I notice this in the attitudes of students towards reading. They will take a 10-page journal article and ask the AI for a summary and then read a summary that's the equivalent of maybe half a page. But if the article could have been half a page, why is it actually 10 pages? It's true that there is some boilerplate, but it's strange to me that people could think that 90% of what they're reading is (to use your phrase) "not true semantic information". It's like if you went to a restaurant and ordered a 10-oz steak and they brought you a little teeny bite of steak and said "Oh, other places will give you a bigger one, but most of that is just filler, we just took out all the superfluous parts." It's a worrying sign for our future if things like this are not tripping people's skeptic sensors and making them wonder if they might possibly be missing something.
I mean I think that points to a related issue of people only focusing on a short-term notion of utility. The point of being a student is largely to learn things that may potentially be of utility to you in some way later, not just to do what meet your immediate needs (in the sense of passing the class).
I get what you're saying and I myself am guilty of surface level learning. But the idea that students should consume all the information is impractical. Learning what is acceptable to discard is part of being a student. I imagine very few students read every college text book cover to cover.
Beyond that people have different motivations and goals and only a limited time to achieve them. Basically I wouldn't be so quick to judge. Plenty of students have dropped out and gone on to do impressive things and that's a bit beyond reading only the abstract for a few assignments.
In theory this is true, but in practice I am skeptical that it's generally possible to do this with generic "business" intelligence that is not accompanied by specific understanding of and genuine care for the actual substance of what the business does. That is, no matter how good you are at "business", you're not going to have a good hamburger stand unless you care about making good hamburgers. It's true that the importance of this varies from one business to another, but I don't see any particular tendency for PE to gravitate towards industries where it matters less. (Medicine is an example of an area where it would matter most.)
> Many people don't really run businesses efficiently.
In many cases that's a good thing, depending on what we mean by efficient. Lots of people run businesses in ways that make less money than they could, and often that's good.
> I don't know how these tradeoffs interact with patient care, but I wouldn't inherently expect PE to be worse at this than any other operating model.
Doesn't the evidence suggest it is indeed often worse?
I think that "everyone should be able to do what they want with their own property", per se, is not a good principle for society. Sometimes people should not be allowed to do what they want with their property. In particular, I think the more property a person has, the less freedom they should have to do what they want with it. (This can also take the form of "the amount of property a person can own should be limited".)
I was speaking in generalities, if that wasn't extremely obvious.
Obviously, yes, people are - and should be - constrained in what they can do with their property. Even the most capitalist systems on earth place restrictions on property. I didn't think it was necessary to caveat that control of private property is not absolute or without consequences. I'm not aware of any capitalist systems that do not put greater protections on people that control large amounts of property (see monopoly, environmental, antitrust, public securities law, etc. Most of those are basically irrelevant to people who don't own large amounts of property).
The point is that for property to mean anything at all, an owner must be allowed to direct the use of that property. What's the point of owning a house if I can't make any decisions about what to do with it. I don't really own a house if I can't decide that I want to live in it, or to sell it.
Yes, but what if you own 100 houses? I'm pretty sure there is some number N of houses (or total value of houses) where I would be fine telling the person, "You don't get to decide what to do with these houses anymore, they're going to be given to people who need houses." Not as a matter of antitrust or monopoly but just directly as a matter of an individual controlling too much wealth.
Aside from that, once you admit that there can be restrictions on property rights, it's unclear how property rights in and of themselves is a steelman of private equity. Why not just say that "you can't sell to private equity" is one of the restrictions? Or, perhaps more subtly, why not say that a private equity company of a certain size is not allowed to buy any additional company, independent of what rights that company's owner has to sell?
There is a lot of stuff you're saying here that sounds simple but isn't.
...once you admit that there can be restrictions on property rights, it's unclear how property rights in and of themselves is a steelman of private equity. Why not just say that "you can't sell to private equity" is one of the restrictions?
What do you think that would look like in practice? Private equity is investment in non-public companies -- the purchase of shares in non-public companies or the purchase of the companies outright. In many cases, the private equity firms themselves are public; but in many cases, they are private, as well.
There isn't a way to make a rule that "you can't sell to private equity" but there can be a rule like "you can't sell a private company at all" or "public investment funds can not purchase shares in private companies" -- if you try a few of the variations that are possible, you'll see that they're all bad rules, I think.
You really have to think about hard about what you mean by "a private equity company". It's not as easy as it looks. If a manufacturing firm starts to buy up suppliers (many of which are small, private entities), is it a private equity company? It's buying up non-public companies.
My point with these arguments is just to say that private property rights are not a steelman for private equity. I'm not saying that these are simple answers to the claim that we need private equity, I'm just saying that the concept of private property is also not a simple answer to the claim that we don't need private equity.
That said, I agree with you to some extent. I think it's not actually so hard to define what I think is bad about private equity, but it's true that that badness is not confined to private equity. In particular I think the distinction between public and private companies is almost entirely meaningless; what we should care about is what companies do, whether they are publicly traded or not. From that perspective private equity is not really different from publicly traded "holding companies" that do basically the same thing.
The crux of it, for me, is companies that are just doing "the business of business", and are not organized around human beings doing things that they genuinely care about and want to do a good job at. You can never run a good company by trying to run "a company", rather than trying to run a steakhouse, or a pet groomer, or a bank, or a car wash, or some particular company that does a particular thing. The problem of both private equity and public "holding companies" is that they value money to the point that they no longer sufficiently value the actual substance of the good or service that the business provides.
I'm not sure that's true. Like if they produced nothing but the worst of the slop they're currently producing, a lot of people would still be bothered by that just because of the sheer volume of such slop that can now be produced.
And that's because the DMCA lets Google exploit its position. It's still a DMCA problem until the DMCA is either repealed or fixed to produce a comprehensively good situation.
Google made an arrangement to keep YouTube afloat. The copyright cartels can't use their automated libel machines if the fraudulently accused have the means to exercise their full rights. That would incur untenable operational expenses when people are permitted a low friction path to nullify the takedowns and then advance to the courts if the libeler wants carry on with their lies.
With intentional bias built into the system, Google gets favorable treatment on remuneration for the commercial copyrighted content that they host. The fix is a revision that revokes safe harbor protection when an accused party is disenfranchised by omission of the counter notice process.
It's not totally clear from the examples given, but I feel like in some cases these changes aren't a genuine effort to improve things. They're just a sort of cycle of changing things to chase fads or look busy.
And what will be the penalty when they inevitably fail to make meaningful changes? Another fine as weak as this one? No. The penalty now should be ten or a hundred times as large as this.
> I am not interested in blaming companies or people
> The issue isn't the models becoming smarter. The issue is that the process of "testing" was careless.
But that's just it. People (working at companies) made the models, people (working at companies) were careless in the testing. So I do want to blame those people and those companies. They did bad stuff. They deserve blame.
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