[First comment was written without reading the rest of your comment. This is in reply to the rest.]
Re: whether a company adds intrinsic value, I agree, it isn’t necessarily counterfactually good, but also that’s sort of the point of a heuristic—most likely you can think of cases where all of these heuristics fail; by prescribing a heuristic, I don’t mean to say the heuristic always holds, instead just that using the heuristic v.s. not happens to, on average, lead to better outcomes.
Serial entrepreneur seems to also be a decent heuristic.
“I don’t mean to say the heuristic always holds”
I understand that, I’m not going that way.
“on average, lead to better outcomes”
That’s what in this case I don’t see. Starting a company entails a large opportunity cost—you can basically not do anything else for a period of time—coupled with a large chance of failing. My intuition is that, as a general advice, it may well be net negative, at least as personal advise.
Now I see that it may well not be net negative in the aggregate if the successful instances more than compensate the failures, so it may be a good community heuristic. Was that your idea?
When I read the post, I interpreted this list as heuristics addressed to individuals, not community heuristics.
[First comment was written without reading the rest of your comment. This is in reply to the rest.]
Re: whether a company adds intrinsic value, I agree, it isn’t necessarily counterfactually good, but also that’s sort of the point of a heuristic—most likely you can think of cases where all of these heuristics fail; by prescribing a heuristic, I don’t mean to say the heuristic always holds, instead just that using the heuristic v.s. not happens to, on average, lead to better outcomes.
Serial entrepreneur seems to also be a decent heuristic.
“I don’t mean to say the heuristic always holds” I understand that, I’m not going that way.
“on average, lead to better outcomes” That’s what in this case I don’t see. Starting a company entails a large opportunity cost—you can basically not do anything else for a period of time—coupled with a large chance of failing. My intuition is that, as a general advice, it may well be net negative, at least as personal advise.
Now I see that it may well not be net negative in the aggregate if the successful instances more than compensate the failures, so it may be a good community heuristic. Was that your idea?
When I read the post, I interpreted this list as heuristics addressed to individuals, not community heuristics.