16 ms·

Mark Zuckerberg Interviews Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen

230 points by yarapavan 7y ago

valleyjo 7y ago
They discuss the fact that we are seeing linear gains from exponential investment in several fields (healthcare, semiconductors to name a few). This is a fascinating problem.
- martin_a 7y ago
  Sounds like pareto principle in final stages.
  - netcan 7y ago
    Wouldn't that be declining returns from linear investments?
    - martin_a 7y ago
      Hm, you're probably right. Not sure though if it looks like linear returns when you choose the timeslot short enough.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Linear gains from exponential investments means declining returns.
- netcan 7y ago
  They discuss healthcare & higher education in parallel, and I do think the cost explosion in both is worth noting... But the differences are as important as the similarities. Some big healthcare cost increases come from increased consumption. It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. Once upon a time we had less medical care to consume, fewer procedures, cancer treatments and other such costly stuff. Medical care costs were mostly clinical, doctors salaries and such. Prenatal care once meant occasional visits to a doctor or nurse. These days, it also means ultrasounds, genetic testing, more blood tests & such. That costs more. There are just more available treatments to treat patients, especially the already high-cost stuff like cancer treatment, surgery.... These are new things that the medical industry are doing, and cost money. It's at least partly a "we buy more" situation, not just price inflation. A sociology degree, OTOH, is not different in a than it was in the 1950s. There are nearly no non-efficiency related cost increases in higher-ed. No new, expensive stuff is being used to teach these students. Prices just increased, and most of that got observed into administration. In terms of ROI at a societal level... Idk if it's usefully measurable, for medicine at least. There definitely aren't massive, healthcare-related increases I gross life expectancy and such. Does that mean bad ROI? This gets philosophical.
  - throwawaymanbot 7y ago
    fascinating, but pity Marks Company is allowing the cancer of fascist content to be delivered with impunity to everyone.
  - jeremyw 7y ago
    > It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. This might be true if there weren't stark counterexamples, e.g. Singapore at 1/4 the cost, with better outcomes. Notably there, government dollars flow through to consumers who choose among competitors by price and quality.
    - pmohun 7y ago
      There is also a lower focus on end of life care in Singapore, which makes up the vast majority of spending in the American system. These issues are cultural, not just political or economic. I am looking forward to seeing what PC and TC can come up with for a common framework. This seems to be a tough problem.
      - keenmaster 7y ago
        The healthcare sector constitutes 18% of our GDP, a truly insane amount. That is 7-8% (~1.5 trillion) more than it should be. Excessive end-of-life care explains almost none of that. The two biggest issues in American healthcare are: - Zero price transparency - Payment through intermediaries like insurance companies and your employer, who often pays half of your insurance premiums and other healthcare expenditures With no price transparency, prices are just made up with little connection to actual value delivered. Because of the middlemen, most patients don’t feel the full cost of healthcare. Patients in aggregate still pay for the full negotiated cost, just indirectly in the form of higher premiums and forgone wages (marginal premiums paid by the employer). At this point, Medicare for All is our best hope. A true market-based healthcare economy, as great as it may be, is a pipe dream. With Medicare for All, the government would set reimbursement rates in stone. Most doctors who want a substantial amount of patients would have to accept those rates. Unlike insurance companies, the government would not be able to aggressively increase its “premiums,” or taxes, every year and it won’t get kickbacks from hospitals for high cost care. The government would also set empirically backed standards of care that lower their cost burden with no impact on average lifespan. We could potentially allow for parallel “luxury care” purchased by the patient if they want to be able to expedite their non-emergency knee replacement from 6 months to 2 weeks. The government would be incentivized to launch health initiatives and laws that help lower the rates of obesity and diabetes in the population. Lastly, the government would also be incentivized to increase the supply of doctors. There are multiple instances in the past when medical organizations lobbied or misled Congress into over-limiting the supply of medical residencies. They also had a hand in restricting the number and size of medical schools. So yes, overpaid, scarce medical professionals are a big part of the cost burden, and their representative institutions are making sure they stay overpaid. Only recently have medical organizations lobbied to increase the number of residencies again. That’s just damage control. The American people should not accept compromise on healthcare any longer. That’s what the ACA was, and it did not do enough. Medicare for All will bring us in line with the rest of the developed world which has better health outcomes at a much lower cost. We can save >$1 trillion and put that money towards things like a national high speed rail network, anti-poverty efforts, government-subsidized corporate internships, and an accredited national online education and retraining platform with the best professors on every subject imaginable.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  I'd think it's more of a problem to assume they should continue to rise with exponential gains....
- PunchTornado 7y ago
  to me this is a meaningless question. it's so broad with so many variables, so many assumptions that you might as well ask if God exists and you'd have the same chance of answering it.
- Barrin92 7y ago
  in semiconductors, it's a natural result of hard physical limits driving up costs for innovation. In the economy overall it's institutional neglect for deep innovation, basic R&D and instead allocation of capital to eCommerce, finance, retail or the gig economy, with ironically companies like facebook contributing to the misery by keeping engineering talent occupied with fiinding better ways to get people to click on ads.
- chubot 7y ago
  That reminds me of deep learning. Investment in computing resources is definitely increasing exponentially over time: https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/ https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-of-ai-and-moores-law/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-o... Tthere doesn't seem to by any evidence of exponential gains in performance, even on their own benchmarks (which importantly don't measure "intelligence", but something more narrow): https://blog.piekniewski.info/2019/11/18/late2019-the-wizards-of-oz/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2019/11/18/late2019-the-wizard... Even though we are doubling the compute available to AI every 3.5 months, so a factor 10x per year, since say 2015, so some 10.000x, the classification performance as measured by top-1 accuracy on ImageNet had barely moved. Now arguably top-1 accuracy on ImageNet is probably not the best measure, but still that seems somewhat striking. The diminishing returns are visible elsewhere too, even that Open AI Rubic's cube is somewhat indicative. From an outside perspective, it seems that everyone is coming around to the fact that self-driving cars is harder than expected. There are no "exponential gains" in that field -- to the contrary, it seems like 90% of the problem was solved several years ago, and you can now take undergraduate courses that teach the basics. But going from 90%, to 99%, to 99.9%, etc. is taking decades, not months or years. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the current approach. I believe at the time the OpenAI blog post was supposed to be "impressive". Certainly I felt a bit of that -- "hey something important is going on there!" I believe that in 10 years it will look like a waste of effort. There will be a different, more efficient approach to solving these types of problems. ---- Peter Thiel is one of the only "major tech figures" speaking out against AI, which I appreciate. And the "AI is communist" meme is pretty memorable, and I don't think wholly inaccurate. I listen to him for his contrarian opinions. I just wish he didn't have these random "tribal conservative" outbursts. The most recent one was a video on here where he was rambling about Obama saying something far worse than George Bush and the Iraq war. I guess it was about sending their daughter to Harvard, but saying that lots of schools are just as good. He was trying to get some points from his conservative audience. I guess it gets attention, but that kind of tribalism undermines the rational points that he generally makes. (I realize the OP doesn't feature Thiel but he was brought up elsewhere in this thread, and is one of the people also lamenting the lack of technological progress despite investment, although maybe due to lack of investment in certain areas too)
