作者Byrne Hobart和Tobias Huber写的一本关于泡沫和科技进步，以及当下技术发展大停滞的书，讨论的话题很深刻，核心其实是泡沫会十分有助于人类走出当前的技术大停滞时代，迈向更高级的文明。比较深入的探讨了为什么为大停滞，其实是源于人类风险厌恶的本性，而泡沫则是很好的协助人类克服风险厌恶、进入风险偏好的有效工具。这么去看的话，泡沫不仅不是我们要反对的，而是要去尽可能拥抱的了。非常有意义的思考，对于当下酝酿中的AI泡沫时代的投资安排，也十分有意义。照例做些摘要。
Across these disparate cases, we find that step-function improvements follow a J-shaped graph. To everyone but true believers, the initial stages of the endeavor look like wasted effort, but these early attempts ultimately deliver outsized gains. Mass adoption leads to lower incremental costs, which increases the number of viable use cases for a given technology.
刚开始看着浪费时间，没有功用，最后却发现作用巨大，新技术这种类似于J曲线的形态值得注意，切不可一开始因为没用就全盘否定，还是要有长远眼光。
Perhaps even more surprisingly, we find that technological breakthroughs and scientific megaprojects share an underlying dynamic with financial bubbles in one very specific sense: they coordinate behavior to build a complex future. Against the standard view in economics and finance, which holds that speculative financial bubbles are intrinsically negative phenomena, we develop a model of bubbles as innovation accelerators. Ultimately, this book argues that bubbles, properly understood, have been the driving force in escaping economic stagnation, and will drive further advancements to come.
泡沫的作用有点类似于技术突破和国家大工程，都是协调更大范围的资源和智慧来打造更好的未来。
that in fact, only innovation-accelerating bubbles can prevent the apocalypse. Technological innovation is more driven by excess, exuberance, and irrationality than by cost-benefit analyses, rational calculation, and careful and deliberate planning. Reality-bending delusions are underrated drivers of techno-economic progress.
bubbles, by coordinating the large-scale capital allocation that technological breakthroughs require, help us overcome our aversion to risk and open a path to a more advanced and prosperous future—one in which we overcome the existential risk of not making enough progress.
泡沫通过大规模的资源重新分配来协助技术突破得以实现，帮助克服了人类的天生的风险厌恶情绪。当然在中国，我们还有另一个方法，就是政府的大力介入来承担相应的风险，殊途同归。
This new monetary fiat regime had a cascade of effects, including high exchange rate volatility and inflation. More importantly for our purposes, the excessive creation of money enabled by a fiat standard had a profound impact on risk-taking. Because the continuous devaluation of fiat currencies increases what economists call time preferences—the preference for immediate utility and short-term consumption over delayed utility and long-term investment—there was a general discounting of the future. ”
Conversely, the less the supply of a monetary medium gets inflated, the more we can expect it to maintain or even appreciate in value over time. This reduces our uncertainty about the future. The future gets less discounted, and long-term planning and investment becomes more likely.
低利率其实是在鼓励长期投资——更低的机会成本。
Another key factor for risk aversion is a phenomenon we’ve already mentioned: demographic change. The more societies age, the fewer risks they take. As a result, capital is less likely to fund novel ideas simply because so much of it lies dormant. Finally, the low birth rate means that younger workers come at a premium, driving up wages and reducing spending elsewhere, including on innovation.
人越来越不愿意投资未来，这是人性，所以老龄化社会的最大挑战之一是对长期投资的缺乏。
The managerial drive to quantify, control, and eliminate risk has had a disastrous impact on science.
After 1971, the divergence between hyper-financialized markets and the real economy accelerated, ushering in an age of artificial wealth and value fueled by exploding debt and leverage.”
