benl

You seem to have misunderstood my comment.

Yes. There are probably a dozen or more across the SP500 and Russel 2000 that will 10-100x in the next 5-10 years. The trick is to be able to identify them!

Those funds are not whole market funds.

But there are things to say about your point too. I’ve commented on that in other threads.

Well yes it will be hard, and hence maybe not economical, and that’s why many people are skeptical of the business case (myself included btw).

But satellite cooling already exists (Starlink v2 satellites dissipate heat at over a kilowatt I believe), so that’s why other people find it plausible.

The bet is that demand for AI tokens will continue to grow exponentially. And that SpaceX will be able to deploy and rent out GPUs to serve those tokens faster than anyone else.

The wrinkle is that they are planning to deploy those GPUs in space. That’s what people are most skeptical about, I think!

If whole market means whole market, then such investments are exposed to companies who are fairly valued, companies who are massively overvalued, and companies who are massively undervalued, and the whole range in between.

If you want to start picking and choosing which companies are overvalued and which are undervalued, don’t invest in whole market funds. But most people are not good at that!

SpaceX is valued at that revenue multiple because of its expected revenue growth rate.

This deal is part of that revenue growth. So the new revenue would be already partially or even fully priced-in.

Perhaps it reduces uncertainty around the growth rate, but expectations were already sky-high, as shown by the multiple!

But the SPCX float is a small fraction of its overall shares. So it will end up being around 0.08% to 0.12% of the weight of the SP500 [1]. Nothing to write home about.

Personally, I do think SpaceX is overvalued at these proposed IPO numbers and I will trade accordingly. So should anyone else who is confident and competent at taking appropriate market positions.

1. https://www.investmentnews.com/practice-management/spacexs-i...

Technically I think this would be fairly straightforward. You could keep the index fund and then short the stock you believe is overvalued, to the degree it's weighted in the index fund. That would give you stock market exposure equivalent to the index without the company you don't believe in.

But I would strongly advise you to NOT DO THIS.

The above position makes it explicit that your thesis involves shorting a stock that could go through the roof in value. That emphasizes what a risk you're taking with your thesis. If your typical investment approach is to just buy index funds, then carry on just buying index funds and let the market do its work.

By the way, if SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI etc were to be excluded from the indices, then professional investors would just start a trade the inverse of the one I outlined above - i.e. they'd start shorting your index fund to the extent it was underweight in those companies, in order to profit off the exclusion of those tickers from it.

If you're in this for the long term (which I assume you are given this is your 401k), don't try to second-guess the market short-term.

£10,000 per year for Mr Darcy is 10,000 gold sovereigns per year. A gold sovereign at spot price today is about $1,100. So that’s over 10 million dollars per year in gold-equivalent wealth. Plenty to maintain his estate with.

Alternatively, £10,000 is 200,000 sterling silver shillings per year (20 shillings per pound) for him. A sterling shilling today is about $13.50 at spot price. So that’s $2.7million per year in silver-equivalent wealth. Still plenty!

Yes, launch cost is the crux of the matter. My skepticism is based on whether they’ll be able to get launch cost low enough and launch cadence high enough. SpaceX has shown the ability to get launch costs dramatically lower and cadence dramatically higher, but it’s not a slam dunk that those curves will continue to the levels needed for this idea to work.

Data centers in space may or may not make sense (personally I'm quite skeptical) but the objections in the article certainly don't make sense.

1. The only reason there are 15,000 satellites in space is because SpaceX launched about 9,500 of them (Starlink is 65% of all satellites) on their semi-reusable Falcon 9. If fully-reusable Starship pans out, they will be launching satellites at 10x the rate of Falcon 9 at the very least.

2. You don't need to upgrade the satellites, you just launch new ones. The reason data center companies upgrade their servers is because they can't just build a new data center to hold the new chips. But satellites in space are a sunk cost, so just keep using the existing satellites while also launching new ones.

3. Falling solar panel costs decreases the power costs for both earth-based and space-based, but they're more efficient in space so the benefit would be proportionally greater there.

As I said, I'm skeptical too, but let's be skeptical for good reasons.

Your explanation of finding a surface to separate good reasoning traces from bad reasoning traces in a high dimensional space worked as a great framing of the problem. It seems though that the surface will be fractal - the distance between a good trace and a bad trace could be arbitrarily small. If so then the work required to find and compute better and better surfaces will grow arbitrarily large. I wonder if there is a rigorous way to determine if the surface is fractal or not.

Sydney

Venom

Fury

Riley

"My name is Legion: for we are many"

Darkness is the absence of light. In this usage light would represent a moral agent, and so darkness is its absence - either no morality or no agency or both.

