[HN Gopher] Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech
___________________________________________________________________
Marc Andreessen on Investing and Tech
Author : MrBuddyCasino
Score : 100 points
Date : 2021-08-18 08:57 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (richardhanania.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (richardhanania.substack.com)
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Moderna, which innovated the concept of mRNA vaccines, it was a
| classic venture capital company. That company would not have
| existed without venture capital, these vaccines would not exist
| without venture capital.
|
| Interesting. I commonly hear asserted that breakthrough
| fundamental inventions don't come from capitalism.
| yborg wrote:
| The fundamental inventions on mRNA vaccines were grant-funded
| academic work. But I don't know that anyone asserts that
| breakthrough inventions don't come from capitalism, certainly
| in the 19th and early 20th century many inventions were created
| by individual entrepreneurs, for example the Wright Brothers.
| highenergystar wrote:
| It's difficult to speak off-the-cuff on any topic that might come
| up in an interview, but I expected better than 'at least it's not
| boring' about QAnon when attempting to reply on the social
| impacts of technology.
|
| Social media definitely has negative impacts (e.g. directly tied
| to mobs in India and Burma) and positive impacts (so much easier
| to stay connected across the world) - it would've been
| 'interesting' to hear a more nuanced take from one of the
| inventors of the modern internet
| cblconfederate wrote:
| > you can see in the data the scandals cause people to use them
| more.
|
| I often wonder if all that negative press about leaks, facebook's
| privacy violations etc. are just publicity stunts. So many tech
| articles seeking outrage and smell of fake.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The technologies behind computer networking that ultimately
| resulted in the internet were funded by DARPA starting in the
| 1950s.
|
| Much of it came from the telegraph network that had been
| developed in the previous century. See "The Victorian Internet"
| by Standage.
|
| Also, in the 1970s working on computers, everybody with two
| computers invented ways to hook them together, i.e. invented
| networking. Many became commercial, like Compuserve and MCImail,
| some became free, like the BBS systems. Then there's Ethernet and
| TokenRing for LAN networks.
|
| (Note that DARPA figured out how to connect two computers as soon
| as they had two. It's just inevitable, not something coming from
| nowhere. Given two computers and the telephone lines, inventing a
| way to network them is going to happen in short order, just as
| water flows downhill.)
|
| We'd have had an internet one way or another.
| zepto wrote:
| The internet is a network of networks. Nobody claims DARPA
| invented sending signals over wires, or even computer networks.
|
| Then DARPA contribution was literally to work out how to
| connect separate networks together into a practical wide area
| network.
|
| The internet is a network of networks.
|
| We would of course have had one in some form. The one we have
| is based on DARPA's.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > The one we have is based on DARPA's.
|
| I know that. My point is to point out that government funding
| was not the key to the internet. The two keys to the internet
| are computers and wires (going back to the telegraphy
| system).
| dboreham wrote:
| Yes but I think he means that these people were the first to
| have two computers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-
| Automatic_Ground_Environm...
| acchow wrote:
| They were the FIRST to have 2 computers? How can we even keep
| accurate historical info about computer ownership?
| svachalek wrote:
| Early computers weren't mass produced objects, they were
| huge, expensive, custom built machines. It's like where was
| the first city to have two skyscrapers or who was the first
| person to fly to space twice. The records would be there
| unless they were deliberately hiding them (as many national
| intelligence agencies do).
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| > Each SAGE Direction Center (DC) housed an FSQ-7 which
| occupied an entire floor, approximately 22,000 square feet
| (2,000 m2) not including supporting equipment. The FSQ-7
| was actually two computers, "A" side and "B" side.
|
| If one computer takes more than 10000sqft, then it's should
| be rare enough and verifiable. For comparison, a large
| California house with 5+ bedrooms are around 3000sqft.
| daxuak wrote:
| For some reason I read the title as Mac Address on Investing and
| Tech.
| boringg wrote:
| Too long in the trenches in my guess.
| mym1990 wrote:
| Genuinely curious question: how does something come to be defined
| as cutting edge? Is it more of a feeling when someone is working
| on something that just seems so far away from the norm? Is
| everyone who is researching ways to cure cancer on the cutting
| edge, or is it a very small subset of that group? Is it defined
| by how close someone is to actually achieving a discovery?