- nugget 7y ago
  One purely linear constraint is time. In many health care fields, it simply takes time for clinical studies to collect data, from which the next generation of clinical studies can be planned, and there's no good way to meaningfully speed up that process.
sova 7y ago
It seems that naturally with technological progress and population increase, we are doomed to always zero out our gains in the minute with losses in the aggregate. How is it that science and technology move forward but crop yields remain constant? Cowen mentions that it seems to be a "last mile problem" for delivering scientific research benefits to all. Collison has a cool list of "Fast" completed projects on his site of big tasks in human history on the order of hundreds of days. Zuckerberg's main focus is to invest in medicine research because he believes the long term eventuality of such investment is a definite decrease in healthcare. Overall, it seems that the questions focus on the global population in aggregate or nations as wholes, and on long-term or permanent solutions to emergent issues. I disagree that Zuckerberg's major impact will be on medicine, human opinion is much more influential than hard science in the shimmering parallax of annals of dimly lit human history backwards into the ages. I'm glad they are talking about such matters: the intellectual hubs of Vienna and Silicon Valley, the research (or lack of research) in coming to understand Human Progress. One thing that seems to be ignored the whole time is the progress of the individual, the progress of the family, and the progress of the tribe. We can measure in aggregate all day, but the only true test of progress is if our newer generations of humans shine brighter and are more illuminated than we are.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  > I disagree that Zuckerberg's major impact will be on medicine, human opinion is much more influential than hard science in the shimmering parallax of annals of dimly lit human history backwards into the ages. If CZI is successful, over the long arc of history, it's almost inarguable that his greatest impact will be on medicine.
- Isamu 7y ago
  >but crop yields remain constant Some, not all, crop yields have been stalling in recent years. I think Tyler's point was maybe the increasing cost of research and effort to keep moving the yield curves up, such that it may be stalling progress there. Data on crop yields here: https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
  - 7y ago
stopads 7y ago
Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that the most important things in the universe are productivity growth and the number of people citing your publication and talks about ways we can make these numbers go up more in this podcast. Are those really our biggest priorities right now? Should they be? How many more decades are we supposed to pretend the pie getting bigger will cause all problems to ~magically tricklesolve themselves~, because this there is lots of evidence that this is not happening.
- empiricus 7y ago
  Maybe a growing pie is not perfect, but it is greatly preferable to a shrinking one. For a simple example, take a company that looses some contracts and stops growing; you get new conflicts or old ones become critical, ppl start leaving, etc. As long as the pie is growing, it can hide or solve by default many existing problems which would be very difficult or costly to fix otherwise.
  - vitro 7y ago
    Is growing pie sustainable?
    - whb07 7y ago
      Why wouldn't it be? Humans have infinite wants and needs. These change overtime in terms of taste/perception as well. So the counter point should be made as to how this isn't the case and that a "growing pie" is actually against human nature.
      - eloff 7y ago
        It's the compound interest problem. If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius. So clearly, growth is not sustainable and must eventually slow down until it approaches zero. To be clear, we're far away from that today. But the parent is mathematically correct, the best kind of correct.
artfulhippo 7y ago
> Collison: when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of “progress,” you know, I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly —— I got confused when Collison said that there was scientific evidence that business productivity increases with improved management practices. That’s the thesis of business schools and management consultants. What’s the new idea here? 1) What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics? 2) When businesses acquire their competitors, does this accelerate or inhibit progress?
- svcphr 7y ago
  He's referring to research by Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford. They've worked together. Ctrl-F management on his research page (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.
  - alkibiades 7y ago
    not sure that means it generalizes to all countries or types of business
    - svcphr 7y ago
      Oh, definitely not! As with all RCTs, gotta worry about generalizability. He has a lot of other work showing correlations between management and productivity at much more scale, but this was the one attempt (that I know of) trying to establish something more causal
- leoc 7y ago
  > What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics? It does sound a bit "Economic history. You've invented economic history." Mind you, VC/Koch-style libertarians are the only people who could be accused of that, given the recent beef between self-described economic historians and self-described historians of capitalism.
hos234 7y ago
Mark Zuckerberg is too full of himself. Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. WTF seriously? I have no idea why he is being entertained. Hand the cash over to experts and fuck off.
- draw_down 7y ago
  The sitting US president is a game show host.
- the_watcher 7y ago
  > Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. The latter is at least arguably true if one assumes that's all the thought he's put into things, but the former statement is just wildly false
  - hos234 7y ago
    The road to hell is paved with good intentions. He is not qualified to be in the room. The problem when people like him with a big chequebook show up, is the majority of "experts" will just pander to get the cheque which has many unintended consequences. Fact of life.
the_watcher 7y ago
What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI. I'm a huge fan of Patrick Collison and know that Stripe is also doing tons of experimentation and product innovation, but I was struck by how much less like an academic Zuck sounded. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but Cowen and Collison seem to focus on what everyone should be doing, while Zuck's focus is on what he, personally, can get done (again, caveat being that Collison is simply so well-read that he comes off as an academic, while I'm aware that in reality he's doing a ton himself as well).
- perseusprime11 7y ago
  Zuck is practical but also naive. Collison does a lot of virtue/wisdom signaling.
  - nwah1 7y ago
    Collison strikes me as genuine and focused on actually solving problems. We are in desperately short supply of such people.
- pc 7y ago
  > What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI. I'm a big admirer of what Mark is doing with CZI (which is part of why Cowen/I agreed to the interview). Stripe is still a private company, but maybe I'll be able to intervene more directly over time. If I do, having CZI as precedent will be very helpful.
  - mikorym 7y ago
