tvural's comments

Learning new languages in-depth is an incredibly taxing thing, because there are whole jigsaw pieces of syntax you have to learn at once. But worth doing the right way if you have time.

It's worth reading the Ray Dalio debt crisis book to see how this might end - the most likely scenario is the US, Japan, and EU all encountering cash flow problems in the next recession that they resolve by devaluing their currency. In that sense people have less money today than they believe. If all the major currencies and stock markets crash at the same time, there's no safe place for everyone to keep their money.

I think the decline of Silicon Valley will have much more to do with the end of Moore's Law than any kind of social or political trend. The name is very predictive - if there will be nothing left to do with Silicon, maybe there will be nothing left to do in Silicon Valley, and the computer industry generally.

Dropbox Paper has worked quite well for me.

Financial projections will undervalue Tesla because they are very different from other car companies - they are a monopoly with gigantic barriers to entry on many fronts. Other carmakers could copy some features of Tesla's cars, but they can't easily copy the multi-billion-dollar factories that make other features possible. They have better engineers than other car companies and a culture that works them harder. They avoided the dealership system and built their own stores. Elon Musk's PR stunts and Twitter feed are a much more effective method of advertising than the TV and Internet ads other car companies use.

True, but it can be a significant problem for legitimate companies. After going public Tesla had the highest short interest of any major stock at 72%. The other companies that were in the top 5 at the time are all bankrupt or close to it now. Short sellers perceived it as an unrealistic joke, and tried to convince everyone else of that, which could easily have become self-fulfilling.

I would also point out that short sellers and "activist investors" are a significant downside to being public. Essentially you give investors focused on these strategies a financial incentive to destroy the company's long-term value. Activism has been a big problem for drug companies where investors will try to fire all the scientists so that profits will go up for a few years.

Healthcare is a much bigger problem for the government than student loans. The federal government spends about 1 trillion per year on healthcare, while the total of all student debt in the U.S. is around 1 trillion. This is true on a societal level too. U.S. healthcare spending is 17% of GDP, up from 5% in the 1960s. The problem with student loans is that the burden falls mostly on the least financially secure people. This is as opposed to Medicare/Medicaid where the government tries to foot the bill rather than allow people to get in massive debt.

I predict that BMIs are going to suffer from the same problem as AI, where the applications that are working in the short-term get very overestimated because they are confused with the long-term where you create a singularity. If you had a BMI that could read/write the entire brain on neuron-level resolution, you could create computer back-ups of people, and if hardware were fast enough you could create superhuman intelligence. If you just have cochlear implants and prosthetics, the best case is a world where nobody is impaired, which is good, but still very far from a singularity. The Neuralink version is that if you can do telepathy, that might be valuable in some situations, but it will probably just be like faster email until the computers become smarter than us.

I think it's unclear how much progress has been made on the superhuman AI problem. We haven't pinned down a good definition of intelligence, or figured out what it is that makes monkeys smarter than mice and us smarter than monkeys. We do have a lot of progress in specific domains, like image/speech recognition, but it's hard to tell whether they're on the critical path to superhuman AI because we don't know what the critical path is yet. That makes the timeline unpredictable, but biased a priori towards "far away". It's possible that better hardware will accelerate progress, but with CPU clock speeds flattening out, significantly better hardware is not guaranteed in the future.

$200M usually isn't enough for even one drug - $500M is on the low end, and not all drug development works out. So it's plausible that the money is better allocated here than in treatments.

But also, from the article: "Based on some of 23andMe’s newer hires, we wouldn’t be shocked to see the company dive into drug development, either."

There are likely some ulterior motives behind the way cryptocurrency is currently being covered. If you have sway in a news organization, it would be quite lucrative to invest in some crypto-related companies, and then encourage all stories written about cryptocurrency to take a positive view. The persuasion works best when it's hidden, like a story about a teenager becoming rich by buying into bitcoin early. This is fine, but only if all such stories come with a disclosure. Otherwise it's an ethically challenging position to be in, like the rating agencies who kept quiet to avoid losing their clients during 2008.

