other criticism that I agree would make it better for the discussion. This would then be the current best version I have to offer, but yes, it’s with the use of an AI tool instead of me going out to talk with some philosopher friends about the latest criticism, taking notes, and then have some other friend check my final version for rhetorical moves, clarity, simplicity and shortness before posting it here.
In general, one question in my mind is how future proof this kind of rule is - if we merge more with the tools around us, if they are more integrated in us, would it still not be wanted to use them if done in good faith?
Name the AI checkbox, say AI-written ideas don’t earn badges, and let moderators revoke badges, retroactively too
Forum Rules
Veritula welcomes a wide range of discussion topics. Generally speaking, people have free speech here. Unpopular topics will not automatically get people banned. The goal of moderation is to preserve productive, truth-seeking discussion.
Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress is a bannable offense. Such behavior includes, but is not limited to, harassment, brigading, rage baiting, public shaming, and persistent bad-faith argumentation or refusal to engage substantively.
Veritula takes intellectual property seriously and reserves the right to take down content that infringes on others’ intellectual property.
Veritula also reserves the right to take down obscene content such as pornography.
AI-generated content may be submitted, but only if disclosed prominently enough so a reasonable person can tell right away. Veritula is a place for genuine discussion and truth-seeking, so we’d prefer to avoid talking to meat proxies without realizing it. AI content is notoriously verbose – don’t flood discussions with it. In addition, it’s your responsibility to ensure that AI detectors give negative results for your content. Repeat submission of AI-generated content that is not disclosed and/or overly verbose is a bannable offense.
To ensure a high quality of discussions and avoid having to refute and re-refute ideas already known to be wrong, members of Veritula are expected to make an effort to act rationally and take ideas seriously. They should stay at least somewhat up to date on discussion outcomes and avoid repeating the same discussions. Advocacy of ideas with pending criticisms and/or rejection of ideas without pending criticisms – in short, deviations from rationality as defined here – may result in a warning when someone should reasonably already know better. Repeat offenses may result in a temporary or permanent ban. Don’t rely on memory alone to decide whether to adopt an idea. Look it up on Veritula and go by whether the idea has pending criticisms – dispassionately, the way a judge would look up a law in a legal text. If you personally disagree, you can say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’ To make things easier, there’s a search page. You can also subscribe to notifications on an idea to stay up to date on any new criticisms (hit the bell icon in the upper right corner of an idea). You can also enable email notifications in your settings.
Serious instances of off-platform behavior that clearly would have violated these rules on-platform may result in removal.
Depending on the severity of an infraction, moderators may issue a warning, temporarily lock an account, or permanently ban the account.
Looking for loopholes in these rules, or abusing the letter to violate the spirit of these rules, is a bannable offense.
Moderation decisions are at the discretion of Veritula.
Users may appeal moderation decisions by contacting the moderators within a reasonable time after a decision. Appeals should explain why the decision was wrong. Appeals are reviewed at the moderators’ discretion. The same decision may be appealed only once.
Talks with moderators should remain respectful and constructive. Changes to these rules should be proposed by criticizing this idea before issues arise. Changes are generally not retroactive unless specified otherwise.
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Forum Rules
Veritula welcomes a wide range of discussion topics. Generally speaking, people have free speech here. Unpopular topics will not automatically get people banned. The goal of moderation is to preserve productive, truth-seeking discussion.
Behavior that is intended, or likely, to sabotage debate or prevent progress is a bannable offense. Such behavior includes, but is not limited to, harassment, brigading, rage baiting, public shaming, and persistent bad-faith argumentation or refusal to engage substantively.
Veritula takes intellectual property seriously and reserves the right to take down content that infringes on others’ intellectual property.
Veritula also reserves the right to take down obscene content such as pornography.