| [deleted]
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| One of my big career disappointments was having a meeting with
| Marc Andreessen with regard to a project he needed us for, not as
| an "investee". I didn't idolize him or anything before that but I
| had it in mind that he would at least have something to offer. In
| our conversation I realized almost immediately he was a total
| buffoon and had just been in the right place at the right time.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| > In our conversation I realized almost immediately he was a
| total buffoon and had just been in the right place at the right
| time.
|
| Sometimes it takes a while, and some deep context, and then
| some more context, ideally in a different set of circumstances,
| before you can assess someone's capabilities fairly.
|
| Some people shine in their specialty domain, and flail outside
| of it.
|
| Others are good in fair weather, but fragile in a crisis.
| Others are kind of the opposite, losing steam day to day, but
| rising to the occasion when shit happens.
|
| Seasoned salespeople know all this. They do well consistently
| in spite of it all by presenting themselves credibly
| irrespective of their competency in any domain. They dress
| right for their audience, and they speak persuasively, always
| mindful of what their audience wants and needs to hear.
|
| But listen to Andreesen talk! He sounds like he's never had to
| learn how to persuade anybody of anything. Well, not any
| regular people.
|
| https://audioboom.com/posts/7923122-flying-x-wings-into-the-...
| jereees wrote:
| He sounds like he had too many Adderall mixed with coffee. I
| would know.
| hamburgerwah wrote:
| And some people are just dolts. It's just my opinion but I
| believe he falls into that camp based on first hand
| interactions.
| wombatmobile wrote:
| Is he wealthy?
|
| Oh, I just googled it, and the answer is yes.
|
| It's a curious thing, wealth accumulation.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please let's not go into unsubstantive personal attack
| in HN threads. Maybe you don't owe this person better but you
| owe this community better if you're participating here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| Your story is interesting of course, but you're not actually
| telling us the story.
|
| Also, "total buffoon and had just been in the right place at
| the right time" is a pretty sweeping conclusion to say you
| realized "almost immediately".
| HNPoliticalBias wrote:
| What a dream, spending your days carrying water for
| Billionaires.
| hncurious wrote:
| I hadn't even dared to think that Sturgeon's Law might apply to
| output in the field of science. Yikes.
|
| "Anyway, science right now is in an existential crisis. This is a
| real, real issue, and there's now a generation of scientists who
| specialize in pointing this out and analyzing it. Andrew Gelman
| and others. I'll give you an example: I had a conversation with
| the long-time head of one of the big federal funding agencies for
| healthcare research who is also a very accomplished entrepreneur,
| and I said, "do you really think it's true that 50-70% of
| biomedical research is fake?" This is a guy who has spent his
| life in this world. And he said "oh no, that's not true at all.
| It's 90%." [Richard laughs]. I was like "holy shit," I was
| flabbergasted that it could be 90%.
|
| He's like "well look, 90% of everything is shit", which is
| literally this thing called Sturgeon's law which says that 90% of
| everything is bad. 90% of every novel written is bad, 90% of
| music, 90% of art... 90% of everything is bad. So his analysis
| was, anything you get in the field of medical experimentation,
| biomedical development, and this is going to be true of any
| field, there's like five labs total in the world that are really
| good at what they're doing and doing really cutting edge work.
| And this is true of quantum computing; pick any field for
| advanced technology you want.
|
| So those five labs have a pretty good shot at doing interesting
| work, even some of that is going to reproduce and some of it
| isn't. But once you get out of those top five labs, it's pretty
| much make-work, incremental, marginal improvements at best, and a
| complete waste of time otherwise. And I said "good God, why does
| the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?" And he
| said, "well, there are all these universities and professors who
| have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these
| systems and people have been promised lifetime employment."
| Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious
| structural and incentive problems in the research complex. "
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > So his analysis was, anything you get in the field of medical
| experimentation, biomedical development, and this is going to
| be true of any field, there's like five labs total in the world
| that are really good at what they're doing and doing really
| cutting edge work. And this is true of quantum computing; pick
| any field for advanced technology you want.
|
| That's also true for software engineers. A handful of 10x can
| carry a company a long way.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| it's all about incentives, the modern academic system has the
| incentives all wrong for creating innovation and quality work.
