Patrick McKenzie: uncertainty

Transcript context

…How much do you worry about video games as a sort of wireheading. Somebody like you were 20-30 years ago, now has access to Factorio. Will they just wirehead themselves to that instead of making a really cool software product? How much should we see this in the productivity numbers? Oh, goodness. I don't know about the productivity numbers. Generally, I do know that Steam keeps a counter of how much I'm playing video games in a year. Knock on wood, I've accomplished a few things in my career. Against that, what was my Steam counter up to? Steam didn't include World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft was at least 1000 hours for me. Factorio recently was 750. If you sum it all over 20 years, I've probably played video games for 4,000-6,000 hours. That's two to three years of professional effort, if one thinks that it trades off directly with professional effort. Do you? Include every single young guy who's a nerd. How much are we worried that a bunch of their productive time is going to video games instead of making the next software business?…

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