“what do you think of gary marcus?”
Summary of results
Anyone knows Randall Carlson's take on this ?
I haven't looked at him very closely, but I'm not sure how to read Jim Cramer.
Just observing his onscreen personality at face value: He's very loud and bold, erratic, yelling ridiculous things at the audience in a Philly accent (no offense to Philly on that ... it just lends itself to a particular stereotype, like he may as well be at a bar talking about the Eagles). When his investments are bad, you can just say oh, the guy is a blowhard, not basing his opinions on keen intellectual insight; it's all entertainment purposes and so on.
But there's another cynical angle that enters, maybe it's paranoid to say but I think it's plausible: Does he have personal stake in his advice? Does he have some connections at these companies telling him to boost the stocks on air? That would enter into the realm of fraud. I guess when people confidently urge others to make ruinous financial decisions, that kind of concern always enters into it.
Yes, him being the head of an AI company means you should be skeptical. But jumping right to "let's do the exact opposite" is not sensible.
Also, sitting right next to him was Gary Marcus, who doesn't have a dog in the fight as far as I know, and he agreed with a most of the recommendations.
Nothing. It's Gary Marcus though and he's carved a niche for himself with doing this sort of thing. It's strange to me that it's given airtime on hn but there you go.
> I like Gary Marcus as a personality and I look out for his work.
That's funny, my interest in reading this article went to zero the moment I saw he wrote it.
Because he's Gary Marcus. The man has made his entire media personality about dissing AI, and he's been doing it a lot longer than LLMs have been around.
I don't want to sound hateful, but Gary Marcus really does seem to have found a nice niche as "pessimisti research scientist". most everytime I see him pop up it's to explain, usually pretty well, why X model isn't actually intelligent, conscious, etc. - often when he has just written a book or article
I feel like at this point gary marcus is an exhaustion attack on peoples’ brains, and he cannot seem to escape bad faith reasoning regarding anything involving llms.
Those are some key aspects of Gary Marcus but not the worst. The worst is that so many people listen to him. It's actually problematic because it confuses lawmakers.
Saved you another click if you also have never heard of this person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Marcus
Seconding reports that Gary Marcus is almost as big a waste of your time as Jurgen Schmidhuber.
Marcus has been writing some variant of exactly the same article multiple times a year for the last 15 years.
With all due respect, Gary Marcus is turning himself into a parody of Jürgen Schmidhuber. All he talks and writes about, to anyone who would listen, is how the work of others, that resulted in products that millions of people love, isn't good enough. He's a bit like that snob who when invited to taste the best falafel in town complains incessantly that it isn't a Michelin 3 star meal. Yes, we know it isn't. It's a falafel. And it's delicious.
Really I'd say it is coined by Gary Marcus. At least that's who I first heard discuss it.
Gary Marcus is my shamelessness role model. Twenty years ago he staked out his academic turf in "The Algebraic Mind", and he's been bravely and publicly defending it even as it's getting blatantly falsified in real time and in full view of the entire world. If I had even half of his shameless grittiness and perseverance I would be immeasurably more successful in all aspects of my life.
Gary Marcus is the definition of petty. He brands himself as an ai skeptic but in reality he's just a clout chaser more obsessed with being right and his own image than anything else.
In his mind he is always right. Every single tweet he made, every single sentence he has said is never wrong. He is 100% right everyone else is 100% wrong.
Gary Marcus has become attention seeking lately. I unfollowed him. Most of his posts were attacks on other people instead of genuine contributions on how we can make AI actually better and safer.
Easy to criticize, much harder to offer effective solutions.
Why did people downvote my comment? Gary Marcus is known for saying things like this but there are also high-profile people who disagree and this article makes it out like all experts are saying this
I kinda feel sorry for Gary Marcus. He’s carved this niche as an LLM critic and must have been delighted to have this bug to post about.
I stopped reading his Substack because he was always trying to find a negative. Meanwhile I use LLMs most days and find them very useful.
Gary Marcus' contribution to the field is to post the same rant about how it's not real intelligence, every 6 months. Why does he keep getting up voted?
Gary Marcus is the Glenn Greenwald of AI. Doesn't mean he is wrong, just that he's always spitting venom like cut snake in his proclamations.
You don't like OpenAI Gary, we get it.
Like Yann LeCun said, Gary Marcus has contributed exactly nothing to the field, he's an influencer that claims to be an expert. Just ignore him.