| Replication crisis is just a symptom of the real problem
| yuy910616 wrote:
| It should be point out that Marc Andreessen of all people
| should deeply believe Sturgeon's law - after all, return on
| investment for venture firms are dominated by few 'hits' and
| lots of 'duds'.
|
| Of course - I think if anyone act on the belief that 90% of
| their bets are duds, they would not be in the venture business.
| It's really interesting that a process could lead to a
| distribution - but knowing the outcome distribution is
| actually...useless?
| satellite2 wrote:
| As if we are capable of determining who is doing the top 10%
| best science and are not glued to the 10% most shining project
| according to the fad of the day.
| dotcommand wrote:
| > He's like "well look, 90% of everything is shit"
|
| I think there is a difference between "being shit" and "being
| fake" though. 'do you really think it's true that 50-70% of
| biomedical research is fake?'
|
| Fake seems more insidious and problematic.
|
| Also this brings up a very troubling issue. If 90% of the
| "research is fake/shit" and lets say that means that 90% of the
| researchers are "fake/shit", then it means that 'scientific'
| consensus is also likely "fake/shit".
|
| This is why I'm always skeptical of 'scientific' consensus.
| Science is about evidence, testing, etc. Not consensus - which
| is the realm of politics, law, etc.
|
| And I'd suspect 99.99% of social 'sciences' is probably
| 'fake/shit' and that is used to push/change
| society/government/etc.
| u385639 wrote:
| Interesting. Marc is a nuanced guy of course but I sense he may
| have shifted in the last while. I recall in his 1:1 w/ Peter
| Thiel he took the opposing side of this argument. Peter does
| not mince words re: the progress of "science". Perhaps Marc was
| just doing it for the sake of discussion.
| [deleted]
| helixc wrote:
| I believe, this is how scaling works, and exactly the price we
| pay to afford the top-notch. In any given field, company, pro
| sport team, there are top 10% labs/groups/players that matters
| the most. However, to make the 10% emerge, there has to be a
| pyramid where the rest 90% is responsible for forming a stable
| infrastructure. Then it comes down to how well we can design
| the pyramid. Our result should be evaluated not by how thin we
| cut down the infrastructure, but how easy we make top-players
| emerge.
|
| On another note, I have seen small no-name labs published
| impactful scientific results, and then went back to stealth
| mode again. It's super cool. Science labs, unlike a business
| entity, should not be measured by recurrent revenue and growth.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > On another note, I have seen small no-name labs published
| impactful scientific results, and then went back to stealth
| mode again. It's super cool. Science labs, unlike a business
| entity, should not be measured by recurrent revenue and
| growth.
|
| Did the individual contributors stay at these labs?
| j7ake wrote:
| Yes, but this sturgeons law (maybe less extreme extent) often
| applies to within labs or within scientists as well.
|
| Newton did first rate work, but he also spent a lot of time
| working on alchemy and theology which didn't get anywhere.
|
| Research grants are generally competitive, if you haven't shown
| you've ever done something my significant or haven't done
| something significant in a long time, it is difficult to
| survive. But indeed even the top scientists spend a lot of time
| on dead ends.
|
| It is true that often only top 5 labs or so doing good work,
| but those top 5 labs are not constant over time, they wax and
| wane like fashion trends.
|
| The lesson is just because over last few years the top work
| came from only a few labs, it's premature to eliminate all
| other labs because those top labs could be lower in the next
| cycle.
| lisper wrote:
| It's also important to distinguish between things that turn
| out to be crap in retrospect and things that can be known to
| be crap given the information available at the time. Those
| are two _very_ different things. Yes, alchemy is crap, but
| there 's no way Newton could have known that given the data
| he had at his disposal at the time.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > things that can be known to be crap given the information
| available at the time
|
| Sometimes people do investigate the crap, and discover it's
| actually fertilizer. The trouble is, one cannot tell in
| advance.
| tmn wrote:
| It's somewhat laughable to say he worked on alchemy and
| theology and that got no where, while we are discussing him
| and his accomplishments 400 years later. Alchemy is an
| esoteric inner journey. Ramanujan was by all accounts a one
| of a kind genius. Just from wiki 'Ramanujan credited his
| substantial mathematical capacities to divinity, and said the
| mathematical knowledge he displayed was revealed to him by
| his family goddess Namagiri Thayer'. Belief systems can be
| very powerful or destructive to ones own accomplishments
| version_five wrote:
| I don't see a better system. Maybe I'm misunderstanding his or
| your point. To me this is essentially capitalism. 90% or more
| of businesses fail, and of those that don't, 90% or more suck.
