Patrick McKenzie on Navigating Complex Systems (Ep. 201)

Special thanks to listener Mark Dancer for sponsoring this transcript.

特别感谢听众 Mark Dancer 赞助这份文字记录。

Check out his Substack: Mark Dancer on Flourishing Business.

查看他的子堆栈：Mark Dancer 的《蓬勃发展的业务》。

An alternative description of Patrick that I might give you is, he’s a guy who moved to Japan for no legible reason at all and became famous by writing on the internet, and now everyone looks to him as a person who knows a lot about everything.

An alternative description of Patrick that I might give you is, he’s a guy who moved to Japan for no legible reason at all and became famous by writing on the internet, and now everyone looks to him as a person who knows a lot about everything.

His Substack is called Bits about Money, and on Twitter you can find him @patio11.

他的 Substack 被称为 Bits about Money，在 Twitter 上你可以找到他@patio11。

Many people, in fact, call him Patio11.

事实上，很多人都称他为 Patio11。

Patrick, welcome.

帕特里克，欢迎。

On money security and banking

关于货币安全和银行业务

The original reason for signing the back of the credit card was, rather than authentication or authorization — meaning that the store clerk would thoroughly apply their forensic judgment in determining that the person signing the receipts and the person signing the credit card was the same person — it was about solemnization, that you are making a solemn, legally binding promise to the bank when you receive your card that you are good for charges made using that payment instrument.

在信用卡背面签名的最初原因不是身份验证或授权——意味着店员会彻底运用他们的法证判断来确定签署收据的人和签署信用卡的人是同一个人——而是为了庄严，即当您收到卡时，您向银行做出了庄严的、具有法律约束力的承诺，即您可以使用该支付工具支付费用。

That was the reason for having the signature field.

这就是有签名字段的原因。

That is also the reason for having the signature field on credit card receipts, that you are promising to the merchant that you’ll pay them under the agreement that you have with your bank.

这也是信用卡收据上有签名字段的原因，您向商家承诺您将根据与银行签订的协议向他们付款。

Now that everyone understands that when you hand over your credit card, that is a binding promise, we don’t really have that much social need for that solemnization anymore.

现在每个人都明白，当你交出信用卡时，这是一个具有约束力的承诺，我们对这种庄严仪式已经不再有那么大的社会需求了。

It is this vestigial feature that is honored in the breach in a lot of places.

正是这种残留的特征在很多地方的突破口中得到了体现。

The vast majority of clerks won’t even check signatures these days, which people are sometimes annoyed by.

如今，绝大多数办事员甚至不会检查签名，人们有时会对此感到恼火。

They put on the back of the card, “Ask to see my ID.” That has no legal effect.

他们在卡的背面写着“要求查看我的身份证”。那没有法律效力。

The clerk is not a forensic investigator.

该职员不是法医调查员。

The clerk also probably has far less knowledge of the credit card infrastructure than you do if you are writing, “Ask to see my ID.” Although, if you’re writing, “Ask to see my ID,” you have a bounded amount of knowledge about credit card infrastructure.

如果您写的是“要求查看我的身份证件”，那么店员对信用卡基础设施的了解可能也比您少得多。不过，如果您写的是“要求查看我的身份证件”，那么您对信用卡基础设施的了解有限。

One of these little idiosyncrasies about the world that will probably be somewhat anachronistic in a couple of years.

世界上的这些小特质之一可能在几年后就会显得有些不合时宜。

For example, if I had, let’s say, a bank account, and I have a secret controlling that bank account, and that secret would allow me to take all of the money out of that bank account, you might think, “How should I protect the secret?” The answer you would come up with in 2023 is not “I want to print it in machine-readable type on every check that I give to everyone.”

For example, if I had, let’s say, a bank account, and I have a secret controlling that bank account, and that secret would allow me to take all of the money out of that bank account, you might think, “How should I protect the secret?”到 2023 年，你会想到的答案不是“我想在我给每个人的每张支票上以机器可读的方式打印它”。

In fact, that is what we did back in the day.

事实上，这就是我们当时所做的。

Many, many tens of billions of dollars of check fraud happened over the years because of that issue, and we just took the punches and developed a vast shadow infrastructure to defang this fundamental, irreducible security hole in the heart of the checking system.

Many, many tens of billions of dollars of check fraud happened over the years because of that issue, and we just took the punches and developed a vast shadow infrastructure to defang this fundamental, irreducible security hole in the heart of the checking system.

That handwritten physical signature has very terrible security properties.

这种手写的物理签名具有非常糟糕的安全特性。

Anyone who has seen it can reproduce it.

看过的人都可以重现。

They’re very easily reproducible by computers; they’re less easily reproducible by humans.

它们很容易被计算机复制；它们不太容易被人类复制。

Checking them for correctness or consistency is terrible.

检查它们的正确性或一致性是很糟糕的。

The forensic analysts who go to court and try to compare signatures against each other — if I were to say they were practicing witchcraft, I think that would be an uncouth thing to say.

The forensic analysts who go to court and try to compare signatures against each other — if I were to say they were practicing witchcraft, I think that would be an uncouth thing to say.

I don’t think it is necessarily untrue.

我认为这不一定是不真实的。

So, not a technology we would use in 2023 and going forward to secure anything that we actually care about.

因此，这不是我们在 2023 年以及未来会使用的技术来保护我们真正关心的任何东西。

But it is ultimately irrelevant because in the case you’re taken advantage of by either a bank teller or a waitress, we have an extremely effective public-private regulatory state machine which will make you whole for that.

But it is ultimately irrelevant because in the case you’re taken advantage of by either a bank teller or a waitress, we have an extremely effective public-private regulatory state machine which will make you whole for that.

It will be annoying, but you won’t actually lose money.

这会很烦人，但你实际上不会赔钱。

So, I go through my life spending very few cycles worried about either individuals in the financial industry or individuals in the restaurant industry taking advantage of my payment methods.

So, I go through my life spending very few cycles worried about either individuals in the financial industry or individuals in the restaurant industry taking advantage of my payment methods.

The credit card ecosystem, while it might present to you as a single pane of glass that you interact with just like you interact with a single pane of glass on your iPhone, is actually a stitched-together patchwork collections of systems that have existed for the last several decades.

The credit card ecosystem, while it might present to you as a single pane of glass that you interact with just like you interact with a single pane of glass on your iPhone, is actually a stitched-together patchwork collections of systems that have existed for the last several decades.

Somewhere in that stitched-together patchwork, someone had a hiccup.

在这片拼凑起来的地方，有人打了个嗝。

Then your credit card gets what we call a spurious decline.

然后您的信用卡就会出现我们所说的虚假拒绝。

The rate of spurious declines is something of a trade secret, but it is much higher than any rational human being would expect is a tolerable rate of spurious false activity within a system.

虚假下降率是一个商业秘密，但它比任何理性人类预期的系统内虚假活动的可容忍率要高得多。

That that has persisted for so many decades is an interesting collective-action problem because it’s a stitched-together patchwork of systems.

这种现象已经持续了几十年，这是一个有趣的集体行动问题，因为它是一个拼凑而成的系统。

There’s no unitary authority saying, “You must commit to decreasing your rate of false declines by 50 basis points within the next two quarters, or there will be consequences.”

There’s no unitary authority saying, “You must commit to decreasing your rate of false declines by 50 basis points within the next two quarters, or there will be consequences.”

There is limited visibility into what is actually causing the problem.

对于真正导致问题的原因的了解有限。

Credit cards are an enormously lucrative business, and for the longest time, all players were like, “Yes gremlins.

信用卡是一项利润丰厚的业务，在很长一段时间里，所有玩家都会说：“是的，小妖精。

I don’t know what to tell you.” I know a little bit more to tell you than gremlins, but unfortunately, some of it is trade secrets.

我不知道该告诉你什么。”我知道的东西比小精灵多一点，但不幸的是，其中一些是商业秘密。

A thing that is not exactly a trade secret is that it is not the fact that problems are not solvable in the world.

