3 ms·
If you're one of the smartest people in the world, working in one of the most impactful areas... the posterior probability is more like 90% than near-zero.
by programjames 3y ago
If you're one of the smartest people in the world, working in one of the most impactful areas... the posterior probability is more like 90% than near-zero.
- dekhn 3y agoDepends- for example, duirng the time that Google started up, I was in grad school with a great deal of support for starting biotech companies, but when I looked... even the geniuses were struggling because at the time, biotech companies could take a decade or more to be profitable or fail. It was clear, as we were exiting the late 90s dot com crash that the economy and money for tech was going to come back, and companies that took advantage of rapidly increasing specs on cheap machines (versus buying expensive Suns, DECs, or SGIs) were going to be able to scale to immense amounts of traffic, and deliver ads for profit.
- programjames 3y agoI don't think at that time biotech could be considered very impactful. After all, search engines were literally impacting billions of peoples' lives within a few years, but a new drug would take a decade to get to market, and impact "only" millions of people.