    I don't want to sound like I am trolling or something. However, I find it hard to take anything Mark Zuckerberg does seriously. For that matter, I am so biased that I have no interest in these interviews at all (maybe to your detriment). How do you see this? You say that you are an admirer of CZI. In my experience with obnoxious CEO types, they are happy to be philantrophic or "build" things when it suits them, and only then. Do you think it's a net positive? Wouldn't someone else (like Gates or even Buffet) be a better leader for these initiatives? I'm sure that if Mark did not get so successful with FB, it would have been the WA founders, otherwise someone else yet again. Sorry if this is a steriotypical reaction, but I am sorry; I just can't trust something from camp Zuck.
pyb 7y ago
"What’s interesting and, anyway should be concerning, is that for almost every conceivable applied measure we seem to be getting at best constant returns. But that’s really bad because we see exponentially increasing inputs and constant return outputs." Ironically, in terms of innovation, the yearly output of companies such as Facebook and Stripe has seemed somewhat constant, despite those companies getting many orders of magnitude bigger! Maybe MZ and PC should investigate this issue at their own companies, and perhaps even begin to fix it. After that, they'll be better able to look at fixing innovation in the world at large.
- buboard 7y ago
  if that were true the companies would have gone bankrupt, but even google keeps increasing its year to year profits.
  - nostromo 7y ago
    Innovation is different than revenue -- especially when talking about companies with strong network effects and monopoly-sized marketshare.
    - buboard 7y ago
      ah yes they shouldnt exclude themselves . of course it depends on the roles and quality of their hires.
- mkagenius 7y ago
  It is possible that there are low hanging fruits for innovation in the world at large but less so at these companies? So it still might be worthwhile to think about it.
- jonmc12 7y ago
  I had been listening to some "Game A" vs "Game B" podcasts - Schmachtenberger, Hall (Greenhall), Rutt, etc, just before listening to this podcast. For example: https://soundcloud.com/venturestories/game-b-in-a-silicon-valley https://soundcloud.com/venturestories/game-b-in-a-silicon-va... These thinkers propose a common constraint for stagnant growth in education and medicine: a philosophy of science. There is much more to it, and unfortunately it's not a concise explanation. However, I find this conceptual frame much stronger than the education/medicine problem "commonalities" described by Zuck, Collison and Cowen. Further, the "Game A" insight seems to predict the shortcomings of an applied meta-approach of "the tool-building which comes from having the experience building engineering teams." Game A: ("hill climbing") invest in better microscopy tools, even though "right now, the actual technology of microscopes is ahead of scientists’ ability to process the data". Game B: ("valley crossing") invest in a philosophy of science to better understand complexity management, causality and sense-making in the domains of education and medicine. "And as engineers.. you really want to get into the code and step through it to see where the thing is breaking down" (Zuck). But whats 'broken' at FB? is it a server infrastructure? monetization? or is it interpersonal psychology of user relationships? Mistaking our tools' observation for reality, and optimizing for only what we can measure can build profits, but it has limits to make sense of complexity - and undefined/unmanaged complexity is common to the nature of education/medicine problems.
PunchTornado 7y ago
Patrick should take some oratory lessons. As a CEO it is important to be able to speak slowly, be brief and on the point.
- throw_away_456 7y ago
  Only on HN will you find randos confidently telling a founder-CEO who grew his company from $0 to $35B what's "important" about being a CEO.
  - AlchemistCamp 7y ago
    I'm pretty sure I've seen this phenomena on Reddit, Twitter, and Medium, too.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    Only on HN will you find randos confusing making a lot of money with being good at everything. If you make money, your statements don't automatically become true.
randomb_1979 7y ago
Smart move by Zuck. If Zuck had to choose one person whose podcast show he could go on, it had to be Tyler Cowen. Tyler is the kind of apologist for big business that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. You don't have to take my word for it, you can listen to this podcast episode on EconTalk: https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-big-business/ https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-big-business/ Plus, if he were the interviewee, the P word (you know, the one Facebook employees pretend doesn't exist) would come up. Again, you don't have to take my word for it. Just do a quick search on the transcript to see if it comes up. And lastly a recommendation. If, like me, you are now completely jaded by these PR stunts, you should absolutely listen to DHH excoriate Facebook on his podcast episode with Matt Mullenweg. https://rework.fm/open-source-and-power-with-matt-mullenweg/ https://rework.fm/open-source-and-power-with-matt-mullenweg/ Also, my condolences to Stripe and Patrick Collison for now being forever associated with this.
- thundergolfer 7y ago
  What’s the “P word”?
  - svachalek 7y ago
    Privacy I assume. Or maybe politics.
    - thundergolfer 7y ago
      Thanks. They really should have just stated it. The "P-word" ain't a thing like the "F-word" is.
- tomhoward 7y ago
  I've never been an avid follower of Cowan's, but have heard him from time-to-time on various podcasts and read some of is writings, and in my assessment, his standout quality is that he's just very mild-mannered and doesn't get enraged or dogmatic about anything, and demonstrates himself as being very well researched and considered in his positions. For this reason he's able to engage in productive discussions with people across the ideological spectrum; his podcast appearance with Ezra Klein [1] was particularly gratifying in this regard. We wouldn't want every commentator to be like this, and his manner doesn't mean we have to embrace everything he says, but there's an important role for someone like Cowan, who will allow their interviewee to express their position when most others just want to pile on and scapegoat. [1] https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show-2468767/tyler-cowen-on-the-painful-end-of-american-complacency https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show-2468767/tyler-c...
dv_dt 7y ago
I'm always cautious about Cowen as he receives backing from the Koch network. https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/scofield-tyler-cowen-koch-brothers-funding-mercatus-center-george-mason-university-academic-freedom/ https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/sco...
- Nokinside 7y ago
  There is noting wrong getting funded by Koch in principle. What your source points out is that the agreements Cowen made as a general director of the Mercatus Center seem to violate standard academic norms and "fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet."
- nostromo 7y ago
  The Kochs have also funded stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives -- are you similarly cautious about those things?
  - dv_dt 7y ago
    They also fund widespread climate denial, federal court stacking, and the tea party (probably not this anymore), likely at many times the magnitude. So yes I am cautious.
    - exolymph 7y ago
      To be clear: You are also cautious about stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives, because those have been Koch-funded?
      - dv_dt 7y ago
        No I've never encountered those efforts and have had no reason to evaluate them one way or another. Maybe they are too small to have reached any appreciable public notice? (or at least my notice). To be honest though, I feel the opinions and speech of billionaires are amplified in our media so one should always be more critical and cautious of any of their projects, because money gives the ability to shortcut a more critical vetting of the effort.
Nokinside 7y ago
The most interesting part of the talk is what is avoided. Like the positive effect of government policy. The US Anti-trust policy was very effective at times. Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 1938-1941 forced licensing of tens of thousands of patents. When AT&T Bell Labs invented transistor it was forced to allow anyone to use it's knowledge. People went to Bell Labs and they were taught how to manufacture transistors. Massive industry spurted overnight. If transistor was invented today, the inventor would have a monopoly for transistor 25 years and generate huge profits.