Content written with AI may be submitted, but only if disclosed: when posting, tick “Text written with AI?” if AI wrote any part of your idea, including polishing or translating your own writing. Veritula is a place for genuine discussion and truth-seeking, so we’d prefer to avoid talking to meat proxies without realizing it. AI content is notoriously verbose – don’t flood discussions with it. In addition, it’s your responsibility to ensure that AI detectors give negative results for content you don’t mark as written with AI. Repeat submission of content written with AI that is not disclosed and/or overly verbose is a bannable offense.
Badges reward your own contributions, so ideas written with AI don’t count toward them, disclosed or not. Badges follow the current rules, so those earned under earlier rules may be revoked.
To ensure a high quality of discussions and avoid having to refute and re-refute ideas already known to be wrong, members of Veritula are expected to make an effort to act rationally and take ideas seriously. They should stay at least somewhat up to date on discussion outcomes and avoid repeating the same discussions. Advocacy of ideas with pending criticisms and/or rejection of ideas without pending criticisms – in short, deviations from rationality as defined here – may result in a warning when someone should reasonably already know better. Repeat offenses may result in a temporary or permanent ban. Don’t rely on memory alone to decide whether to adopt an idea. Look it up on Veritula and go by whether the idea has pending criticisms – dispassionately, the way a judge would look up a law in a legal text. If you personally disagree, you can say something like: ‘Although I personally disagree, at the current state of the discussion, idea X (link to the idea on V) is (or is not) rationally adoptable.’ To make things easier, there’s a search page. You can also subscribe to notifications on an idea to stay up to date on any new criticisms (hit the bell icon in the upper right corner of an idea). You can also enable email notifications in your settings.
Serious instances of off-platform behavior that clearly would have violated these rules on-platform may result in removal.
Depending on the severity of an infraction, moderators may issue a warning, revoke badges, temporarily lock an account, or permanently ban the account.
Looking for loopholes in these rules, or abusing the letter to violate the spirit of these rules, is a bannable offense.
Moderation decisions are at the discretion of Veritula.
Users may appeal moderation decisions by contacting the moderators within a reasonable time after a decision. Appeals should explain why the decision was wrong. Appeals are reviewed at the moderators’ discretion. The same decision may be appealed only once.
Talks with moderators should remain respectful and constructive. Changes to these rules should be proposed by criticizing this idea before issues arise. Changes are generally not retroactive unless specified otherwise.
Site-wide terms and the terms of any bounty you take part in apply as well.
#5969·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedYes, I think you misunderstood. I've been referring to continuity in the organization of information processing, not the physical substrate. Evolutionary continuity is relevant because humans and other animals share many mechanisms and processing structures, some of which may be relevant to sentience. That doesn't imply that evolution couldn't also produce fundamentally new cognitive capacities.
organization of information processing
What does this mean if nothing physical? You mean the structure of their code?
Until about a week ago, when I debated this with my friend Tom Hyde, it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. Throwing a birthday party is solving a problem, and so is stopping an asteroid that is heading toward Earth. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. However, the fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most awe-inspiring skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch argues beauty is objective and improves like science. But beauty doesn’t look like a problem we need to solve. Why do we seek it out?
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” Bigger problems are riskier, but a bigger vision lets you raise more money and hire better people, which reduces the risk. So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition is bounded.
The child who grows up knowing they will inherit several large companies might aim to build an even bigger one, while the child of, say, a cashier might aim to be a cashier. Each is working from a conjecture about what is within reach, formed from what they see the people around them do. It only gets criticized if the child asks whether they could do what someone like Elon Musk did, or something nobody has done before. That is why optimism matters for ambition. It says the only limit is what we don’t yet know.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
#5966·Dennis Hackethal, 1 day ago… I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As I understood it, you argued that it mattered insofar as it was part of evolutionary continuity. Did I misunderstand you there?
Yes, I think you misunderstood. I've been referring to continuity in the organization of information processing, not the physical substrate. Evolutionary continuity is relevant because humans and other animals share many mechanisms and processing structures, some of which may be relevant to sentience. That doesn't imply that evolution couldn't also produce fundamentally new cognitive capacities.
#5965·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.
Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.
So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.
In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing.
