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Re:Life Advice: Become a Billionaire by MaxBarraclough on Saturday July 10, 2021 @05:54PM (#27796729)
Why should I assume I would be a better philanthropist billionaire than the next guy? To make a 'greater good' case for becoming a billionaire, this seems like a question we need to explore.

> the odds of becoming a billionaire are low, but it doesn’t matter if you only consider the conditional probabilities. [...] The bet sounds insane to begin with, but at each step you’re taking on a very reasonable level of risk.

I'm still not convinced that it makes self-interested sense to do the risky thing and spin the billionaire roulette wheel i.e. leave a steady well-paying job and try my luck with a start-up. (Ignoring that some people just prefer being in a start-up, and some prefer not being in a start-up.)

The most likely outcome is a significantly reduced personal wealth. There's a vanishingly small probability of vastly increased personal wealth, but as the article acknowledges, this suffers from diminishing returns. It's a question of what statisticians call 'expected value', and it seems unlikely to me that spinning the wheel improves the expected value of the sum of my happiness and life-satisfaction numbers. Even if I increase the expected value of my wealth, the non-linearity will presumably easily outweigh this.

Re:Life Advice: Become a Billionaire by danboarder on Saturday July 10, 2021 @09:35PM (#27797820)
I think you're skepticism is shared by the majority of people. But I think a small fraction of people have the optimism to set and strive for a big goal (eg becoming a billionaire) and an even smaller subset reach that goal. Thus the "1 percent" concept. I like the idea "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take".