[HN Gopher] Experts from a world that no longer exists
___________________________________________________________________
Experts from a world that no longer exists
Author : yarapavan
Score : 246 points
Date : 2021-11-20 15:16 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.collaborativefund.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.collaborativefund.com)
| polskibus wrote:
| Timing is king. If you know when the current experts will become
| the old fools, and bet on it, you can be the richest man ever.
| It's akin to knowing when the stock will rise or fall. Close to
| impossible unless you know more than others (and therefore become
| an expert ).
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Not just experts, visionaries too. One that strikes me as odd is
| Electric cars. Why just make a 'faster horse'? We can have
| battery transport options in all kinds of shapes and forms, why
| sell sedans and SUVs and underutilize the road networks?
| bigbanggoesbang wrote:
| Is Gavin Newsom an expert in putting hair gel into his hair so he
| can be a proper hair-gel nazi?
| nickdothutton wrote:
| What I found interesting is that the period for reappearance of
| "failed ideas" is roughly the length of a career. Coincidence or
| due to any real effect I don't know. I wrote a little about it
| here:
|
| "Don't be discouraged by the failure of technology or approaches
| of the past. If the problem is still important after all this
| time then it's a problem worth solving. Don't avoid unsuccessful
| solutions. Avoid insignificant problems. Success this time around
| could be unlocked by advances in any number of unrelated
| disciplines."
|
| https://blog.eutopian.io/the-next-big-thing-go-back-to-the-f...
| jonplackett wrote:
| I read a while back that scientific ideas usually take about 50
| years to be accepted. Which means essentially that they never
| are accepted, the people who disagree with them just die and
| the next generation embrace them. Einstein pretty much hated
| quantum mechanics and ended up making a bunch of discoveries
| while making every effort to disprove it.
|
| So if that's how scientists do it - who should be the most
| amenable profession to new information and ideas, what chance
| do the rest of us have?
| dougabug wrote:
| > Which means essentially that they never are accepted, the
| people who disagree with them just die and the next
| generation embrace them.
|
| This is to some degree the point made in Kuhn's "The
| Structure of Scientific Revolutions."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Re.
| ..
| raziel2701 wrote:
| I think the new ideas get accepted when either the old guard
| die, and/or an undeniable technology gets created by use of
| the new idea.
| teddyh wrote:
| " _A new scientific truth does not generally triumph by
| persuading its opponents and getting them to admit their
| errors, but rather by its opponents gradually dying out and
| giving way to a new generation that is raised on it._ [...]
| _An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by
| gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it
| rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is
| that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing
| generation is familiarized with the ideas from the
| beginning: another instance of the fact that the future
| lies with the youth._ "
|
| -- Max Planck, 1948
| pfdietz wrote:
| I don't think this is accurate. Sometimes the facts are
| so plain that the new truth wins (or, at least, the old
| truth dies) quickly without much fuss.
|
| Perhaps the earliest example of this was the destruction
| of the Ptolemaic view of the solar system by Galileo's
| observation of the phases of Venus. This was a "killer
| fact" that rapidly (after 1611) led to abandonment of
| that venerable theory, even by its supporters (although
| Clavius would die soon after). Sales of the standard
| texts on Ptolemaic astronomy, Sacrobosco's _Sphere_ and
| Peuerbach 's _Theoricae novae planetarum_ went into
| immediate terminal decline.
|
| A more recent example is the Big Bang's success over the
| Steady State model. The cosmic microwave background
| radiation was such an overwhelming piece of evidence in
| favor of the former that only cranks persisted with the
| latter (including unfortunately Hoyle, admittedly.)
| auggierose wrote:
| Fuck. I don't have that kind of time.
| burnished wrote:
| I mean.. Einstein did prove himself wrong a bunch he just
| hated it. Its not like the work was flawed, or not performed.
| Its hard to find the sort of fault in that you seem to be
| implying.
| flir wrote:
| That generational thing sounds a lot like IT's eternal flip-
| flop between thick clients and thin clients. (I'm fully
| expecting "web browsers are too thick, we need a thin
| alternative" to appear any day now). On the back-end,
| serverless is time-sharing.
|
| Your attempt-fail-stigmatise curve has a lot in common with the
| Gartner hype cycle.
| padthai wrote:
| I would argue that the birth of Gemini and the (timid) Gopher
| revival have to do with this. They are very far from being
| mainstream though.
| raziel2701 wrote:
| I went through grad school and I saw how change comes about one
| funeral at a time. A big shot professor that has made their
| name with their pet theory/work will fiercely defend it against
| competing ideas, and people will defer to their expertise. It's
| not scientific, it's egotistic. They are a wall against
| progress that gets removed upon death. These professors can
| also create a dogma through their students who also all rely on
| the continued success of their theory for their employment. The
| incentives are misaligned against accepting new theories if it
| means someone will lose prestige.
|
| This article resonated strongly with me.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| I can't help but wonder how much better our governments would
| operate if the median age of their workers were somewhat
| lower (IIRC that's around 45).
| chaxor wrote:
| This doesn't make any sense. Aging is certainly a problem
| that needs to be solved, but the idea that you expressed
| here seems to be that younger people are better at their
| jobs - which is very wrong.
|
| This line of thinking is akin to "If less of the postmen
| had diabetes, I would get more of my mail faster!" Don't
| fall for these ageist logical inconsistencies
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| > _but the idea that you expressed here seems to be that
| younger people are better at their jobs - which is very
| wrong_
|
| That is not the idea I took from the GP's comment about
| government workers being younger.
|
| Younger people have a different perspective to older
| people. That might lead to a better direction.
|
| If you think about progress/improvement as a vector,
| there's speed and direction. Young and old people might
| have the same speed but different directions, and younger
| people might have a direction which is more beneficial
| long term.
| bsedlm wrote:
| > Aging is certainly a problem that needs to be solved
|
| by that logic, childhood is also a problem that needs to
| be solved. I have to get metaphysical to argue against
| the mindset, but IMO the origin of seeing aging as a
| problem stems from seeing death as the opposite of life.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Head to Capitol Hill and you'll see that the legislative
| side of that is much much younger. Though perhaps the age
| of the legislators skews the average.
| sidlls wrote:
| That's more than a little ageist. Age has little to do with
| it. I've worked for--and been managed by--thick-headed,
| egotistical 20-somethings and stodgy older folks alike.
|
| Youth who think they're forging new territory usually
| aren't, but there are plenty who think they are and have an
| arrogance about it that is insufferable.
| msla wrote:
| > Youth who think they're forging new territory usually
| aren't
|
| But that's part of the point of the article: The
| territory actively changes, so even if it's the same
| location in some sense, it's still new territory, ripe
| for exploration. Old people can see that, but it requires
| looking with fresh eyes, as opposed to only being willing
| to see what was there decades ago.
| sidlls wrote:
| I don't see how doubling down on the ageism brings
| anything to the discussion. Old people aren't
| "only...willing to see what was there decades ago."
| msla wrote:
| I didn't imply they were. You're seeing insults I never
| made.
| toss1 wrote:
| Or, you are not seeing insults you did make (however
| un-/sub-consciously / unintentionally)
| ta988 wrote:
| Exactly the reason why I left academia. Egos competing for
| space, money or talk-time to defend themselves not the
| progress of science.