This link isn't behind a paywall: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/this-23-year-old-just-clos...

Their economy is based on copying things that worked in the U.S. In the 1980s people were worried based on Japan's rate of growth that it was going to overtake the U.S. Instead they just ran out of things to copy, and the growth completely flattened. At some point you can only grow by doing new things, and for whatever reason Japan has historically been very bad at that.

This reminds me of Robin Hanson's criticism of medical spending - exercise and diet are much better predictors of health than money spent on healthcare, meaning that there's a large amount of waste in the system. I suspect something similar here, the amount of money people spend on education is uncorrelated from what they get out of it. The other factors, like whether you went to a top school and what you did in college dominate the ROI. There is a tendency to treat education as an insurance policy, where all you have to do is buy in, and you are somehow protected from falling through the cracks in society. It seems that college as an insurance policy has stopped working if it ever did work, and it exposes a fact that's somewhat uncomfortable, you can't just pay these colleges money to have your career set, you have to figure out what to do yourself.

There's definitely more that can be done behaviorally - the solution to obesity today probably looks more like eating better than taking diet pills. But this is the anti-technological solution that can only be pushed so far, like trying to solve the energy crisis by telling everyone to drive smart cars.

Also, there's often nothing you can do behaviorally. Even people with near perfect behavior will eventually get Cancer or Alzheimer's or Heart Disease. Most of the drugs approved to treat these diseases are something like band-aids that decrease your risk 10% or allow you to live a couple months longer. Maybe too many people are making drugs that work barely well enough for the side effects to be worth it. But almost anything that can get past the FDA will work economically, since there are usually very few alternatives from the buyer's perspective.

Negative press like this probably contributes to the FDA being so conservative. They get none of the benefits when a great new drug is approved, but get scapegoated when they approve something dangerous even to small numbers of people. So they just approve as few drugs and medical devices as they can get away with - it's a massive misalignment of incentives.

One might think drugs would be more dangerous if the FDA were less conservative, but I suspect the opposite. If it takes you ten years and 2 billion dollars to release a new drug, and then you find out it has some terrible side effect in 0.1% of the population, you don't get to fix the problem. You might not withdraw it either, since the drug would still be a net good for society. And if one drug is approved instead of ten, patients are forced to stick to the flawed solution.

The far bigger problem than drugs with side effects is a lack of drugs. Around 1/3 as many drugs get approved today relative to 1970, and the costs of a drug approval have risen 5 times faster than inflation since then. Medicine has been an anti-technological field for the last few decades - it's doing less with more. The most valuable biomedical companies are the ones that have been around since the 1800s - one could imagine what computers would look like today if IBM were still the largest IT company.

> "AI's don't need to learn to code any more than they need to learn to use photoshop. They need to learn to provide functionality (or in this case manipulate image data)."

This is interesting. My counterpoint would be that if you rely on AI over programs you lose human-editability and determinism. So fixing a bug or adding a new feature might mean diving into some opaque model rather than adding a few lines of code. You couldn't do anything where consistency is important, like security, manipulating a database with important information, or GUI design. I think that at least protects large swaths of software development.

Even this example seems less like a replacement for Photoshop and more like a cool new feature Photoshop could add

"Fix those two problems, and a new search engine could be better than Google. Whether anyone would notice is questionable."

Yeah, I don't think many people will care about the difference between good and perfect. You might be able to find a niche in search that Google is ignoring, but you would have a hard time expanding from there into general search.

In that sense Google is a bet against technology - you would invest in Google if you believe the Web's going to stay the same for a long time and nothing will replace it.

One possibility is that the resolution of VR goggles becomes so good that you can simulate looking at a screen. Then you might have something as easy to carry as a smartphone but with unbounded screen size.