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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Why don't more rationalists start startups? - Less Wrong Discussion

-3 Post author: adamzerner 20 January 2014 07:29AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 21 January 2014 03:57:00PM 10 points [-]

Doing a successful startup is hard. Surpassing the default 90% lack-of-major-success rate for experienced startup founders, startup founders who are nephews of VCs, startup founders who impress even VCs, etcetera is hard. The best of our community have not yet demonstrated that they have surpassed this level. It could be that with sufficiently systematic training our community could achieve outsized returns by not just being specific but also acquiring sufficient skill levels of See Through Conventions and Avert Office Politics and Use Conditioning Correctly and Be Really Original and Cooperate With Cofounders and MurphyJutsu and Learn From Others Experience and Be Calibrated and so on. It's not the sort of thing where you can read LW and breeze through it. Your post was downvoted because it displayed a tremendous ignorance of the problem's magnitude, trying to hit a 16-pound nail with a 4-ounce hammer.

Comment author: adamzerner 22 January 2014 03:28:31PM *  1 point [-]

Your post was downvoted because it displayed a tremendous ignorance of the problem's magnitude, trying to hit a 16-pound nail with a 4-ounce hammer.

Sorry if it wasn't clear, but my intentions weren't really to make an argument, they were to open a discussion.

Open

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.

Close

I really mean for this article to be a starting point for discussion. I think that if we outline the components and discuss each one, we'll make a lot of progress in coming to an agreement. So let me know which components you think I omitted, and which components you think I'm mistaken about.

I wanted to attempt to take an Inside View at startup likelihood, and get feedback. So maybe I did start off with a 4-ounce hammer, but the idea was to bulk that hammer up so we could attack a problem that I think has major upside, and that suffers from notable cached thoughts.

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