I don't understand the point of this piece. There is nothing breaking or remotely interesting which we didn't already know.

Mind you I don't particularly care about Aschenbrenner or his fund but it feels to me like typical journalists reporting on hindsight without any sort of skin in the game. "Hhm, how could you be so dumb so as to trust your money to a 22 year old".

Peter Thiel did the same with Zuck and like him or hate him he did pretty well.

If you want to show how smart you are hash your predictions, post them publicly with a commitment to reveal by a certain date and then show the world how this was so obvious in hindsight.

> don't understand the point of this piece

>> What, then, to make of Situational Awareness’s plunge? ...Mr Aschenbrenner was hardly alone in such bets; over 80% of fund managers responding to Bank of America’s latest monthly survey named “long global semiconductors” as the most crowded trade. The big worry is that this trade’s whiplash-inducing reversal will have set other investment firms teetering, too.

If Citadel hadn't stepped in, Situational Awareness may have had to fire sell tens of billions of dollars of assets. Assets others have leveraged positions in. That, in turn, could have triggered margin calls and a potential credit or even bank crisis.

Mostly I found it odd to open with a comparison of hobbit to human ages when it's well known that hobbits can live to 130.

"I don't understand the point of this piece."

Its purpose is entertainment

It highlights the age of the Situational Awareness founder and what he was doing before he started the fund

"There is nothing breaking or remotely interesting which we didn't already know."

It's a weekly column not "breaking news"

The column author shares his perspective on current events and usually reflects on the past. It's unlikely that readers "already know" which current events the columnist will select, what he will write about them, including which comparative history he might reference. As such, it does provide something readers "don't already know", namely, the columnist's views on the current event he has selected. As for "remotely interesting", that's an opinion. Surely this column has a readership that finds the author's writing "remotely interesting"

The Economist does at times try, incorrectly, to predict the future

But that's not what is going on in this column. It's looking backward, not forward

If the parent comment is coming from a 20-something recipient of Silicon Valley VC funding and hoping to profit from an "AI" startup, then perhaps a bias disclosure is in order

If, hypothetically, no predictions were ever shared with the public over the internet, what would that do to Silicon Valley. What would happen to the volume of HN submimssions/comments

> I don't understand the point of this piece. There is nothing breaking or remotely interesting which we didn't already know.

The piece is published in a weekly magazine. It may include some interesting things that nobody knew one week ago.