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The End of the Beginning

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Re: The End of the Beginning

#101

Post by cdfky »

hogFeast wrote: post #75
legitster wrote: post #28

I've been reading Zero to One, and one of the ideas the book pitches is that monopoly and innovation are two sides of the same coin. Only monopoly-like companies have time and money to dump into innovative products (Bell, GE, IBM, Google). And people only invest in an idea if they think they can profit from it (look at how crucial a patent system was for the industrial revolution). Competition is important, but to dr…

That isn't right. The truth is somewhere in the middle: definitely, you see some large companies invest heavily but (more commonly) you see small firms nibble at the edges of an existing product until it is too late for the larger companies. Saying that monopoly produces innovation is like saying government produces innovation. It happens but given a long enough period all things happen. The question is about incenti…

That's not Thiel's argument at all. His argument is that the most innovative companies tend to become monopolies.

However monopolies are not always due to innovation, nor our monopolies inefficient. As you mentioned, it's a function of things that repeat, but also due to stronger players that gobble up less efficient and/or innovative firms.

I would read between the lines. Business history is indeed difficult.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#102

Post by chrisco255 »

dredmorbius wrote: post #98
chrisco255 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like those terms from the 60s and 70s referred to "superhighway" in regards to communication, but didn't prefix it with "information". And whether someone incidentally used the word or not is sort of irrelevant. It started to become popular as a means of visualizing the possibilities of the internet in the late 80s and 90s, and that's when I think the first people started to imagine what this might become in…

I'm leaning the other way -- that the usages were significant. The Brotherton reference in particular interests me -- masers and light-masers (as lasers were initially called) were pretty brand-spanking new, and were themselves the original "solution in search of a problem". I've since come to realise that any time you can create either a channel or medium with a very high level of uniformity and the capacity to be m…

That's a cool article on Baran, it looks like he predicted Amazon in 1968, and they were experimenting with early email type systems in that time, too. I'm sure the bulletin board followed shortly after.

Brotherton wrote a book on Masers and Lasers in 1964, you might find more info in that: https://www.amazon.com/Masers-Lasers-They-Work-What/dp/B0000...

is that the one you mean?

Re: The End of the Beginning

#103

Post by tlarkworthy »

the_af wrote: post #67
throw_14JAS wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's evidence is pretty straightforward: you can take wikipedia's list of important inventions and plot their frequency on a chart. Of course, there are debates around which inventions count as significant. And there is recency bias. Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate.

> "Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate." Yes, I suppose that's the biggest thing with these "futurologists": their predictions are both tantalizing and easy to digest. I reserve the right to remain skeptical about any of these Silicon Valley religions though.

U should look him up, futurology is only a slice of Kurzweil's enormous body of innovative work.

Re: The End of the Beginning

#104

Post by dredmorbius »

chrisco255 wrote: post #102
dredmorbius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm leaning the other way -- that the usages were significant. The Brotherton reference in particular interests me -- masers and light-masers (as lasers were initially called) were pretty brand-spanking new, and were themselves the original "solution in search of a problem". I've since come to realise that any time you can create either a channel or medium with a very high level of uniformity and the capacity to be m…

That's a cool article on Baran, it looks like he predicted Amazon in 1968, and they were experimenting with early email type systems in that time, too. I'm sure the bulletin board followed shortly after. Brotherton wrote a book on Masers and Lasers in 1964, you might find more info in that: https://www.amazon.com/Masers-Lasers-They-Work-What/dp/B0000... is that the one you mean?

Yes, that book.

Baran's full set of monographs written for RAND are now freely available online. I'd asked a couple of years ago if they might include one specifically, and they published the whole lot. Asking nicely works, sometimes.

Yes, there's interesting material there.

https://www.rand.org/pubs/authors/b/baran_paul.html

Re: The End of the Beginning

#105

Post by hogFeast »

cdfky wrote: post #101
hogFeast wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That isn't right. The truth is somewhere in the middle: definitely, you see some large companies invest heavily but (more commonly) you see small firms nibble at the edges of an existing product until it is too late for the larger companies. Saying that monopoly produces innovation is like saying government produces innovation. It happens but given a long enough period all things happen. The question is about incenti…

That's not Thiel's argument at all. His argument is that the most innovative companies tend to become monopolies. However monopolies are not always due to innovation, nor our monopolies inefficient. As you mentioned, it's a function of things that repeat, but also due to stronger players that gobble up less efficient and/or innovative firms. I would read between the lines. Business history is indeed difficult.

Yep, more of the usual basic errors.