| But if you tried to call that 99% "waste" that could be avoided
| by only running the good business, you would fail miserably.
| Research is exactly the same. We can't just identify and fund
| the good research.
|
| (But this should be obvious to a VC so I may be reading it
| wrong)
| yuy910616 wrote:
| Well said - Perhaps a way to look at it is that 'good' is a
| subjective target that should be define as 'distance from
| average/medium'.
|
| So let's be thankful of the crappy medium haha
| jollybean wrote:
| This is definitely not the right analogy because one is a
| matter of risk, the other a matter of integrity.
|
| New business ventures are inherently risky.
|
| Research is inherently risky, and we would expect 90% to
| 'fail' but for 90% of papers to be rubbish would be a matter
| of 'extreme corruption' along the lines of 90% of judges
| taking bribes etc..
|
| "I don't see a better system."
|
| Well, one thing we could do is punish people for knowingly
| publishing crap results, i.e. have a 'secondary review
| system' that investigates 'why' results were rubbish, and if
| there was malfeasance, well, put in place some kind of
| retribution.
|
| We could also change our tune with respect to expectations,
| and come to 'expect' that the majority of research should
| publish then 'null' result and that should just be it.
| yuy910616 wrote:
| I think this is a good point too - venture companies and
| research SHOULD have two very different distributions
| nostrademons wrote:
| Be careful about assuming malice where ignorance exists.
|
| It's possible for 90% of papers to be rubbish without any
| ill intent or dishonesty on the part of the experimenter.
| They might simply suffer from "works for me" syndrome, as
| it afflicts software developers. In science, this equates
| to failing to control for all the possible confounding
| factors that might affect the result of the experiment.
| They might have carefully controlled for everything _they
| thought of_ and gotten methodologically valid results, but
| then when another experimenter tries to replicate it, they
| find their experimental environment is different in a way
| that neither considered important but alters the results.
|
| Finding all these conflaters is _the point_ of science. If
| you can 't replicate the experiment, it means the results
| don't hold, but it doesn't mean the investigators were bad
| people - and assuming they are is unlikely to get better
| science.
| JacobDotVI wrote:
| Research in general is the same, but shouldn't _published_
| research have already gone through a filter such that it
| represents the 10% that hasn't failed?
| nostrademons wrote:
| Only if you tie publication to reproduction. But you can't
| really do that, because to reproduce an experiment
| independently, the independent researchers need to have
| learned about your result and methodology, which =
| publication.
|
| Without being able to independently verify results, a lot
| of journals rely on signals like your research & results
| being noteworthy, which is anticorrelated with them being
| true. If our understanding of the world is at all correct,
| you'd _expect_ most experiments to give boring, status-quo
| results, and your first impulse when you get something
| noteworthy is to assume the experimenter made a mistake.
| (Interestingly, this is how things work at the undergrad
| level - if you measure the speed of light at 1 million
| meters /sec, your prof will assume you screwed up.)
|
| Probably we need a separate verification step after
| publication, with researchers evaluated on what fraction of
| their published results survive verification, not just how
| many papers they publish. Publish all the noteworthy
| results you get, but assume that _published_ research doesn
| 't mean much until it's been independently reproduced.
| majormajor wrote:
| > So those five labs have a pretty good shot at doing
| interesting work, even some of that is going to reproduce and
| some of it isn't. But once you get out of those top five labs,
| it's pretty much make-work, incremental, marginal improvements
| at best, and a complete waste of time otherwise. And I said
| "good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you
| know this?" And he said, "well, there are all these
| universities and professors who have tenure, there are all
| these journals, there are all these systems and people have
| been promised lifetime employment." Anyway, a longwinded way of
| saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive
| problems in the research complex. "
|
| This seems like an non-thorough and fairly uninteresting answer
| to the question.
