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Truth Signal

@de_bose

Sep 6

I’ve a Bayesian theory around why “believe in science” and “believe in technocratic progress” are so high, even if the counter-evidences are strong.

Thread 🧵

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The belief, held by humanity until “Industrial Revolution” (1800), emphasized that the future wouldn't necessarily improve upon the past.

Key values included - small, short-term, and high-interest loans (debt is bad and makes society eventually enslaved), focusing on contentment rather than progress, prioritizing family and community, and adhering to spiritual wisdom that warned against exceeding human limitations, as doing so would lead to disappointment and disaster.

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Then came Malthusian Equilibrium and “Trap”.

The Malthusian Trap refers to a situation where, despite improvements in productivity, population growth absorbs the surplus, preventing any sustainable increase in living standards.

This is a key component of Thomas Malthus's theory of population dynamics.

Malthus argued that while technological advancements or improvements in agricultural productivity might temporarily raise the average product of labor, they would lead to higher population growth.

As a result, the growing population would eventually reduce per capita income back to subsistence levels, creating a cycle of short-term prosperity followed by long-term stagnation, known as the Malthusian Equilibrium.

In the diagrams provided, this concept is illustrated by showing how increases in productivity (as seen by the shift upward in the productivity curve) only lead to short-term improvements in wages or average product.

However, population growth eventually drives wages back down to subsistence levels (e.g., point G on the APL curve). The historical data from the 1400s to 1800s shows that increases in population correspond to falling wages, as predicted by Malthus's model.

The core idea behind the Malthusian Trap is that productivity gains are self-limiting in pre-industrial societies. Without sustained technological advancement and significant changes in economic institutions (such as those sparked by the Industrial Revolution), population pressure will continually suppress long-term improvements in living standards.

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Read 25 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Aug 21

Life can be blissful without even knowing mathematical and physical basis of reality.

The more one acquires mainstream
education, the more inflated lifestyle becomes, more status-hungry partner one ends up choosing, more demand come from life-events and more necessity it seems to earn money (fiat) in order to satisfy those requirements, more one has to depend on someone for job (referrals, promotions etc.) and play the “game” etc.

Return on education (I know lots of Asians are growing up being brainwashed by the worldview that a 120K-150K MBA and FAANG/IB/Bank job is key to a happy life. That’s far from truth) over years have been abysmal.

This will be a long thread on practical and philosophical futility of modern education !

Long thread 🧵

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If you are a man, T-levels (testosterone) are one of the most important health dimension for you. And guess what - college-education reduces T levels.

(Testosterone levels according to ethnicity and education in a sample of male American veterans; median age of the sample was 37 years (redrawn from Mazur 1995))

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"Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs" by Lauren A. Rivera

Lauren A. Rivera's Pedigree explores how elite firms in industries like finance, law, and consulting select candidates from specific universities to ensure they recruit the "best" talent. These firms create two tiers of schools: core schools and target schools.

- Core schools are typically three to five highly prestigious institutions from which firms source the majority of their new hires. These firms heavily invest in recruitment activities on these campuses, such as hosting information sessions, cocktail receptions, and extensive interview processes.

- Target schools are additional institutions (five to fifteen) where firms recruit on a smaller scale. While core schools are the main focus, target schools receive fewer interview slots and job offers.

The selection of these schools is primarily based on perceived PRESTIGE and the REPUTATION of the institutions. (if you've missed the opportunity to get admission to these schools, you're chance to get to top firms drops a lot irrespective of your grades/GPA )

Kayla, a recruitment director, summarised the strategy this way:

"It’s totally **anecdotal**. (She laughs.) I think it’s based upon—and it probably lags in terms of time and updating—but it’s based upon a kind of understanding of how selective the school was in terms of admitting students and how challenging is the work. So it’s largely just kind of school reputation and conventional wisdom, for better or worse."

Often, this perception is shaped by the firm's decision-makers, many of whom are alumni of these prestigious schools. However, the inclusion of some schools on these lists can also be influenced by internal advocates, particularly if a senior employee or partner is an alum of a less prestigious school. This connection can lead to the school being added to the firm's recruitment list, sometimes even maintaining its place long after the original advocate has left the firm.

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Read 19 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Aug 30, 2023

Every company is just trying to "capture value" that's already there.

Our entire society became speculative. Trying to catch the raindrops of trillions of dollars of debt as it 'trickles' down through privileged & nepotistic waterways.

@Uber raised like $25B to reinvent taxis and food delivery. They finally made a profit last quarter after 14Y. Facebook bought instagram just to copy tiktok_us which just copied vine. Then Facebook made threads which is just a copy of Twitter which was made 17y ago. A kid born the day Twitter was made will be able to vote in the next election. AirBnb was supposed to be a way to rent out an extra room or couch, but it just turned into investors buying houses specifically as bed and breakfasts (Without actual breakfasts !). Even the current iteration of #ArtificialIntelligence is just some linear algebra, optimised computing & lots of engineering thrown into the mix. Not much actual innovation.

