I think you mean hypocritical.

To answer: no, and even if it was a “yes” it wouldn’t affect the argument I was making. I’ll explain.

I was wondering how long it would take for this kind of meta-critique would pop up. Meta critiques are interesting: some people use them as zingers, hoping to dismantle someone else’s entire position. But they almost never accomplish that because they are at a different level of argument: they aren’t engaging with the argument itself.

Meta-critiques are more like an argument against the person crafting the argument. In this sense, they function not unlike ad hominem attacks while sneakily remaining fair game.

Lastly, even if I was a hypocrite, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that I was wrong — it would simply make me inconsistent in the application of a principle.

I don’t interpret the above as mean-spirited comment, but it does miss the point of the example I gave; namely, people second-guessing a market (or information heavily influenced by markets, like a new funding round) tend to lose. (Of course there are examples in the other direction, but they are less common and do not deserve equal emphasis.)

In general, a market synthesizes more information than any one individual, and when they operate well it is unlikely for an individual is going to beat them.

This is a well known general pattern, so if someone wants to argue in the other direction, they need to be ready to offer very strong evidence and reasoning why the market is wrong — and even when they do, they’re still probably going to be wrong.

> Google also bought Motorola for 12 billion and Microsoft bought Nokia for 7 billion. Those weren't success cases.

A lot of that was patent acquisition rather than trying to run those businesses so it's hard to say a success or not.

I see what you are getting at, but it is important to understand the context for my example and the argument I’m making.

I’ve explained various points at length in other comments: (i) why I selected this example (simply to show that folk wisdom or common sense is less reliable than market-driven valuations) (ii) how a funding round is influenced by markets even though it isn’t directly driven by a classic full market mechanism.

Something I haven’t said yet would be a question: how can an outsider rigorously assess the error in a funding round or acquisition? To phrase the question a different way: what price or valuation would an oracle assign based on known information?

One might call this ex-ante rationality. Framing it this way helps remove hindsight bias; for example, a subsequent failure doesn’t necessarily mean it was mispriced (sp?) at the time.

You seem to think that one selected analogy proves that there’s no other explanation by which something is sensible?

Example: I could also make up dozens of reasons why something permitted by the laws of physics seems ridiculous.

You are just making up nonsense.