人类对风险的逃避或者执着于消除风险，实际上却是科学上的灾难。71年之后的资本市场发达和实体经济脱节，带来的是债务和杠杆驱动的财富虚假繁荣。
So poorer countries end up with higher savings rates used, through many layers of indirection, to finance higher consumption in rich countries. This pattern has a profound effect on societal time preferences, which come to reflect a declining concern for the future.
穷国却高储蓄实际是去资助了富裕国家的消费。这个模式对社会的时间偏好有巨大影响。
Low interest rates are not used to invest in risky, long-term R&D but for large-scale share buybacks and dividends, which are essentially a way for company management to ask shareholders if they have any ideas for good investments.
低利率环境下公司用大量资金去回购股票或分红而不是去投资研发实际上是管理层问股东们是否有更好的投资机会。
Consequently, “creative destruction without destruction,” “capitalism without bankruptcy,” and “risk without consequences” essentially amount to Christianity without Hell. And since Hell is not an attractive political pitch, the technocratic policies of perpetual risk suppression constantly create more systemic risk the harder they attempt to annihilate it. Naturally, eternal stagnation is preferred over economic collapse, which is not a political option. Stagnation, in other words, is a choice.
没有破坏的破坏性创新，就像没有地狱的天堂，结果就是选择停滞，而不是崩溃后再来一遍。
What explains this decline in scientific innovation? We identify three trends. First is the tendency toward scientific risk aversion and conformity: The current institutional system that organises scientific research is structured in a way that rewards and instills orthodoxy. Second is the ever-expanding bureaucratisation of science, which has resulted in the disturbing finding that researchers spend more than 40 percent of their time compiling and submitting grant proposals. These two trends are accompanied by an increasing drive toward the third: hyper-specialisation.
科学家的过于顺从及风险规避、科研上的官僚风气以及过度的专业化分工导致目前科研上的突破越来越少了。
Most studies in these fields cannot be reproduced or replicated. In 2015, an attempt to reproduce 100 psychology studies was able to replicate only 39 of them; 120 a large 2018 study that aimed to reproduce prominent studies in psychology found that only half of the 28 could be replicated. An attempt to reproduce peer-reviewed and widely cited research published in the leading journals Nature and Science concluded that only 13 of the 21 results could be reproduced.
大部分的科研成果无法被复现，这就是当前的现状。所以对于已发表的论文也必须要小心啊。
While we can debate whether we should fund large-scale research projects on telepathy, time portals, or the reverse engineering of alien technology, it’s clear that what is needed in science is what is needed in technology, in business, and in our culture more generally: a fundamental reorientation toward risk-taking. All of the symptoms of stagnation, stasis, and decline we’ve discussed in this chapter are caused by a rise in societal risk intolerance, which has resulted not only in an increase in homogeneity and uniformity but also in a crisis of meaning and a failure to build a definitive, optimistic vision of the future.
Right Thing have be done。全社会都需要有主动拥抱风险的转向。
If our age is defined by stagnation and stasis, which results from a generalized form of risk intolerance that permeates all of society, how can we break free and reach escape velocity for accelerated technological and scientific progress? In a word: bubbles. This might seem counterintuitive at first, since bubbles have funded all kinds of gadgets, fads, and technologies that faded into irrelevance after they burst. But bubbles are among the most powerful mechanisms we have to boost risk tolerance. They foster precisely the kinds of futuristic and optimistic visions we need in order to arrest and reverse stasis and decline. Under the right conditions, they are ideal exit ramps from the Great Stagnation.
泡沫是新技术的最大资助力量，也是对抗人类天生害怕风险、规避风险的最好武器，也只有通过一场大泡沫才能调集全部力量去支持那些能带我们走出停滞时代的技术。
At the core of an innovation-accelerating bubble is a definite vision of the future that drives extreme commitment from investors and other participants. A bubble can be a collective delusion, but it can also be an expression of collective vision. That vision becomes a site of coordination for people and capital and for the parallelization of innovation.