| mnl wrote:
| We tend to romanticise it, but in the end it's just another
| job. It shouldn't, because selling you doing science is not
| the same as doing science, but on the other hand social
| expectations are that you must have a job, so what kind of
| exemption were we hoping for exactly? Once you realise it's
| ordinary people looking for whatever ordinary people look
| for anywhere else everything falls into place. Some science
| gets done regardless, we're talking about professionals
| here.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Academia can be likened more to a clergy or priesthood
| than a job. Although academics are expected to publish,
| it's not like the results or output are as tangible or
| quantifiable compared to most jobs.
| mnl wrote:
| Well, it's not that. Output is quantifiable and expected,
| try to survive doing your thing before tenure (at least
| and don't). Alas, the Republic of Letters is long gone.
| Kind of an _ought-is_ problem.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Cornel West has only published 3-4 or so slim volumes in
| 4 decades. how does he still have a job?
| mnl wrote:
| I don't know, I've mentioned tenure though. I know that
| Peter Higgs has published IIRC 11? papers and that he's
| talked about his former status at his departament and not
| being productive enough for the modern academic system.
| throwkway69 wrote:
| http://www.cornelwest.com/books.html#.YZlPiWiIY4M
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| That was about 15 books, several I've heard of, but it's
| unclear about academic papers at least on that web page.
| He's clearly making an impact with his ideas.
| varelse wrote:
| But that's the system we built. Starting in college you're
| going to spend a decade and a half studying to be a world-
| class expert researching a topic of your own choosing.
|
| And as soon as you become a professor you stop doing
| research and start begging for research funding so others
| can do what you did. And no one sees the problem with this
| so it continues.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Wow, that's incredibly well expressed. I bookmarked it - I
| rarely do that too.
| bigbanggoesbang wrote:
| Is Nancy Pelosi an expert in insider trading? Damn, I wish I
| could get a lucrative government job like that.
| CalChris wrote:
| > Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving.
|
| Instacart has been in business since 2013 and had its first
| profitable _month_ last year during the height of the quarantine.
| It's probably closer to Webvan than anywhere near Amazon.
| Zanfa wrote:
| And Uber has made like $25 billion in losses with no end in
| sight?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| These companies still have no clue how to make profits. I
| wouldn't call that "thriving". They are still riding a huge
| investment bubble.
| gorwell wrote:
| There was an amusing example of this yesterday with The Economist
| saying, `The sharp increase in inflation over the past year has
| blindsided many economists. Almost no one saw it coming`
|
| https://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/1461651190144503808
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| The social media person at the Economist is bad at their jobs.
| The article goes into the nuances of the claim.
|
| The specific claims are
|
| Higher than expected inflation
|
| > new data showed that America's consumer price inflation rose
| to 5.4% in June, well above economists' expectations. On July
| 14th it was revealed that British inflation rose to 2.5% in
| June, which was also higher than forecast.
|
| The specific reason high inflation was not expected was because
| expected long term slump, which didn't happen
|
| > Not long ago economists tended to the view that the covid-19
| pandemic would lead to a prolonged slump in the rich world.
| That view has not worn well
|
| > With unexpected growth has come an unexpected spurt of
| inflation
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| How dare you soil my single-sentence belief with this filthy
| nuance.
| Puts wrote:
| Well this is not true. There has been debate about an emerging
| inflation threat for many years now even long before the
| pandemic due to the rapid rate central banks are printing money
| to keep the economy floating since 2008. However in the
| financial market there are many people whose lives depend on
| constant growth creating a strong sentiment to either willfully
| mislead the market or just lie to themselves for comfort and
| self-preservation.
| Mikeb85 wrote:
| Lol everyone saw it coming, but policymakers needed everyone to
| think it wouldn't come, otherwise the public appetite for Covid
| measures would have been far less...
| smitty1e wrote:
| ZeroHedge has predicted 83 of the last 7 downturns.
| paulpauper wrote:
| more like 83 of the last 2 downturns
| dwiel wrote:
| I follow ZeroHedge, but this statistic isn't very helpful
| without knowing the number of false positives or incorrect
| timing.
| jameshart wrote:
| At the risk of explaining the joke...
|
| "predicted 83 of the last 7 downturns" implies a false
| positive rate of at least 76 incorrect predictions for 7
| correct ones.
|
| Of course, if they made 83 downturn predictions but didn't
| correctly predict the 7 that actually occurred, thee false
| positive rate could also be worse than that.
| jointpdf wrote:
| It's a reference to a 50+ year old economics joke: https:
| //worldin.economist.com/article/17506/edition2020dont-...
| fein wrote:
| I always remembered this as a Peter Schiff joke.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Very likely the source.
| beckingz wrote:
| That's pretty good. How many times were they able to predict
| the same downturn?
| beamatronic wrote:
| I'm still standing for delivery of my physical silver
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| "The less confident you are, the more serious you have to act."
|
| - Tara Ploughman
| dqpb wrote:
| Maybe "expert" is no longer a useful term. Instead we could
| differentiate between creators and power users.
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| I don't get the link
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I think OP is saying is we're moving toward a time when
| growing fields are more likely to be saturated by non-
| specialists
| ksaj wrote:
| I've done various forensic-oriented gigs for court cases. I was
| always given an titles like "Technical Expert" and sometimes
| really specific "Expert" terminology.
|
| In one case I was brought in only to give a high level synopsis
| about how deleted files can often be carved out either in full
| or in part, may appear in multiple places at once, sometimes
| clearly showing edits, and also come with useful metadata
| stored within the directory entries both past and present.
|
| They referred to me as the "Computer Filesystem Expert" which I
| thought was a bit strange, because I'm _not_ what I 'd consider
| an expert in file systems. Hell, I only barely know how
| journaling works without breaking down. I just know a lot about
| a very specific set of details that are useful in a forensic
| investigation.
|
| So there is yet another use of the word "expert" that doesn't
| necessarily mean the same thing to everyone. It's not a useless
| title in this case, but it's really ambiguous to a person who
| understands more than the role requires.
| brabel wrote:
| This article offers nothing of value IMO... because what it's
| saying is basically that experts will, at some point, fail to see
| that circumstances have changed and advice that was good in their
| own "time" is no longer good... however, that's an obvious
| remark: as another commenter pointed out, people almost always
| tend to think "this time it will be different" and choose to
| ignore the experts... I would say more useful advice would be
| that you do that at your own peril: most of the time, nearly
| always, the experts will be right... the occasions where things
| really will be different are rare and far between. Eventually, a
| lucky kid will do well by ignoring the experts, but only after
| thousands before them failed doing the same thing.
| efitz wrote:
| And what if the opportunity cost lost retrying something that
| didn't work over and over? Maybe it will eventually succeed but
| what else could have happened with the same effort?
| paulpauper wrote:
| If half the experts say to buy stocks and the other half say to
| sell, who is right? Aat some point, you have to decide. I have
| observed this a lot with finance. Listening to the wrong
| experts would have meant missing out on the biggest bull market
| ever (2009) or selling during the lows of the 2020 covid crash.
| IncRnd wrote:
| You missed about half the article. There was this part (along
| with lots of examples), "Some expertise is timeless. A few
| behaviors always repeat. They're often the most important
| things to pay attention to."
| ghaff wrote:
| I'm not sure it's so much about timelesss expertise (Although
| that exists as well). Rather, the advice is probably
| something along the lines that when experts tell you that
| some form of the thing you're doing has been tried half-a-
| dozen times in the past and has failed--it _probably_ will
| fail this time too. However, sometimes the difference from
| what was done in the past is sufficient to make it work this
| time. Or the surrounding technology ecosystem is
| qualitatively different. So it 's worth considering what it
| is in today's environment that would invalidate the expert
| opinion.
| brabel wrote:
| I didn't miss it, just ignored it because no one, not even
| the experts, konw which part of their expertise is "timeless"
| and which isn't (otherwise the problem wouldn't exist in the
| first place).