|
| I would want to know how much useful-but-not-groundbreaking
| stuff still comes out of the "make work" crowd, how wide you
| need the funnel to be at the top to make sure you catch the
| people who can end up in the top labs and who make
| breakthroughs, how much of a "safety net" that you need to make
| sure people are motivated to jump into the funnel in the first
| place rather than going into something safer, etc.
|
| A world where we have fewer "wasteful" make-work research jobs
| but also have fewer breakthroughs isn't great. Hell, you could
| call the majority of today's service- and information-oriented
| _non-academic_ jobs "make-work" too (let's up those
| clickthrough rates! let's stream this video in 8k instead of
| 4k! let's move this money around slightly faster!). So is there
| necessarily much utility in moving "make-work" researchers into
| other fields?
| screye wrote:
| IMO, it is another form of compensation.
|
| People look to get 3 things in a job: Compensation, Interest
| and Reputation.
|
| The professor is a researcher who teaches. However, they do not
| want to merely be a teacher. Especially when it comes with a
| substantial pay cut in comparison to the industry. So, you
| offer them repute and interest by giving tenure and something
| to research. The university gets a better teacher for cheap and
| the professor gets an inflated sense of ego and self-
| actualization.
|
| From the student's point of view, it opens up alternate avenues
| for promotion. If only the top 5 labs get funded enough to do
| good work, then entering those top 5 labs early is absolutely
| essential. Anyone who doesn't get on the bandwagon early, will
| be left to the wolves like medical residencies. It will greatly
| exacerbate the competition in standardized exams and sideline
| students who don't abide by a rigid template early in life.
| (eg: a lot of friends went to tier 2 universities for their
| masters, did excellent work and got into the top 5 labs purely
| because the top 50 lab was funded enough for them to make up
| for lost time early in life)
|
| I have also seen lab impact scores jump around substantially
| enough, that while the 90% hypothesis may be true, we have no
| way to picking out who will create the 10% that's gold. While
| half of the 10% might get reliably produced by the top 5 labs.
| The other half can be notoriously hard to pin down. You will
| see this in top industry groups (MSR, Brain) that hire
| exclusively out of the top 5 labs. Even there, the 90% number
| holds, despite there being a hiring system specifically built
| for capitalistic impact.
|
| On the flip side, any academic field whose employability exists
| only within academia is a dictionary-definition pyramid scheme.
| It is a common accusation that's correctly levied on the
| liberal arts, but STEM should not be immune to it.
| majormajor wrote:
| Playing with some numbers... here's an interesting way setting
| a bar for publication can backfire: if you don't publish
| negative results, and you define positive results as
| 0.05-level, you're going to greatly inflate the amount of
| false-positives you publish, in fields that rely on statistical
| significance.
|
| (Fudging here around the 0.05 threshold threshold, since stuff
| on that boundary is the most likely to produce false positives,
| not sure what how to use a more realistic range... I think this
| would just be upper-bound on false positives? Please
| correct/clarify if your probability/statistics knowledge here
| is deeper than mine!)
|
| Let's say twenty different researchers have a similar idea,
| they all pursue it, and one of them gets (un)lucky and gets
| apparently statistically significant results. They're the only
| ones that try to publish, and nobody ever has the knowledge
| that it only worked 1 time out of 20 (or more?) - even the
| people who's experiments failed who see it are only aware of
| their own attempt, and maybe they just messed something up.
|
| Let's say 90% of all published results are non-reproducible.
| What sort of pipeline would be required to create that? For
| every reproducible, significant finding, there are 9 false-
| positives. For each of those false-positives there were 19
| true-negatives. So about 1 out of 180 research attempts are
| reproducible truly-meaningful novel results. Does that sound
| reasonable? It's hard, right, especially to keep finding new
| things on top of everyone else's continued progress too? But it
| isn't necessarily malicious or fraudulent every step of the way
| - we just have our system structured in a way that biases in
| favor of creating false positives.
|
| (Put in other numbers, say 10% of all research has significant
| results, then 90% of it doesn't, and at the 0.05 level, that's
| still (up to?) 4.5 false positives for every 10 truly
| statistically significant things, meaning close to 1 out of
| every 3 papers would still be expected to be a false positive.)
|
| Publishing negative results would require a bigger publication
| industry, and more people spending more time filtering through
| it all, but you'd at least be able to compare to the literature
| to say "this looks like it worked, but ... it hasn't ever
| worked for anyone else."