泡沫既可以看成是一个集体的幻象，也可以理解为一场集体愿景。
The case of railroads points to another potential benefit: Bubbles often have positive spillover effects. What’s especially powerful about these bubbles is that they literally change how we see the world. The concept of something happening “eight minutes past the hour” was pointless in a pre-railroad world but was essential for coordinating train transfers. The digital revolution is defined by even more fine-grained slices of time.
泡沫有强大的溢出效应。
By now, a few economists and economic historians have come to the same conclusion, recognizing the role of bubbles in technological innovation. Still, no one has gone so far as to suggest that bubbles offer a way out of stagnation. If, as we’ve argued, the source of the Great Stagnation is societal risk aversion, then the only way out is to promote a culture that nurtures risk-taking, embraces uncertainty and failure, and pursues aggressive funding of ambitious projects. As mechanisms that stimulate collective risk-taking, nurture extreme enthusiasm and commitment, and excessively fund trial-and-error innovation, bubbles are uniquely suited to incubate and accelerate future technologies that can break through stagnation and accelerate growth.
泡沫不仅有正外部性，也是协助人类逃离大停滞的最好工具。
The most value-destructive phase of a mean-reversion bubble arrives at the moment when belief and reality have diverged yet belief is still able to drive perceptions of reality. By contrast, inflection-driven bubbles have fewer harmful side effects and more beneficial long-term effects. In an inflection-driven bubble, investors decide that the future will be meaningfully different from the past and trade accordingly. The dramatic nature of inflection bubbles has important effects. As a first-order matter, asset prices tend to be volatile because investors’ estimates of potential profits from a new product can be extremely variable.
拐点式泡沫往往利大于弊。
Since there is no middle ground during an inflection bubble, prices are set by trades between the most optimistic investor and the most committed short seller. In theory, different market participants can reach a middle ground because they debate the probabilities—perhaps one investor thinks fully autonomous cars run by Uber have a 5 percent chance of happening and another thinks the odds are more like 10 percent. But in practice, bubble-driven parallelization strikes again: Many different things have to happen for the thesis to be correct, and their odds of happening are correlated because of the bubble dynamics. So the probability calculation ends up being that one side.
The fundamental utility of inflection bubbles comes from their role as coordinating mechanisms. When one group makes investments predicated on a particular vision of the future, it reduces the risk for others seeking to build parts of that vision.
拐点泡沫没有中间状态，要么信，要么不信。其基础是协调机制，让坚信者持续投入。
An important differentiator is that participants in good bubbles tend to talk about the ways in which everyone’s behavior will be transformed in the future. In contrast, participants in bad bubbles often talk about how a new version of an existing product will be more widely available and slightly better than the previous one.
很有意思的观察，好的泡沫带来大的行为改变，比如当下的AI，坏的泡沫仅仅是微改进。
But such behavior also functions as a coordination mechanism. Since good bubbles function by aligning people and capital to work on the right problem at the same time, FOMO helps ensure everyone gets on board at once. If a bubble only excites people who are early in their careers, it won’t be able to marshal the institutional and financial resources necessary to reach fruition. If a bubble only grabs the attention of people who are late in their careers, it will end up constrained by existing paradigms. If a bubble excites speculators but not entrepreneurs, it will bid up assets without building anything. If a bubble only convinces founders to act, it will be starved for capital. All of these people need to participate in the bubble at the same time, and FOMO can bring them together.
泡沫发挥作用的伟大协调机制：如何吸引大家都参与进来，一级市场这个游戏已经很娴熟了。
Today, the dynamic of parallelization is unfolding in nuclear fission and fusion. The increased inflows of capital, talent, and interest over the past few years have parallelized and supercharged the development of different nuclear fusion reactor and confinement prototypes as well as novel fission designs, including fast-neutron reactors and small modular reactors.