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| This article strikes me as the height of overconfidence tbh.
| The experts are frequently wrong but they're also usually
| right, and just blindly ignoring them usually leads to easily
| avoidable mistakes. You weigh the opinions of experts and then
| discount them when they're wrong, but only when you're _really_
| sure
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| How come they are very often two experts with opposite
| opinion? Whoever is right can only be proven by time and
| mostly by realizing the wrong choice was made.
| franze wrote:
| I am sometimes called an expert. I strongly focus on things that
| I or others already tried and did not work. And then hypothesise
| if the circumstances are the same or similar this time around.
| Looking for arguments that they haven't changed (enough).
|
| My track record is ok-ish.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| "This time it's different."
| varelse wrote:
| When someone today complains that solar power is still too
| expensive, or that cell phones and flat screen TVs in the hands
| of poor people proves they aren't really poor, they immediately
| flip my Bozo bit. To be fair people who hate nuclear power have
| always flipped my Bozo bit although they might have done the job
| delaying its adoption long enough for solar power to become
| cheaper by now.
| streamofdigits wrote:
| Experts tend to be specialists, focused on silos and deep dives
| into specific domains.
|
| The world is instead getting radically interconnected as
| "everything" is represented - more or less faithfully - by
| fungible bits. We are going through an "anti-specialization"
| phase, where everything is in principle connected to everything.
|
| This amorphous digital ocean phase will probably not last, but it
| might be decades before a new landscape has settled.
| musingsole wrote:
| In the future, every individual must be an expert on a single
| subject to a currently unimaginable depth. However, expertise
| must be simultaneously robbed of prestige and its value
| relegated to only its utility.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| _buying stocks at all seemed like nothing but speculation in the
| 1920s because corporate disclosures were so opaque. By the 1970s
| that had changed, and you could begin to make rational,
| calculated long-term decisions that put the odds in your favor._
|
| Thriving growth follows sunshine.
|
| Meanwhile, Govs/Corps compulsively fight transparency. Their only
| greater priority is revenge on people who drag them into the
| light.
| thesausageking wrote:
| I can't read a Collaborative Fund post without remembering the
| email to a former board member the founder of CircleUp wrote to
| the partner there who was on his board:
|
| https://docs.google.com/document/d/17tEc9ETL4tjfTmNbpwJJ5OSx...
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > So it will always be the case that those with the most
| experience - and the good, smart, accurate wisdom that comes from
| it - will be the least willing to adapt their views as the world
| evolves.
|
| This is where I stopped reading, although I will finish the
| article.
|
| He's writing about the stereotype.
|
| Humility often comes with this experience and wisdom. Some people
| are capable of seeing that everything is changing, all the time,
| regardless of their personal experience.
|
| That recognition frees you to embrace new, different, the things
| that used to be unthinkable.
| pezzana wrote:
| > "Don't buy stocks when the P/E ratio is over 20" was a good
| lesson to learn from the 1970s when interest rates were 7%, the
| Fed hadn't yet learned what it's capable of, and most businesses
| were cyclical manufacturing companies vs. asset-light digital
| services. Is it relevant today? At a broad, philosophical level,
| yes. In practical terms, probably not. In the same sense, buying
| stocks at all seemed like nothing but speculation in the 1920s
| because corporate disclosures were so opaque. By the 1970s that
| had changed, and you could begin to make rational, calculated
| long-term decisions that put the odds in your favor.
|
| The funny thing is that _exactly_ this kind of talk was all the
| rage leading up to both the 2000 and 2008 crashes. The boom makes
| it impossible to imagine what the bust will look like, and vice
| versa. Most people are utterly incapable of seeing 180 degrees
| through the business cycle. They simply can 't do it and rather
| extrapolate current conditions to infinity.
|
| This is a big part of boom/bust cycles. They are spaced out by
| just enough to entice a new group of greenhorns who ever more
| loudly beat the new paradigm drum. Then this new class learns
| that the business cycle is in fact immortal. But for many, it's a
| short-lived lesson.
|
| And that part about making "rational, calculated long-term
| decisions" is amusing. Because it's during the boom that
| companies start to engage in accounting shenanigans. The book-
| cooking will all come out in the next bust, just like it always
| has. 100x + price-to-earnings multiples will cover a multitude of
| sins.
|
| As Warren Buffet allegedly said, it's only when the tide goes out
| that you find out who's been swimming naked.
| nly wrote:
| The problem is we're all now dependent on stock market
| performance to make retirement feasible. Employer guaranteed
| defined-benefit pension schemes are dead.
|
| My uncles pension scheme was structured to pay out 1.5% of his
| final salary, inflation adjusted for the rest of his life, for
| each year he'd worked. He worked at one company his whole
| career, from age 18 to age 55, when he retired. Factoring in
| his mortgage, which he paid off prior to retirement, his
| disposable income never even dropped when he retired.
|
| Exact figures don't matter too much, but to achieve that with a
| defined-contribution pension you need to invest something in
| the range of 15%+ of your gross salary for 30 years and achieve
| a 7% above-inflation annualized investment return. And it won't
| be final salary but career average.
|
| Most people aren't doing this so are fucked
| redisman wrote:
| I don't know how a pensions would work in tech. 95% of the
| companies won't exist by the end of your career so who pays
| for the pensions?
| kristjansson wrote:
| One wonders about the actuarial assumptions made by your
| uncle's former employer and how, or if, they expected to meet
| that obligation.
| nly wrote:
| The financial planning is the same, the difference is just
| in who takes responsibility.
|
| The bottom line is that many people had this as a benefit
| and now very few do. What's unchanged is most people spend
| less time thinking about their pension throughout their
| lifespan than they do about almost anything else you can
| imagine, but they really should be because it's all on
| their shoulders now.
|
| Here in the UK it seems we have a whole generation a couple
| of decades away from retirement poverty.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| What's changed is that declining population growth and
| eventual reversal makes defined benefit pensions
| impossible to service.
| djbebs wrote:
| If history is any indication the answer to both of those
| were "they were wrong" and "caused severe financial issues
| to the company, if it didn't bankrupt them entirely"
| kristjansson wrote:
| Exactly, the point of the comment being that generous
| defined benefit pension schemes probably aren't some
| paneceal solution that capital is now withholding, but
| that they were at best a burden and at worst a lie.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| How are individuals supposed to have it any easier,
| though? Should people just be forced to work until they
| drop? Or does everybody now need to be some kind of
| financial genius in order to make retirement work?
| ghaff wrote:
| >He worked at one company his whole career,
|
| Which was one of the issues with defined benefit plans. They
| were structured around long employee tenure. Move around
| every few years and you basically got no pension most of the
| time.
|
| I personally think it's unfortunate that most people won't
| have defined benefit plans any longer. (I'm glad I'll have
| one from a long-ago 10+ year job whenever I decide to start
| collecting.) But it's hard to get away from the tenure
| requirements unless you make the system portable and then
| you're basically creating a shadow social security system.
| ChrisLomont wrote:
| >most people won't have defined benefit plans any longer.
|
| Most people never had them. Only a minority of middle and
| upper class white men had them for a short period in time.
