Life Advice: Become a Billionaire(applieddivinitystudies.com)
applieddivinitystudies.com
Life Advice: Become a Billionaire
https://applieddivinitystudies.com/billionaire/index.html
13 comments
The advice was not so much advice as it is a goal. The goal is to become a billionaire, that is the action, setting the goal.
Why should I assume I would be a better philanthropist billionaire than the next guy? To make a 'greater good' case for becoming a billionaire, this seems like a question we need to explore.
> the odds of becoming a billionaire are low, but it doesn’t matter if you only consider the conditional probabilities. [...] The bet sounds insane to begin with, but at each step you’re taking on a very reasonable level of risk.
I'm still not convinced that it makes self-interested sense to do the risky thing and spin the billionaire roulette wheel i.e. leave a steady well-paying job and try my luck with a start-up. (Ignoring that some people just prefer being in a start-up, and some prefer not being in a start-up.)
The most likely outcome is a significantly reduced personal wealth. There's a vanishingly small probability of vastly increased personal wealth, but as the article acknowledges, this suffers from diminishing returns. It's a question of what statisticians call 'expected value', and it seems unlikely to me that spinning the wheel improves the expected value of the sum of my happiness and life-satisfaction numbers. Even if I increase the expected value of my wealth, the non-linearity will presumably easily outweigh this.
> the odds of becoming a billionaire are low, but it doesn’t matter if you only consider the conditional probabilities. [...] The bet sounds insane to begin with, but at each step you’re taking on a very reasonable level of risk.
I'm still not convinced that it makes self-interested sense to do the risky thing and spin the billionaire roulette wheel i.e. leave a steady well-paying job and try my luck with a start-up. (Ignoring that some people just prefer being in a start-up, and some prefer not being in a start-up.)
The most likely outcome is a significantly reduced personal wealth. There's a vanishingly small probability of vastly increased personal wealth, but as the article acknowledges, this suffers from diminishing returns. It's a question of what statisticians call 'expected value', and it seems unlikely to me that spinning the wheel improves the expected value of the sum of my happiness and life-satisfaction numbers. Even if I increase the expected value of my wealth, the non-linearity will presumably easily outweigh this.
I think you're skepticism is shared by the majority of people. But I think a small fraction of people have the optimism to set and strive for a big goal (eg becoming a billionaire) and an even smaller subset reach that goal. Thus the "1 percent" concept. I like the idea "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take".
It is strange we don't connect flooding the system with liquidity/bailouts and the creation of billionaires.
For my personal risk preferences I should mostly be a bond investor but we have basically made that impossible. I have to own equities to get any return. Practically everyone does so the people who own giant equity stakes in successful companies are making out like bandits.
Life advise to own a giant equity stake in a successful company is pretty absurd. Why not add be really good looking too?
For my personal risk preferences I should mostly be a bond investor but we have basically made that impossible. I have to own equities to get any return. Practically everyone does so the people who own giant equity stakes in successful companies are making out like bandits.
Life advise to own a giant equity stake in a successful company is pretty absurd. Why not add be really good looking too?
Being a good looking is actually a good advice.
While you can't be born that way you can surely make yourself less pretty then before due to life choices.
While you can't be born that way you can surely make yourself less pretty then before due to life choices.
> In practice, we can easily generate a reasonable lower bound for the probability. Just take the number of billionaires and divide by a count of the total human population. You end up with a small number, but one considerably larger than 0.
I just got 0.000000354. I guess it's a matter of opinion what counts as "considerably larger than 0," but that's a pretty small chance.
That's really not the lower bound, either. That's the average probability for all people, but some people's chances are much higher than that. For Jeff Bezos' kids, the chance is nearly 1. That means the chance for other people needs to be lower to come out with the number of billionaires we actually have.
I don't really want to put aside that advice like this necessarily can't scale because the number of people taking the advice changes how effective the strategy can be. In the limit, if every single person on the planet tried to found their own AI tech startup, 0 of them would succeed and humanity would quickly go extinct as we no longer had food because all the farmers quit to found AI startups.
We may or may not need some people trying to become billionaires, but we definitely do not want all people trying to become billionaires.
I just got 0.000000354. I guess it's a matter of opinion what counts as "considerably larger than 0," but that's a pretty small chance.
That's really not the lower bound, either. That's the average probability for all people, but some people's chances are much higher than that. For Jeff Bezos' kids, the chance is nearly 1. That means the chance for other people needs to be lower to come out with the number of billionaires we actually have.
I don't really want to put aside that advice like this necessarily can't scale because the number of people taking the advice changes how effective the strategy can be. In the limit, if every single person on the planet tried to found their own AI tech startup, 0 of them would succeed and humanity would quickly go extinct as we no longer had food because all the farmers quit to found AI startups.
We may or may not need some people trying to become billionaires, but we definitely do not want all people trying to become billionaires.
Excellent article, thank you. It’s OK and even rational to be ambitious.
thank you
Life advice addendum.
Become a Billionaire in a manner which is so quiet that only the IRS knows that you are one, even better not even them :)
Become a Billionaire in a manner which is so quiet that only the IRS knows that you are one, even better not even them :)
In practice I believe every billionaire has some very strong skills that enabled them to scale their wealth in that way, but those skills had to have been acquired by pursuing more achievable goals along the way. Ultimately they were lucky enough that their skills and assets aligned with growing economic waves which they rode to outsized success. I don't think you can reverse engineer this because every billionaire is a product of a particular time and niche that has already been exploited.
IMHO the better advice for young people is to focus on finding what you are exceptionally good at, and then intently practice and build those skills with short-term goals in mind. As you go, keep an open mind, learn to identify opportunities, say yes a lot, and if you feel you are onto something then go all-in on it long enough to see where it goes.