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What consensus*-defying beliefs did you hold that turned out to be right, and what consensus-defying predictions would you care to make now?
*in the most loosely defined sense--I just mean something that seems to go against the general public mood, not something you alone out of 8 billion people had a unique insight over.
Over the past few weeks, /r/technology has voted to the top numerous threads outlining deep-rooted issues with Amazon, from its trillion dollar market cap contraction, 11k layoffs, workers strikes and union-busting, and more recently, its Alexa division that's supposed to lose $10b this year.
Regarding the last headline specifically, I'm no superforecaster, but I've always avoided voice assistants and found the rest of the world's apparent eager adoption strange. I think my avoidance is potentially irrational: I generally distrust always-on-mics, but there is massive legal and reputational risk for any large tech firm to spy without court orders and there isn't a clear profit incentive to do it; my impression that the tech is clunky and dumb is probably 5-10 years out of date given all the improvements since; I also haven't identified a clear personal use case, but since I've never used it, I may well be missing out.
Now, there are plenty of goods and services that I don't consume that offer real utility to many other people. But I'd always thought voice assistants overhyped because I couldn't relate to just how much utility they were able to provide the average consumer and how profitable they are to their makers, considering how prevalent they are--new phones goading you into turning them on, perennial sales on voice gadgets, the cultural relevance of Alexas/Siris/Google Assistants/Cortanas/Bixbys etc. Like, I find the similarly free Maps app to be 100x more useful, and yet no one tries to shove Maps down your throat, maybe because they don't need to do it considering how useful it is. And so, while I don't share the fairly obvious undercurrent of anti-Amazon schadenfreude on /r/technology, the news that Alexa is actually failing badly and has always failed badly as a business investment comports with my preferences, and that's reassuring.
I recognize it's super hard to actually predict the future with real stakes (say, a financial investment), or else we'd all be billionaires. And left ignored are the many more incorrect forecasts that I/we don't write/talk about. Still, it's fun to casually celebrate moral wins, and I think useful to constantly tinker with your mental models based on new data points, especially when it relates to things that you strongly disagree with the rest of the world on. So what examples can you think of?
P.S. A couple more random and completely inconsequential things that I turned out to be right about:
About a year before COVID, someone very senior at work pointed to Peloton as an example of an exceptional business model, saying that it was able to earn a huge premium thanks to the self-actualization provided by in-store sales reps who supposedly had sophisticated scripts that effectively bucketed leads based on demographics data etc. that resulted in outsized closing rates. I was skeptical, but its valuation kept on skyrocketing so decided to believe it. It now seems my skepticism was warranted.
I've always held a grudge against Grubhub since back when it was the dominant market share leader in food deliveries circa 5-7 years ago. Can't remember the exact reasons why, but it was probably a combination of what I felt to be dishonest or dark pattern UI/UX for its end users, stuff like defaulting to outrageous tipping % to trick/shame users, or applying that tipping % to the grand total instead of before taxes and fees, or a sanctimonious interview given by its CEO. I'd always thought its dominance was unsustainable because of these red flags, and did enjoy a healthy dose of anti-Grubhub schadenfreude as its valuation cratered and market share dwindled.
And a couple of consensus-defying (again, very loosely defined) predictions:
Asians in the US will go reliably majority conservative by the 2030 midterms (okay, it's not a crazy claim, but most pundits focus on Hispanics and Blacks shifting away from Dems, and largely ignore Asians; also, I've thought Asians were overdue to vote GOP for probably a decade now, which probably actually means my prediction has been very poor considering this hasn't materialized yet).
Blended salads will go mainstream by 2050--that is, people will blend up what is very obviously originally a salad based on the ingredients (and so different from today's veggie smoothies) and drink it for efficiency's sake.
I think I was one of the first people to say that being outside was probably not only safe but one of the best places to be during the pandemic. I was also one of the first to argue that the lockdowns and masks would likely go on for a lot longer than most people realized. I also predicted the reversal of most remote work.
Current consensus defying beliefs:
current efforts to fight climate change are causing more harm than good. (75%)
congestion pricing is very good (99.5%)
there might not be a recession within the next year (50%)
What do you mean by "very good?" The objections I've heard from left-ish friends is that it prioritizes rich people, which is both true and also exactly the point. People whose time is worth more don't have to waste as much of it in traffic, and in turn everyone else in the city gets their taxes offset a bit. Deciding whether this is good or not depends entirely on how the good is measured. How would you measure it?
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/loc16y/congestion_pricing_is_an_underrated_and_poorly/
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It's also just good to prevent overcrowding. Highways reach a congestion inflection point where each additional car results in less throughput (fewer people-miles delivered per hour) and that's a classical tragedy of the commons. Even allocating space by lottery would be better than letting everyone on. (Which is not to deny that an auction is better than a lottery, just that preferring the wealthy is only part of the benefit.)