|
| Here's some historical tables [1]. For example, in 1975,
| 44M people were in one, decently less than half of workers.
|
| [1] https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/ebsa/researchers
| /stat...
| nly wrote:
| In the UK the law was changed such that people were given
| the freedom to transfer out of their defined benefit
| schemes, and most were paid handsome lump sums for doing so
| because the schemes were desperately underfunded and wanted
| people out
| sokoloff wrote:
| How does paying a handsome lump sum to leavers help make
| them less underfunded? If the handsome amount is less
| than the value of the pension, people would leave it in
| there. If it's more than the current value of the
| pension, the pension fund is left worse off, right?
| trenning wrote:
| Adding on to your first paragraph about dependency on stock
| market performance for retirement.
|
| 401ks that my generation is used to are a concept only
| ~36years old, even at that most companies didn't start
| offering them until the 90s.
|
| It's a very young tool that we're only just now seeing play
| out for people reaching retirement age that missed the
| ubiquitous pension era.
|
| And roth IRA was introduced in 1997.
|
| No comment on any of this being good or bad, I think it's
| interesting to look at the historical perspective of it
| though.
| Mc91 wrote:
| Yes. The current p/e ratio of the S&P 500 is 29.59. Prior to
| November 1998 it never hit that high in the prior century. So
| what has the S&P 500 history been since then?
|
| It kept climbing from November 1998 until the dot-com crash
| started in spring 2000. By Jan 2003 it hit 29.59 on the way
| down and went down to 17.46 in April 2007.
|
| Then the subprime boom started really going and it climbed to
| 27.58 by July 2008, hitting 122.39 in May 2009. By October 2009
| it was back down to 20.33 and by September 2011 it was down to
| 13.01.
|
| Then it started its climb again. It was at 22.04 October 2019,
| before they were talking about Covid even in Wuhan. It hit
| 39.26 in December 2020 and is now back down to 29.59.
|
| As the poster says, in 1999 and 2000 and in 2007 and 2008 we
| were hearing about how we were in a new paradigm unmoored from
| the old reality and so forth. At the end of the day, the
| economy always came crashing back to earth. In October 1999,
| the book Dow 36,000 was published echoing a lot of this
| sentiment. The Dow was 10336 the day before the book came out,
| then it went down to 7591 by September 2002. In February 2009
| it was at 7062. We just finally hit 36,000 DJIA this month
| (before going down again).
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| The 2000 and 2008 blowups were pretty bad but back then there
| were still things that could be done like running deficits or
| lowering interest rates. We now have huge deficits and almost
| zero interest already during the boom. What can the Fed or
| government do during the next downturn? I don't see them having
| any tools left to reinflate the bubble.
| ItsMonkk wrote:
| > They simply can't do it and rather extrapolate current
| conditions to infinity.
|
| This is what I think more people should be paying attention to.
| I keep seeing the FIRE(financially independent; retire early)
| people talk about the returns they have gotten the past 100
| years, not taking into account that the first 50 of those years
| saw tremendous growth, and the last of those 50 years saw
| tremendous stagnation and debt that doesn't seem sustainable.
|
| The world's first billionaire was Rockefeller in the early
| 1900's. By 1970 the world's richest man was Hughes, who had
| amassed a fortune of $2.5 billion. In 70 years the number
| doubled. Since then in the next 50 years the world's richest
| man is now Musk, with a wealth 100x that of Hughes at $290
| billion. In 1970 the minimum wage was $1.70 compared to today's
| $7.25, an increase of 4.2x. 100x vs 4.2x.
|
| When you extrapolate that growth out another 50 years, the
| world's richest man ends up at $25 trillion. Minimum wage would
| grow to $30/hour. Another 50 years further, $2.5 Quadrillion,
| minimum wage is now $125/hour.
|
| It's ludicrous. Have we been boiling frogs the past 50 years?
| If the wealthy at those price levels tried to sell even 1% of
| their wealth/year the system would crash. So it's clear from my
| standpoint that those growth levels will simply not happen. How
| does it break? Does it break with minimum wage growth? Does it
| break with everything going to 0? Something else happens?
|
| What happens when interest rates are unable to fall further?
| Are we already at the end of the ball? How much higher can it
| go?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| The value of USD is not constant. Either you adjust the 1970
| values to today's dollar, giving you $17B for Hughes'
| fortune, or you index the $100B by the minimum salary giving
| you 23B vs 2.5B, a less than 10x increase. Not unreasonable
| considering the global scale business can have today.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> What happens when interest rates are unable to fall
| further?
|
| We are there. QE is the next thing. I think they understand
| now that raising interest rate quickly will kill the housing
| market like in 2007. So they need inflation while slowly
| raising rates.
| anm89 wrote:
| Hilarious that he had to write all of this just to be able to
| sneak in a justification for MMT in the last paragraph.
|
| This is a complete fallacy. Don't listen to reason or experts,
| the world has changed! Don't worry about debt and deficits, we've
| invented fiscal policy(which has been around since forever), that
| old wisdom no longer applies!
|
| Believe it if you want. We live more or less in a society with
| free markets where, at least for people with saved wealth,
| individual outcomes can be highly variable by your personal
| ability to understand these systems and allocate your wealth
| effectively. If you think MMT is great and will have no
| consequences, then allocate your money accordingly. I'm going to
| assume that's not true.
|
| Just like everything else time will tell who was right.
| rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
| > you think MMT is great and will have no consequences
|
| Doesn't MMT just tell us that we should focus on inflation
| instead of The Deficit?
|
| I don't think any of its adherents believe that printing money
| is consequence-free; rather, MMT states that over-printing
| money _will_ eventually result in inflation, and we can choose
| to respond to that inflation by either reigning in government
| spending (which enables us to dial back the money printing), or
| by raising taxes (thereby decreasing the money supply).
|
| Its prescriptions are largely the same as the current mode of
| economic thought. If you spend too much, you'll have to pay for
| it somehow. Arguably, it just offers a better model of the
| trade-offs between taxation/spending/printing/inflation, and
| suggests a different feedback mechanism to drive policymaking
| decisions (inflation instead of deficit levels.)
| anm89 wrote:
| > Doesn't MMT just tell us that we should focus on inflation
| instead of The Deficit?
|
| While this is roughly aligned with some of MMTs talking
| points, I don't think you can reduce MMT to just this. At a
| minimum these talking points have some other implications
| like:
|
| 1) Our current congress is capable of reigning in spending
|
| - I strongly disagree that there is any political will power
| to do this regardless of inflation
|
| 2) That the timeframes of tax policy decisions exist on the
| same time scale as would be necessary to use tax policy
| decisions to regulate inflation.
|
| - This is the core fallacy of MMT, even much more so than
| point 1. Maybe congress can figure out how to reduce
| spending, maybe if for no other reason than spite by a
| congress controlled by a different party then the president.
| But the idea that there is any feasible way to fine tune
| taxation to manage inflation on a fast enough timescale to be
| useful is beyond the pale. We get maybe one meaningful tax
| plan per president and even that is a battle every single
| time. so we are talking about maybe on average a meaningful
| change to tax policy every 6 years.
|
| Yet how fast did inflation just jump? We went from a CPI of
| nothing to 5+ in a few months. Who is this magical bureaucrat
| who just jumps in and fine tunes the taxes to account for
| this? It simply does not exist and will not exist any time
| soon without a major political revolution in America.
|
| But the problem is the policy is justified based on the idea
| that micromanaging velocity and money supply is possible but
| any time I've heard an MMTer questioned on this point, they
| openly admit that this part would need to be worked out when
| the times comes.