- mjewkes 7y ago
  In their public-facing work, Cowen and pc talk primarily about the importance and upside of progress and growth [1][2]. As someone who leans left, I find these writings both novel and compelling - some of the most compelling market-oriented thinking I've come across. At the same time, pc, Cowen, and Zuck are in the thick of the SF "conservative libertarian" milieu. Thiel was a/the first major investor in FB, Stripe, and Cowen's "Emergent Ventures". Cowen's Mercatus center has deep ties (that I don't fully understand) with Koch industries and the federalist society. Etc. I'm _far_ less impressed with the policies actually advocated for by these groups. I'd actually be really interested in hearing the three of them discuss opportunities for government policy to have significant positive impact. I'd be surprised if pc wasn't a fan of at least some aspects of the FAA / NTSB [3], and I know Cowen advocates for public increases in basic research / R&D investment [4]. As "libertarian conservative" "public thought leaders", I wonder where else they might agree that government intervention can be net very-positive. [Edit: sorry about the labels. There are real clusters of thinking and people here that need names, but I'm sure that they'd prefer different labels] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Responsible-Individuals/dp/1732265135 https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Respo... + thorough review/interview https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn... [3] https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1021995602970923010 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1021995602970923010 [4] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/the-public-funding-of-research-and-development.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/th...
hogFeast 7y ago
The self-importance of pretty much everything in this interview is literally unbearable. I will give you the precis: I think X is important, why doesn't everyone think X is important (usually about five sentences of escalating grandeur about the importance of X), because I think X is important and "no-one is talking about X" you know that I am a real genius...on and on. Cowen is also an utter ignoramus. He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything (the mistakes Collison makes can be forgiven, there is no reason why an economist shouldn't realise they aren't an expert on literally everything). Btw, afaik, he is the only economist who has actually tried political philosophy too (again, the ego on this guy)...he made the same kind of trite insights and tried to pass them off as signs of his genius there too.
- dang 7y ago
  Thoughtful critique is fine, but please don't post petty personal attacks to HN. It poisons the well regardless of how right you are. Also, please omit the name-calling. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    It isn't a petty personal attack. You believe it is petty but I explained my reasons. Ignoramous isn't a "name", it is a noun describing someone with the attributes that Cowen has (I specifically say that, as he is doing throughout the interview, he pontificates endlessly on subjects in which he has no expertise). Just to be clear, whether he has those attributes or not, people like that exist. It isn't unacceptable to say something negative...ironically, as you yourself show by calling my comment "petty". One rule for us, amirite comrade?
- yellowstuff 7y ago
  > He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything. Cowen does have knowledge on almost literally everything. If you listen to his podcast he will get into the weeds with experts in a diverse array of fields. When he interviewed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar he asked about specifics of his basketball career and also his writing and political work, when he interviewed an Asian food writer he asked specifics about cuisine in different regions of China. He always seems to have studied the entire body of work of every guest he speaks to every week. He reads and travels extensively. You may still think Cowen's ideas are bad, but he is obviously well-informed on the issues he discusses.
laingc 7y ago
I loved this interview, and generally have a lot of time for Tyler Cowen’s podcasts and blog. This topic is one that Peter Thiel has been talking about for over a decade. I have a general theory that whatever smart people are talking about now, Thiel was discussing 10 years before. This is why I always try to find out everything I can about what Thiel is talking about today - it’s like getting a glimpse into the future.
- buboard 7y ago
  it's likely Thiel influenced both of them (is invested in both) > what Thiel is talking about today what he said 10 years ago is more actionable
buboard 7y ago
there's a video of the conversation in zuck's facebook page
wnm 7y ago
there is also a video version of the interview at https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen/ https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with-mark-z...
ebetica0 7y ago
"So for example, if you look at the U.S., productivity growth mid-century or say between, you know, 1920, 1970, was maybe about 1.9% a year. Now most economists think it’s much lower, maybe around sort of .4% a year, something like that." Isn't this just because the US was riding off of the coattails of two world wars and being _the_ global superpower? I wonder what the data says about the rest of the world in that period, probably not so good?
dluan 7y ago
> Collison: But even if technology solved that, I guess my worry would be that the socio-institutional dynamics that have ruined cities or made them less effective or whatever, probably also generalized and applied to other domains. Reminder that Stripe as a company put out a position opposing Prop C. The hypocrisy, I guess. Someone needs to update pg's 'founders should live in the future' to specifically include FAGSLC as the future, because otherwise we're just wasting heat.
- uoaei 7y ago
  >Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism For those having trouble parsing that acronym.
  - adenverd 7y ago
    I'm afraid to ask, but, in what community is this phrase spoken frequently enough to warrant an acronym?
    - uoaei 7y ago
      Satirical-edgy leftist meme pages
professor_trex 7y ago
What is the software package that MZ references at 55:21? It sounds like “nepariu”?
darshanime 7y ago
Why don't we ever see Larry Page doing such things? Don't even remember when I last saw news about him.
- chubot 7y ago
  He has a vocal cord disorder and speaking is apparently a hardship for him.
chillacy 7y ago
> U.S. life expectancy is basically going up in linear fashion. But if you look at expenditures, we used to spend a few percentage points of GDP on healthcare, and now it’s about 18%. So we’ve gone up to 18%, and we’re not even boosting the rate. I’m not saying it’s the fault of any one group of people, but something has gone wrong. (US life expectancy actually declined for a 3rd straight year due to "deaths of despair" like drug overdoses and suicides) But as for the 18% of GDP on healthcare, medicine is an inelastic good that has severe supply side restrictions (AMA + legislation) and no price transparency. Companies are profiting greatly, it's great for GDP and terrible for people. Similar for the other "cost disease" areas mentioned: education and housing (though for different reasons). Slatestarcodex has a good overview on cost disease too: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...
adenverd 7y ago
Tyler makes a compelling case in his book[1] that economic growth is responsible for most of the biggest improvements in human flourishing over the past century. He concludes that economic growth is a moral imperative. All three participants in this interview discuss the "exponential inputs, linear outputs" problem/slow-down that industries face as they scale and mature. Question: how far does ROI have to fall for the growth of an industry to cost more than its returns to society are morally worth? Is this even possible? Or is there an assumption that the market would somehow fix/prevent this scenario?] [1] Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments, 2018
dredmorbius 7y ago
For those seeking the direct audio link: http://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/cowenconvos/CWT-BONUS-ZuckerbergCollison-podcast-v1.mp3 http://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/cowenconvos/CWT-BONUS-Zuck...

