Imagine trying to evaluate the success of Y-Combinator on the median valuation of a Y-Combinator startup. A completely useless exercise.
Surely this is dependent on whether you’re evaluating the success of Y-Combinator from the standpoint of Y-Combinator itself, or from the standpoint of “the public” / “humanity” / etc., or from the standpoint of a prospective entrant into YC’s program? It seems to me that you get very different answers in those three cases!
Sure, though I don’t think I understand the relevance? In this case, people were pursuing careers with high expected upside with relative risk-neutrality, and indeed in-aggregate they succeeded extremely enormously well at that (on conventional metrics, I generally think people did so at substantial moral cost, with a lot of money being made by building doomsday machines, but we can set that part aside for now).
It’s also not the case this resulted in a lot of poverty, as even people for whom the high-variance strategies didn’t succeed still usually ended up with high paying software developer jobs. Overall, the distribution of strategies seems to me indeed like it was well-chosen, with a median a few tens of thousands of dollars lower compared to people who just chose stable software engineering careers, and an average many millions higher, which makes sense given that people are trying to solve world-scale problems.[1]
Well, the relevance is just that from the standpoint of an individual prospective X, the expectation of the value of becoming an X is… not irrelevant, certainly, but also not the only concern or even the main concern; rather, one would like to know the distribution of possible values of becoming an X (and the median outcome is an important summary statistic of that distribution). This is true for most X.
So if I am a startup founder and considering entry into YC’s accelerator program, I will definitely want to judge this option on the basis of the median valuation of a YC startup, not the mean or the maximum or anything of that sort.
Similarly, if I am considering whether “being a rationalist” (or “joining the rationalist community” or “following the rationalists’ prescriptions for life” etc.), I will certainly judge this option on the basis of the median outcome. (Of course I will condition on my own demographic characteristics, and any other personal factors that I think may apply, but… not too much; extreme Inside View is not helpful here.)
Hopefully not the median! That seems kind of insane to me. I agree you will have some preference distribution over outcomes, but clearly “optimizing for the median” is a terrible decision-making process.
clearly “optimizing for the median” is a terrible decision-making process
Clearly, but that’s also not what I suggested, either prescriptively or descriptively. “An important axis of evaluation” is not the same thing as “the optimization target”.
My point is simple. You said that evaluating based on the median outcome is a “completely useless exercise”. And I am saying: no, it’s not only not useless, but in fact it’s more useful than evaluating based on the mean/expectation (and much more useful than evaluating only based on the mean/expectation), if you are the individual agent who is considering whether to do a thing.
(Optimizing for the mean is, of course, an even more terrible decision-making process. You presumably know this very well, on account of your familiarity with the FTX fiasco.)
EDIT: A rate limit on my comments?? What the hell is this?! (And it’s not listed on the moderation log page, either!)
I will definitely want to judge this option on the basis of the median valuation of a YC startup, not the mean or the maximum or anything of that sort.
This sure sounds to me like you said you would use it at the very least as the primary evaluation metric. I think my reading here is reasonable, but fine if you meant something else. I agree the median seems very reasonable as one thing to think about among other things.
EDIT: A rate limit on my comments?? What the hell is this?! (And it’s not listed on the moderation log page, either!)
Yep, we have downvote-based rate-limits. I think they are reasonable, though not perfect (and my guess is in this case not ideal, and also I expect your comments to get upvoted more and then for the rate limit to disappear).
I would like them to be listed on the moderation log page, but haven’t gotten around to it. You would be welcome to make a PR for that, or anyone else is, and we will probably also get around to it at some point.
Surely this is dependent on whether you’re evaluating the success of Y-Combinator from the standpoint of Y-Combinator itself, or from the standpoint of “the public” / “humanity” / etc., or from the standpoint of a prospective entrant into YC’s program? It seems to me that you get very different answers in those three cases!
Sure, though I don’t think I understand the relevance? In this case, people were pursuing careers with high expected upside with relative risk-neutrality, and indeed in-aggregate they succeeded extremely enormously well at that (on conventional metrics, I generally think people did so at substantial moral cost, with a lot of money being made by building doomsday machines, but we can set that part aside for now).
It’s also not the case this resulted in a lot of poverty, as even people for whom the high-variance strategies didn’t succeed still usually ended up with high paying software developer jobs. Overall, the distribution of strategies seems to me indeed like it was well-chosen, with a median a few tens of thousands of dollars lower compared to people who just chose stable software engineering careers, and an average many millions higher, which makes sense given that people are trying to solve world-scale problems.[1]
Again, I don’t really endorse many of the strategies that led to this conventional success, but I feel like that is a different conversation.
Well, the relevance is just that from the standpoint of an individual prospective X, the expectation of the value of becoming an X is… not irrelevant, certainly, but also not the only concern or even the main concern; rather, one would like to know the distribution of possible values of becoming an X (and the median outcome is an important summary statistic of that distribution). This is true for most X.
So if I am a startup founder and considering entry into YC’s accelerator program, I will definitely want to judge this option on the basis of the median valuation of a YC startup, not the mean or the maximum or anything of that sort.
Similarly, if I am considering whether “being a rationalist” (or “joining the rationalist community” or “following the rationalists’ prescriptions for life” etc.), I will certainly judge this option on the basis of the median outcome. (Of course I will condition on my own demographic characteristics, and any other personal factors that I think may apply, but… not too much; extreme Inside View is not helpful here.)
Hopefully not the median! That seems kind of insane to me. I agree you will have some preference distribution over outcomes, but clearly “optimizing for the median” is a terrible decision-making process.
Clearly, but that’s also not what I suggested, either prescriptively or descriptively. “An important axis of evaluation” is not the same thing as “the optimization target”.
My point is simple. You said that evaluating based on the median outcome is a “completely useless exercise”. And I am saying: no, it’s not only not useless, but in fact it’s more useful than evaluating based on the mean/expectation (and much more useful than evaluating only based on the mean/expectation), if you are the individual agent who is considering whether to do a thing.
(Optimizing for the mean is, of course, an even more terrible decision-making process. You presumably know this very well, on account of your familiarity with the FTX fiasco.)
EDIT: A rate limit on my comments?? What the hell is this?! (And it’s not listed on the moderation log page, either!)
This sure sounds to me like you said you would use it at the very least as the primary evaluation metric. I think my reading here is reasonable, but fine if you meant something else. I agree the median seems very reasonable as one thing to think about among other things.
Yep, we have downvote-based rate-limits. I think they are reasonable, though not perfect (and my guess is in this case not ideal, and also I expect your comments to get upvoted more and then for the rate limit to disappear).
I would like them to be listed on the moderation log page, but haven’t gotten around to it. You would be welcome to make a PR for that, or anyone else is, and we will probably also get around to it at some point.