The overhead of sourcing and dealing with 200 investments is not small: they've only managed to invest $50 billion of their fund. Their minimum check size is $100 million. [1]
[1] https://www.axios.com/softbank-vision-fund-1517515371-c269cc...
It's Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/
Yudkowsky agreed with a small group of economists, and disagreed with the Japanese equivalent of the Federal Reserve. You might think, "The Japanese Federal Reserve has every incentive and resource to be correct about growth policies, and this small group of economists has no insight they don't have," but the story is more complicated than that.
That doesn't apply here.
Of course, an appeal to authority is not a valid method of obtaining new knowledge (an authority would be able to formulate the actual arguments that support it). It is a useful method to defer judgment, however, such as when the authority cannot be expected to come in and explain their reasoning in a Hacker News comment.
I have been through it myself more times than I care to mention. Everyone assumes that the other person has some knowledge they don't know about or has some secret "edge"...they never do.
Amd after ten years or so, I learned that people do weird things for one simple reason: they are fucking stupid. That is it. They won't learn from mistakes. They are overconfident. They are greedy. Intelligence doesn't matter. Money doesn't matter. Whatever, they are just incurably dumb.
And btw: organisations are never well optimised for stuff that matters. Finance is the prime example of this. If I wanted to set fire to $100bn, I would do exactly what SoftBank are doing right now.
I know that everyone here believes in technology and continuing progress into infinity. This is true in some areas, it is not true in finance.
It reminds me of a response I got in a theological debate: “you really think you’re smarter than pastor ABC?” No, I simply agree with the pastors that disagree with him!
SVF is a vehicle to deal with excess liquidity from central banks, who have pushed everyone out on the yield curve by flattening the yield curve. The primary way to flatten the yield curve is by purchasing short to long dated government/municipal bonds, and short to long dated corporate bonds, until none of that looks like an attractive investment (overbidding on bonds makes their ROI lower). These purchases are done with newly created money, which is now in the hands of the prior owners (financial institutions) and also the issuers (governments, mostly investment grade corporations).
Because society itself is not comfortable purchasing riskier assets, at the speed of which the addressable investment landscape demands it, SVF collects this capital and deploys it in riskier private equity. Keeping the money in circulation better than without SVF existing. This behavior is the point of why the central banks dampened the yield curve with new money, to force people to make the money circulate instead of sitting so passively in bank accounts or holding government bonds.
SVF is a reflection of reality, which required the vision of independent people and the assertiveness to form the deals and do it. This is completely independent of acumen deploying large amounts of capital, and should be seen as a natural progression of capital formation. SVF's shouldn't be seen as an outlier in deal size 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, if the money supply is able to continue its expansion at a similar same pace. People will get used to it, ideally wages increase or the benefits of the deal flow reaches a broader population.