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moridinamael comments on Open Thread, January 15-31, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I've been incubating some thoughts for a while and can't seem to straighten them out enough to make a solid discussion post, much less a front page article. I'll try to put them down here as succinctly as possible. I suspect that I have some biases and blindspots, and I invite constructive criticism. In other cases, I think my priors are simply different than the LW average, because of my life experiences.
Probably because of how I was raised, I've always held the opinion that the path to world-saving should follow the following general steps: 1) Obtain a huge amount of personal wealth. 2) Create and/or fund the types of organizations that you believe are likely to save the world.
Other pathways feel (to me) like attempts to be too clever. I admit a likely personal bias here, but it looks like it should be easier to become wealthy by any available means than it is to singlehandedly solve all the world's important problems. If you do not agree with this assessment, I humbly suggest that perhaps you haven't thought long enough about how easy it might actually be to become ultra-rich if you actually set out with that goal in mind. I think that generally speaking very few people are actually trying to become wealthy; most people just try to match their parents' socioeconomic tier and then stop.
Might it not be even more effective to convince others to become ultra-rich and fund the organizations you want to fund? (Actually, this doesn't seem too far off the mark from what SIAI is doing).
I agree completely. I stopped myself short of saying this in my first post because I wanted to keep it succinct. I would go a bit further to suggest that SIAI could be doing more than merely convincing people to take this path. For example, providing trustworthy young rationalists with a financial safety net in order to permit them to take more risks. (One tentative observation I've made is that nobody becomes wealthy without taking risk. The "self-made" wealthy tend to be risk-loving.)
This is likely worth doing, but I am fairly sure that LWers are for the most part not wealthy enough to create this financial safety net. This seems like a concept that is worth a discussion post: what would LWers do if they had a financial safety net?
Any arguments that legitimately push you towards that conclusion should be easily convertible into actual advice about how to become ultra-rich. I think you're underestimating the difficulty of turning vague good-sounding ideas into effective action.
I think there's plenty of available advice on how to become ultra-rich. Just look at the Business section of any bookstore. The problem is that this advice typically takes you from a 0.001% chance of becoming ultra-rich, through sheer lucky accident or lottery, to a 0.1% chance, through strategy and calculated risks.
I'm not arguing that it's not really hard and really improbable. However, folks tend to assess P(becoming wealthy by any means) ~ P(winning the lottery).
What's ultra-rich? This claim isn't saying much unless you quantify it.
Intuitively, I find both your claims - that most people only try to match their parents' tier, and that it's easy to become ultra-rich if you focus on it - to be wrong, but it'd be interesting to see more arguments or evidence in their favor.
I don't know, a billion dollars?
A quick Googling turns up a few papers which suggest that parental expectations largely define a child's level of educational and financial achievement. On a more intuitive level, I can only point out that the clear majority of Americans either don't go to college because their financial ambitions are satisfied by blue collar work, or they go to college in pursuit of a degree with a clear Middle Class career path attached to it. Do you know anybody whose stated goal is to be wealthy, rather than to be a doctor or an engineer or some specific career? I don't.
Personally, I figure I'm not intelligent enough to research hard problems and I lack the social skills to be an activist, so by process of elimination the best path open to me for doing some serious good is making some serious money. Admittedly, some serious student loan debt also pushes me in this direction!
Doesn't becoming very wealthy for the purpose of saving the world (and then actually saving the world) count as singlehandedly solving all the problems?
What I was getting at is that the cognitive effort required to actually solve a Millennium problem may be greater than the cognitive effort of making a billion dollars and hiring a thousand mathematicians to work in Millennium problems.
Who's counting?
Is this a joke? (Serious question, I can't tell. FWIW, I was using "count" as "fit the definition of".)
Partly, but not entirely. I noticed that I was asking myself seriously if that counted, then wondered why it mattered if it fit the definition.