Long gone are the days when innovation and the desire to build a better world (by actual curious & talented people, not by someone who went to a IvyMBA to get a 5M seed) drove development. The only thing on anyone's mind is how he can make as much money as quickly as possible from something.

#reflections #investment #innovation

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"My analysis of start-ups, however, shows that the big losses suffered by Uber, Lyft, WeWork, Pinterest, and Snapchat—greater than 50% of revenues annually—are just the tip of the iceberg.

More than 90% of America’s “unicorns”—start-ups valued at $1 billion or more while privately held (before IPOs)—lost money in 2019 or 2020, even though more than half of them were founded over 10Y ago.

And a similar trend of losses holds for European, Indian, and Chinese start-ups.

Of similar importance, recent analyses of venture capital (VC) firms show that ROIs in VCs have barely exceeded those of public stock markets over the past 25Y, and their current losses suggest that returns will fall even further"

Good Lord. IPOs have been strange lately. Lots of unprofitable startups IPO-ing, providing exit liquidity to private investors

"..start-ups that do go public, the % that are unprofitable at the time of their IPO has increased dramatically over the last few decades, exceeding 80% in recent years, according to analysis by Jay Ritter of the University of Florida"

Ref: Rani Molla, “Why Companies Like Lyft and Uber Are Going Public without Having Profits,” Vox, March 6, 2019.

#venturecapital

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"...the most significant problem for today’s start-ups is that there have been few if any new technologies to exploit.

The internet, which was a breakthrough technology 30Y ago, has matured. As a result, many of today’s start-up unicorns are comparatively low-tech, even with the advent of the smartphone—perhaps the biggest technological breakthrough of the twenty-first century—14Y ago.

Ridesharing and food delivery use the same vehicles, drivers, and roads as previous taxi and delivery services; the only major change is the replacement of dispatchers with smartphones.

Online sales of juicers, furniture, mattresses, and exercise bikes may have been revolutionary twenty years ago, but they are sold in the same way that Amazon currently sells almost everything.

New business software operates from the cloud rather than onsite computers, but pre-2000 start-ups such as Amazon, Google, and Oracle were already pursuing cloud computing before most of the unicorns were founded.

Fintech start-ups use algorithms to find low-risk borrowers or insurance subscribers, but economic contraction has shown how sensitive these algorithms are to changes in the overall economy; hence their technology cannot be considered revolutionary.

Other than #artificialintelligence and #DataAnalytics, none of the technologies being developed by unicorns is a breakthrough comparable to those seen by previous generations of start-ups"

TL;DR: Most of tech is commodity now.

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#VentureCapital #investments

Read 8 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Jun 24, 2023

This is a real-life story of how corporatisation of #science (MIS complex) has replaced the curious scientists with stronger moral backbones.

James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or #Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".

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Bernadine Patricia Healy (August 4, 1944 – August 6, 2011) was an American cardiologist and the first female director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

W. Bush tapped her in 1991 to become director of the NIH, its first woman head.

#science #MISComplex

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Reid Adler, the director of technology transfer at NIH, filed an application of patent, presumably with Healy's blessing, on thousands of gene fragments (Science, 11 October 1991, p. 184).

Not only Watson felt it was morally wrong to seek patents on “gene fragments”, neither Healy nor Adler didn’t bother to discuss the application with him, especially when it had major ramifications for the Genome Project which Watson was leading then.

#science #history

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Read 6 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

May 8, 2023

Everywhere GDP-maximalism starts, a bunch of events eventually follow

- more #debt
- more liberal lefts
- more #cancer & chronic diseases
- more decline in mental health
- more junk foods
- more #BigPharma
- more breakdown of family system
- less traditional wisdom & Spirituality
- more societal degeneracy
- more corporations & slave MBAs
- less family leisure, bonding & warmth
- less local businesses
- more environmental destruction
- less fertility

#GDP #Keynesian

It seems GDP-maximalism also correlates (+0.71) with degree of LGBTQ+ acceptance.

#society #capitalism #fiat #economics #culture

Also carbon intensity.

How the global material footprint (MF, equal to global raw material extraction) and global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion and industrial processes (CO2 FFI) changed compared with global GDP (constant 2010 USD). Indexed to 1 in 1990. Data sources:

, and .

resourcepanel.org/global-materia…
globalcarbonatlas.org
data.worldbank.org
nature.com/articles/s4146…

Read 16 tweets

Truth Signal

@de_bose

Jan 11, 2023

Considering that modern humans, due to the Neanderthal assimilation (we carry their DNA), are entirely different from the misnamed extinct pre-contact Homo sapiens, it might be time to rename the latter in order to distinguish them from us, maybe as Homo socialis.

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Since the Neanderthal assimilation most Homo sapiens have retained their predominantly social nature & therefore tend to ostracise those of a predominantly individual nature who, beginning in the 1940s, are being pathologised with the label of #autism

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“modern human-specific alleles that could correlate with a shift towards prosociality in modern-humans, we highlight one allele in AVPR1A (rs11174811), found at high frequency and linked to prosocial phenotypes in modern humans,…”

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

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