“Only one important thing has happened in the last three days, and that is that nothing has happened.” – Sherlock Holmes
“Physicians often pride themselves on curing all their patients with a remedy that they use. But the first thing to ask them is whether they have tried doing nothing, i.e., not treating other patients; for how can they otherwise know whether the remedy or nature cured them?” – Sherlock Holmes
“We did a survey of developers at Anthropic and saw a self-reported 50% productivity boost from the 60% of those surveyed who used Claude in their work. But then things like the METR study would seem to contradict that. We need better data and, specifically, instrumentation for developers inside and outside the AI labs to see what is going on.” – Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, on whether AI tools actually improve productivity or not (20260110)
“Construction in progress (CIP) is now an accounting trick that I believe is already being used. Capital equipment not yet “placed into service” does not start depreciating or counting against income. And it can be there forever. I imagine a lot of stranded assets will be hidden in CIP to protect income, and I think we are already seeing that potential.” – Michael Burry (20260110)
Negative evidence and events that don’t happen, matter when something implies they should be present or happen.
Next:
- 5-2a Check your growth rate of expectations vs circumstances. The former is hard to measure. But remember - you get what you measure.
- 5-2a0 Know what to measure
- 5-3 Don’t fight. Transcend.
Related:
- 1-1a2e11 Nothing objectively represents the represented
- 1-1a6 To live is to live like a detective
- 1-1c6a1c The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence, because it’s about knowledge all the way downdevelop
- 1-2g1a In most cases, the new theory likely predicts the same outcome as the old ones, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need new theories because new theories give better explanations
- 2-1a1a9 ‘Survivorship bias’ - We only see what can be seen
- 2-1a7a1 (1) Increase your productivity; (2) Don’t let your income increase faster than your productivity; (3) Don’t let your debt increase faster than your income
- Productivity ‘boost’ (e.g., with LLMs) might not be directly measurable—because we might start doing things completely tangent then
- 3-1d6d Consistency with specific problems in mind is the key to (detect) progress
- 8-1c4d1a1 The culture (or ‘gestalt’) dictates what’s been written as well as what’s not been written
- 7-1a4a Growth in revenue and in user base are not the same thing.
- 10-2d1a The regularity in nature can be expressed arbitrarily well either by the language of mathematics, natural language, or by computers (zeros and ones)
- 11-2.1 Fiat money shields ideas from criticism—the cost of bullshit goes down in such economy
- Under the gold standard, the share in the company really represents the share in the economy (viz., purchasing power, which, according to Li Lu, is what matters)—see Saifedean Ammous for more on the gold standard
“There’s a deeper reason LLMs are at a permanent handicap here: the thing you’re trying to learn is not fully contained in the text. They can catch up by sheer brute force, but are far more inefficient than humans, and the debt is coming due now. When an investor publishes a thesis, consider what is not in it: the position sizing that limits the exposure; the timing that avoided telegraphing intent; strategic concealment; how the thesis itself is written to not move the market against them; what they’d actually do if proved wrong tomorrow. Text is the residue of action. The real competence is the counterfactual recursive loop: what would I do if they do this?; what does my move cause them to do next?; what does it reveal about me? That loop is the engine of adversarial expertise, and it’s weakly revealed by corpora. This is why models can recite game theory but still write the “nice email” that leaks leverage. They’ve learned the language of strategy more than the dynamics of strategy. This is what domain expertise really is. Not a larger knowledge base. Not faster reasoning. It’s a high-resolution simulation of an ecosystem of agents who are all simultaneously modeling each other. And that simulation lives in heads, not in documents. The text is just the move that got documented. The theory that generated it is called skill.” – Ankit Maloo (20260208)
Related:
- 4-1d0 Look at the whole of conversations, including how things are being said as well as what’s not being said (e.g., taboos)
- 7-1b2b1 The best is seeing the front by yourself, because inexplicit and unconscious ideas exist between heads not within them
- Viz., some ideas exist because of others’ existence, which makes them reactive by nature, hence these wouldn’t be written down anywhere
- 10-1b4 Children concentrically embody their ever-widening knowledge structures by testing the degree of its correspondence in comparison with other members of the society
- 10-2g1f3 We can only figure out what they know by what they do (‘performance’), because we can never directly study what people know (‘competence’). To assert that we can is a common error in thinking.