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The beauty and tragedy of our culture is the ability to leverage your future for a moonshot. It enables some real treasures to be discovered who can share their

by fnovd 4y ago

The beauty and tragedy of our culture is the ability to leverage your future for a moonshot. It enables some real treasures to be discovered who can share their creations with the world, but each comes with the invisible cost of hundreds and thousands of failures who must "settle" for an average life. The success of the fortunate comes in no small part out of the investment of time, energy, and money from the failures. Young people are the worst at risk-assessment and at thinking through long-term costs, so most will happily alter the shape of their 99%-probability future if it improves the shape of their 1%-future. Dreams are powerful. You can do something you don't care for without making it your life.

ricksunny 4y ago
Twelve years ago I wrote a blog post on exactly that concept of people going after optional disproportionally large gains, where everyone else only see the survivorship bias: "I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike. So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . ." https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.html https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.h... (There's context provided in the post). I probably have some interim updated thoughts about this twelve years on, but nothing conclusive.
- fnovd 4y ago
  "Economic conservatism" is a value-maximizing choice in some ways, but there is also the value of risk-taking as self-actualization. "It's better to have loved and lost," as they say. There is value in being granted the freedom to fail, and even smart risks require a chance of failure; that's why banks and investors exist as they do. The difference is that a teenage individual is far worse at analyzing risk and the consequences of failure while having almost absolute authority over their own direction.

by fnovd 4y ago

ricksunny 4y ago

Twelve years ago I wrote a blog post on exactly that concept of people going after optional disproportionally large gains, where everyone else only see the survivorship bias: "I have to wonder then whether, over many eons, we've evolved the risk appetite required to explore options - i.e. in exploration of new food sources. However, while I would argue that such risk appetite is a superior trait for populations, it may be of net negative value for any particular individual singled out of a population. Because, while a roaring success may benefit that individual as well as the population around him, say, if (s)he found a new food source and also could control its public distribution for his/her benefit, it could also turn out that the exploration fails, and the individual perishes from exposure to whatever risky environment in which he placed himself in the first place. So, extrapolated over many generations of natural selection, this successively repeated scenario would breed individuals into risky-options-seeking automatons, who don't necessarily do so on the net likelihood of their own benefit. In a large population of such risky-options-seekers, some would inevitably succeed, improving the lot of the population, but those that failed would be crossed off the natural selection list, even though the same traits were being exercised in survivors and non-survivors alike. So when it comes to the value of risky-options on the individual basis, I would argue that the jury's still out, and that economic conservatism may be the individual's value maximizing choice after all . . ." https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.html https://walkabout165.blogspot.com/2010/05/its-all-optional.h... (There's context provided in the post). I probably have some interim updated thoughts about this twelve years on, but nothing conclusive.

fnovd 4y ago
"Economic conservatism" is a value-maximizing choice in some ways, but there is also the value of risk-taking as self-actualization. "It's better to have loved and lost," as they say. There is value in being granted the freedom to fail, and even smart risks require a chance of failure; that's why banks and investors exist as they do. The difference is that a teenage individual is far worse at analyzing risk and the consequences of failure while having almost absolute authority over their own direction.