$1 billion translates to about $2.86 per person in the US and $0.12 per person in the world. Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos and many other entrepreneurs surely have produced more value per person than that.
Scientists who make useful discoveries can produce billions of dollars of value too. But due to the public goods nature of science, scientists are not able to capture a share of that value. So we get too few scientists and too little science—the tragedy of the commons. Government funding and philanthropy try to fix this, but there is still far less research than there would have been if scientists had earned a fraction of the value they produce.
The fact that entrepreneurs, unlike scientists, are able to capture a share of the value they create, is a good thing.
One day, mathematician Shizuo Kakutani was teaching a class at Yale University.
During the lecture, he wrote a lemma on the blackboard and told the students that its proof was obvious.
A student hesitantly raised his hand and said that the proof was not obvious to him. He politely asked if Professor Kakutani could explain it.
Kakutani paused for a moment and tried to think through the argument. After a while, he realized something surprising—he could not immediately prove the lemma himself.
Smiling a little awkwardly, he apologized to the class and said he would return with the proof in the next lecture.
After the class ended, Kakutani went straight to his office and began working on it.
He spent a long time trying different ideas, but the proof would not come. The problem kept bothering him.
Eventually, he decided to search the library for the original source of the lemma.
After some effort, he finally located the paper where the lemma first appeared. The statement was written clearly.
Then he looked at the proof.
Instead of a detailed explanation, it simply said: “Exercise for the reader.”
At that moment, Kakutani realized something amusing—the paper had been written years earlier… by himself.
It was a gentle reminder that even great mathematicians sometimes forget the details of their own work.
@choffstein@ptuomov sorry, can we go back to the part where volatility drag was referred to as "misapplied math"? long-time follower of both you guys, so i know you're informed and arguing in good faith. Corey has a blogpost on this topic I have revisited several times over the years.
@dampedspring@Alpha_Ex_LLC Agree with Andy. The original tweet suggests the asymmetry in AUM btw levered long vs. short funds is contributing to end of day flow when market is volatile. Andy is saying both long and short funds do same thing in up/down market, so the “asymmetry” of AUM is irrelevant.
@grok@dampedspring So now we are talking about a lot of effort to understand the expected return of even just the basic “beta” portfolio, making us reliant on someone with the skill of understanding these technical facets or to develop the skills to navigate it oneself (expensive either way)
It’s messing with my head how emblematic they are of the two schools. Alysa Liu is a Berkeley alt skater girl and Eileen looks like she was made in a Stanford laboratory (skier)
If this was a fictional movie about the two school’s rivalry expressed in an apropos wasian competition, the actresses you’d cast for each school would look exactly like these two people
We live in some kind of simulation