230 points by yarapavan 7y ago

They discuss the fact that we are seeing linear gains from exponential investment in several fields (healthcare, semiconductors to name a few). This is a fascinating problem.

martin_a 7y ago
Sounds like pareto principle in final stages.
- netcan 7y ago
  Wouldn't that be declining returns from linear investments?
  - martin_a 7y ago
    Hm, you're probably right. Not sure though if it looks like linear returns when you choose the timeslot short enough.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Linear gains from exponential investments means declining returns.
netcan 7y ago
They discuss healthcare & higher education in parallel, and I do think the cost explosion in both is worth noting... But the differences are as important as the similarities. Some big healthcare cost increases come from increased consumption. It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. Once upon a time we had less medical care to consume, fewer procedures, cancer treatments and other such costly stuff. Medical care costs were mostly clinical, doctors salaries and such. Prenatal care once meant occasional visits to a doctor or nurse. These days, it also means ultrasounds, genetic testing, more blood tests & such. That costs more. There are just more available treatments to treat patients, especially the already high-cost stuff like cancer treatment, surgery.... These are new things that the medical industry are doing, and cost money. It's at least partly a "we buy more" situation, not just price inflation. A sociology degree, OTOH, is not different in a than it was in the 1950s. There are nearly no non-efficiency related cost increases in higher-ed. No new, expensive stuff is being used to teach these students. Prices just increased, and most of that got observed into administration. In terms of ROI at a societal level... Idk if it's usefully measurable, for medicine at least. There definitely aren't massive, healthcare-related increases I gross life expectancy and such. Does that mean bad ROI? This gets philosophical.
- throwawaymanbot 7y ago
  fascinating, but pity Marks Company is allowing the cancer of fascist content to be delivered with impunity to everyone.
- jeremyw 7y ago
  > It's not just incentives, bureaucracies and inefficiencies that caused cost increases. This might be true if there weren't stark counterexamples, e.g. Singapore at 1/4 the cost, with better outcomes. Notably there, government dollars flow through to consumers who choose among competitors by price and quality.
  - pmohun 7y ago
    There is also a lower focus on end of life care in Singapore, which makes up the vast majority of spending in the American system. These issues are cultural, not just political or economic. I am looking forward to seeing what PC and TC can come up with for a common framework. This seems to be a tough problem.
    - keenmaster 7y ago
      The healthcare sector constitutes 18% of our GDP, a truly insane amount. That is 7-8% (~1.5 trillion) more than it should be. Excessive end-of-life care explains almost none of that. The two biggest issues in American healthcare are: - Zero price transparency - Payment through intermediaries like insurance companies and your employer, who often pays half of your insurance premiums and other healthcare expenditures With no price transparency, prices are just made up with little connection to actual value delivered. Because of the middlemen, most patients don’t feel the full cost of healthcare. Patients in aggregate still pay for the full negotiated cost, just indirectly in the form of higher premiums and forgone wages (marginal premiums paid by the employer). At this point, Medicare for All is our best hope. A true market-based healthcare economy, as great as it may be, is a pipe dream. With Medicare for All, the government would set reimbursement rates in stone. Most doctors who want a substantial amount of patients would have to accept those rates. Unlike insurance companies, the government would not be able to aggressively increase its “premiums,” or taxes, every year and it won’t get kickbacks from hospitals for high cost care. The government would also set empirically backed standards of care that lower their cost burden with no impact on average lifespan. We could potentially allow for parallel “luxury care” purchased by the patient if they want to be able to expedite their non-emergency knee replacement from 6 months to 2 weeks. The government would be incentivized to launch health initiatives and laws that help lower the rates of obesity and diabetes in the population. Lastly, the government would also be incentivized to increase the supply of doctors. There are multiple instances in the past when medical organizations lobbied or misled Congress into over-limiting the supply of medical residencies. They also had a hand in restricting the number and size of medical schools. So yes, overpaid, scarce medical professionals are a big part of the cost burden, and their representative institutions are making sure they stay overpaid. Only recently have medical organizations lobbied to increase the number of residencies again. That’s just damage control. The American people should not accept compromise on healthcare any longer. That’s what the ACA was, and it did not do enough. Medicare for All will bring us in line with the rest of the developed world which has better health outcomes at a much lower cost. We can save >$1 trillion and put that money towards things like a national high speed rail network, anti-poverty efforts, government-subsidized corporate internships, and an accredited national online education and retraining platform with the best professors on every subject imaginable.
hanniabu 7y ago
I'd think it's more of a problem to assume they should continue to rise with exponential gains....
PunchTornado 7y ago
to me this is a meaningless question. it's so broad with so many variables, so many assumptions that you might as well ask if God exists and you'd have the same chance of answering it.
Barrin92 7y ago
in semiconductors, it's a natural result of hard physical limits driving up costs for innovation. In the economy overall it's institutional neglect for deep innovation, basic R&D and instead allocation of capital to eCommerce, finance, retail or the gig economy, with ironically companies like facebook contributing to the misery by keeping engineering talent occupied with fiinding better ways to get people to click on ads.
chubot 7y ago
That reminds me of deep learning. Investment in computing resources is definitely increasing exponentially over time: https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/ https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-compute/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-of-ai-and-moores-law/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-o... Tthere doesn't seem to by any evidence of exponential gains in performance, even on their own benchmarks (which importantly don't measure "intelligence", but something more narrow): https://blog.piekniewski.info/2019/11/18/late2019-the-wizards-of-oz/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2019/11/18/late2019-the-wizard... Even though we are doubling the compute available to AI every 3.5 months, so a factor 10x per year, since say 2015, so some 10.000x, the classification performance as measured by top-1 accuracy on ImageNet had barely moved. Now arguably top-1 accuracy on ImageNet is probably not the best measure, but still that seems somewhat striking. The diminishing returns are visible elsewhere too, even that Open AI Rubic's cube is somewhat indicative. From an outside perspective, it seems that everyone is coming around to the fact that self-driving cars is harder than expected. There are no "exponential gains" in that field -- to the contrary, it seems like 90% of the problem was solved several years ago, and you can now take undergraduate courses that teach the basics. But going from 90%, to 99%, to 99.9%, etc. is taking decades, not months or years. There seems to be something fundamentally wrong with the current approach. I believe at the time the OpenAI blog post was supposed to be "impressive". Certainly I felt a bit of that -- "hey something important is going on there!" I believe that in 10 years it will look like a waste of effort. There will be a different, more efficient approach to solving these types of problems. ---- Peter Thiel is one of the only "major tech figures" speaking out against AI, which I appreciate. And the "AI is communist" meme is pretty memorable, and I don't think wholly inaccurate. I listen to him for his contrarian opinions. I just wish he didn't have these random "tribal conservative" outbursts. The most recent one was a video on here where he was rambling about Obama saying something far worse than George Bush and the Iraq war. I guess it was about sending their daughter to Harvard, but saying that lots of schools are just as good. He was trying to get some points from his conservative audience. I guess it gets attention, but that kind of tribalism undermines the rational points that he generally makes. (I realize the OP doesn't feature Thiel but he was brought up elsewhere in this thread, and is one of the people also lamenting the lack of technological progress despite investment, although maybe due to lack of investment in certain areas too)
nugget 7y ago
One purely linear constraint is time. In many health care fields, it simply takes time for clinical studies to collect data, from which the next generation of clinical studies can be planned, and there's no good way to meaningfully speed up that process.

