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polymathwannabe comments on "Follow your dreams" as a case study in incorrect thinking - Less Wrong
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I think you're conflating categories of success that are not directly comparable. While "get a position in an NBA team" is zero-sum, that is, someone must get out for you to get in, other dreams, like "become a platinum-disc soprano", are not zero-sum and do not depend on other people abandoning their other possible choices (apart from the money spent in buying your CD).
Becoming a platinum-disc soprano itself definitely seems zero-sum to me. It derives from popularity, and only so many musicians can be popular enough to sell platinum records because of limited interest from the public and social tipping points. Are you saying that it's not a zero-sum dream because even if you fail you are left with something economically or socially valuable, unlike basketball?
What I meant was that there is not a limited number of slots for platinum-selling singers to occupy. Madame A's sales shouldn't have much of an effect on Madame B's if both are similarly great.
It's a bit fuzzier, sure, but listener attention is not an unbounded resource. Neither are radio play, space on movie and TV soundtracks, slots on Pandora playlists, and so forth. If you become a popular musician, your work's going to be funging against something, and most of that something is probably going to be other musicians' work.
(The rest probably comes out of people's attention budgets more generally, which isn't as narrowly competitive but is no less finite.)
The market for professional basketball viewership (and therefore for players) isn't fixed either, but someone making it to the NBA is much more likely crowding someone else out than expanding the pie.
I'd say the post applies about equally to aspiring platinum-disc sopranos and aspiring NBA players. Both have very low chances of success. Sure, the chances of success are low for different reasons, but that doesn't seem very relevant.