First, I replied to a comment. The majority of your points should be directed there. Second, your point about monopolies or why they happen is just uninteresting (the question of "always" is not something that can be answered). Third, your point about the most innovative companies tending to become monopolies is wrong...I am not sure how little you have to know to think this but it is certainly very minimal. The historical evidence is that industries consolidate down to a few large companies, not that they become monopolies. Fourth, again, I repeat what I said about ahistorical nonsense. Neither in theory or reality is monopoly a natural consequence of capitalism. Fifth, most monopolies that have existed in reality, by number, are not privately-owned, they are not innovative. There is a fairly obvious inverse correlation between monopoly and innovation (again though, the issue that is confusing you is thinking that innovation -> monopoly...this isn't a thing).

Re: The End of the Beginning

#106

Post by mistermann »

untwerth wrote: post #89
alexashka wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel like you'll graduate to 'political problems are human problems and human problems boil down to idiots having children, idiots raising children and society being unwilling to rid itself of humans who have convincingly shown to be counter-productive to society', coupled with 'for society to function long term, it needs to have a shared goal, vision, not selfish goals of one house, two cars, fence, big tv an…

Do you feel like you'll graduate to 'Political problems are not emergent individual problems, but an issue of rules. The rules of the political game are rigged to filter out competent people and only allow shallow ideologues to power'? ;)

This is an interesting counterpoint. On one hand, alexashka makes valid observations, but to what degree is the behavior (s)he is observing a result of high quality political leadership most anywhere on the planet? And if that could somehow be changed, might people's behavior suddenly change as well?

Re: The End of the Beginning

#107

Post by andreilys »

hogFeast wrote: post #105
cdfky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not Thiel's argument at all. His argument is that the most innovative companies tend to become monopolies. However monopolies are not always due to innovation, nor our monopolies inefficient. As you mentioned, it's a function of things that repeat, but also due to stronger players that gobble up less efficient and/or innovative firms. I would read between the lines. Business history is indeed difficult.

Yep, more of the usual basic errors. First, I replied to a comment. The majority of your points should be directed there. Second, your point about monopolies or why they happen is just uninteresting (the question of "always" is not something that can be answered). Third, your point about the most innovative companies tending to become monopolies is wrong...I am not sure how little you have to know to think this but i…

Thiel’s point is on the extreme end if you have hyper-competition, firms will have no money leftover to invest in moonshots (self driving cars, cloud computing, etc. ) instead they focus on pure survival.

I don’t see how a company that’s in a life or death struggle could pour hundreds of millions/billions of dollars into R&D but perhaps I’m missing something

Re: The End of the Beginning

#108

Post by [deleted] »

makapuf wrote: post #90
andreilys wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always true. There are some very interesting projects at Google, Apple, etc. that can only be done by companies capable of throwing hundreds of Millions/billions of dollars at problems with uncertain payoffs

Sure but is the probability to work on them with an I teresting impactful role greater than a financially successful startup?

[deleted]

Re: The End of the Beginning

#109

Post by JohnFen »

andreilys wrote: post #78
JohnFen wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. I prefer working for startups and tiny companies -- not because of the income potential (as you point out, there are better ways of chasing that), but because the really interesting stuff is almost always done by startups and tiny companies. Small companies make it possible, large companies make it economical.

Not always true. There are some very interesting projects at Google, Apple, etc. that can only be done by companies capable of throwing hundreds of Millions/billions of dollars at problems with uncertain payoffs

That is why I said "almost always done" and not "always done".

Of course, a lot of that is subjective, as it depends on what you find interesting. I don't personally tend to find large-scale projects very interesting because they tend to be worked on by large teams, rendering most individual roles to something much more narrow. But I do know plenty of devs who get very excited about large-scale projects. Vive la différence!

Re: The End of the Beginning

#110

Post by solidasparagus »

tlarkworthy wrote: post #103
the_af wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Never underestimate the power in something easy to communicate." Yes, I suppose that's the biggest thing with these "futurologists": their predictions are both tantalizing and easy to digest. I reserve the right to remain skeptical about any of these Silicon Valley religions though.

U should look him up, futurology is only a slice of Kurzweil's enormous body of innovative work.

Kurzweil is someone who does not understand where his expertise ends and makes bogus claims based on a poor understanding of non-computer science topics (see his claims about AGI + the human brain as an example). His claims are typically too generic to be wrong or he does mental gymnastics to claim his prediction was correct when it wasn't. Just read his analysis of how his predictions for 2009 did - https://www.kurzweilai.net/images/How-My-Predictions-Are-Far...

He claims he's right even when he's obviously wrong. He is not someone whose predictions should be blindly trusted.

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