781–790 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am fully aware of the GFC, but not sure what "take down" should mean there in relation to Bear. Not everyone who spoke about house price risk was ridiculed, btw.
Catchy and ironic phrasing of "the financial fraudsters ruining Bear Stearns". It seems unambiguous in this context.
One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…
In general I have about zero enthusiasm for trying to find defensible interpretations of things that Ed Zitron said, and I generally agree that the name of Zitron just largely needs to stop coming up in anti- and anti-anti-AI arguments since, it seems, he's just not a particularly insightful or reliable voice on the subject. That said, one or two of the specific assessments in Luu's article seem dubious as well, espe…
Consider two propositions: P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving 2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to tak…
[1]: https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/the-real-ai-crash-will-...
> February 2025: "I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong." Wrong (Zitron continues to write despite repeatedly being proven wrong) This was a good one.
And provably, he did. He wrote until then, and continued after. Since he never stopped writing, he met the challenge.
He's now free to stop writing whenever he wants and still not fail that statement. ;)
This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, th…
> These tech giants need AI to continue to grow This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them. But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.
One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…
> You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Depends if you care about the "prediction" part or if you care about the assessment of the situation (regardless of date). If someone in 2000 said "the subprime mortgages market is a bubble and will blow no later than 2003", they got the prediction wrong, but their assessment would be…
To be fair not predicting accurately doesn't necessarily mean they are wrong - Michael Burry is the perfect example here, a market may actually just be so fraudulent (AI companies being funded by AI companies etc) that it can defy common economics for a while.
If your point is just that there may be an AI bubble, then yes the fact that it hasn't popped yet does not prove it wrong. But that's not what Ed Zitron is saying; he's making very specific statements that happen to be wrong time and time again.
As many said in the comments, it's common for doomers to keep predicting a crisis, every month and every year and so on, until inevitably a crisis does occur and they claim they were right. That's not how it works.
[flagged]
One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…
> You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Depends if you care about the "prediction" part or if you care about the assessment of the situation (regardless of date). If someone in 2000 said "the subprime mortgages market is a bubble and will blow no later than 2003", they got the prediction wrong, but their assessment would be…
You can say "AI will be able to _____" and be right 99.9 times out of 100, but the question is when.
You can say "The AI market will go to 0" and be at least directionally right eventually.
But none of it matters if you get the timing wrong.