3 ms·

the upside to the variable income lifestyle is a relatively small proportion of people living the glamorous lifestyle that Pavlina is selling but the downside i

by andreyf 17y ago

the upside to the variable income lifestyle is a relatively small proportion of people living the glamorous lifestyle that Pavlina is selling but the downside is the much larger number of people who are barely scraping by making ends meet on the same system While this is true, I don't think the assumption that most of the people who end up on top somehow deserve their success and those on the bottom deserve their failures is correct. More to the point, a moral system built on this is is cruel, damaging to one's psyche, and a bad way to motivate people to create things. Alain De Botton gives a very eloquent TED talk about this [1], which is much more interesting than this Black Swan pep talk bullshit. The reality is: in any given attempt at a complicated problem (like most jobs/startups), most failures and successes are for reasons outside of one's control. The world is simply much more complicated than our minds can comprehend. What we can control is how many ways we attempt difficult problems, and this precisely why perseverance plays a much bigger role than intelligence in startup success [2]: because individuals that appear as extraordinarily intelligent don't really understand the world that significantly better than someone of average intelligence. There's a point past which linguistic dialects and the ideas prevalent in one's social circle affect perceived IQ much more than the quality of one's world model. But persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence. 1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtSE4rglxbY 2. http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html

byrneseyeview 17y ago
which is much more interesting than this Black Swan pep talk bullshit. Have you read The Black Swan? It's not a pep talk. It's all about how much of what affects us is out of our control. I suppose one could mope about this, but what Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens. Persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence. Incorrect. If you can generate one more idea than anyone else, you may be worth many times what they're worth--because to someone who desperately needs an idea, they're going to pay a huge premium to get the best person for the job. If you're buying market data in order to make high-frequency trades, the company that gets you information 1% faster isn't worth 1% more. It's worth almost infinitely more, since being the second person in the trade doesn't get you any profit.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- andreyf 17y ago
  Have you read The Black Swan? It's not a pep talk. No, but I've read the wikipedia article, and absolutely despised the tone of this article. That said, calling it "pep talk bullshit" was an emotional response - it's been a long day. What I mean to say is that Taleb is giving bad advice with a lot of confidence and bad "proofs" based on idiotically simple models. For example: Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens That sentence seems to either (a) have a huge gap of basic probability, or (b) contradict itself. First, if "unpredictable" is to mean "low probability of happening", there are several orders of magnitude more "unpredictable" things than "predictable" ones (and that's why they have such a low probability of happening). A better model of "events" and "probability" would consider the key variable correlating to probability of events is specificity - it's highly probable that some planes will crash in the next 10 years. That relatively general event can be partitioned into less probable (but more specific) events. There are more specific events than general events, and each is less probable in proportion to its specificity. If you could know which unpredictable thing were going to happen, they wouldn't be unpredictable anymore. Of course, reality is stranger yet - events aren't all neat subsets and partitions of each other like they are in that model, and predictable varies with probable based on some measure of the accuracy of the world model of the predictor (which, I would argue, is usually pretty bad). Hence, I would argue that predictability doesn't matter much at all (after some point) - evolution and the ability to let go of one seemingly great ideas matters more.

by andreyf 17y ago

byrneseyeview 17y ago

which is much more interesting than this Black Swan pep talk bullshit. Have you read The Black Swan? It's not a pep talk. It's all about how much of what affects us is out of our control. I suppose one could mope about this, but what Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens. Persistence and effort, on the other hand, scales linearly - if you can iterate over 10 ideas instead of 1, you're 10 times as likely to succeed, no matter what your intelligence. Incorrect. If you can generate one more idea than anyone else, you may be worth many times what they're worth--because to someone who desperately needs an idea, they're going to pay a huge premium to get the best person for the job. If you're buying market data in order to make high-frequency trades, the company that gets you information 1% faster isn't worth 1% more. It's worth almost infinitely more, since being the second person in the trade doesn't get you any profit.

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
andreyf 17y ago
Have you read The Black Swan? It's not a pep talk. No, but I've read the wikipedia article, and absolutely despised the tone of this article. That said, calling it "pep talk bullshit" was an emotional response - it's been a long day. What I mean to say is that Taleb is giving bad advice with a lot of confidence and bad "proofs" based on idiotically simple models. For example: Taleb says is to do things that will reward you if the unpredictable happens That sentence seems to either (a) have a huge gap of basic probability, or (b) contradict itself. First, if "unpredictable" is to mean "low probability of happening", there are several orders of magnitude more "unpredictable" things than "predictable" ones (and that's why they have such a low probability of happening). A better model of "events" and "probability" would consider the key variable correlating to probability of events is specificity - it's highly probable that some planes will crash in the next 10 years. That relatively general event can be partitioned into less probable (but more specific) events. There are more specific events than general events, and each is less probable in proportion to its specificity. If you could know which unpredictable thing were going to happen, they wouldn't be unpredictable anymore. Of course, reality is stranger yet - events aren't all neat subsets and partitions of each other like they are in that model, and predictable varies with probable based on some measure of the accuracy of the world model of the predictor (which, I would argue, is usually pretty bad). Hence, I would argue that predictability doesn't matter much at all (after some point) - evolution and the ability to let go of one seemingly great ideas matters more.