I didn’t invest in Bitcoin because I don’t invest in things that I don’t understand well enough to be confident that the Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn’t apply. I continue to believe this is a rational choice—okay, sure, this one time I might have made a lot of money, but most of the time I would waste a bunch of money/time/other resources. And no one writes blog posts about how they could have lost a lot of money but didn’t, so the availability heuristic is going to overweight successes.
okay, sure, this one time I might have made a lot of money, but most of the time I would waste a bunch of money/time/other resources.
This seems like a good heuristic, but is it actually true that Bitcoin was an undifferentiated member of an extremely large class? I agree that the availability heuristic is very important here, but I’m struggling to think of a single thing in the same reference class (maybe cryonics? MIRI? Nootropics?). If anyone can give me examples of “stuff lots of people on LessWrong liked that could have huge payouts”, that would be much appreciated.
As someone who made a profit investing in Bitcoin I endorse and encourage your decision. I definitely want to avoid this somehow turning into “rationalists should win by trying to jump on every crazy make-money-fast scheme because one of them could be the next Bitcoin.” If it’s the case that rationalists should have been able to predict Bitcoin’s success, we should focus on specific factors that indicated there was something there to be gotten.
I can talk now about all the smart people I know who believe in Bitcoin as a reason to want to keep it, but I didn’t know any of those people yet when I first bought it—I met them along the way. It’s hard for me to remember what it was that attracted me to it at the time. I think it had a lot to do with the way the technology played into my own specific vision for the future of tech, which is very personal and not necessarily portable to an arbitrary person in the rationalosphere (in terms of reasons to have believed in Bitcoin at the time.)
I didn’t invest in Bitcoin because I don’t invest in things that I don’t understand well enough to be confident that the Efficient Market Hypothesis doesn’t apply. I continue to believe this is a rational choice—okay, sure, this one time I might have made a lot of money, but most of the time I would waste a bunch of money/time/other resources. And no one writes blog posts about how they could have lost a lot of money but didn’t, so the availability heuristic is going to overweight successes.
This seems like a good heuristic, but is it actually true that Bitcoin was an undifferentiated member of an extremely large class? I agree that the availability heuristic is very important here, but I’m struggling to think of a single thing in the same reference class (maybe cryonics? MIRI? Nootropics?). If anyone can give me examples of “stuff lots of people on LessWrong liked that could have huge payouts”, that would be much appreciated.
As someone who made a profit investing in Bitcoin I endorse and encourage your decision. I definitely want to avoid this somehow turning into “rationalists should win by trying to jump on every crazy make-money-fast scheme because one of them could be the next Bitcoin.” If it’s the case that rationalists should have been able to predict Bitcoin’s success, we should focus on specific factors that indicated there was something there to be gotten.
I can talk now about all the smart people I know who believe in Bitcoin as a reason to want to keep it, but I didn’t know any of those people yet when I first bought it—I met them along the way. It’s hard for me to remember what it was that attracted me to it at the time. I think it had a lot to do with the way the technology played into my own specific vision for the future of tech, which is very personal and not necessarily portable to an arbitrary person in the rationalosphere (in terms of reasons to have believed in Bitcoin at the time.)