Yeah. I don't trust Gary Marcus, and I don't know why the media buys into his persona.
Gary Marcus features a Forbes story in his Twitter bio, "7 Must-Read Books About Artificial Intelligence". That's an article which Gary Marcus paid for (that's what "Forbes Contributor" means; they're cheap, too!). This makes alarm bells go off.
Marcus was one of the founders of "Geometric Intelligence", which was acquired by Uber. 3 months later, Marcus left Uber, and claimed he remained a "special advisor"[0] to Uber; when Recode said he was no longer employed at all[1]. By my reading, it's possible Geometric Intelligence was just a patent troll, and was acquired simply for its patents[2][3].
Select extracts from that Wired piece:
> The company has filed for at least one patent, Marcus says. But it hasn't published research or offered a product
> But Marcus paints deep neural nets as an extremely limited technology, because the vast swaths of data needed to train them aren't always available. Geometric Intelligence, he says, is building technology that can train machines with far smaller amounts of data.
[uh oh; my BS detector just went off.]
I heard Marcus published papers on AI; does anyone know if they're any good?
Is this guy just a successful self-promoter? Why is he being paraded by media as the AI expert? Why does he sound so shady? (especially with that Forbes link, yikes; sorry but I can't take anyone seriously who pays for fake positive news stories).
I mentioned this about Marcus at the end of this comment, 3 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32866142
(I should also add: when the media has "go-to" experts, they're not primarily selected for their expertise, per-se, but for how "available" and eager they are to respond to all interview requests; I've seen the other side of that curtain.)
[0]: https://www.axios.com/2017/12/15/the-head-of-ubers-ai-labs-i...
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2017/3/8/14863560/uber-ai-gary-marcus-ge...
[2]: https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/124838-92#overview
[3]: https://www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-buys-mysterious-startup-m...
Does Gary Marcus do research anymore, or literally just spend all of his time making weak but loud arguments against any AI with a neural network attached to it?
I get the impression that at one time he was trying to do AI (or similar) research, but it didn't involve neural networks. And ever since neural networks turned out to be a useful approach, because it wasn't the path he chose, he switched his career to putting down any AI with a neural network.
The most annoying thing is that they aren't very well written arguments and he doesn't come up with new ones, much less actual competitive alternative approaches to AI.
Also I think that we really do need alternatives to the giant black-box neural networks that are more predictable and auditable but also perform. Yet you never hear him talking about doing any such research.
It would be less disappointing if his background was as the owner of a 1990s-style furniture store in Queens. But supposedly he is a researcher.
It's Gary Marcus, again, as always and as ever, criticizing other people's work as "machines that manipulate data but aren't really intelligent."
He's been on HN many times before, always criticizing the same things:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
As far as I know, all he's ever done is criticize, without ever delving into the mathematical details.
To understand those who disagree with him, read "The Bitter Lesson" by Rich Sutton:
http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html
--
EDITS: Modified and rearranged sentences to reflect more accurately what I meant to write the first time around.
Gary Marcus is a notorious Goal Post Mover so this is no surprise coming from him.
Edit: Gwern has an extensive history with this so I'll let him do the talking.
https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/v8yyv6/somewhat_c...
Further Edits: Not to mention Scott Alexander who has directly rebutted you numerous times. Or Yann LeCunn. Not sure who exactly is backing down.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/my-bet-ai-size-solves-...
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/somewhat-contra-marcus...
https://analyticsindiamag.com/yann-lecun-resumes-war-of-word...
Presumably you approach these arguments like Ben Shapiro and imagine you have "Dunked on the Deep Learning geeks with Facts and Logic."
People in the field knows the political war led by Gary Marcus. He is writing articles like this since many years now. My own experience with him left me with bad taste about his depth of knowledge and his ability to generate meaningful insights. I found him pointlessly criticizing deep learning papers without actually understanding them (on one instance, even without actually reading the paper) and then use other peoples technical comments to make case for his agenda. He keeps harping on problem X and Y for deep learning while none of his “symbolic AI” stuff has ever worked anywhere close to anything significant. Fortunately for him, he is a professor and so others in the field have to entertain him constantly.
