[HN Gopher] Life Advice: Become a Billionaire
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       Life Advice: Become a Billionaire
        
       Author : danboarder
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2021-07-10 20:24 UTC (2 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (applieddivinitystudies.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (applieddivinitystudies.com)
        
       | nonameiguess wrote:
       | > In practice, we can easily generate a reasonable lower bound
       | for the probability. Just take the number of billionaires and
       | divide by a count of the total human population. You end up with
       | a small number, but one considerably larger than 0.
       | 
       | I just got 0.000000354. I guess it's a matter of opinion what
       | counts as "considerably larger than 0," but that's a pretty small
       | chance.
       | 
       | That's really _not_ the lower bound, either. That 's the average
       | probability for all people, but some people's chances are much
       | higher than that. For Jeff Bezos' kids, the chance is nearly 1.
       | That means the chance for other people needs to be lower to come
       | out with the number of billionaires we actually have.
       | 
       | I don't really want to put aside that advice like this
       | necessarily can't scale because the number of people taking the
       | advice changes how effective the strategy can be. In the limit,
       | if every single person on the planet tried to found their own AI
       | tech startup, 0 of them would succeed and humanity would quickly
       | go extinct as we no longer had food because all the farmers quit
       | to found AI startups.
       | 
       | We may or may not need _some_ people trying to become
       | billionaires, but we definitely do not want _all_ people trying
       | to become billionaires.
        
       | caffeine wrote:
       | Excellent article, thank you. It's OK and even rational to be
       | ambitious.
        
       | maverick-iceman wrote:
       | Life advice addendum.
       | 
       | Become a Billionaire in a manner which is so quiet that only the
       | IRS knows that you are one, even better not even them :)
        
       | MaxBarraclough wrote:
       | Why should I assume I would be a better philanthropist
       | billionaire than the next guy? To make a 'greater good' case for
       | becoming a billionaire, this seems like a question we need to
       | explore.
       | 
       | > the odds of becoming a billionaire are low, but it doesn't
       | matter if you only consider the conditional probabilities. [...]
       | The bet sounds insane to begin with, but at each step you're
       | taking on a very reasonable level of risk.
       | 
       | I'm still not convinced that it makes self-interested sense to do
       | the risky thing and spin the billionaire roulette wheel i.e.
       | leave a steady well-paying job and try my luck with a start-up.
       | (Ignoring that some people just prefer being in a start-up, and
       | some prefer not being in a start-up.)
       | 
       | The most likely outcome is a significantly reduced personal
       | wealth. There's a vanishingly small probability of vastly
       | increased personal wealth, but as the article acknowledges, this
       | suffers from diminishing returns. It's a question of what
       | statisticians call 'expected value', and it seems unlikely to me
       | that spinning the wheel improves the expected value of the sum of
       | my happiness and life-satisfaction numbers. Even if I increase
       | the expected value of my wealth, the non-linearity will
       | presumably easily outweigh this.
        
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