不完全是商业秘密的一点是，世界上的问题并不是无法解决的。

You actually can move the false decline rate by having the right people in the right places actually work on the false decline rate.

实际上，您可以通过让合适的人在正确的位置实际处理错误拒绝率来改变错误拒绝率。

Stripe has a number of things.

Stripe 有很多东西。

You can read it from various PR announcements.

你可以从各种PR公告中读到它。

The decade problems frequently have the rough form where, if one executive anywhere cared about this and did the bare minimum of effort, you would have somewhat surprising results on them relatively quickly.

十年问题通常具有粗略的形式，如果任何地方的一位高管关心这个问题并付出最少的努力，你就会相对较快地得到一些令人惊讶的结果。

I had this long-running assumption that we’re doing about as good as we can with rockets.

我长期以来一直假设我们在火箭方面已经尽力了。

The laws of physics are a thing.

物理定律是一个东西。

We’ve dumped billions of dollars into this problem, and the smartest literal rocket scientists in the world at it.

我们已经在这个问题上投入了数十亿美元，世界上最聪明的火箭科学家也致力于解决这个问题。

Then Elon Musk came around and said, “Actually, I think we can cheat the costs of getting things up to orbit by, oh, three orders of magnitude.”

然后埃隆·马斯克回过头来说：“实际上，我认为我们可以将把物体送入轨道的成本降低三个数量级。”

If you had told me that in 1990 — I would’ve been very young to opine about it in 1990 — maybe 2005.

如果你在 1990 年告诉我，我会在 1990 年发表意见，因为我还太年轻，也许是 2005 年。

If you had said that was possible in 2005, I’d bet against.

如果你在 2005 年就说这是可能的，我打赌不会。

That seems, a priori, extremely unlikely to happen.

从先验来看，这似乎极不可能发生。

Now we have an existence proof of it happening, and I am reevaluating what I think about the world and how tractable various problems are in it.

现在我们有证据证明它正在发生，我正在重新评估我对这个世界的看法以及其中的各种问题是如何处理的。

If you’re asking to rationalize this on, why does a smart team like I assume exists at Toast make a signature input thing anyway?

如果你要求合理化这一点，为什么像我假设的 Toast 中存在的聪明团队无论如何都会做出签名输入的事情？

There are anchors in our social practice about doing things, and sometimes things persist in those anchors for far longer than they’re actually required or produce any sort of value, would be my dominant hypothesis.

我们的社会实践中存在关于做事的锚点，有时事情在这些锚点上持续的时间远远超过它们实际需要或产生任何价值的时间，这将是我的主导假设。

But I also think it is probably the case that Toast could build a flag to turn that off tomorrow, and many people would not choose to turn it off for basically rational reasons.

But I also think it is probably the case that Toast could build a flag to turn that off tomorrow, and many people would not choose to turn it off for basically rational reasons.

On debt collection, maple syrup heists, and other evils

关于追债、枫糖浆抢劫和其他邪恶行为

A typical debt collector is a high school graduate.

典型的收债人是高中毕业生。

They make plus or minus $15 an hour.

他们每小时赚正负 15 美元。

Perhaps that has shifted a little bit as inflation has hit hard the last couple years, but broadly speaking, it’s that.

也许随着过去几年通货膨胀的严重打击，这种情况发生了一些变化，但总的来说，就是这样。

You have a pay scale that’s not too different from McDonald’s for a much, much worse working environment, et cetera, et cetera.

对于更糟糕的工作环境等等，你的薪资水平与麦当劳没有太大不同。

One reason — and I think this is over-advanced in the world but is partially explanatory in this case — is that the existence of — I’m about to use the word “evil,” and I don’t want to use the word “evil” to —

一个原因 — 我认为这在世界上已经过于先进，但在这种情况下可以部分解释 — 是， — 的存在 — 我将要使用“邪恶”这个词，而我不想使用“邪恶”这个词来 —

Another thing for debt collection is that in the places where debt collectors actually live, the economy as a whole can be near full employment, but in rural New York, that might not be great.

Another thing for debt collection is that in the places where debt collectors actually live, the economy as a whole can be near full employment, but in rural New York, that might not be great.

It might not be quite so full employment.

就业可能不会那么充分。

For office jobs that are available, a debt collection call center or a more salubrious call center might be the only office job available.

对于可用的办公室工作，追债呼叫中心或更有益的呼叫中心可能是唯一可用的办公室工作。

So, relative to the choices that are actually presented to you, that might be the most rational thing, even if you hate the environment you’ve entered.

因此，相对于实际呈现给你的选择，这可能是最理性的事情，即使你讨厌你所进入的环境。

And indeed, the turnover rate for debt collectors is astounding.

事实上，收债人的周转率令人震惊。

It’s on the order of — I hate making up numbers.

大约是 — 我讨厌编造数字。

This sounds like I know what I’m doing.

听起来我知道自己在做什么。

It is higher than it is for fast food restaurants, which is already close to 100 percent a year, meaning, in the expectation, they expect to turn over the typical employee in less than a year.

这个数字比快餐店的要高，快餐店的年离职率已经接近 100%，这意味着，按照预期，他们预计会在不到一年的时间内更换典型员工。

There’s probably at least an order of magnitude difference — perhaps more — in terms of productivity of the amount of dollars collected per hour by debt collectors.

就收债人每小时收取的美元数量的生产率而言，可能至少存在一个数量级的差异——或许更多。

It is possible to be a net-negative productive debt collector, and since your activity is tracked, your employer will eventually come to understand that about you.

有可能成为一名净负生产性收债人，并且由于您的活动被跟踪，您的雇主最终会了解您的这一点。

But most people who leave don’t leave because this is a job that is beyond their intellectual capability or because the script they’re given doesn’t work well, et cetera, et cetera.

但大多数离开的人不会离开，因为这是一项超出他们智力能力的工作，或者因为给他们的剧本效果不好，等等。

They leave because the job is soul-destroying.

他们离开是因为这份工作摧毁了灵魂。

But it turns out that the amount of supply-chain fraud in maple syrup is actually quite higher than zero.

但事实证明，枫糖浆供应链欺诈的数量实际上远高于零。

The chain of custody for cars of maple syrup is much less regimented than you would expect that chain of custody to be.

枫糖浆汽车的监管链比您想象的监管链要宽松得多。

There are smaller buyers of maple syrup — not on the scale of you or me, but on the scales like a boutique maple syrup refinery — who just don’t do as many checks as the large producers or suppliers, et cetera, do.

枫糖浆有一些较小的买家——规模不是你我的规模，而是精品枫糖浆精炼厂的规模——他们只是不像大型生产商或供应商等那样做那么多检查。

So, it is possible to steal millions of dollars of maple syrup and sell it on the black market, which blew my mind.

因此，有可能窃取数百万美元的枫糖浆并在黑市上出售，这让我大吃一惊。

This rhymes with how Tide, the well-known detergent in the United States, is used as a commodity on the criminal and semi-criminal/system deal, less criminal undergrounds, in that Tide can be resold.

这与美国著名的洗涤剂汰渍（Tide）如何被用作犯罪和半犯罪/系统交易（较少犯罪的地下交易）的商品相吻合，因为汰渍可以转售。

Online marketplaces are getting a lot of the attention, but the traditional way to use Tide as a currency for people who have less access to dollars was to resell the Tide to a corner bodega.

在线市场受到了很多关注，但对于那些无法获得美元的人来说，使用潮汐作为货币的传统方式是将潮汐转售给街角的杂货店。

Since the corner bodega can easily verify that the Tide hasn’t been tampered with because the Tide seal is on it, and has basically unlimited willingness to do small-dollar transactions that make money, that was a way to recycle Tide which had been stolen — or which had been acquired by means that were not stealing, but also not exactly the official way of getting Tide — and recycle it into the more or less legitimate economy, insofar as we think that the corner bodega is more or less legitimate, which I think is a complicated story.

