An American Socialist

Jan 31
Growth at all costs
Growth at all costs

In one of the best parts of Triangle of Sadness, a yacht is being torn to shreds by a storm while the Captain — who remains drunk and in his room for most of the journey — and a hyper-wealthy foreigner find common ground trading barbs about socialism and capitalism. The captain, an American socialist, and the traveler, a Russian capitalist, drink each other under the table.

One of the quotes the Captain says to the traveler represents an important tenant of my investment philosophy, shaped by my work with Golden Section. Andrew Smith, one of our executive directors, recently said to me:

It’s that type of thinking we work against, to go and spend all the money and then go and raise more. You could be in a position to never have to do that again and be just fine! Sometimes it’s doing a lot of reorienting with founders, to realign with them their actual goals.

I recently went to a lecture featuring (a local Houston) company, and (their co-founder and CEO) was like, “Look, you’re over here worried about giving up 5% of your company or 10% of your company? It doesn’t matter, you just gotta grow.” And I’m like, that is like the exact opposite — the polar opposite — of our view. It’s not the way we like to operate. People like that, right, they’re just trying to grow at all costs and hire and do all that rather than be worried about how their business runs and be worried about building something that’s sustainable over the long term. You lose sight of the business itself and just become the guy that’s out raising money all the time. You should be known as the guy that’s growing your business. 

Andrew Smith

In the movie, the Captain shoots back at Dimitry:

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Edward Abbey.

Link Jan 10

Evolution and Quantumania

This raises an important question: What is the goal of human knowledge? As I see it — and as Breiman sees it — the fundamental objective is not understanding but control. By recording which crops grow in which season, we can feed our families. By understanding that germs cause disease, we can know to wash our hands or get a vaccine, and lower our risk of death. In these situations, knowledge and understanding might be intrinsically satisfying to our curiosity, but that satisfaction ultimately pales in importance to our ability to reshape our world to our benefit. 

Noah Smith
The Third Magic

Control is survival evolved.

(B)eing able to predict the economic growth of a few city blocks 10 years into the future with even 30% or 40% accuracy is leaps and bounds ahead of anything I’ve ever seen. It suggests that rather than being utter incomprehensible chaos, some economic systems have patterns and regularities that are too complex to be summarized with simple mathematical theories, but which nevertheless can be captured and generalized by AI.

Noah Smith
The Third Magic

Let’s say it’s 100% accurate. What happens we do predict ten years into the future, and then, ten years into the future, it’s observed and it’s not 100%? Do we say that the model was right but the inputs changed? Or do we have a way more intriguing phenomenon going on that mimics existential questions in the quantum realm?