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The_Jaded_One comments on The Growth of My Pessimism: Transhumanism, Immortalism, Effective Altruism. - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is wrong. Human beings are not a pool of identical rational agents competing in the same game from the same starting point aiming for the same endpoint.
If someone took the time to analyze lots of historically important inventors, entrepreneurs, and thinkers, I doubt the important common factor would be that they made fewer mistakes than others.
Yes, you can "outperform" without much difficulty if you consider getting a nice job to be "outperforming" or you change the goalposts so you're no longer trying to do something hard.
I think this depends on reference class and what one means by 'mistakes'. The richest financier is someone whose strategy is explicitly 'don't make mistakes.' (Really, it's "never lose money" plus the emotional willingness to do the right thing, even if it's boring instead of clever.)
I think the heart of the disagreement here is the separation between things that are 'known to someone' and 'known to no one'--the strategies one needs to discover what other people have already found are often different from the strategies one needs to discover what no one knows yet, and both of them are paths to success of varying usefulness for various tasks.
Nope, finance doesn't work like that. The richest financier is one who (1) has excellent risk management; and (2) got lucky.
Notably, risk management is not about avoiding risks (and so, possible mistakes). It's about managing risk -- acknowledging that mistakes will be made and making sure they won't kill you.
So, obviously 'never' is hyperbole on Buffett's part.
I'll buy that value investing stopped working as well because of increased investor sophistication and a general increase in asset prices. As a somewhat related example, daily S&P 500 momentum investing worked up until 1980, and now you need to track more sophisticated momentum measurements. But to quote Cliff Asness (talking about momentum investing, not value investing):
Depends on the investment class. Even Charlie Munger (Warren Buffet's partner) says "If you took our top fifteen decisions out, we'd have a pretty average record."
Yes, even if success in the domain is basically about avoiding mistakes, I imagine that if there are huge winners in the domain they got there by finding some new innovative way to get their rate of mistakes down.
Getting a nice job with a stable relationship, raising children well and having a good circle of friends that you like, indulging your particular tastes is outperforming the average person.
Perhaps what you're talking about is radical outperformance - "being Steve Jobs", changing the world etc.
In my opinion seriously aiming for that kind of life is a massive mistake - there is no recipe for it, those who achieve it do so through extraordinary luck + skill + genetic advantages which cannot be reliably replicated by any method whatsoever.
There are lots of bits and pieces--e.g. the notes outlined above that two billionaires have signed on to.
Since when is a high probability of failure by itself a good reason not to do anything? If you're a rational expected utility maximizer you do things according to their expected value, which means in some cases it makes sense to do things that initially seem impossible.
If you want to wuss out on life and take the path of least resistance, avoid all the biggest and most interesting bosses in the game, and live a life that has little greater challenge or purpose--fine by me. But frankly if that's the case I'll have to tap out out of this conversation, since it's a bad use of my time and I don't really want to absorb the attitudes of people like you, who explicitly state that they're totally uninterested in accomplishing anything meaningful.
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