|
| Anyway, no obligation to agree with me. But as I said, be
| sure you know what you're talking about if it's your own
| money on the line.
| abeppu wrote:
| This sounds like a bunch of boring truisms when stated this way,
| but perhaps a little extra insight can be wrung out by binding
| this to some more specific claims.
|
| There's a corner of the cognitive science literature about
| iterated learning in a Bayesian framing. A question it asked was
| roughly, "If we partition a dataset over a sequence of agents who
| each see only a slice, and we allow each agent to communicate
| something to the next agent down the line, what must be true of
| the communication between those agents for them to learn the same
| thing as a single agent who saw all of the data?" And roughly,
| for the sequence to converge to the same posterior as a single
| agent, each agent had to adopt an unbiased estimate of the
| previous agent's posterior as their prior. See esp work from
| Griffiths and colleagues.
|
| In a somewhat looser analogy, there's a family of techniques for
| distributed convex optimization (like ADMM), where a group of
| agents are collectively trying to optimize a function over data,
| and each agent sees only a slice of that data. Note especially
| that the way the data is partitioned can be entirely arbitrary,
| including e.g. training an SVM classifier where some agents see
| only positive data points. And for the group of agents to
| collectively converge to the global optimum, each local agent
| basically adds a large term to the function which penalizes
| disagreement with the other agents.
|
| In slightly hand-wavey terms, in either case, for the agents to
| reach a "correct" conclusion as a group, each needs to be able to
| give potentially an arbitrarily high weight to the information
| distilled from others. In the iterated learning case, the
| posterior distribution received from a previous agent may have
| more information than the likelihood distribution of the data
| that an individual agent sees. In the optimization case, the
| consensus term may contribute more to the local loss than the
| data that an individual agent sees.
|
| So in contexts where one is actually trying to solve the _same
| problem_ as a group, placing very high weight on the honest
| information received from previous experts can be critical.
|
| But in cases when you're _not_ all working on the same problem,
| it can be disastrous.
| ericjang wrote:
| > So in contexts where one is actually trying to solve the
| _same problem_ as a group, placing very high weight on the
| honest information received from previous experts can be
| critical.
|
| Another "loose attempt to make this argument rigorous" might be
| to invoke Grim Trigger [1] strategies from repeated PD games. A
| very large negative weight is placed on "dishonest" behavior
| across a communication channel (game).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_trigger
| abeppu wrote:
| Of course, this is only available in certain scenarios.
|
| A Gen Z person at the beginning of their financial lives may
| want to _discount_ the advice of baby-boomers as having come
| from experience in a structurally different economy. But they
| have very little mechanism to _retaliate_ against the boomers
| who supported state university tuition increasing faster than
| inflation for decades.
| dsizzle wrote:
| This seems to assume that experts' advice can only be valued (or
| not) as an appeal to authority. But that would ignore that
| experts can also provide _explanations_: "This won't work because
| this subsystem would violate the laws of physics" e.g. -- and
| that explanation might then spur someone to find an equivalent
| subsystem without that flaw, or perhaps one would find a flaw in
| the initial reasoning, or whatever.
|
| Similarly, seeing a list of past failures may inspire variations
| that seek to overcome the shortcoming without having to waste
| time first reproducing the same failure. One can try to learn
| _why_ it failed and use that to guide future attempts.
|
| The advice to be wary of experts reminds me of the advice to
| avoid criticism while brainstorming, the idea in common being
| that criticism and negativity supposedly stifles creativity.
| However, it turns out that criticism _enhances_ the brainstorming
| process https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/should-we-
| allo... It seems that criticism from expertise could similarly be
| a boon to future advances.
| clairity wrote:
| we avoid negativity during brainstorming to create
| psychological safety. that in turn expands the boundaries of
| creativity. the process doesn't end there however, which is
| what your criticism sems to assume, since we need to winnow
| down the ideas generated to a feasible subset, and then further
| to a pursued option. this latter part is where criticism (but
| not negativity) is employed to iterate toward the chosen
| option. literally no one argues the strawman that there can be
| no criticism during decision-making.
|
| optimizing both divergence _and_ convergence processes leads to
| good decision-making, not just one or the other.
| dsizzle wrote:
| To your point about psychological safety, that is actually
| reason to have an initial phase of idea generation occur
| individually before meeting in a group. Even a fully
| "positive-only" group likely inhibits divergent thinking to
| some degree.
|
| Regarding groups, research challenges your claim that
| avoiding criticism during brainstorming "expands the
| boundaries of creativity", and that criticism is only useful
| for "winnowing down [already proposed] options." There are
| multiple studies showing that criticism during discussion
| _produces_ (not just selects) better ideas.
|
| This is a good academic review of literature covering these
| topics https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/full/10.1287/orsc.2
| 020.14...
| clairity wrote:
| no one's arguing that we can't (or shouldn't) have any
| criticism during brainstorming, only that negativity (which
| can also be read as aggression) reduces psychological
| safety, which in turn reduces creativity. people do pull
| back (consciously and subconsciously) when the sting of
| (negative) criticism looms.
|
| idea-focused criticism (rather than people-focused) can
| hone decision-making, but we still need that psychological
| safety to get the best outcomes. these things can both be
| true at the same time, and we can both succeed and fail at
| fostering either or both and not get the best outcome.
|
| just as we might criticize an overly safety-oriented
| decision-making process, criticism-oriented decision-making
| processes tend to degenerate into contests of aggression,
| which tend to produce inferior outcomes. dogmatism in any
| direction doesn't help.
| Vetch wrote:
| I came here to write something similar: the article does not
| pay enough attention to changing environments. The dotcom
| bubble ideas that are now successful do not share the same
| background environment of internet availability, bandwidth,
| networks of datacenters, storage, powerful portable computers,
| and all around higher digital literacy and people used to
| interacting with computers. If these things hadn't changed then
| trying and trying again would have continued to fail with high
| probability.
|
| As written, the statement by Ford is wrong, it is important to
| keep a kind of Tabu list detailing what didn't work in the
| absence of gradient information. What experts get wrong is they
| fail to be sensitive to dependent parameters that are not
| static (I know the article says something like this too but it
| sort of glosses over it). The problem is many of these are hard
| to say outside of hindsight.
|
| Perhaps listing the requirements before launching and listing
| the state of those requirements after failure, in addition to
| the idea might form a basis for what to retry. An expert might
| say something like "A website for dog food and toys will never
| work, we already did that 20 years ago and it failed
| spectacularly", when they should be saying "A Website for dog
| food did not work 20 years ago, here were our requirements and
| environment, has anything changed?". But even that isn't
| perfect so the process can't be deterministic.
| 5faulker wrote:
| From my experience, many of the problems can be solved by
| spending time on extended introspection. The problem with
| authorities is that they often don't have a firsthand
| experience of the problems itself.
| renewiltord wrote:
| The thing with believing that this time is different is that your
| worst case is you fail but your best case is you succeed. The
| thing with believing that every time is the same is that you
| guarantee mediocrity.
|
| When looking to the probability cone of future outcomes, some of
| us accept wider cones that encompass positive and negative
| outcomes. Others accept narrow cones where they constrain
| outcomes.
|
| I personally fall into the former category and also believe that
| societies that enable both kinds of people (well, all along the
| spectrum of cones) will succeed.
