This calculation is why "growth" companies dominated the stock market during the 2010's: with the Zero Interest Rate Policy that most of the developed world had, the discount rate that the markets used ended up being basically zero. In which case a market player is indifferent between a dollar in 2020 and a dollar in 2040. So if a company had a 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040, that was worth (0.1 * 1 trillion=10 billion dollars). But with a more traditional 4% discount rate then a dollar in 2040 is worth less than half of a dollar in 2020, and that means your 10% chance of being worth a trillion dollars in 2040 has less than half of the value. Even if nothing else changed about your business, just the discount rate changing halved the value of your company.

There is also the concept of "Index Tracking Error". No fund can perfectly mimic the index, and that is expected and understood, but the goal is generally to have the tracking error <0.1%- 1% would be a bad track. And so an index fund could take the risk that they will have a tracking error and delay picking up SpaceX even after it joins the official index, but then if it goes up they will look worse relative to their real competitors, the other NASDAQ 100 tracking index funds. If SpaceX goes down, of course, they will have positive tracking error, but I'm not sure how much potential investors would value that. SpaceX would be something like 4% of the NASDAQ 100 at it's announced expected market cap, so a 10% movement by SpaceX would be enough on its own to get you into the notable tracking error range if you didn't have any exposure to it.

They have instituted rules and gone back on them eventually (most notably for several years they had a "no going public with different classes of voting shares designed to allow control forever, if IPO is after today" rule that they eventually dropped) but they are generally pretty good about following rules.

Thinking... Thinking... Tim Berners-Lee proposing HTTP in 1989 is kinda like the original Attention is All You Need paper, I guess? Netscape 1.0 release in December 1994 is ChatGPT 1.0? And then Amazon.com opened up to the public in July 1995 and then IPO'd in May 1997 (after raising less than 10 million dollars in two funding rounds). But once again we have the business side of these previous cycles moving much faster than this one.

It is entirely plausible to me that there are great technologies that are impossible to reach via the normal means of VC/investor financed capitalism. I certainly have encountered market failures requiring extremely patient money (usually in the form of government subsidies) to produce a useful product that eventually does have market value. That has worked many times in the past. But so far generative AI has not had that, and looking at my non-technology friends, I very much doubt that there would be much support among them for government subsidies of AI companies. AI companies have made too many people unhappy, served as too much of a punching bag, to be in a good position politically for that.

If the end result of this is "certain classes of white collar workers are 10-25% more productive" (which is the best results I can extrapolate from what I've seen so far) then it's really hard to imagine how OpenAI can return a profit to their investors.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VisiCalc#Killer_app is pretty much the normal narrative on Visicalc and its importance to the Personal Computer.

The Apple II went on sale on June 10th, 1977. Visicalc went on sale October 17th, 1979- 860 days separate the two. ChatGPT was opened to the public on November 30th, 2022, which was 1219 days ago- almost 50% more time has elapsed than between the Apple II and Visicalc.

If they do cut back to their size before the acquisition, while continuing to try and support the EMR, they will be doing a lot more with fewer employees.

The acquisition has already had a lot of bad consequences: https://www.businessinsider.com/oracle-cerner-health-larry-e...

How else should the person who just got that information interpret it except... Sorry, you're not really deserving, even though your score qualifies you. And what do call someone who has a score that qualifies but doesn't get to go?

And there are far more of people with this experience than the experience of being born and treated by society as a man and becoming an Olympic athlete as a woman.

In fact, I'm not aware of any genetic testing program ever catching any deliberate cheating, only people who were raised from birth as women. The very first example of this, (1), Dora/Heinrich Ratjen (2) seems to have been an intersex person who was definitely raised as a girl from birth who was a bit confused about what their body was doing. But all the way back in the 1950's when their 1936 Olympics became a big deal, we have lurid tales in the English language media of deliberate cheating that don't seem to have been supported by anything that Ratjen ever did.

1: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_Ratjen

Because those 8 women at that one Games were a lot more than all transfem Olympic athletes in history combined, the danger of ruling people out is much greater than the danger of allowing someone in who doesn't deserve it.

Edited to add: Based on http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html I just discovered another case, that of Polish sprinter Ewa Kłobukowska who was banned from sports in 1967 and stripped of her medals for failing a sex test even though she gave birth to a child a year later. For the 1996 games 8 women failed their sex tests, but 7 of them had AIS and one had 5-alpha-steroid reductase deficiency. All of them were reinstated, and that's when the Olympics ended their previous iteration of genetic testing female athletes.

This idea has a long history, and it's a long history of being wrong. I'm not expecting any better out of it this time.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santhi_Soundarajan The first female Tamil athlete to win a medal at the Asia games (in 2006), then had her silver medal stripped from her because she had Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome- so she's a XY who never developed male genitals because her body just ignored the chemical signals, as happens to something like 1 in every 40,000 births. She tried to commit suicide by drinking rat poison after she came home in disgrace.

It's not a really strong data set (the survey is all of people born between 1980-1984, surveyed in 2002, and they threw out AAPI responses because there were only a few of them) but it suggests that male loneliness might be an artifact of a culture common among the American economic elite.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511784

Points: 27

# Comments: 3

This is one of the strongest effects in the natalism literature I've ever seen, and all it takes is greater support for WFH, no baby bonuses or anything like that.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47459906

Points: 5

# Comments: 2

So the mental model I have of the average HN contributor is basically that they are all SWE's- they know software engineering extremely well, and the farther you get from that the less valuable the conversation will be, and the more likely it will be someone trying to reason from first principles for 30 seconds about something that intelligent hard working people devote their careers to.