由于街角的小酒馆可以很容易地验证潮汐没有被篡改，因为潮汐印章就在上面，并且基本上有无限的意愿进行小额交易来赚钱，所以这是一种回收潮汐的方法，这些潮汐已经被盗——或者通过非盗窃手段获得的潮汐，但也不完全是获得潮汐的官方方式——并将其回收到或多或少合法的经济中，只要我们认为街角的小酒馆或多或少是合法的，我认为这是一个复杂的故事。

Places where there is much less fraud than I expect there should be — one place where we detect much less fraud than I would expect us to detect is in insider trading and other forms of, obviously, illegal market manipulation.

欺诈行为应该比我预期少得多的地方——我们发现的欺诈行为比我预期少得多的地方是内幕交易和其他形式的明显非法市场操纵行为。

I’m undecided on whether that is truly, truly rare relative to the size of all market participation, or we are just abominably bad at detecting people that do it with a B-plus-student level of execution ability.

我不确定相对于所有市场参与的规模来说，这种情况是否真的非常罕见，或者我们只是在检测执行能力达到 B+ 学生水平的人方面极其糟糕。

When the SEC announces, “Hey, we got this person for insider trading.

当 SEC 宣布：“嘿，我们抓获了这个人进行内幕交易。

Here’s the evidence.

这是证据。

They did it on their work computer at Goldman Sachs after googling, ‘How do I get away with insider trading?’ on their work computer at Goldman Sachs.” That is barely an exaggeration, by the way.

他们在高盛的工作电脑上搜索“我如何摆脱内幕交易？”后，在高盛的工作电脑上做到了这一点。顺便说一句，这并不夸张。

Then they left a huge paper trail.

然后他们留下了巨大的纸迹。

This repeats in all the SEC’s press releases, and so I’m wondering, am I getting a biased look at the world?

这在 SEC 的所有新闻稿中都会重复出现，所以我想知道，我对世界的看法是否有偏见？

Or are we only detecting the dumbest possible criminals?

或者我们只发现最愚蠢的罪犯？

Or is it that no one does insider trading after they achieve some level of competence because there are easier ways to make money that don’t involve going to prison?

或者说，在达到一定水平的能力后，没有人会进行内幕交易，因为有更简单的赚钱方法，而且不需要坐牢？

For a while and continuing, I thought that crypto was drawing a lot of the fraud out of the more traditional sectors of the economy, because if you do it in crypto, that wasn’t fraud, or it was fraud that you would get away with and make a substantial amount of money doing.

有一段时间，我继续认为，加密货币正在从更传统的经济领域吸引大量欺诈行为，因为如果你用加密货币来做这件事，那不是欺诈，或者是你可以逃脱惩罚并赚大钱的欺诈行为。

You could do it in broad daylight and still get invited to the best parties.

你可以在光天化日之下这样做，但仍然会被邀请参加最好的聚会。

But I don’t think that is fully explanatory.

但我认为这并不能完全解释。

My model is that there should be much, much more fraud happening in the legitimate parts of the economy than there is in crypto.

我的模型是，在经济的合法部分中发生的欺诈行为应该比加密货币中发生的欺诈行为多得多。

Yet we can see the obvious frauds in crypto and the investigation of those obvious frauds.

然而，我们可以看到加密货币中明显的欺诈行为以及对这些明显欺诈行为的调查。

We don’t have nearly that level of visibility into it in the real economy, so I continue to be conflicted by this.

我们在实体经济中对它的了解程度还不够，所以我仍然对此感到矛盾。

Twitter as a payments app

Twitter 作为支付应用

The thing that users expect to get out of Twitter doesn’t involve payments, doesn’t typically involve interaction with businesses or even, generally, with individuals that they’re on a repeated interactive basis.

用户期望从 Twitter 获得的东西不涉及支付，通常不涉及与企业的互动，甚至通常不涉及与他们重复互动的个人的互动。

They get an entirely different basket of goods out of it.

他们从中得到了完全不同的一篮子商品。

Simply grafting payments onto that basket of goods will not make people adopt the payments.

简单地将支付嫁接到一篮子商品上并不会让人们采用这种支付方式。

I understand, from a product management perspective, how you could believe that that would be fantastically valuable if you got it to work, because the super apps that exist in large portions of Asia are fantastically valuable businesses.

我理解，从产品管理的角度来看，你怎么会相信，如果你让它发挥作用，这将是非常有价值的，因为存在于亚洲大部分地区的超级应用程序是非常有价值的业务。

They have figured out loops that get users to adopt it for one feature and then adopt all the other features because it’s already on your phone, and the biz dev to get it pre-installed on all the phones, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

他们已经找到了循环，让用户采用它的一项功能，然后采用所有其他功能，因为它已经在您的手机上，并且商业开发人员将其预安装在所有手机上，等等，等等。

This is much harder than net gloss I’ve just given with it.

这比我刚刚给出的净光泽要困难得多。

The fundamental reason why I am extremely bearish on it happening for Twitter — and I would put the percentage at below 1 percent, far below 1 percent — is that this is very, very hard.

我对 Twitter 发生这种情况极其悲观——而且我认为这一比例低于 1%，远低于 1%——的根本原因是，这非常非常困难。

It feels unlikely to me that the organization that is Twitter is resourced or competent enough to make this happen.

在我看来，Twitter 这个组织不太可能有足够的资源或能力来实现这一目标。

I will say, I’m an enormous fan of Twitter.

我想说，我是 Twitter 的超级粉丝。

I think it is actually descriptively one of the most important products that exists on the internet because it has not solved, but ameliorated a lot of cross-organization coordination problems that happen in very important places.

我认为它实际上是互联网上存在的最重要的产品之一，因为它没有解决但改善了在非常重要的地方发生的许多跨组织协调问题。

It is broadly under-appreciated how Twitter is the message bus, the sub rosa coordination mechanism for the United States federal government, for every counterparty that the United States federal government or any agency or individual faces, for the media, for everything.

人们普遍低估了 Twitter 作为美国联邦政府、美国联邦政府或任何机构或个人面对的每一个交易对手、媒体和一切事物的消息总线、地下协调机制的作用。

People see Twitter, and they see celebrities posting and the phenomenon that is shitposting, et cetera, et cetera.

人们看到推特，看到名人发帖，看到垃圾帖现象，等等。

To a very real degree, it is an integrated part of the operating system that is the world, but that doesn’t mean that you can graft payments onto it and succeed just because you want to.

在一个非常真实的程度上，它是世界操作系统的一个组成部分，但这并不意味着你可以将支付移植到它上面并仅仅因为你想要成功。

It is broadly underappreciated how Twitter is the message bus, the sub rosa coordination mechanism for the United States federal government, for every counterparty that the United States federal government or any agency or individual faces, for the media, for everything.

人们普遍低估了 Twitter 作为美国联邦政府、美国联邦政府或任何机构或个人面对的每一个交易对手、媒体和一切事物的消息总线、地下协调机制的作用。

People see Twitter, and they see celebrities posting and the phenomenon that is shitposting, et cetera, et cetera.

人们看到推特，看到名人发帖，看到垃圾帖现象，等等。

To a very real degree, it is an integrated part of the operating system that is the world, but that doesn’t mean that you can graft payments onto it and succeed just because you want to.

在一个非常真实的程度上，它是世界操作系统的一个组成部分，但这并不意味着您可以将支付移植到它上面并仅仅因为您愿意就取得成功。

On money transfers and crypto

关于汇款和加密货币

What they spend all the money on is retail points of presence by the customer in both countries, so 50 percent of all revenue taken in by Western Union goes to have a physical point of presence by you sending it and by — without loss of generality — abuela in Mexico.

他们把所有的钱都花在了两个国家的客户的零售网点上，所以西联汇款所有收入的 50% 都通过你发送的钱和墨西哥的“阿布埃拉”——“不失一般性”——建立了一个实体网点。

Do those have to exist?

