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> Uber car crashes. NVIDIA stock crashes the next day because the public thought it had something to do with NVIDIA GPUs. I, and all other ML experts should hav
by MiroF 6y ago
> Uber car crashes. NVIDIA stock crashes the next day because the public thought it had something to do with NVIDIA GPUs. I, and all other ML experts should have been able to call this out and freeze the price of NVDA and say "we have it on good authority that NVDA did not do anything to cause that car crash".
See, but you don't actually know that's why the price of nvidia fell, nor do you know that it is an irrational reason for the nvidia stock to fall. Just because you work in the industry doesn't make you an expert on pricing.
There's lots of problems with this idea (it's incoherent wrt supply&demand, why should people closely affiliated with an industry be the one's setting prices, prices should reflect future expectations not current valuations).
> Predicting the future is an inherently difficult task for experts and I'll give you that.
But that's exactly what prices do. Why would I buy any stock at all unless I'm making a forward prediction about what is happening?
- dheera 6y ago> Why would I buy any stock at all unless I'm making a forward prediction about what is happening? That's exactly what I'm proposing we should change. We should be trading on a company's ability to make the world a better place. That would align incentives across people in a much better way than earnings reports. It also, incidentally, ensure that a company's profit structure is designed to align with its mission rather than align with some arbitrary earnings report deadlines. I realize that metrics for this are hard to design, but we're in the 2nd millenium A.D. and it's okay for us to revise how we think about money. I believe in a future of clean energy electric power, and it's f*ed up that I can't always invest in it because there are times when investing in oil gets me more $ that I can use to improve my own personal clean energy efforts while investing in electric would cause me to be at high risk of losing money, and therefore depend on oil because it's cheaper. That's a really messed up, convoluted system right there.
- MiroF 6y ago> I realize that metrics for this are hard to design, but we're in the 2nd millenium A.D. and it's okay for us to revise how we think about money. It's not just that the metrics are "hard" to design. It's a question of why would I buy stocks based on a company's ability to make the world a better place. What makes the "stock" piece of paper worth more when the company does more to make the world a better place. For real-life stocks, it's the expectation of future buybacks/dividends. For your metric, it's unclear why anyone would participate.
- dheera 6y ago> why would I buy stocks based on a company's ability to make the world a better place I'm precisely proposing that we change the incentive structure in a future version of the economy such that it would benefit you to invest in a company's ability to make the world a better place. That would eliminate OP's problem, among lots of other things. I'm proposing that the role of investors should be fully aligned with the role of scientists and engineers, and the incentives should be designed such that that is the case. Captialism 2.0, if you will. It's a quarter-baked idea, and there are lots of questions to answer, but I'd like to kickstart and encourage more thought and discussion about a future revamped economic system that aligns incentives better than what we have today.
- ericmay 6y agoWell, you can do that. Go invest in these good companies. There isn’t anything stopping you from doing it and encouraging others to do it.