Definitely agree that a good business person needs to be epistemically sound enough to pick good plans. I think the idealized honest business person is something like Nate Soares, separating their ability to feel conviction from their ability to think honestly. But I think that’s beyond most people (in practice, if not in theory). And I think most business ventures, even good ones you have reason for confidence in, would still have a less than 50% success rate. (I think the “switch to overconfidence once you commit” strategy is probably good for most people)
(I do think you can select business ventures that would generate value even if the business ends up folding within a few years, and that an ecosystem that pushed more towards that than random-pie-in-the-sky-with-VC-exploitation-thrown in is probably better. But because of the competitive nature of business, it’s hard for something to end up with a greater than 50% success rate)
[mental flag: I notice that I’ve made a prediction that’s worth me spending another hour or two thinking about, fleshing out the underlying model of and/or researching]
> Eliezer...
Oddly enough I actually have a memory of Eliezer saying both the thing you just referenced and also the opposite (i.e, that he tries a lot of things and you don’t see the ones that don’t succeed, but also that he had a pretty good idea of what he was doing with HPMOR, and while it succeeded better than he expected… he did have a pretty good model of how fanfiction and memespreading worked and that he did expect it to work “at all” or something)
Your recollection about Eliezer seems right to me.
Also I guess you’re right on idealized businessperson vs nearly every actual one. But it’s worth noting that “X is very rare” is more than enough reason for X to be rare among successes.
Definitely agree that a good business person needs to be epistemically sound enough to pick good plans. I think the idealized honest business person is something like Nate Soares, separating their ability to feel conviction from their ability to think honestly. But I think that’s beyond most people (in practice, if not in theory). And I think most business ventures, even good ones you have reason for confidence in, would still have a less than 50% success rate. (I think the “switch to overconfidence once you commit” strategy is probably good for most people)
(I do think you can select business ventures that would generate value even if the business ends up folding within a few years, and that an ecosystem that pushed more towards that than random-pie-in-the-sky-with-VC-exploitation-thrown in is probably better. But because of the competitive nature of business, it’s hard for something to end up with a greater than 50% success rate)
[mental flag: I notice that I’ve made a prediction that’s worth me spending another hour or two thinking about, fleshing out the underlying model of and/or researching]
> Eliezer...
Oddly enough I actually have a memory of Eliezer saying both the thing you just referenced and also the opposite (i.e, that he tries a lot of things and you don’t see the ones that don’t succeed, but also that he had a pretty good idea of what he was doing with HPMOR, and while it succeeded better than he expected… he did have a pretty good model of how fanfiction and memespreading worked and that he did expect it to work “at all” or something)
Your recollection about Eliezer seems right to me.
Also I guess you’re right on idealized businessperson vs nearly every actual one. But it’s worth noting that “X is very rare” is more than enough reason for X to be rare among successes.