sova 7y ago

It seems that naturally with technological progress and population increase, we are doomed to always zero out our gains in the minute with losses in the aggregate. How is it that science and technology move forward but crop yields remain constant? Cowen mentions that it seems to be a "last mile problem" for delivering scientific research benefits to all. Collison has a cool list of "Fast" completed projects on his site of big tasks in human history on the order of hundreds of days. Zuckerberg's main focus is to invest in medicine research because he believes the long term eventuality of such investment is a definite decrease in healthcare. Overall, it seems that the questions focus on the global population in aggregate or nations as wholes, and on long-term or permanent solutions to emergent issues. I disagree that Zuckerberg's major impact will be on medicine, human opinion is much more influential than hard science in the shimmering parallax of annals of dimly lit human history backwards into the ages. I'm glad they are talking about such matters: the intellectual hubs of Vienna and Silicon Valley, the research (or lack of research) in coming to understand Human Progress. One thing that seems to be ignored the whole time is the progress of the individual, the progress of the family, and the progress of the tribe. We can measure in aggregate all day, but the only true test of progress is if our newer generations of humans shine brighter and are more illuminated than we are.

the_watcher 7y ago
> I disagree that Zuckerberg's major impact will be on medicine, human opinion is much more influential than hard science in the shimmering parallax of annals of dimly lit human history backwards into the ages. If CZI is successful, over the long arc of history, it's almost inarguable that his greatest impact will be on medicine.
Isamu 7y ago
>but crop yields remain constant Some, not all, crop yields have been stalling in recent years. I think Tyler's point was maybe the increasing cost of research and effort to keep moving the yield curves up, such that it may be stalling progress there. Data on crop yields here: https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields https://ourworldindata.org/crop-yields
- 7y ago

stopads 7y ago

Mark Zuckerberg takes it for granted that the most important things in the universe are productivity growth and the number of people citing your publication and talks about ways we can make these numbers go up more in this podcast. Are those really our biggest priorities right now? Should they be? How many more decades are we supposed to pretend the pie getting bigger will cause all problems to ~magically tricklesolve themselves~, because this there is lots of evidence that this is not happening.

empiricus 7y ago
Maybe a growing pie is not perfect, but it is greatly preferable to a shrinking one. For a simple example, take a company that looses some contracts and stops growing; you get new conflicts or old ones become critical, ppl start leaving, etc. As long as the pie is growing, it can hide or solve by default many existing problems which would be very difficult or costly to fix otherwise.
- vitro 7y ago
  Is growing pie sustainable?
  - whb07 7y ago
    Why wouldn't it be? Humans have infinite wants and needs. These change overtime in terms of taste/perception as well. So the counter point should be made as to how this isn't the case and that a "growing pie" is actually against human nature.
    - eloff 7y ago
      It's the compound interest problem. If you keep compounding growth, like growing GDP at 1-2% a year, within some few thousand years you've grown bigger than all the resources within a sphere the same number of light years in radius. So clearly, growth is not sustainable and must eventually slow down until it approaches zero. To be clear, we're far away from that today. But the parent is mathematically correct, the best kind of correct.

artfulhippo 7y ago

> Collison: when we sort of talk about the phenomenon of “progress,” you know, I think GDP or GDP per capita is a pretty good first approximation measure of it and it correlates strongly —— I got confused when Collison said that there was scientific evidence that business productivity increases with improved management practices. That’s the thesis of business schools and management consultants. What’s the new idea here? 1) What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics? 2) When businesses acquire their competitors, does this accelerate or inhibit progress?

svcphr 7y ago
He's referring to research by Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford. They've worked together. Ctrl-F management on his research page (https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research https://nbloom.people.stanford.edu/research). In one paper, they randomly assign consulting services from a management consultancy to manufacturing plants in India and found a 17% increase in productivity.
- alkibiades 7y ago
  not sure that means it generalizes to all countries or types of business
  - svcphr 7y ago
    Oh, definitely not! As with all RCTs, gotta worry about generalizability. He has a lot of other work showing correlations between management and productivity at much more scale, but this was the one attempt (that I know of) trying to establish something more causal
leoc 7y ago
> What’s the difference between “Progress Studies” and economics? It does sound a bit "Economic history. You've invented economic history." Mind you, VC/Koch-style libertarians are the only people who could be accused of that, given the recent beef between self-described economic historians and self-described historians of capitalism.

hos234 7y ago

Mark Zuckerberg is too full of himself. Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. WTF seriously? I have no idea why he is being entertained. Hand the cash over to experts and fuck off.

draw_down 7y ago
The sitting US president is a game show host.
the_watcher 7y ago
> Not only does he have a track record of not having an imagination, he seems to have got it into his head, that if he reads two books on Economics and Sociology over the summer he needs to be at the policy making table. The latter is at least arguably true if one assumes that's all the thought he's put into things, but the former statement is just wildly false
- hos234 7y ago
  The road to hell is paved with good intentions. He is not qualified to be in the room. The problem when people like him with a big chequebook show up, is the majority of "experts" will just pander to get the cheque which has many unintended consequences. Fact of life.

the_watcher 7y ago

What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI. I'm a huge fan of Patrick Collison and know that Stripe is also doing tons of experimentation and product innovation, but I was struck by how much less like an academic Zuck sounded. I don't know if it's a good or bad thing, but Cowen and Collison seem to focus on what everyone should be doing, while Zuck's focus is on what he, personally, can get done (again, caveat being that Collison is simply so well-read that he comes off as an academic, while I'm aware that in reality he's doing a ton himself as well).

perseusprime11 7y ago
Zuck is practical but also naive. Collison does a lot of virtue/wisdom signaling.
- nwah1 7y ago
  Collison strikes me as genuine and focused on actually solving problems. We are in desperately short supply of such people.
pc 7y ago
> What I was most struck by in the conversation is that Zuck is actually doing some of the things Cowen advocates - policy experimentation, taking on long-term projects with uncertain payoffs, etc. at CZI. I'm a big admirer of what Mark is doing with CZI (which is part of why Cowen/I agreed to the interview). Stripe is still a private company, but maybe I'll be able to intervene more directly over time. If I do, having CZI as precedent will be very helpful.
- mikorym 7y ago
  I don't want to sound like I am trolling or something. However, I find it hard to take anything Mark Zuckerberg does seriously. For that matter, I am so biased that I have no interest in these interviews at all (maybe to your detriment). How do you see this? You say that you are an admirer of CZI. In my experience with obnoxious CEO types, they are happy to be philantrophic or "build" things when it suits them, and only then. Do you think it's a net positive? Wouldn't someone else (like Gates or even Buffet) be a better leader for these initiatives? I'm sure that if Mark did not get so successful with FB, it would have been the WA founders, otherwise someone else yet again. Sorry if this is a steriotypical reaction, but I am sorry; I just can't trust something from camp Zuck.

