[FRIAM] Nautilus: Investing Is More Luck Than Talent

[Marcus Daniels]

Robert writes:

“They are inherently community motivated and supported and are not the kind of enterprises that you will see move offshore or park their cash there to avoid US taxation”

I make a distinction between people that are primarily goal motivated versus those that are primarily community motivated.  Goal motivated folks prefer to talk about work and ideas.   Community motivated people talk about their advisors or bosses, their distinguished colleagues, the benefits and drawbacks of their organization, and they seek mutually-beneficial relationships, among other things.

A benefit of large, hierarchical organizations to the goal motivated person is that, provided the organization goals are aligned with that person’s goals (employer and employee), the intra-community power struggles can be largely ignored.   This is not to say the community-builder tactics aren’t also used by other employees, often quite effectively, but they aren’t strictly essential for a sufficiently productive employee.

An objection to community motivated organizations is that they are about keeping the community afloat, not about progressing goals separate from the welfare of the members of the community.  The ideal situation, in my mind, is to solve the welfare problem for everyone.   Then discussions could stay on topic and be decoupled from the needs of people.   Another objection to communities is that complicates satisfaction of the “What do you want from me?” constraint.  Now there is not just one boss, but a whole set people and constraints to worry about.

“From your last paragraph, if I follow, you seem to have much more hope that we can improve society with chemicals, gene editing, quantum computing, or with surgical implants than I do.  I don't think that I would want to live in such a society. What will emerge, if any of this is at all possible, is a super-smart animal with the same ratty morals and self-interest.”

There are other phenotypes to consider.  Is there an innate explanation for nurturing and compassion?   Genetically, what is there to maternal instinct?   What is there to sadism?   At what point does emotional empathy become overwhelming and counterproductive to compassion?  Does emotional empathy directly lead to tribalism due to attentional limits?   These predispositions might be tunable too through gene therapy or epigenetic controls.

Another way is to NOT fix what is broken with all of us through, say, a very long FDA approval and socialization process, but to create a new community offshore or off planet that is designed for social sustainability given certain environmental limitations.

“That's a very dangerous animal, IMHO.  This is why many folks are scared of AI; look who's leading the pack at this technology and buying up the world's brain trust: Google ... one of those "enterprises" that you justifiably don't seem to trust. 🤔

Trumpians are very dangerous animals, IMO.  A lot of the output of the AI/ML brain trust is open source, though.   I’m more comfortable with the Google world than the world of the fascists.  If things go further downhill -- more leaders like Trump and ultra-conservative governance, a divided Europe, and an ungovernable China -- I’d say there’s reason to start to think about whole new approaches.

Marcus
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