这些必须存在吗？

Could you do them cheaper?

你能便宜点做吗？

Eh, you might be able to, but the problem (such as it is) is, most of the cost or most of the complexity is by abuela in Mexico.

呃，你也许可以，但问题（事实上是这样）是，大部分成本或大部分复杂性都是由墨西哥的 abuela 承担的。

There’s not one single abuela in Mexico where you just replace this one branch.

在墨西哥，没有一个阿布埃拉可以只更换这一根树枝。

You have to coordinate this worldwide change in behaviors to materially compress that fee, so that is why the fees are so high.

你必须协调全球范围内的行为变化，以大幅压缩费用，这就是费用如此之高的原因。

Another reason why the fees are so high is regulation.

费用如此之高的另一个原因是监管。

This one is, we as a society could choose to do things better and have not chosen these.

这是，我们作为一个社会可以选择把事情做得更好，但没有选择这些。

I wish we would.

我希望我们会。

Due to anti–money laundering and know-your-customer requirements, the amount of compliance drag on small transfers of value in the world is very, very large.

由于反洗钱和了解客户的要求，全球小额价值转移的合规性阻力非常非常大。

The rationale for it — such that there exists a rationale — is that, well, if you can do small transfers of value easily without proving your identity, then you could do large transfers of value by breaking it up into small transfers of value that are unsurveilled, and then that would enable crime and terrorism and tax evasion.

其理由是，如果你可以在不证明自己身份的情况下轻松进行小额价值转移，那么你可以通过将其分解为不受监控的小额价值转移来进行大规模价值转移，从而导致犯罪、恐怖主义和逃税。

Even if you are sending — a typical transfer might be $200 to Mexico — you’d have to go through this song and dance about proving your identity to the transfer agent they have regulated, yada, yada, yada.

即使您要发送 — 一般转账到墨西哥可能需要 200 美元 — 您也必须通过这首歌和舞蹈向他们监管的转账代理证明您的身份，yada，yada，yada。

That entire edifice imposes a lot of costs and a lot of things that are undesirable from user-experience perspective, both in terms of people will tell you that they don’t enjoy them, and in terms of if you were to implement two parallel procedures, the one that didn’t require that level of regulatory hoop-jumping would have a higher success rate by equivalently motivated people.

整个大厦带来了大量的成本和很多从用户体验的角度来看是不受欢迎的事情，无论是人们会告诉你他们不喜欢它们，还是如果你要实施两个并行的程序，不需要那种级别的监管跳跃的程序将由同等积极的人获得更高的成功率。

I’m a longtime crypto skeptic, and one of the things that I think I see eye to eye on with the crypto folks is that AML and KYC impose enormous costs on society.

我是一名长期的加密货币怀疑论者，我认为我与加密货币人士一致认为的一件事是 AML 和 KYC 给社会带来了巨大的成本。

Then where we differ is they think, “Oh, I will make a technological solution to this and just ignore all the laws.” I think, to the extent that we believe this is true, we should probably work on changing the laws and regulations and/or changing how we implement them in products that are actually valuable.

我们的不同之处在于他们认为，“哦，我会为此制定一个技术解决方案，而忽略所有法律。”我认为，如果我们相信这是真的，我们可能应该努力改变法律和法规和/或改变我们在真正有价值的产品中实施它们的方式。

On bank parking lots

银行停车场

New account opening requires 30 to 60 minutes plus of dwell time, depending on what type of account you are opening.

开设新账户需要 30 到 60 分钟加上停留时间，具体取决于您开设的账户类型。

Then when you back out that variability, it turns out that gratuitously over-provisioning the parking space almost all of the time maximizes for not losing new account opening at a few very limited windows per year.

然后，当您取消这种可变性时，事实证明，无偿地过度配置停车位几乎总是可以最大限度地避免在每年几个非常有限的窗口中失去新开户的机会。

Those very limited windows can make or break the branch’s ability to contribute to their larger financial institution.

这些非常有限的窗口可能会决定分行为其更大的金融机构做出贡献的能力。

The number of accounts a bank actually opens per year in terms of checking accounts per branch — that is a number that one can have access to in various places.

银行每年实际开立的账户数量（以每个分行的支票账户计算）——这是一个可以在不同地方访问的数字。

Depending on the bank and the locality, et cetera, it’s between 200 and 500.

根据银行和地区等的不同，在 200 到 500 之间。

So, if you turn away a single customer or two customers in a row to open accounts because you had three parking spaces where you could have had seven, you’ve done a very outsized amount of damage to your financial institution, and thus over-provision the parking in all the places.

因此，如果您因为拥有三个停车位而连续拒绝一位或两位客户开设账户，而您本来可以有七个停车位，那么您就对您的金融机构造成了巨大的损害，从而在所有地方都过度提供了停车位。

To ask you the Willie Sutton question, why do people try to rob banks?

问你威利萨顿问题，为什么人们试图抢劫银行？

It seems like a low-return activity, the form of crime where you’re most likely to be caught.

这似乎是一种低回报的活动，是最有可能被捕的犯罪形式。

Not to give people advice on becoming criminals, but if one wanted to describe a criminal that was using their faculties to the best of their abilities, credit card fraud is so amazingly more lucrative than robbing banks.

并不是要给人们提供关于如何成为罪犯的建议，而是如果有人想描述一个尽其所能地利用自己才能的罪犯，那么信用卡欺诈比抢劫银行更有利可图。

You can do it without ever threatening anyone.

你可以在不威胁任何人的情况下做到这一点。

You can do it with only about as much sophistication about how the system works as the typical bank thief has.

您只需像典型的银行窃贼一样了解系统的工作原理就可以做到这一点。

Indeed, you do see casual fraud by unsophisticated, let’s say, non-professional criminals, high school students, et cetera, who earn or gain access to value through that casual fraud much more than they would if they stuck up a bank.

事实上，你确实会看到一些不成熟的人（比如非职业犯罪分子、高中生等）进行的偶然欺诈，他们通过这种偶然的欺诈赚取或获得的价值比他们在银行中获得的价值要多得多。

And therefore, the people that actually do stick up banks are overwhelmingly drug addicted.

因此，真正闯入银行的人绝大多数都是吸毒成瘾的。

They’re disproportionately struggling with a mental illness, et cetera, et cetera.

他们不成比例地与精神疾病等作斗争。

It is not that big a risk.

风险并不大。

That, by the way, is part of a few reasons why banks are not optimized to defeat people doing bank robbery, which is surprising to many nonspecialists.

顺便说一句，这也是银行没有优化打击银行抢劫行为的部分原因，这让许多非专业人士感到惊讶。

If you join a bank, one of the first things that they say is, “In the event of a bank robbery, don’t be a hero.

如果你加入一家银行，他们说的第一句话就是：“如果发生银行抢劫，不要成为英雄。

This does not matter to us at all.

这对我们来说根本不重要。

Comply with all demands.

遵守所有要求。

Get them out of the bank as quickly as possible.

尽快将他们带出银行。

Do not fight, do not chase,” et cetera, et cetera.

不要打架，不要追逐”等等，等等。

Partly that is due to the liability risk.

部分原因是责任风险。

The way the US system views these things, the net present value of a young bank employee is worth a lot more than $8,000.

按照美国体系看待这些事情的方式，一名年轻银行员工的净现值远超过 8,000 美元。

If they get shot on their way out the door, the bank might be liable for millions of dollars of a settlement to that individual.

如果他们在出门时被枪杀，银行可能需要向该人支付数百万美元的和解金。

Whereas if the person walks away with $8,000, well, yay.

但如果这个人拿走了 8,000 美元，那好吧。

But the other part of it is that the banks truly aren’t at material risk from losing cash in robberies.

但另一方面，银行确实没有因抢劫而损失现金的重大风险。

On living in Japan

关于在日本的生活

I thought, “Oh, shucks, the Wall Street Journal was never wrong,” but I really wanted to be an engineer.