This podcast on congestion pricing was really good. Good in the way that it clarified some unique aspects of the problem in my mind that I hadn't previously understood. Primarily, one issue is that there is no mechanism for the money acquired from the people willing to pay to access to road to end up compensating the people who choose not to use the road because of the price. For many other goods, this isn't as big of an issue. If there is a shortage of apples, it's good to allocate them to the people most willing to pay, but the other folks don't feel as much like they just lose out entirely. There are probably plenty of folks willing to bring a plethora of oranges to the market, and while they're not the same, I mean, eh?
Whereas, having more roads is valuable to people. So if the default solution is "just add a congestion price; that'll fix the problem; don't need more roads; screw the people who can't afford it", it's going to be tough. Those people still really want roads and access to them. They probably can't just go buy a close substitute. Their only real hope is to lobby the government to build more roads, but if the accepted solution is "just add a congestion price; that'll fix the problem", then it'll be more difficult to actually accomplish that (after all, the 'problem' was 'solved' by the congestion price!).
The hypothetical ideal would be if we could magically take the money gained from congestion pricing and give it to the marginal consumers who will now choose to not drive because of the price. That would provide them some compensation for their loss that could replace the hopelessness of wanting to lobby for more roads, which would greatly ease the tension/discontent (it would make the political fights over building/not building new road capacity less contentious, because there would be less of a cliff in loss-of-value), while still allocating road usage as efficiently as possible. Unfortunately, IIRC, the podcast basically left this point with, "...and we have no idea how to actually implement something like this," and I agree. Simply slapping a congestion price on it might be the least bad solution that we've currently tried/figured out, but the nuance here leaves room for hope that we can devise something better.
They are compensated as long as the money is spent on something that benefits them. It could be spent on some public service, given back as a rebate, or used to lower taxes.
The money can be given back in a targeted way. It could be given to poor drivers such that no one won't be able to afford the congestion charge and everyone will be better off.
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Totally disagree. If you think it's an injustice if some people aren't willing or able to provide valuable enough labor in the labor market to entitle them to consume enough scarce goods and services, then we can have a social safety net. But it's economically incoherent to argue that the specific dollars that we collect when we auction off access to a fundamentally scarce service (even if it's a government provided service like roads) need to be handed to people who don't use the service.
I'm 100% on board with not screwing with the price signal in an effort to try to redistribute wealth (if you've ever listened to EconTalk, you should be convinced of that), but this isn't that.
The core observation is that when I sell a scarce good, say an apple, to you, I'm giving something up - the ability to use the apple. But what I'm getting in return for giving that up is money. That's what makes it an exchange.
In this case, that two-sided thing isn't happening. The people who are giving up the ability to use a scare resource are not getting something in exchange for it. It's weird, because the process is being mediated by a gov't who gets to 1) set the quantity of roads, and 2) set the one-sided price for them. So, it's simply not an actual exchange that follows the normal principles.
Instead, the people who are giving up their ability to use the roads view it as purely an imposition of government choice to force them off the roads, with no benefits (only pure costs) coming their way. Does it need to be the specific dollars that are collected by the congestion tax? Not necessarily. But further fundamental theorizing needs to happen to figure out how to structure the system so that all parties are properly incentivized to desire that the gov't build the efficient number of roads and charges an efficient price for it. Without these incentives done properly, we've already botched the price signal's ability to regulate the number of roads/price for them (it becomes a matter of pure political power), without even having the motive of trying to redistribute wealth! We're already causing the very problem that you're now desperately trying to avoid!
They aren't giving up the ability to use the roads any more than you'd be giving up the right to eat an apple by not purchasing the apple.
Should the apple industry be taxed so that the proceeds can be specifically distributed to people who have chosen not to purchase apples?
They could view it any number of ways, but idiosyncratic views don't make good policy arguments.
That's because it's possible to not purchase the apple.
Roads are not entirely funded by congestion taxes placed on road users, even in this scenario. You can't avoid paying for the road.
The government also used eminent domain to build the roads, which is inherently a non-market activity, and its police powers to control road usage, and central planning to decide where to build the roads. Apple sellers lack this power, and we only give the government the power to do this as part of a bargain which includes the government letting us use the roads.
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In your scenario, whence my right to eat the apple in the first place? It doesn't even make sense to talk about "giving up" a right that never existed.
No. The apple industry is giving up their use of apples in favor of money, so their incentives are properly aligned.
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When the Chinese needed Beijing not to be a smoggy dystopian hellscape for the Olympic games, they barred people from driving on a license plate basis. It's quite the elegant way of handling these sorts of things.
Rationing some scarce, car related resource, based on the licence plate has occured many times.
Ah, well. Fair enough. I'm not old enough to remember the 1970s.
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