I mean he's free to hold whatever political opinions. But yeah... he is a contrarian hater usually childish and I hate the sensationalist manner he uses to present things, everything is insanely important and we must act *NOW* and all that. Ever since he was apart that hearing at congress I now view every Gary Marcus tweet through the lens of him desperately wanting to become part of some transnational ai oversight organisation. I just hope he doesn't get any power
> It's Gary Marcus "neural networks don't really work" suddenly discovering they do, and literally trying to shut down research in that area while keeping his prefered research areas funded
Gary Marcus has been aware that neural nets work for a while now, but he is only in the spotlight for his contrarian take, if he stops having a contrarian take he disappears, because it's not like he is producing any research worth of discussion otherwise. So you can expect him to stay contrarian forever. What might have been a genuine take initially is now his job, that's how he makes money, and it's so associated with him that it's probably his identity as well.
"Neural networks don't really work" isn't an accurate representation of Marcus' position, and his actual position hasn't been shown to be wrong unless you believe that LLMs and diffusion models display, or are manifestly on the way towards displaying, understanding. That is something many think, and it's not in itself an unreasonable view. However there are also plenty of reasons to think otherwise and many, including me, who haven't conceded the point. It hasn't been settled beyond reasonable debate.
To assume that the person you disagree with can only hold their view out of cynical self-interest, wishful thinking or plain insanity is to assume that you are so obviously right that there can be no valid debate. That is a bad starting position and I'd recommend against it as a matter of principle. Apart from anything else, however convinced you are of your own rightness it's plain rude to assume everyone else is equally convinced, and ad-hominem to ascribe negative motives to those who disagree.
As for Gary Marcus, as far as I've seen he's been consistent in his views and respectful in the way he's argued them. To read about him on HN you'd think he's spent the last few years badmouthing every AI researcher around, but I haven't seen that, just disagreement with people's statements - i.e. healthy debate. I haven't followed him closely though, so if you know of any cases where he's gone beyond that and said the sorts of things about AI researchers that people routinely say about him I'd interested to see them.
Sure, he can sound strident but I still think Gary Marcus's riffing on the limitations of deep learning is important.
The book "Rebooting AI" that he wrote with Ernest Davis is well worth reading if you are an AI practitioner (a term I use to describe myself). I think Marcus is also well worth following on Twitter to get a contrarian view (he re-tweeted me two weeks ago, so there is some overlap in our points of view).
Way back when, I liked Roger Penrose's 1989 book "The Emperor's New Mind" even though some of the people I worked with thought he was a devil for writing that. I am much more optimistic than Marcus, but find his work useful and thoughtful.
Do these three points fairly characterize Marcus? Have I left out other key claims he makes?
1. AI is overvalued;
2. {Many/most/all} AI companies have AI products that don't do what they claim;*
3. AI as a technology is running out of steam;
I'm no fan of Marcus, but I at least want to state his claims as accurately as I can.
To be open, one of my concerns with Marcus he rants a lot. I find it tiresome (I go into more detail in other comments I've made recently.)
So I'll frame it as two questions. First, does Marcus make clear logical arguments? By this I mean does he lay out the premises and the conclusions? Second, independent of the logical (or fallacious) structure of his writing, are Gary Marcus' claims sufficiently clear? Falsifiable? Testable?
Here are some follow-up questions I would put to Marcus, if he's reading this. These correspond to the three points above.
1. How much are AI companies overvalued, if at all, and when will such a "correction" happen?
2. What % of AI companies have products that don't meet their claims. How does such a percentage compare against non-AI companies?
3. What does "running out of steam" mean? What areas of research are doing to hit dead ends? Why? When? Does Marcus carve out exceptions?
Finally, can we disprove anything that Marcus would claim. For example, what would he say, hypothetically speaking, if a future wave of AI technologies make great progress? Would he criticize them as "running out of steam as well?" If he does, isn't he selectively paying attention to the later part of the innovation S-curve while ignoring the beginning?
* You tell me, I haven't yet figured out what he is actually claiming. To be fair, I've been turned off by his writing for a while. Now, I spend much more time reading more thoughtful writers.
It's also Marcus's best interest to push "LLM is hitting a wall" agenda. Check his blog. It's basically his whole online personality now.
So Marcus and Altman are both speaking out of their agendas, except Altman has a product and Marcus has... a book.
I don't subscribe to him either. Some people do, apparently.
Ted Gioia is totally worth it. I haven't looked at Greil Marcus' stuff yet.
