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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time.

At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.

If anybody could do it and e.g. just 10% did it, then there would be a new 5% (the top 50% of that 10%), and the rest 50% wouldn't be in.

>Thus, I'm a big fan of Peter Theils advice to work on things that satisfy the property that: "if you weren't working on it, this problem would not get solved".

Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.

Unless you have tons of means to contribute (e.g. billions) to some cause, the idea starting out as some e.g. college student that "this problem wont be solved without my help" is 99.9999% BS.

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There aren't very many axes along which >5% of the population actively try to improve themselves. This makes it easy to reach the top 5% if one is trying.

>> Anyone can probably reach the top 5% in most non-athletic areas given enough time.

> At any given time, only the 5% of the population can reach the top 5% in any area.

I believe the GP is saying you can be in the top 5% of a chosen field, if you try, because other people are pursuing other things. So 100% of the population could be in the top 5% of something.

I strongly agree with this. So much antagonism in society, however, arises when people aim for the wrong 5%, e.g. a 5’6 basketball player aiming to make the NBA. Now, such a baller is more directly confronted with his low outcome, but most of the world is not so apparent with people’s preconceived objectives which are often ego-emergent.

This is where I find deep meaning in the Cervantes quote, “The road is always better than the inn.” Accepting the outcome of the admixture of own’s controllable action and the infinitely greater uncontrollable action of the world as positive can go a long way to a kind of stoic peace and ultimately happiness with one’s worldly produce.

The ratio between goals and people is not 1:1.

With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.

That’s reasonable. Also, solved goals entice new goals to be created for others.

>With enough specialization, everybody can become the best in one specific topic. That's the game most phd students play.

Given the rapid devaluation of Phds (never mind the big debts), it doesn't serve them very well in most areas of science...

Just because something is social signaling (which it undoubtedly is in Theils case), doesn't mean it isn't true, and that you shouldn't follow the advice.

Just because a "virtue signaling" statement can also be true, doesn't in any way infer that his advice is good.

If anything, it gives him a motive to say it (virtue signal) which is not "to tell the truth".

So, the advice might very well be true and we should very well follow it. But thus far we have absolutely no arguments as to if that's the case.

You're prematurely moving the debate one abstraction layer up, making the issue about the whether a general virtue signal can ever contain truth. (That's an interesting discussion and I agree with you that it's definitely likely that virtue signaling statements are less truthful in general than "honest" statements.) Had you looked down on the concrete statement we're discussing, clearly no argument would be needed. Clearly it's good advice to "do things which wouldn't be done if you wouldn't be there to solve it", what's there even to argue about.

> Which is a self-aggrandising way for Theils to say that he helped solve some problems that wouldn't have been solved otherwise.

Exactly, I started reading his book Zero to One and quickly dropped it into trash-bin after scanning randomly. I am not sure why it got rated so high. In my view entire advise boils down to create businesses in uncharted territories and create a monopolies around them.

I don't think it's about money. One example I immediately think of is the various free software projects that are short on people who care and have time to work on it. Often I find something that seems interesting to me but hasn't been worked on in months. I can't yet program, but I always think "if I had the skills, I could just work on this myself right now". It's not that I'm special in this, except that I care and not everyone does.

I don’t think it matters much whether or not it’s actually true. What matters is that you believe it.

Also, there’s a ton of fairly specific problems that haven’t been solved yet, so chances of someone working on it are small.

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