But we already know both current and future MacBooks will have von Neumann architecture. We already know it’s only different programming that could matter re: consciousness.
#5965·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.
Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.
So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.
And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.
I disagree. I think there’s an important break/jump in human evolution: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/the-neo-darwinian-theory-of-the-mind
#5965·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.
Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.
So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.
… I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As I understood it, you argued that it mattered insofar as it was part of evolutionary continuity. Did I misunderstand you there?
#5934·Dennis Hackethal, 3 days agoThere’s also continuity in how MacBooks process information over the years, and how their hardware evolved, including ‘sensory processing’ like their cameras and microphones, yet none of them are sentient/conscious, and if one became conscious tomorrow, it would have nothing to do with its hardware and everything to do with its software.
I think you're still missing the distinction I've made. Initially, you invoked substrate independence as though it contradicted my argument, but I never argued that the physical substrate was what mattered.
As Tegmark explains in the article you linked, it's the organization of information processing that matters, not the material implementing it. And that's exactly what I've been talking about: humans and other animals share evolved mechanisms with significant continuity in how information processing is organized.
Your MacBook analogy doesn't address that. In fact, if a future MacBook became sentient, it would be very interesting to investigate its predecessors (probably) ONLY if they shared a sufficiently similar organization of information processing. If, instead, sentience arose through a fundamentally different program, those predecessors would be much less plausible candidates for sentience.
So when you conclude that it would be about software rather than hardware, you're arguing against a claim I never made.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
… I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
She’s unconscious for all of that! It shows the opposite.
I shouldn’t be a hypocrite…
Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…
More unnecessarily complicated language.
Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…
More needlessly complicated language.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
Because nothing is missing in our explanations of how calculators, roombas, self-driving cars etc work. Consciousness doesn’t figure in our explanations of them. The information processing animals do is the same as that of calculators etc. So the same conclusion applies.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
Because then it can be explained fully in terms of mindless execution of a pre-written computer program.
#5958·Vincent Brunsch, 1 day ago·AI-assistedI think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity…
More unnecessarily complicated language.
#5943·Dennis Hackethal revised 3 days ago… because it could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.
I don’t think that’s right. There could be animal behavior I’d have serious trouble explaining.
People asked me about this at Conjecture Con. For example, if we took an animal out of the context in which it evolved, and put it in a new context it didn’t evolve for – that’s where animals bug out – but instead of bugging out, it behaved more like a human in an unknown situation and became reflective, actually seemed to understand what was going on, that would at least give me pause.
I can’t be more specific than that because it would depend in part on new knowledge the animal would have to create in that situation, and by definition I can’t predict new knowledge. But I’d know it when I see it.
That may not be completely satisfying, but it shows that it’s simply not true that any animal behavior “could always in principle have been produced by a nonconscious program.” (Or rather, the implication that I could always explain any animal behavior away.)
To be as specific as I can though, video 15 in my series on animals and sleepwalkers shows the kind of thing I mean. The woman in the video is asleep while talking to her husband for most of the video, but toward the end she wakes up, and there’s something different in her eyes and about her attitude and responses. It’s hard to put into words, but again you know it when you see it.
I think this leaves my central criticism unresolved: Your hypothetical "I'd know it when I see it" seems to test whether an animal possesses universal creativity, whereas my question is whether it can have subjective experiences without possessing that capacity.
Even if an animal never demonstrated the kind of reflective understanding you describe, why would that count as evidence that it cannot feel pain, fear, or anything else?
This seems to depend on the very connection between universal creativity and sentience that is under dispute. What is the independent reason for thinking that noncreative information processing cannot support phenomenal experience?
And I find your sleepwalking example particularly interesting in this regard, because it seems to support the possibility that these capacities don't need to go together. In the video, you yourself point out that the woman can recognize objects and taste, including recognizing that rice cakes are dry, even while asleep.
When she wakes up, however, what seems to change is her capacity for reflective awareness and understanding.
#5956·Moritz WallawitschOP, 2 days ago·AI-assistedFixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.