He's a fool who hurls criticisms, gets repeatedly disproven, and doesn't actually execute on anything. It's obvious why le cun's words carry more weight; he and his labs get shit done; he speaks from experience, not sophistry.
In other words, Gary Marcus has managed to match some linguistic sub-patterns between two articles, but has not proved he is intelligent.
The first time I saw his act I couldn't believe anyone would laugh at this.
Time goes by and his appearances on H Stern would leave me in stitches. He could play an audience, whether 1 person or an auditorium, like a violin.
Genius level up there with Norm and Patton. For a sample search youtube and his 'you fool' bit during Hollywood Squares.
Fun fact: He could talk like a normal person when he wanted to. There's audio of Gary D talking to him on the phone.
Fun fact 2: Gary D went to his apartment after he had been living there 3 years and he was still using plastic lawn furniture until he bought some real furninture. He was already a millionaire by this point.
"Gary V" is probably the biggest huckster, although the universe of 'hustle culture' charlatans is wide and deep.
Just search "ChatGPT" and look for thumbnails where they're making mouth-agape "I'm Shocked!!" faces and an all-caps title about making money.
Marcus' moaning gets old, especially when his criticism is so self-referential; he's hardly the only voice against AI hype, though no doubt he's one of the loudest.
However he does seem to have legitimate complaints about the echo chamber the big names seem to be operating in.
Marcus' moaning gets old, especially when his criticism is so self-referential; he's hardly the only voice against AI hype, though no doubt he's one of the loudest.
However he does seem to have legitimate complaints about the echo chamber the big names seem to be operating in.
I think Marcus’s problem here is less with not being given credit as it is with how LeCun has suddenly shifted to similar opinions without any attempt at reconciling how, until very recently, he openly denigrated Marcus and his ideas.
What I like about Garry:
* I like his rational vision for San Francisco
* I like his investments in San Francisco
* I like how he's fighting corrupt SF politicians
What I don't like about Garry:
* Can be quite sensitive and unprofessional sometimes
* Is/was a crypto bro
Gary is an anti-ML crank with no more factual grounding than people who think AI is going to conquer the world and enslave you.
Marcus has made some very good contributions, including both original research and a good exposition/popularisation of a fairly mainstream skeptical view.
I'm curious what financial incentive you think Marcus or Russell has for hype. For Hinton I suppose it would be the Google shares he likely retains after quitting?
You might be right about the next five years. I hope you are! But you haven't given much reason to think so here.
(Edited to remove some unnecessary expression of annoyance.)
Because Marcus isn't a practitioner and never has been. He's a public intellectual from a different field acting like he's an AI expert. You would never listen to criticisms of a Physics theory from a Biologist and you shouldn't listen to criticisms of Neural Networks from a Psychologist.
He's proven time and time again that he doesn't understand the methods at work and doesn't even seem interested in trying to do so.
I think he is by default less interested in gigantic black box systems that he can't fit in his head, and that secondly he has read Gary Marcus thinkpiece and was persuaded by him, and thirdly I feel like there might be some kind of religion thing but I don't have direct evidence of that third one.
Here is what Knuth has said, related to why he isn't as curious as you might expect:
> "Gary Marcus's column in the April CACM brilliantly describes the terrifying consequences of these developments. [...] I myself shall certainly continue to leave such research to others, and to devote my time to developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy. And I hope you do the same. [...] The topic [LLMs] is timely, and important enough not to ignore completely, but it's emphatically not for me."
Who doesn't love Garry Tan? I've never read a single negative word about him. If he's betting against you, best watch out.
That means YOU, The City and Public Officials of San Francisco. Wake up.
Your city is messed up and smelly, and it's time to take out the trash and clean the dirt from the streets (literally).
I've never heard of Garry Tan before just now, but he didn't strike me as "overtly charismatic" in the linked article. He struck me as incredibly unhinged and unlikeable.
He does not spend an appreciable amount of effort or time advocating for that though. He spends 95% of his energy trying to take down the merits of NN-based approaches.
If he had something to show for it, like neurosymbolic wins over benchmarks for LLMs, that would be different. But he's not a researcher anymore. He's a mouth, and he is so inaccurate that it is actually dangerous, because some government officials listen to him.
I actually think that neurosymbolic approaches could be incredible and bring huge gains in performance and interpretability. But I don't see Marcus spending a lot of effort and doing quality research in that area that achieves much.
The quality of his arguments seems to be at the level of a used furniture salesman.
