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Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

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Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#21

Post by drusenko »

eloff wrote: post #15
whb07 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why wouldn't it be? Humans have infinite wants and needs. These change overtime in terms of taste/perception as well. So the counter point should be made as to how this isn't the case and that a "growing pie" is actually against human nature.

It's the compound interest problem. If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius. So clearly, growth is not sustainable and must eventually slow down until it approaches zero. To be clear, we're far away from that today. But the parent is mathematically correct, the be…

> If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius.

Would be super interested to see your math. What are the inputs and equation that get you to these specific outputs (a few thousand years, all resources, a few thousand light years)?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#22

Post by mattigames »

edanm wrote: post #20
stopads wrote: post #7

Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that the most important things in the universe are productivity growth and the number of people citing your publication and talks about ways we can make these numbers go up more in this podcast. Are those really our biggest priorities right now? Should they be? How many more decades are we supposed to pretend the pie getting bigger will cause all problems to ~ magically tricklesol…

Tyler Cowen has a book with basically that premise - that in the long run, economic growth is the only thing that matters. It's called Stubborn Attachments. It's not an intuitive position for most people, but it's a pretty convincing argument - it's certainly been the most important thing in the last 100 years, in my mind (think the incredible increase in health, standards of living, etc, which, even if they aren't s…

Yeah, most of that was before we discovered (or just didn't care enough) we have been destroying natural resources in a completely unsustainable way, from the extraction processes (mining) to disposal (ocean filled with trash)

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#23

Post by svcphr »

artfulhippo wrote: post #9

> Collison: when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of “progress,” you know, I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly —— I got confused when Collison said that there was scientific evidence that business productivity increases with improved management practices. That’s the thesis of business schools and management consultants. What’s the new idea he…

He's referring to research by Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford. They've worked together.

Ctrl-F management on his research page (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#24

Post by leoc »

artfulhippo wrote: post #9

> Collison: when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of “progress,” you know, I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly —— I got confused when Collison said that there was scientific evidence that business productivity increases with improved management practices. That’s the thesis of business schools and management consultants. What’s the new idea he…

> What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics?

It does sound a bit "Economic history. You've invented economic history." Mind you, VC/Koch-style libertarians are the only people who could be accused of that, given the recent beef between self-described economic historians and self-described historians of capitalism.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#25

Post by the_watcher »

hos234 wrote: post #13

Mark Zuckerberg is too full of himself. Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. WTF seriously? I have no idea why he is being entertained. Hand the cash over to experts and fuck off.

> Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table.

The latter is at least arguably true if one assumes that's all the thought he's put into things, but the former statement is just wildly false

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#26

Post by jeremyw »

netcan wrote: post #6
valleyjo wrote: post #2

They discuss the fact that we are seeing linear gains from exponential investment in several fields (healthcare, semiconductors to name a few). This is a fascinating problem.

They discuss healthcare & higher education in parallel, and I do think the cost explosion in both is worth noting... But the differences are as important as the similarities. Some big healthcare cost increases come from increased consumption. It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. Once upon a time we had less medical care to consume, fewer procedures, cancer treatments…

> It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases.

This might be true if there weren't stark counterexamples, e.g. Singapore at 1/4 the cost, with better outcomes. Notably there, government dollars flow through to consumers who choose among competitors by price and quality.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#27

Post by the_watcher »

What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI.

I'm a huge fan of Patrick Collison and know that Stripe is also doing tons of experimentation and product innovation, but I was struck by how much less like an academic Zuck sounded. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but Cowen and Collison seem to focus on what everyone should be doing, while Zuck's focus is on what he, personally, can get done (again, caveat being that Collison is simply so well-read that he comes off as an academic, while I'm aware that in reality he's doing a ton himself as well).

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#28

Post by the_watcher »

sova wrote: post #5

It seems that naturally with technological progress and population increase, we are doomed to always zero out our gains in the minute with losses in the aggregate. How is it that science and technology move forward but crop yields remain constant? Cowen mentions that it seems to be a "last mile problem" for delivering scientific research benefits to all. Collison has a cool list of "Fast" completed projects on his si…

> I disagree that Zuckerberg's major impact will be on medicine, human opinion is much more influential than hard science in the shimmering parallax of annals of dimly lit human history backwards into the ages.

If CZI is successful, over the long arc of history, it's almost inarguable that his greatest impact will be on medicine.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#29

Post by perseusprime11 »

the_watcher wrote: post #27

What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI. I'm a huge fan of Patrick Collison and know that Stripe is also doing tons of experimentation and product innovation, but I was struck by how much less like an academic Zuck sounded. I don't know if it's a good or ba…

Zuck is practical but also naive. Collison does a lot of virtue/wisdom signaling.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#30

Post by stopads »

empiricus wrote: post #8
stopads wrote: post #7

Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that the most important things in the universe are productivity growth and the number of people citing your publication and talks about ways we can make these numbers go up more in this podcast. Are those really our biggest priorities right now? Should they be? How many more decades are we supposed to pretend the pie getting bigger will cause all problems to ~ magically tricklesol…

Maybe a growing pie is not perfect, but it is greatly preferable to a shrinking one. For a simple example, take a company that looses some contracts and stops growing; you get new conflicts or old ones become critical, ppl start leaving, etc. As long as the pie is growing, it can hide or solve by default many existing problems which would be very difficult or costly to fix otherwise.

Are you Mark Zuckerberg?
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