5 Comments

We see this in the rebellion of young men.

They look at Musk and see someone shooting for the stars.

They look at the woke who tells them they should step aside and STFU.

Not surprising they chose the former.

Expand full comment

I gasped.

Expand full comment

❤️

Expand full comment

I recall listening to a podcast last year where John Carmack justified his moving from VR to AI with similar logic — that bubbles/hype will draw so many bright people in that they catalyze the progress anyway. He figured it was the right wave to ride.

So we all need to manifest the future! Rhonda Byrne's The Secret was kind of right, in a way.

Expand full comment

Just because colossal government waste like the Apollo programme can produce a few decent spin offs, doesn't let use say anything about the counterfactual of the tax payers keeping their money and spending it as they see fit.

In our history, artillery calculations and other military tasks were a big driver of early electronic computers. But without the wars, International Business Machines (IBM) and their customers would have had a lot more money and resources in developing the electronic computer anyway, and perhaps faster.

On a different tack, the famous dot-com bubble wasn't actually a bubble in the simplest sense of the word: if you had steadily bought an index of technology stocks throughout the alleged bubble years, and just held onto it, you would have a really decent return over the next few decades. Thus technology stocks as a whole were not overvalued, the optimism was justified.

The dot-com bust however was very, very real and severely undervalued tech stocks: if you had bought steadily throughout the bust, and held on to your tech stocks, you would have made a killing.

Expand full comment