176 - Empty Calories

"In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." -Benjamin Brewster

In theory, investors, governments, and corporations seek innovation. In practice, they do nothing of the sort. Rather, like a server room piled high with the engineering debt of a decade of mismanaged wires, such entities flow according to the numerous and growing number of catch-22s that silently control and shift their perceptions through all accessible mechanisms of cognitive biases.

Take the perspective of the so-called "entrepreneur" for example. You have a variety of options, all of which are deeply flawed for any technology that isn't so trivial that it may be entirely bootstrapped to a commercially deployable state. Even the term "entrepreneur" is just a way of lionizing the people who pass through a ridiculous amount of wholly unnecessary suffering, imposed by passing through all of those deeply flawed options until they reach some success.

Take a few examples:

  • LinkedIn: Severely penalizes anyone posting more than once every 48 hours, making any significant amount of commenting, newsfeed scrolling, or more frequent posting a waste of time.

  • "X"(Twitter): Extremely severe bias in the algorithms, to the point where 50+ posts, comments, and other interactions are unlikely to be met with any non-automated response of any kind. The platform is very obviously bot-dominated.

*Note: One investor recommended using a bot to reach out to people on Twitter, but that is another catch-22, as anyone stupid enough to reply to such a cold outreach bot would also be too stupid to invest in any viable technology.

  • Investor Events: Primarily serve either as a mechanism for bleeding what personal funds founders have or as a way of pitching sketchy "services" and malicious models of funding.

  • Crowdfunding: Another popularity game where those who weaponize cognitive biases the most effectively win out. Popular with trolls.

  • Other Cold Outreach: Ignored 97-99% of the time, no matter what tactics are used. The volume of trash startup pitches is too high, there are too many unchecked bad actors, and the levels of investor competence are FAR too low.

  • The "Good Ole Boys" Network: Personal connections among wealthy individuals who've developed personal respect for and trust in one another over many years is a different kind of catch-22. If you're on the inside of that network you can get $100m-$1bn+ AI investments without having a shred of innovation or demonstrated cutting-edge technology. If you're on the outside, it doesn't matter if you beat the people on the inside by 1,000x across all metrics.

In theory, each of these is very different. In practice, they are as described above. The safe bet might be to expect the "Invisible Hand of the Market" to "Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee" in the near future.