接下来的泡沫热点可能就是核聚变了。
One reason bubbles succeed is because they create an economic cluster that occurs in time rather than space. The existence of the bubble convinces people to work on specific projects right now rather than risk missing out. And, like traditional innovation clusters, bubbles encourage deep specialization. You don’t have to build the full stack if you know that every layer is being worked on by someone else; instead, you can focus on the layer you know best. Finally, the bubble’s combination of long-term certainty (“This will happen”) and short-term radical uncertainty (“I have no idea how to make this work right now”) creates an environment that incentivizes information sharing.
泡沫是时间上的产业集群，不是空间上的产业集群。这个很有趣，也很深刻。
A bubble also provides its participants with a narrative arc. It has a beginning, full of excitement and promise; a middle, comprising a series of difficult challenges; and an end, in which the original promise of the bubble has been partly refuted and partly fulfilled, at which point participants must find a new vision to pursue. As William Blake writes, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” That’s true of bubbles, too. The end result of the voracious process of information creation and assimilation the bubble entails is that participants exhaust most of the initial uncertainty, leaving behind a stable finished product, new knowledge, and hopefully more wisdom.
过度之路通向智慧之宫，非常哲理的话语。所谓矫枉必须过正。
The Manhattan Project had all the trappings of a successful bubble: risk tolerance from institutions with immense capital and resources; a clear sense of urgency; concentrated talent, fostering an internal intellectual supply chain producing new cognitive tools for solving emerging problems; massive parallelization, with multiple institutions working toward the same goals; and the perception of competition—from Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and indirectly from other parts of the US war machine that could put the money and manpower toward more immediate goals. The Manhattan Project was also bubble-like in that it featured high uncertainty, plenty of waste, many mistakes, and divergent concerns. Some participants were motivated by scientific curiosity, others by geopolitics, but the project focused all of them on the same endpoint. And finally, like many other bubbles, the Manhattan Project had significant spillover effects, enabling new technologies quite apart from the project’s goal and leading to innovations upon innovations.
曼哈顿计划能够成功通过泡沫实现驱动的有效分析。
“The greatest risk of manned space missions is, as one former NASA astronaut put it, “not death” but “not to explore at all.” 190 Worse still is the idea that one might miss out on being the first to reach the next frontier—FOMO on a cosmic level”
放弃探索而不是死亡给人类带来的风险更大——人类的使命之一可能就是尽可能探索未知。
In 1954, for instance, Bell Labs built TRADIC (Transistor Digital Computer), the first entirely solid-state computer, using transistors rather than vacuum tubes. It was an impressive proof of concept but an expensive one, costing 20 times as much as a traditional computer. The difference was reliability. Vacuum tubes had a high failure rate, so a vacuum-tube-based computer process involved workers scurrying around the system with carts full of spare vacuum tubes, looking for failed components to hot swap. By contrast, TRADIC was a computer that would run more or less indefinitely as long as it was built right the first time. Despite these advantages, and the future advances it anticipated, the high cost of the TRADIC made it irrelevant for practical purposes.
成本虽然高出20倍，但更高的可靠性带来的是正向收益。
This is a common feature of new technologies. The initial killer app may have little to do with the ultimate use case, but it provides enough demand to scale production (and convince the creators they’re on to something). The first use case for the steam engine, for example, was pumping water out of flooded mines, not transportation.
新技术的特征之一就是一开始的用法和最终大规模的用法可能完全不一样。这也是容易被我们忽视的。
Fairchild and Intel pioneered some of the management techniques that would later become standard in the chip industry. For example, when there were competing options for performing a task, such as for a potential chip design or a production method, the companies would often assign independent teams to work on multiple models. Whichever one worked best would be implemented at scale. This created some waste and duplication, but it also meant that launches weren’t delayed; parallelizing the process ensured that something would be ready by the target launch date. This approach was similar to the Manhattan Project’s decision to pursue numerous sources of fissile material in case one of them didn’t work; if the goal was to deliver something that worked as quickly as possible (and if the consequences of success were extreme enough), waste was an acceptable price for making that happen.
