Short Term v Long Term Thinking – IGY Foundation
The legendary Nick Sleep wrote an interesting piece on how to think about thinking about business. His main argument was that what defines an organization that is well run is its position towards and relationship with it’s customers.
When a business tries to “steal” from its customers, be it by expanding margins, reducing quality, or scaling back innovation to improve current year fiscal performance, the relationship is damaged. A business with a long term perspective realizes that growth is not a zero-sum game, the customer is their friend, not competitor.
Author: Evan Fife
-
Good/Bad in business is really Long/Short Term Thinking
-
So You Think You’ve Awoken ChatGPT
Read the full article I read on LessWrong.com
I was reading this article about AI and consciousness, and as I was reading it there were a couple of quotes that made me think about the future of AI, specifically Artificial Generative Intelligence (AGI) and the possibility of AI’s having consciousness.
Obviously, I disagree with the premise because I think there is something unique about humanity, we were created by God and have value beyond what we’re able to do. One of my old high school friends and I had a conversation the other day about AI, and he said, “If there was an AI (in a robot body that looked like mine) that had all my memories, that communicated like me, and did everything that I do, would that not be me?” I think my response would be that while an AI can infer everything, and maybe it could eventually reason through everything (i.e. One day an AI could have complete rationality), it could never be human because I’m not sure that an AI could believe, or understand the art of selectively choosing between rationality and irrationality (or better faith).
In essence, I think the debate about whether AGI could exist boils down to the debate on whether or not Faith and Reason can coexist, and if the combination of the two is really the highest form of humanity.Interesting Quotes
In my experience, you have to repeatedly remind yourself that AI value judgments are pretty much fake, and that anything more coherent than a 3/10 will be flagged as “good” by an LLM evaluator. Unfortunately, that’s just how it is, and prompting is unlikely to save you; you can flip an AI to be harshly critical with such keywords as “brutally honest”, but a critic that roasts everything isn’t really any better than a critic that praises everything. What you actually need in a critic or collaborator is sensitivity to the underlying quality of the ideas; AI is ill suited to provide this.
Also, LLMs are specifically good at common knowledge and the absolute basics of almost every field, but not very good at finicky details near the frontier of knowledge. So if LLMs are helping you with ideas, they’ll stop being reliable exactly at the point where you try to do anything original.
-
Daily Reading
Links
A Healthy Response to Failure on the World Stage – The Athletic
Tariff Limbo – WSJ
Competing on Price and Quality, the Ethos of Costco – WSJ
A Deep Critique of AI 2027’s Bad Timeline Models – LessWrong
(and the original article)Thoughts
- Lots of food deals WK Kellog’s acquisition by Fererro and Kraft Heinz’s Breakup being the two that got most of my attention.
- The trade war is keeping the market volatile, businesses who are able to respond and create deals seeing huge gains, others floundering as they wait for clarity in policy
- Trump continues to criticize rate holding behavior by the fed, but the CEO’s of some major banks are still
-
TVPI and Secondary Market Asymmetries
$latex TVPI=\frac{(\text{Distributions}+\text{Residual Value})}{\text{Paid In Capital}} $
Often, returns for an LP investor are measured using the above formula, Total Value to Paid In Capital, its an expression of the ratio of the Net Asset Value of a fund to the cost of the LPs investment. Essentially, it expresses how much each invested LP dollar is returning. Distributions are the liquid assets returned to LPs, Residual Value is the value remaining in illiquid assets that the fund holds, and Paid In Capital is the money invested by the LP
Where this formula gets interesting is at the end of the fund life. Typically TVPI tends to decline as funds reach year 8 or 9, so, in order to preserve their capital, it’s in the best interests of a LP to sell their investment. Let’s say hypothetically the LP invested $100 in a fund, has received $80, and the GP claims that there is $50 in residual value.
[latex]\begin{aligned}
\text{Distributions} = \$80 \
\text{Residual Value} =\$50 \
\text{Paid In Capital} = \text{\$100} \
\end{aligned}[/latex]Right now the TVPI of this investment would be 1.3x, or in other words, for every $1 invested, $1.30 in total value exists.
