Whether or not this study is true or even plausible, everyone is going to point to it and keep citing it and the studies and opeds that cite it will be cited by other studies and opeds and so on and so forth. It's a dishonest enterprise. But really, we could just say, "First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage—and to get there you have to get off your damn phone." Why don't we just say that? It would be far more intellectually honest and compelling, and insofar as we would disagree amongst ourselves, we could then argue on what we really hold dear morally rather than pretending to argue over numbers.

Social science is good for many things, but we should stop citing it for these sorts of questions, even when it confirms our biases.

General purpose technologies require whole new business models in order to exploit their full potential.

it’s a nontrivial task to think of business models that could be fully automated

even with an AI that can’t yet do everything

.

That’s going to be hard! If I had any good ideas for how to do that, I’d go become a billionaire myself.

Bringing warriors from the provinces to the Imperial Capitol to fight in front of the emperor is very Roman

You make the most money when you are right and contrarian

The technology industry continues to see accelerating change because it continues to reinvent itself and broaden its reach. The retail sector could have invented e-commerce, but it didn't, and Amazon wanted to be part of the technology industry rather than a retail business. The automotive industry could have built electric cars, but it took an outsider to the industry to create Tesla. Yet, some have fought against technology ever since the printing press to no avail. Some aspects of technology require review, monitoring, and regulatory oversight, but those who fight against technology continue to find themselves on the wrong side of history.

And just as FAANG is now outdated, Magnificent 7 may soon be outdated too. Should we include SpaceX, TSMC, and Broadcom, which are currently worth more than Tesla and Meta? Or is MANGOS (Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, SpaceX) the new group to watch? We will see. The only constant in life is change, and that’s part of what makes investing hard.
-Alfred Lin (sequoia)

Is there a market for the problem you’re solving, and how well do you understand it?

Why is this the right time for this solution to solve this problem?

The destroyer of our species won’t necessarily come in a rain of fire, an apocalyptic plague, or an armada of drones descending on us from the sky. It may be something we excitedly pay $1000 for every three or four years. All that’s required for our species to go from the masters of the Earth to a memory in the circuits of Claude is that we decide to forsake each other’s company to stare eternally into a black mirror.

The next heuristic is to make your request easy to accept. Making something easy to accept largely is about reducing the cost of acceptance. One clear kind of cost is the magnitude. Do ask someone for twenty minutes of their time, but don’t ask them to read your five-hundred-page manuscript in a week. Another is to make it specific: asking for a resource to start with is better than “can I pick your brain?”. When you’ve made your request, make it low friction for them. If you’re asking for an introduction, write a blurb about yourself which they can forward. If you have a question, ask it in writing rather than over a call. And last on cost, make your ask bounded. Don’t ask for recurring obligations like being your mentor for your whole life, but do keep it limited to asking them to read a blog post. If that instance goes well, they’ll gladly read more.
My last heuristic is stranger: make it easy to say no. You might think that the worst outcome is a no, but the worst outcome is a pressured, begrudging yes. Your coercion will have poisoned your relationship with this person while you feel the false glow of a hard-won victory. A person who helps you with gritted teeth is one who will never help you again. And even then, the help will be a half-hearted effort to get rid of the obligation you manufactured. By contrast, help freely given is effortless, the way you’d hold the door open for someone. Help willingly given keeps your conscience clear, free from the burden of having pressured someone. And help, when given from the heart, is the foundation of a relationship where both of you contribute to what you’re building.

Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think that you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.