The Silicon Valley is such a weird place. I’ve never been, but from everything I hear, many people and companies there have really strange ideas about the world. Sometimes it’s entertaining, but on some fundamental level, also very sad. The stereotypical example would be something like a software engineer who is absolutely convinced that his latest startup idea will absolutely transform the world, and apparently investors agree because they throw hundreds of millions of dollars at him in funding… Only for it to turns out to just be an overpriced juicer:
The internet has had a field day this week making fun of an internet-connected juicer called the Juicero. It was supposed to provide farm-fresh ingredients and save people the hassle of having to buy, clean, and cut up their own fruits and vegetables.
But a Bloomberg investigation revealed that you didn’t actually need the company’s $399 device to squeeze juice out of the company’s $8 bags of fruits and vegetables. Bloomberg interviewed Juicero investors who were dismayed that they’d sunk millions of dollars into an apparently useless gadget.
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The fact that Juicero has managed to raise $120 million to build an over-engineered juicer says a lot about the state of Silicon Valley today. There’s now so much money sloshing around San Francisco’s technology world that even seemingly outlandish ideas can attract lavish funding.
As a pure comedic distillation of this idea, I find Scott Alexander’s “A Bay Area house party” short story series absolutely hilarious, in the same way as the TV show Silicon Valley. Anyway, here is an excerpt from one, titled Another Bay Area House Party:
“I’m working on reversing dementia and cognitive decline,” says Alice. “You know, the amyloid hypothesis seems pretty debunked now, but nobody’s really come up with a new paradigm. My theory is - you know how sometimes you hear a really catchy song, and it’s in your head for days? And how sometimes you’re doing something else, and you suddenly realize that the song has been playing in a loop in your head for the past hour without you even thinking about it?”
“Yeah, that happens to me all the time.”
“Well, my theory is that this never really stops. You hear a catchy song, it runs in a loop in your brain, and even when you consciously forget about it, there are still some brain cells dedicated to looping it, all the time. Over time you learn more and more catchy songs, and more and more of your brain is devoted to looping them. By the time you reach 70 or 80, maybe half of your brain is playing jingles from old commercials again and again, and you don’t have that much left to think with.”
It’s really difficult to combine “knowledgeable and clever” with “complete lunatic” and result in hilarity, but for me, this does exactly that. I hope you enjoy!