This is such a case of a bad-comment that seems clever and insightful. It boils down to saying we don't need to debate or even consider the content of his arguments because we can assume he's only motivated by prestige and money (but without considering the second-order effects on his credibility and funding if he actually turns out to be proven substantially wrong in the future).
I don't know how right or wrong he is - none of us do. That's why it's all still being debated.
The one thing I know is that we can only truly understand a topic by fully understanding arguments for and against all the claims. I also know the pro-LLM set have way more money (double-digit billions as we saw just this week) and credibility to lose over this topic than Gary Marcus does.
What do you think about Marc Andreessen's comments on the topic?
This is mostly just an angry rant, yes, but equally it is just true. Marcus is intellectually dishonest.
Who has ever had respect for Marc? this is just another example in the long list of reasons he's a complete piece of shit
What I've heard about Garry Tan so far suggests he is childish and out of touch.
- He blocks random people on Twitter over the slightest disagreement.
- He capriciously refused a once-in-ten-thousand-lifetimes offer from Peter Thiel for the safety of a steady paycheck at Microsoft. Someone who is that risk-averse really shouldn't be role-playing as Tupac.
How can he be a role-model to the thousands of founders who typically take massive personal risks with no backup plan?
I listen to this guy https://marfooglenews.com/ on youtube and twitter and read his "show notes" each time he posts them. Sometimes they are very interesting like:
https://www.audacy.com/1010wins/news/local/video-nyc-launche...
but sometimes they seem like he's grasping for content.
Hard to take Gary seriously calling out "outlandish claims" with "no substance" when he does the same thing in the opposite direction.
Garbage article for clicks to pay for his lifestyle, now that he's grifted his way into being an "AI Expert" paid to pontificate with no skin in the game.
That's Cory's whole schtick - he critiques big corps. I follow him a bit and most times his analysis is good and other times he dismisses things that don't fit in his ideological viewpoint.
He doesn’t find it funny. If you know Marco from his old blog or his “tiny” podcast[1], you’ll know he is being cynical.
I am not sure who has done more damage to the YC brand for me personally: Garry Tan or Sam Altman. Neither inspires confidence. Perhaps Sam is better at politics, but he clearly isn't Steve Jobs. He would be a great professional manager (i.e. politics), not one to lead a company.
I like Jamey Stegmaier, love his games, love the way he runs his business.
It's hilarious to me that his post generated so much discussion about flossing and variable-rate mortgages.
While on one hand I agree that getting this worked up over speech is weird, Gary is a (not so) unique case in that when he is able to incite the Twitter activist mob mentality on his side, against other people’s speech, he will happily do so with no hesitation whatsoever.
A while back somebody put up some stickers with his face on an octopus and the tentacles holding his various assets. The Twitter mafia went all out saying this was clearly racist and totally unacceptable in civil society, because of some prior art where an asian individual was offensively caricaturized atop an octopus. I tired to point out that the octopus has been used as a symbol of a many faceted organization since forever, and the racist aspect of the prior art wasn’t the octopus but rather the ridiculous caricaturization. The picture of Gary used in his octopus was a totally normal photo, so the racist prior art was of no consequence. Gary somehow saw my comment and decided to launch a tweet thread telling his hundreds of thousands of followers what a terrible racist horrible idiotic person I am, which resulted in a huge hacking campaign being launched against various little personal projects I had posted on my Twitter.
Ugh.
I don’t use Twitter anymore.
I think most of us had a lot of respect for Marc because of the Netscape days but hopefully we can now all agree that he’s become a total fraud motivated by greed. His whole-hearted embrace of everything crypto despite being obviously smart enough to know most of it was a Ponzi was the last straw for me. He’ll do anything to win the VC game.
At this point when I see that a company got Andreesen Horowitz money I think about it as one step above SoftBank money in terms of negative signals.
Ron Amadeo is so relentlessly critical of Google I've stopped reading his articles. Overall I find coverage on Ars to be pretty good but he really seems to have an axe to grind.
He spends much time labeling and psychoanalyzing the people who disagree with him
[...]
But in the last few years, as his firm a16z took in $7.6B of capital to make a disastrous bet on “Web3”, while charging LPs an estimated $1B in management fees for the privilege, he’s been putting out a stream of disingenuous and logically-invalid arguments.
