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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

#71
post #15
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…

A lot of people nitpicking at the argument here, about resource substitutions, efficiency improvements, etc.

So let's simplify this argument a little. It's not possible to have infinite growth in a finite universe. By definition infinity > not infinity for arbitrarily large values of not infinity.

Therefore the limit of growth as time approaches infinity is 0.

At some point you reach the physical limit of the system and exponential growth ends. This is true even for digital systems if the digital good involves some physical resource like energy, storage space, bandwidth, etc.

For example, if we keep growing energy usage at the historical rate of 3% a year, we would cook ourselves with the waste heat within 400 years. It doesn't matter where the energy comes from. Now we can get around that by moving off the earth, which buys time, but eventually, also in short order, we'd use all the available energy from our star. We could get around that through nuclear energy sources or widening the area to encompass more stars. But there is only so much matter and energy in the universe. Eventually the show stops.

I challenge you to find a theoretical counter example.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#72

The self-importance of pretty much everything in this interview is literally unbearable. I will give you the precis: I think X is important, why doesn't everyone think X is important (usually about five sentences of escalating grandeur about the importance of X), because I think X is important and "no-one is talking about X" you know that I am a real genius...on and on. Cowen is also an utter ignoramus. He seems to c…

> He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything.

Cowen does have knowledge on almost literally everything. If you listen to his podcast he will get into the weeds with experts in a diverse array of fields. When he interviewed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar he asked about specifics of his basketball career and also his writing and political work, when he interviewed an Asian food writer he asked specifics about cuisine in different regions of China. He always seems to have studied the entire body of work of every guest he speaks to every week. He reads and travels extensively. You may still think Cowen's ideas are bad, but he is obviously well-informed on the issues he discusses.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#73
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

not sure that means it generalizes to all countries or types of business

Oh, definitely not! As with all RCTs, gotta worry about generalizability.

He has a lot of other work showing correlations between management and productivity at much more scale, but this was the one attempt (that I know of) trying to establish something more causal

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#74
post #69
post #38

"What’s interesting and, anyway should be concerning, is that for almost every conceivable applied measure we seem to be getting at best constant returns. But that’s really bad because we see exponentially increasing inputs and constant return outputs." Ironically, in terms of innovation, the yearly output of companies such as Facebook and Stripe has seemed somewhat constant, despite those companies getting many orde…

if that were true the companies would have gone bankrupt, but even google keeps increasing its year to year profits.

Innovation is different than revenue -- especially when talking about companies with strong network effects and monopoly-sized marketshare.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#75
post #51

I'm always cautious about Cowen as he receives backing from the Koch network. https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/sco...

The Kochs have also funded stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives -- are you similarly cautious about those things?

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#76
post #38

"What’s interesting and, anyway should be concerning, is that for almost every conceivable applied measure we seem to be getting at best constant returns. But that’s really bad because we see exponentially increasing inputs and constant return outputs." Ironically, in terms of innovation, the yearly output of companies such as Facebook and Stripe has seemed somewhat constant, despite those companies getting many orde…

It is possible that there are low hanging fruits for innovation in the world at large but less so at these companies?

So it still might be worthwhile to think about it.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#77
post #66
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 big admirer of what Mark is doing with CZI (which is part of why Cowen/I agreed to the interview). Stripe is still a private company, but maybe I'll be able to intervene more directly over time. If I do, havi…

I don't want to sound like I am trolling or something. However, I find it hard to take anything Mark Zuckerberg does seriously. For that matter, I am so biased that I have no interest in these interviews at all (maybe to your detriment). How do you see this? You say that you are an admirer of CZI. In my experience with obnoxious CEO types, they are happy to be philantrophic or "build" things when it suits them, and o…

If you went back 25 years, Bill Gates was considered by many (if not most) the "obnoxious CEO", but you're now using him as an example of "someone else I'd take seriously".

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#79
post #63

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…

> 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 big admirer of what Mark is doing with CZI (which is part of why Cowen/I agreed to the interview). Stripe is still a private company, but maybe I'll be able to intervene more directly over time. If I do, havi…

Thanks for responding - just wanted to emphasize that I did not mean to minimize anything that you're doing, or the importance of your approach (I'm a huge fan of Stripe, as well as your work with Cowen on progress). I just thought it was interesting to highlight that Zuck is actually doing a whole lot of stuff.

Re: Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

#80
"So for example, if you look at the U.S., productivity growth mid-century or say between, you know, 1920, 1970, was maybe about 1.9% a year. Now most economists think it’s much lower, maybe around sort of .4% a year, something like that."

Isn't this just because the US was riding off of the coattails of two world wars and being _the_ global superpower? I wonder what the data says about the rest of the world in that period, probably not so good?

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