|
| I also believe that the biggest factor constraining your cone
| parameter is how much you have. The more you have, the less
| willing you are to expand your cone. This is because human beings
| are highly loss averse. I have seen this in my own life.
|
| The people most able to succeed are those who (intentionally or
| unintentionally) have a cone with the Markov property. No matter
| how far along the cone they are, the remainder of the cone looks
| the same.
|
| But Western society is prosperous and so the natural loss
| aversion leads to risk aversion. And so the balance shifts
| towards preservation. This article, then, is a message to that
| aspect of ours that is listening for the possibility that,
| perhaps, this time really is different.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > Some expertise is timeless. A few behaviors always repeat.
| They're often the most important things to pay attention to.
|
| AKA: wisdom. Seek, cherish, and protect that. Wisdom is
| functional.
|
| 'Expertise' is often knowledge if the current/historical state of
| affairs. When a dam breaks:
|
| > It usually means other parts of the system have evolved in a
| way that allows what was once impossible to now become practical.
|
| The state of the hardware, the software, and the peopleware at
| any moment in time is an Overton Window.
| foundart wrote:
| TIL Overton Window: "The Overton window is the range of
| policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at
| a given time. It is also known as the window of discourse."
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window A very useful
| concept.
| aigo wrote:
| The window, and the ways political agents try to move it in
| one direction or another, explains a lot of modern discourse
|
| It intersects with Chomsky's ideas about manufacturing
| consent quite nicely too
| cblconfederate wrote:
| Time to dust up those old ideas. Perhaps search HN for the ideas
| that everyone ridiculed
| codehalo wrote:
| Lol. Bitcoin
| DeathArrow wrote:
| >"Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect. It tends to
| create an inability to accept new ideas."
|
| Doesn't being an expert already contain the idea of continuous
| learning? Is expertise something static?
| jaybrendansmith wrote:
| Now my own way to look at this, at least from a software product
| perspective but perhaps it's applicable everywhere: "Everything
| always gets easy if you wait long enough." It's almost a motto at
| this point, because there are so many technical challenges that
| prevented this or that product in the past, or more likely, made
| them niche utilities that required deep expertise to maintain.
| These utilities suddenly become building blocks that are simple
| and commoditized, allowing larger products to be built where
| before it was impossible, or at least very difficult. For anyone
| starting a software business: You can enter a crowded market as
| long as most of the difficult problems have almost been solved,
| and if you can establish that beach head, then acquire and
| sustain customers quickly enough, you can win, because everything
| is perpetually getting easier. The downside of course is that
| eventually your product will be commoditized into oblivion, but
| that's part of the game.
| lettergram wrote:
| One thing I also find interesting are when people think the rules
| change when they really don't.
|
| For instance, Green energy is the future yes, but it'll take
| generations. So people assume the rules change faster than
| reality.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| It better not take generations! We don't have that kind of
| time.
| abetusk wrote:
| This line is what I think of whenever the cryptocurrency vitriol
| comes out here:
|
| """
|
| Pets.com was mocked, but Chewy is now a $30 billion business.
| Webvan failed, but Instacart and UberEats are now thriving. eToys
| was a joke, but now look at Amazon. Some of the biggest
| businesses of the last 10 years are all in industries that were
| the starkest examples of stupidity 20 years ago.
|
| """
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| just because something is profitable doesnt make it not stupid.
| pfdietz wrote:
| They laughed at Galileo, but they also laughed at Bozo the
| Clown.
| b3morales wrote:
| Taking this as a lesson is just survivorship bias, unless _all_
| the failed 90s companies have had their business plans
| replicated.
|
| Some ideas are ahead of their time; some are just bad.
| intrasight wrote:
| I did enjoy the article. I forwarded it to some colleagues. I
| wasn't aware of Ford's rule. But I will say that the rule perhaps
| only applied in that place and time. I've worked in the nuclear
| industry, in defense, in aerospace. Not documenting failures in
| those industries would be a recipe for disaster. Technology is
| way too complicated today. The man who "either did not know or
| paid no attention to the previous figures" isn't very likely to
| help in advanced engineering disciplines. In basic research, I
| think this man or woman can still make an important contribution.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| This article is trying to drive an artificial wedge between
| wisdom and innovation when there is none.
|
| Both are valuable to people.
|
| (regardless of age, sex, race, status, etc)
| bbbhahah wrote:
| "experts" - much like all the liberal fucktarded "covid experts"
| FormerBandmate wrote:
| Are you five
| kingcharles wrote:
| This quote made me feel better: "Some of the biggest businesses
| of the last 10 years are all in industries that were the starkest
| examples of stupidity 20 years ago."
|
| I'm still a little bitter from VC experiences 20 years ago.
|
| In 1998 my friends and I built a browser-based (Java applet)
| collaborative word processor and spreadsheet called Office
| Wherever (o-w.com). We shopped it to a dozen VCs and all went
| ROFLMAOWTFBBQ. They all said the same - no company would want to
| put their files on the (scary) Internet (the term "cloud" was
| still years away).
|
| In 2001 my friend and I had built a full music & movie/tv
| streaming service with a full-screen interface that looks just
| like the modern ones, built demo hardware, had access to all the
| rights etc. Everyone we pitched it to went ROFLMAOWTFBBQ. They
| said people will NEVER get rid of their DVDs! They like having
| things on their shelves to show off. What a stupid idea! You need
| to be like Netflix and rent DVDs to people! You stupid! STUPID
| STUPID STUPID!
|
| I wonder what folks are pitching today to VCs who are rolling on
| the floor laughing when they see the "stupid" demo?
| 2sk21 wrote:
| I feel you. When I was working in IBM research, I developed a
| web-based tool eerily close to Jupyter in 2007 but was simply
| unable to get traction within the company and abandoned the
| work by the end of the year. I still regret not pushing forward
| with it to this day.
| toast0 wrote:
| There was a time that Google had good sucess by launching new
| products that Yahoo had launched 5 years earlier and cancelled
| due to lack of interest.
|
| Nobody wants to be a patent troll, but being too early and
| filing patents can set you up for late revenue. Even if it's
| just watching for patent trolls and licensing your patents to
| the victims to double troll.
| tjr225 wrote:
| I can't wait to see what the experts at hacker news have to say
| about this!
| zackmorris wrote:
| It's weird reading this as someone who identifies strongly as Gen
| X, witnessing how we can't seem to address existential threats
| like global climate change until the Boomers retire. Or a
| thousand other problems.
|
| I've spent the last 20+ years under a near-constant form of
| gaslighting where everybody told me my ideas would never work.
| Having to watch time and again as a different version of me wins
| the internet lottery.
|
| Dunno about all of you, but I'm kinda over it.
|
| My dad (a Boomer and self-proclaimed radical in the 1960/70s
| environmental spirit) reminded my just yesterday though that not
| all Boomers are alike, and that stereotypes hurt. I wish we had a
| different term for people who self-ossify, glorify ignorance, and
| take it upon themselves to dictate to others why they're wrong.
| I'm thinking of guys like Mitch McConnell and Milton Friedman, so
| sure in their certitude that it's inconceivable to them that
| their theology could actively harm the modern world. How do we
| resist such glacial forms of resignation?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Milton Friedman was a supporter of taxes on pollutants. He
| recognized that negative externalities are a case where
| government intervention is needed, and thought Pigovian taxes
| were the best way for government to do that. Were he alive
| today he'd be advocating carbon taxes.
| zackmorris wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know that. Most of the clips I see of
| him online show him berating young people who aren't wrong
| IMHO.
