gwern 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.