我想，“哦，糟糕，《华尔街日报》从来都没有错，”但我真的很想成为一名工程师。

Clearly, the successful engineers in the future will be playing a Venn diagram game where they do one hard thing that is engineering and one hard thing that is speaking a foreign language.

显然，未来成功的工程师将玩维恩图游戏，他们做一件困难的事情是工程，另一件困难的事情是说外语。

I thought speaking foreign languages is hard because it’s the only class in high school that I did not get an A in for showing up — Spanish.

我认为说外语很难，因为这是高中唯一一门我没有获得 A 的课程 — 西班牙语。

I thought, there’s very little advantage for an American in my position to speak Spanish because there are many Americans who speak Spanish better than I ever will, and the amount of trade in software between the United States and Spanish-speaking countries is presumably lower than it is with other countries.

我认为，对于处于我这个位置的美国人来说，说西班牙语几乎没有什么优势，因为有很多美国人的西班牙语说得比我更好，而且美国和西班牙语国家之间的软件贸易量大概低于与其他国家的贸易量。

So, I made a spreadsheet, trying to quantify things like what’s the population of a country, what percentage of their professional adults are capable of doing business English, what’s the size of their software industry, does Microsoft sell there, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

所以，我制作了一个电子表格，试图量化一些事情，比如一个国家有多少人口、有多少比例的专业人士能够使用商务英语、他们的软件行业有多大、微软在那里销售产品等等。

Sort by Column H descending, and Japan was at the top of the list.

按 H 列降序排列，日本位居榜首。

I thought, “Okay, I’m going to learn Japanese, and then I’m going to go to Japan after university for just a few years to get better at business Japanese.

我想，“好吧，我要学习日语，然后大学毕业后去日本呆几年，以提高商务日语水平。

Then I’m going to come back to America, get a job at Microsoft in a Japan-facing role, and I’ll have a nice, safe job in the tech industry despite what the Wall Street Journal says about the tech industry ceasing to hire Americans for the positions that I actually want to do.”

然后我将回到美国，在微软找到一份面向日本的工作，尽管《华尔街日报》称科技行业不再雇用美国人担任我真正想做的职位，但我将在科技行业找到一份不错、安全的工作。”

It turns out that there was a great deal of rigor there, chasing a conclusion that had absolutely no basis in fact.

事实证明，那里有非常严格的要求，追求一个完全没有事实依据的结论。

It is not the case that the tech industry stopped hiring Americans in the last 20 years, but it also led to what was ultimately one of the most important decisions in my life.

科技行业在过去 20 年里并没有停止雇用美国人，但这最终也导致了我一生中最重要的决定之一。

I went over to Japan.

我去了日本。

I lived there for 20 happy (asterisk) years.

我在那里度过了 20 年快乐的（星号）年。

I met my wife over there, et cetera, et cetera.

我在那里遇见了我的妻子，等等，等等。

I often mention this to people as an example of, you can have great reasons for doing something and have that utterly not matter.

我经常向人们提到这一点，作为一个例子，你可以有充分的理由去做某事，但那完全不重要。

Also, I try to tell sophisticated people that other people who they have a high degree of regard for — some sophisticated people, for whatever reason, have a high degree of regard for me — even people you have a high degree of regard for sometimes make very large decisions based on very small amounts of data or very small amounts of consideration with regards to that decision, and therefore you should update your world model about that.

另外，我试图告诉老练的人，他们高度尊重的其他人——“一些老练的人，无论出于何种原因，对我也高度尊重”——即使是你高度尊重的人，有时也会基于非常少量的数据或对该决定的很少的考虑而做出非常大的决定，因此你应该更新你的世界模型。

Be very careful about saying things like “Oh, the tech industry is so over, haha,” as a joke because it is quite possible that someone will listen to that and just perceive the surface-level meaning of it.

在开玩笑时说“哦，科技行业已经结束了，哈哈”之类的话要非常小心，因为很可能有人会听，只是理解它的表面意义。

And then the tech industry would lose the services of someone who, in expectation, it might very much want to have had the services of in 20 years.

然后，科技行业将失去某个人的服务，而在预期中，该行业可能非常希望在 20 年内获得该人的服务。

If you step out of the me-view of the world, the point at which I was an effective professional at reading and writing Japanese was maybe two to three years after I got to Japan, so after a total of six years of study, and I was not the most diligent student during those six years.

如果跳出我的世界观的话，我在日语读写方面达到有效水平的时间点可能是在我到日本之后的两到三年，所以总共学习了六年，而这六年里我并不是最勤奋的学生。

I think if you’re not a heritage reader of Japanese or Chinese, you should benchmark it at least three years to be professionally capable at it.

我认为，如果你不是日语或中文的传统读者，你应该对它进行至少三年的基准测试，以具备专业能力。

Unfortunately, that gets expunged out of the public narrative because you don’t want to tell serious people, “Oh, yes, I totally started doing a startup versus going to Google because The Social Network gave me social permission to do so.” But that is a real thing.

不幸的是，这被从公共叙事中删除了，因为你不想告诉严肃的人，“哦，是的，我完全开始创业而不是去谷歌，因为社交网络给了我这样做的社交许可。”但这是真实的事情。

Anyhow, to Japan.

无论如何，去日本。

I was once walking around Tokyo, and there was a group of preschoolers being led around by their caretaker.

有一次我在东京散步，看到一群学龄前儿童在看护人的带领下四处走动。

One of them asked me in Japanese, “Hey, Mister, what’s your job?” This is at about 10:30 in the morning, for context.

其中一人用日语问我：“嘿，先生，你的工作是什么？”这是上午 10:30 左右，以供参考。

I said, “I’m an entrepreneur.” Preschooler, mind you, said, “Omotta tōri, kare wa mushokuda,” which means, “Just as I thought, he is unemployed.” That is the form of a too-perfect anecdote to encapsulate a broader societal zeitgeist with respect to entrepreneurship.

我说：“我是一名企业家。”请注意，学龄前儿童说：“Omotta tori, kare wa mushokuda”，意思是“正如我所想，他失业了。”这是一个过于完美的轶事形式，无法概括有关创业的更广泛的社会时代精神。

And like many things about — actually, and this gets — there are all sorts of asterisks you can put on that, too.

就像许多关于 — 实际上，这就是 — 你也可以在上面加上各种各样的星号。

Japan loves entrepreneurs in the same fashion that Catholicism loves saints, but they all happened a while ago.

日本爱企业家就像天主教爱圣人一样，但它们都发生在不久前。

These are things that are changing over time, et cetera, et cetera.

这些都是随着时间而变化的事情，等等。

But broadly speaking, entrepreneurs are extremely undervalued in the Japanese dating market.

但总体而言，企业家在日本约会市场上的价值被极度低估。

On Japanese salarymen

关于日本工薪族

The analogs of the US professional-managerial class in Japan are similarly overworked, treated even more terribly to a substantial degree.

日本的类似美国职业管理阶层的人也同样过度劳累，在很大程度上受到更恶劣的待遇。

There is an ingrained culture of abuse in Japanese labor/employer relations, where that culture — there are parts of it in the United States, but not to nearly the same degree.

日本的劳资关系中存在着一种根深蒂固的虐待文化，这种文化在美国也有一部分，但程度却相差甚远。

Now, the thing that you are trying to do if you are a salaryman is not to get the promotion so that you earn more money, because you will not earn appreciably more money.

现在，如果你是一名工薪族，你要做的事情不是升职，以便赚更多的钱，因为你不会赚更多的钱。

Indeed, you will not earn appreciably more money than the false course of just taking social promotions through your entire life.

事实上，你赚的钱不会比一生中只接受社会晋升的错误做法多得多。

The thing you are trying to do is get a higher .

您要做的就是获得更高的成绩。

.

。

.

。

both true and sounds too good to be true.

既真实又听起来好得令人难以置信。

There was a chart of engineers at the company that I worked at back in the day when I was a salaryman.

