Re:Life Advice: Become a Billionaire
by nonameiguess on Saturday July 10, 2021 @06:53PM
(#27797047)
> In practice, we can easily generate a reasonable lower bound for the probability. Just take the number of billionaires and divide by a count of the total human population. You end up with a small number, but one considerably larger than 0.
I just got 0.000000354. I guess it's a matter of opinion what counts as "considerably larger than 0," but that's a pretty small chance.
That's really not the lower bound, either. That's the average probability for all people, but some people's chances are much higher than that. For Jeff Bezos' kids, the chance is nearly 1. That means the chance for other people needs to be lower to come out with the number of billionaires we actually have.
I don't really want to put aside that advice like this necessarily can't scale because the number of people taking the advice changes how effective the strategy can be. In the limit, if every single person on the planet tried to found their own AI tech startup, 0 of them would succeed and humanity would quickly go extinct as we no longer had food because all the farmers quit to found AI startups.
We may or may not need some people trying to become billionaires, but we definitely do not want all people trying to become billionaires.
I just got 0.000000354. I guess it's a matter of opinion what counts as "considerably larger than 0," but that's a pretty small chance.
That's really not the lower bound, either. That's the average probability for all people, but some people's chances are much higher than that. For Jeff Bezos' kids, the chance is nearly 1. That means the chance for other people needs to be lower to come out with the number of billionaires we actually have.
I don't really want to put aside that advice like this necessarily can't scale because the number of people taking the advice changes how effective the strategy can be. In the limit, if every single person on the planet tried to found their own AI tech startup, 0 of them would succeed and humanity would quickly go extinct as we no longer had food because all the farmers quit to found AI startups.
We may or may not need some people trying to become billionaires, but we definitely do not want all people trying to become billionaires.