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welp comments on Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015 - Less Wrong
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We're always too prone to thinking what's valuable is what the other company is doing
Investors overvalue things they do use, and undervalue things they don't use
(Start-ups that are about brining existing products and services together] are capital intensive
(On difficulty of first experience with start-ups’ relationship to subsequent work ethic) easy and impossible converge to not working hard (see ~18.50 for verbatim, explained better)
(You can’t just assume it will be built – deterministic technological futures egg. Ai WILL happen) you have to ask yourself what is the future you want to build, then work on that
People always ask me about the future and about trends, I'm not a prophet, I don't think the future is fixed in that way
Things that are underrated, are the ones that there are no buzzwords, it doesn't fit into any pre-existing categories, and you got to walkways be listening for those
(about investing in weed) maybe a lot of the money (in the drug industry) came from the illegality so people are able to charge a lot for it…the details are what matters, not necessarily the big trends
If (inaudible) is perfectly competitive, you’d never be able to make any profit…. (Gives example of restaurant industry in some location)
These monopolies are the reward for innovation
Monopolies are the reward for innovation (~COMPETITION can be bad for business, and monopolies drive progress)
The goal of every successful business is to have a monopoly
Compares regulation of bits to regulation to atoms - points out that it might cost 100k to get a drug through the fad, but nobody does rats on video games to determine if they're addictive
addItional quote that I'll post for verbatim review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_yJTCDU4uE&feature=youtu.be&t=15m01s
quote shown in a slide, not spoken, from someone else: If you're not working on your best idea right now, you're doing it wrong - David Hansson
He definately privellages specific over sensitive answers (in the medical sense) and has inspired me to read The Reasonableness of Christianity and reconsider Chrstian practice from the allegorical perspective. I was inspired by his thoughts on original sin as a cultural critique. The name dropping of Straussian encourages me to read about Strauss who I haven't come across before.
**
from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_yJTCDU4uE
What great investments does not one like, what great cause is unpopular. Fund those causes...invest in those ideas. Contrarian
You can always disown a child, but you can't disown anything you've written (Talks about there being technologies innovations potentially that subvert the liberty/privacy vs security paradigm - can get more secure and more privacy concurrently)
A good scientist is very much the opposite, more like 180 degree, 179.5 degrees the opposite of a good politician a scientist is someone who's interested in the truth, and a political is someone with a very troubled relationship with the truth.... (But academic science) egressions law - the bad scientist have driven out the good, those who are nimble in writing government grant application have replaced the eccentric scientists who have really pushed the research. And that's sort of this deep corruption of the public. It’s very hard for the public to really appreciate it, because science is so specialised….self-reinforcing expert communities…have made this process of politicisation extremely opaque to the broader public
(on how happy the super rich are) I don't think this is an easy thing to measure, think it's extremely subject...
I'm not sure subjective happiness is the best way to evaluate things...I think there are many other ways of evaluating things (I think he's implying that if it's just subjective you're measuring, what's the point - they can intuit that themselves anyway)
I am going to disagree vehemently with the notion that monopolies drive progress.
Telkom spent a long time as a fixed-line telecommunications monopoly, and South Africa still has terrible fixed-line internet costs as a result.
Monopolies, as far as I can see, will almost always relax once their monopoly is secure and just keep doing things the same way all the time, holding onto their monopoly. (Sometimes they will even attempt to squash competitors before they grow large enough to threaten said monopoly). Companies in competition, on the other hand, will improve their offerings and/or lower their prices in order to attract more customers. Therefore - and this is borne out by the Telkom example - I conclude that monopolies lead to stagnation, while healthy competition is more likely to lead to progress.
You're right, monopolies certainly don't drive progress. But the possibility of a monopoly can.
Progress requires R&D, and R&D is expensive and unpredictable. No one would want to do the type of long-term research that invigorates the economy or even creates brand new industries if they won't take in the lion's share of the profits. So it would be a bad idea to implement a policy of breaking up any and all monopolies, despite the fact that it is better in the moment (similar to Newcomb's problem). In fact, we actually institute monopolies using government power, via intellectual property.
Agreed. The attempt to reach a monopoly is a great driver of progress; it's only once a company reaches that state that it starts to hinder progress.