有一张我当工薪阶层时工作过的公司的工程师图表。

There was a young man — I’ll call him Tanaka San, which is not his actual name.

有一个年轻人 —— 我称他为田中先生，这不是他的真名。

Tanaka San had a couple of weeks of seniority versus me in my role at the company.

就我在公司的职位而言，田中桑的资历比我高几周。

In the default ordering of the social hierarchy at a Japanese company, he would be above me on this chart that is pasted on the wall.

在日本公司的默认社会等级排序中，在这张贴在墙上的图表上，他会排在我之上。

It’s pasted on the wall for an actual business purpose because, if someone’s out of the office that day, you write they are absent or they’re at a customer site or et cetera, et cetera.

它出于实际的商业目的而粘贴在墙上，因为如果有人那天不在办公室，你可以写下他们不在或他们在客户现场等等。

But the order matters, and everyone knows the order matters.

但顺序很重要，每个人都知道顺序很重要。

One day, I watched two young OLs — office ladies they coined in Japan — going up to the chart.

有一天，我看到两位年轻的 OL（她们在日本创造的白领女郎）登上了排行榜。

They had Tanaka San’s name in one hand and my name in the other hand.

他们一只手拿着田中桑的名字，另一只手拿着我的名字。

One of them asked the other, “Which of these goes first?” The first one said, “Well, Tanaka San has seniority.

其中一个问另一个：“哪个先走？”第一个说道：“嗯，田中桑有资历。

It should be him.” The second one said, “Yes, but Tanaka San really screwed the pooch on that last project.” The other one said, “Oh, yes, good point.” There was a literal moving hands up and down and a significant glance between each other, and one said, “Yes, that is the correct ordering, with Patrick on top versus Tanaka San.”

应该是他。”第二个说：“是的，但田中桑在最后一个项目上确实搞砸了。”另一个说：“哦，是的，说得好。”双手上下移动，彼此之间意味深长地看了一眼，其中一个人说：“是的，这是正确的顺序，帕特里克在上面，田中桑在上面。”

Tiny little anecdote that shows much more about the shape of the world.

小小的轶事更多地展示了世界的形状。

A huge amount of the effort involved in the culture that is Japanese salaryman is convincing the people that matter to you — who are most of your social network at work, who will be there at your wedding, who your boss will give a speech at your wedding because that is the culture that they operate in — that you have made it if you are ambitious, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

日本工薪阶层的文化需要付出巨大的努力来说服那些对你重要的人——他们是你工作中最重要的社交网络，他们将出席你的婚礼，你的老板将在你的婚礼上发表演讲，因为这是他们所处的文化——如果你雄心勃勃，等等，你就成功了，等等。

There are people who decline to participate in the same fashion that people decline to participate in the United States, but that is the broad accepted outline of the culture.

有些人拒绝参与，就像人们拒绝参与美国一样，但这是广泛接受的文化轮廓。

I remember, after I quit the salaryman job — which, by the way, salaryman is a full-time employee of a Japanese company.

我记得，当我辞掉工薪族的工作后 ——顺便说一句，工薪族是一家日本公司的全职员工。

The company owns you body and soul.

公司拥有你的身体和灵魂。

In return, it incredibly promises, at least historically, to insulate you from all risk.

作为回报，它令人难以置信地承诺，至少从历史上看，可以让您免受所有风险。

I worked at jobs that are described by that for about six years, burned out terribly, made a socially appropriate excuse to quit, which is the one thing that you, as a salaryman, are not allowed to do.

我在这样的工作岗位上工作了大约六年，精疲力竭，找了一个适合社会的借口辞职，这是你作为工薪族不被允许做的一件事。

I remember April 1, 2010, thinking I could get on a plane right now with nothing but the clothes on my back, close the Japanese chapter of my life entirely, and walk into Jeff Lawson’s office in San Francisco, who is the CEO of Twilio.

我记得 2010 年 4 月 1 日，我以为我现在就可以只穿衣服就登上飞机，彻底结束我人生中的日本篇章，走进杰夫·劳森 (Jeff Lawson) 在旧金山的办公室，他是 Twilio 的首席执行官。

He doesn’t know me, but I think after walking into his office, I can beg, borrow, or steal a job there and do something much more impactful, important, personally fulfilling, et cetera, over the next couple of years, doesn’t seem that I’ve been doing the last couple of years.

他不认识我，但我想走进他的办公室后，我可以乞求、借用或偷一份工作，做一些更有影响力、更重要、更有个人成就感的事情，等等，在接下来的几年里，我似乎没有在过去几年里做过。

But I’m not willing to call it quits on this Japan adventure yet.

但我还不愿意结束这次日本冒险。

I do enjoy living here.

我很享受住在这里。

Working here is terrible.

在这里工作很糟糕。

I will try to carve out some semblance of living from my tiny internet software publishing operation that I was running at the time and see what happens.

我将尝试从当时经营的小型互联网软件出版业务中谋生，看看会发生什么。

Then indeed, the thing that happened three months later is that I met the young lady who eventually became my wife, and so we were off to the races.

确实，三个月后发生的事情是我遇到了那位最终成为我妻子的年轻女士，所以我们开始了比赛。

I know, rationally speaking, I have at least 20-plus years in my career left, and also know that there is a level of energy and health that I had access to in my 20s that I no longer have access to.

我知道，理性地讲，我的职业生涯至少还剩下20多年，也知道我在20多岁的时候所拥有的精力和健康水平，现在已经无法再获得了。

And so, I feel some counterfactual regret as to things that I actually spent that energy and health on, which was running the World of Warcraft III guild and being a Japanese salaryman for many years.

因此，我对我实际上花费了精力和健康的事情感到有些反事实的遗憾，那就是管理《魔兽世界3》公会并成为一名日本工薪族多年。

I do not think that six years of Japanese salaryman optimized for me learning all things.

我不认为六年的日本工薪族生活最适合我学习所有的东西。

I think I could have extracted most of the signal from that experience in six weeks to six months and then left, but felt myself socially constrained from doing so.

我想我本可以在六周到六个月内从那次经历中提取大部分信号，然后离开，但我觉得自己这样做受到社会限制。

I definitely don’t regret moving to Japan because of the other nonprofessional knock-on effects on my life.

我绝对不后悔搬到日本，因为其他非专业的连锁反应对我的生活产生了影响。

But the degree to which my career/impact on the world X personal life X family X raising two wonderful children and being married to a wonderful wife — the degree to which that is enhanced by my level of understanding of business Japanese or ability to function in a Japanese office environment, et cetera, et cetera, seems to be rather limited versus my ability to write well in English.

但是，我的事业/对世界的影响X个人生活X家庭X养育两个优秀的孩子并娶了一个优秀的妻子 ——通过我对商务日语的理解水平或在日本办公环境中工作的能力等等所增强的程度，与我良好的英语写作能力相比，似乎相当有限。

I will say one thing about the experience, is that having a lot of free time on your hands in the evenings and no outlet for English was a great push in the right direction of writing more than most people do in their 20s.

关于这次经历，我要说的一件事是，晚上有很多空闲时间，而且没有英语的出口，这对朝着正确的写作方向做出了巨大的推动，比大多数 20 多岁的人做的更多。

The compounding effects of writing more are responsible for both a lot of the good stuff that has happened to me and a lot of the good stuff that I’ve been able to accomplish in the world.

多写的复合效应既造就了我身上发生的许多好事，也造就了我在这个世界上能够完成的许多好事。

On crypto

关于加密货币

From one sense, I can claim victory.

从某种意义上说，我可以宣称胜利了。

It’s a fraud.

这是一个骗局。

I was saying it was a fraud before it was cool.

在它还酷之前我就说过这是一个骗局。

The government now acknowledges that they did funny things at some point in the past.

政府现在承认他们在过去的某个时候做了一些有趣的事情。

But I think it should also collapse.

但我认为它也应该崩溃。

It is not just a tinkering-around-the-margins fraud.

这不仅仅是一种修补利润的欺诈行为。

There is a huge amount of actual criminal activity there.

