Raoul589 comments on Procedural Knowledge Gaps - Less Wrong

126 Post author: Alicorn 08 February 2011 03:17AM

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Comment author: Raoul589 13 April 2013 07:03:04AM 1 point [-]

In case it's not clear: I'm not trying to contradict you; I am trying to get advice from you.

Suppose that you got a mysterious note from the future telling you that the demand for home-robotics will increase tenfold in the next decade, and you know this note to be totally reliable. You know nothing else that is not publicly known. What would you do next?

Comment author: gwern 13 April 2013 04:56:08PM 3 points [-]

Do more research. Is this even nonpublic knowledge at all? The world economy grows at something like 2% a year, labor costs generally seem to go up, prices of computers and robotics usually falls... Do industry projections expect to grow their sales by <25% a year?

If so, I might spend some of my hypothetical money on whatever the best approximation to a robotics index fund I can find, as the best of a bunch of bad choices. (Checking a few random entries in Wikipedia, maybe a fifth of the companies are publicly traded, so... that will be a pretty small index.) But I wouldn't be really surprised if in 10 years, I had not outperformed the general market.

Comment author: [deleted] 13 April 2013 05:38:06PM 1 point [-]

I'd advise finding a market bottleneck, like ColTan mining. You'll see any technology that can replace tantalum capacitors from further away than you'll manage to see software or design shifts.

Comment author: MugaSofer 13 April 2013 02:07:10PM -2 points [-]

By "you know this note to be totally reliable" I assume you mean you have a fair idea how it got there (eg you just built a time portal. with the intention of sending through financial advice, and a hand, bearing the same tattoo you have, pushed through with the note) and not that you're psychic and literally know things with 100% certainty? IOW you have a high probability estimate that it's genuine, but not an infinitely high one (seems more realistic and applicable if nothing else.)