People have been saying for decades that value investing is not possible since the market is too efficient. My point is that it is not efficient enough to prevent value investing from being a successful strategy.

To test whether markets are perfectly efficient, just look for large movements over time. If a stock goes up 20% in a year, the market might have undervalued it last year, or is overvaluing it this year. It's unlikely the it was correctly valuing it at both times. In the absence of a Covid-19 pandemic, act of god, etc. of course.

You could say that the market just takes "investor sentiment" into account, and is therefore still efficient. But value investing is a strategy that looks for misplaced investor sentiment and exploits it. If that's the way you define an efficient market, than I'd say an efficient market is no obstacle to a value investor.

It's impossible to come up with a business model that does not depend on chance.

Think that's been true for a long time, yank any early 20th-century factory worker out of their job, you'll find a human intellect not being fully utilized. In fact just use a contemporary worker and the same thing is true. We can't all be getting grants to study something, society has to create some extra wealth first.

A lot of sophisticated anti-spam software depended on some sophisticated anti-anti-spam showing up first, and there is a lot more of that now for sure.

Also of course the energy required to get to Earth from somewhere else, for an organism that used any kind of "vehicle" we could recognize as such, would be enormous.

But, good to stay open-minded.

Or, the individual scientists' reputations are enough to pull along the grants when they go.

The community of moderators is kind of a symbiote attached to this enterprise. It gleans and curates and makes the end product more helpful to users. "Helpfulness" is a second-order effect of this moderation, and the whole attraction to the business.

After telling moderators to not moderate, moderators should get the message: It's not about AI, its about whether moderation is valuable, and whether helpfulness of answers is valued by the business.