From an interview between Alexey Guzey and Ben Kuhn:

Ben: And witnessing, comparing the type of reasoning that the founders of Wave employed to find the idea and then turn it into a great company versus the type of outside view reasoning that EMH partisans used to evaluate whether something is worth doing or not.

When I joined Wave, I had a number of conversations with Drew where I said something about base rates and then he was basically like, “Fuck base rates man.” I was like, “No, but don’t you understand like base rates?” And he was like, “No.” And then eventually I realized that was part of why Drew was effective.

There’s a really good blog post on Applied Divinity Studies where he hypothesizes that the reason there are so few successful entrepreneurs in rationality or effective altruism communities is that these communities train people to put a lot of weight on outside type view arguments. I think that’s pretty much correct. And the reason I stopped doing it was that I saw firsthand that “Oh, the effective entrepreneurs that I am interacting with every day do not reason in this style at all.”

I think it’s pretty good for having a low variance, moderately positive outcome. I think ignoring outside views is very high variance. A lot of the time, you’re wrong. For instance, before they built Wave, the founders of Wave built 10 unsuccessful social mobile apps. And they were doing the thing: they were sampling from a heavy-tailed distribution over and over again. And then finally they got a sample that was like a gazillion instead of zero. But at first they drew 10 zeros.

@Austin this is just another version of the infinite monkey theorem

That's...that's not a joke message? That's real?

@evergreenemily Yep. So's this one. Turns out startup founders are strongly selected for people who are overconfident in their startup's success, even when that startup is a forecasting platform.

@IsaacKing Ha, very well-memed. But to steelman James here, he and fellow believers believe the probability of Manifold going full unicorn is high enough that it's worth going all in on as if it had 100% probability. There's a clear path to unicornitude and, despite the uncertainty, diving headfirst down that path -- emotionally treating it as certain -- is what's highest EV.

@dreev Julia Galef would disagree :)

@dreev If that's the case, I'm waiting for some big limit orders from the staff between 10 and 20%

@firstuserhere I guess I'm saying that a 5% chance of a bajillion-dollar valuation is more than enough to justify diving in head-first, emotionally treating it as a certainty, despite rationally knowing that the probability is "only" 5%. I mean, 5% is huge, is my point!

@dreev

a 5% chance of a bajillion-dollar valuation is more than enough to justify diving in head-first

I agree!

It is the giving it a 5% chance part i disagree with.

• a 50bn valuation

Isn't Google valued closer to $1.5 trillion?

@IsaacKing I think it was Google before it was worth this munch in a cultural sense

Out of curiosity, did James block you from his channel for posting this market there?

@IsaacKing Not that I can see

Close date is set to 1 week from now, so they better hurry.

manifoom

@Mira I hope he wasn’t driving last night…

All NO traders should be banned permanently, on the basis that one should not listen to naysayers.

I'll attempt to operationalise these resolution criteria:

"Will this discord message hold up? Resolves on vibes"