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xiaolai committed Mar 6, 2015
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Expand Up @@ -149,8 +149,12 @@ What I would suggest that we will leave you with is there are these different ra

The software distortion that often happens is because people are making such vast fortunes in software, we infer that this is the most valuable thing in the world being done full stop. And so people at Twitter make billions of dollars, it must be that Twitter is worth far more than anything Einstein did. What that realization tends to obscure, is again that "X" and "Y" are independent variables and that there are these businesses where you capture a lot of X and others where you don't. So I do think the history of innovation has been this history where the microeconomics, the structure of these industries has mattered a tremendous amount and there is sort of this story where some people made vast fortunes because they worked in industries with the right structure and other people made nothing at all because they were in these very competitive things.



We shouldn't just rationalize that way. I think it's worth understanding this better. Then finally, let me come back to this sort of overarching theme for this talk, this competition is for losers idea, which is always a provocative way to title things because we always think of the losers as the people who are not good at competing. We think of losers as the people who are slow on the track team in high school or do a little less well on standardized tests, and don't get into the right schools. So we always think of losers as people who can't compete and I want us to really rethink and re-value this and consider whether it's possible the competition itself is off.

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It's not just the case we don't understand this monopoly-competition dichotomy intellectually. So we’ve been talking about why you wouldn’t understand it intellectually, because people lie about it, it’s distorted, the history of innovation rationalizes it in all these very strange ways. I think it's more than just an intellectual blind spot, but also a psychological blind spot, where we find ourselves very attracted to competition and in one form or another we find it reassuring if other people do things. The word ape, already in the time of Shakespeare, meant both primate and imitate and that is something about human nature, it's deeply imitative, ape like, sheep like and this is very problematic thing that we need to always think through and try to overcome.

There is always this question about competition as a form of validation, where we go for things that lots of other people are going for. It's not that there is wisdom of crowds, it's not that lots of people trying to do something is the best proof of that being valuable. I think it's when lots of people are trying to do something, that is often proof of insanity. There are twenty thousand people a year who move to Los Angeles to become movie stars, about twenty of them make it. I think the Olympics are a little bit better because you have, you can sort of figure out pretty quickly whether you’re good or not, so there's little less of a deadweight loss to society. You know the sort of educational experience that at a place, the pre-Stanford educational experience, there is always sort of a non-competitive characterization. I think most of the people in this room had machine guns and they were competing with people with bows and arrows, so it wasn’t exactly a parallel competition when you were in junior high school, in high school. There is always the question: does the tournament make sense as you keep going?
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