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Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

economist.com

31–40 of 87 posts

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#32
post #6

Does anyone recognize where that photograph was taken?

I did an image search and got this - Vista Point overlooking San Jose https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&insightstok... https://www.dreamstime.com/vista-point-overlooking-san-jose-...

Yep. You can see Reed-Hillview airport on the left and 680 on the right.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#33

An article about economists in The Economist, how about that.

Wait until you see an article about an up and coming scientist in the New Scientist!

Ugh if that trend continues soon we'll be hearing about hackers on Hacker News.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then I'll rephrase my statement: how did he end up convicted in a state with supposedly lax enforcement of trade secret laws?

You'll note that Alsup's comment at sentencing was "this is the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen. This was not small. This was massive in scale." He downloaded 10G of confidential files from his employer onto a thumb drive and then founded a startup that was immediately acquired by one of his employer's biggest competitors, with evidence that the startup was only founded as a front for the theft of trade s…

If Xerox is demoing the Alto to thousands of people every year, it’s obvious that they’re not treating it as a trade secret.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#35

The whole reason SV exploded was that people were doing things instead of waiting for the theory to show it can work. That's how software has innovated for 30 years: by practice. Giving a price to an economist, the opposite of somebody practicing and producing, is a signal something is going wrong.

did you read the article? They showed that the economists are designing experiments that lead to new features.

Implicitly distrusting the beancounters is not a bad thing.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#36

The whole reason SV exploded was that people were doing things instead of waiting for the theory to show it can work. That's how software has innovated for 30 years: by practice. Giving a price to an economist, the opposite of somebody practicing and producing, is a signal something is going wrong.

There are plenty of economists who do experimental and applied work.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#38
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, the NIMBYs will oppose any works to help solve this problem. Or global warming floods.

We should desalinate the oceans then. No NIMBYs there to oppose the work, and plenty of fresh water when the floods come.

Desal needs a lot of power. Like nuclear scale power. So it's hard to get those projects to go.

Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley

#40
post #37

Wishful thinking. Most economists will be replaced by machine learning algorithms sooner than later.

As an economist, I welcome this turn of events! This will free up my work time to focus on better margins than the n'th iteration of a linear regression,
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