There’s actually surplus of high-risk-high-reward people in the world, to the point where people would sacrifice the $500 million for a 1% chance of getting $40 billion. They’re not just paying the extra fee for the possibility of becoming a billionaire and lording over everyone else, they’re also paying another even more extra fees fee to compete against other people who are competing for that slot, due to the sheer number of people who psychologically want to become a billionaire and lord over everyone else.
In other words, it becomes a lottery.
Even worse, in fact, because the real world has information asymmetry and is rigged to scam in more complicated ways than lotteries. Such as data poisoning and perimeterless security.
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.
There’s actually surplus of high-risk-high-reward people in the world, to the point where people would sacrifice the $500 million for a 1% chance of getting $40 billion. They’re not just paying the extra fee for the possibility of becoming a billionaire and lording over everyone else, they’re also paying another even more extra fees fee to compete against other people who are competing for that slot, due to the sheer number of people who psychologically want to become a billionaire and lord over everyone else.
In other words, it becomes a lottery.
Even worse, in fact, because the real world has information asymmetry and is rigged to scam in more complicated ways than lotteries. Such as data poisoning and perimeterless security.
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.