Sounds like Sam Altman and Paul Graham. Thinking theyre good for the world but in reality theyre destroying it but not wise enough to understand their actions. Maybe high on their success from going from being nerds who've never kissed a girl to billionaires who can afford to lose their virginities.
Complaining about (VCs funding) teams of a few people destroying the world - it's like complaining about water flowing downhill.
If I had to identify the skill I think they have (and the valley trick in general), it's an ability to reason more accurately than most about replicators, scale and growth.
This is largely orthogonal to any moral basis (although there is a sort of inherent darwinistic streak to the whole enterprise).
There's a certain sort of inevitability about activities that generate momentum and scale, it's like finding a natural force. The opportunity is like a boulder at the top of a hill.
From this point of view, you start to see that someone is going to push the boulder eventually. Some boulders are harder to move than others, and there are great opportunities if you can identify teams proposing to put a lever in the right place.
You can also flip the view a bit, focusing on teams with the "right stuff", and fund them on the basis that they might find a boulder they can move eventually.
There is no shortage in this world of boulders waiting to be rolled down hills, but they are not all the same, you ideally want the biggest ones that need the smallest pushes, with a long way to run. It's better if no one else can copy your action or take your boulder off you or redirect it - and that's not easy - if it were generally easy for everyone, someone else would have done it already.
When you see the huge boulder rolling you might wonder "why didn't they push it that way instead", or "who made them so powerful they're in charge of that thing" or "why do they deserve to be in charge of it". The world isn't quite like that. Sure "they" pushed it, but they had to push it in the direction it "wanted" to move (or else it would have just sat there) and thereafter, things tend to acquire their own momentum.
Some degree of magical thinking is a fairly natural and forgivable response (IMHO) for human beings in uncertain ventures, harnessing powerful forces and involved in complex systems they don't fully understand.
It’s not the snarkiness. It can be snarky if it also adds to the conversation. There wasn’t really anything people could say in repose to your comment that was relevant to the topic.
American produce is a problem but I think only 1 percent of people know how to cook their own food. Instead they buy from restaurants and then are bewildered when their bank accounts are empty and they are fat and with bad skin.
Education in America is worse than growing up in the Bush.
Besides our insistence on having everything even if it is out of season, which isn't really a problem with the produce itself, what is America's produce problem?
Not sure what the problem is but you can experience symptoms. Bad farming practices, poor soil are some of my guesses. How expensive things are that are grown locally.
Just because you cannot identify the problems doesn't mean they don't exist.