那里存在大量的实际犯罪活动。

One sort of naive answer is, do we expect frauds to collapse quickly?

一种天真的答案是，我们是否期望欺诈行为会迅速崩溃？

Probably, no. Madoff was active for 17 or 18 years, and the only thing that actually brought his fraud to light — well, various cognoscenti knew about it — the thing that made it undeniable was being unable to meet redemption requests in the wake of the global financial crisis.

也许，不。麦道夫活跃了 17 或 18 年，唯一真正暴露他的欺诈行为的是——好吧，很多行家都知道这一点——不可否认的是，在全球金融危机之后，他无法满足赎回请求。

Madoff, importantly, did not cause the global financial crisis.

重要的是，麦道夫并没有引发全球金融危机。

Of all the crimes in the world, he was innocent of that one.

在世界上所有的罪行中，他是无辜的。

But people said, “Bernie, you have all this money for me.

但人们说：“伯尼，你有这么多钱给我。

You alone among all the people I invest my money with have avoided this crisis, which is great because now I need money.

在我投资的所有人中，只有你避免了这场危机，这很好，因为现在我需要钱。

Can you wire it to me?” He did not have the money to wire, and that’s how his crimes came to light.

你能把它转给我吗？”他没有钱电汇，这就是他的罪行被曝光的原因。

To a certain extent, it not collapsing is like .

在某种程度上，它不崩溃就像。

.

。

.

。

the thing that we expect to happen everyday until it collapses catastrophically.

我们期望每天都会发生的事情，直到它灾难性地崩溃。

The thing that we would expect the collapse to happen with — my dominant narrative — is some form of government action against their reserves that were custodied in some financial institution in New York, followed by the public disclosure of that action, which might not be a total freezing, but enough to start the domino, and then a classic run on the bank, and then the pipes get overwhelmed, yada, yada, yada, and price goes down substantially below $93.

我们预计会发生的崩溃——“我的主导叙述”——是政府对纽约某家金融机构保管的储备金采取某种形式的行动，随后公开披露该行动，这可能不是完全冻结，但足以引发多米诺骨牌，然后是经典的银行挤兑，然后管道被淹没，yada，yada，yada，价格大幅下跌至 93 美元以下。

In a famous interview on Bloomberg, Tether’s character witness — one Sam Bankman-Fried — said that he believes that it is astoundingly unlikely that Tether is worth, in a true sense, $30, but you could quibble as to whether it’s worth 99 cents or a dollar and a penny.

在彭博社的一次著名采访中，Tether 的品格证人——萨姆·班克曼-弗里德（Sam Bankman-Fried）——表示，他认为 Tether 真正意义上的价值 30 美元的可能性极小，但你可能会质疑它到底值 99 美分还是一美元一便士。

I think there is a material chance it is truly worth something like $30, potentially negative after you add government fines and other actions that happen.

我认为它很有可能真正值 30 美元，在加上政府罚款和其他发生的行动后，可能会出现负值。

I continue to expect that to happen.

我仍然期待这种情况发生。

Do I believe it is overpriced at $33,000 relative to the amount of actual utility that’s demonstrated in the world and the tens of billions of dollars that have been injected into creating infrastructure for it?

相对于世界上展示的实际效用以及为其创建基础设施注入的数百亿美元，我是否认为 33,000 美元的定价过高？

Absolutely, yes.

绝对是的。

But some sense of epistemic humility — I have been watching that ticker for over a decade now, and the ticker and market participants keep voting against my view, and question why — is it because of manipulation?

但某种认识上的谦卑感 ——“我已经观察该行情十多年了，行情记录和市场参与者不断投票反对我的观点，并质疑为什么”——“是因为操纵吗？

Surely, yes, but that is not a full explanation.

当然，是的，但这不是完整的解释。

Is it because of some amount of utility?

是因为有一定的实用性吗？

I think the amount of realized utility by Bitcoin .

我认为比特币实现的效用量。

.

。

.

。

I’m a great crypto skeptic, but if you were to say, “Okay, hold your nose for a moment and steel-man the case for crypto utility.

我是一个伟大的加密货币怀疑论者，但如果你说，“好吧，先捂住鼻子，然后用钢铁侠来证明加密货币的实用性。

Tell me about your favorite projects, et cetera,” I would point at a lot of things that were in Bitcoin that involved some sort of intellectual dissent and community crossover with Bitcoin.

告诉我你最喜欢的项目等等，”我会指出比特币中的很多内容，这些内容涉及某种知识异议和社区与比特币的交叉。

But Bitcoin as itself is clearly not the best product that crypto has come up with.

但比特币本身显然并不是加密货币领域最好的产品。

Yet the market says it is, by a comfortable margin, the most valuable product that crypto has come up with, and I don’t know how to square that circle.

然而市场称，它是加密技术中最有价值的产品，而且我不知道如何解决这个问题。

If the human race does not exist in a hundred years, it is almost definitionally because of some knock-on consequence of the invention of the internet.

如果一百年后人类不复存在，那几乎肯定是因为互联网发明的一些连锁反应。

If the human race ceases to exist, and the internet was necessary in the causal path to get to there, then I would regret the internet.

如果人类不复存在，而互联网是到达那里的因果路径所必需的，那么我会对互联网感到遗憾。

In every other case, I would not regret the internet.

在其他情况下，我不会后悔互联网。

I have an ebullience and love for it in a way that people in our social class in the United States are aggressively socialized out of having ebullience and true love for anything.

我对它充满热情和热爱，就像我们美国社会阶层的人们出于对任何事物的热情和真爱而积极地进行社会化一样。

I think that the internet is the capital G, capital W, Great Work of the human race in a lot of respects, that it is magical.

我认为互联网在很多方面都是人类的伟大作品，它是神奇的。

It is an encapsulation of the best things about our society that is also tremendously, instrumentally useful in making all the good things better and ameliorating all the problems over sufficiently long time scales.

它是我们社会最好的事物的概括，对于在足够长的时间内使所有美好的事物变得更好并改善所有问题也具有极大的帮助。

I have an ebullience and love for in a way that people in our social class in the United States are aggressively socialized out of having ebullience and true love for anything.

我对美国社会阶层的人们充满热情和热爱，他们因对任何事物都充满热情和真爱而积极地进行社会化。

I think that the internet is the capital G, capital W, Great Work of the human race in a lot of respects, that it is magical.

我认为互联网在很多方面都是人类的伟大作品，它是神奇的。

It is an encapsulation of the best things about our society that is also tremendously, instrumentally useful in making all the good things better and ameliorating all the problems over sufficiently long time scales.

它是我们社会最好的事物的概括，对于在足够长的时间内使所有美好的事物变得更好并改善所有问题也具有极大的帮助。

It seems naturally to me that this is extremely important.

对我来说，这自然是极其重要的。

This is extremely valuable, and it seems extremely underrated by almost everyone, including people who would consider themselves great fans of the internet but say, “Oh, I’m a great fan of the internet, but I’m a great fan of penicillin, too.”

这是非常有价值的，而且几乎每个人都低估了它，包括那些自认为是互联网的忠实粉丝但又说：“哦，我是互联网的忠实粉丝，但我也是青霉素的忠实粉丝的人。”

I think, in aggregate, the internet is obviously more important than penicillin by many orders of magnitude.

我认为，总的来说，互联网显然比青霉素重要多个数量级。

Is it more important than medicine?

它比医学更重要吗？

I will bite that bullet.

我会咬住那颗子弹。

The internet is more important than medicine, the entire institution of medicine, from time immemorial to reasonable extrapolations of what we can do right now.

互联网比医学、整个医学机构更重要，从远古到我们现在可以做的事情的合理推断。

Is it more important than writing?

比写作更重要吗？

You couldn’t have the internet without writing, so writing was very important to get to the development of the internet.

没有写作就不可能有互联网，所以写作对于互联网的发展非常重要。

That might be one of the most important things about writing, that writing got us to the internet.

