> By canonization, I mean the process of taking a local, one-off formalization and turning it into library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest
I think this kind of work is constantly misunderstood and undervalued. I don't really see it as a binary thing, more like a complex skill that most people are terrible at, some are good at, and a handful of giants use to be just ridiculously productive in their field.
It reminds me of hedgehogs and foxes - foxes tend to be bad at making one off progress on their own, but are critical for accretive work.
Also I was reading a textbook the other day and thinking wow, it is absurd how much more valuable these things can be than other resources, and it's exactly because they canonize. It would be a massive loss if they stop getting written.
It's complicated. If you go put some dollars down on a prediction, the median person you're in it with doesn't have much evidence to support their position and is basically gambling. The median dollar you're up against is coming from some rich guy with knowledge somewhere between "airmchair expert in this topic" and "outright insider trading." And so it's a situation where for some people it isn't gambling at all; it even generates some useful info accessible to everyone; and it's easy not to notice that only a handful of rich people really benefit, because it feels like anyone "can win." The truth is kind of counterintuitive.
Also, having expert knowledge and then making money off of other people thinking they might have it and being wrong... is a choice.
It's also super easy to apply it wrong because going above X% in one area normally means sinking below X% in another. I think a clearer way to say it is that sometimes, you have to be almost perfect, and 98% could sound like almost perfect but it's way too low. But definitely the things you don't need to be perfect far outnumber the ones you do.
Fair, but it's hard because falling behind on the models themselves is a killer. Maybe they're saying they can't spend resources on anything except staying ahead.
One way of reading this is an article about how good Anthropic's product is. "Look at how many serious flaws users have been willing to accept in order to keep using this thing"
But they should just stop reading. It's actually not ok that it's unfamiliar, because makes you reread and get confused and distracted, all for some silly reference that doesn't make a big difference. Life is short! You can read the hard stuff when it's worth it, and just skip the rest. Surely that's the most common thing to do.
The answer is definitely still a big no, but for me the reasoning is because it will make it worse. And you apparently aren't the target audience anyway, so why should I care if you stick around.
(Whereas in the case of harry potter, the goal was to sell books, not just to produce something good).
At my job I switch between writing analysis code for research projects and writing code for apps. The difference in mindset is so dramatic. In the same way that good software has consistent names and interfaces that are ~useless when you just need the code to run once, research code has its own requirements that are ~useless in software. It's honestly a big challenge to switch back and forth. So I think it just reflects the main skillset of the people who use it (caring is not enough).
It's more exciting to think about evil people plotting how they will control the labor force and steal all its knowledge, but I think both the AI use and the alleged extraction of knowledge of design and craft are better explained by, like, "the job got crazy popular, the labor force multiplied, a lot of less passionate people got involved, and then some solutions were found"
> It’s not hard to understand why people hate health insurers. When you interact with the U.S. health care system, the providers — the hospital staff, the doctor, the nurses, the technicians — all just take care of you.
> Your interaction with the health insurer, on the other hand, feels like a struggle against an enemy who wants to destroy you.
Exactly, the big factor driving healthcare costs is that people like expensive providers. They like the fancy plan that covers their doctor, that doesn't limit them to a community hospital. Any choice that involves retaining even the slightest market leverage is a deal breaker for many people. I think all the clever stuff we do to optimize costs and increase transparency is worth doing and helpful, but like, it will still be expensive. We want that!
Meanwhile it is not really better to go to an expensive doctor, in terms of health outcomes. So the public health problem is to stop people (and employers) from voluntarily wasting their money on healthcare, so we can use it for better stuff.
I'm not just talking about where the initial pressure comes from, but the effects of the changes. I guess the question becomes about how easily these layers get disentangled. E.g. things investors like that then result in lower sales? Things that result in greater sales but that the customers don't actually like?
Naively of course it seems like investors don't like it when sales go down, so there'd be an extremely tight link between financial market and product market feedback. But I imagine you disagree, that this breaks down easily and creates problems?
My biggest struggle with this question is that "going bad" sometimes coincides with not just financial incentives, but also more people getting value out of it. For example Spotify gradually shifting from "we make it easy to curate and share playlists" to "we make them for you to use as background music constantly." Sometimes what's bad for the early power user is great for the late adopter, and it's difficult to make any kind of broad judgment about whether the change is better or worse.
What do you say to this interpretation? In particular do you think most cases could be framed as "the key audience/customer/market has shifted"? Is it possible to find greater financial success while doing things the primary audience doesn't like?
Yes, and there are sometimes many layers to it, which is why you can think "cool, I get that" while still missing something important that would be obvious to an expert.
So be it? Everyone under 30 being permanently worse off due to a decline in education is an extremely depressing outcome, that seems like the whole argument for fixing it
> The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
Obviously literacy is super important but these are examples of things where literacy plays very little role, because ~nobody can read a bill, or follow a written legal argument. I mean a very literate person can get something out of reading it, which is nice until they then completely misinterpret it, or hear what their friends say about it and get onboard purely based on vibes.
I feel like it matters more for the economy and the future of knowledge work which, uh, is a little uncertain these days.
I don't know. I used to feel this way about IDE autocompletes/suggestions. Now they are widely used, and it doesn't necessarily seem hostile. It's not that hard to imagine the same thing could happen here.
> The key to surviving in such an environment is to let go of your ideas of the truth. The customer doesn't want to hear it, and doesn't want to know it.
This is exactly it!
Like you might think "the promised features are not feasible." No, the features you will soon deliver are feasible, on account of you're about to go build them! If you fail, that is still very bad. But the point of rule 1 is you don't have to act like you signed up to deliver exactly X feature on exactly Y date. Instead you can think a little bit, and then you calmly set off on a process that should reasonably end up with the customer being happy. To many people this strategy feels like lying.
In addition to covering the IPO in general last week, Matt Levine also wrote about this specific question Tuesday[1]:
> Historically index providers were in the business of making these sorts of quality decisions, so that index funds were not forced to buy stocks they didn’t like.
> These rules create some tension between the idea that an index is a list of all the stocks and the idea that an index is a list of all the good stocks. Historically, it didn’t matter all that much: The point of the stock market is to tell you which stocks are good, so a company with a high stock valuation should be a very good company, so it should get a high weighting in both the Index of Good Companies and the Index of All the Companies.
> But SpaceX — and also maybe OpenAI and Anthropic in their coming IPOs — will probably break that link. SpaceX will probably (1) do all sorts of stuff that index funds hate and that index providers have specifically tried to exclude and also (2) be gigantic, because the market loves it.
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