I have read enough on Munger and Buffet that I don't think it was quite theater. I think they really believe/believed their own bullshit.
Like the way Munger would promote reading but Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries. They would view building libraries as an opportunity cost and waste of capital.
"Ah shucks, I wish people like me would pay a lot more in taxes" but of course these guys didn't spend a dime on actual lobbying to make that happen. Again, that would be seen as a giant opportunity cost and waste of capital. They wouldn't want to go outside their "circle of competence" into something like politics or policy. How convenient.
I think the only way to have this image of a saintly grandpa when actually an absolute cut throat , money obsessed, richest person of all time is to believe your own bullshit.
It is actually the opposite. The less things you have, the less things you will want.
I even experience this with food. If I am on a strict diet for 2 weeks and then have a "cheat" meal, a previously normal meal feels like a satisfying feast.
If I splurge on food for 2 weeks, even 3/4th a pizza doesn't satisfy. I just want the other 1/4th.
It is really why we have so much wealth as a society but so much discontent. It is like believing there is some amount of alcohol that would satisfy the alcoholic. It just grows the desire for more while contentment is harder and harder to achieve.
I am pretty sure this is just a property of the dopaminergic system.
I just got back from the gym and it was surprisingly empty. Actually, more empty than normal.
My experience from lifting now for 30+ years and seeing thousands of people lift is it is:
1. Genetics.
Everything else is a distant second or third. This was actually something that was widely understood in 90s bodybuilding magazines. Lifting is mostly a display of genetics. That worked when you could sell magazines of genetic freaks working out. Without the magazines you have to sell all this nonsense like 1 gram per lb of protein. Even though I know the early research was 1 gram per kilo and then Americans just changed that to 1 gram per lb. I mean it is just such obvious nonsense that the optimal amount would happen to be the exact integer amount vs body weight that is easiest to remember, how convenient for people who sell protein lol. duh.
I was pretty much told this in the 90s that I would have no real stability in life like my parents did and my life would be constant reinvention. That has been spot on.
It is the younger people who started their career after the financial crisis that got the wrong signaling. As if 2010-2021 was normal instead of the far from equilibrium state it was.
This current state of anxiety about the future is the normal state. That wonderful decade was the once in a lifetime event.
I would agree with this from subjective experience. My non-IT based career has been highly volatile with unintended unemployment, companies going out of business, changing entire sectors and roles many times. Huge volatility in relationships and partners also.
Much downside to this but the upside is my life feels incredibly long and I haven't even reached 50 yet. I have already lived numerous lives compared to the self that would have had a very stable life the last 25 years. My working life feels vastly longer than my very stable childhood. That came and went in the blink of an eye from this perspective.
The best example is that even ATM machines didn't reduce bank teller jobs.
Why? Because even the bank teller is doing more than taking and depositing money.
IMO there is an ontological bias that pervades our modern society that confuses the map for the territory and has a highly distorted view of human existence through the lens of engineering.
We don't see anything in this time series, because this time series itself is meaningless nonsense that reflects exactly this special kind of ontological stupidity:
As if the sum of human interaction in an economy is some kind of machine that we just need to engineer better parts for and then sum the outputs.
Any non-careerist, thinking person that studies economics would conclude we don't and will probably not have the tools to properly study this subject in our lifetimes. The high dimensional interaction of biology, entropy and time. We have nothing. The career economist is essentially forced to sing for their supper in a type of time series theater.
Then there is the method acting of pretending to be surprised when some meaningless reductionist aspect of human interaction isn't reflected in the fake time series.
I worry that it is not a valid perspective and that the bubble dynamics are being driven exactly by this sentiment.
We are pricing in the hollywood version of AI we don't have as if it is the internet.
I communicated with people exactly like what I am doing right now in this post on usenet in 1995. Message boards by 1997. The internet bubble wasn't based on some wild virtual reality version of the internet that hadn't been invented yet.
It is a categorically different process at work here. This bubble is far more insane and speculative since we don't have what we are pricing in. We don't even really know what we are pricing in besides some vague notation of an inevitable "AGI".
No, you are simply wrong but ignorance of scaling properties is the spirit of the day.
I suspect in the future a word will evolve for the stupidity of believing if a person can walk 3 miles in an hour then that scales to walking 500 miles in a week.
I have listened to a ton of Bach but still have only listened to less than 20% of his works.
This is like listening to the outtakes and demos of a band instead of the actual albums. Pointless when it takes a lifetime to get through the actual catalog.
I am not even the biggest Bach fan but it is hard to think of a more towering figure in any artistic medium.
I suspect you don't understand music enough to understand the immensity of Bach's work and influence.
Maybe if Picasso had been born 200 years earlier he could have influenced painting in the same way.
The fact you don't give a counter example kind of shows your hand that you don't know much about this subject beyond your surface level understanding of critical theory.
I think Bach's lute music is the most approachable because it sounds the most modern like guitar music. Even though the baroque lute is an alien instrument visually to the average person today, the sound is closer to what people have grown up on.
The whole question though is like what is the best David Bowie album to start with multiplied by 100.
The catalog is just so immense, the sounds are just so varied that one person's favorite might completely be wrong for someone else.
I think the most relatable after thinking about it more is Stephanie Jones playing lute music on classical guitar.
I haven't used social media in over a decade and I change my mind all the time.
Changing your mind is a good thing for a thinking being.
Social media figures aren't changing their mind in the same way, they are changing and optimizing their public performance.
Professional social media is a paid performance. We understand that Tom Cruise is not really a highly skilled jet fighter pilot but a well paid actor playing the role of one. No one cares what Tom Cruise thinks about Ukraine/Russia air defense tactics. This gets hidden in plain sight with social media though and why social media is hyper stupifying.
I absolute love KDE Plasma but I finally gave up for Mint Cinnamon LTS.
It has just been rock solid on any machine I have tried. KDE I was just always running into some kind of minor problem or something wouldn't work.
I have dolphin and konsole installed and open right now so once you get use to Cinnamon, it isn't really that much different but so rock solid with Mint.
The problem of dotcom is we needed a cultural shift. I had my first internet date during the dot com bubble and I remember we would lie to people about how we met because the idea sounded so insane at the time to basically everyone.
In 1999 it seemed kind of crazy to even use your real name online let alone put your credit card into the web browser.
Put your credit card into the internet browser then a stranger brings you items in their van? Completely insane culturally in 1999. It would have sounded like the start of an Unsolved Mysteries episode to the average person in 1999. There was no market for that in 1999.
The lesson I take from dotcom is we had this massive bubble and burst over technology that already existed, worked flawlessly and largely just needed time for the culture to adapt to it.
The main difference this time is we are pricing in technology that doesn't actually exist.
I can't think of another bubble that was based on something that doesn't exist. The closest analogy I can think of is the railroad bubble but with the trains not actually existing outside of some vague theoretical idea that we don't actually know how to build. A bubble in laying down rail because of how big it will be when we figure out how to build the trains.
The only way you would get a bubble that stupid would be to have 50-100 years of art, stories and movies priming the entire population on the inevitability of the train.
Like the way Munger would promote reading but Andrew Carnegie built 2500 libraries. They would view building libraries as an opportunity cost and waste of capital.
"Ah shucks, I wish people like me would pay a lot more in taxes" but of course these guys didn't spend a dime on actual lobbying to make that happen. Again, that would be seen as a giant opportunity cost and waste of capital. They wouldn't want to go outside their "circle of competence" into something like politics or policy. How convenient.
I think the only way to have this image of a saintly grandpa when actually an absolute cut throat , money obsessed, richest person of all time is to believe your own bullshit.