这可能是写作最重要的事情之一，写作让我们接触了互联网。

That sounds like a little bit of .

这听起来有点像。

.

。

.

。

I know people will take that full quote and say, “Oh, this crazy, nonintellectual person,” but I think that there is a reasonable case for it.

我知道人们会接受这句话的完整引用并说：“哦，这个疯狂的、无知的人”，但我认为这是有合理理由的。

On talent

论人才

There’s a thing that I would have put a high probability on prior to VaccinateCA, that VaccinateCA increased my credence on, which is that relative to credentialed talent in institutions, like — throw a dart at the dartboard about it.

在 VaccinateCA 之前，我很有可能相信 VaccinateCA 提高了我的可信度，这就是相对于机构中的有资质的人才，比如 — 向飞镖靶投掷飞镖。

Let’s say county health departments, for example.

以县卫生部门为例。

They are fully educated in their field.

他们在各自的领域受过充分的教育。

They are credentialed.

他们是有资格的。

There’s a democratic process that ultimately backstops the county health department.

有一个民主程序最终支持县卫生部门。

Jay Rando, person on the internet: “Can’t we be better at important facets of pandemic preparedness given, hmm, two to six weeks versus a county health department that is prepared for exactly this problem for their entire professional career?” Yes.

Jay Rando，互联网人士：“与县卫生部门在整个职业生涯中为这一问题做好准备相比，我们难道不能在两到六周的时间内更好地做好大流行病防范的重要方面吗？”是的。

Straightforwardly, yes.

直截了当地说，是的。

That is the thing I would have believed in 2018, but now I have an existence proof of.

这是我在 2018 年所相信的事情，但现在我有一个存在的证据。

Now, the work of county health departments continues to be important, et cetera, et cetera.

现在，县卫生部门的工作仍然很重要，等等。

I do want to eventually be able to make coalitions with people who are necessary to achieve impact in the world.

我确实希望最终能够与那些对世界产生影响所必需的人结成联盟。

Part of being able to make coalitions implies not throwing them under the bus all the time.

能够建立联盟的一部分意味着不要总是将他们置于公共汽车之下。

But it is extensively underrated how effective nonspecialists can quickly come to be, how spiky talent is distributed, and how the internet can act as a force for bringing together the right spikes for that in a very fast fashion and creating leverage good with it.

但人们普遍低估了非专业人士如何迅速变得高效、尖峰人才如何分布，以及互联网如何作为一股力量，以非常快的方式汇集合适的尖峰并利用它创造良好的杠杆作用。

On negotiations

关于谈判

Now, humans go against their cultural and biological programming all of the time in many important ways, but it requires an immense amount of effort.

现在，人类在许多重要方面一直违背他们的文化和生物编程，但这需要付出巨大的努力。

And most people don’t devote that effort or don’t perceive themselves as being allowed to do that in ways about salary negotiation.

大多数人并没有付出这样的努力，或者认为自己不被允许以薪资谈判的方式这样做。

Then, this creates crazy inefficiencies in the world.

然后，这会导致世界效率低下。

I wrote one blog post about salary negotiation back in 2012.

早在 2012 年，我就写过一篇关于薪资谈判的博文。

I wouldn’t call it a blog post, but between you and me and the internet, it’s a blog post.

我不会称其为博客文章，但在你我和互联网之间，它是一篇博客文章。

Hundreds of thousands of people read that every year.

每年都有数十万人阅读该文章。

Many of them choose to write me an email and say, “Hey, I used the advice that you wrote in this — I can’t believe it’s not a blog post — and resulted in a plus $25,000 to $125,000 delta in the salary I got.”

他们中的许多人选择给我写一封电子邮件并说：“嘿，我采纳了你在这篇文章中写的建议 — 我不敢相信这不是一篇博客文章 — ，结果我的工资增加了 25,000 美元到 125,000 美元的增量。”

I keep a folder in Gmail of the aggregate impact of that and stopped counting sometime after it was like $10 million plus a year for economic impact from one blog post.

我在 Gmail 中保存了一个文件夹，记录了该事件的总体影响，并在一篇博文带来的一年经济影响约为 1000 万美元后停止计算。

What do I come to believe about this?

我对此有何看法？

One, I clearly under-optimized my selection of picking things to write about because that was the shining star in my portfolio for so long, yet I never attempted to take the knowledge that it was the shining star and do more stuff like that in the future.

第一，我显然没有充分优化我对要写的东西的选择，因为长期以来它一直是我投资组合中的闪亮之星，但我从未试图接受它是闪亮之星的知识，并在未来做更多类似的事情。

Two, society was hideously under-optimized in that it took one guy of no special skill in this field, writing for one day on the topic, to unlock tens of millions of dollars of value.

第二，社会的优化程度严重不足，需要一个在这一领域没有特殊技能的人，就这个话题写一天的文章，才能释放数千万美元的价值。

That’s just the stuff we know about.

这只是我们所知道的事情。

Presumably, there are people who get a salary upgrade and do not email me about that.

据推测，有些人得到了加薪，但没有给我发电子邮件谈论此事。

Then, three, this implies that there are a lot of sophisticated actors who are making huge, huge mistakes that could probably be ameliorated for about as much effort as that blog post took to write, but who have not taken that effort.

第三，这意味着有很多老练的演员正在犯下巨大的错误，这些错误可能可以通过与撰写该博客文章所花费的精力一样得到改善，但他们却没有付出这种努力。

On culture shocks since returning to the US

关于返回美国后的文化冲击

As those of you who have been present in the United States for the last 20 years know, the United States is a different country in 2023 than it was when I left in 2004.

过去 20 年在美国生活过的人都知道，2023 年的美国与我 2004 年离开时相比是一个不同的国家。

Even though I’m someone who followed much of the news about this on the internet, a lot of it is hitting me quite hard in the face all at once.

尽管我是一个在互联网上关注大量相关新闻的人，但其中很多新闻同时给了我很大的打击。

There are some things that creep up over time that are not that noticed, but really obvious if you only experience living in America once every 20-year increments.

有些事情会随着时间的推移而逐渐发生，虽然不会引起人们的注意，但如果您每 20 年在美国生活一次，就会变得非常明显。

One of those things is, portion sizes are so much larger than they were when I was growing up, to a degree where there are many restaurants that attempt to serve me things that are .

其中之一是，份量比我小时候大得多，以至于有很多餐馆试图为我提供这样的东西。

.

。

.

。

the act of attempting to serve that would put me off the notion of eating because it does not seem to be designed to be an amount of food edible by a normal person, with my anchor for what normal people ate in the late 1990s.

尝试提供服务的行为会让我打消吃饭的念头，因为它似乎不是为正常人食用的食物量而设计的，而我的锚点是 20 世纪 90 年代末正常人的饮食。

This is not just me saying this, by the way.

顺便说一句，这不仅仅是我这么说。

You can look at pictures of McDonald’s portion sizes over time and track them as they go up into the red.

您可以查看麦当劳份量随时间变化的图片，并在它们出现亏损时对其进行跟踪。

There are a lot of little things that Japan does right.

日本在很多小事上都做对了。

I call it the will to have nice things.

我称之为拥有美好事物的意愿。

In the United States, many places lack the will to have nice things and suffer the consequences of that.

在美国，许多地方缺乏拥有美好事物并承受其后果的意愿。

These are just a million little paper-cut annoyances, like the delivery company deciding to deliver my bed to the middle of the front yard because they couldn’t get into the house.

这些只是一百万个小剪纸烦恼，就像送货公司决定将我的床送到前院中央，因为他们无法进入房子。

We are a rich and powerful nation that puts up with such obviously suboptimal things like that.

我们是一个富裕而强大的国家，能够容忍这样明显不理想的事情。

I’m hitting a lot of them all at once, and it is causing a degree of culture shock — reverse culture shock, rather.

我同时打击了很多人，这引起了一定程度的文化冲击 ——更确切地说，是反向文化冲击。