It's Already Priced Into The Market!
When Many People Know a Thing, Other Things are Inevitable.
I’m on holiday, but I’ve been reflecting on my walks and this came to mind, so I wanted to put it out there.
I watched the excellent show Pluribus on Apple TV over the last week (I still think Apple may have gotten $0 from me for all their great content somehow), and there are so so so many messages sent and interesting questions posed by the show that feel relevant to life in society circa 2025 — even without a global hivemind.
Without going into great detail, in the show, all of humanity is stricken with a virus that causes them to essentially combine their brains, having the ability to move and talk individually, but with shared knowledge, sensations, and awareness.
But, one thing I realized I felt a particular connection to was this idea of awareness.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to people about “AI” over the year, as perhaps evidenced by my “Life With AI” post a few months back —
— and one thing I’ve really tried to impress upon people is that this is a huge bubble (Not financial advice obviously).
But, what I realize after talking a bit is that a lot (not all) of what makes me feel that way is things like the well-publicized circular deals the companies in the space are doing — and that stuff is already priced in. The state of the market with all of its froth is aware that there are sort of weird circular deals going on, and the prices are what they are regardless.
In many ways, this reminds me of how people work in Pluribus: when something happens to expand knowledge, the whole population suddenly receives it at once (similar to markets, this probably actually takes some time, but an infinitesimally small amount). Actions are undertaken the second there is an imperative to do so.
I bring all of this up because when I was younger, I often saw problems, and opportunities and hoped someone was doing something, and I think the reality is that the earth is so large that indeed this is essentially always the case. The problem is actually often less that there is an imperative to do any given thing, but organizing people with the same interests to work in a mutually useful way so that humanity is not flailing.
This is good and bad. On the good side, most problems are on the spectrum of moving towards a solution; but on the bad side, without attention they are unlikely to move very fast. I think when most people become aware of a problem, they at least start conceiving mitigating actions, but there is a strong decay in solution creation, particularly for problems which are niche or which don’t feel super personally impactful.
Suffice to say, most interesting things in the world are spurring some action. A new problem or opportunity is being addressed by someone — that someone might just have to be you.