Weather forecasting has slowly and steadily evolved from mostly snake oil to a generally positive and helpful technology. Having physics and frequent reality checks has greatly assisted in moving the field in the direction toward more effective methods.
There was also the huge impact of computers. The origins of modern weather forecasting as an early application of computing fancied by von Neumann is indeed an interesting case study.
Complicated! I am sure healthcare is riddled with positive and negative examples. Yesterday, Jeff Lockhart told me "snake oil was a decent topical pain reliever brought to the US by Chinese rail workers, then other people in the US started selling ineffective knockoff products and it became synonymous with 'fraud.'"
The history of pharmaceuticals is probably exactly where I should look for positive examples. For a while it seemed like every chemical was a miracle cure, but then we had to build an FDA to sort the curatives from the poisons.
I didn't realize you felt like there was much air between you and them and am curious as to what the bullets points there might be- I've felt you were all part of a 'common sense resistance' to the whole climate. The rebranding is dumb, but both angles (and, I would have thought, yours) strike me as taking vital swings at the idea that LLMs et al. are everything their variously messianic and/or cynically-addled by investor subsidies boosters insist- a group that somehow manages to include most people worried they'll cause extinction events.
I took it as a given that 'normal' and 'snake oil' were routinely overlapping categories- we're in an age where the global pool of money is so big and so bored that essentially any marginal technology or business model can be subsidized by investors until it's so embedded that questions of utility or profitability in any old-fashioned sense are almost peripheral. So I'd answer your question with 'every app you've ever seen an ad for.' Uber comes to mind- relies on 15 years of some of the largest burn rates in history to predatory-dump its way into control of the hired car market, powered in part by nakedly dishonest promises it'd have robot cars somewhere at the halfway mark, finally turns a middling profit, and now...it's here, I guess, getting me to work when my car is busted at the hands of a driver that might still be turning a loss in some analyses.
I'd stick online sport betting in that same boat too- there's a case to be made that certain gambling prohibition regimes are too hypocritical and joyless to be worth the trouble in a harm reduction sort of way, but that got pried open to a circumstance where it's normal for all the 21 year old sports hounds in a shared house to be ten seconds away from funneling their paychecks straight into their phones in a way that I think more thoughtful are united in thinking feels like a hustle.
I hear you that we're on the same side, but it's healthy that negative polarization doesn't force us to agree. I don't know if it's worth writing a whole post about this, but I feel like I almost always disagree with Arvind.
This is too simplistic, but there's here's a subset of a long list of positions he takes that I would be on the opposite side of:
- lack of anonymity in the Netflix prize is a crisis
- bitcoin is deep and useful and good technology
- machine learning is causing replication crises
- machine learning papers should abide by research checklists
Fair- and it looks like I'm on your side of all that list (and thought Arvind was too for the bitcoin bit- I could've sworn there was a line in the normal technology paper disowning it, but I must tangling things up), with the exception of not liking the 'snake oil' frame, about which I'm genuinely curious, just because the whole atmosphere has felt to me like three card monty from the jump- the dicey logic of 'this is so dangerous we need to get it to market first', the flurry of money changing hands with an extra layer of spicy accounting to make it look like even more money is changing hands, the blitz to build integrations no one asks for before they realize they don't want them, the gulf between gamed benchmarks and worked real world utility- I've felt like PT Barnum was here the whole time. I don't want to steal your time here, but is there something about that shorthand of snake oil you feel is especially unhelpful? Is it that is implies the technology has no ability vs. a potential problematic amount, or...?
Fayerabend might say Galileo’s telescope is another case, it looked like a gimmick at first. Astronomers dismissed the early images as distortions, not evidence, and the whole enterprise had a whiff of snake oil. But within a generation it became the baseline "normal" technology of astronomy, precisely because scientists and institutions decided to trust and refine it.
> Let me be clear. I don’t think AI is snake oil OR normal technology. These are ridiculous extremes that are palatable for clicks, but don’t engage with the complexity and weirdness of computing and the persistent undercurrent promising artificial intelligence.