This idea (#5956) should be revised to be marked as a criticism.
#1678·Dennis Hackethal, about 1 year agoImmortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas is not immoral
If that’s the title of your essay, you would want to use title case consistently.
Fixed. The discussion title now uses title case: ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.
Moritz Wallawitsch updated discussion ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas is not immoral’.
The title changed from ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas is not immoral’ to ‘Immortality, Billionaires, and Copying Business Ideas Is Not Immoral’.
The ‘About’ section changed as follows:
Dropped the corrected clause of the Deutsch quote; footnote links his erratum (answers #1673).
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.
Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for1.
The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction2. Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.
If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.
Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous3. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable4, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.
But isn't competition for losers?
Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
- Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
- Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
- Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
- Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
- Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.
Altruism
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.
The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.
Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.
People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.
Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.
Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.
Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.
Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.
Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.
CRISPER-edited Super Babies
Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it5.
Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.
That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.
History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.
Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.
The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.6
Billionaires
Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.7
I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61
See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968
Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.
Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for1.
The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction2. Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.
If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.
Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous3. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable4, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.
But isn't competition for losers?
Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
- Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
- Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
- Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
- Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
- Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.
Altruism
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.
The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.
Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.
People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.
Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.
Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.
Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.
Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.
Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.
CRISPER-edited Super Babies
Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it5.
Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.
That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.
History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.
Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.
The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.6
Billionaires
Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now.7
I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61
See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968
Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218. I omit the sentence’s final clause (“and you and I would be immortal”), which Deutsch corrected in the book’s errata.
Synced with latest draft: Altman line, fisherman gloss, Deutsch flowers, gap in theory.
The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition
Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the simple Popperian view mentioned, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires' Row apartment? Why am I so drawn to these problems? It can’t just be because they are status symbols. I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Future desires are unknowable thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story. The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire it does not give me a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge.
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not pick the bigger problem, since if you solve it society will reward you accordingly. Or should you only be guided by curiosity; as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don't think ambition has a ceiling.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don't yet know what we'd want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition
Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the Popperian view above, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires’ Row apartment? Status plays a part, but I think I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Some of my desires I know already, like the mansion. Most I don’t know yet. Future desires are unknowable, thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story (a businessman advises a fisherman to scale up his business so he can retire and fish). The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire doesn’t mean I get a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge. Deutsch’s example is flowers: they evolved to attract insects, yet we find them beautiful too.
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not solve the problem people pay the most for? Or should you only be guided by curiosity, as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants or where the most interesting gaps are? I don’t know. This is a gap in my theory, and I’d love for someone to fill it. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don’t think ambition has a ceiling.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don’t yet know what we’d want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
Updated to the current Substack version; fixes the copyedits. Open: #1673 (erratum) and #1678 (title).
Elaboration:
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened me to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for multiple output styles and a landing page that better explained the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes those that copying business ideas is moral, that death is moral, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral.
Morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for.
The most fundamental tenant of morality is to not remove the means of problem-solving and error correction. If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu largely failed because it was only a surface level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation and holding back innovation is immoral.
I think it’s interesting to ponder how this wrong moral belief originated. Why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. However, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) are exploiting this system to prevent competition.
Competition is not always for losers
But isn't competition for losers? (Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One). In a demand constrained market—yes. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots would be shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
* Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
* Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
* Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
* Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
* Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI image and video generation becomes possible demand for this kind of software is exploding.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business.
Helping others
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problem. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism is the embodiment of this error. For example, taxing the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote myself, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Everyone has heard bad arguments about death being good. Such as death being the only reason that life is “precious” (there are other great reasons). Ultimately I think these originated to cope with the fear of death. My friend Arjun explained this further in his blog post.
Wanting to be a billionaire
Some people claim that the fact that billionaires exist is immoral. That is wrong. I'd even go so far to say not wanting to be a billionaire is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism.
