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>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. Start a company selling assassinations, and

by feral 14y ago

>Telling entrepreneurs that one class of businesses is more socially correct than others isn't how the world works. Start a company selling assassinations, and the wider world will quickly tell you your business isn't socially correct - you will be shut down. Pyramid schemes are another illegal class of business. There are also businesses that, while legal, do not appear socially useful. There's nothing wrong with disapproving of such businesses. >You never know how or when your product will be used, or who it will help. Your argument is: because businesses can yield unanticipated utility, there is no point reasoning about which business is best to spend time on. Sure, perhaps the cat-pictures business will, through some unexpected turn of events, yield greater social utility than an education startup: Our models of the world are imperfect, and sometimes we mis-predict which actions will be most beneficial. But that doesn't mean we should give up reasoning about what the most beneficial thing to do is. We should still attempt to reason about relative benefits, and act to maximise our expected future utility. Which is not to say we should always "focus on shipping all of extra food to those who are starving". Indeed, maybe some technology that looks trivial will yield huge benefits. So we should definitely spend some time exploring new technologies, to try and catch unexpected windfalls. In order words, we have an explore/exploit tradeoff to make. But: Trading off exploration/exploitation is not the same as just throwing up our hands and saying "do whatever you want, don't attempt to reason about relative utilities". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit

imgabe 14y ago
There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the most likely result is a failed education startup in place of a successful cat pictures business. In terms of relative utility, a successful business is almost always going to be more beneficial to the world than a failed one.
- feral 14y ago
  Right, there's a simplifying assumption of fungibility in my post. In your counter example, you go to the other extreme, where its either a successful but low-social-utility business, or an unsuccessful high-social-utility one. In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success. But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This is just another judgement to make.

by feral 14y ago

imgabe 14y ago

There's an implicit assumption here that entrepreneurial motivation is fungible, that a person who could found a successful cat picture business could also found a successful education startup just as easily. I don't think that's the case. In turning someone away from something they're truly interested in and guilting them into working on a more "serious" business, the most likely result is a failed education startup in place of a successful cat pictures business. In terms of relative utility, a successful business is almost always going to be more beneficial to the world than a failed one.

feral 14y ago
Right, there's a simplifying assumption of fungibility in my post. In your counter example, you go to the other extreme, where its either a successful but low-social-utility business, or an unsuccessful high-social-utility one. In reality, the entrepreneur is going to have to make some tradeoff between likelihood of success (given motivation) and utility of success. But entrepreneurs intuitively make these sort of tradeoffs all the time. This is just another judgement to make.