I suppose you can go and shit on people trying to replicate scientific work, and telling them, extremely reductively, “Well your almost as big number isn’t as big, so fuck you,” like a soccer ultra comparing their team’s score of 3 versus the opposing team’s score of 2, as though the only question that matters is “Whose Soccer Team is Best?” Is that even the right question to ask?

People who actually do research, they don’t just look at the absolute comparison of published numbers! Do you think that’s how research is done, by chasing whatever has the biggest number? No repeat innovator does that.

It’s an interesting collision of world views for sure. This is a social media forum for a venture capital firm. They’d hate for anyone to discover that the numbers don’t tell the whole story, that actually everybody starts at zero, and that being second, because of the price premium put on first, is a huge opportunity. So even in some narrow, cynical interpretation, your point of view would lose people a ton of money. But I don’t really know anything about that.