[latex]\text{TVPI} = \frac{80+50}{100} = 1.3[/latex]
And because our hypothetical fund is in its 8th year, this LP realizes that over time this TVPI metric will decline, they decide that it’s in their best interest to sell their stake in the fund. A secondaries investor offers to buy their stake at 30% discount to the GP’s estimated residual NAV, or in other words, they offer $35 for the LPs stake.
[latex]\text{LP Proceeds} = \$80\ + \$35\ =\ \$115[/latex]
In exchange for liquidity and short term returns, the LP takes a haircut on their already pretty low returns. While the secondaries investor already enters with a relatively high hypothetical TVPI of 1.6x.
[latex]\text{Secondary TVPI} = \frac{50}{30}=1.66
Even if the fund continues to “underperform” and the assets sell for 80% of the residual NAV predicted by the GP in 3 years, the Secondary investor will still exit with a 1.33x ROIC and a IRR of around 15%. The best part is that the LP doesn’t even underperform that much by exiting early. Selling at year 8 yields an IRR of 2.45%, while waiting to receive the distributions yielded to the secondary buyer through the sale, yields an IRR that is only marginally higher at 2.99%. Both IRRs are abysmal for Private Equity, so they are much better off getting liquidity and redeploying the capital.
-
How to Use Anki
Anki is a super powerful tool, and while pretty in depth, this article gives an interesting take on how to effectively use this app:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7Q7DPSk4iGFJd8DRk/an-opinionated-guide-to-using-anki-correctly
-
The Boys in the Boat
Daniel James Brown
This is a book about character, connection, and how they interact to create greatness. It tells the story of the 1936 American olympic 8 man crew, and how they grew into one of the greatest crews that has ever rowed. As the book follows the life of the number 2 oar, Joe Rantz, we gain a window into the character of the boys that rowed as they became men.
I wasn’t expecting this book to be so philosophical, but I appreciated the quotes about character given or inspired by George Pocock. Brown does a fantastic job of illustrating role of physical and mental strength needed to achieve greatness in athletics. From the beginning, the Pocock liked the boys in the boat:
And it wasn’t just their physical prowess. He liked the character of these particular freshmen. The boys who had made it this far were rugged and optimistic in a way that seemed emblematic of their western roots. They were the genuine article, mostly the products of lumber towns, dairy farms, mining camps, fishing boats, and shipyards. They looked, they walked, and they talked as if they had spent most of their lives out-of-doors. Despite the hard times and their pinched circumstances, they smiled easily and openly. They extended calloused hands eagerly to strangers. They looked you in the eye, not as a challenge, but as an invitation. They joshed you at the drop of a hat. They looked at impediments and saw opportunities. All that, Bolles knew, aded up to a to of potential in a crew, particularly if that crewe got a chance to row in the East. (page 94)
Their rough lives gave them the strength, the predisposition, to succeed physically, but it was their character, and the bonds that forged as a result of their goodness, that gave them the opportunity to be great. I don’t know if they recognized the significance of their efforts initially, but it was clear that they knew the gravity of what they were attempting to undertake. They started racing for their school, progressed to racing for the west, and ended racing for their nation, and everything that she stands for. And they almost shrank in front of this challenge:
All along Joe Rantz had figured that he was the weak link in the crew. He’d been added to the boat last, he’d often struggled to master the technical side of the sport, and he still tended tto row erratically. But what Joe didn’t yet know–what he wouldn’t in fact, fully realize until much later, when he and the other boys were becoming old men–was that every boy in the boat felt exactlly the same that summer. Every one of them believed he was simply lucky to be rowing in teh boat, that he didn’t really measure up to the obvious greatness of the other boys, and tht at he might fail the others at any moment. Every one of them was fiercely determined not to let that happen
In the end, it was this desire, the desire to be one with their crew mates, that brought them to victory. Buy surrendering themselves to the whole, rowing with abandon, and giving everything they had, they overcame seemingly insurmountable odds. While we probably won’t ever row in an olympic level crew, we can still learn from the examples of their characters and heed the call to greatness.