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
—Javier Milei
We are like billionaires to people living 2000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Similarly, it’s likely that because certain people prevented the means of error correction through history we are not immortal and exploring the stars by now.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
I recently spent a Sunday vibe coding an ai-image-gen micro-SaaS. The person that inspired me accused me of copying his product and threatened to damage my reputation. However, I improved on his idea by implementing several features his product didn’t have such as allowing for 7 multiple output styles, custom prompts, churn-prevention email follow-ups, and a landing page that better explains the product.
Most people hold fundamentally wrong ideas about morality. This includes thinking that copying business ideas or having CRISPR-edited super babies is immoral, that death is good, that the existence of billionaires is wrong, and that not helping others is immoral. They all spring from an avoidance of conflict: the conflict of ideas, the conflict of accepting not to exist, the conflict of envy, etc. This “morality” becomes destructive because it’s scared of the turning forces of evolution by evading conflict and adversity of any kind. It’s suffocating.
Morality is best explained by epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), not religion or intuition. With this lens morality is the knowledge about what to want, and what to strive for1.
The most fundamental tenet of morality is to not remove the means of error-correction2. Since error-correction is the only way our knowledge can improve.
If society hinders a scientist from inventing and distributing a cure for cancer, that is deeply immoral. Many regulations that restrict the freedom of people and their ideas are immoral.
Copying someone's business
The Samwer brothers famously copied Airbnb and other companies, but these companies provided the solution to people in different geographies or demographics, improving access to the solution.
Their Airbnb clone, Wimdu, largely failed because it was only a surface-level copy that didn’t innovate on any aspect of the business. It incentivized Airbnb to innovate on better host support, internationalization, trust infrastructure, and regulatory compliance.
Opening a lemonade stand two blocks from an existing one incentivizes both lemonade stand operators to improve their lemonade. Competition leads to innovation.
Now, why do most people believe that copying someone’s business is immoral?
I think the main reason is that people think ideas can be “stolen”. That is wrong. Ideas are non-rivalrous3. And everyone should be incentivized to reproduce them and correct their errors. Problems are solvable4, and there is an infinity of problems (people always want more). IP law is another way to incentivize people to innovate. Unfortunately, large companies like Amazon (with hundreds of people in their internal legal department working on IP law) exploit this system to prevent competition.
But isn't competition for losers?
Peter Thiel famously proclaimed this in his book Zero to One. In a demand-constrained market, this is true. Building another AI headshot app wouldn’t be a great idea if the demand for AI headshots were shrinking rapidly. It is not.
Even Founders Fund (Thiel’s venture firm) invested in companies with strong competition:
- Ramp: Launched two years after Brex; both grew quickly as financial operations digitalized.
- Spotify: Entered a crowded market (iTunes, Pandora, Rhapsody) just as music streaming took off.
- Rippling: Entered HR/payroll after Gusto, ADP, and Paychex; succeeded by bundling HR, IT, and finance as businesses moved to the cloud.
- Postmates: Was started after Grubhub and Seamless, but grew fast as on-demand delivery became a habit.
- Icon.com: Was started after there were already countless AI ad generator platforms. As more people consume short-form video content and realistic AI-image and video generation becomes possible, demand for this kind of software explodes.
It would be stupid to claim these companies are immoral because they copied another business. Here are some other moral mistakes I have considered lately. They range from economics to biology to altruism.
Altruism
Helping can be immoral if it prevents people from learning to solve their own problems. It can also be immoral if the invested resources could have led to a greater error correction. Socialism, with its underlying philosophy of altruism, is the embodiment of this error. For example, the US government taxes the 343 million Americans ~$1.2 trillion per year (that’s ~$3,580 per person on avg.) to fund a public education system that is stuck in the 1800s. These people could have used the resources the state took from them to buy education services from private companies that have a clear profit incentive to improve their service. To quote my previous post, “They don’t care if the students hate school” nor if they end up in student debt.
Being immortal
Death is not the only reason that life is “precious”. There are better reasons.