For those who didn’t follow Marc’s Web3 debacle, I’ve kept the receipts:
Criticizing pmarca for not engaging with the core of the argument, while simultaneously bringing up "receipts" for unrelated criticisms is odd. This behavior is more consistent with someone who has an axe to grind than with someone who is offended by 'poor “sportsmanship”' in discourse.
Marc Andreessen spouting off at the mouth about things he doesn't understand?? I can't believe it! /sarcasm
Garry is an awesome individual. Not only a mentor in tech, but a community advocate in San Francisco! I'm so happy about this news!
I had been reading Marginal Revolution and following Cowen for probably 5 years but I finally completely gave up on him.
At first I was deeply impressed and considered him someone who was unafraid to confront challenging issues with thoughtful analysis.
Now I see him as a Malcolm Gladwell style entertainer.
Anybody thinking of taking him too seriously should do some meta-research of their own before spending a lot of time on his ideas.
I like your comments, even though I fall into the DL fanboy camp.
I hope that you read Gary Marcus’s and Ernest Davis’ book “Rebooting AI” - I think it would resonate with you, and it made me get a lot more interested in so-call “hybrid-AI” systems.
I felt that way until he had Carlson on. Carlson is a grade A TV talking head grifter who just spins up sensationalist narratives to drive views. No background, no expertise, just a guy who mastered which buttons to push to get average joe's raging.
Lex says he wants open honest conversation, but Carlson was just doing the same stunningly dishonest grift he does every time he has a mic in front of him. So dumb.
I'll start:
1. Ben Thompson - He is the writer and founder of Stratechery.com
2. Gary Marcus - A cognitive scientist and AI researcher, author of books like "Rebooting AI"
3. Oren Etzioni - CEO of the Allen Institute for AI
4. Andrew Ng - influential figure in ML
5. Steve Sammartino - Futurist with good ideas about education
The "Gary Explains" channel on YouTube is pretty good imo.
Not 100% the same topics, but still informative.
an opinion on Andrew Huberman. I'm always skeptical
about anyone on social media these days. Doesn't
seem like he's trying to sell us anything
I only recently became aware of him so I don't have a real opinion. First impression was I liked many things he said.
One thing I'd note though is that he is absolutely trying to sell something - he runs a supplement business that has attracted some controversy because IIRC he may be overstating the research behind some of his concoctions. (That said, I think they're just formulations of various common generally-recognized-as-safe supplements, and I don't think he's pushing anything fringe-y? not sure)
FWIW - selling something does not immediately disqualify him from credibility IMO. For better or worse this is capitalism. It's actually even worse when we expect to be ascetic monks with no worldly financial interests. Instead let's be realistic and transparent.
Fair, he is a media personality. That said, I've read a Jim Cramer book, I've listened to Dave Ramsey. Those guys are charlatans selling mysterious wisdom and, frankly, bullshit. Clark Howard doesn't do any of that.
Dave Ramsey once said anyone should be able to get a 12% return in a mutual fund. What?? Jim Cramer's constantly picking stocks and is about as good as a drunk monkey with a dartboard.
Everything Clark Howard has said that I've looked at doing, I've vetted and researched. Sometimes he gets it wrong, but I believe he is an honest actor and just trying to help people "Save money, Spend less, and avoid getting ripped off."
Honestly, nobody knows, but I put more weight on his take than most.
Am I the only one who Eric Schmidt rubs the wrong way?
The Google name lends him a certain cachet and credibility, but after reading the book "The Age of AI" he did with Kissinger, I really see him now as just a rich guy who likes to talk about many things, but doesn't really offer any real insight or anything new.
Sort of like a middle manager who thinks he's brilliant...
Yes. He seems good. After hearing him on Making Sense, I tried to read the book, but it was way too much for me. Also I don't really care about his personal issues. Kudos.
Something about Gary Stevenson doesn't feel right. Although what he says generally sounds good, all of his videos contain the exact same rhetoric about blaming problems on wealthy people. And yes, he says he's an inequality economist so it makes sense that he would say this, so why not show the numbers and data to back up his claims? He talks for 10-20 mins seemingly pulling his theories out of thin air. In that very video you linked he claims he saw house prices rising as a result of COVID while all the other economists were blind to it... uh no? He doesn't use the kind of vocabulary I would expect from somebody who has deep knowledge of the subject either.
What is he getting out of making these videos other than playing the populist game? Has he actually been verified to ever have been "Citi's top trader"?