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All of humanity is going to benefit from these moonshots. Sometimes, the original intent of a research program doesn't come to fruition, but there are a lot of downstream benefits and innovations that can be traced to the so-called "failed" research program. I believe that's exactly what's going to happen with some of these so-called "failures." Even today, what Elon Musk has already done, is considered impossible for his companies to have done. (The car, and the backwards landing rocket.) Here's to more moonshots from Google and Facebook! Salute! ------------------- And here's Nassim Taleb on "inverse Turkeys" (i.e., positive Black Swans), from AntiFragile: > Harvard Business School professor, Gary Pisano, writing about the potential of
biotech, made the elementary inverse-turkey mistake, not realizing that in a business with limited losses and unlimited potential (the exact opposite of banking), what you don’t see can be both significant and hidden from the past. He writes: “Despite the commercial success of several companies and the stunning growth in revenues for the industry as a whole, most biotechnology firms earn no profit.” This may be correct, but the inference from it is wrong, possibly backward, on two counts, and it helps to repeat the logic owing to the gravity of the consequences. First, “most companies” in
Extremistan make no profit—the rare event dominates, and a small number of
companies generate all the shekels. And whatever point he may have, in the presence of the kind of asymmetry and optionality we see in Figure 7, it is inconclusive, so it is better to write about another subject, something less harmful that may interest Harvard students, like how to make a convincing PowerPoint presentation or the difference in managerial cultures between the Japanese and the French. Again, he may be right about the pitiful potential of biotech investments, but not on the basis of the data he showed. |
I am not saying ad-networks aren't complicated and involved and require highly intelligent people, but I don't believe them to be comparable to what Musk is delivering.