I realized that, while I've read a bunch of your texts, I'm not sure *what* do you think AI is. Or, to be more precise: how the field will progress, which kind of impact should we expect, and so on. In your recent participation in the Increments podcast you say something like 'the doomers have a very clean narrative of what's going to happen' (or something like this, pardon me for the misquote) and I don't find something similar for your position. In fact, there seems to be very few coherent counter-narratives to the doomer's one and, in that sense, Arvind is positioning himself to be this, whether correctly or no, it remains to be seen. So, while writing a point by point rebuttal of their view could be silly, a broad overview of your assumptions and some general predictions would be very interesting.
I have the same question - I'm intrigued but this post, but having trouble understanding what your message is or what exactly you are critiquing about their stance.
Nice article. I agree that AI isn't snake oil, but (as you seem to implicitly acknowledge) one can find examples of AI snake oil (or at least scams, overpromising and underdelivering, etc).
I'll nitpick on one point. Arvind may at one point have been a "huge fan of cryptocurrency", but in his recent work I've only seen him criticize it. For example, in his most recent post they write that crypto is a "niche... that most people can ignore". The AI Snake Oil book also presents a fairly harsh critique of cryptocurrency, concluding (if I remember correctly) that it doesn't really have a good use case, and is essentially a solution looking for a problem.
"Bitcoin is deep, novel, interesting, and based on sound principles. Beyond Bitcoin is a fascinating world of alternative cryptocurrency designs that we’re just starting to explore, some of which might one day be more important than Bitcoin itself.
We got into Bitcoin because we believe in the power of its technology, and we think it’s deeply connected to the rest of computer science."
He's allowed to jump from fad to fad, and he can change his mind about old fads. But it was clear that Bitcoin was scammy from the start. And it was more than clear by 2017.
Isn't his flip-flop on bitcoin exactly what he's doing now with AI?
Weather forecasting has slowly and steadily evolved from mostly snake oil to a generally positive and helpful technology. Having physics and frequent reality checks has greatly assisted in moving the field in the direction toward more effective methods.
There was also the huge impact of computers. The origins of modern weather forecasting as an early application of computing fancied by von Neumann is indeed an interesting case study.
How about medicine and healthcare?
Complicated! I am sure healthcare is riddled with positive and negative examples. Yesterday, Jeff Lockhart told me "snake oil was a decent topical pain reliever brought to the US by Chinese rail workers, then other people in the US started selling ineffective knockoff products and it became synonymous with 'fraud.'"
The history of pharmaceuticals is probably exactly where I should look for positive examples. For a while it seemed like every chemical was a miracle cure, but then we had to build an FDA to sort the curatives from the poisons.
Yes! Amusingly the original complaint about "snake oil" was not that snake oil was ineffective, but that what was being sold didn't contain actual snake biproducts! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/how-snake-oil-became-a-symbol-of-fraud-and-deception-180985300/
Banger. But also they’re likely doing the smart thing in modern marketing.
I didn't realize you felt like there was much air between you and them and am curious as to what the bullets points there might be- I've felt you were all part of a 'common sense resistance' to the whole climate. The rebranding is dumb, but both angles (and, I would have thought, yours) strike me as taking vital swings at the idea that LLMs et al. are everything their variously messianic and/or cynically-addled by investor subsidies boosters insist- a group that somehow manages to include most people worried they'll cause extinction events.
I took it as a given that 'normal' and 'snake oil' were routinely overlapping categories- we're in an age where the global pool of money is so big and so bored that essentially any marginal technology or business model can be subsidized by investors until it's so embedded that questions of utility or profitability in any old-fashioned sense are almost peripheral. So I'd answer your question with 'every app you've ever seen an ad for.' Uber comes to mind- relies on 15 years of some of the largest burn rates in history to predatory-dump its way into control of the hired car market, powered in part by nakedly dishonest promises it'd have robot cars somewhere at the halfway mark, finally turns a middling profit, and now...it's here, I guess, getting me to work when my car is busted at the hands of a driver that might still be turning a loss in some analyses.
I'd stick online sport betting in that same boat too- there's a case to be made that certain gambling prohibition regimes are too hypocritical and joyless to be worth the trouble in a harm reduction sort of way, but that got pried open to a circumstance where it's normal for all the 21 year old sports hounds in a shared house to be ten seconds away from funneling their paychecks straight into their phones in a way that I think more thoughtful are united in thinking feels like a hustle.