The idea that the shortness of life is what gives it its “meaning” is wrong. Meaning is not zero-sum. I.e., your life doesn’t have a fixed amount of meaning that is reduced if you live longer. The opposite is true, a longer life leads to more meaningful experiences. Life is more like water when you’re thirsty than a rare diamond; its value comes from how much you can experience, not from being limited in quantity.
Life is not its own meaning. Meaning comes from the things you do and create. If your life is unbounded, so is the meaning you can create within it.
People wear seatbelts. Nobody says, “I want to get hit by a car, because my life will have more meaning if it ends sooner.” There’s nothing inherently meaningful about limitation or scarcity by itself. If that were true, a two-day life would be more meaningful than a 70-year life.
Some argue that meaningfulness of life is binary. But if knowing the exact day of your death feels terrifying, that shows that it’s not simply mortality that gives meaning, but the unpredictable and exciting adventure of living itself.
Even Christianity calls death an enemy from humanity’s fall, promising its end: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). In paradise, “death shall be no more” (Revelation 21:4). It sees death as a problem to be solved, not a source of meaning.
Ultimately I think arguments that claim death is moral originated to cope with the fear of death. The thought that our existence suddenly stops. All the laughter, parties, friends, interesting conversation, sex, beautiful landscapes and skylines are suddenly taken from us, for eternity.
Nick Bostrom in his essay The Fable of the Dragon‑Tyrant calls this "deathist" ideology—the passive acceptance of what should be humanity's greatest enemy. My friend Arjun criticized other common arguments against immortality in his blog post.
Involuntary death isn’t a cosmic necessity; it’s a biological error, possibly the greatest error of all. And it’s one we may soon be able to fix. Just imagine the inventions we never experienced and how many more lives would flourish today if people like Euclid, Newton, Tesla, Marie Curie, or Alan Turing would still be alive.
CRISPER-edited Super Babies
Some people don’t like the idea of us playing God. But that is what we are now. We are as gods and might as well get good at it5.
Others claim that gene-editing super babies (to be free from disease or just smarter) would be an innovation that only the rich could afford, thereby creating a segregated society. The 1997 movie Gattaca is a dramatization of this claim.
That logic is wrong because it impedes the spread of an innovation (and error correction). The assumption that non-gene-improved people will be relegated to menial jobs is also wrong because there are many wealthy people with fun jobs who are low in IQ or disabled.
History shows that innovation disperses. Initially only the rich could afford better nutrition or computers. Should we have waited before allowing people to buy a computer until they are cheap enough for eight billion people to have their own? No.
Opposing gene-editing is like opposing antibiotics because not everyone could afford penicillin in 1928.
The technology is here. Using embryo selection or gene editing to have a super baby is a choice about your body and procreation. Some people don't think you should have this choice. But *it's not their choice to make. It's yours*.6
Billionaires
Some people claim billionaires shouldn’t exist. That is wrong. I'd even go so far as to say that not wanting to be a billionaire (or trillionaire) is wrong. Ambition is a consequence of optimism. In his Davos 2024 speech Javier Milei said:
Let no one tell you that your ambition is immoral
We are like billionaires to people living 5000 years ago. If some of these people did not desire immense wealth, we’d probably still live in mud huts now. We're like iron age peasants to the people that will live 2000 years from now.
Like every other destruction of optimism, whether in a whole civilization or in a single individual, these must have been unspeakable catastrophes for those who had dared to expect progress. But we should feel more than sympathy for those people. We should take it personally. For if any of those earlier experiments in optimism had succeeded, our species would be exploring the stars by now, and you and I would be immortal.7
I think the disgust of the existence of billionaires likely stems from envy. But that response is wrong. What matters is not the relative, but the absolute wealth and well-being of people. In the future, inequality will become ever greater. Some people will own entire galaxies, while others will only own a continent on a single planet. Everyone will be immensely more wealthy.
Thanks for reading this. I’ll now continue playing the infinite game of capitalism.