多组平行研发的策略。
In other words, Moore’s law was a coordination mechanism: If everyone in the industry thought it was true and acted as if it would stay true, then it was true, at least until processors reached physical limits that made further advances impossible. Moore’s law was a backward-looking observation that transformed into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
摩尔定律的自我实现机制：如果大家相信，就能去实现。
The industry’s barrier to entry began to gradually rise as capital equipment became more expensive. In his book The Big Score, Michael S. Malone estimates that the cost of the capital equipment necessary to start economically manufacturing chips, which was around $250,000 in the late 1960s, rose to $100 million by the early 1980s. By 1990, Intel was spending $800 million on each fabrication facility. Just a decade later, that figure had skyrocketed to $5 billion. Today, new cutting-edge facilities can cost $15 billion or more.
芯片制造的资本成本急剧攀升。门槛也越来越高。
These early days were characterized by extreme boom and bust cycles. Oil went for $16 a barrel in 1859, under 50¢ in 1861, and $8 in 1864. Fortunes were made and lost in months. Meanwhile, as oil exploration moved further afield, costs rose relentlessly. Deeper drilling and exploration in more hostile climates bore higher costs. In the very early days before internal combustion engines were in widespread use, transporting drilling equipment to a desert meant loading up horses and mules with supplies. But the extreme effort proved worth it. Once refined into kerosene and burned in lamps, oil became one of the most important natural resources in the world.
早期石油行业的巨大泡沫。
Both methods would hit peak production in the first year, but where a conventional oil well would still be producing at 50 percent six years later, a fracked well would lose up to 80 percent of its production by year three. This shorter time frame meant fracking was a more flexible and predictable source of energy profits. In contrast, conventional oil companies were saddled with decisions they’d made several years prior, which left them vulnerable to price changes. They could find that the investments they’d underwritten at $100 a barrel were delivering most of their oil at $50.
When fracking companies describe their business, they often use the term “manufacturing” rather than “oil exploration.” This is a public relations decision, but it’s also a fairly accurate descriptor. Fracking was able to achieve more predictable returns and economies of scale than standard drilling.
压裂技术带来更快的回报机会，决策更短，成本更低。因此压裂让油井决策更接近于制造业，而不是高峰线勘探了。
“It is Bitcoin’s immutable and hard-coded deflationary monetary policy that makes it a vertical or zero-to-one innovation, to use Peter Thiel’s terminology. In contrast to horizontal innovations, which incrementally modify and improve existing technologies, zero-to-one innovations are radically new, breakthrough technologies. Deflationary policy aligns the incentives of all network participants, drives up value, ensures security, and enables network effects. This suggests that the innovation central to Bitcoin’s success is not primarily technical but social; Bitcoin is as much a social bubble as it is a financial bubble or a technological achievement.”
But with each correction, the technological utility of Bitcoin as a trusted keeper of value, and its effectiveness as an inflater of social bubbles, only increases. And while its USD-denominated price can drop in the short term, Bitcoin’s value has, when measured over its existence, not only increased, but every crash that Bitcoin survives is a testament to the network and the cryptocurrency’s robustness
比特币是社会性泡沫，回调即是机会。
One of Girard’s core insights is that our desire is mediated by the desire of others. Desire and imitation spread through markets like a contagion. This happens at many levels.
Extending this line of thinking, bubbles absorb the suppressed, uncontrollable, and excessive desires circulating within society. The irrepressible drive to take risks or achieve greatness (megalothymia) and the desire of the desire of the other (mimesis) crystallize in the configurations of exuberant phases of speculative bubbles.
欲望不知来自于自身，也很容易受到他人的影响。泡沫吸收了巨大的人类欲望。
These cyclical swings in perception are so common that people talk about the “magazine cover indicator,” the observation that big trends often reverse soon after they get major media attention. Bull markets in stocks and oil, for example, were presaged by infamous magazine covers, including Business Week’s “The Death of Equities” in 1979 and The Economist’s “Drowning in Oil” in 1999.