pyb 7y ago

"What’s interesting and, anyway should be concerning, is that for almost every conceivable applied measure we seem to be getting at best constant returns. But that’s really bad because we see exponentially increasing inputs and constant return outputs." Ironically, in terms of innovation, the yearly output of companies such as Facebook and Stripe has seemed somewhat constant, despite those companies getting many orders of magnitude bigger! Maybe MZ and PC should investigate this issue at their own companies, and perhaps even begin to fix it. After that, they'll be better able to look at fixing innovation in the world at large.

buboard 7y ago
if that were true the companies would have gone bankrupt, but even google keeps increasing its year to year profits.
- nostromo 7y ago
  Innovation is different than revenue -- especially when talking about companies with strong network effects and monopoly-sized marketshare.
  - buboard 7y ago
    ah yes they shouldnt exclude themselves . of course it depends on the roles and quality of their hires.
mkagenius 7y ago
It is possible that there are low hanging fruits for innovation in the world at large but less so at these companies? So it still might be worthwhile to think about it.
jonmc12 7y ago
I had been listening to some "Game A" vs "Game B" podcasts - Schmachtenberger, Hall (Greenhall), Rutt, etc, just before listening to this podcast. For example: https://soundcloud.com/venturestories/game-b-in-a-silicon-valley https://soundcloud.com/venturestories/game-b-in-a-silicon-va... These thinkers propose a common constraint for stagnant growth in education and medicine: a philosophy of science. There is much more to it, and unfortunately it's not a concise explanation. However, I find this conceptual frame much stronger than the education/medicine problem "commonalities" described by Zuck, Collison and Cowen. Further, the "Game A" insight seems to predict the shortcomings of an applied meta-approach of "the tool-building which comes from having the experience building engineering teams." Game A: ("hill climbing") invest in better microscopy tools, even though "right now, the actual technology of microscopes is ahead of scientists’ ability to process the data". Game B: ("valley crossing") invest in a philosophy of science to better understand complexity management, causality and sense-making in the domains of education and medicine. "And as engineers.. you really want to get into the code and step through it to see where the thing is breaking down" (Zuck). But whats 'broken' at FB? is it a server infrastructure? monetization? or is it interpersonal psychology of user relationships? Mistaking our tools' observation for reality, and optimizing for only what we can measure can build profits, but it has limits to make sense of complexity - and undefined/unmanaged complexity is common to the nature of education/medicine problems.

PunchTornado 7y ago

Patrick should take some oratory lessons. As a CEO it is important to be able to speak slowly, be brief and on the point.

throw_away_456 7y ago
Only on HN will you find randos confidently telling a founder-CEO who grew his company from $0 to $35B what's "important" about being a CEO.
- AlchemistCamp 7y ago
  I'm pretty sure I've seen this phenomena on Reddit, Twitter, and Medium, too.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Only on HN will you find randos confusing making a lot of money with being good at everything. If you make money, your statements don't automatically become true.

randomb_1979 7y ago

Smart move by Zuck. If Zuck had to choose one person whose podcast show he could go on, it had to be Tyler Cowen. Tyler is the kind of apologist for big business that you would be hard pressed to find anywhere else. You don't have to take my word for it, you can listen to this podcast episode on EconTalk: https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-big-business/ https://www.econtalk.org/tyler-cowen-on-big-business/ Plus, if he were the interviewee, the P word (you know, the one Facebook employees pretend doesn't exist) would come up. Again, you don't have to take my word for it. Just do a quick search on the transcript to see if it comes up. And lastly a recommendation. If, like me, you are now completely jaded by these PR stunts, you should absolutely listen to DHH excoriate Facebook on his podcast episode with Matt Mullenweg. https://rework.fm/open-source-and-power-with-matt-mullenweg/ https://rework.fm/open-source-and-power-with-matt-mullenweg/ Also, my condolences to Stripe and Patrick Collison for now being forever associated with this.

thundergolfer 7y ago
What’s the “P word”?
- svachalek 7y ago
  Privacy I assume. Or maybe politics.
  - thundergolfer 7y ago
    Thanks. They really should have just stated it. The "P-word" ain't a thing like the "F-word" is.
tomhoward 7y ago
I've never been an avid follower of Cowan's, but have heard him from time-to-time on various podcasts and read some of is writings, and in my assessment, his standout quality is that he's just very mild-mannered and doesn't get enraged or dogmatic about anything, and demonstrates himself as being very well researched and considered in his positions. For this reason he's able to engage in productive discussions with people across the ideological spectrum; his podcast appearance with Ezra Klein [1] was particularly gratifying in this regard. We wouldn't want every commentator to be like this, and his manner doesn't mean we have to embrace everything he says, but there's an important role for someone like Cowan, who will allow their interviewee to express their position when most others just want to pile on and scapegoat. [1] https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show-2468767/tyler-cowen-on-the-painful-end-of-american-complacency https://player.fm/series/the-ezra-klein-show-2468767/tyler-c...

dv_dt 7y ago

I'm always cautious about Cowen as he receives backing from the Koch network. https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/scofield-tyler-cowen-koch-brothers-funding-mercatus-center-george-mason-university-academic-freedom/ https://macro.economicblogs.org/naked-capitalism/2018/05/sco...

Nokinside 7y ago
There is noting wrong getting funded by Koch in principle. What your source points out is that the agreements Cowen made as a general director of the Mercatus Center seem to violate standard academic norms and "fall short of the standards of academic independence I expect any gift to meet."
nostromo 7y ago
The Kochs have also funded stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives -- are you similarly cautious about those things?
- dv_dt 7y ago
  They also fund widespread climate denial, federal court stacking, and the tea party (probably not this anymore), likely at many times the magnitude. So yes I am cautious.
  - exolymph 7y ago
    To be clear: You are also cautious about stem-cell research and gay rights initiatives, because those have been Koch-funded?
    - dv_dt 7y ago
      No I've never encountered those efforts and have had no reason to evaluate them one way or another. Maybe they are too small to have reached any appreciable public notice? (or at least my notice). To be honest though, I feel the opinions and speech of billionaires are amplified in our media so one should always be more critical and cautious of any of their projects, because money gives the ability to shortcut a more critical vetting of the effort.