Thanks to my friends for feedback on this essay: Tom Hyde, Milan Scharfe, Ben Chugg, Vaden Masrani, Maxime Desalle, Saketh, Jesse Ray Nichols, David Taurat, Logan Chipkin, Brian Chau, Remus
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3. The Spark, Page 61
See discussion here: https://nav.al/david-deutsch
While ideas as abstract knowledge are non-rivalrous, their application can involve rivalry over scarce complementary resources such as capital, employees, customers, or attention. In this practical sense, ideas can “compete,” but this competition is itself part of the process of error-correction and innovation.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 3, The Spark, Page 64
Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog, opening sentence, 1968
Quoting my friend Kian Sadeghi in his launch video for Nucleus.
The Beginning of Infinity, Chapter 9, Optimism, Page 218
The Epistemology and Defence of Ambition
Until about a week ago it seemed incredibly obvious to me that wanting to be rich is rational but I could not explain why. Fundamentally I agree with Popper and Deutsch that all life is problem solving. But is not having a mansion on Lake Como a problem? Is not being immortal a problem? How do we decide between these?
The lone scientist obsessed with some theoretical problem strikes most people as weird. How can someone toil for 30 years on a problem, living on a modest salary, without any desire to accumulate massive wealth? According to the simple Popperian view mentioned, that is completely rational. The scientist is fully engrossed in problem solving.
If that is true, why am I and most people so drawn to solving my problem of not having a mansion on Lake Como, driving a Bugatti hypercar, or overlooking the skyline of NYC from a Billionaires' Row apartment? Why am I so drawn to these problems? It can’t just be because they are status symbols. I’d want these things even if nobody knew about them.
I think the two reasons are:
- Wealth is the repertoire of things you can do. I can likely only experience these things with incredible wealth. They are a symbol of that repertoire. Future desires are unknowable thus attaining wealth allows me to solve problems in the future I don’t know I’ll have.
- This is the antithesis to the famous fisherman story. The story contains the assumption that the fisherman already knows the problem he wants to solve. The fisherman might want to travel the world, build a school, research AI, explore space.
- Imagine a person 1000 years ago. They might only want better food, safer shelter, a healthy family, or perhaps a larger farm. But if they knew these things existed, they would desire flying across the Atlantic, playing table tennis, or listening to recorded music.
- There are clear limits to this theory. Just because I’m a septillionaire it does not give me a cure for cancer. The fundamental limitation remains the knowledge.
- Beauty is accumulated knowledge. These experiences—the lake mansion, the hypercar, the best view of the most beautiful skyline humanity has forged—are objects of incredible beauty. They are products of accumulated human knowledge. So desiring beauty is a form of desire to experience knowledge.
So how ambitious should you be? In the startup world there is this famous saying that “Starting a company is always hard and it’s about equally hard no matter what you do.” So why not pick the bigger problem, since if you solve it society will reward you accordingly. Or should you only be guided by curiosity; as that drive likely carries some latent knowledge about what society wants? I don’t know. I suspect it is best to follow a mix of these strategies. Whatever the right mix is, I don't think ambition has a ceiling.
Alexandr Wang recently said “Humans will dream bigger and bigger. Kids will dream of having their own star systems.” I think that is true. And one day kids will dream of owning several galaxies. We don't yet know what we'd want after that. Human dreams, desire, and our future are infinite.
#5750·Zelalem Mekonnen, 14 days agoThis works if the tests are identical. What happens if idea A passes test 1 but fails test 2, while idea B passes test 2 but fails test 1?
Good q. I think it would depend on the tests. For example, idea C could say: ‘Both A and B fail a test, but test 1 is more severe than test 2, so A is preferable.’
We have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly get lucid dreaming – lower instead means passive observation.
It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.
We have different degrees of awareness during different dreams, I agree. But we’re aware of them. With higher critical ability, we plausibly have more control over a dream – lower instead means passive observation.
It’s like watching a movie. I have no control over what happens in the movie, still I’m consciously aware of it. I could instead play a video game, where I do have some control over what happens, and which arguably requires more of a critical attitude. I don’t see how this refutes my stance.