|
| A bit serendipitous, but his name popped up just now when I
| was searching for an article about regulation to make
| companies responsible for their own externalities:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-29/cop26-.
| ..
|
| _Big investors really do think of themselves as universal
| investors
|
| The typical attitude is: "If we're a big investor, we're
| universal investors. We can't say we're going to divest
| fossil fuels companies; we have to stay invested." Other
| companies in the portfolio will continue to use carbon. At
| the same time, a universal investor needs to look after the
| wellbeing of its clients. That means making sure they have a
| healthy climate to breathe when they retire, and not just
| that they have an adequate cash flow.
|
| Put differently, the report says they believe that they "own"
| the negative externalities caused by the companies in their
| portfolio "due to the sheer depth and breadth of their
| holdings in all asset classes and regions." As far as they
| are concerned: "Such 'paper' holdings do not negate their
| fiduciary responsibility to wider society." This is a long
| way from the "shareholder value" philosophy associated with
| Milton Friedman that held sway for decades._
|
| Right now I put the responsibility for environmental collapse
| squarely on the shoulders of corporations, their shareholders
| and fundamentally consumers who (due to tragedy of the
| commons) frankly don't know how to begin to be sustainable
| when it takes everything they got to make it in today's
| world.
|
| To say that another way, I don't think that Friedman's views
| are fundamentally incorrect, I just think that they put
| attention in the wrong places. For example, capitalism is
| just economic evolution. It doesn't need to be defended as
| some alternative to social democracy. Capitalism isn't going
| anywhere, but it can be constrained by human will so that it
| doesn't make us slaves to it, toiling in the workaday world
| every day until we die as the earth burns around us.
| gedy wrote:
| Unfortunately , as a fellow Gen X, "Boomer" is turning into a
| term for "older than me and a little more successful/further
| along in life". Hate that some younger people are calling me a
| Boomer, when we didn't have pensions _or_ 401ks, our families
| were gutted with parents divorcing, etc.
| renlo wrote:
| This reminds me of the linotype machine's [0] invention. Many had
| tried to invent a similar machine and failed, the inventor went
| into it without knowing about the other failed attempts and used
| a completely different and novel technique than other attempts
| and managed to make it work.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linotype_machine
| dougabug wrote:
| This article is uncannily apropos for HN.
|
| The spectrum of opinions towards emerging technologies is so
| starkly colored by the eras during which practitioners did their
| primary work.
|
| It reminds me of the Heinlein quote from "A Door into Summer",
| "When railroading time comes you can railroad--but not before."
| wpietri wrote:
| For sure. The older I get, the more I try to watch out for this
| effect.
|
| It's a pain, but one of the nice parts is that it drives you to
| look for deeper principles. E.g., when my dad started coding,
| machine time was really expensive as was storage space, so
| everybody optimized for those things. Hello, Y2K! Now the
| opposite is true: developer time has gotten more expensive, and
| computation is cheap. In one sense, that invalidates a lot of
| old expertise. But on the other, optimization is still usually
| important, we're just optimizing for different things. A little
| reframing of habits and you can end up with a more flexible and
| subtle model.
| dougabug wrote:
| We are in violent agreement!
|
| Optimization never grows old, but it's the more general form
| of optimization of which you speak, rather than hyper-
| specific instances of optimization which can overfit to
| specific eras.
| 2sk21 wrote:
| I was thinking about this in the context of large transformer
| based language models like GPT-3. Based on my years of
| experience in the field, I keep thinking that this is a dead-
| end on the path to full AI but I have to force myself to keep
| an open mind and to not to fall into that trap.
|
| Incidentally, Morgan Housel, the author of this essay is a very
| good financial writer - worth reading his other essays too.
| dougabug wrote:
| Perhaps this was a cherry picked example on the part of the
| authors, but the network generating relevant novel images
| conditioned upon the text prompt "an illustration of a baby
| daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog" ... made me take a
| (not entirely permanent) break from on ripping on GPT-3.
|
| https://openai.com/blog/dall-e/
| squiffsquiff wrote:
| Tldr: "society advances one funeral at a time"
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Tl;dr - Old experts cannot distinguish between
| historical/economic cycles vs. Paradigm shifts that break those
| cycles.
|
| Nice theory, but adjust your scale over a thousand years and
| innovation has yet to usurp megacycles of boom/bust, war/peace or
| the rise/fall of "empires".
|
| We may be better informed than we were in the 1700's, but we are
| no less partisan in our views, speculative in our ventures, nor
| vulnerable to geopolitical storms.
|
| Using one of Housel's examples - high PE equity ratios are
| indicative of excess liquidity in the system chasing speculative
| yield; a subset of which excess liquidity is capital fleeing
| China for the West (or) A federal reserve & US Treasury committed
| to ensuring Boomer retirement assets are not wiped out in a
| market reversion to a historical mean. High PE equity ratios are
| not indicative of any underlying fundamentals that justify the
| majority of these prices.
|
| Yes, Tesla _may_ be an exception _if_ Musk's innovation
| convergence strategy is monetized as its investors hope. But for
| every Tesla there is a Nikola, and for every Moderna a Theranos.
|
| What do old experts (old farts like me) know that Housel may not?
| We've lived through about 8 recessions, three economic crisis,
| one bout of epic inflation, and we've watched change, ignorance
| and greed greatly disrupt or destroy corporate behemoths like
| Lucent, Enron, GM, GE, etc.
|
| We know what is coming. We just can't tell you precisely when.
|
| Housel's temporal sense appears to be stunted. And, yes, he does
| (as he stated) sound arrogant.
| GDC7 wrote:
| > Yes, Tesla _may_ be an exception
|
| Tesla is not the exception, matter of fact it's the poster
| child of a world where the stock market going up becomes the
| goal pf both the elected and non-elected branches of the
| government and not an agnostic measurement tool to check how
| American public companies are faring.
| paulpauper wrote:
| My heuristic is to extend current trends outwards. Stock prices
| will keep going higher, like it or not, even though the media for
| over a decade has been predicting a bear market. Valuations
| matter, but market dominance, growth, and network effects matter
| more. Large tech companies are excelling on all these fronts.
| Microsoft has been dominant and growing for 40 years and its
| share price reflects that. Google and Amazon have been doing it
| for the past 20, and Facebook for the past 10.
| publicdenial wrote:
| We should execute every last politician that ordered "lockdowns",
| and masking and forced vaxxing.
|
| They all need to be executed. Every last one of them.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| this author is revealing something embarassing about themselves,
| namely that they think of expertise in almost exclusively
| financial terms. knowing how to get rich is not really the same
| thing as expertise to me.
| publicdenial wrote:
| Is Fauci still considered an expert since he likes to rip vocal
| cords out of puppies and torture them to death? Just asking...
| Tarucho wrote:
| Everything is tied to the present situation. My past failures
| could be someone else tomorrow successes.
|
| But what about human nature knowledge?
| ketzo wrote:
| At first I was a little wary of this, because it had the sort of
| smooth, business-school-y tone that makes you worry someone's
| trying to sell you something.
|
| But I after reading I thought this was genuinely insightful.
| Particularly politically.
|
| I think it helps give me some perspective to know that different
| smart, well-intentioned people have believed wholeheartedly in
| _entirely contradictory_ positions in their lifetimes.