-
Just Mercy
Brian Stevenson
Just mercy is a fantastic book about the power of mercy and hope in the face of immense suffering and injustice. Brian Stevenson recounts his experience as a young Harvard law graduate trying to make an impact in the lives of people condemned to die by society for the crimes they did and didn’t commit.
I was moved by his commitment to a mission that most wouldn’t consider worthwhile to undertake. Why defend those who violated the social contract enough to have their right to life taken from them? Because, as Stevenson concludes, “Mercy is most empowering, liberating, and transformative when it is directed at the undeserving. The people who haven’t earned it, who haven’t even sought it, are the most meaningful recipients of our compassion.” And beyond saying this aphorism, Stevenson fills this books with humanizing stories of the paths that lead his recipients of his mercy to death row.
At one point, he recounts:
I frequently had difficult conversations with clients who were struggling and despairing over their situations – over the things they’d done, or had been done to them, that had led them to painful moments. Whenever things got really bad, and they were questioning the value of their lves, I would remind them that each of us is more than the worst things we’ve ever done. I told them that if someone tells a lie, that person is not just a liar. If you take something that doesn’t belong to you, you are not just a thief. Even if you kill someone, you’re not just a killer. I told myself that evening what I had been telling my clients for years. I am more than broken. In fact, there is a strength, a power even, in understanding brokenness, because embracing our brokenness creates a need and desire for mercy, and perhaps a corresponding need to show mercy. When you experience mercy, you learn things that are hard to learn otherwise. You see things you can’t otherwise see; you hear things you can’t otherwise hear. You begin to recognize the humanity that resides in each of us.
It’s an interesting concept. We are more than our actions, we have value beyond what we can do or have done. Accepting that is difficult because it’s easy to recognize the humanity in someone who has a character that we can applaud, but it’s not so easy to do that when the person behind the eyes we’re looking into seems to be less than human. It’s the paradox present in the whole book: those who really need and can benefit the most from mercy are those who seem to deserve it the least.
Yet Stevenson forces us to confront our own biases and recognize the humanity of the marginalized. Recounting tragedy after tragedy, he paints a portrait of a system that unfairly put(s) people on death row, and the lives that his “clients” lead to get where they were. Each story felt like it’s own tragedy, but sown together by the mission of a man seeking to save those people, they shed light on a system that was totally broken. The only way to fix it, is to recognize that we are all broken, and move on.
-
When Breath Becomes Air
Paul Kalanithi
Words have a longevity I do not.
It has been a long time since I’ve read an entire book in one day, but when you read a book this good it’s not like you have a choice.
This book helped me to understand the weight placed on the shoulders of medical professionals. While simple to understand, implementing the Hippocratic dictum to “do no harm” is incredibly difficult. Dr. Kalanithi’s broad understanding of living meant that “do no harm” extended to all spheres of a patient’s life:
Before operating on a patient’s brain, I realized, I must first understand his mind: his identity, his values, what makes his life worth living, and what devastation makes it reasonable to let that life end. The cost of my dedication to succeed was high, adn the ineluctable failures brought me nearly unbearable guilt. Those burdens are what make medicine holy and wholly impossible: in taking up another’s cross, one must sometimes get crushed by the weight.
Thus, sometimes saving the life of the patient that he served meant recognizing that the life that they once had was already dead. His transition from the idealism of a young medical student to the maturity of a head resident was amazing. He recognized the need to sacrifice, to truly live, in order to have an impact. He recognized that a life worth examining meant dedicating it to communities and people that were around him.
There is no way I could sum up this book in a single review. But I think that the best attempt was done by Dr. Kalanithi’s widow:
Paul’s decision to look death in the eye was a testament not just to who he was in the final hours of his life but who he had always been. For much of his life, Paul wondered about death – and whether he could face it with integrity. In the end, the answer was yes.
I think we can just hope to live like him.