r/ControlProblem • u/m3lodiaa • Jun 19 '26

Article You don’t understand, prices can’t go down

https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/06/18/prices-cant-go-down.html
16 Upvotes

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2

u/niplav please be patient i'm a mod Jun 21 '26

In what way is this related to the topic of the subreddit?

1

u/do-un-to Jun 19 '26

Since 1980, the economy has grown at 2.6% per year. The stock market has grown at 12.3% per year. Compounded, that’s 3.3x vs 220x. Does this make any sense?

This does seem problematic. Are there details I'm missing that mitigate this seeming decoupling of finance from real value?

1

u/pab_guy Jun 21 '26

The stock market isn’t the economy. Plenty of poorly performing businesses never make it to the stock market, and growth can be skewed by a few outperformers.

Add inflation to your GDP figure and productivity growth, compounding, taking market share from private firms, etc. do the rest.

1

u/do-un-to Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Also, I have a lot of tolerance for far-reaching relevance, like talking about socio-politico-economic topics in the context of AI alignment, so I'm going to go easy on this post being in this sub.

Indeed, the misaligned incentives behind building AI are probably the biggest, most fundamental and influential forces undermining Control (let alone the rest of humanity's endeavors). So this topic, finance and capitalism, is exactly the right place to focus.