[HiLo]

It's almost like PG and his posse is part of the reason for some of the toxic culture in SV. But God help you if you say that...

My open resentment for them aside, I do wonder why he feels qualified to comment on the economics of income inequality. Just cause you were tangentially involved with something does not give you room to run roughshod over well established economic research.

This would be like Alan Greenspan telling you about which technology companies are solid bets. Or an electrician telling the architect that the building is actually designed how the electrician sees it, not the architect. Like wtf?

I would love an official YC response because I know many in the financial and economics community who see SV and PG specifically as kind of a joke would love a debate, rather than PGs masturbatory, illogical, pseudoscientific rants.

[dragonbonheur]

I would like a response from the "many in the financial and economics community who see SV and PG as kind of a joke" as to why they invest in and exploit the tech sector (they know what NASDAQ is, I hope) and yet treat it as a joke? Do they think they are successful jocks versus socially maladapted geeks and nerds? Seriously, computers have taken over finance and expert systems will soon do a better job than humans managing economic systems as large as countries - how do the jocks react when they are told that they will be mere clerks to machines?

Not that I agree much with PG or the HN posse these days but I'm curious to know about their reaction to the inevitability of the jocks being the first casualties of business management automation

[HiLo]

Complete straw man? Which YC companies are listed on the NASDAQ? Exploit might be the appropriate word, but most of the SV VCs come from tech backgrounds these days, not finance.

Why? All of YC's companies are worth $30 billion, and it's the resounding success? How many deals that big does Wall Street do each week? How big are the biggest hedge funds in terms of AUM? What about average hedge fund size?

I don't think they're "successful jocks" at all, although I'm glad you have no experience there - I know you think all the best PHD's are going to SV but maybe rethink that.

If you can convince an owner to sell his company, and another company's management to buy it, all with a machine, well, then you've pretty much created superintelligent AI and it's not just Wall Street that would need to be worried at that points, it's literally everybody. You think a machine can convince a crusty CEO of a company to give up his empire building, spend more time with his kids, and hey, maybe accept a slightly lower multiple too? Or rather, a machine that calls Goldman Sachs at just the right time to offer them an emergency credit line on terms that haven't been offered before - only after convincing them that these terms are actually favorable to them and that your standing will be able to help hold them up? Perhaps they, too, can make the decision about storing oil for a storage trade - maybe they can vet the vessels, the captains, the port agents, the inspectors, the storage tanks, the insurance companies, the financing banks, and the counterparties, and maybe then they can build good working relationships with all of them in order to get them to fix all their mistakes when they inevitably happen? Will a computer go to a bank executive and actually persuade him that these activities should be profitable and safe, when it's not always such a sure thing they will be? Will a computer know not to blend gasoline to a certain spec because hey, there's a chance I might actually want to blend it with something else because this guy has a position and I think I can talk him into adding to it? What I'm getting at is, it's obvious you don't understand how Wall St works.

Nobody was talking about jocks. I'm talking about the people running hedge funds, private equity funds, investment banks, and trading houses. If you totally fail to see how most of these are social activities to their very core, with numbers there as support, then of course you think it can all be automated.

What you aren't factoring in is Wall Street is probably on the cutting edge of automating work - DE Shaw, where Jeff Bezos worked prior to Amazon, was implementing many of the same statistical methods that are just getting big now, all the way back in the 90's.

So I complained about PG specifically posting pseudoscience, and you come back saying "well how will jocks feel when they're automated." I just don't see this going far.

[dragonbonheur]

I'm just going to ask one more question :D What will your buddies do when Bernie breaks Wall Street up? :D :D :D