There&#x27;s a fourth possibility:<p>4. Companies increasingly occupy Extremistan, where a large portion of their financial performance comes from one-off, Black Swan events.  Both the GAAP and non-GAAP numbers are true but useless; the future cash flows of the company depend upon unforeseeable events in the future.<p>The description that the article gives of the non-GAAP results supports this.  Take, for example, a lawsuit against the company that results in a $5B judgment, payable out over many years to survivors of an environmental disaster.  GAAP results include this lawsuit, non-GAAP results exclude it.  Which more closely represents the future financial performance of the company, from the POV of a long-term value investor?  Well, that depends whether there will be future lawsuits like this one.  It depends whether the verdict will be reversed on appeal.  It depends how many survivors survive.<p>The same goes for things like severance pay and patent lawsuits.  Increasingly, it also applies to &quot;normal&quot; business, things like product introductions and the price of oil.<p>In Zero to One, Peter Thiel mentions (and decries) that an increasingly large portion of America is adopting an &quot;indefinite&quot; worldview, where the future cannot be known and it&#x27;s futile to try to predict it.  I&#x27;m not sure folks really understand the potential implications of this shift.  Does &quot;investing&quot; have any meaning when the assumption is that returns will be dictated by large, random events?  Does &quot;meaning&quot; have any meaning?  What does it even mean to be rational, when reason is a tool we use to <i>predict</i> and our assumption is that events are unpredictable?