In the links you referenced Eliezer Yudkowsky argues against applying the outside view for the singularity and AI foom. His argument is that the singularity is like nothing we've seen before, and so while there are many applicable outside views, in none of them is the analogy between the particular event being considered and others in the reference class compelling.
In contrast, you are making an argument about startups, which have already been done many times, and are encouraging others to do something in the pre-existing reference class. This is exactly the domain of applicability for outside view arguments and Eliezer Yudkowsky's counterarguments are inapplicable.
My response will just lead to 'reference class tennis', which is why I think that for the purposes of having a conversation, we should take the inside view.
I think that people are getting too attached to my 80-90% success rate claim, and impulsively arguing that it's wrong. My intentions in this article (that I thought were pretty clear) are just to get a conversation going about the components, work towards agreeing on those, and then maybe try to guess at what the resulting success rate will be.
My motivation behind this post stems from Aumann's agreement theorem. It seems that my opinions on startups differ from most of the rationality community, so I want to share my thoughts, and hear your thoughts, so we could reach a better conclusion.
I think that if you're smart and hard working, there's a pretty good chance that you achieve financial independence within a decade of the beginning of your journey to start a startup. And that's my conservative estimate.
"Achieve financial independence" only scratches the surface of the benefits of succeeding with a startup. If you're an altruist, you'll get to help a lot of other people too. And making millions of dollars will also allow you the leverage you need to make riskier investments with much higher expected values, allowing you to grow your money quickly so you could do more good.
A lot of this is predicated on my belief that you have a good chance at succeeding if you're smart and hardworking, so let me explain why I think this.
Along the lines of reductionism, "success with a startup" is an outcome (I guess we could define success as a $5-10M exit in under 10 years). And outcomes consist of their components. My argument consists of breaking the main outcome into it's components, and then arguing that the components are all likely enough for the main outcome to be likely.
I think that the 4 components are:
The Idea
Your idea has to be for a product or service (I'll just say product to keep things simple) that creates demand, and can be met profitably. In other words, make something people want (this article spells it out pretty well).
What could go wrong?