Upvoted because I don’t think this tension is discussed enough, even if to refute it.
It strikes me that the median non-EA is more risk averse than EAs should be, so moving non-EA to EA you should probably drop some of your risk aversion. But it does also seem true that the top performing people in your field might disproportionately be people who took negative EV bets and got lucky, so we don’t necessarily want to be less risk averse than them.
^This is a really important and I completely missed this. It’s similar to how the winner of an auction tends to be the type of person who mistakenly spends more than the item was worth to them (or anyone). The most visible EAs (billionaires) could be the winners in a game with massive net loss overall. Crypto is exactly that kind of thing.
Upvoted because I don’t think this tension is discussed enough, even if to refute it.
It strikes me that the median non-EA is more risk averse than EAs should be, so moving non-EA to EA you should probably drop some of your risk aversion. But it does also seem true that the top performing people in your field might disproportionately be people who took negative EV bets and got lucky, so we don’t necessarily want to be less risk averse than them.
^This is a really important and I completely missed this. It’s similar to how the winner of an auction tends to be the type of person who mistakenly spends more than the item was worth to them (or anyone). The most visible EAs (billionaires) could be the winners in a game with massive net loss overall. Crypto is exactly that kind of thing.