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Nassim Taleb makes a good argument in Fooled By Randomness that the best way to maximize the expected value of your net worth is to go into dentistry. But this

• nandemo 14y ago
  Hmm, I don't think that's a fair representation of what Taleb wrote. Dentistry is just a profession he chose to illustrate his point. A stereotype. And the point is not so much the high expected value of a dentist's income, it's the very low variance of that income, i.e. a dentist's lifetime earnings are pretty much predictable within a certain range. He could have said "train conductor" and it would still be true. Of course, dentist has the added merit of allowing you to get moderately rich. But the real distinction is between dentistry vs. fiction writing or entrepreneurship, fields where the difference between #1 and #10 can be an order of magnitude. I suppose Taleb's caveat here would be that while a table of past results can be very useful for someone working in insurance or logistics, they are not so useful or are even harmful if we're talking about startups. Until the other day, the largest exit in the "web startups for sharing pics" category was (say) $50 million, then the next day we saw a $1 billion acquisition.