Nokinside 7y ago

The most interesting part of the talk is what is avoided. Like the positive effect of government policy. The US Anti-trust policy was very effective at times. Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) 1938-1941 forced licensing of tens of thousands of patents. When AT&T Bell Labs invented transistor it was forced to allow anyone to use it's knowledge. People went to Bell Labs and they were taught how to manufacture transistors. Massive industry spurted overnight. If transistor was invented today, the inventor would have a monopoly for transistor 25 years and generate huge profits.

mjewkes 7y ago
In their public-facing work, Cowen and pc talk primarily about the importance and upside of progress and growth [1][2]. As someone who leans left, I find these writings both novel and compelling - some of the most compelling market-oriented thinking I've come across. At the same time, pc, Cowen, and Zuck are in the thick of the SF "conservative libertarian" milieu. Thiel was a/the first major investor in FB, Stripe, and Cowen's "Emergent Ventures". Cowen's Mercatus center has deep ties (that I don't fully understand) with Koch industries and the federalist society. Etc. I'm _far_ less impressed with the policies actually advocated for by these groups. I'd actually be really interested in hearing the three of them discuss opportunities for government policy to have significant positive impact. I'd be surprised if pc wasn't a fan of at least some aspects of the FAA / NTSB [3], and I know Cowen advocates for public increases in basic research / R&D investment [4]. As "libertarian conservative" "public thought leaders", I wonder where else they might agree that government intervention can be net very-positive. [Edit: sorry about the labels. There are real clusters of thinking and people here that need names, but I'm sure that they'd prefer different labels] [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-... [2] https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Responsible-Individuals/dp/1732265135 https://www.amazon.com/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Respo... + thorough review/interview https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn-attachments/ https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/tyler-cowen-stubborn... [3] https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1021995602970923010 https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1021995602970923010 [4] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/the-public-funding-of-research-and-development.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/02/th...

hogFeast 7y ago

The self-importance of pretty much everything in this interview is literally unbearable. I will give you the precis: I think X is important, why doesn't everyone think X is important (usually about five sentences of escalating grandeur about the importance of X), because I think X is important and "no-one is talking about X" you know that I am a real genius...on and on. Cowen is also an utter ignoramus. He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything (the mistakes Collison makes can be forgiven, there is no reason why an economist shouldn't realise they aren't an expert on literally everything). Btw, afaik, he is the only economist who has actually tried political philosophy too (again, the ego on this guy)...he made the same kind of trite insights and tried to pass them off as signs of his genius there too.

dang 7y ago
Thoughtful critique is fine, but please don't post petty personal attacks to HN. It poisons the well regardless of how right you are. Also, please omit the name-calling. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart, we'd appreciate it.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  It isn't a petty personal attack. You believe it is petty but I explained my reasons. Ignoramous isn't a "name", it is a noun describing someone with the attributes that Cowen has (I specifically say that, as he is doing throughout the interview, he pontificates endlessly on subjects in which he has no expertise). Just to be clear, whether he has those attributes or not, people like that exist. It isn't unacceptable to say something negative...ironically, as you yourself show by calling my comment "petty". One rule for us, amirite comrade?
yellowstuff 7y ago
> He seems to confuse being an economist with having knowledge about literally everything. Cowen does have knowledge on almost literally everything. If you listen to his podcast he will get into the weeds with experts in a diverse array of fields. When he interviewed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar he asked about specifics of his basketball career and also his writing and political work, when he interviewed an Asian food writer he asked specifics about cuisine in different regions of China. He always seems to have studied the entire body of work of every guest he speaks to every week. He reads and travels extensively. You may still think Cowen's ideas are bad, but he is obviously well-informed on the issues he discusses.

laingc 7y ago

I loved this interview, and generally have a lot of time for Tyler Cowen’s podcasts and blog. This topic is one that Peter Thiel has been talking about for over a decade. I have a general theory that whatever smart people are talking about now, Thiel was discussing 10 years before. This is why I always try to find out everything I can about what Thiel is talking about today - it’s like getting a glimpse into the future.

buboard 7y ago
it's likely Thiel influenced both of them (is invested in both) > what Thiel is talking about today what he said 10 years ago is more actionable

buboard 7y ago

there's a video of the conversation in zuck's facebook page

wnm 7y ago

there is also a video version of the interview at https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with-mark-zuckerberg-patrick-collison-and-tyler-cowen/ https://about.fb.com/news/2019/11/a-conversation-with-mark-z...

ebetica0 7y ago

"So for example, if you look at the U.S., productivity growth mid-century or say between, you know, 1920, 1970, was maybe about 1.9% a year. Now most economists think it’s much lower, maybe around sort of .4% a year, something like that." Isn't this just because the US was riding off of the coattails of two world wars and being _the_ global superpower? I wonder what the data says about the rest of the world in that period, probably not so good?

dluan 7y ago

> Collison: But even if technology solved that, I guess my worry would be that the socio-institutional dynamics that have ruined cities or made them less effective or whatever, probably also generalized and applied to other domains. Reminder that Stripe as a company put out a position opposing Prop C. The hypocrisy, I guess. Someone needs to update pg's 'founders should live in the future' to specifically include FAGSLC as the future, because otherwise we're just wasting heat.

uoaei 7y ago
>Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism For those having trouble parsing that acronym.
- adenverd 7y ago
  I'm afraid to ask, but, in what community is this phrase spoken frequently enough to warrant an acronym?
  - uoaei 7y ago
    Satirical-edgy leftist meme pages

professor_trex 7y ago

What is the software package that MZ references at 55:21? It sounds like “nepariu”?

darshanime 7y ago

Why don't we ever see Larry Page doing such things? Don't even remember when I last saw news about him.

chubot 7y ago
He has a vocal cord disorder and speaking is apparently a hardship for him.

chillacy 7y ago

> U.S. life expectancy is basically going up in linear fashion. But if you look at expenditures, we used to spend a few percentage points of GDP on healthcare, and now it’s about 18%. So we’ve gone up to 18%, and we’re not even boosting the rate. I’m not saying it’s the fault of any one group of people, but something has gone wrong. (US life expectancy actually declined for a 3rd straight year due to "deaths of despair" like drug overdoses and suicides) But as for the 18% of GDP on healthcare, medicine is an inelastic good that has severe supply side restrictions (AMA + legislation) and no price transparency. Companies are profiting greatly, it's great for GDP and terrible for people. Similar for the other "cost disease" areas mentioned: education and housing (though for different reasons). Slatestarcodex has a good overview on cost disease too: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-disease/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

adenverd 7y ago

Tyler makes a compelling case in his book[1] that economic growth is responsible for most of the biggest improvements in human flourishing over the past century. He concludes that economic growth is a moral imperative. All three participants in this interview discuss the "exponential inputs, linear outputs" problem/slow-down that industries face as they scale and mature. Question: how far does ROI have to fall for the growth of an industry to cost more than its returns to society are morally worth? Is this even possible? Or is there an assumption that the market would somehow fix/prevent this scenario?] [1] Tyler Cowen, Stubborn Attachments, 2018

dredmorbius 7y ago

For those seeking the direct audio link: http://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/cowenconvos/CWT-BONUS-ZuckerbergCollison-podcast-v1.mp3 http://traffic.libsyn.com/forcedn/cowenconvos/CWT-BONUS-Zuck...