Imagine how I feel about it :)
16,039 karma · joined August 14, 2007
Incrementally.
John Maynard Keynes developed this idea (that came to be known as Keynesian beauty contest[1]) in 1936. This isn't a new property of the market, it has always been the case.
> when companies do pay dividends or buy back stock, it's sometimes done by borrowing money
It's not clear that this is a problem, given that cash is basically free (though they do have to pay back the principal). I'd be interested to see what proportion of dividends and buybacks comes from borrowed cash. I suppose calculating such a thing would be very difficult, but it'd be interesting to see some analysis on this.
> if 90% of people pull out of the stock market, it's quite possible for the stock market to go up
What if 90% significantly cut consumption? Ultimately the companies have to sell their products to somebody.
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No. Only 25% of households in the US have annual income between $35,000 and $75,000. About one in five families in the US is below the poverty line. So middle class students are over represented at Harvard. Students from poor families are only slightly underrepresented, and considering that household income and academic achievement are correlated, it’s actually a testament to their efforts to have socially conscious admissions. The facts do not support your argument. On this you are simply wrong.
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Less than a third of Harvard students come from a household with income greater than $100,000/year. Almost half the students come from households with income between $30,000 and $75,000/year. One in six students comes from a poor family.
Harvard is firmly middle class. The data simply doesn’t support the argument that Harvard admissions is some old money New England conspiracy.
Here's a thought experiment: can you use aggregation theory to make sufficiently powerful predictions to beat the stock market in the tech sector? Can Ben? My strong guess is that the answer is to both questions is no.
I can't imagine how you must be feeling, so take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
Losing your sight is undoubtedly going to be one of the top five most important events in your life that will split everything into "before" and "after". Maybe it will be the most important. But it's still one of the top five. And right behind those five there will be another five that aren't quite as important, but still pretty close. Life has a way about it like that. (Some of us get dealt a better hand than others of course, but there are precious few for whom all top ten life events have smooth continuity and are all ecstatically positive).
I'm by no means telling you to take this lightly or not to prepare. It sounds like you're throwing yourself into this thing and doing the best you can to set yourself up for future success. That's great. But do take a long view on these things. You have fifty years ahead of you, and crazy shit will happen that will knock you off your horse maybe every decade or so.
It's not exactly that your anxiety is unwarranted, just that it's not telling you the whole story. This is (hopefully) going to be a long, long road. Aiming to have everything buttoned down at 24 (or 34, or 54) is not a reasonable expectation, blind or not.
Anyway, best of luck to you. If you want, I can put you in touch with a friend who's a developer with no sight. (Also happy to just talk to you for emotional support) My e-mail is in the profile.
He says it right there in the blog post-- the problem is desire. For example, someone is reliably making tons of money in China stamping cities into the ground and building thousands of miles of high speed rail. Why can't we? Doing these things is hard in a sense that we seem unable to get collective wherewithal to do it. It's not hard in a sense that a cure for cancer is.
They can't invest in things nobody will let them build. Who in their right mind would invest in high speed rail from SF to LA knowing ex ante they'll deal with twenty years of regulatory quagmire for the project to eventually be killed by a thousand bureaucrats?
(And I think the bureaucrats are the symptom, not the cause. If we wanted things built the bureaucrats would be out on the street in three months. The cause is cultural decline.)
Why that is the case in every business, I haven't been able to figure out. I suspect it's because when businesses reach that size, the efficient market effects become greatly overstated in the short term, so these businesses naturally acquire a lot of fat.
One piece of evidence for this is that private equity exists. You can buy a business, fire a quarter of the people, then sell it and make a lot of money without hurting the operations at all.
The costs of all this are enormous. Is maintaining this army really cheaper than just handing the reigns to ops people and paying them more in proportion to their increased leverage?
I don't have a good model of how these things work. I encountered it first hand, but couldn't develop a good model after a long time of thinking about it. Tons of things happened that I didn't understand at all, and I couldn't understand why higher-level people wouldn't just resolve it.
Help understand this better?
Here's what happens.
First, any given trip alleviates depression for about a month or two. That makes sense to me in a sense that the word "trip" isn't a coincidence-- a really fun intense vacation in a foreign country also alleviates depression for a month or two. You swear that when you come back things will be different, but then you have to answer slack messages at 9pm, and your project is slipping at work, and your wife is flirting with strangers every time you go to a bar, and well... in a month or two you're back to feeling exactly the same way you did before (until you take the next vacation).
Second, people who discover psychedelics go on a multiyear quest for enlightenment. They keep taking various drugs, keep feeling like they understand things better and better, get sucked into the psychedelic social vortex of other truth-seekers, and generally believe that their life is full of meaning and is going to turn around at any moment. Except by any objective measure they're still nervous wrecks-- they have every physiological symptom of stress and depression, and aside from temporary alleviation of their symptoms (see part one), they always regress to the mean.
Third, after a few years of this people eventually reach a fork. Most people realize that their psychonautic journey is at best leading them in circles, and at worst is causing their life to spiral down the drain. So they give it up, get a job without 9pm slack messages (or find a better way to adjust to stress), marry someone who isn't constantly on the verge of cheating, start doing regular exercise, and generally find a way to settle into a reasonably balanced life.
A small minority of people double down, grow out their (usually grey by then) hair down to their shoulders, go to festivals and workshops, talk of energy and chi and chakras, stare into the eyes of strangers, and touch each other's faces.
Generally speaking, I haven't run into anyone yet who found a third path. So, while I'd be the first to admit I'm wrong and celebrate if this proves to actually work, if I were a betting man I'd bet against at any reasonable odds and sleep secure in the knowledge that my money is safe.
But so much of YC felt (and probably does more so now) like you're being judged all the time. Which makes total sense to me, because seeking prestige is so fundamental to human nature. That co-evolved with social cooperation in a virtuous cycle.
If pg really believed what he wrote in this essay, YC would be structured very differently. The moment pg allowed some companies/founders to have better access to him than others, or the moment he talked about how some founders are better than others, he implicitly set up a criteria for judging founders and their companies. And people will always naturally feel envy and try to hack that criteria. But a precondition for doing good original work is not feeling judged. So he should have gone on a crusade to completely eliminate all forms of favoritism if he wanted to maximize the odds of success for a modal company. But that's not what he actually ended up doing. At all.
Now the question is, is the essay wrong or is the YC structure/culture wrong. If I were a betting man, I'd put all my money on the former every single time, and I think I'd never come lose that bet once.
It reminds me of a quote from The Elephant in the Brain. I don't remember the wording exactly, but it's something like "if there is a behavior in a large group of people that doesn't make sense to you, not only is it by design, but it's also probably the whole point."
Incidentally, I was also struck by how much of YC was (in 2009) about hacking venture capital. But lots of people from that era now say this behavior is unethical disavow all knowledge that it was ever actively promoted. It's like we lived through different realities.
If I were to steelman The Lesson to Unlearn I think I'd say this. On an individual level there is enormous benefit to learning how to operate without hacking a test. That's how you do great work; that's what original thinking is. On a societal level this seems unshakable. But societies have made dramatic shifts in behavior and social organization before. From hunter gatherers to farmers to city dwellers, for example. So while this is hard to imagine it might just be that-- lack of imagination. The social return to abandoning this system might indeed be enormous.