| sjg007 wrote:
| It is also difficult to identify who is doing good work a
| priori and there's also the out of left field work which proves
| successful despite being a no name. You also train new
| scientists etc.... I think most noble prizes are from people
| whose research was initially discounted.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
|
| This law seems to lack any kind of rigor or theoretical basis
| and seems like a purely rhetorical device.
| ysavir wrote:
| As are most of these "laws". The idea isn't to do a
| conclusive, thorough examination of all things under the sun
| and render a statement that reflects that particular moment
| in time. The idea is to make an observation--perhaps true,
| perhaps false--that helps us maintain a healthy mindset when
| examining and comprehending things. It's not meant to be
| insightful, it's meant to encourage us to strive for better
| insight.
| vickspicks wrote:
| 90% of laws are bad
| capiki wrote:
| What law is that?
| ysavir wrote:
| Technically, Sturgeon's law.
| breck wrote:
| 84.3% of statistics are made up on the spot
| blueboo wrote:
| OK, but let's be clear: it's not rational. It's "thoughts
| and prayers" for the Star Slate Codex set.
| ysavir wrote:
| I think that's less a reflection of the "law" and more a
| reflection of how you're trying to apply the law.
| boringg wrote:
| Seems like an empirical approach to addressing this would be
| more effective. Otherwise it's just a gut feeling. I am not
| saying its wrong its just lacking in verifiable information.
| majormajor wrote:
| It's purely rhetorical but - the specific 90% figure aside -
| it's fairly straightforward that not everyone can be the
| best. Everything else is just figuring out what sort of
| distribution you have.
|
| In many fields the definition of "crap" depends, after all,
| on what the rest of the field's output looks like.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 90% of Sturgeon's Law is crap.
| Enginerrrd wrote:
| It sounds like a manifestation of the pareto principle. I
| would in no way be surprised to see scientific advancement
| follow a power law distribution among contributors where the
| top 5-10% produce more and better science than the bottom 90%
| combined.
|
| There's all kinds of reasons to expect that too... Everything
| from funding, likely collaboration partners, talent, etc.
|
| That would give it some theoretical basis.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Not only this, but it appears to me that diagnoses of the state
| of science as a problem are making the classic problem a person
| like Andrew Gelman would usually quickly point out, which is
| ignoring base rates. Saying 70% of published research can't
| replicate sounds bad in a vacuum, but how does that compare to
| 50 years ago? We have no idea if this number that sounds
| terrible outside of any context represents an improvement,
| degradation, or no difference at all from what we should
| expect.
|
| That isn't by any means to suggest we shouldn't try to make
| science better by being more replicable and reducing fraud, but
| if it is an improvement, we're already doing something right
| and there is far less cause for despair and cynicism.
|
| It also, of course, doesn't do any base rate comparison to non-
| scientific ways of generating facts. If 90% of published
| psychology research turns out to be wrong, but 99% of folk
| psychology turns out to be wrong, then science is still winning
| there.
| jollybean wrote:
| "Saying 70% of published research can't replicate sounds bad
| in a vacuum, but how does that compare to 50 years ago?"
|
| It doesn't matter a whole lot with respect to 'how it
| compares to 50 years ago' if the assumption that science is
| supposed to be objective and credible.
|
| It's supposed to be 'approaching 100%' i.e. they are
| publishing findings, not fake findings.
|
| i.e. it's not a game of 'getting a higher percentage' it's a
| game of integrity.
|
| The implications that 'most science is rubbish' is pretty
| scary actually and it has profound consequences for the
| future both in practical terms (i.e. we can't trust a lot of
| it), but especially in populist terms (i.e. people not
| trusting climate change, vaccine research etc.).
|
| "If 90% of published psychology research turns out to be
| wrong, but 99% of folk psychology turns out to be wrong, then
| science is still winning there. "
|
| Is it though? We spend bazillions on psychology and nothing
| on pop psychology, so we'd have to contemplate how valuable
| that '10%' is to society - especially in the context that we
| may not even know 'which 10%'.
|
| This is kind of a big problem.