I hear you that we're on the same side, but it's healthy that negative polarization doesn't force us to agree. I don't know if it's worth writing a whole post about this, but I feel like I almost always disagree with Arvind.
This is too simplistic, but there's here's a subset of a long list of positions he takes that I would be on the opposite side of:
- lack of anonymity in the Netflix prize is a crisis
- bitcoin is deep and useful and good technology
- machine learning is causing replication crises
- machine learning papers should abide by research checklists
- all predictive optimization is bad
- we should do superforecasting about AI futures
- the ai snake oil frame
- the entire normal technology essay
Fair- and it looks like I'm on your side of all that list (and thought Arvind was too for the bitcoin bit- I could've sworn there was a line in the normal technology paper disowning it, but I must tangling things up), with the exception of not liking the 'snake oil' frame, about which I'm genuinely curious, just because the whole atmosphere has felt to me like three card monty from the jump- the dicey logic of 'this is so dangerous we need to get it to market first', the flurry of money changing hands with an extra layer of spicy accounting to make it look like even more money is changing hands, the blitz to build integrations no one asks for before they realize they don't want them, the gulf between gamed benchmarks and worked real world utility- I've felt like PT Barnum was here the whole time. I don't want to steal your time here, but is there something about that shorthand of snake oil you feel is especially unhelpful? Is it that is implies the technology has no ability vs. a potential problematic amount, or...?
This is not meant to be political, but vaccines were highly controversial / borderline quackery when they were first developed.
I mean, to prevent smallpox, you put cowpox on a dirty needle and scrape a child with it... seems bad man!
Fayerabend might say Galileo’s telescope is another case, it looked like a gimmick at first. Astronomers dismissed the early images as distortions, not evidence, and the whole enterprise had a whiff of snake oil. But within a generation it became the baseline "normal" technology of astronomy, precisely because scientists and institutions decided to trust and refine it.
It's essential that cynical rebranding and ricketty 'thought-leadership' is called out on Substack.
Hi, Ben! This part caught my attention:
> Let me be clear. I don’t think AI is snake oil OR normal technology. These are ridiculous extremes that are palatable for clicks, but don’t engage with the complexity and weirdness of computing and the persistent undercurrent promising artificial intelligence.
I realized that, while I've read a bunch of your texts, I'm not sure *what* do you think AI is. Or, to be more precise: how the field will progress, which kind of impact should we expect, and so on. In your recent participation in the Increments podcast you say something like 'the doomers have a very clean narrative of what's going to happen' (or something like this, pardon me for the misquote) and I don't find something similar for your position. In fact, there seems to be very few coherent counter-narratives to the doomer's one and, in that sense, Arvind is positioning himself to be this, whether correctly or no, it remains to be seen. So, while writing a point by point rebuttal of their view could be silly, a broad overview of your assumptions and some general predictions would be very interesting.
I have the same question - I'm intrigued but this post, but having trouble understanding what your message is or what exactly you are critiquing about their stance.
Some people claim snake oil could be useful but only water snakes in china have the chemicals.
https://www.pharmacytimes.com/view/fun-fact-what-was-snake-oil-used-to-treat-in-the-american-west-in-the-19th-century
Nice article. I agree that AI isn't snake oil, but (as you seem to implicitly acknowledge) one can find examples of AI snake oil (or at least scams, overpromising and underdelivering, etc).
I'll nitpick on one point. Arvind may at one point have been a "huge fan of cryptocurrency", but in his recent work I've only seen him criticize it. For example, in his most recent post they write that crypto is a "niche... that most people can ignore". The AI Snake Oil book also presents a fairly harsh critique of cryptocurrency, concluding (if I remember correctly) that it doesn't really have a good use case, and is essentially a solution looking for a problem.
This is from Arvind's textbook:
"Bitcoin is deep, novel, interesting, and based on sound principles. Beyond Bitcoin is a fascinating world of alternative cryptocurrency designs that we’re just starting to explore, some of which might one day be more important than Bitcoin itself.
We got into Bitcoin because we believe in the power of its technology, and we think it’s deeply connected to the rest of computer science."
He's allowed to jump from fad to fad, and he can change his mind about old fads. But it was clear that Bitcoin was scammy from the start. And it was more than clear by 2017.
Isn't his flip-flop on bitcoin exactly what he's doing now with AI?