True Due Date is great, thank you for making it!

My wife is pregnant and, because the nearest maternity unit is 1hr45mins drive away, we're going to rent a place near it around the due date. This just gave me a confidence boost about what dates to be there. Thank you!

I found “Aristotle for Everybody” by Mortimer J. Adler to be really great. The topic of the immateriality of the intellect is covered in the last few chapters, but the rest of it is great stuff too.

You might be more familiar with the field than me, but my understanding is that’s Dennett position is not well-thought-of in the fields of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. At the very least there are very good cases made that unpick his position very carefully. They’re not all Cartesian views - I grasp the Aristotelian views best myself.

I’ll try because you asked me to, but i think I’ll do a bad job. You’ll get a much better understanding by reading on the topics of philosophy of mind and metaphysics. Here goes, though:

1. Purely immaterial things exist. Think of mathematics or the laws of logic or physics - these things exist as ideas or concepts, not arrangements of matter.

2. Some abstract concepts cannot be embodied in matter at all. For example, you can make a shoe, you can draw a shoe, but you can’t draw shoe-ness. You can understand and reason about what makes something a shoe in the abstract, but you can only make or draw an individual shoe.

3) the mind contains these purely immaterial things when we think about and reason about them.

4) If we can use the abstract concepts, but the abstract concepts can’t be embodied in matter, then the mind must be at least partly immaterial in order for the concepts to be in our mind.

I hope that helps a but please don’t rely on my exposition of the case - a real philosopher would do it justice.

Yes, I used to hold that view too. But actually it turns out that the null hypothesis is that mind is at least partly immaterial, because all attempts to demonstrate the opposite philosophically are fraught with difficulty. I’ve found that the thought of Aristotle and Aquinas, when explained by modern philosophers, best explains to me why that’s the case.

That’s right - we have minds therefore we must be more than just matter.

I used to think the opposite, but reading the philosophy on the subject changed my mind. There are a lot of different takes on the topic, but what most added up for me was the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas. There are many great expositions of their work out there.

I used to be a believer of the theory that we are super sophisticated machines. When I read some of the philosophy on the subject I changed my mind. I now believe there must be some immaterial component to our minds.

There’s a lot to read out there on this subject, but I found expositions of the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas to be the clearest and most convincing for me. Lots of different books and articles exist on them both - pick one that sounds like it suits your style of understanding.

If you strip out the AGI hype then this just sounds like OpenAI is now moving to monetizing their tech. This makes sense for them but probably not for the philanthropists who originally backed them.

Sadly for them, AGI is metaphysically impossible - this will be realized eventually but a lot of waste and possibly harm will happen first.

We are not just super sophisticated machines, so the fact that we can think doesn’t tell us anything about what’s possible for machines. But philosophy does - and it tells us you can’t get mind from matter, no matter what configuration you put it in.

The Crown of Thorns is kept in the treasury at Notre Dame and was due to be displayed all day this Friday for Good Friday. How it ended up there is an interesting tour of European history in itself. Let's hope that it has been saved.

Yes, but it's my argument that claim 1 is incorrect and overhype. AI cannot drive better than humans, and that was an hubristic claim.

It's rather disingenuous of AI researchers to complain of overhype when they are the ones claiming that their tech should be used to drive cars and hence, as we've seen, kill people.

AI winter will be caused, once again, by the failure of the technology to do what the researchers and practitioners claim it can do. This time, tragically, with fatalities.

I'm sorry you thought I was being dismissive. I felt I had reached the limit of my own pursuasiveness on the question and wanted to point you to somewhere better than me.

One final point I will try to make is that in thinking about how we know things, there's no suggestion that we need to set aside common sense. It's about starting with common sense and then seeing what we can add to it.

That sounds like you're saying something like this:

"I believe empiricism is true because empiricism seems to be true."

We strive to live our lives based on reason, so we should look for ways to understand the world that go beyond a circular argument.

Such lines of thinking exist. They have been well argued and debated and have much going for them. Plenty of places to start learning about them, but maybe start with Aristotle.

"Non-empirical statements are meaningless"

This is a non-empirical statement, given that you probably don't believe that you can demonstrate the truth of it empirically.

Putting it another way, perhaps you might agree with the following statement?

"All legitimate knowledge is gained empirically."

But how do you know this? Did you reach this conclusion empirically?

So there must be some things that you know through non-empirical means.

Hi - Please forward me a copy of one of those emails (to my first name at academia.edu).

We only ever send emails from users in response to a request from them to do so (e.g. they send a message or invite a co-author). Please send me the email and I will look into it.