| majormajor wrote:
| There's a big, important difference between "fake
| fraudulent findings" and "not-replicable findings." The
| latter suggests problems stemming from a big nasty
| complicated poorly-understood world, and can be improved
| with introspection and change over time. The first step is
| the greatly increased discussion over it now than in the
| past - we're discovering the size of the problem. The next
| step will be to do things with that. Publishing negative
| results, getting everyone to have a better understanding of
| prob/stat... I think those are the directions to go in.
|
| If, on the other hand, you just dumped all those psychology
| researchers out of the academic environment and sent them
| to marketing and advertising companies... are we better
| off?
| [deleted]
| abvdasker wrote:
| On immigration policy:
|
| > Traditionally if I wanted to work at a company in another
| country I would have to go to that country. I'd have to be an
| immigrant from my country, at least for a while. In a world of
| remote work and Zoom and Slack, I can now work for people
| anywhere in the world. I can work for companies doing any kind of
| knowledge work. Immigration policies apply to the atoms of human
| beings, they don't apply to the bits. I can go to work for some
| company anywhere in the world if it's a remote-friendly company.
| I may never travel there, I may never have to travel there.
|
| Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet part
| out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date from a
| venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is almost
| certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards remote
| work brought on by the pandemic.
| exolymph wrote:
| Well, it's a free market (for capital, but even then not
| really, but close enough for rhetorical purposes). Outcompete
| those offshore workers, there was never any other option.
| abvdasker wrote:
| Hard to outcompete such dramatic cost savings. An engineer
| India is going to cost a tiny fraction of one in the Bay
| Area. Not sure that's a winnable competition unless you
| accept a massive pay cut.
| dboreham wrote:
| My sense is that today a top notch engineer in India,
| working for a US-based company, doesn't cost "a tiny
| fraction" of one in the Bay Area. A faction, yes, but not a
| tiny fraction.
| mattnewton wrote:
| If it were a tiny fraction there would have to be an
| equally large opposite force keeping that engineer from
| immigrating to the US, and as onerous and terrible as the
| visa process is, I don't think it will prevent the best
| from migrating for better wages, even temporarily.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| Exactly. If they're as good as you think they are,
| they'll also be good at capturing a large fraction of the
| value they create.
|
| There's an ancient Dilbert about this somewhere...
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > Marc Andreessen is getting very close to saying the quiet
| part out loud. This is the clearest statement I've seen to date
| from a venture capitalist that white collar offshoring is
| almost certainly going to accelerate due to the shift towards
| remote work brought on by the pandemic.
|
| If anyone isn't hiring international remote right now they are
| losing a huge opportunity. Lots of people are looking at
| jumping ships, and western companies can outbid almost anyone
| for top talent.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > So it's very hard to make time scales match for 20-year
| intellectual journeys.
|
| Xerox did it with the copy machine. Which then remade the
| business world. They did it again with the user interface, though
| it was Apple that capitalized on it.
|
| Frank Whittle soldiered on for many years trying to invent the
| jet engine, funded by venture capitalism at the time. The
| government wasn't interested until he demonstrated flying jet
| aircraft. In the meantime the US government shut down Lockheed's
| nascent jet engine project.
| petermcneeley wrote:
| > Marc: I think there's a real argument, and this is the most
| uncomfortable form of argument, there is a real argument that
| there are just a certain number of super-elite people.
|
| I really enjoy it when people say exactly what they think.
| david927 wrote:
| It's not a brave or iconoclastic thought; it's actually
| incredibly common: Throughout history the wealthy have thought
| of themselves as superior.
|
| If they got lucky, it was because they were "super-elite." No
| one's going to win a nurture-or-nature argument but there's a
| clear self-interest in these situations to call nature what
| was, at least in part, nurture.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| He's not talking about the wealthy, he's talking about
| scientists, most of whom are not rich, or at least not
| "super-elite" level rich.
| david927 wrote:
| Oh, he's talking about himself and his friends too, make no
| mistake. In nurture-vs-nature, those who struggle to
| achieve something understand how large a role nurture
| plays, and those who win the "circumstance lottery" tend to
| insist that it was bestowed on them directly from God.
|
| It's like talking about how there are "just a certain
| number of super-elite" players of pickle ball. It's
| conflating datasets of those who have been given access to
| the entire spectrum of attributes necessary to know and be
| good at pickle ball, with the vast seas of those who
| haven't. How can you say it's rare based on such a small
| data sample? If you were a pickle ball champion, would you
| really brag about how, "Let's face it, there are only a
| couple of us; we're just that good."