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| I enjoyed this so much. The stories about Ford were terrific.
|
| A lot of "wisdom" is contextual and gets mistaken for universal.
| We learn "X works" and, having been burned by everything else we
| tried, jealously guard the value of X as very special and
| precious.
|
| Scars obtained in the process of obtaining expertise are likely
| an underrecognized factor in experts becoming ossified in their
| opinions. They learned that everything else bites and this
| doesn't. They don't want to get bit again.
|
| Then conditions change and now nothing is guaranteed to work like
| it did before. It likely seems unfair to find their hard won
| wisdom is now irrelevant baggage.
| visarga wrote:
| Experts have done a lot of exploration and gained much
| experience, but just having abilities is nothing by itself. You
| need to exploit your abilities as well, employ them for good
| gain, and that takes time from exploration. Maybe you don't
| want to explore anymore because it's so good where you are at.
| This happened to Microsoft as well.
| publicdenial wrote:
| Is Barbara Ferrer an "expert" even though she has no medical
| degree?
|
| Doesn't she know the facts and science that masking spreads
| germs?
| paulpauper wrote:
| Whether it's finance, geo politics, economics or even Covid, I
| have found that experts tend to have terrible track records. The
| same people today who are predicting Bitcoin will go to 250k in
| four years, made that very prediction four years ago. These
| people are being paid large sums of money to produce worse
| insights and worse performance that even random bloggers or
| random posters on r/wallstreetbets. It's hard to take these
| people seriously no matter how many degrees they have or how rich
| they are. It's obvious that prestige does not select for
| competence anymore.
| antod wrote:
| To me that kind of observation seems subject to all kinds of
| biases.
|
| You seem to be equating "prestige" in a topic with being an
| expert in a topic - the two are not necessarily related.
|
| eg the more outrageous or unusual the claim from an "expert"
| (hence the less likely to be right), the more memorable that
| claim will be, or the more likely it will get attention. And
| the more someone is a "nobody", the more likely that their
| numerous eventually wrong claims will be dismissed or forgotten
| about compared to the memorable times some random was correct
| by accident.
|
| Likewise I find the more certain someone is of something that
| is still uncertain, the more likely they will be to be wrong.
| The alternative of wishy washy consensus full of qualifications
| doesn't report well if at all, and tends to have minor errors
| picked apart and amplified even while broadly correct overall.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >n. And the more someone is a "nobody", the more likely that
| their numerous eventually wrong claims will be dismissed or
| forgotten about compared to the memorable times some random
| was correct by accident.
|
| I think this applies more to some subjects than others. I
| think math and physics experts have a much greater claim to
| epistemological certainty than political or finance experts.
| The vast majority of political experts were wrong both about
| trump getting nomination, wrong about him winning ,and then
| were wrong about the economy doing well under Trump. I think
| nobodies in finance and politics can do as well, if not
| better ,than experts.
| socmovesus wrote:
| Everyone is seeing this all wrong.
|
| Our problem is only with experts who linearly regress away other
| real people!
|
| A politically empowered minority see the masses a rounding error.
|
| Experts in economics tell us it's OK to watch our family members
| die of preventable disease for profits sake.
|
| That doesn't mean we don't need Fauci's and Grace Hopper's.
|
| We need experts in qualifying physical reality not constraining
| criteria for success. Experts accept ideas are not sacrosanct.
| publicdenial wrote:
| Is London Breed an expert in sucking dick?
|
| Is Kamala Harris an expert in getting rugburns on her knees?
| dqpb wrote:
| If you're really an expert, you should be the vanguard, not the
| old guard.
| publicdenial wrote:
| Is Joe Biden an expert in fucking little kids including his
| daughter Ashley in the shower (her words)?
| leobg wrote:
| Great article. Reminds me of Nietzsche's "On The Use And Abuse Of
| History".
| coffeefirst wrote:
| Something I've noticed in the pandemic: there's a pretty big gap
| between what people remember "the experts" saying vs what, if you
| listened to one or two qualified professionals and kept them
| straight, actually said.
|
| Individual experts--the good ones at least--seem to hold up
| pretty well even if they didn't see everything coming.
|
| It's the widespread sampling of chyrons and faces that inevitably
| says everything all of the time and winds up looking incompetent.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| From the book of Proverbs (in the Bible): "The wise man gets a
| lot of advice" (paraphrased).
|
| One chapter later: "The fool listens to most of it" (also
| paraphrased).
|
| If you don't have the time to sort it all out, don't listen to
| all the viewpoints. Society, collectively, is insane - it
| believes so many contradictory things that could not all
| possibly be true. You can't listen to society or "they say" as
| a guide. You'll get nonsense.
|
| But part of this is on the news, especially television and
| internet news. They need a hot take for this hour to draw
| eyeballs. It doesn't have to make sense, it just has to be new
| and different. But if you're trying to follow it to learn what
| to do to protect yourself in the pandemic, it's a hopelessly
| self-contradictory jumble. People wind up saying "They lied to
| us! They're still lying to us!" The problem is that "they" -
| the "they" that the media present to us - is too big a set.
|
| Now, individual experts still can be mistaken, give bad advice,
| or even lie. But no expert is as confused as the union of all
| the experts.
| ericjang wrote:
| You don't believe in the "wisdom of the crowds" ?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Here is a set of people. On a given subject, the _median_
| position is likely to be at least reasonable. That 's the
| "wisdom of the crowds".
|
| Here is a set of experts. Within the area of their
| expertise, the median position is probably pretty close to
| right. The _intersection_ of their views are almost
| certainly right (though it may be the empty set).
|
| But what you can't do is take the _union_ of the views of a
| set of people, and expect anything except a bizarre jumble
| of self-contradiction. And that 's what the media gives us.
| (In fact, the media gives us the union, with extra emphasis
| added to the outliers, because those are "more interesting"
| and therefore attract more eyeballs.)
|
| Wisdom of the crowds? Maybe. Wisdom of the media coverage
| of the crowds? No way.
| musingsole wrote:
| Union vs. intersection vs. outlier weighting is a
| beautiful way to put this.
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| This is why eyewitness testimony can be unreliable . People are
| sure someone said or believed something, or that there is a
| consensus about something, but this may not be true. Social
| media can make this worse, particularly by forming false
| consensuses about issues in which no such consensus may exist.
| gilleain wrote:
| Yes it seems like a combination of magnifying and muddling
| information.
|
| Say, for example, a cancer researcher makes a statement like
| "Red wine contains compounds that might protect from some
| cancers" - not very interesting as news. So it gets magnified
| to "Red wine CURES cancer".
|
| Next, another expert says "excessive use of alcohol can
| increases the risk of certain cancers". Of course the news
| converts this to "Alcohol causes cancer".
|
| Finally, combine these two messages and people quite
| understanderbly conclude that cancer experts have no idea if
| alcohol causes or cures cancer.
| skybrian wrote:
| There is that, but it also seems to be true that a lot of
| scientific studies are done badly. A lesson of the pandemic
| seems to be that when doing a meta-analysis you need to make
| sure to avoid the low-quality and fraudulent studies.
| nostrademons wrote:
| Some of this is a conflation of who the experts are, as well as
| hindsight bias on that question. If you look at say Fauci or
| Trevor Bedford's predictions, sure, they were pretty accurate
| (with some confusion in the middle of the pandemic when
| everything was confused). But if you take Rand Paul as your
| "expert" (also a medical doctor, but in a different specialty),
| you would've had a very different sense of what "the experts"
| were saying. And in the moment, you don't have the benefit of
| hindsight to judge the credibility of expert predictions, only
| their credentials.
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