[blueyes]

For me, what this post illustrates most is the cost of information. By making hasty decisions, buyers are trading present time that might be spent shopping and comparing with future time spent struggling with the wrong product. They're discounting future time. But they're also doing something very rational -- they're making a decision to see what happens. That is, they're testing a hypothesis in the only way the market allows them to. Because people are bad at predicting their own future needs and behavior, and products are bundles of features whose importance is often unknown until you have to use them in high-dimensional futures. So buying is an empirical test.

Unfortunately, most consumers, recruiters and sometimes hiring managers are in a position of information assymetry vis a vis the people selling them something. That is, consumers rely on the self-reporting of vendors which purport to be experts.

https://vonnik.substack.com/p/the-expert-layman-problem

[milesward]

it's worse than that: nobody knows! how are we supposed to know if all the investment vendor A made in "reliability" of their appliance will actually work, or if it was just spent wastefully? And oops: past results don't reflect future outcomes, so you can't even really bank on a brand or a reputation: who knows if they just cut all Q/A staff? Welcome to entropy my friends!

[Terr_]

Entropy would be an upgrade since it would be indifferent to human concerns and manageable by statistics.

In contrast, product information invites people crafting lies for an advantage.

[soco]

Theory (and practice too) says that whatever was used in the proof-of-concept also stays. I mean you are right the initial thinking is to try and evaluate the fitness, but then you're already invested and unless the fitness is abysmal (it rarely is) everything else will be rounded and squared to fit the already implemented hole...

[trod1234]

I think you are overthinking this.

Consumers rely on advertised claims being truthful.

It is not a matter of people badly predicting their own needs in most cases,though there are some that do have problems with this. It is a matter of people being misled by false information and trying to course correct after that information comes to light.

In a world where lies of omission and ambiguity towards borderline malice isn't considered an outright lie, but the sales reps do make those outright lies, and fake reviewers are not punished; there are real problems especially when the presumption is they aren't doing this (when in many markets this is exactly the standard behavior, and even academic studies show these things happen regularly).

Presumptions are just assumptions. Someone will take advantage of the grey unenforced area to push a product that may not be as professionally tested as they claim (or even finished). I've certainly run into a lot of these bait and switch types in my long professional career. The general term to describe this is snake-oil, and with the concentration of the market over time (increasing marketshare less participants), this only gets worse.

[benreesman]

You’re giving pmarca too much credit: he’s just lying. Ya know, for personal profit.

Starving for talent my ass. His portfolio companies have infinite appetite for talent at zero cost, the minute one person wants one point of the upside they’re right back to starving for free talent.

Silicon Valley is the ultimate thought experiment in how wealth inequality plays out when resources are effectively inexhaustible. You don’t have to speculate about a post-scarcity world, this is a post-scarcity world. Ballers in SV ship a billion in revenue on a Tuesday. And yet somehow it’s Andreessen who ends up with all the chips at the end of the night.

These talking heads don’t have a plan, they don’t know what their next big payday will be, they don’t code, they don’t design, they don’t sell anything other than their own personal brand, they don’t add value.

They’re just patient and connected like zen spiders sitting on a web: they’ll learn first about a new big thing, they’ll be there immediately, their friends will wire up the deal in their favor, and they’ll do a TED talk a few years later about how making themselves absurdly wealthy with no real effort is somehow the future of humanity.

They openly advertise their glee at the (ridiculous) idea that soon some autoregressive language model will do all the work and the owners of NIDIA cards can just pocket it all.

In the 90s there was this meme of a yuppy couple doing a business from their couch via “The Information Superhighway”: outsource everything, all you need is a laptop, a glass of Chardonnay, and a lot of cheek.

pmarca should spend less time yakking about AI on Lex stream and more time learning AI on geohotz stream.

[MichaelZuo]

Most of “the people selling something” have little to no credibility, so their words have no value beyond a very low bar.

It would be different if it’s someone e.g. very high up at a F500 selling something, even with a huge information asymmetry, because it’s still possible to bank on their credibility. (Assuming they offer sufficiently many guarantees signed by sufficiently many people.)

[a123b456c]

Why is it different with a F500?

I could think of reasons both in favor and against, but I'm curious about your rationale.

[MichaelZuo]

Because of the credibility attached to the organization that’s then offered as part of the written signed guarantees…

When there’s little to no credibility to offer, such as when a newly hired intern is selling it, then of course it’s no different.