I freely admit to not really understanding how shares are priced. To me it seems like the value of a share should be related to the expected dividend pay-out of that share over the remaining lifetime of the company, with a discount rate applied on pay-outs that are expected to happen further in the future (IE dividend yields 100 years from now are valued much less than equivalent payments this year). By this measure, justifying the current price sounds hard.

Google says that the annual dividend on Nvidia shares is 0.032%. (Yes, the leading digits are 0.0). So, right now, you get a much better rate of return just leaving your money in your bank's current account. So, at least by this measure, Nvidia shares are ludicrously over-priced. You could argue that future Nvidia pay outs might be much larger than the historical ones due to some big AI related profits. But, I don't find this argument convincing. Are future pay outs going to be 100x bigger? It would require a 100-fold yield increase for it to just be competitive with a savings account. If you time discount a little (say those 100-fold increases don't materialise for 3 years) then it looks even worse.

Now, clearly the world doesn't value shares according to the same heuristics that make sense to a non-expert like me. For example, the method "time integrate future expected dividend pay outs with some kind of time discounting" tells us that cryptocurrencies are worthless, because they are like shares with zero dividends. But, people clearly do put a nonzero value on bitcoin - and there is no plausible way that many people are that wrong. So they are grasping something that I am missing, and that same thing is probably what allows company shares to be prices so high relative to the dividends.

Even if it actually turns out that "Super human AI will run on computers not much more expensive than personal computers" (which deepseek-r1 made marginally more plausible, but I'd say is still unlikely) it remains true that there will be very large returns to running 100 super human AIs instead of 1, or maybe 1 that's 100 times larger and smarter.

In other words, demand for hardware capable of running AIs will be very elastic. I don't see reductions in the costs of running AIs of a given level being bad for expected NVDA future cashflows. They don't mean we'll run the same "amount of AI" in less hardware, it will be closer to more AI in same amount of hardware.

I no longer see LW as an alternative to academic publishing or Arxiv in the way that I had hoped. My plan was posts that would have the substance of a solid academic paper

Instead, you wrote e.g. a short vague post on politics [LW · GW]. If you don't want to suffer the consequences of negative karma, don't do that. (I think this should have been obvious, or am I wrong here?)

You post about politics, get downvoted, and then complain that the website it unfit to publish solid academic papers? In my opinion, a website where vague posts on politics are welcome would be the one actually unfit to publish solid academic papers.

It's unclear to what extent LW's reader voters know that their votes are silencing or unsilencing other users.

Speaking for myself, I am aware that downvoting can silence the users who came here to make vague political posts, and in my opinion this is system working exactly as intended.

One thing that's unclear is whether removing negative karma comments/posts affects auto rate limits. If I were 8 years younger I would probably be tempted to try this experiment.

Why would you have to be 8 years younger to delete a worthless post?