| jdminhbg wrote:
| This seems like it's going beyond a simple uncharitable
| reading and straight into psychoanalysis-from-a-distance.
| david927 wrote:
| Could it be that he phrased it poorly? Of course.
|
| But if you're unfamiliar with the hubris and elitism that
| runs wildly unfettered in the Bay Area -- well, lucky
| you.
| achillesheels wrote:
| Irrespective of the self-rationalization, if their success is
| conditional on their starting place, how can one judge it to
| be "lucky"? It must necessarily be predetermined, correct?
| abvdasker wrote:
| I can't tell whether these types of guys are totally ignorant
| of concepts like the Nietzschean Ubermensch or whether they're
| just careful to avoid referring to it too directly.
| thewarrior wrote:
| They are totally aware and believe that they are the
| Ubermensch while funding and working on the Clubhouse app and
| sneering at all the people in broken institutions delivering
| things like healthcare or education.
|
| "Imagine you're an expert in only one thing and it's computer
| programming. Books are a waste of time except as quick
| references; you can achieve full expertise just by teaching
| yourself through internet searches, discussion forums, and
| maybe the occasional blog post if you're really keen. When
| you have to solve a problem, you strip away as much of the
| context as possible, until you can isolate it down to a
| single phrase of logic. As soon as you solve that one
| isolated microproblem, the results blow up exponentially to
| satisfy all kinds of needs and desires you haven't even
| thought of.
|
| Now imagine that even though you're doing journeyman skilled
| labor like a plumber or electrician (except it doesn't even
| require professional certification), you earn a salary well
| into the six figures - or even equity that grows to the
| millions or billions - in a Wall Street-like testosterone
| bubble where you and your colleagues unabashedly believe
| you're the smartest people in the room, the beneficiaries of
| a pure meritocracy, and you're Changing The World as much as
| you can when unimpeded by the hordes of fuzzies who just
| don't know how to think.
|
| Of course you come to believe that anyone who claims to be a
| credentialed expert, and says this or that issue is actually
| much more complicated and contextual than you appreciate, is
| probably just a big faker whose whole field of study could be
| solved elegantly if a smart person like you just spent some
| hobby time stripping away the context to isolate that one
| neat trick of logic."
|
| Not sure who wrote this originally found it here - https://ww
| w.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/i7a24j/tech_brai...
| achillesheels wrote:
| I mean, look at the monuments -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| It's myopic to judge the tech world around mobile apps
| instead of the decades long capitalizations that can bring
| mass market super computers into the palm of our hands.
|
| Now compare that to the research interests over the same
| time-horizon. We still have psychology departments not
| educating basic cellular biology as a graduation
| requirement!
| [deleted]
| jstx1 wrote:
| How is that saying anything meaningful though?
|
| The only way the statement could be false would be for everyone
| to be at the same level of skill/knowledge/aptitude/etc. but
| there's clearly some non-uniform distribution and regardless of
| where you draw the line to define super-elite, some people will
| fall in that group.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| He's saying it's an intrinsic quality. The implication being
| that we spend too many resources educating people.
| majormajor wrote:
| He doesn't appear to be saying that. He's talking in those
| paragraphs about systems, and arguing that by building
| systems that scale, we're creating bureaucracy that de-
| motivates the most elite people even though it was
| originally intended to allow the excellent performers to
| rise.
|
| But he doesn't present much evidence for this beyond a
| speculative "If someone's truly a member of the elite, are
| able to generate elite-level results, if you wanted to
| demotivate them and draw them out of the field, what would
| you do? You would surround them with mediocrity and drown
| them in bullshit" that's extrapolated from what the
| founders he's talking to are telling him.
|
| One potential blind spot seems to be "maybe weeding through
| tedium is a good quality in many researchers, since much of
| research is more tedious than founding a startup." After
| all, he's basing this on talking to people who left the
| system, not talking to today's top researchers.
|
| I think a bigger one is that he says even in his system,
| most (50%+) of the companies he funds fail to do anything
| interesting. So this is still, from the same sort of
| standard of efficiency applied to researchers here,
| woefully wasteful.
|
| I'm also not really clear on how he thinks it should be
| changed.
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