And mine is that it sounds like we did do much better than the average tech industry.
Though maybe you/Scott/others have different intuitions than I do about how common it has been for tech folks to make a bunch of money on cryptocurrency. My impression from Scott’s post was that we wouldn’t differ much in our estimates of the numbers, just about whether “15% is way less than 100%” was more salient than “15% is way more than 1% (or whatever the relevant base rate is)”.
I agree, 15% struck me as a huge number. In particular, everyone in the tech industry has had the money to invest over the last several years, while LessWrongers are a lot younger and poorer. More than half of SSC survey responders are students or entry-level employees, and less than half of people well into their careers are in tech. Also, this is still just an online forum, so I wouldn’t expect investment opportunities to spread as contagiously as among people having lunch together at a tech company office every day.
Bottom line: based purely on background demographics, I would have expected at least 5 times as many (as a %) of Silicon Valley people to have made money off crypto as LessWrongers. Based on the 15% result, I’d be surprised if we didn’t do 5 times better.
I wonder if this comes down to personal situation bias. Scott made no money, and he gives us a C. I made enough to donate >$5k in BTC to MIRI, and I’d give us an A- at worst.
And mine is that it sounds like we did do much better than the average tech industry.
Though maybe you/Scott/others have different intuitions than I do about how common it has been for tech folks to make a bunch of money on cryptocurrency. My impression from Scott’s post was that we wouldn’t differ much in our estimates of the numbers, just about whether “15% is way less than 100%” was more salient than “15% is way more than 1% (or whatever the relevant base rate is)”.
I agree, 15% struck me as a huge number. In particular, everyone in the tech industry has had the money to invest over the last several years, while LessWrongers are a lot younger and poorer. More than half of SSC survey responders are students or entry-level employees, and less than half of people well into their careers are in tech. Also, this is still just an online forum, so I wouldn’t expect investment opportunities to spread as contagiously as among people having lunch together at a tech company office every day.
Bottom line: based purely on background demographics, I would have expected at least 5 times as many (as a %) of Silicon Valley people to have made money off crypto as LessWrongers. Based on the 15% result, I’d be surprised if we didn’t do 5 times better.
I wonder if this comes down to personal situation bias. Scott made no money, and he gives us a C. I made enough to donate >$5k in BTC to MIRI, and I’d give us an A- at worst.