Taylor Wilson built a nuclear reactor at his home when he was 14. People build jet engines and put them on modern model aircraft every day.
If the instructions aren’t immediately available, the internet provides connections and forums to find anything your heart desires.
Information wants to be free.
Arbitraging micro-opportunities (or far more likely, deploying insider information masked as HFT or some secret sauce arbitrage) is not economically useful.
I may have worded it poorly, but everyone can choose the content they consume. And activities they do. You can choose mindless things or things that allow you to learn about the World and understand. Both are easier.
Definitely go surfing, but forget the movie - read Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, it checks the boxes for surfing, journalism, and apartheid South Africa instead of the American reboot. Oh, it won a Pulitzer Prize too.
Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner is about America’s water infrastructure and does an incredible job of outlining the mind-blowing scale of it all as well as the political / historical context in which bureaucracies like the Bureau of Reclamation were able to build 30,000+ dams across nearly every instance of flowing water in the American West.
Productivity in knowledge work is not difficult to measure, just very laborious. A few aspects need to be untangled to do it, though.
Goodhart's law [1] is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom: Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
> In a less urban area, this is far less like. The core of intellectual pursuit isn’t just smart people, but the confluence of people who have the same interests and who are also well positioned.
The idea that spontaneous interactions lead to innovation is wonderfully captured in Kevin Simler’s essay Going Critical
Alan Greenspan phrased it as “irrational exuberance”.
Also, most Americans’ tax advantaged retirement accounts (via 401Ks) are locked in with consistent contributions to diversified index funds or ETFs containing primarily large market cap companies that make up a majority of the stock market.
There is certainly a bias towards long positions due to these dynamics, but wouldn’t you expect this to be at least reflected in derivative markets? The way I understand it is, if there was such a simple correlation, someone smarter and more equipped than me would already be betting on it at enough scale for the information to be integrated into prices.
If you can reliably make accurate predictions, then why on earth would you be talking about it instead of making the correspond bet via some combination of securities?
I don't disagree with some of the things that blog post is saying, but excluding the opinions on the Washington Post home page, where is the is outright bullshit or propaganda? I hear the opinion often but I don't see it when I go to a newspaper.
Now if you were to go to the home page of reddit or twitter there's clearly tons of propaganda.
The current headline on the
Washington post is talking about Israeli strikes in Iran.
Is that the most immediate event pertaining to Israel? Probably. Is that the most important recent event pertaining to Israel? Well, that depends, doesn’t it?
If the instructions aren’t immediately available, the internet provides connections and forums to find anything your heart desires.
Information wants to be free.
Arbitraging micro-opportunities (or far more likely, deploying insider information masked as HFT or some secret sauce arbitrage) is not economically useful.