重大趋势得到媒体的封面报道之后就会逆转。
From the outside, bubbles seem to instantiate a repeatable and predictable pattern: They start with a novel idea or core technology that attracts extreme commitment and excessive investment from early adopters, which results in a speculative mania that is often followed by a crash. From the inside, however, the bubble seems to bring about a leap forward in time. The introduction of a novel idea or the invention of a cutting-edge technology results in the conversion of new adopters and the idea or invention’s widespread diffusion—which has, according to believers, the potential to actualize the envisioned future, a sort of techno-scientific Kingdom of Heaven.
Mathematically, the unsustainable growth contained within a bubble can be identified by the power law finite-time singular growth that is decorated by oscillations in the logarithm of time. Put simply, in a bubble, temporality radically changes.
In a bubble, the future breaks into the present. Like the time-traveling cyborgs in the Terminator franchise, every successful technology entrepreneur is, in a sense, a time traveler who arrives from the future and brings strange new devices (or, at least, a rough blueprint and an urgent desire to instantiate it) to the present.
泡沫模式：新概念、大量投资的开始。泡沫将未来带回现在。
By extracting the defining characteristics of innovation-accelerating bubbles, we’ve identified five overarching traits shared by all of the technologies and megaprojects we’ve covered: Definite optimism and constrained vision；Fear of missing out (FOMO) and you only live once (YOLO) dynamics；Excessive risk-taking and over-investment；Parallelization and coordination；Reflexivity and hyperstition
泡沫的五大特征。
An alternative approach is to get involved when a bubble seems to be taking off. Here, it’s worth noting that a bubble can continue to grow long after the first point at which people deem it a bubble.
If you think you’ve identified a bubble, what should you do? One possibility is to participate in purely financial terms. It’s not hard to find examples of people who have profited from doing this. The legendary trader George Soros has said, “When I see a bubble forming, I rush in to buy, adding fuel to the fire.
看到泡沫之后就应该冲进去，而不是躲开。
Whether through cyborgs, robots, or software, these scientific fields converge on the perennial theme of the immortality of the soul. All of these supposedly secularized and hyper-rational technologies are deeply intertwined with notions of transcendence and spirituality. A trinity of technological breakthroughs—the beginning of the manned spaceflight program, the advent of artificial intelligence, and the discovery of the structure and function of DNA—all had transcendent significance for many of the key figures involved. The religious or spiritual impetus was, for many technologists and scientists, one of the main motivations to take the massive risks and make the sacrifices these projects often demanded. Such spiritual and religious energy is one of the pure manifestations of thymos, the ancient Greek concept of “spiritedness.”
灵魂不朽才是永恒主题，各行业的创新几乎都汇聚于此。
What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature’s intrinsic superabundance. There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits. Scarcity isn’t a built-in feature of our world; the universe produces more energy and offers more matter than we could ever desire to capture, convert, and consume.
真正稀缺的不是资源和主意，而是解锁自然的勇气。
In a 2018 talk, Peter Thiel asked, “What aspects of technology are actually charismatic? Where there is a good story—[a] story about technology making the world a better place. It needs to be real, needs to be a viable business, but at least [it needs to be] something that inspires people, motivates people in the company, and has a transcendent mission.” Another name for what Thiel here refers to as “charismatic technologies” is the sublime.”
It is this transcendence that reintegrates the future into the present and ignites the thymotic intensity and Promethean spirit that is necessary for radical technological innovation and the restoration of dynamism. Bubbles create the reality-distortion field that the transcendent mission requires. Only by embracing a radically different future with singular commitment and sacrifice, often in defiance of the many, can we release ourselves from stagnation, stasis, and decline. This is our transcendent mission.
真正的好技术：拥有超越世俗的使命、给世界带来更好的未来。