I wrote a blog post about something similar - I think historians are next
https://www.personjerry.com/posts/the-future-historians-of-s...
Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
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Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#12Are we seeing the final phase of Sillycon Valley?
The whole area running out of fresh water. Not exactly the place even more people should be flocking to. It will be an absolute shit-show in the coming years.
Don't worry, the NIMBYs will oppose any works to help solve this problem. Or global warming floods.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
The whole area running out of fresh water. Not exactly the place even more people should be flocking to. It will be an absolute shit-show in the coming years.
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.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#14Economists are usually a little bit late to the party.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#15I wrote a blog post about something similar - I think historians are next https://www.personjerry.com/posts/the-future-historians-of-s...
I'm really skeptical of your argument. To start with, you mention that many presidents majored in History-- but the prestige came from the law degree that followed, not the history B.A. (which maybe is popular due to history's focus on political events).
Secondly, you suggest that the study of History centers around high level decision-making. I'm not really sure about that. Assuming you're right, this is also the case in business school, where the decisions being analyzed happen to concern private enterprise rather than the government.
I do like your point about the relevance of Silicon Valley history. But I suspect that it's much more important to be obsessive and passionate about a piece of technology than to know the story behind previous attempts. Palmer Lucky rebooted VR with incredible dedication to the product, not an academic understanding of the field.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#16Taleb would say it's time to short the whole SV tech market due to the wrong party being set up to be rewarded for economic disasters present and future.
If you really want to understand economics, his books are a must read.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#17I wrote a blog post about something similar - I think historians are next https://www.personjerry.com/posts/the-future-historians-of-s...
I'm really skeptical of your argument. To start with, you mention that many presidents majored in History-- but the prestige came from the law degree that followed, not the history B.A. (which maybe is popular due to history's focus on political events). Secondly, you suggest that the study of History centers around high level decision-making. I'm not really sure about that. Assuming you're right, this is also the ca…
The basic assumption of history being made by decision makers is wrong. Such history is made - under good circumstances, yes. If a surplus exists and no internal oppossition rears its head, due to economic stress.
As soon as the economic limits of a system are reached though, leaders are just as the population under the influence of the "physics of the situation". Which is shaped by human instincts, retardations reacting to a percieved "world turned hostile". Meaning, as soon as things go bad, the decision space is very harshly restricted and the consequences are often very much out of control for those in power deciding.
If humanity were a vessel, as soon as storm draws closer, the steering wheel breaks.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#18Taleb would say it's time to short the whole SV tech market due to the wrong party being set up to be rewarded for economic disasters present and future. If you really want to understand economics, his books are a must read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb
Depends how deeply Taleb understands his own theories.
You build antifragile systems by creating networks where the failure of any one component is not just expected, but actively welcomed and designed for. Distributed systems engineers understand this intuitively; any highly reliable system is constantly failing internally, but the system is set up with multiple independent paths to success, such that failure just routes traffic to the non-failing components.
Silicon Valley as a whole is also set up according to this principle. Startups are supposed to fail; big companies are supposed to fail; individual municipalities are supposed to fail. The genius of Silicon Valley is in rapid experimentation and routing all the raw materials for these entities into new configurations that are succeeding. When a giant like Sun Microsystems or Western Digital goes under, the engineers all quit and work for Google. When Google goes under, they'll work for whatever the hot company of 2030 is. Same goes for capital (the early investors in Google have long since cashed out and are actively looking for the next big thing, while the bagholders will be retail investors in the rest of the country who don't know any better) and geography (the center of Silicon Valley has historically moved around between roughly Scotts Valley to San Francisco on a 5-10 year timescale).
And California laws & culture are setup to encourage this, with the ban on non-compete agreements, lax enforcement of trade secret laws, people always searching for the next big thing, customers willing to try the next big thing, lawyers/accountants/engineers willing to work for stock, etc.
Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#19Re: Economists are flocking to Silicon Valley
#20The 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.